Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Chrysais brightened a bit. “We can use the rites of Taurmenios to placate Tenebrio as well.”

  “Yes.” Eldrafel tried to smile his usual smile of sublime confidence, but his mouth merely tightened without curving. His eyes turned again to the tapestry and chilled.

  His eyes were fixed on the image of Sumitra. Chrysais started forward with a jerk. “Would you like more wine, my love? I can send for food, if you are hungry …”

  He turned on her. “I would like to think that you replaced Sumitra’s hair with silk because she has already served her purpose. I would like to think you destroyed the bowstring because we have Dana and Tembujin already in our power.”

  Beneath her paint Chrysais’s face went stark white.

  “Do I think correctly?” His voice seethed. “Or are you protecting someone? Someone who might have fallen to the blandishments of that snot-nosed prig your brother?”

  “I destroyed the hair,” mumbled Chrysais, looking at her feet, concealing her eyes and with them the truth, “thinking that free sacrifices would be more acceptable to Tenebrio.”

  Eldrafel said nothing. The room was so silent that a faint sigh from the hanging lamp sounded like the hiss of a cobra. The tapestries hung lank, the scattered bits of porcelain lay like the pieces of a game abandoned as too intricate to play.

  Then Eldrafel stretched. Perhaps his anger was assuaged. But still his eyes glinted adamant, and his body was not indolent but tense. “Come,” he said with a nod toward the bed. “Let us enjoy ourselves, my wife, and forget the disappointments of the night.”

  Chrysais hesitated as if he taunted her. But he was already removing his scraps of clothing and casting them on the floor. His belt left a golden path through the blood smeared on his chest and abdomen.

  She smiled, her cold wax face melting with relief, adoration, and a hint of gratitude. She moistened a cloth in the puddle of spilled water and went to the bed. “My poor darling. Let me clean that.”

  “Oh, yes,” Eldrafel murmured. “Yes, you shall clean it.” He seized her head in his hands, and despite her protesting squeak, forced her mouth down upon the wound.

  She squeaked again, shuddering, but his hands did not relent. Her own hands coiled in the bedclothes. Her eyes pinched shut. Her red lips and pink tongue darkened to rust with dried blood.

  Eldrafel lay back with a sigh of pleasure.

  *

  Sumitra could not tell whether the soldiers who had precipitously jostled her, Dana, and Tembujin back to their cell were more drunk or dismayed. Two of them even now glowered from either side of the door, as if proper supervision would prevent any more outrages like Andrion’s escape.

  Only three candles sputtered sulkily on the table; the window frame was tinted with silver, the last grace note of the setting moon and the wind that had scoured it clean. Dana looked longingly out the aperture, at the guards, around the dank room; she collapsed against the wall with her arms crossed and her mouth as hard as a fissure in the rock.

  Tembujin stood staring into the shadows that ebbed and flooded darkly in the corners, intent upon some thought of his own; his features considered envy, anger, frustration, fear, and finally seized upon the slitted eyes and outthrust chin of resolve.

  Sumitra sat down, stood, sat and again leaped to her feet. She did not want to worry about how close she had come to death, how narrowly she had been saved by Andrion’s daring and perhaps rash leap. She did not want to worry whether he was alive or dead, whether he would come to save her, whether she was kept as elaborate bait. She had already worried, and her mind was rutted deep.

  The terrible scenes in the temple, the terrible emotions, crawled like leeches through her senses and drained her of strength and will. More drab, dark days of waiting and praying and hoping lay ahead … By the six arms of Vaiswanara, she screamed silently, I grow sick to death of waiting!

  The zamtak lay nearby; as she reached for it, her last consolation, she saw a quick gleam in Dana’s hand, something touched by a last ray of moonlight. But the moon was down, and the object shone on.

  Yes, Andrion’s necklace. Her mind dashed away the memory of him pressing it upon Dana. “Give it to me,” said Sumitra quietly, aware of the guards, but with a low intensity that brought Tembujin up with a start.

  Dana was not at all startled. Curtly she said, “I am of his blood. I shall keep it.”

  Sumi laid her hand on her stomach. “And what do I carry here, a melon? The necklace is mine, as he is mine.”

  Dana drew herself up to her full height, almost a head taller than Sumitra. “I bore him a child; Astra, the heir to Sabazel.”

  “Signifying nothing,” snapped Sumi, “in the real world.”

  “He gave me the necklace and I shall keep it!” Dana retorted.

  “Dana,” said Tembujin, “shut your mouth.”

  Dana scowled. “How dare you—”

  “Arguing solves nothing,” Tembujin interrupted, laying a mollifying hand on Dana’s arm. She wrenched herself away.

  Sumitra groped for calm, for certainty. Dana’s tight white face was still before her, the glittering eyes still pinioned her. And yet something moved in those eyes, some reluctant shade of remorse. The remorse must be mine, Sumi informed herself; if I hate her, I am unworthy of him. With an effort she said, “This evil place would drive me to forget my manners. Yes, Dana, he gave you the necklace, you must hold it until his … return …” Her voice strung the last word over an entire octave, and she sat suddenly in the nearest chair.

  Tembujin shot a wary glance at the guards. They stood immobile, their eyes rolled back so far that only slits of phosphorescence were visible between their lashes. With a snort of humorless laughter he knelt beside Sumitra. “Look,” he murmured. “Look over there—inconspicuously, mind you—by the inner door, where yesterday Andrion laid the sheath of Solifrax.”

  Both women glanced cautiously around. The snakeskin sheath seemed at first to have simply slipped down onto the flagstoned floor. Then Sumitra realized that the shadows hanging about it were not shadows at all, but a darkly gleaming mist. She leaned forward, her hand on her heart to keep it from leaping into her throat.

  The sheath wavered behind its obscuring cloud, flowing across the floor as if it were serpent again, questing for its burrow. And like a serpent, in one smooth motion it oozed between the stones and disappeared. The mist thinned into omnipresent shadow.

  “Ashtar!” exclaimed Dana under her breath, even as the necklace flickered and faded in her hand. “It goes to him; he is still alive.”

  “He gave you the necklace,” Sumitra whispered. “You are blood of his blood, you have known him always, you have the Sight.”

  “No, lady,” Dana insisted with bitter courtesy, “you are closer to him than I can ever be. And you can control your power. Here. Keep it safe, for it will belong to your child, not to mine.”

  Tembujin snorted again; the women’s kindness was sharper than scorn.

  Sumitra gazed at the gold chain, the moon and the star Dana dangled before her, but made no move to take it. “I did not heal you just to show my power,” she said. “I did not heal you just to make you owe me.”

  “I know that. Here, take it.”

  Sumitra took it. It lay across her palm with a warm tingle, dispelling the chill of the night. The window flushed golden pink, presaging the rising of the sun. “We shall share it,” she said, and she laid the necklace along the zamtak, so that its chain seemed another string. And quietly but unmistakably the zamtak began to hum, quivering as if in a slow heartbeat.

  “Ashtar!” Dana exclaimed again, and suddenly smashed her fist against the stone wall. The guards woke and stared at her. She regarded her bleeding knuckles as if they marred someone else’s hand. “I am a fool,” she muttered, her voice no longer sharp but husky. “As long as Andrion bears my shield I am with him. I did not need to hurt you, Sumi.”

  “Nor I you,” said Sumitra, with a sad shake of her head. Her throat clotted and her eyes
burned; gods, do not make me weep before this warrior!

  The warrior turned and fled into the inner room.

  With a shivering intake of breath Sumi lifted the zamtak and stroked the strings. A tear spilled from her eye to trace a shining path down her cheek. The child fluttered briefly, deep in her belly. “I am tired,” she said, her voice very small. “Forgive me.” She was not sure of whom she asked forgiveness, herself, most likely. All will be well, she told herself. All must be well.

  Tembujin sighed, hugged her, rose and began to prowl the room, up and down, a lion in a cage.

  The necklace gleamed amid the strings of the zamtak, beneath Sumitra’s hand. Upon the tide of music her serenity returned.

  *

  Andrion sensed hard stone at his back; the air against his face was still and cold, smothering him with malignant tension.

  He was bruised and battered; the briefest movement made him wince. But the hilt of Solifrax lay in his right hand, and his left arm was thrust through the straps of the star-shield. Their combined whisper stirred the hollow silence around him.

  He had thought himself lucid, there in the temple. Now he was not so sure. Had it been some tendril of sorcery that had urged him to make this gamble? Sumitra, Dana, and Tembujin could well be dead now. Sumitra and the child, he reminded himself with a pang like a spear thrust through his heart.

  His feet were frosted lead. He drew up his knees. He parted his lashes just enough to see the eerie twilight around him, neither day nor night but some uneasy combination of the two. The aura that emanated from sword and shield illuminated the pitiful piles of meat beside him that had only hours before been human beings and a bull. Thank whatever mercy of the gods eked out to man that the faces were turned away from him.

  Thank the merciful gods that only scattered bones lay beside the bodies. Andrion closed his eyes again. Had he been selfish, to run away and leave them? Or would it have been more than selfish, blatantly stupid, not to risk them?

  He had been strong enough to escape, but not strong enough to kill Eldrafel; that black force the man carried about him, turning the invincible blade of Solifrax … The ordeal would continue, eternally, and he was sick to death of it. He groaned, “Harus, why?”

  Images formed in his mind. Fancies, he told himself. Lingering hallucination. But the vision was as clear and precise as Dana’s face.

  The gnarled branches of a tree danced amid drifts of wind-tossed leaves and globes of golden fruit. A fresh, cool wind purled down from Cylandra, scented with anemone, asphodel, and appropriately enough, jasmine. An old woman in a blue hooded cloak stood beneath the tree, leaning upon a staff twisted by a serpent.

  The image wavered, seen through water like the shapes formed by the tiles in the pool in Ashtar’s temple. Then it stood out bright and firm.

  The woman held Solifrax upright in its snakeskin sheath, the familiar gold filigree hilt defined in intricate detail by her hand, as if her hand were a transparent lens. The wind fluttered her hood, allowing just a glimpse of omniscient sky-blue eyes. A falcon soared around the tree and dropped swiftly down, its raucous cry stirring fruit and branch alike, and landed upon the woman’s arm as delicately as a falling leaf.

  The hair rose in questing tendrils on Andrion’s nape, and a shiver not of cold but of awe tightened his spine. Ashtar, with Harus upon her arm, a vision his father had seen but once, and he himself had seen only intimated upon a battlefield. A vision that promised and demanded much.

  God-beloved Andrion, god-haunted Andrion, tested and sported and tested again … He stared up, open-eyed, into the cerulean twilight. A figure looked inquisitively down upon him. If it was a figment of dream, it was the most genuine figment he had ever experienced.

  The man was fully mature, in vigorous middle age; his sturdy torso and long, wiry limbs were clothed in a meticulously draped cloak. His hair lay like russet-brown feathers across a high forehead, his nose was a magnificent beak that put even Jemail’s prow to shame and eclipsed Andrion’s aquiline profile completely. His eyes were bright and probing, now amber, now as dark brown as Andrion’s own; they were of a pellucid lambency Andrion had thought never to see again since Bellasteros’s eyes had closed in death. Eyes like those could see through walls, across leagues, into other dimensions.

  In the strange light of the cavern the man emitted a faint light of his own, an untainted luminescence like that of sword and shield. Manners, Andrion told himself, spurring his sanity; he staggered to his feet.

  “My lord Harus,” he croaked through parched lips and throat. Shakily he saluted, sword and shield clattering. Solifrax flared. The star-shield was rather more cautious, but gleamed in polite greeting nonetheless.

  The god, if it were a god, smiled. His face seemed to crease naturally in lines of wry humor.

  “My lord Harus,” said Andrion, more steadily, “how may I serve you?”

  “I have come to serve you; you called me. Although,” Harus added with a furtive twinkle, “you have not called on me overmuch of late.”

  With a shamefaced nod, Andrion said, “If you are indeed a god …” He stopped, gulped, continued, “If you indeed the god, you can see my heart and read the doubts there. You can feel my bruises.”

  “Ah,” said Harus, frowning in mock severity, “if you did not doubt, you would not be Andrion. You would not be Bellasteros’s son. You would not be my—” He stopped, his frown cracking into a wide grin.

  Andrion essayed a bewildered grin of his own. The man’s—the god’s—voice was not soothing but bracing, indeed like the compelling cry of a raptor. “Tell me,” he asked, “are we indeed shadows dancing at the whim of the gods? Or are the gods the shadows of our own desires?”

  Harus’s auburn brows, feathered like arrows, quirked with an indulgent irony. “Whatever I told you, would you believe me? Would you not continue to struggle with your own conscience and your own will?”

  “Probably,” Andrion admitted, looking down at his feet. He stood on gray, crumbling bones.

  “Few mortals even think of such questions, let alone try to answer them,” Harus said gently. “One of the hazards, the burdens, laid upon the child of a god. Like Bellasteros. Like Eldrafel.”

  “How can you say those names in the same breath?”

  But Harus was looking beyond him, lips compressed, as if the stone were as clear as a window. “Your attraction to Gard has a purpose, Andrion. He needs your help. You, too, are the grandson of a god.”

  The dimness sparked and swirled. Andrion shook his head, but he remained slightly giddy. “The stories told to explain why Bellasteros was a nine-month baby born in seven months. Very convenient. We know the truth, that my grandmother Viridis celebrated the rites in Sabazel and that my grandfather is some … redheaded stranger …”

  Andrion heard his own voice fade and die. Such cynicism ill suited him. Harus was waiting, head cocked. Slowly the blood mounted into Andrion’s cheeks until they seemed to steam in the chill darkness.

  Again Harus released a broad grin, adding a chuckle at Andrion’s discomfiture. He touched the star-shield, drawing from it a burbling chime almost like a woman’s low, delighted laugh. “I, too, know the beguilements of Sabazel.”

  “Ah,” said Andrion faintly.

  “Bellasteros’s mother,” Harus said, “may she live forever in my affection, had to be an outsider so that he would not be related to Danica. Dana is almost close enough to you for your own passion to be forbidden.”

  Andrion gulped. Dana, the daughter of his half-sister Ilanit;

  Eldrafel could almost with justification accuse him of incest. But not quite. His mind spun again, and the ground rocked subtly beneath his feet. “Eldrafel?” he asked. “Also the son of a god?”

  Harus sighed. “Another convenient lie that is simple truth. Proserfina came here to lie with a god. What took her, sadly, was a demon.”

  Dana had sensed Tenebrio was a demon, practicing malevolent sorcery, not a god sharing beneficent magic; that expla
ined much. That helped nothing, however.

  “Tenebrio,” said Harus gravely. “An ancient god whose time is long past, as someday my time will be past. But he would not go peacefully into the long twilight; struggling to continue, he became a demon, and lingered into the reign of his successor, Taurmenios. And now they feud.” He stopped with a grimace of irritation. “Tenebrio sent Eldrafel to restore him to power. But Eldrafel has ambitions of his own, and has corrupted even Taurmenios. It is this island that shall suffer.”

  Andrion’s neck crawled again. No wonder the air of the island was so charged with foreboding. It had become the dueling ground of gods.

  Harus watched Andrion as if his every thought was painted in garish colors upon his face. And he actually seemed to approve those thoughts. “Through your mother you are descended from my consort Ashtar, through your father from me; truly you are beloved indeed.” The god’s face grew wistful. Emphatically he cleared his throat. “Here, I have something for you.” He held out the snakeskin sheath of Solifrax.

  The sword sparked. The scales on the sheath rippled, one after the other, like a glissando played upon the zamtak. “Thank you.” Andrion took the sheath, hooked it to his belt, slid Solifrax into it. The sword sighed with a sensuality that was downright embarrassing.

  Harus laughed at Andrion’s expression. “No, I do not peer over your shoulder at every moment.”

  “But have you not been telling me that, as I feared, as I hoped, all my life and my parents’ lives have been lived to your direction?”

  The god shrugged. “Would you believe me, Andrion …”

  “If you told me?” Andrion amazed himself by laughing. “Very well then, what else can I do but turn my own stubborn will to the task at hand, preventing Tenebrio from extending his shadow over Sardis and Sabazel and the Empire.”

  “Indeed.” Harus saluted the King of Sardis, Emperor. He then enfolded his grandson in a rough embrace and left a kiss upon his brow. “Whether you or I make your decisions and guide your destiny, those decisions and that destiny remain the same. Because I trust you to choose correctly.”