Anackire

17

It would be snowing in Dorthar. It did not snow here. The summer lasted longer, here. Winter never came.

They had crossed by the ancient Pass through the mountains. The Dortharian side was well-guarded, the frequent lookout towers hewn from and perched on the rock, bristling with spears. Even coming down into Thaddra there were Dortharian outposts. Caal the Zakorian was known, however; he had been this way before, with a council seal of Anackyra on his person, and all the correct passwords. It was quite true he was a spy for the Storm Lord. In Free Zakoris he was reckoned a spy of King Yl’s. In this way, Caal got about pretty adequately, sometimes alone, sometimes with servants. He had two guards this time, and a slave.

The private guards were of the light Vis darkness most common in Xarabiss or Karmiss. The slave was a little darker, maybe a Dortharian. He was also disobedient or slothful or careless, for he had been recently beaten. His face was a mass of bruises and old blood, and his strong back, where rags of clothing revealed it, showed old whip scars. He was chained at the ankles too, with just enough slack between the chafing irons to plod. He carried the baggage, while the first guard rode ahead. The second guard and Caal rode behind the slave, and now and then Caal flicked him with the starchy-tongued flail generally kept for flies.

Coming off the Pass, they reached Tumesh, then moved roughly westward. The best mode of travel through the jungles of Thaddra was by poled raft along a selection of her several rivers, such roads as there were being half-choked by growing plants. Before Yl and his armies made their strike into Thaddra these roads had been cleared more assiduously, but for a couple of decades, Thaddra had preferred inaccessibility in all directions. Finding rivers and rafts, Caal’s party pressed gradually on.

The sun seemed to come in black through the great trees, the roping creeper and colossal ferns. The water was like treacle, poisonous to drink, and full as a soup of reptiles. Faintly visible sometimes through gaps in the foliage, Vis’ northern mountains drew away.

By day they broiled. The nights were cooler and feverish with nocturnal life.

But in Dorthar it would be cold now, snowing, now.

The initial beating had been allotted for purposes of disguise. “You see, my lord,” Caal said, when they had got up into the foothills above Koramvis, “someone might recognize you. But with your face swollen, blood all over it—well, even your own brother’d have trouble.”

He was already chained, but the five Karmians held him, for good measure. He still used a couple of tricks they had not looked for, and one had fallen over screaming with a shattered kneecap. But the leg-irons told. Eventually Rarmon gave in and let Caal proceed with his beating. It was pointless to put off and so prolong the inevitable.

Caal reminded Rarmon, as he punched and slashed, of the blow Rarmon had awarded him in the palace.

When the camouflaging marks began to fade, the beating was repeated. There were, too, other pastimes later. Each night, making their camp, they would tie Rarmon some distance from the fire. Caal would bring him a share of food, and leave it on the ground just out of reach. After first attempts to take the food, Rarmon desisted and did not bother with it. Since Caal had told him he had been paid to present this captive in Free Zakoris, as Kesarh’s gift to Yl, and since Karmians remained with them to make sure of it, he would have to feed his prisoner sometime, and did.

Caal was disappointed in Rarmon. He resorted to other less subtle tortures. He was limited in this, too, by the need to keep his goods basically unflawed. He hit on the trick of making a shallow cut in Rarmon’s thigh or arm and stanching the blood with salt. When the cut was almost healed, he would open it again, exactly along the line of the original wound. Sometimes, he used vinegar instead of salt.

The Karmians, men Rarmon had never known, sat by the fire dicing, ignoring it all. They had no interest in Caal’s hobby, and no disapproval. They were risking their lives, going into Yl’s kingdom, but Kesarh had ordered it.

“You wish you were untied, I expect. Like to kill me, I expect,” Caal said. As they approached Free Zakoris, his Zakorian slur was slinking back. He no longer called his slave Rarmon, but Raurm. “Like to kill me slowly, eh, Raurm, bit by bit.”

But Rarmon had no desire to kill his tormentor. He felt only the familiar gray hatred and aversion and that terrible acceptance of both, and of pain, in which Lyki had seemed to tutor him. He did not resist anymore, even in his thoughts. For you found that through abnegation, the beating always ended sooner.

It was all so similar, the dark sunlight, the thick sweating vegetation—breached less and less by squat hutments, barren fields—the rivers and the forest paths where he and the guard and Caal himself worked with knives to get through; even the tortures were similar. Rarmon had long lost track of time. He was aware only that winter must have the Middle Lands and the east. Perhaps they had been two months traveling.

Then there began to be burned clearings in the jungle, wooden towers with guards, river fords patrolled, and narrow dirt roads that were passable. Watchwords came to be needed. The men who demanded them were black or blackly brazen, mostly blow-sculpted of feature and thin-lipped. Caal’s party was approaching the outskirts of Free Zakoris.

Yl son of Igur had got his kingship in the usual Zakorian way, fighting with Igur’s other eldest sons. Yl won the contest by breaking his brothers’ backs. He had taken three hundred wives to his throne with him, and crowned his first queen for slitting the throat, while heavy with his child, of a swamp leopard. So Zakoris had been, and still was, here in the northwest.

When Hanassor had capitulated to Sorm of Vardath, Yl, with some nine thousand men, their women and brats trailing after, had pushed a way through Zakorian swamplands and over the low mountains that bordered southern Thaddra, down into the jungles beyond. He lost three thousand men as they went, in rear-guard battles against Sorm’s harrying troops, or merely devoured by swamp fever or the treacherous variety of landscape. Countless women and children perished, too. In accordance with Zakorian ideology, the sick and the weak were sloughed from their flight.

Thaddra was a lawless land. For centuries she had paid lip service to Dorthar and to Zakoris. What had kept her secure was her lack of riches; she had nothing to offer an invader. Now, however, she acquired other values. The host of petty kings she supported here were too small and too parochial to oppose Yl.

He annexed the coastal region and the great forests adjacent, planning for the future: Timber, and oceanic access to the shores of Dorthar and those lands farther east and south. Zakoris had always been a country of ships. Naval war and piracy were her heritage; the latter had, even in peace, continued.

Between building their galleys and raiding in all directions for things they lacked and for slaves to man the oars, they lay with their women and their slave women and got sons. Every man of Free Zakoris was to fight. From ten years of age they were schooled to it. The daughters they produced had also a task, which was to bear more sons. There were no warrior women now, or women to serve the ships. They were precious vessels, now. In Zakorian tradition, homosexuality, which denied increase, was rewarded by a multitude of appalling punishments. In Free Zakoris currently, the crippled, unless they could prove some use, were slain, and unhealthy babies left in the jungle for wild beasts to cat. Barren women were flogged at the fire-altars of Zarduk, to appease him, until life left them with the blood. But before each major enterprise they would burn alive for him a perfect boy, to show they were in earnest.

The heart of Zakoris-In-Thaddra was a city of wood and stones and mud-brick, westward on the north coast. Ylmeshd had none of the stark grandeur of Hanassor. It stood above the jungle forest, on a sunset smeared with smokes. Beyond, a second forest of spars lay for miles across Ylmeshd’s three deep-water bays, the dying sun crucified on their points.

Caal retrieved the garments of a Dortharian prince from the baggage and Rarmon was requested to put them on, for their entry into Ylmeshd. This necessitated removal of the leg-irons, but escape was out of the question. Rarmon made no attempt at it. Dressed, the irons were fastened on again, the finishing sartorial touch.

Torches burned on the gate-arch which, like the wall, was of piled stones mortared by clay. Whole trees made the gate itself.

Save for its size, Ylmeshd was not like a city. Hovels leaned on hovels like cells in an ant-hill. Hordes of soldiers marched to and fro, in hardened leather—mail was scarce. Forges rang and glared at every intersection. There seemed to be no women out of doors, no children, though babies cried behind hide-curtained doorways.

Acting guide, Caal had called the attention of the two Karmians to a temple of Zarduk and another of Rom, the sea god. Both were no more than caves in the headland, closed by massive doors. The palace dominated on a rocky rise, darkness and sea behind it. It had a stone tower, and stone walls like the city. There was no break in this wall; a ladder was lowered for them to climb once the guards on the wall-top acknowledged their business.

The palace flew the banners of Old Zakoris, the Double Moon and Dragon. But before the entry there was a wooden pole and atop it a leopard of black metal, crudely shaped in the posture of springing: Symbol of the new regime. It rattled dryly in a wind from the sea.

Inside, the palace was dark and guttering from isolated torches. They entered the King’s hall. Wooden trunks, uncarved, held the wooden roof. The floor was dirt flung with skins.

At the far end was a dais with a great ebony chair they said Yl had had brought on his flight from Hanassor. Possibly, the statue had been brought, too. Rarmon had glimpsed a version of the fire god in Ommos, and this was substantially the same. The idol had no body, but was a formless log surmounted by a snarling convulsed face—a mask that could be interpreted as rage, orgasm, or agony. The open belly leaped with red fire. Its energy, and a smell of roasting pelt, indicated some sacrifice had taken place not long ago.

They waited until Yl Am Zakoris came in behind the ebony throne, and down the steps.

For a Zakorian, he was light, bronze-skinned, but he had the threadlike lips and the twisted flattened nose, through the righthand nostril of which a golden chain passed to link a zircon in his right ear. He was a heavy man, ugly and aging, but not tired, and not strengthless. He grinned. It dazzled. His teeth were full of gems.

There was a shadowy group of men behind him. Even in the ill-light you could just see, one shadow was not quite like the rest.

Caal, now all Zakorian, was on his face. The two Karmians kneeled. Rarmon stood. No one had thought to push him down. When the guards who had come in with them took hold of him to do so, Yl called, “No, let him stay as he is. Let me look at him. Is this a king’s son? Ralnar, the scum of the Serpent Woman.” And Yl spat on the floor.

He came slowly to look. He was tall, but no taller than Rarmon. Raldnor, the scum of the Serpent Woman, had given his height, at least, to his sons.

“Do you know,” said Yl to Rarmon, “who sent you here?”

Rarmon said, “I was informed, Kesarh Am Karmiss.”

“Yes. The message I got informed me also, it was Kesr. A friendship token, before we crush Dorthar between us. And I was told you could supply Free Zakoris with the battle plans of your King. The one on the floor there,” Yl said confidentially, indicating the prostrate Caal, “will only have been allowed to learn so much. But you. You were privy to the Storm Lord’s councils, to his heart. If you’re his brother, as Kesr says to me in his letters you are.” Yl stood breathing in his face. Presently Yl said, “I suppose we’ll have to use our Zakorian arts on you, to make you render the strategies of Dorthar?”

“Not at all,” Rarmon said. “I’ll tell you anything. The Storm Lord will know quite well where I’ve gone or been taken, and will alter his military gambits accordingly. Anything from me will therefore be useless.”

In the shadowy group up by the stair, the unlike shadow laughed.

“Yes,” Yl said. “Come here, Kathus. Come and see, too. You knew the Lowland Accursed. Is this his work?”

The man came down. He, like the King, was in late middle age, but slender, quietly dressed, and couth. His complexion was far lighter. Most of all, his movements, his very walk, were different from those of any other of Yl’s coterie. He glanced at Rarmon. The glance itself spoke only of un-Zakorian things. But he said, “It might well be. Certainly, Dorthar has accepted him as such.”

The voice of Kathus was a surprise. It had a little of the slurred accent. Some touch of Zakoris after all, then.

The two Karmians had grown bored with homage and stood up, trying to offer letters to Yl. Caal remained as he was.

The Zakorian guards, at Yl’s order, took Rarmon away.

“Drink, Kathus. Drink deep.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

Yl, but not Kathus, drank deep.

“Thinking of Dorthar, Kathus? Her blood and entrails and ashes?”

“Vengeance,” paraphrased Kathus, imperturbably. His face was scarcely lined, for he had trained it from his early years to eschew expression. “And, of course, your promise I should rule Dorthar in your name. What there will be left of her.”

“And now you think Kesr of the Karmians will have Dorthar from me, when he and I have mown the white-hair half-breed into the muck?”

“I think Kesarh’s too useful, not to agree with all he may wish.”

“And then kill him and give it you?”

“My lord,” said Kathus, “I can be patient. Both of us know that skill, by now. Kesarh’s young and runs swiftly. And may stumble.”

Yl liked Kathus Am Alisaar, who had once been a prince and intriguer in Dorthar. It was in the way he liked a new weapon, or woman, or an animal that could do clever tricks. Kathus was wise. He had been helpful, making sense of the written aspects of a diplomacy Yl required but had no forbearance with. Kathus had fashioned an intricate network of spies. Yl’s blunt Zakorian counselors had not survived the flight to Thaddra. Kathus was the most sophisticated thing in his kingdom.

“Then counsel me,” said Yl.

“You return Kesarh’s envoys. You repeat the false vow that you’ll rebuild Ankabek—he doesn’t give a damn for Ankabek or Anack, we all know that, but he forgives your men the island’s spoiling, so you must play, too, and regret the offense. He’s shown you the other side when he destroyed your fleet off Karmiss, recall. You thank him also for your present, Raldnor’s bastard son. That’s the letter. The military dispatch goes separately and we’ve already discussed that. What, by the way, will you do with Rarmon, son of Raldnor?”

“He would have made a burnt sacrifice to Zarduk,” said Yl. “But Kesr mentions Raurm has lain with men. I can’t offer the god such filth.”

“How irritating.”

Yl grunted.

They had come into the King’s chamber off the Throne Hall. Yl’s eyes strayed across the room to the niche where there reposed a gigantic topaz. It had been a goddess’ eye, at Ankabek.

“The bitch watches,” he remarked. “Zarduk,” he said to the eye, “wears your gold. No use to look for it.” He stared back at the topaz, and seemed to forget the talk in hand.

Kathus reminded him.

“My lord, if I might suggest. Rarmon. Since you can’t burn him alive, he may be useful elsewhere. Further inspiration for your soldiery, a warning to your slaves and those by whom we are scrutinized. It should be told publicly who he is. He should be publicly abused. Keep him, as a figure of obloquy. There’s also the information he can impart.”

“It’s useless. The White-hair will alter his plans.”

“My lord,” said Kathus, “he will naturally do that. But to learn the original formula will suggest what the alternatives may be.”

“Ah. Sharp, sharp. Raurm shall be questioned tonight.”

“Give me charge of it.”

“You judge my captains too rough?” Yl was amused.

“I can’t be sure he has loyalties to anyone, even Raldanash. But he refused to assist Kesarh—Kesarh would otherwise have retained him. This needs inducement. He isn’t to be wasted.”

“What means?” Yl had become brutally curious. While not titillated by cruelty, it sometimes made him think.

“He’s been whipped in the past, knocked about all the way here. It asks something different now. We must remember, too, Kesarh didn’t bother to try persuasion. Kesarh seems to have assumed him unbreakable.”

Kathus, the regicide, walked quietly downward through the sloping corridors burrowing under Yl’s palace. It was interesting to him that the King of Free Zakoris had made his house less penetrable than his city with its high ungated wall, while under it he utilized the natural cave-system of the rock, reminiscent of Hanassor. The ships which had lain in caverns under Hanassor, had also been better protected. Though it seemed unlikely much harm would come to Yl’s present duet of fleets, two hundred and thirty vessels of which were in harbor, before summer opened the war. That was how close war was.

Long ago, Kathus had journeyed through the world, seeing how it changed after the Lowland War. In so doing, he used up the widespread caches of wealth he had formerly set by for himself against catastrophe. He returned to Alisaar where Shansar held sway, and turned from it. For a while, he manipulated affairs in Iscah and Corhl, and earned some prestige in the tiny city of Ottamet. These were all very minor exercises. He had Zakorian blood. At length, he went to Thaddra and to Zakoris-In-Thaddra. He did not tell Yl too much about himself, only enough to make himself precious. He never mentioned that he had murdered, albeit on a battlefield, the Storm Lord, Amrek. The deed, actually in retrospect, struck Kathus as a flight of fancy, almost poetic. It had served no purpose for himself. He had been younger and maybe, despite his own training for himself, had wished, in that wild aftermath of quake and defeat, the trumpets of history loud across the darkling plain, to sear his own mark forever on the scroll of events. But Kathus was not a poet. Yl’s taunting assumption that Kathus wanted revenge on Dorthar was itself poetic, and therefore wrong. Kathus merely wanted ownership. He had always wanted that.

He had by now entered the series of caves that were partitioned for dungeons.

He spoke to the guard. When the guard had removed a sliding stone, Kathus was able to peer into a narrow chimney. About seven feet down were the head and shoulders of a man, the one they called Raurm. The chimney was not wide enough for a prisoner to sit; even to brace himself by knees and back, and so lift the weight of the body from the legs, was out of the question for a grown man, though a child or a small woman might have done it.

The Alisaarian prince now known as Kathus stepped aside, and the stone was slipped back in place. The only light below came in via the grill when the stone was off. The chimney would now be in darkness again. The prisoner had been lowered into it by hooks passed through the ropes that bound his body, for the grill, like the stone, was removable. Food and water could be lowered in the same manner. So far, they had been omitted.

Raurm had dwelled in the chimney one night, a day, a portion of a second night. It would seem to him much longer, although not yet like eternity.

Kathus was fascinated. At this stage, when the stone was withdrawn, they usually shrieked and begged, staring and straining toward the hopeless hope of light and space. But Raurm had not even glanced up.

“At noon tomorrow,” Kathus said to the guard. “As you were instructed. It’s clear?”

“Yes, Counselor.”

Musing, Kathus went away, to drink unpleasing Thaddrian wine. And wait.

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

Rarmon was aware this was not a reprieve. In the dark undercaves he had been allowed use of a primitive bath, and fresh clothes were thrown in on the floor for him. To relax to the relief of these things, because he knew they would not last, was an act he resisted.

In the chimney, it was harder to resist. Physical endurance he possessed. The discomforts that swelled, minute by minute, hour by hour, into atrocious pain, these he made room for. But in such confinement a man became his own tormentor. Thoughts, memories—mind-devils. They danced about him in a space where he could barely shift from one foot to the other. Rarmon did not know how long he could master these other aspects of himself. How long it would be, therefore, until he went mad.

Kathus had seated himself and now observed Rarmon with an unfathomable expression. The he waved him to a chair.

“Thank you, no.”

Kathus nodded.

“Because your legs will strengthen the longer they’re forced to support you, the less respite they’re given. I see you think you’ll be sent back.”

Rarmon did not speak.

Kathus pointed to a dish of fruit, a pitcher of wine.

“To eat will also strengthen you.” Rarmon did not move. “You decline?”

“It seems rather futile.”

“You could have found means to kill yourself on the way here, but refrained.”

“An oversight.”

Kathus smiled.

“Once I had your father brought before me in a comparative position, my prisoner. You may be amused to hear, I found him less adroit than I find you. But then, he was younger, too.”

Kathus clapped his hands. Zakorians did not employ effete summoning bells.

A man entered, set down writing materials, and went out.

“You will,” said Kathus, “outline the Storm Lord’s proposed campaign for us. A general plan should do. Specific questions can be settled later.”

Rarmon crossed to the table. He dipped the pen and wrote one brief line.

Kathus rose and took the paper.

Rarmon had written, At this time, anything I tell you will be disbelieved.

“You’re accustomed,” said Kathus, “to being ill-treated. It began with your mother, no doubt. I knew your mother. I’ve seen you in your cradle, when the women called you Rarnammon. Actually, you were born, with a great deal of clamor, under my roof. Guard.”

They entered the open door and took Rarmon back to the chimney.

A little later, the fruit and wine were lowered to him, and contrived to be left hanging.

The temptation was too great—not so much the temptation of eating as of having something to do. As he gave in, he felt a terrible despair, unknown to him until now. But after he had eaten he slept, and though there were dreams they were no more than dreams, and constantly half-waking, he escaped them.

When his legs had grown numb again and the spike that filled his spine had again reached up and pierced his skull, he was taken out once more. Once more there was the bath, and the fresh clothing. It occurred to him Radius, whose apartment had had certain un-Zakorian refinements, only wanted him dusted off, as it were, so as not to soil the furnishings.

Rarmon limped up the stairways. When Kathus arrived the exchange was brief and the paper and ink already waiting. To sit down was now more agony than to stand, but Rarmon had to take the chair or he would have fallen, bending to the paper.

He had prepared a reasonable theory of Dortharian deployments, a fake. It might not be believed, and he must remember it, since probably he would be invited to repeat the format on many occasions. He had never intended to give them Dorthar’s true war-plans for, having those, the alternatives could be more easily mooted. Rarmon had no loyalty to Dorthar, she had not seemed to touch him. Nor was there a sense of kinship with the man who was his brother. Nevertheless, Free Zakoris was a midden. Even through a haze of exhaustion and blood, he had seen the skeletons of a score of exposed babies lying just off the road, a little heap like discarded rubbish. The concept of Free Zakoris astride Vis offended him. It went deeper and less deep than that. At this stage it was native of him to resist everything. Rather than grow confused, his allergy had become obsessive.

Lowered back into the chimney, he caught himself trying to impede the passage by twisting his body, trying to stop the inevitable descent. He forced his bootless intuition into abeyance and let himself drop the rest of the way.

Later, or perhaps in not so much more than a few minutes, the wine and fruit came down, and a meat gravy. He accepted it all, tilting the bowls into his mouth by angling them with his face.

Soon after, he threw up. Even as he puked—desperately, painfully, the upright position hampered it—he realized some emetic drug had been mixed with the wine or broth. When the spasms ended he stood in his own vomit, as in the rest of the bodily filth, and he began to want death. It was a passionate want.

For some time it filled his mind vividly, sending away even the haunts and horrors of his own inner brain.

Then this flame also died, overwhelmed by another less intellectual passion, equally intense. Thirst.

He fought off the thirst as he had not fought off the wish for death. He scrambled to recapture the ghastly memories that had ridden him earlier. He marshaled them against the torture of the thirst. But the thirst won.

It began to seem to him that if he called to the guards above the grill, they might let him have water without medicine in it. He knew this was not so. But his voice started to make hoarse croakings on its own, meaning to disobey him.

Then the thirst went away very suddenly.

He was not thirsty.

They were hauling him up again. When they stood him on the stone floor above the chimney he keeled over, stiff as a tree. They dragged him. There was no bath, now: he was not going up to Kathus. A man stood against torch-light and told Rarmon the tissue’ of lies he had written was seen through, but the Lord Kathus permitted him a further chance of redemption. Here was pen and paper. Now it must be the truth.

Rarmon wrote. You had the truth before. It stays the truth. His hand, writing, seemed miles from his eyes which saw it.

“No,” said the man. “This won’t do.”

Rarmon was offered wine. He took no notice of it.

They returned him to the chimney and let him down. It was always done quite gently, smoothly. As his feet went into the stinking slime of human excrement that lined the pit, Rarmon thought: I’ve only to continue to insist, remember the deployments as I set them down. They seem very clear. I could have done it, then. Eventually, they will accept my statement. Or, he thought, I could write a different thing each time. Valueless. They might kill me then.

But the dream-desire of death did not return.

Presently, a bowl of milk was lowered. He had the resource to butt it with his head, causing the bowl to shatter on the wall of the chimney, and the milk to be lost before he could gulp it. It might have been wholesome, of course. Maybe it had been. Maybe—

The thirst returned, redoubled. He almost screamed with it. He rolled on the chimney. He beat his head against the stone, meaning to crack his skull like a bowl.

But it was the stone which gave way. He paused in surprise.

Beyond, there was darkness. And in the darkness, far off, a miniature fleck of light.

Rarmon slumped back. He stared into the fissure beyond the stone, at the infinitesimal light. It was hallucination. The thirst was real.

Yet the light was approaching very swiftly. He could not look away. The dark caught no shine from it, no illumination came into the chimney. Then he saw why. It was not light but whiteness. And then it had form. And then it was a girl.

She walked quickly toward him out of the stone where she could not be, all the time getting larger. Her pale hair fluttered as she walked, and the edge of her dress at her ankles.

All at once, she was only a few feet from him, and she held out to him a dish which was filled with water.

She was not tall, a young girl, sixteen, seventeen years old. Her face was grave. Her eyes were suns. She—but she shook her head at him, and lifted the bowl higher.

He was aware of the dirt and fetor, as if she were really there to brave it. He smiled at her, shaking his head in turn. It would be useless to drink the sweet water which was a mirage. But she would not go, and she went on holding up the dish to him. Her arms must ache. Reluctantly, he lowered his head toward the dish; there was room to do this since the wall had given way. Then the water was against his mouth, cool, tangy, tasting as it did from the little falls in the hills above Istris. Chiding himself, he drank. He felt it go down, pure and bright, cleansing him. The dish was empty. He was no longer thirsty, but that had happened before. . . .

“Rarnammon,” said Kesarh’s daughter, Ankabek’s looked-for child.

“I know,” he said, “but you’re only nine years old.”

“No,” she said. “Remember how long I lay in Astari’s womb, and then how long I waited, of the world, but not in the world, to come to term in the womb of Val Nardia. I’m older than you, Rarnammon.”

“Nine,” he said, “and not even here.”

“Here, I am the symbol of your will. You have the power in you to survive all this, but you’ve given the power my shape. As others give the power within them the form of Anackire. But it might be another god. Any that they credit—if the Power is there to raise that god.”

“You’re saying gods are the creatures of men?”

“No. That men themselves are gods. But, fearing their own greatness, they send it from them to a distance, and must give it other names.”

He stood in a chimney of torture in Free Zakoris, waiting to die, and spoke philosophy with a sprite he had imagined, nor did they speak in words. But her eyes—flame and sea and light and shadow, and all things, and Nothing.

“Ashni,” he said.

“I am here.”

He did not argue any more.

“What now?”

“Let go,” she said. “Trust yourself.”

“Yes,” he said. He shut his eyes to rest them, and continued to see her, as he had known he must, behind the lids. “But then.”

“Then. You will bring yourself to yourself again, at the proper hour.”

“Is there any more water?” he asked, not because he needed it. But she was gone.

He opened his eyes. The walls of the chimney were sheer and closed. The stench of waste and illness and fear were thick. But he had no thirst. He was calm. He considered.

Raldnor and Astaris. They had passed from the world into a psychic inferno, blazing, going out. The child in the womb had not been part of that, or it had not wished to be.

Anackire.

Anackire. The island of Ankabek had known. Looking, not for another child in the required image—for the same child.

What was that phrase Berinda had used, in her cot on the hill? “When,” had said her daughter, “did you find me again?” “When my womb swelled.” “But where had I been till then?” “Riding the air,” Berinda said. Riding the air. The third child of Raldnor Am Anackire had not been born from Astaris’ womb. It had been—freed. And then, the spirit of the child had lingered, riding the air, in some dimension of the earth and not of the earth. Until there came about a correct conjunction of race and flesh and of the physical soul—two who were also one.

He could see this, since the restraints of normalcy were gone.

And, what now? he had asked. She had answered explicitly.

He was not thinking of her as a woman, for he would not have trusted a woman. He did not even think that she was, peculiarly, his sister.

The water of illusion or magic had gifted his throat sufficient moisture that it could cry out. At first it was hard to give himself up. The roarings were acted. But even as he heard the guards above begin to stir and shout back at him, he found the courage to let the rational man leave him and the madness which was the god come in.

And light filled his head like a sun.

“Your Alisaarian potions, perhaps, were too rough,” said Yl.

“A purge. Nothing else.” Kathus did not show his exasperation. But Yl, like a beast, could nose such things. “However, lord King, he’ll still do for the display I recommended.”

“Led about Ylmeshd, to be pelted by stones.” Yl picked his jeweled teeth. “You hate him.”

“Not at all. I’m sorry his sanity snapped. I’d never have suspected—but it’s no sham. He’s been thoroughly tested, and the madness is a fact. I begin to suppose Kesarh understood the breaking-point rather than the lack of one.”

“Ah.” The hand that had picked the teeth settled on a bare-breasted concubine kneeling by Yl’s couch. “But he does not die here?”

“The longer he lives in wretchedness, the better an example he provides.”

Yl, his hand between the girl’s legs, said slyly, “And you don’t hate him? Or do you only hate the father, as Free Zakoris does?”

Kathus bowed and took his leave.

At the back of the palace, in an open yard, he could distinguish the awful sounds of the madman. The madness was proven. Weighted chains were needed now. Yl had postulated a scheme. Raurm could be sent to Yl’s pet Southern Road, the interminable track being burned and hacked through to Vardian Zakoris and Dorthar. Fettered in some cart, Raldnor’s son could howl above the slaves, frightening them to nicer efforts. As Yl suggested all this, he watched his Counselor’s face with lazy eagerness: You do not hate him? How much do you not hate him?

Kathus hesitated, listening to the sounds of the madman. Amrek had been unrewarding. Raldnor had cheated Kathus over and over. Now Rarmon cheated him. Only Raldanash was left.

Hate? He did not deign to hate his fellow men. His tastes were refined. But as he had grown older it had set into his bones, partly ignored and always unacknowledged, a sure hatred of this endlessly unfinished game.

18

In the cold months, dawn could walk to Istris over ice in her bay. But under the white mask, the city’s pulse beat loudly; she was not asleep. The snow, in Kesarh’s era, was always a time of refurbishing and preparation. There was nervousness this year, too.

The rabble could be turned like a weather-cock, by gossip, by oratory, or by a sudden dispensation of largesse. The merchant classes could be bribed. The upper echelons could be bribed. But there were the fools, the overly avaricious, and the honorable men who foresaw, in this obscure tack of the Lily toward Zakoris, something to make them shudder. It was only a rumor beyond the palace, for genuine rumor did circulate in the capital along with the paid sort. But even ignorance knew that, ally or enemy, when this spring unlocked the eastern seas, the whole body and ego of the Black Leopard would ride them.

The dispatches from Lan, expectedly, were late. Probably nothing would now get through till the thaw, for Raldnor Am Ioli was proving a lax, ill-organized governor.

To make Raldnor the figurehead of the annexing of Lan and Elyr had served a dual purpose. The eastern lands were to be shown the whip, first. Raldnor at least would do that. Indeed, his dealings had been as harsh, unjust and haphazard as predicted. Presently, a more lenient guardian could be introduced. The conquered would respond, appeased—and lulled—by soothing ointment on the wounds.

Meanwhile, the gambit got Raldnor out of Karmiss, where he had been building far too high on his good luck. Appointing a temporary Warden in Raldnor’s stead was sensible tradition, no more. Such an authority must at all times be resident in Istris. To investigate Raldnor’s affairs in his absence was also a tradition Raldnor himself might have anticipated. Kesarh had found everything scrupulous, and this was strange. One knew what men like Raldnor were liable to do with power. To uncover no tiniest indiscretion gave one to suspect the whole garden had been tidily raked over, to hide some larger blemish.

The reprimand was decided, and lay to hand. With certain tools, one was aware, from the moment of taking them up, that they must eventually be discarded.

Raldnor, like many others, was induced by the snow to hibernate. And the sea was between them. He would reckon on nothing.

Kesarh spent an hour with his council, during which he established Raldnor’s removal from office in Lan. There was no adverse debate. Nor had any of them met a Lannic-looking adventurer on the back stairs leading from the royal apartments. Kesarh had never forgotten the use of such stairways.

Altogether, he forgot little. He had preserved the face of the Outlander far better, for example, than Suthamun had preserved the face of Vis participation. But the Shansarians, Vardians, Vathcrians who occupied key positions in Kesarh’s army, council and court, had been carefully purchased. Bought to a man, they were always ready to recall the King, too, was half their blood.

Even the goddess, despite what Free Zakoris was encouraged to suppose, had not been cast down. In the days of his regency Kesarh had restored Her and that house which She Herself had struck in her wrath against the line of Suthamun. The second statue resembled almost exactly that which the Shansarians had set up. She was just a touch smaller, more eloquently female. Being a woman god, it was not, surely, so curious she had become more of a deity for women. Her naked breasts, hinting at carnal pleasures, had finally reconciled Her with Yasmais, whose temple She had so long inhabited; this was not strange. By the third year of Kesarh’s reign, the lower city had got to calling her Ashyasmai. Emboldened, other gods had reclaimed their dwellings in Istris. Kesarh, who believed in none of them, gave them all gifts. To Ashara-Ashkar-Anackire-Ashyasmai, he gave black pearls. Woven so thickly in her gold hair, it seemed from below she had become a brunette.

Though Lan was sluggish, by midday dispatches had come from those who scanned the west. They had less to say of Yl, the Leopard’s guts, than of its Alisaarian brain. It had only been viable to treat with Free Zakoris since the advent of Kathus.

From Dorthar there was nothing of note. The ships which had sailed from Thos for the Sister Continent, might get home before the snow’s end, for the southern seas were milder. Then, there could be news. Kesarh had sent his own envoy that way, having maintained spurious brotherhood with Shansar for years.

Under the dispatches lay a closed letter without a seal.

She had written to him before, half a month ago. Her writing had not been like his sister’s, but upright and bold, growing wilder at the finish. She had asked him again to return her to Raldanash. As if Raldanash would accept her, now.

Kesarh took up the letter. He was older, and had learned. At no point had he sent word to her.

At no point had he taxed himself with why he must have her. She belonged to him and so she was here. The rest was only interim.

He slit the wax and read.

He seemed for an instant, then, almost to be searching within himself, as if trying to locate some distant memory, something he had felt, or thought to feel. But either it eluded him, or it had never existed. This much, since he was alone, might be told from his face.

It needed two-thirds of a winter’s day to reach the village, an hour more to gain the house. It was a villa, high-walled and well-appointed, with a garden courtyard. It had been one of Prince Jornil’s many country nests.

They had cleared the road, but the snow was falling again, and the wind had risen. When he left the zeebas and his men and went into the upper house, he did after all think of Ankabek, the lamp trembling in the wind above the door, the black passageways beyond. And suddenly of the dying flower he had given her, on her pillow, scented with her fragrance not its own.

He waited in the salon while the servant ran to fetch her.

In less than three minutes, she came down.

He recollected the previous occasion, the ruined dress and unpainted face. Now, all had been arranged, even to the colored lacquers on her nails and the diamond stars in her hair.

They were nearly identical—but not the same. The more like Val Nardia, the less she was Val Nardia. The flower from Ankabek crumbled.

The wine came in before she had greeted him. She did not greet him at all, but said, “Is the room warm enough for you, my lord?”

He replied, “We’ll be in your bed.”

She looked at him for the first time, in terror, and said, “Wait. Please, wait.”

“I’ve waited. You informed me the wait was over.” He picked up the wine flagon, and walked across the floor. She was between him and the stair. He took her elbow almost in passing, bearing her with him. She did not resist, but she caught his arm with her other hand.

“Give me time.”

He stopped, one foot on the bottom stair, which was of elaborately veined marble. He had never seen the house before. He turned from it to her, that he had seen almost all his life, one way or another.

“What did your message say to me?”

“That—I was alone here.”

“A single sentence, like a pining trull.”

“Yes,” she said. “I am ashamed of it.”

“But it was set down with ink.”

“I’m afraid,” she said. She looked away, beyond him. “Let me explain myself,” she said. “Let me talk to you.”

“No.”

He went up the stair, and she went with him. No servants showed themselves. She walked before him into the elegant room, hearing the firm shutting of the door behind them.

He had chosen the house for her, no doubt randomly, yet it was so apposite—secluded, charming—that she had been soothed. She persevered, in the beginning, constructing letters to him asking to be let go, refusing the glory of being jointress to his empire, which she was certain, she said, he had mentioned merely to pacify and entertain her, not to be believed. Only one of these letters had she sent. And then regretted it. Raldanash would never claim her again. Nor could she escape to Xarabiss. Her father, whom she hardly knew, would not receive her.

During this time, however, she regained her self-esteem. She might hold her abductor off until he grew bored, and forgot her.

But she sensed this would not happen, that therefore she was safe to consider it.

She saw that she must not, herself, give in. And so, sequentially, she did give in.

There came an evening when the snow seemed to have lasted a year. She had drunk an extra goblet of the white spirit they fermented on the estate, and she had written a different letter—I am here alone—and they had carried it to him. Why should she fear him? She desired him, fiercely. It might as well be Zastis. What did she fear? That his dead would come back and haunt her? But she was not wary of ghosts.

When it was too late, the letter in Istris, she was appalled, as she had foreseen—mocking herself, then. She thought he might not leave the capital. But each day she prepared herself for his advent. When he did not come she watched herself languish. He was here, and she shook with horror.

There was one defense left to her, had always been, and she assumed it. Unfastening the clothes that had been put on her not two hours before, she let them drop to the floor, and breaking the ribbons of her sandals, stepped out of them. Clad solely in jewels, she went to the bed and lay down on it. She looked at the ceiling all her sleepless nights had made familiar. She said, “Then I’m to be quiet and have only one function; I’m your doxy, my lord, as you said. Your harlot. The price you paid is on my wrists and knotted in my hair. Commerce. Do what you want.”

But as she said this, even tensed with self-revulsion, there came the heavy, languid stirring in her loins. She closed her eyes and did not open them until she felt the heat of him beside her.

He was naked, now, as she was, the tawny nakedness flared with jet-black hair, that came from the mixture of race. The excellent body had few scars. It had fought too well and been too cunning to get many. She had seen men who wanted her, before, but from his readiness her gaze removed itself. She stared up and saw instead his face was only intent, in control of all of him, even the blaze of sex.

Abruptly, what had gone before was meaningless. She could ignore it as he did, leave it lying on the floor with her clothing and his.

She did not ask him if her nudity also was like Val Nardia’s. It was.

The slim figurine of this girl, lightest gold as Val Nardia’s skin had never been, the eyes darker, the hair darker if as rich, was Val Nardia seen through a lens of pale amber.

Her arms were around him, caressing, gathering, pleading.

He found her mouth, and the hollows of ears and throat and hands. The beautiful breasts were young and flawless, as he remembered, their tips eager and hard now as pearls.

There had been many women of many types. But the scent of this girl was her scent. The glide of fingers, plains of flesh, hers. The strong hidden mouth, taking, filled. Hers.

Raising himself, he saw the long primal spasms beginning like waves under the surface of her, how her eyes emptied and were shut, the winged lids drawn tight (Val Nardia’s), and the throat arched—as her throat was arched. He felt again the frantic drowning grip of limbs and hands, the drumbeats of her groin. The agonized cries were known.

When she was still, he stilled himself, looking down at her. But when he began to lift her again she was lazy, almost unwilling, as Val Nardia had been. And then quickening into tumult more avid even than before, and the summit was there, the ascent which was the fall.

Of Kesarh’s hungers, sex was probably the least. Possession he valued. This night was necessary to him, and there would be other necessary times of lust, and of sure comparison. To give this girl the High Queen’s portion of the empire he meant to make himself, that would establish her, the jewel in the jewel. He would look at them, his lover’s double, the world he owned, and perceive he had not been cheated.

But of Ulis Anet he took no concern. Her words, her thoughts, her life, could not interest him.

At daybreak, he left her.

Ulis Anet, cold without his heat, stood in a window glaze by ice, and watched men and zeebas turned black on snow and sunrise.

She understood now why she had been afraid. She had had demonstrated the narrow scope of his need for her, even as she helped him to enslave her flesh. These things might not have mattered if he had been some other man. But he had turned his devastating personal armament against her, as against any he wished to use.

She did not even see the rising sun. His darkness blotted out her sky.

She despised her sentiments hopelessly. It was like some tavern song.

They had been singing Karmian songs in Amlan, raucous from the Salamander barracks, which now took up one side of the Palace Square. You kept clear of that by day. At night, the curfew left the roads empty, but for patrols.

The traveler, who had just successfully dodged one of these, scratched at the door of an inn.

A shutter in the door went back.

“No trade. Go home before the Am Aarl catch you.”

“Basjar.”

“Yes, he’s here. Who wants him?”

“Raldnor, son of Yannul.”

“All of the goddesses! Wait. We’ll open up.”

Hauled into the inn and inspected by the proprietor who had known him, Lur Raldnor, deaf to questions about Dorthar, was next taken to a private room. A few men were drinking under the candle-wheel of thirty spikes that only wore four candles since the Karmians had rationed them. The biggest man was Basjar, the Xarabian.

They drew aside into an alcove.

“You found my message under the hearth stone.”

“Yes. Where Medaci used to put them. In Anack’s name—”

Lur Raldnor had gone the Lowland kind of pale, that was like bloodloss. He looked only fifteen again and peculiarly old.

“No,” said Basjar, “they live, all three of them. Yannul thought it wise to travel. From the way the Karmian riff-raff left your farm, you’ll agree he may have been right. I sold much of the livestock before they could get their bloody paws on it. All the money, and most of the valuables are secure, bonded in Xarabiss where Kesarh’s tribe can’t reach. Your father’s only lost the land.”

“He loved the land.”

Dasjar shrugged woefully, a very Xarabian gesture.

Lur Raldnor had been awhile trying to get home. He had let the servant remain in Dorthar. The man had no family, and did not fancy Lan’s current dangers. It should have made the journey lighter, but did not. In Ommos, shipping seemed a myth. Giving up on it, Raldnor had ridden after all for the Xarabian border. Near here, he met seven men, who robbed him. Reaching the first port penniless, he must lose further days hiring out as a laborer to get cash to pay his passage. Finally, when he would have killed to get it, someone had mercy and let him work his way on a shallow skimmer which was risking Lan to set up prostitutes for the soldiers. The seas were rough. The girls lay retching along the rail, wishing to die. Lur Raldnor rowed, or bailed, seasick too and numb with cold, wishing the ocean would die instead.

When he got to land, and so to the farm, he had wandered for too long amid the nightmare. The walls still stood. But they had fired the roof, urinated into corners, killed orynx in the yard. The snow hid nothing. Every exquisite memory of childhood, which the villa-farm had held in crystal, lay about mangled. And he had deduced his mother, father and brother were murdered. He almost never thought to search under the stone.

Basjar sat by quietly for the moments Raldnor needed, silently and with complete dignity, to weep. Then wiping his eyes on his sleeve like a boy, he said, “Where are they?”

“They went with a Vardish caravan, to be sure. Yannul’s goal was the Lowlands. Hamos, most likely. I sent my letters there for him.”

“She wouldn’t have wanted the Plains,” Lur Raldnor said. “Damn Karmiss.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

They drank to it.

Next morning, funded by Yannul’s agent, and with certain helpful papers and seals, Basjar had been able to supply, Lur Raldnor bolted out of Amlan, pressing south through the snow as Yannul had once done. And thus, bypassing Lanelyr, Olm and the Zor, rode on toward Elyr and the Shadowless Plains.

His namesake, Karmian Raldnor, Guardian of Lan, had himself no plans for travel that season. There were, at the onset of the siege snow, three thousand, five hundred Karmian troops split between the port and the city of Amlan, and, though he could not work sorcery on them by glance or voice, as could Kesarh, they liked him. He let them do almost as they wished, and gave them “bounty” for it. This bounty came from extortion elsewhere, but this did not upset the mixes and Vis who served under him. Commanders in other reaches of Lan and Elyr also had a glowing opinion of Raldnor Am Ioli. He could flatter, and he would pay. They committed crimes, and he forgave them. He caught them out in swindles, and understood. There was also the matter of Karmian rations. It seemed Kesarh had not cared to let his warriors have quite enough, prepared for them to go without in Lan. Raldnor, who had diverted or withheld supplies, now distributed them as his own gift. He saw that women and liquor were brought in. And while preserving a modicum of policy in Amlan, near riot was now and then allowed elsewhere.

Eventually, discipline would have to be reinforced, but he would be able to blame Kesarh for that.

Someone knocked loudly.

Raldnor, lolling on a couch, snapped his fingers. A Lannic page ran to open the door.

Brushing through door-curtain and page, one of Raldnor’s Karmians appeared. He had been at the port garrison yesterday. Now he was here, boots and cloak thick with snow.

“There’s an Istrian ship lying off beyond the ice. Guardian. Boat rowed in. This packet for you, sir.”

Raldnor, with inevitable foreboding, broke Kesarh’s seal.

The contents were slight but Raldnor was a great while over them. When he looked up, he was yellow.

“Something wrong, Guardian?”

He had let them get impertinent, too.

“I’m to go back to Istris.” Patently, the letter had implied rather more, none of it reassuring. The sergeant winced. He, a parasite of Raldnor’s monopolies, did not like the drift of this either. “The new command must be on that ship.”

“Didn’t see anything of it, sir.”

“No, perhaps not. But they’ll be halfway down the infernal road behind you by now.”

There was a commiserating, awkward pause.

“The lads’ll be sorry to see you go, sir.”

Raldnor, who had started to weigh, gave up, and flung his life in the balance.

“Damn it. I’m going nowhere.”

When he was seven years old, Emel had been wakened in the night, dressed and whispered over, and borne to the map-chamber at Istris. The Warden had given him sweets, and let him fall asleep again. But when Kesarh kneeled to him, Emel stood up very properly. Afterwards his nurses murmured how good he had been.

Now, in the dark, lights burst into the bedroom, he was wakened, and Raldnor his protector loomed alone against the door. Emel must get up and get dressed and come somewhere and do certain proper public things, as before, long ago. But Raldnor had none of the women’s gentleness, and though strict instructions had been rendered previously, the bindings hurt, and the male clothing felt insidiously false. Emel was frightened tonight in Amlan as he had never been frightened in Istris. Though, as he now knew, he had had every cause to be.

He was nine when, in another sort of sleep, the Ommos knives had cut him. Afterwards he was cosseted. Drugs had spared him much pain; he had not learned to have any positive sexual desires, and did not mourn heterosexual loss. He had had six years since to grow used to what he was, and now it seemed ordinary. Only at Zastis had there ever been, sometimes, a slight bother. Emel-who-was-Mella did not know that his lovers died, every one of them, when they left him, only that he was never allowed to see them again.

It was Raldnor who taught him, by inference, to resent his new body, which was hermaphrodite, impotently weaponed, and flowered with small virginal breasts. Raldnor had, particularly since Lan, impressed on his charge that, if he should ever have his rights—his kingdom—Emel would have to act the man again, in disguise. The breasts must be bound. There were medicines which, if taken regularly, would lessen such tokens, and raise a little down on the beardless face. And this was how he must walk and stand, sit and speak and be. The instruction had been endlessly repeated, always with tacit cruelty. Emel had come to know his inadequacy by example. He writhed at the girl-name of “Mella.” He hated Raldnor, and he hated Kesarh, Kesarh the more, for he had loved him once. But everything, the lessons, the hatreds, the potions and bandagings and disguise, were all far off. Bored to tears, Emel only wanted to be home in Ioli. He did not really want to be a man and a king.

And now apparently, long before it was reckoned on, he must.

He threw an hysterical tantrum promptly. But then Raldnor struck him, thrice, and Emel knew there was no recourse.

Sniveling, he did everything he was told, and did it well.

But Raldnor did not say he had been good.

The houses along the Palace Square which had become the city’s Karmian barracks had also been aroused. Men packed into the courtyards at the rear and filled the plot of open land that went up behind, climbing trees, walls, the roofs of makeshift stables. Assembly was a Shansarian custom. In the great halls of Istris it was feasible, but here the enormous quantity of soldiers was crammed too tight for comfort. The cold gnawed and the torches flared. The air crackled with oaths and sparks, smell and urgency. In five minutes the situation was charged; something would have to happen.

Presently the lord Guardian entered the courts, guarded, and with some servant by him done up in a cloak. One or two who got a closer look were titillated to see the face of the big-footed mistress-girl from Ioli.

Raldnor was not Kesarh, and did not try to be. He knew the tension the overcrowding and the hour would create. He knew also he had turned his troops into a rabble, and that a rabble could be manipulated.

They applauded him, too, clapping, calling, banging their fists on their shields and their spears on the stone flags. They liked him. He had flattered them. He had given them drink and trollops and cash, let them run amok and told them they were fine, the backbone of their country. He spoke and they listened. He had always said things they liked to hear.

Raldnor Am Ioli announced first that Kesarh, who could not even see that enough food was sent them, now recalled their commander to Istris. They did not approve, and displayed their disapproval, noisily. Raldnor, having thanked them, secondly announced why he dared not go back. Kesarh had, obviously, fathomed Raldnor’s secret. It had had to come. He had balanced his life on a line for nearly seven years. For the sake of justice.

He had seen to it wine was going round, to ‘keep off the cold.’ Now they waited all agog, like babies, for the story.

Raldnor related it, if not with charisma, at least with some flair. He gave them the regency and the plague, and the plot against the Prince—King Emel. He gave them his own revolt, unable to slaughter a child. He explained his rescue. He even awarded them, had to under these circumstances, the fact of Emel’s being kept by him, clad as female. But he left out, of course, that such a ruse would soon have been a failure but for some extra means. He omitted the Ommos knives.

That Emel symbolized the old Shansarian rule was a drawback, and had always been. But Raldnor was himself a mix, and here in Lan the troops’ love affair with Kesarh had soured even for the Vis. In the end, the superstitious currency of pale hair and skin and eyes might tip the scales.

Raldnor was still, whatever else had altered, that opportunist who had pounded out to muddy Xai and flung his dice on Kesarh’s table. Still an audaciously clever and perceptive man whose cleverness and perception would sometimes cause him to act foolishly and blindly.

“Gentlemen,” he said now to the disorderly vandals squashed in the space before him, “I’m in your hands. And your true King is in your hands. We are dependent on you, on your awareness of what’s right, your love of country, your loyalty, and your mercy.” And then, turning to the muffled being at his side he said, so they all heard, “Don’t be afraid, my lord. These men are noble. They won’t harm you.”

The cloak came off on cue. Emel had stayed tractable. He knew better than to make another scene. He stood, very young, face washed, hair lopped, in good male raiment. His fixed terror resembled pride. He did not, in the wine-smoke and the torch fumes, look like Mella anymore. There was a look of his royal father, instead. They even forgot the reedy voice, since Raldnor did not let them hear it.

“Emel son of Suthamun,” Raldnor said to them. And then he knelt, in the Vis-Karmian way, at Emel’s feet.

There was a long, long noiselessness, during which Raldnor held his breath. Then one by one, group by group, battalion by battalion, almost two thousand men began to applaud.

Kesarh’s replacement Guardian, riding into night-black Amlan with thirty men, found nothing amiss on the streets. The garrison seemed wide-awake, and far better regulated than the sloppy mess at the port. He was politely saluted and conducted inside the palace. In the corridor leading to Am Ioli’s apartments, doors flung wide and an attack occurred. The men of Lan’s new Protector tried valiantly to fight, but were hampered by the narrow aisle, sea-and-snow-fatigue and shock. Raldnor had not been supposed to panic. Even if he had, no one had foreseen the whole inland garrison going over to him. How had he managed it? If they wondered, they died wondering.

At length Kesarh’s replacement Guardian was peeled alive off the wall, disarmed and deposited in a room.

There was a dispatch. It purported to be his own, and it informed Kesarh of the success of his replacement’s mission. Raldnor invited him to sign it. .

“How long do you think you can keep this quiet?”

“Until the thaw. Long enough.”

“If I sign this, I’m dead.”

“So you are. And dead if you refuse. The difference being only in the manner.”

Kesarh’s replacement Guardian signed. His body was come across two nights later, stripped to the skin and lifeless, somewhere in the hills.

Meanwhile, the Karmian ship pulled away from Lan’s icy shore for her long, weather-slow voyage of return. She was laden with one dispatch, lightened only of passengers.

There followed a series of wildnesses in Amlan. Celebrating soldiers, as the east had found, tended to commit arson, rape and burglary, and to cast spears at anything which ran.

Raldnor let the festivity continue. He was busy preparing his approaches, so the rest of Karmiss-In-Lan should come over to him.

Ten days after his sparkling coup, while striding across the royal gardens, he was suddenly set on by a yelling Lan with a knife. The man fled before the undisciplined soldiery could catch him. His entry and getaway seemed professionally managed, if the assault itself was rather desperate. Actually, he had intended to kill Raldnor, as Kesarh had suggested, riding disgraced to the ship along the port road. But Raldnor had not obliged in this. The assassin had had to be inventive. Either way, it looked like the work of an incensed patriot, which was what Kesarh had wanted.

Raldnor Am Ioli lay in the snow, eyeing the soldiers who came to pick him up. At first they thought he would speak to them again. But his eyes set. He had said forever all he was going to.

They bore him in with the dramatic dignity the undignified demand at such times. Uproar in their wake, they went on to break the tidings to King Emel.

19

On the Lanelyrian border of Elyr, something strange had happened.

He had sheltered in a deserted steading through the night. The weather-shy Karmian patrols were few and far between, but he had spotted a big, dull star up in the hills that might be a burning village, and taken no chances, setting off again before the sun rose.

Near dawn, then, Lur Raldnor saw two wolves, their smoking jaws clamped in some edible death. They stared with red eyes and red drooling mouths, but as their spit steamed in the snow he realized, with a sudden shift of perspective, that it was not a carcass they were devouring but a crimson flame which ran along the ground. Then as he watched, too amazed yet to doubt, they vanished and the fire with them.

Days and nights of snow could confuse the eyes. Mirages were not uncommon. But the image stayed with Yannul’s son, those petals of flame spilling from the jaws of wolves, not harming them, and not harmed.

Some reports stated Kesarh had put just short of eight thousand men into the east. Others said it was nearer ten. In the little stretch of Elyr there was scant evidence of them. And yet villages lay empty, doors swinging, a broken pot lying to catch fresh snow, everything human melted away to the secret places, the hollow hills, the ancient towers. Once he heard the whirr of a wheel, a spinning-loom such as was used here and on the Plains. But it was the wind moved it. If he came on edible food he ate some, not all, and left payment under their hearth stones, in case they should ever come back. Each time, he felt a dread. The world was tumbling toward darkness and chaos. Who could ever stop it? Who could ever come back?

Only last summer he had dreamed of standing in the way of the shadow, driving it off. Victory, through passion. It was Rem—Rarmon—who somehow, distanced, no longer by him, had shown him the futility of the dream. The sword could only beget the sword. And yet, to lay down the sword was only death by other means.

Prosaically, it disgusted him, too, that having got in such a fix to secure a ship from Xarabiss to Lan, here he was racing almost full circle to the northern Plains, Hamos, and maybe on to the border of Xarabiss again.

The cold and the whiteness and the silence began to break his heart. He was soul-sick. He sat the wretched exhausted zeeba under the dark silver sky of noon, looking off into pallor and nothingness.

He had begun to speak aloud to the zeeba by then, and now he said to it: “I shan’t find them.”

And he went on sitting there in the emptiness a great while, the blade of the wind in his face, but not moving, saying over and over, “I shan’t find them.”

In the area now where he should have made a definite turn to the west and north, he saw he had no faith in this direction. Hamos lay that way, and another Lowland town whose name he had forgotten. He knew, unreasonably, his family was not there.

He discovered he wished to go southwest. This was also unreasonable. There was hardly anything to the south. Except, of course, the old Lowland city. And they would never have gone there. Medaci could never have borne it. And yet.

Yannul had gone by this route, returning from Lan in the Lowland War, riding through the drifts and the cold, with the answer his country would neither hinder nor help.

Lur Raldnor turned south.

It was a kind of drawing. Difficult to do anything else.

But the city was another mirage. Sometimes he saw it, transparent blackness between the winds and the white earth.

Signs of habitation were less frequent than the phantoms of snow-sight. Once he passed a hovel with an old woman standing in the door. He asked her for food, if she could spare any. She gave him a folded lump of bread with meat in it. When he tried to pay her, she shook her head. She never spoke. A pure Lowlander, he wondered if she had only ever used the mind speech. He had had this with his mother, as a child; in adolescence—that age of the clandestine—the open door had partly closed between them. Just sometimes some bright joy or flash of hurt would break through the door. To the stranger, he could not speak within.

He inquired after the city.

She pointed, without words, southwest. So he went on.

The snow blizzard started in the middle of the day.

There was no shelter.

At first, he tried to ride through, but his beast was faltering. They would be beaten, and their sight put out. The zeeba might die, and he, too, might die. Dismounting, he tied cloth over the animal’s head, and bound his own eyes. Then he led the zeeba, a blind man, cautious and with a terrible essential leisure, through the frenzy of ice and wind.

After a while, there was no longer any pain. He could feel nothing. And then there was a slight pleasant warmth, which he knew from tales, told round safe home-fires, was the preface to freezing. When the zeeba sank down, he coaxed it, caressed it, tried to lift it up. It lay in his arms. If he stayed on it, the snow would cover him. And yet he could not seem to let go, its fading body heat, its flickering life, needful to him. Then the zeeba died very quietly, almost restfully, against him. Lur Raldnor laid it down, got up, and stumbled on, forgetting the pack and the saddle, eyes wrapped, not conscious of where he went.

Medaci would know if he perished. He could sense her, his mother, somewhere hidden and inaccessible, as if behind an enormous stony wall. He could not reach her or be reached, yet when the snow killed him, she would feel—what was it they said?—a silence like the ending of a low soft sound, a little area of dark, as if some constant, long-unnoticed light went suddenly out. Yannul would know it, too. Not coherently. It would come to him slowly, maybe taking months.

Would Rem know? There had never been a hint of mind speech between them. Rem, so guarded, even the brain and heart. . . .

Lur Raldnor had loved Rem-Rarmon—as he had loved his family, but the love was of a different kind. He had never been able to mistake it for the love a man might have for kindred. But neither was it the sexual love Rarmon would have recognized and tolerated. On the journey to Dorthar, Rarmon had gone away from him. In Anackyra itself, Yannul’s son had seen Rarmon cater to another man, who was perhaps only his true inner self. Curiously, Rarmon grew to resemble the Storm Lord then, so that it was possible to tell, despite all physical differences, that they were brothers. This was, too, like that thing Yannul had said of Raldnor Am Anackire—the mortal man leaving him, the embryo of a hero, or a god, beginning.

Yannul’s son saw something, inside his blindfolded eyes. A primeval forest, a sweep of a bay beyond, thick and motionless with ice, and the sea sealed with it. The black stems of the trees were also cased in ice, and the jungle foliage above had rotted, leaving skeletons gloved with snow. He knew the scene from the descriptions of others. The forests at the Edge of the World, the brink of the south. A landscape no longer suited to the climate of the Middle Lands, somehow enduring against all odds such extremes of cold. Even as he gazed inward at it, a red-eyed tirr darted over the whiteness, unmatched, poorly equipped to survive—surviving. A symbol.

The ground gave way. Lur Raldnor fell. He was in a drift of searing snow. Inner vision went out. He thrashed about but could not get loose. It became less awful to keep still.

He seemed to come back from somewhere a moment or an hour later to find someone was digging him out.

Lur Raldnor tried to greet his rescuers—there seemed more than one at work—but his mouth was numb and useless. He could just raise his hands and get the protective cloth away from his head.

The wind and the blizzard were done. Some travesty of daylight still lingered. So he could see with no difficulty the five wolves who were scrabbling to prise him from the snow.

He let his hand drop to the knife in his belt. He might be able to fight them off, although he seemed to have no bones, no coordination. He watched them, depressed more than afraid, waiting.

They were grayish, a couple nearly white. The low temperature blotted out their smell.

He came from the drift abruptly, almost as if propelled from below, and then two of them had him and he cried out, frantically wrenching at the knife. And a long narrow paw came down on his wrist. It was extraordinary, so like a human action that it stayed him. He stared into dark golden eyes that matched his own. The paw slid off him. The two wolves were pulling him over the snow and he let them. And then they went up a little hummock of ice and he saw the sixth wolf.

Lur Raldnor started to cry, and could not help it, though the tears burnt. Because the wolf was beautiful and it was part of the legend, and he knew it.

It was the size of a Shansarian horse, and so white it deadened the snow.

The five wolves were pressing against him, tugging, pushing. He found he could get up. He understood what he was meant to do, just as they seemed to understand he was weak and must be aided to do it. The great white wolf lay down and he crawled on to its back. And then, fluid with its strength, it rose up under him.

This was no illusion: The furnace of its body, the rough softness of the pelt, the peculiarly wholesome stink of its breath.

Then the wolf ran.

It ran for miles, and somewhere the sun set, and night came, so pallor went to shadow and shadow to blackness. Then there came a descent, a shallow valley. Weird shapes, trees spun with ice, something beyond, a barrier more solid than the sky. A wall, a broken chasm. The moon was rising and he wondered what it was for a moment. Then he remembered, and then he beheld a ruined mansion symbolized against it.

But there began to be lamplight. He had not associated that with the Lowland city, he had visualized it in the way of the stories, its fires concealed in fear.

And then he had been sloughed very gently and painlessly, and he was lying against a timbered door. The wolf, which he could still see in absolute detail, reared up against the door, touching the lintel with its brow. A paw struck the timbers and they resounded, once, twice. Bemused, Lur Raldnor lay under the arch of its body. Then the arch swung away. He turned his head on the snow and saw the white wolf pass between two buildings. It was gone.

The door opened. Even from their way of going on he knew they were Xarabians. They exclaimed over him, and then they exclaimed again and grew noiseless, for all around the white was pocked by the huge pads of the gigantic wolf.

As he began to lose consciousness, he noted they did not seem afraid or disbelieving, only full of awe and frightening, emotive exultation, as he had been.

They looked after him very well. Inside two days, he was sitting down in the round hall with them, aware of the romantic formula of his situation. They were a mirthful troupe, traders, gypsies once. There was even a honey-skinned daughter, who liked him. He had not had a girl since Yeiza. There had been no time, no inclination either, in the chase across half Vis which had ended up, all amazement and sorcery, here. No one had commented on the wolf-marks, however. It began to be reassuring to block that from one’s mind. For he guessed the prodigy had put an onus upon him. He was correct.

On the third day, someone knocked.

They had been playing a throw game in the firelight, and Raldnor was relaxed since he had now promised to cut wood for them tomorrow, the only payment he could so far render. Then into the room returned the uncle who had gone to open the door, looking constrained, and with him two of the Amanackire.

Everyone stood. Raldnor came to his feet also, not willingly, but so as not to bring trouble to his friends. He had never forgotten the market at Lin Abissa, the Lowland woman, and the throng making a road, making offerings, as if she were a goddess, nor a kind one. And in Dorthar, he had seen others, some as white as she had been, even to the eyes. Ice to look at and ice in the soul. They passed like cold air. There had been whispers of abnormal powers, not only telepathy, or that ruthless passive endurance with which the Plains People had become synonymous. Yeiza herself had once told him that some of the Amanackire were reckoned shape-changers, could heal unblemished from grave wounds, and even fly. Lur Raldnor teased her into laughter at that. The most sophisticated Xarabians could be credulous. Yet, he had never effaced her telling of it, either.

The visitors did not approach. They waited for him—everyone knew it was for him—in the middle of the room. The Xarabs were gestured, mildly enough, back to their fireside. And went.

Lur Raldnor walked over to the Lowlanders. They were both men, and though blanched, their eyes were not white. They looked at him, without menace it must be admitted. But then, without anything.

“If you’re trying to speak within to me,” he said, “I can’t.”

“But you have done so,” one said.

“With my mother,” he said. It was a personal thing, he did not like to tell them. At the same time they stung him, for he had their blood and wanted to prove so.

“Yes, Medaci. You are Medaci’s son.”

“And, as my hosts will also have informed you, the son of Yannul,” Lur Raldnor said fiercely.

“Are you fit, now?” the other man asked.

“Where is it,” Raldnor said, “you want me to go with you?”

Then he stepped away from them, catching his breath with a silly little sound. For they had shown him. It was there only a moment, the picture of the terrace, a palace with snapped-off pillars, and through the gaps as well as open space.

He mastered himself, and said, “Why?”

No mind-picture, no intrusion, now.

One of them said, “You wished to fight, once.”

“What? You mean you’re organizing an army again, to take on Free Zakoris? Or is it against Kesarh?”

“No army,” the man said.

“A fight nonetheless.” The other smiled. For the first, Raldnor acknowledged they were neither of them much his senior. As he got used to them after the dark Xarabians, they looked less like ice, more the shades of light he had seen so often in his mother, and his younger brother. He himself was winter-pale, wind-burned, no more. And he had learned early on how he could use the color of his eyes.

He shrugged, to gauge them.

“We,” said the paler man, “are not your enemies.”

“Some of our people have chosen remoteness. We remain. The world is our mother, as Anackire is the world’s soul, to us. To see the world at war again, the scars opened on themselves, new scars made, the sweep of Zakorian hate which is insanity, the hunger of Karmiss which is cruel. These are the enemies. Not men, never men, but the evil dreams of men.”

Lur Raldnor began to feel a desolate fatigue. He remembered what he had thought in Elyr, the hopeless resignation worse than fear or rage. The world tumbling into chaos, and no one to prevent it.

“Oh yes,” the paler of the two Lowlanders said, tackling the thought Raldnor had not spoken. “Even in that, there’s more than one path to extinction. But other paths, also. Ashni passed by our village. We came here. Very many came here.”

“Like the other time,” the second man said. Now he grinned. “Raldnor’s time. But she’s the daughter of Raldnor.”

“Ashne’e?” Lur Raldnor questioned.

But they said the name over, and he heard the slight difference.

“Ashni.”

The paler man said, “Come and see.”

“This woman you say—”

“Ah, no. She’s gone already, into the north. Each of the cisterns of the world’s power must be woken and tapped. Hers is Koramvis.”

Then, at last he saw how they looked at him, and he went cold.

“You’ve been told about the great wolf.”

“Yes.”

“You expected me to come here, as you did. Why?”

But he knew.

Even the Xarabians did not seem surprised when, solemnly and irrevocably, the Amanackire each touched forehead and heart, the arcane reverence the Shadowless Plains now gave to a lord or a priest, those upon whose fate they saw the Choice of Anackire.

Although in fact it was never given to those who, like Raldnor, Ashne’e, Ashni, were in essence themselves considered to be aspects of the goddess herself. Since the goddess asked nothing, needing nothing, being everything.

They went out into the street, and crowds were standing there with torches. There was no element of the macabre or the portentous. It felt almost frivolous, like a party going to a wedding or a feast.

The Xarabians followed them out.

They walked, hundreds of people, through the snow towards the ruined palace and the magic well.

Later, almost into dawn, lying alone on the border of sleep, he thought: Can it be so simple—ingenuous?

And somewhere, maybe from some other drifting mind in the dark city, or from some cave within himself, the affirmative.

Men are drops of water in the ocean of life. And yet the vast ocean is only that, myriad drops of water. One single thought, crying out: This shall be! Or crying out: This shall not be! And the vast ocean is altered.

They had said something like this to him, not in words. He tried from habit to put it into words now, although the words would lessen it, make it unclear.

The palace had been warmed by the torches. What occurred? They had stood on the ancient mosaics, and drunk yellow wine which they said came from a well. . . .

There were Xarabians, Elyrians, Dortharians even, and mixes of all types. And the Amanackire, spread through the crowd, like a silver string holding everything together.

Lur Raldnor had always had the telepathy of the Plains. Now those who had elected themselves, or been elected to educate him, began to do so. It was not hard to learn, after all. But then, it was not really learning, only recapturing.

Was he important to them because of these obvious things, Lowland blood which brought the mind speech, Yannul’s blood which was proximity to what had gone before? Even, maybe, the significant name of Raldnor, which now was his, and had always been his, though one of Raldnor’s sons had attempted to strip him of it.

Sleep moved over him.

He would not be having the girl now. Sex, the magic power, would be retained and channeled. Strangely, already he did not want her in that way. He could think back to Yeiza, or to others, and there would come merely a glimmer of the senses, cerebral, no longer governing the flesh.

Of course, the cold and loneliness of the journey, the hardship, the being lost, the closeness to death, these had enabled him to enter the occult aura of the ruin. The magician’s purgation before sorcery.

Floating now, as if in the sky. Murmurs of awareness all about him that were not sound, and glows like candles that were not seen.

He remembered how Ashni had gone by them. It seemed to him that, laboring in Xarabiss, desperate to get to Lan, he had caught rumors of something bizarre, and paid no heed—Men and women moving through the last coppery summer days and over the starry hills, something about music and song that were not audible, and sheens and rainbows invisible, and wildcats, wolves, serpents dancing, and flowers in long yellow hair that did not wither. And yet perhaps there had only been a group of travelers walking in the dust, riding carts past the villages through the still ear of night. Which was the vision, the mirage, which the truth? Were both the same? Or could it be that something which had not happened at all had yet happened, because the mind perceived it where the eyes would not?

He thought of a primeval forest in the snow, persisting where it could not persist, centuries.

He was asleep, now, and sleeping, he looked about him without eyes, to find Medaci.

Presently he did find her.

She was as utterly before him as if they had met in sunlight in a little room. But such things were equivalents, as spoken words were the equivalents of the speech of the mind.

In a response then, which was the equivalent of a quiet touch upon her shoulder, he asked her attention, and received it. She was not nonplussed. She seemed unastonished to behold him, safe and where he was, and meshed in the Dream of Anackire. But her gladness in him was as he recollected.

He took her hand and they stood together in the sunlit room smiling at each other, in the love that could only be when no door, however thin or partly ajar, intervened.

He might never see her again. He knew it, and so did she. The fires that would be awakened, a million times greater than any which had gone before—that Waking of the Serpent, to this a taper to the sun—such fires might overwhelm them. Ankabek had been the first sacrifice. Undemanded, unintended, yet now a facet. To die for this would not be required, yet it might come to be that one would die.

For, as he had believed in the beginning, it was to be a victory through passion. Except it was a different passion than the one he had taught himself to serve, with a sword and an angry heart.

As sleep settled more deeply, he relinquished Medaci’s hand, and she was softly gone.

He was on a golden barge then, winged by a solitary shining sail. It was his life, and he powered it by his will and sent it flying over the bright water toward morning.

Yannul the Lan, leaning on one elbow, saw his wife smile in her sleep. Sleeping, she looked so young, younger even than when he had met her. Then she spoke his name and her eyes opened.

“What is it?” he said.

“I dreamed of Lur Raldnor.”

“Was it a kind dream?” Superstition and a desire for her peace mingled in his words.

“Yes. Before—there was a shadow. I was afraid. But he was with me, he told me. Not only a dream, Yannul. Mind speech. We can be easy about him, now.”

“Good,” he said. Almost absently. He found that accepting an unvaried diet of supernatural things tired him. It had been the same with Raldnor of Sar, except that the tiredness had expressed itself in other ways, the ways of a young man.

Medaci was already asleep again. He lay back beside her, and watched the walls of the wagon change color as the dawn began to lift the sky.

He reminded himself it would be a Zorish dawn. They were inside the Zor, and had been so half a month, since getting down the mountain.

After the miracle, the manifestation of the Lannic Anackire—it was useless to pretend it was not a miracle or a manifestation—the Karmian soldiery had ridden off, plainly tranced. An avalanche then blocked the pass. One did not know if any of the Karmians had been killed or injured. It seemed they would not have been. The power of the goddess had been merciful this time, if quite ruthless.

The pass trembled as the rocks fell. Other rocks fell behind them. When the fume settled, when the psychic stupor wore off and the resultant insane rejoicing and hysteria were at last controlled, the Zorish girl Vashtuh stood shouting at them. Her dialect had become incomprehensible, they had to go and see for themselves before they found the way into the mountain, and so into the valley of the Zor, was now clear.

It was partly a cave, and partly a tunnel, man-hewn, maybe. On the far side the mountains cascaded down, hung at intervals with wild white curtains of water.

Their descent was not so simple. They lost a couple of men even here, and a goat later, for though there were occasional paths, they were treacherous. In that manner, the religious bravura wore off. They had unconsciously reckoned themselves invulnerable since the magic on the pass. But natural accidents could still happen, apparently.

Eventually, they got to the intermediary slopes of the valley. Even here, the magic faltered. It did not seem exactly as they had dreamed of it. Rain pelted and thunder rocked about the sky. They were very miserable, like children promised sweets and then shooed into the yard without supper.

Safca, with black-ringed, red-rimmed eyes, spoke encouragement, bullied and cajoled. She never gave up as they floundered and crawled through the first acres of mud and drenching. Though the legitimacy of her nobility had been in doubt at Olm, she seemed a veritable king’s daughter now, royal to her limits, and slightly mad. The girl Vashtuh, too, was full of savage pleasure at beholding her roots, so she went up and down the lines, wet as a fish, grinning. She said something to Yannul and he nodded politely. Only much later did he translate and understand and say to Medaci in bewilderment, “Vashtuh says the snow won’t fall here, only the rain does.”

They believed it presently when one morning the sky had grown dry and luminous, and they saw the heads of the mountains they had left behind thickly daubed with scintillant whiteness, and only the rain ponds on the ground. It seemed the valley ran very low, under the eastern snowline, cupped by its palisade of rock and granite, protected. They might drown but would not freeze.

That night, there were songs at the fires again.

They came to realize the dream they had all had was not a lie, but rather a sort of précis of the facts.

They did not see the river for some while, but before then they had come on the riches of the valley, the fruit yet heavy on the trees and bushes, the animals which roamed everywhere and would provide meat.

When the river did come in sight, there was something else, a stone town. It was Lannic-looking—like Amlan, though far smaller. There had been, until now, only cots, a couple of deserted villages overgrown by bare creepers and deep in rotted leaves. The town gave signs of occupancy.

Yannul wondered if the town was what had swelled in the stories to a city, but Vashtuh insisted not. Her mother had come from this place. The city lay northeast, beyond the river.

There were indeed people in the town, and some system of government, but rather resembling that of Elyr, mystic and mysterious. A group of black-haired men came and talked with them on the incline below the town. Vashtuh acted as interpreter, a necessity, for the dialect was well set in here. Beyond odd words and phrases, the men of the Zor and those of Lanelyr could not make sense of each other.

It transpired, nonetheless, that the Zor no longer counted itself a kingdom, merely the testament to one. Free Lan was welcome, although it was asked that they observe a space between any site they wished to mark out and the existing properties. Meanwhile, refuge in the town was available. There were a number of vacant domiciles, not completely incapable of sheltering them; or the houses of those now absent might be utilized, though with respect for the owners, as was their custom. The produce of the valley was for all.

Plainly, the Zor did not quite trust them, nor they the Zor, but proprieties were maintained, sympathy existed and might expand. The Free Lans, who had watched Karmiss march in and manhandle them, were but too aware of how an influx of foreigners could be viewed. They took care to be amenable and just.

The first night, a percentage were entertained by Vashtuh, who had reclaimed a tumbling house on a slaty outcrop teetering over the river. This had been her family’s dwelling; there were others who had joint claim to it also, uncles and cousins her mother had mentioned, out traveling the valley or the world beyond, who might come back at any time. A long stone table, scrubbed by Vashtuh for her guests, was also laid with five unoccupied places—at each an ivory knife unearthed from a chest, a candle, a stone cup lovingly polished by hundreds of fingers and lips—for those who might momentarily return. This was the custom of the Zor, and though there had been similar traditions in Lan, never had one felt the precipitance of possible arrival so strongly.

Free Lan would settle by the river, there was no argument on this. In summer, maybe, there would be other imperatives, to seek another venue, to leave the valley again and reconnoiter the outer landscape. But they had traveled a great distance. They had achieved liberty and a fair measure of hope for survival. For now it was enough.

“But I,” said Safca, “must go on to the city.”

The Lans listened with deference. Safca was their priestess, she had been the spark for their revolt at Olm, the focus for Anackire on the mountain pass, turning aside their enemies, opening the gate into the Zor. They did not want her to leave them, and if she commanded it they too would feel obliged to go on. She did not, however, command. She expressed her own need, and asked who would accompany her.

Her foremost officer, the man who would have died trying to hold the Karmians back, if she and Yannul had allowed it, frowned in the fragrant, mild winter air, and asked her why she must continue, and how she was sure the city existed.

“I know it does,” she said. “I know I must be there.”

“But why, lady?” He indicated the men standing around gazing at her. “You brought us out of Lan. You invoked the goddess and She rose up before us—” This cry was smothered in a burst of acknowledgment.

Safca flushed darkly, her eyes bright. She loved to be loved, having formerly been left short of love. When she could be heard, she said, “It’s the goddess who informs me I must go on.”

Silence, then. This was indisputable. The officer said, “We’ll follow you.”

“No,” she said, “I invite those who feel the need to reach the city, as I do. Others would be useless to the goddess. She wants only those who respond to her design.”

“What is this design?”

She spread her hands. The wind tossed her hair. In such moments, she began to look beautiful, not as a woman could be beautiful, but like the spires of the mountains, the stands of proud trees.

“I don’t know. But I am part of it. Ashni made me part of it.”

They had been told of Ashni, the child-goddess who had lived among them, unrecognized, at Olm.

The meeting broke up. Next day Safca had her transport, wagons from the town, very light and peculiarly carved, with covers of dyed, waxed linen. There were no zeebas in the valley, let alone horses. The Zorians used the gelded rams from their flocks, and Safca’s party would do the same. When she left, crossing one of the tilting plank bridges over the river, less than twenty persons were moved to go with her.

“Why are we doing this?” asked Yannul.

Medaci said, “Because I’m drawn, as she said, toward the city.”

She tried to explain this drawing to him. He could not grasp it or did not want to, but she wished to follow Safca northeast, and he went with her. Their boy was happy at last. He had struck up a friendship with a Lannic lad of the same age who was also part of the expedition. They rode together on a cart drawn, this time, by two stout but willing pigs.

It still rained days and nights at a stretch.

Yannul, the damp in his bones, cursed the enterprise. He did not believe in the city, yet it assumed vast metaphysical proportions.

He lay on his back now, thinking of him, his sword-arm aching and complaining, remembering how the Karmians had not been hurt, only sent packing, too tired to decide any more if he was angry or excited or afraid or bored. When the riot started outside, he plunged from the rugs, dragging his knife up with him, charging out of the wagon and dropping almost on top of his younger son, who was standing there calling him.

“It’s all right, father. It isn’t war.”

Yannul shook himself. He had been half-asleep after all. He lowered the knife, noting his son found him lovable and heroic and funny all at once, and wanting to cuff him or hug him for it.

“What, then?”

“Come and look.”

So Yannul let himself be conducted a quarter of a mile, and once there, looked.

The woods they had traversed all yesterday opened to the east on a burgeoning sunrise, soft-colored and hazy. At the foot of the sunrise spread another river, a band of water with the sky in it. And there above the river and just below the dawn was the arcane city of the Zor.

A ruined city. A broken sword. . . .

Before they got there, before they crossed the second river, they came on a chain of villages, spread all along the near bank, separated by yards, or a mile from each other, as far as the eye could see. People, it seemed, resided in the proximity of the ruin, if not within it. An odd arrangement. They had to pass between two of the villages, going to the water, and then by or through others as they rode the bank looking for a bridge or ford. Men and women, children, some sheep, wandered out and stared at them. Yannul and a handful of the other Lans attempted speech, but they had no interpreter now. It was useless. Groups vehemently pointed, however, that way—which was upstream. They knew the strangers wanted to go over to the city and were aiding them, without involvement.

Finally there was a large oared boat, in decent repair, tied to a tree. This was the method for getting over.

Four of the Lans rowed the first installment across, and kept at the work until relieved. Although the passage was brief the endeavor took a long time. Not only had human beings to be ferried, but bleating and disgruntled beasts, and necessities from the wagons, which they had had to abandon by the tree.

That the nearest pair of the numerous villages would rob them was probable.

Then the disparaging chatter died down. Deposited under the walls of the Zorish city of Zor, something swept their minds of trivia. It became silent, except for the cawing of the wind around the angles of the stone above.

From outside, the city was a dark bulk, a high bulwark of black stone, infrequently topped by the black tip of a tower.

From the distance, the city had looked whole, though they knew it could not be. Nor was it whole. The walls were cracked, faulted, in spots they had come down, but tumbling against each other had formed new walls, jumbles that remained impenetrable.

They walked, the little troupe of people, along the walls searching for a way in.

Yannul put his hand on the back of Medaci’s neck. “I’m here with you.”

She smiled at him and he saw she was not frightened. Despite the knowledge that this was the Lowland city in replica—for that was precisely what it was; not now but as it had been, centuries ago.

One of the children running ahead found a gateway. There might have been others. There was no gate, just the echoing arch.

Broad terraced steps went down beyond. Streets folded away. Towers ascended. There stood a pillared building on a rise. A long window burned, clasped in the stone. They gestured to it, for the colored glass was not all smashed.

“Safca,” Yannul said.

Medaci shook her head. Their Olmish lady was far off, tuned to some voiceless song of the city.

She walked before them.

They went after.

Overhead, the towers, unleveled if broken, made shadows without shadows on the sky.

“Am I afraid?” Safca asked of herself. “No,” the other element of Safca answered gently, the element which was mother and teacher to the lesser element; her solely human self. “No, not afraid. The power of this place is very strong. But you’re here for a purpose. You can feel that. The purpose is also the Power.”

Something led her, it was no trouble to give in to it.

How long had she been walking in the city? Perhaps several hours. The others must be exhausted. She was not.

Suddenly, she was aware of having reached a destination. Safca glanced about her, in some fashion, she had been anticipating some mighty thing, a colossal statue, maybe, or an edifice that was unearthly and fearful. But no. It was a small carved door in the side of a wall. She touched it, and it gave at her touch. Safca was surprised after all.

She looked down into the eye of a great pool. There seemed to be a cave beneath the ancient street, conceivably some entrance into an under-channel of the river. Then she heard the murmuring exclamation around her. She looked again and saw why. Catching embers from the daylight, she beheld jewels and metal, a hoard such as legends spoke of—

Safca went into the cave room, down its sloping floor, mesmerized not by the worth of the treasure but by its fabulous presence.

The others spilled in after her. Daylight and struck flints shot diamond and ruby eyes across the dimness. There were whispers: Here was wealth to succor Lan against her enemies. Secondary whispers—No, this was a sacred trove, would carry a curse if plundered, had you not seen the carving of the snake goddess on the door? Safca was intrigued at herself, for she had missed it altogether.

It was the pool which had caught her attention, and still did so. She went to it and looked in.

“Make a steady light,” she said quietly, “and bring it here.”

Someone did. By the glow of his flaring lamp, they stared down into the pool.

Its floor was a great pale stone, which had been cut into. The tracery of letters went on and on. It was one huge book. The water, rather than eroding, had somehow preserved. The writing was Visian. They could read every line.

When night came, black as the city, they had located a huge old house on a hill. Some mansion of the past, its round columned hall was intact. No one lived in the city, or none they had come across. A tirr’s nest was long unoccupied, mummified, even its stink was dead. They had seen no tirr in the valley at all. Perhaps these beasts, venom-clawed and ugly beyond reason, were no longer prevalent.

They made their fire, prepared food and ate it. A wine-bag from Olm was opened and shared. They had reached their objective. When the little heap of children slept, a stillness that was in them all came to the surface of their skins and eyes. There was only the crackle of the flames, then, the dance of light on a bead, a woman’s hair.

Safca had gone away behind a stone screen many hundreds of years of age. She lay still there, and heard their stillness, with all that time locked in the screen between them.

She had been celibate since Zastis. It was curious. She had known in the mountains she might have chosen a man from among her captains, and he would have lain with her in an excitement and desire no man had ever felt for her before. Because she was special, because she was holy. But of course it was this very thing which had made sex unnecessary.

And now.

She stared up toward the far-off ceiling, the ebony rafters, young a thousand years, perhaps, before her birth.

Could she contain the force, the fire, which might come? She had known Ashni. But she herself was only mortal. She might die.

Then again, the design of the goddess, if so it was, might fail. But she could not make herself think that. Faith was paramount. Safca’s faith was utter.

Out in the long hall, Yannul and another man were checking the livestock roped in among the pillars with their straw. The animals, also, were silent. When Yannul turned, he found his younger son, and the pure-Vis boy he was friends with. Somewhere along the road they had sworn blood-brotherhood. Yannul had noted the white scars on the side of each of their arms. Now they gazed at him. His son, the spokesman, said, “Is it true?”

“What does your mother say?”

“Yes, and ask you.”

“Then yes.”

They strolled back toward the fire.

“The magic must be very powerful. What will happen?”

“I don’t know. What happened on the pass, maybe, but more.”

“Like what happened under Koramvis when you were with Raldnor Am Sar?”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

Odd that the knowledge should only have been here. He suspected it had actually lain in other areas, but was now destroyed or lost. Passages on the stone in the pool had made no sense. Others were memories, and legends. The Am Dorthar had always boasted that they had come from heaven, riding in the bellies of pale dragons which burned the ground black with their fiery breath. The writing in the stone had also mentioned this. In the beginning, which was before the beginning as they remembered it, the people of this continent had been universally white-skinned and pale—Lowlanders. But the Vis races, dark, avaricious, and clever, had come from elsewhere—out of heaven. Something had gone on that the stone did not properly reveal. There had been a fall, from strength as well as from the skies. The Vis had in some way degenerated, mislaying some mighty power, not sorcerous, yet uncanny. The pale races had already sunk from their personal apex. It seemed they had been witches, but had abused the gift, which finally withered. They gave in to the invaders, who in turn gave in to their own weakening.

These items were peculiar. Mythos. Then the writing in the stone postulated other things, other myths, which belonged here, in the upheaval of the present.

“The Lowlanders have always had such beliefs,” Medaci said to him, when the fire had almost died. “Wells of Power, that might be tapped. And lines of Power that linked each well, painted invisibly over the earth, the water and the air.”

“Did they say where these wells could be found?”

“Some of the priests were supposed to know. There was always reckoned to be something close to Koramvis, and the story of a hidden temple there, made in the time when only yellow-haired men held the land.”

Koramvis. The stone tablet in the pool had called it Dorthara’s Heart. And here, that was Zor Am Zor. And the Lowland city, which the stone called Anak of the Plains. And one other situation, which the stone specified as Memon. And then came the reference to a second country, southward, beyond Aari Sea, that must be the second continent. And here there was a fifth Power source, at a place the stone named Vathak. One imagined this was Vathcri where, disgorged from the ocean, he had ridden with Raldnor Am Anackire, and where Raldnor’s white-haired son had been conceived and birthed. And one saw too, with a shattering clarity, that the doomed tower ship which had borne them to that alien shore, through storm and fire and mutiny and murder, and despair, had driven all the way along or beside the line of invisible force which ran between Vathak-Vathcri and Koramvis, Dorthara’s Heart.

Yannul wanted to laugh with anger. He was close to weeping, too. The supernal authority which had picked him up and flung him through the mirror of destiny, that monster clutched him yet, had never let him go, or any of them, live or dead.

He tried to dispel his tearing emotions by rational comment.

“But Memon,” he said. “Where is that? It isn’t a city, whole or ruin. Not even a town that I ever heard of. Some dot of a village, perhaps, seething with psychic broth. May all the gods help them.”

He put more wood on to the fire. It was damp, and sputtered. Maybe the spiritual force of the planet would be like that, now.

From the valley, the world, the snows, the nightmare invasion and prologues of war seemed nothing. But his other son was out there, in the thick of it. And the two sons of Raldnor Am Anackire.

“And she also,” Medaci said, having read his thoughts with an exactitude that no longer shocked him.

He stirred the fire grimly, the stick gripped with his sword-hand.

“Ashni.”

And the sparks became a leap of solid light.

20

Across the East and the Middle Lands, the cold had cast its spell of white sleep. Through these drifts and canyons of alabaster there presently came struggling a knot of riders, their chariots foundering, their beasts often breast-high or almost to the throat, in snow. Reaching Dorthar, they struggled on. They struggled to Anackyra, and into the Storm Palace of the High King, where they stood, their faces raw, their eyes dull, and one of their number bandaged, having lost fingers.

They brought Raldanash news. The news was bitter, like the journey.

Alisaar, won by Shansar in the Lowland War, had been credited an ally to this Storm Lord, son of the man who had first led Shansar into Vis. Now Alisaar had proclaimed herself. Neutral. The formal message had not yet come, but it would come. The Dortharians who brought the story in advance gave it in their own words.

“It seems Kesarh made secret overtures on first gaining the Karmian throne. He’s half Shansar himself though he shows it little enough. Shansarian Alisaar is a provisional ally with Shansarian Karmiss. Now Kesarh seems to favor Free Zakoris. Alisaar can’t move. She has Vardish Zakoris next door, the Middle Lands over the Inner Sea, Free Zakoris able to get at her on the other side, and Kesarh sending presents and swearing undying love—and most of that from Lan which he’s annexed.”

“Alisaar will fight, my lord, but only for herself. Whoever moves up on her will be shown violence. That means Vardish Zakoris and Free Zakoris alike. Or Dorthar.”

The news, though bitter, was not quite astounding. Already the majority of Shansarian officers had resigned their commands throughout all Vis.

Warden Vencrek, speaking to the mixed council of Anackyra, exposed the threat that underlay Alisaar’s dilemma and resolve.

“We,” said Vencrek, using the Vis tongue, but laced by many now-popular phrases from his birthplace of Vathcri, “have sent our messengers to the Sister Continent. It appears we shall be blushing before the snow is done. I’m sure you’re aware, gentlemen, that if Kesarh had the sense to keep fresh an alliance with Shansarian Alisaar, he will have done the same by Shansar itself.” And the council muttered, although it had known to a man what was coming. “If Karmiss, who still sends us words of friendship—that we discredit—” said Vencrek relentlessly, “if Karmiss, I say, has retained a treaty with Shansar-over-the-water, and we can assume she has, then Shansar must take Kesarh’s part. Kesarh leans to Free Zakoris, the Black Leopard, the sworn enemy of Dorthar. In that case, the second continent now stands thus: Shansar becomes the foe of the Storm Lord’s people of Vathcri, and of Vardath who holds the kingdom of Old Zakoris in Vis. At the least, Shansar will refuse to aid her original ally, Dorthar. At worst, Shansar must declare war on Dorthar, and on Vardish Zakoris. And so in turn on Vathcri and Vardath themselves. And Tarabann, into the bargain. With the crisis as it exists, Vardians or Vathcrians would themselves be imbeciles to send troops here and leave their own ground unprotected. We can therefore expect no support from the second continent, gentlemen. All we can expect is a possible escalation of the war, once it begins, and the decimation of the southern Homeland, even as Vis herself is ravaged.

“Kesarh, by his fiendish maneuvers and his lack of integrity, has set the whole world on its ear.”

In the aftermath of this speech, the cries of outrage died and left them empty.

Here was chaos to rival and surpass that of any former conflict. And now, there would be nowhere for any of them to run. Rich and poor, serf and master, they would all be caught in it.

The foundations were giving way. Rarmon had betrayed them to Free Zakoris. Raldanash sat before them like a cool white stone.

Where were the heroes now?

Into the small room the dusk came crowding, full of shadows and unheard sounds. Beyond the high window the sweep of the uplands showed above the city, and on the deepening sky the mountains built of the sky.

You are not ours, the mountains called faintly to him, no son of our mornings; conceived in other shade. We will not conceal you, nor keep you safe.

Raldanash, sensitive to the alien contour and expression of this land, had long ago ridden its hills, sought out Koramvis, stared. Now he stared inwards, away from Dorthar, and away from Vis.

He was remembering Vathcri-over-the-ocean, her lenient winter season of winds but rarely if ever of snow, her hot months when the valleys flamed golden with grain. He saw the red-walled city, a tiara of towers almost ninety feet above the plain, and the red-walled palace. And there at the center of the cameo of walls and valleys and dark trees, his white mother, whose name had been Sulvian, while she lived.

Sulvian was beautiful. She and he were alike in that, and, in that continent of snowlessness, alike in the snow-color of their hair. As he grew, he believed that they had only each other. She had had a brother she loved, an uncle who could have served as a father to him, but Uncle Jarred had gone with Raldnor to the War, and perished in a burning sea, leaving no trace, nothing to mourn save recollection. And his actual father, Raldnor, Elect of the Goddess, he had not come back, nor been looked for. Sulvian had always comprehended it a vain thought, that she might behold her husband once more. She had promised Raldanash that he would see Raldnor, in her place.

When it began to filter to Vathcri after the War, the word of Raldnor’s disappearance, metamorphosis, transcension, Sulvian had set it aside. He would return to Dorthar. He had been at such pains to have Dorthar—of course he would return. Raldanash had been about five or six when he noticed her trust in this supposition had undergone a change. She commenced, very slowly, to wean her son from the wish she had herself implanted in him, and which they had shared, that one day, when he must leave his home and all he knew and sail to the foreign kingdom to be its heir, then Raldnor his father would await him, and welcome him. She had been used to say, judging his apprehension though he did not voice it, “You won’t be alone, with your father beside you.” But his father would not be beside him after all.

Raldanash, though a child, perceived she was more wounded by this than he himself. She had always understood she had been used—the alliance, the seal of the male child. She had loved Raldnor but without requital. She had turned to love her child instead. But, of course, the child also was a temporary solace. In early adolescence he would be sent for.

He thought of his mother now, as he saw her on the very evening he had gone away.

His heart had been wrung with trepidation and the first-blood of severance. He was just a boy. She, her luster already hollowing, her pale hair wound with gems, stood framed by the gems of stars standing in the sky beyond the colonnade.

“I shall send for you,” he said, trying, for he was so young, to be older.

She smiled.

“I’m always with you,” she said, “there or here, or anywhere.”

It was not until days later on the ship, the land sucked away like an indrawn sable breath, that he felt the hidden omen of her words, and knew she would soon die. He would have wrenched the ship about if he could. But already the discipline of his position, and those other elemental disciplines inherent in him, had taught him how to resist and how to endure. So, he bore it, all the way to Vis. He bore it through the arrival alone, the pomp, the earth tremor that rendered him its terrible homage. Through the ceaseless labor to achieve what was asked for, everything novel and to be learned and no harbor anywhere and no rest, for even asleep he dreamed the worries of his state, how he was to rule, the man he must become. He bore it, too, when they brought him the fact of Sulvian’s death, and laid it softly as a flower at his fourteen-year-old feet, before upward of fifty bystanders.

His court judged him cold, aloof and soulless. His dignity and dry eyes insulted the tenets of Vis. Women keened for their dead. Funeral processions were frantic. This youthful outlander, he should at least have put his hand to his brow, fumbled his sentence of acknowledgment. But Raldanash had no outward theater save his looks. He was stabbed in the mind, and bleeding, but none of them were allowed to observe it.

Cold King. Lowlander. Amanackire.

In his way, he had loved the idea of his father, too, Raldnor, the waking sunrise, the messiah. And to this hour he could still vividly recapture Sulvian’s face and voice, her whole demeanor, as she spoke of Raldnor to their son. To lose such a father totally, and to watch Sulvian’s loss over and over in reverie, these things did their work upon Raldanash, even if never seen to do it.

Like Rarmon, he knew that his father had never valued him. To inherit the temporal kingdom with such knowledge was hard.

In the end the imagery of Raldnor, the very name of “Raldnor” began, at some most private level, to offend and so to disturb Raldanash. Knowing himself as others might not have done, for this reason he had banned use of the name in those who were most often about him. Raldanash was aware, how in the depths of things, it might now and then be possible to confuse intrinsic aversion to a name with its bearer. Those he stripped were not informed of his logic. They took the act to heart, as did Yannul’s son, and were insulted.

The window closed with darkness. Someone came to light the lamps, and then the frost-bitten messenger bowed his way in.

“I am sorry,” said Raldanash, “about your hand.”

The messenger was dazzled and knocked off balance. The King was never humane, he had heard.

“My own fault, Storm Lord. I was careless. But it isn’t my swordhand, thank the goodness.”

“And this other matter?”

“Highness—” the messenger hesitated, uncertain. Then launched into his story with awkward brevity. It had seemed relevant. Now he was less sure.

He had been in Ommos, investigating the movements of Ommish troops and their reactions to the rumors he himself had helped spread of Free Zakorian infamy. When the cold started to gnaw off his fingers, he took refuge at Hetta Para where the Amanackire guardian ruled the sketchy new city, and the wrecked elder capital festered under the snow.

There had already been some murmurings in Xarabiss. They concerned a Lowlander priestess, or witch, depending on who told them, or their point of origin. There had been a peasant’s story of a spirit or even a goddess. She traveled north, and some said she rode a golden chariot drawn by white wolves, and some said she rode in a wagon hung with amber and glowing with an amber luminescence. One or two such mutters would have meant nothing. In troubled times supernatural madness frequently took hold. Gods and dead heroes were seen walking about, calves with two heads were born, loaves bled and water changed into wine or urine. However, these tales of a blonde priestess had decided similarities. Eventually, one began to glean a picture of some holy woman of significance on the road, as it seemed for Dorthar itself.

Then, in Hetta Para, going at nightfall into the unsavory lower quarter of the old city, he had seen, across great mounds of rubble and burnt-out houses, a section of the alleys below moving and bright with torches. Sensing the momentous, for this end of Hetta Para was a dubious sink, the messenger got down and blended with the crowd.

He followed it into a pit, and then considered if he had been wise. First off, he had believed they revived their worship of Zarok—the cousin to the Zakorians’ fire god. A statue, formerly flung down into the pit, was upright, and its oven-belly red with fire.

It was only after the crowd had inadvertently pushed him nearer that the messenger beheld the god, whom he had seen depicted previously, was altered.

“It was no longer ugly, my lord. I can’t explain it. Something had been done to the features, and the teeth—it wasn’t like itself. But that wasn’t everything.” The messenger shook his head slightly at the recollection. He said, “There was part of a broken wall behind the statue, about sixty feet high, before the roof had sheared away. All up the wall there was a mark, a sort of scorch, very faint, but the torches showed it.” Raldanash asked nothing, so the messenger said: “It was most of the shape of a colossal anckyra, the tail, the torso and the arms up to the elbows. . . . eight of them.” The messenger, who was also a spy, had uncharacteristically failed to probe the crowd. He had merely stood in the pit while the crowd did, and come out when it came out.

But by the time he reached the northern border and caught up with his comrades, he had added to his collection of stories. The witch-priestess performed miracles. Some of these involved manifestations of the Lady of Snakes, eighty or ninety feet high. Someone had declared the woman was the daughter of the Storm Lord Raldnor. The Dortharians had got no sign of her, but he guessed she and her people—for she went in company, if not with giant wolves, serpents and docile playful tirr—could already be here, in Dorthar itself.

When the man was dismissed, Raldanash also left the room.

He passed through the palace, its halls and courts, out into a snowy sloping garden, and so to the private temple he had caused to be built ten years before.

The grove itself was fleeced with snow, and the blackness of the temple stood out under it in slabs. As he entered Raldanash remembered, with a dull insistent clenching of the brain, how Rarmon had been proved to him here. Rarmon who now, like Raldanash himself, lay dashed in the uppermost hand of Anackire.

The lamp was lit. Raldanash stretched himself on the stone floor, and prepared swiftly for the trancelike meditatory state, in which the priests of Vathcri, and later the Amanackire themselves, had trained him.

He had long been sensitized, as the Amanackire were, many of them, sensitized, to such an imminence. It had been abstract, until now.

Presently, drifting free, he gazed across the mists of inner sight and made out a slim flame, pale golden, like the eye of some inexplicable creature from another dimension.

Where the river curved and fragmented, heavy and curded now with ice, an ancient watchtower, only a stone shell, marked the northwest reaches of the Ommish-Dortharian border. Not far from here, almost three decades ago, the traitor Ras had crossed, on his mission to destroy the Lowland offensive. He had gifted—not even sold—his people, out of hatred for Raldnor, to Amrek’s Counselor, a man named Kathaos, who now went by another, like, name in Yl Am Zakoris’ service.

In and about the shell of the tower was a small encampment. Rough walls built of gathered stones lent added shelter to the three or four wagons crouched in their lee. Zeebas and men stayed mostly within the yawn of the tower, from which a drizzle of smoke rose up to a smoke-colored sky.

At a glance, you saw none of the attendant magic, no hint of miracles and sorceries. The bivouac was comfortless and gray. No wolves danced in the snow.

Haut the Vardian, one of his servants, and a Lowland man from Moiyah who had joined them near Xarabiss, were returning from a hunt. They had found nothing, which was not unusual. The sheep had all been eaten, save a couple of ewes kept for their milk. The slaughterings had been curious. The girl touched the animals’ foreheads and they fell asleep, nor woke when the knife sliced through them. Ashni herself did not eat the meat. She lived on mysterious things, maybe roots and grasses and now, it seemed, the snow. Yet her slightness was the burnished slenderness of health not wasting.

They had been speaking, out on the cold white slopes of Dorthar, about homelands—Moiyah, on the edge of the Inner Sea, blue-walled Vardath over the ocean. They remembered they were human men, for all she had changed them. But she had brought a great stillness into their lives. And even though they had spoken in words of home, those words were uttered only within their echoing brains.

They were familiar with strangeness.

So, as they reached the outskirt of their camp and saw the smoke rising, they did not balk at the other sight, that of a phantom walking before them through the snow.

One she has summoned, the Moiyan thought aloud.

Or one seeking her, Haut answered.

The vague dusk shone through the man, and his hair was like frost. Because of that, they knew him.

Raldnor’s spirit?

His son.

They proceeded, a respectful distance in his wake. He was a King. But they did look for the tremulous cord that must anchor the psyche to the body during life, and believed they detected it.

Raldanash, in his psychic condition, did not wonder, although never in the past had he ranged so distantly from the body. Nor had he ever been strong enough to project his own image in tandem with his awareness. That power would come from her, her magnetic power, like amber.

He sensed the men behind him, and their ability to accept. But they were as ghostly to him as he must be to them. The world itself was ghostly. Only the golden flame burned before him, the flame that was the girl.

He had already learned, without tuition, all she was, or all that he could understand she was. The soul of Raldnor’s daughter in an envelope of flesh, older than the flesh, reforming the flesh so that it had hastened, growing to the likeness of a young woman, perhaps eighteen years of age. Her consciousness was older. Older even than itself, for she had in some way remembered those insights that the soul forgot beyond the spiritual places of its freedom. That she was also his sister he barely noticed. Of all the reasons to approach, it was the least.

Raldanash’s physical soul entered the shell of the tower. He glimpsed fires, men and women and animals. A few—Lowlanders—glimpsed him, and fell quiet. It seemed she must have wished for them to see him, it was no ostentation. So he passed through them gently, and going approximately to the twist of the stair, ascended.

The small piece of a chamber that remained at the head of the tower, open all round to the darkening sky, was softly brilliant with her light.

Ashni. She rose to greet him, and with an odd sweetness of gesture put her hands in his. He felt her touch, though he could feel nothing else that was real, save the silver cold and the flowing water of the wind.

Her beauty was not like his own, not like the beauty of Raldnor and Sulvian and Astaris. It was the beauty of fantasy, more than pearl skin and topaz hair. Her eyes were not eyes at all, but sheer windows that showed the lamp beyond. Her strength—Raldanash had read a strength like this in Rarmon, but there it was banked; events rather than will must unfetter it. The strength of Raldanash was dissimilar. Rarmon was a sword, and Ashni a sword of fire. But he . . . he saw it now. His strength was the mirror of bronze or glass, taking the sun’s reflection, multiplying heat and flame. He saw, and he saw the mirror blaze, and buckle, cracking, shattering. This, then, was the mirror’s fate. He would die.

Her touch gave him comfort. It was not that she was pitiless. She had told him only what he had guessed, long long ago, on the plains of Vathcri, the hills of Dorthar. Like a candle, some are given life to die, the proverb said.

For some reason he thought then of Jarred, his mother’s brother, consumed in the burning sea.

Ashni held him, and the terror ebbed. She began to talk to him, not in words, or even images, but in a manner that filled his vision, hearing and heart. And it was also true that in some way she revealed the past, so he beheld Raldnor and Ashne’e, Koramvis in her glory, and other subjects of a time before time, at which he marveled, and which afterward he mislaid.

In the end, he knew death as a little thing, and in the end also, raising his eyes which were the astral eyes of his physical soul, he was not amazed or discomposed to find Ashni as she really was, a summer being limned by gold, taller than heaven where the stars were branching in her hair, her eyes like suns, her plated tail coiled with a wonderful economy, the tower miles below them both: Ashnesea, Ashkar, Anackire.

But he employed words then, finding himself in conversation with the goddess. The first word was only: “Why?”

The answer blossomed in his soul’s mind. It said:

I am the symbol and the name. In Ommos I am Zarok. In Zakoris I am Zarduk and Rorn. Outside the world, I am all others. In sleep, the dream. Beyond death, the emblem of awakening.

“And what is that awakening?” he asked Her, though he had been shown already.

She answered: Yourself.

And in the Zor, Safca dreamed of a pillar of light which did not burn.

But in the Lowland city Lur Raldnor dreamed of a black monster and a red, and Rem in the midst of fire, and his face was a screaming skull.

21

Six miles from Ylmeshd the land rose into the southeast, a climbing hip of ground woven higher yet by the reeking, fuming jungle, blood-splashed with raucous birds and lizard-eating flowers. Here, even in the cold months it was never cold. And here, too, began that Southern Road which King Yl desired should one day, loaded with men and chariots, break through to Dorthar and Vardian Zakoris.

But it was a sort of fable. The road was made and the jungle reclaimed it. It was not likely it would see completion before the battle had been joined on other, more accessible, fronts. It served to scare the Dortharians and Vardians. It served to punish those who had displeased Free Zakoris.

Somewhere in the morass of the first twenty miles of Road, slave gangs were clearing the undergrowth.

There was stone paving here, which had been laid a pair of years before. Already it was split with seedlings. The slaves, naked save for leather loin-aprons, hacked and slashed, their salts pouring from them in the heat, and now and then scarlet threads, at the whips of the overseers. A fallen slave was kicked. When she failed to get up, she was slung into a ditch at the roadside. It was forbidden that the guards enjoy her, for she was dying and to waste procreative seed was unlawful. They did not bother to cut her throat; time would see to things.

Farther on, where the great ferns and vines had been torn up, human ants labored to replace cracked stones.

Farther on again, a tree had rooted in the road. It was roped, and the ropes extended through iron harness across the backs of two huge beasts, palutorvuses, giants from the steamy swamps of Zakoris, and the margins of Thaddra. One was rust-red, the other blacker than night. They hauled blindly, streaming hair like water, flinching from the flails and goads as at the stings of insects. Behind them the mighty tree creaked. A root sprang from the stones.

A little way up, in the feverish shade just off the road, other antics were in progress. A holy man, itinerant and perhaps insane, rocked in his delirium. He had divined the possibility of rain and was now courting it. The guard did not make fun of him. When they wished for it, they had another lunatic to mock.

The cart was out on the road, wedged by the boulders against its wheels. The sun slammed down on it, disguising nothing.

He had been howling earlier, but now seemed asleep. The head had fallen forward, matted with black hair and beard. The copper skin was welted and streaked by sweat and filth. The cart was filthy, too, despite the withered garlands still decorating it, and there were chips and scratches where the shards the crowd flung at him in Ylmeshd had missed their mark. The enormous weighted chains roped him round and round, binding him to the cibba post bolted into the cart. Pinned over his head was a piece of wood with letters branded into it. Not everyone could read them, but most could guess. I am Prince Rarmon Am Dorthar, Son of Raldnor Son of Rehdon. Behold my glory.

They had been beholding it nearly a month. Hearing it, too. He had a good couple of lungs. The words were gibberish. It was more entertaining when he thrashed in his bonds, unable to get loose. The smell of wounds and rage enthralled the Free Zakorians. This was what they would do to Dorthar as a whole, and to the yellow men who had shamed them.

Sometimes they fed him, and he was given water every day. Yl wanted Raurm Am Ralnar to live a long while.

At night when he railed at the moon, they had ceased taking the whip to him. He did not quiet. The only man who went near to try knocking him insensible—the madman had gone for his throat and bitten through the neck vein. The guard expired in minutes, hiccupping blood. Now, when Rarmon bawled they cursed him, but nothing else.

Fifty yards away, the tree tore from the road in a fountain of soil and stones. The palutorvuses stamped, and the prisoner in the cart lifted his head.

His eyes were yellow, like the eyes of the Lowland witch Ashne’e, his grandmother.

The Free Zakorians would have put out his eyes, but Yl—Kathus—had decreed he should not be maimed. It was said he would be paraded in the war, and must be recognizable to the foe.

The undergrowth along the sides of the road was to be burned off. Much farther south, in the choked valleys between the mountains that squatted by Old Zakoris, stretches of forest were often set on fire for clearing. An outpost of the Road was well-advanced there, mostly in order to alarm the Storm Lord’s spies. Between that area and this, the rampage of the jungles had been scarcely breached.

Rain was frequent at this season, and they coincided their fires. The deeps of the forests were never dry, full of exhalation and sap, but here in the opened places the trees would flare like kindling, needing some check.

The madman in the cart, if he had even noticed, had presided over two such ignitings and quenchings. The air first perilous with flame and flaming splinters, next the thunder, deluge, and dense strangling smoke. Thirteen days back, a bevy of slaves had been trapped among the thickets and burned, the storm too late to save them. If their screams evoked any ironic memory in the madman’s tumbling thoughts, he did not demonstrate. He stood silent in his chains, then and now.

They could not hope the swamp-giants would be so peaceful. Every palutorvus loathed fire. As the sky about the trees began to threaten, men had climbed up and hooded the beasts, smearing their hairy trunks with salve to veil for them the stink of burning. Now they were being fed titbits. The half-starved slaves were too resigned to look on with envy. Gangs of Alisaarians, Iscaians and Thaddrians worked this plot. There had been a gang of mixes, too, but they were dead. Men with the fair blood generally did not last long at this enterprise under this western sun.

The holy man who divined rain came to, and stood up, snuffling thirstily. He held out his hand displaying three fingers. “This much time, no more.”

The sky was swollen, seeming to touch the treetops. The Zakorians received their order and pounded along the slave lines. Men and women ran forward, touching bright tongues of light against the forest. Suddenly, like a wave, an invisible curling, soaring thing dashed up thirty feet into the branches. Charcoal fell. The slaves skipped away and bunched together on the middle of the track.

Birds hurled shrieking into the sky.

A white cicatrice of lightning slit the clouds. Timing, it would seem, had been commendable.

Thunder rang. The swamp-beasts shook their hooded heads. They were dumb and could not vocalize distress. They had, despite prevention, scented fire.

Walls of transparent flame reared either side of the road. The slaves huddled, offering prayers, groaning, while the holy man pranced, lifting his thin paws to heaven. The overseers began to swear in fear. For the rain did not come.

Thunder sounded again, directly overhead. Two lightning bolts crossed the sky and seemed to meet, exploding—somewhere in the forest a tree jetted into new fire. A blazing stem sprawled across the road. The slaves screamed and milled. The guards roared for the water barrels to be released, and struck out with their lashes, to little avail. A flash of water became steam as the fire drank it in.

Fire was everywhere. Even the sky was full of it—raining fire not liquid.

Retreating from the holocaust, a Free Zakorian stumbled against the madman’s cart. Looking up, he saw the dark golden eyes reflecting lightning. The Zakorian backed away. He remembered which line this man inherited, the very legend over his head proclaimed it—a Storm Lord.

Just then, between the terror of fire-forest and electric sky, a final night-black terror tore loose on the Southern Road.

Someone had been careless at the tethering. Now, savage with its panic, blind in the hood but smelling only conflagration, hearing only the gongs of heaven, the younger palutorvus had broken from its traces. Men scattered away. One not sufficiently swift was tossed, pulped like ripe fruit, as the mighty feet trampled over him.

Scorched, sightless, stupid with fear, the palutorvus bore on. Lightning stabbed into the forest. A white instant showed the giant beast, seeming massive as a mountain. Slaves jumped desperately aside, into fire, which for a moment seemed preferable. The only motionless impediment was the wedged cart and the man shackled within it.

The stampeding palutorvus hit the cart it could not see. The wooden sides burst apart, the wheels whirled across the stones. The cibbawood post bolted to the floor of the cart snapped away, catching as it fell between the monster’s limbs. It seemed Raurm Am Ralnar, bound to that post, would be trampled like the Zakorian. Something else happened. The chains, producing slack as the post was ripped out, had become tangled in the animal’s matted under-hair and the trails of rope which were the remnants of its tethers.

Unable to rid itself of this senseless thing, hung at its belly like weird young, the palutorvus veered desperately sideways, plunging abruptly off the road. The last of the cart disintegrated before it. Directionless and crazed, the beast drove against the very wall of the inferno, and parted it. Into the burning jungle, itself burning, the giant lurched, the post and the chained man dragged with it, and was gone.

When the rain began it sank in a heavy curtain. The madman lay beneath it, and let his body drink.

The animal which had carried him had rushed for many miles, a great voiceless engine. The mobile tent of its body had shielded him from the fire, the forest. And the jungle had given way before the animal, as the fire had ultimately given way. In the thick moisture-mist of the jungle’s gut, the incendiary lights had died from its back. Somewhere it had sloughed its burden, or the claws of the jungle had torn the burden away.

He had been stunned through much of the flight, by repeated blows, smoke, speed. Only now, under the downpour, did he recall he was alive. Then he turned on his side, for the rains of the north and west could drown a man on his back. He thought, too, to open his mouth and let it drink with his flesh and his bones.

The madman was yet a madman. For him, there was neither past nor present, and no future. His brain was all mosaic. Here an icon which was a girl, hair like rubies, here something like a black wall, and the sea beyond. Or there a merchant who was begging to be spared the blade’s edge. Or a silver coin, spinning. It did not irk him. None of it had a name, a start, an end, a purpose. None of it demanded anything of him.

But now, although he did not begin to reason, yet there was some sort of curious change. What was it?

The madman came to his feet and looked about through the shadowy forest, washed by rain as if by ocean.

When the rain stopped, he was walking. It did not concern him where. Sometimes he touched the trees, interested by them. Sometimes he touched his own face. His hands had been wrapped in chains, which were gone, all but some bits of metal still adhering, clanking about him, not constraining him at all. The madman did not theorize upon this. How the post, uprooted, discarded, had uncoiled the chains, and he, rolling from under the great beast, had uncoiled them further. The securing links had given way when the bolts in the cart did so. He had only needed eventually to crawl out of them, as out of the creeper under the trees.

He had forgotten the Zakorians also.

The bluish storm sun went down behind his left shoulder, but he did not note it. Black monkeys with faces like white butterflies watched from the terraces of the boughs sixty feet up. He saw a mask, half black, half white. He saw a man with black hair, and a black pearl.

There came to be a particular shadow, very tall and dense. While he did not recollect it, he sensed acquaintance.

The palutorvus shambled between the trees which, at some juncture, had relieved it of the blinding hood. Too long a captive of men, it grazed the sap-laden leaves, sighing, lost.

When the smaller creature advanced, the palutorvus turned to it, expecting guidance, the goad or the sweetmeat: Order. It had been trained to bear men, even on its back, and despite the smart of its blisters, it soon kneeled. The man did not mount it for some time, staying beside it, touching it. But then the man did go up on to the great back, catching at vines to aid himself.

The palutorvus rose with a feeling of calm, appeased.

Some conceivably involuntary pressure was interpreted as a command.

Riding the primeval beast, the madman slept, dreaming still the mosaic, and the moon filled the forest.

Days and nights were swilled from the world.

The beast moved onward, sometimes pausing to graze the foliage. The madman, too, grazed on the leaves and grasses. Some were fragrant, others musty, or bitter, and these he spat out.

He saw a blue enameled snake embracing an indigo tree.

He saw the sun, and believed it had wings and was a child. Or the moon, and it had a boy’s face and closed eyes.

Sometimes there was water, and he drank, and the beast sluiced up the water and bathed both of them.

He felt its sadness. He pitied it. But he did not know he felt pity.

Days and nights.

It seemed he had lived for hundreds of years.

The madman dreamed he was on a river. Someone cut him with a knife, a shallow cut, and the cut healed. But then he was cut again. And then on the sixth day—in the dream—there was a challenge.

He had no password; he simply stood looking at the three men, seeing them with more than his eyes. They breathed out oaths at the color of his hair, which—in the dream—was nearly white. They told him they would take him where he wished to be.

When he woke up, the madman laughed.

The palutorvus grazed the leaves.

They had come over five hundred wandering miles and did not, either of them, know it.

And they went on.

Rarnammon, hero and king, had built a city in Thaddra once, but it lay in ruins.

The jungles clung close to the valley where the city rested, and had entered its streets. It was a white city but the jungle blackened it. Its name was lost. In forgotten antique tales, Rarnammon, whose own name had, in the beginning, been only Rarn, called it for his birthplace. Which was, depending on the version, Mon or Emon, or Memon.

It had, for centuries now, been the lair of thieves and outlaws.

Tuab Ey, sprawling like a cat to soak up the sun on the high roof, shaded his eyes and began to credit what he had taken for an illusion.

A piece of the jungle-forest was indeed progressing along the wide pale thoroughfare thirty broken walls away down the slope. But it was not, after all, a fantastically moving plant. It was a shadow-beast.

“Look, Galud. What is that?”

Galud, unhandsome, as Tuab Ey was not, scowled from under their awning of sacks. Galud was sun-shy, for he had Tarabine blood, but he had also the long clear sight of his unknown sailor father.

“By my half-wit gods, a palutorvus.”

“I thought,” said Tuab Ey, “such beasts were all extinct.”

“Farther south, the swamps’re full of the things. The Free Zakorians use them for dray-animals.” Galud and another man spat, as even Thaddrian cutthroats would do at mention of Zakoris-In-Thaddra.

“It looks big,” said Tuab Ey nonchalantly. “It looks as if it’s coming here. Shall we run away?”

His men laughed at the ritual idea of their young leader in retreat. He was junior to most of them, but fierce as a kalinx. Pretty as one, too. Tall and slim, he had a lot of Dortharian mixed in his genes. His bandit garments were tattered, revealing a compactly muscled cinnamon skin that had collected only a handful of thin and seemly scars. The raging noon sun on his hair found copper—there might be a Lowland strain somewhere, though his eyes were black as the trees beyond Rarnammon’s ruined city. The earring in his ear was new. It had been carved from the tooth of a man, a Thaddric freak nearly half again his own height, that he killed in a fray in a town to the north. The freak had been friends with a petty king of the region. Tuab Ey and his men had prudently departed.

Galud said, “There’s a fellow up on that monster’s back.”

“I thought so,” said Tuab Ey.

The palutorvus, ambling through a crumbling arch, knocked down most of the wall on either side. It came into a garden, once the pleasance of princes, and began to eat the vines. The man partly lying on its back seemed unconcerned. He did not glance their way. He could not be of their kind. Each renegade holed up in nameless Memon established his territory. Only two days ago, they had fought a rival pack of robbers to keep this tottering palace. The dead bodies, all the interlopers’, had been flung down a handy dry well, over there in the garden where the palutorvus was feeding.

Tuab Ey was leaving the roof.

Galud, and the other lieutenant, the One-Eared, fell into precautionary step behind him.

“Your animal is grazing my pasture,” said Tuab Ey, looking up the long hill of the palutorvus, to the man on top. “I trust you’re going to pay me.”

“Tuab,” said Galud softly. “Can’t you see? He’s crazy.” Tuab Ey had begun to consider it. Thaddrians tended to be superstitious of madness—the Smitten of Gods was what they called the insane. But the Dortharian sophistication of his father made him only scornful. Scornfully, then, even as Galud and the One-Eared affected religious signs, Tuab Ey shouted up the length of the beast: “Are you getting off, or do I throw a stone to knock you off?”

Then the man turned and looked down at him.

The madman’s hair, which was black and curling, reached his shoulders, and he was thickly bearded. The sun had been searing the rest of him very dark, but he was not one of Yl’s nation. Unless Free Zakorians ever had gold eyes. Even here, there had come to be a wary respect for the yellow races. Their goddess could rise on mountain summits to terrify Her foes. With luck, a lot of luck, She might destroy the Black Leopard of the Zakorian-Accursed.

“Well,” said Tuab Ey. “I’m waiting.”

But his tone was more dulcet. The madman’s Lowlander eyes disconcerted him. A thing he was not used to.

Then the madman altered his position. The palutorvus, taking this as a desire to dismount, which perhaps it was not, kneeled impressively. The madman, taking the kneeling in turn as an enablement to dismount, did so.

The watchers were struck by his limber strength. He had the grace of the professional fighter, and they recognized it at once.

Standing before them, he was taller than Tuab Ey, therefore taller than the others. Even covered in human dirt and the debris of the forests, he was imposing, well-made, coordinated. The loin-guard was familiar to the One-Eared, who had inadvertently served a month with Free Zakorian slave gangs. The thief muttered this knowledge to his leader. But his leader seemed not to hear, only staring at the madman. Finally, Tuab Ey said, “Give me that wine.”

The One-Eared unhooked the flask from his belt. Tuab Ey, not taking his gaze off the madman, received the flask, uncorked it, held it out to him. The madman was a while accepting. Then he drank sparingly and handed back the flask.

Although he did not speak, he no longer looked mad, merely unusual.

“Come, then,” Tuab Ey said. His father had actually been an aristocrat absconded after some nefarious act in Dorthar. Tuab Ey now and then reverted to odd displays of breeding. “Be our guest. Follow us. Your—er, your transport will be safe enough here. I doubt if any of our neighbors will try to steal it. The meat, they tell me is awful.”

He walked off, and his lieutenants went after him. Sure enough, the madman followed.

In the great hall of Tuab Ey’s appropriated palace, sunset, then dusk, recolored the wall paintings. The ancient hearths were unusable. A fire leapt brightly on the smashed mosaic, its smoke going out adequately through the smashed roof. When it rained, the fire tended to perish.

The nights grew almost chilly in winter. Sometimes snakes or lizards stole up to share their fire. Tuab Ey did not let his men harm them; they amused him. Once a tribe of apes had got in. Tuab Ey, imitating the chief ape’s threat-behavior exactly, grunting and jumping up and down, had frightened them off.

Now Tuab Ey sat cross-legged, watching the madman, who sat himself a little apart from them and from the fire. He had been offered food, fruit and vine-shoots, and meat from yesterday’s hunt. He had eaten little, and none of the meat. He had been shown the cracked cistern in the courtyard, freshly full of rain. The bandits washed in it when they had the mind; Tuab Ey, the aristocrat’s son, bathed there every day. The madman got into the cistern and cleansed himself. One of the robbers they had slaughtered two days before had been tall and athletic. His clothes were offered the madman, who donned them, ignoring, or uncaring at the knife rent over the heart.

Now, dressed as a bandit, by a bandits’ fire, the madman who, perhaps, should have been at home with such things, regarded the air, seeing sights invisible.

Tuab Ey rose, walked to the madman, and sat down again.

“I’ve a razor and fat, if you want to shave.”

The madman did not respond.

Tuab Ey went on watching him.

One of his men said, “Tuab’s in love with the Smitten of Gods.”

Tuab Ey said, “Each to his own. Is it the frieze of naked girls in the fifth court, or the seventh, that you lie under and play with yourself?”

They laughed. They started to talk about women they had had, or boys.

When the madman got to his feet and walked out, they looked, but that was all. Only Tuab Ey, smiling at them like the proffered razor, went after him.

And like a kalinx, only Tuab Ey pursued his guest up and down the palace, over the ruined stairs, across the subsiding terraces. When the madman paused, so did Tuab Ey. And when he continued, Tuab Ey continued.

Rarnammon, said the stones of nameless Memon.

Rem, Ram, Rarmon, Rarnammon, said the heights and depths of the city at every window-place and balcony.

The wind soughed through the forest and through the vents of towers.

Rarnammon, said the wind.

In each chamber, the wall paintings came alive. He saw the orgiastic feastings, the women in their gauzes, the men with the leathers and draperies of another time, the chalices wide enough to swim in, brimmed by wine. He heard the moaning of unremembered instruments, and the love-cries of those who coupled on the cushions—sounds which never change. He beheld sacrifice to a dragon-headed god which grasped lightnings in its hands. He was witness to an army, marching like armored smoke through the boulevards of the city, war music clashing and the sunlight of ghost-day rebounding from spears and chariots. Rarnammon had taken the continent of Vis and made it one, every land of Vis bound in fealty to himself. He was the first to bear the title ‘Storm Lord’. Yet his eyes were Lowlander’s eyes.

The madman was Rarnammon. A golden-eyed Vis.

Tribute was brought to him, endless streams of men on their knees or faces, heaps of jewels, bars of metal, weapons, slaves—He felt the heat of noon on his skin in the chill of night, and the female kiss of silk against him, where the rough cloth lay.

“Storm Lord,” they said.

But he walked through a colonnade, and saw in at a window. A woman was rocking a child in a cradle, passionlessly, for something to do. And the child stared at her with an aloof distrust to match her own. It was Lyki. She was young, and the child was himself. And then he saw her again, in some other surrounding—a tent it seemed to be, and she clutched the child he was to her, hating him and in need. And someone had said: “If I were to say to you, Lyki, that I would spare your life on one condition, that condition being that I take your child and rip it open with this sword, you would let me do it, for this is how you are made.” And now that someone who spoke, who was Raldnor his father, said to her, “Your death would be useless. Therefore, you shall not die.”

And then it was raining, and he passed through the gate of the red house on Slope Street, in Karmiss.

It was not difficult to traverse the house, and reach the tiny anteroom and so the bedroom. The merchant was not there, out or away. Lyki lay in the bed. She was colorless, her darkness, even her dark hair, seemed drained to monochrome. She pleated the coverings with her fingers, her mouth turned in and down as he had always recollected it. For a moment she seemed flaccid, something cast adrift on the shores of life, soon to be reclaimed by the hunger of the sea. But then she caught sight of him, and she revived.

“So,” she said. “So. You steeled yourself, you put off all the more important things, and came after all. Well. I never thought you would. Money, yes. I thought your guilt and shame might drive you to that. But to waste your precious person on me. Well. I am amazed.”

He stood before her, knowing her. Still.

“Well,” she said. She grimaced, feverish with her excitement and her spite. “An honor. The Prince Kesarh Am Xai’s own henchman, and here in my bedchamber. Did you bring any more ankars? The physician’s no good. He prescribes this and that, but it doesn’t help me. He”—she meant the merchant, her protector—“has gone off to a tavern. He swears I make his own illness worse with mine. Well,” she said, “men have always treated me badly. And you, my son, you never loved me. Never.”

He moved forward, coming up beside the bed, and looked down at her. She was near to death, he had seen this expression on other faces, a concentration beyond her will on some inner perspective, which was death itself.

“You look older,” she said. She seemed suddenly afraid. “What has he done to you? How can you look older? At Zastis you were here, whipped, disgraced—for more than a year I see nothing of you and then you crawl to me, vomit on my floor, put me to difficulty and expense—”

“Mother,” he said. He spoke quietly, but it stopped her. Perhaps she had never heard this in his voice before. He himself did not quite comprehend it. Compassion, forbearance, but not pity and not hate.

And then she began to weep. The tears gushed from her eyes, and he wondered that she had the strength left to cry.

“I beat you,” she said. “You were wicked and deserved it, but I beat you. I should not have beaten you. I shouldn’t have hurt you so.”

“The Amanackire say. What we have done is the past; reiterate the deed, or dismiss the deed.”

“No. I beat you. I hurt you. I’ll be punished.”

“You were punished,” he said. “Do you remember him, Raldnor son of Rehdon, Elect of the goddess? Do you remember in that tent under Koramvis the night before the last battle? He told you what no mortal thing should ever have to hear, he told you he saw the evil in you, as if you were the only creature in the world that had evil in it. And because he made you know your littleness and your viciousness and your selfishness—which is in every one of us, mother, and in him, in Raldnor, too, when he was a man—because he made you know all that, where most of us can keep ourselves from knowing and so hope for something better, you hoped for nothing of yourself, and became simply what he had told you that you were.”

She stared through her tears. Her mouth was open, as if she would gasp in what he said to her.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “anything you did to me. You gave me my life. What I do with my life is my concern, not yours, nor can you be blamed for it. But I thank you for the giving.”

“Rem,” she said, “I’m dying.”

“Wherever you go,” he said, “you’ll be free of this.”

“Are you dead?” she whispered. “Rem—have you come to lead me?”

He knew from the name she called him, and the name she had had for Kesarh, from the room, from the sensation of the atmosphere and season, that he had retrogressed, eight or nine years. She had died in Karmiss long ago and he had not heard of it. As he had ridden on Kesarh’s business to Ankabek, Lyki had finished her battle with the earth. And probably he only imagined this. It was not possible to go back. She had ended alone.

But he said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. The other side of life is only life.”

She frowned, taking the words into herself. She was still puzzling when the final breath went from her. And then her face smoothed over, as if she knew it all. He closed her eyes. Her lips remained a little parted, but no longer wizened or turned down.

He stepped away, and saw Doriyos standing in a colonnade, holding out to him a cup of wine.

But when he took the cup it was Yannul’s son, Lur Raldnor, who had offered it. Then the cup touched his lip. He tasted not wine, but water.

“You will bring yourself to yourself again,” said Ashni. “At the proper hour.”

A skin seemed to tear, across his sight, across his entire body. The dismemberment was painless but total, and the whole of it lifted away and was gone.

He lost nothing, only this, which had come between him and existence. He understood who he was and how he came there, all that had been, everything he had participated in, even the death of Lyki.

And he understood also who the elegant bandit was, standing with him in the rain in the colonnade. So he drank the wine, which had a wine taste now, and nodded.

“Thank you, Tuab Ey.”

“Ah,” said Tuab Ey. His eyes were wide, but he added flippantly, “And who in Aarl are you?”

“Your guest.”

“Called?”

“You may not accept my name, seeing we’re here.”

“Try,” said Tuab Ey, and waited as if he would wait forever.

And having become himself, he said quietly, “The son of Raldnor Am Anackire, the brother of Raldanash, Storm Lord of Dorthar.”

The wide eyes could widen no farther, so they half-shut.

“I’ve heard of you. Rarmon Am Karmiss.”

But he said: “My name is Rarnammon. After the King who built the city.”

“You lost your prey, Kathus.”

“No, my lord. Free Zakoris lost him.”

“Zakoris,” said Yl, “does not trouble too much.”

Kathus showed nothing, which was not uncommon. He was able to conceal disappointment, if he was disappointed. He had lost Raurm son of Ralnar in the moment Raurm’s sanity gave way. The plummet into Thaddra’s jungles was only a formality.

When the fire smothered in the rain, those that could do so went in search. The blundering track of the palutorvus was at first very evident, but later less so. They picked up fragments of chain and wood. In the end, there had been a succession of clearings, and here they were deceived and the trail eluded them. By Yl’s order, the overseers were beaten with rods, but not put to death. From this, you told he did not rate the misadventure very highly.

“Probably, my Kathus, the beast headed for the swampy ground, and the Prince was sucked under there.”

“Probably.”

“We shall see to it Dorthar receives tidings of demise. Yes?”

Kathus acquiesced.

They had gained the end of the stone corridor that ran beneath the palace at Ylmeshd. A great door of trunks braced with bronze was hauled aside. The King and his Counselor entered the cave temple of Rorn.

Free Zakoris had decided to honor all the old ways.

Three male slaves were to be drowned in the sea pool before the god’s altar. The King would not officiate, these were minor ceremonies.

The thickset priests, naked to the waist and kilted in long folds of leather, waded into the pool. As they forced the struggling men under and held them there amid a chaos of churned water, Kathaos Am Alisaar looked on, impervious, polite.

Violent murder did not oppress him, and he was not superstitious. And yet Free Zakoris offended him aesthetically and in most other ways. He had sunk to this, and knew it.

He pondered idly, as the churnings in the water faded, if Dorthar was worth such dealings in brutish mindlessness, or if he would even have Dorthar, when everything was said and done. The long game had failed him so far. Why not once more? Was the extraordinary happening in the jungle a foretaste of failure—as a similar happening had been, almost thirty years ago?

There was a sudden tiresome inertia on him. He knew no trade but this, intriguer, game-player that he was. He could not live any other way, so was condemned.

Shaved if not shorn, the man with a king’s name, who claimed to be the son and brother of kings, began entirely to resemble one himself. He moved among the robbers with ease, yet they were aware of a superiority—nothing he set on them, only something which was. If what he had told Tuab Ey was correct, then he would be used to command. Grudgingly, they acknowledged it, and grudgingly, growling a little, gave him room, picked no quarrel. The passing of the madness was wonder enough. And he could obviously handle himself if it came to a fight. Altogether they fared better with the palutorvus, which they regarded as a symbol of status to their adversaries, and had made into something of a pet.

Rarnammon, anyway, was not much with them.

He walked about the ruined city, almost as if seeking some hidden thing. This interested them rather. Maybe there was a cache of gems or gold or arms he knew of and they did not. But seeing Tuab Ey tended to go about with him, and Galud not much behind, they must trust to that.

In the first days, Rarnammon quartered the city. Tuab Ey acted as a guide, for he had come here more than once, alone or with his pack. The land rose and fell in the valley, and the ancient streets ran up and down in humps and hollows. Here and there were the bandit nests, standing houses or mansions that had been possessed and now held long enough to merit the chiefs label upon them—Scarecrow’s Villa, Jort’s Wall. When cook-smoke went up, they were in residence. To the west, where the jungle had encroached most vehemently and only a few frames of masonry stayed upright, there was a small leper colony. It had its own well, and kept to itself for fear of instant spearing. On the white alleys, the ochre figures moved weightlessly, dying shadows without faces.

At noon, seated on a high terrace, Tuab Ey pointed out a certain flower that was commencing to nose its way up through the paving.

“The year’s turning, Rarnammon. Over the mountains the ice will be starting to heave and crack.”

“And when the sea’s open,” said Galud, who was watering a pillar, “the Leopard moves north, east, west, and south.”

“The war will get here. But you’ll be going back to Dorthar to meet it?” said Tuab Ey.

“No,” said Rarnammon.

Tuab Ey said lazily, “He’ll need you, won’t he, your illustrious brother?”

“Yes,” said Rarnammon. “Not necessarily beside him.”

“Enigma.”

“Fact.”

“Well? I’m your host, remember. Tell me.”

Rarnammon, who was looking down, a long slow look, at the city, smiled. He did not say anything.

Galud stood scowling at them, and then walked from the terrace and some way off. He supposed they were lovers and was jealous, although his own coital inclinations did not run that way.

Tuab Ey stretched himself out for the sun.

“So, you won’t tell me anything.”

“I shall find a suitable place and remain alone there. Wait.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I only know what I’ve told you.”

“You’re a mystic, then.”

“Maybe.”

Tuab Ey moved on to his belly, leaning up on his elbows. He stared at Rarnammon until, feeling the powerful gaze, the elder man turned.

“You said alone. Or shall I come too, and act your page, lord King’s son?”

Initially he did not know what Rarnammon would do now it was said, and Tuab Ey experienced again the unaccustomed, uncanny sensation that was like awe. But then Rarnammon grinned, and the grin made him very young.

“A mystic remains celibate,” he said. Tuab Ey found himself grinning too, charmed or provoked into it. And then Rarnammon turned away again toward the north. “My father was in Thaddra,” he said. “If he didn’t transmute into fire or ether, then he’s still there, somewhere. Part of the stones, perhaps, or the black light through the trees.”

Tuab Ey shivered in the bright heat of noon.

“My own father,” he said, “had dealings of escape with a slave-trader, whose name was Bandar. Bandar, whom I saw as a child, was a fat and insalubrious oaf. He had one story he always forced on everyone. How he carried Astaris into Thaddra as a slave—not his fault, of course—and she was pregnant with Raldnor’s child.” Rarnammon did not glance about at him, but he was listening. Tuab Ey continued deftly. “There was another story, of a wolf child, in the northern forests—you know, a baby left with wolves and reared by them to be a wolf. Except wolves are scarce this side of the mountains. More likely wild dogs. But the child was said to be supernatural, white as pearl and winged, with a star on her forehead—” He stopped because Rarnammon had softly laughed. “Well, I never believed a word of it,” said Tuab Ey, and gave himself up again to the sun.

22

The eastern ice began to break. It was like the sound of the earth tearing apart.

In Dorthar, as the marble world gave way, mankind began to move more plentifully on its surface. Through mud and milky rains, a small caravan ploughed toward the capital, Anackyra. Then skirted it, made on toward the hills, Koramvis, the Lake of Ibron, where they said a mighty statue lay asleep; Anackire, dreaming. . . . The poor wagons were escorted by soldiery of the Storm Lord, which seemed to have been sent to meet them. In the villages and towns they passed, the blazon of the Serpent and Cloud was sighted and remarked upon. Occasional strange rumors flew back and forth. A poisoned well had been found clean, after the caravan had stopped beside it. A woman going out to mourn her dead returned without her sorrow. Someone sick had been cured, after the shadow of something, a cart or a snake, had gone over him as he wandered at the roadside.

A group of Amanackire were seen riding toward the hills above Anackyra.

There was a faint shock on the plain, in the city. Nothing gave way. Many did not feel it.

Vencrek, privately approaching his King, with whom he had spent time but never precisely known when they were children at Vathcri, said, “Raldanash, you can tell me anything about these tales of a priestess given royal escort to the ruin up there?”

Raldanash said, “The tales are true.”

“Who is she?”

“A priestess, as you said.”

“There’s, a lot of common talk—”

“Yes,” said Raldanash, with one of the rare flashes of humor, “there often is.” And then, quite lightly, conducting the Warden to the great table-board which described, approximately, the surface of Vis, Raldanash began to discuss with him the strategies of war. They shifted the small carved galleys, and the units of men and cavalry about, with wands of ivory. Such plans of attack as offered had been revised since Prince Rarmon’s traitorous withdrawal—or abduction. Spies had brought word he was dead. This too might be a lie.

Although he had got no answer to his curiosity, Vencrek succumbed to the charisma of his King. While some part of him stood sophisticatedly aloof, the cousin from Vathcri was yet flattered and warmed to play war-games alone with Raldanash. It did indeed, rather disgracefully, become a boys’ game in the end. Drinking the mulled wine, briskly deploying the ships, the Lord Warden consented to be Free Zakoris, and sometimes Karmiss, to the Storm Lord’s Dorthar. When Vencrek lost he let out a boy’s roar of outrage, and then caught the joke. “By Ashkar. Let’s hope they play as messily as I do.” And heard Raldanash laugh, which was more of a rarity even than wry humor. And remembered he loved him, a male love, not sexual, love of the blood, love of the honor and the steadfast integrity of Raldnor’s son.

And when, later, Raldanash fell asleep before the columned hearth, as if immensely tired, Vencrek looked at the beautiful unhuman face, touched and almost angry at being so trusted.

In Ommos the Dortharian garrison had been increased. Four and a half thousand of the Storm Lord’s men augmented the Ommish defenses. There was also a company of mixes, almost two thousand strong, and freelance mercenary units, Vathcrians and Tarabines, though the pure Shansarians had gone away.

Ommos was afraid.

The last war had raked her over. Like Zakoris, she too had been scourged and shamed, but Ommos had none of the valor of Yl’s long wish to fight back, only the suppuration of puny hatred. She feared the Sister Continent men who were there to help her, as she feared her own Lowlander Guardian and the white-haired King in Dorthar. The hero Raldnor had remained anathema to Ommos. No one loved her and she loved none. Only in corners, where a peculiar radiance had brushed in passing, had the mood softened and strengthened in different form. In the alleys of Hetta Para some still spoke of a long-haired religious—a boy, the dream must be translated—who was tolerant and kind to them. Zarok had been shown in another guise. The image of Anackire, which had likewise been shown and which, some said, had left an imprint on walls, had also in a mysterious way been Zarok. It was explainable as a female alter ego, which they could respect at last, the cloak of the god.

But these pockets of retention and strength were small. Ommos had never been fertile soil for things of light. A fire-worshipper, she had lost even the light of her fires. They were dulled by blood. She was like Free Zakoris, too, in that.

In Xarabiss. Thann Xa’ath had not hung back, as his father had, waiting to see how the cat might jump before he moved.

Then again, the fiasco of Ulis Anet’s escapade with her guard commander had brought considerable embarrassment. Though Xa’ath did not entirely accept the case as presented—there were other notions (she had in some way annoyed Raldanash and been quietly smothered?)—yet he was obliged to observe diplomatic rules. Thann Xa’ath must act, therefore, as if owing an apology to Dorthar. He brought his army smartly into the field, and dispatched a vassal’s token four thousand troops to Raldanash, to deploy as he saw fit. They were on the march before the snow was gone. Slung with spitting braziers, they tramped through the endless rain of the thaw. Thirty men were lost in a boiling river near the Ommos border. But it had been necessary to bustle this spring.

Thann Xa’ath had insufficient imagination to dwell on the price of defeat. He operated the engine of war pragmatically. His court, ostensibly, kept pace.

But out in the crystal cities, in their theaters, pleasure-houses, wine-shops, the talk and the imagery were more honest, or more illuminating. The plays put on were froth—farces, with often a bitter sting in the tail. Acrobats walked wires above the mouths of starving tirr. Escape; dancing with death. Conversation conveyed actual peril. Seers cried aloud in the streets that doom approached. No one laughed. All would be beaten flat, rinsed with blood, with flame—ashes.

There was nowhere to run to.

Even so, as the spring unlocked the roads, they streamed away, to villas, to farms, to remote plains and isolate hills, aristocrat and beggar alike.

Perhaps here, or there, the black and taloned paw would not find them out.

It was a curious fact. Most of them boasted a victory for Dorthar and the Middle Lands. None of them seemed able to trust in it.

Free Zakoris wanted, and would have. Karmiss, the unknown crouching thing, would go for the throat of whichever went down.

A few privately commandeered vessels put out to sea, making on battered sails for the Sister Continent. The weather was uncertain. No word came back from them. Nor any word or ship from those who had voyaged from Thos at the summer’s end.

Southward, the southern extremity of Vis: The Lowlands. It had remained generally a kind of desert, still. And here, the mantle of the snow yet held awhile. On the wide plains the villages had drawn in to themselves as they had always done, tight, unburgeoning pads behind their stockades, revealing no aptitude for spring, let alone politics. Closer to Xarabiss, the towns of the Plains—famous Hamos, coastal Moiyah and part-built Hibrel, having molded to the northern spirit, and the ways from over the ocean, had formed their armies long since. Dortharian and Vathcrian war leaders had drilled their men winter through in the stone courts. Even a band of Shansarian berserkers had remained, a couple of thousand men, at a camp a mile or so from Moiyah. There was a small Shansar fleet as well, thirty swan ships, ice-choked on the beaches there. But gossip said they would, troops and galleys both, be off to Shansarian Alisaar, when once the seas relented.

It was also known that with the thaw Dortharian troops would be garrisoned at Moiyah. She had come to represent a key position to the west and would certainly be threatened. So far the numbers were not noised abroad.

Of the arcane city, the ruin, nothing much was said. It was thought to be no prize either for Zakorian Leopard or Karmian jackal. Already fallen, hiding no treasures, unstrategic—it was left to its own devices, its own silences.

Report suggested certain villages of the southern south had packed up and traveled there wholesale, as had happened three decades before. For sanctuary, presumably.

An itinerant hunter, having come northwest to Moiyah, enlisting under one of the Vathcrian commands there, regaled his battalion—Lowland men, men of the other continent, mixes, Xarabs—with an inexplicit memory of something seen in or near the ruin, over the snow.

He was strongly called to account by his Vathcrian captain.

“I can’t say, sir.” A Lowlander and a peasant, knowing the linguistics of the dark races, his childhood spent with little speech, much telepathy, he seemed now calmly at a loss. “It was sunrise. The light hit the flank of the city—or maybe it was some other thing—it was far off, sir, perhaps only rocks or trees. But there looked to be great towers of gold.”

The Vathcrian, who was younger than the hunter, anxious and furious at the war, needing to fight something he could see and hack, rejoined:

“We’re up against a hell of a thing here, soldier. We don’t need visions and dreams and make-believe. We need guts and an army. No snow-mirage ever won a war. Do you understand?”

The hunter who was now a soldier said that he did.

Only later did the Vathcrian realize he had inadvertently communed in his home-tongue. The Lowlander, ignorant of it, had got the sense by reading his mind.

Across the Inner Sea, Alisaar, the Shansarian fortress, stared in all directions. Carved ships patrolled her waters, up and down, up and down, over and over, like clockwork things. The snow had only sugared her eastern and southern edges, as always. But the voracious winds of the cold months had lashed her. In the Ashara temples Shansar had set up, prophecies were made and auguries read. A secret worship had commenced, native Alisaar going back to her own gods, if she had ever left them.

Across the incoherent border. Old Zakoris, Sorm of Vardath’s dainty from the Lowland War, had also manned every perimeter. The three brief lands, Iscah, Ott, and Corhl, had been sworn to vassalage twenty-five years before, and were substantially under Vardian influence. But Alisaar had become an unknown element to the south. North, the watchtowers eyed the Thaddrian borders; mountains, forest. Particular attention was paid to that threat of Yl’s South Road.

Where Vardian Zakoris mountainously touched Dorthar, the passes were held by mutual armies. On the Dortharian side, the Storm Lord had instigated several Vathcrian companies, who now tended to squabble with Sorm’s Vardish men. One forgot, but Vathcri and Vardath, at home, had once been traditional enemies themselves.

In Old Zakoris, the Zakorian race had prospered under Sorm. He had not deprived them of their religion either, and the fire and water gods still exalted there, if no longer in some of their more brutal rites. Nevertheless, Zakoris was Zakoris. They had the same blood as the Black Leopard of Zakoris-In-Thaddra. Soon they would be called upon to slaughter their racial brothers, even, in some cases, their actual brothers. They had not deserted with or to Yl, which to the Leopard must be the unforgivable crime. A conqueror, he would give no quarter. The Mother-Kingdom would be destroyed. Not one stone would stand upon another, nor one skin upon one set of bones.

And so, belatedly, several did desert, somehow evading the watches and patrols, getting over the mountains or through the jungles into Thaddra, hurrying to Yl’s standard. Others simply ran—to Alisaar, to Dorthar—where they were betrayed and arrested instantly. Or into Thaddra also, but merely to be lost, as Thaddra’s custom was.

But it could not be told enough: In the end there was and would be nowhere to run to. This war was a wave, the world an open shore.

In Thaddra the sea was never obdurate. Snow, to Thaddra as to Zakoris, was only an infrequent crown upon some distant miles-high mountain.

The Leopard, feeling the spice-wind of spring, stretched itself.

The two great fleets, one hundred and three ships, one hundred and twenty-seven, flexed themselves in the deep-water bays. Farther northeastward, a scout fleet of fifteen vessels peeled off from the larger units, sentinel, waiting. With the coming of softer weather, others already drove toward the eastern seas.

On the South Road, the cadavers of slaves made paving. It would never be done in time, yet the whips bit and the flames ate up the trees. Charred birds made sacrifice to Zarduk.

In Ylmeshd the minor ceremonies were ended.

The cave of Rorn was already flooded by a valve, and sealed, left afloat with drowned beasts and men, who would now decompose to the satisfaction of the god. A young priest of Rorn, inspired by the drugged incense and the cries and the gongs, had flung himself down from a high ledge as the sea started to come in. Independent immolation was always pleasing to a deity. The omen was good.

As a heavy sunset began to consume Ylmeshd, King Yl entered in turn the temple of Zarduk, by its city-door.

It was already midnight in the cavern, but as Yl advanced—preceded by priests, followed by his kindred, his commanders, a tail of slaves, and a black-lacquered box, windowless and man-sized, borne high—brands burst into tall red leaf.

The last fire was uncovered as curtains of black hide were dragged away. Zarduk appeared, a carved stone, twelve feet in height, massively underlit by his own fiery intestines. He was finer than he had been, for they had gilded him recently with much melted gold, hung him with golden rings. It was his portion of the loot from Ankabek.

He did not have the ancient ugliness of Ommos, this engoldened fire god from the west. He possessed not only a head, but shoulders and a torso. His hands were sculpted flat against the skirt of his garment, seeming to grasp the furnace of his vitals.

They brought swamp leopards to him, ten of them, and ten men cut their throats. The blood steamed and stank.

Yl, himself clad in the pelts of black leopards, a collar of rubies, a pectoral with onyx and sardonyx, moved to the hewn step before the god. He took a knife from a priest, and slicing his own arm, the King let fall his blood into the hissing flames of Zarduk.

A growl of approval rose about the temple. Priests came instantly to stanch the wound.

Yl went to the statue’s side, and the priests brought him the mask of hammered brass that he must now put on. When he was adorned in it, had been amalgamated into it, he became an entity of the god, a priest himself. The gathering saw as much, and did him reverence. Yl pointed, and a slave approached, carrying an enormous topaz. It was dirty, the topaz, or obscured from within. It did not glitter in the torchlight or the glare of Zarduk’s guts, even when laid on the ground where the length of the god finished.

Yl poured wine now, over the topaz, as if to wash it.

It did not change.

Yl pointed again. The closed black box that had followed him in was brought forward and put down, and its hinged doors were lifted up.

After a few moments, a figure came from the box.

It was a youth, perhaps sixteen, slim yet strong. He was, at first glance, true Zakoris, velvet black of skin, hair and eyes. But there was a handsomeness in the features Zakoris had almost weeded out. The nose had never been splayed, the nostrils were proud and wide, winking with gold. His lips were full, a thing not racially usual; nor was he scarred.

There were golden circles round his ankles, arms, wrists. Otherwise he was naked.

His eyes, dreamy, almost blind—a narcotic—were fixed on nothing.

Drums beat. From behind the Zarduk, two girls emerged, fire on their hair and polished flesh.

They danced, invited, writhed. They ventured to the naked man, caressed him and drew him down, against the skirt of the statue.

The Zakorians looked on, soundless. This ritual too, was old as the Old Kingdom.

A girl lay under him, her hair across the Topaz, in the blood and wine. He parted her thighs, pierced her. As he strove, the red light of the oven of the god strove with him, along his back, buttocks, legs. The other girl stretched against him, her body moving with his, her fingers and her mouth urging him, pressing him to the brink, inexorable.

As he arched, both women arched with him, two curious shadows flung from his silhouette against the light. Orgasm, the magic energy. When he sank down, the women slid and rolled away, and like shadows still, faded through the light and were gone.

His seed was holy. The girl he had chosen to mate with would be examined in due course. If she were with child, this omen also would be propitious.

But now the priests came and turned him, so his face was toward the cavern’s ceiling. He stayed as motionless as if he slept.

Again, the priests had given Yl a knife, broader than the other.

Despite what they had fed him, as the knife went in, the sacrificial victim shrieked—but if with shock or pain was impossible to divine. The cries, oddly remote and unhuman, went on, for the first blow did not kill. This, like the rest, was ritual, old as the name of Zakoris. The viscera, disengaged, were flung into the belly of the god, a bizarre juxtaposition. The cries faltered, stopped.

The dying body still twitched, however, as they poured the oils upon it. It was proper some life should remain—Yl had been skillful and swift. A torch was cast. The image of the victim erupted in a gout of flame.

At last, the Free Zakorians shouted.

Zarduk had been honored and would remember them.

Beyond the burning sacrifice, against the burning statue, filmed now with smoke and gore, the topaz which had been the Eye of Anackire looked on.

In Karmiss, there were tiny golden flowers craning to drink the rain in the garden courtyard. Ulis Anet, bending to gaze at them, knew the harbor of Istris, now less than half a day away, would be open.

She had had a premonition Kesarh would come here today, perhaps tomorrow. He had ridden out one further time during the long snow. She had not expected him. She was given over to despair that afternoon, lying in her bed, unable to tolerate any physical evidence of self which arising would force on her. One of the attendants ran in first. And then he—like a storm from somewhere—moved into the room and filled it; electricity and darkness. “Stay where you are,” he said. He even smiled. “What could be better?” He was eager and clever and demanding, just as before. Her own hunger and its release seemed to obliterate her, the death-wish inherent in sex. In the night she woke and he was already gone. She rose and cursed him, true curses, Xarabian and coarse. He had sent her many gifts. She found the latest of these and dashed them all over the room. Some days after, when she failed to menstruate, she thought she was with child and was shaken by an unconscionable horror or triumph, unsure which. But at length, the blood began to come. She made plans to bribe and connive and somehow to get away when the thaw freed the land. She would go to the Lowlands, seek asylum in some obscure temple of Hamos or Hibrel. Val Nardia had been a priestess.

But then she predicted this return, today, tomorrow. Very strangely, she knew she was somewhat telepathically receptive to him, though he had stayed unaware of it, and unreciprocative.

There had been the macabre dream in Dorthar before his men took her—the sunset sea, the shore of ice, she in his arms. She heard much more now her Karmian servants were used to her. He had come back with his dead sister from Ankabek, some soldier had said, holding the corpse as if it slept.

When he arrived, she would welcome him cordially, with all the coolness that could mean. She would not lie with him. If he forced her, she would evince no pleasure even should her flesh condone.

It would mean little to him. Symbolically, for herself, it might redeem. Momentarily.

She had contemplated taking a lover during the long snow alone. Some attractive groom or guard. Kesarh would discover. He might be irritated. He might have the man punished or executed: She did not want the guilt of that.

Often she brooded on Raldanash. Or on Iros. Someone had let slip that Iros had died.

She had learned a great deal about Val Nardia. Ulis Anet was uncertain now if she had questioned so constantly, or if they had only constantly volunteered to inform.

Occasionally, she theorized to herself that she could attempt to murder Kesarh. But this idea was too melodramatic, like everything else, and vexed her.

She watched most of that day at the windows which looked toward Istris. The sky grew tawny, and she did not think he would come after all.

Fifteen minutes later, as they were lighting the lamps, there came the give-away flurry all through the house. She went down to meet him. He should not find her spread out for him tonight, or even malleable.

She was prepared, and when he walked in, she thought, you see, he’s just a man. You are obsessed by him, but he has not allowed you to love him. It can be borne.

But she avoided his touch and his eyes.

The dinner was served then, in the salon. They spoke desultorily of basics, the needs of the house, the climate. If he was amused, he did not display it. She felt his glance on her, and now and then the intensity of a prolonged stare, which she did not meet.

Inevitably, learning so much of Val Nardia, she had copied her, some of it without knowing.

The dinner ended, and he had not mentioned the bed upstairs.

He walked to the hearth and leaned there, drinking wine.

“Tomorrow, I shall be sailing for Lan.”

“Lan?” she said, courteously, as if she had never heard of it.

“There seems to be some trouble.”

She said nothing, did not care. He had invaded Lan, probably Lan resented it.

“The forthcoming war no longer seems to interest you,” he said. “They say on the streets, Free Zakoris could destroy Istris in an hour. The whole island in six days.”

“But you are the beloved of Free Zakoris.”

“Ah. You do listen, then.”

“I shall pray,” she said, “that the sea is tempestuous for your crossing.”

“It’ll take more than salt water to drown me,” he said. He emptied his cup and she came solicitously to refill it. “Val Nardia,” he said, “often had her hair dressed in that same way. Did they tell you?”

She raised her head and met his eyes then, and said quietly, she did not know why, “Her shade comes to me and instructs me, how to resemble her the most.”

“Bleach your skin,” he said, “and say ‘no.’”

“I shall,” she said, “say no.”

The blackness of his eyes, live as something pale and molten, bore down on her.

“What a pity,” he said, “to have ridden all this way only for supper.”

“There are several pretty girls in the house. One of them even dyes her hair red.”

He smiled slightly. He seemed to be jesting with her as he said, “Or I’ll take you anyway. I sometimes enjoy a little opposition.”

“Of course. Do whatever you wish.”

“You aren’t like her,” he said, “at root. Not like her at all. When you consent, when you refuse. When you most remind me of her I can most perceive it’s a reminder, nothing more.”

“Why am I here then?” He said nothing. She said, “Yes. A man loses a jewel of great worth from a ring. He replaces the jewel with another which, though flawed, will complement the setting. He values it less, but there. The ring is to be worn.”

“And she,” he said, “could never have thought to frame that so wittily.” He drank the rest of the wine. “You know where I’ll be sleeping, if not with you. Send some girl along. I leave the choice to you.”

An hour later, she herself went to the guest chamber.

In the morning, she told herself this too did not matter, that to prevaricate was senseless. Her body had been pleasured. Why not?

But she could no longer rely upon herself, traitor and liar that she had become.

And to admit this, in itself was another form of traitorousness, as she discovered.

They breakfasted together in the salon. She disliked the normalcy of it, her position fixed: His mistress, with all that title’s most dismal connotations. Already, she heard the going about below, his men readying to leave.

When he rode away, what? Another long vacancy, further peering after his sister’s phantom, impotent plans.

“Do you,” she said, “ever remember me when you’re elsewhere?”

He acquiesced amiably. It was a woman’s question. He seemed deliberately to miss the sharper point.

“Yes, Ulis. You’re my haven.”

“From what? The cares and toil of state? But you are in love with those.” With the little knife she sliced open a fruit, and looked into the stained glass of pulp and seeds as if to read portents. “Perhaps I should give you some token to remind you of me. A lock of hair. Like the hair that was sent to Iros, to mislead him to his death.” She said: “You went to great lengths to obtain me. Am I worth it?”

He rose. He nodded to her, said he must be off, remarked that she was beautiful, and that essentials the house required would be delivered in his absence.

Something absurd happened. “Get out,” she said, and her voice was like a cough, and she had snatched the little fruit knife off the table.

She saw she had his attention. He was nonplussed. She had done this, maybe—Val Nardia—

But then he turned and walked toward the door. And Ulis Anet hurled the knife after him. It was a wild cast, aimed for no vital spot. It went through his left sleeve, hovered, and dropped spent on the rugs.

He paused. He did not glance at the ripped sleeve, the knife. He moved slowly and came back to her and she, out of character, lost, stood before him waiting vulgarly for some blow. He did not lay a finger on her. Only the eyes struck down. And a few words.

“Tame yourself, lady,” he said. “We lack conversation as it is.”

“I didn’t mean to do such a thing,” she said. She was void of expression, or excuse. “It serves no purpose.”

“None,” he said.

Soon, the door closed, and he was gone.

The trio of ships, thrust by the rain-speared wind, made speed. Then, as Lan’s bladed coastline came near, they began to throw a shadow in the north. The tall, knife-edge shape of three Zakorians bore down on them. The Karmian vessels flew merely the Lily. The Zakorians hoisted no flag, but their sails had relinquished the Double Moon and Dragon of the Old Kingdom, and of old piracy. Each wore now the sigil of the Black Leopard.

Kesarh’s captain, standing in the bow, said, “Are they after a fight, my lord?”

“You forget, the Lily and the Leopard are fast friends.”

The ships hailed each other peaceably. Thereafter they moved together on the last of the day’s journey into the rocky shelter of the land.

An orange sun went down behind them, and through the burnt, wet shade on the sea, a parcel of Free Zakorians rowed over. Kesarh’s galley took them aboard.

“We thought your King was here,” said the Free Zakorian commander.

Kesarh, mailed, unjeweled, without device, said, “Did you? Never mind. I have his authority.”

The Zakorian was not a fool, not deceived, but neither prepared to argue with conviction. Tall and brutalized, he had one memorable adornment. The left eye, which was gone, had been replaced by a smooth ball of opal.

“King Yl sends greetings then, to your King, through you.”

“Thank you,” said Kesarh. “I’ll remember to convey them.”

“And I’m authorized to offer assistance.”

“In what capacity?”

“There is awkwardness in Lan.” This polite, sarcastic phrase delivered in the Zakorian slur was nearly laughable. Kesarh did not laugh.

“What awkwardness is that?”

“Karmian troops in Lan have rebelled against King Kesr.”

“King Kesr,” said Kesarh, “would be most surprised to hear this.”

There was a stasis. Then the Zakorian said:

“My galleys will escort yours to the port of Amlan.”

“No,” said Kesarh. He smiled gravely. “Karmiss holds Lan. The entry of Free Zakorian warships into her harbors at this time would be regarded, by the King, you understand, as an act of aggression against Karmiss herself.”

The commander had not really believed he would get any other answer.

They exchanged brusque civilities, and the Free Zakorians went away.

In the hour before dawn when the Lily ships began their pull down the coast, the three shadows dogged them, too far off now to be hailed, or accused, simply a very positive menace.

The official word from Lan had been uncomplex. The new command had taken power, Raldnor Am Ioli was ousted and would consequently be disposed of. But much later, other words drifted in, even over the snow and ice—Kesarh’s roundabout skein of spies had seen to that. Details were obscure, yet it appeared—though Raldnor had died—he had won over the troops at least in Amlan and her port. Some puppet leader was now set up, a blond Shansar, who had captured, somehow, their cloddish imagination.

For Kesarh to lose his grip on Lan at the onset of the war could be fatal. He had used Lan as ballast, and needed it. Despite the kudos of his navy, the strategic excellence he had crowed from in Dorthar and by proxy in Free Zakoris, was irreplaceable.

And the Free Zakorians, their own spies active—intelligent in a way they had never been till Alisaarian Kathus had taken over their reins—had also caught a whiff of decay.

Three and a half thousand soldiers were quartered at Amlan through the snow. To go in with less than three hundred men at his back was Kesarh’s gamble, also a necessity.

The Free Zakorians, for one, must now be in serious doubt. You did not race to such a confrontation with such a miniature force. Could their information be wrong? To Karmiss-In-Lan, the look of it would be much the same. This was no punitive expedition. Kesarh was going, not to assault, but to woo them. Maybe they recalled, no one played the suitor better.

In the foredeck cabin the physician, having opened Kesarh’s mailed sleeve, viewed the inflamed and ragged wound in his forearm.

“So slight a cut, but refusing to heal. It bothers you, my lord?”

“Yes. It bothers me.”

“I think there’s some festering. The knife had been in fruit, you say? I regret, we must cauterize.”

“Then do it.”

In Lan, though spring promised excitement, the long snow had already not been dull.

Raldnor of Ioli, slain by maddened patriot or paid assassin, had left Amlan in some confusion. The young Prince-King, Emel son of Suthamun, had heard of the event with obvious alarm. He shed tears in the presence of the soldiers, who thought it not unseemly. He was only a boy, and Raldnor had been a father to him. But the mourning went on, and Emel, having locked himself away, stayed locked away. The soldiers became restive.

During the first days following the assassination, a council was formed comprising the several captains attached to Raldnor’s monopolies. Needless to say, squabbles had soon broken out. Before the month was done, there had been fighting in the streets between the cohorts of this and that commander. On the last day of the month one of the council was found dead in a wrecked wine-shop. A batch of days into the succeeding month, a few other captains met nemesis—one in a trough of sheep-swill, which provided inspiration for the army’s poetic side.

There ensued an inevitable relay seizing of power. Two officers grabbed it, were murdered, two others were elected by cheering soldiery in the Palace Square. These held on for quite a while. The end came when a man rode into the city of Amlan from the south. He brought with him a thousand Karmians, some his own, others he had gathered up en route, and was pitched into a sudden siege when fellow Karmians slammed the gates in his face.

During the second night someone opened the gates, however, and the arrival arrived, with all his men. What had swung the balance was the uncertainty now rife in Amlan. The newcomer had once been a guard in the private army of Kesarh. He still seemed gilded by authority.

Biyh had been sent to Elyr with a small command, to reconnoiter and suborn, not long after he had returned with his King from Dorthar. Biyh had no ambition, or thought he had none. He was a dogsbody, a jack, would take on any job—guard, warrior, messenger. As Prince Rarmon himself had noted, Biyh had not gone up in the world.

But something in the turmoil of Lan, the indigenous revolts, the takeovers and plots and spontaneous slayings, had pushed him to a sort of precarious eminence. Rather to his own startlement, Biyh had snatched his chance. Maybe seeing Rem’s elevation had given him an appetite.

Getting Amlan, he took down the current leaders. Biyh meant only to imprison them, but the men were in a nasty mood and tore them to fragments in the Square.

Biyh began to tidy up the city, which was in a sorry state. He trod on no toes, distributing wine and beer and women liberally, producing the figurehead Emel—Biyh knew the worth of a figurehead—to help implant the notion of fair behavior and honor.

Biyh even visited the brother-sister Lannic King and Queen in the royal apartments. Pale under their darkness, they tolerated him. He was genuinely glad to see them still receiving food and comforts in their interior exile. Native Lan needed its figureheads, too, and Biyh had half feared he would find them lying on the woven carpets in a suicide pact.

One evening, Biyh also paid a longer than usual visit to his postulant King.

The boy had seemed doleful from the start, and frightened. Now, alone with him, Biyh beheld terror.

“It’s been a bad time, this, my lord,” said Biyh, who was never above platitudes, “but you must bear up. Recollect your father. The men love you. Karmiss will be yours.” Biyh did not in fact believe this. He intended to make overtures to Kesarh when the weather broke, and hand everything back to him, Emel included, providing he, Biyh, gained by it.

Emel, who surely could not have guessed, began to cry.

Biyh patted the youngster’s shoulder, and had a curious impression the boy was perfumed, if very faintly, with a woman’s scent.

Remembering how Am Ioli was supposed to have concealed him, Biyh waxed inquisitive. On some pretext he next morning raided Emel’s sleeping-room. Emel, who had lived with shrill panic since the day of Raldnor’s death, was able to hide and evade only so much. Biyh let out a laugh. Something in the type of laugh encouraged Emel; he had heard it before, and that had been in bedchambers, too.

In a while Biyh said, “Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret,” and sat down on the bed. Half an hour afterwards, he was in it.

It so happened. Biyh’s tastes ran to such dualities as Emel’s. Also unlike Raldnor, Biyh was sexually well-mannered.

Emel found himself all at once cherished and petted. Here was one lover who did not disappear, one protector who did not loathe and carp, or mean to be rid of him. Safe at last?

When he had been nothing in the world’s eyes, Kesarh had ridden back from Tjis to the capital in a brazen chariot, a flare of swords, a rain of flowers, and Istris handed her heart to him. A King, he walked into Amlan.

The crossing had not been rough. Ulis Anet could not, he once thought, have prayed hard enough—or the bane had stayed in the knife. The three black shadows, though, had kept behind them. The ships of the Lily docked, and the shadows anchored on the horizon. It did not matter for the moment, might even prove useful, this appearance of a Free Zakorian rear guard.

The troops were thick in the port. Events had been sorted six days ago, after further information boarded Kesarh’s ship: A spy from along the coast who rowed well. The successive juntas now had names, and the current ruler, Biyh, was once a Number Nine, whose thousand men swelled the three and a half thousand at Amlan. As the snow receded other areas had declared for Biyh—or in error for Raldnor, not knowing him to be dead. The puppet “King,” said the spy, was Suthamun’s son, or a crafty double dug from somewhere.

As the oars of the boat brought him in to shore. Kesarh estimated the armored phalanx screening the wharves was two thousand men at least. They did not block the way in, but they could close like jaws on whoever entered.

They were not sure, yet, if it could be him. If he could be such a fool.

Then the boat grounded. He stood up and stepped over on to the ice and shale, then straight up the great stair on to the quay.

Discipline had grown flabby, and a vibrant mutter began to run at once. Most of them knew him by sight, considerable numbers had spoken with him, or supposed they had, in Karmiss, when the Lannic adventure was mounted.

Presently the sounds died out. They stared, metal and faces and the metal faces of shields, hostile and ungiving. They were out of love with him now, Am Ioli’s falsehoods, and the riot and the rift from homeland, had seen to that, and the blank cold madnesses of the winter.

Kesarh stood, alone, in their midst. He had left the rest of his men behind on the ships. They, too, had thought him insane, but admired it. They knew his gambit. They said to each other, it would be possible to walk after such a man into fire. As they sat on the ships.

He was not wearing black, but the salamander scarlet, with the lizard emblem in gold on breast and back—like a target. The hair-fine coat of steel was worn under it, invisible. They only saw he was unarmed. No sword, no dagger, not even the knives that could be carried in sleeves or gauntlet-cuffs or the cuffs of the high boots—they squinted after the tell-tale lines, and they were never there.

He appeared very young, almost cheerful, with a light clear color. He did not greet them. He only looked at them, into their faces, steadily, one by one. Some of the faces turned grim, in others the eyes flinched aside. But he was not offering them a challenge. The regard was measured, finding them out, but never too much.

Minutes dropped away, and nothing else happened. Finally, two of Biyh’s freshly appointed captains came forward and met him.

They did not know, of course, what to say to him. They were in declared arms against him, and here he was, empty-handed, serene, kingly.

“My lord,” one of them blurted, “what is it you want?”

“My destination,” he said, “is the city.”

“I can’t answer for the men,” said the other. “Your life’s teetering on two thousand sword-points. Why don’t you go back to your pretty ship? They’d probably let you.”

Many heard this. The air was conductive, the acoustics rather good. An uneasy jeering noise went round, and metal clacked on metal. When it stopped, Kesarh spoke again. He spoke over the captains’ heads to the two-thousand-odd soldiers who hated him, with a lover’s hate, abused. His voice, the actor’s voice trained long ago, used always to effect, traveled to almost all of them.

“These men are Karmians, as I am. I don’t fear my brothers, gentlemen. Shall we get on?”

He started to walk then, and as he did so, the jaws began to close on him. As they closed, he made spontaneous contact with them. He had—and used—the magic thing, recall. He recollected names, personalities, officers and rank and file alike, human beings he had met years before, exchanged one word with. He blazed there in the raw colorless day, his scarlet like a beacon, the salamander targets crying out to them where they might strike. When they jostled him, he touched them. His hands were steady, reassuring, gentling them like zeebas or horses. When they pressed closer now, it was to touch in turn, no longer rancor. Where they could not see him, they shinned up walls.

And now, the accusations came, because they felt they could talk to him.

Already on the Amlan road, going toward the city, this huge cloud of men—the port left nearly defenseless. Kesarh, they said, or King, Shansarian fashion. It had none of the smack of insolence. It was the intimacy employed in religion.

Why? they said. Why withhold supplies? Why desert us here? Why the wedding with Free Zakoris?

He exonerated himself. He told them the game to be played, Lan the bulwark, Free Zakoris the stepping stone. Vis the stake.

His voice, reaching the perimeters, translated into the pockets where it did not reach of itself, stimulated them. His strength and his certainty, the easy confidence, each of them his counselor, consulted now, given reasons. And all the time he was in the midst of them. The guilty man did not come naked and fearless into the lions’ pit. One who did not love them, moreover, could not trust them so.

There was a flat-topped rise by the road, and they urged him up on it.

He stood above the road and the metal cloud, talking to them, familiar, as if every one of them knew him well. The sun blushed through and laid its patina on the hills, the ice, on him.

He told them some joke, and they laughed. And there was some banging of fists on shields.

He had not discounted them. They were not blamed or shamed or to be set on. It seemed there would be riches ahead, beside which Raldnor of Ioli’s “bounty” would be dross. And he was too, the magician Raldnor had never been, and that no other was.

And then someone came running, and thrusting out of the crowd, bawled at him:

“Suthamun! Suthamun!”

“Yes,” said Kesarh. “What of him?”

“His son,” the man shouted hoarsely, “you murderer—”

“No,” said Kesarh.

It was apparent then, the superstition, the sway of the pale races also wielding vast power.

Their heat had frozen suddenly in the sunlight, his two thousand brothers, Visian Karmians, mixes, the few score Shansarians, of whom this shouting man was one.

“I had thought,” said Kesarh, “Emel son of Suthamun died of plague. Raldnor told me this. You yourselves believed Raldnor’s lies. And so did I. Emel was his pawn. If it is Emel.”

They yelled out, wanting to absolve for him their wrong of rebellion, to give it credentials: “Yes! Emel! Emel!”

Again he waited. When quiet came he gazed at them. It was as it had always been. His courtesy and his arrogance. They had been noticed, as was their right, by a god.

“I recollect Emel very well,” he said. They were listening, bound. “The might of the goddess,” Kesarh said. “She crushed Suthamun’s dynasty, and left only Emel behind it. They say the goddess dreams the world. We’re just the pictures in Her brain. If Emel lives, then the kingship is his, Karmiss is his, you, gentlemen, and I, all his.” He looked at the Shansarian and said, in the Shansarian tongue of Suthamun’s court, “As She wills it.”

He walked most of the way to the city with them, and at midday they shared food with him on the road.

At some point a King’s agent, concealed till then in the crowd, broke the careless ranks and returned to the port, so to the Lily ships: “Not won yet, but winning.”

It was farcical, and diverted him. Somewhere else, in the core of heart or mind, it enraged him. That he had come again to this, this striving, this unavoidable tax paid the conquerors, the Chosen of the goddess. One of whom had casually seeded Kesarh himself. Unknown father. Only the always-weeping wretched woman wandering at Xai, that black-haired Karmian princess, abased and pining, like some pathetic bitch-dog. Hanging herself for Val Nardia to stumble into the cold feet. Their mother. Damn her. She had understood the sorcerous weight of the pale races. She had let it annihilate her. But he, Kesarh, had dragged the legend down. Only to have it rise again. The snake at Tjis. The snake which had been a sword.

The light fever was beginning, just a fraction, to blur the edges of his judgment. Not enough to be calamitous.

The doctor on the ship had proved incompetent. The hot iron had not been applied for long enough, and the infection reinfested the little cut in his left forearm. It would have to be done again.

When the moronic soldiers had fumbled against him on the road, finally lifting him and bearing him into the city, the whole arm had sung out, a low, dense note of pain. Kesarh dealt with that because he had to. But each man who clutched him he could have killed. In the city, on the steps above the Palace Square, where the brother and sister King and Queen had formerly given audience, he had gone through the entire theatrical once more. And taken them once more.

They seemed to be his, now, the four thousand, five thousand troops at Amlan.

It only remained to deal with Biyh. That should not be too difficult, there had been an obscure message left at a village up the coast, Biyh’s offering, all reverence and fidelity.

And then, to round off this bloody day, the inevitable acknowledgment—on the steps, elevation, and proximity to the stinking drunken rabble of soldiers—of the Prince-King Emel.

Somewhere in the war, Emel was again about to die. Obviously.

But it should not have been necessary. Should not have been here for him, this pitfall. Raldnor overreaching himself, Suthamun, damnable Ashara-Anackire—

“That may be of help, my lord.”

The second physician—the other was laid up, a flogging—straightened from his task. The wound, now packed with medicine, seemed numbed, but not eased.

“Tonight,” said Kesarh, “come back here and cauterize it. This time, efficiently.”

“Don’t worry, my lord. I saw what happened to your other attendant.”

“You were meant to. What’s this?”

“Something to cool the fever.”

“And which will make me drowsy? Do you suppose I can afford to sleep here?” Kesarh pushed the cup aside and it fell to the floor. The arbitrary violence was unusual. As a general rule, Kesarh was fair to underlings. The wine merchants of Karmiss, who had rebuilt their trade on his patronage, adored him, praising his magnanimous charm and personal power. The very men outside, despised, would have fought Free Zakoris for him this minute. That had been part of the spell in the old days, too. Even those who were accorded punishment felt they had been singled out.

Rem . . . Why was he thinking of Rem-Rarmon Am Dorthar. Raldnor’s son. Riding, somewhere, on some errand—Val Nardia’s child. No, it was himself, riding to Ankabek which was no more. And the child . . . No, the child had been a nightmare. It had never happened, any of that.

The second physician, who had got in only an hour ago, with the rest of Kesarh’s slight staff, bowed himself, unseen, out.

Biyh was the next visitor.

Kesarh had ordered himself by then.

They went through everything. The obeisances, the fawnings, the agreements. Without doubt, Biyh had been constant. He would be rewarded. A knife’s length between his ribs before summer. But one need not explain that.

Knives. That brainless Xarabian mare. Had her knife been anointed?

Even from a battlefield no wound had ever festered. That flying splinter in the sea-fight off Karmiss, which should have put out his eye, deflecting, leaving a clean scar hardly visible.

Only the snake at Ujis had ever poisoned him, and that at his own discretion. The scar from that was clearly marked. It lay half an inch above the spot where Ulis Anet’s knife had gone in.

Val Nardia, threatening him with just such a tiny knife, unable to use even her nails against him. She had found it simpler to harm herself.

“You did well, Biyh,” he said. “I shan’t overlook it. You’ve earned Lan’s Guardianship, at least.”

Biyh, missing he had been given what he already had, flowered into idiot grins.

“But Emel, my lord?”

“He imagines I may dispose of him, since Raldnor swore I attempted it, last time.”

“Quite, my lord.”

“Reassure Emel,” said Kesarh. “He’s my King. He’ll leave me charge of the armies, I think. I’m a soldier. Let us all stick to the thing we’re best at.”

Biyh shifted. He had, after all, been one of the Nines. He had seen how Kesarh’s mind could work. He knew some ten-year-old secrets, and knew that Kesarh knew that he did.

“My lord, there’s something—” Biyh hesitated. He gnawed his lips. When Kesarh did not prompt, he said, “there’s something Raldnor did, to safeguard Emel. Or rather, himself.”

“Dressed the boy as a woman and taught him harlot’s manners. So I gather.”

“Well, my lord, actually rather more than that.”

The black and merciless eyes, glazed with a strange opaque brightness—fever, they said an assassin had tried to stab him at Istris—pinned Biyh to the air so he writhed. Better come out with it, make a love-gift of it. Left to himself, Kesarh would learn sooner or later, one could not use it for bargaining, and look what he had done with the troops, spun them round like a wheel. He was as much the showman and the mage as ever—

“Raldnor brought in Ommos surgeons. They did what the Ommos have a talent for.” Kesarh gratified him by blinking. “Yes, my lord. The Prince is no longer any sort of a man. Gelded. Not fit to be a king, not by Vis standards, let alone Shansarian. You wouldn’t want to make a fuss here. They’re that touchy. But the council in Istris—”

Kesarh started to drink wine. There was a silence. Kesarh eventually said, “And how do you know?”

Biyh shrugged. Honesty was the wisest course.

“I don’t mind ’em like that. I’ve seen him stripped. I’ve had him.” After another silence, Biyh, feeling more secure than he had for days, added, “You might let him live. Or you might not. But he can’t harm anyone, poor little beggar.”

Emel himself did not hear this culminating plea. He had heard the rest.

Having been penned in Amlan’s palace so many months, he was privy to several of its more interesting crannies. He had sometimes, fascinated and repelled, played voyeur to Raldnor’s sadistic bed-sports, utilizing an unfrequented overhead gallery with a loose tile or two. Kesarh, as the intermediary captains had done, installed his suite in Raldnor’s apartments. It had not been difficult to employ the previous method.

From the moment Karmian ships had been sighted, Emel had felt the gray draught of death drizzling on his neck. Then Kesarh was in the city, and the soldiers cheered just as loudly as on the night Raldnor had produced his insurance among the torches. Emel considered bolting, but the palace was rushing with men. Kesarh entered the palace. Not only one apartment, he was in every shadowed place.

The act of going to eavesdrop on fate needed all Emel’s courage. While he did it, even listening to Kesarh’s earlier words, Emel had not deemed himself reprieved. To be told he would live and be a king always had intimations of a death-sentence. They had all, had they not, promised him that? But he had been praying, too, not to Ashara or any deity of name, but to some unformed god of the self, that Biyh would somehow gain a means to protect him. For Biyh, surely, was faithful. Then Biyh surrendered him uncaringly.

Emel returned to his bedchamber. He had picked up a flair for cruelty from Raldnor, and coming on a beetle on the door, pulled off its legs as he wept with fear. Hearing the steps approach along the corridor, preface to the executioner, he crushed out its life also under his heel, a counterpoint.

Another gaudy orange sunset lit the ceremony on the stairway, hitting the painted walls and tiers of the palace, the stout painted wooden pillars with their lotuses of indigo and henna, and capitals of flying bis. Kesarh had requested that the King and Queen be present, and they sat in their bone chairs with bone bracelets, behind him up the steps. She was lovely, and her brother-husband was sick, still. Kesarh had asked after his health, and the Queen had said, “It’s nothing, lord King of Karmiss.”

“Since I put men into Lan,” said Kesarh, “he’s been failing.”

“Just so,” she said. “He and I, we are Lan. Distress this earth, and we are stricken.”

“Are you?” he said. “You yourself seem to bloom, madam.”

“A painted complexion,” she said. “Didn’t they tell you, lord King, even Lans know something of deception.”

He thought of Val Nardia again. Sister and wife.

Then he went out into the sunset, and the bone chairs came, and the other participants of the play. The soldiers crammed the Square and hung from the rooftops and trees to see. There would be Amlans, too, watching. Perhaps the reinstatement of blond rule, this sham, would seem bitterly humorous to Lan, also.

At each breath, the light throbbed. In an hour or so, there was the second cauterization to look forward to.

Emel was being escorted down the stair.

And the soldiers, catching sight of him, trained to it now, shouted and banged their shields.

The racket swarmed in Kesarh’s skull, but he moved about to welcome the boy—who was not even that—the one mistake that had been made and which could not be rectified till Karmiss.

Emel gazed up, too frightened to avoid the hypnotic eyes of Kesarh. The hand that touched Emel’s shoulder had lost none of its physical power. It had lifted him to horseback and into chariots, it had guided and led him. Once, in winter, when his own child’s hands were frozen, Kesarh had returned them to life, chafing them in his own. Emel had worshipped Kesarh. Kesarh who wanted to murder him.

Kesarh seemed to peruse him now, stern, compassionate. Then he turned to the soldiers. He said to them, the words ringing across the square: “This is indeed Emel. My King’s son, and my King.”

And then, as they bellowed all over again, Kesarh knelt to him.

It was not like Raldnor, but solely like that other time, at Istris in the map chamber. The kneeling man. But the sunset had grown thicker, more like blood now on the shining black of the hair, the bloody garments.

Emel twisted to face the soldiers, and reckoning he was about to speak to them himself, a unique event, they hushed each other and abruptly all the cacophony was gone, leaving just a hollow of ominous red light.

Emel stared at them. They had cheered him, too, had always cheered him. They liked him—it must be so. And there were many of them. And Kesarh, his enemy, was only one.

The desperate solution came to Emel suddenly. He knew he had mere seconds to implement it. He flung up his arms, and screamed at them in his high girlish voice. “It’s lies! He’ll kill me! Kesarh will kill me! Don’t let him—please save me—help me—”

Over and over, the same phrases spurted forth. The shrill wailing penetrated, its anguish apparent even where language was obscured. The front rows of Karmian soldiery reacted, a murmur, sulky and unsure, questions and denials, passed backward. It might have burnt itself out. While Emel’s throat was not strong, he could not have managed very much more.

But Kesarh had risen to his feet. Looking down at this screeching eunuch, his cold blood seemed to boil. “Be quiet,” Kesarh said. But Emel did not heed. He cowered away and began to bawl, sobbing and flailing.

There was malice in it too. It was malice which had lent Emel the bravado. To damage the ones who betrayed him, even as he tried to escape them. And because of this, when Kesarh reached out again to grasp him, hold him still, Emel rounded, snarling through his hysteria. And Emel too reached out, beating and clawing at Kesarh to keep him off.

Emel did not know about the tiny festering agony of the wound. If he had known, instinctively, he might have tried to avoid it.

But the attack—which from blow appeared vitiated, nothing—came down repeatedly there, and exactly there. The pain exploded through sinews, into the pit of an arm, the breast and throat, the vitals. And seeing Kesarh recoil, Emel lashed out again and again.

The soldiers were in fact chuckling, some of them, not realizing quite what went on, finding the spectacle funny; the feeble smitings of their boy King. Then Kesarh struck him.

Probably, they expected a slap. It was not a slap.

They were all fighters, and however sloppy they had become, most of them that saw it saw too the blow was enough to break Emel’s neck. And that it did break it.

Like something falling to pieces, the boy collapsed and toppled all the way down the stair, and into the front rank of soldiers at the bottom. Who leaned over him and tried him, and then let go, muttering. It had a different timbre now, this noise, and it spread rapidly.

The light was almost gone. Last dapplings of red still lit up the murderer on his self-chosen stage of steps.

He did not move or speak. It was not the pain or the fever or the rage which had changed him into stone. Perhaps irony had some part in it. He had used death so often and so adroitly in private. Yet he must have known, in the most public fashion possible he had just now written out his epitaph.

23

Dhaker, THE OPAL-EYE, directed his eternal wink through the night toward the shore, and said, “Something burns.”

He was correct in this.

The three Zakorian galleys, letting out sail to a shoreward wind, circled nearer. Before too long, the distant flashing of flames became self-explanatory. Most of the port of Amlan was on fire.

Outriders of the navy of Free Zakoris, Dhaker’s triad had kept the reavers’ agility. They had a diplomatic reason for going in, which was that Kesr Am Karmiss, ally of King Yl, had patently joined battle with the rebel Karmians in Lan. But the long hot winter prowling Thaddra, and Dorthar’s barren, guarded north, had put them in key for a fight. And doubtless there would be spoil, a city of it, with such drink and women as Karmiss had not consumed.

The boats swam to land, avoiding the Karmian anchorage, which seemed, however, deserted. When they got ashore, most of the battle in the port was over; only bodies, the odd looter, the fires, remained. The Amlans were gone, too. Off into the hills, likely. Hills and mountains were the soul of Lan.

Dhaker organized his men. A company stayed to scour the port, and keep faith with their own ships. The rest took off along the Amlan road.

Nearer and later, the glow over the city wall gave sign of some incendiary action also here. Their mission gradually altered focus.

Free Zakoris hated Kesarh, despite any treaty. He had the yellow man’s blood, and besides had spent his youth and young manhood humiliating her. Now he might fall into Free Zakorian hands. Yl would be interested no doubt, to get such a prisoner, while Karmiss and the east would loosen on the tree.

It was the Shansarian troops who began the riot in Amlan. Their motive was unvarnished: Emel was theirs. When Kesarh was taken, albeit like a felon, into the palace, they had called council. The time of soldierly governance had gone to their heads, and they demanded the slayer of their rightful king be given back to them. Feeling scaled high. They cursed Kesarh. He was Vis, scum, a black jackal. This led to a personalization of insults all round. The Vis soldiery, who had also enjoyed the autonomy, not only of Lan, but in Kesarh’s Visian Karmiss, took exception. Others came in on every side. There really was no discipline left in Amlan. Raldnor and his successors had eroded it, and Kesarh, who could have got it back, was disqualified. They sprang for each other’s throats, howling. Vis against Shansar, mix against both, company against company. And while it went on, messengers and berserkers alike carried the story and the bloodbath to the port. The remainder of Kesarh’s escort, hurrying off the convoy of Lily ships, were intercepted on the road.

One frantic contingent, beating a way through insane Shansars and roaring Istrians, through the fire-hung city and the streams of evacuating Lans, reached the palace doors—now the ultimate and single defended area—and thus the surviving Karmian command. This happened to be a bemused Biyh.

“Commander, three shiploads of Free Zakorians are coming.”

“Hell and the pit,” said Biyh.

He was not far out.

There were not even six hundred of them, the Zakorians, but they were eager, barbaric and in good order.

The port had had no defense. The gates of the city stood wide. Nor could any unity be brought to the maelstrom. Kesarh, of course, could have done it. But Kesarh, of course, had been conducted to the cellar. “My—lord,” Biyh had said there, solemnly, between dismayed nerves and dumbfounded curiosity and a certain oblique pleasure. “For your own protection, I must leave you here. Bound, and guarded.” Kesarh had grinned, or showed his teeth like a dog when afraid, one was not sure. One hastened away and landed in this mess.

Biyh hustled together the seventy men who were holding the entries of Amlan’s palace. He had already made an effort to stir out the Lannic Army from the Salamander barracks. But most of these had made a run for it, or gone to aid their families in the pandemonium.

In the end, Dhaker Opal-Eye’s force cut neat swaths to the door. Not seeking to engage battle, save where it was most tempting, many of the groups of fighters had overlooked them. The palace defenses retaliated bravely, but not for very long. They were dispatched against walls, on galleries, under columns. At length, Free Zakorians had the palace. They did not attempt to retain it. They looted but did not unleash fire, searching diligently. The King and Queen were gone, persuaded by the remnant of their own guard, who successfully gathered them away into Lan’s night-smurred soul, under cover of chaos.

Dhaker’s men did, nevertheless, get into a cellar over five gutted Karmians. They found Kesarh, manacled as they would have wished.

“Here is the one,” said Opal-Eye, “who is not a king. Well,” said Opal-Eye, “you’re not a king now, Kesr Am Karmiss.”

Not only shackled, but burning with fever, he was no difficulty to deal with. They hacked a way back to the road, to the port and to their ships, killing here, looting there.

Leaving embers on the skyline, their slaves rowed them north.

Dhaker himself cauterized the infected wound in his captive’s arm. He heated the iron white-hot and kept it on the roasting flesh for as long as was needful, perhaps some seconds more. Dhaker did not want his trophy to die before they rejoined Yl’s fleets, but also, Dhaker’s father had been at Tjis.

The house, so agreeable and fruitlessly tranquil, was abruptly full of screaming.

Ulis Anet stood to face the doorway as one of the winged pairs of feet flew in.

“Madam—”

“What is it?”

She was told.

The King of Xarabiss’ daughter turned and walked away into the garden. She ignored the turmoil. White pigeons, offended by the sudden din, dashed to the sky between chasms of rose-red wall.

The Lily ships were coming back from Lan. From Istris other ships were setting forth to bring the Karmian remnants out. The length of Lan, they said, men galloped, calling in the troops, summoning them from hills and crags, from the valleys and the villages. Every man of Karmiss must return. Lan would be abandoned, rent and used and left lying, for Free Zakoris to have if Free Zakoris willed it.

The Black Leopard would move toward Karmiss herself, very shortly. No longer an ally—the devourer. The treaties were all torn up.

Kesarh, regicide and madman—Free Zakoris had Kesarh.

She had dreamed of something, she could not even properly remember. A serpent was in it, and its teeth glittered like knives. She had wept in her sleep, and woken weeping. And now she knew. And wept once more.

She did not love him. She loved him. And he would die, and Karmiss would die, and she was to blame, so her dream had shown her, save she could not remember it, or why.

“Lady, you’ll be cold. Here’s your nice cloak, with the kalinx fur, he gave you.”

“No,” Ulis Anet murmured. But they lifted her from the grass, began to bear her away.

“Hush, lady. Istris isn’t safe. Full of crazy soldiers and ships coming in. The Warden’s to enforce curfew. And the baker said, black galleys, the Leopard, seen at sunset—”

A male voice. “We’re going inland. Come on, lady. You’re delaying us.”

She was bewildered. She thought they would sell her as a slave.

“Kesarh,” she said.

“Forget him, lady. He’s sliced in segments, feeding fish.”

“Shush! Let her alone.”

The night closed her eyes. She slept in the arms of her maids.

Stars patterned the darkness.

They were in the hills of Karmiss.

She stared at the stars, and some philosophy or aberration filled her so she lifted her hands. In Elyr, star-gazers understood such fancies.

There was a small inn, and when the sun came up she was alone. Even the ankars and the ornaments they had brought for her had disappeared. The cloak of black and white furs had disbanded into live animals and slunk under the door.

The inn-keeper stood over her.

“Fine lady—fine whore. What’ll you pay me with?”

He raped her. At any other time, such a terrible thing would have sickened her, driven her mad. But she was beyond it. All the while he abused her, her conscious mind was far away.

“You’ll have to try harder than that,” he said.

He told her she could sweep out hearths and carry water, and he would whip her for negligence. Had she been sold and never known it?

She got up from the bed and faced him.

“I am the King’s mistress,” she said.

“The King—we’ll be ripped in shreds because of this king. Out! I’m sorry I soiled myself with you, you red-haired slut.”

There was a road. It went to Ioli, where she had never been. People in flight from every city and town seemed to travel the road in either direction, moving on to it and off it at various subsidiary tracks. There were carts, wagons, lowing beasts, the clatter of pans tied together, and the elderly, too weak to go on, resignedly sitting to die on the verge.

Ulis Anet walked inside the moving entity the multiple evacuation had become. She did not know where she went. Was Ioli secure? Never. Where then? West, and off the island. To Dorthar, where the Storm Lord could protect them. Rot Kesarh. May the crows tear his liver! An old woman, of good family and well-dressed, dropped in the way of a wagon, which was halted with cursing and complaints. Ulis Anet lifted the old woman up, vaguely reminded of a grandmother in Xarar, where the hot spring heated the palace even during the snow. The old woman clung to her. Ulis Anet, having rescued her, could not make her let go. Ulis Anet said, “Kesarh. He was my lover.” The woman spat on her. Catching sunlight, the spittle shone. A pebble struck her arm. Fickle—they had loved him, only three days before, when she had not.

Outside Ioli, she joined a makeshift camp, shared its fire, and back darkness came and stars.

They made about the fire ghastly buffoonery of how death loomed and they would all die. “And a Free Zakorian’s standing there, with a bloody great sword. He says to me. Where shall I put this? And I just pray my mate here’s got his bloody great mouth open.” Or they sang songs: “No morning star to bring us from the night.”

A man tried to lie over her.

“Kesarh,” she said. “He—”

The man beat her, but not much.

She was a pariah. He would not soil himself.

There were ships standing off at such and such a location, bound for Dorthar. Somehow she was with a family who had given her food and were now taking her to the ships.

She imagined entering Dorthar and throwing herself, a suppliant, at the wheels of Raldanash’s chariot as he rode by on the way to war.

“Why are you laughing?” the children asked her.

“Stop that. She’s daft, poor bitch.”

When they arrived at the shore, there were no ships. The family made off westward and deserted the lunatic, who was an ill omen.

She wandered awhile with the wandering light, then sat down on a stone.

The waves blew against the beach. But there was no peace. In the silence, she saw Kesarh and what the Free Zakorians would do to him. She had heard of the exploits of his valor, Tjis, the sea-fight off Karmiss a year ago. She was afraid she would see it in truth, the mental barrier giving way, letting his mind pour into hers, his torture and death, and she could do nothing.

She did not properly understand any of what had taken place, only its outcome. And sometimes she did not believe that either, though she knew it was so.

He had not died. Not yet. She would be aware of his death. Perhaps.

Not much before sunset, a storm cloud began to cross the water, miles off to the northeast. Ulis Anet left the stone and wandered into the surf, and stared at the blackness of the cloud until it melted away against the land. An hour after, another storm cloud, this one red, crept to the sky. At first she took it only as a vestige of sunfall. But it was the nightmare, black cloud, red—Zakorian ships, and fire.

She ran, inanely, the way the family had gone, westward, from the night.

In the blackness, she started back initially, thinking she had reached more arson. But then she perceived it was a group of torches. There was a shallow cove, with boats, rough-made, leaky things, groaning on to the waves one after another.

She came among the people there. They were few. Their lights caught her and someone said, “Look—ulis-hair. A good omen.”

She had been an ill omen before.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“The island.”

She gazed at them. Karmiss was an island.

“The holy shrine,” said another.

“The Leopard took it already. He won’t bother to come back. It’ll be safe there.”

They were going over to Ankabek, in the shadow of the moonless night.

They let her go with them, for her lucky hair.

Vodon’s men had cast Her into the sea from the rocks, Ashara-Anackire, the goddess of Ankabek. Down there She lay, dreaming, as she dreamed in Ibron above Koramvis. It was said She had once dreamed the world.

A sable shell on the sable sky, aureoled with stars, the island rose from the sea.

Have I come this way before, quick, and dead? the Xarabian thought. Val Nardia had done so.

Beyond the landing, the island went up, but the village had been gouged by the Leopard. They said not one living creature had survived. Only ghosts dwelled here now, a slain priestess and her folk, but who had ventured to see?

They entered the village and did what they could with it. Bits of walls provided wind-breaks. They stretched hide across and tented them in, and lit fires. A lizard was spotted, a gray jewel on a rock, life after all. Supper was cooked. Their normalcy was genuine and glad, but here, in the haven, there was to be always the scent of things omitted, the condition of the earth beyond; they did not mention Vis.

She could not eat, thinking of Kesarh. A woman patted her hand. “Ah, you’ve lost someone, I expect.”

Ulis Anet looked beyond the earth, up into the stars, and then the stars drew her away, on to a stony path and through an uncanny wood. It was blackened, but here and there some branch or bough had survived, and put out resinous buds, sweetening the sweet air. It was an hour’s walk.

The temple stood at the island’s summit. The upright slot of the entrance was very high, the doors broken in and their machinery uprooted. There were old black markings on the walls. But, although the way had been breached below, up here the clue to ingress had not been come on. The circle of the inner Sanctuary was still shut.

Ulis Anet went to the stone and laid her forehead and the palms of her hands upon its coolness.

Val Nardia had hanged herself. Is it for some such finality I too was brought to Ankabek?

A night bird fluted in the cremated groves outside. Life in death.

But Kesarh, Kesarh—

Ulis Anet sank to her knees. She pressed her lips to the unpenetrated wall. A prayer of the Amanackire came to her, from somewhere in childhood, and she said the words aloud, not knowing why, or their significance, her tears warmer than the burned stone.

“Not what I lack, nor what I desire, but give me only what I am.”

After a moment, the stone moved. Part of the wall fell slowly back before her. The wall was like a pipe, and the pressure points that sprung the slabs were set low down and could only be come at by kneeling. They responded to breaths of differing shapes, such as were formed phonetically. There were more than a hundred keys, all prayers, of which Ulis Anet’s was merely one.

Beyond, the Sanctum was despoiled, as the pirates had left it, and without light. But she stepped into it. She was afraid, understanding the wall would close. Incarcerated, she could only then seek a way out through one of the inner doors Vodon’s men had forced, and so through the labyrinth of under-passages—

She stood in the blackness now, smashed pottery or human bones under her feet, without even the statue of the goddess to comfort her.

And yet, the goddess might be conjured. She was there for all who cried out to Her—Not what I lack or desire. What I am.

No, it was not Val Nardia’s phantom which hovered here.

It was the woman they had whispered of on the boat, Eraz, the priestess.

“Help me,” Ulis Anet said to her, in the dark.

The help is in you. You must help yourself.

“Yes,” said Ulis Anet. “The help is in me. I must help myself.”

The message of Free Zakoris to Karmiss had been terse. We have your King. Will you ransom him? The Warden of Istris sent to learn the substance of this ransom. The ransom was Karmiss. It was a witticism. Kesarh had awarded the Leopard Prince Rarmon, the Storm Lord’s brother. But the Leopard wanted Kesarh himself and now had him. Karmiss the Leopard would also have, given or taken. Already there were paw marks on the beaches.

As heat began to come into the days, the black thunder clouds poured down the seas of Vis.

In Dorthar’s north, the ballistas started their dialogue with a hostile ocean. It was not much more than an exercise, there, something to divert that eye of Raldanash’s kingdom and a portion of men and armaments. One night, a company of Dortharians swam out and fired four Zakorian ships. As the upper decks exploded, the Dortharians went on to hole the undersides and, breaking their chains, liberated most of the slaves. Gallant heroics these, worth a song. But forgotten when fifty Free Zakorian galleys sailed into the major estuary of the Okris river. For a fleet of any size, this was the road to Dorthar’s hub, and the delta garrison was seven thousand strong. It held the river mouth against the onslaught, which now gave no sign of decreasing. As further black ships drifted to join their fellows, further battalions, mostly Xarabians and Dortharian-Vathcrians, were force-marched or skulled east to shore up the blockade.

Ommos. Ships clustered black against her coast. She had been breached at Karith, that enduringly weak spot, but the Dortharian troops stationed inland against this contingency had ambushed and beaten Yl’s forces off and back into the sea.

Xarabiss reported skirmishes at Ilah’s port. Her watchtowers farther north sent up crimson dragon-breath.

Eastward, Lan, trampled in the mud of passage, kept still, kept silent. None came to take, as yet, but the empty villages were portent enough. The smoke had settled, flowers opened on the hills, but men might have gone away to the moon.

Westward, all Vardian Zakoris was mobilized, and the little ally kingdoms, Iscah, Corhl, and Ott. Alisaar’s fleets, approximating one hundred and twenty-two ships, continued up and down her jagged edges. The Shansar fleet had sailed from Moiyah, thirty carved swans, snake-headed, going west.

It now seemed plain, Yl would bring the bulk of his navy west to south against Alisaar and Old Zakoris, then through the Inner Sea between Alisaar and Xarabiss to Ommos, already sorely harried, and so upward to the womb of Vis, Dorthar.

The Leopard did not conceal its plans. Now it would strike here, now there. It was everywhere at once. For more than twenty years it had been building ships and men to feed this summer.

A forest fire tore the jungles northwest of Vardish Zakoris. Three thousand men, with chariots, catapults and siege engines hauled by monsters of the swamps, palutorvuses—which some, never having seen them, feared—burst against Sorm’s outposts under the dividing mountains. Free Zakoris stared at conquered Zakoris. Zakorian defenders defied their Vardian officers, slew them, and defected. Tattered, Sorm’s force withdrew, leaving the borders in Yl’s hands, fabricating a new border, afraid the Leopard would steal by them elsewhere.

The Leopard had entered northeastern Thaddra too, via her rivers. There were Free Zakorians in strategic Tumesh, now, under the tall peaks, the dragon’s crest of Dorthar. On the pass above, the Dortharians readied themselves.

Once, the oceans beyond all land southwest and south had been mythologically discounted as the Sea of Aarl. As Raldnor Am Anackire had learned, there were marine volcanoes west and south of Alisaar, the seed of the myth. Other, less lethal, passages to the second continent had since become well known to traders.

The withering of the Aarl-bane had additionally opened sea roads around Alisaar into the Inner Sea; formerly, no ship would risk going farther south than Saardos.

It had also, of course, laid wide the way for Free Zakoris.

Coming south, hugging the western shores of Vis as it must, the great fleet would be more than a month in voyaging. There was no land-route possible. Thaddra melted there into a nameless morass of diseased swamp and jungle ancient as the world, unclaimed by any, offering nothing. Where this slab of hateful earth jutted down toward Alisaar, a high beacon had been inaugurated on a rocky promontory. Small unsigiled vessels paddled about the area, keeping the watches of half the countries adjacent.

The great fleet was already moving. The most current sighting estimated a hundred and sixty-five ships, packed with men as Free Zakoris was proficient at packing—maybe eighteen thousand fighting men.

Their slaves rowed not only chained, but blindfold, in case by some accident they might catch a glimpse of those they met, their own countrymen, and be seized with patriotism, or some fantasy of being saved. A handful of slaves had already mutinied. They were tortured on the decks, as the others, blindfold but not deaf, rowed on. Only when these warning voices could no longer scream, did corpses go into the sea. Huge lizard-creatures slid from the jungle coasts and hastened out to feast.

One sunrise, the foremost galleys sighted a tower of glass flying over the water, an iceberg, driven by eccentric currents and winds to slow dissolving under the dry western sun.

The Free Zakorians did not care for it, this cold clear thing. They said it had the torso and breasts of a woman.

The Dortharian fleet was anchored off Thos.

The Middle Lands had seldom fought by sea. Dorthar’s strength had been chariots and men and mighty walls, since the time of Rarnammon. Even in the Lowland War she had thrust away the ships of the Sister Continent, and engaged in combat on land, until the land moved like the sea and ended the battle.

The shipwrights were Vathcrians, and the ships were Vathcrian in style, high-beaked and beautiful. Their white sails glistened, blazed with the rust and black Oragon of Dorthar, gold and black with the Serpent and Cloud, the white on amber on white of the goddess banners of the Dortharian Anackire. The Vathcrian flotilla had in turn put out the blue regalia of Ashkar, brave as if for celebration. The Tarabine flotilla, already colored for blood, reflected the sea into wine. But the fleet numbered less than a hundred vessels. No reinforcements had come from the homelands, no message. Though the Karmians’ vaunting seemed done, it was too late. Alliances were blowing chaff. The Middle Lands stood alone as, since the snow, they had reckoned to stand.

When Raldanash rode into the port near sundown, Thos turned out to wave and exalt. Enough flowers were blooming that they could fling them to him and his men, the glitter of mail in dying sunlight. Next year there might be, after all, no more flowers, no more sun, for any of them.

In the garrison overlooking the harbor, the guardian, too aged to fight but with two sons down on the ships, bowed and stammered and went away, leaving the King and his commanders to their talk.

After dinner, that too dwindled. Most of them set off to bed with willing febrile Thosian women. Everywhere there was a glut of virgins to be had, girls anxious to lose their maidenheads to a hero or a friend. If Free Zakoris had them, they knew how it would be.

When the moon rose, Raldanash was alone, seated unsleeping in the guardian’s bedroom which, hung with the gaudiest silks, was his for the night.

“My lord,” Vencrek had said at Anackyra, “your place is here, in your capital. Not jaunting to meet Free Zakoris at the mouth of the Inner Sea—”

“Farther west,” Raldanash had corrected absently.

“Wherever. Do you think Yl doesn’t daydream of that? You there, and the Leopard breaking in here from Okris, or out of Ommos. Raldanash, we’re holding Ommos by an inch of skin—it could happen any day.”

“You will defend Dorthar,” said Raldanash, “with distinction and common sense.”

Vencrek used an explicit Vathcrian oath. “Dorthar without a heart. Kingless.”

“The people of Dorthar expect me to go where I am going, to intercept the Leopard in its might, the greater force, at sea. Not idly to wait for them to reach us, a hundred and sixty ships.”

“My lord, I’ve never known you to act in such a precipitate—”

“If Rarmon had been here—”

“If Rarmon had been here he would have snatched the crown and brought Yl galloping in to share it.”

“No,” said Raldanash, “you really shouldn’t listen to Free Zakorian propaganda.”

Vencrek said, moving into the tongue of Vathcri, “Why are you doing this?”

Raldanash, too, changed to the language of home. “I’ve told you.”

“No, my lord, you haven’t told me.”

Raldanash had looked at him then, and Vencrek had suddenly pushed all the military paraphernalia aside, walked across the chamber and flung his arms round him, as if they had been boys again, in the valleys.

To be embraced with such frantic affection, love and anger, shook Raldanash, but he suffered it, was even momentarily comforted. When Vencrek let him go, Raldanash began quietly, “If it were not for your support and kindness—”

But Vencrek, striding back to the papers, said, “There will be twenty Amanackire priests on the King’s galley, I hear.” Raldanash said nothing. Vencrek said: “I wonder why?”

“To invoke Ashkar-Anackire.”

Vencrek said, “My lord, I know some of the legends, too. The lines of energy that supposedly cross Vis. The line shot from the goddess temple above Koramvis—to Vathcri. I hazard you mean to meet the Leopard’s ships on that line of Power, as near as your theologians and cartographers can judge it.”

“Then, that’s your hazard.”

Vencrek turned, posed, had his suavity again. He said in Visian: “I see. Well, I’m probably all error. I know you leaned to the life of a sacerdote when a child, my lord, and still do. But you’ve never been sufficient idiot to throw Dorthar away for it.”

They spoke of military deployments.

Only at the door did Vencrek say, very lightly, “Of course, you’ve left no heir. What’s to become of us all if you go down?”

“Amrek left no heir,” said Raldanash. “The goddess provided one.”

Now, in Thos in the moon brightness, one recollected a workshop in the hills and the making of a crescent bow, and a ten-year-old Vencrek running through the waist-high grasses, yelling, waving the bow. And the terraces up to the temple, the cool enamel of live snakeskin, the shadows, and: “When you’re King of all Vis, what’ll I be?” “My Counselor.” And Vencrek frowning, “But I want to fight, lead your armies.” “The wars are over,” Raldanash had said. They had agreed, that being the case, Counselor was best.

Later Sulvian glided across the moonlight, her white hair blowing, but it had merged with some imagery of his father’s, some telepathic symbol lodged in his brain at birth. For Sulvian crumbled into gilded ashes and blew away along the night.

The elegant ships took wing with the morning.

They sailed southward, the crenellated shore always visible on the left hand: Steep-shelved Ommos, the plain-lands of Xarabiss, where watchtowers sent up flowers of blue smoke. There was a mild following wind.

After twenty-five days, the Storm Lord’s fleet came into the glassy water between Xarabiss and the borderland of Alisaar and Old Zakoris. Here, a cordon of Xarabian and Dortharian-Vathcrian vessels had been stationed across the sea, between garrisoned watchtowers on either coast. The original plan had chosen a point farther south, where the sea channel was narrower. But Alisaar’s withdrawal from alliance had made her unacceptable as the western end of this oceanic rope. Nor was the chain mighty. Twenty-three galleys maintained it, equipped with such war machinery as could be spared. The two garrisons were of similar bulk. It was a last-ditch measure. Success elsewhere and the element of surprise would favor it, but if most if Yl’s force swept into the channel, the cordon had no hope, save to delay.

Beyond the northern edge of Alisaar, the sea spread wide again. Xarabiss melted away in a sunset cloud as they turned southwest toward the open waters of war.

It had taken the Thaddrian most of two days to clamber through the rubble and into the uplands beyond. Rising, winning through, these had touches of allegory. Gradually the plains city of Anackyra, its martial show, its multitude of soldiers, the apathetic fear of its citizens, vanished. Within the shambles of Koramvis there had been halts, to rest, to search about. There was no longer any sure way over the wide river, but he found a little raft, some native robber’s, perhaps, and rowed himself unchallenged to the farther shore. That side there was the “Merchant’s Road” a path for travelers coming from the mountains, a project begun and abandoned before it reached the southern bank, falling itself in disrepair.

When he broke out of the lawless damaged loveliness of the ruins, the hills opened like honeycomb on either side. A great bird flew up before his coming, then loomed above him on broad wings.

The sun was just going down and the evening was limpidly gathering all about, when he saw below him the dragon’s eye, Lake Ibron, like a pearl.

They had not gone up to the temple, or where the temple had been before the quake threw down the hill. They sat almost indolently among huge grass-grown boulders.

He saw at first glance Lowlanders, a fair Xarabian, one Vardish man playing dice with another, and the forms of two small red Lannic sheep questing in the grass for clovers. Standing up against the sheet of soft light that was the sky, were Amanackire, like a snowy grove. They stared at him, gods disturbed. But the Thaddrian looked past them, and seeing what he had come to find, he went to her.

He did not obeise himself. She was a part of the goddess, to whom he knelt only in ritual, never in fact, for that was not the proper way.

She told him, without speech, that he should sit.

He sat before her.

The lake, the light, bloomed at her back. Composed and pure as an icon, her symmetry was exquisite. But what pleased him most was her complete approachability. And that in the midst of a totality which seemed to alter the very air. In just this way the most valid things were come to. The sky itself, the sea, the world, magnificent and charged with meaning—a child might gaze at them and read them like an open book. This was the verity of Power.

He was the only sheer Visian there. The idea that he had been invited began to make a strange sense. It was a balance. In a short while, he produced from his priest’s robe a square of cloth, and opened it on the rock for her. Inside were pieces of a shattered amber ring. Sparks of the sun were startled in them. Even the Amanackire came from their eminence to see.

The Thaddrian, who had watched Raldnor and Astaris ride away into the forests of the north, was something of a psychic hound. This talent had enabled him to know Rarmon who was to be Rarnammon, and long after, to track Rarnammon’s path to the spot in Koramvis where enemies had taken him. The ring, shattered, had been abandoned. The Thaddrian had gathered up the bits carefully. It was not that it was a labor Ashni had set him, more a labor he wished in some way to perform for her, and which had therefore been allotted. Even on the Plains, there were sometimes offerings of fruit, or carvings, left for the goddess. She understood it was sometimes difficult, in moments of great joy, not to give thanks in concrete terms; the giver’s need, not the recipient’s.

Ashni drew the shards of the ring into her palm.

A woman now in the Zor had worn this ring. Ashni had worn the ring. Rarnammon had worn it. Another, the son of Yannul, had held the ring, though it burned him. A link of flesh and resin, still bonded.

The pieces were all in place now, all but the pieces of the ring.

The last ray of sunlight coiled through them, like a serpent. And then, the ring was whole, melded together, intact.

He heard their breathing, the circle of them all around, the sighs attendant upon miracle. But the Thaddrian grinned. And she smiled at him.

“Yes, you know,” he said to her inside his skull, without words. “I am the one says miracles need not be, for gods to be. And to this day I never saw any reason why Raldnor and Astaris shouldn’t be living in some lost thatched village of Thaddra, among those who didn’t know them. Ordinary, happy, obscure. I can speak the jargon of the priests—the transcension, the chariot of flame that takes the god into heaven. And to me, that’s so simple, so mundane. Miracles are nothing—the stuff of life. The flower blossoming, the invisible emerging from the womb—a child, resin turned into amber—miracles, nothing but miracles. But there’s the fact beyond the miracle. The stone under the silver lake. What we are and must become. That’s the reason and the perfect truth, and the answer to all the questions and the cries. Isn’t it, Ashni-who-is-Anackire?”

And the reply was given him, just as the ring glowed on her finger. And the sun bloomed still in her eyes, though the sun had gone down.

24

A white tower on a dark blue sky.

The sweep of the scattered city below.

And then the jungle-forest, the distances of Thaddra.

The tower had once been bowl-topped, forerunner of the towers of Dorthar. But the masonry had come down. Into what remained, the neck of the tower, a room with half a ceiling and many long shutterless windows, Tuab Ey trod like a cat. And stopped, staring.

Rarnammon stood in the center of the floor, looking at him, apparently waiting for him.

“I said I wouldn’t visit your new—abode,” said Tuab Ey, “but here I am. Now, tell me what you’ve been doing all these days and nights. Incantations and summonings? A few of them say they’ve seen lights flying to the windows like birds.”

Rarnammon shook his head, very slowly. Tuab Ey was uncertain whether this was denial or wondering contempt. The qualities of Rarnammon had intensified. He seemed less penetrable than any other object, and yet lucent, day pouring through the eyes—

“You are a magician,” said Tuab Ey. “Admit it. I don’t believe in magic, and will laugh. Then perhaps I can coax you forth, mighty lord. My dog-pack wants to go north or east, and find Free Zakorians to kill. Someone came, one of Jort’s pigs, said the north rivers were running with dead.”

“Tuab Ey,” said Rarnammon, “go down to the foot of the tower. Guard it for me. Keep the others out.”

“Why?”

“The magic you referred to is about to be woken up. Incantations, summonings . . . not quite that. But lightning striking this tower might be a little thing.”

“Don’t talk in conundrums if you want something done. All right. I’ll keep the gate for you. The others’ll be off, anyway, if anything happens. What will happen? Apart from lightning.”

“I don’t know. I told you that before. But you have Lowland blood somewhere. I think you’re necessary to this balance.” A hint of friendly bathos: “I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient. But go down now, if you will, Tuab Ey.”

Tuab Ey backed a step, collected himself and said, “You look like a god, standing there. Did you realize? Am I supposed to worship?”

Rarnammon walked toward him through the sunlight of the windows. It appeared to cling and cover him, that light, so that when he stretched out his hand and laid it without pressure on Tuab Ey’s arm, and the light seemed to stream into it and through Tuab Ey, it was only as expected.

Rarnammon put out his other hand to steady him.

Tuab Ey said quietly through the dizziness, “—Power. What do I do with it?”

“Keep the gate.”

Tuab Ey went down the stair, leaning on the wall, light filling him, to keep the gate.

The day was hot, hazy. There was nothing unusual about it. Yet he knew it was—the last day.

Ever since he had come into the tower—the high place stipulated in all lore—he had begun to move mentally toward this time. Even in his ignorance he had moved, as a child learns to walk in ignorance of walking.

There had been dreams, hallucinations, voids, the sense of dropping to earth from the stars, without impact.

Now there was the sense of crisis.

Rarnammon was not alone. Others gathered, as forces gathered. The world seemed one endlessly indrawing breath.

As the day turned, Rarnammon became aware of the tower shutting itself about him. The very glare and heat in the window-places solidified, making a screen where there was none. The haphazard noises of the ruin faded.

It was conceivable he might die. But then, he might have died on a hundred occasions. In his years as a thief, in Kesarh’s service at Tjis, in Lan outriding the caravans, in Dorthar, in the hands of Free Zakoris. Each moment of survival was a gift. Since he had come back to himself here in this fallen city, his physical persona had meant less. He had felt part of some entirety, one bough of one great tree.

Rarnammon lay down on the floor, and the lights crossed themselves in the air above him. A bird flew over the gap in the ceiling on yellow gauffered wings.

It was the final expression of external matter. He closed his eyes and went inward. The madness, the letting go of the fleshly self, had taught him. As his half-brother Raldanash was, Rarnammon also was now an adept.

His consciousness descended, entered another place, and so stepped forth.

One vast eye, seeing without sight, and in the sightless seeing, all other senses were bound, and yet further senses the flesh could not employ.

He sensed, in this manner, Tuab Ey below him at the foot of the tower, seated in the entrance. A shape—the man, Galud—was there, bending over him, asking what went on, and Tuab Ey was sending him off, and Galud obeyed, stumbling.

A coalescence of radiance and color was sinking to a river of moistures and shade; sun and forest. Every insect and beast of the forest gleamed and blinked. The lives in the city’s arid bones flickered like the wings of moths.

Under the city, through veils of stone and soil and rock, the well ran deep, and glowed. It was already awake, communing with itself. The tower delved it, like a vein into a heart.

Sightless, seeing, Rarnammon beheld the other glowing hearts away and away from him, yet near as his own hands lying on the floor forgotten.

He was not afraid. Only some fragment of him remembered his father at this instant, Raldnor, who had borne all this alone. And before Raldnor, Ashne’e, who had been the beginning, the first spark struck against the darkness.

Then he made contact with the starry, fiery heart, perhaps before he was quite ready. But unreadiness did not hinder him. He was blown upward, scorched and spun, but knew the strength of his sailing wings, to ride, and to pace, the whirlwind.

Galud, rushing in among his fellows, was caught by the One-Eared and shaken.

“Look at the sky!” hissed Galud.

They went to look.

Though the sun was setting, the whole heaven was throbbing with an extraordinary brilliance. It seemed as if they were about to see its arteries, or as if portions might be ejected.

“What’s that sound?” said Galud. They listened. The sound was not in the city. It could not be heard.

They stood listening to this soundless sound, as all over the ruins others had paused to listen.

In the colony of lepers to the west, faceless things crawled into cavities to hide.

Miles off in the forests, the chorus of the birds was chopped to dumbness, lizards froze, still water bubbled, creepers uncoiled like snakes from the trees.

The sun had already sunk beyond the ruined city of the south. Dusk sprinkled the colonnades and terraces that had had their youth in the era of Ashnesea.

The market of the Lepasin seemed deserted. Only a small wind played about there, with scraps of paper and petals and dust.

All around, the houses were boarded in, curtained over, shuttered. No light showed.

In the high place of the dark palace, seven figures, so white they seemed without blood, stood with white blowing hair between the broken sticks of columns. They were the guards, the custom. Their pale eyes took the tint of twilight, turning blue and uncanny.

Inward, flowers that had been brought rustled on the ancient floor paintings, the chips of citrine and garnet. The wind moved like the sea through the palace.

Lur Raldnor lay inside the darkness, his black hair poured on the mosaic. The Lowlanders, his kindred, had trained him. He had come to learn and to understand so much, that in the end he was afraid he would be the weakness that must lessen the chain.

Now he was beyond such fear.

His body lay like a corpse. The Amanackire guarded him as if he were a dead king. They would let no one through. They themselves, binding their minds with his, fenced and toughened his psyche.

To his awareness as he soared above it, the lines of force created on the surface of the palace were clear as silver bands. Silver steam described the city. Drunk on prayers, it murmured, sang, without sound.

He was prepared to give his life. He had been prepared to give it in battle. This was battle. But such thoughts were done. The cistern under the city was yielding up its vitality in thrusting surges, like a heart.

The city was all silver now. Far off, it struck a golden shadow, Rarnammon. . . .

And to the east a shadow like molten bronze—

Medaci was the Lowlander who held the gate in the Zor.

She stood at the entry to the mansion in the black night. Seeing her take her position there, knowing from some arcane tradition or instinct of tradition, her hair raying on the wind and the folds of her cloak, she was supernatural; a creature of the firmament. Yannul saw her, turned and went with the others to the chosen area two or three streets away. He had remonstrated at the beginning. He must remain at hand. Very well, the power of the planet would course upward, yet still some animal might come by and harm her. She was beyond him by then, and did not listen, he thought. She had gone so swiftly, he felt she had died. It was his younger son who explained, leading Yannul aside. There would be no animals, no interruptions. Medaci did not even have to bear the unleashing of Power. Safca was elected for this. Safca would bear it. But Medaci was the guardian, some ingredient or symbol of the balance.

Yannul knew, as they all did, when the Power of the city began to stir. It was a terrible, wonderful, unspeakable thing.

He tried to blind and deafen himself with it.

He did not want Medaci to have been “chosen” even for this. Had she not already suffered enough through the psychic use of others? And he recollected the plain under Koramvis, the silent harp-string plucked over and over.

All along the opposite bank, over their river, the villages of the Zor would be watching, offering their own rituals to the esoteric night. The city gleamed, maybe, for those who could see it. Yannul did not want to see it. He was tormented. Finally he walked off from all of them, and from his own son, into the city’s enormous shadow, and sitting down in shadow commenced to pray, as once long ago, only for life, except now it was Medaci’s life.

The Lowland woman, the golden Amanackire who was Medaci, held the gate, the mansion on the hill. The high place. It had put out its temporal fires.

Safca, circling somewhere in the roof (briefly amused, visualizing herself a pigeon), perceived the bronze light of the city’s aura start to wash away the gloom.

How did I come to this? Safca inquired. I am nothing.

But she recalled the bracelet on her left wrist, and what it hid, what had been hidden since birth—the other bracelet, abhorrent, or maybe beautiful: A ring of fine pale metallic scales, incorporated in her dark skin. Her mother had not lived long in Olm. A Lanelyrian, she had still grown used to Dorthar and the luxury of the Koramvin court, which was extended to a favored slave. Freed, she had fled back to Elyr and Lan, when the Lowlanders came. She had caught Dortharian superstition, for an excellent reason, perhaps. Olm’s guardian saw her, made her his concubine, lost interest. The child was born, premature, unimportant. On her deathbed, Safca’s mother had tapped Safca’s bracelet and the deformity they had concealed beneath. “From your father,” she had said. That was the only time, and that was all. She never said who had had her in Koramvis, whose cherished slave she was, who had freed her to escape. Nor positively had she ever said she was with child already when she lay back for the guardian. Only dreams had guided Safca after. She was never sure.

But now she was strong, Her wings beat and bore her up, and as the gigantic flame began to rise, a paean of joy, a hymn, tore through her wordlessly. And she believed she might be what her mother had indicated, and that her destiny sprang from it. So it was, conception, birth, the second birth called death.

The fabric of stones and sky gave way. Medaci lay like a smooth cool bead within the inferno that lifted Safca upward.

But northwest, a white flower of fire steadied the ecstasy and madness.

Bronze and silver and gold, the weavings of the light wove them all to that whiteness, which was Koramvis and her hills and the eye of the sleeping lake.

It was, in this high place, the swarthy Thaddrian who held the gate, guardian, black feather in a balance of pallor. A priest, he was not quite unversed in metaphysical conduct, or the intangible. And he had his own talents. His terror was nothing, nor did he count it.

Below him, the fair men and women maintained their own equilibrium, facing up toward her where she was on the hill’s crest, a tiny figure like a little doll.

But the Thaddrian, though facing away from her, knew the light came up through her, and presently, mundanely, he noted his own shadow cast before him on the earth, jet black from the dawn of whiteness on the crest of the hill.

In all its quarters and corners, the night lay, to the human eye, deep as water over every inch of Vis. The stars followed their courses. The moon went down. The hour before true dawn came quietly across the sea.

The ships like sleeping birds anchored, wing-folded, five miles off the tip of Alisaar. Her clockwork patrols, if they had noted them, had noted also their diplomatic distance, and let them alone. Alisaar might, besides, have other more pressing business.

The beacon on the edge of the western jungle wilderness had been seen to blaze by those who took heed of it. Thirty-five galleys of Free Zakoris, emerging from nowhere like things born out of mud, had swung northwest, perhaps to harry Saardos, or to attempt the Corhlish and Iscaian beaches.

Report stated the greater fleet of the Leopard, which kept on toward the Inner Sea, had grown like a conjuring trick to one hundred and seventy-six ships. There had been bays along that chartless jungle coast, where uncountable vessels might shelter, and slip out to join the concourse, or carry its dealings elsewhere.

Word was, eastern Karmiss had been covered, as if by a swarm, bleeding and on fire, the smoke of Istris one more cautionary beacon.

The mountain Pass from Thaddra into Dorthar would be fluid with battle.

On the passes above Vardish Zakoris, where Yl’s men now ran at will, the Dortharians would use the mechanics of avalanche to block the way. Even if the device had been betrayed, the Leopard would be in difficulties to prevent it. To swamp the Okris delta must be easier. The last message from that region had all the river inlets in arms, the reeds on fire, the stone towers holed by catapults. The wind, blowing to Anackyra, bore ashes and the cries of men, which could not be a fact, and was only a parable of despair.

In Xarabiss, the troops of Thann Xa’ath had retreated from the port of Lin Abissa, leaving the docks alight. A Xarabian detachment had pulled out of Moiyah and marched back to the border, to the Dragon Gate and Sar. There were similar desertions elsewhere, men forging homeward.

In the hour before dawn on the sea once called for Aarl, those who waked or watched on the King’s ship, saw Raldanash go by, walking on the open deck. Here and there a low-voiced greeting was exchanged. His whiteness, clothing and hair, seemed nocturnally luminous, as was the sea itself in patches. At the rail above the prow, he spoke with the captain.

They stood awhile, gazing west.

At sunrise, the vessels would make on. Yl’s great fleet, nearly twice their numbers, would sail to meet them. The area of meeting had been established by some Amanackire priest. It had a religious purpose.

The goddess would, naturally, be with them. The captain, leaving his King to his final living privacy, went away along the deck. A man of Marsak in Dorthar, the captain had never credited Anack, though he had wisely given her lip-service and offerings. Over the black water, he saw now the ghostly Ashkar banners of the Vathcrian galleys. And, moved by a sudden fury, the captain spat in the ocean, in case after all She might be real and he could show her how he rated Her paucity.

Raldanash son of Raldnor observed the sea, with its patches of fire that did not burn.

Soon, he would return to the foredeck cabin, and don the non-physical armor of his training. To linger here was just the humanity in him. His affairs otherwise were in order. But he had wished to bid farewell.

Already pulses, unheard, unseen, unfelt, rocked the world.

An hour, a little more, and it would come to pass. If there was not power or strength or faith enough, it would fail.

There would be, therefore, power and strength and faith enough.

The captain from Marsak, his nervous hatred and act of defiant wrath, these Raldanash had noted, as he could take note of all the welter of thought and will and wish about him. He was even aware of the creatures far below, the huge fish deeply meshed in the currents of the ocean, as they swam out their alien time, valid and unknowable. And he longed to go away with them, stripped of intellect and burden. But could not, would not.

My father, also, was alone like this, that night under Koramvis.

Raldanash sighed.

Those who watched him covertly saw only the handsome face, the royal bearing, a king who had the ichor of gods in his arteries. A mote of trust and perverse hope settled on his watchers. By his excellence, he seemed to prove to them a miracle was possible.

But Raldanash had clasped hands with life, and surrendered it.

When the man of the Amanackire came noiselessly to him, calling without words, Raldanash, Storm Lord and Dragon King, turned back along the deck to make ready.

The great fleet of Free Zakoris, veering eastward now with the tidal currents and winds of sunrise, did not know there was a line drawn across the sea.

They had made sacrifice to Rorn as the disc of the sun escaped his halls. The brief barking prayers were done, though still the bluish streamers of incense rose from every prow of those one hundred and seventy-six ships.

Yl himself rode this arm of his fleets. He straddled there, close to the Rorn god of the King Ship. Behind him was the mass of sail, ochre-colored, with the Black Leopard scrawled over it. The dawn was in the Zakorians’ faces. They had gained indications that enemy shipping might come out to greet them. They expected Shansarian Alisaar, or Xarabiss, more than they looked for Dorthar and Dorthar’s King.

As for the line of psychic force, it was invisible and apparently immaterial.

What they did come to see was a sudden turbulence in the glimmering water fifty oar-lengths away.

Yl’s captain pointed. There was a parcel of shouts.

“Huge fishes, Lord Yl, leaping from the depths.”

There were so many of these fish, they slowed to let them by.

When the arcing, snakelike forms and the sea-flushed spray had settled, a shadow came out of the sun.

The watch-horns sounded. The Zakorian galleys flung themselves to battle-stations before the devices of Dorthar had even been read.

Braziers roared. Fresh smokes curled up into the morning sky. The ballistic weapons were hauled and secured in position on their shrieking chains.

“They don’t come on, my lord.”

“Shy? We shall go to embrace them, then,” Yl said. “Dorthar, and Ralnar’s son, crushed in the fist.”

Across the slight interval of water, oars idle, the Storm Lord’s fleet stood waiting on his order. Which did not come.

“My lord—” said the captain from Marsak.

Raldanash was above him, by the rail. Somehow, a group of Amanackire had got between him and his officers.

All at once, the air was changed. It seemed to ignite, as if the sun had slipped from cloud, but the sky had been clear since dawn.

The captain did not speak again. He wet his lips and rubbed his temples, wondering if only he was effected. All about him, surreptitiously at first, the soldiers did similar things. It was like a sort of drunkenness when the stomach was not full. A rush of clarity that equally obscured. A folding away. A going outward—

The sea began to shiver.

Long waves, like those foretelling storm, raced and broke about the ships.

No wind blew. The sky was pristine.

The sea bucked and tumbled.

They had seen large fish, could it be they were rising again, under the very keels?

Men ran about. A scatter of orders were bawled. Then silence came back. Yet, there was a sound. It seemed rather to be in the skull than in the passages of the ears.

Above them, Raldanash, in the prow. Not moving. Doing nothing.

That white hair was like a flame. Flame ran along the edges of him, a man cut from parchment, burning.

Men cried out now.

A huge sheen enveloped the ship, reflected in the pounding pouring waves.

The foremost Free Zakorian galleys were approaching ramming speed when the sea raised itself and slewed against them.

As the first great runners hit them, oars flailed, breaking rhythm. Then the massive sweeps were shattering like twigs, and a terrified howling came from the rowers’ decks below. On the floundering timbers all about, men crashed over in a rain. A catapult tilted slowly and fell into the water.

“In the name of Zarduk—” Yl, struggling to his feet, gripped his captain by the neck.

The man pointed wildly.

“Something—something in the sea!”

Between the careering, speed-smashed Zakorians and the silhouetted static ships of Dorthar, the water spouted upward, black and combing, sediment and spray and gusts like mist or steam, blotting out now the sight of each fleet from the other.

Something indeed was active there, some massive hulk or beast, thrusting up from the floor of the ocean—

Aarl, place of submarine volcanoes—the story flooded a thousand minds. They called to each other in horror, remembering—

And then in a spume and spurl the ocean was ripped apart.

Walls of water a hundred feet high or more burst into the air. Darkness threw itself over them. The sea would be next. It would crush them in its fist.

And yet, the sea did not fall back as it must, dashing them in pieces, swallowing them whole. The sea hung like a curtain there, glittering and quivering, and the sun began to soak through, and the sea dried in the sun, upright in the sky.

Raldanash had become the mirror, of bronze and silver and gold and white light. His brain separated from his body, then his consciousness.

He floated high in the air, a seabird, weightless, and beheld the ships below, pale and dark, like figures on the war-table at Anackyra. And the sea surged up between.

Flame from the north sheared through. He was aware of Rarmon, very near, as if he were at his shoulder in some fight, their shields locked. Yet Rarmon-Rarnammon was miles off. A communication passed between them, speechless and without format, understood instantly, then gone.

The two lesser fires were nearer. They entered and refocused, swelling, ascending. From the east and the south. He knew the beings searing in the fire, male, female. They touched him, and each other, and the gold light of Rarnammon. The fourth light was beyond them all, so pale it had a core of blackness. Ashni. Sunrise. Morning Star.

Raldanash, or the awareness Raldanash had become, felt itself consumed in the conflagration, without pain or fear, peacefully. And as he died, the fifth ray of the star exploded outward, the psychic orgasmic energy of the spirit.

The filaments flared, from outer point to center and so to each outer point once more, and every filament as it centered and returned, centered and returned, spun off from itself the newborn intersecting threads. Over all Vis, the woof and weft of a colossal loom crackled and sparkled and gave birth.

The sea was in the sky.

Then a figure was there, girded by ocean, tall as the roof of heaven.

The Dortharians saw Anackire.

She towered, She soared. Her flesh was a white mountain, Her snake’s tail a river of fire in spate. The eight arms stretched in the traditional modes. Her eyes were the sun twice over. She spoke to them, in their minds, wordless. She said: It is ended.

But the men of Free Zakoris did not see Anackire, the Lowlander-witch they abhorred. They saw Rorn, their own god, who was black, with sea-plants in His ebony hair and jewels in the palms of His hands. And with one of these gargantuan hands, as He leaned down all His length toward them from the ether, He pushed their ships firmly away, firmly but carefully, for He did, being theirs, care for them.

Rorn spoke in words. It was a voice of tempest, and His breath was salt. You won your land, Rom said to them. Be proud of your kingdom, carved from Thaddra, and be also content. The rest is not yours to take. It is I RORN who say this.

They lay on their faces before Him.

Blue sea gems flashed in His teeth. Thunder encircled His head.

At last they looked, and saw only a white shade of his blackness, waning on the day. They had been moved back like game pieces many miles. The Dortharian fleet was not to be seen. The sky was overcast and troubled, the sea beneath littered with timbers, bits of ironware, and coals that had spilled and not yet gone out. There were, too, a host of broken swords, split cleanly in the midst of the blade.

They had not lost a single vessel, or one man.

Their slaves clamored below, an outcry, in which the names of many gods were mingled.

Yl kneeled trembling before the little Rorn god in the prow.

Above, the ochre sail had parted from the yard. The emblem of the Leopard of vengeance and war had been smeared into shapelessness as if by some immense hand.

The gods walked all Vis that day.

Ten miles from Saardos, Rorn appeared before thirty-five Free Zakorian ships, admonished them, and turned them. He kept one foot on the distant land as He breathed on their sails and blew them southward. The fleet of Alisaar encountered Him, too. When men, maddened by the sight, tried to immolate themselves in His honor, Rorn told them such death was not needful. The Shansarians in the fleet, however, declared they had witnessed Ashara of the fish’s tail. The sun was caught in Her golden hair. Her breasts were lovely. She reminded them of the Homeland.

As, in the person of Ashkar, She reminded the Vardians, Tarabines and Vathcrians in Xarabiss, the Lowlands, and elsewhere.

Close to the port of Lin Abissa, She uncoiled from the road, and Her skin was honey. Her serpent’s tail red copper, and Her hair was red as wine. But the Free Zakorians there saw Rorn, striding through the charcoaled ships, the smoke on His shoulders.

In Thaddra it was Zarduk, Who routed Yl’s forces from the border forts of Vardian Zakoris. And Zarduk, too, on the mountain Pass above Tumesh, Who rose out of the stones. The sun was not in His eyes, it made His belly. Black, magnificent, His masculine form enclosed the whirling solar disc. His breath was incense and heat, a scorching dust wind.

The Dortharians on the Pass saw this: A dragon out of their mythological genesis. It drove down the sky; incendiary beams shot from its carapace and jaws. They expected both the enemy and themselves to be at once incinerated. But not a man was lost, here as elsewhere.

Zarduk was in the delta of the Okris.

The spoons of catapults snapped off against their buffers. The black ships shuddered. Zarduk’s feet were braced in the river, which barely reached His knees, his fiery belly blinded them, or should have done. Anackire, or a creature much like Her, was positioned at His left side.

In Ommos, the god was duality, both feminine and male: Zarok-Anackire.

In Ylmeshd, Yl’s city in Thaddra, a golden glow stained the anthill dwellings, emanating from the cave temple of the fire god, causing some panic.

It was said that priests, stealing in to see, found the topaz Eye from Ankabek, brighter than a lamp, had been transported of itself into one of the eye-places of the Zarduk. That a Zakorian deity should have, thereafter, half the gaze of a Lowlander, was so suitable to resultant legends of that day, it was later suggested Yl himself, not the gods, organized the matter on his return.

Ashara appeared to blasted Karmiss. She rose above Ioli like a daytime moon. In Istris, Rorn had seemed to shake the city, very gently, as if to shift crumbs from a mat.

Stray Leopard ships making for Lan came upon Him seated on the ocean. He said they must go back to Thaddra. They believed Him.

The versions were endless. All differed. Ten men in one place had each seen a vision no other saw. Stars fell, mountains moved, bells rang in the sea.

Yet the words, uttered to the ear, the brain, or the heart—they were substantially the same.

And the felled ballistas, the broken swords, lay thick as flowers where the dead should have lain.

The four fires, the burning-glass, joined like the amber ring, now letting go the light.

Each drew away, became an incandescent dot. The web of force grew dim. Went out.

The dulling of the vast effulgence revealed another, lesser effulgence, where, everywhere, there were shining the tiny faint lights, the miniature trusts and prayers of a world, the will of a multitude to persist—fuel for the vaster flame. And then these also were dimmed. All but one.

The shattered mirror, that had been the focusing will of Raldanash, embers now, retained to itself the palest after-images of linking fire, one of which led northwest to the man who was his kindred, and one northeast toward the aurora of Ashni. But the subsiding embers could not sustain these connections. The trails of fire vanished. Soon only one slender and translucent link remained, scarcely visible while the larger lights had blazed.

This final light did not yet fade.

Its nether point, located on that line of Power which ran from Koramvis to the Zor, was the place of the earliest sacrifice, Ankabek.

She felt his dying, embers to clinker. Raldanash who had been her husband, far away, miles of land and space and time.

She had come to her discovery along a steep and sightless mental tunnel, which she entered voluntarily when the door mechanisms closed her within the Sanctum. At the closing, she had lain down on the marvelous mosaic floor she could not see, and eventually, after some struggle, her ego and her name had gone from her.

Ulis Anet. Val Nardia. Astaris. She had been each of them and none.

She had trusted that Eraz would guide her, but she must guide herself, and so she did. She was so tired, it was not hard to choose this road, or follow it.

As if in a boat on a black winding river, she poled upstream, sleeping or awake she could not be sure, nor did it concern her.

Her mind filled itself slowly. The deep dreams, the conclusions, the solitudes. She herself came last of all, behind a train of fantasies. The inner she.

And so at length she opened the single eye of the spirit, and became one with the will of the world.

And when that will, having created its great sorcery, flowed away, she beheld Raldanash and how he died.

A mortal woman, she had detested him for his unintentional cruelty. Such pettiness was irrelevant now. Now, emerging from her own purgation, she knew his, reckoned up what he had given, asking no recompense. She herself had no special psychic endowment, but she, like all things, held the magic of the force of life. And all around were the stones of Ankabek of the goddess, invocation of Anackire.

Selfishly then, to redeem her own pain by knowing its littleness, she held out the lamp of Ankabek, slightest of fires.

And so she did learn pain’s littleness. She learned in the surge of joy as this stranger, who was nothing to her and to whom she was nothing, yet heard her, yet answered, and reached out across the endless distances to receive the proffered light.

The ships of Dorthar circled in the vortex of sea and sea-wrapped wind.

Only the Amanackire had dared go to the Storm Lord and lift him. He was borne to the cabin.

Without comprehending, his men had seen he was the pivot of the miracle. Now, contending with the tempest, there was no leisure to dwell on it.

Some wept, but there was salt water on all their faces.

Raldanash lay on the royal couch as the ship jumped at the blows of the storm.

The Amanackire stood by. They did not mourn. Ruthless in their faith, and pitiless, certain all men lived forever. What was death? Having only just participated in the lesson, they had missed it. Physical life was also sacred, and to be saved.

Then they felt the telepathic stirring, turned to Raldanash, and saw his eyes open, the golden eyes in the dark face.

He had come back from somewhere he had already forgotten.

His body was weak and drained, listless, would scarcely obey him or acknowledge him. But the vitality in him was like a seed, which would become again the tree. His brain was already vital.

He did recollect the instant, in the very act of falling, that he had seen they had won.

The symbols were no more than that, gods were the emblem, as language was the expression of incorporeal thought. They had used only the power and strength and faith of mankind. It had been enough. The world was ended, and begun.

And I, too, live.

The men in the black galleys rocking above Lan, having seen nothing sensational, were bewildered.

There had been unseasonal storms that day, the winds casting from all directions. When night entered the world, a soundless calm drew in, as curiously unnatural as the turbulence before. In the heavy blackness the stars exhaled their glare. The moon came up from the hollow ocean. It was like some nightfall of history, aeons old.

The men in the two black galleys, hesitated uneasily and listened to the emptiness and stared out at the stars. The ships were the command of Dhaker Opal-Eye. The third of their number had gone down at Karith, when Dorthar sent Free Zakoris back into the water. Such orders as Dhaker received had then dispatched his crews to Karmiss. Dhaker had objected. His own ship carried a passenger of whose identity King Yl was informed. A Karmian of stature, relevant to Karmiss’ present predicament. The Karmians might attempt to help—or at least to capture—this man. But Dhaker had no desire to reveal at large his prisoner’s name. Evasive, he could get no purchase on the obstinacy of the Free Zakorian command then licking wounds off Ommos. So, his ships turned for Karmiss, and skirted her. Dhaker had reckoned to join the Leopard’s forces at Okris delta.

Rough weather caught them less than fifty miles from their objective. They sought to ride it out, but were blown instead, disordered, into the east.

There were weird coronas in the storm. Fires came to perch along the masts and rails. Dhaker had beheld such wonders before. He kept his soldiers busy, and gave them wine and beer, and sent beer down to the slaves. In the evening, the squall had almost parted the two ships, but the abrupt leveling of the sea brought them together again.

Then came the mystery of darkness and open water.

A few hours after, there arose a wailing from the slaves. Someone had been possessed by bad dreams, now they were all catching it like plague. The steady hiss of the whips eventually doused this noise.

“They say Rom walks over the ocean, a giant, with the moon in his hand.”

“I’ve not seen him,” said Dhaker. “Not even with my missing eye.”

Suddenly, he was moved to visit his guest.

It was dark as night, but starless, in the lowest closed place of the ship. This underdeck, counterbalance to the tall stack of the vessel above, lay below the waterline, beneath the rowing positions. It might be utilized as cargo hold, or as dungeon. Dungeon now it was. The prisoner, naked but for hair and filth, sprawled there unmoving, till the Zakorian’s lamp and feet found him out.

“Well, my lord,” said Dhaker, “did you enjoy the storm?”

Kesarh, bloody and bruised on the rusty chains that, during the upheaval, had obviously slammed him over and again into the thick ribs of the ship, looked up at him. The black eyes still had cold heat in them. They should have been filmed over, if not blind. Dhaker’s surgeon had pulled the lashes out, repeatedly. Yet, through the caked blood, the cold heat and the sight continued.

Dhaker liked this unquenchable quality. It would make Kesarh more difficult, therefore more interesting, to kill.

“Istris was in splinters, the last I heard,” said Dhaker. “Does that make you sad?”

But Kesarh’s emotions were well-chained up, you saw, like his body.

Dhaker kicked him, lightly, in the mouth. A side tooth had been broken earlier, and Dhaker had allowed them to cut the lobes from the prisoner’s ears. These he had then sent to Yl as token, with the message of capture. That was sufficient for now.

Dhaker went up again, noting on his way that the rowers had stayed restless after their discipline.

The night was fine, and Dorthar comparatively near.

It was after midnight when the horns mooed.

Some twenty ships of Free Zakoris had appeared in their path, seeming to have been storm-thrown as they were, off course, and heading back northwestward.

Dhaker’s pair of galleys rowed in among their brothers.

Not a man but was struck immediately by the silence, almost idleness of every neighboring deck.

Most of the sails were taken in, but here and there one hung from the yard, torn by the gales. The torches of Dhaker’s ships picked out on these remnants a muddy smear no longer recognizable as the war Leopard.

Dhaker’s galley came up with the flotilla’s lead ship. Like all the rest, she was poorly lit. The men on her deck stood like pillars, or went about their work as if drugged.

“To Dorthar?” Dhaker shouted out, not bothering with intermediaries.

When the call was answered, Dhaker was amazed.

The Free Zakorians were not bound for Dorthar. The war was—abandoned. They went home to Yl’s kingdom, in Thaddra.

“Are you mad?” Dhaker bellowed. He seized a rope and would have swung over, but their captain had come on deck now, and gestured him away.

“Not madness. The gods spoke to us.”

“Gods—you mean some augury—”

“Rom, and Zarduk. Their heads brushing the sun. I have seen it myself. He spoke to me, and his voice was intense. We’re to live in Thaddra. We were told. The sword’s broken.”

“Crazy. This one is crazy.” Dhaker looked at his men, who gazed in awe at the silent ships all about them, setting their inexorable course for Thaddra.

The barren dialogue was abrogated, and Dhaker’s vessels drew away.

The black flotilla with its anonymous sails went drifting on, a phantom thing, dumb and demoniac as the night it vanished into.

In the world there were days and alternating periods of sunlessness, there were hours and minutes, scenes and the responses to scenes, and weather. Below, in the underdeck, there were none of these things. There was blackness, the shackles, stench, the taste of stench, or of blood, the dull noises of the ship. Being thrown against the ribbed kernel of the dungeon, that was military engagement or a storm. Daybreak was seldom, and only a lamp. The various tortures had served in the beginning as a means of telling time—the crescendo of pain, the pain’s slow ebbing. But now pain was universal and constant and varying—the gnawing of the fractured tooth, the bite of the chains in the raw wounds they had made. It was no longer helpful.

One could think, of course, and frequently lose consciousness. Like a hibernating animal or a sick animal, Kesarh had this trick. Awake, he was never completely lucid, and knew it. All the same, he had not surrendered. He expected to outlast this misfortune, though he had neither fantasies of sudden rescue nor of an act of gods, in whom he did not believe. Nor, since he did not believe in a god within, did he presume himself capable of some feat of self-deliverance. His optimism, if such it could even be termed, had no roots therefore in fact.

His resistance was his will, stronger than all the rest of his many strengths.

He refused to finish here and in this way. Could not conceive of it.

That conversation which had taken place between the Leopard ships by night had not, obviously, been relayed below. Yet there was some insubstantial whiff of it to be sensed. Soon, if timelessly, other awarenesses swirled through the timbers. The slave-rowers picked them up, became fractious or terrified. The sharp screams of men under the less tolerable of the whips grew nearly ceaseless.

In a quintet of days—unseen, unknown: Above—Dhaker’s vessels had had other meetings. Some of these were with Free Zakorians beating a way from Karmiss, as Rorn had instructed them. They babbled of prodigies and were gone. Later, a brace of Kumaian vessels appeared around a headland, for they were in sight of the Dortharian coast by now. Outnumbered, but wild for a fight, Dhaker’s galleys had turned to attack, but the ships of Dorthar avoided and eluded them.

There was talk then of raiding the first village they came to, but probably all such would be evacuated, or defended.

Dhaker’s men were bewildered and afraid. Tensions were not restricted to the slaves. There must be some release. Dhaker had begun to believe the insane tales other Zakorian vessels gifted him. If not their truth, at least its effect.

On the fifth day a herd of sea-ox came swimming on a great lacy wake, and the horns were blown and a furor started. His men had been moaning that Rorn arose out of the depths, before Dhaker roared them into stillness.

Something was needed. Up in the world of days and nights and time and weather, Dhaker decided.

When Kesarh was brought into the torch-lit cabin, Dhaker studied him with some pleasure.

His captive’s body was painted by abrasions and the sores induced by chains, yet it had not wasted. After the perpetual dark below, the eyes were winced to slits, but the ice-flame of the black pupils stared through unabated. Kesarh had the royal atoms of Karmiss with the savage Shansar strain; and something more. He was not broken, not even twisted out of shape.

There was food and drink. Dhaker invited his prisoner to dine. Kesarh, without comment, did so. There was no look of desperation, and none of the distrustful questioning almost any other man would have let slip. He supposes he will get through all this, Dhaker thought. The notion astonished him. Kesarh s will was powerful even now, and Dhaker for a second half doubted. Was it possible Kesarh might somehow escape?

There was a vague sound outside, Dhaker’s orders being carried out. He abruptly recovered his wits. Escape was not possible.

“You love me well,” said Dhaker to Kesarh. “You’ve confidence I won’t seek to poison you.”

Kesarh had ended his meal, scrupulously.

“And cheat Yl?” he said.

“Oh, but Yl has lost interest in killings,” said Dhaker. “I’ve heard the signals have failed to show. His ships foundered against Ralnach of Dorthar, then, and never reached the Inner Sea. That, or the gods sent him home with all the rest.”

Kesarh did not react to these riddles. He said, clearly, “Or else he remembers the treaty he made with me, and therefore with the might of Shansar-over-the-ocean.”

“No, I don’t think he remembers that, Lord Kesr. I don’t think he remembers you at all. Vis has gone mad. In the land of madness, the sane must do as he reckons fit.”

Kesarh’s eyes had opened, striving with the murky light. Dhaker felt the extraordinary authority of them.

They sat in silence, neither prepared to ask the other to speak.

Dhaker rose.

“The cushions, there. Take rest. Sleep.”

At last Kesarh said to him, “You have something strenuous in mind for the morning.”

“My father,” said Dhaker, “died at Tjis. I knew him. He was good to me. It’s not sure we’ll reach home port, the world having addled.” The iron eyes never faltered. Dhaker nodded and went out. The door of the cabin was guarded, though he did not imagine Kesarh would attempt heroics. Even a quick death would not be attempted, for Kesarh did not credit he could die at all. He would sleep now, hoarding his endurance. In agony and hopelessness he would cling to life, assured it was his right, until the final drop squeezed through his fingers.

A while before dawn Dhaker Opal-Eye reentered the cabin and regarded the unconscious man, his strong physique, which was about to become its own worst foe. On the left forearm, the wound Dhaker had cauterized had healed curiously, leaving a scar resembling that of a serpent’s bite.

“Take him now,” Dhaker told his men. “Let him come to it as he wakes.”

They did this, dragging Kesarh out into the nacreous vacancy that was ship and sea and sky. As the stars melted, they slung the chained man down, and hauling up his arms, hammered the spikes through his fetters to hold them in position. Then they raised the pole and secured it in a series of jolts, close to the king-sail. He was fully awake by then, and knew. It was an old method of execution, and very simple, common to all western lands, formerly a slave’s sentence in Dorthar.

Suspended from the pole by his upraised arms, his heels had already found the narrow resting place, and gripped there, taking the weight of his body. It would be a struggle to do this, but he would struggle to do it. There was a similar rest under the buttocks that might also be put to use, awkwardly and with difficulty. Since the hanging man would not be able to breathe without recourse to these supports, he would constantly resort to them. Constantly slide from them, constantly regain them. The struggle would be never-ending.

Held by the wrists alone, the lungs cramped, the blood would not move. Asphyxiated, the condemned soon fainted; death could come inside a morning. But that was the swift way. This way was not swift. And Kesarh’s will, his haughty demand to live, would prolong the combat beyond total exhaustion. Three-quarters a corpse, he would still be struggling, sliding, struggling, gasping, and grasping, losing an inch, a moment at a time.

And he would be given water, and food while he could eat it.

It might go on for days.

Now there was light, and dark. There was sunrise through the great sail. There was sunset at his back, his own hanging shadow flung before him along the deck. Men would not cross over it. It was bad luck.

Later, he did not notice this anymore.

Air came by straightening, pinioning the heels and calves or the lower back or the buttocks against the pole. In a dizzying rush, the arms loosened somewhat, the lungs were able to expand. One did this until the anguish of the position forced feet or spinal muscles to give way. Then the former agony re-commenced.

Shortly, all agonies were the same. To be lifted and to breathe in agony, or to let go and to sink in agony, stifling.

He drank the water and swallowed the gruel.

He glared into the sky.

The sea was very flat, the deck flirted like a dancer. Men moved about, or stood, watching him. They were ghosts. They had no meaning. Nor the sky nor the sea. Only pain meant anything. But the pain was life.

At the fourth sunrise, he had forgotten his own name.

He heard them talking below. A man with a mote of flame in his eye, touched Kesarh’s feet, gently, like a caress.

“Kesr, do you live, still? The fourth day, Kesr Am Karmiss. I never knew any to last so long.” And then, “He’s bleeding from the mouth. Blood from the lungs.”

Kesarh turned his head. The sky was crimson and light split the sail. Something came and tapped his face. It was a bowl, pushed up on a stick. Water. He turned to put his lips to the bowl.

“No,” said a girl’s voice, softly, against his ear, or in his brain. “Don’t drink it. Kesarh, don’t drink.”

“Go away,” he said. His tongue found the water. “Bitch.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t drink.”

The water had no taste and he did not want it, though his thirst raged. His body tried to cough. Lances ran through his ribs. Then her hands came and held him. Cool, fragrant, better than the water.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Since we were children, whom did we have to trust save each other?”

“I must live, Val Nardia,” he said. “Get back what they took from me. And if you want me to live, I can. For you. Poison, disease, the wound of any battle—nothing. I’ll run through flood and fire and thunderbolt—Val Nardia,” he said. “I am here.”

“I shall live,” he repeated. A strand of her red hair moved against the red sky as she held him. It was Val Nardia, and no other. No alter image. His head was on her breast.

“Live then,” she said. “Let go, and live.”

Below, Dhaker stirred, fingering the opal eye. The man who held up the bowl said, “He doesn’t take the water.”

“He’s dead,” said Dhaker.

They gave him neither to Rorn nor to the fire-burial of the yellow races. They left him to rot on the pole, or for the seabirds to feast on. Long before they came to Thaddra, only bones remained of him, which might have been the bones of any man who had died.