by Tanith Lee
Her eyes were shut, but she said: “What do you want from me?”
“You know quite well what I want.”
He sat beside her and put his hand on her breast. It was obvious to him, even in the dark, that her beauty was both eradicated and unrecoverable, but it was not prettiness he desired.
“I want the tricks you taught Rehdon, the murdering tricks. You’ll find me an apt pupil.”
“There is a child in me,” she enunciated clearly, “the Storm Lord’s heir.”
“Yes. There’s a child. I doubt it’s Rehdon’s. His seed wasn’t overpotent.”
Her eyes opened and fixed on him.
“Do you imagine,” he said, “that you’d live now if I hadn’t planted you with the excuse?”
“Why does it matter to you that I live?”
“Ah, a profound question, Ashne’e. I want your knowledge. Not only the love you teach between your white thighs, but those powers your people play at in their dunghills. The Speaking Mind: yes, I have mastered your terminology. Instruct me how to read men’s thoughts. And Her Temple—where is that? Close?”
“There are many temples.”
“No, not those. This is Anackire’s place. I am aware the ruins lie in the hills of Dorthar.”
“How do you know this?”
“I have had other Lowlanders at my beck from time to time. Some are looser-tongued than others. But none was an acolyte of the Lady of Snakes.”
“Why do you seek this place?”
“To despoil it of its monetary and spiritual wealth. This no doubt distresses you, but I assure you, you’ve no choice. There are a million subtle ways in which I can distress you more violently should you refuse to assist me in everything I ask. It would be easy to instigate your death.”
He needed no answer. She gave him none.
“Now I’ll have what I came for.”
She made no protest or denial, but reached for him and twined him at once in her limbs and hair, so that he also was reminded irresistibly of serpents in the moon-tinged blackness.
• • •
The Queen had summoned Lomandra to the palace; certain of Amnorh’s men had relieved the scatter of external guard at the Palace of Peace. Amnorh took the Lowland girl to his chariot and drove with her by circuitous routes toward the skirts of the mountains.
A silver dawn was replaced by a pitiless lacquering of blue as the towered city fell behind. Birds loomed on broad wings, casting ominous shadows.
“Stop at that place,” she said to him.
It was a cleft in rock; below, he saw the dragon’s eye, the lake Ibron, a gleam of white water.
“You must leave the chariot.”
He obeyed her, pausing only to tether the restless animals, and followed her along the bony spine of the hill.
And then she vanished.
“Ashne’e!” he shouted. A furious conviction took hold of him that she had duped him, escaped to some lair like a beast. And then he turned and saw her pallid shape, like a dim candle, burning in the rock beside him. It was a cave with an eye-of-a-needle opening. He slid through, and at once felt the dampness in the air, the chill and the encroaching, almost tangible dark.
“No trickery, Amnorh,” she said, and there was a subtle difference in the way she spoke to him. “All that remains of the temple hill-gate is here.”
“How can you be sure of the entrance?”
“I, like you, have been told of this place.”
The back of the cave fell away in a corridor of blackness into which she turned and he followed. Once the blackness enclosed him he felt immediately reluctant to proceed. He struck sparks from a flint to tallow and held it burning in his hand, but the small light seemed only to emphasize the impenetrable shade.
The corridor ended in blank stone. Ashne’e reached out and her fingers ran in patterns on the stone. He tried to memorize what she did, but the shadows confused him. The stone shuddered; dislodged, an ancient dirt cascaded, and there was a groaning of something old disturbed. An opening appeared grudgingly, low and slit-thin.
She slipped through it, a fluttering pale ghost, and seemed to fall in slow motion into a bottomless pit. Amnorh maneuvered after her and found a stairway, a great jagged pile of steps pouring down into the lightlessness below, and sinking in the inky sea was Ashne’e, an impossible fish.
As he watched her, there came a stifling urge to turn back. This was her element, it absorbed her, incorporated her into its being. From the Vis it drew away, amused but intolerant of his greed for substantial things. Yet his lust for the riches of the temple hurled him forward.
He followed.
Curious sounds stole into his ears.
There seemed to be a tingling, the rippling of unimagined instruments; it was the ceaseless dripping of blue water onto silver stone. The shivering damp steamed and slithered on the steps. A vision infected Amnorh of a screaming man who was falling, falling, falling into the depthless dark.
But though trembling and cold, he reached the bottom, and found another arch-mouth. He went through it, after the girl, unprepared by anything any terrified bleeding serf had ever babbled to him. Out of the black sprang a flame, and horror. He felt his tongue thicken and his joints melt like wax.
Anackire.
She towered. She soared. Her flesh was a white mountain, her snake’s tail a river of fire in spate.
No colossus of Rarnammon had ever been raised to such a size. Even the obsidian dragons could crouch like lizards by her scaled serpent’s tail. And the tail was gold, all pure gold and immense violet gems, and above the coils of it a woman’s white body, flat belly empty of a navel, gold minarets of nipples on the cupolas of the ice-white breasts. The eight white arms stretched in the traditional modes, such as he had seen on little carvings in the villages, casting ink-black chasms of shadow. The arm of deliverance and the arm of protection, of comfort and of blessing, and also those terrible arms of retribution, destruction, torment and the inexorable curse.
At last his eyes pulled themselves like tortured flies on to her face. The hair was all golden serpents, twisting, spitting to her shoulders. But the face itself was narrow, pale, long-lidded, set with a devouring yellow stare that might have been hewn from topaz. Or amber.
Ashne’e’s face.
He turned, and saw they stood in the great pool of shade that spread from the anckira, and it occurred to him that the cave was full of light, though no source was apparent.
“Who made this?”
When the girl answered, he could not repress the shudder that took hold of him.
“It has been said, Amnorh, that this is Anackire herself.”
And then sanity came back to him abruptly, for he saw the carved doorway set in the lowest coil of the tail.
“The hub of the mystery,” he said, “the treasure hoard.”
He went by the girl and strode to the door, ignoring what leaned above him. It had no secret machinery, giving at a thrust. Rusty metal swung inward, and he looked down into the eye of a great pool. Another deeper cave, filled by water, probably some entrance into the lake of Ibron. He stared about him, raising the burning tallow. There were no jewels, no religious amulets set with diamonds as the old stories had suggested; neither were there the great books of the lore and magic of the psyche and all the forces it might conduct and control. Only a cave smelling of water and filled with water. Anger lashed its thongs in his brain. So he had been tricked after all.
He turned and looked at Ashne’e.
“Where else do I search for what I want?”
“There is no other place.”
“Did you know there’d be nothing here? That all your legends were merely the dung of time?”
His hand closed viciously on her arm. He saw the blue circlet his fingers made, but no sign in her face that he caused her pain.
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br /> “Perhaps I should abort my child from you and leave you to the gentle mercies of the lord Orhn.”
Incredibly, a smile rose like dawn over her white face. He had never seen her smile, nor any woman smile in this fashion; it seemed to freeze his blood. His hand fell away from her.
“Do so, Amnorh. Otherwise he will be my curse on you.”
A curious sensation gripped him, so that he felt he looked at her not with his open eyes but with a third eye set in the center of his forehead. And it was not her he saw. Standing where she stood was a young man, indistinct, spectral, yet Amnorh could make out that he had the bronze skin of the Vis and, at the same time, eyes and hair as pale as the Lowland wine with which he had poisoned Rehdon during the first nights of the Red Moon.
The apparition faded and Amnorh staggered back.
“There is nothing here for you,” Ashne’e said.
She turned and began to cross the cavern toward the archway and the steps, and he found that he must follow her for he could no longer bear the singing silence and the presence of the creature in the cave.
• • •
He should then indeed have had her killed. She was no longer useful to him, a dangerous embarkation which had failed. And yet his lusts still drew him to her swollen ugly body, long after the star Zastis had paled and fallen from the sky. There was, too, the remembrance of the child in her which might so easily be his own. Would he, if Ashne’e were allowed to bring it forth alive, stand to benefit from this thread of his lineage woven into the royal line of kings?
The temple also haunted him.
Months after he had fled it, he had surveyed his terror and gone back. By then, the High Council, which he held in his palm, had voted him to the position of Warden of Koramvis, that title which ultimately and tactfully would ensure that he attained the regency. It had been the blood price he had earned from Val Mala, and her network of bribes and threats had not failed him. So long as he could amuse her he would do well, and Orhn, now redundant in the palace, deprived of honor and to a large extent of funds, afforded Amnorh a faint, aesthetic pleasure. Yet it was a season of waiting. And in the waiting, the urge came on him to return to that place.
Night was drowning the sky when he took the chariot and rode out of the River Gate, out of Koramvis, into the barren hills. The mountains, still tipped with the last light, were a monolithic desolation crowned with blood. A mad wind, the first voice of the cold days coming, howled among the rocks. When he came to the cleft, he left the chariot as before, and, taking a light in one hand, he followed the path the girl had shown him. He searched a long while. The moon appeared overhead, the stars came out. The narrow arch-mouth eluded him. Everything seemed to have become a fantasy, the hallucination of a dream. He recalled the peculiar moment when he had seen a man stand where Ashne’e had stood.
He turned back to the chariot, but checked a few yards off. The team was trembling and sweating. Amnorh looked about him. It was possible the night had called some animal out of its lair to hunt.
Then he saw it. A huge shape, with a glistening along its back from the moon. It eased over the rail of the chariot and slid away. A rock snake most probably, absorbed now into some hole. Yet Amnorh, voyeur of a superstition, had caught the imprint of the superstition like a disease. Had She perhaps sent it, he wondered with inadequate cynicism, that woman underground?
3.
LOMANDRA HEARD A VOICE calling her name.
She turned to look down the dim corridor, which was empty, and the voice seemed to come again—inside her skull.
Ashne’e.
Lomandra hurried up the marble flight of the tower, drew aside the curtain and stood staring. The girl lay white-faced and expressionless, yet, through the thin shift, Lomandra saw the running stain of blood.
“Has it begun?” Lomandra cried hoarsely, sick with fear. Then: “The child has come early.” They were ritual words merely. Lomandra knew well enough, and without surprise, why the child came. She had mixed the Queen’s medicine with Ashne’e’s food and drink for three months now. “The bastard will tear its way from her body,” Val Mala had murmured, “and be stillborn.” “Will it kill her?” Lomandra had whispered. And Val Mala had said, very gently: “I shall pray that it does.”
“Are you in pain?” Lomandra asked uselessly.
“Yes.”
“How close together are the pains?”
“Quite close. It will be soon.”
“Oh, gods,” Lomandra cried out in her soul, “she will die, she will die, in agony, in front of me. And this is my doing.”
“Where is the physician?” Ashne’e asked tonelessly.
“At the Storm Palace. Val Mala summoned him a day ago.”
“Then send for him.”
Lomandra turned and almost ran from the room.
The Palace of Peace was in pale darkness, caught in the pulsing blue afterglow of dusk.
Lomandra leaned on the balustrade a moment, trembling. She made out a girl moving below, a brown moth fluttering from lamp to lamp, lighting each with the firefly taper in her hand. Lomandra shouted to her and the girl froze, wide-eyed, then fled away through the colonnade, calling.
Lomandra moved slowly up the stairs, hesitant, dreading to return to the room above. In the doorway she halted. It was very dark.
“I have sent for the physician,” she said to the white blur on the bed.
“The waters have broken within me,” Ashne’e said, “just now, while you were gone. How long before he comes?”
Lomandra shuddered. Words flooded from her mouth before she could control them.
“The Queen will delay him. She and I have poisoned you. You’ll lose the child and die.”
She could see nothing of the girl except the dim whiteness. She gave no sign of her pain or any fear; it was Lomandra who writhed in terror.
“I understand all this, Lomandra. You have done the Queen’s work; now you must help me.”
“I? I know nothing of midwifery.”
“You shall learn.”
“I can do nothing. I’d only harm you.”
“I am already harmed. This is the son of the Storm Lord. He will be born alive.”
Abruptly Ashne’e’s body arched in a great paroxysm on the couch. She let out one single mindless animal cry, so solitary, unhuman and remote that Lomandra wondered wildly who it was that uttered it. And then, wanting only to run out of the room, she ran instead toward the girl.
“Take off your rings,” Ashne’e gasped. Her mouth was a great tragic rigor of struggling breath, above which her eyes were blank and empty as glass.
“My—rings?”
“Take off your rings. You must thrust into me and seize the head of the child and draw him out.”
“I can’t,” Lomandra moaned, but a desolate power converged and overwhelmed her. The rings fell glittering from her fingers, with them the jewels Val Mala had bought her with. She found she had bent to her task like a peasant woman, felt her whole stance and physical presence alter, now rough and capable and indifferent, while in the core of her wailed the trapped court woman in horrified loathing.
There was a welter of scalding blood. The girl did not shriek or spasm but held quite still, as if she felt nothing.
Into Lomandra’s narrow hands emerged the brazen head, the wrinkled demon face of birth, and then the body on the dancing cord. In the uncertain dark, Lomandra saw the girl reach up and snatch at the cord, knot it, gnaw it through like a wolf bitch in the Plains.
The baby let out an immediate scream. It screamed as if at the unjust bestial world into which it had been dragged, half-embryo still, blind and unreasoning, aware, nevertheless, of all the agony which had been, the agony which was to come.
“It’s male. A son,” Lomandra said.
She shut her eyes and her tears fell on her bloody hands.
• • •
The physician hurried into the Palace of Peace in the first cool breath of day.
A woman, like a ghost in a dark robe, emerged from the colonnade. He had a moment’s difficulty in recognizing her as the Queen’s chief lady, Lomandra. Brows creased in anticipated distress (for some idiot of a servant girl had delayed the message, and he feared the worst), he asked: “Is the girl dead?”
“No.”
“Then she’s still in labor? Perhaps I may be able to save the child. Quickly—”
“The child was born some time ago, and lives.”
The physician found that his hand had moved unbidden in a gesture of ancient religious significance as he stared incredulously in the Xarabian’s face.
• • •
With a flick of her fingers, Val Mala dismissed her attendants, and Lomandra stood alone in the room with her.
The Queen was big with child, overblown and beautiless; the loss of her looks made her the more terrible. And Lomandra, who had felt herself too weary to be afraid, became afraid as she looked at her.
“You’ve come to tell me some news, Lomandra. What?”
Harshly the Xarabian said: “Both the child and the mother live.”
Val Mala’s bloated face squeezed together in an ecstasy of malice.
“You come to me and dare to tell me that they live. You dare to tell me that you were present and they lived—both of them. The witch that sent a snake to abort me and her offal. May the black hells of Aarl swallow you, you brainless bitch!”
Lomandra’s heart raced desperately. She met Val Mala’s blazing eyes as steadily as she was able.
“What would you have had me do, madam?”
“Do! In the name of Dorthar’s gods, are you a fool? Listen to me, Lomandra, and listen carefully. You will return to the Palace of Peace and wait until the physician leaves her. Oh, don’t tremble, you can dismiss the whore from your mind, I’ll deal with her. Merely attend the child’s cot and see to it that it smothers in its pillows. It should give you little trouble.”
Lomandra stared at her, the blood draining from her face.