'So,' Kane said, 'even if we get up close to it, what then? It looks like we'd need siege engines to break down those walls, eh?'
I nodded my head, grinding my teeth together. Then I said, 'If we wait until dark, it might be too late.'
Neither of us knew what this monstrous woman wanted of Maram. Her song suggested that she might have found in Maram a long-desired mate, but this did not seem possible.
'What is she?' I whispered to Kane. 'I've never heard talk or tale of her like.'
But Kane only stared at me in silence as he shook his head.
An image of another monster flashed in my mind. 'Do you remember Meliadus? This Yaga sang of being of angel's seed, and she has something of the look of him, does she not? Do you think it's possible that Morjin might have sired a daughter as well as a son?'
'It is possible,' Kane growled out. 'The Beast has committed every abomination, every degradation of the human spirit.'
'You told us that the Marudin was to emerge from the Galadin and go on to rule a new order of beings,' I said to Kane. 'But the Yaga sang of the Marudin as if she intended to give him birth -with Maram the father!'
I peered out again from behind the tree in order to take a longerj look at the house. There came a scurry of movement from around its side, and I noticed a large, gray rat darting out from a crack in the rounded wall. The crack zigzagged vertically through the heap of bones; it seemed that an earthquake might once have rent the house nearly in two.
'That might be our chance,' I said to Kane, tapping my finger against his bow. 'Perhaps we can aim an arrow through it.'
'As Berkuar aimed an arrow at that beast?'
'If she's planning what I fear she's planning,' I said, 'her skin must soften sometime. And even if it does not, she must sleep sooner or later. There's a chance that I might be able to squeeze through the crack and kill her before she can open her eyes.'
'You're as mad as she,' he said to me. 'Mad to think you could force your way into her house without awakening her. So, you'll need help.'
He took out his black gelstei and stood staring at it. 'I might be able to steal the fire of her eyes.'
Even here, hundreds of miles from Argattha, I could feel Morjin's shadowy presence and sense him watching us as from the very eye of black gelstei that Kane held in his hand. I said to him, 'It is too dangerous!'
'So, that it is,' he growled out. 'And dangerous
not
to try.'
I scanned the bone-littered ground around the house. It would be madness, as we both knew, to expose ourselves in the light of day to the Yaga's stare anywhere in this zone.
There seemed nothing to do now except to wait for the fall of night. And so wait we did.
How was it possible that an hour spent wandering through a glade with ones beloved on a spring afternoon could pass as quickly as a heartbeat, while this hour - with the wind whooshing through the gap and the light slowly bleeding away from the stones and trees around us - seemed to go on tor an entire month? As I stood behind the tree wild Kane, wondering what was occurring inside the house, I listened to my own breathing and I counted the beats of my heart. It grew darker. From somewhere behind us, through the trees came the harsh hooing of an owl. I looked up and watched the bright constellations wheel into the sky. 'How long,' I said to Kane, 'must we wait?'
'So,' he said with a cruel smile, 'a bride and her groom, on their wedding night, might not sleep until nearly dawn.'
'But we cannot know what she truly intends. What if she
has
taken him for meat?'
'So,' Kane murmured. 'So.'
I looked down the blade of my darkened sword. I said, 'I will not wait, not another moment. Come, let's at least steal up close to the house and see what we can see.'
Kane nodded his head at this. And so we came out from behind our tree. Smoke poured out of the house's bone-made chimney in a plume limned dark as a blacksnake against the still glowing western sky. A thin, yellow light leaked from the crack in the wall. We began stalking across the stony ground straight toward it.
Kane, from ages of discipline and need, moved with the grace and quiet of a big cat. I pushed forward nearly as silently; my father had taught me to hunt sharp-eared deer in the forests of Mesh, and his lessons fill lived in my muscles and bones.
We came up closer to the house. The crack, I saw to my dismay, was too small for me to force my way through it, even if I removed my armor, clothing and several layers of skin. Even a skinny child would have a hard time of such a passage.
'Oh, my - oh, my Lord!' I heard Maram groaning from within the house. 'Oh, my, oh, oh, oh!'
We moved toward the sound of his heavy, pained voice, which flowed like burning air from the crack. Over stones and hardened earth, taking exquisite care, we drew up next to the house. I gripped my sword in one hand while I rested the other against the bones of the house to steady myself. Then I drew in a deep breath and pressed my eye to the crack.
'Oh!' Maram moaned out again. 'Oh, this is too much, too, too much - oh, my Lord!'
Through the thick wall the house seemed all to be one large, circular room, like the felt dwellings of the Sarni. On the far side, a hearth of stones held a bed of glowing coals, and a great steel cauldron - shiny and new-looking - hung bubbling over it. I had a clear line of sight toward the stone door, barred with a great beam of what appeared to be petrified wood. Two statues stood framing the doorway. Parts of them were broken off: arms and a leg, and a missing head. The crack allowed only a partial view of Maram, who lay on a large stone bed at the other half of the house. He had been stripped naked. From his great shoulders and hairy chest had been torn round, red wounds that oozed blood. Ropes, possibly made of twisted hair, bound his arms back behind his head. I could not see his legs. Neither could I see the Yaga. But I smelled her: a foul, thick stench of bloody breath and sweating skin that might never have been washed. It poured from the crack and sickened me.
'Oh - oh. Lord!' Maram moaned. 'This is the end - surely the end!'
Kane's hand fell upon my shoulder. I stepped aside so that he might have a look through the crack as well.
'Oh, oh, oh, oh!'
Then I heard the Yaga, from somewhere within the house, call out to Maram, 'You're strong, my beautiful man. The strongest yet. We'll see if you're the one, we'll surely see.'
Then she broke into song again, chanting out her love poem to Maram:
Alone I've dwelled nine hundred years
In mountains, deserts, stinking meres,
Regaling travelers where I can
While waiting for my dragon man.
No scholar, magus, king on high
If they be cool or soft or dry;
My man is molten earth's desire-,
Whose loins are full, whose blood is fire.
He comes for me, most mighty snake,
A mighty, raging thirst to slake,
Make live inside my honeyed womb
The Marudin's immortal bloom.
I am a maid of angel's seed,
An unfilled well of burning need;
My time has come to mate and breed –
I am a maid of angel's seed.
And so my suitors stop on by,
Enchanted by my violet eye;
I turn to stone the small, effete:
Unworthy mates but good for meat.
To feed my fiery, fecund forge
I fill my red, rapacious gorge;
The blood of men, most potent wine,
Exalts new life and makes divine.
With love I seize and shred and skive,
Put lips to flesh, eat men alive,
Then suck sweet marrow from their bones
And roast on coals their empty stones.
I am a maid of angel's seed,
An unfilled well of burning need,
On life's red flame I fondly feed –
I am a maid of angel's seed.
Kane pulled back from the house and looked at me. In the faint starlight, his face seemed grimmer than ever. He slashed the edge of his hand across his throat. Then he pointed back towards the trees as if telling me that we should make our escape before it was too late.
But it was already too late. The Yaga suddenly broke off singing, and I heard her sniffing the air. And then she called out: 'Is that you, little man? I
know
it is. You smell so sweet - almost as sweet as my Maram.'
I heard a shuffling of hard feet, and I quickly stepped to the side of the crack. The stench of the Yaga grew stronger, and her voice louder and clearer as it poured from the jagged crack: 'Don't be so shy, Valashu Elahad. Why don't you show yourself so that I might look upon your sweet, sweet face?'
'So that you can turn me to stone?' I called out to her. 'As you did my friend?'
'Ha, ha!' she laughed out. 'I've no desire to turn
you
into stone, though I'll surely oblige you if you linger.'
'Val!' I heard Maram shout from inside the house. 'Val! Val!'
'Let Maram go!' I called out. 'And change my friend back as he was!'
'I
could
change that hunter back, indeed, indeed I could. But he would be good only for meat then, and you don't eat your friends, do you?'
'Val!' Maram cried out yet again. 'She's telling the truth! She makes men into stone then brings them back here! When she unmakes them, they are dead!'
'Sweet Maram,' I heard the Yaga murmur. 'I haven't made
you
into stone yet, though you're harder than any man I've known, the hardest yet. Now be quiet while I talk with Valashu, or I'll have to give you another kiss.'
'Leave him alone!' I shouted. 'And how do you know my name?'
'My father told me that you might pass this way.'
'Morjin? Is he truly your father then?'
'Indeed he is. It was he who named me Jezi, which means the lovely one. And I am so very, very lovely, don't you think?' I said nothing to this, then called back to her: 'If Morjin is your father, he would not let you tell me to go away.'
'You're beginning to vex me, little man. Do you think my father has power over Jezi Yaga?'
'If he is able to speak to you from afar, then surely he has power.'
'Ha, ha - great power, it's true. But I no longer do as he commands. We settled that long ago. When he couldn't bear the defiance in my eyes, he tore them out with his own fingers. But then I bit off his thumb and defied him all the more.'
The stench of Jezi Yaga's loathing drove into my belly and made me want to vomit. I gasped out to her: 'Such hatred - for your own father!'
'Ha, ha,' she laughed out again, 'my father commanded that I should be his bride. But he was
not
my dragon man, no, no, he was not, even though he calls himself the Great Red Dragon.'
'Abomination,' Kane muttered beside me. 'Every filthy thing, every degradation.'
'Is that you, Elijin?' Jezi called out.
'You
speak of abomination?' 'So, I do,' Kane said to her. 'Morjin used a varistei, did he not, to bring you forth?'
'The greenstone,' Jezi Yaga said. 'Ha, ha - he
did
use it this way. And he wanted to use it to breed a new race out of my sweet, sweet womb.'
'So, the Marudin.'
'The Marudin, the Marudin,' she sang out. 'The Great One who will defy even the Dark One. But
my
father is not to
be his
father. When I told him that, he took my eyes and gave me these pretty purple stones in their place. He said that since my heart was stone, I should turn to stone any man who tried to love me. My skin can be hard as stone when I make it so, and therefore no one can kill me with sword or arrow. But my heart is never stone - if it were, I would die. As I nearly
did
die. He cursed me, my sweet father did, then cast me out. And so it's been ever since. I've looked all across the world for my dragon man. I've looked upon so many men these many, many years. One day, I shall find him.'
A moan from Maram returned me from the horrible past to the even more horrifying present. He called out, 'Leave me - leave me alone!'
'Yes, Valashu,' the maddened being inside the house said to me. 'Leave us alone. Go off to kill my father, and I will thank you for it. But leave me alone so that I might test the strength of the snake.'
'We won't leave without Maram!' I shouted.
'Will you not?' she shouted back. 'You vex, little man! You vex me.'
Her voice faded, and I heard her feet shuffling against rough floor stones. And Maram cried out, 'No, please don't bite me again -no!'
'You vex me!' Jezi Yaga called out. 'You vex me!'
Just then Maram let loose a terrible scream. It froze me motionless, as if I were a piece of ice standing with my fist clenched around my sword in the dark of the night. It took all my will to keep myself from whipping about and looking through the crack into the house.
'Val!' Maram shouted to me. 'Go away, or she'll eat me alive! Go, and save yourself!'
I could think of nothing else to do. It would be folly, as both Kane and I knew, for Kane to try to put an arrow through the crack. He brought his lips up close to my ear and whispered, 'Let's go back to the others while we still can.'
And so we did. We retreated as we had come, past trees and rocks, down the sloping ground toward the stream. When we drew near the place where Jezi had turned Berkuar to stone, I called out into the darkness so as not to give alarm: 'Atara! Master Juwain! Liljana! We return!'
It took our friends, drawn up with the horses near the stream, only moments to determine that we did not return in triumph. I quickly described Jezi Yaga's house and Maram's imprisonment. I gave an account of our exchange with Jezi. When I finished, Atara cried out 'Oh, but this is terrible, terrible! I should have seen it! And I should see a way out, now, but I can't!'