Anackire

7

After the rains, the young summer rose and walked on the hills.

In the shining evening the hunter strode out of the wood, his kill over his shoulder, and stopped to take in the sweep of the land, the valley tucked below into the slopes, and the village that was his home. There were five dwellings, no more, but each alive with people. The nearest town lay seven days’ ride away. The village had only two zeebas. Many had never seen that town.

The hunter was ignorant, but at peace. The warm shadows running on the hills, the bright ending of the day, enchanted him without words or knowledge. Besides, his household would eat well tonight, and there would be enough to share with the neighbors.

Something then, a wisp of brightness out of the sky and down on the hillside, caused him to turn and look.

The hunter drew his breath hard. His hand reached for the knife in his belt. He made no other move.

Three things were picking a way along the hill just below him, one was a shadow, two were lights. A pair of wolves, a black one, and a white, both spectacular in their coloring and their size. And between them, something else. It was a child, a maiden child, he could see as much from here, for the little breasts had blossomed on her. A child also of the Plains People, for she was whiter than the albino wolf, and the hair that sprayed behind her, so fine it fluttered out even at her steps, was pale yet golden as a sunrise.

The hunter stared. He had heard of such things, children of the wild whose kin were beasts. It was not so much wonder as ordinary fear that stayed him. The huge wolves might attack him, if they should scent the kill he carried. The child would then attack him too, sister to them, no longer to his kind.

The black wolf halted. Its head swung about, and he saw the jetty nostrils widen. At once the white wolf hesitated, turned, looked at him. The girl-child looked last of all.

As soon as she did so, the hunter’s fear increased—and diminished—both at once. It became rather another fear. Though naked, there was a diadem of flowers on her head. He squinted at these, because her gaze filled him with some peculiar sensation he seemed never to have felt before.

The dying light trembled. One further new feeling slid through his mind, easy as water over a stone. And his fear went out. Confronted by the great wolves, the fey, unhuman child, he stood unafraid. He watched them until they turned again and went across the hill, into the mantle of the dusk.

His wife was at her loom when he came in, but started up with a glad cry. He prepared the meat and she cooked it, and later took some in a covered dish to the nearby cot where the husband, laid up for a while, had not been able to fend for them.

Later still, under the lamp hanging from the beam, the hunter played a board game with his wife, using pieces of bone he himself had carved to intricate and beautiful shapes. His wife won, as she often did, and they laughed.

And even later still, as they lay on their bed in the warm darkness, he said, “I saw a wolf child on the hill.”

“I thought there was something,” said the hunter’s wife. “All evening, I thought so.”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

“You’d tell me in your own good time.”

So he told her.

They slept till sunrise, when the little red sheep they kept in the yard began to bleat, wanting the pasture.

The hunter’s wife rose and dressed. She kissed her husband.

“You sleep. I’ll see to Babbya.”

Smiling, he turned on his side, and smiling the girl sought the door, combing her black hair as she went. She loved her man well, though he was some twelve years older than she. But then she had cause. He was a fine man, and besides, her father.

Outside, the sun stood on a hill. The red sheep frolicked. Between the two, the wolf child waited on the slope, her face to the hunter’s door.

The hunter’s wife took in her breath, as the hunter had done. In her case, it was purely awe. The figure on the slope, perhaps ten years old, looked like one of the exquisite bone figures from the board game.

There was no sign of the wolves, only the wolf child, with flowers in her sunrise hair.

The hunter’s wife slipped back into the house. She put a bread cake and some fruit into a dish, wine from the village vine-stocks into another. She re-emerged, bowed, then carried the offerings out beyond the yard, beyond the village, but not far up the slope, and left them there. The child watched her. The hunter’s wife came down again, went through the gate in the stockade and into the yard, and kissed the red sheep on its nose. “You must stay here. Or her brothers may come and eat you.”

The child could not possibly hear what the woman said, but the child suddenly curved her mouth—a smile. She stepped down the slope to the dishes. She did not comport herself like a wolf child, and she seemed to know what a dish was for. Gracefully, she took a berry from one and put it in her mouth. Then she raised and took a sip of wine from the second dish. She left the dishes neatly, turned, and ran away like a ghost of the wind.

The hunter’s wife laughed with joy at the beauty of her movements.

When her husband woke again she said to him, “Not a wolf child. A banaz.” Which in the mythos of Lan was a rural deity.

“A Lowland banaz, then.”

“Why not? Since their king made them lords, they walk all Vis where they will, and their sprites would do likewise.”

About noon there was an outcry. The sons of the fourth and fifth houses had seen a wolf sitting on the slope looking at the village. Men ran on to the street made only by footfalls.

The hunter went out, too, and beheld it was the black wolf, its tongue lolling like a ribbon.

“Fetch your spears!”

“No, no. It’s the familiar of a banaz.”

“Rubbish. It’s a wolf and we must kill it before it comes for the livestock, or for us.”

One of the younger sons unwisely hurled a broken pot at the wolf. It missed. The wolf panted in the heat. Or laughed.

Just then the hunter’s wife went up the slope toward the wolf, carrying a dish of meat from yesterday’s kill. The men shouted, but the hunter said, “Wait. My daughter-wife is clever in these things.” Nevertheless he put his hand to his knife, as he had in the evening on the hill.

A few feet away, the woman bowed to the wolf and set down the dish. The wolf came to the dish and began to eat. The woman walked down the hill again.

When the black wolf had finished, it rolled on its back in the early dust and rose up a gray wolf, and ran away.

The village muttered.

For a month, almost until Zastis, this kind of thing went on. A wolf would be seen on the periphery of the village, or the wolf child herself. None of the village animals were harmed, or the young infants or girls. Offerings came to be made, not only by the hunter’s wife, and were either partaken of or spurned. Women working among the vines became accustomed to the wolves, as to a couple of large dogs. The men would leave them portions of a kill, and began to say such phrases as: “The white wolf didn’t come today. I missed the shape of him on the slope.”

They were more innocent and more knowing in the hills. They could accept such things.

To the child they put up a small altar, and left there items which might please, flowers, honey, beads. These were not touched.

Then, one morning, the hunter’s wife opened her door and the wolf child was the other side of it. She did not speak, and maybe was unable to, having spent her formative years with wild beasts. Yet she smiled, and her smile was lovely. The girl stood back, and the wolf child came into the cot.

The hunter’s wife made no opposition, but she was unsure now of what to do. She watched the wolf child, who was a banaz, pause by the curtain of the sleeping-place, turn away, put one finger, so white it seemed luminous, on the rim of an iron cauldron.

“Let me learn from you,” said the wolf child.

The girl started. She was deeply shocked that the child had spoken to her. Then the shock lessened. She realized with a sweet delight the banaz had not spoken in words at all, but by impression only, in the way of the Lowland People, from inside her skull.

She stayed with them in the house only a few days and nights. She learned swiftly how to be human. It was as if she had always known, merely wished to be reminded.

She clothed herself in garments for the first time, clothes of a girl-child from the sixth house, whose daughters were still young enough to provide them. And she might always have been clothed. She observed the flow of the loom, the bubbling of pots, the gamboling of Babbya, all with equal intensity. She braided her hair and unbraided it. She washed herself in the stream, but, as the hunter’s wife had noted, true banaz that she was, the wolf child had always smelled clean, and of a strange natural perfume, like a flower.

She knew the Vis language, either that or she had no need to know it, taking information with tactful delicacy from their minds. Although no one but the hunter’s wife had direct communication with her, and that seldom.

By night, the wolves slept at the door.

The village left the altar standing.

The hunter’s wife began to love the child, even in these few days, love her as the daughter-sister the gods had not yet granted her. But the child in her village clothes, her hair like sunbeams, seemed older than a child. She seemed a woman.

And on the fifth day the hunter’s wife wept, and the wolf child stroked her hair, her hands a caress, her eyes that were like suns eclipsed by a remote gentleness.

“You must get the loan of a zeeba,” said the hunter’s wife to her husband. “You must go south.”

He frowned, at his wife’s sorrow, the child’s silence.

“Why?”

“She’s told me, in the way she tells me things. She wants you to take her to the town. And—to sell her there, as a slave.”

“There are laws,” he said, “against the sale of Lowlanders.”

“She gathered herbs on the hills today, to stain her skin and hair.”

The hunter stared, as at the first. And afterwards he stared almost in a renewal of fear as he saw the child standing under the lamp, her hair brown as wood, and her skin swarthy, which before had not even tanned.

The wolves dashed, black and white, over the brim of the blue hills, and ran with the cart and zeeba for several miles.

The child regarded them, but did not make a sound. That she spoke to the wolves within her head was likely.

When the wolves dropped back and did not reappear, the hunter said: “You’ll have taken away the luck of my village.”

But he knew that was unfair and untrue, and after-seasons proved as much.

The town of Olm lay in that nebulous region of borderland where Lan married with Elyr. Mountains towered over the town, the backbone of the landscape. Somewhere up amid their spines was to be found the ancient kingdom of the Zor, leaderless now, save that it gave its fealty to the king at Amlan. The Zor had, centuries ago, held to itself a religion currently commonplace: The worship of a woman god, to whom the serpent was sacred.

The carts that came jumbling into the marketplace of Olm had all manner of goods to sell. Even slaves were sometimes sold there, Though Lanelyr, like her parent lands either side, dealt sparingly if at all in slavery. Indeed, to some extent it was the blond man of Shansar and Vardath who had revitalized a flagging trade. In the second continent there were now countless Vis slaves at work for fair-skinned masters. And in the marketplace at Olm, a small group of blond Vardians, merchants of flesh of all kinds, stood with wine, watching a woman on a dais. She was a snake dancer from the Zor, a contortionist limber as the giant snake through whose silver coils she wheeled her brazen body.

Such sights, inserted between the drapes of her litter, brought only exasperation to Safca, the daughter of Olm’s Lannic guardian. But then, the world exasperated her; the world, her youth, and her lack of opportunity. She still fantasized occasionally that some lord, riding through Lanelyr, would see and be seduced by her, sweeping her away to worthier things. But she knew herself too homely to have such an effect.

“Go on,” she said to her bearers impatiently.

Her outrider leaned to the litter, and explained the obvious: The Vardians were in their path and might well refuse to move until the dancer was finished. Such a scene would look poorly.

“If I must wait here, then,” said Safca, “I’ll visit the stalls.”

She got out of the litter, enamel beads in her hair, her spirit crumpled, and started to walk across the market. The outrider dismounted, and walked now at her back, hand ceremonially to sword-hilt.

She was recognized on most sides, and offered politenesses, of course. Only the Vardians quite ignored her.

Perversely, Safca Am Olm idled to inspect the cages of multicolored birds directly beside them. Through bars and feathers, she covertly watched, disliking the invaders’ paleness and their language, wondering through all her antipathy if one might turn and find her interesting merely because she was a contrast.

But they did not turn.

The dancer on the dais fulfilled her ritual—once, such dancing had been nothing less—and went away, roped by the snake. Presently, it became apparent the rostrum was to be used for a slave auction.

The guardian’s daughter stood in the burning sunlight, pretending now she watched the stage.

The Vardians drew her. One in particular. She considered if it would be possible to enjoy a foreigner. Zastis was not so far off. Could this man be enticed as a lover? They said the men of the Other World were immune to Zastis, but how could that be?

The first owners showed off their wares. As they were bid for and sold, the Vardians did nothing at all. Next came a chain of slaves from the backlands, handled by the public auctioneer. They were unexceptional, three men and a couple of slovens, no doubt brought to this by debts.

One of the Vardians, the one Safca had become fascinated by, pointed out the sloven at the end of the line.

But no, it was not the sloven. Another stood just beyond her, a child, eleven or twelve, a girl with a wave of hair, too light to be all Vis, too dark to be legally one of the yellow people.

“Twenty copper parings,” the Vardian called out, “for the child.”

“Twenty, master? That’s not—”

“Vardish copper. Not the impure muck of Lan.”

Safca lost her temper with this man who spoke with an accent, reviled her country, and would not look at her.

“Ten parings of silver,” she cried, much clearer than a bell. “Good silver from the guardian’s store. Nothing imported.”

Here and there, some of the Lannic crowd laughed.

The Vardian turned at last. His look was frank, unenthralled and touched by menace. She held it, alarmed, sweat starting on her forehead. Involuntarily her fingers closed over the lucky bracelet she wore on her left wrist and never took off. Slowly, he turned back. “Fifteen parings of Vardish silver, by Raldnor.”

She lost her head. “By Raldnor!” she shouted, “and by Yannul the Lan, one of his captains—” there was more crowd noise “—twenty silver parings.”

The Vardian turned again. She withered in his gaze. Without another accented word, leaving their wine, he and his companions walked off across the market.

She felt silly, degraded almost. She should have left well alone.

Lan, neutral throughout the Lowland War, had given many of her sons to fight for the hero Raldnor against Dortharian oppression, not least Yannul, the wandering acrobat, who learned the trade of soldiering beside Raldnor in Xarabiss, then used the knowledge fighting side by side with him and with his army, across the length of Vis. It had been Yannul, too, who made the perilous voyage with Raldnor that ended at the forest-shores of the Sister Continent. Some said Yannul had remained in Dorthar, at Anackyra, with the Vathcrian King who was Raldnor’s son. Others said Yannul was in Lan. A pity he was not here. It seemed the yellow men who swaggered across Lan, her commercial conquerors if not otherwise, needed some token of the past to stay their arrogance.

But it seemed, too, Safca had bought a slave.

The child walked by her litter back to the guardian’s stone house with its single tower. A bill for the money had been left with the auctioneer, who in turn Safca saw paying another. This fellow had long hair down to his shoulderblades, a mark of the hills, for in the towns and cities now men wore their hair only the length of the neck—a fashion of Vathcri and Vardath. Probably, the hillman was the child’s father.

Unnerved, Safca had barely glanced at her purchase. In the courtyard, she sent the child to be properly bathed and fed and clad. It was to be presented to her in her chamber before the evening meal.

But the shadows were still short beside the brass fountain when two of Safca’s girls ran out to her in uproar. It seemed the swarthy child, dipped in the tub, had come out like a star.

“White skin—yellow hair—Oh, lady, a Lowlander for sure—”

“And she’s dumb, lady” the other added. “Can’t speak a word.”

Safca went to see.

The maiden child sat where she had been left in the water, appearing quite composed. She was definitely a Lowlander, not even second continent blood could account for quite such crystalline pallor. It was dreadful, Safca knew. The penalty for sale of a Lowlander was fining and flogging, and for buying one it was any and every penalty the prosecutor thought suitable. What must she do?

“Little girl,” said Safca, “can you hear me?”

The child, whose face was most unusual and entirely grave, looked at her, then nodded.

“You were taken in error,” said Safca, firmly. “I’ll manumit you as soon as the clerk comes and I can bribe him. Do you have somewhere you want to go back to? The Plains?” Safca said, wildly now, “Must I send you there? The expense—I’m not able to!”

The child shook her head.

It was odd, since she had not spoken aloud, that Safca knew the shaking of the head did not mean exactly “No.” Merely Not yet.

Zastis bloodied the night sky.

Safca took as her lover one of her litter-bearers. No better prospect offered, and the arrangement was at least discreet, the man flattered, hale, and willing. Yet Safca resented her submission to the Red Moon, she who was not beautiful. While she made do, and, sated, must put the man from her bed, her brothers lay all night with their wives and concubines, her prettier, more important sister with a chosen noble. Since Safca could not choose the manner of her pleasure, it seemed to her she would more gladly have done without it. And so, for a night, she admitted no one to her bed, and burned in it.

At midnight, sleepless and in a rage, she stole down through the house to walk in the cool courtyard of the fountain. In the brief colonnade, she halted.

The brass of the fountain was ruddy, the water playing like strings of glass beads, and everything else dark. Almost everything else. For the white Lowland child was standing by the basin, and something was with her—

Safca’s heart turned over. At first she did not believe. Wrapped about and about the child’s slight body was a huge snake, the very kind with which the Zorish girl had danced in the marketplace. Which was well for a girl of the Zor, birth-trained to mastery of such a reptile. Though not venomous, the great snakes could crush small animals, even the chest of a man should they desire it enough to obtain sufficient grip on him. A slender child would be nothing.

How the creature had got in, slinking through some kitchen hole and pouring over the wall, was now unimportant. Safca’s hand was already at her throat where a tiny dagger hung sheathed in Elyrian enamelwork. Such a minor blade—she must aim for one of the eyes, hoping the reflexive mindless tightening of the coils would not persist too long, after death.

If only the Lowlander had not been dumb, she might have shrieked for aid.

Why then did Safca not cry out herself?

At the instant this thought occurred to her, Safca became conscious of a sound, a low, musical murmur, which was emanating from the dumb child. In that instant, too, the child lifted her head and looked into Safca’s eyes.

They gazed at each other, and the guardian’s daughter slowly raised her dagger and dropped it back in its sheath.

Safca’s waiting women had mentioned to her how the child seemed able to call birds from the air, and how the two shy pet monkeys from Corhl would play with her. But this—

The power the Zorish girl exercised over her snake was nothing to this. The child had no need to fear. She was in command, or rather in communication with the great serpent. Its coils were loose, separating the starlight like the fountain. Its flat head moved in her hair.

Nor was the child dumb. The sound she made over the snake, a hypnotic speechlessness of vibration, was yet articulate. Equipped with vocal apparatus and a thorough knowledge of the Vis tongue, the child did not employ them only because, in some uncontemptuous way, she found language superfluous. All this Safca grasped at once, and accepted at once. She made no objection, only stood blinking before the eyes of her Lowland servant. They had never named the child. They had called her for her supposed birthplace, and that charily. She was not displayed. The guardian had never glimpsed her.

And now the Lowlander moved a fraction, the snake slipping forward, resting its head across her palms. Both their eyes, the eyes of the child and of the serpent, were a pale clear gold, and both sets of eyes seemed glowing.

Safca realized the Lowlander was offering her the snake, offering it like a garland, all the winding terrible power of it. There was a certain lightness in that, maybe. Safca touched her lucky bracelet, and stepped back, and the spray of the fountain kissed her shoulder.

“There is no harm,” said the child.

Safca opened her mouth to scream and did not scream. Her pulses thundering, she reached out and let the snake spill from the child’s arms to her own.

It was heavy, both liquid and dry, an extraordinary sensation. Every hair of her body seemed upraised, no longer with fear, with some more primeval reaction. She shivered continuously, yet a strange elation possessed her. The snake entwined her bones. For she felt the glory of its strength, that did not hurt her, clear through to her skeleton, in the protective ambiance of the child.

How can I fear this thing? she thought. Something so beautiful.

It lasted only moments. Then the snake flowed away, rope on rope of sensation gliding off, leaving Safca trembling and then stilled. It vanished before she looked to see it go.

She wanted to speak to the child, to ask her many things, but the child would be silent now, silent in all ways. How old was she? Older than the eleven years she looked. Younger, also.

Where do you come from? Safca asked the child, over and over, in her brain, aware the child could hear if she wished, aware the child would know she did not mean a land or a people, but some other thing, less actual, more decided.

But the child, as Safca had guessed, did not answer.

8

The ambush on the Amlan Road was not altogether a surprise. There had been a purchased warning at the inn the night before, somewhat unspecific, but enough. The spot itself, though he had never had trouble there before, was also a likely one, the hills leaning to the road and thick with coarse high grass. Men burst out like demons, whooping to inspire alarm and to get rid of their own tension, as they plummeted down on the riders and the five rumbling wagons.

But the wagons were full of eager unsheathed swords. Blood sprang and anointed the wine casks and the bales of silk he had had the forethought to roll in protective owar-hide.

Rem extricated his sword from a tangle of guts and kicked the corpse away in time to throw another bandit forward, off his back and over his head, and under the prancing hoofs of the zeeba in front, which finished him.

The rest of the fight was already over. Dead brigands lay strewn along the road, and a couple hung undecoratively from the wagons. Three or four more had made off alive, scrambling through the thick fur of the summer hills, the last of them dragging some of the worthy merchant’s goods along with him.

“That one,” Rem called. “Bring him down.”

The man with the best eye for it flung a spear, and the bandit fell dead in the grass. His associates did not bother to look back, and were soon from sight.

In the old days, even two years ago, this road was clear enough of such adventures. But since piratical Free Zakoris had come to crowd the sea-lanes between Dorthar, Ommos and Lan, few ships risked the harbor of Amlan, preferring land-trips to and from the ports of Elyr in the south. Thus, the trade road to the capital had ceased to be the well-patrolled and lawful stretch it had been. Every rare cargo that ran the Zakorian gauntlet, stood a fair risk from the hungry robbers of Lan.

Having himself been a bandit, once, Rem was not ill-educated in their ways and means. Hiring out as an escort for such dainties as now remained safe and unspoiled in the wagons, he had built some sort of financial security for himself. Twenty men were in his pay, courageous and intelligent. He could have taken on more if he had needed them. Not so many, maybe, as the fifty who would have followed him in Karmiss, under the Lord Kesarh’s banner of the Salamander. But, as things had stood, it would have been stupid to go back. Kesarh had had no need of him, in any case. Six years ago there had been a breath of plague in Istris, and the Prince-King Emel, though mightily protected, had evinced plague symptoms and shortly died. Less than three months later Kesarh Am Xai was crowned as King. He took two queens with him to the throne, one a Shansarian princess of Suthamun’s house, and one a Vis woman.

But all that was another world. The news came late here, and the emotions the news engendered were low-voiced as distant harps.

Eight years in all had gone by, eight years, and these months of the heat and of Zastis. The child, if she lived, would be less than nine years old. But he had no reason to suppose she lived. Although he had hunted her, and the girl, Berinda, intermittently up and down this land, for all the eight years and the months after, from the north to Lanelyr and back, he had found no trace.

And even though he continued at the savage trade he had chosen in the beginning just because it would take him all over Lan and so enable him to hunt for them, now he no longer understood why he did so. Habit only, probably. For she was dead, of course. Somewhere the winds swilled through her little baby’s bones, and her supernatural adult soul was exiled, riding them.

There had been none of the mind-visions, either, during these eight years. One blessing.

Sometimes he wondered about Lyki, and if she lived on with the rope merchant, or had taken up with some other. Even Doriyos sometimes moved across Rem’s thoughts like a blown leaf.

He did not let himself think very often of Kesarh.

“Rem, this pig has gold buckles. Do you want them?”

“No. Split anything like that between yourselves.”

They did so, rifling the cadavers before heaping them at the roadside. You left such markers in Lan. Someone went and got the haul the running bandit had taken, or tried to take, up the hill.

Then they rattled off along the road again, adhering to discipline and saving their boasting and drinking until they reached the city.

The King and Queen lived in Amlan, in a painted palace of five tiered towers. Every few months they would come out on the steps, each carried in an ivory chair as if incapable of walking, and under parasols, in a welter of guards and nobles, to dispense justice to any who asked for it. This custom, which was also prevalent it seemed in Vathcri, Vardath and Tarabann, amused Rem. While liking it, his soldier’s intellect saw all the dangers inherent. One could foresee a murder on that stair, below those red and blue pillars. And it would be a pity for them to be cut down. Brother and sister, in the tradition of Lan, they were young and handsome, both of them, to a fault.

The inn was a good one, just two streets away from the Palace Square. When he walked in there were yellow lights whirling through the air, a troupe of jugglers spinning flames and bells, and somersaulting between.

Rem settled in the dark corner the inn had left for him, drinking Lannic wine, and waiting for his meal to come. The merchant’s agent was to meet him here. The wagons had been sent to the warehouses, and already the tale would be abroad in the dusk, the ambush and the wily bravery of Rem of Karmiss. There should be a bonus in all that. He was glad enough for the men to share it. For himself—he looked into the somber wine and pondered, as he only occasionally allowed himself to ponder, why he built as he did, why he wasted as he did, the worthlessness, and the lack of roads to any other thing. But there was nothing in him, he knew, to merit special attention either from the nonexistent gods, or from himself.

When he looked up, two men were coming in at the door. They paused to admire the jugglers, and suddenly a kind of rippling went over the inn’s inhabitants, the sort that denoted someone of importance.

Mildly curious. Rem looked more intently. He did not know the older man. He was Lannic Vis, and well into his middle years, but strong, a fighter at one time it would appear, and exceptionally well-coordinated, something that could show even standing still. He was, too, smartly if not at all extravagantly dressed, yet, unlike most of Amlan’s male population, he wore his hair very long, in the old way. Rem had been in and out of Amlan many times, and had come to recognize most of the court by sight. They were frequently about, and the city was not over-large. This man, however, struck no memory, filled no niche.

One of the jugglers at that moment cartwheeled out of the melee and landed in a sweeping bow before the newcomer. Who laughed, and brushed him aside with a generous coin. The man began to walk into the room, glancing round. Here and there a cup was raised, and he acknowledged it quietly. The other walked with him, grinning, proud and poised and self-conscious.

This one was only a boy, not yet nineteen, if so close. Rem started to look at him and did not look away. He was mixed-blood, his skin tanned but not Vis, his hair crow-black. The eyes were light, bronze going toward topaz. Beautiful, like the rest.

All at once the two of them were at Rem’s table. The older man spoke.

“Good evening. Should we disturb your dinner if we sat down?”

Rem in the shadow, the light behind him beyond his pillar, stared hard. He was about to say some noncommittal thing when the inn tore down the middle like a fruit peel.

There was the man, still, but almost thirty years younger. The boy was gone. All around was dust and broiling daylight.

“I beg your pardon,” Rem said stiffly, “you seem to know me, but I—”

“Yannul the Lan. We served together, you and I.”

The inn was there again. Rem swallowed. It had been fast.

“What’s the matter?” the man said to him. He looked slightly concerned, as with a stranger.

“Your name is—” Rem cleared his throat, “Yannul.”

“I’d like to deny it, but I see you know me.”

“Yannul of Lan, one of the hero Raldnor’s captains.”

Yannul, taking this as an invitation, sat. The boy sat, too.

“Once,” said Yannul.

“You’re said to be in Dorthar.”

“Also, once. Now I’m here. This is my son, born here. And you’re Rem Am Karmiss, escort maker for caravans, and yourself once a soldier in the employ of King Kesarh.”

“And how did you hear that?”

“I asked someone. The way you fight your bandits is evidence enough of the skills of an academy of arms somewhere. And this afternoon you left a few more, I gather, for the goddesses to make bone hairpins.”

The server came.

“A jug of your best. I’m paying,” said Yannul the Lan.

“Sir—the inn will pay, if you’ll do us the honor—”

“If I’d done you the honor every time you offered it, you’d be on the street by now. Take this. For the gentleman’s meal as well.”

The server went off.

“What do you want?” said Rem.

“My son,” said Yannul.

Rem looked at Yannul’s son, who smiled. Rem looked back at Yannul.

“Well?”

“You know the way it is with Free Zakoris,” said Yannul. “In a year or so there’ll be bloody war. There has to be.”

“If you say so. You should know.”

“Yes. I should. Lur Raldnor here has a wish to go to the High King’s court at Anackyra, and take arms with him at the proper time against his enemies.”

“The Storm Lord will doubtless be happy to have his support.”

It was Yannul now who looked narrowly. His eyes scanned over Rem, as if searching something out, and suddenly the boy said, in a golden voice, “My father thinks I should arrive with at least a modicum of martial training. It’s sensible. He’s taught me a lot, but I need more. We were about to ask if you—”

“Would leave a profitable business to tutor you in the latest techniques for slaughtering men.”

The boy—called for the hero-comrade, of course—Lur Raldnor, met Rem’s eyes.

“I’m aware killing isn’t a game. My father taught me that, as well. But Yl Am Zakoris has his new kingdom in Thaddra as a base, and the world knows—”

“No,” said Rem. “I’m sorry. No.”

The wine came then. When the server left, Yannul lifted the jug and Rem put his hand over his cup.

“Drink it,” said Yannul. “We’re still talking.”

Rem let the wine pour in his cup.

“I thought we’d finished. You can soon buy another arms-master for your son.”

“Here? There isn’t even an army here.”

“Shansarians.”

“They’re berserkers in battle. That kind of fighting—unless you’re born to the way of it, you get killed.”

“He doesn’t want me to go,” said Lur Raldnor. “I’ve only just persuaded him. If you refuse, I’m done for.”

“Lan’s a pleasant enough place,” said Rem.

“Not if Free Zakoris comes and takes it in the night.”

Yannul swore.

Rem perceived the father saw himself in the son, the same spirit which had followed Raldnor Am Anackire against all the hating might of Vis. Something strange stirred in Rem. He would never have a son, he would never know this feeling, for good or ill. And for the first time in fifteen years, he wished he had known his father, or at least his father’s name.

Across the room. Rem abruptly beheld the merchant’s agent, standing with his mouth open at Yannul.

Yannul intercepted the look. He rose, and the young man rose, no longer protesting, only very still.

“If you change your mind, the innkeeper here knows my farm, and how to get there. Four miles from Amlan, and the grapes are potent. Think about it.”

The wolves were busy on the slope above the ice, tearing something in shreds between them. Rem knew what it was. The child.

Kesarh stood at his elbow, watching the wolves.

“It’s nothing to me,” Kesarh said.

The wolves lay down, growling, chewing. Blood made smoking ribbons along the ice.

Kesarh had gone. Yannul’s son stood where Kesarh had been, and he said softly, “It’s all right. It’s just a dream.”

Rem woke, sea-salt-wet as from the ocean off Lan, and almost as cold in the hot close night.

He had not had that dream for years. It had happened a great deal in the beginning. Ever since that morning, new in Lan, he had woken to find the girl and the child were gone, and, stumbling across the hills he met the men from that little village, out on their wolf-hunt. They had taken him in, cared for him. But they had seen no woman, no baby. The wolves had preyed on them terribly through the snow. The deduction was blatantly there for him to make, if never spoken.

Eaten alive, that fully cognizant, fully helpless being. . . .

Rem got up. He went to the window and looked out on Amlan, the late-burning lamps, the five tops of the palace.

Yannul’s son arriving in the dream, that at least was different.

Yannul’s son.

At the boy’s age, Rem had been breaking necks to steal purses. Lur Raldnor wanted to break necks to save the world.

The vision madness coming back tonight, when he thought himself free of it forever, had shaken Rem. Odd that, at last, the picture had brought with it some information. Who had he been at that moment in the boiling square, black jungle behind him, the man who had served with Yannul, somewhere? The obvious idea was bizarrely ridiculous. The obvious idea was that he had been Raldnor son of Rehdon and Ashne’e, Raldnor Am Anackire, the Lowland messiah.

Days went by, and no work offered itself. No merchandise was going to the port of Amlan, and the only caravans faring south had their escorts fixed. Five of Rem’s men asked leave and went off in the same direction, having families in Lanelyr. On the other business, the continuous, pointless search, a man came to the inn and stood in the courtyard with Rem.

“I heard you were trying to trace a woman and a child, sir.”

“That’s so.”

“I’ve come out of my way here.”

“I’m sure you have.”

After an unfruitful silence, disgruntled, the man said, “There’s a woman in the far north, a Karmian.”

“Yes?”

“She’s got the child, about seven years old, a mix child, very fair.”

Rem never moved. He had been brought similar facts, or lies, before. Sometimes he followed them up, and never found what he looked for.

“And the child’s male,” he said.

“No, a girl.”

“Did you speak to the woman?”

“Yes. But I didn’t tell her you were looking.”

“How did she seem to you?”

“A bit simple,” the man said. “Slow. But good-natured enough. And the child was bright.”

Rem felt his belly tighten.

“And the limp,” he said.

The man frowned.

“The child?”

“Or,” said Rem, “the woman.”

The man licked his lips, decided.

“Yes, sir.”

Rem laughed. He did not realize the devastating darkness in his face, something he had learned, perhaps, from Kesarh. The man, who had found out some of what Rem wanted but not quite enough, blustered, scowled, and soon hurried away, without reimbursement.

Rem walked the streets, through the market. He looked at the palace, like a sightseer. Yannul, Raldnor’s captain, had once ridden all the way through the long snow to persuade his King and Queen, then children, to ally Lan with the Plains.

Yannul had married a Lowland woman, they said. And between them they had formed the glorious son who wanted to go to Dorthar.

Dorthar. Dragon land. Land of the goddess, now.

A man passed on the street. He was like Yannul’s son, but only for an instant. Lur Raldnor, do what Rem would, was very much in Rem’s mind. And no other thing, even by night, had come to divert the image. Rem was wary. The boy was young enough still to be at an age when sexuality was fluid, therefore corruptible, therefore to be avoided. In all his life, despite several contrary opportunities, Rem had never sought the company of any save those he could take for pay. But then he had also, in that way, grown accustomed to proximity without culmination.

Nevertheless, it was another midnight, another day, before he got his directions to the farm and rode out of Amlan toward it.

It was hardly just a farm, more a villa, built, he supposed, on Dortharian lines. The blue hills held it, as they seemed to hold everything of note in Lan, and mountains gleamed far behind in the ultimate hour of the sun. Orchards and vineyards clustered near the house. An orynx herd trundled grunting and splashing in a valley with a stream, zeebas peered from pens, and gray bis fled squawking and flapping across the outer yard, long ringed necks outstretched.

“Splendid,” said Yannul when they met in the coolness of the house. “We eat early here. You’re just in time.”

They settled the questions of routine and pay over the dinner table. Yannul’s Lowland wife, soft-spoken but shining in a dress the color of her hair, helped the two servants serve the meal, then sat down with the family. Lur Raldnor was away, on a hunt, after the wildcat that had been raiding the orynx herds of the area. A much younger son, all gold for his mother’s side save for his black eyes, listened and took part in the conversation without precocity. He had the exact sound blend of couthness and dash apparent in the older boy.

Yannul and Rem ended playing a Lannic board game on the terrace in the afterglow. When the light was almost all gone, Yannul joined his servants haphazardly in kindling the lamps. Up in the sky, the Red Star was also kindled.

As Rem won the first leg of the game, Yannul said, “And I take it your mother often struck you.”

Rem started.

“Excuse me,” said Yannul, “if that’s too raw. But I noticed you flinch when Medaci tapped the boy’s hand on its fourth trip to the fruit bowl. A joke, a love-blow, no more.”

Rem was discouraged at himself to have let slip so much. He said nothing now, and Yannul went on, “it’s a cruel time for her. She loves them both, but Raldnor’s her first-born. We never thought she’d bear, after the life she had in the old city, the Lowland ruin. For a long while she didn’t. And she and he, they’re like lovers, the pair of them. Not in the Lannic way, just love, you understand. If he goes to Anackyra, she’ll pine. Yet at the same moment, she wants him to go, to fight, to stop the creeping dark. And she’s afraid, too. We remember, you see, what it was like before.”

“And what was it like?”

“Oh, you want all the military history in a nutshell, do you?”

“You must be used to that.”

“Why else,” said Yannul, “am I hiding here? I had a year of war, and then a handful of years playing politician in Dorthar. That was enough for me. To return and be Lan’s heroic monument wasn’t my design, either.” A moth had come to die in their lamp and with great gentleness and the excellent coordination of the acrobat and juggler he had been, Yannul caught it and threw it lightly free, unscathed by flesh or fire, back into the night. “Raldnor had the best idea. He disappeared.”

“Why?”

“Why not? He’d done all that was asked. Lost his humanity for it. He was a god. Gods either transcend or decay. Or vanish. And he’d left a son behind him. Raldanash of Vathcri, now Storm Lord. There was another boy, too; the Dortharians played a trick with that one, or tried to. The mother was a fool and a bitch. It’s in my mind the baby died.”

Something cold passed through Rem. He pictured the wolves, tearing—

“And the last battle under Koramvis,” he said. “Witchcraft, earthquake, the goddess manifesting. Is any of that true?”

“Truth and untruth, woven as one. I’ll tell you something, about the Lowlanders. One can believe they’re not creatures of this earth. Not all come in that mold. Medaci doesn’t, and when we took the ruin back from Amrek’s dragon soldiery, I think she was all that stood between me and a kind of madness. I’d gone there out of pity, hope of justice, quite capable of killing in hot blood, and well-trained to do it. Then I found out the core of the Lowlanders.” Yannul’s eyes were sightless now, looking only back. “I remember passing them on the streets in the snow, after the massacre of Amrek’s garrison, these men, those women I’d come to save from tyranny. They were like silent wolves, eyes gleaming like ice—they looked unhuman. And I was sick to my soul. I’d never seen that in them before, but I saw it after. The second continent men, they’re not in that mold either. They’re blond Vis. But the Amanackire are only themselves. They’re in Xarabiss, Dorthar. You can see some of them, now, physically almost all whiteness—skin, hair, even the yellow eyes get pale—ice in fire and the fire going out.” Yannul smiled. “That last battle, under Koramvis. Through Raldnor, they’d come to know themselves, the Woken Serpent. And at Koramvis, Vis came to know them too. They caused the earthquake by power of will. Or maybe that’s false. It didn’t seem so then. They had to win, and the odds had become impossible. That army out of Koramvis—we should have been obliterated. So, if the victory must come and it couldn’t come from strength of arms or numbers, it had to be strength of another kind. They willed to live. We all did. It was like a prayer, the air so still for miles you could sense it thrumming like a dumb string plucked over and over. The only chance was a miracle. And the miracle happened. Koramvis fell. As for the goddess—yes, that happened, too, but there was a sane explanation for that.”

Along the ridge of the nearest hill there came a drifting whoop and sudden splinters of torchlight.

The hunters were coming home.

“Please finish,” said Rem.

“A statue,” Yannul said, “a colossus from a hidden temple in the uplands above Koramvis. The quake threw her in the air and she was big enough and bright enough to see even from that distance, through the smoke and murk. She sank into a lake below. Another deity wisely gone to ground.”

Half an hour later, Lur Raldnor came out on to the terrace with two wildcat tails, the frisks of the murderers who had been viciously killing but not eating the herds.

Standing with the lamp full on him he looked at Rem with unfeigned pleasure, and said, “I never thought you would agree.”

So glad to get this chance at Dorthar, Rem thought. But he returned the grin.

The fighter’s training was one of the easiest parts of it all. Rem had so trained most of the escort-riders in his employ, and himself kept up the exercise a soldier stuck to, if he was thorough, working out with his men where he could, or alone. And Lur Raldnor, hardy and strong, used to hunting and riding, and taught by Yannul from his childhood any number of acrobatic tricks, took to the work with ability, interest and sense. It was true, Yannul had been trained in Xarabiss, whose Academy of Arms, along with those of Alisaar and Karmiss and Dorthar, was universally respected. His tutor, moreover, had been a Zakorian sadist whose relentless lessons were of the best, when viewed in the long-term. Yannul modestly reckoned himself now past the best age for imparting acumen. But his son came to Rem far from a novice, needing burnish rather than welding.

The rest was easy enough. Too easy. The household accepted Rem like a limpid pool, closing over his head with scarcely a ring formed to mark his entry.

He found himself continuously at home in Yannul’s house, and strove to keep some part of himself aloof from home comforts and home intimacies. But he even liked Medaci. She was demure and unassuming, with a sweet smile. Coming out once on to the terrace, he found her with Yannul, the two of them standing hand in hand, his head bowed so their foreheads touched, like adolescent lovers. Nor, seeing him, did they break away ashamed, but separated gently, amused and friendly toward themselves, the discovered, toward Rem, the discoverer.

For Zastis, there were countless graceful means. The short ride into Amlan was no bother, and her Pleasure City was lively if the Ommos Quarter was slight. It had been simple courteously to put aside Yannul’s offer of the three young servant girls at the villa, all of whom were willing and had eyed Rem since his arrival, with the tidings he had a particular liaison in the city.

Despite that, Rem suspected Yannul knew the pivot of his guest’s subterfuge. That the man did him the extreme politeness of reckoning Rem’s desires aside from Rem’s relations with Yannul’s son was impressive, and, of course, honorably obligatory. But he had promised himself to carefulness in any case.

Lur Raldnor had a girl from the next farm-villa. Her parents probably hoped for marriage with the son of the hero’s captain. The girl and the boy cared only for their nights on the Zastis tinder of the hill.

Now and then, riding back in the dawn from Amlan, Rem would meet him walking back from the hill. Raldnor seemed to consider this a conspiracy of sorts. Those were maybe the easiest times of all, and therefore the most difficult.

The practice bouts, the wrestling, the slamming together of blunted iron or wooden blades—or skin—in the yard, that type of innocent physical provocation Rem was used to. The labor, if it was fierce and difficult enough, brought its own relief. Nor, with the bevy of respectable women about, did they strip to fight. In real combat, as a rule, you had mail on your back and leg and arms; to learn to battle weightless in just a loin-guard could prove a disadvantage later on.

With the end of the Zastis months, Raldnor would be going. It was a long road to Dorthar, traveling via the Elyrian port of Hliha. Things were already half arranged. Letters had gone ahead, straight to the person of the Storm Lord, naturally.

Medaci gazed at her elder son, her citrus eyes more still than frozen tears.

One morning there were wolf tracks round the drying mud of the bis pond. None of the birds was missing. The animals of the farm had set up no warning noise during the night. Nevertheless it was thought advisable to pursue the invader. The wolves of Lan became greedy so close to the city, insolent thieves. One canny enough to avoid audible detection could prove a nuisance.

Yannul, who had been out chopping wood with his servants, now sent two of them to get ready for the hunt. The men were experienced in such affairs, grim but not displeased. Raldnor, seeing them start to saddle up, decided he was hunting that day rather than swinging a practice-sword. “Come with me,” he said to Rem. “You hunted wolves in Karmiss, didn’t you?”

Rem had, one whole long winter in the Istrian hills, hunted and eaten them, too. But for eight years wolves had come to mean something else to him, no longer adversary but terror, nightmare. And he had had the dream again, once or twice, at the villa, or on the pallets of Amlan’s Pleasure City.

Nevertheless, they got their zeebas, weapons, food from the kitchen, and set off, catching up to Yannul’s men on the hills.

The dog had the wolf-scent all the way, but it was a prolonged trial. By midday they were miles up and over the hills, with only one abandoned cave to show, and that quickly abandoned also by the wolf-dog.

The heat smote down. They entered a wood and stopped to eat in its shade. The two servants diced sleepily. Even the dog rested, its nostrils alert, but its eyes and tongue lax. It was useless to move on until the sun moved sideways off their craniums.

Where the wood ran down the hill was a wide brilliant pool. Before he quite knew it. Rem found himself swimming across it with the boy. The light meal was no trouble, but after a while each of them turned on his back, floating on the buoyancy, staring up through the leaves to the day and, blinded, shut his eyes.

“That wolf,” said Raldnor, “he must be somewhere near. We’ll come on him before sunset.” But then, “I never yet killed anything and liked it. The chase, yes. And it has to be done. But not to be liked. I’d suppose it’s that way, killing men.”

“Men are easier to kill,” Rem said.

“More stupid than a beast, do you mean?”

“No. But easier.”

After a long while the boy said, “To you, perhaps.”

Then nothing.

It would almost be possible to sleep in this water.

Presently Lur Raldnor, less life-weary, swam for the bank. Rem watched him, the tanned body like a stripe of gold against the darker stripes of the trees.

The responses of his own flesh set Rem swimming again, up and down, efficient clockwork. He had no intention of coming out of the pool, watched in turn, and the evidence of Zastis on him like a blazon. One could blame changes of temperature and element only for so much.

When he did wade out, Raldnor was lying on his belly, head on his folded arms, eyes shut again. Then, as Rem walked to his clothes, there came an oath worthy of the mess hall at Istris.

“—Anack! Who did that to you?”

“What?”

“There are whip lines across your back. A whip with teeth.”

Rem had forgotten. It was a long while since someone had thought to comment or inquire. Not since Doriyos. . . .

“Asleep on duty eight years ago, in the service of my King,” he said, startled by his own paraphrasing bitterness.

Without prelude, for he had not heard Raldnor stir, he felt the boy’s hand gracious yet firm against his spine. It was not an invitation, one sensed that. It was the magnetism of compassion. Before he could control the reflex. Rem shrugged him away. “No.”

“I’m sorry. It can’t still hurt you, can it?”

“It doesn’t.”

Rem dressed. Raldnor had stopped talking, standing naked at his back, clothed only in blamelessness.

9

Beyond the hill was another hill. You climbed it and there was another. They piled behind each other, and then there were the distant mountains.

Rem had gone back through the wood, nodding to the dice-playing servants, and away. He meant to give himself the half of one halved hour, then return. Things would be as they had been, then. Except, obviously, they had been this way from the start.

One of the mountains was moving. Like a great ship, it came sailing toward him, filling the horizon. The top of the mountain was smudged by a sunset many hours away. Lower, the hillside rock opened on a solitary ink-black nostril—the wolf’s lair? No, not that.

Nearby, there was a hovel in a wretched field. A woman came suddenly out of the hut. She seemed to see him; she waved to him and hurried up. She moved in a coquettish way, but, coming close, he saw her dirt, her age and her pathetic idiocy.

“Would you like to come in the house?”

The world exploded like a shattered mirror. Pieces of vision fell down.

“Would you like to come in the house?”

He could see again. He could see the mountains far off in their correct order, the light of primal afternoon on the hills. There was no cave, although there was a field, and a small cot overhung by fruit trees.

“Lord?” the woman said. “Lord?”

And the woman was still there. But she was hardly old, and not dirty. Her looks were plump and pretty, her black hair held back by a red scarf sewn with beads.

Rem looked down at her. Her welcome was unnerving. It was almost more natural when her face fell, lapsed into terror. She turned and ran from him, screaming.

Out of the hut burst a great brute of a man. As he raced through the field, the woman darted to him and he caught her, held her, glaring at Rem.

“What did you do to her?” the man demanded. “She means no mischief. She’ll have offered you hospitality, that’s all. Out here, most are glad of it.”

Rem said, “I don’t know why she cried out.” The hills were slowly moving, not a vision now, only vertigo.

“You must’ve hurt her. Did he hurt you, Berinda?” the man asked her with urgent tenderness. “Tell me if he did. I’ll do for him.”

The hills steadied. The sky was cut above them as if by a knife.

Rem walked toward the man.

“She surprised me. I may have looked angry. Not meant. She’s gentle, isn’t she?” It was the dulcet Lannic word for simple, and the man, accepting its use, grew less belligerent, though no less protective.

“Well, so she is. But she’s been a good woman to me. She’s given me children, a host of them. Nothing wrong with their wits, either.”

Rem went closer. He offered a handful of coins.

“My apology.”

The man brushed the coins away. Money was not always wanted in the hills, barter was more use, but the symbol he allowed.

“See, Berinda,” he said, “a mistake. Smile now, sweetheart. Smile for me.”

And Berinda looked up at the man, smiling.

All these years, searching for her. And he had not known her. Though she had known him, some dark shadow from her unhappy past. Yes, that would be the cause of her terror. Rem was the fall from the ship, the cruel water, the unloving coast—And now, contentedly here, loved and valued at last, a day’s ride from Amlan. All these years—

“Berinda. That’s a Karmian name.”

“Ah.” The man did not care.

They walked together toward the cot where she had borne the host of children, all alive. Was one of them—

No. No, this much the gods might give, but no more.

“Berinda,” said Rem. She glanced at him, and he smiled at her, without recognition, but friendly, and saw her mislay who he had been in her life.

“We have wine,” she said, “honeyed wine from soft fruits.”

The man smiled, too, showing off her housekeeping. “She’s a rare one for hospitality.”

Rem had forgotten the wolf, the hunt, forgotten Yannul’s son.

He sat in the clean little house, where two small children came in and out—strange he had not heard their voices, as now he did, ringing round the slopes—and one more crawled on the rugs, and a fourth purred at the breast.

He had seen her last, this way. Feeding a child. Not that child now. None of them were that child.

There was not much talk, the time went thick and slow and timelessly. They made no move to indicate the door to him. Of course, he did not go. The man and he exchanged a few commonplaces. Rem mentioned he was up hereafter wolves. Something odd, then. The man casting a look at his wife. “Yes, they’re wolves round about. We get no harm from them.”

As the sun began to go, the man asked for supper, and laughing she put down her sucking child and ran about preparing a meal, like a child herself playing with toys. But it was tasty when it came, if Rem could have got any of it down his throat.

“Eat,” said the husband. “We’ve plenty.”

But he could not eat, as he could not leave them. Just as he could not ask her for the past.

Shadows began to come, and a brown candle was lit.

The husband fell asleep. The woman rocked her youngest child, the other children, who had settled indoors like pigeons for the food, grouped sleepily at her skirts.

“Tell us,” said the elder girl, “the story about the wolves.”

And Rem, a mature man who had lived by three or four trades of death and by the hard edges of his brain, felt his heart stop.

She told them.

As she spoke, in the way of her child, he pictured it. The images came, conveyed by her murmuring. And sounds, and scents, all of it. All.

When the white wolf appeared like a thing of snow on the rock above her, she had screamed and help had been far away, unhearing.

After a while, the wolf came toward her, and she tried to run, but the wolf and its fellows caught her up. They loped around her, shutting her inside a wall of their own bodies. All through this she held the baby, and all through this, as she shrieked and wept and ran and fell to her knees, the baby remained quiet. Finally, the wolves nudged Berinda. They nudged her in such a way that she knew she had to get to her feet. So she did. Then they began to nudge her again, and she discovered they were unroughly pushing her toward some other place.

In abject horror, she obeyed. After a distance of rocks and uplands, twisting, climbing, the heat of the wolves’ mouths soaking through her clothing every time they nosed her on, there was a cave. It was a wolf cave, and it stank of wolves and the things wolves had killed. But it had begun to rain, and the cave was out of the rain. Berinda went into the cave and here she sat down for sheer fatigue, and dropped into a sort of dreadful doze.

When she woke, the wolves lay against her. She watched, some slept. The warmth of their bodies was a comfort. The stench in the cave seemed less now that she was more accustomed to it. Berinda, who had grown up in squalor at Xai, had spent her earliest years among the stink of humans, where disease had augmented poverty. The wolves themselves did not smell bad, for they had health. There was the difference.

Later, other wolves trotted in. Berinda was afraid, as if these newcomers might not show the same consideration as the first wolves. But they seemed indifferent. More, they had brought in a kill. Growling, the pack savaged the bloody carcass into parts. At length, a piece of the raw meat was brought to Berinda. She could not stomach it the first day. But the next, when again she was brought something, she did eat it.

By then, she was feeding the child, sitting there in the midst of them. They seemed to respect this duty, and some would stare, wagging their tails like dogs.

With nudgings and tuggings and pullings and whines they managed to conduct her where there was a stream. When the spring began to open the land, she found fruits under the ice and ate them. She offered them to the wolves also, and the wolves ate from her hands.

She was grateful for their warmth in the cold of the nights. She was solaced by their bodies’ liveness against her. She had long ceased to be afraid.

For Berinda, “gentle” as she was, was also a wild thing. To her it came, with more facility than to most, to be at one with the wolves. She reacted with the straightforwardness of a child.

And the child too, accepted and accepting, bloomed in the midst of the cave, or slept in Berinda’s lap in the weak sun of the hillside. She would even leave the baby among them for short intervals, as she wandered with the wolves or by herself.

When the summer came, four of the wolves showed her that they were leaving the cave and she and the baby were to go with them.

She was sorry, but the call of the summer running of the wolves infected her, and she did not hang back. They went south. She did not say this, but it was apparent. Also the impressive distance.

All the way, the wolves fed her and companioned her, as ever. Perhaps she had unremembered mankind. It seemed so from her narrative. Certainly the wolves had generally been nicer to her than men.

Thus, when one of the wolves urged her to a spot where a village could be seen among grain fields, Berinda evinced no special wish to approach it.

But the wolf wanted to approach the village, so they went together, playing through the tall stalks of the young grain. The child had been left behind on the slopes.

All at once the wolf and Berinda emerged into a thicket of people, who shouted, either retreating or hurling things. The wolf ran, and Berinda turned to run—and the people took hold of her, rushing her to the shelter of the village.

In vain she tried to free herself. In vain she tried to tell them how she must go after the wolves, to her baby. Her human speech had suffered. They took her noises for hysteria. When, the backlands of Lan being what they were, they did understand and believe her, it was too late. The wolves and the child were gone. Gone forever. She ran about the hills crying for them, to no avail. Washed clean of the wolf smell, her arms empty of love, Berinda wept in the village street and slept in it, refusing kindliness, bereft.

It was here that the man had found her. He was kinless and wifeless, and Zastis was near. The pretty aura of Karmiss was not all faded from Berinda. Something in her despair, besides, touched him. He wooed her in some way, maybe merely by caring particularly and only for her.

She went home with him, timid at first. But his goodness was not an act, not a fluke. Then the magic was achieved, the magic Kesarh had worked with her, better than Kesarh’s magic, for this child lived. Her arms were full again of love.

And here she was now, her bright eyes bathed with it, and laughter lines about her mouth.

“And when,” said the older girl, gazing up into Berinda’s face, “did you find me again?”

It was plainly a ritual question. The dark child believed she was the baby the wolves had taken, who had somehow sorcerously been reinserted and brought forth a second time.

When Berinda replied, it was sure that she thought so too.

“When my womb swelled, it was you.”

“But where had I been till then?”

“Riding the air,” Berinda said. And the children and Berinda laughed.

Something in the phrase arrested Rem, even through all the rest. The air-borne soul outlawed, waiting—like the ancient Dortharian belief that some souls returned at once, through the medium of their fleshly got unborn children, or the children of their kindred. Hence that insanity of the Storm Lords that not the eldest son, but the last son conceived before a King’s death, must be his heir. The foible which had granted Raldnor Am Anackire a right to the Koramvin throne.

The dark child looked over at Rem, infallibly guessing he had been an assenting party to the whole outrageous tale.

“In winter,” she said, “wolves come to the door and we feed them. From our hands. We’re not afraid. Nor they.”

He assented to that, too.

The world had given way. To feed wolves like poultry was a little thing.

“There’s someone in the field,” the elder boy said.

Berinda turned, unflurried, to look at the doorway.

Rem got up.

He went to the door and out, and saw a man sitting a zeeba, leading another, against the whole pane of violet hill sky, staining crimson in the east from star-rise.

“I’m glad I found you,” said Lur Raldnor. “We didn’t get the wolf, but there’s wolf-scent everywhere up here, the dog’s almost mad with it.” His face was like a stone.

“How long have you been looking for me?”

“Since I went back from the pool and no one could see you. The dog helped.”

“But this isn’t far from—” Rem hesitated.

“About two hours’ riding. We’ve been longer, circling, trying to get the dog to sort you out from wolf.”

“I didn’t realize I’d gone so far.”

“No.”

“Where are your father’s men?”

“Just up there. I think we should leave here now, if you can manage it. They’ve about had enough.”

“And so have you, I take it.”

Lur Raldnor went on looking down at him. He said flatly, “Whatever I did to offend you—”

“You didn’t do anything. Give me a moment, and I’ll be with you.”

The sour exchange had amused Rem in a way he recognized in himself, a shield up against all that had happened.

He felt empty. Even his awareness of the boy did not mean much now, just something else he must control.

He returned into the cot, perhaps to bid them farewell like any other passing traveler. But they had already dismissed him from their scheme of things. The girl child was playing with her mother’s hair, the other children, the baby, the man, slept.

Rem left them, mounted his zeeba, and rode up the slope with Yannul’s very polite and very angry son.

Everything was finished. As it had not, somehow, been finished in the surety of death, in the face of mythos somehow it was. The child might have lived. Now, still it might. But he had heard here of what they called wolf children. There had been similar prodigies rumored in Karmiss; everywhere, maybe. Orphans adopted by wolf-packs, reared like wolves, running with wolves.

And so, if she lived, that was what she was. More conceivably, superstitious hunters had come on her, rending sheep or orynx or men. Killed her. Long ago.

He could of course go on trying to find her. If he ever did, she would be a wolf.

Eight years of dead ends. And then this ultimate dead end.

It was finished.

They made a makeshift camp somewhere in the hills, slept a few hours, and went on. Beyond terse civilities, Lur Raldnor and he did not exchange a word. There was nothing to say. Rem’s quest had been private and stayed private in its solution.

When the villa-farm emerged at the edge of the dawn, he realized what came next. It was the only step which was clear in the aftermath.

“They may be concerned,” he said to Raldnor. “They probably looked for us last night.”

“Probably.”

“My fault. I’m sorry. I’ll speak to your father.”

“Don’t you think I can speak to him myself?” said Lur Raldnor, and for the first time his tone and his look cut like a razor.

Rem shrugged.

“If you prefer.”

“He can’t learn any more from me,” he said later to Yannul. “You’d already taught him enough to pass very well. Otherwise, he’s got presence and a good head. If Raldanash gives him a command, which I take it is what you’re predicting, he’ll handle it. Better than most.”

“And you abruptly found this out during your nonexistent wolf hunt?” said Yannul, bringing him a cup of wine Rem thanked him for, set down and ignored.

“You’ve paid me generously. Don’t throw your money away when you don’t need to. He can work out with the young servant—I forget his name.”

“You’ve taken against my son,” said Yannul. He seemed quite serious, unhurried.

Rem said nothing, fretting for the door.

“I’m concerned,” said Yannul, not looking concerned. “I thought we’d brought him up to be a credit.”

“Sir,” said Rem, “He’ll shine for you in Dorthar like a torch. But I’ve my own dealings in Amlan—”

“I trust you,” said Yannul. “Why don’t you trust yourself?”

Rem stopped dead. Everything stopped.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. He stared Yannul out and was stared out in return.

“Is it,” said Yannul, “that you think he won’t be able, well-mannered lad that he is, to say ‘No’ loudly enough? He would say no, Rem. There’s no Ommos blood in my son.”

Rem felt the lash of that as if the man had struck him.

The land of Ommos, narrow of scope and heart, cruel predator while able upon the Lowlands, had a name now worse than offal. And at the same time that name of Ommos, whose cult was the sexual union of male with male, had become synonymous with the proclivities of men like himself. Logically, illogically. The Lowlanders had hated Ommos. Yannul would hate it. To Yannul it was perversity and filth. All of it, and everything about it.

“I speak my mind,” said Yannul. “But think. You’ve been in my house some while. With my son. And I knew inside a day.”

Something slipped from its moorings inside Rem’s spirit. He was worn out. Truth was making a fair bid to revolt him.

“Yes,” he said. “Very noble. Well, be pleased I’m leaving.”

“I would take it as a victory if you’d stay.”

“Why, in the name of the gods?”

“Something. You remind me of someone. My youth, maybe. The best and worst of it.”

Rem got to the door, blindly.

“No,” he said, “no, I won’t take this. I’ve taken all the rest. Not this.” He wanted to end it, but words kept trying to come. He remembered the lashing at Istris, and Lyki’s house, and vomiting from pain in front of her before he could prevent it. This was the same. And beyond this, anyway, there was nothing. The baggage trains and killing starving thieves, the Zastis nights in brothels. Not even the dawn star of the child to guide him, however hopelessly, pathetically, toward nothing that did not know it was nothing.

“Rem,” said Yannul.

“I’ve taken my beating,” Rem said, “like all the beatings. Kesarh’s. Her protectors with their fat hands. Lyki’s bloody sticks and pails of scalding water.”

“What did you say?” said Yannul.

Rem thrust himself to silence. At last he said, swathing himself in the doorway’s glare: “Nothing.”

“I caught a name. Lyki.”

Why not answer? He never spoke of her, but he had already said too much for more to matter.

“The woman who was my mother. When I was a child, and she wasn’t mooning over her days at the Koramvin court, mistress to some Dragon Lord, she used to knock me about. Or her gentlemen friends would do it, to save her delicate wrists.” There was another silence. “My father apparently deserted her,” said Rem. “I can quite see why. I never knew him. A shame.”

He swung round and was in the courtyard when he heard Yannul shout.

“For the sake of Aarl! Wait!”

For some reason, Rem looked back around the door.

Yannul was gray in the face even through the darkness of his skin. Rem checked. Was the man ill? More quietly than he had intended, Rem said, “Truce, sir. There’s nothing you can say to make me remain here now.”

“Isn’t there?” said Yannul. “What if I were to say you’re the son of Raldnor Am Anackire, god and hero, and former Storm Lord of Vis?” Yannul grinned even through his grayness. “Would you stay for that?”

There were fireflies stringing necklaces from the shrubbery to the terrace. And there was also Rem, who was Rarmon son of Raldnor son of Rehdon, standing looking at them.

There had been talking all day. He was numb from talking as from yet another lashing. That numbness before the agony came.

They had told him all they could. Too much. He was brimmed over by knowledge. To have nothing. Then to be given this.

The gods must be extant somewhere, after all, playing their board games with men, as the fables said.

Lyki. How often she had muttered of her passionate love-affair with royalty. The hero Raldnor’s mistress, of whom he tired. He had preferred the betrothed bride of the King. A year later, Lyki had been part of an abortive plot against his life—how she had hated Raldnor Am Anackire, the father of her son.

Why had she never told him, that bitch? Viciousness—or was her hurt, also, too great? It must have hurt her, a woman like his mother, to fare as she had. To be reduced as she had been reduced.

And after all was said and done, Raldnor had willingly let this son be taken from him. Sown without wish, cast off with the woman. Maybe, as Yannul said, his goddess had possessed Raldnor, blotting out humanity that he might do Her will. Even so, he had planted Raldanash in Vathcri with intent and purpose. Lyki’s bastard had been nothing to him.

There was a step on the flags. Rem knew it. His whole body tensed, then relinquished tension. He had ceased fighting, for a little while.

“In one second I can be off the terrace,” said Lur Raldnor.

“Never mind.”

“If you wanted to be alone.”

“Each of us is always alone.”

Lur Raldnor (my father’s namesake) laughed his golden laugh.

“Still Rem, despite everything.” He moved forward, standing parallel with Rem, but some way off. “Do I call you ‘my lord’?” Rem did not answer this sally. Lur Raldnor said, “What will you do?”

“Nothing. Very little has changed.”

“Everything has changed, and you know it.”

“But only I, and your family, do know.”

“I think he almost knew from the beginning, my father,” said Lur Raldnor. “The first evening, riding back here, he said to me, ‘That man’s like Raldnor. The way he was before Anack laid hold of him.’ I think he was waiting for you to give him the key to it, even if he didn’t realize there was one.”

Rem observed the fireflies. He felt young and afraid. Fifteen years old. And it was too late for that. He should have had this from the commencement, or not at all.

“By rights,” said Lur Raldnor, “you’d go to Dorthar, with me. Present yourself to the Storm Lord on my father’s authority, with myself as your witness. Raldanash is your half-brother. Do you even see?”

“Perhaps not,” said Rem.

He moved away along the terrace, and Yannul’s son followed him.

“Come to Anackyra, Rem,” said Lur Raldnor. “It isn’t just the war. It’s everything else. That place is—like no other place on earth, because of what it was, what’s happened there. You have to see it. Walk over it. You were the first-born: by Dorthar’s laws you don’t threaten Raldanash. It wasn’t even legal—forgive me. But you’re part of the legend, still here in the world, as he is.”

Rem damned the legend, garishly.

“In any case,” said Lur Raldnor, “I never did get that knife-to-sword pass as it should be.”

“The passage to Hliha could take a quarter of a month. The crossing to Xarabiss is six days. The land journey to Dorthar is a deal longer than either.” Rem looked round and confronted him. “In all that time, just suppose I can’t keep my hands off you? We may end the most perfect of enemies.”

Lur Raldnor looked quizzical.

“I thought the premise was I didn’t know.”

“If your father knew, he’d make sure you did. So you could be ready, how did he put it? To say ‘No’ loudly enough.”

“I love my father,” said Raldnor, “and I revere him. A lot of the time, he can speak for me. Not all the time.”

“You’re saying you’d lie on your face like my whore?”

“No. I’m not saying that.”

Humiliated by his own responses. Rem looked away. The boy said:

“When my mother was younger than I am now, she killed a man. He—your father—made her do it. By telepathy, willpower. It was when they broke Amrek’s occupation of the ruined city in the Plains. She’s never forgotten.”

“That has something to do with this.”

“This much. None of us know what there is in our blood, or souls, or minds. But what we are, what we can—or cannot—do, these things make themselves known. We don’t need to struggle always toward them. Or away. It’s like breathing. Rem. If we need it, it happens, without thought. Better, without thought.”

The fireflies hung in the bushes, flaming.

Far off, the boy said to him, “Come to Anackyra, Rem.”

The wolf, which had left its prints around the bis pond, and so drawn them to the hills that day, never returned. It was never mentioned. In after years, if they spoke of it, they would recall it as intrinsic to the will of Anackire, Her messenger. Only Rem would never, he knew, speak of it in that way.

In the end, it was still Zastis when the small party for Dorthar left the villa-farm near Amlan.

A scene had ensued on the hill between Lur Raldnor and his recriminatory Lannic girl. The usual sentences were said. They parted, their irritation unassuaged by love-making. Medaci was gentler. She did not weep, though her eyes were fashioned out of tears. It was Yannul whose eyes were wet.

Rem did not overlook any of these things. He had waited for his fellow travelers in the city. Distance both geographical and psychological.

10

Amlan was buzzing with news before they rode out of it. It seemed to be the one sort of news that did travel fast, since it came straight in off the sea-lanes with such marine traffic as still risked the port. The Black Leopard of Zakoris-In-Thaddra had been prowling the shores of Karmiss and Ommos. Kesarh Am Karmiss had gathered his fleet at Istris, and was preparing to meet the swarm of Free Zakorians. Now thick on the water as a fleet themselves, the pirate vessels were reckoned to be nearly fifty strong, though such assessments were certainly exaggerated. They lay off Karmiss’ southwestern coast, basking in the sack of Ommish Karith, which once Vathcri had tried for and not taken.

Kesarh’s navy, built on past Vis tradition and sound Shansarian knowledge of sea and ships, had also grown in stature and magnitude. It seemed, for the past seven years he had been preparing for such a day, while Dorthar, the hub of Lowland-won Vis, had lain dreaming.

Generally, in the manner of men, these reports were taken as alien to the life of Lan, or else dressed with forebodings. A sea battle of the size now in the wind seemed close to war. Close in other ways. There were dire predictions of the sequel. Karmiss, Ommos, even eastern Dorthar would take the brunt of this, but might not Zakorian strays fare over the water to Lan? Her seas had been unsafe for a long while. Buoyed up with victory or primed to vengeance by defeat, the port of Amlan could prove a tempting titbit with, which the pirates might follow the feast. It was a fact, a convoy of King’s guard had marched out of the city at dawn, making for the port, watchmen rather than defenders. The harbor and the port road had been shut at noon.

Rem got most of this thesis at the inn before he left. He did not discuss it beyond a sentence or so with Raldnor when they met. The boy appeared informed, and so far only mildly troubled to be leaving in the storm-light of such events. He, and even the servant riding with them, claimed to share Rem’s opinion that the battle fleet of Istris would complete its task very ably, and that the routed Free Zakorians were more likely to hit out at the eastern tip of Dorthar in their long flight home, if still capable of hitting out anywhere.

Rem’s conviction, succinctly conveyed, was that Kesarh Am Karmiss would not take on such business unless he was sure of success.

Hearsay had it the King would command his fleet himself.

He had some qualifications for the work.

The storm shadows of war seemed lifetimes away on the incandescent days, high-ceilinged nights of the journey south. As they progressed, the shadows paled altogether. When they entered Lanelyr, the tidings of imminent battle evolved only with the caravan they themselves had joined, more garbled and fantastic than ever by then, and so infinitely less believable.

An unforeseen fresh nuisance fell on them when they broke the journey at Olm.

Rem’s duties as outrider had brought him into the small town on a couple of past occasions. Five years ago he had spent some days riding about the mountain foothills. There had been one of the false Berindas reportedly living in the area. When he found her she was a mix, and her child too. A brooding sense of the Zor had disturbed him in those hills, that old lost kingdom with its black-haired Vis version of Ashara-Anackire.

Olm he had barely noticed. Nor would have done so now, save that Olm had mysteriously been given word that the son of Yannul had ridden in at her gates. No sooner were they settled at the inn than a messenger arrived, and everything must be moved over to the more than modest palace of the guardian.

It was a thundery velvet-textured night, stars like sparks, the Zastis moon a blown rose.

They ate in the palace hall, vanes in the roof hauled back to show the night, and invite nonexistent air.

Rem realized with slight astonishment that his true identity was making itself known to him, for it struck him as funny to be placed far lower down the long table than Lur Raldnor. The female they had partnered with Rem was the guardian’s younger, somewhat illegitimate daughter. She was a strange creature, stiff-backed and fluidly opaque by turns, as if in the process of some curious aesthetic change. Someone had whispered she had aristocratic Dortharian blood, but her mother had been lowly, some Lanelyrian freedwoman. Her thoughts seemed happier elsewhere, and Rem was happy to indulge them.

While comprehending what had been said to him on Yannul’s fire-fly burning terrace, and lured by it to an attempt at self-collection, he was made uneasy trying to be easy. He had been told what the name of the country was not. He had been told, as yet, it had no name, but that a name might arrive for it, perhaps unexpected. He had been told he was valued as a man and a friend.

The goal of Dorthar was also in front of him, filling the empty horizon where had been the oblique dawn promise of his quest for Kesarh’s child. Dorthar disconcerted him, but it promised something, too, if only the recompense of anger.

He paced out all his ground carefully. The dull dinner and the unsociable Lady Safca were actually a relief.

Before they were shown to guest chambers, there was an entertainment.

It was an embarrassing flung-together allegorical re-enactment of Raldnor Am Anackire’s victory over the Storm Lord Amrek, full of gods and fates who did not know their lines.

The son of Yannul had been seated with the guardian’s attractive legal daughter. They were intent on each other, to everyone’s gratification, and paid little heed to the awful proceedings. The Lady Safca, rather to Rem’s surprise, did pay heed.

Presently it came to him that all her attention was centered on one person, a mix girl about twelve years of age.

It was thought blasphemous to impersonate Anackire Herself, and so the girl represented the Idea symbolically, sitting all this while on a little gilded throne borne about by porters. She was dressed as a Lannic priestess, veiled all over in milky cloth, only a high forehead showing, and eyes described by paint. He was too far from her to see if they were light or somber eyes, but the hair escaping under her head-veil was dark. The interesting thing was the fact of the snakes—two of them, wound one each about her bare white arms; live snakes, twisting and coiling, neither they nor the girl demonstrating any wish to escape. The Vis, even mix Vis, even goddess-worshipping Vis, were usually allergic to the touch of serpents. It was obvious why she had been chosen.

Maybe Safca was concerned for this reason. The girl must be a favorite, whatever that might mean. He had noticed, too, a ring gleaming on the snake-girl’s thumb, gold or amber.

At length the theater ended. Soon after, they were allowed to go to bed.

Rem bade his female uncompanion good night. He was not, hopefully, significant enough to be saddled with a bed-girl.

However, on the way to his allotted chamber, the servant going ahead up the lightless corridor with a torch, Rem was given cause for doubt.

Suddenly from a by-way another lesser light appeared. It was a hand-held bronze lamp, and the glow of it lit up the underplains of a slender white face, its eyes downcast but still smudged with paint. She had no snakes about her, though her arms and feet remained bare, and now her head and face were also uncovered.

She was a servant on somebody’s errand, he thought, and gave her no further glance. Then, as they passed each other, he felt her fingers brush across his palm. His hand closed involuntarily on some small object.

Without a sound she was gone. He knew better than to look back.

It was not until he was alone in the room that he opened his hand to see. And there was the ring she had worn.

It was amber, clear as Lowland wine, smooth as cream, and yet warm in his warmth from her. There was another characteristic. A sort of peculiar inner vibration. It seemed alive. In a second he had cast the ring down on the floor as if he had touched instead one of her snakes.

A little later he assembled the truth. The Lady Safca had propositioned him. The ring, put on her servant for the theater, had become a Zastis token.

He wished she had had the sense to avoid that pitfall. He could hardly himself send it back and humiliate her further. It would be best to leave the ring lying, perhaps in the courtyard. Valuable, the palace servant who found it would hardly dare not return the jewel.

That it had tingled was simple magnetism, for such amber was magnetic. Or else the Star had loaned it intensity.

He took off his clothes and lay down on the bed.

There was a hollowness in his skull. Safca. . . .

Some knowledge concerning her, or to do with her, was there to hand, but occluded, by light rather than shadow.

Rem dreamed white wolves were running over a landscape shaped from amber. Behind, rode a man in a chariot. He wore black. He held the reins in his right hand, in his left a gold-handled whip that gradually altered to a serpent.

“Where have you been?” said the guardian’s younger daughter as the Lowland girl came into her chamber.

The girl looked at her, shaking her head gently. This, in the language of signs which was accumulating, seemed to mean the question was in no need of an answer.

“I wish you hadn’t been shown in the hall,” said Safca.

One of her brothers was responsible. He had come into Safca’s apartment unlooked for, and seen the girl at once.

He had fancied her in his bed, so much was apparent. Yalef liked his women young. His two wives were only thirteen. And this child was so graceful, already she moved and walked like a court woman. More elegantly than Safca, or her sister, or Yalef’s two wives.

Safca did not know the girl’s age, but was positive that she was not yet nubile. When argument failed, she tried to put Yalef off by the reminder that pale skin and eyes meant frigid Amanackire blood. She also informed him that the girl was dumb, retarded, and had a habit of coaxing snakes into her bed. Yalef was duly discouraged.

When the word came of Yannul’s son, however, and the entertainment was planned, Yalef came back and demanded the girl for snake-sporting purposes.

Safca could hardly refuse.

At least the blonde hair had been dyed wood-color again. That had been at the girl’s own request. She had written it, so there could be no doubt. The art of writing was something she had to thank Safca for. Perhaps. The woman who taught the girl remarked that she was abnormally quick to learn her letters. Safca, observing the second of the two lessons, which were all that had been required, was filled by awe. It was as if the Lowlander had always known, merely needing to be reminded. . . .

Now the girl came to her and began to comb her hair.

At once, Safca was soothed, her taut muscles relaxing. She half-closed her eyes, watching the flowing movements of hands and hair in the mirror.

Relaxation did not prevail. Abruptly Safca noticed the amber ring had vanished from the Lowlander’s thumb. The ring had been Safca’s gift, her own possession, yet she so unfitted to wear delicate jewelry. Now it had been lost or snatched—Safca opened her mouth to demand where it had gone—or given in turn to another. Safca closed her lips in a tight thin line.

Had she saved the child from Yalef only to have her make other arrangements for herself?

Jealous and put out of patience by her jealousy, she grew rigid under the soothing caress of the comb.

Next morning, the youthful but august visitor departed, leaving the guardian’s elder daughter sleekly lying late a-bed. Maybe a child would result, to be the boast of Olm.

Safca, who had always had a temper if nothing else, threw a piece of pottery across the room, listened to it smash, then shouted for her litter.

The other man, the friend to Yannul’s son, had been as uninterested in Safca as she would have predicted. Something in her seethed and bubbled. She forgot the night the snake had coiled all about her. She remembered instead her mother’s deathbed, the lack of attendants, the lack of words. The few words which were said. Safca clutched the bracelet on her wrist, and ordered the litter-bearers to a trot, and ran them like kalinxes.

When she returned, Yalef met her in a corner of the outer court. With him was a tall blond man. Filled with dread, Safca did not know him for a moment. Then she did. Her heart quaked.

“The Am Vardath gentleman said you had a girl he’d like to buy.”

“No,” she said.

“Alas,” said Yalef. “I already had her brought and given to him. His servant took her off. She’s gone. She was no use to you, Safca. No real use to anyone.”

The Vardian grinned.

“Your brother’s received what you paid, Vis lady. Twenty parings of patriotic Olmish silver.”

She had no say, no power. What was she? An illegal daughter. Maybe not even the guardian’s work. And if the Am Vardath knew that story from the deathbed—he would spit on her literally, instead of merely by inference.

She tried not to cry. She could not even think why she should be crying. Was it her jealous rage which had lost her something she had not properly acknowledged, could only acknowledge now that she would lose it? But what, after all, was the child? A magician who could call serpents—

“Why,” she whispered, shamed by the Vardian’s sneer, “do you want her?”

“I saw last time her Vis-tan was a fraud, cover for a slave auction. Her skin’s white and her eyes yellow. She’s got a lot of pure Lowland blood. Bleach her hair and she’ll pass as immaculate. There are rewards in the Plains for rescuing their children from wicked Vis slavers, evil Vis owners. The Lowlanders, after all, are the elite race. Like my people, the Chosen of the goddess.”

Yalef, between nervousness, and pleasure in Safca’s discomfort, only beamed.

Safca bowed her head.

I shall never see her again.

There was nothing much at Hliha, save the shipping in the bay which ran in and out, organized from Xarabiss or Lanelyr or Lan. The only built thing, on the upland above the scatter of huts and tents, was a slim dark stone tower, one of the multitude Elyr had raised to gaze upon the heavens. Astrology, magic, mysticism, non-involvement, that was Elyr. She had no Kings. She produced enamels, that was her trade. Her fealty, if she knew the word, was given to Lan. One ascertained her temples, rare as the astrology towers were not, were very old. And black. Lowland style.

The ship put out from Hliha before sunrise, and carved over the sea toward Xarabiss.

Rem was on deck, watching their flight from an ascending sun, when he found the amber ring.

There was a reason. He recalled throwing his clothes on the floor that night at Olm. In the morning he had looked for the ring, also on the floor, and failed to find it. Reason assured him the ring had been caught up in a fold of cloth, dropped into the thief’s habitual knife-pocket of a sleeve—whence now it rolled back into his palm. Thief’s pocket and still a thief, it seemed.

He looked at the ring. There was no sensitization anymore. Just a circle of amber.

He could no longer very well return it to Olm. He would give it to Raldnor to give some girl.

He thought of the amber ring he had given Doriyos.

The amber sun shone over the ship to the water.

That night he awoke with the ring in his hand burning like a live coal. Or thought he woke. But somehow the dream went on. The clamor and the redness, and through it he saw the peaceful deck, the tilted sail, the awning, the other sleepers. At the prow the watch leaned out, and through him and through the Zastis-colored night, blades seared down and up, and great doors rocked, booming.

“What is it?”

Lur Raldnor’s voice, wide awake, came through his skull.

He could not speak.

Suddenly his fingers were being prized open. He heard Raldnor curse, and then the ring was gone.

The night cleared. There was only sea and sky and ship.

“The amber,” said Lur Raldnor, “it’s red-hot.”

“Ankabek,” said Rem. He started to breathe again. He heard himself speak and understood only as if another told him. “Kesarh’s won his battle. The free Zakorians are routed.”

Raldnor said quietly: “How do you know?”

“I saw it. Mind pictures. This has happened, something like this—years—Never quite like this. From my father’s side, maybe.” Rem stared into the merciful, ordinary night. He said, “Zakoris. Routed, turning like a wounded tirr. Not against Lan, Dorthar, Ommos. Ankabek.”

Vodon Am Zakoris had lost the battle and therefore, though he lived, his life.

The thirty-eight ships that had turned for home, heavy with spoils from the southwest rim of Karmiss, last-laden from the rich little Ommos port of Karith they had left alight behind them, had met the navy of the Karmian King lying like a sailed city on the afternoon water.

The ships of Zakoris-In-Thaddra were pirates still, but they had always borne the sigil of Old Zakoris on their canvas. That a king sent out his fleet against them, sigiled in its turn with the Lily emblem of the Karmians, and with, at the prow of all their prows, a ship flying the scarlet Salamander of the King himself— that was challenge for challenge. Kesarh did them the honor of offering them war.

They came together then. The black biremes with terrified slaves at their oars and the leopard-bees of Yl standing ready on their decks. The Karmians’ lighter, Shansarian-modeled vessels, curved like swans, that Kesarh had favored, who favored almost nothing else out of Shansar, were rowed for pay and glory. Fifty-three Karmian ships; a score of whirling flame-throwers; half a score of the giant bows which fired their giant arrows of iron to a range of sixty lengths—capable of splitting timbers and breaking masts, at more intimate range capable of slicing a smaller craft in two; six towering fire-catapults; eleven buffer-shot bombards of oil. And packed on their decks close to five thousand fighting men.

Until this time, such an armament and such a multitude had not been sent against Free Zakoris. Fierce as they were, the Zakorians might yet have stolen victory, or wreaked havoc, or at least won space to win through. But there was not only force, there was deployment and preparation against them. Almost as they closed, they were encircled. As their weapons screamed out incendiaries, defensive shots came from the foremost Karmian galleys, knocking two thirds of the blow away, some of it back on the Zakorians. This was a trick not often mastered, but Kesarh’s men had mastered it. The machines of Karmiss had been perfected and the gangs trained to the job had learned to use these great weights, poised on hair’s breadth slipwires of steel, with the accuracy of deflecting spears. The Free Zakorians’ first rain of arson was dispersed, then, and the second rain came from the Karmian side.

As the fire-clouds rose, and the air-borne blades of Karmiss fell again and again, Vodon drove his own galley to engage the royal ship which, flaunting its Salamander, had drifted to the north.

To kill their King would stand for much, when so much else might be destroyed.

Vodon’s ship was not in time to reach the Salamander. A pair of Zakorian biremes fell upon her. He saw them grapple her, and knew all at once she was too easy to come up with. By then, so it had been found. The figures at her rail were straw dressed as men.

It was a joke in the middle of carnage. There was another joke, a memory of twenty-eight years before. The invaders were still grappled, disengaging, when the Salamander exploded. She had been filled with oil and primed, slow-burning. In a similar way the sea had been fired at Karith in the Lowland War, to repulse the fleets of Vathcri, Vardath, Shansar.

Wreckage and hailing flame showered about Vodon’s galley as they pulled away. The other two, panic and fire, were going down with the Salamander.

Vodon concluded Kesarh had not, after all, come in person to fight. This disheartened him, even as he despaired.

By sunset, it was not only the sun that fell burning.

In the dusk, five free Zakorian ships, scorched and ragged, limped from the maze of steam and smoke. They ran. There was no other word. Vodon’s vessel, which had by lot the battle-command, was the third of these. It was instinct by then. For having failed, having shown weakness, there was no place for which to run.

Trailing through the night at the pace of death, they were not pursued, but some of them were in poor shape and the sea drank two of them under. The other three took up men left floundering in the ocean, as reflexively as they had fled. While different men, those who had died of their injuries during the flight, they cast down there, to the courts of Rorn.

But the Rorn gods in the prows, to whom they had offered lavishly after Karith, went hungry now.

When the dawn came, they huddled at anchor, resting the slaves, not from pity, from necessity. Several were dead, and the corpses were unshackled and flung over after the rest. Thaddrian corpses, Alisaarian, Otts, Iscaians, and Corhls, came between the sun’s path and the water. There was even one blond corpse, a mix from the Old Kingdom, now Vardian Zakoris.

Vodon stood with his two officers of deck and oars, and their two seconds.

Their faces were sullen with knowledge. To return to Zakoris-In-Thaddra would mean death-sentence, and ghastly death, the reward of failure. Their other option was the traditional suicide pact, the recognized exit when contrary odds had proved insurmountable. Vodon, the ship lord, must kill these four men on whom the onus of the lost battle had rested. Then himself, the figurehead. Thus they would assure their families at least survived unmolested, retaining the very little they had. Their names would not be spat on.

They had not got far in the night. The current rocked them, racing in to swell the straits between Dorthar and Karmiss.

The dark men stood looking at the waves. Their hair was black, which, if they had sailed the western or southern oceans, it would not have been. The salt of those seas had a bleaching property, perhaps due to their proximity to the great Sea of Aarl, where volcanoes blew fire spouts as fish blew water.

Vodon brought his mind back to terminus. He made a gesture that they should go below.

Vodon’s deck master caught his arm.

“Wait.”

“For public flogging across chest and loins, slow dismemberment, disemboweling? No.”

“You mistake me. I’m suggesting one more deed before this.”

“What?”

The deck master pointed, away into the straits.

“We must go to Zarduk, or to Rorn. Let’s take him a present. Destroy one of the lives of the yellow men’s woman god.”

The sullen sodden faces sparked alert.

“The Anack temple.”

“Will their King Kesr not have protected it?”

“I never heard he did, Kesr has brought the men gods of Karmiss back. He gives Anack only offal at the feast.”

They laughed.

The watch-horn sounded to the other two ships.

With the tide, they turned into the straits for Ankabek.

The three ships were seen at sunfall, sliding dark out of a coming night. There had for some while been awareness on the island of the goddess that eventually religious immunity might fail. A pattern of actions had been prepared. These were instigated.

The village at the landing was swiftly deserted. Other pockets of outlying humanity on the island were alerted by the flare of beacons along the rocky slope, ignited as the first fugitives passed on their way to the temple.

The Free Zakorians, as they hove nearer, saw these fireworks across the gathering dark, but flame, so often the emblem of catastrophe, only stimulated them.

The landing at Ankabek had not sufficient depth of water to accommodate their biremes. They anchored a mile from the coast therefore, and put out for the beach in relays of boats.

Long before they were fully landed, the live things of the island were all within the central temple precincts, men, women, children, and the animals of their sustenance.

The Free Zakorians scoured the village as a matter of course, and fired it, before pressing on up the slope.

The priestess Eraz, having dressed herself in her golden robes, walked the buried corridors toward the Sanctum. Years had passed since the aura of such robes had been thought needful. More than eight years. Yet they were as beautiful and as shining. Eraz herself looked no older than in that hour she had confronted in her gold the young soldier of the Prince Kesarh. Rem, who had been called Rarnammon, on whom the Dream of the goddess lay like a faintly perceptible light. At that hour he was the Messenger. The Message had required to be given surely. Not merely words and scenes, but in the coinage of Power. Eraz had possessed the Power to impart, and he the Power to receive.

The future of his body’s life continued now, along the lines of invisible brilliance, the roads of the planet’s own force. Her body’s life would end tonight. She was saddened, for she had learned to love her body, in the rightful way, and to love the form her soul had taken in this body. To imagine leaving her flesh and meeting again with her soul as it truly was, this was daunting, the reunion with a beloved stranger. But, that was only the fear of the unremembered thing. After death, memory returned. She would not fear, nor be a stranger to herself, then.

She ascended, and passed through the final unsealed door into the Sanctum. She was the last to enter. The door was immediately closed and barred behind her.

The gold curtain had not yet been lifted from before the goddess.

The rest of the room was not unduly crowded, though all were present. The men and women of the island, and of the temple. The novices, the acolytes, the priests and priestesses. And the beasts. Cows lowed, their feet covering the bodies of heroes in the mosaic floor. A pet rodent scampered, chased by a child, in and out, a game.

The waste also saddened her. But the souls of beasts and men could not die. There would be other lives for them in the world, or other worlds. Nothing was for nothing.

They looked at her, and she felt the strength of her aura touch, clasp, enfold them. They could not all know these things. Or could not all trust in them. She must hold them now, their mother, as Anackire held the earth, or the Principle, which they had named Anackire, held it. Eraz smiled a little. It was not hubris.

And outside, the Black Leopard raced toward them.

She had felt their aura, too, the Free Zakorians, a thundercloud. Death and agony of spirit, and lust for the agony of others.

Had she, Eraz, contained the Power of one such as Raldnor Rehdon’s son, had this room been filled by Lowlanders imbued by that Power, then, no doubt, they would not have been the victims. Yet the place where the hero had worked his magic—the earthquake, Koramvis’ fall—had been adjacent to the great Power-source of the hidden cave temple, known to the ancients of Eraz’s people, who had set there the colossal goddess statue. That charge, the vitality of Raldnor, combined—Ankabek was not a power-source, though the island lay over one of those lines of psychic power that ribbed the planet: The line that ran to Koramvis from the arcane kingdom of the Zor.

But no, she must not idle, musing on these occult mathematics. They had not the strength to stand against their enemies, either of body or psyche. That strength had been, and was to come.

As she raised her head, there was a terrible booming.

Women in the small crowd cried out. There was not one of them who did not know what the sound indicated. The Free Zakorians had reached the temple’s outer doors and had begun the process of breaking them in. Having some knowledge of Ankabek, they would have brought make-shift rams from their ships to do it.

Even so, the noise seemed far away.

Eraz began to speak.

“We are well defended,” she said. “The outer doors, when secured, are very hard to penetrate, though they will penetrate them. The Sanctum is enclosed, and it is unlikely any Zakorian may breach the stone’s mechanism, even by random accident.” She saw their faces, and understood she must not prolong their hope, which was groundless. “Yet,” she said, “they will also gain access to the precinct of the novitiates. Corridors descend there and run below the temple, connecting to stairs which lead between this chamber’s outer and inner walls. Here there are doorways only of metal, barred only by metal. Through such a doorway you saw me just now enter.” She waited a moment, her heart chilled at their faces, now. She said, “Others than they might abandon the central temple. The inner ways which lead to it are complex. They would not try them, might not even search for them. But these Free Zakorians are different. There is shame and death before them. They have, in turn, a madness to debase and to kill. By the desperation of this need, they will discover the way in to us. Hours may pass, but you will eventually hear them against these inner doors, which cannot forever keep them out.” Women wept. Children, catching fear, wept also. The beasts were troubled. There was anguish and horror. She must conclude. “We know the leniency of Free Zakoris. To their own kind they are merciless. For us they will have torture unspeakable. I shall describe none of it. Remember only what you know of them. They will leave none alive, but for many death will be slow. They will kill also your children in hideous ways, and your beasts. They will drink blood in the stolen wine. Then they will burn whatever is left.” She paused. She said, “The statue of Anackire they will hoist and drag and fling into the sea, though they will tear away her jewels and cut out her eyes, and rip away the curtain for loot. Such spoil will be vaunted in Zakoris-In-Thaddra. They will say they have slain one of Her lives.”

She waited then, once more, until, over the horrified weeping and moaning, the silence of despair came down like snow. And beyond the walls, all at once, she heard the outer doors give way. The sound was appalling. Even Eraz it appalled.

And even if she had not thought life stretched away beyond life for all of them, yet she could not have wished to live to hear that other splintering of the inner doors, which must come.

She looked out at them, and let the Power pass through her, and from her, and so into each of them.

“The soul never dies,” she said. “Death is not death. So the rituals of the goddess have taught us. Dying is only change. The flesh is left upon the ground. The spirit is born again out of the husk. And this She has taught us by her symbol and her image which is the snake, who, casting its skin, pours from the husk alive, that we may know we too shall live beyond a cast-off skin, alive and beautiful as the stars.”

She felt them now. Each mind a flame, held within the scope of hers. Their faces were empty of fear.

She motioned with one hand, and the curtain flew upward and the statue of the goddess was at her back, before them.

She let them gaze awhile at the goddess. From the trough below the serpents had gone away. They would be safe in their narrow vasty labyrinth, as no other thing at Ankabek.

Outside, with the crashing of the doors, there had come a muffled roar which still went on. Nothing else was distinguishable. It sounded elemental and subhuman.

Quietly, she signaled again, and a priest came to her, the great cup in his hands. She took it and one by one, dozen by dozen, the faces and the eyes came back to her.

She told them about the cup.

The drug was Thaddrian, once more universal. It brought an immobility, and outer hardening, turning men to stone as inwardly, without pain, they died. Those Vis warriors, standing guard forever in the tombs of kings, had perhaps partaken of that brew. Now it had been distilled and mixed. The death it brought was swift, though still painless. A death sweet as sleep, from one small sip at the great cup’s brim.

“If any will not,” she said to them, “say now. There is time for you to hide yourselves in the corridors below. The Zakorians have not yet reached them. It may be possible for a very few to find some cranny that is missed, and so escape. I do not promise it. I offer the choice.”

They murmured. They fell still. None of them moved toward the doors.

“Then,” she said, “if you consent, come closer, to the goddess. When you drink, give also to your animals. Fear nothing. We shall go all together, a flight of souls like a flight of arrows all from one bow.”

The Lowland priest drank first from the cup, as he had offered to do, to demonstrate their oneness, and that the drink was nothing to be afraid of in itself. Having drunk, he smiled at them, and gave the cup into another’s grasp. For a moment they watched him, his countenance—that of a young and handsome man—serene, contemplative, without distress; his eyes full of light.

The cup passed. Hands reached for it. They drank, the Lowlanders, the Vis, priest and priestess and villager. The children sipped. The little pet animals were given the cup, the cattle. None refused, as if all had comprehended. Their lips mingled at the brim with the sense of other lips, a kiss, which was also death’s kiss. The mixture had no taste. Not even like the taste of water.

The last to take the cup, a priestess, came back with it and held it toward Eraz.

A young girl, black-haired, she wept. There was only sufficient in the cup for one.

“Drink it,” said Eraz, “then touch my lips with yours. Yes, it is so strong. I don’t lie to you.”

So the girl drained the last morsel of the drug, and touched Eraz’s lips with hers.

Outside, the roar had ended. Now there began to be a volcanic grumbling from the depths below. They had found the under-corridors. They would soon be at the inner doors.

Within, the stillness was intent, yet soft as powder. Aware of each mind, Eraz was aware as each mind put out its light. In the hall of her brain, the little candles flickered, sighed, faded. Beside her the young Lowland priest was long dead. She could not move her head to look at him.

Sweet as sleep. They had trusted her, they had trusted what lay within themselves. Her sadness was over. Her heart was full of joy.

All the little lights were gone.

And Eraz sank into the moment and the century of oblivion beyond which there waited life.

When Vodon’s men brought down the final door, their bloodlust, so long aroused, so long denied, was a single thing, unanimous. Each man was nearly insane.

They spilled in over the door, yelling, yowling, and others sprang in behind them. All were checked.

Whatever they had expected, whatever the villages and towns of shrieking women and terrified men had lessoned them to look for, it was not here.

The floor torches burned. Across the mosaic, in their glare, the great statue of the yellow men’s she-demon, upraised on her tail, lifted the serpent stems of her arms. Beneath her, they stood, the people of Ankabek. Most seemed to look into the faces of the men who had broken down the door. Their own faces were calm, almost smiling, the eyes wide, luminous and unblinking.

And there were beasts, too, standing there like the rest, or held in the arms of children. The beasts, the children—all alike—

Another door crashed inward.

Another gout of men rushed roaring into the chamber.

And were checked.

A minute passed.

The Free Zakorians began to shout. Spears were hurled, deliberately short, to dive at the Ankabekians’ feet. Not one started, or stirred. Only the folds of clothing stirred at the wind of a spear’s passage, or some woman’s hair.

“What is it?”

“By Zarduk, I don’t know—” Vodon half moved forward. “A trance perhaps—”

Suddenly one of the younger Zakorians ran across the temple. He ran straight through the motionless crowd to the place where a tall woman stood, in robes golden as the goddess’ tail. Shouting, the Zakorian plunged his knife to the hilt in the woman’s right breast. Or would have done. The blade, turning on her breast as if on marble, skidded and snapped from its haft. The Zakorian cried out, a different cry. He backed away from the woman, the almost smiling statues with their glowing eyes, the brindle cow, the silken rat on the girl’s shoulder, the flesh that was not flesh. Then, screaming, he rushed from the temple.

“Witchcraft!”

Vodon choked down a sensation like blood.

“Maybe, but against themselves. Take the jewels. Take the great statue and sink it in the sea. Fire the place. The trees outside. Leave nothing whole that’ll catch alight.” Turning, he spat. As the passionless human statues watched him with their shining eyes, he cut down his officers, next their seconds, then pushed the long knife into his own throat. Presently, his men ran over him.

The night flamed redder than the Star could make it. The flame-colored leaves flared to black ashes.

When they dragged the tumbled Anackira to the edge of the rock, they congratulated their gods. They cast her down to Rorn, naked of riches, and blind, for they had gouged out her topaz eyes.

They drank above the bleeding, smoking groves, the wines of the temple.

A wind came with the dawn. It ravaged the blackened trees, blowing off charcoal dust.

Certain of the Free Zakorians did not like this wind. They groaned that it had been full of figures, swirling—a flight of ghosts, like arrows all from one bow.

Dead Vodon’s ship foundered as they sailed north.

Only one of the goddess’ yellow eyes ever reached Free Zakoris.

At midday in Elyr, the Vardian trader had called a halt. A mile away rocks stood on the dusty sky, and on the rocks two of the ubiquitous star-gazing towers. Here, from a great boulder, a waterfall speared down into a pool.

The Vardian’s two servants and the drover sat apart to eat. The herd of fierce Lannic sheep fretted and picked at the dry grass, and nearby, the two herd kalinxes sat bolt-upright, black as basalt. Such guards were trained from infancy, lambs put in with the kittens to be suckled by a female cat. There were no such beasts in Vardath. The Red Star did not burn there, either. Nor anywhere above the Sister Continent.

The Lowland Amanackire were unaffected by the sexual stimulus of the Star. The race of the second continent claimed to be.

The Vardian trader had long since come to think they were unaffected only while they avoided its influence.

He sat outside the makeshift tent he had had put up for himself, looking at the mix-blood girl. She was taking wine to the servants and the drover as he had instructed her. She did not move like a winegirl. She was thirteen if she was a day. Small supple waist, curve of the hips, the little round breasts. And the lovely white skin that never took the sun.

She brought the wine jar to him. Her eyes were lowered. He had never looked into them. Yellow eyes, of course. He had noted that from the beginning.

“It’s too hot to go on today,” he said to her. “We’ll stay here now, till sunrise tomorrow.” He knew she was dumb. That might be an advantage. She had filled his cup and stood meekly. Eyes lowered. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?” he asked. “Of course not. I’m helping you reach your own people. Safe from the greedy Vis. Perhaps you’d like to give me something in return.” He hesitated. She made no move. He said, “Lie with me.”

She did not flinch. She did not seem pleased.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I know you’re young. I’ll be gentle. Am I the first?” She said nothing. He wondered if he would have to force her to comply. He preferred not to use force. “Go over to the water and get clean, around the rock where the others can’t see. Then come into my tent.” Rather to his relief she turned at once and went toward the waterfall. Probably she was not a virgin, and used to being had. Her quiet was servility not distaste.

It was dark red in the tent from screened-off sun. When she entered, light came in with her and stayed.

For a moment he could not think what it was, then he sat up with an exclamation. He went to her slowly.

“By Ashkar! The brutes dyed your hair in that dung-hill town.”

For she was golden-blonde. She was sheer Lowland stock.

And she was beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful. So white, so golden. Her eyes—golden. They expanded as if with tears, but it was pure luminosity.

The Vardian trembled with his need. He took the edge of her dress in his fingers. The fastenings were simple.

He pulled the garment from her. She stood before him naked.

Again, he was almost shocked. Her exquisite high breasts were capped with gilt. In her navel a drop of yellow resin spat. The hair on her loins resembled spun metal.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” he muttered.

“It is you who fear.”

He jumped away at the voice. She could not speak—had not spoken. The words had been inside his skull. The Vardian was familiar with telepathy, had experienced it with his own kindred, if mostly as a child. Beyond the initial astonishment he was not unnerved by the mere fact of mind speech. This mind speech was, however, unlike any other.

He shuddered. Her eyes seemed to eclipse the world.

Then he fell to his knees. It happened, his body’s reverence, before he knew why. On his knees, only then, he knew.

Cast from her light, a shadow rose behind the Lowland girl on the hot red wall. It was the shadow of a being much taller than the girl, though also long-haired and high-breasted, its many arms outstretched and swaying upright upon the coiled tail that formed its lower body.

“Ashkar,” said the Vardian.

He bowed to his face as wave upon wave of ecstatic and wondrous terror burst through him, until eventually he fainted.