They had come by sea, as I had reckoned, and their tall galley had passed by the unlighted shore of the night marsh with dipped sails. From the rail, scenting sorcery as the hound scents lions, the man of the Sri beheld this on the shore: A white shape, dwarfed in the distance to the size of his small finger.
I beheld in the disk, as he beheld it, that whiteness, and I experienced, as he had done, the smoke of force that rose from it. It was the force of hate. He had shuddered to feel it. He had heard of the burning of Bit-Hessee and of the things
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that haunted there, but this thing he knew to be no phantom. A white woman, with white hair and white hatred growing from her soul like a huge tree. And her Power was as great as mine.
Scattered near her on that muddy open shore were dark shapes with gray Hessek torches in their hands. The breakers and the creaking of the oars and the sails of the ship hid any sound they made.
The old miasma came slinking over me.
The copper was suddenly empty and my host was holding out to me an agate cup with liquor in it.
I drank and he said, “I knew her name. She had written it on the night for any who could read it. I knew also she had marked you for her evil. The mark is on you like a brand. Yet, lord, this whole city has been marked. Not only the men who razed Bit-Hessee, not only the men who dreamed of razing it. Truly there is a black cloud above the golden towers of Bar-Ibithni, the Beloved of Masrimas. A black cloud Which shall hide his sun.”
I stood up and my limbs were trembling. I suppose I must have looked like death.
“How can I match her?” I cried out stupidly, not actually to him. “What Power I use she feeds on. She. I tried, I was rid of her, yet she persists. Whatever I do is turned against me.” My mind was racing. I thought to go straight to that shore, the avenue of dead ships, the blackened ruin, and kill her there. It was what I had vowed to do. Or perhaps 1 should become the quarry. She had marked me, then let her follow me. Leave Bar-Ibithni whole, Sorem its Emperor, and Malmiranet, my woman, on the Lilly Chair of the Crimson Palace, thinking I had fled like a coward….
He took my arm.
“I am a messenger,” he said, “no more. I can offer you no counsel. But my name is Gyest, if you should require my services.”
I wished he might have helped me, but despite his own acumen of strengths, I understood too well he could not. Paradox. My ability towered over his, and I was a shivering baby.
I thanked him. His eyes were fatalistic. The city was under tier curse and he remained in it. What you cannot keep, let go, for it is already gone. Life also, presumably.
Outside, the sky was as blue as the sapphires the black men
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brought from the south on their ugly unicorns. No cloud in sight.
Denades and a couple of his captains had remained to wait for me. He raised his brows and said, “Bad news, then. I hoped not.”
None of them knew anything of my life beyond a few necessary minor items, and were always anxious for the chance to learn more.
“Someone lives whom I had calculated dead,” I said.
“Oh? What now, Vazkor? Can it be you’ll adhere to our customs, the code of the challenge?”
“The challenge is already offered, and accepted.”
Denades stared at me, between approval and distrust.
“Hardly a fit moment, however, my Vazkor, two days before the anointing of Sorem for Emperor.”
I spurred my mount up through the market, so bright with noise and color and show under that unclouded sapphire sky. Denades kept pace with me.
“Does Sorem know?”
“He will, inside the hour.”
He frowned and kept quiet.
I had put a bold face on it, perforce. Nausea pervaded my body. There was a dream I had as a child, later in another form, some wild animal I had come upon on the hunting trail and slain, only to have it start up again, bleeding from its gaping mortal wounds, and leap for my throat. Presently Denades spurred his horse off to the Citadel, no doubt to spread the news.
I would have to fight. There was no other choice. Fight and fight again, however many times the dead beast came at me. It was not this city I gave myself to rescue, no, nor the life or the esteem of any man or woman in it. It was my own terror. I would rather meet the sickening thing head on than turn my back to it. I had thought her dead, or of no consequence, space to seek her, maybe space to forget her even. How Uastis must mock me in her ruin.
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7
I entered the Crimson Palace, as it always seemed I did then, in that eternal afternoon. The sun, swimming into the apex of the tall western windows, crucified the rose-red walls and pink marble floors with long nails of pollinated light.
Sorem was with the council and the priests, learning off his actor’s lines for the coronation. On the day preceding it, he must enter and abide within the Masrimas Temple, tradition prior to the ceremony. I had seen little of him in any case, since we took the Heavenly City. We had gone hunting once after the wild boar that were tamely bred and let out of cages into the game park for the sole purpose that the nobility might chase them-a dissolute, idiot sport it seemed to me after, though I had not chafed then. Sorem, disliking it as I did, had promised me better hunting in the southern hills, puma and lion and various water beasts in the vales there, when we should have days to spare for it. He had been always promising me things through this month of afternoon, and sending me gifts when he was away with the council, so I could not ungraciously refuse them. I had barely noticed, being with his mother more often than in my apartments to receive them, but now I had begun to ponder if he mistrusted me after all, and tried to keep me loyal by bribes.
Nasmet ran up to me on her gilded feet as I lingered, looking drearily at the sun. She put a flower in my hand, which was Malmiranet’s signal to me. Nasmet appeared to have no envy, playing out this liaison which was supposed to be ours, but which led me to her mistress. Usually I was eager enough, and glad to see the girl.
She took in my difference, and said, “She would not have you with her if you have business elsewhere.”
“Business with you, maybe,” I said, my fear giving everything a perverse flavor. “You’d like that.” I put my hands on her waist. I did not want her, yet I would have had her if she had been willing.
But she said, “I would like it a little. But not to displease Malmiranet. 1 love her more than I will ever love any oaf of a man, however handsome he is, or clever in a bed. Besides,”
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and her eyes altered, “she would kill us both.” Her loyalty and her amused spite-mixed as it was with an almost unnatural pride, as if, with Malmiranet’s knife in her heart, she would have said, “See, here an Empress’s anger”-brought me to my senses. I think I should have been embarrassed if other things had not weighed on me like lead. I asked myself, as I followed Nasmet, if she would recount my cloddish courtship to Malmiranet. I imagine some part of me wished to tear desire and liking out of me, flesh and brain and heart. It would be easier to die without it.
Then the doors were opened, and I saw her, and everything was altered, as I might have reasoned it would be.
I think I had never come to her and found her quite the same. Always there was a subtle variance in her mood, the setting of the chamber, her garments. It was her cleverness, mannered or instinctive, to be changeable yet unchanged, like seasons in a garden.
I remember how her thin white robe of Tinsen gauze, catching the red reflection of the sun on the painted wall, seemed to smolder on her skin, pleated smoke caught in by a girdle of ruby silk. Her hair was knotted up loosely. She would tie it this way sometimes that I might unfasten it. She had been playing with a leopard cub, a little tawny mewling devil that rolled on the mosaic, gnawing at the ends of her silk girdle. Turning to me, the light behind her, all the dark slenderness of her body rimmed with fire, I thought suddenly of Demizdor, a contrary thought, for they were not alike in any fashion.