by Adam Corby
The cell was empty.
From the rooms above a sudden sound reached him.
Ampeánor raced back. There he beheld a sight to horrify. The heavy bronze door was shut. He ran to it and struck it with the torch, but the only answer his cries brought forth was the dull, quavering voice that slipped through the door-crack to him.
‘My lord, you have been condemned,’ said the voice of Dornan Ural. ‘The people, your judges, have spoken. The woman you love is dead, and you, young fool, are my prisoner. Now it is I, Dornan Ural, who rules this place.’
* * *
From the camp below the city two score warriors rode forth, the last barbarians still girt for war. Nam-Rog and Kul-Dro rode with the strongest of their tribes up into the city, for the last time. Once more they went beneath the hateful gate of wood and bronze and iron. They shouted up to the battlements above the Iron Gate.
‘Southrons!’ shouted Nam-Rog, who had only a few words of Bordo. ‘We go now! Give us Gundoen! Death-barge for our friend!’
But the battlements were empty, and no voice answered him.
Again the Durbar called up to the empty battlement, to no avail. Kul-Dro looked nervously up at the haunted heights where so many lives had ended.
‘Let us be gone,’ he muttered. Nam-Rog looked back, sighed, and brought his horse around.
Then a scream of metal broke the stillness, and a long bright streak cut the Iron Gate open behind them. The ponies and war-horses bucked and pranced; the riders fell back about the black ruin of Erion Sedeg’s assault tower.
Noisily the Iron Gate fell open. It stopped a fathom or two apart.
Some of the tribesmen made as if to flee, but no army jostled there to surge forth: there was only the same dark quiet. The men on horseback looked one another in the eye, frowning.
A lone figure showed in the brightness of the opening. Kul-Dro and the men of his tribe looked upon him in unbelief. Nam-Rog shook his head and made the Sign of Goddess to ward away evil.
They had looked for Elna-Ana, and in his stead walked this man. There was no mistaking those eyes or the way he held himself before them, unarmored, unweaponed and unafraid.
Ara-Karn walked out through the Iron Gate, the first to do so in more than a year.
‘The lord Ampeánor you will take alive at all cost,’ he told them. ‘The Empress and her women are not to be touched. For the rest—’ he shrugged, a gloomy smile playing about the cruel lips— ‘deal with them as you like.’
VIII
The Black Tent
BY THE SEA’S BRIGHT EDGE a hundred huge, rough-hewn men stood along the stone line of an ancient road. Goddess gleamed off their burnished armor of bronze, silver and gold, and deepened their scarred limbs to purple. Behind them, on slopes leading up to the end of a sere, trampled plain, were gathered other men, older, bearing graver wounds; younger ones stood below, among the rocks in the warm waters. There were no women there. In silence the thousands stared into the sea, that surged and splashed against the rocks, never silent, never still.
Upon the waters a thousand little vessels danced, drawn by currents out to sea. The vessels were black with gold upon their prows, and every one unmanned. For cargo the barges bore clay and bronze bowls and pitchers, broken swords, reddened axes, bound sheafs of human hair, rings, cloaks and a long bag of tough sailcloth stitched tight and sealed with wax against the spray and air.
One vessel was manned: in it a mighty-armed champion rowed with the current, towing behind him the largest, most ornate barge. Alone of all the living the young warrior rowed before the armada of the slain, ensuring with the sweep of his strong-driven oars that the corpse bound in the bag in that barge went first.
Alongside the bag lay pieces of bronze armor, once beautiful, now stained and battered, and a gleaming blue longsword studded with gemstones and inlaid with gold and silver, a weapon worth a kingdom.
From the distant shore a faint keening was borne to the rower above the creak of his oars. The old blind warriors on the plain made their chant, bidding the last farewell to the voyaged ones. Hearing it, the warrior cut the tow-line and put his boat back for land. The thousands of death-barges, driven on by the current, surrounded him for a hundred fathoms on every side. A chill ran up his spine, and he rowed hard to be free of the voices rising from the dead around him.
* * *
Nam-Rog and his two score had passed through the Iron Gate at last. But they found little to delight them. Mutely they stared upon the scene of the last feast of the Tarendahardilites. It was a sight that stirred horror in them: like their horses, tossing their manes and stamping their hooves, the tribesmen longed to be free of that place. To die in battle or hunt was honorable, to die of sickness familiar, to die of hunger unavoidable. But poison smelled of sorcery, of vile charms and muttered curses against which no swords or strength availed.
Ara-Karn, their Warlord, their King, their divinity, had poisoned the wells and cisterns of the citadel.
The warriors covered their mouths and nostrils with linens, and would take no drink of water or wine that they found in that place.
Warily the warriors gathered what riches they could find while Nam-Rog arranged for the corpse of Gundoen to be borne down to the camp. The Empress and her women they left shut up in the White Tower. In half a waking the warriors left that unclean place they had battled so long to win, nor would they ever again willingly set foot within it.
Ara-Karn ordered a public mourning of thirty passes for Gundoen, a thing unheard-of among the tribes. But in truth they all had such rites to occupy them. Many and great were the warriors who had fallen in that battle. So for three weeks the fields echoed with hammer, chisel and saw, as the fleet of death-barges was constructed. The Blind Ones were much sought after. Each new chieftain and champion vied to do his foregoer the greater honor.
Many warriors went up into the stronghold to see it, nor would they re-sheathe their swords until they had beheld with their own eyes the body of the man who alone had turned back all their armies. They went below the earth, into the near-black room of the jailers behind the bronze door. There they gazed upon him in awe, even as the companions of Nam-Rog had discovered him. Elna-Ana, whom the Southrons called Ampeánor of Rukor, lay upon his side against the wall in a corner of the room. His ghastly face seemed to stare each newcomer in the eyes. The famous sword, held in both fists, was thrust entirely through the body.
The Warlord encouraged these visits and ordered, when the tribesmen and slaves should have had their fill of seeing it, that the corpse be hewn into pieces and scattered in ditches for the birds and worms. Such was their dread now of Ara-Karn, that no tribesman dared to disobey. Only Roguil Arn spoke out against it, calling it the deed of a weakling to treat so grand an enemy so shamefully. He stole the body and built a magnificent death-barge by himself, lest any other be blamed with him. With his own hands the greatest fighter of the far North hewed planks and carved that barge and painted its prow with gold. The jeweled blue sword he left beside the corpse-bag. None would take that sword now, not even for payment: it had slain its master and was luckless and untrustworthy.
The young chief of the Vorisals did not face the Warlord’s wrath for his disobedience. Ara-Karn did not attend the voyaging; he hardly stepped outside his tent. Only once did he address his followers after his return: a bitter speech few understood.
He had learned that one of the Imperial embalmers had survived the poisoning, and had him see to the body of Gundoen. Now, filled with herbs and surrounded by fragrant spices, the corpse reposed within a sealed jeweled coffer near the Warlord’s tent. It was decreed that the remains of Gundoen would voyage forth on no waters but those of the Ocean of Death, from the bay of his home village. And in this Nam-Rog agreed, though it flew in the face of all custom to keep a corpse so long.
In that mass voyaging it seemed as though an entire generation went out on the waters at once. And the young warriors on the rocks looked up past the chiefs and champions to
the Blind Ones singing to the Sun. The young men felt as if they had spent their lives passing from one foreign city to the next. They wondered what it would be like to be home again. As children they had gone to war, as men they had known only these Southron lands.
When the last barge sank below the dark line of the sea, the barbarians returned to the camp upon the plain. They went back brooding. Three weeks, thirty passes of dark God overhead, had fled since the taking of the Citadel. It was now well into autumn, and the Darkland winds were chill. At last their vengeance was complete, and the Golden Woman of the South, last daughter of Elna, was in their hands.
Gloom and foul dreams descended upon the camp that longsleep. The barges had been seen off, but the spirits of the dead seemed to linger. So many in these wars had died badly. Hundreds had been left on the parched stones of the Taril. Hundreds more lay in the Palace dump-heaps. Thousands of tribesmen had died in the dim past during the building of that Citadel – and then there were the Southrons and their unclean, luckless deaths. They would not willingly leave this place. How could such spirits ever be appeased?
* * *
After long hours, the jade orb of God rose above the Sea of Elna. The strained, fretful silence ended in the camp. From all quarters the warriors converged about the central clearing. Soberly they gathered, with a sadness strange for victors.
Before them a large, elaborate tent rose above the camp at the summit of a low hill of earth shaped like the barge-mound of some old Southron King. Poles of ivory and seltiswood supported the black folds of silk and dyed bandar-skins drooping to kiss the dead earth. Above the tent a black banner hung unmoving on a pole, marked with a yellow Darkbeast-tooth.
To one side the golden coffer of Gundoen rested on ivory legs, sheltered from the light by a linen canopy like a shrine. To the other side a heap containing all the objects of value found within the Citadel lay open to the sky, awaiting division. Between them two empty high-seats of equal size and beauty had been raised.
All the byways of the camp bore the many marks of that year’s encampment. No tracks marred the awful virginity of the hard-packed earth of that mound. Such was the home of their Warlord-King, the Conqueror, the Returned One, Ara-Karn.
* * *
Inside the tent, the man wet his hard brown arms in a gleaming silver ewer of lustral water and let his attendants dry and array him. This he did naturally, as if long used to it. The walls of the tent surrounded like a treasure-vault the array of spoils, of carpets, statuary and weapons. The place suited the man, but there was something about the man that did not suit himself. Some traces of cheerfulness, of an almost hopeful anticipation. The attendants, noting this change in their master, were almost emboldened to speak and make jests; of course they did not. They were in the presence of Ara-Karn.
In the midst of these preparations three men were conducted into the presence.
His glance took them in. The cleansing and ritual purification of the citadel had been left to the slaves, for no barbarian would enter that place twice. These three newcomers were dark and wiry and appareled with elegance. Their faces were burned with the telltale marks of subtlety, fear and cruelty. In a word, they were Vapionil, and knew well the art and science of their slavery.
A number of Vapionil had survived the poisoning; the mercenaries of Erion Sedeg guarded the Citadel, but it was to the Vapionil that Ara-Karn gave the keeping of the Queen, trusting in their cowardice and venality. Not even the highest lieutenants of Erion Sedeg were allowed entrance to the White Tower.
Now great dread was apparent in their cunning faces, and they prostrated themselves before him with agitation.
‘Spare us, Great Kaan!’ they cried him from the ground. ‘Forgive us, for we are but helpless mortals who have done our best!’
‘What is it?’ he asked coldly. ‘Why have you not brought her as I commanded?’
‘That woman, O King of Kings, who some say is descended from Goddess, has fled!’
There was nothing of cheerfulness about him now. ‘And Erion Sedeg?’ he asked.
Erion Sedeg had survived the burning of the Tower, and was now a man whose power rivaled even Nam-Rog’s. When men spoke of the Warlord, it was now no longer in the terms which Kuln-Holn had taught them, but in those of Erion Sedeg. His flesh was blackened and hideously scarred, but the iron strength and evil will remained. As soon as he heard that Ara-Karn had returned, he ordered himself taken before the King.
Lying on the litter, Erion Sedeg gripped the Warlord’s arm and stared into the cold, impassive face with its hard, black-green eyes. Then he relaxed his grip. Already the rumors of the horror found within the stronghold were circulating about the camp. ‘Yes, you are the one,’ he said, shrinking back to sleep. ‘You are my Master, of whom I have spoken.’ The King of Kings did not respond.
‘Every chamber of the Citadel has been twice-searched, Great Conqueror! Her slaves are being questioned most expertly. The mercenaries of Erion Sedeg swear she did not pass through them – what else are we to think but that she took flight indeed, unless she had jewels hidden away, and the mercenaries do not speak the truth. Or again, some whisper she cast herself from the palace walls; but her women do not weep for nothing, so this seems unlikely.’
They babbled on swiftly in Bordo. A civilized lord, such as they were accustomed to, would have been amused by their extravagant protestations. A barbarian, such as this one was said to be, would have been flattered by their exaltations, or filled with such contempt that he scorned to punish them. But this one only looked at them, and in the bent of his lips might be read either amusement or scorn, and irony or despair in the greenish gleaming of his black eyes. At length, under that moveless gaze, the words of the Vapionil failed, as a brook will falter in the Desert when it sinks into the baking sands and is no more. Even so, the Warlord of the far North knew that the tale was not yet fully told.
‘What else?’ he asked in a calm voice.
They hesitated. ‘O Magnificence of the World, a word she left on parchment, addressed to your August Majesty. Yet it was our doubt whether you would wish to acknowledge it.’
Silently he extended a sinewy hand, its sparse black hairs curling from the intersections of its many lines, its flesh brown from sun and wind, and moveless as a monument’s.
With some agitation, the foremost slave bowed his head, lifted up the scroll, and felt it taken from his hands.
* * *
Among the barbarians below the mound were forty or fifty civilized men. They were dressed plainly, in undistinguished traveling-garb and the harness of many cities. They were Peshtrians, Pelthari, Belknuleans, Zaprolis, and men from all the lesser principalities and cities of the deeper South. They stood meekly and uncertainly among the piles of bales and chests and trunks brought as tribute for the Conqueror.
From time to time the legates cast nervous glances at the barbarians crowding in around them. Foremost were the proud chieftains and champions, light-haired, light-eyed giants bristling with weapons, bedecked with silver, gold and gaudy gems. Among them passed their beautiful women, herb-eyed, slow-moving, as though their every step or shudder produced in them an exquisite ache about the limbs. They were robed in loras of the finest silk, and their thin brown arms were weighted with bands of gold, ivory, silver, copper and electrum. Here was a ruby cut in the design of fallen Mersaline, there an emerald ringed with gold after the fashion of Postio. Evidence of the many conquests was everywhere, not least in the terrible scars of the barbarians, the gashes and mutilations they wore with more disdainful pride even than their jewels.
Without warning the tent-flaps sundered and a solitary man stepped out.
The chieftains straightened and held aloft their spears, swords, axes and bows, acclaiming him. The civilized men, their mouths dry of a sudden, fell to their knees in abasement.
‘Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn!’
The man gazed at the high-seats, then stepped forward. Silently he abode over the masses of men as the c
lamor of the warriors swelled into a roar.
‘Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn!’
At length the civilized men made bold to glance up from their abasements. It was not the proper form, but their curiosity had the better of them. So many were the tales they had heard of this man, that had he been larger than a war-horse and fashioned out of brass and flame, they would not have been surprised.
Yet here was a man not much above the middle height, with a short dark beard and hair of middle length. Over his torso he wore a black tunic cut after the fashion of no known city. He wore soft leather leggings after the manner of the far North, and on his shoulders a short mantle of brilliant green bandarskin. The black tunic rose into a cowl folded behind his head, in the way of the nomads of the Desert beyond the ruins of Postio. He wore no jewels, gold or silver. Yet upon his chest was spread a massive pectoral, all of great teeth curving and cruelly-pointed – the enormous teeth of the mythical Darkbeast.
The Conqueror of the World looked down upon those Southrons as if he knew their thoughts, and his mouth altered its bent somewhat. A dismal, unshrinking cold seemed to radiate from the dark figure, as though this were a thing belonging to no lands beneath Her broad face. At that moment the civilized men could well believe the whispered rumors that named Ara-Karn a Madpriest, one exiled from the Darklands for such deeds as revolted even those tormented souls.
When the acclaim subsided, he lifted his hand to the civilized men and spoke a few words. The legates eyed one another furtively; yet none of them knew the language of their conquerors.
One of the chieftains answered the Warlord, gesturing likewise toward the Southrons. He was an older man with streaks of gray in the ash-blond of his long hair and beard. Yet he stood up strong as a man half his age.
