I sat in a chair and surrendered my mind to a black wasteground of profitless reflection. My past and my chaotic present ran before me, and the unanswered question of my future.

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  5

  A brazen bell rings in the Masrimas Temple of the Palm Quarter at midnight. I heard it struck, and roused myself, and heard another thing. The black dog was barking, for a carriage on the lonely midnight road had halted at my gate.

  One of the Hesseks came into the court and rapped for me at the door.

  “There is a rich woman in the first courtyard, lord. She gave us gold so we should let her in to you.” He showed me the chain of money and grinned nervously.

  I imagined it was my doxy of the afternoon, risking her lofty name and her husband’s indulgence in pursuit of me. For a moment I meant to pack her off, but, aimless as I had become, thought better of it. If her scented flesh and pigeon’s chatter could come between me and my mood tonight, all to the good.

  I told the Hessek to bring her, and sat down again to watch her rustle in, full of pleas and threats and endearments, her skirt of flounces scraping the doorway.

  The lamp was burning low, yet when she came, there was no mistaking it was another than the one for whom I had looked.

  She was tall and she held herself, moreover, very straight, with a pride unusual in a tall woman. Her garments were black, and she came into the red light like a fragment of the dark outside, and for all her flounced Masrian skirt with its fine beaded sweat of gold drops, she was veiled like a Hessek woman, even her eyes. I could see only her hands, long, slender, hard brown hands, like a boy’s, so that for a second I wondered, BarIbithni being as it was. Yet I could tell she was a woman, even veiled, her breast hidden in the drapery, and when she spoke, I could not miss it. A somber, smoky voice like the color of the lamp.

  “You are Vazkor, the man they call the sorcerer?”

  “I am Vazkor, the man they call the sorcerer.”

  She seemed, from her tone, accustomed to prompt replies and obedience in others. Yet now she hesitated. There was a little bracelet, a snake of gold, on her right forearm, which

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  flickered the light as if she trembled. But then she said, clear and steady, “I hear you deal honestly, if the payment you receive is high enough.”

  “Are you in need of healing?”

  “No.”

  “What, then, do you require of me?”

  “I want to know what price you put on a man’s life.

  I had risen, intending to adopt Masrian courtesies belatedly; now I set my hand to the lamp to brighten it.

  “It would depend on the man,” I said. “Some men come very cheap.”

  I heard her draw in her breath slowly, to steel herself. I already knew what was coming. The flame leaped up yellow under the rosy crystal, and she said, “Sorem, Prince of the Blood, son of our lord the Emperor Hragon-Dat.”

  The light did not pierce her veil after all.

  “Sorem’s life is obviously dear to you, madam. Why do you reckon it in jeopardy from me?”

  “He has challenged you by the code to fight him. You will use some device or some trick, and kill him, and he is too honorable and too proud to see this. I ask you to avoid the fight. I will pay what you suggest is necessary.”

  “And what of my honor, madam? Am I to acquire the name of a craven? He promised me I should if I did not meet him.”

  “You barter and sell your magic, if such it is,” she said contemptuously. “You cure a man for a chain of coins, and leave him to die if he has none. What is one name more?”

  “You’re unjust to me, lady, and ill-informed. As to Sorem, I can do no other than he’s bound me to.”

  She stood there a moment like stone and then, in a theatrical, angular gesture, again oddly like a boy’s, she gathered the veil up in handfuls and thrust it off.

  And so I saw her.

  Her hair was black and curling, shiny as glass, piled on her head Masrian fashion with pins of polished blue turquoise. She had no other jewels save for the little snake on her arm, only the flawless copper of her skin, which came from the black case of the beaded jacket like honey from a jar. She was slim, but slim like an iron blade, her hips and waist narrow as her hands were narrow, except at the rise of her breast where the terrain was altered, half revealed by the Masrian bodice, two full amber slopes powdered with gold dust like pollen, which spangled in the, light as she breathed.

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  But her face was something else again. I vow I looked at it and thought her ugly one whole second, confronted by those aquiline features, her age, which was some years in excess of my own, the black anger that masked over her eyes; nothing soft anywhere. Then everything was changed; I saw the beauty that this face really was, beauty like the point of a knife.

  “I do this that you may discover who I am.” She had been like a lightning bolt to me, yet no revelation came with it.

  “I assume you are the mistress or the wife of Sorem,” I said. At that she smiled, not in any womanly way, but sardonic as some prince forced to be courteous to his enemy. Through the kohl and the black lashes of that extraordinary gaze, the lamp found out blueness.

  “It appears you also are ill-informed, magician,” she said. “I am Malmiranet, the cast-off of the Emperor, but still blood of the Hragons for all that. Sorem is my son.”

  “I beg your pardon, madam. I didn’t realize I had a royal woman in my house. Be seated.”

  “And you be damned,” she said, fast as fire. “I am not here to play empress with a dog from the backlands. Tell me the price of my son’s life and you shall have it. Then I will leave.”

  Her eyes were surely blue, but dark as sapphire, darker than his. The looks that shot from them would wake a man part dead.

  “You go the wrong way around this, madam,” I said quietly. “You presume me a jackal and a wretch and a fool. You will make me one, then there’ll be no reasoning with me.”

  “Don’t tutor me.”

  “Nor you me, madam. I have spoken with your son. He won’t thank you for the shelter of your skirts.”

  She made a gesture that said, “This is irrelevant, unimportant, providing he lives.”

  “And if I refuse?” I said, as I had said to him.

  “There are ways.”

  “Have me murdered, Lady Malmiranet, and the whole city will say your son did it out of fear. Besides, I wonder what assassin could overcome me when I can kill a man with my mind alone.”

  She observed me unansweringly, but her hands were trembling again. I could smell her perfume now in the little room, a faint incense, smoky as her voice. Suddenly she dropped her lids and the words came out broken.

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  “Do you think I estimate my son a coward that I came to you? If he were that, you might have him. It is his bravery I fear, and your sorcery. If you can do one fifth of what they say, he will die. Why does a sorcerer want this duel? The notion of honor amuses you. Very well, let him believe you ran from him. What do you care for such a thing? You are a man, and young. Use your powers to make yourself a lord elsewhere, and let Sorem live.”

  I went up to her, this empress who had fallen from her high station for some reason that was beyond me, seeing her as she was. True, she was not quite a girl, but that face, carved so purely and without compromise, would never have been a girl’s face. For the rest, even this close, you would need to be witless or blind to pass by. Her brows were nearly level with my own. I took her hand, the hand with the snake wrapped above it. The palm was hard from riding; the hand of Sorem could not be that much different.

  “For you, then,” I said, “he lives. I forego the dubious sweet of killing him.”

  Her eyes flashed up, wide, blue; deep enough they looked to go bathing in.

  “Tell me your price.”

  “Nothing.”

  It was worth something to me to see her stare.

  She withdrew her hand and began to pull at her veil.

  “How can I trust you if you’ll accept no fee?”

  “That’s one problem you must solve yourself.”

  She paused and said, “Are you the son of a king as the rumor has it?”

  “Ask them in Eshkorek,” I said.

  She turned away, impatiently pulling at the veil till she was swathed in it again. She went out into the court quickly, without another word, and a minute after I heard the carriage wheels and the hooves of the horses on the road east.

  Sorem’s formal challenge came the next morning.

  Two blank-faced jerdiers, his lieutenants, brought it: One handed me the bronze scroll-case and stared in the air above my head while I read the script.

  Sorem Hragon-Dat to Vazkor, generally named the sorcerer.

  An invitation to swords.

  Tonight, the Field of the Lion, by the northern altar.

  The hour after sunset

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  “It is acceptable?” the jerdier asked of the air.

  I told him it was.

  They swung around like clockwork, and strode out.

  The courts were full of whispers that day-Lellih, and the fight to come, and the veiled woman. In the middle of the afternoon a ragged man carried his child to the gate, and begged me to help her. I did not have the heart to refuse it, since there were only the two of them. The child was whimpering with agony hi his arms, but went away laughing and skipping about the man’s feet, he hi tears. It moved me, and I caught myself thinking, She should have seen that, the court lady with her talk of money chains and barter.

  I had not wanted to strike down Sorem, by whatever means. Having abandoned the scheme, now it did not seem such a very difficult feat to turn aside his challenge and end the nonsense. Nor did I mean to leave BarIbithni to do it.

  The way she had secretly come to me-from the Heavenly City, which was a legend for its guards and bolts-must have been dangerous for her. She had not known what to expect of me, either. I might have exacted any price, the sum of her wealth, her jewels, use of her body; I might have killed her even. Since all she had heard of me was rumor, the rumors would have postulated that, too-in some tales I was a savior, and in others a monster. She was brave and she was strong, as only something fine and tempered can be strong. I wondered if her amazement had lasted her, to find me a man and not offal in a gutter.

  About a mile from the Pillar Citadel lay a stretch of open land, given over to vineyards and orchards but falling off northward into rough wooded country that ended only at the seawall. An altar place stood up near the wall on a low hill, a briar-grown pile of stones, sacred to some pastoral goddess common to Hessek slaves and poor Masrians alike, who crept here at dawn to strew bread and flowers for her. Beneath this hill lay the Field of the Lion.

  I went by backways, and on foot, muffled in a cloak. For company I had Lyo with me and no other. I would have been glad of LongEye, his obdurate silence and discretion, his lack of curiosity at my strange deeds.

  A ruined palisade, remains of some Hessek Fortress, ran along the outskirts of the fashionable streets, dividing the Palm Quarter from the vineyards at its edge. The sun was just down, the light hollowing with the flushed blueness of

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  first dusk, when I passed through the palisade and took the path toward the northern wall.

  Swarms of bats went dazzling through the cool sky, and in the black-green stands of cypresses the ubiquitous nightingales of BarIbithni tuned their silver rattles.

  Stars came out. The path wound up, then down into the woods, and I began to hear the sighing of the ocean as the ·soft wind blew it inland, serene as the breathing of a girl asleep. I thought, What a night to go murdering on, what a night to slay a man. And from that I came suddenly to notice that my perceptions had been altered by half an hour’s argument with a woman.

  Lyo was alert for robbers, and flinched at every sound. A fox barked three or four miles off, and his hand quivered full of knife. I laughed at him, so mellow had I grown. Next instant a man stepped from the shadow of trees. But he was one of Sorem’s jerdiers, who nodded to me and beckoned me to follow.

  The Field of the Lion was a rectangle of turf between juniper trees that filled the air with their scent. Northward the ground folded up from the wood into the altar-hill, the shrine at its peak, like an uneven jet doormouth cut in the wide twilight. I wondered how many aristocratic duels she had presided over, that obscure deity of the hill, with the dead poppies around her hem some slave had thrown there.

  They had brought four brands in iron shieldings, as yet unlighted, and stuck them in the ground. Sorem stood by one, with a couple of his officers, dressed in the casual wear of the jerds.

  It was getting dark in the field, but I glimpsed his face well enough. I saw the look of her there in it, as I had seen his face in hers.

  He nodded to me, curtly, polite as my guide had been, and told the nearer man to light the torches.

  “Welcome, Vazkor. I hope you agree the arena.”

  “Most picturesque,” I said. “But there’s another thing.”

  “Well, speak. Let’s settle it.”

  The torches started to flare up behind their metal guards, changing the soft colors of the clearing by contrast to thick violets, greens, and leaded black.

  “I did you wrong,” I said. “I acknowledge it, and will recompense you as you wish.”

  “I wish to find recompense here,” he .said, “with this.” And

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  he tapped the sword the lieutenant held for him, still in its scabbard of white leather.

  “I won’t fight you, Sorem Hragon-Dat.”

  He let out an oath, partway between scorn and amazement. “Are you afraid? The sorcerer afraid? The mage who turns crones into girls?”

  “Let us say, I don’t want your life.”

  The last torch caught with a gust of sparks and his anger sprang up with it.

  “By Masrimas, you’ll fight me, and I’ll feed you steel before you tell me that again.”

  I showed him my hands, which were empty. He turned and shouted to his men for another sword. They brought it. He drew it and offered it to me. It was sharp and good. Next, he drew the other, his own, from the white scabbard. This was blue alcum chased with gold about the hilt, but no better edge on it.

  “Since you have forgotten your blade,” he said levelly, “choose either of these.”

  “You’re too generous,” I said, “but you must accept that I have no use for a weapon.”

  He looked like the tiger just before its springs.

  He slung his own sword, point down, in the ground at my feet.

  “Take it, and be ready.”

  “I decline.”

  He raised the soldier’s sword, saluted the hilt, and came at me.

  I had been tensed for it, yet he moved very fast. He knew his business evidently. Here is a warrior, I thought, with a kind of tribal stupidity. Then I lifted my hand and let the bolt from it. The light blazed out in a thin pale ray and the jerdiers yelled. It caught the darting blade and smashed it from his grasp.

  He halted, stock still, about a yard from me.

  “Magician’s tricks after all,” he said, very gently.

  His eyes widened and went blind. I had barely time to think, What now? Something filled the air, a cold burning. I felt it strike me, and then the ground heaved up and tossed me over on my side.

  I lay there for a heartbeat or two, dazedly aware of Lyo crouched near me with his wavering knife inexplicit for my defense, while I dragged the inner strength from myself to purge my brain and straighten my legs.

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  I had dismissed the delay, the extra days that had elapsed before Sorem’s formal challenge was given me. Now I realized how the time had been spent. He had threatened me once with his priestly training, and he had been renewing his acquaintance with it. Sorem, this prince of the Hragons, could also wield Power.

  I staggered to my feet. He had made no further move to attack me.

  “I see how it is,” I said.

  “Good,” he answered. “Now we fight. In whatever fashion you prefer, sword, or-that.”

  But it had cost him dearly to act the magician. His face was drawn and pale. It had sucked him dry as a gourd already, that one white blow, weaker than any of mine. “Sorem,” I said.