Orhn stiffened, his mouth set. He bowed as rigidly as an automaton and strode out. The great cibba-wood door crashed behind him.
Val Mala glanced at Amnorh standing in the shadows.
“So much for the upstart.”
“Indeed, my goddess. So much.”
“I’m not certain what you mean, Amnorh. Possibly you should be thankful,” but she laughed and pulled the wig from her head. Her hair flowed black over her shoulders. “And has a physician examined the girl?”
“As soon as she reaches the Palace of Peace.”
“And Rehdon,” she said—“and Rehdon. When did he die?”
“A little before sunrise, I would judge. The girl was with him.”
“Foolish Rehdon, to need women so greatly and have such fear of them. Always fear. Even in lust, fear. An inadequate, hollow King.”
“He no longer troubles you.”
“No.” She bent close and her astonishingly white hand gripped his shoulder. “How?”
“I gave it to him in the bitter wine they brew in the Lowlands,” he said evenly. “The Red Moon was in his body. He didn’t realize what he was drinking.”
“I wanted him to know. I wish I could have seen him drink it and die.”
“Impracticable, my Queen.”
“And is Koramvis payment enough for you?” she hissed.
“In excess of what I ask,” he murmured, and reached out to caress her body already moving against his in awakening desire.
A man in a black robe hurried out from under the wide portico of the Palace of Peace. Behind him, high up in one of the bowl-topped towers, the room from which he had just come burned with a yellow light. Dusk was well advanced over the silent gardens.
He passed two sentries, whose eyes squinted after him when he had gone by.
In the shadow of the broad gate a strong hand came from the dark to seize his arm.
“What do you want with me?”
“News of the Lowland temple girl.”
“On whose authority do you ask me that?”
“The Lord Amnorh’s.”
The physician hesitated. At last he said: “It’s too early to judge her condition with certainty.”
The voice in the dark was insistent.
“Come now, physician. You think your own thoughts.”
“Then . . . I think she has conceived.”
The hand let go of his arm and someone moved soundlessly away. The physician shook himself as if to be rid of a shiver, and turned toward the sweep of the city, where lamps were lighting like stars.
Night flooded Koramvis, her bright palaces and narrow murderous ways, night and the star throbbed and faded and sank before the scarlet eruption that was dawn. Thereafter other nights and other dawns followed.
Somewhere a stringed bell began to rasp and toll.
Similar bells echoed it.
As the disc of this new sun steered above the horizon, gouts of smoke burst from the black temple of the Storm gods and drifted in gauzes over the river Okris. This red, scalding day would see a king finally carried to his tomb.
The sky cooled to darkest indigo.
From the Storm Palace, the temples, the Academy of Arms, moved black and glittering worm trails, converging and uniting on a white road flanked by gigantic crested dragons of obsidian—the Avenue of Rarnammon.
The High King is dead, the sun is eclipsed, the moon falls, the earth quakes.
A hundred priestesses were the prologue, wailing the mourning chant; a cry from hell it seemed, it was so full of emptiness, despair, pain. Their robes the storm-red of dragon’s blood, their eyes streaming tears from the citrus juice they had splashed into them, their bodies punctured and streaked with self-inflicted wounds. After them the priests, purple robes and a humming disquiet of gongs and mask faces caught in a congested rigor.
Rehdon’s Dragon Guard carried in their midst the embalmed death. Among their black, clashing assemblage, framed by the dipped rust banners and the trailing tassels, rolled a gilt cage with a man sitting up in it. He wore full armor. The great spiked crest flamed on his head, the eyes stared straight in front of him. He might have lived, yet death breathed out from every pore of him, an odorless stink of corruption, and the black eyes refracted and flashed and blazed, being constructed now not of tissue but onyx and crystal. Behind him walked princes like serfs, a king or two and after these their women and their wives. And Rehdon’s Queen in her black velvet and fantastic jewels, her skirt also trailing in the smoking dust. Her eyes were blank as the gem eyes of her dead and hated husband. Her wish had killed him, yet she must mourn him through the city like a slave. She recalled the greetings of the Zakorian princes—“Honor to the heir in your womb”—and fury burned bitter as the dust on her tongue.
At the tail of the worm marched the endless ranks of soldiery. Drums thundered across the streets and thunder answered dully from the panting sky.
The crowds trembled, hearing this sullen roar of gods in anger. Women fell to their knees weeping as Rehdon’s death cage passed them. Soon a shout rose, a shout to kill the witch, the banalik of the Lowland-Accursed, the murderess of the Storm Lord: Ashne’e.
The Hall of Kings stood on a terraced bank of the Okris, and its entrance was a marble dragon’s mouth.
Between those upstrained jaws the shimmering worm ran, flaring now with torchlight. The sky had turned black, and spears of pallid light flickered beyond the river; rain began to fall in huge molten drops, and the river boiled. Thunder cracked in fragments.
The priestesses raised their rain-and-tear-dashed faces, quivering terror and exaltation.
In the shell of the sepulcher the torches quavered and dug blue and red light from the rubies and sapphires of rearing mausoleums, from the eyes of carved monsters and hiddrax, and ran in silver pools between the limbs of metal guardians.
A line of priests marked the way to the newest tomb. In the breath of sweet-smoke and incense the body of Rehdon was lifted from its cage and carried into its heart. Prayers moaned among the sarcophagi and were lost.
Val Mala followed the kings and princes into the silent place. Long ago she would have been walled in beside her lord, his thing till eternity or decay, and a dry raw fear rose in her throat as she thought of it.
He lay before her on his couch, on his back. Fear was replaced by contempt and scorn as she recalled that never again would he lie thus in life before her. She reached to take his hand, to press her lips to it in a mockery of the traditional kiss of sorrow. And was turned to scarcely breathing stone.
There was a snake.
It stood straight upright on her husband’s breast, wickedly thin, yellow gold, splattered with a coiling black design. Its tongue flickered like a black flame in and out of its mouth.
She could not draw back her hand. She could not call out.
She held out her hand for the snake to strike her with its needle teeth, and for the poison to fill her veins. Its head recoiled and she knew her last instant of life was on her.
Lightning. It seemed lightning had struck through the roof into the tomb. But it was the glare of torchlight on a sword, the sword, in fact, of Prince Orhn, which had moved a fraction more swiftly than the snake and struck off its head.
Val Mala pulled her hand back as if from a sucking, reluctant clay, and fainted.
The silence in the tomb broke into shouts and imprecations, communicated rapidly to the throng outside.
Orhn wiped the blood slime from his sword and re-sheathed it methodically.
“Find the master mason of this tomb. He has some questions to answer.” As guards moved to oblige him, he motioned to Val Mala’s women, then stepped over her body without attention and went out.