Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

Raldnor stared at Anici, wanting to go to her, to touch her, but there was such an awful stillness about her. Her white face was empty as an unworn mask. He turned and walked back down the stairs, across the hall, out into the courtyard. Who was it that had tried to protect her? Some other Lowland man, perhaps, had spilled this blood.

He went through the gate and began to walk, not knowing where he was going.

At last he found himself seated on a low stone wall, and a man was insistently talking to him, urging him to get up and go to some meaningless destination. After a little he looked at this man, and it was Xaros.

“It’s my fault she’s dead,” Raldnor said. “It should have been my blood on the snow.”

But Xaros somehow got his arm and had him on his feet, and now they were moving through crowds, and he thought that Xaros was taking him back to the brothel and began to shout at him. Xaros called to a burly cutthroat lounging in a doorway: “Svarl, my friend’s sick. Give me a hand with him.”

The cutthroat obliged with competent roughness, and Raldnor discovered they were hauling him upstairs into an unknown building. A door opened on an exotic apartment he scarcely noted at the time, and he was hustled onto a couch. A slender, dark woman came into the room.

“Oh, Xaros, you promised you’d be gentle with him.”

Raldnor could not understand the woman’s concern, for she was a stranger to him, but when her cool hand brushed his face, her touch seemed to unlock the most bitter grief, and she held him and let him weep against her as if she were a sister.

He did not know if it was Anici he wept for or Eraz—the shadow image of his mother who, nevertheless, had been exclusively dear to him, or the beloved with whom he had shared thoughts, and for whom, intrinsically, he had felt nothing. For even in his bewildered pain he understood this, and understood, too, that the white-haired girl would be his penance.

Anici bent over him and touched his shoulder. He got up in the darkness, and she stood waiting, the wind washing through her silver hair. The white moon shone behind her; he saw the shadow of her small bones beneath the skin. As he approached her, she raised her arms, and long cracks appeared in her body, like ink lines on alabaster. Then she crumbled all at once into gilded ashes, and the ashes blew away across the moon, leaving only darkness to wake him.

There were evenings, nights, dawns, other twilights and suns rising. He grew accustomed to Xaros’s elegant rooms as he sat in them, eaten alive by a mindless, creeping lethargy.

After three or four days Orhvan had come, his expressive face showing now only a hesitant empty sorrow.

“Raldnor—the thaw will begin in a little while. Tomorrow even, or the day after, perhaps. Then we’ll be setting out for the Plains.”

Raldnor said nothing at first, but Orhvan stared at him as mutely, and finally he said: “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because we have to go now—before the second snow. You understand that traveling becomes impossible after that.”

“Why are you telling me?” Raldnor repeated, “I’m not going with you.”

“You’ve no choice. Oh, Raldnor, you have to come with us. Haven’t you seen what’s beginning here—Amrek’s work? Even the Xarabians have begun to hate and fear us. Every day there are men in the market places and squares, muttering about Lowland perversions and sorceries . . . You have to come—”

“No, Orhvan. You thought of me always as a Vis. And I am Vis. She—she might have altered me, molded me to be a Lowlander like you, if she’d been stronger and more able than she was. And you don’t have to reproach me for those words. I comprehend perfectly every atom of my guilt.”

He felt then the lightest touch against his thoughts, as if the mind of Orhvan, like hers, had brushed against his own through the crippling veil.

“Come to the Plains when you can,” Orhvan said, “when things are better for you. You know you’d be welcome—”

Raldnor shook his head. With unsmiling lacerated amusement, he said: “Don’t ask the thief and murderer back into your house, Orhvan. He might steal and butcher some more.”

Orhvan lowered his head and turned, and left him.

After this Raldnor had only two visitors. One was the Xarabian woman on whose unknown breast he had wept. He had expected at first, confronted with her in the aftermath of this hysteria, to be embarrassed and ill at ease, but in her gentle courteous way she somehow made him able to accept his own actions. It seemed she was Xaros’s mistress, though she lived in her own apartments somewhere in the building. She was always very quiet, yet her presence was unutterably soothing to Raldnor. She would bring him things to eat or occasionally read to him in a cool lilting voice. Her name was Helida, and her interest a maternal rather than an amatory one, for clearly she loved Xaros a great deal in her own reserved and essentially sophisticated fashion.

The other, second visitor was less welcome; she came in the night and crumbled across his dreams in the consuming fire of her burial. He began to dread sleep. Orhvan had left the wolf pelt when he came, and sometimes in the dark the glimmer of its whiteness seemed like her hair across his bed. Her very innocence had grown evil with the haunting.

Immured in the apartment building, he heard nothing of the city outside. Even Orhvan’s ominous despair had had no impact on him, and, besides, alienated from his people as always and for the first time befriended by a Vis, he felt himself truly Xarabian and one with the crowd of Lin Abissa.

Yet on the eighth evening of his lethargy, a boy came running up the stairs and pounded on Xaros’s door.

“What’s this, you hooligan?” Xaros demanded, and Raldnor thought he recognized the child as the son of the landlord and his wife, who lived a flight down.

“Xaros—soldiers—Dortharians—”

“Certainly. Get your breath back.”

The boy gasped a little, swallowed and resumed:

“Svarl saw Dortharian soldiers on Slant Street, asking for a Lowland man with a finger missing on his left hand. He told me to tell you someone directed them here.”

Xaros gave the boy a coin and packed him off; then, turning to Helida, he said: “Sweetheart, go and appropriate old Solfina’s hair dye,” and Helida went out, presumably to obey this curious order, without a word.

“I’ll leave at once,” Raldnor said, starting up in a sort of sick madness of action.

“And meet the dragons on the street? Oh, no, my impetuous friend. From this moment you’ll do exactly as I say. Oh, my darling Helida, how swift of you. Now we’ll make this yellow stuff a respectable color.”

Raldnor protested as Xaros plastered the jet black paste onto his hair, and Helida applied jugfuls of barely warm water.

“He struggles like an eel. Keep still while I attend to your eyebrows.”

“Will this paint wash off?” Raldnor demanded, stunned and made almost submissive by indignity.

“Wash off? Gods and goddesses—Do you suppose all the elderly black-haired ladies you see in the street would pay out their funds to be unmasked by the first rain?”

They toweled his hair before the fire.

“A rough imperfect job of work,” Xaros commented. “Now into your bed, under the covers and shut your eyes. It’s true certain Dortharians have yellow eyes—their famous king Rarnammon for one—but I can hardly pass you off as him. And say nothing, though an occasional groan I will allow you.”

At which moment, new and heavier footfalls, the unmistakable sound of mail, clashed on the stairs.

The imperative knock came seconds later. Xaros opened the door and feigned amazement.

“To what do I owe this honor?”