Samples from books that we have published at Eartherean Books.
This is another in a series from the fourth book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: Darkbridge.
© 2009 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
In Darkness
AMONG THE RUINS of Tarendahardil all rested shrouded and still. Weeds stood between the stones in the streets, silently bending in the wind. Gerlins, starving for prey, soared around the high-piled stones of the Imperial Palace, whose every opening was blocked up with stone or wood, as if they hungered for the blood they sensed within.
In the darkness of those forsaken halls walked the King of All the World.
Alone he trod the chambers of the Black Tower and through the fragrant rubbish left in the elegant rooms of the Southern Wing. With hands caught behind his back, he walked amidst the shades of the thousands who perished by his treachery. His thoughts were his own. Did he seek penance there? He was his own penance. Here, in the shadow of these halls, he had become a nameless man. For two years now it had been Erion Sedeg who had spoken in the name of Ara-Karn.
§
LONG AGO it seemed now, many years, since he sat in the throne in the black tent with the Song of Elna still upon his knee, and fell asleep to the thin bright screams of Dornan Ural...
In that hour he had dreamed of his former life, and fanned the flames of his ancient hatred and yearning for revenge. He saw a youth, a maiden, and a palace of red stone. Then a shadow fell across the dream, of the interloper, the enemy, the stranger: death and ruin, a pregnant woman’s anguish, blood dripping from a smoking sword… The inveterate hatred convulsed his limbs as he sat dreaming, until the dreams turned and twisted, and the maiden lay in the dim place atop the White Tower, and the youth was a weeping, frightened boy in the ruins of Gerso, and the interloper – it was himself, Ara-Karn, who cast that malformed shadow and held the smoking blade; and the hatred ran from him like water and he woke.
He stumbled out of the black tents. There were some clouds but otherwise it was fair and bright. He walked through the camp slowly, followed by his guards. He felt the eyes of all men on him. His presence called them forth. At a distance he saw the top of the tent of the chief of the Durbars. Remembering Gundoen, he had the brief desire to speak with Nam-Rog, but he did not. He was Ara-Karn.
In the penalty-square he beheld the last remnants of him who had once been called the most powerful man in the South. Now the most powerful man in the South was Ara-Karn. Still gazing at the scraps was a woman, the camp-follower who had won the contest. She looked up at his approach. She neither abased herself nor departed. It was as if they had been equals.
She wore a lora the colors of rust and blue and a black shoulder-mantle adorned with beads of glass. Here she was known as Elrialgis. Her hair was long, thick, and black. She was beautiful, but even more cruel. In the depths of her black flashing eyes she carried the scars of all that she had done since these wars had overturned her life.
She had been born in Postio, the tribesmen had told him. There she had been the prettiest and best-loved daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant until, in the midst of her wedding-ceremony to the young man she adored, the barbarians of Ara-Karn at last succeeded in breaking down the walls of that city. Elrialgis saw her bridegroom slaughtered on the altar before her, and she, the bride, was passed from man to man on the dirt before the heat of the burning city. She was added to the spoils of a Durbar warrior, a man high in Nam-Rog’s council; but during the long wait below Bollakarvil he had bad luck gaming, and Elrialgis passed to a warrior of the Archeros, a clever man. She was hardened by then, and the Archero had come to fear her: after the surrender of Ilkas he traded her to a Raznami for a Raamba sword.
After Vapio, many new women entered the camp, more artful and complaisant, and Elrialgis fell among the crowd of unclaimed women, those who must please all comers to survive. Then she learned well the lie, but even as she lay with those bored and sullen strangers, it was not their embraces but visions of their anguished deaths below the Iron Gate that gave her pleasure. She ran her delicate fingers along their scarce-healed scars and took her pleasure in questioning them on their fear and suffering in battle.
Now he, Ara-Karn, had dropped Dornan Ural like a ripe plum into her hands. How she had unleashed all the pent-up cruelty, hatred and pain of these years, and plied well her imagination in giving this old man she had never known to torments.
Ara-Karn looked at her silently. He saw the blood still fresh beneath her nails. She was bleak and vengeful and vicious, this girl still young in years but holding all the bitterness of great age. Never again would she know love or warmth or compassion. So had these wars, which he had loosed, made her. She was his daughter. She was his great handiwork.
For a moment he felt himself stirred by her dangerousness. Then he said to her, ‘The prize is yours. You have done well what I commanded. Now go, and never come near me again.’
She smiled, accepting the pectoral from him, and gave him a courtesy prettily as an innocent maid, and the foulness of her doing that reminded him of himself. ‘Your majesty, Great King, in one breath you have fulfilled both my dreams.’
He left the penalty-square and climbed alone into the Black Citadel. The mercenaries were still at work there, contesting with the gerlins over the stinking bodies of the slain. He entered the White Tower, and the dimplace at its summit where, so long a time before, he had seduced the Empress to the ringing of her own son’s mourning-rites. The place was empty except for the great bed. The maidens were in the hands of the Vapionil, and all the other belongings had been taken by the mercenaries. Even so the place smelled strongly of her presence.
He stepped about the room softly, lest he disturb their memories. He opened the saffron bed-curtains, holding them apart with arms extended. ‘Alastaphele,’ he murmured. The sound of it was as hard and hollow as that of a broken pin dropped down a dried-up well.
He never left the Palace thereafter.
§
HE CONTINUED to let Erion Sedeg speak for him. Why not? By now that man knew him better than he did himself. The matters of the consolidation of his rule did not concern him. Only one thing concerned him.
Great Kaan, that woman was last seen traveling darkward. We have spoken with the peasants of the Marches. She passed in haste, paying for food with coins and jewels. She was alone, Divine One.
Have you spoken to the Madpriests?
Yes, Great King. The chiefs say they have no knowledge of her.
Ignore the chiefs. What did Estar Kane have to say?
Great Kaan, that thief only laughed at us. He threw meat to his pack of dogs, and told us that if she were in the Darkness he would find her.
What else did you do?
Nothing, August Majesty. We could do nothing else there. Estar Kane has said he will look for her.
And do you not realize what will befall her if he finds her? Go now and cast lots among yourselves, for one of you will be killed for this. Perhaps then the rest of you will think twice before deciding to do ‘nothing else.’
But not even his Vapionil spies could learn anything more.
She had been his only passageway back to the man he had been so long ago, that young king brilliant with light. Now she was gone. The wave had passed him by. He felt his own shadows surging to engulf him.
Once he asked the priests of Temaal why they hid themselves away in these caverns under the mountains so deep into the Desert. They, sitting as ever in a triangle three-rowed, smiled. To see a house, it is necessary to step outside it, they answered.
But what of those who seek you?
All those who seek and wish to find us are already here. To know where you are, that is to need go nowhere else.
And you miss nothing of the lands of men? The company of women, perhaps?
The company of women is a thing we would miss indeed, more than anything else. But we do not lack for that. We summon them in our hearts, bewitching, compassionate creatures beyond any that are known there. We are never without women here. Have you not yet seen them?
You speak of dreams and delusions formed of memories.
There are those of us who came here as mere boys with their fathers. These have never known the touch or scent of a woman, yet their dreams are the most powerful, beautiful, and informed. You have known the flesh of women, but you have never known women.
The flesh is the woman, he answered.
They tried to teach him their craft of inventing women for companions and heart-mates, but it had only sharpened his desire for the real Alastaphele and driven him back to his domains.
Now he wished he had learned the trick after all.
So he rested where he was, waiting for Alastaphele or for news of her. This was her place. She would return here if she lived. When she held that dagger to his throat by the palace of her father, then he had gone away. Now she had slipped his siege a second time, and he had departed without removing, in such a way that she must hear of it and know his meaning.
He let stop the work upon his fleet at Arpane on the Sea. As once he had left pleasure and strode into the burning Desert, so now he left vengeance and walked into darkness. He played with madness as a public penance, until it began to play with him. She would know of it. If she lived. But there was no word of her in the lands of men.
And what has Estar Kane to say now?
Divine Conqueror, he at first refused to answer our questions, denying that your majesty is his overlord. But we were mindful of your great majesty’s will, and we came in force. So at last he relented.
Continue.
Great Kaan, he has instructed us to say to you, that Estar Kane has searched diligently, and has found no one in the Darklands. And no one, he said, has passed by way of Darkbridge to those lands into which it leads.
No one?
Divine King, it was his very word.
The Riders came and went, and every report grew more fantastic. She was a blind beggar in the North; she was mustering a vast army on the islands deep in the Southern Ocean; she was dead, slain in a dozen ways and a score of places. She had ascended to Heaven and gained sanctuary by the throne of Golden Fire. She had been ravished again by God in the Darklands and taken to His fastness of jade and black stone in the middle of the sunless seas. It was avowed by the folk of the lands through which it was claimed she had passed, that her hands could heal all wounds and that her breath was defense against all illness. Hers had become a legend as almost as strong as his own.
In the long darkness of his waiting he taught the hostage children games of his native land, secret games their parents never knew. He put weapons and dark joy in their hands, and taught them words in his own tongue. This he did as an idle pastime – or at least, so he told himself. The truth was somewhat darker, as were all things about him now.
And the children, playing in the recesses of the lightless Palace, echoed mockingly the alien sounds of the land that gave birth to their conqueror. The long halls sprang alive with their laughter and their malice. They came to love him, these children being reared by Alastaphele’s maidens among Vapionil and the mercenaries of Erion Sedeg. They came to know him as well as they knew these passageways, until even the Vapionil feared and shunned them.
He, the High King whose name they all professed to worship, let that happen as he let all other things occur, of their own force and aim. He only watched it bring itself to pass. The wave was breaking against the land it destroyed, spending itself in foam.
You should know better than to look for me. If the Divine Queen shall choose not to be found, then not even a king, not Ara-Karn himself, will find her. She has gone down the ancient path, and you dare not follow her. Look for one seed in the fields of autumn before you seek an Empress in the lands of her enemies.
Once he thought he saw her, pale and dim like the image in a tarnished silver mirror. He went to her, his arms outstretched, but she eluded him and was gone. He cried to her to stop, but she laughed with a mocking voice very like his own, and would not turn.
Then he went down into the old Hall of Justice. The King’s Light still fell blind upon the worn old dais. There the Vapionil, Erion Sedeg and his mercenaries, and the Riders awaited him.
What news?
The leader of the Riders knelt upon the tiles, which still bore the stains of the corpses Dornan Ural had by some mad strength managed to drag here and arrange.
The leader of the Riders was a Borso. The ends of his long mustache trailed upon the tiles as he bent forward. His knees bent outward of his hips, and his back curved from all that year’s riding, the riding of two lifetimes of an ordinary man. In his prime, he had become old: even the legendary hardiness of the Borsos was failing in this task. He knelt before the King as if he had been accustomed to it all his life, like a beggar or a slave beyond all hope.
O Great Lord and God, we have searched again, the cities of the North and the South, and the Islands in the Sea of Elna, and in the Southern Ocean. We have gone along the shores of the Desert, we have lit signal-fires the length of the Dusky Border. We found nothing, nothing. The woman is dead, great Kaan. There is nothing to be found of a person. All that we find is a name, and it is always there before us. She is dead, lord, and we, we are tired. Will you not release us, Lord, and let us try to find some sort of peace?
The man in the throne on the dais looked upon them wearily. These too were his handiwork. He looked upon them coldly but without anger, as if from a great distance. They, encouraged by this, redoubled their pleas. He raised his hand, and they fell still.
Perhaps there will be others who will replace you.
Divine One, Great Conqueror, such was my thought also, said Erion Sedeg. I summoned the chiefs and ordered them to take up the search themselves. But the chiefs refused, and demanded leave, threatening armed rebellion if it were not given. This I allowed them if they would leave hostages; but they departed and left us none. They are dangerous, Great One. In time they might even become the enemies of Ara-Karn.
He looked on Erion Sedeg as he had looked on the old Borso. From the shadowy recesses behind him he heard whispers and sly laughter from the children. They spoke in his tongue, and he could see Erion Sedeg grow pale even though he did not understand what it was the children said. Jealousy shone in his red eyes.
Lord, Lord, may we not have peace?
O Divine One, the name of Ara-Karn has been insulted by those chiefs. Now these men are the only weapon Ara-Karn has to use against them.
Among the children were the last of Alastaphele’s maidens, impudent, shameless creatures. In despair and bitterness they had fallen at his will into the hands of the Vapionil; they had supped greedily at the unspeakable pleasures only Vapionil knew. Some had perished of those pleasures. And so now these last few, lovely and degraded, vicious and loose, garbed and painted themselves obscenely and served as nursemaids to the young children.
The old Borso lowered his head toward the ancient floor. It was clear he did so to conceal the dark tears welling in his cracked eyes. The old man still had some pride left. It was just that he did not have enough. If Ara-Karn ordered him to go out again in search or to remain here as a hostage, the Borso would accept the commandment of his King. There was no more spirit in him left to be broken.
You may go, he said.
The old tribesmen looked at him in wonder. Erion Sedeg showed consternation. Even the children fell silent.
Go, and do as you please, he said again. I have no further use for you.
The warriors spoke their gratitude fawningly, and departed. Then, surprisingly, it was the Vapionil who crept forward, and crawled on the tiles before the dais.
And what of us, High One? May we not also go?
They were lean and troubled here, these natives of a sun-burnt city. They had flocked to him at first, eager for the promise of indulgence at the side of the conqueror of the world. But they had failed to overcome the influence of Erion Sedeg; and the ascetic hostility of these barren halls was like death to them. And they feared him, for they sensed the bleakness and loss within him, and dreaded lest it turn violent.
Perhaps, if he could believe that she was truly dead, he might have enjoyed wreaking a dry hostility against them. He might have gone on destroying until at long last he had found his own death. But now he looked on them even with compassion. He had known their kind all his life, since his childhood in the palace of red stone. They were less than nothing to him now.
Go, he said.
After them Erion Sedeg stepped before him, and gave him worship after the fashion of the dwellers in the Desert. But when he looked upon his master, then he chewed his picsle leaf and words failed him.
The King looked down upon his last votary. How this man had come to divine his secret and fall beneath its spell he did not know. It was enough to have heard him speak to Berowne from below the Iron Gate to recognize in him more than a handiwork, but a brother of the kind few brothers of the flesh can boast. It might as well have been Erion Sedeg that Nam-Rog and Kul-Dro had beheld in the opening of the Iron Gate, for all that had come to pass since then.
Dark One, Great Kaan, few like to come here any longer, and it is not a secure place to hold. This is no place for your majesty’s armies. But there are strong-walled cities in Fulmine and Belknule. It is from there that I may best serve Ara-Karn.
Let him go, said the children in the tongue of the other world. Let us go along with him. We will watch him for you, Father.
For the first time in many months, a smile touched his lips. You will not rule well without the hostages.
Erion Sedeg hesitated. He looked behind the throne, trying, as vainly as he had tried to comprehend the words, to penetrate the shadows there. Great Conqueror, that is true.
Take them with you then, and go.
And will you be alone here, majesty? Will your majesty not rather come with us, and found a new seat to the rule and worship of Ara-Karn?
No, Erion Sedeg. You will not need another hostage.
But Divine King, who will serve you?
The gods, of course.
§
HE WAS SITTING in the throne again when the last of them departed. He heard their horses, muffled by the thick stone walls. His cheek still burned from the children’s malevolent kisses. He let them go. He remained.
He knew he would never find her now, never for so long as she did not wish him to. She would find him when she would. As long as he chased her, she would run, but when he turned back she would do likewise. She must.
Alastaphele.
His voice trailed away in the empty hall.
§
SHADOWS filled the halls, and yet he was not alone. He was never alone, who walked among the dead, being dead himself.
His eyes beheld the watery limbs and hateful eyes of those spirits he had fetched up with his own blood, at the stone basin in the grove of dark God. He had loosed them to wreak vengeance upon all those who had maimed and tortured Gundoen, and so they had. The Tarendahardilites lay dead and buried, left unvoyaged; Ampeánor's corpse had been given to dogs and pigs to feast upon.
But who had condemned Gundoen as thoroughly as himself?
And these were not all.
For the spirits of the fallen from Urnostardil, those things he had raised out of frozen ground and darkness on the waking he had taken with bloody hands the name of Warlord from Gen-Karn, had not retreated with the armies. The ghosts had not gone back into the far North, and not all the voyaging rites had served to appease them. He had raised them, and though he had bound them to the warriors by a binding oath, the ghosts had never sworn, and they had always looked to him.
Such things, once risen, are not so easily put down again.
And he had linked these spirits also with a curse, that should any of the tribesmen turn his back on vengeance yet undone, they should rend him. He had not meant himself, of course. But had not Gundoen taken Ara-Karn into the tribe of Tont-Ornoth, and was he not also a tribesman to whom the spirits of Urnostardil bound themselves?
And those dreaded specters were not the worst of the things that rove about him.
Shadows he had cast in his career, and now he lived within them. The Palace drowned in shadows; it was itself a shell brimming over with shadows and little light.
Among all those shadows, one above all would not be still.
He sensed it there, down the long passageways, in the great halls, in the small and privy rooms.
His Dark Man watched him everywhere.
The thing had come unbidden. He had performed none of the ceremonies. He had lost his jade dagger, and mumbled none of the terrible rhymes first uttered before the Sixth Fall of the world.
And yet the thing was here.
‘Begone,’ he swore, but the thing would not depart.
‘Then come nearer, and serve!’
Silence ensued. He waited, hardly breathing, hearkening into the depths of the shadow that he dwelled in. It was so dark there, and his mind so changeable, that he could not have said just where in the Palace he was. Ah yes, he remembered now: he lay upon her bed, in her dimchamber. He knew it was so, for when he breathed in, he inhaled the perfume her body had left in the hollows of the mattress.
He rose, stripped naked, and sat cross-legged on the raised floor at the foot of her bed.
‘Come nearer,’ he whispered. ‘Nearer, nearer to me.’
His fingers danced upon his knees. He rocked his head back and forth, and his lips uttered some of the enticements for such things as the Dark Man was.
He felt it. Something shifted, far down at the base of the White Tower. Slowly up the circling stairs it crept. It gathered without the doors to her chambers. Those doors were shut and locked, he was sure. He felt the thing seep through the cracks around the doors, like smoke, like the perfumed breath of a highborn assassin.
It hesitated outside the hangings that filled the opening into the dimchamber.
‘Be not shy or coy,’ he breathed, ‘with me. Are we not old friends?’
At that he sensed the thing leap inside the dimchamber and roam up and down the walls, arching over the vaulted ceiling. For a time, the thing danced and played, like a puppy that has found a long-lost plaything. He himself sat quietly, breathing in the rhythms he had been taught by things long dead.
At last the shadow, unseen in shadow, came to rest upon the wall facing him. It attended him as of old.
‘Go seek out the Empress,’ he commanded it, ‘and bring her back to me.’
But the shadow writhed and made answer, in the manner of tongueless, mouthless, voiceless things,
I know where she is. Does she not still bear the talisman?
‘Then go and fetch her.’
What then shall be brought to you? Do you want her body, or her heart?
‘I want her heart and body both,’ he told it. ‘This time I ask for the whole of the woman. Give her to me.’
I might go to her, it said, and when I reach her side I will rape her, and give her torments, and murder her. But I will not serve your love, though once I served your lust, and once again I served that lust, and would do so again, for lust is a thing I know. But love and all such matters lie beyond my reach, and I abhor them.
‘Then I have done with you,’ Ara-Karn said; ‘begone forever.’ But at this the thing upon the wall shook with laughter.
You have done with me? You will have done with me when I have done with you! Go I will, and where I go, and what I do when I reach that place, shall be mine and mine alone to decide!
Ara-Karn swept his arm forward and flung the death-bird at the heart of the voiceless words.
The thing flew true as its nature required; it struck something with a sound of the iron striking stone, and sparks flashed in the darkness.
And something screamed with tongueless voice, and something withered and shrank, and something was dispelled. But the thing was dark as the shadow that enwrapt it, nothing might be seen of what took place there. And yet there was a lessening of something in the Queen’s dimchamber, and a weight seemed to have been lifted, a weight more burdensome than the stones of which the White Tower had been made.
But it was the man at the foot of the bed who fell back and cried out.
His hand touched his breast, where the thick, sluggish life-blood oozed, and loosed an aromatic pungency throughout the hivelike chamber.
He struggled to rise; he stumbled through the hangings and fell against the outer doors. His hands scrabbled at the latches. Somehow he passed beyond into the stairway. But his strength failed him, he fell, and could not rise.
‘What weakness is this?’ he asked.
The thing that had been his strength had left him, and behind it had left only a husk or shell.
How long had it been since he had eaten? Too long to feel hunger’s pangs.
From the dimplace above, a weary, gray-washed light seeped like tears through the cracks about the boards that had been set over the lone window. The light fell past him, touching with indistinctness the stairs. The stairs coiled down into a fist-sized hole of blackness, like the tale of centuries, like the flight of winds that had begun their journey at the back of the dark half of the world, like the hours between a poor child’s meals. Time did not matter any longer. An instant or this year without her, it was all the same. He knew now he would not see her again. He had lost her. He had brought about her death through ignorance that first time, but now he had done so through what? Pride, or overlonging. It no longer mattered.
ALASTAPHELE!
The scream rang off the many steps like the dying cry of some wolf in the cold, which is sick from licking the blood of its own wounds and, in rage and sorrow, howls out one last mating-howl before darkness comes to close its weakened eyes. The echo that returned to assail his ears seemed the cry of a stranger.
He heard another sound from below as well.
Slowly he stumbled down the steps, surrendering his body to the eager beckoning of the depths of the earth. The darkness thickened about him almost tangibly, so that it was as if he walked down the deepening, ever-colder levels of the sea. He felt himself drawn down by the need of the spirits of all those he had murdered here. He remembered what he had asked Kuln-Holn about the gods. He remembered what the priests of Temaal had told him about the fate of the dead. Alastaphele, did she walk once more below the hills of Keldaroon?
He stopped before the open doors of the audience chamber. The long, low room was flooded with gray light. The boards that had been nailed over the narrow window were in pieces on the floor. Standing on them were a half dozen large gerlins. Perched on the arm of the throne, regarding him with an evil look, was Niad.
§
THE MAN stepped into the room. The floor was bare stone, but the walls and ceiling still hung with heavy black linen. The birds eyed him watchfully. He felt their hunger as if it were his own. There was no sound there but the dripping of the rain that licked the stones outside.
‘Are you to be my judges, then?’ His voice sounded hoarsely in his ears.
Niad ceased preening and raised his great, wicked head.
Without warning he spread his wings and launched himself.
The black-winged shape filled the man’s vision. Unthinkingly he raised his arm in a protective gesture. The great beak jabbed his shoulder and the cruel talons raked his forearm. He felt the pain as liquid fire as he fell to the floor. The air boiled around him, beat up by the merciless strokes of wings. The room filled with raucous, avid cries. Dimly he saw the other gerlins start up into the air, their talons and wings contesting for the little space.
Again Niad struck, tearing open the man’s broad back. The reek of blood suffused the room, beat about by the rushing wings. The gerlins had starved in the cold season; many died. These, the strongest, were left. Led by Niad, they had at last succeeded in breaking into the Palace, but had not dared venture into the blackness beyond this room.
Now, maddened by the reek of blood, they flew about furiously and fought over their prey. The man covered his face and eyes with his arms and struggled to rise to his feet. They beat him back; he fell into a corner of the room. There the space was so narrow only one of them could come at him.
It was Niad who won the right. The monstrous bird swept in, struck, and wheeled back again. The man dragged himself up with a bloody hand clutching at the linen. He pulled at it between the bird’s attacks. The linen came loose from the wall, but along the floor and ceiling it was fastened more securely.
Again the huge bird swept in. The heavy talons caught linen and flesh and shredded both. Standing half-folded in the linen, the man saw the bird’s sharp turn. He saw the onrush of feathers, beak and talons. Then he fell, and held the linen open in his hands. Screeching, helpless now to turn, the bird flew into the hangings that the man twisted around it. The cries filled the room – different cries now, cries of helpless rage and fear muffled by the hangings. The black linen swelled and fell at the desperate thrashing. There was a heavy, hard sound. Then the roar of feathers was stilled, and the rippling hangings hung down grotesquely, bearing the broken body against the wall.
In fear the other gerlins alighted at the far corners of the room. One by one, doubtfully, they departed through the narrow window, and on the outer ledge spread their wings and pushed into the largeness of the rainy sky.
In the recesses of the room, the man leaned into the embrace of the stone and slowly sank onto the floor. Like some rich young chara’s doll, which she has discarded in the sudden blooming of her womanhood and left to lie in some out of the way corner of her wardrobe, so the High King lay unmoving in that corner in the tower of the abandoned Palace.
In time even the rain fell silent; but shortly afterward another deep-bellied cloud came to loose its veils over the mountain-top.
§
HE CAME BACK to his senses. Weakness, loss of blood, pain, hunger and thirst made this difficult. He looked around the audience chamber, and remembered that time when he had first seen it shrouded so, two years and more before.
He lay resting, gathering his strength. He wanted to see her dimplace again before he died.
Later he stood, and walked unsurely to the door. He could see nothing at first in the well beyond, but he could clamber up the cold stone steps by feel. Slowly he crawled round the circles of the stairs. In truth he did not have the strength for it, not in his torn body. There was a time during which he thought he would not manage it, and would leave his corpse there upon the steps. But that would have been meaningless. If she lived, he wanted her to know he had died in her chamber, by her bed. He wanted her to know he had not forgotten. One last show-piece; and let her live with that.
He lost sight of the place for a while.
He was breathing heavily. He looked about.
Before him the doors were open into her dimplace. By the slivers of light through the cracks in the window he could see the faint, pale outlines of her bed. He took hold of the carved stone railing, and pulled himself to his feet. More he would not crawl.
He went in. He smelled the remnants of her presence. He remembered her troubled sleep that he had seen when he had come here like a thief to discard the water-ewer and guard her life – the last time he ever saw her. He was glad that she was gone. He was glad she had at least been spared this. He did not want to think of her as in any way his handiwork.
Weakly he knelt, then sat at the side of the bed. He rested his cheek against the saffron bed curtains. Breathing in the scent of peaceful flowers by a quiet riverbank, he let his eyes close.
And in death he dreamed.
