Anackire

11

The Xarabian ship reached home port uneventfully, on a smooth evening sea. Next morning, Rem and Lur Raldnor rode inland for the capital.

Lin Abissa was the first true city Rem had laid eyes on for over eight years, and Raldnor’s first ever. You could not count Amlan, whose charm was all in her littleness, her impression of a sturdy painted town.

The high slender towers flashing crystal at the sun, the high walls with their parapets, crenellations, bastions, the combination of refined delicacy and obdurate strength—here was Vis, Visian supremacy and beauty, still upright in an altered world.

They entered through the Gate of Gourds. Above it, the banner was flying, Xarabiss’ dragon woman. There was a tale of the Lowland War, that the tyrant Amrek had accused Xarabiss of using Anackire as a device. And indeed, there was some resemblance.

With the political unsettlement of the seas, Zakorian spies were apparently suspected. Papers must be produced at the gate. Not everyone had papers. The ecstasy of the first-seen Vis city began to pall in a long wait. Then, when Lur Raldnor’s own impressive credentials were produced—Yannul’s letter, marked with the council seal of post-war Koramvis he still had the right to use—an escort of soldiery was brought round to conduct them to the palace of the King.

They had reckoned they would get this treatment (the servant had banked on it), and Lur Raldnor had facetiously postulated a plan of false names.

People on the wide streets turned to look after them. Chariots whipped past, drawn by the fire-swift leaping chariot-animals of the Middle Lands.

But it was as they crossed a corner of Lin Abissa’s Red Market that the initial scene of the alteration was impressed on them.

Members of the pale race, as well as mixes, came and went in Amlan. But they were Vardians or Shansars, in Xarabiss they had so far set eyes on one Tarabine merchant, riding in a litter through the port, the curtains well-back, so all could see him laughing and sharing sweetmeats with his Vis hetaera.

Until now, neither of the Lans, nor Rem himself, had got sight of a born-blood Lowlander, save gentle Medaci.

The Red Market was lazily energetic in the hot afternoon. Under the fringed awnings every kind of ware imaginable was up for sale, even to a row of sequined slaves hung in a flower-strung cage. The ten guard of the escort were good-naturedly prodding and cursing the turgidly moving crowd aside, when suddenly all activity seemed to terminate. Only a drove of cattle was abruptly hurried, lowing and stamping, into an aisle between the booths.

The captain of the escort had raised his mailed hand to halt them, and now held it upright as if congealed in the air.

Clearly, someone of utmost importance was about to enter the Market.

“Who’s coming?” Lur Raldnor asked the captain.

The man lowered his hand. He said, “A Lowlander.”

Lur Raldnor raised his eyebrows. “But who?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the captain. There was no clue in his voice.

“You mean you stop all traffic, clear all paths like this, for any—”

“For any of the pure blood of the goddess. Yes.”

Lur Raldnor looked at Rem, shrugged, grinned, and said: “Proud?”

Rem laughed.

There was hardly any other sound.

Rem had looked for an entourage; litter, outriders, bearers of fans and parasols, something Karmian.

Then the Lowlander came, walking quite slowly along the human avenue. There was only one. A woman. She had no attendants, no accessories.

She was simply dressed, but the robe was silk. Her hair was the whitest blond Rem had ever seen, snow hair, and her skin looked as white. On her arms, almost the only ornament, were bracelets of amber, row on row of them. Round her neck was a serpent tore he took for polished white enamel—then it moved, and he beheld it was a live snake.

The Amanackire woman barely seemed to notice the crowd. She did not glance at them. Only once her eyes swept outward, to the place where the mounted guard sat their animals, waiting with the rest. Her eyes were not gold, but as with her hair, nearly colorless, eyes that were almost white—like the eyes of the albino snake. The pores of Rem’s skin stiffened along shoulders and neck. The captain bowed.

A moment later the woman herself halted. She beckoned to a seller of fruit. At once he and his assistant ran forward, and laid panniers of citruses and grapes before her. She selected, by pointing at it, one fruit. It was taken up and given her. Offering neither thanks nor payment, the woman moved on.

As they rode toward the twisted metal pillars that marked the gateway of the palace, Lur Raldnor said to Rem, “I begin to understand why my father left Dorthar.”

Thann Xa’ath was King in Xarabiss now, the oldest of Thann Rashek’s eleven sons.

They were assured an audience, then left kicking their heels for two hours in a nicely appointed room with a fountain. Plainly, this was not Olm. At last a servant came to conduct them to a larger room with a larger fountain. The King was sitting at ease, flanked by a couple of guards, a couple of minstrel girls, a scatter of courtiers. There were two Lowlanders. They were not as ice-pale as the woman in the Market, but they sat apart under an ornamental indoor tree, watching, seemingly unresponsive.

The King welcomed the son of Yannul the Lan and his traveling companion.

The portion of court clapped.

Rising, the King took Lur Raldnor over to the Lowland men. After sufficient pause to demonstrate amply they had no need, they got to their feet and greeted Lur Raldnor. One spoke. “We remember keenly all our allies, those who fought beside us. Your father’s name is unforgotten.” Thann Xa’ath bore this without a murmur. The implication was not veiled. Xarabiss, who called herself the ally of the Plains, had in fact stayed neutral.

“You’ve arrived at an opportune season,” Thann Xa’ath said to Yannul’s son. “The son of Raldnor Am Anackire’s second most famous captain—our own Xaros—is at court.”

Nor was this veiled. The King saw fit to remind the Lowlanders not all Xarabiss had skulked at home.

Thann Xa’ath began to walk about the room, his hand on Lur Raldnor’s shoulder. One guard moved smoothly, almost negligently, behind them.

A woman said to Rem, “Do you go to Dorthar, too?”

He told her that he did. She smiled, and said, “I also. In the Princess’ train. A tiresome long journey. Didn’t you know? Where have you been? In Lan? Oh, naturally, there’s never any news in Lan. The King’s daughter is just now to be sent to the Storm Lord. Etiquette generally dictates even a High King should come to claim his bride from her father’s house. But Raldanash must remain in Anackyra, with all this talk of war—” Her patronizing smile grew more intent; she widened her charcoaled eyes at him. “They’ll have missed Zastis for their consummation. But I think that may not matter. Raldanash is cold, they say. The hero Raldnor’s son! Do you think it possible?”

“As you mentioned,” Rem said, “we get no news of any sort in Lan.”

He excused himself and went to remind a wine-server of his existence.

But it turned out to be the truth they were now expected to join the cumbersome bridal caravan that would be wending to Dorthar in five days’ time.

Xa’ath’s daughter had been betrothed to the Storm Lord of six years. It was form. Raldanash, entering Dorthar at the age of thirteen, accepting his first three queens a year later, already had a bevy of wives from almost every country of Vis, and out of Shansar and Vardath also. Xarabiss, lacking daughters old enough for bedding, young enough for wedding, had lagged behind till now.

But it seemed Ulis Anet Am Xarabiss was worth awaiting. She had Karmian blood on her mother’s side, that fabled part-Xarabian part-Karmian mixture which had produced the legendary Astaris.

“Well, she’s red-haired at least,” said Lur Raldnor, leaning on a parapet two evenings later. “And with very light skin. That much I got from her lady. You know, the young one I—”

“I know.”

“I heard something more.”

“You’re getting to gossip just like a Xarabian,” said Rem, tickled.

“What else is there to do here, apart from the other thing? This Iros son of Xaros we’ve not yet met. He’s been given the command of Ulis’ personal guard. To attend her to and in Dorthar. Which may be unwise.”

“Because.”

“Because Iros is her lover.”

“I thought custom decreed the bride of a king went to him with her seals intact.”

“He needn’t have deflowered her to have shared her bed.”

“If he’s so restrained,” said Rem, “he’ll be able to control his jealous rage in Dorthar, presumably.”

“Or Iros may have had her. She’s only a subsidiary wife, not chosen to be High Queen. So long as she’s not with child, she’s acceptable.”

Iros was on view that evening. He sat at the King’s side through dinner, and afterwards was noted dicing familiarly with two of Thann Xa’ath’s sons.

Dressed in the casual wear of a high-ranking officer, Iros was exceptionally handsome, as his father had been in his youth and still was, reportedly. The son’s personality, however, was his own. Xaros’ reputation was that of a mercurial opportunist, who had won a decisive stroke of the Lowland War with one fortuitous trick. Iros, though he laughed and jested and gave evidence of wit, had the peacock’s other side of arrogance and anger. Introduced to Lur Raldnor, Iros’ junior by several years, the Xarabian flashed a smile and said, “And are we supposed to hang on each other’s necks all night for our fathers’ sakes? Or can I simply go back to the dice with a clear conscience?”

“Please,” said Lur Raldnor quietly, “return to the dice. I wouldn’t dream of detaining you.”

Iros flushed under his Xarabian skin. His mouth curled and he said, “I’m glad you understand a soldier’s pleasures. But you’re not a soldier, are you? You anticipate something in Dorthar?”

Lur Raldnor looked at him out of advantageous Lowland eyes, then said, “Courtesy?”

Iros scowled. “You’re saying—”

“I’m saying your dice game is pining for you.”

Iros sneered, but could do nothing else but go. He went, and lost the next three throws, as they heard all across the chamber and even over the dancing girls’ music.

So, they had seen Iros. Rem did not see Ulis Anet until the night before the bridal caravan set out.

“What’s the matter?” said Yannul’s son, coming out on the balcony.

“I thought you were with your Princess’ lady,” said Rem.

“I was, earlier. It’s nearly morning now, not worth taking to bed here. We’ll be leaving in a few hours.”

Rem spoke of the perfidy of timing involved in royal progresses.

“You still didn’t say what the matter was. Is it—”

“No,” said Rem. “Zastis is finished, and besides, half the palace carries on like an Ommos Quarter. Go to bed.”

Lur Raldnor nodded, waited, vanished.

The air was fresh and cool in the last spaces of the night. The unlit darkness made an all too perfect slate on which to draw again the pictures, and the thoughts.

To try to recall the first time it ever happened. The lancing pain through the skull, and then the image within the skull, shutting out all else.

Late adolescence. He recollected exactly the hour and the place—Istris, behind the wine-sellers on Jar Street—he had been drunk. He had put the vision away as a thing of the drunkenness, could not now remember what it had been. Nor the others, the two, three, that had fastened on him. . . . Had they borne any relation to his life or to anything? They must have done. For in the end, prescient, empathic, whatever they were, they had all had meaning. Even the mirage which shut his eyes outside Kesarh’s door and earned him a lashing.

He could evoke that one easily. The red-haired woman standing like a stone. And in her womb, the beginning of another life.

And then Kesarh going by on his way to bid stormy farewell to his sister—the sister he loved carnally, Val Nardia, that he would make his mistress at Ankabek. Mistress, and mother of his child.

And at Ankabek itself, in the blind circling corridor of the temple which was now a burned-out husk, the second mirage. Three women, white hair, blood hair, ebony. And the three embryos like wisps of silver steam—

There had been other details. Perhaps, as with the more recent seeings, they had to do with his connection to Raldnor Am Anackire. His—father.

But the vision at Ankabek had told him already who he was. He had been shown the three women who had carried Raldnor’s seed. White-haired Sulvian of Vathcri, mother of Raldanash the Storm Lord. Ebony-haired Lyki—Rem’s own mother—had she not surely identified herself with a blow! And thirdly, the red-haired woman of his former sighting: Astaris.

How many knew that she had lodged in her womb the third child of Raldnor? In all the mythos, there had never been a word of it.

Even Yannul had not known.

The child had been lost, so much was sure. Raldnor and Astaris were gone. Their progeny, if it had survived, had had long years to reveal itself. And had not. And yet somehow the worshippers of Anackire at Ankabek had guessed at its being, its loss of being, looking for the balance to be set right. They had searched for some resembling conjunction of flesh and race. Maybe grotesquely, predictably, they had perceived it in Val Nardia and Kesarh. Blood of the blood peoples mixed with Vis, the sorcerous affiliation of twins, and one other thing, omen of omens—

No wonder Ankabek had held Val Nardia’s corpse in stasis, brought the child to term—

Do I give credence to any of this? Do I even acknowledge the engineering of a holy mystery? No. It’s lust gone sour, insomnia. How could they breed her for that, and their magic let her end a wolf child?

Since the night he had seen the attack on Ankabek through the body of the Xarabian ship. Rem had kept the amber ring among his slight baggage, carefully not easy of access. To take out the ring now, hold it, wear it, might clarify these things. He did not want them clarified.

After all, he had been given a sign, if he must rest this craziness on proofs.

She had come to the banquet, her last night in her father’s palace. Beforehand, the whole place had been murmuring about how beautiful she was, this late daughter of the royal line. How nearly like Astaris, the most beautiful woman in the world.

Rem had not looked to be impressed in any way. As a rule he did not like women. If they were beautiful, he saw it with a grim detachment, or missed it altogether.

Ulis Anet entered the hall with her maidens.

She was lustrously red-haired, as foretold, and her gown was the exact red of her hair with a girdle of red-gold. At her throat shimmered a necklace of polished amethysts, a Xarabian jewelry pun, for the amethyst was the jewel closest in looks to a Serpent’s Eye.

She was slim and graceful. Then he realized her figure and her walk reminded him of another’s.

And then, she was near enough he saw her face.

Ulis Anet, said to resemble Astaris, was also a replica of Val Nardia, the mistress-sister of Kesarh.

Yeiza, her skin fragrant from the grasses she had lain among with Lur Raldnor, knew better than to make a sound beside the doors to the Princess’ bedchamber. She did, however, pause a moment to listen.

Two voices, but not vocal in love.

Shaking her head, as one party to affairs of great importance, Yeiza, unable to make out a syllable, crept away.

Beyond the doors, Iros stood, fully clothed in his elegant attire. A single lamp was burning and Ulis Anet was seated beneath it, robed for the bed she had not sought.

“Then I’ll leave you, madam,” he said coldly. “And this is the end of it.”

“You should never have come here.”

“The secret passage remained unlocked and unguarded. If you’d wanted to keep me out you should have left men there. They might have killed me. Then you’d have been rid of me for good.”

The girl sighed. The sigh caught a flare of purple at her throat where the amethysts still lay.

“You know I don’t wish you anything but well, Iros. But you should have had more sense than to visit me tonight.”

“I should have waited till we were on the road? Come swaggering into your tent for all to see? Or waited for Dorthar, till your white-haired High King tires of you? From what I’ve heard that will be swiftly. If he even troubles to bed you at all.”

Ulis Anet rested her forehead on her hand. She was exhausted. They had had this discussion over and over during the past months.

“Even if,” she said, “I am to live as a virgin in Dorthar, there can be nothing further between us.”

“I’m so dear to you.”

Her temper snapped suddenly, and she rose.

“Don’t be a fool. Do you think I want this match? I’ve no choice, and neither have you. You’ve given me no peace—”

“What peace have I had—”

“What else can I do? Run away with you like a peasant girl married off against her will to some farmer? I’ve been given to the Storm Lord. You knew of it and all that it meant before ever you saw me.”

His eyes blazed with hatred.

“I love you!” he shouted.

Had Yeiza been at the door, this much she would have heard.

“Love. Well, you’ve a choice in lovers. I have none.”

“You chose me, once,” he said, more softly.

“Yes.” She closed her eyes.

“And if Whitehair takes you, he’ll find as much.”

“It seems it doesn’t matter,” she said, “providing there has been adequate interval.”

“He values you so highly.”

Ulis Anet turned. She walked to a mirror and stared it at her beautiful face, the mellifluous lines of her body. And behind her the handsome and furious demon who had invaded her unsympathetic world. She did not love him, but she had been amorously and tenderly fond of him. She doubted now if she had ever meant as much to him. If the bond with Dorthar had not claimed her, she might have been made Iros’ wife, to mark his father’s standing. He would have valued her royalty and her looks, and been frequently and blatantly adulterous elsewhere.

Getting no reply from her, he strode to the drapery that hid the secret door. He wrenched the curtain off its rings and flung out into the stone passageway.

Straight-backed, she crossed to the door and closed it. Then she sat at her window, watching the sun begin to come, since it was too late now for sleep.

12

The princess’ caravan wandered through the heart of summer, slow, dreamlike. They seemed to make no speed at all. Plains gave way to hills and hills to plains, beneath skies powdered by dust or stars. One impressive city enveloped them, then let them go. At night, another would appear far off before them in a valley, haloed with lights.

For Rem it was a time of timelessness. Lur Raldnor was not often nearby. After dark he was with his Yeiza, the Princess’ youthful chief lady. By day, the boy was taken up by the royal circle. Ulis Anet had noticed and liked him. Perhaps that was a further move to anger her commander Iros, or further to keep Iros at bay. Xaros’ son rode at the head of his column of men, stony-faced. His behavior toward his royal charge was ostentatiously correct, so impeccable as to be suspect. There was now hardly anyone in the entourage, down to the last groom or page, who had not fathomed what had been the relation of the commander of the King’s daughter’s guard to the King’s daughter. One day a soldier was flogged a hundred yards from the camp, and left out half dead all through the heat of noon. Apparently he had been overheard by Iros whistling some song invented upon some matter.

At night the commander entertained lavishly and grossly in his pavilion, or organized torchlit chariot-races, making the darkness raucous. In the cities, he picked out the lushest available women and paraded his lust all through dinner.

Sometimes, on the upper plains, thunder came cantering across the skyline, a storm of wild zeebas, shearing away at the last instant from the campfires.

Rem, walking beyond the tents along the rim of a hill in the dusk, glimpsed a man and a woman entwined oblivious amid the fern. Raldnor and his girl. Noiselessly, unseen, Rem avoided them.

Zastis was done, and maybe it was only that which made this distancing in him. The urgent frustration of Lan had become like another’s memory, not his own. Yannul’s son seemed far off, a pleasing sight, amiable companion, a hundred years younger than Rem and scarcely recognized.

Ommos, the ill-famed.

They saw Uthkat on the plain of Orsh, where Raldnor Am Anackire had routed the Vis, and later the ruins of Goparr which Raldnor Am Anackire had razed for treachery. History still moved. Less than a month before, Karith had been burnt by the Free Zakorian fleet, and troops were toiling across the landscape, skirting the caravan once its mission was ascertained. The indigenous Ommos were dark, inclined to flesh, their accent so thick as to create almost another language from familiar words. Other than soldiery, the whole kingdom seemed bare and deserted, and the towns looked dark by night.

At Hetta Para they were received. The capital had been cast down in the War. The new city was something else again, little more than a town on the outskirts of a wreck.

There was no king in Ommos now, but a man who named himself Guardian, a Lowlander. The court, if such it might be termed, was Lowland, too.

The betrothed of Raldanash was austerely and publicly entertained some three or four hours, with a group of her followers. Then they were all consigned to cramped apartments, or to anything the area might be thought to offer.

Those who investigated the spareness of the new Hetta Para and the shambles of the old, came back with stories of an Anackire temple of black stone, its portals patrolled by Lowland guards, of the immemorial fire-dancers in taverns of the ruin, boys or women, scorching their clothing from them with lighted torches, and of a Zarok fire god flung down in a pit. Lowland work, on whom the Ommos came ritualistically and fawningly to urinate, making all the while partly hidden religious gestures for mercy to the god.

There were countless delays between Hetta Para and the border.

It was not for another five days that they came to the river and saw the repaired garrison outpost the War had once destroyed, while the bowl-topped Dortharian watchtower belched out blue purple smolder to welcome them.

Dorthar.

My father came here, not knowing then, as I know mine, his line or dubious rights or heritage. Insolent, ill-at-ease, in danger, in love with the land and hating the land for its symbols and its shadow.

Rem looked about him: earth, mountains, sky.

What’s Dorthar, then, to me?

For the entry into the city of Anackyra, Lur Raldnor had been granted a chariot, and a team of thoroughbred animals, and his best clothes had come out of the traveling chest.

“What do you want to do?” he inquired of Rem.

“What we agreed. You’ll be presented. When the moment is suitable, you give him Yannul’s letters. At some point he’ll read them.”

“From what I’ve heard he may not.”

Rem had also, here and there, picked up Xarabian evaluations of the Storm Lord.

“Then politely stress them, indicating the Koramvin seal.”

“But you’ll follow me into the presence chamber.”

“If allowed.”

“Where are you placed for the entry?”

“Behind the chariots, somewhere.”

Lur Raldnor appraised him and eventually said, “You do know this indifference isn’t humbleness on your part, don’t you? It’s pride. You’re already saying: I know who I am. Let him find out.”

The conversation was held by the old white road which had led across the plain under Koramvis. It was dusk and the tents were up. Tomorrow they would be going in to the new metropolis, and down the valley above the ancient watchtower the smoke plume still hung, one tone darker than the darkening sky.

“It’s possible,” said Rem, “that even when he does find out, he may not care to know.”

“Whatever we’ve heard of him, he wouldn’t risk that. He needs you as a friend, not an enemy. Think of the harm you could do him if estranged.”

“I’ve thought. And Raldanash may think. He might consider me worth a tactful murder.”

Lur Raldnor grinned.

“This isn’t Karmiss.”

Rem was taken aback. Had he implied so much about Kesarh’s service?

Across the long slope of the valley plain, where the ground rose up to the hills which, before the quake, had been of a different shape, the night-fires of the new city began to gleam.

When the boy had gone off to share the Princess’ tent-court, Rem stayed, looking toward the city.

There had been groves of fruit trees and cibba here, burned long ago or cut down. The last battle had begun on this earth. All day, he had noted the superstitious mutter as they approached.

He wondered suddenly if men here alone at night fancied they heard the cries of war and pain, and felt the land start to shudder. He half expected one of the visions to seize on him. But nothing came, and only the lighted lamps of Anackyra shone two miles off, no sheen of ghosts.

The Princess Ulis Anet was dressed in white. Rem, after the first startlement had lessened, had observed her skin was darker than Val Nardia’s had been. Clad in the whiteness intended to symbolize her fitness for a High King of the fair races, she looked darker yet, but arrestingly so, like an icon of pale gold. Her ruby-colored hair was appropriately veiled in an openwork mesh of rubies.

Before and behind her chariot came Iros’ men, blinding with polished metal. The banners of Xarabiss and the blazon of Thann Xa’ath swayed glittering from their poles.

The caravan had sprouted into the usual elements of show.

Dancing girls clothed only in brilliant body-paint with disconcerting mirrors at their groins, acrobats, and magicians producing globes of radiance from the air. Twelve milk-white kalinxes had been found—or bleached—to draw three gilded carts from which sweets, flowers and small pieces of money might be thrown to the crowds by girls dressed in the carmine robes of Yasmis, the Xarabian love-goddess. Before the rule of Anackire, a statue of Yasmis would have been carried in any betrothal and bridal procession that could afford one. No longer.

Musicians played. The chariots rolled.

Where the new road went between the fields and orchards, it was lined by peasants, holding their children up to see, and young girls casting petals and looks at the soldiery.

A quarter of a mile from the gates, Raldanash’s envoy met them, with a further escort.

For the first time Rem saw the white goddess banners of Anackyra, and carried amid them the device of his half-brother, the hero Raldnor’s legal son. Raldanash’s emblem was a brazen serpent coiled about a black thunder-cloud, gripping the might of it surely in immovable coils. The understanding was there for any with eyes to see.

Koramvis had been reckoned the wonder of the north. Anackyra, going up fast on the back of her ruin, had had something to beat.

Yannul had left before the city was completed. The post-War council, mixed of Vis and Lowlanders and men of the Sister Continent, had held together reasonably well under the original Koramvin Warden, Mathon. An old man then, initially chosen for his post just because he was old and therefore considered safe, the earthquake had spared him and he had gone on to watch the city reborn over the plain beneath and the forested western hill-slopes. He had outlived Yannul’s defection, and the death of another who had been, in his way, a friend to the hero Raldnor, the Dragon Lord Kren. Kren had died the year the boy King entered Anackyra. Mathon, though, had lived to one hundred and twelve, an age not unheard of among the Vis, but spectacular considering the upheavals of his era. He had seen the commencing years of Raldanash’s reign. He had seen the city finished. To the end, Mathon had kept his wits and, they said, his uselessness. Now the Warden of Anackyra was a Vathcrian, a cousin of the King’s from home.

The walls were high and thick. There was something in that. Until a few years ago, all but the royal area had been unwalled.

White stone, touched with white crystal and white gold: White fire. Young—she was younger than Rem himself. Beautiful she was too, naturally. They had donated to her all the glories of aftermath. On raised terraces her ten goddess-temples blazed back the sun.

But she did not feel young, or beautiful, or even old under the youngness and beauty, antique Vis crying out in anger at her chains. She tasted of—nothing.

Yet, something there was.

The heat had come early, and there was a curious styptic quality to the air. Rem consoled the neck of the zeeba he rode, gauging its tension, which maybe it had only caught from him.

But there was a stillness, too, which was not possible, for ever since they had got in the gate, the crowds, packed by the road, on balconies and rooftops, had been screaming and calling, and the clatter and music of the entourage itself was enough to deafen a man. Yet those crowd noises, which were at first too loud to have patience with, now seemed engulfed, bat-squeaks in some colossal and echo-less cave.

In Anackyra, as in Koramvis, there was an Avenue of Rarnammon, this one far longer. It was ten chariot-lengths wide, lined by massive statuary—dragons, serpents, and mere human giants. Where the avenue opened out before the terraced approach to the palace, the square was dominated by Rarnammon himself, gigantic above the giants, in a chariot on a plinth. The monument was all gold and gold-washed bronze, with windows for the eyes of saffron glass behind which twin torches were kept lit. In the shadow of this, the Storm Lord would give public welcome to his Xarabian bride.

The stillness was heavy as a blanket, now.

Ahead, the chariots, Iros’ smart men, the ruby-haired woman in her car decked by flowers.

“Storm coming,” someone said just behind Rem. “Look how the trees’re thrashing about.”

Involuntarily Rem turned to see. The trees above the walls were motionless. There was no one close enough at his shoulder to have spoken so hoarsely and been heard.

“Magic,” someone else said, directly before him. He almost felt the breath strike his face and there was no one so near. “Oh gods—what is it?”

Rem looked up and saw the hills above the city. There were white towers there, but only for a moment. He saw the red spout and gush of powdered rock explode silently from beneath Koramvis’ walls. Then the hills ran together and the towers were lifted like an offering to an ink-black sky.

Even as it happened, he was aware it was not real; he felt the zeeba beneath him and kept it in hand. His eyes were open and he knew where he was. Then he seemed to blink, and the hills were calm, the summer morning light spread through them.

He thought, without hurry., precisely, Prophecy, this time. There’s about to be an earthquake.

The zeeba tossed its head and mouthed the reins. You could see it now, all along the route the animals were growing fractious. Men, irritably forcing them to keep the line, were responding too, unknowingly.

In the grip of it, Rem felt only an enormous distancing, no terror. He understood he would be aware to the second. He rode on, holding the zeeba steady.

The Avenue widened and gave on to the great square. Ahead, the mighty Rarnammon statue, behind that the Imperial Hill, the terraced rise with the palace, and higher, framed in forest, the oldest temple of the Dortharian Anackire. Across the nearer space, the glint of other caparisons, banners, the figurines of the Storm Lord and his officials. And the crowd everywhere, and more running in to pile up against the buildings. Some had even climbed the Rarnammon to gain vantage from its chariot wheels.

Inside the body of the procession there was abruptly more room. Rem found he was advancing between the chariots as they widened their phalanx, and through them.

Before he was quite through he felt the pulse of the earth stop. That was what it was like. The earth’s pulse, or his own. Then under the cheering and the hubbub, there came a low strong roar. At first, they mistook it for themselves.

Then bells began to ring, the curiously noted stringed bells brought here from Koramvis. The bells knew the grasp of the earthquake, it had shaken them before. They seemed to be crying out a warning. It was recognized.

All at once the screams of excitement turned to shrieks of horror. The crowd pushed against itself. He could hear the prayer-screams, too. “Anack! Anack!” The Xarabians of the entourage were if anything more afraid than the Vis of the city. This was not even their country that they be expected to die in it. Already all was out of control, beasts struggling and rearing, chariots dragged sideways, men tumbled, and the crowd on every side milling and howling, no one able to move. But the ground itself moving.

The zeeba danced to keep its balance. Something of Rem’s iron command came through to it, just negating the primal urge to kick and run. He looked at the sky. A man was falling from the Rarnammon, screeching. He burst down into the crowd. The great statue, however, did not shift, only trembling at its roots, its human cargo clinging to it.

Rem was through the chariots, up to the place where the rear guard of Iros’ soldiery had flanked the procession’s gaudy center, its core Ulis Anet’s ceremonial car. But something had happened to the order of the procession.

One of the Yasmis carts had overturned. One of the Yasmis girls lay dead where a kalinx, expelled from the shafts and its tether snapped, had torn out her heart and stood now, in her blood and the crushed sweets, irresolute between fear and viciousness. No one had killed it. When the quake ended it might attack again. Rem leaned, met its glacial eyes, and swiftly cut its throat. He rode over the cadaver, the zeeba snorting, and into the clamor of mounted men beyond.

The Xarabians were shouting, invoking gods. A sword, drawn to hack a passage somewhere, into another world maybe, where the earth was solid, slashed blind over his unmailed shoulder and drew blood. Rem turned and struck the sword-waver unconscious. As the man slumped, Rem saw across him to the garlanded chariot of the Princess. The driver was gone and the banners had fallen. Caught in the maelstrom it was pulled now one way now another, the panic-stricken chariot-animals, bred for strength in speed and little else, leaping and cavorting in the shafts, screaming as human women screamed all about. The reins were gone, she could not have taken them up even if she had had the weight to hold the team, which she did not. Beyond this, he saw again the flash of metal; swords were out everywhere. Iros and his captains were cutting a way to her through the crowd, their own men and the naked dancing girls.

The quake was almost done, the earth merely shivering now, like a man after sickness. It needed only moments more for the complementary dousing of panic, a cold despairing relief, to come down on them. The beasts would feel it first.

But before the dousing came, the freakish flailing of Iros’ guard had cleared a road before the Princess’ chariot. The animals did at once what they had wished to do all along, bolting forward, their screams trailing like torn flags. The very men who had striven toward her went down before them. Rem saw Iros dashed aside, the long glancing rip of his sword across the breasts of the team serving to madden them further.

Rem touched his spurs against the zeeba. That was all it took. It rushed forward pell-mell as the chariot-animals had done.

The chariot raced ahead, the girl holding to the sides. Ghastly addendum, one of the dancers, caught by her own long hair among the spokes of the wheel, was carried some way in tow over the paving. Her silence was due to death. But Ulis Anet made no sound, either.

Before them, the royal panoply of the King. On foot, hemmed in and pressed against the first steps of the hill, they seemed set only to stare, those figurines, until the chariot ran into them.

The bells had stopped tolling.

Rem had been in enough skirmishes. It was familiar in essence if not in exactitude. And he knew what to do.

Only a little thought went mocking through his occupied mind:

Kesarh would have planned this.

Then he was level with the pelting team.

Swinging over, he brought his sword down on the inside animal’s brain, blade and arm with all the strength behind them he could spare. The beast went over at once, taking the sword with it out of his hand. The others were unable to stop, their momentum carrying them in a snarl across their dead fellow, the chariot slewing behind, all in his path. But he had already kneed the zeeba aside, and as she came by, her volcanic hair flying, he caught the girl up and out and across his mount.

They were away even as the chariot went over. Wrapped in a tangle of traces the animals were flung across it, broken-spined in half a second.

It was as well he had kept up the warrior’s training of Karmiss, Rem told himself wryly. He glanced with pity at the dead team. Wryness, pity—that was all. He felt no more than that.

He stayed his mount and slid down from it smoothly, lifting the woman after him.

She stared at him. “Thank you,” she said.

“An honor, madam.”

The inanity struck both of them. Standing on the square, amid spaces of white paving spilled with blood, a broken chariot, dead bodies, they both laughed bitterly.

There was a tremendous soundlessness all about. Then a ragged cheer went up. The Xarabians, having botched the job, were congratulating a foreign stranger on saving precious Xarabian goods.

From the palace end of the square, men were starting toward them.

“Are you hurt?” Rem said to the Princess.

“No. But you’re bleeding.”

“Some fool with a sword. It’s nothing.”

“It seems more than nothing.”

“I, too, was a soldier, madam,” he said for some reason. “I know when I’m hurt or not. But your solicitude is generous.”

“The quake. . . . Is it over?” she asked him. He had become an authority on things, wounds, rescues, earthquakes. He smiled, nodded.

Irrationally, this private conversation in the middle of pandemonium seemed relevant. Though it meant nothing, he could see how beautiful she was, still spear-straight and self-possessed.

But her eyes drifted to the dead dancing girl and away. Her voice faltered now, before she mastered it.

“Perhaps it’s an omen. I’ve heard when my future husband, the King, entered Anackyra as a boy, there was a violent tremor.”

Something happened. It was intangible, invisible, deep as mortal illness.

“What is it?” she said.

But at that moment the group from the palace end of the square had reached them.

Immediately Ulis Anet was encompassed. Rem discovered himself cordoned by a mass of men, Vis, Vathcrians. He could pick out none of the Lowland race. And then there was another man, exactly in front of him. He dressed in white as Ulis Anet had been, and a white cloak roped with a golden snake, the scales laid on like coins. His hair was whiter than his garments, but his skin was tawny as young wood. He had the beauty one had heard of, Raldnor Am Anackire’s looks, like a god. But there was no discrepancy in height. They were as tall as each other. So Rem looked at him eye to eye, and these eyes were the color of the glass in the eyeplaces of the Rarnammon.

There had been muttering: “A Vis hero! Who is he? Who is this man?”

Raldanash the Storm Lord said to him directly:

“Who are you?”

The city, if it had shaken in augury or not, had given the torch into his hand. He could no more quench it now than walk away.

“My name is Rarmon,” he said. “I am your father’s son.”

In the darkness, the eyes of the Rarnammon statue glowed upward from the plain, looking brighter than all the other lights of the city.

“But,” Vencrek asked, “how do we know the Lord Yannul was not mistaken? Or misled?” He looked across at Yannul’s son and smiled. “Hmm?”

“You know, sir,” said Lur Raldnor quietly, “because he tells you through me that he was not.”

“Your loyalties are commendably to your father. But after so many years—”

“My father, sir, is not senile. He spent some time at the side of Raldnor Am Anackire, and knew him well. He saw Raldnor again in this man who is his son. As Yannul’s letter explains, the Lord Rarmon was unaware of his own lineage. The woman had never told him.”

“Yes, the woman. Surely the name ‘Lyki’ is not so uncommon in Visian Karmiss. There might be more than one Lyki with a—forgive me—bastard son.”

“She had waited on Astaris at the Koramvin court.”

“So she said. Or so the—the Lord Rarmon seems to have said that she said.”

Rem, who was now Rarmon, turned from the eyes of his namesake below. He put his hand briefly on Lur Raldnor’s shoulder and said to Vencrek, “Might this discussion be somewhat premature, since the King is not yet here? Unless, of course, the Storm Lord’s belief in me is less important than your own.”

Vencrek let his smile freeze, then dismissed it. As the Warden of Anackyra, his good opinion was to be won or forced, or maybe bought. He was a perfect example, one saw, of what Yannul had called the ‘blond Vis’ of the second continent. A butter-haired Vathcrian; Rem who was Rarmon had seen his kind often enough, fair or dark, at Istris.

The rest of the men in the small attractive chamber were of the council. Tradition had kept it mixed. Two Dortharians, someone from Tarabann, a Shansarian, another Vathcrian. It seemed the Lans and Xarabs who had held honorable places here in Yannul’s time had probably all gone home. There were no Lowlanders in the room.

Except, Rem-Rarmon ironically supposed, for Yannul’s son and himself.

There was the old familiar sound of spear-butts going down on marble. The doors opened, and the King walked through, two guards at his back. He had retained the custom of the Storm Lord’s Chosen, an elite bodyguard. They wore the historic scale plate, too, but it was washed gold and marked with Raldanash’s device, the inexorable snake gripping the storm-cloud.

Raldanash looked immediately at him while the others bowed. Rarmon offered no more than an extremely courteous nod.

The Storm Lord sat down. All around, the council representatives seated themselves. Before Vencrek could resume the floor, Raldanash lifted his hand.

“Son of Yannul.” He spoke Vis, as he had on the square. It must be the fashion here, if not at Karmiss. Even Vencrek used it.

Lur Raldnor went forward, bowed again and was acknowledged. The boy was impressed, but then his King was impressive. His appearance alone was overwhelming, straight out of the myth. He had presence, too. Even doing nothing, something came across. And he did very little, his gestures few and spare, his face almost expressionless, the beauty and the trace of power speaking always for him. He was a year Rarmon’s junior, which gave him anyway inalienable rights in Dorthar.

Rem who was Rarmon was not immune to the incongruousness of it all. He seemed almost obliged to suspend skepticism since the earthquake.

Apparently the damage was slight from that. Six persons had died. In Koramvis it had been thousands. Hordes of people all day pouring to and from the Anackire temples, to offer in thanks or supplication against further activity, were by sunfall the only proof that anything had happened.

But there had had to be some sort of personal proof. Bathed, and clad for form’s sake in mild finery, Rem had taken out the ring of Lowland amber. It would go no farther than the middle joint of the smallest finger on the left hand. The finger which, in his father, had been missing from that same joint since infancy.

He had no sane reason for putting on the ring. A silly woman’s Zastis token, which had turned out to have psychic properties. It had assumed the temperature of his skin, he could not even feel it now.

“I shall inform Yannul,” said the King to Lur Raldnor, “of my pleasure in your arrival here. Tomorrow there will be space to speak with you in privacy. For now, be free in my court and my city. Only one thing I will ask from you.” Diverted from his thoughts, Rarmon looked at the two of them. He guessed—or mentally overheard—what was coming, and braced himself for it. “Yannul the Lan,” said Raldanash, “in all well-meaning, named you for his lord. The name of ‘Raldnor’ is frequent everywhere. But I don’t recognize it, other than as the name of my father. In this place, therefore, and in any place where you serve me, you will relinquish it.” Lur Raldnor’s mouth opened. He stared at the King, then decided to keep silent. “You may use instead the name of your father, which is illustrious and well-remembered. Hereafter, you are Lur Yannul.”

The boy realized that was all. He bowed a third time and stepped away. Under his Lowland tan he had gone white.

Vencrek stirred. Raldanash looked directly at him, to Rarmon.

“And you,” he said.

Rarmon waited, meeting the eyes again. It was too easy to meet them. They were like wells of light, a depthless deep that cast away even as it submerged. Magician’s eyes.

“You said,” Raldanash told him, without inflexion, “and before many witnesses, that by his Karmian mistress, you are my father’s son.”

“His bastard,” Rarmon said plainly.

“Yes. You’re not claiming Dorthar, then?”

“I’m claiming nothing, my lord. Except the truth of who and what I am.”

Raldanash came to his feet.

“You’ll follow me,” he said to Rarmon.

As they moved, the King with his guards, back toward the doors, Vencrek started forward and the others hurried from their seats. Raldanash gazed at them. “Warden Vencrek. Gentlemen. I thank you for your attendance. This matter I shall deal with in my own way. Good night.”

They went through the doors, which the guards outside closed on a stationary staring of faces.

The council chambers lay against the side of the Imperial Hill. A covered bridge, magnificent with carving, ran over a small chasm into the palace courts.

So far, Rarmon had only seen the guest palace. The architecture of the royal domicile was massive and complex, grouped in towers and tiers about endless courtyards. It was modeled, they said, on the previous structure gone to dust and rust in the hills above.

Presently they walked into a long hall. The flaming cressets on the columns lit up the sight he had all this while been waiting for.

There were seven of them, and they looked like incandescence, the pale hair and skin, the white clothing—he realized now to wear white was an affectation with them. Not all were as blanched as the woman in the Xarabian market. And indeed, seated to one side, there was a swarthy Vis, a squat man in the yellow robe of the Dortharian Anackire. He looked as impassive as the rest. He would have some need to be.

The guards withdrew.

Raldanash walked down the hall, Rarmon at his back, among the standing candles of the Lowlanders.

None of them bowed, curtseyed or knelt, as the Vis custom was. Each touched a hand to the brow and then to the breast. It was a noble enough gesture of honor. It had the feel of something ancient, too, which was strange, for it was also the gesture of a proud people, and he knew their story. Shunned, spat on, persecuted, due to be annihilated and unwilling to resist—until Raldnor told them differently. Now—this.

Three were women.

All seven looked at the King, and then beyond the King to Rarmon.

He felt something, heard something, but without hearing. They were speaking with their brains, and presumably the King with them. One trick of the hero-god’s genes that had passed Rarmon by. The eyes never shifted from him. Eyes toning through citrine to ice: the eyes of snakes.

The King spoke to him.

“These are your judges.”

“What’s my crime?” Rarmon said.

“If you gave the truth to me, there is no crime.”

Rarmon dissuaded his skin from crawling. A quarter of my blood is like theirs. It’s the same with him—only a quarter.

“My mind is open to them,” he said.

“You have much Vis blood,” one of them said to him. “You are not to be read.”

The words were so near yet so opposed to his thoughts, he sensed there had actually been some inadvertent communication.

“Your adepts can read the minds of the Vis,” Rarmon said.

The comment was ignored. In a body with Raldanash, they turned and went on through the hall. Rarmon was left to follow, a meaningless demonstration of free-will. The Vis priest did not come after them, but only fell respectfully on his face as they passed. Which was a politeness of Thaddra.

Beyond the doors of the hall, a sloping garden-court stretched gently toward the sky. A building blotted the stars, and as they approached it, the smell of the trees was familiar. A black stone temple, in a sacred grove.

It was no bigger than the shrine of some Plains village. When they entered, a lamp hung alight up in the air. There was no statue, no ornament—nothing but the stone, sweating chill even after the heat of the day.

The door shut.

Raldanash walked to the center of the tomblike place.

“Stand here with me.”

Rarmon obeyed. He felt a peculiar misgiving. All religions had mysteries and deceptions. What was to be done here? The seven Lowlanders stood about the walls, snow figures on black.

There was a sound. A soundless sound, reminiscent of the undercurrent in the air before the tremor struck. But it was nothing so simple as precognition.

Raldanash stood facing him. Rarmon was aware they had adopted, he doubted spontaneously, the selfsame position, feet apart, left arm loosely at the side, right arm slightly advanced. Almost a fighter’s stance. The amber ring commenced softly to burn. There was Power here, then. Matter-of-factly, he accepted that the burning was not uncomfortable, ready to remove the ring if it threatened to grow red-hot, as on the ship from Hliha.

Then a new light seemed to come up from the stone under their feet, a curl of sourceless, colorless energy. It enveloped them slowly, rising like water. Witchcraft.

Through the light he saw Raldanash’s face, partly translucent, but no hint of the skull beneath. Instead, a kind of ghostliness, other faces, all his facets—indecipherable. So, too, Raldanash would see him. The facets that were Lyki, the facets that must be Raldnor’s; the inheritance beyond that, a line of kings and priestesses. And his own many lives in this one, the thief and cutthroat, the captain of Kesarh’s men, the lover of boys.

The ring scalded. It was like molten metal. It should have hurt him and he should have wrenched it off, but somehow the heat brought no pain, fire to a salamander. . . .

Then the light went out. The ring was only the temperature of his skin.

Raldanash stepped away from him.

One of them said, behind him, “You are no liar. You have the atoms of the messiah Raldnor, and through him of Ashne’e. There is more. The goddess has left her mark on your soul.”

Rarmon had no reaction to the words, or very little. He looked at the King.

The Amanackire began to leave. As the cool night air stole in, he knew the chill temple had become very close and warm.

“What now?” he said to Raldanash.

“You are what you said,” Raldanash replied. Nothing else.

They approached the door as if nothing had happened.

“Which brings me what, my lord?”

“Whatever you wish, under my authority.”

Outside, scale plate flashed. Guards with torches were standing on the lawn after all.

“Perhaps,” Rarmon said, “a small gift to start with.” Raldanash paused. Rarmon wondered what Ulis Anet had thought when first she laid eyes on this impossible husband. “Yannul’s son,” said Rarmon. “To some men, my lord, their name means very much. It’s a magic thing, the key to the ego. His father and yours were friends. Why not let the boy keep his given name?”

“He is,” said Raldanash, “no longer in Lan.”

“He found that out. You shamed him. Your implication, sir, is that no man’s fit to bear your father’s name.”

Raldanash, looking almost utterly like a Lowlander, seemed to show his Vis blood then. He glanced toward the soldiers. He said: “You say to me ‘Your father,’ yet you harangue me like a brother.”

“I’m asking a favor. And they told you, those you trust, that I am your brother.”

There was a long, still interval. A drift of scented air brought with it faint singing from the public temple in the forest above, some hymn with cymbals and cries. Truly, Dorthar had made Her theirs.

Raldanash said, “He can’t carry the name of Raldnor in my service.”

“Suppose,” said Rarmon, “I’d claimed it for myself.”

“Do you?” said Raldanash.

“If I did?”

They stared at each other, as in the black stone room. Time passed again. Rarmon came to see the King did not intend to answer him, and what this must mean. A challenge could not, beyond a certain point, be offered or accepted, for they were not equals. And yet, with an inferior, one need only command.

“Yes,” Raldanash said suddenly to him, “I was spoken to in the temple, as you were not, mind to mind. My soul isn’t marked by the goddess. I’m only the King.”

“My lord, I don’t understand.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Rarmon. I have powers in me you lack. I have rights you lack. And I was shown, besides, you were a thief who now steals nothing. But one other thing they showed me. You will be more than I can be.”

Rarmon nodded. “I still fail to understand you, sir. But am I to take it you want me to leave Anackyra?”

Yet Raldanash only walked away. His Chosen Guard, among whom the dark race was represented, went shining after him.

Rarmon was still standing there when a chamberlain came out and found him. The man was eager to discuss the apartments to be opened for Rarmon in the palace, and other such matters.

Over it all, the wind still brought the singing down the hill. He did not know the music was because of him.

“More wine?”

The Thaddrian refused, with great politeness. Intoxication would feel uneasy tonight, even on the juices of the High Priest’s cellar.

Beyond the luxurious chamber—the High Priest’s “cell”—the songs and shouts had finally died away in the body of the forest temple. It was almost midnight. The High Priest, who had sent the servant out long ago, refilled his own cup.

“But,” he said abruptly, “You’re sure?”

The Thaddrian gathered himself. This was the fifth time the Blessed One had asked him. The last occasion had been two hours ago. At least the intervals were extending.

“Virtuous Father, you sent me as your witness and I waited in the hall. The cressets were bright. They entered. I had less than a minute before the King and the Amanackire took him from the room to the Storm Lord’s private temple. Nor did I see him closer than that lamp-stand there, at any time.”

“However,” the High Priest prompted fiercely. He was himself, naturally, a Dortharian. Once, they had been the master race. Filaments yet lingered.

“However, I was myself convinced, as I told you, and as you informed the worshippers, that this man called Rarmon is truly one of Raldnor’s sons.”

“And yet you say he’s unlike him.”

“As Raldnor was when I beheld him—few men could compare with that. As few women could have compared with Her. And yet, the likeness was evident. This Rarmon is a handsome man in his way. The features, from certain angles, are similar to those of the Rarnammon statues. Raldnor himself was said to look like these.”

The High Priest assented, and quaffed his wine.

The Thaddrian had at no time repeated his own inner thought on seeing the King enter the hall, the much darker man at his back. A sudden thought, sheer and quite explicit. It was divided between the two of them, then. The white-haired Vathcrian has the beauty. But the reservoir of strength—the other has that.

He had been a child when he saw Raldnor Am Anackire. Sunrise in a rioting Thaddrian town, flames and smoke and sunshine jostling for the sky. And out of the chaos emerged something so simple and ordinary, a peasant’s wagon making for the jungle forest. And in the wagon two creatures not ordinary in the least. A god and a goddess. Only years after did he learn who they must have been, Raldnor son of Rehdon, and Astaris, the woman he had loved. The clean banality of their exit from the town and the majesty of their supernatural looks combined, essentially, to make a priest of the Thaddrian. To make him argumentative also. Certain aspects of the worship of his goddess bothered him. Mythology should only so far rule the lives of men. The afterlife should be left to itself. Religion would do better to aid mortals in the mortal state, not drug them with hopes of the transcending future. Were they to live only dreaming of death?

“In any event,” said the Blessed One, suppressing a small belch, “the Amanackire will have tested him.”

“No doubt, Virtuous Father.”

“And you were sure?”

Merciful Anack. The intervals were growing less again.

“Most Virtuous, as far as I could tell—”

“Yes, yes.” The High Priest gave signs of impatience with both his Thaddrian and himself. The earthquake escapees would have filled the temple coffers. Maybe he wished to go count the loot. The best donation of all had been from a young Xarabian, the commander of the Princess-bride’s personal guard. He had been stunned by a bolting chariot in the quake, but recovered sufficiently to come up here this evening. The Thaddrian doubted the lord Iros had been thanking Anackire for sparing his life. He had seemed in a rage, but also wept. There were already rumors he was in love with the Princess. That had an inauspicious quality to it. Raldnor Am Anackire had been the lover of his Storm Lord’s betrothed.

“The portents are sound,” said the High Priest, rising. It was time to leave, apparently. “Sons of the heroes meeting here, at the hub of Vis. If war’s coming, we need such tokens.”

The Thaddrian prostrated himself and went.

If war was coming. A child could tell—did tell, for the games of Anackyra’s children had become factious, the lower streets loud with those objecting to playing Free Zakorians. War, that curse of men. And this a war worse than any. Zakoris in exile had become a ravening demon. At length she would try to tear all Vis apart for vengeance, and if she won her battles, not one stone would stand upon another, not one blade of grass remain that was not black with fire or blood.

The Lowlanders did not shirk. They had triumphed before. Besides, did not the goddess teach that the soul lived forever? What odds if a man died in the flesh? Death was only the sloughing of a skin. Such philosophy had made them passive long ago, and now reckless, and pitiless.

Passing through the temple, he touched the goddess’ golden scales with his lips, loving the idea of Her, and sick and tired of men.

A distant storm, low and faint, murmured over the mountains. The transparent lightnings were thinner than watered milk, but now and then they would catch the surface of fluid—stagnant rain held in a broken cistern or some accumulative pool. On the river too, they played, lighting it as once the street torches had done, the lamps of temples and boats, and the tall windows.

Dead Koramvis, smashed in bits, lay at either side.

He had left the chariot back a mile or more, tethering the zeebas—he had insisted on zeebas for his journey, unused to the flimsy chariot-animals, not wanting to risk them on rough going.

Why he had come up here he did not altogether know. Now, with all done, maybe it was an urge to escape. His father had known such feelings, trapped here in his glorious disguise, Amrek’s man.

Rarmon had briefly wondered if he would know his route about the mined streets, Raldnor’s genes reminding him. But, considering the state the shock had brought it to, he doubted even Raldnor could have found the way to much.

Only the river, the Okris, was a sure landmark, smeared fitfully with the lightning. A huge bridge had fallen into the water. On the cracked and upheaved pavement, vegetation had had more than twenty-eight years of chance to grow. Here and there, some building still stood in portions, a tower, a colonnade—but the weeds and the vines and the trees had fastened on these too. There were wildcats lairing; he heard their cries.

When the wind blew, powder ran down the lanes, more than dust, the gratings of marble. Rot came from the river. Metal lay rusting. The whole city rusted like a broken sword.

He walked awhile, then stood and looked across the river.

When movement came, off to his left, he turned without haste, drawing his knife. He would have expected bandits to lair here, with the beasts. But the ring was burning. He hesitated. There was no threat, only strangeness. Beyond a shattered arch of pallid Vis stone, there was another arch like a shadow, also shattered, but black. Under the second arch, someone. . . . A girl.

He went toward her slowly. There was no need for slowness, he could not break the mirage, like a web.

All around it was night, but in the second arch, daylight.

She was not looking at him. She was drawing water from a well. Young, thirteen or fourteen years of age, lovely with her youth and with some other thing. Lowland hair and skin. When she had filled her jar, she set it on her hip. She raised her head, and so her eyes. And meeting her eyes in the mirage, which she had not allowed to happen in the corridor at Olm, he knew her and cried out, so the heart of the hollow ruin felt his voice.

13

A queen had ruled over it once, before the history began that was remembered. Ashnesea, from whose name such other names had evolved as Anici, or Ashne’e. It felt old as the earth. It had seen so much. The splendors of legend, the decline of its people, conquered or cast down, the persecutions of the Vis, the ultimate persecution by Amrek. It had been occupied, garrisoned by men who hated and feared both its inhabitants and it. Then a messiah walked over its black stones, and it saw the beginning of the overthrow of the Vis, the Lowland Serpent, waking. And the first strike of the Serpent’s fangs.

It was a ruin still, the Lowland city on the Shadowless Plains, and it had no name, if it had ever had one.

Through its decayed walls animals yet ran in and out, travelers penetrated and departed as they wished. Everything had changed, but it had not. Entering the undefended gates, one would still be overpowered by a sense of enormous age and enigma.

Haut had been intending to make for one of the two or three sizable Lowland towns now flourishing on the Plains, even Hamos, maybe. Then, lying in his tent at Elyr, waiting for the girl to come in and pleasure him, he had considered, if she were good, he might keep her for himself. He would free her first, of course, so there would be no irregularity to annoy the Amanackire, binding her only by love of him. Then she had come in, and he had seen her hair, and her eyes, and next the Shadow of the goddess.

When he regained consciousness, she was gone. He went out, shivering, to determine if she had ever existed. His servants and the drover slept, but she sat by the guard kalinxes, watching the sheep.

He went over to her and when she did not deny him or strike him dead, he kneeled to her and begged her pardon.

Thereafter she rode in a cart with an awning which he purchased at the next village. Sometimes, he asked her what she wished, but she only smiled. However, the smile was enchanting, and considerably better than a flung levinbolt. In the dust, her shadow was now only a girl’s. His servants, Vardians like himself, respected her blondness currently revealed, and assumed his care of her was prudence, prudently copying it.

To Haut, the ways of avatars were familiar from stories. The Lowland War had occurred before he was born, but was recent enough for the new paint on the tales to have stayed fresh. It was still an era of wonders. More than unnerved, he was excited to be included in it. In Vardath, too, where priestesses walked and talked with lions, and the telepathy of near kin was fairly frequent, it was simpler to remain easy with the prodigies of faith.

Crossing into the Lowlands, Haut became aware of their destination. She did not tell him, he merely knew. He was a little disappointed, for the ruined city offered scant business to him, and, he would have thought, scantier fame for her. But it went without saying he obeyed.

He did not warm to the city, standing darkly brooding in its shallow valley. That was no surprise either. But numbers of people still dwelled there, and that was a surprise. There was even a venturesome Xarabian quarter, intent on trade. They had revived one of the marketplaces, and re-awarded it its antique Lowlander name of Lepasin. The houses round about had been shored up and repaired. It was the most cheerful area of the ruin, giving more than a semblance of life, and here the Vardian took rooms looking out on the market. On the far side of its terraces, two arcane palaces kept one in mind of decay, but the rest of the slope had gone to grass. The last of Haut’s sheep could be pastured there, and sheltered in the overgrown courts by night.

With the day, women began to gather at the ancient watering places, carrying their jars, lending to the morning a further normalcy.

There were still many of mixed blood in the city. Not so long ago it had been their only refuge, when they learned they did not suit either with the Vis or the pale races. The true Lowlanders for the most part were gone—to Plains towns such as Hamos or Moiyah, or away into the Vis world now wide open to them. Those who remained here were of that outer kind, pure of blood, yet more tender of spirit. They were many, but proportionally few. The Lowland people had found themselves. Mostly, they were not as they had been. Or rather, they were exactly as they had been, eons past.

When the girl appeared in the Lepasin, the groups of the industrious and the idle made way for her. Even here, deference was paid to the Amanackire, and from her coloring she could be no other.

When she went toward the old well, two or three women hurried across to her to set her right.

“Young mistress—don’t trouble with that. It’s dry.”

“Come to the well on the South Terrace, lady. We’ll show you.”

The girl paused and looked at them. It was clear she had heard them, for she smiled a little and half inclined her head. But then she went on up the steps to the well. Framed by its shattered arch, she stood as if in thought or daydream.

The women conferred. They were mixes, and did not like to belabor their point. They waited under the steps for her to see for herself and come back to be shown the working well the other side of the Lepasin.

All about the moving market was astir with sale and barter, but near at hand there was already some interest in the Amanackire maiden at the dry well.

A young half-Xarabian man left his brother to mind their booth of painted earthenware and vegetables. He brushed through the knot of women now gathered under the well. The Lowland girl had caught his fancy. He walked up the steps until he was beside her.

“There’s been no water in there since my father’s time. Didn’t those daft pigeons tell you? Let me take you to the other well.”

“Wait,” she said gently.

For a moment he was about to answer, then he clapped his hand to his head, inside which he had heard her. His half-blood had made mind speech a rare incoherent thing. To receive so strongly thrilled him. As the hero Raldnor himself had once done, he fell in love with a woman for allowing him one moment’s sheer telepathy.

When she lowered the bucket into the well, he let her do it, unprotesting. When the bucket came up, she dipped in her jar.

He had been looking at her, not the bucket, but sounds alerted him. He looked at the jar, then, and saw it was wet.

Under the steps, the women had seen too. One exclaimed. They gestured toward her.

Then she offered the jar to him.

“Drink.”

The word—but it was not a word—stood bright as glass in his brain. He found he was trembling as he reached and took the jar and brought it to his mouth. Then the trembling stopped and he let out a roar.

Heads turned all about.

The young man was in an ecstasy of incredulous delight, almost fury. “It’s wine!”

People came hurrying, questioning, calling.

“A trick!”

“Magic!”

The girl stepped aside, and let them lower and raise the bucket for themselves; taste, vociferate, pour away, lower again and raise again and taste again and shout at each other.

The noise grew into hubbub.

Watching from his window that looked out across the market, the Vardian, Haut, felt himself also begin to tremble once more. He had known the well was dry, the Xarabian landlord had explained that. Haut heard the cries. He understood she had not required his presence, but now he felt impelled to go into the Lepasin, to become involved in what was happening.

It was part of the repertoire of magical religious conjurings intrinsic to his continent, especially to Shansar. The symbolic metamorphoses: A staff or a sword to a snake, air into fire, the blasting of trees into stone, or the bringing out from stone of water, the changing of water into blood for a curse, and into wine for a blessing. As with the rest she had shown him, he was ethnically at home with it. Yet something now made him want to taste the wine, and perhaps to weep.

When he had pushed beyond the door, one of Haut’s servants caught his arm.

“You know what’s done, sir?” Haut nodded. “They’re trying to buy the wine from her.”

Haut laughed after all, his commercial bone tickled.

You did not buy miracles.

The excitement and coming and going about the well of wine went on until the heat of noonday. The activities of the market were suspended, or carried on half-heartedly. Whoever came new to the scene was told. The dry well did not run dry.

As for the girl, she sat by the well on the topmost step, quite composed, gazing into the faces of those who approached, or away across them all. It was as if she waited, but whether for some sign from the crowd, or from within herself, or out of the sky, was not certain.

Those who knew or had discovered Haut belonged to her, sought him.

“Does she never speak?”

“She doesn’t speak aloud. Just within. She’s Amanackire.”

“Where did she come from? Over the sea?”

“My land? No. I found her in Lanelyr.”

He was a celebrity, since he accompanied one. He stretched and basked, not minding it. The wine was yellow, very clear, a Lowland vintage. Everyone had drunk the wine. He had drunk it. Perhaps he was altered.

Slightly astonished, he found he was comfortably dozing on his bench, his back to the wall. It was very hot. Something so strange was happening, but it was quite acceptable, a perfect fit.

The Lepasin was packed like a cupboard. On the upper terraces they reclined on their sides over the cracked stone and bleached grass, under makeshift parasols. People sat in windows and doorways. A handful had climbed the ruinous facades of the two palaces. Haut could even see the noble bearded faces of some of his sheep peering down between the columns.

The sun passed from the zenith.

The girl rose from the top step of the well.

They watched her as she walked down, and across the market. A vast number got up, unbidden, unrefused, and went after her.

She walked about the ruined city, through its scoured shells and dusty streets.

Twenty or thirty paces behind her, the crowd followed. At any spot she seemed to wish to traverse, where sections of masonry might have collapsed and blocked the way, young men, usually headed by a blond Xarabian, would run ahead with yells and laughter and the fume of dust, to design her a path.

She seemed to know history well.

She walked to the house that had once given shelter to a man called Orhvan, who in turn had sheltered there Raldnor—and, unwittingly, the traitor Ras. She went in at the door and through the round hall alone, and out again, and on. She moved into the upper quarter to the house once belonging to the Ommos, Yr Dakan, but did not enter. The Zarok-pillars outside had long since been crushed by mallets. She crossed the city to the stagnant palace from which the Dortharian garrison had held the Plains, rung its curfew bell, planned its rapine and sadism, and where, on the night of Awakening, it had died screaming in its blood at Raldnor’s word.

She entered the long cold vaults of this palace and lingered. Only a few accompanied her there, to see her and to see her safe. Men seldom ventured into the building. It was reckoned unlucky by the mixes and the Vis, a thing of pain and sorrow to those pure Lowlanders on the edge of their kind.

There were a few other places she visited. Another house that Raldnor had occupied. The makeshift forge where the first Dortharian sword had been seared with a crude but passionate emblem of Anackire, and still hung on a post, rusting now. The street where they said Raldnor had slain a huge white wolf.

The sun lowered itself on golden chains.

The crowd was footsore, some elated and chattering, some losing the thread, wondering why they had followed her, what she was that they should have done so, the little slight figure of a young girl, who never looked back at them.

The shadows were long spills of cinnabar when she led them again into the Lepasin. The black broken column-shafts of the palaces streaked a carnelian sky, darted with purple birds.

Those persons who had remained in the market had cleared their booths for the night and gone away. Only here and there vigil was kept by a lighted lamp. Lamps had been woken also in the windows round about, where watchers leaned to look forth.

The girl walked to the northeastern terrace and up the steps of the undry well. The glow of the western sky edged her, so she also glowed against the dark stone.

A huge stillness balanced between heaven and earth. The birds had settled, no wind blew. The sunset hesitated.

Something was about to happen. It would be impossible not to know as much. The Vis in the Lepasin afraid and voracious, stood on mental tiptoe. The Lowlanders felt an aching of some old wound of the heart.

The girl lifted her arms.

Haut the Vardian, sometime drover of all kinds of flesh, purveyor of sheep, slave-trader, experienced the floating sensation known in the prayer-towers of the Sister Continent, where the soul could loosen in the body, letting go. All around, the crowd swayed, giving up concentrated emotion into the air. There was a sound now, an unheard sound, like the plucking over and over of a single noteless harpstring.

The girl seemed to contain fire, an alabaster lamp—her hair stirred, flickered, gushed upward, blowing flame in a wind that did not blow.

The crowd groaned. Not fear. It was like a love-cry.

What came next was sudden.

Light shot up the sky, a tower of light, beginning where the girl stood, or had been standing, for either the intensity of the light made her invisible, or she had herself become the light. For half a second, then, there was only the light. Then the light took form.

The form it took was Anackire.

She towered. She soared. Her flesh was a white mountain, Her snake’s tail a river of fire in spate. Her golden head touched the apex of the sky, and there the serpents of Her hair snapped like lightnings, causing lightnings.

So tall, so far off, the unhuman face was almost lost, indistinct even as it bent toward them. A necklace of sun-touched cloud encircled Her throat, cloud which, even as they stared, uncoiled and drifted from Her. Her eyes were twin suns. They blinded, they were so bright. The eight arms, outheld as the two arms of the girl had been, rested weightless on the air, the wrists, the long fingers, subtly moving.

The torrential tail of the snake flexed.

She was alive. She gazed at them, and unable to meet Her gaze they threw themselves down, or fell down, losing consciousness.

Anackire remained before them five eternal seconds. Then the sheen of her became, all of it, unbearably effulgent, a searing whiteness which abruptly went out, leaving only the black aftershadow on the dying sunset; presently, not even that.

As some sense came back to him, Haut beheld the girl standing before the well, unblasted by the entity she had released. She seemed in her turn only quiescent, not drained. And he saw at last her face, as it had always been, was the face of Anackire.

Leaving her mistress for the night, romantic Yeiza hoped the antechambers would be roused by the arrival of the Storm Lord. But the candle-flickering rooms stayed calm as stagnant pools. As usual, the doors were not flung open to admit the handsome white-haired King, vivid with his lust.

He might have had his given bride at once, the betrothal permitted that. But startling matters had intervened—the unexpected revelation of the Prince Rarmon, and then envoy from Karmiss presaging dealings so far unannounced. Tomorrow, however, was the marriage day. Yeiza had directed Ulis Anet’s maids in laying out the lovely garments, the jeweled headdress, the oils made from all the flowers of love. By tomorrow evening, the Princess’ suite would have been moved into another sector of the palace. She would be one of the High King’s fifteen lesser wives. And could it be, exquisite emblem of Xarabiss that she was, she would not even have a night with him? It was a fact, all Raldanash’s wives, the lesser, and the higher—those blonde queens from the other continent—were strangely and unfortunately every one of them barren. Some of the concubines had had children, but they were not legitimate, nor did they at all resemble the Vathcrian King.

Could he be impotent? It was also a fact, the King kept no boys to pleasure him, either.

The gods—the goddess—could not, surely, desire the legal line of the hero Raldnor to perish?

As Yeiza came out through a door into one of the garden courts, a man’s hand gripped her wrist. She gave a squeal, but the palace nights were full of amorous squeakings. It would require a determined scream to fetch the guard. Before she could take breath for it, she recognized the handsome face in the light from the doorway.

“Lord Iros—”

“Is he with her?”

“You mean the King? It’s his right to be,” said Yeiza defiantly.

“Not what I asked you, slut.”

“I’m no—”

“Answer me, or I’ll break your wrist.”

Yeiza believed him. She did not care for Iros, though his looks fascinated her. While, in a way, not caring for him had increased her interest.

“No then. She’s alone. My lord—you can’t go in.”

“I’ve bribed seven men to make sure I can. How do you think I got so far unchallenged?”

“If anyone found you with her, she’d die, and so would you.”

“Who’s to find us? Not him, for sure. Unless you betray me.”

Yeiza gazed into Iros’ blazing eyes and quailed. When he dragged her to him and kissed her, she yielded, melting in his heat though she knew it was banked for another. When he pushed her aside she almost sank to the grass. The door shut. Insulted and pleased, she discovered he had dropped a gold coin between her breasts as he caressed them.

The King’s regard contained a constant remote familiarity. Nothing had changed this. One sensed it never would change.

“Good evening, Rarmon.”

“Good evening, my lord. I regret I was delayed.”

“I gather I called you here straight from your chariot. You were riding in the hills?”

“In the ruined city, my lord.”

“Koramvis . . . yes. We all go to look at that. But you’ve been there more than once.”

Rarmon said nothing. It was not out of the question his half-brother the King would have him observed. It was too soon in Rarmon’s own ascent to arrange similar courtesies. His guards, were Raldanash’s soldiers. Even hired men from the streets were not advisable at this juncture.

He had not been privately in the Storm Lord’s presence since that bizarre night of the Amanackire judgment. He had seen Raldanash, of course, and been publicly recognized by him, to the consternation of the council. Warden Vencrek, one deduced, would also have set his own, more prosaic, investigation under way. Meanwhile, the crowds had cheered, an arresting noise to hear for oneself.

This summons was not entirely unexpected, however. Rarmon had at least heard of the arrival of a Karmian envoy. Though his past had not been brandished, or even elaborated upon, Rarmon had given some outline of it from necessity. Raldanash knew he had been Kesarh’s man almost two years.

Sure, enough. Raldanash said, “It seems I must go east. Officially it will be a progress. The Karmian King has sent a man across to Dorthar, a valued councilor, I intend to meet with in person, near Kuma. War games, naturally. You’ll recall how Karmis crippled the ships of Free Zakoris.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I’d like your opinion on the policies that are put forward, since you have some understanding of the aims and mind of Kesarh. You’ll come with me.”

Rarmon gave an acquiescing nod. It had occurred to him, obviously that though the King might care for his advice, he might also prefer to have the bastard brother safely at his side when away from Anackyra.

“There’s to be secrecy. The Free Zakorians have spies in Dorthar. I shall leave tomorrow. The more surprise to the capital the better.”

Something else suggested itself.

“I take it, sir, you’ll spare time to marry the Xarabian princess first.”

“Yes. I don’t want to insult Xarabiss. I’ll be taking her with me, it helps give reasons for such a progress—a show of the land to my new bride. Thann Xa’ath should be flattered. None of the other women had such treatment.” Raldanash did not smile. His eyes seemed far away, held by distant things, that looked like vistas neither of concupiscence nor of war. “So I must give you another task, that of messenger to Ulis Anet. Go tonight to her apartments and tell her my news. She’s to be ready to leave once the morning’s ceremony is concluded.”

Rarmon allowed a moment or two to pass. Then he said, “It’s late. She may have retired.”

“Take a couple of guard with you, and a chamberlain, enough to make it formal. Wait for the women to fetch her. She should be told personally of the journey—but not the Karmian matter. I shall see to that later. And decorous apologies. You understand why I’m asking you to do it?”

Rarmon had ideas. He said, “No, sir.”

“Because etiquette demands someone of importance, while the fewer who are privy to the plan the better. Impress this also on my betrothed.”

“Yes, my lord.” Rarmon waited again, then said quietly, “and if she should wonder why on such a secret matter you yourself—”

Raldanash said flatly, “If I go myself, she’ll suppose I’ve arrived to claim betrothal rights in her bed.”

The frankness, rather than funny, was unnerving. Raldanash displayed no trace of anything, no self-consciousness, not even ruefulness.

It would be politic to say nothing.

Rarmon said nothing.

Outside, summoning two guard and sending for the chamberlain, Rarmon was aware of a further notion ranked with the rest. The King did not particularly want his latest wife, if he had wanted any of them. It might be convenient to fob her off with one’s dramatically important half-brother. Later, maybe, to discover the two of them, and have both executed. Rarmon could not assume Raldanash had learned his sexual preference, even after the psychic delving of the Amanackire. Incriminatory situations might, in any event, be stage-managed. Then again, Rarmon would not swear the King was capable of that. Actually, you could not be sure what the King was capable of, either for good or ill. His charisma was valid, but how he used such a utensil on the fields of life and kingship was not yet clear.

Turning from one gorgeous corridor to another, the chamberlain found his path blocked by the noteworthy son of Yannul, who—politely about to make way—perceived Rarmon and hailed him.

“Can I ask the favor of a word?” Lur Raldnor, now known as Lur Yannul about the palace, was a picture of casual equilibrium. His eyes looked into Rarmon’s and said This is vital and must be now. Rarmon stepped aside from the escort. He and Raldnor stood in the embrasure of a window.

“Is he going to Ulis tonight?”

“You mean Raldanash. No. I’m sent with a message.”

“Someone cast a rumor and has been spreading speculative gossip. The King’s reckoned to be rushing there to have his rights. Which is what Yeiza overheard.”

“Am I to take it the Princess isn’t alone?”

“That damnable clown Iros bribed a way in, through the garden. To get out he has to leave via the antechambers—guard changes—and the antechamber route, due to the rumor, is now awash with members of the entourage.”

“I see.”

“If there’s any hint she’s got a man with her now—you know the laws of Dorthar on adulterous treason. Raldnor just missed them by a dagger’s length, didn’t he?” Yannul’s son smiled, then laughed. Rarmon was not unimpressed by this actor’s camouflage. “Can you do anything?”

“Maybe. If neither of them panics.”

They beamed at each other and parted. Rarmon with his escort went on. Minutes later they were at the doors of the suite, the guards saluting. There were persons in the passage, too, hangers-on come to gawp.

When the doors were opened, Rarmon saw the interlinking anterooms were busy with people. Xarabian servants, even clerks loitering about, as if they might be needed to take letters. All of them looked disappointed not to have caught Raldanash in the act. Ulis Anet’s ladies, or most of them, were also to be seen. Luckily Yeiza, young and frightened though she was, had had the urge to come back.

The chamberlain announced Rarmon unnecessarily. The chamberlain portentously added that the Prince was here on the Storm Lord’s business. Everyone kept a straight face. Spoken in the theater, such words would have had the tiers in thigh-slapping uproar.

Rarmon intervened before the next speech. He thanked the concourse for attending, and dismissed them. His personal authority coupled neatly to his fame, and the rooms were nearly empty in less than a minute. Rarmon then addressed Yeiza, asked her to enter the bedchamber and represent him to her mistress.

There was the chance that Iros, being the impulse-ridden flamboyant he was, might rush from the room, flourishing a sword, sure Raldanash’s soldiers had come for him. But the murmurous noise had so far kept him pinned. Yeiza’s sinuous entry, drawing the inner door closed behind her, did not precipitate disaster.

Rarmon expected that Ulis Anet would master herself and come out, leaving the guilty evidence within.

He was surprised when Yeiza reappeared and said, “The Princess has not retired to bed, my lord. As the King’s brother and her illustrious kin, you may enter.”

This was all so absurd that for a moment he suspected the springing of a trap.

Then he walked into the bedchamber, wondering if Iros had been stuffed in a clothes closet, as in the sort of theatrical farce events seemed to be emulating.

But Iros was standing by the far wall in plain view. Ulis Anet, despite the lie garbed for bed, stood facing Rarmon. Yeiza shut the door, and leaned on it.

“As you see,” said the Princess, “we are at your mercy.”

Her voice was low, but not tremulous as Yeiza’s had been.

Noncommittally. Rarmon said, “I shall render you the King’s message. Then I’ll leave. You need not expect the King himself. In fifteen minutes it will be safe for the gentleman to depart. Using the anterooms, which I shall see are vacant, and wearing the unfashionable cloak I will have Yeiza send him. One more dawdling clerk.”

Iros swore, but had the sense to keep his voice down.

Ulis Anet did not take her eyes from Rarmon.

“You saved me from maiming and death during the earthquake. It must affront you to see me take such a stupid gamble as this.”

“Those risks you take voluntarily are nothing to do with me.”

“And this, my lord, had nothing to do with me.” She lifted her head and there was a tension to her eyes and lips. Again, unavoidably, he was reminded of Val Nardia, the uncanny physical likeness; but they were not the same. “Lord Rarmon, I feel I might trust you. I hope you’ll be my witness before this man that I didn’t invite him here, nor do I wish him here. In fact, my lord, I’m invoking your protection against him.”

Iros made a sound that was altogether too loud. He was gathering himself to speak or to shout, and Rarmon went to him and struck him across the head. Iros slumped back against the wall. Rarmon caught him by the throat.

“Be quiet. She denies you. You ventured this without her consent.”

Iros struggled, but his rage had grown flaccid. Rarmon let him go.

“The bitch can only deny me now, to protect herself.”

“Don’t call her names. If she’d cared to, she might have accused you of rape. If you’d valued her, you might have had the good manners to admit to it.”

Iros rubbed his jaw. He did not like his beauty bruised.

Rarmon said to him steadily, “I’ll be waiting for you in the North Walk, beyond the Fox Garden. Should you be late leaving here, I’ll be compelled to return. It will then have become a charge of rapine, for which you’ll answer to my own men.”

“You upstart slime of Karmiss, do you dare—”

Iros faltered in mid-cry. One did not serve with Kesarh and learn nothing.

“Try to remember,” Rarmon said, “who I have become here, and what you have remained. You’re a braggart and a clot, but you live. I can and will alter that condition if you persist in your folly.”

Later, in the North Walk, they met again for the briefest of conversations. It seemed by then Iros had begun to remember what Rarmon had become.

When at length the commander strode off through the topiary, Rarmon leaned on a pillar and watched the moon go down, and eventually the blazing heat of the amber ring went out. It had been burning from the instant Yannul’s son spoke to him in the corridors. Why? Some new warning? But one could not think of this and not think also of the child.

Eight years, nine years of age, she had shown herself as a woman of fourteen to him, in the flesh at Olm, a ghost in the ruins of Koramvis.

Where was she? No longer among wolves. What did she want from him? She had vanished when he moved toward her, the spell after all broken by proximity or outcry. Yet still there was the sense of something asked. Or to be asked. And the binding of the ring.

Strange, for he did not truly now believe in her anymore. He had no faith in her goddess.

14

After the king had left her, Ulis Anet sat a long while under the dying lamps, still as any other object in the tent.

It was a hilly road, to Kuma, and she had begun it in her bridal finery, the wedding flowers still fresh against her cheeks. When they settled their tents for the night on the rim of the hills, a scene spangled with torches and stars, to which she was becoming inured, a wedding gift arrived. A collar of golden kissing birds and clusters of fruits in rose-quartz and sapphire, with heavy earrings to match. It was all very proper, and more than adequate. She knew then he would be bound to come to her, and so he did.

The lamps had dimmed, the perfumes been sprinkled and the flagons of wine put to hand. Her women had arrayed her for the nuptial bed.

He arrived with an escort, men with torches, singing the marriage songs of Dorthar, perhaps of Vathcri, too, for there were foreign words mixed with the bawdy ones.

When they had gone, and the women gone, Raldanash was alone with her for the first time, in the closed and perfumed tent.

She had seen his beauty in the first chaotic moments on the Imperial Square. Instinctively, she had not responded to the beauty, as to anything positive. There could be no allure in it, it offered nothing. She knew he had not come here to make love to her, and she was right.

“I see you comprehend, Ulis,” he said at last.

She might have reigned her tongue, but she was angry, not specifically with him, with everything, a restrained courteous anger.

“No, my lord, I don’t. But I know what is required of me.”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, nothing.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “if that dismays you. It was never my choice, to bring you to a sterile pairing. We are both victims of policy.” He seated himself then, and said with no show of concern, “Because of policy, I must spend some time with you tonight, and for most of the nights of this journey. It would be thought odd if I did not, and might disgrace you. I realize such a sham may be offensive, but I think you appreciate the need. When we return to Anackyra, you’ll be able to make such arrangements as you prefer. Providing you are discreet, I shan’t tax you.”

“You’re telling me I may take lovers, my lord?”

“If you wish. That’s only fair, Ulis, since I will never be your lover.”

She marveled, even while she anticipated nothing else, at his coolness.

“You’re contravening every conjugal law and tradition of Dorthar,” she eventually said.

“Perhaps.”

“Is it,” she said, “that you cleave only to your fair women, the Queens of Shansar and—”

“I cleave to no women.” He almost smiled. He added, “And no men.”

Without warning she shuddered. She felt herself to have moved beyond her depth, and yet something prompted her to go further.

“You’ll think me impertinent, my lord,” she said, “if I ask you why.”

“You’ve every right to ask. Since all I shall offer you for these hours alone will be conversation, I can at least be honest with you.” He paused. He said, “There is a custom of the lands over the ocean, limited usually to priests, a giving of oneself to the goddess. It entails chastity, and chastity of the emotions. One does not make love, one does not love—anything—save the goddess and the earth which is Her expression. This offering was also demanded of me. I don’t mean that I was asked or instructed to do it. I mean that I knew in myself I belonged to this persuasion. In Vathcri, such men are called Sons of Ashkar. They are considered holy, and can sometimes work sorcery.

“Conversely, the moment I could reason, I grasped I was to leave my homeland and become High King here in the north. I was taught the responsibilities of kingship. To continue the dynasty my father founded was a necessary part of these. But it makes no difference. The voice within is always stronger than any cry without. One has only to listen. Raldnor’s line ends in me.”

“You could,” she said, “never bring yourself—”

“I’ve felt desire,” he said. “At Zastis, I was often tormented by desire. That’s past. I have mastered it, now.”

She could not contain her astonishment.

“This is some riddle, my lord.”

“No. The Vis have no organized cult of celibacy as a source of Power. The Lowland people, the Amanackire, have always had it. To some extent, my people also. To repress the sexual energies of the flesh is not some horrid fruitless penance, such as a Vis priest might set a wrong-doer. Libido is a power that may be transmuted, stored, used as another power. The Amanackire have long been famed for secret carnal temple love. Time out of mind they knew how to structure the act of sex and wield the pleasure-spasm as a lightning bolt of magic energy. Contained and channeled, such energy is equally valuable. Is it so curious that the mechanisms employed in generating life itself are also capable of generating an alternate force of creation?”

The nakedness of his speech, coupled to his impassivity, disturbed her. She said nothing else on the subject and he, surprising her again with his social abilities, guided them into a discussion of Xarabiss. During the two hours he spent with her, he also mentioned the true purpose of their journey to Kuma. She had known there must be something.

When he left she was numbed, but as the numbness wore away Ulis Anet was repelled to find herself aroused and tingling, as if at Zastis. The very sexual power he had described seemed conjured in the tent, a hungering cheated elemental.

Kuma too had been sacked in the War. Smudges of old conflagrations were bandaged by flowers and streamers. The town was almost as much amazed to see royalty bursting in upon it as Anackyra had been amazed to see her Storm Lord riding out. On the second day, a hunt was arranged in the eastern hills. The guardian protested, distraught. Last year there had been something of a drought in the region. Game was scarce. But the Storm Lord proved adamant in his fancy that game abounded and in his wish to pursue it. A third of the wagons went off with the hunting party, the royal pavilions, even the Queen, with a scatter of her Xarabian guard, and various ladies. If Kuma guessed itself a base for other more important adventures, the guardian remained unenlightened.

High on the heat-burned uplands, the imperial party was split again. Leaving the tents to blossom like flowers beside a shallow river, the King, his bastard brother, and some twenty-five guard, rode full tilt away up the slopes, the racing chariots roaring through the dust. For such ardent hunters, their tactics seemed rather poor.

From the peak of a brown hill it was possible to look out toward the sea, miles off, the great glitterings of a sleeping snake, under a sky of cobalt. It was also possible to look down into the valley below, and behold another hunting party. There was one dark tent, men and zeebas straying about.

The King gestured, and the banner of Anackyra was unfurled.

The second party answered promptly with their own device. It was not the Lily of Karmiss. Over the black cloth poured a scarlet lizard-beast.

Rarmon who had been Rem felt muscles clasp together all along his spine. He turned a little to Raldanash, but the tent flap was just then pulled aside. A figure came out and stood in the valley looking up at them. It was Kesarh.

The chariots sluiced forward.

“My lord,” Rarmon said decidedly, “this isn’t some counselor. It’s their King.”

“You recognize him?” Raldanash seemed unmoved. “I had a suspicion. He fought with his fleet, apparently, dressed as a common soldier. He likes the heart of things.”

They were over the brink, the vehicles lightly bowling into the valley.

Had Raldanash done more than suspect? Conceivably, he had known.

Rarmon, with no way out, geared his mind grimly to the confrontation.

Twenty yards off, the chariots pulled up. The white banner-bearer advanced, planted his standard and called out:

“Sir, you are in the presence of Raldanash, son of Raldnor son of Rehdon, Storm Lord of Dorthar, Dragon King of all Vis.”

There was no show from the other side. Kesarh walked forward, and rendered the Storm Lord that grave slight inclination of the head which one king owed another.

Eight years had added to the physical power natural to the man Rarmon remembered, and taken nothing of the style away. His build, like Rarmon’s own, remained a fighter’s, the body had stayed slim and lithe, and tough as iron. Between the right cheekbone and the eye there was a little scar, hardly the length of a child’s Fingernail. No other marks were displayed. The eight years had done something to the eyes themselves, to be sure. They seemed more deeply set, blacker, their gaze less penetrable, though the strength in them was flagrant now, and the evaluating watchfulness. Every last scrap of youthful formlessness seemed gone. Kesarh had become only himself.

He wore black, as ever, and unblazoned. Black-haired in the black he faced white-haired Raldanash in his pale leathers. That was almost theater again. They were two pieces of a board game.

Raldanash dismounted from his chariot.

“I hope Karmiss is well-governed in your absence.”

“I see I’m identified,” said Kesarh.

“My brother,” said Raldanash, “recalls you.”

Rarmon, too, had left his chariot. He began to approach them. It seemed one of the game-pieces was using Rarmon himself as a game-piece. Kesarh’s eyes were moving by the Storm Lord, finding Rarmon, fixing on him. Yes, the eyes were truly Kesarh. They could drive you to your knees. Rarmon walked nearer. Kesarh had recognized him now. Rarmon knew there would be no change of expression. As he came up by Raldanash, Kesarh said, with only the merest inflection, “Your brother, my lord?”

Raldanash did not reply, leaving the blade for Rarmon to pick up. Rarmon said, trying to keep from his tone the clichés either of explanation or insult, “Raldnor Am Anackire’s bastard, by his Karmian mistress.”

Kesarh went on looking at him. At Rarmon who had been Rem, who had merited ten lashes from a whip called Biter, who had milked snake poison at Tjis, who had ridden back with the rags of Val Nardia’s death too tardy to be of service, who had taken Kesarh’s daughter aboard Dhol’s ship. And who had not returned.

The black eyes said all this to him. They told him they had forgotten nothing.

Then the smile came, the brisk charm now and then awarded a servant.

“Yes,” Kesarh said, “I thought Karmiss was in it somewhere.” And to Raldanash, “Shall we go into the tent and talk business, my lord?”

The front of the tent had been looped aside, and afternoon light fell in on them. Thirty paces off, the guards, white and black, maintained their stations.

Kesarh had brought one aide to the table, and a clerk to take notes. Raldanash’s two men sat or stood beside their lord. Rarmon was left to sit farther up, his role as observer unspokenly stressed.

The wine was Karmian. Rarmon noticed the grapes had improved.

For an hour the discussion maundered. The victory of Kesarh’s ships was examined and approved, even the massacre of Ankabek touched on—“An impious cowardly act. The goddess will be paid in blood,” Kesarh remarked. He did not bother to glance at Rarmon anymore, who knew very well, and had probably detailed to others, the depths of Kesarh’s love of Anackire.

The Storm Lord in turn allowed his aides to name predations of Free Zakoris on Dorthar’s coasts. A system of northern and eastern coastal defenses, out of use since the War, had been re-established. There was no startling revelation in that.

Old Zakoris, for twenty-nine years under Vardish rule, was tossed on the table and regarded. It had of course no bargaining worth at all. Vathcri and Vardath were in firm alliance, and the Vardian claims, staked undeniably in battle, siege and surrender, could not be quashed. Yl Am Zakoris, in any case, was now beyond the appeasement of a returned diadem. All symptoms indicated it was the entire continent he lusted after, when he should be mighty enough to snap at it.

The second hour commenced.

Raldanash’s seated aide, taking a cue from Raldanash, desired of the air how many ships were left to Free Zakoris after the disastrous rout.

“Reports indicate ten ships escaped us,” said the Istrian aide. “These were the devils who destroyed Ankabek. Since the sacred island had been given military defense by King Kesarh, there could have been no less than ten in the offensive.”

Raldanash’s aide said ingenuously, “I’d heard Ankabek had no military defense. Having refused it on religious grounds,” he appended sweetly.

“You’re misinformed. A detachment of soldiery guarded the island, and a naval garrison was situated on a high vantage point of the Karmian mainland, looking across the straits and ready to put out should the goddess’ beacons be lit.”

Kesarh’s resonant voice cut effortlessly through this small under-play.

“Yl did not, besides, spend all his ships in the sea-fight. A quantity were left at Zakoris-In-Thaddra. The Thaddrian forests are prolific. They don’t lack for timber.”

“We’ve picked up word from Thaddrian sources of a second fleet of one hundred vessels,” said Raldanash’s aide.

Kesarh said, “My own sources indicate Yl has two fleets now stashed in deep-water bays along the northwestern shore. One hundred ships is certainly the tally of the smaller of these fleets.”

This was news. Raldanash’s aide scowled, and looked at the Storm Lord.

“Your sources are impeccable,” said Raldanash.

“No source is ever that.”

“What tidings do your sources give you,” said Raldanash, “of the Southern Road?”

Kesarh smiled, and poured wine for the Storm Lord and for himself, flustering the mobile Dortharian aide, who should have seen to it.

“You refer to Yl’s fabled highway being hacked through the jungle toward Vardian Zakoris?”

“And therefore toward the western limits of Dorthar.”

“Ah, yes. Yl uses it as a punishment for malefactors. The jungle resists every inch of the way. In ten years, only ten miles of road were secured. Even then, to keep it open, the slave gangs work day and night, or the forest would swallow it again.”

“Outposts of Vardian Zakoris have sighted smoke and burning forest,” said Raldanash’s aide. He waited to be stopped, was not, continued: “They look for rainy weather, and then fire the trees. The rain prevents it from spreading. But it clears the ground remarkably well.”

Kesarh’s face was blank. Looking at him, Rarmon read the blankness: Prior knowledge, obviously.

Kesarh said, “Your highness understands that Karmiss, one of your nearer neighbors and your devoted vassal, would move instantly to take Dorthar’s part.”

“Dorthar thanks you,” said Raldanash.

“And with Karmiss,” Kesarh said gently, “you may anticipate the support of Lan and Elyr.”

There was a lapse. Raldanash’s aide looked to his lord, then said, rather too loudly, “Lan keeps no army. Elyr is a wilderness.”

“There are, however,” said Kesarh, “young men in Lan and Elyr both able and eager to assume arms. A war-force will be levied.”

“The Lannic King has informed you of this?” said Raldanash.

“The Lannic King has accepted my brotherly advice,” said Kesarh. The stillness in the tent seemed to press hard against its walls of owar hide, even against the open wall of air. Kesarh drank from his cup, then nodded to the Istrian aide.

“The Lannic King,” said the Istrian, “feared incursion from Free Zakoris, and begged succor. Fifty-four days after the route of the Zakorian ships, my Lord Kesarh sent such generous help as he might spare.”

The lapse came again.

Suddenly Raldanash’s seated aide sprang to his feet. He was a mix, darker than his fellow, a good three quarters Dortharian. He glared straight at Kesarh and said hoarsely, “Storm Lord—he’s saying Karmiss has occupied Lan.”

“Sit down,” said Raldanash. He had not changed.

The aide sat. His hands were shaking.

Kesarh offered Raldanash the wine flagon. Raldanash moved his cup aside. He said, “Lord Kesarh, whatever you are saying, we would like it more plainly.”

Kesarh’s profile, as Rarmon studied it, was faultlessly composed. He might have been some merchant-prince debating trade.

“Very well, Storm Lord. I am, patently, your servant.” They all hung in the silence, and he let them hang. He said, “I was asked by Lan, who irrationally possesses no means to defend herself, to provide that defense. My ships now patrol her coastline to protect her from attack by sea. I have deployed men inland in case the naval cordon should founder.”

“How many men, my lord?”

Kesarh smiled at last.

“Enough.”

“Then Lan is invaded,” said Raldanash.

“No, Storm Lord. I was invited to enter. I intend that Lan herself will now form her own army. When she’s secure, Karmiss can withdraw her strengthening arm.”

Nobody laughed.

“It was done,” Kesarh went on, “without subterfuge. Karmian maneuvers might at any time have been observed. Possibly the defensive naval patrols which were inaugurated, following the horror at Ankabek, confused any watchers there were. The onset of the mercy mission to Lan may have been misconstrued as only more of these. Deception is not, however, my aim. Even before rumor reached you, my lord, I’ve rendered the story in person.”

“Well?” Raldanash said.

Rarmon demurred. “It turns out you hardly need my judgment.”

Chariots moved across the slope. The sun had grown heavier and swung low.

“No, I don’t need your judgment. But perhaps I should be interested.”

“He’s played the game so long, it’s in his blood—acquisition, conquest. He wanted Karmiss and got it. Now he wants more. He enjoys the getting. And he’s good at it.” Rarmon had never spoken so freely of his former master. He had no basic loyalty to Raldanash, and questioned himself, to see it there might still remain some tug toward Raldanash.

“What is it that he wants?” said Raldanash.

“The world, one mouthful at a time. But that’s the future. For now he’s dangerous because he has two roads to choose from.”

“Dorthar and, the Middle Lands,” said Raldanash. “Or Zakoris.”

“Yes, my lord. Exactly. He can ally with you, or send offers to Yl. He has the weight now to tip the balance. Dorthar caught between Free Zakoris and a Karmian Lan could grow uncomfortable. He’s shown you his hand. He concluded you’ll have scanned it correctly and will make a bid for him.”

“Yes.”

“Your advantage is that Zakoris has, at the moment, little to tempt him with.”

“Yl has a new counselor in Thaddra, a manipulator and strategist. They may find something to offer Kesarh. Aside of course from the ultimate partnering force whereby to take the world.”

“Yes, they can always offer that.”

“You reckon him so hungry?”

Rarmon said, “He was hungry all his youth. Suthamun threw him crusts and bones as if to a dog. It’s a disease now, the hunger. It’ll take a world to stop it.”

“You speak of him with great sureness,” said Raldanash. “As I supposed.”

“You knew he’d be here today, and not some minor prince.”

“It had occurred to me.”

“No, my lord,” Rarmon said. “You knew.”

The King’s charioteer shook the reins, and Raldanash’s chariot moved to join a black vehicle which stood against the stormy sun.

There were more of Kesarh’s men about than formerly. They must have been off on the farther hills. Even so, to stay here, negligent and at ease—that was an ominous display. They would not dare lay a finger on the Lord Kesarh, not even poison him at the sumptuous bucolic supper to which he had been invited, regal friend of Dorthar that he was. The very carelessness of his demeanor told them that his plans were properly shored up beyond any haphazard villainy one evening could see to.

The thunder began as they rode over the first hilltop.

It was not until the storm broke and the rain lashed down that Rarmon’s thoughts flung before him one extra facet. He wondered then as the chariot tore through sheets of water, if he should somehow warn Raldanash. There was, he noted, even a fleeting impulse to inform Kesarh.

Rarmon let both stimuli fade with a sense of conscious divorce.

Eight and a half years were gone. It might anyway mean nothing now, Val Nardia’s red-haired double seated before Kesarh at a banquet table.

Long after sunset, the rain swept down on the splendid little makeshift camp by the river.

In the King’s pavilion, fifty-six dishes were presented. There were even dancing girls from Dorthar, and Kumaian girls to serve the wine. But the officers had not brought their ladies, and the Storm Lord’s minor consort was also absent.

His message had come with the lighting of the lamps. Raldanash politely commanded her to avoid the pavilion. The occasion was festive but no longer social.

By the time the first concordance of dishes was carried out empty and the next relay gone into the great tent, loud with music and lights, she had heard the talk, Raldanash’s aides having been unable to contain it. Unbridled gossip scarcely counted. All Dorthar must presently learn.

Politics did not interest Ulis Anet, since she was required to play such a cursory role in them. She had felt no curiosity. Kesarh Am Karmiss was a name. That it promised to be the name of a tyrant and foe made her the more averse to contact with him, but even that merely in a desultory way.

Yet she was restless, and the confining tent, from which she had dismissed her women, did not please her.

Outside one of Iros’ men stood guard in the rain.

She considered her life as it was to be from now on, and to her humiliation found herself weeping. She had anticipated nothing; it was foolish to mourn because she had been wise.

The man stood brushing water from his cloak.

“Good evening,” Rarmon said, “Biyh.”

“Magnificent gods, Rem, I never thought you’d know me still.”

“And you’re still not thinking, Biyh. I’m no longer called ‘Rem.’”

The soldier from Istris faltered. Resentful, then resigned.

“Yes, you’ve come up in the world. I’m sorry, my lord.”

“Well,” Rarmon said, “you’re here from Kesarh. What does he want?”

“To see you.”

“He saw me at dinner.”

“Privately, Lord Rem—Rarmon.”

“No.”

Biyh goggled at him. He had been another Nine in Kesarh’s secret army. Unlike Rem, he had not particularly gone up in the world, being yet a soldier and a go-between.

“But my lord—” he broke out.

“Your King,” said Rarmon, “is aware how it will look if I’m come on skulking to or from his tent. I’m no longer in his pay. Be so helpful as to remind him.”

Biyh continued for a moment more, unbelieving. Then he went back into the rain.

Rarmon sat in the chair and waited.

There was a chance Kesarh might want to kill him, but assassination was unlikely here. This ground was diplomatic and acute, too brittle to withstand stray murders.

But the intrinsic information had not yet come. It could not be evaded.

He knew what Kesarh would do.

Less than half an hour later, two noisy torches evolved from the splashing night. Shouts were exchanged with Rarmon’s own men outside, one of whom tried to come in and was got from the way. Instead one of Kesarh’s guard strode in, set down a great jar of wine and withdrew. After him, Kesarh entered.

He seemed to fill the tent with an electric darkness. The impression was aphysical but overpowering.

This was how Rarmon had seen him last, at Istris, removing a wet cloak, the focus of the lamps, and the shadows.

“Our approach was well-lit and not quiet,” said Kesarh. “Your King doubtless already knows I’m here, and that he’s been let know it.”

Rarmon indicated the wine jar.

“Doctored? Or do I only merit a knife in the back?”

Kesarh looked at him.

“Stand up,” he said.

Slowly, and without emphasis, Rarmon stood.

Kesarh’s face gave no hint, no clue.

He said: “Now tell me where you left my sister’s child.”

Rarmon gathered himself who he had been, what he might be now, ordered these men and gave them speech.

“In Lan, my lord.”

“Where in Lan?”

“Pirates took Dhol’s ship. You’ll have heard of it. I got her to the shore. The girl went off with her when I slept.”

“You say you failed me, then. Did you search?”

“I searched.”

Kesarh gave him space to go on, and eventually said, “And found what?”

“Wolves.”

Rarmon brought out the word, and the claws of some fateful inexplicable thing closed on him. Why did he mislead? Because the supernatural alternative would not be acceptable? Because he hated Kesarh, or because he was still bound to Kesarh?

Perhaps Kesarh did not care, the child simply a loose end to be tied or cut away, no more. As Rarmon was a loose end to be killed or forgotten. Or killed and forgotten.

“And you didn’t dare come to me and tell me this,” Kesarh said at last.

“As you point out, I’d failed.”

“And then, after all, you discovered your heritage. And were able to convince Raldanash. I’ve heard he isn’t partial to women. Is that it?”

They were in Istris. This could be no other place.

Rarmon said nothing, and presently Kesarh took up one of the gold cups from a side table, and filled it from the wine jar. He drank without interest or thirst.

“Obviously,” he said, “it’s suggested itself to me you may already have known who you were in Karmiss. That you may have been gathering some sort of information to bring as a gift to your Lowlander-Vathcrian King.”

“No,” said Rarmon.

“On the other hand,” said Kesarh, handing him the tasted cup, “you could remain in Dorthar and send information as your gift to me.”

The rain was slackening. A train of thunder wracked the sky and ended twenty hills away.

“Lord Kesarh,” Rarmon said, “I’ve already proven an inadequate servant. Don’t dismiss what else I am. He and I are brothers.”

“Yes, you always were a prince, my Rem. Thief and cutthroat and mercenary. And prince.”

“And the son of Raldnor Am Anackire,” said Rarmon.

Kesarh’s eyes stayed on his, and then Am Karmiss reached out again and took back the cup Rarmon had not drunk from. Deliberately, Kesarh poured the wine on to the rugs. Tossing the cup to the table, he walked out of the tent.

Kesarh, Lord of Karmiss and Protector of Lan, returned across the Dortharian side of the encampment, toward the more modest Karmian bivouac over the river. His torches scrawled smoke behind him. The rain was finished.

The Storm Lord’s pavilion stood near the narrow stone bridge. Close by they had put up the tent of the latest surplus royal bride. The arms of Xarabiss glinted, catching light; the flaps had been pulled back to let in rain-washed coolness. Encased by the dark lamp-shine inside the tent, a woman sat reading.

The silhouetted image momentarily distracted Kesarh. Then was set aside.

In the last hour of that night season the Lowlanders called the Wolf-Watch, Kesarh came out of sleep and lay, his eyes wide on blackness.

He had been dreaming of Val Nardia’s witchcraft baby, or maybe only of the dead Prince-King, Emel. Kesarh could not reassemble the dream. It was already gone. But it had left him strung and tensed as if for violent action.

He rose, and drank from the ewer of wine and water.

While he did so, he painted for himself on the dark the face of a dying blond boy, and observed it, without remorse. Emel had been afraid, and had seemed to guess, even at nine years of age, that he was not expiring of plague but from something more contrived.

Beyond the palace, the crowds were already shouting for Kesarh. When Emel sank in coma, his regent left the death-bed. The next Kesarh saw of the child was the box of spices in which he had been hastily packed. The weather had reached its hottest. Kesarh malignly awarded Suthamun’s son a Vis tomb in the Karmian Hall of Kings, rather than Shansarian cremation. A draped coffin became necessary, the embalmers Raldnor Am Ioli had dispatched declaring a strangely poisonous corruption consumed the body, rendering their work impossible. These mutterings were swiftly quieted. Instead, when Kesarh spoke the funeral oration, the rabble wept. A month later it had shrieked him to the throne of Istris.

Emel’s memory dissolved.

It was the other child which had waylaid his sleep.

When Kesarh left the tent, the first pre-dawn pallor was in the sky. Men were already beginning to move about. At sunrise, the Karmians would depart. Aims were achieved. Dorthar had been assessed, and shown she was prepared to come courting.

Kesarh walked away from both campments, along the bank. Trees grew and tall, thick-stemmed reeds with tasseled heads. Night clung to the earth. The river, swelled a very little by the rain, ran shallowly over its stones.

Kesarh stood among the trees, looking down at the water.

The memory of the child would not go away. It was ironical, he had cared nothing for it. He had taken fewer pains with it than he had taken with Emel, whom he had killed. Even the sorcery had lost its impact, become unimportant. Years back, hearing of Dhol’s wreck, he had thought it dead.

Something glimmered in the shadow on the opposite bank.

So Kesarh looked up and saw, across the twilight and the low race of folding water, Val Nardia his sister.

The initial shock was nothing, like a blow, no more, for she might be unreal, imagined. But then awareness rushed to fill the void. The crepuscular sheen described her, the river held fragments of her reflection. She existed. The second shock was not sudden, a smooth rapid draining, just such as he had felt when told of her death. It left him hollow, and hollow he moved off the bank into the river.

It seemed she took half a step in retreat as he crossed toward her. But the half step was meaningless. The river was a symbol, crossing it another. She must remain, and remain she did, poised on the low shelf of rock, watching him, until he walked out of the water on to the rock and stood over her less than a foot away, and took her arms in his hands and felt silk and flesh and mortal warmth. Light was sinking through the treetops and the red of her hair, red as that Karmian flower, was the first color to come alive in the world.

“Ulis,” he said.

Hearing him speak her name, Ulis Anet could only stare at him. She seemed paralyzed, or enchanted, and could not even attempt to pull herself from his grasp.

She had lain awake all night, stifled by the tent, too tired to rise, her nerves too quickened to allow sleep. In the hour before dawn something had sent her in flight from the tent and the King’s camp. It was ill-considered, the deed of an adolescent. She had even left the guard, and concluding she sought the King, the guard had not argued. Now, alone and unprotected, she reached the margin of this emblematic river, and from the black wood had come a man clothed in black. That he was one of the Karmian’s officers she decided at once. Her own position was horrible. She meant to withdraw immediately, then she saw, even over the distance and in the dark, his eyes.

That was how he held her, merely by looking at her. His intensity, a compound of exceptional personal force directed solely at her, deprived her of volition. Stupidly she stood and awaited him, until he came out of the water on to the rock and took her by the arms.

The human contact was vital. Appalled at her own willingness, she gave in and let the power that streamed from his overwhelm her. She did not know him, but she had heard yesterday’s descriptions, and suddenly she recognized him as the Karmian King. In that moment he spoke her name.

His voice was a low rough sigh. Dimly and unreasonably she sensed that, while he was a stranger, she was not.

She could say nothing, do nothing.

“You’re not,” he said, “a ghost. So how are you here?”

His voice was level now, but the intensity sheared through it as through the black, devouring eyes.

Not a ghost—am someone dead for him, she thought. Still no words would come. She shook her head, and felt the grasp of his hands tighten on her.

“She’s lying in a mausoleum at Istris,” he said. “You can’t be her.” And, with a peculiar shift to mildness, almost casually: “Who are you, then?”

Her voice came from her, before she realized she could speak.

“You called me by my name.”

“Ulis,” he said.

Begun, the words came flooding, titles, meaning nothing at such an hour: “Ulis Anet Am Xarabiss, daughter of Thann Xa’ath, wife to Raldanash.” Is that, she thought, who I am?

His color had come back. The power persisted, beating on her like a dark sun, but the look which had been almost madness, that had ebbed away.

“One of the Storm Lord’s wives,” he said. He did not relinquish her, not the grip of hands, or eyes.

“But who is it,” she said, “that you believed me to be?”

“Not believed. That you are.”

“No,” she said, and for the first time struggled.

He meditated upon her, hands not slackening, until again she gave in.

“You must have been a child,” he said, “when she died. You’re the age now that she was then, Ulis Anet, wife of Raldanash of Dorthar.”

“Let me go,” she said, “my Lord Kesarh.”

He smiled a little, and his hands were gone. The marrow of her bones seemed to go with them.

It was an effort to turn from him. She constrained herself to do so, and then to move through the trees away from him. She knew herself the focus of his eyes, they mesmerized her, even now she did not see them. At the edge of the open hill she must look over her shoulder.

The sun had risen, he was blacker now than the shadows of the trees. It seemed to her he could have summoned her, drawing her soul toward him by means of some invisible nexus.

Once more she convinced herself to turn away.

The steps she took toward the Storm Lord’s camp were leaden and without strength.

Storms emphasized the journey to Anackyra.

The titbit rendered the Storm Lord in a black tent on the Kumaian hills, was now vehemently debated in the capital. Zakoris-In-Thaddra loomed on one side, Karmiss-In-Lan towered on the other.

Two such blades might close like pincers on the Middle Lands.

A dozen days after Raldanash’s arrival in the city, a convoy of three ships put out on the Inner Sea from Dorthar’s small western port of Thos. Their destination was the Sister Continent, and the bulk of their cargo was news. But it would be an embassy, to and fro, of months. Such ballast was precarious at best.

Storms tore Anackyra’s sky, and her council chambers.

Yannul’s son, standing in the princely apartments of Rarmon, said with desperate quietness, “He means to leave Lan spilled in the dirt under the Karmian’s heel.”

“Raldanash’s enemy is Free Zakoris,” Rarmon said. “Dorthar won’t expend her might against Karmiss. She dare not. Move troops out to Lan and Yl’s navy would come in on Dorthar behind them like high tide.”

“So Lan stays a chattel. You must be proud of your old master, Rem.”

This gauntlet was taken no notice of. “What do you mean to do?” was all Rarmon said.

“Go to Lan, what else? No letters can get through, nor have they. My family is there, and he’s given me little enough here. My father tried to warn me. I should have listened.”

“Would you listen to me?”

“You?” Lur Raldnor looked at him with youth’s blasting disdain. “I don’t know anymore which you run with, sir.”

“None.”

“Kesarh went to your tent with much show.”

“I left him no choice but to make a show of it. Which is how you, and the King, learned of the business.”

“Maybe. You must forgive my bad manners. I’m angry, you see. I do know this. Raldanash can strip me of my name but not my blood. I have his leave. I’m going home.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.” Lur Raldnor took one long breath, and was altered. “I’m sorry,” he said, “You wouldn’t even be in this corner of the earth if we hadn’t argued it.” His eyes were steady and clear. Rarmon sensed an invocation of that night in Zastis on Yannul’s terrace, the fireflies, and some feeling that was gone and would not come back. “Rem,” Lur Raldnor said, and now it was oversight not sarcasm, “you do understand that you put this mile of space between us, and not I? I’ve been listening since Amlan. You had only to call on me. You never have.”

“You never told me what you were offering me. The one thing I’d have taken I don’t think you could give.”

“There were other things. Perhaps you didn’t want those. Just something like sex when you needn’t look at my face or remember I can reason or that I’m alive, as you are. I still recall that time you said it was easier to kill a man than a beast.”

They stood without speaking then, until Lur Raldnor turned for the door.

“It’ll take forever if I have to sail from Xarabiss. But they say ships are putting in at Karith again.”

15

Under the heel of Karmiss, Lan shone with unaccustomed armaments. The unusual dust of marital passage contended with indigenous rain. The major garrison installed at Amlan currently occupied one of the larger warehouses of the port. A second detail was beneath tentage in the palace park. Elsewhere, substantial droves of Karmian military were lodged at every significant town. The highways between were patrolled, for Free Zakorians would, if they came, come to any spot and in any disguise. In the smaller villages, men were robbed and women abused in case they might hold Free Zakorian sympathies. Such offenses of the soldiery were localized, but severely punished by the Karmian High Command, when they could be proved. Which was very seldom.

Ships sailing to and from the port of Amlan received an escort that safeguarded them from Zakorian attack. The east harbors of northern Xarabiss, and of Ommos, were open again. As yet, from political tact, escorting Karmian galleys did not venture inside a five-mile limit of the Middle Lands.

There were other limits.

A Lannic curfew was in force, in order to regularize traffic and commerce.

The sound of that bell, clanging across the dusk, turned the blood of Yannul to ice. The first time he had heard it, Medaci had come running to him and sobbed in his arms like a child. The sound was too well remembered from the Shadowless Plains, Amrek’s curfew rung every sunset in the ruined Lowland city, the message of the mailed fist, and the edge of steel to come.

Now, standing at midday in the old audience chamber of Lan’s painted palace, Yannul reviewed the insecure scenes of his young manhood with uneasy foreboding. He had looked for peace with the years, at home.

Presently his host came in, Kesarh’s Chief of Command in Lan. He was the mix type made fashionable by Raldnor of Sar, dark-skinned and blond. He had the hero’s name, too. And all the Vis patina of display.

Wine and cakes were brought. They sat down before windows that gave a fine panorama of dripping feather trees and sodden tents, and a Karmian unit at drill in the mud.

“It goes without saying,” said Raldnor Am Ioli, “you see why you’ve been asked to come here.”

Yannul looked at him blandly.

“The great hero of Lan,” said Raldnor Am Ioli. “We had some difficulty in finding you, though you live so close. But the King was eventually persuaded to reveal your secret.”

“And how is the King these days?”

“His doctors assure me the fever’s broken.”

“Something you may have guessed,” said Yannul. “Lan is barbaric in its royalism. The King and Queen have an almost sorcerous significance to us. A sudden death would be—upsetting.”

Karmian Raldnor laughed.

“My dear Yannul, are you suggesting my Lord Kesarh has left any orders that your King and Queen should be murdered? That’s not kind, sir, to a benefactor. Your King himself invited the Lord Kesarh to send troops to Lan.”

“Our gratitude,” said Yannul, “flows like the rain.”

Karmian Raldnor was not without wits. He said softly, “But the rain’s stopped.”

There had, of course, been no invitation, save the invitation an unarmed country always offered to a predator. Karmian ships had docked at the port after their epic sea fight, been lauded and welcomed. They then lingered, for fear Lannic prophecies of stray Free Zakorian marauders should come to pass. After a while, a small party of troops marched to Amlan’s walls and offered its assistance to the King. He had not been so ingenuous as to accept it, but, with some Karmian influence already at the gates, they were let in. The crowds had cheered them, and thrown flowers. Ten days later, a thousand Karmian infantry and four hundred cavalry with chariots had landed, and swarmed along the port road. Their fellows had the gates by now and ushered them through into the capital. They were a preliminary. Inside a day, Lan was Lan no more.

Kesarh himself had not bothered to sail over. He had matters to see to elsewhere. The invasion was just his goodness at heart.

“Well,” said Karmian Raldnor, refilling Yannul’s full cup so it spilled, “what we desire of you is a small piece of spectacle.”

“My days as an acrobat are over.”

“Oh, I think not.” They smiled at each other. Raldnor Am Ioli said, “there’s been unease. We shouldn’t like it to spread. Your King, as soon as he’s fit, will address his subjects. I’d take it as a favor, sir, if you would be there, and add some encouraging words.”

“Encouragement to what?”

Raldnor Am Ioli sighed.

“You’re a respected, almost a mythical figure, Yannul. You know about policy. Assuage the people. Explain, Karmiss is their friend. That you yourself accept this as a fact.”

Yannul said, “Yes, it’s stopped raining, hasn’t it.”

There was a prolonged pause.

Karmian Raldnor said, “Think of all you enjoy, sir. Your villa-mansion and the land. Your wife—one of the Amanackire. I believe. Your sons. Treasures. It would be a pity to let it all go.”

“You’re threatening me?”

Karmian Raldnor said nothing.

“As you mentioned,” said Yannul. “I’m something of a hero in Lan. I told you how we are about our royalty. In a way, an aspect of that applies to me. Destroy me, and you could have trouble all the way to Lanelyr. I would deferentially remind you also that there are Shansarians, Vardians and other men of the second continent in this country, who stood by Lan’s neutrality in the War, and have since evolved flourishing business concerns on our soil: it would anger them to see those disrupted.”

“The Lord Kesarh is himself half Shansarian.”

“The Lord Kesarh, half Shansarian though he is, has tended to forget, I think, that simply because the Sister Continent is invisible from our own, it has not ceased to exist.”

“Now, I believe, you’re threatening me,” Karmian Raldnor said.

“Not at all,” said Yannul. “I’m only telling you that when the King publicly says whether it is you’ve asked him to say, I shall be indisposed.”

Raldnor Am Ioli, returning to his well-guarded palace apartment, evinced mild irritation.

In the long term, such stumbling blocks as Yannul would not matter. But here and now one could trip over them and go sprawling. Raldnor was anxious to impress Kesarh, though not from any of the fear-admiration the King seemed able to induce in his soldiery. Raldnor had not forgotten the cryptic tidings he had awarded himself in that council chamber at Istris: Once you were of no use to him, he would leave you to burn.

Raldnor Am Ioli the opportunist, had so far followed Kesarh’s dark planet into the ascendant. Raldnor had taken pains along the way to cement his luck. He had also learnt a lesson or two from Kesarh himself, and in this manner had come to execute some bold strokes in the line of insurance. Finding himself sent on this mission to take Lan and Elyr, Raldnor had decided that in his absence from Karmiss, certain routine but exhaustive investigations would be made into his affairs. He had accordingly left everything immaculate, and brought the only incriminating element with him, a touch of utter simplicity, or genius.

His thoughts turning on this eased him, and he consigned Yannul to later deliberation.

Raldnor went out into a private corridor and so walked into a modest room flung with Lannic cushions. In their midst, teasing a kalinx kitten, was the figure of a sullen girl. Her long blonde hair was plaited with ribbons, her fair skin had paint and ornaments upon it.

“Mella, if you tease that cat, it’ll bite you.”

The girl looked up and grimaced at him.

“Why must you—”

“You know I’m thinking of your well-being.”

Mella gnawed her mouth. She pulled the tail of the kalinx and was rewarded by a dagger-thrust of claws and teeth. Leaving the victim screeching, the kitten lied past Raldnor and down the corridor to a tiny window that provided escape.

Raldnor looked on. The remaining furious creature licked its wounds. Mella was known by his men to be a young mistress brought from the estate of Ioli. She was pretty in her way, and though her breasts were small and her feet somewhat on the large side, Raldnor was entitled to his personal taste in bed-girls.

“How long must we stay here?” Mella inquired eventually.

“You’re bored? My humble apologies. You know why I brought you, and you’ve some idea, I hope, as to the sort of action I have to take to ensure Kesarh’s purpose.”

“Kesarh,” said Mella. Her reedy voice was imbued by loathing.

“Yes. For now, Kesarh’s purpose. You’ll have to be patient, as I’ve often warned you, before you can indulge your hate of him.”

“And what of my hate for you?”

“Why should you hate me?” said Raldnor calmly. “I’m your savior. You should be grateful.”

“Grateful to have this done to me?” Mella’s torn hands suddenly dragged down her bodice. Raldnor looked away. He found the sight faintly revolting, though he had once traveled in woman-hating Ommos, and been shown such things as a commonplace.

“Yes,” he said, gazing at the frescoes on the wall, “grateful. Because it’s kept you alive.”

“And will it,” said Mella with dreadful fifteen-year-old scorn, “give me my rights?”

“Keep your voice down. There are Karmian sentries beyond that window out there.”

“But will it?” Mella shrilled, and broke into a repulsive jeering laughter.

“Again, I’ve told you, such things can be managed. But your best safety lies for now in reticence. Or do you want to lose your tongue with the rest?”

Mella paled. Tears sluiced from her eyes and the paint ran. She sniveled at Raldnor’s feet. What an amalgam the thing was!

Medaci turned from the little garden and the ephemeral pale sun came in with her hair. “And must it be so?” “I think it must.”

She sat beside her husband and Yannul took her hand.

“It seems so strange,” she said.

“I promised you peace, here.”

“Is there peace anywhere?”

They stayed still awhile and remembered aloud to each other the past. Yannul understood the litany. It seemed to cry, We have survived all that and can now survive this.

But it would be hard to go away, to abandon the farm and the land, abandon Lan itself which in his youth he had abandoned cheerfully, knowing he could always come back. Fighting by Raldnor of Sar. Yannul had not been so certain of that. Yet he had lived, and taken his golden-haired girl with him at last across the sea and home. There came the first shock, then. The old farm in the hills was empty, most of the roof down, wild bis nesting in the walls. And, beyond the well, the marker of his mother’s grave. Finding one of his sisters in another valley, wed to a stranger, he heard of sickness and hard times, his two other sisters dying, one in childbirth. One of his brothers had gone to join the Lowland army, but did not get there, or if he had, was dead in Ommos or Dorthar, never having made himself known. More likely robbers or shipwreck had been responsible. The other brothers went north, hunters and seekers of the savage wilds. Yannul never found them. All this had been a series of blows across his heart. In the thick of danger himself, he had somehow never reckoned his family anything but safe. In the dark cold nights, they had beamed there for him, in Lan, a distant beacon that could never go out, his mother happily heavy with child as she seemed perpetually to be, his sisters singing and squabbling round the loom, or nursing birds fallen frozen by the door, and his brothers boasting that one day they would eat at the King’s table in Amlan. Well, Yannul had done that very thing. When he remembered remembering that, the blows had seemed to break his heart.

It was Medaci who comforted him. Not only with her words and her touch. By her presence. It came to him that though he had lost his kindred, still he had kindred. He had been enamored sexually of Medaci, fond of her, protective, but in that moment of revelation had begun to love her.

And then his country gave him riches. The villa-farm arose, clasped in the indigo hills which, as Rem had long ago concluded, seemed to hold everything of note in Lan. So there was largesse, and love; presently the boys came. Life heaped them with harvest.

When the shadow began to creep out of Free Zakoris they acknowledged it, for shadows must be acknowledged, and put it aside, for neither must shadows be allowed to drive out all the light.

The Karmian initiative was not looked for.

It was like snow in summer. The end of the world.

“Basjar’s a good man,” said Yannul now, “half Xarabian, a demon for finance and tricks, but trustworthy. He’ll keep the farm in perfect shape, if nothing happens. If the worst happens, he’ll salvage what he can and keep it by for us.” Medaci smiled. Basjar, Yannul’s agent, had always paid courtly love to her in his Xarabian way. She liked him. He was kind, lethal only to enemies. “To find Vardians to make the journey with is also a stroke of fortune,” said Yannul. “Karmiss is still careful of the yellow-haired races.” He had arranged their travel plans yesterday, as soon as he received his invitation to the palace. He had comprehended what that would mean, and had not erred. It would not take long for the blond Karmian to decide that, though Yannul might not be slain, there were other forms of coercion.

The Vardish caravan would wend southward at sun-up tomorrow, and they, Yannul, Medaci and the boy, would accompany it. She was Amanackire and his younger son, fair but for his dark eyes, could pass for it. They would be honored and protected all the way to Lanelyr. In Elyr, Karmian development was still haphazard. Once into the Shadowless Plains they were on the Middle Lands, where Karmiss dare not stake a claim. As yet.

They discussed these things and then Medaci said, “what if Lur Raldnor comes back?”

“The last letter placed him safe in Dorthar. The King would have more sense than to give him leave to return. Raldanash will have work for him.”

“But he might not listen to the King.”

“He’ll listen. Raldnor knows we’ll take care of ourselves. He’ll keep where he is and wait for news. When we reach the Plains, we can send word.”

“Yes,” she said.

She did not cry. Her eyes were only full of yearning, still fixed on her garden sweet with lilies, and shrubs which blossomed at night into fireflies.

The sudden picture came to him again, and Lowland ruin in the snow, blood on the streets and dead Dortharians, and the Amanackire passing like silent wolves with gleaming eyes. And then Yr Dakan’s house, with its own dead, Ommos this time. In the round hall, an indescribable thing hanging half-in, half-out of the Zarok god’s oven-belly. And nearer, crouched by the table, Medaci. She had stared at him, then jumped to her feet, running to the doorway, trying to escape by him. When Yannul caught her shoulders she screamed. And then she had flung herself against him. “Why was I made to kill him?” she had cried in terror, her tears burning through his clothes into his skin.

She had, with her doubt, rescued his sanity that night, and perhaps he had rescued hers.

But he knew, even in flight from the new oppressors, she was afraid to return to the Lowlands.

The army of Lan was already being formed.

Any Vis, or man of dark enough mixture, was from the twelfth year eligible. Or vulnerable. The levies were taken by demand, where necessary by force.

In Amlan, and the towns, a public exhortation was employed. All suitable candidates were ordered to report to the local Karmian station. Those who did not give up their sons or themselves and could not buy exemption, received a visit from Karmian soldiery. A parcel of carpenters’ lathes were chopped up on the cobbles, a chain or so of extra zeebas appropriated by the military, a few score beer jars smashed. That was normally enough to set an example. Youths and men arrived at the recruitment centers and became part of the Lannic militia. The lit Torch emblem of Lan was displayed over each makeshift barracks, under a great scarlet Salamander.

To civilization’s outposts—the little wild villages swept across the uplands, through the bowls of valleys—Kesarh’s troops proceeded and merely took. Men were dragged from their fields or out of their beds, and hauled, stunned and roped, toward a soldier’s life, leaving their women and children to wail and perhaps to starve behind them.

One witnessed such sights on the way south. In the north, rumor said, it was worse.

As the Vardish caravan came down toward the borderland of Lanelyr, it skirted a burning village. Out on the hill a couple of women had been raped to death. Several men, too old to interest the levy, lay about broken. Other women and livestock were being herded away to pleasure and feast Karmian warriors.

The Vardians refused to intervene. Not much, in any event, could be done. The Karmians were many. The dead were dead.

Beyond the scene, those mountains which were the spine of Lan, stood blind against the sky.

In Lanelyr, in the guardian’s house at Olm, Safca was dreaming. In the dream, a Lowland girl stood at her window, with a golden moon behind her head. Come and see, said the girl, but without words.

Safca approached the window with diffidence. She had never thought to meet the Lowlander again. Safca looked where the girl indicated, and noticed her window had a vista in the dream it did not have in actuality, looking out on the great mountains beyond the town. A huge snake was winding up the hills toward them, glittering. Then she saw it was not a snake, but streams of lights.

“Where are they going to?” Safca asked the Lowland girl.

The Lowland girl told her.

Safca was disbelieving, incredulous.

Then she saw that on the mountain tops the golden moon had become the shape of a luminescent woman with a serpent’s tail. For some reason, Safca laughed with delight.

When she woke she was still laughing. She found she knew the Lowlander’s name.

There were only fifty of King Kesarh’s soldiers in Olm. Two stone houses had been given them—the occupants had fled. Their captain had required quarters, for himself and his most immediate officers, in the palace. The levy began on the first morning, and the guardian himself went into the marketplace and instructed the Olmians to cooperate. Karmiss was aiding Lan toward a proper self-defense that was surely needed. There was no rebellion. The influx had been expected for days, and Olm’s population grown even smaller from the resultant exodus. Those who were left had already given in.

The Karmian captain was pleased with the guardian. The Karmian captain now shared the bed of the guardian’s legal and prettier daughter. The man made frequent proud allusions to his rise to power from lowly and insalubrious beginnings on wharfs of Istris. But the guardian’s legal daughter offered no objection, even seemed inclined to show off her lover.

Yalef, the guardian’s eldest son, had run to Elyr with a pack of gambling friends and some acrobat girls.

Safca, catching the blaze of the Salamander lifted above the palace gate, remembered her old anger at the men of Shansar and Vardath, her inchoate wishes for Vis valor to return. Here it was. She writhed with shame and disgust.

There was another reason. Discreetly offered, by her third brother, her own person for the duration, one of the Karmian sergeants had said, “The bitch is all shanks and no breasts, and where’ve I seen that face? On a jug without handles.”

She daydreamed of killing the man throughout the evening. Then, asleep, she dreamed of the Lowlander, the mountains, the lights, and Anackire.

In the morning, anticipated nowhere and with nothing to do, she considered the dream.

There had been, along with the chatter of the Karmian invasion, more frivolous tales of Lowland magic on the Plains, flower-garlanded crowds emanating from the black ruined city, lights and manifestations. One story, brought by a trader, had held Olm’s marketplace agog. Wolves loped with these mystic bands, it seemed, harmless and amiable. And there were snakes, naturally, wound round them with the flowers. Safca, recalling the great snake the Lowland girl had given to her, that she herself might be wound in it, had trembled. Was it that the girl had reached the Shadowless Plains and there led these occult revels? Was it that the girl, telepathic and powerful, had sent a vision to Safca?

Why? It was madness.

At length, Safca summoned the dream-diviner, a toothless crone who dwelled in a hut near the town gates that no one had held against Karmiss. Years before, the crone had interpreted a dream to Safca. Safca had never been sure she accepted the verdict. The woman heard all kinds of gossip, and was clever at guessing. Now it seemed she had guessed some other thing, and fled; she was not to be discovered.

It had been quite apparent where the lights of the dream had been going, even if the Lowland girl had not told Safca. At the heart of those mountains lay the ancient kingdom of Zor, rarely visited, difficult to come at over reeling passes, which in the cold months were inaccessible.

An almost faultless refuge.

Something bizarre began to happen to Safca. It was like a low sonorous vibration in her blood. She did not know what it was. She realized she had felt something of it in the vicinity of the Lowlander.

Now, Safca listened to the thrumming of her soul behind her bones.

All at once, the room where she was seated began to go. She was frightened, and called it back. But the voiceless harp string thrummed on and on.

Outside, the Olmish conscripts were being drilled in the square. A Karmian officer with a stick lashed them when they faltered, like slaves. Some days ago, one had been brutally whipped.

Down below, her sister chirruped, plying the Karmian captain with candied fruit. The two Corhlish monkeys, who were afraid of him, whimpered in a corner.

Safca became aware she was seeing and hearing things that were not to be seen and heard, physically, in this room.

“Ashni,” she whispered. That was the name of the Lowland girl. It had been left with her, and this had been left with her, though she had not known.

The room wavered again.

With a pang of terrified elation, this time, Safca let it go.

The veiled woman at the door of the makeshift barracks was carefully examined for any weapon. The two guards who examined her were very thorough and joked, enjoying it, telling her to enjoy it too. If it had been Zastis, she would have had more from them. They did not bother with her covered face, but probably would not have recognized it. Her bribe they accepted graciously. She had not been foolish enough to wear any jewelry, save the plain little necessary luck bracelet on her left wrist. To go in and entertain her man for the night seemed quite a sensible request. Such things had happened before.

The low stone hall into which the woman picked her way, the door of which was bolted behind her, contained two thirds of the recruited Lannic army of Olm, about two hundred men.

Many were elderly and should not have been involved, sport for sadistic Karmian leaders. Some were very young, children. Some were merely soft, unhappy, and a few of these lay weeping. They were all the fodder of war. But there was a core of men, itinerant hunters, wagoneers, builders of houses, even Olm’s own guards, strong men lying awake in anger.

Safca took out the stub of candle the guards had permitted and kindled it. Then taking up one of the empty lamps, she lit it in turn.

Men roused all about.

Even as the race of excitement, uninformed and random, spread over them, a Karmian came from behind a pillar, one last enemy she had not reckoned on. There was of course mixed blood in Kesarh’s army, though not many blond men at Olm. This one was, which made things seem worse.

“What’re you doing?” He caught her arm.

Safca, half blind with fear, raised her veil and smiled. She put her free hand to her hair, loosening it from its pins.

“The lordly captain sent me to spice your night.”

Her voice shook so it was a wonder he heard it. She shrank, even in this extremity, lest he should think her too unappetizing to be of use, but he grunted and began to pull her back behind the pillar.

“All right. But why light the lamp, brainless mare?”

He was already busy pawing her groin when she brought herself to do what she had known she must, and ran her hairpin in through his ear. The noises he made were muffled but hideous. They did not continue long. It was a fighter’s gambit she had heard Yalef mention, years ago.

Once the man fell, Safca fell beside him and vomited, trying to expel the heart from her body.

When she came to herself, one of the Lannic recruits was holding her head. She struggled away, and he said, “Lady, we saw. Did the guardian send you to such debasement, to play whore to our jail? Don’t fret. One of us’ll say we did it to him.” And there came a dull mutter of agreement. She looked up, her veil clutched to her mouth, and saw thirty or so men grouped around. “They’re only sending us to feed Free Zakoris,” said the Lan. “Better to die here.” Across his shoulders she saw the tail ends of whip marks and realized why he was too feverish to sleep, and too resentful to want life.

Safca got to her feet with help from the pillar. When they handed her water, she drank it.

“There’s no need,” she said, “to die.” They stared at her warily, knowing before she could tell them, the way the desperate sometimes will, that she was a messenger of reprieve. “If you’ve the courage, you can take the Karmians unaware and slaughter them.”

“But, lady, rid ourselves of these, and others will come. We’d be hounded, taken. And our families killed without mercy.”

“There’s one place they can’t hound us to,” she said. They waited. “The Zor.”

There was a great stillness.

A merchant’s son said to her, “The trek up there is hard. Impossible. How many would survive the journey? And what’s at the end? Ruins. The cold months are coming. We’d perish. We’d lose everything.”

“You’ve already lost everything,” she said, startling herself with her own crispness. “Kesarh Am Karmiss took it. Let’s attempt freedom. Or would you rather end in battle—battle with Leopard Zakoris, or with Dorthar, or any other land black Kesarh thinks he can engage?”

The growling noise came again, stronger.

The man drunk with fever said, “She’s risked her life to tell us this.”

Safca said, slowly, her voice gone deeper, thrilling herself, and them: “I had a vision. The goddess Anack instructed me to do this.”

In that moment she had them. She saw herself surrounded by men, some of whom were young and noble, and their faces were full of light that had come from her. She had never before caused any man to look at her in this way.

The jailer was already dead and someone took his sword. Minutes after, Safca’s frenzied screams brought the guards from above to unbolt the door, and she had the dubious joy of seeing them cut down.

Untrammeled, Lans swarmed through the stone house. There were sword racks farther up. They slew every Karmian they found, and later, spilling in the street, slew others. In the house across the way the Karmian soldiery had got wind of violence and put up barricades. Even as external Lans were beating these flat, the Lans inside, catching also the scent of what was happening, perhaps even by some sort of telepathy, took the invaders from the rear.

So it must have been in the Lowlands, Safca thought, the night about her full of running flames, cries and shouts. But before even the curiosity of this idea, which compared Lans to the Amanackire, could unnerve her, she was picked up bodily and carried by blood-stained men into the marketplace amid the torches. Someone was ringing the curfew bell. All about, Olm was gushing forth into the night.

When the Karmian command came from the palace they were murdered to a man.

High on an upturned cart, then, Safca must address the horde of people, their frightened faces, or the victorious faces of those who had already torn free.

What must I say?

But she already knew. She held out her hands to them and was unbearably moved by the night, the fires, the depth of what had sprung from her.

“Anackire,” she said, and there rose a peculiar sighing sob from the heart of the crowd. “Anackire has come to us, as she came long ago, and to all those who are oppressed. Anackire is in the mountains, the black-haired serpent goddess of Lan.”

Within five days they were ready, and traveling. Provisions and persons had come from some of Olm’s villages around about, villages that had seemed deserted and bare since the advent of Karmiss. Most of Olm moved toward the mountains. They even had a Zorish girl, a snake dancer, to act as their guide.

Those who would not go with them they left behind with token injuries, so the Karmians who came later might hold them blameless. The guardian was one of these. Even as the riot of townspeople evacuated Olm, he was scribbling dispatches, left-handed, for Kesarh’s High Command at Amlan, the other arm in a sling. He had begged the Lan with the sword to slice deep. Now the wound was festering nicely. No one would be able to blame the guardian.

The roads that led into the foothills were gentle. The rain held off at first. The Free Lans came on late flowers and wove garlands, and sometimes sang as they moved toward the Zor.

The rain, that was not necessarily Lannic gratitude, was coming down again when the Vardish caravan made camp in the hills. A cold wind was blowing, too; summer ending, with the world.

There had been trouble at Olm, they had been informed of it earlier. Just before sunset, a detachment of Karmian soldiery went clattering by, riding in that direction. The caravan took heed and crossed Olm from its inventory of stops.

It was a wretched night.

Huddled in one quarter of a wagon with their curtailed belongings, Yannul sat watching Medaci make beautiful beadwork with a slender bone needle. Their younger son was down at the fires under the awning, dicing with a Vardian boy.

Suddenly there was fresh clatter and noise. Three riders erupted into the wagon camp, dramatically fire-lit through the lines of rain.

Yannul thought for a moment they were Karmian pursuers, and his hand went to his knife. Then a man’s voice roared out:

“We mean no harm. I bring word to any Lan who may be here.”

There were no Lans that he could see, but undeterred, the spokesman shouted again: “The word is this—one part of Lan stays free. Any who would join Free Lan, come a mile east, to the rock with four trees. We’ll wait there one hour. A caution. Those who seek us seek in friendship. This”—and the man whipped out a sword, cleaving water—“waits for the tirr of Karmiss, or for any traitor.”

Then the zeebas wheeled. The men were gone, leaving the Vardians to yell.

Yannul’s younger son was running toward the wagon from the fire.

Yannul said, “That was a Karmian sword. Karmian mail he had on, too.”

“What is it?” Medaci said.

“I don’t know. A small uprising. Olm, maybe.”

She looked at him, her lovely eyes all flames and rain.

“Go then,” she said. “See.”

Their telepathy was erratic and always surprised him. He kissed her, left her to explain to their son, and went to get a mount.

He followed the three Lans so close they paused for him a quarter mile from the camp, swords out, frowning.

Riding up to them, he thought, with a kind of dull laughter, This is Raldnor’s time all over again.

“Halt. Who are you?”

“My name’s Yannul. I’m a Lan, like you.”

“Yannul.”

They looked at each other. One said, “He would be the right age. His hair’s long. They say he wears it that way. But he’s in Dorthar.”

Another said, “Don’t be a fool. Of course it’s him. I saw his son at Zastis, in Olm. Talked to him. This is Yannul.”

They got around to asking Yannul, then.

“Yes,” he said, “I fought with Raldnor son of Rehdon.” They sat tense as drums and stared at him through the river-running night. “Now,” Yannul said, “what’s your story?”

After a while, they crowded under an overhang. He heard it better there, what had happened at Olm, and about the princess who was a priestess, to whom Anackire had sent a dream. They were going to the Zor. The main party were up in the foothills. But Olmish riders were still going about the villages, stirring others to follow.

Something of their vehemence struck tinder in Yannul; then it died. They were already entreating him to add the weight of his figurehead to their enterprise when he felt himself step inwardly away. I’m past all this. Heroes and miracles. I want the south, and security for her and the boy, and quiet.

“And your woman,” one said, “your wife—she’s Amanackire.”

He said something, afterward he could not remember what, but it sobered them down. He explained he wished them well. He said he was going to the Middle Lands.

One of them muttered, “Raldanash’ll need him. The Black Leopard of Free Zakoris one side, the bloody Salamander the other.”

There were some soaked awkward courtesies.

Not long after, he rode away, back to the Vardian wagons.

Medaci was seated under the awning now, by the fire, with their younger son, whose dark eyes shone. Yannul shook his head at them. Sitting down, he told softly what he had learned, what he thought of it. No Vardians came up to pry. Traders, they were inquisitive but also uneager to know too much of anything. Vardath’s main force was elsewhere too, after all.

“There are scarcely a thousand of them, mostly women and children, I’d surmise. If the snows come early, and they do up there in the mountains, they’ll die. More dignified than death for Karmiss, perhaps. Still death.”

“But Yannul,” Medaci said. “Yannul, Yannul.”

“What?”

“Your country,” she said.

“My country’s all this, not a sad little rebellion herding up a rock.”

“Your country,” she said again. “It’s everything you are. It’s almost your soul, Yannul.”

“Oh, yes. That’s why I left it. That’s why I fought with Raldnor for your people, when mine wouldn’t raise a sword.”

“And like your soul,” she said, “it was a part of you, wherever you went, or fought.”

“Then it’ll be with me in the Plains. Or Xarabiss. Or wherever.”

“No,” she said. “The day the curfew sounded at Amlan, you held me. You said, Lan is Lan no more.”

Yannul looked away. His eyes were full of tears and he chided himself.

“But the heart of Lan stays free,” she said. Something in her way of speaking made him gaze back at her. “We have no country,” she said. “The Amanackire, the Lowlanders, we are a race, but the land is Vis—we have no growing root, no physical soul but the vagrant spirit of our people and the star of the goddess.” He waited almost breathless. She had never spoken like this before in all the years he had been with her, lain with her, seen her carry and bear his sons, loved her. “But you made my people your people, Yannul. You made me your sister and your wife. And your land became my land. Yannul,” she said, it was only a whisper now, “the Zor, Free Lan, the mountains. Let’s go with them.”

She looked a girl again, no older than that day he first saw her in Dakan’s house. He was still gazing at her dumbfounded when their son said, “If Anackire called them. She won’t let them die. Can’t you see that, father?”

“Yes,” Yannul said vaguely, “I suppose I can.”

They traveled through the ashes of the night and all the next day. Yannul mastered the tracks and by-ways up into the higher foothills, which would take zeebas, and which must be taken on foot and the zeebas led. He had never come this way himself, but, a wanderer in his youth, he had been educated and not forgotten.

They had kept from their baggage only what was highly valuable or incorrigibly sentimental, paring down from the other paring down at the villa. The rest they sold for non-perishable foodstuffs. A group of the Vardians began to evince signs of wanting to accompany them, but had been dissuaded by their fellows. Farewells were coupled with good wishes. Ashkar go with you! some had called. Having acquired the tongue of the other continent while he was there, Yannul had spoken all along to the caravan in its own language, for which they respected him.

On the second night they ran into the three Lannic riders who had come to the wagon camp. They had now a bivouac of their own in a tall cave. There were five or six village men too, and seven women, and a quarrelsome pig. Everyone but the pig welcomed them heartily, without explanations.

They moved off before sunrise. The rain and storm winds, though making their own path treacherous, would help deter hunters. Apparently the Karmians were out on the lower hills, searching.

The guardian of Olm had been stripped of his drawers in the marketplace and given four blows with a rod. It had not done him good.

The first mountain flank, blue-gray, the hide of some primeval petrified beast, stretched dauntingly before them. Beyond, other mountains rose, a wall against the air.

There would be a pass, old as the hills themselves, partially choked by boulder-slips. Higher yet, there was an almost legendary way, carved hundreds of feet by nature, leveled by men. It was possible to get in and out of the Zor. The Zorians did so themselves, if seldom, peddlers, magicians, snake dancers, snakes.

They struggled all day, men, women, and zeebas, to climb that initial flank. The pig struggled not to climb it. At last, lamenting, the seven village women let it free. It cantered away, burping with rage, in a torrent of sliding stones.

They got over the flank in the sunset. The rain had paused. The sun descended blazing and red at their backs, laving the mountains before them.

After the sun had gone, pieces of it were seen to have remained, trapped in cracks and on spurs above.

They had reached the lower pass, and found the sprawling camp of Free Lan.

Safca started, nervous and defiant, meeting Yannul the hero. Even a momentary unworthy jealousy had filled her, for she had been both the mascot and the commander until now. They fury at herself—to be so petty. She seemed two persons, always at odds. But at least she was teaching herself how to have dialogue with her other self, to reason with it and tell it to be quiet.

And Yannul was an impressive man. The Amanackire woman had pleased the Olmish refugees, who paid her instant reverence. Safca was more able to accept this herself. Medaci reminded her somewhat of the Lowlander she had known, though they were very unlike in all things but coloring, and even that was not really the same. The guardian’s daughter did not mention the one named Ashni. It did not seem yet the time.

When eventually Yannul said, “You did so much, risked so much on the strength of a dream?” Safca challenged him across the fire: “Lord Yannul, so did you.”

His fine eyes fell. He looked tired and lined under his splendor.

“And I seem still to be doing it.”

He felt himself a faint distrust of Safca, an antagonism. He did not know what it was. She seemed honest, if impassioned, and had shown him so much honor he smiled.

Later, curled up with Medaci under an invented tent, he said, “Anack used to be a goddess of peace. Then She was a wargoddess. Now She instructs women to take up hairpins and knives and kill with them.”

Medaci shivered, and he was sorry. He was all too conscious that, in avoiding the phantoms of the Shadowless Plains, they had entered a situation uncannily similar. Olm, too, had slain its occupying garrison, and now sought to hide in a ruin. But then Medaci said, “That was Safca’s interpretation. So it was interpreted to us by Raldnor, in the past. To meet the sword with the sword. Perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps it’s another way Anackire shows us, but we never see it.”

He thought she fell asleep then, but after a while she said, “There was a story my grandmother told me, why the goddess is depicted with eight arms instead of two arms.”

“I’d heard it was from the spider,” he said. “Eight-armed, because the female spider is greater than the male.”

“No,” she said, laughing a little. He was glad of her laugh. “The story is this. An innocent came by chance into a grove on the Plains and found Anackire seated there. Being an innocent, he was not afraid, and the goddess was kind. They talked and presently he asked Her why, in Her statues, She was shown as eight-armed, seeing She was before him in the grove with only two arms. And Anackire replied: ‘It is because you are innocent that you see me in such a way. But the statues are carven by men who have seen me through other eyes.’ Then the innocent apologized, saying he didn’t understand her. Anackire answered, ‘My words you do not understand. My Self you do.’”

Yannul lay a long time, holding her, listening to the small noises of the exhausted camp. What she had said grew warm and drifting. Again he thought she slept, until she murmured, “Lur Raldnor.” But then she did sleep, and he soon slept, and forgot.

Five days along the pass, having negotiated fallen boulders, crawled through apertures, climbed over tremendous rock heaps, coaxing or forcing the zeebas and what livestock remained to them, they came out on an open platform of stone and were able to look down the long fraught way they had already come. It had not been an auspicious day. One of the unstable slips they had had to climb had tilted. A man was flung into a ravine below the pass. Although they had got the zeebas free, the cart had slithered after him, laden with flour and salted meat. At least, they did not scream as they fell. The man’s wife kept up for several miles the high desolate keening that might be used to mark death, until Safca, walking back to her on blistered feet, had reasoned grief to silence.

When fires were lit at dusk on the platform of stone, some Olmians looked down across the stony sides below. They were even able to make out the flank of the first mountain they had scaled. Before too long, they were also able to make out the many campfires spread along the entry to the pass.

“Karmians,” said Yannul.

The Lan who had been an officer in the Olmish palace guard, next a levy recruit, now a captain of this unmilitary march, considered. “They’re five days behind us.”

“They’re also lighter. We’ve got children, women, beasts, baggage. I’ve had dealings with a man who served Kesarh Am Karmiss. He said little, but his reactions were eloquent. If I were in Kesarh’s army, I wouldn’t want to let him down, either.”

They resumed progress two hours before dawn.

Yannul consulted the Zorish girl who was their guide. She was a strange creature, with black whiplike hair—snakelike hair, as her movements were snakelike. The Karmians had butchered her snake at Olm from superstitious dislike. One heard, the snakepits were gone from the temples of Istris. Very little was known of a Zor dancer’s relation with the serpent partner, but it had long been accepted among scholars as a spiritual one. The snake could be a familiar, conceivably a friend. The girl was full of wordless anger and woe, and this added to the difficulties of stilted speech. The Zor spoke the Vis tongue, but wound into some older or parallel language, its accent more appealing but less understandable than the guttural slur of Ommos, Zakoris or Alisaar. To make matters worse, the girl had never seen her own land. Her mother bore her in Lan and taught her there the snake dance. Though she knew of the passes, Vashtuh had never used them, until now.

“The upper pass, do you remember how far it should be, Vashtuh?”

“Ten days, and then ten days,” she said. Or he thought she did.

“How do we find it?”

“A cave. Through the mountain.”

It rained. The rain turned to hail, daggers flashing through the air, striking starbursts of pallid fire from the sides of the mountains that now went up sheer to either side of them. Sometimes stones fell, causing minor abrasions and substantial panic.

They knew the Karmian detachment was behind them, knowing them to be ahead, though the route curved—it was no longer feasible for one group to glimpse the other.

Moving almost constantly now, they realized, however, the Karmians would have encroached on the separating distance.

The Lannic officer organized fifty men who were willing to block the pass, delaying the pursuit, maybe annihilating it. They approached Yannul, who had the diplomacy himself to approach Safca. “We saw the Karmian campfires,” he said to her, “those we could see. Fifty-one men will hold the pass for fifteen minutes. And they’ll be fifty-one men we’ve lost.”

She accepted him as counselor and with his personality to back her, refused the others leave to act.

On the twenty-third day, worn out, some sick, all sick at heart, and the hail again smashing about them, there was no evidence of the cave Vashtuh had said signaled the higher pass. Only the rock walls going up sheer, the somber peaks beyond, no longer blue, and the memory of Kesarh’s men on the road behind them.

Shortly after dawn on the twenty-fourth day there was a new mountain, directly in their path. A stone-slip had come down there, probably the year before, dislodged by snow. There was no way round it, no way up or over it. The only use it would serve would be to put their backs to when the Karmians arrived.

“I had a dream,” said Yannul’s younger son. “I saw the other side of the mountain. There’s a huge valley. It must be the Zor. It must mean we’ll find a way through.”

Yannul did not say anything. He could only have said, “That’s the closest you’ll come to it, now.” He had other things on his mind. He was wondering if, in the final extremity, he should kill them, his wife and son, to save them from atrocities the Karmians might inflict. One did not hear of such atrocities too often, save from Free Zakoris. The Amanackire were sacred. But maybe not here, where none but Karmians would live to tell of it. Kesarh had ousted Ashara-Anack from eminence in the fanes of Istris. Besides, Yannul recollected the burning village the caravan had negotiated. No, the Amanackire might not be sacred here.

But to kill her, to kill the boy—Yannul’s throat scalded with bile. He did not know what to do, so he went on listening.

“There is a city, you can see it far off. It’s big, but fallen. Black stone, like in the Lowlands. You said the Lowland city was black, didn’t you, father?”

“Yes,” said Yannul.

“But the valley was fertile. There were fruits growing, and I saw sheep, and orynx. And a river.”

“They say an abandoned city is like a broken sword,” said the Olmish officer. Yannul had not seen him come up. “It rusts, rots away. But it wasn’t like that. It felt alive. There was a light there. Did you see that, too?”

“Yes,” said Yannul’s younger son. “A kind of flame on the ruin, when it got dark.”

“A city of fire then,” said someone else. “Not rust.”

Yannul’s belly clenched.

“You’re saying you had the same dream, the two of you—and my son?”

“Maybe. What about you, Lord Yannul?”

Yannul hesitated. At the back of his mind something stirred. In sleep he had thought it was the Lowland city, and had been puzzled because—because a river ran across the plain—

A hundred feet away, Medaci was standing by Safca. Beyond them, a man was running along the pass from the lower end.

Yannul got up and went over.

The man gasped for breath and said, “My zeeba fell. Dead. I ran for miles. They’re almost here. A hundred of them, more. They saw my mate. Spear shot got him. Didn’t see me. Not that it makes any difference, lady. I dreamed of it all last night, dropping asleep in the saddle, seeing the valley. But we’ll never get there now.”

There was a wash of sound. They had all had the dream apparently, but many were only just discovering. Mind-speech was not recognized among Lans. A mental link of such magnitude was unconscionable, therefore sorcerous, therefore, at some level, absurdly acceptable and accepted.

Safca climbed one of the tumbled rocks. Standing higher than the rest of them, she raised her arms.

Yannul looked at her, the philosophical part of him awed, the man amused.

When she became a priestess, this unbeautiful woman changed. A sun seemed to rise behind her face, her whole body, and to be channeled out upon them. She must have looked like this the night they killed the Karmians at Olm. Transfigured.

Suddenly he heard a woman from his past speaking inside his head. “None of us could harm him. He is his god’s. And the gods protect their own.” She had been referring to Raldnor. Raldnor walking back from the forest of the second continent, branded by Anackire.

Safca began to cry out to them. She was telling them the goddess was near and would save them.

The wind and the bad weather had stopped, and she was clearly visible, audible. It was no trance, no rolling of the eyes, wriggling, salivating, howling. She was in command of herself, disciplining herself instinctually that the wondrous energy might pass through her and to them, unsullied.

It was not her power. Someone had trained her. Or gifted her—

It was like something of Raldnor’s. Something he might have passed on to his sons. But Rem had been the son of Raldnor. Beyond that princely and striking but quite human aura, the often striking, not always quite human good looks. Rem had had nothing of this, or seemed not to. Raldanash, seen as a boy, had been more of Raldnor’s way, yet he was heatless as dead coals. Raldnor, even Raldnor as a god, had never been that.

Yannul had loved Raldnor as a brother, but with more love than he had ever felt for the loved brothers of his flesh.

The love had never gone, though Raldnor had left all their lives a generation ago.

Why think of this now?

The Olmians were moved by Safca, electrified. But Yannul had not even heard her. Yet he heard something. Something that had no sound.

He had heard it previously. On the plain under Koramvis, the night before the last battle. The silent strumming of the air, the earth, over and over.

Power.

He felt suddenly young as he had been then, afraid as then, and with a new fear astride the first. Something would happen. He could not see why it should, but it would. Energy, power—and death. An avalanche, perhaps, tearing the mountains out by their roots, burying the Karmian soldiery who hunted them, simply because they were ordered to do so, would commit atrocities upon them because they were scared and cowardice invented evil.

He partly turned. They were all turning, to face toward the lower end of the pass, from which the Karmians would come.

Yannul glimpsed his son. The fine young face was open and savage with strength, a man’s face, a demon’s. Yannul wanted to shout. Whatever they confronted, this was no answer. To meet sword with sword, prevent death by death. They had killed Koramvis and the might of the Vis, and the world was altered, and had brought this, more killing, more pain. Endless. A circle of fire.

“No,” she said. Who was it now? The hand slipped into his was cool and sure. “In the Lowland city, Raldnor made us kill. I recall so well. In my sleep I’ve lived it again and again. But this isn’t like that.”

Medaci.

He was himself now like a child, and clung to her hand.

The wind rose, then.

And around the slight curve of the mountain pass, the Karmians appeared.

The Karmians had had a harsh journey up from the foothills, but had suffered no casualties. They knew perseverance was expected of them.

Their leader, who had been appointed to his post months before by Kesarh himself, was yet galvanized by the meeting, and had imparted some of his dedication to his soldiers. The plan was to slaughter all male Olmians. The women would be sent as slaves to Karmiss, or put to similar work with the army of occupation.

Coming up around the pass and seeing the huddle of humanity before them, their backs literally to a wall, the leader kept his zeeba to a walking pace, allowing the entire Karmian force to fill the pass and so to fill the sight of the Olmians. From here, he would presently command his javelins into position. They could take out a random selection of the rebels as a precedent, before the detachment moved in to a more tidy execution.

Before this could be arranged, the leader noticed a man standing on the stone track, exactly between rebels and soldiery.

It was odd, since he had not seemed to come forward from the rebel side, and certainly could not have climbed down the mountain steeps unseen. From some cave, maybe.

The leader held up his hand to halt the column. There was a problem here. The man was a mix Vis, almost black, but his mane of hair was blond-white and even from here, the eyes were seen to be pale and peculiarly brilliant.

Unwillingly, the leader became aware of muffled exclamations and curses behind him. He even fancied he caught the phrase of a frightened prayer. As this went on, his own skin started to crawl along his neck. Then he knew why. The man on the pass ahead of them wore the dragon-mail of Old Koramvis. He was tall, had the look of a king, and the face of a god—

Behind the leader now, they were kneeling, some of them. Zeebas were shying, officers bawling for order, their voices cracked with shock.

The man on the track was Raldnor Am Anackire.

The leader strove to control his mount. He would have to do something, but what?

Then everything was taken from his hands.

Behind the figure of the god-hero, a gleam began to burnish the air. Gradually the world faded, leaving only this gleam, which touched the sky. A second figure formed within it. It was the figure of the serpent goddess, Ashara-Ashkar-Anackire, the Lady of Snakes.

Rather than screaming, the men of Karmiss had fallen utterly quiet, and motionless. The leader was caught in this same weird grip. He did not feel afraid. He felt a terror, but it was almost ecstatic.

The colossal apparition had not completely solidified. She was translucent. Despite that, She was not as they had heard or ever been shown Her. Her skin was dark, a Lannic skin of brass. Her hair was black, and the great tail black-scaled, with a coiling gold design across it, stammering and alive. But her eyes were amber, and fixed upon them, from out of the sky.

Her eyes did not blast them. Her eyes turned them.

It was not unpleasant now, merely easy. They moved about, and those that needed to remounted their animals, which had become docile. They rode away.

They had gone three miles back along their route at a serene unhurried pace, before the leader, trotting now to the rear of his soldiery, came to himself with a violent start.

Only then did he hear the dying rumble of the avalanche, which had blocked the pass, between the rebels and themselves.

16

When the figure hurried out at him from the colonnade, Rarmon reacted faster than his own guard. But the man dropped to one knee, bowing, an obeisance of Visian Karmiss.

Rarmon’s guard was standing in close, hand to sword, by then. He nudged the man.

“Get up.”

“When,” said the man, “the Lord Rarmon tells me.”

The guard looked inquiringly at Rarmon.

Rarmon said, “Get up, then. And say what you want.”

The man rose. He was Vis and very dark. More than that. Though he had none of the accent, he had a look of Zakoris.

“What do I want, my lord? A word in private.”

Rarmon had been coming from exercise, across the courts of Anackyra’s Storm Palace. This spot was a thoroughfare, a hub of much of the palace’s traffic. The fountain and the scented vines also ensured aristocratic loiterers. For a sudden meeting it was in itself far from private. Without looking about, Rarmon knew their tableau was already well-observed.

He said to the guard, “Step back.” To the man he said, “What nation are you?”

“Yes, lord Prince. I have Zakorian blood. But I’m half Dortharian to sugar it. I feel the war councils of the Storm Lord. A paid informer against Yl.”

“A traitor, in other words.”

“No, lord Prince. I was born in Vardian Zakoris. My King’s Sorm of Vardath, Dorthar’s ally. And I serve Dorthar.”

“Who sent you to me?”

“One you, lord Prince, betrayed.”

Rarmon looked at him. The man’s eyes flinched away, but returned. “Who would that be?”

“A mighty lord, who’d not forget your worth, though you forget his bounty.”

“I see. You are then a Vardish Zakorian, aiding Forthar, and acting for Kesarh Am Karmiss. Does all that never make you dizzy?”

“My lord. I carry the messages of those who pay me.”

“What’s the message?”

“None, as yet. I’m to sound you. Would you gladly receive a messenger from the Lord Kesarh?”

“He knows not. I told him so. Then why are you here? To display the bastard brother in conversation with a Zakorian spy?”

The man took one perfectly coordinated backward step.

“Wait a moment,” said Rarmon. The man waited. “Since this will be going into the annals of court gossip, I must try to cleanse my reputation. Go to Kesarh for recompense if I loosen your teeth.” Moving forward with the swiftness of a cat, Rarmon struck the man and sent him staggering. Pitching his voice to travel, Rarmon called: “That’s all I have for Zakoris.”

Not looking back, Rarmon continued into the colonnade and so to his apartments.

Vencrek, the suspicious and unliking Warden, might have primed the man. A test on all fronts—current loyalty to Dorthar, past loyalties to Karmiss. One trusted it was a test, not simply the machinery of discredit.

Discussion of war had been continuous all month. Kesarh, in possession of Lan and Elyr, and received delicate offers without response, offering in turn only cordial and empty communications. He seemed abruptly disinclined to be wooed, after all. Dorthar already attempted to reconstruct her campaigns, in the likelihood the east must now simultaneously be dealt with too. Both the oratory and the military deployments had acquired a muddled and bombastic ring. Raldanash’s composure began to look like indifference, the old passivity of the Lowlands.

For the Lowlanders themselves, you saw them sometimes, passing through the palace or the streets, just such pale all-indifference to everything. Men stepped aside, bowing, keeping a distance. Children were prevented from playing outside Amanackire houses in the suburbs. They were not only respected, but plainly feared. More, or less, than the Black Leopard of Free Zakoris, Rarmon could not be sure.

It rained. The leaves rotted. Anackyra was full of gloomy forecast and idiotic bravura.

Last year at the end of the hot months, Rarmon had been Rem, riding hills that were then Lan’s own, looking for Kesarh’s child. . . .

Dorthar had given Rem very little, that was his. The luxury and the title and the apparent power were ultimately weightless and meant nothing. In the war, he would have an honorable and exalted command and maybe die. Nothing, again. Dorthar had given him nothing.

Once or twice he wondered if Yannul’s son had got home. But Yannul, and Lur Raldnor also, inhabited the land of the past.

The man who waylaid Yeize, chief lady to Ulis Anet, was not a Zakorian.

He stole upon her as she, with other women of the connubial courts, was hastening down the Imperial Hill from the Anackire Temple. It was early twilight, and dry, though a brisk wind ran from the northern mountains, rattling the forest trees above. But the man murmured to Yeize, whose heart was full of romance, and she was quickly drawn aside. The others, deeming in an assignation, went on.

Some hours later, preparing her mistress for bed, Yeiza snipped a small lock of blood-red hair, under the plea it grew awry. Later yet, when the Queen withdrew to her inner chamber, Yeiza was able to appropriate one of the silver ribbons plaited into the red hair at dinner.

Initially, the girl had been outraged at the idea of stealing anything from her lady. However, the go-between was very charming and persuasive. After all, his master, who had sent him on this mission, could be expected to return a trinket with interest. While, as long as the token was something recognizably the Queen’s, it need be of slight significance.

The ribbon was, Yeiza thought, an apt and artistic choice. Even if the go-between had not forced payment on her, to do this service for her poor neglected mistress and the elegant lord Prince Rarmon could have been a pleasure.

Since Lur Raldnor’s departure, Yeiza had been frankly bored. Her mood was further soured by a growing disconsolation that Iros was now seldom in person about Ulis Anet’s courts. Yeize had decided, with great poignancy, that she was in love with Lord Iros. She was sure she could win him—had he not often shown himself attracted? But not with the Queen as a rival.

On the other hand, here was Ulis Anet, pining for want of attention. Yeiza, who oversaw the appointments of the bedchamber, knew quite well that, though he had been closeted with his new wife, Raldanash had not lain with her. After the hunt at Kuma, Ulis Anet grew strange, withdrawn and listless. She seemed not to know herself or care what went on, observing form, but no more. She was like someone recovering from a debilitating illness. Except that she did not recover.

Since the night Lord Rarmon had saved her mistress from disgrace, Yeiza had astutely guessed he loved Ulis Anet. Had he not already heroically rescued her from her runaway chariot after the earthquake? Had he not banished Iros from her vicinity? As for Ulis Anet herself, it was equally obvious she had conceived a passion for Rarmon. She had trusted him with her life, allowing him to find Iros in her bedchamber. She had come back from Kuma, where she had so often seen him, like a creature without a soul.

The man in the twilight had proved Yeiza’s clever deductions were correct. His master, Rarmon, required a token from the Queen. She had so far refused from loyalty to Raldanash, though, as the go-between stressed, Rarmon was the one lover who could protect her and offer her the honor she merited.

Presently, the conspiracy became more personal.

Suppose the token could be gained without Ulis Anet’s knowledge? Her guilt would not be roused, but the Lord Rarmon would assume himself at liberty to come to her. Once two such persons were alone together with privacy and a bed, who could doubt nature must take its course?

Yeiza did not doubt. She even suspected in this the connivance of the Storm Lord himself. She had heard talk by now that all his women were left alone at night and encouraged to remedy the matter as they wished.

She had also noticed how this apartment connected by a garden walk to a number of deserted courts before reentering the outer environs of the palace. For clandestine visitors, the way was fortuitous.

Nor did Yeiza forget, going out to deposit the lover’s token with Rarmon’s servant, to leave the door on to that walk unlocked.

Iros Am Xarabiss, commander of the guard of Xarabians attendant on one of the Storm Lord’s lesser queens, checked drunk and ill-humored at the foot of the Imperial Hill. He had been trying tonight to buy his way instead into a position of battle command, filled by a rage to kill Free Zakorians, which conveniently masked for him his septic rebuke at the hands of Ulis Anet. But the bribery had not gone well. He felt himself insulted. He felt himself seen through. He, who was the son of Xaros, hero of the Lowland War. The wine had flowed angrily at an expensive inn.

Up in the air the fire-eyes of the Rarnammon statue blazed.

Below, the man stood bowing in its shadow.

Then something was extended, and slipped into Iros’ hand.

“Do you know this tress of hair, my lord?”

Iros stared. The pole-torches of the city gave excellent light.

“And the ribbon,” said the man. “You may have seen her wear that at supper.”

“How did you come by it?”

“No need for alarm, my lord. My mistress could assure you of that. She asks you to attend her this evening.”

Iros lurched forward. The man drew back.

“Ulis—” Iros said. His tongue was thick, and his head, but his heart raced now to clear them.

“You’re to go where the paper tells you. Be there by midnight, my lord.”

Iros did not even look at the paper until the man slithered away across the square. Breakers of huge emotion were rocking the commander. Now she would heal his lacerations with love.

He had never really doubted she must return to him as soon as she was able. He held the lock of hair to his lips, breathing in its fragrance, a lust on him like Zastis, already planning all he would say to her, do with her.

Only when he peered at the paper was he rather aggravated. It seemed a long and curious way to go for prudence’s sake.

Ulis Anet woke in a vague dim horror that had no source. All about the night was quiet. The aromatic lamps burned low, flickering. A bird fluttered its wings in a jeweled cage.

She had dreamed of a sailed boat, black on a dying sunset sea, rowed toward a shore of snow. One man sat behind the sail. She could not make out his face.

He held her in his arms.

She left the bed. She was afraid—or was it fear?

A masculine voice spoke from the doorway, startling her so much she could only turn to him slowly, almost calmly. There were two of them, white-cloaked, Raldanash’s elite guard.

“Forgive me, madam,” one of them said again. “You must come with us. Dress quickly. There’s little time.”

She did not move. Consternation had not yet reached her.

“What is it?”

“The Storm Lord’s received word Free Zakorian assassins have penetrated the grounds. These courts are vulnerable. The royal women are being escorted to safety.”

“Very well,” she said.

They retreated, and the curtain swung to.

Her pulses were clamoring now. Still it was not fear, and still the aura of the dream had not left her. Nevertheless she dressed swiftly, took up a mantle and went out to them in the antechamber.

Beyond the rooms the darkness was silent, as it usually was in this quarter of the palace. The men walked one on either side of her, tense and watchful. It would be possible to imagine a cutthroat in every shrub, behind every pillar. They reached a wall and a gate was opened. In an archway, a covered carriage waited. No guards were in evidence here, although this was one of the exits from the palace grounds.

“But where will I be taken?” she said.

“Just get in, lady. For your safety.”

She obeyed them. They did not follow her. The door was fastened shut and instantly the carriage was moving.

They were proceeding uphill at a jolting heavy gallop—toward the Anackire Temple?

Presently she found the window-spaces of the carriage were also immovably covered and she might not see out of them. The door had been secured from the outside.

She was a prisoner, rushed toward some unknown fate. She suddenly thought: Can Raldanash mean to have me murdered?

The ruins of Koramvis were eerie and desolate by night. Iros left his chariot, and walked down to the edge of the River Okris. The directions on the paper were explicit, the standing house with the tall tree in its courtyard quickly located. He ascended the river terrace, stumbling on the misplaced flags, and pushed open broken doors.

There was a stairway, and at the top a hint of the faint topaz glow of a lamp.

He grinned with relief, and his excitement came back to warm him.

Iros mounted the stair, went through the shadows and into a salon. And found, in the light of a single bronze lamp, that he had been surrounded by men in coal-black mail. Men who showed their teeth. One of whom said, “Not exactly the feast you had in mind, eh, Xarabian?”

He tried to draw sword, but someone stopped him. Iros himself was not in mail, and someone else drove a knife through his ribs into his heart.

He was not quite dead as they dragged him down the stairs, but he was no longer an arrogant officer, no longer a proud peacock. He was a boy, sobbing in his soul for Xarabiss and the laughing father who had carried him on his shoulders, and for light, and for life.

But poised in the air all he saw were the hard stars of Dorthar, and the black river of Dorthar gaped for him, before his passage cleaved it.

The jouncing jolting ride seemed to last forever, the zeebas galloping in fits and starts, as was their wont. When the carriage stopped and the door was opened, she saw the upper foothills of Dorthar’s mountains had come closer. Jumbles of masonry informed her further. She was on the outskirts of Koramvis, far above Anackyra’s plain. There seemed to be the remains of a wharf, and beyond that the ancient river.

Beside her were soldiers. Two others riding up were those who had conducted her from her apartment; they were no longer dressed in the garb and blazon of Raldanash’s Chosen Guard.

She stood and looked at them all. She was not afraid, only very cold, with the esoteric awe of these men a child may sometimes experience for adults.

One approached her, offering her a cup with wine in it.

It was incongruous. She did not accept the cup, but she said, “Is it poison?”

“No, lady. We’ve had instructions you’re not to be harmed, only cherished. But there’s some way to go by river. This will help you to sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“Yes, lady. It’ll be tedious for you otherwise. And you might make a fuss.”

“You’re not the Storm Lord’s men. Where are you taking me?”

“No questions now, lady. Drink the drink.”

One said behind her, “Or we may have to put you to slumber another way.”

“You were told not to harm me,” she said frigidly, wondering how she could speak at all.

“It won’t harm you. A slight pressure to the side of the throat. But not pleasant. Better to do as we ask.”

She stepped away from him. There was nowhere to run. She allowed the other to give her the cup. It smelled herbal under the wine, nothing more. Poisons surely, did not smell this way? Besides, what choice.

When she had drunk she let the cup fall. A man picked it up. Another picked her up in turn. The drug was imperative and already she was will-less, helpless. She remembered when she had known such a sensation before. She admitted where she must be going, then, and felt a curious shame.

By the time they rested her in the boat, the woman was unconscious. They knew better than to sport with her, though she was alluring, beautiful and young.

They rowed upstream.

When the dawn began to show, they were many miles away.

Raldanash sat quietly, listening.

“Events are but too blatant, Storm Lord.” Vencrek posed. “Guards who claim to have seen nothing—obviously bribed to be elsewhere. The two of your Lordship’s own guard killed and stripped naked, hidden in bushes. Patently their garments were used as disguise for the Xarabian’s men. The tracks of a carriage were found, going up into the hills toward the ruined city—My own men have scoured the area without success—a decoy, perhaps. Others have gone the opposite way, to investigate the roads south into Ommos and Xarabiss.”

Raldanash said, “And your conclusion, Lord Warden?”

Vencrek stared at him. They had known each other as children in Vathcri. For a few seconds, Vencrek was too exasperated to remain suave. “Raldanash—this Vis bitch has made you a laughing-stock—”

Raldanash did not respond. There was nothing to be seen, no jealous fury, no passion, not even embarrassment.

“Pardon me, my lord,” said Vencrek. “Your honor is dear to me. You asked my conclusion. Very well. There can be only one. Your Queen Ulis Anet has adulterously run off with her commander, Iros. It’s widespread knowledge they were lovers prior to her marriage. He boasted of it and raged about her loss through half the wine-shops and brothels of Anackyra.”

The limited number of counselors who had been admitted to this scene murmured gruffly. One, a Vis, said, “Your lordship should solace himself that they’ve nowhere safe to run to, and must be discovered. Dorthar’s antique laws, I’d recommend, should be observed. This Iros to be publicly castrated and then hanged. The woman—”

“Yes,” said Raldanash. “I know the justice given a straying royal wife. Spikes and flames.”

“Leniency would be a mistake,” said Vencrek. “If she were of the race of the goddess—from the countries of your birth, or the Lowlands, maybe then. But she’s Vis.”

The Vis counselors shifted uneasily.

Raldanash said, “You haven’t taken her yet.” The beautiful kingly head was turned. He looked across the chamber at his half-brother. “What do you say, Rarmon?”

“Do you want my agreement or my opinion, my lord?”

“Whichever you think most useful.”

“Storm Lord,” Vencrek broke in, “the Lord Rarmon himself has some questions to answer to the council.”

Rarmon regarded him. “Upon what?”

“Your dialogues with Free Zakorians.”

“Which dialogues are these?”

“Storm Lord,” said Vencrek, “this isn’t the moment—”

“If you’re accusing me of something, Lord Vencrek,” said Rarmon, “any moment will do to make it plain.”

Raldanash came to his feet. They all looked at him.

“Lord Warden, you may convene full council for two hours after noon. Until then, I thank you for your energies on my behalf. Good day, gentlemen.” Then, almost idly from the doorway, “Rarmon. Attend me.”

Presently, in one of the glorious rooms of the palace, the Storm Lord sat down again and pointed Rarmon to another chair.

“And now,” said Raldanash.

“Your lordship has, I believe, taken delivery of the statement I sent him.”

“The Zakorian informer who waylaid you in the Fountain Walk? Yes, I do know him; he purports to be ours. But apparently other things have been going on. Free Zakorian letters brought to you. Signals exchanged in passages. Some spy’s dispatch intercepted, which mentioned, albeit obliquely, yourself.”

“And you think I’d be such a dolt as to do such things here, at your elbow?”

“Perhaps,” said Raldanash. “But I doubt it. Another man, maybe.”

“You continue to trust me,” said Rarmon.

“I sense powerful forces at work against you, in this.”

“Do I have your permission to disorganize them?”

“If you can. But these may not be the powers of men alone.”

Rarmon seemed to hesitate.

He would not let himself reach to the amber ring, to contact the fierce yet painless burning.

Raldanash said softly, “and Ulis Anet?”

Rarmon recollected himself. He said, “The flight of the Xarabian Queen is a little too pat.”

“Yes. It parallels, also, the saga of Raldnor and Astaris.”

“Such an ideal, of course, might have appealed to Iros. But she didn’t want him.”

“She was informed,” said Raldanash, “that she might welcome any man, providing it was done discreetly.”

Raldanash, even in this admission, showed nothing at all. Rarmon gave in, and closed his right hand convulsively around the ring. And wrenched his hand away. Though it did not sear the finger that wore it, the other intruding hand seemed scorched. Raldanash had not missed any of this, but made no comment.

“It’s a fact,” said Rarmon, “everyone knew of Iros’ obsession with your wife. And anyone could have learned of it. Someone has therefore abducted her, probably against her will. While the coincidental disappearance of her commander has been arranged to suggest that he and she have fled together. I imagine his body is feasting carrion birds up in the hills. Or fish in the river.”

“Who would want her so much?”

“There is one man. To my knowledge, he never saw her. But it may have happened. Kesarh Am Karmiss.”

Raldanash made no protest, did not even ask for reasons.

“Then he no longer cares to pretend friendship with Dorthar.”

“Enough to give you another story to believe, should you wish to. Iros took her.”

“I see.”

“I can arrange a private search for Iros’ body, and any evidence left lying about up there. And you could send fast chariots to cut them off. They’ll have used the Okris, I think, to go east. Kesarh must have a ship still standing off from Dorthar, ready to take them aboard. Of course, if you do apprehend his men, you’ll have no choice but to break all ties with Karmiss. He could have foreseen that, too.”

In the hour before sunset, the Anackire Temple swam in a dark golden gloom. The Prince Rarmon had previously come here on two occasions of formal religion, included in the Storm Lord’s party. The ceremonies were Vis, noisy and exotic; even the mystic flamboyance of Ashara had not gone to such lengths. But now the place was hugely stilled, smelling of incense and cibba wood, only the cup of flame burning under the great statue.

Climbing the paved avenues up the forested hill, he had been half reminded of Ankabek. But there was nothing of Ankabek here. Though the more extreme rituals were not’ practiced so close to the palace and sacred prostitution was left to the other fanes of the city, this place was simply impressive in the way of mortal things. The marvelous statue, marble, gold, and precious gems, was taller than the Anackire of Ankabek. It touched the intellect and appetite, not the heart.

A yellow-robed priest appeared around a screen, and bowed low, as Ashara’s priest would not have done.

“I regret, the young woman’s dead, Lord Rarmon. It was a subtle venom. We were able to alleviate her pain and lend her courage, but we couldn’t save her life.”

Poor Yeiza. She had been caught in the plot, ventured too far from shore, drowned there. Seeking sanctuary in the temple when she saw how things were going was her only act of wisdom. He could assemble the rest of it: Some token stolen from Ulis Anet to persuade Iros to the meeting. No doubt they had paid Yeiza. An Alisaarian trick maybe, a coin with one razor edge, and poison on it. She had not investigated the little wound until too late.

“I’m sorry,” Rarmon said. But her death was a proof, too, as much as anything she could have told him. “You did right to send for me anyway. I’ll see Anackire’s well-gifted.”

“Thank you, Prince Rarmon.”

Abruptly Rarmon recognized the swarthy little man. He was the Thaddrian who had been among the Amanackire that night of the testing, the Thaddrian who, in his childhood, had supposedly witnessed Raldnor and Astaris riding into the jungle forests.

“I’ve already a gift with me for the goddess,” Rarmon said. “Or for you.”

He drew off the amber ring, cool now, and held it out.

“No, my lord,” said the Thaddrian. “I can’t take that.”

“Why not? Lowland amber is valuable and considered holy.”

“Nor can you give it, my lord.” Despite the squat body, the priest was dignified, almost gentle. “It’s geas, Prince Rarmon. You can’t lay it down. It can be removed by the one who set it on you, no other.”

“It’s only a ring.”

“That isn’t so. It has Power. A gift for you, not to be given elsewhere.”

“I thought you believed in the pragmatics of worship.”

“Yes, my lord. Magic itself can be very pragmatic.”

“I’ll merely leave it lying on Her altar, then.”

“No,” said the Thaddrian. “It isn’t the ring you’re trying to be rid of. It’s your destiny. Which is unavoidable.”

Rarmon found he had replaced the ring. He said, halting, gaps between the words, “Is that what I feel, hanging in the air about me like a storm? I don’t believe in Anackire. I don’t believe in gods.”

“My lord,” said the Thaddrian, “Anackire is the symbol. The externalization of the Power inside us all. The face we put on beauty and strength and love and harmony. As writing is the cipher for a sound we only hear.”

“You stand under the effigy and say that?”

“And see,” said the Thaddrian with a monkey’s grin, “She doesn’t strike me down. Truth is never blasphemy when the god is Truth Incarnate.”

Rarmon turned and walked between the pillars, and out into the pillars of the forest. The storm-warning of destiny pursued him.

It had rained, and the marks the carriage had made going in and out of rough ground were washed away. Rarmon sent his five men along the darkening south bank of the river. They found things, evidence of bandit lairs, a lover’s tryst—but not the one they searched for—and disturbed a nest of wildcats. Torches were lit and bobbed about amid the ruins.

The council had detained him through the afternoon. It had been necessary to parry Vencrek’s added allusions to Free Zakorian friends, in person. But to leave this trail till morning would have left it colder even than it was now. Finally, by an old standing house, one of Rarmon’s men came on a chariot with a team of fretting animals. The chariot-prow bore the sigil of Xarabiss.

In the house they discovered a lamp, upstairs; dregs of recent oil. There was a black stain on the floor, equally recent blood. They went out on to the terrace.

“He’s in the river, my lord.”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Luckless bastard.”

Rarmon sent the chariot cityward with two of them. One of the other three went down by the tree in the yard to urinate. He did not come back.

Rarmon checked the last two men, who were for rushing to see. From the side of the terrace they discerned, around the tree bole, a booted leg sprawled in the relaxation of death.

“Bloody robbers—”

“Robbers wouldn’t dare kill palace guard so close to the city.”

There was a gasp above, a man spontaneously taking air to jump, and Rarmon flung himself aside.

A figure crashed down, crying out as it hit the edge of the stone terrace, but taking one of the Dortharians with it.

The second Dortharian sprang round, thrusting his torch at another running figure while he jerked out his sword. His hair alight, the attacker plunged aside screaming, but two more had the Dortharian between them, blade immobilized.

Someone must have struck the screamer quiet. His noises ended in time for Rarmon to hear the snapping of the second guard’s neck.

Behind him, the first Dortharian had also stopped fighting.

“Throw down your sword, Prince,” someone said. “You can see it can’t help.”

The spilled torch had been rescued. It gave enough light to display the dozen or so men clustered about. They wore the black-washed mail of Karmiss, but unblazoned.

“We knew you’d come here,” said the voice. It was familiar. “Your erstwhile lord, Kesarh, can read your mind like a Lowlander.” A man sidled forward. He was not wearing mail but black owar-hide. It was the accosting Zakorian. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve decided after all to renege, to give my loyalty to my own old master, King Yl Am Zakoris. Your Kesarh helped me to decide. Not shocked are you, Lord Rarmon?” He gestured at the Karmians. “Take his sword, knife, any other weapons. Give any jewels he has to me. I’ll have that ring, to start.”

Aid would not come. Even the other two guard would have been caught and killed by now. Rarmon offered no battle. It would have meant death and he was not ready for death as yet. Even so, they pushed him to his knees before ripping the weaponbelt from him. Someone kicked him in the back, a blow like thunder. He fell into a pit of blackest nausea, and lying on the paving, was aware of the sword removed from one hand, the ring of the geas torn from the other. Then a yell. Of course, the ring had been burning. He heard it hit the stone somewhere and shatter like glass.

The Free Zakorian swore.

Vencrek was not, this time, the first with an accusation. Instead, a parchment had been fastened to the gate of the council halls. It read:

Nobles of Dorthar, you should never harry a wolf. He has run to his brothers in Free Zakoris with news of all your strategies of war. And he laughs at you as he runs.

After the river, there was a traveling-chariot. After the chariot, another oared boat out to a dark galley standing like night on morning sea. They had continued to drug her, she saw these things in snatches. On the ship they drugged her also and now she was glad, for the brief voyage was storm-flung.

When she woke from that she was on land again. She conjectured which land it must be.

But this last awakening was dreamlike. She was in a house, ornately built, overlooking savage gardens of wild and disconcerting loveliness. Beyond, a cultivated valley undulated to the horizon.

As the physical weakness of the drugs left her, she took note of her surroundings. Every appurtenance, everything her rank had made her used to, was supplied, even to the nourishing and decorative food, the costly unguents, and trays of jewelry.

Two women attended her. They behaved as gracefully as any of her attendants had ever done, and answered freely, except when she put questions regarding where she was, and who had placed her here in this attractive cage.

“But I’m in Karmiss,” she said.

“Look at this velvet, madam. How well it suits these pearls.”

The pearls were black, Karmian riches. Yet they would never reply exactly.

But then, she did not need to be told, that was only some vestige of pride—to pretend herself ignorant and afraid.

His men guarded the house, which she came to see was a mansion-villa. Though she might go anywhere in the tower which she had woken to, the rest of the mansion proved inaccessible. The garden, too, was only to be enjoyed from a balcony. She saw distant figures in the fields, but no other servants. It was a relief. If any might have heard, she would have felt obliged to cry out.

Four days went by. Each seemed twice its length. At night her sleep was feverish. Her body ached, but not with any sickness. Sometimes, attempting to read one of the books, or wandering the tower, or seated on the balcony, she seemed to sense some stir in the house—a scarcely audible conversation, a footstep sharp on a walk below—and her heart would spasm with a kind of agony, thinking he had arrived. But her response was never justified.

On the fifth day toward sunset, however, every symptom was shown her that he was indeed imminent. The women brought fresh and surpassing clothing, complex jewels. They were agitated as they contrived to dress her hair. In the chamber where she ate, the braziers now necessary had been lit and perfumes added. Extra candles appeared and were set on fire.

“We must hope,” she said tartly to the women, “the Lord Kesarh won’t be late.”

When they were gone, she paced about in the violent and disquieting afterglow.

She had, captive that she was, no choice but to receive him. But no, the ease of that was false. It had all been made easy for her, but she found at last she could not lie to herself. Since infancy, she had been molded to her existence. Given to the Storm Lord six years before, she had looked for nothing save those things her molding assured her were hers by right. But Raldanash did not want her. She had had some warnings. She tried to be stoical. To remain so, faced with a life of such stoicism. Then, in the darkness of that dawn near Kuma, Kesarh had crossed the black river like the river of arcane myth which separated the living from the shades, and bound her to him by his shadow across her face, the grasp of his hands, the will behind his eyes. Kesarh, unlike Raldanash, had wanted her. And she. Yes, she had wanted to be wanted by Kesarh.

And her integrity was revolted.

Very well, she must receive him. But like this? Garbed and gilded for him like one more dish upon his table—

She ran to the mirror and wiped her face clean of cosmetics. She took down her sculptured hair and shook it loose. Shedding the gems and the velvet, she took up the dress she had traveled in, which they had cleansed and returned to her when she asked for it—she had not then known why—but which was dulled by the journey, no longer gracious, in places even torn.

She was only just in time.

As she stared at her transformation in the mirror, the outer door was opened and then firmly shut.

She learned then that she could not move.

So it was in the mirror’s surface that she saw him come through that chamber with the candles and braziers and table, and stand framed in the doorway of this.

You have seen him, she thought, turn and confront him. He’s no more than you behold in the glass. But in the glass he was enough to take her breath from her. Somehow she made herself turn. She avoided his eyes, looking directly through him.

He said, “I thought the women were to dress you.” She could not stop her ears. His voice came into them.

“They did everything you wanted,” she said. “Now I’ve done as I thought fit.”

“Yes,” he said. There was no irritation, no mirth. No expression at all:

He went back into the outer room, and she was impelled to follow him and to say: “Am I at last to have an explanation for your atrocious act against me?”

He wore black. They had said in Dorthar that was usual. He seemed all blackness against the flaming wax. He was pouring wine, which he now offered her.

“No.”

He drank the wine himself, straight down, all of it.

“You are,” he said, “on the estate of my counselor, Raldnor. At Ioli. Soon it will be expedient to move you elsewhere. I apologize that, as yet, I can’t receive you in my capital of Istris.”

“I’m your hostage against Dorthar,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Just mine.”

“This insult to the Storm Lord could mean war.”

“There will be war anyway. Nothing like this ever caused a fight that wasn’t already spoiling.”

“Why,” she said, “did you—”

“You know why.”

She met his eyes not meaning to. He and she were yards apart. She looked aside from him and her blood seemed full of water.

“I recall for you some woman who died.”

He said nothing.

I, too, should have died, she thought, before I submitted to this. But the idea was empty, a fallacious ritual. Even to her it seemed sickeningly coy.

There came a plea outside the door, and he told them to come in. Unknown servitors appeared; a lavish meal was set out. That seen to, Kesarh sent them away.

He indicated the table.

“And chance some other drug or potion? No, my lord.”

“You mean to starve yourself for virtue’s sake.”

Their eyes met again.

“Don’t suppose,” she said, “I can willingly accept anything of yours.”

He came toward her then, crossing over the bright room as over the lightless river. He did not touch her. He said, “Starvation’s a slow, comfortless way.” He drew the dagger from his belt and offered it as courteously as he had offered the wine. “She killed herself,” he said. “Why not you?”

Ulis Anet did not look at the dagger. It had no value for her. She knew she could never employ death. The words meant more.

“Who was she?” she said.

“My sister.”

She tried to shrink from him.

“You offered rape to your sister? She preferred suicide.”

“What else?”

She gazed at him, striving to see through him to mockery or rage or pain. But she could not; he was like Raldanash in that.

Only the heat beneath the cold darkness was not the same at all.

She must not attempt to force his hand with her, push him to violence or the rape she had mooted like an invocation. Again, it would be too easy. She could give in to superior strength and need not blame herself.

“Allow me to withdraw,” she said.

Even that might exacerbate. She had sounded cool and meek, colorless—she lowered her eyes. It was difficult to do.

“There’s no need for that,” he said. He was dangerously urbane now. “I’ll dine elsewhere.” He walked to the door. She did not look up. She did not know that in the modest gown, her long hair down her back, face unpainted, she was more than ever an image of Val Nardia, that morning when she had departed for Ankabek. By the door, he said, “Tomorrow I’m sending you to a house nearer the capital. It’s pleasant, and there’s a decent road. Anything you want can be got for you.”

“Let me have passage back to Dorthar, then,” she said to Raldnor Am Ioli’s mosaic floor.

“Forget Dorthar. When the war’s done I’ll give you Karmiss.”

The astonishment of it made her, after all, stare at him.

“Yes,” he said, “My first Consort, Chief Queen of Karmiss, Lan, Elyr, and any other ground that’s then in my possession. Did you think I brought you all this way to serve the wine?”

The door was opened and once more firmly shut.

Kesarh had left her alone with the dinner, and with her thoughts.

Far from his estate that night, Raldnor Am Ioli stood in his bedchamber at Amlan, reading dispatches, while a nervous Lannic girl crawled under the bedcovers.

There had been reports of rebels in Lanelyr killing the occupying soldiers, escaping up some mountain and now safe behind a convenient rock-fall. Strange stories had apparently attached to the phenomenon. He supposed he would have to look into it, at some juncture.

He was getting lazy, was Raldnor.

One area, however, where he had remained careful, was the discretion with which he bedded the local girls. This one had been smuggled in and would be smuggled out before sunrise. It would not do for Raldnor’s soldiers to become informed that, though he had brought a favorite mistress all the way from home, he never went to bed with her.

Some, of course, might have liked to. For some, Mella’s sort would always have attractions.

Thinking of his insurance, this most brilliant hazard of his life, Raldnor set the dispatches aside.

Mella.

There must come a time when Kesarh would overreach himself and the heavens crash down. And that would be when Raldnor the King-Maker would lift his gem from the rubble.

The embalmers, who were not embalmers, had got their trade in Ommos and were accomplished. Their covering lies of corruption and poison Kesarh himself had silenced. The child, stupefied with medicines that were not quite those Kesarh had authorized, had slipped into a coma that did not actually preface death. It was an empty box Kesarh had glanced at, sufficiently scented with foulness from a recent and genuine plague-corpse that he did not investigate further. Why should he, anyway? Raldnor had been trusted to perform murder before and seen to it, impeccably. A vacant weighted coffin was buried in the Hall of Kings.

Hygienically and caringly cut, the boy regained consciousness a eunuch. He grew up in the backlands of Ioli, soon female enough to pass for a woman save in the most intimate of situations.

Given intelligent handling, one day the Prince-King Emel might regain the throne of Istris.

Though, being what he was, it was unlikely he could keep it.

The dreadful truth would be found out, and Raldnor, who had waited so long in the wings, could stride across him into glory.

Kesarh had enfranchised Raldnor. Raldnor did not brood on it, but he was no longer the same man who, hearing the slaves shrieking in the blazing galleys at Tjis, had been honorably dismayed. Learning it was workable, a certain latent cruelty had come to Raldnor’s surface. He could now indulge, along with a taste for power Kesarh had taught him by example, the callousness and the infliction of pain which, to Kesarh, were tools not toys.

Raldnor himself enjoyed his sadism, as the Lannic bed-girl was about to discover.