“You forget what Asren told you, goddess. There was an assassin who stabbed me mortally and I survived.”
“Because you willed it,” I said.
“And I shall cease wanting life?”
“Yes, when you can no longer order it.”
I saw the fire leap from his pupils, clear this time, and very bright, and the deep fury answered from the core of my brain. A shaft shot out, blazing, and caught his little death-wish for me, and contained it, and turned it. I seemed much larger than Vazkor, taller, burning. I felt his Power shrivel and draw back, and I pressed after it, pursuing it into the very brain-cave of its lair, into the dark places of Vazkor’s mind. And there I found the diamond spark of his knowledge, down the black corridors of the skull, which in most of mankind are closed and empty, but which in Vazkor were open and alive. I found the spark, the little hard, bright stone, and I scorched it to ashes, destroyed it without compunction, because he had claimed he was my brother, and was only a man.
I drew back. The light faded. I felt small and empty and afraid. By the pillar Vazkor stood, and I saw what I had done to him. I called out his name, but he only stared at me. His eyes nickered, as the blinded inner eye swiveled desperately to each of those doors of ability I had closed forever. As he had killed that part of Asren’s brain which made him a thinking man, so I had killed that part of Vazkor’s which made him a magician, and a god. The Power in him was dead.
I do not know if he was aware of what he did. He took several steps backward, and the last unbalanced him over the lip of the black moat pool. Hardly a splash, the water was so thick and turgid. And then a little dazzling movement all around him, as though the water itself were running to welcome a guest.
Vazkor screamed. The water reddened, sparkled. Vazkor screamed.
I put my hands over my ears and turned away, and began to scream also.
Silence came, only the drip of the water sounded. The liquid of the pool was black, and empty.
“Asren,” I called softly, “we are safe now.”
I was weeping and could not see properly. I found the lynx mask, and put it on, and stumbled across the straw toward
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him. The noise had terrified him. I put my arms around him, and rocked him gently in the dark.
The cannon began quite suddenly. I had forgotten them.
At first the noise seemed far away, thunder beyond the hills. Soon other noises came, bursting and tearing sounds, the thud of rooms collapsing above.
Smoke drifted through to us, and a dull red light. There were great cracks spreading on the vault above. At the far end of the hall, a pillar split slowly from end to end, buckled and collapsed. The gray avalanche gushed through.
Asren whimpered. I pressed his head to my breast, leaned over him as best I could, sheltering him with my body.
A great roaring came swooping to us like a bird of prey. For the first time I felt terror as the ceiling sagged and broke above me. Delicate little pieces scattered like a fine rain, and then the slabs broke away from the flooring overhead.
There was no more time to be afraid.
BOOK THREE
Part I: Snake’s Road
1
There had been blackness, and in the blackness: nothing. Now, still closed in the dark, I began to hear a single sound, rhythmically repetitive, a tireless engine lifting, sinking, indrawing, expelling. Quite suddenly I had begun to breathe again.
My eyes opened a little on a cool, dim, greenish light. I thought it was the Jade, and was too weak to reach and touch it. I did not know where I was, or remember what had happened. Again, I lay under a mountain, awaiting birth; the sequences had become mixed and inseparable.
Yet the light was not green at all, clearing now, whitening. A little thud, and dust drifts dancing. I heard shouts and then a rattle of stone stuff coming down. Dust clouded gray, cleared, and showed a great gap ahead of me, full of the whitish light, except where it was full of the silhouette of a man, leaning forward to me, faceless. He gave a muffled exclamation, but the tongue was new to me, and it made no sense at this moment. A hand came groping toward my face, fastened on the silver mask.
“Do not,” I said.
I used the City speech, could recollect nothing else to use. He did not understand, but his hand snatched back from me, and he cried out in surprise. He had thought me dead, no doubt.
He turned and wriggled from the hole they had made, and shouted to others. After a moment strong hands had a hold on my ankles and calves, and I was pulled unceremoniously out of my grave into the harsh searing brilliance of day. I had enough strength to get one arm up to shield my blinded
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watering eyes, and, in this position, I lay for their inspection, my stained and ripped mantle of yellow Eshkorek velvet rucked up about my thighs, and under that the filthy streamers which had once been fine silken undergarments.
After a while, one of them laughed-I did not particularly blame him-and observed something to the others. This time I seemed able to grasp-not what he said, but the tongue he used. It was new to me, quite new, and yet a far-off echo sounded, something I recognized…. I lifted my arm a fraction, and stared up at three men. They wore wool leggings of dull reds and yellows, and leather belts and boots. To the waist they went naked except for armless leather jackets, and their brown, hard bodies were vivid with tattoos of many colors, and scars of many shapes. Tribesmen, speaking a language different from, yet with a tenuous kinship to, the tongue of the Plains. Against the assault of the blazing sky, I struggled to see faces, lean and set, long grim mouths, wide spaced eyes a salty blue. Their hair, more than blond, was reddish, and not bound in clubs or cut short, but woven into five or more thick plaits behind the ears, held out of the eyes by a circular strip of painted cloth stretched around the head.
I was very confused still, but this new awakening was beginning to make sense. I lolled my head a little, and made out other, similarly adorned males, going to and fro among the wreckage of the fallen tower. Looters, not rescuers. What had I expected? And if they had come so far in order to glory in this collapse of a piece of City power, they would have no time for a woman of that City, half-dead and apparently worth nothing. They would strip my rings and the silver mask, for these were all part of the tower pickings, and then they would ride off and leave me to my fate, or else, perhaps, run a spear through me to help me to it. Unless, of course, they had a fancy for a high-born slave.
They were talking again, and I forced myself to hear what they said. This time the pattern came clear and strong, and I found I could speak it at last. They were discussing their holy man, or seer, who had apparently foretold the fall of Tower Eshkorek, and insisted they ride to it, declaring they would find something precious here. Precious? What other secrets had there been, then? I had no time for speculation. I took the cue luck had given me. They respected religion and magic, it seemed, and dimly I remembered now that Mazlek had mentioned their continual wars.
“I am the precious thing your seer spoke of,” I broke in, and their faces dipped to me, startled. “I am a magicianess of
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great power, a healer and prophetess. I will help you in your battles, intercede for you with your gods.”
It was a ridiculous announcement for a woman lying on her back, her hair matted with dust and filth, and her torn skirts around her waist. Yet they took it from me, with the naivete of savage men to whom all things are simple, or else extraordinary and great. And I had used their language. How could I know it if I were not what I said?
“Of Eshkir,” one said, using the tribal name for Eshkorek Arnor.
“No,” I said. “And what I am, or where I came from, is of no concern to you. Your wise man told you. Is that not enough?”
The third of them, who had said nothing all this time, leaned forward abruptly and picked me up. He was strong and it seemed easy for him. He did not carry me elegantly across his body, as a City man would have done, but over his shoulder, like a kill, and I thought of the wagon people.