But there again, at her lord’s hall, guards were holding open the doors. She stepped closer. Inside, a thousand honey-scented candles shone on the bright clothes of the feasters, on the great tapestries like windows into other lands, on the high table set with porcelain and glass. Garlands of fragrant pine hung everywhere, and the smells of the feast wound through the hall: roast meat, wine, baking apples, oranges and cinnamon from the southlands. The unearthly singing of priestly novices rose up to the rafters.
Gazes followed her as she approached the high table, as if she were a wind and those men and women grass bending in the wake of her passage. She knew herself in their eyes: knew her full, pushed-up breasts, her slim and graceful body, her shining black hair, her pale skin smooth as cream, her faintly smiling ruby lips. Her anticipation was theirs: how that night her maid would pull off her clothes in front of her lover, first her cloak of crimson velvet, then her gown, the pins in her hair, the jewels at her neck and on her fingers, the laces fastening her bodice and tying up her hose, until she stood in candlelight wearing only a lace chemise that slipped from one shoulder …
Did they not, every one of them, want to be that lover?
All the seats at the high table were occupied except for hers and the lord’s, who alone never noticed her. Suddenly she remembered this night, this feast. He had not come. Had stayed in his tower.
The boy, the one she had taken home that night; he had died scarcely a month later. His name had been Veydan. His family had burned their furniture to cremate him properly, hoping thereby to keep his soul from the grasp of Reyozem Ahon. Aleya had given her last scion of silk-rose to the Queen of Heaven’s temple to be planted in his memory.
This had happened already.
Veydan sat at one of the tables, a sweet good-looking boy, gazing at her with a boy’s yearning. He had already died. An ambush at the bridge. Sharp grief pierced her. What was she doing in the past, in this dream?
She was searching for something. For the lord of Shenna? Surely not; she would never seek him out. But—
She found herself at the doors behind the high table. Guards opened them for her as well, and she continued into the corridor beyond. Now she moved uncertainly, peering into shadowed doorways and courtyards. She had never been to Reyozem Ahon’s tower and was not sure where its door lay; word had it that not even his body servants set foot inside.
She had always been terrified of him, though he was a cousin and a bit of his magic flowed in her own bloodline. But all she owned were fleeting moments of true vision, and childhood lessons scarcely attended to. She had lived for music, dancing, and beautiful clothes, while he was a learned man who had traded all earthly pleasures for the disciplines of power. An unforgiving man, too: this lady, this merchant, this captain-at-arms would speak against the war or some injustice, would be stripped suddenly of all property and exiled, or worse. And his sacrifices: he needed more power and still more, he told the priests, to fight the enemies who would destroy the city. When they at last began to demur, he fought the temples, too.
She remembered the shaved, tattooed priestly heads impaled on pikes in the great plaza, whispering in her ear as she walked through the market. It had pleased the lord Reyozem Ahon to create a horde of little sendings, green and gold maggots with tiny human faces, to feed upon the decaying heads. They ate the bound souls, and when gorged, changed to green-gold flies that buzzed away to be eaten by him in turn.
A fierce pang of grief and hatred wracked Aleya; so many men dead, so many children fatherless, so many women left, as she once had been, widowed and alone. And the one whose ambition caused it always hungered for more.
A single guard, face hidden by his helmet, held open the last door. The bitterest cold blew from its dark mouth. As she passed over the threshold, a sharp tingle, like the touch of silk on a dry winter day, coursed up and down her limbs.
When the door closed softly behind her, terror overwhelmed her for a moment.
But then she remembered that this, too, had already happened. The night he had summoned her, the lower city had been burning and the air full of acrid smoke. A flock of tiny golden birds, her lord’s messengers, had launched themselves shrieking from the tower roof.
Now she listened hard until all she heard were the whispers on the wind. Tonight the air smelled only of dank stone.
After all the misery, all that was left of the city were the ghosts and Reyozem Ahon, and her own dead self.
She climbed up. The back of her neck crawled until she thought it might cramp, but at each landing she encountered only an open doorway, and beyond it a bare, darkened room.
Could his tower really be empty?
Step after step, she climbed upward. When at last she reached the top, she found herself on a platform with a waist-high wall of stone, ceilinged only by a skeleton of beams. The platform was empty, too, except for the wind.
She waited, shivering. No one came.
The platform floated high above the darkened valley of Shenna. She could see past the rough country along the lower river all the way to the lowlands, where the earth sank into blue-grey shadow, merging with the sky.
No wonder Reyozem Ahon dreamed bloody dreams of kingship in this spot. Of descending from his cold fortress on the mountain trade roads and ruling all the Rich Lands from the sunny valleys at their heart. But did he ever look up the sheer walls of the mountains, to the ice-mantled bulwark of heaven? Didn’t he know the gods looked down on him? How small every human being must seem from that height. How humble it should make you. What gratitude it should give you for small and human joys, the scent of jonquils, the warmth of a lover’s hand.
No, Aleya thought, that was the worm eating his heart: that to be human was to be small and fleeting.
She found comfort in the smallness. How tiny one’s own griefs were beneath such immensity. The city was just a jumble of pebbles at the foot of the great wall. And the eternal mountains; against them even the centuries since the founding of Shenna were a blink of an eye. In heaven, the only voices in the wind were the gods’, singing clean and pure over stone.
She sat down on a stair, cold, cold, the bitterness of dead Shenna gripping her bones like a vise. Straight above, by the overhanging peaks, the sky had cleared and the jeweled ceiling of heaven shone bright and beautiful, sharp as a sword in her heart.
Down below, a foot shuffled on stone.
Another step echoed up the stairwell, and another. And with those footsteps rose a gust of whispers.
Aleya stood in alarm, gathering her weapons around her—her grace, her perfect beauty. He might have burnt all his earthly passions to ash, but he still had his sight. He would have to look at her.
Then she remembered that she had no beauty. She was a shamefully ugly corpse-thing, conjured from sleep by an ignorant barbarian. To the great sorcerer who had made her this way, she would be merely contemptible.
She had come to bargain with her master. But she had no knowledge of a secret weakness, no more than scraps of a plan. She did not even have courage. She was here only because every other choice was a worse one.
But she could stand straight as if she did have courage. Clasp her corpse-hands together to hide their trembling.
The footsteps mounted the stairs. Wind ripped at her hair, ghost whispers grew into voices wailing in torment and desire as the avalanche of power roared upward through the stairwell. And finally the lord Reyozem Ahon himself rose into view, climbing the last few steps to the platform.
The wind and the voices poured around them. He raised a hand, and a nest of white flames sprouted on his gloved palm like the flower of a water lily. This he transferred to the low wall beside him. In its light, he appeared as he had when alive: tall, lean, heavy-browed, clean-shaven, with a long face and too-large head. His clothes were unchanged as well, all sober and without ornament, and without any sign of wear, either. The wind that whipped through Aleya’s ragged clothes did not stir anything of his.
“Why,” he
said in his deep voice, “do you intrude here, slave?”
How foolish to think she could bargain with this terrible sorcerer.
Aleya took a deep breath, pulling back her wind-snarled hair. “I came back, my lord, to see if we could deal together.”
“Deal? You are my milk-cow. You are the salt venison in my cellar. That barbarian opened the cellar door and conjured you legs to walk on, but you are still nothing but dead meat.”
She said, trying to keep her voice steady, “This meat can walk out of the city again, should you let me, my lord, but you cannot do the same.”
A frown creased his forehead. In the old days, she would have found that a terrifying sight: her head shortly to find itself atop a pike, gnawed by sorcerous maggots.
“Perhaps,” he said, “but I can reach forth my power.”
“Of course, my lord,” Aleya said. “And you could have prevented me from leaving last night. But you wanted to see how far I could go, didn’t you? And I left the valley. Do you know where I went? I crossed into Leyothan in daylight and returned. You can reach forth your power, but can you reach into Leyothan? Can you send out your power when the sun is in the sky?”
“Don’t be insolent to your master, dog,” he said, and the stoniness in his voice made her tremble all over again. “You slipped your leash is all. I don’t care where you wandered. It won’t happen again.”
She tried to calm her racing heart. “‘In Leyothan,’” she said, “‘there is a weapon that will undo all who oppose it.’”
“Oh, yes,” said the lord Reyozem Ahon, “yes: the naked truth of the goddess Maro, her of the All-Seeing Eye. What is this to me, milk-cow?”
Aleya stared at him. It had never occurred to her that this so-called prophecy might not be prophecy at all, but an old and tired aphorism. The barbarian mage had taken it so seriously, but—so ignorant—!
She caught herself short. The lord of Shenna had always played a dozen or a hundred tangled intrigues at once, within his court and amongst his enemies. She should not take anything he told her to be true. He would not be talking to her now unless he had a reason to let her remain free a little longer.
“It is, my lord,” she said, “a prophecy among the barbarian priests, who consider that it refers to an earthly weapon. It’s why that barbarian sorcerer came to Shenna. I was the one his spells awoke, he says, because I am the one who can reveal this weapon of invincibility to him. Are you certain the barbarians are mistaken and it means only divine truth?”
“Priests!” the lord said. “Those savages have no priests! They are filthy, illiterate pig-herders ignorant of the divine realm. If they had any true learning they would know there is no earthly weapon in Leyothan. Those priestesses disdain the world.”
Aleya said, “Perhaps this weapon is something made since we were alive?”
He blinked, looking for a moment as if he had been thrust suddenly into the light of day. She thought: He does not understand how the years have piled up beyond his city. Or he knows, but he finds it hard to think about.
“The barbarians rule our land now, my lord. They know the prophecy, or some of them do. Soon they will all be here to search for this weapon of invincibility. But if you get it first, you will triumph. You will have the means to dissolve the spells that confine you to this valley.”
He blinked again, masking his thoughts this time. “What deal do you propose, dog? You will fetch this great weapon for me? Why should I let you run free to get it? You might just think to use it against me.”
She chose her words carefully. “Deal with me, my lord, and you will hold my promise that I will not use it against you. That promise will mean you have nothing to fear from me.”
“And what do you want from me in exchange?” he asked. “You want your beauty back, I suppose.”
He lifted a negligent hand. A tingling passed over her cold-numbed skin; in the corner of her eye, her wind-whipped rags changed to the lace and brocade of her memories. Her hands—she lifted them and saw slender, smooth fingers.
Oh, she did want her beauty back, her one power over the world, the one consolation the war had not been able to take from her. But when you bargained with sorcerers, you had to be as careful with your words as with theirs.
She also wanted to be away from him and his city. She wanted not to be cold anymore. She wanted … she was tired beyond bearing. She wanted to lie down and sleep, but she wanted to wake up in sunshine. She yearned to smell the first roses of summer, to make a young man smile, hear a child laugh …
Reyozem Ahon would know how to grant her both beauty and a semblance of life in such a way she would not have to prey upon the living to sustain them. Of course, the only way he could do that would be to share his food. She would perhaps have to eat the souls of people she had known. But they were already dead, those shadows populating Shenna. And she had no other choice except to die for good. Even the temples consumed soul-stuff; they only shunned murdering to obtain it.
She would stoop that low to cling to the living world. But she would never bestow upon Reyozem Ahon the power to break out of Shenna. She had promised him, “I will not use it against you”; she was free to find someone who could.
Anxiety that she would say the wrong words nearly prevented her from speaking. “I want … to live as I was, like a natural, living person again, with a natural span of years from this day forward, free of hunger for the souls of the living, and free to leave this city and your service without prejudice or harm.”
A smile spread across his face. On another man, it would have reassured her. She wondered, frantically, what her mistake had been. “If you bring this weapon of invincibility to me,” he said, “and it is a real thing and not some philosophical rubbish of the priestesses, I promise to do as you ask.”
Why that smile? What had she omitted? What actions had she left open to him? Free to leave the city without harm—ought she to have said valley instead, or free to live wherever I go?
Then the smile vanished and he stared at her with his usual cold gaze. “Don’t think,” he said, “to deceive me and go over to my enemies. I leashed you before Shenna fell so I would always have at least one dog to do my bidding. I chose you not because you have any special talent, but because you will never serve a better purpose. You are a hindrance to the defense of the city, a fatal distraction to my captains, weakening them when they need to be merciless. Maybe such as you are tolerable in peacetime, leeches feeding off men’s souls, but in the stern work of war, you are worse than nothing. So I will have no compunction about swatting you like a dung-fly. If you break your compact with me, your sacrifice and your torment will last centuries. Do not try to betray me. ”
“I never fed—” Aleya stared at him, stunned. She had had no idea of the depth of his hatred. No idea he had noticed her at all. The notion that she fed on her lovers was profoundly horrifying. She was nothing like him. She had wanted—she had wanted—
She had wanted to build a wall around those young men where death and suffering held no sway. She had wanted to protect them while the enemy raged outside … although she had always known that they could stay only a brief time in her fortress.
She had never bound a lover to her and she had never cast one off. They had all left her. They had all died, one after the other.
Now he was saying that she had caused it. Had she truly spoiled them for war, had it been her touch that marked them out for death?
She struggled to remind herself that the lord of Shenna was always full of lies. Though it might not all be lies.
But … he spoke as if the battle were still raging. He knew the city had fallen, and yet in his mind his captains still led out his soldiers against the enemy.
If he had leashed her before the fall of Shenna, as he said, why had he never used the tool he had created in the hundreds of years since she and he had died? It was the barbarian mage who had awakened her. A living person.
The spells that bound Reyozem Ahon in this city mu
st have made him unable to loose her and send her out himself.
But perhaps also …
It’s not the way of your kind to remember, the peasant witch had said.
Perhaps he had thought that, dead, he could live off his storerooms of sacrifices. What he had now—and therefore all he could offer her, although she would not think about that right now—was only something like life. His mind could take in nothing new, or at least not well. He could not compass the passage of time. Despite his great power, he, too, could not help but dream of the dead past.
The lord Reyozem Ahon was still, however, a cold and terrible presence. He stood waiting for her reply. Starlight fell through the roof beams brightly enough to cast criss-crossing shadows. But he cast no shadow.
She made a deep courtesy to him. “My lord, I will not break this compact if you do not.”
He said, “You will nevertheless carry this with you, so I will know what you do and say.”
He summoned a glittering disk out of the air and thrust it in front of her face. In the instant before Aleya recognized what it was, the reflection caught her gaze: beautiful Aleya, the old living Aleya, the lie.
She cursed herself. The mirror had to be the one he had tried to force on her when she first fled Shenna. Of course it was ensorcelled, and by looking in, she had become subject to the spells he had placed on it.
“Take it,” he commanded, dangling the mirror by its silver chain.
It was clear that he would not let her leave otherwise. After a moment, she reached out her hand.
The mirror was as cold as ice and no bigger than her palm. Its silver frame tingled against her skin. Circling the glass were gods’ names and divine sigils inlaid in gold: of the God of the Gate, the Queen of Heaven, the Lord of Wisdom, She of the All-Seeing Eye. Strange—the mirror looked more like a temple artifact than a spell of Reyozem Ahon’s making. Now Aleya’s false reflection was rippling like smoke. A hole tore open like a rock smashing thin ice; she was falling. Darkness and light rushed toward her—
Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017 Page 18