At last his eyes pulled themselves like tortured flies on to her face. The hair was all golden serpents, twisting, spitting to her shoulders. But the face itself was narrow, pale, long-lidded, set with a devouring yellow stare that might have been hewn from topaz. Or amber.
Ashne’e’s face.
He turned, and saw they stood in the great pool of shade that spread from the anckira, and it occurred to him that the cave was full of light, though no source was apparent.
“Who made this?”
When the girl answered, he could not repress the shudder that took hold of him.
“It has been said, Amnorh, that this is Anackire herself.”
And then sanity came back to him abruptly, for he saw the carved doorway set in the lowest coil of the tail.
“The hub of the mystery,” he said, “the treasure hoard.”
He went by the girl and strode to the door, ignoring what leaned above him. It had no secret machinery, giving at a thrust. Rusty metal swung inward, and he looked down into the eye of a great pool. Another deeper cave, filled by water, probably some entrance into the lake of Ibron. He stared about him, raising the burning tallow. There were no jewels, no religious amulets set with diamonds as the old stories had suggested; neither were there the great books of the lore and magic of the psyche and all the forces it might conduct and control. Only a cave smelling of water and filled with water. Anger lashed its thongs in his brain. So he had been tricked after all.
He turned and looked at Ashne’e.
“Where else do I search for what I want?”
“There is no other place.”
“Did you know there’d be nothing here? That all your legends were merely the dung of time?”
His hand closed viciously on her arm. He saw the blue circlet his fingers made, but no sign in her face that he caused her pain.
“Perhaps I should abort my child from you and leave you to the gentle mercies of the lord Orhn.”
Incredibly, a smile rose like dawn over her white face. He had never seen her smile, nor any woman smile in this fashion; it seemed to freeze his blood. His hand fell away from her.
“Do so, Amnorh. Otherwise he will be my curse on you.”
A curious sensation gripped him, so that he felt he looked at her not with his open eyes but with a third eye set in the center of his forehead. And it was not her he saw. Standing where she stood was a young man, indistinct, spectral, yet Amnorh could make out that he had the bronze skin of the Vis and, at the same time, eyes and hair as pale as the Lowland wine with which he had poisoned Rehdon during the first nights of the Red Moon.
The apparition faded and Amnorh staggered back.
“There is nothing here for you,” Ashne’e said.
She turned and began to cross the cavern toward the archway and the steps, and he found that he must follow her for he could no longer bear the singing silence and the presence of the creature in the cave.
He should then indeed have had her killed. She was no longer useful to him, a dangerous embarkation which had failed. And yet his lusts still drew him to her swollen ugly body, long after the star Zastis had paled and fallen from the sky. There was, too, the remembrance of the child in her which might so easily be his own. Would he, if Ashne’e were allowed to bring it forth alive, stand to benefit from this thread of his lineage woven into the royal line of kings?
The temple also haunted him.
Months after he had fled it, he had surveyed his terror and gone back. By then, the High Council, which he held in his palm, had voted him to the position of Warden of Koramvis, that title which ultimately and tactfully would ensure that he attained the regency. It had been the blood price he had earned from Val Mala, and her network of bribes and threats had not failed him. So long as he could amuse her he would do well, and Orhn, now redundant in the palace, deprived of honor and to a large extent of funds, afforded Amnorh a faint, aesthetic pleasure. Yet it was a season of waiting. And in the waiting, the urge came on him to return to that place.
Night was drowning the sky when he took the chariot and rode out of the River Gate, out of Koramvis, into the barren hills. The mountains, still tipped with the last light, were a monolithic desolation crowned with blood. A mad wind, the first voice of the cold days coming, howled among the rocks. When he came to the cleft, he left the chariot as before, and, taking a light in one hand, he followed the path the girl had shown him. He searched a long while. The moon appeared overhead, the stars came out. The narrow arch-mouth eluded him. Everything seemed to have become a fantasy, the hallucination of a dream. He recalled the peculiar moment when he had seen a man stand where Ashne’e had stood.
He turned back to the chariot, but checked a few yards off. The team was trembling and sweating. Amnorh looked about him. It was possible the night had called some animal out of its lair to hunt.
Then he saw it. A huge shape, with a glistening along its back from the moon. It eased over the rail of the chariot and slid away. A rock snake most probably, absorbed now into some hole. Yet Amnorh, voyeur of a superstition, had caught the imprint of the superstition like a disease. Had She perhaps sent it, he wondered with inadequate cynicism, that woman underground?
3
Lomandra heard a voice calling her name.
She turned to look down the dim corridor, which was empty, and the voice seemed to come again—inside her skull.
Ashne’e.
Lomandra hurried up the marble flight of the tower, drew aside the curtain and stood staring. The girl lay white-faced and expressionless, yet, through the thin shift, Lomandra saw the running stain of blood.
“Has it begun?” Lomandra cried hoarsely, sick with fear. Then: “The child has come early.” They were ritual words merely. Lomandra knew well enough, and without surprise, why the child came. She had mixed the Queen’s medicine with Ashne’e’s food and drink for three months now. “The bastard will tear its way from her body,” Val Mala had murmured, “and be stillborn.” “Will it kill her?” Lomandra had whispered. And Val Mala had said, very gently: “I shall pray that it does.”
“Are you in pain?” Lomandra asked uselessly.
“Yes.”
“How close together are the pains?”
“Quite close. It will be soon.”
“Oh, gods,” Lomandra cried out in her soul, “she will die, she will die, in agony, in front of me. And this is my doing.”
“Where is the physician?” Ashne’e asked tonelessly.
“At the Storm Palace. Val Mala summoned him a day ago.”
“Then send for him.”
Lomandra turned and almost ran from the room.
The Palace of Peace was in pale darkness, caught in the pulsing blue afterglow of dusk.
Lomandra leaned on the balustrade a moment, trembling. She made out a girl moving below, a brown moth fluttering from lamp to lamp, lighting each with the firefly taper in her hand. Lomandra shouted to her and the girl froze, wide-eyed, then fled away through the colonnade, calling.
Lomandra moved slowly up the stairs, hesitant, dreading to return to the room above. In the doorway she halted. It was very dark.
“I have sent for the physician,” she said to the white blur on the bed.