They arrived at the shop a little after noon, and it was one of the largest and most elegant in Goldbird Walk. The master himself was portly, alert, and as humorously capricious as his offspring. For Raldnor soon discovered from certain intimate references and wild slanders, and the amazing display of affection between the two of them, that Xaros was his son.
It seemed there was a demand for Lowland craft at the moment, and they did on the whole rather well. The dinner invitation was also forthcoming, though Xaros promptly excluded Raldnor from it, declaring that he did not want all his friends poisoned at one sitting.
Xaros remained at the shop, and Raldnor drove the others back in the wagon via byways. Yet he was in a lighter mood than he had been for many days.
There was an incident to mar all this waiting for him on the road.
Trying to avoid the increasing crowds and at the same time to follow Xaros’s directions, he came finally, by a wrong turn, to the great intersection of the Avenue of Kings. Without understanding any of the geography of Lin Abissa, he saw at once that they were on the brink of the processional route the Storm Lord would be taking.
The wide street, with its flanking statuary and pillared buildings and towers flashing like diamonds against the sky, had been swept clear of snow. Banners drooped from a hundred cornices. Spectators milled about, and the wagon was trapped immediately in the press. Ahead he heard the distant pulse of drums and the wail of horns.
There came a voice suddenly from the crowd, yet not of the crowd—a harsh, commanding, terrible voice: “Get your rubbish off the road, hell blast you.”
Raldnor looked down, his guts lurching with a recognizing fear.
A giant in brazen scales, his helm mask and his scarred coppery face all one. He brought his spear butt sharply against the nearest zeeba’s flank.
With a dry mouth and no possible answer, Raldnor pulled hard on the reins. The wagon began to move backward.
“Hurry! Hurry yourself, you brainless Lowland filth.”
Behind, the crowd scattered, cursing.
The soldier chopped with his hand, signaling a halt.
“Far enough. Now. Let’s see your permit.”
“I don’t carry it,” Raldnor said. Before he could explain that Orhvan had it, the soldier had reached up and dragged him from the box. Raldnor felt the jarring impact of the ground and caught the wheel to steady himself. Next came the soldier’s mailed fist aiming for his mouth.
There was a scream from somewhere, and next minute he found that he had ducked the blow and was facing the Dortharian with his hunter’s knife poised in his hand, ready to kill him through all his armor. Then the bizarre happened. A tangle of people swept between them and the blade was plucked from Raldnor’s fingers. The soldier parted the crowd roughly, but he was smiling.
“You pulled a knife, you clod. Let’s see it, then. Think you can nick me, do you, before I break your neck? Besides, it’s a hanging offense to resist the Am Dorthar.”
A voice called out: “He hasn’t a knife.”
Other voices yelled: “We’d’ve seen, wouldn’t we? You imagined it, Dortharian.”
The soldier’s face darkened. He spun to the crowd, snarling, but another soldier shouted for him abruptly from the road. With an obscene curse the Dortharian turned and glared briefly at Raldnor.
“Sometime I’ll settle with you, dung-creeper.”
He swung aside and shouldered through the press to his station.
A hand slipped Raldnor’s knife into his grasp. One or two people were going past; he was not certain who did it. He climbed back on to the box, shaking with a horrified sick fury, and saw Orhvan’s white face at the wagon flap.
A burst of trumpets. Dimly Raldnor became aware of the advent of the procession. He had a fine vantage point, which went mainly unused. He registered only a vague blur of dark soldiery, the colors of Dorthar and Thann Rashek, and the priestesses of Yasmis in their carmine garments, while the brass music howled in his ears. But then he saw the chariot.
For some reason all his senses sharpened and centered on that chariot—the vehicle of the Storm Lord, jet-black metal drawn by a jet-black team of animals. Perhaps it was the animals which first caught his attention, for he had never seen their breed before.
The man in the chariot had the Dortharian black copper skin and the black hair. His face was curious, a strangely distorted face—as if it held, half concealed, a cauldron of inner violence—though externally well-formed and boasting the large ebony eyes of his mother, Val Mala. He wore black, with a gold chain slashed across his breast. He held the reins in his right hand, in his left a gold handled whip. And that left hand had on it a gauntlet, with a smoky sapphire on the smallest finger.
And this then was the High King. This dark and odd-faced man was the royal Enemy.
Until this moment he had been merely a phantom; now, as if fated, all Raldnor’s hate transferred itself to him.
At the rose heart of Lin Abissa lay the Pleasure City, that area dedicated to the more carnal side of Yasmis, goddess of love. Xaros came in the blue dusk for him, and they soon left behind them the almost empty hostel and the pale girl sitting at the fire.
She had not wanted to go to the fine Xarabian’s house; she equated that dinner with the food and fear offered by the Ommos, Yr Dakan. Yet neither did she want to be alone in this creaking shadowy room, with its smoking, barely hospitable fire. On the hostel stairs she had brushed Raldnor’s arm.
“Must you go with Xaros?” she faltered.
“You know I must. I explained to you—we’re to see a furrier about the wolf pelt.”
“But must it be tonight?”
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
She could not tell him.
Soon he grew impatient. She tried to repress her tears for she knew that he hated her to cry. In his eyes there came that look which appalled her. She gave him no pleasure—how could she when she did not understand how? So he must look elsewhere. For she realized already that it was to a brothel he was going.
Now the tears ran down her face freely, and she did not wipe them away.
The narrow streets glowed with hot windows. Spangled women flaunted their sensual wares on high booths—fire dancers from Ommos and Zakoris, snake dancers from Lan and Elyr. Pimps roared out the virtues of their most expensive whores.
“Such breasts—such thighs—”
“Three of each,” Xaros remarked to the immediate crowd.
They came to a tinsel doorway and went in.
There was a naked Yasmis statue in the middle of the room, and a girl acrobat was contorting herself about it; prisms were pasted over her nipples and between her thighs a piece of mirror. Various customers were scattered here and there, drinking and observing her.
They sat down in an alcove, and a man brought them wine unbidden, and charged a ridiculous amount for it. Discomfort took hold of Raldnor. Presently two girls came drifting across the room.
They might have been twins—both pretty, both the smoke and honey shades of Xarabiss, their blue-black hair in heavy curls, gold sequins at the corners of their eyes. Their dresses were transparent gauze, cunningly pleated to opacity at breasts and pelvis, yet revealing a red gem set in each navel and a gold sunburst raying out from it across each softly curving belly.
They greeted Xaros with chirruping affection, but one sat dutifully by Raldnor and poured him wine.
“You’re very handsome,” she whispered to him over the cup, but it was a mannered sweetness. “My name is Yaini. And you’re a Lowlander.”
“Yes.”
“There’s love in the wine,” she murmured. By this he understood her to mean that it was laced with an aphrodisiac, and he set down his goblet untasted. She looked at him curiously, then smiled. “There’s a room above.”