No Flame But Mine (40 page)

‘Forget your awe and fear of Zeth,' said Lionwolf at last. The
shapes
of these words swam deep into the consciousness of the whale. ‘His day is done. His power is going out.
I
am the power now,' said Lionwolf, without modesty, arrogance, amazement or unease. ‘Trust
me
, brother. He can never hurt you again. If he draws near you, say my name to him.'

‘
Lionwolf
,' whisper-
shaped
the whale. It was a sigh like a sea wind far inshore.

‘And call to me,' said Lionwolf. ‘Then watch the old dad
run
.'

Miles off over hills of ground and time, Guri heard his nephew's laughter behind him and the more oceanic mirth of the whale. Guri scowled, guessing, knowing, all that went on. That bloody whale had impaled him –
twice
. Forgive?
He
would thump the thing when next he met it. Or not. Maybe not. But then anyway Guri saw Sham again before him down a sort of swirling tunnel. Sham by night and goldworked with ten thousand torches. And it had grown bigger, and the temple of Gurithesput had grown
much
bigger. And Guri galloped forward, his scowl now like thunder at seeing this urban sprawl.

Jemhara had been left to her own devices for a long while. At least so it seemed. She had tried to reckon up the days, but as there was never really any night here, only a brief flicker of evening which seemed to occur as and when it wanted to, her estimate varied.

The god ignored her as a rule. This she had become used to. Also that
having
ignored her for what seemed several months, he would abruptly seek her. He always manifested from the golden air. Or out of a tree. Something like that. At first she believed that was simply what he did, a habit, a foible. Then she began to suspect he did it to discompose or thrill her.

Why should he think that necessary? He was Zeth Zezeth.

She asked herself if she attempted to make sense of her own incarceration here, his prize or experiment, by inventing flaws in his psychology.

Yet the Magikoy training she had inadvertently attained insisted to her Zth was no longer quite himself. That is, not what he had been in mythology or temple-lore. He had gone downhill.

His constant boastful references to destroying her in the sexual act, and how he
would
not; his diatribes against the Rukarian state, mankind in general, other gods – Yyrot, Ddir, the one he called a
doy
, Saphay – and so on. These were like the rantings of the angry and enfeebled, unable to lash out with anything but temper and tongue.

As for the main anathema, Lionwolf, Zth now seldom mentioned him coherently. Nor did Zth command Jemhara to any of the unspecified tasks of vengeance he had suggested. Of this she was glad. Yet she drew a conclusion.

Her instinct had already compared her celestial jailer to the aged King Sallusdon.

Those wasted limbs, wilted loins, crass, conceited and unfunctional
mortal
brain – to make such a comparison was risky, surely. Zth could read her mind if he wished. But, he did not …

Here he was now, extracting himself from an orichalc column.

Jemhara obeised herself.

‘Ah, get up, get up.'

It
was
Sallusdon! That foolish and inappropriate glee at her gestures of slavishness.

And his golden gaze on her was like that of a man not merely unintelligent but –
senile
?

They strolled in gardens of iridescent leaves.

Zth recently seemed to like to see things that approximated earthly fauna, preferably killing each other. And so the glades were frenzied with sapphire wasps seizing ruby spiders, or vice versa, and cobalt wolves with auburn cats in their jaws. It was illusory but unneedful and sickening.

Was this too his own vitriol having to be performed by others?

‘What will you do for me, Jema?'

‘All and anything, supernal lord.'

‘Yes. You do love me so, do you not, my Jema?'

‘Lord, more than all and everything, what else?'

And off he went then on a rant. And after the rant he gave an outline of what he might do with and to her. The one he always gave.

When he brushed her lips with his finger a shiver of impossible bliss consumed her. She allowed herself to collapse at his feet. He enjoyed this.

He
enjoyed –
this
.

And he credited her fawning lies.

Later once, just once, Jemhara bit the inside of her mouth to prevent a yawn.

When he buzzed away she sat motionless. The blink of twilight disrupted the sky. It seemed to her that it lingered many seconds more than previously.

That he could read her thoughts was still feasible. Jemhara cared less that he should finish her than that he might make her harm others, particularly Thryfe. She had forged her own plans for suicide in whatever format seemed workable, should that finally happen. It would go against her life-wish which was very strong, even here. It would not be easy, but it would be done. Vuldir had used her as his puppet to be rid of Sallusdon. If any will, human or superhuman, used her now it would find her
useless
.

Dusk returned. And a dusk it was. It went on for an hour, she thought. At the time Jemhara bathed her eyes and heart in its grey-blue sweetness. There were even groups of stars, and one quarter-moon, more slender than the white curve of a baby's nail.

She sat in his garden, and watched the raucous leaves calm to ashes.

Somewhere a bird sang. Jemhara had never heard such a thing. Even the caged birds of Ru Karismi had not had songs. It was exquisite. She fell asleep.

Being what now she was, sleeping she was entirely aware of her journey out of the Sun Wolf's confine, down or out towards the earth.

She went along a path, a milky way here and there pasted with small stars. The larger stars were aeons off, greater than worlds.

Unlatching a door, she stepped into the room of a mansion. She was in a mage's towery. She had reached Kol Cataar, and the house of Thryfe.

When she saw him, dream-projection that she was, all of her seemed to fissure like crystal at a blow. It was a blow of love.

The magician wore lighter clothing – the climate had grown warmer here. He had posted himself before an oculum, and this thaumaturgic instrument was itself new-minted, and had a few innovations Jemhara had never heard of, let alone seen before.

She could see too he was strong, this husband of her soul, not as when last she looked at him, either in the flesh or through her psychic eye. Jemhara read him as the god could not read
her
. Thryfe's wretched deprivation of her, and how the other god, Vashdran, had healed him of illness but not of grief. He had wanted to keep his grief, it seemed. But he was himself.

‘Good evening, my love,' she said.

Yet Thryfe, awake and in the world, Magikoy though he might be, did not hear.

Jemhara found herself close enough to embrace him. She did this, leaning her head on his shoulder while her hair poured over him.

Curiously at that moment she felt his ring again on her finger. It was not there, of course.
Oh, it is truly inside me then, inside my finger, safe about the bone
.

She wanted to tell him this, explain.

He knew and saw and felt nothing of her.

But in the oculum, which a minute before had been blind, a picture was painted.

Jemhara watched with Thryfe as something black tore apart something pale under a tree daggered with ice.

Futile as a nightmare, the magic mirror was showing him the horror of his mother's death. Naturally, the mirror seemed to say, he had always feared to have Jemhara taken from him too. Thus, losing her, he could only accept the theft, and that the thief would be death. It had been bound to happen.

The vision muddied and was gone. Now a world hung there. Jemhara did not know what this was, this greenish-bluish globe panelled over with white. Thryfe had come to know, for he had been shown the sight before by this oculum. The earth looked back at him like the pupil-less iris of an eye. The pupil instead might be the black of space that stretched about it.

As one looked, some of the whiteness went from the iris. Thawed lands and seas flowered out in green and blue.

He had not decoded what the apparition of the earth said. Only that, with the coming of another sun god, things might be freed from the ice. In itself that was a dangerous prophecy. The change would be vast and violent and might cause the end of the world.

Presently the earth dissolved in the glass. On the dark background Jemhara stood in the oculum.

Thryfe caught his breath. Jemhara also.

The portrait was exact, even to the gown of tissue given her by Zth.

‘Good evening, my love,' said the Jemhara in the mirror.

Thryfe waited unspeaking, like iron.

The Jemhara who held him shed sudden tears. In the oculum, that Jemhara too shed tears.

Thryfe said woodenly, ‘Don't cry. Why are you crying? Is death – so harsh?'

‘
I am not dead
.' Both Jemharas spoke together. Their crying stopped. ‘I am here in the room with you. But you refuse to see me.'

Inside his iron case she felt him, the Jemhara who held him, turn to rock. ‘You are nowhere.
Oculum
. Cancel this false image. Do it. Or I shall smash the glass.'

The external Jemhara let her lover go.

The internal Jemhara in the mirror, like the earth – dissolved.

She positioned herself in a corner. She watched Thryfe as he investigated the oculum, with a jinan summoned to assist. Nothing was found wrong with the mechanism.

Then Thryfe paced the chamber a couple of circuits. She was afraid he would pass through her and drew back to avoid the possibility. Even the jinan had not seemed to pick up any indication of her at all.

‘She's dead,' Thryfe said aloud, at last. ‘I know this with my intellect but not with my mind. I must school myself. I must let her rest. All I have is this unwanted house, this unwanted and unmerited honour given me by a demoralized king. This unwanted work – gods help me – my duty of care among mankind. And I care
nothing
for any of them. Did I ever? I doubt I did. I degrade my training. I am dross. And he, that shining demon, has ensured I shall survive and live long to know my worthlessness and my just punishment so well deserved. She's
dead
, Thryfe, your Jemhara. One day you'll join her in oblivion. Pray for that to whatever rootless spirit will listen. Till then,
this
.' He went from the room. After which, so did she.

The stubborn shards of ice had been hacked away from the garth, like the carapace.

Daybreak had hacked off the residue of night.

The settlement had a damaged look, though it was almost intact. Something in its persona perhaps had been vandalized.

In the Holas House Arok the Chaiord had sat down, or been organized into sitting, in his carved chair. His face seemed drawn and elderly. He had aged by thirty years they said, his people, loitering about the lean lanes, or in the House yard. His warriors did not know what to do with or for him.

Nirri tended to him in a collected manner. She had the women mull beer with ginger stalks from the hothouse, and then served him this in the bronze flagon kept for him that only he, or his favourites or son, could drink from. The true favourite had gone, of course, Fenzi, lost Dayad's stand-in. Some had seen him merely stride off over the snow. Others muttered that it had been his phantom anyway, he was already dead; as Arok was. The other son of Arok's body they said nothing of. They knew the Saffi-goddess witch-hag had done something, made some mad sorcery. They had no mages to counteract her mischief. The wise-women had refused to come out of their house. As for the werloka, he was cunning at drinking and gambling, but not worth much at anything else.

‘How are you, sir?' asked Nirri of Arok, in the most civil and accommodating way. Her eyes, some said, looked more sunken than Arok's own.

Arok said in a low crust of a voice, ‘Don't bother me with how I am.' And he drank a mouthful of the hot beer and put it from him.

Those warriors who had been with Arok at Padgish had informed Nirri of all the circumstances. The Winter god she had seen herself. She had not faltered. Only her eyes – sunken.

Upstairs something burned and froze at the same moment.

No one dared go to see. Once Arok had come in neither had Nirri.

Outside the garth still the handsome foreign prince Curjai lingered with the blonde witch-woman. Let
them
go off together for all the good they did now.

The werloka stumped from the Holasan-garth, leaning on his staff, ignoring all those who ignored him. His grizzled mane was uncombed and the tousled tatty wolfskin he wore to keep him warm he also slept in. He knew their opinion of him in the garth, as in the village from which, back on the other continent, he had been ousted by a talentless numbskull. Despite all that the werloka had confidence in his own ability.

Although the ice had been shattered and the garth seemed full of walking dead, not to mention glers saying they were gods, something else irritated on the perimeter of sight and hearing. It was just over there, beyond the fields of dormant crops. It needed seeing to. The werloka knew that none other here, for whatever reason, was remotely capable of that. He hoisted himself along. He was unsure if
he
was. He meant to try.

Half an hour on from leaving the garth he crested a slope and saw what he had come to face.

He halted, and leered at it.

Winter sat on the adjoining hill in a carven chair, not unlike the Chaiord's. Doubtless he had glimpsed it in the House and now inadvertently copied. While Winter was eternal and presently universal, Tirthen-as-Winter was a rather untried god.

To the werloka however Winter-Tirthen was only one more gler.

‘Be off, you!' shouted the werloka, and went at once into an unshaven rampaging jig, flexing his staff. This had been effective, sometimes, in evicting malignant Jafn sprites. Bewitcheried lights littered the vicinity.