by Adam Corby
‘Watch for an opening,’ he counseled them. ‘When I tell you, attack fiercely – then part and run. Severally we may still gain the Citadel. Nor will we be trapped there, come what may. There is a secret way in and out; did not my own dear mother once show me the way, and have I not used it to bring in charai out of the eyes of the watchful guard? Obey me, and we shall yet teach these beasts to fear us!’
They obeyed, more in awe of him than hope; and giving the foe a sudden rush, gained ground and scattered. Elnavis plunged into a doorway, running through charred, smoky passages to the far side. Yet that street too swarmed with barbarians. He went from street to street, staying in the side-ways, making his way back to the Way of Kings. Yet ever the enemy rode between him and the Citadel. By now those barbarians had guessed whither all flights must lead, and were closing off the ways.
Exhausted, his twisted leg throbbing, Elnavis paused in an alleyway. Scarcely might he recognize most of the buildings around him, burnt and broken. Yet there to the right the high, sheltering walls of the Brown Temple rose toward heaven. The fire had not touched it. He wondered, would it be a safe refuge? From its doors he might, in a pass or two, make his way across the great square on the other side of the Temple to the Hall of Kings. It was in the Hall of Kings that the secret passageway from the Citadel emerged into the city.
Like a shadow he crossed the narrow back street and reached the Temple’s porter’s-doors. He descended warily the damp steps and slipped within. The doors, he found, had been left unfastened. Grateful for the rest, the last Emperor of Tarendahardil closed the doors and sank to his knees in the gloomy passageway. Yet he knew he must not let sleep overwhelm him – not now, after he had held it off for so many wakings.
A soft sound, as of furtive breathing, startled him. He put his hand on the hilt of his old friend.
‘Who is there?’ he whispered. There was no reply. His nostrils caught a faint scent in the air, a woman’s scent. A priestess? ‘Do not fear,’ he coaxed. ‘I am your Emperor – Elnavis nal Bordakasha. I can shield you. If we can but hide here safely for a while, then I will be able to conduct you to the Citadel.’
There was no answer; but a hand, cool and soft, touched him. Again he smelled her, and despite himself was aroused.
‘Come,’ she murmured. ‘We will hide you.’
They went up the passageway and down another, reaching at length the altar room. The holy fire burned still, but the floor was strewn with refuse and the walls had been ransacked of offerings. Upon the low marble dais before the idol the broken, bloodied body of the reverend High Priestess had been laid and administered with care. She had seen three generations of his House come and go, Elnavis thought; it seemed scarcely credible that she would sing the rites no more.
His guide was a pretty young girl, whose robes were those of an attendant of the second ring. She lifted up a door in the floor behind the idol, and pointed within. ‘It is there the others are concealed,’ she said. ‘Now I must resume my place.’ He nodded, and entered.
As he descended, the darkness of the steps gave way to a glowing brilliance nothing like the glow of torches or lamps. There was a round, drumlike chamber vaulted overhead with ponderous, ancient stones. From the sides of the ceiling a ring of opening admitted the light, which must have come from the Temple’s rooftop mirrors: for that was Goddess-light.
In the center of the chamber, where the light was brightest, the priestesses stood about a waist-high altar awaiting him. Filthy and bloody and terrible he must have seemed, he thought; yet these maidens regarded him with nor fright nor surprise. They parted before him and gestured to the altar. The light seemed soothing and yet wearisome. He stepped among them, leaning on the altar. Still, they spoke no word. The scene was so strange to him after the tumult he had undergone these last long months, that the mantle of the war-hardened, embittered, ruthless man fell for a moment from his shoulders. Something of the boy-prince returned, wan and trembling.
A cup of dark drink was pressed into his hand. The liquid was sweet like wine, syrupy, with a vague taste of root and dream-herb about it. His battered, stained armor was gently removed from his body by hesitant, unsure hands. They laid him on the altar.
Now the light converged on his face, bright as a cloudless summer yet heatless, so that his senses were confused. The dark drink coursed through his veins, he fluttered closed his eyelids, then opened them once more.
The priestesses were around him in a circle. Now they wore the black robes of the high ceremonies. Their faces were concealed by golden masks upon which had been worked, by the most antique of techniques, the stylized visage of Goddess. There was no bit of their bodies visible save for their hands.
‘Go on, Alsa; it is the task for which you were prepared, though it is true, we never thought you should perform it. Not in long centuries has the rite been enacted: not since Elna.’
The words sounded strangely in Elnavis’ ears – then he realized they had been spoken not in Bordo but in some other, more ancient tongue, which he understood only because it was so like the tongue of the barbarians. He opened his mouth, but no sound came forth – nor might he lift his arms, or command any portion of his body save his head and eyes.
One of them leaned over him, chanting rhymes he could not fathom. Then she spoke loudly, so that the drumlike chamber beat with the rhythms of her voice in strange acoustics; and she said:
‘In the name of Her whom we all serve, I begin the ceremony. I call upon Her to see with Her eyes, all that we do here: to see it and know it for good, and grant that all may follow as was promised. The kingdom is fallen, and Her Wrath stands over us like a flame. The ancient rites of the Voyage have been desecrated. One whom we had ferried forth has returned, to defile the kingdom with his touch. An offering of atonement has been demanded: the Offering of the King.
‘So with his blood he enriches his fields – so with his heart he gives back courage to his people – so with his death he renews the life of his kingdom. Goddess, take you now my hand. This is none of my doing but only yours, to whom all loyalties are due.’
She put forth her hand, which clasped a black knife of chipped, honed stone, sharp as a silk-cutter’s knife. Elnavis beheld it with a sudden slight gurgling of horror.
She cut the throat first, that the vessels might be filled: then in several sure strokes opened the chest and cut free all the stubborn root-veins of the heart.
Of what occurred afterward, it is not lawful to tell.
* * *
Aimlessly, Kuln-Holn wandered the streets of High Town. All about him the tide of death surged up full, but he was unmolested. The gods were unkind to Kuln-Holn upon this pass: they allowed him to live on.
All his life he had been a little man, with no great strength, no great skill to hunt or fish or fight, no great knowledge, no great wit. He had sought little for himself, save, at first, to feed his wife and infant daughter, and later to see his dreams fulfilled. He had only dreamed of ease from toil, and peace from the unending blood-feuds, and full bellies for the hungry people of his tribe. Then Ara-Karn had come; and now this was what Kuln-Holn received as the fruit of all his prayers and his preachings.
Kuln-Holn wandered on, taking now this turning, now that. To him, it seemed he was alone in the City – alone of all her lost defenders. Down streets he saw metal riders flashing past, bows and swords and axes bloodily upraised.
It was left to him, an alien, to see this ancient City at her end. She had been beautiful, Tarendahardil. There had been all of culture in her, from the best to the worst. Her streets had been lined with statues of brass and iron, jade, silver, topaz, and unveined marble; her harbors had traded with the world; her temples had attracted the faithful from all the Hundred cities. City Over the World, Most Holy, the seat of the Empire of the Bordakasha, cultural and mercantile hub of the world, Tarendahardil had seemed a deathless Queen among cities, as much beyond her sisters as Goddess is beyond mortal women. Kuln-Holn wept, to see now the full pro
of of the vanity and falseness of that former assurance; and he wandered on.
It was not he, so it must have been some other, who guided his way safely between the hundreds of horsed barbarians and led him up again unto the Black Citadel of Elna.
* * *
The heavy-armored barbarians rode the streets of High Town, and spared none they chanced upon. This city, the city of thrice-damned Elna, had resisted their efforts too long, and at too great a price. For that, it must be made to pay the penalty of Ara-Karn. Tarendahardil they disdained even to loot: to destroy and murder was now the only wish of their ensavaged hearts. Not even the sorely wounded were spared the bite of the merciless, steel-shod horses. They rode in patrolling arcs round the entrances to the square below the Black Citadel; and in the abeyance of the rain the fires smoldered to new life; and the city streets became like some abominable Hell of torment and death.
Few more gained the safety of the Citadel. Of the Emperor’s brutal followers, those who escaped the lances and arrows of the barbarians were denied entrance at the double gates. Stones were hurled down on their heads, or they were hoisted aloft only to have their lives cut loose from the body by the guardsmen, and their corpses hurled below, into the rocky coomb between the rising rock of the Citadel and the square out of whose center Elna’s Pillar of Victory still leapt into the smoky sky.
XXIV
Ara-Karn, at Last
ABOVE THE ROCKY COOMB the Imperial engineers and their slaves worked on, finishing their task. With picks and iron pries, they dug out the last stones of the bridgeway to the double gates, loading them in great wooden baskets hanging from the battlements far above. The high, black gates were shut fast now, not to be opened save by bloody, fearsome force.
Below, about the fringes of the square, some barbarians could be seen riding by. They were fewer now, for the smoke of the fires was choking in the streets. Only a few wretched survivors, driven from their holes by fire and smoke, slipped through the patrols and staggered across the square, and begged to be brought across the coomb.
But the engineers and their slaves worked on. The temporary wooden bridges now were not long enough to cross the widening gap, and had been taken up. The last survivors wailed piteously, but the engineers had little choice: they had their own skins to think of. The survivors clambered down into the coomb among the bloody bodies of the Emperor’s last followers. From there they would have climbed up to where the engineers worked; yet that was a climb beyond their skill and strength. One after another they fell back. At length, they lay at the bottom of the coomb, weeping and praying for merciful death.
Hoofbeats rang on the ashen stones of the square. A lone rider broke from the burning stony wilderness of High Town and rode up toward the Gates looming large and dark above him. The rider wore a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg; the hood masked his features. He did not pause but drove his wearied horse on – it leapt from the end of the square and, scrambling, fell with a crash against the little lip of rock on which the engineers worked. The rider was thrown from the saddle by the impact, but the horse, neighing fearfully, its chest broken and red, fell to its death.
Cursing, the engineers assailed the rider. ‘Fellow,’ they shouted, ‘dark God alone could care whether you will kill yourself, but must you murder us while you are about it?’
The newcomer disdained to answer. Up close, the engineers could see within the hood that this was a young-looking man with dark hair and a short beard, whose muddied, torn cloak and tunic bespoke a long, difficult journey. Tugging the line of the basket, he brought forth a guardsman above, who took up the full basket and lowered it again unloaded. From the engineers’ equipment the rider took a length of rope and let it down to those huddled wretches in the coomb. Looping the rope around his middle, the stranger drew the wretches up one at a time. The last of them took up the stranger’s saddle-pouches from the twitching carcass of the horse.
As men and women escaped living from the embalmers, the wretches wept and clamored at the rider’s knees, thanking and hailing him. ‘For what you have done, how may words or deeds repay? May Goddess bless and guard you, sir. You are our savior.’
The man smiled as he helped them into the basket. He had ever been one to appreciate a jest.
When the last of the cityfolk were safely aloft, the rider turned to the engineers. ‘Your work is finished now,’ he told them. ‘This should be enough.’
They, eying the smoke and the barbarians below, were not of a mind to quarrel with him. The engineers were taken up, and then their slaves. The stranger would not go up until the last of the others were secure. Only then did he himself step into the basket. Far above, the slaves pulled at the ropes, and the wheels turned; and the swaying basket rose.
The plain of the city slowly lowered itself before the view of the man in the basket. The lower quarters were no more than a cindery waste, to the north and south and the bright horizon. Yet High Town burned and smoldered still. The air was sick with the stench of the burning dead and the bones of Tarendahardil. Faintly on the winds rose the cries of the slaughtered and the hoofbeats of the conquerors.
Yet they were fading, as the City was slowly emptied, and her death-throes ended.
From the shadow of one of the huge disks of the Pillar of Victory, brawny arms raised on high a bow. It was a great bow with a double-curve, better-made than most, and likely to have been one of those the Warlord himself had fashioned with his own arts for those archers he deemed among the finest. And the arrow the arms pulled back against the gut string was dark and true, like those arrows the Warlord had said were the true death-birds. Those arrows never failed to hit their mark, and never failed to kill what they hit.
The bowman aimed the arrow at the hooded man in the basket, and let fly.
True the death-bird lanced through the air; it struck the man full in the breast about the heart. A cheer rose from the lips of the tribesmen gathered about, and the archer smiled and turned to make his boast, when his lips turned down, and words failed him.
In the basket, the man in the dark green hooded hunting-cloak took the shaft of the death-bird and drew it bloody from his heart. He held the arrow before him and touched the brow of his hood with it, saluting the man who had killed him.
The barbarians drew back in superstitious fear. Never before had one of their Warlord’s matchless death-birds failed to kill.
The basket lurched and stopped. After a moment, the hooded man turned from his contemplation of the destroyed city and stepped upon the steady stones of the parapet of the battlements. With a careless, weary gesture, he dropped his saddle-pouches on the stone beside his boots. The arrow he held onto, turning it idly in his fingers like a toy.
Before him the battlements rose in three broad low steps. Through the smaller inner gates the grounds of the Citadel might be seen, filled with the huddled, wretched survivors of Tarendahardil. There were outbuildings, stables, sheds, workhouses and shrines. Above them were the high black walls of the Imperial Palace itself, a huge, thousand-eyed edifice built up of the same perdurable volcanic stone of the mountain itself.
Leaping aloft against the dark horizon, the highest tower commanded attention, both because it alone was built not of the black but of white, smoothly chiseled stone, as well as for the gleaming golden mirror set upon its high roof like a beacon, which they called the Disk of Goddess. The upper reaches of that tower had but a single narrow window to mar the gleam of the stones, where the private dimchamber of the Empress of the South was said to be.
The many lines of battlements and buildings stretched flatly to either side, a fieldlike ending to the sheer loft of the mountain. Only the dark outlines of the man standing on the parapet and that lonely tower the color of bone stood upright to break the monotony.
The mountainous billows of smoke and ash wheeled about the mountaintop, filled with predatory birds, so that it seemed almost as if it
were the very earth that convulsed in revulsion at what she had been forced to witness; but the white tower was still, and so, for that moment at least, was the stranger.
He stopped. He looked from the tower to the arrow yet bloody in his hand.
‘I have changed my mind,’ he called hoarsely to the guardsmen. ‘Surely your supplies here must be limited, and you need no more mouths to feed. Lower me down again, and I will return whence I came, and trouble you no more.’
‘But the barbarians,’ the guardsmen protested. ‘You cannot hope to evade them, or oppose them all by yourself.’
‘Will you joke with me? I tell you, let me down!’
‘Calm yourself, man,’ said one.
‘We know, we all have felt your sickness and fury at what Ara-Karn has done,’ another added. ‘But such despair is only another weapon in his bloody hands.’
‘And then think you, there is her majesty, the Empress. She will need all such brave and skillful defenders as you if she is to be spared the ravages of the barbarian. And she will wish to reward you for your services.’
‘Yes,’ the man said, ‘there is that…’
‘But what are we to call you? Have you but now come from Egland Downs?’
He looked at them for a moment as if he were minded to tell them. Within the hollow circles of his eyes were darkness and space and the sparks of an echoing horror – the black darkness of the Darklands, where Estar Kane led the savage Madpriests – the unbounded space of the desolate Marches this side of the knife-edged border – the fiery horror of the ruins of this, the finest city known to man. Half he had opened his lips, but then he shut them and shook his head.
He stepped down off the parapet and mounted the steps of the battlements, easily, like a man long seasons absent, returned at last to a home he scarcely knows; he looks about him puzzled, making the effort to marry his memories with what his eyes perceive. So this one, as he answered the guardsmen’s question quietly, in sadness and disgust and a deep, pitiless weariness.