Day by Night Read online

  DAW Books presents classic works of imaginative fiction by multiple award-winning author TANITH LEE

  THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY

  THE BIRTHGRAVE

  SHADOWFIRE

  (originally published as Vazkor, Son of Vazkor)

  HUNTING THE WHITE WITCH

  (originally published as Quest for the White Witch)

  TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH

  NIGHT’S MASTER

  DEATH’S MASTER

  DELUSION’S MASTER

  DELIRIUM’S MISTRESS

  NIGHT’S SORCERIES

  THE WARS OF VIS

  THE STORM LORD

  ANACKIRE

  THE WHITE SERPENT

  AND MORE:

  COMPANIONS ON THE ROAD

  VOLKHAVAAR

  ELECTRIC FOREST

  SABELLA

  KILL THE DEAD

  DAY BY NIGHT

  LYCANTHIA

  DARK CASTLE, WHITE HORSE

  CYRION

  SUNG IN SHADOW

  TAMASTARA

  THE GORGON AND OTHER BEASTLY TALES

  DAYS OF GRASS

  A HEROINE OF THE WORLD

  REDDER THAN BLOOD

  DAW is proud to be reissuing these classic books in new editions beginning in 2015.

  Day by Night

  Tanith Lee

  DAW Books, Inc

  Donald A. Wollheim, Founder

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Elizabeth R. Wollheim

  Sheila E. Gilbert

  Publishers

  www.dawbooks.com

  Copyright © 1980 by Tanith Lee.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover illustration by Galen Dara.

  Cover design by Katie Anderson.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 408.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY, 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698404564

  First Paperback Printing, November 1980

  First New Electronic Edition, August 2020

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  DEDICATION

  To Bernard Lee, my Father,

  who generously gave me a planet, and all its problems.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Tanith Lee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Part One

  Part Two

  Chapter Two

  Part One

  Part Two

  Chapter Three

  Part One

  Part Two

  Chapter Four

  Part One

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Part One

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Part One

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Part One

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Part One

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Part One

  Half a staed below the palace of Hirz, the formal gardens gradually smoothed themselves into the curve of the lake shore. Here, where jade-green undulations of liquid broke on the pale gold sand, stood a golden young woman and her three attendant robots.

  Apart from the Hirz Palace, no other building was visible above or along the arms of the shore. This portion of the Yunea, for twenty staeds along the Ring in either direction, was the property of Hirz. Hest, lay the holding of the Domms, to hespa, the decadent estate of the Thars.

  It was the fifth hour, as two or three singing clocks within the palace had just announced. It was also Jate, the waking time. Nevertheless, customs had changed. Only the girl and her three robots occupied the scene, and before them the lake spread its empty, sun-flecked sheet under the wide green sky. Then the Voice Robot spoke.

  “Vel Thaidis, your brother is coming.”

  Vel Thaidis did not bother to glance either way, since her sight could not match the optics of the robot. Instead, she looked at the robot itself in the form of Courteous Address.

  “You are certain that it’s Velday?”

  “I will check the patterns. Yes, they are his. There are also companions.”

  “Who?” Vel Thaidis said, and the inner polarizing lids of her eyes flickered as if with tension.

  “There are altogether five extra persons of both genders. Shall I name all of them?”

  “No. Is Ceedres Yune Thar among them?”

  “Yes, Vel Thaidis. He is riding with your brother.”

  Vel Thaidis turned and looked at the lake, adopting the Distant Address.

  “Advise me. I wish to avoid Ceedres Yune Thar.”

  “You should return to the palace and shut yourself into your own apartments immediately.”

  “Bad counsel, Voice,” Vel Thaidis said sharply. “Velday will give Ceedres free rein in the palace. Ceedres will batten on our hospitality, as always. If I’m there, perhaps I can keep some control of the situation. I can’t avoid him after all.”

  “Hespa, the sand cloud your brother’s vehicle is creating is now apparent to the human eye,” said the Voice Robot.

  Vel Thaidis, angrily, turned once more and gazed to her left, hespaward, through the dark lenses of her polarized inner lids. The three robots also turned. They were of a blond matte plastum, creamily shining in the unchanging sunlight. In shape they resembled women, with delicate doll-like features, blond spun hair and colored mineral eyes, to enhance their aesthetic value. The voice of the Voice Robot was rather high, but pleasant and not unnatural. Yunea science had long perfected such matters.

  The young woman herself, Vel Thaidis Yune Hirz, had been formed in one of the Yunea Matrixes, a formation both genetic and human. Burnt gold of skin like all her race, she had the curvaceous graceful figure which the women of her line inherited, and the beautiful face that reappeared, in either sex of the Hirz, at regular intervals. Her hair had been bleached and tinted a faint milky green, then arranged in folds and coils over her head and down her back. Her long draped garment was smoke-white, and bracelets of apricot metal ringed her slim metallic wrists.

  The sand-cloud neared like a running plume along the fifth-hour hespan shore. Now she saw the open car, the green parasol wobbling above like a long-stalked flower growing out of it, and the two madly racing lion-dogs of plated bronze thundering before. And now she saw Velday, her brother, a figment of the same Hirz beauty, grinning as he twitched the reins, and the wind of the race parted his gilt-color hair. And finally she saw Ceedres Yune Thar standing beside Velday, also handsome, also gilt-haired, the driver-box held casually in his hand. He grinned too, a grin exactly like Vel
day’s grin, for much of Ceedres’ fascination for others lay in masterful tricks of imitation. And as he grinned, he skimmed the speedometer of the box up and up the scale. Now the lion-dogs leapt in an ecstasy of propulsion, and sparks showered from their open mouths. One instant the chariot was a staed away, next instant the fore-whip of flying sand stung across Vel Thaidis’ bare arms and her throat. Then the chariot was stationary, the bronze beasts petrified in a crouching posture, the reins slack in Velday’s hands, and the driver-box idle in the hands of Ceedres.

  “How lovely you are,” Ceedres said directly to Vel Thaidis, without preliminary, the compliment-as-insult method he was so good at.

  She stared at him, and immediately he copied her stare, staring back with all her own intensity reproduced.

  “Oh, come now,” said Velday. “You’re not going to fight already. My sister and my friend should like each other.”

  “She mistrusts me, I fear,” said Ceedres softly. His polarized eyes went on and on, staring at her. “How can you be so cruel to me, Vaidi, when I—”

  “Don’t call me that,” she said to him. It was a trap he had set her, of course, to force her into speech with him. Even so, she would not allow him to use the diminutive of her name: Vaidi, the abbreviation due to family, intimate or husband.

  “I’m sorry, Vel Thaidis,” Ceedres said. The sun glinted on his fair hair like a mesh, more polished than the hair of her brother. Polished as Ceedres’ manner, now. “Truly sorry. I beg your pardon. And yours, Vay,” he added, deliberately showing her that Velday permitted him the diminutive.

  “Oh, don’t trouble yourself, Cee,” said Velday, entering wholeheartedly into the game.

  She forgave her brother. Ceedres had enchanted him since childhood: Ceedres could enchant almost anyone. Only she, it seemed to her, could fathom the roots of what Ceedres was. But she was accustomed to this triangular situation, which had also existed between the three of them since childhood. And though, at some deep level, it profoundly disturbed her, the disturbance was familiar as a garment. Sometimes, too, she admitted to herself that she enjoyed it, the quarreling, the flare of her instinct, warning her. As a child she had been jealous at losing her brother to Ceedres, and Velday had striven to soothe her jealousy, and still did, and these blandishments she relished. She guiltily relished the egotistic awareness that she alone was proof against Ceedres, had analyzed and duly despised him as a parasite. She was not self-blind, but she was young.

  “Well,” Velday said, leaning on the side of the vehicle, “we kept J’ara in the Slumopolis. The food is always so filthy—great wads of papery stuff and synthetic meats. But the drink, of course, is rare. Only Hirz vintage will do after that marvelous glue they serve at the J’ara Mansions. Cee will be joining us for breakfast, my sister, and about three more—when they catch up. Do you allow it?”

  A second, broader plume of sand was just blooming on the hespan horizon.

  Vel Thaidis had not kept J’ara (Jate-in-Maram or stay-awake), but Maram itself, the time of sleep. Now the palace would be filled by whatever sleep-starved aristocrats Velday had collected during his J’ara, half-intoxicated, furiously hungry, argumentative and flippant.

  Vel Thaidis felt a little involuntary shrinking, a little surge of mournful excitement. Crowds drew her and repelled. As Ceedres did. As an adolescent, she had hidden herself from gatherings of all types. But her father and mother were dead. Velday and she remained the solitary figureheads of Hirz.

  She smiled at Velday, to disarm her words: “When have you ever asked me?” she said. “You do as you want.”

  She was a year his senior. Theoretically, the palace was beneath her jurisdiction.

  She stepped aside on to the sand-excluding stone path that led from the shore to the palace. The three robots moved after her.

  “We’ll follow at our own pace,” Velday called.

  Ceedres said to him, loud enough for her to hear, “Just give her the space to poison a cup or two for me.”

  With a flash of exhilarated rage, she looked over her shoulder at him and said, “The only way to poison you, Ceedres, would be to make you swallow your tongue.”

  * * *

  • • •

  An avenue of apple bushes soon flanked the path and drew it into the gardens of the palace. Ten feet in height, the bushes leaned together overhead, their thousands of dark-green fruits, the size of large buttons, hanging from boughs and stems. Beyond the avenue of apple bushes, the garden rose on banks of lawns, set with trees of fleshy, moisture-storing leaves, tiers of foliage that were hardly trees at all, satin cacti of powdery pastel grays and pinks, thin fountains of jade liquid, enormous flowers with plump, wax-white petals, each broader than a man’s skull. Bronze and plastum marble, the portico of the house appeared, and its transparent doors slid open in answer to Vel Thaidis’ command.

  Throughout, the palace was cool and tinged with many soft colors. Its zenith-oriented windows were painted and, blazingly sunlit behind, cast vivid traceries on the floor. Since the sun never altered its position, neither did these traceries. Sometimes an infrequent imbalance in the sky-ceiling thickened the light for an hour or so, and muddied the jewel brightness of the windows. In Vel Thaidis’ tenth year, there had been such a happening. An esoteric globe had been produced immediately in the main salon of the palace, and kindled into yellow radiance, while mild prayers were offered to the gods of Yunea science. The globe had to do with occasional religious observance, and communicated with one of the outer temples beyond the great estates. At the second prayer, a button was depressed. An image evolved inside the globe, the transmission of an auto-priest. This mechanical being, regaled, obviously, in the Courteous Address, replied with reassurance. Yet, itself a symbol of the law, morality and religious ethic of the Yunea, its reassurance was conceivably as symbolic.

  If the gods were vague, so too was the unease caused by the thickening of the light. The aristocrats of the Yunea did not believe any true harm could come to them. In the Slumopolis, she had been told later, robot lawguards had mobilized to contain an upsurge of panic. But what else could you expect of the Slumopolis? Naturally, its people were educationally ignorant of the function of the sky-ceiling of the planet, which provided an enclosed atmosphere for the species below. Vel Thaidis, however, had realized, even by her tenth year, that though the Yunean aristocracy was educated in all the facts and mechanics of its world, it no longer comprehended them. Science cared for her favored children. They had no need to comprehend. Their assurance and bravery at the time of half-darkness was due, therefore, not to knowledge, but to complacency, for they were spoiled and supposed the gods of science loved them and would protect them always. They were even conscious of their own attitude, but it was impossible for them not to succumb to it, and Vel Thaidis had succumbed with the rest.

  Now, she placed her hand on a wall panel.

  “Prepare breakfast for my brother and five companions, with caffea and the last-chosen wine from the cellars.”

  The panel sang, and she sensed activity pour through the house, unseen; circuits, synapses, passing the message, and the kitchens buried beneath brimming into life.

  She wondered if her brother would sleep after the breakfast and the J’ara, and doubted he would. Infants were taught to compose themselves for sleep somewhere during the eight hours of Maram, but the training did not always hold. Velday was now one of those who inclined to sleep only one Maram in six, with an hour every second or third day under the dream-wash technique, the machinery every Maram chamber provided.

  Vel Thaidis herself chose seven hours of sleep at most Marams. Suddenly, standing in the pale shade of the palace, she beheld her unlikeness to her brother, not only regarding J’ara, but in all things, with a bewildered surprise. She had never properly thought about it before. Like the running battle with Ceedres, the dissimilarity had always been there. Yet she and Velday were near in affection. O
r were they?

  At their inception, their parents had been old, a father in his three-hundredth genetic year, a mother barely younger. The pair’s rapture with each other had kept them from procreation a long while. Finally, reluctantly, they had obeyed the law. They had permitted the reproduction elements to be taken in order that two children might be matrixed.

  No disease existed in the Yunea. Even in the Slumopolis, specific illness, when detected, was swiftly erased. But among the aristocrats whose existence could be lengthily prolonged into three or four hundred spans, boredom came to be the killer, a bizarre running down, a sort of decline and decay, nonphysical but fatal. To this malaise, the father of Velday and Vel Thaidis had submitted in his three hundred and twentieth year. Their mother lived a year longer. Now only their dust remained in golden urns. During their lives, in any case, they were reclusive, and hardly more affectionate than the two urns they had ultimately become. They had ignored the compulsory offspring scientific tradition demanded of the princely houses. Beyond strictures of behavior and religious vagaries, no communion linked parent with child. Was it merely this, then, which had formed an alternate bond between brother and sister?

  Velday was really the only person who had proper significance for Vel Thaidis. Nobody else had ever seemed—what word was she seeking?—accessible. By which she meant, surely, sympathetic—safe. Vel Thaidis frowned, peering into her own mind in this way, and unnerved by it. If her link with her brother were spurious, probably he had already spiritually broken free. And she, what was left for her?

  Within doors, the inner polarized lids had lifted from her eyes, which showed clear and dark and now quite blank with insecurity.

  She heard a dim whirring as the main salon prepared itself, and outside the distant clatter of chariots and the robot lion-dogs bounding into their mechanical stalls. Strains of laughter were floating on one of the terraces, then a great shout lifted and more laughter—some joke or antic, probably of Ceedres’ devising.