by Tanith Lee
“Do it,” Amrek said. His Guard had served him well; there was not a scratch on him. Yet he seemed in a trance.
A last catapult delivered flame among the orchard trees.
The dragons drank wine as they waited above the smoke.
Glancing up at the blue-black sky, a man said: “No carrion birds. That’s strange.”
“Not enough to feed them of ours, and the skin and bone Lowland muck would stick in their gullets,” his neighbor answered.
Farther along the line, a boy, ladling from the wine pitchers, fell abruptly behind in his task.
“Come on, you. Get a bit of speed on.”
“It moved,” said the boy.
“What moved, you numbskull?”
“There! Look—” The boy pointed, and, staring down, his sergeant saw a tremor disturb the scarlet liquor, ripple and run and flatten out into nothing. He laughed.
“There’s a beetle got in, boy. Ladle up. One of our lucky lads’ll get more in his cup than he reckoned on.”
Yannul the Lan straightened and drew out his blade. The Zakorian, who had stayed behind to fight, crashed down into the bushes.
Now at leisure, Yannul glanced around. The smoke was full of dimly glimpsed figures moving all one way. The dragons seemed to have been called off to let them choke and roast at their own pace. He turned and ran with the general tide between the fires and emerged on higher ground where the smoke lay more thinly. Behind, trees crackled under their pall; beyond those was the glitter of the Vis troops in their immaculate squares, drawn up as before, and waiting.
A great stillness had settled over this place, though he could hear faint shouts and cheers from the Dortharian end of the valley, and the snap of burned wood in the orchards below.
“What now?” he said to the nearest Lowlander, wiping soot and blood from his eyes.
The man turned to him an ash-white face. “Now they die,” he said.
Yannul’s scalp shivered.
“You mean, I think, we die—once they leave off swilling and cheering, and come on.”
Just then the sky turned black as night.
Some of the Vis sections of Raldnor’s army let out cries and curses and stared up at it. The Lowlanders stood like blind statues, paying no attention.
Then there came a new sound across the valley. A sound like a colossal gong beaten underground.
• • •
The shadow of the black sky fell over the dragons, and their cheering stopped. In the thick stillness which followed, a man began to gibber. The animals tossed their heads, rolling their eyes and sweating.
“Storm coming,” a soldier said hoarsely. “Look how the trees’re thrashing about.”
In the orchards the cibbas were swaying like dancers. Men pointed at them and made religious signs, for there was no wind.
Then came a great brass mooing, up out of the ground at their feet. Animals reared in fright; men cried out to their gods. On the upper slopes a creaking catapult tilted slowly and fell flaming among the Dortharian ranks. But the ultimate voice came from behind them—the voice of the city, where a thousand bells began to toll.
They turned, struggling with their mounts, staring back toward the white towers of Koramvis, and in that moment they saw the red spout and gush of powdered rock explode silently from beneath her walls, after which the hills ran together, and she was lifted like an offering to the ink-black sky.
• • •
Above the city, in the cave of Lake Ibron, the steep sands let go their immemorial hold. Deep down, where colors bloodied into purple, ancient laws of balance became subtly altered, and tidal urges swept the hidden caves.
• • •
The first shock cracked through Koramvis. The noise of it was a low metal booming, the single note of a monstrous heart. Lightning turned the sky to glass.
At the second shock, paving lifted by its roots, and fissures spread in a spilling stain. In the lower city, walls burst apart. Lamp poles fell in rows. The river came running sideways up its banks into the collapsing hovels, its water as red as blood. The fleeing wagons overturned, or ran out of control along the roadways.
The great bridge that spanned the river to the south broke at its center, as if under the impact of a gigantic axe, letting go its human freight into the boiling mud.
In the Avenue of Rarnammon the Dragons tumbled from their bases, showering a rain of shattered obsidian across the streets.
Towers leaned and fell.
Fires burst into white flower.
Screaming, calling out to their tottering gods to save them, the terrified and the trapped wailed and shrieked in their agony.
In a celebration of doom, the thousand bells of Koramvis roiled and jangled.
• • •
Val Mala stood beside her chair in the tilting room, while gold lamps crashed from the ceiling.
“Dathnat!” she cried.
The bells seemed to beat inside her skull. Her legs were the feeble limbs of an old woman. She dared not cross the room. A girl lay dead before the archway with bloody hair, and in a moment she too would sink forward and the roof would come down across her back.
Miraculously, she felt iron fingers suddenly grasp her arm, supporting her.
“Dathnat—the ceiling will fall—”
“Lean against me, madam,” the dry voice said, without a trace of fear.
Weak with terror, Val Mala could do nothing else.
Dathnat half carried her up the impossible angle of the floor and under the arch. The corridor was full of smoke, for a fire had started in the lower rooms. A stream of ocher gushed from above.
“We must find a way out, Dathnat. Quickly, Dathnat.”
The Zakorian glanced about her, and ahead. The passage seemed blocked by fire; besides, there would be no time to reach the lower courts before the upper portions of the palace gave way. Even so, her gods had not been entirely unjust. Pausing beside an open gallery, Dathnat pointed.
“See how Koramvis burns, madam.”
“Dathnat—have you gone mad? Find a way for me to escape this place before the roof falls and kills us both.”
“There is the way, madam,” Dathnat said.
Val Mala looked down. She saw a terrace laid out with colored flags that seemed from here as small as a checkerboard.
Presentiment came, immediate and undeniable.
“Dathnat!” she screamed.
Dathnat, with one swift and irresistible blow, thrust the Queen over the broken ledge of the gallery. That one thing her gods had left her time to do. Complacently she watched Val Mala spin shrieking to meet the empty stones beneath. After the meeting, she was silent.
• • •
In the depths of the rock, Anackire stirred.
The margins of the pool within her had long since widened and filled up the room, bursting the door from its hinges and flooding the stone temple. Now the foaming water had lifted her a little and was thrusting up against the roof of the cave.
Her golden head grazed on the granite above. Over this place huge clefts had already spread themselves as the quake dissolved the structure of the hills. Now the land slid and fell away. Out of the chasm emerged the massive milk-white torso with its burning eyes and hair.
The third shock, the final shock which flung down the last of Koramvis, spewed Ibron up into the cave. The full force of the water came gushing out from the fractured rock, lifting the goddess with it.
Higher and higher the jetting liquid took her. She crested the hills and rose incredibly into the pitch-black sky, a towering moon of incendiary ice and flame.
In the plain, floundering among the craters and the fire, the dragons witnessed that last and most absolute omen. Her eyes like stars, Anackire soared and blazed, crushing them with the eight maledictions of her serpent arms. Now the known
laws of their world, which had supported and nurtured them all their lives, betrayed them and brought about the final inrush of Chaos.
They had seen Nemesis. Their world was ended.
The goddess shone like a meteor in the black air, then sank, as the wave relinquished her, out of their sight, into the torn mirror of the lake.
• • •
But Kathaos lived and was unchanged. He imagined nothing at the sight of the creature in the sky. Even at the end of the world he was rational, and a cynic. She was a device. He knew it, though her origins at this time held no interest for him. For he understood quite well, despite his logic, that the things he had labored at carried neither significance nor hope in this altered landscape.
Only one thing, therefore, was left. An act that was fitting, if no longer useful.
He rode his chariot along the broken lines, past men clawing in the contrary earth, through the churning flame fight and the purple smoke, and the weeping and the prayers.
He came to Amrek at last. Amrek, the Storm Lord, who had become, through the admission of Chaos, accessible. He looked at Kathaos blankly, without trepidation or violence.
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” Kathaos said. He approached Amrek and stabbed him in the side where the mail was unaccountably rent, as if purposely for his knife. “It is an act compatible with our circumstances.”
Kathaos remounted the chariot and turned the heads of his team toward the first and only break in the sky.
Amrek lay still in the dark. He was not quite dead. Only formless thoughts disturbed him. He was tranquil, until terror came abruptly out of the ground.
Terror had glittering eyes and came sliding and narrow from its black home under the boulder. Terror was a snake.
Amrek’s body jerked helplessly.
The snake wove in circles, its head darting from side to side in frenzy. It, too, was afraid; the earth had also shaken down its world. Suddenly it discerned a refuge. It looped against Amrek’s face and trickled to rest against his throat. He felt its living pulse pressed strongly to his fading one. And abruptly terror stopped. Partnered with his flesh, the skin of the snake was dry and cool and layered like cameo.
“How can I fear this thing?” he thought quite clearly. “Something so beautiful.”
Presently, the snake, restless and seeking now the earth was quiet, left the shelter of the man’s dead body and shivered away across the slope.
BOOK SIX
Sunrise
25.
THE HUGE, DULL-RED SUN, poised on the final edge of the horizon, blistered the mountains into coral. A black tongue of shadow had already covered the tumbled angle of hills below and the ruins of the city which had once been Koramvis.
There had come a season of snows and rains—after this, a season of heat, when the urge to growth possessed the fertile northern land. And the fruitings of the soil were not idle in the city. The deserted gardens overspilled their boundaries; young trees burst from the broken streets. Soon the corpse of the metropolis was entirely claimed by a loose mantle of vegetation. Birds screamed and sang in the wrecked palaces, and in the upheavals of the broad roadways, orynx and wildcat established lairs. Of men, only the dead remained in Koramvis. Their tombs were haphazard and various. Others, clawed free by lovers, or discovered on the battlefield below, had achieved houses of earth and markers of stone. Of a King’s mound there was no trace. If Amrek had found burial was unknown. Perhaps the earth had swallowed him at last, or the running fires ironically given him Lowland rites. Certainly, no woman or man had come weeping to carry him to the privacy of the grave. Such was his destiny.
It was on the plain below that men lived and went about their work, in a town of wooden houses, with a few roughly made stone halls—an ugly, sprawling, makeshift place. To the west of it, on the lower forest slopes, a temple was being built before any other thing—a Vis temple of white stone, with a high tower and many pillars and steps. Incenses burned on the altar, grapes and fruit were spread out and blood spilt. They never forgot to worship here, nor to bring Her gifts, for now She was theirs. Adopted in their terror, She had assumed the character of their own. The Dortharian Anackire. They would name the new city for Her, when they built it, and Her priests were dark-skinned men who praised Her with fire, smoke and cymbals, experienced visions and practiced magics for Her sake.
And there were other Lowlanders in Dorthar now.
In one of the stone halls on the plain, two councils sat down. The first comprised Dortharians. Kren, who had once been a Dragon Lord in the city, was included in its ranks. Mathon, the old warden, miraculously protected from death by an eccentric formation of the collapsing house beams over his head, still held his familiar office in unfamiliar surroundings. In the second council sat Lans and Xarabians, and yellow-haired men from the Lowlands and elsewhere. Warriors of Tarabann and Vathcri were seen about the streets; pirates from Shansar turned politician and hero overnight. Sorm of Vardath was detained in Zakoris, where the black beehive of Hanassor had capitulated, starved to its deepest cellars; and in Karmiss the Shansarian vengeance fleet, having drunk its fill of blood and wine, had set up Ashkar as goddess of the island and began the business of making Her sons into kings. Karmiss was a malleable and docile land. She showed them her ways of pleasure and her forms of joy, and bowed to the yoke gracefully. And it was whispered behind the ivory lattices that the conquerors were beautiful and brave, and women, like another woman in Vardath, began to bleach out their black hair and tint it gold, paint their dark skins white, as once the Dortharian Queen had done. And amber, which had been of precious mystic value to the Plains people, now grew priceless as black Karmian pearls.
Across the breadth of Vis, alliances of the flesh began. In that second fading of the summer, the first crop of children was harvested from that first sowing. The obscure Sarish name of “Raldnor” invaded the nomenclature of those newborn sons whose blood was mixed.
And talk of the King who bore the name was rife as the weeds. He had wed a Vathcrian woman, but would he also take a wife of the dark races in the manner of the Vis? And would he live on, below the ruined city of Koramvis, or return to her ruined sister on the Shadowless Plains? Or did he live at all? There was a rumor that he had died in battle, for very few had seen him since the earth moved and shook down Koramvis.
As the last piece of the red sun slid behind the mountains, a chill breath of night blew down the wooden streets. The double council, seating itself in the dark stone hall, talked together, Vis to Vis, in stealthy whispers, while the Lowlanders merely kept still, as was their way.
The lamps were lit. A man entered and took his seat between them. He had never dressed as a king; now he wore a dark cloak, as if for traveling.
He heard their business out. Decisions were made, things settled. But there was a sense of the portentous in that place. At last he told them their responsibilities, and who he would leave in his stead as regent for the pale-haired son Sulvian had borne him across the sea.
There was clamor from the Vis. Men came to their feet.
“Storm Lord—the land is still in a state of flux—Where in the goddess’s name are you going, that you feel you can leave us like this?”
The Lowlanders kept quiet, knowing already.
“My work is done,” he said. “It finished when the city fell.”
He looked about at them. His face was curiously altered. Some of the great and terrible light had gone out of it, and yet the eyes, which had been empty of everything except those fires of will and power, now contained an infinite closed in shadow. The thing which had cast out his soul and possessed him had now let him go. He was, in the most essential sense, himself again.
He paid no attention to their altercation. Kren, the Dragon, saw something in Raldnor which told him as much as the Lowlanders could tell, for he was an excellent judge of men, whether the gods had chosen them or not. Yannul the L
an, because he had known Raldnor once, formed a picture in his mind as clear as if Plains telepathy had come to him. Xaros was at that time in Abissa, feted as a hero for his trick in Ommos by Xarabians who wished their aid remembered. When he heard how the King had lived solitary for several days, then come to the Council and given his kingship back into their hands, he also guessed.
How Raldnor found his way to it, they never knew. Yet his mind to theirs was like a bright machine—it might be turned to anything. And so they glimpsed this vast complex of thought—this brain, so enlarged, so alien, striving in some secret and deliberate frenzy of search. What had been the trigger to the searching was equally hidden—some infinitesimal tremor or stirring. Perhaps merely hope, or the thrust of buried yet insuppressible pain and loss. For he was still a man, after all. Those who saw him in the Council could no longer doubt it. It was to them an unnerving thing to witness a god reduced. They preferred to remember everything but that.
Outside, the night was cool and still and lit up by stars. A few men watched him ride up the slopes into the ruins of Koramvis, making for the mountains.
An hour later, in his wooden house, Yannul said to Medaci: “She’s alive then, after all. In Thaddra. Red-haired Astaris. And he’s gone to find her.”
• • •
There had been a child’s voice, a child’s voice calling across the black gulf, piercing his brain with its lost beseeching.
He had thought briefly of Sulvian’s son in Vathcri, more briefly still of Karmiss, and the black-haired baby Lyki had borne him and finally carried there. Flesh of his flesh cried out to him—not with words, for it had learned no speech, yet in an abstract, intimate tongue of the inner mind he had spoken only with one other. A perfect equation constructed itself.
His seed.
Astaris’s child.
Astaris.
When the thought was made clear to him, a formless presence gushed from him and was gone. He was emptied of the geas, the spiritual motivation which men explained as Anackire, that emanation of race which had possessed him. As in the past, the thought of a blood-haired woman took hold of him, flooding his brain like dawn, and left no room for any other thing.