“What news? Only news of the plague.”
“There have been men looking for you since morning.” He beckoned to me. “Will you step nearer? I’ve no mind to shout.”
“I may be infected,” I said, “and probably am.”
“Probably we all are for that matter.” He swung down from his saddle and came up to the gate. “Sorem’s dying.”
It shocked me. To see one’s death in a mirror. This was what I had run from. Like a fool, I asked if it was plague.
“Yes, plague. What else?”
“When did he fall sick?”
“Sunrise. He asks for you.”
“I can’t heal him.”
“It’s not for healing, sir.” The jerdier’s face was set. He looked away from me and said, “It’s little enough. It’s a hard death he’s having; worse with the strong ones, for it takes them longer. All the same, you had better hurry if you intend to go. The priests have spoken the last prayer for him.”
I wanted to ask him if Malmiranet lived, but the words blocked my throat like the black flies. My fate had hunted me down. I should have to watch Sorem’s death. Maybe hers. I would have given everything to avoid it.
“I’ve no means to get a mount.” Most of the horses had contracted the plague, the cattle, too; hour upon hour I would hear the mallets of the slaughterers over the temple wall, like a dull thunder.
”Take my horse,” the jerdier said. His eyes were bleak with the estimation he had made of me. “You remember the road to the Crimson Palace?”
They let me in at the gate with no delay.
There was not a breath of wind in the garden city. Black spears of shadow lengthened beneath the trees. The pink flamingos picked their way among the shallows of the lake in-
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differently. No bird had the sickness, neither the smaller domestic animals.
Between the pillars of the incense and the plague fires, the city stretched like one great public tomb. Bodies were tumbled in the streets, since there were few still healthy who would risk carrying them away, though occasionally the death carts trundled by. Here and there a priest or beggar hurried between the shuttered, silent houses and the barricaded shops. In an alley a blind man was tapping with his staff and calling for alms, nervously darting his head to catch tha stillness. Perhaps no one had told him that Bar-Ibithni was dying, invisibly, about him. On the steps of a porphyry fountain a little starving dog, some woman’s pet, had chewed greedily at a thing from which I turned my eyes.
Sorem’s bed faced west across the large frescoed chamber, to where the windows stared into the overcast sky. It had a copper skin, that sky, and a yellow sheen revealed where the sun was lowering itself; no air came through the open casements, only the reflection of the sinking day spilled on the floor. The beautiful room stank, but it was a stink so familiar to me now that I hardly noted it. I could see the bruise still on his cheek where the horse had kicked at him, no other color there but one. He lay on the crimson pillows, which seemed to have drained the blood from him into themselves. Yellow Mantle, yes, it was cleverly named.
I went up to him. He was very near to death; I had barely been in time.
As sometimes happened at the end, the fever and the delirium had abated, leaving him clear. Though he spoke with almost no voice, scarcely audible, yet his words were formed and precise.
“I’m sorry to greet you in this disgusting state. It was good of you to come.”
His gray bitch hound was stretched near the bed. Hearing him speak, it raised its head eagerly and beat with its tail an instant, then sank down again like a stone. Sorem was so weak, he could not order his expressions to show me pain, sadness, pleasure-anything. I sat where the physician had put his wooden stool before he went away.
“I was in the Commercial City,” I said. “One of Bailgar’s Shields found me and told me how it was with you.”
“Oh, it’s nothing now,” he said. “It’s almost done.” He yawned, as a man does who has lost too much blood, and murmured, “Even the healing of Vazkor could not defeat this
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thing. But you will live, my sorcerer.” He seemed to have forgotten his accusations, what he had said to me in the tower, and before her. His hand was moving on the covers, dry and yellow. “I regret we never went hunting,” he said. “The white puma and the lion. It’s strange,” he said, “I never thought of death before. Even that night of Basnurmon’s assassins, not even then. I held a leopard on my spear, in the hills once. Any mistake, and he would have killed me, yet I was too busy fighting him to think of it. But this leopard is different.”
There was no one close. The court functionaries, what portion was left of them, and the priests, had been and gone. Only the physician was at his table across the room, and a sentry at the door. Sorem set his hand over mine. In the gray parchment flesh of his lids, his eyes had grown more blue, younger by contrast.
“You will not always think poorly of me, will you, Vazkor? It is hard to find yourself, as I did, like some stranger in a dark grove. Harder to find yourself alone there.”
I took his hand. I could do nothing else. His grip was feeble. He shut his eyes, and said, “Malmiranet lives. They told her you were in the Palace, and she went away so we might talk privately. I believe she knew me before ever I knew myself. Leave me, and seek her. I’ll do well enough for a while.”
But I could see he had not far to go. I kept where I was, and said, “Presently, Sorem.”
He lifted up his lids, and said quite strongly, “My thanks. It won’t be for long. Don’t call anyone. I would rather my mother didn’t see me die. She has seen plenty already.”
So I sat there by him, his hand in mine. A minute passed. The heat was fading, the room growing dank and chill, yet the walls were drowned in the last hot copper-yellow rays of the afternoon, which altered even the motionless dog to a beast of brass, as if the air itself had caught our sickness. Sorem looked toward the windows and his eyes widened, as though he could make out his death rising on the metallic sky.
“The sun is almost down. I shall go with Masrimas then.” I said, for I could summon nothing else, “I envy you your god.”
But he shut his eyes again, and his mouth twisted and his hand clenched strengthlessly in mine.
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“I spoke merely for custom. There is only the dark before me, and it is too easy to reach it. I have often wondered-”
He did not finish, and stupidly I leaned to hear the rest. But he was dead.
I got to my feet slowly. The physician, employed in mixing some balm Sorem would not longer require, did not turn. Malmiranet stood just within the door. I could not properly see her face in the darkening of the light, but she seemed all pity rather than grief. I suppose she had dreamed him dead a thousand times through the years of intrigue they had weathered here. The reality could not appal her. Only its wickedness.
I was shivering, but, having looked too long for it, could no longer distinguish the demon. As Malmiranet moved across the chamber, the darkness appeared to billow and fold about her. Then I saw that the grieving pity in her face also included me. I tried to say her name and could not say it and sank to my knees without properly knowing how I came there.
Her fingers touched my neck and forehead like wands of ice, and then there was no more.
I was nine years of age and a snake had bitten me. It was in Eshkorek Arnor that this had happened, and the doctors had laid me in a bath of ice to cool my fever. Yet I shouted to them that I was cold, the cold was killing me, and they paid no heed. Eventually my father came.
He was lean and dark, his crow’s wing of hair framing his shoulders and his face as he bent to me.
“You must lie quiet,” he said. “She has ordered it. I can do nothing. She will punish you till she grows bored with the punishment. Then it will stop.”
He showed me, pointing with his long jeweled finger, where my mother stood. Her robes were white and her breasts were bare, the breasts of a maiden, firm and high. Her face Was hidden hi a cat-mask of gold, and golden spiders spun in her long pale hair. It was from the deck of a ship she Watched me, a ship with great blue sails, and from the yard depended a hanged man, and the gulls snapped and clapped their hunger in his vitals.