The brain I had entered was like a twilight fog at sea. Objects pushed up from the mist, mirages or rocks, the fragmented, now meaningless, remembrances of her brain, like a catalog chipped in stone that the dust storm has eroded. The violence that had sprung from them was basically motiveless, a misinterpretation, a bewildered flailing in the dark. For the creature I had raised was in confusion. A state vague and stupefied, a frenzy concocted of instincts and impulses. Though her brain had retained its melted images of me, the eyes of the automation did not recognize their significance. Its response was primeval. I had introduced this disturbance, and it must denounce me, destroy me. From which it would seem

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  there was some reasoning there, but there was not. As a sail changes to the wind, so this thing angled itself this way and that. No more. All this I know, who searched for a woman inside that skull, and met only the tenantless desert.

  I seemed to have grown as vacant as the being I held in my arms, my soul to have left me.

  Yet I could not help but be gentle as I reached and stilled what I had set in motion, those ticking clocks within the wooden doll. I gave her back her body’s death.

  Gradually the tremors of physical life fell quiet, the head slid softly aside, its blind eyes closed. When I had wiped my blood from her mouth, I saw again my woman’s face, as I had known it.

  I laid her down, not where I had taken her up, but in that couch she had given me.

  Her flesh had not yet begun again to die, for this moment it was sweet and perfect. She looked like sleep. I did not ask her pardon; it had not been her I wronged. My trembling had stopped. I lifted up the lid, the huge golden lid I had cast from me. I must use my Power for that, and even as I did it, I thought, This is the last hour I use it. It has brought me sorrow and folly. I am a child with fire. Let me wait till I have been taught by my life and by the world. I will not be a sorcerer again till I have reined myself and what is in me.

  The shadow enlarged itself over Malmiranet, and hid her. Only the small sun-hole was left. The peacock with its broken tail, the horse, and all the flowers would reflect on her, and when her beauty was merely bones, their whiteness would take color, blue and rose and gold, at the passing of the sun.

  The star had vanished from the roof of the tomb. The black was warming into mauve.

  One ultimate act of Power was needed to open the wall. One initial step was needed to carry me into my life, which was altered. Something glittered on the silken bed, a bead that had fallen there from the flounces of Malmiranet’s red skirt.

  I sat and turned it in my fingers, that bead, as the world turned toward the dawn.

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  6

  Human alarm takes many forms. Some appear comic if one’s mood is desolate and drained enough.

  There was a door into the tomb. They had brought me through it, and she had come that way also. It could not be seen from within, among the branches of the painted trees, but the priests of the necropolis could effect entry when and if they chose. I believe they did not often choose such visits. No doubt they would have foregone this one, if they had not been pushed by decrees other than their own.

  I had never thought how it might seem.

  A tomb contains the dead, who are properly immobile and unspeaking. Though Masrians leave lamps for the ghosts, nobody expects they will be lighted.

  First had come my own muffled yells and bellowings, then the enormous crash of my coffin lid on the tiles, followed by a destruction of masonry and the brazen clamor that marked my opening of Malmiranet’s sarcophagus. The domes are solidly built but provide excellent echo chambers with the vent in the roof to let the noise out upon the air. Probably a timorous watch was posted at this juncture, who did not pass a barren night. Maybe they heard me speak, my movements. Certainly, the glowing of the lamp through the aperture would have been noticed. Finally, the snapping of the spear that missed my body by inches. And after that her terrible cries-so terrible to me that they have lingered in my sleep along with all my other hauntings, less poignant but how much more awesome to the priests outside.

  They waited till sunup. BarIbithni had had a surfeit of the dark.

  The door was flung wide suddenly on the twilight morning of the tomb and on the shadow of my brain; a golden eastern sky gilded everything, and somewhere there was a rill of doves purring, for the priests kept silent a long moment, as if to let me hear them.

  There were ten priests in all. Their eyes popped as if invisible nooses tightened on their gullets. Here a hand dropped a

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  magic censer-for purpose of exorcism? There one was turning red with fear, the way some fat men do.

  So I had my dismal joke, as I sat there resurrected. I even had the humor to recall it was not the first time I had come back from death to men’s eyes, and these not the first priests to marvel at me, though they were without Seel’s fury, and this place something finer than the krarl.

  Abruptly one of them spoke my name and fell to his knees. It was less a gesture of reverence than a loosening of the joints in fright, but the rest aped him. Presently every man kneeled, every man whispered, “Vazkor, Vazkor.” (I was back in another place of my past, a fortress-rock in the mountains, seeing the masked city men of Eshkorek kneel before a tribal brave, who was Vazkor, the Black Wolf of Ezlann returned from the grave.)

  The joke died, as I had not.

  I thought, I have taken sufficient for one morning.

  I said nothing, made no sign. I walked by the kneeling men and out into the sunny avenues of the Royal Necropolis.

  I could have made myself a king that day, Lord of the Masrian Empire. Who could have withstood a deathless sorcerer-god? No man whose name I call to mind. I could have been an emperor, and conquered fresh empires, as my father had meant to do before even he got me, indeed, as he had begun to do, before even he was very much older than I on that day.

  But I was beyond empires; I had achieved, or lost, that much at least.

  I got out of the pillared archway with no trouble. The guard there, making eyes at the gardener’s boy, paid me no special attention, and probably took me in my Palace gear for a noble come to offer in the little temple, for friend or kin.

  The streets of BarIbithni, sponged with saffron lights, seemed as when I had first gazed at them: busy, opulent, luxurious. The fringed litters went by, the rich men and the merchants, the boy-girl “Theis” in their tinsel clothes, and occasionally a Hessek slave on an errand. It was very strange, dreamlike, as if the separate scourges, the uprising and its fires, the swarm of Shaythun and the yellow plague, had never been save in some nightmare curtailed by the dawn.

  My eyes were dazzled. I had been too long from the sun and too long from men. My way turned east of itself, to leave this enchanted, self-healing wonder behind, and reach

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  the open land beyond the old palisade, the vineyards, and the groves, and perhaps the place where I had flown down from heaven on a white horse, and she and I had nearly missed the signal of the burning docks so deep we were in another fire.

  On the road, not far from the edge of the Palm Quarter, I met a woman.

  She was obviously an aristocrat’s slave, most likely his concubine, dressed fashionably and prettily, and she even had her own slave to walk behind her, to hold a parasol above her curly head, and with a club in his belt for overfriendly citizens. She stepped out from the gate of a great house with green enamel cats along its walls-it was my staring at the cats, my eternal symbol for Uastis, that made me see the girl. She appeared to be set on the same direction as myself, and she was crying.

  Till she glimpsed me. Then she put her hands to her mouth and halted, as if at a chasm in the pavement. The male slave, primed to her reactions, strode forward and scowled at me, and told her she should have no insolence from me while he stood by. But she choked out, “No, Chem. Everything is well. This gentleman has done me no harm.” Then, starting softly to cry again, she came toward me.

  I do not properly recollect what I felt. That she recognized me was sure, that she craved something of me also was evident. My heart beat in heavy leaden strokes, knowing already. She was a Masrian slave, tall and slender. She would have had a look of Nasmet, but for her sadness.

  “Forgive me if I am foolish,” she said. “It can’t be, for they told us he was dead, dead for thirty days now, and buried secretly at the order of the Empress.” I could say nothing. She said, “But I have often seen him, here in the Palm Quarter. He was a sorcerer, and he could heal all sicknesses. Or can it be that you, sir, are Vazkor?”

  Then I found I was answering her, not meaning to.

  “And if I were Vazkor?”

  The tears streamed from her eyes. She, too, dropped on her knees.

  “Oh, my lord. It’s my child. They said you would not heal anymore, but I will pay you anything. My master is rich and careful for me-anything, my lord.”

  The male slave, who had been standing looking warily at us, now moved up and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s no good, lady. Suppose he were Vazkor, he could do nothing. Your child died last night. You know it. We all

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  know it, and grieve with you, even the master. But that’s an end.”

  But the girl raised her face to me, running with its tears, bright with them and with a burning hope, and she said, “Vazkor could raise my child. He could raise the dead. Oh, my lord, make my child live again.”

  A warrior does not learn how to weep in the krarls of the red people, nor can he learn it after in hubris and Power. Yet there will come one day a blow so gentle that it will split the rock and find the spring beneath. The fates are kind to women, or to any that can with ease wash the sores of life in such water. Even when it comes hard, it is a balm.

  Yet I had enough of my past still with me that I turned away from her, that she should not see me weep.

  Easier to hide a wound than crying from a woman. She knew at once, and at once she was changed. She rose and put her arms about me, and held me like a child, like her own maybe who was gone, and whom I could not give back to her. As if she understood it all, she asked no more of me. Nothing she had from me, yet she would comfort me, and truly, I found comfort there in that leafy street beneath the enameled wall, with the stoical slave idling nearby till our display should be done.

  At length the well ran dry. Her own tears she had put aside. She said she was going to the goddess on the hill, that this was a mighty deity, dispenser of calm and consolation, and that I must go also, to be calmed and consoled. Because of the curious thing between us, I went.

  The turf was extensively disfigured beyond the old palisade by the marks of the plague fires. This different aspect, the daylight and my own brain, kept it from me some while that I had journeyed this way once before, and that my friend was conducting me to the shrine that stood above the Lion’s Field, that dueling ground of princes. I had fought Sorem there, and after him certain others, beneath the eye of the shrine’s goddess. Later, I had disrespectfully burned the black poppies on her altar to give me light, when I watched the Hesseks climbing from the northern wall and the sea.

  There were no poppies there now but a green-gold ear of grain and some honey in a crock. The stones were briar-grown as ever; I wondered, if they reverenced her, that the slaves never cleared these away. But my friend explained to me, seeing my look, that the goddess preferred the living

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  thing to twine about her. In fact, no offering was set there, even a flower, unless it came of stock already plucked for use.

  “She left you strict orders, then,” I said.

  “Ah, no, she asked for nothing. The offerings do us good, for the act of giving, however small, is beneficial.” She herself had brought a flagon of cinnamon oil. Her tears returned and she poured them, with the perfume, on the stone; the smell of the oil was pleasant in the clean salt-freshened air. Then she kneeled and whispered on the west side of the altar. I turned away to let her pray in peace, as Chem had done. Shortly, she called to me, and her face was different, not happier, but with a kind of quietness.

  She deceived herself into this serenity, thinking the diety had blessed her with peace, but what matter, if she could bear her sorrow more easily? But the girl was there before me again, and she said, “It’s not the goddess who takes the burden from me; I find the strength within myself, through her memory that lingers here.”

  This seemed an advanced, unusual teaching.

  “Is your lady old or young?” I asked.

  “Young,” the girl said. “Something less than twenty years ago these stones were raised to her. And she’s real, too; my mother spoke with her. You won’t credit me, but thus it is. Shall I tell you?”

  I said, glad to humor her, that I should like to hear.

  “The city was not so great then. My mother dwelt hi the southeast country, among the valleys there and the hills, where the southern lakes begin. She was in the fields, near sundown, when she saw a woman walking between the sheaves. Now you must remember this, the light was fading, Masrimas’ sun going out, but still the woman shone and gleamed. It was from her skin and her hair, which was as white as alabaster, and her face-my mother said-was too beautiful to bear.”

  I had caught my breath.

  She did not notice; she said, laughing, “You’ll disbelieve it, but listen. The track between the sheaves led by the spot where my mother stood. Soon the white woman had drawn close enough to touch, and my mother, who was afraid, sank on her knees. She was carrying then, with me, and maybe more fanciful because of it. The woman turned, and she said to my mother, ‘Will you tell me if there is a town across the hill?’ My mother managed to say that there was. She was sure

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  the woman was a sprite, for she could speak hill-Masrian quite perfectly, though clearly she was a stranger. But then the woman, who was looking at her without menace or contempt, said, ‘You have a child with you.’

  “My mother started, expecting her womb to be cursed, but the woman stretched out her hand and laid it on my mother’s cheek, and at once, my mother would tell me, all her fear left her. The woman said, ‘When your labor begins, think of me and you will have no pain. The birth will be swift and uncomplicated, and the child strong. Though I fear,’ and here she smiled, ‘you have a girl inside you, not a man, for which perhaps you are sorry.’ My mother was dumbfounded, and begged to serve the stranger, to bring her food or drink, but the stranger said she lacked for nothing, and went on into the dark.

  “And now, here is the magic part. When her time came, my mother recalled vividly what the stranger had said. She invoked her name-did I say the woman gave her a name to speak?-and suddenly her birth pangs left her, and I was born inside the hour, the girl she had been promised, healthy as an apple. Doubtless you consider this a foolish romance, but the pain of birthing is not pleasurable, and a woman surely knows when it is gone from her by a spell.”

  I got my voice, and asked, “Did your mother reckon her goddess, then, or witch?”

  “Something of both, maybe. But it was in BarIbithni that I heard the name of the stranger again. Generally it is the poor who cleave to her. They say she came this way, traveling to the northwest-to Seema, maybe, along the ancient route of the wagons.”

  “To Seema,” I repeated, and turned my head westward involuntarily.

  “Yes, my friend said. “That is why they have carved her image on the west side of the altar here.” She led me aside to show me.

  I had not seen before. I had not thought of such a thing; that what I sensed of the presence of Uastis here in BarIbithni was only the memory of her traveling, this ancient remembrance, that while I scoured the city and its environs for news of her, her token had been here upon the hill, where I leaned that night and watched the Hesseks come from the groves and the sea. I wondered if those paid searchers I had set to find her had simply missed this obscure sect of a white

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  goddess, or if they merely did not associate such a mild pastoral deity with the picture I had specified-a white hag out of some hell.