He smiled.
“You forget, goddess. We are brother and sister, you and I. When this is finished, we will have another duty to our ancestors, besides the duty of Rule. How else does Power return and spread except through new life? We will make children together, and our Race will be reborn.”
I stared at him. He seemed emotionless, yet very certain. If a man had spoken in this way to me at that moment, in that time of my own hubris, I might have killed him, but I did not dare to set my own fledgling Power against the mature capabilities of Vazkor.
“I am I,” I said to him, “so enorr so. A woman, perhaps, but not a vessel of your pride.”
He smiled again, not very much. He was indifferent to my individuality. It had no place in his scheme of things. I was abruptly afraid, the familiar terror of being caught in another’s will, having no person but the person they countenanced, existing because of them, dead at their death, as I had felt I should be at Barak’s ending, without fully realizing it.
I turned away and went from the room, and he did not try to stop me.
It was easy for me to find the black, chill hall of the statue. It was a model in miniature of the great Temple of
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the City of Ezlann. I had learned that all high officials and lords possessed their own private replica.
Having entered, I was not sure why I had come. I walked into the darkness, and soon could see quite well the pillars, the ornate ironwork, the veiled giant woman of gold.
Before her, on the altar, the flame stirred in its stone bowl.
Going forward, I waited for fear to come, but fear did not come at all. Had the years of nonrealization emptied the power of Karrakaz from the flame? Even as I thought it, a little movement came in the back of my brain, a little whisper.
“I am here.”
Yet still, there was no terror. I went close to the stone bowl and looked down into it, at the white light. Yes, I could sense Karrakaz, and yet a Karrakaz quite changed. I did not feel a terrible power come from the bowl, only a tremor of presence. I, now, it seemed, was the more powerful. This being could not ever match me.
“Karrakaz,” I said aloud.
The flame flattened and twisted on itself.
Suddenly I was happy, and unafraid. I was invincible. If this thing could not awe me, what was he, Vazkor, brother who-feared-me? Involuntarily my hands went to the cat mask, but I checked. I had not yet broken the curse; the face of ugliness was still on me, and until I found the Jade and abruptly I knew that my new power was as strong as the Jade, that I had no need of the Jade, that I could defeat everything that troubled me, bit by bit, and by my own will alone. I knew. Elation. For the first time, the sense of being.
Strange, that when we feel we understand all things, we understand nothing. Strange, that when we feel we understand nothing, we have begun, at last, to understand.
4
He came to me in the morning, after my one and only meal of the day, which did not consist of food but of a drink, very like wine in its taste. It contained all the nourishment my body required, and was the first wholly digestible substance I had consumed. No longer the torturing pains in my stomach which had followed every morsel of food until now.
Vazkor looked at me through the wolf’s red glass glare,
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and said, ‘Tomorrow. The Festival of the Golden Eye. The whole City will fill the Temple of Uastis. That is the day their goddess will wake. I hope you understand.”
“You will make it your business to see that I do,” I said.
He came toward the ebony table, picked up the slender silver beaker, and turned it by its polished stem.
“I have not yet seen your face,” he said.
“No,” I said, “nor is there any need you should.”
“There is a need,” he said.
He drew off the wolf’s head, put it on the table, and stood looking at me, waiting.
I recalled Darak, who twice had dragged the mask from me and left me burned and naked. Yet I had no terror now. Yes, let him see what Karrakaz had done to me, and be afraid of it. I lifted the mask from me, and held it loosely in one hand. I looked at him, level, and it did not distress but pleased me when his eyes widened, his face whitened. I smiled at him.
“Now you have seen,” I said. “Remember it.”
He turned away and I laughed gently, and covered myself again, laughing.
I had been in Ezlann seventeen days, and had seen only the gardens and the tower palace, nothing more. No window gave access. Each was a view in itself, a jewel, an art-form; what need, then, for it to show anything beyond its own beauty? Yet now I was to see the City, walk in it, and finally possess it.
The Festival of the Golden Eye fell at the same time each year, in the long month they called White Mistress, because soon the snow would come to cover the wilderness of the desert with a new and cleaner death. The festival would last three days, days of entertainment, music, pleasure and, never to be forgotten, worship of the Lost, and of their representative Uastis.
All through the day there had been much happening in Ezlann-so he told me. But, now that the sun was setting, they were moving toward the great Temple, and we must move with them. Vazkor had told me all I must do, and I felt no apprehension, only a slight amusement and languor, which I did not yet realize were false. High Commander as he was, he would ride behind ten of his own soldiery, flanked on either side by five, and followed by twenty maidens, and, walking, a final cavalcade of thirty captains. At the portico of the Temple he would wait on the, arrival of the Javhovor
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and his own personal guard. The soldiers would remain with him, the maidens would withdraw inside the building. I, following the maidens, would slip away from them, once inside, into a passage he had told me of, and there one would meet me-a priest, but Vazkor’s. It was quite simple, and I was not troubled.
Dressed like the other maidens in black robes, which left bare the breasts and arms, wearing like them a silver mask shaped like a flower-oval at the center with stiff petals framing the face, and a full wig of silver hair hanging behind-I followed Vazkor, among the sounds of harness, marching feet, the rhythmic chant sung by the women, along the dark corridors, out into the City.
Each City had its own color, and because Ezlann was built entirely of black stone, they had taken it as their tradition to use black furniture and to wear black clothes. Now the world which was Ezlann seemed strange and very lovely. The son was down, and the sky flooded by a deep gray-pink gloaming against which the endless pinnacled silhouettes of the City rose back, in a detail fine and sharp as a thorn. Ahead, humped like the back of an animal asleep, a tall hill, and on the hill the Temple, row upon row of circular terraces set one on the other, growing smaller as they reached higher, until they gained the climax of an open dome where a watchlight glittered like a cool green eye. Toward the Temple wound the endless separate processions, all black, yet spangled with the soft stars of their lamps and tapers and torches. All through the upward streets of Ezlann the dark slow crowds, like black, lamp-sparkling water flowing the wrong way, curved and trickled back to their source.
Stars pierced the sky as we walked. I sang the chant with the maidens around me, a chant to Uastis to whom “the brave and the fair come to bring homage.”
We reached the Temple hill, and the crowds lining the streets eased and were gone. Marble flagstones, and then the vast building, so huge now that we were close to it, the portico above its forty shallow steps like the great open mouth of some monster.
The maidens slid aside. A smaller archway, dim light, the rustling of our robes. To the left a passageway opened, its walls painted with lotuses and vines. Swiftly I turned into it. The women went by me, unseeing, drugged by the strange plant wine of the south, and by their chanting and belief.
It grew darker the farther into the passage I went, until a small light appeared ahead of me. As I came nearer, the light