The Storm Lord

1

The great upturned bowl of the Plains’s sky was drenched with the blood of sunset. The sun itself had fallen beyond the Edge of the World. Now, before the rising of the moon, only a single scarlet star gemmed the cloak of gathering twilight.

A group of about twenty men were crossing the arid slopes—hunters, but not of the Plains. They rode thoroughbred animals, with here and there a light hunting chariot of Xarabian design, yet they were not Xarabians. They moved with a special, almost a specific, arrogance, which pronounced them alien to this landscape far more than did their black hair and black-bronze burnish of skin. Yet it was the scale markings of their metal that told the precise nature of their menace, for they were Dortharians, dragons, and they carried a High King in their midst.

Rehdon, King of Dorthar, the Storm Lord, that god-given title which essentially meant mastery of the entire continent of Vis, this now darkening planet: a king, ruler of kings. Even the hunting helm bore the spiked Dragon Crest. Beneath it, age had infected, with its own reptilian markers, a pair of eyes that were staring upward, toward the gem of the scarlet star.

Zastis. In Elyr, the withdrawn and euphemistic, they called this the time of marriages. But it was more vile and prosaic. It was the time of greatest sexual need, the tyranny of the flesh, strong in all, but in the royalty of Dorthar a domination brooking no denial, a bizarre badge of the line of Rarnammon.

The moon rose. A moon red from the star.

Rehdon’s charioteer glanced back at him, a thin graceful man with a face which, at no time, said anything, except where the long narrow slits of eyes led down into a machinery of intellect. His position as chariot driver was misleading. This man was Amnorh, King’s Councilor, the Warden of the High Council of Koramvis, in certain ways the nearest power beside the throne.

“Amnorh, we’re far from Xarar,” Rehdon said suddenly. He had a king’s voice—deep, resonant. He had in fact every appurtenance suited to a king, but it ran shallow. Amnorh knew this well.

“My lord’s restless? There’s a village near here. The serf we questioned mentioned it, you’ll recall.”

“This accursed No-Land. Why do we hunt so far from the borders of Xarabiss?”

“I hoped your lordship would get better sport here in the Lowlands. The borders of Xarabiss are hunted out.”

“This place,” Rehdon said again. The star made him uneasy, peevish, as always. “What name did you give it before?”

“Oh, the native name, my lord. The Shadowless Plains.”

Abruptly the land dipped. They were among sparse grain fields, blush-colored from the red moonlight. A small shrine appeared between stalks and was gone—probably a field altar to the Plains goddess Anackire, half woman and half serpent. Amnorh knew of such things. He glanced back again, this time beyond Rehdon, to the place in the party where the Prince Orhn rode with his men. Orhn, Rehdon’s cousin, had little time for Xarabiss and her elegant ways. He would be happy enough to pitch a camp here for the night. As for Xarar, Rehdon’s visit of courtesy to his king-held fiefs was almost at an end.

Presently, Amnorh made out a flicker of lights.

It was one of the Lowland villages indeed, an uneven track, groups of poor dwellings, a dark religious building with a grove of red trees.

The hunting party drew to a halt.

Three or four women stared from the grove. Unlike the Vis, the master race, the Plains People were pale, light-haired, yellow-eyed. No children showed themselves, and no men. Perhaps a disease had taken them or they were away, hunting plain wolves—those the Dortharians had unsuccessfully tracked all day—or the venom-clawed tirr that shrieked from the forests at the Edge of the World.

“Where are your men?” Amnorh called out.

The women remained blank-faced, and immobile.

“We are Dortharians,” a voice said harshly. “You’ll give us the best you have to offer for the night, and be honored.”

Amnorh turned and saw Prince Orhn. The racial intonation amused Amnorh, also the great and powerful body on the granite-black animal, a symbolic strident aggression, achieving apparently nothing. More softly, Amnorh said:

“We’re in need of food. And the Red Moon troubles us.”

The women stared unflinchingly back, but he guessed this threat might have touched them. The Lowlanders were immune to Zastis, it was said.

Rehdon moved impatiently behind him. The reptilian eyes ran over the women, already hungry, already dissatisfied. Irritably, he turned his head.

He saw, framed by the uprights of the temple doorway, a girl.

Motionless, expressionless, she seemed carved from white crystal, translucent eyes, like discs of yellow amber, open wide on his, the tawny cloud of hair fixed as frozen vapor.

“You. Girl,” he said. “Come forward,” and his voice held all the majesty of thunder, was even echoed by thunder low above the dune-dark slopes. If it spoke power to her she did not show it, but she obeyed him. “Tonight you lie with me,” Rehdon said. There was the briefest pause, a drop of silence, like the first drop of a great rain.

“Yes,” she said then. And strangely, for there was no other answer she might give, her voice carried all the meaning, all the accepting in the world.

They pitched their camp at the edge of the straggle of village, small owar-hide campaign tents; the grooms and charioteers would sleep in the open. They had taken what they wanted in the way of food and drink, careless that their demands would make the thin yield of the fields harder for the village to bear. Vis servants had slaughtered a cow in the temple square, and roasted it whole above a pit of coals.

But, unlike their King, they did not take the women, although the need was already on them. Even the coarsest groom had shied away from a vision of white-limbed passivity and wide eyes. Plains women, it was rumored, knew strange arts. Knew, too, how to stare in at a soul stripped naked by the pleasure spasms of the flesh. So the women slipped unmolested away, and not a light showed from their hovels, not a sound came out.

In Rehdon’s tent the meal was finished. Amnorh leaned forward, filling the King’s goblet with the stolen bitter potent Lowland wine. Orhn was absent—his animal was lame and must be seen to, he had said, but it was Amnorh’s presence he abhorred. Amnorh half smiled at the thought. Orhn Am Alisaar, waiting on a tyrannical sire who would not die and give up his kingdom for his bevy of sons to fight for. Orhn sought power rather at the side of his cousin, and Amnorh, sly Amnorh, came between them in subtle ways. And not only between cousin and cousin, for there was also the matter of Rehdon’s Queen.

The man posted outside the tent showed himself.

“Storm Lord, your pardon. There’re priests here from the village, asking for audience. Do we send them packing, my lord?”

“They were hiding in their temple until now,” Rehdon said. “What reason to emerge?”

“The girl your lordship honored with speech.”

Amnorh said:

“Your lordship might be amused by them.”

Rehdon, oblivious of most things save his waiting lust, nodded to the guard.

The man ducked out. A moment later the priests entered, three in all, long black robes, faces blanked out by shadow from their hoods. Priests in Dorthar were gaudy, vivid with their oracles and their miracles and the corruption of a thousand greeds. These intruders carried their own mystery, they seemed to have no presence, as if some smell of humanity were absent from them.

“We thought no men were in the village tonight,” Amnorh remarked smoothly.

“Among us a priest is not numbered as a man.”

“So we see. Well, you’re here. What causes you to trouble the Storm Lord?”

Without seeing them, he sensed the six eyes of the priests fixed on him. He was not as contemptuous as he seemed, knowing as he did of certain powers sometimes manifested in these serfs, and peculiar magics. He wondered if they now conferred together inside their heads as they were reputed to do.

“Your lord desires to lie with Ashne’e. We ask him to take another woman from the village.”

So she was called Ashne’e. A common enough name among Lowland women.

“Why?”

“The woman belongs to our temple. She is ours, and Hers.”

“Hers? I take it you mean your serpent goddess.”

“Ashne’e has been given to the goddess.”

“So. The Storm Lord will pardon you that the girl’s no longer virgin. I imagine this is what you intimate.”

He thought they would speak again, but they were silent.

“Go back to your temple,” Rehdon suddenly snarled at them.

In the bowl sky, thunder burned.

Without a word the priests turned; making no sound, they slipped one by one into the dark.

The fires were almost out, smears in the night world, when they brought the girl to Rehdon’s tent.

In the half-light she was unhuman. The low flame of a tent torch filled one eye with gold, freckled her cheek as though she wept fire.

The men sidled out and were gone.

Rehdon trembled with his need. He took the edge of her robe in his fingers, recalling what Amnorh had said to him.

“You’re from the temple, Ashne’e?”

“Yes.” There was no color in her voice.

“You know the bed lore of the temple women then.”

He pulled the garment from her. She stood before him naked. His hand moved on her, hesitated on her chill breasts. He drew her to the torch, examined her. An evanescent beauty, which a very little would swiftly destroy. High breasts, cold, for they were capped with gilt. In her navel a drop of yellow resin spat. The resin excited him unreasonably; it might have been a third eye, this time of her sex. He cupped her sexual hair, rough as the spun metal it resembled.

“Are you afraid of me?”

She said nothing, but her eyes expanded as if with tears.

Unable to resist the impulse of the star he pulled her down with him on to the couch, but somehow she twisted as she came and was above him. He saw then the expansion of her eyes was pure luminosity, they were glowing, awful as the eyes of a tirr, or a banalik crouched now to suck out his soul.

His head reeled with amazing fear, but he found in a second more that she knew those things which Amnorh had promised. He could not evade her will, floundered gasping in her snake’s coils, until the night became a dream of fire between the surges of which came the intoxicated thought he must keep her by him forever after, to terrify and delight him and pull him struggling and groaning into the spinning pit of her womb.

Dawn came, cool before the day’s heat, with a beat of bird’s wings over the trees.

Amnorh folded back the flap of the King’s tent, and stood a moment regarding the sleeping girl, her face turned into the cushions, first light licking her bone-pale back.

The King lay on his side, apparently locked deep in sleep, yet, as Amnorh had already noted, his black eyes were wide open. Amnorh crossed to him, reached and shook the Storm Lord’s shoulder, presently slapped the bloodless mouth. The glazed eyes were fixed far beyond this insolence. Rehdon, Dragon King, whose new heir had lain two months in the body of his queen at Koramvis, whose other earlier heirs by lesser queens slunk about the palace courts in dozens, lay dead apparently from a casual Zastian coition.

Amnorh left the tent. He cried out wordlessly into the morning air, rousing men bleary-eyed from the embers of their fires. Two guards ran to him.

“In the tent,” Amnorh said harshly. “Our Lord Rehdon is dead. The bitch-witch is still sleeping. Bring her out here.”

He saw the horror start up in the guards’ eyes. They ran into the tent, the flap did not fall back into place. He saw them balk at Rehdon’s corpse, then lean and drag Ashne’e from the couch. She seemed limp, yet when they dropped her before him on the ground, her eyes came open, staring up into his. She made no move either to rise or to cover herself.

“Abomination,” Amnorh hissed at her, “you have murdered a King.”

One of the guards lifted his spear.

“Wait!” Amnorh rasped. “There’s more to this.”

“No doubt.”

Amnorh glanced up and registered the tall figure of Orhn Am Alisaar, fully alert, a drawn knife ready in his hand.

“What’s this panic for?”

“The Storm Lord is dead,” Amnorh said, his eyes reduced to slits.

“Damnation take your tongue. I’ll see that first.”

“My lord prince is very welcome to judge for himself.”

Amnorh stepped aside from the tent mouth; Orhn strode by him and inside. Amnorh watched him shake Rehdon’s body, speak to it and finally let it subside. Orhn straightened, turned and came out. He glared for the first time with dry pitiless eyes at the girl Ashne’e.

“Who?”

“A whore from the temple. Has your lordship forgotten—”

“Yes. I’d forgotten.”

Orhn kneeled abruptly, caught her face in a cruel grip so that her eyes were forced to his.

“And what did you do, temple witch? Do you know who this man was before you killed him? Storm Lord, High King—Look at me!”

Her gaze had slipped to Amnorh, and then, suddenly her eyes turned up and the lids fell over them as if in a fit. Orhn felt her skin grow chill under his hand and let her go, thinking she had fainted. Amnorh knew otherwise, said nothing.

Orhn got to his feet.

“No time for ceremony,” he said, “I’ll dispatch her now.” He stared upward at the pale sun newly risen, which already masked the inflamed star. “The Red Moon was a curse to Rehdon,” he said. “He was no longer a young man.” The knife shone in his hand.

“However, lord prince, there’s one thing we forget,” Amnorh said softly.

Orhn looked full at him.

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, yes, my lord. It’s possible—merely possible—that Rehdon’s child is planted in this inferior body.”

A deeper, more intense silence fell around them. The men stiffened in attitudes of almost superstitious unease.

“She may have used the way of women to stop it,” Orhn said.

“How can we be sure? There is no suitable test, lord prince. And permit me to remind you, my lord, that the last child conceived before the death of the king becomes, by the laws of Rarnammon, his ultimate heir.”

“Not a by-blow on a peasant—the yellow scum-race of the Plains—”

“Indeed, my lord, but dare we alone decide the matter?”

Orhn’s eyes were flint; the contemptuous distaste he felt for Amnorh suffused his face like a blush.

“My authority should be enough—”

“Lord Orhn!” a man cried suddenly.

On a low scarp a few yards away a guard waved his arm, then pointed off across the fields.

Orhn turned and saw a dust cloud whirling up from the slopes.

“What now?”

“The village men,” Amnorh said softly, “perhaps returning?”

Orhn moved with long strides up the side of the scarp and stood beside the guard, Amnorh following more leisurely.

Sunlight touched the dust to silver, made it hard to distinguish shape inside the shining blur.

“How many men to kick up that much dust?” Orhn snapped. “Fifty? Sixty?”

“But they are only serfs, as you pointed out, lord prince,” Amnorh murmured succinctly.

Orhn ignored him. He shouted down the hill: “Captain, get your pack into weapon drill.”

Activity answered him about the smoking fires.

“Men from more than this one village,” Orhn said. “Why?”

“Possibly the priests called them,” Amnorh said.

“Called them? Because of a girl?” Orhn cursed. “You profess to know a great deal about these Plains scum, Amnorh. What’ll they do then, do you suppose?”

“They’re known for their passivity, lord prince. Probably nothing. But under the circumstances I think you’ll agree the girl should be spared your knife.”

Orhn sneered, sheathing the blade.

“For once, your counsel carries some weight. See, I’ve put the toy away. What now?”

It was plain he had no enjoyment in deferring to Amnorh’s judgment, yet Amnorh did indeed seem to have some curious grasp of this unlooked-for situation.

“I suggest this: Tell the village of Rehdon’s death, laying no blame on the girl. Say that she will in fact be honored as the vessel of the King’s heir.”

“Heir!” Orhn spat. “Can you see any faction in Dorthar upholding such a claim?”

“That scarcely affects us, lord prince. These are ignorant people, as your lordship has been heard to mention. It’s quite probable that they’ll accept such a story. It has a certain mythological quality that should appeal to them. Once in Koramvis, let the High Council decide what’s to be done.”

“You’d take her to Koramvis?”

“It’s always best, lord prince, in the face of the unprecedented, to be as cautious as possible. Who knows what view the Council would take of any hasty action?”

Orhn frowned toward the dust cloud. He could make out zeebas now, and fair-haired men riding them.

“There’s one small problem,” Amnorh said. “The girl must be seen to comply.”

Orhn looked down at her, his dark features fraught with disgust.

“Difficult, when to all intents and purposes she appears dead.”

“Merely a trance state, my lord. Some Lowland acolytes are adept in such magics. I think, if you’ll permit me privacy with her, that I can bring her out of it.”

“I bow to your wisdom. Do as you think fit.”

Light the color of a dead leaf circled in the brazier.

Out of it Amnorh drew a flame-tipped brand, shook off candescent fire flakes that settled in the air above the girl’s naked body. She lay on his sleeping couch, where the two grooms had placed her, a white stasis in the darkly glowing tent.

“Can you feel the heat of the fire, Ashne’e?” Amnorh murmured. He bent to her ear. “Let me tell you, Ashne’e, what I’m about to do to you.” Whispering like a lover, he scorched the down about her navel, but no more. “If I hold the torch to your throat the flesh will char to the bone. But you have presumed to kill a king of the Vis, Ashne’e, perhaps I should make you linger. Begin with your breasts—”

Pearls of moisture broke on the girl’s forehead. With a sudden eruptive motion life regained possession of her. Her eyes opened and focused instantly on his.

Amnorh smiled. He had outwitted the spark of her consciousness in its blind craving for existence—once the body was threatened she had fled back to succor it.

“Did you think I’d do that? Scorch the gilded nipples from your white breasts?”

She spoke for the first time.

“You would do as it pleased you.”

“Very perceptive. I would indeed. Most recently it’s been my pleasure to save your flesh from the Prince Orhn’s knife. Can you imagine why? No, I would think not. Prolonging your life will be more difficult. It depends in point of fact on whether or not Rehdon’s child is in you. With the Am Dorthar the last male conceived before the king’s death generally becomes his heir.”

“Yes,” she said, “I am with child by the Storm Lord.”

“Your brave self-confidence inspires me to help you.”

The tent was filled with blind crimson light.

He reached out and stroked her inert body. She seemed to have three eyes as she looked at him, two golden eyes set in her face, the third eye sputtering in her navel.

“I have told you. The King’s child is in me.”

“If not, there’s still time.”

The urging of the star was on him, yet he was subtle, as in all things. But his caresses, which had pleased even Rehdon’s queen, were wasted on stone. The Lowland girl lay like a corpse beneath him, while her hair seemed to set the pillow alight. So he used her, and found her spoiled for him, and drew away, his eyes only showing how it might be at another time.

The dust cloud had settled on the fields, subsided like a swarm of insects in the grain.

The Lowlanders sat still on their zeeba mounts. Not a sound came across from them to the Dortharian camp. The hunt guard stood in formal lines, an impassive defense formation, weightily outnumbered, yet supremely confident of superior military skills. What did they face, after all, save a rabble?

“The Councilor takes his time,” Orhn remarked impatiently. The captain turned to send a man up the scarp to Amnorh’s tent, but Orhn caught his arm. Amnorh had requested absolute privacy, claiming his esoteric work to be a dangerous affair, and Orhn could do little but leave the matter in his hands.

There was an oppression of waiting in the air. The staring sun laved the Plains with its furnace heat.

“Movement from the temple, lord prince.”

Orhn glanced aside.

“A priest.”

The black muffled figure slid across the track, as if on rollers, along the slope toward the Lowland men.

“Some new scheme hatching,” Orhn said.

He watched the hooded priest make some form of silent contact with the foremost rank of riders, and almost instantly a man came out to stand beside him. Man and priest then began to walk back, crossing between the grain at a different angle, making directly toward the Vis camp. Orhn followed their progress intently. He made out the man to be young, unremarkable; tanned, muscular, gaunt-boned, a boy whose body and mind had long been exposed to unluxurious hard living—good military material had he been born of Vis stock. The priest at his shoulder glided like his black shadow.

At the outskirt of the encampment a guard stepped in the way, blocking their path.

The young man stopped, amber eyes fixed on Orhn. “Storm Lord, you have kept a woman here to please you. Let her return to her people.”

The guard struck him with contemptuous lightness on the chest.

“Kneel when you address the prince, Plains dog.”

The young man knelt immediately, not looking at the guard.

“I ask again, Storm Lord.”

“I am not the Lord,” Orhn barked. “The Lord is dead.”

“That is sorrow. But I ask again for Ashne’e.”

“Ashne’e possibly carries the King’s heir. Do you understand? She must go with us to Koramvis.”

The young man stared back at him with pale immutable eyes.

“Will you kill her there?”

“If she carries, she’ll be honored.”

“Why are you so concerned at what we do with Ashne’e?” a voice demanded, Amnorh’s voice. So the Lord Warden had at last emerged from seclusion, successfully it would seem. “She belongs to your goddess, not to you.”

“My sister,” the Lowlander said slowly, “she is my sister.”

“Very well. Follow me and bring your priest with you. You shall speak to Ashne’e. Ask her if she desires any greater joy than to enter the city of the Storm Lords.”

The statement, brusque, imperative, seemed to strike responsive, relevant nerves. Orhn saw the Lowlander accepted at once both Amnorh’s authority and his words. Amnorh went up the scarp, the boy following; at the top Amnorh let him alone into the owar-hide tent.

Orhn waited, and it was not in his nature to wait gladly. Would the girl speak as Amnorh instructed her? Damn her, she would have been better dead before talk of conception and the Council had clouded a perfectly clear issue. And what, in all this, were the Lord Warden’s personal motives?

The Lowlander came out from the tent. Orhn saw at once a change in him—he seemed astonishingly blind and old, groping, not through a physical but a psychic darkness. He walked down the scarp, among the Dortharian lines into the sketchy wilderness of the fields, all the while the priest keeping like a black crow at his shoulder.

A simultaneous movement ran through the Lowland ranks. Men and zeebas broke formation suddenly, wheeled, a flurry of fresh dust surging up to mask their departure.

The captain swore beneath his breath.

Orhn glanced at Amnorh.

“Very clever, Councilor, very clever.”

And Amnorh allowed himself a moment of childish answering inner scorn: “Certainly too clever for you, lord prince.”

As a form of inescapable etiquette, a messenger was sent ahead of them to Xarar. Consequently, Orhn grit his teeth as they passed beneath the white Dragon Gate and entered a city plunged into deep and poetic mourning.

“Damn their mewling,” he thought as the women howled in the streets for Rehdon, whose momentarily glimpsed person they had most probably forgotten.

Their host in Xarar, the King Thann Rashek, whose name in certain circles was Thann the Fox, sent a procession of embalmers to anoint and bind Rehdon’s body. Rashek’s numerous queens, women of Xarabiss, Karmiss and Corhl, and the troop of daughters, appeared in profound funereal magenta, while bards wailed of invented heroics—there had been no full-scale war since the time of Rarnammon in which a lord might earn or buy a hero’s name. The mummery sent Orhn into a tight-held towering rage. He gathered up the disorganized factions of Rehdon’s entourage with brutal haste. Within four days he had shrugged off the pomp and drama, the ubiquitous pale faces ready with histrionic tears and the eight-stringed laments.

He moved the Dortharian party swiftly out across Xarabiss, the corpse as the excuse, and left her crystal cities in a pall of offering smokes.

They entered the narrow land of Ommos, death in a closed golden Xarabian bier. Ashne’e—kept in exotic captivity in Xarar like a wild yet interesting beast, peered at, no doubt, through spy holes in the drapes—now dwelt in windowless gray rooms, and was spat at from low hovels flanking roadways. At twilight, in a white-stoned fortress by the sea, the warden personally killed a newborn child, brought into the world mere hours before their arrival by one of his dull-eyed wives. It was to mark his sorrow, he told them, yet it had been a girl and not a son and so, particularly in the case of an Ommos, no great loss to him.

Not long after, Orhn heard the mother shrieking somewhere in the darkness, and for some barely explicable reason his thoughts turned to Rehdon’s Queen.

Val Mala, Dortharian princess of a minor House in Kuma, raised to her position as Jointress of Koramvis because of her beauty and Rehdon’s weakness.

How she would detest the Lowland girl.

Orhn permitted himself a grim smile at the thought of the cruelties Val Mala would devise for her; in particular quarters Val Mala’s name was already a byword for cruelty. Certainly no woman who had maligned her in her early days of power was now to be seen about the court. He recalled her chosen pet—a white kalinx, a tuft-eared cat, devil of incalculable viciousness—which roamed her apartments more or less at will, and was a symbol to Koramvis at large of her own glamorous and inventive spite. Val Mala indeed would be an intriguing study on their return.

And if the Lowland bitch were seeded? If there was to be public proof of the Vis Lord’s extramarital lust? Orhn wondered, with a not entirely idle malice: would the embraces of the Lord Councilor be sufficient consolation?

2

Dorthar, the Dragon Land, Dorthar the dragon’s head, the mountains its jagged crest, the lake Ibron its white eye, Koramvis its thinking jewel of a hub, the heart-brain.

The city lay on the foothills of the crest crags, elevated like a gigantic pure white bird on a nest of fire. Her foundations, bisected by a river, lay in the farthest recesses of time; like the Dragon Gate of Xarabiss, she was in part a remembrance, a physical creation burdened by essential legend, her ancestry a charred place where the Storm gods had come out of heaven, riding in the bellies of pale dragons.

At mid-noon, in the first Zastian month, her watchtowers spoke to her across the plain, black scavenger clouds of death smoke, and Koramvis opened her gates to admit her King.

Val Mala’s apartments were filled with a dim smoky incense-light. Candles fluttered, her women were dressed in black. The girl who conducted them there had silver tears painted on her cheeks.

Val Mala made them wait a good while, Amnorh the Lord Councilor and Orhn prince of Alisaar. When Orhn grew impatient, the girl stared at him and murmured: “The Queen mourns.”

Orhn made a sound of derision, but presently the mourner came and he bit back his curses.

Val Mala. Her Vis coloring was startlingly disguised by a creamy unguent, the Dortharian ebony of her hair hidden under a wig of hyacinth blue silk. She wore a funereal gown but the mood of it did not reflect in her face or her kalinx eyes, though they were as black as moonless lakes. She was far younger than her dead consort, had never loved him. Even her pregnancy was as yet invisible. She seemed to have rejected every vestige of Rehdon, and the ritual phrase—“the Queen mourns”—had all the absurd obscenity of something scribbled on a wall. Yet her beauty had lost none of its familiar edge, its stunning magic, despite that faintest hint about her of a high-class whore, that pinpoint glint of something vulgar and unrefined.

She glanced at Orhn, and then away.

“Where is my Lord Rehdon?”

“Coming unconducted through the palace courts since you, madam, called us to wait on you,” Orhn growled.

“It’s a pity, Prince Orhn, that you didn’t conduct him better while he lived. He might, perhaps, still walk among us.”

“It’s at once apparent, madam, how grief overwhelms you at your loss.”

She flinched at his irony and clenched her ringed hands in a convulsive, furious spasm.

“Oh, I am indeed overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by your malicious impropriety. You bring a gift for me, I hear.”

“A gift, madam?”

“So I hear. Your notion of a gift.” Her voice rose. “His whore! This filthy temple slut. A snake-worshiping devil-bitch he took for his pleasure because he couldn’t have me.”

Am Alisaar said nothing, his face stony with his own anger.

She spat at him: “You will not speak of this problematical child she carries. I won’t have her live! I am the mother of the King’s heir—I, and no other.”

“You and many others, madam.”

Her eyes grew suddenly enlarged and blank as if they saw in terror those other lesser children clamoring for their birthright. She turned and crossed to Orhn and looked in his face.

“I,” she said, “I, alone. Your King is here, Orhn Am Alisaar,” and she snatched his hand and laid it over her belly. He felt the gentle swell of her body, the ribs of some jewel set in her navel beneath the folds of her dress. He felt, too, the blood thicken immediately in his temples and surge in his groin. Val Mala saw his breathing quicken and abruptly pushed his hand away. “Your King, to whom you will kneel,” she said, smiling contemptuously at how she and the star had moved him. “And now you have my leave to go. The Queen-widow, I believe, can give such an order to a mere prince of Alisaar.”

Orhn stiffened, his mouth set. He bowed as rigidly as an automaton and strode out. The great cibba-wood door crashed behind him.

Val Mala glanced at Amnorh standing in the shadows.

“So much for the upstart.”

“Indeed, my goddess. So much.”

“I’m not certain what you mean, Amnorh. Possibly you should be thankful,” but she laughed and pulled the wig from her head. Her hair flowed black over her shoulders. “And has a physician examined the girl?”

“As soon as she reaches the Palace of Peace.”

“And Rehdon,” she said—“and Rehdon. When did he die?”

“A little before sunrise, I would judge. The girl was with him.”

“Foolish Rehdon, to need women so greatly and have such fear of them. Always fear. Even in lust, fear. An inadequate, hollow King.”

“He no longer troubles you.”

“No.” She bent close and her astonishingly white hand gripped his shoulder. “How?”

“I gave it to him in the bitter wine they brew in the Lowlands,” he said evenly. “The Red Moon was in his body. He didn’t realize what he was drinking.”

“I wanted him to know. I wish I could have seen him drink it and die.”

“Impracticable, my Queen.”

“And is Koramvis payment enough for you?” she hissed.

“In excess of what I ask,” he murmured, and reached out to caress her body already moving against his in awakening desire.

A man in a black robe hurried out from under the wide portico of the Palace of Peace. Behind him, high up in one of the bowl-topped towers, the room from which he had just come burned with a yellow light. Dusk was well advanced over the silent gardens.

He passed two sentries, whose eyes squinted after him when he had gone by.

In the shadow of the broad gate a strong hand came from the dark to seize his arm.

“What do you want with me?”

“News of the Lowland temple girl.”

“On whose authority do you ask me that?”

“The Lord Amnorh’s.”

The physician hesitated. At last he said: “It’s too early to judge her condition with certainty.”

The voice in the dark was insistent.

“Come now, physician. You think your own thoughts.”

“Then . . . I think she has conceived.”

The hand let go of his arm and someone moved soundlessly away. The physician shook himself as if to be rid of a shiver, and turned toward the sweep of the city, where lamps were lighting like stars.

Night flooded Koramvis, her bright palaces and narrow murderous ways, night and the star throbbed and faded and sank before the scarlet eruption that was dawn. Thereafter other nights and other dawns followed.

Somewhere a stringed bell began to rasp and toll.

Similar bells echoed it.

As the disc of this new sun steered above the horizon, gouts of smoke burst from the black temple of the Storm gods and drifted in gauzes over the river Okris. This red, scalding day would see a king finally carried to his tomb.

The sky cooled to darkest indigo.

From the Storm Palace, the temples, the Academy of Arms, moved black and glittering worm trails, converging and uniting on a white road flanked by gigantic crested dragons of obsidian—the Avenue of Rarnammon.

The High King is dead, the sun is eclipsed, the moon falls, the earth quakes.

A hundred priestesses were the prologue, wailing the mourning chant; a cry from hell it seemed, it was so full of emptiness, despair, pain. Their robes the storm-red of dragon’s blood, their eyes streaming tears from the citrus juice they had splashed into them, their bodies punctured and streaked with self-inflicted wounds. After them the priests, purple robes and a humming disquiet of gongs and mask faces caught in a congested rigor.

Rehdon’s Dragon Guard carried in their midst the embalmed death. Among their black, clashing assemblage, framed by the dipped rust banners and the trailing tassels, rolled a gilt cage with a man sitting up in it. He wore full armor. The great spiked crest flamed on his head, the eyes stared straight in front of him. He might have lived, yet death breathed out from every pore of him, an odorless stink of corruption, and the black eyes refracted and flashed and blazed, being constructed now not of tissue but onyx and crystal. Behind him walked princes like serfs, a king or two and after these their women and their wives. And Rehdon’s Queen in her black velvet and fantastic jewels, her skirt also trailing in the smoking dust. Her eyes were blank as the gem eyes of her dead and hated husband. Her wish had killed him, yet she must mourn him through the city like a slave. She recalled the greetings of the Zakorian princes—“Honor to the heir in your womb”—and fury burned bitter as the dust on her tongue.

At the tail of the worm marched the endless ranks of soldiery. Drums thundered across the streets and thunder answered dully from the panting sky.

The crowds trembled, hearing this sullen roar of gods in anger. Women fell to their knees weeping as Rehdon’s death cage passed them. Soon a shout rose, a shout to kill the witch, the banalik of the Lowland-Accursed, the murderess of the Storm Lord: Ashne’e.

The Hall of Kings stood on a terraced bank of the Okris, and its entrance was a marble dragon’s mouth.

Between those upstrained jaws the shimmering worm ran, flaring now with torchlight. The sky had turned black, and spears of pallid light flickered beyond the river; rain began to fall in huge molten drops, and the river boiled. Thunder cracked in fragments.

The priestesses raised their rain-and-tear-dashed faces, quivering terror and exaltation.

In the shell of the sepulcher the torches quavered and dug blue and red light from the rubies and sapphires of rearing mausoleums, from the eyes of carved monsters and hiddrax, and ran in silver pools between the limbs of metal guardians.

A line of priests marked the way to the newest tomb. In the breath of sweet-smoke and incense the body of Rehdon was lifted from its cage and carried into its heart. Prayers moaned among the sarcophagi and were lost.

Val Mala followed the kings and princes into the silent place. Long ago she would have been walled in beside her lord, his thing till eternity or decay, and a dry raw fear rose in her throat as she thought of it.

He lay before her on his couch, on his back. Fear was replaced by contempt and scorn as she recalled that never again would he lie thus in life before her. She reached to take his hand, to press her lips to it in a mockery of the traditional kiss of sorrow. And was turned to scarcely breathing stone.

There was a snake.

It stood straight upright on her husband’s breast, wickedly thin, yellow gold, splattered with a coiling black design. Its tongue flickered like a black flame in and out of its mouth.

She could not draw back her hand. She could not call out.

She held out her hand for the snake to strike her with its needle teeth, and for the poison to fill her veins. Its head recoiled and she knew her last instant of life was on her.

Lightning. It seemed lightning had struck through the roof into the tomb. But it was the glare of torchlight on a sword, the sword, in fact, of Prince Orhn, which had moved a fraction more swiftly than the snake and struck off its head.

Val Mala pulled her hand back as if from a sucking, reluctant clay, and fainted.

The silence in the tomb broke into shouts and imprecations, communicated rapidly to the throng outside.

Orhn wiped the blood slime from his sword and re-sheathed it methodically.

“Find the master mason of this tomb. He has some questions to answer.” As guards moved to oblige him, he motioned to Val Mala’s women, then stepped over her body without attention and went out.

It was no comfort to Val Mala that she was not required to walk back across the storm-choked streets. She lay like the brief vision she had experienced of her own death, and after oblivion came pain and sickness and alarm: physicians scurried to her, there were a hundred remedies and prayers. But the feared miscarriage did not occur; she held to her child with a furious, frightened vigor, and after the panic was done more than one surgeon howled under the whips of her personal guard.

She lay in her darkened bedchamber beneath the glittering coverlet embroidered with marigold suns and ivory-silver moons, and her eyes scorched her own shallow brain with their hate. Never had she known such terror, few times would she know such terror again.

“Bring me Lomandra,” she said.

Lomandra the Xarabian, her chief woman, came like an elegant and slender ghost into the shadowy room.

“I am here, lady,” she said. “I rejoice at your safety.”

“My safety. I almost lost the child, the King within me, Rehdon’s seed. My only hope of honor—she wants to take it from me—she sent the snake to kill my son.”

“Who, lady?”

“The whore Orhn brought here to spite me. The Lowlands worship the serpent, the anckira. That witch, that she-devil—I prayed she wouldn’t live. I swear she shan’t.”

“Madam—”

“Quiet. This is all you must do. You must go to the Palace of Peace.”

“Madam, I—”

“No. You’ll do as I say. Remember, I trust you completely. You’ll wait on the bitch, and then we shall see. Take this.”

Lomandra stared at the Queen’s extended hand and saw what Val Mala offered her—a ring of many precious stones, a beautiful and valuable ring.

Lomandra seemed to hesitate, and then, softly, she drew it off and placed it on her own finger.

“It becomes you,” Val Mala murmured, and Lomandra was wedded to her scheming.

Outside the casements, thunders crashed and galloped across the city, the black animals of the storm which was to last three days.

After the long rain, morning heat fell more sweetly into the gardens of the Palace of Peace.

The eyes of the guard turned sideways. A woman was coming up between the tall trees and the topiary, a woman with golden ornaments and wearing palace black. They knew her by sight: she was the Queen’s chief lady, Lomandra the Xarabian. She walked past them, up the pale steps, under the portico.

Inside, a coolness in the corridors, and mosaic floors. In a room sat a girl with lank hanging hair that was the exact hue of the rarest amber. Her belly was already enlarged with child, but her body did not seem to have grown with it; rather, it appeared shrunken away, as if all her flesh, all her being had concentrated itself in this one area of new life, the rest of her merely a shell, a housing.

Lomandra halted. She stood quite still, she stood with all Val Mala’s pride and contempt apparent in the lines of her, for she was at this time a total emulation of Val Mala.

“I am sent to you by my mistress, the Queen of the Am Dorthar and of all Vis, the Lord Rehdon’s widow,” she said coldly, stringing the titles like rare gems.

“For what purpose?”

Lomandra was startled by this directness, but only for an instant.

“To serve you. The Queen honors her husband’s child.”

Ashne’e turned and looked at her. She was a pathetic creature, Lomandra thought, with merciless distaste. Except, that was, for her eyes. They too were amber, and quite extraordinary. Lomandra found herself staring into them and looked quickly away, disproportionately unnerved.

“How long have you to wait for your labor?”

“It will not be long.”

“Precisely how long? We understand the Lowland women carry their children for a shorter time than the Vis.”

Ashne’e did not answer. Lomandra’s hauteur crystalized into anger. She went forward and stood over the girl.

“I’ll ask you again. How long before your child is born?”

Yes, the eyes were perfectly—Lomandra searched her mind for a suitable word and could not find one. Perhaps it was merely this alien racial coloring that made them seem so—preternatural. Small veins stretched across the white like paths into the golden circlet of the iris, the vortex of the pupils. The pupils expanded even as she gazed at them. They seemed to pull her down into a whirling lightless void. In the midst of the void Lomandra was assailed by a foreign emotion which was pure horror, pure dread and a misery beyond endurance.

She fell back gasping and caught at the chair to steady herself.

When next she looked down, the Lowland girl was sitting with her head bowed and her hair falling over her face.

Lomandra stared about her, confused. “I am ill,” she thought.

“In five months I shall bear the child.”

Lomandra recalled putting a question to the girl; this then must be the answer. She had asked about the birth. Her reason steadied suddenly about her; she was reassuringly calm, almost amused, at her brief hysterical disorientation. “I must be more careful of myself.” It was the heat, or possibly . . . Lomandra smiled, remembering that tonight she would lie with Kren, Fourth Dragon Lord, Warden of the River Garrison, whose lovemaking always pleased her.

The girl Ashne’e had already dwindled, guttered like the flame of a candle.

Lomandra forgot at the Garrison high table, and later, when the night dripped redly black through the open windows and she lived through the world of a man’s body under the auspices of the star. But when she slept, she lay with the great swelling of her own imminent labor before her, and felt the terrifying movement of foetal life within. Then there was a crowd screaming, and she stretched naked in an open place, pegged out under the cruel sky, and a blade was thrust through her, through her sex into her womb—the most ancient, unspeakable punishment of the Vis. She screamed, she heard the embryo scream. She saw her own corpse, and found it was not hers. It was the corpse of Ashne’e.

Kren woke her. She turned her face into his chest and wept. Lomandra had not wept since, long ago, little more than a child, she had left her own land for the crags of Dorthar. Now, rivers ran from her eyes, and afterward she trembled, fearing herself possessed.

At first she considered revealing to the Queen her fear, asking that some other woman be sent in her place to watch the Lowland witch, but when she attended Val Mala, bringing her the answer to her question, all hope of it left her. Since the serpent, Val Mala’s beauty had been gradually demolished by the tyranny of her womb; her whims were peevish, and she was at her most temperamental and dangerous.

So Lomandra returned to the Palace of Peace and found only a thin and wasted girl chained to the parasite of creation.

A month passed. Lomandra dressed the girl in rare fabrics that hung like sacks on her body, and combed out her lifeless, fulvid hair, and observed her closely, never once looking into her eyes, which now, correspondingly, never turned to hers.

And Lomandra marveled. She came to know the fragile body intimately, yet, knowing this much, Lomandra felt she knew nothing; the soul within the body was dumb and locked away.

The physician, the black gown flapping round his thinness like rags on a skeleton, came and went. At the end of the month, Lomandra approached him in the twilit colonnade.

“How are things progressing, lord physician?”

“Well enough, though she doesn’t, I think, seem well made to bear a child. Her hips are very narrow and the pelvis like a bird’s.”

Lomandra said then, as Val Mala had told her to: “It will happen soon?”

“Not for some months yet, lady.”

“I would have expected sooner,” Lomandra lied, the Queen’s words. “Milk pap comes out of her breasts on occasion. She’s complained of sharp pains in her lower back. Are these not signs?”

The physician appeared startled.

“I haven’t noticed that. She’s said nothing.”

“Well, I’m a woman. She’s peasant stock, unsophisticated, afraid perhaps to speak to a man of such things.”

“It may be sooner, then.”

He seemed troubled as he turned away and vanished between the pillars like a tattered shadow.

Lomandra, her hand already on the curtain, paused. She had guessed long since the Queen’s intent; but it came to her now, for the first time, to recoil from what she had made herself accomplice to.

In the room, the girl sat before the oval mirror drawing a comb slowly through her listless hair. An inexplicable pity choked the Xarabian. She went forward, gently took the comb and continued its movement.

“Lomandra.”

Lomandra was startled. This voice had never before spoken her name. It had a curious effect; for a moment the pale drained face in the mirror became the face of a queen who had bound her in service. Her eyes met Ashne’e’s in the glass.

“Lomandra, I have no hate for you. Fear nothing.”

The words fitted so perfectly with the overlaid image of royalty that Lomandra’s jeweled hands shook and she let go of the comb.

“Xarabiss lies beside the Shadowless Plains, Lomandra. Though you are Vis, the blood of our peoples has mingled. Know me and yourself, Lomandra. You will be a friend to me.”

The soul of the Xarabian screamed suddenly within her. Only fear of Val Mala kept her from crying aloud what she knew must happen.

The girl seemed to hear her thoughts, without surprise.

“Obey the Queen, Lomandra. You have no choice. When her work is done, then you will do mine.”

The moon hung, a red fruit in the garden trees, as Amnorh passed the uncrossed spears of the guard with a noncommittal: “I am on the Queen’s business.” Inside he climbed the darkness of a tower and pulled back the curtain of Ashne’e’s chamber. Only moonlight defined the room.

“I see you always as I see you now. Lying on a bed, Ashne’e.”

Her eyes were shut, but she said: “What do you want from me?”

“You know quite well what I want.”

He sat beside her and put his hand on her breast. It was obvious to him, even in the dark, that her beauty was both eradicated and unrecoverable, but it was not prettiness he desired.

“I want the tricks you taught Rehdon, the murdering tricks. You’ll find me an apt pupil.”

“There is a child in me,” she enunciated clearly, “the Storm Lord’s heir.”

“Yes. There’s a child. I doubt it’s Rehdon’s. His seed wasn’t overpotent.”

Her eyes opened and fixed on him.

“Do you imagine,” he said, “that you’d live now if I hadn’t planted you with the excuse?”

“Why does it matter to you that I live?”

“Ah, a profound question, Ashne’e. I want your knowledge. Not only the love you teach between your white thighs, but those powers your people play at in their dunghills. The Speaking Mind: yes, I have mastered your terminology. Instruct me how to read men’s thoughts. And Her Temple—where is that? Close?”

“There are many temples.”

“No, not those. This is Anackire’s place. I am aware the ruins lie in the hills of Dorthar.”

“How do you know this?”

“I have had other Lowlanders at my beck from time to time. Some are looser-tongued than others. But none was an acolyte of the Lady of Snakes.”

“Why do you seek this place?”

“To despoil it of its monetary and spiritual wealth. This no doubt distresses you, but I assure you, you’ve no choice. There are a million subtle ways in which I can distress you more violently should you refuse to assist me in everything I ask. It would be easy to instigate your death.”

He needed no answer. She gave him none.

“Now I’ll have what I came for.”

She made no protest or denial, but reached for him and twined him at once in her limbs and hair, so that he also was reminded irresistibly of serpents in the moon-tinged blackness.

The Queen had summoned Lomandra to the palace; certain of Amnorh’s men had relieved the scatter of external guard at the Palace of Peace. Amnorh took the Lowland girl to his chariot and drove with her by circuitous routes toward the skirts of the mountains.

A silver dawn was replaced by a pitiless lacquering of blue as the towered city fell behind. Birds loomed on broad wings, casting ominous shadows.

“Stop at that place,” she said to him.

It was a cleft in rock; below, he saw the dragon’s eye, the lake Ibron, a gleam of white water.

“You must leave the chariot.”

He obeyed her, pausing only to tether the restless animals, and followed her along the bony spine of the hill.

And then she vanished.

“Ashne’e!” he shouted. A furious conviction took hold of him that she had duped him, escaped to some lair like a beast. And then he turned and saw her pallid shape, like a dim candle, burning in the rock beside him. It was a cave with an eye-of-a-needle opening. He slid through, and at once felt the dampness in the air, the chill and the encroaching, almost tangible dark.

“No trickery, Amnorh,” she said, and there was a subtle difference in the way she spoke to him. “All that remains of the temple hill-gate is here.”

“How can you be sure of the entrance?”

“I, like you, have been told of this place.”

The back of the cave fell away in a corridor of blackness into which she turned and he followed. Once the blackness enclosed him he felt immediately reluctant to proceed. He struck sparks from a flint to tallow and held it burning in his hand, but the small light seemed only to emphasize the impenetrable shade.

The corridor ended in blank stone. Ashne’e reached out and her fingers ran in patterns on the stone. He tried to memorize what she did, but the shadows confused him. The stone shuddered; dislodged, an ancient dirt cascaded, and there was a groaning of something old disturbed. An opening appeared grudgingly, low and slit-thin.

She slipped through it, a fluttering pale ghost, and seemed to fall in slow motion into a bottomless pit. Amnorh maneuvered after her and found a stairway, a great jagged pile of steps pouring down into the lightlessness below, and sinking in the inky sea was Ashne’e, an impossible fish.

As he watched her, there came a stifling urge to turn back. This was her element, it absorbed her, incorporated her into its being. From the Vis it drew away, amused but intolerant of his greed for substantial things. Yet his lust for the riches of the temple hurled him forward.

He followed.

Curious sounds stole into his ears.

There seemed to be a tingling, the rippling of unimagined instruments; it was the ceaseless dripping of blue water onto silver stone. The shivering damp steamed and slithered on the steps. A vision infected Amnorh of a screaming man who was falling, falling, falling into the depthless dark.

But though trembling and cold, he reached the bottom, and found another arch-mouth. He went through it, after the girl, unprepared by anything any terrified bleeding serf had ever babbled to him. Out of the black sprang a flame, and horror. He felt his tongue thicken and his joints melt like wax.

Anackire.

She towered. She soared. Her flesh was a white mountain, her snake’s tail a river of fire in spate.

No colossus of Rarnammon had ever been raised to such a size. Even the obsidian dragons could crouch like lizards by her scaled serpent’s tail. And the tail was gold, all pure gold and immense violet gems, and above the coils of it a woman’s white body, flat belly empty of a navel, gold minarets of nipples on the cupolas of the ice-white breasts. The eight white arms stretched in the traditional modes, such as he had seen on little carvings in the villages, casting ink-black chasms of shadow. The arm of deliverance and the arm of protection, of comfort and of blessing, and also those terrible arms of retribution, destruction, torment and the inexorable curse.

At last his eyes pulled themselves like tortured flies on to her face. The hair was all golden serpents, twisting, spitting to her shoulders. But the face itself was narrow, pale, long-lidded, set with a devouring yellow stare that might have been hewn from topaz. Or amber.

Ashne’e’s face.

He turned, and saw they stood in the great pool of shade that spread from the anckira, and it occurred to him that the cave was full of light, though no source was apparent.

“Who made this?”

When the girl answered, he could not repress the shudder that took hold of him.

“It has been said, Amnorh, that this is Anackire herself.”

And then sanity came back to him abruptly, for he saw the carved doorway set in the lowest coil of the tail.

“The hub of the mystery,” he said, “the treasure hoard.”

He went by the girl and strode to the door, ignoring what leaned above him. It had no secret machinery, giving at a thrust. Rusty metal swung inward, and he looked down into the eye of a great pool. Another deeper cave, filled by water, probably some entrance into the lake of Ibron. He stared about him, raising the burning tallow. There were no jewels, no religious amulets set with diamonds as the old stories had suggested; neither were there the great books of the lore and magic of the psyche and all the forces it might conduct and control. Only a cave smelling of water and filled with water. Anger lashed its thongs in his brain. So he had been tricked after all.

He turned and looked at Ashne’e.

“Where else do I search for what I want?”

“There is no other place.”

“Did you know there’d be nothing here? That all your legends were merely the dung of time?”

His hand closed viciously on her arm. He saw the blue circlet his fingers made, but no sign in her face that he caused her pain.

“Perhaps I should abort my child from you and leave you to the gentle mercies of the lord Orhn.”

Incredibly, a smile rose like dawn over her white face. He had never seen her smile, nor any woman smile in this fashion; it seemed to freeze his blood. His hand fell away from her.

“Do so, Amnorh. Otherwise he will be my curse on you.”

A curious sensation gripped him, so that he felt he looked at her not with his open eyes but with a third eye set in the center of his forehead. And it was not her he saw. Standing where she stood was a young man, indistinct, spectral, yet Amnorh could make out that he had the bronze skin of the Vis and, at the same time, eyes and hair as pale as the Lowland wine with which he had poisoned Rehdon during the first nights of the Red Moon.

The apparition faded and Amnorh staggered back.

“There is nothing here for you,” Ashne’e said.

She turned and began to cross the cavern toward the archway and the steps, and he found that he must follow her for he could no longer bear the singing silence and the presence of the creature in the cave.

He should then indeed have had her killed. She was no longer useful to him, a dangerous embarkation which had failed. And yet his lusts still drew him to her swollen ugly body, long after the star Zastis had paled and fallen from the sky. There was, too, the remembrance of the child in her which might so easily be his own. Would he, if Ashne’e were allowed to bring it forth alive, stand to benefit from this thread of his lineage woven into the royal line of kings?

The temple also haunted him.

Months after he had fled it, he had surveyed his terror and gone back. By then, the High Council, which he held in his palm, had voted him to the position of Warden of Koramvis, that title which ultimately and tactfully would ensure that he attained the regency. It had been the blood price he had earned from Val Mala, and her network of bribes and threats had not failed him. So long as he could amuse her he would do well, and Orhn, now redundant in the palace, deprived of honor and to a large extent of funds, afforded Amnorh a faint, aesthetic pleasure. Yet it was a season of waiting. And in the waiting, the urge came on him to return to that place.

Night was drowning the sky when he took the chariot and rode out of the River Gate, out of Koramvis, into the barren hills. The mountains, still tipped with the last light, were a monolithic desolation crowned with blood. A mad wind, the first voice of the cold days coming, howled among the rocks. When he came to the cleft, he left the chariot as before, and, taking a light in one hand, he followed the path the girl had shown him. He searched a long while. The moon appeared overhead, the stars came out. The narrow arch-mouth eluded him. Everything seemed to have become a fantasy, the hallucination of a dream. He recalled the peculiar moment when he had seen a man stand where Ashne’e had stood.

He turned back to the chariot, but checked a few yards off. The team was trembling and sweating. Amnorh looked about him. It was possible the night had called some animal out of its lair to hunt.

Then he saw it. A huge shape, with a glistening along its back from the moon. It eased over the rail of the chariot and slid away. A rock snake most probably, absorbed now into some hole. Yet Amnorh, voyeur of a superstition, had caught the imprint of the superstition like a disease. Had She perhaps sent it, he wondered with inadequate cynicism, that woman underground?

3

Lomandra heard a voice calling her name.

She turned to look down the dim corridor, which was empty, and the voice seemed to come again—inside her skull.

Ashne’e.

Lomandra hurried up the marble flight of the tower, drew aside the curtain and stood staring. The girl lay white-faced and expressionless, yet, through the thin shift, Lomandra saw the running stain of blood.

“Has it begun?” Lomandra cried hoarsely, sick with fear. Then: “The child has come early.” They were ritual words merely. Lomandra knew well enough, and without surprise, why the child came. She had mixed the Queen’s medicine with Ashne’e’s food and drink for three months now. “The bastard will tear its way from her body,” Val Mala had murmured, “and be stillborn.” “Will it kill her?” Lomandra had whispered. And Val Mala had said, very gently: “I shall pray that it does.”

“Are you in pain?” Lomandra asked uselessly.

“Yes.”

“How close together are the pains?”

“Quite close. It will be soon.”

“Oh, gods,” Lomandra cried out in her soul, “she will die, she will die, in agony, in front of me. And this is my doing.”

“Where is the physician?” Ashne’e asked tonelessly.

“At the Storm Palace. Val Mala summoned him a day ago.”

“Then send for him.”

Lomandra turned and almost ran from the room.

The Palace of Peace was in pale darkness, caught in the pulsing blue afterglow of dusk.

Lomandra leaned on the balustrade a moment, trembling. She made out a girl moving below, a brown moth fluttering from lamp to lamp, lighting each with the firefly taper in her hand. Lomandra shouted to her and the girl froze, wide-eyed, then fled away through the colonnade, calling.

Lomandra moved slowly up the stairs, hesitant, dreading to return to the room above. In the doorway she halted. It was very dark.

“I have sent for the physician,” she said to the white blur on the bed.

“The waters have broken within me,” Ashne’e said, “just now, while you were gone. How long before he comes?”

Lomandra shuddered. Words flooded from her mouth before she could control them.

“The Queen will delay him. She and I have poisoned you. You’ll lose the child and die.”

She could see nothing of the girl except the dim whiteness. She gave no sign of her pain or any fear; it was Lomandra who writhed in terror.

“I understand all this, Lomandra. You have done the Queen’s work; now you must help me.”

“I? I know nothing of midwifery.”

“You shall learn.”

“I can do nothing. I’d only harm you.”

“I am already harmed. This is the son of the Storm Lord. He will be born alive.”

Abruptly Ashne’e’s body arched in a great paroxysm on the couch. She let out one single mindless animal cry, so solitary, unhuman and remote that Lomandra wondered wildly who it was that uttered it. And then, wanting only to run out of the room, she ran instead toward the girl.

“Take off your rings,” Ashne’e gasped. Her mouth was a great tragic rigor of struggling breath, above which her eyes were blank and empty as glass.

“My—rings?”

“Take off your rings. You must thrust into me and seize the head of the child and draw him out.”

“I can’t,” Lomandra moaned, but a desolate power converged and overwhelmed her. The rings fell glittering from her fingers, with them the jewels Val Mala had bought her with. She found she had bent to her task like a peasant woman, felt her whole stance and physical presence alter, now rough and capable and indifferent, while in the core of her wailed the trapped court woman in horrified loathing.

There was a welter of scalding blood. The girl did not shriek or spasm but held quite still, as if she felt nothing.

Into Lomandra’s narrow hands emerged the brazen head, the wrinkled demon face of birth, and then the body on the dancing cord. In the uncertain dark, Lomandra saw the girl reach up and snatch at the cord, knot it, gnaw it through like a wolf bitch in the Plains.

The baby let out an immediate scream. It screamed as if at the unjust bestial world into which it had been dragged, half-embryo still, blind and unreasoning, aware, nevertheless, of all the agony which had been, the agony which was to come.

“It’s male. A son,” Lomandra said.

She shut her eyes and her tears fell on her bloody hands.

The physician hurried into the Palace of Peace in the first cool breath of day.

A woman, like a ghost in a dark robe, emerged from the colonnade. He had a moment’s difficulty in recognizing her as the Queen’s chief lady, Lomandra. Brows creased in anticipated distress (for some idiot of a servant girl had delayed the message, and he feared the worst), he asked: “Is the girl dead?”

“No.”

“Then she’s still in labor? Perhaps I may be able to save the child. Quickly—”

“The child was born some time ago, and lives.”

The physician found that his hand had moved unbidden in a gesture of ancient religious significance as he stared incredulously in the Xarabian’s face.

With a flick of her fingers, Val Mala dismissed her attendants, and Lomandra stood alone in the room with her.

The Queen was big with child, overblown and beautiless; the loss of her looks made her the more terrible. And Lomandra, who had felt herself too weary to be afraid, became afraid as she looked at her.

“You’ve come to tell me some news, Lomandra. What?”

Harshly the Xarabian said: “Both the child and the mother live.”

Val Mala’s bloated face squeezed together in an ecstasy of malice.

“You come to me and dare to tell me that they live. You dare to tell me that you were present and they lived—both of them. The witch that sent a snake to abort me and her offal. May the black hells of Aarl swallow you, you brainless bitch!”

Lomandra’s heart raced desperately. She met Val Mala’s blazing eyes as steadily as she was able.

“What would you have had me do, madam?”

“Do! In the name of Dorthar’s gods, are you a fool? Listen to me, Lomandra, and listen carefully. You will return to the Palace of Peace and wait until the physician leaves her. Oh, don’t tremble, you can dismiss the whore from your mind, I’ll deal with her. Merely attend the child’s cot and see to it that it smothers in its pillows. It should give you little trouble.”

Lomandra stared at her, the blood draining from her face.

“I begin to wonder if I can trust you, Lomandra. In that case, I shall require proof of what you’ve done.” The Queen settled back into her chair and her face took on a look of impenetrability. In that moment Lomandra despaired, for she felt she was no longer communing with anything human or rational, but rather with some she-devil from the pit.

“Bring me,” Val Mala said, “the smallest finger of the child’s left hand. I see you will like this task even less than the first. Consider it the punishment for hesitation. You understand the alternatives, I think. Disobey me and you’ll live the rest of your life with every manner of scar on your body that my whip master can devise. Go now. Get it done.”

Lomandra turned and went out, dragging herself like an old woman. She scarcely knew where she was going. With dull surprise she reached the curtain of Ashne’e’s room and could not remember how she had come there.

The child lay sleeping in its cot beside the bed; the mother too appeared asleep, and the physician had taken his leave. Lomandra went to the cot, stood gazing down with burning, half-sightless eyes. Her hand went out and touched the pillow’s edge. Easy, it would be so easy. The pillow slid half an inch from below the head of the unconscious child.

“Lomandra.”

Lomandra turned swiftly, and the girl’s eyes were open and full on hers.

“What are you doing, Lomandra?”

The Xarabian felt the impossible compulsion grasp her.

“The Queen. The Queen has instructed me to smother your son. As proof that I’ve carried out her wishes she desires the little finger of the baby’s left hand.”

“Give me the child,” Ashne’e said. “On that table the physician has left a sleeping draft in a black vial. Bring me that also.”

Lomandra, moving in a dull and soulless incomprehension, did as she was told. Ashne’e took her baby in the crook of her arm, bared her breast, and smeared there a little of the dark liquid before giving the child suck.

“Now,” she said, “fetch me a knife.”

Never in all her life had Lomandra witnessed such an adamantine ruthlessness. Beside this, Val Mala’s malice became a scattering of dust.

It seemed to the Xarabian that she moved like a doll to do what Ashne’e directed, as though some puppet-master brought about all her actions by the twitching of silver strings.

A man in the Queen’s livery bowed low before the Queen.

“Madam, the Lady Lomandra begs to present you with this token.”

“Indeed? What a pretty box. Elyrian enamelwork, I think.”

The Queen eased up the lid of the box a little way and gazed inside. Not a muscle moved. Only the sight of her personal blood distressed her. She had that true stamp of Vis royalty which made her consider all others, particularly those born from the lower echelons of the people, to be progressively more and more subhuman. She shut the lid with a snap.

“You may tell Lomandra that her gift delights me. I shall remember her kind thought.”

Val Mala rose and went into the privacy of an inner room, where she tipped something from the box into an incense brazier.

Moments later her women were brought running by a sharp cry. The Queen’s labor had come upon her, somewhat prematurely.

Five physicians and a flock of midwives were summoned.

The birth was uncomplicated, but Val Mala forgot she was a Queen and screamed like a street whore, cursing them, and complaining to the gods that this affliction was not to be endured. At last a drug was administered, and the child born as its mother lay insensible.

White birds were slaughtered on temple altars, offering-smoke lay like river mist over the Okris, stringed bells rang, blue signals shot from the city’s watchtowers.

The Queen woke.

Her first thought was of her own body, free now from its enslaving ugliness, the tyrant plucked out. Second, she thought of the King, the man she had created and would eventually rule as he sat on the throne of his hated forerunner, Rehdon.

Several women stood beyond the bed; low evening light caught ornaments glistening like rain and showed, too, a certain unease on the dark faces.

“Where is my child?” she asked them.

Nervously they glared into each other’s eyes.

A fat midwife approached the bed.

“Majesty, you have a son.”

“I know.” Val Mala became impatient. “Let me see him. At once.”

The woman backed away, was replaced by a man in surgeon’s robes who leant over her and breathed: “It might be best, gracious madam, if you were to recover a little of your strength before we bring the baby to you.”

“I will see him now. Now, fool, do you hear?”

The man bowed low, gestured and a girl came from the end of the chamber carrying the white bundle of the infant in her hands.

Val Mala stared about her from her cushions.

“Is the child dead?” The sudden question sent a pang of terror through her. This was her only key to Dorthar and the power of Dorthar; if this were a stillbirth—Oh gods, what would she do? She snatched the baby in its dragon-embroidered mantle, and it was warm and feebly moving, though it gave no cries. She unwound the cloth. Why did the thing not cry? Was this unhealthy? No, now it sat naked in her hands she saw that it was perfect. And yet, what was—?

Val Mala screamed. The discarded baby fell tumbling down the bed, the midwife and the girl rushing to catch it up.

A monster, she had birthed a monster. Waves of insane rage and fear pounded and smashed in her body like a boiling sea.

A pale bird, sacrificed on the altar of Amnorh’s palace, would not die. It screamed and fluttered, its breast sliced open, until all the birds in the cages of the aviary court were shrieking and dashing themselves against the bars. It appeared the gods were loath to accept the offering.

At noon a flight of white pigeons, winging up past the windows of the Storm Palace, redrew the incident clearly and frightfully in his mind. An omen. Yet what place had omens in the Warden’s scheme of things?

Val Mala came into the room a moment later.

Her beauty was restored. It had taken her one month and the arts of a hundred women and slaves, masseurs from Zakoris, beauticians from Xarabiss and Karmiss and an astrologer-witch out of the Elyrian lands. She wore a gown of amethyst velvet, a girdle of white gold, and jewels scorched in her hair and on her hands.

“My greetings, Lord Warden.”

“I have been in darkness without the lamp of your loveliness,” he said.

“Pretty words, Amnorh. Did you buy them from a minstrel?”

Amnorh stiffened. He felt a sudden obtrusive coldness in his loins and around his heart. She had changed toward him, then. He must tread softly now, very softly. He thought of certain rumors he had heard concerning the birth of the prince. Certain rumors, too, that certain people present at the birth were strangely no longer seen about.

“I seek your counsel, Lord Warden. Your advice on a delicate matter.”

“I am your servant, madam, as you know.”

“Do I, Amnorh? Well.”

A low white shadow drifted through the open doorway. The kalinx had followed her in. The sense of cold griped in Amnorh’s vitals as if this creature were the presage of some disaster. It rubbed its face against her foot and sank down beside her, and she, seating herself in a low chair, began to caress its head. Her familiar.

“I am troubled,” she said, “deeply troubled. I’ve received curious reports regarding the Lowland girl. No one has seen her baby for many days, and she will say nothing. I think she’s killed the child and hidden the body.”

His narrow eyes studied her expressionlessly.

“And why, my peerless Queen, should she do that?”

“I’m told she suffered unduly at the birth. Perhaps she’s deranged.”

Amnorh gambled.

“Perhaps there’s a beautiful woman who hates her.” And saw at once that he had lost a good deal on this one cast. She stared at him with her black-as-venom eyes and said without inflection: “Never be too sure of me.”

“Madam, I speak only as your servant—one who would guard you whenever possible.”

“Really? You’d guard me, would you? Haven’t you known how this Lowland witch has practiced against me with all manner of diabolical magics and foulnesses?”

“Radiant Queen—”

“She is a sorceress and shall be punished as such,” Val Mala cried out in sudden fury, and the kalinx lifted its icy head and snarled.

Mastering himself, Amnorh tried a new tack with her.

“What you do is dangerous,” he said. “All high positions make enemies. Beware of those who will seize any opportunity to destroy you.”

“Who?” she said, almost in a caressive tone. “Tell me.”

“You yourself should be aware—”

“I am aware of more than you think, Amnorh. And why is it that you want the Lowland bitch to live? Was the body of the Queen not enough for you?”

“The nucleus of her spite,” he thought, “merely jealousy? But such dangerous jealousy.”

“There’s a reason why the girl should be spared. She has knowledge of peculiar powers. They would ensure you complete and unassailable rule. The throne of Dorthar would be safe for you and for your son.”

“I don’t need your safety,” she said.

Silk rustled in the doorway.

“Majesty, the Lord Orhn still waits on you in the antechamber,” a woman said.

“You may tell him I shan’t be long.”

Amnorh held his breath, weighing the feel of a balance in his mind. Val Mala rose.

“Go now,” she said, and she smiled at him, “go and enjoy your skinny little Lowland whore while you are able.”

“You misjudge me, madam.”

“I think not. I’ve heard you’ve often been a midnight visitor at the Palace of Peace.”

The coldness filled his mouth, and he shivered. Flinging the last dice, knowing already everything was lost, in a measured voice he said: “You forget the service I did you, Val Mala, in the Shadowless Plains.”

“Oh, but I do not.”

His tongue grew large in his mouth as it had when he looked at the white and golden nightmare creature in the cave. He bowed, turned silently and left her, knowing very well what she had promised him. In the anteroom he passed the tall figure of the Prince Orhn Am Alisaar, but did not see it.

Orhn, however, marked the Warden’s going and waited no longer.

He came into the room, and the kalinx lifted its head, lifted its lip and bared wicked ivory at him.

“Keep your place, you filthy abomination,” he said to it, and the kalinx sank, tail twitching, eyes a livid blue.

Val Mala turned.

“I didn’t give you leave to enter.”

“We’ll dispense with this playacting, I think, madam. I have entered and am here, with your leave or without it.”

“I’d heard, Orhn, that we were at last to be blessed with your departure.”

He grinned unexpectedly, but it was a wolfish, menacing grin.

“I’ll depart, madam, all in good time. But I seem to remember, madam, I did you a kindness which hasn’t been repaid.”

“Ah, yes. The prince rescued me from a serpent. What do you want, then? The usual mercenary’s fee?”

“What I have in mind I don’t imagine you spend on hired soldiers.”

Val Mala’s eyes widened. She took a step back, and he several steps forward. He reached out his large hands and gripped her velvet arms.

“Before I leave, I’ve promised myself something. And I calculate you know precisely what.”

“Your insolence is disgusting.”

“I always appear to disgust you, but you graciously granted me this audience. And so beautiful and elegantly dressed you are for it. Or do I mistake? Did you pretty yourself for Amnorh instead?”

“Let me go.”

He pulled her against him and thrust one hand inside the neck of her gown, his fingers closing like five claws of hot metal on her right breast. She reached up and raked the point of a ring down his cheek. He came away from her in a second, but caught her wrists in his hand and struck her across the face without hesitation. The blow chopped her to one side, and only the grasp on her wrists kept her from falling. A weal of dark blood appeared like a brand on her cheek.

“Hell take you for that!” she screamed.

He swung her up struggling.

“What dulcet tones my lady has,” he said, and he was very jovial. He carried her across the floor, and she shouted at him and fought against him all the way. He kept her hands tight and a distance from his eyes. Her spite was entirely impotent.

A brief colonnade led to the door of her bedchamber. He thrust the door open and then shut, and dropped her down onto the coverlet, where the embroidery of suns and moons flared up shocked eyes at him.

“Do this to me and I’ll kill you,” she hissed.

“Try by all means. I’ve slain men in single combat sixty times, each one fully armed and skilled in weaponry. Don’t think you could do better.”

He bent over her and began to unlace her bodice but she scratched at him. He immediately struck her hands away and effortlessly ripped the material open and the lacy undergarment with it. The false paleness of her unguent faded into copper on her breasts. He slid both hands to cover the erect red buds at their centers and felt them harden, like warm stones, against his palms.

“Now,” he said, “this isn’t Zastis, madam. You’ve no excuse for that. And I am so disgusting to you. Let me disgust you a little further.”

He pushed aside the heavy folds of her skirt.

When he entered her she made a sound in her throat far from anger, and her arms came clinging to his back, but he pushed her away and held her still, totally passive under his riding. Not a long but a hard ride. At her abandoned cries of ecstasy he slipped the tether and fell plunging in blind convulsions of pleasure through the golden thunder of her body.

“You hurt me,” she murmured. Her soft hand slid over him, finding out his hard muscular body, its plains and crevices, the core of his loins, which stirred faintly, even now, beneath her touch. “You’re well endowed for this work.”

“And you are a whore,” he remarked.

She only laughed, and soon he pushed her back and took her again.

The blue dust of night settled in the room.

Orhn left the bed and stood against the open windows, a towering male symmetry composed of darkness. Lifted on one elbow, Val Mala considered him.

“You abuse me, then leave me, Orhn. To Alisaar?”

He did not reply.

“Do me a service before you go,” she said, and caught the glint of his eyes turning to her. “Help me rid myself of the Lord Warden of Koramvis.” Unable to see his mouth, she surmised he might be smiling. “And also of the she-witch who practices sorcery against me.”

He came back to the bed and sat beside her, and now she saw the smile. Still he said nothing.

“Orhn, might it be possible that the girl’s baby wasn’t Rehdon’s seed . . . perhaps some priest, before he used her—”

He stretched out and cupped her breasts.

“Val Mala, when we found Rehdon dead, the Lowland girl sent herself into a kind of trance, which Amnorh claimed himself able to revive her from. He was alone with her in his tent for some time.”

The breath hissed between her teeth.

“So.”

“So. I’ve answered both your questions, I think. And the child which troubles you so greatly is no more than rotten fruit.”

“Amnorh shall be killed.”

Orhn shrugged. She caught the lobe of his ear between her teeth and bit it viciously. He pushed her away with an amused curse.

“Do as you like, gadfly. You’ve only the gods to answer to.”

“And you. Is it the regency you want, or me?”

“The regency. You, sweetheart, are the worthless dross that comes with it.”

White stars clustered in the sky, swung in the stained glass of the river, on the brink of which black hovels craned up to the moon. Some way off, on the opposite bank, the glow of a temple’s lights spilled down narrow steps into the water.

Lomandra moved along avenues of old cobbles, between the rat-infested remains of walls. Often she glanced nervously from side to side. Earlier a man had come out at her from a rotten doorway, thinking probably that she was a prostitute searching for custom.

“Let me by. I am summoned to the Garrison,” she had managed to choke out, and this invocation of the name of law deterred him.

She came to the place this time on foot, the hem of her cloak wet with mud from the filthy gutters, she, who had always in the past ridden here in curtained litters. It was a large formless building, white walls soiled with dirt and night. The guard at the gate blocked her path with a slanted spear.

“What’s your business?”

Lomandra had no presence of mind left to her at this moment.

“I am here to see the Dragon Lord, Kren.”

“Oh, are you, miss? Well, the dragon is busy, too busy to be interested in your sort.”

She felt her body wilting with weak hopelessness, but another man spoke from the dark beyond the gate.

“You, sentry. Let the lady through.”

The guard swung round, saluted, moved aside. Lomandra came into the dingy, damp court. She could not see the man’s face, but his voice had seemed familiar. He took her arm gently.

“The Lady Lomandra—am I correct?”

He led her beneath the pulsing splutter of a grease torch, and, looking up, she was able to identify him. His name was Liun, a man of Karmiss, one of Kren’s captains.

“Yes, I see you are.” His mouth took on a scornful slant. “You must have missed him unbearably to come here alone. These streets are no place for a court woman, particularly after dark.”

“I—have to see him. . . .” She halted, uncertain as to what he would do, how much credence he would give her. If he judged her a pestering fool, no doubt he would do his best to keep between her and the Dragon Lord. But there was an unexpected warmth in his tone when he spoke again.

“If you’ll forgive me, you seem unwell. Come inside. The place is grim enough, but at least impervious to river damp.”

They passed between a row of sentries at perfect attention and in through the studded cibba-wood doors. Too casually he said to her: “Has he given you a child?”

“No,” she said. Her eyes watered with tiredness. “No. And yet,” she thought, “it’s because of a child that I’ve come.” Ashne’e’s child, taken in the concealing dark from the palace, now hidden away in one of the dank houses by the river and fed on pulps. The old woman who rented out the slum had scarcely glanced at the baby’s tiny damaged paw, but no doubt she was inured to the injured brats and frenzied mothers among the poor. Lomandra struggled against a sudden dreadful urge to weep. She seemed to have lived a year without sleep. Why she had done as the Lowlander told her she hardly knew, and did not permit herself to seek for an answer, afraid of what it might be.

She felt the young man’s grasp on her arm increase.

“You aren’t well. Sit here, and I’ll go for Kren myself.”

And she was seated in a small lamplit room, where a fire smoked dully in the grate.

It seemed a long time before he came, a tall broad-shouldered man, dressed informally in brown leather and the dark red cloak of the Garrison. He had a tough intelligent face, scarred, like his body, in his earliest youth from border fights in the Thaddric mountains and sea skirmishes with Zakorian pirates. But the face was dominated by a pair of observant and remarkably steady eyes. His smile was concerned and friendly but no more, for there had never been sentiment between them; only in a bed had they been lovers.

“How can I be of service, Lomandra?”

She opened her mouth but could seem to get no words out. In the pause, he saw the oldness in her face. Her eyes were sleepless and unpainted, her beautiful hair hung lankly on her shoulders.

“Liun seems to think you have my child.”

“No. Besides, it would have made no difference to us.”

Again silence choked her. He went to a table and poured wine into two cups. She took the goblet, and when she had swallowed some of the drink, words came into her mouth.

“I need your help. I must leave Koramvis. If I remain, it’s likely the Queen will kill me.”

He looked at her for a while, then drank.

“I’ve told you of the Lowland girl Ashne’e.”

“The enchantress who poisons your sleep with bad dreams,” he said quietly.

“Yes, perhaps. . . . Her child was born a month ago.”

“I’d heard of it.”

“Val Mala had medicines mixed with the girl’s food—she hoped the child would be stillborn. When it lived, she ordered me to kill it—smother it. She wanted the small finger of the left hand given her as a token of its death.”

Kren’s face darkened. He drained the cup and dashed the dregs into the fire.

“The bitch is insane. Does she think you’re her butcher?”

“I didn’t do it, Kren. Ashne’e—cut the finger away—I—have never seen such a savage purpose. I sent Val Mala what she asked. But the child is still alive.”

Her whole body drooped on the narrow soldier’s couch. He set down his cup and sat beside her, putting a gentle arm about her.

“And you have this child hidden somewhere.”

She was very glad of his perception.

“Yes.”

“You’re a brave woman to go against Val Mala.”

“No. I’m afraid to my very soul. But Ashne’e—she asked that I take the baby out of Koramvis, leave it in some Lowland holding on the Plains. The Queen will murder her as soon as she has the means, and the child, too, if she can find it.”

“Then she must be positive it’s Rehdon’s work.”

“It has the skin of a Vis,” Lomandra said softly, “but its eyes—are her eyes.”

“I’ll help you get safely to the Plains,” he said. “A traveling chariot and two men—more would arouse suspicion. I’ll make certain you can trust them.”

“Thank you, Kren,” she whispered.

“And you,” he said, “what of you, Lomandra?”

“I?” She looked at him distantly, finding she had not thought of herself, only of the child. “I suppose I shall return to Xarabiss. My family are dead, but I have jewels I can sell. Perhaps I’ll marry into some noble house; I’ve been well-trained in aristocratic etiquette.”

He touched her hair lightly, got to his feet once more and went to stand beside the smoking fire.

“I’ll see to it that there’s transport ready in the morning. Sleep here tonight. There are several private chambers you can choose from.”

She saw that it was solicitude prompted him to make this offer that she sleep alone. Perhaps, besides, he had already made arrangements with a woman of the Garrison to share his bed. She felt too weary not to be glad, yet, at the same instant, vague regret, for she would not see him ever again.

4

The city was roused at midnight by an apocalyptic blaze of watch fires, running torches and the clangor of bells. Men in the black and rust livery of the Storm Palace stood shouting in the public places of Koramvis, riders galloped through the avenues and alleyways, bawling their proclamation as if the end of the world had come.

It was to be a night of fire and terror.

Treachery. Blasphemy.

Amnorh, High Warden of Koramvis, Councilor of the dead Storm Lord, had the curse of the gods on his back. He had taken the Lowland witch, whose evil had first slain Rehdon, and used her as his harlot. His bastard, not the Storm Lord’s heir, had thriven in her devil’s body.

The work was done well. The absurd pride of the Dortharian rabble, who believed themselves, even in extremes of poverty and unprivilege, to be in some remote way fathered by gods, soared to fever pitch. In the streets they bawled for Ashne’e’s death, for the spike to be driven into her womb, and howled too at the gates of Amnorh’s palace, for they fancied themselves tricked and had been given the power of revenge.

A party of soldiers, the mob behind them, strode into the Palace of Peace, their mailed feet ringing in the corridors. Two of them came to the room where the girl lay and entered a little uneasily. She was, after all, a sorceress; she might turn into an anckira when they touched her. It was said she had devoured her own child.

But she lay quite still. The torch glare seemed to shine right through her, as though she were made of alabaster.

She had not waited for them.

The soldiers carried out the corpse, nevertheless, and showed it to the people. A pyre was roughly but enthusiastically built in the Square of Doves. The populace dragged out willingly items of furniture and clothing to solidify its structure. Ashne’e’s white body was carried by a grinning baker to the top and slung down naked on the heap. Torches were applied. A black column of smoke towered into the lightening sky.

The mob broke open wine shops and became drunk. When the charcoal struts collapsed, they ran again to Amnorh’s palace and tossed blazing brands over the wall into the trickster’s court.

“My lord,” a man shouted, “the trees at the wall are on fire. The gate will go next. Once that’s down the mob will surge through, and the house guard can never hold them.”

“Is my chariot ready as I asked?”

“Yes, Lord Amnorh.”

The servant hurried ahead of him into the courtyard. The dawn air was already thick with smoke and the charred smell of burnt wood. Outside he heard an unmistakable crowd noise.

Amnorh mounted the chariot alone and took up the reins of the skittish team. He felt a certain bleak satisfaction in himself that he could turn his back so completely and promptly upon the entire sum of his power and wealth and leave it to the flames and the greed of the Dortharian scum.

“Aiyah!” Amnorh cried to the team and drove them along an avenue of smoldering feather trees, straight toward the gate. His own guard scattered, slaves pulled the gate wide for him.

Torch flare and smoke and mass, and foul stink and an impression of a single creature with a thousand yelling mouths and clawing hands. He plunged into it, the chariot’s bladed wheels spinning, and the foremost rank of the crush toppled and spread before him, screeching. It seemed for a moment the chariot would overturn or at least be halted by the mash of fallen human flesh, but the fleet, neurotic animals, blowing, and terrified by the fire, dashed on and pulled the car after them, while Amnorh slashed from side to side with his knife.

A man leaped in next to him, shouting obscenities, but Amnorh, with a swift half-turn, slit his vocal throat and thrust him out. A severed hand clung on the rail until the chariot’s uneven progress shook it loose. Women wailed curses and agony.

A rush of sweet air, and the crowd was behind him. A few ran baying after him like dogs, but could not match his pace and presently fell back. The chariot was spattered with blood, and his hands also.

The white road spun beneath; gardens and buildings were flung away on the burning wind. He glanced back. A glare lit the dark half of the sky; flying sparks must have homed at last into his tasteful rooms.

The wheels rattled across the great south bridge, and the Okris shone below like clouded wine in the sun’s first rays.

One of the black palace chariots was behind him.

The charioteer, a man in the Queen’s livery, raised his hand and yelled for him to stop. Amnorh raked the backs of the team with his whip and saw flame strike under their hooves. From the mouth of a turning in front of him a second chariot leapt into his path.

“She has my measure,” he thought in a moment of leaden anger, but he pulled the animals around and hurled to the right of the opposing vehicle. The wheel blades churned through their near axle; the car tilted and spilled its contents on the road. “But not quite, my lady,” he thought, “not quite.”

The city streaked behind, and the hills opened like honeycomb on either side. One black chariot was still at his back.

“I should have reckoned on the advent of this day, and planned for it,” he reproached himself.

Between cleft rocks he saw the sudden pearl gleam of water: Ibron far below.

At once he visualized the cave. Could he but have found it now.

“What do I offer you, Anack, to persuade you to reveal your hidden ways to me?” his thoughts whispered with a bitter humor. “My Vis soul?”

There was a bend in the road. A great bird fled up before their coming, and the animals swerved madly at its passage. Rocks struck the wheels and flew off into air. Amnorh felt the chariot give a great lurch, then sky and earth were momentarily juxtaposed, after which there was only sky.

The black car careered to a halt. The two men jumped down and ran to the lip of the road, staring over at the mangled remains of the broken chariot and team caught on the teeth of the scarp some way below.

“Where’s the Warden?” one asked the other.

“The lake. He’ll die just the same.”

“It’s a better death than she would have allowed him.”

The wind shrilled. The burning whip of the wind had beaten him semiconscious. He turned in mindless spinnings toward the great mirror which would swallow him.

At the last instant, a thought—death.

Amnorh struggled with his numb flesh, striving to arrange his body for that moment when it would cleave the water. He took huge gasping breaths at the air.

The impact was of a white hot furnace. His bones seemed to run like molten gold. Stifling ringers probed in every orifice. There was no sound.

Deep below the surface now, Amnorh turned more slowly, a foetus trapped in a womb of inky sapphire.

Death.

“I lie soft,” he thought. “I am no longer a man but a piece of this water.”

A pain flared in his chest. His lungs convulsed uselessly on nothing.

“Let the water in and die.”

But he could not.

There were bubbles lisping upward through the dark; he felt dimly the pull of a new current and let it take him. He shut his eyes, lifting so gently. Presently raw light pierced his lids and stone thrust against his inert body. He floundered like a fish in a net, all instinct suddenly to achieve the light. His hands grasped the stone and air splashed on his face.

He lay by the brim of a great pool, breathing, spent, the terrible spasms of coughing and retching past, and his body a lifeless heaviness containing the pale flickers of his thoughts.

“There is a door. A rusty door. She is all about me. I am in Her entrails like Her egg, Her child. When I reach the door and go through it and crawl out into the cave, I shall be born of a goddess.”

After a time he got to his feet and staggered to the stone wall of the pool, edging along it until he found the door. He pulled and the door gave, but he fell to his knees with the effort and crawled, as he had fantasized, out of the golden tail of Anackire.

He opened his eyes and saw the narrow pale mask of a giantess gazing down at him, framed by a gold seething of serpents. And he thought: “The face of my mother.”

And grinned, thinking of the Iscaian slut who had conceived him in a wine shop under a minor Dortharian prince. Bastardy had been useful, as Amnorh had realized when he climbed the first rungs of the social ladder. She might so easily have brought forth from a respectable marriage to a hod carrier.

He got to his feet. His wet clothes clung unpleasantly, for it was chill in the cave.

“So you saw fit to save me, Anack,” he called out at the statue, “and now I’m your firstborn. My humble thanks.”

Her eyes bored into him.

“What gifts will you give me, Mother, now that I’m cast penniless on the cruel world?”

He went forward and laid his hands on her fiery tail—a million scales, each a plate of hammered gold.

Experimentally he grasped one of the plates and wrenched at it. How long ago had she been made? Too long—she was in sad need of repair. The plate came away in his hands, and Amnorh let out a bark of wild derisive mirth. Again and again he wrenched. A rain of gold fell round him, and he plucked violet jewels like grapes from a vine.

When he had stripped her as high as he could reach, he made a bundle of his cloak and slung the riches into it.

“So I despoiled you after all, Mother mine. Unwise to take such a thief to your bosom.”

He fancied impotent rage on the white face, and at the arch he turned and saluted her, crazy from the water and the falling gold.

In the dark he moved with inadequate care. The bundle bumped and clanked. This time he had no flint and no guide. He did not reach the steps.

At last it grew apparent to him that he had taken a wrong turning somewhere in the blackness.

He stared about him but could make out almost nothing. He became aware in that moment of the far-off, high-pitched singing note that he had heard before. And, as he moved on in his blind search, the sound seemed to grow fuller, as though several more voices had joined the first.

“Anackire weeping,” Amnorh mocked aloud.

But sweat broke on his forehead and his hands. He moved more quickly.

The stairway was lost to him for sure. What then? Retrace his steps? Somehow the thought of turning back toward the cave repelled him. And the sound, the sound was louder. It penetrated his skull like a knife.

Amnorh turned to look behind him.

There was a man in the passage, distinctly visible against the dark. A man with black-bronze skin and yet pale hair and eyes—even as Amnorh stared the hair and eyes spread and merged like flames; the whole face melted and became Ashne’e’s face. The mouth opened, and out of its serene pallor burst the singing scream of the cave.

His own cry mingled. He ran. The bundle in his hands doubled, trebled its weight—he almost threw it down and left it there, but somehow could not despite himself. The walls bruised him, and colored sparks exploded before his eyes.

Suddenly daylight.

He flung himself into it, blind and moaning, and the ground left his feet and he fell.

“Wake up,” said an insistent female voice, as it seemed mere seconds later.

Amnorh turned his head and saw a girl kneeling beside him. She had a brown peasant face and too-big, simple eyes.

“I thought you were a devil out of the hill,” she said conversationally. “I went in there once, and there was a light, and I ran away.” She ogled him. “But you’re only a man.”

He sat up. The hot sun had already dried his garments. How long had he lain here with this laborer’s bitch watching him? He glanced apprehensively at the bundle of his cloak, but it seemed undisturbed.

“Are you going to Thaddra, across the mountains?”

“Yes,” he said shortly.

“There’ll be men going there over the pass. Our farm’s just down the slope. Will you wait there for them?”

Amnorh looked at her. It would be reasonable to travel in company. He had no provisions, and an early snow might soon lock the mountains in walls of ice. There were also bandits on the mountain shelves.

The farm was little better than a hovel. A bony cow picked at yellow grass outside, and there was an old man minus eyes sitting like a dried-out insect against the wall.

Amnorh waited in the shade of the house while the girl went about her tasks. The traders did not come. He wondered if she had dreamed them up to keep him here for some villainous purpose, but she seemed too stupid for that. He tried to question the old man, but he was apparently deaf as well as eyeless.

In the cool of evening the girl gave him bread and cheese and watered-down milk. When he had finished, she sat close to him and put her hand on his thigh.

“I’ll be friendly with you, if you like. I’ll do whatever you want if you give me something.”

So, she was whoring to supplement the leanness of the living. He gripped her shoulder roughly.

“Were you lying to me about the travelers?”

“No—no—tomorrow they’ll come.”

“You’d better be speaking the truth.”

He pushed her away and lay down to sleep, the bundle an awkward pillow under his head.

He slept long and deeply, weary to his bones. Near dawn there was a dream.

The Lady of Snakes came out of the hill and slithered down the slope into the hut. She wrapped him in her coils and in her arms and in her spitting glinting snake-hair, and he played with her the games of lust which Ashne’e had taught him.

A fierce needle of sunlight burned on his eyes and woke him; the travelers had come.

“There was rioting and a fire in the city,” one of the men said to him.

Amnorh glanced back toward Koramvis, a toy of white towers between the jut and fall of the hills. He turned away, and for the first time an anguished frustration and a bitter despair ignited in his heart. The Lord Warden had indeed perished beneath Ibron.

“Everything is lost,” he thought. “Only I remain. And I—I no longer exist.”

The seated Garrison chariot rattled from the Plain Gate of Koramvis in the black hour before dawn. Amun, a charioteer who had once won races in the arenas of Zakoris, bypassed the ways of the riot, yet they heard the distant belling on the wind and smelled the smoke. Liun’s face was set and unreadable, but he muttered: “On occasion a man wishes the gods had made him a rabbit or an ox—anything rather than a man.”

Lomandra held the child close to her, but it made no sound. She felt some dim yet awful presence over the city. “This act will bring its own retribution,” she thought. And she prayed the girl had been dead when the mob came for her, as Ashne’e had told her she would be.

They traveled across Dorthar, arid and golden in the last conflagration of the summer, across the broad river into Ommos, where perfumed pretty boys squealed at the chariot, and the Zarok statues now and then consumed in their furnaces the flesh of unwanted girl children. At a little eating house they saw a fire-dancer strip her flimsy garments from her body with a live brand.

“A symbol,” Lomandra thought. “So it is with my life.”

Yet, as they passed into Xarabiss, the tension and the sourness left her. She felt liberated, almost at peace. As so often before on the journey, she examined the child, and no longer observed it with fear. What would it become? she wondered. Most probably some peasant—hunter or farmer—sweating out its days, unaware of the turmoil and ancestry that had formed it. Or perhaps it would die young. Should she herself keep it, she asked herself now, rear it and give it whatever status and wealth she could acquire? She felt an immediate aversion to the plan. Despite the compassion she experienced, there was the imposition of another’s will, a sort of geas laid on her. This baby was not Xarabic, nor hers. She had no place in her life, whatever that might be, for this curious and terrible stranger. And Ashne’e, it seemed, had known and approved that fact.

The first cold rain of the year came at sunset in Tyrai, about ten miles from the border.

She had fed the child with milk, while the storm beat like birds on the shutters and finally fell quiet. Red slanting strokes of the tumbling sun pierced afterward into the room. A knock came on the door, and when she opened it, Liun stood in the doorway. It was the first time either of the men had come to find her after the day’s traveling. She thought something must have happened and alarm clutched at her pulses.

“Is anything wrong?”

“No, nothing at all. I’m sorry if I made you think so.”

He came into the room with a directness that was at the same time somehow diffident, and crossed to the cot as though this were an excuse for entering.

“A quiet child, thank the gods.”

“Yes, he has always been quiet. As she was.”

“And you,” he said, exactly as Kren had said it, “what of you?”

“I shall make a home in my own land when I’ve done what she asked me.”

“Xarabiss. Yes. You should never have left it.”

“Perhaps not.”

He opened a shutter on the cool red air. Awkwardly he said: “Did you wonder why I was the second man in the chariot?”

“Kren promised me an escort I could trust.”

“I asked to accompany you.”

She looked at him, surprised.

“Why should you do that?”

“I suppose I’d be a fool to suppose you’d understand such a thing. I never dared to speak to you in Koramvis.”

“Speak of what?”

He flushed slightly and smiled without humor, still not looking at her.

“That I desired the Queen’s chief lady. What, after all, was the use? A mere captain existing on army pay.”

A flood of quite unexpected warmth ran through her. Something she had never considered before, she found, had the power to lift her off her feet. She felt like a very young girl, a ghost of herself in Xarabiss. Her hands trembled and she let out an unconsidered sparkling laughter.

“But I have nothing now,” she said.

He looked at her then, his face full of amazement.

“Kren would release me,” he said breathlessly. “I have enough put by to get a villa-farm, to hire men; it could be a good living, here or in Karmiss. But such a life would be horrible to you.”

“Dorthar was horrible to me and the things of Dorthar. Oh, yes, Liun, I could breathe in the life you offer me. And I can get money to help you.”

They were both laughing, unreasonably, happily. He came to her and his eyes were very bright.

“Oh, what am I doing?” she asked herself, but nothing seemed to matter except this strong young man with his bright eyes and the sense of hope that clung about him. He was younger than she, but it was irrelevant suddenly. “You are not a thirteen-year-old virgin to tremble like this,” she thought as a little clumsily, yet gently, he lifted the thick hair back from her cheek and kissed it. How could she have longed for this and not known it?

“Lomandra,” he said, and kissed her mouth not clumsily at all.

The next day they passed through Xarar under a metallic sky. By afternoon the wind was full of dust.

“Storm coming,” Amun said. He spoke little; when he did, it was generally about the weather, the state of the chariot or the animals.

“Do we call a halt, then?” Liun asked.

“There’s a small town, outpost of Xarabiss, a few miles west of the Dragon Gate. I reckon we can make that before the worst of it breaks.”

So they went on, and the two white pillars of the Gate passed behind them, and the roll of the Plains spread out their barren amber flanks under a purple canopy of cloud.

Presently it grew dark. There came a wind like a bolt of black cloth, whipping and screaming across the slopes. Lomandra held the child close to shelter it as whirling grit slashed their faces. They seemed to be driving straight into the mouth of a ravening, spitting, roaring beast.

A pale blue flash hissed overhead. Instantaneously thunder pealed. The animals flung up their heads and pranced with fear. She heard Amun curse them: “Damn half-bred team to dance a pimp to his fancy boy’s couch!”

Another lightning skewered toward the plains. The chariot jounced and rumbled, and the animals careered ahead of it, their manes streaming back in black whips. Amun’s face was fixed with rage as he held to them; he had been used to something better, his whole stance proclaimed, in his racing days.

A copse of dark and ragged trees sprang suddenly up in front of them on the livid skyline.

“Pull their heads round,” Liun shouted.

“Do you think I’m asleep, you puppy?”

In that moment the world cracked open on a white and blazing void.

Lomandra felt a great cold heat rush by her like the breath from a demon’s mouth. She lost all sense of place and of self and seemed to be flying until a wedge of pain slammed into her back.

She discovered herself lying on the ground among drifts of dead leaves, the child at her breast. Her own body had cushioned its fall, but its face had screwed into tears. A white glare came and went on her eyes and then was blotted out as Liun bent over her.

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head, giving herself no time to think whether she was or not, and he half-lifted her to her feet. She stared about her wildly.

“Lightning,” Liun said brusquely. “It struck the trees and the team. You and I were pitched clear, and the brat.”

“And Amun?”

Liun’s face was set.

“His gods were sleeping.”

Lomandra looked away, unable to bear his stony grief. A dreadful guilt came down on her like the weight of the icy rain which was now pouring over them. She turned a little and made out the shape of the chariot trapped in the black and white flaring mosaic that was the burning trees.

“Don’t look.” He put a hand on her arm almost formally. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way to the town.”

One slope was very like another in the cloud-sealed darkness. Muddy banks ran up a little way, dripping with sparse wet vegetation, though the rain had stopped. Liun had taken the child from her, but she walked with that other irrational weight fastened to her body.

It was her guilt perhaps which made her unnaturally aware of menace in the gloom. For a long while she quivered with the knowledge and kept silent until at last the sensation became unbearable and uncontainable.

“Liun,” she said softly, “there is something behind us.”

It surprised and strangely pained her when he said: “I think so too. We’ve had company for about a mile.”

He put his free arm about her and did not turn to look back.

“What is it, Liun?”

“Who knows? Perhaps only a dust rat or two.”

The undergrowth was thicker here, steaming with moisture. Through the narrow stems she caught an abrupt and ghastly glimpse of light—a pair of incendiary eyes, first scarlet, then gold. He heard her gasp, but only glanced aside. Casually he said to her: “Take the baby, Lomandra. And get ready to run.”

She took the bundle from him in blind obedience.

“Tell me why.”

“Our admirers are dangerous.”

“What—”

“Tirr,” he said without expression.

She felt the blood abandon her heart and stood paralyzed.

“Then we’re dead.”

“Not inevitably. I can delay them and you can run for your life. A hero’s death. I never thought the gods had marked me down for that.”

“Liun—Liun—”

“No, my darling Lomandra. They haven’t left us the time.”

He pushed her. There was the sound of tearing foliage above, and a shape arrowing down. An awful screeching cry burst from the dark and stench filled her nostrils. She saw the bald flanks, the jutting face and the envenomed claws. A second cry sounded, and a third. Two others anxious not to miss their kill. And—though she knew he must die, this man who had thrown away survival for her, who she might so easily have come to love—she fled.

She ran on in nightmare, feeling death hanging on her heels, and far off, as she ran, she heard a no-longer recognizable voice calling out in agony.

At last she could run no more.

She fell and lay still and waited for a smell of corruption and a rending which did not come. The child whimpered at her breast, demanding milk she could not give.

There was an itching discomfort in her shoulder. Gradually, as she lay there, a dull and numbing ache began to spread across her back and upper arms. A little blood ran down her side. She did not remember a paw striking at her or the penetration of the single claw, but she saw now that her flight had been entirely useless after all.

The Xarabian got to her feet, the child locked in her freezing arms, a cradle of already annihilated flesh.

“You,” she thought, “you.”

But she did not particularly hate the child.

“Where shall I die? Which is the spot where I shall fall down and you at my breasts? And how long will you outlive me in these foul and empty Plains?” And again she thought: “It will die young.” And began to walk toward the moonless horizon.