by Tanith Lee
What happened after that was swift but very certain. It was like the wave that suffused me, the light that burst me when I slew Ettook. Yet it was different. It was like a dam holding back the sea, and the dam breaks and the sea pours through, but there is no substance to the sea, no heaving force, no tumult, only a faint shining on the back of the eyes, and a stillness after.
The horse was still, also. He stood there, breathing and shaking his head softly, as if embarrassed by his wildness before. He picked up his hooves as though to examine them or the sensation of their being on solid ground.
He had voided the muck they had given him all along the flats; the dung was greenish and had an acid smell. Maybe it was after all that this voiding had cured him, not any mage-craft of mine.
I was shaking as if I needed food or a woman. Then the shaking went off and I looked around about me.
Erran’s courtiers were at a loss. Some had been cheering me, I vaguely recalled, for my berserk dash at the stallion’s head, but this was beyond their scope.
The golden bear had wandered a little to the front of them, trying to puzzle it out, doubtless.
I slid off the stallion and shouted for one of the gawking grooms to come and cover him up, for his sweat was still steaming in the icy wind.
I walked straight to Demizdor’s gold bear. I was no longer angry or bemused. I was precise, knowing what came next.
I did not carry a sword out in the park, just a knife for cutting rope or hard earth from the horses’ hooves. I stuck the knife to its hilt in the bear’s belly, and watched him wriggle and stagger and try to pull it free, and finally roll down in the broken snow, and die.
In the cities, a bronze-mask does not kill one of his lord’s gold men.
That is the way of it, with no going around.
I suppose I had turned crazy, having endured the cage when I should have refused it, now refusing when I should have endured. Like many a man before me, I acted at the wrong moment and in the wrong way, because I ought to have acted sooner and had not.
My wrath was finished. I was only adamant, aware I had lost everything, life, too, most likely, and had no more to cast away.
I was taken back to Erran’s palace and flung down head first into my room of apricot windows. Any weapon here was removed, the ring-key appropriated; I was locked in.
Presently Erran visited me with three silver captains.
“I am disappointed in you,” he said. “You are a fool.”
I said, “I have upset your plans because you made me a toy for idiots. You should have judged me better. You are the fool, my lord.”
“We shall see,” he said.
He walked about before me, relaxed and easy, as if he need watch for nothing. Obviously, it would not serve me to kill him; there were too many who could step into his boots.
He picked up one of the books that lay on the table. He said, “You have acquired quite a taste for city things—literature, music, love. . . . Some while ago, when I got you from Kortis’ servile clutches, I think I told you how your healing process fascinated and intrigued me. Because you have transgressed, because you must be punished for it, I have decided to learn thereby the answer to my question. You can be of no other use to me.”
Despite myself, my mouth went dry. I would need to be a fool in truth not to see what was coming. He said, quietly and without undue coldness, and with none of Zrenn’s excitement, “I shall begin by cutting off your right hand, my Vazkor. I shall then be able to discover for myself, as indeed will you, to what extent your body is able to reproduce its tissues. Later, I will put out your eyes, extract your tongue, and sever your windpipe. If you survive so much, my physicians shall remove your inner parts. You may, naturally, die of shock before we can proceed so far. If you live and are able to repair—which is a debatable and curious thought—it may be that I shall reinstate you as my underling. It would be shortsighted not to retain such a prize—an entirely invulnerable champion.”
A terror like black worms oozed up my throat, but I would not let him see it take hold of me. I said, “When you are on your deathbed, Erran, pray that you never meet me in the place you are going to.”
He made a gesture that cried, Ah, the savage is back in him. What is this nonsense of meetings and afterlife? Aloud, he said only, “We begin at dawn tomorrow. For tonight you shall be brought food and liquor, women, if you want. Enjoy your senses while you have them.”
The sunset dulled to magenta behind the thick panes of the western window, yet speared in bright orange flashes through eyelets of broken crystal.
This strange and contrasted patterning was a result of the handiwork I had been putting in on the window with a bench, a table, the bronze-ware cups and jug. To no avail. The leading held, the glass sugared into fragments, none of them large enough to furnish a weapon.
Long before the sun went down, constructing its ominous sorcery of color with the casement, I had consigned myself to an assortment of grim alternatives. That I should come on some fighting means unexpectedly during this last night, or that tomorrow I could ask for the barber to shave me before Erran’s guard arrived, forcibly borrow his razors and do some business with them. Other wild thoughts ran about my skull. I might tempt in the sentries who had been set outside my door; they were bronzes, partial to wine . . . a sword snatched, a break made—I should be trapped and slain, no other thing seemed possible, but not chopped up for death like a piece of butcher’s meat that still lived, and some should go with me. Then, too, I think I dreamed I might escape them, knowing I dreamed it.
The window became somber and the wind came through where I had damaged it.
An hour after sundown, the door was opened. A silver captain and ten bronze guards entered to supervise the setting of my dinner by two cloth-masks. With perverse generosity, Erran had sent me excellent fare. When the men had gone, I ate some of it, thinking to fatten myself for bravado, but the taste was dust and ashes, and the meal soon abandoned.
Beyond my prison, I could hear music playing in the city. There was always some melody or song abroad in Eshkorek by night.
I smashed my fist against the leaded frame of the window, because this was no time for songs.
It was later that the door opened again.
It opened only a crack. Through the crack stole a single figure, the ultimate horrible jest. For Erran had sent me my last woman.
The candles were smoky; I could not make her out at first. Slender, muffled in a flimsy shabby veiling, the hint of light catching a bronze mask—I had been going to be rough, but checked myself.
“Sparrow,” I said, “of all of them, he should not have sent you to me.”
Yet she was too tall for Sparrow. Suddenly the veil slipped from her hair and the candles blazed in it. She put up her hand to draw off the mask, and she wore one long scarlet glove of blood from fingers to elbow.
My guest was Demizdor, and in her grasp the red-wet gleaming of a knife.
6
Her face was white. She said, as if it explained everything, “I have killed your guard. There was only one.”
I must have started toward her, for she held out the bloody knife to me, the grip to my hand.
“What can this be?” I said. “Has Erran sent you here so I can slice your neck as my final worldly joy?”
“Erran? Erran did not send me.”
“Why come, then, lady? Are you so hungry for earth in your mouth?”
Stonily she said, “You may kill me. But then you will never escape them.”
I took her wrist and plucked the blade from her fingers. I said, “That I am to die is your doing. You primed your golden bear to his sport.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then you are happy. Why talk of escaping? Why kill the guard?”
Her eyes were fixed on me, blank as two green pebbles in her colorless face.
“You go too swift to me already,” I said. “I am done with you, and you with me, girl. I’ll put no trust in anything of yours.”
She smiled at that, sneeringly.
“Are you a savage still, Tuvek? Will you throw away your solitary chance because I bring it?”
“Why bring it, then?” I said.
“Why,” she repeated. Something twisted behind her empty eyes and her mouth twisted with it. “Because I can’t be rid of you. Because you have got my soul with child, and even the child is you, and I can never bear it or be free of you.” And she caught my arms and sunk her nails in them and stared into my face.
I said no word to her, having no word to say. What had been in me for her was long silent. Her passion and her anguish confounded me; they were unchanged or had swelled the greater, under the mask of disdain and hate.
“You want me away then,” I said. “Very well. I am ready.”
She let go of me, and turned her head to hide what no longer needed to be hidden, since I had seen it all.
The guard lay at the threshold in his blood. He was the second man she had killed because of me. I took his weapon belt and his mask and donned them, and put on my own cloak and drew up the wolfskin hood to cover my too-recognizable hair. She told me that the way we were to travel was a chilly one, and any seeing us would not marvel that I went hooded. She told me, too, to wrap my uneaten dinner in a packet and store it in my shirt. She said I would be needing food on my journey.
I followed her out into the passage, and along that into one of unpainted stone, dark-lit by far-spaced torches. And all the while I was considering that another turn might bring me onto someone’s sword, that this was a fresh game of the court. Yet I knew, beneath my disquiet, that she had been true to me at last, my city wife, that it was as she had said.
At length we came out on an open rampart of the palace, and I got there my concluding sight of Eshkorek, its craters of blackness and its starry-lighted towers. But then there was a stairway, and we had passed under the angle of it and down, and Eshkorek was gone.
We descended into the cellars, the depths of Erran’s palace.
Twice we met gangs of the Dark Men. The first toiled at a huge arrangement of vats and cisterns, in the dull red luster of the torches; the second group marched out of one dim vista into another, passing us in the gloom as if we were invisible. Only once did we come on bronzes, overseers probably of the slaves. They sat grumbling and dicing by a brazier, nudged each other when they saw us, but offered no challenge. When we had left them behind, I asked Demizdor why this was. She said the underpassages were common night roads to the bedchambers of the princes above.
Apart from these, and similar questionings and replies, we exchanged no conversation.
I did not know where she was guiding me, but surmised it must be onto some unfrequented path from Erran’s territory, maybe even from the city itself.
We entered a passage with no exit, and I guessed the trick of it before she set her schooled palm on the place in the wall that swung it wide. Beyond lay blackness and a smell of gray bones.
“I don’t see in the pitch-dark, my lady,” I said.
“It is only a short distance without light,” she said, “but you must take my hand.”
So, hand in hand, we stepped into the solid night and the wall folded shut behind. That hand was very small and cold in mine; it was the white one without the blood, a slim, sad, hungry hand that clung to me against its will. It made me recall, that hand; it brought back shreds of what had been before. It woke up my pity, thinking of her pain.
Then the black began to dilute, and she drew herself away from me.
We had come under a street, and the paving had burst overhead, opening the passage-roof in places, just enough to wash the dusk with starshine.
Everything seemed fossilized here, not even a rat to scuttle.
Shortly the gaps closed above us, and tunnels ran off to the sides, and the sourceless luminescence of a sea-cave lighted everything.
There were faint markings on the stone sides of the passages; I suppose she told the way from them.
In the end, she led me through another magician’s wall into a vast underground hall of broken pillars, and here was a black horse tethered, harnessed, and with a pack at his saddle.
Her resourcefulness brought me to a standstill. I could see she had been planning quickly and thoroughly; her mind surely had begun to work on it the second my blade went in her lover’s gut.
“The horse is sound,” she said. “I brought him here by another way at sunset, and he carries a little food and water and some other items for your journey. I could not get you much or my endeavors would have been noticed. There are flints and a parcel of resin torches that you will need later.” She spoke calmly, as if she were a stranger I had asked for directions on my road. She pointed across the space, beyond the horse, and said to me, “The opening by the leaning pillar. Go down it, turning neither left nor right. Presently you will notice a mark like a serpent on the left-hand wall. Put your palm over his head and he will open the stone for you. Have you noted what I have said, for I accompany you no farther?”
“I shall remember,” I said. “Where then?”
“The tunnel runs straight,” she said, “through the belly of the mountains southeast of Eshkorek. I don’t know where it ends, but it will be far from here. Nine or ten days to ride it.”
“And you?” I said. “You will tell Erran where I have gone?”
“I shall not tell him.”
“He will suspect your complicity and he will make you tell him.”
“He will not. But he may detect for himself. The princes are aware of this tunnel, though few of them wish to enter it. It is a thing they designed, who came before us, our ancestors from whom we are degenerated.”
She paused there, no longer fierce or pleading, only remote, as if her spirit had been emptied from her, and her eyes seemed blind. I thought of the nights and noons when we had coupled, when my world had been only Demizdor, and that she had said to me, “One day you will regret me.” Now there was only this beautiful, unknown, unloved stranger, murderess and savior in a single day.
I said, “Maybe you would be safer if you rode with me.”
She said, “Don’t offer me dross. I shall be safe enough here; these are my people.”
And then she talked, quietly and succinctly, of the hours before her kin took her from the krarl, how she had thought me dying or dead, how the braves had raped her and tied her and returned to rape her, how she had lain awaiting death herself, the anguish and the shame and the rage and the fear of it—everything she told me, till she was a lesson I had by heart.
To lose love and find how you have lost it, neither to blame, like sightless children groping in shadow; there is an edge to that like the knife itself.
“Demizdor,” I said, “come with me. We may be friends at least.”
“Oh, but I do not want your friendship. It is your love I want, and yet, I don’t want it. Go, or I shall curse you. It will be a curse that sticks, for women’s curses are more cruel than yours.”
I saw it was past reasoning. I turned and untethered the black horse and mounted up.
When I had trotted him across the stone hall, she called my name, my tribal name, as she had used it earlier.
So I looked back. The tribes say it is unlucky to do so. There was a story Tathra had whispered to me, about a warrior who was enticed into the Black Place by a woman’s spell and half regained his liberty, but the witch uttered his name, and he glanced over his shoulder, and she drew him back by the fox-fire in her eyes.
There was no fire in the eyes of Demizdor. I could barely make her out for the gloom, only the pale face, the one pale hand.
“You are my life,” she said.
And she stepped away into the dark and vanished like smoke.
I did not call after her. I foresaw she would not answer me.
I rode into the tunnel’s mouth and did not look back again.
Part II: The Wolf Hunt
1
ELEVEN NIGHTS, TEN DAYS I traveled that thoroughfare. Judging by the additional passages I had observed leading to the hall of broken pillars, many of the great houses of Eshkorek had secret access to the under-city, and thereby to the ancient tunnel. Kortis’ palace indisputably contained one of these entries. How else should Demizdor have known the place or the trick wall-openings unless she had been familiar with them from elsewhere? Besides, others took the route later, and not via Erran’s cellars.
Having discovered the serpent marker on the stone and activated it, I entered a narrow, low-ceilinged run, speckled with the light of green and gray fungus, and with a foul, damp dungeon odor. This section took an hour’s careful riding, occasionally bent double to avoid the roof. Then the way spread out again into some hall or cave, and grew black enough that I could not see a knife’s length before me. I halted, struck a flint, unparceled one of the torches, and set light to it.
The resin flared up, but presently the flame sank a little, for the air was turgid and enclosed. High overhead, where torchlight could not reach, bats stirred, if bats they were; I never viewed them to be certain.