“To your right!” she cried, and he turned to avert and parry a Bilhaar sword. Then, like a methodical butcher, he slashed in turn, and the black man fell.
A nobleman. Bejeweled fingers. A self-confident fool. Where in hell are your bodyguards? thought Ranhé while she cut the throat of the black assassin before her.
No. . . . Do not think of it, of what you are doing.
The gray man dispatched the last one of the pairs. The fifth had disappeared into the forest, she knew. His task as the last living of his set would be to report back, and to take the honorable Guild punishment—or so rumor had it.
Silence, and the world came back into focus. The clearing was littered with anonymous black bodies. Ranhé became aware that she breathed again.
Death . . .
Breathing harder than she, the gray stranger moved to dismount. He crouched, saying nothing, and wiped his fine blade on a Bilhaar’s dark garments, then walked quickly to calm the two horses of the carriage. His own trained mount followed like a familiar.
Stench inside me, so familiar, death.
Ranhé also dismounted, and bent to clean her own blade against a dead man’s black cloth. Because of the gray stranger’s turned back, his lack of acknowledgment, she wasn’t sure how to proceed.
Temples pounding.
Slowing down.
She sheathed her blade, then remounted and slowly rode up to the carriage, her horse fastidiously stepping over the bodies and sniffing nervously.
“May I be of any more help, sir? Are you hurt?”
Her voice had an uncanny quality. So steady, so matter-of-fact after what had just occurred. She heard its falsity as she was floating one moment outside her body, and the next, inhabiting it. Her tone was polite and cloaked, the kind she used with prospective customers.
The gray one had dark long hair. It spilled like a bit of the road darkness past the folds of his hood. And as he turned to regard her, there was at last a face, one of aristocratic refinement.
“Thank you for the help already given, freeman,” came a voice devoid of emotion. “And no, I am unhurt.”
The keenness, the elegance of his features, as if wrought of candle wax. Impossibly distant. It reminded her of temple statues with their beautiful chilling asexual faces. She tensed with the effort of remembering what bloodline might have produced this likeness. For, this man’s Family was surely one of the Noble Ten. His eyes were absolutely opaque in expression.
He is taking my assistance for granted. And he doesn’t yet know I am a woman. Not that it really matters.
The closed curtains in the carriage window moved, and a veiled matron looked out.
“Is it over?” sounded a shaking old female voice. “Elas?”
“I am unhurt, aunt, everything is fine. They are gone.” He spoke to reassure, this man called Elas. How differently he addressed the old woman.
“Ah—all Tilirr be praised!” the dame exclaimed, breathing with difficulty and holding a kerchief to her veiled face, as though she could shield herself from it all.
Stench is rising. . . .
“You’re both very shaken, aunt,” he said immediately. “And Lixa? They didn’t touch—”
“No, of course not! No one got through.” The old woman sputtered with indignation at the very possibility. And then she noticed Ranhé.
“Good evening, madam,” said Ranhéas Ylir. She herself now resembled but another shadow in the encroaching mist, and the old woman responded in fear.
“Who is this, Elasand?”
“A friend, madam. You are quite safe,” said Ranhé.
“Yes, a friend,” said Elas, giving Ranhé a vacant look. “This honorable stranger came to aid us, and has very likely prevented harm from befalling you and cousin. He fought to protect your carriage.”
The old dame’s tone warmed immediately, and she moved her veils aside to observe better. Ranhé could at last make out a wrinkled face and eyes squinting in relief. “Then, sir, we’re much in debt to you, aren’t we, Elas? What’s your name, good sir, to whom are we obliged?”
“It’s no particular matter, madam,” said Ranhé.
At that moment, a younger female, completely unveiled, peeked from behind the curtain, saying, “Mother? Is it over?” And then she saw Elas. “Cousin? You are unhurt?” she said to him faintly, “What of the driver? I am afraid he—”
“I’m fine,” he said sharply. “But he is quite dead.”
“Oh. What will you do?”
“What do you think? What should be done with this unfortunate man?”
“I don’t know.”
Ranhé observed this peculiar stilted exchange, noted the young woman’s wooden voice. Her rounded face had an odd expression, difficult to fathom, like the moon seen through the fabric of passing clouds.
“Incredible, but he appears to be our only loss,” spoke Elas then, turning away suddenly from the woman in the carriage, and continuing with his back to them all. “Even the horses are untouched.”
“You are very lucky,” said Ranhé. “One would think Bilhaar are usually better organized. Another time, and your horses would’ve had broken ankles, all. It appears your superior ability took the attackers by surprise, my lord. I wonder, were these really the Assassin Guild? We should take the masks off the dead and observe their faces.”
He turned again to look at them, and his gaze paused on Ranhé without seeing her. But before he could speak, the young female in the carriage leaned forward, illuminated by the last vestiges of gray sky glow, so that Ranhé could at last see her widened keen eyes.
“No!” she exclaimed with horror. “You mustn’t look at the dead, oh gods, no!” And then, added with peculiar barely repressed violence, “Who is this woman?”
The dame squinted again. “What? Indeed, it is a woman! Oh! And you have a sword, too, I could’ve sworn—”
Ranhé thought she saw some evidence of awakening in Elas’s expression. He focused on her, fully at last, and was evaluating her. But not a muscle moved in his face.
“Then we must ask your pardon for our blindness, besides being indebted to you, freewoman—”
She was amused. “My name is Ranhéas Ylir.”
With a faint smile he said, “I am obliged to you.”
“No need, my lord, to be obliged. My help was minimal, and you were doing quite well without it. Besides, I only indulged my own caprice. I was curious to fight the legendary Bilhaar.”
As though he did not hear her, his hand moved to his belt, and he drew out a small pouch.
“Will this silver be adequate recompense?”
“Sir, really now, you offend me. I ask for nothing.”
“And in your refusal you offend me.” His smile was delicate. “So then, freewoman, take this. I have little time to argue.”
With the last words his even tone had acquired an edge of irritation, and he extended the pouch to Ranhé.
“Yes, my dear,” added the dame. “Take it! Oh, but please, you must. We cannot be thus indebted in honor—”
And the other female in the carriage also nodded, looking at Ranhé with her keen frightened eyes. She took quick shallow breaths through slightly parted lips that nevertheless did not tremble. Only in that rhythm of breath was there a sense that cloud-shadows of emotion were passing over the moon-face.
Think of a certain empty purse, idiot bitch, considered Ranhé, seeing all of them watching her. But there was a little angry beastling within her that now stirred.
And so she smiled at them, a thin smile, her hands stilled in a firm grip on her horse’s reins.
“I would, my lords,” she said in a little voice, “rather remain unoffended, and you likewise.”
“If you will not have it,” he said, “then so let it be.”
And he tossed the moneybag to the ground. The dark satin pouch landed with a clank on the chest of one black corpse. Everyone stared at it.
“Whatever you choose to do, I have paid, and we are acquitted. Once again,
my thanks.” He turned away, sure of what she would do next.
Only, that was not the thing to be, to be sure. Not with Ranhé.
“My lord!” she called loudly, while sudden violent anger started rising in a mass of smoke and veils and uncontrollable darkness in her throat.
The dame and the young lady watched her from the carriage.
Elas had turned away, and had begun pulling at the body of the driver in order to take his place.
“My lord, I choose my own terms of acquittal.”
What the hell is making me say it, what the hell . . .
He paused and turned to stare at her.
And she grinned at him, a skull’s grin. “So then, let the dead man have it—for funeral expenses? I choose to take nothing from you.”
And before she allowed her mind to register the two women’s confused faces, or the nature of the expression in his eyes, Ranhéas Ylir turned her back on them. She rode away in the northwesterly direction along the big road, leaving the small trail behind, before anything else could be done.
She was remotely aware of the fact that she fled without real cause, leaving behind a reasonable payment.
Even in their generosity they reek of pride. Keep your money and choke on your highborn arrogance, she thought, as an excuse for her own loss of sense.
And then, But why did I not take the money? Is it not because of my own pride? So then, I choke also.
Night, silver-hued, was almost fully upon her. She tried to put the encounter out of her mind. But the memory of striking down those beings, those so-called Bilhaar, was bitter.
Indeed, the roiling darkness was still settling in the back of her throat. . . .
Something was not right.
In the black roadside foliage, cicadas and evening insects worked up a comfortable cacophony of sound.
She felt sorry for that old matron and the young woman, her daughter. Alone, without a bodyguard or reasonable escort. What damned arrogance.
The thoughts refused to leave her.
And then, one old familiar thought surfaced.
What does anything matter anyway? I have killed again.
Ahead of her, the oblivious night sang.
I speak of veils and mysteries, and here is another.
Ranhéas Ylir.
For several years now, she had crisscrossed the West Lands—settlement and wilderness—serving as a guide, bodyguard, messenger, scout, spy, scribe, interpreter, and anything else conceivable.
Rumor had it that she could speak, fight, portray anything.
She was nondescript, young in appearance, yet she had been thus for years. She was cultured, when needed. Or she became rough-hewn like a child of the gutter. She was lighthearted, loud-spoken, and frivolous. Or she was deadly serious, intellectual, and fastidious in her attitudes. And maybe she held, of all things, a distaste for spilled blood.
Aside from that, nothing in the world seemed to be of great consequence. She had no concrete values—or, if she did, they appeared as mutable as the wind, those of a chameleon. She also admitted no ties of any sort, nor—however odd this may sound of a mercenary—could she be bought, although she made it a point to sell herself and was in demand.
Ranhé claimed no relation to nobility. Her roots stemmed from the big City, mercantile and clerical. Or maybe even the gutter. What more that could have meant, no one knew, for she was a storyteller. Indeed, one might think she had spread the bulk of the rumors about herself.
Most likely, she was a madwoman, or at least someone on the fine edge between clarity and disturbance.
In the capital City, Tronaelend-Lis—the place, it is said, of boundless dreams—she had done business countless times. Tronaelend-Lis was chaotic as any big city is bound to be, always in need of one or more of her talents, filled with gems and rabble, seething with motion like a boiling kettle of fragrant soup. Opportunities surfaced like bubbles in that soup, and it was there that Ranhé absentmindedly made her way now, finding, as abruptly as always, her purse light as a dream.
Now, a curiosity about that purse. Despite being adequately paid for her work, she remained vagabond-poor.
Ranhé was not a spendthrift like some others, who would squander their earnings on urban pleasures. She was not known to drink spirits that distorted the mind, or gamble, or even purchase erotene favors.
But after a good earning, she was often seen passing out easy gifts, allowing dull metal coins to leave her hands as quickly as they came. And ultimately finding herself without means every time, Ranhé only laughed.
“I can be rich any time,” she spoke flippantly. “I could have an estate, a house in the City, all illuminated with white light, finer than any of the great villas in Dirvan. And maybe I will. Or maybe, I won’t. Maybe”—she would let her eyes turn strange—“I would rather have the silver moon.”
But now, moon or no, her purse was light again, and she, moved by an inborn restlessness, was on her way to Tronaelend-Lis, and opportunities.
She was now but a day’s ride away from the City. At the last settlement she passed the other day, the local woodsmen suggested she follow the small trail northwest to shorten her way, and that a lodging place would be reached by evening of this day.
They had spoken in uncomplicated ways, the locals, with nothing beyond the ordinary in the pale silver faces. Their clothing was drab; their skin had been turned dull and coarse in the gray sun-glare, and at the corners of their eyes it crinkled like rice paper. They were merely weather-beaten, like all the others who lived at the edges of the wilderness and were attuned only to its natural rhythms. And unlike them she sensed other things in the air, brewing—subtle things that swept past their awareness. Things they would never know to tell her.
There was a crispness, a sense of change in the wind, and it required a sixth sense to feel its encroach.
And death . . . But no, don’t think. . . .
Merely a deepening of twilight.
* * *
The philosopher, sitting in one of the lightly shaded groves of the Outer Dirvan, watched two ebony swans float upon the mirror surface of a small pool. He was not too different from the numerous other philosophers in the City—of some learning, yet not particularly literate; introspective, yet easily distracted by outer beauty (such as now—oh, the swans!); hungry for revelation about the nature of truth, yet somehow afraid that revelation might really come, and what would he do then? And, like most of his peers, he pondered the phenomenon of Rainbow.
There existed a common set of thought regarding that unfathomable event of about four hundred years ago—if indeed it did happen. Belief was customized, altered according to one’s nature. Yet essentially, the postulates were twelve in number.
And so the philosopher recited them one by one in his mind, like mantras, at the moment without new insight, yet hoping that the concepts might flower suddenly within him.
* * *
Postulate One: Rainbow is Fulfillment.
* * *
Deileala Grelias, the Regentrix of Tronaelend-Lis, brushed a cool finger along the lower back and buttocks of the naked young man lying prone before her on the great silken bed. Shafts of silver sunlight from the window fell in curving patterns that defined the shape of his body. In response to her touch, she watched a tensing of his skin over muscle, movement in the haunches.
So equine.
He turned his dark head toward her, and his eyes were drowsy, long-lashed.
“My love!” he whispered. “Where have you been? I’ve come here, waiting almost an hour now, after your summons.”
His words conjured double meanings.
The woman standing before him, petite but statuesque, and always aware of double meanings, regarded him silently for several moments. She did not really hear him.
She wore an insubstantial pale dress, more like a piece of thin gauze than any real garment, wrapped around a voluptuous body. Nothing could properly conceal it, and she would never try. Veilings only emphasiz
ed her flesh—as veils are wont to do, to aggravate the mystery of a surface which had a sheen to it, textured like an apricot’s skin, delectable silver velvet.
“I’m sorry, my pet,” she said at last, in a voice like well-fermented mead. “It was terrible, simply terrible of me to forget. Just that the idiot Minister said there were people to see me, of all things, and he wanted my opinion—something like that. And you know, sweet, that as much as I loathe that court foolery, it’s not to be avoided. Especially the giving of opinion.”
The youth missed the knife-edge of her words. He was too consumed with watching her in helpless adoration. He watched her pale eyes fringed by acutely dark lashes, sculpted arches of brows, and her bountiful hair, indefinite like shadows, and soft like a cloud of dandelion. Oh, how well he knew it.
And yet, did he?
There was something severe and perfect in her profile, that reminded him, always, of who she was—a creature chiseled out of marble. And who he was to her. It was even there in the crevices of her lips, that reminder of marble wreathed by dandelion; soft and hard things bound together.
Her lips were his obsession. Whether in his dreams, or even when he was in fact biting them insatiably, it was never enough. Sadistic intensity distorted his thoughts.
Ah yes, his thoughts.
Such they were, such unusual perverse thoughts. He couldn’t ever have even imagined harboring them, before he was singled out by her, and became her pet.
The Regentrix exuded power. The power was profoundly sexual, positive, masculine. And yet she was completely female, overwhelming with her sexuality, so that her lovers, no matter how skillful, always managed to feel inadequate. Possibly because the act of copulation presented but a diplomatic challenge for her, and she expected more as a result of that ultimate release than was humanly possible. The youth was well aware of all this, of how he, too, would at one point be inadequate for her, how—
But for now, there was only the moment.
She leaned somewhat over him, and her oval breasts, bobbing lightly, moved forward against her thin garment. A twinge of jealousy passed through him when he reflected that all could see her thus, her wonderful flesh, and she flaunted it before every “idiot” minister and imbecile courtier.