A twilight had come into her eyes, seeming to tint them, but not with colors—or with those indescribable colors of which she could not tell him.
“We are to be envied and despised,” she said. “You know it.”
He inclined his head.
“Vis will tremble,” she said. “But it will be worse, at last, for us. In the end, we shall be lost.” She held out her hands to him over the bier of her risen kindred. “So, we are alike, you and I, after all.”
When he went to her, she laid her head against his breast, as if she were tired and yearned to sleep.
“Before sunrise, you must be got out of this sorcerous unclean city. Rehger, I will send you by a safe road. To the sea. Nor far, my love. Will you trust me to do it?”
“Yes. But that’s for the morning.”
She said, in a whisper, “You have read my thoughts.”
The dry pond of the plain had gathered to itself a fragrance on that evening. It was the perfume, lacking all the myriad smudgings and stenches of humanity, of the distances of a starry sky and the ground swell of the metamorphosed foliage of Ashnesee.
They walked the ridges and defiles of the city.
She discovered for him, as they went by, the massive monuments, and gilded shrines, the fair diadem of the temple, with its bloom of inner fire. Where the palaces were aglow, sometimes the silhouettes of beings moved on the lights. (Often, the noble buildings stood void.) In a garden, now and then, like statuary alive, the pale Amanackire went up and down. They were in constant union and almost always separate.
Twice, Aztira came upon her fellows on the roadway. Some greeting was exchanged, naturally in total silence.
The allergy of all that place, directed toward him like an instinctive music—this he could not fail to sense. She had said he must be gone before the new day. He had beheld them in their sanctum, and he had been allowed to judge the rite of reincarnation. And he was Amrek, and All-Vis.
But their antipathy was nothing in the peace of that evening. Beside her lawless and boundless beauty, nothing. The Star exalted in their celibate heaven.
As they walked, they spoke occasionally of Alisaar, of Saardsinmey, as if still it throve, sparkling with torches, and the races in the stadium due to begin. They laughed together once, thrice. The old stigmas had been sloughed, with the meanings of time and sentience.
In the oval hall of Aztira’s mansion, slaves had laid out a princely supper. The plates were silver chased in gold, with a design of sea-monsters—assuredly a gift from Sh’alis.
The wine was red: From Vardath.
Their conversation, which had become untrammeled, melted into the pauses of reflection, and of desire.
Her bedchamber, reached by a little low stair, warmed by a dozen tapers, had no windows, was enclosed as the womb of a shell.
Her nakedness, when he encountered it, the whiteness of her, like ice or marble, had, too, its inner fires, which he had forgotten. They took each other like leopards, famished, the commerce of a minute. And then again, the earth revolving and flung away.
It was the house behind the lacemakers. He heard the far shamble of the traffic on Five Mile Street.
Or it was Moih, and at his prayer the statue had become flesh.
“Rehger, forgive my use of you.”
“We seemed evenly matched.”
“That was not the use I meant.”
“I will forgive you anything, Aztira Am Ashnesee. You will outlive me, anyway. What does it matter?”
“Once you leave me here,” she said, “I shall become again a ghost, to you.”
As they lay on the pillows, through the final hour of darkness, she had begun to plait her hair. When he moved from her arms, he found it all in fetters round him. He lifted three or four of the plaits, shook them, and let loose the showering hair.
“You smell always of blossom and clear water.”
“But you will forget me, nevertheless.”
He made to begin loosening another of the plaits. She stopped this.
“In Iscah,” she said.
“In Iscah, what?”
“The sign of a married wife.”
He stared then deeply into her eyes, frowning, curious.
“What mystery is this?”
“Never mind it,” she said.
He put his mouth to her breasts, their pale and velvety buds, but lust was done with, hers and his. She had called him by his Alisaarian name, but he might forget that also, when he left her. He knew as much, indifferently.
“The dawn has begun,” she said softly, in a while. “A man will be standing in the garden, under the tree where the doves gather—do you recall? He led you into the city, and will lead you out of it. A hidden river runs away through caverns toward the coast. Where it breaks from the ground, there will be a boat, provisioned and ready. But then there is the wide western sea. Oh, Rehger,” she said.
“Zastis is good sailing weather,” he said.
She did not weep. Her eyes, as the Lowlanders said, were formed of tears.
They made love an ultimate time, swimming and slow, drowning, and cast ashore apart.
Transparent sunrise flooded the bedchamber when its door was opened.
He went between the bars of light, each falling behind him like a dreamer’s sword.
Not till he had traveled the corridor’s length, did he hear her say, “Don’t turn. There’s an ancient rhyme which warns against it. Forget me and prosper. I think you will know me still, when next we meet.”
He raised the curtain at the corridor’s end, and going on, let it fall again, between them.
The white man met Rehger Am Ly Dis under the tree of doves. They went together, not a phrase exchanged, to the lower tract of the garden, by the fountain there, and into the tunnels beneath Ashnesee.
So then the Vis wanderer saw Aarl-Hell, out of the legends of his own people. It was glimpsed, inadvertently almost, at a turning here, in a passage there—Laval fires burned in it and toiling figures lurched hither and thither spawning nightmare shadows. The slaves of the Chosen Race were busy. They oiled the clockwork of paradise above and could not afford to idle.
The undercity was an ant hill.
Rehger passed through it unchallenged on the heels of his guide, and came at long last into a luminous cave. Flat and thin, the river wormed along its rocky channel.
The Amanackire observed Rehger’s progress down the bank for less than a minute before retracing his steps into the warren of hell.
Alone, about an hour after, Rehger encountered a group of slaves on the river rocks. But they did not appear to see him, though he went by within three feet of them. They were fishing in the steely water.
And later again, when daylight had started to be ahead of him, he saw another detachment of slaves, squatting on the bank. They were actually laboring at nothing, perhaps resting. (Their faces were mindless yet controlled.) They might have been the very ones who had put ready the boat—and stacked in it the store of food and barrels of water and wine—that presently he came on.
It perched in the shallows, and beyond, the river yawned wide and the cave frayed into air and sky and leaning granite. And on the clifftop, the black thatch of the jungle-forest flourished like giant weeds.
Rehger pushed the boat into the main course of the river, brown and lazy water veiled by insects and heat. He rowed, and in the forests the sun beat and birds squalled.