The Storm Lord

5

All heat was draining from the year and the sky was like unpolished brass as the ten or so villagers followed Eraz to the temple. She lay on her death bier, very white and still, conforming like any corpse to the pattern expected of it, but her hair was still tawny for she was not beyond her middle years.

A hunter held up the front of the bier. Like all the rest but one, he was quite without expression. No Lowlander reckoned on longevity, for life was hard and mostly fruitless. But the young man who supported the lower poles of the stretcher was staring at the dead face, his own working with the effort not to weep.

It was the bits of amber in her ears. He had seen them gleam so often in and out of her hair; it was perhaps his earliest childhood memory. Now they moved him unbearably, and he did not want to shed tears in the midst of these people. They seldom if ever wept for their dead—he had never seen it. They showed no emotion: no pain, no sorrow and no joy. They. He tasted an old bitterness in his mouth, for though he was in part one of their own, yet he was a stranger and an alien. She had understood, Eraz, his foster mother, and she had given him what demonstrative love she could and such intimations of a locked-up sweetness.

They came into the grove of red trees and up to the black oblong of the temple door. Two priests emerged. They moved like lightless ghosts, one to either end of the bier, and took the poles from the hands of the hunter and the young man. Without a ritual word the priests bore Eraz into the gloom. The villagers stood immobile for a moment, then turned and slowly dispersed. Only the hunter, passing him, murmured: “She is with Her now, Raldnor.”

Raldnor could not speak. He found his eyes were burning and wet and turned his head, and the hunter moved away.

Soon she would be ashes mixed with the soil beyond the temple. Or would the essence of her truly rest in the arms of Anackire? The tears ran scalding down his face and left him oddly purged and empty. He walked away from the temple and began to retrace his steps toward Hamos, the village of his fostering, below the slope.

When he reached the little two-roomed hovel, he pushed the door shut and sat alone in the deepening shade of evening. Before, this place had been his home. Despite all differences and all self-searching, he had never questioned that. But now, now he questioned. Naturally he could stay among them, work in their fields as through the preceding years, hunt with them in the lean times, eventually tie himself to a wife and produce children. So far, from the few casual couplings, there had been no births. As well. They would not want another cripple in their midst.

He got up suddenly and went to the round of polished metal Eraz had used for a mirror and stared in at himself.

Vis.

Vis, for all the light gold eyes and the sun-bleached yellow hair. It was physically apparent in the dark bronze sheen of the skin, the tan which did not fade in the cold months, and also in the strikingly handsome face, the arrogant mouth and jaw that had no place set on a peasant. He was taller, too, than the average Lowland man, very wide in the shoulders, very long in leg and lean of hip. It was an unmistakable mark on him: this man was at least half-bred from a line of strong forebears who have never starved on the unnourishing acres of the Shadowless Plains.

He said suddenly aloud: “Why was I moved by the death of a woman who wasn’t my mother?”

For his mother had been a Xarabian, he knew. A man of Hamos had found her near dawn, a few miles from the Vis town, Sar, which perhaps had been her destination. A beautiful woman, he said. She lay on her back with the last wisp of moon hanging over her like a drop of milk. There was an oozing tirr scratch on her shoulder and a mewling baby held tight in her arms.

In memory of her they had given him a Sarish name. But she had marked him already. It was her ancestry betrayed him. Yet he had a Lowland father, for his eyes and hair spoke of that. He thought of the woman with disturbed emotions. It must have been a casual Vis mating, for the dark races shunned the Plains people by all accounts. And she had left him a dreadful legacy. Her Vis sex, for one. He, like they, roused irresistibly at the coming of the Red Star. It had been the dreadful shame of his childhood till Eraz had explained it to him. Later it sent him prowling like a wolf through nights of sleepless blind desire when every dream was an unsatisfying frenzy. The girls of the village, unsensual at any season and quite immune to the Star, cost him endless effort, each coition preceded by intolerable seduction. That he gave them pleasure he only knew by the almost grudging soft cries wrung out of them on occasion. He felt they went with him from pity, and were amazed by the effect he produced on them, and every coupling was ultimately soured for him, for it was basically unshared, and he to himself seemed bestial once the Star had faded.

Yet this legacy was not the worst. It was his crippling which was hardest to bear. At the remembrance of it now, here in the dark hovel, he smashed his fist against the metal mirror in senseless anger.

He was both deaf and dumb. Not physically, that was, but in his mind.

They, the pale-skinned people all about him, could listen to each other’s thoughts, project their own. There was a silent murmuring always about them, like invisible swarms of bees. And he stood, unconscious and mute, on the fringe of their society, a tolerated idiot—outcast, not by them, but by his own deformity.

Outside, above, the white pitcher of the moon poured black night into the sky.

A wolf howled faintly across the distances of the Plains.

Soon it would be cold. Snow would come. Thick stockades would be dragged about the village, and they would be trapped within until the second thaw.

Resolution came on him suddenly. He took from the chest the thick cloak of wolf skin, and from the wall hooks his hunter’s knife and the pouch of small copper counters that was the sum of Eraz’s wealth. He felt like a thief.

There was no one else about in the night. He strode along the straggling earth road, up the slope, by the temple, and away toward the south.

“Where are you going?” he asked himself.

Not to Xarabiss, certainly. Automatically, it seemed, and resentfully he had turned his back on the north.

Something came into his brain.

Somewhere ahead there lay the ruins of a city, a Lowland city, Eraz had said, a relic of a past completely blotted out. Why not there, then, to this hulk of the Shadowless Plains.

He felt insecurity and liberty mingle in a peculiar sensation for, whatever else, he was free. He would not have to endure again and again the same excluding faces; at least now they could be different ones.

And he grinned as he walked, at his pleasureless joke.

He lived where he could off the wild, shunning the occasional impoverished signs of habitation. He kept toward the south. He became lightheaded at his journey—this sloughing of all responsibility—and the city assumed vast metaphysical proportions.

After about nine or ten days he came to a hovel with an old woman outside it. She was patching a garment, her long colorless hair hanging over her face. He asked her for a drink of water from the well, and then about the city. She pointed without words, southward. So he went on.

“A mirage,” he thought, “a phantom I don’t even see.”

The winds blew very bitter.

He had never been so long alone.

It was early dusk and there were leafless trees. He came out of them and looked down and saw a shallow valley set in the slopes, already swimming with shadow. And in the valley and the shadow a progression of shapes—runnels, channels, flat projections—like something a child might build out of the rain-moist dust. The City.

He did not believe in it at first. He began to walk down into the valley, expecting at any moment that it would vanish, a trick of the fading light. But it grew more solid and more real. Quarried black Lowland stone like the stone of the temples.

Half a mile away, it occurred to him that no sound came from the city, no light, and not a puff of smoke showed. It was deserted then—quite feasible considering its dilapidation. Still he went on. A great ruinous wall loomed presently above him, and the vault of an open defenseless gate. He went into the gate, and was at once almost overpowered by a sense of enormous age and enigma—the city’s personality.

Beyond the arch a stone terrace led down in broad steps to a dim, shadow-filled square. His boots sounded on the stone, and a purple gust of birds flurried up from the dark into the sky, startling him.

As he crossed the square, there was a flicker of sudden light from under an arch-mouth. A woman with a tallow lamp and hair like the lamp flame was drawing water from a well. She did not look at him. So, there were inhabitants after all, lairing like beasts in the ruins. Well, he too could make a lair.

He walked the cold oppressive streets as the white embers of stars formed in the sky. He saw no other living thing abroad, though bird wings sometimes fluttered on the tops of ancient houses, and now and then he made out a trembling obscure light behind narrow latticed windows.

The moon was rising as he climbed the steps of a dark palace.

Sitting, leaning against a pillar, while the moon splashed white on the cracked mosaic of the floor, he ate the last meager ration of his fire-cooked meat. Shadows slid all about the roofless hall. They were very deceptive. He did not for a long while see that one of them was a man.

“Don’t be alarmed,” the figure said, moving forward into the moonlight, “there’s no need of your knife.”

He was in middle age, wrapped in a ragged but serviceable cloak, and at his heels padded a black velvet beast with glowing eyes.

“Sit, Mauh,” the man said, and the beast sat. “Yes, she is indeed a wolf, but mine since birth and therefore will do you no harm.”

“Then you needn’t fear her harmed,” Raldnor retorted sharply. “I’ve killed wolves often.”

“Yes. So much is evident.”

The man squatted by his animal and looked into Raldnor’s face. Although plainly a Lowlander, his countenance was unusually open, promising to be expressive.

“Your mind is shut to me, and you are dark-skinned,” he remarked after a moment. “Perhaps that’s why you’re here. There are many mixed births in the city. Men with light eyes and dark hair, blonde-haired, black-eyed women.”

“You give sanctuary to misfits, then?” Raldnor said sardonically.

“‘You,’” the man repeated, considering the word. “There is no collective ‘you’ in this place. No Authority. In the temple villages there are the priests, but here—here there is only the city. We are all a scattering, all strangers to each other. Why did you come up here?”

“To eat,” Raldnor said shortly.

“This is the palace of Ashnesea, a princess who ruled before time as we know time. You see bits of her still there in the mosaic on the floor, musing with the goddess.”

Raldnor said nothing. The man troubled him; besides, his days of lonely traveling had made it additionally hard for him to communicate.

“At night,” the man said abruptly, “in the cold months, wild beasts run into the ruins. It would be best if you found some house to hole up in.”

“Thanks for your advice.”

“No thanks are asked, or indeed given, I think.” The man rose and the black wolf rose with him. “My name is Orhvan, and you’re welcome to share our hearth—the hearth, that is, of my little family, my kin by choice not blood.”

Raldnor hovered between embarrassment and reluctance. Yet it would be better to rest in reasonable comfort tonight than roam the city searching for some bleak cranny. He felt at once intolerably weary, as if all the exhaustion of his spontaneous flight had suddenly caught him up.

“Come,” Orhvan said.

“I have some money. I’ll pay for anything I have.”

“Money? Ah, the city doesn’t recognize such things. All is barter here.”

Raldnor got to his feet and let the man Orhvan lead him down the palace stairway, the wolf loping ahead.

He woke to the clear cold hyacinth sky of late morning from a bewildering welter of dreams. He lay on a firm pallet stuffed with straw, a faded brocade cushion under his head, a generous pile of furs and blankets over him. It took him a moment to remember he was in the house of Orhvan. At least the house Orhvan had appropriated for himself. What ancient family had originally dwelt in these dark impressive rooms and glided up and down that imposing staircase, only She knew.

Raldnor left the bed and began to dress again. The air up here was freezing, coming in through broken shutters and cracks in the ceiling. He recollected that last night there had been a fire below in the grate of the round hall, barley bread to eat and a hot soup. A young man with a gaunt narrow face and deep-set eyes had been sitting in the firelight, plaiting baskets. Set aside on a bench was a fine, as yet unpolished carving in light wood of a slender epicene girl. Orhvan had taken it up, remarking on its beauty, and the young man had shaken his head with a half-smile of abnegation.

“This is Ras, who doesn’t understand his own talent. And here’s a symptom of the way we live. We all plait baskets from time to time and exchange them for food and other luxuries.”

Later, as they ate, a whispering movement came from above, little more than the stirring of a large moth.

“Yhaheil,” Orhvan said. “Yhaheil’s father was an Elyrian,” he added with a measured bluntness, “and he has their leaning to astrology. He spends most of his days in the tower room of the house.”

Orhvan had allotted Raldnor this small chamber, and the pallet and coverings had been provided and also the cushion, a product of Xarabiss, Orhvan informed him. Raldnor wondered how it had come here. In the dark on the stairs a shadow brushed by him—Yhaheil? He had only the impression of some creature with an unhuman lisping dream-quality about it, yet he glimpsed dark hair above the dark robe, and was curiously comforted. Perhaps the astrologer also spoke only with his mouth.

Dressed, Raldnor went down the staircase and into the hall. A little albino snake, of the kind that lived in the stone walls of houses, was squinching gracefully under the door in order to sun itself outside. There was no other company. Neither Ras nor Orhvan was here, and he saw that the heap of baskets had vanished with them. There were slices of bread left under a cover on the age-pocked table, and a little pitcher of milk. Raldnor ate and drank sparingly, conscious of the poverty of these people, which seemed worse than, yet strangely not so depressive as, the poverty of the villages—perhaps because they had presumably chosen this warren in preference to field labor.

A fire was still burning in the grate, and he added a few sticks to it. As he was doing this, he became intensely aware of another presence in the hall. He straightened and turned slowly, and found a girl had come in from the street. She carried one of their baskets with a cluster of eggs in it, and Mauh, the black wolf, stood at her heels. He found himself astonished, almost absurdly awe-struck, for she seemed quite unreal, a kind of apparition of pure light, like something cast from milk crystal. She was all whiteness—even her ragged dress seemed caught up and filtered through her glow, and all of her framed by hair like blown and nacreous tinsel.

But she also was startled, almost afraid. She clutched the basket to her.

“Orhvan offered me shelter,” he said to reassure her, wondering if she too were one of Orhvan’s “family of choice.”

She lowered her eyes, saying nothing, and came into the room to set down the eggs on the table. As she passed by him he felt an unmistakable twinge of desire—but it was her rarity he wanted more than her flesh.

“My name is Raldnor. May I ask yours?”

She said something he could not catch, and hesitated at the table lip, not putting down the basket. He came and took the basket out of her hands and set it down.

“Who did you say you were?”

“Anici.”

“That’s a pretty name, and suits you very well.”

“It’s a corruption of Ashnesea,” she whispered, like a nervous yet erudite student, “as is Ashne’e.”

“Oh, really? Well, I like your name the best.”

She blushed at once, and her blush stirred him. He reached out and gently silked a strand of her white hair through his fingers.

“I thought at first you were a ghost. Or a goddess.”

“I must go now,” she said breathlessly.

He saw she was trembling, and this response to him of shy fear, he found, excited him in a most extraordinary way, perhaps simply because it was a response. He slid his arm beneath her head and leaned to her mouth, but in the final moment some sentimental regard for her obvious innocence stayed him, and it was a very chaste brief kiss he delivered to her lips before he let her go. He saw tears in her eyes, nevertheless. The full intention of his body had communicated itself quite clearly. And, with a lazy disdain, he said: “I beg your pardon. You were entirely too much for me.”

She jerked about and fled toward the door, provoking in him at that moment a sort of scornful amusement. And then, without warning, his head reeled and he staggered against the hearth as if drunk. An agony, bright and unbearable, pierced through his skull so that he let out a cry of pain. She halted in the doorway, staring at him, and in that moment he felt his mind touch hers.

Shaken, he leaned against the stone, gazing in her face almost pleadingly, but she had somehow shut him out. Next moment she turned and was gone out the door.

Orhvan and Ras came back at noon, having bartered all the baskets but three for provisions and a woolen shirt.

“Anici came and brought us eggs,” Orhvan said. “And how is my guest today? Did you see a white-haired girl?”

“Yes,” Raldnor said, but no more. He had sat before the fire a long while, lost in a dazed frustration after she had gone.

“No other visitors, I trust? No. As well. It’s better I deal with the Ommos when he comes.”

They ate some of the food Orhvan had brought, and the wolf gnawed delicately on a bone at Ras’s feet.

“This is how it is,” Orhvan said. “We sometimes take our wares across the border into Xarabiss, to Xarar or Lin Abissa. Ras’s carving fetches a good price, despite his modesty, and Anici is a cunning weaver. The profits are more than useful in the cold months. Now suddenly we find there is a new law—no Lowlander can leave the Plains without a permit signed by a Vis.” Orhvan’s face had, like his tongue, gradually fulfilled its early promise of expressiveness: he frowned. “There is a Vis merchant here in the city, an Ommos with his household. Oh indeed, a curious phenomenon. But, as you will unfortunately see, he uses largess to manipulate the city dwellers, for who has much pride when they’re starving? Now we have to ask him for a permit, in exchange for which he will take a commission on our sale amounting, as I understand it, to over half. I expect his steward today.”

Raldnor felt a stirring of anger, and these first intimations of racial sensitivity were strange to him.

“Why let him exploit you? Can’t the people here band together against him?”

“That isn’t our way, Raldnor. We Lowlanders are a passive breed. You perhaps may not quite be able to accept this.”

“Because of my mother’s blood? Maybe. I don’t dispute the fact that if a man strikes me in the mouth, I’ll strike him back with interest.”

“There you have it,” Orhvan said.

“Possibly it was your philosophy that frightened Anici away. She generally waits for us.”

It was the first thing Ras had said, though he had looked at Raldnor intently from time to time since they had come in. Raldnor met his deep-set shadowy eyes. In the depths of them he thought he glimpsed a love-haunting. With contempt Raldnor said: “She seemed a timid girl. No doubt well taught by example.”

“Anici is a child still,” Ras said quietly.

“And you are ambitious that she remain one.”

Orhvan spread his hands.

“Be still, my friends. You bring discord on my house.”

“I apologize,” Raldnor said stiffly.

“No need, no need,” Orhvan said, but his heart troubled him. “You are Vis,” he thought. “Like the chameleon, you have assumed some of the color of your situation, but under all, you are a dark man with black hair, and a package of lust and anger and arrogance in your soul.” And then he thought with compassion: “Poor boy, poor boy, to be pulled thus two ways at once. There is a look there too, the pain of the blind and dumb.”

“It is the Storm Lord who makes these permits necessary,” he said aloud, deliberately ignoring the brief disturbance in the conversation. “He has no love for the Plains people. I’m afraid we shall suffer for that.”

“Storm Lord,” Raldnor said, “the Vis High King.”

“Yhaheil says,” Ras murmured, “that he has the scales of a serpent on his arm because a snake frightened his mother as she carried him.” His impenetrable gaze leveled, “and he has, so Yhaheil says, an extra finger on his left hand. An irony you will appreciate, Raldnor.”

Raldnor felt the malice sting him. Before he could answer there came a loud knocking on the street door.

“Orklos,” Orhvan said softly, and rose.

The open door revealed two thin Lowland male children dressed as pages, and behind them the looming figure of the unwelcome visitor. He moved into the room and seemed to fill it up with his scented smell and his well-fed body, and the barbaric-colored cloth of his robe.

“Good day, Orhvan.”

His speech was curiously slurred by his thick Ommos tongue. A ruby glinted in an upper canine. His black eyes rolled languidly toward the unknown face.

“Who?”

“My name is Raldnor.”

“Indeed. I have a message for this house. From my master, Yr Dakan.” He yawned and glanced again at Raldnor. He saw the stunted left finger and pointed at it immediately. “You gave it to a god?”

“No.”

“No. Well, well. In my land it is customary for a man to dedicate something valuable to his gods. Often it is more precious than a finger, hmm?” Orklos turned as if remembering Orhvan. “My message. Tell Orhvan the basketmaker that he is invited to dine at Yr Dakan’s house tomorrow night.”

“Thank your gracious master. But I asked for a permit.”

“So, so. You will not refuse a dinner. The permit will be granted, perhaps, after the food. You are all welcome. The little pale girl also. And this young man too. The hour after sunset.”

Without waiting for an answer, Orklos turned and swayed through the street door, the two pages running after him.

Through the afternoon Raldnor walked about the streets in the grip of a desolate and panic-ridden anguish. At first he could think only of the girl Anici and how, in that astonishing instant, his mind had seemed open to hers. If only—ah, goddess, if only. Might Anici be the key for him? Yet as a leaden sunset darkened the sky, he began to think again, and with increasing distress, of his foster mother Eraz. He felt, in some irrational way, that he had abandoned her. “I must find her,” he thought and was unsure if it were Anici or Eraz he visualized.

He made a vow to leave his copper counters on Orhvan’s table and be gone, and then remitted the vow at once.

In the night he lay awake on the pallet and heard the dim dismal wailing of wolves which seemed often very close about the house. He remembered Orhvan’s warning that wild beasts ran into the city in the cold.

“Perhaps she’ll come in the morning, as today. Perhaps. Perhaps,” he could not help hoping.

Finally he left the pallet and went down to the hall. Mauh widened her opal eyes at him from her place by the hearth, and he scratched between her ears, still unable to quench his instinctive reaction to her ancestry. A polite reserve existed between them.

It was not for some time that he realized there was another in the room. As before, it was a faint, moth-soft movement that gave away the presence of Yhaheil the Elyrian.

The man was seated on Ras’s bench, his dark hair falling round a waxen face.

“Raldnor,” he said, and his voice was a whisper that shivered on Raldnor’s spine.

“Yhaheil.”

“I’ve seen strange pathways in the stars on this night. The man who knows fear, who will comfort him?”

Raldnor flinched at the unemphatic doom of the words, but he was also suddenly heavy with sleep.

“Predictions are subject to error,” he said, but Yhaheil ignored him.

“It’s her doing. Ashne’e. She reaches out of time and stirs the world.”

“He’s eccentric or else mad,” Raldnor thought, but was not convinced of this.

Yhaheil went on murmuring. Buzz, buzz. A velvet bee droned round and round in Raldnor’s brain.

“Sometimes a light-haired girl is born with the face of Anackire. For her there is always a destiny. The Storm Lord took her from her temple, mounted her and died. The dragons carried her to their city, which is called Koramvis. She brought forth a child. Whose child? The King’s? Or the Councilor’s? The mob killed her and nothing is known of her child.”

Yhaheil folded his pale hands and was still. He saw that the young man had fallen asleep. What had he spoken of? He could not recall. In Elyr they had wanted to train him in the ways of a mystic, starve him and paint his eyes and feed him incenses so that he would fall down and babble intimately of psychic realms. But Yhaheil had been too swift for them, flying by night across the Elyrian wastes into the land of the Snake, from which his mother had come.

Remembering this, he gathered in his hands certain charts and stole out of the hall and up the stairway to the tower and to his stars, leaving the stranger sleeping below.

Yr Dakan’s house lay in the upper quarter of the city, a tumble of weather-blackened stone like all the rest, but, unlike all the rest, blazing with light. An alabaster lamp hung over the portico, reflecting on the imported brass gate pillars—shapeless logs to a height of eight feet with, as a capital, the hideous convulsed face of Zarok, the Ommos fire god.

“To that, they sacrifice their children,” Orhvan murmured.

They had all dutifully answered Orklos’s summons—even Raldnor. He felt he did not really know why he was here except, perhaps, that by coming with them he would see the girl once more. As they went through the gates and into the burning vestibule, he watched her walking close beside Ras. It made him angry to see this closeness, angry as the withdrawal of her mind made him, for he was aware of her mind, acutely aware now that she was near to him, yet only in the sense of being conscious of something locked away—a bolted door.

“What are they to each other, those two?” he wondered. Not lovers certainly, even though Ras plainly adored her—or would worship be a more suitable word? And he visualized Ras kneeling at an altar in submissive contentment, never even thinking of touching the image, and another man with dark Vis skin dragging down the white goddess and remaking her into a woman.

An Ommos porter in the vestibule picked his teeth. The ancient stone of the walls had been disfigured with an obscene fresco of Ommish sexual and cannibalistic mores.

Orklos appeared, smiling and heavy-lidded.

“Ah, the Lowland guests. We have been waiting on your arrival.”

He ushered them into the circular hall which was full of the wine-red light of lamps in ruby glass. A Zarok statue towered in the center of the room, a low-banked blare of fire in its open belly.

Orklos sidled to Raldnor’s elbow.

“You gaze on the flame god. It is customary to sacrifice to Zarok, or he may grow angry. It is usually a young woman that we offer him, for in my land, as you may know, they are mostly expendable. But now we are here, we discontinue the practice. The Plains people might find the rite offensive.”

Raldnor discovered himself paling with anger, and only the allegiance he felt he owed Orhvan kept him from violence. He fixed his eyes on nothing and remained silent.

“And Anackire, does not Anackire demand a tribute?”

“Anackire asks nothing because she needs nothing, being everything,” Raldnor said tightly, using a quotation of the temple.

The Ommos laughed gently and shook his head.

“Such undemanding gods.”

There was an obese man in a scarlet robe seated at the low table, already eating and drinking. He snapped his fingers, and Orklos guided Raldnor and also Anici forward to stand before him.

“Like slaves at market,” Raldnor thought, his rage almost unendurable. But in that moment he felt the little tremor of fear that stole from her unguarded mind to his as she stood so close, at last, to him. Not fear of him now but of Dakan. Dakan uttered a low belch and grinned. He was almost bald, and his face and body gave evidence of a hundred debaucheries and misuses. His gelid eyes fastened on Anici, and Raldnor half wished he would reach out and touch the girl, for then he knew his control would entirely snap and he would probably kill the man. But the fatty hands stayed in the plate.

“Welcome, Ralnar. And little Anci.” The Ommos tongue mangled their names in syrup. “You shall sit with me. The young man to my right. And you to my left.”

They were seated, Orhvan and Ras placed opposite and food brought in. Orklos, the steward, moved about stealthily among the Lowland servants, snarling or slapping at them when he considered their work ill done. The Lowland faces were quite blank, but Raldnor wondered what insupportable hardship had brought them to sell their souls.

The dinner was good, doubly good because they were hungry, had always gone without quite enough and were now invited to eat their fill, indeed, to bloat themselves. Through it all, Raldnor was nagged by the question of what payment would be expected.

There was no conversation during the meal. Finally Dakan signaled—another snap of the fingers—and the last dishes were carried out. Two men entered, bearing a semi-opaque bowl on tripodal legs which they set down beside Dakan. Inside the bowl was a dim swirling movement of small water creatures.

Dakan rose, held out a hand. Orklos placed in it a long, thin-bladed knife.

Raldnor tensed with a new and helpless anger. A Lowland man killed animal life only for food or in defense. This live sacrifice, perpetrated before them, was not merely a means of horrifying them but of humiliating them too, for who would protest?

The knife was thrust into the bowl, withdrawn and a speared thing came from the water, doubling and twisting on the blade, and screaming also the screams of a tortured child.

Dakan laughed. He strode to the belly of the flame god and shook his offering into fire. The screams rose and presently stopped.

“My tribute to you, mighty Zarok,” Dakan said, and wiped his knife on his sash.

Orhvan, Ras and Anici were staring at their hands, and Anici’s face was gray. Raldnor rose.

“Lord Dakan, you promised us a permit to cross into Xarabiss,” he said, hard and very cold, noting vaguely that he had included himself in that “us.”

Dakan turned and looked at him, the smile slipping a little on his pudgy face.

“You speak out of turn, young man.”

“Your servant told us that the permit would be given us. Is he the liar, or are you?”

Dakan’s face fell entirely. His eyes narrowed, yet Raldnor glimpsed a fleeting alarm.

“You shall have your permit. There is no hurry.”

“There’s great hurry. There are wolves in the city by night. The sooner we leave the better.”

Dakan waved a hand.

“Fetch what he asks.”

Raldnor felt his pulses thud with triumph. The man seemed unnerved by him—probably no Lowlander had ever insisted on anything before.

Orklos approached Dakan and handed him a slip of reed paper. Resting it on the table, Dakan added his scrawling signature and the imprint of his seal ring.

“There. It’s done. You may still your impatience. Speak, Orklos.”

Orklos smiled at Raldnor.

“My master offers you all the hospitality of his house tonight.”

So there it was. Secured by wolves in the Ommos’s house, the girl would be prey to any scheme the merchant had in mind for her. His lust was all too obvious. And for that matter, his servant seemed interested in Raldnor himself.

“Our thanks, Dakan,” Raldnor said acidly, “but we’ve abused your hospitality long enough.”

He picked up the permit.

“But these wolves—Orhvan, are you in agreement?”

Orhvan had risen, white-faced.

“I think that I am, Dakan. We’ll thank you, and leave.”

Dakan’s countenance grew very ugly.

“Please do. And remember, if you reach Xarabiss, the terms of this contract. I trust your wolves avoid you.”

They passed through the foyer into the cold black night.

A hand brushed Raldnor’s arm.

“Why go with them?” Orklos hissed from the doorway. “You endeavor to act as one of these Lowland serfs on whom the Vis spit, but you—you have the way of a Vis and a face I have seen on the statues of Rarnammon. What do they offer you, these people? Stagnant ruins, filth, poverty. My master can be generous, I assure you, to my friends.”

Raldnor shrugged off the hand.

“I’m not your friend, Ommos.”

The door thudded shut behind him.

At first they traveled the dark streets in silence, the small lamp Orhvan carried casting an erratic pallid light.

Raldnor, walking a little to the rear, stared at the girl’s silver fountain of hair. The Ommos wine and his victory had made him slightly drunk.

“Perhaps you were too brisk with them, Raldnor,” Ras said eventually, not looking back. “It’s not good to fall foul of Yr Dakan.”

“You’d have preferred to stay then, and have your girlfriend taken into the slug’s bed.”

Ras turned and glanced at him: a look turbulent with unreadable yet disconcerting emotion.

At that moment a wolf howled not twenty yards away. It was a peculiarly resonant sound, too big for the silence of the night.

They froze like a tableau.

“That’s the white one. I know his voice,” Orhvan said softly. “He came last winter and killed five men in the streets.”

Raldnor’s hand slid to the hunter’s knife and pulled it free of his belt. He felt a corrosive scorn for the three in front of him, passive with inevitable despair. He went past them and was in front as the white shape ran suddenly out between two crumbling walls, and paused, its eyes intent on him.

It was hunting alone, then. He was arrested by its unexpected beauty and its colossal size, for this one was two wolves made into one. He had heard hunters’ tales of similar monsters, mutations of strength, but never seen one before. Its massive head would reach as high as his ribs. But such grace it had. He caught the dull calculating flash of its eyes, and its open mouth looked full already of blood.

And then it seemed he toppled into its black primeval brain. Dark, ancient, elemental, a dank forest full of merciless things, steaming swamps and torpid rivers, where sudden sparkling drives and lusts darted and flamed.

It leapt at him, but he had seen the diamond firework of its thought. His hand moved even as its glorious body slammed against him and its stench and insolence choked his throat. He buried the knife to the hilt in the eye of a demon which went immediately out.

He lay then very still beneath the coverlet of the wolf, racked with an abrupt impossible sorrow. Buried by its magnificence, he could only mourn. It was presentiment. There was a sound of distant voices shouting in his head. He opened his eyes and saw the girl Anici kneeling by him on the street, her face a rigid mask of fear for him. He smiled at her and, thrusting aside the corpse of the wolf, sat up and took her hand. “You care for me, then, do you?” he thought, and she hung her head, for there was no longer a bolted door between them and her mind was open for him to invade all the fragile private dusts and dreams inside it. He felt as though he walked on a splintering crystal, entering her mind, and a protective tenderness surged through him.

He got to his feet and, still holding her hand, drew her up also. Then he lifted the dead wolf in his arms and glanced at Orhvan and at Ras.

“Something else to sell in Xarabiss. This pelt should fetch a good price.”

Ras’s face was blank; Orhvan looked at him, wearily nodding. They sensed how he had usurped them.

6

To begin with he had turned his back on Xarabiss. Now there was a craving in him to cross the border into Vis lands, to find towns seething with life, and dark-haired women resembling his lost mother. It came on him suddenly, he was not certain why, the day after he had killed the wolf and skinned it of its beauty.

Orhvan took two days hiring a wagon and two zeebas from the lower alleys of the city. Ras and Raldnor fetched the many-colored weaving from Anici’s house, the wreck of a palace haunted by the girl’s grandmother. They left Mauh here also, sniffing after rats among the fallen columns.

The old lady seemed suspicious of Raldnor. She snatched Ras’s sleeve and whispered at him, and Raldnor’s face burned with anger. He followed Anici into the ruinous garden and caught her hand.

“Come with us to Xarabiss.”

“No. I couldn’t leave her alone here.”

“Surely there’s someone else who could look after her, and Mauh would be protection enough.”

She hesitated, her eyes lowered. He sensed a malleable quality and said: “I want very much for you to be with me.”

She looked into his face, and her loveliness and innocence brought his heart into his throat. She was very precious to him; his ability to enter her open mind, the look of love in her eyes, were salves for his bitterness. She was his link with his people. He did not want to lose her even for a month.

“There is a woman in the third house,” she said tentatively.

Later, as Ras and he walked back across the streets, Ras broke his silence to say: “We’ve spoken hard to each other, you and I. I saw the way she looked at you, and I was envious. My fault, Raldnor. I ask for peace between us now, and wish you both happiness.”

Unexpected warmth moved Raldnor. He made his own verbal reparations, after which they were friendly enough, though Ras’s friendship was subdued and reserved, in the manner of the Lowlanders.

They traveled under blowing dark roofs of skies, and at night ringed the wagon with fires. Once they saw tirr crossing a plateau beneath, and Raldnor felt old implacable hatred rise up in him, thinking of the dead Xarabian woman and that lost finger he surmised they might have bitten off.

They drove most of the day, taking this task in turns, huddling at dusk to eat by the fires. In the dark of the night he would lie awake and listen to Anici’s breathing behind the curtain she stretched midway across the wagon. They were all too close for him to go to her. He wished there had been more sexual complicity between them, for then it might have been managed. The Vis sex in him was hungry for her, the hunger made more greedy by every day spent in her presence, seeing the look of shy loving in her eyes. Even the sounds of her soft breathing inflamed and curdled in his loins. And yet he had had nothing from her except those gentle and unsatisfying kisses, for she was very timid and nervous—a delicate, difficult pupil of his desire.

On a day of harsh silver light they crossed the border and reached Sar, that small Xarabian town so near to which the Hamos man had found the dead woman and her child.

Their permit was shown at the gate, yet the sentries seemed indifferent, and there were many yellow-haired people moving about the streets. At the town’s center a terrace climbed to a small shrine dedicated to the wind gods who beat about the hill, and near this place they found cheap lodgings.

Raldnor lay on his back in the male dormitory he, Orhvan and Ras had settled for, while two or three prostitutes plied their trade from pallet to pallet. The bestial grunts and mutterings of the Vis about him both sickened and excited him. At last, seeing his companions asleep, he got up and slipped out of the long room, following the narrow corridor to the tiny cell where Anici had been housed.

He thought she might have barred the door, but she had forgotten.

Inside the room he stood a long while looking down at her as she slept. Moon shafts described her body and her drifting hair. He woke her with the softest touch of his mouth, yet she stared at him in fear.

“What is wrong?”

“Nothing, darling Anici. Nothing.”

“Then why are you here?”

Her naivety served only to increase his need. He sat beside her and stroked her cheek, then took her face in his hands and kissed her, no longer with the familiar childlike kiss.

She did not resist him, but she gave a series of tense nervous shudders, and when he let her go, she began to weep very softly to herself.

“I’m afraid.”

“I won’t hurt you, Anici. I only want you to be happy. I want to share what I feel with you.” And at once he found the stale words again in his mouth from those endless courtships at Hamos—stupid, superficial sentences masking a lust, always impatient, now virtually agonizing. He found he could not bear to drone through those ritualistic phrases again, not with this girl with whom he had mingled thoughts. He moved close to her and began to caress her trembling body. She lay like stone and merely suffered him, and suddenly a rage took hold of him that he could not keep control of. He gripped her shoulders and snarled: “You forever say you love me. I think you lie to me.”

“Oh, Raldnor—you know my mind—how can you say these things—”

“Then you’re a child. They kept you a child in that pile of ghosts and ruins.”

The tears ran down her face and ended his patience. He found he despised her, hated her passive endurance. He felt that urge come on him that was like a possession—the Vis part of his body ravening to be free. He experienced a total loss of will to it.

When her hands came thrusting at him in terror, he held her more cruelly, and his brain was flooded by her frenzied inner cries. But she was no longer anything to him except an object that in some obscure way represented all the frustrations and tortures of his life. He remembered only partly that she was a virgin, and so, while he did not exactly force her, yet it was an effective and bloody rape. And not once did she cry aloud, only inside her mind, and it was these cries that finally brought him to his senses. His horror then at what he had accomplished was the more intense because he himself had done it. For it seemed to have been another man, a man he would hunt out through the byways of the inn and beat to a pulp. He held her and tried to comfort her, appalled by her anguish and her blood. And as he grew more panic-stricken, she faded into an empty and desolate calm.

“What have you done to me?” she eventually asked, the pathetic seal on her poor ignorance so thoroughly wrenched away.

He bathed the hurt and wrapped her in the blankets of the bed, and finally she fell into a dreary sleep.

He did not leave her until near dawn, when he wandered the streets of Sar as the sun rose, feeling as if some sort of murder had been committed in the dark by a man who had been his friend.

Somehow she kept from the others what he had done to her, but she kept herself from him also. And he found he was like a shamed child in her presence.

They came to Xarar at midday, showed the permit, and sheltered in a dismal eating house from a barrage of hail. The town seemed curiously inert and empty.

As they sat at the trestle over their muddy inexpensive wine, a young man came through the door, shaking hail from his cloak, cursing the weather in a colorful, altogether rather humorous way. He stayed drinking for a while, in a corner by the fire, but Raldnor was aware of his steady, dark, Xarabian gaze, and presently the Xarab rose and, bringing his wine jug with him, came and sat beside them.

“Pardon the intrusion, but I see our friend has served you the worst wine in the house. Permit me.” Whereupon he took up Raldnor’s cup, dashed the contents on the ground and refilled it from the jug. After which he repeated the performance with each of their cups in turn.

“I must protest,” Orhvan said, startled.

“Well, if you must, you must.”

“We’ve no means to repay you,” Orhvan said simply.

“I am already paid, twice over,” said the stranger, kissing Anici’s hand.

They seemed instantly in the young man’s power. He had a sorcerous personality, an indefatigable, oblique sense of fun.

He bought them dinner and they learned his name was Xaros. He was the agent, he said, of a miser in Lin Abissa. He seemed to know that they were not merely sightseers but had wares to sell, and later Orhvan took him to look at the colored cloth and the carvings and the few glazed pots that were their inventory.

“You’ll sell nothing in Xarar,” Xaros decided. “Lin Abissa’s the place.”

“We’ve had trade here before.”

“Haven’t you noticed, my friend, how empty the streets are? I see you Lowlanders get no news on the Plains. The Storm Lord is the guest of Thann Rashek at Abissa, and the whole of Xarabiss has crowded in after him to stare. At Abissa there is endless custom, therefore, from all the holiday-makers. In addition to which, my despicable master will get you a better price if you deal through him.”

“You were on the lookout, then, for Lowland traders,” Raldnor remarked.

“To be frank with you,” Xaros said, “I came to Xarar to visit a lady with whom I am slightly acquainted, at a time when I should have been on my employer’s tiresome and unimaginative errands. If you decide to deal with him, I shall use this as the excuse for my absence. Otherwise it’s the begging bowl and the open road. Don’t think for a moment, however, that I’m trying to influence any decision you might make—”

“What price could your master obtain for our work?”

“Name what you ask independently.”

Orhvan and Ras conferred and produced a sum. Xaros gave a bark of derision.

“No doubt you’re renowned for your charity, but how do you live? You’ll get three times that, even after the swindler has taken his share. And I suspect your permit’s been signed by some filthy Vis thief—some excrement of Sar, or worse, an Ommos. Think how delightful it will be to pay the vileness only the half of your expected profit, and keep the excess yourselves. Don’t be afraid. I make a very fair counterfeit bill of sale.”

It was a two-day journey to Lin Abissa. Xaros rode in their wagon. He had ridden a coal-black zeeba to Xarar, but subsequently sold it to buy his “lady” a present.

His company lifted all the sense of reserve and gloom from their party. He spread a kind of ubiquitous lightness. Raldnor found he could even be easy with Anici now, and she, beneath Xaros’s deluge of undemanding flattery, began to smile shyly and seem again like a sweet and untroubled child. Raldnor felt a warmth and a gratitude toward Xaros, but also a twisting of remorse inside himself, a pang of realization he refused to admit. The Xarabian’s freedom had been transmitted to him. Now he must ask: Might his true place be here, in Xarabiss, among Xarabians—his roots and all the leanings and cravings of his spirit and flesh? And it was Xaros who spoke it for him, the second night as they sat by the fire.

“The piece of your mother in you feels herself home.”

Raldnor stared at the flames and said: “I’ve lived a Lowlander all my life till now.”

“So the worm lives in the chrysalis till the sun bursts it. Then out pops the brilliant flying insect in amazement and mutters: ‘Well, well, I’ve lived in a chrysalis all my life till now.’”

“Not so easy to discard my father’s half, Xaros.”

“Easier than you think. The Plains breed a gentle and worthy people. Let’s admire them, but be honest. You’re not a Plains man. For one thing, I see you don’t use their mind language.”

Raldnor flinched involuntarily at this new knife piercing of the old wound. Besides, he had always heard the Lowlanders tried to hide their telepathy from the Vis. He said nothing and Xaros let him be. But his own brain took up the discussion and gnawed on it.

The first flakes of snow were feathering down as they rode through the broad red gate of Abissa. The guards, with the dragon woman of Thann Rashek’s emblem on their breasts, made much of the permit, passing it along their hierarchy to a captain, who finally came out and stood in the snow, examining their faces. At last he called to Xaros: “Will you take responsibility for these people?”

“I will. But what need? As you can see, they’re full grown and out of diapers.”

The captain cleared his throat and with a stony face waved the wagon on.

“Idiot,” Xaros said. “He fears the Dragon King.”

“The Storm Lord?”

“You have it. It’s well known Amrek hates the Lowlanders. There’s always been the story of the curse on him of a Lowland witch, and a prenatal curse at that.”

“A Lowland witch?”

“A temple girl, reputed to have slain the father—Rehdon—with sexual acrobatics, and then set the malignancy of Anackire on the unborn prince. Truly a woman of many talents—one I would like to have met.”

Something moved uneasily in Raldnor’s mind: A Lowland temple girl—someone had spoken of such a one in the city. Or had he dreamed it?

“And of what nature is the curse?” he asked, partly to divert his own unquiet. “Ras spoke of snake scales.”

“Apt, but unproven. Who knows? It gives mothers something to scare their children with.”

The snow was falling thickly, obscuring the towers and marble vistas of the city, laying on all immobile things an anonymous white pall.

“There’s a reasonable inn hereabouts,” said Xaros, but when they reached it, the inn was full.

It began to grow late. Overhead the oil-fired street torches of Vis cities flared and smoked. There were three more inns, all with the crimson flag at their doors to show they were crammed. There were soldiers in the courtyard of the last. Big braziers burned there, lighting up five or six of them laughing about the porch. They were very tall, wide-shouldered, plated with a bizarre reptilian armor—scale on winking black scale, each a cresset of dull flame—the dragon mail of the Am Dorthar. Cloaks of rust color, sprawled with black dragons, roped in the wind. The crests and mask-pieces of their helms made their faces fabulous. Lizard men.

As the wagon trundled by, one of the dragons glanced their way, the laughter still playing round his lips. Carefully and elaborately, he spat.

Raldnor felt horror take hold of him. He was made to know abruptly his powerlessness, not only before the armor and the spears, but before such unthinking hate. What did that man hate them for? Only because his Overlord hated? Or was it some old primitive fear ready to ferment in all the Vis, merely because of a difference in pigmentation and the stories that had grown up round it?

Raldnor glanced at Xaros. He seemed to have missed the incident. Was that possible? Or was Xaros, too, a potential enemy?

Finally they found a dilapidated hostel in a narrow alleyway known as Pebble Street. A few Lowlanders sat by the fires in the hall. The dragons did not come here; it was too far from the palace and their King.

Xaros departed into the snow, having arranged to return in the morning with his miser-master’s offer, and they made a drab meal—most provisions in Lin Abissa having gone to feed the Dortharians—and took the creaking stairs to the narrow bedrooms. Raldnor, the old restraint on him again, touched the girl’s hand briefly in the dark and left her, unable to speak. In the night he lay and thought only of her and the thing he had done to her, and regret was mixed now inextricably with lust. Lust was a granite barrier between them. And Anici for her part dreamed confused and terrified dreams of a faceless man with a deformed arm. The talk of Amrek and the curse on him had inflamed ancient horrors, begun when, as a child, she had heard from the old women who drifted with her grandmother about the courts of the bleak palace the brief mentions of his name, his nature and his crippling.

Outside the snow sugared the world with its leveling pallor.

Xaros came back in the morning.

“My master’s beside himself with voracious joy. Can you take the wagon up Slant Street at noon? He has a hole in the wall in Goldbird Walk.”

Orhvan clearly knew the route.

“Hardly a district for holes in walls, I’d say.”

Xaros dismissed this with a shrug.

“Only one item—keep the wolf pelt back. It’s too good to waste. You can try a furrier later.”

It seemed almost prearranged between them that while Anici remained at the inn, Orhvan and Ras—the Lowlanders—should take the wagon, and Xaros and his part-Xarabian brother, Raldnor, should walk together like citizens. Raldnor found himself obscurely troubled by this, yet he was sick enough of wagon riding, and so it was.

“Our poor friends will take at least twice as long,” Xaros remarked as they reached the broad snow-white streets of the upper quarters. “Half the roads are cordoned off, the rest choked with sightseers. There’s a procession route from the Yasmis’s Temple to the palace—the Storm Lord giving his devotions to the goddess of love and marriage. There’s a betrothal in the air, it seems; Amrek and the Karmian, Astaris. You’ve never heard of her, of course.”

“Never.”

“I thought so. One day the earth will crack in half without the Lowlanders noticing. Well, I’ll enlighten your vile ignorance. Astaris is the daughter of the last king of Karmiss, now deceased, her mother being a Xarabian princess of Thann Rashek’s stable. She’s said—said, mark you—to be the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s been in Xarabiss a year, in her grandfather’s house at Tyrai. She came to Abissa, once, since when I and half the city have been unable to call our hearts or loins our own.”

“So she’s beautiful, then?”

“Superb. Have you ever seen a red-haired Vis woman? Oh, no, you head-in-a-bucket Plains man, you wouldn’t have. Well, they’re pricelessly rare. And this one—a mane the color of rubies. Here comes Lamp Street,” he added. “The law here is the law of the wolves. Smile tiredly at the prostitutes and watch your pockets.”

There was a great noise in Lamp Street when Xaros was spotted. Clearly, he was well known. Villainous-looking bearded men, probably robbers or hill bandits, clapped him on the back and whispered chuckling nefarious anecdotes at his ear; madams blew him kisses and invited him to bring his handsome self and handsome friend inside to give the latest batch of virgins a taste for their trade. At the end of the street a snake dancer from the Zor twisted an amber python around her bronze flesh.

“I see a hungry man,” Xaros said. “Tonight, I think, we’ll visit the Pleasure City.”

Raldnor colored slightly. Xaros said: “My unfortunate Lowlander, transparent lust is the hallmark of the Vis. Give in. Your mother has you by the heels and is roasting you over a slow fire.”

“I’ve no money—only a few copper bits.”

“So, I’ll lend you something. The wolf pelt will make you a good deal or I’m very mistaken. Owe me till then.”

“Anici—” Raldnor began, and stopped.

“Anici’s a delicious child who, like all females, will react favorably to a little competition. Tomorrow you can buy her a dress and some jewelry to ease your conscience and ensure her forgiveness.”

“And Ras and Orhvan?”

“My master’s certain to invite them to his house tonight. He likes to show off his liberality and his furniture, and they’ll get a good dinner—he has a splendid cook despite his other numerous failings.”

They arrived at the shop a little after noon, and it was one of the largest and most elegant in Goldbird Walk. The master himself was portly, alert, and as humorously capricious as his offspring. For Raldnor soon discovered from certain intimate references and wild slanders, and the amazing display of affection between the two of them, that Xaros was his son.

It seemed there was a demand for Lowland craft at the moment, and they did on the whole rather well. The dinner invitation was also forthcoming, though Xaros promptly excluded Raldnor from it, declaring that he did not want all his friends poisoned at one sitting.

Xaros remained at the shop, and Raldnor drove the others back in the wagon via byways. Yet he was in a lighter mood than he had been for many days.

There was an incident to mar all this waiting for him on the road.

Trying to avoid the increasing crowds and at the same time to follow Xaros’s directions, he came finally, by a wrong turn, to the great intersection of the Avenue of Kings. Without understanding any of the geography of Lin Abissa, he saw at once that they were on the brink of the processional route the Storm Lord would be taking.

The wide street, with its flanking statuary and pillared buildings and towers flashing like diamonds against the sky, had been swept clear of snow. Banners drooped from a hundred cornices. Spectators milled about, and the wagon was trapped immediately in the press. Ahead he heard the distant pulse of drums and the wail of horns.

There came a voice suddenly from the crowd, yet not of the crowd—a harsh, commanding, terrible voice: “Get your rubbish off the road, hell blast you.”

Raldnor looked down, his guts lurching with a recognizing fear.

A giant in brazen scales, his helm mask and his scarred coppery face all one. He brought his spear butt sharply against the nearest zeeba’s flank.

With a dry mouth and no possible answer, Raldnor pulled hard on the reins. The wagon began to move backward.

“Hurry! Hurry yourself, you brainless Lowland filth.”

Behind, the crowd scattered, cursing.

The soldier chopped with his hand, signaling a halt.

“Far enough. Now. Let’s see your permit.”

“I don’t carry it,” Raldnor said. Before he could explain that Orhvan had it, the soldier had reached up and dragged him from the box. Raldnor felt the jarring impact of the ground and caught the wheel to steady himself. Next came the soldier’s mailed fist aiming for his mouth.

There was a scream from somewhere, and next minute he found that he had ducked the blow and was facing the Dortharian with his hunter’s knife poised in his hand, ready to kill him through all his armor. Then the bizarre happened. A tangle of people swept between them and the blade was plucked from Raldnor’s fingers. The soldier parted the crowd roughly, but he was smiling.

“You pulled a knife, you clod. Let’s see it, then. Think you can nick me, do you, before I break your neck? Besides, it’s a hanging offense to resist the Am Dorthar.”

A voice called out: “He hasn’t a knife.”

Other voices yelled: “We’d’ve seen, wouldn’t we? You imagined it, Dortharian.”

The soldier’s face darkened. He spun to the crowd, snarling, but another soldier shouted for him abruptly from the road. With an obscene curse the Dortharian turned and glared briefly at Raldnor.

“Sometime I’ll settle with you, dung-creeper.”

He swung aside and shouldered through the press to his station.

A hand slipped Raldnor’s knife into his grasp. One or two people were going past; he was not certain who did it. He climbed back on to the box, shaking with a horrified sick fury, and saw Orhvan’s white face at the wagon flap.

A burst of trumpets. Dimly Raldnor became aware of the advent of the procession. He had a fine vantage point, which went mainly unused. He registered only a vague blur of dark soldiery, the colors of Dorthar and Thann Rashek, and the priestesses of Yasmis in their carmine garments, while the brass music howled in his ears. But then he saw the chariot.

For some reason all his senses sharpened and centered on that chariot—the vehicle of the Storm Lord, jet-black metal drawn by a jet-black team of animals. Perhaps it was the animals which first caught his attention, for he had never seen their breed before.

The man in the chariot had the Dortharian black copper skin and the black hair. His face was curious, a strangely distorted face—as if it held, half concealed, a cauldron of inner violence—though externally well-formed and boasting the large ebony eyes of his mother, Val Mala. He wore black, with a gold chain slashed across his breast. He held the reins in his right hand, in his left a gold handled whip. And that left hand had on it a gauntlet, with a smoky sapphire on the smallest finger.

And this then was the High King. This dark and odd-faced man was the royal Enemy.

Until this moment he had been merely a phantom; now, as if fated, all Raldnor’s hate transferred itself to him.

At the rose heart of Lin Abissa lay the Pleasure City, that area dedicated to the more carnal side of Yasmis, goddess of love. Xaros came in the blue dusk for him, and they soon left behind them the almost empty hostel and the pale girl sitting at the fire.

She had not wanted to go to the fine Xarabian’s house; she equated that dinner with the food and fear offered by the Ommos, Yr Dakan. Yet neither did she want to be alone in this creaking shadowy room, with its smoking, barely hospitable fire. On the hostel stairs she had brushed Raldnor’s arm.

“Must you go with Xaros?” she faltered.

“You know I must. I explained to you—we’re to see a furrier about the wolf pelt.”

“But must it be tonight?”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

She could not tell him.

Soon he grew impatient. She tried to repress her tears for she knew that he hated her to cry. In his eyes there came that look which appalled her. She gave him no pleasure—how could she when she did not understand how? So he must look elsewhere. For she realized already that it was to a brothel he was going.

Now the tears ran down her face freely, and she did not wipe them away.

The narrow streets glowed with hot windows. Spangled women flaunted their sensual wares on high booths—fire dancers from Ommos and Zakoris, snake dancers from Lan and Elyr. Pimps roared out the virtues of their most expensive whores.

“Such breasts—such thighs—”

“Three of each,” Xaros remarked to the immediate crowd.

They came to a tinsel doorway and went in.

There was a naked Yasmis statue in the middle of the room, and a girl acrobat was contorting herself about it; prisms were pasted over her nipples and between her thighs a piece of mirror. Various customers were scattered here and there, drinking and observing her.

They sat down in an alcove, and a man brought them wine unbidden, and charged a ridiculous amount for it. Discomfort took hold of Raldnor. Presently two girls came drifting across the room.

They might have been twins—both pretty, both the smoke and honey shades of Xarabiss, their blue-black hair in heavy curls, gold sequins at the corners of their eyes. Their dresses were transparent gauze, cunningly pleated to opacity at breasts and pelvis, yet revealing a red gem set in each navel and a gold sunburst raying out from it across each softly curving belly.

They greeted Xaros with chirruping affection, but one sat dutifully by Raldnor and poured him wine.

“You’re very handsome,” she whispered to him over the cup, but it was a mannered sweetness. “My name is Yaini. And you’re a Lowlander.”

“Yes.”

“There’s love in the wine,” she murmured. By this he understood her to mean that it was laced with an aphrodisiac, and he set down his goblet untasted. She looked at him curiously, then smiled. “There’s a room above.”

He rose at once, embarrassed by this sexual etiquette of which he knew nothing.

He followed her to the room, which was only large enough to accommodate a bed. In the dim lamplight she reached to embrace him with a delicate, well-simulated passion. There was magic in her mouth and light-fingered hands, and, as he caressed her pliable and willing body, she seemed to quicken too, though possibly it was part of her training to seem to do so.

Much later, as they lay together in the golden gloom, it came to him suddenly that perhaps his unknown mother had been a prostitute with a sunburst painted on her belly, and he grinned maliciously at this.

“You’re smiling,” she said, raising herself on one elbow to look at him. “Why? Did I please you?”

“Naturally you pleased me. You’re very lovely and also very well instructed.”

“That’s a cruel thing to say to me after love.”

“You must think me very naive,” he said. “Am I the first Lowland peasant you’ve entertained?”

“You’re not like a Lowlander at all. Neither like a peasant. You despise me as a whore. You think you bought my pleasure automatically.”

He looked at her, and she was clearly angry. Her responses had seemed genuine enough certainly. He drew her toward him and kissed her coral mouth and honey breasts.

“Again and again and again,” she whispered breathlessly. “You’re indefatigable, a Storm Lord—” He scarcely heard that hated name. “If I please you so much, will you visit me later?”

But he did not answer her except with his body.

A hurricane rent the darkness in his skull.

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

“What is it? A dream? It was only a dream. You’re awake now.”

“No,” he said, his eyes wide, “not a dream.”

And in his brain the alien terror thundered, making him giddy, sick and afraid. He flung himself off the bed, snatched up his clothes and began to dress.

“Oh, what is it?” she sighed frantically. “Let me help you.”

But he was at the doorway and suddenly gone. Distressed, Yaini huddled on the bed. He was the first man who had ever totally pleased her. She had not expected such strength, such passion and such exquisite lovemaking from one of the moderate Lowlanders. And now he had left her—she did not know why—as if some demon had suddenly driven him mad.

Outside he shouldered through the idling customers and their whores. Of Xaros there was no sign. Intolerable waves clashed in his head. He ran from the brothel.

A black velvet night, towers stitched golden on it now, and lamp shine on snow. He thrust between knots of people, who laughed or cursed him. He lost his way and found himself in a desolate alley, sobbing and clutching at his skull like a drunkard in a fit.

“Anici,” he moaned, “Anici, Anici—”

He saw a tall portico of twisted white gold, and shapes of men, and he shouted at them to let go of her. He blundered down the alley, through a yard, calling out, so that faces appeared at windows.

7

The metal pillars were twisted like strange sweets, and torchlight flared from the iron gates. Beyond, a dark avenue, lines of bare trees white with snow blossom.

The chariot wheels sizzled.

One of the dragon men reached out to fondle her right breast.

“And how do you like Thann Rashek’s palace, eh, little Lowlander?”

The other man laughed, turning the chariot now toward the temporary Dortharian barracks. A spear with a red drying tip leaned on the rail. It could be an amusing night. But abruptly there were new torches on the road and an imperious order to halt. The soldier pulled his chariot to a standstill; the other muttered an oath under his breath. Dragon Guard. On their black cloaks he could pick out Amrek’s personal symbol, the white lightning.

A Guard captain detached himself and came up to the chariot. He looked first at the two uneasy soldiers, next at the pale, ash-faced girl.

“You’ve got a Lowlander there, soldier.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How d’you come by her? The truth.”

The soldier scowled.

“There was Lowland scum on the procession route today, sir. Caused me some trouble, but the crowd—these damned Xarabian sheep—milled about and made things awkward. I went looking for him to teach him some manners. Easy enough to find him, sir. There’s only a few places dare to take the yellow rats in, with King Amrek here.”

“Did you find him, soldier?”

“No, sir. No such luck. But I found his wench, as you see.”

The captain smiled without mirth.

“Well, soldier, I have good news for you. All this time you’ve been on a mission for the Storm Lord and never knew it. Someone overheard your plans, man, kept an eye on you and told the High Lord. He wants to see this girl himself.”

The soldier’s face collapsed in a mixture of alarm and vindictive frustration.

“Right, soldier. Hand her over. Don’t weep, man, he’ll let you have her back when he’s finished with her.”

Argument would be fruitless and dangerous. The two soldiers thrust the girl out, and the Guard captain caught her and set her on her feet.

“Lucky lass that you are,” he sneered, “destined after all for such a high table.”

She hung her head and walked in the company of black, iron-faced men into the palace halls. They left her in a glare of torches, swaggering past her. She was briefly alone, except for the two giants who guarded the entrance with crossed spears. Then a tall woman in a diaphanous robe came. She gripped Anici’s shoulder in a ravening grasp like eagles’ claws, and escorted her along corridors and through anterooms. At a carved cibba-wood door, she halted. Her Dortharian face was a mask—black caves of eyes where unmined diamonds glinted, the blood-red mouth of a vampire.

“You go to the Storm Lord. Please him.”

Her claws rapped on the wood and it flew open. She pushed Anici through.

Anici stood like a statue, almost blind, almost deaf and dumb with fear, while the walls reeled and the floor tottered, but it was the earthquake of her fear.

A huge shadow evolved from the light. She felt herself choking on the poisonous vapors of terror. She spread out her hands to save herself from falling into the dragon’s pit, but clutched only empty air.

“So this is a Lowland girl,” a voice said. She could not calculate the whereabouts of the voice; it seemed everywhere. “Take off your pathetic rags and show me the rest of you.”

But she only stood clutching at the air and gasping. She saw him now; at least, she saw the gauntleted left hand come reaching for her, and already she invested it with the marks of damnation. The curse of Anackire. The moment it touched her she would die. So she had always believed in her nightmares.

“Oh, gods, is this what killed my father? Don’t you comprehend, girl, the honor extended to you? You, the fruit of the mating of some obscure Lowland filth. What are you afraid of? This? Well, well, there’s justice in that. The blasting of the women of your yellow hell now brought home to roost on your innocent, no-doubt virgin flesh.”

He pulled her toward him, and the hand of her death settled over her heart. A knife of fire impaled her like the water creature in Yr Dakan’s house.

Amrek lifted his mouth from her skin. He looked at her. When he let her go, she fell at once. Under the dull bleeding of the incense braziers, she lay like a white inverted shadow, stretching out from his blackness on the floor. He bent over her and found that she was dead.

Raldnor opened his eyes and knew neither where he was nor how he had got there.

After a little he moved slightly, fearing some injury had immobilized him. Yet he was unhurt and soon sat up. There was faint, cool fire in the lower sky. All around were twisting dirty alleys, littered with refuse. He thought: “Have I lost my mind in Xarabiss?” And it seemed he had lain all night in the shelter of a rotting hovel.

His head ached dully, and he remembered suddenly an unprecedented terrific blow bringing darkness. Someone had clubbed him then—some thief. Yet his knife was still in his belt, and what was left of Xaros’s loan after he had paid the girl. He got up and began to walk along the nearest alley. An old woman emptying slops cursed him for no apparent reason.

At the turning of the alley lay a broken doll on its back with its arms flung wide. The moment he saw it he remembered, and a pain like death surged up into his throat. He leaned on the wall, trembling, muttering her name. What had become of her and the frantic unconscious signalings of her mind? And what, what had brought the dark down on his skull?

A man came shuffling up the alley. Raldnor caught his arm, and before he could struggle free, asked: “Do you know the way to Pebble Street?”

The man grumbled sullenly. Raldnor thrust a coin under his nose. The man responded with vague directions, grabbed the coin and hurried off. Raldnor began to run.

The sun rose, a dim red bubble, as he negotiated the tortuous byways of Lin Abissa, asking again and again for directions. Finally he came to familiar streets and at last stumbled into the courtyard of the hostel.

Catastrophe was at once apparent.

Great wheel ruts—the marks of a chariot—gouged across the snow, and near these were other marks, as of something dragged, and a brown stain.

Raldnor moved like a somnambulist across the yard and into the hall. The fires were out and no one there. He propelled himself through the hall and up the stairs, and stopped outside the door of the tiny cramped room which had been hers. There was no sound in that room, yet there was a presence. He pushed at the door, which swung noiselessly open.

It was very dark, for the shutters were still closed on the windows. But he made out a girl lying on the narrow bed and a man sitting by her. The man looked up and straight into his face. It was Ras.

“She’s dead.”

“No,” Raldnor said.

“She is dead. If you’d gone with us to the Xarabian’s dinner, she would have come. If you’d asked her, she’d have gone with you. But you went to the brothel and left her here alone, and they came for her while you were with your harlot.” His voice was quite expressionless and very even. “Orhvan and I came too late. His soldiers brought her back after. He told them to. Amrek. She was to have pleasured Amrek, but she died before he had any pleasure from her. As a little girl, she was always afraid of him, I remember. You took her, I let you take her. I couldn’t stop you. But why did you take her, Raldnor, when you didn’t want her? She was a child, Raldnor. Why didn’t you leave her as she was?”

Raldnor stared at Anici, wanting to go to her, to touch her, but there was such an awful stillness about her. Her white face was empty as an unworn mask. He turned and walked back down the stairs, across the hall, out into the courtyard. Who was it that had tried to protect her? Some other Lowland man, perhaps, had spilled this blood.

He went through the gate and began to walk, not knowing where he was going.

At last he found himself seated on a low stone wall, and a man was insistently talking to him, urging him to get up and go to some meaningless destination. After a little he looked at this man, and it was Xaros.

“It’s my fault she’s dead,” Raldnor said. “It should have been my blood on the snow.”

But Xaros somehow got his arm and had him on his feet, and now they were moving through crowds, and he thought that Xaros was taking him back to the brothel and began to shout at him. Xaros called to a burly cutthroat lounging in a doorway: “Svarl, my friend’s sick. Give me a hand with him.”

The cutthroat obliged with competent roughness, and Raldnor discovered they were hauling him upstairs into an unknown building. A door opened on an exotic apartment he scarcely noted at the time, and he was hustled onto a couch. A slender, dark woman came into the room.

“Oh, Xaros, you promised you’d be gentle with him.”

Raldnor could not understand the woman’s concern, for she was a stranger to him, but when her cool hand brushed his face, her touch seemed to unlock the most bitter grief, and she held him and let him weep against her as if she were a sister.

He did not know if it was Anici he wept for or Eraz—the shadow image of his mother who, nevertheless, had been exclusively dear to him, or the beloved with whom he had shared thoughts, and for whom, intrinsically, he had felt nothing. For even in his bewildered pain he understood this, and understood, too, that the white-haired girl would be his penance.

Anici bent over him and touched his shoulder. He got up in the darkness, and she stood waiting, the wind washing through her silver hair. The white moon shone behind her; he saw the shadow of her small bones beneath the skin. As he approached her, she raised her arms, and long cracks appeared in her body, like ink lines on alabaster. Then she crumbled all at once into gilded ashes, and the ashes blew away across the moon, leaving only darkness to wake him.

There were evenings, nights, dawns, other twilights and suns rising. He grew accustomed to Xaros’s elegant rooms as he sat in them, eaten alive by a mindless, creeping lethargy.

After three or four days Orhvan had come, his expressive face showing now only a hesitant empty sorrow.

“Raldnor—the thaw will begin in a little while. Tomorrow even, or the day after, perhaps. Then we’ll be setting out for the Plains.”

Raldnor said nothing at first, but Orhvan stared at him as mutely, and finally he said: “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because we have to go now—before the second snow. You understand that traveling becomes impossible after that.”

“Why are you telling me?” Raldnor repeated, “I’m not going with you.”

“You’ve no choice. Oh, Raldnor, you have to come with us. Haven’t you seen what’s beginning here—Amrek’s work? Even the Xarabians have begun to hate and fear us. Every day there are men in the market places and squares, muttering about Lowland perversions and sorceries . . . You have to come—”

“No, Orhvan. You thought of me always as a Vis. And I am Vis. She—she might have altered me, molded me to be a Lowlander like you, if she’d been stronger and more able than she was. And you don’t have to reproach me for those words. I comprehend perfectly every atom of my guilt.”

He felt then the lightest touch against his thoughts, as if the mind of Orhvan, like hers, had brushed against his own through the crippling veil.

“Come to the Plains when you can,” Orhvan said, “when things are better for you. You know you’d be welcome—”

Raldnor shook his head. With unsmiling lacerated amusement, he said: “Don’t ask the thief and murderer back into your house, Orhvan. He might steal and butcher some more.”

Orhvan lowered his head and turned, and left him.

After this Raldnor had only two visitors. One was the Xarabian woman on whose unknown breast he had wept. He had expected at first, confronted with her in the aftermath of this hysteria, to be embarrassed and ill at ease, but in her gentle courteous way she somehow made him able to accept his own actions. It seemed she was Xaros’s mistress, though she lived in her own apartments somewhere in the building. She was always very quiet, yet her presence was unutterably soothing to Raldnor. She would bring him things to eat or occasionally read to him in a cool lilting voice. Her name was Helida, and her interest a maternal rather than an amatory one, for clearly she loved Xaros a great deal in her own reserved and essentially sophisticated fashion.

The other, second visitor was less welcome; she came in the night and crumbled across his dreams in the consuming fire of her burial. He began to dread sleep. Orhvan had left the wolf pelt when he came, and sometimes in the dark the glimmer of its whiteness seemed like her hair across his bed. Her very innocence had grown evil with the haunting.

Immured in the apartment building, he heard nothing of the city outside. Even Orhvan’s ominous despair had had no impact on him, and, besides, alienated from his people as always and for the first time befriended by a Vis, he felt himself truly Xarabian and one with the crowd of Lin Abissa.

Yet on the eighth evening of his lethargy, a boy came running up the stairs and pounded on Xaros’s door.

“What’s this, you hooligan?” Xaros demanded, and Raldnor thought he recognized the child as the son of the landlord and his wife, who lived a flight down.

“Xaros—soldiers—Dortharians—”

“Certainly. Get your breath back.”

The boy gasped a little, swallowed and resumed:

“Svarl saw Dortharian soldiers on Slant Street, asking for a Lowland man with a finger missing on his left hand. He told me to tell you someone directed them here.”

Xaros gave the boy a coin and packed him off; then, turning to Helida, he said: “Sweetheart, go and appropriate old Solfina’s hair dye,” and Helida went out, presumably to obey this curious order, without a word.

“I’ll leave at once,” Raldnor said, starting up in a sort of sick madness of action.

“And meet the dragons on the street? Oh, no, my impetuous friend. From this moment you’ll do exactly as I say. Oh, my darling Helida, how swift of you. Now we’ll make this yellow stuff a respectable color.”

Raldnor protested as Xaros plastered the jet black paste onto his hair, and Helida applied jugfuls of barely warm water.

“He struggles like an eel. Keep still while I attend to your eyebrows.”

“Will this paint wash off?” Raldnor demanded, stunned and made almost submissive by indignity.

“Wash off? Gods and goddesses—Do you suppose all the elderly black-haired ladies you see in the street would pay out their funds to be unmasked by the first rain?”

They toweled his hair before the fire.

“A rough imperfect job of work,” Xaros commented. “Now into your bed, under the covers and shut your eyes. It’s true certain Dortharians have yellow eyes—their famous king Rarnammon for one—but I can hardly pass you off as him. And say nothing, though an occasional groan I will allow you.”

At which moment, new and heavier footfalls, the unmistakable sound of mail, clashed on the stairs.

The imperative knock came seconds later. Xaros opened the door and feigned amazement.

“To what do I owe this honor?”

“No honor, Xarab. You’ve a man here—”

“Why, yes. How singularly clever of you to know—”

“A Lowlander.”

Xaros raised his eyebrows.

“Indeed no, soldier. I spit on such scum.”

“Oh yes? Then who’s the man?”

“My brother, sir. Prey to a strange affliction; the physician is entirely baffled.”

The two Dortharians thrust by him and flung open the door of the second room. They saw a dark-haired man, apparently asleep in the bed, and a Xarabian woman drooped at the bedside in an attitude of weary despair.

“I must beg you, sir, not to disturb the poor fellow. Additionally,” Xaros muttered with pathos, “the fever is highly contagious.”

The soldier nearest the bed checked his stride.

“Have you reported his sickness to the authorities?”

“Naturally, sir,” Xaros murmured.

“Damnation,” snarled the Dortharian in the doorway. “You were born of a lying race, Xarab. I’ll skin those rats in Slant Street if I catch them.”

“Liars abound,” Xaros remarked sententiously.

The two men pushed their way past.

“What had the Lowlander done to displease you, magnificent sir?”

“That’s my affair. I owe him something.”

Xaros ushered them out and called solicitously after them to mind their step on the lower stairs, then shut the door—and leaned thereon in the helpless mirth of self-applause.

“I’m in your debt for my life,” Raldnor said. It had been easy enough to feign illness in that room, so close to a piece of death.

“So you are. But, more to the point, don’t you think, Helida, that he makes a remarkably good Vis?”

And later, when Raldnor stared at himself in Helida’s glass, another man looked back at him. Something irreparable had occurred—it stretched quite beyond the incident. For it seemed to him he was no longer Raldnor, certainly no longer the Raldnor he had known. And the planes of his face were comfortable and apt, their hauteur set now in this darkness. He seemed to discover himself for what he was. “I am easy with this stranger,” he thought. “He never knew the crippling of a deaf mind, nor the unwilling Lowland girls; not even the white crystal girl of the Lowlander’s sleep. I am Vis now, truly Vis. Is this the legacy my mother intended? Out of an old whore’s dye bottle?”

He took up the wolf pelt in the morning and went out to sell it. The streets ran with the rain of the thaw, but he did not think of Orhvan’s wagon negotiating the unfriendly mud, nor of the ruined city; in a way he had renounced them. And he walked arrogantly, unafraid. Since he had seen the Dortharian soldier spit from the courtyard after them, a hidden part of him had been uneasy to move about these streets, though he had not owned this.

Yet near the furriers Xaros had recommended, he passed across the Red Market and saw five women up for sale to the whorehouses.

Four were pert faced and untroubled enough, flirting with the crowd—black-haired tarts already from the look of them. The fifth was a Lowland woman, dressed in a coarse shift.

Raldnor stared at that familiar and unreadable face he knew so well from the villages. And then, incredibly, it seemed their minds touched, for her head jerked up and she scanned the crowd. Yet he was not strong or adept enough to hold their accidental contact; he did not know how. And she, seeing only dark men about her, relapsed into gray immobility.

Yet the mob, mostly louts with some Ommos and Dortharian men among them, began to jeer at her.

“Looking for me, you yellow mare? I’ll ride you!”

Sudden cold fear dropped over Raldnor. He began to shiver. With an impulse of agonized cowardice, he turned and pushed a way across the square.

He reached the furriers with a sense of horror still on him.

The shop was lofty and dim, and smelled of its wares. He snatched up a handbell and rang it sharply, and the merchant emerged like a shade from a crevice in the wall.

“My lord?” His voice was oddly fawning, unctuous. Raldnor was marvelously surprised to be addressed in such a voice.

“This,” he said; he opened the cloth and spread the pelt on the counter in a spool of icy flame.

The merchant betrayed himself with a sharp intake of breath. Then, mastering himself, he said: “A fine skin. Indeed yes. You bleached it?”

“I didn’t touch it. This was a white wolf.”

The merchant gave a little laugh, as if amused by a favorite child.

“Ah, my lord. A wolf pelt of this size, and so white?”

“If you’ve no taste for my goods, I’ll go elsewhere.”

“Wait, my lord—indeed—you’re too hasty. Possibly it’s as you say. But I’ve no recollection of a hunter trapping such a thing for years.”

“Not trapped. Pierced through the eye. The pelt’s unmarked.”

The merchant hastily examined the hide, then, shaking his head, he murmured: “Of course, it would be difficult to sell so large an article, the times being what they are. I could offer you fifteen ankars in gold.”

“Offer me thirty,” Raldnor said, well instructed by Xaros and inflamed by loathing to boot.

“He deserves more for his impertinence alone,” a new voice said.

Raldnor turned and saw a man had come out of the hole in the wall. He was a Dortharian, there was no mistaking it, yet he did not wear the dragon mail. He leaned on the counter, looking at Raldnor.

“You should have called me sooner, merchant.” The merchant began to speak, but the newcomer overrode him. “Tell me, where did you kill your wolf?”

Cautiously Raldnor assessed his own words.

“In the Plains.”

“The Plains? A long way surely from home? You’re from the cities of Dorthar, are you not?”

This ghastly irony brought the blood singing to Raldnor’s ears.

“I’m no Dortharian.”

“How quickly you disclaim the High Race of Vis. Where then?”

“I come from Sar,” Raldnor said, “near the Dragon Gate.”

It was where his mother had been making for, so his foster village had thought, thus it carried a kind of truth.

“Sar, eh? And the wolf, where did he come from?”

“Out of the dark, on to my knife.”

The man laughed.

“Fifty gold ankars for that pelt, merchant.” The merchant gobbled. “But you’re too late. My master will buy it. It’s better than anything you showed me. Come aside.” And he drew Raldnor into the dusky twilight of the shop—the merchant, for some reason intimidated, not following. “Well, hunter, so you can kill wolves. Ever killed a man?”

Raldnor stared at him in silence.

“Oh, it’s a good trade, the trade of soldiering. Your mother was Xarabian, was she? Know your father, do you?”

“You insult me,” Raldnor said coldly, a burning nausea in his throat before he knew the reason.

“Not I. Your father was a Dortharian for my money. And that, lad, is a compliment. Well, would you like to soldier for an exceptionally generous lord who holds a high place in Koramvis?”

“Why should I want such a thing?”

“Why indeed? Why not scratch out a life in Sar?”

“Who is this lord?”

“You go too fast. Take this and spend it, and think about spending such a sum more regularly in Dorthar. Return here tomorrow at noon. We’ll talk then.”

Raldnor took the bulging money bag, opened it and saw the gold pieces shining up at him. He felt once more a shifting in the planes of his life.

“You’re very sure of me, Dortharian.”

“That’s how I earn my gold. By my unerring sense of a willing quarry.”

Raldnor turned and walked between the heaps of furs, leaving the pelt for the stranger who had bought it. At the door he heard the Dortharian call after him: “Noon, hunter. I’ll be waiting.”

Outside the rain still ran in the gutters, but a dark shadow of change covered the landscape. Raldnor considered: “I’ll go back. Why? A soldier in their corrupt armies. I, the impostor, Lowland scum. And Dorthar—that reeking tomb of dead kings. What’s that dragon place to me?”

8

She rode into Lin Abissa, her grandfather’s capital, on the back of a rust red monster.

She and it were a dual thing of fire in the white afternoon, the apex of a procession made up of gaudy acrobats, fantastic dancers and incredible creatures dressed to resemble Xarabian legend. Amrek’s betrothed was piped, sung and magicked through the streets like a goddess from an era before time.

The beast that carried her was a giant palutorvus from the steamy swamps of Zakoris. She sat in a golden contraption with a roof of plumes. She wore a dull red gown, trimmed with chestnut fur and cut low in the neck, an orange jewel clenched between her breasts. From a tower of golden flowers at her skull fell a smoky drift of scarlet veil. Her hair was the precise color of blood.

The crowds murmured and craned up to see her. And, as with all things flawless, she seemed unreal. Instinctively they searched her person for humanity, some hint of dross, but this was a salamander beauty, burning, mythological, unbounded by any laws or levelings.

She rode without a glance to either side. She was an image of herself.

The procession halted on the avenue before the palace portico, and the red beast knelt.

A man took Astaris’s hand as she stepped from her gilded ladder of steps and bowed low.

“Madam, I welcome your grace to the Storm Lord’s court at Lin Abissa. I am the Lord Amrek’s Councilor, Kathaos. Account me your slave.” His voice was slightly slurred with the accent denoting Ommos or Zakorian, yet the triple-tailed dragon of Alisaar was the emblem on his robe.

She said nothing to his courtesy, and, meeting her eyes, he had the impression of endless depths of beautiful opacity.

Amrek waited for her on the palace steps in order that the crowds at the gates should get some oblique glimpses of their meeting. Kathaos led her to the King and stepped aside. The woman was confronted by the man who was to be, from this moment, her lord.

He was dark and cruel in his exterior, like an emblem of himself and his reputation. He leaned toward her and placed on her lips the traditional kiss of greeting that marked his approval.

Her mouth was very cool, and she seemed to wear no perfume, despite her finery, as if she were merely a doll that had allowed itself to be dressed. Something about her angered him. He was subject to such angers. Ostentatiously ignoring his Councilor, whom he hated for many various reasons, he took her hand roughly and pulled her into the palace with him. She made no complaint.

“Madam, I am unaccustomed to dangling women on my arm. I walk too fast for you, I think.”

“If you think so, you should walk more slowly,” she said. Her remark had a combination of insolence and wit, yet he sensed that both were somehow accidental. She had simply made a statement.

“So you have a tongue. I thought the swamp beast had bitten it out.”

They came into a huge room, the retinue left behind. He moved her to look about at things.

“Do you know what happened in this room, Astaris Am Karmiss? A woman died here because of her fear of me.”

“Did it pain you that she died?”

“Pain? No, she was a Lowland whore. Nothing. Don’t you want to know why she feared me? It was this—this gauntlet. But you, Astaris, have no need to fear it. I wear the glove to hide a knife scar—not a beautiful thing.”

“What is beauty?” she said.

Her curious responses disturbed him, and she also, this impossible jewel cast into his gloomy life to blaze there like a comet.

“You, Astaris, are beautiful,” he said.

“Yes, but I’m not a measure.”

He let go her hand.

“Were you afraid on the monster’s back? You must blame Kathaos if you were. His ideas become a village circus-master.”

“What should I fear?”

“Perhaps, despite what I said to you, you should fear me a little.”

“Why?”

“Why? I am the High King, more, I am her son—the bitch queen of Koramvis. I inherit all her foulness and her cruelty. And now I am to be your lord. While you please me, you’ll be safe enough. But not when I lose interest—unsurpassable loveliness might evoke boredom after a time, even yours. Especially yours. Your perfect symmetry will grate, madam.”

She only smiled. It was an enigmatic smile. Was it her hubris, her self-assurance, or was she perhaps unable to grasp his meaning? Either she was obscure or she was slightly insane. Perhaps this was the flaw—an imbecilic queen to rule Dorthar by his side.

Moving with unbelievable grace, she began to look at frescoes. He felt fleetingly unreal in her presence.

“Astaris, you’ll attend to me,” he shouted.

She turned and looked at him searchingly, though her eyes, as Kathaos had noted, were pools of bottomless dark amber glass.

“I attend,” she said, “to you.”

A late afternoon light was settling on Lin Abissa as Kathaos Am Alisaar crossed from Thann Rashek’s major palace to the guest mansion adjoining it. Such was Am Alisaar’s status as Councilor to the Storm Lord that the entire scope of the latter house had been given over to himself and his household.

Which was as well, Kathaos’s household being of an immodest yet clandestine nature.

Particularly, there was his private guard. Not that this was, in itself, an unusual acquisition; most nobles amassed them. Yet the dimension and ability of Kathaos’s guard would have been found notable had it been investigated. Chosen by Am Alisaar’s agents at random in the thoroughfares of several cities—a method which successfully evaded Amrek’s direct notice—they came from among the ranks of fortune hunters, thieves, malcontents. Once under Kathaos’s yellow blazon, however, they were arbitrarily amalgamated, specifically trained in the fighting techniques of the Imperial Academy in Koramvis and led into collective though no less dangerous modes of living. Not many rebelled or abused their school. Those who did vanished mysteriously, yet suitably, into the dark to which such men were subject. Those who persisted at their new trade did well by it, becoming almost inadvertently part of a large and well-oiled machine. For Kathaos’s aim was to possess at last a defense as traditionally geared, strong, elite, and deadly as the Dragon Guard of a Storm Lord.

Kathaos had, as it were, hereditary reasons for his ambition.

His father had been Orhn, ultimate King of Alisaar. Though it was generally said that by the time that Orhn moved to take Alisaar from the dying grasp of his sire, he had in truth lost all interest in her—for by then the reins of Dorthar were firmly in his hands. He had fathered Kathaos on a minor Zakorian queen during one of his brief forays to Saardos, but he was never away from his regency, or his mistress Val Mala, for long. Only death put an end to his to-ing and fro-ing. And now, ironically, it was Kathaos who was Val Mala’s lover—a pleasant enough situation, for the queen had taken care to age as little as possible and extended favors to those who amused her.

He wondered if Astaris would amuse her, and decided emphatically that she would not.

The junction of the palace and the guest mansion was marked by a pillar forest of crimson fluted glass, which now throbbed with mulberry embers of the low sun and clotted incarnadine shadow.

“Rashek’s architect seems to have had a certain vulgar genius,” Kathaos remarked.

“If you say so, my lord.”

Kathaos’s Guard Lord, Ryhgon, striding half a pace behind him, was not as a rule addicted to long sentences.

A huge Zakorian, his true addiction, which was a form of authoritarian brutality, showed in every line of body and face. His giant’s nose was smashed into unrecognizable shape, and a white scar jumped from jaw to oxneck. A vicious leader for Kathaos’s personal guard, a leader not to be crossed, with the power of six apparent in his abnormally developed sword arm. Kathaos found him excellent.

“There are twenty recruits from Abissa, so I hear,” Kathaos said. “You, of course, will manage them superbly.”

Ryhgon gave a grim smile.

“Trust me.”

At the portico the Zakorian took another smaller entrance and advanced down the corridor of the mansion to that long hall where the recruits were waiting for him. Firelight seeped about the hall, casting up a huge familiar shade behind Ryhgon. The men fell silent at his approach, their facial expressions ranging from nervousness to bravado. This was to be one of the few times when Ryhgon spoke at any length. It was a well-known speech to him. He had used it on several battalions of untried adventurers such as these, and the unpleasant smile was still on his scarred mouth.

“So, this is the latest filth they’ve given me to hammer into men. I say ‘hammer.’ I choose the word with care. You see this arm? This is the arm I hammer with, if I have to.” He moved to a table and poured himself wine, and the silence prevailed about him. “Your profession from today is that of house guard to the Prince Kathaos Am Alisaar. The least witless of you may have gathered already that there’s more to it than that. But you’ll keep your tongues quiet or someone will quieten them for you. I hope you understand me. If it’s gold pieces you’re wanting, there’ll be plenty. If you feel the need to screw a whore, you’ll find those provided, too. If you’ve any other bedroom habits, settle them elsewhere and pray I don’t catch you at it. For the rest, you’ll discover the discipline is savage and I’m not a gentle master. Do as I tell you, and work yourselves sick and you’ll live till Koramvis.” He drained the wine without swallowing and banged down the goblet. “Any of you that find occasion to want a quarrel—seek me out. It’ll be my pleasure to accommodate you.”

Lightly, Ryhgon flipped the short sword at his belt, then turned and left them.

A man at Raldnor’s side said, very low: “Zakorian midden-keeper.”

At dusk the first white birds settled on Lin Abissa. The thaw was ended. Soon the three-month snow would hold all the eastern segment of Vis under its inexorable seal.

The Lord Kathaos’s new recruits ate their meal at a long table, separated from the more seasoned guard. The guard paid them no attention, it being their unwritten law to show no interest until training and probation were done. And there was a deal of sullen silence and covert gossip at the long table. Ryhgon had already established himself as he had chosen to be established—a figure to be hated and inordinately feared.

“That man’s no lover of gentle ways.”

“Zakorian whore’s mistake.”

“Watch yourself. Walls have ears.”

“Did you get a look at that sword arm? And the scar on his face? Gods!”

Later they sought the narrow pallets of a bleak dormitory.

Raldnor lay a long while on his hard bed, listening to their mutterings and to his own thoughts.

Outside the snow fell in silver flickerings. The siege snow.

“So I’ve locked myself in with strangers and with uncertainties, instead of with the known village and its familiar hopeless ways,” Raldnor thought. He recaptured Hamos under the snow, the purple snow nights and the howling of wolves, and he thought of Eraz beneath the white layerings, returned to the stuff of the Plains.

He had paid his debts. He had given back to Xaros all he owed while Xaros protested volubly, but he had told neither Xaros nor Helida of the man in the furrier’s nor, later, of where he was going. And they had respected his silence, probably imagining he would be returning after Orhvan to the Lowlands and the ruined city. He had found a shop in the back streets of Abissa and bought himself a supply of black dye with which he subsequently attended to his body hair. With this bizarre sorcery committed, his life and his soul seemed to slip into a curious interim, a limbo. He had worked a spell of change upon himself, and he had unleashed, like magicians of old, ungauged elemental forces. Now, anything might happen.

Yet there were remnants of ancient magic still clinging. She came, for the first time in many nights, here, to this Xarabian palace in the dark. The white moon shone behind her, and the cracks appeared in the broken vase of her milk-white body, and she blew away like ashes or like snow.

The bed was an oval of beaten silver, shaped to resemble an open flower, for, like the procession which had brought her here, it was deemed proper that all things surrounding Amrek’s betrothed should be fantastic.

And in this flower Astaris opened her eyes at midnight.

There had been a dream. An unaccountable dream. A woman blowing in ashes across the face of the moon, all negative whiteness.

Astaris left the bed and crossed the room, throwing open the draperies and shutters, moving out on to the icy, snow-capped balcony. The cold was only a half-felt suggestion at the edges of her thought. Her entire consciousness seemed centered at the core of her brain, more so now than at any time before. She felt herself listening, yet not for any kind of sound.

And then she saw a man lying before her in the dark. Yet she did not exactly see him or even sense him. She felt, but rather, she comprehended. She did not ask: “Who is this?” There was no need. At that moment it was herself.

Instinctively she withdrew, flinched aside from the contact, and the formless image of the man was gone.

The secret of the enigma of Astaris was only this: She lived within herself, and no part of her reached out to commune with others. It was not pride or fear, but simply the most pure, the most unhuman introspection. She could not believe, or barely, in the external world and its characters; she did not even believe in her own physical self. She was an intelligence shut inside an exquisite mummy case of flesh, a creature in a shell. Now, by accident, a note had woken her, a resonance no longer outside her, but within.

Like a citadel invaded, she was at once full of alarm, but there was yielding also. She understood nothing of what had occurred, but did not need to. This was not the sort of questioning she used. She understood merely that, for an instant, the coiled sea creature which lived in the shell of her and was herself had been discovered by the wandering somnambulist impulse of another.

“Something has come near me,” she thought in strange stilted wonderment. “Something has found me out.”