And it seemed he did. His hand went up to his masked face, an involuntary gesture, as if he would doff his visor for me, as his captains had done for him. But he checked himself, and under his breath, too low for them and thinking me ignorant of his language, he muttered, “I never dreamed to meet you in this room again, Black Wolf, Black Jackal of Ezlann.”
Then I guessed why I had regained their tongue, or imagined I guessed. I looked in his glass eyepieces.
“Did you not?” I said. He cried out aloud at that. I said, “And did you call my father ‘jackal’ to his face? Or did you rather gnaw the bones from the jackal’s table, and run at the jackal’s heels like his hound?”
Even Zrenn had taken a step back from me. I got to my feet. Standing, I was a measure taller than Kortis Phoenix Javhovor.
He glared past me and shouted at them, “Did you know he had our speech?”
Zrenn stammered, controlled his shock, and said, “My lord, he never before spoke a word of it. He must have learned from my kinswoman, or the Moi perhaps, who have a smattering of it-”
“I learned from none,” I said, watching Kortis. “It is my father in me. It is Vazkor.”
For all my bonds and my uncertainties, such a scalding wave of pride swelled me that I feared none of them. It would have been more prudent to fear, to fear and keep silent, but I might have been breathing drug incense. And all the while I felt him there, dark fiery shadow at my side, the emanation of my father. I could remember only my inherited
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gift of magic power, which must come from him, how I had killed a man with it. I had merely to reach for strength and I should find it. All men, perhaps, must have a deity. Godless so far my entire life, Vazkor became my one true god.
Kortis drew himself up* to confront me. His throat rasped like an old man’s in a harsh winter.
“Very well. You are the seed of Vazkor. Somehow you have got our speech, which is cunning of you. And your mother, some heifer of the krarls?”
I said negligently, partly to test him and thereby learn more of my heritage, “No tribal woman. A woman from the cities. A woman with white hair and white eyes. The wife of Vazkor.”
The music that had been playing all this while somewhere in the palace, some hidden orchestra, just now ceased as if at a signal.
“Then you are Uastis’ son,” Kortis said, “It is true, she was albino, and her womb was filled by him. Did she escape the fall of the Tower? Was it she taught you our language? Is she living, then, or dead?”
A woman spoke beyond my shoulder. It was like the voice of the one he had named, and the hair rose on my neck. But it was not my lynx-mother, spirited out of the air, it was Demizdor.
“Javhovor, don’t listen to this liar. I never lessoned him in our speech, but sometimes I have used it, and he is sly and quick, this man, he has learned from me. The stories too, I told him, of Vazkor and of Uastis. I do not reckon him Vazkor’s sowing, despite his looks. He has kept me as his doxy in the stinking tents of the shlevakin, he has defiled me, and I must follow the ways of his degenerate race in order to preserve my life. From this hell my kinsmen rescued me.”
I kept my ground, but my bowels twisted at her crying. She was a pace or so behind me, but I could not look about at her unmasked face, her pale fever and her eyes and her hate.
“Javhovor,” she said, more softly, breathing fast, “your own kin slew themselves because of this lying dung and his playacting. My lord was one of them. I beg for vengeance.” Her quick breathing faltered, and she began to weep.
“There is no need to beg for vengeance,” Kortis said slowly; he had mastered himself now. “Whoever and what-
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ever he is, he shall suffer.” His eyes returned to me. “Do you comprehend?”
“I comprehend that in Eshkorek the women are vipers, and the men dogs walking on their hind limbs.”
He struck me with the back of his hand, as if it were an idle blow, simply correction to a stupid slave who knew no better, and his bronze guard took me. Zrenn had them throw me flat a second time and drag me by my ropes to amuse his master and himself.
Outside I was permitted to walk, traveling down the length of the palace now, and below it into dank underground chambers. In one of these, small as the great room above had been large, my bindings were exchanged for fetters, the fetters mated with rings of black metal jn the sweating stone.
When my guard had gone and taken the light with them, the rats commenced adventuring in and out, but none came too close, as yet. I did not relish the cell, however, if I should begin to bleed.
The scene in the hall reenacted itself in my skull, the goldmask’s horror, my pride, the demands of Demizdor. It began to seem an hallucination. No shade was any longer at my shoulder to guide me. I had had the power to kill Ettook, but not enough to burst my bonds, it appeared.
I fell into a brief sleep and woke with the rats about my feet like a tide come in. I slashed a length of my chain among the red stars of their eyes and they fled chittering, till I should be quiescent once more.
I thought of Tathra weeping as she struggled to birth Ettook’s child, of Demizdor weeping when she believed she had slain me.
I wondered if the sow who bore me had ever shed tears.
3
Three bronze guards came through the passage beyond the cell and opened the metal door. It was their torches and the sound of their boots that had woken me this time; a change from the rats.
In the doorway, Kortis. Somehow I had been expecting a visit from him, and was not enormously amazed. He moved into the cell, and set one of the torches in a rusty bracket, and the guard closed the door, and walked a good way off. It was to be a private audience, it seemed.
The torch splashed sallowly on Kortis’ golden face and the gold of his great seal-rings. He said, “After the luxurious night you have no doubt spent here, perhaps your family history has altered somewhat.”
“The truth can’t be altered,” I said, “but I expected nothing more of your hospitality. There are rats in all the rooms. Some squeak, and some wear gold on their faces.”
On this occasion he did not strike me.
“Your father,” he said, “would have answered with more care.”
“My father would have seen you dead.”
“Yes. That is true enough,” he remarked quietly. He turned a little looking off into his past. “In the days of the glory at White Desert, when the Alliance held, I was the nephew of Eshkorek’s Javhovor, and I was not content. One sundown when I had gone hawking in the waste, my party met a company from Ezlann, and with it, Vazkor. They had. come for the spring horse-catching, for the finest mounts were the mad ones of Eshkorek. He was only a young man, not much older than you, my savage; but he had a tongue like the adder’s bite, and his eyes made you believe him wise. I have heard it said he had slave blood, something of the Dark People in him, which may well be so. I have heard also he
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was a sorcerer, and that I have never doubted. That night’s camp we shared on the desert’s fringe, and he made a plan with me, piece by piece, like the fitting of a puzzle. Though it was some years later that the goddess opportunely struck down my uncle, and Vazkor set me in the royal chair of Eshkorek.” He glanced back at me. He seemed bound to tell me those things, and weary of them and weary of telling them, for I could see he had spoken of them many times inside his own head. “When Vazkor’s power was on the wane, when he had overreached himself, I threw in my lot with the five cities of the Alliance. I don’t think he felt a particular hate for me; he was incapable of hate as he was incapable of pleasure. No man mattered enough to him that he should hate him, and no woman either. Apart from one, maybe. Uastis. I never set eyes on her, the risen goddess of Ezlann, but I believe her power matched his, and if she lived after him, then no doubt she, too, betrayed him, as I did.”