Raldnor opened his eyes and knew neither where he was nor how he had got there.
After a little he moved slightly, fearing some injury had immobilized him. Yet he was unhurt and soon sat up. There was faint, cool fire in the lower sky. All around were twisting dirty alleys, littered with refuse. He thought: “Have I lost my mind in Xarabiss?” And it seemed he had lain all night in the shelter of a rotting hovel.
His head ached dully, and he remembered suddenly an unprecedented terrific blow bringing darkness. Someone had clubbed him then—some thief. Yet his knife was still in his belt, and what was left of Xaros’s loan after he had paid the girl. He got up and began to walk along the nearest alley. An old woman emptying slops cursed him for no apparent reason.
At the turning of the alley lay a broken doll on its back with its arms flung wide. The moment he saw it he remembered, and a pain like death surged up into his throat. He leaned on the wall, trembling, muttering her name. What had become of her and the frantic unconscious signalings of her mind? And what, what had brought the dark down on his skull?
A man came shuffling up the alley. Raldnor caught his arm, and before he could struggle free, asked: “Do you know the way to Pebble Street?”
The man grumbled sullenly. Raldnor thrust a coin under his nose. The man responded with vague directions, grabbed the coin and hurried off. Raldnor began to run.
The sun rose, a dim red bubble, as he negotiated the tortuous byways of Lin Abissa, asking again and again for directions. Finally he came to familiar streets and at last stumbled into the courtyard of the hostel.
Catastrophe was at once apparent.
Great wheel ruts—the marks of a chariot—gouged across the snow, and near these were other marks, as of something dragged, and a brown stain.
Raldnor moved like a somnambulist across the yard and into the hall. The fires were out and no one there. He propelled himself through the hall and up the stairs, and stopped outside the door of the tiny cramped room which had been hers. There was no sound in that room, yet there was a presence. He pushed at the door, which swung noiselessly open.
It was very dark, for the shutters were still closed on the windows. But he made out a girl lying on the narrow bed and a man sitting by her. The man looked up and straight into his face. It was Ras.
“She’s dead.”
“No,” Raldnor said.
“She is dead. If you’d gone with us to the Xarabian’s dinner, she would have come. If you’d asked her, she’d have gone with you. But you went to the brothel and left her here alone, and they came for her while you were with your harlot.” His voice was quite expressionless and very even. “Orhvan and I came too late. His soldiers brought her back after. He told them to. Amrek. She was to have pleasured Amrek, but she died before he had any pleasure from her. As a little girl, she was always afraid of him, I remember. You took her, I let you take her. I couldn’t stop you. But why did you take her, Raldnor, when you didn’t want her? She was a child, Raldnor. Why didn’t you leave her as she was?”
Raldnor stared at Anici, wanting to go to her, to touch her, but there was such an awful stillness about her. Her white face was empty as an unworn mask. He turned and walked back down the stairs, across the hall, out into the courtyard. Who was it that had tried to protect her? Some other Lowland man, perhaps, had spilled this blood.
He went through the gate and began to walk, not knowing where he was going.
At last he found himself seated on a low stone wall, and a man was insistently talking to him, urging him to get up and go to some meaningless destination. After a little he looked at this man, and it was Xaros.
“It’s my fault she’s dead,” Raldnor said. “It should have been my blood on the snow.”
But Xaros somehow got his arm and had him on his feet, and now they were moving through crowds, and he thought that Xaros was taking him back to the brothel and began to shout at him. Xaros called to a burly cutthroat lounging in a doorway: “Svarl, my friend’s sick. Give me a hand with him.”
The cutthroat obliged with competent roughness, and Raldnor discovered they were hauling him upstairs into an unknown building. A door opened on an exotic apartment he scarcely noted at the time, and he was hustled onto a couch. A slender, dark woman came into the room.
“Oh, Xaros, you promised you’d be gentle with him.”
Raldnor could not understand the woman’s concern, for she was a stranger to him, but when her cool hand brushed his face, her touch seemed to unlock the most bitter grief, and she held him and let him weep against her as if she were a sister.
He did not know if it was Anici he wept for or Eraz—the shadow image of his mother who, nevertheless, had been exclusively dear to him, or the beloved with whom he had shared thoughts, and for whom, intrinsically, he had felt nothing. For even in his bewildered pain he understood this, and understood, too, that the white-haired girl would be his penance.
Anici bent over him and touched his shoulder. He got up in the darkness, and she stood waiting, the wind washing through her silver hair. The white moon shone behind her; he saw the shadow of her small bones beneath the skin. As he approached her, she raised her arms, and long cracks appeared in her body, like ink lines on alabaster. Then she crumbled all at once into gilded ashes, and the ashes blew away across the moon, leaving only darkness to wake him.
There were evenings, nights, dawns, other twilights and suns rising. He grew accustomed to Xaros’s elegant rooms as he sat in them, eaten alive by a mindless, creeping lethargy.
After three or four days Orhvan had come, his expressive face showing now only a hesitant empty sorrow.
“Raldnor—the thaw will begin in a little while. Tomorrow even, or the day after, perhaps. Then we’ll be setting out for the Plains.”
Raldnor said nothing at first, but Orhvan stared at him as mutely, and finally he said: “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because we have to go now—before the second snow. You understand that traveling becomes impossible after that.”
“Why are you telling me?” Raldnor repeated, “I’m not going with you.”
“You’ve no choice. Oh, Raldnor, you have to come with us. Haven’t you seen what’s beginning here—Amrek’s work? Even the Xarabians have begun to hate and fear us. Every day there are men in the market places and squares, muttering about Lowland perversions and sorceries . . . You have to come—”
“No, Orhvan. You thought of me always as a Vis. And I am Vis. She—she might have altered me, molded me to be a Lowlander like you, if she’d been stronger and more able than she was. And you don’t have to reproach me for those words. I comprehend perfectly every atom of my guilt.”
He felt then the lightest touch against his thoughts, as if the mind of Orhvan, like hers, had brushed against his own through the crippling veil.
“Come to the Plains when you can,” Orhvan said, “when things are better for you. You know you’d be welcome—”
Raldnor shook his head. With unsmiling lacerated amusement, he said: “Don’t ask the thief and murderer back into your house, Orhvan. He might steal and butcher some more.”
Orhvan lowered his head and turned, and left him.
After this Raldnor had only two visitors. One was the Xarabian woman on whose unknown breast he had wept. He had expected at first, confronted with her in the aftermath of this hysteria, to be embarrassed and ill at ease, but in her gentle courteous way she somehow made him able to accept his own actions. It seemed she was Xaros’s mistress, though she lived in her own apartments somewhere in the building. She was always very quiet, yet her presence was unutterably soothing to Raldnor. She would bring him things to eat or occasionally read to him in a cool lilting voice. Her name was Helida, and her interest a maternal rather than an amatory one, for clearly she loved Xaros a great deal in her own reserved and essentially sophisticated fashion.