Anackire

1

Dawn came to Istris over a silver sea. The slim-towered capital, which was also the mistress-port of Karmiss, released a shower of birds on the sky, a shoal of slender fishing skimmers on the water. The dawn bell rang from a cupola high on the Ashara Temple—a custom of Shansar-over-the-ocean.

Kesarh Am Xai, standing at his casement, looked into the sunrise and cursed it.

Hearing him speak, the girl still lying in the great bed murmured, “My lord?”

Kesarh did not glance at her.

“Get up. Get out.”

He stood where he was, naked, his back to her as she obeyed him.

The mixture of his blood showed clearly, the tawny lightness of his skin, the black hair, dark eyes. His looks were arresting, the young face vivid with intelligence and power. Tall, sparely and strongly built, his body also was possessed of a natural and powerful physical grace, elegant even unclothed. In the flesh, his lineage had served him well. In all other ways it had failed him. He was, among the minor princes of Karmiss, one of the least. A stray Shansarian had got him, the more forward of twins, on a lesser princess of the old Karmian royal house, in the frenetic year following the Lowland War. The other twin was a girl. They were not alike, Kesarh and his sister, though they had shared the womb in closest company. Val Nardia was an exquisite white-skinned doll, with light eyes almost the shade of honey. And her hair, as sometimes happened with mixed blood, was the same fabulous scarlet the rising sun now dashed on the bay of Istris.

So, he cursed the dawn, and his sister.

The slut he had taken to bed the previous night was gone. Kesarh turned and began to dress himself, drinking the last cupful of wine from the jug as he did so.

Going outside, he paused, looking at the guard on duty there. Since adolescence Kesarh had thought it wise to have his apartments guarded. This man, however, was leaning on the wall, asleep—even despite the fluttering past of the girl. Kesarh drew his dagger. Catching him suddenly about the throat, the Prince pressed the honed blade into the sentry’s skin. Blood welled and the man came to himself with a startled oath.

“So the assassin would have caught you, and thereafter caught myself.”

“My lord—I’d have woken—”

“Yes. Like this. But the blade through your windpipe.”

Kesarh let him go, and watched the fellow straighten in his unblazoned mail, a hand to his bleeding neck.

“You can choose, soldier,” Kesarh said. “Seek my sergeant and ask him for ten lashes. When you have recovered from them, return to my service. Or else surrender your issue-weapons and the clothes I put on your back and lose yourself in the alleys, or whatever other hole you were dug up from.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The soldier, mouth twisted, bowed. He was Karmian, dark hair and copper skin. There was a lightness to his eyes, but that might be only a Vis heritage. He would choose the lashes, probably.

Kesarh walked on along the corridor, his black mood enhanced yet ornamented by the soldier’s respectful hate striking between his shoulderblades.

His sister’s modest apartments were already busy and vocal. In the antechamber the chests stood piled and ready. The female fussings irritated him and he walked straight through the scurrying and swirling of skirts, the stares of big painted eyes, into her bedchamber.

Val Nardis was standing, as he had stood, before a long window, but facing into the room. The moment she saw him, she froze all over her stillness. He too had stopped dead. From childhood he had been used to seeing her in such silks and velvets as their station allowed, her hair plaited with jewelry, and at her throat invariably their dead mother’s golden torc with its three black Karmian pearls. Now she was dressed for the coming heat of the day in a gown of unbleached linen. Her skin was without cosmetics or gems, and her hair hung loose about her, one long combed flame.

Something checked him, he was not sure what it was.

He indicated, not looking at them, the two women who were in the bedchamber.

“Send them away.”

Val Nardia drew in one deep breath. But she did not have to say anything to the women, they were already in retreat. The door curtain rustled and the door was closed. Beyond, the ante-chamber had turned very quiet.

“Have you come to bid me farewell?” Val Nardia said. Her eyes had fallen and she was pale, a pallor easily discernible through such fair skin. She looked even younger than her youth.

“If you like. Farewell, dearest sister.”

“Don’t,” she said. She swallowed; he saw the movement of her throat. “Don’t upbraid me, Kesarh. This should be a happy day for me, and you should be happy for me.”

“Happy to see you go, to waste your life. Be happy then, you witless mare.”

The lash of anger seemed to release them both. She looked up at him in fear as he came toward her. He stood less than a foot from her, and reached out and grasped her suddenly by the arms. Her eyes filled at once with moisture, perhaps not tears. She looked at him, shaking her head.

“All this for Ashara-Anackire. All this to be buried in Ankabek.”

“I shall be a priestess of the goddess,” she cried out. “Is there something better for me here?”

“I am here.”

“You—” she whispered. Tears or not, the drops ran out of her eyes.

“And it’s because of me that you’re leaving the court.”

“No, Kesarh.”

“Yes, Kesarh. You’re afraid to the roots of your spirit of me, and of yourself when with me. Aren’t you, my little sister?”

They regarded each other. “Let me go,” she said eventually.

“Why? In Lan it’s thought quite proper.”

“Kesarh—”

“Father and daughter, brother and sister. To lie together, to wed, even.” He grinned at her. She watched him it seemed in a horrible fascination. “Let’s fly to Lan and be married, and live in the hills and spill a horde of brats.”

She struggled between his hands, then ceased to struggle. She lowered now not merely her eyes but her head.

“It isn’t that you want me,” she said, “but only that you must have me. Everything you desire you must possess.”

“I’ve little enough. A title that means nothing. A cupboard euphemistically called a room in the lower palace. A strip of land at Xai that yields nothing but rotten gourds and diseases. But if you’d stay, I might wrest something from the rubbish. For both of us.”

“I only want peace.”

“Which is to be had away from me?”

She looked up again and into his eyes.

“Yes.”

“And in a few nights, Zastis will be burning in the sky. What then? You’re not white enough or yellow enough, my half-breed sister, to ignore the Red Moon.”

“There are disciplines practiced in Ankabek, learned from Lowland temple lore—”

“And none of them so effective as a man against you in the sheets. You’ve had Zastis lovers, Val Nardia, if never the one you truly wanted.”

She wrenched away from him at last, and he laughed softly, his face now full of contemptuous dislike.

“No,” she said, “you’ve never been able to commit that wrong, at least.”

“But you think finally I shall force you? Is that why you’re running away?”

“Yes, then, if you must have it. Running from you. Oh, not simply your lusts, your demands. From everything you are. Your corrupt dreams, your plans, your clever brain fermenting into a sewer—”

He caught her by the hair this time and pulled her sharply against him. Her slanders were cut short as he brought his mouth down on hers.

At first she grit her teeth to keep him out, but he had also cut off her breath. Soon her lips parted to gain air. The tingle of Zastis was already apparent to those susceptible. He felt her trembling tension alter, and suddenly her hands were locked across his back. For a lengthy swiftness of moments he swam strongly in the fragrant coolness of her mouth, in the pleasure of her own strength answering his, the narrow hands fierce on him. Then her struggles abruptly began again. She pushed at him, clawed at him, and he stepped away, drunk on her and dazzled.

To his bemused, amused, furious surprise she had snatched up a little fruit knife from a table.

“Get out,” she said. Her voice was no more than a cough, but the tiny blade glinted.

Kesarh turned. He retraced his steps to the door, paused, and glanced back at her. At once she raised the knife, poising it to be thrown.

“Farewell, gentle sister,” he said. “Remember me in the hot crimson nights, alone on your religious mattress.”

Only when the door had closed on him did Val Nardia carefully replace the knife beside the fruit. It required care, since she could see nothing now for her tears.

In the stony under-palace, Kesarh’s guard sergeant surveyed a covered court, and the long post at its center, thumbs hooked in his belt.

“Yes, that’s his way, our Lord Kesarh. To send you on your own authority. You’re not the first by any means, soldier. Nor won’t be the last. Too much beer, was it? Or too much of the other thing?”

The Karmian guardsman—he had given his name a year ago as Rem—said nothing. The sergeant did not expect him to. With ten lashes in the offing from the prescribed whip, known among the men as Biter, few saw anything to joke or intellectualize over.

Kesarh had ten private guard, the permitted number for a prince of his lowly lights, a by-blow, with the royalty and the elite yellow-man’s blood in different parents. The bastards of the conqueror Shansar king and his brothers did much better. Kesarh’s ten men, however, mysteriously and schizophrenically fluctuated. Number Seven, for example, could be stocky and scarred one day, stocky and smooth the next, tall and smooth the next. Secretly listed under every single number there were now ten soldiers, which added up to a hundred, ninety of them unofficially in Kesarh’s private army. The practice was not uncommon, but Kesarh was more subtle, and more accumulative, than most. He also had a distinct and conceivably unfair advantage. Charisma was either natural to or absent in a leader. The Prince Am Xai had a goodly share, a peculiar dark and pitiless human magic that kept his men enthralled even though they frequently had some grievance against him, for his brand of justice was often bizarre, and occasionally actually unjust.

And this one, now, was going to get Kesarh’s malevolent unjust justice all nicely cut into his back.

“And who do we send you to to be looked after,” the sergeant said conversationally, “when we take you down?”

The sick and the punished did not lie up here. The whole force, save those ten on duty, were billeted about the city. Sometimes they deserted, but there were always more to be found. This one, this Rem, had been a thief, had he not?

“There isn’t anyone,” said the soldier flatly.

“What, no friendly doxy you keep in a burrow somewhere?”

“Not just now.”

“Kin?”

The soldier glanced at him.

“I don’t ask idly,” said the sergeant. “If there is someone, you’ll need them.”

The soldier who called himself Rem looked out at the whipping-post, the iron cuffs hanging ready from it.

“Yes.”

“Well, then?”

“A woman,” Rem said. “The red house on Slope Street, near the harbor.” He smiled in an unsmiling way. “She may refuse. She’s the mistress of a dealer in rope and cord. He’s out of the city at the moment.”

“As well for you. All right, soldier. Strip to your drawers, you know the formula. It’ll come fast and hard, you’ll feel it less that way. And no worse after. Call me any names you like while I’m doing it. I was a whip-master in Zakoris twenty years ago, and good enough then.”

They walked out together to the post and Rem put up his hands into the cuffs, letting them snap closed. The two guards, the picked witnesses, grunted their commiserations. The sergeant gave him a drink of raw spirit that tasted itself like the edge of a lash.

Then the whip named Biter came down on his back.

Rem, as they suspected, was not his name. But the name she had pinned on him, his crazy mother, he would hardly use that. Even the abbreviated form it had come to have was too suggestive to a keen ear. Growing up in the middle environs of the city, and now and then its slums, through the white dusts of the hot months, the gray snows of the cold, every tenth or eleventh male child around him named for Raldnor of Sar, the Lowland hero, Rem’s name had brought nothing but trouble. His childhood had been spent fighting, and when he went home, he was battered and beaten there, too. His mother’s protectors did not care for him. His mother did not like him either.

Latterly, he had come to think some of those blows rained on his immature head responsible for what had now happened five times in the past five years. What had been happening, in fact, when Kesarh Am Xai had walked out of his apartments and found him.

Coming back to himself with the prince’s dagger eating at his throat, it had been wiser to pretend. The prince had obviously assumed Rem was dozing on duty, the slumber of a fool. To be a palace soldier to one of Kesarh’s unspoken ambition and arrogant strengths might lead somewhere. Rem sensed about Kesarh some special vitality, some gift for earthly power. The work beside brought regular money, and privileges. Rem did not want to sink back into his former trade of robbery with violence. The job of a soldier was similar enough, but it was lawful. The best fee for what you did the best—that was a logical goal.

If Kesarh knew what had happened to Rem by his door, there would have been no choice. It would have been dismissal. The streets again, the old ways, going nowhere.

Rem had glimpsed the girl come out of the room, shivering, one round shoulder uncovered through a tangle of dark hair. Then the pain shot through Rem’s skull like a lance. He knew what was coming, but there was nothing he could do. The girl did not notice. The palace corridor misted and went out and the picture flashed in behind his eyes like a flame. What he saw was absolutely clear, as these visions were always clear. A woman stood there, in his mind. He could not make out her garments but he caught the glimmer of violet jewels. Her hair was red, that blood-red color once rare, now less so, from the mixing of the blond and dark races. But not only did he see all this, he saw into her body, into her womb. A creature coiled there, in its silver bubble, sexless and sleeping. There was a shimmering about it, the pulse of an aura. He felt its inherent life, smelled it, like air before a storm. Such feelings, when he was his normal coherent self, he would have ridiculed. The mind-pictures that had come to him since late adolescence he would also mock and reject as soon as they were done. He would accuse himself neither of empathy nor prescience. The things he saw were like symbols and, so far as he had ever known, had had no relevance to his own existence. Otherwise, it was a kind of madness he had confessed to no one, and until today he had never been caught out.

That Kesarh himself should be the one to catch him was the worst of all bad luck.

But the lie had held. And Rem was used to beatings.

When they took him down he was conscious, and had not expected to be otherwise.

It somewhat surprised him, therefore, after he had been got into the wagon—en route to the harbor and paid to make a detour through Slope Street—to fall into a whirling nothingness. He came out of it to find his companion, the man detailed to play nurse until they reached the house, and a leather wine bottle. Rem drank, and nearly brought the vinegar back. There seemed no pain in his body until he moved even slightly. Then it shifted in shreds off his bones.

“We’re here, Rem. The house you said.”

Rem agreed with a ghastly chuckle, and somehow he and the other soldier got him out.

The gates in the russet brickwork were shut, but hammering brought a porter. It was the same sullen old man Rem recalled from a year ago, the last time he had been here. The house itself looked much the same, a narrow dwelling with no windows facing the street. The vines were a little thicker on the walls.

The porter was difficult. Master was away. Mistress would have to be told. They persuaded him to go tell her. Rem began to laugh. The other soldier was bored and ill-tempered and the wagon gone.

“You can leave me here,” Rem said, leaning on the gate.

“Yes. She’s sure to take you in. Only a bitch’d turn away a man in your state.”

“Then she may turn me away. For she’s the bloodiest of all bitches.”

The soldier shrugged. He went off to find a wineshop, his duty accomplished.

Rem hung on the gate. The heat of midday began to drum down on him and he was starting to faint again when the porter came back and let him in.

He walked across the court and into the house and into the room the old man had specified. The edges of his sight were vague, and so the shabby gaudy chamber made no impression. In the center of his eyes, however, the woman seemed brightly in focus, absurdly just like the bright clarity of the visions. The long youth of the Vis was starting to desert her, but it was her disappointment, her bitterness that had drawn her face into such hard dry lines. She had always been telling him of that bitterness and that disappointment, seldom any details, but a generalized medley of wrongs. How royalty had once loved her in Dorthar. How she had been ill-treated and used by the processes of intrigue, the foul treacheries of the court at Koramvis in the last days of its power. And how his father had deserted her. She had always hated Rem for his father’s sake. She had informed Rem that, even in the cradle, she had known her son would fail to love her.

He felt rather sorry for her. Her dark hair was elaborately dressed by the maid she beat with a rod when the girl displeased her, some old style, of that lost Koramvin court no doubt. The pins were gold-plated, and from her ears swung heavy black pearls, the untrue kind caused by injecting ink with the cultured grit.

She looked at him, the lines deep-cut between her brows, her wizened mouth turned down.

“For more than a year I see nothing of you. Then you come here like this and in disgrace. Am I supposed to care for you? How should I? What will he say when he comes home?”

“Your friend the merchant will say nothing, if he’s sensible. He will, besides, get some money from the coffers of the prince I serve.”

“Yes, he might like that,” she said spitefully.

“Or he can take one of his bits of cord and hang himself.”

Through the shirt they had thrown on him he felt his own blood soaking, scalding. The chamber trembled, and before he could stop himself he fell to his knees and vomited on the floor at her feet.

She jumped away in revulsion, calling him a string of gutter names. At the end of them she employed his given name, with all the searing scorn she could summon.

He spat, and said, “Even kings are capable of vomiting, mother.”

“Rarmon!” she screamed. “Rarnammon—” in a perfect seizure of malice.

He stood up and the pain filled him with despair. Business had fallen off, for the rope merchant, his mother’s recent protector, and two of the three servants had been sent packing. The damp storeroom they had occupied would be empty and Rem could lie up there. Of Kesarh’s bounty, they would feed him and perhaps make sure he stayed alive.

He waited therefore until her railing ran out, knowing it was useless to ask her for compassion. Only as a child had he once or twice uselessly done that, as Lyki slapped his head over and over back against some wall or other, or the day when she had caught him stealing from her and plunged his hands in boiling water.

She had been very pretty once, but how ugly she was now. He was close to vomiting again, but somehow controlled himself, knowing she would take it as one further insult, and all this would then go on much longer.

By mid-afternoon, the traveling-chariot was well advanced on the white road that led from Istris to Ioli, a journey of two days. Thereafter half a day’s riding should see them at the brink of the narrow straits where floated the isle of Ankabek. The nights between the days would be spent at discreet inns warned beforehand. The road was excellent, and in the hot season there was not likely to be anything to delay the party, which was a small one, although their speed was not great. The fine bred racing chariot-animals usual on the Vis mainland were less common in Karmiss, while the horses of Shansar-over-the-ocean did badly during long voyages and were less common still. Therefore thoroughbred zeebas drew the vehicle, capable of galloping, but only in bursts.

The Princess sat reading among her cushions, or else she merely gazed over the chariot rail, into the sun-washed haze. The girl who accompanied her had begun a flirtation with one of the two outriders. With good fortune, the little entourage would get back to the capital before Zastis bloomed in the sky.

The gilded day flushed into fire and a lion-like dusk. They had reached the hilly country that tomorrow would pour down to Ioli, and so to the northern strip of sea. The towered inn appeared with the first stars showing over its roofs.

Val Nardia veiled herself before they entered the courtyard. Her mantle, the escort and maid, were sufficient to command respect, and to avoid excitement. A minor princess, she journeyed simply as a lady. The inn received her as such.

In the private room high in the second tower, she ate some of the meal they had brought her. The wine was yellow—a Lowland vintage. The vines of Karmiss, burned twenty years ago when the ships fell on her coasts, had not yet come back to their fullness. Beer had come to be the drink of this land, and a fierce white spirit crushed from berries.

Beyond the opened shutters, the night possessed the sky.

Val Nardia sent the girl away and was alone.

As she sat in the chair, her book spread before her, her mind vacant and afraid, she heard a wild sweet melody rise from the inn below. A song was being sung, and irresistibly she must listen, trying to follow the words. Only one or two were audible through the floors, out of the open windows beneath. But suddenly she heard a name: Astaris. It was a song of Raldnor, then, the vanished hero of mixed blood, and of the Karmian princess, his lover, red-haired Astaris, said to have been the most beautiful of all women in the world.

Involuntarily, Val Nardia found she had touched her own rich hair.

When the song ended, she went to bed, and lay on the pillows, her eyes wide.

Long after the inn was quiet, Val Nardia watched the night in her window, whispering now and then the ritualistic prayers she had learned. The prayers to Anackire, the Lady of Snakes, who alone stood between Val Nardia and her dreams of terror and lust. But at last she did sleep, and saw her brother standing on a high hill against the flat flawed mirror of the sea, and knew she had called to him and that he would come toward her and she would be lost. And so, in the dream, it was.

They had been hunting, a successful hunt. Coming back at nightfall through the streets in a rumbling of wheels and clack of hooves, the King was easy enough to single out, golden on the amber horse, and laughing. There were cheers, and women, appearing on their balconies, cast down flowers. Suthamun Am Shansar had liked to keep here the informal boisterous roughness of his former court among the marshes and rocks of his homeland. They said that in his youth, for years after he had appropriated the crown of Karmiss, he would go in disguise about her cities, now a beggar, now a potter, now a dealer in livestock, just as gods had been used to do, playing with humanity. Those who were good to him in his pretended role he would afterwards reward—caskets of jewels for accommodating ladies, a stallion horse for some struggling groom who had given the poor beggar a coin. And those who treated him ill in his acting he would summon later to the palace, and there turn their bowels to water with the truth. They would have deserved it, for any who had not recognized their king by his hair or skin should have known him from his heavy accent and difficulty with the Vis tongue.

But he had been mellower in the past decade, more concerned to be known for what he was, aristocrat and master. The old title of “Pirate-King,” which had made him merry years back, could now cause him to scowl and shout. He had married only with his own kind, and his few Vis mistresses bleached their hair and painted pale their flesh.

Entering the palace, they took their noise in with them. Feet tramped and weapons clanked; there was the barking of dogs and hissing of hunting kalinxes, and over all the uproar of men intent on enjoying themselves. Suthamun liked noise of almost any type. In the long and glittering hall, minstrels came running and strings and drums struck up.

Suthamun, in the midst of a bellowed laugh, broke off. His blond brows drew together.

Into the hall had walked Kesarh Am Xai, one of his guard at his back, a pair of matched black kalinxes stalking on leash before him.

Kesarh, cursed by the Vis blackness of his hair, had arrogantly seemed to make a feature of that black. His guard, of whom everyone knew there were far more than ten, wore dark mail on ceremonial occasions. He himself, as today, was most often seen in black clothing, relieved only by the fine pectoral on his breast showing in gold and scarlet the fire-lizard Am Xai had taken as his personal blazon. Amrek, the damned tyrant and genocide of Dorthar, had worn black, as if to flaunt his preference for his own race. And Kesarh—even the kalinxes were black. Also, of course, splendid. Where had the cash come from to purchase or breed such beasts? The mother had had little to leave him and the Shansarian father had not bothered.

Suthamun studied the kalinxes, their cold blue eyes spitting malice, but the hand on the leash ruling them utterly. They had run with the rest, and taken the first kill, working together, and separately from the pack, a thing one rarely saw. Suthamun had instantly wanted them, but to demand anything from this lesser prince would be uncouth, ungenerous. Somehow, Kesarh would make him sweat.

The King was very aware of Kesarh, and did not like him. For one so lowly to attract so much attention was in itself an indictment.

Kesarh had reached the end of the hall where his lord was standing among his brothers and favorites. A little attentive quietness had come with the prince, and it was all at once possible to hear the tune the musicians were playing. Kesarh looked full at the King, a leisurely, blank, immovable look, and then followed it with a short graceful bow.

The two kalinxes, stopped like stone on their plaited leash, laid flat their tufted ears. The vicious things had responded to the vicious mood of the king, and were now showing it off to everyone.

Suthamun laughed.

“The hunting was timely. Did you have pleasant sport, Kesarh?”

“Yes, my lord.” Kesarh smiled. They both spoke the tongue of Suthamun’s home, the current language of the Karmian court.

“Your cats there, they won you that.”

“True, my lord. Dortharian kalinxes are often the best.”

Suthamun stared at them greedily. By Ashara’s Amber Nipples, why should this nothing own such animals?

“Dortharian, eh? They must have strained your purse.”

Another smile.

“Somewhat, my lord. But they weren’t bought as an indulgence of myself. I wished to try them today, to see if they merited their praises. Since they do, I’d rejoice if I might present them to your majesty, as a gift.”

The crowd in the hall rustled, gave off a bird-flurry of little laughs, and then clapped.

It would have been ungenerous to demand. It would now be ungenerous to refuse.

Suthamun himself now smiled. He snapped his fingers and a groom ran to take the double leash from Kesarh. Trained to perfection, the cats made no demur, even their ears rose. They were led magnificently away. Suthamun steeled himself, went over to Kesarh and embraced him.

The court clapped again.

Vathcrian wine came, and Kesarh drank with the King and his brothers. Uhl leaned to Suthamun’s ear. The King nodded.

“I hadn’t forgotten. A day’s sport, an evening’s work. Gentlemen, follow me upstairs. You also, Am Xai. You can leave your guard here.”

Up the stair, they passed into one of the council rooms. Lamps were already alight. On a wall, in exquisite mosaic, was a map of the world, including the outlines of the second continent. The place names of all the mighty areas had been put in with gold, Shansar most prominently. Mosaic fish frisked in the seas between, and marine volcanoes bled cinnabar.

Suthamun strode directly to the map, and stood gazing at it. When he turned back his face was self-consciously kingly and portentous. He glanced quickly about at them all, as if to be sure they would not mock him. But none of them was such a fool. Even the arrogant Kesarh maintained that polite blankness which would alternate in such company with his polite smile or his polite solicitous frown of attention.

“Your sister rode for Ankabek today,” said the King.

“Yes, my lord.”

“We were pleased to grant her desire to devote her life to Ashara, the one true goddess.”

Kesarh bowed.

“Val Nardia was agleam with her gratitude. Sire.”

Suthamun checked, but the young man’s demeanor was faultless.

“And you,” said Suthamun, “what shall we do with you?”

“My King knows I am his own to order to anything.”

Suthamun flung one arm back toward the map.

“Zakoris,” said the King. “We remember, do we not, how my brother of Vardath took black Zakoris, and how Zakoris collapsed? And then, how the defeated lords of Zakoris made inroads on Thaddra. And there they roost around the north sea edges of Thaddra, and from there they make reavers-war on Dorthar. My brother of Dorthar, the King Raldanash son of Raldnor, has sent to warn me how his northern coasts are harried by these pirates. The guardians of the northeastern towns of Karmiss have also sent me word that so-called ‘Free Zakorian’ raiders have been sighted, and smoke on the beaches of Dorthar.”

Suthamun, Pirate-King, paid homage to his past neither with word nor gesture. Fifteen years ago, he himself might have found this funny.

“For the safety of Karmiss,” he now said weightily, “and to demonstrate my concern for the Storm Lord’s lands, I’ve been thinking to dispatch a force of men and ships to rout the pirates. I myself was in the sea battle at Karith when the Vis put light to the water and the waves rattled with the bones of yellow-haired men.”

It seemed his brothers recalled this, too. Their faces were set. The few Vis councilors who were in the chamber lowered their eyes.

Only Kesarh in his black did not look away, and so the King’s eyes met his at once.

“The captaincy of this force I mean to give into the hands of a man with youth and vigor on his side, a man not yet famous in Karmiss, but that through no failing on his part.” If this was sarcasm, the King did not stress it. “A Prince of the old royal house, with the blood of the goddess’ own people—Kesarh Am Xai, I offer this command to you. Do you take it?”

Kesarh showed nothing. He simply continued to meet the King’s eyes.

“You honor me, Sire.”

And the King shook his hand, while the haphazard council congratulated him heartily.

The stinging bees of Free Zakoris sailed in small swarms, but it was sure Suthamun would send an equally small portion of the Karmian fleet against them. It was, besides, a fleet soft from easy times, and mostly Visian, for mainly those Shansars who had wanted to remain under sail had gone home. Add to that unpreparedness and lack of size, indolent ship lords, then place in charge a prince without kudos and with no more experience of a sea-fight than the fire animal of his blazon, the salamander.

It could be phrased to look like an opportunity. It could also be an invitation to disgrace and death.

The long northern sunset was almost finished as the barge came from the pink water and ground on the stony beach of Ankabek. There had been a delay after all, a zeeba casting a shoe, some hours spent in shining Ioli. But the barge had waited, of course, and the crossing was only a matter of hours, the sea all calm, and the mysterious island growing before them from the shadows and the light, so it almost seemed enchanted, blessed. As it was, indeed, must be.

Val Nardia stared toward it with a curious yearning, touched by the beauty of the portents, and the last aching sunglow on its heights.

Above the landing, a village spread along the slope. Men came toward the beach with torches, and with them a woman walking like a ghost as the twilight closed the world.

The court escort was already back in the barge, only the girl stayed fidgeting with the Princess’ belongings, suddenly bursting into tears and kissing Val Nardia’s hand. Val Nardia spoke quietly to her, a reassurance, but her awareness was fixed on the woman walking among the torches. Then she was near, and the servant girl dropped to her knees.

The woman was a Lowlander. There was no mistaking it. Her hair beneath a smoky veil was lighter than a morning sky. Out of her ice-white face her eyes shone, the gold of the torch flames.

She looked at Val Nardia with these eyes, and seemed to pierce her through with them. The Princess did not resist the gaze. She opened herself, eyes, brain, and soul, to it, and so felt no fear, only a great astonishment. Did the Lowland priestess read her mind? It was well. Let all the sin and sadness be known, and then there might come healing.

But the woman merely said, in a low, still voice, “We have expected you, lady.”

The sentence had all the courtesy of one who, being the child of the goddess, could afford to be gracious.

“And I,” said Val Nardia softly, “have longed to arrive.”

The priestess glanced at the torchbearers who now took up Val Nardia’s slight possessions. They walked back, past the village and up the slope.

The priestess went after them without another word, and Val Nardia followed her.

Behind them, the barge dwindled at the edge of the water.

Ahead the dark path darkened further among tall trees. Where the torchlight lit them, their leaves showed red: These were the sacred trees of the Lowland temple groves. Presently, too, the evening breeze began to wake a tinsel sound from among them where discs of thin whitish metal were hung from the boughs. It was an hour’s walk.

The temple of Ashara who was Ashkar who was Anackire stood at the island’s summit. Black stone on the black of night, its windows revealed no lamp, it had no ornament. Only in its size did it differ from the temples of the Plains. The upright slot of the door was very high. No one called to be let in, yet the black doors swung inwards. Beyond, a dull sheen of light was the only hint of the temple’s life.

The men with torches placed their burdens neatly just within the doors, then turned and filed away. They were Vis, or mixed-blood, Karmian with Shansar and Vathcrian, but they had been trained, or had grown, to other ways. They seemed barely human.

The priestess stood within the doorway now.

“You enter here,” she said, “the Sanctuary of the goddess. For all that seek Her, She waits. As, for those who do not seek Her, She is not.”

A note seemed to chime in Val Nardia’s heart; the music of the discs on the trees sounded all at once.

She went swiftly into the Sanctuary, and the doors, without apparent agency, swung shut behind her.

2

The ceremony was conducted on the wide raised terrace before the temple. The building had formerly housed the Karmian love goddess, Yasmais, but she had been cast down and chased away to the little shrines of the Pleasure City. Now the temple was Ashara’s, the watery Anackire. Her smaller image had been brought out and she balanced on her golden fish tail, her eight white arms outspread like rays.

The magician-priest of the King slit the throat of a white bull-calf. In Shansar they had always offered Her blood before a battle.

Above, the sky was clear and innocent, but the Star had already manifested there and at night blazed behind the moon. At this season, all things came to have a sexual underlay, even magic and religion, certainly the acts of war. And it was a bad time to fight, who did not know that? The fair men of the second continent claimed immunity from Zastis, but one noticed they did not seem quite indifferent and had grown less so, those that lived long in Vis. Only the pale people, the Lowlanders, the Amanackire, took no heat from the months of the Red Moon.

Rem shifted in his mail. Other men shifted, the crowd surged and whispered.

The priest cried out his prophecy of victory, and the Karmian cymbals clashed, and the crowd found release in a shout.

So much ceremonial, and so few ships. Three, to be exact. Three ships, undermanned, rowers on double-pay in their unwillingness, and half that in arrears until Kesarh himself had somehow found their wages. They were old ships, also, the cream of the Karmian fleet of thirty years ago, patched up and pretty and liable to take water. The captains were here, and would presently swagger to the harbor and embark. They would make sail around the coast toward the mouth of the straits. The Prince Am Xai and his twenty guard—he had admitted to keeping, shockingly, twice the number permitted him—would ride ahead and await this speck of fleet at Tjis, the town which had sent the latest report of Zakorian activity.

It was a farce, and this religious frill only made it worse.

Rem shifted again, and his new scars gave him a dry little pang, and he thought of Doriyos.

Rem, once called Rarmon, had been six days lying up after his lashing. The physician he had managed to bribe the merchant’s man to fetch, had tended him thoroughly, and he had healed very well and very fast. But sprawled hours long on his belly in the damp heat of the cellar storeroom, listening to the throb of the sea against the wall, he had been filled with a vague hatred for all things. Lyki came to visit him once or twice. She had not been friendly, but she had had the man bring him soup and beer and bread. Thankfully, the beer and the physician’s draughts sent him to sleep more and more often as the pain died down.

On the sixth day, Zastis was visible just before sunrise, a wicked blush. Rem had left the storeroom, used the functional bathing facilities of the merchant’s house, and looked for his mother. She was still in bed. The merchant would be home tomorrow, perhaps. Rem left two silver Karmian ankars for Lyki, lying amid the cheap jewels by her mirror. She would know what that meant.

On the street by the very gate, Rem met one of his fellow soldiers.

“I was sent to fetch you. Our Prince has been selected to murder Free Zakorians at Tjis. I, and you, are picked to die with him.”

They had laughed, and spat on the notion, and Rem had agreed to find himself at the palace by nightfall. It had given him an odd feeling, nevertheless, that Kesarh, having sent him to his whip-master, should next call him back to such specific service. Probably it meant nothing, Am Xai had simply stipulated a number, which in Rem’s case was nine, and the other nine Nines were for some reason unsuitable or elsewhere.

To go toward the Pleasure City was inevitable in any case, it was not merely the warrior’s death qualm pushing him toward the life-urge. By day, the area was less glamorous but, naturally, busy. A glorious tawdry glitter of sun and sequins shot from everywhere. Turning through a fancy little arch into the Ommos Quarter, he soon reached the House of Three Cries, deplored its name as ever, and knocked on the door.

The elderly Ommos, whom Rem always had the wish to throttle, let him in at once, having first peered round the door like a tortoise from its shell.

“Enter, enter, dear master. He is free. He has kept himself for you since the Star opened its eye, such is his love for you—”

Rem thrust a coin on the old villain and went up the endless twisting unclean stair. The contrast when, having knocked again, he opened the topmost door and stepped into the room, was very great. This airy chamber at the top of the house was clean and calm, and scented with the flowering shrubs Doriyos grew in two ceramic urns beneath the window. Doriyos himself was seated between them at work on mending one of the countless broken musical instruments he would collect, repair, play sweet-noted, and thereafter sell, or more often give away.

Seeing his guest, however, he grinned, put down the stringed oval and crossed the room. Reaching up, he kissed Rem lightly on the lips.

“I was told you keep yourself for me,” said Rem good-humoredly, “yet you allow anyone into the room.”

“I recognize your tread on the stair, hand upon the door.”

Doriyos was beautiful, pure Karmian, a skin like honey and eyes like black onyx, and with a bronze-copper tinting to enhance the fine dark hair. He dressed simply and ornamented sparely. The gold chain around his neck had come from Rem, in the not-so-distant days when Rem was yet a thief. But the gold drop in his ear was another’s gift.

Used to the healing pain, and in his physical eagerness, Rem forgot. Stripping, he heard the exclamation and wondered what had caused it.

“Your back. Who—”

“Oh. I fell foul of the Lord Kesarh. It’s nothing, almost better.”

“Nothing?”

“I should have thought, and warned you.”

“You should have told me. Who tended you?”

“A physician.”

“Whose?”

“I went to Lyki’s house. Probably a mistake. But she so enjoys being disgusted with me.”

“You should,” said Doriyos, so softly Rem stared at him, “have come to me.”

“You have… You might have been busy.”

Doriyos smiled. “What the old man downstairs says to you when you come here, when he tells you I love you, it isn’t a lie. I would have looked after you, and no one else would have come in.”

“No other client.”

Doriyos shrugged. “I’ve been a whore since my eleventh birthday, I was sold to it. But I’m not a slave anymore. I do this because I know how to do it—”

“Yes, that’s very true,” said Rem, and so the conversation had been curtailed.

The Star made the first union partly frantic, swiftly bringing a shrill choking ecstasy, and, after the briefest interval, kindling up again into a slower and more profound pleasure.

The shadows were the color of Lowland amber on the walls when Rem came back to the bed and put the ring into Doriyos’ palm. The stone in the ring matched the shadows.

“You,” said Doriyos. “You don’t have to pay me.”

“A gift.”

“I know the worth of amber.” There was a pause, and then Doriyos said, “You’re going to fight, aren’t you? This Zakoris idiocy—I heard talk in the market. Your Prince Kesarh, who has you flayed.”

“It seems so.”

Rem had not mentioned the summons. But, as the Shansarians boasted they were with lovers or kin, he and Doriyos were sometimes sympathetic enough to share a mild telepathy.

“I can’t say be careful, you’ll have no choice. I can’t say again even that I love you, because I see you rather uncare for it.”

Rem shrugged. His eyes were full of a peculiar hurt he had not shown for the wounds on his back. The black hair that thickly curled along his head and neck fell in spiraled locks over the broad low forehead. For a moment he was vividly handsome, as sometimes he could be.

In that moment, sounds came from a room below, grunts and screeches and the splat of a soft whip as unlike the Biter as could be imagined.

“Bless the goddess, Gheal is busy once more,” said Doriyos piously. And the two young men burst out laughing.

So the farewell was merry if not gladsome.

The crowd’s alertness recalled Rem. Something else was going to happen.

Kesarh stood in his jet-black mail before the altar. All this trumpery of sacrifice and prayer had given him public attention. He seemed poised, yet electrified, and cut a strong figure, impressive and elegant.

A great bowl of beaten silver had been brought, in which a knot of serpents writhed and hissed.

A momentous hush fell over the crowd. One of the favorite sorcerous tricks of the Shansarians was about to be perpetrated. The magician-priest thrust his arm into the bowl and raised it, a mighty snake, more than half the length of a man, gripped in his fist. The snake twisted, its scales like metal or mirror, then suddenly flattened out, grew straight and rigid, quivering to immobility in the hand of the magician.

The crowd gasped.

The snake had become a sword, as expected.

The King, Suthamun, came over the terrace. It had been noticeable, his brothers and legal heirs were not present. He took the sword which had been a snake, and placed it in the hands of Kesarh Am Xai.

“You go to do our will. Go then, with our favor, and with Hers.”

Kesarh held the sword, faultless showman, up for the crowd to see. When he spoke, his voice, heard for the first time, was startling: cool and dark, and carrying with the ease of an actor’s.

“For the honor of my King, and for the glory of the goddess.” He waited, and then, just before they could cheer these sentiments, he called out to them with an abrupt and vocal passion: “And for Karmiss, the Lily on the Sea!”

The crowd responded instantly and with fervor. It was a garland aimed for the hearts of the Vis.

Rem thought wryly, Well managed, my lord. And then, with a wholesome lifting of his spirit, Perhaps he doesn’t mean us to die at Tjis, after all.

It was an eight days’ ride along the rambling coastal roads, two men of the twenty detailed each day to ride ahead or drop behind and keep the three Karmian galleys in sight. Rem, part of this detail on the first day, noticed another piece of business had been managed. In order to avoid an open act of war against Zakoris-In-Thaddra, the ships were not flying the Lily of Karmiss or the fish-woman of Shansar. Their blank sails had been powdered each with a scarlet salamander.

After a couple of days, the party of riders was ahead. Those that rode in from ship-watching, when relieved by others sent back, gave their ordinary reports. The three ships were still afloat, sails hopefully out, the oars looking lazy. The weather was hot and almost windless. They joked to each other about whether it was better to bounce all day on a zeeba, or groan all day over an oar. They knew they must reach Tjis first, and so they did, but making bivouac on the hills the night before they were due to sight the town, a pair of riders came at them out of the dusk and from the wrong direction—that of Tjis itself.

“What is it?” Kesarh asked these two messengers. His own charioteer, he had only just left the vehicle, and stood stripping off his gloves while he listened.

“My lord—the King sent us no word—are there only these few men?”

Kesarh said, “There are ships coming, a day or so behind us.”

“Thank the gods—the goddess—if they can be hurried—”

“Probably. I deduce you now expect the pirates of Free Zakoris to pay a personal visit?”

“Yes, my lord. Last night they touched Karmiss west of here, we saw villages burning. Poor villages, sir. It was done from spite. The guardian feared for Ankabek—”

Kesarh’s extraordinary presence seemed to intensify. His men knew why. Prince Kesarh’s lady sister had only just gone to Ankabek, had she not?

“But there are beacons the island would light,” the messenger hastened on, sensing something, “and none showed. Besides, the Zakorians’re superstitious about holy places.”

“Not the holy places of a woman-god,” said Kesarh. His face was forbidding.

The messenger said quickly, “But they came on in this direction, air. Eastward, away from the sacred island. The watchtower below Tjis put up red smoke at noon. A man rode in just before sunset, who’s seen them himself, at anchor a handful of miles off.”

“How many ships?”

The messenger was an optimist who had not been told the strength Istris had sent. He said confidently, almost casually, “Seven, my lord.”

Only one of Kesarh’s soldiers swore.

Kesarh waited, then he said to the messenger: “I take it you’ve good reasons for thinking they may not come on at you immediately.”

“Zastis, sir. Zakorian ships always carry women. And the villages they plundered were great beer-makers—they’ll be celebrating. Unless we’re unlucky.”

“Actually,” said Kesarh, “you may be.”

Kesarh dispatched a single rider back toward the Karmian ships. They all heard the order. The galleys were to come on at battle speed, with relays of sailors at the oars when the rowers flagged. It would not be unheard of, nor would it be popular. He expected the vessels in the bay southeast of Tjis by dawn tomorrow. One could visualize the reactions. That accomplished, he took his guard sergeant aside, said something, and remounted the chariot. Their pace had been steady but not punishing, the tough zeebas could manage a few more hours through the warm red night.

“You. Nine, and the two Fours, your animals look the freshest. Follow.”

The three ran to remount. Rem with a curse of sheer interest, surprising himself. One more minute and they were charging down the bad road in the wake of the chariot, as fast as the zeebas would gallop.

Kesarh reached the town of Tjis two hours before midnight, his team bleeding and foaming at the bits, his three men at his back on mounts practically dying. The pace had been remorseless.

The gates flew open, and the doors of the modest mansion likewise. The Vis guardian himself led the Prince Am Xai to a decorated hall, and quite a decent supper was brought in, with sweet and fragrant Vardish wine.

“Our gratitude to the King,” said the guardian, “is inexpressible.”

“So it should be,” said Kesarh, cutting himself some of the roast. “He’s sent three mildewed hulks, manned by fellows who’ll be too tired to fight when they get here. And even so much was an afterthought. If your town survives this adventure, your gratitude will be to me.”

The guardian stared, and collected himself.

“Do you understand?” said Kesarh.

The guardian, rather pale, said that he did, and took some wine.

Kesarh watched the shaking hands ringed with rather unvaluable stones, and the wine slopping over them.

“How much wine,” said Kesarh, idly, “does Tjis possess?”

“My—lord?” The guardian gaped. “What do you—”

“This will go quicker,” said Kesarh, with an awful smile, “if you answer my questions rather than asking your own. How many barrels, skins and jars of wine would you estimate are in Tjis tonight?”

The guardian gulped, made an intelligent guess, and offered it.

“Excellent,” said Kesarh. “I noted you’ve prevented a panic evacuation. Keep things as they are. Get your guard out and use them, and anyone with arms and legs, to cart the wine. The square before this house here will do for a collection point.”

The guardian sat amazed.

Kesarh pushed the wine flagon sloshing toward him.

“You can set a noble example with this.”

Very slowly, the guardian rose with the flagon in his hands, and wandered out.

Initially on being roused, the town thought the Free Zakorians upon them, and chaos reigned. It was Kesarh himself, riding about the short narrow streets on one of the guardian’s zeebas, flanked by the guardian’s guard, who introduced an element of ruthless and compelling order.

In time, his strange demand was obeyed. The wine came out, off tables and shelves, up from cellars, and was dumped in the square.

Rem, a haulier with the others, saw a kind of good humor take the town. In the face of terror, any action, even if insane, was better than passive wretchedness. There was some cause for humor too, grannies rolling barrels, the wealthy squabbling for compensation, and here and there a guard taking a few minutes off to have a willing girl against a wall. It was Zastis, after all, and the death-fear qualm was surely driving toward the life-urge here.

Tjis was mostly Visian, not a light skin or a fair head had he seen—though there must be a few of them. That Kesarh was black-haired might well be a reassurance. His three soldiers were Karmian, too.

Rem was as uninformed as any man of Tjis. Until the other things began to be brought. Then he knew, and reveled in the outrage of it, sure it must fail. And not so sure. The Zakorians were drunk already, and full of pride, and scorn. It was, besides, the only chance Kesarh really had, save to turn tail and run.

They stood up black on the sunrise, a group of three at the mouth of the little cove, and four others a short distance farther in. The water was deep enough there to support them, for they were large ships, large but swift, biremes, their double rows of oar-mouths now vacant, their black sails folded. Opened, each would show the full and crescent Moon sigil of Old Zakoris, slit over by her snarling dragon. Red eyes were painted either side the beaked prows. Fast and powerful and low, they lay now heavy-bellied on the sea. There had been plunder along Dorthar’s southern coast, and sport among the villages of Karmiss, screaming women and bright frothing beer.

Despite the orgy, however, there was a watch set at every prow, men with the cruel uneven profiles of Zakoris, black-skinned or dark brass. Their land had hated the yellow races even before Amrek, even before the allies of Raldnor, the Bastard of Sar—a man nearly dark as they—had brought their city of Hanassor to its knees. Karmiss now was fair game to these pirates, and any place that accepted or affianced the rule of yellow-haired men—which was to say, everywhere. Zakoris was in Thaddra now, and now able yet to make war upon the world. But the day of the Black Leopard would come back. For Zarduk willed it, and Rorn, and all the male gods of Free Zakoris.

After the dawn had come kissing across the lips of the cove, a big silent ship swung by them like a dream.

At sunrise, the tide swelled into the straits between Dorthar and Karmiss. Such a swell alone might be carrying the ship, for only the dawn wind filled her sail, on which a scarlet lizard flamed. Her oar-ports were hatched closed.

The nearest watch-horn hallooed. Others responded.

Not long after, two of the black biremes—only two, for they were disdainful—put out after the phantom ship.

The slaves shackled to the oars were fairly fit, for they had been allowed only a ration of beer, and no women. The torrent of Zastis had for centuries been reckoned a handy extra scourge against these men. At such times, mercilessly chained and prevented from relieving their sexual frenzy save in the crudest and most haphazard way, the Star might send some of them mad. Yet the unexpanded, unfulfilled energy lent power to the oars.

Losing their slack sleeping look, the biremes shot out on to the straits in the wake of their prey, like two lean black dogs.

They caught her inside a mile and offered no violence, for they could see she was apparently deserted and adrift.

Such a thing was not uncanny. Pirates, they had frequently come on vessels in a similar state. Fat merchants and their crews took to the boats, or swam for land at hint of a superior force of reavers. It had happened often enough, and there was, often enough, easy spoil as a result, items too bulky to have been rescued.

Presently they grappled her and swarmed aboard, taking care that none lay concealed below, but all was empty as a scoured jar.

The jars, on the other hand, were full.

She was nothing more or less than a wine-shop, her holds crammed with cibba-wood casks, leather skins, stone and clay jugs. They held the perfumed heady wines of Vathcri and Vardath, and Tarabann, the only good to come from that accursed continent beyond Aarl-hell.

They knew Tjis waited not many miles off up the coast, but they could let her wait, her ecstasy of fear only the more climactic for being prolonged by foreplay. There was even a jest the town might have sent the wine to placate them, and it raised much laughter.

It was the league of their patriotic and lawless brotherhood that made them assume the ship’s cargo and return to share it with the other five biremes. The salamander galley they fired and left, a new sunrise on the water behind them.

There was not, of course, quite enough of the wine to go round. In the traditions of their land, they fought each other for it. Several men were knocked unconscious, or maimed, and a couple killed. The joyous riot of drinking was general enough and lavish enough and headlong enough so that by the time they knew they had been tricked, which was quite soon, it was too late.

When the first casualties began to display their symptoms, they were mocked as weak stomachs. Drunks who collapsed senseless, or rolled moaning and throwing up, were compatible phenomena. Yet presently the men of every ship became affected. Tearing gripes ravaged their intestines or their throats, their vision fragmented, they lost the powers of speech and movement. Men spewed blood, and the last disbelievers were enlightened. There had been some virulent poison in the wine. They did not know if they would die of this agent—in some cases it seemed likely, in others it was accomplished. Their terror and impotent anger were to no avail. Even the captains and officers had drunk the wine, they more than any. Bedlam and horror ruled, and in the midst of it, two Karmian galleys rounded the headland beyond Tjis and stole into the cove.

The small percentage who had not drunk, or who had not taken much, ran or crawled to their stations. Knowing their drill, this scatter of men attempted to operate the flame-throwing devices with which two of the Free Zakorian vessels were equipped. But the fires were out and all human fire out with them. Only one missile was released, fell short, and perished in the sea, drizzling. The pirates, those who could stand, could do little else. Some of the purged staggered to the rails, their knives and swords in readiness. And here and there an archer loosed a shaft, or a spear was flung. But their aim was mostly out, and their heart was gone.

The first Karmian, unlike the Free Zakorians, had come prepared. She had mounted on her deck, of Suthamun’s bounty, one of the great spoon-catapults the Shansarians had perfected for naval use. Kesarh Am Xai, positioned at the prow, now gave the crew of the ballista leave to fire. Instantly the catapult thundered and spat. The large globule of flame soared out, roaring and whining as it parted the air, and splashed down on the foremost of the black ships. Primed now, again and again the spoon thudded against its buffer and the volcanic charge flew forth.

The Free Zakorians were burning, and those that could leapt in the sea, where the Karmians quickly picked them off with spears and lances, as if piking fish. The sick and the crazed even began to call for help to the ships with the salamander on their sails. While out of the thickening smog of smoke and between the towers of fire there came the crunch and crack of parting timbers and a fleece of sparks as the tall masts crashed. Beyond these noises, even as they stood away, the Karmian vessels heard the screams of the rowers trapped beneath their enemies’ blazing decks.

The captain of the first Karmian turned to the Prince Am Xai. The captain was of mixed blood also, but in the modish celebrated fashion of the hero Raldnor, his skin very dark against golden hair.

“My lord, it’s well-known Zakorian pirates employ only slaves at their oars.”

Kesarh looked at him, unhelpful and remote.

“My lord, the men burning to death down there will be Alisaarians, Iscaians, Thaddrians, men of lands we have no quarrel with.”

Kesarh smiled with such magnetic charm the captain smiled in return before he could prevent himself.

After a pause, Kesarh stopped smiling.

“If it concerns you, captain, you have my leave to go and get them out. Provided, that is, you go alone.”

In flat truth, not many had compassion for the chained slaves and their agonies. The odds had been too vast against the Karmians, and now were nothing. They had already begun to shout, over and over, Am Xai! Am Xai! A din that gradually almost drowned the other, of dying ships and men.

By midmorning, only skeins of charcoal and metal bits and a heaven-touching smolder marked where the Zakorian pirates had gone down.

Those who had got ashore, less than thirty men, were pursued by Kesarh’s own mounted guard and a pack of yowling sailors eager with blood-lust. It was butchery, not killing, on the uplands.

Some few others may have escaped by swimming under the ships and then on toward Dorthar, but the chances were against that. If the fire and the spears did not finish them, the sea and the poison maybe did.

For a long while after, Tjis drank peculiar toasts with her wine. The town chronicler made haste to note in his history what had gone into the wine of that night. Anything that was bane—rank herbs, opiates, lamp oil, emetics, purgatives, and liniments for zeebas—all these, providing they had slight taste and lesser odor, or at least so long as they smelled and tasted sweet. Even perfumes had been poured into the vats and jars. To Free Zakoris, the wines of the southern continent were scented and honeyed beyond any they knew. They took the thickness, and the unexpected first reply of nostril, palate and belly merely for the unusual at work. And drank deeper to grow accustomed. It might not have killed them, but it gave them to be killed.

Kesarh returned into Tjis, and the golden afternoon dulled on his darkened sword. It was not the sword the magician had made from a serpent, but his own blade, forged a year ago when no battle at all had been in the offing. Nor were the Zakorians he had ridden down on the hill the first men the Prince had slain.

Rem, who had also killed men, had been the swing and cut of that sword, and glimpsed the white fixed grin that involved only lips and teeth, the eyes hard and cold, deadly as hell, above it.

They said, Rem had heard it often, that Kesarh at fifteen or sixteen had now and then had himself shut in with armed felons, and so learned to polish his fighting, to the death. Princes sometimes trained themselves in this way in northern Vis, if not at the imperial academies of arms, but always a guard stood ready to aid beyond the door.

They had lost only five men, none of them Kesarh’s own.

The Tjisine women were eagerly offering themselves, and the Karmian crews, their ships anchored, careered about the town, instigating potentially as much damage as the Free Zakorians might have done. The guardian feasted, if without wine, the Prince and his captains.

Four girls came to dance to shell-harps and drums, Vis girls, their long black hair dripping beads on the floor as they arched their brown backs.

“My daughter,” said the guardian, pointing out the prettiest arching back.

When she was tactfully offered to him for his night, Kesarh modestly accepted her.

The guest room was small, the draperies moth-eaten.

Rem found he had been posted at the door for the last half of the night. That was, he supposed, a jest.

The girl did not want to leave him, either through opportunism or lust, or a mixture of both. He had her again, now with scant courtesy, and then pushed her out. Affronted, she donned her flimsy clothing and went.

Kesarh lay on the bed, looking up at the domed ceiling of the chamber.

Noises of carouse and sometimes glints of feverish light came in through the window, from the town, although it would be dawn in less than two hours. He pondered how much mess the ships’ soldiery would have made by sunup. It would be obvious, of course, that his own personal guard was not responsible. Tjis in any event was a flea-bite on the earth.

They had intended to send word of victory at once to Istris. He had made them wait.

A sudden lantern or torch caught the straight and naked length of the ceremonial sword leaning against the wall.

Kesarh took note of it. It was a little more than half the height of a tall man, himself, and heavy, meant only for show. Tonight he had let it be carried into the provincial feast, along with his banner of the Salamander. That was the only value of such weaponry. That and to be masked by illusion and gimcrack jugglers’ play as a snake.

Sleep was beginning to come, now he was sated, sleep deadening the dull rage, the dull searching after some lost thing that kept his mind restless though his limbs were lax. And Val Nardia, how did she fare tonight, Zastis the rose of desire scorching her flesh under the sheet—

The light of the stray torch flickered on the sword blade.

He could remember seeing no women after all on the sinking pirate biremes. Dressed as men, perhaps, disguised by that and smoke, or dead or stupefied below, their hypothetical screeches mingled with the shrieks of the men.

He dismissed the idle thought. His mind was quieting now.

The sword went on flickering the light. Through his half-closed lids, Kesarh seemed to see the metal growing fluid, rippling, running like a river down the wall. . . . He turned on his belly and slept.

What woke him was the gentle touch of a hand about his ankle. He was alert, totally and at once, and as totally his self-discipline kept him utterly still, quiescent, as if yet unaware.

Had the girl come back? No. The touch was not the girl’s—some assassin, then. How? The window was barred by a lattice. Number Nine, the man at the door—Rem—just possibly disloyal, or careless and dead despite the whip—

The gentle touch uncoiled from Kesarh’s ankle. It began to flow upward along the muscle of his calf, the back of his thigh.

Suddenly he knew what it was. An assassin maybe, but not human. The sweat broke out over every inch of him, that he could not control, and the weighty treacly length of the creature paused again, perhaps tasting his sweat, his fear. For he was afraid of this. He had the intuitive Vis aversion to such beasts, nor was it irrational. From the size, neither small nor large, of what he felt so sensitively upon him, the snake was most likely venomous.

It had reached his lower back now, shifting smooth as milk across one buttock, the cleft at the base of the spine.

Kesarh clenched his teeth across his tongue, holding his body down to the bed with an appalling strength that must not even be felt in the shiver of a sinew.

It lay against his spine, rising and falling with his breath, quickened a little, but not much. At any instant it might strike at him. Even if he were motionless, some abrupt noise from the town—

It moved again.

Now it had found his hair, wandered briefly, slipped to his left shoulder.

The closer a bite to the throat or skull the more deadly. The snake seemed to consider. His face was turned to the other shoulder, away from it. It touched his arm, almost a caress. Then swam down the arm, the rope of its body against his side.

The snake had reached his hand. He was so conscious of it now he realized when it lifted its head, and he was already involuntarily and unavoidably tensed for the spring that would take him from the bed if the fangs shut in his flesh. A knife to the wound, then fire to cauterize—And then the snake laid its head across his hand and ceased to stir.

He waited. Waited. The snake did not change its position. He felt the stasis in it, as if it might lie there forever, or rather until disturbed.

Kesarh pushed fear from his mind. He measured the attitude of the snake, explored without eyes, by sense alone, the angle of the flat head against his fingers, the upturned sleeper’s palm, open to it, cradling it now. There would be one second only—

In a single convulsive movement, Kesarh squeezed closed his fist, an iron vise about the skull of the snake.

The tail spurted into immediate spasms, lashing and thrashing against his side, his chest and loins as he threw himself from the bed. But the clamp of his strong fighter’s palm kept the deadly jaws bound shut. He could see it now, the seizure of prismatic scales faded by darkness.

Kesarh raised his arm and flung the thing from him hard against the wall, the whole length of it, the head coming free and next moment meeting the plaster. Then as it fell back stunned on the flagged floor he had his sword from beside the bed and brought the metal edge down across the snake’s middle.

The weapon was blunt from killing Zakorians, but it carved through most of the snake. It lay dead, spasming still but harmless, at his feet.

The door crashed open and the soldier called Rem, his own sword drawn, sprang into the chamber, framed by the light of candles in the corridor.

Kesarh recalled he had cried out, one loud hoarse cry, as he severed the snake.

“My lord—”

Kesarh picked the snake up across his sword, bloody and broken and contorting, and showed it to Rem.

“One dancer too many,” said Kesarh. “Bring in one of those candles and light these. Shut the door when you get in, or Am Tjis will come prancing to see what’s wrong.”

Rem did as he was told, came back with a candle and shut the door.

By the glow of the newly lighted wax, he could see the ceremonial sword had gone from its place against the wall. Kesarh had slung the dead snake down where the sword had been.

“Witchcraft,” said Kesarh. His tone was light and clever. “If I’m to credit such things. Can it be Ashara-Anackire practices against me, leading me to think all this while her serpent was a blade? Never trust a woman.” Kesarh sat on the bed. “But then you wouldn’t, would you, Number Nine.” Rem looked at him. Kesarh shrugged. “You went to a female person who is your mother after you were lashed. If you haven’t an affectionate woman for your bed at this season you’re either diseased, deformed, a Lowlander, or prefer boys.”

“Or my woman dislikes nursing.”

Kesarh said nothing. He reached for the wine jug and drank directly from it. It had beer in it tonight. A reaction was setting in all over him, his finely controlled body now rigidly trembling. That was like the cry. He ignored it.

“You ran in here like a kalinx to defend me, Number Nine. Suppose you’d found me in the grip of four well-armed men? Or did you merely think I was in a Zastis dream?”

Rem said nothing.

“I think I can trust you,” said Kesarh. “Of course, I’ll have you killed if I find I can’t. And I would find out, my Rem.”

“I’m sure you would, my lord.”

“However this happened, this gambit with the snake, someone was at the root of it. Someone—maybe Suthamun himself.”

“Or an heir, jealous of your sudden fame. His brothers. Prince Jornil.”

“That’s astute. But then, I should have died in battle with the pirates, shouldn’t I? This was a provision if I did not.”

“You sent no victory messenger to Istris,” Rem said.

“Quite. I may send one now. News of my victory, and my . . . nearness to death from snake-bite. I mean to take refuge from any further hopeful assassins. A very safe refuge, but a place where I’ll be allowed one companion only, and where besides I’ll need some sincerity—Ever milked snake-poison, Rem?”

“No, my lord.”

“You are about to. That thing over there is indeed venomous, but dead. Safe, unless your hands are open anywhere.”

“No, sir.”

“Then I’ll direct you. Use your knife.” As Rem went by him, the Prince lounged back on the bed. He indicated the beer-wine jug. “Drink, if you want.”

Rem drank.

“A beaten child,” said Kesarh, his eyes shut, “continually tries to placate and to earn the favor and affection of its harsh parent. Is that what you would do?”

“I’m older than you, my lord. Almost two years, I think.” Rem bent over the snake and forced wide the jaws as directed. “And where is your lordship’s refuge to be?” Rem inquired.

The dark voice was barely audible from the bed.

“Ankabek of the goddess.”

The departure was circumspect. Only after they were gone was Tjis to discover what had occurred. No doubt unsavory rumor would take up the tale. A prince, Vis in appearance, all at once a hero, all at once in danger of his life. The idea of treachery would be but too apparent.

The guardian, privy to calamity, had already muttered a phrase or two most unguardedly indicative of such suspicions.

The ship was a lightweight skimmer with a discreet sail, perfumed strongly by fish. Four Tjisine rowers had been taken on. The guard sergeant of the Prince Am Xai’s men, and one soldier, had gone aboard with him. It had been done at first light. The Prince could not walk and had had to be carried to the ship. It alarmed the guardian to see Am Xai so sick. Having seen the corpse of the snake, the guardian was fairly certain his recent savior would not live, despite the healing skills of Anack’s priests.

The ship put off around the headland, and disappeared.

She ran well, taking all the early breeze, the rowers fierce at their oars. They had been given gold, and besides owed him something, the man now a tossing shadow under the sketch of awning.

The morning went by with strips of heat-wavering coast to port and flashes of sun on the oar-smashed water. Later, as they turned more northerly, hints of Dorthar’s edges grew visible, far off and blue as sapphire, more pastel than the sea. A current drove in across the straits hereabouts, sucked toward the smaller island. They chased it and bore on.

The Tjisine ship beached at the landing place of holy Ankabek not long before sunset, at the same spot, and almost the same hour, that the temple barge had brought Val Nardia.

They, however, were not looked for.

As the rowers hung exhausted over their oars, a group of men came from the stony village on the slope. There was a short discussion, and one man boarded to look down on the lord under the awning.

Then the men went away, and Kesarh cursed them in two or three vicious phrases. Nevertheless, before the sun quite met the sea, they were back with a stretcher of matting between poles. The temple would receive the invalid. The rest might sojourn on the beach till morning. They must then return to Karmiss.

Kesarh, his light-skinned face the color of the bone beneath, eyes bruised, skin polished by sweat, his hair and garments drenched with it, began to rave and cry out: His life was threatened—he must keep someone by him.

Seeing the state he was in, not wishing to tax him further, the porters accepted that Rem should also go with them.

There was not much to be seen in the afterglow, red sky, red leaves on the tall trees. Then night fell. Finally the coal-black temple stood up on the coppery air above. Turning aside, the men with the stretcher took a subsidiary path that ended among a group of buildings. Lights were burning in this area, while the temple loomed lightless and soulless at the head of the incline, removed in every way.

The stretcher was carried into a cell with cream-washed walls. Kesarh, lifted from the matting to the pallet-bed, seemed to be unconscious.

“Someone will come to you.”

The men filed out and vanished again into the descending groves of trees.

Rem looked over at the bed and Kesarh grinned at him. The cell was lit by a wick floating in oil. This, and the illness, far milder than it seemed, lent to the Prince’s feverish face a glaze of pure evil.

A minute or so after, a priest came across the clearing between the buildings, and passed into the cell.

Rem had heard of the priests and priestesses of Ankabek. They modeled themselves, apparently, upon the Lowland religious of the Shadowless Plains. If to be a black ghost was the intention, then they had done well.

The hooded figure bent over Kesarh.

“Who are you?” said Kesarh, clearly. “Are you my death?”

“Your death is not here,” said the priest.

Rem’s spine crawled.

The priest asked no questions, but touched Kesarh gently at the forehead, throat and groin. Kesarh thrust the hands away. They were pale hands, paler than his own.

“The poison of the snake has almost left you,” said the priest. “I shall have medicines prepared. Rest. You will be well.”

“No,” said Kesarh, with a desperate breathless rage, “I’m dying. Don’t you think I know?”

“Life is sacred. You will be tended.”

“Too late.”

The priest drew back.

Kesarh said in a loud distinct whispering, “My sister is here. The only kindred I have. My sister, the Princess Val Nardia, from the court at Istris.”

“Yes,” said the priest.

“I must see her,” said Kesarh. “Talk with her, before I die.”

The skin twitched once more across Rem’s shoulderblades. Discomforted, he moved nearer to the doorway, farther from Kesarh.

The priest had not answered.

Kesarh cried out: “Will you deny me? Tell her I’m here, and why. Dying. Tell her, do you hear?” The ache of the poison in his veins seemed to turn to knives and awls. He fell back, clawing the mattress, his eyes blind.

On his left forearm the puncture wounds of the serpent’s fangs, discolored and open, showed violently in the yellow light.

When almost every drop of venom had been forced from the sacs of the snake, Kesarh had dragged it off the floor and slammed the points of the teeth through into his flesh. There was enough slaverous filth on them by then to do the work he wanted. No longer enough to do more than that. He had needed, as he said, some sincerity, to earn the protection of the sacred island. The pain at least was doubtless real, as the fever was. A small sacrifice for his plan. But now there seemed to be also some second plan, tangled with the first.

Rem leaned in the doorway. The scene beyond the cell was impartial and nothing to do with them. The night was very fragrant from the trees. White stars were netted among the boughs. The red Star smoked.

Somewhere a contralto pipe began to play, melodious and wandering. He thought of Doriyos.

Behind Rem, Kesarh was panting, thrashing on the bed, damning the priest to Aarl, a spot neither, presumably, believed in.

Rem stepped aside to let the priest go by, out again into the impartial clearing, the ethereal surety of night.

3

Val Nardia stood motionless, surrounded by the dark, while before her the slender candle of the shrine fluttered in its vein of glass.

Aside from the candle, the shrine was empty.

It was for the novitiate to conjure there the relevant image of meditation or fantasy; if desired, the visitation of the goddess Herself.

Val Nardia had existed now on Ankabek twenty days. At first, she had been tensely strung, wishing to rush forward into the security of this religion so mysterious and so profound, and there be lost. Afraid also that the arms of the goddess would not hold her tightly enough, and she would slip away, her thoughts and her dreams coming on her like ravening tirr. But almost instantly tranquility had replaced her nervous seeking, and her doubts. Some luminous unseen air, indigenous to the great temple, enfolded her. With no effort, everything that was spiritual within her rose like unbidden music.

Even the persuasions of Zastis might be channeled, used in other ways, a flame that would burn in alternate vessels. She commenced to know the wonderful freedom of the human heart discovering, suddenly and in surprise, that through itself alone may be evolved communion with the Infinite.

Yet the knowledge and the state were primal to her. She had not had time to understand entirely that either condition, the world or the spirit, was valid; that the soul was capable of as mighty adventuring as the flesh, conceivably more.

She was not ready therefore, and poorly defended. A priestess had come, a Vis woman, yet with that ambiance of the temple. The priestess had given her the news.

And now, the only image Val Nardia could conjure beyond the candle-flame was that of her brother. Of Kesarh, drifting on the shores of death, less than half a mile from this room.

Most of the lamps about the clearing had been doused. The piece of midnight which moved did not resolve itself until it entered the dim seepage of light from the cell. A woman’s shape, slender, folded in a cloak.

Rem stood up, waiting.

There was no need of a guard. Not here. No assassin surely, even of the King, would dare pollute this sanctuary. Yet Kesarh had not trusted, required some guard. The trustless would seldom completely trust, of course. Rem had recalled once or twice the screaming, burning sea beyond Tjis, and dismissed the memory. Rem had done deeds enough himself to haunt himself, if he wished so to be haunted.

He thought the woman a priestess, and was prepared to offer her some courteous cautious challenge, when the oil lamp in the cell started a glint of red under her hood.

“My lady.”

The Princess Val Nardia looked at him, her eyes wide, as if to ask a question, then the question became apparently superfluous. She went by him, and into the cell.

Rem glanced after her, and saw Kesarh. The medicines had not greatly quieted him. Either real or exaggerated, the fever still pushed him in a slow dance from side to side of the pallet. Banked up by the rough pillows, his head was now tilted back. He looked ghastly, dead but reflexively animate. It must terrify her.

Rem was about to speak. But Kesarh’s voice came out of the slowly tossing corpse, and told him in three words to walk off. Then it told Val Nardia to draw the curtain over the door.

The footfalls of the soldier went away. There began to be a long soundlessness.

“Kesarh,” Val Nardia murmured.

“Come closer. Snake venom isn’t contagious.” She did not stir. “Did they tell you what I said they should tell you?”

“That you might die,” she said. “They told me that.”

The smudgy eyes glared at her out of the livid face.

“Did you believe them?”

She had not discarded her hood and it obscured her; her head was bowed.

“I woke before dawn. I thought it was a dream—some vast and deadly stillness surrounding me—Tonight, they told me you were here, and why.”

“You’d heard I was to fight Zakorian pirates in the straits.”

“I knew nothing of that. We’re out of the world, on Ankabek.”

“We? My glorious victory means nothing to you, then. Or my death at Suthamun’s order.”

“The King—” Her head was raised. The swift movement after all dislodged the cloth from her shining hair. She saw him stare at her, and fell silent.

“The King,” he said slowly, “guesses what I might become, in despite of him. He’s realized, maybe, I won’t be content with a strip of mud at Xai and ten soldiers at my back.” Kesarh let go the tension that had seemed to hold him. His body sank down into the pallet, his eyes shut. “But all that’s ceased to matter. If I die, I’ll trouble Suthamun no longer.”

Not seeing her, he heard the rustle of her cloak. Then the fragrance of her, either some perfume or her very skin, hair, soul, flowed into his brain. He did not raise his lids. For some reason on the black behind them he saw the empty space where the sword had stood in the chamber at Tjis, the sword which had reverted to a serpent—or been filched by some clever method through the bars of the window lattice, just before the snake was fed in there. Then Val Nardia’s fingers came down like weightless birds on his forehead. He sighed at their coolness, their gentleness.

“Don’t speak of dying,” she said. “Believe in your recovery, and you will recover. They would never have left you alone here if they thought you close to death.”

“Why not?” he muttered. “There’s my soldier to watch me. And they sent you.”

“I wasn’t sent. They only told me you’d asked for me.”

“And in compassion and pity you overcame your aversion, and forced yourself to my bedside.”

Her hand drifted from his face and he reached out and caught her hand in one of his. He opened his eyes and looked at her, into the radiant light of her beauty where all the illumination of the tiny room seemed concentrated. She was white, afraid for him and so, for now, no longer of him.

“Since we were children,” he said, “whom did we have to trust save each other?”

Her eyes faltered. They were bright with tears.

“Kesarh—”

“If you want me to live, I’ll live for you. Poison, disease, the wound of any battle—nothing. I’ll run through flood and fire and thunderbolt, unscathed. You can make me invulnerable.”

She wept then, briefly. She did not, even weeping, take her hand from his.

Later, the fever going out, he slept. In the sleep, once, he spoke to her, calling her, as in their childhood together, Ulis. It was the name of a rare scarlet summer flower, indigenous now only to the cultured gardens of Karmiss.

He returned once, and stopped ten paces from the curtained door. Having been dismissed, Rem’s purpose on the island was nullified. And there was no menace in the darkness under the foliage; nothing.

The sense of oppression emanated from the cell itself. Its source was presumably the Prince Kesarh Am Xai. Rem had no urge to meddle, and had gone away gladly, not even curious. He did not understand the feeling; it was hypothetical yet threatening, like unknown footsteps heard by the blind.

Having checked the clearing this second time, Rem once more moved off, on this occasion toward the low summit where the temple stood.

Ankabek was now immeasurably quiet. To one used to nights in Istris, or in some camp of men, the quiet was unfamiliar, partly disturbing. It seemed trembling always on the brink of an insidious whisper.

Near the temple, the trees fell back, and the inflamed eye of Zastis sheered through filaments of cloud. The darkness reddened.

Rem halted, considering the temple, its great doors closed, walls windowless.

Why had he come up here, to look at this?

Yet strange, he would not be the first to think it: The pale people of the Lowlands who built their cities and temples of black stone, the dark Vis who built in crystal and stone whiter than salt.

Rem moved forward again. He had a peculiar urge to touch those immutable-looking doors, maybe crash his fists against them. They would not let him in. He was neither worshipper nor acolyte. Ashara, Ashkar, Anackire—his mother had reverenced other gods, Yasmais, chiefly.

When he was not far off, the big immutable, impenetrable doors swung inward. There was only the mildest noise. Some mechanism, then, must be automatically in operation under the threshold. Any might enter, who had the wit to approach. Of course, that was what they said of the goddess. Seek Her, you will find Her. Seek Her not, She is not.

A vague glimmer, hardly even to be called light, hung inside the temple. He could walk into it, or away.

Rem, once called Rarnammon, walked into the temple. When, after a few steps, the doors swung shut behind him, he hesitated, looking back. But they would open again when he returned. This was no trap. He went on.

The passage was lofty but unornamented, somber stone, that gave none of the magnification to his movements he had expected, no echo. The fount of the infinitesimal light seemed to be ahead of him. Gradually he discerned that what lay ahead was a blank and featureless wall. But he proceeded, and beheld that on either side of this wall the end of the passage branched into a new corridor. In each of these the light was a little more definite, and they curved away, out from the heart of the building. Randomly, he entered the left-hand corridor and followed the curve of it. The light was decidedly more vivid, but again there were no decorations, no painting or carving of any kind. The wealth of Shansar-conquered Karmiss had been diverted to create this place, and gifts had come from Dorthar, and tribute from Xarabiss, Alisaar and Lan. It could have been one of the richest wonders of the continent, a-drip with jewels, its temple guard stationed like statuary—but Ankabek had no guard. Only mysteries.

The curve turned out, then inward, circling. But the light unencouragingly dwindled. Then the wall ended ahead and Rem, passing beyond its angle, found himself, just as he had been some minutes before, beside blank stone at the juncture of three passages, his one of them, the largest leading off to a pair of tall shut doors. It was a replica of the entry in every respect.

Rem strode down toward the new exit, but here the doors did not respond. He retraced his way therefore, and took the new left-hand curving corridor. This, leading back, became the right-hand corridor of the entry, as he had suspected.

In the original passage, Rem cursed softly. There would be a secret kept at the center of all this, inside the black drum of stone that the passages endlessly led to and encircled. The means of getting to it, however, were well-concealed. There was no mark on the stone to indicate anything at all.

All at once, the windowless, pointless O filled him with doubts. The light which had, it seemed, no source, began to make him uneasy. He took another long stride back toward the first pair of doors—

And the pain shot through Rem’s skull like a lance.

He fell against the wall, shocked and powerless—it was too soon for this thing to happen again. Then the world went and the pictures came.

There was a mask, half of it cast from black marble and half from white. Then a second mask replacing the first, half gold, half silver. And then a third, half fire, half snow—

A man dashed from behind the mask. He was a Zakorian, howling and in agony. He had been poisoned by wine—no, not wine, by fruit, yellow fruit rolling under his feet, while behind him a bonfire flapped its skirt at the sky. The fire was that of burning ships, reflecting in black water. In the air also, where Zastis blazed. Then the flames sank. There were three women. One had hair like ice, and one hair like ebony, and one hair like blood. He saw into the womb of each of them, and in each case it was filled. The woman with ebony hair raised her fist and her face grew ugly. It was his mother, Lyki. She darted toward him with the rod gripped to strike and he flung up one arm to shield his head.

“No!” The voice that came out of him appalled him, it was not the voice of a child, but of an adult man.

He stared at the woman. Nor was she Lyki, but a stranger, Vis, dressed for the temple, and her hands relaxed at her sides. Behind her, two shadow-shapes: male priests.

This was almost amusing, to be caught twice. Next time, when? Next year? Tomorrow? Perhaps in a fight or battle, killed because the vision came and he could not control it. No, not the vision. The madness.

“Forgive me,” Rem said to the Vis priestess of Anackire. “I was trying to find the inner sanctum. I’m very tired. Dizziness—”

Her dark eyes looked back into his paler ones. He knew, as if she had told him so, that she did not believe what he said. That she knew, and the men behind her knew, he had been possessed. Lowland telepathy learnt by the Vis. . . . Had she peered inside his skull?

“You wished,” she said, “to find the Sanctuary of the goddess?”

“It’s well-hidden.”

“I will show you.”

Rem balked. He was nauseated, superstition crowding him, and the undertow of fear.

“No.”

“Come,” she said, and his eyes followed her though he did not.

She went to the blank wall between the three passages and knelt, and leaned to it as if to kiss. After a moment, the stone quivered and a portion of it fell slowly backward. A glow of light poured out. It was a mechanism like the doors, then, if not so amenable. Probably the marks on the wall were clear enough to those trained to recognize them.

He did not want to enter their temple anymore. It had become saturated by what had happened to him. Yet, in those instants, there seemed nowhere else to go.

Rem walked after the priestess, and the two priests, like guards, came after him. Perhaps, despite this show, he was trespassing and they meant to punish him. It occurred to him that he expected punishment in every avenue of life, expected and no longer resented punishment, and that this might be a fatal flaw.

The piece of wall which had fallen in had formed a tilted bridge on to a flight of ascending steps. At the top of these an opened arch let out the light.

The priestess glided ahead of him. In the arch she became a silhouette, stepped to one side and vanished from sight. Rem reached the arch.

The core of the stone, as the windings had suggested, was round. There were no colonnades, and still no carvings. All about the perimeter of the floor jets of fire spurted from openings, volcanic in appearance and certainly unnatural. They lit the high vault of the great black chamber, and sent waves of brilliance across and across the floor itself, which was one whole extraordinary mosaic. Gems flashed there and skeins of color. Myriad legends seemed depicted, legends or dreams—figures of men and beasts, winged things, chariots and ships and hurtling golden stars—his eyes abandoned it giddily. And there was something else to gaze on.

Across the wide room, four black pillars stood up against a curtain of gold. Closing off the crescent of the chamber’s end, the curtain was perhaps sixty feet in length, in height much more. Its folds hung thickly, and as the light burst on the faces of these, the curtain seemed made of laval rain. Scales of pure metal composed it. Thousands of them. The gold curtain alone showed where the rich offerings of Vis might have gone.

One of the priests said to him, “In this manner, the Lowland temples were made.”

“And so finely dressed?” Rem blurted in marveling anger.

“Yes,” the woman answered, “centuries ago. So finely, and more finely.”

“And beyond the curtain,” Rem said. “What’s there?”

“She is there.”

He shrugged to stop himself shivering. “Your goddess.”

“Anackire.”

The outer temple, the passages—they were a trick, a safeguard. Uninvited, none might enter here. Yet they had brought him here, because they sensed some supernatural element at work on him. He should resist, or he would lose himself. He winced at his thoughts. They were out of all proportion—Yet the sensation did not abate. He was turning to go when one of the men behind him, the other who had not spoken before, said quietly, “Cross the mosaic. When your feet touch the sky-borne dragons, the curtain will open.”

“More technology to astound the credulous.”

The man’s head was lifted in its hood. The eyes which looked into his were the color of the scaled curtain.

“Only logic,” the Lowlander said. “To approach so close to Her expresses a wish that you might see Her. And yet, to see Her at once, and always: How then are we to remember what She is, that an effort must be made to attain Her? Men grow too easy with familiar things.”

Rem turned again and observed the curtain. Its very wealth seemed to draw him, that and the thunder of flame across its fire.

He did not look for the dragons, but he must have trodden on them twenty paces or so from the curtain. Like a bright wing it soared away. Framed between the central pillars the statue rose, and stopped him like a blow.

She was only a small goddess, three times his own height, maybe a fraction more. The beauty of Her, the perfection of Her lines, led one to forget She had been fashioned. And yet She was bizarre, unhuman and terrible. That men and women, creatures of the world, could turn to this as to a mother—He smiled wryly, recalling the mother he himself had been given to.

Beneath the statue, a foible of the second continent he had been used to think, the bronze trough was filling with serpents as if with water. They came freely into or vacated the trough through holes that led away into their warrens under the floor. Their gold scales glittered like the huge scales on the looped curtain, and like the coiled tail of the goddess, for She too was a snake from the belly down. Her eight arms were upheld or outstretched in the traditional modes. He did not know their meanings, but some appeared benign, others cruel. Her eyes seemed to meet his own. Lowland eyes.

He, too, might have some Lowland blood, but then, Lyki would surely have flaunted it. It did not matter.

He had glimpsed representations of this goddess in the Ashara temples of Istris and Ioli, but they were not like the statue before him now, even when Ashara’s fishtail had been transformed to that of a water snake. Nor was the Vathcrian or Vardish Ashkar quite like this. And yet, Anackire Am Ankabek, modeled on the Lady of Snakes, the arcane deity of the Shadowless Plains—some part of Rem told him he had already seen Her, long ago, far away. Before he was even born.

Above the clearing, but west of the temple, the red trees gave way to oaks, and it was possible to look out between them to the dark blue sea of the long afternoon. Among the grasses stood a small stone Anackire, rough layman’s work. No offerings had been set before Her, for this was Ankabek, and She needed nothing.

Since the fever had left him, Kesarh had mostly slept. The priests of the place had come and gone. Day and night had come and gone. Rem had been at the door, or within call, except when sent away. Val Nardia had remained. Last night, waking, Kesarh had found her sitting on the low stool, exhausted from watching and asleep, her head beside his on the pillow. They had been together only what their blood had made them, brother and sister. And now, brother and sister still, they had come up here to gaze at the innocent sea. There was time enough for a prolonged convalescence. His last order had kept the two ships and their men at Tjis, where they were happy to stay, feted and adored, though the town would probably never recover. Meanwhile, the messengers must have space to reach Istris; the messenger dispatched to the King, and that other messenger Kesarh had dispatched for other purposes, the morning after the snake.

Val Nardia, paler now than Kesarh, sat close beside him. Her eyes on the ocean, she reminded him in swift sentences of their childhood at Istris, the old tower in the lower gardens from which they had watched the distant harbor, excursions into the hills. Or the summer Festival of Masks five years ago, when they had found each other in the crowds and known each other instantly. He drank the wine and water in the flagon and ate the fruits she pressed him to eat. He basked in her love, letting her see the weakness which had almost left him, nothing more. And she, he recognized, was his accomplice in the deception.

Speaking of Istris, however, brought her abruptly, like a slip of the tongue, to mention his departure. Her pallor deepened.

“When,” she said, “will it be safe for you to return? Must you go in fear of your life in Karmiss always?”

“I always have gone in fear. That’s how I escaped worse than a snake. But I had plans for this, the Zakorian sea-fight, the murder attempt. You see, Ulis, such things, or others like them, had to come. To be ready was everything.”

“Then—”

“Then my own men will alert the paid gossips of the capital. They’ll soon be active. My heroism will be paramount, that and the treachery offered me. By the hour of my return there’ll be flowers on the street for my chariot to crush, and he won’t dare try for me again.”

“I shall pray to Her it shall be so. And to keep you in her protection.”

“The goddess was his weapon against me in Tjis. Her sword, Her serpent.”

Val Nardia turned from him, bewildered, at a loss.

“His corruption, not the goddess’ will—But you’re certain it was the King?”

“Who else?”

“Some other enemy.”

“You think I have a variety and may choose?”

“Your ambition,” she said softly, “but more than this—this thing in you which frightens me. This has made you enemies. Is your way unalterable?”

He saw the dangerous path now, and avoided it. He lay down on the grass and told her his head ached.

Later, as he drowsed against her, he said, “I’m glad you came here. You’ll be out of the reach of any harm. Otherwise they might use you as a lever against me. Elsewhere I’m armored.”

“You would sacrifice me with all the rest,” she said remotely, without resentment or distress.

“Ah, no,” he said. “Not you.”

Not you.

Kesarh had been on the island of Ankabek ten days when the boat came from the Karmian mainland. It was full dark and the Red Moon had risen with the Star. Men ran from the village, and the arrival stood on the beach glaring at them.

“I am sent to the Prince Kesarh Am Xai, by Suthamun, the King.”

By dint of this lie, the man won through at last to the temple hostelry, and the poor cell where Kesarh now stood, healed and ominous in the sullen light.

“Good evening, Number Three.”

The man, one of the ten Threes of Kesarh’s guard, saluted him. “My lord, I have this message for you.”

The soldier recited. Seldom did Kesarh or his guard sergeant commit such things to paper. When the recitation stopped, Kesarh’s expression had not changed at all. He had, of course, no reason for surprise. Matters had run to plan. The riders, pausing for nothing and appropriating new mounts as they had to, had halved the journey time, and the work was well-advanced. Visian Istris seethed on his behalf. To go back now was as wise as it had been formerly to stay away.

“And the ships at Tjis?”

“Have received an order to return, their captains and a few picked men to accept the bounty of the guardian in chariots and zeebas, and to proceed overland to the southeasternmost village on the Istris-Ioli road. Here to await yourself.”

“And thereafter to ride into Istris at my back,” said Kesarh. He grinned.

The ships would be slow. He had had no intention to allow his triumphal re-entry into the city to be marred or delayed. The caviling blond-haired half-blood sops who had jittered on their vessels, scared to fight, then mewling about the rights of slaves—they should run behind him through the streets, his kalinx pack, his dogs, for all Vis-Karmiss to see or to hear of.

“We’ll take the boat across again at first light. Where are the rowers sleeping?”

“On the beach, my lord.”

“You can have this cell. Share it with Number Nine, I’m sure he won’t object.”

The soldier stepped aside as Kesarh strode through the doorway and on up the slope toward the temple. Puzzled, the Number Three wondered if his Prince were going to give thanks to Ashara.

The little metal discs on the trees fluttered, making an eerie irritation of sound that seemed to burn in his veins.

He by-passed the great doors of the temple and continued along the black running wall. Quite simply, during their many conversations, his sister had mentioned where the novitiates were housed. Quite simply too, as his health improved, she had been less and less with him.

Presently an arch broke the wall. He went through into a courtyard. A single torch in a vase of thin pinkish stone trembled above a doormouth. The wind was rising on the sea. It could be a rough crossing tomorrow.

Kesarh knocked on the door. A grill was raised and a dark face showed in the glow of the torch-lamp.

“Who’s there?”

“I am the Prince Kesarh Am Xai. I’m here to bid my sister farewell. Let me in.”

“You may not enter.”

“Either you let me by or I break in the door.”

“This is a sacred place.”

“Then keep it sacred. Don’t risk unholy violence.”

There was a whispering, and the face went from the grill. Kesarh waited. The strength which flowed in him, which would brook no denial, seemed also aware that denial would not, ultimately, be tendered. After a minute, he heard a bar retracted on the inside of the door, which then opened to let him through.

He advanced into the gloomy passage and a weightless hand fell on his wrist. He looked, and saw a Lowland woman was by him, pure Lowland from the look of her, her narrow hand now shielding a candleflame from the snarl of wind at the door.

“You see Val Nardia. She is here. Follow, I’ll guide you to her.”

Something in this astonished him. He nearly laughed. They were naïve, then, or more wily than he had thought them.

Kesarh went after the woman and the flame, both blonde, ghostly on the unlit passages. There seemed a mile of these, serpentinely twisting, sloping up or down, and all lightless. Now and then the candle touched a side-turning, or the recess of a door. He suspected the obscurity was a device to confuse intruders, or profane visitors like himself.

Abruptly the woman halted. They were at another door-recess. She moved about and faced him.

“This is Val Nardia’s chamber. She is in the shrine just beyond. You should not disturb her there. Her meditation will shortly be ended. She’ll return, and find you.”

For a moment, he wondered if that were some trick, but then the Lowland woman said to him: “There are high slots in these walls, open to the sky. In the dusk before dawn you should be able to see quite well. The Princess herself can direct you.”

Kesarh lifted his eyebrows at her impassiveness.

“You imagine I’ll be here all night.”

She merely looked at him. Her face was unreadable. Only the yellow eyes gave any color to it, and the violet jewel depending on her forehead—the Serpent’s Eye, gem of the goddess.

“Well,” he said, “I intend to be off the island by sunrise.”

“Then she will light a lamp for you.”

Kesarh suddenly laughed.

“How much do you want for this? Or is it to be a gift to the temple?”

“My lord,” the Lowland priestess said, “the only gift which is required will be given.”

“A riddle. I said, how much?”

“My lord,” the priestess said. That was all. He glimpsed her leaning toward the candle and heard the snake-hiss as her breath blew it out. In the sheer blackness he did not see her go, nor hear it. No glimmer came from the slots above, if slots there were, this place was turned away from the moon and the Star.

Kesarh fumbled with the door and felt it give. The room beyond was lamplit, and he went into it, slamming the door shut on the black outside. The encounter had angered him. He glanced about, and perceived instantly the other curtained doorway. Ripping the curtain aside he gazed into a fresh lightless passage, which presumably led to the shrine the woman had mentioned. With an oath, he pulled the curtain to again and gave his attention to the empty room.

It was spare and small and, to Kesarh, unbeautiful. At junctures, Val Nardia’s own possessions stood or lay, the chests he had seen piled up at Istris for her departure, a box of Elyrian enamel, the plain mantle she wore here. The bed was low and slender. Lying on the pillow was a dying flower that he had tucked yesterday into her hair. He picked it up. A little of its scent still lingered, but mostly now it was perfumed with Val Nardia, and he crushed it in his hand.

Then he heard the noise of the curtain behind him, and next the long indrawn gasp.

He turned. She was barefoot, and had carried no light through the dark. Now she seemed half-blinded, by the lamps, or by him.

“How did you come here?” she said.

“Your priestesses let me in. I came to say good-bye. I leave tomorrow.”

“But,” she said. Unlike the face of the Lowlander, Val Nardia’s gorgeous face was utterly readable. She had flown here for sanctuary, but the sanctuary had abetted him. She was betrayed.

“There are no windows in this room,” he said. “You can’t see the sky. Or the stars. Not even Zastis.”

She took a step toward him. “You must go. Go now.”

“When you believed I might die, you were full of grief and fear. Now you pack me off, maybe to my death, like a doll you tired of. Is that how you considered me, all those years we were children together? A toy. Useful, comfortable. Made of wood or rags.”

“No,” she said, “that’s how you think of me.” Her honey eyes widened. “Something for your use. Your admiring slave. A game you played. For your use.”

“Let me use you then,” he said. “And you, Val Nardia, use me.”

She opened her mouth, and this time he knew it was to scream. Before she could make a sound, he had closed the gap between them. He grasped her against him. The gauzy robe she wore, the shift under it, made no barrier. He seemed to feel her body and its detail as if both of them were already naked. The hand he had clamped across her mouth he drew away, closing her mouth instead with his own. She struggled, as she had struggled before, but more frenziedly now. Even, she tried to bite him, his lips, his tongue, as they invaded her. But the bites were ineffectual, she could not bring herself to hurt him, even in this. He knew a blazing stab of pity for her, pity which was also love, and could have wept himself as he drew his head away. She was too breathless now to scream. Besides, who would hear her?

Her hands went on beating at him, clawing at him. She tugged at his hair, scratched his throat—but again, strengthlessly. And all the while she muttered her one word of entreaty and objection—No, sometimes his name mingled in it—and he muttered her name, or the pet name, Ulis. It became a litany between them, a song, meaningless.

Soon he lifted her and carried her over to the mean bed and put her on it, and lay down over her.

He could feel the tensions of her flesh, all the agony of Zastis. The fastenings of the robe came undone with ease, and the rough lace beneath. He found her breasts, moulded them, tasted their sweetness. She struggled still against him, her clutching hands now like those of one who drowned. But he thrust her back under the water and drowned with her. The room seemed scarlet from her hair, the hair of her head, and the ulis-petalled hair of her loins.

At the final invasion, her eyes were open, meeting his, her hands fierce on his shoulders, her mouth hungry for his, forgetting at last all words. Almost instantly she became a whirlpool, a whirlpool which clasped him, dissolving him. Her cries came, louder, higher, endless. She seemed to be dying against him, but somewhere in her death there surged his own. He lost her, but not the essence of her, never that.

In the defended stillness of death which followed, he smiled, lying on her hair, her flesh, thinking this too a victory, quite conclusive.

4

The first of Suthamun’s heirs, his eldest legal son, waked in his love-bed and kicked the nearer girl into communication.

“What’s that din?”

The girl did not know. Nor did the other, when he kicked her.

Prince Jornil rose from the bed, petulantly furious. He was clear Shansar from both parents, but birth and growth in Karmiss the Lily on the Ocean had caused him to be a twining plant rather than a tree. He had never had a moment’s doubt of himself or his future. Only his father’s wrath could make him blink.

He stood, goldenly handsome in the window, listening incredulous to the uproar out in the streets. He knew nothing about it. It was not for him or his.

When a servitor informed Jornil the hubbub sprang from a crowd, gathering to watch the return of the Prince Am Xai into Istris, Jornil laughed aloud.

Paid word-mongers had prepared the way. Then genuine rumor and real truth had augmented everything. Making camp in the eastern hills above the city, the returning heroes had paused, sending some ahead to collect and bring them out their finery for a processional entry. Somehow Prince Kesarh had persuaded them that Suthamun would countenance acclaim for the victory. Even the single lost ship would be forgiven. Because he had been clever, the three captains and their ship-lords thought themselves clever, too, and were not difficult to convince.

In fact, Suthamun Am Shansar had had no intention of drawing the public gaze to their achievement. Having received the official messenger Kesarh had sent, the King had had prepared a slight speech of commendation to be delivered in council, by the Warden. The King himself would, after an interval, extend a fairly private audience to the Prince Am Xai, thank him, give him some small gift; upbraid him gently and with magnanimous brevity for the loss the galley. As for an entry into Istris, Kesarh and his twenty men might come in at any time. The ships might also make free of the harbor as they wished.

The going-out had been stagy, to display Suthamun’s excessive care for clean shores. He had himself reckoned the Free Zakorian menace less than it was, or he would have sent his own captains in Shansar-built ships, and under the command of his brother, Uhl.

Suthamun, though, had reckoned without Visian Istris. Men in Shansar had a weakness for show, but it was show of a different sort, magic or mystic often, generally significant. Little events were seldom blown up to gales with hot air. When the crowds came out to cheer him home from a hunt, the King had failed to see it was the pleasure of event they rejoiced in, not his royal self.

There had, additionally, been the touch of organization. Men who, at sun-up, had stationed themselves about, stating which streets should be kept clear, therefore encouraging the crowd to pile up on either side. The women who had gathered or purchased flowers, declaiming on the lord they would cast them to, garlands for his greatness. And there were the others, who had spoken from the beginning—At last, a dark man who would safeguard their honor and their security.

By midday there was expectancy, press of people and loud sound throughout all the wind and stretch of streets and avenues from Istris’ White Gate to the palace. Banners had been hauled from chests and hung out of windows. Hawkers sold colored streamers, bells and squeaky trumpets, with the wine and sweets. Only the Ashara Temple, last bastion on the route before the palace was reached, gave evidence of extreme uninterest.

A few minutes after noon, the word of an approach began to fly.

On the heels of this faultless rabble-rousing forerunner, the Prince Am Xai came through the White Gate from the Ioli road, in the midst of his cavalcade.

Drummers marched in first, six of them, in black burnished mail, setting a brisk solid tempo. Directly after these came bronze horns and rattles, and then the Lily banner of Karmiss borne high on the music. After the Lily banner prowled two nubile girls, dressed in ribbons and little else, with lilies in their hair. They led by ropes of flowers two black gelded bulls, docile and obliging. The crowd was quick to see the analogous joke, or perhaps they were helped. “Free Zakoris!” the cry went up. Free gelded Zakoris, led by the dulcet Lily. The girls flirted and blushed. They were wenches from the hills, earning money beyond their dreams. The bulls, too, were from the hill farms.

Ten soldiers rode by, and two soldiers walked in their trotting wake, carrying between them the outspread banner of Kesarh’s blazon, the Salamander in gold on a scarlet ground. The overall approving noise winged into cheering. The crowd started to call his name, as men had on the ships at Tjis: Am Xai! Am Xai!

They could already see him, standing in the brazen chariot. He wore red today, the color of the wine with which he had made dupes and corpses of the pirates. His team of zeebas was black, black as his hair. Despite the uproar, he held the team in perfect check with one hand. The other rested almost idly on the chariot rail, loosely holding in its grasp a gold-handled whip. The symbols were exact. Not many missed them, though most would not have given them a name. The stance of facile strength and grace, the warlike masculine beauty which seemed to encompass Kesarh, surrounded by his men in their dark mail, in control of all things, so it seemed. The image of a king. A Vis king.

They were bawling now, and the flowers were coming down like rain.

He turned now and then, acknowledging them. None of Suthamun’s riotousness, or the heirs’ simpering or smiling contempt. Kesarh was different. His courtesy and his arrogance enthralled them. They felt they had been noticed, as was their right, by a god.

Such was Kesarh’s presence, which he understood, and used so plainly and so well, having waited so patiently for a chance to use it.

Behind Kesarh rode twenty more of his men, all the Twos and all the Fives of his one hundred. Altogether, almost forty of his personal guard were on view through the procession.

The heroes of the ships, who rode after, were more gaudy, and the crowd made a fuss of them, naturally. But they tasted the vinegar on the honey. Even the blond, dark-skinned captain named—along with many others—for his looks: Raldnor, even he on his costly horse knew he was not that day’s darling.

By the time the Prince reached the Ashara Temple, the crowd was thunderous and the incense of broken flowers hid the fact that no sacred incense rose from the holy terrace.

People burst across the square as Am Xai reined in. His guard held them back good-humoredly, for they were good-humored themselves, wanting only to come closer to their focal point.

The black bulls were led by their floral chains across to the temple and up the steps, the Prince and his guard following, and the crowd spilling after.

The priests, who had been watching from eyelets, were doubtless perturbed. None came forth.

Kesarh stood, with unflawed poise, calmly waiting, demonstrating that the fault was not his, but he would overlook it. The crowd, however, began to shout and yell at the temple. Eventually a solitary flustered priest scurried from the porch to be greeted by abusive applause. He was a Shansarian, or at least enough of one to fulfill the rigid strictures of the Ashara Temple.

He hurried to Kesarh, but before the priest could speak, as if he had been asked, Kesarh said, in his carrying actor’s voice: “I’m here to sacrifice to the goddess, in the sight of the people, for my victory at Tjis.”

The priest looked about him, decided, and ran away.

The crowd cat-called, protested. Then fell quiet, anxious to see what Kesarh would do.

What he did was to hesitate an instant, as if in thought, then walk directly up to the marble altar on the terrace.

He said nothing further, but a motion of his hand brought the pair of bulls to him, a man now at either side, the girls melted away.

Kesarh drew his knife. The edge was honed to a razor—he had been expecting this.

With a swiftness that was astonishing, and an atrocious accuracy, he swept his arm across the black taurian necks, slicing both throats before the stroke was ended.

Blood spouted, gushed. The great heads flopped, the bodies spasmed and sank, almost as one. Drowned in gore, the flowers unwove and streaked the steps with brackish red. But he had been so agile, there was not a splash on his fine clothes: even his hands were unmarked.

Long ago, in the past of the past, kings had sacrificed in such a way.

The priest, who had only gone for reinforcements, rushed out with his fellow officiates upon the terrace. Unneeded.

The King was stripped naked, save for the cloth about his loins. He had been at exercise with stave and bow, was en route to his bath, and that it was in this way and this state that he took the audience was significant. The insult was a blatant one. That the young man in the wine-red garments knew himself insulted, what rank he had totally ignored, must be certain.

“Well,” Suthamun said to him, letting the slave place a mantle at last across his shoulders. “Your explanation?”

Kesarh Am Xai looked at his King with enormous blankness.

“My explanation of what, my lord?”

“Your dance measure through my streets. Of that.”

“You gave us free entry, my lord. Your people chose to honor us, in your name.”

“My name? You flounced back into Istris as if you’d re-taken Zakoris herself, instead of a brace of boats.”

“Seven ships, my lord.”

Suthamun, wrapped in the robe, sat down and drank wine. None was offered elsewhere. There were a number of others in the room, watching with interest. The oldest son, Prince Jornil, ate figs and stared at Kesarh’s clothing. As the father had coveted kalinxes nearly a month ago, the son now coveted this elegant costume. It irked Jornil that Kesarh, who had, and deserved to have, no revenues, could procure such tailors and such dyes.

“Seven ships,” said the King. “Or were you seeing more than double the number?”

There was a long pause. The offensive question apparently required an answer.

“Seven, my lord,” said Kesarh. “If you fear my reckoning is out, you might ask the captains you yourself appointed, Lios, or Raldnor Am Ioli.”

“I’ll ask them nothing. They’re disgraced. With you.”

Another long silence. Kesarh kept his eyes down, knowing what Suthamun might behold in them, should they be raised.

“You must excuse me, my King. I thought, when you sent me to Tjis, I went with your blessing to gain some renown for myself.”

“Did you? Then you should have waited for me to tell you so. You were sent, you Visian dog, to burn refuse on the sea. No more.”

There was a vague murmuring about the room. Suthamun ran his eye over it, daring it to grow louder, and it died.

The talk had reached the palace, the talk of the streets. Kesarh had been set on in the coastal town by agents of some enemy, some high enemy, who was envious. Only the skills of Ankabek had saved him.

That the King did not mention the sojourn at Ankabek was also evidential.

Kesarh waited. He waited for Suthamun to see that regal unfavor toward him now could reek of villainy. But Suthamun did not, or would not, see this.

“You came in,” said Suthamun Am Shansar, “like a young leopard. You can creep out again like a mouse. You will go at once to your estates at Xai.” Kesarh’s head came up and his eyes flashed like drawn knives. And Suthamun smiled. “Yes, my Salamander. The fire’s out.”

The ragged man bowed low, the third time he had done so.

“They’re selling locks of black male hair, saying it’s yours, sir. And the poet made a fine job of the paean; he’s singing it over in the eastern city by now. And the women—women we never funded—mooning over you, refusing their lovers—”

“All right,” the shadow said from the chair. And then, to another, and to the ragged man’s great relief, “Pay him what I told you.”

When the paid man had gone out, Kesarh rose and filled a glass goblet with water. This indeed was no hour for wine.

The mistake had been in not realizing fully he played this game against a dolt. Suthamun, too much an idiot to make the correct move, the move which would have laid brick on brick—

Kesarh drank the bitter water.

“What else?”

His guard sergeant handed him a package. It had been opened, tested for its motive.

Kesarh examined the contents.

“Raldnor Am Ioli’s third best ring. A love-token?”

The sergeant showed his teeth.

“Better than writing it, my lord.”

“True. He doesn’t like Suthamun’s response. Rather than blame me, he blames the King. Another fool. This one more convenient, perhaps, if he keeps his promises. Are those men ready to ride?”

“Yes, my lord. One fifth, as you ordered. The lads we’ve had longest, and most often seem about you.”

“They won’t like Xai. But then, neither shall I. There’s another man. One of the Nines, Rem. A Karmian with light eyes and friends in the Ommos quarter.”

“I know him. We put Biter to him not long ago.”

“Find him and send him there. The King gave me just until sunset to get out of Istris.”

There was a sound beyond the apartment door, the man on guard there striking the floor with his spear. Next second the door was flung wide.

A servant stood fluting in Shansarian: “Through the will of Ashara, the First Heir, Prince Jornil of Istris,” while Jornil brushed by him and walked into the chamber.

Kesarh looked at him. Jornil beautifully returned the look. The light of late afternoon tumbled against him like a loving woman. The door was shut at his back.

“An honor,” Kesarh said shortly. “You’re here to wave me off.”

“I’m here to tell you to leave those clothes behind you when you go.”

Kesarh stared at him, then all at once he laughed, only one harsh note of it.

He pulled another flagon over and gestured to the sergeant. As the door closed a third time, Kesarh presented Prince Jornil with a drink of wine.

Jornil put the smoky glass down untasted.

“Come now,” said Kesarh. “Did you think I put something in it?”

Jornil beamed. They spoke in the Vis tongue. Despite the announcing servant, Jornil had some difficulty with the language of his fathers.

“No. But I don’t like your wine.”

“Karmian grapes.”

“Quite. The clothes. . . .”

“Of course, my Prince,” said Kesarh. He put his hand to the fastening of the tunic. “Now?”

“Oh, you can simply discard them here. I’ll send someone for them.”

“And do have them well-laundered. I rode at least three miles in them.”

Jornil picked up the wine, regarded it, put it down again.

“Is it true what they’re saying? I mean, that my father attempted to have you killed?”

Kesarh considered.

“It isn’t true. But I wonder why you should think someone is saying it.”

“It’s common gossip on the street. A poisonous snake at Tjis—”

Kesarh now burst out laughing. Jornil, not intending to, laughed with him.

“A minor wound in battle. No snake. Nor is there any reason on the earth,” said Kesarh, “for Suthamun to have need to kill me. He can send me to Xai, a living death. Much worse.”

Jornil, who did not like Kesarh, but who was yet vastly drawn to him, and who had been intermittently yet fascinatedly jealous of him since their childhood, snorted with amusement.

“I may come and visit you there.”

“Don’t, for the goddess’ sake. A royal progress to Xai would finish it. No. Remember me here. Wear these clothes for me. This dye, they tell me, was mixed with the blood of thirteen virgin girls, to get the color so exact.”

Jornil, between belief and scorn for Zastis quickening, lifted the cup of sour young wine and drained it.

Xai was situated on the plains of southwestern Karmiss, many miles from the capital. It was a journey of fifteen to seventeen days, mostly due to the poverty or nonexistence of the roads. The inns were also poor, or nonexistent. The land was flat at Xai. Wild zeeba herds galloped across it, as if themselves unwilling to linger. Two small villages crouched on the estate. The villa itself was ramshackle. Patchy jungle-forest, adrift in a swampy lake, gave the house its characteristic aura and odor.

Kesarh had spent enough of his childhood in this place to know how much he detested it.

Like a sick lion, he fretted in his confinement. At night, or at odd times during the blazing days, Zastis drove him to couple with the wretched women who were his possessions. He rode, exercised, and tried to hunt the sterile country. The men he had taken with him got drunk on the vile local beer and spewed it up again, cursing Suthamun, or Kesarh, or their gods.

He had been there a full month before he had any unsolicited word. Then it was from the source he partly anticipated: the half-blood captain, Raldnor of Ioli.

Twelve days later the man arrived, with an escort only of three. Which boded rather well.

They sat on the roof terrace under awning. As the sun began to set over the forest in the lake, birds rose and fell in screaming clouds.

“I’ve come to see more and more distinctly,” Raldnor Am Ioli declared with soft persistence, “how we were used. I, my fellow captains, yourself, lord Prince. All to be sacrificed. Then Suthamun to send some favorite and clear the seas, getting glory over our backs. We were the taster at the feast. Meant to die to prove the strength of the bane.”

Kesarh smiled slightly. At his signal the girl refilled the Iolian’s cup.

“And so naturally,” Am Ioli said, “instead of reward—punishment. My captaincy retracted. And fined—fined, by Ashkar—for making unsanctioned public spectacle.” He drank. His pale blood was not from Shansar, but out of Vardath, hence his Vardish name for the goddess. That too was useful, in the matter of basic loyalties. “Is Suthamun insane?”

Kesarh shrugged.

“The King believes in the supremacy of his own yellow race. Men of mixed blood—even of such favorable coloring as yourself, sir—are a blot on the purity of his people. I didn’t properly understand this, I confess, until Tjis. Now, Raldnor, I wonder how long I shall understand anything.”

“You’re in fear of your life, still.”

“If I died at Xai, it would go unremarked.”

“No. The capital’s alive with your praises, even now.”

“Till the mob forget, then. After that—another snake, maybe.”

“He could reach out to all of us.”

“So he could.”

They drank. Raldnor Am Ioli banged down his empty cup.

“Other than fly Karmiss like felons, what solution?”

Kesarh said, “I could hardly get off the island, having been regally detained here. He’d like me to attempt it, possibly, then invent treason out of it. A lawful execution would follow.”

“This is Suthamun’s madness.”

“His obsession. But what hope does any man of dark blood have since the Lowland War?”

Ruffled, Raldnor intuitively smoothed his feathers. Until recently, the accident of coloring which had earned him his illustrious name, had worked as an aid rather than a drawback. The godlike Storm Lord Raldnor himself had been a mix.

The sun was in the lake, drowning and burning like one of the Free Zakorian ships. The wine, too, was nearly gone.

“Berinda,” Kesarh spoke peremptorily to the girl. She looked at him with the soft, wounded eyes of the born-broken slave, then slipped away to refill the jug. “In any case,” Kesarh murmured, “I’m surprised you think me worth your concern, sir. After our discussion at sea.”

“Those galley-slaves you left to roast?” Raldnor met his eyes coolly. “It was an act I loathed, my lord. But your ruthlessness, while I abhorred it, do abhor it, led me to expect—how shall I put it?—great things of you. A shining future. You’d destroy anything that stood in your way.”

“And you,” said Kesarh, “would rather risk yourself beside me, than find yourself in my way.”

Raldnor, with a certain humorousness, nodded.

He was an audaciously clever and perceptive man. These very qualities would occasionally cause him to behave foolishly and blindly.

“You asked if there might be a solution to the King’s malice,” Kesarh said. “There may be. Something that will show his hand to the people so openly he won’t dare to try again. Something stamped with such ironic justice that Istris will never forget it. It’ll hurt, too, if you like your revenge with salt on it.”

Raldnor shifted. He now knew himself in the presence of what he had already sensed he was in the presence of, aboard the Karmian galley. But, opportunist that he was, his eyes were open and his hands steady as he said, “Please enlighten me, my lord.”

In a couple of sentences, Kesarh obliged.

“By all the bloody gods,” said Raldnor, whose Vis mother had been a successful whore in Ioli’s Pleasure City.

Across the roof, against a sky which had lulled to bronze, the girl Berinda was coming back with more wine. She had heard nothing of what was said, nor would it have interested her. Her mind was fixed and held by fundamental things. As she leaned to fill Kesarh’s cup, she remembered how he had lain with her, and she inhaled the male scent of him like some drug.

He paid her no heed.

The priestess Eraz became aware that another had noiselessly entered the Sanctum, beyond the curtain of golden scales. Eraz looked, with her inner eye, out into the unseen space. The persona was immediately recognizable, not only for itself, but for the infinitesimal secondary element which was now in the midst of it, fainter than the warmth of a dead coal.

It was presently the time when the luminary fires of the temple burned low, and when the curtain before the goddess did not rise merely at a footfall on the sky-borne dragons of the mosaic. These were, too, the hours between midnight and morning known in the ancient mythos of the Shadowless Plains as the WolfWatch. The hours of the insomniac, of doubt and self-dislike, and, sometimes, of death.

The Lowland priestess moved from behind the curtain and into the body of the Sanctum. She crossed to the spot where the Princess Val Nardia stood, her head bowed, alone and in silence.

“Do you seek the goddess?”

Val Nardia faltered.

“I seek. She isn’t to be found.”

“Yes. Always.”

Val Nardia turned her face not simply downward, but away.

“I’ve sinned. She’s not for me.”

“If you’d thought Her not for you, you would not have come to Her, Val Nardia of Istris.”

“I’ve sinned—sinned—let me confess it, and give me a penance.”

“That is the way of your mother’s people. Anackire awards no penance, no suffering. The symbol-stretching of Her arms which are retribution, destruction, torment, the inexorable curse—these are metaphysical. We inflict our own torture upon ourselves. We chastise ourselves.”

“My sin—”

“Your sin is only sin because you will have it so.”

“No. Help me!” Val Nardia cried, looking up, catching at the woman’s robe.

Eraz said, “The help is in you. You must help yourself. What we have done is the past. We reiterate the deed, or we dismiss the deed.”

Val Nardia gasped. “You hate me,” she said abruptly. “Your kind hate all of us who have the blood of Vis. I shouldn’t be here. Your goddess, not mine.”

Eraz did not glance at her, her eyes were lamps. She seemed not to be human.

“Yours, if you will accept Her. You don’t need my comfort, Princess. This is what we try to teach you. You need only Her, and to know the power within yourself.”

“You disdain to listen. My crime—”

The golden eyes returned to her.

“Search firstly within yourself. Then, if you fail yourself, you may come to me.”

Val Nardia flung away. She ran across the mosaic and, reaching one of the obscured exits, ran down it into the ground.

Eraz paused. She became in her mind two persons, as she had trained herself to become. The first said to her, This girl has no fortitude to bear these things. She understands nothing. Eraz answered, Each of us has the fortitude to bear all things. For centuries, my people believed they were the victims of this earth, ordained to suffer and to perish, finally to be expunged. But at last they were shown another way. They believed then they would be world-lords, as in the depths of the past. This now is the path they would tread. Val Nardia is in the hand of the goddess. She must come to know this. But I think, too, her destiny forbids it.

And far off, she was aware of Val Nardia, hastening through the under-temple, wrapped in her black pall of shame, and the tiny new-lit candle at the core of her, blacker to her than all things else.

Storms tore through Istris, dry storms without rain. There began to be some fears of drought. Then water speared from the swollen cumulus and the bright summer hail that flamed where it struck stone or metal.

In the last quarter of Zastis, came a Karmian feast day, the Festival of Masks. The marble walks were still running with rain at sunfall, but the skies had been polished of cloud, from the apex sheer to a magenta sea.

The city began to resound like a beaten drum, flaring into mobile lights that ran frenetically everyway. Vanes of colored glass hoisted on the street torches turned the boulevards mulberry, amber, indigo, the shades of Aarl, till they were smashed. In wild costumes the richer rabble and the more adventurous well-to-do paraded themselves, concealed by the represented faces of sun and moon and Red Star, beasts, demons, and banaliks.

The palace itself, seldom demure after dusk, had blazed up like a bonfire, cacophonous with music and buffoonery.

There were rumors the King might go abroad in the city later, suitably hidden in a mask of gold, that old escapading streak getting the better of him, as the tales told it had so often done before. What beggars would win horses tonight? What thirteen-year-old virgins boast, ten months from now, that Suthamun Am Shansar was responsible for the wailing thing bouncing on its springy womb-chain?

There was another rumor too. It had started somewhere around the harbor. Kesarh Am Xai had come back, without the permission of his King. Even before the rain stopped and the sky hollowed, this theme was current everywhere. The King himself had heard it reported, and furiously laughed it to scorn.

“Who is Kesarh Am Xai?” Suthamun had demanded. “Am I familiar with the name?”

As night climbed, the drink poured like the rain and lovers coupled in the fever of the Star in doorways, on roofs, on bell-hung carts, kissing through masked lips, starting up or down into faces of sunbursts and orynx. Drunks had visions. Some spoke of having seen the Prince Am Xai here or there. Of having shared a beer jar with him in Lamp Alley, or discussed pirates in the lower city. Or he had gone by with a swirl of his cloak and two or three of his soldiers, on not-so-secret secret business somewhere, but masked like all the rest. This was a new apparition. Generally, Istris saw ghosts at the Festival of Masks. Numerous times the hero Raldnor Am Anackire himself had driven his chariot along its roads, red-haired Karmian Astaris at his side, and men had fallen on their knees and tipsily fainted. Of course, it was quite likely someone had been dressed to fool the populace, some dark-skinned man donning white hair and a fair imitation of the old Dortharian scale-plate dragon mail. And there were many red-haired women now, from the mixing of bloods.

Jornil, the Oldest Son, First Heir to the King, did not recall from whence the idea had initially sprung. He thought it his own entirely, and it appealed to him at all his various levels, of vanity, of mischievous caprice, of envy and of idiocy.

In the beginning, the elegant clothes of the marvelously sanguine red dye had required some alteration. Kesarh was leaner at waist and pelvis than Jornil, and longer-legged besides. When the necessary amendments had been carried out—somewhat under the pretext that the discrepancy was in the shoulders, which would need widening—the notion was introduced that Suthamun might not wish to see his heir in the apparel of one disgraced.

Jornil was careful of his father. The other heirs were children; it was not so much a chance of being cast off, or even of a loss of privileges. It was more some incoherent thing that had to do with the stronger personality of his sire, which had cowed Jornil from the cradle, and helped, with the obverse cushioning of Karmiss, to make him what he was.

So, he did not put on the prized clothing. And thus began to look for some opportunity to get away with putting it on. Then, as the festival approached, the second notion was introduced.

In fact, one of the re-fitting tailors had supplied the first caution against wearing the clothes. The suggestion of assuming them on the night of the masks came from a girl, cunning not only in bed. Both had been paid to do this service for the Prince Jornil. The paymaster was a fellow with loosely curling black hair, Vis, but lighter-eyed than most. Only the girl recognized him as a man who had previously attended the Prince Am Xai, and she had the wisdom to forget it.

The rumors that Kesarh had been spotted in Istris amused Jornil greatly. When he left the rowdy feast in the palace hall, and went to change into Kesarh’s red clothes, he needed his sun-ray mask to hide his excitement.

Since manhood, he had been sensitive to Kesarh. Kesarh had seen to it, in some off-hand, under-played fashion, that he should be. Now, to become Kesarh for a night was awesome, a challenge. On top of that, to carry on his father’s legendary tradition, haunting the city in disguise, added its own sauce to the jaunt.

Suthamun would go mad, if he ever learned the truth. But Jornil, along with nervousness, had gained a total lack of respect for his father’s ability to reason.

When he had on the clothes, he pulled off the sun-ray mask. The mask he replaced it with was quite unremarkable, save that one half was black, the other half white. Pouring back from the crown of it, the wig of thick black hair covered up his blondness.

Jornil strutted for himself in front of a mirror. Then went out, his legs moving in Kesarh’s long stride, by lesser passageways, into an inside court. There he mounted a black zeeba, and his escort of five guards, their mail washed dark, unfurled a small banner, signaled with a fire-lizard.

They pelted out into the city.

It was nearly midnight, and the carnival was in some places escalating, in others getting sluggish.

When the first cries went up—Am Xai—It’s the Prince Am Xai—Jornil grinned hugely and unseen.

He went on grinning a long while, till his jaws ached. He never for an instant questioned why he, who ostensibly had everything Kesarh had not, should be impelled to this, and gain such enjoyment from it.

Inevitably the enjoyment and excitement started to take fire from Zastis. He began to want a girl, and to look about for one he fancied.

Both he and his escort were by now fairly drunk. Coming into a square where the celebration was still exuberant, he thought to dismount and make his way on foot. His guard enabled him to push through. A procession was winding over the square, singing and shrieking, with jugglers throwing fire-brands. He had turned to look at it, when a girl came out of the crowd and fell against him.

Her face was covered by a kalinx mask, but her perfumed hair streamed from it over her shoulders and her breasts, which were almost bare. She was dark, a Vis girl, and she clung to him.

“My Lord Kesarh,” she said hoarsely, “Zakorian pirates killed my brothers. You avenged me, and countless others like me. And I’ve loved you ever since. Yasmais answered my prayers and brought you here, risking the wrath of the King. I’ve followed you for miles, daring myself to speak to you. Don’t send me away.”

Jornil breathed fast. He reached out and thrust aside her mask, as he felt Kesarh would have done. She was pretty. She even closely resembled a girl Kesarh had once kept in the palace.

He whispered something in her ear. She pressed herself to him, exquisitely making contact with every part of him, through Kesarh’s clothing.

The girl led Jornil across the square, his five guard meandering after. They turned into a side street, and then into the courtyard of an unlit dilapidated house.

Already unlacing, Jornil hastened into the dark beyond the door, his breathing like a bellows, and leaned the girl against a wall.

The guard loitered just outside, a vestige of security, mostly persuaded they too might get a turn with the girl.

His head tipped back to drink from the passing wine-skin, the fifth guard choked. The sky was falling on him off the top of the wall, and holding a knife that suddenly replaced the wine in his throat.

The cart with its streamers and bells raced clattering and ringing through the streets, dragged by three terrified zeebas. When the congestion of people ultimately slowed its rush, and men had climbed up on it to try its cargo, they found only one item.

The body of the Prince Kesarh Am Xai, dressed in red, which red nevertheless did not obscure the multiple wounds. It had been stabbed and slashed, pierced, hacked, practically butchered, until only the masked face remained uncut. Which masked face, when it was uncovered, revealed itself as that of the princely heir, Jornil.

The night was turning toward morning, but in the windowless room she could not see it, could not see moon or stars, or the Red Star itself. As he had said. Her brother, Kesarh.

And she had only to think this to feel once more his hands and mouth upon her, his body upon her, within her, and the anguished frenzy they had created not once but many times through the brief hours they shared together. Each coupling had exhausted her, wrung her to emptiness. She had not been able to think, to fight anymore, either physically or with her spirit. She had lain beneath him, beside him, curved into the angles of him, pinned fast to the mattress, wrapped in his arms, a comforted prisoner. And no sooner did awareness reclaim her than her stirring flesh sought his as he sought her. Again, no space for denial. It had been no rape. As he had told her, he had used her, and she him. They had tried to extinguish themselves, breaking like waves on the shores of each other’s lust and life. Or so it had seemed to her.

Then he left her, to return to Istris—not as he had gone away, better than that. He had been sure. His sureness and his strength had shone with a fierce dark light in the little dark room and she had not wanted him to go. She had been afraid, for when he was gone, she would be alone. She would have at last the space to know what they had done.

He had kissed her, put her aside, gently now.

“I’ll come back. I’ll take you from this stone box. When I can, when it’s safe for you. Till then, be here for me.”

And he had kissed her once more with a lover’s kiss, so letting her drop back among the covers. He had walked out of the room and away, and she had become for him an accomplishment, set on one side, no longer a priority. Oh, she knew that much.

While for herself—

He was now a colossus, closing her horizons. She had escaped him, but he had pursued her. The goddess of Ankabek had given him the means, and so the goddess had died like a light. Kesarh dominated now. His black intention. His power. Shadow on shadow.

Could it be that, twins, each embodied an opposing principle, as each had been formed to an opposing sex? Val Nardia, timidity, a shrinking from the world. And he, a hunter, a devouring.

Kesarh was evil. She knew it. Had known it since their childhood passed behind them. Cruel, pitiless, some essential atom missing from his soul.

She had struggled so long with this. No remedy had suggested itself. Yet, there was a remedy. She had realized as soon as the other, inexorable realization came to her.

She had attempted to pretend at first that it was not so. But her body, her body which had betrayed her to him, her body mocked her, content with what it had done, and had sealed her to its purpose, and his. For her body was with child. The child of her brother.

Val Nardia considered she had been stupid to approach the Lowland priestess. The people of the Plains were not like the Vis, not even like the races of the Sister Continent, Vathcri, Shansar, but unique to themselves. And pitiless as Kesarh, in their passionless way.

She stood up. Shrinking from the world, she had now come to that crossroads of both the cowardly and the brave, and chosen her direction.

She stepped onto the stool indifferently. She had gone sleepless many nights and was very tired. Using only one hand, she brought the looped end of the scarlet cord dangling from the rafter quite matter-of-factly over her head.

She felt only the slightest apprehension at what would happen. Her neck was very slight. Just so her own mother had ended her life. And as Val Nardia herself, a child of eight or nine, had come into a room and found her, so some other would come into this room and find Val Nardia.

Sighing a little, and with a strange grace, she slipped her feet from the stool.

Kesarh had sat very late over his wine, then taken the wine and a girl to his bedchamber.

The faint stench of the swamp-lake disturbed him, that and the activities of the night which he had no means as yet of knowing. The Festival of Masks had provided him with a drawn dagger, Raldnor Am Ioli had helped place the blade, and the King’s Heir, if Jornil remained true to himself, had thrown himself on it.

The moment Jornil had ordered Kesarh to gift his processional clothes to him, the plan had begun to quicken in Kesarh’s brain.

Raldnor’s men had started the rumors of Kesarh’s return—false, naturally. Rem, who had seen to the tailor and the girl, had also suggested a deserted house. He himself had once employed such buildings, and knew of several about the city, from the days of his brigandage.

Am Ioli’s men had performed the murder. If they had done it. If everything had gone to plan. If. That was the exacerbation of this. Kesarh must wait here in ignorance, must be known to wait here in ignorance. That was everything.

In the end the wine and the girl relaxed him. He fell asleep, a sleep deeper than the center of the land he lay over.

Then, in sleep, a hurricane rent the darkness in his skull.

He woke, crying out, and the girl caught his shoulder.

“A dream—a dream, my lord,” she muttered, trying to soothe him.

He shook her off, reeling up from the bed.

“Not a dream.”

She reached out and he struck her away.

She sank back, whimpering, and he went out and up the stair to the roof terrace. Here he stood in the star-reddened night, the pulses of it beating on him, staring away toward the forest. There was a kind of nothingness inside him. As if some vital organ had perished, and yet he lived.

He did not know what it was, and gradually, forcefully, he thrust it from him. And away. And away.

When he went back, the girl was folded on the floor.

“Come here,” he said. “You were right. It was only a dream.”

She crawled back to him and caressed him until he wanted her and took her. He fell asleep again, and as he slept, Berinda curled against his spine, smiling like a forgiven child.

5

Against a blue dusk no longer tinged by Zastis, the magician’s hands flickered and a rain of light fell from them. In the shallow bowl beneath, the bones of a recently dead animal, clean and white, glimmered. There was a prolonged hiatus. Beyond the window, stars hung in streams above the bay. A star smoked also on the highest palace roof, a morbid beacon to all Istris: the funeral watch-fire of a King’s dead, custom of Shansar, burning now for more than a month.

“Well?” Suthamun eventually rasped.

“What do you see?” Suthamun’s magician raised his head, and the mysterious light among the bones went out.

“You were wise, King, to call him back from Xai.”

“Was I? That was the advice of my council. Black men and yellow. He’s made himself popular, a little hero. My Vis didn’t care for his exile. This tale I tried to kill him—twice—at Tjis, now here in the capital, my assassins falling on my own heir in error—By Ashara! It was the rabble here did that—black and brown scum—drunken—killing my boy, knowing him even in those damnable filched clothes. Or else Free Zakoris. Infiltrators revenging themselves on Kesarh—mistaken—” Suthamun broke off. His grief was real but oblique. His eyes were dry, yet he had wept in rage when they brought him the corpse. Jornil had been, if nothing else, a symbol of the continuance of Shansarian rule in Karmiss, that dynasty of reavers. Now Suthamun’s oldest legal heir was seven years old. The rest were mixed-blood bastards, or daughters. Useless.

“King,” said Suthamun’s magician, “even the High Lord must sometimes listen to the desire of his people. You could have done no other thing than return the Prince Am Xai to your court.”

“And now I must pet him, make love to him, to please them, keep them quiet. When he was the cause of my son’s death. And I never raised my hand against the dog. Never. The story about Tjis—it’s a lie.”

“You believe Prince Kesarh might also be implicated in the Heir’s murder?”

“I don’t know. Free Zakorians, the mob, Kesarh—yes, why not? In Shansar I’d have put him to the test, the Three Ordeals, fire, water, steel. But I daren’t, not here in this liars’ land.”

“You do well to humor him, King. The constellations that companion his birth are arresting. And the goddess has spoken here, a low soft voice, indecipherable, but evident.”

Suthamun, impatient and afraid, reined his pacing.

“What do you mean?”

“The Aura of the goddess has passed across the fate of the Prince Kesarh. It would, King, be pointless now to oppose him.”

Suthamun grunted. He longed for wine and noise; the ten-night-long Shansarian death-feast, loud lament and toasts to the shades, that had eased him. But they were done. And tonight Kesarh would also sit at the table. He had been welcomed back discreetly, at noon today, having passed through the city incognito as a thief. As one of his own assassins, perhaps?

There had been nothing to link Kesarh with the death of Jornil—save the clothes in which Jornil had died. But despite the Aura of the goddess, diplomacy, magic, what-have-you, one would be slow not to, yet he saw the event from an oddly angled perspective, from the dramatic epic view of what he had been, a tribal lord in a land of omens and sagas. For Kesarh to think Suthamun strove to murder him, and so to have Suthamun’s son dispatched while playing Kesarh—Suthamun to carry the blame—these were Shansarian vengeance-moves of the highest order. The King, if he credited them as such, gave them also that much respect.

He did not prophesy from them a particular threat to himself. It would have been absurd to do so. Kesarh was nothing, save transiently to the Vis rabble. And even with the foremost heir missing, Suthamun and his five brothers yet stood between all men and the Karmian throne.

The fire on the palace roof was doused. It smoldered out as Zastis had done, conflagrations of love, life, death, showing no great difference from each other.

The summer too began to flame and die. The flames of leaves rotted on the trees. The reeds beside the pools turned sallow, then black, and the sunsets thickened.

Rem, having found himself intimately involved with his master’s schemes at Tjis and Ankabek, thereafter waited, at a loose end. That afternoon before he left for Xai, Kesarh had spoken to Rem. It was the first time Rem had been inside the modest royal apartment, as opposed to on guard outside it. His former trade was apparently to be put to some use. Talents Rem had been glad not to use for more than a year were again called on. With the correct blend of implicit coercion and silken payment, he had seen to it the required persons were suborned to Kesarh’s will. As a result, Jornil was now ashes, and Kesarh back at Istris, installed in new, more lavish rooms, a party to most of the King’s social calendar.

The situation astounded Rem. To live off a man’s enforced bounty, the cold blade of his hate, though sheathed, always waiting at your back—Kesarh seemed quite unmoved. Only the intense stillness of his eyes sometimes belied it. He was aware, he was vigilant. His brain worked on, even as he drank Suthamun’s wine, or as the girls ran to kiss him on the streets. Before too long, appeased by Suthamun’s ironic punishment and the victim’s glory, Visian Istris would forget Kesarh’s wit and bravura. It was only a matter of time. And then, if only then, some accident might be arranged. Kesarh would know all this. Know it more competently than did the King.

But Rem himself was weighed down, uneasy. He considered again and again quitting the Prince’s service. It would mean a fat fee gone. While, knowing what he now did, Rem might find his own life in danger. In flight without wages was a state that did not appeal. There was, too, some abstraction that kept him loyal. To carry out such tasks for a man bound you to him, more than fear or prudence.

Another thing troubled him besides.

What had happened at Ankabek, the sudden second subjection of his reason to those mind-pictures, too close upon the first—so he had awaited other such subjections in constant nervousness for days and nights after. Even now. And the night of the temple, the statue of the serpent woman, so irrationally familiar.

Weeping storms visited the city. The nights grew cool, then chill. Kesarh had awarded presents to the council, and the Warden, but he must conjure some other insurance before the cold months came, for already the mood of the city was changing. Part of the roof of the Ashara Temple had been found to be unseated. During this stormy weather tiles had crashed in the street. Shansar and Vis alike were dismayed at the augury, which could be adapted to almost anything bad.

Kesarh went modestly but openly in his black, with only two guards, to offer to Ashara for the joy of Jornil’s soul. Istris, suitably alerted to the happening, watched in somber approval.

A doleful letter from Lyki somehow found Rem at the lodgings he was then frequenting. The rope merchant was sick and crotchety. Lyki herself was unwell. It seemed she needed a physician and her protector, miserly after his losses, would not send for one. The thinly disguised cry for alms was adorned by veiled references to her own former generosity to an unloving son. Hating her, but unable to do otherwise, Rem sent her money.

An hour after this charitable deed, he was summoned to the under-palace.

The rain fell like arrows on the streets, and in the open court. Kesarh came striding at him out of the downpour, and began to speak to him while they drowned, and lightning curled in a wedge of purple light over their heads.

“He’s done something almost clever,” Kesarh said, and Rem knew he meant the King. “He’s thinking of recalling my sister to court. I value her. She could therefore be used against me.”

Rem nodded. Kesarh handed him a sealed packet.

“Take her this letter. Only to her, do you understand? Breakneck speed. Your mount’s over there, with cash to buy a new one if it drops dead under you.”

“Ankabek,” said Rem.

He did not want to return to Ankabek.

Kesarh looked at him, and Rem knew there was no choice. Again, it was not exactly fear. He had been trusted, trusted by something that could, with just as much facility, kill him minus a second thought.

The ride was wet all the way. The tall skies of the hill country roared, and the Ioli road was slick as sweetmeat.

On the coast the sea collided with the shore in quake. At first they would not put out for him. When he had bribed them enough, they rowed him cursing, but the waves had looked worse than they were.

After the usual preliminaries of landing, he was conducted on the long uphill walk to the temple, through a rain now red from sacred leaves.

He waited three hours in a stony building, trying to coax the fire to dry him, trying intermittently to find someone to whom to reiterate his urgent duty as messenger to the Princess Val Nardia.

Finally he gave up on both and fell asleep, and then they came and he had to follow them out again into the rain.

They led him to the temple, and in one of the two curving corridors performed their door-opening sorcery. His reluctance, when he thought he would have to re-enter the body of the temple, startled him. But in fact the way went down, this time, under the temple’s core, presumably. He ended up in an insignificant room, which was suddenly lit by the coming in of an apparition. He guessed at once he was for some reason meant to be affected, impressed. That did not diminish anything.

She was a priestess, a white-skinned Lowland priestess, with the Serpent’s Eye on her forehead. All the rest was gold, gold hair, gold robes of scales—like the curtain he recollected—gold eyes. Her eyelids and lips were golden, too, and her sails. She entered unannounced and merely stood before him, looking at him, and he felt something of his self-will give way at once.

“You were sent by the Prince Kesarh?”

“I was,” she said tightly. Her voice did not sound human. There was a resonance somewhere, not striking against him, but somehow . . . inside him.

“You have brought a letter for the Princess.”

All at once, he knew.

“What’s happened?” he said, “what is it?”

“Rarnammon,” she said. Just that, no other thing.

It appalled him, for there was no sense on earth for why she should know his given name. He was afraid, and would not question her. He said, “I’ll ask you again. What’s happened?”

“You will follow me,” she said, “and you shall see what has happened. Then you’ll return to her brother, and tell him what you have seen, and all you have been told.”

They walked through a long corridor, barely lit by slotted windows high above. Then through an iron door, as if to a dungeon. Steps went down, and below another door was opened for them by two of the hooded priests.

As before, Rem knew himself led, helpless and unwilling, toward some profundity. His head began to ring, he felt again something of the weird disorientation he had experienced in the boat, the world shifting; chaos.

There was smoke now, incense, unlike the incense of Ashara, more subtle, darker, permeating everything. (He had heard they did not use incense here.) A gauze curtain drifted aside. Another. The smoke, the curtains, sight, all misted together. The center of his body seemed empty, as if he were hollow. Chanting came from somewhere, all around it seemed, one word over and over, or did he imagine it—

Astaris. Astaris. Astaris.

Then the sound stopped. The mists cleared. They were going into quite an ordinary chamber, though lamplit and without windows. In the midst of the room was a bed or couch, with draperies drawn close.

The golden priestess, glittering from the lamps, clasped a tasseled cord, and the curtains slid away.

There on the bed lay the young woman Rem had sometimes glimpsed at Istris, even more frequently here, the Princess Val Nardia. She was asleep, her hair spilling around, saturating the pillows with its color. He noticed something else. Her belly lifted high under the black gown, the firm rounded lift of early pregnancy.

“Yes,” the priestess said, as if he had remarked on this. “Now go closer, touching nothing.”

Not wanting to, he did. So he beheld the terrible marks on the neck. Somehow, these people had remolded the face, disguising the bulge of the eyes, resettling the tongue within the mouth.

“Who did this?” Rem said. But he had no image of the King’s men somehow here and at the work.

“Val Nardia took her own life. She despaired. She had learned nothing.”

Rem started round on the woman, a gutter expression nearly on his lips. But he saw it was not lack of pity, but pity itself which had prompted the callous-sounding phrase.

Instead he asked, “When did she do this to herself—yesterday? today?”

“Some months past,” said the priestess quietly.

He began automatically to say that was not possible, and fell silent. At last he only said, “How have you preserved her like this?”

“Certain medicines, certain drugs. And yes, also methods the Vis would term magic. Things known to the ancient temples. But we don’t abuse her, Rarmon. Her body is empty, the spirit free. We retain her bodily life only that the child shall also live. When the child is ready, it will be brought forth. All of her will have death’s freedom then.”

He had flinched at her use of his abbreviated name almost more than at her use of the longer, older name. Sweat had broken out on him, though the room was cold.

“The child’s important. Important to you.”

“Important, certainly.”

“Why? How do you know?”

She smiled. He was surprised, for they did not often smile, the pure-bred of her race. They had suffered so in the past, for centuries, maybe that was why. This smile said gently, scornfully: You know our means. But she said to him, spreading her hands in a gracious mimicry of Vis theater: “Anackire.”

He glanced at the dead girl again, then away. Something was whispering in his brain, a memory he did not want, the brain-vision of three women, white-haired, dark-haired, scarlet, and of their wombs, which he had seen were filled.

“And the father,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Return to him and tell him,” she said, “what you’ve been shown, what I’ve spoken of.”

“You know the father’s her brother, then.”

“As you, also, Rarmon, know it.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“It is your name.”

He felt sick. He needed to be away from the room and went to the doorway.

“Not anymore.”

There were women in the outer chamber, he had not noted them before. Though nauseous, he was steadied now, as if by a blow, or icy water.

When they reached the upper passage, he said to her, for want of something else whereby to behave as if all this were normal, “I’ll take his letter back to him then.”

“As,” she said, “the other message was also taken back.”

Rem checked.

“From Suthamun?”

“From the King.”

“Before me?”

“And left yesterday. A secret well-kept. But then, ours also. The King’s messenger does not know all I have told you. Nevertheless, the King will have news of her death before the Prince hears of it.”

Though he walked the rest of the distance through the under-temple, Rem was already running. He ran physically across the island and between the stripes of the rain. On the beach he fought a man, throwing him over and mashing his lips against his teeth, to get the boat back in the water.

Regaining land, he almost killed the first zeeba, and the second that he stole when purchase was refused him.

He had thought often, as he rode to Ankabek, of using this opportunity to be gone from Kesarh’s service. There were other ports around the coast. He might have risked some leaky merchantman to Dorthar over the straits. But not now. Rem, between the attacking madness of visions, and the strangeness of the temple, had still seen them together, in the cell, on the hill, Kesarh and his sister. An exile from the landscape of heterosexual love, Rem had found himself now and then fascinated by the ethics of it, as by some rite he could comprehend yet never know, and never wish to know. It had the bizarre glamour of most alien things. The close relationship did not enter his calculations at all, save as a permissible theory for Val Nardia’s suicide.

And Kesarh had looked at her, in his illness and in health, as Rem never saw him look at any other thing.

And the King would have news of her death before Kesarh.

Rem glimpsed now Suthamun might use it.

The mason was a muddy color, almost the shade of his light hair, which he wore so proudly and fashionably long. Two soldiers had come on him at home, and brought him here, surreptitiously, by back ways, jollying him to dumbness, promising rewards while the edges of swords gleamed in the torchlight. The man in the chair was Kesarh Am Xai. The mason had never seen him, but had heard him described often enough. It seemed Kesarh had found out something about him, too. A couple of things, neither of which would be beneficial to the mason should others also learn of them.

“Am I to—to—believe I’ve been spied on, my lord?”

“If I were you, I’d believe it.”

“But why—what possible interest could your lordship have—”

“The Ashara Temple,” said Kesarh Am Xai. The mason gaped. “You’re in charge of the restoration around the Eastern Cupola.”

The mason nodded. He had been pleased to get this portion of the job, which carried kudos, and excellent fees if well done. The roof was being tended in several places since the storms had laid bare its weakness. But the Eastern Cupola was the trickiest spot; so much weight, so much ornament to be preserved.

“Someone,” said Kesarh, “suggested that, if unattended, this area of the roof might have given way entirely. During snow, perhaps.”

“Indeed—indeed, yes, lord Prince. Quite likely. The heaviness and cold of the snow making brittle, overbalancing a structure already out of kilter. Very hazardous. Some of the ceiling might have fallen into the temple itself.”

“When?” said Kesarh.

“When, my lord?”

“If unrepaired, when would this happen?”

“Already the repairs—”

“Indulge me.”

“Rest assured, Prince Kesarh. Even unrepaired, not for several more years.”

The mason did not want to meet Kesarh’s dark Visian eyes, but found he had to. Caught and held, he heard Kesarh say, “You will see to it, sir, that not only the ceiling, but the Eastern Cupola too, fall into the temple before the first month of the siege snow is ended.”

The mason almost fainted. He had realized something was coming. Not this.

“But, my lord—”

“The occasion,” Kesarh went on smoothly, “will be some religious observance, when the whole court is present. And the King, and the King’s brothers, naturally.”

The mason sank to his knees. His legs had given way, his bowels and bladder almost. To be informed of all this would mean he would be watched hereafter, under sentence of swift death by Kesarh’s men if he revealed or attempted to reveal any of it. Nothing could have been more explicit. The eastern end of the temple was the King’s place, directly before the figure of the goddess. If the Cupola fell, it would crush anything and everything beneath to powder—and pulp.

“I see you’re pondering my ingenuous transparency, and what it must entail.”

“But you’ll kill me anyway,” gasped the mason. “Even if I could do it, how could I expect to live?”

“The baker who poisons his dough soon has no customers. Let me amaze you: I deal honestly where I’m able. Those who serve me are recompensed. Only those who displease or inconvenience me get their wage in pain. Your choice is simple. Agree and benefit. Refuse, and have your sins revealed to all and sundry. Thereby you’ll lose your position, and perhaps end up in the harbor, if I feel particularly insecure.”

The mason kneeled on the floor. He began to sob. Kesarh watched him.

“How could it be done—timed to fall so exactly—”

“You’ll have some help with that. Tomorrow someone will come to your house to discuss the details. There can be no mistakes. Now get out. Your tears and urine about to spill on the floor won’t enhance it.”

When the man was gone—there were several useful by-ways out of the new rooms—Kesarh walked through into the bedchamber.

The girl he had brought from Xai was staring at one of the gilded books left lying open. Of course, she could not read.

She looked up at his step, adoring him. She was not unattractive, wholesome, and had improved on the nourishing diet he had seen to it she now received. She was also a half-wit. The combination suited him. At this time he needed no one about him, even a slut in his bed, that he could not rely on.

He thought of Val Nardia. She would have the sense to do as he had written, feign some illness, not allow herself to be pried from the sanctuary.

Whenever he thought of her now, he felt a curious nothingness, as if some wounded nerve were deadened. He had drunk fire with her at Ankabek. It had exemplified all Zastis, that one night. And yet now, whenever she came to mind, only this lack of feeling came with her. Why? Was he sated there, as with all the others? No, it was not that.

He abandoned the reverie, and moved toward his safe little wine girl. There would be time, before the etiquette of dinner—

There was not time.

The spears clashed on the marble outside and there came rapping against the doors.

Suthamun had summoned him.

Kesarh had no more apprehension than at any other hour. He lived in a constant state of attentive self-guard, a sensitivity to peril, as an animal did. He found this neither pleasant nor unpleasant. He was used to it. It was, to him, synonymous with the nature of living. Other men who did not grasp this truth were sluggards, or imbeciles.

The kernel of Suthamun’s blond court was gathered in one of the frescoed side chambers off the banquet hall.

It was the general scene, servitors padding about, hangers-on conniving or preening or sulking. By the fountain two of the council were discussing something as frivolous as Iolian chariot races. Kesarh nodded to them, and they bowed. The King stood with his brother Uhl and the scarred half-brother who was also a favorite. There was something unique. Kesarh took heed of it instantly. The usual loud music the Shansarian court so much enjoyed was absent.

Abruptly, Suthamun shouted clear across the room. “Kesarh! Here to me.” The tone was well-meaning, as it had been since the recall from Xai. Those words of going, Visian dog, might never have been uttered. Yet there was another element now. A modulated depth, not unlike the timbre a priest assumed in some holy declaration.

Kesarh began to walk forward. He looked unaltered, but his wariness had now increased.

He was thirty paces away when Suthamun called out again in the peculiar tone.

“Kesarh, I received ill news today. Ill news.”

It flashed through Kesarh’s brain that his own messenger and the secret rider of the King had passed each other on the road; that Val Nardia had already denied the invitation back to court and here the denial was, about to be thrust at him, an accusation dressed as a regret, maybe a request that he persuade her otherwise.

Suthamun now came toward him in turn. His face was puckering, swollen with consternation. The crowd about the room was noiseless, all eyes and ears. “Ill news,” Suthamun repeated, yet again.

Kesarh stopped and waited.

“I’m grieved to learn it, Sire.”

“Alas. Your grief, your grief for sure. Word came to us not two hours ago, from Ankabek. Your sister—” the voice rang, hesitated.

Kesarh went on waiting.

“Your sister, the Princess Val Nardia, is dead.”

Those closest to Kesarh saw his color go, like light blown out in a lamp. That was all. He said nothing, and then the King reached him, took his hand, in commiseration.

The murmur went round, and round again, and ended.

The King said loudly, “It offends me to add to your burden, but there it is. Val Nardia hanged herself. She was with child— She slew both herself and it. The goddess alone knows what possessed her.”

They had been speaking in Shansarian, of course.

It seemed to Kesarh as if he had never learned that tongue, and now sentences were delivered to him without meaning. Yet the room had faded to smoke, the floor disintegrated, gone. This then was why, the nothingness, the death of the nerve, the nightmare at Xai—

As if he had no control of his mind, a chain of creatures stole across it. A little child, laughing, a young girl singing, blushing, combing her hair, a young woman with her mouth yearning toward his, her arms locked about him.

It should be possible to leave this place. But it was not possible. The deceptive smoke was treacherously full of people. An enemy gripped his hand, exalting. Now one must show decorous, suitable anguish. Nothing more.

She had hanged herself. Val Nardia. And a child, their—his child—

Probably his hands were cold, cold as the hands of certain men before they must kill another. Suthamun would feel the coldness in the hand he had taken. But the hand was also still. It did not tremble.

Kesarh returned the pressure of the King’s palm.

“My lord,” he said. His voice was eloquent, subdued, as ever excellently pitched. He had not, after all, forgotten the Shansarian language. “You show me too much care of me, taking it on yourself to bring me these tidings. I don’t deserve your kindness. For my sister, I knew nothing of a child, nor do I know why she should do this to herself. The goddess has her now. Val Nardia is with Her, in Her all-cognizant forgiving arms. My sorrow will last my lifetime. I can scarcely express, my lord, how your solace, extended toward me at such a moment, moves me.”

They whispered all about him in the smoke. He could have smiled. Suthamun let him go. Kesarh knew his eyes had not left the eyes of the King. Kesarh knew that his eyes shouted louder than the King’s histrionics. Let Suthamun read what he liked there. Soon it could no longer matter.

She passed like music through the air, her pale gown reflecting in a polished floor, her blood-red hair.

She passed with flowers, ten years old, her little breasts already blooming through her dress, a doll trailing from her hand. “Kesarh, where are you? I couldn’t find you.”

Val Nardia.

He drank wine with them, and went to eat with them. He ate. He discussed other topics, rationally. They gave him margins for his seemly grave distress. They condoled, they praised her beauty, and he thanked them with great courtesy.

He wanted to tear them apart, scraps of skin, bits of bone.

It would be seemly also to beg the King’s leave to retire early, but not too early. She was a woman, not even his wife or mother, less than a comrade, father, brother, son—Though perhaps he had lost a son, too, did they but know it.

At exactly the correct time, he begged leave, got it, and left.

In the second black hour of morning, Rem came to the doors of the new apartments. He showed the soldiers, two of the Sevens, Kesarh’s authorization, and got himself let in. Rem had gone too long in a saddle and too long without sleep. He had become sure he was also too late, yet the impetus of the attempt not to be, failed to let up until he knew.

Arriving in the first chamber, he found out. Lamps still burned on their stand, describing the shards of a smashed wine jar. Against the wall a girl huddled, the Xaian girl, Berinda, her cow-calf eyes all unquestioning misery. She said nothing. Rem moved to the inner door and knocked. There was no sound. Rem opened the door and walked through, and presently into the bedchamber.

There were no lights here, only the moon coming in through the window. Against that, the straight male outline of Kesarh was immediately to be seen.

“It’s Rem, my lord.”

“I know it’s Rem. You wouldn’t have got in past the guard if you were anyone else. They don’t fall asleep. None of you do, after ten lashes.”

The voice was the same, constant. “My lord, I tried to reach you before the King—”

“I’m sure you did.” There was a pause. Kesarh said, “Where did they bury her?”

Rem could be sure of nothing. He was too tired to be able to assess. It had to be told.

“My lord, did anyone mention there was a pregnancy?”

“Yes. They mentioned that.”

“The priests there, they think they can bring it to term.”

Kesarh was silent, immobile.

“Somehow,” said Rem, “they’ve preserved the body. They claim they can preserve her till the baby’s grown, then birth it. It’s some kind of drug-witchery. Probably lies. It looked real enough, as if it might happen as the woman said.”

“All right,” Kesarh replied, as if everything that had just been related were feasible. But then, “I’ll go there. He’ll expect me to, be pleased, think I’m no holiday in grief, idle—I’ll see to it. You did what you could. Get out now.”

“My lord. Did you understand—”

“No. It’s gibberish like everything else. Get out.”

“My lord—”

“By the nonexistent stinking pits of Aarl get out. Go straddle your whore-boy or eviscerate your shrew of a mother. Anything. Away from me.” Kesarh had hardly lifted his voice, but he had turned. There was a piece of the smashed jar in his hand and he was working his fingers around and around it, fluid showing dark, wine or blood. The moon gave just enough illumination. He was crying. Not couthly, detached as his stance and his diction had been, but messily and completely as a child.

Rem backed a step, recollected, and turned round to walk out of the door.

As he shut it, he heard Kesarh briefly laugh, despising him.

In the end, no one investigated Ankabek. The King, it seemed, wished to keep Kesarh near him, to comfort and sustain the Prince. Suthamun gave no sign if Kesarh’s resilience annoyed him. The King had learned the game, or thought he had, and played it now with all the interest of an intriguing hobby.

Kesarh did not speak of Val Nardia in public, in private did not ask again for her burial place, or query the tale of Lowland witchcraft, the hypothesis of a child growing in the stasis of a live-dead womb. The King’s own messenger had been given some notion of a modest stone marking her ashes, near the temple precinct. To the worshippers of the goddess suicide was neither a sinful nor an honorable recourse. No stigma had added itself. For a minor female aristocrat sufficient had been done.

Kesarh appeared to accept both the King’s patronage and the blank wall of death. He was thought, by many not directly initiate, to be the current royal favorite. His displayed but disciplined bereavement was admired.

Several days after the headlong ride back from Ankabek, walking through the lower city, Rem met Doriyos, guarded by the elderly tortoise from the House of Three Cries. Doriyos came up to him and stood slim and well-mannered before him, and said, “I never see you anymore.”

Rem smiled, mostly at Doriyos’ beauty, which shone like a lamp in the sallow day.

“I’m sorry for that.”

“Sorry for me, or for yourself?”

Rem smiled.

Doriyos said simply, “You’re in love with him, then.”

Rem stopped smiling.

Doriyos said, “I mean, with your lord. Your Prince.”

“Wake up,” said Rem. “Stop talking like some coy girl. That was what I had you to avoid.”

Doriyos cast down his eyes. “And you learn, too, the speech of the beloved.”

Rem walked on and left him standing there, his light slowly dimming, like the last summer sky.

The skies turned to slate and bore great winds. Then to grayness and to stillness. The skies became low ceilings of gentle ivory from which there parasoled the pitiless fore-taste of the snow.

Raldnor Am Ioli propped with practiced ease a column of the covered walk, inwardly admiring himself, in his furs, the bright pallor of his hair, against the backdrop of a snowy garden.

When the first flecks drifted into Istris, he had found himself once more at the outer fringes of high society. With the first thaw, on the fringes of the court itself. Now the second snow, the three-month-siege snow, was down, the city Lowland-white, and ice creaking in the harbor. And Raldnor had strolled through the royal gardens in chat with a significant official. Pausing here among the columns, he had already seen the Warden of the council slowly patrolling on his own constitutional. When the man came level, they would exchange a few polite words.

Raldnor was pleased with himself. He had aided Kesarh, taken indeed a mighty risk for him, but it had turned out well advised. Kesarh had that mark on him, that devastating escutcheon of natural advantage. His ruthlessness, his magnetic personal power, exercised at will, effortlessly, were sure symptoms of greatness.

King-Maker. That was a title for Raldnor to toy with.

He had added his own revenues to help buy the council. They were all amenable now, predisposed. Kesarh’s own gold, so marvelous to those who had reckoned him in poverty, had sprung it seemed from a careful use of reliable bankers, and trade ventures that had brought in consistent though concealed profits. The business had been initiated by Kesarh at the age of thirteen. That was impressive enough. Impressive too he had, even as a boy, not squandered anything, lived as if poor in truth, letting the monies grow, never showing he had wealth until it would be opportune.

The Warden was nearly level now. A half-blood Vardish Vis, as Raldnor himself, but dark in looks: Suthamun’s sop to the people.

“Good day, lord Warden.”

“Good morning. A cold one.”

“All we’ll get now, my lord, until the spring.”

The Warden had paused, his clerk at his back, his guard farther off. Others patrolling the walk would note whom the Warden of Istris stopped beside.

“I must thank you for the wine, Raldnor. A very welcome vintage in this weather.” Raldnor bowed. The two unmentioned jars in which the wine had gone were banded with precious metals and gems. “And tomorrow we give thanks for a new heir,” said the Warden. “The blessing of Ashkar, to replace lamentation for the loss of a son so quickly with hymns of joy at the birth of another.”

“Yes, indeed.”

They stood solemnly, considering the blessing of Ashkar.

The boy-child had been born on the first day of the siege snow, to one of Suthamun’s lofty Shansarian wives. In antique Dortharian belief, that would be the soul of Jornil returning. Tomorrow, the whole court must roll their chariots through the whiteness to the Ashara Temple, where the repairs upon the roof had been just now suspended until spring. Skeletons of scaffolding reared from the heights, like an extraordinary forest. Levers and cantilevers held all supported and secure.

“I shall drink a cup of your good wine before setting out,” said the Warden. “The temple, I think, won’t be warm.”

He passed on, leaving Raldnor Am Ioli satisfied. Raldnor himself would not be at the temple ceremony. There was no particular reason for this absence. For the King-Maker had, in this respect, been told nothing at all.

The wind was blowing in across the bay, and smoking snow flared along the streets. The royal household struggled through it. Shansarian horses trapped in gold slid on carpets of ice.

Inside, the temple was unwarm, as predicted, its lamps tilting to the wind. But Ashara, balanced on her burnished fish-tail at the temple’s eastern end, and clothed only in carven hair, did not feel the cold.

For a child, no blood was shed, but perfumes. A soaring window of thickly colored glass threw down its lights into the pillars of incense, through which the new heir was now brought, quieted by soporifics, to be shown to the goddess.

Suthamun stood in the shadow of her four right hands, Uhl and the younger brothers beside him, and near them their sons, the chosen nobles. The Prince Kesarh had by many been expected to stand there with them, close to the King. But Kesarh had effected the same mistake twice. Until now decorous and modest, all at once he had made it plain, as when he had come back from Tjis, that he anticipated favor. Some remark had casually been let slip concerning his placement in the temple. Suthamun, softly this time as velvet, had seen to it the Prince Kesarh was requested to stand farther off.

The ceremony, which in Shansar would have been conducted on open rock or in some hut before the totem, having gathered clutter, dragged.

Amid the chants, a dull crack of sound far above went unheard by several. Of the royal party, only Prince Uhl glanced upward, instinctively; those who watched saw Suthamun smile, shaking his head. He, like most others, took the noise for a solitary blotting of the wind against some loose strut of scaffolding. The state of the roof had earlier been viewed by palace officials, and it was safe. Among the scatter of other heads raised, the Prince Kesarh’s did not number. Though he had heard the sound, he knew perfectly well what it was.

Perhaps five minutes later, another sound began, however, which caused the chanting of the priests to stumble. At first almost inaudible but gradually burgeoning, it was a strange rushing, like that of water. A stream of powder sprinkled down out of the air and across the altar.

Very few now did not look up. Unblemished, the pale dome above the goddess’ head showed signs only of permanence. Then came a colossal bang. Women wailed. Shouts rang out. And from the square beyond the doors cries arose. A hill of snow had poured down the surface of the temple roof, crashing to the ground. Almost immediately the concourse of people recognized the frightful blow for what it was, although such shifts did not normally occur until the spring thaw. A wave of reaction flowed through the gathering. Suthamun was seen to smile again, as he leaned forward under the goddess’ hands.

And then another woman shrieked.

There was just the space for that, and for a sudden veining to appear like a web in the dome. Then the dome cracked like eggshell. In white thunder, the eastern roof dropped into the temple.

Tons of masonry fell, descending like a driven bolt, and, striking earth, splashed out again in all directions. Missiles hit stone and flesh. The great colored window was riven.

The cacophony of screams, terror and agony, mingled with a muffled continuous after-rumble. The powder dust stood, a wavering column from floor to sky. Very little could be seen through it, only the blundering of figures, the isolated lick of fire from smashed lamps, and above them a horrible impious thing—the goddess Ashara with half her head torn away, in silhouette against the cold open void now skewered in the broken window.

It was the Prince Kesarh, his forehead bleeding from a shallow gash, who called his own men into instantaneous action. Suthamun’s slight had set Kesarh well outside the major zone of impact. Now he seemed shocked to life while others about him could only gaze or crawl or invoke their gods, some of whom were not Ashara.

Kesarh led the twenty of his guard who were in the temple straight into the smothering flour-like dust. Presently, from the corners of the precinct, men ran to help them. Nobles hauled at the smashed enormous debris, bloody, coughing, dusty, with the common soldiers. Kesarh himself worked like one possessed, in an icy fever. Some of the blocks were not to be lifted by men alone, they would require zeebas. Slaves erupted from the temple. A dreadful generalized outcry came from everywhere.

All they could find at first were dead. Uhl lay on the altar, his skull squashed like a fruit, and the officiating priest next to him. The child, the new heir, had been hammered beneath them.

Suthamun, when Kesarh’s men lifted away the broken beams which had obscured his face, was still alive.

Kesarh went quickly to him and kneeled down. An incredible weight lay on the King’s chest. Black blood ran thinly from his mouth. His eyes turned sluggishly toward the Prince.

“Have courage, my lord. They’re fetching a team of zeebas to raise the stone.”

The column of powder was lessening now. Through the swirl of it, those uninjured or only slightly harmed were creeping near. The dreadful outcry was sinking to a dreadful anguished murmur without words.

Kesarh maintained his vigil by the King until teams of beasts were led along the aisles, profaning the sanctuary. Then he rose and assisted in the work of haulage.

As suspected, no other who had been at the central point under the eastern dome had survived. The four younger brothers of the King were barely recognizable. The scarred half-brother had been struck down by a falling hand of the goddess Herself. Suthamun was uncovered, and seeing his wounds, it was apparent he too could not continue for long. It was actually unapparent how he might still persist.

They rested his head tenderly on cushions so he might lie and look up at the jagged vault of sky. A sick priest came, and whispered prayers. Kesarh knelt again. The crowd watched, and the window mouthed the snowy wind.

After a while, Suthamun died.

If he had guessed anything at all, he had not been enabled to voice it. And Kesarh, anointed with his own blood, kneeling with such grace and such steadfast strength by the man he had killed—not one who saw him forgot how he was, the galvanic rescue attempt, the nobleness inherent in each line of his compassion.

But beyond everything, the omen loomed.

It seemed Ashara herself had flung her malediction against Suthamun and his house. It could hardly have been more clear.

Only the engineers themselves knew the truth. The cavity which had been made beneath the upper roofing, hidden from the eyes of searchers, and the small fire which had been left smoldering with the pot of oil a supported and mathematically devised distance above. It had all been mathematically coordinated, with the skill of men familiar with the values and forms of architecture, and of men knowledgeable in methods of carnage. When the oil exploded, a fire took out the carefully balanced underpinning of the Cupola. The way it had been nurtured, it had needed only that to hold it firm, only the destruction of that to fall. It seemed merely negligence was responsible, and weather, or fate. Or Ashara.

An interview was, despite superstition, sought with the mason and those men who had worked on the eastern roof. None of them were to be found. It was assumed they had fled, quite sensibly, out of the way of justice.

The council was seated in the map-chamber, under the mosaic.

Outside, across the city, the funeral bells still clanged, and on the height of the palace the funeral beacon, barely put out it seemed, once more gouged the twilight with its reddened eye. Suthamun’s second wife, the mother of the baby which had died with him, had mortally stabbed herself an hour later. They were brave, the women of Shansar, if impetuous. She had been laid beside her husband on the pyre, the infant in her arms. The brothers were consumed a score of feet away. It was a family affair.

Now Istris waited, and all Karmiss beyond her walls, to hear who should take up the reins of power. The potential King, of course, was known. It was to be the most mature heir, the seven-year-old Prince Emel. But seeing he was a child, there must be a regent, and all the legal guardians, Uhl and his brothers, and the oldest legal sons of these brothers, had been killed with Suthamun. It was truly a catastrophe of epic proportions. Now the choice stood between a bevy of bastards or lesser sons, men very young in years themselves, and popularly unknown. Men who had never looked for anything and who had made no mark in any sector of the city’s political life.

There had been argument, some of it heated. It was mooted that the lord Warden himself might take the traditional step to the regency his position had allowed others in the past. There were instant raucous jeers from the edges of the room, where those men who had bought a place at the council, supporters of this or that faction, objected. But for the most part, these bystanders were partisan noise-mongers and little else. The Warden silenced them, and declared he had no aptitude for a regency, and no appetite either.

At this point, a figure pushed through the press, signaling he wished to speak.

Shansarian customs of tribal council had altered the format of the Karmian institution. In Vis times such free-lancing would have been unacceptable. But the Warden beckoned.

“We grant you the floor, Raldnor Am Ioli.”

Raldnor stepped out on to it, and looked round. He was used to commanding a ship, when granted one; this doghouse did not bother him in the least.

“My lord Warden. Gentlemen. At the commencement of Zastis, seven Zakorian pirate galleys were ravaging the Karmian and Dortharian coasts. King Suthamun, a wise and canny master, sent a man he trusted to rid the seas of them. Not aware of the Free Zakorian strength, he gave him for the work three ships, nor of the best. I know. I captained one. When we learned what we were up against, I was for sailing home. But my commander, Kesarh Am Xai, held us where we were, and with ingenuity and valor, the sacrifice of one listing ship, and the loss of five men—five, gentlemen—won us the day.” There was a noise of approval now, scarcely any of it paid for, especially from the Vis in the chamber. “Forgive my enthusiasm,” said Raldnor. “I was impressed. Remain so. The Prince Kesarh is a mature leader, known to Istris by elite report, and by sight. He is, moreover, of royal blood. His father was a Shansarian officer. His mother was a princess of the Karmian royal house, whose roots go back to the time of Visian Rarnammon—”

Raldnor broke off as a shout went up all around the chamber. It was the old cry—Am Xai. Raldnor mused, standing in the thick of it, hearing dimly behind the racket the screeches of roasting slaves chained to their oars. It was a point to remember. Once you were of no use to him, he would leave you to burn.

The council was bustling, conferring. They had undoubtedly known, simply been waiting for the proper cue. Three at least had been frankly bought.

Presently they withdrew to the privacy of another chamber to deliberate.

Raldnor went on musing, perambulating the corridors without, as others were doing. Even musicians had been called to play in one of the rooms, a deferential lament harmonizing with the bells, still music.

The stroke of ill-luck which had brought the end to Suthamun’s current dynasty was peculiar. Ashkar’s doing?

Raldnor, who believed in chance, did not however believe in this chance. That he had been excluded from the astonishing plot annoyed him and left him with a feeling of relief. He had sense enough, he thought, to demonstrate neither emotion.

The bells had stopped and it was nearly midnight when a train of messengers raced through the halls.

The loiterers, alerted, crowded back toward the map-chamber. The council filed in. The lord Warden nodded to them all.

“The Prince-King Emel has been summoned. It’s late for the child, but by the laws of our Sister Continent, his fatherland, he must be present.” There was a pause. “We have also,” said the Warden, “sent for the Prince Am Xai.”

Not long after, a sleepy blond child, bemused but well-schooled, was led to the doors by his nurses, and from there into the chamber by two of his guard. The Prince-King Emel sat where he was asked to sit, and graciously accepted a sweetmeat from the Warden.

It was an hour later that Kesarh arrived.

He walked into the council, the crowd giving way for him, like a creature of silent thunder, his black clothes, his black hair blown from riding, his face distraught. He had remained behind at the site of the King’s pyre with those other mourners who would stand vigil there all night.

“Your pardon, Prince Kesarh, that we called you from the death-watch.”

“I can go back,” Kesarh said.

There was a little whispering. Raldnor of Ioli listened, awestruck despite himself. The man’s theater was incomparable. His entrance, his looks, his voice, had carried them all.

“Yes, my lord. You can go back. First I must ask you, in the Name of the goddess and by the will of this council of Istris, if you will act regent for Emel son of Suthamun, until he shall be of sufficient years to assume the throne of Karmiss?”

There was no answer. The stillness went on and on, Kesarh at the center of it like a sword.

The interval in sound awoke the child, who had fallen asleep on a stool. He raised his lids, and saw across from him a tall man like a shadow. Then the shadow moved. It came toward Prince Emel. At the final instant it kneeled at his feet. Emel recollected, and he got up.

As the words of assent buzzed in the air, Emel waited to go back to bed, drowsily looking at the shining black mane of the man who would be his death.

6

A marble world.

As the months of the long snow continued, the landscape was sculpted to them, seeming incapable of change. Windless, white, the silver lace of ice in all her bays, Karmiss lay as if asleep.

The new lodgings Rem had taken, however, though spacious, were kept warm. There were even nocturnal companions, comely and skillful, who might be hired from a nearby wine-shop, if one felt the need. Rem found himself prey to an intermittent nostalgia for Doriyos. Now and then, Rem visualized returning to the House of Three Cries, but knew he would never do so.

There had been an alternation of Rem’s status in the Prince Am Xai’s personal guard. In the wake of the Festival of Masks, his pay was splendidly augmented. Then, five days after the wild ride back from Ankabek, too late to be of service, there had come a metamorphosis of position. Rem ceased to be a number. There were thirteen Nines, at this juncture, and he was no longer one of them. He was all at once in charge of fifty men who would, in the name of the Prince, answer solely to Rem. The advancement was welded to, yet apart from, the hierarchy of the guard, the membership of which had currently escalated to over two hundred. The guard sergeant who had lashed Rem now greeted him with respectful equality.

Rem, acknowledging these novel conditions, was far from complacent. Mostly, he had been required to organize escorts.

At regular intervals, autonomously, he exercised in the under-palace, sword and shield, body combat, or those coordinating arms it could be fatal to mislay. A couple of times he would find the Prince himself also at exercise. On the first day of the siege snow, Kesarh had called Rem into the court instead of one of the paid masters. Stripped to the minimum, they fought for thirty minutes. The sexual element, forever intrinsic yet forever irrelevant to such contests, angered Rem. In the end the anger won him the bout. He sent Kesarh sprawling, half stunned.

Kesarh seemed amused. Rem knew the Prince had merely permitted his concentration to flag. Rem had seen how Kesarh could fight even in sham. The victory was a mean one. Almost an insult.

When the eastern roof of the Ashara Temple crushed Suthamun and his peers, Rem was not in the building, not even on duty in the square outside. He had realized something was prepared, had known there must be something. But the magnitude of it shook him.

He was ordered to captain a detachment of Kesarh’s guard during the funeral procession and the ghastly Shansarian deathwatch. Slow-striding after the purple-draped chariot through the snow, he had felt the same sort of affront as at the insulting victory in the exercise court. Somehow, it had all been too easy. And when the messengers came floundering over the torch-lit ice to summon Kesarh to the council, Rem stood expressionless, wanting to laugh or curse, something, anything, to acclaim the grandiose and sinister triteness of it all.

But Am Xai was regent now. His secret guard were official, every one of them. His apartments had once more improved, transmuted to the upper palace, with all that implied.

In a stretch of months, he had traveled a vast distance. Answerable at last only to the predisposed council, and to a seven-year-old child who, if the stories were accurate, worshipped him.

He would kill the child. That much was obvious.

How long would he let it exist? A year? Two years? How much of life would the Prince-King Emel be allowed to know, before some unforeseen mishap rendered all valueless?

Any idea of sentiment for infancy or kindred would be a nonsense, now.

Since the night he came back from Ankabek, Rem had detected no trace of grief or unease about his master. The public lament for Val Nardia had been perfect and quite false. Yet the anguish Rem had interrupted must still be there, somewhere, surely? The gnawing worm known only to Kesarh’s most private privacy.

And the weird sorcery at Ankabek—had Kesarh dismissed that, as he had seemed to, as Rem could not?

For despite all reasoning and explanation, he believed still what the golden woman had told him. That across miles of snow and frigid water, under the frozen ground, in the cold womb of one dead, the first fruit of their incest, Kesarh’s, Val Nardia’s, their incest and their obsessive love, mindlessly swelled toward awakening.

Waiting in the antechamber of the Prince’s apartments, Rem knew he was here because of Ankabek. He felt a kind of urgency, sifted with oppression, heavy on the air.

Yet Kesarh did not come in for some while.

In the interim a physician passed through the room, on his way from the women’s suite. The girl Kesarh had brought from Xai, Berinda, had conceived during Zastis. Rem had seen her about, walking with a proud, bewildered big-belliedness. Yesterday she had begun labor pains long before her time. Gossip said she would lose the baby. It would be stillborn. She was simple, not fit to bear. All this was like some perverse omen, distorted echo—of that other thing, on the island.

Through a long window. Rem could look into the colonnade across the wide court below. Presently he saw Kesarh pass with the Prince-King. Emel was excited, giggling, his pale skin rosy.

Rem turned from the window with a grimace.

A few minutes later Kesarh entered, his darkness softened by the purple of Karmian mourning, worn for Suthamun as never for Val Nardia.

They went into an inner room.

As the doors closed, Kesarh altered. Rem recognized he was seeing the Prince’s private face, or some of it.

“Ankabek,” said Kesarh. “Do you remember, months ago?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Tell me again what you told me that night.”

“You didn’t credit it, my lord.”

“No. Tell me again.”

So Rem told him, more fully than before, of the priestess, what she had said to him, and what he had been shown.

Kesarh let him go all through it, watching him. The private face was still, and dangerous. Afraid?

Rem concluded. There was a gap. Then Kesarh walked to a chest, unlocked it, took a paper. Turning, he held out the paper to Rem.

“Read it.”

Rem did so.

“They sent—”

“A man. Anonymous. He came to my sergeant and left this with him. It seems he knew the proper channels. How?”

“Not from me, my lord.”

“No. I didn’t think it was from you.”

“It says—”

“It says my child will be born at sunrise, on the day of the Lion-Feast, Shansarian calendar.”

“Nine mornings from today.”

“It would take at least seven days to get there. If anyone was fool enough to travel such a distance in the snow.”

“Which gives a day or so in hand for your lordship to make suitable excuses.”

“Doesn’t it. Judged to within a hair’s breadth. They obviously expect me to go.”

Rem kept silent.

Kesarh poured himself wine, then drained the goblet straight down to the dregs. He had drunk from the jug rather in that way at Tjis, after the serpent. His back was to Rem now. He said, “I want you here. Awake and alert for anything. Raldnor can play with Istris awhile. I hope for his sake he doesn’t get a taste for it. The Warden will cover my place. You’ll set your men where and how you have to, to see everything is done in fair order. And to take note of anything I might not care for. Is this clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How fortunate you were once the strategist-leader of a promising little band of cutthroats.” Kesarh turned again, smiling at him with great charm. “And how fortunate, too, you deserted them for me.”

Rem stood like a stone. The interview appalled him, for reasons he failed quite to grasp. Certainly Kesarh’s private face was gone now, simply the grayness left in it, which might only be reaction to the weather. Shansarian blood disliked the bitter temperatures of this clime. One recalled occasionally, he was part Shansar.

“I’ll be taking ten or twelve men. Enough to manage a boat. I’d rather have you with me. But in my absence, I need you here.”

Once again, the unerring stab of casual and deadly trust.

Gratuitously, Rem responded to its blazon.

Just then, an awful screaming broke out somewhere inside the walls. His hand went to his dagger but Kesarh pushed the hand free.

“It’s only that poor little bitch from Xai. They must have told her her child’s dead.” Kesarh hesitated. Something moved behind his eyes, and then was gone.

To make a journey to his sister’s grave was eccentric for the season, but pardonable, estimable, perhaps. It showed a certain naïveté.

He would never have done it, risked leaving his prize even in the lacuna of the snow, save something drove him. An absurdity. Though he knew she was dead, he had never known it. She lived on for him, somewhere, unextinguished. Ankabek was at odds with both these feelings—the certainty of her death, the intuitive rejection of her death.

Whatever grisly witchcraft they worked on her, he would end that. Or was she, somehow, impossibly alive again, as she had never been anything else? It rode with him, on his back like a devil, as the horse his regency had brought him thrust its way, often breast-high in whiteness, toward the coast.

By killing herself she had won his contempt, his horror and his hatred. Their telepathy, haphazardly conveyed from the Shansarian side, had remained undeveloped, yet it was there; from birth, a part of them. He did not recognize it, had never considered it. Even when he woke at Xai crying out, or after, when he recalled that wakening. Nevertheless, Val Nardia had forced him, through the fact of that telepathy, to participate in her death.

The guilt for her death was another matter. That he accepted, shrugging it behind him, branded by it.

For the rest of his days he would carry that, the mirror of her terrified flight whereby to see himself, what she had fled from.

They led him into an unimportant room under the temple.

“Well,” he said.

A Lowland woman stood before him. She seemed to be the one from Rem’s narrative, but she was not dressed as she had dressed for Rem. Her garments were plain, only the violet gem on her brow to indicate anything.

“My lord Prince,” she said, “you’re here in good time.”

“Tomorrow’s sunrise, according to your instructions. And if I’d been delayed?”

“It did not seem,” she said, “you would be.”

There was nowhere to sit. He leaned on the wall and the melting snow slid from the shoulders of his cloak. The trees had cast it down on him as he walked over the island, though the air was becalmed like the sea.

“I’d like to know your name,” he said conversationally.

“Eraz, my lord.”

“Ah. The name of the hero Raldnor’s foster mother.”

“I was born in Hamos.”

“The hero’s foster village. Now a large town, I gather.”

“A room has been prepared for you, in the precinct of the novitiate.”

Suddenly he remembered her himself. This was the bitch who had led him to his sister, like a veritable madam, that last night—“How much do you want for this? Or is it to be a gift to the temple?” “The only gift which is required will be given.” He would have remembered sooner, but his eyes were dazzled from eight days’ snowscapes, aching from that and lack of sleep, his whole body dull with weariness.

“First,” he said, “I’d like to see my sister, the Princess Val Nardia.” He paused and said, without any expression, “Why did you tell Suthamun she was dead? To protect her?”

“She is dead, my lord.”

“Oh no. Dead women don’t bear.”

“I’m sorry to prolong your distress, my lord Prince—”

“Don’t worry about my distress. Worry about whether or not I decide to put your bloody temple to the torch.”

“No,” she said softly, “you won’t do that. You have built your reputation high in Karmiss. Such an unpopular deed would destroy all you had worked for.”

“All right. Just you, then. An official burning. Premature Lowland burial rites. When your unholy sorcery is exposed.”

“The Lord Kesarh doesn’t believe in sorcery.”

“That’s true. But you could try to convince me.”

“Then follow.”

So he let himself be led again. Yet when they got there, a curtain of figured gauze stretched midway across the room.

“No farther, my lord.”

“What’s to stop me, aside from the drapery?”

“Little. But you would kill your child.”

“Assuming I accept there is a child.”

“Assuming you accept there may be a child.”

It was possible to see through the gauze to a shadowed bed. What lay there was hidden. Incense braziers burned about the bed, as they had burned in the chambers outside. Priests had let them in, priestesses passed quietly up and down between the smokes and the flimsy screens of veiling. It had been exotic but insignificant. None of Rem’s deep-seated, passionless awe had communicated.

“On a concealed bed,” said Kesarh, “there could be anything. A peasant girl, perhaps, near term, brought on by your drugs.”

Eraz raised her left hand, and the heavy drapes about the bed started suddenly to furl upwards. A showy bit of conjuring, obviously, some lever in the floor, or unseen accomplices.

The curtaining, then its shadow, left the bed.

Kesarh said nothing. For a long time he merely stood, gazing at the figure of his sister as she lay in her black robe, her scarlet hair. Her belly rose, great with its prisoner, her hands like white flowers spilled either side, and, at the robe’s black edge, the upturned stars of her feet.

Eraz had laid her fingers lightly on his arm. He became aware he had moved abruptly forward. “Not yet, my lord.”

“What are you doing?” he said. The words, unpremeditated, unclever, hung in the nothingness.

“Magic, if you wish. The will of the goddess.”

“Damn your goddess. She’s dead—you say she’s dead?”

“She is dead. It is the child which lives, and with the turn of the tide, the breaking of the dawn, the child will be brought forth.”

“Why?”

“Because Anackire wills it.”

“Why Val Nardia’s child? Mine?” He heard his own voice. It made no sense. He asked questions which did not matter to him. There were other things, but he did not know them to ask.

“Children of one womb and one birth,” she said. “A double being reunited, creating a third. A gateway. In spirit, it is not actually your child, lord Prince. It is another child, older. But still a child of a double being, two who are one. One that is two. I can’t convince you, my lord. Let someone take you to the prepared room. Rest there.”

“Here,” he said. “I’ll stay here. Have them bring a couch, some food. Here. I shan’t leave this place until you work your magic.”

“You’re tired. It shall be done as you want.”

He caught her wrist. The grip must have hurt her, it was meant to. Through the mist of the temporary snow-blindness, her eyes shone like distant flames.

“Whatever you owe your goddess, try to recall who I am.”

But she did not reply, and somehow she slipped from him and was gone. She had vanished before, the blown-out candle—How ridiculous it was. All of it unreal. Even alone, seeing Val Nardia before him, he could not now break through the flimsy gauze.

They brought seating, food and drink. He had left his men at the village. He required the priests to taste the food for him, and the wine. It was a pedantic insurance, he did not really suppose it necessary.

He took the refreshment sparingly, not meaning to fall asleep. And gradually his trained body, like an obedient dog, responded to his demands. Wide awake, he sat and watched Val Nardia through the blurring of his sight and the curtain.

At midnight, so he judged it, hooded black-robes began to file into the chamber. There they perched against the walls, motionless, like comatose birds of prey. Then the women came. They passed across the curtain and hid everything from him.

Kesarh rose, but they made way for him at once. He went back and stood by the gauze.

The priestesses entered, and between them another woman not of the temple, presumably from the village near the landing, or some other habitation on the island. She was a Vis, sheer Vis from the look of her. At the curtain she halted, to leave her shoes lying on the ground, and to throw off her dress before them all. Under it she was naked, a matron in her late middle years, of no attractions, but strongly made. The curtain parted. He could not quite distinguish the seam, but the woman stepped through. No others. Only she. And only her flesh, no other thing, to pollute or disrupt the vacuum of the spell.

Chanting started now, all round him. It irritated Kesarh. Its insistence on some word or group of words, over and over.

The light was going down. Everything was murky.

The woman had approached his sister. It occurred to him what she must be: a midwife for the dead.

He stood at the curtain and watched as nothing at all happened.

After maybe an hour of watching this, he went to the table and took more wine, to keep himself on his feet. When the monstrous lightning flash happened he wanted to witness it. To know when the trap-door allowed them to send through the alien child, soon to be presented to him, from between his sister’s dead legs, as his own miraculous offspring.

The prelude to the light woke one of Kesarh’s twelve men, and vacating the chilly village bivouac, he went to urinate.

Beyond a walled yard, the slope ran into space. Below, the sea smoldered on the beach of stones. The soldier, eased, but cursing with the cold, was yet arrested by some quality either of strangeness or unrecognized beauty in the dawn.

He walked to the low wall, and looked out along the straits into the east.

Clouds hung like a puff of icy breath at the horizon, just turning the shade of milky amber. Through this amber a slip of palest gold now pushed its way.

Emanations of the cloud had muted the disc of the sun. The man could look directly at it as it rose, round and luminous and curious, like some new planet born from the world. Indeed, this was what the sunrise resembled, the birth of a child, the round head emerging from a womb of cloud.

The man did not know why they had been dragged to Ankabek. Some duty, they had heard, to the Prince’s sister’s tomb—that surely could have waited till the thaw.

Yet the dawn held him there, in the snow-locked silence, feeling himself the sole human thing awake on the earth that saw the coming of the sun.

The chanting had stopped. Something had happened, but he was not sure. Had he slept after all on his feet, and missed it?

Then he saw the village woman bending forward. The room seemed to shake with a kind of noiseless thunder he did not know was Power.

The unlovely hands were thrusting, inside Val Nardia’s immobile body—The midwife bent to her task, rough, capable, and indifferent.

There was a welter of blood. Kesarh’s own breathing seemed to choke him. He expected the girl to shriek or spasm, but she was still, as if . . . she felt nothing.

The child came out in the woman’s hands. He saw it. Amid the scald of blood, the dancing cord joining it yet to the recesses of his sister’s body. There was the glint of a knife. The cord, severed, fell down like the dying snake at Tjis.

The midwife did something to the child, then turned and held it out toward all those behind the gauze.

There was no sound.

The arms of the child were moving slowly, and the head. It lived, though it did not cry. It was very white, as if luminous. Kesarh’s eyes seemed to have cleared. He could perceive the fruit of his seed and of Val Nardia’s dead womb was female. A daughter.

In the door, the priestess Eraz stood momentarily in his way.

“Yes,” he said. “I saw it happen. I’m the witness to your sorcery.”

“One will take you to the room now, where you can rest.”

He could hardly keep his balance, though he saw her with sharp clarity. “And when I wake up,” he said, “I may wring your neck.”

In the village above the beach, Kesarh’s well-disciplined soldiers kicked their heels, and attempted to pay for the food they were brought, as instructed. But the payment was left lying. Nor did they offer any violence to the women of the area, though there was nothing else to do.

As the day began to go, they regretted they would have to spend a second night in the wretched dump.

Kesarh had other plans for them.

He was awake, dressed for traveling and drinking the wine left him, when the priest entered his room.

“Good,” said Kesarh. “Go find Eraz, and send her here.”

The priest, a dark man, looked at him. He had learned the way of looking that the Lowlanders had.

Kesarh observed it, then said, “Either you do it, or I do it. I think you’d all prefer the former.”

“Generally,” said the man, then, “the priestess Eraz is not summoned like a common serving-wench.”

“And generally I’m not kept hanging about.”

“My lord,” said the priest, “in this religion, a priest is the equal of a king. Or the greater.”

Kesarh crossed the room. He struck the priest a blow that sent him staggering. The hood slipped away. For a moment, only a cowering Vis lurched in the corner.

“But you see,” said Kesarh, “I don’t value your religion. Now get out and do as I told you. And while you’re at it, have them fetch me some decent wine.”

Eraz brought the wine herself, a curious almost playful addendum to the comparison with a serving-wench. It was Vardian liquor, some of the kind that had undone the Free Zakorians.

“The wine of the Shadowless Plains is not to your liking,” she said.

“No. I like nothing from there.”

He was restored, or seemed so. There was no mark of exhaustion on him, no hint of pain or unease.

“And you’ll be leaving us shortly.”

“As soon as you’ve prepared my sister’s body for the journey.”

Eraz met his eyes. She was, predictably, without readable expression.

“You will not trust her death rites to the temple.”

“You’d burn her, wouldn’t you? Cremation, the way of your Plains.”

“And of Shansar, which blood is in your veins, and hers. But the ashes should lie in the earth, unscattered, the spot to be indicated by stone.”

“She’ll have a tomb in Istris, in the old way.”

“Very well, my lord. I’ll see to it. There’s no need to fear corruption. Our drugs will keep her beauty pristine until you reach the capital, and for longer than that.”

“I begin to think your drugs may have killed her in the first place.”

“You don’t think that, my lord. You know the truth. Should you remove the golden tore from her throat, you would see—”

“Yes,” he said. “Then you must accept my bemused wonder at your genius, mustn’t you?”

Eraz said softly, “And the child?”

“One more to swell your sacred ranks,” he said. He drank the Vardian wine and refilled the cup and drank again.

“Not so, my lord. She is not ours.”

“It’s nothing to me,” he said.

“Your daughter,” Eraz said.

“A little white slug. Keep it.”

“No, my lord,” she said, her softness now impassive. “The child must go with you.”

“Because it’s mine? The result of incest? In Lan across the water that’s nothing at all.”

“Then send her to Lan, my lord. But she shall not linger here.”

“Because of the incest, then.”

“Anackire,” she said.

“Oh, more of your stenchful snake-woman. She wants my child dead, presumably. One day old, out in the snow. And I don’t think any of my men are capable of nourishing it at the breast. Why don’t you merely kill the thing yourself? Smother it, starve it, freeze it to death here? Why did you force it to live at all?”

“Our medicines, which so offend you, will also preserve the child. She will sleep until Istris, nor will she hunger. She may lie warm, enclosed with her mother.”

“Impossible.”

“As impossible as the event you witnessed at sunrise, my lord.”

The men who brought the wooden box to the shore helped break the ice there, so the boat could put out again.

Kesarh’s guard did not complain, though the sun was down on the ocean, and all the west, sky and water, an empty savage crimson.

They rowed across the sunset and the icy sea. A little wind was stirring for the mainland and they raised the sail to take it. There was no sound save the mutter of the canvas, the touch of the waves, the pull of the oars. The island of Ankabek drew away, the last light describing it oddly, a floating skull.

Beyond the sail, Kesarh sat in the bow, with the long box. It was fastened shut, holding her close, the living child, too, asleep as if still coiled in flesh. Holes had been affected in the planking of the box to admit air. It lay at his feet and he did not look at it.

The afterglow went out and blackness came. There were no stars, only the faint luminescence of the cold, and the low far pallor, like a thread of platinum, that was the snowy mainland shore of Karmiss.

Somewhere in the black as they rode, an hour off yet from landfall. Kesarh’s soldiers heard the planking of the coffin wrenched apart, and the lid come up with a precise ripping out of nails. They said nothing. They continued to row. They had learned early on in his service what was the Prince’s concern, not theirs.

Behind the sail, Kesarh looked down into Val Nardia’s face.

Their mother’s tore with the black pearls concealed her throat. Otherwise, it was true, her beauty was unmarred, her dreadful pointless beauty. It seemed to him it would have been the same with them, if she had been ugly.

Presently, he lifted her free of the box. He left the unconscious child, a bundle of wrappings, to tumble among the rugs with which the box was lined. He did not care what happened to the child.

He held her in his arms, his sister, her head against his shoulder, the Hood of her hair shawling over both of them, dark now in the darkness as his own.

And so they passed like a ship of ghosts across the soundless glimmering sea, to Karmiss.

Rem opened the door of his lodgings and two of the visitors walked in. Two others took up casual sentry posts in the passage, and the door was shut.

Outside, the watery gusty snow of incipient thaw rippled down the benighted building, rattling the shutters. The man’s cloak was beaded with it. He threw it off and across a chair.

“I trust the money and the documents arrived previously,” Kesarh said.

“Yes, my lord.”

“And you and your men are ready.”

“Yes.”

“Baffled by it all, my Rem?”

“As baffled as you require, my lord.”

“My requirements are those I stipulated. The ship you’re to take is the Lily, Dhol’s vessel. When you reach the port of Amlan, you’ll accompany Dhol’s man to my commercial agent in the capital. She doesn’t understand,” Kesarh added, for Rem had glanced at the girl. “Nothing, in fact. She thinks the child’s her own, the dead one, come back to life.”

“Nor has anyone disillusioned her.” Kesarh looked at him, only waiting. Berinda stood in her dripping cloak, rocking the swathed thing that was the baby, smiling down on it. She looked more aware than Rem had ever before seen her. Rem said, “and I’m to give the agent in Amlan your letter, and the child. What then?”

“Come back over the water. He’ll find it a home, an obscure home, and get me word. Somewhere Ankabek can’t suss, even by magic. One day the female may be of use to me. If not, she’ll be no use either to my enemies.”

Rem hesitated. Then he said, “The child of your sister.”

“No. The child she refused to bear. They made her body bear, that’s all.”

“And the sorcery meant nothing to you.”

Kesarh smiled; his eyes were cold. Rem held his gaze, not wishing to.

“I’m not here to discuss my emotions. I’m here to leave you the brat and its wet-nurse. I considered exposing it on the shores of Karmiss, when I got it there. Your work is to remove it from my unloving grasp to Lan. You see?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Yes, my lord. You’ve always gone about like a prince rather than a bandit, my Rem. You look more like one, too. One of my girls once told me you have a likeness to the old statues of Ram Am Mon.”

Rem schooled himself. His heart disproportionately clamored, but he showed nothing. Kesarh had turned away, taken up his cloak.

“On the ship,” he said, “you’re just another minor noble, voyaging with your guard and your mistress and your favorite bastard baby. The vessel sails with the morning tide.”

When he was gone, the two escort clanking behind him down the stairs, Rem stayed where he was. He stayed there until the hoofs of zeebas rang through the alley.

He looked at Berinda again, wondering how she would react to the departure of her god. But in fact the baby was now her god. She believed in her muddled way it was hers, the life expelled in agony from her womb, cold clay, carried out as she screamed, but brought back warm and breathing. Something of her very own, at last.

Rem sat her in a chair and brought her the mulled wine Kesarh Am Xai had not bothered with. Berinda laughed down at the baby as she sipped the drink. Rem beheld only a crescent of tiny skull above the blanket. It was a white-skinned child, the pale hair like gossamer on its head, all Shansarian, it seemed, unless the eyes were dark.

It was when he told Berinda they were leaving now, as she got up obediently, lifting her bundle of slight possessions from the floor, that the blanket slipped from the child’s face.

Rem’s heart rushed again, again for no proper reason, save that the eyes of the child were not dark at all. They were like smoky golden suns.

The crossing was a matter of nine or ten days, something less, maybe, with seasonal winds rising. Once the Lannic coast came in sight on the left hand, it would be a passage of sixteen to eighteen days to reach the port of Amlan.

The Lily was a merchant-trader, a heavy ship winged by great sails. Her ship lord, Dhol, had served the Prince’s agents on business ventures in the past, and thought no more of this, housing Rem in his own unluxurious cabin. Rem’s three soldiers slept under awning on deck, used as he was himself to rainy makeshifts. In the cabin. Rem allocated the bed to the girl and baby. He himself stretched out on the floor, something Dhol might have been interested by, had he come in to see.

The time of year was not the best for traveling. Dhol, a money-grabber, always got out before the other trading vessels of Istris. On the whole, the weather was kind to them, raining and blowing consistently, but without serious threat. The push of the wind was actually fortuitous. By noon of the ninth day, the shadow of Lan hardened behind the rain.

“The food to your liking?” inquired Dhol, eating in the cabin with them tonight, to celebrate the sight of Lan.

Rem complimented Dhol on the food.

Seated on the bed, the girl played with the baby, talking to it. As Dhol launched into their first dialogue, some inventory of sea weather, Rem’s mind drifted from him and settled by the child.

She was certainly not quite normal. He had begun to wonder if the incestuous union had brought about some flaw. Nothing so simple as, say, deafness, for sure. She heard things. Or blindness—she saw them, too, in a baby’s way of seeing. And she could make noises though he had never heard her cry. Somehow he sensed she had not cried at birth. But what was it then, this strange haunting otherness? Perhaps imagination. He had been around fewer babies than most men, having never got a woman with child.

“And by the gods, and Ashara, the king-mast cracked like a—”

Dhol was interrupted by something outside. Sudden shouting, that had nothing to do with the activities of the ship. Dhol looked at the door.

“What is it?” Rem asked. The girl paid no attention.

“I’ll see. Sighted a big fish, perhaps. They try to spear them, spear and line—can pull a craft to bits—” Dhol got to his feet. “Continue with your food, sir.”

A wave of dizziness, hollowness, went through Rem’s head. There was no warning pain, it was not really like the other times. But suddenly there was another man standing where Dhol stood, and one of the iron candle-wheels, obviously deprived of its marine balance by some malign hand, flung sideways with enormous force and struck him on the temple—Rem came to his feet and the scene cleared. Dhol was thrusting out of the door, and had not noticed.

Almost involuntarily, Rem followed him.

The deck was loud with noise, and its cause was almost instantly apparent. From the northeast a great dark shape was shouldering out of the rainy dusk, a red smear at her prow. Already she was close enough that their own port-side lights picked out two flaming eyes glaring from the murk, and, high above, the Double Moon and Dragon device of Old Zakoris.

“Pirates!”

Dhol was panting with fear.

“Can you outrun her?”

“Never. Never had to. Never seen one come this far to the south—”

Rem stared, as men hurtled everywhere about him, yelling. The black ship was like a phantom, an undead come back from Tjis to take vengeance.

His three soldiers forced a way to him.

“What orders, sir?”

“The ship lord says he can’t outrun her, and that seems likely. The Free Zakorian biremes are cut for racers. This thing wallows at the best. But no doubt he’ll try.”

“You can already feel it.”

This was so. The rowers’ stations had been alerted below. The wooden husk swarmed to a new internal rhythm. They were rowing for their lives, now.

“If that fails, as it probably will—” Rem looked through the rain at the phantom. Over the din the Lily was making, he could distinguish a thin murmur, a glad shouting from the Free Zakorian as she gained. “Since we haven’t,” he said, “sufficient wine to poison them on this occasion,” the three men grinned, “there’s a ship’s boat forward. Cut it loose and jump for it. Your priorities are the child and the girl.”

“Yes, sir.”

One minute later the Zakorian rammed them.

The shudder that took the merchantman and the howling of pleasure and fear, obscured the crash the boat made, hitting the water. One of Rem’s men swung over after it on the piece of a rope, dropping neatly, despite the turbulent rollers, amidships. Rem already had the girl at the side but, clutching the baby, she recoiled. “No!”

The Free Zakorians were boarding them like a tidal sea, pouring down the deck. Already the shrieks of dying men slit the tumult.

“Take the child from her and throw it in the boat,” Rem said to the other two soldiers. The third man in the boat was poised, ready to catch. “Don’t make a mistake. You know whose child it’s supposed to be.”

The second soldier nodded, reached out and gripped the baby. Berinda started to scream.

The other man spun, brought up his sword and sliced with it, and pirate blood rained through the rain. Rem turned in time to stop a knife going through his back. He hit the Zakorian between the eyes and as he reeled drove his own knife into the man’s armpit, where his tattered mail left him bare. Even as he went down, four others sprang over him, trampling on him as he died, to come at Rem. The second soldier twisted his blade from a mass of hair and sinews. Rem half noted the girl had stopped screaming. “The Kidling’s safe in the boat,” the second soldier murmured, almost confidentially, ripping a man’s palm open. “And the girl, too.” He finished speaking as one of the Free Zakorian knives slammed through his throat. As he fell, the other Karmian fell on top of him, a pirate crouching on them both to retrieve his dagger.

Two Zakorians hammered at Rem; the other would rejoin them in a moment. Hideous and boring, the fight had only one predictable outcome.

Rem drew his sword and slashed off a man’s ear. Throwing away his knife into someone’s wrist, he seized the knife-hand of the nearest Zakorian and keeping that pinned, pulled the man against him. Grappled, his Zakorian shield cursed him, rather entertained by the move, flexing to free his armed hand, the other punching again and again across Rem’s spine. Rem threw himself back against the ship’s side, the Free Zakorian going with him, loosening a little all over at the impact. Rem managed to crack the man’s knife from his hand and broke their grip. Now Rem struggled upward, but found after all the Zakorian was tenacious, had him again. He would have to take the man with him. Rem felt the rail, kicked desperately, and then the air gulped beneath him. The Free Zakorian, still scrabbling, lay on him in the air, then rolled away.

The sea, when Rem struck it, was itself like a blow, the coldness seeming to suck all the strength from him in one huge gasp. As he came up, he heard the Zakorian splash down not far off.

Rem fought to reach the tossing thing ahead which must be the boat.

His hands closed on the wood at the same instant the swimming Zakorian’s hands closed on him again. Then one hand lifted. Rem knew it was the backswing of another knife. He tried to kick once more, but in the freezing water he could not seem to make it happen. Then his third soldier leaned over him and ran the pirate through.

The soldier hauled Rem into the boat.

“You should have got away,” Rem said. His teeth were chattering from the cold and he could barely enunciate. “Thank the gods you didn’t.”

But the third man, his sword still slimed from the pirate in the sea, was already leaning again to the water. It parted to accept him. There was a black arrow-shaft where his eye had been.

Rem pushed himself up and over on top of the moaning girl, the silent child. “It’s all right,” he said to them. “Keep still. It’s all right.” And nearly laughed.

More arrows flickered about the boat, but hit nothing. The ocean was more choppy now; it was getting rough and they were drifting, away from the ships.

Eventually he raised himself. No one else had come after them. Only a little convention of corpses, drifting too, bobbed on the sea. The ships, locked like fighting kalinxes, were half a mile away. The Lily was already burning.

Rem unshipped the oars and began to row for the memory of land to the east.

The boat took water, but somehow failed to sink. Rem rowed, rowed, and time ceased. He lost track of everything but the grinding tear of his muscles, the squealing of the boat, the vicious teeth of the cold. He rowed in a dream, or a nightmare, and did not wake up until they ground on a beach of silken ice. The rain had stopped.

He herded the girl inland with him, having sketchily hidden the boat in case the Free Zakorians decided to pursue them after all. In the scoop of a low hill he made a fire. Day was beginning to melt the darkness, and show him Berinda’s face. Her eyes were full of a fear that seemed unable to go away. She watched him, afraid of him, clearly, as of all things. She held the child pressed close, and in the end exposed her breast to the searing cold in order to feed it. Despite the temperature, this act appeared to calm the girl. Rem was glad.

He lapsed back on the hard ground, and looked toward distant hills, a dark soft blue still chalked by snow, and beyond these higher forms yet, mountains found by the light of dawn, then fading away into it. They would have to move soon. Northern Lan was unpopulous. They were miles from anywhere that might give aid. The land smelled empty as a clean blue bowl.

Above the globe of the woman’s breast, the eyes of the child had fixed on him. They seemed to see him distinctly. Between sleep and reality, he felt again the strangeness of the child. What is it? he thought. As if now, of all moments, that was relevant. And yet, it almost seemed he came to understand . . . She called him. Somehow she spoke to him. There were no words. Gradually he became aware of some profound thing, some purely spiritual hugeness, trapped there in the small and helpless soft shell.

The soul was in the eyes. And though it was the frame of a baby, it was not the soul of a baby at all.

And then sleep washed over him. His consciousness went away.

When it came back, the girl and the child were gone.

Berinda crooned to her infant as she walked. She told it stories. Her own discomfort was nothing to her now. She felt more hopeful. The disasters of the night had been an error. She had left them behind with the dead fire and the sleeping man. Now she would seek her lord, her dark and beautiful lord who cared for her, who was the father of her child, and he would make them safe again.

She sensed no echo. No shadow of another Vis woman, walking with a fair-haired child, fell across Berinda’s confused fancy. She had never been told of Lomandra, who carried the child Raldnor from the malevolence of Koramvis, in her arms . . . Or, if she had been told, Berinda had forgotten.

The sun was high and she had gone quite a way, when something moved on the rock above her.

It was a white wolf, looking bigger than the sky, and three others of its kind were behind it.

Berinda screamed. But she had come too far to be heard.