The Carnelian Throne (32 page)

Then, heavily, he descended the steps until he was eye to eye with those who stood on the bottom one, and held out the blade to the dark power Chayin, beside whom was Mahrlys-iis-Vahais, her hand pressed to her mouth and her eyes wide above it.

He was conscious of Quendros, suddenly at his side, offering aid.

With a savage shake of his head, he refused. Not before Mahrlys would he be supported by another man.

There was an unbearable interval within which he chased the gift of speech, while they waited, the spirit powers and Quendros and Mahrlys. Shame flooded him, that he could not speak but only stare dumbly, and upon its heels came rage that he would be cheated of even this small triumph, and then Kirelli landed upon his shoulder and he almost fell.

The whelt’s claws dug into him, its head, pressed against his. With a wracking sob that echoed through the great hall, he gave over the blade to the dark power Chayin, and called that one’s name, as he had been instructed, in his need.

He knew that he was falling forward, felt Chayin’s arms about him, and a sharp light like a length of steel pierced the shroud through which he saw the world.

Those filmed eyes searched deep in his, and when he pulled back, the skin against which his own had rested glittered with moisture.

“Deilcrit?” said Chayin.

Deilcrit?
“Yes,” he said, and heard “yesssss.”

Fortified by that success and what seemed like a great light coming from the spirit powers, he said to Mahrlys what he had long wanted to say, what he had longed to say since she had told him there was no place for such as he in the world, what he had needed to say since she had stolen from him the beauty in which his mind had long enwrapped her. He said:

“Mahrlys-iis-Vahais. You are my priestess and my betrothed. Do you not kneel before that power to which you are sworn?”

She seemed to melt rather than kneel. He stared at the black cascade of her hair upon the steps, and thought that now he might sleep content.

“No!” came an irresistible command like dry twigs rustling in his mind, forcing the presence of Imca-Sorr-Aat which had crept up on him disguised as his own will to shrink back. “Speak,” commanded that voice, this time in his ears. He turned his head to follow the sound and beheld the scarred countenance of the spirit power Sereth. Those slitted eyes impaled him where he stood, holding him upright. At the periphery of his vision he glimpsed Quendros’ agitated attempts to get his attention. But he could not turn from the power’s grasp.

“I ... we ... Kirelli and I ... though that together ... we sent the truth throughout ... all the minds .... If the remembrances that lurk under the amber dome ... could be ... silenced ... it would be as it was meant ....”

“Thank you,” said the spirit power Sereth, nodding.

He had done well. The spirit had asked him questions, and he had answered them. He, Deilcrit, had answered, against all of Imca-Sorr-Aat’s protestations.

Within him, Imca-Sorr-Aat wailed, and took thought to its own safety, a thought it had never had to think in all the years of its cogitation. Desperately it struggled to retake the instrument through which it affected life, for without the mind’s will to which it was bound, it could not initiate any action.

But Deilcrit was leaning upon the spirit power Sereth. That one held Deilcrit’s arm across his own broad shoulders, and his whispered queries ripped answers Deilcrit did not understand from the memories of Imca-Sorr-Aat.

Out through the gaping portal into that hallway where the great doors still clamped shut upon the shirt Mahrlys had given him in Dey-Ceilneeth, Sereth propelled him, while Imca-Sorr-Aat babbled to him of Mnemaat and what glories for manwehrs they might together attain.

And they stopped before the glowing oval within which rested colored bricks. But they were not colored bricks. With Imca-Sorr-Aat looking out through his eyes, screaming in horror a hundred bribes and offers and imprecations, he gritted out the sequence long ago entered into the organic memory, discorporate, that was Imca-Sorr-Aat. And that intelligence faced oblivion, as for the first time in all that time the biophysical interface programmed itself: by invoking its own accession, it remanded Imca-Sorr-Aat into the prison of eternal dreaming whence it had come.

It was Sereth’s fingers which did the work, for Deilcrit claimed only half those moments as his own, and when Imca-Sorr-Aat spoke through him he murmured and pleaded and cried ancient tears and toward the last both Quendros and Chayin held him.

There was a pride in him, a joy though he expected death, that Kirelli had sat on his shoulder, that at last they had managed to complete what it was that they had started. And a pleasure, too, that Mahrlys was not there to hear Imca-Sorr-Aat squealing through his mouth nor see them wrestle him to the ground.

The oval before his eyes swam close, brightening unbearably. Across its face shot red lines, then yellow, the white, while under his body, pinned by Chayin and Quendros to the stone, the whole universe heaved and quaked.

He saw blackness, unutterably complete, heard the screaming recede from his inner ear. After a time he felt emptied and crawled around within himself seeking any traces of the red mist, but there were none.

Deilcrit opened his eyes. Chayin’s, and Quendros’ peered into him.

“Deilcrit?” demanded Chayin.

“Deilcrit,” he said, a hoarse rasp, hardly intelligible. But Chayin removed his weight, and Quendros also.

He sat, rubbing his left arm, and felt his skin pimple as the sweat began to dry. Chilled, he rose to his knees. Dizziness assailed him. But they only waited, to see what he would do.

In his mind was a soreness and an ache and a rubbish pile of knowledge he knew would take him a lifetime to sort and arrange.

It was Kirelli who attended him, while he huddled there, head hanging, seeking the strengh to rise.

The whelt alighted before him, thrust its beak into his face, and inspected him closely. Then it cooed and tugged on his hair.

A hand was extended. He ignored it. Clumsily but under his own power he gained his feet and held out his arm to Kirelli.

As the whelt sidled up to his shoulder, he surveyed the entrance hall, of Othdaliee. The light, soft amber, still came from the arched ceiling. The outer doors were still locked tight. The oval still gleamed, but with three pinkish bricks only.

Otherwise, everything was changed.

The corridor in which he had taken the trial, where the red mist had inundated the substance of his body, lay open, and there was no mist therein. All along the hall’s expanse were similar passages, each attended by two whelt-headed creatures spun from light.

Sereth obscured his view. The assessing look upon the spirit power faded. He extended his hand, palm up, to Deilcrit.

Wishing that his limbs did not shake so, he met it with his own.

“This had needed doing a long time. Errors of copying fidelity in any organic system cannot be avoided. You have not lost. You are still Imca-Sorr-Aat; what that one was supposed to be. Rule well, and stay out of dreamscapes.” He was grinning.

Deilcrit felt his face pull up in an echo of Sereth’s grimace. It felt strange and stiff and the muscles in his face hurt.

“I know,” he said. “When we sent the call of Imca-Sorr-Aat throughout Wehrdom, we ensured that nothing would be lost. I think we all know. And for some, it was the first time that such knowledge was presented. You might say Wehrdom has been introduced to itself, at last.”

“To its
selves,”
corrected the spirit power Sereth.

From out of the pile of years in his mind came an understanding, a surety based upon the audience Imca-Sorr-Aat had once held with a glowing creature whose strength was unassailable and who had arrived, like this one, in a shadow form black before flame.

“You are Mnemaat’s successor, are you not?” he asked of Sereth, and that one, suddenly unsmiling, inclined his head.

“If you will refrain from called me Mnemaat, I will refrain from calling you Imca-Sorr-Aat. And I promise you, I will be Unseen soon enough. I am not one to take a hand in others’ affairs unless invited. Or forced.”

There was a remonstration there that Deilcrit did not misconstrue. But also there was a confirmation, a promise of aid should the occasion arise.

“Imca-Sorr-Aat means ‘he who came into being out of many,’” replied Deilcrit. “I would not be that, even in name. I will be Aat-Deilcrit, the self-begotten, for I am he who came into being out of Deilcrit.”

Sereth laughed softly. “Then might we not be Aat-Sereth, Aat-Chayin, and Aat-Estri? It suits me better than Mnemaat. I am not so holy as all that.”

Kirelli leaned forward and rubbed his cheek. He sensed the whelt’s concern, and fingered its banded leg. “Kirelli wants to know if this means that you will not, after all, remain Unseen? The whelts liked not the banded servitude that the ossasim Imca-Sorr-Aat imposed on them.”

“You tell your co-regent that it is a long journey to the Lake of Horns, and that neither I, nor any of mine will again make this trek unless you or he should call upon us for aid. I am not in favor of opening these shores to my own kind.”

Kirelli made a small and regently “Breet” and inclined his beak majestically.

“I must go collect my woman. The time for me to become Unseen fast approaches. Chayin?”

But neither Aat-Chayin nor Quendros followed Aat-Sereth into the octagonal chamber where waited Mahrlys and Estri in the crowd of light-forms who attend the wants of the master of Othdaliee.

Chayin had the grayed blade in his hands, scraping at it with a fingernail. Where his nail scratched, the gray came away, and the green metal shone through.

Quendros, a little behind him, merely stared after Sereth’s retreating back, incredulity doubling the size of his eyes, which seemed to want to hop from his head and follow the successor of Mnemaat.

“How did Se’keroth get like this?” asked Chayin without preamble. Quendros jumped as if struck, and turned his gaze upon the cahndor’s massive litheness as if seeing it for the first time.

“Aat-Chayin, I beg your forgiveness. I was fighting ossasim, and it flew from my grasp, and lightning struck it, and it fell down the slope,” said Deilcrit.

The cahndor’s right eyebrow lifted high. He squinted at the sword, once more digging at it with his nail.

“Go on, you ...” And then Quendros seemed to remember to whom he was speaking. “Go on, Aat-Deilcrit, finish it: the blade fell down the mountainside and landed in a pocket of ice.”

A shrill ululating cry pierced his ears and echoed around the hall. Sereth came running to the doorway. The whelt screeched and beat the air, claws digging his shoulder.

Chayin held the sword high, and again the Parset victory cry blared from him.

Sereth advised something in a tongue even Imca-Sorr-Aat had not known, and Chayin lowered the sword and slipped it through a loop on his belt and studied Deilcrit for a time, during which Quendros fidgeted around with pursed lips as if what he waited to say would burst from him against his will.

Deilcrit stroked Kirelli’s crest and shifted from foot to foot, wishing one of them would speak of what concerned them.

He was about to seek Mahrlys in the throne room when they both blurted out, together: “I would speak with you alone.”

“Cannot the spirit power Aat-Chayin speak freely before the Minister of Histories, Third Hand of Othdaliee?” asked Deilcrit somberly, and then could not suppress his own grin at Quendros’ shocked expression.

Chayin took no notice of Quendros’ shy shuffling of feet, ludicrous as it was on a man of such bulk, but ground out: “What would you say if I asked you for Mahrlys’ life?”

Deilcrit, misunderstanding, said: “She is in no danger from me. I have loved her in my dreams for years. All who erred under the sway of Imca-Sorr-Aat’s nightmares will receive absolution. We have all learned a great deal. We may have even learned how to be ourselves. But were I not giving mercy as it was given to me, I would still sprare her. It will be a wondrous thing to have her at my feet. In a sense she is what I have achieved.”

He spied Quendros’ troubled face, and thought of Heicrey, and quickly added: “Surely Imca-Sorr-Aat’s successor may have more than one consort, after so many Imca-Sorr-Aats have been abstinent. I will bring Heicrey here too. They will learn to love each other.”

“Boy, you know nothing of women,” Quendros burst out. “They will kill each other.”

“It is true that I know nothing of women, but there is only one way to learn. And Kirelli well knows Mahrlys ....”

Then he looked at Chayin’s face, whose expression he could not name, whose hand clenched, unclenched upon Se’keroth’s hilt. There was a snapping of membranes and behind them, a drawing back.

“You have done me great services. You quenched Se’keroth in ice for me, something perhaps only you could have done. You preceded me into the maw of Imca-Sorr-Aat. You invoked my word upon me when Mahrlys urged me to slay you, and thus kept me from a folly I would later have regretted. But I wonder if I do you any service? I, myself, know more of women than most men, and she worked such wiles upon me as I have never before seen but for Estri’s.”

“She is mine,” said Deilcrit, folding his arms over his chest, wincing as they pressed against the deep, scores Eviduey’s ossasim had dealt him.

Aat-Chayin growled, and spat upon the tile. “She is that. But if you find you cannot handle her, bring her to Nemar, and I will instruct you.” From the thickening of Aat-Chayin’s voice, by the dignity of his bearing as he wheeled and strode toward the carnelian throne, did Deilcrit at last understand that Chayin, too, felt love for Mahrlys.

And he inspected his feet, thinking that he had two women and the splendorous spirit power had none, until Quendros clapped him square upon his bandaged left arm and he yelped.

“And another thing? Recall when you said we’d make a drum of Eviduey’s hide? Come on, I’ve a thing to show to you.” He and Kirelli went where Quendros dragged them, down a corridor that had, Quendros said, materialized with all else that now was opened wide in Othdaliee soon after the maw of red mist had swallowed them up. “You should have been here. It was amazing. Those big doors to the throne room opened up and out came these sleepwalking ossasim with a dead one and its severed head and they went down there.” Quendros pointed to the corridor across the hall from the one which they traveled. “So I slipped in here that they might not see me, and remember, you’re going to share her with me,” Quendros grinned lasciviously. Deilcrit, recollecting the boast he had made to Quendros, nodded rather stiffly, stumbled over this ossasim passed out full length in the corridor. Must have been the same thing that knocked Mahrlys senseless.