“Aztira,” Rehger said to the shadows and the perfumed emptiness. He crossed the salon and tried the doors along the corridor beyond. Each opened. Many of the rooms lacked even furnishings. In some, dim shapes, nothing that was animate.
From a terraced balcony, a stair led up to the roof of the mansion. He climbed it slowly.
I healed before, there have been other wounds.
I was younger. No wound like this.
The roof was garlanded by the garden trees, only on the southwest side partly open to the dancing lights of the street beyond the alley, which seemed remote as fireflies. It occurred to him he glimpsingly heard the sea, as he had at the inn. And on the beach, sheathed in Velva’s golden flesh.
Pale on darkness, the Lowland girl was seated at the parapet. Her hair, unbound, with no ornament, hung round her to the roof itself, a waterfall. She did not turn.
“Is your name,” he said, “Aztira?”
She did not reply.
“Aztira, you’ll have to heal me, as you did the Corhlan. I was cut in the arm today, and it was your fault.” He moved toward her, but she did not look about. The moon was in the eastern trees. Not red, as yet, only like the rosy amber she had worn on her forehead. “And then I brought the one clue my father ever left my mother. It’s a coin. An adept can read something from a possession. In Alisaar they can, or say they can. I want to ask you about that man. If you take the coin, and tell me. He was called Yennef. My mother could never pronounce it. Nor I, till I came here.” He stood by her. All about, the darkness throbbed and whispered. “Aztira? There’s also a dream I need you to divine.”
She turned then. As she stood, her hair drifted out like silver smoke; her eyes were stars veiled in water. She raised her arms and her fingers touched his shoulders. There was strength in him, fierce and warm as wine. No wound, no trouble. He put his hands on her waist and lifted her and drew her up his body until her silver arms encircled his neck, until her heart smote against his, until their mouths could meet.
BOOK 2
Alisaar, part two
8
Sold and Bought
Not the temples. It was the brothels the Corhlan had gone to.
There had been a nightmare, of death. Somewhere. But you need not think of it, here.
He had fought, lost, walked away from the under-rooms of the stadium. To submerge his grievance, he came to this place, near the waterfront. He had had some cash saved, which had not yet run out. When it did, they would throw him on the fish-reeking cobbles, the madam glaring and vituperative, the girls regretfully sad. Then—then he would devise some other means to get by.
“I’m a prince, in Corhl,” he told the girls. They did not care, or believe him. But his healthy limber frame, his handsome face, they liked those. “Come to my palace. Be my queen in Corhl.” “Oh, get on with you,” they said.
The bed was scattered with the somber marigolds of Alisaar, the pomegranate-color wind-flowers, the speckled topaz lilies that grew wild on the hills. The establishment servants fed him, and brought wine, and white Karmian spirit that made you think you could fly. (“Fly to Corhl with me.” “Oh, get on.”)
During the first night, near sunrise, an enormous herd of cattle had woken him, mooing and rumbling under the sea. But cattle did not go about there.
The girl screamed as she lay on his belly, gripping his shoulders. He was finished just before her, and, his eyes clearing, saw through her contorted face into another face, white as a skull. There was a pain in his chest, running down from the neck to the breastbone.
The Lydian had given him a whack with his shield. It had stunned him. Weil.
“Now, for me,” the other girl said, sliding on to Chacor.
“Corrah, no. I’m dead.”
They had heard those rumors too, and did not believe them, either, though they did believe otherwise in every manner of miracle, jinx, glamour, ghost and demon.
“Ah, Chacor. The sun’s going, the Star’s coming up. And look, what’s this?”
Erect in her canny winsome hands, he surrendered himself. And she buried him in her loins, most marvelously alive.
Wrapped in her cloak of black silk and a great poured collar sewn with jets, Panduv stood and stared.
The man, a mix, poorly dressed in contrast to her opulent slavery, clanked the throats of the bags again.
“Five hundred bars, standard rate. Take and have them weighed, if you wish.”
“You’re her menial,” said Panduv. She snapped her fingers for her girl to go on ahead, through the covered court into the building,
“No. But she can command me, of course. Her kind can always do that.”
“So I see. Well. Go back and tell her to—save her money.”
The man looked down at the bags.
“They’re heavy.”
“I cry tears of blood for you.”
The man cursed her for a black Zakorian trull, and Panduv stalked by him. She could have killed him with her bare hands or feet, for she was stadium-trained also to fight, like every professional dancer-acrobat of the city. But that was out of bounds. He was, Yasmat snap off his organ, a mix. And an errand-boy for an Amanackire.
Panduv was tiring of that Amanackire. Once had been enough. What next?
Entering the purlieus of the theatre, Panduv discovered.
“She’s here.”
“Who is here?”
“Your snake woman.”
The manager, between contempt and nervousness, peered about the ante-stage, a space just now banked up with properties, and persons who were listening.
“Not mine,” said Panduv resolutely.
“I put her in the painters’ room. Go and see to her, for the love of the gods.”
Panduv left him and went to the painters’ room.
“You must be amorous of me,” she said to the Amanackire. “May I decline? Those stadium-trained avoid drinking milk.”
“I only want what I have told you I want.”
“Which you knew I’d refuse, or else why are you here before me, when your groveling money-bags met me outside?”
“Name your own price, Zakorian.”
Panduv detained a flock of replies. Curiosity was claiming her, despite everything. The Amanackire had come out tonight mantled in clear colors, a chameleon for once. Her tell-tale hair, and even her face, were veiled in gauze.
“Why do you want to purchase such a thing?” said Panduv.
The Amanackire sighed—for the gauze fluttered. She did nothing else.
Panduv said: “You think you’ll need it? And before I shall?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I mustn’t rejoice. You may strike me down—I’ve heard your race can kill by lightning from the brain. And then where would you be? But the stone is black, lady.”
“The Lowlands use black stone,”
“And burn their dead.”
“I’m not among my own kind here. I respect the customs of the lands I visit. I have been influenced.”
“Something more,” said Panduv. She narrowed her lustrous eyes, toyed with her jet-stone collar nearly as dark.
“What would you have?”
“Say,” said Panduv: “Why from me?” “It has the nature of a balance, Zakorian, which you might not understand. Besides, yours is of the best, the masons boast of it. The most sturdy.”
“You fear Saardsins would break in and desecrate?” By a movement of the face-veil, Panduv saw the Amanackire smiled.
“Before Zastis, you came to me,” said Panduv, “asking me about the Lydian.” “It was, if you wish, a prelude to this.” “But you’ve met him by now. It’s all over the stadium, and the Women’s House. That you and he fire the Star together. That you hexed him and nearly crippled him in the practice court so you could have him all Zastis to yourself. So why not ask his help with this other problem?”