Moving Water (18 page)

She nodded, vindicated, at my speechlessness, and tapped my arm. “Then today it's ten different dresses and boxing Timya's ears and a pet to rebuild the loggia, there's been workmen in all day and none of the designs'll suit, she tore one to shreds and the architect, well, he's . . . disappeared. You know? And this afternoon she comes in the wardrobe. Slates this, rips up at that, I thought I'd vanish too, but, ‘Come in the boudoir,' she says. Makes me sit down. Won't do it herself. To and fro, to and fro. ‘How,' she says, ‘can anyone know? Klyra, do you know what's bad and what's good?'—‘Ma'am,' I say, minding the decanter, it's that lovely Thangrian crystal, ‘what on earth do you mean? Good's to make the sacrifices and do your duty, like the rest of Assharral.'

“She looks at me, sharp as needles. ‘And what's bad?'—‘Why, ma'am,' I say, ‘displeasing you.'

“ ‘Ohh!' she says and spins like a top. ‘Ma'am,' I say, all of a creep, ‘if I've upset you. . . .' ‘No,' she says. She pulls at the drapes, that lovely gold velvet—oh, you wouldn't know—‘I won't,' she says. ‘It's stupid. Plain insanity.' She starts to get angry again. Then she spins round and—Captain, if I didn't know better, I'd think she was scared.

“ ‘Oh, Klyra,' she says, ‘I don't know what to do!'

“Well, I've been here a dozen years and she still seems a girl. ‘Sit down, pet,' I say, ‘and drink some of this, and don't worry. You just do what you want.'

“ ‘I can't,' she says. Crying. I've never, ever seen her cry. ‘I don't know what I want! Oh, damn him to the fiery pits, I don't know!' And out she goes in tears, Captain, believe me, in tears!

“Then this evening Tannis makes a bear joke and she
rends
him. He's disappeared too. Oh, Captain, you just don't know how it is up there.” She gripped her hands together in genuine distress. “I've thought of it all day and I couldn't bear anymore. I slid out, I thought I'd come to your house, you can tell him—make him stop. He's got the whole of Ker Morrya in such a turn-out, and the Lady . . . let be I'm terrified, I can't bear to see her like that. It ought to be stopped!”

She stared with those grotesquely ringed eyes while I tried to muster my wits. All I found was the conviction that Beryx must know. At once.

“I'll tell him,” I said. “You'd best be off. Be careful.” We both caught our breaths. “I—think he'll be grateful. But I can't promise it will stop.”

* * * * *

As I should have expected, Beryx's reaction was unexpected. At first he did look pleased. The tantrum produced a gleeful chortle. But then he sobered, and by the end there was pity in his face, outright distress.

“Yes,” he said, staring into the brazier. “Yes.”

This time I kept quiet.

At last he said, “If there was hope, this is what I'd expect. But. . . .” He bit his lip. “Math isn't teaching, or coercion. You have to find it for yourself.” He got up and began to pace. Sounding quite tormented, he said, “There's nothing I can do.”

Nevertheless I slept better that night, waking in a crystal morning to a sea wind fragrant with salt. As the new guard marched up to Ker Morrya I thought wistfully of bygone days when Callissa and I had sailed a racing dinghy out near the Heads on days like this. . . . We rounded the curve onto the gates. There on a pole before us, bloody and hideous with that bizarre paint over the death scream, was Klyra's head.

I fought in Phaxia. Yet I cannot blame the guard who toppled in a faint. My belly turned over too. People were everywhere, scuttling by with furtive looks, the duty sentries were fish-white and gulping continuously, my troop lost rank, broke step, never was habit such a lifesaving rope.

Somehow we managed the change. The old guard almost flew downhill, I took one step after them, and stopped. I did not know why. Until a moment later the Lady Moriana swirled in a black whirlwind out the gate.

“Captain.” A true viper's speech. My eyes shut instinctively, I cringed with eyelids printed by the glare of gold in burning black. Her words pierced, a stiletto, cold, thin, certain death.

“I thought,” she said, “that you would wait.” My feet moved me after her, willy-nilly, down the street.

The crowds melted from our path like dust. She swept them away, a black silk tornado, more fearful than a tornado can ever be, for when it razes and shatters and rends it does not will the ruin. For that you must go to men. Terror pierced even my trance. The Well, I thought. She was evil, and now it was beyond spite, rampaging, out of control.

How Beryx knew I cannot tell, but he was standing before she entered, his face formed, a battle-line. As she whissed into the vault he said, “She did it from loyalty. Because she cared for you.”

She stopped. Her skirts swirled, black froth broken on a rock. Something swept me like a blast of poisoned ice.

He said, “It was embarrassing, yes. She shouldn't have spoken.” Again pity was in his face. “She wasn't wise enough not to act.”

She was standing quite still. An immobility more fearful than any paroxysm. Almost gently, he said, “I know how you feel.”

Her back stiffened. The ripple of an adder rising to strike.

His face snapped taut. “Moriana, wait—”

She pivoted on her heel and her eyes traversed like a catapult. My vision shattered in a hail of golden darts, her teeth showed, the grin of a fury, between those perfect lips.

I was moving forward, toward the closest brazier. Its red mouth filled my sight, its bed of coals needed my touch—

The brazier bounced as if struck by a catapult bolt, flew high and crashed in smithereens, spewing a fiery fan of coals. Beryx nearly shattered my head.
“No!”

I had staggered half a dozen strides back. It was irrelevant. The other brazier remained.

Something let go, abrupt as a snapped rope. Again I staggered back. They were both on tiptoe, she arched to strike, her eyes black fire that distorted her face, he bowstring taut, and his eyes were white-starred burning green.

“Very well,” he said. It grated like crossed steel. “If that's what you want.”

How to continue? Words, physical metaphors fail to convey the immaterial, and my memory is crazed by the blast, my own pain. I remember their eyes which seared like branding-irons pressed relentlessly into flesh, that it was like being caught between two suns' hearts, consumed by both. Images of a sort. Black lava tides that clash with tides of green and white, my mind withered in the turmoil's heart. Molten black and white sword-blades that snicker in and out my eyes, hurtling gouts of gold-black, green-white fire that explode on collision in my head. Blindness, and the fire still consuming me. Torn apart, not limb from limb but will from will, sense from sense, thought from thought, fragmented in some vacancy, and the fragments re-torn between two wrestling, rending entities that could not win them and would not give them up. You suppose feeling stops, when pain deprives you of wits, but I have known otherwise. I have been a myriad particles spattered in nothing, and each one had its consciousness.

Shattering was nothing to the re-assemblage. Later I found my surcoat plastered with mud, dirt under broken nails, bruises on palms, knees, skull. And that was only the flesh.

When I stopped voicelessly screaming, and pain cast me up on its further beach, I was sitting on the floor. The Lady stood over me. She was panting, each breath straining the black gown at her breast, her face bathed with sweat, still fixed in its battle grimace. Her bracelet had snapped. Thillians lay round me like fallen drops of ice. And in the straw Beryx was on his knees, doubled over, muscle and bone and mind buckling in company, over-matched.

Given free will, the sight might have made me run about and shriek. Instead I stood up. There is no conveying the sensation of your limbs moved by another will.

The Lady smiled. At that too, given liberty, I might have shrieked.

With a fiend's triumph, she said slowly, lingeringly, “. . . Math.”

Beryx stirred. Twisted. Made a pathetic attempt to rise. Fell prostrate. After two or three trials, wedged an elbow under him. Levered it straight. It shook as if palsied, and when it bent he slid helplessly back into the straw.

Then he simply lay there, for an uncounted time, until some shred of body or mind's strength returned. Back humped, still trembling in every muscle, he managed to sit up. Raggedly, he wiped at his face.

The Lady waited. Finally, he looked at her.

She said, “You lost.”

He answered, in the whisper of exhaustion, “Yes.”

Her eyes turned to me. In the same thread of a voice, he said, “No.”

I was beside the brazier. Its red heat held my outstretched right hand, my face. Behind me, he repeated, “No.”

She answered, pitiless. “Would you do it yourself?”

My hand poised before the coals. Five, ten, fifteen tallied my heartbeats, in casual interest. That jagged, shaky voice said, “If that's what you want.”

She did not reply, but I found I had left the fire, turning, able to see them both. She was still grinning. He was looking up at her. Not in a plea for mercy, but with a kind of wonder that such creatures could exist. Then, effortfully, clumsily, he got himself on his feet and shambled, bear-like in his exhaustion, toward the fire.

She watched. He shook his sleeve back, the bizarre action of a man not wanting to wet his shirt. Not the vilest Phaxian torturer would extort such a price, such a voluntary price, from a one-handed man.

He did not hesitate, plead, look back in a last hope of clemency. He walked straight up to the brazier and thrust his left hand in among the coals.

It must have been the aedr's will. His body flew back like a tight-wrenched bow, his face contorted. And his hand did not stir. He did not make a sound.

The fire crackled, the vault filled with that loathful stench. I heard his teeth grate together. She must have waited to be quite sure she would be denied the final pleasure of screams and writhings and total breakdown, before she said, “Yes.”

As his hand met the air he dropped, with a screech of jerked chains, face down in a tangle on the stone. There was no other sound. When he did not move, the Lady, with a gorged, ghoul's satisfaction, turned away. And she chose that I should follow her.

* * * * *

As I tore back from the harborside my mind had divided again, one part raging, The last twist of the knife, the filthy whore, she knows about burns, that's why she sent me so far. . . . I shot across the market, snatched a pot and hethel oil, strewed coins, the other part of my mind cursing, And if you could think when you're snatched, were prepared for it, could fight. . . . I skidded downstairs, across the vault, and with frenzied haste sloshed oil into the bowl.

It must have been some sort of swoon, but also an aedric art. Or wish. After the first stupor he had thrown himself around. The straw was ploughed, he was wound in an impossible knot, blood on his rasped wrists, the left arm twisted somehow in midair, his face driven into the straw. He was making slow, senseless sounds at each hoarse breath, twisting in time with it, grinding his cheek into the stone. But he was quite unconscious. When I jammed his hand in the oil he only gasped, then whimpered again.

I clung to his wrist, fighting to keep the burn covered and the bowl upright. It was too late, inadequate, I knew what was needed, and could not go for it. . . . It seemed the very incarnation of Math when I looked up to find Sivar hovering cravenly at the door.

“Run to my house!” I yelled. “Someone, anyone, get them to give you the Xhen plant, the whole pot! Go on, man, run!”

He excelled my wildest hopes. When the big clay pot of spiky, dull-lime, cactus-like leaves came bumbling down on Sivar's legs there was a white, terrified but obdurate Callissa in its wake.

She knew what to do. She threw down a cloth, ripped off one soft foot-long spike and split it to scour out the translucent green jelly within. “Come on!” she snapped at Sivar.

In less than a minute they had a mound of it. She rapped, “Ready!” I took a good grip, whisked his hand across, she scooped the pulp over it, pulled up the cloth, he had barely time to sob before she was saying, “Other rag. Tear a strip. Tie this on.” Then, shoving back her hair. “I'll hold it. You untangle him.”

By the time we unthreaded him the Xhen jelly was at work. He was still unconscious, but the terrible writhing had eased, muscles shuddering as they relaxed, and he lay back with sheer exhaustion rather than agony in his face. Xhen. Burnt. I have no idea of the herbalist's name, but in Frimmor it has been Xhen, the burn-plant, time out of mind, and nobody making a garden would leave it out. For soothing and healing burns it is the sovereign remedy.

“Thank you,” I said at large, trying to convey all I felt: for the help and for the courage that offered it.

Callissa said nothing till Sivar, eyes whitened at the clay shards and dead coals and thillians, began to edge away, muttering, “Get 'nother brazier, sir?” Then she reeled off a list of provisions long as my arm. Looked at the head on my knee, said, “Water, too,” and followed Sivar.