The Carnelian Throne

by Janet Morris

  But he realized her beauty; and he had climbed up out of the pit of hopelessness with his assessment of his position.

  He reached out and touched her, drew her to him. Her openhanded slap sent his head snapping to one side, but he did not release her.

  “There are no ptaiss here to protect you,” he said, looking down into her revealed face, contorted with a fury that swelled her lips and colored her flaring cheekbones.

  “It will take me but a moment to call one;” she grated through bared, even teeth, “and then I will have wasted near twenty days in the outer forest and you will be the corpse you should have been the night the wehrs raged. Take your hands from me, guerm-tender!”

  Hurt rather than frightened, he did so. She was so tiny: her arms so slight, his hands closed around them; her waist so slim the thong he had worn wrapped twice around her. And yet she commanded him, and he obeyed.

  He looked at her, then at his hands, then measured his desire, then wondered how this could be. He could take her, throw her to the grass, have her before any ptaiss might intervene. He gauged her labored breathing, the rise and fall of her breasts through the thin robe, and knew that this was so, that she herself recognized this truth.

  “Please, guerm-tender, do your self a service; save yourself for the ajudication. Your crimes are far too momentous to be dealt with summarily in the open air. It is the bowels of Dey-Ceilneeth that must receive your repentance, extract from you their due. I have brought you this far. Proceed the rest of the way under your own will, or die here, now.”

  “You cannot make me,” he said, referring equally to both alternatives she offered.

  “You speak truth, yet you do not even know what you know;” she snapped, backing slowly away from him, her eyes fastened on his.

  Oblivious to all else, he followed.

  So intent on her was he that he did not see the shadows, manlike, flitting at the edge of his vision; nor the net, until it fell upon him from midair and he fell, thrashing, tangled in its weight.

  The four ossasim followed the net to earth, alighting easily, spaced around their quarry. Even before their wings grew limp they had gathered up the net, and him within it, helpless, his weight on his left arm, the arm, twisted under him, blazing with pain.

  He was twirled and turned in the net until it became a shroud binding him round, preventing any movement. Then three of the red-eyed, gray-furred wehr-masters held him in midair, while the fourth pressed a cloyingly scented cloth to his mouth and nose. He struggled hopelessly, until he could not, until pink stars consumed his vision.

  The last thing his struggling showed him was her face, green eyes huge, peering through the tough netting.

  “Poor Deilcrit,” she murmured. “There is no place for such as you in the world. None at all.”

  And he thought that she kissed his forehead, or was about to, as he spun into the drug’s domain.

  The guards in the subterranean prison were pleasant to him, in that they did not abuse him, or any of the others in the straw-strewn cage. But then, they were not men, nor women, nor any creature he had ever seen. Some said that they were offspring of ossasim and Beneguan females, and mules as a consequence of this. They could have been, he supposed, given their lightly furred flesh and their horny, lipless jaws; but something told him that more could come from the mating of ossasim and woman than these. Privately, he judged them ossasim females, a position for which there were no other contenders, and reasoned that though it seemed the flat-breasted things were sexless, to an ossasim they might be ultimately enticing, with some other way of procreating than through the orifice women use. They did not abuse him, and he did not question them. After his initial fright, when one of the red-eyed things appeared, characteristically suddenly, through his prison’s door, he took little note of them. They were another feature of his new existence to which he simply adjusted.

  He was not fettered, he was not stripped, he was not starved. He was free to walk the extent of his rocky prison with its one mirrorlike wall of glazed, fused black rock. This one wall was smooth as glass, and perfectly regular. All the rest of the cavern was, a gentle circling of seamless, irregular limestone. The door slid back from the featureless middle of the black wall, and when it was closed there was no sign as to exactly where on the wall it might have been. In the cavern’s roof were two barred openings, to which no man could climb. There was no reason to restrain any of them within the cave; its security was unbreakable.

  So believed the nine others who shared the straw with him, two of whom had been here so long that they had the teeth of their youth carefully stashed in pockets in the rock. These two were naked. Their garments had rotted from their bodies. They did not recall their own names, most times, and only twice while he was incarcerated there did he hear them speak at all: one gave a long indecipherable monologue and his companion answered.

  There was a man with a broken arm that had healed badly, and who was blind. He was taken away not long after Deilcrit arrived, and did not return. That made one less sharing the food.

  This pleased the three young men who doled out the portions, those who slept beneath the openings to the sky, until the next feeding. Then they themselves were taken away.

  The two old men could not truly feed themselves. The three remaining younger prisoners waited calmly for their portions to be dealt out to them, long after it was clear to Deilcrit that the men who had doled out the food would not return. Speech was rare in the cavern: but for the two old seniles, Deilcrit had not heard any prisoner speak in more than monosyllables in all the time he had been immured.

  First, he got up and went and stood over the cooling gruel that a brown-furred arm had thrust within the cavern. Then he went for the hundredth time and tried to discern the seam of the door that lay directly behind the tray. When he had satisfied himself that all eyes were on him, he went and crouched down before the three prisoners who sat together.

  “Should I feed them?” he asked, pointing to the two elders who huddled together.

  One of the three men blinked. They were all black-haired, full-bearded, of indeterminate age. They still wore remnants of their clothing, and by it Deilcrit determined that one had been a gatherer and one a weaver and one bore a craft device which was strange but for its class. It was to this last, he who had blinked, he whose craft badge still dangled from a woven jerkin that had once marked him as a deep-forest dweller, a far-ranging taker of risks, that Deilcrit spoke.

  “Those men are not coming back, we have to feed ourselves. Shall I do it?” Softly but insistently he sought the other’s attention.

  The man, whose eyes seemed wholly black, blinked again. He clawed the tangles from his brow and said: “If you will, lad ... I ...” Then he stopped, and smiled hesitantly, proud of himself. “I will help you.” The man had come a long way, up from some private world. “I am Laonan.” Deilcrit touched fingertips with the craftsman, Laonan, while the other two black-haired men stirred and muttered and the seniles began a senseless cackling that rose hysterically and then faded into sobs. Motioning Deilcrit to proceed with silence, the lank-haired Laonan scrambled over to the tray and began with quick, economical movements to dole the food out into bowls. “You are right,” he whispered as Deilcrit squatted to assist him, “they will not be back. Only six bowls. Sssh!” This as Deilcrit began to question him eagerly. “Do not disturb the old ones. I will talk with you later. Over there.” And it seemed that Laonan stared in wonder, sighting down his own pointing hand to the other side of the cavern. Then, that same incredulity in his eyes, he clapped Deilcrit hard on the left shoulder, grinning.

  A rainbow built of pain bedazzled him, and when it was gone, so was the man Laonan, scuffling, bowls in hand, across the straw toward the two seniles, mewling with impatience.

  “Nothing wrong with their noses,” Laonan puffed, returning to where Deilcrit had appropriated a portion of gruel for himself. Laonan moved to take bowls to the two remaining black-haired men, those with whom
he had been sitting.

  “No,” ordered Deilcrit. “If they would eat, let them get their own food. They are men, are they not?”

  Laonan, startled, froze with one thumb in the steaming gruel. Then, slowly, he raised it to his mouth and sucked it clean. “As you wish.” He shrugged, sweeping up the bowl.

  Then, for the first time, he straightened to his full height and headed for the empty nook of rock he had earlier designated as the spot for their conversation.

  Deilcrit, bemused, followed suit.

  By the time the two had licked their bowls clean and put them beside them on the straw, the black-haired men were beside the tray.

  Shaking his head, Deilcrit turned from their crouched forms.

  “How long have you been here?” he demanded of Laonan.

  “How long? How long is long? You tell me, boy. I have been here since Mahrlys-iis-Vahais’ accession.”

  Deilcrit let that sink in a moment.

  “Twelve years.”

  “Is that all? Feels more like twenty.”

  “And they?” pointing to the two sitting cross-legged by the tray.

  “They were taken with me. My fault, really. We were running contraband between here and Aehre proper.

  “What is contraband?”

  Laonan snorted. “Any trade is contraband, by Wehrdom’s standard. Weaponry, to be specific. They were glad enough to get it in Aehre, lest they go the same way as Nothrace. I was off to Kanoss with sulfur from Aehre .... Eh, boy, did it happen?”

  “What?”

  “Did the Byeks reach an agreement? Is it AehreKanoss or two foredoomed states? Or, in point of fact, does either of them exist now? Has Wehrdom eaten all without the Wall?”

  “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I was an outforest iyl: I tend ptaiss and keep the guerm out of the river, and the rest is none of my concern. Or was.”

  “Something’s your concern, something that shouldn’t have been, else you wouldn’t have ended here.”

  “That seems to be the case,” Deilcrit conceded. “Though I am not clear on what it was exactly that I did ....”

  Laonan guffawed, and the seniles whined and threw their arms about one another. “Come, now, boy—what is your name, by, the by?”

  “Deilcrit.” He stumbled over it, almost adding his hard-won honorific. Hard-won and easily lost.

  “Well, Deilcrit, you must know what you did that was wrong. Nobody is casually incarcerated in Dey-Ceilneeth. You must have done something?”

  “I did a number of things, I suppose.” The grin would not be forced back. “But which one got me here, I can not ascertain. I am surely guilty of heresy, blasphemy, unclean acts of any sort you might care to name.”

  “Sounds like you had a real good time. Care to tell me about it?”

  When he had finished, the moon spilled through the ventilators. Rubbing his beard, then scratching, then worrying with both hands a foody tangle, Laonan sat staring into his empty bowl. Sometime during the evening, the two youngish black-haired prisoners had crept up to within ear-shot. Now they ventured close, and took the bowls from the conversants, and put them upon the tray near the door.

  At this, Laonan put his fingers to his lips and gestured at Deilcrit to take up his old solitary corner. Seeing this done, Laonan joined his two companions in their previous, passive aspect.

  It was not long until the glossy wall opened and the brown-furred creature that guarded the catacombs entered, glared around, and backed hastily from the cell with the tray.

  He would have risen. A glance at Laonan’s cautionary face persuaded him otherwise, and he sat, head bowed, until he heard a scuffle, and Laonan slid along the wall to his side.

  “I still am not sure that they cannot see through that,” he confided, indicating the black, glossy wall.

  “And if they do, what will they see? And what have you to lose that is not lost already?”

  “While I am alive, boy, I have something to lose.” And he thrust his face close to Deilcrit. “Are you a wehr?”

  “I ... I do not know. I do not think so.”

  “It seems that you do think so, when you talk about what happened in the forest.”

  “No,” said Deilcrit, turning a glance of naked helplessness upon the man, “I do not think so. I fear so. What is it, to be a wehr? And what am I, that such a thing could happen to me? And if it is so, why must I die for it? What sense is there in a gift that exacts death as its consequence? And anyway, I am but wehr-chosen.”

  “And what that is, is a matter of interpretation. Deilcrit, I cannot answer you as to what a wehr is. But let me point out that Mahrlys-iis-Vahais herself is a wehr. And all but two of the rulers of Aehre-Kanoss, at least when I was abroad in the land, were wehrs. Wehrs are on the whole very successful individuals and do not as a rule die on acquiring whatever it is that makes them wehrs. It seems to me that a lot of effort has been put into seeing that you do not die. Mahrlys and her wehrs have some use for you. Or maybe just the wehrs do .... Did you know that Mahrlys is part ossasim?”

  “That cannot be.”

  Laonan shrugged. “It is.”

  “You are very knowledgeable for a man with a trader’s badge who has been locked below the ground in this hole for a dozen years,” he said, suddenly suspicious.

  “I have had ... ah ... certain other functions for which trading suits as an excuse, at certain times and for the right individuals. Things change slowly in the lands of Aehre-Kanoss. Deilcrit, what I really—”

  And it was at that moment that Kirelli squeezed his way through the bars to swoop in ever-narrowing circles around the confines of the cave.

  “Kirelli,” Deilcrit hissed, knowing that the moment had been lost, and whatever Laonan was going to say would not for a long while be said. But then, in mid-curse, he looked at Laonan’s face and the surprise thereupon was answer enough to allay his worst suspicion: this man was no wehr, planted here to drag out what secrets he might hold all unsuspecting. Such a one would be neither shocked nor affrighted at Kirelli’s presence.

  A thrill of pride buoyed him as the whelt stalked about the straw and clacked its viciously curved silver beak. The little old men in the cave’s rear whined like babies, and the black-haired pair made themselves small against the rock. Laonan, beside him, was stiff and still as a corpse. Though full of words of wisdom, when confronted with an agitated whelt he was timid as any Beneguan.

  “Sit up, man,” Deilcrit advised him, before his companion melted into that submissive posture his look-alikes had already taken, forehead on palms, hands pressed to the straw. “You too,” he called to the other men. “Sit up. The whelt seeks me. Do not be afraid.”

  The only trouble was that, before all these witnesses, he could not very well shirk from receiving the whelt’s message.

  With a sigh, he extended his good arm. An explosion of wings, and the whelt rode his shoulder, its head pressed to his own.

  From it he received a picture of the whelt, and himself, and a dark-haired man, standing with a woman whose hair was black and whose face he could not see. They stood by a giant throne of carnelian that burned with an internal glow. There were three others there: they were shadows before glowing fires, silhouettes in the flames.

  Then the opening in the obsidian wall drew apart, and the whelt, screeching, leaped from his shoulder to disappear through the barred openings in the cave’s roof.

  Through that opening stepped three figures: one winged wehr-master; one brown-furred, wingless guardian; one woman robed in cobalt who was not Mahrlys-iis-Vahais.

  This woman beckoned.

  He looked at Laonan, who had turned his face away, pressed his forehead to the wall.

  “Well met, prince of words,” he chided softly as he rose to answer the woman’s summons.

  She had golden hair and half-lidded eyes he could not read. Her broad forehead was banded with gold; gold drew her robe tight at the waist and hemmed its edges.

  “I am not ready,” he blurted out,
though it could surely make no difference to her, and he was as ready as he would ever be.

  The woman smiled encouragingly, extending her arm. The ossasim behind her fluttered half-tumescent wings and drummed its taloned fingers on its hips. He shuddered under the gaze of those red-in-red eyes, and took the woman’s arm. The cobalt material was the softest thing he had ever felt, excepting Mahrlys’ hair.

  And it was thoughts of Mahrlys that consumed him as the golden-haired woman led him up steps like frozen seawater and the ossasim fell in behind.

  He looked around once on the staircase, and saw that the outer side of the black wall of his prison was concealed with hangings depicting a convocation of Wehrdom near the Isanisa’s bank. He wondered what the hangings concealed—if Laonan was right and they had been watching him. It would explain their timely entrance. The brown-furred one had taken up a seat by the entry to the cell.

  The stairwell, and the landing, and the quiet rock-hewn halls floored with cracked and jagged blocks of the seafoam stone gave way to high-ceilinged corridors whose very walls were slabs of angled, tinted transparency. These walls through which light came were never perpendicular: all the corridors curved inward, toward that sanctuary that was Dey-Ceilneeth’s heart.

  When they deposited him with two guards at a huge wooden door with brass hinges, he had seen such oddities as left his head spinning. On the floor below this one, the outer wall had been removed, or broken. Women worked there, shaping bricks of mud and straw, and fitting this masonry into the frame which had once held the wonderful transparent wall. On the other side of the same corridor, the side made of the black material, bricklayers and painters were also at work. Set into one finished portion were torch sconces, filled and blazing. On the floor just below, all this work had been earlier completed, and temple scenes brooded there, in a darkened hall.