by Tanith Lee
She only smiled. It was an enigmatic smile. Was it her hubris, her self-assurance, or was she perhaps unable to grasp his meaning? Either she was obscure or she was slightly insane. Perhaps this was the flaw—an imbecilic queen to rule Dorthar by his side.
Moving with unbelievable grace, she began to look at frescoes. He felt fleetingly unreal in her presence.
“Astaris, you’ll attend to me,” he shouted.
She turned and looked at him searchingly, though her eyes, as Kathaos had noted, were pools of bottomless dark amber glass.
“I attend,” she said, “to you.”
• • •
A late afternoon light was settling on Lin Abissa as Kathaos Am Alisaar crossed from Thann Rashek’s major palace to the guest mansion adjoining it. Such was Am Alisaar’s status as Councilor to the Storm Lord that the entire scope of the latter house had been given over to himself and his household.
Which was as well, Kathaos’s household being of an immodest yet clandestine nature.
Particularly, there was his private guard. Not that this was, in itself, an unusual acquisition; most nobles amassed them. Yet the dimension and ability of Kathaos’s guard would have been found notable had it been investigated. Chosen by Am Alisaar’s agents at random in the thoroughfares of several cities—a method which successfully evaded Amrek’s direct notice—they came from among the ranks of fortune hunters, thieves, malcontents. Once under Kathaos’s yellow blazon, however, they were arbitrarily amalgamated, specifically trained in the fighting techniques of the Imperial Academy in Koramvis and led into collective though no less dangerous modes of living. Not many rebelled or abused their school. Those who did vanished mysteriously, yet suitably, into the dark to which such men were subject. Those who persisted at their new trade did well by it, becoming almost inadvertently part of a large and well-oiled machine. For Kathaos’s aim was to possess at last a defense as traditionally geared, strong, elite, and deadly as the Dragon Guard of a Storm Lord.
Kathaos had, as it were, hereditary reasons for his ambition.
His father had been Orhn, ultimate King of Alisaar. Though it was generally said that by the time that Orhn moved to take Alisaar from the dying grasp of his sire, he had in truth lost all interest in her—for by then the reins of Dorthar were firmly in his hands. He had fathered Kathaos on a minor Zakorian queen during one of his brief forays to Saardos, but he was never away from his regency, or his mistress Val Mala, for long. Only death put an end to his to-ing and fro-ing. And now, ironically, it was Kathaos who was Val Mala’s lover—a pleasant enough situation, for the queen had taken care to age as little as possible and extended favors to those who amused her.
He wondered if Astaris would amuse her, and decided emphatically that she would not.
The junction of the palace and the guest mansion was marked by a pillar forest of crimson fluted glass, which now throbbed with mulberry embers of the low sun and clotted incarnadine shadow.
“Rashek’s architect seems to have had a certain vulgar genius,” Kathaos remarked.
“If you say so, my lord.”
Kathaos’s Guard Lord, Ryhgon, striding half a pace behind him, was not as a rule addicted to long sentences.
A huge Zakorian, his true addiction, which was a form of authoritarian brutality, showed in every line of body and face. His giant’s nose was smashed into unrecognizable shape, and a white scar jumped from jaw to oxneck. A vicious leader for Kathaos’s personal guard, a leader not to be crossed, with the power of six apparent in his abnormally developed sword arm. Kathaos found him excellent.
“There are twenty recruits from Abissa, so I hear,” Kathaos said. “You, of course, will manage them superbly.”
Ryhgon gave a grim smile.
“Trust me.”
At the portico the Zakorian took another smaller entrance and advanced down the corridor of the mansion to that long hall where the recruits were waiting for him. Firelight seeped about the hall, casting up a huge familiar shade behind Ryhgon. The men fell silent at his approach, their facial expressions ranging from nervousness to bravado. This was to be one of the few times when Ryhgon spoke at any length. It was a well-known speech to him. He had used it on several battalions of untried adventurers such as these, and the unpleasant smile was still on his scarred mouth.
“So, this is the latest filth they’ve given me to hammer into men. I say ‘hammer.’ I choose the word with care. You see this arm? This is the arm I hammer with, if I have to.” He moved to a table and poured himself wine, and the silence prevailed about him. “Your profession from today is that of house guard to the Prince Kathaos Am Alisaar. The least witless of you may have gathered already that there’s more to it than that. But you’ll keep your tongues quiet or someone will quieten them for you. I hope you understand me. If it’s gold pieces you’re wanting, there’ll be plenty. If you feel the need to screw a whore, you’ll find those provided, too. If you’ve any other bedroom habits, settle them elsewhere and pray I don’t catch you at it. For the rest, you’ll discover the discipline is savage and I’m not a gentle master. Do as I tell you, and work yourselves sick and you’ll live till Koramvis.” He drained the wine without swallowing and banged down the goblet. “Any of you that find occasion to want a quarrel—seek me out. It’ll be my pleasure to accommodate you.”
Lightly, Ryhgon flipped the short sword at his belt, then turned and left them.
A man at Raldnor’s side said, very low: “Zakorian midden-keeper.”
• • •
At dusk the first white birds settled on Lin Abissa. The thaw was ended. Soon the three-month snow would hold all the eastern segment of Vis under its inexorable seal.
The Lord Kathaos’s new recruits ate their meal at a long table, separated from the more seasoned guard. The guard paid them no attention, it being their unwritten law to show no interest until training and probation were done. And there was a deal of sullen silence and covert gossip at the long table. Ryhgon had already established himself as he had chosen to be established—a figure to be hated and inordinately feared.
“That man’s no lover of gentle ways.”
“Zakorian whore’s mistake.”
“Watch yourself. Walls have ears.”
“Did you get a look at that sword arm? And the scar on his face? Gods!”
Later they sought the narrow pallets of a bleak dormitory.
Raldnor lay a long while on his hard bed, listening to their mutterings and to his own thoughts.
Outside the snow fell in silver flickerings. The siege snow.
“So I’ve locked myself in with strangers and with uncertainties, instead of with the known village and its familiar hopeless ways,” Raldnor thought. He recaptured Hamos under the snow, the purple snow nights and the howling of wolves, and he thought of Eraz beneath the white layerings, returned to the stuff of the Plains.
He had paid his debts. He had given back to Xaros all he owed while Xaros protested volubly, but he had told neither Xaros nor Helida of the man in the furrier’s nor, later, of where he was going. And they had respected his silence, probably imagining he would be returning after Orhvan to the Lowlands and the ruined city. He had found a shop in the back streets of Abissa and bought himself a supply of black dye with which he subsequently attended to his body hair. With this bizarre sorcery committed, his life and his soul seemed to slip into a curious interim, a limbo. He had worked a spell of change upon himself, and he had unleashed, like magicians of old, ungauged elemental forces. Now, anything might happen.
Yet there were remnants of ancient magic still clinging. She came, for the first time in many nights, here, to this Xarabian palace in the dark. The white moon shone behind her, and the cracks appeared in the broken vase of her milk-white body, and she blew away like ashes or like snow.
• • •
The bed was an oval of beaten silver, shaped
to resemble an open flower, for, like the procession which had brought her here, it was deemed proper that all things surrounding Amrek’s betrothed should be fantastic.
And in this flower Astaris opened her eyes at midnight.
There had been a dream. An unaccountable dream. A woman blowing in ashes across the face of the moon, all negative whiteness.
Astaris left the bed and crossed the room, throwing open the draperies and shutters, moving out on to the icy, snow-capped balcony. The cold was only a half-felt suggestion at the edges of her thought. Her entire consciousness seemed centered at the core of her brain, more so now than at any time before. She felt herself listening, yet not for any kind of sound.
And then she saw a man lying before her in the dark. Yet she did not exactly see him or even sense him. She felt, but rather, she comprehended. She did not ask: “Who is this?” There was no need. At that moment it was herself.
Instinctively she withdrew, flinched aside from the contact, and the formless image of the man was gone.
The secret of the enigma of Astaris was only this: She lived within herself, and no part of her reached out to commune with others. It was not pride or fear, but simply the most pure, the most unhuman introspection. She could not believe, or barely, in the external world and its characters; she did not even believe in her own physical self. She was an intelligence shut inside an exquisite mummy case of flesh, a creature in a shell. Now, by accident, a note had woken her, a resonance no longer outside her, but within.
Like a citadel invaded, she was at once full of alarm, but there was yielding also. She understood nothing of what had occurred, but did not need to. This was not the sort of questioning she used. She understood merely that, for an instant, the coiled sea creature which lived in the shell of her and was herself had been discovered by the wandering somnambulist impulse of another.
“Something has come near me,” she thought in strange stilted wonderment. “Something has found me out.”
BOOK THREE
The Meteoric Hero
9.
ENCLOSED IN THE WHITE WOMB of the cold, the eastern lands waited in their three months’ chrysalis. Pragmatic winter exchanged their contours for a geography of snow marble, wind-stenciled ice, and the inexorable silence of the desert. Nevertheless, the sun waxed as ever, encroached as ever. The sudden, bright, sounding first rains of a Vis spring shocked and cracked the alabaster seals, as they had always shocked and cracked them.
In Lin Abissa the gutters foamed, and the ornate gardens quickened.
• • •
Twilight oceaned about the towers of Thann Rashek’s guest palace, bringing an old nostalgia to Yannul the Lan as he sat cleaning his soldier’s gear in the uninspiring and impersonal barracks. Impersonal, despite the fact that in three months Am Alisaar’s recruits had littered it with certain personal things—their blunt but sentimental knives, some girl’s favor, trophies, knickknacks, memories from previous lives. For it seemed to Yannul that they had all been cursorily reincarnated into this soldiering under Kathaos’s yellow cloak, made new men with discarded pasts, about which many were very reticent. Raldnor the Sarite, now. He and Yannul seemed to count each other friends, yet what did they ever really say to each other about their earlier days? Both had been village farm stock to begin with—Raldnor, he said, on the perimeter of Sar, Yannul in the pendulous blue bosom of the Lannic hills. Later, both had made their way to the towns of Xarabiss: Yannul to be a juggler and acrobat in the markets, Raldnor to spend a nebulous time about which he said nothing—until Kathaos’s scouts found both of them and lured them under the yellow blazon. Yannul rubbed a troubled hand across the nape of his neck. Soldiering had meant a barber for the shoulder-blade-long Lannic hair. “No barbarians in this service,” the man had clacked. And “slash” those knives had gone, and a part of his supposedly barbarian pride with them. He saw Raldnor looking at him then, across the shadows, so he set nostalgia aside and said: “Koramvis soon.”
“Yes,” Raldnor said, “the city of Rarnammon, under the protection of the Storm gods of the Am Dorthar.”
It had puzzled Yannul often, the pains Raldnor had apparently taken to discover the bits and pieces of Dortharian religion and myth, for under the curiosity and the lip service there seemed to be another emotion—dislike. There had been, too, an incident once—some low muttering at table about how Kathaos was intent on toppling Amrek the Storm Lord. Men had sat, stony-faced, keeping their own counsel and wary of Ryhgon’s spies. But Yannul had seen Raldnor’s hand clench on his cup until the knuckles went white, and on his mouth there had been a hint of the grimmest and most macabre grin—almost the grin of a madman—before the Sarite had mastered himself.
“It pleases them to say so,” Yannul said lightly. “I think Kathaos fears no divine forces.”
“Then he’s a brave man.”
“Oh, men make their own gods,” Yannul remarked. “I have a god with a fat belly, and a house full of expensive women to attend his every need, and I call him Yannul the Lan in Five Years from This. Well, that’s done,” and he laid aside the knives and other metal duly polished. “What now? Neither of us has watch duty. We could try the wine shops of Abissa.”
Raldnor put down his own gear and nodded.
“Why not?” Like most people confined inside set limits, they were glad enough to get out of them whenever possible and by whatever excuse. “But we’ll need a gate pass, Yannul.”
“No. Lazy Breon’s in charge. Remember, Ryhgon eats at Kathaos’s table tonight. And Kathaos has my profound thanks.”
None of them had much cause to love the Guard Lord. He had proved himself all he had promised to be three months before. Yet he had taught them well. The knowledge of the fighting academies of Dorthar, Alisaar and Zakoris was ingrained in them by now, for Ryhgon had flayed them with it, given it to them in place of bread. And there was a bonus, too, for with his absences, however brief, there came a sense of holiday.
Yet the thaw dusk had laid a strange hold on both of them for all that, and they idled only slowly down toward the outer court.
• • •
Kathaos glanced across the lamplit room at Ryhgon and said, with irony far too subtle to offend his guest: “I trust the dinner found favor with you.”
Ryhgon grunted.
“Your lordship keeps a generous table.”
“Good fortune grants I can.”
“Your lordship’s no believer in fortune.”
“Perhaps not, but in this world of euphemisms, you’ll permit me mine.”
“As your lordship likes.”
“Well. And do you have any news of my guard?”
It was customary for Ryhgon, after these excellent dinners, to make some report. Responding to the signal, he laid out his inventory. Things were well enough. The latest recruits from Abissa had shown reasonable aptitude and had been split up among the first and second companies. By the time they reached Koramvis he would have cut them into shape.
“Be careful the knife doesn’t slip,” Kathaos said.
“Your lordship doubts my ability?”
Kathaos smiled.
“You’re a harsh master, Ryhgon.”
“Do I claim otherwise? Don’t worry, my lord. I can sort the metal from the dross. It’s the dross that suffers.”
“There was a man with light eyes—I saw him at drill yesterday,” Kathaos said unexpectedly. “What about him?”
“The Sarite?” Ryhgon gave a short unpleasant laugh. “He’s the unquiet sex of a dragon. The women your lordship supplies have been unusually busy. They seem to like it, too.”
“What’s his measure as a fighter?”
“Fair.” In Ryhgon’s terminology this was high praise. Kathaos judged it accordingly.
“That interests me. I want you to keep a watch on him. He has an uneasy resemblance to the royal line of the Am Dorthar.
”
“I hadn’t noticed it.”
“I would never expect you to. However, I am perhaps more familiar with that face. Don’t you think it unusual that such a Dortharian brand should be set in Sar?”
“A by-blow. Some passing Koramvin.”
“Then that Koramvin would need to have been a prince.”
“Unlikely.”
“Quite. Which leads me to a theory that perhaps your Sarite comes from a higher bed altogether, in Koramvis itself.”
Ryhgon’s eyes widened.
“Belly of earth!”
“I may, of course, be mistaken,” Kathaos said dryly.
“He would have had to know where your lordship placed your scouts.”
“Possibly he does. There is a certain careful enmity between Amrek and myself, yet I’m useful to him and not overt in what I do. But if this Sarite is some half-brother of Amrek’s, put here as the King’s spy—I think you understand me, Ryhgon.”
• • •
There was a light, indeterminate, white moth snow blowing on the wind, melting colorlessly on the pavements of the city.
Still absorbed by the melancholy dusk, Raldnor and the Lan had settled on the lower and more obscure ways of Abissa. The first wine shop they came to was unknown, but they pushed in out of the snowy dark to the murky light of greasy candles. The place was deserted.
Yannul took hold of the handbell hanging by the grate and rang it, and out of the silence of the shop came the rustling of a woman’s skirt in answer. But it was a threadbare skirt, and she little and thin and very young. As the shadow left her, Raldnor saw that she had yellow hair.
She did not speak. Yannul asked her for wine; she nodded and went out. As soon as she was gone, he said: “A Lowlander!” His voice was full of amazement. “Does she know how close she is to Amrek’s nest? How has the persecution passed her by? She must be a slave.” And then, with surprising gentleness: “Poor little mite, she looked barely old enough to couple.”
