“Enough,” she said. “You can’t kill me to blot out the crime of my race.”
“It seems not.”
“Would you have done so?”
He said, “In my thoughts, lady, I’ve slaughtered you many times. The way a Vis would crush a snake. That picture would come to me. To break your neck.”
“And in these thoughts did I never in return blast you with lightning?”
Her voice had risen. She looked indeed as if she burned coldly, her whiteness livid. And suddenly, she glanced toward the wide hearth, partly lifted up one hand. And there were flames on the stones, not flowers, shooting upward to send a crash of light into the chimney, and limn her pallor (and that of the silver serpent), as if with blood.
He felt the scorch of the fire on his body, then—it cooled. Flowers scattered the hearth; the only light came down from the hanging lamps.
“And since you can never kill me, Rehger, and since apparently I’ll spare you, what next?”
“In Var-Zakoris and Dorthar,” he said, “the chance of this city is a cause for debate. They would like someone to go back, and tell them.”
“A paid agent. As your father was.”
“Did you divine that also from his coin?”
“In other ways. I had no time to tell you all I learned. But you have met with your father.”
“It was the meeting with him which put me on the road to Ashnesee.”
“My regrets you could,” she said, “get nothing more from it.”
Aztira turned. She went to the wall, to where a tree of pale ruddy leaves was painted on the plaster. She touched one of its branches, and a faint murmur passed through the wall, along the floor. In seconds, a figure came in at the hall’s other doorway. Rehger had seen a goddess of the city, now he saw one of its slaves.
She was a dark woman, umber-skinned and small, clothed in a linen smock, her hair bound closely to her head. She bowed from the hips, drooping down like a thirsty plant.
Aztira said, “Here is the lord I told you of. Take him to the prepared chamber, and serve him as you were instructed.”
Her tones were distant. It was not the address of mistress to slave, but of a sleepwalker to a phantom. Though chattels, the servers of Ashnesee were not, then, considered to be actual. They were only specks of a commanding brain.
The Amanackire said to Rehger, as if in another language, “Go with her. You will not be uncomfortable. Tomorrow you may depart by the same hidden route. The two men who brought you, one or other of them will come here at first light. Be ready. You have seen the City of the West has substance. Perhaps they will reward you for the discovery, in Var-Zakoris. Or say you lie. Or in returning you may be forfeited to the jungles. Understand, it was your bond with me, Rehger, that drew you here, against all odds. Not my outcry, or any magic. Your fantasy was of finding me alive and of killing me, knowing that if I had lived, to kill me would be impossible. You undertook this sullen quest because there was nothing else for you to do.”
He stood and gazed on at her, unspeaking, a statue with somber, considering eyes. Behind him, shadow on shadow, the black slave-girl waited, head still bowed.
“You mourn Saardsinmey not only for its destruction, but for its false purpose, which you borrowed. Gladiator and king, your freedom would have come with death. You would have perished inside five years.”
He answered then.
“So I believed.”
“You had made a pact with it. But your true life, which you had chosen and begun in Iscah, was interrupted by the man who bore you away. He declared he gave you a gift of brightness, days of glory, Katemval the slave-taker. But he cut the thread of the life you planned, that which your soul had wanted—”
“I don’t credit the soul’s life, Aztira. You know as much.”
“It was too late to recapture in Moih the ghost of that beginning,” she said, paying no heed, it seemed, to his denial. “Or else the making of things was not the only task you had set yourself. How willingly, therefore, you abandoned that last great victory you won over the stones, in the Lowlands, your apprenticeship. To hunt instead the ghost of me.” She moved back, slowly, drifting as if weightless, to her hearth. She said, “Go with the slave.”
“Aztira,” he said.
“What now?”
“If your race believes in many physical lives, do they ever fear rebirth as some man of Alisaar or woman of the black Zakorians?”
Startling him, she laughed, lightly; all her youngness was in it.
“Yes,” she said, “they do fear that. They say it would be self-punishment. Why else must we maintain one body against death, but to elude this truly awful fate?” Laughter and irony faded from her. “Leave me now,” she said. “You have had enough of me.”
When he turned, the crumpled slave straightened somewhat and went ahead of him, into the mansion.
22
The City of the Snake
Across the ceiling of the room, clouds had been painted on a ground of milky azure. They had no look of fundamental sky, yet, in the dusk of dawn and evening, seemed to float, while the blueness swam upward and changed, if not into ether, at least out of the condition of paint. The walls were incised with a coiling design which resolved into a serpent’s head beside the door. A tap on one of its eyes caused the door to open. On the other, and there would come at once one of the slaves with expressionless faces like dark brown wood. There were high-up grills which let in air and some quantity of light, but nothing more, and there were no furnishings beyond a bed, assembled for the guest, and wound with curtains. But the insects of the jungles of Vis seldom found their way into Ashnesee. Adjoining the chamber was a room for bathing and a closeted latrine, both of which outdid the best of the rich houses in Alisaar, At night an alabaster lamp was lit on a stand of marble.
He did not make ready to leave, the morning after his arrival.
He lay in a vast cavern of sleep, such as had sometimes come on him after a race or a fight. They had known this, the creatures of the house, and let him alone. Waking at noon—the sun was up above the grills—he saw they had removed the choice, uneaten meal offered the previous night. Later, when he had brushed the serpent’s eye-socket, a breakfast was brought in.
Rehger did not interrogate the slaves of the city. Like their overlords, they seemed to have no inclination to verbal speech. When one had made to taste his food, he shook his head at her and she went away. He had not supposed the sorceress would resort to drugs or toxic substances. Conceivably it was her pain or anger, or her scorn, to imply, through the slave’s action, that he would think so.
The bedchamber being large and uncluttered, he took exercise there, as if he were a prisoner and had no rights to the rest of the mansion or the garden below, which they had shown him were accessible. The streets of the city were another issue. He was not forbidden them—simply, they were not alluded to in the mannerisms of the slaves.
The second night was sleepless, the gate of the vast cavern fast shut against him. Wine-red Zastis tinctured the grills. He did not ask the house of the sorceress for a girl. He did not want one of their bed-menials, however pleasing or acquiescent. He recalled the blonde Ommos-Thaddric woman, in the roof-thatch of the last village. He considered her, and when desire became unbearable, he turned his memory to the image of death in the square below, the white she-man, joking and applauding a corpse to its grave.
When the sun rose he went after all down from the upper floor of the mansion, into the outer court, and into her garden, where the city was to be seen. The inanimate bleached buildings rocked at anchor in a soft morning mist, through which beast-headed towers seemed to lift their snouts to snuff the air.