Regeane had often been alone. In the evening, before one of her mother’s maids put her to bed, she would peer out of the narrow window of her chamber at the sunset. The last flare of the daystar glowed a golden mist down the road to their villa. She would dream of following that road into the haze of gilded splendor. For she understood as a woman that a child looks into the realm of absolute possibility not with fear, or desire, not with love or loathing, but simply with clear-eyed acceptance.
The child waits for time to fling it forth into that strange realm that it cannot yet fully comprehend. And this was how Regeane began her savage journey, speeding like an arrow into a blaze of golden light.
Now she stood, woman, birth, naked, in a temple of darkness. The pillars of the hall reared up to reach the sky. From the top of each was a throat belching forth roars of flame and black smoke. The smoke was an inky cloak that blotted out the stars. The floor was polished black glass and reflected the bloody glow of the fires roaring from the pillars above.
“Welcome,” a voice said, “to the ruined land.”
Regeane knew she stood in the midst of a court. A ruler’s entourage, and this ruler’s subjects were horrors. They were clearly visible in the light from the dreadful fires burning above lining the long aisle between the flaming pillars of the hall. The aisle led to a throne and on it was seated the skull-faced woman who had greeted her when she first entered the temple. Only this time the vision was worse. Then, Herophile had been wrapped in a mantle that covered all but the ivory face. This time she was draped in gossamer that covered a lush woman’s body. The soft breasts had dark nipples straining at the thin fabric. At her neck the flesh stopped and teetering on the column of bones was a naked blackened skull. Wrapped around her body, the tail at the neck, the coils embracing the breast and waist, was a serpent. Its head deeply thrust into her loins.
The voice echoed in Regeane’s mind again. I, the Queen of the Dead, welcome you. For know you, Woman Wolf, the road to paradise is through the gates of hell.
The crew surrounding her was no less terrible than their queen. Some of them seemed to be dead, for surely no living thing could look so. Eyeless horrors blackened by fires. Rags of flesh dripping from shiny red bone. They looked like carcasses being cleaned by vultures.
Others glowed with the evil blue light of putrescence. They were puffed out with rot, running with the juices of decay. Yet they all moved with a horrible life. Laughing, howling, weeping, they surrounded the throne of the queen. Outside the temple of the dead queen, Regeane could see between the columns surrounding her, a pitted, pockmarked waste. In the distance ground fires flared in the inky gloom.
Regeane realized she could recognize some of them. Those who had lived in the insula with Antonius. Drusis, legless and blind, the entrails spilling from his split belly. Sirus, one of his murderers, the one she’d killed slowly, his face black, eyes bulging. Hideously, he groped his way toward her, arms outstretched. The girl, Crysta, whipped to death, crawled in her direction, she also leaving a trail of bloody slime.
Nightmare. This must be a nightmare. Regeane’s mind gibbered and shrieked.
“There is nothing,” the voice continued, thundering at her from the black stone throne, “nothing between you and what you fear.”
In a few moments, the throng of horrors would be upon her. Their vile, rotting hands, clutching at her naked flesh. Regeane gasped and tried to twist herself into the change, but this time the wolf failed her. She wouldn’t come to Regeane’s aid. She was alone.
Regeane could feel her body collapsing slowly as she fell to her knees. In dreams, one doesn’t fall. But here her senses were awake. Her hands seemed to move like tentacles through thick liquid as they groped toward her own eyes, not to cover them, but to punch them out of their sockets. Her knees contacted the stone floor and the icy cold rock sent a shock of pain through her naked flesh.
Eternity. Regeane’s mind stumbled and groped for the concept. She seemed to see an endless loop, herself standing there locked in insane terror. While the dead struggled to reach her, a madness that would begin ever again in endless repetition. A nightmare from which one could never escape, never break free. She would stand there, lost in everlasting anguish as the dead groped toward her forever in vain.
Then Regeane felt the wolf and realized she was not gone. The she-beast remained with her always, and as she looked out at the demonic throng through her eyes, the woman’s heart almost burst—not with horror—but with compassion.
She was more than wolf and woman, she was wolf-woman. Neither one nor the other, but a being embodying both creatures at once, immeasurably more powerful than either, immeasurably stronger.
The wolf, as she had said to Antonius, saw neither ugliness nor beauty as the woman saw them. She saw only humanity caught in the shackles of time.
Time causes the dead to fall to dust, time maims. Time kills. Time corrupts. Here at the gateway to eternity the dead still bear the scars of their journey not only through time, but the wounds we humans, in our vainglory, inflict on one another.
Then the vision of cruelty faded, and the crowd around her grew taller and taller. She saw they were becoming transparent. As they did so, they seemed more sad and more harmless. Then they vanished like a gust of smoke captured by the wind. They left only the roar and stench of the fires burning atop the high pillars and the endless keening of the blast that blew like the breath of some dreadful curse over the wasteland. All were gone except for the eyeless ghost of the girl who had been whipped to death at the insula. The girl who had once cursed Regeane for being young and beautiful. The girl Regeane had avenged. Crysta.
She was no longer a horror now. Regeane saw her as she had been when she was young; at the moment of her first youth when her life began. She was gowned in white, a garland of flowers in her hair. She carried a sword in her hand.
One other remained. Herophile still sat in her chair. She also had undergone a change. She was no longer the obscenity of lust and death that met Regeane’s eyes a few moments ago, but the white-robed, laurel-crowned priestess who stood at the gateway to the underworld. She lifted one hand and beckoned to Regeane.
“Approach my throne, girl,” she said. “For you have seen truly. You have looked on the dead, not with the eye of fear, but of truth, and so escaped the first danger of your present state.”
Regeane walked down the long aisle between the black columns toward her throne. The stone was icy under her feet and the wind-borne grit from the desert beyond the temple stung her naked flesh painfully. The wraith of Crysta, sword in hand, trailed behind her.
The wind howled more loudly and dust devils whirled at the edges of the temple and whipped across the floor. Regeane’s eyes teared and she raised her hand to clear them.
“Weep not,” Crysta whispered, “for the pains of wretched human flesh. For you have trespassed where no living flesh was meant to go.”
Regeane paused before the throne and looked up. She could see the woman’s face. Not old, yet not young; she was ageless.
“What do you wish?” she asked.
“I ask to heal Antonius,” Regeane said.
“Then,” Herophile answered, “you must search out someone who can heal him.”
She stared down the aisle of the temple past the tall pylons that seemed like deadly trees spouting leaves of flames, on into the distant waste. The hot dry wind gusted again, and Regeane heard the whimpering cry, the same cry that had awakened her by night in the convent. A cry of sorrow so profound, so bitter, that it seemed beyond hope or even love. A desolate lonely sound, the weeping of one condemned to wander forever without either consolation or rest.
“The one who will guide you there—to him—in whom you hope, cries out for you.”
Regeane looked around. Only a desolate expanse of broken rock and sand lit by the temple fires met her eyes.
“I see no one,” she said.
“She is there,” Crysta said, “waiting. You gave her the mirr
or and hope.” She extended the sword toward Regeane.
Regeane turned and looked her in the eyes. Before she had seen only a shadowy wraith, though a beautiful one. Now, she seemed a real woman, auburn haired with hazel eyes and a pale, milky complexion. She smiled at Regeane, almost impishly for a second, then her face sobered and hardened.
“What I must do is not easy for me,” Crysta said. “For I must take your blood that the spirit may drink and become one of us and then so that you will bleed and know the path to return. You will travel as wolf to the garden and each time your forepaw touches the ground, the blood will be an offering. It marks your road back. But before I do, I would have peace between us. When we first met, I hated you. Your beauty reminded me of all I was and all I never could be again. Will you forgive me my spite? When I died, my troubled spirit hovered near, thinking all the world was cruelty and pain and as life had been, so also must be eternity. But you came.”
“I avenged you,” Regeane said.
“No,” Crysta said. “You brought me justice.”
Justice? Regeane wondered as she extended her hand toward Crysta’s sword, remembering the bloody melee in which she’d killed the guards at the insula. She wondered if even the dead were at times deluded. Had that been justice? Perhaps it had. Surely she had shown no mercy.
Herophile answered her thought. She leaned forward and rested her chin on her fist. “We, too, have our debates and our divisions, even here. The poor soul that cries out to you asks salvation, sees you as her savior. For our sins do not always find us out, Regeane. Sometimes we become the sin we commit and that is its own punishment. Her will cannot forget the pattern of an earthly human life. You are, as I have said, her salvation. Say you will give it to her.”
“I will,” Regeane said and extended her hand.
The sword bit deep, cutting a slice across the palm of her hand. Blood began to drip from her fingers. A shadow flitted into the red light surrounding the three women and began to sip greedily at the blood. Then a second later, cold bony hands clutched at her wrist.
Regeane refused to flinch and held her hand still as the thing formed into flesh before her eyes. First it became a skeleton; then flesh slowly clothed the bone—the pale, tallowy flesh of a corpse, the face, a sunken horror, withered lips drawn back, eyes lidless holes. But as it drank, sucked, and drank, the thing took on the lineaments of life. The pale flesh ripened, took on the flush of a living thing. The lips returned, the eyes glowed in the black hollows and then were covered by soft blue-veined lids, until a woman knelt there, whole and lovely as she had been in life. She released Regeane’s hand.
She was bejeweled, painted, and gowned in silk. As beautiful as she must have been when Lucilla dressed her for her journey into the tomb.
She stood and spun in joy, looking into her mirror. “I am myself again.”
Herophile, sitting on her throne, sighed deeply. “Come, Adraste,” she said. “It is as you have long desired?”
“Yes,” Adraste whispered, but she couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from the mirror in her hands. “All my beauty is returned to me. I have it now for eternity.”
Regeane curled her injured hand and clutched it close to her breast. Waves of pain ran up her arm, jolting her right to the edge of consciousness.
“Tell me, Adraste,” she whispered, through dry lips. “How may I save Antonius?”
“Find Daedalus’ garden,” she said, almost absently. Her gaze riveted on the mirror. “Cross the waste until you reach a river of fire. Many ghosts flit along its banks, unable to cross. Some of the ghosts will not see you. Many will not care even if they do. But you must search there until you find one willing to carry you across. But take care when you do. If you exchange one word with that vagrant throng, or answer when they speak or if they answer you, then you are doomed to wander among them forever. Beyond the river is Daedalus’ garden.”
“Antonius saw you as you were, didn’t he?” Regeane asked. “I mean when he painted you with the glass in your hand. He was just another mirror to you.”
For the first time Adraste tore her gaze from the mirror and directed a malevolent glare at Regeane.
“That’s all love means to you, isn’t it?” Regeane asked. “To see your loveliness mirrored in the pleasure of another’s face and eyes. Because of that, you took him for your lover and your victim.”
“Unnatural thing,” Adraste shrilled. “Not beast and yet not human, who are you to condemn me? You who are destined never to know love unless it leads to death.”
Then she turned back to the mirror in her hand and smiled, crooning softly to herself in a comforting way. “I have my beauty. It’s all I ask, and if I doubt, I can always look into my mirror and see it there.”
Slowly she began to drift away; but even as she did, Regeane saw her body was begining to fall into the ruin of the grave again. Yet the reflection in the mirror remained unchanged—a face young and beautiful forever.
Then, from the timeless current of air that blew across the waste, a zephyr took her and she drifted like a fallen leaf taken by the wind into the immense reaches of eternity.
“She is in hell and doesn’t know it,” Regeane said to Herophile and Crysta.
“I cannot say,” Herophile answered. “In time she might come to know herself better.”
“But there is no time here,” Regeane answered.
“True,” Herophile answered. “No time, but many mysteries. So there is hope that one day she may forswear self-love for compassion and regret. But to do so would bring pain, so she would rather stay as she is. Know well, Regeane, that the price of paradise is pain. Now if you have the will, go seek it and heal Antonius.”
When she ceased speaking, she also seemed to cease to be. Wherever Herophile went she took Crysta with her, and Regeane found herself alone. She heard only the endless moan of the wind and the roar of the fires at the top of the pylons.
Whatever compulsion had kept Regeane woman was lifted also, and she found herself wolf again. She started out across what Herophile had called the ruined land. Every time her forepaw touched the ground, the pain was like a red hot iron slicing into the sensitive pad of her foot, but the wolf, controlled by the woman’s will, held to her task and drove on.
The ruined land was rock and sand, the sky a dark starless pall, and Regeane found her way by the light of burning cities. As she drew close to each one, she found they were inhabited, filled with the senseless cruelty and blind tragedy that has afflicted man since time began.
In the streets, illuminated by flames pouring over burning rooftops, leaping from the windows and doors of dying dwellings, wives wept over their fallen husbands, men cried out against heaven as they stared down at ravished and murdered mothers and daughters.
In places the gutters ran red with the blood of the slain and the victors rioted drunkenly amidst the slaughter even as they, too, were felled by disease and ran themselves on each other’s swords to escape the pain of water running from their bowels and lumpish swelling of armpit and groin that drove them wild with misery. Others were beset by torture, flaying, branding, blinding, burning and they writhed in agony even as they turned on their torturers and sent them by the same road.
All these visions tormented the wolf as she dragged herself onward. Her suffering consisted in wondering if she saw actual spirits locked in an endless repetition of cruelty, pain, and despair. What little comfort she felt lay in believing they were only shadows of what had been, and somewhere the souls of those enduring so much agony, suffering were free.
The last city was only rubble filled with bloated corpses eaten by dogs and flies. Ahead of her she saw a forest and through the forest ran a river of fire.
The wolf stumbled into a painful lope, her heart hungry for the trees, for the coolness under the heavy boughs. The ash was a torture almost as intense as her wounded paw. Perhaps in the forest she could find clean water to drink and she would smell something besides smoke dust and burning flesh.
/> But when she drew closer to the forest she saw it was a ruin also. Charred dead trees lifted a tracery of leafless branches against the sullen sky. A sky reflecting the bloody light of burning cities. In a few moments she was among the skeletal undergrowth at its edge. She felt the dead branches snap against her body as she passed. They were brittle and rotten.
Down the slope she struggled, toward the river of fire. Many trees were fallen, shattered into tangles of sinister branches and thorny growth, the deadfalls traps for her tired feet.
The only water she found there stank of mold and was heavy with the tannins released by rotting wood. Bark hung in strips from the trunks of trees still standing like flesh falling from the bones of a corpse. The forest was no sanctuary. Still she struggled on down and down toward the river. Its fires glimmered through the trees.
At the rocky bank, Regeane found the ghosts of which Adraste had spoken. Some of them she could see, but even the wolf turned her eyes from them. Some walked unseeing, lips moving in silent communion with themselves. Others wept or raged, teeth clenched, spitting out the bile and fury of a lifetime at the empty dark. Others were only sad, lonely voices drifting on the wind. Their words were a torment to her ears and seemed to demand she speak if only to offer them what little comfort she could.
They cried out of the heart-wrenching tragedy of being human. And Regeane, soul locked in the wolf’s body, wept silently that her wolf shape could not weep with them.
“I died in childbed …” one moaned. “Oh, the pain—the pain.”
“I was captured and taken as a slave,” a man’s voice cried in anguish. “My life was impossible without freedom. I died under torture after the third time I ran away.”
A child’s voice wailed, “I died of hunger. My mother starved me after my father left her.”
No, the wolf thought. No. And despite the wound in her paw, she began to run along the rocky river bank away from this cauldron of human pain. The fires blazed from the water, scorching her side.
The Silver Wolf Page 35