The White Serpent

20 Death and Life

It was a place of blackness, of untextured night sleeker than water. But out of the black sprang a flame.

And the flame gathered itself, and grew.

The flame became flesh.

Became a woman of unnatural height, white as the snow upon a mountain.

A white body, and eight white arms stretched in rays . . . beneath, the torso ended in the tail of a great snake; the coils like alabaster, scalloped by scales that gleamed faintly, as they ceaselessly stirred.

Far above, framed by a snow-cloud of hair which was also a whirlpool of serpents (twisting, spitting to her shoulders), a pale face, set with a devouring stare of colorless ice. Or colorless fire.

Aztira’s face.

Then the sheen of her became unbearably effulgent—and went out.

Only the untextured blackness remained, sleeker than water.

The moon was rising as she left the temple. The Star was already aloft, and west and east the sky was a clear magenta, deepening into night only at the zenith.

From the height of the temple terrace, the young woman had an encompassing vantage of the city, spread around and about her down to its ring of walls. Outside these walls the flattened landscape had swum into nothingness. The city itself had the look of an artifact, a small assembly of carven buildings on the board of some Vis war game. The Star and the stained moon dyed it like a fiery bone.

The girl abandoned her height, descending a broad paved stairway between garden slopes of sculpted trees, basins and arcs of water.

Her whiteness glimmered in the hot dusk, if not so emphatically as in the temple. That which she had created there, on the altar, the image of Inner Self symbolized as the goddess, had probably been witnessed, though not a sigh penetrated the sanctum. It was to her a spiritual exercise, a condition of life, similar to the walk she took, morning or evening, through the wide avenues of Ashnesee, or across the plain beyond, where the wind blew sometimes warm and saline from the jungle-forests, or a slinking tirr might come to mouth her footsteps or rub its nightmare head, in abasement, on the dust. She need have no fear of tirr, and in the city of her kind, she was foremost among equals.

At the bottom of the temple terraces, two men of the Amanackire stood beneath a cibba tree, maybe by design, to look at her. Their whiteness, like hers, shone in the umbra of tree and night.

Greetings, Aztira.

They did not speak aloud, but within. And in words only approximately.

In the same fashion, she replied, and walked on, along one of the marble roads without a name, between the pale palaces.

Silence lay on the city. Like the most primal of creatures, these people had no vocal conversation, sounds rarely escaped them. They moved with a deftness nearly noiseless. They seldom inclined to music, and perhaps never sang. Their children, few, for birth was controlled and selective among them, were as quiet as they.

The road was lined solely by palaces, with here and there an obelisk or shrine. These places, some now blooming into lamplight, were interspersed with parks and groves. There was very little else in Ashnesee. Beneath the mansions and the lawns, under the streets, the city was cut by tunnels and chambers, generally manmade, where the maintenance of everyday living went on. Ashnesee was served by slaves, and had been built by slaves. Once dark Thaddrians, Otts and Corhls, and darker Zakors, they were by now a mingled, molded race, some generations bred to their duties and their station.

After walking for the half of one hour, meeting no other, Aztira reached her house. It rose on an eminence, unwalled but moated by a mosaic courtyard. Near the stair was a tall pillared edifice, the Raldnor Shrine. From this proximity the mansion of Aztira was to be identified.

She went up the stair, over the mosaic, and through opened doors. Beyond the unlit vestibule, whose plaster was marked with dimmed pictures, lay the round painted hall of an Amanackire palace.

Ghostly lotus lamps floated on slender chains in the high ceiling. No slave had yet come to kindle them.

Aztira crossed through the hall, climbed more steps, proceeded into the braincase of a tower, a large bare room, with one large window of smoldering glass.

Before this window, which faced east, Aztira stopped. Her stillness was like that of an icon, she did not seem to breathe.

Her entire consciousness was centered at the core of her mind. She was listening, but not for any kind of sound.

In the Lowlands, a village of five huts—this was her birthplace. She was born pale-eyed, and perhaps her mother had misliked her gaze. When the child’s hair began to come like silver flax, they knew, and took her to a temple.

Her parents, unremembered, and vanished in her first year, were pure yellow-fair Lowlander, accustomed to mind-speech as to need. Otherwise ignorant, solitary, fixed. From such stock the albino strain normally emerged.

Before she could walk, or talk in the verbal sense (Lowland children from the initial months were capable of a sure if eccentric telepathy), Aztira was in Hamos, that xenophobic city of the south Plains. Here she grew up among her own, those with whom she had no ties of blood, and here she was schooled, as all such children were, a process which incidentally discovered among them the most adept, the most flawlessly Of Anackire.

There was no love, and there was no kindness, not in that inner reach. But Aztira did not miss love or kindness, for neither was there any injustice or cruelty shown her. There could be no lies. Though educated to use the spoken language forms of Vis—and, too, of the blond Sister Continent beyond the seas—communication rested on the hundred thousand nuances of mental dialogue. It was learnt early, how to parry and to protect the insights and signals of the mind. For, unlike the merchanting telepaths of Vardath or Moih, these did not give to tactful atrophy any of their supernatural gift. The Amanackire were also children of Truth.

They were a cold people, so the Vis had always named them, even at the gold-haired periphery of their tribe. What need had they for warmth? Passion and effusion were the sugar and salt with which the mind-blinded spiced the turning meat of their relationships. What the Amanackire desired they asked, and what they would not render they refused. Now, because they had grown powerful and self-sufficient, because their legend had imbued all Vis, because they were coming to believe that they were gods, they did not hanker after human things.

What was ambition? If wanted, advantage might be taken. And what was love ... a carnal urge that in the Lowlander was subject to command—or only the product of fear—terror of loneliness or death—which states the pure Lowlander had almost eradicated, and which the Amanackire had almost ceased to know.

For the soul continued forever. And (like a mild breeze the other intuition moved upon them), the flesh itself might be sustained.

When she was twelve, a year after she became a woman in the physical sense, Aztira had found herself capable of healing.

One of her fellows had fallen, the skin undone. Aztira knit up the skin again, and drew off the scar like smoke into the air. The motive had been the empathy of startled pain. The fount, herself. To heal was native to her. In fact, she had effected some slight cures before, not understanding what she did.

There were other abilities. In Hamos, especially the inner enclave of Hamos, they were a normalcy.

In the Women’s House, which Aztira had now entered, leaving the fostering of her guardians—never anything resembling kin—Aztira practiced the psychic lore of the antique temples. She unbound in herself those arts that—outside, Vis-over—were the tricks of magician-priesthoods, and the substance of myth.

She was aware of the other universe beyond the stones and seals of her Lowland city. Sometimes she saw actual Vis, the beings of this outcast world. They were as alien to her as she to them, in appearance and attitude. She was used to her own kind. The darkness of the Vis perturbed her, even. She had been taught these dark races were the lords of the planet once, in a time which had itself succeeded an earlier unlike era. She recognized the Vis as mortal.

A priestess of a clandestine sanctuary, a scholarly, wise child, she reached her seventeenth year in Hamos, having experienced nothing else. She had had three lovers, perused a multitude of books, unleashed in her body powers that neither alarmed nor distorted her notions of self. She had grasped the fundamental meaning of that which was called Amanackire.

Although there, was positive sexual differentiation among the Amanackire, there was no submission to gender. In prior history, the Lowlands had upheld a matriarchy. While such as Moih now aped the Vis way, ruled by councils of males, the center of Hamos was a council comprising male and female proportionally.

Before this council, Aztira was summoned. She was just seventeen, having no fears or doubts on the matter of anything.

She was among the most adept of the Amanackire at Hamos, and the moment had arrived when the existence should be made known to her of Ashnesee.

In an amorphous, telepath’s way, she had already intercepted atmospheric currents to do with the City of the West.

Now they told her, in solid terms of geography and building and hidden routes. The abstraction was given dimensional reality. Ashnesee was a city and a kingdom. It was, moreover, an intention. Once before, the temporal power of the Lowlanders had been thrown down. Presently Amrek the Genocide would have crushed all trace of them from the earth. Amrek’s memory, shunned where possible among the Vis, had survived in black freshness with Aztira’s people: He was enthroned in their mythos beside the messiah, Raldnor. For where Raldnor had been the life-granting spring of Anackire, Amrek was the anti-life. They were, in the being of the Balance, one thing. As the people of the Plains now resumed a former name on the tongue of Vis—the Shadowless—so Amrek was the Shadow. And, if he had gone, body and ego, into the past, yet his elemental presence was retained in the old hatred, the antipathy between races. In New Alisaar, broken in all but material dues from the conqueror Shansars, and in Free Zakorian Ylmeshd to the northwest, and in Dorthar itself, the shining hub of Vis, which in embracing the godhead of Anackire had degraded and corrupted her to an idol—there and otherwhere, the Shadow sifted and slunk, and stretched itself. In every honey skin and skin of bronze and jet, in every skein of sable hair and every darkened eye—there, the Shadow was, and waited.

Against this, Ashnesee had been raised.

A fortress. A graven image of another thing, which only was. A sword of snow. The exacting completing second half of the endless Balance. A serpent all whiteness poised upon its tail.

Into herself Aztira accepted Ashnesee, the voluntary conception of a child.

The idea had a symmetry not one of her race could deny.

The very name itself, worked a magic within her, like the melody of that sleeping sea she had also only heard of. It was the true name of the oldest city of her kind—Ashnesea—the rusted blade left lying south of south on the Plains.

Slaves of the Vis race had been herded to the building of this reincarnation of Ashnesee. It lay innermost in the thick fur of the dark beast’s back, the jungles of the northern west. And close to malignant hating Zakoris. Yet further particles of Balance.

To Ashnesee then, would Aztira go? It was offered to her as a quest at the moment her youth itself might have been craving one.

For Ashnesee was to be sought. As, long ago, some had sought Ashnesea.

A month later, Aztira left by the north gate of her city, alone and on foot, which was how the Amanackire mostly traveled.

In Xarabiss, she was stared at. It was summer, and there were crimson flowers on the land like a daylong sunset. The peasants came to offer her fruit or bread, little basins of broth or wine, with a garland arranged at the brim. (What she required, she accepted.) In the cities they made way for her, soldiers pushing the crowds aside. At hostelries and inns, the best chamber was at once allocated, but as a rule she chose the open, where they would place an awning on a roof or in a garden. She was never disturbed. The busy, loud-clashing crystal cities of Xarabiss passed as if on wheels. They were none of them her city of the Plains.

In the narrow land of Ommos, in theory a Lowland possession, if not much cherished and barely kept, the journeying girl elicited terror and aversion. In the towns, no one would look at her, they skulked or ran away. Ommos itself was considered ugly Vis-over. Coming on a party of mixes on a shore, she took passage in their ship to Dorthar.

Dorthar she did not amaze.

At the first town she was greeted with ceremony and gifts, and refused them. Unshaken, they offered her the use of a traveling chariot, chariot-animals, and a driver bowing to the street. She had come all that distance a pedestrian, preferring it, undaunted, having no need for the security of wagon or servant, her physical vivacity, that looked so fragile, stronger than the strength of a healthy man. But she did assume the chariot for a little of the journey. She was curious to see the city of Anackyra.

Again, on the open road (now a paved highway), a delegation accosted the Amanackire. Men in gold trim and heavy ornaments who asked, under their goddess-banners, if she desired escort, who inquired if she wished to meet with the Storm Lord—he would, they promised, receive her with pomp. She put them right, there. She had no interest in their High King, the mixed-blood bastard descendant of Raldnor, and though she did not speak of it in that way, that was the way they took it from her, without a flicker or a risen brow.

Under a dragon comb of mountains, Anackyra demonstrated streets of hammered marble, many Anackire temples of bare-breasted golden harlots, bleached-hair Dortharians, prosperous Vathcrians, and tall, brazen Vis.

Having to address her, from the princes in their chariots to scrabbling rabble by the gutters, it was with the title Priestess, but now and then. Goddess.

She lived a year in Dorthar, up in the hills between Anackyra and the ruins of ancient Koramvis. A lord had made over a villa to her, the nobility had been jostling to do it. Mix slaves waited on her. Tame pigeons nested in the feather trees, but the kennel of hunting kalinx the lord had removed—the Amanackire Goddess had no inclination to venery.

If any white Amanackire were her neighbors in these regions, they did not reveal themselves, and were not spoken of.

There was an importance to Dorthar, and to the dissimilar twin cities—the ruin above, the rebirth below. One adjourned here, to absorb the psychic smolder, or to pay some obscure respect to it.

This spot was a well of Power, deep and unstable as the earthquake-faulted strata of the land.

Aztira compared it to the being of the other spot, the gamepiece of the Amanackire, which by then, like a tiny muffled light, was a beacon in her brain. Ashnesee had been erected solely upon ground. There was no reservoir of mystic and violent energy beneath. In itself, that was significant enough.

All this time, the time of traveling and resting, no part of Aztira had faltered. None of her beliefs was shaken or changed. These mortal Vis were alien, and interested her less than their monuments. Fearing nothing, knowing herself mightier, and awarded everywhere homage, she did not query her supremacy. And when she glanced inwardly toward the beacon of the City of the West, it did not trouble her any more than the sea and the forests which coiled it round.

After that year of pause breathing in the airs of Dorthar, Aztira traveled again. She went down the coast in the other direction, south by ship from Thos, and crossed to Shansarian Ahsaar. (She found Shansarian reverence like that of other countries, and their unease also quite comparable.)

She was approaching the age of nineteen, in Sh’alis, when the slow mental breakers from the west altered their tempo.

Her leisurely meandering was leading her always to Ashnesee, and thus in a manner Ashnesee had already claimed her. She was only a filament straying from and to the kernel of its thought and plan. Otherwise, having no necessity to reach outward, she had fed her eyes and ears, her moods, but never explored analytically anything of the real and ordinary life of mankind which everywhere fermented. Yet suddenly, for no apparent reason, as if she had put her hand upon a pulse in the body of some statue—she felt the genuine aliveness of the world and of its mass of peoples, surging and whirling on every side. And only then she learned how Ashnesee had also felt this surge and whirl.

Like a beast rousing from fathomless sleep, Ashnesee had lifted its lids and distended its nostrils—

The white serpent, waking. ... As Aztira sensed the terrible invading threat of living mass pulsing, boiling against her, Ashnesee long ago had sensed it. And Ashnesee the serpent was gathering itself.

For the first hour in all her days, Aztira was overcome by a featureless, awful doubt. She did not see what it was, for it was so unusual.

In the burning starlit nights of northern Alisaar, the goddess-girl, unable to compose herself for sleep, paced up and down the courts and passages of a house some Shansarian aristocrat had given her. Her own instinct, feeling the ambivalent clutch of external life, was to thrust it off, trample it. The woken instinct of Ashnesee was like her own.

The sword-snake yearned to strike a warning, warding blow.

As she comprehended her own skin on her bones, the flowing hair that clothed her head, so with Ashnesee, now.

What Ashnesee willed, she must will, for the will was corporate, indivisible.

Linked with this power, some sensation never before experienced entered her marrow. It was both physical and spiritual. It had no name, but it shamed her, and this led her at length to suppose it was, itself, shame.

A Shansar prince with Karmian graces, who had religiously sent her wines and flowers and jewels, was going down to the south, to vaunting “Tree” Alisaar. A chariot race, famous and notorious, drew him there. Most of his Shalian household would go with him, and quantities of horses.

Aztira informed the man, Kuzarl, she would travel with him but without display. Falling on his knees, he told her such a commission was an honor.

She did not know why impulse drove her south, to Saardsinmey, a city by the ocean. Infallibly, her psychic’s prescience thrust her forward. She obeyed herself, for in the past she had always been able to rely on what she was.

New Alisaar loathed white Lowlanders and demanded money (Kuzarl’s), and sneered behind its fingers, but was also afraid.

Aztira subtracted funds but only one servant from Kuzarl, a mix girl with tawny eyes. Aside from this, Aztira, in the coastal city, broke free of Kuzarl entirely. He was cleaving to her, although she had not lain with him, as if he were her lover—protective, possessive. He brought pearls to lave her feet and she directed him at once away.

During the last piece of journey out of Sh’alis, riding in a curtained litter, Aztira had given herself, doubtfully, to inner conflict.

It came to her she traveled beneath a shimmering blade. It came to her that, like a cipher of vengeance, she herself would be the precursor of the storm.

Saardsinmey was the target of the Amanackire sword. An upsurge of Vis arrogance was typified in it. What could be more suitable than to destroy such a thriving boast. Nothing need be threatened or claimed. The message of the act, even if received without knowledge would, on other levels, be understood exactly by every consciousness of Vis. And the Sea of Aarl swept the beaches of Saardsinmey, an oceanic earthquake zone with cellars of somnolent fire. . . . Walking about the streets of the ruby-tiled metropolis, the urge was on her repeatedly to smite them with hand or mind—For this she had come, to revel in aversion and foresight.

She dressed in white and veiled her white hair in whiteness. And surrendered herself to the flaming sweet tumult of pride, going up and down a city of the living dead.

The racial hysteria grew in her like a poison until it almost seared her out. She had not thought to resist or to question. She went on watching and waiting on the first intimations of destruction. Only then could she take her own departure. She must see it begin.

And in this heightened state, this sort of ecstasy, she started to hear a name, over and over. Even Kuzarl had uttered it. It was the name of a god—that was, one of the mortal gods of the mortal Vis.

The Lydian, they said. The Lydian, Lydian, Lydian.

Everything had been elevated or compressed to symbols by now, in her delirium of Power. So she regarded the virtue of this name, and said to it: The city makes you its soul. Then, the Lydian is Saardsinmey.

And she thought, He will die in the doom of the city, this man.

And she started to seek him out, but in a dream. She did not, in fact, set eyes on him. Nevertheless, suddenly, in some supernatural manner, she found him. In the slang of Vis she was a sorceress. She “looked” at Saardsinmey’s Lydian, and “saw.”

Scattered across the world, probably, there might be others, the brood of palace women and freed slaves. Yet here, at this node of history, an ultimate of symbols had occurred. The death of the boastful city could encompass a death of the bloodline of the Genocide.

Saardsinmey, the Lydian: Amrek, the Shadow.

She witnessed only a moment of the famous race, from a balcony near the end of Five Mile Street—the chariots tore down the night in a molten river, torch-fire and screaming, and were gone.

He would be the victor. She had already judged that.

Purchased outside an inn, by an alley, two birds slain for a supper. Galvanized from corruption by her white hands, she sent them where she had learned they would be noted, for the Lydian.

Victory is transient. Since he is, tonight, your city, tell him this.

Earthquake had spoken before she did, out at sea, a promise. The sword in the starry sky and she its messenger—

That had been the apex of her flight.

Immediately after, she plunged to the nadir below.

She, too, was to die in Saardsinmey.

Not in the cataclysm. For her, it would be sooner.

She woke in a lucid dawn, aware. (The pink petals of sunrise glimmered on her couch, as she lay in the old house behind the lacemakers, by the street they called Gem-Jewel. . . .)

The unheard bellow of the city’s gathering death had obscured the lower crying that was her own.

She was not yet nineteen. She struggled and beat death away, there in her mind, in dawn and silence, alone. But the huge black hawk came down again upon her heart, and settled there, folding its wings. And she accepted.

She beheld then in a bright fragment, how it was to be, and that it came through him, her ending—the Lydian, the Shadow. He was her death, and, strangely she was his—but his life, also.

In a trance she rose and went about her day as ever, and when the evening stooped on the streets she walked out unguarded, on foot, and chanced on the means. As she had known she should.

The means was the carriage of a stadium dancer, a coal-black Zakorian. (The Balance, always that, dark with pallor.)

“The Lydian . . . tell me how he’s to be come at.”

The Zakor girl fenced a while. Her brain snarled and veered, and with no effort Aztira read it.

“Thank you,” said Aztira, like a killing snow.

And under the columned midnight arches near Sword Street, she lingered, and saw him stride out into the eye of the lamp. Rehger, the Lydian.

In him there was a completeness, to her gaze obvious at once. The savagery of leopard and lion, the gentleness of doves, the calm of deep water, the edge and might of fire. Yet, something unfinished too, something awry. The life had begun—but not moved in its allotted course. Like a star wrenched from its sky. Oh, the star blazed—She was pierced by the brilliancy of him, burnt.

Amrek—Vis—mortal—bronze almost to black—out of the Shadow, the light.

For myself, I loved you, from the moment I saw you I believe.

Though he denied her, he would come to her.

And though she conceded it was now inevitable, she had forgotten death.

(Aztira stood like an icon before the glass window in the tower at Ashnesee. The moon had ascended to the roof Beyond the city and the walls, the plain was a sea of night.)

They were lovers then, life with death mingling. She has won him to her by priestly trickery, in the childish wickedness of her delirious desire, herself half-hypnotized by the acceptance of fear. She had won him by death-dealing. (She saved Chacor, their victim, that she should owe the Corhl nothing. She had brought the boy back from the blow of Rehger’s sword as she would have led an animal from some crumbling pit into which it had strayed, frightened by her voice.) She was in three conditions—shame, hubris, love. She was flung from each height into another or into an abyss, and all this she showed Rehger plainly, not in the telepath’s way, but in the woman’s.

Finally, she was able to become with him only that, a woman. A blissful peace enveloped her. The battle was done. Fatalistically, she dismissed the destiny of the city, and did not listen to the footfall of her own particular death.

Even so, she detected it.

Then—she saw how the pattern might be resolved, and how—in the jaws of a whirlwind—her dying should stay Rehger for life.

She bought Panduv’s tomb. (Black for whiteness.)

Panduv would survive; Aztira knew it, just as she knew the milk that day had venom in it. She had paid well for her own murder, coins for lilies and bane. She had consented.

And even as she penned her letter to him, to her lover and her love, she had gloried in her Amanackire Power, which held pain far off. She had exalted that she no longer dreaded to die. And, lying down softly on the couch, she had cast herself adrift, as it seemed into a tremendous nothingness, like slumber, sensuous and enfolding.

He would live through her, he could not forget her, now. She had left behind a shrine of gold and silver and could go to sleep.

But, ah—what came after—

“No,” she said aloud, the woman at the window.

The horror which had been, there in the black tomb, empty and swilled by water, this she resisted, would not recollect. Her exclamation, charged with her will, started a soundless vibration in the tower room.

Now across the night, beyond the window, the terraces of the city, the walls, the slopes of earth and darkness, her lover hunted her. It was not that she had called to him, or even that he could have heard her, the beating of her heart, the susurrus of her mind, here in the forests at the land’s western brim.

They were perhaps condemned to meet again because of what they were, because each furnished for the other a spectral landmark in the chaos.

To the traveler, the track, beaten so flat and lacking obstacles, was the business of a couple of days. During the midafternoon of the second day, he came to a clearing, unlike any other clearing previously encountered. The forest, primeval, architectural, seething with profound animation, was curtailed as a shore would end against water. To the limits of keen vision, this curtailment stretched. While beyond the brink there was a plain.

To any who had seen them, the plain resembled, here in the womb of the jungle-forest, the bare rolling flanks of southernmost Vis: The Lowlands, south of Moih. They had weathered, it was true, rather differently in an altered climate, these alter-Plains. Their tones were more sonorous, richer, and here and there an island of ripe vegetation rode on them, or postings of the forest itself.

Where the surge of the forest and the line of the track stopped, and the lake of the plain commenced, was an arch on pillars, seventy feet in height, carved as a game-figure, white as the straight blade of the road, five chariot-lengths in width, that ran away beneath.

The road was paved with large dressed blocks. In a city of Dorthar, Karmiss, Xarabiss, Alisaar, the road would not have been a phenomenon.

Marching beside the road at intervals were obelisks of white marble, with crests of gold-leaf, catching sun.

There was not a mark on the road. It was new-made, an hour before, it seemed. Nothing had ever gone over it. Not a wheel or a hoof, not a footstep, a lizard, a bird, a leaf, a wind.

Narrowing in perspective, it pointed to a low mountain rising from the plain perhaps seven or eight miles away. In the manner of mountains, the top of the crag was lit by snow: The city.

The city.

It had been raised on a platform of rock, and the lit snows of its crags were towers and the heads of walls. The sun struck down on it, and crystals flashed from the mirrors of huge windows. In size, it was itself not vast.

The road roused up into a high causeway, but where the causeway came against the platform of the city, there appeared, from the plain below, to be no gate or entry. The face of the platform was sheer.

A wood of trees, also like the arboreal stations of the Plains, had collected at the roadside, before it gained the incline to the causeway. Here Rehger left the paving, and from this area he watched as the westering sun got over the platform, and a brass sunset turned the whiteness of the city black.

The city did not seem real. It had about it, or appeared to have, some of the imagery of legendary Dortharian Koramvis, which Raldnor had broken in bits.

A wind blew east over the plain, once all the day was out. It was warm and silken-heavy, smelling of farther jungles where the sun had fled and fallen. The wind brought no perfume and not a note or murmur. Zastis was rising.

The Star had also sprinkled red lights along the surface of the plain. They blinked and flickered, like luminous nocturnal roses. But it was a black wave of red eyes which was blowing now, as the wind had blown along the earth.

It would be possible for a man to climb a tree of the wood, but they, too, could—Besides, their dreamlike slowness checked him. Their odor was not as he remembered it from the menageries of Alisaar. In Moih, Chacor, but not Rehger, had hunted them. And once, as a child in Iscah, he had been snatched up by Tibo, as Orbin sprinted before them, and his mother’s braids stung against his neck as she ran with him for the farm.

Tonight, on this surreal plain, it was a pack some fifty or sixty strong, gliding as if wafted above the ground, without stench or cry.

They washed against the wood, entered it, and turned tens of heads to look up at him with the fire-drippings of their eyes.

One put its forelimbs on a trunk, the slaughterous claws retracted.

The evil shape of the head of this single beast caused Rehger a curious puzzlement, that it should in its form prefigure so exactly what it was—

He was not especially alert, had gained none of the ebullition of danger. He had not drawn the knife, it was sheathed still, like the talons of the tirr.

Aztira. Her name had a likeness to theirs.

The Tirr that had put its forefeet on the tree dropped down again.

The wind’s breaths rustled the leaves of the wood, but there was no other noise. Then there came a noise without any sound, a sort of whistling purr, in the ears, or in the skull.

The tirr pack responded. They gathered themselves away, pressed back into the trunks of trees, where their eyes did not cease glittering and winking.

Two men walked out between the tirr and the trees, shining like nacre. By mind-speech, evidently, they controlled the pack.

Rehger did not speak, or think. If the Amanackire attempted to scour his brain, he would not make it easy.

One of the two men parted his lips.

“You are approaching the city.”

The other said, in the same pithless, unused voice:

“Your kind do not enter Ashnesee, except they enter as slaves.”

“Ashnesee,” said Rehger. Sensitized to it now, it seemed to him he felt his thoughts shoot out a bolt of anger, or great heat. “I’d heard that was one of the words for your city.”

Their snake stares turned on him like sightless stones.

Outside the wood, the moon now was rising, white kindred of theirs at any time but Zastis.

They must scent his ancestry, rage—his, theirs, weaving its lines of force between them.

The first man said, “Follow.”

As they walked along the road, the tirr were melting into the night, as if night had constructed them and lent them movement, and kindled their eyes like stars, and now put them out again.

21 The Hearth

The gate into Ashnesee was, for Rehger, a shrine or sarcophagus located at the base of the rock platform, below the causeway. The white men breathed on it and it opened—you heard of such devices in their temples. The aperture closed behind them.

A stair went underground, and led into a warren of man-hewn passages, dully and oddly lit both by distant torches and some faltering luminescence that seemed to have no source.

The route, at first level, then lifted itself in ramps. They emerged into a shut courtyard like a well, where the hot moon streamed in at one corner of the shaft.

The city stayed mute.

Another covered passage ran from the court, finishing at a slender door of cibba wood. The plashing of water had suddenly become audible. When the door—managed this time by touch—slid wide, rosy moonlight burst out again, crushed into the juice of a vast fountain. Its curtains in cascading down, seemed to bar the way. But there was an interval of dry space, and through this one passed into a garden.

The white men moved ahead, ascending, not glancing back, as if mislaying the barbaric animal they had brought in with them.

Rehger, however, hesitated, to view the city of the Amanackire. It lay on three sides, rinsed by the moon and made of the moon. . . . Tiers of pillared buildings, ruled by roads like frozen rivers—and, among clusters of trees, slim groves of towers whose heads were shaped like the masks of beasts—things not quite viable. And though small cells of illumination rested there in pools, humanly lifeless, too, a necropolis, so exquisitely formed it was, and devoid of motion as of sound.

The white men had halted at the top of the garden, under the vertical of a mansion there. A tower rose here, also. It had a serpent’s head burning coldly with the eye of an enormous moonstruck window.

Rehger followed the terraces up to the men under the wall.

“This is her house?”

They looked at him.

He said, “You’ve brought me to her. Aztira.”

It was not that he had begun to read their minds. There could be nowhere else they would bring him.

One of the men pointed. (Rehger saw another gate, this of decorative iron, ajar in the white wall.) They disliked to speak aloud, when it could be avoided.

And they would let him go on alone. They did not, then, mistrust him. Or she did not. Or, whatever his scheme or temper, they had valued themselves at more.

When he made no instant move to enter through the gate, they left him, and descended the lawns.

Then, standing on the grass of her garden, in the Zastis night, he remembered the house behind the lacemakers, and how he had gone to her, there.

But Ashnesee had even a different smell, an arid and vacant air, like that above a desert ruin, tinged merely now and then with a ravenous cloy of orchids.

He put his hand on the iron gate.

He would come into the mansion by way of the door beneath the tower, where the vine clung to the stones. From this entrance, the corridor would lead him into her hall, the great blanched oval with a floor of mosaic tiles, on whose walls were paintings of low hills, and pale-robed maidens who danced, immobile, in a field of grain, all lit now by the glow of the lotus lamps above. On the hearth, which in the evenings of the cold months would sometimes blossom fire, flowers lay sprinkled, giving off a dusty sweetness. A huge coiled snake of silverwork guarded the hearth, with eyes of creamy amber. There were few other furnishings.

Aztira waited, by the hearth snake. She wore a dress the color of the girls’ robes in the mural. She had no jewels.

In the quiet Rehger’s progress through the house, light-footed as the padding of a lion, was audible. And that, not once did he pause.

The girl’s eyes flame-flickered, but only like the eyes of the inanimate snake. If she breathed, it had remained invisible.

The heavy drape at the doorway was swung aside with a jangle of rings.

He did not stop even then, but crossed into the room, over the patterned floor. His eyes were on Aztira, and on nothing else. Even the snake did not seem to divert his attention. He strode under the lamps, and they turned him, one after another, to gold, until, perhaps ten feet from her, the advance ended.

He had arrived in the city of gods a vagabond. The glamour and the shackles of Saardsinmey were done with, two years had run away, forests had resisted and torn at him. More than ever, in the torrent of this, he had stayed, become, a king. And his black eyes fixed on her with all she remembered of their beauty, and their strength and cleanness. Such clarity was itself a power.

The girl before the hearth of flowers held out her hand to him, palm uppermost. There on its whiteness lay a triangle of tarnished metal.

“The coin your father left your mother,” she said to him, “the drak which you gave me to divine. My proof, in case it is wanted.”

“Proof of what?” he said.

“That I live.”

“Oh, lady,” he said, standing in the golden shadow, “I know that you live.”

“But that I died, also?”

“Yes. That you died and woke up, and here you are. The Goddess Aztira.”

She continued to extend to him Yennef s drak. He did not come to her to accept it.

She said, “I took it with me to my grave, to comfort me.” But her hand sank down, closed now on the coin.

“Your kind,” he said, “live forever. Why did you need comforting?”

“Since I was without you,” she said.

He said nothing. He was completely still, as she was, now, and as the city itself.

Aztira said, “Hear and believe this. I foresaw my death, but that was all. I predicted murder and terminus. I entreated you to my funeral rites because I reasoned the tomb of black stone would withstand the shock and the water. There was some measure of choice for me. But I was glad, in dying, trusting you would survive.”

“Thank you then for that, madam. You get no thanks from Saardsinmey.”

“No,” she said, “I won’t bow my head and cringe before you. If I am ashamed, it is my affair. If it was evil and my sin, that, too, is mine, not a matter between us. I thought I would die—oh, the soul, yes, the soul is eternal. But body and soul are strangers to each other. I—there would be nothing more of me. You think that to return out of bodily corruption is a simple thing? You said—that I woke. No, Rehger. This isn’t how it was. I hope you will let me tell you of it, but not yet.”

“Perhaps never. Did you call me here by some witchcraft?”

“Not by any sorcery. Not by the energy of the will or mind. Only my memory of you. That perhaps did cry after you. But I see, you would not have listened.”

“I was instructed to remember you. I’ve done so. No day or night, since Alisaar, that I failed to think of you. You stayed alive for me, Aztira, like the stink of mutilated flesh and sea filth, and a hundred sights of rubble.”

“Enough,” she said. “You can’t kill me to blot out the crime of my race.”

“It seems not.”

“Would you have done so?”

He said, “In my thoughts, lady, I’ve slaughtered you many times. The way a Vis would crush a snake. That picture would come to me. To break your neck.”

“And in these thoughts did I never in return blast you with lightning?”

Her voice had risen. She looked indeed as if she burned coldly, her whiteness livid. And suddenly, she glanced toward the wide hearth, partly lifted up one hand. And there were flames on the stones, not flowers, shooting upward to send a crash of light into the chimney, and limn her pallor (and that of the silver serpent), as if with blood.

He felt the scorch of the fire on his body, then—it cooled. Flowers scattered the hearth; the only light came down from the hanging lamps.

“And since you can never kill me, Rehger, and since apparently I’ll spare you, what next?”

“In Var-Zakoris and Dorthar,” he said, “the chance of this city is a cause for debate. They would like someone to go back, and tell them.”

“A paid agent. As your father was.”

“Did you divine that also from his coin?”

“In other ways. I had no time to tell you all I learned. But you have met with your father.”

“It was the meeting with him which put me on the road to Ashnesee.”

“My regrets you could,” she said, “get nothing more from it.”

Aztira turned. She went to the wall, to where a tree of pale ruddy leaves was painted on the plaster. She touched one of its branches, and a faint murmur passed through the wall, along the floor. In seconds, a figure came in at the hall’s other doorway. Rehger had seen a goddess of the city, now he saw one of its slaves.

She was a dark woman, umber-skinned and small, clothed in a linen smock, her hair bound closely to her head. She bowed from the hips, drooping down like a thirsty plant.

Aztira said, “Here is the lord I told you of. Take him to the prepared chamber, and serve him as you were instructed.”

Her tones were distant. It was not the address of mistress to slave, but of a sleepwalker to a phantom. Though chattels, the servers of Ashnesee were not, then, considered to be actual. They were only specks of a commanding brain.

The Amanackire said to Rehger, as if in another language, “Go with her. You will not be uncomfortable. Tomorrow you may depart by the same hidden route. The two men who brought you, one or other of them will come here at first light. Be ready. You have seen the City of the West has substance. Perhaps they will reward you for the discovery, in Var-Zakoris. Or say you lie. Or in returning you may be forfeited to the jungles. Understand, it was your bond with me, Rehger, that drew you here, against all odds. Not my outcry, or any magic. Your fantasy was of finding me alive and of killing me, knowing that if I had lived, to kill me would be impossible. You undertook this sullen quest because there was nothing else for you to do.”

He stood and gazed on at her, unspeaking, a statue with somber, considering eyes. Behind him, shadow on shadow, the black slave-girl waited, head still bowed.

“You mourn Saardsinmey not only for its destruction, but for its false purpose, which you borrowed. Gladiator and king, your freedom would have come with death. You would have perished inside five years.”

He answered then.

“So I believed.”

“You had made a pact with it. But your true life, which you had chosen and begun in Iscah, was interrupted by the man who bore you away. He declared he gave you a gift of brightness, days of glory, Katemval the slave-taker. But he cut the thread of the life you planned, that which your soul had wanted—”

“I don’t credit the soul’s life, Aztira. You know as much.”

“It was too late to recapture in Moih the ghost of that beginning,” she said, paying no heed, it seemed, to his denial. “Or else the making of things was not the only task you had set yourself. How willingly, therefore, you abandoned that last great victory you won over the stones, in the Lowlands, your apprenticeship. To hunt instead the ghost of me.” She moved back, slowly, drifting as if weightless, to her hearth. She said, “Go with the slave.”

“Aztira,” he said.

“What now?”

“If your race believes in many physical lives, do they ever fear rebirth as some man of Alisaar or woman of the black Zakorians?”

Startling him, she laughed, lightly; all her youngness was in it.

“Yes,” she said, “they do fear that. They say it would be self-punishment. Why else must we maintain one body against death, but to elude this truly awful fate?” Laughter and irony faded from her. “Leave me now,” she said. “You have had enough of me.”

When he turned, the crumpled slave straightened somewhat and went ahead of him, into the mansion.

22 The City of the Snake

Across the ceiling of the room, clouds had been painted on a ground of milky azure. They had no look of fundamental sky, yet, in the dusk of dawn and evening, seemed to float, while the blueness swam upward and changed, if not into ether, at least out of the condition of paint. The walls were incised with a coiling design which resolved into a serpent’s head beside the door. A tap on one of its eyes caused the door to open. On the other, and there would come at once one of the slaves with expressionless faces like dark brown wood. There were high-up grills which let in air and some quantity of light, but nothing more, and there were no furnishings beyond a bed, assembled for the guest, and wound with curtains. But the insects of the jungles of Vis seldom found their way into Ashnesee. Adjoining the chamber was a room for bathing and a closeted latrine, both of which outdid the best of the rich houses in Alisaar, At night an alabaster lamp was lit on a stand of marble.

He did not make ready to leave, the morning after his arrival.

He lay in a vast cavern of sleep, such as had sometimes come on him after a race or a fight. They had known this, the creatures of the house, and let him alone. Waking at noon—the sun was up above the grills—he saw they had removed the choice, uneaten meal offered the previous night. Later, when he had brushed the serpent’s eye-socket, a breakfast was brought in.

Rehger did not interrogate the slaves of the city. Like their overlords, they seemed to have no inclination to verbal speech. When one had made to taste his food, he shook his head at her and she went away. He had not supposed the sorceress would resort to drugs or toxic substances. Conceivably it was her pain or anger, or her scorn, to imply, through the slave’s action, that he would think so.

The bedchamber being large and uncluttered, he took exercise there, as if he were a prisoner and had no rights to the rest of the mansion or the garden below, which they had shown him were accessible. The streets of the city were another issue. He was not forbidden them—simply, they were not alluded to in the mannerisms of the slaves.

The second night was sleepless, the gate of the vast cavern fast shut against him. Wine-red Zastis tinctured the grills. He did not ask the house of the sorceress for a girl. He did not want one of their bed-menials, however pleasing or acquiescent. He recalled the blonde Ommos-Thaddric woman, in the roof-thatch of the last village. He considered her, and when desire became unbearable, he turned his memory to the image of death in the square below, the white she-man, joking and applauding a corpse to its grave.

When the sun rose he went after all down from the upper floor of the mansion, into the outer court, and into her garden, where the city was to be seen. The inanimate bleached buildings rocked at anchor in a soft morning mist, through which beast-headed towers seemed to lift their snouts to snuff the air.

All the flowers in the garden were white, or of a diluted pastel. White pigeons were cooing in a tree, and he was able to hear the rush of the fountain that concealed the garden’s lower entrance. No other sounds came up the hill. However, a quarter mile off, erected on a level with the tree of pigeons, one of the pillared buildings had put out a branch of smoke. A temple to the Lady of Snakes, maybe, where the altar fires were still kept alight, from politeness, by gods no longer needing to worship.

A voice blew quietly against his ears. Rehger did not react to it. This was how she had communicated first with him, Aztira, calling his name in his mind. Now he only felt the pressure of her attention, like a slight pressure of fingers, yet for several moments. After which, she withdrew from him like a sigh.

He continued down to an edge of the garden, where there was the girdling of a low, steep wall. Far beneath, on the misty boulevard, between the monuments, and great houses, he beheld some men and women walking, without haste, two by two, or alone. Like the city, they were all one in whiteness. Zircons flowed over a woman’s wrists, a silver clasp was struck on the shoulder of a man’s tunic. None of them looked up to see if any watched them from the garden’s vantage. Had they done so, they might have taken him for a slave, a brawny servant of Aztira’s mansion who, for some reason, was not moving in the rat-tunnels under the lawn. But doubtless they would not probe his brain to learn why this was, for he was subhuman and did not count.

(He had garnered a notion of the undercity from the invisible coming and going of the slaves, and from once or twice seeing their emergence or retreat through apertures in the plaster, pillars and stairs.)

But for the Amanackire citizens, they progressed unhurriedly over the surface, along the boulevard, and two by two or alone, vanished in adjacent thoroughfares.

Further on in the morning, on the lush hill of a park, he saw another group of them. They seemed at a kind of slow and measured play, a ritual, or a dance even. There was no music and no song.

He could recount these scenes in Zaddath, if ever he returned there.

Rehger thought of Amrek, who had meant to wipe this people off the earth’s face. He stared across the city.

He had admitted, as far away as that last village in the forest, that he had no purpose remaining to him. Purposeless, he had known therefore he would reach this place.

The feeling was similar to something he had experienced in his childhood, brought out of Iscah by the man Katemval, It came back to Rehger sharp as a knife. How the child he was had wept suddenly—losing something. It was the black bitch-dog—it was the black hair of his mother—all he could properly remember, save her name, pronounced differently.

The hurt, so small and incoherent, swelled and battered under his breastbone now, trapped and bemused in his man’s body.

Not Yennef, not Katemval, nor Tibo. The stadium had been parent to him, creatrix, and Daigoth, deity of fighters, acrobats and charioteers, Daigoth was his god.

But his mother had reverenced Cah, squat, bloody, and blacker than all other things. . . .

What had driven him was not pride or hate, or rage, or love. If he examined himself, it transpired that he had never validly undergone any of these states, these justifiable emotions of humankind. What motive then, for any of it?

And as he balanced on that height of the unreal yet extant city, he knew that he had lost himself forever. Rehger, like Amrek, was gone into the past.

She sat, almost all that long second day, her hands folded, overhearing the ebb of the struggle within him. It was her Power which made her able to do so, and made her able to endure it.

Then, when shadows had covered all her floor, she put that from her, and rising, sought him.

She loved him, but beside her love for him there was her own destiny, and that of her race. Anackire. She must be two women, the lover, and—his conjuration—the sorceress.

She reached the threshold of the chamber in the scattering sunset.

He stood, arrested, in the center of the room, as if he had been pacing about. He wore the clothes the slaves had brought to him, on her orders. The garments were white, as every piece of good raiment was, here. And in his thoughts a picture lay discarded, of another man in Moih, a dark Vis clad in white for his wedding. (Who this man was she could not tell.)

“Zaddath, or Dorthar,” she said, “will want to hear all you can tell them of my city.”

Were his eyes empty, now? Their blackness seemed to have no depth—like two shutters of burnished iron.

“Come with me,” she said mildly. “Tonight something may happen in Ashnesee that will be of interest to the councils of Zakoris and the Middle Lands.”

“You know so much of me,” he said. His voice was empty, surely. “Everything.”

“Nothing, my dear. Nothing at all. I don’t know if you revile me still.”

All she could decipher now, there in this room of her palace, was the sea-change in his perception. Rollers poured and thundered on the beach. Below, his meditation had become unformed but constant, and like that of a child grown very old.

“You’re inviting me to go with you into the streets of your city,” he said presently, gravely. “If that’s your wish. Yes, goddess.”

“Goddess. You haven’t been tainted by the superstitions of fools.”

“Now I have.”

“Rehger,” she said.

“But I don’t recognize that name you give me,” he said, “that man, that Lydian. He was done for in Saardsinmey. Your lesson, which I have learnt.”

“You misunderstood—” she cried, blindly and suddenly, the liar and lover, now. And at that he moved to her and gently put his hand, curving, quiet, against her face. She remembered so well the warmth, the strength and self-restraint of his formal caresses, the peerless grace of the lion taking her up like a leaf, not to damage her—

She thought, woman’s thought: What have I done? She said, “You suspect you will not return to Zaddath with your news.”

“It seems unlikely. But I’ll go with you now, Aztira.”

She put her own hand against his, and drew away. She closed her heart, and said, “You must walk a step or two behind me. Pardon me, that I ask you to do it.”

“Of course.” He smiled at her. She saw that he was serene. He had surrendered. This was the dignity of the king borne to the public scaffold—again it was she who must rein in wildness and lament.

“No one,” she said, “will think you a slave. We seldom keep secrets in Ashnesee. Some are already aware of the guest of my house. Even to his bloodline. Seeing you, the knowledge will run like fire among them. This isn’t dangerous in itself.”

“No.”

“But you may feel the lash of it. You’re able to shield yourself.”

“I know that, too.”

“An unusual ability in a Vis. The line of the first Storm Lord, Rarnammon, boasts a Lowland strain. Now entirely debased among the Dortharians.”

She walked before him down through the mansion.

At the higher grills and windows, the sunset massed hard, glistening scarlet. Yet, emerging from the vestibule, the west lay over behind the city, more suavely dyed, a flush of amber soaked on silk. The shrine exactly below the house snared the sun on its lid of gold. The rest was darkened like a cloud.

The woman descended the terraces and turned east.

Her whiteness blazing on the dusk, she preceded him along the nameless roads of Ashnesee.

A stairway of stone led into the shallow valley. Night had already gone down into it, and filled the bowl of grass and trees as if with smoke. The towers rose out of the dimness, gleaming, their peculiar cupolas, which were the heads of kalinx and tirr, the slender muzzles of dogs or the hooked visages of birds, blushed like copper. These staring masks had pairs of eyes, crystal windows, each balefully holding the dying sun.

White among the groves, the Amanackire had gathered. There were perhaps two hundred of them, which might be the sum of their numbers in the city. A minority were children, or adolescent. Mostly they looked to be between twenty and thirty years, at the commencement of long adult life for a Vis, the peak maturity of the Lowlander. There were no old ones. Men and women mingled, as the children mingled with the rest, no person or group adhering to another. And their faces, which were, every one, flawless and, if analyzed, beautiful, were as blank as the cut marble faces of the beast-towers, or even of the bred slaves with skins of wood and eyes of mud.

Lamps shone from some of the trees, and stars were coming out, and the big Star itself had got over the rim of the valley sky, red in redness, like a ruby in wine.

Aztira reached the top of the stairway, and Rehger, behind her.

And all the Amanackire, Children of the Goddess, lifted their heads to see, reminding him of the tirr that guarded the plain outside the city.

He did not need mentally to hear the inquisition that washed murmuring through the groves, like urgent ripplings over a pool. Nor how it brimmed against the girl who had brought him here. What answer she gave he did not know. He let the fluttering, saturating needles furl in about him, bore with them, a rock in a tide. Amrek. Perhaps this was the demon they summoned, or it was more subtle, more dreadful. If they were conscious of him as a man he did not guess. He was All-Vis, to them. But to himself, only granite, and their sea of intellect and magic, sweeping over and about, was unable to do more.

After a while the sea furled away again and left him alone.

Then Aztira started to go down the stair, and he followed her.

He had begun, since he had let go, to be aware of her love. And, as long before, her impossible might. (It was these elements, twinned, that had caused him to smile.) Somehow the desperateness of such power awoke compassion.

When she came to the foot of the steps, the people had parted to let her by. There was an aisle of flesh and robes and trees. They walked along it, he and she. It ended against the column of a tower. Thirty feet above, the dog’s head was growing paler on the deepening dark, the eyes had relinquished their rabid glare and turned chill.

The way into the tower was an oval door of white lacquer. Aztira leaned her hand against it, and it opened inward.

The room had been made round, and on its walls were the expected frescoes, pastoral visions, dancers, a beaming solar disc of gold. As in the palaces, lamps had been lit, all up the vault of an inner stair.

By its positioning, the groves and fanciful decorations, he had by now deduced what the area was. A graveyard, and this, one of the tombs. The assembly was not, however, a burial party.

Aztira glanced at him. She moved on into the round hall, and up into the stairwell. He, and he alone, went after her.

At the topmost level of the tower, the marble ended in a coal-black chamber. Here, on a pedestal, flames burned in a black bowl, in the manner of their temples. By the flame-light, nothing was revealed but for a silver bed, and lying on the bed, a man.

He could have been anyone of the Amanackire who waited below. Their unflawed faces had by now become all one face, males and females, duplicated over and over, saving only hers.

The man on the couch was breathing. Once, in every minute, his shoulders, the sharp line of the ribcage, were disturbed with motion.

Again, Aztira glanced at her companion. She put up her hand, as she had done in returning his caress. Now the hand was to stay him.

She approached the bier, and stood over it. To all appearances, she was a sister to the breathing corpse, so physically alike they were.

“Urhvan,” she said, aloud.

Her lids dropped over her eyes.

She was speaking within. Yet the chamber rang with the litany of her inner voice—entreaty, reassurance, insistence.

The man’s eyes opened without warning. They bulged. He let out a braying scream.

It was a noise of the arena. A sword had gone between the bladed armour of the bones, into the belly. A death cry, panic and disbelief, fury and denial.

“Urhvan,” Aztira said, again out loud, while the whirlpool of thought and energy soared and smote against the black room, and the glare of the flame-bowl flattened, flared.

The woman bowed over her struggling brother. Her hands settled to his forehead and his throat. His body shuddered and relapsed. He lay along the bed of death, as if dead once more, but now he breathed with a defeated regularity.

After a little while, Aztira drew back. As she did so, the man sat up sluggishly on the couch. His face was stupid. Then that slipped from him. He was in possession of himself. He was Amanackire. They gazed on each other and spoke with their minds. And the room sang.

The flame had steadied in its agate cup. In the eye-windows of the dog, the darkness was complete.

Soon, the Amanackire male got up from his couch. He looked about him, once, his eyes passing across the image of a dark man clothed in white without any attention. Before Aztira, the Amanackire made an obeisance of the Lowlands, the flight of one hand to brow and heart. Without any other show, he then went by her and down the inner stair.

The man and woman left behind in the tomb’s upper chamber confronted each other, also quite wordlessly. Until there thrust out of the nighttime groves of the burial garden beneath the thud of one huge atmospheric pulse—deafening as any shout.

“But you,” he said, “were alone.”

“I was alone, and in Alisaar.”

“Is it always an act of such violence?”

“Was it ever easy,” she said, “to be born? Urhvan canceled his own life twenty days ago, on the agreement of return. That has become the final ordeal. Those who dare to do it, and restore themselves, become the elect of Ashnesee. There are at present only ten of us, but eventually each will have met with and outwitted death. In nearby towers, some are lying who have couched with death a year, and longer. Their flesh stays pristine. Thus, the pledge. They will return. At the flickering of the life-spark, we go to them, to minister, those of us for whom the testing is already past.” Her eyes strayed to the blackness in the windows. “I suffered renewal alone, but I was spared the deed of suicide. A tavern-girl slew me to save you from my bane. I had only to accept her pitcher. She had even dressed it for me with lilies.”

He said, “Didn’t you think to ask that other favor of me. To wait for you.”

“Ah, no,” she said. “No.”

“Since you say you reckoned only on death.”

“Yes, maybe I am dishonest there. All my kind are warned. Any adept of my people might return out of the night. But then.” She looked down at the vacant bed of silver. “How unlikely it is, such a thing.”

He waited now, if not in Alisaar. At last he said to her, “Did you also want privacy for your return in anguish?”

She said, “I shrieked and rent myself with my nails. I didn’t know my name or who—or what I was. I thought myself an animal, a fish, a serpent, I thought that life was death, I was dying, and blood ran from my mouth and in absolute horror I attempted to tear free of the snare. No, no, I did not want your witness. The body weighs like lead. The seeing eyes are like sightlessness. To call out is to be dumb and to breathe is to suffocate. Anguish, agony. To die is better. And one day, I may die completely and be gone. But now—how shall I ever be sure? To live. That is our chastisement and our blessing. For you accused me truthfully. We are gods, my kind.” She put back her head and her hair spangled about her and her eyes were bloodless fires. The Power that streamed from her was like the rays of a winter moon. It was no more than a fact, what she had said to him in the inadequate language of men. “Eventually we will be as we were, as our history has us to be. There is a memory. It’s said we were winged. I nearly think it may be so. We have also traditions among us of lands above the sky, and that we rode from such places in chariots like stars, and will go back there, to reclaim many kingdoms. We dream of it. I, too, have done this. And when I dream—there are other colors there, which I—But I can describe none of them. And all those worlds will be ruled by my race. Without mercy or pity, until we fall or are pushed down again from our heights, and our wings are broken and our season finished. We heal of death. But there will be a death born from which even the Shadowless can never heal. For we shall be feared very much, and hated equally. Until the dawn of that death, then, the path lies upward. The cups of flame will burn before our untenanted altars, and those names we worship will be our own. We are gods. But Anackire is not a god. Anackire is everything, and of this the gods are only part.”

A twilight had come into her eyes, seeming to tint them, but not with colors—or with those indescribable colors of which she could not tell him.

“We are to be envied and despised,” she said. “You know it.”

He inclined his head.

“Vis will tremble,” she said. “But it will be worse, at last, for us. In the end, we shall be lost.” She held out her hands to him over the bier of her risen kindred. “So, we are alike, you and I, after all.”

When he went to her, she laid her head against his breast, as if she were tired and yearned to sleep.

“Before sunrise, you must be got out of this sorcerous unclean city. Rehger, I will send you by a safe road. To the sea. Nor far, my love. Will you trust me to do it?”

“Yes. But that’s for the morning.”

She said, in a whisper, “You have read my thoughts.”

The dry pond of the plain had gathered to itself a fragrance on that evening. It was the perfume, lacking all the myriad smudgings and stenches of humanity, of the distances of a starry sky and the ground swell of the metamorphosed foliage of Ashnesee.

They walked the ridges and defiles of the city.

She discovered for him, as they went by, the massive monuments, and gilded shrines, the fair diadem of the temple, with its bloom of inner fire. Where the palaces were aglow, sometimes the silhouettes of beings moved on the lights. (Often, the noble buildings stood void.) In a garden, now and then, like statuary alive, the pale Amanackire went up and down. They were in constant union and almost always separate.

Twice, Aztira came upon her fellows on the roadway. Some greeting was exchanged, naturally in total silence.

The allergy of all that place, directed toward him like an instinctive music—this he could not fail to sense. She had said he must be gone before the new day. He had beheld them in their sanctum, and he had been allowed to judge the rite of reincarnation. And he was Amrek, and All-Vis.

But their antipathy was nothing in the peace of that evening. Beside her lawless and boundless beauty, nothing. The Star exalted in their celibate heaven.

As they walked, they spoke occasionally of Alisaar, of Saardsinmey, as if still it throve, sparkling with torches, and the races in the stadium due to begin. They laughed together once, thrice. The old stigmas had been sloughed, with the meanings of time and sentience.

In the oval hall of Aztira’s mansion, slaves had laid out a princely supper. The plates were silver chased in gold, with a design of sea-monsters—assuredly a gift from Sh’alis.

The wine was red: From Vardath.

Their conversation, which had become untrammeled, melted into the pauses of reflection, and of desire.

Her bedchamber, reached by a little low stair, warmed by a dozen tapers, had no windows, was enclosed as the womb of a shell.

Her nakedness, when he encountered it, the whiteness of her, like ice or marble, had, too, its inner fires, which he had forgotten. They took each other like leopards, famished, the commerce of a minute. And then again, the earth revolving and flung away.

It was the house behind the lacemakers. He heard the far shamble of the traffic on Five Mile Street.

Or it was Moih, and at his prayer the statue had become flesh.

“Rehger, forgive my use of you.”

“We seemed evenly matched.”

“That was not the use I meant.”

“I will forgive you anything, Aztira Am Ashnesee. You will outlive me, anyway. What does it matter?”

“Once you leave me here,” she said, “I shall become again a ghost, to you.”

As they lay on the pillows, through the final hour of darkness, she had begun to plait her hair. When he moved from her arms, he found it all in fetters round him. He lifted three or four of the plaits, shook them, and let loose the showering hair.

“You smell always of blossom and clear water.”

“But you will forget me, nevertheless.”

He made to begin loosening another of the plaits. She stopped this.

“In Iscah,” she said.

“In Iscah, what?”

“The sign of a married wife.”

He stared then deeply into her eyes, frowning, curious.

“What mystery is this?”

“Never mind it,” she said.

He put his mouth to her breasts, their pale and velvety buds, but lust was done with, hers and his. She had called him by his Alisaarian name, but he might forget that also, when he left her. He knew as much, indifferently.

“The dawn has begun,” she said softly, in a while. “A man will be standing in the garden, under the tree where the doves gather—do you recall? He led you into the city, and will lead you out of it. A hidden river runs away through caverns toward the coast. Where it breaks from the ground, there will be a boat, provisioned and ready. But then there is the wide western sea. Oh, Rehger,” she said.

“Zastis is good sailing weather,” he said.

She did not weep. Her eyes, as the Lowlanders said, were formed of tears.

They made love an ultimate time, swimming and slow, drowning, and cast ashore apart.

Transparent sunrise flooded the bedchamber when its door was opened.

He went between the bars of light, each falling behind him like a dreamer’s sword.

Not till he had traveled the corridor’s length, did he hear her say, “Don’t turn. There’s an ancient rhyme which warns against it. Forget me and prosper. I think you will know me still, when next we meet.”

He raised the curtain at the corridor’s end, and going on, let it fall again, between them.

The white man met Rehger Am Ly Dis under the tree of doves. They went together, not a phrase exchanged, to the lower tract of the garden, by the fountain there, and into the tunnels beneath Ashnesee.

So then the Vis wanderer saw Aarl-Hell, out of the legends of his own people. It was glimpsed, inadvertently almost, at a turning here, in a passage there—Laval fires burned in it and toiling figures lurched hither and thither spawning nightmare shadows. The slaves of the Chosen Race were busy. They oiled the clockwork of paradise above and could not afford to idle.

The undercity was an ant hill.

Rehger passed through it unchallenged on the heels of his guide, and came at long last into a luminous cave. Flat and thin, the river wormed along its rocky channel.

The Amanackire observed Rehger’s progress down the bank for less than a minute before retracing his steps into the warren of hell.

Alone, about an hour after, Rehger encountered a group of slaves on the river rocks. But they did not appear to see him, though he went by within three feet of them. They were fishing in the steely water.

And later again, when daylight had started to be ahead of him, he saw another detachment of slaves, squatting on the bank. They were actually laboring at nothing, perhaps resting. (Their faces were mindless yet controlled.) They might have been the very ones who had put ready the boat—and stacked in it the store of food and barrels of water and wine—that presently he came on.

It perched in the shallows, and beyond, the river yawned wide and the cave frayed into air and sky and leaning granite. And on the clifftop, the black thatch of the jungle-forest flourished like giant weeds.

Rehger pushed the boat into the main course of the river, brown and lazy water veiled by insects and heat. He rowed, and in the forests the sun beat and birds squalled.

The city had disappeared, and soon an angle of the river-wall closed away the exit from the caverns.

The day and the river, the boat and the man, went on toward an assumption of the sea.

But as he rowed, the man sensed upon him the eyes of a goddess in the sky. Eyes of tears, without pity, sorrowing.

He would reach the ocean. Sailing in to shore, he could then proceed gradually south. It was a prolonged voyage, but finite. Winds would rouse and belly the slanting sail, fish leap in an offering of sustenance.

Huge plated beasts would wallow from the beaches of the jungle, but not dare attack the oar-finned wooden animal with its one snapping wing.

Even the pirates of Free Zakoris did not often try the water here. There was nothing for them to steal, and they had besides religious qualms concerning these coasts.

South, should one reach it, the very land itself pointed toward Alisaar. The world commenced again, and the circle of the ring was sealed.

In the serpent-headed tower, Aztira gazed within herself, seeing a life adrift in waters. But it was not Rehger’s life.

Perhaps I did not even need to ask your forgiveness.

His generosity would have allowed her what she asked, and had done so.

A covenant, between your race and mine. Between reality and hubris.

Among the Shadowless, on the pure white banner of their pride and her own, she had branded darkness irrevocably. Created now, and fixed, the genes of her descendants would carry it to eternity. A rogue flowering, it would fruit when seldom looked for. From the albino tree, a black viper. A constant, and recurring, theme. With every generation, bronze skin, black hair, black eyes, would spring from the core of the snow.

Inside her body, implanted, the seed of her lover, his child. Rehger’s son. But grown in the ocean of her adept’s Power, like herself, he would be, this boy, this man, a magician and a god. A god of the blood line of Amrek, with the mark of the snake on his wrist.

It was the Balance. It was Anackire.

But, also, it was only love.

For love must have something.

She pressed her hands against her side, seeing what was yet invisible, unknowable, and known.

Westward she did not gaze. She did not think of it, or stretch out the psychic tendrils of her will. Nor did she entreat. She had no superior left to hear her prayers.

But she felt the drum of her heart like that of a stranger, as in the tomb she had feh it, when terribly as death, it called her to return.

That was all.

When the drumming smoothed and quietened, and coursed back into her own breast, she knew the circle was complete.

At dusk, when the Star rose, an enormous Boundlessness claimed the sea, under the mutter of its waves and the vagrant shiver of the wind.

The boat drifted between land and liquid and atmosphere. Tidily, the sail had been secured, and the uneaten stores of food set out to tempt the birds. The wine, poured in the sea, had long ago been drunk away.

No other thing was in the boat.

Where the Star pierced through the water, it revealed, as if fathoms below, disorientated meanderings, the wreckage possibly of a sunken ship, or merely shoals of fish foraging.

Later the moon was birthed out from the amphitheater of the forest.

Maybe the moon did finger a sudden glitter on the sea. But it was the dance of water-things, which flirted in a diamond rush of spray and dived again to the depths.

The reflection of the boat stayed black on the lunar ocean but faded when the moon swung over. By morning, when the gulls came to feed on the viands of Ashnesee, the vessel was already listing.

The birds fought and screamed over the feast, to have it all, before the boat should go down.