Slath took her in properly then. She was the sort of girl he liked himself, despite her sullen, haughty eyes. But there were bits of gold winking on her sandals and in her plaits, and she filled the lord’s cup with a proprietory air.
“A tasty lass,” Slath remarked carefully, knowing what he said might be repeated to her if she were powerful here, and that he could afford to be insolent but not derogatory. “But doesn’t Lord Hmar have more than one? It’s usual.”
“Oh, there are others. Ten or more, I’ve heard. Even some of those tall narrow females from the south. But he keeps them well hidden. Panyuma’s the only woman seen about him.”
Later, when Slath was summoned to the lord’s presence, he went with a cheerful mind. The interview was brief and to the point. Slath had done well and foresaw doing better. In the campaigns to come there would be swift promotion, and Hmar seemed indeed to be all he had judged him. Slath restrained his after-dinner belches in deference to the graceful manners, and grinned inwardly at those nervous flickering eyes. At the last he spoke of his trouble, the genteel-born girl he feared was going to be a nuisance to him in his quarters here.
“Of course, Lord Hmar, I’d throw her out without a second thought, if it weren’t for her remarkable looks. I saw her by sheer luck at a private sale—” He went on to say how he had been certain she was some noble’s sister reduced through a decline in family fortunes, and how he had paid fifty bars for her.
Hmar looked at him, and the restless eyes leveled for a moment.
“I’ve been told of your girl already. If you wish to sell her to me you may bring her, and I’ll consider the proposition.”
Jolted by this bluntness, Slath shouted at the door for his servants, and Seluchis was hurried in. She had been bathed and dressed in a robe of thin red silk; the pungent scent of cibba wood emanated from her flesh.
Her eyes lifted and came to rest on Lord Hmar.
Slath was startled. It was the first time he had seen any life in her eyes at all. For an instant a look seemed to pass between Hmar and the girl—the robber sensed a bizarre recognition on both their faces.
“Yes,” Hmar said shortly, but there was a curious tremor in his voice, “you may ask my man outside for fifty bars’ payment.”
Unnerved already, Slath had anticipated argument over the price; shocked again, he bowed himself feverishly out and left his slave to her new master.
It was as if, drifting for miles over a faceless ocean she had come suddenly in sight of a marker in the sea. Nothing good in it, nothing to bring her joy or peace, for these could never be hers again, yet something oddly recognized. She did not comprehend how she knew him. She did not know him as a man. She knew him as all things know their own death, and with as much despair.
He said tightly: “She is here. I sense Her here. How can She be here, because of you, you Vis woman?”
By this she understood that he too sensed his death, and she was his death. They were to be each other’s.
“So be it,” she said to him.
He started violently, then seemed to master himself—all but the darting eyes, which, instead of raking the room, now explored her intensely.
“You inspire me with fear. This should be amusing. You’re nothing. A slave. Offal. Whatever you once were has been obliterated. This is how it devolves upon us all. Once I was other than I am. Now I am Hmar, goddess-born, Guardian King of six ant heaps of Thaddra. Panyuma!” he cried out suddenly, and almost at once a curtain parted and a small dark woman slunk through on glittering feet. She looked directly at Astaris, but her broad-boned face was empty. “Panyuma,” Hmar said softly, “take her and prepare her.”
“Yes, lord,” Panyuma said. Her aspect was of a malignant nurse humoring an evil child. But Astaris felt no protest at what was to come. The Thaddrian woman took her arm and conducted her out, and up long flights of ancient stairs.
The last metallic stains of sunset were fading from the sky.
The woman dressed her in a black robe heavy with gold, and wound jewels in her hair. Gold was put around her throat and on her arms and fingers and ears. Astaris grew aware of a curious coldness piercing her where the gold touched her skin.
In the orpiment twilight Panyuma led her through deserted corridors and finally to a granite wall. There was a mechanism in the floor which the Thaddrian clearly knew well. Bare stone parted and revealed a dim-lit gallery beyond. With a swift thrust Panyuma pushed her through, and the walls grated shut between them.
It was a place of the dead.
Here, past Guardians had been buried in the immemorial manner of Vis kings. Vast carved boxes contained their bones, with silver cups and bronze swords heaped up on them, and all about them their warriors frozen forever on their feet, shrunk to black sticks in their armor, with glass gems winking in their eyes. The air was heavy with dust and with the smell of those old embalmings.
But at one end of the gallery was something different. A lamp burned on a stand, and Hmar was sitting on a couch to face her. Behind him ranked ten women with gold burning on their hands and throats, and violet jewels in their hair. Astaris understood three things at once. The women lived, but they did not move, would never move and she was to become one of them.
“I see you comprehend,” Hmar said to her. He rose and came forward and there was a gold cup in his hand. “You’re to be a gift to my mother. I put her gold and her jewels on you, and then I make you as still. She hunts me in the dark. I angered her. But she loves me too, my mother Anack. Fear and love. Here, take the cup. Drink it down. A poison of the jungle, but without pain. A living death. And it will make you immortal. And you’ve no choice, I assure you, madam.”
When she smiled at him and reached out immediately for the cup, he paled. She had reminded him again of another woman, years before, whose name had been Ashne’e.
Astaris emptied the cup. Still smiling, she asked him: “How long must I wait?”
“Not long,” he said.
And it was true. Already she felt the cool passage of the liquor through her body, and presently she ceased to blink.
“Now I shall be what I have always truly been,” she thought.
After a time he picked up her inert body and laid it on the couch; it was still malleable enough for his purpose. She observed his frenzied ecstasy remotely. It was a preliminary and she felt nothing of it. When he was finished, he set her up beside the couch like a doll, arranging her hands as he had arranged the hands of those others. He seemed to be speaking, but she could no longer hear him, and soon her sight also began to fade from her wide open eyes.
She was drowsy, near to the black sleep he had given her. She thought: “Now I am the icon I was always. This is fitting; only the shell and nothing left within.” Then came the stirring in her womb, troubled, seeking. “Be still,” she thought. “You were his and mine, but we are nothing now. Be still.”
The dark came suddenly after that and took her away with it.
In the night, as so often, Anack came for him. He heard the dry rustling of her scales like dead leaves blown about the floor. The white moon of her face crested the foot of the bed. On her head the serpents hissed, and he saw her snake teeth gleam like fire.
He screamed for Panyuma, and woke.
The woman held him in her swarthy arms, but at first he did not recognize the corruption of his name when she spoke it.
“I am Amnorh, High Warden of Koramvis,” he thought, bewildered, as she muttered her dark forest magic to keep spirits at bay. But then he remembered who he was, and how the incantation could keep him safe. For he had come to believe in these things, being no longer independent of their terror.