“She told you that,” I said, “Karrakaz. Fount of wisdom.”
I thought, as I had thought with every one of these beings I met, Is this her seed, half kin to me, a son or daughter got from her lying with some albino buck, some child she kept?
Suddenly, hand in hand, like a cabalistic painting on the wall of a magician’s house, the two of them rose upward in the air and drifted away, grinning back at me, among the trees.
Hot and cold chased over my spine. Though I could perform the selfsame act, now I witnessed it for what it was: The mirror of my Power held up for me to see.
I told myself I had begun to understand her plan now, if plan it was.
I found a glimmering brown skull in the snow. I could not tell if it was mortal or god, and there seemed a sobering moral in that. I took it up and snow fell from the eye sockets. I set it back beneath a white-clad cypress, and its black glare watched me away.
This dreamlike wonder-working, the extra-normal surroundings, were meant to rob me of any human values, and any human rage or vengeance I should have left.
The sun sank into the depths of Kainium as I emerged on the beach a few minutes after, a beach broad and white with ice between the city and the water. Beyond the ice, silver mud flats ran out into the surf, and the sea was like cold silk flung shining there toward the advancing eastern night. And against that night, garishly lighted by the last sun ray, the huge mountain in the ocean, directly opposite this shore and finally immediate, was a shock of cinnabar.
About forty yards off the torches burned, still greenish in the dusk, and a crowd was moving there on the light, men and beasts, and farther on a bonfire splashing up at the dark, showing the humps of wagons, carts, and the other traveling impedimenta of humanity.
What this was I did not know. Yet I had only to pause, to use my wits, to guess.
Lectorra, the goddess’s chosen, roamed the mainland, and a crowd of people gathered here facing the mountain-island
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itself. It was to be a time of healing, when these uncanny adoptive progeny of Karrakaz laid their restorative hands on mortals. She did not come. She never left her island, I had been told, but her Lectorra could work her magic, having been taught by her, and I had seen as much.
The torches were not a beacon for me, after all, except in as much as they should demonstrate to me that my Powers were far from unique in Kainium. Healer, magician, in all things the tribe of the goddess were there before me.
I went slowly to the light, slowly out of a kind of bitter savoring of events, these last drafts of wine to be tasted.
Men, their women and offspring, packed close together about the fire and the resin brands, singing, which I heard over the breakers as I came to them along the beach, some parochial ballad of their villages. All this to keep the night at bay, the phantom city from exercising its spell, while they waited for gods to arrive.
On the outskirts of the group, a boy feeding a shaggy horse before a wagon caught my footfall and froze, nervously eyeing me. But I was a black-haired man, not white. His alarm changed to simple curiosity. I must be an Inlander and obviously sick, or I would not be here where invalids came seeking aid: nothing to fear.
I could see sick ones now, lying about on litters, some of them unable to move, a few alert with desperate attention. A small stir as I passed through. A woman made room for me on a rug spread near the fire. A man, unspeaking as she, offered me a mug of hot beer they had been mulling to warm themselves. This mute kindness touched me, the compassion of human beings pulled together in harmony by the peculiarity of their mission.
I had not decided whether to play my part and remain to watch with them, or to make on, when their singing broke off, and two or three pointed along the shore, southward.
The Lectorra had appeared abruptly, apparitions evolving from the crimson dusk like slender twinkling white lights. They were not walking but gliding this way, their feet some inches off the ground. It would have been nicer, if they had flown through the air; this was the calculated unostentatious ostentation of a cruel mocking and insensitive youth. Decidedly, Gyest had had the right of it. Sympathy is the sister of fear. These creatures had nothing left to fear, and fear in others was a game to sport with.
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The human crowd made no sound. Somewhere a single dog whimpered, but fell quiet of its own accord.
The Lectorra alighted a couple of yards from us, just where the torchlight would make marble of them. There were five, the girl and the boy I had intercepted in the tomb garden, another two boys about sixteen years old, and a girl the same age. All were garbed in white, as Mazlek had been, white on white. All had that green speck between and above their eyes. All were beautiful with a beauty that knotted the guts and stifled the breath. Not a beauty to be restful with, unless one was inclined to worship them. Which I was not.
I had no necessity to puzzle what they would do next, for they kept none of us in doubt for long.
“Ressaven is not here,” said one of the older boys.
“She should have come,” the elder girl said. “See how many there are.” She glanced over the people. She smiled contemptuously and said, “How ignorant and rough they are. What point in saving them?”
“They should offer us homage,” the youngest boy, he I had met in the garden, remarked, “but they only gawk. They think we’re the circus show come to amuse them, perhaps.”
“I don’t want their homage, but they should bring us gifts,” the elder girl said. “They should bring us their gold if they have any. Or perfume, or good leather for harness, or horses. Anything. But they expect all for nothing. I do not think I wish to touch their smelly brown bodies with my hands.”
“Nor I,” said the younger girl. She slid her arms about her male companion’s ribs and murmured, “I will touch only you, Sironn.”
They had been speaking all this while, of course, in the city tongue, or that more antique version of it Mazlek had used. I alone understood their simpering banalities, the crowd merely waited, in unknowing meek patience, for the noble gods to begin their miracles.
Whether the Lectorra had noticed me among the throng I was not certain. Perhaps not, for a form of inner silence had steeled on me that seemed to shut me from everything.
The gods had fallen now to noncommittal staring.
The people, unsure, stared abjectly in return.
Presently a man near me, mistaking the immobile stance of the Lectorra for invitation, or else unable to support further inactivity, stumbled out of the crowd and up to them, and kneeled down on the ice before them.
“Lordly ones,” he stammered.
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The Lectorra gazed at him with delighted distaste.
“What does he require?” the boy Sironn asked of the sea.
“Mighty ones,” whispered the man, “I am blind in my left eye.”
The elder girl it was who fixed him with a white frown. Very carefully and clearly, in the village tongue, she said, “Be thankful, then, that the right eye is yet healthy.”
Her companions, diverted, laughed, the fiendish silly laughter of imbeciles.
The man at their feet, obviously thinking his comprehension, or his speech, at fault, explained again. “I am blind in my eye. I can see nothing.”
“Oh, there is litle to see in any case, I would suppose, in your wretched hovel,” said the oldest boy, who had spoken before.
The younger girl bent to the man, and sweetly instructed: “Take a fire-charred stick at midnight and put out the eyes of all the other clods in the village. Then you can master them with just one eye. They will make you king.”
The man, kneeling on the icy beach, put his hands up to his face. His expression had altered to terrified confusion, and still he reckoned it was his own fault, that he had not made himself lucid to them. He stretched out to the elder girl, instinctively begging sympathy from her superior years and what he imagined to be the qualities of her womanhood. His fingers brushed her mantle, and she wheeled to him with a dazzle of fury in her colorless eyes, and lifted her own hand. From her palm sprang a thin dagger of light that struck him in the brow.