All the flowers in the garden were white, or of a diluted pastel. White pigeons were cooing in a tree, and he was able to hear the rush of the fountain that concealed the garden’s lower entrance. No other sounds came up the hill. However, a quarter mile off, erected on a level with the tree of pigeons, one of the pillared buildings had put out a branch of smoke. A temple to the Lady of Snakes, maybe, where the altar fires were still kept alight, from politeness, by gods no longer needing to worship.
A voice blew quietly against his ears. Rehger did not react to it. This was how she had communicated first with him, Aztira, calling his name in his mind. Now he only felt the pressure of her attention, like a slight pressure of fingers, yet for several moments. After which, she withdrew from him like a sigh.
He continued down to an edge of the garden, where there was the girdling of a low, steep wall. Far beneath, on the misty boulevard, between the monuments, and great houses, he beheld some men and women walking, without haste, two by two, or alone. Like the city, they were all one in whiteness. Zircons flowed over a woman’s wrists, a silver clasp was struck on the shoulder of a man’s tunic. None of them looked up to see if any watched them from the garden’s vantage. Had they done so, they might have taken him for a slave, a brawny servant of Aztira’s mansion who, for some reason, was not moving in the rat-tunnels under the lawn. But doubtless they would not probe his brain to learn why this was, for he was subhuman and did not count.
(He had garnered a notion of the undercity from the invisible coming and going of the slaves, and from once or twice seeing their emergence or retreat through apertures in the plaster, pillars and stairs.)
But for the Amanackire citizens, they progressed unhurriedly over the surface, along the boulevard, and two by two or alone, vanished in adjacent thoroughfares.
Further on in the morning, on the lush hill of a park, he saw another group of them. They seemed at a kind of slow and measured play, a ritual, or a dance even. There was no music and no song.
He could recount these scenes in Zaddath, if ever he returned there.
Rehger thought of Amrek, who had meant to wipe this people off the earth’s face. He stared across the city.
He had admitted, as far away as that last village in the forest, that he had no purpose remaining to him. Purposeless, he had known therefore he would reach this place.
The feeling was similar to something he had experienced in his childhood, brought out of Iscah by the man Katemval, It came back to Rehger sharp as a knife. How the child he was had wept suddenly—losing something. It was the black bitch-dog—it was the black hair of his mother—all he could properly remember, save her name, pronounced differently.
The hurt, so small and incoherent, swelled and battered under his breastbone now, trapped and bemused in his man’s body.
Not Yennef, not Katemval, nor Tibo. The stadium had been parent to him, creatrix, and Daigoth, deity of fighters, acrobats and charioteers, Daigoth was his god.
But his mother had reverenced Cah, squat, bloody, and blacker than all other things. . . .
What had driven him was not pride or hate, or rage, or love. If he examined himself, it transpired that he had never validly undergone any of these states, these justifiable emotions of humankind. What motive then, for any of it?
And as he balanced on that height of the unreal yet extant city, he knew that he had lost himself forever. Rehger, like Amrek, was gone into the past.
She sat, almost all that long second day, her hands folded, overhearing the ebb of the struggle within him. It was her Power which made her able to do so, and made her able to endure it.
Then, when shadows had covered all her floor, she put that from her, and rising, sought him.
She loved him, but beside her love for him there was her own destiny, and that of her race. Anackire. She must be two women, the lover, and—his conjuration—the sorceress.
She reached the threshold of the chamber in the scattering sunset.
He stood, arrested, in the center of the room, as if he had been pacing about. He wore the clothes the slaves had brought to him, on her orders. The garments were white, as every piece of good raiment was, here. And in his thoughts a picture lay discarded, of another man in Moih, a dark Vis clad in white for his wedding. (Who this man was she could not tell.)
“Zaddath, or Dorthar,” she said, “will want to hear all you can tell them of my city.”
Were his eyes empty, now? Their blackness seemed to have no depth—like two shutters of burnished iron.
“Come with me,” she said mildly. “Tonight something may happen in Ashnesee that will be of interest to the councils of Zakoris and the Middle Lands.”
“You know so much of me,” he said. His voice was empty, surely. “Everything.”
“Nothing, my dear. Nothing at all. I don’t know if you revile me still.”
All she could decipher now, there in this room of her palace, was the sea-change in his perception. Rollers poured and thundered on the beach. Below, his meditation had become unformed but constant, and like that of a child grown very old.
“You’re inviting me to go with you into the streets of your city,” he said presently, gravely. “If that’s your wish. Yes, goddess.”
“Goddess. You haven’t been tainted by the superstitions of fools.”
“Now I have.”
“Rehger,” she said.
“But I don’t recognize that name you give me,” he said, “that man, that Lydian. He was done for in Saardsinmey. Your lesson, which I have learnt.”
“You misunderstood—” she cried, blindly and suddenly, the liar and lover, now. And at that he moved to her and gently put his hand, curving, quiet, against her face. She remembered so well the warmth, the strength and self-restraint of his formal caresses, the peerless grace of the lion taking her up like a leaf, not to damage her—
She thought, woman’s thought: What have I done? She said, “You suspect you will not return to Zaddath with your news.”
“It seems unlikely. But I’ll go with you now, Aztira.”
She put her own hand against his, and drew away. She closed her heart, and said, “You must walk a step or two behind me. Pardon me, that I ask you to do it.”
“Of course.” He smiled at her. She saw that he was serene. He had surrendered. This was the dignity of the king borne to the public scaffold—again it was she who must rein in wildness and lament.
“No one,” she said, “will think you a slave. We seldom keep secrets in Ashnesee. Some are already aware of the guest of my house. Even to his bloodline. Seeing you, the knowledge will run like fire among them. This isn’t dangerous in itself.”
“No.”
“But you may feel the lash of it. You’re able to shield yourself.”
“I know that, too.”
“An unusual ability in a Vis. The line of the first Storm Lord, Rarnammon, boasts a Lowland strain. Now entirely debased among the Dortharians.”
She walked before him down through the mansion.
At the higher grills and windows, the sunset massed hard, glistening scarlet. Yet, emerging from the vestibule, the west lay over behind the city, more suavely dyed, a flush of amber soaked on silk. The shrine exactly below the house snared the sun on its lid of gold. The rest was darkened like a cloud.
The woman descended the terraces and turned east.
Her whiteness blazing on the dusk, she preceded him along the nameless roads of Ashnesee.
A stairway of stone led into the shallow valley. Night had already gone down into it, and filled the bowl of grass and trees as if with smoke. The towers rose out of the dimness, gleaming, their peculiar cupolas, which were the heads of kalinx and tirr, the slender muzzles of dogs or the hooked visages of birds, blushed like copper. These staring masks had pairs of eyes, crystal windows, each balefully holding the dying sun.
White among the groves, the Amanackire had gathered. There were perhaps two hundred of them, which might be the sum of their numbers in the city. A minority were children, or adolescent. Mostly they looked to be between twenty and thirty years, at the commencement of long adult life for a Vis, the peak maturity of the Lowlander. There were no old ones. Men and women mingled, as the children mingled with the rest, no person or group adhering to another. And their faces, which were, every one, flawless and, if analyzed, beautiful, were as blank as the cut marble faces of the beast-towers, or even of the bred slaves with skins of wood and eyes of mud.