The White Serpent

8 Sold and Bought

Not the temples. It was the brothels the Corhlan had gone to.

There had been a nightmare, of death. Somewhere. But you need not think of it, here.

He had fought, lost, walked away from the under-rooms of the stadium. To submerge his grievance, he came to this place, near the waterfront. He had had some cash saved, which had not yet run out. When it did, they would throw him on the fish-reeking cobbles, the madam glaring and vituperative, the girls regretfully sad. Then—then he would devise some other means to get by.

“I’m a prince, in Corhl,” he told the girls. They did not care, or believe him. But his healthy limber frame, his handsome face, they liked those. “Come to my palace. Be my queen in Corhl.” “Oh, get on with you,” they said.

The bed was scattered with the somber marigolds of Alisaar, the pomegranate-color wind-flowers, the speckled topaz lilies that grew wild on the hills. The establishment servants fed him, and brought wine, and white Karmian spirit that made you think you could fly. (“Fly to Corhl with me.” “Oh, get on.”)

During the first night, near sunrise, an enormous herd of cattle had woken him, mooing and rumbling under the sea. But cattle did not go about there.

The girl screamed as she lay on his belly, gripping his shoulders. He was finished just before her, and, his eyes clearing, saw through her contorted face into another face, white as a skull. There was a pain in his chest, running down from the neck to the breastbone.

The Lydian had given him a whack with his shield. It had stunned him. Weil.

“Now, for me,” the other girl said, sliding on to Chacor.

“Corrah, no. I’m dead.”

They had heard those rumors too, and did not believe them, either, though they did believe otherwise in every manner of miracle, jinx, glamour, ghost and demon.

“Ah, Chacor. The sun’s going, the Star’s coming up. And look, what’s this?”

Erect in her canny winsome hands, he surrendered himself. And she buried him in her loins, most marvelously alive.

Wrapped in her cloak of black silk and a great poured collar sewn with jets, Panduv stood and stared.

The man, a mix, poorly dressed in contrast to her opulent slavery, clanked the throats of the bags again.

“Five hundred bars, standard rate. Take and have them weighed, if you wish.”

“You’re her menial,” said Panduv. She snapped her fingers for her girl to go on ahead, through the covered court into the building,

“No. But she can command me, of course. Her kind can always do that.”

“So I see. Well. Go back and tell her to—save her money.”

The man looked down at the bags.

“They’re heavy.”

“I cry tears of blood for you.”

The man cursed her for a black Zakorian trull, and Panduv stalked by him. She could have killed him with her bare hands or feet, for she was stadium-trained also to fight, like every professional dancer-acrobat of the city. But that was out of bounds. He was, Yasmat snap off his organ, a mix. And an errand-boy for an Amanackire.

Panduv was tiring of that Amanackire. Once had been enough. What next?

Entering the purlieus of the theatre, Panduv discovered.

“She’s here.”

“Who is here?”

“Your snake woman.”

The manager, between contempt and nervousness, peered about the ante-stage, a space just now banked up with properties, and persons who were listening.

“Not mine,” said Panduv resolutely.

“I put her in the painters’ room. Go and see to her, for the love of the gods.”

Panduv left him and went to the painters’ room.

“You must be amorous of me,” she said to the Amanackire. “May I decline? Those stadium-trained avoid drinking milk.”

“I only want what I have told you I want.”

“Which you knew I’d refuse, or else why are you here before me, when your groveling money-bags met me outside?”

“Name your own price, Zakorian.”

Panduv detained a flock of replies. Curiosity was claiming her, despite everything. The Amanackire had come out tonight mantled in clear colors, a chameleon for once. Her tell-tale hair, and even her face, were veiled in gauze.

“Why do you want to purchase such a thing?” said Panduv.

The Amanackire sighed—for the gauze fluttered. She did nothing else.

Panduv said: “You think you’ll need it? And before I shall?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I mustn’t rejoice. You may strike me down—I’ve heard your race can kill by lightning from the brain. And then where would you be? But the stone is black, lady.”

“The Lowlands use black stone,”

“And burn their dead.”

“I’m not among my own kind here. I respect the customs of the lands I visit. I have been influenced.”

“Something more,” said Panduv. She narrowed her lustrous eyes, toyed with her jet-stone collar nearly as dark.

“What would you have?”

“Say,” said Panduv: “Why from me?” “It has the nature of a balance, Zakorian, which you might not understand. Besides, yours is of the best, the masons boast of it. The most sturdy.”

“You fear Saardsins would break in and desecrate?” By a movement of the face-veil, Panduv saw the Amanackire smiled.

“Before Zastis, you came to me,” said Panduv, “asking me about the Lydian.” “It was, if you wish, a prelude to this.” “But you’ve met him by now. It’s all over the stadium, and the Women’s House. That you and he fire the Star together. That you hexed him and nearly crippled him in the practice court so you could have him all Zastis to yourself. So why not ask his help with this other problem?”

“He has never bothered with provision. They say it’s notable, Panduv. The women, though mostly less exposed to obvious danger, always see to it first.” The Amanackire paused. Then she came toward the Zakorian girl, and as she did so lowered the veil from her face. She stood looking up at Panduv. The Lowlanders generally lacked the height of the Vis. But all at once, her slender smallness, the always-unrecollected youth of the white girl, stirred the dancer, sexually and emotively, and, therefore, to an awareness of the human.

“Panduv,” she said, “forgive me. My race are arrogant and cruel. I know no better than to demand. Let me crave your pardon, and ask, then. Please, Panduv Am Hanassor, I beg you. Permit me to buy from you your built black tomb on the hill. With the riches I can give you, you can build at once one even finer. Although, I promise you, you won’t need it. Your days will be long.” Panduv shivered.

“Not yours? Yes, I see. Why else this hurry.” “You will hear quite soon that I have died. Then rejoice, if you want. Sell the tomb to me. Take my blessing for your curses.”

Velva had entered the Salt Quarter, the warren of narrow streets and ruinous lots that lay between the warehouse district and the eastern slums of the city. She had told the inn-lord the Lydian wanted her. Her employer had not argued, or looked for further payment. He had not guessed it was a lie. Would it were not.

There was a thin twisting sooty street that coiled and wriggled through the warren. Though leading nowhere of import, and of revolting appearance, it was well-known in its way, or ill-known, certainly.

Sometimes, from some black crack, a hand reached out and plucked at the girl’s cloak, or a face squinted. But they were feeble, indeterminate attentions. Prosaic lust was not what prompted this defile of night.

She passed all the doorways, not looking, and the alley-mouths. She passed the cavelike open entries, shelved with mortal flesh. In this worm-wend, all manner of drugs and essences were sold. Incenses and elixirs, inducements to dream or drown, the recipes of many lands. Here even they sold Aarl’s Kiss, that had its fame, now, Vis over. It was the juice of a yellow fruit, plucked from a mysterious island that lay at sea beyond the shores of Alisaar, and off the proper routes of the traders. They said the blond Storm Lord, Raldnor, had found the island on his journey of discovery that ended at the Second Continent. The fruit, when eaten, made one drunk. More. In sufficient quantity, the rind and pith mixed in, it made all things beautiful; it opened the portals into the kingdom of the gods. But it also killed, in great pain, and swiftly. Crush the whole fruit, however, distill and dilute the juice, one might imbibe the pleasant drink moderately for some years, knowing something of the ecstasy often. Or, if in haste, much ecstasy and death in a few months. Those that took the juice a decade denied it was an assassin. They loved it as their friend. They tried to hold it off, as a loved friend is held off, and gave in finally, and in the last seasons of addiction, married it. Those that went more quickly acknowledged it was death. What had life, anyway, to offer them, that was delicious as this?

In the deep porch, Velva touched the cord of a bell.

She did not hear it ringing, but the door, after a moment, was opened, two inches.

“What?” said a voice.

“Aarl’s Kiss.”

“Cash? Or do you barter other things?”

“Coins.”

“Let’s see ’em.”

Reared among the tenements of Saardsinmey, she knew to show just one flash of one bright drak. She had saved the Lydian’s money, which he had pressed on her, meaning to give it back to him. But he had not sought her again. The witch had ensorcelled him instead.

“Come in,” said the unseen one. He held her arm through the door, and she pushed him off.

The darkness stank of sea-damp and filth. A light burned, very low. Neither purveyor nor client wished to be illumined. Velva had slight fear she would be plundered and slain. She would be more profitable alive. For this medicine, she would come back. Taste, and you must return to it.

“How?” said the man she could not see.

“Not the usual mixture. Undistilled. From the pulpings.”

Now she was in some unsafety. She had implied she meant this venture to be unique.

“That’s not so simple,” he said. “Why d’you want it that way?”

Velva turned a fraction, for he was shifting the lamp, trying to spy her better.

“My lover. He’s old. Sick. The juice does nothing for him, watered.”

“You want him packed off, eh?”

She hid her face in her cloak, and threw weighted dice.

“I need his money. Fill another vial for me—that one distilled.”

And the vendor cackled, pleased to be of service. Since, hooked by her elderly paramour, she also was his, and—youthful and hale—might stay so an entire ten years.

It was a winter morning when slave-takers came to the fishing village a mile below Hanassor. Above, the dark conical cliff that held the city, blocked the sun, but the sea was sheened. It was never really cold in Zakoris.

Panduv’s aunt-mother—her birth-mother was long dead—was gutting fish and pegging them to dry out on the posts. She was bare-breasted, and big-bellied, always with child, as was the old way, by any one of the village men, who held all their women in common. Other women worked farther along the stony shore, seeing to the nets or the fish the men had brought in just before sunup. Smoke swarmed from the hut-holes.

Panduv, who in those days had been called something in the way of Palmv, had also been caught turning cartwheels when supposed at toil with the pots in the water tub. Her aunt-mother had damned her, naming her not only Palmv but the Hated-of-Zarduk. Nearly three years old, eyes wet (for the blows had been harsh), Palmv scoured the clay. She did not know the bruises of those blows would fade in another world.

Zakoris was Vardish, since the Lowland War, over a century: Var-Zakoris. The might of Hanassor was done, and there was a new capital inland with another title. Sometimes pale-skinned men with yellow hair were seen in the village’s vicinity. They were not liked, or annoyed. The gods had had their say. Zarduk was chastising his old kingdom. In Free Zakoris, over the mountains, that was where the soul of the land had gone.

Seeing riders coming down on them, Palmv’s aunt-mother had called the other women. They spoke of Vardians or Tarabines—but the riders were not white men. Dortharians, then, the lovers of Vardians and Tarabines.

Nor were they Dortharians.

They came along the stones, the zeebas picking a way. The women stood ready to fight if needful. Their men, resting after a night’s fishing, were not to be disturbed.

Then a couple of the riders explained what they wanted. Children. Very young. Girls—for boys were not sold at Hanassor. Boys were still considered warriors here, and powerhouses of seed. But girls were expendable. Particularly a girl like Palmv, whose mother had died of childbearing and might have passed this stigma on.

Palmv heard the exchanges. She heard herself offered, for the slavers’ price. When they came and looked her over, she barely struggled. No man was consulted. No one knew who her father was, she had never been an asset to the village.

Presently she was carried away to Alisaar.

She thought all this while that it had happened to her because she was inferior. Because she had turned cartwheels. Useless, this was her punishment. It was in the stadium, in the girls’ hall, that she learned, gradually, painfully, disbelievingly, that she had been taken for her beauty and her strength, and that her name was Panduv, and she would be a dancer and a princess in glory. When she might otherwise have scratched at pots, dried and pickled fish, and lain with her legs open, either taking men in or pushing them, new-born, out, all her days.

Now Panduv stood on the top-walk of the triple stage, thinking warily of these things. Was it an omen, to consider her start? Had the white woman lied, saying Panduv would not need the tomb and that her life would be long? Was it only that some fate hung over Panduv, a death that was not expected, and would leave nothing to be buried? Obliteration by flames, or water—Panduv felt an instant’s awful fear. To the Lowlanders, with their religion of eternal renewings (alien to Panduv as anything of theirs), physical death was nothing. (Why else, that one, so calm in the face of it?) But to a Zakorian, only a holy burning or drowning in sacrifice was vahd. The gods provided for all such victims, as for men who fell in war. For the rest of the dead, without the model of their corpse to remember by, the shade would be formless and amnesiac. And if the cadaver was shelterless, how could the shade achieve a refuge? Death was a dim, bleak country anyway. Every aid was needful, there.

The theater was nearly empty, rehearsals concluded. Up in the crimson roof the lamps had been doused by those monkey-boys who could scale the pillars. The poled sections of scenery had been run off along their, grooves into the wings—the wheels below, into which the poles were locked, had screeched throughout the rehearsal so the actors laughed and complained and the manager despaired. Behind Panduv, there remained only the great bole, part primeval tree, part column, abandoned on stage until tomorrow. It was a tall drum of solidly carpentered wood, braced with gilded bronze, and painted. Jointed and hinged lengthways, it stood currently wide. The play had a diversion: A manifestation of the love-goddess Yasmat. A magical tree carved into a column was to be split by divine lightning. The goddess would step forth, to be fawned on by leopards and birds. In a dance, she then demonstrated the omnipotence of sexual love. The goddess must at no time speak, that would be blasphemous. She might only be portrayed by perfect beauty and exceptional talent. Panduv had been engaged for the role at a staggering fee. Her worth was further attested by the shockproofed structure of the column, and the cushioning of its interior. However, the cranky crane, having deposited the column-drum, promptly broke down. It had been altogether a disquieting night.

Nor yet over.

The leading actor of the Alisaarian troop appeared on the apron, and came stealthily and quickly up the stages to Panduv, taking her into his arms when he reached her.

“Yasmat,” he groaned in her ear.

“Delay a while,” she said. “We can go to the clothes room.”

“No. Let’s go in there. Yes, into the column. It’s comfortable enough. Black on black, my Yasmat. Oh, don’t make me wait any longer—”

It was Zastis, the nerves of both alight. She allowed him to prop her in the dark column and himself against her, pulling shut the hinged sections . . .

Yet even as they clung and plunged, upright and frenzied, in the close-bound, hidden dark, she had an idea they made love in a grave. And that, once all the business of the night was over, she must propitiate

Yasmat for being given, especially flippantly, the goddess’ name.

The night ran its course. With accidents and pleasures. With lovemaking and merrymaking. With clandestine messengers bearing deeds, packed harlotries and taverns, street fights near the docks. With a sumptuous dinner in the Guardian’s palace, whose guests ranged from indigenous merchant-princes through a pack of nobles from Sh’alis, to charioteers and philosophers.

Toward sunrise, tiring, the night left everything lying, flotsam on a beach, and seeped with Star-set into the west.

The flowerseller moved with earliest morning along Gem-Jewel Street. Few were about but slaves. Women drew water from the fountain. A wine-shop or two had organized its brooms. Hawks sailed high and pigeons fanned their wings on the rooftops.

A snatch of talk came from an upper window.

“The sea’s gone out again, the fishmonger said, further than before.”

“So. It always comes back. The tides are high.”

“And it sings to itself at night. They heard it, as far as the High Gate.”

“So. Let the sea do what it wants.”

“Hey, girl! Give me some flowers. What are you asking for those lilies?”

But the girl shook her hooded head. “Not for sale. Already bought.” And went on.

It was true, her flowers were of the best, fresh with dew and dawn, from the hills, doubtless, behind Tomb Street, where the other flower gatherers went.

Why should it occur to anyone the flower seller had not picked a single bloom herself, but paid to take this pannier of lilies, wall-rose and white aloe, from a one-armed woman near the Shalian temple?

She had been industrious, Velva, and extravagant. All her coins were gone now.

Turning into an alley by the lacemakers, she reached the gate of a house wall, and sat down there.

Soon she heard the sound of the zeeba, and the man, calling his wares. Then he had paused on the street to serve customers; then, as Velva had done, turned into the alley. On either side the patient zeeba hung a cibba-wood cask, and through the man’s belt was stuck a copper ladle, filmed with white. He was a milk vendor. Since it was possible to learn so much about the habits of the woman who lodged in this house, she being of such interest to all, it was easy to find out that milk was bought here once every three days,

“Clean milk, sweet milk,” he called, winking at Velva where she sat with her flowers.

It would be sweet today, wonderfully sweet. Which no one would think odd. In the hot weather, the milk was often sugared or salted against curdling.

“Does the lady take flowers ever?” said Velva, to the milk vendor.

“Well, she might.”

Timidly, “Would you let me come in with you, and ask the servant? They’re fresh-look—to stand in vases or make garlands.”

“Oh, you’ve heard the Lydian calls here, too.”

Velva lowered her eyes. The man stole near and rubbed his hand on her belly. “If I praise you to the servant, and you sell your flowers, what do I get?”

Eyes lowered, Velva said, “What a kind man always gets at Zastis.”

When they reached the downstairs entry, the man, having opened the door, hallooed up the steps. The zeeba chewed the long dry grass of the garden, and Velva, pitying it, unseen by the man, fed it two of her precious flowers.

Just so one thing must be devoured to sustain another. It was the gods’ law.

Borne to the satin beaches on the black thoroughbred, in the arms of the Lydian, she had exalted and clutched at happiness, knowing it would not last. She had hoped he might want her again, for a while, from time to time. But all the city worshiped him. She was an inn sloven. It might have to do for her lifetime, that one night.

She was resigned, but she loved.

From the vantage of that love, she heard he shared the witch’s bed. It was the gossip from one end of the city to the other, tickled and aggravated: That he should be wasted on a Lowlander, that the arrogant Lowland mare should have yearned after him. But she had been his Zastis pairing, it seemed, even before he sought Velva. Yes, he had asked the way to the witch’s house ... but she had been unavailable, and something of less significance was substituted, Velva herself. Next on this knowledge came the story of the sword-wound in the practice court. It informed Velva of a thing already sensed and dreaded. The Lowland woman was Death. As the giant snake would crush, the lesser inject with venom—it was her nature. She would drain him and destroy him, he would perish miserably, before his hour, the mock of men, uncherished by gods.

But not if Velva succeeded at her task today, not then.

There was the quiet noise of sandaled feet on the stair, the servant girl coming down with her pitcher.

The milk vendor said to Velva, jokingly, “You won’t get to see him, if you were thinking of that. He wasn’t with her last night. The Guardian had a dinner for the Lydian. He couldn’t say no to it.”

Velva had known of the dinner, as she knew that Swordsmen never drank milk.

The mix girl had entered the foyer and the man was ladling into her pitcher. Velva went forward and stood near. The mix did not glance at her. Velva surreptitiously stroked the milkman’s side. He smiled.

“My cousin here,” he said to the mix. “She’s had a bit of bad luck today. Up before dawn getting all those flowers, the first and freshest, for a cow along the street. But the cow’s sulking over some tiff with her lover, and won’t buy.” He hesitated, not yet taking the coins the servant held out to him. He was doing his very best. “I suppose your lady wouldn’t care to take some? Do you think you could ask her. It’d be a kindness. I’m sure my girl here wouldn’t mind giving you back a bit of what your lady pays ... if it’s enough, of course.” His hand shut on his own payment at last.

The mix turned and looked at Velva. Velva hated and was afraid of the yellow-brown color of her eyes, but she said hopefully, “Look, miss, beautiful flowers. These roses—for a love-couch nothing better.” The peculiar eyes went on to the flower basket. Velva had begun to tremble. She had an array of gambits, all risky, but was alert to veer in whatever direction she must—even to upsetting the milk pitcher. “Oh, please, miss. Could you perhaps take up the flowers for her to see? She’ll like them. And the lilies are good fortune for lovers. Oh, do. I could hold the milk. Here, you just carry up the basket—” And Velva brought the pannier, adrip with water drops and fragrance, against the servant’s hands. While, with the dexterity of her trade as wine-girl, Velva laid hold of the pitcher’s handle. If the mix refused, something else must be done. But the mix did not refuse. She gave over the pitcher and accepted the flowers, and went away up the stair with them like a doll of clockwork from Xarabiss.

Velva forced herself to turn slowly, friendly, to the milk vendor.

“Yasmat’s blessing.”

“That’s what I trust I’ll get.”

“Those trees near the gate,” Velva said. “It’s cool there, and no one can see. Go on, or she may think we’re up to something else. I’ll meet you in a minute.”

“You’d better,” he said. But he was deceived. The gods of Vis were helping. He led the zeeba off through the garden. And Velva fumbled the vial of poison from her cloak. Prizing out the stopper, she closed the vial with her finger. Putting her hand down into the milk, she released the poison in its depths.

Her hand was dry again, the milk smooth, when the mix came back. She had no flowers but an array of draks to pay lavishly for them.

“Heaven reward you,” said Velva. She pressed two draks, as if ingenuously, on the mix, and then went out to the trees by the gate to let the milk vendor enjoy her. Something must always be rendered for something. That, too, was the gods’ law.

The young soldier, part of the Guardian’s force, which had a military requirement of a certain height, discovered that the Lydian was still a trace taller. He waited, with the westering sun behind him, and the soldier said, “You can go in, if you want. Shall I tell you the news first? Not good, Lydian.”

The Lydian replied that he would hear the news. Accordingly the soldier gave it. “I’m sorry to be the one tells you. Don’t curse me for it. Do you still want to go in the house?”

The Lydian said he would, thanked him, and went on through the gate and across the garden.

It was late in the hot afternoon, the sky with a strange glaring light that taxed the eyes. The house was deadened but not refreshed by shade. There were soldiers on the stair. They, too, let the Lydian by, commiserating, one asking after his arm, and, insensitive in embarrassment, when he would fight again. The other said, “The slut’s run, a thief, too. There’ll be trouble with Sh’alis over it, mark my words.”

It seemed she had asked to be shown some lace that day. So the lacemaker and her two girls had come in and found it all, and rushed out shrieking in fright for the watch.

A sheet of lace was strewn on the floor of the salon; they had forgotten it in their panic. It was, too, costly, of gold threads from which the stretched gauze backing was scorched out by a heated iron. Perhaps the lacemaker had thought she would be accused of malice—though who would dare practice against an Amanackire? Somebody, plainly.

Elsewhere chests and cabinets hung open, a jewel-box had been emptied and flung down. The mix girl had robbed her mistress, having, presumably, murdered her. Servants did sometimes turn on their employers. As for Shansarian Alisaar—Sh’alis—always on fire for the honor of Shansar’s old ally the Lowlands, they would have to be appeased. It was excellent the villainess was a mix. Nothing else was about to be considered.

She lay on a couch near the window, that window where she had wept. Apart from the fact that the mix had torn the rings from her fingers and the jeweled pin out of her dress, she lay as peacefully as if she slept. Her pale, pale hair glistened in a shaft of sun. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted, fresh, delicately painted as the mouth of an image. Superstition had apparently caused the robber to leave the amber drop on the forehead alone, also the enamel snake on her arm. Its eyes sparkled dully, as Rehger crossed the chamber. But nothing else was stirring.

He had seen death many times, and caused death, and walked with death. But she did not look dead.

Rehger bent over her, and put out the sun from her face.

Yes, this was how she looked in slumber. For he had seen that, too. Serene and still. The dead, despite the words of poets, never looked like this. They looked—vacant, like something sloughed and thrown away. But here she was, poised for life, And no life came.

He would hear, before dusk, for they wanted to tell him all they could, as if details might be of use, that the poison had been identified, in the last of a cup of milk left standing by. Though the scent was very faint, both the physicians sent in by the Guardian had diagnosed the substance, for they had seen men and women depart through its benefits before. She had drained the pitcher; it was thirsty weather. Nothing on earth could have saved her, the medicine being that strong. It was astonishing she looked so quiet, as this way there was firstly euphoria and then terrible pain—And, somehow, obviously realizing her end was on her, she had got out and laid ready the necessary papers to do with her disposal. These also the robber respected.

Although Amanackire, she had at some time decided, with surprising tact, to be buried. The Shalian Ashara temple was to see to the rites. Regarding a tomb, she had recently bought that of Panduv the dancer. Indeed, ominously enough, the documents had only been notarized and sealed the previous night.

From all this one might even suspect a suicide. But the method, if so, was curious; she was young and in the wholeness of health, and of a race thinking itself god-gotten. And she was the doxy of a man any woman, liking men, would have desired.

There was nothing to be spoken to the dead. They would not listen. An inspiration was on him to say her name, Aztira. But he did not say it.

In the deep silence, a bird sang in the garden trees.

9 The Fall of the Hawk

There was a room which was kept for him above an armorer’s shop on Sword Street. It was not quite unusual for Swordsmen, or the dancers of the Women’s House, to retain such a bolt-hole. Here they might have a privacy the stadium dormitories did not afford, for lovers, or for mere solitude. Rehger had always thought it proper to pay for the room and its maintenance, his cash rewarded by scrupulous attention from the armorer’s cleaner. The whitewashed walls were spotless, the rugs shaken, and the sleeping couch aired and ready. Tonight, for some reason, she had put speckled lilies in a crock under the window. The very same flowers that had clouded up from a figured bowl in the salon of the mansion.

He arrived quietly, ascended the steps behind the shop, and unlocked the door. It was not yet sunset, miles of time between him and a new day. He thought of it in this manner. He did not know what should be done with the night, with Zastis, with all the burden of terrible surprise, of feeling, that had not had the space to become for him recognizable, to fade to an irrelevance, or spur to any height—Dawn, his superstition told him, would wash at least the doubt away. Or night itself, submerging him, would be his teacher. He almost feared to learn. Yet he had come here to aloneness, in order to do so. He had not lived so long in Daigoth’s courts through bandaging his eyes.

Rehger had been in the room less than the third of an hour when someone scratched on the door. He supposed the slave had come, or the armorer’s wife, to see if he wanted anything brought, supper or wine. Inclined not to answer, he delayed, but to give a churlish response displeased him, so he went to the door and opened it. No one was there. The shadows lay in place along the yard from the well tree and the trellised creepers. While from the yard’s far side the hammer and anvil thudded on the forge like an angry heart.

By the room’s threshold, a square of reed paper lay, rolled and corded, with a pebble set inside to weigh it down.

Some girl, maybe . . . But the retreats of champions were respected. Love-letters came to the stadium, or the wine-shops.

He took this letter up. Going back inside, he sat, the paper in his hand, looking at the lilies in the final sunlight.

Then he untied the cord.

The stadium educated its children, but there had never been much occasion to read anything. It was often so with the Swords, acrobats and dancers, wedded to the body not the mind. As for love-notes, they were short, or if copious, did not need to be scanned. , The paper was fully covered, by a fine and beautiful script.

It began: “To Rehger Am Ly Dis, son of Yennef son of Yalen: A prince of the Royal House of Lan, and of the bloodline of Amrek, King of Dorthar, Storm Lord of All Vis.”

Only one other knew to address him in this way—this extraordinary way. She who had risen in the center of night, leaving his arms to search by sorcery the drak of bronzed gold. She, like an icon of ivory before the one lamp that had not yet burned out, turning the coin, in a while telling him of his mother that she had never seen, of his father that neither she nor he had ever looked on. And of that father’s father. Of bastardy and foolishness, of births and wanderings, of a frivolous search she could not properly decipher—She had described the wretched farm at Iscah, and the city of Amlan. She had spoken of a priestess, Amrek’s daughter—And in the end he had only left the couch and gone to bring her back against his flesh. It was Zastis. Let the past and future wait.

“Dear Friend,” the letter continued, “when this comes to you, I will be dead, and you will know it. I think that you have some care for me, but not enough that this can wound you deeper than a little scratch might do. Salve the hurt, and may it heal swiftly and well. For myself, I loved you, from the moment I saw you I believe. I have never told you of my circumstances, but, like you, I was taken from my kindred early. And so to love, at last, was a gift She gave me. To be requited was not needful.

“She that brought you this, my servant, had disguised herself on my instructions, in the same way that she was instructed to take my jewels. She knows what she must do, though they will hunt her for my murder if they can. She is guiltless, of course. While the one that is culpable will in due season be punished, if even punishment is wanted.

“Only two things more to say, and quickly. By those means you have termed sorcery, I can banish pain. But there are not many minutes. A vanity—I refuse to die uncouthly. They will find me lying on the couch composed as if for sleep. And unless some unforeseen mistake occurs, so you will find me also. I regret we had no more together. But since there is no true death, I believe we will meet again.

“Having had communion with the coin, I have, as I cautiously promised you, been able to uncover something further: When you are able to seek your father, you will find him in the Lowland province of Moih. It really asks no larger information. You are, I think, destined to know him. The sons of the hero Raldnor never met their sire; his own was dead at his conception. That which the Vis call Chance, and we, Anackire, tends always to a balance where allowed. It will come at the correct hour, knowledge, and to both. I must be brief—

“Thus. I invite you to my funeral obsequies. Though it is perhaps irksome, nor joyous. To see me to my black stone bed on the hill. The Ashara temple will have charge of me. But I shall lack followers. Do it for kindness’ sake, Rehger. I set it on you, that you must.

“And now I shall seek the couch and lie down there.

“Prosper. And, perhaps, remember me sometimes. Or how else will you know me, when next we meet?”

The letter was signed, without any of the flourish which had begun it, Aztira,

The madam arrived in person to oust Chacor. Her wide hips filled the doorway and her scent the chamber.

“So soon,” he said.

“We’re a good-class house, and hygienic. Money goes farther in the stews, but a Corhlish prince wouldn’t want those, ”

“And I see I’ve fallen from favor with my last coin.”

“Fallen? Scarcely down than up, from what I heard. And you’re pretty enough to ruin all my girls for the other trade. And my best, my Tarla, so taken with you she’s left out her petal, and Yasmat knows, now the silly tart’s probably womb-full of something the doctor will have to see to. Unless you want it brought up to help you rule Corhl.”

“If I had any cash left, I’d give it you in recompense,” said Chacor. Cheerfully he placed a squashed marigold in the madam’s hand and kissed her well-powdered cheek. “But I’ve only enough for a cup of bad wine.”

He descended the brothel stairs whistling, the girls leaning over the galleries to reprove him for leaving, or for whistling, or to wish him luck.

It was getting dark, and the lane outside was murky. Farther down it forked, plummeting toward the fish market on one hand, up toward Gods’ High Gate on the other. He had been thinking a while, once Tarla had gone, (lamenting over the springy “petal” of softened cow gut, that should have been inserted within her before their congress, and which eagerness had made her leave lying in the washbowl. The Way of Women, in rustic Corhl, was normally effected by a leaf pasted over the navel.)

That thing which had happened in the stadium arena—the wild rumors—these were a three-day wonder and would have run themselves out by now. Nevertheless, it was the right moment, maybe, for the rover to be on his way. Corrah showed the path by different means. He had kept enough to buy passage on some roughish ship. Destination was not so important. He would take the fortune of the draw.

Best get round to the harbor, then. Before all-night shut down and the cutthroats came out to pluck the price of supper.

As Chacor started toward the market fork, a woman screamed piercingly not far ahead.

Yells of various sorts were not so uncommon, particularly here. But then, out of the gathering dark, the screamer pelted up the lane toward him. Chacor immediately suspected some thief s trick. He braced himself, but the woman, hair and cloak flapping, rushed past him and was gone. Her eyes had looked properly scared. That established, Chacor now stepped back against a windowless house wall that here fenced in the lane. He expected a gang of men or women to be in pursuit of the first runner. What came, however, was not human.

Initially, he thought it was some evening revel, carrying lamps. But in fact, the lamp was alone, and carried itself.

A pale blue sun, transparent, yet glimmering so fiercely it colored the house wall, and the hand Chacor involuntarily raised to mark himself for Corrah’s protection. The ghost-sun drifted up the lane, after the running woman. He watched it come level and go by, and when it had done so put his hand to the knife in his belt. But a knife was no use.

He had been witness to a supernatural thing. For sure. What had that woman done, to have such bane hounding her?

Bemused, unsettled, Chacor resumed his walk down to the harbor, wondering what to make of this omen. His reflections sent him inward. He did not know, therefore, until he was fairly in the thick of it, that the evening was full of mischief and the waterfront in uproar.

On certain nights, if there had been a great catch, the market lit its torches and stayed open, but the fish by then was singing high. Added to this, now, was the smell of fear, and an electric crackle that made the fires spit. The night was very bright; Chacor thought absently of clear skies for tomorrow’s passage out—

But men were running about, and one barged into him.

“What’s up?” said Chacor.

“Got no eyes?”

Then Chacor did take notice. The clarity of the night was not due to torches or stars. He thought. The moon’s up early. No, it was not the moon—It must be a ship on fire down in the basin.

So he went along with the shoving, shouting crowd, to see.

The market ran to a palisade above the harbor wall. Here it was possible to look out at the bay, the beaches shelved away into it, and the curve of the harbor rimmed with watch-turrets. Leftward, a quarter of a mile off under the wall, the smaller craft rocked in their huddles, behind those a wood of spars, galleys, merchantmen and red-eyed towers, at anchor in the basin of Saardsinmey. The activity of the docks seemed also in suspension, or disarray. In one of the huge careening bays, Chacor’s keen sight made out men standing on the sides of a landed ship, pointing, or seeming to wrestle with each other in fear. Something was decidedly burning, but it was not a vessel. It was the sea itself.

(You heard, blue fire sometimes lit on the southwestern oceans. At sea, on the passage to the Second Continent, the phenomenon was often spotted. They called it Rorn’s Borderings, the fringes of his mantle, harmless, auspicious even.)

But if this was anything of Rorn’s it was not convivial to see.

It began just outside the harbor, inside the mouth of the bay, band on band of searing, restless flame, where there should have been only liquid. Now and then, out of the flame, a streamer or ray shot into the sky. This happened as Chacor elbowed a place at the palisade. There were cries of dismay. A big fat man nearby, well-dressed, and with a flower he had forgotten to hold to his nose, said, “I tell you, it’s an oil-spillage. Some skimmer’s messed on the sea, and it’s caught a spark.” But no one agreed with him, nor did he seemed convinced.

Then there was another cry. “Look! There it comes again!”

And all the crowd put round its collective head, Chacor’s with it. After a moment, he made out two more of the ghostly fireballs flowing across the market. One burst with a sudden implosion, the other vanished into an alleyway.

Thunder rumbled over the sea. Annoyed at the water’s antics, heaven was brewing a tempest. The sea began to shine upward on to heaving masses in the air. Lightning, blue or reddish, speared through, broke like an egg, and sizzled down the clouds.

A man beside Chacor said to him, brother in unease, “I know what I think. That Amanackire woman. She or her kind, they’ve sent it, a threat of revenge. Well, it stands to reason. They hate us and we hate them, with their white skins and their stinking snakes. Whoever killed her, no one’s sorry. She won’t rest quiet till—”

“The Amanackire,” said Chacor. “Did you say—?”

“—And they’ll bury her tonight. Have to be quick in this heat. But that won’t help any.”

“You said she died?”

But the man was moving off with his message of doom. The whole crowd, wanting to get away now from the evil spectacle in the bay, to seek advice or consolation, was pushing itself in all directions. A pale red moon stood vaguely gleaming on the horizon, but the moon had not risen yet.

Chacor had a vision of a girl’s white face, veiled in silver hair. A silver hand that lay on his shoulder. He was stirring amid some dark that seemed to be inside him. Like a great clock, the essence was dripping out of him, the water level sinking down, and when the weights grounded, the time he would tell would be his death. But the silver hand sent through him a rush of light, and the machinery of life shuddered. The levels gaped wide, and refilled themselves. He rose on the tide, as if the hand drew him, blood drumming, pulses racing—even his loins had answered—and his eyes, from which tears had coursed.

Chacor fell against the palisade. The air flickered and needled. He was not the only one on the verge of fainting—

He knew, now. And knowing, could not return to ignorance.

He had been as close to death as his fingers were to the wooden post he gripped. But she had healed him. The Amanackire. Ah—did they not worship the goddess, too, if wrongly? From the chasm of darkness, she had led him forth. And, while he lay on the girls of the whore-house, proving his life, his guide had herself been cast into the pit of endless night. Poisoned, it seemed, for others were talking of it now, murder and Lowland vengeance.

Chacor worked the iron spike atop the post into his palm, until the pain pulled him together.

As he straightened, the phantom moon went out over the blazing sea.

The Shalian temple stood below Tomb Street, in a grove of cibba trees. Its doors were made of cibba, too, highly polished and inlaid with gilded bronze. The rest was stone, dark, after the habit of Lowland temples, but faced with tawny and white marbles. Though not large it was a costly building, nor easy of entry. Even the colored glass in the high altar-window had a frame of black iron. It showed a bloody cumulus roped and tied by a golden serpent, on a purple base, a motif similar to one of the Lowlander-Dortharian sigils, after Raldnor’s sons had come to power.

In the beginning there had been several Shalian fanes in the city, to cater to the several Shansarians. Once Alisaar divided and the south became New, and Vis, only this one place remained, getting its sustenance from Sh’alis, now and then with a slogan scrawled on its marble overnight.

No one was scrawling any now. The discreet convoy sent by the Guardian had come earlier, ten crack guards armed to the ears, a captain, the body in a closed long-litter of the sort awarded the sick, or pregnant women. Thereafter the temple glowed with lights. The birds who nested in the cibba trees might have been forgiven for thinking dawn had come back, but it was the strange glare from the sea which had disturbed them. They had shrieked rather than chirruped, and lifted in a swarm. Most of the birds in Saardsinmey had behaved likewise, it was said. While the populace itself had gone down to the docks to inspect the show. Some were pleased with it. Generally they sought their own altars, where they were now offering and praying.

It was possible to observe the ocean from Tomb Street itself, but not the bay, which the spired bulk of the city hid from view. Along with the glare of mirrored incendiaries, the storm was raging there. No rain fell. And hardly any noise of thunder reached the temple. The air itself seemed dense as water. Only lightnings cleaved through it.

The thoroughbred the guard captain had ridden was restless. The zeebas of his men kicked and shied. The men themselves scratched, sneezed, shuffled.

The Shalian priests, not one of them a Shansarian but all mixes, seemed impervious to the electric tension of the night, and the affair at hand. They saw to the body in a back room. The written instructions she had left had been specific. She had requested only to be tidied. Though refusing fire, she wanted, naturally, no Vis embalming, no sprinkling or perfumes of flowers. No costume save the dress in which she had died. Death would see to her. It was the will of Anackire. And by those words, if by nothing else, she ensured cooperation.

The burial was also to be discreet. One hour before sunrise. The men the Guardian had conscripted to attend, provision against trouble, expected no one but themselves and the priests to wait on her.

They were therefore somewhat put out, just past midnight, to behold a man walking up through the grove. They did not know it, but later, they would be put out a second time.

Chacor Am Corhl discovered he would be in company with the Lydian after he had paced a little less than three hours in the side court of the temple. He had not wished to be in the fane itself. He disliked the form of Ashara, as he did the form of Anackire—fish or snake, she appalled him, offended him. Though he had had an instant of thinking her some perversion of the Truth, that was not enough to be able to endure proximity. Besides, he had called her names.

Firstly the soldiers had been at him. They frisked him for materials of desecration, and questioned him erratically as to why he was there. Their tempers were short but their tongues were long, and he heard all the story, and all the jumble of suppositions, in exchange for his stubborn: “It’s only decent somebody should walk behind the bier.” “Well, we know you didn’t have her,” they said. “Not with the competition.” The captain came over and said, “You’re the Corhlan. The racer. The one who nearly died. Only that’s a lie. Look at you. Some slight wound. I’ve seen that before. All blood, and no bother. She healed you, didn’t she, the witch?” “Yes,” he said, and he shook. “Well,” said the captain, “you lost a third time, didn’t you, if you wanted to thank her Zastis-style?”

They had been asking why he was there, and Chacor did not know, himself. Shaking, angry, he had not grasped now what was meant. (He had misunderstood the laments elsewhere, too, somehow even missed the name. Perhaps not desirous of learning.)

However, Hes and slight wound and no bother or not, the guardsmen seemed to become chary of him all at once and let him go on into the temple. Chacor found a priest—Shansarians held to a masculine order, unlike the Lowland sect, which was mingled, female and male, and the priestesses of some significance. This priest was a brown mix.

Chacor only inquired for the time of burying. Then again, what else had there been to ask? He could not have gone near her body, even if they had let him. Alive, had he ever properly seen her? That skull-whiteness, the touch of the hand of light—

There was a small shrine in the court, but delightfully lacking any image, only a flame burned there in glass. It rose very upright, very still. It was Chacor who moved about. Then he sat on a bench, and fell asleep. Some noise from the soldiers outside woke him. Then he got up and paced again.

When someone entered the court behind him he thought a priest had come to warn him they were setting out, or even to go away and wait in the grove. He turned with a snarl ready, his nerves primed high, and saw the Lydian between two pillars, looking at him, stock-still as the watch-flame.

In that instant, each seemed to fathom, and to its depths, why the other was there. Neither spoke. Neither challenged the other on his rights.

The Lydian nodded, as if to a man he knew from some supper they had both been at, where they had bartered a few phrases of no import.

Then he crossed to a bench, and seated himself. He sat in perfect cohesion, expressionless, gracious, like some carving poured with gold and then for some reason clad in a good plain mantle.

That man killed me, Chacor thought, and in there lies the corpse of the one who brought me back. He laughed aloud. Which was, in Corhl, unlawful at a burial. Then recalled that, and laughed harder. And, He doesnt care for the Shalian goddess, either, our hero.

And Chacor went out, after all, to wait in the cibba grove, a selected distance from the soldiers.

The statue of Ashara had claimed Rehger’s concentration only a handful of moments. He had seen god-images often, in the city temples. Rorn maned with black sea-waves, Zarduk with his belly of fire, and

Daigoth in the stadium precinct, the warrior, sword in hand and triumph on his forehead. Occasionally you would also come across tiny effigies of Ashara-Anack, in the bazaar. He knew her shape, and here it was, only a foot or so taller than he. Though her skin was white it did not look like skin. Her hair was yellow-gold, her eyes discs of citrine. Eight-armed, which made the shoulders unwieldy and unreal; the fish-tail of Shansar, yet patterned like snake-scales, and heavily jeweled. . . . She must be worth some sacks of money. She was not, in her way, unbeautiful. But she had for Rehger no look of Being, which the icons of his own race, modeled from men, or women, always had.

Ashara-Anack was not remotely like Aztira.

She had not informed him when her burial was to be. So he had walked up through the city to the Shalian temple and inquired. That done, those miles of time still washing about him, he had returned to the stadium, to pet and feed the team of hiddrax, to toil in the practice court alone. His arm was healing excellently. The wound had entirely sealed itself, and had the healthy dark, ridged color of ten days’ renewal. Rehger had not taken it to the surgeon, who would see everything was happening too quickly. Instead, a reliable man on Sword Street removed the stitching only this morning, with no interrogation.

Possessing her had been enough, it seemed. Her loveliness, her love. Unlike the Corhlan’s injury, this would leave its scar, seemly, decided. To remember her by.

Finding Chacor in the temple court Rehger had, it seemed to him, understood the cause for being there. Unlike the boy, Rehger did not reveal surprise at unwanted company.

When the Corhl laughed, Rehger, recollecting the chariot race, thought only, He does that when he’s sure of something in the heart of doubt. What has he discovered to be sure of? (The Corhl had seen the sword become a serpent, in the arena. Had he forgotten? Remembered? Was he laughing at that?)

They had been saying, all along the upper streets, that the sea was burning in the bay. Groups were setting out to look, some with wine-flasks and baskets of food, going to make a night of it on the wall or the beach. Others coming from there looked less happy. Rehger did not pay much attention, having noted the over-radiance of the sky, which obscured even Zastis, and the storm which did not come inland.

When the Corhl had gone, Rehger stood up again. He went to the empty shrine and regarded the flame.

Aztira had presumably worshiped the snake goddess. He touched the flat of the shrine. He said, to the silence: “Be for her what she needs the most. Tomorrow, I’ll bring you something, lady. Whatever they give you here. I’ll ask, and bring you something fine.”

He could not have said it to the statue in the temple. Yet for a second, without the unreality of the image in the way, he did suppose She heard him.

As he turned, a priest appeared between the pillars, and motioned him to follow. It was time.

Across the hill-slopes above the city, the Street of Tombs had gradually wound its way through the years. Richer Saardsins, taking up their abode on it, left orders for paving to be laid and kept in repair. Shade trees and aromatic shrubs were planted, and, between the sepulchers themselves, quantities of which were ornate to the point of jollity, stood altars, statues, and monuments. Meanwhile, on the lower southwestern side, astrologers, diviners, mages, and the practitioners of obscure cults, pitched their tents and cobbled up their mud-brick huts. Death Town throve.

Tomb Street properly began just above the cibba groves. As the funeral ascended on to it, there came the unavoidable impression of entering some benighted aristocratic avenue, mysteriously silent, but not always lightless. Very many of the mausoleums were large, and here and there a lantern shone out from a tall porch, or in some marble hand, for the Street watchmen were paid to effect this service.

The storm had faded at sea. Now and then, seen between trees and stones, lightning fluttered noiselessly far off. The city itself was mostly in deep shadow at last, slipping in her sleep toward the expected sunrise.

Zastis had set. A spangling of lamps along the waterfront and docks gave their usual tokens. An isolated window or two, torches on the Zarduk temple roof, were yellowed pearls shaken out on the dark. At the old capital, Saardos, the beacon fires had burned each and every night, to warn shipping on the western ocean to put in for port before Aarl sucked it away. But Aarl was a legend now, or a condition of the soul.

The night had retained its peculiar stifled stillness. Some dogs were yowling down the hill, starting off others elsewhere. But their voices were oddly muffled, and the chorus did not continue. The night choked it out.

The Shalian priests carried brands, and rang bells softly. In their midst they bore the long-litter, curtains drawn. The torches barely smoked. There was no wind. The Guardian’s soldiers, redundant, resentful, but prepared, trudged after, for mounted men were not allowed on this thoroughfare. They had demonstrated some disapproval of followers, or mourners, especially that one should be the Lydian. But nevertheless he and the Corhl walked to the rear, side by side, unspeaking.

The sarcophagi of the entertainers lay at the topmost stretch of the Street. They had their own quarter, as did all the senseless dwellers in the necropolis. The painted death-palaces of famous hetairas with carved roses on their doors, the pavilions of champions, chained chariot wheels and split shields. The challenging epitaphs caught torchlight under the trees: “You live arid I am gone, but when I lived my life was better.” “I kissed the sun. It was enough,” Or, too, the dulcet, among the blossomy leaves, a dancer’s body in bronze and garlanded with gold, the tablet under her foot: “I was loved.”

Panduv’s tomb, far up the incline, and ringed by flowering aloes, had no inscription. The stone was black. It was a domed shape reminiscent, to any who had seen it, of the beehive city in the cliff, Hanassor.

The door of the tomb, thick stone on a grooved runner, stood open. The priests with the litter paced inside, the fires and bells.

Over the paved boulevard of the dead, a quietness seemed to descend now like a lid.

For miles, not a sound.

“Trouble, sir.”

One of the soldiers spoke abruptly.

Another added, “Yes, someone after us, and mounted up, from the noise of it.”

They listened. Out of the night, some distance away along Tomb Street, a suspicion of hiddraxi, even horses, galloping. And some other resonance, as if a heavy thing were being dragged between them.

“Two or three miles, I’d say,” said the captain.

His cohort waited, hand to sword, mollified by a chance of action. This was work they knew.

Then, sudden as it had begun, the hoofbeats and the dragging ended. The whole band seemed to have been swallowed into nothingness.

Presently, one of the soldiers swore. He looked at the Lydian, who had won bets for him. “Ghosts, eh?”

They paused there, in limbo. Ten guards, a captain, a prince of Corhl, a hero of the stadium of Saardsinmen—while from the tomb a muted light stole and the notes of alien prayers.

Then the lawless riders were on the Street of Tombs once more. Pelting headlong toward them all. In three seconds more each man there ascertained some crucial difference. If hoofs, if wagons or chariots, they had come out from the roots of the earth—

And then the ground rolled.

Because he was in low spirits, Katemval had been glad to go on a drinking party with old friends. They were men who had made themselves, as he had, through luck and knack, traders and adventurers, in their youth. With the Saardsin grain merchant, he had once hunted wolves. While to the Kandian trapper, Katemval had once stood witness in two legal, savage duels, during which the man won his dead father’s goods from five brothers. Only one of the brothers had required killing. He was a plotter who would not have taken to defeat.

Talking of which, and other former days, the outing, litters spurned, roved through a decent inn or two, ate its supper, and drank its fill. The Star, and the hot sparks of remembered youngness, sent them all at last into a house of women, and here they finished off the night.

They had also, at an earlier juncture, gone to the harbor wall to look at the ocean. Many people were out to do the same, some picnicking even on the beach. But mostly there were long faces. Imbued with the wisdom of travelers who have gazed on many marvels, and calmed by wine, the drinking party found the sight of wet fire interesting but no cause for alarm. They reassured the timorous on the streets. Some freak current or outpost of the storm had sent in the fire unusually close. Oh, yes. As for the flame-balls, that was something one beheld at sea. Though there were sailors who swore such things were demons, many tabbed these random emissions of lightning. With similar facts, they regaled the uneasy at the emporium of joy.

A while before morning, youth having evaporated, and the threat of un-well-being upon him, Katemval hired a boy with a torch, and started for home.

The sea was still giving up to heaven an eerie blur of light, plainly visible between the tall southern roofs and garden walls.

Perhaps the gods had been roistering, too. They lived forever, and must get bored with it. For men, boredom was normally offset by notions of brevity. Katemval was not yet to his seventy-sixth year, an upper path for a Vis. His father had gone to one hundred and fifteen, but not pleasantly, riddled with ailments. Well, my dear, thought Katemval, following the bright blot of the torch, a few more such nights, and seventy-six should see you out.

But he did not credit that. Sleep and a posset would put him right. And there was this breach with Rehger somehow to be sorted. The witch was dead—so that at least was seen to.

They had reached Jewel Steps, and were climbing them, the torch-boy springing ahead, when there came a sudden tremendous bang, from the waterfront behind.

It rocked the night, a horrible echoing thud, that drove the air deep into the ears.

“Was that the harbor?” exclaimed Katemval. “Some ship’s oil-casks have gone up—”

The boy looked frightened, staring back toward the sea that house sides hid from them, the torch dropped to the stair. Katemval had turned also. Below, light was being kindled in a score of windows.

Katemval thought, No, I wont go to gawp. It’s my bed I need—

Then he was falling.

He could not tell why. He struck the steps, and hit his head, and thought stupidly. It was aching anyway. Where’s justice—But then some rhythm in the stone jounced him on, and he fell farther, and the next blow stunned him, so everything was mazed, a mad misty universe where walls were jumping into the sky, and there was a ghastly mad noise going on, grinding and cracking and splintering, with the strains of bells and screams mixed in.

Since the crane had stayed unrepaired, the column-tree had remained upon the top-walk of the stage. It had been the axis of this evening’s discord at the theater, along with the leopards for Yasmat’s dance, which were fractious and unbiddable. Panduv herself had unfalteringly performed her routines, her body obedient to her as a black rope. . . . When the rehearsal perished, the night had run nearly into a day. But Panduv’s lover among the actors persuaded her to combine with him, again, inside the column-drum. “You never make a sound above a sigh,” he complained when they were done. “Don’t you like what I do?” Well-mannered to intimates, she was casting about for a reply that would suit his peacock soul, when such things ceased to matter.

“Tits of Death!” the peacock cried, between anger and fear. “Some pig’s winching us on that cracked-up crane—trying to kill me—that Epos, he thinks hell take my place—Epos! Damn you into Aarl, you bloody dog!”

The drum flung to and fro. The lovers were tossed into each others’ arms, and away against the cushioning. All at once, the column reeled. Sickeningly, beyond any command of theirs, they felt it toppling. As in the other thing, he made more noise than she. The crash was bruising but not fatal—now they rolled. They were deafened and buffeted by the tumbling drum. The actor roared and flailed. “Keep still, brainless,” Panduv spat at him. “Hit me again, I’ll tear out your eyes.”

“You Zakor sow, don’t mark my face with your talons—” Just then, with a shudder, the column jarred to a halt.

All of this had lasted less than a minute. Breathless, and in abject wrath, the actor now scrabbled over Panduv to release the hinges of the drum. After some difficulty, he succeeded, and crawled out into the darkened theater. Something crunched under his knee. With undeductive surprise, he realized it was the piece of a lamp which seemed to have come down from the ceiling. Perhaps the column had struck it in the air.

Then, and only then, it came to him the atmosphere was full of a thick abrasive dust. He began to cough, cursing the damage to his voice. As he did so, the second revelation occurred, and on its heels, another. There was a most bizarre music playing in the city beyond the theater courts. It had elements of pipes possibly, a wild wailing song. More than ten thousand throats seemed to make it up. Instinct caused him to glance overhead. He saw, through the cloud of ocher, something flash and flicker in the roof. It was lightning. The roof had become sky—

“Oh, Panduv—” he said, his tone inadvertently laced with high tragedy, for once genuine.

Then there came a groaning boom. It passed through the ground beneath and the open sky above. The world started again to vibrate. The actor sprawled on his face.

Panduv, in her turn, had been listening to the music in Saardsinmey. It had held her spellbound on her belly, shrinking, immobile. And now, while she lay there still and the earth quaked and thundered a second time, her companion’s desperate feet spasmodically kicked shut the partitions of the column. As all the tiers of the theater lifted slowly from their beds, and glided down on the stage.

In Velva’s tiny cubicle at the inn on Five Mile Street, there was space only for a bed, a slender cabinet, a mirror of bronze upon the wall. No space at all for the earthquake.

Most of the inn had collapsed into the street and surrounding yards. The wing which housed the tavern slaves and girls, only one story high and tucked into rising ground, had largely survived both shocks. But internally it was a shambles, and full of the electrifying sawing wailing sound that now seemed to hang densely on the city as the dust.

Velva had not been sleeping. The deed of the previous morning, the gossip-borne news of its accomplishment, had held her ever since in a kind of paralysis. She performed her tasks in an orderly way, but when the night’s service was over, coming into the cubicle, she lay down fully-clothed, straight as a rod, her hands clasped across her waist—the position of one buried.

Neither dread of accusation, nor remorse, had affected her. She had felt herself to be merely an instrument of some great will. Maybe it was in itself this epic picture of the murder that now wrung her out. For sure, she had no thought of elemental punishment. When the earth tilted, throwing her from the bed, and from her apathy, she was only terrified, nothing more.

The first shock tore through the world. And passed. Perhaps thirty seconds elapsed, filled by crashings and subsidences, the human hymn of pain and fear. The aftershock, in itself far less, but needing solely to strum the weakened structures of the city to bring them down, seemed if anything stronger than the first. That too passed.

A beam had dropped from the ceiling and smashed the bed. Had Velva not been ejected, it would have crushed her. But she had no fancy either she had been spared.

The boy had run away. That was not amazing. But he would not have expected it of Rehger. Was the boy Rehger? Rehger was a man, now—Katemval lay on rubble of the Jewel Steps and brooded on these things. Then, his eyes wandering, he saw after all the boy who was not Rehger had also not deserted him. A cascade of stones from a nearby house, covering the steps, had killed him outright. This brought Katemval an instant of extreme grief. Then, his consciousness moving inevitably outward, he realized such motives for sorrow were everywhere around.

Katemval crawled to his knees, and wrapped the edge of his mantle over his lower face, against the smother of stone dust and plaster. He stared in a sort of emotionless acceptance, finding that he could now look out to sea from Jewel Steps, for every wall and building in between seemed to have collapsed.

The dawn was coming, too, carelessly out of the east. It burnished the whirling pillars of the dust, revealing or suggesting distances. Here and there, like lamps underwater, fires had broken out and were burning, attractive sweet colors through the murk, rosy, and soft white—The whole city, on one breath, seemed to scream.

Katemval felt anger then. He looked at the sky, the ghostly sketch of sea. He might have spoken against the gods. But the ground began to shake again. The thundering rumble came from far away, pouring toward him. And like a beaten dog he cowered before the stick.

Then a god rose in front of him, a scarlet blazing tower. Or it was the misplaced sun exploding as it was hurled up from the southern sea, eight miles away, had he known it, turning the sky to blood.

The sea in its sequins had gone this time two miles out. It had run from Saardsinmey as if itself afraid of the quaking of the earth. The water left the ribbed mud behind it, shining still, littered with thrashing sea-life and the slovenly nets of weeds.

The ships in the harbor basin, dashed and buffeted by the rocking of the world, several alight, were now grounded, ineffectual as huge toys.

Of those people still alive in the vicinity, few paid heed to the sea’s escape.

It had waited out its while, a thousand years perhaps, the thing under the ocean. Once or twice, playfully, it had turned in its sleep, and the coasts of Alisaar trembled. Nothing sleeps forever. Feeling its quickening upon it, it woke, and lifted itself into the darkness of the day.

There came then the bellowing crack of doom. Those who could, craning in horror toward it, saw this:

A funnel of brilliant white, a hammerhead of blackness. Then red, red for New Alisaar, the red of roses and fire and blood, bursting, hitting heaven, streaming down.

The landmass seemed lit by it, end to end. The sky recoiled. All hint of sunrise was put out.

Black and red the turmoil now, and through the upsurge, silver snakes that twisted, wreathing the stormclouds, clutching, strangling them, never letting them go.

The submarine volcano, brother or child of countless others located far from shore, south and west, the mountains of fire which had given those oceans their legends of Hell: Its frenzy was flame against flame, so the water, running into it, was gulped and burned away. Steam and magma, liquid rock, salt and boiling smoke, gushed a quarter of a mile into the atmosphere. The volcano raped the sky. The sea churned, caught between waves of moving earth and fire. The sea fell in upon itself, and, repulsed by the phallus of Aarl, turned back for land.

Sixteen years of age, Tarla, her clothes torn, her face freshly painted with dirt, sobbing, framed in the upper window of a room that had no longer any actual walls; Tarla with dead women heaped around her on the cushions and the wreckage, saw—across the flattened chaos of ten thoroughfares, a market, a descending terrace that finished in midair—saw Rorn come out of the sea. Or thought she did.

The towering fire-cloud with its lightning coils of white serpents coming and going, that made no sense to her. Nor had the earthquake done so. It was a nightmare, although she could not surface from it. Only an hour ago, she had been arguing for the hopes of a hypothetical embryo, lodged in her womb by some Corhlan wanderer—Now, those ideas had vanished. She clung to the window-shape. She sobbed, and the red sky heaved and fissured.

Then, Rorn came up from the depths.

He had no form, as in the myths he did. No, he was only water. It piled up on itself, scaling into the sky until the sky was gone. It hid the mountain even, and the mountain’s fiery light. The world turned black. Yet the water glowed. It gleamed like bales of silk, up there, stretching to the roof of eternity.

In wonder, the girl had stopped crying. To cry had no meaning.

One moment the ocean was a glittering sheet on its side, distant, unbelievable, and real, and then you saw, too, the curling creamy head of it, pleating over, the breaker, two hundred feet high—

It looked utterly gentle, so smooth now was its passage. And gently, tenderly, it smoothed down the granite palisade of the harbor, the last fifty-foot standing stones. As it came, it drew up the galleys and the merchantmen, the turrets, the basalt slipway itself, in one cupped hand skillful and sure as a mother’s—

Tarla saw all things, whole or in portions, gathered to the sky. The needles of a fine spray pierced her face. The breath of Rorn rushed in her mouth, her lungs, as she opened them to call aloud. Then countless tons of water, the tidal wave, combed in across the shore, the street, the city, and her little protest, and silenced every one.

When the ground moved, men fell down as at a magician’s mantra in some theatrical comedy. When the ground moved a second time, they fell a second time. Here and there a tree uprooted, leaving behind a perfect impression in the soil. Stones shook out of tombsides, and fifty feet away a lamped statue was smashed in bits, and set the shrubbery in flames.

Farther off, the city had fared much worse. A smother of particles and smokes hazed up from it directly, obscuring and heightening the chaos. Otherwise only noise came out. It rumbled and moaned, and bells jangled—there was a long bass roaring that did not properly end, but seemed to go round and round in circles in the hollow shell of the earth.

Then the gout of bloody matter exploded like a lanced abcess on the horizon of the sea.

As the world flashed red, then darkened to a reborn night, having the clue, even those who had begun to flounder down toward the mass of the ravaged city—checked.

Not one of them had said a coherent sentence all this while. With blasphemies and oaths, pleas and wordless expletives, or total silence, so they had greeted the advent. The Shalian priests, who had scrambled out of the tomb for fear it would come down on them, had done no better than the unenlightened soldiery, the cursing stone-worshiper from Corhl, the Lydian Swordsman fighting, as he usually fought for life, without comment.

Panduv’s black tomb, abandoned, had nevertheless withstood both shocks. The quake, spreading from the hell-mouth in the ocean, was lessened here. It had been their fate to survive.

“There’re snakes in the sky,” said one of the soldiers, softly.

Then they could no longer see them. Something had risen, between the dust-pall of the land and the spasms of the volcano.

They could not make out what it was, this interruption. A couple asked each other. One man said, “I’ve heard of that—it’s water—it’s the sea—” And then he screamed and turned and ran away up the street of the dead, stumbling on the upraised paving, clawing through the shattered trees.

The rest stood quietly, looking out toward the curious, shimmering entity that was a wall of water taller than the tallest spire of Saardsinmey.

Chacor said, softly as the other man, “What does it do?”

“Nothing can stop it,” said the captain. “Look, it’s coming inland.”

“But the city—” said another of the soldiers. He added, very low, as if ashamed to tell the secret, “My son’s there. And my mother. If she got down into the cellar in time, do you think—No. It’ll flood the cellars. It’ll break everything above and fill up everything below. No. That can’t be. Rorn’s stinking guts, it can’t be.”

Some of the men began to murmur, solemnly, couthly. They stood on, looking out toward death, straight-shouldered, praying. The priests of Ashara were voiceless beside them. They waited also, trying, it would seem, to be faithful to the precepts of Shansar and Lowlander alike: Die well, live forever.

The sound of the water began to come, now. It was like a deep hoarse sigh. All other noise was lost in it, as everything would be lost.

The Lydian spoke-behind them.

“There’s the tomb. It’s solid, and the water has to push uphill, here. A chance.”

They turned, not all of them, and gazed at him, surprised he thought to refuse the gods. Chacor said, “He’s right. Move, you—” He shoved at the two men next to him. Suddenly the whole group was struggling back to the tomb, the priests coming after.

They got through the tangled aloes. No one properly paused on the threshold. A man hesitated to call after the fellow who had run away, but he was out of sight and did not answer, and the sound of the sea now was very raw and strong.

The last man in, they put muscle to the stone door and thrust it along the runner, closing it fast. Though mysteriously equipped for it, it would be more difficult to open from within. But maybe they would never need to try.

The mausoleum was an oval, divided into an outer and inner place. The priests’ torches flowed through ornate carvings, leaves and leopards and laughing moons, which sprawled all about the walls, seeming a sheer insanity at this minute.

Beyond a doorway, the inner tomb held shadows. They did not need to enter it. It was this, the antechamber, farthest from the wave, and doubly fenced by walls of stone, which would be the most secure. Nevertheless, the nervous torches spilled into the shadow. There were glimpses of something pale lying on its dais, another madness which they saw and did not see, comprehended and had no time for—

The ground was shaking once again, and fine dark powders sifted down. The noise of the enormous wave had altered to a steady howl—

They heard, through the surge, Rorn’s feet upon the hill—

If they noticed each other, or remembered their families or their gods, not one now who displayed it. Each man stood before death, as before death men, though mown down in millions, have always stood, companionless and lonely.

The torches dipped. Night gaped. Thunder. The wheels of giants bore up on them.

Then, shrieking, the water came.

Rehger thought, I forgot her warning. She was speakings then, of this. If she knew what she spoke of, that night she cried. And her death brought me here. Not to die. This isnt the unstoppable sword, the broken spine of the chariot’s flight. No glory in this, Katemval. And Amreky where is he? Under what slide of rock and turfy on the plain of Koramvis, listening in your envy to the footfall of men above—

He half reckoned she whispered to him, the dead girl with the gauze veil across her face, but he could not hear her.

His mother put into his hand a fruit. “Eat, before he sees.”

He was riding the dog Blackness, and the crowd cheered. The cheering clove through the stones. The fruit tasted of salt water.

10 Dispossessed

Terror, fire, water, and darkness, had bestridden the world. After a short century of obscurity, of thunders and chumings, and a great sweeping away, a slow, uncanny light began to come. And a silence thick as deafness, with, inside itself, the same inexplicable sounds that deafness knows—sudden long whistling notes, sudden inner boomings, a sharp snap like parting bone, a leaden pulse, a rushing sigh—

Miles out, the Aarl-mouth, the volcano, glowed a dark deep red. The huge column of its smoke seemed to stand quite still, though far overhead the cloud had opened into a parasol, magenta in color, and now and then chalked with dim reflected fire. Somewhere, in some other country, the sun had risen; it was noon. The sky here was that of an eternal sunset, all the somber crimsons, thin russets, heavy purples of decay. The sea looked nearly black, but for the streaks on it of the mountain’s sinking lamp.

Black rain had trickled over the city, ashes and tears. Dead birds also came down. It was a season of fallings, birds and rain and tiles, and strength. The wave, too, had slipped away. It took with it, back to the ocean, many of the treasures of the city. In return, the wave had sprinkled the land with marine keepsakes. Fish were in the trees. Weeds wrapped the uprights of doors and embraced the legs of arches. But Saardsinmey was no longer a city, a built place. It had become a geography, a place of escarpments and jagged standing stones.

Very occasionally there was the oddest, least conscionable, event. Something living might be seen moving through the city, or heard calling out there. These happenings were infrequent.

Beautiful and pristine, her masts precise, long flanks tidy with oar-ports shut, her prow pointed by a gilded Vardish lion that blazed in the strange light, the ship lay at anchor on the roof of the Zarduk temple, almost forty-five feet in the air.

Below, aside from the massive outer walls, and their girdling pillars the width of ten men around, little of the temple remained. But it was, nevertheless, a marker in a desert, for beneath its stair, strewn with freakish debris, nothing else had stood in a radius of thirty streets.

“The hand of Corrah,” said Chacor. “Or some god they offended.”

He stared in disbelief and dismay at a dead sea-thing, a dark blue bladder with its eyes sunken in, and half the size of a man’s body. It was automatic to measure that, for a man lay beside it, a Zakorian priest of the temple. The wave had broken his arms and squashed out his face with his soul, even as it battered the sea-beast against the pillar.

Chacor was full of horror, and abject depression.

A man darted from the temple. He was wet and filthy and carried a sack. He came at the dead priest like a rat and tried to pull a golden wristlet from him. Chacor struck the looter flat, drawing his dagger as he did so. The Alisaarian looked at Chacor, at the dagger, clearly muddled. “Something to you, was he? That won’t help him now. Go on then. You have it.” Chacor sprang toward the looter, ready to knife him. The looter, sack held tight, sprinted away, between the hills of patchwork dripping masonry, from which bodies hung, and skeins of hair like weed and weed like hair. . . . How had he survived, that Alisaarian? Corrah knew. Some quirk of destiny, like Chacor’s own.

The sea had smitten the tomb of Panduv like a colossal hand, not a fist, a woman’s blow, open-palmed.

All light died. That was the augury. One expected to be next.

Rung face down, bruised by those damnable carvings of a dancer’s vanity, Chacor heard rather than saw the walls giving way. The water poured through and filled his mouth. He thought, formlessly, that this was a disgusting way to die.

He came to himself, soaked and cold, puking up the sea, and then to realize someone was helping him, one of the soldiers. Happiness that another man was alive with him made Chacor cry. The soldier had the kindness to pretend that this was only the sickness affecting his eyes. In Alisaar it was beneath a man to weep. In Corhl, as in Zakoris, it earned a boy over six years a flogging.

The soldiers, they had all survived, had got out of the tomb by use of the door mechanism. Three of the Shalians had been killed. The rest had taken their bodies away, down to the temple, if anything was left of it. Everyone else stood on the slope of an alien land, mud and muck, minced bushes, branches piled as if for a bonfire, and various rubble. In parts, a tomb jutted from the unrecognizable vista. Houses of death, they had weathered death better than fifty thousand houses of the living.

The light was appropriately hell-light, now scarlet, now sporadically phased by black clouds and dirty syrupy rain that had a foul odor. It occluded most things, and wholly masked the view of the city, a blessing, perhaps.

The soldiers meant to go down into Saardsinmey—they still named it that, the havoc below: Report to barracks. They did not seem to question it would be there. On the other hand, the Guardian’s palace and adjacent buildings had been erected with much care and cash. It was impossible to detect anything from up here. Except look. That was the Zarduk temple, by Rom’s teeth, drifting in and out of the murk, and something glinting on the roof—a beacon maybe—

“Where’s the Lydian?” said Chacor abruptly.

Some of the men had already gone off to the Shalian fane, to see if they could find any of their mounts alive. They were coming back now, mountless, with grim faces. Chacor had thought the Swordsman might be with them.

“One court and one wall standing,” said the first soldier to reach the captain. “Our Rom trod on their goddess good and proper. They’re making a pyre for their mates, trying to find something dry enough to bum. I said, row out to the fire-mountain. I shouldn’t have said it. But Rom’s bleeding guts, there must be thousands dead down there—”

“You can see a bit, from their wall,” said another. “It’s a shambles.”

“The Lydian,” said Chacor.

“What? Oh, to the stadium, could be. He’s long gone.”

Presently the soldiers got themselves into pedantic military order, and marched off, sliding and out of step in the slime. They would be wanted in the city. They had welded themselves to this idea.

But Chacor had no inspiration at all. He decided eventually to start after the Swordsman, or at least in that direction. He did not know why, or ponder why, any more then he knew or pondered why he kept glancing back, through the red-black rain, at the hill and the tomb where the white woman still lay, her bed awash with trapped salt water.

He could not find the stadium. He could not find anything. Enormous stacks of stone and plaster went up, some with caves in them. In the caves were chairs and colonnades, barbers’ shops, bread-ovens, gleaming mirrors, dead bodies. Sometimes a tree or pillar had been carried up and pushed through a wall. Sometimes the trees and pillars had stayed put. He saw dogs and hiddrax, and once a horse, hanging by their necks from boughs or high cornices, as if in a knacker’s yard. He saw too many such things.

Once he heard, or thought he did, a woman shouting and calling. He tried to reach her but could not shift the mounds of marble, the great fallen arch with its headless statues. And finally anyway, he could not hear her any more.

When he gave up on the stadium, and so on the Lydian, he got to the Zarduk temple and observed religiously the grace of the stranded, crewless ship. For the first time it had occurred to Ghacor some god had done all this, and that it would be clever to be gone. The looter, once he had vanished, became unreal. No one else seemed living. A couple of times Chacor was misled—a woman, her hair fluttering in a gust of cindery breeze, the glimpse of light on an ornament . . .

Then suddenly, he found Five Mile Street.

It was easy, in a way, for the sea had cut through it as through a canyon, mostly unimpeded, and so left its wide long shape, the margins only spoiled by debris, pools of water, and fantastic flotsam.

Chacor walked then, looking exactly before him, and climbed up and over where he had to. When he heard things he took no notice. Twice, there were hoofs. They echoed, striking every new hollow, whipping back from a hundred sounding boards, until a phalanx of riders raced through the sky. But there was no point in attending to it. Something seemed to be burning down ahead, near where the docks had been. Probably it was some fire that the wave had not quenched, or a weird reflection of the volcano, which was now itself barely visible through smoke and umbra. Even so, a few ships might have remained, coasting the wave, as had the vessel on the temple, these with their crews living.

A man moved out from the wreckage on to Five Mile Street, about a hundred yards away. Chacor, fooled too often, would not look. When the man waited, Chacor kept on, although, recollecting the other meeting with the looter, he drew his knife.

In an altered landscape, height was an irrelevance. He did not perceive the other man was the Lydian until he was nearly up to him.

“Where are you going?” the Lydian said. His voice was quiet, lacking the authority with which it had offered twenty men the chance of safety in a tomb.

“The harbor. I thought I saw a beacon.” Chacor hesitated. As if the world were after all sane enough for conversation, he added, “You?” . “I went to try to find someone in a street there.”

“No luck.”

“Well. The house was down. He was always very proud of the house. He got it betting on me.”

As rarely in the stadium, the Lydian was dyed by blood. His hands and arms looked as if they had been toiling in the brickwork, veins enameled darkly on the dark gold of the skin. He said nothing more. He seemed sorry rather than anguished, composed, not stunned.

Chacor turned, and the Lydian accompanied him. They went together toward the harbor.

Well, they lived with death. Of course, any day, the end. One forgot, but they were slaves, too, the Sword-Kings of Ahsaar’s ruby cities. “What will you do?” Chacor said. “Does this make you free?”

“I suppose not,” said the Lydian.

They did not run off to liberty. No need. Saardsinmey, perished, offered this one manumission, or disinheritance.

“Go to Kandis. They said you’ve fought there. And Jow,” said Chacor. “Will you? You couldn’t go up north and hire to Shansars in Sh’alis.”

At the end of the five miles, Gods’ High Gate had come down and blocked the road. By the time they had got over it, and all the mess beyond, and were in reach of the harbor, its ruin and smashed ships, Chacor’s rogue fire had disappeared. Even the volcano seemed vanquished or asleep. Only the sky of ichor and amber burned on and on and on.

Arn Yr, a ship lord from the Lowland port-city of Moiyah, had taken out his vessel, Pretty Girl, a dozen times that summer, with no trouble. This had made him a trifle uneasy, so, a mix, he had offered to Zarok and prayed to Anackire, before again setting sail. Both, it transpired, had been busy with other matters.

No sooner had they begun the crossing through open sea toward northern Alisaar, than the mother of storms hit them.

Pretty Girl was not just a pretty face. Plucky and tough, she took all the weather could give. When the sea calmed, ladled out in an opaque sunrise, they discovered her intact. But they were miles down south, with half the stores gone, and some of the cargo with them. Arn Yr offered his men the vote, whether to turn back to Moiyah, or try for the nearer ports of New Ahsaar, where their predominantly yellow hair might not get them the love they had at home.

The vote went for Alisaar. They said they would dye their manes black like the hero-god Raldnor, if necessary, and laughed. Arn Yr, three quarters Lowland, but with an Ommos grandmother, was not too pleased. But the ships of Moih went by the same democratic values as her cities. They turned for New Alisaar.

The overcast and tingling air they took for some after-aspect of the storm. Then the ship’s instruments began to play up on them, and then the skies grew odd. In a while, no shore in sight, bereft of moon and stars and sun, they were lost, and saw themselves in the hand of the goddess.

Near morning, they made out terrific explosions south and west.

“Someone’s having a fight with someone,” said Arn Yr. He thought he recognized the noise of ballistas and exploding ships. Nowadays Free Zakorian pirates kept to the north and east. This could only be some fracas between Shansar and Alisaar, which boded ill for everyone, let alone poor Pretty Girl. Blond or not, they had begun to trust by now to Saardsinmey’s dockyard and markets.

It was a spectacular dawn, the sky composed of metals and bloomed with stratos. Birds flew over and got some applause, for they meant the coast was near. Some of the birds even settled briefly on the ship, and were fed as fine omens.

Cautious however, and with no sailing wind. Pretty Girl went to rowers stations and nosed westward, having once more a sun to guide her.

They sighted and identified the coast at sunset. They would make Saardsinmey inside four hours.

There was no sign of war.

Only, the sunset lingered, its tints growing hotter . . . After a while, they started to remark on it.

Then the moon came up. It was Zastis, and the flushed Zastian lunar orb was familiar. But this moon was not red. On an endless vermilion east it was a disc of molten orange with a purple halo, and it seemed to shift and flicker like a sun.

The west, too, still held the light torch-red, ringing—The ocean soaked the colors up and looked itself on fire.

In the midst of this, they saw the smoke off to larboard, and concluded somebody’s fleet had burned. The cloud lay nearly firm as sculptured rock along the water, a large mass slowly gliding west.

Every star in the sky was like a blood drop. Zastis itself was not to be seen. They had now had three hours of sunset.

They rowed on for the Alisaarians’ city because it was human, something they understood.

Or so they thought, until they saw it.

The Moiyan ship paused, a mile from land, as they looked on Saardsinmey.

“No Shansarian,” murmured Arn Yr’s deck master, “no men, no weapon on earth, did that.”

“The gods,” said Arn Yr, “did that.”

And reasoning out at last what might have been the gods’ instrument, that tumble of hard black now resting behind them on the sea, still they went in to shore, drawn by horror and compassion, and in case, against all chance, they might render help.