Hunting the White Witch

  Presently she hissed in my ear, “Sorem the Masrian is your lover, then, Vazkor Shaythun-Kem. You should have made me a boy, like Thei.”

  “Take your weight off me, priestess, or I’ll send you back to your god, who you say is my father, with this knife.”

  “Oh, a knife, is it?” she whispered. “That is all you are able to stick in me? And such a tribal barbarian still, equipped to slay with light, yet preferring a thief s blade.”

  I thrust her aside and held her and hit her, so her head rolled on her neck, for it did not suit me to be afraid of a woman. It seemed she had read my past with the rest, to know my origin.

  “Your people revere me. You had better get the habit.”

  She looked back at me. Her eyes were all surface, like polished iron, without depth. One cheek was red from the blow, and she put her hand to it, gently, as I have seen girls tend a sick baby or a kitten. Indeed there was nothing of the old Lellih left in her. Though she was the figurehead of a faith, I saw in that instant that she alone of her heritage set no store by me as a messiah. I had every one of the clues then, and missed them.

  She slid from the couch, drew up her robe, and laced it with the odd side lacings the Hesseks affected. The veil she let down over her face and hid her look in its white smoke, and went out.

  The beetle-priest entered a moment later. He had been waiting on her as she bade him.

  He kneeled at once on the floor, and I instructed him to rise. I took a high-handed attitude, for my nerve was gone, and I would gladly have been in most spots but there. I asked him straight out what he wanted. He bowed and recounted the legend of Hessek. He spoke of the savior I must be, who would lead the outcasts from the swamp through the wide white streets of Bar-Ibithni, striking down walls and gates and men who stood in the path, installing Bit-Hessee at the hub of the Heavenly City and in the Crimson Palace of the Emperor, made crimson indeed by a liberal spillage of Masrian blood.

  As he intoned all this, the beetles, following his facial movements, scurried on his cheeks and brow. It was a strange thing, for I could see he genuinely reckoned me what he called me—the Shaythun-Kem, god-made-visible—while imagining he might yet instruct me as the instrument of Old Hessek. Thus a real messiah would be, I suppose, the hammer of his people’s hope rather than a man.

  I say this now, calmly. At the hour, a sea of panic was sweeping in on me. I felt the burden of their demand and their hunger, their malice, their ungovernable hate. To be five years old and surrounded by foes out of a nightmare, that is what set on me in that high room of the swamp city.

  There went across my inner eye that scene in the docks as it must have been: Charpon murdered simply because he opposed me—the flint in his brain their gift to me, like the bloody crow, the tiger man.

  My only weapon remained constant: mundane, flat logic.

  “Are you finished?” I said to the priest. He lowered his head. “Good. Listen, then. I’m not your prophet, neither your savior. I am the sorcerer Vazkor. No religion and no religious power will alter it. You may fear me. I’ll allow you that, since I can kill the pack of you, when and how I please. But for a leader, search elsewhere.”

  He did not glance at me. “Why have you come among us? Why have you done as you have if you are not the one we wait for?”

  “Ask Shaythun,” I said. “Now. Step away from the door.”

  He stood rooted and murmured, “I cannot, my master. You must stay with us. You are ours.”

  I moved toward him, and he straightened and grappled me about the waist.

  He was a muscular man. His breath smelled from some drug or incense, and through his open lips I saw the tooth I had chipped. I did not want to use the Power on him. The sorcery of this hell seemed to feed from mine. I had played at being Shaythun, and I had augmented Shaythun’s influence in doing it. I had gazed inside the skull of Ki; Lellih had scoured my own. A demon’s shadow had remodeled itself as my father’s. Loose the energy of death here now, and, I wildly surmised, it would assume another form to destroy me.

  So I wrestled the priest and struck him from me. He gripped my legs to pull me down, and I leaned and stabbed him. (“Tribal barbarian...equipped to slay with light...preferring a thief’s blade.”) He groaned like a man turning in slumber, and let me go.

  Outside, the corridor lifted itself upward to the left, as I had dimly remembered from the previous night. Dayglow suggested itself on the slope of the wall. I ran toward it, and no one prevented me.

  9

  Despite my hubris and my ability, I went to the Rat-Hole of the south under Hessek witching, and I abandoned it part crazy. No man is weaker than one who believes himself invincible, and even the sting of little wasps can kill, when they gather in great numbers.

  I found myself, after an interval, wandering among the ruined upper tiers of Bit-Hessee. How I got above I had forgotten, and how I should escape across the uncertain swamps and lagoons I could not for some while reason out. Eventually I recollected Hessek’s boats stowed along the fringe of the silted dock, and the ships’ graveyard where, if other plans failed, some beggarly raft could be constructed from oddments. To walk on water I never contemplated. I wished just then very much to be merely human. An eye seemed to be watching me, the eye of Old Hessek. Be Shaythun and I should call Shaythun. I shuddered from fatigue and horror, and could not pull my wits and impulses together.

  So I proceeded, staggering along roughly northward, and overhead the wreck black stacks of Hessu’s port staggered in rhythm with my stride.

  The heat of the day came, a slaty pressuring of low sky. Once something shrilled in the marsh among the towering fern-trees. And once, between the buildings, I sank to my knees in a gaping mouth of mud, and dragged myself free with difficulty.

  I saw no men and no beast. Neither did I reach the dock or the shore.

  At last I lay down in the shade of a wall, full length in the muck and reeds, with no watch for enemies. (He was everywhere. Why trouble to look out for him?) Their Power contained mine. They kept me in. I had fled the warren and was now caged on the surface. I muttered with a sort of fever, dozed, and tossed about, a pitiful object if there had been any to take pity.

  When I recovered myself, the light was fading in slashes of madder and bronze behind the crossed swords of upper foliage and the broken roofs. Something shifted against me, and I found six or seven leeches oozed from a pool in the street and supping on my calves. I tore them off me, rending them and myself. In the smoking dusk my blood welled, and the wounds did not heal.

  In Masrian theater, the storm always comes at such a moment. The melodrama of thunderclap and red lightning hyphenate the bellows, prayers, and poetry of the doomed hero. And so it was. The sky blacked over, building to a mountainous pressure, which was suddenly carved by three white blades and a crash of battling clouds. The rain fell hot as my blood on the antique cobbles.

  I blundered into a doormouth and leaned there inside the shadows. The rain hung like a curtain outside; I could see nothing through it. Thunder rang across the sky, and my head cleared abruptly. Vitality and intelligence seemed to wash back into me. I looked at the leech-marks and they were sealing. Now was the time to break for the dock. The natural storm had sluiced off their sticky magic, and I might find the lagoon and a boat, and reach open water.

  Behind, something whispered my name. Not my chosen name that was, but the name my krarl had given me.

  Tuvek.

  I turned around slowly, not wanting to see, though I left the uncleaned knife in its sheath, accepting its uselessness.

  A hall went back from the doorway, uncertainly lighted by crevices in its walls, featureless, save at the farthest end of it there was a white shining. I could not distinguish what it was, but even as I stared and held my breath, soft fibers came drifting out and fastened about the pitchy walls, the roof, interweaving, methodical, ultimately floating around me a
lso. An enormous web. And at its center, in the pale luminance, a spider?

  I began to walk that way, toward the white core of the web. It was not so much a compulsion as a deadly, angry knowledge that I could never get away in the other direction.

  The threads of the web fluttered as I broke through them, and re-formed, fastening me securely within. The touch of them was like an icy kissing. I could observe something seated in the light now, the center of its whiteness. I think I had begun to believe it from the hour I woke to Lellih at the couch’s foot, telling me my dream.

  I had anticipated finding Uastis, had cast my net for her. But she had grown more astute with the years, the sum of my whole lifetime, in which she might have prepared her weapons. What better and more hidden place for my mother to choose for herself than Bit-Hessee-over-the-marsh? What better kingdom, rotten, masked, vengeful?

  She had twice my years, perhaps a little more, but she looked, as I had suspected she would, far older. Her face was, as ever, covered, on this occasion in the Hessek mode, with a figured veil of heavy white silk. Yet her arms and throat were bare, the stringy harsh albino flesh gathered on the bone, and under the robe, the shape of the two withered dugs that never suckled me. Her white hair was plaited and held with silver links, and the long talons of her hands were enameled the color of dying fire.

  I could say no word. I had sworn to slay her when I discovered her, but I was helpless. I gawked like an idiot, and she spoke, this hag, and her voice was young and fresh and beautiful, and harder than blue alcum.

  “I was rid of your father by means of my hate. You also I may kill. Unless you consent to serve me.”

  “If you wanted my service, you should have kept me by you.”

  “You were his curse on me,” she said.

  “And I am still.”

  “Hessek is mine,” she said. “Obey me. Lead my people to victory, and I will spare you and reward you.”

  Suddenly my brain revived. I perceived that none of this made sense.

  “Shlevakin,” I said, “they are shlevakin. Rabble. Hessek is nothing to Uastis the cat-goddess of Ezlann. This is some further trick of Shaythun’s priests.” Before I properly guessed it, my hand had shot out and snatched the veil from her face.

  I jumped backward with my eyes starting from their sockets almost. It was not a woman’s face at all, but the head of a white lynx—its fur had brushed my palm as I wrenched off its covering, and I had scented the rank perfume of its mouth. Pale green irises like diluted jade, brown teeth striped with old blood.

  I knew it for an illusion, but it seemed, in every particular, quite real. At that, in panic, I drew the knife from my belt and thrust it at the nearer gleaming right eye. Reality met the unreal, as the knife pierced tissue and she screamed. And vanished.

  The web trembled, became what it was: cobwebs. Of the spider-bag-cat-queen nothing remained. The knife lay on the floor, but it was stained new red.

  I went out into the rain, and walking down the flooded street, got easily to the shore and the dock. I found a boat with equal ease; there were about ten of them pulled up among the reeds. I unshipped the oars and rowed into the lagoon. The thick water spread in slinking rings under the splintering rain. The thunder had sunk northward, scud following it in procession over the darkening dusk sky. I did not consider that I should lose myself any more, even in the many channels of the delta. I was guided to the ocean by an instinct such as that which sends the fish to warmer waters at the year’s end. Besides, by a foolish, unpremeditated act—the ham-fisted blow of a terrified tribesman—I had torn the web of Old Hessek. Before it knit again, I should be gone.

  Not that the affair was done between us.

  The rain ceased, and the papyrus boat slipped through the slender giant trees toward the sea, as a ruddy hunter’s-bow of moon was painted in on the emptied night.

  Although the hag they had shown me had been only the illusion of Uastis, I was now grimly convinced that she was somewhere near. I saw her strategy in the wickedness of Old Hessek, the poison of her enchantments like a powerhouse that they might tap. True, she was indifferent to the aspirations of Bit-Hessee, but she might use them to destroy the threat which was myself. She had known I would seek her, and she had left pitfalls in my road. Well, she had taught me a lesson. In the future, I would be more ready.

  As for the Rat-Hole, a notion had come to me. If she were watching out to see me tumble, she had better beware, the bitch.

  About an hour later, the reeds opened on the vista of the ocean, pure salt air, fish leaping, and, far to the east, the jewel haze of Bar-Ibithni.

  10

  I gave the city and the docks as wide a berth as had my Hessek guides on the previous journey, since any craft spotted en route from Bit-Hessee might arouse the suspicion of the Masrian watch. Sheer marble walls, palace parks, and the ornate grounds of Masrian fanes stretched down into the sea all along the coast east of the bay of Hragon, and I had no choice but to come ashore in the garden of a temple. Here, amid the incense of the night-blooming scarlet lilies of the south, I stove in the papyrus boat and sank it in the black water under the temple wharf.

  I met a red-robed priest in the garden, who took no more note of me than if I had been a prowling cat. Perhaps worshipers commonly came here after sunset, or, more likely, lovers, to keep trysts in the bushes.

  It was close on midnight when I reached my apartment house and found all the courts in darkness. This was unnatural anywhere and at any hour of night in the Palm Quarter, and I trod with caution. No need; violence had come and gone before me.

  The outer doors were broken off their chains, the inner doors similarly forced. Trampled drapes lay about, and smashed crocks, and the black dog my sailor guard had been keeping had had its neck snapped and been thrown in the gutter outside for the street sweepers.

  Of Kochus and my men no trace remained, and I could guess the fate of the women.

  I had such a variety of enemies by now, I was unsure of who these visitors had been. As I was staring about, I heard a noise and whipped around, to find a figure at my elbow, one of the kitchen girls.

  “My lord,” she squeaked, “oh, my lord.”

  Her face was smeared with tears and fright, of me as much as anything. I sat her on the broad rim of the fountain, and gave her a drink of koois from a silver flask that had been overlooked; most of the other valuables, the alcohol and the wine, had disappeared.

  Amazement at being served by the master of the house pulled the girl together, and she poured out her tale without preamble.

  Trouble had arrived sometime in the hour before dawn, when she was already up to light the oven-fire behind its shield, and fetch the water for the bath-tanks from the public well.

  The Hessek guard had been whispering together and acting oddly all night. (Most probably, I thought, they had got word I had been persuaded over the marsh. Just then, all Hesseks appeared to be in league against me.) However, despite their agitation, or because of it, their watch was not thorough. The outer gates were suddenly shattered, and the yard and courts aswarm with men. They shouted for me, and getting no answer, routed the appalled household from their beds or from the places in which they had hidden. The girl did not see much of this. Accustomed to calamity from an immature age, she had taken refuge in the great tank that fed the faucets of the bath. She had long been acquainted with this tank, having had to fill it every day with nine pitchers of water from the well. Now it was only part full, and she crouched down in the dark and water, and heard indicative sounds as the strangers beat and took Kochus and the Hesseks prisoner, and presently ransacked the rooms, thereafter extending their quest to neighboring courts. Finding no trace of me, they at last turned their attention to my property, drank my liquor, and lay with the kitchen women, who, the girl prudishly declared, being loose hussies, were apparently audible in consent and approbation.

  At lengt
h, silence encouraged my girl from the tank. She found the havoc much as I had found it, and no one on hand save the alarmed neighbors, most of whom fled for fear of further activity. She alone had remained to warn me.

  Seeing she was braver and more quick than the rest of them put together, I gave her the silver flask to keep and some silver cash I had on me—makeshift reward for all her gallantry. But she blushed and gave me back the coins, saying she loved me and had done it for that. Poor little thing, I had scarcely noticed her, a skinny, small brown waif of poor Masrian stock, and not much above thirteen. Still, she did not try to give me back the flask. I imagine life had taught her already to put some prudence before sentiment.

  I asked her if she could tell who the invaders might be, and she said at once, “They wore yellow and black—the guard of Basnurmon Hragon-Dat, the Heir of the Emperor. Everyone knows his wasp device.”

  I sent the girl off to her home, after she had surprised me by insisting that she had one. Then I collected up any money-raising portable items that might have been accidently ignored by Basnurmon’s morons, and went straight out to the nearby hiring stables, dressed as I was in Bit-Hessee mud.

  The man who opened up for me seemed innocent enough, but had heard the news of soldiers sacking my courts, and was nervous with questions to which I did not reply. A chain of cash got a mount from him, and an hour after the midnight bell I had crossed the bright streets of the Palm Quarter and was hammering on the bronze Fox Gate of Pillar Hill, the entrance to the Citadel.

  * * *

  There were three or four decent rooms, the central chamber large and well furnished, more than a soldier’s cell, commander or otherwise. The lamps were the plain pleasant shade of the yellow wine that stood by in the crystal flagon. On the lime-washed walls were swords of damascened alcum, and a collection of shields, and bows and spears for hunting or war; and in one place hung a leopard’s pelt, something Sorem had taken himself and been proud of. I should not have been ashamed to have got it myself. There was an un-Masrian quality in the lack of clutter, but neither was it unaesthetic. The woven Tinsen rug had all the jeweled colors the lamps did not, and the wine cups of polished malachite would not have looked amiss on any fancy table of Erran’s in Eshkorek.