by Tanith Lee
• • •
Lyki straightened and idly began to rock the cradle in which her child was lying. Her child, and the son of Raldnor. Its nurses had taken to calling it Rarnammon, and she imagined they did so to spite her. Its hair was a series of coiled darknesses, like flower buds growing on its small skull. Its eyes were curious—neither dark nor golden but strangely both at once—and its face was sullen and apt to turn purple, like a bruised fruit, when its digestion or its emotions troubled it.
Lyki rocked passionlessly, and the child stared at her with an aloof distrust to match her own.
Several gems glittered on her hand. Her dress was of a rare embroidered silk. Her rank, since Astaris Am Karmiss had perished, was considerably improved. She enjoyed, as Koramvis had observed, the personal protection of the lord Kathaos. Many of Astaris’s handmaidens had not been so fortunate.
Lyki herself was unsure of her position. While she had carried the child, Kathaos had made no proposition of any kind, save that she remain within his house, and she felt this gallantry due not to courtesy on his part either toward her or her condition, but merely to the fact he had no immediate need of her and yet foresaw a need at some future time. She knew that he would use her in whatever manner seemed good to him, and the knowledge made her nervous, even while she could discover no alternative. Once the child had been born and he had bethought himself of the matter, he had wooed her with all the lascivious pertinacity of a lover. Again, she realized, he did so with no sincerity, but because it amused him to do so. And indeed, his goal once achieved, his amatory interest had been brief.
She took her hand from the cradle. The baby kicked among the covers. She saw, with a strange and bitter gladness, that it would not develop Raldnor’s beauty.
There was a sudden noise in the inner court. Lyki heard feet running and voices calling for Kathaos. With a swift start of terror, she envisaged the enemy already at the gates, but the quietness of Koramvis all around her instructed her that whatever the event, it belonged to this house alone.
She crossed to the long window and stared down.
The court was rectangular, laid with black and white flags and dominated by a curious fountain. The water and the spray were constructed from faceted crystal, and ivory lilies were set in. No doubt the deception was well suited to Kathaos’s tastes. Sometimes birds would fly to the surface and attempt to drink, their claws clicking among the frozen flowers.
At the fountain were two guards, dressed in Kathaos’s yellow, and between them was a small skeletal man, whose face and neck were splotched with sores. He was a Lowlander.
Lyki’s head swam; she clutched the upright of the window to steady herself. It was not the man below who produced this effect on her, but the emanation of another man, suddenly conjured in her brain.
A second after, Kathaos appeared in one of the doorways which opened onto the court.
He was quite calm, apparently uninterested. She had expected nothing else.
“What do you imagine that you want?”
A series of shudders ran over the Lowlander. His voice, when it came, was cold and muffled, as if it rose from a tomb.
“I can tell you something that will help you, Lord Councilor. I can tell you something about Raldnor, Ashne’e’s son, that will make Koramvis uneasy.”
Lyki felt fear burn her throat, fear and something else, as she gripped the window and recalled Raldnor the Sarite. At the court, and in the streets, the Lowland king was never accorded any other name than this. The lower city knew him as Raldnor Bride-Stealer, for they had nothing to gain by forgetting Astaris. Only in the presence of Amrek himself did they desist. There, men did not speak of Sar. Many of the captains and commanders grumbled amongst themselves concerning Kren, the Dragon Lord, who had harbored an enemy of Dorthar, but their weapons of spite were compulsorily sheathed.
“It will take more than a visitation of rats to make Koramvis afraid, Lowlander,” Kathaos said.
“But there are more rats than you think. Consider Saardos and Shaow. Raldnor doesn’t work alone. There are ships and men stealing in from a place beyond the sea, of which Dorthar, in her magnificence, knows nothing.”
“For an informer,” Kathaos murmured softly, “you’re notably arrogant. Why betray your own people? Can it be that it’s your Raldnor who sent you here? For some obscure reason—to create panic, perhaps?”
The man in the court smiled, but it was like the grinning of a skull.
“I no longer have a people. I have a wish. I want Raldnor to die, soon, and when he is dead, I want you to kill me, Lord Councilor.”
“On that point at least you can rest assured.” Kathaos turned to the guard. “Take him inside.”
As they moved in through the doorway, Kathaos said without raising his eyes to the window: “Follow us, Lyki. I shall expect you.”
Yet when she obeyed him, trembling with vague fright, she found herself shut out, to wait, presumably, on the Lowland creature’s mouthing.
Once she had heard a story in this house that Kathaos had long ago known Raldnor to be the child of Rehdon. Oh, how little she knew this devious man who now had such access to her life.
At last he let her in. The Plainsman was gone; she had no notion where—whether to reward or instant death.
Kathaos said immediately: “How is the child today?”
She looked at him without comprehension, startled at the seemingly irrelevant question.
“He does well enough.”
“Good.” Kathaos smiled. “I’ve been thinking it a great pity that Raldnor never saw his son.”
At once, though still without understanding, she was overwhelmed by terror.
• • •
The streets of Karith were empty. Although the plague had not penetrated here, three days since had come the news of Goparr’s fall, and the Ommos fled before a magician’s shadow. Only a few abandoned pet animals wandered to and fro, searching for shelter or food.
In the brain of the watchtower, a Dortharian soldier gnawed on a stick of roast meat and scanned the sky. He scarcely credited Kathaos with sanity, however the Council at Koramvis had seen things. As much expect ships to whistle out of the clouds as from a make-believe land over the sea. He doubted greatly if any such existed. The thought of the doomed garrison at Hetta Para bothered him also. Who knew for sure whether or not plague germs lurked here? Damned Kathaos, certainly, had no concern for a private pushed every way on other men’s business.
And he hated the deserted town, full of cold echoes and ghosts. It was hot in the tower, yet he felt the occasional urge to shiver. Zastis hung like a wicked scarlet rip in the night, and he wanted a woman; his need was distracting and imperative. He longed for the end of the watch. Every so often, from some hovel in the town, he heard a girl screaming. Most probably she was in labor, and her Ommos husband had thought her too cumbersome to take with him in his flight and left her to the will of Zarok. The soldier was not unduly concerned with her discomfort and certain terror, but whenever the cries came, they pared his nerves to the quick. He longed to go out and find her, and beat her into silence.
He finished with the meat, slung the bone from the open window and heard it crack on the court below. There was the patter of frenzied claws, and some small animal made off with it into the shadows. Beyond the court, the rock stretched down some forty feet to the pale smudge of the beach, where little ripples chased each other. On the sand he made out the stark line of catapults and, on the sea itself, the bobbing, anchored Ommos fishing boats extending away parallel to the shore as far as the eye could see.
Idly he looked farther out, toward the horizon. A dark, dimly smoking mass was moving there.
An instant’s sheer panic choked his throat. He remembered Alisaar, taken unaware in her sleep, by a fleet come from nowhere; then he flung himself to his feet, plunged up the three steps to the cupola where the
giant bell hung on its ropes and dragged it into life.
• • •
Faintly, over the water, they heard the bell ringing in the hot silence.
They were soldiers of Vathcri and Vardish sailors, carried together in the great beaked vessels that had once been forest trees; there were also Shansarian pirate ships, their black sails like gall in the light of the Star. They had come a long way to see this strip of land, this fortressed town, and waited a long while for the signal-sending of the white-haired man they called now Raldanash.
Jarred of Vathcri stared ahead.
“Ships, captain.”
“So it is, my lord. But no men on ’em.”
Eyes scanned for any movement on those low decks. The movement came instead from the rocky beach beyond.
“Catapults!” Jarred cried. His urgency possessed him. He ordered his vessel to fire, but the white streamer fell short and sizzled in the sea.
“By Ashkar!” the captain shouted. “My lord—their gods have driven them mad! They’re not aiming at us, but at their own vessels.”
Orange flame burst and arrowed from the shore and lodged among the little rigs and skimmers lying idle on the water.
Men cursed and marveled. The Shansarians laughed and roared their contempt into the flaring night.
The first explosion burst from the Ommos boats as if a monster had woken in the sea.
A column of pure flame gushed outward and upward, eighty feet in height, accompanied by a waterspout of scalding blackness that crashed down upon the foremost Vathcrian galleys. Red light bled across the whirlpool, and flame ran after. In the wake of the first convulsion, a second followed, then a third, a fourth, each one giving rise more rapidly to others, as the inferno spread from vessel to vessel. The whole sea thrashed and boiled.
“Oil—” The captain wept, kneeling, blinded on the deck.
Men screamed as the heat peeled skin from flesh.
Jarred’s ship was the first to catch alight.
Her sail screwed itself into wizened papers, like a moth’s wings caught by a huge candle. The figurehead of Ashkar began to melt, dripping its ivory like wax. Timbers blazed up. The sea was a pool of liquid gold.
Men jumped from burning hulks and perished in the burning water. The air was thick with smoke and screaming.
The ships of Shansar, more to the rear, fell back, taking what men they could, leaving the pride of Vathcri to split and fry.
No other menace came from the shore. There was no need. The raging wall of fire ran every way.
The casks of oil in the Ommos boats continued to erupt, blotting out the sky. The conflagration lasted through the night.
In the pink smoldering fog that came with dawn, small sea creatures lay dead at the foot of Karith, and the stripped corpses of men floated and rapped with half-bone hands against her rocks. One of these bodies was Jarred’s. Of the enemy fleet there was no sign, save for those still-smoking ruined trees, with their curious charcoal prows lying broken sideways like the necks of swans.
• • •
“How does he know these things, Yannul my friend? Has this Raldnor I used to go whoring with become a sorcerer out of a book?”
Yannul shrugged. He and the Xarabian Xaros had struck up a wary camaraderie, partly to persuade the factious Lans and Xarabs in the camp that it might be done. At dusk the Vis sections of the army had been in good spirits. Goparr had fallen and was the first stronghold they had looted. She had tried treachery in her first surrender, and Raldnor had given her over to rape and sack with the merciless justice they had come to expect of him. The Lowlanders had taken no part in that. They sat silent at their cookfires, speaking no doubt in their skulls, Xaros sourly concluded. He too experienced that uneasy uncertainty about the Plains men and their mechanical, emotionless abilities.
Now the Sending had come, or whatever in Aarl it was. Somehow, by some mentally immoral method, Raldnor now knew that a segment of the allied fleet had been driven from Ommos, and more than half of the segment destroyed.
“Whatever else, one thing’s for certain,” Xaros said. “The Dortharian and Ommos soldiers at Karith will be out on the road to meet us, and no help from your otherland friends.”
“Their young King died in the sea,” Yannul said. For various reasons this had distressed him. He had come in some ways to equate Jarred with the boy-monarch of Lan.
“That’s bad, but reaches all of us. I regret I’ll never see my Helida again—a prize among women, who thinks with her brain more often than her pelvis, which is uncommon. Ah, nostalgia, Yannul. I wonder if she’ll put up a shrine for me, or simply hop into bed with one of my damned father’s rich and handsome younger brothers. And who is that girl you ache for these Zastis nights? Ah, yes, the golden Lowlander Medaci.”
Yannul grinned.
“And what of the Tarabithybannion—whatever-god-forgotten-name-it-is fleet off Dorthar? If the dragons know the plan, there’ll be trouble there as well. No, wait, I can surmise. Raldnor has sent to warn the ships.”
“So he has.”
“Oh, by the gods. I should have been resigned to it. I suppose he’ll settle the Karith force by magic, too.”
“Who knows, Xaros. The plague in Ommos was strange. And I told you of the dustwind at Vathcri.”
“On the assumption that we should save our pitiful strength for Koramvis, what stands between us and Dorthar now, apart from Karith?”
“Hetta Para due north, mostly evacuated. And a small Dortharian garrison across the river to keep out possible plague carriers.”
“I have a plan,” said Xaros, “improbable only in its genius. Come with me to Raldnor, and let’s show him what honest clods can do by a bit of verbal wrangling.”
When they went through it, the camp was bright with fires and there were Ommos women still about in it, though Goparr lay some miles behind. These at least seemed to have preferred Lannic and Xarabian rapine to Ommos peace.
• • •
Forgis of Ommos, the bullock fat captain of the mixed troops from Karith, sweated in the early sun and stared where his scout had pointed. He did not like this work in the heat, nor the five hundred Dortharians who laughed at him—and not behind his back, though it was broad enough.
“Well, well? What am I to be looking for?”
“A rider, on the slope, coming from the direction of the Lowlanders’ camp, sir.”
“Plains man?”
“No. See, sir—he’s dark.”
Forgis wiped sweat from his eyes, but could not make this out. Nevertheless, he struck a spearman on the shoulder.
“Ride, you oaf, and bring him down.”
The man plunged off in a wash of dust. But there was no need of him. The rider met with some sudden difficulty, his beast floundered and fell and the man rolled off, over and over down the scarp, to end in an untidy curl at the bottom.
Forgis rode up without undue haste. The man shifted, groaned, sat up, and rubbed his face gingerly with long brown fingers. The zeeba had wandered uncaringly away and was cropping the grass. Forgis let out a slow laugh. The man turned and stared at him vaguely. The fall seemed to have jolted the wits out of him.
“Xarabian, are you? Where do you come from? The Lowlanders’ camp?”
The Xarabian’s mouth worked anxiously.
“No—I—” He broke off and appeared to be searching for an adequate excuse for his presence there.
Forgis spat.
“We cut up dogs like you and feed them to the beasts. If you want to live, be hasty. Where are you going? And why running away?”
“I—the gods of Koramvis—”
“Gods?” Puzzled, Forgis frowned. “What is this talk of gods?”
“They’re dead,” the Xarabian suddenly said.
“Dead? Who is dead? These gods? Gods cannot die.”
“Sentries huddled at their fires, some in their sleep. All dead.”
The scout said in a dry excited voice: “Do you mean the Lowland army?”
“No longer,” the Xarabian said.
“If they’re dead, who has killed them?” Forgis grumbled.
The scout backed off.
“Plague, perhaps, sir. You, Xarabian, stand away. You may carry the disease.”
The Xarabian slunk aside.
Forgis barked orders, then turned and said: “You will guide a detachment of one hundred Dortharian foot soldiers to witness this thing.” He grinned at his own cunning. If there were sickness, let the accursed-of-Zarok catch it.
The Xarabian began to protest in terror, but a drawn sword quickly changed his mind.
So it was, an hour later, the Dortharians, emerging over a rise on the old Goparrian-Karith road, saw their enemies stretched out below them in the myriad ghastly attitudes of painful death.
The dragons went no closer and did not linger; neither did they retain their guide who had begun to clutch his belly and groan.
In a spume of dust they marched back along the road, and thence back to Dorthar and her white city, where, for a time, there were crazy rejoicings in the lower quarter.
There were rejoicings also in the camp of death once all the corpses had rubbed life back in to their stiff limbs, put out a burning tent and caught several strayed zeebas. It was the best and last joke of the march, and Xaros was a hero who would take his place thereafter in any decent saga, as a prince of deception.
“So much for magic,” Xaros remarked. “And now I think of it, I was lucky they didn’t turn the tables on me and grant me a quick death with a sword.”
• • •
In Dorthar the laughter presently stopped.
News limped in of fires along the Zakorian coast and Hanassor besieged, while the remnants of the fleet driven off from Ommos had fallen in frenzy on Karmiss, and her nights also were now full of smoke.
From the river quarters on the Ommos border the dispatches were very late. At last a solitary man reached Dorthar and died of his wounds in the streets of Koramvis, like a warning.