Moving Water (35 page)

We were halfway to Ker Morrya's gate. Below and beside us the city sank away between spur and harbor down the Morhyrne's flank, once a mass of mansion, temple, tower, park, garden, colonnade. The buildings looked as if a stick had been swept across a flowerbed. The city wall was flat on its side. The trees and grass were fire-blasted brown. And clear down the Morhyrne's side lay that lava slash, so bright it did not seem part of the earth it flowed upon, so bright it must surely have extruded from another, more intense, scaldingly vivid world. The heat of it lashed across our faces, once. I was thankful to fall back with coughs and splutterings into the murk.

“Take the horses up,” I heard Beryx choke, and Fengthira, “Safer for both.” We forged on up the cumbered street.

The Treasury facade was down, columns rolled out in heaps of drums whose diameter exceeded a man's height, gates crushed beneath. I spared a thought for the scribes. Then it occurred to me that guards, more loyal than I, might remain at Ker Morrya's gate.

“Amver,” I snapped to the wraith at my elbow, “take Zam. Evis, give Zem to Wenver. Come on, you others. They can't use farsight in this.”

As we closed up on them Beryx gave me a quick distracted smile. Fengthira also glanced about, a wintry gray flash. “Kindly thought on,” she said.

The gate square was devoid of life. Live beings, that is. Bodies were strung in a row under the arch, men and women, naked, vilely mutilated, and before my eyes winced away I saw the tatters of what had been court finery on the cobbles beneath.

“Ah,” said Fengthira, sliding down, with another scythe of a glance. “Dost feel like vengeance now?”

Nobody replied. Her eyes rose to Beryx, sitting his horse with the guise of numb horror I knew so well. She tapped lightly on his foot.

“Wake tha, lad.” It came with rough kindness. “Hast work to do.”

They walked among the horses, bidding them stay, then he turned to us. “Alkir, will you hold the gate? And the horses.” With an almost trusting look, he stepped between Callissa and the arch. “You'll see the twins don't see too much?” He turned back to me, and I took the words out of his mouth.

“Evis can handle this. I'm coming with you.”

I am still not sure what made me say it. Concern for him, remembrance of Fengthira's prophesy? One last bloody determination that if Moriana escaped him along with Math, she should not escape the requital of Assharral?

I did have the wits to suppress that. I said, “Assharral needs a witness,” and stared him straight in the eye.

He looked away. Aedric reflex, his own habit, to protect human fools. His eyes and Fengthira's crossed. She gave me one south-wind stab of a glance, and then, abruptly, turned to Callissa. “I'll,” with a nod to me, “look after him.”

Callissa stared, then nodded too. For an instant I almost thought they had exchanged a conspirator's glance, but I had no time to consider it. Beryx must have received his own message. He was bracing himself to face the gate.

* * * * *

This time the palace had not been upturned by its owner's will. The signs of sack were everywhere, the ruin that is more than greed, more than callousness, the demon that possesses men at such times, here spurred on by revenge. There were bodies, too. If the court had fled for asylum, it was in vain.

“Foh!” said Fengthira, weaving down the colonnade, and shook her head at Beryx's mute, sickened glance. “Every breaker to his beast. I know horses can be vicious. Which way now, Alkir?”

Smoke had rimed the fretted walls of the green vestibule, the floor was ripped up by something like picks, the jade plaques bore foul scribbles in fouler ink. But no mark of traffic, let be rapine, showed on the rough-hewn steps.

“Curs,” Fengthira coughed. “No guts for the stallion. Make do with t'heavy mares.” She glanced at Beryx. “What art waiting for?”

He turned. I was stunned to read uncertainty in his face, apprehension, outright timidity. Her eyelids crinkled, but she spoke with mock impatience.

“Art such a mouse's heart as that?”

“ 'Thira. . . .”

“Get on with thee, man. Tha prentice. Claim her, then.”

“But. . . .”

Her eyes mocked him. “If th'art fearful, trust tha silly heart. One thing'll not fail thee is tha foolishness.” But it was a good luck pat with which she pushed him to the steps.

As the fog swallowed him she glanced round, and her mirth become open hilarity. “And art gnashing tha teeth to come so far and miss all at the last. I'll have mercy on thee. Look here.”

Her eyes flared. A gray world sucked me in, leaving behind her last words, ironic with self-mockery.

“I doubt I'd bear to miss it myself.”

I do not know what she did. But one moment I was gazing at her across a rumpled pavement, the next I was a pure faculty of vision, soaring over the rivannon trees to view the bower of Los Morryan.

It must have been like a furnace down there. The plants and perridel leaves were scorched brown, dust lay on the shriveled moss. I saw with shock that the fountain's basin held a mere residue of heat-crazed mud. No water, no sweet heedless melody. I hardly mourned it, for I had seen the Lady herself.

She was poised, balanced, atop the porphyry parapet. Her hair had been pinned up under some sort of coronal, but it had come loose, so thillians spurted white fire amid the ebony coils, and free strands wove on the lava's updraft like snakes about her neck. She was wearing black. Fine black sendal in some tight-waisted robe whose floating skirts furled and shifted like huge black fluid lily petals, black that left her throat white as marble but no whiter than her bloodless face, black that paled against the inky depths of her eyes where the gold meteors blazed like battle-flags, black that could not tinge the dewdrop purity of the great globe she clutched with both hands to her breast. The lava glow spurted up behind her, livid red through the leaden smoke, and her head was back and up, the pose of the cornered darre that sees death coming and yet rears to strike.

“Ah,” said Fengthira, doubtless in mindspeech. “Whate'er the Morheage lacked, they ne'er had craven hearts.”

A moment later, I heard feet.

Beryx paused between the rivannons. Their eyes flew together. I could feel the lightning snap. Then her lips lifted back. If she had lost the power, she retained the hate.

“I knew,” she said, “you'd be here for this.”

Beryx was looking stern. Mostly from nervousness, I suspect.

“Not going to produce any catchcries? ‘I told you so'? ‘Incompetence'? ‘It serves you right'? How ‘good' this is for Math?”

When he shook his head the grimace became a snarl.

“So
kind
.” It came like a poisoned dart. “But then, you always were. No matter what I did—you'd never hit back.”

His silence made her eyes flare like golden hail. “And now I shall repay it a hundredfold. But you won't have the last laugh. Oh no! You can have my splendid ‘empire,' my loyal ‘subjects'—or what's left of them, ha-ha! And plenty of patching up, won't you love that! But you won't get me to drag round the streets on a rope! And”—her voice went shrill—“you won't get this!”

She jerked the Well. Its surface shot a red sheet of deflected light.

“And, my fine virtuous friend, do you know why? Because we're both going down there!” She jerked her elbow to the inferno and her voice shot up in a shrilling laugh. “Let's see what you do about that!”

She glared at him, breathing in quick short pants. Like her eyes, I guessed her pupils would be dilated, but they were lost in that single night.

He waited till her laughter was quite finished. Then he said, with no inflection at all, “I don't want Assharral.”

“To be sure!” A shriek of truly witch-like mirth. “Is it too much damaged? But I thought that would appeal to you!”

He waited again. His eyes were steady now, the nervousness gone.

When she had calmed, he answered, “I never wanted Assharral. That's something you know you knew.”

“No, Assharral would have been gift-toll, wouldn't it? What you really wanted was this.”

She spun round, my faraway heart stopped. Over her shoulder she taunted him, the Well poised above the abyss.

“What will you bid for it this time? Don't tell me you don't want it, that's a lie. No offer? Oh, so sad. It's going first. I want to watch your face when your precious Fount of Wisdom, your wizardly pride and joy, your chance to change the universe goes flying down there, phut! If that's the last thing I see, it'll be worth the price. And it will be the last. How very, very sweet!”

She shook the Well. Beryx's face was empty. He did not so much as twitch. When she paused, he said, “Throw it, then.”

She was the one off-balanced, this time. Her mouth half-opened. Then she turned to face him, the Well clenched to her breast.

“Don't try to cozen me! I know what it is. You told me. I didn't think even you could be such a fool as that. There'll be no more Wreve-lethar when this is gone. No more supreme art, no more making Math. Not one of your warlocks that ever lived wouldn't weep blood at the thought of losing it. And you're no different!”

“No.” He sounded quite casual. “I know what it is, and what a tragedy it would be to lose it. I'd sooner you destroyed all Assharral, yes. But”—and for the first time a gleam of humor showed—“that's not what I want.”

She stopped laughing and stared at him, her eyes narrowed as if to see over a great distance, blazing black slits. He did not look away. And suddenly I knew with fear and outrage and sheer exasperation that she was reading his thoughts as well. And he was permitting it.

“Bah!” she cried. “It's a lie!”

“It's not.”

“Don't try to hoodwink me!”

“I'm not.”

I saw her breath stop. Then her head reared back and up and if she had blazed before she fairly erupted now.

“So even the Well and even Assharral wasn't enough! Not for you, you upstart little—king! And if there was no other way you'd have crawled there up my skirts!”

I heard Fengthira choke. I saw Beryx's chest rise and hold, and knew he was struggling with all his might: not to curb anger, but to contain a laugh.

“No,” he answered, straight-faced. “At a pinch—I could have foregone the skirts.”

She very nearly threw the Well at him. Her forearms jerked, it flared red light. She hissed between her teeth.

“Get out! Slimy, cackling, hypocritical whoremonger,
get out!
”

He sobered. Quite gently, but inflexibly, he answered, “When I get what I want.”

As her head reared again he went on softly, unhurried, unstressed.

“I don't want the Well, I don't want Assharral. I don't want to mend your wretched country or turn you into an aedr, or even try to save you, for your own sake, from Ammath. I want something else.”

Her hands trembled on the Well. A chaos of reactions battled in those enormous eyes. Outrage won.

“So you think now I'm beaten you can stroll in and snap your fingers and say, ‘Here, dog,' and I'll come crawling all over your feet? Because it's my only hope?” Her teeth bared. “I'll see you blinded first!”

He clicked his tongue. “You should know better. You do know better. If I were so boorish as to snap my fingers, the last thing I'd want is you crawling over my feet.”

Her cheeks flamed red as the spasming fire. “Thank you!” She could barely hiss. “Then just what do you want?”

He smiled then, outright. A sweet smile, full of mischief, with something hotter underneath. “A token of your thanks?”

“OH!” It was too much. She did throw the Well, but she did it without malice to mind her of the lava, she hurled it in sheer ungovernable outrage straight at his head. And it missed.

There was a crash, a spray of vivid white sparks. The Well rebounded, leaving, I saw in total disbelief, a dent in the black native rock. Struck the pavement, left another dent, and rolled slowly, lazily, to his feet.

He did not look down. He watched her with the tag-end of that smile, while she teetered on the parapet, quite literally gnashing her teeth.

“You ape! You bear! You dancing bear! So now you have it, don't you? All of it!” Tears of pure chagrin spilt on her cheeks. “But I'll tell you once and for all, you won't get me!”

She went up on her toes to spin and leap and he took one swift step and shouted, “Stop!”

It physically wrenched her head around. I wanted to hide from her eyes. They were actually scorching me.

“Moriana,” he said. Quietly. And more quietly, “Don't. Please.”

Her teeth bared. “Why not?”

“Because,” he answered softly, “I ask.”

The lava steamed, the earth roared. A dead branch rattled on the perridel. Then, fraction by fraction, she turned her back on the abyss. Now the glitter in her eyes was ice.