Танит Ли: Anackire

To his bemused, amused, furious surprise she had snatched up a little fruit knife from a table.

“Get out,” she said. Her voice was no more than a cough, but the tiny blade glinted.

Kesarh turned. He retraced his steps to the door, paused, and glanced back at her. At once she raised the knife, poising it to be thrown.

“Farewell, gentle sister,” he said. “Remember me in the hot crimson nights, alone on your religious mattress.”

Only when the door had closed on him did Val Nardia carefully replace the knife beside the fruit. It required care, since she could see nothing now for her tears.

In the stony under-palace, Kesarh’s guard sergeant surveyed a covered court, and the long post at its center, thumbs hooked in his belt.

“Yes, that’s his way, our Lord Kesarh. To send you on your own authority. You’re not the first by any means, soldier. Nor won’t be the last. Too much beer, was it? Or too much of the other thing?”

The Karmian guardsman—he had given his name a year ago as Rem—said nothing. The sergeant did not expect him to. With ten lashes in the offing from the prescribed whip, known among the men as Biter, few saw anything to joke or intellectualize over.

Kesarh had ten private guard, the permitted number for a prince of his lowly lights, a by-blow, with the royalty and the elite yellow-man’s blood in different parents. The bastards of the conqueror Shansar king and his brothers did much better. Kesarh’s ten men, however, mysteriously and schizophrenically fluctuated. Number Seven, for example, could be stocky and scarred one day, stocky and smooth the next, tall and smooth the next. Secretly listed under every single number there were now ten soldiers, which added up to a hundred, ninety of them unofficially in Kesarh’s private army. The practice was not uncommon, but Kesarh was more subtle, and more accumulative, than most. He also had a distinct and conceivably unfair advantage. Charisma was either natural to or absent in a leader. The Prince Am Xai had a goodly share, a peculiar dark and pitiless human magic that kept his men enthralled even though they frequently had some grievance against him, for his brand of justice was often bizarre, and occasionally actually unjust.

And this one, now, was going to get Kesarh’s malevolent unjust justice all nicely cut into his back.

“And who do we send you to to be looked after,” the sergeant said conversationally, “when we take you down?”

The sick and the punished did not lie up here. The whole force, save those ten on duty, were billeted about the city. Sometimes they deserted, but there were always more to be found. This one, this Rem, had been a thief, had he not?

“There isn’t anyone,” said the soldier flatly.

“What, no friendly doxy you keep in a burrow somewhere?”

“Not just now.”

“Kin?”

The soldier glanced at him.

“I don’t ask idly,” said the sergeant. “If there is someone, you’ll need them.”

The soldier who called himself Rem looked out at the whipping-post, the iron cuffs hanging ready from it.

“Yes.”

“Well, then?”

“A woman,” Rem said. “The red house on Slope Street, near the harbor.” He smiled in an unsmiling way. “She may refuse. She’s the mistress of a dealer in rope and cord. He’s out of the city at the moment.”

“As well for you. All right, soldier. Strip to your drawers, you know the formula. It’ll come fast and hard, you’ll feel it less that way. And no worse after. Call me any names you like while I’m doing it. I was a whip-master in Zakoris twenty years ago, and good enough then.”

They walked out together to the post and Rem put up his hands into the cuffs, letting them snap closed. The two guards, the picked witnesses, grunted their commiserations. The sergeant gave him a drink of raw spirit that tasted itself like the edge of a lash.

Then the whip named Biter came down on his back.

Rem, as they suspected, was not his name. But the name she had pinned on him, his crazy mother, he would hardly use that. Even the abbreviated form it had come to have was too suggestive to a keen ear. Growing up in the middle environs of the city, and now and then its slums, through the white dusts of the hot months, the gray snows of the cold, every tenth or eleventh male child around him named for Raldnor of Sar, the Lowland hero, Rem’s name had brought nothing but trouble. His childhood had been spent fighting, and when he went home, he was battered and beaten there, too. His mother’s protectors did not care for him. His mother did not like him either.

Latterly, he had come to think some of those blows rained on his immature head responsible for what had now happened five times in the past five years. What had been happening, in fact, when Kesarh Am Xai had walked out of his apartments and found him.

Coming back to himself with the prince’s dagger eating at his throat, it had been wiser to pretend. The prince had obviously assumed Rem was dozing on duty, the slumber of a fool. To be a palace soldier to one of Kesarh’s unspoken ambition and arrogant strengths might lead somewhere. Rem sensed about Kesarh some special vitality, some gift for earthly power. The work beside brought regular money, and privileges. Rem did not want to sink back into his former trade of robbery with violence. The job of a soldier was similar enough, but it was lawful. The best fee for what you did the best—that was a logical goal.

If Kesarh knew what had happened to Rem by his door, there would have been no choice. It would have been dismissal. The streets again, the old ways, going nowhere.

Rem had glimpsed the girl come out of the room, shivering, one round shoulder uncovered through a tangle of dark hair. Then the pain shot through Rem’s skull like a lance. He knew what was coming, but there was nothing he could do. The girl did not notice. The palace corridor misted and went out and the picture flashed in behind his eyes like a flame. What he saw was absolutely clear, as these visions were always clear. A woman stood there, in his mind. He could not make out her garments but he caught the glimmer of violet jewels. Her hair was red, that blood-red color once rare, now less so, from the mixing of the blond and dark races. But not only did he see all this, he saw into her body, into her womb. A creature coiled there, in its silver bubble, sexless and sleeping. There was a shimmering about it, the pulse of an aura. He felt its inherent life, smelled it, like air before a storm. Such feelings, when he was his normal coherent self, he would have ridiculed. The mind-pictures that had come to him since late adolescence he would also mock and reject as soon as they were done. He would accuse himself neither of empathy nor prescience. The things he saw were like symbols and, so far as he had ever known, had had no relevance to his own existence. Otherwise, it was a kind of madness he had confessed to no one, and until today he had never been caught out.

That Kesarh himself should be the one to catch him was the worst of all bad luck.

But the lie had held. And Rem was used to beatings.

When they took him down he was conscious, and had not expected to be otherwise.

It somewhat surprised him, therefore, after he had been got into the wagon—en route to the harbor and paid to make a detour through Slope Street—to fall into a whirling nothingness. He came out of it to find his companion, the man detailed to play nurse until they reached the house, and a leather wine bottle. Rem drank, and nearly brought the vinegar back. There seemed no pain in his body until he moved even slightly. Then it shifted in shreds off his bones.

“We’re here, Rem. The house you said.”

Rem agreed with a ghastly chuckle, and somehow he and the other soldier got him out.