by Martin Ash
So had Leth simply fled? From what Anzejarl knew of his character, this also seemed improbable. But the King's non-presence created potential complications with the True Sept, who, in return for their services, had been promised his life from the very inception of this campaign. It had occurred to Anzejarl that Leth might yet be secreted somewhere within the Palace or city-castle. He had given orders for a thorough search, but so far had turned up nothing.
In the royal bedroom Prince Anzejarl brooded on. Now his thoughts assumed a more darksome cast as he began to contemplate his own future. He accepted that the task for which Olmana had commissioned him was as good as complete. He had done all she had demanded of him. Her ambivalence in regard to the mysterious Child that she sought was not his affair. He would help her seek on if she so required, but it was surely hardly more than a matter of hours now.
What then?
She no longer needed him. What was to be his fate?
To be abandoned? She would leave here, taking her booty, taking her trolls and slooths. . .
Or would he retain command of them? Would he be master or hapless victim of her Gift?
The question sent a tremor through him. He reached out, grasped a fistful of ghinz leaves and stuffed them into his mouth. His thoughts grew more anguished. Could he bear to be parted from her? Why, how, could she not care? He loved her with a passion unlike anything in his experience. Enchantment's Reach meant nothing if he was to lose her. Why could she not love him in return?
It scarcely mattered that she had used him. Not even that she despised him. But to be spurned . . . to lose her . . .
Anzejarl threw himself from one side to the other upon the bed.
Woman, what have you done to me?
What have I become?
The answer slammed into his mind with a force that brought him to sitting bolt upright upon the royal bed, clutching his head, his gem-eyes stretched wide. A swelling wave of nausea slid through him, raising gooseflesh. He gasped, retched, cold clammy sweat breaking out all over his skin and his mind reeling.
As the initial sickness began to pass Anzejarl lay back again, exhausted. He was weak, his limbs trembling. Gradually, with effort, he located that distant part of himself that remained Karai. He entered that place, standing back from himself, and his thoughts assumed a measure of detachment. He began to consider his position. How might it be improved?
He thought of the rose crystal. It was undoubtedly most precious to Olmana. What was she without it? She was still not aware that he knew of its existence. Could he profit from this? Through ownership of the crystal might he deprive her of her power over him? Could he oblige her to bend to his will?
The thoughts turned over and over. Wild possibilities came to him, and were dismissed as far-fetched and impracticable. But the idea that, through the crystal, he might yet find a way to turn the situation to his advantage was not so quickly discarded.
Since entering Enchantment's Reach Olmana had kept the crystal upon her person, hence Anzejarl had no further opportunity to gain access to it without her knowledge. She no longer showed any interest in bedding with him, but he knew she still came to him in the night. Usually she held him in some mysterious paralysis whilst, with the aid of the crystal, she performed her ministrations upon him. Might he, with supreme effort, resist that and remain fully conscious?
The idea had great appeal. Olmana needed the crystal, Anzejarl knew that. It was not only that she employed it to bestow upon him command of the trolls and slooths, but he had become convinced that under the crystal's weird influence she took something from him. She had told him that she had placed something inside him. In some wise she fed off him. There was something he possessed that she needed. Could he be in some way vital to her existence here?
The idea galvanized him. But then he began to doubt. These are the thoughts of a madman!
Still, he could not let them go. They spun and twisted, taking him through a gamut of doubts and enthusiasms. He chewed more ghinz, dismally aware that he was helpless in the grip of these teeming, autonomous thought processes. They stole his detachment, blurred that last part of him that remained Karai. He was addicted to them.
And in their grip, he waited.
*
Olmana came in the night's deepest hour. She was careful to make barely a sound as she entered, assuming Anzejarl to be sleeping, and having no desire to wake him. She stole to the bed where he lay, reaching with one hand into the leather pouch she wore at her belt. She withdrew a smaller pouch, made of green velvet, and from this brought forth the rose crystal. Then she lowered herself onto the bed beside Prince Anzejarl, holding the crystal over him, and began to chant.
Her voice was soft at first, crooning words in an unknown tongue. As the crystal began to emit its rosy glow her voice grew stronger. She leaned closer, her human semblance altering. The crystal burned with a fierce light. She moved to straddle Prince Anzejarl, putting the crystal to his forehead.
At that moment Anzejarl reached up and seized her wrist, holding it immobile while with the other hand he wrested the crystal from her grasp. Then he rolled swiftly to one side, pushing her off him. He slid from the bed, snatching up his sword which rested close by.
'Anzejarl, what do you do?'
Anzejarl stood back from the bed, revolted by the sight of her, for she was far from human - all tight, grey, horny knobbled skin, scrawny little limbs and a physiognomy that he could barely look upon. From within her mouth a long grey tongue protruded, then withdrew. Her slit eyes flared murderous red.
Sword in one hand, Anzejarl held the crystal high with the other. 'What have you done to me?'
'What? I have helped you, Anzejarl. You know it. I have given you power. Only power.'
'No! Stay still, or I will cast the crystal down and smash it upon the floor.'
Olmana shook her vile head. 'That would lose you everything.'
'I want you to tell me what you have done to me. I want to know how it can be reversed.'
'Reversed?' Olmana gave a harsh snort of laughter. 'Reversed? Anzejarl, you are a bigger fool than I had believed. After all I have given you, why would you want to return to what you were?'
Anzejarl shook with anger. 'You have not given me. I am transformed, it is true. But it is because you have taken. You have taken from me what I was. I am no longer Karai!'
'You are a fool!' she spat.
Anzejarl's temper flared - something that, in the past, could never have happened. Sternness, yes; but a loss of self? Never! It was yet another indication of how far he had been led. 'You--' he began, barely able to get the words from his mouth. 'You--'
'I have given you the ability to conquer the world, you fool! Your army sweeps across nations. Humans fall like flies before you.'
He shook his head vehemently, his fabulous eyes ablaze.
'It is yours. All this is yours!'
'At what a price!' he roared. 'Do you not see? All you say may be true, but look at what I have become. Everything I now know and feel is alien to me.' He gesticulated wildly. 'You have made me weak, made me into that which I most despise! One of them! I have become my own enemy!'
The admission brought a great sob from deep within him, violently racking his lungs and shoulders. And at that moment Olmana sprang, reaching for the crystal.
Anzejarl was not totally distracted. He sidestepped and struck out with his sword, slicing into her arm and opening a dreadful wound. Olmana drew back, glanced down at the wound, then smiled. 'You fool. You poor, poor fool.'
She laughed and came at him again. Again he struck out. She made no move to resist him. The blow half severed her head from her shoulders. Still she laughed. Anzejarl swung once more. Her head parted company with her shoulders and fell to the floor with a dull thud, the body folding to the ground beside it.
Anzejarl stared, breathing hard, scarcely believing. The room seemed to rotate around him. He was dizzy and faint. A dim taint reached his nostrils.
He sank to on
e knee, eyes still glued to the disjoined corpse.
No blood!
Even as the thought raised the question in his mind he saw Olmana's body move. A thin arm reached out, the clawed fingers flexed. The body twisted and sat up. Anzejarl recoiled.
Olmana's severed head, lying upon the floor, grinned demoniacally and cackled out loud. 'Fool! Poor, poor, pathetic fool! Will you never learn?'
As Anzejarl scrambled to his feet the headless body leapt. With astonishing strength, for her metamorphosed grey limbs and torso were small and wiry, she grasped him by wrist and flank, twisted him around and hurled him across the chamber. At the same time she yanked both sword and crystal from his hands.
Anzejarl rammed into the wall, scattering candlesticks, the back of his skull slamming against the stone and the air rushing from his body. He sagged and slid limply to the floor, near senseless but for a shrieking haze of pain.
He was dimly aware, though he could not move, that Olmana had bent and grasped her severed head. Two clawed hands lifted it and placed it back upon the scrawny grey shoulders.
Through the haze he saw her stalk across and lower herself over him. She grasped his head roughly between her hands. 'Just a little longer, Anzejarl. I need you just a little longer.'
She plied open his jaw. Her grey tongue snaked out and inserted itself between his lips. Anzejarl choked and gagged but was powerless to resist as the thing burrowed swiftly down his throat, deep into his chest and beyond. He found himself staring up into her dreadful eyes. His body bucked, but she held him firm.
When she was done she withdrew and stood over him. For a moment she looked down upon his naked form with bestial contempt. Anzejarl made no move. His eyes were open, but glazed and appeared to be gazing elsewhere. Olmana licked her lips and wiped away spittle with the back of her bony wrist.
Something happened then to Anzejarl, something that had never and could never have happened before. It was alien to him, utterly strange and innately human. He had witnessed it on countless occasions among humans, when they stood or knelt or were pinioned before him, pleading for mercy, for life, or, in the end, for death. He had witnessed it, too, in animals. But in a Karai? Never!
Slowly, in the corner of each of his eyes a glistening tear gathered. It brimmed, then tumbled down the sides of his face, and he lay there, in pain, in shame, in strange and helpless wonder.
Reassuming human form, Olmana turned and strode from the chamber.
*
Presently Anzejarl heaved himself to a sitting position, slumped against the wall. With one hand he cautiously kneaded his throat. A weight of despair lay upon his soul, like nothing he had known. He could not bring himself to move. For perhaps an hour he remained where he was. The fire had died to little more than embers, but though he was still naked Anzejarl was insensitive to the night's cold.
At last he rose. He walked stiffly to the window and looked out into the dense night. A few flakes of snow drifted down. For some moments Anzejarl appeared to grow immersed in the distant weirdlights, then he turned his body slightly, wincing, and angled himself a little more towards the south. That way, further now than he could calculate, lay his homeland, Karai. There were the peoples of whom he could never again be a part.
I am stripped. I am shamed.
Prince Anzejarl knelt before the window, his spine erect, his buttocks resting between his heels. His gaze remained fixed upon the southern horizon, and into his mind came the sacred Karai incantation, the mantra ingrained from birth into the subconscious of every Karai warrior, the final induction to be invoked only at a time of irreversible disgrace, loss or defeat.
'I am the dead,' he intoned silently.
'I am the dead.'
'I am the dead.'
'I am the dead . . .'
EIGHT
i
'Why did you let me live, Aunt Issul?' enquired Moscul. He beamed up at her, for all the world like an inquisitive small boy, except that there was a cloyingly and affectedly winsome quality in his smile, and his violet infant eyes shone with something more than innocent inquiry.
The question took Issul aback for a moment. 'I- It was because- Moscul, I think you know the answer to that.'
'But I want to hear it, from your lips.'
'Why?'
His face darkened with sudden pique. 'Don't question me!'
Issul was confused by him. Though she was dauntingly aware of the peril of her situation, she still fell so easily into the habit of addressing him as a three-year-old. His manner and appearance were disarming and deceptive, and he played on this with some skill before jolting her rudely back to reality.
'It was because I am a human being,' she said.
'Ah! I understand. Human beings don't harm newborns.'
'That’s so.'
'Even when they know that the newborn is not all it seems?'
'Nothing was certain at the time.'
'Was it not? Aunt Issul, are you so sure of that? You certainly knew that something quite out-of-the-ordinary was happening? You were there! You witnessed me give birth to myself, out of your sister's corpse. Did that not suggest something to you?'
Issul gripped the inside of her lower lip with her teeth. She was exhausted and deeply dispirited and her thoughts would not come clearly. She recalled the awful birth, and her sister Ressa's prior entreaty that she tell no one of the coming child and that she, Issul, take care of the baby in secret.
'You should have strangled me then, Aunt Issul. You know that, don't you? All this would have been avoided, wouldn't it?'
'It is easy to see clearly with hindsight,' replied Issul. 'But still I’m human, and humans are fallible.'
Moscul was shaking his fair curly head from side to side, his lips compressed. 'Actually, you are wrong.'
'In what respect?'
'In every respect. But firstly in thinking that my death would have changed things. The truth is, had you slain me at birth, you would have changed very little. Virtually nothing at all. Though you might have saved yourself a deal of trouble - in the short term, at least. But nothing more.'
'I don't understand.'
Moscul grinned, then hunched his shoulders and giggled behind his hand. 'Shall I tell her?' he mused out loud to himself. 'Shall I? Shall I? Yes, I think I may. I must. But not yet. Not quite yet.'
Issul was horrified. She saw in his face, for the first time, the likeness of her sister, Ressa. It brought bile to her throat. Moscul looked back at her with watery violet eyes, and smiled.
They were deep in the forest - Issul could not tell where - resting after a day's arduous travel away from the tail of the Portal where she had been snatched by Moscul's grullags. The day had turned bitter. Sometime during the afternoon it had begun to snow, a dense fall lasting perhaps half an hour. When it ceased the forest lay beneath a light, patchy, serene dusting of white.
Issul and Moscul were seated on a fallen black branch beneath a sprawling oak. Grey Venger waited a little distance away, chewing on rabbit-flesh as he sharpened a knife, his back against a towering, jagged jut of limestone. Elsewhere, all around, were the hulking, heavy-headed shapes of grullags. Some ate, a few dozed, others prowled or squatted listessly between the trees and boulders, and some kept watch.
Issul had prevailed upon Moscul to untie her wrists so that she could eat, insisting that with so many grullags in his company - she had estimated more than twenty - she could not possibly hope to escape. As it happened, when the food was brought she had declined to eat. The 'meal' had consisted of the raw flesh of freshly killed rabbit and wild pig. Moscul and Grey Venger, as well as the grullags, had torn into it with relish. For Issul's part, though she was becoming faint with hunger, she could not bring herself to eat.
She shivered and looked up towards the sky. 'Where are you taking me, Moscul?'
'Home, Aunt Issul. Back to Enchantment's Reach.'
'Why?'
'Oh, because that is where you will understand. And then you will die.'
She weighed this. The implication was that she was safe in the Legendary Child's custody, relatively speaking, until they reached the capital. Why? She was as perplexed as ever. What was he intending? To hand her to the True Sept as he assumed the throne and established the new era that they awaited?
She glanced across to where Grey Venger sat, still whetting his blade with quick, agitated movements and throwing her hate-filled, leering glances.
'He won't touch you, Aunt Issul. Not unless I give him the word.' Moscul looked up at her guilefully. 'Trust me.'
He winked. Issul recoiled inwardly. There was something not only mocking but disturbingly inappropriate in such an arch, cynical gesture from a three-year-old boy. But then, everything about Moscul was disturbing.
He is no child, he is a monster!
It was hardly necessary to remind herself. There was only aberration here; he was a travesty.
But then Moscul came forward and laid his curly head tenderly upon her thigh.
'Aunt Issul,' he coo-ed, in a parody of affection and vulnerability.
Issul looked down at his slim white neck, bared before her. So easy to break it, now, with a single, simple, calculated blow of her hand. Would it end all this? It would end her own life, that was certain, but to slay the Legendary Child, now - would his death bring an end to the horror that had befallen her land?
It surely could not be so simple. Not now.
Moscul lifted his head and gazed again directly up at her. 'I am still your little nephew, you know.'