The Rose of Sarifal (40 page)

For a moment she seemed unsure. “I wouldn’t know,” Lukas said. He looked up to see the eyes of his friend—tied down, helpless, away from him and to the left—watching him. In the mix of light, harsh and soft, dirty and clean, the genasi’s skin looked as pale and slick and unhealthy as a fish’s belly.

“It is the blood of the leShay,” confirmed the girl. “My father lied to you. He wouldn’t send her south to Synnoria. He wanted her brought here, because this is the place—this is the place …”

She paused for a moment, then went on, “This is the place where he intends to raise my lady out of the Abyss.” Then she laid her cheek upon her knees, hugging her shins within the circle of her black arms.

“Araushnee,” Lukas murmured.

“Araushnee,” she repeated. “They have tried and failed, tried and failed here for months. The guardian has worn through an entire circuit of the lady’s rituals, over and over. But it was her idea—she could entice her with the rarest blood in Faerûn, and Araushnee would answer to the smell of it, as if she were some predatory creature and not a goddess or a queen.”

“Silly,” Lukas murmured, too softly for the girl to hear.

“It’s so silly,” she continued without irony, as if she knew his thoughts but not his mind. “Her spider’s nature is the curse Corellon laid on her. She yearns to cast it
away, reject it and be free. When we speak of our desire to live again on the surface in the forest of Winterglen, simple wood elves like our ancestors, it is so we also can share in a goddess’s aspiration, and be more than creatures fighting in a hole. This is why she did not come, not until now. We should be looking for her in the shrine I built for her—you saw it—and not here in a pit of corpses and carrion, stinking of sulfur and decay. This is an insult.”

Tears were in her eyes, Lukas saw, touched in spite of himself. He had heard different stories of Araushnee’s fall and the emergence of Lolth from the Demonweb Pits. He wouldn’t think about those stories now.

“It is so easy to fall back into old habits,” said the girl. How beautiful her voice was—he had not noticed until now. “Creatures in a hole, hiding and fighting. But if we are to walk among the moon and stars, surely we must change. Come back to what we were, long ago, in the simple time. Captain,” she said, surprising Lukas, who had thought she was speaking mostly to herself. “Captain, that is why it hurts me so to see you like this, you and her. Among the drow, our men don’t treat our women with affection, as you have treated her.”

She meant the princess. “Is that what it is?” murmured Lukas, too low for her to hear. He was watching the genasi, who blinked once, slowly. Gentle mockery, Lukas guessed. Maybe that was also what Amaka was talking about. She probably didn’t see enough of that among the drow.

“Well, if it hurts you so,” he said, “and if you’re sure it’s useless, you could let us go.”

Her expression, when she looked at him, was so panicked he could not continue. “Where is the priestess now?” he said, meaning the hierophant.

“Hurt. Too hurt to conclude the ritual. Mauled by Eleuthra Davos, and by … someone else. Crouching in her own little pit, too hurt to come out.”

“Like a spider,” Lukas said.

“Like a spider.”

Amaka rose to her feet. Unsteady on the shattered, uneven surface, she came a few steps closer. When he had first seen her up above, Lukas had wondered if she was drunk or drugged, her spirits were so high, but there was no trace of that now.

She stood above him then flopped down on a chunk of marble, part of the facing stone of some ornate structure, a cornice or a frieze carved in a pattern of birds in flight. But because it had been slaved up from some broken palace in the Underdark, the birds themselves were fantastical and impossible, with tiny wings and long, curled bills and claws—mythical beasts carved by someone who had never seen the sky.

She bent down over him. “Do you think,” she said, “that if my sisters and I make our home … among the trees in Winterglen … above our heads, then we will find someone to treat us the way you treat … her?”

Lukas watched the genasi’s eyes. They blinked once, slowly.

“Free me,” Lukas muttered, though he found he could not lie to her, even though she had betrayed them. She had obeyed her father, that was all. How could he
find fault with her? Not that he had ever obeyed his own father much, come to think of it.

Still, he pitied her. He could not lie to her. “I haven’t kept her all that well,” he muttered, wondering first whether his connection to Amaranth looked different from the outside than it did from the inside, and second whether anyone who knew how he had lured her back to Gwynneth Island and then lured her down here, would still say he had done the best he could for her. What did it mean anyway to treat someone well, in what had been, since he had known her, a series of disasters?

“Free me,” he muttered as Amaka bent over him, her pretty face a few inches from his own—prettier, actually, than he remembered. The dirt was gone from her cheeks. Her eyes were closed. Again, thought Lukas, what this looked like was different from what it was. She was too innocent to know what she was talking about, and anyway he could scarcely move, so maybe none of it meant anything.

Besides, all of an instant, he got the distinct impression she was mocking him, and had been mocking him all along, with her talk about drow, and her desire for better treatment. Now he noticed how her shift was held together—by a brooch or a needle on her right shoulder. He did not remember seeing it before. And now he could see the sharp end of it protruding from the fine white linen cloth—finer, actually, than he had thought. This part of it wasn’t ripped or stained. Close to his mouth, the other end was fashioned in the shape of a spider, a beautiful ornament of silver chased with
gold. He caught it between his teeth and pulled it away from her, and the garment parted. Without opening her eyes, she reached up her hand to secure it over her breast.

But he didn’t pay any attention to that. Instead he pressed his chin against his neck and bent himself to the intricate task of picking apart the silken cord that bound his arms to the stone pier—little by little. He held the sharp silver needle between his teeth. He scarcely noticed when the light around them changed, became brighter and softer and less full of smoky fire. He had managed to loosen himself and sit forward a little bit, pry himself upright, the needle hurting his mouth, when he heard a sound from Gaspar-shen, a whimper of amazement, a soft noise whistling through complicated nasal cavities, and he looked up.

Amaka had climbed up to the shrine where Amaranth was laid out. She stood on the topmost ridge of garbage with the rats around her feet. They did not seem alarmed. One went up on his hind legs, poked his little nose in the air, curled up his tail between his legs and around his fat, purselike body. Amaka brought her hand from her right shoulder, stretched it palm up toward the candles, which burned now with a purer, bluer flame—the wind had died. Her garment—whether it was just a trick of the new light, Lukas didn’t see any more rents or tears in it, or any dirt and filth. The cloth itself seemed transfigured—the garment wafted to the ground. “There was a time when I would gladly have accepted these gifts,” she
said. “These offerings. Not now. Not today. Not from these hands.

“Besides,” she said, “I have already eaten. I have no more room.”

She was not altogether naked. Silhouetted by the candlelight, she seemed made of darkness, a girl-shaped hole in the world’s protective screen. Lukas watched her lean down over Lady Amaranth and run her forefinger over her forehead, her cheek, and down her neck. The princess, who had been unconscious or asleep, now roused herself, came awake under the black hand. Lukas saw Amaranth press against her bonds, heard her little moan. But she had not yet opened her eyes by the time Amaka turned from her, and stepped over the lip of the abyss, and climbed down out of sight into the well.

Lukas said nothing, the needle between his teeth. Gaspar-shen blinked twice, in quick succession. Lady Amaranth struggled weakly against her restraints, cried out as if she had been hurt. Lukas bent down to his task again, worrying and picking at the pale strands. He worked faster now, hurting his mouth and not caring, because he wanted, once loose, to climb up to the rim of garbage and at least look down into the well, past where Amaka had descended, taking some of the radiance with her. The air was darker now. One of the strands gave way, and then another. He pulled, and his hand was free.

Gaspar-shen watched him extricate himself then stand painfully erect, rubbing his shoulders and his hands, wiping the blood from his mouth. He himself felt comfortable and secure, because he couldn’t move. In the Elemental Chaos where he had been born, these moments of stasis formed small islands of bliss, even in memory. Traveling with Lukas, there was far too little of this, and it was worth it to be hurt, sometimes, or imprisoned, or in danger of a terrible death, to enjoy a small bit of quietude sometimes. Closing his eyes, he could see the colors of the ocean, hear the roaring of the water.

It couldn’t last. Lukas stood above him then knelt down as if to free him. But—and this was an astonishing thing, which made Gaspar-shen think with a surge of gratitude that sometimes his friend almost understood him—instead he whispered in his ear, his eyes on the leShay princess waking up. “Stay right here—” as if he had a choice! “I’ll go see what I can see. We’ll need weapons to get out of this.”

Maybe. Gaspar-shen wondered if they had gone past the need for fighting. In his mind he pictured the tidal wave that had inundated the field at Caer Moray, that had broken against the curtain wall—ah, how beautiful. What passions it had washed away! And he imagined this place, also, flooded, the salt water rushing through the tunnels and caverns like the blood pushing through a human body then receding. He imagined the pressure building until the water found a vent onto the land, and it would wash them out into the sunlight and tumble
them down into Cambrent Gap, and down to the ruins of Caervu on the Straits of Alaron, and down into the sea. What would he give, he thought, to set his course out of the Moonshaes and never return?

Feeling his constraints, he opened his eyes. Lukas had clambered down into the tunnel’s mouth, and he disappeared between the burning rocks. The genasi, as if gifted by the goddess with a vision of the future, imagined himself walking after him, but not into some dark, desiccated passage underground, but into the open air above the sea. He watched himself stumbling down a stony beach, and falling on his knees in the shallow water, and allowing the surf to knock him backward, the seagulls above him, and a rainbow in the spray.

His experience was not the same as Amaranth’s as she woke up. And yet there was a point of similarity: She had retained a small sharp fragment of her dream, a vestige of a feeling that was comforting for a single moment. She saw herself in her bedroom in Karador when she was a little girl, before her mother had died and Mistress Valeanne had come to take her away, had woken her in darkness. Someone in her dream, perhaps her mother—no, but her mother’s skin was not as dark as that, her hair not as pale—had touched her cheek and neck, had put her lips next to her ear and whispered something she was able to remember when she had come up to the surface of the world and looked around, and
vainly tried to struggle against the suffocating ropes. In a moment of claustrophobic panic, she heard a voice whisper to her: “You are as different to these creatures as a man is to a stone. You are like a goddess on this world. Do not let them judge you, for their ideas mean nothing. A thousand years will not wash you away. Your life is not with them. Do not be fooled by any chance resemblance or feeling. Remember this if nothing else.”

As it happened, she remembered the whole thing. She was able to lift her head. Lukas was gone. His friend, however, lay close to her. “Ah,” she said.

Do not be fooled by any chance resemblance or feeling. Well, there was no likelihood of that. The genasi lay on his back. Depending on the light, his skin was blue or green. His body was hairless, and streaks of color moved across it, words in unknown languages. Wind whistled through the slits that formed his nose. “I have something to ask you,” he said. “If you could have one dish to eat right now, not to share, but just enough for you, what would it be?”