The Carnelian Throne

by Janet Morris

  His chin caught in the headhole. He struggled with it. When he could once again see, she was searching something from the wide belt she wore. Naked but for a strip of cloth—and it old and threadbare—wound around his loins, he crossed his arms over his chest and squatted down. Not ever had he been naked before a woman. He hoped that the whelt was gone, and not spying on him from the trees.

  She, too, crouched in the grass, palm outstretched. Her eyes appraised every inch of him, calmly. The tiny smile upon her face fanned bright.

  Ptaissling or no ptaissling, Mahrlys’ whelt’s orders not-withstanding, he almost ran, then. At length, he crouched before her like a man set to jump, palms flat to the ground between his feet, weight well forward.

  Never afterward, though often he tried to recall the truth, could he determine if her touch alone had healed him or if the sticky brown substance she applied to the trough the whelt had dug in his shoulder provided the cure. Her palm’s proximity caused his flesh to turn cold, then so hotly cold he flinched. Then the touch was gone. And back a second time, smoothing the sharp-smelling gel into the wound. At that moment, he paid the healing process little mind: her gaze had found what he had hoped that she would not see. But when she raised her face there was no censure, no fury in it. She merely stretched toward him and repeated the same procedure on his right cheek. As the evil-smelling unguent began stinging, he tried not to flinch, but his flesh trembled under her hand. He studied the ground, biting his lip, so desperately did he want to look at her.

  “I have found another scratch,” she said, touching him upon the belly. He groaned softly. “What did this?” she asked, as if she had not heard.

  “Jicekak,” he answered, first knowing he did so when the sound surprised him. She stared intently at his scratched cheek, nodding. Then she leaned closer. Her thinly clad breast brushed his arm.

  “Please, Most High,” he begged, holding the surging inside him. His fingers ached in their trenches newly dug among the weeds.

  “Does it hurt so much?”

  “Yes,” he admitted, very low. He longed to touch that strange, glowing skin, unwind the thick braid of copper hair.

  She sat back, inspecting him critically. “Let me see the back of you. Go on, turn around.”

  He was glad to do so, that he could not see her.

  “Who is Mahrlys-iis-Vahais?” she asked, her strong fingers rubbing salve into his back.

  “Mahrlys,” he repeated, pulling away from her. If Mahrlys knew that he had been naked before this creature, messenger of Mnemaat or no, the iis’ retribution would be terrible. But he remembered the slain quenel and ptaiss, and the whelt’s message, and he realized that no worse could befall him.

  “Mahrlys-iss-Vahais rules Benegua,” he said simply, when she asked again. “Please, do not amuse yourself with me. It is not permitted.” His voice even to his own ears, came thick and hoarse. Her hands turned to soothing, to kneading the thrice-knotted muscles of his back. “Most High,” he moaned, driven to desperation. “No!”

  “Turn around.” And when he did not: “Now! Face me!”

  Slowly, he obeyed. Her face was unreadable, eyes half-closed.

  Implacable, she reached out a hand to him. He squeezed his own eyes shut, kept them shut, but he knew what he did. He simply could do no different.

  When it was done, when he had committed the final, most heinous sacrilege, he groaned softly and pried his lids apart. His fingers, digging into her arms, would not at once heed his command that they release her.

  He allowed himself the further iniquity of appreciating her, as he waited for death to come. He had earned it.

  She rolled aside, and he felt her finger run the length of his transgression. Pulling her legs under her, she put her finger to her lips and licked it, her eyes huge over her hand. Then she laughed and scrambled to her feet. He followed suit, naked, his belongings forgotten in the grass.

  “Most High, who are you?” he asked, taking her proffered hand. Behind her back, the two firelit figures hovered, blades drawn, at either edge of the blaze, stone-still, listening.

  “Estri,” she replied firmly. “But that is not what you meant. Chayin once observed that we are more than men, yet less than gods, and sometimes used by the latter to mold the former. Will that do?” She smiled, touched his lips.

  Deilcrit, then, heard what softly rising sounds had so concerned Sereth and Chayin. He pushed her toward them awkwardly, unable to answer her bright smile. From behind her he said, “In that case, you three may yet survive.” He could feel the breeze of them, the restless air that always accompanied the gathering of wehrs in numbers.

  “What do you mean?” she demanded, then stopped dead so that he stumbled into her. This time, it was she who gripped his shoulders.

  “That I did not tell you all that the whelt told me. I was forbidden to. But I cannot ... What we have done ... Most High, forgive me, but I am trying to tell you that the whelt told me to await the wehrs’ justice, to keep you here. Wehrs’ justice is that of death. Can you not hear them? See?” And he pointed to where pair upon pair of glowing eyes bestarred the forest’s blackness from ground to treetops.

  “Deilcrit.” With a shudder she released him, whirled, and scrambled up the hillock in a dash that ended her in Sereth’s arms, babbling urgently.

  He turned his eyes from their frantic embrace, and sought the ptaissling, who slumbered fitfully now that ptaiss-mutter filled the air. He had to pass by the dark one, Chayin, to get there.

  That one fixed him with a piercing glare, half-pitying, half-contemptuous, and spat in Deilcrit’s direction.

  “Well, will you fight, ungrateful whelp? Or will you meet your death like you have spent your life, cowering before gods and spirits and even dumb beasts?”

  Deilcrit, his face buried in the ptaissling’s neck, felt at last the first spray of horror cool his skin. The wave surged close behind. A shuddering racked him. When it was gone, he pushed the youngling away, and uncurled himself to stand straight before the glowering Chayin, in whose unwavering extended grasp was a white-bladed knife.

  A ptaiss roared, a cough answered, and a high-pitched cry silenced both.

  “I cannot lift weapons against the ptaiss,” Deilcrit got out. “It is not ... not possible. Please ...” His arms, of their own accord, stretched out to encompass the fire, the clearing, the denser shadows of forest cushioning the moonless night. “I cannot.”

  Chayin, with a shrug, flipped the knife and cast it between Deilcrit’s feet. Then he turned his back and joined his companions.

  Silently the three walked to a stretch of level ground, and there, halfway between fire and slope, formed a triangle, back to back. Their alien weapons gleamed. Sereth spoke tersely, very low, and Chayin grunted an assent. And then they stood like statues, unmoving, for an instant.

  Even as Deilcrit bent to still the ptaissling’s sudden bleat, even as the knife jumped of its own accord into his fist and every vestige of his composure fled, the black forest exploded. Into the light leaped and bounded and flapped the wehrs. Ptaiss predominated, and their roars, deafening, were only a background for more terrible cries. A wall of diverse creatures erupted out of the dark.

  Deilcrit had no time to survey them, only a moment for the incredulity of their numbers to sink in, and then a spirit-white ptaiss was upon him. Blindly, his face contorted so that his teeth lay bare, screaming without knowing that he did, Deilcrit stabbed about him. No law, no question of submission stayed his furious thrusts, though he had knelt a hundred times while the wehrs passed ravening among the folk of Benegua, striking dead whom they chose. This time his palms lay not on the ground with his forehead upon them. In one fist he grasped a ptaiss’ ear, in the other the blade that tore again and again into the beast’s belly. The claws of one forepaw raked the ground by his head as the awful weight bore him down; its mates sank deep into his right shoulder and scraped bone. Up into its vitals, again and again, did Deilcrit plunge his weapon. His grip on the beast�
��s ear slipped, and the slavering jaws thrust toward him, drenching his face in drool and spittle.

  With all his strength, he thrust his free arm down the ptaiss’ throat, gouging the soft palate with his nails. Halting momentarily in surprise, the suddenly choking creature arched its back, threw its head up, and Deilcrit’s knife hand was no longer skewered to the ground by the claws in his shoulder. He thrust the knife upward, deep into the ptaiss’ jugular, even as those hideous jaws closed upon his elbow, and the ptaiss’ frenzied convulsions snapped him up into the air. He had only enough time to drop the blade and hug the beast’s neck as it reared up, shaking its head. Gorge rose in its throat, spilled from its mouth, but the ptaiss would not release Deilcrit’s arm, now torn half from its socket. For a moment, swinging free of the ground, the whole clearing was revealed to him.

  Sereth, Chayin, and Estri, still back to back, stood amid a growing circle of corpses, over which new assailants vaulted. He saw the wing-flutter of an ossasim, its manlike body strewn uppermost on the pile. Then, as a screaming ptaiss launched itself over the barrier, Estri uttered a hoarse cry, she and Sereth both threw their weapons—he at the ptaiss and she at a tusked, long-bodied campt, and the three joined hands. Then they were gone. The campt, with a roar of pain, fell aspraddle where they had just stood; and Deilcrit’s vision went red with pain as the ptaiss jerked him to the ground. His lungs emptied, his head struck a stone. And while he hung limply, gasping, the ptaiss, fangs locked around the limb choking it, blood spurting from the gaping slash in its neck, snapped Deilcrit first to the right, then to the left. Then, with a growl and a bound, it dashed him to the grass, raking his torso with its hind talons. He did not even feel the creature’s grip go slack as it collapsed on top of him, nor its huge heart pumping out a final jet of blood that spilled over his face, into his ears, and from there trickled down upon the sedge grass.

  III. Of Whelts and Wehrs and Imca-Sorr-Aat

  I crouched in the sand, gulping great chunks of air out of the moonless night. I had brought us into time-space a trifle high, and we had fallen a short distance to land in a tangle. I was not displeased—dragging the both of them, the cahndor a deadweight, and Sereth so much heavier that it seemed as if I attempted to pull the whole congruence plane out with me onto the sand of the bayshore—I counted myself fortunate to have emerged at all. That I had brought them both through on my power alone was near miraculous. But desperation is an inspiring instructor, and a propitiously timed obviation of space had seemed our only alternative to an eventual death atop a mountain of suicidally ferocious animals.

  Chayin’s voice, cursing monotonously in his native tongue, was the first sound I heard over my own pumping lungs. Then, as I struggled to my feet and brushed the sand away, I saw Sereth.

  He stood at the water’s edge, facing out to sea. Chayin, hunkered down nearby, stared straight at the sand between his feet, still excoriating in Parset.

  It was not until I saw the severed hand, badly chewed and bearing a ring about one swollen finger, that I understood. Then I cursed myself for a fool and joined Sereth where he stood looking out at the empty sea.

  “Do you think you miscalculated? Are we at the right point in space, but the wrong one in time?” he asked, his eyes never leaving the water, voice so soft it might have been the lapping of an articulate wave against the shore.

  “I am afraid,” said I, “that you overestimate me. I hardly calculate.”

  “Estri...” Even softer.

  “No, then. I do not think so, There is no moon. What chance there is that I might have accidentally landed us here on another moonless night during which a severed hand wearing a Parset ring exactly like Neshub’s found its way to the shore—that chance is far less than the obvious: the ship is gone, and Chayin has lost at least one of his crew.”

  He did not acknowledge me, and after a time I said that perhaps the crew had mutinied, killed Neshub, and cast off for Menetph, far across the sea.

  In answer, he took my arm and pointed, and I saw what nestled against the jetty’s rocks, and looked away. I had no desire to closely examine those misshapen hulks and shattered timbers.

  I shook his hand off and retreated up the beach, until—I found a spot free from growths and shadows, where I could not be stealthed upon.

  “Come away from there,” I cautioned Sereth, who had not moved. “The wehrs ...” And the speaking of that word reminded me of Deilcrit. I saw him as I had last seen him, prostrate, while the ptaiss ... I covered my eyes with my palms, but it did not help.

  “Estri,” said Chayin in my ear, “do you think you could return us to Port Astrin?”

  I nodded. “It is no harder than was returning here. There is no distance, just the procedure’s of entry and exit, and a choosing, in that cold place.” I shivered, recollecting the shriveling agony of the procession of matter through the congruences. “But give me some time. And let the sun be risen. Then I will be stronger.”

  A shadow fell that was not material, and I looked up to see Sereth, all the heavens’ fury in his crossed arms and forward-jutting hips. “So, we must simply stay alive until sunrising. With one sword and two knives between us. Then we will meekly turn our backs on fifty dead men, a gutted vessel, the criminals we came to this land seeking, and slink home by the aegis of Estri’s skills, to sit and chitter and get fat and lazy ruling our various holdings, secure in the knowledge that should we ever again find ourselves in difficulties, we need but call Estri and she will remove us from the scene.”

  Chayin stiffly rose up, kicking me roughly from his path. Standing opposite Sereth, he growled, “A man must know when to cut his losses.”

  I scrambled to my feet and insinuated myself between them. Sereth shoved me aside.

  “Do not speak to me of what men must do. You are overqualified. Both of you”—and he inclined his head at me, that there might be no mistaking my inclusion in Sereth’s “you”—“would do well to keep silent in that regard. Shapers’ blood makes for too many disparities. Flee! What of Se’keroth, and your much-vaunted ‘age of the divinity of man’? For that matter, what of your vow to that pitiful savage?”

  Chayin had no answer. He merely stared at Sereth’s empty scabbard.

  “Call my name and I will aid you,” mimicked Sereth savagely. “A god who can offer his followers so little might have trouble retaining them.”

  “I did not realize,” said the cahndor, “that you had lost Se’keroth in the fray.”

  At that, Sereth wheeled around and strode into the surf. Knee-deep in the shallows’ froth, he stripped off the chased scabbard and threw it, belt and all, out to sea. The spinning sheath flew thrice the distance of a man’s normal cast and was lost in the darkness.

  “That,” called Sereth, “is what care I have for Se’keroth.” Beside me, I heard Chayin’s harsh indrawn breath. “And for all of Khys’s manipulations, and your cursed attempts to follow in his stead.” A waterspout rose in the sea, born of Sereth’s rage.

  Chayin put his arm around my waist and drew me close.

  “I cannot believe,” I whispered through my shock, “that he is saying these things to us.” My internals felt as though someone had just removed them, and my empty carcass was only momentarily capable of sustaining the fiction of life.

  “Be quiet,”. Chayin advised. “It will pass. He is distraught. This has been long coming. There are differences ..” And he trailed off, as Sereth approached. But I did not miss the unsteadiness in the cahndor’s voice.

  We three stood facing each other, only breathing, a long time. I spent that time bewailing, in my mind, the impossibility of ever foreseeing what this man, whom I loved as much as my next breath, would have me do.

  “This serves no one,” said Sereth at last, quietly, but without that deadly edge to his tone. Almost shyly he reached out his hand. I took it: It was clammy.

  “Sereth, did you mean to start that turbulence?”

  “No.”

  His reply was almost inaudible.
I longed to comfort him, but I had no comfort to give. The briding of such strengths as he had so recently acquired is an intimate undertaking, different for each. But I understood why he had, of late, so strictly controlled both his temper, which had never been placid, and those of his new skills which dealt with the direct application of mental force.

  Chayin, grunting, unhanded me, squatted down, and craned his neck toward the sky.

  “What is it?” Sereth, suddenly cautious, pulled me down to the sand.

  “I heard something, something large flying, perhaps even circling overhead. But I cannot see it. And my sensing gives me a presence, though what kind, I do not know.”

  “Estri, what are the chances of your successfully obviating space again this night?” Sereth asked, squinting into the starry evening.

  I thought about it. The obviation of space is a painful, draining, and ever-uncertain undertaking. Once I was caught for three days in the congruences. I shuddered. “Not good. Especially with you both as passive companions. If you two tried, perhaps—”

  “I have tried,” Chayin cut me off. “With no great success. This is something I know: a time comes when such skills will be within my reach. And this is another thing I know: that time is not yet.” He paused, rubbed his right shoulder, and continued in a ruminative growl, “You, yourself, have told me that such feats remain the most precipitous of all that you attempt. The chance of hindrance by our efforts to help is too great to ignore.” He looked at me questioningly. I kept silent.

  “But you could do it,” pressed Sereth, “if you had to.”

  I sighed. “I can try, if I have to, though if it is a choice between dying under the teeth and claws of ptaiss and wehrs, or dying lost between the moments in the domain of eternity, I should rather it be the ptaiss.”

  “Then let us hope,” said Sereth, gently, “that you do not have to try. But we must agree: if an insurmountable attack comes, from the forest, from the sea behind, that is what we will do. My bow, quiver, and”—Sereth shifted, looking pointedly at Chayin—“Se’keroth, and Estri’s blade lie in that clearing. There also are a number of dead creatures who possibly could have been dealt with more humanely. Do either of you have any ideas ... ?” And he broke off, and half-rose, staring upward, then around him at the ground.