Orhn waited, and it was not in his nature to wait gladly. Would the girl speak as Amnorh instructed her? Damn her, she would have been better dead before talk of conception and the Council had clouded a perfectly clear issue. And what, in all this, were the Lord Warden’s personal motives?
The Lowlander came out from the tent. Orhn saw at once a change in him—he seemed astonishingly blind and old, groping, not through a physical but a psychic darkness. He walked down the scarp, among the Dortharian lines into the sketchy wilderness of the fields, all the while the priest keeping like a black crow at his shoulder.
A simultaneous movement ran through the Lowland ranks. Men and zeebas broke formation suddenly, wheeled, a flurry of fresh dust surging up to mask their departure.
The captain swore beneath his breath.
Orhn glanced at Amnorh.
“Very clever, Councilor, very clever.”
And Amnorh allowed himself a moment of childish answering inner scorn: “Certainly too clever for you, lord prince.”
As a form of inescapable etiquette, a messenger was sent ahead of them to Xarar. Consequently, Orhn grit his teeth as they passed beneath the white Dragon Gate and entered a city plunged into deep and poetic mourning.
“Damn their mewling,” he thought as the women howled in the streets for Rehdon, whose momentarily glimpsed person they had most probably forgotten.
Their host in Xarar, the King Thann Rashek, whose name in certain circles was Thann the Fox, sent a procession of embalmers to anoint and bind Rehdon’s body. Rashek’s numerous queens, women of Xarabiss, Karmiss and Corhl, and the troop of daughters, appeared in profound funereal magenta, while bards wailed of invented heroics—there had been no full-scale war since the time of Rarnammon in which a lord might earn or buy a hero’s name. The mummery sent Orhn into a tight-held towering rage. He gathered up the disorganized factions of Rehdon’s entourage with brutal haste. Within four days he had shrugged off the pomp and drama, the ubiquitous pale faces ready with histrionic tears and the eight-stringed laments.
He moved the Dortharian party swiftly out across Xarabiss, the corpse as the excuse, and left her crystal cities in a pall of offering smokes.
They entered the narrow land of Ommos, death in a closed golden Xarabian bier. Ashne’e—kept in exotic captivity in Xarar like a wild yet interesting beast, peered at, no doubt, through spy holes in the drapes—now dwelt in windowless gray rooms, and was spat at from low hovels flanking roadways. At twilight, in a white-stoned fortress by the sea, the warden personally killed a newborn child, brought into the world mere hours before their arrival by one of his dull-eyed wives. It was to mark his sorrow, he told them, yet it had been a girl and not a son and so, particularly in the case of an Ommos, no great loss to him.
Not long after, Orhn heard the mother shrieking somewhere in the darkness, and for some barely explicable reason his thoughts turned to Rehdon’s Queen.
Val Mala, Dortharian princess of a minor House in Kuma, raised to her position as Jointress of Koramvis because of her beauty and Rehdon’s weakness.
How she would detest the Lowland girl.
Orhn permitted himself a grim smile at the thought of the cruelties Val Mala would devise for her; in particular quarters Val Mala’s name was already a byword for cruelty. Certainly no woman who had maligned her in her early days of power was now to be seen about the court. He recalled her chosen pet—a white kalinx, a tuft-eared cat, devil of incalculable viciousness—which roamed her apartments more or less at will, and was a symbol to Koramvis at large of her own glamorous and inventive spite. Val Mala indeed would be an intriguing study on their return.
And if the Lowland bitch were seeded? If there was to be public proof of the Vis Lord’s extramarital lust? Orhn wondered, with a not entirely idle malice: would the embraces of the Lord Councilor be sufficient consolation?
2
Dorthar, the Dragon Land, Dorthar the dragon’s head, the mountains its jagged crest, the lake Ibron its white eye, Koramvis its thinking jewel of a hub, the heart-brain.
The city lay on the foothills of the crest crags, elevated like a gigantic pure white bird on a nest of fire. Her foundations, bisected by a river, lay in the farthest recesses of time; like the Dragon Gate of Xarabiss, she was in part a remembrance, a physical creation burdened by essential legend, her ancestry a charred place where the Storm gods had come out of heaven, riding in the bellies of pale dragons.
At mid-noon, in the first Zastian month, her watchtowers spoke to her across the plain, black scavenger clouds of death smoke, and Koramvis opened her gates to admit her King.
Val Mala’s apartments were filled with a dim smoky incense-light. Candles fluttered, her women were dressed in black. The girl who conducted them there had silver tears painted on her cheeks.
Val Mala made them wait a good while, Amnorh the Lord Councilor and Orhn prince of Alisaar. When Orhn grew impatient, the girl stared at him and murmured: “The Queen mourns.”
Orhn made a sound of derision, but presently the mourner came and he bit back his curses.
Val Mala. Her Vis coloring was startlingly disguised by a creamy unguent, the Dortharian ebony of her hair hidden under a wig of hyacinth blue silk. She wore a funereal gown but the mood of it did not reflect in her face or her kalinx eyes, though they were as black as moonless lakes. She was far younger than her dead consort, had never loved him. Even her pregnancy was as yet invisible. She seemed to have rejected every vestige of Rehdon, and the ritual phrase—“the Queen mourns”—had all the absurd obscenity of something scribbled on a wall. Yet her beauty had lost none of its familiar edge, its stunning magic, despite that faintest hint about her of a high-class whore, that pinpoint glint of something vulgar and unrefined.
She glanced at Orhn, and then away.
“Where is my Lord Rehdon?”
“Coming unconducted through the palace courts since you, madam, called us to wait on you,” Orhn growled.
“It’s a pity, Prince Orhn, that you didn’t conduct him better while he lived. He might, perhaps, still walk among us.”
“It’s at once apparent, madam, how grief overwhelms you at your loss.”
She flinched at his irony and clenched her ringed hands in a convulsive, furious spasm.
“Oh, I am indeed overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by your malicious impropriety. You bring a gift for me, I hear.”
“A gift, madam?”
“So I hear. Your notion of a gift.” Her voice rose. “His whore! This filthy temple slut. A snake-worshiping devil-bitch he took for his pleasure because he couldn’t have me.”
Am Alisaar said nothing, his face stony with his own anger.
She spat at him: “You will not speak of this problematical child she carries. I won’t have her live! I am the mother of the King’s heir—I, and no other.”
“You and many others, madam.”
Her eyes grew suddenly enlarged and blank as if they saw in terror those other lesser children clamoring for their birthright. She turned and crossed to Orhn and looked in his face.
“I,” she said, “I, alone. Your King is here, Orhn Am Alisaar,” and she snatched his hand and laid it over her belly. He felt the gentle swell of her body, the ribs of some jewel set in her navel beneath the folds of her dress. He felt, too, the blood thicken immediately in his temples and surge in his groin. Val Mala saw his breathing quicken and abruptly pushed his hand away. “Your King, to whom you will kneel,” she said, smiling contemptuously at how she and the star had moved him. “And now you have my leave to go. The Queen-widow, I believe, can give such an order to a mere prince of Alisaar.”