The Storm Lord

19

As he came near the city he saw smokes rising from it, up into the red drought of the early winter sunset. Despite the smoke, it was a ruin, a desolation; already the shadows had it. Yannul noted the strip of banner over the gate—the black dragon of Dorthar. So, she was occupied, as the vague rumors had suggested out in the wilds of the Plains. The ruin had been invested with malignant, alien life. Yannul was reminded of certain sorcerers, mountain charlatans no less evil for being frauds, who claimed to be able to animate the corpses of the dead with demons, and make them eat, drink, copulate and dance.

He cursed softly, but his companion kept silent.

They had had a zeeba apiece till the last village, some twenty miles back. Since then, Raldnor had gone on foot while Yannul rode. It was a logical expression of their supposed relationship—Vis master and Lowland serf. Yet the “serf” seemed composed enough with whatever thoughts he had, whereas Yannul was uneasy, his whole body tense. The situation fitted him imperfectly, or perhaps it had simply been the long journey with this man, inland from the dark sickle bay where the Shansarian ship had left them. They had come by another route from the far land of the yellow-haired men—a route marked on their ancient maps, free of fire mountains and fiery water, and dotted with small islands. Yannul had diced and wrestled with the pirates, cracked jokes, drunk and exchanged histories. At the primeval bay, the edge of the Lowlands—unfrequented because it was too near the mouth of Aarl Sea—he had found himself alone with a man who was no longer a man in any human sense. He felt great loyalty to this being. Also compassion, admiration and even a desire to serve him—that ancient tribute inspired by true kings, so legend had it. Yet the old liking and the old companionship were dead. It had been hard on Yannul to travel in this silence and awe across the cold and lonely Plains toward a city of despair.

There were soldiers in the gate.

He swore again. The menacing incongruity worked on him like acid. Amrek’s jackals. Yannul spat to clear his mouth of a taste of sick anger.

They reached the ruined walls. Two sentries stepped out and peered at them through the dim vermilion dusk.

“Rein in, traveler. What’s your business here?”

“Not mine, my master’s. With the Ommos Yr Dakan.”

“Oh, yes? Your hard luck then. Who’s your master?”

“Kios of Xarabiss,” Yannul said. He drew out and showed the nearest soldier a forged letter and seal.

“Hasn’t your master heard the Storm Lord’s forbidden all trade with the Lowlands?”

“I told you, sir dragon. He’s dealing with the Ommos pig.”

The soldier laughed.

“And who’s this ape trundling along with you?”

“My slave,” Yannul said. He spat again, in Raldnor’s direction. “It saves an extra pack animal.”

The soldier, still grinning, drew aside.

“Pass through. And watch out for your needle in the pig’s house.”

The gateway was black. A weight of years and abysmal solitude pressed on the Lan, yet he, too, grinned, pleased at his acting.

The terrace and the wagon way beyond the gate were slippery and stinking with decayed fruit. Traders, venturing to ignore Amrek’s new trade laws, had had their merchandise tipped out at the gate. The dragons took what they wanted, left the rest to rot. Under this stench came a cold, dull, tomblike odor, the perfume of the doomed city.

There was no sound but the zeeba’s hoofs in the long, unlit streets, over which the sunset had suddenly gone out. Yannul saw no lights. The smokes rose in the distance, all in one place. This place, he deduced, was the Dortharian Garrison.

A bell began to toll onerously.

“We will separate here, Yannul,” Raldnor said. “You recall how to reach the Ommos?”

“I remember. And you? What if they catch you on the streets when the bell’s finished?”

“This spot is close to Orhvan’s house,” Raldnor said.

He turned and moved off up the street, becoming a shadow among other shadows. Yannul rode left, along the stony, empty roads. The bell rang itself out. No moon rose to alleviate the dark.

Orhvan’s house.

No lamps burned. A ceramic vessel lay broken on the steps.

The tall man struck the door with his fist. And on the silence of the place was overlaid a second silence—listening, with fear in its mouth. The man did not knock again; he sent his mind, instead, into the dark house.

Presently a hand drew back bolts. A figure opened the door a little way and beckoned him in. Then the door was closed and rebolted. Not a bar was left out of its socket.

The figure, guiding by mental signals, led across the round hall in the blackness, up stairs into an upper room. Two or three candles flickered here in a candlebranch, giving off the palest, most insubstantial glow. By it, the guest made out his host’s face, which had become the face of an old man.

The old man spoke now aloud.

“You’re welcome, sir. We’ve little to offer you. You see we hide like rats up here, afraid even to light a fire. But you were wise to knock on our door once the curfew sounded—lucky, too. This may be the only inhabited house left in the street.”

The guest looked about him. An old woman sat in the shadows. On her brocaded flesh was suddenly imposed the memory of a young, pale, beautiful mask.

“Orhvan,” the guest said. He pushed back the hood of his cloak and looked full into the faces of the old man and the old woman. “Do you know me now?”

“Why—why—” the old man stammered. Tears, either of emotion or shock, welled in his eyes.

“You are Anici’s death,” the old woman hissed. She tensed, fluttering like a fragile insect; the venomous pain of her thoughts pulsed in the room. “The death of my daughter’s daughter. I only saw you once. That is how I remember you.” But she could not meet his gaze with her own. Her hatred guttered before him.

“Now you can speak with your mind,” Orhvan said, as if he had not heard her. “Ah, Raldnor, how did it come to you?”

“I was well taught, though in a distant place.”

“Oh, what joy to see you.” Orhvan took his hand, struggling with the moisture in his eyes. “And yet—why come back at such a time?”

“At such a time, where else, for one of our race?”

“Raldnor, Raldnor—where else indeed. Where else. Have you seen the dragon men?” Orhvan let go his hand and stared into the black corners of the room. “Every night, when the bell finishes, they split themselves into parties, draw lots for which house to visit. They fling in live brands at the windows. If there are women, they use them in the street. Men are flogged to death every day. They invent reasons. Once they caught a man after the curfew. They cut off his hands and feet and nailed them up where he could see them as he bled to death.”

The old woman whispered a name like a curse, from the edge of the candlelight: “Amrek Snake-Arm.”

“No, no,” Orhvan said, “Amrek’s lying ill at Sar. He sees devils, so they say. No, these are the whims of the Koramvian soldiers. They have a commander, a man from Dorthar. He lets them do as they wish. No matter. We are only cattle waiting to be butchered. Before the year is out, every hovel in the city will be emptied. The old will be slaughtered without compunction. The young and the strong they’ll take to the mines of Yllum, to the galleys and the refuse pits. That was Amrek’s promise to us. We shall be his invention—a race of slaves.”

Through the chinks in the broken shutters there came a spurt of red fire igniting far off across the city.

Orhvan, shuddering, turned from it toward the faint, flickering candles.

“We have a little food—you must eat—”

“I need nothing,” Raldnor said. “Are you alone in this house?”

“Alone . . . yes, Tira and I. . . . Yhaheil died—died of a chill, like an old man—up in the tower room, staring at the stars. We are alone.”

“Then you will be the first in the city to hear me. I did both of you a great wrong in the past. I have not forgotten.”

“Ah, Raldnor, there’s too little time to eat bitter bread together. We’ve put aside that past, haven’t we, Tira?”

Then he felt the current stir and sift in his brain.

“I no longer know you,” he suddenly thought. “I wasn’t mistaken. No longer that anguished boy pulled both ways by his blood, the angry sullen boy whose mind was shut. Now here is a stranger who commands me, a man I’ve never met.”

The old woman, glimpsing something, whispered in her mind: “You have come a long way to us. Somewhere your guilt was purged or lost. Does she rest quiet, then, my little white-haired baby, my Anici?”

But the man had begun to speak to them. The tide of his own thoughts bore theirs away like leaves on the wind.

The Ommos was big, a strong-built man succumbing now to fat. Rings cluttered his hands; a ruby bled on an upper tooth.

“Well, Lannic traveler, what is it you wish?” The voice was smooth, without a modicum of interest.

Yannul stood his hard-won ground in the hideously frescoed hall. There had already been considerable trouble with the porter.

“I’ve told your man. I want to speak to your master, Yr Dakan.”

“The Lord Dakan is at dinner.”

“Splendid. I’ll join him. I’ve eaten nothing since this morning.”

The Ommos smiled, snapped powerful fingers and waited while two thickset house guards sidled in from the porch.

“I suggest to you, Lannic traveler, that the dinner might not be to your liking.”

There was a smash of timbers a few streets away, the sound carrying harshly over the silent city. The Ommos’s slothful eyes shifted involuntarily to the door, and Yannul, tearing aside a curtain, strode into the hall beyond.

Red light submerged the room. A massive Zarok statue dominated the center, its belly flaring poisonous flame. A memory of abominable sacrificial rites griped in Yannul’s guts.

Yr Dakan, seated at a low table, looked up startled from his food, a tidbit held halfway to his mouth.

“What’s this? Am I not to be allowed to eat in peace?”

Yannul halted in front of him, gave a short bow, and handed him the letter from the imaginary merchant stamped with the false seal.

Yr Dakan set down his meat and took the letter in his greasy fingers.

“Explain. Who sends me this?”

“My master. Kios Am Xarabiss.”

Dakan broke the seal even as the Ommos servant appeared between the curtains. Before the man could utter a word, Dakan waved him peremptorily to silence. Yr Dakan read, grunted and looked up.

“You know your master’s mind?”

“The lord Kios has considered in some depth the imminent termination of all trade with the Plains.”

“A few months, a season, and the Plains will be no more.”

“As you say,” Yannul smiled, “and what a lot of good things will go for waste—assuming the Dortharians don’t find them.”

“How perceptive of your master. He is thinking of the village temples, perhaps? Yes. Well, I have a little knowledge of such things. If he is prepared to find means of transport, as he suggests he can, and to see that I am recompensed for my trouble. . . . He mentions a reasonable sum, but I think my services may be worth more—We shall see. But I will take no risks with the Dortharian rabble—this is to be understood.”

“Perfectly, Lord Dakan.”

“Orklos,” Dakan said, half turning to the servant at his back, “before you shut guests out of my hall, you will inquire into their business.”

Orklos stretched his mouth and bowed.

Dakan waved toward the several dishes.

“Eat if you are hungry, Master Lan.”

He bent to the letter and reread it.

Yannul took a cup of wine. His hunger had been curbed by tension and fatigue. And it was to be a long night yet, discussing business with the greedy Ommos, upping his fee, assuring him he need have no part in the smuggling—for the merchant clearly understood the Dortharians despised his race almost as much as the Lowlanders. He had not reckoned on a long sojourn in the city once the dragons came there. Some night they might burn his house as readily as the serfs’.

The wine scorched Yannul’s throat. Dakan began to amuse him, sinuously avoiding all manner of dangers, not realizing the secret agent at his table was using him and making sure of him for the struggle which was coming.

At midnight Dakan allowed him to seek a bedroom on the upper story. A man led him there, guiding him with a lamp. Yannul had noted several Lowland servants about the place, and this man, too, was a Lowlander. Yannul studied him with a certain uneasy curiosity. He seemed almost entirely fleshless in the creeping lamplight, his eyes craters. At the low-linteled door the man went by to light the lamp beside the bed.

“You serve Yr Dakan, do you?” Yannul asked. Something about the man prompted him to exploration.

“As you see, Lord Lan.”

“Do you think you’ll be safer from the dragons with a Vis master to look after your hide? Not that there’s much of a hide. Do they starve you in this house?”

“Yr Dakan is a good master to those who serve him well,” the Lowlander said without expression. The lamp caught suddenly in the pits of his eyes, and Yannul saw a surprising welter of emotion in them; thoughts slid like fish—unrecognizable, yet forever revealed in motion. Yannul sensed pain, a capacity for hate.

“What’s your name, Lowlander?”

“Ras.”

The dull sibilance disturbed Yannul.

“Well, thanks for the lamp, Ras. I’ll say good night.”

“No need, Lord Lan. I am only the merchant’s slave.”

A smile, or some sort of stillborn bastard sister to a smile, briefly altered the Lowlander’s mouth as he turned away into the passage.

The blackness dwindled into a gray winter dawn. The Dortharian bell sounded over the city; the curfew was finished for another night. There had been no bells in the Plains, or any other warning. They had brought this brass voice from Marsak, and had repaired the city walls, also, for their own purposes as jailors. Beasts still roamed the streets at night, but on two legs now. Day, a day of cold sun, drew the creatures of the city out of their lairs. The little albino house snakes, on whom the Dortharians stepped when able, slid on the palely sunlit stone ruins. Light-haired men moved in the shadows, dropping back into darker places when soldiers passed on the roads. Trade still persisted—barter, the stuff of life—yet very silently. The whole city smothered beneath its silence. Only the Dortharians made sound.

Of the other races—those part-Lowlanders with the blood of Elyr, Xarabiss, Lan—some, capable of passing as Vis, had fled back to the lands their half blood opened to them, and lived there with a sense of horrified estrangement and precarious safety, and nightmares. Others went to earth in obscure villages of the Plains, or into the deep cellars of the city, even, to exist as brothers to, and in the manner of, rats. The soldiers killed a few for offenses various and bizarre. They were the mark of an ultimate shame and had no right to remain as proof of it Some died without assistance. Yhaheil, the Elyrian astrologer, had done so, seated before the wide, star-filled windows of the icy tower. Despair, not fever, had eaten him—but it was an impersonal, spiritual despair, for he had seen Amrek’s genocide written over the sky, and intimations of chaos following it.

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

On the steps of a well in the northern quarter of the city, they moved aside to let the old woman draw her water first. They were courteous to her age, also to her sorrow, for Tira had outlived both daughter and granddaughter—an almost mystical grief—and lost, too, the companions of her age to illnesses of the hot months and the maladies of fear. Her weed-grown court no longer susurrated to the brittle, moth-wing flutter of their movements, the dry grasshopper rustle of their old women’s voices. Nor indeed to anything, for the dragons had long since burnt it out.

Tira bore the brand of these things, and yet today Tira was different. She moved differently; her mind emitted pulses of a curious and definite strength. At the head of the steps she gestured aside the young women’s hands offering help, and drew up the water herself. Then she turned, the brimming jar balanced on her hip and by her bone-thin hands. She looked at the women, and suddenly into the mind of each of them fell a single pure shining drop, like a tear of molten gold let fall into the dark water of the well.

There came a rattle of wheels. Down the narrow street galloped a light chariot with two Dortharians in it; it reined to a halt at the watering place. The soldiers called out obscenities at the women who stood there. Their immobility melted, they vanished as swiftly as the night had done. Only an old woman balancing her water jar on her hip was left at the well’s head.

“Give us a drink, old bitch!”

The soldier grinned when she came down to him and handed him the jar. He snatched carelessly, pretended to lose hold, and dropped the vessel on the roadway, where it broke. Water gushed out. The soldiers laughed. A bronze whip cracked, and the chariot rushed on.

Tira stood still. They did not see her extraordinary smile. She had dealt in symbols once, and now, changed by the man who had come out of the night, she saw Dortharian blood, not water, running self-spilt down the street.

Four winds howled like demons through the streets of Sar.

On the hill’s head a black bull was slaughtered to appease them. A priestess of the shrine, found thieving from the votary offerings, was taken to the sky-stung hill and whipped. Her blood mingled with the dead bull’s, but the winds continued to rage. The day was blown away.

At dusk the Guardian of the town bowed himself into the chamber where the Storm Lord sat—had sat, in fact, since he had come here. The walls were hung with thick, dull velvets of a miasmic crimson. Shutters were clamped at the windows, yet the wind spat through and the marble candles guttered. The Guardian’s eyes went nervously to his royal guest. Amrek’s face had a waxy, fixed pallor, and the lankness of illness had invaded every part of him. He slouched in his chair like a distorted doll, but his eyes had the vivid dangerousness of an animal looking out of a cage. For the thousandth time the Guardian cursed the fate which had struck down his High Lord in Sar, bringing such anxiety and trouble to a peaceful life.

“My Lord,” the Guardian ventured, “may I humbly ask you how you’re doing? My physician tells me—”

“Your physician is a sour-breathed fool,” Amrek said. “You want me away, do you? Out of this refuse pit you’re pleased to call Sar. Your weather is a foulness. I can’t sleep for the wailing of your filth-laden winds.”

“My physician is preparing a draft to encourage your slumbers, my Lord—rare herbs from Elyr—”

“Damn his potions. Let him take it himself and omit to wake up until I’m gone. Besides which, insomnia has become more pleasant to me than my dreams.” Shadows and the sickly wavering candlelight fluttered up and down his face like ghastly birds. “The gods,” Amrek said, “torture us in our dreams. Has this ever occurred to you, Guardian?”

“My Lord—I—”

“They make sport of us, Guardian. Last night I slept long enough to dream the sky was full of blood. A rain of blood falling on the towers of your wretched little palace.”

The Guardian stood staring at him.

“Shall I send for a priest to read the portent of it, my lord?”

“Portent? There’s no meaning, Guardian, beyond what is obvious. Men don’t dream of what is to come, but of what has been, what’s finished.” His head dropped forward on his chest as if it were too heavy for him. “That’s how the gods make fools of us. By showing us a million times those things we long to forget, those things we aspire to alter and have no power to change. That, Guardian, is how it is done.”

The Guardian of Sar shuffled out of the close chamber. The irony that beset his town had not escaped him—the misfortune that Astaris’s seducer had named it his place of birth, however fallaciously. In the corridor the man caught himself making the old sign against evil intent, and shame filled his sallow cheeks for fear some underling had seen him.

The yellowish winter dusk filled the city. The bell clanged dismally. Having emerged at dawn, like the little snakes, the Lowlanders vanished with the snakes at the first suggestion of darkness—only the feet and the torches of the Dortharians moved on the empty streets. They played their games of rapine and death less frequently, for now the ruins seldom yielded prey.

Inside the garrison, fires smoked and voices were loud. It was an old palace they had put to their use; the wide halls were well suited as a barracks. Yet age leaned on them in that place—the crushing presence of time and the accumulations of time. Men drank heavily, and dicing led to brawls. Overtaken by boredom, they became the meat for bad dreams. Superstition stirred. How hard must you beat a Lowlander before he would cry out? And their pale women, lying in their own blood with eyes filmed over like the eyes of the blind. By the gods of Dorthar, they would be glad enough to pack the slaves off into the mines and galleys, and be done with them. Fear, the begetter of all hatreds, recalled old tales of Plains witchcraft. They remembered Ashne’e the demoness, and the curse on Rehdon’s line. Here, in a black box, with the keening of the wind as lullabies around the box’s towers, and the icy fingers of drafts stroking their limbs, the dragon men tossed and muttered in their sleep, struck at the whores who shared their couches, fell sick and fell out among themselves.

Three days after a Dortharian had let fall an old woman’s water jar in the northern quarter, a patrol in the eastern sector saw some ten or twelve yellow-haired men talking together on the steps of a roofless house. The Lowlanders had a certain gift, an ability, to slip swiftly and unexpectedly away. Partly, the Dortharians had taught them this art. Only one man failed to elude them. They cuffed him and dragged him to the garrison, and into the presence of Riyul, their commander.

Riyul was a man of Marsak, a soldier fourteen years since, a mercenary by trade to any land that would buy him, until the profits of his homeland army tempted him. The command of the Plains’s garrison had come to him unexpectedly, with Amrek’s illness. It made him both imperious and uneasy. He subdued the city by terror, out of deference to Amrek’s hate, but also because it came easy to him.

He questioned the Lowlander for an hour, between the strokes of the whipman, as first snow drifted by the windows. Meetings of more than two men at a time were prohibited. The restriction had been a matter of course, until now either observed or unnecessary. The Lowlander bled, but said nothing. Riyul had him slung at last into the cellars of the palace which made such an excellent jail, and left him there to rot. There were no further gatherings, at least none the Dortharians spotted. There seemed no need to be troubled. The Plains people were a passive, servile race—everyone knew it—with livers pale as their skin.

There was a Lannic juggler in the hall that night, a clever devil who had struck up an acquaintance with a soldier at the garrison gate and wheedled his way in. Riyul threw him a silver piece.

It seemed he had legitimate business of some kind with the Ommos, Dakan, but the interesting thing about him was the talk he started of Lowland whores. Such a creature had never been seen, either in the city or out of it, yet the Lan claimed he had laid skinny blonde bitches galore, who, for a fee or a false promise of safety, would teach all manner of interesting bed tricks.

Riyul’s curiosity was whetted; his loins began to disturb him at the thought. Had there not been old stories of temple prostitutes?

Riyul’s name day fell in the gray time of the thaw. He had planned to have himself honored then by a makeshift feast in the palace hall, in the manner of a conqueror. He was playing at greatness, a dangerous silly game, in Amrek’s absence. Drunk, and lusting for white flesh suddenly in his smoky chamber, he sent the juggler word that if he valued garrison pickings, he had better make good his boast and provide it with some Lowland whores on the evening of the feast.

Yannul slept very deeply in the stagnant barracks that night. A cheerful madness had come on him with the continuance of the crazy acts he must commit. Vague thoughts of horror, of blood to come, he set aside. He had no choice. He had known as much when he rode across the alien summer landscape behind Raldnor, and sensed the stirrings of chaos underground.

His head heavy with the garrison wine, his last thoughts had also been of women, though in a temperate vein. Resha, his Alisaarian girl, for one, who had gone with a Vathcrian noble to live an unaccustomed life of order and fine clothes. She, who had initially feared racial enmity, had surprised Yannul by taking complacent refuge in camouflage. The Vathcrian had begun to pay her court in the last month at Vardath, when the nights were red from forge smoke and the roads rumbled with the passage of the great trees felled for ships. She must have learned early to survive and ride her chances aboard the Zakorian pirate. Now, a schooled opportunist, she accepted her suitor despite all obstacles, and the matter of his age, for he was well into his middle years—it made him a safer proposition, clearly. If it was her novelty that attracted him, however, the noble was to be sorely tried, for, once their union seemed likely, Resha had turned like a chameleon. She bleached her hair and began to use a face paint much like Dortharian Val Mala’s famous white unguent. Yannul rendered Resha all applause, and hoped her shaky house would stand. There had been no romance between them but a deal of liking. He only trusted her stout lover could keep pace with her through the dark.

Whatever else, he guessed she might be happier than the pale-haired girl, Jarred’s sister, they had wed to Raldnor at the altar of Ashkar Anackire. She had already the look of a woman who loved deeply and forever, but went unnoticed in return. Raldnor had been gentle with her, no doubt, but it would be an impersonal, automatic gentleness. And once the solitary month was up, he had left her and would probably never go back. A great pity, for she had been worth a second look, had Sulvian of Vathcri.

Asleep, Yannul dreamed of the farm in Lan. Snow thick on the hills, icicles stabbing from the roof. His mother happily heavy with child as she seemed perpetually to be, his sisters singing and squabbling at the loom, or nursing birds which had fallen, half-dead from the cold, beside the door. In the second thaw, three thin large-eyed girls holding out handfuls of wings. White birds soaring up from brown hands without a word of thanks; white birds turning black against the blue sky.

On the narrow pallet, Yannul dreamed of home. The ghosts of the palace left him alone.

Over the city the snow moon burned like a lamp of blazing ice. Sentries passed on the wall of the garrison, shivering and cursing.

“Do you hear that sound?” one asked the other.

“What sound? I can only hear my guts freezing.”

Yet he sensed also the electric movement of the air, less sound than vibration, a deaf thrumming under their feet, the twanging of a silent harp.

Somewhere, a wolf howled, sharp as a spike.

The sentry grinned.

“Do you remember that old man with the pet wolf—the black bitch Ganlik got with his spear? Lucky devil, Ganlik, with that pelt to wrap up in of a night.”

“I’ve heard Ganlik’s sick,” the other said.

They separated and moved on. A cloud choked out the moon.

And in Sar, Amrek dreamed of Astaris on the back of a white monster. Her hair bled over her shoulders, and her face was a golden skull.

20

Snow flamed on the wind. The wind was on fire with snow.

When the snow stopped, the Plains lay in unbroken whiteness under an exhausted purple sky.

The detachment of soldiers wound in a slow black rope across the blank whiteness of the land. Their business—the urgent provisioning of the garrison—was one they cursed in their various fashions. The makeshift pens, originally packed full of Lowland cattle stolen by Dortharians in warmer months, had grown progressively roomier as the occupation dragged on. Now the snow had come, while Amrek still took his ease in Sar, and the second Siege Snow would not be far behind it. There was talk they might even have to spend the winter here in this stinking verminous hole.

The detachment’s captain snarled out his orders and chafed his hands. Frozen to his very bones, he was thinking of a particular woman he had left behind in Dorthar, a bitch he was sure would find other amusements in his absence, and now had all the cold days to catch some filthy disease with which to present him on his return. In addition they had passed one farm holding and a village, both of which had been empty.

The second village showed itself to them two hours after noon, when the sky was already darkening drearily.

The gate in the stockade was wide. They rode through, and up the broad street, the men fanning out, stabbing open doors, peering into the musky gloom of stables and barns. Neither human nor beast remained. Shutters flapped and slapped at windows.

The hooves of the animals pushed the track into mud, and the swinging braziers spat pink phlegm.

A shadow ran suddenly out between the houses, its eyes a leap of flame. With hoarse nervous shouts men leveled spears at it.

“Wolf!”

But the thing vanished like a spirit.

“Ride on,” the captain bawled.

They overtook no one and found no footsteps in the snow.

The next village, the third, was nearer—only a mile or so.

Some plates lay broken in the road, partly covered by snow. A heavy silence welled up to meet them. They searched and found nothing. Once there came the whirr of a wheel on a loom, but it was the wind that turned it.

“They’re running,” the captain grunted. “Where?”

This time a few men slipped aside to see what might be picked up in the way of loot—people who moved in such apparent haste must surely leave valuables behind. They did not find a single metal ring. In the gloomy temple building not a golden scale remained.

Leaving the abandoned village, they strained their eyes for any sign of movement across the aching white waste of the Plains.

A luminous dusk soaked into the sky.

Far off, over the shadowy mirror of land, the captain glimpsed a thing, a shape, that might have been two men on zeebas, or only a trick of the gloaming. Fresh snow began to fall.

The captain sneezed and wiped his nose. He ordered the column back toward the deserted village and a chilly comfortless night’s camp.

On the scarp the two pale-haired men sat still on their zeebas, watching the Dortharians trample back through the stockade and, presently, the mauve smokes rise up.

The snow did not trouble them. The childhood of each had been spent in some holding of the Plains—their later life in the ruined city. For bread they had become the servants of Dakan the Ommos. They were well used to the raw cold and eternal hunger, and hardship of a hundred sorts.

One man glanced at the other, speaking without words. They turned the heads of their mounts.

The Ommos thought they were at his work, gathering gold for a nonexistent merchant of Xarabiss with Yannul the Lan. The Ommos had therefore provided the pass that enabled them to leave the city and roam the Plains at will. Certainly there was a tiny priceless statue and a heap of gems in their saddlebags as proof of their supposed errand. Yet their mission was a different one.

There had been an old woman, and a single shining thought dropped into dark water. Ripples had spread from that drop, ripples of the mind across the black stagnant well of the city. Only they knew what the golden thing meant to them, but such was its purity that it was totally communicable. At each village, each farm, the two messengers passed on their vision, Raldnor’s vision, unaltered, still perfect, through the unclouded medium of mental speech, passed it like fire from torch to torch, until the whole surface of the Plains would be burning. The change, where it came—and soon it would come everywhere—was entire. A sleeping serpent, coiled in the brain, always present, never until now awake, had been wakened, as if it had been foretold. Promontory slid into recess; groove fitted with groove in a jigsaw of destiny, abruptly engaged.

Through the falling snow, the two Lowland men rode over the scarp and silently on into the night with their invisible fire.

Under the city’s ancient gateway the host poured, from dawn till dusk. The Lowlanders came with their wagons, their livestock and their belongings piled in carts. The Dortharian wall guard was doubled. They sat their animals in the deadly cold, working off their anger on the Plains people. They snatched bits of amber and thin gold chains off the necks of the women.

They assumed the snow had caused the sudden influx—also fear of the soldiers of the provisioning detachment. Certainly the scum had brought food enough for the garrison with them. If any starved, it would not be the Am Dorthar.

That day, too, Yannul came back to Yr Dakan’s house, the Lowland men riding behind him with their bags of jewels. The Ommos examined the treasures greedily. He ran his pudgy fingers over the breasts of the Anckira statue, but their coldness seemed to repel him.

“Little enough in stones,” he said, “but She—She is worth something.”

“So Kios will think,” the Lan answered.

“And when will your employer expect you?”

“Not till the Snow’s done, the spring thaw. There may be other stuff I can lay hands on besides, at the bottom of all those wagons that have come into the city.”

“Don’t forget that I have helped you, Master Lan.”

“Indeed, Lord Dakan, you can rest assured.”

Under the snow, time paused in the city.

In the white-crusted ruins wagons camped about the stone-ringed fires. Smoke rose more frequently, for the Dortharians seldom now troubled the dark. The cold of the Plains was too bitter for them. Besides, they were sullen, trapped in this tomb with their captives, and discontent robbed them for a while of pleasure in their sadistic sports.

There came a night of iron stars.

Long after the curfew had fallen, a piece of movement came silently through the streets. It was a thing of shadow, like a ghost; avoiding the routes of the Dortharian patrols, it slid at last into the inky porch of Orhvan’s house and sent a mind like a pale blade searching through the walls.

Orhvan soon came and led the shadow into an upper room, where a small fire now burned and flickered. Firelight fell harsh then on the bone-white angles of hands, and fell back from the hooded face. It was a priest.

“Raldnor,” Orhvan said.

Sparks ignited briefly within the hood as the priest’s eyes turned and fixed on what was sitting perfectly still before him—a figure as dark, as enigmatic as his own.

“You call this man Raldnor,” the priest said softly, “who claims to be our King.”

A voice came from the figure.

“Call any man a king; it will not alter him. Call a king by some other name, he is still a king.”

“I speak to you with my mouth,” the priest said, “because your mind is too expressive for my needs, and conveys too much. You have let fall a thought, woken a snake in the brain of our people. They have never seen you, but their minds visualize you as a myth, half king, half god. I dispute nothing of this. Nor the vision of another land, which I too have been shown in that chain of minds which has spread from yours. For all the years of our race, we have been passive, meek, submitting rather than observing the rules of war. The Vis set their heel on our necks for centuries. The heel crushed us, but taught us to endure. You have found out our secret—the serpent coiled in our soul. By this abstract yet entire thought you have implanted, you have said this: They who endure more, are more; they who suffer most can accomplish most. You, who master yourselves, can master others. You who possess the speaking mind should not bow down beneath the yoke of the deaf, the blind and the dumb. You have given us hubris. That was the unborn serpent in our core. You have hatched the serpent’s egg; you have woken us. But it is the double-edged sword. After you have taught us to be cruel, can you teach us to be humble once again, in time, thrust us back inside the broken shell and seal it, before we rend ourselves?”

“We must live for each moment as it comes,” the voice said to him, “neither in our past nor in our future. Should we fail to wake at this moment, we shall be destroyed forever. Those who sleep will die in their sleep. There will be no survivors of Amrek’s scythe.”

“You are the dual child, both bloods. This is very clear.”

“I am an amalgam that had eventually to be formed,” the voice said. “The era has called forth both myself and Amrek, the black tyrant. We are figments of the destiny of our separate peoples. No more.”

“They who said they were your messengers summoned us here from the Shadowless Plains. They said tonight you will speak to us, your mind encompassing every other Lowland mind in the city. Can you do this? I, too, have felt it to be so.”

A coal burst suddenly in the fire. The priest caught the glimpse of a face that seemed cast from dark metal, and two burning eyes of a strangely colorless icy gold. The eyes appeared to be without soul. Only purpose, only power was behind them.

“Indeed,” the priest thought, “you are no longer a human man.”

“I am the golem of the goddess.”

The terrible jest filled the priest’s brain. He lapsed by their fire to wait.

At midnight there came a peculiar intensity over the city, like the brittle contraction, the unseen shimmer that precedes a storm.

The Dortharians spoke in loud, broken whisperings about the streets. In the garrison, men swore and swilled their wine. The air hummed. Yannul the Lan lay stiff as starch in the Ommos bed, feeling the city moving as though a torrent rushed under its roads.

The rain broke early as the snow had been late. Yet it was an uncertain, fickle thaw; flakes still met in silver spirals, though the gutters ran with mud.

These bright spinnings beat on the shutters of Yr Dakan’s chamber as Ras moved noiselessly across it and swung down the bronze candle wheel and snuffed its lights. On the floor an erotic painting of young men throbbed in the glow of a plum-colored lamp.

Yr Dakan lay in the big bed, eating sweets. Sometimes a girl would lie beside him awaiting his intentions, or a boy, or possibly both. Tonight the space was empty.

Ras crossed to the bed and stood looking down.

“What do you want?” Dakan demanded irritably.

“Lord Dakan,” Ras said softly, “since I came to you I have been an obedient servant.”

Dakan said lazily: “You’d have felt the lash otherwise.”

“Lord Dakan,” Ras whispered, his face unchanging, “tomorrow night, one of this household will kill you.”

Dakan started up, letting fall a nibbled delicacy.

“Who?” he rasped. His eyes glittered with shock. “Who?”

“Any one of us, Lord Dakan. Perhaps Medaci, the girl who bakes your bread. Perhaps Anim, who looks after your stable. Perhaps myself.”

Liverish anger rushed into Dakan’s sickly face.

“Zarok has burnt a hole in your brain. You’re mad. I shall have you whipped tomorrow.”

“A good measure, Lord Dakan. Don’t spare the thong. Beat me senseless. Cut off my hands so I can’t grip a knife to harm you with.”

Dakan caught Ras a blow across the face.

“Tomorrow I will have Orklos deal with you.”

Ras said expressionlessly: “There is talk of a king. Do you remember Raldnor of Hamos? He’s instructed us to murder every Vis in the city, Lord Dakan. Tomorrow, on his signal, at the seventh hour after sunset.”

“Zarok has scorched you,” Dakan repeated, but his heavy face was heavier with fear. Eventually he said: “How do you know all this?”

Ras’s smile was a stillbirth which scarcely altered his mouth.

“My mind. Have you never heard the tale that the people of the Plains talk inside their heads?” He turned and walked to the curtained doorway and looked back. “Kill all your Lowlanders, Yr Dakan,” Ras said. “Kill us before the snake stirs in us. Then bar your door.”

It was still very cold.

The two soldiers who set out every five days for the gust-battered town of Sar, taking Riyul’s report to the Storm Lord, kicked their beasts into a lather, and damned the mail that clung to them like a second skin of ice. Those who remained in the garrison slept badly at night; by day they hanged Lowlanders in an ancient marketplace.

On the morning of Riyul’s name day the clouds were lined with a thin skim of gold, as if a split wine gourd had spilled over.

Yr Dakan came late to the table.

“I hope you’re in good health,” Yannul said.

Dakan did not look well. He grunted.

“Tell me,” he muttered, “do you think there is something abroad in my house—some conspiracy against me?”

“Who would dare such a thing?”

“My slaves—my Lowland slaves . . .”

Yannul let out a sharp laugh.

“Lord Dakan—you leave me speechless. The lily-livered rubbish are incapable of violence. Besides, how could they escape punishment if they had such a plan? Amrek’s soldiers would be only too glad of the excuse to butcher the lot.”

“One of my servants has told me that there will be an attempt upon my life tonight,” Dakan said.

“Who?” Yannul knew at once his question had been too ready. He added swiftly, “Whoever told your lordship such a thing’s a madman.”

For some reason an instantaneous picture had formed in his brain—of the thin, strange-eyed Lowlander who lit the lamp on his first night in the city. “But no matter,” he thought. “Whoever blurted, there’s no stopping now.”

Dakan’s face relaxed.

“Yes, the man who told me this is mad. I have long suspected it. I will bar my door,” he added to himself, “a mere precaution . . . where will you be beyond sunset?”

Yannul, who had never seen fit to speak of his second role in the garrison, slyly drooped one lid.

“A little Elyrian,” he murmured, carefully not stipulating his invention’s sex, “has offered me entertainment for the night.”

By noon the Dortharians were in the streets, selecting Lowland girls for Riyul’s feast. Their acts of rape had taught them to be generally unafraid of the old reputed sexual magics of the Plains women. They were, it was true, all bones—frigid, unwilling bitches. But part of Riyul’s wine ration had already gone round in the garrison, and the soldiers regarded these skinny makeshift wenches cheerfully enough.

The women collected in the chariots with an expected pathetic docility. Some wept—slow tears without sound. The Dortharians did not notice that their eyes held a crystalline hardness in them, like zircons.

The men pulled up their skirts, cuffed them, and laughed at them, and eventually left them to the mercy of the garrison whores, who spat in their faces as they wound ribbons like colored weeds through their hair.

At last they huddled in the dark like dolls made of rags, in their gaudy anklets and glass beads, and with blank faces and trembling bodies. Their hard, cold, wise, and terrible eyes were fixed on the flags.

Night fell and thickened. A thin layer of snow gilded the streets. In the fifth hour after sunset ice formed like glass.

Inside the palace hall the torches had blazed since dusk, and carcasses turned on the great hearths, spitting fat. Three quarters of the garrison was present, lolling at the tables, steeped now in the plentiful wine and beer. A troupe of dancers, of mixed Elyrian and Lowland blood, had been caught lingering in the city at twilight. Brought in to entertain, they turned somersaults with anxious eyes, while their girls tremulously shook strings of bells. They understood well enough that they might be given money tonight, but flogged into pulp in the morning. Amrek had no mercy for their kind.

Riyul sat in his place in tarnished finery—a couple of defaced gold armlets, loot from an old war in Thaddra, and a grease-spattered scarlet shirt. A soldier had died the night before, and Riyul had appropriated the black wolf pelt from among his belongings, and wore it now on his own back. He was very drunk, as were his men. It was late that he recalled his new lusts.

He looked about for the juggler.

“You there, Lan,” Riyul shouted, catching sight of the man at a lower table, “you’ve been gorging our meat, but have you kept your word, eh?”

“My word, Lord Riyul?”

“These temple trulls you idle with—where are they?”

The Lan grinned.

“Outside, my lord.”

A ragged cheer went up. Men banged their wine cups on the board.

One of Riyul’s aides was sent lurching to the hall’s single entrance. When the big door was opened, into the oppressively close air blew a gust of the vicious night. The torches curled and smoldered.

“Bring ’em here!” Riyul roared.

The silence of curiosity fell on the feasters.

The little Lowland girls, employed until now as servitors, turned their pale faces and stared. The garrison whores muttered spiteful sarcasms.

The three women the tipsy officer now shoved into the hall wore saffron shifts, slit at the sides from ankle to thigh. Their arms and legs were bare gleaming whitenesses, each naked limb painted with the golden rope of a serpent. Their flaxen hair hung down their backs in coils; their lips and the lids of their eyes were stained with gold. They grinned as they came up the room to Riyul and thrust out their breasts. No man there had ever set eyes on a Lowland prostitute. There was an odd wickedness in their paper faces, leering mouths, and shimmering skin.

The Lan had edged over to Riyul’s chair.

“Temple girls,” he murmured. “I told them your lordship might be disposed to save them from the mines if they pleased you sufficiently. Whether you do so is your business, but have no doubt they’ll supply their best tricks for you tonight.”

Riyul gave a low drunken laugh.

“Engaging sluts.”

The first girl had reached Riyul’s place. She set her hands on the table top and vaulted lightly to sit among the gravy-crusted trenchers. Despite her full breasts, she was thin. Yannul saw the sharp bones of her hips stab momentarily through her shift. Curiously, the contrast stirred him, and he also, in that macabre instant, hardened for her core. His lust disconcerted him, knowing, as he did, what was to come.

She sat there, smiling, her eyelids flashing, while Riyul maneuvered his paw under the flap of her skirt. Suddenly she raised her long arms and began a sinuous torso dance, stretching and weaving like a snake. The two other girls drew narrow pipes out of their saffron. A formless, wandering melody came from their fingers and slid about the big room.

In Dakan’s hall, the Zarok god waited, like a beast that must be fed.

Yr Dakan had taken it into his head to eat in his chamber, and the hall was in darkness save for the coals in Zarok’s belly. Lit by its own flame light, the thing glared through the shadows, the long points of its teeth seeming to drip blood.

Orklos came late with the tray of slops; behind him the slave girl Medaci carried in narrow hands a vase of wine. The glow out of Zarok’s oven stained her hair bright gold, like the glass in a palace window. It showed a bruise mark where someone had struck her across the mouth, and her glistening eyes, boring into Orklos’s back.

With the stone shovel, Orklos replenished the coals and waited until flames sprang and crackled. Then he threw in the rinds of his master’s meal and watched the fire consume them. Orklos turned and took the vase, thrusting the shovel into Medaci’s hands.

He began to pour wine into the fire, lazily, aware of nothing save his task. His back to her, he did not see the sudden shudder that ran over the girl’s body.

She raised the shovel and struck at Orklos’s skull.

Stunned by this first blow, the Ommos staggered and the wine vase shattered at his feet. Raising herself on tiptoe, Medaci struck a second time with all her strength, and again, and again, until blood ran. Then, as the man tottered, she dropped the shovel and pushed at him with both her hands. As he fell, his head went into the oven.

Above, there came a crash and splintering of wood.

On the table top, the Lowland girl glared down at Riyul with her golden eyes.

Riyul was prepared to be good-natured.

“Look all you want at me, bitch,” he encouraged. “You’ll see more of me later.”

He raised his cup and was drinking deeply when the girl’s hand shot forward and buried a dagger to its hilt in his chest. Riyul grunted at her stupidly while wine spilled out of his mouth; then he fell into her lap, splashing her with crimson.

Yannul moved back from the table. Expectancy had not been enough. He tasted bile, for what he saw was nightmare.

The dragons had brought only women to their feast, planning to use them, when the festivities were at their height, in the orgiastic manner of the ancient feasts of Rarnammon. And these women had struck simultaneously, with daggers, with knives from the table, with heavy stone drinking cups. Thick blood ran on the flags and smeared the walls.

Those men still living were too drunk and too dumbfounded to retaliate. They watched the Lowlanders run toward them and did nothing to prevent the swooping blades, like beaks of thirsty birds. The thing was too sudden, and too terrible and too unlooked-for. In death, their faces were masks of surprise. Those who staggered toward the single door, stumbled on the heaped bodies of their officers and subordinates. Those who reached the corridors beyond the arch screamed out in frustration and fear.

Lowlanders had killed the sentries at the same moment that the women struck inside the garrison and were now bounding through the complexes of the building, seeking further prey.

All through this Yannul stood rooted to the spot. There was something unutterably horrible in the sight of these Lowland girls, their faces blotched, their hair striped with hot blood, killing and killing, without thought or hesitation, like machines with eyes of blanched steel.

Yet their hatred was discriminating. They did not touch him or the group of Elyrians at the center of the hall. They ran round them and past them, as if they were no more alive than other furniture which must be avoided. In honesty, neither he nor the Elyrians moved at all. Dazedly, he watched their own dazedness.

He had never shirked a fight in his life, but this fight was not his. For a long while he would remember every detail and, it seemed, every red-stippled face.

The garrison sentries who, unlike the men in the hall, had worn scale plate, lay with their throats open. A new soft snow fell over them and dropped into their wide eyes and mouths.

In the garrison there was a sudden quiet.

In Riyul’s hall, the Dortharians’ whores were too fearful to set up the keening that betokened death. They huddled by the fire pits, idiot-faced from fright.

In the web of streets that stretched away from the gate, dragon soldiers lay on their faces like broken toys under the falling, falling snow.

Yannul made his solitary way back toward the house of Yr Dakan. Frequently he passed the dead, their torches smoking on the paving, which was marbled with their persistent blood.

Sometimes, but not often, Lowlanders went by him, silent as wolves in the snow. Their eyes gleamed at him like icy moons, but they left him alone.

He was sick, and to his very soul. Not only because of what he had seen, but because of his part in it. He had hated and despised the Dortharians. Now, with an abrupt disintegration of purpose, he discovered a massacre of drunken babies, and discovered, too, the color of his skin and hair in this place of the yellow-haired men. And he had come to fear the Lowlanders, these people he had so pitied—to fear their awful certainty and efficiency, and their union of minds.

When he came to Dakan’s house, the guards were lying under the porch. The doors were wide open, but no lamp burned in the foyer. There was a faint glow seeping out of Dakan’s hall, presumably from the belly of the fire god.

He entered the archway and mounted the stairs to the upper apartment. Another Ommos lay here, a vicious boy whom Yannul recognized as one of Dakan’s playthings.

Dakan’s door, bolted as he had promised, had been forced inward, the iron bar torn out of its socket. Dakan himself lay across the bed, his eyes accusing the ceiling.

Yannul turned, taking with him the small lamp at the bedside. It threw gesturing shadows on the walls. Apart from the dead, the place seemed unoccupied.

Then, in the foyer again, he heard the sound—long retching sobs—and he smelled too, suddenly, the disgusting stench that hung about the entrance to the hall.

He went in, past the drawn curtain, and held up the lamp to see.

An indescribable thing hung, half-in, half-out of Zarok’s oven, smoking still. Nearer, crouched by the table, was Medaci, the kitchen girl. Her hands were clutched at her stomach, and her eyes were shut until the new light struck them. She stared at him, then jumped to her feet and ran at the doorway, trying to escape by him into the foyer beyond. When he caught her shoulders, she screamed out, although he had been careful not to hurt her. After a second her eyes cleared. She seemed to recall who he was. She flung herself against him and buried her head in his chest, yet she was so thin he hardly felt the impact of her flesh.

“Why was I made to kill him? Why did Raldnor make me kill him? He came into my mind, and I beat and beat with the stone shovel—”

Yannul stroked her hair, and she wept like a child after a bad dream, longing only to be comforted.

“It had to be done,” he said. The words came without thought, answering his own question as well as hers. “It’s over now, and you’re safe.”

“Don’t leave me,” she said into his chest.

Did she remember, as he had, the color of his skin and eyes? Or had these things become irrelevant for her in the aftermath?

When he felt the tension slackening in her body, he led her out into the street and lifted her onto one of Dakan’s zeebas and took her to Orhvan’s house.

The one dragon soldier left living in the city strained his eyes toward the dawn. He had spent the night trussed to a pillar in the vault under the garrison, where a crack of a window looked out of the earth bank into a paved court. In the night the window had not proved friendly. The wind had haunted him through it, and bloody arms and hands had snatched at him, whether in hallucination or reality he was not sure. He had seen his comrades die in the hall, and in his drunken terror had run out into the stone corridors, hearing the ghastly din behind him. He had hidden himself under the cot of a sick soldier, whose throat, he had time to notice, had been sliced from ear to ear. Here he vomited up Riyul’s wine and lay in the stink of his own sickness, afraid to move or search for weapons.

About an hour later, two Lowland men had come into the room and pulled him out, gibbering with shock. It was as though they had known of his presence there for some time.

He thought they would run a blade into him and be done with it, but instead they dragged him down into the black cellars of the palace and bound him to a pillar. There was a dead Lowlander lying by another.

When the dawn filtered in to him, he heard them at the door. The dim light fired their pale hair; their eyes were like splinters of flame. He could not read their faces, but he knew that they were no longer slaves.

One of them loosed his bonds.

“A pleasant day for a hanging,” he remarked, swallowing nausea.

“You’re not to die,” said the Lowlander. “The Storm Lord has asked for you.”

“Amrek?” Incredulous, the soldier felt he had, after all, lost his wits in the night.

“Raldnor,” the Lowlander said, “Rehdon’s son.”

They took him by alleys to a dark house and left him in the circular hall. He thought of chancing an escape, but could think of no refuge in this hostile city. He had seen them dragging the bloody corpses into an open place, and burning them. The Lowlanders always burned their dead.

When the man came, the soldier was astounded. A Vis, he thought at first, until he saw the hair. Then something struck him—a name, and a face. He started violently at the crippled hand.

“Dragon Lord!” he exclaimed.

“You know me.”

“You’re Raldnor of Sar, Amrek’s—” The soldier fell silent in horror. Here stood the dead, for Amrek had had this man killed, had he not—the seducer of Astaris Am Karmiss.

“You will do me a service,” the undead said to him.

The soldier trembled and mouthed words which never came.

“You will carry a message to my brother Amrek.” The eyes leveled on the soldier, held him trapped and unpleasantly aware, burning the words into his skull. Irrationally, intolerably, yet without a doubt, the soldier knew that whatever mission this man gave him must be accomplished. It was inescapable as a geas. “Tell Amrek that his father Rehdon is my father also, that my mother was Ashne’e the Lowland woman. Remind him of the laws of Dorthar, that I was sown two months later than his sowing in Val Mala’s womb, that therefore I am the Storm Lord. Tell him that I freely lend him the months of the second snow in which to put his affairs in order and to relinquish his throne. When the snow is ended, if his place is not mine, I will drown Koramvis in the blood of his people.”

The soldier shuddered and half began to weep. This man was no ghost who could make these demands of the living.

“If I speak to him as you say—he’ll kill me—”

“Dragon,” the man said to him, “it will not trouble me if you die.”

The soldier cringed and covered his face against the phenomenal eyes. Here was no hatred, and no mercy either—nothing. Nothing in this man sought vengeance. Similarly he contained no mechanism for pity.

Men and women crowded to look down from the snow-rimmed towers of Sar.

The winds had abated, yet there was little enough to amuse them with half the theaters respectfully closed, and the wine shops full of Amrek’s Guard. Now there was a rumor, a wild story—they watched the solitary Dragon ride into the square before the Guardian’s palace, a train of about twenty camp whores trailing behind him. Abruptly Amrek appeared at the head of the outer stairway, a startling black figure against the vivid snow.

“What’s your news, dragon?”

The soldier fell to his knees.

“Storm Lord—the Lowland garrison has been destroyed, every man in it killed except for myself.”

“What?” The dry voice rang with an unstable, hollow derision. “A whole garrison gone and only one worm left to crawl out of it? Who did this miraculous thing? Banaliks?”

“My Lord, I swear—it was the Lowlanders. They struck all together in a space of minutes—How could we know, my Lord, that they’d find a leader?”

“A leader.” Amrek’s hands twitched at his sides; his mouth curled. He came slowly down the stairway into the square.

“They let me live—to bring his message to you,” the man cried. Amrek stopped still. There was no sound. “They took me to this man. He said—he said his father was also yours—Rehdon, the High King. His mother, the Lowland witch-woman. He says—says he was conceived after your lordship—that by the old laws this—makes him the Storm Lord—he demands the throne of Dorthar, or else . . .” The man faltered on the rash, impossible threat which, in that round dark hall, had seemed so immutable, so certain. “My Lord, he swears he will drown Koramvis in the blood of her people if he isn’t acknowledged by the snow’s end.”

Amrek laughed. It was a melodramatic, insane noise to fill the dead silence.

“This man—this King,” Amrek said harshly, grinning, “who is he, this lord of scum?”

It was a rhetorical question. Yet it had, so curiously, an answer.

“Raldnor of Sar,” the soldier choked out, unable to help himself. “Raldnor of Sar, your Dragon Lord—”

Amrek’s blow split his lip; he tasted blood in his mouth.

Amrek screamed at him: “You’re lying to me! Who paid you, you filth, to lie to me?”

The soldier lay on his face. Amrek turned, and turned again, screaming at the high walls: “All liars! Damn you! Damn your lies!”

He circled the court, yelling at them, beating the air with his hands. Suddenly his eyes rolled back. He fell and twitched on the ground, writhing and sprawling in the middle of the empty space. No one approached him. They were too afraid to help him. He seemed possessed by an ultimate and inescapable demon.

Then, abruptly, the fit was finished. He lay quite still.

To those watching from the towers, he was a black cross against the snow.

21

The high council had been formed in haste in the palace on the Avenue of Rarnammon. Many were absent, keeping to their beds on this chill and inauspicious day and sending word their physicians would not let them rise. Mathon, the Warden of the Council, rubbed nervously at his cold hands. He was an old man who had been elected for his safe vacillating and his well-known lack of ambition—and this situation was quite beyond his ability.

Sharp-faced and sick-eyed, Amrek sat in the dragon-legged chair. He had recovered from the terrible spasm at Sar, only to ride to Dorthar with all the frenzy of a madman. The treacherous thaw had ended, and the snow was falling heavily by the time he reached Migsha. It did not dissuade him. He tore across the caravan tracks of the Plain lands and the hills, camping at night in a sodden tent and traveling through blizzards that sent him blind for two days in the Ommos town of Goparr, his chariot clogged to the wheels in snow. His Guard fell behind. He lost them and left them to the wolves and the deadly cold, and to struggle after as best they could. He crossed the Dortharian border with ten men at his back. He rode unknown through Koramvis and came immediately to the Council Hall. The mud-stained cloak he had worn lay on the floor behind the chair.

“Well, we are agreed then,” Amrek said. “No army of Dorthar can march until the snow is done. Word must go to Xarabiss. She’s a lazy land, but has enough troops to quell a Plains rabble.”

“My gracious lord,” Mathon said, “I fear Xarabiss will evade such work.”

“She’s a vassal,” Amrek said, “and will obey. Send a messenger to that effect.”

The Council was silent. They had heard rumors out of the Lowlands, even ahead of Amrek’s crazy race. They did not care to exacerbate him further.

From the edge of the room came a man’s voice, a voice made unmistakable by its Zakorian slur, that gift of his dam.

“There is one small matter which disturbs me.” An uneasy movement ran over the chamber. It was like Kathaos Am Alisaar to touch baldly upon a point which, until now, they had so scrupulously avoided.

“Your Lordship’s soldier claimed that the Lowlanders’ ‘king’ was Raldnor the Sarite.”

Amrek’s black eyes glared unseeingly.

“The fool was mistaken.”

“A mistake of unusual magnitude, my lord.” Kathaos paused, allowing the Council to see, by inference, how Amrek permitted his judgment to be clouded by his jealousy and shame. “My lord, surely it should be considered that if the Sarite lives, suspicion falls on a Commander of these same armies we all trust to defend this city. You’ll recollect that Kren, Dragon Lord of the River Garrison, informed us, without a doubt, that Raldnor was dead.”

“I recollect.”

“Then surely, my lord—”

Amrek was on his feet.

“We’ll have Kren here to answer your charges.”

The Council sat frozen.

“Damn you, Mathon, move yourself! Send a Council guard to escort Kren here.”

“Storm Lord, you’ve not yet rested—”

“Rest be damned. Do as I tell you.”

“And if he declines to come?” Kathaos murmured.

“Then I shall make him come.”

Nevertheless, this Amrek could not do. Garrison it was, and fortress too, built, long before the wharfs and hovels had grown up about it, as a defense of the river. Battlements surrounded the buildings inside; the place was stocked with food and drink and a community of men and women entirely loyal to Kren. It could withstand a year of siege, but the streets and houses around it could not.

To Amrek’s demand, Kren returned the courteous message that he was sick and could not leave his bed, but that he would welcome the Storm Lord’s person at any time he cared to approach the gates.

Mathon paled on hearing this, fearing some endless strife was about to tear the city in half.

“We must send a party of Councilors to the Dragon Lord. We must try to persuade him to reason.”

Amrek thrust past them and, with his improvised escort, rode to the Garrison gate.

He stood in the chariot like a supplicant, his face yellow with fatigue. The red-cloaked sentry saluted him and presently led him in.

Kren was waiting for him on his feet, and without a trace of subterfuge.

“You seem in excellent health to me, Dragon Lord,” Amrek remarked.

Kren smiled.

“Shall we say, my lord, the sight of such an illustrious visitor has done me good.”

“Kathaos suggests that your reluctance to present yourself before the Council proves your guilt conclusively.”

“All suggestions, perhaps, should be considered carefully, my lord. Do you believe the Sarite lives?”

Amrek’s glance faltered like a candle.

“You must tell me that, Kren.”

“There is a grave within these walls, my lord.”

“Yes. I believe my mother sent her guard to make sure of that. She was very anxious for my honor at that time. Is it the Sarite’s grave?”

Kren’s steady eyes met his own.

“Indeed, my lord, it is. Is there some proof I can offer you?”

“Your word will do, so I’ve heard.”

“That, my lord, without hesitation, you have.”

And yes, he had buried the Sarite there, the invention that had been the mask of a man he had enlightened and made whole, and broken at the same instant.

When his royal guest was gone, Kren stood some time alone in the shadowy room.

The early dusk was numbing the bitter whiteness of the palace courts. The mountains loomed on the distant sky like threatening clouds.

The cold dazzled Amrek’s eyes. Coming from the chariot, he stumbled and seemed to hang above a gaping vault of blackness before one of the Guard caught his arm.

Crossing a room where the lamps were already lit, a woman came rustling toward him in glimmering brocades. He looked up from his stupor and saw his mother, Val Mala.

He pushed away the supporting arm and glared into her white painted face. How beautiful she was still, this mother. Would her arms have been a comfort to him if they had ever spared him a moment’s solace when Kathaos and Orhn and the others had done with them?

“Well, madam. You’ve heard.”

“Yes, I’ve heard everything. I’ve heard that the Lowlanders sent you packing from their dunghill. I’ve heard that you rode like a peasant across three lands, and after that went begging to Kren. What a son I’ve made. The midwives must have turned me in my labor so that I lay on your brain and crushed it.”

He watched the diamonds glittering in her hair and ears. Their refractions made him dizzy and sick.

“You tell me you hear all these things, madam, yet you’ve never heard what happens to a woman with a Lowlander’s face. You’ll use another unguent, madam, before I see you next.”

“What faith you have in my obedience, Amrek. I am your mother,” she said with spiteful sweetness.

“And I, madam, am your King, distress you as it may. If I chose, I could send you to the fire for your whoring.”

For a second he saw how afraid of him she was; a bitter triumph surged through his veins, like a poisonous yet refreshing drug.

But she said: “No, Amrek. This is your sickness. You confuse me with another.”

In the black ruin on the Plains, anvils rang, and the makeshift forges turned the night clouds red. Into the melting pots went iron caldrons, brazen bowls, the accumulated metal of the villages, the bolts from city doors; in went the armor taken from the bodies of dead dragons, those eight hundred men who had perished in a single hour. New swords lay stacked in empty houses—also shields and metal plates to guard the chest, back and limbs.

All the while, like an ally, the three-month snow fell into the cup of the Plains.

In those first white days, six men left the city. Three rode northeast, to Lan.

They were many days on the Plains. It was hard going in the snow, yet not impossible. The two Lowlanders bore all difficulties stoically. Yannul the Lan, exasperated by their silence, cursed and sang in his saddle. On the whole he did not feel too bad, yet nervous as a boy going to his first woman, riding back home on this ironic errand.

When they crossed into the little land of Elyr, the snow was falling fast. In a matter of miles, they passed five or six dark towers—astrologers’ roosts, each with a single dim light burning high up.

It was not a long passage through Elyr. Near dawn, on the border of Lan, Yannul saw two wolves, their smoking jaws clamped in some edible death. They stared with red eyes and red drooling mouths, and their spit steamed in the snow. Yannul thought unpleasantly of omens.

The King was young, only a child. He held a kalinx kitten on his knee as he listened gravely to what Yannul said, and, at his side, his sister-wife listened also. Yet it was to the King’s advisors that Yannul spoke in actuality as they stood behind the bone chair, toying with pieces of quartz.

When he was done, however, they waited on the boy to speak first.

“You are a Lan,” the King said, in his high boy’s voice, “yet you’ll fight for the Lowlanders. Why is this?”

“The man who sent me, my King, has inspired me to fight for him.”

“How? By promise of reward?”

Yannul smiled wryly, seeing the child was wise beyond his years.

“No, my King. His cause is just, as I’ve explained to you. Also he was a friend.”

“Was?”

“Now he’s a king, as you are. It makes it harder to be close to those around you.”

The boy nodded. Clearly, this much he had already learned. Then, in a controlled but eager tone, he asked: “And this other land—tell us, Yannul, about that place.”

Later, the councilors went away to discuss what should be their policy, and the boy talked seriously to Yannul, while the little girl Queen smiled serenely. His heart burst with absurd pride in them. When he was an old man, or even if he did not live to be one, this pair, full grown, would rule well in Lan.

“You must understand, Yannul,” the King said to him, “that if I were older, I would lead my people to fight for the Lowland King. But I know what they’ll say. They will say that not only Dorthar, but Zakoris and Alisaar hate the Lowlanders, and will also attack them; that Dorthar herself is our neighbor, separated from us only by a little stretch of water. She would turn to us and destroy us, and we have no army.”

“The Lowlanders have no army, but they’re making themselves one. They’ve had to.”

“Yes,” the King said. His eyes shone. “Many men will go from Lan to fight with them. I heard two or three on the stairs talking about it. Amrek isn’t loved here. The Queen thinks he’s a demon.”

The serene girl lowered her lids and giggled.

The policy was to be as the King had said, yet not harshly put. As to the passage of other-land ships along the western flank of Lan, no harm would be offered them. It was intimated, if not spoken, that men who rode to the Plains would go unabused. At supper in the hall, four young nobles came to Yannul and talked with him at length, with bright fierce eyes, of justice and struggle—at which the councilors never turned a hair. Questions were also asked of the Plains men who had ridden with him. Until now there had been a sort of restraint; yet the Lowlanders seemed strange and silent to the people of Lan. They did not question them overlong.

Once, in the indigo hills, Yannul and his brothers had boasted that they would eat at the King’s table. The memory smote him that day. Ringed by familiar things, he yearned to ride deeper into his country and be lost there for a while. But there was no time.

Three men rode to Xarabiss in the snow, to Xarar, where, eleven years before, a hot spring had erupted out of the earth. A new palace had been built to encompass the spring—a winter house where the king and his wives might warm themselves in the cold.

Thann Rashek, whose name in certain circles was still Thann the Fox, had been dozing by the ornate hearth, while two pretty girls played and sang eight-stringed melodies of Tyrai. He was an old man who liked beautiful things about him, professed himself indolent and appeared deceptively docile. When the man leaned to his ear and whispered his news, Thann Rashek’s eyes expanded, and he began to display symptoms of unnerving wakefulness.

The three cloaked figures entered the room and bowed simultaneously, like puppets.

“Lowlanders. How interesting,” Rashek remarked.

“We carry a letter from our King,” one of the men said.

Thann Rashek’s steward intercepted the paper and brought it to him. The wax bore no imprint. Rashek broke the seal and read. Presently he looked up.

“Your King has signed himself Raldnor Am Anackire. Does he claim to be the offspring of the Lady of Snakes?”

“It is a method by which all of us now make ourselves known. Our land has no name—therefore we claim our descent from Her.”

Rashek smiled.

“An elegant fancy. Poetic, yet apt.” His voice did not alter. “Does your King imagine I can defy Dorthar on his behalf? With my weak, my idle land?”

He had sent a similar message to Amrek regarding the Plains city: “Alas, my troops are indifferent: pleasure lovers and braggarts. They would not survive the snows.”

Amrek’s answer had been swift.

“Your open unhelpfulness angers us. We have not forgotten your previous words concerning the scouring of the Lowland filth out of Dorthar, neither your persistent trading in Lowland goods long after our edict forbade it. You will set your house in order, my lord, before the spring.”

The Lowland messenger seemed to read Thann Rashek’s mind. Perhaps this was even possible, for they read each other’s, did they not?

“You may be forced at last to engage in war with Dorthar, lord king.”

“So I may. But not before I’m forced, I think.”

“Then you will march against the Plains?”

“I?” Rashek smiled. “I was never a warlord, sir. And my land is a courtesan, willing only for luxury and love.”

“After the thaw, lord king,” the messenger said, “we ourselves move against Dorthar, and our way lies across Xarabiss.”

“I deny access to none. We are a hospitable and friendly people. No doubt you’ll find generosity here, particularly from our liberal women.”

The messenger bowed; so much had been implicit in the nonchalant words.

“One thing,” Thann Rashek said. “I’ve heard your King is the man from Sar—the lover of my granddaughter Astaris. Val Mala’s men had killed him, I thought.”

“He is the man, Lord Rashek. He did not die in Koramvis.”

“That’s very wry,” the Xarabian said. “Perhaps he will avenge, then, your King, the red-haired woman Amrek destroyed.”

But the Lowlander made him no answer.

He thought of Astaris when they were gone. She had been, of all beautiful things, the best. A strange, rare woman. And beyond the high windows the snow fell into the mouths of icy fountains, and he felt that coldness creep in his old man’s bones.

Before the third month of the snow had ended, the ruined city was full once again of Vis.

They came in chariots, wagons, carts, on zeebas and on foot, not for purposes of occupation, but out of fierce new loyalties to a barely known cause and a lesser-known people. Easygoing Lans, handsome Xarabians. Elyrians who proved withdrawn and mainly silent. It was a fever running in the lands to north and east. Even soldiers came—mercenaries from Xarar and Tyrai with their officers, carefully defacing their Xarabian insignia around the fires at night to save Thann Rashek’s name. Even the slurred accent of Corhl was heard about the streets, and in the encampment outside the walls, two itinerant Alisaarians who had found nothing to love at home. Also, for some reason more slowly, those of mixed blood returned, those men with light eyes and dark hair, and the blonde-haired, black-eyed women. They were perhaps more lonely then, seeing that King, who was like them, and yet had become so different. But the old suppressed pride, the frustrated angers welled in them. They were as ready for the struggle as any paid fighter of pure Xarabian blood or stargazing Elyrian.

The newcomers brought their own squabbles and problems. They stole each other’s cattle and zeebas and equipment. They composed their own individual ballads, too, and dreamed nostalgically of their homes, now they were no longer safe and dull in them.

It was a strange time, for already the forces of disruption were at work, and men felt that weird quickening, either in their bones or in their souls. Even so early, no single thing could stay quite as it had been. Soon everything would be altered, swept away; only in realignment and great change could anything remain.

In Koramvis, in the third month, the snow held like stone.

In this bitter weather, the Queen’s woman, Dathnat, her own face pinched and wooden, worked longer upon the Queen’s flesh with her creams. Val Mala, sensing in the snow an enemy, kept much to her apartments. She no longer wore the white unguent. In the harsh, pale light of the winter days her golden skin seemed brittle and papery. Nothing amused her.

“I begin to tell myself old tales, like an old woman,” she thought. “I. I.”

She had been thinking of Rehdon, not so much as a man, but as the personification of her disappointment in him. It was a sour taste in her mouth when she recalled how he had come to her father’s palace at Kuma.

Her father was the Guardian of the place, a small and unimportant merchant town with squat towers like squashed cakes. It lay in the path of one of Rehdon’s progresses; otherwise, doubtless, he would never have considered entering it. Val Mala had hated Kuma, and she had hated her carefully preserved virginity. Her countless lovers did their best to serve her, in their own way, and after every Zastis her nurses came, with their prodding fingers, to ensure that matters had not gone too far. Such were the sexual customs of her house.

On the evening before Rehdon’s arrival, her women had chattered ceaselessly, hysterical with excitement. They had all manner of tales concerning him. Tales of his power and beauty, and burning eyes that could strip a woman literally quite naked—a magic thing which they had been assured he had once done. For the occasion of his visit, Val Mala had been made a dress of glassy stuff sewn all over with golden flowers, and her hair had been plaited in twenty stiff braids woven through with pearls.

The sun rose. The palace woke and grew frenzied with anticipation, and Val Mala, accompanied by thirteen ladies in matching gowns of blush-red silk, had been taken to the head of the city wall. From here, she was told, she might look down and throw flowers decorously to Rehdon’s chariot. She had been instructed in everything, but she waited at the wall, breathless in her anxiety that he should look up at her.

The long brazen river of men seemed to wind endlessly in through the gates of Kuma. At last she saw his vehicle, quite unmistakably ornate. She leaned forward and flung the blossoms from her hands, and called out to him—only his name, which was enough, as it turned out.

Above the hubbub, her clear high youthful voice had reached him, and he lifted his head and looked into her eyes. In those days Rehdon, though many years her senior, had been a giant—handsome, almost godlike, a magnificent product of his line. The sight of him struck her deliciously dumb. Her whole body ached for him with sudden wild longing.

Later, she lay in the dark, watching the lights of passing sentries quiver on the domed ceiling, and she imagined, with uncontrollable intensity, the ecstatic delight she might feel at Rehdon’s hands if he took her as his wife. She vowed to herself that if she could make him desire her enough, he would marry her, and take her from dreary and provincial Kuma to the splendor of Koramvis and the agonizing rapture of his bed.

It became plain to her, in the days that followed, that Rehdon was fascinated. He could not keep his eyes away from her and would stare at her for long spaces of time, during which she affected not to notice his scrutiny. At last she contrived to be alone with him, in a marble chamber where stood the ill-carved statues of her ancestors, and where no servants, who had made their own analysis of the situation, would dare to intrude.

“Ah, my lord,” she had sighed, “how beautiful Koramvis must be. How you must long to return to her.”

As always, his eyes hung on her face and body, and when she went forward to him, he caught her hands in his.

“Would you like to see Koramvis, Val Mala?”

“Yes,” she whispered, “oh, yes, my lord.”

He slipped his arms about her.

“You’re no more than a child, Val Mala.”

She pressed herself against him.

“I long that you’ll teach me to be otherwise, my lord.”

He could have had her there and then. There was money enough to recompense for her defloration. But her extreme beauty had ensnared him, and her trust, which was really her unthinking foolishness. In some ways he was a sentimentalist, and in the matter of women and his reaction to them, his understanding was limited.

So seduced was Rehdon that he married her, and set her higher than his previous consorts. In the wonderful white palace, at the feet of the Dragon Comb of Dorthar, he lavished a million gifts on her, but her marriage to him destroyed her expectations.

In the great, gold-embroidered bed, he had hammered himself into her, but such was Val Mala that the pain pleased her more than anything else he might have done. She had endured so long the arts of love without their culmination that agony was a delight in itself. When it was finished, she must have more of it. It was her avidity that frightened him. Rehdon was not a master; for all his mass, he preferred to be the seduced rather than the seducer, which was the reason for her success with him in the first place. Now he taught an unwilling pupil the role she must play, and taught her to hate and despise him in so doing. Despite all this, she was adept and skillful, and he grew to rely upon her. Presently she became his chief Queen.

It was ten months after their marriage that she began to withdraw her favors from him. When he craved her the most, she proved the most evasive. She forced him to cringe for the benefit of her body; she made him fearful, taking a wicked pleasure in the enterprise, all the time hating him the more because he succumbed to her whims. She was a child of fourteen, he a man and a king. She longed for him to silence her, take her and use her, although she did not truly understand these desires.

At last she turned from him to the riches her position offered—to the temptation of power, and to lovers, the most ingenious of whom was Amnorh. He proved very useful to her, not least as an assassin. But the best-loved was Orhn Am Alisaar, for he treated her as a whore and so, in some curious and appropriate way, fulfilled her utterly.

In the fourth month the snow was cracked like marble by the rain. Nine days later, under yellow plumes of rain-cloud, an army rode out of Koramvis with all the paraphernalia of war.

Atull of Yllum had been picked to lead it—a Dragon Lord formerly in command of one of the mountain strongholds set up on the borders of Thaddra. He was a man of some experience, tough and forthright, well used to fighting, yet in reputation obscure. To deal with a peasant rabble in the Lowlands he was the ideal choice.

That Amrek should lead the punitive force was barely considered. No king was required to swat this fly. This was as well, perhaps, for Amrek had been often ill (something seldom alluded to), and his rulings indecisive. It had seemed to some that he would have been afraid to return to the Plains. Was it the old shame, the cuckolding that made him sweat? Or did he believe the tales of Lowland magic and dread the lingering curse of the Plains woman Ashne’e? Believe that the Lowland King was indeed his father’s son?

Amrek, as he stood on the great stairway to watch them go, felt a nameless horror and despair whisper in his core. “I am impotent before a ghost,” he thought. He glanced at the woman behind him.

“Well, Mother, our brave captain rides out.”

“We shall pray to the gods,” she said without inflection.

“You think Atull will fail,” he said to her, coming close. The faintest of lines were etched on her forehead, which troubled and pleased him. “Have no hopes the Lowlanders will ultimately kill me.”

She turned her head.

She remembered Raldnor, and she remembered the fair-haired woman who had sent the snake to her in Rehdon’s tomb.

“Did I mistake death a second time?” She thought of the grave in the River Garrison. No. She would not have them unearth whatever lay there. She no longer wished to know, for if she had lost him yet again. . . . Lamps burned softly through the nights in her bedchamber. She had begun to fear the dark.

Atull’s force moved across Ommos. The Ommos had taken to throwing yellow-haired dolls made of rags into the fire bellies of their Zarok gods. The sky blew and thundered.

When they crossed into Xarabiss, countless mishaps befell the march. Wheels ran loose, trees crashed in their path. Between Abissa and Tyrai, as they bridged a river, now rain-swelled and foaming, the timbers gave under them. Chariots, men and animals floundered and were swept away. At night came disturbances in the camp; running figures made off into the hills. Supplies were pilfered, beasts unshod. There was frequently some burning tent, blowing its ashes down the wind.

Atull sent his dispatches home. Word came shortly to Thann Rashek: “Your people hinder us. Prevent them.”

Thann Rashek’s reply was very courteous. Xarabiss had suffered a hard winter, and a poor harvest before it, and hunger had inflamed her robber population. If Rashek knew a means to govern bandits, he would be a happy man; he entreated the Storm Lord to instruct him how it might be done.

Atull’s command reached Sar, under beating heavy rains, and found the place in uproar. The Sarish watchtower had sent up a scarlet signal half an hour before. At dawn goatherds had spotted a force moving northward on the Plains.

The population of Sar was afraid, both of Atull’s soldiers and the Lowlanders. They began to evacuate the town in droves, burdened with crying babies and bleating domestic animals. Even if the stories were true, they were sure that Raldnor, for all he had claimed himself one of her sons, would not spare Sar.

The dragons advanced on to the Plains and crossed the border in the late afternoon. They saw no signs of an army on the march, rabble or otherwise.

“Those herders were drunk, or asleep and dreaming,” one of Atull’s captains remarked. “My guess is the rats are still skulking in their ruin.”

As dusk fell, they made camp on the banks of a narrow watercourse, where a small wood provided some shelter from the rain. Soon the dark was jeweled by their cook fires. Sentries prowled on the perimeter. They were not uneasy. They expected nothing.

Just before dawn, a sentry on the western rim of the encampment heard a movement in the dripping brush and went to investigate. He did not return.

“Fire!”

The yell burst across the tent lanes. Men sprang up, cursing and coughing; animals screamed and kicked at their pickets, broke free and ran, lathering with fear. The rain had eased in the night, but there was little dry enough for a blaze to take hold of. Nevertheless, the waterlogged undergrowth smoldered and stank. A thick, choking flame-fog enveloped the camp.

Atull pushed from his tent, his eyes weeping. There was no hope of orderly retreat. Men and animals burst from the wood.

Beyond the trees, back-lit by the first white rays of the sun, unexpected figures materialized. Swords clanged with a dull iron sound, spears sung. The Dortharians, who had looked for nothing in their pride and ill-fated assumptions, were cut to pieces as they erupted in confusion from the smothering trap. The enemy were half their strength in number and, by comparison, indifferently armed. Smoke and surprise, however, turned the balance. There was an absurd and bloody slaughter. Atull himself, fell heavily, an obscenity on his lips, a Plains man’s shaft in his guts.

They had been smoked out of their lair like orynx in the hills above Koramvis. It was a trick well remembered by the man who had once hunted with Koramvians, on the day the earth shook.

A few men evaded the red blades and fled. It was an ignominious flight and ended in death anyway. Some perished oddly in Xarabiss. Those that reached Dorthar were hanged to the last man.

Also unlooked for, like black swans, there came out of the north sudden ships.

They crept over the laminations of the sea: vessels of Shansar and Vathcri along the shadowy coast of Lan toward Ommos; a vast fleet of Shansar and Vardath edging behind barbaric Thaddra, making for Alisaar and Zakoris. And, far off still, behind the Dragon Crest at Dorthar’s back, Tarabine galleys with blood-red sails.

They had been a long time building. Vathcri had stripped her forests of their huge trees, turned her army into a navy at Vardath and manned the wide decks under Jarred. The Shansarians, eager to despoil the Vis lands, leaped about their own black sails, which bore insignia of countless different kings, and sang their pirate songs. There were pale goddesses with plated tails leaning out from the up-curving prows that had the carved beaks of birds or the wide mouths of water snakes.

The spirit which had departed with the white-haired man still moved them in their various ways.

They hung, a few miles out from Vis, waiting, like the shadow of an evening soon to fall. It was not yet quite the time. There would be a signal; their priests would know it—an emanation, a Sending. It might come from the holy men of the Plains—a magic communion from one group of sensitives to another. Many believed that he alone would order it, the man they called Raldnor. Especially the pirates observed his name with awe. To some extent he had been deified among them.

The days passed. Storms broke at Dorthar’s back, and the red-sailed ships of Tarabann withdrew to a farther horizon.

“He is in Xarabiss,” said Melash the High Priest of the Vathcrian Ashkar. And a muted, half-troubled cheering rose from the wide decks.

To forty Shansarian pirate ships in the twilight off Alisaar came the first injunction.

The priests cried out with white faces. The sails opened; the iron oars ripped the glass surface of the sea and churned the bay of Saardos, capital of Alisaarian kings since the time of Rarnammon.

Their decks were straddled by their armament. The spoons of catapults barked on their leather buffers, and spat white flame among the towers and walks of the seaside mansions and the merchant quarters. Flame lodged and gouted and lit up the sky. The pirates, wild with their blood frenzy, leaped down among the blazing wreckage of the docks, running on the spines of smoking fishing smacks and up the fire-bright wharves, to butcher the unprepared soldiery massing from the garrison.

Saardos burned that night, a horrible example to the dark-haired races. The ancient palaces collapsed in rubble; the garrison gave out at dawn. The city showed a gutted skull’s face to the pitiless day as the howling invaders ravaged her corpse. Her king fled by a back gate to the fortress at Shaow to muster troops. In the confusion and fiery dark his commanders had learned nothing of the enemy. They surmised Zakoris or Thaddra had attacked them, and the world had gone mad.

The Lowland army had left Sar lying untouched, yet virtually abandoned behind them.

The warm, half-fetid perfume of summer was on the wide Xarabian plains. Towns lay in their path; they passed them with a mile or so between. They skirted Xarar, and no warning smoke rose from her garrison tower, though patrols had noted their passing from the woods above the road. Sometimes men rode to join the march—in twos or threes mostly, sometimes alone.

Often the wayside fields were empty and the farmsteads quiet, but full of anxious eyes. The Lowlanders took little and despoiled nothing. Near Tyrai the land was red with flowers, and men intercepted them with carts laden with beer and bread for Raldnor’s troops. There were women too. They threw the red flowers at the soldiers. The Lowlanders watched serenely. The Lans laughed. The Xarabians bowed and tucked the flowers in their collars. Flowers trampled under the feet of the animals sent up a smoking fume. For Raldnor it was like the summer a year before.

The dark-eyed girls still stared at him. But he was different now, no longer an adventurer from Sar, but now a god in a hero’s body. Their sighing was altered, but no less.

Thann Rashek was at Lin Abissa, in the white palace with the twisted golden pillars. He sent word to the force in his land: “My city lies helpless before you. We open our gates and beg the mercy of Raldnor Son of Anackire.”

That night the Pleasure City did a brisk trade, though not from the Lowland men. It was the Lans and Xarabians who were taken to its erotic breast, and loved and fleeced under the ruby lamps.

“The Lowlanders do not fancy women,” the beautiful daughters of Yasmis complained. “Nor anyone else,” remarked her beautiful sons in the Ommos Quarter. It was a disappointment to discover, as they had always suspected, the sexual reticence of the fair-haired race.

Raldnor dined that night at Rashek’s table.

“Well, we are conquered,” the Xarabian said. “How unfortunate that you should find us so poorly defended.”

He had been very curious. Now he observed, with ironic delight, the Dortharian-taught prince’s manners, but he noted, too, how the soul was drained by what drove it. Yet who could doubt this man was Rehdon’s seed? “He will die, of course, in Dorthar,” thought Rashek. “Amrek’s dragons must outnumber them, in proportions so vast as to make assessment unthinkable. Their luck at Sar is unrepeatable. They will shortly be overwhelmed. And this extraordinary man will be led in gold chains through Koramvis and slaughtered in some unique manner of Amrek’s devising; for who cannot believe that Amrek hates and goes in terror of my elegant guest? Well, Raldnor will follow where she went, perhaps. If the shades are capable of love.”

As the Lowland troops rode away from Abissa in the morning, a man on a black zeeba came galloping after. The Xarabian contingent took him in gladly enough, but in the dusk, when their camp was made once again on the open slopes, the newcomer presented himself at Raldnor’s drab, owar-hide pavilion, the impersonal erstwhile tent of some minor Xarish officer.

He was at pains to get in. The Lan he had heard of and one or two captains from among the mercenaries were drinking wine. Raldnor stood by the lamp, reading a piece of reed-paper.

“Well, my friend,” the Xarabian said, glancing around, “who would have thought it?”

Raldnor turned about. The Xarabian, catching sight of his face for the first time in more than a year, checked himself and his humorous banter.

“Xaros,” Raldnor said. “You are very welcome.”

He held out a hand, his mouth moving in the exercise generally recognized as a smile.

Xaros laughed uneasily.

“Well, I’ve come to swell your number by one. No doubt a stupendous contribution.”

Later, crouched by a smoking fire in the chill late of night, Xaros composed a letter to Helida, who had never for a moment expected him to think of such a thing.

“Oh, by the gods, my love, how he’s changed. I suppose I should have anticipated something, but not this. I had feelings of sentiment toward this man, as you well know. But I might as well grasp the hand of an icon. Oh, he treated me excellently, when I’d have been happy to rough it and grumble, because, as you understand, I was never made to be a soldier. But he’s no longer anyone I know. Look for me back any day, though I’ll stick this fool’s errand if I can. This damned zeeba I robbed your uncle of has devoured half my food as I wrote this. I have told it I shall eat it in return, if ever we reach Dorthar.”

In Koramvis, Amrek had not stirred. There had come a rumor of fire and terror in the west—Saardos sacked by pirates with pale hair. As yet it was only a rumor, like so many of the wild tales born suddenly in the mouths of the fearful.

Again, messengers had ridden to Xarabiss and returned by circuitous routes in fear of the Lowlanders.

Thann Rashek’s answer was, as usual, courteous, but this time with a barb in the tail.

“I exclaim once again that I have no able troops ready to defy the men of the Plains. Though anxious for Dorthar’s honor at all times, I am an old man. Can I be blamed if my cities surrender in terror to the savage Lowlanders, when even your Highness’s own soldiers were forced to fly?”

“He begs for war, and shall have it,” Amrek spat.

The Council were silent. The Lowlanders also begged for war; yet Amrek made no move to arrange it.

“Storm Lord, can all defense be left now to Ommos? Surely some men must be sent—”

“Then see to it,” Amrek rasped. His eyes were fixed upon the letter he still held. He raised it, showing them the crimson wax with its imprint of the woman-headed dragon of Xarabiss.

“Anack,” be hissed.

The Council kept still, their own eyes darting.

“Anack!” Amrek screamed out. “He dares to use the snake goddess as his seal!” He sprang from the chair, pointed at the six personal guards grouped behind him. “A Xarabian—find me a Xarabian in Koramvis and bring him here.”

Without expression, two of the black-cloaked men strode out.

They took a Xarabian tailor in the lower quarter. His wife ran after, screaming and imploring them, as they dragged him up the narrow ways into the wide white streets and under the obsidian dragons of the Avenue of Rarnammon. Amrek’s Chosen grinned, and men laughed on the roads, for the Xarabians, who should have cauterized the running Lowland sore and had failed to do so, were not greatly liked.

The dragons pushed the whimpering tailor into the Council Hall and held him still.

Amrek caught a blade from the nearest belt and slit the tailor’s threadbare shirt.

“Your master, Rashek, the stinking Fox of the Xarab midden, has sent me a certain token, which you will take back to him.”

He slashed with the knife, and blood ran. The tailor screamed, and screamed again as Amrek carved on his back the crude symbol of an eight-armed image with a serpent’s tail.

At last, shivering, Amrek dropped the knife on the flags. The Xarabian had fainted.

“Take the offal out. Whether it lives or dies, send it to Abissa as my promise.”

The hall was thick and close with silence. The face of the Warden Mathon was gray and puckered, for the sight of the blood had made him ill.

Kathaos sat motionless in the shadows.

Surely now there could be no further doubt that Amrek was entirely mad.

There was plague in Ommos.

It came with the summer heat. Men suffered pains in their bellies, turned black and died. Of the garrison force of a thousand Dortharians established in Hetta Para, where the plague was at its worst, only two hundred men survived, and most of them greatly weakened.

The Lowlanders had at this time taken Uthkat, where a battalion of Ommos soldiery fought them on the plain of Orsh, and unaccountably fled in rout. It was reasoned that the ravages of sickness and a certain foolish superstition were responsible. The Ommos had left off burning yellow-haired dolls. Some, it was muttered, burned wax effigies of Amrek instead. The Lowlanders were magicians, in league with hell and the creatures thereof—with banaliks, anckiras, and demons.

News had broken through at last, even to Ommos. Saardos had indeed been gutted, and the Alisaarian king slain at Shaow by white-haired berserkers, who fought screaming and seemed to take no wounds. Alisaar at least could no longer offer troops for Amrek’s expected offensive, though Zakoris had dispatched a generous vassal’s guard of three thousand men—gladly, and with contempt. She had no fear of pirates. Hanassor, inviolable in her rock, laughed at the rabble of the seas, whoever they were: Let them chew up Alisaar and come on. Yet who were they? Ommos knew. Devils conjured from the Waters of Aarl by the sorcerer who infested them with plague.

The Plains army reached Goparr and sat down for siege. It was remarkable, despite the sickness raging in the barricaded city, that none of Raldnor’s troops, Vis or Plains man, took the disease.

In the long hot blue of the nights, crickets scratched with their tinsel wings.

On a slope below besieged Goparr, a Lowland man lay dreaming in the dark. Sometimes he twitched in his sleep. The crickets troubled his dream.

He had found her face, her forgotten face. It was white, all white, and transparent, like crystal. It hung like a mask in the air.

“Anici,” he murmured.

No one was near enough to hear him, or to pry into his mind; he was very careful to sleep alone.

High overhead, a violet lightning expanded the sky.

Ras started awake. This was his agony, for awake, he knew her to be dead and himself alive. Awake, he forgot her face, remembering only the faint image.

When the spear had opened his skull, and he had murdered Yr Dakan in the upper room, it had come to him, as a sudden revelation, what must be done.

He must kill Raldnor.

Never before had such a solution to his pain presented itself, yet, in the act of killing, he saw how easy and how nourishing to his bloodless soul that act of blood would be.

Yet Raldnor was no longer human. He was a golem now, soulless also, capable of dying, but, to a human executioner—impervious. Only events, not hands, could slay the preternatural creature he had become.

Ras got to his feet. He made toward the zeeba pens. Passing two Lowland sentries, he shuttered and locked up the sparkling fever of his mind.

He had visualized the creeping black swans sailing on Zakoris, waiting off Dorthar and the Ommos coast. A jumble of possibilities cascaded through his thoughts. As another had once done, he had been recently at great pains to learn of the Dortharians. Yet he did not see them as enemies. They had become a means to an end.

He took a zeeba from the pen and mounted it.

Musky foliage flashed past and overhead were glimpses of a faded moon. No one halted him. Such was Lowland unity that there seemed no reason.

Three miles from the camp, he remembered his hair and skin and pulled up his hood.

22

Koramvis, when he came to it, seemed composed of white flame.

The Zastian months had begun. The days were now very hot—heat of a dull sickening variety, heat like an omen, which to Ras meant nothing. The guards in the great gateway, expecting nothing extraordinary of a single man on foot, and oppressed by the sun and the Star, barely glanced at him.

Some miles beyond Hetta Para, Ras had become part of a great Ommos flight, intent on putting as much distance between themselves and the Plains people as possible. By that time he had darkened his hair and skin haphazardly with a sour water dye. Doing it, he had no sense of a perfidious irony—nor when he entered Koramvis. He had forgotten Raldnor’s past, for Raldnor had become for him a target—no more, no less.

The dye infected his flesh; scalp and skin broke out in dribbling sores which he scarcely noticed. The Ommos, however, avoided him, fearing this disease of scabs to be a new variety of the plague.

Due to the plague, the sprawling caravan found itself halted at the river border of Dorthar. Soldiers menaced with spears. They did not want the sickness carried over. Ras went downstream, forded the river in the deep of night and went on alone.

The journey slid off his senses; only the city awoke him—not to itself, but to his purpose. The pure white bird of Koramvis on her nest of fire left him unmoved. There was no room in him for curiosity; the capacity for observation had long since starved on the aridness of his soul. So he saw nothing beautiful, and neither did he see the turmoil which was eating like a worm between the whiteness.

In almost every thoroughfare there were soldiers—mostly mercenaries of Iscah and Corhl, or black Zakorians. In other parts, mainly the narrower, poorer byways of the city, families were packing their belongings in readiness for flight. Cooking utensils and piles of clothes and furniture were stacked precariously in carts. In a shadowless doorway a carrier was extracting his fee from a cow-faced whore.

Everywhere there was an aching tension, an absence of children playing in the streets. Wine shops had closed their shutters like pursed lips.

To these things Ras was impervious. He rode, gazing ahead of him, slow and dumb, an ugly apparition—a tangible form to some, perhaps, of the sudden, unlooked-for superstitious fear that held Koramvis. For here, too, they had begun to believe in magicians.

He crossed the Okris at noon and began to ask the road he must take. Men laughed at him and spat on the blazing pavements.

“Kathaos! Listen, Yull, this wants Kathaos, by the gods.”

A woman crouched on the steps of a temple where sweet smokes rose into the sky glanced up and pointed in answer to his toneless query. Later, an urchin led him to the wall of a great villa and picked his pockets of all their little coins.

Above the gate, the dragon of Alisaar was worked in bronze. Two guards slouched with narrow eyes.

Ras hesitated. His mind saw only the immediacies of entry. He turned back a street to where he had half seen a well.

Minutes later Am Kathaos’s two guards metamorphosed from their slouching with oaths, for a Lowlander stood on the paving, looking up at them with gelatinous, mosaic eyes.

Lyki straightened and idly began to rock the cradle in which her child was lying. Her child, and the son of Raldnor. Its nurses had taken to calling it Rarnammon, and she imagined they did so to spite her. Its hair was a series of coiled darknesses, like flower buds growing on its small skull. Its eyes were curious—neither dark nor golden but strangely both at once—and its face was sullen and apt to turn purple, like a bruised fruit, when its digestion or its emotions troubled it.

Lyki rocked passionlessly, and the child stared at her with an aloof distrust to match her own.

Several gems glittered on her hand. Her dress was of a rare embroidered silk. Her rank, since Astaris Am Karmiss had perished, was considerably improved. She enjoyed, as Koramvis had observed, the personal protection of the lord Kathaos. Many of Astaris’s handmaidens had not been so fortunate.

Lyki herself was unsure of her position. While she had carried the child, Kathaos had made no proposition of any kind, save that she remain within his house, and she felt this gallantry due not to courtesy on his part either toward her or her condition, but merely to the fact he had no immediate need of her and yet foresaw a need at some future time. She knew that he would use her in whatever manner seemed good to him, and the knowledge made her nervous, even while she could discover no alternative. Once the child had been born and he had bethought himself of the matter, he had wooed her with all the lascivious pertinacity of a lover. Again, she realized, he did so with no sincerity, but because it amused him to do so. And indeed, his goal once achieved, his amatory interest had been brief.

She took her hand from the cradle. The baby kicked among the covers. She saw, with a strange and bitter gladness, that it would not develop Raldnor’s beauty.

There was a sudden noise in the inner court. Lyki heard feet running and voices calling for Kathaos. With a swift start of terror, she envisaged the enemy already at the gates, but the quietness of Koramvis all around her instructed her that whatever the event, it belonged to this house alone.

She crossed to the long window and stared down.

The court was rectangular, laid with black and white flags and dominated by a curious fountain. The water and the spray were constructed from faceted crystal, and ivory lilies were set in. No doubt the deception was well suited to Kathaos’s tastes. Sometimes birds would fly to the surface and attempt to drink, their claws clicking among the frozen flowers.

At the fountain were two guards, dressed in Kathaos’s yellow, and between them was a small skeletal man, whose face and neck were splotched with sores. He was a Lowlander.

Lyki’s head swam; she clutched the upright of the window to steady herself. It was not the man below who produced this effect on her, but the emanation of another man, suddenly conjured in her brain.

A second after, Kathaos appeared in one of the doorways which opened onto the court.

He was quite calm, apparently uninterested. She had expected nothing else.

“What do you imagine that you want?”

A series of shudders ran over the Lowlander. His voice, when it came, was cold and muffled, as if it rose from a tomb.

“I can tell you something that will help you, Lord Councilor. I can tell you something about Raldnor, Ashne’e’s son, that will make Koramvis uneasy.”

Lyki felt fear burn her throat, fear and something else, as she gripped the window and recalled Raldnor the Sarite. At the court, and in the streets, the Lowland king was never accorded any other name than this. The lower city knew him as Raldnor Bride-Stealer, for they had nothing to gain by forgetting Astaris. Only in the presence of Amrek himself did they desist. There, men did not speak of Sar. Many of the captains and commanders grumbled amongst themselves concerning Kren, the Dragon Lord, who had harbored an enemy of Dorthar, but their weapons of spite were compulsorily sheathed.

“It will take more than a visitation of rats to make Koramvis afraid, Lowlander,” Kathaos said.

“But there are more rats than you think. Consider Saardos and Shaow. Raldnor doesn’t work alone. There are ships and men stealing in from a place beyond the sea, of which Dorthar, in her magnificence, knows nothing.”

“For an informer,” Kathaos murmured softly, “you’re notably arrogant. Why betray your own people? Can it be that it’s your Raldnor who sent you here? For some obscure reason—to create panic, perhaps?”

The man in the court smiled, but it was like the grinning of a skull.

“I no longer have a people. I have a wish. I want Raldnor to die, soon, and when he is dead, I want you to kill me, Lord Councilor.”

“On that point at least you can rest assured.” Kathaos turned to the guard. “Take him inside.”

As they moved in through the doorway, Kathaos said without raising his eyes to the window: “Follow us, Lyki. I shall expect you.”

Yet when she obeyed him, trembling with vague fright, she found herself shut out, to wait, presumably, on the Lowland creature’s mouthing.

Once she had heard a story in this house that Kathaos had long ago known Raldnor to be the child of Rehdon. Oh, how little she knew this devious man who now had such access to her life.

At last he let her in. The Plainsman was gone; she had no notion where—whether to reward or instant death.

Kathaos said immediately: “How is the child today?”

She looked at him without comprehension, startled at the seemingly irrelevant question.

“He does well enough.”

“Good.” Kathaos smiled. “I’ve been thinking it a great pity that Raldnor never saw his son.”

At once, though still without understanding, she was overwhelmed by terror.

The streets of Karith were empty. Although the plague had not penetrated here, three days since had come the news of Goparr’s fall, and the Ommos fled before a magician’s shadow. Only a few abandoned pet animals wandered to and fro, searching for shelter or food.

In the brain of the watchtower, a Dortharian soldier gnawed on a stick of roast meat and scanned the sky. He scarcely credited Kathaos with sanity, however the Council at Koramvis had seen things. As much expect ships to whistle out of the clouds as from a make-believe land over the sea. He doubted greatly if any such existed. The thought of the doomed garrison at Hetta Para bothered him also. Who knew for sure whether or not plague germs lurked here? Damned Kathaos, certainly, had no concern for a private pushed every way on other men’s business.

And he hated the deserted town, full of cold echoes and ghosts. It was hot in the tower, yet he felt the occasional urge to shiver. Zastis hung like a wicked scarlet rip in the night, and he wanted a woman; his need was distracting and imperative. He longed for the end of the watch. Every so often, from some hovel in the town, he heard a girl screaming. Most probably she was in labor, and her Ommos husband had thought her too cumbersome to take with him in his flight and left her to the will of Zarok. The soldier was not unduly concerned with her discomfort and certain terror, but whenever the cries came, they pared his nerves to the quick. He longed to go out and find her, and beat her into silence.

He finished with the meat, slung the bone from the open window and heard it crack on the court below. There was the patter of frenzied claws, and some small animal made off with it into the shadows. Beyond the court, the rock stretched down some forty feet to the pale smudge of the beach, where little ripples chased each other. On the sand he made out the stark line of catapults and, on the sea itself, the bobbing, anchored Ommos fishing boats extending away parallel to the shore as far as the eye could see.

Idly he looked farther out, toward the horizon. A dark, dimly smoking mass was moving there.

An instant’s sheer panic choked his throat. He remembered Alisaar, taken unaware in her sleep, by a fleet come from nowhere; then he flung himself to his feet, plunged up the three steps to the cupola where the giant bell hung on its ropes and dragged it into life.

Faintly, over the water, they heard the bell ringing in the hot silence.

They were soldiers of Vathcri and Vardish sailors, carried together in the great beaked vessels that had once been forest trees; there were also Shansarian pirate ships, their black sails like gall in the light of the Star. They had come a long way to see this strip of land, this fortressed town, and waited a long while for the signal-sending of the white-haired man they called now Raldanash.

Jarred of Vathcri stared ahead.

“Ships, captain.”

“So it is, my lord. But no men on ’em.”

Eyes scanned for any movement on those low decks. The movement came instead from the rocky beach beyond.

“Catapults!” Jarred cried. His urgency possessed him. He ordered his vessel to fire, but the white streamer fell short and sizzled in the sea.

“By Ashkar!” the captain shouted. “My lord—their gods have driven them mad! They’re not aiming at us, but at their own vessels.”

Orange flame burst and arrowed from the shore and lodged among the little rigs and skimmers lying idle on the water.

Men cursed and marveled. The Shansarians laughed and roared their contempt into the flaring night.

The first explosion burst from the Ommos boats as if a monster had woken in the sea.

A column of pure flame gushed outward and upward, eighty feet in height, accompanied by a waterspout of scalding blackness that crashed down upon the foremost Vathcrian galleys. Red light bled across the whirlpool, and flame ran after. In the wake of the first convulsion, a second followed, then a third, a fourth, each one giving rise more rapidly to others, as the inferno spread from vessel to vessel. The whole sea thrashed and boiled.

“Oil—” The captain wept, kneeling, blinded on the deck.

Men screamed as the heat peeled skin from flesh.

Jarred’s ship was the first to catch alight.

Her sail screwed itself into wizened papers, like a moth’s wings caught by a huge candle. The figurehead of Ashkar began to melt, dripping its ivory like wax. Timbers blazed up. The sea was a pool of liquid gold.

Men jumped from burning hulks and perished in the burning water. The air was thick with smoke and screaming.

The ships of Shansar, more to the rear, fell back, taking what men they could, leaving the pride of Vathcri to split and fry.

No other menace came from the shore. There was no need. The raging wall of fire ran every way.

The casks of oil in the Ommos boats continued to erupt, blotting out the sky. The conflagration lasted through the night.

In the pink smoldering fog that came with dawn, small sea creatures lay dead at the foot of Karith, and the stripped corpses of men floated and rapped with half-bone hands against her rocks. One of these bodies was Jarred’s. Of the enemy fleet there was no sign, save for those still-smoking ruined trees, with their curious charcoal prows lying broken sideways like the necks of swans.

“How does he know these things, Yannul my friend? Has this Raldnor I used to go whoring with become a sorcerer out of a book?”

Yannul shrugged. He and the Xarabian Xaros had struck up a wary camaraderie, partly to persuade the factious Lans and Xarabs in the camp that it might be done. At dusk the Vis sections of the army had been in good spirits. Goparr had fallen and was the first stronghold they had looted. She had tried treachery in her first surrender, and Raldnor had given her over to rape and sack with the merciless justice they had come to expect of him. The Lowlanders had taken no part in that. They sat silent at their cookfires, speaking no doubt in their skulls, Xaros sourly concluded. He too experienced that uneasy uncertainty about the Plains men and their mechanical, emotionless abilities.

Now the Sending had come, or whatever in Aarl it was. Somehow, by some mentally immoral method, Raldnor now knew that a segment of the allied fleet had been driven from Ommos, and more than half of the segment destroyed.

“Whatever else, one thing’s for certain,” Xaros said. “The Dortharian and Ommos soldiers at Karith will be out on the road to meet us, and no help from your otherland friends.”

“Their young King died in the sea,” Yannul said. For various reasons this had distressed him. He had come in some ways to equate Jarred with the boy-monarch of Lan.

“That’s bad, but reaches all of us. I regret I’ll never see my Helida again—a prize among women, who thinks with her brain more often than her pelvis, which is uncommon. Ah, nostalgia, Yannul. I wonder if she’ll put up a shrine for me, or simply hop into bed with one of my damned father’s rich and handsome younger brothers. And who is that girl you ache for these Zastis nights? Ah, yes, the golden Lowlander Medaci.”

Yannul grinned.

“And what of the Tarabithybannion—whatever-god-forgotten-name-it-is fleet off Dorthar? If the dragons know the plan, there’ll be trouble there as well. No, wait, I can surmise. Raldnor has sent to warn the ships.”

“So he has.”

“Oh, by the gods. I should have been resigned to it. I suppose he’ll settle the Karith force by magic, too.”

“Who knows, Xaros. The plague in Ommos was strange. And I told you of the dustwind at Vathcri.”

“On the assumption that we should save our pitiful strength for Koramvis, what stands between us and Dorthar now, apart from Karith?”

“Hetta Para due north, mostly evacuated. And a small Dortharian garrison across the river to keep out possible plague carriers.”

“I have a plan,” said Xaros, “improbable only in its genius. Come with me to Raldnor, and let’s show him what honest clods can do by a bit of verbal wrangling.”

When they went through it, the camp was bright with fires and there were Ommos women still about in it, though Goparr lay some miles behind. These at least seemed to have preferred Lannic and Xarabian rapine to Ommos peace.

Forgis of Ommos, the bullock fat captain of the mixed troops from Karith, sweated in the early sun and stared where his scout had pointed. He did not like this work in the heat, nor the five hundred Dortharians who laughed at him—and not behind his back, though it was broad enough.

“Well, well? What am I to be looking for?”

“A rider, on the slope, coming from the direction of the Lowlanders’ camp, sir.”

“Plains man?”

“No. See, sir—he’s dark.”

Forgis wiped sweat from his eyes, but could not make this out. Nevertheless, he struck a spearman on the shoulder.

“Ride, you oaf, and bring him down.”

The man plunged off in a wash of dust. But there was no need of him. The rider met with some sudden difficulty, his beast floundered and fell and the man rolled off, over and over down the scarp, to end in an untidy curl at the bottom.

Forgis rode up without undue haste. The man shifted, groaned, sat up, and rubbed his face gingerly with long brown fingers. The zeeba had wandered uncaringly away and was cropping the grass. Forgis let out a slow laugh. The man turned and stared at him vaguely. The fall seemed to have jolted the wits out of him.

“Xarabian, are you? Where do you come from? The Lowlanders’ camp?”

The Xarabian’s mouth worked anxiously.

“No—I—” He broke off and appeared to be searching for an adequate excuse for his presence there.

Forgis spat.

“We cut up dogs like you and feed them to the beasts. If you want to live, be hasty. Where are you going? And why running away?”

“I—the gods of Koramvis—”

“Gods?” Puzzled, Forgis frowned. “What is this talk of gods?”

“They’re dead,” the Xarabian suddenly said.

“Dead? Who is dead? These gods? Gods cannot die.”

“Sentries huddled at their fires, some in their sleep. All dead.”

The scout said in a dry excited voice: “Do you mean the Lowland army?”

“No longer,” the Xarabian said.

“If they’re dead, who has killed them?” Forgis grumbled.

The scout backed off.

“Plague, perhaps, sir. You, Xarabian, stand away. You may carry the disease.”

The Xarabian slunk aside.

Forgis barked orders, then turned and said: “You will guide a detachment of one hundred Dortharian foot soldiers to witness this thing.” He grinned at his own cunning. If there were sickness, let the accursed-of-Zarok catch it.

The Xarabian began to protest in terror, but a drawn sword quickly changed his mind.

So it was, an hour later, the Dortharians, emerging over a rise on the old Goparrian-Karith road, saw their enemies stretched out below them in the myriad ghastly attitudes of painful death.

The dragons went no closer and did not linger; neither did they retain their guide who had begun to clutch his belly and groan.

In a spume of dust they marched back along the road, and thence back to Dorthar and her white city, where, for a time, there were crazy rejoicings in the lower quarter.

There were rejoicings also in the camp of death once all the corpses had rubbed life back in to their stiff limbs, put out a burning tent and caught several strayed zeebas. It was the best and last joke of the march, and Xaros was a hero who would take his place thereafter in any decent saga, as a prince of deception.

“So much for magic,” Xaros remarked. “And now I think of it, I was lucky they didn’t turn the tables on me and grant me a quick death with a sword.”

In Dorthar the laughter presently stopped.

News limped in of fires along the Zakorian coast and Hanassor besieged, while the remnants of the fleet driven off from Ommos had fallen in frenzy on Karmiss, and her nights also were now full of smoke.

From the river quarters on the Ommos border the dispatches were very late. At last a solitary man reached Dorthar and died of his wounds in the streets of Koramvis, like a warning.

The Lowland force was alive; he had seen them. They had razed Hetta Para and crossed the river, wiping out the small camp there with ease.

No trepidation or superstition had really prepared the Vis. It seemed unthinkable. The scum of the Serpent Woman had touched the soil of Dorthar with its feet, had drawn in lungfuls of her dragon air. Despite all hindrance and all probability, they had, at last, become all too real.

23

Kathaos smiled at his guest.

“I hope the wine is agreeable to you, Lord Mathon. A subtle vintage from Karmiss, which I fear may never produce grapes again. We must make the most of it.”

Mathon shivered and set aside the wine, which had the color and suddenly the taste of blood.

“Yes, this thing seems to have grown unstoppable.”

“That, my Lord Warden, is because inadequate steps were taken.”

“But a rabble, and so few of them—Ultimately they must fall before the strength of Dorthar’s arm,” Mathon concluded querulously.

“I am soothed to find that you think so, my lord.” Casually Kathaos added: “Had you heard? Two days ago some of the Sarite’s Vis troops rode east and sacked Kuma. As I ascertain, merely for provisions and exercise.”

“Kuma. The Queen’s birthplace.”

“Indeed. A minor town yet a healthy one, and under the circumstance that it has produced royalty, worth repayment. But still, I believe, the Lord Amrek considers it unwise to meet the Lowlanders in battle.” These words were spoken without inflection, but Mathon twitched, sensing an awkward drift in the conversation.

“It’s near, then. Siege perhaps,” he muttered.

“Such a thing seems incredible. But yes, my lord, I think it may even come to that. I gather that several of our most notable citizens are making for Thaddra, and the dregs of the lower city are already gone. In addition we have the soldiery which Yl Am Zakoris has so kindly loaned us, kicking its heels at every corner. Soldiers become bored with inaction and pick quarrels. They also eat a good deal.”

“I’m certain, Lord Councilor, that Amrek will move when the time is right . . .” Mathon said uneasily.

Kathaos smiled at him again.

“Indeed yes. Besides, we have our own garrison, do we not?”

Mathon balked at this hint of Kren. He made some excuse about his duties and rose. He thought: “I am an old man. I cannot be expected to parry the thrusts of this intriguer. What does he want me to do? Very well, so he has saved us from the pirates by strategy, and is more clever than Amrek. Can I make him King of Dorthar? He has the Council already in ferment. Ah, why cannot Amrek rouse himself?”

In the taverns where they had been billeted, Yl’s mercenaries boasted and swore, picked their teeth and spat out wine that was not to their liking. Occasionally they would clash with Amrek’s soldiers, churning the byways into arenas of dust and blood. Their commanders agitated at the palace, seeking an audience with the Storm Lord. The streets became rowdy and unsafe after twilight. A well-born girl of twelve was raped near the river bank in the upper city by a Zakorian captain, and the matter hastily smothered. Dorthar had no wish to insult her benefactor, Yl, by a public whipping.

The great brazen heat of the warm months became unbearable. The sky pulsed like a tautened skin; clouds painted on it in white ink never moved. The Okris withered and shrank in its margin, sucked dry, showing its stagnant dirt now, and the harvest of garbage and discarded furniture thrown in by the people. A stench rose from the low water, and river things crawled up the mud and died on the paving at the top. Slaves were sent to clear the wreckage before the rotting plates and bedclothes bred an infection.

The priests in the temples raised their arms, spilling the blood of black bulls and pale birds. Rolling in trances, they declared that the drought was a sign of coming thunder. The Storm gods were preparing to strike the Lowlander down.

Crops burnt up in the fields like tinder. Slaves took their meager possessions in the night and fled to Thaddra, though sometimes their masters caught up with them. All along the white road leading through the plain before Koramvis, men and women were hung on poles to die.

Koramvis, the thinking jewel, the heart-brain, had become a refuse pit of dying things and their decay.

In the last month of Zastis a scarlet signal shot from the watchtower on the plain.

A man in Kathaos’s livery rode through the shouting streets.

At the gate of Kathaos’s villa a crowd of supplicants had gathered, pleading for his aid, shrieking for transport with which to abandon the city. Guards stood massed, keeping the hordes back with a hedge of spears. Men in despair beat their fists against the wall. The rider forced his way into the courtyard, flung himself down and ran in through the high doorway.

Kathaos met him in the striped shadows of a colonnade, and his face, for once, was as fierce as a leopard’s. Beyond a filmy curtain, the messenger made out a woman standing with her hands pressed to her mouth.

“Well?”

“My lord, they’re half a day’s march from us.”

“And Amrek—”

“—is sick, my lord, unable to leave his bed.”

Kathaos nodded, turned without a word and thrust aside the curtain with his hand. Lyki stared up at him. The paint on her eyes and lips was too vivid, for she was suddenly very pale.

Into the small room where he sat the dusk came crowding, full of shadows and unheard sounds. It filled the corners and swirled about the chair like the sea. Beyond the high window only the mountains showed—vast looming blocks, with the color and apparent substance of the tinted sky.

“You are ours,” the mountains said to him. “The son of our mornings, conceived beneath the shade of our bones. Come up, come with the dark. We will conceal you and keep you safe.”

“No,” Amrek said aloud. The noises and flickerings of the dusk flurried and resettled. “No. I am a king. My penance for that is that I must grapple with devils tomorrow, with the firstborn of the Lowland serpent-witch. Yes, I’ve sent them word that we fight, that I’ll lead them. And I’m afraid, afraid, afraid. And I can’t keep from thinking it: Here is my doom, my destiny. A coward. Yes. What else? Last of the line of Rarnammon, and I have no son to follow me. Wait, Raldnor. Hold off until I’ve had time to marry and get myself a boy on her.”

Amrek laughed softly. He shut his eyes. The room was suddenly full of a dark garden and the scent of trees. A voice at his elbow said to him: “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. I can deal with my enemies, my lord, if I live. And yours, too.”

“Well, Raldnor,” Amrek said aloud. “Well. The enemy is at the gate, the men with their knives. How will you defend me?”

At the brink of the plain below Koramvis, Raldnor’s army made its camp in the twilight.

Red smoke still floated in the still air over the watchtower, a mile away down the valley. A road began among the burned-out orchards and wound off toward the elevation of the lower hills and the distant, silhouetted diadem of towers that was the city. There were no lights on the plain, but they had made out that marching line of poles where slaves had been hung, rotting in the fire of day.

There was a great silence on the camp. The Lowlanders moved as ever in their passive unemotional way; over the Lans, Elyrians, Xarabians and those of mixed blood a vast quiet had descended. Until now they had ridden on an adventure—with a stirring of the soul, with luck and trickery, with a chance, also, to turn back. Now, confronted by this ultimate symbol, Koramvis, they sensed what they had done, and they, like the Dortharians, were numbed by it. They had reached a supreme, an unthinkable goal. And thereby given it power to destroy them.

Koramvis, the beautiful and the strong.

Yannul, as he honed the blades of long swords in the glare of crackling flames, visualized the wide gates opening in the new day, spilling the might of Dorthar.

“They were waiting, lazy, letting us come to them for the plucking,” he thought. “There should have been help from Shansar and Vathcri with us, Tarabine men marching over those mountains to take the Dragons from the back. But a traitor ran to Koramvis, and now no other man will come. Death in the morning. A few hours away. Gone beneath the hooves and the chariot wheels. Made into dung to fertilize their blighted fields, carrion for their birds to eat. Oh, creamy-breasted Anack of the Plains, why bring a man so far to die?”

Yannul glanced about. A Lowlander was at his shoulder.

“Come,” he said.

“Come where, and for what?”

The Lowland man pointed. Men were leaving their fires. Lans and Xarabians, leaving their women and the spoils they had snatched from Kuma, moving up beyond a line of orchard trees, out of sight.

“What’s up there?” Yannul asked, his scalp unaccountably prickling.

“We go to pray.”

“To pray—ah, no. I’ll spend my last night alive in other sports, many thanks.”

The Lowlander said no more and walked away after the others. Yannul turned back to the pile of weapons.

The crackle of the fire became very loud. The sky darkened, and the last flush of flame on and over the mountains guttered out.

Yannul’s back began to crawl. He slung down a sword with a curse, got up and stared about. Even the women had gone now. Only an empty slope remained, dotted with little fires.

He went up after them, in among the trees. In the dark, men stood in a union of vast soundlessness.

“Pray,” Yannul thought, “to what? To Anack?”

Then he felt the curious whisper in his brain.

He started. Could they invade Vis thoughts now? But no, this was something different—an awareness only of the humming intensity all about.

Will. Why call it prayer? Prayer was their instrument; they used it like cloth to fashion a garment, like the stone he had used to sharpen blades.

“Well, I, too, can will to live out tomorrow.”

It seemed quite natural then, the linking of his consciousness with those about him, in a common cause of self-preservation, though the air sizzled and thrummed as if before a storm.

Under the torch-lit gate of Koramvis, a covered carriage rolled toward the valley plain.

Within the musty dark, Lyki snapped shut her eyes. All this, she knew, was a game to Kathaos—more fascinating in the irony and skill than in likelihood of success. She gnawed her lip in a sudden extremity of fright. “May the gods damn him!” She felt her heart twisting in on its own raw blackness of anger and fear.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw Ras on the wooden seat opposite her. His face was like white enamel, and she wondered if he could see hers as well, for the darkness of her skin.

“Why are you doing this, Lowlander?” She had tried to keep all pleading out of her voice, but her tone betrayed her. At first she thought he would not answer, but then he said, quite gently: “I hate him. I hate Raldnor.”

“Do you hate me too?”

“You?” He stared at her as if seeing her for the first time.

“If we do what Kathaos wants, I’ll die. They’ll kill me.”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” he said, but there was no malice in his voice.

“What about the child? The child will die too.”

“Raldnor’s child.”

In a sudden gesture of defense, Lyki drew the child close to her, shielding it with her arms. She had carried it inside her and labored harder to bear it than she had previously labored at anything, and now a man who knew nothing of pregnancy or birth brushed away its little span of days as lightly as a feather. She looked down at its swarthy dreaming face, the black curls like wisps of fern clustering on its broad, low forehead. They had given it a medicine to make it sleep, to shut its strange, accusing eyes, and muffle its demanding mouth. She bowed her head over it, absorbed once more in her own bitterness.

Many years before, another court woman, whose name had been Lomandra, had come this way, down this pale road, from Koramvis, carrying a child in her lap.

Almost an hour passed, marked by the faint creaking of the carriage, the uncertain rumble of the wheels as they left the road and took to the hilly paths between the cibba groves and drought-blasted fruit trees.

At last the carriage came to a halt, and the silences of the plain gathered around them. Their driver jumped into the grass, dragged back the curtains and stood waiting. He put out his hand to Lyki to help her, and his mouth was crooked with contempt. She longed to spit her venom into his face. She thrust off his hand and pulled her mantle about her until it hid both her and the child. Beyond the trees she saw the red suggestion of firelight. Suddenly her limbs seemed to dissolve and she felt as weak as if death had brushed her—but not from fear alone.

The Lowlander took her arm—a casual, deadly touch. They began to walk.

At first the enemy camp seemed deserted. No movement or sound emanated from it. Then came a sudden burst of singing over the slope, and hands clapped in a Xarabian dance, and there was laughter.

She marveled at their confidence on this eve of death.

Suddenly there was a guard silhouetted in front of them against the fire haze; he was carving a stick with his knife.

“Who’s there?”

“Peace, friend.” Light slanted on Ras’s hair. The Lan relaxed, showed his teeth and stood aside for them. He winked at Lyki’s averted face.

“As good a way as any to wait for a battle.”

Irrationally, Lyki felt fury seize her, because the sentry imagined that she had given herself to this thin pocked man. Then the camp was all around them. There was the smell of food cooking, and steam rose from iron caldrons slung over countless fires. It was now a place of dimly seen movement, vaguely heard voices, smoke going up, animals cropping turf at their pickets, everything blurred together by the smearing flame light.

No one spoke to them.

At the head of one of the tent lanes, a deserted fire was burning in a circle of stones. Cibbas grew thickly here, casting a dense shadow. Ras went to the hearth and seated himself. Meat bones lay whitely in the grass, and scraps of bread from a finished meal. All around the camp, the orchards and vineyards ran in seared acres under the blistering stars. Lyki thought for an instant she might slip away when Ras took his cold eyes from her. Yet she knew that he would never look away, would never allow himself to be distracted.

“Why do we wait?” she asked eventually.

“There will be men in the tent with him—Yannul the Lan, and the Xarabian; some of my people, maybe. When they leave him, I shall see them go.”

She looked about them for some Commander’s pavilion, but all the tents were the same.

“Which is his tent?” she whispered.

“There.”

Her heart stabbed and she shivered in the boiling night.

When the flap was opened, yellow light spilled out, shocking her. Men moved away across the camp, two of them laughing together.

Ras got up.

“Come now.”

Lyki stared at him. She clung to the child and found she could not move.

“Come.” He crossed to her and took her arm, pulling her slowly, without menace and without gentleness.

“There will be a guard,” Ras said softly. “Walk toward him, and I’ll take him from behind.”

She nodded dumbly. Stumbling, she began to make her way between the cibba trunks. She saw the guard now, a Lowlander, leaning on his spear impassively.

He caught sight of her at once.

“How can I help you?”

Lyki opened her lips, but her mind had emptied. She knew that her terror must be evident in every part of her. While she stood there helplessly, Ras came from the dark and felled the guard with a stone.

“There’s no one to stop you now,” she hissed at Ras. “Go into the pavilion and kill him, and let me go.”

He glanced up. His eyes were like the eyes of a banalik, scalding her with hate, and she knew her plea was useless.

“You must kill him,” he said, “as Kathaos intended.” He smiled, but without humor, probably without even realizing he did so. “He would never let me kill him. He would come into my mind and stop me. You must do it.”

“Oh, but he’s a sorcerer,” she snarled scornfully, trembling. “Can’t he look into my mind too?”

“You are Vis. Your minds are shuttered, even to Raldnor.”

She turned away and took the flap of the tent entrance abruptly in her hand, and it astonished her—the reality of the leather between her fingers. She held it open a little way and stepped through, and let the fold slap shut behind her.

There was only one man in the tent, reading beneath a lamp. He looked up slowly, without surprise, and the lamplight fell on his face.

She had not known how she would look at him, but she could not take her eyes away. She had not known if he would seem different to her, and she found him changed, utterly, yet indefinably the same. His sheer physical beauty she had remembered well, yet not well enough, it seemed, for now she was amazed by it. She found that she could not believe that this was the man with whom she had locked limbs, whose shoulders she had imprinted with the marks of her kisses, and her teeth and her nails. Those memories of passion which had tortured her through Zastis, became terrible, awesome in this drab tent, as though she boasted copulation with a god.

“Lyki,” he said.

“Yes,” she whispered, “I’m Lyki.” She pushed the hood back from her hair and the cloak from her shoulders. She wore a black dress, without ornament, and carried the child pressed against her, wrapped in a shawl. She raised this burden now and held it out to him mechanically. “I’ve brought you your son.”

Despite Ras’s certainty, he seemed to see into her, piercing her brain with pitiless clarity. At last he came toward her, and his nearness made her afraid, as the eyes had done. He lifted the child lightly from her arms.

“Your son,” she repeated. “I never gave him a name, but my women call him Rarnammon. A joke you will no doubt appreciate.”

The baby in his hands awoke now, yet did not cry, and she felt a sudden fierce jealousy run through her and longed to snatch it back from him, and hide it again inside her cloak.

“Unfold the shawl,” she said. “He brings you a gift.”

The tiny gilded box lay on the child’s chest, tied there by a ribbon.

“This?”

He eased up the lid. She caught the glitter of the golden chain inside. The blood stamped in her skull.

Raldnor turned, holding out the box to her.

“Honor me, madam. Take out the chain and put it round my neck.”

“I?” She drew back. “No—”

“An Alisaarian trick,” he said. “A razor edge, lacquered with poison. Kathaos?” He shut the box and set it aside. “The second time, Lyki, you have betrayed me.”

“Don’t kill me,” she cried out. “I had no choice—Kathaos forced me to obey him—Let me live, for the sake of your son, at least—”

“If I were to say to you, Lyki, that I would spare your life on one condition, that condition being that I take your child and rip it open with this sword, you would let me do it, for that is how you are made.”

She shrank away from him. Then, when he held out the child to her, she seized it and buried her face in its shawl.

“Your death would be useless,” he said. “Therefore you shall not die.”

She longed to weep, but her eyes were dry as if the drought had burned them up. She could not look at him anymore.

Two hours before dawn, Yannul and Xaros, coming from the tent of two sweet-natured women, caught sight of something revolving slowly beneath the high bough of a cibba.

Going nearer, they found a man had hanged himself in the night.

“This is the strange one from Yr Dakan’s house,” Yannul said, “the one with the serpent-hiss name—Ras. Why in the world—?”

“Our traitor, perhaps,” Xaros said.

They cut him down and stowed him out of sight, for since the curious prayer on the slope, the mood of the camp had been too good to have it spoiled.

An hour before dawn the only coolness of the day lay in the burned gardens of the Storm Palace. Already white haze was forming on the shrunken river where decayed lilies stank, and on the river steps, before the palace temple, a flaccid water thing had crawled and died.

The man, dressed in black scale-plate, paused to look at this before turning aside under the portico.

A film of smoke still drifted in the huge and empty aisle. Amrek stood motionless, staring up at the black marble monsters which dominated the gloom. Their long irrids were slurs of dull radiance, their dragon features a blurred impression of some ancient and untranslatable nightmare, half lit by the cups of spooling flame beneath.

“Have no fear, great ones,” Amrek said softly, “I’m here in observance of tradition, no more. I’ll ask you for nothing, as I know quite well you will give me nothing.”

He thought of the child on the morning of the feast, hacking away his flesh with the agonizing and incompetent knife. Pain and revulsion and terror. That hand, that hand with its layered silver scales, which he had slashed over and over again, screaming out to those black gods to accept his blood, his blood, but let the curse of the serpent goddess be taken from him. The screams had circled in the great roof, echoing, becoming one continuous scream. Then Orhn had come, his mother’s bedfellow, the seal of horror and scorn, and later the scales grew back among the jagged scars.

Amrek touched now at the hand, covered by its black glove, the too-thick last finger held grimly by the dark blue jewel. He had known at eight years how potent was the Lady of Snakes, and how little the gods of Dorthar loved him.

“You have no admiration for the weak,” he said to them.

Their very shadow crushed him, buried him, blotted him out.

He opened his eyes and saw the figure of a woman standing facing him across the great, flagged space. The light was attracted dimly to her exquisitely painted face, and to white glimmering points on her throat and hands. He smelled perfume over the temple musk.

“I forbade you to wear that unguent,” he said.

“Did you, Amrek? I’d forgotten.”

He glanced at the gods.

“So it is. My mother comes before me on the day of the battle, wearing the white face of my enemy. What do you want?”

“I shall need transport and an escort. I intend to leave Koramvis.”

He turned to look at her fully. She was smiling, but her eyes were bright with fear, though she had done her best to hide it from him.

“I require the services of your guard, madam. For a war. I can’t spare you fan bearers.”

“Then I’ll take my women and go alone.”

“By all means. I wish you luck with the mob at the city gates.”

Venom came into her eyes now, and into his. Each saw in the other a likeness of the flesh, none of the soul.

“What poor encouragement to the armies of Koramvis, madam—the Queen flying from the back gate while the lord rides from the front.”

“You!” she spat at him. “A lord! A commander! You weren’t made for war, neither for a throne. You should have been a priest, my son, with nothing to do except raise your arms to the gods and entreat their pity.” She paused, and there was more than spite in her voice. “The Lowlander will kill you, Amrek.”

He felt the blood draining out of his heart, not in horror or surprise, but at the perfection of the portent, coming as it did from her lips.

“Yes, Mother,” he said, “I’ve long been aware that he would be my death. I’ve been evading him. Now circumstances have made it impossible for me to escape. Neither, it appears, can you.”

“You coward! You resign yourself to dying and drag as many down with you as you can.”

“It seems to have turned out an unhappy day after all, Mother, that you lay with Rehdon and conceived me.”

He moved away, but she called out to him in a voice that was abruptly wild and fragile with excitement: “Wait!”

He stopped, his back still to her.

“Well, madam. I wait. For what?”

“To hear the truth from me,” she said.

When he faced her, he saw she had again that look, that look she had worn when she told him that the one woman and the one man he loved, had loved each other in despite of him.

“Whatever it is, then speak it,” he said.

Triumph and alarm lit up her eyes. Her words came quickly, one on top of the other.

“Very well. I will tell you. It was said that Raldnor wasn’t Rehdon’s sowing, but the bastard of Amnorh, his Councilor. But which of us doubts that Raldnor comes from Rehdon’s line? It is you, my son, who bear no impression of the sire.”

His mouth moved stiffly.

“I don’t understand you, madam.”

“Don’t you? I must be more explicit then. Rehdon was afraid of me and could give me no child. Without one, I should eventually have lost my high place in favor of a younger, ostensibly more fertile girl. You’ve always called me a whore. Revel in the proof of it. I took Amnorh into my bed, and, unknowing, he got you on me.” Her eyes went blank with old remembered hate. “And then my royal husband, who had no life in his loins for me, mounted a little white bitch-virgin in the Plains and gave her what should have been mine. Can you estimate the irony, Amrek? You, the fool and the cripple, are Amnorh’s distorted seed. Raldnor, not you, Raldnor should have been my son.”

She looked at him, and at that moment her years had caught her up. Cheated of everything, she supposed, she also had been given the power to destroy. But his face showed nothing. His eyes were fixed like the eyes of the blind.

He might have been dead already.

24

From throats of raw bronze the Koramvian trumpets howled—a sound of war unheard in this place for centuries. Every stone of the city answered it. It peeled white layers of birds from their roosts above the Avenue of Rarnammon. Only the clouds kept still—the transparent, shriveled clouds, little flat embryos of unborn rain on an indigo sky that was almost black.

Down the half-empty streets came the soldiers with their drums, rattles and pipes, rank on rank of them; the sun burned on their armored scales, cavalry and chariots, and banners bright as blood. Catapults and other machinery of war passed rumbling on their chains. Men and women peered from windows and galleries, and were heartened. The Lowland magician was outnumbered and greatly outclassed. Here came Amrek’s personal Guard, the white lightning on their cloaks; and there the High King, the Storm Lord in his chariot. Black plate and gold; over that the wide collar and the tall spiked Dragon helm, at which they pointed, as if to remind themselves of Rarnammon, and history itself, which bristled with successful war. A few women flung down garlands, already withered in the heat. Amrek’s face was without expression of any kind, but they noticed mainly his armor. After him came the Zakorians, forgiven now for their indiscretions, striding with their eight-foot maces, and masked in black metal.

At the wide space before the Plain Gate of Koramvis, three bulls were butchered on the marble altar.

Kathaos stood waiting in his armor, his chariot beside Amrek’s. The Lord Councilor had many thoughts to occupy him. He did not know if Lyki had succeeded at her task; it had been a matter of chance, all part of the game, and she, like all the rest, a game piece, one he would not even particularly regret losing. The Council had approved the scheme, though not Amrek—it had been kept from him. If it failed, it would mean little. Confronted by this superior force the Lowlanders could not do much but die, their mercenaries with them. If it had been successful, however, Kathaos would become the hero of the city; it was as simple as that. They still feared the ravages of the pirates, but Dorthar, unleashed, could, they believed, quell such brigands; besides, for this moment, they were the problem of Zakoris and Karmiss, which would perhaps save Dorthar the trouble. Even those who spoke of demons from the sea understood quite well that Raldnor had conjured them—that should he perish, they would perish too. Yes, it was Raldnor they mostly, absurdly feared; his outrageous luck, his reputation and his mother had made him into a figure of ominous brightness.

The last bull bled.

Blue smoke wound upward and whitened on the dark sky.

“And in the coming fight,” Kathaos thought, “if Amrek falls, I carry the Council in my hand.”

He became aware that Amrek was looking at him.

“Where is Kren, my lord?” Kathaos asked immediately. “Do you anticipate the troops of the River Garrison will join us here?”

“I have left Kren to guard the city,” Amrek said. His voice was toneless, empty.

“He has lost hold on life already,” Kathaos thought. “He thinks Raldnor will kill him.”

“But, my lord, there’s some suspicion surrounding Kren. If he were to open the gates to an enemy—”

Amrek’s eyes glittered for a moment with a curious vestige of life.

“You’re blind, Kathaos, as I am. It comforts me to know that.”

They stood under the molten sun, forming a shape dwarfed by the drought-blackened vastness of the plain.

Above, the Dortharians poured from the gate and spread their shining squares across the slope.

Men laughed and swore. If that were the Lowland army, how had they got so far?

A Zakorian roared: “Does it take a grindstone to squash a flea?”

Yet there came no fresh commands. The great mass of soldiery began to move toward the plain, and, from a rise, the first Dortharian catapult jarred and spat. The gobbet of flame fell wide and set the dry trees immediately alight. Smoke obscured the valley. With a sudden cry the foremost lines of Dortharian cavalry broke ranks and galloped down into the fog. Spears leveled, the foot soldiers ran after and the great chariots juddered at the rear.

Amrek felt the vast spasm of movement sweep him up. He was borne along with it, shouting bright men on every side, into the burning darkness of the orchards.

“Aiyah! Aiyah!” The yelling of the charioteers.

The smoke wrapped black across his face like a woman’s veil.

To his left, abruptly, a man screamed and fell dead, an iron shaft through his neck.

Amrek stared at him.

More fire rushed through the air, lighting up the way ahead. Amrek saw a yellow-haired man come running out of the murk toward him with a masklike face, his sword raised.

“My first Lowlander,” he thought. “The first Lowlander I’ve seen this close.” But no, it was not so. Raldnor had been a Lowlander. Raldnor, his brother. And also—yes, a girl, long ago. A white-haired exquisite girl who had died quite literally at his touch, as if he were the incarnation of her death. As Raldnor would be the incarnation of his own. “This man running at me, this man should be Raldnor, bringing my death,” he thought suddenly, but the face was unknown and the raised sword falling.

A Guard had struck the Lowlander down. He fell under the wheels of the chariot.

Val Mala’s women scurried about her apartments, shrill-voiced with alarm, gathering up the costly clothes and priceless jewelry.

The Queen sat in her chair, twisting her hands with frustration and fury.

Amrek.

She was consumed by a final hatred of her son, a clawing paroxysm as she recollected everything—how she had carried him in discomfort and ugliness, her beauty subservient to his needs, how she had borne him in indignity and pain, how she had drawn back the birth robes and seen Ashne’e’s mockery irrevocably branded there.

It did not trouble her that she had at last destroyed him. She had never credited him with humanity; it had never been convenient for her to do so.

Today, she imagined, he would die, and after his death she saw the abyss opening in her path. Other sons of other, lower queens might take the throne, and their heads, and the heads of their mothers, she had anointed with her malice since the morning on which she married Rehdon. She visualized what they would do to her once Amrek’s body lay within the Hall of Kings. Already she had tasted the poison on her lips, experienced the stifling velvet pillow pressed to her sleeping face. This city could no longer be her home. She must abandon it as the rabble had done.

Beyond the long windows, the city lay burning and breathless in the coruscating sunlight. There seemed to be no sound in the world save the clamor which was all around her in this room.

Dathnat, the Zakorian, appeared in the arch-mouth.

“As you ordered, a covered carriage waits for you in the court below, madam,” Dathnat said. Her tone, as always, was precise and clipped. It gave Val Mala an uneasy comfort to know that this woman was totally unmoved. The elements of confusion and distress seemed to shrink away from her, afraid themselves that she would find them unacceptable.

“These fools!” Val Mala said. “They can do nothing. They have the wits of lice. Tell them to be quick. Tell them I’ll give them each a flawless jewel if they hurry.”

“As you wish, madam.” Dathnat’s eyes touched hers for a second. Val Mala met in them the hatred that had amused her once and which now sank into her breast like a weight of cold metal. She thought: “I am surrounded by enemies,” and saw no particular justice in it.

A smell of corruption breathed suddenly across the room. One of the nervous girls let out a shriek. Val Mala turned. The white kalinx stood in the arch. The Queen started; it was like an apparition of death to her.

“Take it away from me!” she cried. “Why isn’t it locked in the court? Which of you fools let it out?”

The women approached cautiously. It snarled at them and crept to Val Mala’s feet, staring with its glazed blue-bubble eyes. It rubbed against her, but she kicked it away.

The kalinx snarled again, aimlessly, showing brown teeth like rotten filberts. It was too old to defend the rags of its existence.

The rheum ran down its bald cheeks like tears.

The Lowlanders, after all, refused to die.

The Dortharians cursed the running fires and fog of smoke which their own catapults had created. The Lowland troops used the smolder as cover, ambushed out of it small groups of soldiers cut off from the rest and slunk away to hide in it when this work was done.

“They fight like tirr, the bastards. How many have we killed?” the captains demanded of their runners. No one knew. They came across bodies with yellow hair, yet there seemed somehow always more of the enemy among the trees, as if the dead replaced themselves by supernatural means.

“Banaliks come to fill their armor when they fall!”

A Dortharian was found screaming in a burning grove.

He whimpered that he had seen a thing pass—half woman and half snake. He had been drunk before the battle; nevertheless someone clouted him over the head to keep him quiet before the panic spread.

Somewhere, from the slopes, the brazen trumpets bellowed a withdrawal.

Sluggishly, the smoke-blackened, scale-plated men pulled themselves out of the trees, the Zakorians coming grim and orderly behind.

Amrek’s commanders crowded to him.

“Storm Lord, we’ve lost few men. The scum must be crippled, but there’s no way to tell in that trap. If we let the fires spread, we can drive them out into the open on the other side and take them cleanly.”

“Do it,” Amrek said. His Guard had served him well; there was not a scratch on him. Yet he seemed in a trance.

A last catapult delivered flame among the orchard trees.

The dragons drank wine as they waited above the smoke.

Glancing up at the blue-black sky, a man said: “No carrion birds. That’s strange.”

“Not enough to feed them of ours, and the skin and bone Lowland muck would stick in their gullets,” his neighbor answered.

Farther along the line, a boy, ladling from the wine pitchers, fell abruptly behind in his task.

“Come on, you. Get a bit of speed on.”

“It moved,” said the boy.

“What moved, you numbskull?”

“There! Look—” The boy pointed, and, staring down, his sergeant saw a tremor disturb the scarlet liquor, ripple and run and flatten out into nothing. He laughed.

“There’s a beetle got in, boy. Ladle up. One of our lucky lads’ll get more in his cup than he reckoned on.”

Yannul the Lan straightened and drew out his blade. The Zakorian, who had stayed behind to fight, crashed down into the bushes.

Now at leisure, Yannul glanced around. The smoke was full of dimly glimpsed figures moving all one way. The dragons seemed to have been called off to let them choke and roast at their own pace. He turned and ran with the general tide between the fires and emerged on higher ground where the smoke lay more thinly. Behind, trees crackled under their pall; beyond those was the glitter of the Vis troops in their immaculate squares, drawn up as before, and waiting.

A great stillness had settled over this place, though he could hear faint shouts and cheers from the Dortharian end of the valley, and the snap of burned wood in the orchards below.

“What now?” he said to the nearest Lowlander, wiping soot and blood from his eyes.

The man turned to him an ash-white face. “Now they die,” he said.

Yannul’s scalp shivered.

“You mean, I think, we die—once they leave off swilling and cheering, and come on.”

Just then the sky turned black as night.

Some of the Vis sections of Raldnor’s army let out cries and curses and stared up at it. The Lowlanders stood like blind statues, paying no attention.

Then there came a new sound across the valley. A sound like a colossal gong beaten underground.

The shadow of the black sky fell over the dragons, and their cheering stopped. In the thick stillness which followed, a man began to gibber. The animals tossed their heads, rolling their eyes and sweating.

“Storm coming,” a soldier said hoarsely. “Look how the trees’re thrashing about.”

In the orchards the cibbas were swaying like dancers. Men pointed at them and made religious signs, for there was no wind.

Then came a great brass mooing, up out of the ground at their feet. Animals reared in fright; men cried out to their gods. On the upper slopes a creaking catapult tilted slowly and fell flaming among the Dortharian ranks. But the ultimate voice came from behind them—the voice of the city, where a thousand bells began to toll.

They turned, struggling with their mounts, staring back toward the white towers of Koramvis, and in that moment they saw the red spout and gush of powdered rock explode silently from beneath her walls, after which the hills ran together, and she was lifted like an offering to the ink-black sky.

Above the city, in the cave of Lake Ibron, the steep sands let go their immemorial hold. Deep down, where colors bloodied into purple, ancient laws of balance became subtly altered, and tidal urges swept the hidden caves.

The first shock cracked through Koramvis. The noise of it was a low metal booming, the single note of a monstrous heart. Lightning turned the sky to glass.

At the second shock, paving lifted by its roots, and fissures spread in a spilling stain. In the lower city, walls burst apart. Lamp poles fell in rows. The river came running sideways up its banks into the collapsing hovels, its water as red as blood. The fleeing wagons overturned, or ran out of control along the roadways.

The great bridge that spanned the river to the south broke at its center, as if under the impact of a gigantic axe, letting go its human freight into the boiling mud.

In the Avenue of Rarnammon the Dragons tumbled from their bases, showering a rain of shattered obsidian across the streets.

Towers leaned and fell.

Fires burst into white flower.

Screaming, calling out to their tottering gods to save them, the terrified and the trapped wailed and shrieked in their agony.

In a celebration of doom, the thousand bells of Koramvis roiled and jangled.

Val Mala stood beside her chair in the tilting room, while gold lamps crashed from the ceiling.

“Dathnat!” she cried.

The bells seemed to beat inside her skull. Her legs were the feeble limbs of an old woman. She dared not cross the room. A girl lay dead before the archway with bloody hair, and in a moment she too would sink forward and the roof would come down across her back.

Miraculously, she felt iron fingers suddenly grasp her arm, supporting her.

“Dathnat—the ceiling will fall—”

“Lean against me, madam,” the dry voice said, without a trace of fear.

Weak with terror, Val Mala could do nothing else.

Dathnat half carried her up the impossible angle of the floor and under the arch. The corridor was full of smoke, for a fire had started in the lower rooms. A stream of ocher gushed from above.

“We must find a way out, Dathnat. Quickly, Dathnat.”

The Zakorian glanced about her, and ahead. The passage seemed blocked by fire; besides, there would be no time to reach the lower courts before the upper portions of the palace gave way. Even so, her gods had not been entirely unjust. Pausing beside an open gallery, Dathnat pointed.

“See how Koramvis burns, madam.”

“Dathnat—have you gone mad? Find a way for me to escape this place before the roof falls and kills us both.”

“There is the way, madam,” Dathnat said.

Val Mala looked down. She saw a terrace laid out with colored flags that seemed from here as small as a checkerboard.

Presentiment came, immediate and undeniable.

“Dathnat!” she screamed.

Dathnat, with one swift and irresistible blow, thrust the Queen over the broken ledge of the gallery. That one thing her gods had left her time to do. Complacently she watched Val Mala spin shrieking to meet the empty stones beneath. After the meeting, she was silent.

In the depths of the rock, Anackire stirred.

The margins of the pool within her had long since widened and filled up the room, bursting the door from its hinges and flooding the stone temple. Now the foaming water had lifted her a little and was thrusting up against the roof of the cave.

Her golden head grazed on the granite above. Over this place huge clefts had already spread themselves as the quake dissolved the structure of the hills. Now the land slid and fell away. Out of the chasm emerged the massive milk-white torso with its burning eyes and hair.

The third shock, the final shock which flung down the last of Koramvis, spewed Ibron up into the cave. The full force of the water came gushing out from the fractured rock, lifting the goddess with it.

Higher and higher the jetting liquid took her. She crested the hills and rose incredibly into the pitch-black sky, a towering moon of incendiary ice and flame.

In the plain, floundering among the craters and the fire, the dragons witnessed that last and most absolute omen. Her eyes like stars, Anackire soared and blazed, crushing them with the eight maledictions of her serpent arms. Now the known laws of their world, which had supported and nurtured them all their lives, betrayed them and brought about the final inrush of Chaos.

They had seen Nemesis. Their world was ended.

The goddess shone like a meteor in the black air, then sank, as the wave relinquished her, out of their sight, into the torn mirror of the lake.

But Kathaos lived and was unchanged. He imagined nothing at the sight of the creature in the sky. Even at the end of the world he was rational, and a cynic. She was a device. He knew it, though her origins at this time held no interest for him. For he understood quite well, despite his logic, that the things he had labored at carried neither significance nor hope in this altered landscape.

Only one thing, therefore, was left. An act that was fitting, if no longer useful.

He rode his chariot along the broken lines, past men clawing in the contrary earth, through the churning flame fight and the purple smoke, and the weeping and the prayers.

He came to Amrek at last. Amrek, the Storm Lord, who had become, through the admission of Chaos, accessible. He looked at Kathaos blankly, without trepidation or violence.

“I beg your pardon, my lord,” Kathaos said. He approached Amrek and stabbed him in the side where the mail was unaccountably rent, as if purposely for his knife. “It is an act compatible with our circumstances.”

Kathaos remounted the chariot and turned the heads of his team toward the first and only break in the sky.

Amrek lay still in the dark. He was not quite dead. Only formless thoughts disturbed him. He was tranquil, until terror came abruptly out of the ground.

Terror had glittering eyes and came sliding and narrow from its black home under the boulder. Terror was a snake.

Amrek’s body jerked helplessly.

The snake wove in circles, its head darting from side to side in frenzy. It, too, was afraid; the earth had also shaken down its world. Suddenly it discerned a refuge. It looped against Amrek’s face and trickled to rest against his throat. He felt its living pulse pressed strongly to his fading one. And abruptly terror stopped. Partnered with his flesh, the skin of the snake was dry and cool and layered like cameo.

“How can I fear this thing?” he thought quite clearly. “Something so beautiful.”

Presently, the snake, restless and seeking now the earth was quiet, left the shelter of the man’s dead body and shivered away across the slope.