by Tanith Lee
The mountains were clean of intellectual clutter. They held only voracious and primal emotions, and his own captive body.
He dreaded reaching it so much that now he was running towards it, straight up. He did not know what he would do. Had never known. He remembered how he had said to Guri that time when the true human Gullahammer marched towards the Ruk, ‘This road I’m on – sometimes I look back and see the distance I’ve come. Or forward, and I see a light as if the world burned – I wonder what choice I have.’ And Guri had answered quietly, pragmatically, ‘No choice. Your kind – none.’
Balanced on her spur, the Magikoy apprentice slept. She had dreamed or believed she had of the city, bright and whole, like her own future once. As she opened her eyes, longing swamped Ruxendra. Then she heard Vashdran coming in at some portal in the rock below.
It was not that he made a sound. The noise was psychic. Her undead brain or her soul heard him.
From her shoulder blades the blood-red wings unfurled. A slim scarlet crait, she clung to the ledge, staring down through the last of Hell’s daylight.
Vashdran appeared. He lifted his head and stared back at her through the transparent floor. At the body lying there he did not look at all.
Then he jumped upward, a sort of dive, and Ruxendra too sprang into the air, up into the head of the tower, shocked from her perch as his upraised fists and his skull hit the vitreous. It splintered in an eruption of needles at the impact, and like a nail hammered through plaster he rose on through it, his hair glittered by glass, otherwise unmarked, and his face a mask like gold—
In that instant did she recall the god she had, in all but essence, forgotten? Vashdran was his image. Save – Vashdran was more like the god Zeth now than Zeth Zezeth himself had ever been.
If she did recall in any case it was not obvious.
She closed her wings and dived in her turn straight down at him.
Vashdran caught her. He held her round the body, her arms trapped by his, her feet kicking at him, while he seemed not to notice her struggles and her blows, which were made weak by proximity, and he gazed into her face. Behind her the wings flapped strenuously, impotently, sluggishly.
Vashdran said, his mouth almost against her lips, an icy kiss, ‘What did you want done to him? Do you think your fury with the Lionwolf can match mine, you child?’ She tried to speak, to shout and spit at him, but now her psychic force was impaired by his own. Zeth had been wrong. She was not this being’s equal, even here. He pressed his face against hers entirely, brow to brow, her slender features allowing his some margin. Into her very mouth he spoke.
‘The Lionwolf – you know nothing of him. I will tell you. He put men to use like beasts – less than beasts, for of animals he was quite fond, and when he killed them he was tender. But men and women and children too – little girls like Ruxendra – those he gave to savagery and to rape and to a hundred deaths. But then, both his enemies and his friends Lionwolf gave to the steel and stink and treachery of dying. Because he was a god, and what does a god care for human things? No more, my girl, than for the meat or the fruit he carves with his knife. Yes then, to your effete metropolis, your toy city of Ru Karismi, he brought his multitude of warriors. Had they got in, that pearl of the south would have been spattered to ten million bricks, ten million million bones. And such as you would have bled out your lives on your backs or your faces, speared over and over by the other sword men wield between their legs like wolves that rut. Don’t shudder,’ he said, soft now, worse now, ‘don’t close your eyes. Look into mine and through mine and see what’s in the refuse pit of my brain. Do you see, Ruxendra? A crawling thing that’s less than any man and calls itself a god. Lionwolf. There he is. And when your Magikoy masters let loose their ultimate weapon on us, that too, as you so sensibly understood, was my singular sin, not theirs. I stood alone in a desert of dust that was all the men I had brought there, all the beasts, all the world I carved with my knife and tried to eat alive. Yes. I should be made to pay, Ruxendra. But you, you whining pathetic ignoramus, aren’t capable of the task of harming and destroying such a monster. Better then, girl, let the monster do it himself.’
When he dumped her back on the remains of the floor she simply lay there. She was stunned by the non-human physicality of his astral self, by the boiling lava of his self-hatred and his seething immortal rage.
Dizzy as at her death, she turned to see what he would do next.
Dense blue darkness was coming. Yet a hollow radiance persisted, unable to escape and trapped in the tower.
She saw Vashdran lean over the prostrate form that was also his.
The eyes of the prone Lionwolf, if so he was, were open. Vashdran and he looked at each other, coolly, almost with indifference.
‘Are you prepared?’ Vashdran said.
‘Yes, prepared.’
‘For the world then. For all the world—’
The great blade that swung upward in both Vashdran’s hands descended too fast for the girl to see. It was like a lightning flash. But in its wake soared a crescendo of blood.
Lionwolf screamed. The scream went on for ever because here, in this place of stones, there was no need to draw breath.
Ruxendra pulled herself to her feet.
She gaped, not realizing what she beheld. For perhaps a minute she watched the intricacy of the gleaming blade, the surgery it performed, the flags of flesh and burnish of strange shapes suddenly revealed beneath and between.
Vashdran too was screaming now, bellowing, never drawing breath.
Again and again the lightning flash, the crescendo.
It came to Ruxendra what she saw, as if blindness left her vision.
As her city was dying, she had witnessed much. Nothing like this. Nothing in all her universe ever, like this.
His eyes were fire. All the rest was blood. The sword was blood, his body and hair, the second body – blood – blood and offal, and all of this framed in a long double crying without pause to breathe—
Ruxendra, who had travelled such a way to exact payment, leapt through the hole in the floor, her wings beating inaccurately against the sides of the rock, and stumbling out from the tower, falling and bruised on the night flank of the mountain, she too began to scream, yet breathing, breathing deeply, between each shriek.
A shadow inked over Ruxendra. Night was in full bloom, yet oddly a single round moon had come up.
Ruxendra sat. She looked at the newcomer in terror.
As once before he said, ‘Don’t be afraid.’
At that she threw her hands over her face and wailed. ‘Mother – where’s Mother? I want her – I want my mother …’
Curjai seated himself beside her. Her wings were gone and her dress was tattered and grey in the spiky moonlight.
‘Your mother isn’t here,’ he said, flatly but not unkindly.
Ruxendra sobbed. Presently, when he slid an arm about her, she bowed into him and wept on his shoulder.
Curjai had flown up the mountain towards the glint of windows. Then he had made an interval, during which his own shield wings dispersed. By the hour he had arrived all sounds were over in the tower, and outside too. Yet they had been recorded there on tablets of granite. So he heard it still, the screaming.
As Ruxendra drained herself to calm, he found a fleece cloak by them on the rock, rolled it ready and laid her down there. ‘I won’t be long,’ He thought she would cling but, already exhausted, she was asleep. Asleep in Hell. The moon showed him only the face of a sad young girl, vacant now of anything but loss.
Curjai walked up the last of the mountain and went into the jerry-built tower.
A peculiar light was burning there – but no, it was the moonlight angling through a trio of windows.
Had Hell’s queen sent this moon? If so, why?
Not bothering with the re-creation of wings, Curjai merely levitated to the broken floor and went through. He positioned himself, and began to realize the two dark blots he had spotted from belo
w were a pair of bodies, each apparently quite dead.
Both were Vash.
Both were – not.
One lay in separated joints, hacked, eviscerated and butchered, like the meats that rose up from the ground for cooking. There was therefore not much by which to identify the mirror-body they had composed. It too now was totally deceased.
The other body was face down, sprawled. A huge sword lay by it – or rather a sword that seemed to dwarf the figure. Curjai began to reason that this was because the second form of Vashdran was no longer that of a man, but of a boy not much more than twelve years in age.
‘Vash?’
Curjai touched the boy on the arm and felt ‘life’ there, under the surrogate flesh of one undead.
Gradually Curjai turned him over.
He had been copiously bleeding too, but all the wounds had closed and vanished scarlessly away. Only the blood stayed, hard and dry, describing the areas of assault so obvious on the other disjointed body. They were the same injuries, of course mirrored. Yet even now the dried blood flaked off. This body surely could not die in Hell, only suffer and endure. But it had changed, for without doubt now he was a child – just past the age of twelve: too old for Olchibe mercy.
‘Vash …’
The eyes of the child opened. They were piercing rich blue as the last of Hell’s sunset.
‘Guri,’ said the boy, ‘I’ll die. Don’t make me die here. Not like this.’
‘You can’t die.’
‘I’m half mortal. The mortal half … can die. Uncle, don’t make me die here.’
Curjai bent down and picked the boy up in his arms and carried him to the break in the floor, jumped through with him, and took him out on to the night mountain.
As he did this, Curjai thought, I never could have had a son.
Below, far off, there was the sequin of a fire on the plain. Heppa and the rest were there. How easy it was to persuade oneself all this was factual.
Curjai sat down by Ruxendra, who was still fast asleep. He held the boy in his arms until the child too seemed to drift asleep.
The moon did not cross the sky. It stayed fixed above, a steady candle in the dark.
Looking at it, Curjai seemed sometimes to glimpse the ghostly outline of a woman’s face, ebony in opal.
Eventually he too slept.
Below, round the fire, the others, even the dogs, were sleeping also, all but Taeb who, out on the plain of stones, was fighting with the conjure of a wolverine. Occasionally she called it by a Jafn name – Rothger. The violence went on and on.
Vashdran, who was Lionwolf, descended or ascended or walked a level invisible path in utter darkness beyond all nights, to a tiny place darker yet, and colder than any Hell.
Here he stopped, for there was nowhere else to go.
He had reached the metaphorical basement of existence.
For a long while he sat, his back to nothing, resting on nothing, his arms and his head on his knees.
Where he had been, each blow he struck against his mirror-self had rained also on him; he felt everything he did, even as he viewed it happen. Finally the other was vanquished. Then he too dropped headlong into oblivion. But oblivion it was not. His consciousness continued, his sense if not of body, then of being. In this state, once – twice? – he heard himself mumble words. But it was as if another spoke, and miles away. He was only here. Curiously though his guilt and panic, which had followed him here, were separate at last. They went with him as companions now – but no longer as internal foes. He saw them clearly, and their faces – despite the fact they were faceless and formless – were composed and nearly dignified. They did not lash out at him. They had been completely recognized and so relaxed their grip.
I am in the place where I was first made.
Within his brain, if it was now only a brain, he saw a smith hammering out a piece of metal on an anvil. Sparks ricocheted like jasper beetles. The metal was first dull, then brown, then like new-minted bronze.
Like that, he thought. He knew faint wonder at the miracle of his life. And at the waste he had made of it only regret and sorrow. Anger had burned away.
The picture faded.
Sleep was coming in soft waves. Gratefully he let it come, thinking it to be at last genuine death – extinction.
But sleep took him in its arms and swam strongly with him through all time, all dimension, all actuality and all nothingness – that too – but it was only like a journey under a midnight sun.
Clouds of solid ice passed him, glimmering, and armoured fish, and other oceanic creatures. But they were symbols, as the sea was. He was inside his own deeper mind.
Yet the travel soothed him. He had no fear of self, not any more, nor of what he had done. And if at any unnoticed second he had ever been timid at life or death or the world, that too was done with.
This melodious progress went on for an indefinite space, until eventually he grew aware of a kind of anchor. A warm opening was there, and something set in it, like a red gem inside a flower. He stared at it, waking in the dream to sudden fascination. The gem was for him. It was his. For now he must wait, but soon the gift would be ready to claim.
Swimming, he spiralled round this ultimate of symbols, astonished and glad, eager, and also diffident – and patient, as never had he been in all his godlike days on earth.
When the blue sun dawned, the round moon was still fixed to the sky. Although the moon dimmed, it did not disappear, but Curjai thought now it had moved a little towards the west. The boy lay heavy on him and Curjai was unnerved, remembering what slumber had made him forget. He turned his head and Ruxendra knelt at a basin of water called out of the mountain, washing her face and hands and combing her hair.
As she realized Curjai had woken and looked at her she said, frosty with nervousness, ‘Don’t let him see me.’
Curjai glanced at the boy, then back at her.
‘He’s younger than you are, now. You shouldn’t be afraid of him. He can’t hurt you.’
She said nothing. She began to cry again, then gave it up. Vigorously she laved her face once more in the water, which had a pleasant perfumed smell, an unguent no doubt from the Ruk. She said, drying herself on a silk cloth that had also manifested, ‘Will he start again – will he – to wound himself—’
‘I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe that was enough.’
She shivered.
‘It is my fault,’ she said, solemn and miserable. ‘I’ve soiled my training. I was Maxamitan Level. They would have cast me out of the Order.’
‘Never mind that,’ he said. ‘There’s no Magikoy rule book here.’
Wanting to stand up now he shifted, to test how the boy he clasped would respond.
But the boy lay unresponding, and heavy and stiff as wood.
His face was Lionwolf’s – Vashdran’s. Just so he must have looked at twelve or thirteen.
‘Vash? Wake up now.’
As he said the words Curjai heard his mother howling in memory, grabbing on to him. But he, Curjai, had already been gone.
‘What is it?’ Ruxendra whispered.
‘This too,’ Curjai said.
‘What? What?’
‘He’s dead. Real death. Second death.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Yes. Look.’
‘No, I won’t look.’
Curjai stood up, then bent and laid the boy’s body down on the mountain.
The head, too stiff, did not loll; the torso and limbs were immovable. He had died and frozen in that position of being supported and held.
Ruxendra tilted her face to the sun and moon and started to wail.
Curjai took hold of her. He drew her in against him and found as he comforted her noise into silence that he smoothed her hair, which smelled sweet, like young lilies, with his lips. He did not mind she clung to him now. ‘Ssh,’ he said. ‘Hush, sweetheart.’
When she raised her child-woman’s face, he kissed her mouth, unintrusively but with the d
emanding passion of any fraught moment in Hell. And Ruxendra kissed him in return, and when they drew apart she was flushed and altered and no longer hysterical. In their lives, he thought, she had been two years his senior. She would never have let him kiss her then.
But be damned to that. Why live in yesterday when today was here, sufficiently laden with tragedy and hope?
He carried the second body of Vashdran back into the tower, went up and laid it by the other, the raw meat body, on the vitreous floor. Then he took the cloak he had found for Ruxendra and spread it over them.
A terrible grieving ripped at Curjai and yet he gave it no attention. He did not believe in this or any death. A sort of unseen, unheard, unknown, inexplicable assurance was on him. Do this and this, and this will not matter. Denial was all. Then let denial reign supreme.
They walked unnecessarily carefully down the mountain, taking only a short while over it even so.
When they reached the camp the men, Kuul, Behf, Swanswine and Heppa, were sitting uneasily, watching green-haired Taeb prancing round the cadaver of some big striped hairy animal out on the plain. Heppa’s bride Wasfa was placidly cooking porridge in a pot over the fire.
‘Do you see that?’ asked Swanswine, pointing at Taeb. ‘All night over killing it. Never trust women, unless Olchibe and Crarrow.’
‘What type of beast is it?’ asked Behf.
‘I told you. Wolverine. From the ice swamps of north Gech.’
Kuul said, ‘She was squealing it had eaten her alive. She called it by the name of a bastard soint of the Jafn Klow, Rothger.’ Kuul spat. ‘She was his witch long ago. I seem to have recalled that much.’