by Tanith Lee
A voice pealed through the sunken silent palace hall.
“So ends the vanity of the world.” (It was the voice of Stormy—Anger. Lying facedown he had long ago learned how to pitch it out.) “For all is vanity and death claims all. Only through God shall we live. Amen.”
And the crowd crossed itself, gasping, shuddering. Amen, amen.
But when the fearsome dwarves, under cover of shadow, had conjured themselves away, slaves replaced the candles. Light came back, the weary minstrels waxed their strings. Those that could began to eat and drink and jest and lust and argue and hate and live again.
A spider in her web, she waited for him. Staggering, sottish, to bed, he did not know it.
‘The water clock which dripped in the annex of the hall had shown midnight. In the torch-gloom there were still songs. “We keep later hours at Korchlava,” he had said. But generally he had never been included in those.
On a narrow stair, a woman appeared. She was flinty sober, dressed as an upper servant of the house.
“You’re the man Cirpoz? My lady summons you.”
“Does she now.”
“None of that. She’s the queen.”
“What queen? The queen’s at Korchlava … Oh, that one.” Unease curdled him. He had met her, last evening, in the ruins of the elder palace. That thin ghost with frost on her hair.
“Come now. What could she want with me?”
But the woman turned and he had to follow her, for a queen summoned him and he was, in fact, a nobody.
When he entered her apartment, after all the heat and noise, it seemed winter-cold to him, and dim from its two or three candles. The witch—many named her that—sat in her chair. Three dark rings stared from her hand, but not so darkly as her gemstone eyes. She made his skin creep. The servant was gone. This one and he were all alone.
“Illustrious madam.” The apartment as well as dim and cold was not very luxurious. Better spread butter on his words. “This honor—”
“You know me, do you?” Her voice surprised him by its youth. It was a girl’s voice.
“Why madam, you’re the regal queen.”
“Am I? What will you do for me?”
His gorge rose. He had heard she frolicked, this hag.
“Wh—whatever—I’m able, madam.”
“Are you able,” she said, “to take away from me one who harms me?”
“I—what does your ladyness mean?”
In her web, the ice-spider with the girl’s voice looked at him with her five black eyes.
“There is a chit here at the palace who works against me. But she would be easy for you to lead away, out of this house. She’s only young, slender—no nuisance to you.”
“You mean—to kill her would be easy?”
His nerves had steadied. This task was not quite unknown to him. The other victims had been men. A woman should present no problem.
“Is she of high rank, madam?”
“No.”
The hag was very definite. He wondered if she lied.
“But—”
“She’s nothing. No one will miss her. Only I will notice her loss. I shall be grateful. But it must be now—tonight.”
There was something in the corner, gleaming faintly. He had taken it for the glimmer of a low-slung lamp. But then instinct made him see what it was. It was the legendary witch’s sorcerous mirror, standing open, reflecting all the room. And himself. Cirpoz edged from the mirror’s view.
“But am I to kill her, madam? Sometimes that can be quite awkward. Especially since I must then go off myself—and there’s my troop of dwarves to consider—”
“Do what you want. Violate her, give her to Draco. Feed her to savage beasts. Whatever you like.”
Then she sighed. She looked away from him.
He fawned: “Immaculate lady, I dislike that I must ask, but I may still need … some funds.”
“There,” she said. “That’s for you.”
“What, madam? What am I to have?”
“Your reward. There it is. It’s worth the fortune of your king. My father paid for it some hundreds of gold coins. He told me so. It was the talk of his castle.”
“But—what?—Where?”
“There. Before you. That. It’s heavy with silver, and has gold adornments. Fetch some servants to carry it, or your dwarves. Take it. I don’t want it any more.”
Yes, yes, she was insane. Nor did he want the mirror—but she was correct. It was worth a fortune. Were there even three such objects in all Draco’s wide kingdom? Perhaps Draco had forgotten it was here. Perhaps his other queen would like to have it?
Cirpoz said, throatily, “Tell me where to find this pest who upsets you so.”
When she described the room and the part of the palace he would locate her in, Cirpoz. was reassured. It was nut an area where any important ones kept their apartments. He was glad to have been crafty.
Luckily for Cirpoz, he and his own slave were sufficiently strong that between them they shifted the glass. But by then he had closed the lid. He did nut want the mirror to snag his soul on its surface.
When the servant of Draco was gone, and his slave, Arpazia paced about the empty chamber. once by one, the two or three candles died.
High in the woods wolves howled, or it might have been some last drunken noise of games from Tusaj’s hall.
I want none of it any more. To go to the wild wood. To make fool’s spells with old woman. I don’t want to see her, anywhere. Never, never again.
The girl who was Arpazia’s youth, the girl they called Candacis, or Coira,. Meeting her on the avenue of trees, they had clashed together, eyes and hearts and spirits. Each a blow to the other. To Arpazia, the worst blow?
But she recalled who Cirpoz was, and even though he had aged seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years, yet she knew him. How could she ever forget the one who hauled her up into the forest of war and led her through the camp to Draco? Let Cirpoz now take this girl, then. Let him lead her away to some doom. Or let him simply kill her and throw her white body, red with blood, into the black earth.
Arpazia walked round and round her chamber, now in the darkness. But if she spun her web or broke the threads of it, she did not know.
She is me. Take her away.
Take her away from me. Take her away and take the mirror away.
She thought, cruelly, Idiotic old crone, it will do you no service. You never learn.
But still round and round she circled, like a wheel, or the dead stars, round and round, until the night was done.
Before the night was done, Ulvit came up from her own prayers lower on the terraces. Candacis had not accompanied her. Ulvit, thought that she would be sleeping, and did not try to rouse her. In the morning, when Ulvit woke, herself, she thought only that Candacis had gone out alone, and early, as sometimes she did. And so a long while passed before Ulvit knew Candacis had vanished from the palace. Perhaps others knew, who said nothing—stones in the walls, the lizards clamped by winter under the temple paving, the Oracle (which knew everything) not murmuring in the hill.
Ulvit did not make a stir, though she sought an interview with the prince—with some difficulty—and told him how the Princess Candacis was not to be found. Ulvit had already lost hold of the girl. It was not in her to be vocal with grief.
Besides, she and all her kind had known fate lay awaiting Draco’s daughter, if not how, or when. She was Coira, the Maiden, and had been offered to the King of the Dead. They were not wicked, Ulvit’s people, only, in their way, religious. The story had always been here: Demetra and her child who Hadz snatched and carried off. The gods might wish to reenact that story. Coira-Candacis had been shown, twice, in the wood, the second time as a queen. She was a sacrifice, perhaps. The Woods People had not connived. But they had opened the way. To hear now that Candacis, first in white, and then in green, had disappeared, would not astonish them.
As for Tusaj, like many just then, he nursed an aching head.
; Surfacing from its stupor, the court at Belgra Demitu was only glad the dwarves, who had described their sins, and died for them, were no longer about.
As for Cirpoz, he was, of course, a nobody. Who would suspect him?
He had tapped on the door in the leaden remains of night. Tapped, until she came to see who was there. Not even a servant to protect her. And no one else near.
Cirpoz, who had watched her at the feast, envied her her place, fancied her, did not know Candacis in this slender pallid form, wrapped in night and a worn cloak, hair tied back in a plait.
He seized her at once, grinning at the facility of it, and with his big hand cut off her air until she slumped. She weighed nothing. A lot less than the bloody mirror. No one saw him take her away from that remote room and down to his wagon. Even the yard grooms were dead drunk. But the adventure and the freezing night had cleared Cirpoz’s clever, canny, crafty head.
There was a ramshackle hunter’s bothy along the hills, in the woods. He could store her there, tied up like a bitch-dog, till he had collected his dwarves and the mirror from his quarters.
She was young and wholesome. And perhaps she had talents; she must have, if she had enraged the queen. But that madwoman had not insisted on death. So he would not kill the girl. At least, not yet.
Under the World
I.
FOR THE DREGS OF A NIGHT, AND half a morning, she was in the hut.
She did not think about whose hut it might have been—only asked herself if they might come back, discover her, and set her free. But the place was in bad repair. Even some of the roof was down, and the hearth long cold. And no one came, except for mice, and at last her captor, who returned in the sallow noon.
By then, Candacis had worked her hands free of the thick coarse rope with which he had bound them. She had reached just beyond the door, and was sawing at the cord on her ankles with a jagged stone. He had not taken many chances, but if he had been delayed, she might have got away. When she saw the wagon grinding up among the trees, a panic-stricken fury had made her go on at the cord, right up until the moment when he stood over her.
Almost petulantly Cirpoz said, “Couldn’t you keep still five minutes, eh? You’ve made your wrists bleed. That was my best rope, and you’ve messed it for me. I should give you a whipping.”
As a further precaution, he had sold off his slave in the town. So he would have to manage all this alone.
Then she was somehow standing, and facing him with the jagged stone. She said nothing. Her nearly expressionless face said it all. She was strange-tooking—eerie. Did she have unnatural powers?
“There, but I won’t, won’t whip you. That’s not how I am. I’m not rough, but a king’s man.”
Since he was saving her, for now. he had left her some wine, and his own second cloak to keep her warm. If she had drunk any of the wine he was not certain. He finished it himself, letting her stand there, awkward from her tied ankles, weapon-stone wavering, until she lowered it.
“Throw that way. Away, or do I put out your light again?” said the unrough courtier.
It seemed she judged then if he or she would get the better of the fight, and sensibly decided it would be him. She dropped the shard on the ground. She made no protest either when he tied her hands together once more. “Just for luck.” he merrily said. He picked her up and carried her to the wagon. “What’s your name?”
Candacis said nothing.
“Oh, a haughty one, are you? Well, I can make a name for you, if you like. Let me think—Blackhair will do. Know who gave you to me, do you, Blackhair? A forceful female person. And I’m to take you far away from here, since you annoyed her so.”
Then he opened the flap of the wagon and shoveled Candacis inside, like a bundle of yarn.
There were rugs on the floor, but the brief fall stunned her a little. She lay feeling a gray nausea for several moments, during which she was aware that the wagon had started up. Cirpoz had two horses, not of the best. She heard them trundling back down the slope, and the wheels jangled over tree roots.
Soon Candacis became conscious that there was other life, besides her own, keeping very still in the wagon’s back.
She smelled it first, human flesh shut warm in heavy garments, hair washed in soap or combed with spices. Then she heard them breathing.
Candacis turned her head and looked.
She met two dark eyes in a great rutted face, a face young and old at once, sane and demented at once. She saw the body under the face. A small giant’s head had been fixed on the physique of a big muscular child.
“Mistress, that’s my bed you’re lying on,” said Greedy, curtly.
Candacis made a rapid, fishlike movement and pushed herself away. Hand-tied, she still struggled up, until her back rested against the side of the wagon. Greedy instantly resumed his spot on the rugs, pulled a pillow under his shaggy head, and went at once to sleep.
But by then, Candacis could see others, and their twelve gleaming wolves’ eyes.
Of courses she had heard there were dwarves at the palace; they had been talked of everywhere. But she had not happened to meet them, and by the hour of their play she had left Tusaj’s hall.
Candacis was schooled in the malignity and probing uninterest of others. To Ulvit’s care and company she had been gracious and nor unreceptive—but even so she could never fully have accepted them. Finding in the wood that she could not trust Ulvit either had not appalled Candacis, if perhaps it made her unhappy. She loved none, wanted to love none, expected no love, had forgotten what love was. Enemies might find her unfathomable. Cirpoz did, but was too slow to know it.
Now she was only afraid and subdued. As she glanced at the dwarves, the dwarvixens, it was without alarm or recoil. Having noted them, and seen they were not actually about to attack her, she looked away again—and seemed to fold herself away behind some veil.
Perhaps the dwarves themselves recognized this devastating matter-of-factness. She was essentially prosaic under duress, and so were they.
Presently Tickle spoke.
“This isn’t a large wagon, mistress. We keep our own space. There is a pot behind that curtain for the functions.”
Want said, in her low whining chant, “Mistress couldn’t help getting on Greedy’s bed-rug. She was thrown on it.”
“So mistress was,” said Tickle.
“There’s bread in that crock,” said Stormy. He did not raise his eyes, put out and embarrassed by the human woman’s unwanted proximity. “And water in that leather bottle, if you have a thirst, mistress.”
Then the girl answered. “Thank you,” she said.
But she did not stir.
“Her wrists are all bloody,” whined Want, uncomfortably.
“Shut your row,” said Soporo.
“When he gets angry, master lays about,” Want insisted.
“Not with you, though,” snarled Soporo. “It’s I and Greedy-guts and Stormy gets it, and Tickle. So stitch up.”
Want whined again.
Soporo suddenly began to sing in a robust baritone that rocked the bumping wagon.
Under that, Candacis heard the other dwarvixen, she with the green eyes, hiss, “Mistress is pretty. She’s pretty nearly as me.”
Cirpoz naturally had not discussed his plans with the dwarves. They only knew this female human superior, tossed in here, was a slave. That meant, apparently, they could not avoid her, since she had been slung almost down to their level. They would make the best of it. Greedy had needed to assert his rights, and Tickle to explain the wagon-code. Jealous Vinka was simply marveling that something properly human could aspire to her own inferior-thus-exquisite charms.
The girl kept quite still. She did not shut her eyes, or sleep, but she blinked rarely. You could just make out that she breathed. She did not utilize the pot, though once Soporo did, rattling its lid, whistling, and splashing like a dray horse. Tickle sewed a seam in the half-light. Sometimes Greedy farted odorlessly in slumber.. Stormy scowled at
a wooden pipe he was shaping with a blunt knife. Want and Vinka sputtered at each other or to themselves.
Only Proud stared frequently at the girl. He was quite sorry for her—Cirpoz’s slave, as they were, but without their unique stamina.
Just as Candacis (Blackhair) did not crawl to use the pot, so she did not take any water or bread and cheese.