I told the Hessek to bring her, and sat down again to watch her rustle in, full of pleas and threats and endearments, her skirt of flounces scraping the doorway.
The lamp was burning low, yet when she came, there was no mistaking it was another than the one for whom I had looked.
She was tall and she held herself, moreover, very straight, with a pride unusual in a tall woman. Her garments were black, and she came into the red light like a fragment of the dark outside, and for all her flounced Masrian skirt with its fine beaded sweat of gold drops, she was veiled like a Hessek woman, even her eyes. I could see only her hands, long, slender, hard brown hands, like a boy’s, so that for a second I wondered, Bar-Ibithni being as it was. Yet I could tell she was a woman, even veiled, her breast hidden in the drapery, and when she spoke, I could not miss it. A somber, smoky voice like the color of the lamp.
“You are Vazkor, the man they call the sorcerer?”
“I am Vazkor, the man they call the sorcerer.”
She seemed, from her tone, accustomed to prompt replies and obedience in others. Yet now she hesitated. There was a little bracelet, a snake of gold, on her right forearm, which
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flickered the light as if she trembled. But then she said, clear and steady, “I hear you deal honestly, if the payment you receive is high enough.”
“Are you in need of healing?”
“No.”
“What, then, do you require of me?”
“I want to know what price you put on a man’s life.
I had risen, intending to adopt Masrian courtesies belatedly; now I set my hand to the lamp to brighten it.
“It would depend on the man,” I said. “Some men come very cheap.”
I heard her draw in her breath slowly, to steel herself. I already knew what was coming. The flame leaped up yellow under the rosy crystal, and she said, “Sorem, Prince of the Blood, son of our lord the Emperor Hragon-Dat.”
The light did not pierce her veil after all.
“Sorem’s life is obviously dear to you, madam. Why do you reckon it in jeopardy from me?”
“He has challenged you by the code to fight him. You will use some device or some trick, and kill him, and he is too honorable and too proud to see this. I ask you to avoid the fight. I will pay what you suggest is necessary.”
“And what of my honor, madam? Am I to acquire the name of a craven? He promised me I should if I did not meet him.”
“You barter and sell your magic, if such it is,” she said contemptuously. “You cure a man for a chain of coins, and leave him to die if he has none. What is one name more?”
“You’re unjust to me, lady, and ill-informed. As to Sorem, I can do no other than he’s bound me to.”
She stood there a moment like stone and then, in a theatrical, angular gesture, again oddly like a boy’s, she gathered the veil up in handfuls and thrust it off.
And so I saw her.
Her hair was black and curling, shiny as glass, piled on her head Masrian fashion with pins of polished blue turquoise. She had no other jewels save for the little snake on her arm, only the flawless copper of her skin, which came from the black case of the beaded jacket like honey from a jar. She was slim, but slim like an iron blade, her hips and waist narrow as her hands were narrow, except at the rise of her breast where the terrain was altered, half revealed by the Masrian bodice, two full amber slopes powdered with gold dust like pollen, which spangled in the, light as she breathed.
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But her face was something else again. I vow I looked at it and thought her ugly one whole second, confronted by those aquiline features, her age, which was some years in excess of my own, the black anger that masked over her eyes; nothing soft anywhere. Then everything was changed; I saw the beauty that this face really was, beauty like the point of a knife.
“I do this that you may discover who I am.” She had been like a lightning bolt to me, yet no revelation came with it.
“I assume you are the mistress or the wife of Sorem,” I said. At that she smiled, not in any womanly way, but sardonic as some prince forced to be courteous to his enemy. Through the kohl and the black lashes of that extraordinary gaze, the lamp found out blueness.
“It appears you also are ill-informed, magician,” she said. “I am Malmiranet, the cast-off of the Emperor, but still blood of the Hragons for all that. Sorem is my son.”
“I beg your pardon, madam. I didn’t realize I had a royal woman in my house. Be seated.”
“And you be damned,” she said, fast as fire. “I am not here to play empress with a dog from the backlands. Tell me the price of my son’s life and you shall have it. Then I will leave.”
Her eyes were surely blue, but dark as sapphire, darker than his. The looks that shot from them would wake a man part dead.
“You go the wrong way around this, madam,” I said quietly. “You presume me a jackal and a wretch and a fool. You will make me one, then there’ll be no reasoning with me.”
“Don’t tutor me.”
“Nor you me, madam. I have spoken with your son. He won’t thank you for the shelter of your skirts.”
She made a gesture that said, “This is irrelevant, unimportant, providing he lives.”
“And if I refuse?” I said, as I had said to him.
“There are ways.”
“Have me murdered, Lady Malmiranet, and the whole city will say your son did it out of fear. Besides, I wonder what assassin could overcome me when I can kill a man with my mind alone.”
She observed me unansweringly, but her hands were trembling again. I could smell her perfume now in the little room, a faint incense, smoky as her voice. Suddenly she dropped her lids and the words came out broken.
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“Do you think I estimate my son a coward that I came to you? If he were that, you might have him. It is his bravery I fear, and your sorcery. If you can do one fifth of what they say, he will die. Why does a sorcerer want this duel? The notion of honor amuses you. Very well, let him believe you ran from him. What do you care for such a thing? You are a man, and young. Use your powers to make yourself a lord elsewhere, and let Sorem live.”
I went up to her, this empress who had fallen from her high station for some reason that was beyond me, seeing her as she was. True, she was not quite a girl, but that face, carved so purely and without compromise, would never have been a girl’s face. For the rest, even this close, you would need to be witless or blind to pass by. Her brows were nearly level with my own. I took her hand, the hand with the snake wrapped above it. The palm was hard from riding; the hand of Sorem could not be that much different.
“For you, then,” I said, “he lives. I forego the dubious sweet of killing him.”
Her eyes flashed up, wide, blue; deep enough they looked to go bathing in.
“Tell me your price.”
“Nothing.”
It was worth something to me to see her stare.
She withdrew her hand and began to pull at her veil.
“How can I trust you if you’ll accept no fee?”
“That’s one problem you must solve yourself.”
She paused and said, “Are you the son of a king as the rumor has it?”
“Ask them in Eshkorek,” I said.
She turned away, impatiently pulling at the veil till she was swathed in it again. She went out into the court quickly, without another word, and a minute after I heard the carriage wheels and the hooves of the horses on the road east.
Sorem’s formal challenge came the next morning.
Two blank-faced jerdiers, his lieutenants, brought it: One handed me the bronze scroll-case and stared in the air above my head while I read the script.
Sorem Hragon-Dat to Vazkor, generally named the sorcerer.
An invitation to swords.
Tonight, the Field of the Lion, by the northern altar.
The hour after sunset
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“It is acceptable?” the jerdier asked of the air.
I told him it was.
They swung around like clockwork, and strode out.
The courts were full of whispers that day-Lellih, and the fight to come, and the veiled woman. In the middle of the afternoon a ragged man carried his child to the gate, and begged me to help her. I did not have the heart to refuse it, since there were only the two of them. The child was whimpering with agony hi his arms, but went away laughing and skipping about the man’s feet, he hi tears. It moved me, and I caught myself thinking, She should have seen that, the court lady with her talk of money chains and barter.