When the first time he was approached by the priest, the boy turned cold, clear, haughty eyes on him, quite unlike what Nestre expected in that instant. And he merely said that he was here to “contemplate Alhveh.” His voice had been measured, adult, and its control chilled the old priest.
But from then on, the prince took polite notice of him and greeted him regularly. And gradually, he would come to talk to him, at last bestowing trust, so that the priest began to know his reasons for coming here, or at least, to guess at them.
For, why would a young boy come to visit such a god as Alhveh? Were there not more appropriate, brighter deities to serve, for a boy his age, than this Shadowy One? And why Serve at all? Nestre remembered his own halfhearted apprenticeship when he was that age, his desire for other things, the living ones. His apprenticeship to this priesthood had come more out of necessity than piety. Only later did he come to deepen in his understanding, to really see the nature of this god. . . .
“So, Your Grace,” spoke the old priest. “Has the god spoken to you today?”
“Not quite, Lord Priest . . .” Lissean’s words came impeccable, polite. He never faltered in what he wanted to say, even if uttering the words hurt him to the quick.
Just as he had not faltered that one time, when, looking into the old man’s expectant eyes, he had said the one thing that the priest himself would’ve had difficulty in saying:
“They tell me I have the White Plague, the same thing my Father died of when I was too young to know him. It is the disease of lords, one that runs in our line, priest. You have heard of it, I assume. As the disease progresses, one grows paler, for the blood becomes anemic, thinner. Eventually there is an onset of such weakness that one can no longer move. . . . And one is pale, pale as death, pale as that thing called white. And then—but I’ll not speak anymore. I am not quite so pale myself. Not yet. Truly, I should be proud to be dying of such an ailment. But—I only want to hear Alhveh Himself speak to me and tell me why. Why must it be I, of all people.”
When he had said it that one time, there was emotion in the boy’s eyes, a boiling pot of it. Since then, not a word. And not a single feeling in his gaze. But the priest knew it was unnecessary. Never would they forget what was uttered once. To face it once was enough.
And now, the old man would play along, play the pretense game, ask the boy-prince. It had become a game with them, to ask whether that day the god had spoken, and to give the answer “no, not quite.”
For it seemed that if ever the lord of Empty Skies and Death made His voice heard, that would be the end of certain things. The end of that final tentative hope that nestled in Lissean like the wings of a summer moth.
“I will go now, Priest Nestre,” said Lissean. “Good day.”
He turned then, and walked quickly, slipping away like a shadow, out of the great hueless Temple.
“Good day to you, Heir Lissean,” replied the old priest, looking at the receding figure, and hearing not even a soft echo of his footsteps against the marble floor. Only eerie dusk and silence.
He was a shadow indeed then, this boy Heir, who would never live to be Heir of the Regent. For only shadows left no echoes in their wake. And only the dead put the heart into silence.
* * *
At first Ranhé froze. Elasand, talking with Pheyl Milhas on the other side of the room, watched her from the corner of his eye. The woman is odd, no doubt, he thought, with a pride beyond her apparent condition. But I have seen her fight effectively. Which is more than I can claim for the others.
“Master Nilmet,” Ranhé said then, smiling lightly. “A mere presence of a blade hardly means it’ll be used. I carry it as a deterrent against attack, and I am rather unreliable with it.”
“Indeed?” said Nilmet with a shadow smile. “There’s no need to put yourself down.”
“I wouldn’t dream of doing that.”
She is perverse. . . .
Elasand slowly made his way, Pheyl at his side, in their direction. Layers upon convoluted layers of perverse pride. Oh, I know her, yes. Like myself.
“Well, suit yourself.” Nilmet shrugged. “Except that seventy dahr is far too great a price not to consider.”
“Why not take it yourself?”
Nilmet smiled gently. “Oh, I couldn’t. I was only joking there. You don’t eat meat, and I don’t wield a blade. Not even in self-defense. It’s my philosophy, shall we say.”
“Somehow, I overheard your words,” said Elas, pausing before their table. He nodded a greeting at Nilmet—and for a bizarre moment Ranhé thought that the look that passed between them was that of old acquaintances. But then his glance went straight to Ranhé.
For an instant, silence. Then she looked up at Elas, a contained gaze, and her mouth was smiling faintly. “Your pardon, my lord?”
Curiously, in that moment, the first thought that came to him, almost superstitiously, was to make sure of the expression in her eyes. Yes, he saw then, there was nothing out of the ordinary, no secret in her pale irises. Instead, they were almost too bland. Whatever happened to that spark of quick brightness, like the forest fox, which he’d once seen there?
“You were discussing my offer, freewoman, were you not?”
“He was, not I.” She shrugged it off. “I repeat, I am not suited for the job.”
It was as though she laughed in his face.
He made every word meaningful. “Come now. My judgment tells me you would do as well as any other.”
Don’t think I underestimate the service that you’ve done. He was willing her to read his mind.
“Indeed, my lord, you say this to a stranger whom you know nothing about.”
“I know that you wear a sword,” he said.
“A sword,” she echoed. “Why, it might be but a blunt stick, part of a jester’s costume, a traveling player’s prop.”
“Or it might be steel.”
“Even so. You’d trust me to guard you and yours where others refuse? Really. You think I’m mad, to tangle with Bilhaar?” She made a delicate gesture with the wrist, and looked away, rolling her eyes like a buffoon.
Mad she is indeed, and crafty. The fox is enjoying herself. I believe she wants not so much for me to raise the price, as to see me ask her more than once.
“So your final word is—”
“My lord, my final word is that it’s time for me to get up and go to my sleeping place. I need no gold, nor your silver.” And she indeed got up. He read the stressed meaning in the last word, and thought of the pouch of silver lying upon the black garments of a corpse.
The lying bitch. You’re down to your last coppers. Maybe indeed I shouldn’t have insisted thus on paying you, back there on the road, or you wouldn’t have bristled so.
And then, just as suddenly, Elas felt pity. He looked at her thin tall figure, the dirty lanky hair gathered in a braid, sallow face, and thought, If I had not insisted, yes. I am the one at fault, for not respecting her sense of honor. She has nothing but that to herself.
And he swallowed his pride, Elasand who was always impeccably fair.
“Good night, freewoman,” said Elas kindly, so that Ranhé looked back at him in surprise. “I’ll hear your real last word tomorrow morning.”
With a faint smile he turned away, nodded something to the other hired man, and went upstairs.
“M’lord . . .” she coldly echoed in his wake, nodded, and turned to go her own way.
She smiled at Nilmet—he could see her confusion in the uncustomary lack of movement of her eyes—and said, “I believe the hay is fresh in the stables here. Why, with assassins lurking, I wouldn’t leave my mount unwatched. Besides, a room around here is far too expensive for my means.”
Nilmet understood only too well. “Good night to you then, Mistress Ranhé. It has been good, your acquaintance. I wish you luck, if I don’t see you. Luck, and a good sleep,” he said softly, still sitting in his place while she left through the front door, heading to the stables.
&n
bsp; The black outside swallowed her, dispersing all orange shadows. The door closed, the monochrome in the corner illuminating now an empty room.
Nilmet sighed, then rose slowly, to lie down on his own semi-temporary pallet which Jirve Lan had allotted him, next to the wall. It was clean, away from any draft, and Nilmet had thought himself extraordinarily lucky to have the use of it, free of charge, these last couple of weeks.
What a strange but engaging young woman, he thought. And the haughty lord. Yes, I remember your games, Elasand Vaeste. And yes, these two are definitely not strangers to one another.
And before he made himself completely comfortable for the night, Nilmet again lifted his tall ungainly frame, and slowly came to the corner of the room where the monochrome orb hung on a thin rod from the ceiling, its glow more blinding as he neared. He paused, as though momentarily in doubt, then, ignoring the complicated knob that normally cut off the flow of light, put one hand forward, touching the odd, barely warm, glassy surface.
And then, like every evening of his stay here at the inn, he willed it not to be. As his thought took form, the light in the sphere flickered for an instant, began losing radiance, growing dimmer and dimmer—while the room visually receded, wildly, too abruptly to be natural—and then it went out. It threw its last orange spark upon the soulful eyes of the man, dark like smoke.
And then came absolute black.
No one would ever suspect how the lights were turned off these days at the White Roads Inn.
CHAPTER 5
Violet.
Ranhé’s mind surfaced from sleep. For a moment she did not know why she was awake. There was reassuring softness, a smell of the hay and the stables, the soft slumber-sounds of the animals, warmth. Her horse stood asleep nearby.
Awake, yet she did not move. A habit of caution made her pretend shut-eyed oblivion, while the senses of smell and hearing would first alert her to sudden danger.
This time was different. Nothing wrong on the surface. Her heart beat evenly. No one but the animals in the vicinity.
Something is wrong.
An illusion of nervous prickling in her brain.
Ranhéas Ylir opened her eyes to the dark.
Violet.
For an instant, her mind would not take in the meaning of what her sight registered.
It was as if the world were illuminated by some sky-great invisible violet monochrome. Everything—the night, the rich darkness around her, the slit of the barn door left ajar, letting in pale moonlight—everything was impregnated with violet. It ranged from deepest black within the stable to the palest delicate lilac in the moonlit night outside.
Ranhé blinked her eyes, opened them wide, rubbed them, an overwhelming sense of the unknown rising in her throat—sudden panic. Then, just as violently, with an effort of will she slammed the gates of panic shut. She calmed the pounding in her mind, the sense of insanity.
A surreal moment.
She sat up. One thing is true about the world: There is an explanation for everything.
She blinked again, hard, her eyes beginning to tear. She felt powerless, oddly incompetent in this overwhelming universal violet. She had never seen anything like it in her life. She wasn’t even sure if it was what she thought it was.
Sensing her movement, her horse woke up, made mild sniffing sounds in the dark, as though questioning her fear.
I need air . . . None of this is real.
She got up, filled with an odd swooning calm, dizzy with the purple blackness—her mind starting to soar outside her body, somewhere beyond, as it did during moments of deadly combat—and stumbled out of the barn. She threw the door open, and dared herself to look. Her eyes met a pale heliotrope swollen disk of the full moon. Like a color orb it rode a deep violet sky.
There was a lavender glow upon the earth, and as she watched, her senses spinning from the visual overload, everything, everything in the world was violet.
This sudden alien world pressed down and squeezed the breath out of her.
This is a dream, she thought, everything inside her reeling, it must be. . . .
And it made her sick. Her stomach felt weak with the sickening fear, the abnormality.
Then softly, from a great distance, she heard it—a sound of a stream, a river flowing. Melodious tinkling, like bells, a light spattering rain.
And yet no water came from the sky.
Still trying unconsciously to blink away the violet, Ranhé stood listening to the sound, which grew in volume.
As it grew, something even more alien was happening to the landscape. The stables, the courtyard, the very building of the inn began to recede, lightly, dreamily, like an undulating mirage. It stopped then, at a stage where all was half-material, semi-transparent, so that Ranhé could see through objects, to the others beyond them. Through branches, there were other branches, and tree trunks, and she could see all the rooms of the inn-house at once, and the shadow people who slept in each. A fragile world of lavender glass stood about her. And the light had grown also, paled and intensified.
Ranhé stood frozen, unwilling to move lest she lose even her personal reality. She glanced at her hands and saw her own finger bones through the translucent skin and muscle, observed the rhythmic movement of dark liquid through the subcutaneous network of veins. And then she saw, in one room of the “glass” inn-house, a distant figure of a man, like a darker shadow, start suddenly, in sleep, then come awake.
He rose slowly, his figure toy-small from the distance, yet in this preternatural lavender light she could see two pale dots of eyes, wide open. Somehow, by instinct, and without a moment of doubt, she knew it was the one called Elas.
She watched him leave the room (while the sound of the stream came louder, mad music of the psyche), descend the staircase, then pass through the transparent common room with its extinguished orb-light and sleeping figure of a man on a pallet on the floor. And then, as if he also needed to breathe freely, Elas came outside, not as a sleepwalker but with the desperation of someone trying to escape, break free.
Elas paused, not seeing Ranhé on the other side of the courtyard. His puppet-figure was now also stained silvery lavender by the moon, appearing to exude its own light, and had that same semi-transparent quality to it as the rest of the world.
I wonder if I also look transparent to him. . . . But she knew he had not seen her. And she did not dare speak out to him, no longer sure if she even had a voice.
What took place next was wonder.
Where the moonlight fell brightest, away from the trees of the courtyard, another shimmering reality began to take form, born of that light. Like a window into some other place, Ranhéas saw a garden. Mist and vapor was matter there, unreal and exotic, and the things which grew in that garden (if “grew” is the right word to explain that process of being) were not to be described in human terms.
Lovely like dew-drop gems, like bits of light, they shimmered and pulsed and—but that is not to be spoken. And the glow which came from there was a warmth, such a great strange warmth of the mind, that Ranhé knew suddenly that she was looking at an aspect of truth, bared.
There was a woman in the garden. Human beauty is not a term to be applied to her, because she was beyond that vague perfection that is normally conceived. Thus, she also shall remain without a word to qualify her.
And this woman walked in the garden, paced it like a shade of pure light.
Ranhé’s head pounded. The sourceless sound of the stream, or the river, or the rain, was a chord within her mind, close to unbearable now. She wanted to clench her head within her hands and tear it out—not because it was terrible, but merely beyond her. Somehow it was connected to the woman of light. And somehow, the woman was the source of all violet.
And then, within her, Ranhé heard another mind-sound, the clamoring voice of Elas.
You! he cried to the image. Who are you? And Ranhé sensed that he was more agitated than he had ever been in his life.
As if only now b
ecoming aware of the intruders into her world, the woman moved her head of light, with tresses like the rain (that sound again). Ranhé never looked into her eyes, averting her gaze, sensing it might be sacrilege. But Elas had seen the gaze when it swept over him. An odd pathetic ecstasy came to him, so that he shuddered, every cell of him filling for an instant with light, and he himself shone, was transfigured. . . .
Ranhé knew that the woman had spoken to him and not to herself. The stream was in her head, running like the Greatest Flood, while her dreaming eyes took in the contrast of the vision of tranquility, the fantastic garden and its goddess inhabitant. She knew that Elas was speaking to her, passionately, like a madman, stretching his hands to her in futility (that intensity in him—never again will she see it), and the woman was answering—how, she would never know.
And suddenly, an emotion came to her. It was an emotion long forgotten. . . .
Ranhé felt it, the pang, an inner wrenching. Then came an expanding presence, the sense of widening, going outward, and then burning. It was a thing completely acute, an opening of the insides, a sudden vulnerability. She steeped in its oddness, its warmth, at the same time knowing that its nature was the same as the power that the woman radiated forth, the way she radiated violet. She, the woman, was that expansion, that receptiveness.
And the thunder of the stream made sense in her mind at last, saying over and over, a name.
Laelith.
And Ranhéas Ylir, no longer capable of containing within her senses all of this intensity, felt herself slipping down gently, softly into a reverie, while the distant yet intimate face of Elas transfigured, danced in her dizzy vision, his lips moving with mantras, with the many chords of words he uttered to her who was lady of violet, and the form of light nodded to him, and raised one outstretched hand—
The last thing Ranhé knew before darkness came, was that, without having had any direct contact with her, she now loved, absolutely and selflessly, as she never loved anyone, this woman of light.