by Tanith Lee
A glittering fever of fear held the streets. People hurried beetle-like about. Conversely doors slammed, windows were shut and barred.
No one had run away. There was nowhere to go save the snow waste, or to uncouth and scarcely explored southern lands.
Provisions had been made, stores were being brought in, also grain, cattle and people from the surrounding steads and ice fields. Soldiery had put up makeshift wooden conning towers along the ice road of Kings Mile. Just north of the walls, bulwarks of frozen snow had been raised, and also surmounted with towers. From the highest points of the city, sentries kept watch day and night.
‘What is to become of us?’ said the whisper.
Other whispers added, ‘Long ago this should have been stopped.’
Some declared, ‘We have our High Mages – the Magikoy. They can protect us. No one can go against their magic. There are weapons here superior to anything.’
In the palaces on the highest heights, Vuldir, King Paramount, passed his evenings dining with music, even though his brother, that fool Bhorth, was a captive of the enemy.
God-statues were stolen in quantities from the temple-town. Every man wanted his own three personal deities with him, and in the most sacred form available. People fought for them there, and in the Great Markets they fought each other too for siege stores. Then soldiers came down the ramps from the upper city and dispersed the crowds with swords, and with sorcerous rays provided by magicians.
Sunset faded on Ru Karismi. Her lamps showed less in the darkness because she was hoarding oil along with all other necessities. So the light went out on her.
From the dusk, a man had come and climbed the thousand-stepped staircase of marble known as the Stair. Diagonally placed, its steel figures stood impervious. He examined only one of these, the one he usually looked at when he paused to take breath on the seven hundredth or seven hundred and first step up. It was a swordsman, with head slightly tilted and blade lowered in repose.
When the man reached the Stair top, the Gargolem came from its alcove in the high door.
‘Greetings and welcome, Highness Wundest.’
‘Good evening, Gargo. But I’m not here for the kings. It’s you, Gargo,’ said Magikoy Wundest, ‘that I wish to talk with.’
The Gargolem attended. Its metallic face, that of an unknown beast, looked down at Wundest, of course expressionless.
‘How may I assist you?’
‘You know about the advance of war, and what we have come to – and what we approach?’
‘I do.’
‘Do you know that Thryfe, who might have been of help here, has vanished?’
‘I am aware of it.’
‘Gargo,’ said the Magikoy Wundest, ‘by most ancient decree, all Magikoy must assist the capital, for it is the heart of the Ruk. This you know, but do you also know where Thryfe is?’
‘Yes, Highness.’
The Magikoy braced himself. ‘I’ve been sent to ask you. Answer then, is he dead?’
‘Not dead. He is in his southern house.’
‘Behind walls of impenetrable ice, which not even our oculums can see through. What’s happened there, Gargo?’
The Gargolem spoke through the great quietness of the city and the palaces. ‘I can see in, a little, with my inner eye. The ice has also blocked up every room, every aperture. But it is not, Highness Wundest, ice.’
‘Then what?’
‘Time.’
Wundest drew back. He stared around him as if never before had he seen Ru Karismi. In fact he did not see it at all.
‘Time has ceased in the South House,’ elaborated the Gargolem, ‘and it is therefore the passage into a second dimension, unconnected to this one, which forms an impression of freezing.’
‘Did Thryfe do that? Why? Has he reneged on his duty to the people of the Ruk? Buried himself alive?’
‘That I cannot answer, Highness.’
‘He might have done something here,’ said Wundest, to the city. ‘He might have devised some other course.’
The Gargolem kept politely on the Stair until Wundest went away down the steps. The magician walked more hesitantly while descending, and paused three or four times. By the moment he reached the bottom, the Gargolem had gone back into its alcove.
Did it care anything for the fate of men? Sorcerously built to serve them, yet it was indifferent – just and reasonable only through programming. Returned into its obscure corner, presumably it went on with its own thoughts.
Much further down, along the River Palest, that night other lesser gargolems had emerged. They stationed themselves to guard parts of the solid river, in the ice of which strange symmetrical cracks had appeared. Some citizens perhaps even attributed the cracks to a change of weather.
But yet further down below the ice-sheet, seven Magikoy, of whom Wundest was not one, of whom Thryfe should have been – journeyed over the obsidian bridges of the Insularia and along the slopes of rock to an area beneath all the rest.
These seven had been chosen from the Order for a specific task.
The way to it was itself guarded by several gargolems. The seven Magikoy, primed as were no other men with the correct responses, soon passed through every check.
Lastly they entered, through seven separate complex gates, the central shaft.
It was a well of black glass plunging to an unknown depth. The seven, balanced on air, dropped swiftly together, by means of the shaft’s own mechanism, to the place below, the Telumultuan Chamber.
To each of them then, these powerful ones, it seemed he had fallen into a tiny cubicle barely big enough to contain him, made of stone and blind of windows or any door. No others of the Magikoy with whom he had fallen were now still with him. He was alone.
For a while there was nothing else. Each Magikoy must wait in patience and calm. Well trained, each did so.
Then, from the walls, the Gargolem of the Chamber spoke. ‘What are you doing here?’
Each Magikoy replied, ‘There is true peril. I am here to defend from it the Rukarian people.’
‘Do you know the price?’
‘I know it.’
‘Will you pay?’
‘I will pay.’
‘Pay then.’
From each of the seven sets of four close walls, a sword snaked out. They were unlike the swords of fighting men. Whippy and extended and dancing, they sliced into the bodies of the Magikoy, hurting them. The magicians must stay, under this onslaught, still as the stones. Otherwise they would die. Their blood dripped.
Presently the swords withdrew.
Trembling – not one of them did not, less from pain than physical shock – the Magikoy remained in all other ways motionless.
The walls, having analysed their intention and worth from their blood, began slowly to expand.
Seven Magikoy beheld seven narrow doors, each filled by a cold light. They walked into it, it healed their wounds. And beyond lay the Chamber of the Telumultuan, which no living thing had entered through countless centuries, except in nightmares.
The space was both high and far. It disappeared on all sides into mists of dimness and perspective. It was featureless aside from the things which stood here.
Dwarfed by these, the Magikoy gazed up and up at them.
They knew they would never, afterwards, be permitted to speak of what they had seen, but even to themselves they would never quite be able to describe what they saw.
Like a forest they rose, the indescribable things, uncountable but many.
Faintly they glimmered, like a grey dawn on platinum. Their shape was, maybe, most like that of fearsome trees which had been shorn of ice and snow, and also every leaf and bough – and which had thrived on such cruelty, and become stronger. So high up they went, you could not be sure where they ended, nor if any were taller than others, and yet everyone of them was different, and everyone identical.
They were the ultimate thaumaturgical weapons the Order of the Magikoy had made, in a time so long
before, it was another world.
Not one man now present still asked if it must come to this. It had come to it. All debate was over.
They sat down, the seven, on the floor, which seemed to be of a sort of polished granite.
They must wait until the signal reached them from the Chamber’s Guardian. That was all. And it was everything.
None of the steadings they went by now had a man left on them, nor any animal.
The citywards fleeing Rukar had emptied the byres and barns, the growing-channels and smoke-houses and towers of brewing. Hothouses and orchards had been stripped and burnt. Nothing was willingly abandoned to assist the invader.
But these peoples of the north and east, they were used to surviving – and now their blood was up. They knew also tricks of the waste. Inventive and accurate hunters, they took meat from every patch of glacial woodland, birds from the sky, and found pockets of dormant fruit under the ice.
These lands were fabulously fertile and rich. How had they been so daft as not to come here before?
That morning, shamans of the Fazions and Vorms entered the tent of the king-leader, Lionwolf. They told him they could smell the city now. It was near, less than two whole days’ march. Its size and opulence made it reek for them of plenty and luxury and overripeness. They smacked their lips.
Wizards of the Gech took auguries. The Olchibe, who never included their Crarrowin in a war march or vandal band, sat on their mammoths, smiling. They knew the city was near, right enough, and they would get there. Among the Jafn, though, the mages worked in circles of blood-red torches, preparing stews of magic to distress Ru Karismi.
‘They have a few weapons there, Magikoy stuff,’ said the Jafn warriors, ‘past their best from lack of use.’ They laughed at the weapons, having legends enough of their own, and very few of Ruk Kar Is.
Later, when they had halted again, the camp held chariot races along the ice. Lionwolf joined in. He perched on the chariot-rail, and the lions seemed to run along the air. He won; he always would – a race, a city.
When full night set in, while telling stories at the fires, they glanced up to find Lionwolf walking among them, as he often did. He told them stories also, and his stories were always of the finest. When he went to make his friendly offerings at the Ranjal cart, hundreds of his men went with him to watch. The Ranjals were the Gullahammer’s talisman, and God was God – or Gods – but the Lionwolf was their own god, here and now.
‘After we’ve taken the Rukar, what?’ they asked each other. They grinned and answered, ‘Perhaps the earth?’
They were on an incandescent wheel which rolled downhill, while in the imagined valley below lay Ru Karismi, small and pitiful with distance.
It was a sleep night, for tomorrow they would be against the walls.
Lionwolf retired late. He let the tent-flap drop behind him, against the mage-flames and sentry torches and dying cookfires. He fed the two lions titbits, and they lay down by the tent’s entrance. Lionwolf sat on the ground.
‘Guri?’ he enquired of the tent. But Guri was not there. Guri now was more frequently elsewhere.
As a child it would have enraged Lionwolf, the absconding of any he wanted about him. He might dismiss, or absent himself – never others.
Now, he felt only loneliness. Of course, he was not unused to that: even from the first he had been placed apart. Once ejected from his mother’s womb, he had been alone. It never occurred to him this was the case for everyone.
He had spotted Chillel tonight. She stood out like a black moon amid the virtually womanless camp. She was currently with an Olchibe man, not even the leader of a vandal band. He treated her respectfully, for it seemed Olchibe had come to the conclusion Chillel was some type of Crarrow. But she had told them in her tale-telling: she was directly made by the gods.
Lionwolf did not understand women. They had been too easy for him; they always worshipped him, gave in. Even if they railed against his faithlessness, as only one or two had – Saphay one of these – they did not do it in a way that taught him anything about them.
He would have Chillel, he decided, after this battle under the Ruk capital. When all the rest was done, destroyed. To the battle he looked forward, not knowing this was his childishness, but thinking it the war-greed of a man.
Would he sleep tonight? No, he would not bother.
Something touched Lionwolf. It was like the brush of a feather along his neck. He turned frowning – and found, startled, that he was asleep and dreaming.
He knew this dream. It was what he avoided. Guri knew it too – should Lionwolf shout now for Guri?
A shadow was there before Lionwolf. For a second he hoped it was his own, that luminous shadow with its sparks.
The shadow addressed him. ‘You make me wait.’
It was not his own shadow.
Lionwolf had no terror of men; he was invulnerable to them and their implements of violence. But this was not a mortal man.
He, whose name was spelled by Rukarian scribes Zzth, stood there forming in the shadow. His hair was silver hot from a furnace. His eyes were sun-discs of gold. His face, however, was not painted indigo.
By his side was a great wolf, bluish-white. He stroked its head idly, just as Lionwolf caressed the heads of lions.
‘I say, you keep me waiting, boy.’
Lionwolf glared back at him. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘One day, you will know.’
‘You’d kill me? I am strong. You can’t.’
‘Oh, can I not? We shall see, when the hour breaks. Kiss the city for me tomorrow. I have shrines there.’
Lionwolf spun into the vortex of the dream and leapt for its exit-point. With a cry heard only in his head, he burst free.
Awake, he lay there on the ground. Why did he dream again of the god? The god was returning to attack and ruin him? That could never happen: Lionwolf was grown, his vitality supreme—
The human part of Lionwolf pushed inside him, humorously informing him, It was only a dream.
As men do, he listened to that. How else is it possible to survive?
Jemhara and Thryfe were pressed body to body. Rukarians, they had no awkwardness with sleep – which for the Jafn had become so deeply associated with dying and the state of death. Even the stars were only dogs in the hand of night, the Jafn said. Night put out the stars, just as dogs died in the service of men. Until then, resist.
But Thryfe and Jemhara slept, exhausted by lovemaking and sexual appetite. They had been unknowingly parched for lust and culmination; now they could not have enough. Soon they would wake to each other again. Skin and hair, limbs and hands, would slide in circling delirium, until he and she could fit themselves together in the most flawless completion. Neither had desired this or expected this. It seemed this had desired and expected them. They had therefore no autonomy. They became two parts of one whole being which yearned only to regain itself. She had not wanted those minutes to end, and he – he had no time for anything save her. Magicians of such power, the minutes could not end for her; for him time, otherwise, was redundant.
FOUR
Like a relentless hand, something had kept pulling Guri away – from the Gullahammer riding march, from Lionwolf whom he had adopted; and from, it began to seem to Guri, the physical world. He found himself irked by the deeds of mankind. Yes, even by the deeds – the capitulation – of Peb Yuve. Guri himself had assisted in Peb’s motivation towards a war with the south. Then, Guri had brooded to see his former commander as one of the captains of – this boy. Even though, formerly, Guri had called the boy his leader.
He had the manners of a Rukar prince, the Lionwolf, but, Guri thought now, the bad manners.
The ’tween-world drew Guri off like the head from beer. He exploded into there, lay with mermaids and got them with egg, played at Olchibe battles with mammoths and comrades, and adversaries either unharmable or illusory. He squatted too, whole nights and days, on heights of the earthly landscape, staring
at heaven and stars.
That was what his name meant: ‘Star Dog’, ‘Dog Star’. Guri, so used to his name, had forgotten, until it was spoken by Lionwolf to Peb.
It was the stars Guri ached for, although mostly he refused to see this. The stars and what was behind them … behind the whole sorry scheme.
The day the Gullahammer swept down on to the ice fields just north of Ru Karismi, Guri had gone to the seaside. He stood on the far ice, staring at liquid black water running to an iron horizon. He was there hours or minutes, searching for something – not knowing what. A voice seemed to call to him from under the sea, under the icy extension of the shore – a mera maybe, one who had got through properly on to the mortal plane.
Disconsolate, Guri felt old. If he had lived, he would by now have reached his late thirties. Olchibe, though tough and often long-lived, greyed and lined early. He would have looked his age, as Peb did.
Better go back, see how it went. One more city smashed and eaten alive. One more triumph. Guri too had heard the boasts in the camp: the Ruk tomorrow, next the world. Preferable, then, to leave such a world. The trouble was, Guri had mislaid the means – it was finally less when than how?
When he returned into existence on the Rukar ice fields, Guri saw he had popped up by the travelling Ranjal cart, and was not best pleased. Perhaps he had been aiming for Lionwolf’s standard, but now it was not here.
Instead, the deceased sibulla sat there on the cart, frustrated as uncommitted sin.
‘Get off with you, you old bat,’ snarled Guri.
He saw she was crying bitter tears of loss.
Both of them alive, she would have been nothing to him. He would have killed her at once, she being too elderly for rape. But now, like an Olchibe woman, Narnifa was one of his own kind.
Reluctant, Guri sat down beside her.
‘Listen, silly, there’s other places to go. Don’t you know that?’
‘Want lady,’ she snivelled.
‘Your lady moved about a bit, but that was some magical twitch. She’s only a lump of wood. Most of these gods, that’s all they are. Only the Rukar gods seem to be real – and the Great Gods too, amen. Look,’ said Guri. He did a thing to the air as he could do now, and it undrew like a curtain.