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.