by Janet Morris
I remembered a time in Nemar North, with Chayin, when I had revealed to him that I was at war with his father, god of that land. And he had named himself spawn of chaos. “‘Out of fear’s belly did I come,’” he had said then. I shivered.
“‘Son of dark gods, son of life / She between them blessed with light,’” I said. The words came from me slowly, involuntarily, as if dragged up from some primal foreknowing spirit pit, like the child that knows, in paralyzing realization, that this time that which lurks in the dark is no phantasm, but the reality of which phantasmic monsters are but racial memory.
In the Sword of Severance, there are four ors. They are concerned with a time of cleansing and rebirth come upon Silistra, indeed upon all the universe. And it is concerned with the instruments of that cleansing. And there is a sword, and a scabbard, and a hand to bear it. There are two men and a woman. And there are labors the extent of which have these thousands of years relegated the prophecy to the pertinence of epic drama.
“Some thought it fulfilled by the destruction of the surface cities,” Chayin said at last, uneasily shifting in his seat, as a brist might ramp back and forth at the smell of men.
“Would that I could believe that,” said Sereth. “If we make this journey, we will know for certain.”
“If?” I said, pushing away. I found my dry mouth in need of kifra. I raised hand to the girl. Sereth slid down lower upon his spine. He took his knife and with the blade cleaned his nails. The knife was all stra, hilt and blade both. Its butt caught the firelight.
“If we do not return from that land, we cannot be they.” A log burst, snarling sparks.
Chayin rubbed his left bicep, upon which, under the supple tas, was inscribed the slitsa wound about a recurved blade. His hand trailed to his shoulder, stayed long at his neck.
A very small part of that prophecy I knew we had fulfilled. Great harm had come upon Silistra from out of the south. We had come. We had been, the three of us, responsible for more deaths by violence than are normally written upon the Day-Keepers’ Roll in twenty Silistran years. And we had done it in little more than five. And the dying was not over. Those who tried the helsars—a good number of them would die.
Perhaps as many as had died at the Lake of Horns. I hoped not. Over two thousand Parsets invested the Lake of Horns. They killed close to their own number. More than a hundred of those corpses were children. I had not been at the burning. There had been too many to bury. The corpses, piled high, had been fired. A number of the restrained had thrown themselves, alive, onto those pyres. None moved to stop them. It had been Chayin’s order that those who were in lifelong restraint not be interfered with in any way. For those still living, there can be but little comfort.
“Carth,” said Chayin, “led the ceremony himself. Supported by two of his arrars, for he could not stand alone, he led the lake-born in prayer.” He had turned to Sereth, smiling. “I think you were right about him.” Another log burst. Chayin’s recollection of the pyres blazed bright before me.
“I hope so,” said Sereth, who had laid the dharen’s chald into Carth’s hands, along with his life and the Lake of Horns. Certain terms had Sereth and Chayin dictated to Carth, highest living of the dharen’s council. Those terms, Carth almost gratefully accepted. He ruled in regency for Sereth. The focus of his efforts was to be not the reconstruction of empire, but the fortification of the law within. As Khys, in his youth and brilliance, had envisioned it—before ego and power and hardship stripped him of his objectivity—Sereth would have it become. Sereth asked no alteration from Carth in the teachings of his master—only that those teachings be put truly into practice. Before Miccah, the high chalder, oaths had been sworn. And Sereth had taken up an arrar’s chald for himself, and one for me, and instructed Miccah as to their alteration.
And Carth had shaken his dark head, from which great clumps of hair had been singed away, and his demeanor had turned darker, but he had not spoken. He lived, spared by their mercy. That had been made clear to him. And yet he seemed to me not servile. Sereth, toying with arrar’s chald, had regarded him questioningly.
“Have you something to say?”
Carth, lying propped up against the austere wall of his own small keep, said, “Am I to exercise your authority as I see fit, or as I might conjecture that you would see fit?”
Sereth looked at him in that very chill countenance of his, Chayin shook his head as if his ears deluded him, that such impertinence and impropriety could come from a man who by all rights should have burned with his brothers. “What I want,” said Sereth very quietly and at length, “is no more than minimally difficult to understand. Since it is unacceptable to everyone but me that there be no dharen upon Silistra, and since I have no intention of staying here and being dharen, it falls to you. I can kill you, and it will fall to someone else. I would rather not. Be dharen—not as I might see fit or you might see fit, but as best serves Silistra. Keep a light hand upon her. Aid as best you can the helsar children; school them, counsel them, but above all keep cognizant of them. Teach restraint. Let the time go its own way awhile, that owkahen will settle ...” He broke off, unwound one hand from his chald, brushed hair from his eyes with it. The wound upon his skull was nearly healed. He frowned briefly at Carth, “If I thought you really did not know what was needed,” he said softly, as if disappointed, “I would use another. How we regard each other matters little at this time. You may think what you will of me, as long as it does not impair your judgment in my behalf. If you need me, send word. I will receive it.”
He rose up. “And recollect this well: it is to the south you must send in your need. Then, only, will you suffer any northerner to set foot there. Should there be any reprisals, we will in truth tear these buildings down, stone from off of stone, and Silistra will live beneath the beneficent hand of the chosen son of Tar-Kesa.”
Carth had turned away, though movement was costly to his bandage-swathed body, humped but hardly hidden beneath the couch clothes.
It was to Miccah he twisted. The white-haired high chalder, his seamed face distraught, hurried to his side. They whispered together. A cloud begrudged us even the slatted light streaming weakly through the six narrow windows.
Chayin motioned Sereth to him. They also conferred. It was this that had brought us to the lakeside so soon after Khys’s reliving. I had little attention for the moment that day. My flesh was racked with chills, and I could not more than huddle in this corner or that. So did I attend it, Carth’s assumption of the dharen’s chald, a set time after I had run from Sereth and my guilt. For better or worse, Carth, who had been once crell in the pits of Nemar, would rule from the Lake of Horns. On Brinar fourth fifth, 25,697, did a hase-enor, and a telepath, take up Silistra’s care.
The silence was long. Neither Sereth and Chayin, nor Carth and Miccah, seemed anxious to break it.
“Excuse him, lords.” Miccah straightened at last. His chins puffed as he worked his mouth. Confronting their austere authority, his message would not come forth.
“Excuse him,” he sprayed. Tiny bubbles formed where his lips met. His eyes darted here and there in their bloodshot milky pools. “I beg you. Carth has no more strength for words. In his last breath, he bade me tell you he will humbly and to the best of his ability carry out your will.” The words, springing forth all together in a jumble, were nearly unintelligible. Mouth agape, Miccah waited, hands thrust deep into his hide apron, feet wide and figure swaying. Still half in shock seemed Miccah, and yet grieving for the dharen.
Chayin, arms folded over his chest, looked at Sereth meaningfully. Then both turned to Carth, who lay in his body like a yra of binnirin grains in a two-stone sack.
“Is that what he said?” queried Chayin innocently.
“Yes,” affirmed the high chalder.
We can only hope that Carth will keep his proxy’s promise. What he does is done in Sereth’s name.
“Se’keroth, Se’keroth, direel b’estet Se’keroth,” growled the cahndor
, as the girl served me kifra. His eyes measured her as she leaned over to pour. She had evidently spoken to me. I had not heard. I had been with flame, once again.
“She is not yet well,” said Sereth, half to the innman’s girl and half to Chayin.
“Would you want three chambers, Se ... arrar?” I heard her through the sea pulse, breaking upon the jetties and my eardrums.
“Two,” Chayin said, “with access between.”
Sereth’s shifting, as he dug dippars from his pouch, was more immediate. I resettled myself against him.
“Re Dellin has been here, and left instructions that he be the first to know should you happen this way.” Under his gaze, she preened herself, patting her hair with a sturdy wrist.
“When?” Sereth was tense-stiff, his quietest.
“Just this rising,” she murmured, deferential, “if it should please you, arrar.”
“And if it should not?” he snapped.
Sereth tossed three coins. The third was titrium half-well. The girl smiled, eyes lowered demurely, Chayin twisted around in his seat as she bent to take them. She brushed against him. She hesitated, her breast against his shoulder, her fingers upon the coins. “Should I send him word, then?” she asked.
“No,” said Sereth.
“Se’keroth, indeed,” I whispered as the girl withdrew and gave me back view of the hearth. Others entered then, to dine and chase the salt chill from their bones.
My fingers found the arrar’s chald at my waist, and a certain knife that was sheathed upon the parrhide belt. In its hilt was a single gol drop. It had been given to me by Sereth, upon Mount Opir. Or its mate had. He had commissioned them, both alike, when I had been accounted dead. The gol drops in their hilts had been gift to us from a golachit we had aided, high in the gollands of the Sabembe range. Khys had taken them from us. We had, upon rediscovering them, learned the faithfulness with which the weaponsmith had followed the Ebvrasea’s intention: “Tempered and made the same, so that one may not be told from the other, Se’keroth.”
At length, we each took one. There was no telling them apart.
The fired blade must be quenched in ice. We would not reach the eastern shore much before winter solstice, first first of Orsai.
I sat up, away from Sereth. Chayin looked at me, pensive, expectant.
“There is no proof. Beware use by prophecy in search of fulfillment,” I warned him, knowing that if any could have warded off such forces, that one was no longer among us. He caught my thought, for he glared at me severely. I shrank back, upon reflex, from his displeasure. Then straightened. I had made no secret of my hesitancy to undertake this, or any, journey. They had both separately informed me that a time of peace and reflection was not in the sort. I think, rather, it is not in their natures.
The cahndor massaged that old wound, often his prelude to speech. It has long since ceased to pain him, but the habit remains. He seemed on the verge of comment when the innman’s girl again approached. With her she bore a rolled document—documents, actually two, the larger serving as post around which the smaller had been wound. Then the whole, the larger, orangish fax, diapered with bone-white parchment, had been bound up in a strip of tas, upon which the Liaison’s device was stamped in gold. One newly seated guffawed over his mug, across the room. His fellows joined in.
It lay upon the striped ragony, amid the wet rings and crumbs of our meal.
Sereth only regarded the girl, who without breaking her silence laid two brass keys beside the tas-bound tube.
She seemed to quiver all over, like a startled crier poised upon invisible wings above some scum-choked pond. “He said,” she gave forth at last, “that if you would answer ‘no,’ I was to give you this.” Her eyes had swelled to the size of copper dippars. She seemed flesh-locked, under his scrutiny.
“And you have done so,” he said, tossing his head. The movement seemed to free her. She staggered slightly, like one who, long pushing upon some aged, recalcitrant door, stumbles forward in surprise when at last rusted hinges recollect their task. And like that door her retreating steps were jerky, as if she had long forgotten her body’s command. She drifted between the tables, toward the men seated by the far wall.
None of us spoke for a long while. I looked after the innman’s girl, now wiping her brow like one come out of a fever. She had seen—what? She did not know: a glowing, as of eyes more than mortal; two great beasts, abattle beneath a sky transformed; a room of seven corners, in whose center a spiral bound a woman in flame. She trembled. It ran from her head downward like a dorkat shedding water. It was a mark, only, she had seen, some odd bejeweling upon the foreign woman. I pulled my mind away, my fingers finding that device I still bore—the Shaper’s seal, and Khys’s most audacious statement of disrespect. He had appropriated it, as he had mimicked their councils and assessments. If I chose, I knew, I could divest myself of it. As yet, I have not done so. Upon a certain scale, it has value, as does even the most painful of remembrances, and on another, I have a right to bear it. And no move so simple as removing the dharen’s device from my flesh will erase from Chayin’s mind, or Sereth’s, or mine, what Khys, in his battle against the father’s will, chose to do with us. What will they say of him, those like the woman who still regarded me across the inn’s common room? And of us? Will we be turned by the ineluctable chroniclers of events into liberators or villains? Those for whom such wars are waged have not yet breathed their first breaths, had said Chayin to me. And yet, the validity of Khys’s sphere of restraint, the helsars’ final testing, the loosing of the lake-born onto Silistra all loom imminent; as in Se’keroth, they approach, bringing with them that judgment of which all words will speak. Such as she would see a legion more of us, all bearing in our genes the legacy of Khys’s bestowal.
“What think you of this,” rumbled Chayin, poking once at the missive, then again, each touch pushing the tube closer to Sereth.
“‘And all the worlds of creation hearkened, and some even lent their hand unto the task. Let them be blessed,’” I recited dully, as Sereth’s stra blade severed the tas, halving the M’ksakkan seal. The parchment, with a will of its own, uncurled from about the longer tube of fax and lay like some cornice upon the ragony.
He pulled it out, spread it flat. His elbows on the table, he scanned it. Then he put his head in his hands. After a time I took it from him.
When I had read it, I passed the parchment to Chayin. It had taken up water from the table, and some of the words blurred indistinct as if they would disappear from the page. A wayward gust howled down the flue. The lamps’ flames cowered.
Dellin played his part well. After greeting, his message was sparse of words:
My appreciation for my life, and that of my world, also. Notwithstanding, I must, while I do live, perform my function. Enclosed find maps and intelligence pertinent to that journey which I have been informed you will undertake. It is my hope that you will accept them in the spirit of the giving, and take heed to my requests.
Be those men and women you seek alive, I ask you to return them unharmed to us. It is upon me to discipline my own people. M’tras, or I, or both, would most willingly accompany you, that they be bloodlessly apprehended.
I have long been charged with the care of Tyith’s son. I could find no way to broach the subject under those circumstances you must well remember. I am bound unto that duty. I do not seek relief of it, but inform you lest you learn it from another and mistake my silence for ill intention.
Presti, m’it tennit. I will be at the Harth’s Nest upon the Street of Greaves until Decra third first.”
And at the bottom, above his seal, he gave Sereth tasa.
Chayin threw it. It sailed upon a current, to drift to the floor by my foot. Sereth raised his head and reached for the fax.
What had the serving girl seen upon us? She who now leaned against the hearthside, what could she have known of us? Were we so set apart now, that any could see it?
And Dellin, who knew lit
tle enough of Silistra that the whole extent of his knowledge might rattle around in some child’s thimble, how came he to serve owkahen’s will?
“Will you see him?” asked Chayin, his eyes devouring the map of that land which no Silistran cartographer had ever charted.
“No, I have what I need.”
His voice echoed, forlorn, up from the abyss. I touched his arm. He took me in under it. We gave each other warmth there, as one can in certain moments when the barriers between spirit and spirit turn thin with remembered grief.
It has passed now, that aching time for us. The sea has salved our wounds. We have found new ways to look upon each other, freed from the shades of loss.
He has said to me, so soft, holding me in the night with the world’s womb rocking us gently, that he would not have it otherwise, that he is content.
Chayin bespoke it: If owkahen, or prophecy, or the fathers use us, what of it? If we come to be such instruments, we shall do so of our own will. So is it, always. It is the self that predestines, the mind that compels.
Khys fell to Estrazi, knowing that he would. As long as he fought them, that long did he create his own ending. A man, disoriented, running at dusk in the forest, circles and comes at last to that same brist-shaped rock from which he first took flight. Had he gotten me with child and presented me pregnant to my father when first I set out to discharge the chaldra of the mother, it would have fallen out the same. Did he know, then, all or only part? And how goes such choosing, upon what scales might such decisions be weighed?
Might we come to learn, upon this shore, of such burdens? Perhaps. It was Khys’s will that we come here. He took time to put his affairs in order. He designated his successor. In deference to some rhythm heard by his ears only, he passed from us. We must seek what we may.