“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.
Lomandra, her hand already on the curtain, paused. She had guessed long since the Queen’s intent; but it came to her now, for the first time, to recoil from what she had made herself accomplice to.
In the room, the girl sat before the oval mirror drawing a comb slowly through her listless hair. An inexplicable pity choked the Xarabian. She went forward, gently took the comb and continued its movement.
“Lomandra.”
Lomandra was startled. This voice had never before spoken her name. It had a curious effect; for a moment the pale drained face in the mirror became the face of a queen who had bound her in service. Her eyes met Ashne’e’s in the glass.
“Lomandra, I have no hate for you. Fear nothing.”
The words fitted so perfectly with the overlaid image of royalty that Lomandra’s jeweled hands shook and she let go of the comb.
“Xarabiss lies beside the Shadowless Plains, Lomandra. Though you are Vis, the blood of our peoples has mingled. Know me and yourself, Lomandra. You will be a friend to me.”
The soul of the Xarabian screamed suddenly within her. Only fear of Val Mala kept her from crying aloud what she knew must happen.
The girl seemed to hear her thoughts, without surprise.
“Obey the Queen, Lomandra. You have no choice. When her work is done, then you will do mine.”
The moon hung, a red fruit in the garden trees, as Amnorh passed the uncrossed spears of the guard with a noncommittaclass="underline" “I am on the Queen’s business.” Inside he climbed the darkness of a tower and pulled back the curtain of Ashne’e’s chamber. Only moonlight defined the room.
“I see you always as I see you now. Lying on a bed, Ashne’e.”
Her eyes were shut, but she said: “What do you want from me?”
“You know quite well what I want.”
He sat beside her and put his hand on her breast. It was obvious to him, even in the dark, that her beauty was both eradicated and unrecoverable, but it was not prettiness he desired.
“I want the tricks you taught Rehdon, the murdering tricks. You’ll find me an apt pupil.”
“There is a child in me,” she enunciated clearly, “the Storm Lord’s heir.”
“Yes. There’s a child. I doubt it’s Rehdon’s. His seed wasn’t overpotent.”
Her eyes opened and fixed on him.
“Do you imagine,” he said, “that you’d live now if I hadn’t planted you with the excuse?”
“Why does it matter to you that I live?”
“Ah, a profound question, Ashne’e. I want your knowledge. Not only the love you teach between your white thighs, but those powers your people play at in their dunghills. The Speaking Mind: yes, I have mastered your terminology. Instruct me how to read men’s thoughts. And Her Temple—where is that? Close?”
“There are many temples.”
“No, not those. This is Anackire’s place. I am aware the ruins lie in the hills of Dorthar.”
“How do you know this?”
“I have had other Lowlanders at my beck from time to time. Some are looser-tongued than others. But none was an acolyte of the Lady of Snakes.”
“Why do you seek this place?”
“To despoil it of its monetary and spiritual wealth. This no doubt distresses you, but I assure you, you’ve no choice. There are a million subtle ways in which I can distress you more violently should you refuse to assist me in everything I ask. It would be easy to instigate your death.”
He needed no answer. She gave him none.
“Now I’ll have what I came for.”
She made no protest or denial, but reached for him and twined him at once in her limbs and hair, so that he also was reminded irresistibly of serpents in the moon-tinged blackness.
The Queen had summoned Lomandra to the palace; certain of Amnorh’s men had relieved the scatter of external guard at the Palace of Peace. Amnorh took the Lowland girl to his chariot and drove with her by circuitous routes toward the skirts of the mountains.
A silver dawn was replaced by a pitiless lacquering of blue as the towered city fell behind. Birds loomed on broad wings, casting ominous shadows.
“Stop at that place,” she said to him.
It was a cleft in rock; below, he saw the dragon’s eye, the lake Ibron, a gleam of white water.
“You must leave the chariot.”
He obeyed her, pausing only to tether the restless animals, and followed her along the bony spine of the hill.
And then she vanished.
“Ashne’e!” he shouted. A furious conviction took hold of him that she had duped him, escaped to some lair like a beast. And then he turned and saw her pallid shape, like a dim candle, burning in the rock beside him. It was a cave with an eye-of-a-needle opening. He slid through, and at once felt the dampness in the air, the chill and the encroaching, almost tangible dark.
“No trickery, Amnorh,” she said, and there was a subtle difference in the way she spoke to him. “All that remains of the temple hill-gate is here.”
“How can you be sure of the entrance?”
“I, like you, have been told of this place.”
The back of the cave fell away in a corridor of blackness into which she turned and he followed. Once the blackness enclosed him he felt immediately reluctant to proceed. He struck sparks from a flint to tallow and held it burning in his hand, but the small light seemed only to emphasize the impenetrable shade.
The corridor ended in blank stone. Ashne’e reached out and her fingers ran in patterns on the stone. He tried to memorize what she did, but the shadows confused him. The stone shuddered; dislodged, an ancient dirt cascaded, and there was a groaning of something old disturbed. An opening appeared grudgingly, low and slit-thin.
She slipped through it, a fluttering pale ghost, and seemed to fall in slow motion into a bottomless pit. Amnorh maneuvered after her and found a stairway, a great jagged pile of steps pouring down into the lightlessness below, and sinking in the inky sea was Ashne’e, an impossible fish.
As he watched her, there came a stifling urge to turn back. This was her element, it absorbed her, incorporated her into its being. From the Vis it drew away, amused but intolerant of his greed for substantial things. Yet his lust for the riches of the temple hurled him forward.
He followed.
Curious sounds stole into his ears.
There seemed to be a tingling, the rippling of unimagined instruments; it was the ceaseless dripping of blue water onto silver stone. The shivering damp steamed and slithered on the steps. A vision infected Amnorh of a screaming man who was falling, falling, falling into the depthless dark.
But though trembling and cold, he reached the bottom, and found another arch-mouth. He went through it, after the girl, unprepared by anything any terrified bleeding serf had ever babbled to him. Out of the black sprang a flame, and horror. He felt his tongue thicken and his joints melt like wax.
Anackire.
She towered. She soared. Her flesh was a white mountain, her snake’s tail a river of fire in spate.
No colossus of Rarnammon had ever been raised to such a size. Even the obsidian dragons could crouch like lizards by her scaled serpent’s tail. And the tail was gold, all pure gold and immense violet gems, and above the coils of it a woman’s white body, flat belly empty of a navel, gold minarets of nipples on the cupolas of the ice-white breasts. The eight white arms stretched in the traditional modes, such as he had seen on little carvings in the villages, casting ink-black chasms of shadow. The arm of deliverance and the arm of protection, of comfort and of blessing, and also those terrible arms of retribution, destruction, torment and the inexorable curse.