by Tanith Lee
The elegantly draped tunic was pure white, the blinding white of solar heat. A white suncloak, figured in dull gold, hung negligently, held across the broad shoulders by two crossed chains of polished bronze. Vel Thaidis consciously saw none of this. Only afterward did she recall his clothing in such detail it seemed she had labored to memorize it. Neither did she see his face. Rather she felt it, a shock wave, a current which passed through her, fierce enough to kill, somehow only stunning her.
He was smiling and contemptuous, yet there was about him an aura of enjoyment, gluttony almost.
Tilaia wasted no time. She went straight across the length of the salon and kneeled with the lithe grace of a dancer; leaning like a snake, she kissed Ceedres’ sandaled foot. It was a gesture of total abnegation, performed with the utmost pride. It is no shame to honor a god, it said. And, in parentheses, If he is a god, look which mortal he has chosen.
The Princes’ Friend, not Ceedres, courteously assisted Tilaia to rise. Ceedres watched their actions, contained, entertained. Gently, he lifted the collar about Tilaia’s neck, weighed it lightly, let it fall.
Throughout this prologue, Vel Thaidis remained rooted to the floor. There was no escape. The copper panels had joined at her back, to release their seals would be to draw attention rather than evade it. So far, she was still thinking in terms of a monstrous coincidence. A coincidence which had brought her to take refuge in a resort Ceedres frequented, in which he kept a mistress, to which mistress he had given apparel from the spoils of Hirz. Reacting in this way, she had forgotten Tilaia’s story of the Yune Mek patrons, the unnamed antagonism that had fired between Tilaia and herself.
“Your companions, Prince Thar?” the Princes’ Friend inquired.
“Give them a while longer, I think,” Ceedres said. “They’re somewhat—occupied.”
The Princes’ Friend gave an unctuous growl of understanding.
Ceedres began to stroll through the salon. Tilaia moved at his side, subtle and unspeaking. At the waiting kitchen girls no one cast a single glance.
“The dinner you ordered, Prince Thar,” said the Princes’ Friend. “stands ready. Shall it be served?”
“Why not? Let the others have the leavings when they arrive.”
“Oh, Prince,” said the Princes’ Friend lovingly, “as if my house would serve leavings.”
Ceedres, head partly turned, had been fluidly matching the man’s expressions, virtually smirk for smirk. Vel Thaidis, the observer, had followed the old trick, paralyzed. And now, Ceedres’ face abruptly flattened, grew bleak and unliking, terrible by contrast. He said nothing; from the gaze alone the Princes’ Friend recoiled. Hollow-cheeked, he lurched into motion, beckoning to the ten female waiters.
“Not all,” Ceedres said then. “Leave one girl to serve the wine.”
“Thaidis will stay,” Tilaia said from beside him, inevitable and soft as a leaf falling through the air.
“Thaidis?” Ceedres asked. He did not look about him. His voice was very bland. “I don’t recall that name. She must be new.”
Thus, completely, the fantasy of coincidence deserted Vel Thaidis.
The other kitchen women left the chamber and passed away through a side door, in the wake of the Princes’ Friend. Vel Thaidis remained alone with her two enemies. And, alone, she tensed as if for an executioner’s blow.
“Well, Taia,” Ceedres murmured, “Where is the wine?”
“You, girl,” Tilaia said, also looking nowhere in particular, “pour wine for my prince. She is very slow,” Tilaia added to Ceedres. “Please forgive her.”
“I remember a princess of the estates,” Ceedres said. He seated himself on one of the divans, his eyes half-lidded, the smiling mask replaced. “She served the wine and told me to swallow my tongue and die of it.”
“Such a woman should be made to suffer,” Tilaia said.
Ceedres, lolling, unlooking, said like velvet: “Pour my wine, Vel Thaidis. Though I can’t promise I’ll choke, you can pray for it.”
His utterance of her name—her full and exact name—fixed the seal upon her horror. And simultaneously, strangely, released her from her paralysis. She went to the table nearest Ceedres, uncorked the flagon and drew it from the cooling mineral crystals. Fressa had given her sufficient lesson in this art. The cups stood ready. And then he said again, “Pour the wine.” And she knew at last his eyes were on her.
She barely foresaw what she would do, did not foresee enough to prevent it.
She turned, and dashed a stream of the glaucous liquid on the tiled floor.
“It’s poured,” she said. Her voice was husky, but audible. “Now lap it, like the other dogga.”
But then she shrank, and when he got to his feet, she scarcely held her ground. If he was angry, she could not tell, could not, in fact, bring herself to meet his eyes or scrutinize his expressions any further. But he only came for the flagon, which he removed deftly from her fingers. He took a cup and poured for himself.
Tilaia, naturally, submitted no word. This was her master, and she would do nothing without some sign from him.
Ceedres drank. He said, “This new one, I like her, she has originality. She’ll be my steward through dinner, but keep a watch out for her. I don’t want the gravy down my neck.”
At that, Tilaia ran to Vel Thaidis. She whipped back her hand and swung it forward in a striking action. Vel Thaidis, still unused to physical violence of any sort, shied away inadequately, but the stroke was never finished. Noiselessly laughing, Tilaia had stopped her hand at the last instant. It was a warning, no more.
“Taia has a brother,” Ceedres remarked, resettling himself on the divan. “Taia’s brother is one of the Slum rabble. At my suggestion, Taia sent the fellow to hunt for you at the labor centers of hest-Uma. How did I locate your presence in this sector? Because it’s adjacent to your estate. The Law is direct, and never wastes unnecessary staeds. Sherner did his work well. He discovered you an hour before Maram. Taia invited you to become one of Seta’s glittering company. How could you resist?”
Strains of a music had detached themselves from the general melodium of the mansion and were coming close.
“Don’t be afraid I or Taia will reveal you as a disgraced aristo. We are discreet. Though others, of course, may know you and betray you.”
The side door opened.
A procession, music, food and fire, came through and filled the chamber.
The nine women served Ceedres. Not even Tilaia ate with him. A man of the house stood by to carve the meat, another to decant the J’ara’s wines. Musicians played upon the chame-sett, the horizontal baritone extension of the upright chame, upon treble pipes and basso, bell-drums and lion-drums. Two girls danced, one to the rhythm of the drums, one to the meandering of strings and pipes. Black beads and gold dripped from their bodies and their brass hair. When the meal had passed through a scarlet course to a white course, a porcelain thimble of white caffea was offered to Ceedres by a child hardly more than eight or nine years of age, beautiful, spangled, clad in the bleached skin of a lionag cub. The dancing girls faded away. Fressa came to dance with a golden knife and dressed in a black armor out of legends; breastplate, thigh guards, armlets, a helm with a trailing violet plume which licked and sipped at the scattered flower petals and beads left behind on the tiles. Fressa’s partner in the dance was the incs. It too was armored and bore a knife of gilded wood. It had been trained to rear on its hind limbs, and imitate the coilings, cuts and retractions of its opponent. The result was mirror image rather than mock battle, each advancing on the other as one, aiming, retreating as one. The girl’s skill was in her judgment. Too vehement a cut would mean the incs also slashing too vehemently, a bruise to ribs, hands, ankles. Brilliantly, yet mindlessly, the almost mechanized creature copied Fressa’s dueling. When the dance was done, negligently Ceedres threw it a coin of meat. To the girl, nothing.
He seemed indifferent to them, these lower humans who tended him so diligently. They might have been robots. With self-absorbed countenance and lazy eyes, he sat through the proceedings. Of only one person might he have been aware, the young woman stationed at his left shoulder. She who must receive those plates intended for him and set them down, those wines, and pour them. He neither spoke to her nor turned to her. Nor was he in any way apparently alert or eager.
And yet, as he exacted service from her, Vel Thaidis told herself that, of all the life in the room, she alone mattered to him at this hour. Her thoughts were a confusion, she was in an agony of uncertainty, amounting to fear. But still she responded to her place in his awareness with a ghastly vibrancy. For the same reason Tilaia had abased herself, Vel Thaidis steadied herself to endure. See whom he has chosen.
She shivered and imagined the table knives, within her reach, snatched up and put to use. She imagined her death from sheer dismay. But it all sprang from him. An electric chord, like one of the pulsing chords of the chame-sett, stretched singing between Ceedres and herself.
She had heard stories of Slum J’aras. These things of food and dance were tame: she divined that he had picked them for their worth as a background. To demonstrate orgy before her would not achieve his aims. Like him, she must note only one other in this room.
Even the dance of the girl and the incs was like the games of mimicry Ceedres played.
She balked at her own logic, which seemed coordinated by the power he exerted over her, the net he trapped her in.
The incs had gulped its piece of meat, and Fressa, taking up the bit of chain at its neck, led it off.
A course of sweets was being brought before the next savory. As the platters approached Vel Thaidis, she beheld the lattice which veiled the elevator pull aside.
“My tardy companions,” Ceedres said.
Two of the manufact hierarchs advanced into the chamber. Their clothes were festal and of token princeliness. Between them they supported a man drunken or drug-sodden to the point of clownishness, but who was a prince in title and in fact. The three laughed together idiotically, and Ceedres raised his cup in greeting.
“Ceedres! Ceedres!” they cried back at him.
“Be seated, gentlemen,” Ceedres called. “You have missed a duel-dance, Vay, between Fressa and an incs.”
Supported between the hierarchs, Velday Yune Hirz frowned in sad delirium at a world he could no longer fully see.
* * *
• • •
Golden Vel Thaidis had changed to stone.
Her spirit seemed to leave her body and fall upward into the air. From this novel vantage, she stared at her brother, an unknown young man, bright fair hair poured over his wine-darkened face, swollen-eyed, maniacal and boneless in the grip of fiends. (She saw them as fiends, insubstantial yet malignant, from the same arcane mythos as Fressa’s dance armor, and a black occult room ceilinged with white fires.)
This was not her brother.
She had never seen him like this. He had never actually been quite like this before, quite so reduced. Ceedres had had three Jates, almost four Marams, in which to work upon him in the confines of Hirz, the depths of the Slum. But it was a masterpiece Ceedres had begun long ago, Vel Thaidis accepted as much in this minute of revelation. For years, Ceedres had been weaning Velday from the customs of life, from Maram to J’ara and away from sleep, away also from intellect, from abstinence, continence and self-evaluation. In these recent three Jates, a culmination, given impetus by Velday’s guilt and willingness to grow blind, his sense of honor long perverted; his basic trust in his adopted brother who, since the commencement of their lives, it appeared, had striven in undetected ways to coerce and eliminate.
Half of Hirz? Ceedres would take all.
So Vel Thaidis foresaw. Not simply destruction of herself, but of her kindred, of her name and house.
Velday could not resist. Had not. Velday, the magical being beloved in her childhood. Velday, youthful, handsome, his open-heartedness altered to the falterings of an imbecile, his gentle sophistry poisoned. Velday, a cripple.
The alcoholic fumes, the fumes of the fuel lights had gone to her head. Despite the rationing of tears, she began to cry, there in that place full of danger and despair. She had believed the dam of her grief would collapse in public and in the sight of foes, and she had prophesied. The charcoaled tears drew furrows in the gilt powders and rose powders on her face. No one perceived, or, if any did, they were untroubled by it, not even moved to jeer at her. While Velday—it had been clear at once, as he careered with his escort among the tables—Velday did not see or recognize her.
Ceedres, not turning, said to Tilaia: “Empty this room, Taia.”
Tilaia rose and imperiously clapped her hands, functioning as Ceedres’ right arm and mouthpiece. She was submitted to as such. She ordered the musicians out, the carver, nine of the waiting girls, the dancers; they were gone. She wound her body toward Ceedres, for his approval of her authority.
“Also yourself, Taia,” he said.
At that, Tilaia let slip her stance. Seconds only, but enough that her lips sewed themselves together as if on a tart fruit, and her tilted eyes burned. Her inquisitiveness, her malice, were to be balked after all. “May I,” she broke out, very nearly shrill, “may I not—”
“Not,” he said, the man who held her leash. He turned then, and showed her unerringly her own expression on his face, and Tilaia lapsed and folded herself away. She lowered her eyes. Her mouth was smooth and yielding.
“I do as my prince bids me.”
“Conduct my two friends here,” Ceedres said, indicating the drunken hierarchs. “Select them another dining room.”
The two were already slouching up, bowing to Ceedres, groveling, sidling to an exit.
Tilaia proceeded to them and led them away, with a mask of courtesy, even interest and vivacity. She had been, like the incs, well trained.
The side door shut.
Velday, Ceedres, Velday’s sister were alone in the salon.
Ceedres rose. He walked quietly to Velday, taking up the dull bone jar of white caffea as he went. Velday sprawled on a divan, beside the chame-sett which, with the larger drums, had been left behind. Monotonously and unmelodiously he stroked the strings, and drank between whiles from a leather flagon that one of the hierarchs had brought in with him.
“Well, my brother,” said Ceedres, “did you spend your time profitably? Did Ler justify my recommendation or exceed her fame?”
“Ler is a bowl of light, a river of shade.”
“Is she?” Ceedres drew the leather flagon from Velday’s hand. Velday protested, noted the white caffea, and graciously accepted the exchange. Velday gulped from the throat of the jar.
“Ler,” said Velday, his speech barely understandable, “is a pitcher of white caffea.”
“And the other things?” Ceedres inquired, enunciating ever more finely, as if to compensate, in order that the third person with them should miss nothing.
“Superb,” Velday said. “Now, I have been educated. I am wise.”
“There is also,” Ceedres said, “a girl in this room.”
“A girl?”
“By the table there.”
Velday squinted, tried to make out the girl Ceedres spoke of.
“Is she wholesome?”
“Oh, yes. I think you would find her so.”
“Bring her then. Let me find her. I ask, because my legs,” Velday laughed wildly, “refuse to bear me any farther.”
Ceedres glanced at Vel Thaidis. He nodded to her, politely.
“Come here.”
“Won’t she do it?” Velday asked, fascinated.
“She’ll do it.”
And Vel Thaidis, a puppet, began to walk toward them, dragging her limbs of stone.
“
She’s been weeping,” Ceedres remarked. “Tell her not to be afraid.”
Concerned, Velday assured Vel Thaidis: “Don’t be afraid.”
“Perhaps,” said Ceedres, “she has had some contact with your sister.”
“My—sister—” Velday’s face crumpled. His youth, with his intoxication, combined to make him look younger even than he was. Almost with a child’s face, horribly sottish, a child’s sick sleepless eyes, he wavered his attention to his friend and brother. “We made a vow,” he said, “a pact, Cee. Not to talk of her, not to think, until some solution could be—some plan—and the Law, the conclave of the Law—”
“But perhaps,” Ceedres said, “this girl may be able to help us.”
“Oh, girl,” Velday stammered, “girl—girl—” And huge muddy tears ran also from his eyes, without warning. Deprived of control even as he had been dehumanized, he put down the white caffea, and reached toward Vel Thaidis as if he sank in mire, an analogy vile in its exactitude.
The stone cracked and splintered from Vel Thaidis. She dropped to her knees before Velday, snatched his hands, caught them, held them.
“Vay,” she said, her voice breathless but expressionless, for her emotions had been orphaned of expression. “Vay, look at me. Look at me.”
“Yes,” he said. His eyes swam over her, over and over. He struggled to identify her, as his instinct already had. His whole body writhed, and he jerked their locked fingers, clinging to her. Then, quite suddenly, he knew her. A dreadful stupid astonishment sped across his features. He bent his head, and rested his forehead on her wrists in silence.
In the silence, Ceedres spoke.
“Yes, Vay. A little J’ara slut. In the ranks of the Slumopolis far beneath Ler, your river of shade.”
“But, Cee,” Velday whispered (yet he did not look at Ceedres any more), “we have found her. Didn’t you say, to trace her was everything? That we must attempt to trace her?”