The Storm Lord

9

Enclosed in the white womb of the cold, the eastern lands waited in their three months’ chrysalis. Pragmatic winter exchanged their contours for a geography of snow marble, wind-stenciled ice, and the inexorable silence of the desert. Nevertheless, the sun waxed as ever, encroached as ever. The sudden, bright, sounding first rains of a Vis spring shocked and cracked the alabaster seals, as they had always shocked and cracked them.

In Lin Abissa the gutters foamed, and the ornate gardens quickened.

Twilight oceaned about the towers of Thann Rashek’s guest palace, bringing an old nostalgia to Yannul the Lan as he sat cleaning his soldier’s gear in the uninspiring and impersonal barracks. Impersonal, despite the fact that in three months Am Alisaar’s recruits had littered it with certain personal things—their blunt but sentimental knives, some girl’s favor, trophies, knickknacks, memories from previous lives. For it seemed to Yannul that they had all been cursorily reincarnated into this soldiering under Kathaos’s yellow cloak, made new men with discarded pasts, about which many were very reticent. Raldnor the Sarite, now. He and Yannul seemed to count each other friends, yet what did they ever really say to each other about their earlier days? Both had been village farm stock to begin with—Raldnor, he said, on the perimeter of Sar, Yannul in the pendulous blue bosom of the Lannic hills. Later, both had made their way to the towns of Xarabiss: Yannul to be a juggler and acrobat in the markets, Raldnor to spend a nebulous time about which he said nothing—until Kathaos’s scouts found both of them and lured them under the yellow blazon. Yannul rubbed a troubled hand across the nape of his neck. Soldiering had meant a barber for the shoulder-blade-long Lannic hair. “No barbarians in this service,” the man had clacked. And “slash” those knives had gone, and a part of his supposedly barbarian pride with them. He saw Raldnor looking at him then, across the shadows, so he set nostalgia aside and said: “Koramvis soon.”

“Yes,” Raldnor said, “the city of Rarnammon, under the protection of the Storm gods of the Am Dorthar.”

It had puzzled Yannul often, the pains Raldnor had apparently taken to discover the bits and pieces of Dortharian religion and myth, for under the curiosity and the lip service there seemed to be another emotion—dislike. There had been, too, an incident once—some low muttering at table about how Kathaos was intent on toppling Amrek the Storm Lord. Men had sat, stony-faced, keeping their own counsel and wary of Ryhgon’s spies. But Yannul had seen Raldnor’s hand clench on his cup until the knuckles went white, and on his mouth there had been a hint of the grimmest and most macabre grin—almost the grin of a madman—before the Sarite had mastered himself.

“It pleases them to say so,” Yannul said lightly. “I think Kathaos fears no divine forces.”

“Then he’s a brave man.”

“Oh, men make their own gods,” Yannul remarked. “I have a god with a fat belly, and a house full of expensive women to attend his every need, and I call him Yannul the Lan in Five Years from This. Well, that’s done,” and he laid aside the knives and other metal duly polished. “What now? Neither of us has watch duty. We could try the wine shops of Abissa.”

Raldnor put down his own gear and nodded.

“Why not?” Like most people confined inside set limits, they were glad enough to get out of them whenever possible and by whatever excuse. “But we’ll need a gate pass, Yannul.”

“No. Lazy Breon’s in charge. Remember, Ryhgon eats at Kathaos’s table tonight. And Kathaos has my profound thanks.”

None of them had much cause to love the Guard Lord. He had proved himself all he had promised to be three months before. Yet he had taught them well. The knowledge of the fighting academies of Dorthar, Alisaar and Zakoris was ingrained in them by now, for Ryhgon had flayed them with it, given it to them in place of bread. And there was a bonus, too, for with his absences, however brief, there came a sense of holiday.

Yet the thaw dusk had laid a strange hold on both of them for all that, and they idled only slowly down toward the outer court.

Kathaos glanced across the lamplit room at Ryhgon and said, with irony far too subtle to offend his guest: “I trust the dinner found favor with you.”

Ryhgon grunted.

“Your lordship keeps a generous table.”

“Good fortune grants I can.”

“Your lordship’s no believer in fortune.”

“Perhaps not, but in this world of euphemisms, you’ll permit me mine.”

“As your lordship likes.”

“Well. And do you have any news of my guard?”

It was customary for Ryhgon, after these excellent dinners, to make some report. Responding to the signal, he laid out his inventory. Things were well enough. The latest recruits from Abissa had shown reasonable aptitude and had been split up among the first and second companies. By the time they reached Koramvis he would have cut them into shape.

“Be careful the knife doesn’t slip,” Kathaos said.

“Your lordship doubts my ability?”

Kathaos smiled.

“You’re a harsh master, Ryhgon.”

“Do I claim otherwise? Don’t worry, my lord. I can sort the metal from the dross. It’s the dross that suffers.”

“There was a man with light eyes—I saw him at drill yesterday,” Kathaos said unexpectedly. “What about him?”

“The Sarite?” Ryhgon gave a short unpleasant laugh. “He’s the unquiet sex of a dragon. The women your lordship supplies have been unusually busy. They seem to like it, too.”

“What’s his measure as a fighter?”

“Fair.” In Ryhgon’s terminology this was high praise. Kathaos judged it accordingly.

“That interests me. I want you to keep a watch on him. He has an uneasy resemblance to the royal line of the Am Dorthar.”

“I hadn’t noticed it.”

“I would never expect you to. However, I am perhaps more familiar with that face. Don’t you think it unusual that such a Dortharian brand should be set in Sar?”

“A by-blow. Some passing Koramvin.”

“Then that Koramvin would need to have been a prince.”

“Unlikely.”

“Quite. Which leads me to a theory that perhaps your Sarite comes from a higher bed altogether, in Koramvis itself.”

Ryhgon’s eyes widened.

“Belly of earth!”

“I may, of course, be mistaken,” Kathaos said dryly.

“He would have had to know where your lordship placed your scouts.”

“Possibly he does. There is a certain careful enmity between Amrek and myself, yet I’m useful to him and not overt in what I do. But if this Sarite is some half-brother of Amrek’s, put here as the King’s spy—I think you understand me, Ryhgon.”

There was a light, indeterminate, white moth snow blowing on the wind, melting colorlessly on the pavements of the city.

Still absorbed by the melancholy dusk, Raldnor and the Lan had settled on the lower and more obscure ways of Abissa. The first wine shop they came to was unknown, but they pushed in out of the snowy dark to the murky light of greasy candles. The place was deserted.

Yannul took hold of the handbell hanging by the grate and rang it, and out of the silence of the shop came the rustling of a woman’s skirt in answer. But it was a threadbare skirt, and she little and thin and very young. As the shadow left her, Raldnor saw that she had yellow hair.

She did not speak. Yannul asked her for wine; she nodded and went out. As soon as she was gone, he said: “A Lowlander!” His voice was full of amazement. “Does she know how close she is to Amrek’s nest? How has the persecution passed her by? She must be a slave.” And then, with surprising gentleness: “Poor little mite, she looked barely old enough to couple.”

Raldnor said nothing. As once before, a terror of betrayal came on him. Then it had been the woman in the market at Abissa, but fear had found him more expectedly, and so less painfully, at that time—the physical change he had wrought on himself being still new. He saw now that in the three months of the snow he had come to think of himself as a Xarabian, and as a Vis, despite the subterfuge of the dye. True, he had nursed the old hatred for Amrek, but that had become an almost abstract thing, an emotion sufficient unto itself, a reason no longer essential. Even when she came to him in dreams, and he woke sweating on the couches of the whores, thinking himself once again in the Pleasure City, the agony of despair beginning in his skull, the focus of Anici’s death was dissociated from race. Could not a Xarabian love a Lowland girl and lose her to a monstrous perverted King? It had bitterly pleased him to study the ways of the Am Dorthar, to read their legends, and somewhere in this morass of beliefs, he had mislaid the pure monotheism of the Plains. It had been easy, in the end, to swear by gods and not by Her, the Lady of Snakes, who asked for nothing, being all.

And now this girl in her rags, a figment of his lost unhappy past, conjured to torment him with remembrance.

She returned and set cups and a stone jug on the table, and then took their payment in her chapped hands. Raldnor turned away, but even when she had gone the room seemed full of her.

Yannul gave him a brimming cup, and they gulped the raw strong drink. He noticed the Lan’s eyes on him.

“Finish your wine. This is a gloomy place, and there’s a love house five doors up,” Yannul said.

There was a sudden noise outside which did not somehow belong in these streets. The door burst open and the fire leapt.

Six men entered. They wore the black tunics and black hooded cloaks that were the casual wear of the Storm Lord’s Dragon Guard, and worked in silver upon breast and back was Amrek’s lightning blazon. They cast half looks at the house’s earlier customers, discounting them as of no importance. Kathaos’s badge was ignored. One of them spoke in a low voice. They laughed.

“A strange haunt for Amrek’s Chosen,” Yannul said softly. “Why here?”

The dragons had sat down at a trestle and, disdaining the bell, began to beat with their mailed fists on the table top.

“Let’s go,” Yannul said.

But Raldnor found he could not move. He sat like stone, staring at the inner doorway, and a moment later the Lowland girl came. She walked quietly toward the noisy table, as though unaware of any enmity in the world.

Silence fell at once. The Dragon Guard sat, their eyes riveted on her. One of them, the tallest, eased back his hood.

“Wine, little girl. And make sure you bring it yourself.”

Expressionless, the girl turned and went away. A dragon laughed.

“Spawn of the snake goddess. So the rumor was correct.”

Raldnor felt Yannul grip his shoulder.

“Let’s be on our way.”

“Wait,” Raldnor said and set down his cup; the blood thudded in his temples, and a taste of dry bone was in his mouth.

The girl came back shortly, a jug in the crook of her arm, cups caught by their stems between her fingers. She poured their wine, then stood waiting for payment.

After a while a dragon looked round at her.

“What do you want, girl?”

One of his companions leaned forward.

“She’s demanding money.”

“Money for what? For the wine?” He drained his cup and held it out to her, empty. “See, you didn’t give me any.”

A slow cold laughter circled the table.

The girl turned, presumably to go in search of the proprietor. The dragon swiftly caught her, swung her about and pushed her against the trestle.

“If you want money, little girl, you’ll have to earn it. Yes, struggle all you want. You won’t get away. Besides, you struggle very nicely.” Holding her easily with one arm, he pealed open the bodice of her dress, revealing the beautiful yet immature breasts of barely quickened puberty. “I’ve heard all you Lowland bitches are virgin. I’ve never had a virgin. How do you think that’ll compensate for the wine you never poured me, you slut?”

But something like a vise caught his shoulder and dragged him round from the girl with a force that utterly surprised him. Next came a blow of darkness in his throat and for a time the world stopped spinning. He fell across the table and was still.

The other five stared at this tall, light-eyed house guard of Kathaos Am Alisaar, who could not be anything but insane.

“Foolish,” one said, but he was smiling.

They began circling, two to get behind him, three content to wait on his capture. Raldnor understood very well that he had given them the right to kill him, but he was indeed mad, in a way. Like them, he felt a strange joy at the prospect of violence, and the big men were dwarfed by his mood—a pack he could toss off his back like beans. Then there was a yell from behind him. Yannul, it seemed, had joined the fight.

Raldnor snatched the wine jug from the table and flung the liquor in the nearest dragon’s face, leaving the two behind him for the Lan. As the man cursed and clawed his eyes, Raldnor sprang, knocking his legs from under him and sending him crashing into his neighbor. Rolling clear of the struggling heap, he brought his fist into cracking connection with a gaping jaw and kicked the other deftly with a light yet almost deadly accuracy over the heart. In the background he heard the blows of the Lan’s own iron juggler’s knuckles, and to this continuing music the third Guard slung himself against Raldnor, a short knife blazing in his hand. But he met Raldnor’s foot before his body, and next got a concussion in his guts that sent him retching and reeling to the ground. The handy stone wine jug added the finishing touch, and his knife fell harmlessly on the flags.

Raldnor turned with an irrepressible brutal laughter.

“Ryhgon taught us our trade immaculately,” he called to Yannul. “A harsh but an excellent master.”

Then he looked fully at the second Guard the Lan had felled and saw from the angle of him that his neck was broken.

Yannul stood staring at the body, his face pale.

“He’s dead, Raldnor. I wasn’t as elegant as you.”

“The blame’s mine,” Raldnor said sharply. “My fight. You came to help me.” Yet a dark and dismal quiet had settled in that place. Who knew better than he that death was promised to any who killed one of the Storm Lord’s Chosen? It had been Dortharian law for a thousand years or more. But he took Yannul’s arm. “Out of here. Who saw?”

“She did.”

Raldnor turned and noted the Lowland girl standing motionless at the grate.

“She won’t tell any tales.” Harshly he shouted out to her: “Go back to the Plains before they eat you alive in this stinking city.”

But her golden eyes stared blind as stones into his, though he felt a curious fluttering like a bird in his brain. He turned, put his arm over Yannul’s shoulders and drew him out into the cold and empty streets.

“Well Ryhgon, what is this so urgent news?”

“Your pardon, my lord. There’s been a brawl in Lin Abissa. The Storm Lord’s Guard. And two of my men. One of the dragons is dead.”

Kathaos’s face was blank.

“You have this on good authority?”

“Would I accept it otherwise? The owner of the wine shop reported the incident. A sniveling sot, frightened of what would be done to him, spying behind a curtain. He described your guard—the Lannic acrobat was one. The other—a pale-eyed man, missing a left finger.”

“The . . . Sarite. Is he the killer?”

“I don’t know as yet, my lord.”

“Discover. What began the trouble?”

“The Xarab fool who runs the shop keeps a Lowland mare as a slave. The dragons were unlacing. The Lan and the Sarite were pleased to take exception to rape.”

“Something you find hard to believe,” Kathaos remarked.

Ryhgon said: “You know my views on women, my lord.”

“Her race is at present more interesting than her sex. How many Vis defend Lowlanders with Amrek here?”

“Xarabs and Lans have soft ways for the Plains.”

“Yet our hunter may not be Xarabian, as we discussed before. Where have you put the two?”

“A cellar room below the palace.”

“Let them sample a night there. Bring me the hunter here at noon tomorrow. Find out what you can between now and then, but restrain your arm. Is there any word from Amrek?”

“None.”

“As well. But not illogical. No doubt he would dislike the incident widely broadcast. The Guard of Kings, after all, is supposed to be invincible, and myth should never be reduced to a mere technicality.”

After the darkness of the cellarways, the midday light in the upper rooms of the mansion hurt his eyes. His guards had left him in a small bright chamber, unbound, and presently Kathaos entered.

It was the first time Raldnor had come close to him, this man who had owned him through these three months of hard-bought living. Ryhgon had been the harsh symbol; here stood the actuality. A well-controlled face, blood lines too mixed to give him any hint of his royalty beyond the finecast good looks.

He seated himself and observed Raldnor with an unfathomable expression that might have been the mask for anything and was almost unarguably the mask for something.

“Well, Sarite, what have you got to say to me?”

“Whatever you want me to say, my lord, to amend my fault.”

“An elegant speech won’t mend anything, Sarite, I assure you. Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve offended the King. Of all men, the Storm Lord’s Dragon Guard can do as they please; their rights are second only to his. And you, hunter, have hung them up by the heels. Not a good thing to do.”

“Your lordship is, I believe, aware of my reasons.”

“Some wine girl . . .”

“Little more than a child, my lord. They’d have killed her.”

“She was a Lowlander. The King tells us Lowlanders are of no importance.”

“A child—” Raldnor broke out.

“Instruct me,” Kathaos said, and his voice had grown harder, “which of you broke the dragon’s neck?”

“It was my pleasure.”

“Your pleasure. Why kill this one man and leave the rest alive?”

“He was their leader.”

“He was not.” Kathaos paused deliberately. “The shopkeeper saw the Lan catch the guard’s neck in his hands and break it like a fowl’s.”

Raldnor did not speak. At last Kathaos said: “You extend your altruism too far, and anything stretched too far loses its edge. Nevertheless, I am not going to make you the meat for Amrek’s anger. Yannul the Lan will do well enough for that. Ryhgon will see that he’s punished for his offense. You will shortly receive a pardon.”

Raldnor stared at him.

“Punish me too. The fight was mine.”

Kathaos lifted and rang the small bell at his elbow. Doors opened and guards reentered.

An empty disdain shook the last dregs of hope out of Raldnor. Buried in his own guilt for Yannul, he ignored what Kathaos offered him, finding it valueless.

“I thank your lordship,” he said quietly, “for this impartial justice.”

It was enough to hang him, but did not. The guards merely marched him back to his dungeon, from which Yannul was gone.

Yet Kathaos sat on in the upper room for some while. The whole episode had seemed curious; who knew what lay behind it? From the first he had considered it best not to thrust the man in the path of royal fury. That would be to force Amrek’s hand, and if the Sarite were a spy, then he would only, at some future time, be replaced by another, less detectable one. As things stood, he had become a sort of game piece between the King and his Councilor, and there might be uses for him later.

“And I was not mistaken,” Kathaos now thought. “This naïve fighting cock is one of the princes of Koramvis.”

It was the sudden icy gust of imperial arrogance that had convinced him. A fool might be stupid enough to spit in his lord’s eye, as Raldnor had done, yet not with that aura of incredible assurance and contempt. Kathaos knew that look very well. He had endured it from his earliest conscious hours. That look had, in part, been the foundation of his lifestyle, and now, coming unexpectedly as it did from the eyes of a man who should by rights have been pleading for his life, it had breached all defenses. And Kathaos Am Alisaar had inwardly cringed, a fact that interested rather than distressed him.

The night passed in a black fever as Raldnor paced his prison, half mad with anger. More guilt. Had there not been enough guilt for him to bear? The rat thoughts scuttled and gnawed.

In the morning he woke out of a stupefied sleep and saw the iron door left open for him.

He climbed the stairways up into the light. He passed guards and servants with blank faces. In an upper corridor he saw one of the barrack whores, a pretty sloven, who normally liked him well enough. But when he caught her arm and asked her: “Do you know where Yannul is?” she shook her head and hurried off.

In the dormitory he and Yannul used he found a man untidily penning a letter, who looked up immediately and said: “You’ve heard how Yannul was punished?”

“No. You’d better tell me.”

“He was a fool to set on the Chosen. So were you to follow him. You can take friendship too far.”

So that was the story Kathaos had put about. Raldnor let the man’s meddling, worthless advice go by like so much chaff on the wind.

“Yannul’s punishment,” he reminded harshly.

The man shook his head.

“That bastard Ryhgon had him dragged into the hall and had them hold his right hand up against the chimney column. Then he took a cibba staff and smashed it across the back. Must’ve broken every bone. That’s Zakorian justice for you.”

“Ryhgon,” Raldnor said very softly. That was all. Then: “Where’s Yannul now?”

“The gods know. Not here, that’s for sure. What will you do?” the soldier added curiously. Raldnor knew him well enough for a gossip.

“I? What can I do?”

All that day the anger mangled him. The pivot of the anger—Yannul—became a secondary thing. Though he did not analyze this, part of him knew why he no longer sought the Lan or asked questions as to his whereabouts. Yet he had no thoughts beyond his anger. He was quite absorbed in it.

Evening came, and the evening meal at the long tables.

“Look out for yourself, Raldnor,” a Xarabian muttered to him. “My gods tell me Ryhgon hasn’t quite finished with you.”

“My gods tell me things too,” Raldnor said.

Another man glanced his way and said: “I see no justice in breaking a man’s right hand so he can do nothing to make himself a living. A juggler, wasn’t he? He’ll juggle nothing now.”

A sudden thick quiet fell. Ryhgon, a latecomer, had just entered the hall, his officers about him. He did not sit at once, but struck the bell by his place, and the last vestiges of chat and stirring died out in the room.

“I’ve something to say to you. I don’t doubt you know two men here saw fit to cross Amrek’s Dragon Guard. That they live is due to the mercy of the Lord Kathaos and the present good humor of the King. The Lan was punished. The Sarite, as you see, received his pardon. My lord the prince chooses to be lenient with fools, but you’ve all had fair warning before of my dislike of foolishness. You can thank your gods, Raldnor of Sar, that I too am in a pleasant humor. And in future, Sarite, you’ll work twice as hard and watch your manners twice as carefully as any other man here. Am I understood?”

The hush of the room was intolerable. A sense of impending drama had come on it at the last instant, and the eyes of every soldier present were fixed on Raldnor as he sat at the end of the bench. Not turning yet, he got to his feet. His face was quite unreadable, but he reached and picked up the great meat knife off the board, and a hiss went up from the hall as if from icy water thrown on burning tiles.

He turned then and walked up the room toward Ryhgon’s table.

“Put that back, Sarite,” Ryhgon said.

“Give me back my knife then, Zakorian.”

“You’ll get your knife when the prince Kathaos thinks fit.”

“Then I’ll make do with this. Or would you feel safer if you used a staff on my hand first?”

Ryhgon gave an ugly grin.

“You seem over-touchy at the punishment I gave the Lan. I wonder if there was more between you than friendship?” The Guard Lord turned, silently ordering laughter from the crowded benches. Few men laughed, and the mirth that came was false, dry and isolated.

“Words, Zakorian,” Raldnor said and, halting a yard or so away, he addressed the jagged point of the meat knife to Ryhgon’s breast. “Are you only going to offer me words? You once promised to accommodate quarrels. I’ve a quarrel, Guard Lord. Accommodate me.”

Ryhgon’s huge perversion of a right arm moved slowly until the great hand found the sword hilt. The action should have been enough.

“I’ll accommodate you, Sarite. Throw down your toy and I’ll give you a taste of thong. I think you’ll like it better than what I have here.”

He saw the movement in the air and swung to avoid it, but he had expected nothing and so was sluggish. The edge of Raldnor’s butcher’s blade caught the Zakorian’s unscarred cheek, and blood ran bright.

In that instant Raldnor knew death was as near as Ryhgon himself, but such was the madness on him that he welcomed it, for he could outwit death as skillfully as he had outwitted the Vis.

However, he seemed light as air while Ryhgon was a lumbering elemental force all about him, the dragon sword in the giant’s grasp lusting after him. Raldnor dropped down to the side and the massive blade swung by him, resounding on one of the stone pillars of the hall. Ryhgon used no guard. He wheeled the sword like an ax; the vast sweeping blows were hypnotic and paralyzing. He fought contemptuously, a machine that knows it is invincible and does not have to think. “But the master should be careful of his pupil,” Raldnor thought quite clearly, and in his sparkling rage he saw only a reputation behind the sword, something that expected to be feared and was not essentially fearful.

“Look at me, Ryhgon,” he thought, “how I freeze with terror,” and he fell back before the giant as if afraid, and the storm came on, its teeth a glimpse of lightning. The great arm lifted the sword, and on the end of that soaring hung Raldnor’s death dangling like a doll.

Raldnor thrust beneath and up to meet the descending arm. It was a swift almost casual stroke that severed the Guard Lord’s wrist. Thick blood spurted, the ox muscles spasmed and the sword dropped from Ryhgon’s impotent fingers.

Ryhgon fell to his knees, clutching the shorn-off hand against him, shouting and drooling in agony. No one moved to help him. They sensed perfectly that his rule was over, yet more than this, they were appalled by the sight of the monster on its knees, reduced so simply and so totally to its basic animal parts, emptied like a broken jar of all its power.

But in Raldnor the silver rage did not abate. He saw they would be on him in a moment and there would be more of Kathaos’s justice. So he leaped across the room, over benches, toward the outer doors. No one stopped him; he seemed to be moving in a different time, and outside the corridors were empty.

He ran in smoky lamplight over mosaic floors, looking for an exit point. But there was no cool reasoning left to him—only instinct. At last it was a window, not a door, he found—a window with dry creeper, half dead from the snow, coiling away from it. He took its withered brown claws in his hands and climbed downward into a court of shadows and a forest of columns of poppy-colored glass.

“What now?” he asked himself, and then came a black absorbing dreariness: “Nothing now.”

But there was something. A light. It sprang up ahead of him, and where it shone through the pillar stems it was a pale carnelian fire. He pressed backward, but the flame found his face.

There was a girl, carrying a lamp. She was the sort of girl he had grown accustomed to seeing about the walks of the major palace in the past three months—gliding always in the distance, accompanied by servants, hair intricately dressed, jewels on her fingers. Yet this one was alone. She tilted her head a little to one side and gave him an inquisitive, dangerous smile.

“And what’s your business here, Am Kathaos? An illicit love affair with some Dragon Lord’s wife? And you so breathless to get to it.”

The abrupt transition from anger, blood and flight to this could only stun him. The madman’s plan came out of his mouth before it was fully formed in his brain.

“I seek an audience with the Storm Lord.”

Her eyes widened, but she gave a little false, elegant laugh.

“Indeed? You’re very ambitious.”

“Where do I find him?”

“Oh, you don’t,” she said haughtily. “Your request must go through the proper channels and will take several days. After that you will probably be granted a moment with some underling, if you’re excessively favored. And I doubt, soldier, if you will be.”

Raldnor felt his head spin from fatigue. He considered thrusting by this doll creature into the courts of the palace, but where could he go? Besides, he could see that expression behind her eyes that he had grown used to seeing in Vis women when they looked at him. He chanced his luck with her, having no other choice.

“I’ve killed a man. If Kathaos’s guards find me, I’ll be finished.”

“If you’re a criminal, no doubt you deserve to be punished,” she said, but she was neither afraid nor anxious to see him taken away to a gallows.

“Self-defense,” he said.

“Oh, so they all say. What do you expect I should do with you?”

“Hide me.”

“Oh, indeed? And why should I? I am the chief lady of the Princess Astaris Am Karmiss, and what are you, I wonder? Some riffraff off the streets of Xarabiss under the Lord Councilor’s badge.”

Behind him, from the tiers of the guest mansion, came a sudden sound of shouting and red torchlight moving on the colonnades.

“Decide now, princess’s lady,” he said. “Your mercy or their justice. If they take me, I’ll be fit only for worms by morning.”

Her eyes flickered and her cheeks paled with excitement. She had made her decision.

“Follow me,” she said.

And turning, she and her lamplight drifted between the pillars and into the dark garden walks of Thann Rashek’s palace.

Overhead the moon was a smudge of ivory, and near at hand fountains arced among the vegetable statuary. The scene, so incongruous to him now, affected his draining insanity and anger so that he had a crazy urge to laugh. He slipped an arm about the woman’s small waist, and she pushed it away, though slowly.

“Don’t be insolent with me, soldier.”

“Your beauty precludes all restraint,” he said.

She heard the laughter in his voice and glanced at him curiously.

“Banter, and you in fear of death? Stop here now. This is the place.”

“The place for what? Am I to be so honored—”

This time she did not thrust him off, but said tightly: “You see that avenue? He’ll pass along it when he comes from Astaris’s rooms and then go by you here.”

“Who?”

“The one you say you seek; Amrek the Storm Lord. It’s a route known only to a few. I risk my life telling you.”

“I’m humbled by your supreme bravery,” he said and kissed her. When he let her go, she trembled but said in a measured, cool little voice: “Time enough for that if you survive the night. And remember, you never met me.”

And, taking the lamp, she slipped away, leaving him alone in the black velvet garden, the scent of her costly perfume lingering on his hands.

Amrek sat staring at the woman who was to become his wife. “I am mesmerized,” he suddenly thought, “gawping at her like a fish on a cold slab.” But oddly, neither this realization nor the analogy he had produced made him uneasy. “Well, she was meant to be looked at, devoured with the eyes. The eternal feast.” He could imagine her losing none of this, even with age. She would die at thirty, or else she was immortal, some sort of goddess mistakenly at large. These fancies spread across his mind in many colored fans, evoking no particular emotion. It was on the whole very strange; he had been the subject of violent tearing rages since childhood—the present of his mother, he bitterly supposed. They came on him in white hot waves, like a recurrent illness. More than once he had cowered, suspecting himself mad, before the great and overweening pride of his position swept fear into the underlayers of his consciousness. And yet, with this woman, a stillness had come into his life. Simply to be able to sit like this, quite motionless, as she had been in her carved chair for so long, was a kind of surprising peace. What kept him so still? This banquet of loveliness? Or did she extend some part of her own immobility to the things about her? Certainly it was no gift she brought him on purpose. She was curiously impersonal in all she did, almost unaware of her surroundings. The sudden twinge of nervous jealousy tore him; she might be so easily unaware of him along with all the rest.

“Astaris,” he said. Her amber eyes lifted their inner lids like a cat’s—yet not entirely. She looked at him, but did she see him? “What are you thinking?”

“Thoughts are very abstract, my lord. How should I express them to you?”

“You’re devious, Astaris. When I ask a woman what she’s thought or done and she answers in this way, I invariably conclude that she’s hiding something.”

“We are all born with armor,” she said.

“Riddles.”

She turned her head again and presented to him the profile of an image. He seemed always to see her in these terms—something unreal, an artifice.

“Well, I won’t tax you with it. I’ll tell you instead what I thought as I looked at you. You see, I’m altogether more explicit. Every day, I thought, free men and women make slaves of themselves to please me. And you, merely by your presence which denies me its thoughts, please me more than anything in the world.”

She looked at him again, and said: “When you speak like this, I wonder what you want from me.”

Her words unnerved him. He had never grown accustomed to her directness and her forms of logic.

“I want a queen, Astaris, a woman to give me sons.”

“Perhaps I’ll fulfill neither of these requirements.”

Her calmness stung him. He rose and stood over her, then reached and half lifted her to her feet and moved her body against his.

“Then it must be you I want, must it not? This Karmian flesh.”

Yet he had never lain with her, despite the bed rights given him by their betrothal. He had never analyzed his reserve—it was not, certainly, any kind of fear, yet somehow her serene unreality had held him off. Now, quickened by her nearness and the faint pure scent of her unperfumed skin, he nevertheless felt not the slightest desire to satisfy himself with her. Perhaps she would be disappointing, yet somehow he did not think so. Perhaps rather she was like that treasured gift, guessed at but avoided until the last moment.

Now he kissed her, and his need increasing, only drew back from her and looked in her face. She smiled, a peculiarly sweet smile.

“You inspire tenderness in me,” she said, as if it surprised her as much as it surprised him to be so told. Surprised, and oddly hurt him, too. Desire was transmuted into a sort of disorganized spite. Wildly and blindly, with a sensation of helplessness, he cast himself into the pit.

He let her go and held up before her the gloved left hand.

“And this? Does this inspire tenderness?”

“The hand of legend,” she said.

“Yes. Didn’t you believe me when I told you I wore the glove to mask a knife wound?”

“No,” she said simply.

He turned his back, his face working in sudden pain. He had been moving toward this moment all along, this moment of shame and terror, for he had known she would see his lies in his face when he told them, this damnable seeress.

“Scars, too,” he muttered, “scars, too. I was eight years old when I prayed to the gods to relieve the curse, and I hacked my own flesh to ribbons in the early morning of a feast day in Koramvis. Then Orhn came. I remember Orhn very well. He picked me up and slung me down in her rooms on a couch. ‘Your mewling cub bleeds,’ he said to her. She hated me for that. I was screaming, but I remember how she sent for a girl to clean the blood off the velvet before she called for the physician.”

Amrek turned and looked at the woman who was to be his wife.

“She seduced my father in Kuma: it’s common knowledge. She was thirteen but advanced for her years.”

“Val Mala,” Astaris said softly, but now she was only a golden shape imprinted on the lamp glow.

Shaking with his anger and his pain, he turned again, this time toward the doorway.

“I’ll leave you, Astaris,” he said stiffly. “You’ll forget what I’ve said to you. It’s dangerous to slander the King.”

For her, such an empty injunction.

Yet he caught a glimpse of her eyes before he left her—those bottomless eyes—and saw the briefest flickering in them, as if he had stirred their depths with his anguish.

So he went out into the night garden, with his own insanity dogging him—a monster, a shadow shape from his own childhood nightmares, for he had terrorized himself in his dreams.

And she remained behind, the faintest despair on her, for she had seen the tortured animal in his eyes, burning there, and had been unable to communicate with it.

The garden was black as death, the moon put out in cloud. Two Dragon Guard fell into step behind, but he scarcely noted them, and they kept their usual respectful distance from him.

At the end of the avenue a figure moved out onto the path in front of him. He was barely aware of it at first, but one Guard ran by him, sword drawn.

“Keep still, whoever you are.”

A light was struck, and Amrek saw then the yellow blazon of Kathaos’s house guard, and after this, the face of a Dortharian prince. The incongruous apparition acted on him like an icy blow. His first thought was: “One of my father’s bastards.”

Then the man spoke.

“I ask clemency of the Storm Lord.”

“Then ask it on your knees,” the Guard rapped out.

The man did not move. He looked in Amrek’s face and said: “King Amrek knows I honor him. He needs no proof.”

Amrek felt himself reacting, not with anger, but with a peculiar excitement to this unforeseen thing. It cleared his head of shadows, and made him back into a human man, and a King.

“So you honor me. And you ask for clemency. Why? What have you done that you need protection?”

“I’ve offended your Lord Councilor.”

“How?”

The man on the path grinned a savage and exultant grin. He might have been drunk, but not on any kind of wine.

“Ryhgon of Zakoris goes one-handed from this night on.”

The nearer escort sucked breath sharply between his teeth; the second muttered an exclamation. Ryhgon had a certain reputation among the Dragon Guard.

“What made you come to me?” Amrek demanded sharply.

“Frankly because your lordship has more authority than Kathaos Am Alisaar.”

The moon slid out overhead and sketched dim gray ghosts between the trees. The man on the path blinked and shook his head as if the light troubled him, and Amrek noted lines of intense weariness on the extraordinary face. At this Amrek experienced an unexpected awareness of this man. As when he had seen Astaris for the first time, he felt himself confronted by a personality, a live thing—instead of the silken cutouts of people who generally moved around him, bowing and flinching, or else steeped in their own concealments and ironies as was Kathaos. And he sensed, too, a strange rearrangement of planes either inside himself or without. He felt that he was facing a part of his destiny. The insight was astounding. He looked hard at the stranger, this mere underling of Am Alisaar’s soldiers, yet he could not shake the absurd conviction from him.

He waved the Guard back a few paces and indicated to the man a stone bench. They sat together, and it bewildered Amrek that this did not disturb him. “Well, and if he’s one of my father’s spawn, I suppose he has a half right to be at my side. Is this what I feel then? An obscure brotherhood?”

“Well, soldier,” he said aloud, “what are you called?”

“Raldnor, my lord, Raldnor of Sar.”

“Indeed. Then I know you better than I thought.”

“The matter of your Guard, my lord. I humbly apologize for proving superior to the Chosen.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Sarite.”

“What other game is left me, my lord? Either your Councilor hangs me, or you do. I would only draw your attention to one thing—something Kathaos of Alisaar has failed to see.”

“Which is?”

“I’ve proved my excellence as a fighting machine. I could substitute for Ryhgon very well, and better, either in Kathaos’s guard, which is unlikely—or in your lordship’s.”

“This is the proposal of a drunkard or a fool.”

“And to ignore it would be the act of one. My lord.”

“Be careful what you say to me, Sarite.”

“One day, my lord, long after you’ve seen me dangle on a gallows, a man may slip a knife in your back or a powder in your cup, which I, had I been there, would have prevented.”

“You offer yourself as a bodyguard, then?”

Raldnor said nothing. The scents of the garden drifted about them.

“How did you find this place?” Amrek asked.

“I followed one of the Lady Astaris’s women. She was returning from a tryst, I think, and didn’t see me.”

“You’re too cunning, soldier. And you’ve too many enemies.”

“I can deal with my enemies, my lord, if I live. And yours, too.”

“I think,” Amrek said slowly, “that you, Sarite, had the same father as I.”

The face of the young man beside him seemed to harden almost imperceptibly, then relax.

“You don’t have an answer to that, I see.”

“My line is all Xarabian, my lord.”

“Not in your eyes. You have the mark of Rarnammon there.”

“Perhaps, my lord, we were honored, unknown, in some past generation.”

Amrek rose; Raldnor followed him.

“From this moment your trial has begun. No, not the gallows. I’ll give you what you claim a right to; then I’ll watch you earn it, and I promise you, you’ll be fighting for your life every inch of the way.”

“Good morning, Kathaos.”

Kathaos turned and bowed, and nothing about his attitude or his person betrayed his rancor or his unease.

“I called you to inform you of the whereabouts of a certain man—a Sarite. I think you know who I mean.”

“Indeed, my lord.”

“Indeed, Kathaos. He’s here. Of course, you’d assumed as much. Your hunter, who can defeat both your men and mine. Can you imagine what his fate will be?”

“I’ve a poor imagination, my lord,” Kathaos said, without inflection.

“Yes, you’ve already proved that conclusively. Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve pardoned your Sarite to save you the trouble. Look for him in a few days, and you will find he has become a Dragon Lord.”

“You base your hopes a good deal, my lord, on the man’s luck, which will one day desert him.”

Amrek smiled.

“All luck, Kathaos, comes to an end. Think of that sometime, when you lie in the bed of my mother.”

10

On a blue Xarabian morning of the warm months, the entourage of the Storm Lord and his bride left Lin Abissa.

It was to be a slow journeying—a miniature city on the move, equipped with all necessities and luxuries. Twilight found them between Ilah and Migsha on the empty slopes—a settling of tents like a flock of birds. When the moon rose, a herd of zeebas, galloping across the star-burned silences, fled from the red twinkling of their fires.

The messenger who had ridden all the way from Koramvis, and whose news had displeased Amrek, made inquiries over his meat.

“The light-eyed man in the Storm Lord’s tent—who’s he now?”

“Some upstart from Sar. He crippled a man and got made a Dragon Lord. That’s how it is nowadays.”

“He has the look of the royal line,” said the messenger.

“Perhaps. He can handle his men—his division’s the crack division they tell me. He gave ’em a name, like in the old days—the Wolves. Ryhgon trained him, Kathaos’s dog, before his pupil turned on him. But the Dragon Guard spit on his shadow. He gave them a shaking up at Abissa—”

And across the lanes, in the owar-hide pavilion, Raldnor sat—at ease in the King’s tent.

The surprise of power had long since left him. He had been too busy that month and a half at Abissa, busy with the network of bribes and threats and preferments that ensured those of his new rank their safety. And he found himself a leader, too, as he had boasted he could be. There had been a rebirth on that night in the garden. He had talked his way into the trust of a man he hated, had spoken to that man as if he honored him, and as if he himself were a Vis. And yes. He had become a Vis in that dark garden.

Sitting here in the tent of the King, he thought back over that scene for only the second time. The first had been in the delirious aftermath, when he had felt an exhilaration mixed with panic. He remembered coolly now Amrek’s accusation: “You had the same father as I,” and how his pulses had leaped and pounded in an insane moment of total confusion. For, having momentarily forgotten his Plains blood, it seemed his unknown father, too, might be a Vis, any Vis—even a king.

It amused him now to wonder where his looks came from—some past venture in his ancestry, he surmised, showing itself, as sometimes happened, several generations later. After all then, the Xarabian woman had left some birthright—royal blood—to pass on to him.

Amrek, his King and patron, sat brooding. The news from Koramvis had irritated him. The Council demanded that he leave his bride to travel alone, and ride posthaste to the Dortharian border of Thaddra, that wild and mountain-locked land, source of constant dispute and foray. There was fresh trouble there, and the Storm Lord must be seen as an ever-present power, not dallying with his woman in Xarabiss. So it was. He was the ultimate ruler of a continent, yet he must obey his Council. And he did not want to leave his scarlet-haired girl, Raldnor could see. Did he then love her? Raldnor, observing her in the distance of his life, acknowledged her beauty was astounding, but she seemed like a waxwork, a puppet moving very gracefully on strings. He had never been near enough to hear her speak, but he could imagine her voice—perfect, and quite without tone.

The question came suddenly to Raldnor, as he watched the King’s dark, empty face: “This man I’ve allowed to give me every scrap I have; do I hate him as implacably as ever?” The white ghost sprang up into the tent but could not entirely materialize for him. Raldnor had lost half his blood, half his soul. The schism of divided race had finally resolved itself, and the Lowlander was eclipsed by the black-haired man. It was hard to hate now, and the pale girl who came in the night, still came, even between the silky sheets of Lyki’s bed, was only a dismal dream, no longer accompanied by meaning.

“If an assassin ran into this place seeking Amrek’s life,” he thought with sudden surprise, “I’d kill him.”

“Well, Raldnor Am Sar,” Amrek said, “I’ll leave the charge of this entourage with you.”

“I’m honored, my lord.”

“Honored? You and those Wolves of yours will die of boredom on the road. But my Karmian—keep her safe for me. Remember, I’m not a fair man. If she wants the moon, get it out of the sky for her.”

He rose and put his hand on Raldnor’s shoulder. It was unmistakably a gesture of knowing, not ownership. The King was at ease with him, and he at ease with the King. But then, there had been a strange sort of ease between them from the first.

“You can trust me,” Raldnor said, and knew it to be true. “When does your Lordship leave?”

“Tomorrow, first light.” One of the lamps flickered and went out. Amrek gazed at it and thought: “In a tent like this my father died on the Plains. A white woman with yellow hair killed him, and left her marks on my body before I was born. It always meant a great deal to me. Now less. Why is that, I wonder? Has she done it, the Karmian enchantress? I seem to see everything from behind cool dark glass. I vowed to erase the yellow scum from the face of Vis, but now I see only shadows, not devils. . . .”

He glanced at Raldnor.

“In your hands then. And be glad I didn’t take you away from your own woman.”

Lyki’s body lay stretched in the black sheets like a star. A shaft of moonlight pierced the tent and blanched her flesh to fiery snow, bleached her hair to a negative without color.

“I think you never sleep,” she murmured.

“I prefer to lie and look at you.”

“Does Amrek still permit you to be insolent to him?”

“Amrek guesses, I think, who led me to him in Thann Rashek’s garden. What lover were you coming from then?”

“A man I abandoned for you.” She lay still, then said: “So Amrek rides to Thaddra. My lady will be even more difficult then, no doubt. I’m sure that she’s deranged; sometimes she moves like a sleepwalker. She says the oddest things—” Lyki always spoke of Astaris in this way.

“You’re very intolerant of the woman who provides your bread.”

“Oh, what a banal statement. Such a betrayal of your peasant origins,” Lyki said tartly.

But presently she said other things to him as he caressed her in the dark.

A storm rolled over the slopes near dawn. He woke from the dream and could not for a moment remember where he was. The dark girl was sitting up combing her hair, and she turned a pair of cool gem eyes on him in the half light.

“Astaris has dreams, too,” she said with asperity. It was part of her character that she was sometimes sharp with him, particularly when he was vulnerable, as now: she knew of his recurring nightmare, though not the content.

“Does the princess, then, discuss her dreams with you?”

“Oh no. But she left a paper lying by her bed, and she’d written on it very clearly.”

“And you read the paper.”

“Why not? It said: ‘I dreamt again of the white woman blown to ashes.’ That was all. I remember very well.”

He felt a cold wind pass over him, and the hair rose on his neck. He sat up.

“When was this?”

“Let go my shoulder. You’re hurting me. It was a day or so ago. I forget. Is it Astaris you want now, instead of me?”

He shook the icy tendrils off him and pulled her down.

“You, you faithless bitch.”

And tried to lose the incredible sense of fear in the core of her golden limbs.

There were partings at dawn—a private parting between the King and his bride, a public one among the tents. Troops presented arms; the Wolves showed well.

Raldnor had been drunk in his way when he had asked for a command among the Dragon Guard—his well-established enemies—but sober enough afterward. He had picked his men with care, his captains with more than care, and not from among the Guard. Kathaos’s halls had taught him other lessons besides those of combat. He took his levy from the general bulk of the army—raw recruits, still young and inexperienced. It had interested and pleased them to learn they had been singled out from the mass; it was easy enough to have these newly enlisted molded to his specification, and to impress them. For he possessed, like Ryhgon, a reputation, and he used it better. They saw what he could do with sword, ax and spear, and when Kothon, promoted from the Chariot Corps, had taught him the ways of the flimsy Dortharian vehicles, they saw that here was a charioteer also. His veterans he selected cunningly. Like Kothon they were soldiers, intelligent in their particular trade, but in little else; limited men, who were contented with the good food and pay he saw they got and did not mind his increasingly long shadow cast over them. For he had walked by Amrek a great deal in Abissa and accomplished, in various ways, an admirable amount in the brief time he had there. He never questioned his abilities. His life had been inactive once; now he made up for those lost and useless years in a surge of judgment and power.

The Storm Lord, with his Guard and personal, small entourage, rode over the slopes, bypassing Migsha, and was gone. It was too early in the year for dust to mark their passing. And there was a good deal of mud on the first part of Astaris’s royal progression.

The princess recaptured her solitude and lay bathed in it. She had responded to Amrek’s inner pain with vague maternal stirrings which surprised her, but even these small tokens had been exhausting. He had leaned on her so heavily. She sensed his need, yet the impassable barrier remained to lock her in, away from him as from all others. She experienced the bewilderment of closeness without intimacy, understanding without knowledge, a blind communion through layers of gauze. And when he left, she felt herself emptied of the little she had achieved with him. Quite suddenly he became again a stranger. Yet the stranger had worn her out.

They passed through Migsha moving north. She sat like a doll at feastings and withdrew early. She did not notice that Amrek’s new Dragon Lord watched her for a time very closely, for, as always, she scarcely noticed anything at all.

In the streets of the beautiful cities of Xarabiss, girls tossed early flowers, which fell in a rain about the procession and were trampled by the feet of men and pack animals and under the wheels of the chariots. To Raldnor the whole journey through Xarabiss came to be symbolized by this odor of crushed, bruised blossom, and by the eyes of women fixed on his face as he rode at the head of his Wolves.

In the warm humid evenings women would come to garrison gates, decked out in their various fineries, to request the pleasure of entertaining him. Sentries teased them, asked if they would do and finally divided the spoils among themselves. Something of Raldnor’s past rose up and sickened him. The Vis woman was a harlot, everyone a daughter of the Red Moon. The easy victories after the aridness before had begun to cloy. And these dark ladies were jealous too, as he saw too often with Lyki.

They crossed into Ommos, and there also his past caught him hard.

A narrow land with narrow-towered cities, ruled by a cruel, perverse code. Scant honor for Amrek’s bride here—she was a woman, merely the house of unborn men. The entourage kept to its own metropolis, the encampment, as it traveled. Only in Hetta Para, the capital, did they pause—etiquette dictated that they should. Uhgar, the king, had something of Yr Dakan in him for Raldnor; it was inevitable that he should. Raldnor took in the gaudy feasts, the fire dancers, the blazing-bellied Zaroks, the pretty simpering boys, with a grave face. Here, men, not women, importuned him. He was revolted but he had learned a sardonic tact along with the rest.

He slept poorly at Hetta Para.

On the second and third night in the capital he rose and walked along the bleak upper galleries of the palace, which were open to a sky full of enormous stars. He thought of Orklos, and of Anici. He became a Lowlander for brief agonizing seconds. It came to him at last, among the stones of Ommos, how pathetic Anici’s life and beauty had been to her.

Then he saw something that was like an omen—indecipherable, yet charged with portent.

Across the walls and the gulfs between them, a woman with blood-red hair stood on her balcony, wrapped in a blizzard of untimely snow. Astaris, dressed in a cloak made from the pelt of one perfect and unmarked ice-white wolf, the gift to her of the lord Kathaos, who had bought it by proxy in the market of Abissa. Raldnor shuddered.

He turned away, back into the corridors. She had been like a phantom to him. And he could not forget that she dreamed dreams which were his own. Anici had become a curious property between them.

Lyki had come to his bed in his absence, and lay awaiting him with her expectant sensuality. He desired her only because she was available.

She lay afterward at his side in the dark and said: “I think I have your child.”

The banality of her statement irritated him.

“Why assume it’s mine?”

“It can be no one else’s, Raldnor my love. With the others I took care not to conceive. Besides, I’ve been faithful to you. Can you say the same?”

“There are no vows between us. You can do as you like.”

“Well, so I have. And I carry. Your seed. Does it mean nothing to you?”

He did not answer. Many Vis women bore their children without the accessory of a husband, yet he sensed in her a desire to bind him to her by her maternity, to show other women that he had put a piece of himself into her, as if he had chosen her specially for this purpose.

“You’re angry,” she chided him sharply. “Well, it’s done now. I told her”—by her inflection he understood she meant Astaris. “She gave me a strange look, but then she’s always strange.”

Three days after, the rolling caravan crossed the river into Dorthar.

The suns were dazzling that day. Under a white metal sky he made out a land like a woman’s dark hair drawn through a comb of blue mountains. There came an unexpected and unlooked-for quickening. Oddly, he felt he had seen Dorthar before.

Koramvis disturbed him deeply. Part of him had wished to remain unimpressed. But then, he knew from his reading, there was no city like her in all Vis. Never a city with such architecture, such grace, such splendor, such legends.

A man met them on the road.

“Val Mala, mother of the Storm Lord, sends fond greetings to her daughter Astaris Am Karmiss.”

And this would be all the greeting Astaris would get, Amrek being in Thaddra.

As with the city, Raldnor had expected and wanted something different. He had pictured Val Mala in the light of what was said about her: a woman in her middle years, prone to rage and terrible cruelty, a whore and a villainess. He visualized a dragon woman with lines of age and evil living on her face.

His Wolves flanked Astaris and her attendants into the Storm Palace; so he saw Val Mala for the first time.

She had twice his years, yet her vanity and wealth had retained for her the long youth of the Vis. She had a voluptuous, vibrant beauty. Compared to Astaris’s own it might seem a sort of vulgarity; yet conversely, set off by Val Mala, the Karmian seemed more than ever like something fashioned from wax. The Queen of Dorthar wore a gown of flaring liquid scarlet, and on either side of her chair was chained a long-necked scarlet bird with a spreading tail. One thing startled him, even though he had been told of it: the whiteness of the unguent on her skin.

“Astaris, you are to be my daughter from this moment.”

She did not bother to conceal her dislike, and the ritualistic words accentuated this. She embraced the Karmian as if she were poisonous.

“We have allotted you apartments in the Palace of Peace.”

It was an insult. A brief murmuring went up from the room. This palace, not its subsidiary, should house the future consort of the King. But the King was absent.

Astaris said nothing. It occurred to Raldnor how her immobility would infuriate. It amused him to see these two astonishing women locked in a form of mortal combat, and one of them so uninterested.

A steward tried to smooth the way with mutterings at the Queen’s ear. She spoke to him softly, and he paled.

It was to be a day of strangeness for Raldnor. When they passed through the gate of the Palace of Peace, he felt a dark bird fly over his brain. Kothon, his charioteer, jerked a blunt thumb at old black markings on the walls.

“See that, Commander? That’s part of the history of Dorthar. Have you heard of the Lowland woman, Ashne’e, the yellow-haired witch who killed Rehdon?”

“I’ve heard of her.”

“The soldiers came to take her, and found her dead. There was a crowd behind them, and they dragged the body out and burned it in Dove Square. The brands they carried made those scorches.”

A sickness came over Raldnor. Kothon did not notice. “This is what he plans for them all, all the people of the Plains, that man I sold my soul to,” Raldnor thought.

Then the cool bowl of the palace appeared among the trees.

And he knew it. Knew the pale color of the stone, the sound the leaves made through windows at certain points of the interior. Inside—what? He searched his mind in a cold frenzy. A mosaic floor—a picture of women dancing—and above, there was a room in a tower. . . . No, what could he know of all that?

Yet when he was inside, he saw the floor before him. He did not search the room in the tower, for the thought of it filled him with a peculiar dread.

“Up there,” Kothon said, applying wine to his grizzled chops, “that’s where she lay, the Lowland woman. They found her dead up there.”

A woman presented herself at the apartments of the princess. She was tall and sour-faced, her hair, the lifeless black of ebony, caught back in a snood of golden wool.

She answered Lyki’s challenge with an arid smile.

“I am Dathnat, the Queen’s chief woman. I am here to assess your mistress’s personal needs.”

She went about her task with few words, and her looks were as barren as her words and as unwanted as her person. When she was gone, Lyki mimicked her, screwing up her face and compressing her breasts with her hands.

Dathnat was a Zakorian, a strange custodian of the Queen’s beauty. Lyki guessed that Val Mala employed her as much for the service of her sharp ears and her bitter disposition as for her talents as handmaiden.

A scented lamp burned softly in the Queen’s bedchamber.

Val Mala had retired early. Two attendants worked, one on either side of the couch, painting and shaping toe and finger nails, and the Zakorian, Dathnat, had begun the kneading movements on her flesh. She was a skilled masseuse; the little creeping lines fled before her iron fingers.

Val Mala sighed.

“Who is this man all my women are chattering of?”

“The Dragon appointed by my lord, your son, madam.”

“What excellent hearing, Dathnat. This is the man from Sar? Amrek’s favorite. And what do they say?”

“They prattle about his body and his face. They say he has pale eyes, and a jealous mistress who guards him, though they’ve got from her that he is—” Dathnat paused distastefully, “remarkable between sheets.”

Val Mala gave a drowsy laugh.

“I’ve seen him, Dathnat. I don’t doubt his lady’s estimation.”

When the women were done with her, she sat for a long while by her mirror. It was her glory that she could still do this unafraid. Yes, she was a match for the Karmian, though twice her age. She pondered upon the new Dragon Lord, the upstart—he had had something in his face which reminded her of Orhn. She regretted the loss of Orhn still. She approached sadness when she thought of him. But the power she had given him had made him many enemies. When the grooms had brought his broken, battered body from the hunt, she had had them flayed and pinched with red-hot tongs, but could discover nothing. How should he fall from his chariot and be dragged by it till he was dead, he who had mastered chariots at the age of ten along with his first woman?

Oddly, she thought of Amnorh, too, on this night, for the first time in years. Amnorh the too-clever, whose body lay on the floor of Ibron. She did not regret him. It had amused her, long ago, when she had been told of his death.

Dathnat crouched at a clothes chest, inserting perfumed sachets among the robes. Val Mala had a sudden, strange hallucination; it seemed another woman’s figure—younger, graceful—was superimposed upon the Zakorian’s. Lomandra. Lomandra, who had fled in revulsion when she had completed the Queen’s task and dispatched the Lowlander’s bastard. Lomandra, the soft Xarabian fool.

“Dathnat, you should get yourself a lover,” Val Mala said. It was her pleasure to taunt the woman thus. The expected blood-burn appeared on the averted bony face. “A man like Kren, of the River Garrison, perhaps. A man with the shoulders of an owar.”

In the dark corridor a woman’s hand snatched his. Raldnor turned uneasily and found Lyki, with a bloodless face, at his elbow.

“Raldnor . . .”

“What is it?”

Her eyes kindled.

“You used not to be so brief with me.”

“There used to be no need. What’s the matter?”

She leaned against the wall.

“There was a message for me—a man waiting by the gate—”

“Did he muss your hair, then, this man? If you wanted a quiet night, you were a fool to go.”

“You!” she flared at him suddenly. “You don’t trouble yourself what happens to me. You put your child into my body and then you’re done with it.”

“By your account, Lyki, the child was as much your doing as mine.”

She would not look at him, or leave him either. She stood immobile, her eyes on the ground. When she raised them, they glittered with sudden spite.

“Am I dismissed, then, Dragon Lord? Would you rather spend your nights alone, dreaming about the little Sarite girl who didn’t want you?”

She had touched him nearer than she knew. Seeing his expression, she fell back a step.

“You delayed me to tell me something, Lyki. Tell it.”

“Very well. The man at the gate caught my arm, and he said: ‘You’re Lyki, Raldnor of Sar’s bitch.’ He had an ugly scarred face, and his right arm ended at the wrist, so I don’t think there’s any need to give you his name. He said: ‘Tell your bedfellow that I’ve something I owe him for my hand. Because of what he did, I’ve nothing better to do in life except watch him, and wait until his gods forsake him. When they do, I will be near. Tell him that.’” Lyki smiled lifelessly. “Then he spat. And let me go.”

She turned and walked away.

She did not come to his bed again, but he found no shortage of lovemaking when he desired it.

11

It was a very social life at Koramvis. Raldnor found that he was fashionable, an asset at the supper tables of rich men and beautiful women. His birth in Sar fascinated them. He became a practiced liar. He knew that for the most part it was taken for granted that he was a bastard of the Imperial line—either Rehdon’s work or that of one of Rehdon’s lesser brothers. They amused Raldnor, these nods and fawnings, but he had made Kothon his bodyguard. He, like all men of rank, considered now he had a need of one.

His fame gave rise to weird anomalies.

At a dinner in the Storm Palace he met an officer of the Queen’s guard, Kloris by name—a handsome boastful fool. He made it clear that he detested Raldnor and his meteoric ascent, and also that he coveted everything that was Raldnor’s, from his post to his woman. The man had been wooing Lyki in trite, unoriginal ways for the whole month that they had been in the city, simply because she was Raldnor’s. Raldnor wondered if she would lose her allure for Kloris now they had parted.

After the dinner the Queen made a brief appearance. She wore pleated white linen and a wig of gold silk. From a distance she was white-skinned and golden-haired. He had heard of the enmity between Val Mala and her son—was this some secret jibe at him, something she would not dare in his presence, yet which would be repeated to him in Thaddra?

She moved graciously among the important guests, her ladies drifting after her. The Zakorian was absent, he saw, but then that one was hardly for show.

Behind him, Kothon jerked to attention. Raldnor realized, with some initial surprise, that Val Mala had singled him out.

“Good evening, Dragon Lord.”

He bowed to her.

“Do you guard the princess well?”

He met her eyes then, and words caught in his throat. In her face was a meaning and an invitation quite apparent. Her sexuality breathed out of her, and a burning hot shiver crept along his spine.

“Koramvis is a safe city, madam,” he said presently.

“Not too safe, I trust. I’ve been told you’re something of a hero. A young hero shouldn’t become bored.”

Confronted with her like this, many men had grown afraid, he had heard. She was too potent, perhaps. But not for him. He had reacted to her already and the promise in her eyes. Besides, she was a power in this land, as Amrek was. He decided at once, and a cool, ambitious logic ruled the illogical ambition in his loins.

“One word from Dorthar’s Queen has dispelled any possible boredom forever.”

She laughed, the frivolous false laughter of a woman engaged. How old was she? She seemed only a few years his senior, even this close. She took his arm lightly. People marked their progress as they walked.

“You invest me with an unfair amount of ability. One woman compared to so many, Dragon. You can pick and choose, I hear.”

“Alas, no. The gods would make me happy if I could.”

“Who is this that you desire, then? This unobtainable one.”

“I wouldn’t dare, madam, to pronounce her name.”

“Well,” she said. She smiled at him, pleased with the little play. “You shouldn’t despair, my lord of Sar, the gods may be kinder than you think.”

Leaving him, she gave him her hand to kiss. He encountered her smooth, scented, painted flesh. Her rings were cold on his lips.

In the guest palace that night he slept poorly. A girl with a red wig shared his bed—half of them wore red wigs since Astaris had come here. He no longer wanted her. He wanted the white-skinned bitch queen. Zastis would be in the sky within a month. How long would she make him wait for her, or would she change her mind? He felt cast back to his uneasy beginnings by this uncertainty, and the palace, which the women said was full of ghosts—more specifically one ghost—oppressed him in the dark.

But Val Mala, as she lay under the Zakorian’s hands, had no intentions of delay.

Dathnat herself could have told Raldnor how brief would be his waiting. She knew this sleekness, this restlessness in her mistress from before. She was a student of Val Mala and had been taught well.

“Tell me, Dathnat,” said the sleepy, throaty voice, “what’s your opinion of Raldnor Am Sar?”

“Your majesty knows I am unqualified to judge.”

Val Mala laughed. Her spitefulness, too, was always at its sharpest before a new affair, and Kathaos had been long away—first in Xarabiss, now in Thaddra.

Dathnat hated the Queen, but her heritage had made her stoical and very patient.

She thought of the Queen’s pet kalinx. Once so beautiful, that creature, and so dangerous. It had lurked about these apartments, Val Mala’s second self, equated with her name in the city. Innumerable lovers had gone in fear of it. Now the cold blue of its eyes was filmed and rheumy, its fur molted, its teeth rotten with age. It smelled. Val Mala could not bear it near her, though neither would she have it killed. Dathnat understood, even if the Queen did not, that to Val Mala the ruined cat represented her own person—age which she had cheated and the deformities of age that would one day invade her body.

In her stony soul, Dathnat smiled. The gods, who had given her nothing, had nothing to rob her of. She was younger than her mistress and would see the ending of her.

She worked upon the Queen’s skin with relish, striving with her iron hands to preserve, her eyes watching greedily for the first signs of Val Mala’s punishment.

A man came to him, wearing the insignia of the Queen.

“Dragon Lord, Val Mala, the royal mother of the Storm Lord, requests your presence at noon,” he said. His eyes said other things.

The day was very hot. The Storm Palace seemed to burn with dry white fire. A mask-faced girl with glinting eyes took him to a suite of rooms and left him there.

Smoky draperies shut out the harsh sunlight, and incense rose in eddies from ornate bowls. When she came in from behind the heavy curtains, she wore a plain robe, her black hair loose on her shoulders and her breasts. She looked incredibly young and incredibly knowing and certain of what she could do to him, and his eyes blackened for a moment in an irrepressible torrent of desire.

“Please sit,” she said. “No, beside me. How restrained you seem. Have I called you away from some important duty? Some—further heroism?”

“Your majesty must know by now the effect of her loveliness.”

“Do I affect you, then?” She poured wine into a cup and handed it to him. He could not drink it, and set the cup aside. The servility of her gesture had been intimation enough. He lifted her hand to his mouth, caressing it in quite a different way from before. He felt the pulse in her wrist quicken. She said: “Are you daring to insult me?”

Part of his cleverness as a lover was that he had always understood with every woman, except one, her basic needs, her sexual requirements, and had responded to them intuitively. With Val Mala he sensed what she asked him for, and took possession of her mouth before she had finished speaking, and when she stirred, he held her still.

But she was, after all, the Queen. At length he let her go. He had no doubt she would give them what they both wanted, yet the decision was to be hers.

She rose and held out her hand to him.

“A little walk,” she said, very low.

In the colonnade she ran her teeth along the edge of his hand.

“How did you lose this finger, my hero? In some fight?”

He had lied, too, about the circumstances of his birth, as well as the geography. Enough rumors had already accrued. Yet he had kept the falsehoods as near the truth as possible; it was easier that way. He knew nothing of the damaged finger, so he said now, as he had said before to many of the nobility of Koramvis: “I lost it in infancy, madam. I’ve no recollection how.”

The carved door slid open; beyond lay her bedchamber. This symbol struck him—some hint of permanence to come, in that it was not merely a couch he was to have her on. But she had halted in the doorway, and her face, though still smiling, had become suddenly altered, as if the smile were only the garland left behind after the feast. She looked as if—he could not quite be sure—as if she had abruptly glimpsed another person standing in his place.

“In infancy,” she echoed him, and her voice was strangely colorless. “I’ve heard it said you have the blood of my husband. Do you think it likely?”

Her coldness infected him. Desire fell away; his hands grew clammy. He felt himself on the brink of a fear he could not even guess at.

“Most unlikely, madam.”

“You have yellow eyes,” she said. She said it as if she spoke of something quite different, something horrible, obscene—a murder. All at once she seemed to shrink and shrivel. He saw in her face the weight of years which would eventually find her out. He no longer wanted her, she appalled him—why, he was uncertain. But he had been so close to the power she offered, still wanted that—

“Madam, how have I offended you?”

“You have the eyes of a Lowlander,” she hissed.

His blood turned to ice. He found himself trapped, confronted unaccountably by a terrified old woman, and beyond them both, a waiting gold and silver bed of love.

“What did you want from me?” she shrilled. “What? You’ve no hope of anything—anything, do you hear? Reveal yourself and he’ll kill you.”

He felt himself back involuntarily away.

“Yes—go—go! Get out of my sight!”

He turned, he almost ran from her, driven by forces of hate and fear he did not understand.

Val Mala fled inside the door and pushed it shut. The room was full of shadows.

“Lomandra?” she asked them. Nothing stirred. No, it was not ghosts she had to fear. It was the living.

The living.

Strange, she had never doubted, never allowed the intrusion of doubt. She had thought the Xarabian had fulfilled her promise and smothered Ashne’e’s baby. She had not dreamed the finger she had flung into the brazier had come from the hand of a living child. When Lomandra vanished, she had been unsurprised. The woman had been sickened and had run back to Xarabiss. It did not matter, for her work was done.

And yet now, never having doubted, she knew without hesitation, knew that the child had survived and grown into a man. A man with the face, the body, the very stance of a king.

She had thought herself rid of Rehdon.

But it was Rehdon she had found suddenly beside her—Rehdon in his youth, at the peak of his beauty and magnificence, as she had known him in Kuma when he had seemed to blind her like a sun. She had always believed the child was her husband’s seed, despite her accusations; the gods had seen fit to prove it to her. And simultaneously he had given her the key to what he was.

Had Lomandra died before she could tell him his history, or had she lived and spoken? It seemed not. Would he be so stupid as to intimate to her in such a forthright way, if he had known? Unless, of course, he had meant to frighten her.

He must be killed. But how? They said Amrek loved him. Raldnor’s curious, swift ascent seemed to uphold this. She would not dare have him assassinated out of hand. Inform Amrek, then, that his favorite was a Lowlander—but that would reveal her part in it, what she had tried to do. She hated her son, yet she feared him. Who could tell which way he would jump? Perhaps she would suffer as much as the bastard.

Sheer terror clutched her heart. What was his purpose here? A yawning gulf seemed to open at her feet. She glimpsed her face in a black mirror beyond the bed, a face for this moment stripped of beauty, and old—old as the mummy dust of tombs.

Zastis was in the sky, a red wound at the moon’s back. There was a joke abroad in the lower quarters of the city. It concerned Astaris and the star and the color that her hair must be, surely, between her thighs.

There were rumors about Amrek also. He would be home shortly, Thaddra’s barbaric insolence settled. There had been a skirmish or two. A few women would weep for their lost men, but that was nothing besides the prestige of Dorthar. And the worst was past. Kathaos was already in the city, attending to various council duties that must precede the Imperial wedding. The rites would be held at their traditional time—the peak of Zastis.

There was also Kathaos’s personal honor to the bride. He had been ever mindful of this, though not vulgar: two or three expensive, unique gifts, as was fitting. Now he arranged a royal hunt in the hilly forest land—the acres of cibba, oak and thorn to the northwest above Koramvis. Kathaos entertained certain thoughts concerning Astaris. He appreciated the beautiful and the rare. His childhood at the court in Saardos had taught him to admire and value things, and, at the same time, systematically deprived him of them. Now he would pay handsomely for an exceptional piece of enamel work from Elyr, and be prepared to wait anywhere up to a year for a silversmith to achieve the required perfection in some lamp stand or set of plate. He had had to wait a lot of his life—be patient and be slow to get anything he wanted. It had become an acquired skill. So, in the same way that he saw the Karmian as an art object, he was prepared to maneuver, most of all to wait to have her. He had attained several high beds—Val Mala’s not the least. And he had enjoyed the preliminaries as much as the prize—in some cases, more.

The royal hunt today was all part of the exercise. He did not think Astaris would enjoy it, if she noticed it at all. But there would be intervals when he could discreetly engage her attention.

Amrek was too demanding for her. It was subtlety that breached her remoteness, or so it seemed to him. It would be a game he liked to play, and which he was good at.

She looked like some exquisite pastoral goddess for the ride. He wondered who dressed her so well; she herself he could imagine taking no personal interest in such things. Lyki, perhaps, the Sarite’s discarded mistress, chose her wardrobe.

And the Sarite was there also. Kothon absent from his chariot, he was handling his team himself.

The man was still a thorn in Kathaos’s side. He had had an intermittent watch set on him, but Raldnor was probably aware that such a thing was possible and accordingly careful. It seemed he had done no specific damage. As often before, Kathaos pondered his origins and his purposes, achieving no solid answers. There was the story, too, of Raldnor and the Queen. Certainly it had been a brief enough liaison. And now Val Mala had shut her doors to all comers, the lord Councilor included. He had heard she was ill. Kathaos sensed many threads leading down into some furiously productive yet hidden loom.

He saw that Raldnor had raised his hand to him in formal salute. On impulse, Kathaos trotted his team level with the Sarite’s vehicle.

“I trust that you’ll enjoy the hunting, Dragon Lord.”

“I’m here to escort the princess, lord Councilor, not to enjoy myself.”

“It’s praiseworthy that you take your duties so seriously. But I assure you the princess will be quite safe in this company.” The light eyes, so reminiscent of past royalty, were full of ironical disdain in the impassive face. “Your rank becomes you very well,” Kathaos said. “Perhaps I did you a service, indirectly. And how is the Queen these days?”

The look in the eyes altered, and for a fleeting second Kathaos saw he had touched a nerve. With the polite friendly nod reserved for useful underlings or merchants, Kathaos turned his chariot.

Noon had brought unexpected heat to the still, windless day. Cloud masses were already building for a storm.

Grooms flushed orynx from their shallow lair with burning pitch; the kalinx pack was unleashed and the chariots rumbled after.

The hunting was not to Raldnor’s taste. It was the old Lowland ways which troubled him again. A man hunted only for food or clothing or in self-defense. It was another mark of the effete and the sadistic to take life as a sport. He had detailed three of his captains to trail Astaris’s chariot. It was privacy he wanted in these woods. Once he had been too much alone. Now he felt crowded. Always a man at his door, Kothon at his back, the bickering court, the soldiers’ gossip. Even the women in his bed with their post-coital questionings.

Like all men forced consistently to lie, he felt now the pressure of being absorbed by his false self.

Heat beat and blazed through the forest roof. He thought of Val Mala and what she had cheated him of. The pang of his sex strove in him to make itself a strange component of his fear. For he feared her, feared her words to him. A hundred times each day he reasoned them away—over wine, at drill, lying snared in the satisfaction and arms of some woman after love. And she had done nothing, the white-faced Dortharian woman. Was she mad, then? At worst, even if she spoke, Amrek hated and distrusted her. When he thought of Amrek, he was filled now with abrupt uncertainties. He felt that absence had estranged what he had known. Amrek was once more stranger; and legends, ghost stories had come between. He recalled his moment of burning loyalty in the tent between Hah and Migsha with discomfort, almost with shame.

All light suddenly drained from the sky. The chariot team quivered the length of their bodies and stopped still. The whole scene seemed to congeal in soundless stasis. It brought Raldnor from his thoughts. He glanced upward through the carved boughs into a breathless mahogany overcast. Not a whisper of wind or rustle of life. It occurred to him that there seemed to be no birds. Then the light blackened totally and was gone; the sun had been put out. In the preternatural midnight, a gust of primeval terror swept over him. It had nothing to do with actual fear. It was something older, more intrinsic.

His head ringing with silence, he jumped from the chariot and slashed the team free. They ran at once, their shod pads making no noise.

The thunder came then. Not from the sky. It was under his feet.

The grass parted without wind. The trees began to creak and shake their leaden flags. The earth pitched. He was thrown against iron limbs a moment, but the ground was trembling and sliding. He rolled helpless across a landscape upset on its side. A large cibba sprang up with a victorious scream and appeared to bound in great hops across the forest floor. Other trees fell in ranks. He could not rise. He lay scrabbling at the soil like a terrified animal. There was nowhere to run or to hide.

The last spasm, when it came, was almost gentle. It rolled, like a sea wave, languidly, over the ground, and settled.

He lay there, holding on to the still land with his hands. Presently he got to his feet and spat earth from his mouth. He might have been in a different place. Dragon oaks leaned sideways; others lay across their own chasmic uprootings. One had smashed the back of his chariot.

He began to walk through the leveled forest as the sky lightened to cinnamon. He negotiated fallen things and the places where the rock had split and spewed up underlying humus.

There was a clearing ahead of him, a clearing that had not been there before. He glimpsed what remained of a chariot and its team. A man lay on his side—dead. There was a woman standing not far off. It was so dark still that he did not make out the color of her hair until he was near.

Her face was like parchment, her eyes wide open and completely blank. She might have been dead though still somehow standing, like the warriors in ancient Vis tombs. In a moment of enraged sanity he wondered where in damnation were the captains he had sent after her. He stopped half a yard away and said: “Princess.” She did not answer or look at him. “Are you hurt?” he said. She had never been so physically close to him; neither had he seen her so empty. She had seemed before only vacuous, hidden away, closed in, but now she was hollowed out. She might have been cauterized to her very soul. It was no longer applicable to treat her as something royal and untouchable, though any man who laid a finger on her, without prior consent by the Storm Lord, would lose the hand as well. That was their law. But this was only a woman, a living creature in need. He put his hands on her shoulders, but her eyes did not even flicker.

Conscious of holding back his strength, he slapped her face, then caught her as the blow toppled her. He felt all her sinews loosen, and so continued to hold her up. Her eyelids fluttered. The film left her eyes, and suddenly she was back inside them, looking out.

“I’ve never seen death before,” she said in a cool and rational voice. “They kept it from me.”

“Are you hurt?” he asked her again.

“No. I am alive.”

He knew from her tone she meant something other.

A growl of storm thunder ripped the shattered clouds. The sky began to weep, a long drowning sheet of cold tears.

“Who are you?” she asked suddenly.

With a certain irony he said: “The Commander of your highness’s personal guard.”

The rain beat down. Her fabulous hair seemed full of fires.

He had never thought to desire her before. She was too beautiful, too unalive. But now, still holding her shoulders in the lashing rain, he met for the first time, and fully, those unsurpassable wells of her eyes. And though her face still reflected serene abstraction, there came a thrust of pure ego in him—his reaction to her and against her. And abruptly he had bridged the depths of her eyes and found their floor, and she was in his skull like a flame and he in hers.

There was a moment of shock and utter fear between them both, but each knew the other totally.

She said aloud: “How—?”

“You know.”

“Wait—” she cried out, “wait—” But there was a wild joy in her face, and in her mind a conflagration. He knew all the internment as she had known it, as she knew all of his.

He pulled her against him and she moved to him as frenziedly. The longing came swift and devouring and fed on itself in each of them.

In the black ruin of the forest, under the spinning sky, they came together in a coupling like beasts in the aftermath of horror, and as if they had awaited it all their lives, like the last man and the last woman in the world.

The pulse of the rain had slackened.

He looked at her face and said softly: “This was insane. Anyone could have come here and found us. I shouldn’t have exposed you to risk like that.”

She smiled.

“You didn’t think of it. Neither did I.”

There stirred between them that communion given to their minds. He kissed her mouth and lifted her to her feet. He might have known her always, she him. The visions of her life before were nebulous, locked in; she had experienced no great yearnings or doubts. His own ambitions, dreads, desires had faded. At this moment she was all he wanted. He could not see beyond it.

“We could find a wagon in the hills, travel over the mountains like peasants. We’d be safe in Thaddra,” he said.

“They’d find us,” she said.

“What then? What? Amrek takes you and I waste my life in his armies.”

“For now,” she said, “for me, this is enough. I have no gods, but She, perhaps, will help you.”

Knowing everything, she knew also his race. He did not fear her knowledge or resent it. In a way, she had made him back into what he was, but it was the best of him, not the least.

There came a shout from the trees. It came from another planet. He did not at first believe in it. But she cast at him one long glance, full of sadness and regret. And then they were apart and she was quite still, an icon again, the nadir of her eyes dissolved once more in subterranean amber.

Four of Kathaos’s men had found them. They looked askance at Raldnor, embarrassed that they had known him before his circumstances altered. A captain of the Wolves was with them; the other two were dead, crushed in the deep gut of an earth crack.

She looked no different when she mounted the chariot and was driven away. Only the echo of her thoughts remained, like music carried on the wind.

Seven milk-white cows were slaughtered before the altars of the Storm gods. Did the steaming blood appease their anger? Who knew for sure, though the auguries improved when groped for in the entrails.

Half a forest felled, great rocks displaced. Ibron had boiled like a caldron.

For the most part Koramvis had escaped. Some dwellings in the lower city came down and a whorehouse, killing ten of its best girls. It was a religious city for many days.

Kathaos, sitting in his carved chair, an open book before him, let them wait a little, shuffling their feet; let them see, these two dragon soldiers, that it was not his custom to give time to such as they. In the corners twilight thickened stealthily.

“You requested an audience with me,” he said eventually, “you have it. I understand that you’re oppressed by some problem regarding Raldnor Am Sar.”

“Yes, my lord,” one spoke. The other kept silent, staring at the ground.

“If this is so, why come to me? Should you not seek out the Dragon Lord himself?”

“Dragon Lord!” The man looked ready to spit but remembered where he was in time. “Your pardon, my lord, but I’d not have any doings with him.”

“If you’ve some charge, soldier, you should try the public prosecutor.”

“I thought the matter better brought to you, my lord. As the Lord Amrek is away.”

A cunning look revealed itself. This lout saw personal advantage in backing Kathaos against Amrek.

“Very well,” Kathaos said, “I will listen.”

“My lord, it’s dangerous for me to speak—”

“You should have thought of this earlier. Already you’ve said enough to give me the right to detain you. Proceed.”

“The quake,” the dragon said unexpectedly. There was a mixture of craft and superstition on his face. “The gods were angry. I think, I think I know why. I was with the Storm Lord’s garrison in Abissa, my lord. The Lowland muck still creeps in and out there—Rashek cares more for trade than a clean city . . .”

“Keep to the point, soldier. Your slanders are inept.”

“Pardon, my lord. I’ll be brief. There was a Lowland rat without a permit. He pulled a knife on me, but the damned Xarabians got it off him and swore he never had it. I remembered him after, went looking for him with Igos here. We got his girl, but King Amrek found out about it and took her off our hands—kept her too, I reckon, till he got tired of her. We never had a taste—”

“Are these sordid grievances all you have to tell me?”

The soldier muttered and said: “I had another look for the Lowlander after, my lord. Traced him to a Xarabian’s house—the Xarab said he wasn’t there, only his own brother with a fever. Couldn’t find a sniff of him then—thought he’d scuttled back to his cesspit in the Plains. But I’d know him again, my lord. So would Igos.”

“Indeed. And what has this to do with me?”

“He’s here, my lord. In Koramvis. He calls himself Raldnor of Sar.”

Kathaos’s expression did not for a moment alter. He said: “Such an accusation is as stupid as it is absurd.”

“Oh, no, my lord. I remember him. Same build, same looks—Vis blood somewhere. The Lowlander was missing a little finger on the left hand. And this Raldnor has pale eyes, my lord—that’s rare in a Vis. And easy to dye his hair. At first I wasn’t sure, but he’s been about a lot, since the King took him up. In the end, I was certain, and Igos, too. If the Storm Lord knew it—”

“So you came to me.”

“Your lordship took him on first—not knowing. And he maimed your Guard Lord—”

“Does anyone else know of this?”

“No, my lord, I swear—”

“Very well. The information may be useful to me. Go downstairs, the servant will show you. I’ll see you get a meal. And some form of monetary reward for your time.”

Kathaos’s servant took the grinning dragon and his sullen mate below, having recognized the brief sign his master had given him. The two would be drugged with their drink and then disposed of. They were not the first voluntary spies who had gone that way into the dark, and would not be greatly missed, for soldiers, even dragons, deserted all the time.

Kathaos sat locked in thought. He had killed from caution, for an extraordinary idea had come into his mind. He knew the story: the yellow-haired woman, Ashne’e, who slew her baby, and devoured it, so the rabble believed. In more sophisticated circles, the disappearance of the child had been laid at several doors—Amnorh the Councilor’s, Val Mala’s, even Orhn’s. Yet, if it had lived—

A yellow-eyed man, part Lowlander, part Vis—royal Vis—Rehdon’s blood. . . . How often that resemblance had troubled Kathaos. Could it be that here lay the missing piece of the puzzle?

Raldnor. Raldnor, Rehdon’s bastard by a Lowland witch.

Did he know it? No. Neither his actions nor his demeanor indicated knowledge.

Kathaos reflected upon the ancient law—that law which held that the last child conceived of the Monarch before his death was his heir. He visualized the throne of Dorthar. It had fascinated Kathaos, shining in the distance all his adult life. And now, here was the means of realizing the mirage—an insane yet feasible means, which would use Raldnor as its pivot.

“Even my father,” Kathaos thought, “consented to a regency.”

For the regency was the penultimate step toward the throne itself. And in the end, a King, tainted with Lowland blood, would be easy to be rid of.

12

The long soft sunset of the hot months rested on the mountains and the hills in chalks of red and lavender and gold. Raldnor rode the chariot above Koramvis, using the little-known tracks, the byways. But he was too skillful—the management of the vehicle did not take up all his mind. It left him free to think of her.

Amrek was expected in three days. Raldnor had not been near her since the day of the quake. He had seen her, as before, far off, a moving doll on strings. Sometimes, but not often, he felt the moth flicker of her mind in his, but rarely. She did not trust him among strangers, or else she did not trust herself. Sometimes in the dark he would feel her insubstantial presence close enough to touch. Even in these brief contacts, the speech of their minds had gone far beyond words, into those abstract yet specific concepts which are the soul of the brain.

And he was mad for her, and she for him. He knew this much. The Star tortured both of them. He took no women into his bed now, wanting none of them, only her. He seldom slept. He burned, as once before. “She has made me a Lowlander again,” he thought. She had been a virgin. It had not surprised him once he had so completely known all her life. She had never desired a man before him. Now her passion was as exclusive as his. Yet neither sought the other. They were hemmed in by codes—they, who were unique.

He had driven beyond the lake. The way grew treacherous, then impassable. He tethered the animals and began to walk. Some instinct drove him upward. The sun was almost down, a smudge of savage light on the mountain crests.

He came unexpectedly on a hovel and a wretched field. Behind it a preliminary flank stretched up toward the blackness of a cave mouth. He paused, staring up at it. He had heard of men drawn by the edge of a precipice to leap down into death. Something about the black hole of the cave drew him with a similar chilly compulsion.

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

“Would you like to come in the house?”

Finding him silent, she pulled down her dress in a dreadful and revolting parody of allure, and he saw the brilliant jewels about her neck. She must have stolen them. Nothing of the hovel or herself proclaimed any wealth and these violet gems—clearly she had no idea of what they could bring her.

“Where did you find your necklace?” he asked.

At once she clutched her throat.

“I have no necklace—no—no—none at all.”

He took half a pace toward her. She began to scream, and out from the hut burst a great brute of a man. As he raced up the slope, the woman caught at him, but he thrust her off and she fell headlong in the withered stubble.

Raldnor drew his knife.

“I’m the Storm Lord’s man. Watch yourself.”

The creature checked. With bewildered accusation he said: “You shouldn’t’ve made her yell.”

“I did nothing. I asked her about her necklace. Did you thieve it for her?”

“I? No, lord. She’s a fool, an insect. I have to beat her . . .”

The woman whimpered as she heard him.

“Ask her where she got it.”

The man lurched to her and pulled her up. He stared at the jewels as she made little sounds of terror.

“Where’d you get this glass, slut?”

“There—up there—a man came out and I took them when he slept.”

Raldnor stared up again, where she pointed, into the solitary, ink-black nostril of the rock. A feverish coldness filled his body.

There had been a legend. Eraz had told it to him when he was a child. The jewel of the goddess, the Serpent’s Eye . . .

He took a coin from his belt and threw it to the man. Then moved on up the slope towards the hole of night.

Near midnight, certain lovers strolling still in gardens, or human vermin abroad on their various business, heard a chariot pass them on the road. Women glanced from saffron windows and sighed theatrically, for it was the Sarite who drove beneath on the streets of Koramvis.

On the terrace of the Palace of Peace two or three late watch ceased laughing together and stood to attention. When he came, he had a look about him that kept them very quiet. They discussed it after—perhaps some pleasure drug of Xarabiss, or some woman who had at last proved too much even for Raldnor Am Sar . . .

In an inner room an officer of the Queen’s guard was lounging—Kloris. Raldnor’s mind moved sluggishly. He supposed the man had been after Lyki once again, but Kloris bowed with insolent, exaggerated courtesy and said: “Her majesty sent me to relieve you of your post. That is, as guard to the Princess Astaris. Here’s the relevant paper and the Queen’s seal. My men escorted the royal Karmian at dusk—she now occupies a suite in the Storm Palace.” He smiled, promoting conspiracy. “No doubt the Lord Amrek would expect to find her there.”

Raldnor stirred within himself a little way from the stupor of the mountain. He had sensed her gone. He took the ornate scroll, glanced at Val Mala’s seal. Kothon would already have done as much. He had half expected this sudden reverse of tactics because of fright at Amrek’s return. He said what was necessary, but Kloris did not go.

“There’s another matter—I discovered a creature skulking about by your apartments an hour ago, while I was awaiting your return.”

Kloris’s insufferable smile wavered a little as Raldnor looked at him.

“Well,” he said, “I apprehended the man for you. He’s dumb, but your—er—Wolves—ascertained from his signalings that it was you he wanted. They have him now.”

Raldnor gave him the briefest nod and went below to the guard room. Kloris, summarily dismissed, continued to idle about the place with a great show of nonchalance.

Like a shade come from the dead, the dumb man gazed at him with torpid eyes. He was a beggar, his feet scarred and dusty, yet he held out a little pouch of black velvet. In the pouch was a strand of blood-red silk—hair that could only have come from one woman’s head.

Raldnor, the drug dream of the cave still on him, responded to this new urge like a sleepwalker. Pausing only to wrap about himself a black anonymous cloak and not once to think, he followed the mute out into the midnight city.

They passed behind the Storm Palace, on the broad white boulevards, under a cyclamen moon.

Soon the streets became narrower. Pole lights were infrequent here. At last he grew uneasy. A woman’s lazy voice, calling to him from one of the timbered doorways, brought her for a moment nearer death than she knew.

The dank, foggy odor of the river seeped into the air. Raldnor’s guide turned into a street of villas, on whose tall leaning gates broken escutcheons of ancient houses showed. Water snakes and rats were the present tenants of these crumbling palaces, and probably the robber, cutthroat and procurer.

The dumb man hurried down the pavement and went under the ebony shadow of an arch.

An ideal place for a murder, Raldnor thought, but he followed.

There was a wild garden beyond the high wall. He stared at the overgrown lawns, the pallor of toppled statuary. The dumb man had halted. He stretched out his arm, pointing through a tangled growth of trees toward the ruined hulk of a mansion. It had blind-eyed empty windows, and beyond its ivy-webbed towers lay the iron gleam of the river.

Raldnor’s guide slipped sideways into darkness and was immediately gone.

Raldnor drew the knife from his belt. It had been her silken hair, none other, yet the ruin filled him with a sense of leaden distrust. He went forward through the blowing grasses.

The garden was empty. Whatever shadows proved to be assassins searched for smaller prey than himself.

He passed between the fallen columns. The moon sent spears in intermittent pale hot shafts through the damaged roof. Ahead was a hint of the faint topaz glow of a lamp.

He threaded the dilapidation toward it and came out into a rectangular salon, open on one side to the Okris and the river-sounding night. Across the water temple lights burned on the far bank; here a little bronze lamp flickered on its pedestal. There was a great bed with transparent curtains. He touched them, and a fine powder of dust and rotten gauze fell from his fingers.

He felt a cool, soft, searching question open in his brain.

He turned swiftly. There was a woman in a hooded cloak standing in the doorway. He crossed to her and gently pushed back the hood and slid his hands into the flames of her hair.

“How did you discover this place?”

“I’ve been listening to gossip at last. This has been a lovers’ trysting place for many years. The old caretaker is blind.”

“So he says. You should never have exposed yourself to danger in this way.”

“We have so little time,” she said quietly.

It was an expression of despair, yet not uttered in sadness. It was so unarguable, he answered nothing. Then she touched his face and said: “Your goddess spoke to you.”

He held her back a way and the river silence settled round them.

“No, Astaris.”

Very slowly he opened his mind to her and let her see what he had seen. The shock, the numbing fear; the exaltation he lessened for her, partly forgetting that some of its impact on him had sprung from the beliefs of his childhood and the inherited memories of his race. He gave to her the stumbling dark cave, the tingling of the water drops, the singing soundlessness and the inner region where the light swelled from some unimaginable source. And then the soaring whiteness of the giantess with her whorling golden tail. Anackire, the Lady of Snakes. His bones had seemed to melt.

But the awful ecstasy was brief. He saw her for what she was, the magnificent symbol, not the thing itself. Even her serpent tail was damaged, some of its golden plates displaced and lost. Yet She had stood in Dorthar, the heart and hub of Vis, for uncountable centuries, this yellow-haired, white-faced Lowlander. How many other men had found her and fled? Not many. Only one, it seemed, had looted her, and there was no word of her in Dorthar—only those legends of mountain banaliks and demons so common to all lands.

He felt the woman tremble in his arms and drew her closer.

“I thought you had been granted a vision,” she said, “but She, too, was only an image.”

“No, She gave me something, something too subtle for me to understand as yet. But it will come. Besides, you’re all and everything I want. And there’ll be an answer for us. I know it.”

Beyond the terrace Zastis had flushed the river like metallic wine. It brought them the first consolation of passion, and soon a fire to consume them. The mansion was a quiet and secret place; it muffled the whispers and the cries of lovers, and the anguish or the joy which lay between each joining through the long embers of the night.

Kloris crossed the still garden of the Palace of Peace. He had had a good deal of wine, and it was very late—or early, he supposed—near dawn. By a little ornamental pool sat a girl in a loose pale dress.

He still pursued Lyki simply because he had not yet had her. It had occurred to him, after his fourth cup of liquor, that he now possessed a piece of news which might alter things.

He stumbled on a root. In the tree to which the root belonged, a bird woke and let out a single piercing argent note. Lyki turned.

“What a clumsy spy you are, Kloris.”

He chuckled.

“One day you’ll cut your mouth on your tongue. What makes you think I’ve been spying on you? I don’t need to, do I, to see how your belly’s rounding?”

He was pleased when she flinched and looked away. Reaching her, he slipped an arm about her and fondled her breast. She thrust him off.

“Still hoping your virile Dragon Lord will do that for you, Lyki?” She made no reply. “The Sarite,” Kloris said, very carefully, “has found himself another repast. A strange eccentric lady, who sends mute beggars to conduct him to her.”

He saw he had caught her attention.

“What do you mean?”

“A mute came, and Raldnor followed him out. Where else would they be going on a Zastis night?”

“A dumb man—” she said. She seemed bemused.

He leaned on the tree casually.

“A dumb, tongueless, speechless mute.”

Moving then, he thought, with unexpected speed, he blundered against her and caught her close, but she twisted away and, before he could stop her, raked his cheek with needle-pointed nails. As he shouted and staggered, she shot across the level lawns.

Going back through the garden, Kloris passed the night patrol with their lamps.

When he was barely past, one turned grinning to the other.

“Kloris found a kalinx in the shrubbery tonight.”

The dawn was cold with the ashes of the Star, as cold as burned-out fire.

Cold eyed, Lyki halted at the gate of the Palace of Peace.

As she had thought, the iron chariot stood a little way up the white road, waiting for her. There was a veil of mist, and the chariot seemed to grow out of it, heavy and black as an old anger. She set her hand on the rail and looked up. He had learned to drive and control his team with his left hand. It must have been hard to do.

“Your little urchin messenger found me, as you see,” he said. “It seems now you’re as anxious to harm Raldnor of Sar, in your woman’s way, as I am. I thought the time might come.”

“I’ll tell you something to make you happy then, Ryhgon. And after that I’m done with it.” She looked down at her hand on the rail, then up again. “Your enemy has spent the past night with the Princess Astaris.”

The scar on Ryhgon’s face seemed to catch light. A grimace of pain or savage pleasure twisted his features.

“Do you know what you’ve said, woman? Are you speaking the truth, or what your wicked tongue suggests to you?”

“The truth. Would I dare make such an accusation otherwise?”

“I remember,” Ryhgon said, “he was never out of the beds of the whores at Abissa. It seems he hasn’t lost the habit.”

“I’d thought for a long while there was something between them,” Lyki continued, venom in her eyes. “Yesterday a man came begging for bread. He was a mute, and she happened to hear of it. She ordered me to fetch him, and then sent me out. That was before the Queen’s escort came to take her to the Palace. When she went with them at dusk, she left all her women behind to see to her clothes and jewels. That was unusual, but she’s always strange. I thought no more of it until I learned that a dumb man came here at midnight and summoned Raldnor away with him, as it’s fancied, to some tryst.”

“You’re a jealous little bitch, Lyki. The gods will see you suffer for it.” But he grinned at her. “Now you’ll come with me and tell the lord Kathaos all this.”

Startled, she drew back from the chariot.

“I said, I’m done with it.”

“You’re not.”

She turned to run in sudden panic, but he caught her up and thrust her in beside him. A jeweled comb fell from her hair on to the road.

The chariot lurched into movement and the sky broke into a fiery race.

They came to Kathaos’s villa, stone-still above the city in the morning.

Ryhgon pulled the chariot to a halt and tethered the animals. He looked back at her only once.

“Stay here. If you run, I’ll come after you, and I can be tenacious.”

He went in through a wall entrance, and the door was shut.

She did not dare flight, though she waited a long while. She recalled too well the angry scar, igniting with its own purple life. Eventually she opened a round of mirror in her bracelet and tried to repair her face paint. The comb she had lost on the road had been worth a good deal; no doubt some thief would find it and be grateful.

At last a servant in Kathaos’s yellow livery came to the wall door and beckoned her in. She followed him through the tasteful and opulent rooms until she found herself facing Kathaos across a length of icy marble.

He was quite expressionless, as usual, but Ryhgon stood on his left, his face congested with impatience.

“Well, madam.” Kathaos’s coldness offset the demoniac elation of the man beside him. “I’ve heard a curious story. I believe you’ve been Raldnor’s mistress.”

“A while since,” she said sharply.

“And now you’re telling tales about your lover.”

“I wasn’t brought here willingly.”

“Were you not? Did you speak unwillingly to Ryhgon, too? What prompted you, madam—your sense or your spite?”

Tightly, and with acid dignity, she said: “I don’t think the gods of Dorthar would spare me if I allowed the Storm Lord’s bed to be soiled.”

“Very well. I’ll hear your story again. I’d advise you to choose your words with care. I wonder if you understand what you’ll be sending Raldnor to. I see you think you do. Then you can bear in mind that if you lie to me, you yourself will go to it.”

Val Mala poised a jewel in the hollow of her creamy throat.

“Poor Kathaos,” she murmured, “I’ve been neglecting you.”

Kathaos smiled.

“That’s your privilege, madam, and my misfortune. But not the reason I’ve sought an audience.”

She raised her eyebrows. Amrek had returned this morning, and any signs of her rumored illness had been put from her. Their meeting, he had heard, had as usual been turbulent. Certainly, Val Mala would not have gone to it in any state of vulnerability.

“I’ve been made the master of some strange information that will doubtless bring you much grief.” He paused only for a fraction. “The information is unfavorable to your son’s bride.” He marked her interest. She did not attempt to disguise it. “Nevertheless, the facts of the matter are uncertain. I require your jurisdiction, madam, to prove them true or false.”

“Tell me what she’s done.”

“I hear that she’s kept an assignation with the Storm Lord’s elected Commander, Raldnor of Sar.”

He was unprepared for the excessive excitement with which she greeted this statement. Eyes burning, she demanded: “You mean she’s given herself to him, made herself his whore?”

He concealed a smile. Ironically he supposed she too had made herself Raldnor’s “whore.” She seemed to guess his thought.

“The Sarite has never been anything to me, Kathaos,” she said. “He’s an ambitious upstart. I shan’t be sorry when Amrek’s rid of him.”

There was no intimation in Kathaos’s face of his own opinion. He would regret bitterly the necessity of Raldnor’s death—Raldnor, who might have been the key to so much. If there had been more time to plan. But the circumstances and the betrayal had been unforeseen. He had been forced to play for the lowest throw—Val Mala’s spite against Astaris—simply because the man he had been prepared to back was a fool. He regretted, too, that nothing better than the fire would sample the exquisite Astaris’s body.

“Majesty, if the Lord Amrek understands I’m working against the princess, he’ll try to stop me, perhaps find some way to remove me. If the investigation were undertaken in your name, I can apprehend whatever treason there is, unhindered.”

She nodded her gold-tiered head in unequivocal assent.

“Do it. What plans have you made?”

Concisely he told her. In a curious way he recalled Amnorh to her then—Amnorh, who had promised her Rehdon’s death and whose reward had been his own. But, as she heard him out, she smiled, for she saw the host of her enemies overthrown, the fall of bright stars and the exorcism of ghosts before her eyes.

A man bowed to Raldnor on the terrace of the Palace of Peace and slipped into his hand a jewel.

“Do you know this gem, my lord?”

“The Princess Astaris’s seal ring—how did you come by it?”

“No need for anger, my lord. My mistress could assure you of that. She asks you to attend her this evening.”

“Who is your mistress?”

“You know her well, Dragon Lord. Her last servant gave her request no tongue.”

Raldnor stared at the man, and in his heart feared for her. The speech seemed brashly put. She had chosen this time a poor messenger.

“You’re too open. Take care.”

“I beg your pardon, my lord. I only do as I’m bid. Will you go where you found her last?”

“She knows I will.”

“Do you remember the way? This time there’ll be no guide.”

“I remember it.”

“Leave here two hours after sunset then, when she’s left the feast.”

He bowed again and departed.

He himself, being master of a certain trade plied along the river bank, knew the old mansion on Water Street. It seemed they had questioned the princess’s women as to where their own trysts were taken, then wrung from the old imbecile of a caretaker all the rest—the hooded woman and her lover, the priceless jewels that had been given in payment. Then Astaris’s chief lady had stolen her seal ring. It had been easy enough to do, and the villain, as he slunk across the garden, felt scorn for their stupidity, these great ones who had everything and who thought themselves so beloved of the gods they would never come to grief. Well, let them rot, the pair of them.

Raldnor almost guessed the trap that had been laid for him. Not consciously—it was a prickling in the core of his bones. Yet he neither analyzed nor hesitated, for at that time he seemed to live in a limbo of desire. Besides, he had feared treachery before and found none.

As he left the gate, a figure, cloaked and hooded like himself, slipped out after him, unseen.

In the old unpaved alleys of the city, his dark intuitions came to the fore. When he reached the street of villas, his skin was crawling without apparent reason. He crossed under the arch, his knife drawn, and went through the rustling garden to the portico of the great house. Somewhere ahead the lamp was burning. Yet it did nothing to still his glittering nerves. He paused and reached out for her with his mind through the gloomy, river-smelling palace, and there was no answer.

He experienced an instant’s icy clutching dread that she was no longer living, yet Anici had taught him that this at least he would have known. He went through the shadows and into the salon.

The lamp shone as before, yet more dimly, and the river washed beyond. On the bed there was a dark muffled shape, which rose up suddenly and poked out its scarred and grinning face.

“Not such a dainty repast as you thought, Sarite.”

Ryhgon. He barely noted him. He knew abruptly that the shadows of the hall outside had been full of men. With a single leap he crossed the room and the narrow strip of terrace. Poised in the air, he saw the Okris gape for him, sprinkled with lights, until his passage cleaved them.

In high summer, in the streams of the Plains, he had swum to wash away the day’s dust. But this water, now, in Koramvis was sluggish and very cold beneath. When he lifted his head for air, he rose against a stone wall, viscous with muddy weeds, where an old cooking pot floated on the scum.

The terrace of the ruined palace lay some way back now, and lights had flared up there. They knew he was in the river, but he had been too quick for them. They had assumed that he had gone the other way, for this was where they pointed. A partially submerged plank had caught their attention, and one man flung a spear at it. He dived again.

Red moonlight filtered down to him, and the river gods hung on his heels.

He rose a second time; the mansion was now far off downstream. A stairway lifted itself brokenly out of the water. He climbed up onto the desolate wharf, and rats scuttled to shelter. Beyond, black alleys opened out. He chose one at random and moved into it.

Soon he heard the sound of men’s voices, the dull chink of scale plate. Then the color of the torches rose behind a row of hovels on his left. They must have recognized the plank for what it was and split their party in two. He gripped the pole of a street light and pulled himself up it to the level of a house roof, then dropped silently and lay flat on filthy clay still warm from the day’s heat.

They passed beneath him with flare-lit faces, thrusting spears into dark areas—doors, alley mouths—but never looked up at the parapet.

“Must have headed for the gate!” a man shouted below.

The hunting party made off northward up the narrow street.

His mind in turmoil, he lay on the roof. Besides himself and them, nothing seemed to be stirring. He lifted his head. He could still see the tawny lurch of their torches, off to the right now, and the hovels standing out like black paper against it. Yet beyond those, thrusting up like a pale marker in the uniform flat of the slums, he made out the battlements of the River Garrison.

The half-formed plan took hold of him, a madman’s plan as once before. Reach Kren’s hold and he could use his rank, perhaps, to commandeer a chariot, then drive across the searchlines to the Storm Palace—who could predict he would run that way? Then he must find some means to get to Astaris. He had had a moment’s chilling leisure now to understand what had happened, and to see what would be done to her. But he would pry her out of whatever imprisonment they had allotted her, however meager his chances or strong the jail. He would sell his life and freedom for hers, if he had to, without thinking, for it was impossible for him to imagine that he might lose her to the fire, and he infinitely preferred to envisage his death rather than her agony. It was a new wine that filled him. As in the garden at Abissa, impulse ruled him and drove him on.

He swung over the parapet and dropped noiselessly to the cobbles.

And saw, too late, the individual patrol lurking in wait for him. As they thrust from cover, the Star painted their eager faces. He doubled back and a shout went up. Torchlight converged behind him.

He sped up the narrow alley, doubled a second time into Date Street and emerged onto the open and unsheltered square that fronted the high Garrison gates. Two red-cloaked sentries stood leaning on their spears on the raised walk before the gate. They were at ease, expecting, until now, nothing special this night. The baying of a hunting pack and the glaring brands jerked up their heads. They leveled spears.

A figure ran below, and after it, into the square, a group of fourteen or fifteen of the Queen’s guard. There came then an abrupt cessation of all movement, each man poised like an actor in a tableau, scoured by the raw light of the flares.

Raldnor stared up at the sentries on the walk. He drew in his breath, hard, and prepared to speak with every shred of his authority. It was to be his throw of the dice against death, but he saw only her in his mind’s eye.

The air parted with a hiss behind him, and he felt something thud against his back. He thought they had flung a stone at him, but there was no pain. He turned half around to face them—it had been part of his earliest training never to turn his blind side to an enemy, and he had forgotten it. In that moment he found he could no longer see. It took him suddenly, too swiftly to make him afraid. His hearing went next and after that, everything. The last conscious thought left him in the void was a woman’s name, shining like a red jewel, but he could no longer recollect to whom it belonged. A moment later there was nothing.

The guard who had driven his knife into Raldnor’s back moved to one side to allow him to fall on to the square. He grinned at the watchers above and bent to wipe his blade on the fallen man’s cloak.

“Do you have the authority to kill?” one of the sentries called.

The guard finished wiping his knife and pointed to Val Mala’s blazon.

“That’s my authority.”

The sentry turned and bellowed back at the gate, and into the courtyard beyond. Almost at once an alarm bell began to toll.

“You can tell the Dragon Kren all about your authority when he comes.”

The guard spat out: “What’s to keep us here?”

But the gates had rolled wide, and a phalanx of Garrison soldiery moved out, fully armed, even to their shields. A man was quickly sent for Kren.

The Dragon Lord followed his officers out into the walk and showed neither displeasure nor irony at being summoned to this brawl. With his steady and appraising eyes he took in the scene and said at last, quite evenly: “Who is this man?”

“Ours,” the guard snarled, “by order of the Queen. Cause us no further trouble, Dragon Lord.”

“No one has answered my question,” Kren said with the utmost politeness, his eyes like polished steel. “I asked you who the man was.”

“The Sarite who calls himself Raldnor. King Amrek’s Commander.”

“And his offense?”

“That, Dragon, is the Queen’s business.”

Kren bent over the man named Raldnor and turned him gently. He had been swimming in the river, this one, and he looked near death. Kren lifted the lid of one eye, then took the limp wrist. He noted with a curious sense of imminence that the man’s smallest left finger was missing. He had heard mention of Amrek’s favorite but not paid a great deal of attention to what was said. There was a look of Rehdon in the face. And Val Mala’s rats were hunting him, were they? Kren had no great love for the Queen’s intrigues, and this piece of Koramvis, after all, lay within his personal jurisdiction. He traced the faintest flicker of pulse bedded in the Sarite’s wrist, but he was losing blood fast.

Kren straightened.

“You’ve done your lady’s work admirably,” he said shortly. “This man’s dead.”

A barely detectable signal drew the phalanx in close about himself and Raldnor. Two Garrison soldiers lifted Raldnor on a shield and carried him quickly in under the gate.

“You’ve no right—” the Queen’s guard cried out.

“I would remind you, gentlemen, that you’re within the limits of the River Garrison. I have every right. But if you’d care to wait on our physician, he’ll no doubt confirm the news I’ve given you.”

They had no choice but to do as he told them.

His hospitality was faultless. He had wine brought for them as they paced, cursing, about the hall. Eventually an old man in a stained robe came nervously in. He glanced at Kren, then murmured: “Quite dead. The blade pierced the lung.”

The guard’s response was immediate.

“There’d be blood on his mouth if the lung took it. Do you think I’ve never seen a man die? You don’t know your trade, Aarl take you!”

An unexpected severity possessed the physician. Lying at Kren’s direction had disconcerted him, but this layman’s lecture drew his temper.

“My trade? I know yours—to damage what the gods made; mine is to patch up what I can after your blasphemies. You butchered your victim, and if you know the method a man employs to live by after his heart’s stopped, I’d be happy to learn it. As to Aarl, he knows more of that place than either of us.”

13

Amrek turned a jeweled collar in his hands. A beautiful thing, a fitting gift. Yet would it please her at all? She seemed never to notice what she wore. He nodded to the goldsmith and his assistant, his eyes fixed on the gems flashing in the lamp shine. He was troubled and constrained. He had seen her at the feast, at his side, and she seemed to him as remote as ever—and yet, strangely different. He could not be sure of the change, only sensed it. In the anteroom he had embraced her and found on her the hint of a most curious new physical mood, like a scent without substance. Though he had not inspired it; it was neither because of, nor meant for him. He felt he had lost anything he might have achieved with her before. Damn Thaddra. He had craved for this woman every night alone in the mountains. Where must he begin again?

The slightest of sounds came from the open doorway. Amrek glanced up and saw Val Mala standing there.

“My lady mother. An unexpected pleasure.”

“Send these men away,” she said. “What I have to say to you is not for their ears.”

He set down the collar and stood up.

“What’s the matter, madam? Has Kathaos disappointed you tonight?”

She said nothing, but there was a kind of blankness on her face, a mask she held badly; behind it he saw an impossible triumph. He stared at her, and a premonition laid its clammy fingers on his skin. He waved the two men out, and they scurried, bowing, away. He barely noticed.

“Well, madam? What’s your news?”

“My son,” she said, “what I have to tell you concerns your bride.”

He felt the dark roaring of a sea engulf him.

“What’s happened to her? What have you done?”

“A good deal has happened to her, and I’ve done nothing but discover it.”

The hate that boiled up in him disfigured her and made her very ugly. He seized her shoulder. It seemed incredible to him that once he had been curled up inside her, at her mercy—and, now he was free of her, able if he wished to choke the life out of her, still he was mewling and helpless.

“No more games, madam. Tell me what you came here to say.”

Then he saw the smile; she could not keep it back.

“Your Dragon Lord, Raldnor the Sarite, has been teaching your bride bed manners.”

He let her go as if her flesh had burned him.

“Don’t lie to me,” he got out, knowing quite well that even she would never dare lie to him on such a matter, and tasting suddenly, once more, that new, unnamed, scentless perfume on Astaris’s flesh.

Val Mala composed her face and held up the mask again as she told him everything.

While she spoke, his eyes never left her mouth. He seemed to watch the words that came out of it as if watching rats emerging from some stinking crevasse underground. By the time she had finished, his face had become quite fixed and quite empty, like the painted face of an idiot in a carnival.

He turned away, shutting his eyes against the painful light, but her relentless voice followed him down the black corridors of his brain.

“Surely, Amrek, you’d rather discover before your marriage than after it what a whore your princess is. Do you want a slut in your bed, coming to you every night from the couch of one of your soldiers?”

Her eyes glittered, yet something in her flinched slightly, waiting for the lash of his anger, at her spite. She remembered how he had flung himself at her once, when he was a child and she had thwarted some desire of his; he would have killed her then if he had had any weapon to hand. Yet now there was nothing. A sense of the ultimate victory braced her.

“Did you prefer, Amrek, to be deceived?”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was toneless.

“It seems then that others are more sensible of your honor and the honor of your rank than you. Perhaps, had you taken your betrothal rights, Amrek, she might have been satisfied and not turned her eyes elsewhere. It was a woman they gave you, not a piece of glass.”

He had moved beyond the light of the lamp. She heard his silence in the darkness.

“You fool,” she hissed, “think how this Karmian has slighted your throne. Make sure she suffers for it.”

He came through the palace, half blinded by the soft light of the lamps. In the anteroom of her apartments, her women, having seen his face, curtsied in terror and fled. He threw open the inner doors and found her facing him, as if she had been waiting for his coming.

He thrust the doors shut after him and stood staring at her.

“I was betrothed to you at Lin Abissa, madam. I’ve come for my betrothal rights.”

“As you wish, my lord,” she said, without either reluctance or readiness. Whatever he did to her now she would accept, for he was superfluous to her existence. The fury rose into his throat like bile. He felt impotent, sexually and in all other ways, before her insane serenity.

“Did he force you?” he said to her.

There was the moment’s briefest response. As once before, he saw a stirring in the depths of her eyes, yet no fear. It was distress for him. She pitied him—she pitied—Did she know what would be done to her?

“No, my lord. I was willing. I’m sorry to cause you pain.”

“Pain? I think you need instruction, Astaris. By the laws of Dorthar you’ll go to the stake for this, and burn.”

“And Raldnor?” she asked, as if not noticing her own fate.

The congestion in Amrek’s throat almost choked him.

“Whatever I order. At least, castration and the gallows.”

She looked at him, but there was no sort of entreaty in her face. She was resigned for both of them. He thought of the men pinning her against the wooden pillar, and the flames eating upward through her feet, cracking her ivory bones like tinder, the uncurling leaves of her golden flesh and the black petals blowing on the morning wind, and the cloud of her hair on fire, which was fire, and he shouted aloud, a great hoarse scream, his hands across his eyes to shut out the million little separate flames of the lamps.

“I can do nothing,” he cried out, “nothing!” and found that he was weeping. Blindly he took hold of her, but could not bear to touch her hair. “No,” he whispered, “I won’t let you die because of a tradition. I’ll find some way.”

Dimly, as if far off, he felt the soft touch of her hand, the bitter aloe of her consolation, this woman who had betrayed him, who should expect only death in return. And the thought came then of Raldnor, hunted now through Koramvis, the man he had chosen to serve him. Would he die on the knives of the impatient guard, or be left for the rope he had evaded in the garden at Abissa? Amrek kept still a moment, accepting her touch, then drew back.

“I’ll send someone here,” he said. “Go with them. I can offer you nothing but your life. Take nothing with you.”

“Am I to go alone?” she asked.

He felt the armoring of years creep over him.

“Madam,” he said, “don’t ask too much of me. The mob will expect something. Besides, your lover is most probably already dead.”

He did not know if she meant to say more. He turned and left her in the lamplit room. It would be easy after all to cheat the flames and still to lose her. He felt a terrible lightness. He could never have been meant to have her, he had always guessed it; his body, holding back, had known. Now he was returned to a point in time before her coming. He was himself again, the powerful madman, the monster, the cripple. He had reentered his own legend. All he could do now was to live there in the rabid dark.

“I must be true to myself,” he decided.

Near dawn a man came, a nervous hurrying man, who led her through the lower corridors of the palace, having first wrapped her in a patched and musty cloak.

The gardens were gray and deserted, and a little boat bobbed below the steps at the river’s edge. She passed between two stone dragons to get to it and among half-rotten lilies. There were no guards. There had been no guards at her door.

The sun rose and flooded the Okris with gold as the sweating man rowed them untidily downstream. The white morning city slid by on either bank. She did not ask where they were going. Destination had no meaning for her.

Since their coming together, she had felt Raldnor in her brain, however faintly, always somehow there, not a definite thing, yet conclusive, unobtrusive as a memory. And before ever Amrek came to her, she felt that presence snuff out. There had been death; she had already known it. His Anici had taught her too.

Now she also returned to what she was, that inner core, with all about it the empty vistas of her life. She did not weep. Her sorrow was not separate enough that she could analyze and be moved by it. Sorrow had become her flesh.

The nervous man rowed on, carrying his dangerous cargo. By the banks men were cutting reeds. It was a day like any other.

Five days passed after it.

With great secrecy, the lord Kathaos, cloaked and reticent, came to the River Garrison on the sixth. The seal he had shown at the gate had been Val Mala’s, but once inside, he pushed back the hood and put the seal away. Certainly the Queen had no notion that he was there.

Kren came in and bowed to him, showing no particular surprise—but then that was not this Dragon Lord’s way, so Kathaos had heard. The man had been a commander in Rehdon’s time, but kept his rank all the years since, which required some cleverness.

“I am honored, lord Councilor, by this visit. My soldier didn’t know you.”

“Yes. Well, we must all employ caution occasionally. The city’s in an uproar.”

“So I heard,” Kren said.

“The Princess Astaris is believed to have taken poison,” Kathaos murmured. “Certainly there’ll be no public execution after all this time, though I gather an effigy was burned yesterday in the lower quarters. The mob are always hungry for a spectacle. They lost the Sarite, too. At your very gates, so I hear.”

“The Queen’s men were impatient and stabbed the man in the back. My own physician saw to him, but it was far too late.”

“And you had the body buried here?” Kathaos allowed himself the most inoffensive of smiles. “Of course. That would be prudent in this heat. I believe the Queen sent someone to inspect the grave.” Kathaos paused. “There’s the strangest rumor abroad, Lord Kren, that the Sarite may still be alive.”

Kren looked him in the face and said with matchless courtesy: “Your lordship is kind to tell me of these unfounded stories. Naturally the rabble will believe anything.”

Kathaos acknowledged the man’s wit. He saw he must fall back, at least in part, on the truth, though it did not please him.

“Shortly before Raldnor was stabbed at your gate, Lord Kren, I received certain information. Would it interest you to know that the Sarite had Lowland blood?”

He saw the change in Kren’s face, and how he mastered it, but it told him altogether too little.

“Lord Kren,” he said, “no doubt you recall Rehdon’s unlucky union with the Plains woman, Ashne’e. The child vanished and was never found. If it had lived, it would have been informative to see how far the Council of Koramvis would have adhered to the law and upheld its claim to the throne of Dorthar.”

Kren did not speak and his expression was schooled.

“I hope that you understand my meaning,” Kathaos said. “Waste is always distressing.”

“Indeed, my lord, but as no doubt you’ve heard, none of us can argue with death.”

As Kathaos rode back across the city, he pondered the conversation. He was unsatisfied, and yet uncertain whether the man was lying to him or not. It seemed, in any event, that Kathaos had lost the game entirely inasmuch as it related to Raldnor. Whatever Kren purposed to do, there would be little detection or hindrance in the Garrison, that inner room of Koramvis. And it was plain besides that he intended no help in other quarters. Yet neither would he spread secrets; he had not kept his position through gossip but because of that persistent strength and cynical integrity so apparent in his person. So, it was finished.

Kathaos, who had grown accustomed to waiting, settled in again to wait. He, too, had been put back into an earlier skin, yet in his case at least the fit was not unkindly. He had lost a game piece, that was all. There would be others.

In the narrow room at the tower’s head, Kren stood looking down at the unconscious man he had saved from death, simply out of a sense of justice. Nearby the physician clattered his instruments, and the girl servant was clearing up after him. He was a competent but messy old man, scrupulously clean with wounds—very few soldiers contracted festering or rot under his care—yet he was villainously untidy, with even a soup stain on his collar.

“How’s your patient today?”

“Rather better. The worst of the fever’s past and the back’s healing well.”

No other than the three in this room knew of Raldnor’s continued existence. The Garrison had seen something buried in a bloody sheet and assumed it to be a man. In a way, Kren was a king here; the soldiers, armorers, cooks, grooms and their women and children lived within these walls as if inside a minute city, and he ruled them in his own fashion, which was one of discipline tailored to human needs. They gave him their fierce loyalty, and so he put a bundle of old rags and goat’s flesh into the earth, not in fear of betrayal, but to protect his people.

As to what the lord Councilor had just told him, that could be shared with no one—except, that was, for the man lying on the bed, for it was obvious to Kren that he could never have known.

The maimed hand had made Kren uneasy, he could not at first think why. When he recalled at last the woman he had helped fly Koramvis and the baby she had taken with her, he had never thought to bring the two together—the man and the unseen child—as one. Until that moment in the room below, when Kathaos Am Alisaar had overreached himself in his machinations.

Now the weight rested on Kren. It troubled him that soon it would rest more heavily on Raldnor. With an unerring judgment he had already gauged Raldnor’s inner fragility, which bore no relation to his physical strength. And it was indeed a burden for any man to bear, this knowledge of the undisputed past, the impossible frustration of the future. For here was a King who could hope for nothing.

Raldnor woke in the dark to a girl’s anxious face.

“Lie still,” she whispered at once, although he had not moved at all. “You’re in the River Garrison,” she added, although he had not asked her.

Soon after the physician came. He muttered and seemed pleased with himself. Eventually Raldnor began to question him, for he could remember nothing beyond the moment he had pulled himself from the Okris and into the hovels and the dreadful night. His long sleep had seemed haunted with dim shouts and torches. Now the physician told him why.

“However, you’ve mended well. Though you’ll have a splendid scar to impress your next woman with.”

It was hard now to wait out the captivity of his weakness. As the girl and the old man seemed to know so much, he asked them for news of Astaris. The girl blurted out at once: “Why, she poisoned herself!”

At which the physician took her shoulder and shook her, calling her every foul thing a garrison full of soldiers could have taught him, and perhaps a few more. He had heard the young man mutter a name in his delirium—the name of a scarlet Karmian flower—and guessed at deeper emotions than pure lust. Nevertheless Raldnor only said: “Better than the fire.”

In his mind he felt a curious aching and turning, a search, but not for something dead. With an uncertain prescience he sensed her still alive, but far away as the stars. When they left him, he wept, but more from illness than despair. He experienced a strange mixture of hope and desolation, for he was once more in a limbo of the soul.

Soon there were days when he was sent to sit on the roof of the tower to take the air. It had been put about that the brother of the physician’s girl was visiting her.

He wondered when he would see his benefactor, Kren. And wondered also what the man’s reasons were for giving him life. There was nothing given for nothing, so the Vis had taught him. He was therefore not prepared for Kren.

The wide-shouldered man, long past youth yet obviously still strong of mind and physique, came onto the paved terrace at sun-fall and nodded to him courteously. Raldnor saw a scarred, lined face with unexpected eyes. There was nothing wavering or stupid in them, and nothing masked either.

Raldnor rose, but Kren signaled him back to his chair and sat also.

“Well, sir. It’s very pleasant to see my guest so much better.”

“I owe you my life, my lord. It’s my disgrace I’ve no means to repay you.”

“There you’re wrong. There are a few matters I must talk to you about. It may take a while, so bear with me, and I’ll be well repaid enough.”

Kren poured himself and the young man wine from the jug set between them. He tried to be easy with him, yet he found Raldnor troubled him—too many ghosts sat at his elbow. Kren remembered suddenly how she had drooped before him with her tired unpainted eyes, his poor Lomandra, with the millstone of Val Mala’s infamy on her back. His glance strayed to Raldnor’s severed finger, and he thought incongruously: “It mended well. I never thought it would.”

“Raldnor,” he said, “who was your mother?”

The young man stared at him.

“No, I’ve not gone mad. I asked you to bear with me. Please do so. This will be a difficult conversation at best, but necessary, I assure you.”

Raldnor looked away, his hollow invalid’s eyes burning oddly.

“Then she was a Xarabian—”

“You must hear some talk, Dragon Lord.”

“Please, sir, do me the kindness of dispensing with my rank. We’re cursed with the same title. Yes, I’ve heard about your beginnings—a mother dead in childbirth at Sar, the father dead soon after, then adoption by a widow, your aunt. Is any of this true, or merely a convenient alteration of the facts? No, please, I’m not intending insult. May I propose another version of your story? You were the foundling of Sar, perhaps, but you weren’t born there. Some traveler discovered you as a baby on the Plains outside the town . . . with a Xarabian woman. Was she alive or dead?”

Hoarsely Raldnor answered: “Dead. Your deductions are excellent. A hunter found me in my mother’s cloak.”

“Not deductions merely, Raldnor. I knew your—mother. Her name was Lomandra. She was a court woman and, for a long while, my mistress.” Kren paused, seeing some irony in what he had said. “But, of course, I’m not your father. One of your parents, as you know, was a Lowlander.”

The flaring eyes in front of him seemed to burn upward out of their pits.

“You’re my host, my lord. I can only wonder at your humor. No man can think himself safe when he’s named one of the Plains people.”

“I know that. You see there are no witnesses to what I say. Let me go on and things may become clear. Lomandra had a good reason for taking you from Koramvis. She was making for the Lowlands, and she required my help, because her errand was dangerous. I gave her an escort—two of my captains. One of them loved her; I thought it might bring them luck. She would have sent me word when she was safe; it was her way. No word came. So I detailed a man to track them down through Xarabiss to the Plains. He found the wreck of the chariot and its driver on the Xarabian border, and, some way off, what was left of the other man, although the tirr had picked him fastidiously clean. It was only by chance he found the shallow grave, small enough for a woman. He unearthed her for me, to be sure, and there was no child. I didn’t know then if whoever took you had found her dead or had killed her. As for you, I thought some slave master had carried you off. The caravans go all ways. There seemed no hope of finding you. Besides, I had then my grief for her.”

Raldnor leaned forward and said: “You knew my mother. Who was my father? Do you know that too?”

Kren’s level eyes darkened with their unhidden trouble.

“The gods play some strange tricks on us, Raldnor.”

Overhead the sky was deepening toward dusk, and a flight of birds, catching the last of the invisible sun on silver wings, soared and swooped toward the river. Raldnor was acutely conscious of their passage.

“Raldnor, have you heard of the Lowland temple girl Rehdon took on the night of his death? He put a child in her, though it’s been suggested it was the bastard of the lord Councilor, Amnorh.”

“I’ve heard of her. Ashne’e. The women were always saying they saw her ghost in the Palace of Peace.”

“Raldnor, Ashne’e was your mother, your Lowland mother. Rehdon, the Storm Lord, was your father. Val Mala feared your birth because it threatened her status through her son. She instructed Lomandra to kill you, and she demanded your smallest left finger as the token of your death. Ashne’e cut off the finger while you lived. Lomandra took you to the Xarabian border and died there, so you knew nothing of what you are.” Kren studied the young man’s face but could discern no trace of emotion. There was only that blankness in his eyes which spelled an inner turmoil too frenzied to rise to the physical surface. “It’s the custom of the Vis that the last child conceived of a King is his heir. Amrek was plowed before you. You’re Rehdon’s last child. You are the Storm Lord, Raldnor. And if you leave this Garrison, your own Dragon Guard will hack you to pieces.”