On the steps of a well in the northern quarter of the city, they moved aside to let the old woman draw her water first. They were courteous to her age, also to her sorrow, for Tira had outlived both daughter and granddaughter—an almost mystical grief—and lost, too, the companions of her age to illnesses of the hot months and the maladies of fear. Her weed-grown court no longer susurrated to the brittle, moth-wing flutter of their movements, the dry grasshopper rustle of their old women’s voices. Nor indeed to anything, for the dragons had long since burnt it out.
Tira bore the brand of these things, and yet today Tira was different. She moved differently; her mind emitted pulses of a curious and definite strength. At the head of the steps she gestured aside the young women’s hands offering help, and drew up the water herself. Then she turned, the brimming jar balanced on her hip and by her bone-thin hands. She looked at the women, and suddenly into the mind of each of them fell a single pure shining drop, like a tear of molten gold let fall into the dark water of the well.
There came a rattle of wheels. Down the narrow street galloped a light chariot with two Dortharians in it; it reined to a halt at the watering place. The soldiers called out obscenities at the women who stood there. Their immobility melted, they vanished as swiftly as the night had done. Only an old woman balancing her water jar on her hip was left at the well’s head.
“Give us a drink, old bitch!”
The soldier grinned when she came down to him and handed him the jar. He snatched carelessly, pretended to lose hold, and dropped the vessel on the roadway, where it broke. Water gushed out. The soldiers laughed. A bronze whip cracked, and the chariot rushed on.
Tira stood still. They did not see her extraordinary smile. She had dealt in symbols once, and now, changed by the man who had come out of the night, she saw Dortharian blood, not water, running self-spilt down the street.
Four winds howled like demons through the streets of Sar.
On the hill’s head a black bull was slaughtered to appease them. A priestess of the shrine, found thieving from the votary offerings, was taken to the sky-stung hill and whipped. Her blood mingled with the dead bull’s, but the winds continued to rage. The day was blown away.
At dusk the Guardian of the town bowed himself into the chamber where the Storm Lord sat—had sat, in fact, since he had come here. The walls were hung with thick, dull velvets of a miasmic crimson. Shutters were clamped at the windows, yet the wind spat through and the marble candles guttered. The Guardian’s eyes went nervously to his royal guest. Amrek’s face had a waxy, fixed pallor, and the lankness of illness had invaded every part of him. He slouched in his chair like a distorted doll, but his eyes had the vivid dangerousness of an animal looking out of a cage. For the thousandth time the Guardian cursed the fate which had struck down his High Lord in Sar, bringing such anxiety and trouble to a peaceful life.
“My Lord,” the Guardian ventured, “may I humbly ask you how you’re doing? My physician tells me—”
“Your physician is a sour-breathed fool,” Amrek said. “You want me away, do you? Out of this refuse pit you’re pleased to call Sar. Your weather is a foulness. I can’t sleep for the wailing of your filth-laden winds.”
“My physician is preparing a draft to encourage your slumbers, my Lord—rare herbs from Elyr—”
“Damn his potions. Let him take it himself and omit to wake up until I’m gone. Besides which, insomnia has become more pleasant to me than my dreams.” Shadows and the sickly wavering candlelight fluttered up and down his face like ghastly birds. “The gods,” Amrek said, “torture us in our dreams. Has this ever occurred to you, Guardian?”
“My Lord—I—”
“They make sport of us, Guardian. Last night I slept long enough to dream the sky was full of blood. A rain of blood falling on the towers of your wretched little palace.”
The Guardian stood staring at him.
“Shall I send for a priest to read the portent of it, my lord?”
“Portent? There’s no meaning, Guardian, beyond what is obvious. Men don’t dream of what is to come, but of what has been, what’s finished.” His head dropped forward on his chest as if it were too heavy for him. “That’s how the gods make fools of us. By showing us a million times those things we long to forget, those things we aspire to alter and have no power to change. That, Guardian, is how it is done.”
The Guardian of Sar shuffled out of the close chamber. The irony that beset his town had not escaped him—the misfortune that Astaris’s seducer had named it his place of birth, however fallaciously. In the corridor the man caught himself making the old sign against evil intent, and shame filled his sallow cheeks for fear some underling had seen him.
The yellowish winter dusk filled the city. The bell clanged dismally. Having emerged at dawn, like the little snakes, the Lowlanders vanished with the snakes at the first suggestion of darkness—only the feet and the torches of the Dortharians moved on the empty streets. They played their games of rapine and death less frequently, for now the ruins seldom yielded prey.
Inside the garrison, fires smoked and voices were loud. It was an old palace they had put to their use; the wide halls were well suited as a barracks. Yet age leaned on them in that place—the crushing presence of time and the accumulations of time. Men drank heavily, and dicing led to brawls. Overtaken by boredom, they became the meat for bad dreams. Superstition stirred. How hard must you beat a Lowlander before he would cry out? And their pale women, lying in their own blood with eyes filmed over like the eyes of the blind. By the gods of Dorthar, they would be glad enough to pack the slaves off into the mines and galleys, and be done with them. Fear, the begetter of all hatreds, recalled old tales of Plains witchcraft. They remembered Ashne’e the demoness, and the curse on Rehdon’s line. Here, in a black box, with the keening of the wind as lullabies around the box’s towers, and the icy fingers of drafts stroking their limbs, the dragon men tossed and muttered in their sleep, struck at the whores who shared their couches, fell sick and fell out among themselves.
Three days after a Dortharian had let fall an old woman’s water jar in the northern quarter, a patrol in the eastern sector saw some ten or twelve yellow-haired men talking together on the steps of a roofless house. The Lowlanders had a certain gift, an ability, to slip swiftly and unexpectedly away. Partly, the Dortharians had taught them this art. Only one man failed to elude them. They cuffed him and dragged him to the garrison, and into the presence of Riyul, their commander.
Riyul was a man of Marsak, a soldier fourteen years since, a mercenary by trade to any land that would buy him, until the profits of his homeland army tempted him. The command of the Plains’s garrison had come to him unexpectedly, with Amrek’s illness. It made him both imperious and uneasy. He subdued the city by terror, out of deference to Amrek’s hate, but also because it came easy to him.
He questioned the Lowlander for an hour, between the strokes of the whipman, as first snow drifted by the windows. Meetings of more than two men at a time were prohibited. The restriction had been a matter of course, until now either observed or unnecessary. The Lowlander bled, but said nothing. Riyul had him slung at last into the cellars of the palace which made such an excellent jail, and left him there to rot. There were no further gatherings, at least none the Dortharians spotted. There seemed no need to be troubled. The Plains people were a passive, servile race—everyone knew it—with livers pale as their skin.
There was a Lannic juggler in the hall that night, a clever devil who had struck up an acquaintance with a soldier at the garrison gate and wheedled his way in. Riyul threw him a silver piece.