by Tanith Lee
Later Sulvian glided across the moonlight, her white hair blowing, but it had merged with some imagery of his father’s, some telepathic symbol lodged in his brain at birth. For Sulvian crumbled into gilded ashes and blew away along the night.
• • •
The elegant ships took wing with the morning.
They sailed southward, the crenellated shore always visible on the left hand: Steep-shelved Ommos, the plain-lands of Xarabiss, where watchtowers sent up flowers of blue smoke. There was a mild following wind.
After twenty-five days, the Storm Lord’s fleet came into the glassy water between Xarabiss and the borderland of Alisaar and Old Zakoris. Here, a cordon of Xarabian and Dortharian-Vathcrian vessels had been stationed across the sea, between garrisoned watchtowers on either coast. The original plan had chosen a point farther south, where the sea channel was narrower. But Alisaar’s withdrawal from alliance had made her unacceptable as the western end of this oceanic rope. Nor was the chain mighty. Twenty-three galleys maintained it, equipped with such war machinery as could be spared. The two garrisons were of similar bulk. It was a last-ditch measure. Success elsewhere and the element of surprise would favor it, but if most if Yl’s force swept into the channel, the cordon had no hope, save to delay.
Beyond the northern edge of Alisaar, the sea spread wide again. Xarabiss melted away in a sunset cloud as they turned southwest toward the open waters of war.
• • •
It had taken the Thaddrian most of two days to clamber through the rubble and into the uplands beyond. Rising, winning through, these had touches of allegory. Gradually the plains city of Anackyra, its martial show, its multitude of soldiers, the apathetic fear of its citizens, vanished. Within the shambles of Koramvis there had been halts, to rest, to search about. There was no longer any sure way over the wide river, but he found a little raft, some native robber’s, perhaps, and rowed himself unchallenged to the farther shore. That side there was the “Merchant’s Road” a path for travelers coming from the mountains, a project begun and abandoned before it reached the southern bank, falling itself in disrepair.
When he broke out of the lawless damaged loveliness of the ruins, the hills opened like honeycomb on either side. A great bird flew up before his coming, then loomed above him on broad wings.
The sun was just going down and the evening was limpidly gathering all about, when he saw below him the dragon’s eye, Lake Ibron, like a pearl.
They had not gone up to the temple, or where the temple had been before the quake threw down the hill. They sat almost indolently among huge grass-grown boulders.
He saw at first glance Lowlanders, a fair Xarabian, one Vardish man playing dice with another, and the forms of two small red Lannic sheep questing in the grass for clovers. Standing up against the sheet of soft light that was the sky, were Amanackire, like a snowy grove. They stared at him, gods disturbed. But the Thaddrian looked past them, and seeing what he had come to find, he went to her.
He did not obeise himself. She was a part of the goddess, to whom he knelt only in ritual, never in fact, for that was not the proper way.
She told him, without speech, that he should sit.
He sat before her.
The lake, the light, bloomed at her back. Composed and pure as an icon, her symmetry was exquisite. But what pleased him most was her complete approachability. And that in the midst of a totality which seemed to alter the very air. In just this way the most valid things were come to. The sky itself, the sea, the world, magnificent and charged with meaning—a child might gaze at them and read them like an open book. This was the verity of Power.
He was the only sheer Visian there. The idea that he had been invited began to make a strange sense. It was a balance. In a short while, he produced from his priest’s robe a square of cloth, and opened it on the rock for her. Inside were pieces of a shattered amber ring. Sparks of the sun were startled in them. Even the Amanackire came from their eminence to see.
The Thaddrian, who had watched Raldnor and Astaris ride away into the forests of the north, was something of a psychic hound. This talent had enabled him to know Rarmon who was to be Rarnammon, and long after, to track Rarnammon’s path to the spot in Koramvis where enemies had taken him. The ring, shattered, had been abandoned. The Thaddrian had gathered up the bits carefully. It was not that it was a labor Ashni had set him, more a labor he wished in some way to perform for her, and which had therefore been allotted. Even on the Plains, there were sometimes offerings of fruit, or carvings, left for the goddess. She understood it was sometimes difficult, in moments of great joy, not to give thanks in concrete terms; the giver’s need, not the recipient’s.
Ashni drew the shards of the ring into her palm.
A woman now in the Zor had worn this ring. Ashni had worn the ring. Rarnammon had worn it. Another, the son of Yannul, had held the ring, though it burned him. A link of flesh and resin, still bonded.
The pieces were all in place now, all but the pieces of the ring.
The last ray of sunlight coiled through them, like a serpent. And then, the ring was whole, melded together, intact.
He heard their breathing, the circle of them all around, the sighs attendant upon miracle. But the Thaddrian grinned. And she smiled at him.
“Yes, you know,” he said to her inside his skull, without words. “I am the one says miracles need not be, for gods to be. And to this day I never saw any reason why Raldnor and Astaris shouldn’t be living in some lost thatched village of Thaddra, among those who didn’t know them. Ordinary, happy, obscure. I can speak the jargon of the priests—the transcension, the chariot of flame that takes the god into heaven. And to me, that’s so simple, so mundane. Miracles are nothing—the stuff of life. The flower blossoming, the invisible emerging from the womb—a child, resin turned into amber—miracles, nothing but miracles. But there’s the fact beyond the miracle. The stone under the silver lake. What we are and must become. That’s the reason and the perfect truth, and the answer to all the questions and the cries. Isn’t it, Ashni-who-is-Anackire?”
And the reply was given him, just as the ring glowed on her finger. And the sun bloomed still in her eyes, though the sun had gone down.
24.
A WHITE TOWER on a dark blue sky.
The sweep of the scattered city below.
And then the jungle-forest, the distances of Thaddra.
The tower had once been bowl-topped, forerunner of the towers of Dorthar. But the masonry had come down. Into what remained, the neck of the tower, a room with half a ceiling and many long shutterless windows, Tuab Ey trod like a cat. And stopped, staring.
Rarnammon stood in the center of the floor, looking at him, apparently waiting for him.
“I said I wouldn’t visit your new—abode,” said Tuab Ey, “but here I am. Now, tell me what you’ve been doing all these days and nights. Incantations and summonings? A few of them say they’ve seen lights flying to the windows like birds.”
Rarnammon shook his head, very slowly. Tuab Ey was uncertain whether this was denial or wondering contempt. The qualities of Rarnammon had intensified. He seemed less penetrable than any other object, and yet lucent, day pouring through the eyes—
“You are a magician,” said Tuab Ey. “Admit it. I don’t believe in magic, and will laugh. Then perhaps I can coax you forth, mighty lord. My dog-pack wants to go north or east, and find Free Zakorians to kill. Someone came, one of Jort’s pigs, said the north rivers were running with dead.”
“Tuab Ey,” said Rarnammon, “go down to the foot of the tower. Guard it for me. Keep the others out.”
“Why?”
“The magic you referred to is about to be woken up. Incantations, summonings . . . not quite that. But lightning striking this tower might be a little thing.”
“Don’t talk in conundrums if you want something done. All right. I’ll keep the gate f
or you. The others’ll be off, anyway, if anything happens. What will happen? Apart from lightning.”
“I don’t know. I told you that before. But you have Lowland blood somewhere. I think you’re necessary to this balance.” A hint of friendly bathos: “I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient. But go down now, if you will, Tuab Ey.”
Tuab Ey backed a step, collected himself and said, “You look like a god, standing there. Did you realize? Am I supposed to worship?”
Rarnammon walked toward him through the sunlight of the windows. It appeared to cling and cover him, that light, so that when he stretched out his hand and laid it without pressure on Tuab Ey’s arm, and the light seemed to stream into it and through Tuab Ey, it was only as expected.
Rarnammon put out his other hand to steady him.
Tuab Ey said quietly through the dizziness, “—Power. What do I do with it?”
“Keep the gate.”
Tuab Ey went down the stair, leaning on the wall, light filling him, to keep the gate.
• • •
The day was hot, hazy. There was nothing unusual about it. Yet he knew it was—the last day.
Ever since he had come into the tower—the high place stipulated in all lore—he had begun to move mentally toward this time. Even in his ignorance he had moved, as a child learns to walk in ignorance of walking.
There had been dreams, hallucinations, voids, the sense of dropping to earth from the stars, without impact.
Now there was the sense of crisis.
Rarnammon was not alone. Others gathered, as forces gathered. The world seemed one endlessly indrawing breath.
As the day turned, Rarnammon became aware of the tower shutting itself about him. The very glare and heat in the window-places solidified, making a screen where there was none. The haphazard noises of the ruin faded.
It was conceivable he might die. But then, he might have died on a hundred occasions. In his years as a thief, in Kesarh’s service at Tjis, in Lan outriding the caravans, in Dorthar, in the hands of Free Zakoris. Each moment of survival was a gift. Since he had come back to himself here in this fallen city, his physical persona had meant less. He had felt part of some entirety, one bough of one great tree.
Rarnammon lay down on the floor, and the lights crossed themselves in the air above him. A bird flew over the gap in the ceiling on yellow gauffered wings.
It was the final expression of external matter. He closed his eyes and went inward. The madness, the letting go of the fleshly self, had taught him. As his half-brother Raldanash was, Rarnammon also was now an adept.
His consciousness descended, entered another place, and so stepped forth.
One vast eye, seeing without sight, and in the sightless seeing, all other senses were bound, and yet further senses the flesh could not employ.
He sensed, in this manner, Tuab Ey below him at the foot of the tower, seated in the entrance. A shape—the man, Galud—was there, bending over him, asking what went on, and Tuab Ey was sending him off, and Galud obeyed, stumbling.
A coalescence of radiance and color was sinking to a river of moistures and shade; sun and forest. Every insect and beast of the forest gleamed and blinked. The lives in the city’s arid bones flickered like the wings of moths.
Under the city, through veils of stone and soil and rock, the well ran deep, and glowed. It was already awake, communing with itself. The tower delved it, like a vein into a heart.
Sightless, seeing, Rarnammon beheld the other glowing hearts away and away from him, yet near as his own hands lying on the floor forgotten.
He was not afraid. Only some fragment of him remembered his father at this instant, Raldnor, who had borne all this alone. And before Raldnor, Ashne’e, who had been the beginning, the first spark struck against the darkness.
Then he made contact with the starry, fiery heart, perhaps before he was quite ready. But unreadiness did not hinder him. He was blown upward, scorched and spun, but knew the strength of his sailing wings, to ride, and to pace, the whirlwind.
• • •
Galud, rushing in among his fellows, was caught by the One-Eared and shaken.
“Look at the sky!” hissed Galud.
They went to look.
Though the sun was setting, the whole heaven was throbbing with an extraordinary brilliance. It seemed as if they were about to see its arteries, or as if portions might be ejected.
“What’s that sound?” said Galud. They listened. The sound was not in the city. It could not be heard.
They stood listening to this soundless sound, as all over the ruins others had paused to listen.
In the colony of lepers to the west, faceless things crawled into cavities to hide.
Miles off in the forests, the chorus of the birds was chopped to dumbness, lizards froze, still water bubbled, creepers uncoiled like snakes from the trees.
• • •
The sun had already sunk beyond the ruined city of the south. Dusk sprinkled the colonnades and terraces that had had their youth in the era of Ashnesea.
The market of the Lepasin seemed deserted. Only a small wind played about there, with scraps of paper and petals and dust.
All around, the houses were boarded in, curtained over, shuttered. No light showed.
In the high place of the dark palace, seven figures, so white they seemed without blood, stood with white blowing hair between the broken sticks of columns. They were the guards, the custom. Their pale eyes took the tint of twilight, turning blue and uncanny.
Inward, flowers that had been brought rustled on the ancient floor paintings, the chips of citrine and garnet. The wind moved like the sea through the palace.
Lur Raldnor lay inside the darkness, his black hair poured on the mosaic. The Lowlanders, his kindred, had trained him. He had come to learn and to understand so much, that in the end he was afraid he would be the weakness that must lessen the chain.
Now he was beyond such fear.
His body lay like a corpse. The Amanackire guarded him as if he were a dead king. They would let no one through. They themselves, binding their minds with his, fenced and toughened his psyche.
To his awareness as he soared above it, the lines of force created on the surface of the palace were clear as silver bands. Silver steam described the city. Drunk on prayers, it murmured, sang, without sound.
He was prepared to give his life. He had been prepared to give it in battle. This was battle. But such thoughts were done. The cistern under the city was yielding up its vitality in thrusting surges, like a heart.
The city was all silver now. Far off, it struck a golden shadow, Rarnammon. . . .
And to the east a shadow like molten bronze—
• • •
Medaci was the Lowlander who held the gate in the Zor.
She stood at the entry to the mansion in the black night. Seeing her take her position there, knowing from some arcane tradition or instinct of tradition, her hair raying on the wind and the folds of her cloak, she was supernatural; a creature of the firmament. Yannul saw her, turned and went with the others to the chosen area two or three streets away. He had remonstrated at the beginning. He must remain at hand. Very well, the power of the planet would course upward, yet still some animal might come by and harm her. She was beyond him by then, and did not listen, he thought. She had gone so swiftly, he felt she had died. It was his younger son who explained, leading Yannul aside. There would be no animals, no interruptions. Medaci did not even have to bear the unleashing of Power. Safca was elected for this. Safca would bear it. But Medaci was the guardian, some ingredient or symbol of the balance.
Yannul knew, as they all did, when the Power of the city began to stir. It was a terrible, wonderful, unspeakable thing.
He tried to blind and deafen himself with it.
He did not want Medaci to have been “chos
en” even for this. Had she not already suffered enough through the psychic use of others? And he recollected the plain under Koramvis, the silent harp-string plucked over and over.
All along the opposite bank, over their river, the villages of the Zor would be watching, offering their own rituals to the esoteric night. The city gleamed, maybe, for those who could see it. Yannul did not want to see it. He was tormented. Finally he walked off from all of them, and from his own son, into the city’s enormous shadow, and sitting down in shadow commenced to pray, as once long ago, only for life, except now it was Medaci’s life.
The Lowland woman, the golden Amanackire who was Medaci, held the gate, the mansion on the hill. The high place. It had put out its temporal fires.
Safca, circling somewhere in the roof (briefly amused, visualizing herself a pigeon), perceived the bronze light of the city’s aura start to wash away the gloom.
How did I come to this? Safca inquired. I am nothing.
But she recalled the bracelet on her left wrist, and what it hid, what had been hidden since birth—the other bracelet, abhorrent, or maybe beautiful: A ring of fine pale metallic scales, incorporated in her dark skin. Her mother had not lived long in Olm. A Lanelyrian, she had still grown used to Dorthar and the luxury of the Koramvin court, which was extended to a favored slave. Freed, she had fled back to Elyr and Lan, when the Lowlanders came. She had caught Dortharian superstition, for an excellent reason, perhaps. Olm’s guardian saw her, made her his concubine, lost interest. The child was born, premature, unimportant. On her deathbed, Safca’s mother had tapped Safca’s bracelet and the deformity they had concealed beneath. “From your father,” she had said. That was the only time, and that was all. She never said who had had her in Koramvis, whose cherished slave she was, who had freed her to escape. Nor positively had she ever said she was with child already when she lay back for the guardian. Only dreams had guided Safca after. She was never sure.