The Carnelian Throne (12 page)

He dared not ask her what it was that he had done, nor even make an excuse. Her eyes, when later she looked at him, were those of one who has paid a costly price and been cheated, one whose trust has been betrayed.

She wore the scabbard he had made from Estri’s tunic around her supple waist. His eyes were often upon it in the long days of forced march to which she put them.

It was as if the privilege of hearing her voice would be ever denied him, though he might accompany her and look upon her as he wished, provided he himself did not speak. And this he did, because it occurred to him, because it was a way of retaining his selfdom, because he knew that he was prejudged: “fallen iyl,” she had called him. Whatever he did now could bring upon him no more execrable fate than that which already awaited: he enjoyed the blessing of the condemned: freedom from care.

It was the day upon which she removed his stitches, by his reckoning sixteen days from that rainy midday she had found him in the road, that they entered the maze around Dey-Ceilneeth.

Now, Dey-Ceilneeth is the seat of Law in Benegua; the Temple of Mnemaat, home of His Eye and Mouth; and, by these necessities, the abode of women only: no man enters Dey-Ceilneeth unaccompanied and emerges. From these labyrinthine paths, tortuous beyond mortal comprehension, grown up from Benegua’s most poisonous hedges so long ago that the maze reaches skyward, tall as any deep-forest giants, there is no escape but for the initiate.

He caught himself holding tight to her robe, that he not find himself suddenly alone and helpless among the flesh-eating telsodas that framed the maze’s outer corridors. As tightly fitted as a wall of stone, trimmed perpendicular to the ground for twice his height, the pink-petaled mouths on their thorny stems smacked a thousand lips together as they passed. The sound sighed around them in the dappled light, filtered down toward them from the canopy that grew untrimmed above their heads.

Dangling blossoms writhed from that vaulted ceiling of branches, sometimes idly, sometimes striking with such a force that branches rattled about them, but they always fell short.

Even knowing this, even beside the priestess, in the midst of the tightly packed ptaiss, he ducked reflexively each time the hungry telsodas sought him.

Once he caught her face from the corner of his eye, freed, as he had never before managed to see it, from the veil her eyes threw out. She was most certainly laughing at him. This caused him to stiffen, and when they passed through one of a myriad identical breaks in the telsoda hedge to be confronted by two green-patterned serpents of nightmare proportions, he steeled himself to stride unconcerned between those rewound coils, the thinnest of which was the width of his waist, that slithered restless upon his right and his left.

Putting one foot mechanically before the other, eyes on the ground, he strode right into her, for she had stopped.

Dry-mouthed, trembling with each gust of wind that rattled the fahrass berries of the second hedge, he stared openmouthed as the ptaiss split asunder and she walked down the aisle they made directly toward the right-hand serpent’s coils.

The musky smell of them was intolerable to his instinct-frayed nerves. He found himself pressed closely between two restless ptaiss, leaning upon them for support.

She stood wraithlike before the viper, whose wedge-shaped head swayed and descended until it was at a level with her own. Its twin, across the path, hissed and flickered its black tongue.

She laid her hand on the sinuous neck, and laughed, a low, throaty sound. Then the berceide of the second hedge, for such is the name of the great green snakes that guard Benegua’s sanctum, began a long series of cadenced hisses and odd sibilances which the priestess answered in kind. When their cheeks touched (if such a viper, with head long as a man’s torso, can be said to have a cheek), he cried out, so clearly did his mind’s eye see those coils unreel, whip around the gauze-robed figure, so slight and full of life, and squeeze that life out onto the grass.

But nothing untoward occurred, unless it was that the priestess spoke at length to the berceide in its own sibilant tongue, turned her back, and rejoined him in the midst of the ptaiss.

“All is in readiness for you,” she said to him, and the satisfaction that rode her voice was dire with its foreshadowings. He tried to retreat from her, but the ptaiss against which he had been leaning stood firm. No longer did he feel the detachment which had thus far cushioned his response to all things as they occurred.

“That is right,” she said sweetly. “I have no longer the need to render you tractable by artificial means: you cannot now do otherwise than follow me. You cannot find your way back to the forest, not from within the second hedge.”

The berceides, both with heads resting on their coils, regarded the ptaiss and what stood within patiently, ophidian eyes unblinking.

“No, I cannot. I could not have, in any case,” some part of him said. “And since you have won, since I am your prisoner, why do you still hide your face? What difference if the captive sees the face of his captor?”

“You have been seeing my face, in your dreams if nowhere else, a long time, impertinent one. Dare your posture that you know me not?”

She stripped off the ensorcelment that had thus far masked all but her eyes in a soft haze of light, and he went to his knees among the ptaiss before her.

“Ipheri, forgive me. I—”

“Forgive you? Hardly. But you bear no additional stigma for what has passed between us; all of this”—and she waved her hand, as if to, encompass not only the space around them, but the time he had spent in her presence—“is of my design.”

It was then that the whelt, Kirelli, swooped from nowhere, screeching, toward Mahrlys’ head. A ptaiss leaped, jaws snapping, claw rending the air. But the whelt was gone into the thick-leaved fahrass above their heads.

“For that,” she hissed, “you will suffer. For the loss of Kirelli, I will have full recompense. Now, move!”

He scrambled to his feet, full of remonstrations unspoken: he had not sought the whelt, nor lost her anything by his will. Or he thought he had not. Once he started to speak, but she silenced him angrily and he followed, meek, silent, through the seven concentric mazes that remained between them and the inner chasm.

Before this, in spite of himself, he halted. It was a sight he had never expected to see, nor did he covet its rarity. A great distance below, white water churned and spat and, growled. Across the gorge lay Dey-Ceilneeth herself, scintillant and megalithic, like some gemstone wrapped in foliage. But he was not awed that he stood before the hallowed retreat, not while he faced the chasm and the swaying, lacy bridge that spanned it.

The ptaiss, with uncanny precision, parted, and, taking his hand, she drew him onto the pale lattice that spanned the precipitous drop. He stood with one foot upon the woven bridge, one upon the solid sod. At her urging he shook his head.

“I can force you,” she reminded him, and at his back he heard a growl, and felt a subtle push. There was a stanchion every dozen steps, through which stout rope was threaded. He closed his right fist over these and focused his gaze upon Mahrlys’ white-robed figure before him. It retreated. He followed, not daring to look down, where the white water could be seen between the knotted netting of pale rope. He concentrated on trying to determine of what the ropes were woven, and on Mahrlys-iis-Vahais, moving surefootedly before him. Somewhere about the middle of the expanse, when a cruel gust shook the bridge swaying, he used his left hand. He did not realize it until he took a step onto solid ground, until he with an effort of will pried his fingers from the guide ropes. Then he grinned, and flexed each finger in turn, and performed a number of testings upon the limb. Except for a not-unexpected stiffness, and an aching reminder of what work still proceeded within the bandage, of memnis, the arm worked perfectly. A great weight lifted from him. He turned and stared ruminatively at the ptaiss, across the chasm. They were restless, full of coughs and growls; in short: ptaisslike. As he watched, the group dispersed, some heading back into jicekak of the innermost maze, some leaping the crevice with little concern, some wandering along its length.

“Deilcrit,” called the priestess, and it was then that he was struck by her beauty. Earlier, when she stripped off her veil of light, it had been her revealed identity that had dropped him to his knees. Before that, it had been her numinous presence and those very veils that had kept him awed, cowed, unthinking—that and her desire. But he recalled her without her robes. He almost recollected what had passed between them that night. He had had proscribed knowledge of this woman standing before him, of that he was sure. And be she Mahrlys-iis-Vahais or no, she had known him—had tended his wounds, had fed him.

He did not understand the promise made him by Kirelli the wehr; he did not understand her fury concerning the bird’s actions; nor why the wehrs had not killed him when he had raised arms against their kind; or even what significance was to be put upon the swords she now bore slung about her robe and those who had once worn them.

But he did know that she had wanted him, and the swords. That she had wanted him alive and that she had felt the need to obtain his permission before taking the artifacts from him—this he knew. And it was not lost on him that whatever else might be said about Kirelli the whelt, he was an emissary of Wehrdom, and no small force to have upon one’s side; Mahrlys was incensed at having “lost” him. He wondered what she would think if she knew what the power that called itself Chayin had promised him. Perhaps he would try speaking that one’s name, as he had been counseled, should his need grow great. And then he remembered the whelt, spying upon him from the trees, and wagered within himself as to whether Mahrlys did in truth already know. Since the wager turned out not in his favor, he determined to keep his own counsel, and to hold these truths, his only possible weapons, sacrosanct against any interrogation. He did not realize how difficult this would come to be.

But he realized her beauty; and he had climbed up out of the pit of hopelessness with his assessment of his position.

He reached out and touched her, drew her to him. Her openhanded slap sent his head snapping to one side, but he did not release her.

“There are no ptaiss here to protect you,” he said, looking down into her revealed face, contorted with a fury that swelled her lips and colored her flaring cheekbones.

“It will take me but a moment to call one;” she grated through bared, even teeth, “and then I will have wasted near twenty days in the outer forest and you will be the corpse you should have been the night the wehrs raged. Take your hands from me, guerm-tender!”

Hurt rather than frightened, he did so. She was so tiny: her arms so slight, his hands closed around them; her waist so slim the thong he had worn wrapped twice around her. And yet she commanded him, and he obeyed.

He looked at her, then at his hands, then measured his desire, then wondered how this could be. He could take her, throw her to the grass, have her before any ptaiss might intervene. He gauged her labored breathing, the rise and fall of her breasts through the thin robe, and knew that this was so, that she herself recognized this truth.

“Please, guerm-tender, do your self a service; save yourself for the ajudication. Your crimes are far too momentous to be dealt with summarily in the open air. It is the bowels of Dey-Ceilneeth that must receive your repentance, extract from you their due. I have brought you this far. Proceed the rest of the way under your own will, or die here, now.”

“You cannot make me,” he said, referring equally to both alternatives she offered.

“You speak truth, yet you do not even know what you know;” she snapped, backing slowly away from him, her eyes fastened on his.

Oblivious to all else, he followed.

So intent on her was he that he did not see the shadows, manlike, flitting at the edge of his vision; nor the net, until it fell upon him from midair and he fell, thrashing, tangled in its weight.

The four ossasim followed the net to earth, alighting easily, spaced around their quarry. Even before their wings grew limp they had gathered up the net, and him within it, helpless, his weight on his left arm, the arm, twisted under him, blazing with pain.

He was twirled and turned in the net until it became a shroud binding him round, preventing any movement. Then three of the red-eyed, gray-furred wehr-masters held him in midair, while the fourth pressed a cloyingly scented cloth to his mouth and nose. He struggled hopelessly, until he could not, until pink stars consumed his vision.

The last thing his struggling showed him was her face, green eyes huge, peering through the tough netting.

“Poor Deilcrit,” she murmured. “There is no place for such as you in the world. None at all.”

And he thought that she kissed his forehead, or was about to, as he spun into the drug’s domain.

The guards in the subterranean prison were pleasant to him, in that they did not abuse him, or any of the others in the straw-strewn cage. But then, they were not men, nor women, nor any creature he had ever seen. Some said that they were offspring of ossasim and Beneguan females, and mules as a consequence of this. They could have been, he supposed, given their lightly furred flesh and their horny, lipless jaws; but something told him that more could come from the mating of ossasim and woman than these. Privately, he judged them ossasim females, a position for which there were no other contenders, and reasoned that though it seemed the flat-breasted things were sexless, to an ossasim they might be ultimately enticing, with some other way of procreating than through the orifice women use. They did not abuse him, and he did not question them. After his initial fright, when one of the red-eyed things appeared, characteristically suddenly, through his prison’s door, he took little note of them. They were another feature of his new existence to which he simply adjusted.

He was not fettered, he was not stripped, he was not starved. He was free to walk the extent of his rocky prison with its one mirrorlike wall of glazed, fused black rock. This one wall was smooth as glass, and perfectly regular. All the rest of the cavern was, a gentle circling of seamless, irregular limestone. The door slid back from the featureless middle of the black wall, and when it was closed there was no sign as to exactly where on the wall it might have been. In the cavern’s roof were two barred openings, to which no man could climb. There was no reason to restrain any of them within the cave; its security was unbreakable.