“Then you will be the first in the city to hear me. I did both of you a great wrong in the past. I have not forgotten.”
“Ah, Raldnor, there’s too little time to eat bitter bread together. We’ve put aside that past, haven’t we, Tira?”
Then he felt the current stir and sift in his brain.
“I no longer know you,” he suddenly thought. “I wasn’t mistaken. No longer that anguished boy pulled both ways by his blood, the angry sullen boy whose mind was shut. Now here is a stranger who commands me, a man I’ve never met.”
The old woman, glimpsing something, whispered in her mind: “You have come a long way to us. Somewhere your guilt was purged or lost. Does she rest quiet, then, my little white-haired baby, my Anici?”
But the man had begun to speak to them. The tide of his own thoughts bore theirs away like leaves on the wind.
The Ommos was big, a strong-built man succumbing now to fat. Rings cluttered his hands; a ruby bled on an upper tooth.
“Well, Lannic traveler, what is it you wish?” The voice was smooth, without a modicum of interest.
Yannul stood his hard-won ground in the hideously frescoed hall. There had already been considerable trouble with the porter.
“I’ve told your man. I want to speak to your master, Yr Dakan.”
“The Lord Dakan is at dinner.”
“Splendid. I’ll join him. I’ve eaten nothing since this morning.”
The Ommos smiled, snapped powerful fingers and waited while two thickset house guards sidled in from the porch.
“I suggest to you, Lannic traveler, that the dinner might not be to your liking.”
There was a smash of timbers a few streets away, the sound carrying harshly over the silent city. The Ommos’s slothful eyes shifted involuntarily to the door, and Yannul, tearing aside a curtain, strode into the hall beyond.
Red light submerged the room. A massive Zarok statue dominated the center, its belly flaring poisonous flame. A memory of abominable sacrificial rites griped in Yannul’s guts.
Yr Dakan, seated at a low table, looked up startled from his food, a tidbit held halfway to his mouth.
“What’s this? Am I not to be allowed to eat in peace?”
Yannul halted in front of him, gave a short bow, and handed him the letter from the imaginary merchant stamped with the false seal.
Yr Dakan set down his meat and took the letter in his greasy fingers.
“Explain. Who sends me this?”
“My master. Kios Am Xarabiss.”
Dakan broke the seal even as the Ommos servant appeared between the curtains. Before the man could utter a word, Dakan waved him peremptorily to silence. Yr Dakan read, grunted and looked up.
“You know your master’s mind?”
“The lord Kios has considered in some depth the imminent termination of all trade with the Plains.”
“A few months, a season, and the Plains will be no more.”
“As you say,” Yannul smiled, “and what a lot of good things will go for waste—assuming the Dortharians don’t find them.”
“How perceptive of your master. He is thinking of the village temples, perhaps? Yes. Well, I have a little knowledge of such things. If he is prepared to find means of transport, as he suggests he can, and to see that I am recompensed for my trouble. . . . He mentions a reasonable sum, but I think my services may be worth more—We shall see. But I will take no risks with the Dortharian rabble—this is to be understood.”
“Perfectly, Lord Dakan.”
“Orklos,” Dakan said, half turning to the servant at his back, “before you shut guests out of my hall, you will inquire into their business.”
Orklos stretched his mouth and bowed.
Dakan waved toward the several dishes.
“Eat if you are hungry, Master Lan.”
He bent to the letter and reread it.
Yannul took a cup of wine. His hunger had been curbed by tension and fatigue. And it was to be a long night yet, discussing business with the greedy Ommos, upping his fee, assuring him he need have no part in the smuggling—for the merchant clearly understood the Dortharians despised his race almost as much as the Lowlanders. He had not reckoned on a long sojourn in the city once the dragons came there. Some night they might burn his house as readily as the serfs’.
The wine scorched Yannul’s throat. Dakan began to amuse him, sinuously avoiding all manner of dangers, not realizing the secret agent at his table was using him and making sure of him for the struggle which was coming.
At midnight Dakan allowed him to seek a bedroom on the upper story. A man led him there, guiding him with a lamp. Yannul had noted several Lowland servants about the place, and this man, too, was a Lowlander. Yannul studied him with a certain uneasy curiosity. He seemed almost entirely fleshless in the creeping lamplight, his eyes craters. At the low-linteled door the man went by to light the lamp beside the bed.
“You serve Yr Dakan, do you?” Yannul asked. Something about the man prompted him to exploration.
“As you see, Lord Lan.”
“Do you think you’ll be safer from the dragons with a Vis master to look after your hide? Not that there’s much of a hide. Do they starve you in this house?”
“Yr Dakan is a good master to those who serve him well,” the Lowlander said without expression. The lamp caught suddenly in the pits of his eyes, and Yannul saw a surprising welter of emotion in them; thoughts slid like fish—unrecognizable, yet forever revealed in motion. Yannul sensed pain, a capacity for hate.
“What’s your name, Lowlander?”
“Ras.”
The dull sibilance disturbed Yannul.
“Well, thanks for the lamp, Ras. I’ll say good night.”
“No need, Lord Lan. I am only the merchant’s slave.”
A smile, or some sort of stillborn bastard sister to a smile, briefly altered the Lowlander’s mouth as he turned away into the passage.
The blackness dwindled into a gray winter dawn. The Dortharian bell sounded over the city; the curfew was finished for another night. There had been no bells in the Plains, or any other warning. They had brought this brass voice from Marsak, and had repaired the city walls, also, for their own purposes as jailors. Beasts still roamed the streets at night, but on two legs now. Day, a day of cold sun, drew the creatures of the city out of their lairs. The little albino house snakes, on whom the Dortharians stepped when able, slid on the palely sunlit stone ruins. Light-haired men moved in the shadows, dropping back into darker places when soldiers passed on the roads. Trade still persisted—barter, the stuff of life—yet very silently. The whole city smothered beneath its silence. Only the Dortharians made sound.
Of the other races—those part-Lowlanders with the blood of Elyr, Xarabiss, Lan—some, capable of passing as Vis, had fled back to the lands their half blood opened to them, and lived there with a sense of horrified estrangement and precarious safety, and nightmares. Others went to earth in obscure villages of the Plains, or into the deep cellars of the city, even, to exist as brothers to, and in the manner of, rats. The soldiers killed a few for offenses various and bizarre. They were the mark of an ultimate shame and had no right to remain as proof of it Some died without assistance. Yhaheil, the Elyrian astrologer, had done so, seated before the wide, star-filled windows of the icy tower. Despair, not fever, had eaten him—but it was an impersonal, spiritual despair, for he had seen Amrek’s genocide written over the sky, and intimations of chaos following it.
With the day, women began to gather at the ancient watering places, carrying their jars, lending to the morning with a sort of normalcy.