Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

She lay in her darkened bedchamber beneath the glittering coverlet embroidered with marigold suns and ivory-silver moons, and her eyes scorched her own shallow brain with their hate. Never had she known such terror, few times would she know such terror again.

“Bring me Lomandra,” she said.

Lomandra the Xarabian, her chief woman, came like an elegant and slender ghost into the shadowy room.

“I am here, lady,” she said. “I rejoice at your safety.”

“My safety. I almost lost the child, the King within me, Rehdon’s seed. My only hope of honor—she wants to take it from me—she sent the snake to kill my son.”

“Who, lady?”

“The whore Orhn brought here to spite me. The Lowlands worship the serpent, the anckira. That witch, that she-devil—I prayed she wouldn’t live. I swear she shan’t.”

“Madam—”

“Quiet. This is all you must do. You must go to the Palace of Peace.”

“Madam, I—”

“No. You’ll do as I say. Remember, I trust you completely. You’ll wait on the bitch, and then we shall see. Take this.”

Lomandra stared at the Queen’s extended hand and saw what Val Mala offered her—a ring of many precious stones, a beautiful and valuable ring.

Lomandra seemed to hesitate, and then, softly, she drew it off and placed it on her own finger.

“It becomes you,” Val Mala murmured, and Lomandra was wedded to her scheming.

Outside the casements, thunders crashed and galloped across the city, the black animals of the storm which was to last three days.

After the long rain, morning heat fell more sweetly into the gardens of the Palace of Peace.

The eyes of the guard turned sideways. A woman was coming up between the tall trees and the topiary, a woman with golden ornaments and wearing palace black. They knew her by sight: she was the Queen’s chief lady, Lomandra the Xarabian. She walked past them, up the pale steps, under the portico.

Inside, a coolness in the corridors, and mosaic floors. In a room sat a girl with lank hanging hair that was the exact hue of the rarest amber. Her belly was already enlarged with child, but her body did not seem to have grown with it; rather, it appeared shrunken away, as if all her flesh, all her being had concentrated itself in this one area of new life, the rest of her merely a shell, a housing.

Lomandra halted. She stood quite still, she stood with all Val Mala’s pride and contempt apparent in the lines of her, for she was at this time a total emulation of Val Mala.

“I am sent to you by my mistress, the Queen of the Am Dorthar and of all Vis, the Lord Rehdon’s widow,” she said coldly, stringing the titles like rare gems.

“For what purpose?”

Lomandra was startled by this directness, but only for an instant.

“To serve you. The Queen honors her husband’s child.”

Ashne’e turned and looked at her. She was a pathetic creature, Lomandra thought, with merciless distaste. Except, that was, for her eyes. They too were amber, and quite extraordinary. Lomandra found herself staring into them and looked quickly away, disproportionately unnerved.

“How long have you to wait for your labor?”

“It will not be long.”

“Precisely how long? We understand the Lowland women carry their children for a shorter time than the Vis.”

Ashne’e did not answer. Lomandra’s hauteur crystalized into anger. She went forward and stood over the girl.

“I’ll ask you again. How long before your child is born?”

Yes, the eyes were perfectly—Lomandra searched her mind for a suitable word and could not find one. Perhaps it was merely this alien racial coloring that made them seem so— preternatural. Small veins stretched across the white like paths into the golden circlet of the iris, the vortex of the pupils. The pupils expanded even as she gazed at them. They seemed to pull her down into a whirling lightless void. In the midst of the void Lomandra was assailed by a foreign emotion which was pure horror, pure dread and a misery beyond endurance.

She fell back gasping and caught at the chair to steady herself.

When next she looked down, the Lowland girl was sitting with her head bowed and her hair falling over her face.

Lomandra stared about her, confused. “I am ill,” she thought.

“In five months I shall bear the child.”

Lomandra recalled putting a question to the girl; this then must be the answer. She had asked about the birth. Her reason steadied suddenly about her; she was reassuringly calm, almost amused, at her brief hysterical disorientation. “I must be more careful of myself.” It was the heat, or possibly . . . Lomandra smiled, remembering that tonight she would lie with Kren, Fourth Dragon Lord, Warden of the River Garrison, whose lovemaking always pleased her.

The girl Ashne’e had already dwindled, guttered like the flame of a candle.

Lomandra forgot at the Garrison high table, and later, when the night dripped redly black through the open windows and she lived through the world of a man’s body under the auspices of the star. But when she slept, she lay with the great swelling of her own imminent labor before her, and felt the terrifying movement of foetal life within. Then there was a crowd screaming, and she stretched naked in an open place, pegged out under the cruel sky, and a blade was thrust through her, through her sex into her womb—the most ancient, unspeakable punishment of the Vis. She screamed, she heard the embryo scream. She saw her own corpse, and found it was not hers. It was the corpse of Ashne’e.

Kren woke her. She turned her face into his chest and wept. Lomandra had not wept since, long ago, little more than a child, she had left her own land for the crags of Dorthar. Now, rivers ran from her eyes, and afterward she trembled, fearing herself possessed.

At first she considered revealing to the Queen her fear, asking that some other woman be sent in her place to watch the Lowland witch, but when she attended Val Mala, bringing her the answer to her question, all hope of it left her. Since the serpent, Val Mala’s beauty had been gradually demolished by the tyranny of her womb; her whims were peevish, and she was at her most temperamental and dangerous.

So Lomandra returned to the Palace of Peace and found only a thin and wasted girl chained to the parasite of creation.

A month passed. Lomandra dressed the girl in rare fabrics that hung like sacks on her body, and combed out her lifeless, fulvid hair, and observed her closely, never once looking into her eyes, which now, correspondingly, never turned to hers.

And Lomandra marveled. She came to know the fragile body intimately, yet, knowing this much, Lomandra felt she knew nothing; the soul within the body was dumb and locked away.

The physician, the black gown flapping round his thinness like rags on a skeleton, came and went. At the end of the month, Lomandra approached him in the twilit colonnade.

“How are things progressing, lord physician?”

“Well enough, though she doesn’t, I think, seem well made to bear a child. Her hips are very narrow and the pelvis like a bird’s.”

Lomandra said then, as Val Mala had told her to: “It will happen soon?”

“Not for some months yet, lady.”

“I would have expected sooner,” Lomandra lied, the Queen’s words. “Milk pap comes out of her breasts on occasion. She’s complained of sharp pains in her lower back. Are these not signs?”

The physician appeared startled.

“I haven’t noticed that. She’s said nothing.”

“Well, I’m a woman. She’s peasant stock, unsophisticated, afraid perhaps to speak to a man of such things.”

“It may be sooner, then.”

He seemed troubled as he turned away and vanished between the pillars like a tattered shadow.