The White Serpent

4 The Fire Ride

The city skies were filled by the morning hunt of the hawks. They stooped and fell and rose again, broken prey in their grasp, with an unalterable motion.

Until one single hawk stooped, fell, and continued to fall-Through all the rings of light and color, dawn and distance, it plummeted—into the garbage of an alley.

The man who had come oversea from Vardian Zakoris that morning, was a four-generation mix. His skin was black, his hair light brown, and his eyes, too, had been washed down from the blacks or yellows of his ancestors’, to one of the strange occasional grays you saw now in such breeding. He was otherwise unremarkable, a merchant-trader off one of the score of foreign ships in the harbor.

New Alisaar perhaps interested Vardish Zakorians, still themselves under the full sway of blond rule. For New Alisaar, while she paid dues to her Shansar king in the north, was elsewhere solely independent Vis. And of her ruby cities, the port of Saardsinmey was queen. Ninety years had gone into her building, her long boulevards, her teem of alleys, the red tiling that dragonplated her. She flew into the bargain the three-tailed dragon-banner of the former kingdom. As for the northern half of Alisaar, the Shansarian province, they termed it here, with a scathing lightness, Sh’alis.

It was also a propitious time to be in town. This evening would bring Saardsinmey’s great summer race, the one they called the Fire Ride. The city was a hotbed of wild and spirited gambling, aglow with all the blood-lust and factious rivalry of secondhand danger.

Thinking of this and working at his accounts under the awning on the inn’s roof, the mix trader had not neglected his cup, but others had, and now there was a dearth in it. The inn was of the best, far up along Five Mile Street. You expected decent service.

“Hey!” the Var-Zakor shouted, banging his cup on the table.

The noon hour was a busy one, but the three girls catering to roof top custom were not hurrying, rather pausing here and there to chat and flirt. They were thorough Visians, too, oil-black hair and eyes, and firm brazen skins that seemed to invite a caress, a pinch, or a slap. The Var-Zakor took pride in his own elements of pallor, such as they were. As the nearest girl came leisurely toward him, he gave her a glare which, in certain quarters of the homeland, would have made any Vis step lively. But she only stood by, wine-pitcher on hip, and, what was more, raised her smooth-strung brows at him like two black bows.

He thrust his cup forward.

“The jug’s empty,” she said.

“Then get on and fill it, you lazy cat.”

She was well-dressed, with gold on her arms, no less, and a flower in her hair. She looked back at him and she said, “Keep a civil tongue, if you please.” Making no move to obey.

“Don’t try any of your lip with me,” said the mix. “Get about your business, or do you want something to speed you up, sow-face?”

“You’ve got a foul mouth,” said she. “I doubt if our wine will wash it out.”

At that the mix rose. He brought down his left hand on her shoulder, liking the feel of it even as he drew back his right hand to strike her. To his astonishment—and pain—her knee came up and struck him first in the belly. The trader doubled over, aware even as he coughed for breath that all along the benches customers laughed, thinking it funny. Saardsinmey was a Vis stronghold, and needed teaching manners. Better start with her.

She was hastening back toward the stair when the Var-Zakor caught her. Someone shouted her an amused warning across the tables, but that was all. The mix snared her by her Vis hair and pulled her around. She tried to hit him with the pitcher now, but he pushed off her arm. This time he landed out with his fists. The pitcher went flying and was smashed. She gave a faint scream as she dropped. He had struck her just under the left eye, she would have a fancy bruise to remind her of him, but he was not done yet. As he drew back his foot to gift her a good sound memento of a kick, someone said to him politely, “Wait a moment.” This checked the mix. He glanced up and noticed a stillness had come over the inn roof. Suddenly it was so quiet the rumbling noises of the street below intruded, one might hear crickets in the creepers and the bells on the awning in a passing breeze.

A figure was standing a few feet away, having just come up the stair.

The Var-Zakor beheld the arrival was above average height, and of more than average physique, and Vis naturally, like nine tenths of the city.

Then there was a blur, a surge of motion and heat—in a terrifying rush the mix found himself high in the air—he punched feebly, with all his strength, against the fearsome stamina that held him there so indifferently.

“Listen to Mud-Hair bleat!”

“Throw him off the roof, Lydian.”

“Do it, Lydian. We’ll say he tripped on his little dangler.”

Roars of mirth and applause were followed by some hoots of disappointment. For, returning to the stair, the tall man they had named a Lydian flung his howling burden straight down into the middle courtyard, a mere dozen steps below. Here the Var-Zakor crashed among some pots and lay groaning.

There was a general move, beneath and round about, to observe his condition. But the Lydian had already set his back to the scene. He was kneeling by the girl, who, her palm over her injured cheek, had sat up to lean on his shoulder.

“Let me see, Velva,” He turned her face with care, examining the bruise attentively.

“Has the bastard disfigured me for my life?” she said fiercely.

“Not at all. Take it from one who knows. Here.” He put money in her hand. “Go to the physician on Sword Street.”

The girl abruptly threw her arms round his neck, kissing him and shawling him with her beautiful hair.

“Let him alone, Velva,” voices cried. “Do you want his mind on that before the race?”

The Lydian now laughed, and gently disengaging himself from the girl, rose to his feet.

“I love you,” she whispered. “It was well worth it, that pig’s fist, to be held in your arms.”

“Ah,” he said, and shook his head at her, before walking away across the roof. There was scarcely a woman in Saardsinmey who had not murmured similar words to the Lydian, if only in her waking dreams.

From midafternoon, the shops along Five Mile Street had firmly closed their doors, while quantities of others in adjacent thoroughfares did likewise. Not only were the usual locks and grills employed: In some cases boards were being nailed to the facades. After the Fire Ride there was often fighting in the streets, and no doubt there would be this year, since three of the competitors were blond free men from Sh’alis.

By late afternoon, a thick honey light spooned down on the districts of the city. A peculiar lull had come with it, the hush before the storm.

From several hundred cornices, balustrades and porticos along the celebrated route, flowers roped and banners stood flat on the serene hot air. The three-tailed dragon was out in force, and the blazons of such innkeepers and merchants whose cash helped mount the seasonal sports. Mostly the colors of the contestants were on display, in swags and swathes, spilled from windows, twined in trees and the hair of girls, the reds of Saardsinmey eclipsing the rest. Luck banners had been tied to the poles of streetlights or hung across the way from building to building. They depicted the god Daigoth, patron of fighters, acrobats and racers, and, closer to the waterfront and all along the harbor wall, from God’s High Gate to the Coast Road, images of the sea deity Rorn.

The spectators had been assembling since midday. As the afternoon wore and flushed, they came in droves, piling up the stairways to their bought benches on rooftops and balconies, and all the upper terraces for the length of fifteen miles.

At the head of Five Mile Street, the vast stadium of Saardsinmey was already packed beyond its limits. There were multitudes who preferred to oversee and make judgments—or merely to emote and scream—along the course. But the rest who could afford the price, high tonight as never elsewhere in the whole year, preferred to witness the birth of glory and its killing finish on the stadium straight, despite the long interim of waiting when all there was to guide them were the flare of distant lights across the city, and far-off shrieking, and occasional panting runners with unreliable bulletins.

By the time the first stars raised their silver torches over New Alisaar, in a clear rouged sky, there was barely a quiet pulse beating in Saardsinmey.

The great mirror of glass, which had once poised in a palace of the old capital, now rested in its clawed frame of gilded ebony in the hall beneath Saardsinmey’s stadium. Here men, burnished to the sheen of its gilding, sometimes scarred as its tarnished face, dressed in magnificence to kill or die, would stand a moment, and stare in. It might be the last sight they would ever have of their looks, their wholeness, or their life. It was thought fortunate to touch the mirror as it held you, and to instruct the reflection: Stay, till I return.

Usually the mirror was taller than any who gazed into it. One man matched it, height for height. The Lydian.

He wore the charioteer’s short open-sided tunic, a garment of linen, ruby-red for Alisaar, strapped with red-dyed leather cuirass, belted by golden scale-work. His calves and forearms were also braced by leather, ringed by gold; his black hair drawn back, for the chariots, into a tube of hollow gold. He was altogether a creature of gold as he stood there, of gold and blood.

The faultless proportions of his body, developed through practice, since earliest boyhood, of every physical skill of the stadium (in each of which he excelled), had formed him, built him, like the endeavors of some genius artisan. As indeed they were: He was his own architect. But the head and face of this man had also their perfect proportion. Though the immaculate features were sculpted to strength, it was strength, too, of mind, and spirit. While the eyes, large and vividly black, dreamer’s eyes, misled opponents long, long ago, until the pride of jaw and mouth, or of a simple deadly sword, put them right. There had already been a saying in Saardsinmey, for five or six years: As bright as the sun and as handsome as the Lydian.

Saardsin professional fighters, whatever their original race or merit, however rich they might become, however much courted, however many contests won, or lost, entered these halls as children and remained as slaves. Barring death, there was no manumission from the courts of Daigoth. But then, to be slave here, in this way, was not like the slavery of others.

As for Rehger Am Ly Dis, standing his moment before the surface that once had mirrored Alisaarian nobility, he did not seem like any kind of slave. He looked a king.

Reaching out, the Lydian briefly touched the glass.

“Stay, till I return.”

It was a fact, the man who owned one of the finest seats at the stadium had almost stayed away.

Katemval had had a premonition. If such it could be called.

Leaving the charming house on Gem-Jewel Street, he had parted the curtains of his litter, looking along the avenue in the sunset. Every shop was bolted and boarded-up as far down as the public fountain, where a phalanx of the Guardian’s soldiery was even now marching smartly across the intersection. Then something else caught Katemval’s eye.

In the warm light and shadow, a cold blank omission.

Katemval turned his head sharply—a woman in a white mantle gleamed against some garden wall. White was not the fashion in New Alisaar, its racial connotations were unpleasing. But then Katemval realized that beneath her white veil, her hair shone paler.

They were past.

Katemval almost shouted for the litter to halt. But ordinary sense prevented him, and he let the curtain fall.

Her face had been young—her hair bright with youngness, and she was white-skinned he was sure. Neither age, nor bleach and cosmetics had made that pallor. An unmixed Lowlander, then, the plains race of southernmost Vis, they who had tumbled a world. One heard tell of such albinos, Amanackire they were named, Anackire’s Own, the Children of the Serpent Goddess.

Suddenly he plucked the curtain back again and craned out. But they had turned the angle of the avenue by the fountain, and that part of the street was lost to view.

There was something in this incident, small though it was, that unsettled Katemval. There were certain legendary traditions in the west that showed death as a thin colorless ice woman with claws—

Death was always vigilant. She—it—being ultimately inescapable. So what? How one lived, the gifts of life, these were the valid matters. Death was the end. No less, but decidedly nothing more.

He had watched Rehger in combat and competition at the stadium whenever trade permitted. In recent years, seldom the traveler now, Katemval had been there to watch at every event. He saw Rehger fight, and ride, and strive and win, and fame on him like pure gold. But death was always there, too, and only a fool did not know that. Why be troubled now?

At eighteen, Rehger had lost footing in sand slick with various life-fluids. The sword of the Kandian youth they had paired with him had cleaved the air in a terrible blaze—cutting home into Rehger’s breast, high, against the shoulder. That had nearly been the finish, then. The crowd, Katemval recalled, which had already begun to adore him, becoming one with him as he fought, groaned the sound they termed the death-moan—But Rehger, sashed in his own blood, had steadied himself, and when his adversary came in at him again, returned the blow, this one straight to the Kand’s heart. A year later, on the proceeds of a bet laid, in Saardsinmey’s most honored manner, upon that fighter one most truly loved, Katemval had bought his house on Gem-Jewel Street.

The pale races existed, and maybe might come to see the boxing and sword-play, and the chariots, in Alisaar. To glut their eyes on the Lydian, too, that Katemval had rescued from the mire of backland Iscah. Had he not said to him even, at the first, trying to seal the boy’s destiny to it—Grow for glory, glory days, and a death clean and fair—Stop thinking of it. Katemval chided himself, superstitious, for the litter was by now forcing through the press of people, toward the stadium gate. It was a lamplit, febrile dusk. And here and there the retired taker of slaves heard the friendly cry, “There goes the Lydian’s father!” An old jest, not inapplicable. The father gave life.

“Twenty white pigeons,” Katemval muttered under his breath, in his heart, to Daigoth, as the litter went through the gate. “And a two-year bull. And my most cherished wine to quench the burnt offering. If he lives.” And added, being now thoroughly a resident of the metropolis, “And wins.”

There were ten for the Fire Ride this year. It could accommodate as many as thirteen; often only seven or eight dared it. The prize was weighed on the old measure, twenty bars of gold. But the renown was better.

The slave champions of other places, three long seasons training for it, sponsored and financed by the cities and prospering towns of New Alisaar—and from everywhere else. There were free men, too, who thought it no embarrassment to compete with such slaves as these. Mixes, Vis, the yellow-headed men of the Sister Continent. Flaunting Karmians, dark or blond, and sly Xarabs, whose pretty chariots were unloaded from the ships like courtesans enameled with flowers, the surly Ommos, Dortharians in their pride, their cars with black storm emblems and gold-leaf snakes. Men came, too, from Var-Zakoris, for the Vardian conqueror had his own customs of such racing, as he had had his own rules of war. Conqueror Shansars arrived, the charioteers of ships. And Shansars from Sh’alis, riding their horses overland to be gawped at and envied, though for this evening’s work they had had to learn to manage the hiddrax, the chariot-animal of the Vis, bred to race since the times of the All-King Ramammon.

This night then had brought its usual assortment.

A Thaddrian, a free man and seemingly a bandit-noble, color brown and ocher. An Ott, free man, merchant stock but game and wily, color swarthy cream. A Zakorian, from Free Zakoris, what they called a fighting-leopard, color applicably black. A man from Corhl, a petty princeling, color steel.

For Alisaar, a slave racer from Kandis, highly esteemed, color Alisaar red with rose. And a Jowan aristocrat, one of the Jow Guardian’s nephews apparently, color Alisaar red with black. Saardsinmey’s contender, a slave racer unbeaten in any contest for three years, but never before drawn in Daigoth’s lots for this one, the Lydian, color red with red.

While from Sh’alis the trouble had come. Two mixes, both free men, since no man with a touch of fairness in his pigments might be lawfully a slave. One Shalian with the color raw yellow, the other yellow with blue. And last, a Shansarian lord who owned estates in Sh’alis and in Karmiss, color white.

(White. There was the answer to the riddle. In his box now Katemval, having glanced along the program, neatly copied and brought him by a stadium scribe, acknowledged respite. If the Shansar devil could bring ten horses with him he would not need—he had—why not an Amanackire mistress with whom to ride after the Ride?)

It was full night now, the sky above the stadium deep as a bowl of ink and splashed by stars. Along the terraces, the lamps were dim, the wicks trimmed purposely low, or capped by smoky vitreous. Tension close as darkness, waiting for the storm to break.

The stadium trumpets sounded.

A huge single cry went over the stands, and was echoed all along the wide artery of Five Mile Street.

In the dense torchlight under the stadium, the chariots had been drawn up waiting. The teams of hiddrax, backed into the shafts one quarter of an hour before, catching the night’s fever, pawed the ground and shook their long heads, the light flowing over their groomed and burnished skins, their adornments of metal and ribbons.

The brass dice of Daigoth had been cast, each position allocated. Now the priests came along the line, to foreigner, free man and slave alike, the first offering him the cup of Daigoth, a solitary taste of wine, while the second priest uttered the ritual sentences before him.

“You are the god’s. Go, be yourself a god.”

Rehger, in eighth place, listened to the phrase repeated over and over. The Ott, the Jowan, the Thaddrian, the Kand and the Free Zakorian, each drank and accepted. Whatever their personal religion, tonight they were Daigoth’s, tonight they would be gods. But when the priests reached the color-yellow Shalian, he interrupted harshly, “No. None of that. I worship the one true goddess.” The priests came away from him at once, without response. But the Corhlan, next in the left-hand position to Rehger, laughed loudly. He said to the man from Sh’alis, “Corrah is the one true goddess. You mean Corrah?” The Corhl did not have much of an accent; his comment was quite clear. The Shalian ignored him. Their teams fidgeted and shook their tasseled bits, sidling away from each other. (On the bodywork of the yellow chariot had been represented the Sh’alis sigil, a staff roped with a golden snake.) The priests had come to the Corhlan. He drank from Daigoth’s cup and received the benison. Then he spoke to the Shalian again: “Corrah will trample your snake-dung of a whore-goddess under these hoofs and wheels.” The Shalian stood like stone, holding back his sizzling animals, a smile of fury on his mouth.

The cup had reached Rehger. He bowed his head and drank the thin sugary wine. “You are the god’s,” said the priest to him. “Go, be yourself a god.” Not immune to the galvanic of the incantation, Rehger felt it pierce him through, and closed his eyes a moment, in the verity of its power.

Returning to himself, he was aware of the Shansar next to him on the other side, saying, “I ride for Ashara-Anack. Your Daigoth’s a phantom.” But the other Shalian, the last of the line, drank from the cup and heard the words without protest. Even in Sh’alis men might worship as they desired, providing they also made offerings to the Shansarians’ fish-serpent-woman.

The trumpets shouted up above.

“Corrah,” said the Corhl.

Along the line, each side of him, Rehger might glimpse the hands of men quickly marking themselves for their gods, or their fates.

But the ten chariots were already moving. The hiddraxi, glad of mobility, trotted eagerly up the ramp. The gates were grating wide, opening the stadium before them, a mouth darker than the lit cavern they were leaving, which would be appropriate enough for some.

Rehger had no fear of death, only a familiar sense of it. It was integral to the ecstasy. From your earliest adult year in this place, you knew that no sane man took more than the token sips of liquor in the three days before an event. For it was in the very air. The moment you came out on the stadium sand, you were drunker than ten cups of wine could make you.

And they were out. The black huge sky overhead, the oval rings of terraced stone descending from it, crowded with living things, that now welled into an astonishing bellowing thunder—the breaking of the storm.

And over all the cries, the praises and exhortation, a thudding drum beat:

The Lydian! Lydian! Lydian!

So a icing must feel, then, when—if ever—he was saluted with such real passion. A man who did not soar, know himself in that hour lord, and god, was a mindless heartless wooden lump—and such did not long make charioteers.

They went down the straight, east to west, took the turn under a rain of banners, ribbons and showering flowers, progressed back again, west to east, toward the Guardian’s box.

One saw that important man, the Guardian of the city, often. He liked the stadium sports. Now he was nothing, only part of the vast being of This, part of night and noise and arriving fire.

The young boys were bringing the fire, or its physical emblem. Ten male children of the stadium courts: once Rehger had been such a child, and done this office for others. A million years ago. And a million years from now, one of these would very probably stand where he stood, some other in the future far away, when he and this moment were dust. And a remembered name.

The child held up the burning torch for him. The child’s face flamed like the torch.

“Win for your city,” said the child, in the ritual, meaning it.

The Lydian laughed.

“Go with me in your heart,” he said, and grinned. And having raised the torch high, for men and gods to see, next thrust it down and home into the gilded iron bracket on the chariot’s prow. Steeped in fats and resins, even the enormous speed of the racing chariot and the acid salty wind from the sea would not extinguish it.

Then the children ran and were off the straight.

The Guardian nodded. On the stone table below his box they struck the tinder over the oil, and paused, while the world held its breath.

Then let the spark fall.

A blast of scarlet spurted at heaven. The crowd screamed.

Like ten great beasts of fiery night, the chariots sprang forward, neck and neck.

The first three laps, completed in the stadium, would rarely establish subsequent placings. The racing track was firm and clean, blocked only by its central platform that, during other events, was lowered by machinery under the earth. Five Mile Street, similarly, cleared of obstacles and lit by torch-poles, was a smooth dancing floor compared to the swooping coastal road that came next, nearly ten miles of it, revealed only by the lanterns of spectators, stars and the torches of the chariots.

At the first turn, those Daigoth’s dice had given the inside positions took the lead, as was inevitable: The Ott and the Jowan burst forward on the straight. But the brown and ocher Thaddrian, third out from the inside, pulling his team of hiddrax around less by skill than main force, drove a diagonal course across the two forward cars, clipping the Ottish chariot so it juddered and banked up on the Kand, who was driving in fast to the rear. A primed racer of Alisaarian Kandis, the red-rose charioteer avoided the mess with nothing more than a restrained sprint, scraping past between the Ott and the central platform, and falling in behind the Thaddrian and Jowan. The yellow Shalian meanwhile, cutting into the Free Zakorian’s fifth position, cutting out again in a hurry to miss the sudden huddle of chariots, ran instead against the Zakor’s car. This, with a contemptuous slam of its flank, pushed the Shalian sideways and overturned him. The mix from Sh’alis who worshiped the one true goddess, and had made the mistake of losing his temper before the race began, was tipped into the dust. He bolted presently for safety on the platform, to the encouraging jeers of the Vis crowd.

His hiddraxi, writhing and shrieking, anchored to the unyielding mass of the fallen car—which by some miracle had neither felled them nor caught alight from its prow-torch—were abandoned perforce leftward of the center track, the first unstable obstacle of the race.

The remaining chariots had by now reached and taken the second turn at the platform’s western end, and were hurtling along the opposite straight. The Jowan and the Thaddrian had the lead, the Ott, discomposed, had reined back and was in third. Behind these, in an almost mathematical line, the Kand, the Zakor, the Corhl and the Lydian, galloped at a loose stretch. While behind these again, the second Shalian, and the white Shansar. To build full speed in the stadium was foolish at the start of a Fire Ride. Not till you were on the street could you afford to do it. Yet every year the unwise and overly-opportunistic angled and snatched and dog-fought for position on the first laps, as the Thaddrian and Jowan did now. As they came around into the eastern turn again, the red and black Jow chariot executed a move known as the Unwilling Girl. Ignoring the favorable inside advantage, the Jowan swerved abruptly outward across the incoming second positon, to throw the Thaddrian wide. The Thaddric car, slapped on the hip, pulled out, her bandit-lord cursing in a dazzle of golden teeth. But as the Jowan wallowed back to grab the turn, the Ott went shooting by on the inside, taking first position once more.

The black Zakorian now broke from line, rattling down the straight behind the three leaders, who, giving it a generous margin, were just past the Shalian chariot wreck.

In the upset, the traces had been snapped from the head-stall of one of the outside animals, leaving it attached only to the crossbar of the yoke-pole. Not everyone had noted this, but it seemed the Zakorian had done so. Spectators, who had observed he had drawn the narrow dagger permitted to a charioteer for his own purposes of survival, began to caw and upbraid him, predicting his move. As he tore by the wreck, leaning from his vehicle—in itself a feat of some daring and expertise—the Zakor slashed the hiddrax’s last restraint.

In Old Zakoris, racing had been an art of savagery and blood for centuries. It was well-known any Free Zakorian racer kept up these virtues. In Alisaar, where the animals of sport were pampered, such antics were not approved.

It was, however, a gambit.

The hiddrax, screaming in hysteria and excitement, dashed out from the wreck, in the path of the Kand chariot and the Corhlan.

The Kand split to the left, space to spare, missing both the animal and the wreckage. The Corhlan, held off by the presence of the Kand, pressured from the right by the press of other vehicles, veered crazily as the untethered hiddrax skipped in a kind of ghastly dance before him. Then the animal flung itself against his team, trying to run backward with them. Next second, the rogue hiddrax had tumbled. The steel-gray bosses of the Corhlish chariot were seen running up the air—and grounding down directly into the Shalian ruin, as, in a terrible cascading bound, the Corhl’s animals went plunging in over the sides of the wreck.

The Corhlan had one chance only, and he took it. Amid the din of the terraces they heard him sing out the wild name of Corhl’s goddess, and with only momentum to aid them, he used the whip across the necks of his team, merciless, not to withdraw, but driving them on now, and forward, through the panic and collapse of the dead chariot, its honor splintering under hoofs and wheels—as he had promised the Shalian it should do.

Bred for swiftness, the legs of hiddraxi were notoriously fragile. Shod and braced by metal, plied by whip and encroaching fire, they floundered and pranced. Even as the smashed car gave way under them and began to burn, they broke out through it, maddened—whole—slewed around, recovered themselves—coursed on.

A colossal shout was lifted for the Corhlan throughout the stadium, and those with his colors shook them joyfully. He was the youngest driver in the race, a handsome boy, and courage and wits were seldom vaunted without applause in Saardsinmey.

(Trapped on the platform, the yellow Shalian lamented. His chariot burned in great clots of smoke, his team lying broken with it to be consumed.)

The Lydian, glancing over his shoulder, saw beyond the Shansar and the blue-yellow Shalian, the Corhlan pelting after them, silhouetted on the blaze, racing last now, but alive in the palm of his goddess.

When they took the east turn for the third time, elements in the crowd were already yelling: Doors! Doors! Commanding that the southern exitway be opened in readiness on the street. As if such a matter might be overlooked.

For the south gate, the benign position was now reversed, being on the outer right-hand side.

Approaching the west turn, the adventurous Ott struck out for the right, premature, and running headlong across the noses of the Jowan and Thaddrian. This foolhardy and clumsily developed measure, not to be mistaken for bravura or dexterity by the seasoned crowd, gained the Ott a precarious minute. The Thaddrian, enraged by the tactic and judging the Jow was about to try something similar, rammed the red and black sidelong, to an overture of hissing and railing from the stands.

The Jowan chariot shuddered but held her course. The Jow, aristocrat or not, might be beheld shouting oaths at the bandit, while the two teams rushed stride for stride. Then the Thaddric chariot seemed to rein up, giving over any hope of advantage. Inevitably, when the Jowan started to pull for the right-hand, the Thaddrian rammed him again. This time, leaning for the crossways cut, the red-black car tilted, skidded on one wheel, curved slowly over and went down. The stands were howling for Alisaarian vengeance. In the dust and spitting crush of light the Jowan seemed gone, ripped away under the hoofs—then he appeared again and the roar of the terraces redoubled. In the Thaddrian’s chariot with the Thaddrian, the nephew of the Guardian of Jow was explaining stadium etiquette with his fists. The red and black chariot lay heaped on the track; the brown and ocher car careered across the straight, (the Kand, Zakorian and Lydian breaking to avoid it), to smash against the terrace barrier, where both men dropped out fighting, and girl-high the hiddraxi screamed.

The Ott was on the west turn, far right, where the Zakorian, speed-lifted at the proper instant, passed him, followed in a graceful in-curling arc by the Kand, the Lydian, the Shansar. Surprised, the Ott scrambled in their wake, only the leftover Shalian and the Corhl all at once behind him.

The southern exit on to Five Mile Street stood properly panting wide. Beyond, the great boulevard, jeweled either side by a watching city—

To a paean of ecstatic frustration the stadium saw each brilliant fire-strung car complete the turn, hurl along the ultimate strip of straight, dive in the gateway—and longed for a means to follow.

The yellow Shalian, the Thaddrian, the Jow were out, three slaughtered vehicles, slain beasts, living, bruised, unloving men. On the terraces there were already wailings and gnashed teeth, and luckless gamblers’ talk of suicide in the morning.

The blue-yellow Shalian had twice crowded him on the track, a thing of no great moment, and mostly lost on the spectators in the flamboyance of other catastrophes. Now, the Shalian was back behind with the Corhl; it was the Shansar in his gold and white enamels who came on, and on.

Rehger spared no second glance for these, or for the merchanteering Ott, who should have stayed home with the bales and baskets.

Before, the Kand and the tricky Zakorian leapt down the road, their dust, with the sparks of his own fire, in his face.

Five Mile Street was walled by a tall hemmed stitchery of lights and outcry. The banners and flags poured past, everything streaming in the gale of the race. This idle promenade of an hour was a chariot-run of minutes, no more, for the speed was building now, from the powerhouse of vehicle and team, from the beating hearts of the animals and the beating heart and brain of a man, and all the rushing torrent of the night.

The street curved slightly, east to west, an accident—its straightness had been meant to be the pride of Saardsinmey. Already, up ahead, there was the dim straddle of the huge dockside gate, garlanded with flares. And soon after it, one met the fierce turn to the right, for on this stretch every turn was set contrary to the left-hand turnings of the stadium.

The Lydian ran now for Gods’ High Gate, letting the first true escalation mount toward an upsurge of speed that might slough the Shansar from his shoulder.

And he felt the Shansar fall from him, but not totally. For the Otherlander, too, had come armed with knowledge to this fight.

Then the gate rolled over, rang like a giant bell, and was gone.

The hiddraxi pulled, straining to reach the stars. The Kandish chariot seemed to flow back toward them. Vague ghost voices were calling miles away: The Lydian! The Lydian!

Beyond the gate it was darker, a wider mouth of night, despite the winking windows and the lamps on the rigging of every ship in the bay. Stiff reek rose from the shut fish market down below, and the breathing salt of the sea.

The Zakorian folded sideways, a blur of torchfire, taking the turn, a quarter of a mile ahead now, and next the Kand went into it and lilted through it beautifully. Rehger met and possessed the turn like a lover, more beautiful yet, and the disembodied voices laved him again from their distances. Win for your city. Go with me in your heart.

They were on the Coast Road. Blindfolded, you would know it, going uphill, all gliding gone, now the chariot caught the action of steepness, of ruts and stones, jumping and clacketing. Nor was it a broad path. Enough room for one chariot to pass another.

The flaming prow-torch spat back at him, flinders of fire, touching his neck and jaw.

On the stepped heights above and to the right, the skeins of lamps and beacons continued. But to the left hand now, for the most part only a frame of ground pegged with watch towers, that slipped downward to the ocean. A lit ship or two blazed out on the water as if she burned, only more motes of arson to one who ran.

The Kand sank backward into Rehger’s arms. A fume of red and rose, the jingling hustle as one team briefly companioned and then deserted the other, and the blare of the second torch whirled behind into the dark. Up on the heights, the balconies and roofs, came a screaming of the city’s name now, as personified in one charioteer. And there was the sound of the Kand, too, trying to regain, to grip and pass—but that speed, though well judged, not a match for this. Rehger’s hiddraxi, that he had for two years nurtured, they were in flight, nor were they done flying yet.

The ground, having risen, leveled. The surface of the road did not.

Only the Zakorian now, in front of him.

(And maybe a mile behind, a bubble crashing as it burst. The Ott, finally fouled. The Shalian was on his tail, and had perhaps helped him to it.)

But the fading noise of the Kandish car had expanded. No, it could never be the Kand coming in again. It was the Shansar, rising now out of the dark as the Lydian did.

Ahead, the Zakorian looked back. Rehger, closing the gap, was easily near enough to see the grim flash of the shadowy face, and the long tongue of the whip that followed it. To hear the old charioteering shout—“Ayh! Ayh!”

The Zakor’s animals were straining now, not to catch stars but only in labor. A breakneck swiftness tugged the black chariot away and away, and Rehger unfolded the wings of power, unleashed the coiled spring, held all this while within the hiddraxi, their hearts, his. “Fly now, my soul—” And though they had seemed to fly before, now they flew—

The night spun off like water. Flame in his face—The world was cast away.

The Zakorian, sucked up into their vortex, held a moment, also flung away.

Only the twisting spine of the road before them now, weirdly splashed with light from the clapping torch, humped, chattering, made nothing now by the weightless entity that sped over it. A road that had become a ribbon across the sky.

A lighted tower, its walkway bunched with watchers, jumped from the blackness, bawled for the Lydian, and vanished.

Fireflies unraveled to tiny threads of gold—the lamps above—the ships below.

Yet the Shansar at his back, his white shadow.

Then a white beating wing.

Then on the road, just wide enough, in a speed like stasis, they were side by side.

The Lydian, in his dream of power, turned and stared and saw the face of the Shansar stare back at him, also locked into the magic of the dream. In that split second they were brothers, and like brothers they might kill each other for a birthright.

The Shansar had gained the inside position, against the rising terraces of the land. His onset had been perfectly gauged, and risked, coinciding with those instants when the unevenness of the road had pushed the Lydian’s chariot to the outer edge—Now only stumbling rock, the open yawn of night and water walled him in. If the Shansar was treacherous to match his cunning and finesse, here would be the place for it.

As if to illustrate this scenario, there came a sickening noise out of the lost shelves of darkness behind them. The screech of iron on bronze, the clangor of collision and a rippling rush of stones which fell; the dreadful girl-like cries of hiddraxi—it seemed, to tell by the answering crescendo along the watch-posts of the suburbs above, that one of the vehicles had gone to its death over the low cliffs into the bay. And, from the tone of the lament, too, that it was the chariot of Alisaarian Kandis which had been lost.

But that was in another country. In this landscape now, only two chariots existed, the game was only for them.

Neither man now looked at the other. Neither attempted, by ways deft or malign, to shift the other off the road. They raced, and still they were team to team, torched prow to prow, shoulder by shoulder. And when the whips rose now to claw the air high above the animal’s necks, they cracked as one. Some god had spoken, Daigoth, Rorn, or the blond man’s scale-tailed lady, to link their cars together. Each striving now, thrusting, coaxing, to bring on the last orgasm of pure speed, the severing that would dash the other from him, and mean victory.

The road began to turn with the cliff, swimming to the right, to the northwest. In three minutes, or less, the blocks and walls of the city would gulp them in again. The home stretch then, north and uphill, on the wide byways, all neatly cleared for it, ablaze with smoke and heat and the lather-spume of the animals, between the booming crowds, through on to the outer circle under the stadium’s bank, around to the south gate once again, in upon the stadium sand where a third of Saardsinmey would be waiting—

Deep in the night, another voice, not of the sea, not from any mortal throat, spoke out.

The animals shrilled in terror. Even as they shrilled, unflagging, they ran.

Each man, the blond Shansar, the dark Vis, turned, irresistibly, and looked away into the pit of black star-swarmed nothing—

And the voice spoke again.

It was not of, and yet it came from, the ocean, yet also from the vault of atmosphere above, and from the rock beneath their chariot wheels.

A century or more ago, the annals of Alisaar recorded, Rorn himself had stalked these waters. It had been a time of unrest and war. In that era, any great happening was possible. Rom, striding the waves, touching heaven with his brow, that had been possible—Aaaurouuu, the voice insisted, a droning, whistling, miaowing howl, parting the night.

Then the earth, like the chariots, began to run.

Before, the road had seemed discarded under the hoofs and wheels, but now it pleated itself together, heaved upward, smote them, trying to throw them off.

Rehger heard the Shansar call out, another language, the tongue of his homeland, but the name of the Ashara goddess was decipherable.

The chariots were no longer airborne. They were earthly things of wood and metal, struggling to keep a purchase. The teams of hiddrax, squealing, bloody foam issuing from their mouths, ran out of rhythm, striking each other with their sides, aliens and teammates alike.

The night was full of roaring, like the ten-thousandfold throat of the stadium.

A faint hot lightning washed through the sky above the sea, and sudden thunder belled after it, and the other sounds ended, snapped out into silence as if some mighty creature had died there.

The ground shivered and lay down flat. The shock was done. Only stones littered down the slopes, a few trickling off into the air, harmlessly passing as they sought the sea. Somewhere above, in the slanting field by someone’s fine house, a dropped lamp had set the trees on fire. This added brightness painted in the deathly face of the Shansar. His dream was over.

Speed-broken, both chariots. Though they still ran, they lumbered.

The Lydian’s whip curled out across the sway of necks, not catching them, correcting only with harsh music.

To this accompaniment, Rehger sang to the hiddraxi love words, a litany of pleasures to come.

Overseen by the throng in the burning orchard above, the team skewed, rollicked. Then melted to order like a blessing. He had slept in their stalls, fed them from his hands, gifted them and caressed them.

“Go, my soul—”

Above, orchard unheeded, the watchers cheered and stamped.

The Shansar, somehow blundering yet at his side, damned him.

The Lydian, feeling the great surge of speed come back, strong and profound as sex, into the reins, the animals, the vehicle, the world, laughed at him. “Tell them in Shansar-over-the-ocean,” he shouted, “Rom was angry!”

And then they pulled away, as if drawn on a rope of riven fire. And slicing northward quite alone, sprang back into the city, to take the last two miles in a downpour of petals and screaming, the stadium gate in an ovation, triumph, gold and glory, within the hour.

It was a sign of Saardsinmey’s sporting fervor that the earthquake, the first to be felt in coastal Alisaar for eighty years, was almost discounted in the closing outburst of the race. The shock had been a slender one, and later, when the tales came in from the watch-towers and the vineyards above the sea, of the Shansar chariot speed-smashing at terror of Ahsaarian Rom’s war horns under the water, even that phenomenon of fear was incorporated in the rejoicing.

The Lydian, winning for Saardsinmey, received the rich prize, the twenty bars of gold. He scarcely needed it, since to the Swordsmen of Daigoth everything in the city came always, in any case, gratis.

Wreathed like a young god in flowers, by firelight in the stadium, the crowd itself became his team and dragged his chariot one whole lap, then bore him on their shoulders. Their love was tangible. And presently, the Saardsin aristocrats, his willing hosts and companions since he began to fight and win before them, trooped to admire him, hang their jewels on him, and their bodies, if he would have them.

The man from Kandis was dead. The had fished him from the bay. The fly silly Ott would never ride the chariots again, nor be much use among the ledgers either, blinded, battered. The Zakorian had been fined for his conduct, and the crowds of the city, getting hold of him, partly stoned him, pinned a notice on his skin that read MURDERER OF KANDS, and sent him toward Free Zakoris tied upside down on a zeeba. The Shansar, coming in second, was hooted, and retired from public view. The Corhlan had the third place, and the rewards youth, bravery and looks might get him at a time of goodwill. The second Shalian was fourth, and had nothing.

But that night the Lydian went to dine and drink in the house of a nobleman on Sword Street, a mansion with which Rehger was quite familiar. The first wine, the first spiced food for days. And after it, the first woman for a month. It was the custom to visit, before a stadium event, some inn you cared for, and take one token sip of liquor. So that, should you perish, they might say ever after there, He drank the last sweet cup of his life with us.

But the girl who lay in his arms that night, and coiled him with strands of rubies red as Zastis, silken hair and limbs, was a princess of the old royal line, and she said to him, “And if you’d died, I might have boasted, might I not, here he took also a last sweetness. Do you believe me, I stayed celibate as you did, my beloved? I’m glad you’re alive.”

Katemval, however, coming from the stone temple where he had filed the tablet of his promised offering to Daigoth, learned he also had received a gift.

Delivered at his house, in his absence, by unseen porters, a plain cibba-wood casket.

Opened by his slave, Katemval found it contained the strangely-embalmed bodies of two birds. A hawk, a shard of flint lodged in its breast, and from whose talons hung a pigeon.

A sheet of reed paper lay beneath them. Which said:

5 Alisaarian Night

“Then, what is it?” Rehger said. He lay on a marble slab of the stadium bathhouse, as the slave kneaded his body with wanned oils. Previously, all day since sunrise, he had been in the courts at exercise with sword, spear and knife, or among the slings and bars of the acrobat’s yard. Before that, for two nights and a day, he had been under a nobleman’s roof, in bed with a princess.

“Some means to warn you, or more likely threaten you. Go carefully.”

“Carefully? This to a winner of the Fire Ride,” said Rehger, turning on his back, closing his eyes.

Katemval nodded at the ironic absurdity. His professional gaze—both of slave-taker and of gambling connoisseur—lingered on the young man’s nakedness. There was nothing sexual in Katemval’s optic possessiveness, possibly not even anything sensual. It was the reverence of life’s animal expression, it was the pride of his race, and, even now, of having discovered such a paragon of these things.

Two healed fire-kisses from the chariot-torch temporarily marked Rehger’s jaw and throat. There were few scars on his body, nothing to mar it or infer a weakness. No scars on the mind. Rehger had kept his clarity, his primal innocence. I did that for him. But don’t preen, Katemval thought. The gods did it first.

And he remembered the images Rehger had been used to fashion as a child, even into his seventh year. The training of the stadium had already begun for him—it began in certain ways from the very start. Yet in spare moments, the child, allowed clay, had formed these figures, miniature lizards, orynx, little teams of hiddrax—once he had glimpsed them—with tiny men in the tiny, intricate chariots. They had been, his creations, coming to a fineness, perhaps on the verge of beauty—and at that time, all at once, he stopped. Rehger had ceased making external icons and gone to work on himself.

The masseur was finished. Rehger nodded and the man moved away. In the oval bath beyond the arch, other Swordsmen splashed and swam.

Ought one to say more? Katemval considered. But the box of dead birds, the ominous, elegantly-penned script, seemed irrelevant now. Daigoth had taken his offering. The race was won, there would soon be the demands of other events. And Zastis in the sky before this month was through.

Katemval saw that Rehger had fallen asleep. The high arch of the ribs, the flat belly plated by smooth muscle, rose and sank evenly. Unimpeded, clear, his breathing was silent.

That secure in the arms of Mother Alisaar. Well, then. Let it go.

The fire dancer was black as a Zakor leopard, true Zakoris, but of an elder or younger strain, for her lips were full as flowers, her face was sweet.

She stepped between the long tables of the feast, on to the open mosaic of the floor.

Her arms were ringed by bracelets of white bone. Aside from these, she was covered, neck to ankles, by an opaque and many-colored tide of gauze.

The lamps had been dimmed, the room was hushed.

The dancer extended her hands, with a half-contemptuous flick of the wrists, and waited for the two flaming brands to be given her by a steward. She looked at none of them, the assembly of nobles, their guests and servants. She looked away into some mysterious inner space, to her gods and her art.

The torches, also braceleted in holders of bone, were set in her grasp gently, respectfully. Her fingers closed on them. The steward stepped away. The girl tossed her head. Her hair was fastened up on it in a little tower of gold, and let free again from the top like the tail of a jet-black mare.

Music welled out of the shadows, double pipes, shell harps and drums.

The dancer moved. She became fluid. She flowed and coiled, reshaping herself to the pulse of the music. And the right-hand torch slid down her body—

The gauze, treated with perfumes, lipped by fire, sent out its incense, the aroma seeming to brim the room. The girl lifted the torch away, her throat curved backward and her hair streamed to the floor. She held the torch toward a ceiling-heaven, rather as they did before the Fire Ride, then stroked the brand again downward, to touch her length with flame.

The gauze that covered her sparkled, smoked—a layer of the fabric dissolved in fire, vanished, then another and another smoldered away to nothing. In black moonrise, one bare exquisite night-shade breast was revealed, tipped with a star of diamond.

The dinner party murmured its susurration of approval.

The dancer neither saw nor heard.

The left-hand torch was gliding about her now, at her shoulder, her hip. The undulations of her torso came more quickly, as if to flirt with the fire, or to seduce it. The floating gauzes lit for a second, now here, now there, flared, charred, magically disappeared, each panel of color expending itself into another, and the perfume coming and going. The drum galloped, the pipe ran up and down. Fire fastened its teeth into all her veils, and for a moment she seemed to catch wholly alight, and some of the watchers, startled, cried aloud—but the flame, judged to a hair’s breadth, scattered from her like burning blossoms. She was bare to her pelvis now, but for diamonds. Her anointed skin itself smoldered from the brush of torches. A gem like a dying coal crackled in her navel. The love affair with fire began, as if reluctantly, to languish. . . . The dancer was lethargic, the music altered at her mood, the drums heavy. . . . She leaned to the fire, swooned away from it. She drooped, folded herself, lay on the mosaic and took the ivory fire-spikes from her own hands, gripping them with her feet. Limpid and slow as black molasses, she stood upright on her palms. Her strong legs and narrow feet plied the two fires in the air, then lowered them teasingly along her spine. And suddenly she blazed, became a fireball—there was only fire—out of which there catapulted a somersaulting wheel of wild lights. It spun and came down and turned to stone and was a woman.

The dancer stood scatheless before them, diamond-breasted, diamonds woven at her loins, a garnet in her belly, clothed otherwise only in faint smoke. The torches were held outward stiffly from her sides. She was still as a statue, seeing nothing and no one, as the music ended.

Acclaim rang through the room. She did not note the noise, nor stoop for the jewels that were laid—not thrown—at her feet. Three princes came in turn and gathered them up on her behalf, while her own slave approached to drape the dancer in a cloak of silk.

“Panduv, I never saw you better. You were embracing the Star itself.” The Alisaarian aristocrat bowed to the dancer. Such was the code of Saardsinmey, which revered equally an aristocracy of talent. “Will you come back to my dinner when you’ve dressed? Say you will.”

“I will not,” said Panduv, regarding him for the first, and smiling.

“You desolate us.”

“I’m expected elsewhere.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

“Perhaps.”

In the well-lit salon prepared for her convenience, Panduv cleansed her skin and donned her expensive garments. She drew a half-mask of thin hammered gold on to her lower face. It was an affectation, for all the city knew her, or of her, and besides, her covered carriage was always recognizable, Zakorian black, with the Double Moon and Dragon device of the Old Kingdom, once the sigil exclusively of rebels and pirates.

The slave-girl had collected the dancer’s fee. As in the case of all the city’s entertainer-elite, this was virtually superfluous. Her Swordsmen and charioteers were kings, and her acrobat dancers queens, welcomed and honored everywhere. It was well-documented, and might be seen anyway, any day on Tomb Street, that this fraternity died so rich their burial houses rivaled the sarcophagi of Dorthar’s Storm Lords.

Even so, Panduv had not yet reached the pinnacle—to be accorded publicly the name of her birthplace, Hanassor. This recognition—which others, such as the Lydian, had gained—she had sworn to have, on the altar of Zakorian Zarduk, the fire god.

By the gate, the unmistakable carriage stood ready. Panduv entered it, and beheld another was before her.

A woman, mantled and hooded, who surely must have bribed the driver some vast amount, and be besides of high birth. It was almost Zastis. Such things did happen. The Zakorian was not necessarily averse, depending on what was offered when the wrappings came off.

“Good evening, lady,” said Panduv, through her own mask. “I’ve contracted to be at the Guardian’s palace before moonset. I can grant you a few minutes.”

“Hanassor,” said the other woman, softly. “You know nothing of it. Did they never tell you, for example, that the dancer’s craft which brings your celebrity here, was reckoned of small worth, there? In the taverns of your Zakorian capital, women burnt their rags from them for a few coppers. It was a commonplace, not especially skilled. The clumsy were frequently scarred. Every such dancer was treated as a harlot. Go to Free Zakoris now, and see the value of a woman.”

Panduv held her breath. Her hand slipped to her breast, to the dagger she wore there in a sheath of nacre. The intruder was a telepath. And one who could breach even a Vis mind having itself no such knack.

“Yes,” said the hooded woman. “I can speak within. And read you quite well.”

“Then you’re Shansar.” Panduv spoke with all the hauteur of Visian Alisaar.

“No. The Shansarians are not generally so adept. I am Amanackire.”

Panduv swore. “A Lowlander.”

“Amanackire, I said. There is a difference.”

This then explained why the driver had allowed the woman into Panduv’s carriage. While the invader-conquerors might occasionally be denied something, one denied nothing to Lowlanders. They could totter cities, the rabble of the serpent witch, and summon gods from under the sea.

“What do you want?” Panduv said. Patently it would not be oneself. Which was lucky, for white flesh repelled her.

“The Lydian,” the woman said. “The Children of Daigoth know each other’s business. Tell me how he’s to be come at.”

“You do surprise me,” said Panduv. “How should I know? Go to the stadium. Petition him, like the others. Send a gift.”

“You misunderstand what I want. To speak with him, privately.”

“The stadium. Petition. A gift.”

“Zakorian,” said the woman-. Her soft voice chilled the very air of that hot pre-Zastian night, “my kind are never refused.”

“Then he won’t refuse you. Why come to me?”

“To ease my path. Yes, now I see it. He’s at a supper—will leave shortly, since in four days more he fights in the stadium—how explicit, your mind—And which homeward route will he walk, Panduv Am Hanassor, alone in Alisaarian night?” (Panduv, her inadvertent thoughts rifled, robbed, attempted to wall off her knowledge of the city’s avenues. Failed, of course.) And, “Thank you,” said this Amanackire bitch, gentle as a killing snow.

Just past midnight, a group of Saardsin Swordsmen came out from under the portico of a mansion of Pillar Square. They were laughing, and a touch drunk, dressed in all the splendor of youth and strength and money. One of their number was Rehger Am Ly Dis.

As they crossed under the columned arcades, moving toward Sword Street, a voice called to the Lydian.

His companions, unheeding, went on. He hesitated, and glanced back. A pale shadow, that of a woman, was framed between two pillars.

“Not tonight, beautiful,” he said, already turning from her. “I fight the first day of Zastis.”

Then he realized that no one had spoken. His name had been surely uttered, but within his own skull.

All the blond races boasted of their ability to mind-speak. Most unmixed Vis abhorred the notion. Rehger turned again, and went to the woman. A lamp burned near, but it was behind her; he could see nothing of her but the pallor of her cloak. He stood over her, and carefully shut the anger from his face and tone before addressing her.

“That trick could earn you a beating in New Alisaar. Don’t do it, even in play.” He looked around, and added, “Where’s your escort?”

“I have none,” she said. She used her real voice now, it was cool, it did not invite.

“That’s unwise,” he said. “Next time, take your servant or slave.”

“Because only a champion is safe on these streets? Even cutthroats follow the races and are gamblers in Saardsinmey.”

“No man would try for me,” he said. “He knows I could kill him.” It was not vanity, only a fact.

But she said, “No man would try for me. That would also mean death.”

She took a step away, under the lamp. And as she did so, brushed the hood from her head.

He had never seen such whiteness. Perhaps, in a figurine of marble. Her skin, her hair—there was a trace of shadow on her brows and color at her lips, and maybe that was paint. Her eyes were unhuman, they rasped his senses—the white eyes of a snake—he did not want to look at them, or at any part of her.

All her race were said to be magicians. He supposed he believed it, seeing her.

“Why have you detained me?” he said.

“You acquiesce, then. I may detain any man I wish, roam where I will and as I want? You admit, my people have your people now under the booted heel.”

“I’m a Swordsman and charioteer. I know nothing about your people.”

“All Vis knows something of us.”

“And a slave, the property of this city. My opinion isn’t worth anything to you. So much said, lady, excuse me. Good night.”

“I don’t give you leave to go.”

“Madam, with or without your leave, I regret.”

He moved away from her and had begun to walk again toward Sword Street, when she said, “A paradox. A slave who is a king. Lydian.”

“What do you want?” he said, finding he had stopped after all.

“Come to my house tomorrow evening.”

“Again, my apologies. I’m obliged to be somewhere else.”

“You can find it with no trouble. Ask on Gem-

Jewel Street. Anyone will tell you where the Amanackire is lodging.”

He strode out now, and left her standing under the lamp.

The columns marched by him. Some were scratched with mottoes or poetry, or the names of feted prostitutes.

He had known this city nearly all his life, been famed and free of it since his nineteenth year. Yet now some drifting memory of the other land, the first, surfaced in his mind. The mountains of Iscah. A woman, whose face he did not remember, only the springing blackness of her hair. He thought of her sometimes, his mother. Sometimes even, in lieu of jewels or the gold chain, he wore in his ear the stud of coin, the drak his father had paid her with for their night. He did not lament or eschew the incoherent past.

He recalled, too, more clearly than faces or words, how in that country one of the men had struck the woman (his mother), continuously. Here and now, no man who was clever lifted his hand to a woman in the Lydian’s presence. He had required his preference, confronted by the white-eyed Lowlander. For he had felt in those minutes a thing which only came to him rarely in the stadium, the boiling itch of blood-desire. It seemed to him he had wanted her death.

6 Chacor’s Luck

The Star ascended, the night burned. From ship to shore, from avenue to promenade, in the sumptuous chambers of palaces, in huts piled up the hill behind the Street of Tombs, lovers loved. But in the courts of Daigoth, those men due to fight tomorrow lay watchful, and hungry. The phallus must become the sword.

The shows were always very good, in the initial days of Zastis.

Before sunrise, before the great hawks, which hunted over the crags of the city, launched themselves into a hollowing sky, fighters were at exercise in the stadium yards.

“The Corhlan is in love with Rehger. The chariots weren’t enough for him, he’ll be back for more.”

“What can dung-heap Corhl offer him? If he can win a bout here, even unowned as he is, he might make some cash.”

Boastful, the slave-Swords. Free men were poor things. No one worshiped them enough to keep them. Often they came here, these outsiders, to try the lots, chancing their arm against Saardsinmey heroes. Generally they left the stadium feet-foremost in carts.

Those that sparred with Rehger knew that he, or they, were capable of finishing any Corhlan, if it came to it. This was Zastis, and every man at work here in the dawn mingled words and unspoken concepts of sex with the killer’s banter. Not one Saardsin would be drawn against another—that, too, was Daigoth’s law. They would be tried on the blades of other cities, other lands. So it was safe to mention death. You did not slay your brothers. And who wanted to grow old?

The sun rose, climbed. The exercise court was empty.

The noise of the morning city came and went. Over the high stadium walls, the sky hammered out its blue.

Slaves appeared with their baskets and scoops of sand. The central platform had been lowered, and the whole great oval stretched flat. The slaves scattered the sand thick and white across it, everywhere, making the stadium into a beach. A sea would break upon this beach, of a sort.

At noon, the gates were thrown open. The crowd crowded in. Colors poured down the terraces. The smell of scent, sweat, and fruit, changed the air into a pomade. But soon there would be, too, the butchery smell of blood, to lay the perfume and the sand.

Because he was a free man and an amateur, not bred and molded to the customs of a stadium, Chacor the Corhl had spent the foregoing night with two girls. It had been far from a random tryst. He had sought it purposely, intending to rid himself of the first need of Zastis, and leave mind and body clear for the fray. The idea of starving the need and deploying it as a weapon was one he would not have entertained. Such things Zakorian pirates did to their oars-slaves, chaining them during the Red Moon so they could not even see to themselves, until the act of rowing became the only release.

Meanwhile, Chacor’s luck in surviving the chariot race had prompted him to display other skills. It was true, there was nothing much for him at home. He had come out of Corhl with only his goddess for property. In little towns of Ott, Iscah, and unfree Vardian Zakoris, he had beaten the locals at this and that. The cities of New Alisaar, with their codes of dueling and betting and their choice of public games, had lured him on. Perhaps he wanted glory more than wealth, but pure metal bars and bags of draks were not uncharming.

He had also, in a young man’s way, become obsessed by the Lydian, and wanted to fight him. The Lydian was a slave, a king, a god, and an older male. Just as the three-year stallion animal would try to oust the herd-lord, Chacor longed to challenge him, tussle, bring him down, or at least to taste the strength of what bettered him and would not yield. Envy and admiration mixed in it. Besides, he could not help but be aware, on some mostly submerged level, that the Lydian Swordsman, vastly his superior in skill, would not slay a free man the crowd was partial to. A sense of the hazard, the mere foolhardiness of the venture, were not let past the Corhlan’s mental doors. Indeed, he had been praying to Corrah for this chance, to be drawn in the lots against Saardsinmey’s champion. Obscurely, since Corrah and Cah—the goddess of Iscah—were one, Chacor imagined she might wish also to bring both of her sons together, like any primitive mother of the region, to do battle. Not a hundred years ago, Alisaar’s princes fought each other to the death for the kingship. In Free Zakoris they did it still, and in several areas of the western lands, many, noble or peasant, kept the tradition.

Chacor, if his family had retained this method, believed he could have disposed of all his legal brothers, and so inherited his father’s small wooden palace in the forested swamps of Corhl. But Corrah had instead meant him for a wanderer. Corrah had brought him here to match him with the Lydian.

Convinced he could not die, the Corhl thought to himself. And if he kills me, that’s glory, too.

The acrobats came out first, clad as characters from myth, or beasts, and did their tricks, chancy, spectacular and ribald by turns. Then there was a mock race, spoof of the Fire Ride, teams of waddling orynx drawing flimsy gilded cars. Snorting and defecating in rage, the orynx soon ran amok and the chariots collided and collapsed, the charioteers tumbling and diving in all directions. The winner gained the favors of a promising maiden, but was only allowed to embrace her while hung upside down from a pole. After several attempts, during which the crowd laughed and proffered instructions, the lady ran off with a monkey.

Following the acrobats, the creatures of the stadium menagerie were paraded, swamp leopards in jeweled collars, fighting-bis, plumed and hooded, a pride of Vardian lions with gold in their ears and manes, Shansar horses, neighing, brindled kalinx, and apes as tall as a man.

A selection of these animals might be reared for combat, but generally they were trained for use in religious processions, or to spice scenes of terror in the theaters. The citizens, diverted by a display of their possessions, always, weighed and measured and evaluated, and threw flowers to the hons.

When the display had finished, and the stadium, where necessary, had been swept and freshly sanded, there sounded the blast of brass horns.

It was at that moment, when all eyes were inclined to fix passionately on the arena, that a slight stir ran along the eastern tiers. Someone had come late, and appeared suddenly in one of the boxes to the left of the Guardian’s seat. This was the section reserved for women of rank. A fringed awning mantled it, and here and there were screens of pierced stone behind which the boxes’ occupants might modestly conceal themselves, a convention seldom observed. Those female aristocrats who attended the sports alone, made display, each jamming the box with her retinue and bodyguard.

There had been a rumor for most of the month that an Amanackire was in the city. Now, she was here. Clothed entirely in white, her ice hair lit with silver ornaments, she entered the box, unguarded, without a single slave, and sat down there.

The Guardian was absent on political affairs. His counselor, occupying the center box, angled himself to favor the white woman with a stare. When she turned, his nod of courteous deference underlined a plain disapproval, both of her boldness and her life. But her cold, cold eyes returned him nothing. She looked away as if she had not seen him, or, seeing him, had not thought him to matter. She, too, fixed her gaze downward on the stadium floor.

The Swordsmen were coming out on to the sand. The attention of the eastern tiers refocused itself.

There were eighteen pairs of fighters, eighteen Saardsins matched with eighteen contenders, slave-Sword or free, from the rest of Vis. They were strategically spaced around the stadium, to give every part of the terraces the view of an individual battle, at least in its commencement. As habitually, the Swordsmen of whom the most was expected were ranged along the portion of arena below the Guardian’s seat and the boxes of the rich and royal.

Here, then, the Lydian, with either side, at a distance of some fifteen feet, two Zakor-born champions, the Ylan, who had only recently earned for himself recognition by the name of birthplace, and the older man famous with axe and mallet, nicknamed the Iron Ox.

The crowd yelled and waved its arms. Flowers fell for the beauty of dangerous men as for the danger of beauteous beasts.

Armored at loins, right forearm and calves, heads helmed and eyes shuttered behind the sealed visors, already in the drug-dream heat, Zastis, the glare of the sand, the love-partnership each man with the man before him, Daigoth’s Marriage of the Sword—not one looked upward to the tiers, or into the boxes.

Chacor had been aggrieved. The lot had not cast him with the Lydian. He was paired, on the north side of the stadium, with an Alisaarian-born Sword. Nevertheless, everything was not lost. Overwhelm the Alisaarian, and Chacor might choose his next “Marriage” from any Saardsin also rendered partnerless by success. So it would go on, until every man had been fought out and a majority of one side only, the Swords of Saardsinmey, or her foreign challengers, were on their feet. Grueling, this bout, as only Alisaar could devise. But when the Lydian fought, the city, without exception, won. He had never left this place other than on his feet, sometimes bloody, but always unbeaten.

Since his mastery of the chariot race, more than usual was anticipated from him today, and the betting had been fraught if biased.

The wise gamblers of the city had seen Rehger’s kind before. Like the orchid, they broke quickly to bloom, and burned in brightest magnificence a handful of years. Then the gods, sensible men must not rival them too long, cut the plant to the ground.

The horns brayed, and the Alisaarian’s steel came like a flash of water, to slice Chacor’s arm to the bone. But Chacor was away. He grinned, and slammed back with a rough crazy stroke, never completed, instead switched sideways as the Alisaarian moved, disdainfully to block it. Chacor’s blade, like all the rest burnished to blind, tickled the Ahsaarian’s ribs into a thread of blood.

Above, the north tiers, having noted the impudent Corhlan was returned, gave him a how! of wrath and glee. He was valued as lucky, and had been bet upon.

The Alisaar, put out to be bleeding, struck back with his own feint, which Chacor dismissed, catching the actual blow squarely on the oblong stadium shield.

Then, abruptly tilting the shield, pushed his opponent’s sword wide, an equally unpredicted deed the Alisaar did not care for; he was forced to hurry in his own shield as Chacor, excited now, drove for his guts.

“Tool,” remarked the Alisaarian.

“Accursed-of-Corrah,” replied Chacor.

It was a mistake to converse while fighting, but one commonly made by free men used to backland duels.

“What?” encouraged the Alisaarian.

As Chacor gladly repeated what he had said, with a jewel or two added, the Alisaarian set his sword glancing, left, right, left—smashing upward as he did so with the shield. In three seconds Chacor found himself nipped in the right shoulder, left forearm bruised from the impact of the brass shield rim. Such injuries, far from fatal, could nevertheless tell. While anything that bled shortened a fighter’s time on the sand.

A rolling gasp went over the north tiers, ending in unholy roaring. A man had gone down to the left, not a Saardsin. (Lost in the universal shouting and clamor, the fate of the Lydian’s partner at the eastern end.) Chacor, angry at his error, smarting, wished now he had not ridden with those girls last night. He could see, from a curious glow in the Alisaar’s mask-framed eyes, that unspent sex might also have its worth.

Then the Alisaar aimed a stroke that almost took Chacor’s arm from his body.

Springing backward, propelled by the instincts of panic-speed, Chacor’s feet slid in wetness. (The Saardsin leftward had finished his man, blood ran in a river.) Chacor fell, had fallen. Bloody sand burned his shoulders, and the Alisaar loomed over him, laughing, ready. Yes, there were frequent kills at Zastis. Chacor had learned that, from the Alisaar’s eyes. Above, the crowd were moaning and swaying, crying out, caught in Zastian sex-death-blood-lust.

As the Alisaarian’s sword came plunging down, Chacor brought up his shield with all his strength behind it. Death-desire met life-wish. The shield’s metal buckled and the wooden frame under the owar-hide gave way. As the point of the sword tore through, Chacor rolled aside from it. The Alisaarian, cheated of murder, only the wrecked shield on his sword, unbalanced, hung forward in the air. The Corhl came to his feet, slipping, grasping, deadly silent now, and slammed into the leaning man. As the Alisaarian went down, Chacor, who in all his itinerant brawls had never killed, fell again, astride him, and forced his sword half its length through flesh, muscle and pounding heart.

The Saardsin died with one orgasmic shudder, giving no audible sound.

Not so, the terraces. Curses and women’s scarves descended on Chacor as he rose up wildly, driven mad, shieldless—grabbing the Alisaarian’s shield—looking east.

Then, past the couples of fighting men, the length of the stadium north to east, the Corhlan ran, brandishing the red sword, yelling the. name of the one he wanted.

The Lydian had not killed. The two challengers he had disposed of he had removed by temporarily crippling them. They lay bleeding and semi-conscious against the terrace barrier, awaiting perforce the bout’s end to be carried to a surgeon. Killing was another matter. He did not want it. This might disappoint the crowd, but the fireworks of his swordsmanship so far held them cheering him. Though, too, they urged him to use his genius more cruelly. There had been times in the stadium, not always at Zastis, when Rehger also had come to want a man’s death. Such occasions were not predictable. When the prompting took him, he obeyed. He killed. That was all. He never made a record of numbers, nor kept count, even, as some did, of names, countries, dating his life: That morning I did for the Istrian; that race when I broke the mix’s neck.

On his left, the Ylan had wounded once, and killed twice. Rehger had not witnessed it, but heard, on the edges of awareness, the sea-sound of the crowd shot up in great waves.

The Iron Ox, to the right, had himself been hurt. He fought on, dispatched adversaries, but inexorably slowing. If he had his wits, he would presently sham a swoon. The crowd liked him; he could afford to skive, and win them back another day.

As the Lydian shed the third man—(unseaming the skin from knee to pectoral, a gaudy wound that, ending just under the nipple, induced fainting swiftly in a tired and unprofessional duelist), someone shouted his name. Not from the stands, which was perpetual, from the arena.

Rehger turned, and found the boy from Corhl before him, sword anointed tip to grip, face insane with the fighter’s lust.

From the look he had taken a life, for the first time. Like loss of any virginity, it was significant, that first. He was bleeding himself, a scratch on the right shoulder, not yet impeding him. The Corhlan was untrained, and craving, as they said, to touch the sun.

Fortune had spoiled him, in the race.

Fortune was trustless.

The boy was maybe three or four years Rehger’s junior, in other ways younger still. Not done growing yet, he lacked the Lydian’s height, but then few men were as tall, and since his twentieth year, he had met none taller.

The Corhlan was smiling, his eyes burning on Rehger. So the hunter might dwell on his prey, so a woman might ponder a man she hoped would possess her.

The tiers had laughed at the boy’s headlong stampede, his need to meet the Lydian, and now they were saluting him, his valor and his idiocy. At least, probably, if he fought well, they would not regret watching him spared.

Rehger moved, slowly enough that the boy could see he was accepted and that it had begun.

The Corhlan made one beautiful answer, skimming with the sword—but, instantly checked by Rehger’s nearly gentle counterstroke, reacted with a clottish swing. From that, Rehger merely stepped away, as if ignoring a piece of pointless bad manners.

This was how the Corhlan would fight, then. Artist and dolt by turns. Katemval would have said, if he had been child-sold to a stadium something might have been made of him. But he was free, and it was too late now.

And then—chaos claimed the world.

It was so ridiculous, so incompatible, that for a moment Rehger paid no heed to it, only readjusting his reflexes and his touch as if in response to some natural happenstance.

It took him a few seconds more to realize that, although this had taken place, and continued to do so, it was impossible, and therefore he had no jurisdiction over it.

He had lost control of the sword in his hand. Lost it completely. The sword was alive. It tugged and pulled against him, it twisted against his palm. As he raised it, it resisted, and the length of it thrummed. Cold as ice, charged with an energy, a strength that wrestled with his own—

Before his mind had even laid hold of the facts, his entire body broke into a freezing scalding sweat—not of fear—of pure horror.

Witchcraft. A spell. Yes, Rehger could credit these. But whose work? The Corhlan’s? The power did not seem to come from him—

Struggling, a live enemy for a weapon, his actions suddenly labored and arbitrary, the Lydian strove to contain the boy’s gadfly attack.

(The tiers, supposing their champion taunted the swingeing young Corhl by mimicry, lovingly chided and clapped him.)

But the Corhlan was falling back, retreating. Under the dark Vis tan, his face had paled below the pallor of excitement. His eyes were on the bewitched sword.

So Rehger had an inch to spare, to glance, to see for himself.

They called it Shansarian magic. A trick of the Ashara temples. Katemval, who had beheld it done often in Sh’alis, had ascribed it to drugged incense and hallucination, or some odder ability to flex metal. Snakes became swords, swords were changed to snakes.

In his hand, the grip to the hilt remained, though it rippled with convulsive life. The hilt had shrunk to a kind of spine, quivering with the movement of the rest.

Under what was left of the hilt, the full length the sword had been, a serpent. Stiffly stretched, it was writhing to rid itself, even as he grasped it, of the final vestiges of the steel. It was the color of milk, the hard clinkered scales gleaming like platinum. The eyes stared from its flat head, soulless white—He knew then whose power had formed the spell.

The impulse was to fling it from him. There was an inherent loathing in the Vis, of snakes, which the people of the snake goddess had fed on and fostered. Real or illusion, to clutch this thing now, as it strove to full animation, turned the stomach, destroyed the will.

It must be she meant him to die. To die in shame, before his hour. He felt her cold eyes on him now.

And then, as if by that recognition of her, as of his fear and anger, he had satisfied the Amanackire sorceress, the sword returned to him. The snake disappeared. There was the flash of metal. Slim and balanced, it filled his hand, his servant, his. For how long? Now he could not rely upon the blade. The steel was a white snake, inside. He had seen it loosed. It might, having learned the truth of its nature, at any moment aspire to it again—

All this had taken only seconds. The crowd had noted nothing, only the Lydian’s joke of hamfistedness, the retreat of the Corhlan, the tiny pause that sometimes came in combat before some decisive blow.

Rehger’s skull sang. His vision was blurred, and his body too light. Such sensations followed great exertion and bloodloss. They were the prelude to death-danger. You could not stay long on the sand then, you must complete the task.

His hand on the sword felt numb now. The leaden beats of his heart tolled through him. He was past fear and shame, numbed like the sword hand. So it would be, on his death day.

The Corhlan was fighting him, his face full of the terror and fury Rehger had lost. The Corhlan did not understand, but the sorcery had him yet, its teeth in his throat.

Somewhere, the abacus in the Lydian’s brain had kept score, by the noises of the crowd, how many Saardsins had fallen or triumphed, and their popular status, how many men had been discommoded and hacked. Three or four fights still went on and were the last, this being one of them. Then it would be done.

Rehger moved suddenly. As the weakness dragged from him like a cloak, every failure and shadow of his life swept up on him. They were strangers, these emotions, yet they knew him.

He clipped leftward with the serpent sword, and doubled the blow, and the Corhlan’s shield clanged down at their feet.

It was not a matter of art any more. A howling mob ran on Rehger’s heels.

He saw the young man’s eyes, beautiful as a girl’s, widen with shock and dismay. Then Rehger brought the sword downward, gods’ fire from the sky, and cleaved through him, from the left side of the neck to the breastbone.

The stroke required colossal strength (the clavicle had been shattered), perfect judgment. It was, nonetheless, a butcher’s.

The tiers, amazed by rapidity, one falling figure, the abrupt climax, its glamorous awfulness, erupted. Women shrieked. Well, one had known they liked the Corhl.

Rehger did not acknowledge them. He stood, the sword ripped from his hand, looking at the unconscious youth dying in front of him.

When the paean of the trumpets rang out, with those who had survived and could, Rehger raised his arm to acknowledge a teem of praise and veils.

He neither searched for the Amanackire among the boxes, nor gazed after the surgeons’ carts which were coming up to tidy the corpses and the maimed.

He walked from the stadium, and passing into the rooms below, allowed himself to be stripped of armor and leather. Then, going to the bath, was cleansed in turn of dust and sweat and the blood of others.

A group of noblemen who had come down to laud him, found him stretched along a pallet of the empty upper dormitory, his head on his arms, as if for sleep. “Forgive me,” he said. Swordsmen might wax moody after their prettiest battles, it was well-known, nor was the lion-orchid of Ly Dis any exception. They spoke awhile of poets and women, to him, and awarded him their presents, and tossed a garland of golden poppies over his head, before leaving him. Then, only then, he wept.

The man stood immovably in the entrance of hell.

“I beg your pardon, lady,” he said. “You can’t come in here.”

The torchlit corridor beneath the stadium was very dark, the cavern which opened beyond the man, evilly-lit by braziers, had its own darkness. The woman gleamed between, too white, too ghostly, omen of all things bad.

And now she said, looking in his eyes with her own that were like sightless mirrors, “You see who I am. Stand aside.”

“Yes, I see. I’m very respectful, I’m sure. But no woman gets in here. Not even the whores, to say good-bye.”

Behind him, emphasizing everything, a man shrieked out in agony. That would be the one the Iron Ox had taken last. It was, altogether, the surgeons’ room, no place for the curious, whatever bribe or threat they offered.

“The Corhl,” the woman said.

“Oh, yes.”

“He’s alive,” said the woman.

“Somehow. His own gods know how. When they haul the steel out of him he’ll hemorrhage and die, anyway.”

“Let me by,” she said.

The man, like all Vis, knew of the Amanackire, what they were said to be, and to be able to do. But that Yllumite the Iron Ox had filleted, he was screaming now on and on, halting only to get breath. The man in the entrance said to the Amanackire, “Why don’t you, lady, go and find your goddess, and when you do, crawl up her hole.”

Then something hit him in the chest. Like some beefy fist, it knocked him back, into the upright of the doorway, winded. As he lay on the wall gasping, the Amanackire woman went by him, into the place beyond.

The murky room, stinking of hot metal, blood, offal and medicine, was very busy. The doctors bent to their work beneath the low-slung lamps. A gaggle of boys ran about with boiled water for the implements, the hooks and knives and bone-saws. Another made rounds with a pitcher of wine. He stared at the white being as he went by, and signed himself for divine protection.

The Yllumite had died abruptly and his cries were ended.

The surgeon straightened, washed his hands in the bowl one of the boys had brought. He turned, desultory, to the couch where another casualty lay, a sword wedged among splinters of shattered collarbone, in the meat of shoulder and breast.

The surgeon was anatomically impressed by the force of the blow; perhaps there had already been a weakness in the clavicle. . . .

“That must come out,” the surgeon said. “We don’t let him die by the long road. There’s not much left, but hold him,” he added. No one moved. The surgeon looked up and saw the woman who had come to the head of the couch. “Lady, you shouldn’t be here. Get out.” And heard how the boys muttered with fright that he had so addressed a white Lowlander.

For the woman, she took no notice.

“Lady,” he said, “I’m sorry if he was something to you, but he’s lost his race. You don’t want him to suffer? Go out, or move back. The blood’ll splash you.”

And he set his grip on the sword.

Before he could do more, one of the woman’s slender hands came down on his.

The hand was the color of snow. It repulsed him, its whiteness on his own black-copper—he expected her skin to be cold, but she was warm, as he was.

“I will do it,” she said.

“Daigoth’s eyes. Don’t be a fool, woman.”

“Stand away,” she said.

A silence had fallen over the whole wide room.

To his annoyance, the surgeon discovered he had stepped off as instructed.

Then, while the room watched, the Amanackire drew the sword backward out of the Corhlan’s body, as smoothly as from a sheath of silk.

A dew of blood scattered the wounded man’s flesh, the cover on the couch. Where the steel had divided him, a ragged purple stripe now crossed the top of his breast, from the base of the neck to just above the center of the rib cage. The woman, letting go of the sword she had extracted, leant forward, and her silver hair rained over him, hiding what she did. When she lifted her hands and her head, there was nothing on the surface of the Corhlan’s body at all, save a single bead of blood, which slowly trickled away.

Without another word, the Amanackire returned across the speechless frozen room, passed through its doorway, and was gone.

7 The King’s Mark

The sunset hung like a scarlet awning over the city. The day’s stadium events, which had ended with Zakorian wrestling and three nine-lap races, each with a favorite charioteer, had left the gamblers to rejoice or lick their aches.

A bizarre story was going round by lamplighting. The beserk young Corhl, given so obviously to death before the multitude, had been improbably saved by the surgeons.

Of the Lydian, immediately forgiven the Zastis-excess of killing him, there was no special news.

As the sun declined, leaving pools of red along the ground, Rehger was among the stalls of the hiddrax, up behind the stadium on the northwest side. Each racer of worth reckoned to have his own particular team by his twenty-second year, as he would expect his chariots built for him by the best carriage-makers of Alisaar.

Rehger’s hiddraxi, who had taken him to the summit of the Fire Ride, now stood kissing his shoulders and receiving fruit from his hands.

But for the humming of the sea-hemmed city, the evening was quiet here. A few grooms went about on their agenda, the hiddrax stirred the straw and ate. North, from the horse stables, there came a vague hubbub. There had been a horse-race, too, this afternoon, and the precious beasts were not yet settled.

“Listen, my soul,” said Rehger to the hiddraxi. “Listen to the uproar they’re making. And not one to race as you race, like wind and fire. Best on the earth, my loved ones.”

A groom came across the court, leading a black saddle thoroughbred, and stopped by the arch, where the team-hiddrax could not see too much of it.

Presently Rehger went out. He was to dine with a merchant-lord, the very one who had gifted him this mount two seasons ago.

As he stood in the rich light, checking the animal’s recently shod hoofs, the groom said, “Lydian, you’ll want to know. That Corhlan boy, he’s alive.”

Rehger did not hesitate, picked up another hoof.

“Yes. Not for much longer.”

“Something happened. There was a woman, one of the white Lowlanders. But she knew some trick, and they healed him.”

“No,” said Rehger. He let go the last hoof, straightened, rubbed his fingers along the thoroughbred’s neck.

“Yes, Lydian. I swear it. The whole stadium knows. Ask anyone.”

“Yes,” said Rehger.

“There’s not even a scar on him.”

Rehger mounted, and turned the thoroughbred out through the arch, into the mouth of the sunset, then south down the curve of the high, tree-lined avenue, with its view of the distant ocean, into the city.

It was Zastis after all, Saardsinmey more than usually frenetic. In less than a mile he had been approached more than ten times, always decorously, always part-sensually, to be told the Corhlan lived.

By the hour he rode into New Dagger Lane, he had come to credit it. He had destroyed the Corhlan. There was no chance any man might recover from such a stroke. Rehger had felt an extra guilt that he had not himself withdrawn the sword there and then and, if needful, ended the boy’s pain. But Rehger had not been able to take up that sword, that sword which had become a serpent.

A white Lowlander—the groom’s words. The sorcery that could accomplish one such trick—why not another? Blade to life, dead to life—

Sinking into the oblivion of fatigue, the victory diadem of poppies yet on his head, Rehger had dreamed the earth shook, columns toppled, and mountains. White seared on redness and rushed into a void of black. The Lowlanders had cast down the ancient capital of Dorthar by an earthquake. They had called gods from the sea.

“Lydian! Lydian!” Young tavern girls in the blushed dusk, gilded bells in their plaited hair. “Oh, Lydian—are you glad or sorry that boy’s alive?”

“Is he?”

“Yes, oh, yes.”

“Where is he then?” He laughed down at them as they laughed up at him, putting blossoms into the mane of the thoroughbred, touching his ankle or foot shyly, pressing their breasts against the animal, wanting the man.

“With her,” one said. “The white one. She healed him by Lowland witchcraft. He’s her prize then, isn’t he. He’s handsome, Lydian.” She gazed into his eyes, unable to help herself.

He put them softly aside, and rode on, and they let him go, standing to speak of him under one of the night-blooming torch-poles.

Nearly at the merchant’s doors, Rehger quickened the thoroughbred into a trot. They went straight by, down Sword Street, over Pillar Square, and through the maze of slighter roads that led south.

At the fountain on Gem-Jewel Street, he reined the beast in. Across the way, on the stair of a prosperous wine-shop, a man opened wide his arms.

“Thanks for my winnings, Lydian, may your gods always love you. Will you delight us by drinking here? Good wine, happy girls.”

“Another night,” the Lydian said. Then, as she had told him to, he asked, “The Amanackire woman. She lodges on this street?”

The man’s arms fell, and his face. He looked uncertain, but he said, “By the lacemakers. The tiled house with the high wall.”

The house stood back in the alley that curled behind the lacemakers. In the wall, a gate of ornamental iron gave at a thrust. A garden lay there, with trees, and overgrown by dry grass. Flushed starlight fingered a choked pool.

The lower floor of the house seemed in disrepair and unoccupied. In the second story a cluster of windows showed light within their grills.

Rehger, having tethered his animal, went in by the unlocked entry and ascended to the upper story.

A lit lamp hung over the door, and a bell, in the Alisaarian manner.

A minute went by, during which he thought of nothing, did nothing. Then, as he reached toward the bell again, the door was opened. A servant, a tawny mix girl with those eyes one came to see sometimes in three or four generation mixes, clear brown as ale. She said nothing, but stood aside to let him enter, then led him through the outer chamber into a salon.

This also was lamplit, the flames under painted glass, that set the room awash with pale rainbow colors. The furnishings were simple, not comfortless but with none of the luxurious clutter Rehger associated with wealth and women. He scarcely saw any of it. On a table, a crystal jug and beakers. The servant girl went there and poured him a drink unrequested. It was yellow

Lowland wine, he had never seen it before, and stared into the cup before motioning her to take it away.

The girl did not argue with him. She replaced the cup upon the table, and went softly from the room.

Rehger stood, waiting, not thinking, clothed in his elegant garments for dining, his fighter’s meticulous grace. The Corhlan was not here. He knew that. Only she.

There was a perfume on the air. Not of the usual sort, bottled essences and burning gums.

A curtain drifted. She entered the salon, the Amanackire.

“Be welcome,” she said, and bowed to him. lowland courtesy, meaningless. Or a jibe.

Thank you. Am I welcome also to lay hands on and kill you?”

“You have done your killing,” she said, “in the stadium.”

“Yes, and been cheated of it, I heard. Is it a lie? The Corhl stays dead.”

“He lives.”

“I’ve only your word for that.”

“And the word of the whole city, which brought you here.”

“No, madam,” he said, “I meant to call on you anyway. You played a game with me today. I didn’t care for it.”

She watched him across the length of the room, the wavering rainbows of light.

“Why?” he said. His voice had nothing in it, except perplexity. He could not strike her or rage against her. With no woman on earth would he ever do that. So what was left to him? She was not tall for her sex, and slender, a breakable thing that did not even look human. He went toward her because that was all he could do, as if proximity might invite reason.

“Ice in the sun,” she said. “You, and all men. This city.”

“If you invade my mind,” he said, “you’ll find nothing of use to you.”

“You are too modest.”

“Do it then. I can’t stop you. But why bother with it, or with the sword? Or to save the boy’s life?”

“It was owed to him. It was my fault that you harmed him as you did.”

The perfume came from her. It was not perfume. It was the scent of her skin, and hair.

The crown of her head hardly reached his shoulder. And her face was a girl’s, she could be no older than the boy she had raised from the dead.

“This is so,” she replied, to his thoughts. “Yet I have a power in me and upon me. You never met a man in your arena of blood and steel who had such power. Lydian, I could end your life in moments, by will alone. Do you believe me?”

“Perhaps,” he said.

“Look,” she said. She raised her hand, and her hand began to blaze. He saw its bones, he saw white fire where flesh should be. Then the blaze went out. Her hand was only white, and the arm, white as lilies, ringed by a bracelet of white enamel darker than her skin. The bracelet was a snake, with tintless zircons for eyes.

“Temple sorcery,” he said. “But what’s your quarrel with me?”

There were pink pearls in her hair, and a drop of rosy amber, the Lowlanders’ sacred resin, depended above and between her brows.

She was beautiful, but not as something born; too beautiful, as something fashioned, sculpted. Yet she was alive, he saw her breathing, and felt the warmth of her, so close now in the heat of night.

There was in fact a depth to her eyes. This near to her, he could not help but see it. A depth without a floor, bottomless.

“Why?” he said to her again. He leaned forward as he spoke, so the word itself should brush her lips. “I seldom fought a man whose name I knew. It’s a Swordsman’s superstition, you may have heard of it. Are you afraid then, to give me your name?”

“My name is Aztira,” she said. “Shall I say yours?”

“Say it.”

“Amrek,” she said. Her voice was a wire of hatred.

“Amrek, the Enemy, branded by the bane of Anackire. Genocide, and monster.”

He stood back from her, startled despite everything. He did not know the name, or if he did, it was nothing to him—some king out of history, dead a century or more.

“Your wrist,” she said. “What is that?

He said, calmly, his heart thundering, “This? A birthmark. I’ve had it since childhood.”

“Yes, birth-marked for sure. Her mark. Her curse on him, on you, son to daughter to son.”

Rehger took his eyes with difficulty away from her. He looked at the thin silvery ring around his left wrist, familiar to him, forgotten.

Then he looked again at her.

But all at once she turned from him. As he had done, and with the same recognizable muted violence, she wept.

In his experience, which was limited in such things, women did not weep for any cause. They wept when there was none. Moods of amorous passion or jealousy, to conceal, over little things—the loss of a lover or an earring. In his limited world, no woman had ever shed tears at misery or pain—slave-girls beaten, an old beggar-crone huddled in Iscaian snow. ... his mother kicked across the dirt floor of the hovel: Dry eyed.

Yet, some inner sense, recognizing her real anguish, for he had been shown something of her strength, moved him to pity.

Almost unremembering their prelude, he took hold of her carefully, quietly, to soothe her. And as against the white silk of her hair and skin he saw the metallic darkness of his hands, bronze on marble, his body, waiting all this while in Zastis cunning, astonished him with a sudden bolt of hungry lust. What he had disliked before, it was this very thing which ravened now through his veins.

He was not amazed that she slid instantly from him. They were cold as they looked, her kind, so it was said.

She had not let him see her tears, only hear them, and now she moved before a window, her face to the garden shadows, hiding herself still.

“I’ve been greatly mistaken,” she said. “In everything. A blind, meddling child. Go away. Swordsman. Go to your own, of whom you have no fear. For I fear you, and I fear them, your Alisaarians, your peoples of black Vis. And my own kind also, I am afraid of them.” She gripped the iron of the grill in both her hands. Oh, Rehger!” she cried out. “Warn this city! Warn them—tell them—”

She was on her knees beneath the grill, still gripping the iron in her hands as he had seen prisoners do, or men dying in agony. Her weeping now was terrible to hear. Death’s music, grief that was triumphant.

To question her, to think that she might be questioned, was impossible. Since he might otherwise only console her in the Zastian mode she would abhor and resist, he did as she said. He went away.

The merchant was cheated of his dinner guest that night. But it was Zastis. Heroes, immune to cutthroats, might yet be waylaid at every corner. . .

He had gone to the inn on Five Mile Street, the drinking-house that he would visit before an event, to taste the “last sweet cup.” (One day that would be true.) He had been there the night before. To go back after the stadium was a favor they would value.

He did not climb up to the roof, but sought the smaller court to the building’s rear, from which, once in a way, you might catch the sighing of the ocean. It was a spot for trysts, vacant tonight, as he had foreseen, for all the assignations had been made. The Lydian did not want fame or celebration, he did not want to drink.

The girl who came to him through the vine shadows was Velva. Her skin, darkest honey, was as smooth, her face clear of the blow the Var-Zakor mix had given her, for the physician on Sword Street was excellent, even if he could not cure the dead—

She drew in her breath when she saw the man under the vines. The fragrance of her caught in his brain.

Her hair, as his had been, was wreathed by golden poppies.

“What can I bring?” she murmured.

“You.” He took coins and put them in her palm, holding her fingers closed upon the money. “If you can, and will.”

“Yes—” she said. Her eyes flamed in the light of the Star.

“Not a room here,” he said. “Come to the shore with me. Give the cash to him. Tell him I want you for the night.”

“No payment—not from you—He wouldn’t.”

“Yes, payment. And more for yourself.”

“No.” But she ran to take the politeness of the coins to the inn-lord, her anklets ringing.

When she came back, her eyes were lowered. She let him lead her down out of the inn to the yard, and lift her up before him on the black thoroughbred.

Five Mile Street was loud with people and lights. Here and there someone greeted the champion, but soon they turned into the side alleys that ran toward the market.

Near the harbor wall a sentry or two gave them a mild good night. The Guardian’s men knew well enough who this rider was, but made no comment. With all the palace and aristocratic liaisons he could choose from, if he wanted to bring a wine-girl to the beach, that was his business. As for such a man being a slave, this sort of slave did not seek to break for liberty. Bred for their destiny, whatever other thing could offer them what slavery gave? The gods of the stadium went where and how they pleased.

As they rode down the path into the vast, plush, reddened black of sea and night, he began to caress her. The entire ride had been a caress, their bodies moving against each other, his arms roping her as he held the reins.

The pleated sea was fired by the Star. The Red Moon scorched behind the heights of the city. Nearest of all to heaven and to Zastis, strangely, the long hill cumbered by the tombs of the dead—

Under the rock, at the sea’s edge, the Lydian lay over Velva in a bath of satin sand. Her flesh burned with the light, her breasts tasted of powders and cinnamon, and of the sah of the ocean, budding against, within his mouth—She could not be still, her hair furling in inky coils along the dune, her hands polishing his skin, every muscle and tendon waking at her touch—She fell back dying into ecstasy long before he had penetrated the sea-cave between her thighs. He laughed at her rapture, cradling her through the joy, beginning again to court her even as it ended. When he took her, she was already crying out, calling thin and disembodied as a sea-bird—He thrust to the center of the sweetness, and the fount of life surged from him, excruciating pleasure, with the misleading finality in it of death. The poppies of her garland had been crushed between them.

In the brief hiatus, before the urging of the Star seized on him again, Rehger heard the waves on the shores of Alisaar, as he had heard them some eighteen or nineteen years. Changeless, those waters. Mankind did not matter. Once could know that at such moments, and not mind.

He had come to this southern city to enable them to betroth him to a girl he had never seen. She was apparently most beautiful. That did not encourage him; his mother was beautiful, the bitch of bitches, a Dortharian woman who plastered her skin with white. Why? To be different from every other woman of Vis. Or for some secret reason beyond him—Unless it was to turn the knife a little more in his wounds.

From the palace windows, he saw the snow, white also, lying on the city.

There were Lowlanders in the city. Despite everything he had ordered, every edict. Every terror.

Gloved, held in by cloth and rings, his hand lay out on the window embrasure before him. He need only strip the rings, the one great ring on the smallest, deformed finger, to see the hand as it was. The right hand, (naked, well-formed, very dark, unflawed), the right hand moved toward the left, stealing up on it. Take off the glove, and look. No. No need. He knew.

From childhood, from his first conscious hour. He recalled that once, once only, he had stared very long at the ungloved hand, turning to catch the lamplight of another room, in Koramvis. It had come to him then that the hand was actually a marvelous thing, almost an artifact, for it seemed made of silver, and the fine chiseled scales upon it, marred only by old scarring near the wrist, were perfect as silver discs laid one upon another. The scales, after all, of a dragon, not a serpent. Not the snake-scale curse on him of the lowland goddess Anackire—

There was rapping on the door. The woman, the mistress of his pleasure-girls. He had told her to go and fetch the one the soldiers had abducted. The Lowland girl-beast.

The door was already opened, and as the slave slipped out, the Lowlander was pushed through, and left to him.

She was terrified, he saw immediately. Good. She was too afraid to see his fear. That was often his means, was it not, the fear of others before a High King, a Storm Lord. They dropped at his feet and did not see him trembling.

He said something to her. What had he said? That she was a Lowlander, was she? Take off her rags then, and let him see the rest.

But she only stood there clutching at the air and gasping.

So he went on talking to her, reviling her, and in the middle of it, as if he could not prevent himself, his own horror filled him and that in turn spoke to her. Was she afraid of his hand, this one? Well, that was just. The blasting of her people laid in rape on her.

And he was also horribly aroused by her, her whiteness, her skin like snow, her hair like ice. Revolted and fascinated, sick, and avid—He pulled her to him and pressed the snake-scale hand over her breast and felt the heart leaping like a creature in a net. But then it ceased leaping, there was nothing, under his hand, his mouth. She had died. She was dead. He let her go and looked at her on the floor. A child. A dead child.

He knelt down slowly. He kneeled beside her, waiting for her to live again, for death to be a faint from which she would recover. He smoothed her face. He took her hands, and relinquished them. He slapped her.

He had not meant her to die. That was not fair, on her or on him. He had meant her to be used. Perhaps not even that. Only the gods, who hated him, knew what he had wanted or truly meant to do. But to kill her—should not have been possible.

Yet it was foolish, for he would not tolerate any of her race in the world. He would be rid of them. And this—was one less.

“It was only a dream.”

He looked into the girl’s dark face, framed by black hair and night, the Star-burned ocean.

“Yes,” Rehger said. “A dream.”

But Velva leaned over him still, her eyes wide, searching his.

He said, “What is it?”

“The Lowland witch,” she said, muttering so he barely heard her. “You were saying, the Lowlander, the Lowlander—”

Red lightning flickered, smiting the southern sea.

Rehger drew her down. “Now I say only ‘Velva.’ ”

He silenced her with kisses. He drew her astride and let her ride him, helping her with his strength until she moaned in an agony of delight. But even as his own body swelled toward its tumult, his mind stood far away. His mind was in the palace rooms of Koramvis and Lin Abissa, looking out of the eyes of Amrek, High King of all Vis, one hundred and thirty years and more in the past.

In the garden courtyard of the house on Gem-Jewel Street, Katemval was breakfasting, while his tame water-birds pecked at crumbs or swam about in the cistern.

When the slave came out, followed by the sun-blazoned figure of Rehger, a note of keen gratification went through the older man. It was rarely now that the hero sought his inventor ... if the attentions had ever been frequent, or more than the easy friendly courtesy the

Lydian extended to most of humanity, his fellow Swords, the city nobles, the drudges of taverns, the gambling mob. (Yet I’m soothing to him. He knows that. Here he is now, some enquiry on his lips. He used to ask me many things, long ago, when I told him the stories of my travels, other lands, legends. Alisaar’s his earth, he can never go anywhere else, or want to. But my mind-box is his library. We’re to fight Thaddrians, have you seen Thaddra? I was offered a team of animals from Dorthar, would they be worth going for?)

“Sit, eat, drink. And ask me,” said Katemval.

Rehger smiled. “Is it so obvious?”

Seating himself, then, a dash of sea-sand fell from his mantle. He was dressed for evening fare, but he had been on the beach.

“Not the princess, surely,” said Katemval.

Rehger glanced at the sand, which some of the water-birds had come to try. He took one of the little breakfast cakes and broke it for them, stroking their necks of irridescent indigo as they ate, “No, not a princess. There was something curious with the sea. At dawn, when she and I were walking back toward the harbor wall, the tide had gone farther out than I ever saw. A couple of ships outside the basin were in difficulties, they were pulling cargoes off in a hurry. She was afraid of the sea, she said it meant something bad would happen. You know what those girls are like sometimes.”

“I remember.”

“But the fishermen were down the beach, waving their arms and running about. There were scores of fish left behind all over the mud. The men said to me Rorn was thirsty, he was drinking the sea.”

“The waters beyond Alisaar were always strange. Myth used to have it they rolled on into the ocean of Hell, Aarl, All-Death. Then the traders began going back and forth to the white men’s lands, and Hell had to move its traps. But you can see sailors, the ones who stick to the south routes and the west, hair gone gray, and some of the fishermen and shore-liners get it, as far up the coast as Hanassor. Bleached by Aarl-salt—and it turns the brain, too, probably. It’ll have been the tremor on the night of the Fire Ride. The land shudders, then the sea does flighty things. But that isn’t what you came to ask.”

“No, Katemval.”

The slave hurried out again with a fresh griddle of hot cakes, and honey-curd and raisins—and to remove the milk, regardless of Katemval, which the Children of Daigoth never drank. Rehger thanked the slave, waiting till he was gone to say, “Who was Amrek? I mean the Storm Lord. Do I have the name right?”

“You do. Amrek son of Rehdon, the last Vis High King. He was the one who said he’d wipe all smudge of the Lowlanders off life’s face. But Rehdon’s bastard, Raldnor—half Vis, half Lowlander, and Anackire Incarnate for a mother, if you swallow all the tale—Raldnor made a treaty with the other continent, the blond men of Vathcri, Vardath and Shansar, and picked up the Lowlanders and told them they were magicians. And armed with that, he whipped Amrek into an early grave. Koramvis city was smashed to bits in the earthquake. Anackire sat on the mountains and applauded like a lady at the stadium. Around a hundred years back, it happened again, another way round. Free Zakoris wanted war, but the war was stopped. The gods stopped it. If you believe all that.”

“Do you?”

“Well, if I spill the salt I ask the god’s pardon like some up-country wench. And I sacrifice regularly in the temples. I even make an offering now and again in the Shalian temple near Tomb Street. To the snake woman. Just to be on the safe side. But the gods walking the water—I can never quite credit that. I don’t even know if I credit the gods. May they excuse me.”

Rehger laughed softly. But his eyes were distant. His unleveled beauty, as he sat there at the ordinary sunny table, filled Katemval with an instantaneous anxiety. It seemed to provoke fate. The years of fighting and winning, the crown of the great race—and no mark on him, no disfigurement to appease the envy of perhaps nonexistent gods.

“But Amrek,” said Katemval, “why Amrek?”

Rehger looked down at the ornamental birds. Katemval looked at them, too, remembering that casket with the hawk and pigeon in it. Sometimes slum archers bagged such suppers—the shard of flint in the raptor’s breast seemed to indicate this was their origin. But then some other one had bought or taken the trophy. They were not embalmed, as it turned out. The corpses were kept pristine by some other perturbing method. Flung on the compost behind the house, even now, the slave said, they had not decayed. Nor had anything utilized the carrion.

“Yesterday, it was suggested to me,” Rehger said, “that I come direct from Amrek’s line.”

“You’re Iscaian. There was no look of it, there,” Katemval said promptly. He was unnerved. He thought. And every look of it in you. By a pantheon of gods—yes—

“Well, Katemval. My father was just a man who had my mother, not an Iscaian. He left her that golden drak, remember. She told me something of how he looked, tall and strong, and dark. He might have been rich, once. And he said he was a Lan. Is that possible? Is there some remnant of Amrek’s house in Lan?”

“Now wait—wait—” Katemval tapped the table, so the raisins jumped in their dish. “Lanelyr—About the time of that non-war. A priestess who claimed descent from Amrek Am Dorthar. She married into the royal house at Amlan. Not to the Lannic throne, you understand, which only goes to brothers and sisters or sons with mothers, incestuous pairings.” Abruptly Katemval ceased. He sat and looked at Rehger, realizing that the boy—the man—had never bothered to mention this vital circumstance of his begetting, all through their years of friendship)—which plainly was not any kind of friendship at all. Katemval said, in a foolish, stricken voice, before he could control himself, “Didn’t you trust me, to tell me that? Your mother’s honor, was it?”

Rehger glanced up. His eyes lost for a second the sheen of distance, they gentled, as Katemval had seen them do with a woman or a beast. Insulted, Katemval drew away as Rehger reached out to clasp his arm. And the gentleness went. Rehger shook his head impatiently.

“I thought it was unimportant, who he was. I never told you because it meant nothing to me.”

“What can it mean now?” Katemval said. “You’re a Saardsin Sword.”

“A slave, yes,” Rehger said, offhandedly. “But I should like to know. If I have a king’s blood. If my mother took me from a king’s descendant.”

“All right,” said Katemval. He was brusque. “Stroll along Three Penny Alley and find a soothsayer, or some witch, and ask her to cast it out for you.”

“It was a sorceress who told me first,” Rehger said.

Katemval thought of a white image by a wall, a message of downfall, of weird rumors concerning a raising of the dead—

“Don’t go to her,” Katemval said. “If it’s the Amanackire woman. No.”

“It seems I may have to.”

“No, I said. Certainly, she is a witch. Without pleasantries, the deadly sort. Like all her race, the white ones. There’s a tale they have some colony, in the northwest jungles—oh, beyond Zakoris. They plot there and ferment their cold sickly magics. The written warning I told you of, it has that tone. It must have come from her—”

Rehger’s face had acquired a shadow. The prefiguration of the bones within. After all, he had been marked—“You watched the last combat, Katemval?”

“I can always watch now, when you fight.”

“Did I kill the Corhlan?”

“You killed him. And half the city says she brought him back. But who’s seen the boy? It’s an ugly nonsense, but it’s compatible with what she is. Oh, they can work magic. Sham or genuine, it’s nothing to want to be near.”

Rehger came to his feet. He gazed at Katemval, a long, open look, and the shadow was in his eyes now.

“Katemval, I have to be going. I must be in the practice court by midmorning, or put out the fighting-squares.”

“Yes,” said Katemval. “Go carefully.”

He felt old, and sat down as Rehger turned to leave. But then, getting up again, Katemval walked upstairs to the roof and watched the Lydian riding away along the avenue on the coal-black thoroughbred. Katemval watched as far as the fountain, where the road angled. For the snake witch lived on this very street. In the dilapidated tiled mansion. Rehger had gone by it without a glance. But neither had he looked back once, toward Katemval’s house.

He might have excluded himself from the practice court, this one day; the squares would not have been out, despite what he had said to Katemval, who knew as much. Champions made their own laws for such things.

But he had required the fight, the hard exercise. Sex had not purged him. The sea and the night, disturbed by red glimmerings, the water plucked away. It was Zastis. He was of the bloodline of a dead king. And in his mind, he could recall a white girl lying on a palace floor, a white girl with her hands locked upon a grill of iron.

Eight squares, each composed of four men, spaced two by two, back to back.

The sun streamed down and broiled them, and the blades, sword and dagger, made lightnings, slammed together, slithered, grated, shot away.

And the Corhlan. He lived. Did he? Where? Where would a man go to, who had been slain and restored inside a day? To the brothels? The temples?

“You’re slow, Lydian,” the Ylan, facing him from the next square, rhythmically lunged. “Too many times, Rehger, with the one you had, Rehger. Last night. Was it six times? Or seven? Did she go pale, then?”

You did not converse while fighting. Except now and then in the practice court.

“Last night I was praying,” said Rehger, feinted almost idly, and thumped the Ylan across his helm with the sword-flat. The Ylan went down, and the man back-to-back with him stumbled and cursed.

Rehger thought: That was word-play, too. Pale. He meant the Amanackire.

The trainer ambled up the block of squares. Now he frowned, now called on Daigoth.

Rehger waited for the Ylan.

“Take off your pathetic rags,” he said to the frightened girl, in snow-lapped Xarabiss.

The Ylan was on his feet, shaking his head like a bemused lion.

Amrek. Rehger. A dream, memories carried in his blood—

The Swordsman beside him, a young sturdy Ommos who would be worth watching in a year, if he lived so long, landed a blow upon the Ylan’s side-mate. The man swerved, missing the worst of it, and came back to ram the Ommos under the ribs with a dagger hilt. “That’s what you like, boy-stitcher.” The Ommos sprawled toward Rehger’s piece of ground. Rehger sprang away. The Ylan, favoring his dagger now, tried to score under the Lydian’s sword. Rehger moved effortlessly beyond the stroke. Bringing up his left hand he took the sword neatly from his right, snatched the dagger right-handed. The showy gambit now brought the sword left-handedly down on the Ylan’s blade, and scythed it to the court. The Ylan snarled, his anger was real. Generally they fought in the practice court with blunted iron. Not today. It was Zastis. Tempers and blades were sharp—

The Lydian’s sword and dagger re-passed each other, the showy gambit performed twice without a flaw. “Only able three times, then,” growled the Ylan. “You saved it for me?”

The Ommos, still rolling on the ground, sank his teeth suddenly in the foot of the man who had felled him.

A howl of laughter and abuse went up.

The trainer groused stamping forward. Dirty fights earned docked privileges. No boys for the Ommos tonight—

What did it matter if you were a king’s making? That blood must run thin by now. And he was a slave in Saardsinmey—Careful with the sword. Swords might be snakes in disguise. “I fear you. Oh, Rehger—warn this city—”

Something was screaming, miles below, loud and sonorous, a mighty creature in the gut of the planet—

Rehger lifted his head—the sun canceled vision. His left arm flew outward for no reason, and he looked and saw the Ylan standing in astonishment there. “You let me cut you.”

The blood of a king, it was leaving him now.

The trainer was at the Lydian’s elbow, holding the left arm, examining it. The Lydian allowed this. The arm, opened lengthways a hand’s breath below the elbow to the wrist, did not belong to him. It belonged to the city.

The other squares fought raggedly on.

“That’s deep enough. This old wrist scar here blocked off the stroke. Lucky. Off, out of it. Gods blind me, Lydian, I never saw you take a dolt’s bite like that since you were eleven years of age.”

He walked away from the court. He held the blood of Amrek inside his arm as best he could, but it spilled between his fingers, to the ground.

The surgeon pointed to the cup of wine.

“Eh-ink that. Keep still.”

Unkinder echo of Katemval, this morning.

Rehger did as he was instructed. The surgeon drove his silver needle six times through the skin, tied off the gut-thread and severed it. The wound was bound by an apprentice.

“You won’t compete for our city for ten days. You were due two events, they’ll pine. I will inform you presently which exercises you may or may not indulge.”

When the lecture was done, Rehger said, “Do you know anything about the Corhlan who fought here?”

“I wasn’t in attendance yesterday. But I’ll tell you, Lydian, I don’t know of a single man among all the stadium surgeons who was.”

In the under-passages, a pretty harlot, one of scores kept to content the younger Swords, came by the Lydian, slipping her dress from her shoulders and smiling slyly. “They say the Ylan got you—well, and so he did. Well, I know. You let him do it, so you can be with that woman, didn’t you? To have your Zastis days and nights alone with her.”

On foot, cloaked and hooded, he went there. He even stooped a little; some might know him by his height.

But three torch-lighters, who always greeted him, paid him no attention as they made their way through the main boulevards of Saardsinmey, touching the stalks of light-poles to yellow flower. And the girls did not come up to him, or the shopkeepers and princes who had won.

A couple of riotous dinners were in progress on Gem-Jewel Street, and there was also dancing in the road about the fountain, young women swirling their beads and skirts. Two officers of the Guardian’s cohorts, standing to watch, were complaining that word had it the Lydian had been sliced through the arm at practice, and would not fight or race for thirty days, or maybe never again, and how would the bets go now, Daigoth-eat-and-spit-it-forth.

Her house was in darkness.

Even in the garden, no lit window was visible.

He came to the upper entrance, and the lamp there, too, was out. He left the bell and crashed his fist several times on the timbers.

When the mix girl opened the door, he was sorry.

“It’s all right, sweetness. I only wanted to be heard.”

She said nothing, nor did she try to stay him. She darted away and he was left to enter as he would, closing the door himself.

Everything was shadows, the salon empty. Yet he could smell the perfume of her, faint as fine pollen, everywhere.

He went to the grill, where she had clung lamenting. The garden lay beneath, quite silent. The moon was rising, the Vis moon of Zastis, red as the hair of a red-haired woman—white, in the cold months, as the Amanackire. His arm gnawed and burned. His fingers had stiffened. The surgeon had not told him, since he knew, that even with the utmost care, some malady might set in. The wound could fester. The arm ... be lost to him. Some chose to sweep the courts then, to clean the privies, to put oil in the bath-house jars. To run errands for the Swords. Some went back into the stadium and soon died there, jeered and pitied, and praised in death. It was the mercy of Daigoth, to kill a crippled man swiftly.

“Aztira,” Rehger said to the shadows and the perfumed emptiness. He crossed the salon and tried the doors along the corridor beyond. Each opened. Many of the rooms lacked even furnishings. In some, dim shapes, nothing that was animate.

From a terraced balcony, a stair led up to the roof of the mansion. He climbed it slowly.

I healed before, there have been other wounds.

I was younger. No wound like this.

The roof was garlanded by the garden trees, only on the southwest side partly open to the dancing lights of the street beyond the alley, which seemed remote as fireflies. It occurred to him he glimpsingly heard the sea, as he had at the inn. And on the beach, sheathed in Velva’s golden flesh.

Pale on darkness, the Lowland girl was seated at the parapet. Her hair, unbound, with no ornament, hung round her to the roof itself, a waterfall. She did not turn.

“Is your name,” he said, “Aztira?”

She did not reply.

“Aztira, you’ll have to heal me, as you did the Corhlan. I was cut in the arm today, and it was your fault.” He moved toward her, but she did not look about. The moon was in the eastern trees. Not red, as yet, only like the rosy amber she had worn on her forehead. “And then I brought the one clue my father ever left my mother. It’s a coin. An adept can read something from a possession. In Alisaar they can, or say they can. I want to ask you about that man. If you take the coin, and tell me. He was called Yennef. My mother could never pronounce it. Nor I, till I came here.” He stood by her. All about, the darkness throbbed and whispered. “Aztira? There’s also a dream I need you to divine.”

She turned then. As she stood, her hair drifted out like silver smoke; her eyes were stars veiled in water. She raised her arms and her fingers touched his shoulders. There was strength in him, fierce and warm as wine. No wound, no trouble. He put his hands on her waist and lifted her and drew her up his body until her silver arms encircled his neck, until her heart smote against his, until their mouths could meet.