“The Lydian . . . tell me how he’s to be come at.”
The Zakor girl fenced a while. Her brain snarled and veered, and with no effort Aztira read it.
“Thank you,” said Aztira, like a killing snow.
And under the columned midnight arches near Sword Street, she lingered, and saw him stride out into the eye of the lamp. Rehger, the Lydian.
In him there was a completeness, to her gaze obvious at once. The savagery of leopard and lion, the gentleness of doves, the calm of deep water, the edge and might of fire. Yet, something unfinished too, something awry. The life had begun—but not moved in its allotted course. Like a star wrenched from its sky. Oh, the star blazed—She was pierced by the brilliancy of him, burnt.
Amrek—Vis—mortal—bronze almost to black—out of the Shadow, the light.
For myself, I loved you, from the moment I saw you I believe.
Though he denied her, he would come to her.
And though she conceded it was now inevitable, she had forgotten death.
(Aztira stood like an icon before the glass window in the tower at Ashnesee. The moon had ascended to the roof Beyond the city and the walls, the plain was a sea of night.)
They were lovers then, life with death mingling. She has won him to her by priestly trickery, in the childish wickedness of her delirious desire, herself half-hypnotized by the acceptance of fear. She had won him by death-dealing. (She saved Chacor, their victim, that she should owe the Corhl nothing. She had brought the boy back from the blow of Rehger’s sword as she would have led an animal from some crumbling pit into which it had strayed, frightened by her voice.) She was in three conditions—shame, hubris, love. She was flung from each height into another or into an abyss, and all this she showed Rehger plainly, not in the telepath’s way, but in the woman’s.
Finally, she was able to become with him only that, a woman. A blissful peace enveloped her. The battle was done. Fatalistically, she dismissed the destiny of the city, and did not listen to the footfall of her own particular death.
Even so, she detected it.
Then—she saw how the pattern might be resolved, and how—in the jaws of a whirlwind—her dying should stay Rehger for life.
She bought Panduv’s tomb. (Black for whiteness.)
Panduv would survive; Aztira knew it, just as she knew the milk that day had venom in it. She had paid well for her own murder, coins for lilies and bane. She had consented.
And even as she penned her letter to him, to her lover and her love, she had gloried in her Amanackire Power, which held pain far off. She had exalted that she no longer dreaded to die. And, lying down softly on the couch, she had cast herself adrift, as it seemed into a tremendous nothingness, like slumber, sensuous and enfolding.
He would live through her, he could not forget her, now. She had left behind a shrine of gold and silver and could go to sleep.
But, ah—what came after—
“No,” she said aloud, the woman at the window.
The horror which had been, there in the black tomb, empty and swilled by water, this she resisted, would not recollect. Her exclamation, charged with her will, started a soundless vibration in the tower room.
Now across the night, beyond the window, the terraces of the city, the walls, the slopes of earth and darkness, her lover hunted her. It was not that she had called to him, or even that he could have heard her, the beating of her heart, the susurrus of her mind, here in the forests at the land’s western brim.
They were perhaps condemned to meet again because of what they were, because each furnished for the other a spectral landmark in the chaos.
To the traveler, the track, beaten so flat and lacking obstacles, was the business of a couple of days. During the midafternoon of the second day, he came to a clearing, unlike any other clearing previously encountered. The forest, primeval, architectural, seething with profound animation, was curtailed as a shore would end against water. To the limits of keen vision, this curtailment stretched. While beyond the brink there was a plain.
To any who had seen them, the plain resembled, here in the womb of the jungle-forest, the bare rolling flanks of southernmost Vis: The Lowlands, south of Moih. They had weathered, it was true, rather differently in an altered climate, these alter-Plains. Their tones were more sonorous, richer, and here and there an island of ripe vegetation rode on them, or postings of the forest itself.
Where the surge of the forest and the line of the track stopped, and the lake of the plain commenced, was an arch on pillars, seventy feet in height, carved as a game-figure, white as the straight blade of the road, five chariot-lengths in width, that ran away beneath.
The road was paved with large dressed blocks. In a city of Dorthar, Karmiss, Xarabiss, Alisaar, the road would not have been a phenomenon.
Marching beside the road at intervals were obelisks of white marble, with crests of gold-leaf, catching sun.
There was not a mark on the road. It was new-made, an hour before, it seemed. Nothing had ever gone over it. Not a wheel or a hoof, not a footstep, a lizard, a bird, a leaf, a wind.
Narrowing in perspective, it pointed to a low mountain rising from the plain perhaps seven or eight miles away. In the manner of mountains, the top of the crag was lit by snow: The city.
The city.
It had been raised on a platform of rock, and the lit snows of its crags were towers and the heads of walls. The sun struck down on it, and crystals flashed from the mirrors of huge windows. In size, it was itself not vast.
The road roused up into a high causeway, but where the causeway came against the platform of the city, there appeared, from the plain below, to be no gate or entry. The face of the platform was sheer.
A wood of trees, also like the arboreal stations of the Plains, had collected at the roadside, before it gained the incline to the causeway. Here Rehger left the paving, and from this area he watched as the westering sun got over the platform, and a brass sunset turned the whiteness of the city black.
The city did not seem real. It had about it, or appeared to have, some of the imagery of legendary Dortharian Koramvis, which Raldnor had broken in bits.
A wind blew east over the plain, once all the day was out. It was warm and silken-heavy, smelling of farther jungles where the sun had fled and fallen. The wind brought no perfume and not a note or murmur. Zastis was rising.
The Star had also sprinkled red lights along the surface of the plain. They blinked and flickered, like luminous nocturnal roses. But it was a black wave of red eyes which was blowing now, as the wind had blown along the earth.
It would be possible for a man to climb a tree of the wood, but they, too, could—Besides, their dreamlike slowness checked him. Their odor was not as he remembered it from the menageries of Alisaar. In Moih, Chacor, but not Rehger, had hunted them. And once, as a child in Iscah, he had been snatched up by Tibo, as Orbin sprinted before them, and his mother’s braids stung against his neck as she ran with him for the farm.
Tonight, on this surreal plain, it was a pack some fifty or sixty strong, gliding as if wafted above the ground, without stench or cry.
They washed against the wood, entered it, and turned tens of heads to look up at him with the fire-drippings of their eyes.
One put its forelimbs on a trunk, the slaughterous claws retracted.
The evil shape of the head of this single beast caused Rehger a curious puzzlement, that it should in its form prefigure so exactly what it was—
He was not especially alert, had gained none of the ebullition of danger. He had not drawn the knife, it was sheathed still, like the talons of the tirr.
Aztira. Her name had a likeness to theirs.
The Tirr that had put its forefeet on the tree dropped down again.
The wind’s breaths rustled the leaves of the wood, but there was no other noise. Then there came a noise without any sound, a sort of whistling purr, in the ears, or in the skull.