Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Dana ignored his lascivious double meaning. “Her spies are good ones, then, to represent places and people with such accuracy.”

  “Yes,” Eldrafel said.

  “Bonifacio, for example,” Dana went doggedly on. “Why should anyone care to picture Bonifacio?”

  Eldrafel’s mouth quivered, amused. Turning away from Dana’s features, as uncompromising as the slopes of Cylandra, he ran a languorous fingertip down Rue’s cheek. She inhaled with a sob, and the color drained from her already pale face so that she seemed an alabaster figurine. Beneath the modest cotton gown she wore her body shuddered.

  Dana gagged on the uneasy brew of Eldrafel’s sensuality and her own fury. She looked away. On the far side of the room, almost hidden in shadow, was a huge chest. The open lid revealed several small jars and bags, sprinkled with dried brownish green. A collection of herbs, no doubt, like the arnica or hyssop that Sarasvati carried to heal the ailments of daily life. But Dana had trouble seeing Chrysais as a healer.

  She gulped her wine, but did not taste it. A frontal assault on Eldrafel, verbal or otherwise, would gain nothing. He could afford to tell them exactly what he wanted them to know; the soldiers outside the door were his. But the tapestry was damning enough.

  Tembujin shifted, rather flushed. Dana’s eyes were drawn ineluctably back to the bed. Eldrafel was casually tonguing Rue’s ear, his body sleek with the knowledge that it was being watched and appreciated by his audience. He had the broad shoulders, narrow hips, and straight limbs of a man, sculpted with a woman’s perfection of symmetry and poise. But not a line of his body was soft, not a movement tentative. While he would not descend to anything so crude as outright lewdness, his fastidious delicacy as he played with Rue did hint at the force he could use if necessary.

  Dana surprised herself with a tremor of pity for the woman, a puppet in the hands of such a creature.

  Rue’s body was so stiff it seemed Eldrafel’s next touch would shatter it to dust; her face was shaded more with despair than with pleasure. Which became stark terror when the door burst open and Chrysais stormed in.

  Tembujin sat up straight and uncrossed his eyes, glancing shamefacedly at Dana to see if she’d noticed his bewitchment with the androgynous figure of Eldrafel. Dana grasped at rational thought, cooling the heat in her belly. Bewitchment, yes, she told herself. The man is a sorcerer, so powerful and so subtle that he does not even smell of it. And he does not care if we know it.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Chrysais, with a sharp, venomous glance from Dana and Tembujin to the stairway. “I did not realize you were entertaining visitors, my husband.” Then her eye fell like a mace upon Rue and widened in angry affront. She tossed something she had been holding, a tiny plait of black hair, perhaps, onto a nearby table.

  Eldrafel rolled back among the pillows, his sublime composure unperturbed. It remained unperturbed when Chrysais seized Rue’s dress and sent her sprawling onto the floor. Something small and glinting red rolled from the slave’s gown into the chamomile.

  It had to be Sumitra’s ruby stud; Dana and Tembujin stiffened in simultaneous recognition. But Chrysais fell upon the gem before they could move. “Where did you get this?” she demanded of Rue.

  Rue crouched, hands raised. One dark eye, its sly luster dulled, rolled toward Dana and Tembujin. “Her,” the woman exclaimed sullenly. “She who was brought here. She gave it to me for my service.”

  “It was in her nose,” Eldrafel said to the ceiling. “A custom of the Mohan. So she gave it away freely. I did not think it more than ornament.”

  Arrogant bastard! Dana squirmed. He does not even pretend Sumitra is not here!

  “She gave it to you?” Chrysais demanded. “What did you give her in return? Information about our guests?”

  Rue withered. “No, my lady, no …”

  “By the dark horns of Taurmenios, I shall have loyalty from my servants, or no servants at all!” Chrysais seized Rue by the hair, thrust the ruby back into the slave’s dress, and pulled her toward the door. There she delivered both Rue and some unintelligible instructions to the waiting guard.

  Chrysais returned rubbing her hands, perhaps less in satisfaction than to clean them, and with a haughty glance at the visitors threw herself down beside her husband.

  Asserting her ownership, Dana thought. Eldrafel’s elegant facade cracked in a hairline fracture of annoyance. But his voice was as silky as ever. “Since you are our guests here, allow me to offer you initiation into the rites of Taurmenios Tenebrae.”

  “No, thank you,” Dana said. The room was suffocating. She had to escape. She stood, her legs as flexible as willow wands. The room spun slightly, the lamps becoming pennons of light, the shadows congealing into gouts of darkness.

  “I attend quite enough rites already,” said Tembujin. He rose, testing his footing as if the floor buckled. He cast a wary glance at Eldrafel and Chrysais, but neither made any move to stop him. Indeed, Eldrafel nodded toward the door and said, with a private smile not echoed in the misty purple and silver depths of his eyes, “You can find your way back to your quarters, can you not, since you found your way here?”

  Dana’s tongue was thick and clumsy. She muttered some sarcastic courtesy and strode for the door with as much dignity as she could muster. Tembujin’s tail of hair swished in disdain.

  Chrysais leaned against Eldrafel, her fingers grasping at his chest like the suckers of a squid. He touched her with the same self-possessed delicacy he had used to tease Rue, and Tembujin and Dana with her. Chrysais’s great moist eyes seemed to flood to the pull of Eldrafel’s amusement, washing away the gaudy mask of her face and leaving nothing there, no features, no expression. With thumb and forefinger he slipped her bodice from her shoulders.

  Dana and Tembujin fled, slamming the door behind them.

  The afternoon was even dimmer than it had been, the sky like the inside of an iron caldron. Dana was still warm and dizzy, from the effects of Eldrafel’s blandishments, no doubt. The air strummed itself, as feverish as foreplay prolonged until the climax was unbearably intense.

  Tembujin wiped his brow. “I thought we were in trouble there.”

  “We are. We have been all along.”

  “But we sprang the trap too soon; the pattern in that god-cursed tapestry is not completed. He had to release us.”

  “To show his contempt,” Dana spat. “Why should he fear us? I have never sensed such power, or such confidence.”

  Tembujin kicked at the flagstones. “If only we knew what their game is. It would have been so much easier to kill us on the beach …”

  “… but they did not. Now they play with us, cats tormenting mice before that last fatal bite.”

  “We must force the issue,” said Tembujin. Despite the firmness in his words, his voice was slurred.

  Dana frowned. “Indeed. We shall know what the trap is when its jaws close around us.”

  A wrong turn brought them to a garden concealed in an angle of the passageway. Various plants were mere sketches in grays and brackish greens in the dense shadow of a great yew tree. With a cry of delight, “Bows!” Tembujin sprang toward the tree and began testing its more limber branches.

  “Yew,” Dana mused. “Poisonous.”

  The fronds of the tree sighed as they brushed the ground, too heavy to reach toward the sky. The other plants, some tall, some small, whispered as an errant raindrop stirred them. The tiny pearlescent berries of lethenderum nodded, and waxen blush-white flowers bloomed just at Dana’s hand. She bent to pick one. “Black hellebore,” she said to herself, and to Tembujin, “Look, more poison. And hallucinogens.”

  “How does a warrior know such herb lore?” he queried. With his dagger he carved a limb from the tree.

  “The queens of Sabazel have not always had to be warriors. I had hoped days of peace came again, so when Sarasvati came to study the healing arts, I did too.” She walked slowly from plant to plant, avoiding even the lightest touch of their leaves upon her garments.
“Deadly nightshade, hemp, wolfsbane, hemlock, poppy,” she muttered in evil litany. “And …” Quickly she bent and collected several small woody seedlings. “Antithora, thank the goddess. Bryony. And—ouch!—nettles.” She hardly felt the sting; her fingers were strangely numb.

  As Tembujin came to join her, carrying two slender yew branches, he stumbled over a mossy stone. “Quite an appropriate garden for a sorcerer and his wife,” he muttered.

  The poisonous plants seemed refreshingly honest, after that sorcerer and his wife. “Come,” said Dana. “We must make tea of these antidotes.”

  Tembujin stared at her, slow to react. “We drank the same wine he did!”

  “Someone can dose themselves until they become immune to certain poisons. I would expect such from Eldrafel.” Yes, she was quite definitely dizzy, and so hot that the moist air lathered her like a horse.

  “But if he has nothing to fear from us …” Tembujin turned a corner, misjudged the distance, and caromed off the wall. “Perhaps he does. Encouraging, that he does not want us … alert.” His voice died in his throat. The yew limbs fell from his fingers and he scrabbled after them.

  They swam slowly through dim, suffocating corridors where frescoes made mocking gestures and pillars pirouetted absurdly. They stumbled past the lotus pool. Jemail was not at the door; two new guards were. “Andrion?” Dana cried as they entered, but he was not there.

  *

  The dye works did not stink as badly today; Andrion’s nostrils were as dazed as the Sardians’ eyes. Quickly he determined who the foreman was and gave him the purse, buying his men extra food and a clean place to sleep. The purple cloak and smoldering face earned a more respectful response than the coins.

  As the soldiers and sailors were set to work stirring vats and opening shells, they collided clumsily with each other, their smudged faces as expressionless as the animals they had become. Niarkos himself meekly lifted a sledge of discarded shells and trundled them down to the beach. He showed no sign he had ever before seen a beach.

  Lightning ripped the sky and thunder boomed. I shall free you, Andrion vowed, and tore himself away. So he had been separated from almost everyone now; only Tembujin and Dana—friends, not followers—remained. His necklace was surely charring his skin; his ears rang; his heart strained, pounding against his ribs. His escort was knocking about in some foolish scuffling match. He barked orders at them, and they set off in smart formation several steps behind him.

  No disheartenment, he ordered himself. Disgust, at the ugliness of the game he was forced to play. Anger, and resolution.

  The cypresses murmured. Vapors swallowed the harbor and licked at the city. The far buttress of the palace shifted before Andrion’s gaze like a cloud; were those windows cut into the rock, or peering eyes?

  He found himself beside the arena. He saw only the tracks of bulls upon the sand, rusty stains on the altar, unfaded blooms of amaranth left like offerings on the railings. And from nowhere, taking him completely unaware, realization pounced. Rue’s face was that of Rowan, Bonifacio’s chief acolyte. The strong one.

  The thought was a blow to the pit of his stomach. He stopped dead in the street, gasping, and his escort piled up behind him. Forcing air into his lungs, forcing his feet to move, he trudged on. Thunder reverberated in the ground, welled in a heavy wave around him, consumed the song of the sword and shield. His brow tingled, as though the diadem had been ripped from it.

  Andrion thought grimly, Rowan and Rue must be brother and sister. The gods only knew what trouble Rowan was stirring in Sardis; Bonifacio would not notice an armed rebellion unless it dirtied his robes. The rule of the Empire was indeed at stake, and he had come rushing here on a foolish quest. Not surprising, but stupid, very stupid, unworthy of an emperor to abandon his realm for … Sumitra. Sumitra and his child.

  No. His quest was far from foolish, his journey far from stupid. Surely the tug of his necklace on that balcony in Sardis has assured him of that. Surely, surely … I now know without doubt, he told himself sternly, that the threat to me, to my family, to my land, begins here. So here is the place to thwart it.

  He could only trust that Patros’s keen wits would recognize the threat in Sardis. He could only pray. His lips quirked into an acid smile; the gods moved subtly indeed, like footpads bludgeoning the skulls of unwary travelers.

  His spine as stiff as the blade of Solifrax, Andrion strode under the homed gate and into the palace. This turn and that, reversing the way he had come. The escort, panting slightly, was still behind him. “My thanks,” he said to them. “You may leave me now.” With salutes they left.

  At last it began to rain, the mist about the palace thickening, swishing down upon the columns and frescoes, roughening the surface of the lotus pool. Thunder grumbled in the distance. Still the air hummed with expectancy.

  Jemail was gone. Two other guards bracketed the door, impassive as ceramic figures. Maybe Dana and Tembujin had circumvented them all, and waited with information. We must force the issue, Andrion told himself as he opened the door. We have no other choice. And if all this—mockery—is meant to make us force the issue, well, we shall know what the trap is when the jaws close around us.

  Andrion saluted the guards, who, startled, saluted back. He stepped inside and was greeted only by a shadowed and ominous silence.

  Chapter Nine

  Sumitra emerged from her reverie. From the window of her cell she saw land, water, and sky diffused by gauzy rain into mere implications. A chill damp breeze stroked the back of her neck, and her shoulders tensed. Rain was not the conclusion for which the breathless atmosphere of Minras waited.

  Solifrax gleamed on her lap, its crystalline blade shining so brightly that the small room was filled by light, shadowless. Odd, Sumitra thought. Rue had not brought food or a lamp, and yet it must be almost evening. Was Chrysais going to let her repent of her stubbornness in dark, hungry solitude?

  She asked herself, if the sword and the shield speak to me, does that mean I can speak to them? And yet who am I to call the magic of the gods and demand its use?

  Solifrax sighed. “All right then,” Sumi said to it. “You can challenge me, the gods can challenge me, only so often. If the issue must be forced, then I shall force it indeed.”

  The sword murmured sweet nothings against her hands. The warmth of her resolve filled her like strong wine. “If you are Andrion’s,” she said to the sword, “then so am I. I am the mother of his heir. I shall not fear shadows.”

  Sumitra laid the sword next to the shield, fitting them tightly together. Solifrax chimed gently and the shield rang in response, the embossed star rippling with light. Their familiarity no longer disturbed her; it was right, somehow, that they should be consorts.

  After that initial note of music the weapons quieted, waiting. The silent evening itself waited.

  A gleam caught the corner of her eye and Sumitra glanced again out the window. Was the sun at last going to appear, now, almost too late, as evening crept inexorably across the sea toward Minras? The strands of rain were stretched as fine as the silk thread with which she had stitched pictures of the shield and sword, glinting not only silver and gold, but every color of the rainbow.

  She let down her hair and combed it. She picked up the zamtak. Her fingers stroked the strings, tentatively at first; then, as they hummed with a power not at all unlike the humming power of the sword and the shield, quite deliberately. She did not play a ballad or a jig, but improvised train after train of rising notes, wordless and elemental, drawn not from her mind but from her soul. Andrion, come, come to me… .

  Each group of notes did not die away but hung suspended; each new note built upon the ones before, until the air vibrated with melody. The wind freshened, sieving the rain into ethereal threads of color and light. The sword flared, and the shield shone in its embrace, emitting a harmony that grew louder and richer until the ancient stones of the palace reverberated with it, summoned from an age-long stupor.

 
Sumitra compressed her lips, and unaware of the drop of perspiration that trickled down her cheek, ignoring the brief qualm of nausea her intensity cost her, played on.

  *

  Andrion stepped warily into the darkened room, his hand groping toward the hilt that was not at his side. The room was pervaded with a pungent and yet fresh scent, not sorcery, not lotus. Had the rain at last cleansed this unhealthy place?

  No. A small pot sat upon a table beside a lamp, matted with what looked like an unappetizing mess of stewed herbs. Two empty cups sat nearby, next to a water jug. Andrion sniffed; yes, the pleasing aroma was wafting from the pot. What had Dana been brewing? Where, for that matter, was Dana, and Tembujin with her?

  All Andrion could hear was the rain drifting in sheets across the roof. A chill breeze crept in the windows and tightened his nape. He looked in one room leading off the main chamber, and another, and another. There, two dim shapes lay mounded upon the bed.

  It seemed as if black flames licked out from the corners of the room, held at bay only by the sweet smell of the herbs. But when Andrion turned to look directly at the fire, it was gone. He shook his head to clear it of such fancies and approached the bed with a puzzled frown.

  The two upturned faces were smooth and peaceful, Dana’s blond hair mingled with Tembujin’s black upon the same pillow. So that is what it is like when they make love, Andrion thought, and quickly shrugged that fancy away too. As if Dana would engage in illicit activity.

  The two fully-clothed bodies were sprawled like wrung-out rags, felled by exhaustion. Andrion touched Dana’s throat. Yes, she was breathing deeply and evenly. He hated to wake her; the tight lines beside her mouth, the worried furrow in her brow, had relaxed, and her lips were actually curved in a slight smile. But it was quite apparent that something had happened.

  Surrendering to impulse, he sat upon the edge of the bed, leaned down, and kissed those parted lips. Some hint of sweetness still clung to them, and some hint of bile and bitter weeds as well. His frown deepened.