The White Serpent

18 Bargains

On a darkening backdrop, Zaddath was closing the brass-bound doors of her Blue Gate, to the sound of horns. The procedure was carried on at every sunset. Sunrise saw the gate opened with the same ceremony. It was a Vardian way of doing things, for Zaddath, the New Capital of Old Zakoris, was a Vardish city. Now a Guardian sufficed to rule here; the kings had gone home across the seas. The gate, however, stayed a monument to the conqueror, its uprights garnished by mighty fifty-foot Ashkars (the Vardish Anackire), and the surface of the wall torchlit for two miles either side, and faced with tiles of violet glaze.

Missing getting in the gate was not too serious an affair. The suburbs had long since overrun the city, taking in as they went the villas, temples and taverns strewn along the Zaddath South Road. The swamps, too, had been drained, but still the proliferating forest encroached continually on this island of building. Even in the paved streets, whippy tentacles of verdure endlessly emerged, to be hacked and hauled, their roots gouged out with fire. Any house left untended on the outskirts was filled by the jungle and ruined in ten days or less. In the gravid nights of the hot months, in the depths of walled stone Zaddath, frogs chirped and crickets made their sing-song, and large insects dashed themselves against gauze bed-curtains and died there like smoldering jewels.

The riders, who had just missed the gate, showed no inclination to retreat to a handy inn.

Progressing into the gate mouth, the foremost man seized the chain of a bronze bell hanging there and clanged it.

Two soldiers appeared on the walk above.

“You, what d’you think you’re at?”

“Inviting you to let me in.”

“Flit over the wall. Or wait till morning. Lay your hand on that bell again, and it’ll be a flogging.”

“Yours,” called Galutiyh Am Dorthar. “I’ve got business with the Warden and Council.”

“What authority?”

“Come and see.”

After a wait, three bad-natured soldiers and an officer who had been at dinner, clattered down the stair. Galutiyh displayed some seals. They were impressive. The goddess of Dorthar’s High Council, the authentic golden Snake and Rod of Shansarian Alisaar, the Lion-Astride-the-Dragon symbol of Zaddath herself.

The tone of the sentries changed. They cracked a postern, and presently Galutiyh and his riders trotted into the city.

Galutiyh swaggered through the Council Hall at Zaddath, having left his escort of ruffians on the street. The place was mostly empty but for secretaries scribbling in cubbies. For such a career Galutiyh’s family had intended him, but he had been more venturesome. He worked and wormed and vaulted his way up. Gray-eyed Galutiyh was not all Lowland-Dortharian. He had a lot of Thaddrian blood on his mother’s side. For the Lowland—or other continent—connection, it was somewhere, but no one knew where. He claimed a Lowland grandfather, and had now said it so often he partly believed it himself.

When Counselor Sorbel entered the allotted chamber, Galutiyh was quite gratified. Sorbel, called after the Vardish king, was also the right hand of Zaddath’s Warden. Nevertheless, he seemed brisk.

“What do you want, Galut?” (Galutiyh winced at this Thaddrian abbreviation of his name.) “Really a drama, at the gate. No one here would like you to abuse your privileges.”

“My lord, I earned my privileges by devotion. It seemed to me speed wasn’t inappropriate.”

“And why?”

Galutiyh recounted his reason.

Sorbel altered. He looked keener, less at ease.

“This story of an Amanackire woman,” Sorbel eventually said, “is a—” he used the Vardian expression, and in Vardian: “Flimsy mast on which to fix a sail.”

Galutiyh allowed himself to demonstrate he understood the phrase. “Even so, when the Council of Dorthar sent me to investigate the Plains, I was instructed in this—story. And then it occurred to me the Council here was more in need of my findings . . . they seemed to think it was important. Wasn’t it?”

“Don’t be insolent.”

“Excuse me. Lord Sorbel. Blame the rigors of the journey. Fifty-three days by land and sea.”

“Where is the man?”

“Safely shut in a hostelry five miles back down the Zaddath South Road.”

“All right. Wait here.”

Sorbel went out and Galutiyh sat down. A minute later, a servant brought a tray of cakes and Vardish wine, which boded well.

A great beetle, glistening like a drop of ichor, clung by its pincers to the window-post. One of the three men in the room lurched toward it, raising the pommel of his knife to crush the insect.

“Why not let it live,” said the third man quietly. It was the first thing he had said for a long while, and the significance of this, apparently, stayed the man with the knife.

“What do you care?”

“Can’t stop him, can you?” said the second man.

The third man was shackled to the table by a iron cuff on his right wrist.

The blond mix, who had been disturbed by an increasing abundance of insect life on their journey west and north, lifted the pommel higher. Beyond the window, the black night tinked and purred.

“In Alisaar,” Rehger said, as quietly as before—and as before the other hesitated—“it was thought unlucky to kill anything before a duel or combat. Since the gods strike in the same way, suddenly, perhaps without cause or care. Like the beetle, you might not see the blow coming.”

Galutiyh’s blond ruffian stared at the beetle. Grudgingly he lowered his knife.

“Anackire protects,” he said, ritually. He worshiped all gods, and none.

He went back to the far end of the table where Rehger’s second guard, a swarthy Ommos-mix, giggled. “Scared of the gladiator? Wait till he breaks the chain. No? Isn’t he mighty enough?”

Galutiyh first produced a shackle when they came off the Xarab ship at the border port. He had requested Rehger to allow this necessity. Rehger did not argue. Once he was cuffed, the other end of the chain was fastened to the wrist of one of Galutiyh’s biggest fellows, a dumb, brown-haired man, with crazy eyes. “After all,” said Galutiyh to Rehger, when it was done, “you won’t mind that. You’re a slave, aren’t you?” They had ridden the roads up into Xarabiss and there had been some dithering about before they took ship. Galutiyh obviously suspected he was being followed, but had then eluded his pursuer, leaving evidence of a trail continuing on to Dorthar, or at least a more northerly town. Instead, they crossed the Inner Sea at its narrowest point and put in at the edge of Shansarian Alisaar. In a cove on the border a half-rotten fishing skimmer or two lay rubbing her sores on the rocks. One of these hags consented to bear the party up the coast. It was windless weather, and the crew rowed, and Galutiyh’s men lounged among the reeking kreels, sometimes casting line themselves for fish or water-snakes off the bows. The Zakor sailors paid them scant attention.

Zakoris ranged herself on the left hand, to all intents impassable country, jungle-forest rising back in stairs that choked the sun, or wading out even into the sea. During the day, Rehger was again unshackled; after dark the chain was fastened to an iron ring in the mast. When this second voyage of twenty airless, mindless days and anchored nights ended at the Var-Zakor port of Ilva, Galutiyh commandeered some scrubby horses. Then the chain was lengthened and the dumb man and Rehger rode side by side. At night, when the travelers halted, Galutiyh would undo the dumb man and chain himself to Rehger. “May I lie with you, dearest?” asked Galutiyh. But even then, as always until then, Galutiyh did not trespass beyond a few words. He would only chide Rehger in the morning, “How beautifully you sleep! Not a snore or a nightmare. Teach these others, will you? Their moans and snuffles drive me insomniac.”

Getting on the Zaddath Road, riding through the villages and into the suburbs, they were looked at, and Rehger—or it might be the dumb man who shared the daytime chain—was marked as a culprit. Once some black-skinned priests emerged from a wayside temple. They purified the road, when the company had gone by, both of horse-dung and criminal aura. Generally the native Zakorians were less interested than the conqueror Vardians. There was little sign of mixture, but neither any of oppression. Close to the conqueror capital, the Zakorians adhered with seeming equanimity to Vardish ways, mostly dressed and carried on as Vardians, and were bilingual. Here and there you might see the emblem of a black Ashkar-Anackire, but never a white-skinned Zarduk or Rorn.

There were laws in Zaddath, too, concerning human noise after midnight. The hostelry was therefore very still, and the sound of hoofs approached distinctly along the road.

“There’re our mates, coming back,” said the blond mix. Relieved, he threw his knife quivering into the wooden wall.

Torchlight began to hit the lintel of the window where the beetle clung.

When the door was opened, neither Galutiyh, nor any of the mates, presented themselves. It was a natty Vardian officer and five Zakorian guard.

The Vardian demanded that Rehger be delivered to him.

Galutiyh’s men obeyed.

In the courtyard, “I see you’re a gentleman. If you’ll swear by the goddess not to lark around, you can ride free into the city.”

“I don’t worship the goddess,” said Rehger, with the frankness of a good child, the Vardian thought, rather taken with him.

“Well, that’s straightforward. By any god you respect, then, or just your word, I think, would do.”

“Of course,” said Rehger. “You have it.”

The chamber was lamplit and windowless. A vane stood wide in the ceiling behind a sieve of linen. Moths still drizzled down. Aside from Galutiyh, and Rehger, there was no man in the room who was not of the peoples of the goddess. Blond hair, the pale summer tan of Lowlander, Shansar, Vardian. Amber eyes. If there was any trace of interbreeding, it was invisible.

The Warden of Zaddath sat in his carved chair, with Sorbel standing next to him.

Directly by Sorbel was another man, tall and strongly-proportioned, garbed like a Shansar prince.

The Warden had turned to him immediately.

“What do you say?”

The Shansarian fixed Rehger with an eagle’s look. The yellow eyes scorched and the mouth curled, and his ringed hands moved at his sides in a gesture of some recaptured motion and guidance—Rehger recognized it. He recognized the Shansar. Not his face or name certainly, but his person and the hour of meeting it.

It was Sorbel who spoke.

“He is claimed to be a slave of Alisaar, called the Lydian.”

“Yes,” said the Shansar. “Your hunting hound was clever.” He did not take his gaze from Rehger. “Neck and neck, Lydian. But I didn’t tell in Shansar, Rorn was angry. Since it was the anger of Anackire.”

The Warden cleared his throat. The Shansarian prince, who owned estates in Sh’alis and Karmiss and, once, had gone to Alisaar to race in the Fire Ride, turned and said, “Lord Warden, we were side by side, he and I, on the cliff above the sea. He remembers, too. That was what he mocked me with, Rorri, their nonexistent sea god, when his chariot broke from mine after the earth and the water shook. I would have won the race, but for this slave.”

“What do you say?” inquired the Warden of Rehger.

“He also raced in the Fire Ride, as he says. We were nearer to one another than we are now.”

“And you survived the destruction of the Saardsin city?” The Warden, the chamber, both were full of some hesitation, some unwillingness. “How?”

“In a shelter,” Rehger said, “on the Street of Tombs.”

“You refer to a grave.”

“He was at the funeral rites of his beloved,” cheeped Galutiyh from his corner. “Her rites.” At Rehger’s shoulder the Vardian officer shifted, but Sorbel remarked, “Be silent, Galutiyh. You think yourself too wise.” To Rehger, Sorbel said, in an abrupt harsh creak, “You’ll be asked to describe this escape.”

Rehger said, “I have to reassure you, my lords. If you’re wondering whether I, too, rose from the dead, I did not.” It was a perfect hit. Every man in the chamber reacted to it.

“There was a rumor,” said Sorbel, “some man of the arena, who was healed.”

Rehger said, “The woman you’re discussing was Amanackire. In Alisaar, all your blond race are reckoned sorcerers.”

“Galutiyh promises us,” snapped Sorbel, “that he captured you and forced you here as his prisoner. Please realize, your words and deeds will be scrutinized in the light of that.”

“I came with Galutiyh of my own accord.”

“Yet you were chained.”

Rehger said, “The Vardian officer there still has the chain. Perhaps he would return it to me.”

The Vardian, without waiting on response, smartly handed Rehger cuff and chain.

Rehger clasped the shackle on his wrist and taking hold of the other end of the chain, slowly pulled it outward from the cuff. In a few moments the links of the chain had altered shape, as if softening in a furnace. The men in the room regarded this spectacle silently, until the chain crunched from the cuff and Rehger dropped it on the floor. He broke the fastening of the cuff itself more quickly, threw that down also.

It was the Shansarian charioteer who then began uncouthly to applaud.

“This Vis dog brings the stadium to Zaddath. Cheer him. Let us make him a garland.”

“Let’s first of all discover,” said Sorbel, “what this garland is, that he desires. We have questions to put to him. But he has his own questions. Look at him. This man isn’t a slave. We think he knows some secret. He disdains our suspicions. Do we stretch him over coals, or whip him, maim him, and expect compliance?” Sorbel glared at Rehger. “Do you have the blood of the Plains People?”

“To my knowledge, no.”

Sorbel put his knotted fist to his throat.

“Do you, to your knowledge, have the blood of Raldnor Am Anackire?”

The chamber surged. The lamps flickered and flashed at the uneven breathing of men.

“Do I take you to mean am I descended from the bloodline of Raldnor? My mother was an Iscaian farm-woman wedded to a peasant in the mountain valleys.”

“What do you want?” Sorbel cried out shockingly, a sensitive who had lost control of diplomacy in the swirl of empathic vibrations.

“Is it so difficult to guess?” Rehger said. “The woman Aztira was known to me. Like yourselves, I wonder if she could live after death, in the flesh. And if so, where she’s gone to.”

In the way of the ancient palaces of Vis, the Council Hall at Zaddath burrowed into the ground. Beneath the upper rooms, with their ledgers, clerks, formalities, and clandestine late sessions, corridors descended into the pit of a dry river-course. Down there, even the insect chorus did not sound. There were other noises, sometimes.

The cell was not cramped, lit by a pair of clay lamps, and with a brazier even, against damp or cold. A clean pallet lay along one wall. The jailer, having detailed the room’s appointments, vowed to bring kindling, oil and food, at logical hours. Wine could also be purchased, even women. “Don’t get low, sir,” said the jailer. “I’ve never known any man to be left here more than six months.” Rehger seated himself, on the pallet, to wait.

He thought, in flowing, sequential degrees, of the passages of experience which had brought him here. The weave of the cloth, a tapestry of chariots and swords, or shouting crowds, of fire bursting from water and metal from its sheath—and the powder of marble. At the hem, in Iscaian dusk, his faceless mother. Through it all a fragile thread recurring, white as the center of the lamp-flames.

Remember me sometimes. This the Amanackire had written to him, before the city perished.

Alive or dead, she drew him on. He remembered. He remembered her.

And, as he was doing this, another man came to the cell’s door and stared in by the grating.

An amber-colored Shansarian eye saw, in the filmy light, the seated statue of a king musing, done in gold-washed bronze.

The Shansarian snapped his fingers, and the jailer made him free of Rehger’s cell.

Rehger did not get to his feet, and thus became a king giving audience from a couch. Plainly, he was not fraught. Not doubting or anxious at himself. Nothing could be done to him, got from him. Besides, he was honest. He had said it all.

The Shansarian prince looked down on the seated king.

“So the Fire Ride stays fresh for you, too? I should have come back, the next year, and beaten you, if your city had stood.”

“Perhaps.”

“Above, in that chamber,” said the Shansarian, “you saw a conclave of allies, who distrust each other and all things. They summoned me from the province of Alisaar. I told them what I’d learned, the famous tale. Will you be told it, too?”

“I came here for that purpose.”

“Expect no embellishment. I’m not a paid spy of Vardath, like their Dortharian kiss-foot, Galutiyh. I worship the goddess. My land over the oceans was the first to swear allegiance to brotherhood with Raldnor, and the Lowlands. (Vathcri claims that. They cheat. It was Shansar.) Now, the Lowlands have become two races, and one of these an enemy. The tale is this. Near the end of the months of the scarlet star, a girl of the Amanackire traveled up through the Alisaarian north. She had two or three servants, who served her as the white ones are always served. A lordling of the Shansarian province who saw her on the street, recalled her beauty from Saardsinmey, where he had gone to attend to some affairs. He sent politely to her house to ask if she was the same lady, and if so, to congratulate her on leaving the city before the disaster, as he had done. The message was returned that she had witnessed the disaster, or its effect. The prince then sought her doors. They shut. Who aggravate the Amanackire? He came away.”

“You were this prince?” said Rehger.

The Shansarian made a flaunting gesture. “I. Kuzarl Am Shansar.”

“You’d met her in Saardsinmey.”

“Beheld her, after the chariots. She was by then yours. Or so it was said.”

“But you saw her, nevertheless, frequently and closely enough, to pick her out this second time, in the north.”

“Do I swear to that? The woman on the street went veiled. Yet, you’ll know, with a woman one fancies ... the carriage of her head, the movement of her frame as she walks, linger in the mind.”

Rehger waited. Kuzarl Am Shansar studied him, and said at length, “Have you missed that she boasted to me? When she sent me a written message to declare she had survived.”

“Not missed.”

“She boasted also before you of the prowess of her people? And that they would bring down a proud city of the black races, to make an example of it?”

Rehger did not reply. In his mind, a hawk fell, and Aztira kneeled and wept in hubris and horror. Not only her people, herself: She also had been divided. From that impetus, it had seemed to him, she had—this cunning sorceress—given herself to a murderer.

“The wild tales now spread like weeds all over Alisaar and the province,” said Kuzarl. “Perhaps at her instigation. A woman of Saardsinmey had plotted to slay her, done it, seen her in her tomb. After the quake and the wave the Amanackire was reborn, in her own body, which healed of death by her magic.”

“The Lowlanders believe life is inextinguishable.”

“Yet not the flesh, which corrupts. There are legends in Shansar, of heroes who re-entered their own corpses in time of need. Raldnor is supposed to have done this during the un-war with the Zakors.”

One of the clay lamps guttered suddenly and turned red.

As if at some signal, the Shansarian seated himself upon the floor opposite to Rehger.

“Now ril reveal the second story. There’s a marvelous city in Thaddra. Or beyond Thaddra, in the forests farthest to the west. Too far, too lost a land even for the Free Zakors to covet. The Amanackire have built the place. Partly by witchcraft, also by the labor of Vis slaves.”

“And who has visited this city?”

“None, maybe. Whispers wend along the rivers. Dorthar says: A makebelieve. Rarnammon’s son is a coward and a libertine. For his personal blazon he has a dragon embracing or struggling with a snake. He will sire geese. Still, he pays hounds like Galut to snuff about. But Galut finds the Vis can only vie with each other for crumbs, and the Lowlands are kept blind, or they hide their eyes. No one has seen the city of the Amanackire—save they themselves.”

“She traveled westward?”

“It’s said so. She was gone like a white smoke. Yet all Var-Zakoris has the tale now, of a resurrected sorceress. In some of the Zakor villages, out in the woods, you come on shrines to her. There’s a new plan. To send men to the west, a doomed mission. The forests are impenetrable. The heart of Thaddra is the land of losings. Even gods and heroes vanish into it forever. The westernmost jungles are deeper than the deepest seas. Who enters needs wings. But then, the Amanackire fly,” Kuzarl said. “Did she inform you?”

The weak lamp faded. The other also, but with no preface, went out.

In the dark, the Shansarian said, “Spirits are eavesdropping. Or else you have Power. Yes, I credit you do. In the race on the cliff, I felt that.”

“The chariots have their own life. Any professional racer would tell you.”

“That’s Power. But you Vis send it always outward. Your gods are sorry but dangerous things, you put such being into them.” Kuzarl leaned forward. His voice was a murmur. “The Vardians might kill you. Such is their fright.”

“I was warned of it.”

“Yet came here? Then she’s called you. At liberty, would you go now to the city—the perhaps-city, in the west?”

Rehger said, after a moment, “If a sorceress called me, presumably I’d have no choice.” Then he said, “But what shall I owe you?”

There came the sound of Kuzarl rising, notified by the clink of the jewelry on his wrists and belt.

“There was a second, when we raced the chariots together. Did you think: Brothers who duel for their birthright.”

“Yes.”

“You have the mind-speech, too. Only a touch. Not enough to send your Vis brain mad. We’re dealing now in the dark. Don’t haggle, Rehger Am Ly Dis. Some things must be. Sorbel’s in a lather up above. But the Warden I’ll persuade. You and I. We’ll journey west.”

The second lamp, which had died, quivered and gave up a hiss of light.

As Kuzarl smote the cell door and was let out, this lamp was again brightly burning.

“He was questioned at great length, and answered openly. The scribes have written down these accounts. But he’s Vis. How can he be thought an accomplice of Amanackire?”

Sorbel stood blocking out the dawn in the Warden’s high window.

“Not questioned, my lord, under any pressure.”

“I’ve never before known you longing to torture a man.”

“We’re at war, my lord. You know it. At war with magicians. In the beginning we thought ourselves part of the select, friends to the white race, white as they were. But the Amanackire are albinos, and adopt the sigil of the white serpent. Even their own parent people, the Lowlanders, have been made alien by the Shadowless. So, we discover ourselves at risk along with the dark men of Dorthar and Alisaar, and as little able to protect ourselves.”

“I’m lessoned in these things, Sorbel.”

“They can attack us when and how they choose. They will attack us, because theirs is an inimical and haughty people, possessed of Power. On our side, can the smallest grain of sand be left unsifted?”

“As this Rehger pointed out, you also, Sorbel, would be deemed a sorcerer, south and east and in the Middle Lands.”

“And Kuzarl is a Shansar, and mad as they always are.”

The Warden laughed a little. He was very tired and wanted the simple comforts of breakfast and sleep.

“Yes, Kuzarl is a Shansar.”

“All we know of him otherwise, my lord, is that he’s a wealthy adventurer. This berserk pouncing of his on the idea of a city in the west—”

“It may exist. He may find it. That may in some sort be advantageous.”

“Find with the assistance of Rehger the Lydian.”

The Warden said, “Consider, Sorbel. If the man Rehger was her lover, beloved enough that she saved his life—it seems she did—perhaps her kind wish him returned to them, and perhaps our permitting him, unhindered, to reach them, will steady the supernatural balance. You, Sorbel, are aware of the worth of such bargains.”

“I dream constantly,” said Sorbel. “My wife tells me I call out, till she wakes me. I lie in her arms like an infant, shaken with terrors. I can’t ever remember why, where I have been or what I have looked at.”

“Kuzarl will go on his journey whatever the Zaddath council decrees. We shall send the Lydian with him. They will never come out of the forests. Nothing may come out of them. In ten years we may still be debating the matter. Perhaps our fears of the Amanackire are only an evil dream. The goddess will wake us, we’ll lie in her arms.”

Sorbel turned from the window. The gathering sunrise streamed around him. His back to the light, he said, “When they speak to me in the council of these rumors, that there are sorcerers now who can rise from the dead, I dismiss the silly talk. But here, in private, I tell you I believe it. It’s as if someone whispered in my ear, at night in the darkness. Against a superior enemy who hates us, and can never die—all struggle supposedly is futile. Isn’t it?”

“Struggle,” said the Warden, “is frequently useless. And hope, they say, a viper, which entices in order to bite the more viciously. Even so, there is some other state, not despair, not hope, and not struggle. Some belief or knowledge, nameless yet definite. Cling to that, Sorbel. Or, let it fasten on you and bear you up.”

The Dortharian agent Galutiyh rejoined his men at the hostelry with a malign flourish, flinging some gold on the table and, as they cursed and scuffled for it, announcing: “Underpaid. The bastards docked our wages.”

Galutiyh virtuously resented the mantle of secrecy in which the conclave of allies at Zaddath had gone to earth. Though he had found out, via byways, that Rehger was imprisoned. This did not distress Galutiyh. Now, philosophically, the Dortharian Thaddrian with the phantasmal Lowland granddaddy, switched his vision elsewhere.

He told his company they might make merry in Zaddath tonight. Tomorrow they would be returning along the road to Ilva. There he expected to be meeting someone. This was Yennef. Galutiyh had realized, by the time they made the sea crossing from Xarabiss, that it was Yennef who came after. Yennef had probably reckoned they would go directly to Dorthar, since Dorthar had hired them both. Galutiyh faked his clues accordingly. He had also, wanting something in reserve, left a message for Yennef farther north, in case Yennef did not eventually tumble to the realities. Galutiyh had made sure that in the end Yennef would grope his way into the Vardian west, where the laws of Dorthar would be less helpful and less protective. Galutiyh had not forgotten the Lan’s grip and the razor-edged metal at his throat.

While his men whored and got drunk, he made an offering to Anackire-Ashkar in a temple. It was a blood offering, which was permissible here. He asked the goddess to give him his rights and his revenge. This did not seem incongruous to him. Of her eight uplifted arms—each of ivory in Zaddath, with amber bangles, fingers of gold, a topaz in each palm—he gazed on the arm which signified retribution.

She seemed, through the smoke, to smile down at him.

He adored and honored her; she was his god and he gave her what she liked. She would not leave him wanting.

19 Fire, Water and Steel

Forty miles west of Zaddath, all the roads ended. Thereafter, there was only forest, and those things which the forest contained, or let be. Above, sky, sometimes barely seen for days where the canopy had meshed to closure. Southward, from high terraces of ground, once the canopy broke again, mountains were visible, their shoulders half-transparent, their crowns melting into air. In the glades, pools of inky water lay motionless in a mist of gnats and dragonflies. Occasionally a village had hewn a niche for itself. Some had not lasted; their bones showed dimly among the creepers and roots which had eaten them. There were tracks and trails through the trees, the footpaths of men and animals. Along these avenues, where light came in, the summer fires of flowers burned on the earth and dozens of feet up in the boughs. By night the forest was strummed like a harp. Sudden storms hammered the foliage and lizards came down with the rain. This country of the jungle was eternally Vis. It had obtained long before the Vardians, long before men. Treasures might be dug out of it, shafts of ivory, crude masks of deformed gold from Zarduk rites centuries out of date, or the gemmed teeth of travelers. Kuzarl’s men, mostly Vardianized Zakors, had not brought maps, or charms for dowsing, and did not grub after such articles.

Along with the ten Var-Zakors were two Shansarians, servants of Kuzarl’s household, and a cook from Karmiss. Every man had sworn an oath Shansarian fashion, of loyalty and secrecy, over a sword standing in heated coals. In the old days, they would have had to grasp the metal in the left fist, the subsequent blisters a mark of their intention, a reminder of their faith. Kuzarl had twittingly mentioned this, before requesting the modified version. Rehger he did not ask for the oath. “You’re already bound,” Kuzarl had said.

There was no time in the forests, except for each day and each night, and, when the going was exceedingly rough, each hour. It was not possible to take pack-beasts through the inner jungles. Each man carried a quantity of what was needful. Sometimes they must also hack their way, every one of the fifteen men, pausing only when exhausted.

Conversation, so often the solace of inactivity, was lacking among them. About the cook-fire by night, the Karmian, who had a fine voice, would sometimes lament his birthland, the Var-Zakors would bet with painted Vardian dice. Kuzarl was given to isolated and thoughtful monologues, concerning Shansar-over-the-ocean, the mythic Lowland war, the gods, Anackire. Into these philosophic examinations he beckoned Rehger, but Rehger never spoke at any length. “Tell me more of Saardsinmey,” said Kuzarl one evening. “It was destroyed,” said Rehger.

One sunup, two of the Zakors were missing. Their remains were soon found. A huge snake, which had left evidence of its passage through the undergrowth, had crushed them, and devoured one, leaving only his metal ornaments and boots. On the other, birds and reptiles were feeding. Where blood had run into the flowers, they had lowered their calyxes thirstily.

Some of the men were very afraid. The notion of a serpent now was not only physically but psychically threatening.

“Return then,” said Kuzarl, straddling the serpent’s trail with princely defiance. “Know the way? By Ashkar, I supposed not. Come on, then.”

That night Kuzarl said to Rehger, “The Lowlanders burn their dead. This custom is upheld as an acceptance that flesh has been doffed, the spirit flown away. But I detect another origin. They use flames to prevent resurrection.”

Kuzarl’s band now numbered thirteen. They mounted a strict watch by night.

The Shansarian servants obviously found the dripping molten heat oppressive. Kuzarl, reared, he said, in Sh’alis, was rather more enduring. Maybe a month and a half was gone, since they had left Zaddath.

They crossed a swamp by a Zakorian bridge, partly unsafe. Thrown out on the edge was a massive skeleton, a palutorvus, or some thing even older. Fever stalked the camp, taking up both of Kuzarl’s Shansars, three of the Var-Zakors with mix blood. They lay up a day or two. The fevers went down and the oaths held.

Rehger opened his eyes.

“What?”

“Not,” said Kuzarl, “more snakes. But I’ll show you.”

Aside from the dutiful watchman, the rest of the camp slept, not yet troubled by flies. The dawn was starting, back the way they had come.

Kuzarl plucked through the ferns and creepers under a ribcage of trees. At the end, as they had suspected the previous night, was another of the deserted villages. Rather than antique, however, it was quite recent and had not entirely submerged. The huts had become bushes, but a stone pillar-oven, of the oldest type of the shrines of the fire god, braced itself on a step of baked clay. Kuzarl pointed to the foot of the step, where he had previously pulled the creepers aside. A sort of wooden pin had been sunk in the soil, and daubed white. It had something of a face and a veil or mane of bleached human hair.

“A shrine to Zarduk, and a shrine to Aztira,” said Kuzarl. “Do you see where the underside of the clay is marked? They were making sacrifice to her. Burnt meats.”

The sunrise poured past Rehger’s body, into the lost village. He looked at the daubed pin Aztira. The night of her burial, he had stood before the altar of the Shalian temple, and promised an offering to the snake-fish goddess, for Aztira’s peace. He had never made this offering. Instead, all Saardsinmey had made it, consumed on the altar, flushed by the lustral of the sea.

A slow storm of hatred moved in him. He was now accustomed to this. It had commenced on the ship of Arn Yr, and in the studio of Vanek it had dulled down, aching only now and then, as the scar on his arm never did. But that third life at Moiyah, that had been sundered also, the life of the artisan. As he came west, again the hate burgeoned, deepened, and had by now perhaps possessed him.

“She passed them by here, then,” Rehger said.

“Seemingly. These primitives could never have heard of her otherwise.”

For my self, I loved you, from the moment I saw you I believe.

The picture returned to him, through the present image of the wooden pin, the image he himself had been forming from marble; and the image of her lovely deadness on the couch, as if she slept.

The hatred engorged him, like desire.

Kuzarl said, “Be wary, Rehger. I told you, the mind-speech isn’t quite unknown to you. Your brain thunders, and deafens me.”

“And the words?”

“No words. Does a screaming baby have words?”

Rehger lifted his eyes and looked off through the smothering village.

“When asked so surprisingly in Zaddath, if you were of the line of Raldnor,” said Kuzarl, “you replied, pedantically, that you took them to mean the line of his sons. Evasion?”

“Mind-read it,” said Rehger. “If you’re able.”

“No need. I put together two blatant themes. You have the appearance of the line of the first Ramammon, the Dortharian Storm Lords. You are not Raldnor’s. You descend then from the seed of his half-brother. Amrek’s get.”

Rehger turned from the village.

“She told me so.”

He had been repelled by her at the beginning. That whiteness. He would harm no woman. But she was not human. He had cut her from the marble, wrung her neck in the wax.

Rehger said to Kuzarl, “A Moiyan sculptor used me as the model for a statue of Raldnor. Taken into Xarabiss an accident befell the stone. All trace of the features was splintered from the countenance.”

Sword into snake. Snake into woman. A serpent, which sloughed its skin and crawled out from the black hole under the boulder . . . something so beautiful—

Rehger leaned down and wrenched the daubed peg from the earth. He cast it away over the village.

There was a normalcy of sound growing behind them, in the camp. The cook clattered his pots and sang.

Kuzarl said, “Tradition dictates, Rehger Am Amrek, we’re enemies. You knew it, and have spoken it.”

“A combat then, Shansarian. As and when you wish.”

“The goddess will demonstrate the time and place.”

“Your goddess is a demon of the air. Your wanting it will make the time and place.”

Kuzarl bowed, a hint of the codes of Karmiss despite everything.

Not a bird or insect made its noises in the foliage about them.

They want back easily to the camp, pacted, as if nothing at all had happened.

The first wilderness ended in the towns and villages, the cleared and fertile marshes and flax-sumps of the Var-Zakorian west. There were now consistent vistas, on one of which the mountains marched away over the southern horizon.

There had been no route to the Great Sea-Lake in the days of Old Zakoris. Corhl and Ott had used this enclosed sprat of an ocean for fishing trade and piracy upon each other. But now a couple of Vardish roads rambled to the shore.

Kuzarl’s party, again, had been depleted by this juncture. Five Var-Zakors, despite the desperate oath, had vanished at the first town beyond the forest. “Tested in fire,” remarked Kuzarl, “the flawed metal breaks.

Such vermin we shan’t be saddled with in the depths of Thaddra.”

At a fishing port on the rim of the Lake, one of Kuzarl’s servants found out an Ottish captain, due to take his twenty-oared galley across to Ottamet and Put. Kuzarl drew a map in the sandy soil with his daggar. “There and here, the Ott-towns, and here, or here, a river which runs off through the mountains northwest, where we are going.” So it was settled.

The water of the Sea-Lake gleamed like glass under a high sun, and far out fish were leaping.

The Ottish captain and his men took that for some favorable omen, and trotted instantly to the galley. Kuzarl and Rehger went aboard, but the rest, dawdling in the port, were almost left behind. The Karmian cook railed against the Otts as savages. But their ears were thick with their own dialect and they chose to ignore the faces he pulled, smiling and chattering and nodding in reply.

Ottamet, the capital, was a thatched wooden town, painted scarlet, rose and cream, with brilliant blue jetties of obscure religious meaning, that prodded half a mile into the paler blue of the waves. The sea was tidal but calm, and there had been a strong breeze on the body of the water. The crossing had taken little more than a day. From Ottamet, the galley turned north, flattering the coast. Miniature Ott also had been flinging territorial nets, and advanced in patches up along the Sea-Lake until a wide rivermouth checked her. Here was Put, wooden and thatched, rouged and jettied. Wild parrots nested in the roofs, screeching and squawking. The echoing omnipotence of the black jungle-forest loomed and towered behind. The river estuary, a swamp pillared by colossal reeds, choked up with sand banks, islets and hot springs, sent a quavering fume into the sky. It was possible to get through, carrying a light vessel upended overland, until the main channel of the river won free. No man of Ott wished to go that way, but several were willing to sell all manner of boats.

Lizards the size of two-year-old children sat on stones to watch the bargaining, often conducted in sign language, the tall Shansars and Zakors, the shorter, chunky Otts, with playful wicked eyes. The parrots screeched and scratched.

Before sunset all but one of the Zakors had deserted. One of the Shansarians had gone down once more with fever and been taken in at a hospice by a holy jetty. The Karmian, who was related to this man, became woebegone and was therefore released by Kuzarl to cook for the sick one and save his stomach from Putish “muck.” Next morning, when the parrots were barely stirring, the four remaining men of the expedition went out of Put with a slender rowboat slung on their backs.

The river won fifteen miles upstream in a skein of purple lilies that gave suddenly on muscular brown water.

Like a dream the mountain banks of western Thaddra came floating toward them as they rowed.

The mountains stepped down and walled them in. On the sloping plain between the mountains and the river-course, the forests pushed and crowded nearer to the water, and in parts invaded it. Massive trees had rooted in the river, which clashed and hurled itself about them, foaming with rage. But the peaks of the mountains stood in the forest like giants in a meadow, staring away into the past and future indifferently.

Clogged by the jungle, the river had split in strands and narrowed. Conversely it was very deep. They made their journey that day by thrusting off with oars against the boles of trees and great ferns. Overhead, the boughs met to form a tunnel.

From noon onward there began, beyond the noises of their exertion, the boat, the water, the forecast stillness of approaching storms.

The air itself became another hindrance, another block against which to drive the unwilling vessel.

Near sunset a royal sky was erected miles off behind their sunshade of leaves. The atmosphere boiled slowly over.

For an hour thunder tuned itself among incredible distances, growling like cruel hunger around the valley’s hollow belly, striking the mountains and struck aside. From the forests things answered with squalls and cries, brilliant, snuffed-out flickers of wings. Then the silence returned, weighing like lead.

The men let down their oars, laid them over the planks. The water along the channel crinkled, flattened, and grew thick as agate; only where it rocked against the boat did it move, and this seemed half illusion.

Lightning speared across the leaf-eyelets of the sky.

It pierced a distant crag, or seemed to, exploding. Then the thunder boomed as if the heavens fell in masonry blocks.

Wind like a scythe tore through the valley of the river, bending the trees, making the boat jump in the solid water. The men crouched down. The Var-Zakor was unnerved, agitated, the Shansar servant looked on in a trance.

The wind shrieked unknown words. Lightning passed once more with a tearing hiss.

This lightning hit the top of the tree-canopy, about thirty feet away from the boat.

The world turned inside out as a sheet of living flame threw itself upward. The agate river was changed to gold. A deluge of burning leaves and branches, a fire-howl, enveloped everything.

As the boat ignited, Rehger pitched himself into the river.

Beneath three or four incendiary surfaces, darkness filled the deep narrows. There was no bottom, only here and there blind shelves and obtrusions of the land.

Presently Rehger rose for air. The boat lay some way off, alight and flaring in a cage of flaming elements, wood, reflections. The fire was all around, and above him. Of the other men there was no sign. He dived again.

Red light filtered down to him now, and the river gods sank their fangs into his heels.

He rose a second time, much later. The fire was in turmoil, upstream, but flashing out, catching, hurrying after him.

One of the gods under the river took hold of Rehger by the waist and pulled him, with iron human hands, down again deep under the water.

There, in the opaque reddish dark, he saw the pallor of the Shansar’s clothes, flesh and clouding hair. Kuzarl’s pale eyes were wide, his paler teeth clenched, grinning, while the scintillant breath escaped grudgingly between them. Letting Rehger go, he hovered before him, like a sky creature resting at midflight, in the levity of the water. Kuzarl had no weapons in his grasp, was revealing the emptiness of his hands. He would use only himself, like one stadium-trained.

To Kuzarl’s mind, apparently, the goddess had devised and provided. There was to be combat—

As the Shansar curled over to grapple him, Rehger swung beneath him, lunging up under Kuzarl’s body, flinging him off and off and away, a knot of torso and limbs twisting capriciously in the medium of liquid.

Each man shattered the surface once more, perhaps twelve feet from each other, here the limits of the channel. The fire lashed at them, and smoke drifted from their hair as from the water. The atmosphere was spoiled, but they gulped it in. The Shansar laughed, without noise or breath, his eyes blazing like the forest. Tradition: A berserker. He plunged in a vast diving spring, like a leaping fish, straight up and across the channel, falling on Rehger, bearing him down, one of the ringed hands clamped on the Lydian’s throat.

As they sank again, Kuzarl’s fingers pressed for the life in the neck veins, to bring on sightless confusion, or unconsciousness, but the neck of the Swordsman was armored in muscle, a statue’s neck, like the rest of his physique. As Rehger began remorselessly to detach Kuzarl’s clasp, the Shansar broke of his own accord and tried to turn to kick his adversary away. But Rehger it now was who secured Kuzarl, forcing back his grinning face, using legs and arms to detain him, and at the same moment angle his body into an agonizing spinal arch.

But the medium of liquid, yet again, advantaged and misled.

The Shansarian abruptly tossed himself backward, a voluntary description of the arch, and hurled both men over in a series of spinning wheels, from which in turn they loosed, and so from each other, to hang suspended there, unappeased.

Certain burning stuff from the forest above, not immediately extinguished, was now arrowing down past them through the river, like flaming comets. Between their lips the silver flames of their breath escaped.

They were not merely flame-breathing sky creatures. Dehumanized, the Shansar was now equally submerged in the fighting-madness of homeland ritual. Nothing was in his eyes but starvation, greed. Buoyed in fluid, his eloquent hands were taut and ready. To Rehger, the blood-lust of Saardsinmey had come back. It was not genuine, or even entire, for through it he thought quite cleanly: This was a substitution, a surrogate, scapegoat for the unbearable itch of hatred.

The crimson comets seared by, going out like old wine in the abyss beneath. How far might they fall?

The two men, strong lungs still lined by a little air, forgetful, eager to renew their contact now as two lovers separated, drove forward, slammed into each other, grasped, would not let go.

Kuzarl, his mouth stretched in a grimace like joy, started to rip, to gouge, to dismantle his enemy. But Rehger, speedlessly, with a terrible expressionless power, had commenced to wring, with one arm alone, the last of the air from the Shansar’s lungs. The left arm of the Shansar was pinned. He had discovered it to be so, and redoubled the efforts of the right arm—but Rehger now had the right arm also, and propelled it, slowly, graciously, aside and backward—

The awful complaint of this right arm, rotated from its orbit, almost from the socket, penetrated Kuzarl’s madness only in order to heighten his murderous frenzy—but a kind of screaming, part berserk fury, and part sheer pain, shot his lungs of the last air. His ribs caving under Rehger’s crushing vice, a helpless spasm, like a ghastly hiccupping, sucked the water in instead.

All at once the Shansar was suffocating. Drowning.

He floundered, began to struggle, the gargantuan vitality of the berserker state beating like gavels—on the obduracy of bronze.

Rehger, his own vision blackened, his own lungs seeming to have collapsed flat as the rent skins of drums, held Kuzarl like a huge, fighting, insane child. Which grew sleepy, which ceased, inch by inch, second by second, to fight. ...

Locked together, idly revolvingly, they were gliding now down and downward.

Rehger felt the heavy head loll against him, the legs, the jeweled hands flexible as weeds—felt but could no longer see. And now could no longer feel.

He thrust against the water, to regain the in-jutting of the channel, the rocks and roots which all this while had grazed against him, falling. Rehger, holding Kuzarl now solely by the princely buckle of his belt, hauled them both, lightly cumbersome, unseeing, unreal, in a miasma or shadow, against the channel side. Using its leverage, Rehger launched himself, and the deadweight weightlessness of Kuzarl, upward—

Darkness. Of water, sight, mind. There was no end to the dark, or the shadow. To the water, no end. Subsurface, the channel must have spread. They were in under the rock, buried, in a stone river.

Whiteness blasted across his face. The air shrilled into his lungs like knives. He could not make them take it, and then—could not get enough.

Vision was senseless—They were still inside the water. Vertically now, it lanced upon him. Rain. And the fire was out.

Under the rain, and the sullen sky snagged on remnants of the forest roof, Rehger rolled the Shansar on his face and worked the river out of his chest and guts.

The blood-desire had faded as his own life ebbed. It would have been easy to continue dropping down into oblivion and night. But only now, surely, did he think it easy, now when he had brought both of them back from it alive.

Kuzarl, lying breathing on his side, looked at Rehger with inflamed, gentle eyes.

“That’s not the last of it,” said Kuzarl Am Shansar.

The boat was gone. The Shansarian servant, the Var-Zakor—neither had reappeared. The rain fell. The sky guttered out.

Rehger did not answer Kuzarl.

Kuzarl said, hoarsely, “The Three Ordeals, to find out guilt or innocence, or the victory, or the essence of what must be. Fire, water, steel. Not always in that order. The hero Raldnor passed through them. The steel of the assassin. Tempest. Volcano.”

“Save yourself,” said Rehger. “We’ve some way to go yet, I imagine.”

“I don’t speak of facts, but of truths.”

“Shansar truths.”

“The Fire Ride—That was the fire, repeated here, you and I. And for you the fire in the sea, like Raldnor, and the wave that had your slave-city—an ordeal of water. And steel, every one of your duels before the mob. But one more time, the steel, with me.” Kuzarl was not yet properly returned to his body to be quelled by its discomfort.

Rehger said: “On your terms, I killed you in the river. You’re bested. Your reptile goddess gave you to me.

Rehger’s eyes, and face, were composed. He spoke without malice or gluttony.

But Kuzarl said, “You killed me and restored me. You kept me for the steel, as she kept you.”

“Anackire.”

“Anackire. ”

“If she exists, your goddess, if she is what your people and her own people say, if she is Everything, if she is all places and times, this land, this weather, all men, you, and I, then we’re much to be blamed, Shansarian. We botched the world. We made it ill and wrongly, and deserve the disaster and the misery of it. Get up. Let’s get on wherever you reckon we’re going. If your philosophy’s accurate, what does it matter?”

But Kuzarl only nodded and rose to his feet quite steadily. His jewelry had ceased to shine, but his eyes had become once again polished, luminous amber.

“Why do the children play games?” said Kuzarl. “Isn’t it unkind and unbecoming to prevent them, even when they bruise their limbs or sometimes hurt their companions. Children must play. And why should we think so?”

Rehger only waited. Kuzarl gestured indolently upriver, westward.

Through the rain, the burnt charcoal fringes of the forest, along the riverbank, westward, they went.

The tangle of trees, miles and days beyond the fire, shut the river. Only the pinnacles of the mountains sometimes showed. They seemed intrinsic not to the earth, but to the sky.

It was possible to snare lizards in the muddy, silty places which the river had left behind. The water which was available was full of salts. In preference, they sliced the stems of ferns and drank their sour vegetable milk.

The now-and-then visibility of the mountains, the passaging of daylight, guided them west.

Aside from necessities, they did not speak.

Their individual endurance and rate of progress was not competitive. They had been welded into a bizarre union. As if by prearrangement, if not the plan of Anackire, all else was removed from them, and there was at last no doubt that a goal existed and would be achieved. Despite the brawl under the river, neither man was impaired, or had given up his wits. The hard common sense of savagery was on them now.

In the middle of a day, conceivably the fifteenth or sixteenth after the fire (or it might have been longer), the Lydian, who was ahead of the Shansar, cut his way through the continuous forest fence into a clearing so wide its farther extremes were out of sight. It was not the conclusion of the jungles for, far off, they lifted up again into the sunlight, like mounds of a blue haze, and ghosts of the mountaintops were anchored over them, southerly, though no longer to the north.

In the. clearing was a town.

Having subsisted some time on tasteless and infrequent meat and the resin of ferns, maybe the oddity of the town was simply perspective, transposed.

It had a strain of Ott, of Thaddra, too. The buildings were of mud and had grown together in the manner of a hive. Carving stuck out of the thatches. Wooden birds roosted there, perhaps for good fortune. Then one of these carvings shook its feathers. A flightless fowl was tending its nest. The town seemed to have no proper relation to the jungle-forest. Its people did not stare at the two travelers, only gave them occasional glances.

In a square was a market, where they were able, surprisingly with coins, to get food.

At one side of the square, regardless of other business, a custom of Ott went on, a Death Feast, at a long table. In the seat of honor, embalmed and dressed in its best, the cadaver sat overlooking the feasters with indigo eyelids. The Otts toasted the deathshead and invited passersby to quench their thirst; Rehger and Kuzarl were among these. The beer was potent. Nothing, in any case, seemed truly curious to them, or real.

As dusk came on in a preface of light, a red star appeared in the wide dome over the clearing. It was the first night of Zastis.

“Still the fire,” said Kuzarl.

They were seated on a tavern roof, under the awning woven of leaves. An outrider of a night breeze tried the awning, feathering the leaves, the movement of a wing. They might have lived in the town many years.

Down in the square, the funeral had just disbanded. The figure of Death, a man dressed as a woman, and all in white, had appeared to lead the dead away for burial, with happy songs and jests.

Kuzarl’s blond head was back, to gaze at the Star. “Your Zastis doesn’t trouble my kind. They have no special hunger. All Shansars will tell you so, as they rush for the brothel door. No, no. Transparent lust is the mark of the Vis.”

Rehger watched the last of the funeral party. The stirring in his blood was remote, but he had been aware of it for days, realizing the season. He was accustomed to containment, or to the alternatives of action. The combat in the river, even so long ago, had been tinged by some premonition of the Star.

“Zastis is a love-house of the Vis gods,” said Kuzarl, “set on fire and burning forever in the skies.” Kuzarl might have been drunk. Both men might have been so. “Or,” said Kuzarl, “Zastis is one of the mysterious flying chariots of the Lowlanders, or of the Dragon-Kings of the Vis. Combusted, flaming magic, unable to go out, its erotic radiation sprinkling the earth like scarlet snow—”

“If you want a woman,” said Rehger, “go and find one.”

“See there,” said Kuzarl.

Across the rosy twilight roofs, another roof, not far away. There were two women on it, one dressing the other’s hair. This apparition gleamed in the gathering dusk, for though the women were smoky-skinned, their long tresses had been bleached. The seated one had noticed Kuzarl’s scrutiny. She smiled to herself and looked away. The other continued the hairdressing, but also she began to sing in a low cindery voice.

To get to the women’s thatch was no difficulty, since almost all the roofs ran into each other at one point or another.

The women welcomed them courteously, like old friends of the family. They were very modest, nearly bashful. The dialect prevented much verbal commerce.

The younger girl Kuzarl took down the stair. Rehger lay on the roof with the elder, in a nest of straw, under the stars which seemed to expand and spill across the eventual roof of night.

“These people never go north or west, they insist. They don’t pry into the limits of the jungle. Somewhere is the sea. But who can reach it? The forest closes on the traveler and eats him up. Only phantoms come back. Mine whimpered me a story of that, and frightened herself so I had to comfort her.”

“Nevertheless,” said Rehger, “this town uses coins.”

“There are other settlements in the mountains, north, and east,” said Kuzarl. “So they say. Traders go about from petty kingdoms of Thaddra, lost Zakor and Dortharian outposts.”

“And the fabulous city. Have they heard of that?”

“If they hear, they never listen.”

They stood at the town’s border, where the graveyard was. The tombs were of raised impacted mud. Creepers and flowers grew over them. The stacks looked cheerful and careless, and where they had given way, the flowers only bloomed more exuberantly.

“The city,” said Kuzarl, “is lapped in jungle, between this country and the coast. I begin to dream of Ashnesee. Did I mention, that is the name of it?”

Rehger said, “Describe the dream.”

“White light ringed by midnight and the fire of eyes.”

“You also begin to talk like a priest.”

“All Shansars are priests. Priest-warriors. Today, we fight again, you and I.”

“And if I kill you,” said Rehger, “how will I find the way to Ashnesee?”

“Do you suppose I can lead you there?”

“She gave you directions,” said Rehger. “In Saardsinmey, or Sh’alis.”

“She? The Amanackire. Ah. You think that.”

Past the graveyard, the forest. The sun gilded its facade, then there was blackness.

At length the Shansarian said, “You acknowledge, you are in a sort of dream, a sorcery. You say to yourself, nothing is as it appears to be.”

“I understand you’d prefer I thought in this way.”

“How are we to duel?” said Kuzarl. “Where shall we get swords? Shall I seek them? I might go into the woods, and take up two serpents. Each would become a blade of steel.”

Rehger said, softly, “That was a trick she played on me.

“Who are you?” said the Shansarian. “Do you know yourself? Perhaps you died in Saardsinmey. Perhaps I died in the river.”

Rehger turned. “Now,” he said.

He jumped one of the tottered grave-stacks and came at Kuzarl. Rehger had drawn the knife the council at Zaddath had given him, to replace that which Galutiyh had had. It was proved. It could hack reeds and vines, and the flesh of lizards. The customs of the stadium were nullified, even the abstaining from sex before a combat. He brought the knife lengthways across Kuzarl’s ribs, and blood welled, red as only blood could ever be.

Out sparkled Kuzarl’s dagger, Shalian in design, incised with a snake-fish, gems in the hilt. Kuzarl ignored the slit in his side.

Rehger stood back, waiting. When the Shansarian lashed in at him, he blocked the blows, once, twice, and dashed the man from him, disdaining to slice him again.

The sunshine rang on the land. But the fight was heavy and purposeless. Used to the fined reactions of a merciless training, Rehger found his body had become that of a stranger. It did not move as he remembered, and was itself resentful that it could not. There was, above the arena of the graveyard, no murmurous and excited crowd. There was no reason and no prize.

The Shansar rolled and plunged at him again, and again, and Rehger met the advents and the blows, beating him aside, down, and to nothing. Rehger returned the onslaught without emphasis, allowing Kuzarl to shield himself.

From the first and only wound the Shansar bled. This did not seem to disable him, and yet even he did not attack with spirit. He did not strive as he had in the river.

Rehger cast the Zaddath knife from the right to the left hand. He went forward and brought his right fist cracking against Kuzarl’s jaw. As the Shansar staggered, Rehger kicked his feet from under him. Kuzarl crashed among the flowers, and the Shalian dagger flew away in a bush.

“You died in a river,” Rehger said, “as you told me.”

“Amreky” said Kuzarl. “Kill me or let me up to fight you.”

Rehger stood over him. “Brothers in Alisaar duel for their birthright. And what’s ours?”

“The world. Raldnor’s quarrel. Who will possess.” He reached to grip Rehger’s ankle and pull him down. Rehger snapped Kuzarl’s hand away with his foot.

“You’re bleeding, Kuzarl. Go back to the women in the town and ask them to see to it.”

“Who will possess,” Kuzarl repeated. “Your race. Mine.”

“Or the Amanackire. If I travel west, I’ll find the city.”

Kuzarl lapsed against the ground. He seemed suddenly to suffer from the gash in his side.

“I was her servant, in northern Alisaar—Sh’alis. I saw her unveiled. She was Aztira. She’d died and lived again. I lied to you.” He closed his eyes against the sun, his face secretive and cunning.

“Did she say her sorcery would act on me to bring me after her?”

“She said nothing of you. She forgot you, Lydian.”

“Then she only spoke of the city.”

“Something of the city.”

“Enough that you could find your way to it.”

“Yes, yes. . . .”

“Why did you delay to do so?”

Kuzarl opened his eyes again. His face became proud, arrogant, unknowing. “This thing, and that thing. Or fate elected me your guide.”

“But no longer.”

Tardily, cautiously, Kuzarl sat up. He leaned on a piece of grave, and helped himself to his feet.

“Ashara-Anack,” he said.

He went without haste, quite steadily (as after the river), back toward the town. He made no attempt to reclaim the costly dagger from the bushes. To Rehger, he said nothing more.

The Lydian walked through the graveyard and in under the arches of the jungle trees. The morning light was behind him, the west was represented now by the density of the forest. Soon, as Kuzarl had said that they said, the forest folded in upon him.

It was night. Night in day. There was no day. There was no direction, north or south, east or west. And in the coolness of his anger, the drunkenness of disillusion, and the clarity of the dark, he gave himself then to fate, or to Anackire, or to the will and the afterimage of the woman, Aztira.

Nothing seemed alive in the forests now but for himself and the enormous growing trees. Although there was great heat and moisture. When he was thirsty, which was not often, he drank from the sweating leaves.

He went on until an incredible tiredness dragged him to the earth. Then he slept, and when he woke, went on again.

Childishness entered into him. He had towered among men, but here in the endless night of the trees, his identity was valueless.

If he had measured time, it might have been five days later that he came on the pillar.

Its paleness, or some other thing, caused it to glow in the ebony forest. It matched the tallest trunks to their topmost heights, eighty feet, or a hundred. Coming near, you saw the figures of birds and cats, dragons and serpents, carved into the pure white stone.

Beyond the pillar, straight as a knife-cut through the forest, ran an unpaved track, two chariot-lengths across. Nothing blurred the track, or had rooted in it. It went into distance, until the darkness smoothed it away. Without a doubt, it led somewhere. It led to the ultimate hallucination, the Amanackire city. Ashnesee.