by Tanith Lee
They had been smoked out of their lair like orynx in the hills above Koramvis. It was a trick well remembered by the man who had once hunted with Koramvians, on the day the earth shook.
A few men evaded the red blades and fled. It was an ignominious flight and ended in death anyway. Some perished oddly in Xarabiss. Those that reached Dorthar were hanged to the last man.
• • •
Also unlooked for, like black swans, there came out of the north sudden ships.
They crept over the laminations of the sea: vessels of Shansar and Vathcri along the shadowy coast of Lan toward Ommos; a vast fleet of Shansar and Vardath edging behind barbaric Thaddra, making for Alisaar and Zakoris. And, far off still, behind the Dragon Crest at Dorthar’s back, Tarabine galleys with blood-red sails.
They had been a long time building. Vathcri had stripped her forests of their huge trees, turned her army into a navy at Vardath and manned the wide decks under Jarred. The Shansarians, eager to despoil the Vis lands, leaped about their own black sails, which bore insignia of countless different kings, and sang their pirate songs. There were pale goddesses with plated tails leaning out from the up-curving prows that had the carved beaks of birds or the wide mouths of water snakes.
The spirit which had departed with the white-haired man still moved them in their various ways.
They hung, a few miles out from Vis, waiting, like the shadow of an evening soon to fall. It was not yet quite the time. There would be a signal; their priests would know it— an emanation, a Sending. It might come from the holy men of the Plains—a magic communion from one group of sensitives to another. Many believed that he alone would order it, the man they called Raldnor. Especially the pirates observed his name with awe. To some extent he had been deified among them.
The days passed. Storms broke at Dorthar’s back, and the red-sailed ships of Tarabann withdrew to a farther horizon.
“He is in Xarabiss,” said Melash the High Priest of the Vathcrian Ashkar. And a muted, half-troubled cheering rose from the wide decks.
To forty Shansarian pirate ships in the twilight off Alisaar came the first injunction.
The priests cried out with white faces. The sails opened; the iron oars ripped the glass surface of the sea and churned the bay of Saardos, capital of Alisaarian kings since the time of Rarnammon.
Their decks were straddled by their armament. The spoons of catapults barked on their leather buffers, and spat white flame among the towers and walks of the seaside mansions and the merchant quarters. Flame lodged and gouted and lit up the sky. The pirates, wild with their blood frenzy, leaped down among the blazing wreckage of the docks, running on the spines of smoking fishing smacks and up the fire-bright wharves, to butcher the unprepared soldiery massing from the garrison.
Saardos burned that night, a horrible example to the dark-haired races. The ancient palaces collapsed in rubble; the garrison gave out at dawn. The city showed a gutted skull’s face to the pitiless day as the howling invaders ravaged her corpse. Her king fled by a back gate to the fortress at Shaow to muster troops. In the confusion and fiery dark his commanders had learned nothing of the enemy. They surmised Zakoris or Thaddra had attacked them, and the world had gone mad.
• • •
The Lowland army had left Sar lying untouched, yet virtually abandoned behind them.
The warm, half-fetid perfume of summer was on the wide Xarabian plains. Towns lay in their path; they passed them with a mile or so between. They skirted Xarar, and no warning smoke rose from her garrison tower, though patrols had noted their passing from the woods above the road. Sometimes men rode to join the march—in twos or threes mostly, sometimes alone.
Often the wayside fields were empty and the farmsteads quiet, but full of anxious eyes. The Lowlanders took little and despoiled nothing. Near Tyrai the land was red with flowers, and men intercepted them with carts laden with beer and bread for Raldnor’s troops. There were women too. They threw the red flowers at the soldiers. The Lowlanders watched serenely. The Lans laughed. The Xarabians bowed and tucked the flowers in their collars. Flowers trampled under the feet of the animals sent up a smoking fume. For Raldnor it was like the summer a year before.
The dark-eyed girls still stared at him. But he was different now, no longer an adventurer from Sar, but now a god in a hero’s body. Their sighing was altered, but no less.
Thann Rashek was at Lin Abissa, in the white palace with the twisted golden pillars. He sent word to the force in his land: “My city lies helpless before you. We open our gates and beg the mercy of Raldnor Son of Anackire.”
That night the Pleasure City did a brisk trade, though not from the Lowland men. It was the Lans and Xarabians who were taken to its erotic breast, and loved and fleeced under the ruby lamps.
“The Lowlanders do not fancy women,” the beautiful daughters of Yasmis complained. “Nor anyone else,” remarked her beautiful sons in the Ommos Quarter. It was a disappointment to discover, as they had always suspected, the sexual reticence of the fair-haired race.
Raldnor dined that night at Rashek’s table.
“Well, we are conquered,” the Xarabian said. “How unfortunate that you should find us so poorly defended.”
He had been very curious. Now he observed, with ironic delight, the Dortharian-taught prince’s manners, but he noted, too, how the soul was drained by what drove it. Yet who could doubt this man was Rehdon’s seed? “He will die, of course, in Dorthar,” thought Rashek. “Amrek’s dragons must outnumber them, in proportions so vast as to make assessment unthinkable. Their luck at Sar is unrepeatable. They will shortly be overwhelmed. And this extraordinary man will be led in gold chains through Koramvis and slaughtered in some unique manner of Amrek’s devising; for who cannot believe that Amrek hates and goes in terror of my elegant guest? Well, Raldnor will follow where she went, perhaps. If the shades are capable of love.”
As the Lowland troops rode away from Abissa in the morning, a man on a black zeeba came galloping after. The Xarabian contingent took him in gladly enough, but in the dusk, when their camp was made once again on the open slopes, the newcomer presented himself at Raldnor’s drab, owar-hide pavilion, the impersonal erstwhile tent of some minor Xarish officer.
He was at pains to get in. The Lan he had heard of and one or two captains from among the mercenaries were drinking wine. Raldnor stood by the lamp, reading a piece of reed-paper.
“Well, my friend,” the Xarabian said, glancing around, “who would have thought it?”
Raldnor turned about. The Xarabian, catching sight of his face for the first time in more than a year, checked himself and his humorous banter.
“Xaros,” Raldnor said. “You are very welcome.”
He held out a hand, his mouth moving in the exercise generally recognized as a smile.
Xaros laughed uneasily.
“Well, I’ve come to swell your number by one. No doubt a stupendous contribution.”
Later, crouched by a smoking fire in the chill late of night, Xaros composed a letter to Helida, who had never for a moment expected him to think of such a thing.
“Oh, by the gods, my love, how he’s changed. I suppose I should have anticipated something, but not this. I had feelings of sentiment toward this man, as you well know. But I might as well grasp the hand of an icon. Oh, he treated me excellently, when I’d have been happy to rough it and grumble, because, as you understand, I was never made to be a soldier. But he’s no longer anyone I know. Look for me back any day, though I’ll stick this fool’s errand if I can. This damned zeeba I robbed your uncle of has devoured half my food as I wrote this. I have told it I shall eat it in return, if ever we reach Dorthar.”
• • •
In Koramvis, Amrek had not stirred. There had come a rumor of fire and terror in the west—Saardos sacked by pirates with pale hair. As yet it was only a rumor, like so many of the wild t
ales born suddenly in the mouths of the fearful.
Again, messengers had ridden to Xarabiss and returned by circuitous routes in fear of the Lowlanders.
Thann Rashek’s answer was, as usual, courteous, but this time with a barb in the tail.
“I exclaim once again that I have no able troops ready to defy the men of the Plains. Though anxious for Dorthar’s honor at all times, I am an old man. Can I be blamed if my cities surrender in terror to the savage Lowlanders, when even your Highness’s own soldiers were forced to fly?”
“He begs for war, and shall have it,” Amrek spat.
The Council were silent. The Lowlanders also begged for war; yet Amrek made no move to arrange it.
“Storm Lord, can all defense be left now to Ommos? Surely some men must be sent—”
“Then see to it,” Amrek rasped. His eyes were fixed upon the letter he still held. He raised it, showing them the crimson wax with its imprint of the woman-headed dragon of Xarabiss.
“Anack,” be hissed.
The Council kept still, their own eyes darting.
“Anack!” Amrek screamed out. “He dares to use the snake goddess as his seal!” He sprang from the chair, pointed at the six personal guards grouped behind him. “A Xarabian—find me a Xarabian in Koramvis and bring him here.”
Without expression, two of the black-cloaked men strode out.
They took a Xarabian tailor in the lower quarter. His wife ran after, screaming and imploring them, as they dragged him up the narrow ways into the wide white streets and under the obsidian dragons of the Avenue of Rarnammon. Amrek’s Chosen grinned, and men laughed on the roads, for the Xarabians, who should have cauterized the running Lowland sore and had failed to do so, were not greatly liked.
The dragons pushed the whimpering tailor into the Council Hall and held him still.
Amrek caught a blade from the nearest belt and slit the tailor’s threadbare shirt.
“Your master, Rashek, the stinking Fox of the Xarab midden, has sent me a certain token, which you will take back to him.”
He slashed with the knife, and blood ran. The tailor screamed, and screamed again as Amrek carved on his back the crude symbol of an eight-armed image with a serpent’s tail.
At last, shivering, Amrek dropped the knife on the flags. The Xarabian had fainted.
“Take the offal out. Whether it lives or dies, send it to Abissa as my promise.”
The hall was thick and close with silence. The face of the Warden Mathon was gray and puckered, for the sight of the blood had made him ill.
Kathaos sat motionless in the shadows.
Surely now there could be no further doubt that Amrek was entirely mad.
• • •
There was plague in Ommos.
It came with the summer heat. Men suffered pains in their bellies, turned black and died. Of the garrison force of a thousand Dortharians established in Hetta Para, where the plague was at its worst, only two hundred men survived, and most of them greatly weakened.
The Lowlanders had at this time taken Uthkat, where a battalion of Ommos soldiery fought them on the plain of Orsh, and unaccountably fled in rout. It was reasoned that the ravages of sickness and a certain foolish superstition were responsible. The Ommos had left off burning yellow-haired dolls. Some, it was muttered, burned wax effigies of Amrek instead. The Lowlanders were magicians, in league with hell and the creatures thereof—with banaliks, anckiras, and demons.
News had broken through at last, even to Ommos. Saardos had indeed been gutted, and the Alisaarian king slain at Shaow by white-haired berserkers, who fought screaming and seemed to take no wounds. Alisaar at least could no longer offer troops for Amrek’s expected offensive, though Zakoris had dispatched a generous vassal’s guard of three thousand men—gladly, and with contempt. She had no fear of pirates. Hanassor, inviolable in her rock, laughed at the rabble of the seas, whoever they were: Let them chew up Alisaar and come on. Yet who were they? Ommos knew. Devils conjured from the Waters of Aarl by the sorcerer who infested them with plague.
The Plains army reached Goparr and sat down for siege. It was remarkable, despite the sickness raging in the barricaded city, that none of Raldnor’s troops, Vis or Plains man, took the disease.
• • •
In the long hot blue of the nights, crickets scratched with their tinsel wings.
On a slope below besieged Goparr, a Lowland man lay dreaming in the dark. Sometimes he twitched in his sleep. The crickets troubled his dream.
He had found her face, her forgotten face. It was white, all white, and transparent, like crystal. It hung like a mask in the air.
“Anici,” he murmured.
No one was near enough to hear him, or to pry into his mind; he was very careful to sleep alone.
High overhead, a violet lightning expanded the sky.
Ras started awake. This was his agony, for awake, he knew her to be dead and himself alive. Awake, he forgot her face, remembering only the faint image.
When the spear had opened his skull, and he had murdered Yr Dakan in the upper room, it had come to him, as a sudden revelation, what must be done.
He must kill Raldnor.
Never before had such a solution to his pain presented itself, yet, in the act of killing, he saw how easy and how nourishing to his bloodless soul that act of blood would be.
Yet Raldnor was no longer human. He was a golem now, soulless also, capable of dying, but, to a human executioner—impervious. Only events, not hands, could slay the preternatural creature he had become.
Ras got to his feet. He made toward the zeeba pens. Passing two Lowland sentries, he shuttered and locked up the sparkling fever of his mind.
He had visualized the creeping black swans sailing on Zakoris, waiting off Dorthar and the Ommos coast. A jumble of possibilities cascaded through his thoughts. As another had once done, he had been recently at great pains to learn of the Dortharians. Yet he did not see them as enemies. They had become a means to an end.
He took a zeeba from the pen and mounted it.
Musky foliage flashed past and overhead were glimpses of a faded moon. No one halted him. Such was Lowland unity that there seemed no reason.
Three miles from the camp, he remembered his hair and skin and pulled up his hood.
22.
KORAMVIS, WHEN HE CAME to it, seemed composed of white flame.
The Zastian months had begun. The days were now very hot—heat of a dull sickening variety, heat like an omen, which to Ras meant nothing. The guards in the great gateway, expecting nothing extraordinary of a single man on foot, and oppressed by the sun and the Star, barely glanced at him.
Some miles beyond Hetta Para, Ras had become part of a great Ommos flight, intent on putting as much distance between themselves and the Plains people as possible. By that time he had darkened his hair and skin haphazardly with a sour water dye. Doing it, he had no sense of a perfidious irony—nor when he entered Koramvis. He had forgotten Raldnor’s past, for Raldnor had become for him a target—no more, no less.
The dye infected his flesh; scalp and skin broke out in dribbling sores which he scarcely noticed. The Ommos, however, avoided him, fearing this disease of scabs to be a new variety of the plague.
Due to the plague, the sprawling caravan found itself halted at the river border of Dorthar. Soldiers menaced with spears. They did not want the sickness carried over. Ras went downstream, forded the river in the deep of night and went on alone.
The journey slid off his senses; only the city awoke him—not to itself, but to his purpose. The pure white bird of Koramvis on her nest of fire left him unmoved. There was no room in him for curiosity; the capacity for observation had long since starved on the aridness of his soul. So he saw nothing beautiful, and neither did he see the turmoil which was eating like a worm between the whiteness.
In almost every thoroughfare there were soldiers—mostly mercenaries of Iscah and Corhl, or black Zakorians. In other parts, mainly the narrower, poorer byways of the city, families were packing their belongings in readiness for flight. Cooking utensils and piles of clothes and furniture were stacked precariously in carts. In a shadowless doorway a carrier was extracting his fee from a cow-faced whore.
Everywhere there was an aching tension, an absence of children playing in the streets. Wine shops had closed their shutters like pursed lips.
To these things Ras was impervious. He rode, gazing ahead of him, slow and dumb, an ugly apparition—a tangible form to some, perhaps, of the sudden, unlooked-for superstitious fear that held Koramvis. For here, too, they had begun to believe in magicians.
He crossed the Okris at noon and began to ask the road he must take. Men laughed at him and spat on the blazing pavements.
“Kathaos! Listen, Yull, this wants Kathaos, by the gods.”
A woman crouched on the steps of a temple where sweet smokes rose into the sky glanced up and pointed in answer to his toneless query. Later, an urchin led him to the wall of a great villa and picked his pockets of all their little coins.
Above the gate, the dragon of Alisaar was worked in bronze. Two guards slouched with narrow eyes.
Ras hesitated. His mind saw only the immediacies of entry. He turned back a street to where he had half seen a well.
Minutes later Am Kathaos’s two guards metamorphosed from their slouching with oaths, for a Lowlander stood on the paving, looking up at them with gelatinous, mosaic eyes.
