I must have started toward her, for she held out the bloody knife to me, the grip to my hand.
“What can this be?” I said. “Has Erran sent you here so I can slice your neck as my final worldly joy?”
“Erran? Erran did not send me.”
“Why come, then, lady? Are you so hungry for earth in your mouth?”
Stonily she said, “You may kill me. But then you will never escape them.”
I took her wrist and plucked the blade from her fingers. I said, “That I am to die is your doing. You primed your golden bear to his sport.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then you are happy. Why talk of escaping? Why kill the guard?”
Her eyes were fixed on me, blank as two green pebbles in her colorless face.
As if I had not spoken she said, “Erran stationed only one bronze at the door. Since you have none but enemies here, Tuvek, the prince never imagined any would send you aid.
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Only among the pleasure-women do you have friends, and they would never dare to help you. Except for one. I summoned your music girl and took a loan of her garment and her mask. She shall say someone stole them from her if any question her, but I don’t imagine that they will. The route I shall take you is known to very few of the gold and silver rank; the bronzes know nothing of it. When I came to this door, I told the guard that Erran had sent me for your night. When he turned to unlock, I stabbed him. I did it clumsily, but he is dead. I took the ring-key. Another will come this way in an hour, at midnight, when they change the watch. We must be swift.”
“You go too swift to me already,” I said. “I am done with you, and you with me, girl. Ill put no trust in anything of yours.”
She smiled at that, sneeringly.
“Are you a savage still, Tuvek? Will you throw away your solitary chance because I bring it?”
“Why bring it, then?” I said.
“Why,” she repeated. Something twisted behind her empty eyes and her mouth twisted with it. “Because I can’t be rid of you. Because you have got my soul with child, and even the child is you, and I can never bear it or be free of you.” And she caught my arms and sunk her nails in them and stared into my face.
I said no word to her, having no word to” say. What had been in me for her was long silent. Her passon and her anguish confounded me; they were unchanged or had swelled the greater, under the mask of disdain and hate.
“You want me away then,” I said. “Very well. I am ready.”
She let go of me, and turned her head to hide what no longer needed to be hidden, since I had seen it all.
The guard lay at the threshold in his blood. He was the second man she had killed because of me. I took his weapon belt and his mask and donned them, and put on my own cloak and drew up the wolfskin hood to cover my too-recognizable hair. She told me that the way we were to travel was a chilly one, and any seeing us would not marvel that I went hooded. She told me, too, to wrap my uneaten dinner in a packet and store it in my shirt. She said I would be needing food on my journey.
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I followed her out into the passage, and along that into one of unpainted stone, dark-lit by far-spaced torches. And all the while I was considering that another turn might bring me onto someone’s sword, that this was a fresh game of the court. Yet I knew, beneath my disquiet, that she had been true to me at last, my city wife, that it was as she had said.
At length we came out on an open rampart of the palace, and I got there my concluding sight of Eshkorek, its craters of blackness and its starry-lighted towers. But then there was a stairway, and we had passed under the angle of it and down, and Eshkorek was gone.
We descended into the cellars, the depths of Erran’s palace.
Twice we met gangs of the Dark Men. The first toiled at a huge arrangement of vats and cisterns, in the dull red luster of the torches; the second group marched out of one dim vista into another, passing us in the gloom as if we were invisible. Only once did we come on bronzes, overseers probably of the slaves. They sat grumbling and dicing by a brazier, nudged each other when they saw us, but offered no challenge. When we had left them behind, I asked Demizdor why this was. She said the underpassages were common night roads to the bedchambers of the princes above.
Apart from these, and similar questionings and replies, we exchanged no conversation.
I did not know where she was guiding me, but surmised it must be onto some unfrequented path from Erran’s territory, maybe even from the city itself.
We entered a passage with no exit, and I guessed the trick of it before she set her schooled palm on the place in the wall that swung it wide. Beyond lay blackness and a smell of gray bones.
“I don’t see in the pitch-dark, my lady,” I said.
“It is only a short distance without light,” she said, “but you must take my hand.”
So, hand in hand, we stepped into the solid night and the wall folded shut behind.
That hand was very small and cold in mine; it was the white one without the blood, a slim, sad hungry hand that clung to me against its will. It made me recall, that hand; it brought back shreds of what had been before. It woke up my pity, thinking of her pain.
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Then the black began to dilute, and she drew herself away from me.
We had come under a. street, and the paving had burst overhead, opening the passage-roof in places, just enough to wash the dusk with starshine.
Everything seemed fossilized here, not even a rat to scuttle.
Shortly the gaps closed above us, and tunnels ran off to the sides, and the sourceless luminescence of a sea-cave lighted everything.
There were faint markings on the stone sides of the passages; I suppose she told the way from them.
In the end, she led me through another magician’s wall into a vast underground hall of broken pillars, and here was a black horse tethered, harnessed, and with a pack at his saddle.
Her resourcefulness brought me to a standstill. I could see she had been planning quickly and thoroughly; her mind surely had begun to work on it the second my blade went in her lover’s gut.
“The horse is sound,” she said. “I brought him here by another way at sunset, and he carries a little food and water and some other items for your journey. I could not get you much or my endeavors would have been noticed. There are flints and a parcel of resin torches that you will need later.” She spoke calmly, as if she were a stranger I had asked for directions on my road. She pointed across the space, beyond the horse, and said to me, “The opening by the leaning pillar. Go down it, turning neither left nor right. Presently you will notice a mark like a serpent on the left-hand wall. Put your palm over his head and he will open the stone for you. Have you noted what I have said, for I accompany you no farther?”
“I shall remember,” I said. “Where then?”
“The tunnel runs straight,” she said, “through the belly of the mountains southeast of Eshkorek. I don’t know where it ends, but it will be far from here. Nine or ten days to ride it.”
“And you?” I said. “You will tell Erran where I have gone?”
“I shall not tell him.”
“He will suspect your complicity and he will make you tell him.”
“He will not. But he may detect for himself. The princes
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are aware of this tunnel, though few of them wish to enter it. It is a thing They designed, who came before us, our ancestors from whom we are degenerated.”
She paused there, no longer fierce or pleading, only remote, as if her spirit had been emptied from her, and her eyes seemed blind. I thought of the nights and noons when we had coupled, when my world had been only Demizdor, and that she had said to me, “One day you will regret me.” Now there was only this beautiful, unknown, unloved stranger, murderess and savior in a single day.
I said, “Maybe you would be safer if you rode with me.”