He … was she. That mundane. Guri, picking himself up, found he was picking herself up.
Whether he was a comely or skilful woman he did not know, no more than she. But breasts she had, and strong young female arms, and the feet of a woman, and her long hair had no braidings or skulls. Her skin was fair-sallow.
As soon as the alteration claimed him, he – she – knew why, and for what purpose. He felt her womb inside himself, and her undefended entry.
Only then did she hear the yelling and yowling, the crackle of fires and clout of blades, the tingling hiss of arrows. One arrow slewed in at the door and struck her through the forearm. Her flesh was softer than Guri’s and it scalded. She gave a cry. He gave it in her voice.
Then, at the low hut door, three or more Olchibe men slunk through, grim-faced and dedicated.
‘She’s not much.’
‘Useless for the markets of Sham.’
Outside, albino phantoms, the mammoths trampled and snorted. Running figures were speared about a central fire.
The first time, Guri had tried to speak Olchibe to the invaders, to brave it out. But the woman’s voice that jagged from him or her had no words of Olchibe or anywhere in Gech. It was some Rukar dialect. And like the speech he had heard in the village town of Ranjalla, though he understood its meaning it was as unlike Rukarian as anything he had ever heard.
The three or five men wore fur caps. Their hair was twined with little skulls, and their skin leopardine yellow. They stank. It was worse than any bodily odour. It was the effluent of unempathic wickedness.
They raped her. Guri thought the first time she must have been virgin, to be hurt so much. But no, it transpired the men were dissatisfied. The bitch had borne children and was not succulent enough. They brought a club then, from the outer darkness, explaining to her in words she could understand if not replicate that the club was the right fit for her, as she was so slovenly and big.
Guri, the woman Guri was, died each night from these and other attentions. But always she woke – then on and on it went, one session and death after another.
He, or she, he supposed, recognized none of the men, and sometimes too they were different more or less, though always Olchibe.
At least none of them, he thought, had been himself, when living.
In dawns lily-like or coraline over the snow, she would once more revive, and find that she was he.
After the initial experience he thought that was to be the only occasion. But he was wrong.
Frequently his trials as a woman were alternated by male sufferings. A village man then, he was anally staked, or burned one limb at a time, to screaming death. He always guessed now what was coming, having watched or personally done it that morning.
Tonight, stooping through the doorway in the sluht, which quickly would transform to the hut-place door of a Marginal settlement, Guri felt the nauseous leaden pangs of true fear sweep through him.
Suffering did not strengthen him, or accustom him to itself. Once you knew to be afraid, you became, he saw, afraid of everything. He was a coward now.
Morning broke, that morning. He went out and, as sometimes happened, threw up on the snow. His unknown Olchibe comrades, ready for the day’s pillage and horror, mocked him, saying he had ‘drunk too much’ the previous night.
Guri had found he could not resist the raids they went on. His body, even his thoughts, would not obey him. Only his inner thought stood back, shivering in stress. Struggling, still he would swing himself on to the kneeling mammoth – which always, during the course of the fight, would die, sobbing, breaking his heart. Nevertheless he could only give in and let all again occur.
Yet today, that day, something different.
Up on the slope above the Olchibe camp, a spiky object pierced from the snow. The snow had sprinkled over its swathed form, with its unsettling bunches of arms or hands. The rough hair was sugared white, striped like that of a badger from the darker jungles.
Guri gazed up at the object. It turned and, with a hand fingered by long knotted twiggy branches, beckoned him.
None of the daytime others paid heed. Guri climbed the slope. It was a novelty. Besides, her he remembered from the world. Ranjal, goddess of wood, made of wood.
But there had been an old woman too – Narnifa, Ranjal’s deceased priestess. Narnifa had been, by the cataclysm of the White Death, incorporated in the broomstick goddess, both of them coming fantastically alive. Ranjal-Narnifa, I. That was what she had said, before flying off over the dust plains beneath Ru Karismi.
Guri balanced on the snow, looking at her.
Her eyes were bright and black. She seemed confident and hearty.
‘Bow me,’ she said. Then, ‘Give me.’
Ranjal had always liked to be given nothing, save by Lionwolf, who had spoiled her, bringing her citrine crystal leaves or wild icy flowers from the forests.
Guri did not move. What point in it, now?
From nowhere, a psychic bolt swiped him. He rolled down the little hill. No one took any notice, and when he raised his face from the snow again the goddess beckoned.
Guri toiled up the hill a second time and stood there.
‘Bow me.’
Guri shrugged. He bowed low. Then he set down before her handfuls of nothing, one after another, on and on, until she exclaimed in her young sportive voice, ‘Enough. Excessive!’ In, of all things, an aristocratic Rukarian accent.
‘Are you in hell too?’
‘I? This hell? Why I be in any hell?’ She was back to her normal outlandish tongue.
‘No reason, only you’re here, old lady.’
Now her striking him was quite gentle. He only staggered. And he saw she grinned.
‘Old not now. All me young. God, I.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’re another god.’
‘Ask me,’ she said, ‘what is you want.’
She had always been like that, even when stuck in her solely wooden form. Men went to her in troops, praying for prophecies, and everything she said was without exception of the best. She never predicted any bad event, even for those you saw after cut to pieces or fried to dust.
‘You tell lies,’ He anticipated she would hit him again.
But she did not. She said, ‘Never.’
‘Yes. You lied to the men in the war camp, saying they’d get all they fancied.’
‘Some of them do get it,’ she responded with asperity.
Guri looked down at his booted feet, toeing the snow about.
Ranjal said, ‘Make glad them.’
‘With lies,’ he could not resist repeating.
‘Make happy by promise is not to be lying. In end-of-all, all men get all ever wanted.’
Guri squinted at her. He thought she probably knew, being now properly deified. But end-of-all was a soint-muck of a way off.
‘Ask,’ she said benevolently again.
Guri glanced over his shoulder at the Olchibe men, spectral or concrete, getting ready for their jolly day of mayhem prior to the torture of night.
‘Have me released from that. From this.’
Ranjal frowned. ‘Cannot.’
‘Then you’re no bloody use to me, wooden lady. Why are you here?’
‘You,’ she said, ‘kind to me. Back before, never ask for anything.’
Astounded, Guri said, ‘I never was kind to you. You were just an ugly bit of wood.’
Curiously unoffended, Ranjal insisted, ‘To me that was sibull, to Narnifa, kind. Before she I and I she.’
Guri laughed. It was the first he had ever laughed in his hell. It tasted bitter, like bad wine. ‘No.’
Ranjal said, ‘You speak they words to her, and she all alone. You make her angry, keep her hopping mad and in world by me. So when the white breath comes we join. Thank you, I. Both of I.’
‘Ah? All right,’ Guri reluctantly said. ‘You’re welcome.’
‘Ask,’ said Ranjal.
Guri glared into her face. In her rough and sturdy wa
y she was not now unattractive, for a badger-woman with branched multi-hands.
‘Let me see Olchibe again – the real Olchibe. Let me go back once in the world – let me make some change for them. The best Olchibe warriors died at Ru Karismi. All the beasts died. Great Gods know what can be done—’
Ranjal smiled widely. She had no teeth, he thought, only a row of wooden pegs in there. What could the rest of her be like?
Then she was gone. Hell – was gone.
Guri found himself alone on a white plain of the real ice-world, under a blue aerial ceiling strafed by cloud. He could smell the sky.
For him, the episode that followed was all one extended jumbled day, sunset and night, which happened in random order over and over. Time in the world was not like time in Guri’s hell.
He quickly came across Ipeyek wandering stupidly about and soon conned Chillel’s gem-dark seed in Ipeyek’s mating equipment, primed, ready and unfired. He haunted Ipeyek, drove him crazy, and herded him towards the north and east, towards the sluhtin of dead Peb Yuve – if anything should be left of it.
Guri gloried in what he did. The fleet impossible running, the near flight, the invisibility or manifests of his ghostliness were irrelevant at last save where they assisted this one task.
When Guri had delivered Ipeyek home to the Crarrowin and the sluhtin, he knew he must report back from his holiday, to hell. He could not shirk it, nor did he try.
The Crarrowin had sobered him too. The Crax he had slept with, infinities ago. She was old now, though still an arresting woman. But he had thought these wise women so wise. Yet even they said nothing against unprovoked war and thievery, the slaughter of non-Olchibe men or children above the age of twelve, or the rape of un-Olchibe women. If they had ever protested he had never heard it. Despite all this, the love of his own kind, the need to make them powerful and favoured, did not leave him. The Crax had contracted with him that the black child would bear his name. And even as he was hurled again from the world to the inner prison of that place of damnation, he could hear the reborn echo of his name, and was for a moment energized, and cleansed of all blame, all terror and all sadness. But the moment ended, and night was there in Guri’s hell, and into the hut they came, nine men now, with a red-hot brand.
Eighth Volume
THE WINDS THAT NEVER BLEW
Hell lies colder than the Here and Now, But if the Here and Now be cold enough – Perhaps the Here and Now Are Hell.
Gech saying: Sham
ONE
Jemhara entered Ru Karismi naked as her day of birth – aside from a single twig caught in her hair.
She had run the final laps in her shape-change of a hare. No clothing could survive that, only hard things such as certain jewels and metals. The twig though had been given her by the peasant sibull in the hot spring village. It must have properties because, wound in a tress and so in her hare’s pelt, it came through.
From her magic she had learned that the gates of the lost city were both undone and undefended. Even the reiver bands which had flocked there to maraud currently left the ruin alone, superstitious, or sick of it. Jemhara had reasoned that some apparel, or merely even odd furs or cloth, would linger among the houses. Otherwise, she trusted her sorcery to protect her flesh, and her youthful, adapted endurance.
But – O gods – the shock of the cold sliced into her and nearly knocked her down. When she stood against it, muttering her protections, the weather sneered and the sky clouded. Snow began to cascade earthwards.
I am a fool. He would tell me that, she thought. Considering Thryfe, his pictured reprimand, even if contemptuous, warmed her slightly.
She went in at the hole which was mostly what remained of Southgate.
Jemhara, who first came to Ru Karismi poor and wide-eyed, knew the city well. She had lived variously in its sectors before achieving the palaces on its heights. Even when royal, Sallusdon’s second queen, Jemhara had quite often gone back to the lower city on forays, carried by slaves in her litter. The Great Markets, the lesser markets, the temple-town with its daunting milieu of Rukarian gods, little pleasure gardens and fine buildings where esoteric books might be read, all these were familiar to her.
The snows of previous years had covered much, hardened, baked to permanence by the coldness of the earth. Trees frozen in their armour had still extended roots beneath the ground to tilt columns, crumble steps and walls. Even the disintegrated stained glass had now died beneath the frosts. There was nowhere any hint of heat or light, an absence of colour as of movement, scent and sound.
Beautiful Jemhara looked vivid against the monochrome. It seemed to make her a target for the wind now rising. She shuddered and hastened up a slope of street towards a block of just recognizable houses.
An hour after, she huddled still naked inside a mansion below the Stair of one thousand steps. All garments or soft materials had been removed from the city – looted or simply made unusable by weather. She had instead found closets of coins, some jewelry, and a store of wine – breached and sampled by robbers but mostly left intact; perhaps they had not liked it. Scrolls and bound books she found too, their unprotected sheets and leaves often fallen away. And there were the dead. The skeleton sitting bolt upright in his chair of carven ivory, with the rotted paper in front of him from which she could still read the words Upon all magicians may the sky fall; or the small dog, perfectly preserved, his coat like pale brass, lying as if asleep at the foot of a bed of human bones.
By now Jemhara experienced the cold like a covering. Also she spontaneously shook, her feet were numb, her hands ached, and the points of her fingers had become desensitized. The nipples of her breasts stayed erect and sore as if bitten. Another would have moaned in pain and fear. She was silent. She focused inflamed eyes on the marble Stair. Snow caked across it too, and more was coming down. She could barely see the steel statues, let alone the top of the flight. She must go up, she had decided. Among the palaces she might detect some remnant of protective wear.
Without this essential she felt she could not dare the Insularia, which lay under the thick ice of the River Palest. The immodesty of a nude female might provoke some psychic attack.
Jemhara forced herself out of the shelter of the house. The bladed wind was sheering round to the south. Snow filled her eyes and mouth, melting tardily. Over the Stair whirling whiteness danced like Jafn air spirits she had heard of. It came to her, unbelievably, she might after all die if her dilemma could not soon be resolved.
And what was this now? Did she hallucinate?
There inside the spiralling storm something was descending the Stair, solid, gleaming yet shadowy – and very tall.
For one heart-stopped instant Jemhara thought it was Thryfe the Magus, walking down the Stair towards her.
But the form was in fact too tall even for tall Thryfe.
Jemhara stared, freezing where she stood, briefly not noticing this.
Then the snow parted like curtains.
Through them stepped the impressive figure of Ru Karismi’s Gargolem.
The Gargolem moved with impeccable mechanical coordination. Its metallic hide, golden-bronze, burned like a lamp through the snow, and the great expressionless head, maned, fanged, noble, appalling, faced towards her, so eyes of unfathomable intelligence could meet her own.
Jemhara screamed. So hypothermically reduced was she, the shriek was pathetic, more like the mew of a tiny bird.
Although it was the guardian of the kings of the city and of the city itself, few had seen the Gargolem except far off. The Magikoy made it, perhaps aeons before, and they could speak to it familiarly. But otherwise such messages as it sent among men were carried via magic, by mirrors, oculums, or by lesser gargolems. Kings supposedly had irregularly conversed with the Gargolem. It was always addressed as a man and named Gargo.
‘Gargo,’ croaked Jemhara, trying to recover. She blurted, ‘I’ve done nothing to offend you—’
‘Yes,’ said the Gargolem. The voice o
f it was neither robotic nor at all human. ‘Sallusdon, King Paramount, was poisoned by you at the will of Vuldir, then King Accessorate.’
Jemhara breathed, ‘I had no choice.’
‘There is always choice.’
‘Shall I make amends?’
‘You will do so. But not here, nor at this time.’
Jemhara looked away from the Gargolem. It stung her eyes worse than the cold. She had seen from her own magecraft at Stones that when the White Death was unleashed, this enigmatic servant of the city had vanished without trace. If a guardian, it had proved a dismal one. But then, she had never grasped its real function or the real nature of its imposed vocation.
Jemhara gibbered and tried not to. The Gargolem stalked towards her, something unfurling darkly from its almost manlike hands. This must be death. But she had space for no pleas or quavering outcry. Death swooped on her and smothered her up. Death was warm, soft. She found she grappled it to her. Death, as it turned out, was really a loose velvet gown dropped over her head, a cloak of fur wrapped round her.
The Gargolem, bending from its dominant height, slipped boots of tenderized leather on to her feet, which fitted her like gloves. The gloves it slid on to her hands also fitted her – like gloves.
‘Drink,’ said the Gargolem, putting a flask against her mouth.
‘Is it … what is it?’
The Gargolem did not bother to reply. Jemhara drank the brew, which had in it wine and spice and some restoring medicine she herself, long since, had mixed for others.
The graves lay in the floor, all along the inner chamber. It was the Morsonesta of the Insularia, where the Magikoy dead were laid to decay under stone. There were other historic burial places about Ru Karismi, and sometimes even a Magikoy cadaver had been interred elsewhere. In the city’s final days, only a minimum of bodies were brought down here. Many dropped at their posts while tending the sick and dying, or performing such manual offices as digging death pits and tending funeral pyres. By then, with no ceremony, they were chucked in on the corpses of ordinary men, women, children and animals. The Magikoy, not long after the White Death, had largely been stripped of respect or specialness. And they had not by that date argued. These graves here therefore were an uneven combination of ancient and modern. Each bore a name, some well known and some by now obscure. Jemhara looked down as she walked over. She did not like to tread on them but had no option. Herself, she recognized no name. At the room’s edge she noted four or five small graves set apart. These were of apprentices of High Level, it seemed, who had died helping the afflicted populace in the short days before no one troubled with burial any more. Flazis, Jemhara read, His future bright has ended in this darkness. Vrain, she read, Death is not the end. On the last grave Jemhara paused. She stopped as if listening, for a strange vibration seemed to sound beneath it. Looking down again, unwillingly, Jemhara read: Ruxendra. Fifteen years of age. Beloved daughter of good family and talented in the Great Magics. Now in Paradise.