Mazirian the Magician by Jack Vance

Liane. “Look at me! Note my perfect grace, the beauty of my form and feature, my great eyes, as golden as your own, my manifest will and power … It is you who should serve me. That is how I will have it.” He sank upon a low divan. “Woman, give me wine.”
    She shook her head. “In my small domed hut I cannot be forced. Perhaps outside on Thamber Meadow — but in here, among my blue and red tassels, with twenty blades of steel at my call, you must obey me … So choose. Either arise and go, never to return, or else agree to serve me on one small mission, and then have me and all my ardor.”
    Liane sat straight and stiff. An odd creature, the golden witch. But, indeed, she was worth some exertion, and he would make her pay for her impudence.
    â€œVery well then,” he said blandly. “I will serve you. What do you wish? Jewels? I can suffocate you in pearls, blind you with diamonds. I have two emeralds the size of your fist, and they are green oceans, where the gaze is trapped and wanders forever among vertical green prisms …”
    â€œNo, no jewels —”
    â€œAn enemy, perhaps. Ah, so simple. Liane will kill you ten men. Two steps forward, thrust — thus !” He lunged. “And souls go thrilling up like bubbles in a beaker of mead.”
    â€œNo. I want no killing.”
    He sat back, frowning. “What then?”
    She stepped to the back of the room and pulled at a drape. It swung aside, displaying a golden tapestry. The scene was a valley bounded by two steep mountains, a broad valley where a placid river ran, past a quiet village and so into a grove of trees. Golden was the river, golden the mountains, golden the trees — golds so various, so rich, so subtle that the effect was like a many-colored landscape. But the tapestry had been rudely hacked in half.
    Liane was entranced. “Exquisite, exquisite …”
    Lith said, “It is the Magic Valley of Ariventa so depicted. The other half has been stolen from me, and its recovery is the service I wish of you.”
    â€œWhere is the other half?” demanded Liane. “Who is the dastard?”
    Now she watched him closely. “Have you ever heard of Chun? Chun the Unavoidable?”
    Liane considered. “No.”
    â€œHe stole the half to my tapestry, and hung it in a marble hall, and this hall is in the ruins to the north of Kaiin.”
    â€œHa!” muttered Liane.
    â€œThe hall is by the Place of Whispers, and is marked by a leaning column with a black medallion of a phoenix and a two-headed lizard.”
    â€œI go,” said Liane. He rose. “One day to Kaiin, one day to steal, one day to return. Three days.”
    Lith followed him to the door. “Beware of Chun the Unavoidable,” she whispered.
    And Liane strode away whistling, the red feather bobbing in his green cap. Lith watched him, then turned and slowly approached the golden tapestry. “Golden Ariventa,” she whispered, “my heart cries and hurts with longing for you …”

    The Derna is a swifter, thinner river than the Scaum, its bosomy sister to the south. And where the Scaum wallows through a broad dale, purple with horse-blossom, pocked white and gray with crumbling castles, the Derna has sheered a steep canyon, overhung by forested bluffs.
    An ancient flint road long ago followed the course of the Derna, but now the exaggeration of the meandering has cut into the pavement, so that Liane, treading the road to Kaiin, was occasionally forced to leave the road and make a detour through banks of thorn and tubegrass which whistled in the breeze.
    The red sun, drifting across the universe like an old man creeping to his death-bed, hung low to the horizon when Liane breasted Porphiron Scar, looked across white-walled Kaiin and the blue bay of Sanreale beyond.
    Directly below was the market-place, a medley of stalls selling fruit, slabs of pale meat, molluscs from