Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “Sacrificed servants,” hissed Dana. “Think of them lying here, forced to drink a poison draught, feeling dark death creeping horribly through their bodies as the stone rolled across the mouth of the tomb. Barbarians! Give me a battle in the open air, and death shining like Ashtar’s tresses!” Her voice echoed down the passage, doubled and redoubled into a rushing murmur of disapproval. Her hand trembled and the gleaming blade of her dagger sent reflections wavering across the bodies; headdresses of enamel and gold blinked like awakening eyes. Andrion and Dana, as one, started back. The broken strings of a lyre stirred in protest beneath their feet.

  “I used to play a lyre,” said Andrion, grasping at some kernel of calm sanity. “I sang love songs for you, Dana.”

  Her face in the torchlight was all harsh planes and pinched angles. “And I for you,” she replied.

  “Oh?” And his voice, too, was caught and stolen by the echoing currents. They walked on leaden feet, stepping between the bundles of dried rags that had been human forms. The dust was heavy, swirling in slow eddies, cold and slick. The quick glints of cup and jewel and statuette could well have been the gleaming scales of wary snakes, glancing out at the warm and solid flesh passing by and then retreating into blackness.

  The corridor turned. They hurried by a spot slimed with bat dung and the crawling creatures who lived on it. A vault, its edges lost in shadow, opened before them. Here were more bodies, and the glints of sword and armor; soldiers, dying for Gerlac as surely as those killed in Sardis’s many battles. Was this death as honorable? Andrion wondered. What was honor? A few steps would carry him into the free air, into shame and scorn. I cannot leave, he told himself, until I have Solifrax, or until my bones, too, are a sacrifice to Gerlac.

  Dana’s cold arm shuddered against his. The musty air of the sepulcher stirred; a shadow cloaked in shadow, no more substantial than smoke, came toward them. Pretending no chill crept through his body, Andrion lifted the torch higher. Sparks snapped against a low ceiling painted with outspread wings, Harus in the aspect of hovering Death.

  The shadow was a man, or rather the image of a man, a suggestion of face and form wavering uncertainly in uncertain light. It was Bellasteros. A beardless youth trammeled by his father’s pride, features guarded by his own protecting arrogance. He turned blind eyes toward Andrion and Dana, unaware of their existence; and indeed, they did not exist for this memory of the prince who had become king at Gerlac’s timely death.

  “Father,” Andrion breathed. But the ghost was not his father, was not even properly a ghost, because Bellasteros yet lived . . . With the searing pain of a sudden sword thrust, Andrion thought, Did he yet live?

  Dana’s fingers clawed his arm. “Look, he searches,” she whispered, and her words stirred slow spirals in the dust. The figure turned dark, blind eyes toward them; yes, he was searching, Andrion realized, the young man for victory and love, the old for victory and death.

  The misty image moved noiselessly on. The eyes looked through them and beyond. Andrion thrust his dagger into its sheath and raised his hand. “Father, your search has ended; you are with Danica in Sabazel.”

  Those names, anathema in this place, plummeted into blackness. The shape stopped. The dark eyes fixed upon Andrion, sensing their mirror image, and besides it the echo of Danica that was Dana, The torch guttered.

  The vaporous shadow that was Bellasteros swirled. The eyes paled, the skin tightened, cracked, sloughed away. It was a fleshless skull, teeth bared, sockets filled with blackness, that stared at Andrion. And the entire body of the image was a skeleton, for one moment complete, then with a dry cascade of chimes scattered over the dusty stones of the floor.

  Andrion knelt among the bones, hands outstretched and yet unable to touch them. “No,” he cried, “you cannot die. I still need you!” His voice boomed across the room and returned, subtly altered, mockingly.

  “It is only a spell,” squeaked Dana past some obstruction in her throat. “The evil in this place, racking us with illusion.”

  “Illusion?” Andrion asked. “Gods, if only it is!”

  A gust of icy wind, reeking of natron, spices, and decay, scoured the room. The torch fluttered wildly, and grotesque shadows leaped across the walls and ceiling. The wings of Death beat slowly, fanning the wind, and the torch flared and died.

  Impenetrable darkness. Utter silence. No wind, no movement, nothing but the chill malodorous air. Andrion’s intestines convulsed within him; he heard his own pulse racing in his ears, and he heard Dana beside him gasp. But nothing happened. After an eternity Andrion pulled himself together, forcing each knotted tendon to loosen, and tried his voice. “Dana!”

  “I am here.” A wisp of sound, but her voice nonetheless.

  “What if this darkness is also illusion?”

  “It is still darkness.”

  Outside the sun shone on Patros’s gilded helmet and on Ventalidar’s sleek coat; on the city of Sardis crouching like a hunting raptor abreast the two rivers. His heart sent warm blood through his veins. “If I cannot have hope,” Andrion said between clenched teeth, “then I shall take honor.” He laid down the burnt-out torch and groped across the floor. The bones lay about him, hard and dry to the touch, quite real.

  “What?” asked Dana.

  “We shall have illusion dispel illusion,” he said. His fingertips touched the skull, started back, then gingerly, lovingly, traced the line of jaw and brow. He lifted it. He held the simulacrum of his father’s head, and prayed that the real head still held the living spirit of Bellasteros. “Harus,” he called, “I am your son as well as Ashtar’s. Aid me.”

  A faint gleam. Two gleams. The eye sockets of the skull lit with a clear crystalline light. The light of burnished Solifrax, shining where Bellasteros’s dark, pellucid eyes had once reflected it. Carefully Andrion stood.

  The light emanating from the skull was colorless, consuming the darkness without being tainted by it. Andrion turned to Dana; her face was starkly pale, her eyes so wide that glistening white rimmed silver-green irises. “Ashtar,” she quavered, short of breath, “see us from this sorcery-ridden place.”

  “See us to the sword,” Andrion returned, “and after, thence.”

  Dana muttered, “You and that sword.” He pretended not to hear. How could she understand? It was enough that she came.

  Close together they walked across the vault, skirting the desiccated bodies of the guard, and passed through an empty doorway into yet another chamber. Here were the grave goods Andrion remembered from his dream, gold-plated furniture, alabaster vases, an entire chariot inlaid with sardonyx and ebony. And in the midst of the jumbled riches lay the carved sarcophagus of Gerlac.

  Andrion faltered. The light of the skull dimmed. Shadow shapes coiled like smoke in the corners, and the bas-reliefs on wall and ceiling mumbled curses. The air was close, reeking with spices and decay, and despite the chill Andrion began again to sweat.

  Dana’s dagger flashed as she turned from side to side. “Get it, quickly,” she said, “for the evil gathers itself.”

  Andrion forced his body forward. Stiffly, with awkward steps, he approached the sarcophagus. Dana moved warily at his back. If she had not been breathing so loudly, he might perhaps have heard fingers tapping within the coffin. And yet her ragged, racing breath was comforting.

  A brazier filled with ashes stood next to the sarcophagus. He laid the skull upon it, balancing it upright, and the light shone out clear and bright. His shadow moved against the wall, sweeping away lesser darknesses, as he bent over the great slab of stone.

  The image of Gerlac, granite carved in an eternal vulpine sneer, gazed up at him. Granite, not the gold of his vision. Andrion set his jaw and gazed steadily back. “You have no power over me, Gerlac.” He pushed against the lid. It was too heavy, or he too weak; it did not matter. The great slab would not move.

  “Gods,” hissed Dana, trembling.

  He had never seen her so frightened, at the limit of her self-control. But if
she saw something he did not, he certainly did not want to know it. He muttered something reassuring, to which she did not respond, and drew his dagger again. He worked the point into the slit between sarcophagus and lid and turned it. The metal was well forged, holding the weight, and with a low creak the lid lifted.

  Dana saw what he was doing and hurriedly set her shoulder to the stone. She groaned, wrenched to the heart; Andrion, lifting beside her, turned his dagger and set it upright between rim and lid. Dana slipped exhausted down the side of the coffin to crouch on the floor. “Are you well?” Andrion asked, even as his eyes were drawn to the interior of the sarcophagus.

  “Get it, get it!” she exclaimed.

  Darkness welled from the narrow crevice between coffin and lid. The dim light emanating from the skull faded. But then a similar light glimmered, died, glimmered again from within the sarcophagus. Andrion felt his face pulling into a grimace of resolve, felt his hands tightening into fists; he looked in.

  A band of light curved across tattered grave-wrappings, Solifrax gracing the face of Gerlac himself. Andrion recoiled in disgust and glanced wide-eyed at Dana. She staggered to her feet, averting her face from the coffin. He slowly edged head and shoulders into the crevice, holding his breath against the choking stench of natron and rot.

  The face of the old king was not regal, not serene in death. It was twisted with hatred, dried lips drawn back on brown teeth, hollow cheeks, empty sockets lidded with parchment like skin that seemed, in the uncertain light, to be straining to open. The shroud, stained with unguents, was torn, revealing wizened, shrunken limbs. The body was petrified in a writhing motion, as if it had been put into the tomb alive.

  Again Andrion recoiled. He exhaled, and his breath was a cloud of mist in the cold. Dana was motionless, half crouched, watching with slitted eyes something behind his back. His skin crawled.

  He reentered the sarcophagus. Solifrax lay, pure and unsullied, across the crumbling body. The hands, fingers like sharp talons, grasped at the sword but fell short. The mouth moved, muttering soundless curses; Andrion seized the sword and pulled it from the bone and granite trap.

  It flared, light dancing along the length of its curved blade, just as it had flared outside Iksandarun. But the filigree hilt had shrunk, it seemed, or else his hand had grown to fit it. Dana glanced at the sword, her eyes glinting in its light, and said, “Come now, come.”

  The skull of Bellasteros was gone, leaving only a print in the cold ashes of the brazier. But the sword glowed, clear and white, casting shafts of luminescence about it and driving back the shades that gibbered in the corners of the chamber. At last, Andrion exulted, I have won this sword. Surely I shall win the Empire, and win back my father’s life.

  He looked again at the remains of Gerlac, King of Sardis, no longer a king or even a demon, vanquished long before. He tried to feel sympathy for this man devoured by hatred, but he remembered Viridis and Lyris and his own mother, and could feel only satisfaction and the smooth, cool hilt of Solifrax in his hand.

  “Come!” insisted Dana, plucking at his arm.

  He was oddly reluctant to leave, mesmerized by the wasted face of Gerlac. As he stared at it, it twitched. One hand rose, reaching for him. Dana lunged forward and interposed herself between Andrion and the body. He started, waking. The desiccated hand twitched the dagger away. The lid of the sarcophagus fell with a resounding crash.

  Dana screamed. Crash and scream reverberated together through the tomb, through the earth itself, pounding like Andrion’s heart within his body. He was no longer cold, his limbs leaden; his head swam with sparkling coils of light, and every fiber in his body fired, ordering flight.

  He fumbled for Dana’s hand, grasped it and ran out of the chamber into the room where the warriors lay, the radiance of Solifrax like a torch before him. Her breath was a great bellows, opening and closing, sending gooseflesh down his back. The dead warriors stirred, bony fingers reaching for their weapons, skulls turning, blind eyes searching for their prey.

  “Hurry,” he said to the dim shape at his elbow, and the shape turned its face and grinned at him. A face with only a thin aperture for a nose, lips like dried papyrus, lidless eyes opening onto dark, bottomless pupils.

  His cry of horror echoed in receding circles of sound into the blackness and was swallowed. He dropped the hand he held, leaving stinking particles of dried flesh on his own skin. The demon threw back its head, neck bones rippling like falling axe blades, and laughed. It was not Gerlac; it was something else that had once been human, Adrastes, perhaps, who had given himself to evil and whose shade now crouched eternally at the feet of his master, Gerlac.

  Andrion’s body surged with hatred: My father and mother withstood you, you have no power over me! “Ashtar!” he cried. Solifrax sang. Blade and name alike cleft the thin neck of the demon, sending dried flakes of flesh and bone spinning away into darkness.

  Andrion gasped for breath. The warriors struggled to their feet around him. God’s beak! his mind exclaimed, what if the demon were only illusion and he had just beheaded Dana! But no, he would not believe that. He spun, knowing that if he ran now, he could escape the tomb, but knowing that he could never escape without finding Dana. Dana, child of the clear moonlight, must not be left to molder in this airless place.

  He sprinted back into the pitch-black chamber, illuminating it with his sword. Dana slumped against the sarcophagus, dagger at the ready, eyes staring in a paroxysm of terror and courage. Her long hair had been caught by the falling lid of the coffin. Andrion swept her up in his free arm; she was cold and yielding—was she dead? No, she breathed, her eyes blinked, and for a moment she actually clung to him.

  “Forgive me,” he gasped. “I did not mean to leave you here, I thought you were with me.” He was babbling. She did not hear.

  Andrion raised Solifrax and with a trembling hand sheared her hair, freeing her. So, he told himself, his mind reeling with relief into wry and irrelevant thought, now she pays indeed for lying with me. Her shining hair will remain here, an offering to my lust for power and for her both.

  Dana shuddered, released Andrion as if his body were a burning brand, straightened. She croaked, “Can we go now?”

  His body flushed with anger, at himself, at those who had made this tomb a place of evil, not of peace, at the gods who tested him with illusion and with darkness. “Come,” he snapped, taking a fold of Dana’s shirt securely in his hand. And together they confronted the dead guards.

  The warrior bodies stood in uneven rows, not quite remembering how to soldier, bony hands grasping rusted spear and sword, eye sockets staring vacantly. Andrion did not pause. Shouting, raising Solifrax, carrying Dana with him, he dove straight for the center of the warriors’ line.

  And Dana, desperately denying her fear. shouted also. Solifrax flamed, its brilliance exploding the shadows that shielded the skeletons. Sword and dagger struck, and bones fell rattling to the floor. The bite of the rusted weapons were only brief stings of ice against warm flesh; the wrath of the living prevailed, and the dead fell back into uneasy sleep.

  Andrion and Dana gained the passage. They skidded through the bat slime, crushing small slithering creatures beneath their feet. They careened past the dead servants and scattered enamel and gold behind them. They catapulted from the tomb entrance into the light of day.

  “By the tail feathers of the god,” Andrion gasped, “I never thought the scent of rotten lemons could be so sweet.”

  Dana turned away from him, head bowed, shoulders shaking, alone.

  It was, surprisingly, evening. Storm clouds massed, layer upon layer of blue-black billows, in the east. Shafts of yellow sunlight streamed through apertures in the cloud, but the basin was in shadow. The waiting soldiers started up; Patros rushed forward.

  He looked with unconcealed joy at the sword Andrion held. Then he looked at Dana’s stark, pinched face, and her shortened hair fluttering about her neck. His face clouded, caught between extremes. The soldiers set up
a feeble cheer, dispersed by a gusting wind. The gaping tombs and monuments in the basin seemed like staring eyes.

  Andrion leaned to Dana, asking quietly, reluctantly, “What did you see there, in the darkness?”

  She replied in a small, stiff voice, “The same that has gnawed me since the dawning of the day. My death.”

  “And still you came with me?”

  “I told you I would stand by you.” Her lips thinned. “And I did not understand my vision, did I? I was wrong. I did not die.”

  Her courage was greater than his; her loyalty greater than his lust. Honor above hope indeed. Andrion stared for a moment uncomprehendingly at the sword in his hands, his triumph somehow stained. And yet he had gone back for her. He did have Solifrax, his own now. If only you could be pleased for my triumph, he said mutely to Dana. But still she stood aloof.

  Andrion turned, bowed, handed the sword hilt first to Patros. It flared in a brief moment’s promise. Patros bowed deeply, took Solifrax, and with a slow, reverent gesture slipped it into its sheath. It entered with a hiss, its light winking out. He returned the sword to Andrion, and Andrion hung it on his belt. The sword was heavy, murmuring of power. He let his hand rest lightly on the hilt. Ventalidar tossed his head, and seemed to gaze at Andrion with amused skepticism. No, he thought, do not doubt me; I can no longer doubt myself.

  No dead flesh clung to his hand. He could tell himself it had all been hallucination. He had lost the sword to evil, and he had paid to reclaim it, whether or not it was his legacy from the god-king Bellasteros his father.

  Patros handed Dana her bow. She glanced at it, and up at her father’s concern, and she summoned a smile. But her eyes were haunted by terror, her cheeks pale, and when Patros dared to pat her shoulder consolingly, she stepped away from him, unable to take comfort from a man.