by Lee Duigon
That was the old city of Obann, now a mountain of ruins on the south bank of the river. As great as it was, even that great city could not accommodate all the people who came to see the coronation. So it was held on the north bank, where the present city of Obann stands now, and a temporary city was created there—a city of pavilions in every gorgeous color you could think of, and humble booths for humble people, and great spreading tents for the multitude of presters, and more tents for the kitchens and the artisans, with feasting and music all throughout the day and night. And only when all the people were gathered there, and fed, and preached to, was King Kai anointed with the holy oil and crowned with a jeweled crown that beamed like a many-colored fire in the sun.
Merffin Mord studied the fascicles that told of it, so that he would know how to stage a spectacle that would lure King Ryons back to Obann. And because he considered the First Prester a simple man, and easily deceived, he consulted with him.
“The man’s a simpleton,” he said to Aggo, his confederate. “But if he’s with us, so much the better. No one will suspect him—”
“Of treason against the king,” Aggo finished for him. “That’s what we’re planning.”
“It’s no treason,” Merffin said, “to restore the proper order of things. I won’t have you call it treason. We never asked for a king. All we want to do is to return to the way things were.”
When he was just a high-ranking prester, and Lord Reesh’s favorite, Orth lived in great estate in Obann and cut a lordly figure. He still lived in his elegant townhouse, but now he hosted simple dinners for the poor instead of sumptuous banquets for the very rich. He used to be famous for his opulent wardrobe. Now he dressed simply, and when he wasn’t preaching sermons in the open air, or talking to people he met on the street—as if carters and cobblers and cooks ought to have the First Prester expound the Scriptures to them!—he spent much of his time at the seminary, encouraging the students and the scribes who were copying the holy books. Sometimes he lent a hand in the work. It was not the way any First Prester had ever behaved, and that was, in Merffin Mord’s opinion, because his mind had come unhinged. When all was said and done, Merffin thought, Lord Orth was no more than a puppet for Prester Jod in Durmurot. All the same, Merffin thought he could make use of him.
“A coronation?” Orth mused, when Merffin had him as a guest for a private luncheon at his house. “But how could we ever hold a proper coronation? The Crown of Kai, of Obann, has been lost for centuries; even King Ozias couldn’t find it. Nor has anyone mixed the anointing oil since long before Ozias’ time.”
“We have goldsmiths and jewelers in this city who can make a new crown every bit as royal as the old one,” Merffin said. “And isn’t the recipe for the oil given in the Scriptures? I’m sure it is.”
“Only for the oil used to anoint the High Prester, in the age before the kings,” said Orth. “For that we know the ingredients, but in what proportions is not recorded.”
“Don’t you want the king to have a coronation?”
“Ryons is already king by God’s election. He rode the great beast and delivered the city out of certain destruction. There is nothing we can add to that.”
“But would you be averse, as First Prester, to anointing the king with oil and placing the crown upon his head?”
Orth sat and thought. Merffin had hoped to impress him by serving him the daintiest of dishes for his meal, and yet the First Prester had eaten them like biscuits—Orth, who once was famous as the greatest gourmet in Obann. Whatever had happened to him during his absence from the city, Merffin thought, only a shell of a man remained. “But if all turns out well,” he thought, “we’ll soon have a new First Prester, too.”
What was Orth thinking about? You couldn’t read anything from his expression. Maybe his wits were wandering, and he wasn’t thinking at all. He hadn’t even touched his wine, one of Aggo’s choice vintages. Merffin half-expected him to fall asleep. But just before he lost his patience altogether, Orth finally spoke again.
“No,” he said, as if he considered the matter to be among the world’s least consequential things, “I would not be averse to it.”
“Good! Splendid! We’re agreed!” Merffin said, as heartily as he could, successfully masking his exasperation. “Leave the fashioning of the crown to me and the composition of the oil to some of those experts at the seminary. All will be taken care of as it should be.”
“By the grace of God, amen,” said Orth.
CHAPTER 14
How the Zeph Were Quelled
Martis knew the way to Silvertown, but he didn’t just walk up to the gate. Instead, he circled around, climbed a thickly wooded hill overlooking the city, and tried to assess the situation down below. Wytt chattered in his ear, but he couldn’t understand. But soon he saw for himself what Wytt was trying to tell him.
Down the mountain, from the east, a thousand men were marching into Silvertown—Zephites, by their horned headdresses, behind a commander on horseback.
Over the past year, a small but steady trickle of refugees from Silvertown managed to reach safety in the hills and woodlands still controlled by Obann. Collecting intelligence for Baron Bault, Martis had interviewed a number of them, so he already had some idea of the conditions in Silvertown. The people were enslaved, forced to labor on Goryk Gillow’s building projects.
But the main thing was that there was not enough to eat in Silvertown. The city had always been a mining center, the land around it ill-suited for farming. Without the supply wagons that came in almost daily from the Thunder King’s more prosperous domains, the city would starve. Even the Heathen warriors had to tighten their belts, and it was worse for the conquered populace.
“And now they’re bringing in another mob of mouths to feed?” Martis wondered aloud. There was only Wytt to hear him, but he’d fallen into the habit of talking to the Omah. “Well, it shows the mardars aren’t infallible. Unless those Zeph are just passing through, it was a mistake to bring them here.”
At any rate, he thought, now was not the time for him to try to enter Silvertown.
“Find us something to eat,” he said to Wytt. “It looks like I’ll have to stay up here for a while.”
Goryk had lost half his army—the black Hosa and the man-eating Zamzu—when Mardar Wusu led the last invasion of Lintum Forest. They never came back: indeed, the Hosa, Goryk learned from his spies, had deserted and joined King Ryons’ army.
That left him with a mixed force of some two thousand Wallekki, Griffs, and Dahai, and some Obannese who’d followed him into treason. There was no mardar to command them. “I didn’t come here to lead an army, but to advise you,” Zo said. Goryk had quite enough on his plate without taking on the duties of a general, so he’d given that post to Iolo, who’d been a captain of a hundred in Obann’s peacetime army. Lolo spoke some of the various Heathen languages, and his short temper and heavy fists did most of his talking. The fear of the Thunder King’s authority, vested here in Goryk, kept the bored and hungry troops from open mutiny.
Goryk had not known the Zephites were coming to Silvertown until his Wallekki scouts reported it the day before. The news disconcerted him.
“I haven’t asked for reinforcements!” he protested. “Great flaming stars, how am I supposed to feed them?”
“They’ll be very useful, if you plan on undertaking any offensive operations,” Zo said, calm as always.
“Useful my eye!” Iolo said, his face already darkening with rage. He used to be a heavy drinker, but gave it up when Goryk made him second in command. Abstaining from strong drink had made his temper even shorter. “Zephites! Our troops hate them almost as much as they hate the Zamzu. And to step aside in favor of some Zephite mardar? Cuss’t if I will!”
Iolo didn’t know, as Zo and Goryk did, that the Thunder King’s mardars simply made decisions and ascribed them to the Thunder King. They taught people to believe that everything they did was by the orders of their master, magically conveyed to
them by the union of his spirit with theirs. That was the secret brought down by Gallgoid when he escaped the avalanche that buried the Thunder King’s hall at Golden Pass. There would always be a man to wear the gold mask of the Thunder King, but only the initiated mardars knew that it was not always the same man. To the rest of his subjects, the Great Man at Kara Karram was presented as immortal.
Which meant that some ambitious mardar had taken it upon himself to bring the Zeph to Silvertown—and Goryk would somehow have to make the best of it.
Now the Zeph were here, and the people of Silvertown watched in dismay as the horned helmets, like a herd of wild bulls, marched into their city. They knew it would mean shorter rations. Their Heathen captors watched sullenly, knowing it would mean shorter rations for them, too.
Iolo had rushed out to meet them. Now he stood fuming, with his fists clenched at his sides. “Cuss’t blockheads didn’t even bring any wagons with them!” he muttered to a Dahai chieftain who stood beside him.
“Maybe they’re expecting us to hold a banquet for them,” said the chief, in Tribe-talk.
The mardar riding proudly at the head of his army, on a wiry little spotted horse, wore the Zephite horns but had the top half of his face painted black—mardar war paint, proclaiming his intention to go into battle: where, who could say? He halted his following with an upraised hand and reined in just in front of Iolo.
“Greetings in the name of the Thunder King our master, the terror of the gods,” he said, in thickly accented Tribe-talk.
Iolo spat on the ground. “There’s no food here!” he said. “I don’t suppose you brought some.”
“I am Khaggin, a mardar of King Thunder. Who are you?”
“I’m Iolo, and I command the army here.”
Khaggin’s eyes narrowed. “You are not a mardar. How is it that you command anything?”
“The last mardar we had got himself killed on a tomfool expedition to the forest,” Iolo said. “Goryk Gillow, First Prester of Obann by the order of the Thunder King, has put me in command of the army. If you don’t like it, march on.”
This was no way to speak to a mardar. Had Zo been there, he would have intervened. But Zo and Goryk, anticipating trouble, were busy in the chamber house.
“Beware!” Khaggin said. “You may find yourself on the sacrificial altar.”
Before Iolo could think of a satisfactorily disrespectful reply, the Dahai chief spoke.
“I am Tamur Golk, son of Agbar, chief of the Dahai. We take no orders from an ignorant Zephite whose speech sounds like the lowing of a cow!” The Dahai and the Zephites were hereditary enemies going back a thousand years. “We already have a commander. It’s food we do not have! Take your open mouths and go.”
Khaggin glared at him. “You have all been in this place too long!” he said. “You have forgotten how to behave yourselves. But my men and I will teach you.”
Iolo answered with a string of profanities unintelligible to any Zephite. But his tone made his meaning unmistakable, and it was more than Khaggin would tolerate. The mardar raised his hand again, and a thousand men reached for short swords and heavy axes.
At that moment, Zo and Goryk came at a run, Zo in the lead with a small square box in his hands. Distracted, Khaggin stared at him, his hand still raised to unleash his men to violence.
Zo halted in front of him, cradling the box.
“In the name of our master, the Thunder King!” he cried.
And suddenly the Zephite’s face was bathed in light, white light brighter by far than the light of the afternoon sun: it leaped at him from out of the box. And Khaggin shrieked and toppled from his horse. The nearest men behind him cried out, too.
They rolled on the ground, clutching at their eyes. And suddenly there was no light. Zo called out in the language of the Zeph.
“Warriors of the Zeph, be still! I am Mardar Zo, the servant of King Thunder. I hold his wrath in my hands. As it has struck your chieftain blind, so shall it strike you—all of you! Obey me, or you die!”
Their mardar and a dozen of his best men lay wallowing and groaning on the ground, without a blow having been struck against them. What else could the Zephites do? They sank to their knees and held up their palms in submission.
Goryk’s men were gathering, their weapons at the ready. Goryk waved them back, and they stopped in their tracks. They had no way of knowing what had happened, but they were afraid.
“There is not enough food in Silvertown to feed you,” Zo said. “Therefore you will pitch your camp outside the city walls, and in the morning, march back the way you came. Take your mardar with you, and send him under guard to Kara Karram. He is a mardar no more—in the name of our lord the Thunder King, I have deposed him. Nor will his eyes ever see again: for our master has taken his sight from him. There is more of our master’s power here, in my own hands, should you care to feel it. I have spoken. Go!”
Timorously, some of the warriors raised the fallen men. Khaggin and the others groped the air, gasping and whimpering. They wiped their eyes, but could not wipe any sight back into them. Zo and Goryk and Iolo remained in
place until the Zephites had all gone back outside the walls. Iolo and Tamur Golk had the presence of mind to close the gates after them and post a guard. The defenders went to their stations like men in a trance.
“That was a near thing!” Zo said softly. “In another instant there would have been fighting inside these walls, but for the power of the demon.”
“What power it is!” said Goryk. It had all happened right in front of him, but he was still trying to take it in.
“I let out only the merest fraction of it, and only for an instant,” Zo said. “There is enough here to destroy an army. Now you have seen it for yourself.”
Goryk felt slightly dizzy. His knees almost buckled under him. The demonstration of the demon’s power had been overwhelming. He realized that, up until now, he hadn’t truly believed in the power that Zo claimed was imprisoned in the ancient box.
“I have seen,” said Goryk, “and now I have decided. We shall go to Obann, you and I, and take this power with us.”
Jack missed it all. He was still locked up in his room, somewhere deep enough inside the chamber house that he couldn’t hear anything that was happening outside. But when a slave brought him his supper that evening, he learned something.
“An army came today.” The slave was a girl a little older than Ellayne, underfed and pale. “You should have seen them—men with horns, like bulls. And then the prester used sorcery against them!”
“What kind of sorcery?” Jack asked.
“Nobody knows! But those men turned right around and left the city. I didn’t see what happened, but everybody’s saying the general of that army was set on fire, or turned into stone …” She stopped herself. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
She trembled. “It’s all right,” Jack said. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“I have to go now.”
“My name’s Jack. They kidnapped me.”
But the girl turned and left without answering or giving her name. Jack didn’t hold it against her; he could see she was terrified. “Who knows what they’ve done to her?” he wondered. But he decided he would rather not know.
Jack didn’t believe in sorcery or magic. He and Ellayne had had many arguments about it. In his travels he’d seen things that might have passed for magic, but they always turned out not to be. There were ways of cheating people and deceiving them that looked like magic. And there were certain things, a very few of them, left over from the ancient times—Martis had explained it to him—that worked like magic, but weren’t. Those things, Martis said, could be unexpectedly dangerous; and Jack believed him.
Maybe Goryk Gillow had one of those old things.
That was exactly what Martis most feared.
Up on the hilltop, having seen the Zephite army ejected from the city, following a flash of brilliant light that resembled nothing that he’d ever seen befo
re, Martis sat back and wondered what it meant.
Evening was approaching now, and it was growing chilly, but he dared not risk a fire. Wytt found a bird’s nest and brought him the eggs, which he had to eat raw. That, and some few rations given to him by Kadmel when they parted, was all he had to eat. It would be wise to make the rations last as long as possible.
Worse than his immediate fear for Jack was the fear that the Thunder King would turn loose against Obann some ancient engine of destruction. Lord Reesh had always hoped that more of these items might have survived in other parts of the world than could be found in Obann. He had amassed a private collection of these fragments of antiquity—Martis had seen it many times—none of which had any function. But since then Martis had seen and handled one such item that still had life in it, even after so many centuries had passed. Some of these, Lord Reesh used to say, had the power to destroy a whole city in the blink of an eye.