“Behold your messiah,” the woman said to her Hesseks. “Behold the Shaythun-Kem. Y’ei S’ullo, y’ei S’ullo. GodMade-Visible has betrayed you. Shaythun sent the swarm of his vengeance, and Bar-Ibithni the Beautiful bleeds on its deathbed. But this one thinks he has cheated Shaythun; this one thinks he will live.”
Isep had got me a knife, along with the sentry’s clothes. I set my hand to it involuntarily.
“See,” the woman said. “Barbarian still, calling himself the
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sorcerer, yet preferring to use the metal blade of a Masrian cur.”
The taunt was familiar. It checked me.
“I am the sorcerer,” I said. “Then name yourself.”
“You name me.”
A wave of dizziness and heat went over me.
“Uastis,” I said, “the bitch-goddess of Ezlann. My mother, but not for much longer.”
She got to her feet, and with delicate mincing steps, she came along the deck to me. She was so little, small, and slender, and yet a force came with her like a huge dark shadow thrown upon the air.
I could not seem to stand back from her or advance to meet her. She halted about three paces from me, and then I noticed how she held her head, somewhat aslant, as if she could see me only from the left side. And, as before, I reached out my hand and snatched off the veil.
A woman’s face, not raddled now, but a girl’s. Beautiful as a statue, flawless, all but the right eye, which was gone, the scars hidden by a green jewel.
It had taken me till that instant to realize. Whoever she was, she was not my mother, not Uastis Reincarnate, for Uastis had the blood of the Old Magician Race; she would have healed. Smoke went over my eyes, like a myriad insects running on a crystal pane. Then I saw differently.
I had chased a phantom, fished for a reflection in a pool.
No, not Uastis. The illusion slid from her as sand runs from an hourglass. The robes were dirty, torn, and of a grayish flax, and her hair was the dull black fleece of Hessek hair, and her one eye a black Hessek eye, the other bound in a rag, and her skin the sallow white of Hessek. But I had dug this pit that swallowed me down. I had been so intent upon the hunt that when a quarry offered itself I never mused it might be other than the one I sought.
“Vazkor is yet Vazkor,” she whispered. “He has learned his mistake at last. Not the old witch, but the young. For you made me young, my master and my lord, my stallion, my beloved, and I shall be your death.” Lellih smiled at me and slid her arms about me and pressed her body to mine. I felt all its youngness through the fabric of her clothes and mine, all the youth with which I had reenameled it. “In life you turned from me, but in death you will obey me. In your burial place I will work my magic, and lie in your dead arms. Oh, I can’t heal my flesh, it’s true, but there are more won-
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drous things. It is you who taught me, my sorcerer. Listen how I talk. Do I sound like an old hag of a sweet-seller, my dove? No. The Power you poured into my brain to recreate my girlhood created me also your equal. A sorceress. A goddess.”
A fire came and went across my eyes, obscuring the deck, the shadowy motionless figures of the Hesseks, the pendant corpse. Lellih wound me about like a snake and her mouth on my skin was like the fall of burning rain.
I remembered the Hall of Physicians, her tiny bird skull between my hands, the surge of Power that passed from me to her, illuminating her mind like the sun. I remembered my pride.
Small miracle she had been able to tap my Power ever after, to turn on me those abilities I had inadvertently installed in her. I had been her powerhouse from the first.
“Yes,” she murmured, reading my thoughts, as previously she had read my whole brain, my history, my vow, my compulsion. “Yes, you have become my joke, beloved, with your quest for Uastis, who was really Lellih. I took her form to mislead you. You took my poor eye, my lovely eye, in exchange for that jest, beloved. Even that I should have forgiven you, if you had valued me. Then Bit-Hessee might have sunk in the mud for all I cared, and Shaythun, Shepherd of Swarms, sunk with it. There is no Uastis here, and no devilgod either, Vazkor. Only a wellspring of belief I used as my instrument. It is I who sent the plague. It is my betrayal I punish you for, not the betrayal of my people-Lellih’s anger, not the anger of a god. Know this, Vazkor. .. . What?” she asked me then, for I had tried to speak to her. I mumbled something through my frozen lips. She said to me, gently, “No, you’ll die, Vazkor, I promise you. Do you suppose of all the numbers who have perished that you alone, who I have cursed twice for every curse I laid on Bar-Ibithni, that you alone, my darling boy, will escape? Believe in the vitality of your own magic which you gave me. You are dying in my arms this very minute.”
I knew it to be as she said. She had reseated the plague on me. My viscera scalded, but my flesh was like a layer of wool. I could barely see or hear, only the lower mast between my shoulders kept me on my feet, that and her twining. She had crawled up me to my mouth, and fastened there as if she herself would drain me of my life.
Somehow then, I felt the knife. My hand had not strayed
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from it. My muscles were lead and my lingers water, yet this hand and this arm I could move, if I willed it. It seemed to take me hours. She was too busy with her grave-cold kissing to heed my hand and the knife. Not till the blade went through her back into her heart did she heed it.
I had never killed a woman before, not meaning to, but with her it was more like crushing a viper beneath a stone. It Was a clean blow, despite everything, though she was not inclined to go, and fought an instant, and her one eye stayed wide when she fell upon the deck. She had uttered no final ill wish, having emptied the vat of her perverse hate on me, and to the dregs indeed.
She refuted Shaythun, and maybe she was wise, but something led her to her death, as I to mine.
I stepped over her, and began to stagger toward the rail, but suddenly my eyes cleared, and my brain. I thought, It shall end here, after all, for me and for the rats who killed me. The Power came with no effort. I saw the rays leave me, hitting the leaping forms of men, the body of Lellih, and the hanging corpse, the masts, the shrouds, the wall of the night itself.
A torch fell. It caught the edge of Lellih’s gray-white garment. It was right this should dissolve in fire, as everything was dissolved in it, Bit-Hessee, the plague-dead, the glory of Bar-Ibithni.
Masrimas’ light.
A burst of white flame lighted my way as I crawled down the ladder and fell into the boat. The rope came free, and the small craft, swinging in against the ship’s side, swung off again from the impetus, catching the current, drifting out into the fire-flecked sea.
Thus I, too, drifted, into a raging hell of agony, and the world came and went around me, and came and went.
Voices shouted.
A mile off, a burning ship mirrored its tumult in black water.
The face of a man was nearer.
“Vazkor, do you know me? No, Bailgar, I don’t think he can speak. It’s up with him for sure. So much for physician’s prophecies, so much for sorcery. By God, look at the blood he’s lost.”
Someone else said, “Have a care lifting him. That moron
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girl of the Empress, to let him go. Sheer luck I recalled the Vineyard.”
They were lifting me. I tensed for the pain but it did not come. Someone’s rolled cloak was under my head, and through the murk of the sky I thought there was one star stabbed through like a silver pin.
I could recognize Bailgar’s voice now, but not who he was. He bent over me, and said, “Try to last, Vazkor. She’ll want to see you.”
Unaware of who he meant, I shut my eyes.
“It’s odd,” the first man said, “he doesn’t stink, like the Others with this filthy thing-maybe it’s a good sign.”