by Tanith Lee
These items were peculiar. Mythos. Then the writing in the stone postulated other things, other myths, which belonged here, in the upheaval of the present.
“The Lowlanders have always had such beliefs,” Medaci said to him, when the fire had almost died. “Wells of Power, that might be tapped. And lines of Power that linked each well, painted invisibly over the earth, the water and the air.”
“Did they say where these wells could be found?”
“Some of the priests were supposed to know. There was always reckoned to be something close to Koramvis, and the story of a hidden temple there, made in the time when only yellow-haired men held the land.”
Koramvis. The stone tablet in the pool had called it Dorthara’s Heart. And here, that was Zor Am Zor. And the Lowland city, which the stone called Anak of the Plains. And one other situation, which the stone specified as Memon. And then came the reference to a second country, southward, beyond Aari Sea, that must be the second continent. And here there was a fifth Power source, at a place the stone named Vathak. One imagined this was Vathcri where, disgorged from the ocean, he had ridden with Raldnor Am Anackire, and where Raldnor’s white-haired son had been conceived and birthed. And one saw too, with a shattering clarity, that the doomed tower ship which had borne them to that alien shore, through storm and fire and mutiny and murder, and despair, had driven all the way along or beside the line of invisible force which ran between Vathak-Vathcri and Koramvis, Dorthara’s Heart.
Yannul wanted to laugh with anger. He was close to weeping, too. The supernal authority which had picked him up and flung him through the mirror of destiny, that monster clutched him yet, had never let him go, or any of them, live or dead.
He tried to dispel his tearing emotions by rational comment.
“But Memon,” he said. “Where is that? It isn’t a city, whole or ruin. Not even a town that I ever heard of. Some dot of a village, perhaps, seething with psychic broth. May all the gods help them.”
He put more wood on to the fire. It was damp, and sputtered. Maybe the spiritual force of the planet would be like that, now.
From the valley, the world, the snows, the nightmare invasion and prologues of war seemed nothing. But his other son was out there, in the thick of it. And the two sons of Raldnor Am Anackire.
“And she also,” Medaci said, having read his thoughts with an exactitude that no longer shocked him.
He stirred the fire grimly, the stick gripped with his sword-hand.
“Ashni.”
And the sparks became a leap of solid light.
20.
ACROSS THE EAST and the Middle Lands, the cold had cast its spell of white sleep. Through these drifts and canyons of alabaster there presently came struggling a knot of riders, their chariots foundering, their beasts often breast-high or almost to the throat, in snow. Reaching Dorthar, they struggled on. They struggled to Anackyra, and into the Storm Palace of the High King, where they stood, their faces raw, their eyes dull, and one of their number bandaged, having lost fingers.
They brought Raldanash news. The news was bitter, like the journey.
Alisaar, won by Shansar in the Lowland War, had been credited an ally to this Storm Lord, son of the man who had first led Shansar into Vis. Now Alisaar had proclaimed herself. Neutral. The formal message had not yet come, but it would come. The Dortharians who brought the story in advance gave it in their own words.
“It seems Kesarh made secret overtures on first gaining the Karmian throne. He’s half Shansar himself though he shows it little enough. Shansarian Alisaar is a provisional ally with Shansarian Karmiss. Now Kesarh seems to favor Free Zakoris. Alisaar can’t move. She has Vardish Zakoris next door, the Middle Lands over the Inner Sea, Free Zakoris able to get at her on the other side, and Kesarh sending presents and swearing undying love—and most of that from Lan which he’s annexed.”
“Alisaar will fight, my lord, but only for herself. Whoever moves up on her will be shown violence. That means Vardish Zakoris and Free Zakoris alike. Or Dorthar.”
The news, though bitter, was not quite astounding. Already the majority of Shansarian officers had resigned their commands throughout all Vis.
Warden Vencrek, speaking to the mixed council of Anackyra, exposed the threat that underlay Alisaar’s dilemma and resolve.
“We,” said Vencrek, using the Vis tongue, but laced by many now-popular phrases from his birthplace of Vathcri, “have sent our messengers to the Sister Continent. It appears we shall be blushing before the snow is done. I’m sure you’re aware, gentlemen, that if Kesarh had the sense to keep fresh an alliance with Shansarian Alisaar, he will have done the same by Shansar itself.” And the council muttered, although it had known to a man what was coming. “If Karmiss, who still sends us words of friendship—that we discredit—” said Vencrek relentlessly, “if Karmiss, I say, has retained a treaty with Shansar-over-the-water, and we can assume she has, then Shansar must take Kesarh’s part. Kesarh leans to Free Zakoris, the Black Leopard, the sworn enemy of Dorthar. In that case, the second continent now stands thus: Shansar becomes the foe of the Storm Lord’s people of Vathcri, and of Vardath who holds the kingdom of Old Zakoris in Vis. At the least, Shansar will refuse to aid her original ally, Dorthar. At worst, Shansar must declare war on Dorthar, and on Vardish Zakoris. And so in turn on Vathcri and Vardath themselves. And Tarabann, into the bargain. With the crisis as it exists, Vardians or Vathcrians would themselves be imbeciles to send troops here and leave their own ground unprotected. We can therefore expect no support from the second continent, gentlemen. All we can expect is a possible escalation of the war, once it begins, and the decimation of the southern Homeland, even as Vis herself is ravaged.
“Kesarh, by his fiendish maneuvers and his lack of integrity, has set the whole world on its ear.”
In the aftermath of this speech, the cries of outrage died and left them empty.
Here was chaos to rival and surpass that of any former conflict. And now, there would be nowhere for any of them to run. Rich and poor, serf and master, they would all be caught in it.
The foundations were giving way. Rarmon had betrayed them to Free Zakoris. Raldanash sat before them like a cool white stone.
Where were the heroes now?
Into the small room the dusk came crowding, full of shadows and unheard sounds. Beyond the high window the sweep of the uplands showed above the city, and on the deepening sky the mountains built of the sky.
You are not ours, the mountains called faintly to him, no son of our mornings; conceived in other shade. We will not conceal you, nor keep you safe.
Raldanash, sensitive to the alien contour and expression of this land, had long ago ridden its hills, sought out Koramvis, stared. Now he stared inwards, away from Dorthar, and away from Vis.
He was remembering Vathcri-over-the-ocean, her lenient winter season of winds but rarely if ever of snow, her hot months when the valleys flamed golden with grain. He saw the red-walled city, a tiara of towers almost ninety feet above the plain, and the red-walled palace. And there at the center of the cameo of walls and valleys and dark trees, his white mother, whose name had been Sulvian, while she lived.
Sulvian was beautiful. She and he were alike in that, and, in that continent of snowlessness, alike in the snow-color of their hair. As he grew, he believed that they had only each other. She had had a brother she loved, an uncle who could have served as a father to him, but Uncle Jarred had gone with Raldnor to the War, and perished in a burning sea, leaving no trace, nothing to mourn save recollection. And his actual father, Raldnor, Elect of the Goddess, he had not come back, nor been looked for. Sulvian had always comprehended it a vain thought, that she might behold her husband once more. She had promised Raldanash that he would see Raldnor, in her place.
When it began to filter to Vathcri after the War, the word of Raldnor’s disappearance, metamorphosis, transcension, Sulv
ian had set it aside. He would return to Dorthar. He had been at such pains to have Dorthar—of course he would return. Raldanash had been about five or six when he noticed her trust in this supposition had undergone a change. She commenced, very slowly, to wean her son from the wish she had herself implanted in him, and which they had shared, that one day, when he must leave his home and all he knew and sail to the foreign kingdom to be its heir, then Raldnor his father would await him, and welcome him. She had been used to say, judging his apprehension though he did not voice it, “You won’t be alone, with your father beside you.” But his father would not be beside him after all.
Raldanash, though a child, perceived she was more wounded by this than he himself. She had always understood she had been used—the alliance, the seal of the male child. She had loved Raldnor but without requital. She had turned to love her child instead. But, of course, the child also was a temporary solace. In early adolescence he would be sent for.
He thought of his mother now, as he saw her on the very evening he had gone away.
His heart had been wrung with trepidation and the first-blood of severance. He was just a boy. She, her luster already hollowing, her pale hair wound with gems, stood framed by the gems of stars standing in the sky beyond the colonnade.
“I shall send for you,” he said, trying, for he was so young, to be older.
She smiled.
“I’m always with you,” she said, “there or here, or anywhere.”
It was not until days later on the ship, the land sucked away like an indrawn sable breath, that he felt the hidden omen of her words, and knew she would soon die. He would have wrenched the ship about if he could. But already the discipline of his position, and those other elemental disciplines inherent in him, had taught him how to resist and how to endure. So, he bore it, all the way to Vis. He bore it through the arrival alone, the pomp, the earth tremor that rendered him its terrible homage. Through the ceaseless labor to achieve what was asked for, everything novel and to be learned and no harbor anywhere and no rest, for even asleep he dreamed the worries of his state, how he was to rule, the man he must become. He bore it, too, when they brought him the fact of Sulvian’s death, and laid it softly as a flower at his fourteen-year-old feet, before upward of fifty bystanders.
His court judged him cold, aloof and soulless. His dignity and dry eyes insulted the tenets of Vis. Women keened for their dead. Funeral processions were frantic. This youthful outlander, he should at least have put his hand to his brow, fumbled his sentence of acknowledgment. But Raldanash had no outward theater save his looks. He was stabbed in the mind, and bleeding, but none of them were allowed to observe it.
Cold King. Lowlander. Amanackire.
In his way, he had loved the idea of his father, too, Raldnor, the waking sunrise, the messiah. And to this hour he could still vividly recapture Sulvian’s face and voice, her whole demeanor, as she spoke of Raldnor to their son. To lose such a father totally, and to watch Sulvian’s loss over and over in reverie, these things did their work upon Raldanash, even if never seen to do it.
Like Rarmon, he knew that his father had never valued him. To inherit the temporal kingdom with such knowledge was hard.
In the end the imagery of Raldnor, the very name of “Raldnor” began, at some most private level, to offend and so to disturb Raldanash. Knowing himself as others might not have done, for this reason he had banned use of the name in those who were most often about him. Raldanash was aware, how in the depths of things, it might now and then be possible to confuse intrinsic aversion to a name with its bearer. Those he stripped were not informed of his logic. They took the act to heart, as did Yannul’s son, and were insulted.
The window closed with darkness. Someone came to light the lamps, and then the frost-bitten messenger bowed his way in.
“I am sorry,” said Raldanash, “about your hand.”
The messenger was dazzled and knocked off balance. The King was never humane, he had heard.
“My own fault, Storm Lord. I was careless. But it isn’t my swordhand, thank the goodness.”
“And this other matter?”
“Highness—” the messenger hesitated, uncertain. Then launched into his story with awkward brevity. It had seemed relevant. Now he was less sure.
He had been in Ommos, investigating the movements of Ommish troops and their reactions to the rumors he himself had helped spread of Free Zakorian infamy. When the cold started to gnaw off his fingers, he took refuge at Hetta Para where the Amanackire guardian ruled the sketchy new city, and the wrecked elder capital festered under the snow.
There had already been some murmurings in Xarabiss. They concerned a Lowlander priestess, or witch, depending on who told them, or their point of origin. There had been a peasant’s story of a spirit or even a goddess. She traveled north, and some said she rode a golden chariot drawn by white wolves, and some said she rode in a wagon hung with amber and glowing with an amber luminescence. One or two such mutters would have meant nothing. In troubled times supernatural madness frequently took hold. Gods and dead heroes were seen walking about, calves with two heads were born, loaves bled and water changed into wine or urine. However, these tales of a blonde priestess had decided similarities. Eventually, one began to glean a picture of some holy woman of significance on the road, as it seemed for Dorthar itself.
Then, in Hetta Para, going at nightfall into the unsavory lower quarter of the old city, he had seen, across great mounds of rubble and burnt-out houses, a section of the alleys below moving and bright with torches. Sensing the momentous, for this end of Hetta Para was a dubious sink, the messenger got down and blended with the crowd.
He followed it into a pit, and then considered if he had been wise. First off, he had believed they revived their worship of Zarok—the cousin to the Zakorians’ fire god. A statue, formerly flung down into the pit, was upright, and its oven-belly red with fire.
It was only after the crowd had inadvertently pushed him nearer that the messenger beheld the god, whom he had seen depicted previously, was altered.
“It was no longer ugly, my lord. I can’t explain it. Something had been done to the features, and the teeth—it wasn’t like itself. But that wasn’t everything.” The messenger shook his head slightly at the recollection. He said, “There was part of a broken wall behind the statue, about sixty feet high, before the roof had sheared away. All up the wall there was a mark, a sort of scorch, very faint, but the torches showed it.” Raldanash asked nothing, so the messenger said: “It was most of the shape of a colossal anckyra, the tail, the torso and the arms up to the elbows. . . . eight of them.” The messenger, who was also a spy, had uncharacteristically failed to probe the crowd. He had merely stood in the pit while the crowd did, and come out when it came out.
But by the time he reached the northern border and caught up with his comrades, he had added to his collection of stories. The witch-priestess performed miracles. Some of these involved manifestations of the Lady of Snakes, eighty or ninety feet high. Someone had declared the woman was the daughter of the Storm Lord Raldnor. The Dortharians had got no sign of her, but he guessed she and her people—for she went in company, if not with giant wolves, serpents and docile playful tirr—could already be here, in Dorthar itself.
When the man was dismissed, Raldanash also left the room.
He passed through the palace, its halls and courts, out into a snowy sloping garden, and so to the private temple he had caused to be built ten years before.
The grove itself was fleeced with snow, and the blackness of the temple stood out under it in slabs. As he entered Raldanash remembered, with a dull insistent clenching of the brain, how Rarmon had been proved to him here. Rarmon who now, like Raldanash himself, lay dashed in the uppermost hand of Anackire.
The lamp was lit. Raldanash stretched himself on the stone floor, and prepared swiftly for the trancelike meditatory stat
e, in which the priests of Vathcri, and later the Amanackire themselves, had trained him.
He had long been sensitized, as the Amanackire were, many of them, sensitized, to such an imminence. It had been abstract, until now.
Presently, drifting free, he gazed across the mists of inner sight and made out a slim flame, pale golden, like the eye of some inexplicable creature from another dimension.
• • •
Where the river curved and fragmented, heavy and curded now with ice, an ancient watchtower, only a stone shell, marked the northwest reaches of the Ommish-Dortharian border. Not far from here, almost three decades ago, the traitor Ras had crossed, on his mission to destroy the Lowland offensive. He had gifted—not even sold—his people, out of hatred for Raldnor, to Amrek’s Counselor, a man named Kathaos, who now went by another, like, name in Yl Am Zakoris’ service.
In and about the shell of the tower was a small encampment. Rough walls built of gathered stones lent added shelter to the three or four wagons crouched in their lee. Zeebas and men stayed mostly within the yawn of the tower, from which a drizzle of smoke rose up to a smoke-colored sky.
At a glance, you saw none of the attendant magic, no hint of miracles and sorceries. The bivouac was comfortless and gray. No wolves danced in the snow.
Haut the Vardian, one of his servants, and a Lowland man from Moiyah who had joined them near Xarabiss, were returning from a hunt. They had found nothing, which was not unusual. The sheep had all been eaten, save a couple of ewes kept for their milk. The slaughterings had been curious. The girl touched the animals’ foreheads and they fell asleep, nor woke when the knife sliced through them. Ashni herself did not eat the meat. She lived on mysterious things, maybe roots and grasses and now, it seemed, the snow. Yet her slightness was the burnished slenderness of health not wasting.