Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Patros had not been pleased to hear, at the staff meeting, Andrion’s plan for the night. “You will creep back into the city?”

  “Yes. I want to see if the water tunnel can be cleared, letting our troops open the gates of the city from within. Justice, do you not think?”

  “Indeed,” the governor had sighed. “I shall not waste my strength arguing with you, Andrion, to let someone else go in your stead.”

  Andrion almost wished Patros had argued with him. It was sobering to be thought infallible. The party crept across shadow-dappled plain, a chill south wind bearing the muffled sounds of their horses away from the city. At last Andrion’s straining eyes picked out the limber branches of the willow grove. He had come home. But this place, too, was changed from his memory of it. The trees creaked like crones, whispering querulously.

  An ethereal silver light stirred beneath the trees, the bare branches an intricate lace across a starry sky. The small band tied their horses and walked up the stream to the great leaning stones. Miklos lifted the dried thorn branches hanging over the entrance to the tunnel. The water was icy cold on Andrion’s feet, the darkness shifting and stirring as if black torches guttered within the corridor. He set his hand on the cold, tingling hilt of Solifrax.

  “So this was how you escaped,” Tembujin said. His quiet voice echoed, faded, died. “Not the divine intervention I had assumed.”

  “I would not be so sure of that,” said Andrion, thinking of Toth.

  They huddled inside the entrance as Miklos opened his tinderbox and lit a torch. The sudden light was a blinding radiance. Blinking, Andrion took the torch and lifted it. The flame flickered in a chill draught. “See,” he said, as much to himself as to the others, “there must still be an opening.” Close together they splashed on, slipping, colliding, parting with muttered excuses.

  The pool was dim watered silk, softened by swirls of mist. The rough-hewn ceiling of the chamber was a wilderness of shadow. Not like Ashtar’s cavern, Andrion thought irrelevantly. Dana eyed the ancient specters thronging this place, not threatening, but not welcoming either. The torch seemed to have shrunk into a mere pinprick of light.

  Andrion started up the stairs, slipping in the tumbled rocks and dust. Soon he was blocked by large boulders. He inspected them carefully; it would never do to survive the odyssey of the last months only to die in a landslide back where he had begun. There, he decided, that stone. Silently he handed the torch to Dana and set his shoulder against the rock. It was cold, draining heat, draining strength. Miklos and Tembujin pushed beside him. The rock moved. With a mighty rumble and crash it fell.

  The wind gusted through the opening and the torch guttered wildly. Four shadows leaped and danced upwards. They scrambled out of the hole, doused the torch and stood, weapons ready, waiting for someone to come and see what the noise had been. No one came.

  The wall of the palace was a jagged rim against a sky that at one moment spewed chill rain, at the next cleared into star-embroidered gauze. “Come,” said Andrion. He lifted Solifrax before him, its blade a curving glimmer driving back the darkness, and he led the way into corridors filled with dust and debris and tattered cobwebs.

  The palace spun past Andrion like a distorted dream. He wondered suddenly if he would wake and find himself still young, still secure, the ordeal having been only nightmare. The cold, musty corridors were like a tomb. His footsteps, the footsteps of the others, were a faint ripple through the silence. A rat scuttled in front of them and they all started.

  It was not all silent. A reedy voice crooned in an anteroom of the throne chamber. Andrion and Tembujin shared one long, wary look, and peered around the corner.

  Hilkar held an oil lamp above a figure crouched at his feet, a ragged woman clutching a baby. “Please, lord,” she said. “I have no jewelry for you; they took it all. Please. I need food, if not for me then for the child.” The baby wailed faintly, no louder than a kitten. The woman’s free hand grasped at Hilkar’s robe. Andrion saw then that he guarded a basket filled with bread.

  “What a shame,” Hilkar said without sympathy. “You must have something to spend in order to buy. Go scratch in the streets; perhaps the high and mighty Khazyari dropped something of value there. Sell yourself to them. Or, perhaps . . . ?” His scrawny hand reached toward her.

  “Is that he?” asked Dana’s breath in Andrion’s ear.

  “The traitor,” Andrion and Tembujin answered simultaneously. And Tembujin added, “So he has come back here. Could Sita . . . Sarasvati . . . ?”

  “Please,” the woman begged. Hilkar smirked, savoring his morsel of power.

  Sparks spun behind Andrion’s eyes, a blazing fury blinding him as surely as had the sudden flare of the torch. Spitting an epithet, he stepped around the corner. Hilkar started violently at this apparition in black and bronze. The lamp jerked, sending Andrion’s shadow streaming up the soot-stained wall like some all-consuming wraith. “Who, what?” Hilkar gasped. The woman’s pale face turned with hope and fear mingled.

  “Your evil past,” snarled Andrion, “come to haunt you.” He threw his cloak back. The winged brooch glittered no less brightly than his eyes. His armor gleamed. The sword Solifrax flashed, and its light drained Hilkar’s face of color, leaving it as pale as the skull beneath the skin.

  The man’s eyes bulged from their sockets. “Andrion!”

  Andrion lunged, the sword singing in his hand. Hilkar, for once rendered speechless, dropped the lamp and collapsed like a deflated bladder. The lamp sputtered out. The woman reeled back, seized the basket of bread, fled. Her running footsteps and the tiny wail of the baby faded into the night.

  Hilkar sprawled beneath Andrion’s foot, his eyes crossed and fixed upon the shining blade lifted above him, his mouth open, containing only abject terror. “Murderer!” Andrion snarled. “I swore, I swore to . . .” What had he sworn? That boy who had cursed and cried in this very room as the enemy pounded at the door was no more. He had drunk deep of the cup filled with hatred, and there was only a bitter aftertaste in the mouth of the man he was now.

  Tembujin knelt beside Hilkar, drawing the man’s eyes to him. The eyes froze in their sockets, and Hilkar moaned like a sick animal. “Think upon it,” Tembujin purred. “Your betrayals have betrayed you in the end, for they brought enemies into alliance against you.”

  Hilkar’s eyes rolled back, becoming only glistening white crescents beneath shivering lids. His body trembled violently and squeaks emanated from his throat, pleas for mercy perhaps. Andrion’s stomach crawled; the room spun, drawing a cold wind across his hot skin. His eyes cleared and his fury chilled into shards of ice. This pitiful creature, he thought, devoured by his own hatred, a wasted shell of a man. If I could even for a moment pity Gerlac, I can pity Hilkar.

  Tembujin glanced up, one eyebrow arched. “You will not kill him?”

  “No,” said Andrion.

  Tembujin stood, his mouth tight as he, too, tasted the bitter dregs of revenge. Deliberately he turned his back on Hilkar’s cowering form and dusted his knees. “Pathetic worm, is he not?”

  Swift footsteps echoed down a nearby corridor. A light glimmered, setting the shadows dancing. Andrion lifted Solifrax again.

  A cloaked figure paused in the doorway of the anteroom, bracing one hand on a column, firm and yet poised for any eventuality. A woman’s figure, Andrion realized. “Hilkar!” she demanded. “How dare you come lurking here?” His heart leaped into his throat. It was Sarasvati.

  Tembujin stiffened. Miklos stepped forward and then back. Dana shot a swift, intrigued glance at each of them. Hilkar scuttled like a giant cockroach away from the lifted lamp and into a side corridor. “Let him go,” said Dana, as the men spun about, torn. “He has bought his fate.”

  “Let him go, then.” And Andrion turned away, his face opening into a radiant grin. “Sarasvati! It is I!”

  The lamp did not move, its small flame did not waver. Her hand grasping the cloak loosened, and it fell. Her coppery hair gle
amed with rich amber highlights, her eyes were the shining lapis lazuli of deep evening, reflecting and magnifying the glow of Solifrax. Her eyes swam. “Oh,” she said, her voice suddenly small and choked.

  Andrion was at her side in one bound, sweeping her into his embrace. Her hand faltered, and Dana leaped forward to take the lamp just as she dropped it. Andrion swallowed the tears that clogged his throat; how long had it been since he had wept in joy? His hand held Solifrax angled across his sister’s back, for a moment forgotten.

  She clung to his shoulders, wondering perhaps when those shoulders had grown so broad. She searched his face in the shadow of his visor, noting what strengths had been incised there since they last met. His eyes were the eyes of the emperor, dark and rich, flickering with a distant flame. “Andrion . . .” Her belly stood up tautly rounded between them.

  He laid his fingertips on her lips. “I know. I know.”

  Sarasvati looked from the shelter of Andrion’s arm to each of the figures behind him. She paused in pleasure at Dana’s smiling face; in grief at Miklos’s features, as contorted as if her look were a sword thrust through his vitals. When she came at last to Tembujin’s locked and shuttered eyes, she blanched. “Gods! He has come back to haunt me!”

  “No,” Andrion assured her, “he is quite alive.”

  The lamplight and the light of Solifrax touched her face with a sheen of gold and sorrow. Tembujin alive, and Bellasteros’s sword carried in Andrion’s hand; “Ah,” she said, accepting all.

  Andrion led her into the throne room. The peacock throne had been gouged of its precious stones, and some of its fine carved wood was hacked into splinters. The walls were stark stone, unsoftened by any tapestry or fresco. The past had been erased; the room was a parchment, waiting for new hands to write upon it.

  Andrion seated Sarasvati upon the throne. “No,” she protested, “it is not my place to sit here.”

  “Yes it is,” he replied. He sat at her feet and laid Solifrax across his knees, where he could see its shimmering refractions play across the vacant chamber, catching an occasional spider web like a misty jewel. Dana perched on one arm of the throne, holding the lamp, her other hand placed on Sarasvati’s shoulder. Miklos stood at quiveringly taut attention in the doorway. Tembujin scouted the walls, pretending great interest in nothingness.

  “So,” said Andrion. “Tell me.”

  Sarasvati spoke in brief phrases, filling in the gaps left by Toth’s and Tembujin’s accounts of the woman Sita and the necklace of the moon and star. Then Andrion and Dana spoke in turn of Sabazel and Sardis, ailing Bellasteros, the sword Solifrax, the rescue of Tembujin, the deaths of Toth, Shurzad, and Baakhun. The palace seemed to stir around them, a hungry beast waking, ready to feed.

  “Gods,” Sarasvati said at last, whether a prayer or a curse Andrion could not tell. “Obedei told me what he knew, and I feared our father was wounded—”

  “Obedei?” asked Tembujin from a far corner. “He is here?” And scathingly, “He would not defend me against Raksula’s charges.”

  “Of course he would not,” Sarasvati shot back. “Like me, when I came willingly to your bed, he chose life over honor in the hope that honor would in time prevail.”

  Tembujin scowled, his features veneered with a petulant arrogance, and advanced to the throne. “You would have me ask forgiveness of you?”

  Miklos’s sword fell from his hand with a crash, as though he threw it away rather than slash Tembujin with it. Sarasvati searched his face; frowning, she looked back at Tembujin, pinned him with her eyes, ripped the veneer from him. “You have been to Sabazel, and still you can ask me such a question?”

  Dana’s foot began to tap, a quick, uneven rhythm. Solifrax flared in Andrion’s clenched hand. Tembujin shut his eyes. The words were dragged from a depth he may not have known he possessed. “So then, forgive me, my lady . . .” His voice thinned and died. He had just swallowed something cold and slimy, it seemed, and struggled to keep it down.

  Dana exhaled and grinned at him. “Your sensibilities grow finer by the day, my odlok.”

  He offered her a ripple of his mouth that might have been a smile. Sarasvati glanced calculatingly from Tembujin to Dana and back. “You, too?”

  “Yes,” Dana said. “I am with child, his or Andrion’s, we know not. But I chose them both.”

  “And that is the difference.” The side of Sarasvati’s mouth crimped at such a choice. “Surprising as it is, Tembujin, I am pleased that despite my best efforts you are not dead. But then, I am no longer bound to you, and I need never touch you again.”

  Tembujin turned away, too proud to admit defeat.

  “By law,” Andrion said, “I should order Tembujin to marry you, Sarasvati. But that would hardly remedy the situation.”

  Sarasvati nodded emphatic agreement. Committing herself to a difficult task, she turned to the stiff shadow in the doorway. “Miklos, I am pleased to see you well.”

  “Thank you, my lady,” he returned, biting off each word.

  Andrion waved Solifrax as if cutting the tension. A bubble swelled within him, smooth bright colors glinting from its surface. He stood. “Miklos,” he announced, “let me offer you a reward for your service. The hand of my sister Sarasvati. If she so pleases,” he added quickly. Ah, he thought, preening himself, a fine idea come to fruition.

  Miklos stepped forward stiffly, called to parade before his commander. “My lord, my lady, I—”

  “Andrion,” said Sarasvati in a faint voice, “I think perhaps . . .”

  Dana laid down the lamp, leaving her face suddenly in shadow. Tembujin strolled away until he collided with a wall. He leaned against it with his face concealed by his crooked arm.

  “My lord,” said Miklos, pulling each word tighter and tighter, “this is such a great honor—thank you very much—but I cannot, I cannot.” He turned abruptly away and went to retrieve his sword.

  “Why did you do that to him?” Sarasvati asked Andrion wearily. Her dark blue eyes shone with tears.

  Of course. His bubble burst into a rain of needles, piercing him to the quick. Of course Sardian Miklos would recoil from a woman stained by rape. The young soldier had learned a definition of honor so narrow it choked him.

  No, it was not fair. What was? Andrion slashed the air with Solifrax and the blade sent light glancing across the room. The complications of the heart, damn them all. Miklos stood bowed in the doorway, patiently waiting for Andrion to come and kill him. Tembujin leaned against the wall, denying any part in this travesty. Dana, her mouth slitted with irritation, glared at the flame in the lamp. Sarasvati sighed; she reached for and secured Andrion’s hand, at the moment the stronger of the siblings.

  A shadow stirred in a far, dim corner. A gray cat padded up the length of the room like an ambassador seeking an audience. It meowed courteously to Dana and to Andrion, and leaped onto Sarasvati’s lap, draping itself around her belly. She started, and then smiled at it.

  Dana and Andrion glanced at each other, shaken from the somber moment. “That could not be—” Andrion began.

  “Qemnetesh,” stated Dana. “Shurzad’s cat.”

  Sarasvati plucked it up and held its face to hers, seeming to expect it to talk to her and reveal the truth. “It appeared only two days ago; it must have come with the Khazyari.”

  “No doubt as a little spy for the gods,” Andrion said dryly. He reached out and ruffled the beast’s ears. It smirked at him. He might have been angry or sad or merely tired, but he could not afford the luxury of reflection. “We must return to camp, Sarasvati. We shall attack tomorrow, from without and within.”

  “Justice,” nodded Sarasvati, turning also to duty. “Very good. I have been hoarding weapons; the slaves, our people, will rise against their oppressors. Bring yourself and the sword, and they will fight for you.”

  “But are you not coming with us now?”

  “I must stay here,” she said, admitting no other possibility. “The people need direction. I shall see y
ou on the morrow.”

  “Or in paradise,” Andrion returned. He shivered. It was in this very room that Bellasteros had taken leave of Aveyron with almost those words . . . No, the price had been paid, and paid again this night; the victory would be theirs. All he had to do, it seemed, was be in two places at once.

  Gravely he kissed his sister. Dana embraced her. Tembujin bowed jerkily and fled into the hall. Miklos looked at Andrion, almost pleading for hatred; then he squared his shoulders and turned to Sarasvati. They stared at each other, divided by the length of the chamber, divided by the length of the Empire. He saluted her, and with a clash of his armor vanished. She let him go.

  They left Sarasvati sitting on the battered throne in a pool of lamplight, thoughtfully stroking the cat. The cat lay with its forepaws tucked, whiskers alert, ears pricked for any echo of battle.

  The group walked in glum silence through the deserted corridors. They spread splintered boards from the ruined stable across the opening to the well. They lit the torch again, and followed its small sputtering crimson light to the willow grove. The wind had died; the trees were still, each branch an engraved pattern against a steel-gray sky. The horses stamped restively, eager to be away.

  Andrion sheathed Solifrax and climbed onto Ventalidar. He saw Sarasvati’s glistening eyes before him, and his gut cramped cruelly. He glanced over at Tembujin, who would be his friend, and he said matter-of-factly, “You bastard.” Miklos’s white, pinched face looked around, thinking, perhaps, that the prince spoke of him. Dana winced.

  “Ah,” returned Tembujin in acid tones, “but my parents were wed. It is you who are—”

  Andrion growled, “Hold that handsome tongue, Khazyari, or I shall be pleased to shorten it.” His voice spun itself out and broke. Ventalidar leaped forward.

  Tembujin jerked his head so that his tail of hair danced, but he said nothing more. The grove fell behind them. The dark mound of Iksandarun seemed to shift and stretch, its eyes, the fires of the Khazyari, blinking. The streets began to resonate with the rumor, with the promise, that the black prince had come at last, and that he carried his father’s sword.