The Hidden City

hissing susurration of their endless whispering. Their eyes following me wherever I go—and their laughing and whispering. I hear the hiss, hiss of their whispering endless whisper—always my name—Ssscar-pa, Ssscar-pa, Ssscar-pa, again and again, hissing in my ears. Flaunting their rounded limbs and rolling their soot-lined eyes. Plotting, scheming with the endless hissing whispers, always seeking ways to hurt me. Ssscar-pa, Ssscar-pa, trying to humiliate me.’ His blue-tinged eyeballs were starting from his face, and his lips and beard were flecked with foam. ‘I was nothing. They made me nothing. They called me Selga’s bastard and gave me pennies to lead them to the beds of my mother and my sisters and cuffed me and spat on me and laughed at me when I cried and they lusted after my mother and my sisters and all around me the hissing in my ears—and I smell the sound—that sweet cloying sound of rotten flesh and stale lust all purple and writhing with the liquid hiss of their whispers and—’
    Then his mad eyes filled with terror, and he cringed back from her and fell, grovelling in the mud. ‘Please, Mother!’ he wailed. ‘I didn’t do it! Silbie did it! pleasepleaseplease don’t lock me in there again. Please not in the dark. Pleasepleaseplease not in the dark. Not in the dark!’ And he scrambled to his feet and fled back into the forest with his ‘Pleasepleaseplease’ echoing back in a long, dying fall.
    Ehlana was suddenly overcome with a wrenching, unbearable pity and she bowed her head and wept.
    Zalasta was waiting for them in Natayos. The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had seen a flowering of Arjuni civilization, a flowering financed largely by the burgeoning slave-trade. An ill-advised slave-raid into southern Atan, however, coupled with a number of gross policy blunders by the Tamul administrators of that region, had unleashed an uncontrolled Atan punitive expedition. Natayos had been a virtual Ssm of a city, with stately buildings and broad avenues. It was now a forgotten ruin buried in the jungle, its tumbled buildings snarled in ropelike vines, its stately halls now the home of chattering monkeys and brightly colored tropical birds, and its darker recesses inhabited by snakes and the scurrying rats which were their prey.
    But now humans had returned to Natayos. Scarpa’s army was quartered there, and Arjunis, Cynesgans, and rag-tag battalions of Elenes had cleared the quarter near the ancient city’s northern gate of vines, trees, monkeys and reptiles in order to make it semi-habitable.
    Zalasta stood leaning on his staff at the half-fallen gate, his silvery-bearded face drawn with fatigue and a look of hopeless pain in his eyes. His first reaction when his son arrived with the captives was one of rage. He snarled at Scarpa in Styric, a language that seemed eminently suited for reprimand and one which Ehlana did not understand. She took no small measure of satisfaction, however, in the look of sullen apprehension that crossed Scarpa’s face. For all his blustering and airs of preeminent superiority, Scarpa still appeared to stand in a certain awe and fear of the ancient Styric who had incidentally sired him.
    Once, and only once, apparently stung by something Zalasta said to him in a tone loaded with contempt, Scarpa drew himself up and snarled a reply. Zalasta’s reaction was immediate and savage. He sent his son reeling with a heavy blow of his staff, then leveled its polished length at him, muttered a few words, and unleashed a fiery spot of light from the tip of the staff. The burning spot struck the still-staggering Scarpa in the belly, and he doubled over sharply, clawing at his stomach and shrieking in agony. He fell onto the muddy earth, kicking and convulsing as Zalasta’s spell burned into him. His father, the deadly staff still leveled, watched his writhing son coldly for several endless minutes.
    ‘Now do you understand?’ he demanded in a deadly voice, speaking in Tamul this time.
    ‘Yes. yes! Father!’ Scarpa shrieked. ‘Stop! I beg you!’
    Zalasta let him writhe and squirm for a while longer. Then he lowered the staff. ‘You are not master here,’ he declared. ‘You are no more than a brain-sick incompetent. Any one of a dozen otherrs here could command this army, so do not try my patience further. Next time, son or no son, I will let the spell follow its natural course. Pain is like a disease, Scarpa. After a few days—or weeks—the body