by Tanith Lee
Annihilation, to this world, is Paradise enough.
After the burying, he wandered about the regions of the Insularia. All were, like the city, dead or dying. Here and there a wan-coloured iridescence stirred; now and then a failing gargolem spoke. By the great gates of the Nonagesmian Chamber the serpent-worm lay exhausted.
‘Who comes?’ it asked in the voice of death.
‘Sleep,’ he said. It slept, and did not again wake.
Finally and inevitably, Thryfe descended to the Chamber of the Weapons.
This would have been allotted to him, had he been both present in the city and quite unable to prevent their deployment. Seven Magikoy had gone down. One of these had been a substitute, for Thryfe, despite his steely modesty, was one of the Highest Order and that echelon alone was authorized.
The drop through the shaft, the slicing swords, meant nothing now.
As Jemhara would do, after these two years, that were – to some – centuries, had gone by, Thryfe moved out through the empty Telumultuan.
Naturally he was versed in its tricks and concealments.
For a time he walked there and then, without warning, the full edifice of despair crashed down about his head. Presumably until then he had generally held it off by trying to render some assistance. But here at last, with all in ruins and the symbolic child-girl with her mission of astral vengeance laid to rest, the structure of resistance gave way.
It had been the father who wept. Men were weaker. Thryfe had often thought so. Women, with their legacy of childbirth and, often, subservience, must endure. Their tears were more illustrative than profound, or if profound, then unnegotiable.
But when Thryfe had wept, there in the Telumultuan Chamber, he knew it was only the weeping of a fool staggering under his debt.
Pay it then. Pay the damnable thing.
He raised some barrier – glass, ice – went through and closed it. And in that place the smoulder of the funeral pyres came flocking immediately, and all the reek of them, more repulsive and again original than when in the city, for here the air had been clean.
These vestiges massed out of his memory, his thoughts. He welcomed them with an awful sense of rightness. Night settled too. Welcome, night.
When the paroxysm of grief was spent, he slept for some hours lying on the ground, in the familiar miasma and dark of world and self-criticism.
Rousing, he had been stripped of anything he supposed he was. And so he shouted for release.
An antique torture of Ruk Kar Is was to hang a man alive and upside down. In Thryfe’s smouldering sleep the image had come to him, though it had not been himself but some emblematic fiery male writhing in chains. By now no intellectual connection was made for him with emblems he had read in the past concerning a man who was half god, half human.
From an unseen ceiling chains rolled down and picked Thryfe up. As they seized him he in turn seized them, in an exuberant frenzy of abnegation. Until they curtailed all autonomous acts.
Swung over and depended, he was aware of the blood of a viable vascular system thumping into his head. It stunned him, and when he revived gradually altered him.
With a sort of bitter pleasure he felt his mind give way. Fragments scattered his consciousness like broken shells. No birds fluttered from them. He was immeasurably glad.
Time now became nothing.
Back to his babyhood and his beginnings he spun. It was that morning when he was two years old, and foresaw the killing of his mother by a black wolf. Again he must go through it all, shrieking and put aside, standing to see her fly apart under the tree of ice.
Eagles whirled him upward, as the forgotten chains now did. He was fifteen. He flew in their taloned grip, revelling in the bemusement of his village. Then he was sent away. He was in town after town, next in cities of the Ruk. He was examined, proved. He suffered all the trials of the Order that now appropriated him. He felt the teeth of whips, the bite of beasts and fires. He fought off fear and lust and longing and loneliness. He closed himself for the first behind a barrier of invisible glassy ice, this one mental and, he believed, never to be penetrated.
Worse than all else then, through the humming of his bruising brain, she stole.
A black hare ran. Thryfe the Eagle brought it down.
Jemhara. Lovely as stars at sunset. Sweet-mouthed, sweet-breasted, clothed in her black hair, her cream skin just blushed with her blood – blood that smelled, since the eagle had spilled it, of pristine water.
Shape-changer. Mind-changer. Destroyer of ice and barriers and the ramifications of the forged and adamant heart.
A beautiful and shallow face, until he saw the depths within her eyes. Until she looked at him, saw him, her own heart springing open like a bud.
Some sorcery was on them both – yes, now he glimpsed as much, hung here to die slowly for his sins of non-attendance and inadequacy. Perhaps not all her fault then, that timeless year or month or hour of their lovemaking.
Sweet, so sweet. So good, so nourishing.
Like food to one starved, drink to the thirsty, warmth to the frozen cold – all these. But then, replete, warmed through and all the protective iron of the ice gone to liquid, then, waking out of the dream to find he had lost the world. Worse, he had lost that world not only for himself, who deserved nothing else, but for so many thousands more.
All the dead stand now in the limitless empty chamber of Thryfe’s mind, whose scope is larger by far even than the Telumultuan. They stand, fixed in their unheard screaming, in the moments of white below the walls of Ru Karismi. On and on their scream, bleeding to the colours of silver, ebony and carmine, and back again to the blank of snow.
Let me die. God help me and let me free …
But there is for him no God, no gods, not even those fallible malicious demons worshipped in the Ruk. No, Thryfe sees the void before him, empty also of everything. He aches and yearns towards it as once towards the joys of the flesh he renounced. Yet it is miles away, oblivion. It will be a journey of millennia to reach it.
And now he is an infant again, and he too is screaming as the wolf rips his mother into bits under the tree.
His eyes were open, but he did not see with them.
All of him hung there like the captive body of an eagle, a lammergeyer, its wings trailing downward, feathers of bronze and black raggedly torn.
The surrounding fog was very thick. It had the taint of old burning.
Jemhara had hurried through it and stood beside him now. Thryfe’s face floated in the murk just above her – all of him by a small amount out of her reach. Sometimes a galvanic shudder would race through his frame and he would swing like any criminal confined on a gibbet. But the mask of the face never altered. The eyes were always blind.
For a long while she remained there, gazing at him.
She did not try to reach up to him, or even touch a trail of one unravelled sleeve that hung temptingly near enough for her fingertips to brush it. Perhaps a quarter of an hour eroded. Jemhara sat down on the floor below the living dying body of her lover. She never took her eyes from him. She began to murmur. Was it a prayer? Some cunning spell? It was the song from her childhood. By all the winds that never blew … She spoke the words to the shroud of smoke and the deaf quiet, and to his intermittently convulsing flesh, and to his unseeing eyes. I sing of you.
Once before they had been condensed in timelessness. Timelessness returned to them in the darkness. Soon all sound ended, even the whispers of her breathing and her words. Jemhara, not really knowing what she did, began to pierce, in slow awkward stages, the outer casing of Thryfe. That was, her awareness pushed like a remorseless needle in through the skin, the muscle and the bone, in and further in, to the essence of him.
There she located the eagle. Not that she saw it, or even imagined it. By other unlike senses, she discovered this animal genius of his psyche.
It perched on some bleak high crag of his soul, wings folded, staring into a type of vacancy. For a very long
while nothing had alerted it. It was inanimate and void, though it had not so far lost its etheric non-visual outline, or its paraphrase of might and flight.
And as Jemhara came to it, the eagle suddenly swerved its hook-beaked head, as if at an unforeseen noise or flick of brilliance.
Gems of light appeared too in its eyes. Very fearsome it looked, described in that unseen iconography by which Jemhara now saw. Pitiless it looked, and blood-hungry, and still vital. There was no remnant of humanity now, no restraint. But life there was.
Maybe she had known all along, unconsciously. Even so she had come here, and had she not said to him before, ‘Let me die for you. Kill me, if you like.’
She rose, there in the physical room of darkness. Then she was gone. On the ground poised the black hare of her witch’s shape-change, with one jewelled spark of Jemhara still flaming in its brain.
And on the mind-crag of soul and thought, near where the dusty wicked eagle perched, a black hare loped from a crevice. Next instant it sped away.
The eagle, glaring from its sideways eye, lifted with a heavy slap of wings. Over some symbolic plain it soared, and the black hare fled below. The bird stooped. A screech burst from its throat.
In the outer dark the form of the hanging man grew translucent. From the body of Thryfe the eagle of his aura flowed like fire out of lit coals. Upward it dashed, and the whole of the foggy space expanded at its coming to make room for it.
Here too the hare ran, pathetic and small, across a vista that was both plain and floor – but also neither. Again the eagle gave its hunting cry. It wheeled, clapped shut the sweeping wings and fell downward like a lightning bolt from a black sky.
Hooks of bronze, the talons seized the little hare. The very crash of the hammer of the fall must have broken her back. Down on the ground he pinned her, and rent her with his beak till all her velvet sable was red.
Deep within herself Jemhara held her psychic core intact, distant from the agony of the blows. She felt them, they were real and terminal, enough to kill her, surely, but it seemed her powers were greater, had been made so by former dealings with Thryfe. She did not die, she did not give way. And when abruptly the eagle let her go, standing there above her, Jemhara too flowed upward out of herself, on this occasion the human flowing outward from the animal genius of the hare.
Naked she came, and unmarked, speckled only fractionally by the unstoppered blood she had passed through, her hair flying around her.
With both hands she grasped the terrifying eagle by its neck. Clash its beak and twist as it might, she would not let go. The wings spread like lethal fans. Jemhara took no notice.
Up from the floor or earth the great bird rushed, dragging her with it. It beat towards the shape of the hanging magician, seeking its eyrie of flesh.
What hung there had also begun to move, to struggle. The eagle lashed against it, unable to access return, while the body swung and contorted, mindlessly at first like some corpse animated only by magic.
Then something flared inside the eyes, something live, something mortal and aware, but neither sane nor gentle.
High above an incendiary explosion shook the incorporeal walls of the room. Smoke and dark fell in disintegrations, and a briary of chains splashed down with them. Thryfe fell. As he fell the eagle altered to a stream like molten metal, broke free of captivity and gushed over him, back into him, vanishing, leaving no clue save in the laval insanity of his eyes.
With these madman’s eyes Thryfe watched Jemhara as she crouched on all fours. She too had been dropped from the eagle’s supernatural talons. Quickly she propelled herself to her feet. Then he surged up from the ground.
Thryfe, in all his tatters, filthy and damaged, his brain in loose rattling sections bruised blacker than any smoke by upturned blood, dizzy at being gravitationally upright, reeling and slavering, retching, coughing, cursing in a backlands slobber no one had ever heard from him since his sixteenth year.
‘Thryfe,’ Jemhara said. Her voice was thin, like a cobweb.
His voice was like a cracked knife.
‘I am no longer Thryfe. This is not Thryfe, you bitch.’
All her dreams of him then had been true. The dream of his hanging, but also the previous dreams in which he came towards her to slay her.
He staggered at her like a drunken man on the deck of a storm-battered ship. She stood immobile as a slender rock. And he foundered on her, he and the ship of his murderer’s intention, foundered as he had before in the spider-silk of her love. Down he went, unconscious at her feet. But bending over him Jemhara heard him breathe, and under her hand felt the gallop of his heart.
The Gargolem had waited elsewhere. Possibly it had even retired into that other unnamed dimension it utilized. Now it was present in the Telumultuan Chamber.
How it had got there went unanswered. Certainly it had not come through the descending shaft, as men must. Nor did it, in any apparent way, evolve out of the air.
Whatever, it had divined unerringly the moment of Thryfe’s release, Jemhara’s second triumph.
The woman, straightening from the prone body of the magus, turned reflexively and saw the Gargolem through the hole she had made in the barrier of ice-glass. As earlier, even now the sight of the Gargolem astonished and frightened her. She began to shake with fear of it, where through all the other terrors she had more than managed.
The Gargolem however nodded to her. An unusually urbane gesture.
‘You must leave this place,’ the Gargolem said.
‘Yes – but how?’
‘I will show you a route from the Chamber.’
Jemhara looked at Thryfe. She had learned that tears when genuinely cried hurt her, so pushed them away. ‘He …’ she said. Then again, ‘He.’
‘I will carry Highness Thryfe.’
With no effort, the Gargolem did as it had said.
It led her then through the awful Chamber to a spot where there was a narrow door. Had it been there from the start? Jemhara neither knew nor cared.
The Gargolem, bearing Thryfe as easily as the mage himself, two years ago, had borne the dead apprentice Ruxendra, climbed ahead of Jemhara up slopes and flights of steps, in semi-blackness, lighted only by some mysterious occult glow – which was itself perhaps imagined.
Through the last doors and exits they went. They emerged finally on a bank of the River Palest. The snowstorm had ended, and the sun was sinking with hardly any colour. Jemhara did not know if this was the sun of the same day she had gone down into the Insularia, or that of several days later. She did not ask.
In the grey sky the heights of the city sparsely glittered, faded.
Twilight sponged Ru Karismi melancholy blue.
A sleekar stood on the street beyond the ornamental broken lamp-standards, with a team of lashdeer waiting quietly in the shafts. From where had they come? Again, Jemhara did not bother the Gargolem. Instead she asked it, ‘Where must I take him?’
‘Go to his southern house at Stones.’
‘But the house is sealed. I won’t have the skill—’
‘You have the skill. Think what you have done.’
Jemhara gaped like a small girl told without warning she is now all grown up.
Then, dubiously, she set her attention on the ice-chariot and team. Normally only a strong man could control such a vehicle.
The Gargolem this time presumably read her thought from her body language.
‘You will find no problems.’
‘The deer—’
‘They are swift and obedient. Though you are of light build, and also the car will contain the magus, you have only to trust what I tell you.’
Jemhara said, ‘The lessons of the Kraag. Nothing is real, only unreality. So all is achievable.’ She had not read theosophical books for nothing.
Surprisingly perhaps, as the Gargolem laid Thryfe down on the mattress within the sleekar it volunteered: ‘The Kraag are an elder people, their knowledge cleverly concealed by innocence and a p
erceived semblance of naivety.’
‘I’ve met none of them.’
‘Few persons of Ruk Kar Is ever have.’
Jemhara paused. Her mind on all things else, and yet nervous of the Gargolem, still she inquired, ‘Have you?’
‘I have met them. But I am not human.’
Some bundles of food, carefully wrapped, and three flasks had been secured to the sides of the chariot. Thryfe the Gargolem proceeded to strap down, either for the magician’s safety or Jemhara’s. Maybe both.
She mounted the sleekar. She took the reins and felt instantly the vast pull, even while static, of the lashdeer against her.
‘What is real is unreal,’ she said softly. ‘What is unreal is real. I am strong enough. We’ll run like the wind. Like all the winds that never blew, and lingered to blow now.’
‘Highness Jemhara,’ said the Gargolem, ‘drive well.’
In utter amazement, the young woman craned her neck to stare back at it – for it had accorded her the title only rendered a Magikoy Master.
But the Gargolem was gone. Not a trace. And on the snowbound street night frost formed, hiding any footprint.
Jemhara glanced at Thryfe. ‘Stay sleeping, love. Till you’re home.’
She cracked the reins as she had seen so many drivers do. The deer leapt forward. She braced against them, and understood it was possible to her. They were sorcerous probably. But they would do the work.
As two moons emerged from the east, little faint bent bows, and a third one rose an hour or so after, shining big and proud to mock them, the sleekar bounded over the freezing land, away into the western south.
TWO
Curled like an embryo in the womb, that was how he lay.
How else? It was as if he had never been born.
Besides, the wall had taken him in. It had offered itself, a blanched cave, yet smooth and gelatinous in texture. He had crawled inside.