by Tanith Lee
Velday felt a dislocation of awareness, between doubt and rejection of doubt. He went from the Maram-chamber, called a robot and asked for white caffea. Ceedres had left a flagon ready-chilling in a fountain that adjoined the upper salon of Hirz. At the sight of it, the touch of the enamel in his hand, Velday experienced an abrupt and undeniable sickness. Seeking to dispel it, he drank, but was only the more sickened. He sat down trembling on a cushioned bench, until gradually the motion and the murmur of the fountain refreshed him.
“Where is Ceedres?” Velday inquired of the robot.
“Ceedres Yune Thar-Hirz left word for you in the panel of your apartments.”
“Oh.” Velday considered returning to see, but his head rang. “I am unwell,” he said to the robot. “Bring me something to ease me.”
The robot went away, but a succession of figures seemed to come swirling out of the fountain to fill its place on the marble. When it reappeared, and bent to him with a thimble of medicine in its blond hands, he said uneasily, “When did I come back from the Slumopolis?”
“Three Jates, two Marams ago, Velday.”
“What?” The medicine almost dropped out of his grasp. He swallowed it hastily, and holding gagging muscles in check, demanded: “You mean I slept so long?”
“Ceedres would have woken you.”
“But I was too—too sluggish with wine to be roused?”
“Yes, Velday.”
And with berry juice and pavra. And with the women of Nu and their profligate flesh. The medicine soothed him, body and soul, almost immediately. A sense of calm came over him then, spiced with an uneasy self-reproach. Sodden with poisons, he had slept three Jates away. Reviving, he had reached out to take fresh poison, as the matrixed child reached for the mechanical tube of sustenance.
Velday shut his eyes. On the lids, he saw Ceedres’ kneeling hierarch.
“Tell me about my sister,” Velday said to the voice robot.
“Vel Thaidis,” said the robot, “is dead.”
Velday seemed himself to die, and start alive again, in two atrocious spasms.
“What did you say?”
“Vel Thaidis is dead.”
Velday saw everything, in instant retrospect—his sister’s attempt upon the life of his friend and sworn brother, her exile to the Slum; his acceptance, his troubled dislike of her which muffled his troubled guilt. It seemed as if it were a year since she had gone away, or only yesterjate.
“How—what killed her? Did she take her own life?”
There was another picture now, a girl at Seta, one of Ceedres’ women, Velday had assumed, a girl who resembled Vel Thaidis. Or was it a dream? It must have been, for Ceedres had dominated it unpleasingly. He had spoken in a manner Velday could not recapture, but a manner vile and impossible; decidedly the stuff of bad dreams, like that of the smoldering lake.
“Vel Thaidis, formerly Yune Hirz, is dead in the legal form. That is, she has passed beyond the reach of Yunean justice.”
Velday could not follow this.
“What do you mean?”
The robot spoke, in its high aesthetic tone, of the Fading Lands. Still, Velday did not comprehend. Vel Thaidis was dead, and yet he felt her life, as if she stood at his side. He remembered her eyes when she was an adolescent girl and he a boy, her eyes of love and admiration and jealous, controlled disquiet. He had been secure in her eyes, and had been annoyed by them, wanting her fascination with him, and not wanting it.
Velday rose and walked back to his apartment, to the message panel.
Ceedres’ communication was brief. He had gone hunting with a chariot and three machines of Hirz.
If Ceedres was prodigal, did he not have every excuse? He had existed such a while with nothing. And he took now, as ever, with such charm, it was a pleasure to render him everything. Even the land and name of Hirz.
“I blame him,” Vel Thaidis had said, “for his smiling schemes to use us.”
The message panel mentioned nothing of Vel Thaidis. There were only these half mnemonic fragments, the kneeling hierarch with his words of escape, and Ceedres: Gently, not in the presence of her brother. . . .
All at once, Velday, with no opinions of his own to aid him, found himself beset by apprehensions of every kind. They seemed to have stolen up on him in his drug-clotted slumber, as if machines had mumbled in his ears all Maram, insinuating things. Now, awake, disarmed, wrestling with fear, there was no answer, no powerful arm against which to lean. He wished Ceedres had been there, to embolden him. Ceedres would have put all to rights. Velday was sure of this. So sure, he must repeat the surety aloud, over and over. Eventually it occurred to Velday, born of the repetition, that Ceedres had gone hunting. Velday would go after him.
At the thought, a warm flow of vitality replaced Velday’s sluggish depression. Out on the hunting lands, he and Ceedres would meet. They would discuss the kill and sip the minerally cold, fulvous last-chosen wine. Casually, Velday would require an explanation of the confused account the robot had given him. Perhaps the germ of it was that Vel Thaidis, rather than die, had been rescued in some way, which Ceedres had withheld from him till he should be sober. A part of Velday touched him with cold; deep within himself, he could now outguess his own hopes. However, the overhang of optimism persisted, the idea of Ceedres as a magician-hero who could cement everything together and make all bearable.
But despite this, and despite the scientifically magical restorative he had drunk, Velday noticed, in a glimpse of unexpected nervousness, how his own body had begun to undermine him. His youth and stamina seemed to have failed in several tiny, easily ignored, frightful ways. He ached. His spirit flagged and rose up inebriatedly, and flagged again. As the bird chariot pranced on its long legs across the staeds of Hirz, a wind of terror blew by him and was gone, leaving only the acrid dust of its passage.
He did not react to the temple until the chariot was almost level with it.
It was the Hirz boundary temple, alike, of course, all the others, the gleaming domes, the pillared walks, the lush lawns and trees. The Hirz temple, yet Velday Yune Hirz was hardly intimate with it. He had not ridden this route for years, had not specifically visited since boyhood. Not since the Jate he had sought the place with Ceedres, to swear kinship with him. Ceedres had been fourteen, and he himself nine or ten. Ceedres had humored him in this sentimental whim that had somehow forged a link of steel and gold between them.
Velday stopped the bird chariot almost inadvertently. The lower outer sun limned the ground with spurs and runnels of bright copper, and a green-gray cliff went up in the distance, over the border of the estate, out on the hunting lands. Direly, Velday’s reverie had turned itself back toward the J’ara hunt, to Ceedres and Vel Thaidis in the Thar temple, his modesty, her rage, the knife, the cataclysm which profaned equanimity.
Before he quite knew what he did, Velday had left the chariot on the lawn. He was striding, hurrying, through the unintelligible, tinsely god-sound, toward the door of the Hirz temple, which opened for him as he advanced. When he reached it, he was almost running. Bursting into the soft-lit columned space beyond, seeing the figure of the priest emerge before him, Velday admitted his desperate need. Uncertain of his ground, the child in him was looking over its shoulder to the omnipotent gods.
“Welcome,” the priest said, spreading its hands in greeting.
“Priest, I am Yune Hirz.” Velday’s voice was still slurred. He swallowed and sighed. The title had been his sister’s before.
“Do you seek the Room of Prayer, Yune Hirz?”
“Yes,” Velday said. He felt an urge to sob, and turned from the priest, as if it were human, as the floor began to rise.
He had not completely forgotten. The room was the same, the occult symbols on the walls, the myriad yellow globes, burning on their marble stands.
Velday crossed to a globe at random. He reste
d his palms over it, and lowered his forehead to rest against its light. His eyes were wet when he closed them. A tired child, he laid himself down before heaven for guidance, for some god to life the burden from his shoulders.
Leaning mentally toward the supernatural, he was not surprised to have it almost at once within view. Like others, he had seen the vision long ago, the closed-lid imprint of the beautiful garden, some distortion of glare and shade focusing back into the pupils of the eyes—so, in adult parlance, he had learned to dismiss it. For, though sometimes worshipping gods, the Yunea did not permit itself to stray too far onto the abstract path of sheer faith. An ambience of security was all the aristocrats required, a guarantee that fate loved them. Of which guarantee Velday had been orphaned.
Seeing heaven, wanting to credit it, his eyelids clenched. Even so, the vision did not desert him.
There, a waterfall, there some creature in flight across a dome of sky. . . . Had Vel Thaidis seen such a mirage, before succumbing to murderous insanity by the Thar temple? No, she had seen a vision of hell, of black sky, white venoms, a sight she claimed Ceedres had forced on her.
Velday’s eyes snapped open, and paradise was obliterated.
“Priest,” Velday said. His mouth stayed wide, ready to blurt everything.
“Yes, Prince.”
“Tell me about the upper room of this temple.”
“The upper room of the temple contains its energies.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else,” said the auto-priest.
“Show me,” said Velday, “the upper room.”
What prompted him was a muddled vehement process of thought. All temples were alike, all robots basically similar, even the revered priests. It seemed the phantom of the upper room of darkness had haunted him all these Jates, Marams, J’aras, and now he must lay it by forever.
“No one goes there,” said the auto-priest.
“Why not?”
“No one asks to go there.”
“I ask,” said Velday, with a resolution unusual and strained. “I am asking. Do you deny it?”
“No, Yune Hirz.”
“Then, upward.”
Immediately, the floor began again to rise; overhead, the ceiling to draw apart.
Velday gave a shout. It was a shout of alarm, but also of disbelief. And with the alarm and disbelief, a weird admixture of dull, acquiescing shame.
The floor was ascending into a great gape of blackness.
“No,” cried Velday. “No farther.”
The floor halted. Above, the black, and on the black a scatter of white gems, flaring into piercing brilliance.
“You informed me,” Velday said, “the room contained the temple’s energies.”
“It does so.”
“And the blackness, the lights—a facsimile of hell in the myth.”
The priest’s hairless cranium glowed in the cold sheen of white and dark. Its mortal plastum face looked blandly at him, as the bland face of Ceedres’ priest must have looked at the princely council which interrogated it, the men and women who condemned Vel Thaidis. None saw these rooms because none asked to see them. Their function was unguessable, but their actuality was not. Ceedres had somehow come to knowledge of them, and now the phantom had grown to substance. For if Vel Thaidis had not fantasized about the room, what else had she been truthful in?
Some part of Velday shied from the simplicity of the revelation. Some part protested that Ceedres’ deception could not have built itself so adamantly on such a flimsy base as mere ignorance. But another part of Velday, scalded by an intense mistrust of himself and all he had done, pushed deduction away. Was it not as he had always half suspected? He could not hide any more from his own baseness. His character and his honor had melted very thin. Only Ceedres now could save him, Ceedres his brother. Because Ceedres must, and would, have a solution even for this. (Ceedres’ auto-priest, which had lied to the council and to the Law—was there a solution for that, also?)
And yet, no answer could be come at directly. It would be a time of testing; he, Velday, making test of Ceedres. This was unthinkable and nearly insupportable to him, but he felt a frantic motivation to attempt it. It would be straightforward, of course. Ceedres had always mastered Velday, been the stronger and the wiser of the two. Velday had only to let Ceedres go on in that assumption.
Velday turned to a golden globe and buried his face against it. Certainly, he had want of his gods now. Otherwise, he was quite alone.
* * *
• • •
It was the sixteenth hour of Jate. Hirz had entered the station of Aita in hespa. The painted Zenith window wall of the salon draped the chamber in its perpetual luminous gauze, lavender, cool yellow, and deep red.
Velday lay, like a stranded robot fish in the shallows of this lake of color and light. Ceedres’ flagon of white caffea, two-thirds empty, and a crystal flask of wine one-third full displayed themselves as the remains of his breakfast. Velday looked sick in the cheerfulness, sick but merry.
When Ceedres entered, he came like the sung stroke of a clock, Golden and exact, freshly bathed and dressed after his hunting. He smiled at Velday, a smile of interest and liking.
“I tried to wake you,” Ceedres said, “but you were past waking.”
“Now I’ve breakfasted, I’m better.” Velday’s words were particularly malformed. He grinned ingratiatingly. “But tell me, do you think I take too much of this liquor?”
“Not too much. There are times when solace is necessary. I’ll join you.”
Ceedres took up the wine flagon and poured himself a measure.
“Solace,” said Velday. “Yes. I have been thinking of—my sister, Cee. I dreamed of her.”
“I should never have let you hear the news.”
“The news?”
“Her escape into the Fading Lands.” Ceedres’ face was intent and melancholy. He drank the wine. He said, “She was noble. She fought against iron justice until the end.”
“The end—she’s not dead, Cee?”
“No, my brother. Not dead. But lost. Beyond the Law. Beyond all of us. And she may die there.”
Velday hiccupped.
“Could we not,” he said, “go after her?”
“How would we find her?”
“Don’t,” said Velday pathetically, “don’t treat me as an infant. Don’t suppose I don’t guess—you’ve kept things from me.”
“Only to protect you, Vay.”
“I know. But now I propose to search for her.”
“The Law is absolute. I’ve tried to thrust it aside, to come at her and help her. But she’s flung herself away from everything. It would be better to count her dead. I apologize for saying it, Vay. It pains me to say it. She was like my sister, too.” The well-made steady hand trickled white caffea into the jade thimble and offered it to Velday. The other hand rested a moment on Velday’s hand, the way a man would reassure a fretting beast.
Velday recognized the nature of the touch. The paranoia of suspicion had flooded him in the temple; he remained awash. The empty flagons, his appalling diction, were pretense. Acting the state with the facility of much genuine practice, he was conscious of anesthetized pangs of horror. He craved the alcohol before him now, and was glad when his performance permitted him to sample it.
“The Law,” Velday muttered.
The Law, he thought, How can the Law of the Yunea have borne the lie that no mythically black room existed? He drank, and in a sort of fear felt the buoyancy the spirit instantly lent him, sickness only a faint blurring at its edges. So, the Law is inadequate, had a blind spot. I must work on him without the Law. Work on him—on Ceedres.
“The Law,” Velday said again.
“Just, but harsh. My brother, let’s forget this thing. We can do nothing. It’s beyond us. You know I’d have done
all I could.”
They drank, and Velday shut his eyes. A whirling memory came to him at once, as if it had only been poised for the opportunity.
“Seta,” Velday said. “We could keep J’ara there. There was a girl, wasn’t there?”
“You mean my bitch Tilaia?” Ceedres smiled, lazy and generous, indicating to Velday that men might laugh secretly at women, from their deeper fellowship. “She’s beautiful but, if you want her, yours.”
“Not Tilaia. She was a—servant at the table.”
The dream sequence was returning to him. Consider, and he could recapture it.
“Not Tilaia? Surely you don’t mean some pot girl, Vay? Though I suppose if that’s what you want.”
Not a flicker in Ceedres’ eyes, nor over the unique face. Nothing to convict. Yet the girl had been Vel Thaidis. Only Velday’s stupor had kept him from knowing it before.
Cee had found Vel Thaidis. He had brought them together, brother and sister and friend. In the wake of so many falsehoods, equivocations.
There they all were. Velday could see them, even himself, minute figures, yet unmistakable. The girl wore the clothes of Seta, and the dyed brash hair, the rosy sunflower face. “Why are you doing this thing?” she said to Ceedres.
“If you mean your hapless brother . . . he has been drinking, inhaling pavra dusts. By Jate he’ll remember next to nothing.”
“No,” the girl—Vel Thaidis—reasonably. “I meant to ask you why you’ve become a torturer. Your strategy, I follow, to obtain Hirz. But there can be no need for this.”
“Recollect a black room. I went to the room to conquer my fear and know my conquest. I am enthralled with what I am. I intend to discover every facet, brain and spirit.”
“And Velday is merely part of your experiment?”
Velday started at the sounds of his own name inside his skull. He listened determinedly, hotly, as if to voices overheard in a neighboring chamber.
“Oh,” Ceedres said, “Velday. You and your brother, two spoiled brats.”