by Tanith Lee
Riadis stared at him.
Then she fled from the tibbuk, through the dense trunk-pillared corridors of the palace to her room and her carved chest. The mirror bit was wrapped in a piece of tiger-skin, a wonderful and rare pelt allowed only to the royal houses.
She held it there for some time, tracing the pale dark stripes, stroking the paler amber of the fur which, when you turned the surface, went to purest white.
She thought how quiet the palace had grown, as if it held its breath, this place that had never bothered much either with herself or with Curjai. Outside too a restless wind which had risen with the sun lay down on the ice-tasselled trees.
She had not yet removed the mirror when Korch arrived at her door.
In the mirror, a fragment no larger than a man’s hand, the woman looks at the instruction of the shaman.
She sees appear a sweeping landscape clothed in growing fronds, a vast city to which Padgish is a pebble.
Within the city a crowd sings and lauds a procession of men and chariots that is riding out into a wide square space. The foremost chariot is drawn by animals that Riadis does not recognize, although they seem to her somewhat like tigers – but they are maned, and in colour grizzled.
The driver of the chariot is a god.
By no possible means could even a fool miss this fact, and Riadis is no fool at all.
Who is he? Is he the fire god?
No, she does not think he is, for Attajos is very dark of skin and hair, with golden eyes. And this god is red-haired with golden skin. These eyes are blue like the sky above the city.
She only sees the god a moment anyway.
Curjai rides there at his side.
Curjai. Him she knows instantly. She has always known him to be exactly this. A handsome man, about twenty years now, of a light yet muscular physique, his eyes like the hazel gems men dig from mountain caves. His hair is a mane to rival those of the chariot-cats, to rival even that of the red-headed god.
Curjai.
‘My son,’ she mutters, too proud to be silent yet careful not to unseat the spell.
When she speaks, Curjai however seems to hear. He half looks at her. For a fleeting second he smiles, showing all his fine white teeth. He has every limb. He is a man – she had always known he was this, inside the body he had been born with. How marvellous he was always, then too, undeniably then. His nature and his dreams. His leaps of humour and pooling gentleness, his kindness to others.
My son.
Riadis sees there is another man in the front chariot too, but she pays him no heed except to note he has a skin she has never seen, a yellow one.
Ahead of the chariots, across the city square, there is a wall of pulsing light. It seems to beat like a heart. It is somehow terrifying and steadying all at once.
The chariot is going away from her towards the light. All the chariots, all the men, are doing the same.
The glass clouds.
Before she can prevent herself Riadis cries out—
The vision blanks.
‘Bring it back!’
‘No, queen. I can’t show you more. Some secrets the gods have to keep, or they’d send us insane.’
Along the up and down tumbles of the land of Simisey, lying alone in a ruin, another woman is sobbing for her child. The goddess Saftri remains a woman, remains Saphay. In sleep, she saw him. When she awoke, he, and her lover’s arms, were gone.
But more curiously, elsewhere, a human woman of the Olchibe stands dry-eyed, gaping at the sudden removal of a mirage on the snow. From the other two, the queen and the goddess, this woman, a young Crarrow, is separated by much more than miles, lands or seas. However she too has beheld a chariot drawn by lions which, actually, she does not quite identify. In the chariot she saw two shadows, one shining and one darker, and also a little Olchibe boy who turned on her a look of such utter insolent astonishment, the Crarrow girl had wanted to reprimand him. Too late anyway. The mirage faded. And she must go back to her sluht. In the distance a snowstorm is starting, up in Gech by the Copper Gate and the mighty city of Sham.
My son, say the whispers. Saphay and Riadis know why. Only the clever Crarrow, trotting back through the ice-woods, is again surprised. Has she seen a vision of the man who will be born to her? Indeed she has.
Beyond the pulsing light lies an open plain covered in stones and shards.
It is the first plain, cold hell, under a watery veined sky that presents no sun of any type or tint.
The chariots fan out. Men dismount from the vehicles, which disappear with their various animals like smoulder.
‘I fear this, Vash,’ said Curjai, apparently forgetting Lionwolf’s reinstated name, and also not knowing he or some facet of himself had recently smiled at another, elsewhere.
‘And you were the one who told me of Lalt and Tilan,’ said Lionwolf.
‘They quarrelled. One killed the other, and died too, inside his own heart.’
Guri said morosely, ‘It’s uneasy for us. This is the first we ever had to go back into life.’
‘Vash!’ Curjai gripped Lionwolf’s shoulder.
One by one, without any fuss, the other fighters on the plain were winking out like blotted stars.
‘It’s so simple?’ asked Guri.
‘Not for vis.’
‘Ah? Do you know, Lion?’
‘Something in me knows. In all of us something knows.’
Every other man was gone. The plain was vacant.
Then it was not.
Over the stones came bowling a high plume of blackness, a kind of tornado, twisting.
Lionwolf gazed up into it.
He had never feared anything save his father, and himself. Those fears were gone, presumably for ever.
‘Run, Guri,’ he said, ‘run, Curjai. Run with me towards it.’
They darted forward, three lions now, lion of Olchibe, lion of Simisey, and Lionwolf, son of god and mortal.
They met the funnel of blackness. It curled them up. It tore them into shreds. There was no agony, no horror. It felt right, as a sword feels right that is made for you and put into your hand, as a kiss does from one you want, as day does breaking, as hope does always, even when it can never be realized.
Tomorrow, sang the plain on one long monumental chord. Yesterday.
Riadis jumped to her feet.
A spark from the brazier had flown off and lodged in her skirt. She beat it out in three slaps.
The hole scored through the cloth into her flesh. A miniature triangle on her thigh was already scarlet and blistering. There would be a scar. No doubt of it.
Greater than the discomfort, the sureness.
‘Attajos,’ she said.
… Unended …
Turn the page to continue reading from the Lionwolf Trilogy
ONE
Gold moon sailed green sky. Beneath the two lay the world.
As she stood at her narrow window, the solid frigid sea to one side, and the wrecked city of Kandexa filling the rest of the view, the magician stared unblinking with her sombre eyes. The evening had a look it must often wear. The limpid and beautiful dusk alone seemed capable of change. The ice-imprisoned earth was stuck.
Of course there was always the chance of a savage fight. A pall of smoke hung on the city. The settlements of West Villagers and Clever Town had come to blows again.
Jemhara turned towards the door of her room. She sensed, as now she usually did, a human approach.
After a moment feet sounded on the attic stair and next the gentle rap of knuckles.
She did not move. The door opened at a twitch of her will.
A young man stood gaping. Yet all of them knew she could do such things. The people here had established for themselves she was one of the Magikoy, those mages that had been the most powerful, supposedly, in the world. Technically she was not Magikoy and she had never claimed the title for herself. But then too many of them said black-haired Jemhara was once a queen.
The young man cl
eared his throat.
‘Someone has come to Paradise, Highness,’ he announced.
She nodded gravely.
Inside herself the little involuntary leap of her heart was instantly squashed. Persons did arrive at the barricaded and stupidly named zones inside Kandexa. At first, on being told of any newcomer she had frozen in expectancy. But it was never him.
The boy went on, ‘The mageia says can you come and see to it?’
The lesser mageia was a sensible woman.
Following the boy down from the attic, showing the stair for them in the gathering dark with sorcerously lit glims, Jemhara heard the echo of words in her head.
A man is on the road to you. A man like a tower of ice with eagle’s eyes.
Only one surely could be defined in that way: Thryfe, Magikoy mage of the Highest Order.
A dead god had given her the news in a kind of vision. But he was a god of wickedness and destruction.
Oh, she had still believed it. For a while. Most do when offered hope. And it sparkled before her like some image in a scrying mirror. Then, just as the dark now fell on the city, dark had fallen over her dream. She had asked herself simply how she could ever have credited a promise so obviously flawed. For though Thryfe was her only love, to him she was a despised and hated thing, causer of his guilt and utter despair.
The girl was seated cross-legged on the floor. She looked about eighteen or so, but within her face much older. A slender purple scar vividly marred her forehead; her skin otherwise was creamy. Ragged brown hair had been dyed green but the dye had now mostly grown out. A witch?
From her natural colouring she seemed to be from the Ruk. But the dye indicated the wild sorceresses of Gech in the far north.
Aglin, the older mageia of Paradise, was tending the fire-basket, lighting a couple of lamps by means of a nod and putting on water to boil.
Jemhara saw that the girl seated on the floor watched this with mild interest, calm but at odds with everything, as if she had given up either resisting or asking real questions.
‘Here I am,’ said Jemhara.
‘Here you are, Jema. And here’s this one.’
Jemhara looked again at the girl. ‘How are you called?’
‘Azulamni. But he called me Beebit. He said I’d have to answer to that or I’d be killed. And now I’m used to it.’
Jemhara raised her brows. She was familiar with strange coercions from her own youthful past.
‘Why was that?’
‘After the reivers came here, those years back.’
‘You mean to Kandexa, in the time of Vashdran?’ To speak the name of the dead god who had made war on the Ruk burned Jemhara’s mouth, and left a bitter psychic taste. It was he too who had spoken to her in the vision.
‘Kandexa surrendered to the reivers, the only city that did,’ remarked Aglin to herself. ‘Thought it’d save them but the buggers smashed the place anyway. Scum, like all the mixed armies of Vashdran the Lionwolf.’ She stared at the water over the fire. ‘Watched pot boil!’ It boiled at once.
‘I was hiding up in the roof,’ said the girl now called Beebit. ‘My father said go up, you’ll be safe, and because I’m limber, I could. But they found him. I heard them murder him. Then I came down, so they caught me.’ She was matter-of-fact. ‘One of them, he was a Kelp, he stank of fish, he threw me down and raped me. The rest of them got bored and went off. There were other nicer things and women. But then the Kelp saw how I was, what I can do. He didn’t hurt me much, he was only small. I’d served bigger.’
Aglin brought Jemhara wine and hot water with a stick of spice. The mageia murmured, ‘Daddy had put her into the game. A cunning whore at twelve years.’
‘So old?’ said Jemhara.
Hearing this, the girl glanced at them and suddenly she laughed. The mageia and Jemhara were both surprised. Laughter was not what they expected.
‘Look,’ said Beebit.
Then she lay down on her back, not using her arms to help her, and slowly and evenly put up both her legs until her feet rested flat on the floor either side of her head. Then she stood up once more, weight only on the soles of her feet, bringing her head and torso round and under and out in a sort of leisurely backward somersault. Still grinning she sat on the floor again and crossed her legs, this time with a foot on each of her shoulders.
‘See, Highness?’ she said to Jemhara.
‘Honey bones,’ said the mageia.
Jemhara nodded. ‘And the Kelp liked that?’
‘He loved it. So he hid me and fed me, and he brought me green dye. That sallow Rukar skin, he said, that’ll pass for Gech, if you change your hair. He said he had met a Gech witch once. She was like that. Then I travelled with Vashdran’s army. I soon learned the other languages, Kelp, Vorm, Jafn. I’m quick to learn.’
‘The Gech mageias have magic,’ said Jemhara. ‘Were you never asked?’
‘I said my magic was how I could do the things with my body I can do.’
They paused in silence then, each drinking the hot watered wine.
Outside somewhere in the ruin there was shouting, but far away. Dogs barked but left off.
Aglin sat in one chair and Jemhara in the other, and they gazed at Beebit sitting on the ground with her feet on her own shoulders.
‘So then?’ said the mageia. It seemed she hadn’t heard all yet.
‘Don’t you want,’ said Beebit, ‘to know if I saw Vashdran?’
‘Did you?’ said the mageia.
‘Now and then. Never close. He was very beautiful. He was golden, and his hair was red as sun-up and they said his eyes were blue – but in war they went the red of blood. He could do what I can – I mean he could walk straight up the sides of walls and trees, up the hard ice. He’d ridden into a battle standing on the back of a chariot-lion.’ Her face was dull again and she said all this impassively. ‘But I never liked men, even gods. Only my father. He was always kind.’
‘He made you a harlot,’ said Aglin flatly.
‘Oh, that. He was a harlot too. Since nine years. It’s a profession. I’m not ashamed and nor was he.’
‘And the Kelp who saved your life?’ asked Jemhara.
Without any expression the girl replied, ‘I swore to myself I’d kill him first chance Fate gave me. But it didn’t find me, that happy day. Never mind it. The Magikoy saw to him and all the rest at Ru Karismi, City of Kings. They unleashed the great magic weapons of power and the White Death came. The whole enemy horde – gone to dust and powder. Even the Lionwolf, I think, for no one saw him since.’
‘Someone told you this?’ said Jemhara. Her flesh prickled with silver quills under the skin. ‘Because you had got away from the Kelp and so avoided the White Death, which none present escaped.’
‘No, lady,’ said Beebit. A tiny and impertinent smile crinkled her mouth. ‘I was there. I saw it happen. It was like noise without noise and a lightning flash that went on and on. And then – just powder and dust, and me standing in the midst, by the baggage carts where the women were. Only no carts left, no women or beasts. Even the chain he’d put on my ankle and the peg in the ground – not even those. My clothes were all lightninged off me too – but not my hair.’
Jemhara spoke very softly.
‘And the scar on your face?’
‘That? A man threw a knife at me when I was fifteen. The dad killed him. That’s all that is.’
A second moon rose, but only a thin crescent. The third did not rise and the first was already down. On the nights of strongest triple moonrise – two moons at least at or nearly full and the third not less than half – Kandexa bleakly resembled a scorched skull smouldering fires, where people came and went with rapid unease, like lizards darting over stones. But tonight was not so violently lighted. A lot could go on in the dark.
Beyond the city, the humped old orchards of frozen fruit had been burned down during the war, along with anything else potentially useful to the enemy. Years’ snows had covered these places. Now the
approach was a sheet of white. Anything which moved there even on a night of thin moons showed at once.
It must then be a tall man, tall and lean, casting a lean long shadow.
Behind him his footsteps were imprinted in the softer snow. They stretched off for a vast distance, hours off, before different terrain hid them. Apparently he had walked a great way, which for a man alone was not so usual. Sometimes one noted a slight discrepancy to the left side of the prints – an intermittent halting in the left leg.
Kandexa had no gates. That was, she had no external ones. All her fortifications and barriers were inside. They ringed in the rival zones of the city.
The man who walked passed into the city.
Most of the thoroughfares now wound between the settlements, for most of the larger roads had been blocked off two or three years before.
As he moved through a narrow alley then, that once had been part of Kandexa’s Royal Road, he was spied from two storeys above.
‘Who’s he?’
‘Some fool.’
‘His garments are good; look at that cloak.’
‘He strides as if proud of himself.’
‘Too big for his boots to carry.’
The low voices sizzled like ice-snakes.
Certainly the stranger could not have heard them …
Nor the sudden twang of a dart-bow.
The dart, of ice-hardened black flint, speared down and caught the stranger between his shoulder blades. The three men rose to their feet on the roof, waiting for the idiot to topple over.
But he did not.
‘You mucked your shot.’
‘Never – never! You saw – it hit him square—’
‘Well, he’s seen us now – Hey!’ one of them shouted over into the alley. ‘Fancy us, do you? Then we’ll come down and join you.’
They swarmed along a rope kept ready and landed in the compressed space. The stranger had not moved. He stood there, and the dart lay on the street. It had struck him – yet missed?
The biggest man, first to reach the ground, slung his knife with all his weight behind it. It too struck the tall man, this time in the heart. Then like the flint it shivered and let go, dropping back to earth with a thunk. Bloodless.