“No. You’d better tell me.”
“He was a fool to set on the Chosen. So were you to follow him. You can take friendship too far.”
So that was the story Kathaos had put about. Raldnor let the man’s meddling, worthless advice go by like so much chaff on the wind.
“Yannul’s punishment,” he reminded harshly.
The man shook his head.
“That bastard Ryhgon had him dragged into the hall and had them hold his right hand up against the chimney column. Then he took a cibba staff and smashed it across the back. Must’ve broken every bone. That’s Zakorian justice for you.”
“Ryhgon,” Raldnor said very softly. That was all. Then: “Where’s Yannul now?”
“The gods know. Not here, that’s for sure. What will you do?” the soldier added curiously. Raldnor knew him well enough for a gossip.
“I? What can I do?”
All that day the anger mangled him. The pivot of the anger—Yannul—became a secondary thing. Though he did not analyze this, part of him knew why he no longer sought the Lan or asked questions as to his whereabouts. Yet he had no thoughts beyond his anger. He was quite absorbed in it.
Evening came, and the evening meal at the long tables.
“Look out for yourself, Raldnor,” a Xarabian muttered to him. “My gods tell me Ryhgon hasn’t quite finished with you.”
“My gods tell me things too,” Raldnor said.
Another man glanced his way and said: “I see no justice in breaking a man’s right hand so he can do nothing to make himself a living. A juggler, wasn’t he? He’ll juggle nothing now.”
A sudden thick quiet fell. Ryhgon, a latecomer, had just entered the hall, his officers about him. He did not sit at once, but struck the bell by his place, and the last vestiges of chat and stirring died out in the room.
“I’ve something to say to you. I don’t doubt you know two men here saw fit to cross Amrek’s Dragon Guard. That they live is due to the mercy of the Lord Kathaos and the present good humor of the King. The Lan was punished. The Sarite, as you see, received his pardon. My lord the prince chooses to be lenient with fools, but you’ve all had fair warning before of my dislike of foolishness. You can thank your gods, Raldnor of Sar, that I too am in a pleasant humor. And in future, Sarite, you’ll work twice as hard and watch your manners twice as carefully as any other man here. Am I understood?”
The hush of the room was intolerable. A sense of impending drama had come on it at the last instant, and the eyes of every soldier present were fixed on Raldnor as he sat at the end of the bench. Not turning yet, he got to his feet. His face was quite unreadable, but he reached and picked up the great meat knife off the board, and a hiss went up from the hall as if from icy water thrown on burning tiles.
He turned then and walked up the room toward Ryhgon’s table.
“Put that back, Sarite,” Ryhgon said.
“Give me back my knife then, Zakorian.”
“You’ll get your knife when the prince Kathaos thinks fit.”
“Then I’ll make do with this. Or would you feel safer if you used a staff on my hand first?”
Ryhgon gave an ugly grin.
“You seem over-touchy at the punishment I gave the Lan. I wonder if there was more between you than friendship?” The Guard Lord turned, silently ordering laughter from the crowded benches. Few men laughed, and the mirth that came was false, dry and isolated.
“Words, Zakorian,” Raldnor said and, halting a yard or so away, he addressed the jagged point of the meat knife to Ryhgon’s breast. “Are you only going to offer me words? You once promised to accommodate quarrels. I’ve a quarrel, Guard Lord. Accommodate me.”
Ryhgon’s huge perversion of a right arm moved slowly until the great hand found the sword hilt. The action should have been enough.
“I’ll accommodate you, Sarite. Throw down your toy and I’ll give you a taste of thong. I think you’ll like it better than what I have here.”
He saw the movement in the air and swung to avoid it, but he had expected nothing and so was sluggish. The edge of Raldnor’s butcher’s blade caught the Zakorian’s unscarred cheek, and blood ran bright.
In that instant Raldnor knew death was as near as Ryhgon himself, but such was the madness on him that he welcomed it, for he could outwit death as skillfully as he had outwitted the Vis.
However, he seemed light as air while Ryhgon was a lumbering elemental force all about him, the dragon sword in the giant’s grasp lusting after him. Raldnor dropped down to the side and the massive blade swung by him, resounding on one of the stone pillars of the hall. Ryhgon used no guard. He wheeled the sword like an ax; the vast sweeping blows were hypnotic and paralyzing. He fought contemptuously, a machine that knows it is invincible and does not have to think. “But the master should be careful of his pupil,” Raldnor thought quite clearly, and in his sparkling rage he saw only a reputation behind the sword, something that expected to be feared and was not essentially fearful.
“Look at me, Ryhgon,” he thought, “how I freeze with terror,” and he fell back before the giant as if afraid, and the storm came on, its teeth a glimpse of lightning. The great arm lifted the sword, and on the end of that soaring hung Raldnor’s death dangling like a doll.
Raldnor thrust beneath and up to meet the descending arm. It was a swift almost casual stroke that severed the Guard Lord’s wrist. Thick blood spurted, the ox muscles spasmed and the sword dropped from Ryhgon’s impotent fingers.
Ryhgon fell to his knees, clutching the shorn-off hand against him, shouting and drooling in agony. No one moved to help him. They sensed perfectly that his rule was over, yet more than this, they were appalled by the sight of the monster on its knees, reduced so simply and so totally to its basic animal parts, emptied like a broken jar of all its power.
But in Raldnor the silver rage did not abate. He saw they would be on him in a moment and there would be more of Kathaos’s justice. So he leaped across the room, over benches, toward the outer doors. No one stopped him; he seemed to be moving in a different time, and outside the corridors were empty.
He ran in smoky lamplight over mosaic floors, looking for an exit point. But there was no cool reasoning left to him—only instinct. At last it was a window, not a door, he found—a window with dry creeper, half dead from the snow, coiling away from it. He took its withered brown claws in his hands and climbed downward into a court of shadows and a forest of columns of poppy-colored glass.
“What now?” he asked himself, and then came a black absorbing dreariness: “Nothing now.”
But there was something. A light. It sprang up ahead of him, and where it shone through the pillar stems it was a pale carnelian fire. He pressed backward, but the flame found his face.
There was a girl, carrying a lamp. She was the sort of girl he had grown accustomed to seeing about the walks of the major palace in the past three months—gliding always in the distance, accompanied by servants, hair intricately dressed, jewels on her fingers. Yet this one was alone. She tilted her head a little to one side and gave him an inquisitive, dangerous smile.
“And what’s your business here, Am Kathaos? An illicit love affair with some Dragon Lord’s wife? And you so breathless to get to it.”
The abrupt transition from anger, blood and flight to this could only stun him. The madman’s plan came out of his mouth before it was fully formed in his brain.
“I seek an audience with the Storm Lord.”
Her eyes widened, but she gave a little false, elegant laugh.
“Indeed? You’re very ambitious.”
“Where do I find him?”