Overhead, the sky was melting into grayness, the stars dis-
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solving like salt cast on water. In the east, almost at my back, golden cracks were splintering the cloud.
I did not see it for a long while, the light behind me. the sky indigo ahead. But then the sun broke free and struck on it, and, I saw very well what I was hurrying to. About two miles away, the ground began to rise upward, and the paved road became a wide causeway, some fifty feet above the surrounding barrenness. A mile beyond that, two great pillars stood up on either side, made of dark stone, and the paving seemed reinforced and level. Beyond those, about five miles from me, the monotonous land had erupted into a great cliff, flat-topped and black as blindness. On the cliff’s summit stood the City.
It too was black, but the gleaming black of basalt and marble. The rearing spires and many-terraced roofs caught the sun like mirrors.
I held the horse still, and stared at it, breathing quickly. How old was the City? Old enough. It had stood in their time; they, the Old Ones, had been the builders of it, through the medium of their human slaves. There was no repulsion in me, no fear. Only the need to be there among the glittering darknesses.
The horse leaped under my hands and feet, and rushed forward toward the causeway.
I had no thought I would see them on the road, but I had forgotten that many chained men move more slowly than a single rider, however hard they are flogged.
It had been a fast ride-the paving even underfoot. Between the dark pillars, very tall, crowned with the carvings of flames and phoenixes picked out in gold. The light was full and harshly bright now. Abruptly I saw the crawling shape ahead, a mile away, the black riders and the stumbling men, linked together by dull metal. The captive wagoners and the band that had come for them, the men with swords who had stabbed me in the heart, which to them meant death.
I kicked the horse, and it ran forward again. Its pace tended to slacken whenever I ignored it. The air sang, and the shapes of the desert rushed by. The unpleasant procession in front drew nearer and nearer.
Three black soldiers, riding at the back, heard me first. They turned swiftly, and the sun ignited whitely on their silver skull-masks. One let out a startled cry. They floundered their horses around in confusion, drawing their swords. But it was an impotent gesture. Had they not killed me once be-
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fore? The halting rhythm of the march broke up entirely. The captives’ gray faces turning, men grunting in despair, surprise, pain. The useless flick of the whips even now. Then twenty of the black soldiers riding back to confront me, one of them seeming to be their new captain, the thick armlet of twisted black and golden metals on his right arm now.
I reined the horse in, and sat looking at them. They were faceless, yet so was I. Thirty men in all, and I was not afraid. I felt only contempt. They and I knew how little was the damage they could do me.
The silence lasted a long while. Then one of them broke out breathlessly: “She was dead-Mazlek killed her. I saw the blade go in through her left breast-she fell.”
“Yes,” another added urgently. “Mazlek, then my own blade. I put it in her belly. She was lying in her own blood. She didn’t move. Still lying there at dawn when we took them out of the hall. She was dead.”
“Be silent!” the new captain roared. His voice was iron, but he was afraid like all the rest. “You were mistaken.”
“They were not mistaken,” I said to him quite softly. “Your men killed me, and the steaders buried me. But now I am here, and I am whole, and I am alive. These people you have in chains are mine. Where are you taking them?”
“To the citadel,” their captain said, “to serve as soldiers in the war, under the Javhovor of Ezlann, the great city ahead of you. This is no business of yours.”
At their use of the ancient tongue, the ancient title, I was filled with fury. I knew they were not of the Old Race, though they strove so hard to emulate them.
“Who is this man that dares to carry the name of HighLord? Are you his?”
An incredible sensation of Power came with the anger. I felt them shrivel before it.
“We are soldiers of the High Commander of the Javhovor,” the captain said hoarsely. “You see our strength. Turn back and we will not harm you.”
“Harm?” I said. “Will you kill me again?”
There was a new silence. The dry desert wind hissed by.
“Let go these men you have taken,” I said, “or I will kill them, one by one, before you. They are mine. Either Death or I will have them, not you or your lord.”
“If you’re their witch, you seem to care little enough for them. Better a chance of life in the war than death, here and now.”
“They mean nothing to me,” I said, “but they are mine.
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Either Death or I will have them.” And it was true. I felt no compulsion, only great anger and great Power.
The captain cleared his throat. With a mailed fist he struck the dagger hilt in his belt.
“The woman is mad,” he said. “She has no weapon. Let the desert deal with her. Turn!” he shouted. The men wheeled. And waited, their backs to me, uneasy. “On!” the captain called. Dust clouded up under the metal-shod hooves, the dragging feet and chains.
A white heat rose from my belly and filled my brain. I felt my skull would split open if I could not let it free. A blinding white pain gushed from my eyes. My hands clenched into knots of agony and fury. I stretched them above my head, I rose in the stirrups, my whole body arched and straining as I screamed after them the single word.
A jagged sheet of numbed color flared on the causeway. Horses shrilled and reared. The ground rumbled and shook. Thunder and cold heat eclipsed the world.
Only my horse stayed still, a rock beneath me. The pain had gone out of me, leaving me weak, trembling and sick. I straightened myself with an effort, and opened my eves, which instantly ran water and would not focus. The black soldiers and their horses were in chaos, men thrown, animal bodies lurching and kicking. The wagon men had toppled in neat rows among their chains. Their skin seemed drained of all color, and a sort of silver deposit, fine as dawn frost, lay over them and the ground about them. They were all quite dead.
I was near to vomiting, giddy and ill. It took me a while to notice that the black men had fallen on their knees on the causeway, dragging off their skull-masks to reveal arrogant, well-set features and silver-pale hair. The captain approached me very slowly, a handsome man, his face, like the rest, cruel and cold, but now stripped’ naked like the rest.
“Forgive us,” he said, kneeling in the dust before me. “We have waited long for you. So long, we have grown unthinking.” And then he spoke my name, the healer’s name I thought at first, and then I knew the difference, for he repeated it over and over, a sibilant hissing word, the “U” softened now to the “O” sound of the Old Tongue. “Forgive us, Uastis. goddess, Great One, forgive us, who have erred, Uastis, goddess. …”
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2
It is difficult now to explain that I felt at that time no aneuish or remorse of any kind at what I had done. There can be no atonement made now in words. Yet the murder had brought its own punishment. As if in the throes of some violent illness, I swung in my saddle, sick, half-blind, half-deaf, shaking uncontrollably, my body running, my clothes and hair dank with icy sweat. But still the sense of Power; no defeat. This was only a temporary disorder. The black soldiers flanked me, once more masked. The dead wagoners they had left for whatever predatory life might exist in this barren place.
The wind whistled.
We did not ascend the farthest stretch of the causeway which led upward to the burning black gates of Ezlann, the Dark One. Instead there was a rock shelf, wide enough to take five men riding abreast, which ran away around the body of the cliff. Finally, a gaping arch-mouth, dim greenish torchlight in the walls, a ramp sloping down, then upward. In places there were iron gates with a mechanism that responded to certain pressures from the armlet of twisted metals. All this I saw, but did not question until much later. The last gate was not iron but water, a curtain of it, but they could control that too, it seemed, for great slabs closed over above our heads, and shut it off until we were through.