“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?”