The Birthgrave

1

One by one the red flowers dropped from my hands, down the dark shaft of the tomb. At the bottom, the dead one lay.

“Weep,” said the voices around me. “If you would only weep, he would be whole.”

But I could not weep, although my throat and eyes scorched with the unshed tears. And he was changing now; it was too late. Into green hard stuff he was changed, into a man’s figure of jade.

“Karrakaz,” I said into the dark. “I am here, Karrakaz.”

But Karrakaz did not come. Somewhere in the deep of me, gorged on the blood of Shullatt, of the villages, of the merchants at the ford, of Essandar and the others in the Sirkunix, but best of all, bloated with the blood of Asutoo, the ancient Demon of Evil and Hate lay sleeping.

“We are one thing, you and I,” it had said to me in Kee-ool.

“So Karrakaz enorr,” I whispered. “I am Karrakaz.”

I was not certain how I had come there, that high-up echoing place. I remembered the plains horse running in terror under me, but then probably I had fallen or been thrown. I was very close to the sky; I sensed this more than knew, for I lay in a black hole in the rock. I say a hole—it was a cave, I suppose, yet the darkness was so thick it pressed closer than any stone. No light. Yet behind my eyes, light: pale and green and red. I do not know how long I had been in the cave, perhaps as much as fifteen days. It was very cold, and I was not really at any time properly conscious. Dreams, hallucinations, and the dark reality were all mingled and lost in each other. I cannot really say what I felt. I can only recall that recurring fantasy that if only I could weep, Darak would be restored to me, and each time, somehow, the blazing tears would not burst forth, and he was turned to jade.

Voices, new voices. Not the voices in my mind, but things separate and alien. A deep voice, urging and impatient, a higher, lighter voice, shrill with echoes, hanging back a little, but not much. Then other sounds, unmistakable and intense in the dark. And then a little silence. Suddenly the girl whispered, frightened,

“Gar, Gar! Look!”

Gar grunted something.

“No, an animal. Over there.”

There was a small altercation between them, then Gar getting up, a big, shaggy, strong-smelling man. His blackness, blacker than the black around me, fell over my eyes.

“Sibbos!” he muttered—some deity’s name, used as an oath. “It’s a boy—no, a woman—a masked woman.”

The girl was scrambling up beside him, pulling down her skirts as she came.

“She’s dead.”

“No, she’s not, you blind bitch. I’ll take off this mask—” His great hand came reaching for the shireen, and, in an instant, my own flared up and struck his away. He cursed, and jumped back, startled, while the girl shrieked.

“Alive, all right,” he muttered. “Who are you, then?”

“No one,” I said.

“Simple,” the man observed. He turned. The girl caught his arm.

“You can’t leave her here.”

“Why not?”

They argued as the man strode down the length of the cave, whistling, the girl hanging on his arm. And then, abruptly, he cursed again, strode back, and picked me up. He slung me across his shoulder, and, in so doing, whether from anger or clumsiness I was unsure, he cracked my head against an overhang. A pain like an adder lanced through my temple, and I was thrown back into the dark.

I thought I was in the ravine camp. There was smoke and muddy light, what seemed a huddle of tents around me. Meat was roasting, dogs were running about yelping at kicks, as though being kicked still surprised them. Something creaked continuously overhead, a yellow arc against the darkness.

“Shall I fetch her some meat?” a voice asked.

“That one couldn’t eat meat in her state; broth or porridge.” This was an old voice, and soon an old woman was bending over me. It was easy to classify her as old, her face was wrinkled, and wrinkled again upon its own wrinkles like sand after the path of the sea. Her skin was yellow but her teeth amazingly white and sharp, like the teeth of a small fierce animal. Her eyes, too, were very bright, and when she moved, she was like a snake, sinuous and strong. She bent over me, but I had shut my eyes.

“What about the mask?” the girl was asking. “Shouldn’t you take it off?”

“That’s the shireen,” the old woman said. “This one’s a Plains woman. They think if they go bare-faced with any but their own men, they’ll die.”

The girl laughed scornfully.

“Laugh away. You’ve never had such a belief drummed into your head since childhood. Have you never seen a cursed man? No, I daresay you haven’t. Well, a healer puts a curse on him and says: ‘In ten days’ time you’ll drop down dead.’ And the man goes away and thinks himself into it, and on the tenth day he does just what she says. It’s all what you believe, girl. And if this one thinks she’ll die if she’s unmasked, we’d best leave her as she is.”

Through the slits of my eyes I looked at her, this cunning one, who knew so much. I could tell from the slight unconscious stress in her voice when she spoke the word “healer” that she was one. And now, as she got up and moved about, I began to see where I was, and it was her place, not a tent, but a wagon.

The flaps were wide open, and outside, under the vaulted ceiling of a black eave, the cook-fires were burning, the meat roasting, and the kicked dogs running. In here a lamp swung above me, and beads and dried skins, and the skulls and bones of small animals hung and rustled on the canvas walls and from the wooden struts. I lay among rugs. The girl was crouched at the brazier where something—not food—bubbled in an iron pot. The old woman had taken her seat in a wooden chair, a black, long-eyed cat across her knees.

“I see you’re awake,” she said then. The cat stirred, twitching the velvet points of its slightly tufted ears.

“Are you hungry?”

“As you said,” I answered, “broth or porridge. None of the tribes eat meat.”

“True enough,” the old woman said. She ignored the fact that I had been listening so much longer than she had thought—or perhaps she had known anyway. She made a sign to the girl, who glared in my direction and jumped out of the wagon, making it rock.

“How did I get here?” I asked, not so much wanting to find out as to divert the old woman’s attention, which seemed very piercing, the bright eyes delving like knives, quite impartial and, at the same time, quite merciless.

“Gar went threading with some girl in the upper caves. They found you and brought you here. Where you came from before that is your own trouble; I don’t know it.”

“I am a fighter from the tribes,” I said. “My man was killed in a street fight in Ankurum. I think I rode into the hills, but I was stunned and remember little. I suppose my horse threw me.”

Her old face told me nothing. She stroked the cat.

“Ankurum? You’re many miles from Ankurum now. Nearer Sogotha. And higher than the hills. These are the mountains—the Ring.”

“Whose camp is this?” I asked.

“Oh, not anyone’s in particular. Though ask another and he might say we were Geret’s people. A merchant camp. This is a caravan bound for the old cities beyond the Ring and the Water. We travel in a pack because of thieves. Not many in the mountains, but a few, and, with the winter coming on them, they like to be well provided for.”

“Do you carry weapons for the city wars?”

“Some. Mostly foodstuffs. It’s poor husbandry across the Water. A bad barren land.”

Irony, bitter as herbs, tasted in my mouth. Another caravan; this time, a true image. And I in the wagon of the healer, I, who had been healer of sorts. And they went in fear of thieves.

The girl brought a sticky porridge then, but I could not eat it. The old woman made me a drink, bitter as the irony in my mouth, and I slept.

I did not remember my dreams now. In the mornings I was heavy from the bitter drink, and at first everything was blurred and uncertain. We were on the mountain pass, it seemed, going over the Ring, but it was colder now, and there was a four-day-old rainstorm beating outside the string of caves in which they had taken shelter. You could hear the storm, but it did not sound like a natural thing, more like some huge animal howling and scrabbling to get in at us.

Fresh icy water ran in the big cave, and the fires were always going, acrid and spitting.

The second day, a man with a fur-edged robe, and a couple of henchmen behind him, came to the wagon mouth.

“Uasti,” he called out in a deep important voice.

It was the healer-woman’s name clearly, for she left her iron pot and opened the flap wider.

“What?”

“ ‘What?’ Is this the way to speak to me?”

“How else, Geret wagon master, if I want to know what you come seeking?”

I could see Geret was discomfited. He was used to having his way with people, a bully and organizer, perhaps quite intelligent in his limited fashion. He had the slightly bulbous eyes that seemed so common to his type, thin curled hair, and very red full lips. Now he gave a little laugh.

“I defer to your age, Uasti. An old woman’s privilege to be rude.”

“Quite right,” Uasti said. “And now?”

“And now, this girl I hear you’ve taken in—some Plains savage—”

I had been sitting among the rugs, half asleep, aimless and detached, but the bee’s sting reached me. I got up, and there was strength in my legs for the first time since I had run from my butchery.

“Very savage,” I said, leaning out over him, one hand on the nearest wagon strut, the other taking him lightly by the fur collar. “Have you heard of the warrior-women of the tribes? I am one, Geret of the wagons.”

Geret looked alarmed. He made a few brief noises, and I wondered why the two behind him did not come forward and detach my grasp. I glanced at them, and one was openly smirking. It appeared Geret was not a popular man. Yet it took Uasti to laugh.

“Let go of him, girl, before he wets his fine leggings.”

I let go. Geret flushed and pulled his robe straight.

“I had come,” he snapped, a little throatily, “to say she might stay with us, provided she worked for her food and comfort. Now, I think otherwise.”

“Oh, yes?” Uasti said. “And where will she go? We’re high in the Ring, Geret, and the snow is only a wish or so away. Does not the oldest law of the traveling people say, ‘Take in the stranger lest he die’?”

“Die? This one?” Geret looked skeptical. “She got up here by her own wits, let her use them and get down again. I’ll have none of the tribes in my place.”

“Your place? I must remember to tell Oroll and the other merchants what you say. And don’t look angry at me, Geret. Remember there’ll be illness and trouble enough coming for you to thank me when I cure it.

Now, no more about She-in-my-wagon. I’ll take care of her and no bother to you. She eats hardly at all, so that needn’t lose you any sleep.”

Geret, furious, began to say something else.

“No,” Uasti cut in, sharp as a knife, “just you remember who I am, before who you are. You’ll be glad you did what I said if a fever comes on you, and I have to tend it.”

The menace in her words was unmistakable, and I saw for the first time, clearly, what power the healer had in her own community if she was good at her trade, and made them recollect it.

“Be damned!” Geret snapped, turned and made off.

The two henchmen offered brief respectful salutes to Uasti, and trudged after, grinning behind the wagon leader’s back.

2

So now I was Uasti’s. Her property, for I had my life at her demand. Yet it seemed she wanted nothing.

It seemed so.

She let me wander where I wished, through the big cave into smaller caves, to be alone in the dank darkness. I was used to the hostility of these wagon riders. It was a familiar thing. Soon, if nothing happened, they would accept me, perhaps, in their own way. For now, they were a little afraid, and that was enough. When I went back to the wagon, she made no comment on arrival or absence. She would stroke the black cat, and offer me food, which I might accept or refuse as I liked. The girl chivied her, it is true, hating me for many varied reasons. Uasti would glance at me to see if it bothered me, and then tell her to go, or to be quiet, or to think of other things. The girl, in awe of the healer-woman, obeyed sullenly, but one evening, when Uasti was gone to see to some sick child, the girl came in and found me on my own. I had been mixing together some herbs which the old woman had asked me to do. This was a new thing, to set me tasks, but I could hardly refuse. I was going at it aimlessly, a pinch of this, a pinch of that, green and brown and gray stuff, when the girl came through the flap and ran straight at me.

“You! Who told you to meddle with that?” she screeched. This was her office, clearly, and she did not like to be usurped. Something occurred to me then, but I had no time to think of it at that moment. All the herbs went scattering, and she was tearing at my hair and beating at my chest, and trying to claw with her nails, but they were short and did not do much damage. She was bigger than I, but I was very strong and she had not reckoned on that. I got her hands and then her body and opened the flap and flung her out. It was not far, and I aimed her toward some rugs heaped up to dry by a fire, but I expect her bones rattled at the impact. She began to shriek and wail, and many women and a few men came up.

It seemed we were for the old trouble, when a cool amused voice, crackling as snakeskin through dry reeds, called out.

“What’s this, then? Rape—or has a wolf got into my wagon?”

A silence fell, and the crowd parted and let Uasti through. No one spoke or tried to stop her until she came to the rugs, and then the girl reached up and touched her wrist.

“Healer! She was mixing up the herbs—the Givers of Life—I saw her.”

“And so? I told her to do it.”

“Told her—! But that was my work!” the girl wailed, her face blank and pale.

“Well, it’s your work no longer, hussy. You can bring the food and water from here on, and no more.”

“Healer!” screamed the girl, grabbing at hand and sleeve now.

Uasti picked her off.

“If I decide otherwise, I’ll tell you,” Uasti said. “Until then, you are cook-girl.”

The girl curled over on herself and began to sob.

I was very angry with Uasti, for now I saw what was in her mind—to deprive one in need, and give to one who had no wish for it. She came into the wagon, dropped her bag of potions, and sat in the wooden chair.

I sat by the flap, and said to her, “Why do that? She had served you many years, and was apprentice to your trade.”

“Why? Because she’s a fool and a sniveler. Years, you say, since twelve, five years in all, and she has learned little enough. She’s no instinct for it. And the Touch isn’t in her fingers. I’d thought there was nothing better.”

“Until now,” I said.

Uasti moved her hands noncommittally. “It remains to be seen.”

The black cat rubbed by me on its way to take possession of her knees.

“Cat likes you,” Uasti said. “She never liked that other one.”

“Uasti,” I said, “I am not a healer.”

“Not a healer? Oh, yes. And a stone is not a stone, and the sea is made of black beer, and men run backward.”

“Uasti, I am not a healer.”

“You’re a strange one,” she said. “You’ve more power in your eyes than in your fingers, and more power in your fingers than I in mine, and you let it lie.”

“I have no power.”

“But you’ve healed before. Yes, I know it. I can smell it on you.”

“I did not heal. It was their belief I could, not I that healed them.”

I said this before I could keep the words back, and Uasti smiled a little, glad I had committed myself. I became very angry then, and all the hurt and fear and bewilderment crowded in on me. Who knew better than I that in showing another his or her fears, one finds one’s own? Yet I could not help it. It was dark in the wagon, the flaps down, only Uasti’s bright eyes and the bright eyes of the cat gleaming at me, two above two.

“Uasti, healer-woman,” I said, and my voice was a pale iron shaft through that dark, “I come from earth guts, and I have lived with men in the stamp they have given me which was not of my choosing. I have been goddess and healer and bandit and warrior, and archer too, and beloved, and for all this I have suffered, and the men and women who set me in the mold of my suffering have suffered also because of me. I will not run between the shafts anymore. I must be my own and no other’s. I must find my soul-kin before I corrupt myself with the black impulse which is in me. Do you understand, Uasti of the wagon people?”

The two pairs of ice-bright beads stared back, a creature without form, seeing, waiting.

“Look, Uasti,” I said, and I dragged the brazier near me, and poked it into life, then pulled the shireen away from my face.

By the flicker of the coals, I saw Uasti’s old woman’s face draw in on itself, the lines suddenly harder etched. The cat bristled and rose, spitting, its ears flat to its head.

“Yes, Uasti,” I said, “now you see.”

And I put on the mask again, and sat looking at her.

She did not move for a moment, then she quieted the cat, and her own face was expressionless.

“Indeed I see. More than you think, you who are of the Lost Ones.”

I cringed at that name, but she lifted her hand.

“Come here, lostling.” And I went to her, and kneeled before her, because there was nothing else I could do, while the cat jumped from her lap and ran somewhere in the wagon to shelter from me.

“Yes,” Uasti said, “I know a little. It’s legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire, and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance. When I was a little thing, many, many years ago, and they saw I had the healing touch, my village sent me to live with a wild race in the hills, and there I learned my trade.

They were a strange people, wanderers, they went from place to place, but they believed they had the eye of a god, a great god, greater than any other, and, wherever they went, they carried a box of yellow metal, and in the box was a book. It was written in a strange tongue, and some of the old ones said they could read it, but I am not so sure of that. They’d chew a herb they grew in little pitchers of earth, and lie in dark places, and have dreams about the Book. But they knew the legends of the old lost race without the trances. There was an inscription on the cover of that Book. The cover was gold, and the joints were gold, and the inscription was all I ever saw. They never let a woman look inside it.” Uasti lifted aside the rugs, picked up the iron which was used to stir the brazier, and sprinkled something from an open vessel on the bare floor. With the hot metal she traced out the words:

BETHEZ TE-AM

And then she glanced at me.

“Well, lostling?”

Those words, so close to me in the green dust she had sprinkled, not spoken because of their power—how new and alien they seemed, for I sensed no evil in them, only a great sorrowing.

“Herein the truth,” I said.

“They called it the Book of the True Word,” Uasti said. “Their god had dictated it, but the legends knew better, and the healers knew better too. So I learned.”

3

I thought that I had been one with Darak, in my fashion, forgetting oneness does not come from the body alone. Now I became one with the strange old woman of the wagon people—by an almost imperceptible process that sprang from understanding.

The day after we had spoken together in the wagon, the storm lifted and the camp pressed on. It was late in the year for traveling, the snow very close, brooding behind whitish gray skies adrift with cloud clots. A boy drove our wagon, and the little shaggy horses which pulled it. Uasti often got out to walk, and I walked with her. She was very brisk and strong, and the cold slid off her like water off a turtle’s shell. I did not see the girl who had been her apprentice, except when she brought Uasti’s food. Then she did not look at me, but only at Uasti, pleadingly, like a dog.

But all these things were little things beside the oneness.

In fact, she had not told me so much, but she had known, and that had been a wonderful release for me.

The legends they had told her, the strange wild men and women of that savage tribe where she had learned her healing arts, were many-colored and many-faceted, and, as with any legend, one must read between the words, being skeptical but not too much so, sifting and rejecting and searching. There had been a race—the Lost, the Book of the tribe called them, a great race, skilled in the Power, healers and magicians of genius. But evil had possessed them and eaten them and spewed them up again in a new form. Then they ruled with hate, malice, and corruption. In the end a disease had come, nameless yet terrible, and they had died in droves, in the very acts of pleasure that had damned them. Some were buried in the magnificent mausoleums of their ancestors, others, having none left to bury them, rotted in their palaces, and became at last white bones among the white bones of their cities, and even the bones perished. And so they were no more. But the Book, or so the priests said, had persisted in its cry that the old race were not made up of evil and hatred only. Their symbol had been the phoenix, the fire-bird rising from its own ashes. There would be a second coming—and gods and goddesses would walk the earth again.

I do not know if Uasti believed me to be one of that second coming. Certainly there was little enough goddess in me. She never asked me where I came from or what I knew, and I never told her more than I had that day when I pulled the shireen from my face. Yet there was this sharing. She began to teach me her arts, very simple and humble in their way, and I found a response in me. I wanted—needed to know.

The wagoners were beginning to accept me. When I went among them with Uasti they scarcely noticed now, and once or twice, when I walked on my own away from the wagons, at night, when they were in the shelter of some cave or other, people would come and ask me to tell Uasti this or that. And once I found a lost girl-child in some cave alley, crying, and when I led her back to the firelight, she came very trustingly and put her hand in mine. I am not a one for children, there is not enough human woman in me for that, but a child’s trust is a remarkable compliment, and it touched me.

That night I wept for Darak, silently, in the wagon, and, although I was silent, I knew Uasti heard my grief, but she did not come to question or comfort, knowing, wise one, there was nothing she could do.

The next day it was better.

Oh, yes, he will always be there in me, I have good reason to remember, but, like the old wound, it throbs only at certain seasons, and then one is well used to it.

The eighth day after I had come to them, the snow began to fall all around us, thick and white.

The pass was narrow, the crags going up on every side and away into their own gray distances. The snow would choke the way eventually, bring down boulders and avalanches of loose stuff and torn-up pines. There were also the wolves who came out at us soon as the whiteness was down. They were not very big, whitish in color, but with flaming eyes. They harried us like an army hidden in among the rocks.

The children and the sick or weakly were shut firmly in the wagons, as were the stores of food. Riders went on the outside of the caravan, holding burning tar-torches with which they thrust at the wolves. But the horses did not like our new companions, and it was a weary, noisy, irritable time.

For all the caravan was officially led by the most important merchants traveling with it—Oroll, Geret, and two or three others—it lacked organization, and there were constant disputes between the “leaders.”

I had been wondering how they would get across the Ring at all with the snow coming so fast, for it could only be the first snow of many. Uasti told me there was a tunnel soon, through the mountain rock itself, a sheltered black passageway hewn out long ago. She did not say the human slaves of the Old Race had made it, but I thought it was so. Now an argument broke out among the wagons as to whether we should make on toward this place or hole up in some cave until the brief thaw that generally comes after this first snowfall. Geret and another were for waiting, Oroll and the rest were for pressing on. Fairly soon the caravan had split into factions. There were fights, and bleeding noses and broken knuckles for Uasti to heal. Finally, in the refuge of a cave, the snow piled high outside, fires blazing at the cave-mouth to keep the howling wolves away, they came to Uasti, and demanded she read the auguries.

With men it is always this way, they will ignore their gods until they are in trouble or need, and then they will turn to them with sudden fervor and belief. The god of the wagoners was a small, white image, rough-hewn and only a foot or so in height. They carried it in the spice wagon and so it came out reeking of herbs, cinnamon, musk, and pepper, and was dumped by sneezing porters in the back of the cave.

They called it Sibbos, and it was a man-god, and they had a special red and yellow robe that they brought out for it now, and put on it, together with necklets and rings and colored beads. It had an expressionless, unpainted face, and there was no special aura to it, for it was not worshiped often enough to have taken on any personality of its own, as do the vast statues of the temple gods, who are feared and called to every day of the year.

I had been learning Uasti’s medicine for some days now; not so much the binding of wounds and setting of limbs, but those other arts which are deeper and more profound.

Now, after Geret and his men had gone, she turned to me and said, “I’m old for this work. You shall do it.”

I did not want any part of their religion, and I told her so. I had thought she understood my needs and antipathies.

“Yes,” she said, “but I understand too that in your way you must get power over others. That’s your heritage, and you can’t shy away from it forever. Here is power in a small way, and you must take it, and learn to control both others and yourself.”

Then she took out a black robe with long sleeves, and a black belt to pull it in at the waist, and made me put them on. They were her things, but she was a slim, small woman, and they fitted me well, too well, perhaps. I stood silent then, while she told me what I must do, a strange figure, white hands and feet and hair, black mask-face, and black body. She put the necessary things into my fingers, opened the flap, and told me to go.

I went out from among the wagons into the round belly vault of the cave. Red firelight and smoke hung across it like shifting veils of gauze, and through the veils I saw them all, hushed and waiting, the pale, intent faces turning abruptly now to the god and his priest.

When they saw it was the tribal woman and not the healer, a little gasp and mutter went up, but they had awed themselves too much before the expedient god to make a scene now in front of him.

It seemed I had enacted this role so often, the sea of staring faces fixed on me—in the village, in the ravine camp, at Ankurum when the Sirkunix roared, and later at the Victors’ feast. But this time there was a difference. In the village I had not wanted to have power over them, or thought I had not; in the hills the faces had been hostile. Now there was that look of waiting, and submission—not the frenzy of the stadium, but the quiet sleep-trance of belief. Something stirred in me at it, as I realized I had them in my palm. I stood very still in my white and black, holding the copper things in my hands, and then I began to walk between them toward the god. And I laughed at the god as I went toward him. You—what areyou? And he had no answer for me, for here it was the priest who was the power, not the god, poor empty stone.

I set down the copper implements before him with a slight clatter. Into the round cup on its three-legged stand I poured incense dust, and lit it by thrusting a taper into the fire already burning there in its brazier.

The smoke went up, blue and cloying. I raised my arms as if in prayer and heard the mutter of response behind me. Then I scattered the dried grains, red and brown and black, and studied the patterns they formed on the stone ledge before Sibbos. This is not such a mystic thing. You see what it is sensible to see, or else you interpret what you see so that the meaning comes out as you want it. I could make out a winding shape, red among black, a black shape rather like a dog, and an arched shape, also black. So I turned to them and called out,

“A track, a wolf, and an arch-mouth. Sibbos tells you to go on, over the track toward the mountain tunnel, not fearing the wolves or the snow.”

Uasti had told me this was best—the thaw was not always kind or punctual, and Geret’s plan might be more dangerous in the long run than pressing on. But, if it had been the other way, I might well have said the wolf barred the track from us, indicating we should stay in the shelter of the cave—the arch-mouth I could see.

Next Oroll, Geret, and some others came up, and I gave them each one of the little closed copper vessels. Geret looked uneasily at me, but he took the thing and said nothing, yet his eyes flickered a lot. I lifted up the bowl of incense by the tongs, and tipped out the contents at their feet. Then I touched each vessel, one by one. And each man opened and drew out what was inside. Each item is very tiny, but a symbol, and it is the order in which they are discovered which is supposed to convey a meaning. First was the red clay disc which is the sun, and after that, the black wood oblong which means bad luck.

After these, the white bead which is snow, the green bead which is warm weather, the yellow oval of good fortune, and the blue circle which has another circle cut away from the inside of it, and means the god’s pleasure.

There are twenty or so of these vessels, all in all, and everyone must be brought by the healer, and given out at random—the god guiding her hand, naturally. Still, it would be easy to mark the vessels so that one could identify which was which—a tiny scratch mark to the copper, discernible by the sensitive hand—yet there was no need. You could twist the meaning any way you chose. Today, it was this: Sibbos told us that to wait for the thaw—the sun—would be bad luck since there would be heavy snow and not good weather. Good fortune came by placing ourselves trustingly in the hands of Sibbos and going on toward the tunnel. It would have been equally simple to say—wait for the thaw, it is bad luck to go across the snow. Good weather is coming and good fortune, and the god smiles on us.

Nevertheless, the healer’s interpretation is final.

Oroll and the men who wanted to move on grunted and nodded. The Others looked sullen. Only Geret spoke up.

“I defy the reading. Uasti should have done it. This man girl isn’t a true diviner. I don’t trust her judgment.”

There was a tense quiet in the cave. The fires crackled.

“Do you argue with your god, Geret?” I asked.

“With you I argue.”

The time had come for me to finish his troublemaking. I looked at him, and his eyes could not slither from the grasp of mine. It was very quick, and I knew I had him.

“Then, Geret,” I said, “you anger Sibbos. Put down his vessel before he burns your hand in his fury.”

Almost at once Geret yelled, and dropped the little copper pot. His palm was red and blistering, A cry of amazement went up, a few screams, and much jostling as those farthest from us tried to discover what had happened. I dipped my fingers in the water cup and flung a few drops in Geret’s face. He came awake at once and clutched his hand. Oroll nodded to me.

“Truly, Uasti has chosen well. You’ve the true knowledge of the god. Foolish for anyone to question it.”

He moved aside to let me pass. I went by, down between the people, who moved apart for me, and back to the wagon.

I set the things in their places. Uasti was sitting very still in her chair, her eyes glittering slightly in the gloom.

“It is done,” I said.

She did not answer. Then I saw the strange, blood-red necklace around her throat. The horror I felt is quite inexpressible. I wanted to shriek and shriek, but somehow I kept it down, like vomit. I thought for a moment a wild animal had got in, but no animal was so neat in what it did. There was a great deal of blood, I was already covered in it, having come in among it without thinking. And then the screaming started, and I thought at first it was me. But it was another. The girl who had been Uasti’s was running up between the wagon-lanes, yelling and weeping and tearing her hair. In a moment men and women were running to her, running back with her toward the wagon. They wrenched open the flaps, and light speared at us, Uasti and I.

“Her! Her!” the girl wailed, hysterical with malice and fury, and terror at what she had done. “Look at her, covered with the old one’s blood! Vampire!”

Her frenzy caught at them like flame in dry grass. It was the women who came at me. I was pulled down from the wagon, onto my face, then rolled onto my back. There was the sensation of many hands holding me helpless, fingers in my hair and clothes, straining and biting into my flesh, the great mist of faces, bestial and intent. I was choked and blinded by panic and shock, and I knew it would be now, after all, that I should die. Those hands hitting at me, all one bruising blow falling again and again. Blood salt in my mouth from a loosened tooth. It scarcely seemed to matter what damage they did if I was to die anyway—I only wanted to lose consciousness and feel no more of it.

But I could not quite let go. Beyond the blur of pain, I heard a dim bellowing of men’s angry voices, then the high calls of women, and suddenly my attackers were being pulled off me and slung aside. Strong, rough, but helpful hands had me now. I was being lifted away—I glimpsed faces, and one face in particular, the full red-lipped face of Geret—and found, surprised, it was his men, not Droll’s, who had rescued me.

This was his wagon, richly hung and rather cluttered. Two lamps overhead—greenish gold between my slitted lids, already puffy and closing. The shireen had saved me a little, but not much. Cautiously I probed at the tooth, which wobbled unpleasantly. Yet I knew enough now to realize that if I left it alone, it would have grown back into its socket by morning. As for my body, the robe was stripped away in great rents and holes, one breast and most of my legs bare. The flesh was streaked with blood and purple with bruises, and my head ached from the handfuls of hair they had wrenched out.

Beyond the wagon, I could still hear shouts and screaming, but it grew quieter gradually.

I lay and waited for Geret.

When he came in, through the flap I glimpsed for a moment the circle of his men guarding the wagon.

“Well,” he said, and chuckled. “Not a pretty sight, not pretty at all. They’ve made a bad mess of you, warrior woman. What would your tribe say now, eh? The warrior who couldn’t even hold off a pack of girls.”

I did not bother to answer; besides, it would have hurt too much.

He got the lamps down on their chains, and lowered the wicks. The light became very dull and murky, but I could still see enough to know when he hoisted up his robe and lowered his leggings, and came at me with his enraged manhood wagging. He ripped off the last of the robe, but did not touch the shireen.

He had no interest in faces, that one. Neither did he have time to notice anything else.

When he was finished, he rolled aside and lay on his back.

“You there,” he said, “tribal mare. Have the sense to see Geret has broken you at last. I know you’re not strong enough to turn on me, but in case you think you are, there are twenty men outside, and I’ve only to call.”

I wondered how true that was, remembering the first day, and how the henchmen had grinned at his discomfort. But perhaps he had picked his guard better this time.

“I will not hurt you,” I managed to say.

He cursed.

“You know they’ll kill you for murdering the old bitch? Not a nice killing either. The women have a very high regard for their healer. I might be able to save your skin—what they’ve left you of it. But I ask myself if I should. I don’t know how you managed that trick with the copper, but I don’t take kindly to it.”

I was drowsy. I had learned to take my safety where I found it, and I knew now what must be done.

Uasti had taught me something more than the arts of eye and hand, which had already been in me, though without discipline. And I did not grieve for Uasti, for she was not one to pity or be sad over, even in murder and death. Her face had been calm and silent above the slashed throat.

And her vengeance was coming.

4

I woke early, sensing day without any smell or sight to indicate it, holed up as we were. Geret was snoring on his back, and oblivious, as I examined myself. I was healed. Only the very deepest scratches and cuts had left a faint mauve scar, but that would be gone before the day was over. The tooth was whole in my mouth. Even the soreness in my hair had vanished, and the hair-growth seemed unimpaired.

I took Geret’s jug of icy water, and sponged myself, careless of the puddles which formed on his rugs. I took one of his pig’s-bristle brushes, with which he scraped his thin curls, and brushed my own hair into silk. Next, I rummaged in his clothes chest, and found a green cloak with fastenings down the front of it, and holes for the arms to come through. It was very voluminous on me but not too long, for he was a short, squat man, this leader of the wagons.

Ready now, I went up to him and kicked him in the side.

He gave a grunting snort and woke up. His eyes fixed on me at once, bleary, angry, bulbous eyes.

“It’s you, is it? What do you want, then?”

“Get up,” I said. “Go and tell the people of the wagons that Sibbos demands justice for the crime against the healer.”

He gave an unbelieving laugh, turned over, and prepared to sleep again. I got the water jug, and tipped what was left of the icy stuff over his head and face. He came up at once, spluttering water and fury.

Another moment and he was on his feet, reeling at me, swearing, his hands ready to beat me into pulp.

But he was looking in my face. I felt my eyes widen to absorb him and his petty little consciousness, and all at once he was stopped, his mouth slack, his eyes fixed, his hands still raised to begin the beating.

“Now, Geret,” I said, “it is time you knew I am under the protection of Sibbos. You have wronged me, and must be punished for it. Oh, Sibbos!” I cried out. “Punish this man.” I waited a moment, and Geret began to whimper. I said, “The god has set light to the soles of your feet, Geret. They are burning.”

Almost at once his face contorted with agony. He yelped and screamed, hopping up and down, and clutching at his feet in vain attempts to beat out the nonexistent flames.

I watched him, and then I said, “I have Interceded for you with the god, and he has put out the fire.”

With little cries of distress, Geret sank down on the wet rugs.

“Now there is only coolness, and no pain,” I said to him, and he began to sob with relief. “But next time,”

I added, “the punishment will be greater and more lasting. My guardian, Sibbos, is angry with you. You must do what I say in the future and offer me no violence. Now wake, and do not forget.”

Then I went to him and slapped him across the face. The trance dropped from his eyes, but he remembered, and there was a look of utter terror there instead.

“You will obey me now, Geret,” I told him. “Yes, tribal woman. Yes.”

“Not tribal woman. Now I am Uasti, your healer. Go and tell the wagon people that Sibbos is angry and demands judgment. Tell them it will be a trial by fire.” He got up and pulled his robe together, and lurched out. It seemed so easy then, I was suddenly afraid I had forgotten some vital part, and the plan would not work. But it would.

I had taken her name already, and that would hold them to me by her bond. After a time, they would ignore the differences between us, and I would have been healer always. As for the trial by fire, they would love such a show. They would long to see the miscreant writhing in agony, and so they would hold off from tearing me limb from limb, because that would spoil the entertainment. Geret was away a long while, and the noises outside were confused. Finally, five of his men came, and motioned me to come out. I walked among them from the shelter of the wagons.

The crowd was there, as before, yet very different. They jostled, hating me. A few women spat curses, but, as I had judged, they did not attack me.

We got to the back of the cave, where the god still stood in his red and yellow, and his jewels. Geret stood there, too, sallow and nervous. When I came up to him, he nodded.

“I told them.”

“Good,” I said. “Now have them bring out Uasti’s body in her wooden chair, and place it before the god.”

Geret did as I said, and a great muttering went up. The women had already washed the body and bound its neck, and dressed it in black garments and all its trinkets and beads, and then stuck black round discs over the lids to keep them closed. All this was their tradition, done out of fear. They feared the spirits of the dead, particularly of the murdered dead. Now four of Geret’s men went and got the corpse, and they were uneasy going, pale-faced coming back.

The crowd hushed and drew away, and much female weeping and imprecation broke out.

Uasti was very stiff, but it gave her a certain dreadful majesty. I did not like what they had done to her face, for they paint their dead like dolls—white, with red lips and cheeks, and scarlet nails. Yet it was only revulsion at their ways which stirred in me, not anything else. This was not Uasti, only the dry stalk, broken off. The men set her down and drew back, and she sat there, staring with her black disc eyes.

I stepped forward and held up my hand, and growling broke out.

“Tell them to let me speak,” I said to Geret, and he shouted at them, and when the noise went on, his men—distributed strategically around the cavern, I saw—prodded and pushed them into silence.

“You think me guilty,” I shouted at them then, “but I am innocent of this beast’s act. You see I have no fear of the dead one, nor of the god. Yesterday the women tore my flesh. Many, I expect, remember what they did.” At once shrill cries of malicious agreement. “Look, then,” I said, and pulled open the fastenings of the robe and dropped it, and stood there naked and healed. The susurration of surprise went up. I had been badly marked but there was not a scratch on me.

Then a girl had forced her way to the front, ducked between Geret’s guards and was yelling, “You did it with your witchcraft, evil one! Don’t think to confuse us, standing there naked and shameless in your wickedness.”

It was Uasti’s girl, and at once the crowd began to bay behind her voice. Geret shouted again, without my prompting this time, the guards hustled, and quiet came once more.

“No,” I said, “the god has taken your marks from me to show you my innocence. But I will give you further proof.” The stir of anticipation. “Get them to bring an unlit torch,” I said to Geret, “and a stand for it.”

A man went and got one from a stack nearby, while another hurried away for the stand. The tension in the cave mounted, and the delay while things were fetched increased it. My nakedness confused them also; they themselves would have been ashamed to be stripped before so many, and were even a little embarrassed to look at me.

When the torch was set up on the spike of the stand, I dipped a taper in the altar brazier and set it alight.

My hands were trembling as I turned my back on them, and confronted Sibbos as if to pray. Could I do this thing? Well, too late now if I could not. I stared at the bright blue jewel on his breast until my eyes unfocused, and slowly, slowly, an avenue in my brain came open, and I walked down it. Now I seemed two people as I turned back to them. First myself, heavy as a sleeper, conscious of my body only as one is conscious in a half-dream, without any control over it at all; and the second—an entity, cold as an ice-crystal in the top of my skull, who controlled my body perfectly, as the first “I” could not.

I turned myself to face them, and, as I did so, I placed one of my hands on the hand of Uasti.

“I am guiltless of your murder, dead one,” I called out, yet not I but the other “I,” a voice that I did not feel vibrate in my throat. “If this is as I have said, let the fire not burn me.”

I heard them hold their breath, the single held breath of the crowd, all one.

Then I leaned myself forward across the torch, and the flame lapped my shoulders, breasts, and bellv. I did not feel the flame at all; even had it burned me, I should have felt nothing, but the yellow luminance slid like water on my skin, and left no mark. Cries and shouts went up from the crowd. I stood myself straight, and drew the torch off its spike in my numb hands, and stroked it up and down me. It glowed on my flesh, but without smoke. The noise had fallen off again. It was totally silent as I made the torch go back into its position on the spike, turned to the god and the blue jewel, and let go the trance that was on me. It was a strange coming-together of the two parts of me—swift and shocking in the return as the going-out had been slow and dreamlike. Sound, sight, smell, touch seemed overbearingly acute, almost agonizing, but I had no time to be discomfited. My body was whole and I had proved myself, and now came the next move.

“A trick!”

Uasti’s girl had run forward, nearer to the back of the cave where the god stood. Furiously she screamed, spitting white flecks in her terrified anger.

“Can’t you see it’s a trick! Don’t let the murderess escape her punishment!”

The vague murmurs rumbled again, but I called, “No trick at all,” and I stooped down to the green cloak, and ripped a piece out of it, stood, and dropped it on the torch. At once the material caught and flared up, turning black in a moment. The crowd pressed closer now, but their intensity was a different thing. I began to hear the words.

“She’s innocent. The spirit of Uasti protects her.”

“Wait,” I shouted, and they stopped like horses who feel the reins suddenly pulled hard in their mouths.

“All is not done. The god is angry at the death of the healer. Someone here is a murderer. If not I, then who?” It was the moment of attack and not defense, and I took a fierce joy in it, I who had been the quarry until now. “You!” I pointed at a plump woman near the front. “Was it you?” and she shrank away, pale with shock. “Or you?” and I turned on a skinny, narrow-skulled man in the center, whose mouth dropped open, showing the dismal stares of a few, coyly distributed gray teeth. “Tell your men to bring those two here,” I hissed at Geret, and in a moment the stupefied man and whimpering woman were dragged struggling to the god.

I went to the woman first, and, as I possessed her terrified eyes, I said, “Have no fear. If you are innocent, Sibbos will protect you. Touch Uasti’s hand and she will protect you too.”

The woman—calmed, sure of her innocence, and under my will now—touched the dead paw, and then meekly let me lead her to the torch.

“If she is guiltless,” I cried out, “the fire will be cool and pleasant to her as water.”

I guided her arm, so that her hand went into the flame up to the wrist, and she gasped at it, like a child who has just seen a sea, or a sunset, or a mountain for the first time—knowing, yet delighted and amazed. The voice rose up hysterically. I drew out her plump unmarked hand, and dabbed a few drops from the copper water cup across her brow. She woke dazed and smiling. The man was next, but it was the same. The crowd was in ferment now, bubbling and chattering. I stared down at them, and motioned with one hand.

“Not I, not these,” I called out. “Who, then?”

I saw that the girl who had been Uasti’s was at the very front, where she had pushed her way, yet she was moving now trying to get back. Panic was beginning to distort her face. Abruptly, she saw me turned to her, and she stopped quite still. I began to walk toward her, and another of the quietnesses dropped around us. I went very slowly, yet in a straight line, not looking to either side, only at her. The closer I got, the more she shrank away, but she could not seem to move. In any case, the crowd would not have let her.

When I was a foot or so away, I said, “You, too, must prove your innocence before Uasti and the god,”

and many willing hands pushed her forward into mine.

It was cruelly easy, she had no strength left. I did not have to do anything to her, her own guilt and the natural fire would be enough. Yet I was not prepared for what happened—a phenomenon close to the one I had conjured, yet in reverse.

I pulled her to Uasti’s corpse and said, “Touch her hand, and, if you are innocent, she will protect you, and the fire will not burn,” and then she began to struggle and weep.

“I am afraid, I am afraid.”

“Why?”

“She is dead—a dead thing! I can’t bear to touch the dead!”

At once the great mob voice rose in the hall.

“The trial! The trial! The trial!”

I wrenched the wailing girl’s right hand and forced it down onto Uasti’s. And then the thing happened.

The girl gave a terrible shriek, animal, mindless, which cut the chant like a sword. She flung backward on her heels and fell down before the wooden chair, and her right palm was turned upwards so all could see the blackened flesh, seared to the bone.

Now the noise came loud and total, the triumph and fury and hate. Before any could stop them—and who indeed tried?—the women had the body of the girl, and had borne it away to savage it like wolves, as they would have savaged me. Yet the girl was dead, had died the moment she touched Uasti’s hand.

Sick at last, I picked up the green robe and drew it on. What power the girl had possessed after all, inside herself, and had never found the key to it, only the razor edge of it which destroyed her.

5

There was to be no thaw that winter. Uasti’s good sense, if not the auguries, had been true.

The line of wagons, guarded by the red moving hedge of the torches, toiled upward over narrow Ring Pass, to the accompaniment of the howling blizzard winds of the east, and their whirling white frenzy of new snow. At least we were free of the wolves now, for they do not like the east winds, though they have their voice.

I rode in Uasti’s wagon, among her things, which I knew very well at last, and considered mine. The boy drove the shaggy horses for me, as for her, and a different girl, quiet as a mouse, brought me the food I asked for, and came with me to carry my healer’s stuff when I went among the sick. There was not much they needed. They were, on the whole, a healthy crew. One broken limb I set, and took away the pain; a few fevers that were over and done in a day or so; a birth, easy and uncomplicated, with a mother who knew very well what she was at. That time, it was the healer who learned, but the knowledge might well prove useful later. And they called me Uasti.

The strangest thing of all was what happened with the black, tuft-eared cat. For two days after Uasti’s death, I could not find her, and where she went I do not know, for we were traveling by then. But on the third day, early in the morning, I woke and found her seated on my belly, washing herself, and going up and down with my breathing. I fed her and did not expect anything from her, but she would follow me about the wagon and the camp, when we made one, and sit on my knees purring. She, too, it seemed, had let me replace Uasti. I loved her beauty, and was glad of her, and the bond did not impose a conscious tie on me.

Geret was my other concern. He went in fear of me, a fear so deep now, he would never lose it. This suited me, but I did not want him to seem so suspiciously afraid of me before the wagoners, only to respect my position as healer, as they would think fitting.

At our next camp—under an overhang, a poorly protected spot, but caves were rare now—I went to his wagon. He was drinking after the evening meal with a few of the other merchants, but when he saw me, he hurried them out, and sat waiting nervously.

“Geret.” I said, sitting opposite to him in my healer’s black, the new robe the women had made me. “You have done very well. Sibbos extends his favor to you and though we have had our differences before, I am well pleased. I have heard them say that in a day or so—perhaps the day after tomorrow—we will reach the tunnel through the Ring. I have heard too that this is in its way as dangerous a journey as through the snow. It is time the wagons had a true leader, not a group of men arguing, who all claim the title from time to time. It seems to me that you are the strongest and best organized, therefore it should he you.”

I could see he was pleased. To have complete and acknowledged control of the wagons, to be factual instead of titular head, would carry many advantages. It would also end the bickering, and the mishaps and trouble that bickering always causes.

“Yes.” he said. “yes. Uasti. But how can I do it? One day they call for me. the next for Oroll or another. I have my men but so have Oroll and the rest.”

“I will do it for you.” I said. “I have the ear of Sibbos, and it is the god’s mind that I speak.”

He looked crafty suddenly, knowing, amused, and not at all in awe.

“But,” I said, “remember, if you are the temporal power, I am the spiritual. The fire of the god be upon you if you disobey me once you lead.”

His face drained yellowish.

“Yes, healer,” he said quickly, “I’ll remember, I swear it.”

In a way. this should have been more difficult than it was. However, there were certain things in favor of Geret. He was not a particularlv strong character for all his pomposity, yet he had cunning. Oroll, who should have carried more weight of authority, was too indecisive when it came to the point of action.

Geret, on the other hand would act, even if wrongly. The wagoners were split into six sections, the people and servants of Geret’s caravan, and the people and servants of the other five. Originally each group owed allegiance to its own merchant-lord, but, as there were substantially more men and women in Geret’s portion than in any other of the single units, their voice tended to be loudest. In addition to this Geret’s henchmen wore his own blue and brown uniform. All the merchants had a guard, but Geret’s, dressed up for the occasion, tended to act in a more soldierly fashion, given this psychological impetus.

The last factor in Geret’s favor was his cargo—wheat and corn and the ready-made flour. It was his work to provide bread for the journey, and, while they could have lived on their stores of salt meat, dry cheese, and fruits, the warm fresh bread was a comfort to them. This seemed perhaps the best explanation as to why the whole caravan had styled itself “Geret’s people” from time to time. But, like the god, they had only turned to him when they were hungry.

In the matter of the god, I had already altered their habits. His power was important to me for it was the cloak of mine. Therefore I offered a prayer to him, morning and evening, and they had fallen into the way of praying with me. When I helped the sick, I invoked his name. When we made camp, the robed statue was set up in shelter, and I would give him thanks for our safety. No one was commanded to these worshipings, but most came. So belief had become an ever present thing, more important than before.

Now it was very useful to me, for it was through Sibbos that I made Geret leader.

When I went to pray before him, the morning after I had visited Geret’s wagon, I stood rather longer than usual, then turned and looked back at the crowd. It was one of the endless iron-gray days, bitterly cold, and they were huddled close.

“I must read the auguries,” I said to them, “for there is danger.”

I cast out the grains and stood over them for a long time, as if I saw something, then turned again and said: “There is an animal walking on six legs, but the head is severed, and I cannot find it in the pattern.

Before the animal is a pit, into which it will fall, because it has no head to guide it.” They murmured, and I spread out my hands and cried: “It is the wagon people. Six parts without a leader.”

They broke into shouts and yells then of alarm and surprise, calling out the names of their own particular merchant lord.

I held up my hand for silence, and when I had it, I said, “We must choose one leader for us all. It must be done. This is Sibbos’ warning. Let us pray to him to direct us.”

Then I began the prayer which I had used to him before, in the mornings and evenings.

“Great god, guide us through the dark places, and let no harm come to us. Protect us from danger and distress. Let us judge well in what we do. Give us our bread and our drink, our quiet and our rest. And when we call upon you, do not turn aside from us.”

It was a simple thing, but their minds were open and naive. The phrase, “give us our bread,” so innocently placed in the prayer, unconsciously recalled Geret, the wheat merchant. When it was finished, I looked at them and asked: “Who will you elect for your leader?”

I had told Geret that when I said this, some of his men and women must shout his name. This they did, and, all at once, the whole crowd had caught up the cry. They swirled around and made for his wagon, and soon Geret came out in apparent amazement, and reluctantly agreed to become their master.

As for Oroll and the others, they grumbled a little, but agreed at last that the leadership was nothing in point of fact, and might be useful as a spur and comfort. As I had guessed, Oroll was too indecisive, and the others followed him and accepted the situation.

Things were easy after that. Geret was their lord, but I ruled Geret. For once I felt the strength of command, and freedom, and a sense of identity. I had pored long hours over the old yellow maps of the land we were going to, beyond the Ring and the Water. And now, when I dreamed, I sensed ahead of me the green cool beckoning of the Jade. Incredibly, it seemed, I had guided myself, without knowing, toward my goal. Not once had I deviated, only slowed myself in my time with the village, with Darak, and now with the wagons. Never had the awareness of an imminent fulfillment been so intense. I would wake, burning with joy, trembling and alight with expectation. Soon, soon.

On the second day from Geret’s election, we came to a high place, a treacherous climb among the white-crusted rocks, to a black round hole: the Tunnel through the Ring.

1

It was a black journey, and lasted ten days.

The Tunnel was perhaps some twenty-five feet wide and about twenty feet high, though in places it varied, the walls and ceiling drawing out or in. At all times there was space enough to get through, and at intervals we found wide cave rooms where we could halt and make a camp. The worst of it was the dripping damp, the hollow soundlessness which would pick up a thought and seem to speak it at you, and the darkness that fluttered at the torches like gigantic bats. And there was, too, the nameless fear.

Many of the children fell sick in the Tunnel, but the fear was always the cause of it. The adults, too, became prey to sudden aches and faintings—which they put down to bad air creeping through from other parts of the mountains. Fear was a natural thing; I had expected it—the unconscious terror of the miles of mountain rock balanced over our heads, the primeval terror of dark underground, common to all creatures who are mortal and bury their dead in the earth. Yet this fear was more than these things. I knew, long before I found the key to it. The ghost of the Lost was very strong in this place.

I began to dream of them again, yet the dreams did not appall me as they had. My edge was blunted. I had glimpses of the building of this place—the human overseers, turned against their own people through fear of the Higher Race. I saw the sweating gangs heaving at stone, their flesh dead white as the flesh of slugs from years underground. The whips flicked and cracked. Men fell dead. When they came, they were beautiful in the horror and degradation. They had had greater plans for this tunnel than there had been time to achieve—pillars, carving, frescoes. It should not have been a mere worm’s hole through rock, this passage, but yet another of their unsurpassable works of art built by the toil and misery of underlings. Later, I found the scratch marks on the wall—faded, unreadable to any except eyes as accurate as mine. These were not in the Old Tongue, but an ancient form of the language I had heard in the village, the hills, Ankurum, and among the wagons. And they were all curses—curses against the Great Ones—the curses of men.

Once, at one of the five camps we made, I found a back cave, very wet, hung with stalactites like stiff curtain fringes of glass. There was a black pool, and, at the bottom, bones gleamed dully. Just at the lip of the pool, this one had chipped in the ancient slang of humanity: Sickness, the serpent, is coming to bite you, Death, the old dark man, is coming to carry you off, Rest uneasy, you stinking carrion, on your gold beds.

Near the end of the Tunnel, the passage was less finished, and more treacherous. There were narrow bridges over black nothingness, where the wagons were partly unloaded to lighten them, and men and horses walked singly. And there were places where the roof dropped low enough to scrape the canvas wagon tops. But soon the air picked up the curious sweetness of above-earth air, and sharp fresh breezes blew down into our faces.

The tenth day we broke free of the tunnel-womb, and came out onto the rocky plateau that stretches for miles above the great expanse of river they call the Water.

It was late afternoon, the time when spirits usually begin to flag, but they rose high today when we reached freedom. Children and dogs ran round and round in frenzied games; there was a great sighing and relaxing, and looking up at the sky.

It seemed a curious thing, for we had found the Tunnel in the snow drifts, but now, on much lower ground, there was only the bare rock. Behind, the mountains towered, white to their middles, but here, a little warmer and beneath the snow line, we had only the fierce wild winds of the south to trouble us.

They were dry and harsh, like the land they came from. We could catch a glimpse of it, that land, faintly, through a haze of distance—a dim smoky outline of flatnesses, all one desert emptiness it seemed from the plateau. Yet there must be life, or why had we come?

The river was another matter. It was many, many miles across, almost like a small tideless sea, a brilliant blue that would have nothing to do with the dull sky. There was apparently some deposit in the clay at the bottom that turned it this color, yet it seemed shocking in its intensity—a wide aquamarine ribbon, running from west to east as far as the eye could see, and onward almost to the horizon—a painted slash across the featureless gray-brown landscape.

Three or four streams forked down from the rocks, turning into falls to jump the gaps—these glass-clear and quite safe to drink from, as the river was not. A mile or so from the plateau a camp was made for the night at one of the many glittering pools these streams formed on their glittering progress to the Water.

Like dogs with the scent of the quarry in their nostrils, they were up early, and away again at dawn, winding down the track to the river. We got to it by midday, and uneasy silence fell on the wagon people.

There was the barren shore, where nothing seemed to grow except little clumps of a black sticky grass.

Rocks, skinned and bruised by the rasping winds, stood up like thin deformed giant women in the attitudes of their bitterness and insanity. The air, sucking through holes in these rocks, made noises like girls crying or animals shrieking in pain. Before us, the blue beautiful poison of the Water, now the only thing we could see ahead of us to the horizon. It seemed a lost land, no place for us to be waiting in, for this is what we had to do. Today, or tomorrow, the boats would come from that seemingly empty other side, and take us and our wares across. Geret had said there were settlements and steadings on the other bank, and, farther south, the first of the great cities. But he was vague. None of them seemed to have accumulated much information about this place, as if it had hypnotized them, or drugged them, or as if they simply did not want to recall.

The wait went on, and a camp was made. The fires crackled redly in the gathering dusk, and it was very quiet—no bird song or animal cry, only the frightful noises in the rocks, the slight sluggish movement of the river.

I lay in the wagon, unsleeping. The cat crouched in a corner, wide awake, muscles tensed, her coat slightly bristled. I smoothed her and kissed her cat eyes shut and she slept, but twitched in her sleep uneasily, reminding me of Darak. Later Geret came, rather drunk, swinging in with little ceremony.

“Pardon me, Uasti,” he said, brash with the beer, “but it’s an ill place here. Most of us seek company for the nights by the water.”

“Go, Geret. Go and seek company.”

He sat down and offered me the leather beer-skin.

“No? Now, Uasti, we should be friends, you and I. I helped you with the women when they wanted to kill you, and you helped me later to get what I wanted. I do very well now—better food, and a proper council where I have the say of things. There was a little girl I fancied, you know—her brothers were funny about it, but they’re friendly enough now, and so’s she.”

“Then why not go to her tonight, Geret?”

“Tiresome,” he said, “always the same one. A man likes variety.” He slipped one hot hand onto my shoulder. “Come, healer, you’re young and smooth under that robe—I know, I’ve seen you. And not a virgin, either, I remember. Oh, I was rough before, but I’ll behave myself now.”

“I do not want you,” I said. “If I had wanted you, I would have made you welcome long ago.”

He gave a little grunt of disbelief, and began to explore my body with his sweating hands. I thrust him off, and, surprised at my strength, he was still a moment.

“Have you forgotten so soon, Geret,” I whispered to him, looking in his eyes, “what I can do to you?”

He shrank back at once, groping for the leather bottle.

“Go,” I said. “There are plenty to help you. Out there.”

He lumbered from the wagon, and I saw him swaying through the dark, cursing.

I, too, left the wagon then, for it seemed full of the smell of him and the beer. The night was cold, yet oddly close. The wind gushed and quieted alternately.

I had begun to feel at last the rope that tied me to the wagons, and I yearned to go free. I wanted my aloneness, it was a longing in me.

I walked along the pebbled shore, and left the camp behind. Below, the water lay like ink, and I could smell its sweet and deadly smell. I recalled my race who had walked upon water, and wondered if I could cross, as they had crossed, to the far side which seemed, particularly now in the dark, to call me.

A cold white light struck suddenly over me, making me start and look back. The white moon had crested the mountains behind me. Its markings were oddly accentuated by the dusty air so that it resembled a bleached skull. The light lay in a sheet of silver glass across the water, and all at once it seemed a path, a safe way for me to cross by. My hands clenched, my body tensed with expectancy and the sense of Power. I stretched out one foot to begin my journey—

A shrill cry behind me, then other voices. I made out the call.

“Uasti! Healer! Healer!”

I turned, angry, sparks of fury burning under my skin, making every hair on me stand on end like the hair of the cat. A man came running along the bank, and I did not even walk toward him. As soon as he was near enough, he began to shout the story—his child, a baby of two or three years, had crawled away from its mother and drunk the blue water. The man tugged at my hand, and I knew I could save his child if only I hurried back with him, and I could not seem to do it.

“I am with the god here,” I said to him, “and you have interrupted us.”

He stammered, nonplussed and at a loss, and suddenly the glass light on the water seemed to crack, and I knew what he was asking, and turned and ran with him.

The child was screaming and kicking, the mother in a frenzy of terror. I turned her out, and made the child vomit copiously with one of Uasti’s medicines, then poured cup after cup of clean water down its throat, together with various herbs and powders. Pain had made it obedient, but once it was relieved it became fractions and sleppy. I thought I had saved its life, so soothed it and let it sleep. I was very weary by then, and went away to sleep myself. In the hour before dawn the man came and woke me—the child’s body had turned blue. I went with him but I could not even wake it, and soon it died.

“The poison of the river was too strong.” I said to them.

The man nodded dully, but the woman said. “No. You weren’t quick enough. He said you wouldn’t come with him at first, when he ran to you.”

“Hush,” the man said, “it was only a moment, and she”—he dropped his voice—“was with the god!”

“What do I care for the god.” the woman suddenly screamed, catching up her dead child. “What god is he that takes away my son and leaves me nothing!”

I should have felt pity, but I felt only contempt. I knew had it been a girl she would have mourned less, and it angered me. I turned from them without a word and went away.

I lay down to sleep again, stiffly, not caring what story the woman would spread about me, only wanting to be free of them all, and across the blue water.

2

There was a high wind at daybreak, full of dust. The girl came as usual, bringing food. I fed the cat, the flaps of the wagon down against the grit-laden day.

Perhaps an hour later I heard the single shout, followed by others, and the noise of feet on the pebble-beach; they had sighted the boats from across the Water. I picked up the bundle I had made of my stuff, and called the cat to follow me. She jumped down and stalked after me to the brink.

The wind had a color now—grayish yellow like the land. The dust whirled and flared around me, making it difficult to see very much, but I was glad of the shireen for it protected me completely. The others had wound cloths about their mouths, and pulled the hoods low over their eyes. I could just make out the faint, far-off shapes on the dust-smudged blueness, and wondered how the men had seen anything. Then I heard the low-pitched, nasal moaning of a horn. This had been their warning, though I had not heard it in the wagon.

It was almost an hour’s watch, there on the shore, while they struggled toward us over the grit-pocked river. At last they beached on the rotten soil a little way down from us, five long unpainted vessels, certainly more than the “boats” Geret’s people had called them. They were low, but raised at bow and stern into a curving swoop, roughly carved like the tail of a big fish. Each possessed a solitary sail, but these were stripped from the masts, and the single banks of oars had been in action. Now the oars lifted, were heaved upright, and men came jumping among the pebbles. They were very dark—darker than any people I had been among so far, for though there had seemed a predominance of black hair in each place I had gone through, there had been fair skins and light eyes, and, among the tribes, brown and blond hair too. The newcomers had an olive tan—almost a gray tan, as though like the wind they had picked up the color of the land. Their eyes were black—the true black, where it is impossible to tell iris from pupil. And their hair, lopped very short, often shaved totally to leave a shadowy stubble on their heads, had a bluish sheen to it I had never seen before. The other thing about them, perhaps the strangest, was the black, coarse clothing they wore, unrelieved by any ornament. Even among the tribes there had been a glint of color or metal here and there, and apparel had shown the individuality of its wearer. These men carried nothing, apart from short knives in their belts, and what they wore had a distinct sameness—almost like a uniform, though it was not. They did not even carry protection against the dust.

A tall shaved-head came and spoke to Geret, Oroll. and the rest waiting behind. The grim face gave nothing away. Already the rowers and the wagonmen were unloading and stacking stuff into the ships.

Finally Geret turned around and came along the beach, looking fairly satisfied. As he got near me, he glanced up, and his face turned sour.

“I should get under cover, healer. These storms can last two or three days.”

“No need,” I said. “We shall be going across soon, will we not?”

His bulging eyes bulged more.

“You want to cross, too, do you? It’s not usual. We leave the women behind. With a guard, of course.

Old Uasti never came with us.”

“I shall be crossing,” I said.

He heard the finality in my voice, and argued no more, though I saw he did not like it.

When the things were stowed and tied down, about half of the wagon men clambered aboard the five vessels, and squatted among the coils of ropes near the stern. When I got into the fifth ship, they glanced at me uncertainly, and began to mutter a little. It came to me then that when they reached the steadings across the Water, their buyers might feast them, and provide other entertainments also. Judging by the miserable expressions of the men left behind, and the even more miserable and frustrated looks of the women, this was so. Naturally, the guests would not want their woman healer along. It did not trouble me. I felt a compulsion to cross, an almost desperate desire to reach the land beyond the river, and if they did not like it, they might choke on it.

I had taken the cat into the ship with me, but she struggled and cried, and abruptly, just as the rowers were climbing in and getting their oars ready, she scratched me, and leaped over the side onto the pebbles. There she stood quite still, staring in my face with her silver eyes, her fur on end. I felt a sense of anger and loss, and it made me aware, for the first time, that I knew I would not be coming back across the Water.

The crossing took nearly two days, during which the storm raged around us, angrily and without relief.

The journey was monotonous—the endless creaking of oars and timbers, the slupp-slupp of the viscous water, the whistling harshness of the wind. At the midpoint of the river, when no land was visible before or behind through dust and distance, we passed by a stone block sticking some ten feet out of the blueness. It was featureless, except for the smudgy carving of the elements.

“What is that?” I asked a wagoner near to me.

He shook his head. “They call it only the Stone, healer,” he mumbled, embarrassed by my presence.

Once or twice the dark crew began a deep groaning chant-song as they strained at the oars. They spoke a different language from the wagon people, but the chant was different again, and it seemed to make no sense. I guessed it was the slurred and abbreviated version of something older.

There was no stop when night fell; the dark men rowed on. Their strength and endurance seemed strange, oddly sinister, for I was beginning to notice how blank and empty each of their faces was. They appeared almost in a trance, mindless, but I supposed their hard life had made them this way.

Late into the second day the wind dropped, and sullen clouded skies appeared. We saw the rocky rim of land we were making toward, and, in an hour, reached it. If anything, it seemed at first glance flatter and more barren than the other side beneath the Ring. A squat stone tower stood up, but that was all.

Yet, once the ships were beached, we were led through a cave-mouth and down an underground slope, and emerged, minutes later, incredibly, among trees.

They were thin, these trees, bent over, with twisted trunks that reminded me of the tortured rock shapes we had left behind. Black-green foliage stood high in the branches, stiff, as if carved. Beyond the trees the steading of the Dark People shambled away, enclosed on three sides by rock walls, but open to the east, where there was still a bright blue piece of the river to be seen, winding into the distance. Between the rock walls ran the thread of a stream, and on the banks of this were small patches of vegetables and grain, nourished by the water. The rest of the place was barren, except for the weird trees which stood up, here and there, among the mud brick houses, almost like gigantic birds of prey, waiting.

Roughly in the center of the steading stood a large building, reinforced by rough blocks set in the original mud. The roof was thatched with a stringy brown material, and just under the roof were a few hacked-out slits meant for windows. Stone uprights and lintel framed the door, and toward this went Geret, Oroll, and the dark man they had spoken with earlier.

It was not a long wait. We sat in the shelter of the trees by the unloaded goods, and three women brought us clay bowls full of water or a thick yellowish milk. These women, the only ones in evidence, were thin and scrawny, dressed in black coarse cloth like their men, their hair twisted up in knots on the top of their heads, and they, too, were sullen and silent. I did not see any children, or even any dogs or goats, the usual flotsam of such a place. It was very quiet except for an occasional snake-dry rustle from the leaves. After a time, Geret and the others emerged from the large building with another dark man, very tall, and with a collar of white stones around his neck. This apparently was their king or chief. He extended his hands and spoke gutturally to us. “You are very welcome. Tonight we will feast.” The wagon men looked pleased. I wondered what there could be here in this unlovely spot to make them glad to stay another second in it. Geret came over to me.

“You won’t want to come to their feast,” he said. “Not fit for a woman. They’re pigs, these ones, but—”

He tailed off and grinned. “See the old woman over there? Go with her and she’ll find you a place for the night. I’ll come for you to morrow, about sunset. We sail back then for the other shore.” I turned and saw the old woman, incredibly wizened, toothless, and bent almost double. Fierce black eyes glared at me from the alligator flesh. Her topknot was gray.

I left Geret without a word, and, as I went toward her, she—also without a word—turned and went on ahead of me. We walked across the stream by a rough-built bridge of wood and stone, among the predatory trees, up a slope, and in at a cave opening in one of the rock walls. Again a brief passage in darkness, then a flat plateau, quite barren, covered by a huddle of mud huts. I saw several women here, and a few children; apparently they lived separately from the men.

I was taken into a vacant hut and left there, except that, from time to time, a woman or a child would come to the entrance and peer in at me.

I stayed in the hut until a murky sunset closed in on the day. I had not been sure what to do—I felt that if I moved out of the hut and began to go back through the rock passage, the women might run at me and stop me. I did not, in fact, intend to go anywhere near the stone-and-mud hall, but to walk out of this dismal oasis, and begin a crossing of the unwelcoming land, as I felt I must. I was full of expectancy, and a slight fear, I did not know quite what the irresistible pull was, but I reasoned it must be the Jade, or some place of the Jade.

And then sunset. I had heard the women about until then; now a close silence fell. I went to the hut door and looked out. Stippled red light fell in squares across the plateau. Each hut had a rough reed screen pulled over the entrance, and there were no lights. Nothing stirred. I left my hut, and crossed between the others, and no one came out, or even looked from the blind window spaces. I found the rock opening and went in, emerging slowly in the other part of the settlement. Down the slope, among the trees, across the bridge. It seemed silent here, too, very silent, and then, when I was on the other side of the stream, I began to hear the sound—a faint droning, almost like bees, a whisper-growl deep in the core of the stone-and-mud building, its door closed now with a leather curtain, under which seeped a faint orange glow.

I did not know what drew me to the curtain—only curiosity, perhaps—perhaps other things. But I went to it, half expecting to find a guard or lookout posted there, and when I found no one, I pulled the curtain an inch or so aside, and looked in.

It was a long low hall, fire pits at the far end where meat had hung—bones now. Smoke curdled up among the rough hacked rafters, leather flaps covered the windows. The light was murky and uncertain, and the men, who lay around the sides of the hall on skins and pelts stretched over the packed-earth floor, were indistinct, slightly moving shadows. There seemed to be a mist in the hall, more than the smoke. I could not tell wagoner from steader, but here and there, one of the Dark People crouched, boys or very young men, used, it seemed, as in the tribes, to wait on their elders. Their eyes were bright black lines in the shadow-blurred faces; their teeth showed pointed and white as the teeth of animals.

All this I saw very quickly, but then my eyes were drawn to the center of the hall, and I made out the three girls. It was the first time I had seen beauty in these dark ones. I realized now that it came early and died early, killed by the rotten living and the cruel work. They were not more than thirteen, but physically fully mature, lithe, sinuous, the full, girl-perfect breasts trembling at each flex and tremor of their limbs.

Unlike the rest of their people, they wore ornaments, many-colored beads dripping down their smoky bodies, and little chips of crystal wound in their blue-black hair; otherwise they were naked. This was beautiful, but it was not all I saw. It seemed I was looking into my past, or my future, or at a painted picture, which forever changed itself, and yet retained its basic elements. In the center of them, its scales and protruding black eyes glinting in the firelight, squatted a gigantic lizard. I think I had not seen it sooner because my eyes had passed over and discarded it, unbelieving. It was the size of a large dog, of a wolf even, some sort of mutation of its kind. It had its own jeweled loveliness as the flames made glass-gleams on its armor, but its cold eyes swiveled from one dancing girl to another, and I saw then clearly the manner of their dance, sensual and inviting, and that their gestures were directed at it. Suddenly one girl slid down to her knees, then leaned backward over her own calves and feet until her hair lashed on the floor. Her thighs wide open before the lizard, she began to croon and stroke herself. It got up onto its feet, lurched toward her, and, as it came, its phallus—gigantic yet oddly human—slid from the scaled sheath. I thought the girl would shriek with pain as it pierced her, but she only moaned and sank farther backward over herself. The other girls settled around the lizard, caressing it, as the unnatural act of copulation began.

My head swam. A fire-storm of colored lights misted across my eyes and was gone. I noticed the thick, bittersweet scent in the hall for the first time. A drug. Yes, I could make out now bluish fumes that rose from the fires; but it was more than this—the unwholesome magic lay in their cups and on their food as well. I stepped back, and let the leather flap fall into place. Cool darkness and silence all around. Yet I was excited, sleepy—I had breathed the essence of their black feast. I walked back across the oasis, my limbs like lead, and pale hands reached for me, and there was the old and ancient laughter of the dead who had not died, but lived on in the corruption of all who had come later.

I began to run, along by the narrow stream, to a place where the water widened and became a pool into which a needle-bright, needle-sharp fountain jetted from a single vast rock spire. It was dark now, and the moon was in the sky. I realized I had left the rock enclosure behind, and was out on the flat empty land. Trees still stood sentinel, but ahead there seemed nothing but that cheerless, moon-bleached desert.

And then—a swift silver glitter along the side of the rock before me. With the glitter, a shifting dark, and the faint hushed sounds of animals and men moving carefully.

I saw their way past before they did, a twist in a track that led under the needle-spray and by the pool. I leaned back into the shadow of one of the skeletal trees and watched them come, about forty men, each dressed entirely in black, riding black horses with muffled hooves. The moon was in cloud a moment, and when it slipped clear, I was shocked and, the drug on me, I almost cried out, for of their heads and the heads of their horses nothing seemed left but a black mane and a burnished silver skull.

It took me a moment to become rational, then I saw the masks for what they were, and knew at last what had been the model for the skull-guard of the north.

Perhaps it was logical that I should at once assume they had come to the steading—there was nowhere else, surely, they could be heading for in this waste? Yet it was more than that. I knew they had come for the wagoners, to take them—where I did not know, or why. And abruptly I was angry and afraid. I was their healer, had made myself Uasti. A responsibility for their despised lives clutched suddenly at my being.

The skulled ones had paused a moment at the pool; some of the skull-masked horses were drinking there. I slid back across the shadow, from tree to tree. It took longer than I recalled, grim and real now.

At last the hall, no color left under the leather curtain. I ran to it, past it, and into the dark. There was a little spark of light at the far end, where the roasting fires had been. I stumbled against a man: he moved, but did not seem to notice me. There were sounds and little sobs. The sexual climax of the feast had come with the dark, and no doubt more of the beauty of the Dark People was being crumpled all around me. I picked a way toward the light, and found a long cloth curtain had shielded the last fire. Beyond the curtain the light was scarlet, and here the giant lizard stared at me from the length of its iron chain. Near the fettering post sat three of the dark men and the one who seemed to be their chief and wore the collar of white stones. They had been quite still, and turned to look at me without expression. I knew their language was different, but I had heard little of it, and was still unsure. I emptied my mind and managed to find words.

“Men are coming, men with skull-masks. Against you.”

For a moment I thought they would not speak, then the chief said, “Not against us, woman. Against your kind. It was arranged.”

There was no further need of words, after all. I swung and pulled a long thin tree branch from the fire, blazing only at one end. I thrust it at them, and they jumped up and backward, a little emotion in their faces now. The lizard’s eyes swiveled nervously, blinking. I turned and ran back into the hall, ripping down the curtain as I passed.

“Wake!” I screamed at them. “Wake—an enemy is coming!”

It was the most ancient of cries; the flamelight crackled and lit up patches of the hall with red, yet nothing stirred. Men lay slumped, sleeping it seemed. Yet the branch glared on their open eyes. They smiled drowsily at my shouted words.

No use here. I ran to the leather door curtain, went out, and let it fall behind me. I stood still in the moon-obscured blackness, staring out at blackness, holding up the burning tree’s-finger. Soon they came, not so quiet now. Thud of horse hooves, harness sound. My brand, not the moon, bit silver out of their dark shape. Now they were only fifteen feet away from me.

I did not know why, but I called out to them in the Old Tongue of the Lost, the single word:

“Trorr!”

And they halted as I commanded, and stayed still. Then a man at their head—their captain, I thought—detached himself and rode a little nearer to me. On his right arm a thick bracelet of twisted black and gold metals in the shape of knotted snakes. Through the skull-holes of his mask I could see no eyes, for they were covered by black glass.

“Who are you?” he demanded in a deep, cold voice. It was not the Old Tongue he used but something as close to it as I had heard in the living world.

“I am Uasti,” I said, speaking in the strange mid-language he had uttered, “and you come to carry away the people in my care.”

When I spoke the name I had taken, a little rustle of movement went over them, but quieted quickly.

“Stand aside,” the skull captain said. He dismounted and came toward me with a slow menacing stride, hands resting loosely on the ten bright-hilted knives at his hips.

I stayed quite still until he was very close, then I dropped to my knees before the door, in an attitude of supplication, still holding the blazing branch in my right hand.

“Lord,” I began, “I beseech you...” and caught at his belt.

He swore at me, cuffed me aside, and strode forward to the curtain. Yet, as I fell, the knife I had put my hand on dragged from its sheath.

I stood up. He was reaching for the leather.

“No farther,” I said.

He took no notice, and I threw the knife into his back, neatly, so that the blade pierced straight through the heart. He uttered a brief, surprised curse, and dropped on his face, his head going under the curtain hem so that only his trunk and limbs remained outside.

Confused yells, followed by sudden activity. Spears flew toward me. I dropped down, and they clattered harmlessly on the stone blocks of the hall, one only finding a mark in the hardened mud. But they were off their horses now, men with drawn, ice-pale swords, running at me, howling their anger.

Incongruously, it occurred to me that this was more than mere aggression—it was emotion. Their captain must have been popular among them.

I was confused. It seemed I was with Darak. I flung the blazing branch in the faces of the two men who reached me first, and, as they reeled and spat with pain, grabbed both the swords from their hands. One blade cut my palm almost to the bone as I took it, and the blood made it slippery and difficult to wield.

Still, I gave them some trouble.

The worst thing was my woman’s dress—I had almost for gotten it, and so it hampered me with surprise as well as cloth. In the end, tangled in it, covered in their blood and mine, the skull-men closed on me, and I took my death wound.

I scarcely felt the pain, only a great numbness. The light and blackness ran together. The moon floated like a bulbous, pallid growth on the face of the sky, then darkened, and went out.

1

So I did not see them take the wagoners. For some days I did not see anything at all, except things in a fever dream, best forgotten.

I suppose it was two or three days I lay dead, if it can be called death when all the time the death wound is healing itself. I woke finally in great pain and very weak, in a place of oppressive darkness. I thought for a while I had returned beneath the Mountain, and must start again. Then the raw stench of bruised earth penetrated to me, and I understood. I was in the ground where the Dark People had buried me.

Not so strange—like many primitive groups, they feared the hauntings of the unpropitiated dead. There were even a few dried-up fruits and a clay bowl of milk set down beside me, and they had left me my clothes and the shireen, and put a black cloth over my face. Luckily the soil was so dry and scattery it had not put much weight on me and left me air to breathe, and it was a shallow grave, for they had little time for me despite their spiritual fears. Nevertheless it took me a long time to tear and scrabble my way free, and, in my sickness, I knew all manner of terrors—that I would truly die, that I would never reach the surface, that perhaps I was dead after all, and this some sort of morbid fantasy. But in the end the ground gave way above and around me, falling onto me, into my mouth and eyes, and I crawled upward into the cleanness of a gray day. I fell on the earth weeping, and could not move again until the sun was a low purple on the horizon.

Then I sat and looked around me. I was some way from the steading; I could just make out the rock walls, the trees, and a drift of cook smoke going up beyond. Near, there was something more interesting—a patch of yellowish grassland, where three or four scraggy, bony horses were nibbling frustratedly.

In the lavender twilight I dragged myself toward this place, and reached the fence and gate just as a young boy was coming to bring the animals into the steading. He took one white-faced look at me, then turned and flew away, shrieking in fear. Small wonder—I had been a corpse, and behind me now gaped the uprooted grave; I was gray with dust and dirt, my hands covered in blood from my torn nails, my hair matted, stuck with clay, white and terrifying as the quills of some strange beast: a ghost, an undead. The horses, too, shied away from me, but I got one by its straggling rough mane. The effort it took me to swing onto its back drained the last of my strength. I leaned forward across its neck, kicked its sides lightly, and it started forward at a frightened gallop.

I did not think they would follow.

There was a road—paved stone, the blocks irregular now, pushed up in places, sunken in others.

The first part of the ride had passed in a sick dream. Now it was moonlight—dark, the black and white world of the desert night.

I was a long way from the steading, and wondered why the horse had taken itself in this direction. It occurred to me later that probably the steaders would ride this way from time to time, and the horse, responding to the familiar kick, had started off to it accordingly. There seemed no point in altering its course.

I straightened, and looked around and ahead of me.

Desolation.

A flat landscape, occasional stark rock stacks, short and squat and crumbling. And the ancient road, so like the Lforn Kl Javhovor I had traveled with Darak. Ahead, the desert and the road repeated themselves across the land, tireless and monotonous. The moon burned white holes through my eyes.

I thought then I did not know why I let the horse take me along that ancient Road, but I think, perhaps, I did. Toward dawn, I began to feel the pull. A fish, dragged shoreward in the cruel net, cannot have felt more helpless. Yet I had no fish’s terror. I was glad to be drawn, to be pulled; excited, elated, joyous. A new strength ran into me, hardened and warmed me. I sat very straight, and slapped the horse with the flat of my hand. It had been trotting for some time, now it ran forward again, very fast and sure on the rotten paving.

Overhead, the sky was melting into grayness, the stars dissolving like salt cast on water. In the east, almost at my back, golden cracks were splintering the cloud.

I did not see it for a long while, the light behind me. the sky indigo ahead. But then the sun broke free and struck on it, and, I saw very well what I was hurrying to. About two miles away, the ground began to rise upward, and the paved road became a wide causeway, some fifty feet above the surrounding barrenness. A mile beyond that, two great pillars stood up on either side, made of dark stone, and the paving seemed reinforced and level. Beyond those, about five miles from me, the monotonous land had erupted into a great cliff, flat-topped and black as blindness. On the cliff’s summit stood the City.

It too was black, but the gleaming black of basalt and marble. The rearing spires and many-terraced roofs caught the sun like mirrors.

I held the horse still, and stared at it, breathing quickly. How old was the City? Old enough. It had stood in their time; they, the Old Ones, had been the builders of it, through the medium of their human slaves.

There was no repulsion in me, no fear. Only the need to be there among the glittering darknesses.

The horse leaped under my hands and feet, and rushed forward toward the causeway.

I had no thought I would see them on the road, but I had forgotten that many chained men move more slowly than a single rider, however hard they are flogged.

It had been a fast ride—the paving even underfoot. Between the dark pillars, very tall, crowned with the carvings of flames and phoenixes picked out in gold. The light was full and harshly bright now. Abruptly I saw the crawling shape ahead, a mile away, the black riders and the stumbling men, linked together by dull metal. The captive wagoners and the band that had come for them, the men with swords who had stabbed me in the heart, which to them meant death.

I kicked the horse, and it ran forward again. Its pace tended to slacken whenever I ignored it. The air sang, and the shapes of the desert rushed by. The unpleasant procession in front drew nearer and nearer.

Three black soldiers, riding at the back, heard me first. They turned swiftly, and the sun ignited whitely on their silver skull-masks. One let out a startled cry. They floundered their horses around in confusion, drawing their swords. But it was an impotent gesture. Had they not killed me once before? The halting rhythm of the march broke up entirely. The captives’ gray faces turning, men grunting in despair, surprise, pain. The useless flick of the whips even now. Then twenty of the black soldiers riding back to confront me, one of them seeming to be their new captain, the thick armlet of twisted black and golden metals on his right arm now.

I reined the horse in, and sat looking at them. They were faceless, yet so was I. Thirty men in all, and I was not afraid. I felt only contempt. They and I knew how little was the damage they could do me.

The silence lasted a long while. Then one of them broke out breathlessly: “She was dead—Mazlek killed her. I saw the blade go in through her left breast—she fell.”

“Yes,” another added urgently. “Mazlek, then my own blade. I put it in her belly. She was lying in her own blood. She didn’t move. Still lying there at dawn when we took them out of the hall. She was dead.”

“Be silent!” the new captain roared. His voice was iron, but he was afraid like all the rest. “You were mistaken.”

“They were not mistaken,” I said to him quite softly. “Your men killed me, and the steaders buried me.

But now I am here, and I am whole, and I am alive. These people you have in chains are mine. Where are you taking them?”

“To the citadel,” their captain said, “to serve as soldiers in the war, under the Javhovor of Ezlann, the great city ahead of you. This is no business of yours.”

At their use of the ancient tongue, the ancient title, I was filled with fury. I knew they were not of the Old Race, though they strove so hard to emulate them.

“Who is this man that dares to carry the name of High Lord? Are you his?”

An incredible sensation of Power came with the anger. I felt them shrivel before it.

“We are soldiers of the High Commander of the Javhovor,” the captain said hoarsely. “You see our strength. Turn back and we will not harm you.”

“Harm?” I said. “Will you kill me again?”

There was a new silence. The dry desert wind hissed by.

“Let go these men you have taken,” I said, “or I will kill them, one by one, before you. They are mine.

Either Death or I will have them, not you or your lord.”

“If you’re their witch, you seem to care little enough for them. Better a chance of life in the war than death, here and now.”

“They mean nothing to me,” I said, “but they are mine. Either Death or I will have them.” And it was true.

I felt no compulsion, only great anger and great Power.

The captain cleared his throat. With a mailed fist he struck the dagger hilt in his belt.

“The woman is mad,” he said. “She has no weapon. Let the desert deal with her. Turn!” he shouted. The men wheeled. And waited, their backs to me, uneasy. “On!” the captain called. Dust clouded up under the metal-shod hooves, the dragging feet and chains.

A white heat rose from my belly and filled my brain. I felt my skull would split open if I could not let it free. A blinding white pain gushed from my eyes. My hands clenched into knots of agony and fury. I stretched them above my head, I rose in the stirrups, my whole body arched and straining as I screamed after them the single word.

A jagged sheet of numbed color flared on the causeway. Horses shrilled and reared. The ground rumbled and shook. Thunder and cold heat eclipsed the world.

Only my horse stayed still, a rock beneath me. The pain had gone out of me, leaving me weak, trembling and sick. I straightened myself with an effort, and opened my eyes, which instantly ran water and would not focus. The black soldiers and their horses were in chaos, men thrown, animal bodies lurching and kicking. The wagon men had toppled in neat rows among their chains. Their skin seemed drained of all color, and a sort of silver deposit, fine as dawn frost, lay over them and the ground about them. They were all quite dead.

I was near to vomiting, giddy and ill. It took me a while to notice that the black men had fallen on their knees on the causeway, dragging off their skull-masks to reveal arrogant, well-set features and silver-pale hair. The captain approached me very slowly, a handsome man, his face, like the rest, cruel and cold, but now stripped naked like the rest.

“Forgive us,” he said, kneeling in the dust before me. “We have waited long for you. So long, we have grown unthinking.” And then he spoke my name, the healer’s name I thought at first, and then I knew the difference, for he repeated it over and over, a sibilant hissing word, the “U” softened now to the “O” sound of the Old Tongue. “Forgive us, Uastis. goddess, Great One, forgive us, who have erred, Uastis, goddess. ...”

2

It is difficult now to explain that I felt at that time no anguish or remorse of any kind at what I had done.

There can be no atonement made now in words. Yet the murder had brought its own punishment. As if in the throes of some violent illness, I swung in my saddle, sick, half-blind, half-deaf, shaking uncontrollably, my body running, my clothes and hair dank with icy sweat. But still the sense of Power; no defeat. This was only a temporary disorder. The black soldiers flanked me, once more masked. The dead wagoners they had left for whatever predatory life might exist in this barren place.

The wind whistled.

We did not ascend the farthest stretch of the causeway which led upward to the burning black gates of Ezlann, the Dark One. Instead there was a rock shelf, wide enough to take five men riding abreast, which ran away around the body of the cliff. Finally, a gaping arch-mouth, dim greenish torchlight in the walls, a ramp sloping down, then upward. In places there were iron gates with a mechanism that responded to certain pressures from the armlet of twisted metals. All this I saw, but did not question until much later.

The last gate was not iron but water, a curtain of it, but they could control that too, it seemed, for great slabs closed over above our heads, and shut it off until we were through.

I sensed we were now in the City, yet still underground. Black man-hewn passages, half-lit. Then a new light, cold and gray, under the open sky. We emerged into a circular courtyard ringed by a black wall and black gleaming columns. One break in the wall, a meandering white stone avenue, flanked by towering dark green cedar trees; beyond, on either side, the bluish vistas of gardens. We rode between the cedars, where black marble statues stood, men and women, entwined with animals and birds, light sliding and oozing on their frozen flesh. And then, the last turn, and ahead, the palace of the Javhovor’s High Commander. It was built like one single tower, stretching up and up, narrowing by design and also with perspective, ten stories high. Steps led to it, white, veined with black and scarlet. In the first section stood a succession of vast rounded archways filled with doors that seemed to be made of many-colored crystal. The pattern of those doors was repeated in the subsequent sections of the tower, this time as long windows. Fires seemed to come and go in the rainbow-shot glass—violet and emerald, mauve, rose, lavender, and gold. Shining drops of color spilled over the steps, and on our bodies.

All this I saw in confusion then. This new landscape seemed surreal. Now my escort was at a loss, torn between their military duty to their commander, and their new, spiritual duty toward me. Their captain and three others conducted me inside. I do not remember much of this. There was great beauty all around me, but I needed every atom of my strength to hold myself on my feet and could spare none to observe. I think I fell into a dull sleep-trance, and only woke when I heard the irritated, derisive voice strike into their reverence and my silence like a knife.

“So this is the goddess, is it? This scarecrow from some steader’s field? Have you lost your wits, Sronn?”

I began to see a little, and my eyes focused unwillinaly on the man who had spoken to them. Electric fear sprang from my skull into my spine. It seemed I knew him, knew him very well.

“Vazkor, High Commander, the True Word spoke of the coming of the goddess,” the captain said, his head bowed before the man who was his lord, second only to the Lord of Ezlann.

“I know it. Uastis. Does this woman—I call her a woman for want of a description vile enough to suit her looks—seem to you the reincarnated spirit of the Ancient Ones?”

“She killed, Vazkor, High Commander. I have told you.”

“Yes. You have indeed told me.”

Cruelly, my eyes were clear now, I saw him well. A tall, large-boned, elegant frame on which his dark masculinity hung vital and animal and sure. He, too, was masked, a golden mask shaped like the head of a wolf, red glass in the narrow eye-pieces. The silver hair of the wolf mane lay sparsely over his own, which reached almost to his waist, and was the intense blue-black of the Dark People. The skin of his hands seemed the gray-olive tan of theirs, yet their shape was very different. Three black rings glowed on the thin, iron strong fingers. He wore a long black velvet tunic that reached to mid-calf, but was slit open at the hip on each side, reminding me of the leather bandit flaps. Black trousers of fine shimmering cloth, and boots of purple leather with countless winking buckles of gold. Around his neck hung the chain—eleven smooth rings of hollowed green jade, with golden links.

He had stood quite still since coming into the room. Now he put one hand on his captain’s shoulder, light, and very deadly.

“Sronn, you know how urgent is the levy of forced troops in the Javhovor’s latest campaign. Can it be you have failed me, and used this poor rat’s tail as an excuse?”

The sickness the use of the Power had left was fading quickly now.

“It is as he tells you,” I said.

The golden wolfs head jerked in my direction. In the gesture there was so much surprised disdain, I almost laughed at it.

“Be silent, desert bitch. You are nothing here.”

I knew his contempt—the contempt of the High One for the mere human. But it was he who was vulnerable. Two lances of pain stabbed behind my eyes. Around his neck the jade chain burst from its links, cracked, and fell in pieces on the marble floor. The soldiers went on their knees at once. But he was not so swift. He came toward me very slowly, and his voice was soft and dry.

“You do not know me, I see, or you wouldn’t try your witch-tricks on me.”

I was not afraid. I felt it would be easy to match him, secure in my newfound hubris.

A look from me, he stopped. Quickly the strong hands reached up to draw off the wolf mask. They believed too, it seemed, in the power of the unshielded eyes. And then, the mask was gone, and I saw his face.

“Darak,” I said.

My knees gave way at once, as if my body had been chopped in half. Ridiculously, I, to whom the soldiers kneeled, now kneeled involuntarily before this man I had meant to silence forever. But I could not touch him; he, as I, was already dead, already reborn. I had seen the Warden’s men at Ankurum carry him from the feast hall, had seen his body hoisted on the gallows, swinging and empty. Yet here, as at the first, stood Darak, defying others’ belief in my divinity, yet Darak, a little older, finer drawn, a prince sprung from the crysalis of the bandit. Yet, now that I kneeled before him, I saw this was not quite Darak. And there was no recognition in his face, no knowledge, fascination, fear, scorn, love, or hate.

And suddenly my sense of strength left me. I began to weep. The soldiers looked up, startled, horrified.

He they called Vazkor, who was Darak. turned from me in disgust.

“Could you do no better than that, Sronn?”

I leaned forward over myself, uncaring, my misery endless and unfathomable. I knew no longer what I must do. My hand found a piece of the broken jade, and I clutched it to me.

I heard an order called out, and was slightly aware of other men running in to seize the skull-soldiers I had ridden with. Then silence.

I sensed, at last, that he was sitting, half watching me, in one of the great ebony chairs. I could not understand why he had not already had me taken out; he did not believe in my immortality. Perhaps he had some crueler and more exquisite sport in store for me.

Finally he said, “They will be killed, the men who brought you. A pity. We shall need every man we possess for our war. Still, in a skirmish with the uncivilized Shlevakin from beyond Aluthmis, who can tell what will happen. The steaders’ hovels will be burned down, naturally. Not a trace of your coming will remain. And now, Uastis, get up. This room is architecturally designed to please the eye, and your present position mars it for me.”

I seemed to have no choice. I rose slowly and stood, but could not look at him.

“I recall some human man to you, do I?” he asked me. “You must forget that, Uastis Reincarnate. You and I are not of that breed. Under the earth to grow, then from the sleep to the life. To rule. It is the heritage of the children of The Lost. Come here.”

Again I seemed to have no choice. I went to him. From inside the hem of the long tunic he drew a fine-bladed dagger. With it he scratched the surface of his right hand. A trickle of blood welled out, then stood like a red jewel on the instantly closing skin. A second more and the faint scar vanished, seeming to dissolve back into him.

“It is not hard, Uastis,” he said to me, “to recognize a sister.”

Life, circling endlessly on itself like a dark bird, carried me back to my core, without mercy.

It seems it should have been joy I felt to have found this “brother” in the world of humans. But I felt no joy. I felt nothing, only an overbearing sorrow and bewilderment I could not analyze or explain to myself.

That I had found Darak again seemed least strange of all. I could not tell if it frightened or pleased me.

Each time I thought of how he, Vazkor, High Commander of Ezlann, the Dark City, had drawn the golden wolf mask from his face, I could only cry, as I had not cried at Barak’s death.

I was ill when I came to Ezlann, and half mad. My escort had been too awed to see it. But he saw, and he sent me away to a suite of apartments which at the time meant nothing to me, only a black quiet place in which to weep. Ten days, perhaps. I remember there was a woman like a dark moth. She wore black and a black silk mask, not like the shireen. The mouth was covered over without an opening. I recollect I could not think how she would be able to eat, and being human, I thought she would starve. It became an obsession. I dreamed of her wasted body, hands clutching at food, holding it whimpering to the shuttered mouth, feebly, and without hope. Only later did I learn the customs of the Great Cities of the south.

A twilight era began, in which I rose and walked about the several oval rooms. I was not sure how many rooms there were, sometimes three, sometimes seven. Sometimes it seemed they were endless and without number. I bathed many times each day in the sunken bath of black marble, which seemed like a sleepy tomb, and was oddly pleasant to me. I looked often from the two long windows with which each of the rooms was graced. I could not understand the view—pale glow, soft white mists, dim golden columns, very thin and tall, and clusters of green foliage that shed a constant and unchanging veridian light into the rooms. There were no sunsets and no dawns. There was no time at all.

It was a long while later that I began to see my apartments for what they were.

There were four rooms in all, each oval, and each similar to the one preceding and the one following.

They were built in a circular chain about an inner space onto which the tall windows looked, and one could therefore pass from the first room to the second, from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth, and from the fourth back into the original and first. Each was hung and ornamented in costly black materials. Black smooth onyx things stood ready to be caressed, carvings of animals and swans. A black and muted silver mosaic on the floor, black gauze draperies. On the ebony tables, the sudden white luminance of huge alabaster lamps, which the woman lit sometimes, randomly, from tapers. Beyond my windows, a petrified garden of carved green jade, glowing and misty from unimaginable sources. How the rooms were ventilated, I do not know. There was no access to the open except the single door through which the woman came. I examined it in her absence and found it to be locked. There were two small grooves on the surface; I touched them but there was no response. I was shut, like a rare insect, into a beautiful prison, and left there to be observed, perhaps passionlessly dissected at my keeper’s will.

A new obsession grew on me—that there was some hidden means for watching me. I questioned the woman, and found she would not answer. In frustrated anger I struck her across the face. It might have been a doll I struck.

The day after that—I say a day, I mean one of those unknown units that followed sleep—she brought me undergarments, a long dress of black silk with tight waist and sleeves, a girdle of golden links each shaped like a three-winged leaf, and a golden mask with the face of a cat. She set them down on my bed and left me at once.

When she was gone, I examined these things, mostly the mask. It was very beautiful and lifelike. Around the wide rimmed eyes were set translucent green gems, and there were no glass eye-pieces to hide the human organs behind them. The pointed ears were hung with swinging, clashing earrings of golden drops and discs, each with a nugget of emerald burning dependent at the center. From the crown of the mask hung long tails of stiff gold threads, plaited to resemble hair.

There was no mirror in the apartments, which had pleased me, I, who never dared look in one. Now, almost hypnotized by these strange clothes, I longed for the means to see myself dressed in this way. Yet I did not dress. I stood, naked as I had been since waking here, afraid of a possession overcoming me.

I walked to the door and tried it for the thousandth time. It did not yield.

I went to bathe.

I lay a long while in the scented water, then rose at last, and found the woman had come back. She dried me, then held out the black silk dress. It seemed very natural then that I should put it on, and the golden belt also. Now the mask was in her hands. I took it, and at once she hid her eyes in her palms and turned away.

I tore the hated shireen from my face, and put on the mask of the cat.

Incredible, it was beaten so thin and fine it rested on my face lighter than a shadow. The golden plaits swung into my hair. A new strength flowed into me. At once I felt as I had done on the causeway, when I had said to Vazkor’s men, “Will you kill me again?”

I caught the woman’s shoulder so hard she cried out at the pain.

“Take me through the door.”

Somehow she squirmed from my grasp, and ran away from me, but I caught her at the door as she opened it with a sideways pressure of her smallest fingers in the two grooves I had noted earlier. The door swung open. I seized her arm and went through to the other side, pulling her with me as my captive.

3

Beyond the rooms, a dark corridor, shimmering like glass, glass globe-lamps set in the walls.

I pushed her down it, walking a little behind her now, an edge of her sleeve in my fingers. At the end of the corridor a single arch filled by a gold-worked curtain. We went through into another black room, this time very vast, echoing, and oddly chill with size. Enormous basalt columns reared toward the ceiling. It was utterly dark, only one tiny glowing point of light elusive between the pillars, some way ahead.

Suddenly my hand was seized and pulled from the woman. A shadow slid closer to me, and turned me toward itself, even as she fled from me, swift as the moth she resembled.

“So, you’re ready now,” Vazkor said.

His voice, the voice of Darak, had grown strange to me in the time I had not been with him. I could not see his face, yet I could feel the pressure of his hand on mine.

“Come with me,” he said.

I could not bear the touch of his familiar-unfamiliar hand. I drew mine away.

“Where is this place? And what is it?”

“Come with me, and I can show you.”

He walked away from me, expecting me to follow, but it was hard to do it in the blackness, now that I did not have his hand to guide me. I had felt sure enough before I found him here. Now I was not so sure. There was a fierce terror in me that his being would absorb mine; I had known this fear with Darak but neither so intensely nor in a manner so self understood.

We stood in an aisle, slightly sloping upward. Down the aisle, onto our closed faces of wolf and cat, the dull light filtered. There was a tall veiled shape—a statue of gold, glittering faintly under its covering.

Before it, the block of an altar from which rose a great basalt cup. In the cup, a flickering, ever-changing light.

How well-known to me.

Here was Karrakaz. So near. Yet I heard no voice, felt no sensation.

“Here then,” I whispered.

“An ancient altar,” he said. “I have kept the flame burning for them, as it burns in all the great temples of the Cities.”

He went close to it. I followed him. I stared in at the twisting, phosphorescent flame. Did he have no sense of Evil near him?

“Look up,” he said.

I drew my eyes away, looked instead at the statue, and saw a metal woman in a black dress and the golden mask of a cat.

“You understand nothing,” he said. I thought I heard a slight contemptuous pleasure in his voice. “I must teach you about yourself. Goddess.”

So he taught me—their customs, their beliefs, their dark dreamings, and his own ambition which was to be mine as well. And he taught me how he would use me as the instrument of his power, like an ax, to hew out the way for him. Yet he taught me also, without intending it, that he feared me and my sudden coming, that he feared I should in the end be more than he was. And he taught me to fear him, too.

The City of Ezlann was old, as were all the Cities beyond the Water—which they called Aluthmis, after the Aluthmin, a blue stone mined thousands of years before their birth. And the mining of the stone, the building of the Cities had been in the time of the Great Ones. Now humans, who would not admit their humanity, lived there like the rats who invade foresaken houses. Yet not quite like that. How they came into possession of these places I did not know, nor were there records to tell me—only their legend. The legend said they carried the seed of the Great Ones, a mixed stock, part-god, part-human. They had rebuilt the cities exactly as they had been in the earlier time. They had learned the mechanisms of the Cities (although without properly understanding them, I guessed). And now they spoke a corruption of the Old Tongue, acted out the court etiquette of the dead, dabbled dangerously in the mental exercises and magic arts the Lost had mastered, and went to ridiculous lengths to hide from each other their humanness.

The Old Ones had often gone masked, so all now went masked; yet a hierarchy persisted, human in origin, for in a city of the Lost all were equal in their magnificence. Here the lower orders wore plain masks of silk or satin, the higher officials and soldiery wore masks of beaten bronze. Higher than these came the silver masks, and lastly the golden masks of the elite—the commanders and lords and princesses. In the masks were eye-pieces, usually covered by colored glass, openings at the nostrils, but no further opening for the mouth. They knew that the Great Ones had had few bodily wants, and now to eat was a hidden, furtive thing, never carried out or referred to in public. The need of food had joined the shameful ranks of urination and defecation, for the Lost had required none of these processes to sustain life. The sexual organs, however, were shown openly in certain modes of dress, and the sexual arts the Lost had perfected were striven for with aggression. Not many possessed Power; being human, it cost them most of a lifetime’s labor even to scratch the surface of understanding. Their magicians were old and dry, and, for the most part, fools. Vazkor, who possessed Power as his right, had concealed it, knowing the danger of their jealousy. He would not tell me how he had come among them, but knowing the strange yet inevitable paths I had taken to reach superiority in a human community, I was not surprised at what he had done, only curious.

Outside the Cities of the south crouched the steadings and villages of the Dark People. I learned of their position now, and this much, at least, was as it had been before. They were the slaves of the community, the human workers, allowed to live out their rotten, hopeless lives by the courtesy of the City soldiery.

They farmed the unwilling land, and sent a tithe of seven-eighths of their yield to the City stores; they were recruited without warning as soldiers and builders. By the laws of their “superiors” they were not permitted any color or ornamentation of dress, except for their chiefs, who might wear a collar of stones to denote rank. Neither were they allowed any religious or secular ceremony, except for a death. This last was probably granted because of the terrified outcry that might have arisen had it been denied; even the soldiers were less horrible than angry ghosts perhaps. It seemed strange, even then, that a people should agree to such enslavement perpetual, and without any reward or relief. Yet the City legend stated that the Dark Ones were the children of the most ancient slave-race, those who had suffered beneath the yoke of the Lost. They had been born to suffer, the Cities said, and perhaps had been made to believe it.

Knowledge of the Cities led me to their war. I had known little before, and yet the whisper had always been about me on the far side of the mountains. Barak’s “caravan” had gone to Ankurum because the Cities indirectly bought their war gear there, and in the other towns along the Ring—I saw now why. Not only would few of the unhuman humans consent to demean themselves by work as smiths, but this dead land had very little left to give. If it was farmed out, it was mined out also. The Old Race had been merciless in their demands on it, and now it was spent.

I read a great deal about the war, but I did not fully comprehend. There were, it seemed, three alliances, each between a group of Cities, Ezlann and five others here in what was termed the White Desert, six farther south in the Purple Valley, and a collection of ten—remote, mysterious—at Sea’s Edge. Each group was theoretically in arms against the other two, Ezlann and hers against Purple Valley and Sea’s Edge, Sea’s Edge and Purple Valley against each other, and so on. Superficially the war was to gain possession of extra territory, and yet ... It seemed a game, a game similar to the one Vazkor had taught me, a complex and sophisticated vicious test of wills, set on a red and black checkered board with pieces of ivory and transparent quartz. Its name was Castles, and it could be played only with a kind of cool hatred. Battles in the war were scarce, neatly fought on the no-man’s land between alliance and alliance, that area they called the War March. They seemed to be conducted with more attention to martial etiquette than a desire to win. Besides, there had been no battles for five years or more. I did not understand, but yet, it seemed, I did. Had the Old Race fought, or made a pretense of fighting, among themselves, to spice their boredom on that peak of total supremacy they had achieved? No memory moved in me at the thought. In fact, all my memories that had woken with me under the mountain seemed to be fading day by day. I could scarcely remember now the fiery rooms, the statues, the lake of swans and endless marble stairways, only remember that I had remembered. ...

Everything I learned in great detail, for like all people unsure of themselves, the citizens were very exact in writing down every nuance and petty rule of their culture.

I knew the contempt Vazkor felt for them. A special look possessed his face when he spoke of them to me, a controlled yet acid disgust, a detestation no less corrosive because he gave it no true expression.

And then, the final legend—a belief that sustained them, yet must have been a constant terror too—that certain of the Lost lay sleeping, yet alive, and would one day wake. This they called “Reincarnation,”

although it was not really so, as it was their own bodies to which they returned. Nevertheless, their waking would be fresh, their bodies strange to them, a reincarnation of sorts. It was for these gods that the dark flame was kept burning in the stone bowls, the flame of Evil, which to the Cities was only a Watchfire. Each City had its own special deity. Here in Ezlann her name was Uastis.

When at last I finished reading the highly ornamented books, I sat silent at the great window of the tower palace. I could not see out through the rainbow crystal, the lamp flickered on its colors; outside, the moonlight made a white prison of the panes.

For three days I had done little but read and absorb the sentiments of this place. Even my recreation—the extraordinary gardens, the game of Castles—had been part of my education. Now, abruptly and for the first time, I was aware that these incredible things were real, and true. Even the expected goddess had come.

Vazkor stood across the long room, dark and motionless at the hollow oval of the fireplace, where small pale flames still twitched their tails.

“So now you understand a little,” he said to me.

“A little. But what is it you want, Vazkor?”

He shrugged.

“You can’t confine a thinking brain, goddess. How do I know? I know only what I want at the present, and you will help me to it. When I have what I want now, I shall want other things of which I have no awareness at this moment.”

“And at this moment, it is the place of Javhovor in Ezlann?”

“Ezlann, and then her sisters in the south.”

“And the Javhovor’s war will then be yours. Where does the war fit into your plans?”

“When I have Ezlann and her five allies, I shall take Purple Valley and Sea’s Edge in battle. You have seen, no doubt, how little our militarism means in terms of conquest. When I am finally and fully in the lists, there will be many changes made.”

“And I,” I said, “I am the symbol of your right to rule.”

A muscle flinched slightly in his jaw. This direct reference to my own Power made him uneasy.

“It is to your advantage,” he said.

“Yes.”

I rose and crossed to the fireplace. But I did not stand near to him, I was afraid of nearness, and the sense of intimacy and longing in me because he was Darak, undead.

“Surely,” I said, “I will be an inconvenience to you when you have all that you want—at this moment. I recollect your soldiers who died because they must not speak that they had seen Uastis.”

“I know you cannot be killed,” he said, his narrow eyes very cold and empty.

“A living death can be as effective. Some underground room, an airless place where I would be always as near to death as was possible.”

He smiled.

“You forget, goddess. We are brother and sister, you and I. When this is finished, we will have another duty to our ancestors, besides the duty of Rule. How else does Power return and spread except through new life? We will make children together, and our Race will be reborn.”

I stared at him. He seemed emotionless, yet very certain. If a man had spoken in this way to me at that moment, in that time of my own hubris, I might have killed him, but I did not dare to set my own fledgling Power against the mature capabilities of Vazkor.

“I am I,” I said to him, “so enorr so. A woman, perhaps, but not a vessel of your pride.”

He smiled again, not very much. He was indifferent to my individuality. It had no place in his scheme of things. I was abruptly afraid, the familiar terror of being caught in an other’s will, having no person but the person they countenanced, existing because of them, dead at their death, as I had felt I should be at Barak’s ending, without fully realizing it.

I turned away and went from the room, and he did not try to stop me.

It was easy for me to find the black, chill hall of the statue. It was a model in miniature of the great Temple of the City of Ezlann. I had learned that all high officials and lords possessed their own private replica.

Having entered, I was not sure why I had come. I walked into the darkness, and soon could see quite well the pillars, the ornate ironwork, the veiled giant woman of gold.

Before her, on the altar, the flame stirred in its stone bowl.

Going forward, I waited for fear to come, but fear did not come at all. Had the years of nonrealization emptied the power of Karrakaz from the flame? Even as I thought it, a little movement came in the back of my brain, a little whisper.

“I am here.”

Yet still, there was no terror. I went close to the stone bowl and looked down into it, at the white light.

Yes, I could sense Karrakaz, and yet a Karrakaz quite changed. I did not feel a terrible power come from the bowl, only a tremor of presence. I, now, it seemed, was the more powerful. This being could not ever match me.

“Karrakaz,” I said aloud.

The flame flattened and twisted on itself.

Suddenly I was happy, and unafraid. I was invincible. If this thing could not awe me, what was he, Vazkor, brother who-feared-me? Involuntarily my hands went to the cat mask, but I checked. I had not yet broken the curse; the face of ugliness was still on me, and until I found the Jade and abruptly I knew that my new power was as strong as the Jade, that I had no need of the Jade, that I could defeat everything that troubled me, bit by bit, and by my own will alone. I knew. Elation. For the first time, the sense of being.

Strange, that when we feel we understand all things, we understand nothing. Strange, that when we feel we understand nothing, we have begun, at last, to understand.

4

He came to me in the morning, after my one and only meal of the day, which did not consist of food but of a drink, very like wine in its taste. It contained all the nourishment my body required, and was the first wholly digestible substance I had consumed. No longer the torturing pains in my stomach which had followed every morsel of food until now.

Vazkor looked at me through the wolf’s red glass glare, and said, “Tomorrow. The Festival of the Golden Eye. The whole City will fill the Temple of Uastis. That is the day their goddess will wake. I hope you understand.”

“You will make it your business to see that I do,” I said.

He came toward the ebony table, picked up the slender silver beaker, and turned it by its polished stem.

“I have not yet seen your face,” he said.

“No,” I said, “nor is there any need you should.”

“There is a need,” he said.

He drew off the wolf’s head, put it on the table, and stood looking at me, waiting.

I recalled Darak, who twice had dragged the mask from me and left me burned and naked. Yet I had no terror now. Yes, let him see what Karrakaz had done to me, and be afraid of it. I lifted the mask from me, and held it loosely in one hand. I looked at him, level, and it did not distress but pleased me when his eyes widened, his face whitened. I smiled at him.

“Now you have seen,” I said. “Remember it.”

He turned away and I laughed gently, and covered myself again, laughing.

I had been in Ezlann seventeen days, and had seen only the gardens and the tower palace, nothing more.

No window gave access. Each was a view in itself, a jewel, an art-form; what need, then, for it to show anything beyond its own beauty? Yet now I was to see the City, walk in it, and finally possess it.

The Festival of the Golden Eye fell at the same time each year, in the long month they called White Mistress, because soon the snow would come to cover the wilderness of the desert with a new and cleaner death. The festival would last three days, days of entertainment, music, pleasure and, never to be forgotten, worship of the Lost, and of their representative Uastis.

All through the day there had been much happening in Ezlann—so he told me. But, now that the sun was setting, they were moving toward the great Temple, and we must move with them. Vazkor had told me all I must do, and I felt no apprehension, only a slight amusement and languor, which I did not yet realize were false. High Commander as he was, he would ride behind ten of his own soldiery, flanked on either side by five, and followed by twenty maidens, and, walking, a final cavalcade of thirty captains. At the portico of the Temple he would wait on the arrival of the Javhovor and his own personal guard. The soldiers would remain with him, the maidens would withdraw inside the building. I, following the maidens, would slip away from them, once inside, into a passage he had told me of, and there one would meet me—a priest, but Vazkor’s. It was quite simple, and I was not troubled.

Dressed like the other maidens in black robes, which left bare the breasts and arms, wearing like them a silver mask shaped like a flower—oval at the center with stiff petals framing the face, and a full wig of silver hair hanging behind—I followed Vazkor, among the sounds of harness, marching feet, the rhythmic chant sung by the women, along the dark corridors, out into the City.

Each City had its own color, and because Ezlann was built entirely of black stone, they had taken it as their tradition to use black furniture and to wear black clothes. Now the world which was Ezlann seemed strange and very lovely. The sun was down, and the sky flooded by a deep gray-pink gloaming against which the endless pinnacled silhouettes of the City rose back, in a detail fine and sharp as a thorn. Ahead, humped like the back of an animal asleep, a tall hill, and on the hill the Temple, row upon row of circular terraces set one on the other, growing smaller as they reached higher, until they gained the climax of an open dome where a watch light glittered like a cool green eye. Toward the Temple wound the endless separate processions, all black, yet spangled with the soft stars of their lamps and tapers and torches. All through the upward streets of Ezlann the dark slow crowds, like black, lamp-sparkling water flowing the wrong way, curved and trickled back to their source.

Stars pierced the sky as we walked. I sang the chant with the maidens around me, a chant to Uastis to whom “the brave and the fair come to bring homage.”

We reached the Temple hill, and the crowds lining the streets eased and were gone. Marble flagstones, and then the vast building, so huge now that we were close to it, the portico above its forty shallow steps like the great open mouth of some monster.

The maidens slid aside. A smaller archway, dim light, the rustling of our robes. To the left a passageway opened, its walls painted with lotuses and vines. Swiftly I turned into it. The women went by me, unseeing, drugged by the strange plant wine of the south, and by their chanting and belief.

It grew darker the farther into the passage I went, until a small light appeared ahead of me. As I came nearer, the light resolved itself into a lamp held firmly in a plump black gloved hand. The priest wore black holy robes stitched with silver. Somehow, from the size and set of his silver mask, I was able to tell that his face was fattish, a little too small for his body, and narrow at the forehead—not the head of a clever man.

He bowed.

“Goddess.”

A smooth oily voice. Did he believe what he spoke? I sensed that he did not, and yet that he was convincing himself that he did—a curious paradox I had no time to think of.

“Take me there,” I said.

He turned at once and moved off, through the warren of dark corridors beneath the Temple of Uastis.

The statue in the Temple is more than a giant, it is a colossus. Her head touches the roof beams, the fingernails of her smallest fingers are the size of a man’s skull. At her festivals she is unveiled, and stands in all her beauty, lit by lamps burning on chains from the roof, which light only her and not the places below. She is naked gold to her lips, her sex and thighs and legs covered with a golden drapery of skirt held by a wide belt of gold studded with green stones and jade. Around her neck is a golden collar hung with droplets of jade which depend onto her breasts. These jades are each larger than a woman’s body.

Her hair is made of gold wire plaits and silver wool, and her head is the head of the cat.

In the little dim-lit room, two priestesses with silver flower faces covered my neck, shoulders, arms and breasts, my stomach and back, my hands and feet with a scented yellow cream. When the cream dried, it hardened on my flesh like a new skin of burnished gold. Around my hips to my ankles they draped the stiff golden skirt. The golden belt was fastened at my hips, the golden collar was fastened at my throat, and the jades rang cold on my breasts. They turned aside as I put off the silver mask and put on the cat’s face Vazkor had sent me. I wondered who had made this mask, and if they too had died, knowing too much. The priestesses combed out my long hair and added nothing. White is sister to silver.

Then, having prepared me themselves, they fell on their faces, and whimpered in apparent terror of my god-head.

The priest returned, and led me through another corridor, to a small black stone door. A secret lock, geared to his touch alone. The door rasped open. Stooping at the low lintel, I went through. The door shut.

Steps. Many, many steps. My bare feet stirred a faint brushing echo. A platform and another door.

Outside, the narrow ledge and the drop of over a hundred feet to the Temple floor.

Who, looking up, would see the tiny blemish in the goddess’ belly, just above the knot of her skirt? A tiny oval scar on her immortal frame, which was the door.

Outside, the dim roar and breathing sound of worship. I had only to wait for the single cry, the cry of the chief priest—“Come forth!” Each festival the cry came, a matter of ceremony only, but on this day the entreaty would be answered. Abruptly, my skin turned icy, my knees shook. I imagined stepping out onto the narrow ledge, losing consciousness, falling, regaining my senses in time to experience the impact of the stone flags. It was pitch-dark in the belly of Uastis. Trembling, I sheltered against the metal wall, afraid to hear the cry at any second. No need for fear. I would not go out. Yes, and then Vazkor would punish me—some slow death which was not death—a constant agony, endless torture. And yet I was more powerful than he. Karrakaz had slunk down before me. I straightened a little, but I longed for him to come, fling open the door, and carry me back down the steps in his arms. To be safe and to be his, my love whom I could not help but love, because I had loved him before our meeting. Weak with this longing and with the selfanger which accompanied it, I leaned against the door. And the cry came.

“Come forth!”

It belled and echoed, even here, the great voice in the silence of religion beyond the door.

On impulse, because it had been planned, not thinking, I thrust at the metal—first left, then right—and the ancient spring responded. The door raised slowly up, and the Temple lay yawning before me, black, glittering with a million small lights like the eyes of waiting animals.

I stepped out onto the ledge, not so narrow as it seemed, amid the lamp-glare that surrounded the goddess. One great rushing sigh of shock rose like the thrust of the sea below me. I could not see their faces, only knew that every face was lifted to me. The door slid down again behind me; no way back.

Yet, it was unreal to me now.

After a while the chief priest’s voice called up to me. I could not see him, yet the voice was shaken, and not quite in control.

“Who is this, that dares answer our prayer, which may be answered only by the goddess?”

“I am the goddess,” I said. The clear words dropped down among them like glass beads into a pool. “I am Uastis Reincarnate. I am the True Coming, the Risen One, She you have waited for.”

Below, the Temple seemed to swing back and forth like a great ship at sea. A small white fleck, the flame in the altar bowl, pulled at my eyes. Numbly, with my right sole, I sought the grooves of the ledge, and found them at last. My toes exerted their light pressure, straining the tendons of my foot. A faint hoarse hum of ancient machinery stirring, rusty from aeons of disuse, misuse. The ledge jolted only a little.

It began to move, slowly, down the length of the goddess’ skirt, toward the floor.

Shouts and exclamations, a few women screaming. Perhaps the priests knew of this thing, but not the people of the City. Perhaps not even the priests, only Vazkor and his. The sensation was of levitation, so smooth was the passage now. The great lamps grew dimmer behind me. The blackness of the Temple swallowed me up.

Blind, I stared at them through the holes of the mask. I could not see a single face, only the little taper lights and the dark. Despite the sense of many people, I felt quite alone.

And then the man came toward me. Gradually his dark robes grew evident, the golden lion mask with its golden crest—the chief priest. A few feet from me, I checked him.

“No closer,” I said.

He seemed tall now, certain. He spoke, and I heard an anger in his voice.

“We must know if this is true holiness before us.”

“Must the goddess prove herself?”

He stood straight, and folded his arms—a gesture of total and insolent challenge.

I looked at him and knew his mortality. I felt the burning contempt brim my eyes like tears. I pointed at him, and contempt ran down my finger and leaped from the gilded tip in a thin white ray. It caught him in the chest, but his whole body blazed whitely for a second, lighting up the Temple. He fell backward without a sound. In its bowl the flame, which to me was Karrakaz, leaped and cowered.

The Temple groaned and mumbled, I heard them kneeling, groveling, heavy robes scraping, jewelry ringing on the stone floor.

I saw better now. I made out the line of thirty priests prostrate before me on the stairway, whispering their prayers, the people, the lords and their women bowed over as if sick. On the raised places, on golden chairs, I saw the high ones under the purple canopy of the Javhovor, each and every person in an attitude of terrified submission. Except for one.

Near to the back of the great hall, one masked face raised, one body straight. Yes, but he would submit, he would not dare to let them see, as yet, he had no fear of the goddess. Now he kneeled, now his head dropped forward. Vazkor offered me his empty homage.

5

A new prison. The Temple, like every other place, was proved to be a trap. Thirty days passed, and I remember little of them; they might have been only one long day, each was so like the rest.

Every morning early, I would rise, and the women would come to bathe and dress me. They would not always gild my skin, except on every fourth day when I must stand in the Temple. I would wear a robe of pleated black linen, tight at sleeves and waist, arranged at the skirt in many complicated folds. Great collars of gold, golden bracelets, finger and toe rings and girdles were fastened around my body like armor, or chains. Only the golden cat mask pleased me still, for it seemed more my face than my own.

In my basalt cage, I would sit on a high-backed chair, and men and women would come in to me, and throw themselves down. Their clothes were very rich, and their jewelry crashed against the marble. Only the gold or silver ones gained access to their goddess. Here was I again in the village Temple, or among the bandit tents. They begged me for health, for the love of others, for power, both temporal and of the spirit. Sickness I could remove with a touch, but emotional command over their fellows I would not give them. That was my right, not theirs. To their cries for honor and position I referred them to the Javhovor.

On the days when I stood in the Temple, thousands came and bowed down before me. Women screamed and wept. Yet I was impotent, I waited in the shadow of a man they had forgotten. In those days of acting like a mindless machine, I grew very like one. I scarcely seemed to think at all, or to feel.

The fat priest Oparr, who had led me to the statue, was my principal attendant, and I supposed, Vazkor’s spy. He ushered in my visitors, and stood behind my chair while they groveled. He now had become my chief priest, in the wake of the votary I had killed, but he was Vazkor’s man. Vazkor had raised Oparr from obscure nothingness (this much was evident), planted him like a rank weed in the Temple garden, and watered where he could his growth there. Now the weed was the tree-pillar of Vazkor’s house. What other men he had set in high places, I did not yet know, but I guessed there would be many, all with a taste for command and for the good things it brought, very loyal to the man who had given them so much, and too stupid to see even further profit in overthrowing their benefactor. Clever Vazkor; yet he had gambled with me.

The City had been in tumult at my rising, yet I did not see it. The other five allied Cities of the White Desert were looking frenziedly to their own altars.

My place in the Temple was very quiet. The windows stared out upon courtyards and great leafless trees. On the thirtieth day of my god-head and imprisonment, snow fell and turned the black stones white. It was the first winter I had seen—I recalled no cold time from my lost childhood. Worse than in the mountains, this snow. It fell without a sound, and now the desert would be white indeed.

“The Javhovor is coming,” Oparr said, standing fat before me. “The Javhovor asks that the goddess will grant him a little time in her holy presence.”

“Where is Vazkor?” I asked at once.

“Vazkor, High Commander, will naturally attend his lord, the Javhovor.”

“When?”

“The time it will take the Javhovor’s ring bird to fly back to the palace.”

I had not seen Vazkor all this time. I did not know what he desired me to do or say to his overlord, this man he intended to replace. I gave Oparr one of my golden rings to put on the leg of the carrier bird, accepted in exchange the gold ring of the Javhovor, set with an onyx and carved with the crest of the phoenix.

It did not take long. I suppose they came through the snow, but the way was cleared for them. I am not certain what I expected, but I think I was looking for a Raspar of Ankurum, even another Geret perhaps.

The Javhovor entered, attended by three men only, and one of these was Vazkor. The Javhovor was tall, straightly and slimly built. The golden phoenix mask he drew off at once, presumably out of respect for me. His face was delicately shaped, chiseled too fine perhaps, extraordinarily beautiful, and yet not feminine in the least, and he was very young, not more than sixteen years of age.

Despite his youth he was poised, quiet and elegant in his movements. He bowed to me deeply, but did not fall down as the others had. His skin was pale and clear, the eyes an intense black-blue. In the lamplight of the room his long hair shone golden as the mask he had removed from it.

“I am your servant, goddess,” he said gravely, and I sensed a spark of polite defiance in him for the one who had come so abruptly from nowhere.

“What does the lord desire of Uastis?” I inquired. It was the usual manner of asking those who came to me.

’To pay my respects. To see the goddess for myself. To question her, if she permits. I am very curious; I hope the goddess will not be angry.”

“Curiosity,” I said, “does not generally move the anger of the gods.”

He smiled, courteous and unruffled. Half turning, he spoke to his three companions. “You may leave us.”

“My lord,” the tall man with the wolf’s mask said, “it is unfitting you should have no guard.”

“Vazkor, Vazkor, I am not afraid. The goddess is my guard against all harm.”

They left him, Vazkor also, and then Oparr, sliding his smooth unctuous passage out of the room. We were alone, the Javhovor of Ezlann and I.

There was a single bench against one wall. Now he carried it forward and sat on it. His slenderness had misled me, I had not thought him particularly strong, yet the bench was marble, and a big cumbersome thing. He sat easily, looking into my mask face, because of the bench, a little lower than I.

“May I ask what I want?”

“You may ask,” I said.

“And the answers are at the goddess’ discretion? I understand well. Where did you come from, goddess?”

It was hard to make an assessment. Vazkor had sent me no warning. I had not expected to meet such courteous probing.

“From the Old Race,” I said.

“But the Old Race is gone, goddess. They say you slept, then woke.”

“Yes,” I said, “beneath a far mountain.”

“And now you have come to Ezlann. Why?”

“Ezlann is my City. She has worshiped me since before my waking.”

“How did the goddess come to Ezlann?”

“I came here,” I said. “That is enough.”

“And how did the goddess enter the Temple, learn of the hidden door and the secret machinery?”

“I entered,” I said, “and I learned. That is enough.”

“There is a legend already,” he said, “that Uastis in the form of the golden phoenix flew through the stone wall of her Temple, and burned herself in the watchfire at the altar, and rose again. They say she has lived among many peoples and been their god, that she has died and returned to life, that the look of her face is so terrible it will turn to stone any man that sees it, that her body is filled with a serpent, and her brain is hewn from jade.”

“Some things are hidden,” I said.

“Once,” he said softly, not looking at me, “an assassin was sent to kill my High Commander, Vazkor. He has enemies, goddess, and these things happen. Usually men die. I have heard what happened—Vazkor’s guard ran in and found the man had stabbed him several times in the chest and throat, yet it was the murderer who was dead. Vazkor had snapped his neck in the very act of killing.

They assumed Vazkor would perish from his wounds, but he did not. You have seen as much. And this I know”—he looked at me and smiled “because I, too, must have spies, goddess.”

I was not sure what I should do. I said nothing. After a moment the Javhovor rose.

“Power,” he said. “I know you could blast me where I stand, as you did the priest. But you are not an angry goddess. There is another part to the legend. Have you heard it?”

My only strength was in silence, so I waited.

“The legend states that the goddess will take as husband the High-Lord of her City. A parable of unity between religion and the state. Already the people of Ezlann are calling for it.”

Yes, he was very dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than Vazkor, for his weapon was honesty. I wondered what Vazkor would want from me in this situation, and wondered also what I would want.

“You,” I said, “are mortal.”

“Of course,” he said, “very mortal. The assassin who puts a knife in my heart need fear nothing further from me.”

“I do not know what to say to you,” I said. “I must have time to seek an answer within myself.”

He bowed, and smiled again, without warmth.

“There are prayers daily in your Temple for our union. Such a passion for tidiness.”

He put on the phoenix mask, and turned towards the doors. As he drew near, they were whisked open by his servants outside, who must have been listening all the time, surely, to be able to judge his exit so perfectly.

Soon Oparr returned.

“Did you hear what was said?” I asked him.

“I? But, goddess, I was not present.”

“Naturally,” I said, “there is some spy-hole that looks into this room.”

He was silent, and the gloved hands twitched uneasily in the folds of his robe.

“Listen, Oparr,” I said. “You are Vazkor’s man, but I am loyal to him also—you have seen as much. We must work together, we three, or your master’s schemes will come to nothing. The interview I have just had might have gone better if you had warned me beforehand what the Javhovor would say. Now, get word to Vazkor, and ask him what I must answer, and what I must do.”

Oparr stood quiet a moment, then he bowed low, murmured “Goddess,” and went out.

Part of me had hoped that Vazkor would come himself, but he did not come. It would, after all, have been a foolish thing to do. Instead, Oparr slunk in to me at midnight, as the women were preparing my bed for sleep.

“Well?” I asked him.

“Yes, goddess,” he said.

“Yes? What do you mean?”

“To all that has been asked, the answer must be ‘yes—’ ”

I had guessed as much, but it infuriated me. As ever, I was bought and sold. Using all the force of my hate, I struck Oparr across the head and neck. He staggered and fell down. For a while he lay on the floor, groaning at the pain and the injustice.

“Get out, or I shall kill you,” I said, and he ran.

The women cowered away from me in fright. Hate stabbed from my eyes at a tall black vase, which shattered instantly.

“Go!” I shouted at the women, who thankfully fled.

I lay in the cool dark. I thought, I will leave. By night, I will run away into the desert.

I dreamed of it, the horse flying under me through the moon-drained spaces. But another horse came after me, black, and more powerful than mine. And Vazkor caught my reins, and halted me, and I knew that I was glad that I had not escaped from him. So it was.

My answer went to the Javhovor, together with a golden seal ring. There was, apparently, great rejoicing in the City. Five days passed, days of supposed purification for my bride groom. On the sixth, the women brought me my bridal gown—black velvet, so thickly embroidered with a phoenix of gold thread that it stood stiff as armor on my body. It was a strange business. At the appointed time I entered the vast hall of the Temple, girls going before me, strewing the torn off petals of forced winter roses, white as the snow. I sat on a tall throne, and Oparr, larger and more impressive in his ceremonial regalia, led the chants to my greatness. At last, the formal question—would I take a man as my husband? And the formal reply, yes, it should be the High-Lord I would have.

The elegant, beautiful boy who was to be my spouse came forward, faceless, dressed in black and gold.

It seemed quite wrong this sham should involve him. He was at once too innocent and too aware to have been drawn in. Yet he kneeled before me, and spoke in a clear cool voice all the praises and promises which must be spoken. After which I raised him, and stood with him hand in hand, and it seemed curious to find him altogether so much bigger than I for all his slimness; for he seemed so young to me I had half expected to stand hand in hand with a precocious child. More chanting, and then together we left my prison of darkness for, I imagined, another, different prison.

Through the snow-filled, crowded, noisy streets we rode, standing, still hand-clasped, in a large golden chariot, drawn by a team of six black mares. Behind and before us, marching guards, maidens singing and casting colored petals on the snow. It was bitterly cold and took a long while. Occasionally, from our closeness in the chariot, I would feel my companion shiver, a little helpless spasm, that eluded even his poised control. His hand was light on mine, the spare, long fingered hand of a poet or musician.

We reached the palace, another of the huge, many-tiered black towers of Ezlann. Inside, mosaic floors, golden lamp clusters, a drifting warmth from the hot pipes which lay behind the walls and under the paving.

For an hour more we sat on our thrones, while the aristocratic multitude filed past, laying priceless trinkets at our feet.

It was dusk, and lamps blazed. We were alone together in a circular room with twenty narrow windows that looked out over Ezlann. The Javhovor removed his mask, which he did not seem to like wearing, and spoke to me for the first time that day, except for his appeal at my feet in the Temple, which was not for me at all.

“Well, then, it’s over, goddess. At last. I’ve allotted you ten women, I hope they will be enough; if not, you have only to tell me. They’ll come when you press that carved flower there. They’ll see to whatever refreshment you require, prepare your bedchamber, and attend you at all times. The palace is yours to walk where you want. Naturally, you will wish to preside in the Temple from time to time. I’ll arrange a suitable escort whenever you need it.”

He was very courteous, as ever, but his voice was a little too cool now, perhaps.

“And my wifely duties?” I inquired.

“None,” he said. “You are my goddess before my wife, and I remember it. I am honored.”

“And you,” I said, “are my husband. Am I not even expected to honor your bed?”

“That least of all,” he said.

I felt the slightest twinge of disappointment, and it surprised me.

“You will not, then, command me to lie with you,” I said, “but I imagine I might command you.”

“You can command me only so far, goddess. There are some things even you have no power to command.”

I had expected him to be embarrassed, but he was not, only reluctant to explain he did not want me, that the thought of me made him sick—She whose face turns men to stone, She who kills with one look. And I was Vazkor’s, he had virtually told me he knew as much.

“You underestimate my powers,” I said to him. “However, I understand your reluctance. A peaceful night to you, my husband.”

He bowed to me and went out. I pressed the carved flower, and soon the women came and took me to my new apartments, which were gold and green and white, not the black of Ezlann. In a metal box lay his marriage gift to me, a great collar-necklace of twisted gold and silver, set with jades in the shapes of lions.

It troubled me, he troubled me, but I put him from my mind, and slept.

6

There were many processions in which we rode hand in hand, for it was traditional. There were many entertainments at which we sat, and he would courteously ask me what I would have the dancers or the players or the jugglers or the magicians do. I had been afraid of these entertainments once, expecting the corruption to be strongest here, but I saw only beautiful things—a woman changed into a single jewel, two albino lions on whose backs two albino youths made strange knots of their bodies. There was music too, sinuous and softly thrilling, languid melodies coaxed from the round bellies of stringed instruments, and the bowls or silver horns.

Yet I was more aware of him than of the things I saw. In public we sat close enough, but in the palace we were separate. A word was not exchanged between us except those formal words when we must speak for his people. The vast library of the palace, filled with beautiful books, painted and bound in gold and jewels—I would often find him there, but when I came he would go away. I had thought at first he had never been with a woman, and perhaps feared me because of that, but I learned later, as one always can from the gossips of any establishment, that two or three of the small, beautiful, deerlike palace maidens had shared his pleasure at one time or another.

I had never really been lonely before, there had been no time or person to induce such a feeling of emptiness. In my dreams I would long for Vazkor, and the body and the power of Vazkor, long to hurt him, punish and destroy him, long to use him as a man would use a woman—to humiliate him, and finally become his slave. But awake, I would think of my husband the Javhovor, whose name I did not know. I would think of him beside me in the chariot, the slight abrupt shudders of cold that had run over his body, and yearn to warm him with my own, to stroke his hair and smooth cheeks, and walk with him in the palace, and talk to him, and have him sing to me as he did with his doe-eyed girls.

And I was afraid. Vazkor, like a black shadow of death, reached out to seize and replace his overlord.

Some days after the marriage, when I had ridden to the Temple so they could fall on their noses before me, I sought out Oparr.

“Give this letter to Vazkor,” I said.

But there was never a written answer. Perhaps Vazkor mistrusted me even further now, for I had written: “Do you know the Javhovor understands your Power? Do you realize he guesses your ambition?

And he is not a fool.”

Oparr came to me a few days afterward, and, when we were alone, he said softly to me, “The answer is, goddess, that some men, seeing death in front of them, walk toward it instead of running away. One who waits on death is easy to be rid of.”

That dusk I went to him in the library. He rose at once, bowed, and turned to go.

“My lord,” I said. It was the first time I had addressed him as an equal let alone a superior in rank. He stopped, looking at me curiously.

“I am your servant, goddess,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“You are in danger,” I said, my lips feeling stiff and cold behind the mask. “You must realize it ... your spies ... I do not know if I can help you—I do not think I can—but surely you can help yourself, now, before it is too late.”

“Would you have me execute all my captains?” he said to me immediately. “A little impracticable.”

“Not attack, but defense,” I said.

He came across the room, and looked at me, smiling a little.

“You cannot understand, goddess,” he said. “I have lived with an awareness of death since I was three years of age. These things are not so important for a mortal, goddess.”

Involuntarily, I put up my hand and touched his face. So soft the skin over the fine bones. He flinched away; then, correcting the gesture, he took my hand a moment, then let it go.

“I will send someone to light the lamps,” he said, “so you will be able to read here.”

I might have kept him there, looked in his eyes and paralyzed his will to be away from me, but I could not do it.

Like a silly, love-sick girl, I watched him from windows, stood in doorways of rooms where he sat unaware of me.

I had a magician come to me, in secret, and he conjured up ghost things in a circle on the floor. It was all trickery, but it filled the hours.

I had not spoken to Vazkor for forty-six days.

There came a morning when I woke with a sense of unreasoning fear. My skin was drenched with sweat, my night garment and sleep mask soaked in it. I lay for a long while, trying to calm myself, and then sat up to rise. The pale room tilted, and it seemed a herd of white horses pulled it like a chariot round and round the Skora of my bed. I lay back, and my whole frame ached and trembled. I saw then that I was sick, and could not understand it. My body, so strong and healing it had survived death, had betrayed me at last to some fever of the cold weather. I was lucid enough to press the carved flower by my bed for the women, but I do not remember much after this. There was a scared physician, I seem to recollect, who did not dare touch me, and prescribed many coverings, and braziers around the bed, but this did no good. I recall glimpses of Oparr, restless and ill-at-ease, watching me, I guessed, to be certain I spoke no slander against Vazkor in my ravings. He was little enough comfort to me, and at last I made him understand I would not have him near me.

Months later, it seemed, I began to drift toward the surface of myself. There was not much left of me.

My skin was flaccid and raddled as an old woman’s, and my thoughts would not keep still in my head.

Then, as I lay like a skinny corpse on my pillows, the women fluttered like birds and were gone, and my husband was standing beside me. My brain seemed to clear at his coming. He set his mask down by the bed, and he was very pale. I thought for a moment it might have been concern for me, but this was foolish.

“I am sorry you are sick,” he said gravely and gently.

“I do not know how long I have been ill,” I said, half petulant, for no one would tell me.

“Nine or ten days,” he said. “I came before but you did not know me.”

A sudden little chill went through me, and I asked, “Do they know in the City their goddess is sick?”

“Oh, yes,” he said quietly, “they know.”

Drearily I said, “And now they doubt she is a goddess, because she is mortal enough to be ill.”

“No, you’re wrong, goddess. They have been in a tumult of fear for you. But there was never any doubt.

Oparr has led prayers for you day and night. The women have torn their hair and breasts for you, and a black bull has been slaughtered every dawn.”

“What a waste,” I said.

“But now you’re getting well,” he said.

I took his hand, and though I saw him flinch ever so slightly, he did not pull away, and I did not let him go.

I must have slept.

After a time, a smear of golden lamplight on my lids. I half opened my eyes, and he was still there, sitting by me. I was not properly awake, but there was a sense of conviction and urgency on me.

“You are in danger,” I said, “you must go. They will kill you.”

My eyes would not focus, I could not see his expression.

Softly he said to me, “I know.”

“Then go now, go,” I whispered, thrusting at him weakly with both my hands.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I have waited for this moment all my life.”

Helplessly, I felt the sleep miasma pull me down. I struggled to keep hold of him, but I could not do it.

In a dark corridor, I saw him walk calmly ahead of me toward a burning, terrible brightness. I ran after him, calling him back, calling and calling him, but I could not seem to reach him, and he did not turn, only went on, walking so calmly, his hands loose at his sides, toward the devouring light.

There was a terrible sound in the palace: a wild beast roaring and trampling.

I woke, and sat upright in the golden bed. It was very dark, and the noise beat round and round the room. Abruptly, ice-white lightning seared through the windows.

A storm.

Now I made out the separate sounds of the blustering wind, the lashing snow-rain, the hammering fist of the thunder. There was no one in the room; the lamps had blown out. Still petulant with illness, I pressed at the carved flower. But no one came.

After a time, I made out once more the other noises I had heard in sleep that the storm had muffled but did not explain away. Shouting and screaming, shrill screams of exultation or terror, I could not tell. I pressed at the carved flower again and again, without result. Finally, I pulled myself from the bed, and began to make my way toward the double doors of the chamber. It was a slow laborious business. I did not dare to walk across the open floor, which seemed to shift under foot, but slid myself along with both hands on the walls. Another lightning flash fell blazing on the dark, and then another immediately after it, but this one gold, not white. The doors had been flung open. In the doorway many black figures, priests and priestesses, and in front of them, Oparr. He raised his hands, and cried aloud in his temple voice:

“Praise and love! The goddess is safe! Uastis is unharmed!”

The cry was echoed and reechoed. Priestesses ran into the room with me, and Oparr shut the door on us.

I was bewildered and very weak. All things were uncertain and strange to me, and so it did not seem so much stranger than anything else that they stripped me, and painted me with the cream which made my skin golden, and dressed me for the Temple, and hung on me the jewels of the Temple, and finally placed the cat mask on my head over my lank hair, even over the sleeping mask itself. Dimly I saw that the women were afraid.

When I was ready, one called out, and the doors were opened again. Oparr stepped forward.

“It will do,” he said; and then, to me, “The people have been frightened for you, goddess; you must show them that you live and are well. We will help you.”

They did not carry me, but a priest came on either side of me, and led me firmly by the elbows, so I should not fall. Something about these men told me they were not really priests at all. They walked with a soldier’s stride.

After a time, Oparr stopped them. He came close, and said quietly, “We are nearly there, goddess.

There is only one thing you must remember. When the High Commander, who has saved you, kneels before you, you must touch his shoulder and say, ‘Beheth Lectorr.’ Only those words, that’s all you need to remember. When he kneels. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I could remember, but they made little sense to me then, those two words of the Old Tongue.

There was red light ahead. We turned a corner and came into the long hall which opened onto a high terrace above the City. The terrace doors were wide, and scarlet torchlight streamed against the black racing sky. Below, thousands of people were massed, the gardens and the walks were flooded with them, and they were shouting, calling, screaming out in a frenzy of anger and fear a single name.

“Uastis! Uastis! Uastis!”

The storm had eased. Hail had fallen, and the terrace flags were very slippery. Men stood here, black still shapes, with silver skulls for heads. Near the edge of the terrace a man with a golden wolfs head stood alone. Oparr halted. The man with the wolfs head turned to us, then back again to the people. He raised his arms, and a crescendo of ragged cries broke the drumbeat of the chant. Slowly he left the edge and moved toward us.

“Let her go,” he said to the priest-soldiers who held me. He looked at me, and his eyes were fierce behind their glass shields, strong enough to hold me up instead. “Now you must walk out where they can see you,” he said. “They are very afraid for you, and you must reassure them.”

His eyes held me hard; my body braced itself, and the paving did not seem to tilt beneath my feet. Stiffly, I began to walk toward the terrace lip, Vazkor a pace or so behind me, holding me firmly without touching me. Moving me like a mechanical toy.

The crowd below could see me now, and they began to sing and cheer.

I stared down at them without thought, and behind me he said, “Give them your blessing, goddess.”

And without thinking, I raised my hands, and made over them the sign I made in the Temple.

A hush fell on them then, and, in the hush, Vazkor came and kneeled beside me, his head bowed.

I was very tired and wanted to sleep, but I had not forgotten. I bent and touched his shoulder, and said the two words, which meant nothing; to me, at least. At the sound of them, the crowd erupted once more. I am not certain how they heard my voice; it was little more than a whisper. I suppose there was some trickery in the structure of the terrace which allowed the whisper to carry.

Vazkor rose. His eyes willed me to turn and go back inside the hall. I did not understand the command, only obeyed it.

I walked before him, away from the noise, and away from the light and the attendants. No one remained; even Oparr was gone. In the faintly lit corridor he let go his mental control of me, and lifted me up physically instead. The doors of my bedchamber were ajar. He nudged them open with his foot, kicked them shut behind him when we were inside. He put me on the bed, neatly and precisely.

“Things have gone well,” he said. “You can sleep now.”

A little cold pain.

“Where is he?” I asked Vazkor.

“Who?”

“The Javhovor, my husband. He was with me before Oparr came.”

“The Javhovor has gone, goddess; he need trouble you no more.”

Weights of lead were piling themselves upon my body, but I must speak a little longer.

“Vazkor, where is he? Is he dead?”

“He’s finished, goddess, and as well for you he is. You have been sick, and now I will tell you why you have been sick. Your husband, afraid of your Power, has been poisoning you. A human woman would be dead by now, but you, goddess, being what you are, will recover and live.”

“No,” I said. “No, Vazkor, no.”

But he was gone. The doors were shut.

Far away the crowds still faintly roared, merciless in their joy. The snow was falling again.

7

Five more days it took me to be strong again, and in those days Vazkor achieved the last bastions of temporal power in Ezlann. Yet it had been quite easy for him, once the goddess had uttered the ancient words over him: “Beheth Lectorr” “Here is the Chosen One.”

I remember how Vazkor had spoken of the gathering of the steaders as being for the Javhovor’s latest campaign. But he had not been one for war; it was Vazkor’s levy. He had been planning, even then, as if he sensed my coming.

Each day, despite my weakness and reluctance, I had to go out to the terrace, and let the people see me. I learned the story of the lost days from the physician who attended me now, though I learned it in secret. My husband, the Javhovor, had attempted to kill me by poison. On the night of the storm, Vazkor, suspecting the worst, had roused the crowd and come with his men to the palace. The Javhovor was called out. He denied the allegation very quietly, it seemed, and half smiling, and then, in the very act of the lie, some unseen Power had struck him down before the whole crowd. After this, I had been brought forth, and had selected the new Lord of the City—aptly my rescuer and champion.

I had no doubt it was Vazkor who killed him—killed, as I had killed, with the white knife of hate that leaps from the brain. I did not ask what became of his body, it seemed only Vazkor would know, and there was no point. As to the poison, it was a fallacy. How fortunate my illness had been for the High Commander—but he was Javhovor now, and the chosen one of the goddess.

But as I grew well, I grew hard in my bitterness. I saw Vazkor truly as he was, my enemy, and I knew my danger. Wherever I went I was attended by his people, both women and men. Outside my doors stood his guards—to protect and honor me, it was said. One day I was called out and taken to a small room, where Vazkor and Oparr and various priests waited. Here Oparr intoned over us words I recalled from that other ceremony in the Temple. And when this was finished, hand in hand, Vazkor and I presented ourselves at the high terrace, and the people roared. It was formality, yet I was afraid now what this lie would mean; but it proved even less of a marriage than the last. Vazkor was occupied in sending and receiving messages across the snow wastes to Ezlann’s five sister Cities, and had no time for me.

For many days after this I saw no one except the women, but eventually Oparr came. Since I had struck him, he had come to me, cringing a little with fear. To the fear—after the night of my first husband’s murder, when he had a brief power over me in taking me to Vazkor—was added a curious gloating little triumph. Now he both whined and exulted, one emotion or the other, in turn, getting the upper hand as he sensed my anger or weakness. He would be dangerous to me in distress, yet I dared not harm him, for I still feared Vazkor’s strength.

Now he bowed low, and informed me that I must go next day to the Temple and be worshipped there.

The people pined without their goddess.

I answered “Yes,” and sent him out, and thought in terrible frustration of the great power which was mine in the City, and yet how helpless it had made me. In my sleep I dreamed myself a giantess, crushing Ezlann in my hands, throwing her towers into the desert, where they broke, and ran like blood.

In a yellow dawn I rode there in the goddess’ chariot, behind me thirty black guards, ahead thirty other guards, on either side two black archers with silver skull faces. Everywhere, the phoenix badge of the Javhovor, but under it the wolf’s head. I do not remember the worship in the Temple, only the murmur and sea-sound of the chanting, and smells of heavy incense. Going back, the snow was thick in the streets. In the huge forecourt my driver reined the white mares. Men waited courteously for me to retire.

Slowly, with the goddess’ erect, stiff gait, I left the chariot, began to walk across the snow. Danger, all around me, and no help for it. Through the black doorway, along corridors with glassy floors. ...

Abruptly I was aware that someone was behind me, matching his speed to mine.

I turned. Three men had followed me, soft-foot as cats. Under the silver masks, I sensed a waiting. Had Vazkor sent them to remove me already? Yet it was the phoenix they wore, not the skull, and it was oddly reassuring, though it meant nothing now.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We are the goddess’ new guard,” one said. He was taller than the rest.

“Vazkor’s men,” I said with a bitter emphasis.

The tall one said, “Now we are Vazkor’s. Before, we were the guard of Asren, Phoenix, Javhovor of Ezlann.”

I had never known before the name of my first husband. I started at it; spoken at this time by this man, it seemed as if I glimpsed him suddenly, alive and immediate.

I turned away and continued the walk to my apartments, yet my blood tingled. I was aware of a great difference, a sort of sea-change in the air. They moved behind me, and I felt no menace in their presence.

At the double doors, I halted again.

“You may enter,” I said.

I went through, and they followed me. The third guard pushed the doors closed, shutting us in.

There was a moment’s silence as I stood facing them across the beautiful room, and then they were kneeling, unmasked. I went to them, and raised the face of the tallest guard in my hand. Recognition. This man had knelt to me before, on the causeway outside Ezlann—not the captain. for Vazkor had disposed of him, but one of the arrogant, silver blond soldiers.

“I am Mazlek,” he said.

The name was familiar: She was dead—Mazlek killed her—I saw the blade go in through her leftbreast—

“Goddess,” Mazlek whispered. His eyes were wide on me, open, and coolly reverent.

“How did you escape from Vazkor?” I asked him.

“Easy. He did not know me, and I was Asren’s man.”

“A spy,” I said.

“Perhaps. I was Asren’s man. When death came for us because we had seen you, I slipped away. I’d expected it of Vazkor.”

“And so Asren Javhovor knew from you how I came to Ezlann.”

“Yes, goddess.”

I smiled a little at a mystery solved—for Asren, my husband, had never believed my god-head, only in my Power. Yet this soldier believed.

“And now you are my guard,” I said. I turned to the other two, a little smaller, both blond and very handsome—they might have been brothers. “Your names?”

“Slor,” one said.

“Dnarl,” the other said.

Even their voices were similar.

I motioned them to rise, and I saw now that Mazlek, their captain, was very tall indeed, and very strong, he who had killed me once in the moon-darkness.

“How long are you to watch me?”

“It will be easy at first, goddess, to prolong our stay. Later, perhaps, it will be necessary for you to declare us your honorary guard. In all, goddess, I have eighty men under me. Not a great many, but enough to save your holy person from immediate insult or assault.”

Again I smiled, involuntarily. I took his hand, and shook my head at him when he began at once to kneel.

I would be safe now. More, much more than physically safe.

It had been uneasy, that first time, in the green woods of Darak’s second camp, something that must be given a different name. This was an open thing, without dishonor.

I lay down early to sleep, before the day’s candle had quite smoked itself out over the snow wastes.

And beyond the doors my guard waited to protect me, Mazlek, Slor, and Dnarl, who had once been Maggur, the black giant, Giltt gold-earrings, and little Kel the archer.

8

Oparr came in the morning.

I received him, and sensing my mood, he cringed a little over his words.

“Vazkor Javhovor requests the goddess’ presence.”

“Why?”

“I am only the goddess’ priest. I do not know all things.”

“You are the worm in the woodpile, Oparr,” I said sweetly. “You worm in and out of things, and you learn a great deal.”

He hesitated, fidgeting, his black-gloved hands busy with his skirts. Then he said, “It is to do with the council at Za, goddess, I believe.”

Za, the central City of White Desert, was a vaguely known name to me. Of the council I had heard nothing, yet I wanted no further truck with the venomous priest. I rose, and he led me to Vazkor, and behind me walked eight men; Slor and his cohort.

He waited for me in the library, among Asren’s books and the beauty Asren had engendered there.

Oparr, Slor, the rest, were shut outside.

Vazkor was masked, and very still in his chair.

“Sit, goddess,” he said.

It was a small thing, but he made it sound like a command. I sat.

“So, we are to go to Za,” I said. “Why is that?”

There was a moment’s silence. He had not expected me to know anything about it. The last time he had seen me, at our formal marriage ceremony, I had been listless, malleable. Finally he rose. He went among Asren’s things as if he understood them, and had some right there. Stupidly, it angered me, but quickly he was back, and unrolling a parchment map before us on the polished table. The map was light brown in color, painted in black, and beautifully drawn with little superfluous drawings of ships and chariots and horses, farmers busy in fields, marching soldiery. To the north there was one single gash of sapphire, below the mountains, which was Aluthmis, the Water.

He set the onyx weights at each corner, and pointed things out to me. I scarcely heard him. I could only think of Asren’s hands unrolling, caressing the map. But abruptly I was aware of the Cities, set forth like a formation of stars, around which had been drawn the shape of some nebulous animal, such as might be described on an astrologer’s chart. Ezlann marked the head, and four others the body, and, stretched out behind, the last City tipped the tail.

“Here is Ezlann,” Vazkor said. “To the southwest of her, Ammath, to the west, Kmiss. To the southeast of Ezlann, So-Ess, and between and below So-Ess and Kmiss, Za. Beyond Za, the mountain City Eshkorek Arnor. You will see now that etiquette demands any meeting of the six Cities of the Alliance should be held at Za. Her position is symbolically central, between the other five.”

I recalled the messengers who had ridden back and forth in the long days since Asren’s death, and I understood a little.

“You are drawing the five High-Lords together to master them at Za, and take the reins of power.”

“I plan so,” he said.

“And I, why must I go with you?”

He removed the weights, and the map curled in on itself swiftly, like a disturbed fetus.

“It is necessary the goddess should be there.”

“And why, Vazkor, is it necessary?”

He said nothing. Still masked, he turned to replace the map in its jar.

“Because, Vazkor,” I said softly, “without the goddess you are nothing.” We both knew this well, but it gave me great pleasure to say it.

After a moment he said levelly, “You have made a complete recovery from your illness, I see. I am glad, I should not have liked to risk your health on the journey to Za.”

“When do we leave Ezlann?” I asked him.

“Two days,” he said. “You can bring five women, no more; they are bad travelers. Naturally I’ll send you a detachment of my men, as personal escort—the Cities will expect to see you honored.”

“No need,” I said. “I have my own guard. Eighty men and their captain, my commander. That should be enough for my honor, should it not?”

He turned to me swiftly, and I knew behind the mask he was staring.

“Who is this man?”

“You will no doubt discover by your own methods,” I said. “I should not like to discourage your labors.

Only remember, he is under my protection.”

His stiffness eased. Very politely he said, “You have been a little unwise, perhaps.”

“Indeed? Perhaps I am not alone in that.”

“You must not persist,” he said, “in your mistrust of me. We are one, you and I, however hard you try to put it from your mind. If you are goddess, then Vazkor is god. They have no legend here for me, that is why I must use you as my shield. For a time.”

“It is foolish of you,” I said, “to use as your shield the spear,” for abruptly I remembered Asutoo’s words in the cave, when I had made him tell me how he had betrayed Darak. “Too narrow for defense,” I said to Vazkor, “and much too sharp.”

He did not answer me, and I left the room and went to my apartments. At the doors I called in Slor.

“Get word to Mazlek that I have announced my Guard of Honor to Vazkor Javhovor.”

Unmasked, I saw his face tauten, then relax. He smiled grimly.

“Well and good,” he said.

“Will you wear my badge?” I asked him.

“Goddess,” he said. I did not understand the familiar emotion on his face; I had seen it so often in others, yet still it made no sense.

“The head of the cat,” I said. “Can you find smiths to cast it? We have only two days.”

He bowed.

“Easily, goddess.”

When he had gone, I sat a long while in the winter-lit room, and passed from my triumph to deep depression. I had the sensation—so often on me now—that having left any place, I should not return there. Even so, I did not understand why it should distress me to quit this city, until the thought came that it was Asren I must leave. I cannot explain this aching super-awareness of his presence, even after I knew him dead. He seemed all around me, particularly in the library, which was so entirely his. I longed to take and hold things that had been his, yet I had nothing of his, except that necklace he had sent me on our marriage night, which possessed nothing of him because he felt nothing for it, had given nothing to it, knowing it was for me. The day wore on, and with my knowledge of impending departure, the sense of no return, I began to pace the room, ridiculously desperate, and unable to be still.

Finally I went to the doors and opened them. Outside, four men, phoenix-masked. I knew they were all strangers to me, yet I could tell even from so small a thing as the line of their bodies as they looked at me that they were mine.

My mouth felt stiff and dry, but I said to them, “The dead lord, Asren Javhovor—where is he buried?”

“Goddess,” one of them said, “it was done swiftly, and with shame. Vazkor’s work. We do not know.”

“But give us time,” another one said. “We can discover.”

“There is no time,” I said.

“Perhaps,” a man said. He hesitated. “Possibly one of the women—Asren Javhovor’s women—might know. There must have been some rights allowed. He was not the steader Shlevakin, after all,” he added with intense bitterness.

“Find out for me,” I said. I touched his shoulder lightly, and felt that peculiar quickening under my fingers that was not sexual but spiritual desire. He bowed and was gone.

The windows blackened. Women entered and lit the lamps, their dresses coiling and rustling on the floors.

Then Dnarl came and two others, and they brought a girl with them, and left her in the room with me.

I had expected to feel jealousy—jealousy of any kind, sexual, mental, anything, I was not sure. Yet I felt nothing of this.

She was very young, fourteen or fifteen, very fragile and lovely; like him, she had reached perfection before her years, and by token of the very swiftness of this achievement, there seemed to be something ephemeral about her. Long icy-gold hair spilled on her shoulders under a dark veil. I would not have asked her to unmask, but I suppose Dnarl had told her she should. The gold thing, some flower shape, dangled from her hand. Her arms and naked breasts were pearly, and quite perfect. She wore no rings or jewelry, though she seemed made for adornment. And, though she was plainly terrified, it would have been useless to tell her not to be.

“I have asked for you to come to me,” I said, “because I want to know where my husband is buried.”

“Yes, goddess,” she said, not looking at me.

“Do you know this?”

“Yes, goddess.”

“How?”

She made a little nervous gesture with her hands.

“Vazkor Javhovor sent a man to tell me. It was a burial of shame, he said, because of what had been done, but only fitting some should remember and go to the place.”

“Why were you told?” I asked her.

“Because—” she stammered. “I was his—but I am of no importance. Don’t be angry with me!” And she began to cry out of pure fright. She, it seemed, had also expected my jealousy.

“There is no need for this,” I said gently. “There is no anger in me for you. Will you take me to the place?”

She nodded dumbly, and turned at once.

It was a long journey. Two guards came behind us, and they had a lamp, which at first seemed unnecessary. But soon the lighted corridors were behind us. We went through dark, earth-smelling ways deep under the palace, through old and neglected cellars crusted with dust and misty with hanging gray webs, down worn staircases that twisted round and round on themselves in the shadows. It looked a dangerous way for her to come. I remember it surprised me she did not seem afraid of it. At last there was a level corridor, and, at the end, a great iron door. She moved her fingers in the grooves and it lumbered unwillingly open.

What lay beyond filled me with bitter fury.

Some earth-heap in the desert would have angered me less.

Black velvet draped the five walls of this underground chamber, which reeked of dust and neglect.

Despite the drapery, the floor had not been swept clean. Filthy scraps of cloth and glass lay scattered everywhere. Damp would soon eat holes in everything. At the center of the room, a black draped slab—wood or stone, I did not know. On this rested the ornate tomb-cask of a High-Lord—cedar wood plated with gold, ornamented with phoenixes and serpents, set with blue stones and jades, nailed shut with diamond-headed nails. Around the cask flowers had been scattered to wither, adding their decay to the rest, precious oils had been spilled, and now ran sticky, rancid and evil-smelling down the cracks of the floor.

The guards waited in the corridor, the girl slid into a corner, wide-eyed as I walked round and round the coffin until my anger, like a pain, eased a little. The girl had begun to weep again, for him, I think, this time. The aching loss I felt must be unbearable to her; she, after all, had known him and been one with him.

“If you wish to stay a while, I will wait for you in the corridor,” I said, but she choked off her sobs immediately, and ran after me.

So she led us back the long dismal way. We reached my apartments and I beckoned her inside. I thanked her, but she did not seem to understand the thanking.

“Later,” I said, “if I can, I shall have him reburied, openly, and with honor, in the tradition of Ezlann.”

But she did not comprehend, and, anyway, how empty it seemed, all of it, how pointless, for he could not enjoy or suffer anything of it now. Yet I could not get the filthy room from my mind.

I let her go after that. She was so afraid I could not keep her another moment. I had wanted to ask her for something of his, some small thing he had given her that meant less than the others, but I knew she would give me the best and dearest because she was so frightened, and besides this, it seemed such a desolate thing to ask. So, I said nothing and regretted it later.

There were many dreams that night, formless but terrifying. Waking, I recollected only the stone bowl and the flame whose name was Karrakaz, and the words of the curse, and how I cried out that I was stronger, much stronger than the he-she thing in the bowl.

The next day there were preparations for departure, and, at sunset, I must go to the Temple and bless Ezlann for the last time, though, it is true, they expected me to return. As I stood there in the stiff gold things, my eyes never once left the bowl where the flame burned. Yet the flame was very still and no voice spoke unspeaking in my brain: “I am Karrakaz the Soulless One, who sprang from the evil of your race ... there is no escape ... you are cursed and carry a curse with you ... there will be no happiness.

Your palaces are in ruins. The lizards sun themselves ... the fallen courts let me show you what you are.”

1

When I left the village under the volcano, the crowds stood sullen and fearful at my going; women had wept and plucked at me. And later, from the amphitheater of the hills, I had looked back, and seen the scarlet lamp which was the villages’ burning in the volcano’s second aftermath. Now I rode with Vazkor, though not side by side, not even with the remote nearness I had had then to Darak. Hundreds of inanimate and living things separated us: soldiers splendidly clothed; horses incredibly appareled in silken body drapes with purple ribbons plaited in manes and tails, and golden nuggets on harness; wagons of provisions dragged along by mules; even the levies from the steadings, trapped out as soldiers in leather, but unmasked, their eyes and faces dead as I had seen them first.

Bells were ringing in Ezlann, deep and endless, and crowds milled at the edges of the streets and on the balconies. I rode in my open chariot, a ceremonial thing which would be discarded at the gate for a carriage. The people shouted, and cheered us. It was more than the procession of a goddess and a king—this was the magnificent riding of the warlord to his war. Beyond White Desert stretched the War March, the jousting place, where each alliance did battle with the others, yet Vazkor knew, and others too, perhaps, that his war march began at the back gate of Ezlann. Every city was a prize to him, conquest and power, something to blot the running wound of his pride, for a time. Yes, even more than this, not only the Cities of the south, but everything outside his own body, even the body itself, must be subdued and held in iron to satisfy the craving of his mind.

The cheers and bells rang on and on. So unlike the village, so unlike. But then, their goddess had not really left them; her Power was everywhere, in the great statues still, and in the person of her chief priest Oparr.

I almost laughed.

At my back rode eighty men, phoenix-masked, each bearing on the right side of the breast the golden cat, each ten groups of seven captained by an eighth man who wore a green sash about his waist. This had not been my idea but Mazlek’s, presumably. Yet no one could now mistake the Honorary Guard of the Goddess. I did not know how they had settled with the smiths and dye merchants, for I had no revenue of my own.

It took us fourteen days to reach Za, more than twice as long as it would take a single mounted man, but so it is with caravans of any sort. There was little of individual interest to me; for most of the time I was immured in my traveling carriage—a stuffy gilded box, that left me each night stiff and aching, and was drawn by four toiling and temperamental mules. Several times each day the carriage would judder to a halt, and I would hear the drivers arguing and cajoling, while the mules stood regarding them with polite interest, until leather-thong whips were applied.

I had brought only two women with me—the prettiest, because it had occurred to me I should have to look at them a great deal—but they were petulant and uneasy, frightened of me at such close and prolonged quarters; and their conversation, when it came in little bursts, was the hollow chatter of fools.

Each night a camp was made, a military and architectural undertaking, which helped put days on our journey. First, about late afternoon the foot soldiers would be marched briskly ahead, reach the proposed site, and begin to erect there the movable metal walls carried by their pack horses. By the time the mounted men and carriages arrived, the camp was securely walled by five-foot-high sections of iron with quaint little gates in them, and the tents and pavilions were going up. Sentries were posted, horses were quartered and fed, and fires accurately built and cooked over. For the dark, we were a town, and a rowdy town at that. Despite the efficient iron walls and sentries, drunks roamed the lanes all night hotly pursued by furious superiors, horses broke loose and galloped about, snorting and defecating and knocking into things. The scattering of prostitutes held nightly revels in their gaudy arbors at the camp’s lower end, and at first there was fighting on every side, due to absurd rivalries between one section of soldiers and another. Fierce and individual loyalties existed; whichever captain a man served was better than any other captain, an egoist extension of self that apparently went unrecognized. Each dawn discovered the dead and dying remains of these ridiculous fracas, until Vazkor put a stop to it by threat of execution in the cold and sober morning for all who drew sword on a brother soldier. There were three of these executions, however, before the new law penetrated to their brains.

Vazkor’s pavilion was the centerpiece of the camp. Mine stood a lane or so away, under the protection of my own guard. There had been no fighting among Mazlek’s men, I had noticed, neither did any of the regular troops come to challenge them.

In the icy-red daybreaks of winter the camp would fold itself up and prepare for departure. The Ezlanns, for whom all natural functions had assumed such colossal taboos, were cleverly secretive in all that was necessary. The levied steaders, as if in studied insult, ate and drank and performed all other bodily duties quite in the open. They were regarded as animals, and so behaved as animals, and curiously, in so doing, had achieved something of an animal’s dignity. No longer was there disgust and pity in me for men tied to such necessities; it was the secretive and denying Ezlanns I pitied now.

The greater part of the journey, as I have said, was deathly to me. I had brought books with me from Asren’s library, but the jolting of the carriage and the dim light made reading while in motion quite impossible. Only at night could I turn to them, and then I did not read, for the ghost of him was in every page I touched and brought its own peculiar melancholy. The winter scenes from the small carriage window—all blank whiteness, very flat, with snow-haze on the near horizon obscuring sky or possible mountains—gave me dead, pale dreams at night. Nothing seemed to live in the desert, not even snow wolves and bears as on the Ring. The caravan itself made a great noise, but beyond that clamor there seemed nothing, nothing at all.

At the dawn of the tenth day of journeying I called Mazlek into my pavilion.

“Mazlek, find me a horse to ride, and some sort of man’s clothing to fit me, so that I can ride it.”

He looked astonished.

“But, goddess—” He hesitated. Then he said, “it would have to be boy’s clothes—and, does the goddess realize how cold it is?”

Despite his argument, the clothes came, plain black and, though clean, I could see they had been worn before. I donned the leggings, knee-length side-slit tunic, and the boots. Drawing the belt far around on itself, and forced to cut a new notch for the catch, it came to me suddenly, with unexpected pain, how I had put on the bandit boy’s clothes in the ravine, Darak standing behind me. There was a cloak Mazlek had brought, black also, but lined with some animal’s thick gray fur—the fur of several animals, in fact, for I could tell from the markings, and the little joins where each skin met the other. I counted the skins so I should know when I rode through the day if it were twelve or fourteen deaths which kept me warm. I pulled my own gauntlets on my hands, gold stitched. They, and the golden mask, no doubt looked quite incongruous with my new apparel.

Outside a black mare waited. They had picked me a very docile and well-behaved one. They could not know how I had leaped the furious brown horses in the woods with Maggur.

I swung onto the mare’s back lightly, causing enormous surprise. It was curiously emotive to me to feel once more a living creature between my thighs, that phenomenon which seems always to evoke a sexual imagery, and yet, for me at least, spells a kind of elemental freedom. I had known men of Barak’s who had been “one” with their horses, and I understand very well what they meant, though there had been no horse-mate for me. I leaned over the mare’s neck and stroked her, and looking up, saw Vazkor across the semi-dismantled tent lanes which divided us. He turned immediately and spoke to a man who came running instantly to me.

“Goddess,” the man called up to me, “Vazkor Javhovor asks if he may speak with you.”

It amused me very much, this deference he exhibited in public—because he must.

“Certainly,” I said. I turned the horse, and rode leisurely toward him, startled men gawping at me on every side. Even some of the steaders turned their blank faces to look as they sat gnawing their bread.

“Well, Vazkor,” I said, looking down at him for once, a petty thing, but still it was pleasant enough.

“Will the goddess deign to enter my pavilion?” he asked.

“The goddess will deign,” I said.

He put up a hand to help me down, and ignoring it, I dismounted easily and walked into the pavilion first.

I had not seen it before, but it was black and austere as the exterior, with a few burning lamps, a brazier, and ebony desk neatly stacked with maps and various military objects. The flap fell shut, and it was very dark, despite the lamplight.

“Goddess,” he said, “I would strongly advise you to continue this journey as you were—in your carriage.”

“Vazkor,” I said, “I would strongly advise you not to advise me.”

“You must understand,” he said harshly, “that being a goddess entails certain obligations of dignity. Ride in this manner, in that inelegant clothing, and you will destroy your own image.”

“I have ridden many times. I shall not fall off. If you object to my clothing, find someone who can make me riding clothes to which you do not object, providing, of course, you do not expect them to include a skirt.”

He was masked and did not remove the mask. He stood stone-still and said, “This is very stupid of you.

Beyond a certain point your stupidity will outweigh any use you might be to me.”

His voice was emotionless and very quiet. In spite of myself, a little coldness ran through me, and I knew myself still afraid of him. Yet what could he do to me that would not mend or heal? Perhaps it was more a desire in me to fear him than an actual fear which I felt. I shook it all from me.

“Brother,” I said, rising against him that kinship he used against me, “we must not quarrel over such trivia.

I will do as I please, and you will do as you please, and while it serves both of us to help the other, we will do so. You cannot ride into Za without Uastis.”

There was a brief silence. Then he said, “Tonight I will send you a tailor. We will leave it at that.”

It was a defeat for him, yet it frightened me a little.

I went out, remounted, and rode out that day at the head of my guard, Mazlek behind me, leaving the carriage to my women and their fool’s chatter.

From the horse, the white dead world was not so different. Once a flock of birds flew over, calling, going away to the east.

The tailor came by night, and a scared woman, to fit me. I wore fine black wool now, a black slit tunic of velvet, slashed gold. The boots had gold buckles; the cloak was lined with a white bear fur, almost indistinguishable from my hair.

Late on the twelfth day, we passed through a village of the Dark People, huddled around a frozen fall among some rocks. Men were out chipping the ice for water, but, as I recalled, the women, animals, and children were hidden away elsewhere. Vazkor’s soldiers went through the village, and appropriated jars of oil and a store of wood, and also, more surreptitiously, leather skins of beer. Dusk came on, and our camp was built about a hundred yards from the settlement. In the dark, men stole away and raided the steaders for food. Later, I heard screaming, left my pavilion, and saw a great bonfire burning a few lanes away. In the glare of it, one of the village girls was being enthusiastically raped. I did not know how they got hold of her, or why she in particular was so afraid, for I remembered the girls who had danced with the lizard by the Water.

Looking aside at Vazkor’s pavilion, I saw him standing there among his guards, watching a moment, curious as I had been at the noise. He was masked but there was something strange about him. Only for an instant. Bored, he withdrew almost at once. I am not sure why I turned and walked immediately towards the bonfire—anger at him, perhaps, or because it was a woman they were hurting. Certainly I felt nothing for her as a living creature.

“Stop this,” I said when I was near enough.

Men turned and stared, guiltily. One, on top of her still, either had not heard, or was too far gone to care. Her screams had stopped. I leaned over the bucking rapist, got his shoulder, and hauled him off her. As he came up, helpless in my grip, the semen was already spurting from him. I struck him across his unmasked face several times. He came out of the paroxysm staggering, glassy-eyed, bemused and furious. There was nothing special to his face, only ignorance and bestiality and anger. I do not think he knew who I was. Perhaps no one had told him the goddess rode as a man now. He drew his long-knife and aimed at me, panting and ridiculous, the apparatus of his sex flopping lethargically in front of him.

Men yelled at him to come to his senses, and hissed my name as a warning. A drunken string of curses came from his mouth. He lunged at me, but he was a fool. I stepped aside and caught his leg with mine.

He fell heavily. I did not even think to kill him with the Power; there seemed no need. He lay on the ground grunting, and presently was still. I realized finally he had taken his own blade in the guts. The soldiers were cowering. I looked at the girl, but she was dead. I told them to bury her, and returned to my pavilion. It was only an incident of the journey.

On the fourteenth day we reached Za. Her name is a corruption of an ancient word which means dove.

It is her symbol, and I had heard her spoken of as the Dove a few times among the soldiers. Like Ezlann, she was named for her color—the pearl-gray stone from which the rocklands hereabouts are formed and from which she was quarried. She too stood high, not on a cliff but on a man-made stone platform, raised twenty feet from the surrounding area. A beautiful city, full of toys, and birds which had found a refuge here from the desert, and nested on her roofs and steeples and towers.

We entered the gates at evening, and rode for an hour or more through wide roads lined by shouting crowds, and even above this noise the birds of Za, circling and circling overhead, which was their ritual before sleep, made an incredible storm of twittering. The palace of the Javhovor of Za stood in a great circular square, a terraced tower with innumerable turrets, and ornamental work that looked like the decorations added to a cake. Facing the palace, a solitary finger tower, with a mechanized clock to strike out the hours of the day and night. At each striking—an appalling clangor from a brazen gong—ten fantastic figures of gilded iron and enamel in the shapes of maidens, monsters, and warriors progressed around the crown of the tower. It was a masterpiece of unique torture, clanging through my time at Za like a pretty and irritating child which grows worse and worse until tired out, its peak achieved at midnight—the twenty-fourth hour of the day, when the twenty-four pealing hammer blows of triumphant precision roused every soul from sleep or thought like the trumpet of Doom.

2

The High-Lord of Za who welcomed us was a small, plump man. Though the phoenix is the symbol of every Javhovor, it is designed and cast so differently in every city that you can easily tell one mask from another. The art-form of Za was languid, with soft curving lines. The Zarish lord’s hair was long, yellow, and curled. Jewels dripped from his ears, and on his hands were openwork meshes of gold and pearls.

Beautiful dove-masked women in the sheeny gray clothes of Za fluttered in the background. Music played. Formal words of greeting were spoken between lord and lord. There was a little embarrassment because the Javhovor of Za had not known the goddess was already present. He bowed hurriedly, striving not to look askance at my riding clothes, and a silence fell on the room.

Later, in my separate apartments, I heard the toy clock crashing the nineteenth hour.

They were all in the City, the lords of Ammath, Kmiss, So-Ess, and of the mountain place Eshkorek Arnor. The different colors of their soldiery and pavilions stretched down from the palace, through the broad open field at its back: red for Ammath, magenta Kmiss, So-Ess blue pastel, and the dull yellow of Eshkorek. Presumably these were the colors of their city stone, and it seemed incredible to me. I wondered what temperaments would come from a blood-colored place such as Ammath, or the purple wound of Kmiss.

I understood very well that I was to be a goddess again once inside Za. I donned the pleated jade-green silk, and countless ornaments of jet, emerald, and gold. The two women, in black velvet and jewels, came solemnly behind me with two colossal fans made from the stripped feathers of many white birds.

The fan is a symbol to them of Greatness Honored, but seemed absurd when snow lay thick on the ground. Behind the women came Mazlek and his ten undercaptains, also clacking with ornaments and medals.

We entered the Great Hall of Za from its west end, where the huge marble stairway sweeps down a hundred steps into the room. Like staring from a mountain peak at the snake carved pillars, a cypress tree of ebony and gold in the center, its branches touching a ceiling of gold lamps. There had been a fanfare at my entrance, they had cleared a lane for me; now, to a man, they bowed to me—heads dropped, most of the women on their knees. Contemptuously I glanced over them, and noted the ornamental false wings which drooped from many shoulders of both sexes.

I descended, and Vazkor approached and kneeled. I touched his head lightly, and said, “Rise, my husband,” after which he escorted me to a golden chair beneath the cypress tree. Here I sat throughout this first formal evening. There were entertainments—dancing and acrobatics I think—I hardly remember them. The High-Lords came to me and presented themselves. Each was arrogant, well-fed, and oddly in awe of me—except for the lord of Eshkorek. He was little, and bowed over like a man trying to withdraw inside himself; if he had possessed a shell like the tortoise, none of us would have seen him at all, I am certain. More than this, he was terrified of me, and I could tell quite plainly from the politely unmasked face and eyes that it was not my god-head he feared, but my Chosen One, Vazkor. There were some women too, rather lovely—princesses of the Cities, and concubines or wives of the Javhovors.

Toward midnight the affair began to end. Vazkor and I withdrew together. I had already noted his apartments adjoined mine. We parted at my doors, but, a little later, one of my women told me he was waiting in my reception hall. There was, apparently, a communicating door between our anterooms, though I could not see it.

“This is very formal,” I said when I went out to him. He was masked as he usually was now with me, except on occasion in public.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” he said. “I will not keep you long. You did well tonight.”

“There was nothing for me to do.”

“Sometimes the manner in which nothing is done is important. Despite your curious entry into Za, they are very enamored of you. Do you recall the dark-haired woman Kazarl of So-Ess’ wife?”

“Not particularly.”

“Never mind. She’ll be sending to you shortly, begging an audience.” He paused, but I said nothing so he continued. “She wants a child, I believe.”

“Am I supposed to give her one?”

“Indeed yes, Uastis. Though I imagine she does not expect you to do it in the normal fashion. You will promise her a conception.”

“And if she remains barren?” I asked. It seemed a pathetic request, and I was not certain I could help her.

“So-Ess,” he said deliberately, “is a friend.”

“And Eshkorek?”

He looked at me for a moment through the glass wolf eyes.

“Why do you ask?”

“The mountain lord seems to understand what this council is truly about.”

“There is danger in Eshkorek,” he said. “She is very much on her own, and very secure in her mountains.

It’s necessary I have absolute control of her. It would be foolish to ride out against the dragon, leaving a dragon’s egg to hatch at home.” He nodded to me. “I’ll go now.”

About half an hour after he had left, a woman came to me from So-Ess’ wife, and minutes later the princess herself entered. She drew off her mask, and kneeled, a beautiful cold woman, well-suited by her ice-blue dress.

“Rise,” I said. “I know why you have come.”

She flushed slightly.

“Now,” I said, “tell me why the child is necessary.”

“But, goddess, unless I bear, I will be cast off.” She looked at me hollow-eyed. “I have prayed and longed for your coming to Za. You must help me—I am desperate.” Stiff proud woman, she was unused to pleading. I looked at her intently, and seemed to know her suddenly.

“You do not conceive because you do not enjoy your husband,” I said.

“It is true,” she said, and looked away.

“Enjoy him, and I promise you a child.”

She sobbed a little, and I thought of the southern people who dreamed they were the Old Race, yet still judged their women on the ability to bear, and still bred frigidity, because the act of sex to them was still such a tremendous curiosity.

“Come here,” I said. I touched her forehead and looked at her through the open eye-pieces of the cat mask. She flinched once, then relaxed.

“I will give you this ring,” I said. “Wear it whenever your husband comes to you, and you will have both fullfillment and a child.”

I touched her forehead again and put the ring on her finger. She thanked me profusely and left. It had been easy, after all, though I was not certain her belief in me was strong enough, for all her prayers.

I took what sleep I could between the strokes of the clock.

At Za I dreamed of Karrakaz many times, and they were strange dreams, not particularly frightening, but somehow desolate. My life was very empty. Yet I could not seem to break free from it. Where, after all, could I go? Nothing was left that might have belonged to me.

The Council met—So-Ess, Kmiss, Ammath, Za, Eshkorek, and Ezlann. Behind each Javhovor, an array of bodyguards and captains, behind my golden chair at the table head, Mazlek, Dnarl, and Slor. Vazkor had sent me a letter, directing me how and when to speak, and telling me the cues he would give me.

Committing the precise words to memory, I thought of Darak’s only written message to me, the misspelling and erratic formation of the letters. Vazkor’s was an elegant and scholarly hand, which gave away nothing except that it would give away nothing.

At the first meeting there was a lot of talk about the war, the campaigns to come, honor, victory, and the final amalgamation of the three alliances. At each new utterance, they would look to Vazkor. He had them already, and they knew it—his decision, the powerful aura of his iron mind, the sense of mental Power that hung about him, had quelled them utterly. By what he said, and by what he had instructed me to say, they began to edge themselves toward the election of one total overlord. It was an amazing sight.

I felt no pity for them, tangling themselves in Vazkor’s web. Except for Eshkorek, perhaps. He was not in awe—he was terrified, and there is a great difference. At the first meeting he held back, his head bowed.

At the second and third meetings he was noisy in his silence. At the fourth coming-together the lord of So-Ess voiced the opinion that Vazkor, honored of the goddess, is should take possession of the five sisters of Ezlann. I recall I thought myself naive that I had not seen before So-Ess was a friend indeed, and Vazkor’s man into the bargain. I do not know what Vazkor had promised him, or how it had been done—possibly by the Power itself. I glanced around the table, and, like a dog sniffing out rats in the walls, abruptly I knew them all: So-Ess, Kmiss, and Za were his. Ammath was ready to fall. But Eshkorek ... even as I reached him, he rose and stood there, bowed over, a bewildered, angry, frightened tortoise, sticking out its head at a serpent.

“No,” he said, “I do not think so.”

“What, my lord, do you not think?” Vazkor inquired.

“I do not think,” Eshkorek stammered, “I do not think any of our Cities should lose her independence.”

“There is strength in unity,” Vazkor said softly.

Eshkorek shook his head. He turned around to the others desperately. Surely he must know there was no help there?

“I simply say I do not think—”

“Truly, you don’t think,” broke in Kazarl of So-Ess stridently. “Purple Valley might turn on us all in the spring, and howl around our walls all summer. One petty argument between City and City—only one—and there is isolation and collapse. No. Safer to be under one rule. I’m happy to bow to it.”

“The war has never created such a situation before,” Eshkorek said. There was silence. Abruptly, impossibly, he turned to me. “Goddess,” he said, “I appeal to you.”

I was astonished at his stupidity.

“Eshkorek Javhovor,” I said, “I am of one mind with my Chosen Lord.”

An incredible thing happened. I had seen it before, and I have seen it since, but it is always curious.

Eshkorek s fear turned to fury. He made a great lashing movement with both his hands.

“You!” he screeched at me. “Vazkor’s witch-whore! Fine goddess for an ancient line to grovel before.”

The table erupted into righteous horror; soldiers drew their swords. Eshkorek grunted, turned, and walked from the room,

“Vazkor Javhovor,” Ammath cried, deferring already and apparently instinctively to Vazkor, “let me send men after him. The insult to the goddess must not go unavenged.”

“Goddess?” Vazkor turned to me.

I did not know what to say. I was oddly shaken, for I could see the tortoise had judged me very well, despite his stupidity.

“Let him go,” I muttered.

They bowed low to me, and the meeting ended.

A little later in the day, while Eshkorek’s Javhovor was riding in the square, ordering preparations for departure from Za and the journey eastward to his mountains, a tiny piece of tile, dislodged from one of the turrets—by a bird presumably—fell and struck him. It entered the brain and killed instantly. It was a freak accident, yet none were particularly surprised that unseen forces had struck him down after his insult to me. The death had an enlivening effect on the City lords. They began to press for Vazkor’s sovereignty. Murder can be a useful lesson, and Vazkor’s men, of whom there were many, were everywhere.

After Eshkorek’s death, there was strange weather at Za. A three-day storm came from the east and blanketed the world in blackness. Candles and lamps burned in the palace night and day. In this eerie and unnatural light Vazkor was made overlord. There were various ceremonies, but I do not remember them very well, only the flicker of the false gold light on gold, and the greenish-dark sky, and the thunder. I saw less of him privately than ever before, though I saw him more often in public.

The crowds in Za were afraid of the storm. When it cleared they chanted prayers of thanks to me in the square. I do not know why they did not thank their own goddess, whoever she was, but then she had not woken yet.

There were other meetings after this, though he sent me word I need not be present. I was very tired, and glad enough not to go.

Five nights passed. On the sixth Vazkor came through that mysterious door which joined our apartments.

“Goddess,” he said, “everything has been settled for the winter campaign. We shall be riding southward in two days, by which time the bulk of the armies of Kmiss, So-Ess, and Ammath will have joined us here.”

“And Eshkorek?” I asked him.

“We shall meet them on the way to Purple Valley.”

“Who is lord there now?” I asked.

“A man,” he said.

“Yours?”

“Yes. I had been planning for this time, goddess, a long while before your fortunate advent. Your arrival made this day sooner, that is all. It would have come anyway.”

He used a different tone with me, and he had come unmasked. I felt weaker than usual; the tiredness was intense. I had needed sleep a good deal in the past days, as seemed necessary with me from time to time, and the clock had made sure I had not got it

“Well, then,” I said, “we ride in two days.”

“No, goddess. We do not. You will remain at Za.”

I saw then that it had finally come, the moment of my elimination—not to death, but to womanhood and uselessness—and I had not been ready for it. It is true I did not want to ride with him across the bitter white wastes to make war on a name. But I wanted less the role into which he was so gently thrusting me.

“I, too,” I said, “ride southward.”

“Though a goddess,” he said, “you are a woman. I have heard of your brawl with my soldiers over the village slut, but that is not enough to carry you through a battle.”

“I know nothing of you,” I said, “and you, Vazkor, know nothing of me. The world beyond the Ring would not interest you, so I will not tell you what I did there.”

“You lay with a man named Darak,” he said, “who resembled me.”

Of course it was quite logical he could have deduced as much from our first meeting, but it was shocking and painful to have him talk of it in this way, as if he knew all of it. Suddenly I began to tremble, and could not speak to him. I turned from him and walked toward the doors of my bedchamber, then stopped because he had followed me.

“I believe you did as I told you to in the matter of So-Ess’ wife,” he said behind me. “I gather she is both happy and hopeful. I have set you very high, and it is time you carried my seed to remind them you are mated with me.”

I stood in the doorway, petrified. It was not the act I feared, it was the act’s intention and purpose, and this man, so totally passionless in all he did, who was prepared to lie with me as passionlessly. I could not imagine such a thing between us. And yet I could. Suddenly my sense came back to me. There was nothing to be gained by denials. This moment was his, and it would be foolish to struggle against it.

“You are my husband and lord,” I said courteously, “you may lie with me whenever you choose, since I have found you acceptable and pleasing to me.”

We went into the large dove-carved room, and he shut the doors behind us. There was no one else there, the women had long since gone away. A few candles flickered, almost burned out, casting a dim thin light. One of Asren’s jeweled books lay by the bed.

I removed my garments without speed or hesitation, and let them lie where they fell. I began to think of Geret whom I had helped elect leader of the wagon people, Geret who feared me and raped me—though it was little enough to me what he did. Turning to Vazkor, I saw him standing quite still, clothed and silent. I lifted my hands, and pulled the mask from my face. His eyes narrowed, that was all.

There was no longer any power in my ugliness to protect me against him. I let my hands fall. I went, and lay down on the silken bed. After a moment, he came and stood over me.

“You see, Vazkor,” I said, “I am quite submissive.”

Two candles fluttered and went out together, then another, and another. Darkness was settling. He did not bother to remove his clothes, only what was necessary. Geret. Yet Vazkor could not sicken me or make me laugh at him. I could not best him afterward with cold water, and the threat of a fat white god. I had forgotten he must touch me, I had forgotten he would be clever in what he did, I had forgotten his weight on me would feel like Darak in the dark, the hands would be Darak’s hands, even without their scars. Even the moving shaft between my thighs. ... Despite his silence, there was a kind of opening in me I could not help, and yet I hung above it, watching my own responses as if it were a dream. I do not know if he found pleasure in it. He did not seem to. For him it was another achievement, some thing else settled. He was so perfectly controlled, so perfectly indifferent, I did not even know his moment of helplessness until it was past.

His long hair brushed my face as he pulled away and left me, not Darak’s hair at all. The candles were dead. In the dark he said, “Thank you, goddess. I hope I shall return before the birth.”

It was ridiculous, his certainty, yet it chilled me. I said nothing, and soon he went away. I lay cold on the bed until at last the moon shone in on my nakedness and I found my sleeping mask and put it on. The clock began to strike the second hour of morning, and then the third, fourth, and fifth hours. My sleep had not been good in Za the Dove.

3

For two days the armies of Ammath, So-Ess, and Kmiss rumbled and clattered into Za. There was a great deal of noise and confusion, but I heard little of it, nor of the dreadful clock. I had sent for a physician, and, sorting out from among his herbs and drugs things my time with Uasti had taught me to recognize, I made myself a sleeping draft. It seemed absurd I had not thought of it before. For two nights and the day between I slept without waking. I opened my eyes in an oddly silent dawn, and they were gone, Vazkor and his war-force and the wagons of their train.

I rose, bathed and dressed, and called Mazlek to me.

“Is there more of the fighting force to pass through Za?”

“Yes, goddess,” he said, “there are several blocks of troops still to come, and a great deal of foot.

They’ll be marching through the City for many days.”

I told him we were going to join Vaskor, and he seemed surprised but pleased at this prospect of action.

Yet it was a strange business. I waited patiently until the fourth day after Vazkor’s departure. In the afternoon five hundred riders and two hundred foot arrived from Ammath, under the command of a huge blond man, fully armed for the march, as his men were not. They quartered themselves under the walls in the palace field, or found billets in the city, and it was a noisy night. At dark, lit by the torches of my escort, I crossed the short grass among the tent lanes, and arrived at the vast scarlet pavilion. Under a black cloak I wore the full regalia of the goddess. The sentries knew me at once, and within minutes I had entered and was facing the nervous, startled commander. He had been drinking not long since, and was at great pains to conceal the fact. He gave me a tall chair and paced about the table, not knowing what to do with me.

“Commander,” I said at last, when his jerky courtesies had petered out, “I have been expecting your answer all day.”

“My-my answer!” he exclaimed, stopping still.

“To fit my men for the march.”

His unmasked eyes were round and stupified.

“I can see, commander,” I said, “the messengers did not reach you. I am to ride with my husband the overlord on this campaign. The honor of arming me has been left to Ammath.”

His face red with shock, he began to apologize and assure me of immediate concurrence with the wishes of the overlord.

It entailed a delay of two days for Ammath, but nevertheless Mazlek and his eighty were superbly fitted from among the march-wagons, both for themselves and their horses. The commander nervously inquired what I would choose for my self, but the armor was no use to me at all. They do not, as a rule, make it for women, and so it cannot be fitted second hand; in addition to which, every piece was far too large and bulky, and would probably have fallen off the instant my horse achieved a gallop. I chose only knives, therefore, and a long bright sword without a device. When he began to protest that I must be fitted separately—further delay of many days, and, in addition, iron breastpieces which would chafe me raw—I told him I needed only to attack, not to defend. He cleared his throat and nodded, assuming me, I suppose, clothed in my god-head and invulnerable. Yet every hurt I would suffer from, even if I could not die. It simply did not seem important. I do not think I had even visualized battle as such, I was thinking only of how Vazkor had determined to shut me away in Za, and that I would not be shut.

During this time, a cohort of So-Ess rode in and out of Za, and soldiery from Za itself went clattering under the vaulted archway, southward. The last night, as I sat late in my apartments, preparing a formal letter to my host, the yellow-crested Javhovor, one of my women ran in to me and informed me he had come in person.

He entered and bowed deeply, and fidgeted with his mask. I asked him what he wanted.

“Goddess, pardon me, but I understood you were to remain here, in Za.”

“How did you understand such a thing?”

“Lord Vazkor...” He hesitated. “The overlord entrusted your well-being to my care. He—explained matters. Your delicate condition...”

I looked at him stonily, and he flushed.

“Delicate?” I asked him. “Why?”

The—pregnancy,” he got out in a throaty whisper.

It was at once laughable and macabre.

“The Lord Vazkor is, I am afraid, quite mistaken,” I said. “Therefore you have no need to dissuade me from going, and indeed, I should strongly advise you not to do so. You will dismiss your guards from my doors at once. Any further attempts to restrain my person will be dealt with by my own guard. You will remember who I am and the Powers I possess. Did you wish me to demonstrate?”

He whitened and drew back, trying to find adequate words.

“I understand your dilemma,” I said kindly. “You are torn between your desire to obey Vazkor, and your desire not to anger me. However, it is really quite easy. I am here, and Vazkor is not. Now go, and do not trouble me with any of this again.”

He bowed, and withdrew shakily, and I never saw the guard I had guessed he brought with him, poor confused fool.

We rode out at daybreak into hard bright sunlight.

The road sloped down from the platform of the city, out into the white empty desert, yet it seemed very beautiful that day, sparkling like diamond under the clear pale sky. Far away to the east, I could make out now the faintest ghosts of those mountains which led to and enclosed Eshkorek Arnor. There a man had sat, waiting on the Council at Za for the death of a tortoise, and Vaskor’s word, “Now you are Javhovor.”

We made good time, for the wagons were few and did not slow us overmuch. At night the metal walls went up, the fires flared. Mazlek would come to me and teach me a little of war, but not too much; tired from the riding, I found sleep easy and pleasant. I was treated with great respect and courtesy. Ammath’s commander clearly thought he was pleasing everyone. No doubt he was actually looking forward to the time when he might deliver me safe, honored and duly armed to my delighted husband.

I gathered Vazkor had set the meeting place for all his forces at a spot they called Lion’s Mouth. Near this place, where great rock hills thrust up to make a stockade around Purple Valley, was a narrow pass leading downward. In winter such passes were blocked by snow, and there was some speculation and discontent as to how Vazkor planned to make a way through, or how long the wait would be until the spring thaw did the work for him. In any case there was grumbling. A winter campaign across the War March was a rare and uncomfortable thing.

As we rode nearer to the hills, we passed into a strange new landscape—frozen water courses, thin sprinkling of woodland, the trees stripped, the branches broken by snow. There were a few villages here, and the usual soldierly thefts took place, but there was no rape this time, perhaps only because they kept their women better hidden. Here also we began to catch up with and pass the long grinding processions of great wheeled cannon, siege-towers and other machines of war, dragged along by chains of mules or dead-eyed dark men. They left great black rut-trails over the white ground. Overseers prowled along the straining lines, long whips flicking up and down like the writhing tongues of serpents. On the tenth day two mules dropped dead at once as we passed, their hearts burst by the great metal ram they were hauling. The men with the whips cursed and shouted angrily, but it caused a great deal of laughter among the Ammath soldiers. I turned my head away from the twin shapes lying like a pattern on the snow. I do not know why it distressed me so much to see an animal die when human death did not move me.

Perhaps because they were more beautiful, and there is no corruption in them, while in the best of men there can always be found some guilt or wickedness which seems to have earned him death.

The rocky hills grew and hardened into purple darkness ahead of us. The broken woodland clustered and withdrew. Birds embroidered the sky from time to time, and dawn brought a scattering of white wolves with it, nosing about the camp walls, and howling their flesh-lust.

“There are animals in the hills, then?” I asked Mazlek.

“A few, goddess.”

“More now,” I said, nodding around me at the soldiers and horses. He grinned.

Having sighted the hills, it took us two days to reach them, three to scale the first slopes, for they go up and down, and there is no road or short way around. On the morning of the fourth day of climbing the Ammath commander rode back to me politely.

“Up there, goddess”—he pointed—“the Lion’s Head. Top it, and we’ll reach the Mouth—probably before sunset”

I looked where he indicated, and saw a great formless chunk of black and snowed-white rock. It did not to me look even remotely like a lion, though I suppose in days long past it must have, presumably.

“There are the jowls,” he was proudly telling me, “and the eye, and that stratification forms the mane.”

“Ah, yes,” I said.

Topping the head, a horse fell and broke a foreleg and they killed it. The shadows lengthened, the sky was low-slung and empty of sunset color. A sense of coldness and melancholy seeped into me. I had begun to fear my meeting with Vazkor after all.

There was a twisting track now, looming rock walls on either side, then an opening, and below a great snow-bound dip, terraced and falling away at its far end to a piled-up chaos of giant boulders. Beyond them there seemed to be a drop, where the heads of other rocks stood out faintly in the thickening color of dusk. In the dip itself a vast camp stretched out, milling like a hive. Already the red points of torches.

Smoke from fires drifted up. There must be thousands grouped here, apart from the wagons, machinery, and picketed animals. Away to the east of the dip natural arches opened into further levels where other parts of the armies and their lights were moving back and forth.

I was at the front now, behind the men of Ammath, flanked by Mazlek on my left, the scarlet commander on my right. We picked a way down the rocks. I could not help but remember the ravine camp, and a dismal panic was growing on me helplessly.

Sentries challenged us. We rode between the tent lanes now, smoke, firelight, men moving out of our way. Soon I should see the black pavilion.

A man standing by the commander’s horse was saying something. ...

“No, sir. The overlord has moved ahead to the lower camp—two days away now, sir.”

Slowly the words penetrated my brain. Vazkor was gone.

Now the man was bowing to me. My pavilion should be got up at once, and all things arranged for my comfort. They were very surprised to see me, but it was an honor, an encouragement to them all to have my holy person in their midst.

It was true, my arrival seemed to have had a peculiar effect on the great camp. They appeared genuinely excited and glad of my presence. And it was the men of Kmiss, Za, So-Ess, and Ammath whose pleasure seemed doubled. I was still special for them, because I was not theirs. They cheered me as I rode now, and a sort of warmth ran through me—relief that Vazkor was elsewhere—and a sense of my own Power so abruptly evident to me in this unexpected place called Lion’s Mouth.

4

I was very grateful that Vazkor had not been there. He had apparently ridden ahead with some two hundred men of Ezlann and So-Ess, to a lower area near to the pass, where a perfect view presented itself of the valley terrain. There he made a new camp, plotting the moves of the game, while the last stragglers arrived at the Lion’s Mouth above. The command of the Mouth had gone to Kazarl, Javhovor of So-Ess—a logical move, since only he, of all Vazkor’s fellow Javhovors in White Desert, had come in person with his armies. The troops of Kmiss, Za, Ammath, and Eshkorek had come under the lords’

younger brothers, elder sons, cousins, or nephews. Age, easy-living, and general disinclination had caused this absence of the first three; besides, I could see Vazkor would rather have the youthful and the willing on such a venture. No doubt he had taken measures to see no plots hatched among the figureheads left at home. As to Eshkorek’s new master, he was too fresh in his seat to run out of it so quickly. Probably he had remained at Vazkor’s express order.

My first full day at the Mouth was taken up with two enormous small things. First the business of getting from them the winelike drink on which I now so comfortably lived. I had brought enough of it for my journey here, but all wells run dry at last. With Vazkor there had been no problem, for he had seen to it.

Alone, I must break down their barriers of embarrassment, describe it, and then witness its furtive and deferential arrival at my tent. I had not lost their admiration, nevertheless, for none of them could live on such a flimsy thing. My second trouble I considered a foolish one, yet it nagged at me. My bleeding had long since assumed a predictable rhythm, presenting itself to me after every unit of twenty days, and no longer distressing me in any way, being light and painless, and lasting only forty-eight hours or less. Now, twenty-five days had passed and the expected guest was absent. I reasoned with myself that very likely the journey here had upset things, but I was not consoled. A stupid, icy little certainty was growing in my brain, though I had not yet voiced it, even in my thoughts.

The second day at Lion’s Mouth, I turned my mind to other matters. Soldiers had been marching in, in regular bursts, and the huge camp had grown even more crowded and sprawling. I sent Dnarl with two others to bear my greetings to the various High Commanders, Kazarl among them, and ask them to attend me at the twentieth hour in my pavilion. I knew they would respectfully come, and also that they would be very unsure of what should be said to a female deity roosting in the center of a war-camp. But they found it was easy for them. Throughout the two hours of their company, I spoke only a few words, and these were really promptings. I gave them free and full rein to talk about the war—its history, and its future campaigns. They had no notion Vazkor did not want me here. They thought it would please him that they had attempted to inform me of all they knew, and when they discovered that I could apparently follow what they said, and seemed both interested and involved with their prowess, they came, I could see, to a new opinion of me. I was, they would assess it, a woman, but with a man’s mind; it shone out of their faces, this high tribute of the human male. They left me in good spirits, impressed with their goddess, having taught her a little of what to expect in the war, and a good deal about their own characters.

In the morning I rose early, and walked about the tent lanes, Mazlek, Dnarl, and Slor behind me. There were more starings than obeisances, yet the soldiers I stopped and spoke to seemed both awed and pleased to have been singled out by the Risen One. Tomorrow would see this camp on the move to join Vazkor at the lower site, and already preparations for departure were in progress. Kazarl appeared and took me on a tour of the war machines, and an inspection of the drilling of swordsmen and horses. In the archers’ quarter men were restringing their bows, a few on horseback aiming practice shots at a swaying man of straw and sacking, others, on foot, at random targets hung upon poles.

I remarked to Kazarl that I had omitted to choose a bow for myself, and that I would now do so. He seemed amazed at each new thing I showed myself capable of, and this was no exception. He called a man, however, and we went among the stores, and after a while, I chose what seemed to handle best. It had no intimate feel to it, like those I had used with Darak—which had been made for me—but I hoped a union might come between us in time. I took it outside with some shafts, and made short work of the colored eyes of the targets. There was a murmur of interest around me from the archers, and I knew word would spread.

There were other things I did, perhaps foolish things, for I was not sure I would be successful at them, but then, I had very little time. I fought a practice bout of swords and knives with a thin and devious fighter among the officers’ pavilions. I think at first he held off in alarm at the situation, but after a while my skill convinced him he had better do something about me. We were judged on points and ended as equals. I think I could have beaten him, though I will not swear to it, but I did not want any jealousy or anger from what I did. In an open place there were horse herds from the mountain valleys of Eshkorek Arnor, still wild, that men were breaking bit by bit for battle work. I had not liked this business since I watched Darak ride Sarroka in the tribal krarl and I had learned that to conquer a horse means to snap its spirit also. Yet I singled out a white stallion—the pride of the herd, ungelded, untamed, and furious at this whole world.

“That one,” I said.

Kazarl began to protest, but I politely told him to be quiet. They got the white one into a separate pen by the use of goads and curses, and I jumped in after it. I see now it was indeed a foolish thing to do, but at the time the deed had its own perverse logic.

The white one turned and eyed me with the two blazing red wheels which passed for eyes, and clawed up the soil with alternate forefeet. I had told them not to hold him for me, and I hardly think in any case that they could. He swore at me, and stood back on his hind limbs in that impossible gesture of horses, and while he balanced there on the knife edge of his anger, I ran to him, and aside at the last instant before he could swing to me, and, as he dropped, I got his mane, and my foot on his icy side, and was up. He gave a leap, all four feet in the air, that seemed to shake every bone loose in my spine. I clung to his neck and hair, but my arms would not reach far enough around his huge neck to restrict the windpipe, in that old but necessary trick of breakers. The camp, the rocks, the sky broke up in small fragments, and began to whirl about our heads. It was a ghastly ride, and I thought more than once that now I had ruined my plans and would be tossed off, and probably eaten, for these wild herds from Eshkorek had a reputation for devouring men. Even so, I cannot deny there was a sort of panicky,pleasure in it—it was a real thing in the midst of experiences and troubles that seemed quite unreal.

The end came very suddenly. No slowing down, just an abrupt finish to all movement. I do not know how long the ordeal lasted, but quite a while I think. There were crowds of men around the pen, staring, cheering. Kazarl was masked and unreadable, yet he held up an arm in salute.

The horse stood under me, not shivering or seeming at a loss, only very quiet. I thought at first the frenzy might start up again, but after a while I ventured to get down. I went to the great head and stared at the one smoldering eye I could see. The horse leaned and butted my shoulder. I reached up and smoothed the pale neck, slightly mottled this close with a half-invisible lovely network of bluish freckles that made it seem cast from marble.

“Mine,” I said.

I had made a point, but he caused some trouble, that white devil, for he would be quiet with me—and a groom or two, once he had been properly introduced—but with all others he was still man-eater and demon. Perhaps that is the best way, to restrict a horse only to one hand. At least I had not destroyed him, or his mad horse soul.

So we rode to Vazkor in the morning, a short journey of a day, and I went at the head of them on the white horse. It had not been difficult. I had told Kazarl I would lead the armies of White Desert to their overlord, and he had bowed and capitulated at once. Of the men who followed after me, I did not think many were aggrieved. I was a goddess, after all, and a warrior-goddess at that. Altogether, it was really a very small thing—lord for a day, in fact. But it meant a good deal by its implications. I was no longer fearful to meet Vazkor.

When the sun lay on the edge of the rock hills, we wound down the old track—made in the long past by travelers, perhaps—and arrived at the vast level plateau with its scattering of tents and horse pens. It was an enormous open place, and beyond, the rocks yawned in many narrow defiles, which looked as though they must pass straight through to the valley in summer but were closed now with the snow. At one point a break in the rock showed empty space below, obscured at present by white evening mist.

The armies of the south snaked downward after me and spread themselves across the plateau.

Torchlight leaped red behind me in the soldiers’ hands.

From the black pavilion a man came, wearing a wolf mask with scarlet eyes.

“Overlord,” I called. I saluted him. “I have brought your fighting force to you, as you commanded.”

He stood still a moment, then walked toward me. He stood by the horse, looking up.

“You are very welcome,” he said formally.

He extended a hand to help me down, and I used it because of the many eyes on us.

I lifted one arm, and Kazarl followed the direction, dismounted, and discharged the rest of the great column to its separate captains. Figures on horses wheeled away. It was very noisy as the many tents began to go up, and the men quartered themselves.

Vazkor nodded to me. “My pavilion.”

“No need,” I said. “My own is already going up—over there, do you see?”

A groom had come for my horse, and he was stamping and tossing his head. I turned to quiet him, and found Mazlek and ten others of my guard behind me, very stiff and still, turned to face Vazkor. It was a beautiful gesture, uniquely theatrical and yet, so effective.

Vazkor nodded again, and walked away. I went to the white horse and smoothed him into quietness.

I could not be still that night. I was elated at what I had achieved, too much so, probably. I sat in my pavilion, in the red glow of many braziers and lamps, twitching like an animal in sleep at my waking dreams of purpose and independence.

And then Kazarl Javhovor came to the flap, entered, bowed, and looked at me palely.

“I trust the goddess is well,” he said.

“Should she not be?”

“I have come to beg your pardon,” he said.

“Why?”

“You must understand,” he said nervously, “I was not aware of the goddess’ condition, at Lion’s Mouth.”

“My condition,” I said, and my thoughts congealed to flint.

“Indeed, yes—I did not know. The Lord Vazkor has informed us all, and he is angry. I hope and pray your health has not been endangered—”

He broke off and took a step backward. For a moment I could not understand why, and then I realized I had risen, and I felt the fury and the frustration singing around me, electric and terrifying, an aura he could sense, perhaps even see. I looked away from him, and a piece of crystal on one of the side tables cracked open. I clenched my fists and tried to push the fury back into myself.

“Vazkor,” I hissed, “is mistaken. You may tell your army so. Now, get out.”

He turned at once and stumbled outside.

I stood in the center of the pavilion, my anger turned inward like a blazing, raging sea, stopped in a jar. I passed my hands over my belly, and I spoke to anything which might be in my womb.

“No, not of him. Out, out of me. Not of him.”

A sharp pain speared upward through my groin into my guts. It frightened and sobered me, and soon I grew very calm and cold. A thought stirred.

“No,” I said to it, and I smiled, a small tight smile, a joke between my brain and my body, with the intruder shut out, “I will not believe in you. I am very strong. If I do not give you credence, you cannot be.”

And I slammed an iron door shut on the thought, and turned my back.

5

For three days gangs of men worked ahead through the rock pass, clearing the snow as best they could.

On the fourth day the great armies of the south packed up their gear and followed. I had already had a glimpse of what we were going to through the gap which overlooked the valley. A long basin of whiteness, far away a frozen lake, areas of evergreen trees, top-heavy with foliage, standing up like black birds on one leg. On the farthest horizon the unmistakable shape of a city, sloped walls, the defensive elevation of a platform, natural or otherwise, ringed apparently by woods.

The night of the third day, Vazkor and his captains sat in the black pavilion, and discussed the hill-crossing, and the march toward those walls. Orash she was called, this first fish of the catch. I, too, sat through this assembly. No one denied me my place. Vazkor did not speak to me at all, and neither did I speak to them, only listened. There seemed little plan, all in all, only the aggression of persistence, determination, and greed.

Though it was easier than they had anticipated, the riding was not good through the rocks. Snow falls came crashing down from the high places, dislodged by the reverberations of thousands of marching feet, hooves, rolling wagon wheels. It was a crossing of three days, and ten men died on the first. At night, camp fires made blood splotches on the ice walls above. On the third day the head of the army emerged on the rock shelves below, and the rest floundered after. Part of an old roadway guided us down the last steep miles to the valley floor. There are many roads in the valley. They seemed to come from nowhere and vanish again into the ground after a mile or so, like the trails of huge primeval slugs.

There was a strange feel to that part of the valley. A silence. The desert had been silent too, but not in the same way. There had been a dry wind there, occasional birds. It was easy to imagine a little life might exist, in hiding now from the snow. But the valley seemed to have no wind—the hills seemed to seal it off like a bowl, and the low white sky was the lid. In the valley even the trees were unreal, the straight hard trunks, the persistent foliage which was not green but black. Men chopped them down for wood stores, and the grinding scream of each as it fell pierced my ears and struck through to my belly. And ahead the wood-garlanded City of Orash. Orash which seemed asleep, or vacated too. As we rode across the floor toward it, a curious conviction began to grow on me that it was quite empty, or else that everyone in it was dead. It was Uasti, I recalled, among the wagons, who told me the legend of the Lost—how the disease came, and they died where they stood or lay, finally with none left to bury them. A dream began to come at night. On the white horse I rode with the great army, not far back, with Mazlek’s men, as I did by day, but at the very head, alone. The gates yawned open, and, beyond, the white streets lay straight as a rule, stretching to a distant burning point. In the dreams there was never any sound, not even the rumble of the host behind me. The ride went on and on, and a terror grew with it, a terror apparently without reason, yet cold and clinging and unshakable. There was no climax to the dream, no sudden horror revealed, only the ride, the emptiness, and the fear.

We made camp by the oval frozen lake on the fifth day of the valley march. Iced reeds stood up, sharp as knives, by the rim. A mauve sunset came and went, and the shape which was the City vanished into the dark. It was then something occurred to me I had not consciously noted before: there were no lights in Orash. For miles back we should have been able to spot the haze of them, however faint, over the sloping walls by night. Now, a day’s march away, I could make out the pattern of her towers and ramparts, but the window sockets were blank and black.

I had been walking around the iron walls of the camp with Mazlek. Now I turned to him and told him.

“Yes,” he said, “I thought so too. It is very strange.”

My skin began to prickle nervously. I stared across the valley plain at the thick patches of trees that girded the City, and then spilled toward us, thinning as they came. At intervals along our metal stockade sentries of Ezlann, So-Ess, Ammath, stood stiffly, facing outward, spears grasped in their hands.

“The camp is well-guarded, goddess,” Mazlek said.

I nodded.

It seemed a small thing, the darkness of Orash. Perhaps they hibernated like animals through the winter.

White Desert knew little enough of their manners.

Asleep, the dream did not come. Instead, there were the cries of wolves screeching through the night, a pack of them, circling and circling the camp. I turned from side to side, restless, yet not properly awake.

I had not heard wolves before in the valley, could not understand the noise of them, closer and closer. A horrible conviction took hold of me that they were over the stockade. I struggled with myself and woke abruptly. There were no wolf cries, only the silence pressing down like a cold hand.

And then. There was a tremendous crash, a cacophony of horses screaming, and the impossible thunder of their hooves. Beyond the cloth of my pavilion walls a fierce orange light opened itself, seeming to flare and flap great wings. I might have reasoned it was some accident—oil spilled on a fire, a drunken man in among the horses—but an electric silver cord ran up my spine into my brain, and I knew. I slept mostly clothed for the march, so now it was simply a matter of snatching up the iron sword, the long-knife, thrusting the daggers into my belt.

“Dnarl!” I called, for he had been outside my tent tonight But no one answered. I opened the flap and went out, and was instantly knocked sideways by ten mules running mad. The pavilion went next. The scene was starkly lit by the blazing hulk of three wagons on fire and several tents a few lanes away. Through the fire there plunged the bellowing wild horses, terrified and furious, and the yelling figures of men. Above the noise of snapping wood, shouts, and panic, I heard various captains roaring for order. Lying on my back, struggling in company with the mules to get free of my pavilion, I could have laughed at it. Away to my right there was a colossal booming thud of sound.

Gold fire this time, a folding plume of smoke, and streamers of sparks as oil exploded among the wood stores. Almost free, I saw a dark shape running toward me, and thought at first it must be Dnarl.

“This line around my ankle,” I indicated helpfully, but it was not Dnarl, it was a man in white clothes smeared over with dirt, his face masked like a nightmare in hell. He fell toward me, his hand alive with a curving blade, and I rolled sideways, ripping free of the tent, scrambled to my knees, and caught him in the chest as he tried to rise and finish me. I got up and stumbled over another dead man. This time it was Dnarl.

Two more thuds as oil wagons exploded. The sky was alight with blazing splinters and sparks. A tent caught near to me, and went up like burning pastry. I ran down between the pavilions, no longer bewildered or amused. I was angry with an old and well-remembered anger. Two of the white, demon-masked men of Orash spun to me from their work my sword and long-knife swung out as one, and caught them both before they could make a sound. Hands grabbed my hair, but I jerked backward with my heel at him and the hands let go. A blade lashed out and sliced across my back, so cleanly I scarcely felt it for a second. I turned and found five or six of them waiting for me, backed by the incendiary darkness. In the light their white was a murky magenta now, the iron masks dripped the flames like blood. They wore the faces of no beast I had ever seen or heard of, maned and horned, with long cruel teeth jutting from them.

I leaped forward, and the blades rang on theirs. Metal skidded, a man cursed. White pain darted across my ribs, and then I was thrust forward, down, smashed against the white red-black earth by the man on my back. There was no true battle frenzy on me. For a moment I panicked, slithering and jerking to avoid the certain knife thrust.

And then I heard him say, in the City tongue, with a little laugh: “A woman.”

The pressure eased and I was pushed onto my back, to lie looking up at the hideous mask.

“No time,” one of the others said. “Kill her, and come on.”

But he was anxious, this man of Orash, to enjoy his discovery. Still holding both my hands flat on the ground, he leaned over me, and a little thin shell broke in my mind, and a lazy trickle of hate dripped into the bowls of my eyes. Before, it had been agony, but now it was fiercely sweet. A pale light flickered between us. He gave a squeal and rolled from me. I got up quickly and turned, and saw them staring at him. One lifted a knife to throw it. The sweet pain pierced my eyes and he arced over and fell on his side.

I ran among the others and killed them with my sword, not noticing what they did.

There was a great deal of noise after that, the red light and stink of burning things. It seemed the scarlet volcano had burst once more, this time across the southern landscape of snow, and silence. Gradually the light grew dull, almost tame.

Through the groaning shadows, I made out the cry: “Goddess! Goddess!”

I leaned on the crimson sword and waited, not really knowing yet who would come.

It was Mazlek, masked but known, and various other soldiers—my guard, men of Ezlann and So-Ess.

They stood still when they found me.

“Are you hurt?” Mazlek asked.

“Not much.”

I suppose I was covered in blood. I heard later many had seen me killing the Orashians among the tents.

“Things are better now,” Mazlek said, “most of the fires out, all the attackers dead.”

They had come at midnight, apparently, to the eastern section, killed the sentries at the wall, slunk in and set some horses loose, and managed to fire a wagon or two before the camp woke in confusion. Surprise is a great ally, but there had been too few of them. They had not done as much damage as it had seemed.

The most revealing point was that Orash, too, had now presumably discarded the “etiquette” of war, to fight with raw hands and anger.

In my pavilion, after I had cleaned the mess from me, I asked them where Vazkor had been and what he had done in the fighting. I did not know why I asked. I knew, whether I wished him safe or otherwise, he could not come to any harm. He had sent no word to me, but then, I had not expected that he would.

So the vast army of White Desert marched against Orash, City of Purple Valley, and I thought there might be a good deal of fighting after that skirmish by the lake. But there was not much fighting at all.

Whatever spirit has possessed them to come at us with swords seemed to have died with those other deaths among the smoldering tents.

We reached her at noon, and returned fire for fire. Ten villages massed among the trees, guardians of the City fields. These, together with all crops, orchards, stores of timber, oil, and cloth were ignited and totally destroyed, except, of course, for necessities taken by the army for itself. The villagers, I think, were mostly killed, though I saw some about the camp in after days, acting as unpaid servants or whores.

After the smoke cleared, leaving a reeking black deposit on everything, the army arranged itself around the platform slope and on the causeways which led to Orash from south and north. Despite the soot, she was a white City, in design a sister to any of the desert. No sound or signal came from her. Dusk fell, and not a light was lit.

“Conserving fuel, most probably,” Mazlek said. “She guessed it might be a long wait.”

This was logical, and yet the darkness of her was unnerving. Around the walls the camp fires blazed, the lamps moved; above, the moon made an icy appearance, and between the two the white City stood lifeless, and blind.

Morning, after a night uneasy with many marching sentries. No chances taken this time.

From first light, every hour, the war trumpets of Vazkor’s force pealed their challenge, reminding me a little of the clock at Za. From Orash came no answer. Curious, it is in our natures to be so afraid, so suspicious of something silent. There seemed to be a trap in Orash that stopped the great rams from rolling at her gates, the laddered towers from leaning at her walls.

Evening came creeping to the eastern line of hills.

“How are things being decided?” I asked Mazlek.

“Vazkor has three men from the Orash villages with him.”

“He is asking them about the City?” I was a little amazed. “Do they know anything?”

“It seems he thinks so, but they will not tell. You can hear the screams from time to time.”

I felt nothing for the Shlevakin of the villages, nor did Mazlek, yet we both expressed an unspoken, mutual disgust at Vazkor’s pointless cruelty—because both of us hated Vazkor, for different reasons.

“I have thought about Orash,” Mazlek said. “I think she is empty.”

“Yes,” I said, “I think so.”

No moon that night, and, in the blackness, the word ran that the time of our attack should be now. As they should not have expected us in the snow months, so they should not expect us to hammer their walls in the dark.

It was well-conducted, that muffled preparation, horses held still, men silent, the machines oiled and smooth on their wheels. The first true sound was the great beaked ram going headfirst at the north gate.

After that thunder there was the briefest pause, the half-unconscious waiting for a response from the City.

Yet there was no response, no warning bell, no shout, no hail of missiles, pouring of fire. After the pause, the sounds of anger came again, and there was no cessation.

I sat some way back from the offensive, on the great white horse I had won myself in the Mouth. He was restless and disturbed by the armor he had had put on him. Until this he had gone very lightly trapped, only a saddle pad and rein. Now he carried, like his fellow battle steeds, the large iron breast-guard, the belly-guard, and over his back the stiffened leather drape with its built-in saddle. On his head the crown piece to protect eyes, cheeks, and skull, with the short sharp unicorn spike protruding from the forehead. Most of the war horses were trained to kick and bite, and stab at their rider’s enemy with this metal horn, but the white had not been so taught, and had no use at all for the encumbrance. He glared at the other steeds, and snorted to tell them what fools they were to brook man’s impertinence.

The gate burst suddenly with a terrible sound. In the torch smoke-light men swarmed through the opening. Company by company the army cavalry galloped up the causeway, into the shattered maw of Orash. I kneed the white horse, raised my hand to Mazlek and his, and rode fast after them.

Through that gate, then, as in my dream, though not at the head, and not in silence.

All around, leaning up skyward from the broad gate-street, the towers and roofs and terraces. I was not uneasy now that the moment had come, it was too noisy, and there was too much light.

Perhaps an hour passed, and things were louder and brighter then. Orash was full of soldiers, run in from her front and back gates. Many had broken off from the main stem to loot and set on fire the occasional deserted house and mansion—for there seemed no one here at all. There was a rabid cheerfulness about the arson, the big warm fires of burning homes coloring the world like a festival. And then we reached the square, our riding column, Vazkor at its head now. A large open place, and at the crest of many steps the huge pile of a building, its ice-white pillars seeming to dance in the flame reflections. On the steps stood a woman, tall, white robed, her head encased in a devil mask like those we had met before. It was shocking to see her there, suddenly, this one life—unreal in the empty city.

She screamed at us, and the column halted. From her voice I could tell she was very old, a little mad, but not afraid. Across the curve of the riders I saw Vazkor, dark and tall on the black horse, looking at her under the black iron helm with its drifting plume.

“You,” she said, “War-Death. This is the Temple of the City. They have fled before you to Belhannor, but I have not fled, and the goddess is behind me. You have breached the etiquette of the old war, jackal of the desert. Go back now, or die.”

So, they had evacuated—an answer, and sensible. Vazkor’s campaign was a new and dangerous thing, a sweeping and a devouring. But this one remained. She raised her hands, and fire opened in the air before her, then went out.

“Look,” she shrilled at Vazkor. “I have Power. I will destroy you. Go back, or die.”

Vazkor made a little movement with his own hand, I did not see at first, but then a string spoke and a shaft had pierced the priestess-witch under her left breast. She staggered, and fell over on the steps, but was not quite dead. She pointed at Vazkor and rasped out a mumbled chain of words I could not catch—some curse or other—then laid her head over on her arm and lay still, like an ancient crumpled bird on the staircase.

The steps were very wide, and Vazkor spurred the horse and rode up them, over her arrow-pierced body, and the column followed, stray groups of the foot running up beside us. The Temple would have many rich things in it, and presumably they did not fear the wrath of this goddess since they had the woken goddess with them.

Between the pillars it was black. In the dark narrow hall there came a sudden furious screaming, a thrust of bodies, blood. I drew my sword and hacked a devil-masked warrior from my side. They were here then, not many, but a few still fierce to guard the shrine. I lunged and stabbed in the half light, and the white horse, having never been trained to do it, kicked, and slashed with his lethal brow. Soon it was over, and there were dead men scattered on the floor among fallen dying torches.

I slipped from the horse and stood for a moment in the confusion’s aftermath. The fight was done, yet, in this moment, the terror had come to me at last. I cannot explain the frightful sense I had. I must go on. I bent and picked up the nearest torch, and threaded among the soldiers, the dead, the frightened horses.

There was a doorway, and inside the windowless place, a soft light from the stone bowl on its stand.

Beyond, almost in shadow, the great marble figure of the goddess of Orash. I raised the torch and saw her white body, with its draped white skirt, the fall of silver hair, and finally, the face. But she was the first I had seen in the south who did not wear a mask. This was not the cat-headed Uastis. This one wore her own god-head. A sound came out of my throat, a little retching grunt. The torch dropped out of my hand, but the flare in the bowl was leaping now, and I could not look away.

Above the white body of the woman was the white face of the Cursed One—the face of all horror and ugliness and despair, the mark of hate. And I had thought I had not seen before a beast which resembled the devil masks of Orash, the thing on which those masks had been modeled; yet I had seen this thing, could see it at any moment of my life I wished—it was the face Karrakaz had shown me under the Mountain. My own face.

A step behind me. I could not turn as I kneeled in the shrine. For a while there was no further movement, then a hand came coldly and precisely onto my shoulder.

“The goddess worshiping the goddess. How apt.”

“Vazkor,” I said, and even his name, in this place, and at this moment, seemed some sort of amulet.

He lifted me and put me on my feet, but I could not stand upright. The shame and revulsion seemed to shrink me, to eat me.

“Control yourself,” he said to me.

I lifted my head a little, looking at him. An iron figure, armored limbs, mail plates across chest and back, helm, mask, metallic hands.

“Every City,” I said softly, “here and in the desert, and at Sea’s Edge—each one worships a woman.

There are no gods for Vazkor to say he is, only goddesses.” I am not sure why that revelation came to me then. I looked away from him and said, “Orash. Orash, not Ezlann, is my city.”

I turned and somehow walked from that place. In the hall, where men were still taken up with the business of dying, Mazlek and Slor came hurrying to me. “I am hurt,” I said, “not badly.”

And when I lay in my pavilion outside the city, I whispered to Mazlek, kneeling by me, “Is there a limit to what you will do for me?” “No,” he said intensely, “no, goddess.” “Then fire Orash,” I said. “Raze it, destroy it. Leave nothing.”

He was quiet for a moment, then he got up, hissed my name, and left me.

I fell asleep, but in sleep I heard the trumpet call which means a warning. Outside there was great activity, but I knew no enemy was upon us. I slept deeper then. At dawn I woke and went outside the pavilion. Orash was a black City now, after all. Gutted, yawning, damned. The camp was still in turmoil—angry and bewildered at riches lost in the blaze. One of the small fires, they reasoned, had spread, and not burned out as we had all supposed. Not many of the looters had perished; there had been too prompt a warning for that.

Mazlek did not speak to me of what had been done, nor I to him. Vazkor, if he suspected, showed no suspicion. She was a small prize. Her brutal destruction might be more valuable to him than her abandoned hulk standing at his back for an enemy to possess.

It was stupid, what I had done. It should have brought no comfort, for I had not burned my own ugliness, only the mark of it. And yet...

6

From the black shell of Orash, we rode southwest to Belhannor. Here the fugitives of Orash had fled, so the priestess had told us, leaving only a temple guard to ward us off. We passed the frozen-hard ruts of their wagons in the snow, but they had been quick in their escape. The only stragglers we overtook were dead ones, abandoned where they collapsed.

We rode close to the western hill line, and passed thin craning trees. The snow was long in breaking that year.

I do not recall much of that tedious march. I seemed always cold and slightly feverish, which led to brief peculiar hallucinations, so that I saw Belhannor ahead of us several times before we actually reached her.

I had not bled for forty-two days and would not think about what this must mean.

We saw her first in the late afternoon, under a sullen amber sky, black silhouette of a pale City, white as Orash. She flickered before my eyes.

An hour later our camp was set in scrub woods under the hills. I went to my pavilion, and lay there, neither asleep nor awake, while the black night slid over us. In the dawn there were new trumpets, away across the valley floor. Belhannor, it seemed, was ready to fight in the old fashion, challenge for challenge.

I felt very ill that day, and the illness angered me. I went out and had them bring the white horse, but when he came I could hardly get up on his back. My eyes were swimming, and the whole world of camp, trees, hills, plain, distant army, distant City spun around like a potter’s wheel. No one argued with me that I must not ride out with Vazkor’s troops. Perhaps I looked better than I felt.

Brass whined from either side, became the single voice which sounded the advance, a pealed yellow blade splitting the morning from crown to gut. A lurch of movement, the ground running black and white like broken paving, lead-colored sky with a single rent of faded orange. Ahead, the force of Belhannor, a large swirling mass, not white but iron. Yet it was not the battle they hoped for. Ammath cannon spoke from our left in gouts of smoke and light. The Belhannese lines broke and tumbled apart like toys.

The white horse did not like the cannon. He swerved and cursed them, and soon the stink of powder and scorched metal drove him mad, but not to run away. Crazy as I was, determined as I was, perhaps, to submerge our rampant individuality in the morass of war, he plunged abruptly forward, leaving all vestige of conformity behind. Our own soldiery broke ranks and gave way. I do not remember very well how we burst ahead and were flung among the cannon-crippled forward line that was Belhannor.

I felt no sense of panic as fate-which-was-the-white-horse drove me in among an enemy. I was glad, I was exultant, for here was complete forgetfulness. I raised the sword in both my hands, and I was no longer the faceless woman in her trap of earth. I was the first rider, the archer, the charioteer, the warrior.

I was Darak, I was Vazkor, I was Death. Their faces, helmed, masked, empty, sprayed up and away from me like the scattered petal-heads of flowers, and the enormous white beast between my thighs danced on their dying. The sky was red from the cannon blasts. I heard the great balls fly like iron birds above my skull, and knew myself safe. In that whirlwind of hatred and joy I found the beauty of pain, the triumphant cacophony of horror which is music. A great tidal hymn, the last coitus with darkness, of which the final note is a vast, piercing, orgasmic scream of agony.

The scream hung white and perfect under me and all around, sinking now, paling into scarlet.

The horse gave a convulsive shudder, scuttled like a ship. I let go of the rein and fell slowly sideways, aware only of the motion of the fall, the horse falling also, even more slowly, until we lay side by side, spent by the act of love, or death.

I woke, and thought I was in my pavilion, on the low mattress with its heap of rugs. Then my eyes cleared a little, and I saw it was a large curtained room, smudged with a small quantity of lamplight. Two indistinct female figures stirred at the foot of the bed. One rose, went out through the doors, and was back in minutes with a tall dark man following. My eyes did not seem to focus properly, and I could not raise my head. The man came and stood over me.

“My congratulations on your fight, goddess,” Vazkor said. “Your last for some time, I imagine.”

“Where is this?” I asked. My voice was very faint, I did not think he would hear me, but he had.

“Belhannor,” he said. “The City yielded after the battle, and we are in occupation. The Javhovor is apparently intelligent and has realized resistance is useless. The ladies tending you at this moment are princesses of Belhannor. They are anxious to do all they can for your comfort. Outside, of course, there is a guard—your own men.”

He must be very sure of the City if he had left me unconscious and helpless with these women—I was still valuable to him, after all. I could see a little better now, make out their pale and frightened faces. And beyond the door was Mazlek.

“Thank you,” I said. “How damaged am I?”

“A little,” he said, “but you heal quickly. Mazlek and his crew cut a way to you after you fell. The white horse was dead.”

“I will need another, then,” I said, stifling my guilt and pain so he should not see it. “When do we ride?”

“I shall leave a portion of my troops here, under the command of Attorl, Prince of Kmiss. The rest of us march at dawn tomorrow.”

I knew then, of course, that the march did not include me. I could tell I would not have mended so quickly.

“I am to follow you, then?” I said. “As before?”

“No, goddess. You are to stay here, in our prize of Belhannor. You forget your pregnancy. I do not think we dare risk the child any further.”

“The child,” I said with weak fury, “this child does not exist.”

Vazkor turned and moved toward the doors. I thought at first he was simply abandoning his cause as proven, but then I saw he had ushered my attendants out, and someone else had come into the room, a hunched-over, coarse-robed woman with the used-up, swarthy ugliness of the Dark People. She came to the bed with him, and stood looking at me from the blank unmasked face which was mask in itself, and two glittering reptile eyes, carved, black, and empty.

“This is a village witch,” he said, “not worthy of you, but highly skilled they tell me. I apologize for her.

But there. It is very necessary you understand your condition.” He turned to the hag, and spoke a couple of words in the village tongue, directions for an examination.

I half hoped she would be afraid to touch me, but she had no emotions left, that one. He had chosen deliberately and well. Her hands were dry and cruel on me, and he stood and watched us as she probed and prodded at my bruised and agonized body, and added new hurts to the old. Finally she stood back, nodded, and muttered something. Vazkor waved her away, and she went out. I knew what she had said, and he knew I knew it, but it was a mutual pretense between us that I did not.

“You are with child, and surprisingly healthy, considering your injuries. You have probably two hundred days yet to carry. In Ezlann your time would come in the month of the Peacock.” He smiled a little.

“Belhannor is safe, and you will stay here under the protection of Attorl. Your own guard will naturally remain also.”

I lay in the sheets, unable to lift my head. I said, “I will not bear this child.”

“You will,” he said.

That was the deadlock between us.

He went out, and the two Belhannese princesses returned, and gazed in abject terror at me.

Sleep.

He rode out with his army in the morning, as he had said he would, he, the warlord, going on to his conquests. And I was left behind, with no hope of following.

I am not certain what injuries I had had, but in another day I was well enough to rise and walk about my suite of white marble and tapestried hangings.

I was not sure at first what I would do, but gradually I became determined to wrest what I could from the situation—a dry gourd indeed.

From the windows of my apartments I looked out over the snow-draped vistas of the City, gardens below, an icy greenish river straddled by three vast bridges of stone, towers, and winding streets, and terraces of steps. She seemed to have suffered no damage, here at least in her High Quarter. I learned from Mazlek that her capitulation had been swift and total. The Javhovor had kneeled and kissed Vazkor’s gauntleted fingers in the gate-street. They were not used to the true burning breath of war, these Cities which had fought their toy battles for centuries.

Toward evening, after the lamplighting, I sent word to Attorl that I wished his presence. He came promptly enough, dressed for some festive occasion in magenta velvet and many jewels. He was a minor princeling, pretty and well mannered, with a very small mouth. Silvery fair hair coiled on his shoulders. He wore a phoenix mask when he entered, but drew it off for me.

“I understand, prince, that Belhannor has been left in our charge.”

A little surprise. He had understood Belhannor had been left in his charge.

“I see your puzzlement, prince,” I said graciously. “Naturally, you are commander of all our forces here.

But equally naturally, your rulings are subject to my authority.”

He looked dismayed, but did not think to question it. I was, after all, Uastis Reincarnate, and he believed in my religious power, if he did not take kindly to my temporal aspirations. He bowed, acknowledged what I had said, and I let him go. Thereafter, I was plagued by every petty affair which must be seen to—the curbing of very minor disturbances, posting of guards to police the streets, diversion of supplies to our armies. My interference was confined mostly to setting my seal on documents already attended to by Attorl, or rather by his advisers and scribes, for paperwork of any kind distressed him. Nevertheless, it held for me some vestige of recognition.

The silver-robed princesses who attended me were, I discovered, daughters of the Javhovor himself.

They became my official maidens, and each bore that cumbersome and incongruous fan of honor. They spoke only in answer to my commands, which pleased me well enough, and their fright never ebbed.

Their father, a pale plump anxious man, came and paid homage to me of his own accord, and sent me sumptuous gifts of jewelry, silks, perfumes, and magnificently bound books, which rivaled even those I had of Asren’s.

It was a dreadful time, Like the numbed white snow that would not break for spring, so my life seemed hardened and numbed by a covering I could not break.

It seemed I had nothing left, only these trivial pieces of power, my own Power, which came with hate, and grew in me day by day like a cancer. And that other cancer he had left in me, which grew also. I did not suffer the troubles most human women experience, there was no sickness or pain, only a sense of heaviness, out of all proportion to what I carried. From the eightieth day of pregnancy, the mark of my subjugation began to swell out from me. I realize I was not very big, nor did I grow very big, yet it seemed to me then that I was huge and bloated. To make it worse, the slimness of the rest of my body persisted; even my breasts grew only a little. More than ever, in the loose velvet gowns I had now to wear, the thing in my womb seemed an imposition, some thing nailed onto my own self, thrusting out, taking possession; a haunting.

Three times I tried to be rid of it—once by my own will, but the pain was terrible, and I could not force myself to go on; once simply by drinking too much of their wine, which did nothing. The third time I rode out of Belhannor to one of the tiny steadings still left standing at her foot (Vazkor had razed most of them before Belhannor bowed, and her walls were stained with their smoke). Only Mazlek and Slor rode with me for the sake of secrecy, but I spoke the tongue of the Dark People well enough to find their healer-woman, and ask her to assist me. She showed none of the alarm or surprise which would have met me in the City. She motioned me into her hut, and there I lay through the afternoon and night in a stinking blur of firelight, sickness, and fear. I had not realized there were so many varieties of pain—pain sharp and bright as silver, pain which burns like molten gold, and the dull booming bronze pain which comes after.

Finally she leaned over me in the predawn grayness.

“Is it finished?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. She gave me no title at any time, and few words.

“What now, then?” I whispered, fighting back my panic at the thought of new horrors done to me.

“Nothing now,” she said. “A loving child. He will not be parted from you.”

So I called Mazlek, and he and Slor helped me mount and ride away. I did not see their faces behind their masks, and I was glad of it.

For several days I was violently ill, vomiting, and in great discomfort, and all that while I willed myself to lose Vazkor’s seed, but it was no use. I suffered, and perhaps the thing inside me suffered, but it would not let go.

News reached us by messenger of two Cities which had fallen in the forest land farther south, to Vazkor and his men.

7

Sixty days had passed for me in Belhannor, and we had entered the month which in Purple Valley is called the Time of Green. The spring is usually stirring by then, but the snow lay thick and hard across the city and the valley floor. Anxiety grew, the fear that always comes when an established pattern falters.

The white-robed priests of their Temple offered lambs and pigeons to their goddess, a custom I had not seen in action since Ankuram. I recalled Za and the three days’ darkness, and so was not very surprised when Attorl requested an audience, and entered with the Javhovor a few paces behind him.

“Goddess,” they both intoned, and the eyes in their unmasked faces swiveled nervously from my belly.

“What do you want?”

“There’s unrest, goddess,” Attorl said, playing with a neck chain. He looked bored with the unrest.

“There’s some disturbance about the weather—men running around the streets, a mad woman going about shouting doom. ...”

“Goddess,” the Javhovor said uneasily, “there have been prayers in the temples and in the great Temple of our goddess, but the snow does not break. Now, in humility, we turn our eyes to you—Vazkor Overlord spoke of your power—dare we hope...?”

I say I was not surprised, but neither was I pleased. Power, yes, but over elements and seasons? They expected a good deal of me, and if I failed—what? And if I refused what?

As I sat in my chair, disgustingly aware of my condition before their embarrassed eyes, the old festering anger woke in me, snarling, and I recalled abruptly the no-voice which had said, “Magicianess, who ruled the elements, the stars, the seas, and hidden fires of earth.”

I am not certain what kind of knowledge was on me then, but I got to my feet and said, “The palace of Belhannor has a temple, too, I think? Then take me there and leave me there.”

Both Attorl and the Javhovor looked startled, but I was conducted along the passages to a great door, manned by six of the royal guard.

“Let me alone in here,” I said, “and when the door is shut on me, tell them to pray in your City.”

Inside, closed in, a small golden room. So intense was this sudden irrational motivation, I had not even flinched from their goddess, in case she were Orash’s sister; but she was not. She was small and beautiful, her head covered by a golden sunburst and hung with pendants of the jade so special in every southern hierarchy. Before her, the stone bowl, held in claws of gold. The flame was very low as I went toward it.

I did not know why I did what I did. I leaned over the flame, and whispered, “I am strong, even now, I am strong. Your Power and mine will be a great strength.”

There were no words in my brain, I sensed only a tremendous struggle, not in the least physical, but nonetheless exhausting. I fought against the writhing thing, and finally it was still. I stood with my eyes shut, and my hands on the sides of the bowl, and pulled something up from within me, tense and bright and unwilling.

There seemed to be no time spent, yet I had stood here forever. It was very quiet. I pulled at the thread, and when it pierced my skull, I found a way out for it above and between my eyes.

It had seemed such an intense yet tiny thing to do, but now there was a terrible blast of sound, a great crashing of thunder over the palace roof, and the snapping violence of lightning searing through my closed lids. I found I could not open my lids, but I was not afraid. Rain came smashing like glass against the high shutters, and in the noise and light I lost my balance and fell, and lay there with my eyes still fast shut, and now I knew what it was I wanted.

At the time, it made sense to me, though afterward it was only a blur of shapes and feelings. I had the mastery of the enormous storm which would melt the snow with its boiling drops, and I turned it a little, like a wild horse, so that half its face was toward the armies of Vazkor. I did not know where they were at that time, bivouacked, perhaps, at the feet of the fifth City of Purple Valley, in the woodland there—though a picture formed of a frozen narrow river, and marching sounds came to me, and grinding wheels. I pushed the storm head and the lightning bit into my lids. Everything was lost in thunder.

I opened my eyes quite suddenly and got to my feet. I was trembling and shaking, but I felt very excited and happy. The flame was flat in its bowl, and the cold sky-blaze came and went on the walls.

I sat on one of the prayer-seats of the Javhovor and his family and tried to be calm, but it was difficult.

The storm died slowly, and afterward the rain droned on for several hours. I think I fell asleep, for the golden room was abruptly red and purple from a stormy sunset beyond the windows.

I went to the door, and out, and the guards kneeled down in front of me. I was tired and locked inside myself, and ignored them. A little way on, I found Mazlek, my escort to my suite.

“In the City,” I said, “What?”

“A storm, goddess. And now the sky is clear.”

I dreamed I was with Asren, a strange dream, for though I knew it to be him, his features and his beauty unmistakable, he seemed little more than a child. Strange, too, because we were walking, hand in hand, very happily, in some green garden place. Then there were many white steps, and at the bottom, one of those stone bowls in which they kept alight the symbol of the Unawakened, the symbol which was Karrakaz.

The child Asren stared down at the bowl, then looked at me questioning, and I smiled and pointed, and nodded. He leaped from the steps in answer to that nod, and fell into the bowl, and the flames covered him.

The storm had swept Belhannor clear of snow and the black slush which followed. The skies were golden, and there was a new warmth in the air. I think I had forgotten half of what I did, or tried to do, in the palace temple. Certainly I did not think of it until I was reminded. Days passed, and buds were breaking on the trees. Beyond the walls, fields saved from the fires of War were melting into greens and citrons. They sang hymns to me in the City, the goddess who had ridden to destroy them, and now blessed.

We were seventeen days into our sudden spring, when the first of the messengers reached us. It was a dramatic entry, a frenzied man, shouting incoherently at the palace gates, whose horse dropped frothing and dead from under him.

I heard the hum of excitement in the corridors beyond my rooms, and sent one of Mazlek’s men to discover what was happening. I had, however, no need to wait on him. The Javhovor came to me, and his face was yellow with alarm.

“Goddess,” he said, “a man has come. The overlord and his armies—a storm among the High Woods—that is the forested hill line that runs east of us—an avalanche, massive accumulations of snow, and broken trees and rocks brought down with it, all loosened by the rain, and the river An in flood. Ah, goddess, many lost—”

I had risen, a cold hardness in me.

“And he?” I asked. “Is there word of my husband?”

“Safe,” he said, glad to reassure me, “quite safe. But the army greatly depleted—and there are other troubles.”

They had been making for Anash, it seemed, the mistress City of the river, and fifth of their goals. Now, cut off in sections by the avalanche, and in distress, the army found itself harried by troups of Anash, which had swiftly seized all advantage.

In the next few days other messengers came, and the story grew. A battle fought now, and Vazkor’s men routed. Vazkor and a handful of his captains holed up in the hills, striving to pull together what was left to them from a morass of casualties, sick men, and deserters. The winter campaign was taking its toll at last. There was a disease at work, and rations were scarce since the disaster of the avalanche.

I had thought I might see now the gleam of defiance in Belhannese eyes, but in my stupidity I had forgotten all the divided angers of the three Cities which still stood, and worse—the fury of Anash and Eptor, which had escaped Vazkor’s greed. Those two had joined to fight him off, and, his power smashed, might well turn their vengeance on their sister Cities, which had let him pass so easily, and where remnants of his force still lingered.

A rider came—the last messenger we were to receive. He brought word that Vazkor and his armies were no more—all slain, or dead of the sickness, or broken up into packs to run like jackals for the safety of the mountains. An abrupt end to war-might. The man enumerated those dead he could, among them Attorl’s uncle, whereupon, apparently, Attorl collapsed weeping. No doubt when they brought me news of Vazkor’s end, they looked for similar results. But I felt nothing, not even triumph, for I knew he was not dead.

For a while, then, we heard no more. A sullen depression and unease settled on Belhannor; a waiting.

I was well past the one hundred, and twentieth day (which, by the witch’s reckoning, was the middle of my pregnancy), heavy and sleepy often, while my head ached constantly. I was asleep when the first weary troop of refugees trailed into the City from her two sisters farther south. Vazkor had taken them easily, now they fled from the forces of Anash and Eptor, which, having crushed White Desert’s march, were striking north to finish the work.

Belhannor opened her gates to them, foolishly, out of pity. She had taken in the flight from Orash already. Now the numbers swelled—wagons of women, men, and children, domestic animals and household pets. The city grew crowded, slovenly; tents put up in the streets and gardens and horse fields, and the warrens of the lower quarters blocked and stifled.

Attorl, I heard, was struggling to organize defense, but he was ill with nerves and panic, and made a poor job of it. Belhannor’s major war-machines had been appropriated by Vazkor and taken south.

Now a few rusty cannon were wheeled out to protrude from the walls like mistaken drainage pipes. The soldiers in Belhannor did well enough, though it was a small garrison force, not more than four hundred men—adequate to subdue civilians but hopeless under the circumstances. Attorl’s wavering attempts to recruit ordinary men, particularly from the refugee population, met with sickly failure.

Vazkor had allowed only for perpetual success, never once for the stumble that would come inevitably, with time.

I experienced no guilt because of the storm—I felt that I had simply introduced a certain catastrophe a little earlier.

Anash and Eptor rode fast, smashing their way toward us, extravagant and impetuous with anger. We saw their tokens on the horizon now, from our high towers—smoke pall, black and filthy—some burning village; nearer, the haze of camp fires by night. It was interesting that quite suddenly some of those who had fled into Belhannor packed up their gear and fled out of her again. They were the wise ones. Others felt a false security in the sense of walls around them. I imagine I must have had similar thoughts, though not consciously. I felt too heavy and dreary to attempt flight. Sour amusement had settled on me, I, once the besieger of Orash and Belhannor, now besieged by these Cities I had not even seen.

They reached us on a crisp bitter-green evening, spring rain spangling intermittently, an evening for nostalgia and old love songs.

Attorl had begged use of my guard for the walls, and I had put it to Mazlek. He nodded, seeing, probably, no other course. Now I sat in my bedchamber in one of the carved chairs. A jeweled book was spread open before me on the sloping ivory desk, a useful thing I could bring conveniently close across the obscenity which was now my stomach. It was a book of fabulous animals and beasts—salamanders, unicorns—and the pages blazed with beautiful color from masterly illustrations. I was not really reading it, only admiring, when suddenly I found a single word written in the margin. I had thought this book to be one of the gifts of Belhannor’s Javhovor, had not realized I held one of Asren’s books, one I had never before looked into. I did not know his writing—I had seen his personal seal, no more—yet I knew it at once. Without embellishment, clear, straight, wise yet open, inured to yet conscious of pain—all this I saw in the solitary word he had written. I reached out to touch the word with my fingertip, and in that instant the great thunder came, splitting the world. The room trembled and steadied. I pushed the desk away, went to the nearest window and saw the reddish glare on the river thrown back from burning houses in the lower quarter. They had fired across the wall, and the ball had struck. I had not realized the power of those iron birds of death.

Other crashes came after that, now close, now far off, always terrible. Gradually the sky reddened into smoky darkness.

The bombardment ceased at nightfall, though I did not notice then. I was still at the window, clinging there in helpless fascination, when the silence came. But not silence. A crackling from burning places, the occasional soft thud of a collapsing house, and cries, and warning trumpets brought with the ashes on the wind.

I did not leave my rooms. The palace was full of frightened women. There were three men of my guard by my door, and, when others relieved them later, there might be news of a sort.

At midnight the cannon roused again. It was clever, not allowing us to sleep. Mazlek came soon after, dirty from the wall, his arm bound around with bloody temporary bandaging.

“Little action to tell,” he said. “There are many of them, and more to come from the look of it. I think there are men from the other Cities with them, recruited after the surrender.”

“Have they tried to take Belhannor?” I asked.

“No. They’re playing with her, goddess. A spokesman rode out, and called up there should be no quarter for the men of White Desert, but—” Mazlek paused, smiling slightly. “For Belhannor, if she opens her gates, sisterly love restored between the Cities of the valley.”

It was a sharp little dagger, that. It pricked even my lethargy.

“What did Attorl do?” I asked.

“Fired on the man,” Mazlek said, expressionless, “fired on him, and missed. The Belhannese cannon are useless, except to the enemy. The first blew up and killed thirteen men on the wall, and the ball never left her. Goddess,” he said, “it is only a question of time before they think to save their own skins.”

He spoke it softly, not so sharp now, but then, the blade was already in.

“I must leave,” I said, but it was a blank statement. I did not know where I should go.

“If you will put the matter in my hands?”

I nodded.

“Then collect what is necessary to you, goddess, and be ready to come with me, night or day. I will guard you with my life. You know it.”

Despite the intermittent noise of war, I slept that night, deeply and without dreams.

It was a quiet morning, very still. The river shone like green pearl. I could not see from my apartments any of the ruins, only the faint smoke, drifting like a girl’s hair on water, across the pale sky. I bathed and dressed and they brought my drink. I remember sitting in a chair, staring around me at priceless things, combs and ornaments, and knowing none of them as mine. I would have little to carry, except—I went to the desk and touched the open book I had forgotten since the first cannon sounded.

A knock then, and, when I called for them to come in, a man entered in the livery of the Javhovor, and told me he begged my presence. It seemed strange, before they had always come to me, and yet it was a very polite summons. I followed the man, and was brought eventually to the great audience hall, its function virtually obsolete, but its splendor undimmed. Among the scarlet and green and white hangings, the pale-faced man, who was High-Lord, came to me, unmasked and bowed very low.

“Goddess, forgive my request that you come here, but I felt it was safer, perhaps.” A little pause, during which I noticed several courtiers and ministers around the walls. Behind me, the white fans of the princesses dipped nervously. “We have been forced,” the Javhovor began, and halted. “We thought it best,” he said. “A cruel decision. We have delivered ourselves to the mercy of our sister Cities, Anash and Eptor. There was no other path for us, goddess. I could not see my own die around me.”

I was angry with myself for falling into this trap, angry at the Javhovor for ensnaring me, angry with Mazlek that he had not sensed, and come in time after all.

“What have you done?” I asked—a blind speech enough, but he answered.

“The men of Belhannor will rise against the men of White Desert on the wall. It has been arranged.” He hung his head, gray and sick at the betrayal for which I did not even blame him.

“And I?” I said. “Where do I fit in this tapestry?”

“No insult will be offered you, goddess—I swear it.”

“I am delighted you are so confident. I do not share your optimism.”

There came a sudden, distant noise outside—shouts, cries, a roar of surprise and pain. No cannon uttered; there was no need. The men of Belhannor would be opening wide the gates now, welcoming their brothers inside, hopeful and a little nervous.

I sat my heaviness in a chair to wait, and noticed that the princesses slunk little by little away from me, to their father’s side. Soon there was a sound of booted feet, horses, many voices under the windows, before long, marchers rhythmic in the corridor outside, the doors and curtains thrust aside, and twenty men emptying into the hall. Mixed uniforms of purple and bright yellow, armor pieces, the visors of helms tipped back to show the arrogant masks of lions and bears—Anash, the mistress of the offensive. A man, a silver-masked soldier yet very proud, spiteful in triumph, swaggered into the hall—their commander, thinking himself their Javhovor.

A half nod to the High-Lord of Belhannor, a vicious little chuckle.

“Well. An intelligent move, brother.”

They might have been Vazkor’s words, but the voice was very light and high, oddly matched with the bulk of the man.

And then the insolent turning, the gaze taking in the length and breadth of the hall, coming to rest at last on me.

“And who is this, brother? Your lady, perhaps?”

He would know of me, know of the cat-faced goddess of Ezlann. She who had carried the enemy of Anash to his power.

“I am Uastis,” I said to the commander. “My husband is Vazkor, who would have plowed you and yours deep in the river soil had he but time to spare.”

I said it to anger him, catch him off balance in this atmosphere of placatory groveling. His hand whipped to sword hilt, and I felt a laziness come on me, knowing what I could do, to him at least, and to his twenty, if I could summon hate enough. But after that, death would come, or the only form of death I could know. And abruptly I was afraid. How my enemies could play with me, endless games of agony.

There came a startling little cry, just beyond the door, a little thrusting and cursing because a man had fallen and pushed others as he fell. The Anash commander turned, and in that moment the doorway changed color and shape and was full of black-liveried men, some green-roped at the middle, all with the badge of a cat on the right side of the breast. Swift swords and men dropping before them. The floor was littered purple and yellow.

Two men ran to me—Slor and Mazlek.

“Goddess—quickly!”

I ran with them, not pausing to watch the amazement on those figures left alive behind us.

There were many corridors in the palace at Belhannor, and those we ran through were very empty. I had the impression that we were going downward, but had no time or breath to ask—that other in me made it hard for me to keep up. Then we turned out into a broad dark hall, and found a pack of the purple and yellow soldiers, plundering chests. Apparently anything that ran and did not wear their colors was fair game for them. At once swords were out, and they came rushing at us up the hall, yelling. Mazlek pulled me across their path, through a side door which was slammed behind us.

Fewer men with me now. Many had stayed on the far side of the door to hold off the pursuit. A sloping passageway ran down, followed by flights of dark stairways where wall torches struggled to remain alight. I stumbled many times.

In the damp darkness, we heard the great clang of the door bursting open above, and knew the hunt was on again.

“Not far,” Mazlek whispered. “A door soon they won’t be able to open.”

The steps narrowed and became a corridor without lights. Behind, the sounds were wild and raucous and savage. Slor came to a halt, and the rest of the men froze where they stood.

“We’ll hold them here,” he said, “a narrow place. By the time they can get past us, you will have got the goddess safe away.”

Mazlek hesitated a second, then he nodded. He reached out and clasped Slor’s shoulder hard in his hand, then he turned and pulled me on into the dark.

I was quite breathless by now, and hardly understood what was happening. It seemed only some awful part of my ordeal when my fingers met stone, and I found the corridor ended in a blank wall. I leaned on the cold pitted surface, gasping, and Mazlek thrust something into my hands.

“A cloak,” he said, “and a plain silk mask—iron gray, the color of the lower orders in Belhannor. Please put them on.”

I turned away and obeyed him,, though I could not see how this would help us. When I looked back, I saw that he had donned a tunic of this stuff over his mail, and a plain mask also. I dropped the cat mask where he had dropped his own, and his badge and sash with it, but the open skull-cat eyes glared up at me, my own self left behind. A rasping sound made me jump back from the wall. A narrow oblong opening had appeared, framing blackness.

Mazlek held up one hand on which a ring curled I had not seen him wear before.

“I bought this key many days ago,” he said. “I thought it might prove useful.”

He guided me into the black mouth, followed me, then shut the way behind us.

“They may never see the door,” he said. “If they do, it will be useless to them without the ring.”

He grasped my arm firmly and we started forward. I could make out nothing at first, but then a greenish luminance began to ripple about us, and I smelled the river.

The light grew. I saw mud and mosses clinging on the walls. Bright green weeds strangled about our feet.

We came out of a small cave, like a rat’s bolt-hole, into the dull, white, faintly smoking day. The passage had opened on a low bank of the river, but not the river I had known from my windows. This was an oily trickle, clogged with weed growths and garbage. Rough steps led up from the mud to the narrow streets, peeling houses, and war ruins of the lower quarter.

8

The purple and yellow soldiery of Anash had filtered through into these streets, but by careful maneuvering we avoided a face-to-face collision with them. Despite their leader’s promises of brotherhood, they were breaking down the doors of perfume shops, clothiers and jewelers, and taking what they thought valuable. In an alley we passed a dog they had used for archery practice. Their noise was always with us—now distant, now dangerously close. Twice other men passed our hastily sought hiding places, in charcoal colors, marching. Eptor, it seemed, were a more orderly crew.

Most of the house doors were locked tight and bolted from within. Many had fled, I think, at the last instant into the cellars and passages beneath their houses. Nearer the wall a whole street had been gutted by fire, still smoking, and a thick scattering of dead men lay there, some of whom I recognized; the last soldiers of Vazkor’s army.

Finally, a white stone house with a courtyard, the door of which was swinging on broken hinges. We went inside, and Mazlek dragged furniture from inner rooms to block the entrance. He would not let me help him. Once the barricade was in place, we went in and upstairs, and found narrow empty bedchambers. He made me lie on a bed, and pulled the covers over me.

“I will be outside your door,” he said, “if there’s trouble of any kind.”

“But, Mazlek,” I said, “how long do we stay here?” “Not long. We must leave the city as soon as possible.” “And then? Where?” “White Desert,” he said.

I lay in the room but did not sleep, though I was very tired. Once there was a great commotion in the street, shouts and screams and crashes, but I was too exhausted to get up and look, and eventually the sounds died away. I spent a considerable amount of time reflecting, quite irrelevantly, on the fact that there seemed to be no hovels in the lower quarter. A City of palaces and houses, as I supposed Ezlann had been, as I supposed were all the Cities of the south—too proud to degenerate into slums, these bastard children of the Lost. The colorless sky crept toward darkness. Mazlek came in softly.

“I must leave you for a while, goddess,” he said. “Don’t move from this place, and light no lamps.”

I nodded, and he went. The night pressed close, very black, except that outside many separate little firelights sprang up, and flickered rose-red on the ceiling of the narrow room. The house began to creak and squeak ominously in the way of all houses when they have a solitary victim in them. I heard countless steps on the stairs, heavy, sly, cruel steps, soldiers with knives, whose way with pregnant women was too well known to me from camp chat to leave me unmoved. But none of them were real, except the last.

I sat up when I heard them, tense and very still, knowing this was no trick of the house. The door to the room swung open and a soldier of Anash stood there, the fire-glow picking out his livery, the bear mask, the stained knife stuck through his belt.

“Goddess,” said the soldier of Anash in Mazlek’s voice, “don’t be alarmed. I found this one on his own, and got these from him. It will be easy now. Most of them are drunk—drinking openly in the streets like animals. The gates will have sentries, no doubt, but as incapable as the rest, I think. There’s a horse in the courtyard.”

I followed him out of the house, and he mounted me behind him on a shaggy pack horse, a sturdy, squat, dark little beast, with more than a share of donkey; there was a glass wine bottle tied on the saddle.

Mazlek unstoppered it, and poured half the red liquid onto the paving.

“When I tell you, goddess, you must act like a drunken woman, cling to me and laugh.” He sounded acutely embarrassed, and added: “Forgive me. I would not ask it of you if there were another way.”

“Oh, Mazlek,” I said reproachfully, “do you think me such a fool? Forget I am what you think I am because you killed me with your sword at the steading by the Water, and I healed, and followed you. If we are to make this journey together, you must understand I am nothing very special or particularly worth any trouble on your part. I will do what you tell me, and be grateful for your help.” It was a moment of weary truth for me, very bitter, yet oddly comforting too. If he was shocked by what I had said, he did not show it. There was a moment’s silence, and then he spurred the horse and we were off.

The ride was swift, punctuated by dark alleys, by abstract patterns of firelight and figures outlined on that redness. Drunken men shouted at us, but had no particular inclination to follow. Away in the heart of the city there was a fierce orange glare among the palaces, and gouts of purple smoke. So much then for sisterly love restored. We reached a broad avenue and ahead, quite suddenly, the wall loomed behind houses. A lower gate this, not of great importance, therefore presumably sparsely manned. We passed a crowded bonfire in the street, and a missile struck the horse, which swerved, corrected itself, and ran on.

Around a block of plundered shops, and stables where a few stray animals wandered, and the gate lay ahead.

“Now,” Mazlek said.

Even expecting his change of character, it was a surprise to me. He jerked on the horse’s reins abruptly, so that it protested and pranced, and he began to sway in the saddle, yelling some formless song without words or melody. He had untied the half-empty wine bottle, and now waved it aloft. I was so enthralled with his performance I almost forgot my own, but finally remembered, put my arms around him, and began to sing at the top of my voice one of the musical offerings of Darak’s camp, which might raise a few eyebrows, even here.

In this way we got to the gate-mouth, an entrance for drovers probably, judging from width and ugliness, and the amount of ancient animal droppings cemented to the road.

There were about ten men, more than I had hoped for, but unmasked, and with their store of bottles and wineskins about them, they were obviously not in their prime. I thought there might be some business with passwords which we did not know, but they had apparently forgotten all that.

“Halt!” The nearest one, who seemed to be in charge, came wavering toward us. “Halt, you drink-sodden son of a mare. Halt, halt, halt. What’s that up behind you?”

He did not speak in the elegant manner of the Cities, though in a corruption of the same tongue—a kind of army slang, almost a language on its own.

“A woman,” Mazlek said, and offered him the glass bottle.

The soldier drank, belched, and looked at me.

“Belhannese,” he said.

“That’s right,” Mazlek said, “and very willing to make me forget it.”

“Not much showing,” the soldier said, “but I’d say she’d got one in the pot.”

“That’s all right by me. She won’t be saying it’s mine, then, if we come here again, will she?”

The soldier put up a hand and began to explore me, and I felt Mazlek’s body stiffen. I gave him a little slap.

“Did I say you owned me, soldier?” I asked Mazlek. “Just because you gave me a ride? This is a nice man, I can tell.” I patted my besieger’s cheek, and the fool grinned. “We were going outside for a bit.

Why not come with us?”

“Outside?” he queried, dubious. “Why not here and now?”

“I like to pick and choose,” I said, “and besides, do you want that riffraff pushing in before you?”

He glanced at the other men, grinned again, and walked to the front of the horse. As he led us out of the gate there were a few shouts, but he told them to be quiet, and they were, so that was no problem.

A little path ran down from the gate. The platform had degenerated into a slope here, loosely mantled with springpared trees.

“Here’ll do,” our escort said.

“Never mind him,” I said as I got down from the horse, nodding at Mazlek. I let the soldier pull me into some bushes, where he proceeded to get on with what interested him most. Mazlek was perhaps too quick, too angry, but the trained fighter in him saved us; he was also too professional to make a mess of things, for all his fury. He rose suddenly over us, palmed the man’s mouth, and thrust the knife into him.

The Anashian died without a sound, and Mazlek dragged him off me, and flung him aside.

I could not see Mazlek’s expression behind the mask, but every line of his body expressed his horror.

“Goddess—I thought I had been too quick for him to—”

“Unimportant,” I said.

He shook his head and turned away.

We remounted the horse, and rode quickly from the walls of Belhannor, through village fields, into the safe darkness.

We were lucky. An hour or so later, riding in the scrub woodland trailing from the foot of the hill, we found another horse, twin to the first, easily caught with a gift of sweet grass. Mounted separately, we rode down at a trot, and made the dawn without a halt.

Belhannor was only a shape on the horizon now, an ivory figure from the game of Castles, with a smoke plume like a thundercloud still poised above her head. We made our stop in a copse of twisted thorn trees, and lit a small fire. Mazlek stripped off the things of Anash, and put on once more the soft iron-colored tunic and mask of a lower citizen. Now we were only Belhannese refugees, one pair out of hundreds probably, making for ruined Orash perhaps, until it was safe to go home.

Mazlek drew from the saddle pack a small box, and I could see from his unease what it must contain.

“Mazlek,” I said softly, “I can go for many days without food. You supply yourself as you want.”

He nodded, but slunk off among the trees to eat. He had not flinched at the bald statement, but, even so, the taboos of a lifetime could not be blown away so swiftly, if ever.

Later, we rode on, keeping a steady but unhurried speed. The land around me seemed quite unfamiliar—I had seen it last under snow, and through a fever haze. Nevertheless, it was a strange journey, this going backward over ground I had crossed before—the first time ever I had returned to any place which it took longer than a day to reach. Beneath the horses’ hooves the soil was now warmly brown, dappled with many greens. Dusk fell more slowly, and birds rang like bells at the dawn light. A fox’s lair among the bracken, and a vixen mottled white on her russet, still half in her winter coat.

Five or six days passed, and Mazlek told me we were not making toward Orash, as I had thought, but would turn eastward now toward the hill line. Beyond the hills—mountains, part of the great chain of primeval children folded upward from the southern earth in the first struggles of the landscape.

Northward, they would become one with the Ring, broken only by the blue water, Aluthmis. Northeast they would lose their peaks in the rock plains that fell away from Eshkorek Arnor, City of White Desert.

“The best road for us to take,” Mazlek said. “If any followed us, seeking you, they’d guess we would go by the open path—back the way the armies came.” “Road?” I said. “Are there roads across the mountains?” It seemed there were, though ancient and elusive, impassable in winter, tracks of an old mountain people who had vanished like the Lost, centuries before. Mazlek seemed confident enough, but a sense of foreboding settled on me. It was not the road I feared, but the destination—Eshkorek Arnor. I did not know why. I reasoned with myself that it was the Javhovor of Eshkofek who haunted me—that anxious tortoise who had thrust his neck from his shell too far by half. The brave, terrified man who had screeched at me across the Council table in Za, then died in the square with a piece of tile in his brain—Vazkor’s example of power. Yet no need to fear, there was a new lord now—Vazkor’s man.

The eleventh day of our journey, we rode into the hills, and left that valley of failure behind. There was a village or two, where Mazlek would walk off with the black-eyed chief, and return with small bundles of food. I ate a little every seventh or eighth day, and my pampered stomach rebelled each time with hideous pains. The worst trouble was a constant tiredness. Several times I fell asleep as I rode, and miraculously kept my seat until some jolt would wake me up again. Each night, a six-hour halt. We kept no stated watch, though Mazlek slept little, I think. As watcher I was quite useless, and could not keep my eyes open. It angered me, but I was helpless; the thing in me made me so.

But there seemed to be no pursuit. Probably the runaway bitch-witch-whore-goddess had no great interest for them. They had not bothered even to pursue Vazkor, it seemed, simply accepted the word that he was dead. Fools. Where he was, what he did, were problematical, but I knew at least he could not die, my brother, with his healing skin.

Beyond the hills, the mountains rose, clustered, uncut amethyst, dully luminous against the soft spring skies.

I became aware that I was searching, asleep and awake, my brain burrowing into itself to remember something. Curious, the sensation of quest, without a known goal.

9

And they were kind to us, after all, the mountains. The horses, with their sure, shaggy, little feet, managed well, and enjoyed the tufts of ice-green mountain grass which cracked the stone. Fresh streams and waterfalls sprinkled themselves into shallow pools. Heather, every shade of purple, furred the old sleeping bones.

There were, at first, winding tracks, safe enough, but crudely hewn. But then we found the road—a pass, wide and paved, not as the slaves of the Lost had paved the roads of the Plains, but in small, palm-sized blocks. Mostly the mountain sides walled us on this way, but here and there a ghastly drop would open to left or right, jagged frozen cascades of rock, plunging into barren valleys. Less beauty now. The farther we rode, the more desolate the road became. Soon the greens and heathers were all gone. We had paid for our safe passage with ugliness.

Toward evening, perhaps five days into the mountains, we passed a ramshackle little hut about twenty feet from the road. A half-barren field stretched sloping toward us, and three or four despairing trees leaned on each other for support near the door. There were two old men in the field, both skin and bone got up in rags, with long light hair flapping in the breeze. Not of the Dark People, these two, but outcast city dwellers presumably. One crouched on his haunches staring at us, unmasked, the other stood up stiff and straight, his back turned. After a moment I saw that there was a flock of gray mountain pigeons in the field, pecking at the impoverished crops. Every so often a group of these would fly onto the standing man’s head and shoulders, and stamp up and down, or settle to preen.

Our small supplies were low. I could see, from the tail of my eye, Mazlek drawing rein and dismounting.

Suddenly the squatting man called out: “Don’t let her near me! Don’t you let her!”

“Forgive him, goddess,” Mazlek said, sounding irritated. “Only a mad old man—a woman-hater no doubt. He means nothing.” He went up through the field, and the birds scattered with what looked an almost melodramatic act of fright, except for the group on the scarecrow, however, which remained unruffled.

Mazlek spoke to the man. He shook his head frenziedly, and waved sticklike arms.

“No—nothing left—those others took it—thieves!”

“Others?” Mazlek’s voice came sharp and clear now.

’Ten men and horses—black riders—skull masks—except for him, the dark one—the wolf—”

Mazlek turned and looked back at me. My hands were tight on the reins, and my heart thudded in intermittent, painful, nervous beats. Mazlek left the man and came back to the road.

“Vazkor,” he said unnecessarily. “Still alive?”

“Oh, yes. I never thought him dead.”

“Making for Eshkorek—as we are,” Mazlek said. He mounted swiftly. “We should hurry, goddess; perhaps we can catch them, now that we’re on the same road.”

“No,” I said.

The old man shouted hoarsely at us, without words.

“Wise to ride with him,” Mazlek said. “Twelve men can protect you better than one.”

He was anxious for my safety. It was useless to protest. We urged the horses forward, and left the old man standing in the field, beside the pigeon-heavy scarecrow he had put up to keep the birds away.

Darkness thickened around us. Stars burned blue-white be tween the distant crag-crests.

“We do not know how long ago they passed,” I said. “We may be days behind.”

“I don’t think so,” Mazlek said. “That one would have had a short memory, yet he remembered them very well.”

“I must rest soon,” I said.

He nodded through the gloom.

“I will find a safe place, then ride ahead to them. He’ll wait, or return with me.”

“Will he? I wonder, Mazlek, if he will.”

But he would, of course. I carried what was his.

Not long after, the road began to drop downward. Across rock thrusts came a new light, faintly red.

“A fire,” Mazlek muttered.

We saw the dip a minute later, a trickle of path and scrub bushes clinging around it, and, at the bottom, a hollow full of firelight. It seemed blatant, careless even. I saw horses moving beyond the flames, shapes sitting against the rock. Abruptly two men leaped from the scrub, one for each of our bridles. A third stood a little behind, a couple of knives very ready. Not so careless, after all, for he had posted sentries.

Mazlek’s ambusher prodded at him. “Who are you?”

Mazlek said calmly, “I am Mazlek, Commander of the Goddess Uastis’ Guard. I have conducted her to her husband.”

The skull faces turned to me. There was nothing about me recognizable, no golden cat mask or rich robe. Even the pregnancy had shown itself since they saw me last.

“Well,” I said, “go and ask your Lord. He will remember me, I think.”

A little hesitation, then they pulled our horses aside, and led them down the path into their camp, the knife man coming last.

It was warm in the hollow, and smoky. One of our guides strode off around the fire into a cave beyond it. I began to feel stifled, the smoke catching in my throat and eyes. I wanted to run away, and cursed Mazlek unfairly for bringing me here. Damn Vazkor, I did not want his venomous weight on my freedom again.

The man ducked out of the cave, and another man followed him, tall, spare, dark; under the silver strings of the wolfs head, his own black hair hanging in long, raw silks. He came around the fire, and stood looking at me. “Welcome, goddess,” he said.

When he spoke, the race of my fear stumbled. I looked back at him bewildered. Not Vazkor’s voice, a stranger’s voice, dry and old, and empty.

Mazlek was at my stirrup, offering his arm to help me down. I dismounted.

“Make the goddess comfortable,” the unknown voice finished. He nodded and turned back into the cave, and was gone.

“So, even he understands defeat,” Mazlek said softly. “It is finished for him, and he knows it.” There was a bitter pleasure in his tone I might have shared if he had said it on the road.

I took my hand from Mazlek’s arm, walked around the blaze, and followed Vazkor into the black mouth of the cave. Far back there was a leather curtain hung up for privacy, and beyond it the slight glow of a wick in oil. I let the flap fall to, and stood staring at the bed, made of one folded blanket, on which he lay.

He was very still. The mask gone now, his face showed sick pale under the gray-olive skin, and the shadows of his face seemed bruised deeper. Except for his open eyes, which turned slowly to look at me, he might have been dead. His mouth stretched a little.

“Our positions are finally reversed, you see,” he said.

“You are ill,” I said softly, not quite believing it.

“Yes. I am ill. But I will be better soon. I’m sorry to disappoint you, goddess.” His eyes shifted a little to my belly. “Well,” he said, but even that could not anger me. The walls of hate I had built against him had crumbled instantly, of course. His vulnerability stirred me almost into an agony of compassion I could not help. I went to him and kneeled down.

“What can I do for you? Shall I fetch you anything...?”

I reached out and touched his face with my fingertips, and, as if it were a signal to my body, I began at once to weep, the silent scalding tears of our separate loneliness. He too had lost what was dear to him, however perverse his desires and hopes had been. Lost. He could not even express any pain he felt. He lay like ice under my touch, Darak turned to jade at the bottom of the tomb-shaft because I could not weep for him.

“Let’s put an end to this,” he said after a moment, quite gently. “This is no use for either of us.”

I got to my feet, and he shut his eyes, closing that last door into himself with the finality of stone.

There was another cave place they had found for me, and here I lay, Mazlek across the mouth of it, but his body defenseless in worn-out sleep. It was I who watched that night.

Dawn, ice-chill in the mountains, stippled rock flanks with incandescent red.

There was a beaker of the wine-drink for me that morning. Mazlek, like a child, stretching, rubbing at his eyes, glancing guiltily in at me because he had not stood guard all night.

Vazkor came from the cave as they were saddling and loading the horses. He saw to his own mount, slowly and carefully. The mask hid his face. After a while he mounted, and sat with an unusual stiffness, as if it took much effort to keep himself there. They waited for his signal, and followed after him up the road.

It came to me: I have done this. The storm I turned from Belhannor was the beginning of it. I have smashed the soul of Vazkor. Yet I could not quite believe it. Where, after all, was my triumph in the act?

Mazlek and I were some way behind. After a while Vazkor motioned another man into the lead, and waited on the road until we reached him. He turned to Mazlek, and Mazlek dropped back until out of earshot. Vazkor’s black gelding dwarfed the horse I rode.

“I have seen that man before,” Vazkor said after a while. His voice was slightly husky from the fever, yet different from when I had heard it last; how, I was not sure. “Your commander. One of Asren’s men who rode with me for a time, I think. In Ezlann.”

I said nothing, could think of nothing to say, since the words I needed to speak he had locked inside me forever.

“You think,” he said, after another little silence, “things are finished with me.”

Hooves bit sharp on the road.

“Well, goddess, the castle fell at the river An, but I can build it again, on its own ruins, out of its own bricks. This is not defeat, goddess, it is delay. We are headed for a mountain fortress that will keep us very safe until the time is right for me. Tower-Eshkorek—my gift from the last Javhovor of Eshkorek Arnor. I hope you will find it comfortable. Our child will probably be born there now.”

1

Where the mountains reach toward the City, leveling, they take on the tinge of lions. The great tower-fortress, like Eshkorek herself, was built of this same fulvous rock. Not beautiful, but ugly, it threw its indomitable phallic shadow black across the sunset mesas and the sloping crags. Not beautiful, but very strong, very secure. Yet not to keep things out, but to keep things in. A prison. At once I had the sensation that if I entered I could never again get free, but I thrust it off.

Nearer, I saw how the place was ringed by a huge oval crater, filled to a third of its height by stagnant water, black and impenetrable, a sightless eye. Over this moat there seemed to be no way, except by swimming. Weed lay on the surface in glinting nets, clotted at the base of the tower.

One of Vazkor’s men shouted. The rocks took his voice and split it into many voices, and hurled them at us from every side. A pause then, but as the silence crept back, another sound came in answer, and the silence ran like a hunted man. Grinding, grating, a narrow door was being forced in the tower, and from that mouth a long stone tongue began to thrust toward us. Over the moat the thing angled itself, to vanish with a rasping screech in some slot beneath the crater’s lip: a bridge. It was ten feet wide, at least, but to a man they rode single file, exactly at its center, and led by instinct only I did the same. Riding over the water, my stomach seemed turned to ice. Against my will, I glanced down into the depths, saw nothing, yet looked away swiftly.

Beyond the narrow doorway, a roofed-over courtyard, stables on either side, a dark, primitive, cheerless place. Three men in gray liveries slashed with yellow stood like statues. Another man, fat under his long tunic of furs, bowed deeply.

“Warden,” Vazkor said.

“My lord, your messenger reached me only a day ago. We are not as ready as we might be.” Behind the silver eagle mask little eyes glinted. But no eagle this, but the mythological demon-toad, well-fed and venomous. Oparr, yet not Oparr, for this stream ran deeper and blacker.

For some reason I had not expected anyone to be here, yet, I supposed now, as a fortress it would be garrisoned to some extent. So I came to look for many men and servants, and, as we climbed the stone flights, toiled through the large oval hall, past storerooms and armories, for the efficiency and crowding of a barracks, and I did not find it. Few people lived here after all, a scattering of the gray-clad soldiers—the Warden’s men—an old woman and a young, both apparently witless from the brief glances I had of them. It seemed a peculiar arrangement, but I was too tired to question it; we had been on the road together long days—I had lost count of how many. Vazkor, for all the last traces of the fever which still hung on him, appeared less exhausted than I—but then there was presumably some purpose for him here; for me, nothing.

I followed the thin, slightly limping servant girl to a small room near the head of the tower, and when she had gone, I sank down on the curtained bed and buried myself in sleep.

I woke again in darkness, tinglingly alert, listening. There was nothing to be heard, only the silent strength of the tower humming to itself. I went to the narrow slit of window, pulled aside the shutter, looked out over bleached crags, black sky, white-eyed stars. I was very tense and did not know why.

Standing there, I suddenly realized what it was my mind had been searching out since Mazlek had brought me to the mountains—that half-unconscious quest, without a known goal. I had been trying to remember the word which Asren had written in the book, the beautiful book I had meant to bring with me from Belhannor, and had left behind because there had been no time to plan. And now I realized that oddly I had examined the letters, the character in the formation of that word so closely that I had not seen what the word was in itself. Whatever importance it had had for him, or for myself, was lost. A trivial thing, perhaps, but it troubled me. The last, the only, item I had had of him had slipped from my possession and my memory forever.

A movement caught my eye, unexpected in this place, where sky and mountains seemed locked in ancient immobility.

I looked across the rock shapes, then lifted my eyes, and incredibly found the answer in the black drift overhead. Between the fixed scatter of stars, three other stars, larger and very bright, sailing in the form of an arrowhead, southward. Ankurum, and the street, so late or early, and the moving silver light I had watched with Darak, the light Asutoo had watched also, and taken as a god-chariot, an omen to betray.

The three glittering things slid over the tower, out of my sight.

I was afraid, more than that primitive fear because I could not understand the lights in the sky. I turned and faced the room as if an enemy waited for me. There was in this place—something—something I feared yet must find, deep in the bones of the tower. I had sensed it from the beginning, but the silver star chariots of Asutoo’s gods had peeled away the last layers of my blindness.

In the morning the limping girl brought a pitcher of water, a silver cup of the wine drink, and a little later returned with a selection of silk and velvet clothes, and a silver mask—a curious shape which seemed to be the head of a lynx. Apparently the tower Warden had sent these things, and I wondered to whom they had belonged. Perhaps to an absent wife or lady, for he appeared to keep neither here at present. They were all shades and tones of Eshkorek yellow and rather full, but that seemed suited to my condition. The mask presented a subtle problem. The Warden’s rank would not entitle him to wear the gold, and therefore he could not provide a golden mask for me, and yet, if only by chance, I was demoted by going in silver now. Yellow strings hung from the lynx head over my hair, each one ending in an exquisite marigold carved from yellow amber.

Mazlek came up the stairs soon after. I saw his eyes take in the silver mask, and then discard the thought which had come to him, as it had to me.

“What is happening, Mazlek?”

“A man has been sent to the City to inform the Javhoyor that Vazkor is here.”

“Vazkor’s Javhovor,” I said softly.

“Yes, goddess. Vazkor’s men expect immediate loyal help from that quarter—honored welcome into Eshkorek Arnor, a war council, fresh troops—but things are not so simple, goddess, I think.”

“Why?”

“This man, the Warden—he is very uneasy. I don’t think Vazkor is a welcome guest either to himself or his master.”

I remembered Vazkor’s words on the road, harsh, affirmative. Yet he could do nothing without the support of the Cities of the desert. If he had lost it, what would become of him?

“Where is Vazkor?” I asked Mazlek.

“A room on the east side of the tower. One man keeps guard outside the door, and no one has seen him since last night.”

“Mazlek,” I said, abruptly anxious to put Vazkor from my mind, and attack my fears of this fortress instead, “there is something in this place—something I must find.”

“Goddess.”

He was quite ready to follow me, to protect me, yet he did not understand. I think I had half hoped he might have sensed also the secret feeling of the tower. A sort of mental intimacy had seemed to grow between us during the flight from Belhannor; we had spoken little, yet things had been clear enough. I was reminded of Slor suddenly, and the blind offering of his life for mine, and thrust the thought away.

“I have explained badly,” I said. “I do not know what troubles me here, even if anything exists to trouble me. But I have to search until I find it, or fail to find it.” I discovered I had locked my hands together tensely. “Something hidden,” I said.

He went after me, down the flights of stairs, to the oval dark hall, needing candles even in daylight, and stood ready behind me as I spoke to one of the three gray soldiers lounging there. I noted they did not leap to instant attention at my entrance, as they would for the golden cat goddess of Ezlann, and I learned a lot from that.

“Where is the Warden? I should like to speak to him.”

“The lord Warden hasn’t yet risen, lady.”

Even the title—miserly enough—was delivered with a certain sneering slur. He found it easy to forget who I was—who I had been?

“Soldier,” I said, “I am Uastis of Ezlann, Reincarnate of the Old Race, wife to Vazkor Javhovor, Overlord of White Desert. I am addressed as “goddess” by men who are standing on their feet, and have bowed their heads to me first.”

There was an uneasy shuffling from the table as the soldier’s two companions got up from their chairs, and stood awkwardly, in positions of uncertain respect. The man I had spoken to, however, seemed unimpressed, and my words tempted him into insolence.

“I have heard of a goddess,” he said, “in Ezlann. And then, lady, you wore a plain mask when you came here, and a plain robe, too. Those things ... well, they’re the Warden’s bounty, if I recall correctly.”

I did not feel angry, only knew I dared not let my authority fall out of appreciation, here, of all places, where I sensed so much danger.

“Soldier,” I said, and I walked close to him, and stared at his eyes behind the bronze mask, eyes slippery, and unwilling to be caught. “Men do not insult me twice. Since you need proof of me, I am afraid I must give it. You will not forget who I am. Lift your hand.” He whimpered, and I knew I had him then. “My touch is fire, the brand to you.”

I laid one finger on his naked palm, and he screamed.

“Go free!” I hissed, and the trance broke from him. He ran back, nursing his blisters, sobbing with shock and fright. “Now,” I said, “you say the Warden has not yet risen. Go and tell him to rise. I shall expect to see him here before that candle stub has burned out.”

This time, I was obeyed.

I glanced at Mazlek, and his eyes had narrowed behind the mask in a malicious grin, proud of me and my ferocious powers. I sat down to wait, and watched the door across the yellow velvet hump of my belly.

In fact, the Warden was not long in coming, masked and ringed, yet still in his bedrobe. He took off the mask, bowed, and put it on again. I wondered if he had heard anything of the scene in the hall. I could see he wanted to draw nearer to the hearth where a fire was eating a breakfast of loss. He shivered meaningfully, but I sat where I was and left him to suffer. I was not certain how I should begin my interrogation, or even if I had been wise to start with him, and any advantage was a comfort.

“Good morning, Warden. I find I must thank you for my wardrobe.”

“Nothing.” He bowed again.

“Your hospitality is most welcome to the Lord Vazkor and myself.”

“I—I trust the Javhovor is in better health today—some illness on the journey, I believe.”

I noted that he had called Vazkor “Javhovor” only, not “overlord.”

“No illness,” I said carefully, “merely fatigue. But Eshkorek will provide him with rest.” My host gave a little nervous laugh. “Tell me,” I said, “this is surely a fortress; why is there no garrison?”

“Oh, but there has been no garrison for many, many years. A remote spot, and very little to capture, even if an army should cross the mountains from Purple Valley.”

“As it well may,” I said. He started. “You surely know of the havoc we left behind us, Warden? It would be advisable for the Cities of White Desert to hold together under this threat.” Again a little start, as if I had probed into a bad tooth. Certainly there was trouble then, for Vazkor, and so perhaps for myself, but I set it aside. “I am curious, Warden,” I said. “I am curious because, if there is no garrison, why is there a holding here at all?”

“A—matter of policy,” he said, very stiffly, and I could tell I had touched a nerve once more, but a different decay this time, possibly more rotten than the first.

“Then your soldiers are guarding nothing?”

“No, indeed—except, in theory, the tower.”

Liar.

I nodded, and, after a minute’s polite talk, sent him graciously away. I went to my room, and asked Mazlek to follow me.

“What do you know of the structural plan of the tower?” I asked him.

“Very little,” he said. “Stores and armories, private chambers above, below—kitchens, bathhouse, barracks—empty now.”

“And below that?”

“Cellars probably.”

Until that I had not been sure where my frenzied mental quest was taking me, drawing on my instincts only. But now I felt a rush of coldness through my body, knew I had grasped a piece of darkness, unseen, but vital.

“Cellars,” I repeated, “and under those—dungeons, Mazlek?”

I saw him check, as I had done.

“Yes,” he said, and stared at me.

Neither of us spoke of the sense of discovery which had come so abruptly. It was incredible, unthinkable. And yet, this tower: “My gift from the last Javhovor of Eshkorek Arnor,” Vazkor had said.

And so, Vazkor’s possession, Vazkor’s fortress, defense, prison.

“Mazlek,” I said. “After dark. The first hour. It should be quiet then.” And he nodded, so that I needed to say no more.

2

I did not mean to sleep at all that night, but tiredness made me lie on the curtained bed, and I dozed and woke up again in terrible starts. Dreams—faces, white with open eyes, staring, the stone bowl and its jumping fire ... Mazlek’s scratch on the door. I sat up and pulled myself from the bed. I felt afraid, heavy with fear. I opened the door, and he stood there, a low burning lamp in one hand, drawn knife in the other.

“Goddess,” he said, “I asked one of Vazkor’s men how to get to the wine cellars. Not as low as we’ll need to go, but near it, I thought. About an hour later I went there and searched them thoroughly. There seemed to be no way to get farther down, but there was luck with me. The old woman came into the cellars by the stairs from the kitchen.”

“Did she see you, Mazlek?”

“No. I hid myself, but little need. I think her sight is weak, and her mind is worse. There is a moving panel, and steps beyond.”

“Does it open only to her?”

“No, goddess. When she had come back, and was gone again, I tried the place—a harlot of a wall, open to anyone.” For a moment he paused, the light flickering softly on his mask. Then he said, “She carried food of a kind, slops in a bowl. When she came back, she did not bring it with her.”

“Mazlek,” I said. My heartbeat was a fiery pain under my breast.

“If you would prefer to remain here, goddess, I will go there alone.”

“No,” I said.

He nodded, and turned away down the stairway, and I followed him.

I did not believe it, even then—could not let myself believe it. Yet I knew, with desperate certainty. Each step downward made me more impatient for the next, but, at the same moment, I was terrified.

It was a long way. Abruptly we reached the black vaulted place where they kept their wine and oil, and almost mesmerized by the endless winding stairs, I stumbled. Mazlek steadied me and I clutched his arm.

“Mazlek,” I said hoarsely, “do you believe the prisoner here is who I believe it to be—or am I mad?”

“Asren, Phoenix, Javhovor of Ezlann,” he said, as hoarsely as I.

I let out my breath in a stifled sigh.

“Yes, Mazlek. Yes.”

His hand settled on half invisible notchings in the wall. I thought it would not open, and almost screamed, but there came a soft grinding sound, and an area of dark stone slid sideways. Beyond, the light tripped itself on the worn treads of thirty steps, which I counted irresistibly as we descended, insanely struggling to keep my hysteria in check. Mazlek, too, was unsteady. The light flicked and slipped on the walls, and I heard his breathing, harsh and uneven.

There was a smell of death—the smell of a tomb.

We reached a stone floor; on either side walls pressed close—a narrow passage. At the end of the passage, a wooden door, simply bolted on the outside.

We stopped, staring at the door. Impossible that in that moment of finding we stood there petrified. Then I ran toward the door, breaking my nails as I scrabbled at bolts, and Mazlek was there too in a second, reaching for others.

The door jerked, and we pulled it open.

The shuddering lamplight jumped on a tiny oblong room, windowless, and carpeted by reeking sacking.

A figure sat facing us, cross-legged, covered in the rags and dirt of its imprisonment. Young, male, silent.

Fair hair, streaked and matted, lay on the shoulders in tangled coils. Slowly the face was raised, catching a little of the light. Black-blue eyes looked into mine. Under the filth, a delicacy, chiseled too fine perhaps, beauty, yet not feminine in the least. ...

“My lord,” I whispered, “Asren—”

I took a step forward, but Mazlek’s hand fell brutal and burning on my shoulder.

“No, goddess.” His voice was tight, bruising as his fingers.

“Why...? Why, Mazlek? Let me go.”

But I knew already. Neither he nor I could hold me back from a brink I had already fallen into.

The boy in the oblong room gave a little gurgling groan, and pulled himself away from the light of the lamp into one corner, where he curled himself into the protection of the fetal position.

I stood very still in the doorway, Mazlek behind, no longer any goal ahead of us, for we had found what we sought—Asren, Phoenix, Javhovor: but behind the eyes—nothing; behind the face—nothing. A brainless, helpless, whimpering thing, trapped in a body we remembered.

“Where is he?” I asked Vazkor.

“Who?”

“The Javhovor, my husband. He was with me before Oparr came.”

“The Javhovor is gone, goddess; he need trouble you no more.”

I remembered many things as I stood in the doorway. I remembered that never once had Vazkor spoken of him as if he were dead. I remembered Vazkor’s story that I had been sick because Asren had tried to poison me—a story I did not believe even then. I remembered the underground room with its draperies and littered floor, and, at the center, gold and precious stuff—the fantastic tomb-case—the empty tombcase. I remembered the Council at Za where the dead man who had been Eshkorek’s High-Lord screeched at me, “Vazkor’s witch-whore!” And the words took on a new meaning, for he must have known what had been sent to rot in his tower fortress—his propitiatory gift to the usurper. I remembered the lost word in the jeweled book of beasts. I remembered—

“Goddess,” Mazlek said.

“Yes,” I said, “yes. I know.”

I stared into the cell again. The creature which had been Asren had uncurled itself, and lay with its back to us on the sacks. My whole body was one throbbing wound of pity, and of disgust—I could not help it, I could not help it.

“Mazlek,” I whispered, “what now? We cannot leave him here—”

“No, goddess. But he is like a child. And afraid. If I take him by force he’ll scream, wake the Warden’s guards and Vazkor’s jackals.”

“Like a child,” I said.

I dreamed I was with Asren, a strange dream, for, though I knew it to be him, he seemed little more than a child. ...

He had turned now, was facing me. The vacant black-blue eyes followed the swinging movement of the yellow silks hanging over my hair. I took Mazlek’s knife and cut one of the strings. I shuddered as I entered the stinking room, but thrust my revulsion down. It was so unimportant. If I had loved, then I must love still ... I held out the yellow silk, the amber marigold shimmering at its end. He gazed at it, and did not flinch from me when I kneeled down beside him. One hand reached up, patted at the shiny toy.

There was a little spark of interest in the wide-open eyes. I put it into his hand.

“Come, Asren,” I said softly. I stroked the matted filthy hair from his face, and took his free hand. He let me draw him to his feet. At the door Mazlek took his other arm.

“Come, my lord,” he said.

I could not see him weeping because of the mask, but the tears were falling under it across his breast in dark streaks.

We left the dungeon, went through the cellars, and up the endless stairs to my chamber. Asren did not make a sound; fascinated by the piece of amber, he did not seem to notice anything else.

3

I went to Vazkor in the morning.

There was a man at his door, as Mazlek had said, but it was easy for me to get by him. It was early, but Vazkor was up, fully dressed though unmasked, seated at a table by the open window, reading from papers stretched before him. I had thought he might still be weak or ill, but he seemed neither. Perhaps my own distress gave his looks, for me, a visual edge, making him invulnerable, cruel and strong.

He rose, and stood looking at me, and at my borrowed clothes.

“Good morning, goddess. I must ask Eshkorek for a golden mask for you.”

“Vazkor,” I said, “I have found Asren.”

His face altered, a slight shifting of the dark planes. Impassively he said, “Really? It must have been unpleasant for you.”

“There is more to it than my displeasure. I have found him, and now I have him in my room. He is under my protection. What you have done to him is unspeakable—unforgiveable—I shall not let you do anything further.”

He regarded me a moment or so longer, then he turned away, and shuffled the papers together on the table.

“If you wish to act as his nursemaid, that is your own affair, goddess. You will have to feed and clothe him, bathe him, help him to achieve his human functions, and cleanse him afterward. Hardly a task I would have designated to your care. However, if it will ease your mind. I would only ask you not to overtax your own strength. You will have a child of your own shortly.”

“A child?” I said softly, feeling I would choke. “A child?Your seed, Vazkor. A thing which will carry, no doubt, the likeness of its sire. Why did you not kill him? Why did you kill only the brain?”

“He may still be of use to me. In his present state I can control him when and how I wish.”

“No,” I said.

“For the present, no,” he amended. “I am glad you have rescued him, goddess. You have perhaps anticipated events in a very fortunate manner.”

“You will not hurt him anymore,” I said.

“You forget, goddess, you also have destroyed men without reason. Your Mazlek will recall, I think, the wagoners you killed, simply to prove they were yours. Perhaps that will be your answer to me—to kill Asren when I come for him.”

I left him, and returning to my room, I thought of how I had kneeled by him in the cave, and wept because of him, and I felt I should go mad.

Yet, I had Asren safe for a while. For a while the black shadow would not trouble us.

He did not seem properly aware of his new surroundings. I could not tell if he were any happier or not.

It was not I, after all, but the limping girl who attended to his bodily needs; she had seen to it before, and it did not appear to upset her. I hated myself then because I could not do these things for him, gave myself no peace, and yet, they were so alien to my own needs. ... Perhaps I could have learned in time.

But when he was clean, she would bring him in to me and I would dress him and feed him, like a small child. I do not recall there was any pleasure in this for me, any oblique maternal gratification. I remember I often cried as I did it, quietly, so as not to confuse him with my tears. He was easily confused, or scared, as a little child would have been. Rain beyond the window, some noise lower in the tower, the door of my room opened suddenly—any of these could shock him into hiding behind the nearest piece of furniture.

My days were absorbed in trying to occupy him—a piece of jewelry to play with, the shadows of my hands on the wall made into some animal shape, or a bird with finger wings. I found a way to the battlemented roof, and I would walk him there, Mazlek behind me, up and down, and around by the bleak parapet. Mazlek caught a mouse in the storeroom and brought it for him. We fed it scraps of cheese and bread, and it grew tame very quickly, and showed no desire to leave. Asren liked to watch the mouse, and stroke it when I held it for him. At these times that faint, far-off gleam of interest would come into his face, and I would grasp at the hopeless hope that I could repair his mind, and teach him to be as he was. But there was nothing left for me to heal. Nothing. He slept on a mattress by my bed; he could have had the bed, I the mattress, but the curtains frightened him and he would not sleep there. In the night I would lie awake listening to him breathe in sleep, calmly, sweetly. I could look at his face, sleep-smoothed, and see him as he had been, as I had never seen him then.

Besides all my time, I gave him all the love that remained unsoured within me. He had rejected me before, but now I was only a symbol to him, a security, and so he accepted the hand holding his, my caress on his face, and seemed comforted by them. Yet to me, it was a spoiled thing, almost necrophiliac, this embrace given to a body which would have thrust me off had it remembered, too dead now to know who embraced it.

Mazlek guarded us silently, closed in his own hell. He never spoke to Asren, but if he had to call him it was always by the meaningless title of “lord.”

It seemed a long while then, but I do not think it was so very long. Suddenly I came out of the half-dream in which I had been living. It occurred to me that days had passed, and that I did not know Vazkor’s position, that I must learn of it, because it would affect Asren—this much Vazkor had implied.

Of course, he had some use for him, though obscure to me now. Why else would Vazkor, who wasted nothing, no one, have kept him alive here?

That afternoon, when we went to walk along the parapet, I saw an Ezlann man standing in one of the jutting alcoves of the wall, and drew Asren back out of sight. A sentry, the first Vazkor had set. And he did not face south toward the valley, but north and west toward Eshkorek Arnor and the Cities of the desert.

I took Asren below. I did not want them to see him as he was.

A rose-red evening washed against the mountains, swimming with stars.

Mazlek told me Vazkor had called his men together in the hall, and instructed the Warden he should be present. The messenger, it seemed, had returned in the small hours from Eshkorek. For all I felt I did not sleep, I must have slept then, and had not heard the bridge grate out across its sinister moat, the hoofbeats, and weary steps in the courtyard. I left Mazlek to guard the door, and Asren inside it, and went alone downstairs to the hall.

A murky firelight and candle haze lay unevenly over the oval room. At the long table eight of Vazkor’s men sat unmasked and openly drinking. The Warden with his guard stood near the hearth, and seemed uneasy. When I entered he glanced up at me nervously. Vazkor was not yet here.

“I expect we shall have some news now,” the Warden said.

“I expect we shall.”

I sat near the table in a tall chair, and waited.

When he entered, I could tell easily, without looking up. There was a contraction of movement all around me. The Warden, fidgeting and bowing, Vazkor’s men coming to their feet, unembarrassed by their wine jars—presumably they knew how little he cared for certain City niceties.

He came to my chair and stopped, holding out a polite arm.

“Goddess.”

I rose and let him lead me to the table. He set me on his right, and pointed the Warden to the opposite end. The golden wolf’s face turned, slowly, the hidden eyes examining each of them briefly—not me, but then, he knew me and there was no need.

“I sent a man to Eshkorek Arnor—perhaps you recall? Ah, yes, Warden. I see you do. It seems there is some trouble from the south—Purple Valley in arms. The desert Cities have wisely vowed to strengthen their alliance. Unwisely, they have elected a new overlord.”

He spoke offhandedly; I wondered how much it cost him to speak in this way, with the foundations of his ambition rocking under him. The Warden gasped and began to splutter something.

Vazkor cut him crisply short. “Your condolences are premature, sir. I am not yet dead.” The Warden’s unmasked face paled to a sludgy yellow, and he was quiet. “You must understand,” Vazkor continued,

“that Kmiss, Ammath, So-Ess, Za, and Ezlann have combined forces to smash the valley armies. They are also sending a small detachment to these mountains in order to smash me. About two hundred men—a great amount, it seems, but then they were not sure how many troops I had brought with me.

Eshkorek has not yet sent men against me, but she will, no doubt, when pressed.”

The captain of Vazkor’s guard got to his feet, giving vent to some curse on Eshkorek’s faithlessness.

“Overlord—”

“No need for panic, captain. I have kept one security. There is a charge that not the gods but I—by some incredible means—struck down Asren Javhovor. They have said they consider the evidence against him—his attempted murder of the goddess—was false, and they have elected their new lord out of the Ezlann royal house as a proof. Now, gentlemen, Asren Javhovor is still alive.”

Startled exclamations along the table, except from the Warden, of course, who stared uneasily at his rings.

Vazkor waited for the outcry to subside. Then he said, in a very cool and measured voice: “What Asren tried to do was foolish. His loyal people would have killed him themselves, torn him apart in the streets, if they had been given his body when he collapsed. But the goddess was merciful, and desired no vengeance. I had him declared dead, and then I sent him here, where he has been a prisoner under the authority of the Warden ever since. When our guests arrive, I shall tell them this, and present them with Asren. Most probably they will elect him overlord in place of their present choice. The grateful Asren will then reinstate me as High Commander of his armies.”

“Can you trust him?” the captain asked.

“Completely,” Vazkor said. “Asren’s mind has become somewhat—unstable, shall I say? And please do not forget, my divine wife has some influence.”

They glanced at me warily. He did not look at me at all. He imagined I would see the foolishness of speaking now, of telling them whose influence would truly direct Asren in the next moves of this game. It was a curious situation. Vazkor’s men did not know it was he who had destroyed Asren’s mind, and, though they could not fail to see, when he produced him, what Asren had become, there was no fear they would betray Vazkor’s manipulation—it was in their own interests that he succeed. As for possible traitors—how powerless. Myself—but I would be silent. Mazlek—but he was mine and would do as I did. The old woman and the girl—perhaps, but they were witless. Only the Warden presented any danger. I glanced at him, and he seemed abruptly aware of his trouble. As he quivered there in his seat, Vazkor turned to him.

“There are certain diplomatic errors in our present situation. It would be more fitting, Warden, if you were to return to your City of Eshkorek Arnor, before the next stage begins. Your presence here must be an embarrassment both to your master and yourself.”

It was obvious the man could not believe his luck. He bowed and thanked Vazkor profusely for such tactful kindness.

Vazkor rose, holding out his arm for me. Two of his men fell in behind us as we mounted the stairs to his room. Inside, he shut the door, and indicated for me a chair by the lowburning fire. I did not go to it.

“The Warden,” I said, “will naturally perish before he reaches the City.”

“Naturally,” he said, “and his men.”

“It is possible someone may find their bodies.”

“Not at all. This tower is well-equipped to take care of such things.”

I said nothing, and he drew off the wolf mask, and put it on the table.

“I think you understand now why Asren has been kept here all this while.”

“I understand. And I oppose you, Vazkor. You have done enough. He is not your horse to ride to market on.”

“When they are at the door, my sister, you may think differently.”

“Let it end here, then,” I said. “Both of us possess enough Power to go free with our lives.”

“I have used my life,” he said, “and I shall not stop now. I am not a wanderer. I know my road.” He sat down in the chair I had refused, and looked at me. His face was quite blank, completely closed, his eyes a steady bar of darkness that seemed to have no break. “Even you, my sister, see your life as a succession of units, a river, in which the men and women you meet are like islands. But you’re wrong.

Your vision is confined in the narrowness you have made. We are the sum of our achievements, nothing more and nothing less. The mountain road which led us here was built by a dead people none of us would remember otherwise. What we create is the only part of us which can survive, or has the right to.

Man is nothing, except to other men.”

I had no answer. There was no purpose in answering. I did not even marvel that he had spent so much of his philosophy on me. I put my hand on the door to go.

He said, “How long before the child comes?”

“Sixty days—eighty days—I think I have lost count. The month named for the peacock in Ezlann, so you said.”

“You understand that now it is officially Asren’s progeny,” he said to me. “For the moment at least. A detail, but you should try to remember.”

“There was a woman at Belhannor. A village healer. I did my best to be rid of what you gave me, but I failed. The result of my efforts may not be very beautiful.”

“The child will be perfect,” he said. “I am surprised you cannot see that. Your organs heal themselves from mortal wounds, and yet you expect your womb to succumb to a village abortion.”

Oddly, I had not thought of this, had not compared these separate yet related facts before. I realized I had stupidly still half-believed I would not bear. I opened the door and went out. It was dark, very dark, on the stairways of the tower.

Through the evening I heard the Warden’s preparations for his flight from the tower. He was to leave at dawn with all his few men. But not for Eshkorek Arnor. I did not know what Vazkor had planned for him—did not know if he or his guard would see to it.

Determined to sleep, to blot out any sound or sight of violence, I lay awake until the first red claw marks of the sun opened the sky.

There had been nothing. Yet neither were there hoofbeats on the bridge, riding away to the City.

The innocence of silence was too profound.

4

I took Asren to walk on the tower battlements, as I had not done since Vazkor’s men were posted there. It was a warm bright day, the blue wheel of the sky turning itself slowly overhead. Asren had become brave with the mouse, and was letting it run from one arm to the other, stroking it whenever it stopped still for a moment.

Perhaps thirty feet away the solitary sentry stood, his back to us, curious eyes averted. I had not felt safe to speak before.

“We must leave the tower,” I said softly to Mazlek. “Very soon, before the army of the new overlord arrives.” I told him of Vazkor’s plans, and Mazlek said nothing, but his right hand clenched on the parapet, clenched and unclenched rhythmically. “I do not know how we can do it,” I said. “Possibly at night. We can deal with the stray guards we may meet, but any uproar will bring Vazkor. I do not think I can fight Vazkor, his powers are superior to mine—I have told you this already. And the moat—how can we cross it without using the bridgeway, which will make more noise than anything else?”

Mazlek shook his head.

“Perhaps there are underground passages here, as in Belhannor, goddess. Most strongholds have them as a final means of escape during siege or attack. But it would be difficult to trace them. Vazkor’s wolves are not to be bought.”

“The old woman,” I said, “she may know, and she is too simple to betray any questions to him.”

The sentry stretched, removed his helm, scratched at his blond hair, and subsided once more into immobility.

“And beyond this place.” I said, “where can we go? No longer any shelter in the Cities.”

“Eastward from the mountains there are rock plains and areas of forest, marshes to the southeast and south, and then the sea. A wild land, good to be lost in if any were coming after,” Mazlek said.

“Deserted land?”

“Almost, goddess. A few tribal peoples, savage and war-mad, krarl against krarl, though, reportedly, they do no harm to out-clan strangers.”

“Then that is the desolation we must go to, to be safe for a time.”

It seemed a gray hopeless future for all of us, but there was no other way. Escape, the imperative need, left no margin for despair.

We walked around the oval enclosure, to lend authenticity to our presence there. The sentry’s eyes flickered over Asren as we passed, surprised, amused, totally unsympathetic, a man watching a half-wit capering at a fair. Vazkor had picked his creatures well—narrow, unintelligent men, good fighters, unafraid because they had no imagination, loyal because they responded to their own sense, and until now, there had always been enough food and wine, women and prestige; trustworthy in this last extremity because the old order had been good to them, and Vazkor seemed able to restore it.

We returned through the little door into the stone gut of the tower.

“I’ll bring her tonight, the old one,” Mazlek said, “when her work’s done.”

I nodded.

The mouse, darting on Asren’s shoulder, looked up at us from blood-drop eyes.

The day dragged its heels as I waited for her to come. The light in the windows thickened, blue as stained glass. A slender moon watered the peaks with highlights and shadows.

I sat on my bed, the curtains thrust well back, Asren beside me. Something had made him afraid; he cried and clung to me, and now I held him in my arms, and could not move because he would begin to cry again.

A soft knock came on the door. Mazlek entered, and the old woman followed, and stood gazing at me.

She had taken off her mask, presumably at Mazlek’s instruction, but her face was like a half-formed dough, pale, expressionless, and without depth. Round watery eyes blinked and blinked at me, and then at the man I held.

“I am to come for him?” she said. “The girl not to your liking?”

“No,” I said, “it has nothing to do with that. I want to ask you something.”

She blink-blinked at me.

“The cellars,” I said, “and under the cellars—are there any other passages?”

“Passages,” she said. She blinked. “Passages.”

“Passages which lead out of the tower. A way out.”

“The moat-bridge,” she said.

“Apart from the moat-bridge.”

She blinked.

“Under the tower,” I said, “a passage under the tower which leads out into the mountains.”

Asren stirred against me, and her eyes slipped from my masked face to him.

“Pretty one,” she said, and clucked as if to a pet animal.

Mazlek seized her shoulders, and spun her to face him.

“A passage out of the tower,” he hissed at her, and shook her. She squeaked and struggled.

“No way—no way!”

“Let her go, Mazlek,” I said wearily. He took her and thrust her outside, shutting the door on her round staring.

“This is useless,” I said. “We are in a trap.”

“I’ll search the cellars,” he said, “and below. There has to be some way, goddess.”

“Yes, there has to be, Mazlek. And soon.”

I turned to Asren, and saw he had fallen asleep against me. I reached to touch his hair, and, in that moment, I felt something thrust inside me, sharp, insistent, and very real. It was the first movement I had felt, the first proof I had had that the thing which swelled under my belly was animate, and I shuddered at the feel of it, as if I carried death, not life.

Mazlek searched, then. The cellars, the foul dungeon ways, the vaults and underground places of Tower-Eshkorek. And there was no exit to freedom, at least, none that he could find.

Four days had passed in that search. And on the fifth, about noon, a bell began to clang from the head of the fortress, a terrible sound, the most ancient noise of panic and expected violence.

Asren screamed, and the startled mouse leaped from his wrist, and up the curtains of the bed. I hurried to him, trying to shut the clamor out of his ears with soft words. Incredibly, my instincts of protection had dwarfed him, so that he seemed small enough for me to lift up and cradle in my arms.

Soon Mazlek came, to tell me what I did not need to be told. Vazkor’s sentry had made out the marching column a few miles away: the soldiers of the new overlord would reach us before nightfall.

It is easy to judge afterward, when all decisions are theoretic, in the quiet, when the outcome no longer matters. Perhaps I should have left the game to Vazkor, should have given up Asren to be his instrument for the short time it was necessary. There were other days ahead, beyond that time, when I could have fled with him, out of the shadow’s reach. And he would have understood, after all, nothing of the use to which he had been put.

And yet I could not let it happen, this final degradation, this final eclipse of his being. Asren, who had seemed to me in the Temple at Ezlann at once too innocent and too aware to have been drawn in. ...

There were many men, more than two hundred, all in all, I think. They settled about the tower, and lit their night fires to shine on the mixed liveries of the five Cities of White Desert, and of Eshkorek Arnor, for she too had sent her quota of power in the end. They did nothing, simply sat around us in a ring, letting us see what was possible to them.

Vazkor’s man rode out to them when the moon rose, nervous, for all his supposed immunity as a messenger; he knew very well they had half a mind to shoot him on sight. Still, the archers held their hands, and he got to their commander and delivered Vazkor’s words: that he held Asren alive, had protected him here, as his lord, since the night of the mob in Ezlann, that Asren would speak for him.

There was some confusion in the camp. The commander—a prince of Za, who had known Asren well—demanded he be shown an hour after dawn at a low window in the tower. If the appearance did not take place, or he was unconvinced, their cannon would open fire on the fortress, and not cease until they had razed it. This arranged, he let the messenger go.

Mazlek told me all this, swiftly, in my room.

I pulled Asren gently to his feet.

“Take him,” I said to Mazlek. “Go now, quickly. You have searched the lower reaches of the tower, you must know a hundred hiding places there; perhaps they will not find you. And if the tower falls it should be far safer.”

“And you?” he said to me.

“You know I cannot die, Mazlek,” I said. “There is no need to fear for me. Only take him now, before they come for him. I will delay Vazkor as best I can.”

Mazlek did as I told him, only Asren hung back, staring at me, but I found the mouse among the curtains and gave it to him, and at last Mazlek got him away and down the stairs.

It was a confused plan, a stupid plan. But there was so little I could do, so few ways open to me.

Vazkor did not come for a long while, he was so sure of me.

He knocked courteously at the bolted door, and when I did not answer, and the door did not give, two of his men set their shoulders to it and, after a time, they and it fell into my room. At another hour, such a sight might have been very funny. Vazkor walked into the room while they were still picking themselves up and cursing.

“Where?” he said to me. Only this one word.

I had always been afraid of him in a way, though an almost willing and sexual way, perhaps. But now I was terrified, truly and utterly.

“Where?” he said again.

“If you assume I have hidden something, why should I tell you where it is hidden? That rather destroys the point, does it not?”

He came across to me, and pulled me from the chair. He was unmasked and his face was white, his eyes extraordinarily black. The heat of anger can be brutal, but his cold anger was horrible; there seemed no limit to what it would do, and no act, however crucial, seemed likely to appease it

“Tell me,” he said, “where he is.”

His eyes appeared to expand, to draw me helplessly downward. I felt weightless, floating ... useless to resist, simple to tell him what I had done ... Yet I, too, knew this art of Power, and I pulled free of him, a sensation so physical I seemed bruised after it.

“No, Vazkor.”

“An hour to dawn,” he said, “and then an hour after it. After that, their cannon, and the roof down over our heads.”

“It does not matter to me,” I said.

He pushed up my mask and hit me across the face, again and again. I lost count of the times he hit me.

There was no pain. One of the black rings on his fingers had cut my cheek, and warm salt blood ran in at the corner of my mouth. After a while, I realized he had stopped. I sat masked in my chair, looking at him. The two men had gone and the door was closed.

“You realize, goddess, you are an ideal victim for any torture I care to devise—your healing skin will provide you with endless variations of repeatable agony. And while this is in progress, my men will search the tower thoroughly. We shall find him, whatever happens. There is no point in your suffering unnecessarily.”

I gave a little coughing laugh, for quite suddenly I was no longer afraid of him.

“You can do nothing to me,” I said. “I am your sister, you remember. I have touched my own body with fire, and have not been burned. And, Vazkor, the very fact that you require me to tell you anything proves to me you think there is some chance you may otherwise find nothing.”

He turned away from me, went to the window shutter and pulled it open. The dark sky was paling. He stood there a moment, then he turned and got me from the chair once again, and pulled me by my hand from the room and down the stairs.

I was light-headed from the beating he had given me, and, at first, what he was doing made no sense.

We went deep, that same way Mazlek and I had gone. When we reached the wine cellars he did not, at first, touch the wall panel, but led me up and down the length and breadth of them all. There were signs of a recent search—his men had been violent, but too frenzied perhaps to be completely thorough. It came to me then why he had brought me here. Asren, with his child’s instincts, still tied by the security he had found with me, might sense my nearness and run to me from whatever covering Mazlek had found for him. I stopped at once, but Vazkor pulled me on.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” he answered. “Talk all you want. He will find you the sooner.”

The cellars covered, he took me to the panel, and moved it. He dragged me down the steps into the narrow dismal passage beyond. I saw again the wooden door, open as we had left it, and through it, the oblong, stinking, black horror of that room. Not here—surely never here. He pulled me to the doorway, and held me there, turning his head to inspect each corner. We went inside, and he stirred the sacking with his boot. Nothing moved. We went out.

Vazkor touched the right-hand wall, brushed a series of markings with his fingers. Part of the wall groaned aside and another dark corridor lay beyond. Had Mazlek found this way? Vazkor urged me into it.

There was no light with us, yet somehow I could see. Doors lay at intervals along the passage, iron doors with little gratings, each bolted on the outside. A flight of steps led downward to a dark hollow hall. Water dripped, black flickering shadows dipped and danced on stone pillars holding up a vault of ceiling. The corrupt odor of ancient water gone rotten pressed itself into my nostrils. Ghosts clamored.

Toward the far end of the hall a pile of masonry lay in a mountain of crumbled shapes, the relics of an earlier wall. Straw was scattered there and along the floor.

We began to walk across the open space between the pillars, toward the pile. It was very quiet except for the sluggish drip of water. Our footsteps sounded sharply.

In the straw something darted from my feet, back a little way, and then sat staring at me from bright red eyes. A mouse.

My heart clenched painfully. Vazkor’s hand on my arm drew me relentlessly forward.

“Past dawn now, goddess,” he said.

I willed that Asren would not recognize that sound, that familiar sound, by which he had heard Mazlek address me so often.

There was a scuttle of movement among the battered blocks of the fallen wall. Only his head emerged, the blank beautiful face almost expectant, the wide eyes searching for me.

“Asren,” Vazkor said. “Come out, Asren.”

Behind us both the swift hiss of breath, the rasp of a blade coming out of its scabbard. Vazkor whipped around, jumped sideways, and Mazlek’s sword slashed lightly, cheated of its aim, across his breast.

There was one second of immobility as the three of us stood in tableau. Then a kind of glitter in the air, a kind of bright flicker that might have been a trick of the eyes. Mazlek’s sword clattered on the stone flags; his body leaned sideways and fell. I ran to him, but he was dead, and his skin was very cold.

On my knees still, I looked up, and saw Vazkor standing by one of the pillars, and Asren, out of the pile now, walking toward him, a puppet already, completely under his control.

“Vazkor!” I shouted.

He turned and looked at me, and, at once, as if a mechanism had been halted, Asren stopped.

“Goddess,” Vazkor said, “your interference in this matter will cease. I am going to take him above now, to a lower window in the tower, where he will speak to them.”

“No,” I said.

“Except in this matter, he is useless to me,” Vazkor said, “and so, if you prefer it, he can die now, and we will all suffer together.”

His hand moved on the pillar. There came a deep rusty screaming from under the floor, a trembling like an earth quake. Blocks slid backward into other blocks, leaving, in place of that open area we had crossed earlier, a large oval well of greenish-stippled stone. In the depths of it, water, black as oil, oozed and quivered, and was never entirely still.

“Moat water,” Vazkor said.

I shivered sickly, my hair prickling, feeling that same dread I had experienced when we rode across the bridge.

“The water is not empty,” Vazkor said. “Living things. The Warden and his men know them intimately.

Asren too can come to know them, if you so desire.”

“No!” I screamed at him. I scrambled to my feet in panic.

“Goddess,” he said, “you cannot stop me.”

“My Powers,” I whispered.

“Your Powers? You think they are superior, perhaps, to my own.”

“They are the same,” I said.

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “No, goddess. There is something you should understand, though a curious time and place in which to tell you, no doubt. There is a great difference between us and what we can command. Your Powers are intuitive, untested and unstable. My Power is learned, hardened and tried. Yes, goddess, learned. No, I am not of your Lost Race, after all. My father was a warlord of Eshkorek, a dabbler in magic. My mother came of the Dark People, a girl he raped on his way to one of the toy battles they played at in the old days. I heard of the legend early—the legend of the Power and the Second Coming. I set myself to work. He must have had some stunted ability, the man who fathered me, something which took root in me. I learned very well. By fourteen I had been hounded and stoned out of my village because of it. Men fear a magician, and when I came to the Cities, and found they looked only for a coming of goddesses, not gods, I thought my road was closed to me. Fortunately, I had enough of my father’s looks to pass as a citizen, despite my darkness. I enlisted in the armies of the Javhovor of Ezlann, and, by dint of apparent courage, and also by bribery and intrigue, I became at last High Commander. And then, goddess, you were found for me.”

My brain hummed; I felt in me a terrible stirring. He had thought to silence me forever because he had built himself from clay, and I was still unformed. But he had forgotten the hubris which had grown in me, the ancient contempt for humanity which he himself had helped to foster. White-hot lava began to bubble in my veins, my face set like a cold white stone, so that I drew off the lynx mask and felt no nakedness, only the sense that I could create fear. And I saw him flinch, very slightly, as he had that first time he saw my face.

“Vazkor,” I said, “you are a human man.”

“I have still deceived you very well. In Ezlann, when you were sick and I set the blame on Asren, you did not believe me. Yet did you not think your illness very opportune? I sent you that illness to serve my purpose, and you did not guess it, I think. And the balcony, do you remember that, when I controlled your movements and your mind as easily as I can this creature who was Asren?”

I sensed the scrabbling behind his level voice, the hands clinging onto the rocks, and the drop below. I scarcely heard what he said.

“Vazkor,” I repeated, “you are a human man. You can die.”

“You forget what Asren told you, goddess. There was an assassin who stabbed me mortally and I survived.”

“Because you willed it,” I said.

“And I shall cease wanting life?”

“Yes, when you can no longer order it.”

I saw the fire leap from his pupils, clear this time, and very bright, and the deep fury answered from the core of my brain. A shaft shot out, blazing, and caught his little death-wish for me, and contained it, and turned it. I seemed much larger than Vazkor, taller, burning. I felt his Power shrivel and draw back, and I pressed after it, pursuing it into the very brain-cave of its lair, into the dark places of Vazkor’s mind. And there I found the diamond spark of his knowledge, down the black corridors of the skull, which in most of mankind are closed and empty, but which in Vazkor were open and alive. I found the spark, the little hard, bright stone, and I scorched it to ashes, destroyed it without compunction, because he had claimed he was my brother, and was only a man.

I drew back. The light faded. I felt small and empty and afraid. By the pillar Vazkor stood, and I saw what I had done to him. I called out his name, but he only stared at me. His eyes flickered, as the blinded inner eye swiveled desperately to each of those doors of ability I had closed forever. As he had killed that part of Asren’s brain which made him a thinking man, so I had killed that part of Vazkor’s which made him a magician, and a god. The Power in him was dead.

I do not know if he was aware of what he did. He took several steps backward, and the last unbalanced him over the lip of the black moat pool. Hardly a splash, the water was so thick and turgid. And then a little dazzling movement all around him, as though the water itself were running to welcome a guest.

Vazkor screamed. The water reddened, sparkled. Vazkor screamed.

I put my hands over my ears and turned away, and began to scream also.

Silence came, only the drip of the water sounded. The liquid of the pool was black, and empty.

“Asren,” I called softly, “we are safe now.”

I was weeping and could not see properly. I found the lynx mask, and put it on, and stumbled across the straw toward him. The noise had terrified him. I put my arms around him, and rocked him gently in the dark.

The cannon began quite suddenly. I had forgotten them.

At first the noise seemed far away, thunder beyond the hills. Soon other noises came, bursting and tearing sounds, the thud of rooms collapsing above.

Smoke drifted through to us, and a dull red light. There were great cracks spreading on the vault above.

At the far end of the hall, a pillar split slowly from end to end, buckled and collapsed. The gray avalanche gushed through.

Asren whimpered. I pressed his head to my breast, leaned over him as best I could, sheltering him with my body.

A great roaring came swooping to us like a bird of prey. For the first time I felt terror as the ceiling sagged and broke above me. Delicate little pieces scattered like a fine rain, and then the slabs broke away from the flooring overhead.

There was no more time to be afraid.