“We shall pray to the gods,” she said without inflection.
“You think Atull will fail,” he said to her, coming close. The faintest of lines were etched on her forehead, which troubled and pleased him. “Have no hopes the Lowlanders will ultimately kill me.”
She turned her head.
She remembered Raldnor, and she remembered the fair-haired woman who had sent the snake to her in Rehdon’s tomb.
“Did I mistake death a second time?” She thought of the grave in the River Garrison. No. She would not have them unearth whatever lay there. She no longer wished to know, for if she had lost him yet again. . . . Lamps burned softly through the nights in her bedchamber. She had begun to fear the dark.
Atull’s force moved across Ommos. The Ommos had taken to throwing yellow-haired dolls made of rags into the fire bellies of their Zarok gods. The sky blew and thundered.
When they crossed into Xarabiss, countless mishaps befell the march. Wheels ran loose, trees crashed in their path. Between Abissa and Tyrai, as they bridged a river, now rain-swelled and foaming, the timbers gave under them. Chariots, men and animals floundered and were swept away. At night came disturbances in the camp; running figures made off into the hills. Supplies were pilfered, beasts unshod. There was frequently some burning tent, blowing its ashes down the wind.
Atull sent his dispatches home. Word came shortly to Thann Rashek: “Your people hinder us. Prevent them.”
Thann Rashek’s reply was very courteous. Xarabiss had suffered a hard winter, and a poor harvest before it, and hunger had inflamed her robber population. If Rashek knew a means to govern bandits, he would be a happy man; he entreated the Storm Lord to instruct him how it might be done.
Atull’s command reached Sar, under beating heavy rains, and found the place in uproar. The Sarish watchtower had sent up a scarlet signal half an hour before. At dawn goatherds had spotted a force moving northward on the Plains.
The population of Sar was afraid, both of Atull’s soldiers and the Lowlanders. They began to evacuate the town in droves, burdened with crying babies and bleating domestic animals. Even if the stories were true, they were sure that Raldnor, for all he had claimed himself one of her sons, would not spare Sar.
The dragons advanced on to the Plains and crossed the border in the late afternoon. They saw no signs of an army on the march, rabble or otherwise.
“Those herders were drunk, or asleep and dreaming,” one of Atull’s captains remarked. “My guess is the rats are still skulking in their ruin.”
As dusk fell, they made camp on the banks of a narrow watercourse, where a small wood provided some shelter from the rain. Soon the dark was jeweled by their cook fires. Sentries prowled on the perimeter. They were not uneasy. They expected nothing.
Just before dawn, a sentry on the western rim of the encampment heard a movement in the dripping brush and went to investigate. He did not return.
“Fire!”
The yell burst across the tent lanes. Men sprang up, cursing and coughing; animals screamed and kicked at their pickets, broke free and ran, lathering with fear. The rain had eased in the night, but there was little dry enough for a blaze to take hold of. Nevertheless, the waterlogged undergrowth smoldered and stank. A thick, choking flame-fog enveloped the camp.
Atull pushed from his tent, his eyes weeping. There was no hope of orderly retreat. Men and animals burst from the wood.
Beyond the trees, back-lit by the first white rays of the sun, unexpected figures materialized. Swords clanged with a dull iron sound, spears sung. The Dortharians, who had looked for nothing in their pride and ill-fated assumptions, were cut to pieces as they erupted in confusion from the smothering trap. The enemy were half their strength in number and, by comparison, indifferently armed. Smoke and surprise, however, turned the balance. There was an absurd and bloody slaughter. Atull himself, fell heavily, an obscenity on his lips, a Plains man’s shaft in his guts.
They had been smoked out of their lair like orynx in the hills above Koramvis. It was a trick well remembered by the man who had once hunted with Koramvians, on the day the earth shook.
A few men evaded the red blades and fled. It was an ignominious flight and ended in death anyway. Some perished oddly in Xarabiss. Those that reached Dorthar were hanged to the last man.
Also unlooked for, like black swans, there came out of the north sudden ships.
They crept over the laminations of the sea: vessels of Shansar and Vathcri along the shadowy coast of Lan toward Ommos; a vast fleet of Shansar and Vardath edging behind barbaric Thaddra, making for Alisaar and Zakoris. And, far off still, behind the Dragon Crest at Dorthar’s back, Tarabine galleys with blood-red sails.
They had been a long time building. Vathcri had stripped her forests of their huge trees, turned her army into a navy at Vardath and manned the wide decks under Jarred. The Shansarians, eager to despoil the Vis lands, leaped about their own black sails, which bore insignia of countless different kings, and sang their pirate songs. There were pale goddesses with plated tails leaning out from the up-curving prows that had the carved beaks of birds or the wide mouths of water snakes.
The spirit which had departed with the white-haired man still moved them in their various ways.
They hung, a few miles out from Vis, waiting, like the shadow of an evening soon to fall. It was not yet quite the time. There would be a signal; their priests would know it—an emanation, a Sending. It might come from the holy men of the Plains—a magic communion from one group of sensitives to another. Many believed that he alone would order it, the man they called Raldnor. Especially the pirates observed his name with awe. To some extent he had been deified among them.
The days passed. Storms broke at Dorthar’s back, and the red-sailed ships of Tarabann withdrew to a farther horizon.
“He is in Xarabiss,” said Melash the High Priest of the Vathcrian Ashkar. And a muted, half-troubled cheering rose from the wide decks.
To forty Shansarian pirate ships in the twilight off Alisaar came the first injunction.
The priests cried out with white faces. The sails opened; the iron oars ripped the glass surface of the sea and churned the bay of Saardos, capital of Alisaarian kings since the time of Rarnammon.
Their decks were straddled by their armament. The spoons of catapults barked on their leather buffers, and spat white flame among the towers and walks of the seaside mansions and the merchant quarters. Flame lodged and gouted and lit up the sky. The pirates, wild with their blood frenzy, leaped down among the blazing wreckage of the docks, running on the spines of smoking fishing smacks and up the fire-bright wharves, to butcher the unprepared soldiery massing from the garrison.
Saardos burned that night, a horrible example to the dark-haired races. The ancient palaces collapsed in rubble; the garrison gave out at dawn. The city showed a gutted skull’s face to the pitiless day as the howling invaders ravaged her corpse. Her king fled by a back gate to the fortress at Shaow to muster troops. In the confusion and fiery dark his commanders had learned nothing of the enemy. They surmised Zakoris or Thaddra had attacked them, and the world had gone mad.
The Lowland army had left Sar lying untouched, yet virtually abandoned behind them.
The warm, half-fetid perfume of summer was on the wide Xarabian plains. Towns lay in their path; they passed them with a mile or so between. They skirted Xarar, and no warning smoke rose from her garrison tower, though patrols had noted their passing from the woods above the road. Sometimes men rode to join the march—in twos or threes mostly, sometimes alone.
Often the wayside fields were empty and the farmsteads quiet, but full of anxious eyes. The Lowlanders took little and despoiled nothing. Near Tyrai the land was red with flowers, and men intercepted them with carts laden with beer and bread for Raldnor’s troops. There were women too. They threw the red flowers at the soldiers. The Lowlanders watched serenely. The Lans laughed. The Xarabians bowed and tucked the flowers in their collars. Flowers trampled under the feet of the animals sent up a smoking fume. For Raldnor it was like the summer a year before.