He would not answer for a long time. I let my silent persistence drum at him, and at last an image formed. A sweep of torjer tussocks, two cavalry camps, picketed horses, the smoke of fires. And beyond them, as if I looked from behind the troops, high on the shivering horizon, Eskan Helken’s towers made a red blotch in the haze.
At that all my pent strain and terror burst. “You have to kill them!” I burst out. “It’s not just Hethria now—it’s them or us!”
Another storm was brewing in the adjacent north. The first gust of wind lifted his matted hair, but nothing else moved. He sat against a finlythe, knees pulled up, arms clasped about them, head laid sidelong on top, and his eyes were alive, furiously, convulsively alive, in a death-mask of a face.
He said on a sort of sigh, “There are thirty thousand men out there. Are you proposing I should kill them all?”
“Not all, no! Just enough to show you can. Just the cavalry, they’re the danger, once they get here it’s the end of everything. You’ll see—when a few die, the rest will balk. Estarians’ll do a lot for three gold ingots, but they won’t do that!”
His eyes did not waver. “They’ll be executed for cowardice if they withdraw.”
Words died on my lips. Then I set my teeth. “Kill them, then. You must.”
“And the reserves on the Gebros?”
“Them too, if they come!”
“And go on killing as they come, until I empty Estar? Until every man, woman and child of them is dead?”
It was the donkey’s choice, as Kastir would describe an argument carried to absurdity, and it drove me to absurdity too. “Yes! Yes! Kill every last one if you have to! And you do have to—you must!”
He said quietly, “You have lost your wits.”
It was all I needed to do exactly that. I plunged to my feet and screamed at him like the veriest harridan.
“It’s you who’s crazy and you have been from the start! You wouldn’t avenge Zem, you wouldn’t kill Kastir, you wouldn’t stop the troops or turn the storms or get help from Beryx or pull out of here—over and over I’ve told you what would happen and you ignored it and now see where you are! The country’s overrun, the people you’re supposed to save are being slaughtered, Kastir has Everran and his command again, there’s an army on your doorstep, Assharral that belongs to your supposed—friends!—is at risk, I’m at risk, you’re at risk—Hethria’s fallen apart like a mud hut in a thunderstorm and it’s too late to save it any other way. And all you can say is, ‘You’ve lost your wits!’ Oh, if I only had! But even then I wouldn’t sit and watch Hethria torn to pieces for the sake of a few cursed principles—for the sake of your crazy, useless, nonsensical, milk-and-water Math!”
His head came up. His eyes shot a single warning flash. He said with brutal clarity, “Be quiet.”
“I won’t! I can talk sense if I’m not allowed to act on it!”
“You do not”—he bit off each word—“talk sense at all. You talk scurvy pragmatic politicians’ filth. And I will tell you once and for all, I’ll have my throat cut before I deny Math.”
“And you’ll see those fiends out there cut mine, no doubt! And my family’s. And Karyx’s family and all the rest of them. Let the rivers run blood, so long as your principles are dry!”
His face went harsh, stiff, and deadly dangerous. He said, almost silkily, “Must I make you quiet?”
He could do it. He would.
With a gigantic effort, I forced myself to be calm. My voice came out cold as his.
“I will be quiet in a moment. I’ve one last thing to say. I thought you were an aedr. That you could do anything. That,” I choked, hearing it in Zem’s laughing, teasing, mortal voice, “you were invulnerable. The truth is, you have no power. You hide behind Math, you say it forbids you to do things—but really you can’t do anything at all!”
He came to his feet in one smooth lunge and his eyes took fire as I had seen them in the throes of Ruanbrarx, molten, phosphoric white. He put out a hand, pointing down the slope.
“Go down there.” He spoke softly, silkily, with a wholly terrifying gentleness. “I am going to do something now. And I would not want you hurt.”
From pure innate contrariness, I balked. His eyes flamed. A giant’s fist gripped me, turned me about, and literally catapulted me down the hill.
Chapter X
I cried, of course. Crouched among the well ferns, cursing the blithely indifferent saeveryrs, I cried with rage, and fright, and chagrin, and grief, for myself and Zam and the Sathellin and Hethria, because he had not had the sense to accept necessity in time, because I had driven him to the-Four-knew-what folly with a blatant lie, because I had let my stupid, vicious tongue run away with me once too often. Because we would die in the next day or two, and die estranged.
The storm rumbled away in the north, louder, louder, with unnerving pauses between the thumps, and Eskan Helken lay in the shadow of its burgeoning, deathly, eerily quiet. I dropped my tears in the well till they ran dry. Then I sat a while, in an effort to compose myself. Then I faced my own bitter necessity at last.
Then I got up and began to clamber, step by step, back up the hill. Whether he threw me out or incinerated me or we both died tomorrow, one thing was imperative. I had to apologize.
Head down, I plodded by the last ferns, the gully fold, the furrows left by ancient garden plots, on to the finlythes’ shade. Zam was not there. He must have gone to the cave. I lifted my head, unnecessarily gauging the distance, and stopped. Something was happening, above me, on the path.
The sun was low enough to reach under the northern cloud, and though the storm loomed over Eskan Helken the pocket itself still blazed with sweltering afternoon light. In weird contrast to that airborne turmoil of dazzling white and bulging black, the green foliage and coppery rock were lit vividly but normally, stark above their shadows, precise and sharp. There was no dust to blur the air. The wind had stopped. Not a leaf tapped on the finlythes, not a stalk bent among the grass. Except for that one place, everything lay breathless in the storm hush, which is tense with threat as well as expectancy.
Whatever was going on up there was not heat-haze, as I had at first supposed. Yet there was a sort of eddy in the air, a turbulence, a swirl of transparency, vaguely reminiscent of the whirlpool in Zam’s eyes.
I blinked, and in that blink it was there. The figure of a man, standing on the path.
Or so I thought at first. But there was something wrong with its stance, as if it were out of plumb with the ground. Moreover, the edges would not settle into focus, they had the continual crisp and waver of heat above a fire. And though the clothes were still the entire figure moved, as a sheet of paper ripples in a draft.
Too puzzled for fear, I blinked again. The figure of a man, in a long black robe mottled with ash, hands folded on his breast. . . .
My breath caught. There was a huge wound, wet, open, manifestly a death blow, in the side of his throat. I gasped and my eyes shot to his face.
It was marble-white, set as in death, a proud, cold, nobly boned face, but with a hint of the raptor that chilled me more than the wound. The eyes were closed. But as I watched, they opened. And whatever it was looked at me.
The eyes were white, all white, but there were irises, for they were defined by the prick and sift of red and golden fire, like the heart of a great white maerian gem. It was a movement I recognized. The aedric mobility.
Some things can be so abnormal the impulse of fear does not pertain. Yet I know now that my calmness was unnatural too. As I stared, another shape materialized beside the first.
It was a man as well. The neck was twisted awry. The mouth bore a restless, reckless, defiant smile, and that same smile shot white blades like lightning through the narrow black eyes. I did not notice the clothes, for a third figure had appeared beyond them, a woman with a riot of cornelian curls and gold-shot black eyes and a huge hideous bruise on her throat.
Others crowded them, a white-skinned, black-eyed m
an as lithe and sleek and deadly as a water-snake, a woman with russet eyes and a positive cloak of cornelian hair, more and more of them, all sharing a family resemblance. But then another figure appeared, well to their left, and it was quite different.
It was another man, but the hair was coppery gold, flung back from the brows as with the wind of violent speed, and the eyes were green, an intense spitting green that leapt from the thin eagle’s face. I never saw such a ruthless face. If it was a predator, it was a predator on an elemental scale, volcanic in its passions, tempestuous in the mere passage of its thoughts.
Beside it appeared a man with the same bones but with golden hair and vivid sparkling blue eyes, and a mouth that smiled with caustic bitterness. The next had copper hair and green eyes; but his were fine black brows, and that face was a caricature of the master design, the violence decayed to slow, cruel, conscious wickedness. Then came a woman with the green eyes under a cap of silver hair and the passion transmuted to a bland ungovernable willfulness. I shivered, seeing her, and thanked the Four I had been born female, to escape such a woman’s snare.
More and more figures crowded round them or formed fresh groups, too quickly to note individuals, but a great many bore wounds that spoke of a violent death. One group reminded me elusively of Zam, except their eyes were less gray than the white of midwinter hail. In another group I recall a woman with eyes the luminous gray of fenghend gems amid a cloud of charcoal hair, a man in chain mail with the same eyes and a hideous red mash for the lower part of his face, a white-haired man whose green eyes had a cat’s cruel, impassive stare. And then I recognized a face.
Gray eyes, limpid as rainwater, arrogant bones, silver hair, hands folded on a blue desert robe. Fengthira, as Zam had shown me her in Phathire.
I must have known then, without admitting it. The spell snapped, and I was not merely frightened but caught in an overmastering terror that silenced reason and overbore reflex and drowned everything in one panic urge to run. I spun round, and recoiled.
There were more behind me. In perfect silence they had gathered, eight, ten, fifteen groups of them. The circle was shut.
I swung wildly to the front. The circle had contracted, though none of them appeared to move.
I backed. This time the circle closed in, visibly. I was looking straight at the first green-eyed man and there was life in those eyes now, they saw me, there was a reaction, and it was cruelty, pure, gloating cruelty, the eyes of a big cat poised for the quarry to run.
There was a thud of feet. Something struck my back, a hand whirled me round, my face was driven into sweat-rank blue cloth and Zam shouted with his voice cracked in frenzy, “Not her, you fools! Not her!”
Then, faster still, stumbling as over an incantation, “Arskan vist, Asthyn! Helve.” And with an impulsion that nearly lifted me off my feet, “Sha. Sha! Go!”
From his shoulder’s motion he had shot his free hand out to point somewhere. As if on cue there was a stupendous crack of thunder, the short ear-tearing bolt that means something has been struck, and in pure reflex I drove my face deep into its shelter, not caring that I almost smothered, hearing the thunder of Zam’s heart louder than the thunder above.
* * * * * *
It seemed a long time before he took his hand from the back of my head and stepped away, letting out a long, shivery breath. His face was white, glistening with sweat, his eyes were dark as the fringes of the storm, dark with stress and the aftermath of some dreadful fear.
Though I knew we were alone, I dared not look away from him. I heard myself say in a tiny, cowed voice, “Who—was that?”
He looked down at me, still at a double remove. “Asthyn,” he said, as if I ought to know. “The Dead. The aedric Dead.”
The fear revived. In the heat of Hethrian day I was deadly cold.
“I called them,” he said.
“You—”
“You wanted me to do something, so I did. Ruagesthyn. It’s a Black Art. To call the dead.” He slapped the words at me now, with anyone else it would have been open vindictiveness. “If you go into Ammath you may as well go all the way.” He jerked his chin to the west. “I sent them out there.”
“What?” I said faintly. “Why. . . .”
“They are going to drive the Estarians out of Hethria. Not kill them outright, I did manage that. Though plenty will kill themselves. The Dead will send them mad, they’ll scatter in the desert, lose their way, or just run until they drop.” His mouth twisted. “There’s a legend come true for you. Don’t they sing in Everran of Lossian the ghostly Hunter, whose quarry is men’s souls? Did you see the green-eyed one with the black brows? That’s Lossian. He’ll be hunting real souls tonight.”
I could not help it. I recoiled. He looked at me with bitterness. Then he said, “I am a sorcerer. If I fight, it’s in the sorcerer’s way.”
That roused my wits. “No,” I said sharply. “You’re doing it the aedric way. Magic, not murder. If they die, it’s not your fault.”
The bitterness softened a little, so he just looked worn out. I stared round, at the lowering storm, the red rocks, the sunlit grass, the untenanted air. It had all happened too quickly for belief. “So it’s . . . over?”
“Not yet. You can’t run clear back to Everran in a night, even with Lossian on your trail. A few days.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes and added absently, “And, of course, the price.”
“Price?” I said sharply. “What price?”
“Nothing.” He was brusque. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is to save Hethria.” He set his jaw and stared out over the storm-shadowed desert. “Even at the expense of Math.”
Thinking I understood, I forgot all else.
“Zam,” I said, “I was coming to apologize. I shouldn’t have said—anything I said. It wasn’t true. It still isn’t true. You will save Hethria, and you won’t betray Math. No bloodshed, you said at the start. And there won’t be. At least, not the sort I wanted you to—I was wrong. You were right.”
He wore the oddest expression, as at an irony so bitter its only possible riposte was a laugh. I caught a flash of strong emotion that might have meant “. . . always generous. . . .” Then he said softly, “Yes? If you hadn’t said that, I would never have acted. Just sat there and been swamped.”
Then he glanced hurriedly away to the storm and finished, “Firewood. Hurry, or we will be swamped.”
* * * * * *
Those next few days were strange as a dream, the sort of dream where you wander in a strange land that is elusively familiar, a well-known place somehow changed. Zam slept most of the time, when he was not following events with farsight, but he did not offer to share it, and beyond ascertaining that the scheme had worked, I did not ask. Imagination was enough. Math or no Math, I thought, the Estarians’ fate had been poetically just.
Intellectually I understood the tide had turned, we were hopefully close to a decisive victory; but I could not feel anything, least of all euphoria, for Zam was oddly dejected, indeed quite morose. I put it down to the inevitable deaths; but he was also tense, nervy, jumping at noises, after the first exhaustion he slept very badly indeed, and at times he fell into a remote, unnatural calm that disturbed me deeply, for it reminded me of the old foresighted warriors before a battle they knew would be their last. Though I kept it suppressed, the word that hovered in the back of my mind was “fey.”
I was pottering over dinner the evening he came up from the finlythes, stood there a while, then said quietly, “It’s done.”
I jumped up. His face left joy stillborn.
“No more Estarians,” he said, “in Hethria. Live ones, that is.”
Presently I asked “Were many—killed?”
He pulled up his shoulders. “Enough. They’re trying to unravel the survivors in Everran now. Most are out of their minds.”
“Then you think—do you think—”
He gave a little snort. “If I tried to colonize a country that cost me over twelve thousand lives an
d a million gold rhodellin, and what turned out ghost-ridden was bare desert to begin with, I think I might call it a day.”
I drew a deep breath. “Then—it’s finished. Hethria’s safe.”
“Mm.”
I hesitated, my own impulse to shout, “Come on, let’s celebrate!” dashed by his lack of joy, of plain relief. And by a vague, ungrounded fear.
Making the best of things, I said, “If you fill the kettle, this will be ready soon.”
He nodded. But he still gazed down the slope to the towers of Eskan Helken, copper and lambent gold above the desert’s fading amber and lavender and indigo, and I had the curious impression that he was committing the image to memory, as if he would never see it again. Then it came to me that what his face showed was resignation: the look of a man consenting to some imminent, foreseen fate.
* * * * * *
Over the meal I tried to cheer him up, but he was on edge, as short and gruff as I had ever known him, once or twice almost snappish, so in the end I let it be. The fire crackled peacefully away between us, its light faint on Fengthira’s morrethans, mostly gone to seed, its sound a pleasant undertone in the silence of Eskan Helken that was now ratified, secure. Yet I could not feel at peace.
A parrasoth called far out over the desert, the bird of night, with its eerie keening wail. At the sound Zam looked up, looked past me, and before my eyes his face went white.
I spun about as I sat. Something was on the edge of the firelight, something like the shadow of a man.
“Be quiet,” Zam said without looking at me. “Don’t ask questions. Go in the cave.”
My muscles set in some terrible premonition. I sat on my heels and stared.
“Get up.” He struggled for control, of fear or temper I could not tell. “Go in the cave.”
With a huge bound my wits revived. “Tell me what it is,” I said. “Tell me—”
“It’s nothing to do with you—!”
“Tell me, or I don’t go anywhere.”
He shot me one whiplash glare, saw I meant it, and furiously gave in.
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