Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Beyond the trees they plunged into a wilderness of grotesquely shaped stone. Worked stone, weathered over a millennium, until the toppled columns, the blind lumpish statues, were parodies of their original shapes. The road led between pillars that still stood, some square, some round, carved from porphyry, travertine, marble—even, Andrion swore, Sardian granite—all arranged like tributes to some ancient ruler.

  Tenebrio filled the dusk. Its slopes were billow after billow of shining black stone like petrified waves threatening to inundate the heavens. Its crest blunted a rose-quartz sky and cast a smoky lavender shadow over the ruined … town? Temple? In the purple-tinted translucence every texture was accentuated, every shape crisp, every sound uncannily clear. Sumitra’s footsteps, echoing from the rocky slopes of the mountain, were magnified into the marching tread of an army.

  “I did not know we were so close,” Andrion said to Dana, gazing warily up at the bare-branched vineyards and drystone walls upon the mountainside.

  “It jumped out at us,” she returned. Cold sweat stood like beads of ice across her forehead and she gasped for breath.

  Andrion’s nape crawled. This place was filled with an effluvia of sorcery, like a whirlpool sucking down all the evil air of the island, circling, circling… . “Sumitra!” he called, and the name, too, echoed, repeated again and again in a mocking torrent.

  Sumitra walked on. Gard plucked at Andrion’s cloak, whining to go back. Tembujin set an arrow to his bow. The string glinted gold and ebony.

  Some presence was behind him. Andrion spun about. Solifrax flared from its sheath, slicing through the gathering violet shadows. A spectral moon hung above the sea, its slightly ovoid shape imperfect, incomplete; it would not be full until tomorrow night. To Andrion its face was a baleful glare. But I am your son! he protested. It gave him no sign. His necklace was heavy on his throat, choking him; he could not fill his lungs in this accursed air.

  Sumitra swayed and sank to her knees among the ash-dusted bracken. She buried her face in her hands and crouched, waiting.

  A shape stood atop a low wall, where none had been a moment before. One last ray of sun cast a dense shadow before it, like a hand reaching across grass and stone, right to the knot that was Andrion, Tembujin, Dana, and Gard. Then the sun was gone, as was the shadow, but the eerie rose twilight lingered.

  The shape leaped down from the wall. A man, inhumanly agile, immaculately gold and purple and silver. Eldrafel.

  Andrion stood frozen, Solifrax upraised, his hand cramping on the hilt. The fevered urgency of the air coagulated around him and time stuttered to a halt. It seemed as if he had been cast into the depths of the sea. Eldrafel’s movements were slow and distinct, and the soldiers he beckoned swam like will-o’-the-wisps across the stone wreckage. Their broad, leaf-bladed spears glimmered like rippling seaweed.

  Eldrafel’s eyes shimmered with a fell pleasure, his turquoise and amethyst and jade necklaces clanked musically against his chest. “So we meet at last, my lord emperor.” His voice fluted, making of Andrion’s title a jeer. “I am so pleased you can keep your appointment with Taurmenios Tenebrae.”

  Appointment? They were meant to come here all along? Soot swirled through Andrion’s mind, coating every nodule of rage, of fear, of anguish with black despair. Betrayed, yes, betrayed by his own pride and by the gods themselves to some greater purpose indeed… .

  “Gods!” Andrion exclaimed. Desperation snapped his stupor. He lunged, wanting nothing more than to destroy that smug malevolence. Solifrax flared. For an instant even Eldrafel’s gilt features blanched in the light of the sword.

  But the priest did not move aside. He made one languid gesture. Black fire erupted from his fingertips and seared Andrion’s hand. The sword was ripped away; leaving an arc of radiance like a comet’s tail, it landed with a puff of ash at Eldrafel’s feet. Its light winked out.

  The ground trembled. Andrion’s mind splintered. A turquoise shard was Gard, hoisted by a burly soldier, carried screaming and fighting to—amethyst, that was Chrysais, clutching her son convulsively, her moist face buried in his hair, his disgusted face buried in her bosom—no, she could not be crying, not those cold-blue faience eyes… . Her eyes were fixed on Andrion, drowned eyes, fathomless depths of emotion, power, and fear—yes, fear.

  That gold and ebony shard was Tembujin, pinioned between two soldiers, his head lolling, a purplish bruise marring the angle of his jaw, his own hair a garrote round his neck. His bow lay broken in the dirt, where the zamtak lay pristine, as if carefully laid down, its strings humming. Sumitra was a dim shape in the dirt, sobbing rackingly, beyond reach.

  Andrion strained to move toward her, strained to move toward Eldrafel. The world expanded and contracted again, man-shapes elongating and shrinking. The ground twisted and threw him to his knees. “Yes, yes,” Eldrafel laughed. “I accept your homage.”

  And Dana—and Dana, her stricken face bleached as white as a skull by the ghastly pallor of the shield, her dagger in her hand, menaced at least five soldiers with light and sharpness and the frantic malachite shards of her eyes. Her thought howled so violently Andrion could hear it: “I have betrayed us all; Ashtar take me!”

  “No!” he shouted, “it was I!” But his lips were numb and ash clogged his throat, and his knees seemed planted in the gritty dust.

  “Sabazel!” she cried, and sprang forward, straight for Eldrafel. With horrible slowness a bronze spear turned the rim of the shield and buried itself in her side.

  Her face did not change expression. Her eyes widened, seizing upon sanity, losing it again. They closed. She fell onto Solifrax, still holding the shield, and its metal clanged against the metal of the sword. Its light hissed and sputtered out beneath the sudden spate of carnelian blood.

  In perversion of the clear ring of sword against shield, the harsh blast of a bull’s horn rent the air. Torches leaped up, marking a stairway up the side of the mountain, charring the lavender twilight into impenetrable night.

  Andrion could not move, could not feel, could not think, not even when soldiers seized him and dragged him off. Every nerve had been sheared away by the closing jaws of the trap.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dana seized a vague tendril of memory. Amid sorcery-clotted ruins, Eldrafel, beautiful and malignant, gestured. The mass of Tenebrio gathered itself and fell upon her.

  She drifted in a misty otherwhere, a being of thought, not of skin and bone. A Sabazian lullaby summoned her, a melody of moonglint on Cylandra’s ice crown and the scent of anemone on a purling wind. Surrender to that song, whispered her thought, release that last strand of awareness, and slip peacefully into oblivion.

  How tempting to let go, to be free. But something held her back. A task, a task had to be done that only she could do. She could not leave that task undone. That would be too easy.

  She struggled through the mist as she had struggled through the blood-warm sea, fighting toward the border of air and water, of light and dark… . She realized she was surrounded by candles. The multitude of lights, reflected off stone walls, was too bright. She squinted, her lashes draping the lights with inky lace. Voices rose and fell like the susurration of the sea—Tembujin, Sumitra, Andrion. She was dead and laid on a bier, and these were her only mourners, for she was in an alien place.

  Her awareness was rewarded by pain, waves of agony pulsing in her gut like the labored beating of her heart. She was not dead; she hurt too much to be dead. She remembered the bronze spear that had felled her. Fool, she chided herself, to be taken unaware. It was dying that was too easy.

  Her hands and feet were cold leaden lumps attached to the tatters of flesh that were her limbs. Her breath rasped in her throat.

  Andrion’s face materialized before her, the skin stretched into a glazed mask. My fault, she wanted to say, but her icy lips would not move. Trembling hands touched her, a cloth swept across her brow, Sumitra’s dark eyes swam before her. The eyes were dull, smudged windows behind which something struggled
to be free—Dana saw Sumitra’s hair rise from her head and wind tightly about her body, binding her to some terrible deed.

  Vision, she told herself, only vision. The room faded, the candles blurred, the faces grew transparent and wavered out. Behind them was another form, not a person but the shade of one.

  A young woman, elaborately coiffed and dressed in an open-bodiced dress, bedecked with amethyst, lapis, malachite. The jewels faded and brightened like drowsy eyes yearning to sleep but waked repeatedly by some consuming worry. The woman wrung her hands, and her body trembled so fiercely that her flounces and ringlets rustled. Her mouth was drawn tight, teeth glinting between red lips, and her eyes stared like a cornered animal’s.

  A ghost, Dana realized. The living woman had known such anguish that her mind snapped rather than believe and bear it. The phantom unclasped her hands and laid them over her face. She crouched, swaying. Proserfina, said some echo in Dana’s mind. Her name had been Proserfina.

  The great empty eyes looked up. Gray eyes, disturbingly clear, holding horror no longer, holding no trace of any human emotion. Those eyes were Eldrafel’s, gnawing this once youthful face like worms behind the surface of a blush-fresh apple.

  Then, as through a dark gauzy curtain, Dana saw Sabazel. At first she thought she was looking at the paintings on the walls of a sacred cavern, attenuated figures dancing intricate steps of life and death… . No, she saw Andrion clasping her own nubile body, performing a rite more ancient than any other. But even as she grimaced with both joy and regret at the memory, their bodies withered and were separated and swept away by a great ocean wave. Andrion!

  She saw Ilanit sitting amid dead leaves in her garden, her gaunt body held as straight as a blade. But her face, too, was gnawed, her green eyes dull. Kerith paced up and down beside her, too tired to sit still, stamping and turning as if she alone guarded Sabazel. The child Astra sat beside her tiny quiver of arrows, but she did not see them; her eyes, the depths of the sea, reflected: Sarasvati running down the Royal Road, spectral chariots painted with phosphorus pounding right behind her. The skulls spoke with voices that were and yet were not Bonifacio’s, the priest’s words vibrating with an uncharacteristic vigor: “The living god comes from the sea, and by him shall we be redeemed …”

  A vast shadow loomed behind Bonifacio like a puppet master behind his toy. Upon its arm glinted a winged bull.

  The images spun away, the candles reeled. Dana was alone with the agony of mind and body; we were meant to come here, and I led us! She would scream, expelling the frustration and pain. Her throat emitted a whimper. Be silent then, she ordered herself. Never whimper.

  The eyes above her were still Sumitra’s, but now they were lucid, dark and deep, surveying some terrible truth with a somber and sober calm. Her hair was bound neatly atop her head, leaving no image strands about her body. A spell. She had been under a spell, and now it was broken.

  Shadows beckoned seductively from beyond the candlelight. Dana tried to turn away from them, to ignore them, but they swarmed ever closer. Her nostrils filled with the scent of asphodel.

  *

  The window was an arrow slit in the massive stone wall. Andrion blinked and peered through it as if waked from a deep sleep. The moon had been dirtied. Thin black clouds coiled like questing worms across its death’s head of a face.

  He had been dragged through a portal in the mountainside and along labyrinthine stone corridors. All he remembered was the rough-hewn walls rippling in the torchlight like the grasping tentacles of a kraken; his mind had been flaccid, the kraken’s gutted prey. But rationality was returning, cauterizing his daze, searing mind and spirit with an agony he would have thought impossible had he not felt it.

  His bloodied hand reached for his belt and found the sword’s clasp dangling empty again. The sheath lay forlorn on the floor. His hand clenched and crashed against the windowsill.

  We were meant to come here. Led by the ambiguity of Dana’s visions, or by my own impatience, or by some greater force. We were meant to come to Minras. But no! his mind howled, I cannot, I will not believe that my life is only a thread in the evil tapestry of Taurmenios Tenebrae. No, the game is more subtle than that! It must be!

  His necklace sizzled against his throat. The merest breath of wind entered the narrow window to stir the room’s cloying odor of incense and overripe fruit, mildew and blood. Do not test me, he told the gods. Do not taunt me. I defy your destinies and claim my own.

  Andrion turned away from the window, into the central chamber of a comfortable, if not luxurious, suite of rooms. Again they were pampered like choice stock; it would have been considerably less disquieting to have been tossed into a dank and moldy crypt. A place like this had to have a crypt.

  Tembujin huddled in a chair, rubbing his bruised jaw and fending off the damp cloth offered by Rue. “A camel is dancing inside my skull,” he snarled. “You betrayed us again, did you not? If Dana dies her death is upon your head.”

  Rue, her presence probably one of Eldrafel’s mordant jests, sat back amidst her baskets of clean clothes, food, and soap, averted her face to shield it from Tembujin’s threatening gaze and said nothing.

  “She is but a pawn,” said Andrion between his teeth, “providing Eldrafel with only the details of the escape we were meant to make.” And Jemail? he asked himself. He could well have made a mistake trusting Jemail. But the child Gard was untainted, he would swear to that.

  Tembujin grunted. Rue did not move. The candles wavered and the jewel in her nose winked.

  So this, Andrion thought, is what a mortal wound feels like, the heart oozing slow viscous drops like molten iron… . Sumitra was seated by Dana’s couch. She had been used, callously, fiendishly, as bait; first kidnapped, then enspelled to lead them here. Andrion realized that now, too late, too late.

  But even as his eye fell upon her Sumi straightened, lifted her zamtak into her lap and turned her lovely, guileless face toward him. Summoned, he went to her and set his hand upon her cheek. Like a sudden ray of sunlight glancing through cloud, he saw that her eyes had cleared and her manner had steadied into cool serenity.

  The enchanting thread had broken. Chastening, that he had not been able to break it; more chastening still that she should never have asked him to. But she had carried the burden of the spell alone. How could I have been so complacent, Andrion demanded of himself, to think we could not be ensorcelled? And he asked himself, Will you wallow in guilt and let your heart’s blood drain away? Will you wait like a dumb animal for the bludgeon? Or will you act?

  Dana whimpered, as faint as the mewing of a newborn kitten. Her fingers groped in the air. Looking for the shield, no doubt, but that, too, was gone. Andrion seized her hand and she grasped his feebly. Dana, feeble? Desperate enough to cling to him at all, let alone before his wife? Perfidious gods, to bring her to this!

  Surely it was not her body, with its familiar tastes and textures, that lay upon the narrow couch like a side of meat. His cloak was snugged about the gash in her side; he could not remember placing it there. Seeping blood had colored the purple cloth scarlet. Her hand in his was marble cold, her face so pale as to be translucent, and her parted lips were the amethyst of Chrysais’s jewelry. Only her will kept her alive, and that was ebbing. No, she cannot die, she cannot! Andrion’s body shook in a paroxysm of grief, rationality shattering; act, act how, when, what?

  Sumitra turned her lips into his palm and kissed it, sending a thrill up his arm not unlike that of the waking sword. Her shining face damped his anguish, counseling hope.

  Hope, yes, Andrion thought, I will seize upon hope. She refuses to regret her enchantment, she determines to make amends for the damage it has caused; she has always been willing to pay debts incurred by others. “Sumitra,” he began, “Sumi, my lady …”

  Someone moved at his back. He spun about. Gard stood just inside the room as a soldier slammed the door behind him. He announced defensively, “No one sent me here. Is she dead?” The boy’s face
was shadowed by the thicket of hair. Chrysais’s chestnut hair, unfussed, waving free. Eldrafel’s gray eyes, their clarity smoked by concern.

  “No,” replied Andrion. Odd, his voice was quite calm.

  “Forgive me. They chased you to regain me.”

  “No,” Andrion said, more harshly than he would have liked. “Your being with us made no difference to them at all.”

  Gard’s eyes glinted. His lower lip stiffened. From his belt he produced a coil of black hair and said with a nod toward Sumitra, “I found this woven into my mother’s tapestry. Your image, lady, made from your own hair. Bent across the shield of Sabazel.”

  “As if broken upon it,” Andrion concluded. That, too, had been one of Dana’s visions. He had thought it only symbolic. He thought too damn much. He seized the coil and held it in a candle flame until the stench of burning hair eddied through the room. No wonder the spell had been broken.

  “The tapestry is here?” asked Tembujin.

  “I suppose they need it for their magic.” Gard replied.

  “Sorcery,” Sumitra corrected.

  Tembujin looked narrowly at Gard. “But how could you touch the cloth? Dana tried to touch it with her dagger and it shot fire at her.”

  Gard shrugged. “The witch-fire only tickled me.”

  “An advantage then,” said Tembujin acidly, “to being witch-spawned.”

  Gard’s mouth stiffened even further. “Here. This was lying nearby, already threaded upon a needle. I brought it to you because I thought you liked me.” He threw down the bowstring made of Tembujin’s and Dana’s hair, carefully separated into black and gold. The Khazyari pounced upon it and set it afire so quickly he burned his fingers.

  “We do like you,” Andrion told Gard’s crestfallen face. “Thank you.” And he thought. We victims of capricious gods must work together, seizing hope and defiance beyond reason.

  Tembujin, contrite, added, “You were very brave to bring these to us.”