No Flame But Mine

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Praise for the Writing of Tanith Lee

“Tanith Lee's lush fiction is marked by exotic venues, precisely and elegantly invoked, populated with passionate characters whose deep emotions drive them to outstanding feats of folly and bravery, sacrifice and love.” —Paul Di Filippo

The Secret Books of Paradys

“Fatalistic explorations of a city so sinister it makes H. P. Lovecraft look suburban … a high-quality mixing of eroticism, horror, and aestheticism.… Superb.” —
Chicago Sun-Times

“Tanith Lee is an elegant, ironic stylist … one of our very best authors. The prose is powerful, as well as stylish, and the characterizations are acute.” —
Locus

“Gorgeous, intoxicating, appalling … Paradys brings to mind M. John Harrison's
Viriconium
and Lawrence Durrell's
Alexandra.
” —
The Washington Post Book World

“Top-notch demonology and atmosphere … it is Lee's talent for realizing an exquisite and appalling mingling of lust and horror, sexual pleasure and loathing, yearning and revulsion, that drives the book and its readers from cover to cover. Enthralling.” —
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review, on
The Book of the Beast

The Lionwolf Trilogy

“It's refreshing to find a fantasy world where the more common medieval backdrop is developed into something deeper; where each page brings something new.” —
SFX
on
No Flame But Mine

“Originality which leaves vivid images in the mind long after … Powerful, poetic.” —
Starburst

No Flame But Mine

Tanith Lee

For Mavis Haut,

who so often sees to the roots of what I write

while I only swing through the branches

Translator's Note

This text has been translated not only into English, but into the English of recent times. It therefore includes, where appropriate, ‘contemporary' words such as
downside
, or even ‘foreign' words and phrases such as
doppelgänger
or
par excellence
. This method is employed in order to correspond with the syntax of the original scrolls, which themselves are written in a style of their own period, and include expressions and phrases from many areas and other tongues.

As with the main text, names, where they are exactly translatable, are rendered (often) in English, and sometimes both in English and the original vernacular – for example the name/title,
Lionwolf
(
Vashdran
in the Rukarian). Occasionally names are given in a combination of exactly equivalent English plus part of the existing name where it is basically
un
translatable, as with the Rukarian Phoenix, the
Firefex
. Note too perhaps the name
Jemhara
, which is a mix of Rukarian (
Jema
) and Latin (
hara
: hare), resorted to since in the original this second part of her name, which refers to her shape-changing, uses an obscure and ancient scholastic tongue of Ruk Kar Is.

A final point. Among Rukarians to abbreviate or alter the ending of a name may be a sign of affection. But to change or deform the first letter – as with
Pth
for
Zth
– is always a grave insult.

Note on Intervolumens

The three books of the trilogy make up, in the original format,
one
long book, composed of scrolls – here represented as Volumes. The
Intervolumens
are interpolated adventures and developments from other richer sources – since, in the scrolls of Lionwolf, many of these events are detailed sketchily, and in a sort of shorthand.

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity …

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Adonais
LII

Tenth Volume

I
CE
J
EWEL AND
H
EART OF
F
IRE

Always are there enemies. Some at you run with knife, some smile at your side. Some you notice not till round your throat their two hands come.

Inscription found on many male amulets;

the warding spell is presumably carried

by the stated facts: Vormlander

ONE

Gold moon sailed green sky. Beneath the two lay the world.

As she stood at her narrow window, the solid frigid sea to one side, and the wrecked city of Kandexa filling the rest of the view, the magician stared unblinking with her sombre eyes. The evening had a look it must often wear. The limpid and beautiful dusk alone seemed capable of change. The ice-imprisoned earth was
stuck
.

Of course there was always the chance of a savage fight. A pall of smoke hung on the city. The settlements of West Villagers and Clever Town had come to blows again.

Jemhara turned towards the door of her room. She sensed, as now she usually did, a human approach.

After a moment feet sounded on the attic stair and next the gentle rap of knuckles.

She did not move. The door opened at a twitch of her will.

A young man stood gaping. Yet all of them knew she could do such things. The people here had established for themselves she was one of the Magikoy, those mages that had been the most powerful, supposedly, in the world. Technically she was not Magikoy and she had never claimed the title for herself. But then too many of them said black-haired Jemhara was once a queen.

The young man cleared his throat.

‘Someone has come to Paradise, Highness,' he announced.

She nodded gravely.

Inside herself the little involuntary leap of her heart was instantly squashed. Persons did arrive at the barricaded and stupidly named zones inside Kandexa. At first, on being told of any newcomer she had frozen in expectancy. But it was never him.

The boy went on, ‘The mageia says can you come and see to it?'

The lesser mageia was a sensible woman.

Following the boy down from the attic, showing the stair for them in the gathering dark with sorcerously lit glims, Jemhara heard the echo of words in her head.

A man is on the road to you. A man like a tower of ice with eagle's eyes
.

Only one surely could be defined in that way: Thryfe, Magikoy mage of the Highest Order.

A dead god had given her the news in a kind of vision. But he was a god of wickedness and destruction.

Oh, she had still believed it. For a while. Most do when offered hope. And it sparkled before her like some image in a scrying mirror. Then, just as the dark now fell on the city, dark had fallen over her dream. She had asked herself simply how she could ever have credited a promise so obviously flawed. For though Thryfe was her only love, to him she was a despised and hated thing, causer of his guilt and utter despair.

The girl was seated cross-legged on the floor. She looked about eighteen or so, but
within
her face much older. A slender purple scar vividly marred her forehead; her skin otherwise was creamy. Ragged brown hair had been dyed green but the dye had now mostly grown out. A witch?

From her natural colouring she seemed to be from the Ruk. But the dye indicated the wild sorceresses of Gech in the far north.

Aglin, the older mageia of Paradise, was tending the fire-basket, lighting a couple of lamps by means of a nod and putting on water to boil.

Jemhara saw that the girl seated on the floor watched this with mild interest, calm but at odds with everything, as if she had given up either resisting or asking real questions.

‘Here I am,' said Jemhara.

‘Here you are, Jema. And here's this one.'

Jemhara looked again at the girl. ‘How are you called?'

‘Azulamni. But he called me Beebit. He said I'd have to answer to that or I'd be killed. And now I'm used to it.'

Jemhara raised her brows. She was familiar with strange coercions from her own youthful past.

‘Why was that?'

‘After the reivers came here, those years back.'

‘You mean to Kandexa, in the time of Vashdran?' To speak the name of the dead god who had made war on the Ruk burned Jemhara's mouth, and left a bitter psychic taste. It was he too who had spoken to her in the vision.

‘Kandexa surrendered to the reivers, the only city that did,' remarked Aglin to herself. ‘Thought it'd save them but the buggers smashed the place anyway. Scum, like all the mixed armies of Vashdran the Lionwolf.' She stared at the water over the fire. ‘Watched pot boil!' It boiled at once.

‘I was hiding up in the roof,' said the girl now called Beebit. ‘My father said go up, you'll be safe, and because I'm limber, I could. But they found him. I heard them murder him. Then I came down, so they caught me.' She was matter-of-fact. ‘One of them, he was a Kelp, he stank of fish, he threw me down and raped me. The rest of them got bored and went off. There were other nicer things and women. But then the Kelp saw how I was, what I can do. He didn't hurt me much, he was only small. I'd served bigger.'

Aglin brought Jemhara wine and hot water with a stick of spice. The mageia murmured, ‘Daddy had put her into the game. A cunning whore at twelve years.'

‘So old?' said Jemhara.

Hearing this, the girl glanced at them and suddenly she laughed. The mageia and Jemhara were both surprised. Laughter was not what they expected.

‘Look,' said Beebit.

Then she lay down on her back, not using her arms to help her, and slowly and evenly put up both her legs until her feet rested flat on the floor either side of her head. Then she stood up once more, weight only on the soles of her feet, bringing her head and torso round and under and out in a sort of leisurely backward somersault. Still grinning she sat on the floor again and crossed her legs, this time with a foot on each of her shoulders.