Jirel of Joiry (16 page)

He smiled again briefly, and then somehow all about his magnificent dark figure a swirl of rainbow dazzle was dancing. She stared, half afraid, half in awe, watching the tall, black tangibility of him melting easily into that multicolored whirling she had seen before, until nothing was left but the dazzling swirl that slowed and faded and dissipated upon the dark air—and she was alone.

She drew a deep breath as the last of the rainbow shimmer faded into nothing. It was
a heavenly relief not to feel the unbearable power of him beating unceasingly against her resistance, not to keep tense
to the breaking-point all the strength that was in her. She turned away from the spot where he had vanished and scanned the dark land of
Romne
, telling herself resolutely that if she found no gateway, no weapon, then death itself must open the way out of
Romne
. There was about
Pav’s
terrible strength something that set the nerves of her humanity shuddering against it. In her moment of soul-nakedness she had sensed that too fully ever to surrender. The inferno of the
thing
that was
Pav
burning upon her
unbodied
consciousness had been the burning of something so alien that she knew with every instinct in her that she would die if she must, rather than submit.
Pav’s
body was the body of a man, but it was not—she sensed it intuitively—as a man alone that he desired her, and from surrender to the dark intensity of what lay beyond the flesh her whole soul shuddered away.

She looked about helplessly. She was standing upon stones, her velvet skirts sweeping black jagged rock that sloped down toward the distant line of trees. She could see the shimmer of dark water between them, and above and beyond their swaying tops the black mountains loomed. Nowhere was there any sign of the great chamber where the image sat. Nowhere could she see anything but deserted rocks, empty meadows, trees where no birds sang. Over the world of grayness and blackness she stood staring.

And again she felt that sense of imprisonment in the horizon’s dark, close bounds. It was a curiously narrow land, this
Romne
. She felt it intuitively, though there was no visible barrier closing her in. In the clear, dark air even the mountains’ distant heights were distinct and colorless and black.

She faced them speculatively, wondering how far away their peaks lay. A dark thought was shadowing her mind, for it came to her that if she found no escape from
Romne
and from
Pav
the mountains alone offered that final escape which she was determined to take if she must. From one of those high, sheer cliffs she could leap…

It was not tears that blurred the black heights suddenly. She stared in bewilderment, lifted dazed hands to rub her eyes, and then stared again. Yes, no mistake about it, the whole panorama of the land of
Romne
was melting like mist about her. The dark trees with their glint of lake beyond, the rocky foreground, everything faded and thinned
smokily
, while through the vanishing contours those far mountains loomed up near and clear overhead. Dizzy with incomprehension, she found herself standing amid the shreds of dissipating landscape at the very foot of those mountains which a moment before had loomed high and far on the edge of the horizon.
Pav
had been right indeed—
Romne
was a strange land. What had he said—about the illusion of it?

She looked up, trying to remember, seeing the dark slopes tilting over her head. High above, on a ledge of outcropping stone, she could see gray creepers dropping down the rocky sides, the tips of tall trees waving. She stared upward toward the ledge whose face she could not see, wondering what lay beyond the vine-festooned edges. And:

In a thin, dark fog the mountainside melted to her gaze. Through it, looming darkly and more darkly as the fog thinned, a level plateau edged with vines and thick with heavy trees came into being before her. She stood at the very edge of it, the dizzy drop of the mountain falling sheer behind her. By no path that feet can tread could she have come to this forested plateau.

One glance she cast backward and down from her airy vantage above the dark land of
Romne
. It spread out below her in a wide horizon-circle of black rock and black waving tree-tops and colorless hills, clear in the clear, dark air of
Romne
. Nowhere was anything but rock and hills and trees, clear and distinct out to the horizon in the color-swallowing darkness of the air. No sight of man’s occupancy anywhere broke the somberness of its landscape. The great black hall where the image burned might never have existed
save
in dreams. A prison land it was, narrowly bound by the tight circle of the sky.

Something insistent and inexplicable tugged at her attention then, breaking off abruptly that scanning of the land below. Not understanding why, she answered the compulsion to turn. And when she had turned she stiffened into rigidity, one hand halting in a little futile reach after the knife that no longer swung at her side; for among the trees a figure was approaching.

It was a woman—or could it be? White as leprosy against the blackness of the trees, with a whiteness that no shadows touched, so that she seemed like some creature out of another world reflecting in dazzling pallor upon the background of the dark, she paced slowly forward. She was thin—deathly thin, and wrapped in a white robe like a winding-sheet. The black hair lay upon her shoulders as snakes might lie.

But it was her face that caught
Jirel’s
eyes and sent a chill of sheer terror down her back. It was the face of Death itself, a skull across which the white, white flesh was tightly drawn. And yet it was not without a certain stark beauty of its own, the beauty of bone so finely formed that even in its death’s-head nakedness it was lovely.

There was no color upon that face anywhere. White-lipped, eyes shadowed, the creature approached with a leisured swaying of the long robe, a leisured swinging of the long black hair lying in snake-strands across the thin white shoulders. And the nearer the—the woman?—came the more queerly apart from the land about her she seemed. Bone-white, untouched by any shadow save in the sockets of her
eyes,
she was shockingly detached from even the darkness of the air. Not all of
Romne’s
dim, color-veiling atmosphere could mask the staring whiteness of her, almost blinding in its
unshadowed
purity.

As she came nearer,
Jirel
sought instinctively for the eyes that should be fixed upon her from those murky hollows in the scarcely fleshed skull. If they were there, she could not see them. An obscurity clouded the dim sockets where alone shadows clung, so that the face was abstract and sightless—not blind, but more as if the woman’s thoughts were far away and intent upon something so absorbing that her surroundings held nothing for the hidden eyes to dwell on.

She paused a few paces from the waiting
Jirel
and stood quietly, not moving.
Jirel
had the feeling that from behind those shadowy hollows where the darkness clung like cobwebs a close and critical gaze was analyzing her, from red head to velvet-hidden toes. At last the bloodless lips of the creature parted and from them a voice as cool and hollow as a tomb fell upon
Jirel’s
ears in queer, reverberating echoes, as if the woman spoke from far away in deep caverns underground, coming in echo upon echo out of the depths of unseen vaults, though the air was clear and empty about her. Just as her
shadowless
whiteness gave the illusion of a reflection from some other world, so the voice seemed also to come from echoing distances. Its hollowness said slowly,

“So here is the mate
Pav
chose.
A red woman, eh?
Red as his own flame.
What are you doing here, bride, so far from your bridegroom’s arms?”

“Seeking a weapon to slay him with!” said
Jirel
hotly. “I am not a woman to be taken against her will, and
Pav
is no choice of mine.”

Again she felt that hidden scrutiny from the pits of the veiled eyes. When the cool voice spoke it held a note of incredulity that sounded clearly even in the hollowness of its echo from the deeps of invisible tombs.

“Are you mad? Do you not know what
Pav
is? You actually seek to
destroy
him?”

“Either him or myself,” said
Jirel
angrily. “I know only that I shall never yield to him, whatever he may be.”

“And you came—here. Why? How did you know? How did you dare?” The voice faded and echoes whispered down vaults and caverns of unseen depth
ghostily
, “—did you dare—did you dare—you dare…”

“Dare what?” demanded
Jirel
uneasily. “I came here because—because when I gazed upon the mountains, suddenly the world dissolved around me and I was—was here.”

This time she was quite sure that a long, deep scrutiny swept her from head to feet, boring into her eyes as if it would read her very thoughts, though the cloudy pits that hid the woman’s eyes revealed nothing. When her voice sounded again it held a queer mingling of relief and amusement and stark incredulity as it reverberated out of its hollow, underground places.

“Is this ignorance or guile, woman? Can it be that you do not understand even the secret of the land of
Romne
, or why, when you gazed at the mountains, you found yourself here? Surely even you must not have imagined
Romne
to be—as it seems. Can you possibly have come here unarmed and alone, to my very mountain—to my very grove—to my very face? You say you seek destruction?” The cool voice murmured into laughter that echoed softly from unseen walls and caverns in diminishing sounds, so that when the woman spoke again it was to the echoes of her own fading mirth. “How well you have found your way! Here is death for you—here at my hands! For you must have known that I shall surely kill you!”

Jirel’s
heart leaped thickly under her velvet gown. Death she had sought, but not death at the hands of such a thing as this. She hesitated for words, but curiosity was stronger even than her sudden jerk of reflexive terror, and after a moment she contrived to ask, in a voice of rigid steadiness,

“Why?”

Again the long, deep scrutiny from eyeless sockets.
Under it
Jirel
shuddered, somehow not daring to take her gaze from that leprously white, skull-shaped face, though the sight of it sent little shivers of revulsion along her nerves. Then the bloodless lips parted again and the cool, hollow voice fell echoing on her ears,

“I can scarcely believe that you do not know. Surely
Pav
must be wise enough in the ways of women—even such as I—to know what happens when rivals meet. No,
Pav
shall not see his bride again, and the white witch will be queen once more. Are you ready for death,
Jirel
of
Joiry
?”

The last words hung hollowly upon the dark air, echoing and re-echoing from invisible vaults. Slowly the arms of the corpse-creature lifted, trailing the white robe in great pale wings, and the hair stirred upon her shoulders like living things. It seemed to
Jirel
that a light was beginning to glimmer through the shadows that clung like cobwebs to file skull-face’s sockets, and somehow she knew chokingly that she could not bear to gaze upon what was dawning there if she must throw herself backward off the cliff to escape it. In a voice that strangled with terror she cried,

“Wait!”

The pale-winged arms hesitated in their lifting; the light which was dawning behind the shadowed eye-sockets for a moment ceased to brighten through the veiling.
Jirel
plunged on desperately,

“There is no need to slay me. I would very gladly go if I knew the way out.”

“No,” the cold voice echoed from reverberant distances. “There would be the peril of you always, existing and waiting. No, you must die or my sovereignty is at an end.”

“Is it sovereignty or
Pav’s
love that I peril, then?” demanded
Jirel
, the words tumbling over one another in her breathless eagerness lest unknown magic silence her before she could finish.

The corpse-witch laughed a cold little echo of sheer scorn.

“There is no such thing as love,” she said, “—for such as I.”

“Then,” said
Jirel
quickly, a feverish hope beginning to rise behind her terror, “then let me be the one to slay.
Let me slay
Pav
as I set out to do, and leave this land kingless, for your rule alone.”

For a dreadful moment the half-lifted arms of the figure that faced her so terribly hesitated in midair; the light behind the shadows of her eyes flickered. Then slowly the winged arms fell, the eyes dimmed into cloud-filled hollows again. Blind-faced, impersonal, the skull turned toward
Jirel
. And curiously, she had the idea that calculation and malice and a dawning idea that spelled danger for her were forming behind that expressionless mask of white-fleshed bone. She could feel
tensity
and peril in the air—a subtler danger than the frank threat of killing. Yet when the white witch spoke there was nothing threatening in her words. The hollow voice sounded as coolly from its echoing caverns as if it had not a moment before been threatening death.

“There is only one way in which
Pav
can be destroyed,” she said slowly. “It
is a
way I dare not attempt, nor would any not already under the shadow of death. I think not even
Pav
knows of it. If you—” The hollow tones hesitated for the briefest instant, and
Jirel
felt, like the breath of a cold wind past her face, the certainty that there was a deeper danger here, in this unspoken offer, than even in the witch’s scarcely stayed death-magic. The cool voice went on, with a tingle of malice in its echoing.