Songs of Love & Death (47 page)

She stretched a graceful hand toward me. My pistol fell from my numb fingers and clattered on the concrete. Despite my furious attempts to counter her power, I could no longer control my own body. My hand was lifting, reaching out toward my doom…

Lady Beth smashed my arm down and stepped between me and the demon. Catching the succubus’s hand, she cried, “No!”

The fiercest magic I’d ever experienced exploded as Lady Beth slammed the torrent of demonic energy back at the succubus, adding the full force of her own vast and highly trained magical power. I was knocked backward, falling onto the cold concrete.

Horrified, I saw Lady Beth vanish in a blaze of annihilating power. One instant she was there, a silver-haired warrior of light. Then she was gone.
Gone!

“Bethany!” I cried in anguish. I knew Charlie was right in saying she wouldn’t be here forever, but I hadn’t really expected to lose her
tonight
. I had thought that I would be able to save her at least, if not myself.

I had failed, and now she was utterly gone.

I wanted to howl to the heavens, but that was for later. Now I had a mission to complete. I collected my gun from where it had fallen and lurched to my feet.

The demon lay collapsed on the cracked concrete. Bitterly, I hoped she was dead, but the false Bethany’s perfect breasts still rose and fell with her ragged breathing. It was damnably unfair that this creature still lived while my Lady Beth was gone!

I could remedy that. Not caring if I destroyed my career as a cop or was
jailed for murder, I raised my gun.

Her eyes flickered and she whispered in a dazed voice, “What… what happened?’

It added to my anguish that her voice was a rich, youthful version of Lady Beth’s crisp British accent. I said grimly, “You killed Lady Bethany, and I am about to send you back to hell.”

Her disorientation cleared and she gasped, “David, don’t shoot! The succubus is gone. I’m Bethany. The one you know.”

I hesitated, wondering if the demon was enchanting me. The creature looked just like Bethany had when she was young, and the force of her sexuality was plenty strong enough to scramble my remaining wits.

“It’s really me, David,” she said with a shaky laugh. Cautiously the—woman? demon?—pushed herself to a sitting position. “Look at me with your inner vision.”

Doing my damnedest to block my attraction, I scanned her. No sign of demonic energy, but maybe the succubus had the power to baffle even an experienced hunter. “How did you find a body that looks just like a young version of Lady Bethany?” I asked harshly, still unable to trust my senses.

“I… I’m not sure.” She ran her hands over herself experimentally. “This doesn’t seem like a strange body. It feels like me.”

Watching her run her hands over her breasts and hips made my mouth go dry. “How do I know you aren’t faking me out with an illusion spell?”

Her brows arched. “For heaven’s sake, David, you’re a hunter! Have I ever been able to fool you with an illusion?”

Her tartness was exactly like the Bethany I knew. Realizing that I was still clutching my pistol, I lowered it to point at the ground, but I didn’t put the safety back on. “Lady Bethany couldn’t fool me—but maybe a succubus could.”

She gave a wry smile. “Perhaps, but with the demon gone, I’m sure the ability to scramble your wits with a glance is gone, too.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Not wanting to admit how vulnerable I was to her, I sought an explanation. “The succubus attacked and ripped away a piece of Lady Beth’s arm. Could this body be cloned from the DNA and matured in a such a brief time?”

She frowned. “That seems impossible, but I can’t think of any more plausible explanation. I don’t feel any lingering traces of a different human soul here. Or demonic energy, either. There’s just… me. Feeling much as I did in my youth.” Her gaze moved to my gun. “Are you going to let me stand without shooting me?”

“Go ahead.” I stepped back. Though still doubtful, no way could I shoot if there was a chance this was the real Bethany.

She got unsteadily to her feet. “Did I imagine it, or was my old body consumed by the power involved in dismissing the demon?”

My lips tightened. “You didn’t imagine it.”

“It’s… strange to think that the body I occupied for so many years is gone.” She stared at the faint scorch mark where Lady Beth had been standing. “It was a good body.”

“For a hunter to die fighting is a good death.” But I still hadn’t decided whether I was facing the real Bethany, or a very, very clever succubus who wasn’t wearing anywhere near enough clothing.

“I wonder… am I actually dead and my spirit is just hanging out here for a bit before moving on?” She was shivering hard, no surprise given the cool night and her minimalist dress. Her fishnet stockings were torn and goose pimples showed on her arms and legs. “Or am I really me and properly installed in a healthy young body?”

“I have no idea.” I pulled off my black trench coat and tossed it to her, careful to stay out of touching distance. “I’m better at field work than theory.”

“Thank you.” She pulled on the coat, which fell almost to the ground and could have wrapped twice around her. “How is the demon’s victim doing?”

I drew a deep breath, relieved that most of her was covered. Made it a little easier to think. “I think he’s okay, but I’ll check.”

Keeping a wary eye on her, I knelt by the college kid and spread my hand out on his chest. After a moment, I said, “No permanent harm done. He probably won’t remember what happened when he wakes up, which is just as well.”

“So we succeeded in tonight’s mission, though the price was high.” Her vivid blue eyes caught my gaze. “What will it take to convince you that I’m really Bethany, not a demon?”

“I don’t know,” I said bluntly. “When the big battle went down, I sensed the powers of the demon and Lady Bethany, but there was also an intense, alien energy I didn’t recognize. What the hell was going on?”

She tied the belt of the trench coat around her slim waist with shaking fingers. “As I blocked the succubus’s death magic and turned it back on her, I used a soul-transfer spell to exchange our spirits.”

I thought back, trying to analyze the hurricane of power that had blasted us all. “So the unfamiliar magic was that spell?”

She nodded. “Very unusual energy, wasn’t it?”

I frowned. “Where the hell did you find a soul-transfer spell?”

She bit her lower lip. Her full, lush lower lip. She’d have to drop a bag over
her head not to be alluring, and maybe not even then. “While you were taking Charles downstairs for a taxi, I followed more links on the succubus page. One of them led to a very ancient spell that supposedly would switch souls between two different people.”

I swore. “You tested an unknown spell in combat conditions? That’s crazy dangerous!”

“I didn’t have a lot of choice,” she said mildly. “I was going to die anyhow. This way I had a chance of surviving.”

Souls are eternal—every Guardian knows that. “I had the impression that Lady Beth had no fear of death.”

“I didn’t.” Her gaze caught mine. “I had other reasons for wanting to live longer in a young body.”

My heart began beating faster. “Why?”

“You know why, David,” she said softly.

The allure she radiated was a fire in my blood despite her being covered with a trench coat from her chin to her ankles. Demon magic, or was it pure Bethany? “You need to be… more specific.”

She drew a deep breath. “Ever since I met you ten years ago, when you were just out of the SEALs and paying a courtesy call on an old Guardian lady because your mother told you to, I’ve wished that I were a few decades younger.”

“You never said or did anything to suggest that you felt that way.” My throat was tight as my desire to believe warred with the fear that she was still a succubus and wickedly adept at convincing a man to believe in what he wanted to hear.

She smiled wryly. “It’s… unseemly to be a lecherous old woman yearning for a man young enough to be my grandson. I was grateful that we became good friends. How could we possibly be anything more? Then this demon showed up wearing my body.” Her voice hardened. “I thought she owed me something for that. Certainly she could not be allowed to stay in possession of it and use it to kill innocent young men.”

If she was acting, it was a brilliant show that she was putting on. Knowing that I needed the courage to risk my emotions as she was doing, I said haltingly, “It’s also unseemly for a man to be lusting after a sweet little old lady. So I didn’t. But I’ve never met a woman whose mind and spirit fit mine as well as yours. If you’re really Bethany, and not the cleverest damned demon in the universe!”

She’d been tense as the brick wall, but she eased into a smile. “I don’t think that succubi are particularly clever. This one was all selfish hunger.”

“Maybe she’s clever enough to know what I haven’t wanted to admit even to myself,” I said slowly.

“If you can’t be sure what I am by reading my energy, there’s only one solution, David.” She reached out a hand. “Touch me.”

If she was still the succubus, one touch would probably turn me into mental mush, and her next meal. But there was no other way to find out.

I’d always been a risk taker. I took her hand, and energy flared between us like wildfire. Not succubus steal-my-soul-and-consume-my-life energy, though. This was ten years of caring and affection transmuting into fierce, true love. The woman I pulled into my arms was
my
Bethany, no doubts and questions, forever and ever, amen.

Our kiss wasn’t the affectionate peck on the check that is exchanged between friends, but a hot, needy lover’s kiss. “Bethany,” I whispered when I could breathe again. “I never thought we could be together. Not this way.”

“Nor did I.” She laughed a little. “It’s such a cliché to fall in love with a man who’s tall, dark, and handsome. But as soon as you showed up on my doorstep, I was head over heels. Proof that age doesn’t bring wisdom.”

I smoothed back her silky hair, touching her as I’d never touched her before. “It’s also a cliché to fall in love with a hot blond babe. The hard part was knowing that that babe was seventy years in the past.”

“Not anymore.” She rested her forehead against my cheek, her soft breath warming my throat. “I’ve always dreamed of a Guardian alchemical marriage. Two souls blended as one. I loved my first husband, but we didn’t have that. I thought I’d missed my chance.”

“Yet here we are.” I kissed her forehead. Her vibrant young body was a little taller than her old one had been. “I think we were meant to be together, but we got the timing wrong.”

“Time kept us apart—but the demon inadvertently gave us a chance to reset that timing.” She slid an arm around my waist and gave me a shining smile. “Let’s go home, David. I’m in a hurry for us to have some privacy.”

So was I.

Tanith Lee is one of the best-known and most prolific of modern fantasists, with more than a hundred books to her credit, including (among many others)
The Birthgrave, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Don’t Bite the Sun, Night’s Master, The Storm Lord, Sung in Shadow, Volkhavaar, Anackire, Night’s Sorceries, Black Unicorn, Days of Grass, The Blood of Roses, Vivia, Reigning Cats and Dogs, When the Lights Go Out, Elephantasm, The Gods Are Thirsty, Cast a Bright Shadow, Here In Cold Hell, Faces Under Water, White as Snow, Mortal Suns, Death of the Day, Metallic Love, No Flame but Mine, Piratica: Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl’s Adventure Upon the High Seas,
and a sequel to
Piratica,
called
Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island.
Her numerous short stories have been collected in
Red as Blood, Tamastara, The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales, Dreams of Dark and Light, Nightshades,
and
Forests of the Night.
Her short story “The Gorgon” won her a World Fantasy Award in 1983, and her short story “Elle Est Trois (La Mort)” won her another World Fantasy Award in 1984. Her most recent books are the collected reprint of
The Secret Books of Paradys
and two new collections,
Tempting the Gods
and
Hunting the Shadows.
She lives with her husband in the south of England.

It’s said that each of us have one special person in the world that we are destined to love, and that to miss meeting that special person, to go through life without them, is perhaps the worst tragedy that can befall you. In the intricate, opulent, and lyrical story that follows, Lee shows us that if you miss your destined lover in
one
lifetime, it may just be possible to find them in another…

PART ONE—TIME AND TIDE

1

G
OING TO THE
lake. Either in her head, or in the soft, hovering drone of the flybus, she heard this refrain, repeating over and over.
Going to the lake
—was someone singing it?

Zaeli refused to look around. All these people smiling at or talking to each other, or reading guide books, or gazing earnestly, hungrily, from the windows at the exquisite ghosts of ruins littered all over the tawny folds and featherings of landscape.

But all I can see
—

All she can see behind her eyes, whether closed or open, is Angelo. All she can hear, apart from the tinnitus of the
Going to the lake
refrain, is his voice, dark and beautiful; what it said that evening four years ago, when they were, both of them, twenty-three years old. There in that far distant, ultramodern city that lay along the shores of that other lake. And then, of course, in sequence, she will see the other lake too, the first lake, glimmering in the darkness, and all the spiteful lights of the people hurriedly gathered there. How can it still stab into her like this? She must have reseen it, reheard it all so many times now, hundreds, thousands. Sometimes she also dreams it. The pain never eases. It never can.

No one can help her. She is a fool to have listened to the relentlessly caring advice which, eventually, has brought her here, into such a different environment, across so many miles and through so much time. And tomorrow it will
bring her to shores of the second lake, that lies waiting in those palace-scattered, ancient hills the colors of tobacco, sand, and turquoise.

T
HERE WAS A
halt around midday at a picturesque roadhouse, a copy of palatial architecture done small, and perched on a high terrace. The view was spectacular.

Below lay forests now. The vastly tall and slender trees, with their smoky foliage, were alight with the fiery flickerings of indigenous parrots and
fonds-oiseaux
. At the horizon, the mountains had appeared, melting out of the blue-green sky.

Everyone kept saying how sensational it all was. And it was. There was a lot of discussion of legends, and questioning of the guides. That far-off peak, shaped rather like an uprisen serpent, was that Mt. Sirrimir, where the mythic Prince Naran had shot his arrows up into the third moon, killed it, and brought it crashing down—dead—onto the land?

And how long before they reached the lake to which they were going? Would they be there by sunset?

Naturally. Of course.

The Lake of Loss, that was its name.

Zaeli felt a sudden hot rage, perhaps fresh camouflage for the never-ending pain.

But she gave no outward sign. She leaned on the railing and gazed miles away over the trees. An intermittent upland wind lifted strands of her hair and blew it across her green eyes. The hair was coppery red. She brushed it away with her hand and the hair seemed alien to her, and then the hand did too, and when she rested it again on the rail it lay there, her hand, pale and slim, like a separate object she had set down, which could now scurry off on its own.

Going to the lake. It would not matter. It, like her hair and her hand, and herself, and everything, could mean nothing. She would simply have visited and seen a bit of water, and listened obediently to the local legends. And then she could catch the returning flybus and go back. Back to the place called home. Home, where the heart was not.

You see, I did what you suggested. Another lake. I tried my best.

“It will have done you good.”

Yes, thank you
, she would answer, politely.

Someone really was speaking to her now, and Zaeli glanced at them distractedly. It was time to move on. To the Lake of Loss.

T
HE BUS GLIDED
smoothly out between the hills just as a crimson solar disc dropped among the mountains. The upper air turned purple, and beneath it, as if held in an enormous bowl, a purple mirror copied every shade and aspect of the sky. It showed how darkness came, too, with the rising on it of a pair of lavender moons, and the tidal star Sunev, pinned in the east like a boiling diamond.

Every person on the bus stared downward now into the mirror of the lake, as they crossed above it, and saw the spangle of their own lighted passing.

But that was all. Reflections, and night: surface. The depths were not revealed.

Staring also, Zaeli told herself that the lake was made only of solid glass. Nothing was below the surface. Nothing was in it. Neither living, nor dead.

W
HEN THE GOLDEN
bug cruised by above, heading toward the farther shore, the fisherman looked up at it a moment. Such vehicles made very little noise, and sometimes their lights enticed the fish to rise.

He doubted, this fisherman, that the passengers would notice him, or his little wooden insect of a boat, tucked in as they still were against the eastern beach. But soon the sail was up. Propelled by a night wind, the boat ghosted off through the water, breaking the mirrored star and moons with her silver net.

F
ROM THE HOTELS
by the lakeshore came a loud and mingled noise. Many diverse musics played and many unmatched voices, human and mechanical, were raised. The multitude of windows and entrances glowed, sending twisted corkscrews of brightness down into the water, trailing away like glowworms into the hills. The largest remaining area of the ruined city stood up there. But it had left its markers too all down the shore, and all about the groups of elegant contemporary hotels, thousand-year-old columns rose, as well as broken stairs or walls or lattices. No hotel garden did not possess at least one fragment of the ruins. Adjacently, ancient trees lifted. Lit lanterns delicately swayed in the low wind from the lake.

Zaeli had walked down to and then about a mile along the pebble-cluttered beach. At this time of year, the lake was tidal. Its ripples had lapped up as far as they would climb tonight. In an hour, perhaps, it would begin a melodious retreat.

Though lights still glinted at the water’s edge, the hotel complex seemed a long way off. The omnipresence of the ruins had grown dominant.

Inevitably so. For once the greater part of the city had been here—
there
, down
there
, beneath the lake itself.

She had stayed in the hotel for dinner, and then a lecture on the legends of the city. The guides gave this, with the assistance of a recreationist docudrama shown on two wide screens.

Then the rest of the party, and the guides, went smugly off to the bar.
I don’t belong with these others
, she had thought,
I never have or will
—Zaeli had found a door and stepped out into the night.

For a while, she stood at the water’s brink. Overhead, all the stars had burst their shells. Blazing Sunev was now halfway over to the west, pulling at the lake as it went. One moon had hidden behind the other.

Something was moving, out on the water.

Zaeli looked to see what it was. A fishing boat, its sail now furled, a man rowing strongly in to shore. He was a local, obviously, and would not be like the efficient, and probably falsely friendly, staff who worked in the hotels. An indigenous man, oldish, yet toughened, wound in a tight-belted robe, his lower face swathed in the masking scarf that men affected here more often than women.

Zaeli decided that she had better leave the beach, go back to the hotel—her proper place, a sort of zoo built to contain the foreigners, where the local people could be amused by them but not have to put up with them too much.

Abruptly, she felt sullen. She had begun to feel a little better. Not happy, not secure, but less stifled out here, alone, listening to the pulse of the water. But now her mood had darkened again. She should go back—

But just then the boat, surprising her slightly with its abrupt fleetness, nosed in on the shingle. The man stood up and raised one hand in a traditionally courteous greeting. “Good evening,” he said. He spoke Ameren, but almost everybody did, and it would be a facet of his courtesy to extend the foreign woman’s language to her.

“Hello,” she said. “Did you catch many fish?”

“None,” he answered gravely. He had a deep and musical voice, well-pitched and calm.

“I’m sorry.”

“Ah no,” he said. And oddly, from the creasing movement of the scarf, she saw that he smiled. “I never even try now.”

Zaeli said nothing. He was an eccentric, or he did not speak Ameren as well as he thought. Or she had misheard him.

But then, he drew up one end of the net his boat had trailed. It was empty. He told her, “I fish for other things. What the lake may give up from the world beneath.”

He must mean the drowned city.

“Is it really there?” she asked. “The city?” How childish I sound. Presumably it was, or
something
was. And did everyone here believe the legend? How, when Prince Naran had cloven and brought down the third moon, waters under the earth had erupted to meet it, and, falling back, covered the metropolis, leaving only its outer suburbs along the hills above the water.

But the fisherman simply looked at her. He had dark eyes, blacker than the sky, they seemed. And she thought of Angelo. His face, his body, his life were entirely there before her, standing between her and the fisherman, and between her and all things. It was always worse when it came like this, the memory, the despair, after some brief and so very hard-won interval of respite.

The fisherman was watching her. He would not be blind to the alteration of her face. He might think she was ill, consigned to die in a few months, or that she had recently lost a child, or a parent, or a lover. That something loved beyond reason had, without reason, been wrenched away from her.

She said, “Well, I must go—”

And he spoke over her immediately. “Let me take you across the lake in my boat. There is a special spot where you can see down into the water, all the way to the city. I have seen it very often, and in the past I have sometimes shown others, visitors like yourself.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I must—”

“That is up to you.” And he made again a most respectful, almost a courtly, gesture, one now that indicated his departure, and turned to leave.

She thought.
He might take me out on the lake and drown me. Is that what I’m scared of? Or rape and drown me? What do I care? What does anything matter? Angelo won’t come back out of the water, not this water, not the way he came back then. Not like that—

“Wait!” she called.

The fisherman paused.

“How much should I pay you?” she said.

Then he turned again and the scarf creased again for his smile.

“No payment. I am rich. Please, the boat is ready. Let us go.”

“B
ECAUSE OF THE
star, do you see,” he said, as they drifted over the water. “Sunev-la, who draws the tide. The star is only present for a month twice a
year, but at those seasons the tide may flow strangely, near the center of the lake. Have they told you of this?”

“They told me the legend,” she answered. She did not watch him, but gazed down into the black glass of the lake. She resisted the urge to trail her hand in the water. He did not row now, nor had he reset the sail. Somehow the water itself—or the tide, or the star—drew the boat forward. And therefore helped to retain for Zaeli the illusion that the fluid of the lake was solid glass—or polished obsidian—the ripples a fake. Impenetrable. She could swim, of course. But she had not done so since that evening long ago and far away.

He said, “One region of the city rises from the lake, that is the legend. Not all of the city, by no means. It is the palace of the king, they say, that rises. Did they tell you his name? He was called Zehrendir, and Naran was his brother. But there was no longer a bond between them, for they had quarreled over a woman. She was betrothed to Zehrendir but, or so the legend says, Naran stole her.”

“Oh, yes,” said Zaeli, absently.

She could see nothing in the water but darkness. And a faint reflection of her own paleness, and the pallor of the fisherman’s clothing: two ghosts.

“When the moon fell, the waters covered the city, and Amba—this was her name, the woman both Naran and Zehrendir had wanted—knowing her deserted betrothed had drowned, concealed herself in a high cave of the mountains. There she stayed, and although a streamlet ran through the cave, she would drink none of it. She died of thirst, because the king had died of too much water. So they say.”

Zaeli raised her eyes after all and stared at him. What was it in his voice? But the laval silver star was now behind his head, and she found it difficult to make out his already mostly hidden face.

For a bitter moment, tears pushed at her eyes, wanting to pour into them and through. But she had not been able to cry during the past four years, and could not now. Another kind of thirst, maybe.

Instead, words flowed out of her mouth and she listened in astonished shock as she told him, the unknown fisherman: “I was in love once, when I was young. He was… he used to be unhappy. I didn’t—I never got to know him well—he scarcely saw me—I didn’t know him well enough to know why he was so unhappy. He never allowed me near enough. But I think it was—as much in his mind as in his life. And one afternoon I met him in the dreary place where we both worked, and he started to talk to me, only I could barely hear him, and I had to keep asking him what he had said, and then he said ‘I
hate them.
’ And I said who—was it the people he worked with? And he said
‘I hate my
friends
. I hate them. I hate my friends.’ And then he walked away.”

Her voice was low and intense. “They say you can’t love someone you don’t know. But you can. Oh, you can. I wondered if I was included in his hatred, but then, we had never even been friends. That evening I went to the lake—there was a lake there, too. I went because I had to go somewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking of him or what he’d said—the sort of thing a child says, but he was twenty-three. And when I got to the beach it was getting dark and there were a lot of extra lights, and a medical vehicle. And he—his name was Angelo—was lying on the ground and they were trying to revive him. He had swum out and then—no, not suicide. He had a heart attack, they said, even though he was so young. Someone had seen and got him in to shore. But he died. He died on the beach in front of me. I saw him, just before they put him into the medicare. His eyes were open. They were dark as this lake,
this
one, not the one where he died. His eyes were darker—or less dark—than yours. I can’t decide. Isn’t that odd?”