Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  In the middle of the afternoon, a scarf of wind blew up and a light drizzle dappled the island. Presently, the sky opened its doors.

  The cat flew in the tent, disliking the sudden bath it had got. Soon Hwenit came running, her shawl over her head, and huddled in beside the cat.

  I began thinking of the last cloudburst I had crouched through, in the lee of those limestone spurs, that day the wolf hunt caught up to me.

  This rain was like an omen added to my former misgivings.

  “Hwenit,” I said, “I am going down to the beach. Stay here.”

  She gazed up through her hair at me.

  “What do you look for?” she asked.

  “My back is crawling. I feel the hunt is coming here, after all.”

  “The city men?” Her eyes widened. Abruptly she whispered, “I lighted a fire on the rock!”

  “Maybe someone saw, maybe not. I’ll watch for a while. In this rain any boat would have rough work coming in.”

  “Mordrak,” she cried to me, “I could think only of him—of Qwef—it was to bind him I made the fire. Oh, I am a fool, and have endangered you.”

  “No matter,” I said. “Probably it is some old woman of a fear got into me for no reason.”

  But as I went between the trees, I recalled she had not liked me much the night before, and though I did not believe she intended to betray me, perhaps an angry mischief in the dark hidden part of her mind, “Light a big fire, and there is a means to thrash this pompous oaf.” For I had been pompous, and an oaf, for all I imagined myself so forbearing with her. Ride a girl, then tell her who else she might or must not ride with. Fine morality.

  The tide was coming in, brown and pocked with rain. Through deluge and spray, I could pinpoint nothing moving on the water.

  I waited among the sea wrack, on the slick sand where last night Hwenit and I had coupled. I waited there some minutes before I heard her scream in the wood.

  I did what the half-wit would do. What they reckoned on. I turned and plunged back into the trees toward the tent. And right into a man with white-blue eyes and wet rat’s-skin hair, who stepped from the mossy trunks into my path, holding Hwenit and a blade at her throat, and laughing softly, interestedly, the old laugh I remembered well.

  They had come ashore at the far end of the island, the other side of the trees. The current was less favorable there, but they had managed it, or, to be accurate, their slave had managed it. This was the Dark Man, the guide who had tracked me from the tunnel and obeised himself before me when I slew the silver-mask with white killing Power. Presumably the guide had returned to his masters next . . . telling them what? Little, I guessed, for the Dark Slaves in Eshkorek had seemed to speak only in answer to direct and unequivocal questioning, never volunteering information on their own.

  Apart from the Dark Slave, their navigator, there were two men. The other pair of the four must have grown bored with the chase and abandoned it. These, however, had their own personal reasons for keeping after me.

  Zrenn stood, playing with Hwenit’s hair and stroking her throat with the flat of his knife, looking at me for my reactions, his porcelain eyes alert. He had taken off his mask, I think that I should have known him the more swiftly.

  It was the fragile Orek who had come up at my back to put his own knife against my ribs.

  I had been wrong. Not a spear but a knife. In a moment I should feel the iron enter my lung. His slender hand trembled with anger or gladness.

  The slave was by a tree, and noncommittal.

  Hwenit’s face was narrowed hard. After that one cry, she had ensorceled herself to black adamantine.

  “It is a delight for old friends to meet once more,” Zrenn said. “It has been our hope that we might see you again, my Vazkor, before you depart this life. Not that your going shall be hasty. Erran, the leopard-chief, is not isolated in his artistic plan for a death. Slow and painful, my Vazkor. A limb, less—an organ, a finger at a time. I see you are healed of the cruel cuts I gave you in Eshkorek. We shall have to mince you very small to be certain you remain beneath the earth, shall we not? And between whiles, we will play with this midnight doll you have thoughtfully provided us.”

  It seemed to me I could turn easily and disarm the willowy youth behind me. Meantime, Zrenn would slash Hwenit’s throat. This fathomed, I kept still. My grave was near as Orek’s hand, and I had foretold my grave. Yet it appeared ludicrous. As Zrenn reminded me, I healed of wounds. Could I recover from a death stroke, as Erran had more than half believed?

  “Did you find the love-tokens I left you?” I said to Zrenn, gently as he. “All about the hills? The silver-masks peacefully sleeping in their blood?”

  “The jackal, slinking up on the baby’s cot. Oh, yes. Like your noble father, Vazkor’s son. You did it winningly.”

  I sensed the blade at my back come a half breadth nearer.

  “You have too many deaths to pay for,” Orek rasped in his broken boy’s voice.

  “He shall pay with many deaths,” Zrenn said, smiling.

  It is not simple to kill with Power, once you understand the trick of it. You bring extinction by summoning it from yourself, and it touches you also, like a burning, bloody wing. That is why sickness follows. And when the price is high, you do not spend indiscriminately. This held me, even now, in this second of stupid extremity, poised between a girl’s neck and a boy’s knife.

  The savage, who knew only how to wield bludgeon and ax, must learn more subtle weapons.

  I indicated the slave. I said, “Did he tell you how I killed the last man, the man in the camp?”

  Zrenn, prepared to dally a long while, followed my procrastination almost with approval.

  “His face was congested. I presume you choked him with your strong warrior’s paws.”

  “Not so. Ask him now, your slave, how Vazkor’s son slew the silver-mask.”

  Zrenn, yet smiling, jerked his head to the slave.

  “Inform me, clod.”

  The slave said in a flat, though thickly accented and unhandy voice, “Black lord stare, and white light come and fair lord fall and die.”

  Zrenn’s mouth slackened. He frowned. “What do you mean, you dreg, white light!”

  “White light from eyes of black lord. White light strike fair lord. Fair lord fall. Fair lord die. Light go out. Black lord god.”

  The slave’s tone was extraordinary. He might have been talking of the weather. I recalled how he prostrated himself in the mud before me, then walked away into the night. It seemed he and his stony people had grown accustomed to recognition and universality of demons in some remote and dismal past.

  I was trying to assess what ability lay in me that I dared use. You will see this plight in the brilliant marksman who manages his marvels by instinct. Force him to study his art, to explain how he focuses magically on his target, and he will grow mannered and unsure and presently miss his mark altogether.

  Abruptly Hwenit spoke. Striving to alter her predicament, I had forgotten her as a live being. Forgetting, too, that though I comprehended city speech, she did not, and the whole dialogue thus far had been gibberish to her.

  “Mordrak,” she said, “don’t bargain for me. This is my fault. Let him kill me if he wishes, but get free.”

  At this Zrenn shook her. He asked me, “What does the black wench say? Does she say she loves me, Vazkor?”

  I said, to get more time (when would I have had sufficient?), “She wonders how you came here.”

  “Oh, the slave sniffed out the little cavern where her clan keep their disreputable boats. He speaks their tongue, but they lied to him in the village about you, Vazkor. They told us you had gone by them on the trek north. If it had not been for the slave’s sharp eyes and mine, seeing that pin-head of beacon fire last night, we should never have dreamed where you might be. When I am done with you, my brother and
I shall revisit this bitch’s tribe, and roast them in their huts.”

  Just then I saw a bright orange marker in the grass—the tail tip of Hwenit’s red cat. Next moment, yowling, the cat sprang up Zrenn’s booted leg and bit him in the thigh and sprang away. Zrenn yelled and half whirled about, slashing with his knife after the cat, which had already been too quick for him and was gone. Instantly Hwenit darted from his grasp, but, unlike the cat, not quick enough.

  Zrenn moved fast as a lash and caught her by her hair as she was running from him, and reeled her about. His face was crazy with a white fury of pain, irritation, and maleficence, and full in this dangerous face Hwenit spit, and with a single movement of his arm, unpremeditated, directed by spite alone, Zrenn hammered his knife into her side.

  Then came stasis, Zrenn letting slip between his fingers, like the motivating strings of a puppet, the black stands of Hwenit’s hair. As she gradually loosened and slid toward the ground, his expression altered to total disbelief. He had played the wrong game piece, and too soon.

  I discovered myself already spinning around, crashing my fist hard into Orek’s arm so his blade went flying, smashing the other fist into his belly. He folded soundlessly away into the weeds, neat as a lady’s fan.

  When I looked back, Zrenn had recovered himself.

  He waited for me, part crouching, his red knife flickering, eyes bright. But I was done fighting. I did not glance at the shape of the woman; my guts were knotted up, but I kept her lessoning.

  “Zrenn,” I said.

  “Fight me, warrior.”

  His eyes, white-hot, the blue sucked away by the heat, danced at me. Then the dance went out of them. Confronting mine, they fixed like enamel in the kiln. It took three breaths to mesmerize him, this lord of the silver, even for one new to the practice. He looked as small to me as a gnat. It was no difficulty for me to take control of him.

  “Zrenn,” I said, “come closer.”

  “No,” he muttered, but he came.

  I took the knife from his fingers and he could not prevent it. His face worked and struggled all about his calcined eyes, to tell me I must not hurt him. To no avail.

  I held his rat’s-skin hair, and cut his throat. He gargled in blood; it reminded me of his laughter. It is a vile death, but brief.

  After that, I went off a way into the wood, and threw up, as if I had never killed a man before. I mused drearily, as I leaned shuddering on a tree, that I might as well have used the killing Power in me for all the good I had got from restraint.

  When I returned, everything was very still. Some time ago the rain had stopped, and I saw the red cat was picking a path inch by inch, through the bladed grass toward Hwenit’s body, stiff itself as a moving corpse. I watched this sight a minute, but a stirring nearby put me in mind that there was unfinished business.

  Orek stared up at me, lying on his back. His mask had fallen off, or he had pulled it off. His face, like that ghost of another face, and the eyes the green eyes of that face, made my gorge rise again. No, whatever else, I could not kill this distorted image of Demizdor.

  “Zrenn is dead,” I said to him.

  His eyelids fluttered, and his lips. He was not less proud, but less royal than she had been.

  “Did you love her?” he croaked at me. He could mean one only. He said, “I will tell you before you butcher me, I will tell you why I came to hunt you down like the stinking diseased dog that you are. Shall you listen, dog? Or will you silence me before I can tell?”

  “I don’t want your life,” I said.

  “Don’t you? Nor do I, filthy, mangy dog. Listen. She was better than any, fairer than any woman in Eshkorek. And you lay on her, on her white body. Shall I say what became of Demizdor? Shall you like to hear?”

  “Erran,” I said, halting. My heart beat in great slow thunders, like the surf hitting the beach below.

  “Erran? No. He got no chance. Did she show you the way, the old tunnel under the mountains? Yes, certainly she must have done. How did she bid you farewell? Did she kiss and cling, did you have her again, in the green slime of the passageway? Or did she curse you?”

  “Get on,” I said. “If you will tell it, tell.”

  “I will tell. She set you on your road. After this, she went to her chamber in Erran’s palace, and unbound the velvet cord from the draperies, and hanged herself with it.”

  He was weeping. He was not shamed to weep for Demizdor.

  I thought, I have surely known it all this while, known she was dead. At our parting did she not call to me and say, “You are my life”? But I could see her only as she had lived, riding her horse, steady as any brave; in our bed at sunup, golden with sleep; how she had lain with me, crying out my name; her skin, the living warmth of her. Cold now. Empty now. Rotting in some tall tomb in Eshkorek, shut in by diamond-headed nails.

  Orek had turned on his side in the grass to get on with his sobbing.

  The cat, too, had begun to cry, wailing in inhuman spasms over Hwenit’s body.

  And I, caught between two griefs, like corn between the millstones.

  The sky cleared. The wood soaked in a sallow sunlight, winged over with damson scud, promise of more rain to come.

  I had changed ground. Taking up Hwenit’s body, I had carried her into the black tent and set her on her rug bed there. And found she lived. It was the remnant of a pulse. Zrenn’s knife had pierced up through her breast, yet it must have missed the heart. But, though she breathed, it would not be for long. The cat had followed me, meowing and rubbing on my boots, apparently thinking I meant to help her. But she was past help.

  A little after, someone came to the doormouth. Orek, knuckling his eyes like a whipped boy, said, “I and the slave will bury my brother out there.”

  “It’s free soil,” I said. “Do it.”

  I had realized for some while he would not try for my life; his passion was squandered in tears; besides, he had had a surfeit of slaughter.

  He turned and went away. They had only knives to dig with, and the slave scrabbling with his hands—it would be a shallow burial, and no gold to lay on the casket.

  For Hwenit, she could rest among her own folk, though it would be no comfort to any of them.

  Somewhere in my mind, Hwenit and Demizdor were merging. Life snuffed out and beauty turned to cold meat for worms. And Hwenit, my black witch, she had said she would die of her love, the perennial girl’s lament, now proved true. She had never even lain with him, her Qwef, not once. I saw the desert of it, its yearning barrenness. Brother, sister, only words; but this, a reality, the destroyer at the gate. What could it have mattered, after all, to celebrate her hungry youth and his, before the sword fell on her? All the plots and schemes, the moralities and codes of men, seemed dust in the face of death.

  The cat came and licked my hand with its rough tongue. I had seen hounds mourn and entreat in this way.

  A shadow fell through the doormouth again. I looked; the Dark Man stood there, his arms muddied to the elbow—slave, guide, rower, digger of graves.

  He would not speak till I asked him what he wanted. Then he nodded to Hwenit and said, with the first modicum of curiosity I had ever seen one of his race exhibit, “Unwilling, woman?”

  This made no sense. I told him to use his own tongue, that I could follow it. Then he said, in a corrupt rattling speech, “The lord cannot make the woman obey? Shall I bring anything to the lord?”.

  He supposed that, though she was near-dead, I would restore Hwenit. I had not even considered it. I had healed a horse, a child, half accidentally, but I had not been sure with the horse, and there had been some fight in the child for the healing to work on. Hwenit’s pulse was weak as the flickering of a moth’s wing. Yet when I reached and put my palm on her neck, she was still warm; she had seemed a century cold. Irregularly but continuously, her heart beat. How had she lived this long? Perhap
s she clung to her shred of life, waiting for the magician to cure her?

  She had helped me, taught me something of my Power.

  I owed her a debt. Maybe there was only one way to pay her.

  It frightened me. Before, during those haphazard healings, I had not thought. Now the nerves ran on me. What must I do? And, more, dreadfully, what was the consequence?

  “See to your master,” I said to the slave.

  The slave stretched his mouth. I had never observed any of them smile before.

  “You are all my masters. Lord Orek, the buried lord, Zrenn. You.” He shut and tapped his left eye. “I am called Long-Eye,” he said. He moved sideways and was gone.

  Westering red lights began to fleck into the tent.

  I tried too hard to reach Hwenit. I tried to knit blood and flesh with hammer strokes.

  At last, sitting bathed in sweat in the black exhalation of nightfall, it came to me how unvigorous and silent it had been before; the poisoned stallion in Eshkorek, the choking baby in the village, when I had not even felt the virtue go from me.

  So Hwenit’s pupil smoothed his slate and began afresh.

  The sun rose. I left the tent, and the slave was at his grave-digger’s office a second time. This second grave, out of synchronization with the other, seemed oddly superfluous, an afterthought.

  “Who is this for?” I asked him, using his own wretched speech.

  “My master Orek,” he said.

  You harness death; you harness life. You can kill or cure. A grave becomes a symbol, one weak branch fallen from a flourishing tree.

  The sun, clear of the wood, swam red and golden in front of my eyes.

  I had not expected much else of Orek. Though he was young. I had no compulsion to pity. The slave clamped down the clay to cover the blond face, over which a scrap of cloth had been laid.

  “How?” I said.

  “His knife,” said the slave, responding to me with a weird vivacity I had not formerly noted in these slave people. “He wedged it among the tree roots and threw his body on the blade. He did it wrong. It took a while.”