A falcon circled a sky of deep, clear, brittle sapphire. Ashtar’s eye, Andrion told himself. The depth of her thought suspended a spectral waning moon, a wisp of light that was like her mercy . . . If I cannot believe in the gods, he decided, I shall have to believe in myself. I cannot believe in nothing.
Even here, at the borders of Sabazel, ashes swirled in a gentle wind and the acrid scent of the funeral pyre lingered, the last traces of the Sabazians dead in the battle of the Galel. The Sabazians dead for me, Andrion thought. And for him. Several women bore a litter toward a waiting ox cart, the body of Bellasteros carried at last from its sanctuary.
No, Andrion wanted to scream at the solemn faces, no, this is not a funeral, he will yet wake!
The wind rippled the banners of a waiting honor guard. The cart received the litter. Ilanit raised the shield in salute, and the morning sun hissed across its surface like wind stirring water in the bronze basin. Danica pressed something into Andrion’s hand. It was the diadem of the Empire, a gold circlet newly polished and so cold it burned his fingers.
What did she mean? He fought in his father’s name, not his own. And yet . . . “Would it be easier,” he asked his mother, “if he had died a hero’s death in Iksandarun, as he intended before I forced him to run away, before I brought him to this?”
“No,” replied Danica. “The goddess has her purposes.”
The crisp green eyes were calm, resigned, but to Andrion they were shadowed by the image of the black warrior, Bellasteros’s mortality. He spun about, went to the cart, lifted the protective hangings and placed the diadem on Bellasteros’s silver hair. The crown no longer fit him; it was too big, and tilted rakishly over his brow. His closed eyes did not open, and the crescent shadows of his lashes on his hollow cheeks did not waver.
“The diadem is yours, Father,” Andrion whispered so that only Bellasteros could hear. “But the sword is mine now; the horse has always been mine and never yours . . .” He inhaled with a shudder, wondering if he uttered blasphemy. “Father, I carry your burden, I fight your battles, have I not earned the sword?” The still face did not change. The falcon screeched overhead, and the hangings snapped in the breeze. What did you expect? Andrion asked himself.
Tembujin peered over his shoulder. “The emperor, your father?”
“Yes,” Andrion replied, too dull to resent his curiosity.
Tembujin’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Toth did not keep me alive with food alone, but with tales of gods and ancient heroes and the exploits of your parents before you were born.” He glanced at Danica cautiously, suspecting, perhaps, what it meant to spring from such stock.
“I am sorry, Andrion, I had a part in bringing him to this.” Tembujin stooped to inspect one of his horse’s hooves, pretending to find some pebble imbedded within.
Ah, thought Andrion. So you try to be my friend. He was not sure he liked that thought. But it was little enough to forgive another man, when the gods themselves were ultimately unforgiving.
Ventalidar snuffled the cool, clear air and shook his mane as though to say, enough of this maudlin introspection, let us dance across the world. Andrion had to grin as he leaped onto his back. Danica, with the plump turtledove of Shandir beside her, sat ready behind the oxen. Lyris frowned down at her sword, debating whether it was sharp enough for the task ahead. Ilanit contemplated the sky, listening to resonances in the wind.
Dana reined up beside Andrion. “Is Kerith well?” he had enough wit to ask her.
“Well enough,” Dana replied, “so long as she stays here.”
“I shall return you to her side before the snow flies,” he said, and was warmed by Dana’s smile.
The ox cart creaked, bearing the weight of his past. The Companions of Sabazel turned away from their own borders and followed him over the rim of the world.
* * * * *
Andrion had realized, even as he gave it, that his promise to Dana was a rash one. The snow would probably fly well before they could even approach Iksandarun, let alone before the Sabazians could return to their home. But such rash promises were, it seemed, part of the language of love.
The imperial army moved laboriously south. Scouts brought word that the Khazyari had indeed been turned away from the pass; suffering from the loss of so many of their ponies, the barbarians seemed to turn tail and run. But as Nikander took the trouble to point out, they could well have learned the virtues of playing dead. Patros kept scouts, the questing senses of the legions, moving briskly into the great southern plain.
Was Tembujin, Andrion wondered, galled by his people’s seeming meekness? He looked up from burnishing the bright blade of Solifrax, across the gold pavilion to where Tembujin made some minor adjustment to his bow. “We should move faster,” Andrion said to Patros, seated at a writing table nearby. “We must harass them, give them no time to regroup.”
Patros laid down his quill, but it was Tembujin who answered. “Having you behind them should be harassment enough.”
Andrion exchanged a glance with Patros; Tembujin spoke of his tribe in the third person. “Governor,” he said, “what shall we do with the Khazyari? Reinstate Tembujin to his proper role as khan?” He gestured expansively. “We could settle them on the moor north of Iksandarun, calling it Khazyaristan, perhaps. The Empire has room for a nomadic tribe.”
The odlok glanced up, fully aware he was being tested. “You would not kill them—us—all?”
“I would rather free the Khazyari of Raksula’s evil influence,” Andrion replied. Tembujin’s face darkened and his fingers snapped the bowstring in a short, sharp gesture.
“We have to defeat them first,” said Patros. “Then we can be magnanimous.”
“To a khan I can trust,” added Andrion.
Tembujin’s eyes were glittering slate, opaque, unreadable. “Have you not yet learned to trust me?” he said to Andrion and Patros both. “I know what ambitions I can now afford, and what my loyalties must be. Building is much harder than destroying, but in the end more profitable.” For just a moment his eyes widened, letting Andrion see within. Then Tembujin tucked one corner of his mouth into an ironic smile and bent again to his bow.
Andrion leaned back in his chair, almost breathless. Solifrax hummed across his lap, glistening with a brief aura of light. Beautiful, Andrion thought. As beautiful and as compelling as death.
* * * * *
The moon died, was swept away by the sun, appeared again as a glaucous sliver riding the morning sky to the army’s left. The days were punctuated by violent but inconclusive skirmishes as the Khazyari faded before them. The world was sustained in a russet haze of autumn, the plains like rippling fluid bronze, the sky a blue so crisp it made Andrion ache.
Tembujin resumed tying his hair into a short, stubborn tail. Thank Sarasvati, thought Andrion, for trimming his manhood so nicely. The new moon after the fall equinox was Sarasvati’s birthday, noted by a prayer to the crimson-plumed helmet: Bellasteros, protect your younger daughter, give her strength. He gives us both his strength, Andrion told himself. And we pray to him as if his apotheosis were already accomplished.
The quarter waxing moon marked Valeria’s birthday; a new Valeria, who initiated conversations with Andrion and Tembujin both, and contemplated the world with firm chin and clear eye. She is no longer a fragile flower, Andrion thought, but fruit ripened as I have been, by ordeal and the love of her parents. Tembujin paid her polite and correct attentions, more formal than the jests he shared with Dana or with Andrion himself; Patros watched, partly skeptical, partly amused.
Shurzad stayed close beside her daughter. Her mutilated hand reached as often for her naked throat as Andrion reached for his. Her eyes still held some trace of that creature struggling to be free. Or perhaps she found it, and did not like what she saw. Her hair was carefully ringleted, her eyes shadowed with lavender and kohl, but still she seemed to Andrion to be an edged weapon blunted.
Patros watched his wife through sad, wary eyes, and as often as he shared a smile with Valeria, he smiled at her as well. But it was Ilanit with whom he often talked, in the elliptical sentences of conversations already long concluded. And one evening Shurzad came to Ilanit in the camp of the Sabazians.
Lyris tensed, her hackles rising. Andrion, seated with Dana, looked up. Ilanit offered Shurzad a rock to sit upon as graciously as if she opened the Horn Gate to her.
Shurzad remained standing, ill at ease but driven from within. “My thanks, Queen Ilanit, and to your mother, Danica, for helping me. Despite my often . . . unkind words about you and yours.”
Ilanit bowed. At her knee the shield sparked gently.
“It was your goddess, was it not, who told you to succor me?”
Ah, thought Andrion. She seeks assurance that the gods do indeed look over us.
“No,” answered Ilanit. “I chose freely to aid a wounded soul.”
“But you are not directed by the voice of your goddess, certain in all that you do?”
“No.” Ilanit cocked her head to the side, as if finding either the question or the questioner to be slightly pitiful. “My mother once bore the power of the goddess, but I never have. Ashtar reserves her strength to herself now, and leaves us mortals to find our own certainty.”
“Ah. I see.” Shurzad’s face fell and she turned away.
Andrion stood, intercepted Shurzad, took her poor hand and bowed over it. “Forgive me, lady, for wounding you.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. “With the lock of hair you gave Valeria I enspelled you to come to Sardis, so that I could use you.”
“No, no, lady,” he returned, hastening to reassure her. “I dreamed I should come, in Ashtar’s cavern at the full moon after midsummer’s moon.”
“And my spell was laid as the moon waned.” Her face contracted in pain, her voice faltered. “So, even that effort was for naught.” She turned and blundered away.
Andrion realized not what he had said, but what she had heard. “Harus! I did not mean to rub her nose in her helplessness!”
“She waits for redemption,” Ilanit said, shaking her head.
Yes, Andrion said to himself. So do I. And I shall find it only in duty. He touched Dana’s cheek lightly with his forefinger, bowed to Ilanit and the shield, managed a wink for Lyris. And he, too, went into the night, not blundering but striding as stiff as any soldier.
* * * * *
The full moon drifted, a gleaming disk, above the Khazyari camp. The sounds of revelry were muted, as if Baakhun’s prodigious appetite had eaten the spirits of his warriors and taken them with him into death.
Raksula sat beside Vlad at the head table. He wore the plaque of the khan, and the lion skin now waved above his head. But he paid no attention to them; Raksula plied him with delicacies, candied figs, lemon curd, roasted lark. “Imperial foods for an emperor,” she told him with an ingratiating smile.
A nuryan bowed before Vlad, inquiring about the posting of the guards. His mouth full, he nodded toward his mother. Her smile glistened as she gave the orders herself. Odo started to amend the order and was quelled by an evil look from Raksula. His face tightened and darkened like an overripe plum. He handed Vlad another skin of kviss, asking with exaggerated courtesy, “This, my lord, or some of that wine?”
Vlad muttered some sneer at Odo, spraying Raksula with particles of fig. Her smile froze into a bare-toothed snarl. He grabbed the skin, drank, wiped the dribbles from his chin.
Something gleamed in the folds of his tunic. Raksula’s eyes widened so far that the whites glistened. With an oath she lunged, seized the object, held it up. It was a necklace, a gold crescent moon with a gold star at its tip. “So,” she breathed, “you have it.”
Vlad tensed. The voices stopped. A sudden wind moaned about the great yurt. With one clawed hand Raksula seized Vlad by the collar. “Where did you get it!” Realizing that the Khazyari watched her, she softened her voice, smiled again. But her eyes were points of jet. “Where?”
“My father,” he glowered. “He carried it in his tunic and talked to it. It is pretty, so I took it; I am khan now and it is mine.” He scrabbled at the necklace but she whisked it away from him.
Odo’s stubby fingers opened and closed in midair. Raksula thrust the necklace into her own bodice and hissed, “That weakling Baakhun, bleating over the necklace his precious Tembujin wore. But he is gone now, they are both gone, and my time has come!” She scrambled up, dragging Odo with her. He quickly wiped a sullen expression from his face and replaced it with obsequious eagerness. Raksula giggled with malign glee and issued new orders, a surprise attack on the imperial camp to coincide with her sorceries. The chieftains of the Khazyari leaped up with new energy.
Raksula stalked from the great tent, Odo bobbing in her wake, and hurried to her own yurt. From charred bags she took herbs and arranged them in an arcane pattern around a tiny lamp. Odo began a chant, spitting rough, harsh words at the flame. Raksula lifted the necklace. She was a wizened gargoyle, teeth glistening, talons grasping a sparkling cascade of gold. The gold passed through the fire and dimmed.
* * * * *
Andrion was dreaming of the full moon, and Sabazel, and Dana’s enlaced limbs warming the chill of the night, when the moon seemed to waver and wink out. He shifted, his senses crawling with dread. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly awry . . .
He awoke. The camp was silent, the wind chiming softly around his tent, charcoal settling with little creaks and pops in his brazier, Miklos’s steady tread outside marking the cadence of the night. The moonlight was a hazy corona between the flaps of the doorway, fluttering as if shadowed by sinister dark wings. He sat up, alarmed; then the alarm dulled, his mind sinking into lassitude, his thoughts moving painfully, slowly, through a cold torpor. He fumbled for Solifrax, every muscle groaning.
There. The sword, hard in his numbed and heavy hand. For a moment he saw himself, a reverse reflection in still water, clear and distant; then the water rippled, disturbed by a touch, and his image melted away.
The coals in the brazier hissed, smoked, flared into life. Fangs of flame, of ice, leaped before his eyes. He could not blink. He could not speak, his tongue frozen in his mouth. His ears rang with an infinite silence; no, a faint chant hung like a mist about him. He struggled to remember his own name—an important name, he had heard it before . . . Valeria, he thought suddenly, enspelled with cold fire like an icy venom. Like this. His thoughts faded again, sucked from him by the chant.
The brazier seethed with flame, but no heat emanated from it. He fought against the torpor. Think, he ordered himself, try to think . . . the something wrong was within himself, writhing like a great snake in his heart, in his belly. His mind steadied, spun, steadied again. He saw Bellasteros’s drained eyes, imagined his own eyes as blank and hollow. With a moment of clarity he thought, They found my necklace. He raised his hand to throat and snatched it away, his own flesh burning cold.
Andrion tried to call out, but his voice was only a shallow breath, a shallow wind devoured by the night, dying before the implacable face of time. But time slowed, halted, froze into bright glittering moments like jewels forever beyond his reach. Fangs of cold flame opened before him. His hand pulled Solifrax from its sheath, and the serpent skin slithered away, slow viscous scales absorbed into shadow. The blade of the sword was crystalline ice, reflecting no flame, as cold and remote as the face of the moon, a perfect death’s head. Ashtar! he thought, and for a moment the name cleared his head. Ashtar, Dana, Ilanit, Danica, help me!
His mind fell through echoing nothingness and spattered into sparks. His hand stroked the sword. A thin trail of red glinted across his palm. He leaned his face into his hand and tasted the sizzling sweetness of his own blood. Blood and fire and the blade, sharp and sweet, compelling—it would pierce him through—no, it would be like a woman receiving a lover, filled . . . his blood would flow crimson over the blade and it would dissolve, it would be seized by clawed hands in some place filled with a gibbering darkness . . . Of course, he told himself. I shall no longer want it. I shall be free of it. Andrion turned the sword, pressing its curved tip against his chest. It cut the linen of his chiton, each individual thread parting with a tiny snap.
The icy flames illuminated his face, his eyes hollows of desire and despair. Death, deliver me from the harsh borders of this world . . . The blade pricked his flesh and his mind convulsed, screaming, Dana!
* * * * *
Between one moment and the next Dana started into tense alertness. Something, somewhere was terribly awry. She jumped from her bedroll and stood trembling. The moon, she thought, the moon wavered oddly, barred by a floating mist as dark and dense as Andrion’s black cloak. A cold wind rippled through the grass and brush, rippled through the stars, swinging them like bells. Faint on the air she heard a cry, Dana!
Andrion! She seized her bow and dagger and screaming a warning ran from the camp. The Sabazian sentries leaped up. Danica thrust aside the hangings of the cart. Lyris and Ilanit tumbled out of their tent, grasping their weapons.
Dana plummeted into the imperial camp. Dana! came the cry again, sharp and urgent, dying abruptly. She brushed aside several surprised sentries and almost trampled Miklos at the door of Andrion’s tent. She burst inside.
He sat on the edge of his bed, staring into the sullen red coals of his brazier. But his dark eyes reflected leaping white flame, cold flame, fangs of ice. He held the shining blade of Solifrax reversed against his own chest. He leaned into the blade, his face suffused with a grim ecstasy, and a coiling trickle of blood smoked down the brightness of the sword.
“Andrion!” Dana cried. “Gods, no!” She seized his hands, trying to pull the blade away. She realized then that a miasma hung about him, the chill sour odor of sorcery, sorcery turning the power of sword on its bearer. His flesh burned her fingers, but she did not let go.
He looked toward her without the least hint of recognition. His lips drew back in a snarl. With uncanny strength he knocked her to the floor, leaped up and raised Solifrax over her. Like a frozen lightning bolt the sword fell. She rolled away, knocking into and spilling the brazier. “Andrion, in the name of Ashtar!” He struck at her again, his face that of a mindless demon.
Miklos leaped at him from the side, bearing him down. The sword flew from his grasp and he howled in outrage and terror mingled. He fought, scratching and biting at Miklos, and the young soldier, his eyes rolling with uncomprehending terror, tried only to avoid him.
Dana scrambled up. Together she and Miklos pinned Andrion to the floor. The prince stared beyond them to the roof of the tent, through it to the darkening sky, his body jerking in uncontrollable spasms. Strange syllables issued hoarsely from his throat, the echo of some evil chant. Solifrax lay among the ashes of the spilled brazier, its brightness stained with blood, muted.
Ilanit stood in the doorway, the shield a fiery disk on her arm, her eyes and mouth circles of appalled comprehension. “Mother!” she gasped. “Not him, too!”
Andrion’s chiton gaped, his chest smeared crimson, his bared throat pulsing with an angry red image of his necklace. “Mother,” Dana repeated, not knowing if she called on the goddess or on her own mortal parent. Andrion’s body trembled in her arms, his familiar body strange and distant.
Ilanit knelt and laid the shield over Andrion. His voice stopped with a gurgle. His eyes closed and he became suddenly still. Then Danica, too, was there, her strong but delicate hands resting with her daughter’s and granddaughter’s on the rim of the shield. The three faces, avatars of the same bone, the same flesh, set in the same intentness, were sketched in vivid relief by its clear light. A cold wind purled through the doorway, drawing the spilled ashes into swirls of luminescent particles. The sword hissed, flared, and faded.
Miklos edged away, his face struggling with fear and confusion. Then shouts spilled through the encampment, and he fled.
* * * * *
Dim shapes crept toward the imperial encampment, curtained by a dark haze. The sentries stirred uneasily, and more than one sleeper muttered in the grip of nightmare. The moon darkened as though veiled by gauze. Lyris, standing with Shandir beside Bellasteros’s litter, watched Danica disappear after Dana and Ilanit into gathering shadow and drew her sword slowly across her thumbnail, frowning, shaking her head. “Sorcery,” spat Shandir. “Evil sorcery.”
With unearthly shrieks the Khazyari attacked. Some sentries were swiftly and mercilessly overrun. But those who had been startled by Dana’s rush through the camp gave the alarm. Trumpets blared.
Fire arrows streaked through the air and tents blossomed into flame. Ponies pounded through the crimson-streaked night and legionaries died as they ran from their tents. Patros appeared clad only in a chiton, naked sword in hand, calling his soldiers to him. Nikander hitched up his robe and began organizing the legionaries as laconically as if the tumultuous camp were the parade ground by the walls of Farsahn. The soldiers of the Empire steadied and returned battle.
Tembujin leaped onto the bare back of his horse and grasped its halter in one hand, his bow in the other. His face was that of an archaic statue, hard planes and sharp angles untouched by the dancing light of the flames. He slipped from light to shadow and back again, and many Khazyari died in terror.
A cordon of Sabazians stood about Bellasteros’s litter, Lyris cursing with disgust at being saddled with a defensive position. But she stood steadfast. Shandir knelt in the doorway, eyes narrowed, dagger ready to defend the sleeping king.
Ilanit and Dana roused and started up, then turned back, torn, toward Andrion’s stark, white, pained face. Danica lifted his head into her lap, lifted Solifrax into her own hand. “We choose this man, too,” she said, her voice breaking. The shield sparked. The sword sparked in reply. Dana wiped cold tears from her cheeks and followed her mother into battle.
Shurzad and Valeria huddled together beside their cart. Khazyari raced with gleeful whoops through the tangle of camp followers, seizing women and booty indiscriminately. The great ursine warrior—he who had escorted Tembujin to his supposed death—leaped from his pony and grabbed Valeria, saying something that even in Khazyari was obviously obscene. She struggled, but his huge hands could almost span her waist.
Shurzad leaped upon him, screaming, clawing, fighting for her daughter. Ponderously, as if to see what insect annoyed him, he turned. Several other Khazyari paused to watch, shouting taunts at warrior and women equally. Shurzad’s cat scrambled up the man’s felt-clad leg, every hair on end, tail like a brush.
An arrow cut the night. The warrior, his face set in innocent amazement, looked down at the shaft protruding from his tunic and then up. Tembujin, ghostly on a spectral horse, cursed him in his own language. The great warrior’s eyes bulged. He fell, struck down by fear as much as by the arrow, dragging the women and the cat with him. His colleagues screeched and collided with each other, some rushing forward, some back.
One of them leaned from his pony and seized Valeria’s arm, attempting to lift her up. Shurzad scrambled after them, wrenched her daughter away, interposed her own body. Tembujin swept the girl onto his horse. She clung to him with one arm, leaned precariously out and reached for her mother.
The Khazyari grasped Shurzad and threw her like a sack of meal over his horse. One of Tembujin’s arrows struck him but he did not stop. The cat, clinging desperately to Shurzad’s skirts, yowled. Valeria screamed. Shurzad’s stunned face, a white oval tinted with flame, glinted over the warrior’s leg and was gone.
The wrath of Ilanit’s blazing shield and Dana’s crimsoned dagger, the threat of icily gleaming Solifrax, turned the battle from Andrion’s tent. Legionaries lunged in counterattack, led on one flank by Nikander, on the other by Patros. Bonifacio, clutching the plumed helmet, looked fearfully from his tent, but the shouts and screams of battle were already retreating into murky distance. Dim shapes began fighting the fires, and the ruddy glow faded. The Sabazians leaned on their swords, the sleeping emperor unscathed. The moon cleared and became again a pale orb, remote and silent, drifting to the west and drawing dawn behind it from the east.
The cold light of day was a shroud over the shattered encampment. Even the wind seemed to moan in pain. Smoking ruins of tents lay in hummocks along the avenues; search parties divided the soldiers lying in the churned, red-stained dirt into piles of bodies like cords of wood, into twitching tortured figures borne away to places of rest.
Tembujin gave Valeria into the circle of her father’s arm and turned away before she could tell him the tale of Shurzad’s capture. The odlok found Dana sitting wanly beside the bed where Andrion muttered in delirium, starting up in a cold sweat, lying back as still as death. Danica sponged his brow, her face shuttered and chill. Ilanit’s shield hummed beside her, singing some private dirge; Solifrax, silent, lay at her hand. She glanced at it again and again, perhaps in resentment, perhaps in respect.
“Your barbarians have his necklace,” Miklos said to Tembujin shortly, from his post by the door. “That you gave them.”
Tembujin scowled. “Can you not stop the spell?” he asked Danica. She looked at him with a terrible patience. “I can protect him from its full force. But I cannot stop it, no. The necklace holds too much of him.”
“So,” Tembujin muttered, “I owe him life.” He spun, his fists clenched at his sides, and brushed aside an approaching Sabazian without even seeing her. Dana looked after him, frowning, seeking after some nuance of his thought. But it escaped her, and he, too, was gone.
* * * * *
The Khazyari camp was traced by the mists and smokes of a bleak, cold dawn. Warriors milled about, quarreling over their booty, binding their wounds. A nuryan, seeing Shurzad huddling numbly by the body of a dead warrior, relieved her of her jewelry and silk gown and delivered her to Raksula. “A lady of quality,” he announced. “Perhaps she has information.”
Shurzad, clad only in a thin shift, shivered with fear and cold. But when Raksula’s sharp fingers grasped her chin and jerked her face to the watery sun, she did not flinch.
Raksula’s eyes were bruised with exhaustion and her many braids straggled unheeded. She was a cornered scorpion, sting poised to attack all who came near. She snarled at Shurzad, “I know you. You failed me.”
Shurzad nodded in dull recognition, unsurprised. “You are she who led me to the betrayal that stains me still.”
Vlad, puffed with self-importance, prodded the soft curve of her flank. Odo stared sullenly at Raksula. Raksula ignored them both and leaned close to Shurzad, spraying her face with venom. “Ah, but you followed me. You and I are alike, our plans thwarted at every turn by the power of Sabazel.”
Again Shurzad did not flinch. A tiny, angry tremor tightened her mouth, perhaps at Raksula, or at Sabazel, or even at herself.
To the assembled warriors, Raksula called, “Build a fire. This is the lady of the governor-general of Sardis; she will be sacrificed to Khalingu, that our fortunes may be restored.” She smiled, every pointed tooth glinting, and released Shurzad’s chin with an acid caress.
Shurzad’s face went even whiter. She swayed, caught herself. The cat padded through the watching throng, eyes bright, tail lifted alertly. Slaves brought loads of brushwood and piled it high.
“So,” Raksula murmured, seeing the cat, “a small Qem, Khalingu as snow leopard. Did you know, Shurzad, that you worshiped the god of the Khazyari?”
Shurzad stared blankly at her, not quite hearing her, listening to some other voice. The cat folded itself around her leg.
Raksula pulled the gold necklace from her dress and thrust it into Shurzad’s face. “See my power? I hold the life of your prince in my hands.” Odo’s fingers twitched. Vlad frowned petulantly. The gold was reflected twofold in Shurzad’s somber eyes, a distant brightness like the glow of moon or sun through a rift in cloud.
On the outskirts of the crowd a sentry fell without a cry, taken from behind. A dark figure quickly assumed his tunic and fur cap and stood watching. Icy rain spattered the morning, and the people huddled closer to the pile of brush. Someone threw a flaming torch into it. With a slow crackle, fire danced among the branches.
Odo grasped Shurzad’s unresisting form and began a wailing prayer. She closed her eyes, sighed deeply, opened them not on to despair but on to decision. The cat crouched. Unnoticed, Tembujin set an arrow to his bow and then lowered it, grimacing in frustrated loathing as Raksula stepped forward brandishing the necklace, and was concealed by several children. The fire roared upward, smoke and flame licking at the shrouded sky.
Then with a shriek the cat leaped onto Raksula, its claws raking long furrows into her forearm. She shrieked in turn and threw the beast away from her. In one smooth movement Shurzad wrenched herself free of Odo’s grasp, seized the necklace from Raksula’s fingers with her own maimed hand, and threw herself into the incandescent heart of the pyre.
Brush crashed and sparks flew. She screamed, less in pain than in ecstasy, “Qem, I commend myself to you. Harus, Ashtar, have mercy!”
“Gods!” Tembujin exclaimed. His bow leaped up. An arrow like a hissing brand struck Shurzad cleanly in the heart. Her hair was a torch, her clothing ash, her body a golden image traced in fire, but she was already dead; Andrion’s necklace was melted gold in the melted flesh of her hand, purified. The expression on her face, hopeful at last, remained an afterimage among the flames.
The cat, a gray shadow, disappeared. The Khazyari stood in utter silence, even Raksula struck speechless. Gouts of flame seared her face of any human expression, leaving only the cold, vacant sneer of a reptile. A wind pealed across the sky, too cold to spread the scent of death.
Tembujin raised his bow again. As if sensing his presence, Raksula jerked about. Her eyes were knives flaying his disguise from him, peeling his every motion down to the hard kernel of hatred in his soul. Her bloodstained hand pointed at him. She screamed in hysterical denial, incoherently. Vlad screeched excited orders, Odo shouted, the Khazyari cried out in dismay and confusion and surged in grotesque shapes about the roaring, all-consuming fire. Raksula was swallowed by the crowd.
“Seethe in your own wickedness, witch,” Tembujin shouted. Cursing her, cursing himself, he ran on the heels of the wind to his horse and raced into the uncertain light of day.