No Flame But Mine (39 page)

‘Shall we try what we can do?' said Guriyuve.

‘She – this Chillel – she's reduced us to little boys, as our mothers never did.'

‘She makes all men fools. Even her lovers. The demon Lionwolf she turned into a clown. My father Ipeyek was a nomad. He
travelled
to be rid of her. When she got close to him again in his mind through me, he deserted me and travelled back alone to the Uaarb.'

‘My father wasn't like that. He forgot her by staying put. Yet – he remembered her too. Yes, if I'm honest. He'd look at me, and think back to her. I can see it now. My real mother could see it
then
.'

‘But we're men,' said Guriyuve.

Both of them put one hand on the nearest wall.

There was no need to discuss this.

Jointly they let the rage and panic off the leash and sent them headlong in every direction.

The prison roared. Huge cracks and splinterings resounded. Chunks of masonry burst outward. From above a torrent of stones and stanchions plunged down. But the debris was insubstantial as smoke, and the falling stuff like a deluge of dark feathers.

When the dust settled they stood untouched in the middle of a vast open hall, like that of a king, but a king greater than the monarchs of dead Ru Karismi.

Overhead the roof had become non-existent. The stars blazed. With an almost musical choreography, nine round white lamps of differing sizes circled and partnered and abandoned and crossed each other.

‘Are they moons?'

Which of them asked this aloud? Both believed the other asked.

Then from a long way off up the hall they beheld a woman, moving neither quickly nor slowly towards them. Limned by the moon-lamps she was slender and quite tall, clad in a colourless garment, with black hair budding and lustrous as a plant of the outer garden, heavily drifting out behind her to the ground. Her face they could not properly see. Even as she drew nearer, they could not see it. Was she veiled or masked? It did not seem she was. But everything else was exactly visible now, everything but for her face. She was black as they. She was Chillel. Chillel moved towards them. Chillel – and they could not see her face.

Azula dreamed she had slithered down the tree in the groves, the chaze looped about her shoulders.

In the dream this seemed quite a canny move.

When she reached the liopard that lay calmly by the foot of the trunk, she stretched out her arm and the panther started running its head against her hand and wrist. She knew it was called a panther at this point.

The feel of its pelt was like the shorter and more wiry grass, yet with a lushness woven in the coat that surprised her. The snake did not try to escape. Eventually the cat got up and she and it trotted, a sort of
dog
trot, towards the hill with the tower. Azula saw the glow had come up again behind the tower. It reminded her of the big cat's eyes.

Just then she woke up.

Azula learned she, the chaze round her neck, was dog-trotting with the panther over the turf towards the tower.

A liquid splash of fright went off inside her, covering her insides, heart, viscera and brain with abject dread. But next that washed away like water tipped from a bowl. She thought,
It's too late now
.

Gaining the tower's foot Fenzi paused, looking it over, up and down. Before he did this however he glanced back again. The panther cats were no longer to be seen.

As he perused the tower structure, its ponderous yet oddly familiar stonework, he heard a terrible noise from deep inside it. Fenzi had had second-hand experience of reiver fights along the Jafn shore, and first-hand of mishaps of the voyage with Arok to the new continent. He had been there during the pig-hunt and its aftermath, Winter the godforce hunting them. Fenzi knew a cry of agony when he heard one.

Was he startled? No. Or startled only by the inevitability of this doomed quest's conclusion.

Death was in the tower. Vangui the rending she-wolf, the moon's cruellest, thinnest quarter: a claw.

After the ghastly cry there was an interval, less than a minute. Then other cries were heard. They varied in loudness and in tone, even in intensity. Yet all were comparable in that they were grunts, howls and screams of shock and intolerable pain.

Fenzi was sure every cry was voiced by a different man – none was not male. He found he had started to count them, somehow also including the number of those uttered before his count began. Every one went through him like a blade. When he had, or thought he had, counted over seventy cries, he pounded up the last of the slope and in at a tall slot he discovered in the stones. It was unlike a doorway, reminding him more, if he had considered it, of an enormous keyhole.

Inside stretched a space, roofless. High in the vault of it nine minor moons made patterns, passing, repassing.

Fenzi felt like a child. How old was he after all? Three – five – seven – nine?

He had known himself an adult man. Now this was cut from him. The urge to curl up tight on the stone floor was very insistent. He drew his sword.

Then Vangui entered the space from another chamber or another world.

How fearsome she was.

She had clad herself, over her physical blackness, in white mail, and a dark cloak trailed from her to the ground. Her head was shaven. Fenzi could not see her face. Instead there was a gleaming mottled redness, the kind of marks that might show on the moon's face during an eclipse – which he had never witnessed but been told of, or somehow divined. In her narrow hand too was a sword of whitest steel.

No use to battle with her. She was more powerful than a god; she was his source, the First Mother. And what man could slay his mother? Damn her then, this seef bitch from the guts of a rotten moon. Let her have him. He threw down his sword. When it hit the stony floor it shattered. Symbols, when very trite, often wound the worst.

Through him life beat in a flood, bearing his true parents, bearing Arok and Nirri, bearing Sombrec the lover, and even the tiger baby he had given to Curjai – and then blankness, more horrible than the trance the great cats cast, for he was not helpless, could move and operate his body, and yet was powerless as a man whose every bone had been ground to mist.

They saw her, most of them and all of them essentially, in a dissimilar form. To Guriyuve and Sallus for example, standing together, she had appeared rather the same. Yet her colourless dress was of a differentiated style for each, her unseen face was, for each,
unseen
in an unlike way. Fenzi saw her as a warrior goddess, hairless and defeminized. Among the rest of the Children of Chillel, she was visualized as seventy or eighty – more, more – other beings.

Some even watched a dual creature approach, partly masculine and partly female. Some gazed on a giantess, or a monster from their own personal set of myths – Fenzi was not alone among the Jafn-raised to compare her to a vampire. Two of the Chillelings from the Faz calculated her a shark-woman, but in either instance a
different
shark. Several Rukarians saw her in the image of one of their plethora of gods, the malign side always … To some she entered that desert of space as a panther that walked upright, with a woman's breasts and genitals flaring silver, as did her teeth, eyes and talons.

That was a constant, however. The talons.

The number of the Chillelings had never been certain. Somewhere between thirty and one hundred men? One was absent, of course – Dayadin, born son of Arok. And two were daughters – Brinnajni, Azula – and neither of these currently in the tower, and one not now to
be
in the tower. But all the men had either entered there, or been dragged there, or would enter or be dragged in. And time naturally in the fastness of a god, as in the otherworlds, had slight meaning.

She steals towards them individually and all, with the tread of dawning night upon an isolated island. Though already in the dark,
her
dark is final.

Even where two or four had grouped together, as had Sallus and Guriyuve, she draws close and then no other is by, no other exists. The whole earth is only himself and her.

She is not Chillel. But nor is she Winsome either in name or type. She is Vangui. They all grow aware that she is Vangui, and those who had guessed achieve a second depth of understanding that she is Vangui. Vangui of the Claw.

When she is very near the musk of the animal or creature she appears to be, or the perfume of the woman she appears to be, smothering and killing invades their nostrils, then despite the fact they are not paralysed their feet seem to have grown into the floor of the tower. Their arms lie leaden. If their hearts beat it is only like drums. If their eyes can see, and they can, it is only like mirrors.

Vangui regards them with her own black-silver gaze. No mercy or love in it, no family feeling. Not motherly. Never kind.

The right hand of the woman, the right forepaw of the beast, even if it is an armless serpent or a shark, springs back, a living thing in itself – and tears forward.

Four talons that seem made of iridium score the son who stands before them. They score as if he is quite naked, making nothing of any garb – leather, cloth, metal. They score inward and down from just beneath the left pectoral to the lowest root of the ribcage. They score to the skeleton, so through the torn blackness and spurt of fiery blood the human ivory is for one split-torn second clearly revealed.

And he screams. In all of the thirty or eighty or a hundred or more voices. Screams in agony, in affront, in horror, in misery. And the night captures each cry and stores it, files it carefully, hangs it like a jewel upon the air.

As she steps across the last inches of turf and enters the slot-like door to the tower, Azula begins to think she is under a spell. She feels no alarm or distrust. That must prove she has been duped. But what can she do? The panther has brought her and the chaze has companioned her. But now she is alone in a vast empty hall, and above her nine white globes dance together and faintly chime.

Azula supposes she will die here. Whatever comes at her she will loathe. And still she can experience her prospective loathing – that's good. Thank the gods. And if she dies anyway, if there is a Paradise, her ma will be there—

Something is gliding over the distance towards her.

Azula focuses on it. A woman?
Death
.

Chin up, brace the spine, take breath and meet death eye to eye. Azulamni is only a little girl a few years old, but when did that ever matter?

And I hate you, you goddess of rubbish
.

Hate you
.

THREE

Brightshade had descended from the mountains. As his non-bright shadow cascaded outward over the plain, wildlife fled to every compass point. Men, where the semi-ectoplasmic entity had passed by, took it mostly for a reflected cloud. The occasional magio had grimaced and fired off incantations. But anything non-human knew and ran.

One other thing there had been on the plain, not animal, not human, but this was gone.

Guri too, and the mammoths, had left the region by then. Lionwolf was sitting under an upright fan of ice sculpted at sunrise by the wind.

Brightshade's shade filled the world.

‘What nostalgia,' said Lionwolf, looking about. ‘How well I remember all those impressive filth hills and jingle-jangle bone forests decorated with corpses on your back. Some have been jettisoned. Never mind, Brighty. You've garnered several new ones. I especially like the artistic fortress of broken ships' masts. Besides, when I
walked
over you I never saw
inside
your guts. You have a fine collection there, too. Let me see – is that a whole shore village which you've swallowed? You must have sent a wave to throw it adrift.'

Brightshade loomed. He regarded the
shapes
of Lionwolf's friendly sarcasm, and picked up the regret with which Lionwolf also judged the wanton slaughter such a ‘collection' involved.

‘Forgive me,'
shaped
Brightshade. ‘Brother – forgive.'

‘It's done. No doubt I can't persuade you to give it up.'

‘I will,' sprayed the
shapes
, inaudible but deafening, ‘do anything! Only forgive what I have done to
you
.'

‘To me? I have forgiven it. You helped me. Didn't you know? Death and Hell were my anvil.'

Tears rained from the stained-glass palace windows of the leviathan's eyes.

Reaching the snow they sizzled, leaving oval slushy places, each about the size of a shed.

‘He persecutes and harries me,'
shaped
the whale. His agility with language had been got from multifarious meetings. Perhaps its dramatic tone was inevitable. Most of the ones he had heard using words were dying in terror because of
him
. ‘Save me from the father – save me, brother! I will be your slave. I will serve you. There is none but you.'

A particularly valid tear splashed out an oval the size of a cottage. They were not corporeal, the tears, yet had the force of sincerity. Until this moment Brightshade had been partly acting, to win Lionwolf's favour. But suddenly the script overwhelmed him. Now he wept like a sea.

Lionwolf began to speak soothingly to Brightshade in a kind of melodious gibberish. It was rather as mothers spoke to infants. Brinnajni, Lionwolf's daughter, had done something like this before, when she lulled the whale asleep and rescued Dayad from his stomach. Lionwolf could see the scar this rescue had fixed even on Brightshade's astral body. If the whale had ever grasped how he was robbed was unclear. But the chastisements of their father, Zth, were also plain enough.

Only too well did Lionwolf recall his own anguish of fear in pre-infancy when he had been threatened by Zeth Zezeth.

With his phrases and voice, Lionwolf reassured his half-brother. The plain beamed about them. It was, perhaps, the one lying just below the southern mountains. They were therefore in Kraagparia, Brightshade and he. What was real was unreal, what was unreal, real.