The tirr pack responded. They gathered themselves away, pressed back into the trunks of trees, where their eyes did not cease glittering and winking.
Two men walked out between the tirr and the trees, shining like nacre. By mind-speech, evidently, they controlled the pack.
Rehger did not speak, or think. If the Amanackire attempted to scour his brain, he would not make it easy.
One of the two men parted his lips.
“You are approaching the city.”
The other said, in the same pithless, unused voice:
“Your kind do not enter Ashnesee, except they enter as slaves.”
“Ashnesee,” said Rehger. Sensitized to it now, it seemed to him he felt his thoughts shoot out a bolt of anger, or great heat. “I’d heard that was one of the words for your city.”
Their snake stares turned on him like sightless stones.
Outside the wood, the moon now was rising, white kindred of theirs at any time but Zastis.
They must scent his ancestry, rage—his, theirs, weaving its lines of force between them.
The first man said, “Follow.”
As they walked along the road, the tirr were melting into the night, as if night had constructed them and lent them movement, and kindled their eyes like stars, and now put them out again.
21
The Hearth
The gate into Ashnesee was, for Rehger, a shrine or sarcophagus located at the base of the rock platform, below the causeway. The white men breathed on it and it opened—you heard of such devices in their temples. The aperture closed behind them.
A stair went underground, and led into a warren of man-hewn passages, dully and oddly lit both by distant torches and some faltering luminescence that seemed to have no source.
The route, at first level, then lifted itself in ramps. They emerged into a shut courtyard like a well, where the hot moon streamed in at one corner of the shaft.
The city stayed mute.
Another covered passage ran from the court, finishing at a slender door of cibba wood. The plashing of water had suddenly become audible. When the door—managed this time by touch—slid wide, rosy moonlight burst out again, crushed into the juice of a vast fountain. Its curtains in cascading down, seemed to bar the way. But there was an interval of dry space, and through this one passed into a garden.
The white men moved ahead, ascending, not glancing back, as if mislaying the barbaric animal they had brought in with them.
Rehger, however, hesitated, to view the city of the Amanackire. It lay on three sides, rinsed by the moon and made of the moon. . . . Tiers of pillared buildings, ruled by roads like frozen rivers—and, among clusters of trees, slim groves of towers whose heads were shaped like the masks of beasts—things not quite viable. And though small cells of illumination rested there in pools, humanly lifeless, too, a necropolis, so exquisitely formed it was, and devoid of motion as of sound.
The white men had halted at the top of the garden, under the vertical of a mansion there. A tower rose here, also. It had a serpent’s head burning coldly with the eye of an enormous moonstruck window.
Rehger followed the terraces up to the men under the wall.
“This is her house?”
They looked at him.
He said, “You’ve brought me to her. Aztira.”
It was not that he had begun to read their minds. There could be nowhere else they would bring him.
One of the men pointed. (Rehger saw another gate, this of decorative iron, ajar in the white wall.) They disliked to speak aloud, when it could be avoided.
And they would let him go on alone. They did not, then, mistrust him. Or she did not. Or, whatever his scheme or temper, they had valued themselves at more.
When he made no instant move to enter through the gate, they left him, and descended the lawns.
Then, standing on the grass of her garden, in the Zastis night, he remembered the house behind the lacemakers, and how he had gone to her, there.
But Ashnesee had even a different smell, an arid and vacant air, like that above a desert ruin, tinged merely now and then with a ravenous cloy of orchids.
He put his hand on the iron gate.
He would come into the mansion by way of the door beneath the tower, where the vine clung to the stones. From this entrance, the corridor would lead him into her hall, the great blanched oval with a floor of mosaic tiles, on whose walls were paintings of low hills, and pale-robed maidens who danced, immobile, in a field of grain, all lit now by the glow of the lotus lamps above. On the hearth, which in the evenings of the cold months would sometimes blossom fire, flowers lay sprinkled, giving off a dusty sweetness. A huge coiled snake of silverwork guarded the hearth, with eyes of creamy amber. There were few other furnishings.
Aztira waited, by the hearth snake. She wore a dress the color of the girls’ robes in the mural. She had no jewels.
In the quiet Rehger’s progress through the house, light-footed as the padding of a lion, was audible. And that, not once did he pause.
The girl’s eyes flame-flickered, but only like the eyes of the inanimate snake. If she breathed, it had remained invisible.
The heavy drape at the doorway was swung aside with a jangle of rings.
He did not stop even then, but crossed into the room, over the patterned floor. His eyes were on Aztira, and on nothing else. Even the snake did not seem to divert his attention. He strode under the lamps, and they turned him, one after another, to gold, until, perhaps ten feet from her, the advance ended.
He had arrived in the city of gods a vagabond. The glamour and the shackles of Saardsinmey were done with, two years had run away, forests had resisted and torn at him. More than ever, in the torrent of this, he had stayed, become, a king. And his black eyes fixed on her with all she remembered of their beauty, and their strength and cleanness. Such clarity was itself a power.
The girl before the hearth of flowers held out her hand to him, palm uppermost. There on its whiteness lay a triangle of tarnished metal.
“The coin your father left your mother,” she said to him, “the drak which you gave me to divine. My proof, in case it is wanted.”
“Proof of what?” he said.
“That I live.”
“Oh, lady,” he said, standing in the golden shadow, “I know that you live.”
“But that I died, also?”
“Yes. That you died and woke up, and here you are. The Goddess Aztira.”
She continued to extend to him Yennef s drak. He did not come to her to accept it.
She said, “I took it with me to my grave, to comfort me.” But her hand sank down, closed now on the coin.
“Your kind,” he said, “live forever. Why did you need comforting?”
“Since I was without you,” she said.
He said nothing. He was completely still, as she was, now, and as the city itself.
Aztira said, “Hear and believe this. I foresaw my death, but that was all. I predicted murder and terminus. I entreated you to my funeral rites because I reasoned the tomb of black stone would withstand the shock and the water. There was some measure of choice for me. But I was glad, in dying, trusting you would survive.”
“Thank you then for that, madam. You get no thanks from Saardsinmey.”
“No,” she said, “I won’t bow my head and cringe before you. If I am ashamed, it is my affair. If it was evil and my sin, that, too, is mine, not a matter between us. I thought I would die—oh, the soul, yes, the soul is eternal. But body and soul are strangers to each other. I—there would be nothing more of me. You think that to return out of bodily corruption is a simple thing? You said—that I woke. No, Rehger. This isn’t how it was. I hope you will let me tell you of it, but not yet.”
“Perhaps never. Did you call me here by some witchcraft?”
“Not by any sorcery. Not by the energy of the will or mind. Only my memory of you. That perhaps did cry after you. But I see, you would not have listened.”
“I was instructed to remember you. I’ve done so. No day or night, since Alisaar, that I failed to think of you. You stayed alive for me, Aztira, like the stink of mutilated flesh and sea filth, and a hundred sights of rubble.”