“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
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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 wav? 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 gainfully. 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
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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 the 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.
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“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.
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“Vazkor,” I repeated, “you are a human man. You can die.”