Shadowfire (Birthgrave #2)

by Tanith Lee

They smelled incendiary, as though they were dragons. It was their smell rather than their size that warned me of the danger in them, for they were not large.

“You are not Slarn,” he said. The masks of the city men had no apertures at the mouth and the voices that came from them were filtered and changed. I could tell this much, however: he was neither a young man nor a nervous one.

He blurted out two syllables I guessed to be an oath. Yet aware of his speech and still unable to fathom the word, I realized in a moment it was not an oath but a name. “Vazkor.”

I felt contempt, black and deep as the hole in which they lay. Pride in myself had brought me here; now my pride urged me away. I was not one with this mortal wreckage, crawling like insects in their own filth.

The body of the silver-mask who had renamed me was missing—he must have lived long enough to crawl into their camp and warn them. Informed of everything, they had negligently formed their cordon and let us leap into it, like moths into the candle. The warriors behind me faltered. They had never fought any but their tribal kin. What confronted them had an appearance of sorcery.

I felt no battle lust; it was a grim task that must be done.

I, too, went searching shortly, destructive and covetous as any of them, with a sense of I knew not what gnawing at my spirits.

I had often heard the tale of men who preferred suicide to this or that shame or deprivation or terror. However, hearing the tale and seeing the evidence are not the same. It shook me, though. It made me think at once, rationally and with an abject, instinctive loathing, what would be my test, my ultimate unbearable burden, that I would choose my own iron in my belly rather than endure?

“Be happy then, you filth, you diseased and verminous rubbish. Be happy and die of it.”

I was confounded. I had raped women on countless raids and tribal wars. They had bitten me, screamed, cried tears, or whined with pleasure. They had not coolly insulted me.

“Who or what is Vazkor?” “You,” she said. “Tribal savage, dog, offal. Ask the dead.”

“Even my name is to be defiled,” she said. “But I will call you Vazkor.”

I had half dreamed of bringing away one of the tubular cannon on its wheeled cart, but the braves would not touch it.

We had one prisoner only and she was mine.

try tricks and you will be at the mercy of others who are less courteous even than I.”

I could not bring myself to hit her. I was intoxicated with her body and would not damage it, and this she knew, sensing her power already,

the thought took root in me. If I resembled their dead prince, his must be the spirit which had guided me, my possession.

Later, of course, they would hate me the more for the favor owed.

Slave she might be, but she had been valuable in the fortress.

she would not drink when I was by.

There is some child’s legend that she was slain but recovered from death, that she took on the form of a white lynx,

I had seen corpses in plenty, but had not returned to a battlefield when the crows were banqueting there.

“I am not your slave,” she said, “though you may play at it. Hang me with shackles, beat me, murder me. I am still no slave of yours.”

I will get you with child. Then we will see how much my slave you are.”

Too much alive, I could not envisage my alleged slaughter.

that I remembered my mother. She also would believe me slain or slave. I had forgotten that.

Already the bond was snapped that had held the twenty-three as one, and their shout for me was only so much frosty breath left behind.

It was not so much slovenliness that had made me miss it, either, but the arrogance that had come on me when I entered the fortress, and which had never ebbed from my veins.

I saw them all through her eyes, as she was seeing me, a herd not worth the driving.

And they showed their teeth, tasting the flavor of it, though their loyalty to me was gone.

Through her weeping, you could see her fury. She had missed her miniature queenship because of my death, and she could have killed me for dying.

These, my best of enemies, were going to exclaim to their gods of my virtues and the joy they had had from me. They were going to entreat the Lords of the Black Place to set me free to return to them.

Only in legend does the dead man reply to the call, generally ghastly to behold, and without his head or some such thing. On the living earth nobody comes; it is just a piece of the chanting to crave and entreat.

At this Seel changed his stance. Leaping upward as though his drawers had caught alight, he whirled at me, beating his arms, squawking, “Away, Undead, away, away! Back to the Shadow Region!”

He opened his swollen lips to utter some exquisite idiocy, but there was suddenly a lot of screaming that saved him the trouble.

there was something in her attitude that was as naked as her face was not.

She did not weep, but she looked finished and withered as a branch burned in the fire.

Ettook never visited my welcoming feast, though several men were there who did not much like me, yet considered it expedient.

it teaches you that you must not trust to the things you know, that it is better to build on shifting sand than the rock which may confound you on the day it shatters.

I had never met pride in a woman before, not true pride, or, if I had, I had not known it.

It is not constructive to ponder on a woman’s thighs when you are shoulder to shoulder with a battle-wild brave and a band of his spear-brothers flying up on left and right.

I had lost my fighting madness, lost my joy in killing, lost my hate, or most of it. It was not that I was afraid. It was that it no longer mattered to me, my strength and my youth and my valor had gone for nothing because I could not take my victories to her.

He was distressed as ever that I had missed death; he never ceased, I think, to wish for it.

I was cutting the cloth to fit me, and Finnuk and his daughter getting the edge of the knife.

Her eyes were wilder than any I had ever seen. They told me something of my own injustice to her, and I did not like it.

It did not occur to me then that it could shame her to love me, shame her blood and her pride, make her doubt her reason almost, that she should hunger for one on whom her kind spit.

Let no man count himself fortunate till his gods brand it on his back.

She chided me for a savage, she mocked me; she damned our ignorance, our lack of books or music, our treatment of our women and ourselves. I bore all this because her eyes denied it.

me. I had never before, since I began, been celibate so long, but I knew the feast was coming.

I have said Demizdor was my world in those months. This made me less aware of other things. Even fighting I got more wounds because of it, growing careless, though never feckless enough to let myself be killed. But I was stone-blind to Tathra. Afterward I cursed myself for my stupidity. By then the hour for cursing and for wisdom was past.