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.)