The Birthgrave

by Tanith Lee

  And yet I could not let it happen, this final degradation, this final eclipse of his being. Asren, who had seemed to me in the Temple at Ezlann at once too innocent and too aware to have been drawn in. . . .

  There were many men, more than two hundred, all in all, I think. They settled about the tower, and lit their night fires to shine on the mixed liveries of the five Cities of White Desert, and of Eshkorek Amor, for she too had sent her quota of power in the end. They did nothing, simply sat around us in a ring, letting us see what was possible to them.

  Vazkor’s man rode out to them when the moon rose, nervous, for all his supposed immunity as a messenger; he knew very well they had half a mind to shoot him on sight. Still, the archers held their hands, and he got to their commander and delivered Vazkor’s words: that he held Asren alive, had protected him here, as his lord, since the night of the mob in Ezlann, that Asren would speak for him. There was some confusion in the camp. The commander—a prince of Za who had known Asren well—demanded he be shown an hour after dawn at a low window in the tower. If the appearance did not take place, or he was unconvinced, their cannon would open fire on the fortress, and not cease until they had razed it. This arranged, he let the messenger go.

  Mazlek told me all this, swiftly, in my room.

  I pulled Asren gently to his feet.

  “Take him,” I said to Mazlek. “Go now, quickly. You have searched the lower reaches of the tower, you must know a hundred hiding places there; perhaps they will not find you. And if the tower falls it should be far safer.”

  “And you?” he said to me.

  “You know I cannot die, Mazlek,” I said. “There is no need to fear for me. Only take him now, before they come for him. I will delay Vazkor as best I can.”

  Mazlek did as I told him, only Asren hung back, staring at me, but I found the mouse among the curtains and gave it to him, and at last Mazlek got him away and down the stairs.

  It was a confused plan, a stupid plan. But there was so little I could do, so few ways open to me.

  Vazkor did not come for a long while, he was so sure of me.

  He knocked courteously at the bolted door, and when I did not answer, and the door did not give, two of his men set their shoulders to it and, after a time, they and it fell into my room. At another hour, such a sight might have been very funny. Vazkor walked into the room while they were still picking themselves up and cursing.

  “Where?” he said to me. Only this one word.

  I had always been afraid of him in a way, though an almost willing and sexual way, perhaps. But now I was terrified, truly and utterly.

  “Where?” he said again.

  “If you assume I have hidden something, why should I tell you where it is hidden? That rather destroys the point, does it not?”

  He came across to me, and pulled me from the chair. He was unmasked and his face was white, his eyes extraordinarily black. The heat of anger can be brutal, but his cold anger was horrible; there seemed no limit to what it would do, and no act, however crucial, seemed likely to appease it.

  “Tell me,” he said, “where he is.”

  His eyes appeared to expand, to draw me helplessly downward. I felt weightless, floating . . . useless to resist, simple to tell him what I had done . . . Yet I, too, knew this art of Power, and I pulled free of him, a sensation so physical I seemed bruised after it.

  “No, Vazkor.”

  “An hour to dawn,” he said, “and then an hour after it. After that, their cannon, and the roof down over our heads.”

  “It does not matter to me,” I said.

  He pushed up my mask and hit me across the face, again and again. I lost count of the times he hit me. There was no pain. One of the black rings on his fingers had cut my cheek, and warm salt blood ran in at the corner of my mouth. After a while, I realized he had stopped. I sat masked in my chair, looking at him. The two men had gone and the door was closed.

  “You realize, goddess, you are an ideal victim for any torture I care to devise—your healing skin will provide you with endless variations of repeatable agony. And while this is in progress, my men will search the tower thoroughly. We shall find him, whatever happens. There is no point in your suffering unnecessarily.”

  I gave a little coughing laugh, for quite suddenly I was no longer afraid of him.

  “You can do nothing to me,” I said. “I am your sister, you remember. I have touched my own body with fire, and have not been burned. And, Vazkor, the very fact that you require me to tell you anything proves to me you think there is some chance you may otherwise find nothing.”

  He turned away from me, went to the window shutter and pulled it open. The dark sky was paling. He stood there a moment, then he turned and got me from the chair once again, and pulled me by my hand from the room and down the stairs.

  I was light-headed from the beating he had given me, and, at first, what he was doing made no sense. We went deep, that same way Mazlek and I had gone. When we reached the wine cellars he did not, at first, touch the wall panel, but led me up and down the length and breadth of them all. There were signs of a recent search—his men had been violent, but too frenzied perhaps to be completely thorough. It came to me then why he had brought me here. Asren, with his child’s instincts, still tied by the security he had found with me, might sense my nearness and run to me from whatever covering Mazlek had found for him. I stopped at once, but Vazkor pulled me on.

  “No,” I said.

  “Good,” he answered. “Talk all you want. He will find you the sooner.”

  The cellars covered, he took me to the panel, and moved it. He dragged me down the steps into the narrow dismal passage beyond. I saw again the wooden door, open as we had left it, and through it, the oblong, stinking, black horror of that room. Not here—surely never here. He pulled me to the doorway, and held me there, turning his head to inspect each corner. We went inside, and he stirred the sacking with his boot. Nothing moved. We went out.

  Vazkor touched the right-hand wall, brushed a series of markings with his fingers. Part of the wall groaned aside and another dark corridor lay beyond. Had Mazlek found this way? Vazkor urged me into it.

  There was no light with us, yet somehow I could see. Doors lay at intervals along the passage, iron doors with little gratings, each bolted on the outside. A flight of steps led downward to a dark hollow hall. Water dripped, black flickering shadows dipped and danced on stone pillars holding up a vault of ceiling. The corrupt odor of ancient water gone rotten pressed itself into my nostrils. Ghosts clamored.

  Toward the far end of the hall a pile of masonry lay in a mountain of crumbled shapes, the relics of an earlier wall. Straw was scattered there and along the floor.

  We began to walk across the open space between the pillars, toward the pile. It was very quiet except for the sluggish drip of water. Our footsteps sounded sharply.

  In the straw something darted from my feet, back a little way, and then sat staring at me from bright red eyes. A mouse.

  My heart clenched painfully. Vazkor’s hand on my arm drew me relentlessly forward.

  “Past dawn now, goddess,” he said.

  I willed that Asren would not recognize that sound, that familiar sound, by which he had heard Mazlek address me so often.

  There was a scuttle of movement among the battered blocks of the fallen wall. Only his head emerged, the blank beautiful face almost expectant, the wide eyes searching for me.

  “Asren,” Vazkor said. “Come out, Asren.”

  Behind us both the swift hiss of breath, the rasp of a blade coming out of its scabbard. Vazkor whipped around, jumped sideways, and Mazlek’s sword slashed lightly, cheated of its aim, across his breast. There was one second of immobility as the three of us stood in tableau. Then a kind of glitter in the air, a kind of bright flicker that might have been a trick of the eyes. Mazlek’s sword clattered on th
e stone flags; his body leaned sideways and fell. I ran to him, but he was dead, and his skin was very cold.

  On my knees still, I looked up, and saw Vazkor standing by one of the pillars, and Asren, out of the pile now, walking toward him, a puppet already, completely under his control.

  “Vazkor!” I shouted.

  He turned and looked at me, and, at once, as if a mechanism had been halted, Asren stopped.

  “Goddess,” Vazkor said, “your interference in this matter will cease. I am going to take him above now, to a lower window in the tower, where he will speak to them.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Except in this matter, he is useless to me,” Vazkor said, “and so, if you prefer it, he can die now, and we will all suffer together.”

  His hand moved on the pillar. There came a deep rusty screaming from under the floor, a trembling like an earthquake. Blocks slid backward into other blocks, leaving, in place of that open area we had crossed earlier, a large oval well of greenish-stippled stone. In the depths of it, water, black as oil, oozed and quivered, and was never entirely still.

  “Moat water,” Vazkor said.

  I shivered sickly, my hair prickling, feeling that same dread I had experienced when we rode across the bridge.

  “The water is not empty,” Vazkor said. “Living things. The Warden and his men know them intimately. Asren too can come to know them, if you so desire.”

  “No!” I screamed at him. I scrambled to my feet in panic.

  “Goddess,” he said, “you cannot stop me.”

  “My Powers,” I whispered.

  “Your Powers? You think they are superior, perhaps, to my own.”

  “They are the same,” I said.

  “Oh, no.” He shook his head. “No, goddess. There is something you should understand, though a curious time and place in which to tell you, no doubt. There is a great difference between us and what we can command. Your Powers are intuitive, untested and unstable. My Power is learned, hardened and tried. Yes, goddess, learned. No, I am not of your Lost Race, after all. My father was a warlord of Eshkorek, a dabbler in magic. My mother came of the Dark People, a girl he raped on his way to one of the toy battles they played at in the old days. I heard of the legend early—the legend of the Power and the Second Coming. I set myself to work. He must have had some stunted ability, the man who fathered me, something which took root in me. I learned very well. By fourteen I had been hounded and stoned out of my village because of it. Men fear a magician, and when I came to the Cities, and found they looked only for a coming of goddesses, not gods, I thought my road was closed to me. Fortunately, I had enough of my father’s looks to pass as a citizen, despite my darkness. I enlisted in the armies of the Javhovor of Ezlann, and, by dint of apparent courage, and also by bribery and intrigue, I became at last High Commander. And then, goddess, you were found for me.”

  My brain hummed; I felt in me a terrible stirring. He had thought to silence me forever because he had built himself from clay, and I was still unformed. But he had forgotten the hubris which had grown in me, the ancient contempt for humanity which he himself had helped to foster. White-hot lava began to bubble in my veins, my face set like a cold white stone, so that I drew off the lynx mask and felt no nakedness, only the sense that I could create fear. And I saw him flinch, very slightly, as he had that first time he saw my face.

  “Vazkor,” I said, “you are a human man.”

  “I have still deceived you very well. In Ezlann, when you were sick and I set the blame on Asren, you did not believe me. Yet did you not think your illness very opportune? I sent you that illness to serve my purpose, and you did not guess it, I think. And the balcony, do you remember that, when I controlled your movements and your mind as easily as I can this creature who was Asren?”

  I sensed the scrabbling behind his level voice, the hands clinging onto the rocks, and the drop below. I scarcely heard what he said.

  “Vazkor,” I repeated, “you are a human man. You can die.”

  “You forget what Asren told you, goddess. There was an assassin who stabbed me mortally and I survived.”

  “Because you willed it,” I said.

  “And I shall cease wanting life?”

  “Yes, when you can no longer order it.”

  I saw the fire leap from his pupils, clear this time, and very bright, and the deep fury answered from the core of my brain. A shaft shot out, blazing, and caught his little death-wish for me, and contained it, and turned it. I seemed much larger than Vazkor, taller, burning. I felt his Power shrivel and draw back, and I pressed after it, pursuing it into the very brain-cave of its lair, into the dark places of Vazkor’s mind. And there I found the diamond spark of his knowledge, down the black corridors of the skull, which in most of mankind are closed and empty, but which in Vazkor were open and alive. I found the spark, the little hard, bright stone, and I scorched it to ashes, destroyed it without compunction, because he had claimed he was my brother, and was only a man.

  I drew back. The light faded. I felt small and empty and afraid. By the pillar Vazkor stood, and I saw what I had done to him. I called out his name, but he only stared at me. His eyes flickered, as the blinded inner eye swiveled desperately to each of those doors of ability I had closed forever. As he had killed that part of Asren’s brain which made him a thinking man, so I had killed that part of Vazkor’s which made him a magician, and a god. The Power in him was dead.

  I do not know if he was aware of what he did. He took several steps backward, and the last unbalanced him over the lip of the black moat pool. Hardly a splash, the water was so thick and turgid. And then a little dazzling movement all around him, as though the water itself were running to welcome a guest.

  Vazkor screamed. The water reddened, sparkled. Vazkor screamed.

  I put my hands over my ears and turned away, and began to scream also.

  Silence came, only the drip of the water sounded. The liquid of the pool was black, and empty.

  “Asren,” I called softly, “we are safe now.”

  I was weeping and could not see properly. I found the lynx mask, and put it on, and stumbled across the straw toward him. The noise had terrified him. I put my arms around him, and rocked him gently in the dark.

  * * *

  The cannon began quite suddenly. I had forgotten them.

  At first the noise seemed far away, thunder beyond the hills. Soon other noises came, bursting and tearing sounds, the thud of rooms collapsing above.

  Smoke drifted through to us, and a dull red light. There were great cracks spreading on the vault above. At the far end of the hall, a pillar split slowly from end to end, buckled and collapsed. The gray avalanche gushed through.

  Asren whimpered. I pressed his head to my breast, leaned over him as best I could, sheltering him with my body.

  A great roaring came swooping to us like a bird of prey. For the first time I felt terror as the ceiling sagged and broke above me. Delicate little pieces scattered like a fine rain, and then the slabs broke away from the flooring overhead.

  There was no more time to be afraid.

  Book Three

  Part I: Snake’s Road

  1

  THERE HAD BEEN blackness, and in the blackness: nothing. Now, still closed in the dark, I began to hear a single sound, rhythmically repetitive, a tireless engine lifting, sinking, in-drawing, expelling. Quite suddenly I had begun to breathe again.

  My eyes opened a little on a cool, dim, greenish light. I thought it was the Jade, and was too weak to reach and touch it. I did not know where I was or remember what had happened. Again, I lay under a mountain, awaiting birth; the sequences had become mixed and inseparable.

  Yet the light was not green at all, clearing now, whitening. A little thud, and dust drifts dancing. I heard shouts and then a rattle of stone stuff coming down. Dust clouded gray, cleared, and sh
owed a great gap ahead of me, full of the whitish light, except where it was full of the silhouette of a man, leaning forward to me faceless. He gave a muffled exclamation, but the tongue was new to me, and it made no sense at this moment. A hand came groping toward my face, fastened on the silver mask.

  “Do not,” I said.

  I used the City speech, could recollect nothing else to use. He did not understand, but his hand snatched back from me, and he cried out in surprise. He had thought me dead, no doubt.

  He turned and wriggled from the hole they had made, and shouted to others. After a moment strong hands had a hold on my ankles and calves, and I was pulled unceremoniously out of my grave into the harsh searing brilliance of day. I had enough strength to get one arm up to shield my blinded watering eyes, and, in this position, I lay for their inspection, my stained and ripped mantle of yellow Eshkorek velvet rucked up about my thighs, and under that the filthy streamers which had once been fine silken undergarments.

  After a while, one of them laughed—I did not particularly blame him—and observed something to the others. This time I seemed able to grasp—not what he said, but the tongue he used. It was new to me, quite new, and yet a far-off echo sounded, something I recognized. . . . I lifted my arm a fraction, and stared up at three men. They wore wool leggings of dull reds and yellows, and leather belts and boots. To the waist they went naked except for armless leather jackets, and their brown, hard bodies were vivid with tattoos of many colors, and scars of many shapes. Tribesmen, speaking a language different from, yet with a tenuous kinship to, the tongue of the Plains. Against the assault of the blazing sky, I struggled to see faces, lean and set, long grim mouths, wide-spaced eyes a salty blue. Their hair, more than blond, was reddish, and not bound in clubs or cut short, but woven into five or more thick plaits behind the ears, held out of the eyes by a circular strip of painted cloth stretched around the head.