When he felt the tension slackening in her body, he led her out into the street and lifted her onto one of Dakan’s zeebas and took her to Orhvan’s house.
The one dragon soldier left living in the city strained his eyes toward the dawn. He had spent the night trussed to a pillar in the vault under the garrison, where a crack of a window looked out of the earth bank into a paved court. In the night the window had not proved friendly. The wind had haunted him through it, and bloody arms and hands had snatched at him, whether in hallucination or reality he was not sure. He had seen his comrades die in the hall, and in his drunken terror had run out into the stone corridors, hearing the ghastly din behind him. He had hidden himself under the cot of a sick soldier, whose throat, he had time to notice, had been sliced from ear to ear. Here he vomited up Riyul’s wine and lay in the stink of his own sickness, afraid to move or search for weapons.
About an hour later, two Lowland men had come into the room and pulled him out, gibbering with shock. It was as though they had known of his presence there for some time.
He thought they would run a blade into him and be done with it, but instead they dragged him down into the black cellars of the palace and bound him to a pillar. There was a dead Lowlander lying by another.
When the dawn filtered in to him, he heard them at the door. The dim light fired their pale hair; their eyes were like splinters of flame. He could not read their faces, but he knew that they were no longer slaves.
One of them loosed his bonds.
“A pleasant day for a hanging,” he remarked, swallowing nausea.
“You’re not to die,” said the Lowlander. “The Storm Lord has asked for you.”
“Amrek?” Incredulous, the soldier felt he had, after all, lost his wits in the night.
“Raldnor,” the Lowlander said, “Rehdon’s son.”
They took him by alleys to a dark house and left him in the circular hall. He thought of chancing an escape, but could think of no refuge in this hostile city. He had seen them dragging the bloody corpses into an open place, and burning them. The Lowlanders always burned their dead.
When the man came, the soldier was astounded. A Vis, he thought at first, until he saw the hair. Then something struck him—a name, and a face. He started violently at the crippled hand.
“Dragon Lord!” he exclaimed.
“You know me.”
“You’re Raldnor of Sar, Amrek’s—” The soldier fell silent in horror. Here stood the dead, for Amrek had had this man killed, had he not—the seducer of Astaris Am Karmiss.
“You will do me a service,” the undead said to him.
The soldier trembled and mouthed words which never came.
“You will carry a message to my brother Amrek.” The eyes leveled on the soldier, held him trapped and unpleasantly aware, burning the words into his skull. Irrationally, intolerably, yet without a doubt, the soldier knew that whatever mission this man gave him must be accomplished. It was inescapable as a geas. “Tell Amrek that his father Rehdon is my father also, that my mother was Ashne’e the Lowland woman. Remind him of the laws of Dorthar, that I was sown two months later than his sowing in Val Mala’s womb, that therefore I am the Storm Lord. Tell him that I freely lend him the months of the second snow in which to put his affairs in order and to relinquish his throne. When the snow is ended, if his place is not mine, I will drown Koramvis in the blood of his people.”
The soldier shuddered and half began to weep. This man was no ghost who could make these demands of the living.
“If I speak to him as you say—he’ll kill me—”
“Dragon,” the man said to him, “it will not trouble me if you die.”
The soldier cringed and covered his face against the phenomenal eyes. Here was no hatred, and no mercy either—nothing. Nothing in this man sought vengeance. Similarly he contained no mechanism for pity.
Men and women crowded to look down from the snow-rimmed towers of Sar.
The winds had abated, yet there was little enough to amuse them with half the theaters respectfully closed, and the wine shops full of Amrek’s Guard. Now there was a rumor, a wild story—they watched the solitary Dragon ride into the square before the Guardian’s palace, a train of about twenty camp whores trailing behind him. Abruptly Amrek appeared at the head of the outer stairway, a startling black figure against the vivid snow.
“What’s your news, dragon?”
The soldier fell to his knees.
“Storm Lord—the Lowland garrison has been destroyed, every man in it killed except for myself.”
“What?” The dry voice rang with an unstable, hollow derision. “A whole garrison gone and only one worm left to crawl out of it? Who did this miraculous thing? Banaliks?”
“My Lord, I swear—it was the Lowlanders. They struck all together in a space of minutes—How could we know, my Lord, that they’d find a leader?”
“A leader.” Amrek’s hands twitched at his sides; his mouth curled. He came slowly down the stairway into the square.
“They let me live—to bring his message to you,” the man cried. Amrek stopped still. There was no sound. “They took me to this man. He said—he said his father was also yours—Rehdon, the High King. His mother, the Lowland witch-woman. He says—says he was conceived after your lordship—that by the old laws this—makes him the Storm Lord—he demands the throne of Dorthar, or else . . .” The man faltered on the rash, impossible threat which, in that round dark hall, had seemed so immutable, so certain. “My Lord, he swears he will drown Koramvis in the blood of her people if he isn’t acknowledged by the snow’s end.”
Amrek laughed. It was a melodramatic, insane noise to fill the dead silence.
“This man—this King,” Amrek said harshly, grinning, “who is he, this lord of scum?”
It was a rhetorical question. Yet it had, so curiously, an answer.
“Raldnor of Sar,” the soldier choked out, unable to help himself. “Raldnor of Sar, your Dragon Lord—”
Amrek’s blow split his lip; he tasted blood in his mouth.
Amrek screamed at him: “You’re lying to me! Who paid you, you filth, to lie to me?”
The soldier lay on his face. Amrek turned, and turned again, screaming at the high walls: “All liars! Damn you! Damn your lies!”
He circled the court, yelling at them, beating the air with his hands. Suddenly his eyes rolled back. He fell and twitched on the ground, writhing and sprawling in the middle of the empty space. No one approached him. They were too afraid to help him. He seemed possessed by an ultimate and inescapable demon.
Then, abruptly, the fit was finished. He lay quite still.
To those watching from the towers, he was a black cross against the snow.
21
The high council had been formed in haste in the palace on the Avenue of Rarnammon. Many were absent, keeping to their beds on this chill and inauspicious day and sending word their physicians would not let them rise. Mathon, the Warden of the Council, rubbed nervously at his cold hands. He was an old man who had been elected for his safe vacillating and his well-known lack of ambition—and this situation was quite beyond his ability.
Sharp-faced and sick-eyed, Amrek sat in the dragon-legged chair. He had recovered from the terrible spasm at Sar, only to ride to Dorthar with all the frenzy of a madman. The treacherous thaw had ended, and the snow was falling heavily by the time he reached Migsha. It did not dissuade him. He tore across the caravan tracks of the Plain lands and the hills, camping at night in a sodden tent and traveling through blizzards that sent him blind for two days in the Ommos town of Goparr, his chariot clogged to the wheels in snow. His Guard fell behind. He lost them and left them to the wolves and the deadly cold, and to struggle after as best they could. He crossed the Dortharian border with ten men at his back. He rode unknown through Koramvis and came immediately to the Council Hall. The mud-stained cloak he had worn lay on the floor behind the chair.