No Flame But Mine (23 page)

If he could do so much, why had he needed so much help to break from the matrix? Zzth had interrupted his arrival: was it that? The ritual, once begun, must be concluded in good order. If that, then now for sure it was.

The wall having given way fresh air was soaking through. Curiously ordinary once more Lionwolf picked up Thryfe's mantle, discarded on the floor. Lionwolf dressed himself, and belted the garment with a length of cord drawn from a nearby sack.

Thryfe moved. He drew in a long, clicking breath.

His eyes opened and fixed on what stood in front of him.

Saying nothing, pulling again only on enormous reserves of will, the magician dragged himself to his feet.

His sole and total plan raved in his glare. He must once more assault the creature, whatever it was, whatever it might do. He must somehow impair it.

But the boy – boy? – this beast-thing from some Hell – the boy held out his hand. ‘You'll feel better in a moment, sir.'

‘What?' said Thryfe, arrested by absurdity where terror and horror and despair had not stopped him.

‘You've suffered, but you heal. Give it a chance. That's best.'

Thryfe sealed his lips. He came at Lionwolf in a lurching leap.

Lionwolf caught him. Held him.

Something … The touch of the god was wonderful, like fiery wine which – yes – healed.

‘I can't call you
Father
, can I?' the god asked with a certain tactful inanity. ‘Physically of course. But there.' He put Thryfe down gently on the slab.

Ashamed by a dreadful wash of compliance, Thryfe felt how life flared in him now. It ran like lions through his veins.

He forced out words. ‘What happened to the woman who bore you?'

‘Jemhara lives.'

‘
Where
?'

‘She has been taken, but the one who has her thinks her valuable.'

‘
Who
?'

‘The god Zeth Zezeth.'

‘Are all of you
real
then?' Thryfe blurted scornfully.

‘Some of us are.' Lionwolf had now, it seemed, the grave authority of a great earthly king. Surprisingly again, he knelt by Thryfe, looking into his face. ‘But Thryfe, a destiny may sometimes be immovable. The parts we play, gods and men, may be written out for us before we are born. And in that writing we too may have colluded.'

Thryfe sat stunned, stupefied. He felt vigorous, healthy, young. He was hungry and thirsty in sane and eager ways. He was
greedy
for his existence that, less than five hundred heartbeats before, he had meant to sacrifice. It
was
like becoming drunk on wine, he thought. As the drunk believed, it should despite anything be possible to move the world in the desired direction.

I must wait to regain my right mind. Until then there is no use in questioning, even in thinking
. He had touched a god. God help him.

Somewhere above the room and corridor there was the sound of general disturbance. Men were coming, Bhorth's guards no doubt.

Thryfe became aware of the rats then. They were emerging from all points of the room, crowding in like a thrilled audience. They stared at the Lionwolf.

And the god rose, turned abruptly and saw them, and his face lit with laughter. He shook his head at the rats and the scarlet hair shook too like a wild wing. But the rats only kept their ground, chittering, tweeting like strange birds. Some held on to others, as people did sometimes when amazed or delighted.

‘Oh, then,' said the god. A kind of pale, soft fan of light flew off from him. It covered the room, the dank dark walls of which shone out like honey. The rats jumped and sported in the wave of light, washing themselves and each other.

When it sank they scurried off. They were gone and the room was dark again and empty but for the magician, and the god he had fathered.

‘What did you do,' Thryfe said, ‘to the rats?'

Down to such a ridiculous and irrelevant query had this vast event driven him.

But the god only laughed aloud and did not answer.

Above came the noise of mailed, running feet. Below rang the bird-like song of rodents doused in beams of supernature.

‘He is a fool. Yes, as he foretold, a fool. Does he have no idea of what constrained him – what can still
unmake
him?'

The voice was melodious. The place, glorious.

Jemhara took in the scene with a deadly rapture.

She sat in a grove where trees in heavily gilded leaf gave on a view of distant mountains, russet and vermilion, some of which mistily fumed into an amber sky.

The warmth was rich but not oppressive. A fountain of liquid water spouted through twists of copper.

‘No, not quite what you see, Jemhara,' he said. ‘None of you ever can see it, or report it, quite as it is. Perhaps nor do I.'

His malign side was shut off. The god Zeth was attractive and delicious in all ways. He looked not only unsurpassably handsome but
good
, wholly benign, as if no unjust or spiteful action could ever be possible to him.

She thought,
I am in his paradise, where the Rukarian priests and poets say he goes for recreation. It's true they all describe it differently
.

She looked down and saw she was clad in orichalc tissue. Her hair was clean and perfumed with an attar of some unknown and matchless plant probably foreign to earth. She was young again, not even young as she had been before Apple, but about seventeen. She did not need the flitter of little glass mirrors hung in trees to tell her her loveliness had returned repaired, in fact improved.

Her first actual thought had been one of fear – she could not find, either on her hand or lying where it had about her throat, the silver ring. Fear subsided to a small grey ache, the familiar bruise of loss. But then she had wondered if the ring too, magical and representing so very much, were still a part of her, had
become
a part of her. She imagined it grown into the marrow of her bone above the heart.
Let that be so. Let me think that
. And the ache melted away.

By then beside her stood Zeth Zezeth, the Sun Wolf.

‘Don't bow to me,' he said. He did not mean it. It radiated from him that she must always bow no matter what he said. He caressed her cheek with one finger. The sensual pleasure of this was nearly unbearable. Rapture – deadly, deadly.

‘Please pardon me, lordly one. I can hardly bear to see—' she attempted as he led her towards a prism drifting between the leaves and the water.

‘But you must.'

So she must.

It was the world naturally that was to be scried in the prism. She expected to be shown Vashdran there, the Vashdran baby crying, frightful yet vulnerable and pathetic. Or the sudden egg. But what was revealed was a snow-high street and over it, between house walls, a stream of rats scampering. Each was very large and seemed to have been dipped in gold leaf.

‘Playful,' said Zeth. He smiled. ‘He plays about like a little boy even now. Imparting energies to rats. But can he know, or does he not, why Thryfe could both draw him in and hold him put? Only that roaming moron Ddir, who had nothing better to do today, was able to release the simpleton called Lionwolf from his stasis. Well, Jema, you have been a Rukarian scholar. What do you think?'

‘How can I know, lord?'

‘Even you, my Jema, trammelled and trapped Lionwolf. Thirteen months. Poor
boy
. Poor
Jema
.' The jeer in Zeth's sublime voice was enchanting. Nothing foul or vicious could be involved with it at all.

‘Did I, lord? I had thought the delay was—'

‘No, Jemhara. It was you. The two of you.'

Jemhara wanted only to listen. She did not want to listen. She wanted anything, even pain and degradation, all but this. Irresistibly she gazed into his face. Her spirit seemed sucked right out of her. But then he had made a slave of her spirit already. Without thought she knew even the silver ring within her breastbone could not anchor her soul against this flood. She drooped with desire for Zeth, and love, and in her heart a little knife began to turn slowly on and on, coring her like the apple she had been named for.

‘If—' she said.

He paid no attention. He told her: ‘He is a god now created using only mortal material. Before, he was made of myself – of
me
, my very
essence
. Now he is common clay. Oh, he transcends it utterly, and with all human others he will meet it has little bearing on him. But Thryfe, though not able to kill him, has been like a magnet to him. One which, if properly manipulated, might weigh him to the ground. You however, my Jema, are better. Lionwolf has grown in you, and you have brought him out.
You
will be able to sink the fool lower yet, into the very pit, back to his hells. You are to assist me in this task.'

Jemhara kneeled on the gilt turf. Little hot fruits grew in it, and blossoms. She wished only to serve Zeth.

Again he touched her, one finger, on the crown of her head. The other had done that, her –
son
. Sweet flame trickled through her body and bones, her very hair. By now her heart was a hollow pip.

‘Jema, I would take joy in lying with you,' said Zeth. How prim his terms. She knew, her hollow heart knew. She languished, knowing he would
not
be ‘lying' with her. ‘One kiss from me would blast you apart. My congress with the other doy was different – I mean with his first earthly mother, Saphay.' Something bluish evolved, a skitter of malevolence; it was smoothed at once back into satin beneficence. ‘Even I have never known, would you credit me, what Saphay possessed to claim me, and to survive me, let alone to bring out Vashdran with my brightness locked inside. There have been women elsewhere, you understand, taken by me and so destroyed. And beasts now and then; they seem immune, perhaps protected by the beast form I must assume in order to dight them. Nor have any of them been able to steal from me, as Saphay did, and
he
. But then,' mused Zeth, moving from Jemhara, crossing like a flight of sunlight into the avenue among the trees, ‘does there have to be a reason for everything?'

THREE

Embedded in the court of Padgish, Arok knew himself reckoned a barbarian, but recollected plainly he was a king.

He believed he had been retained as a hostage against the threat of the warlike intent of his people. Their number was not known here, and doubtless their fighting ethic had been noted. That the Simese kept the Jafn rather as interesting zoo animals was beyond the bounds of consideration.

Arok stood now with a group of his warriors, ostensibly watching a peculiar game that the Simese conducted, on a court cleared of snow, with long, flat-bladed sticks and a ball. The ball must reach and strike a gong, of which there were two, one either end of the court. Each team of men had a colour, black or red, stitched to their sleeves. Some attempted to prevent the ball from striking the gong, throwing themselves flat, rolling and kicking; others tried to whack it home. Unluckily both sides constantly managed to score, and the continual clang of the gongs had by now given Arok a headache. This whole stupidity was it seemed to honour the god of Winter. He presided on the side. It was an ugly statue with pointed teeth.

Under the noise the Jafn spoke in their own tongue.

‘But how's it to be done?' said Khursp.

‘Simply.'

‘Yes?' The others crowded close. All around the game-enthused Simese ignored them. The ball, of goatskin over split rope, bounded once more to a gong.
Clunggg
.

‘Tell me who among us still finds himself a Jafn?' demanded Arok, clenching his brows with pain rather than anger.

They named themselves. There were others – ‘So-and-so, he's besotted by a fellow here, who treats him like a scrat.' ‘So-and-so, but he's gone crazy on a girl, some bitch, I think she's poisoning him.' ‘And
he
and
he
have taken up Simese manners, in the bath all day, even worship these outland gods – I don't mean as I have, to be on the safe side of things. No, it's real with them. You say, But what of God, and they say, Ah, that.'

‘Us alone then,' said Arok. He had already counted them in his mind. There were five men beside himself here in the court. Fenzi had been sent with the Simese princelet to the Holasangarth.

‘Can we leave them behind,' asked Khursp, ‘those others of us?'

Arok clenched his forehead more tightly.

He did not want to. It was not the Jafn code. To comrade and subject you stayed true. If you could, if he deserved it.

‘Khursp,' he said, ‘try to speak to them.'

Khursp winced. ‘If you want, Chaiord. But they're stuck on Simisey.'

The gong went off again. There was a definitive uproar of cheering and yells in which the Jafn sensibly joined. The ball contest had ended.

Arok felt the oddest thing. Without warning a cold finger seemed to have tapped against his brain. It cleared the headache instantly but left a fractured echo, as if his mind had divided in two or three segments.

Across the ball-court he sensed impulsively the grim presiding statue. Arok looked over. What an object. It was not humorous and logical like the dromaz god Obac, nor pretty and frivolous like Obac's tiny wife, the naughty mouse goddess Vedis. This was a staring face of bleached stone with slitted eyes and fangs. Winter was unpleasant. Perhaps that was logical too but Arok, raised to have faith in something much larger and far more enigmatic, automatically took against the Simese god of snow and ice and cold.

‘What's that idol's name?' he asked Khursp as they left the court.

Aware of Simese all around, Khursp muttered, ‘That fellow is the Lord Tirthen.'

‘We'll go out then come back. We'll make an offering to the filthy thing. Tell the others. The mages will come up to oversee it, shoving in their beaks. Let them.'

‘Why do we offer then, Arok?'

‘There are things that have – power. They're never gods. But one treads with care.' He did not add that, of all the Simese in the court, that one with the teeth had seemed to overhear his thoughts. To
want
something from him.