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The Plains army reached Goparr and sat down for siege. It was remarkable, despite the sickness raging in the barricaded city, that none of Raldnor’s troops, Vis or Plains man, took the disease.

In the long hot blue of the nights, crickets scratched with their tinsel wings.

On a slope below besieged Goparr, a Lowland man lay dreaming in the dark. Sometimes he twitched in his sleep. The crickets troubled his dream.

He had found her face, her forgotten face. It was white, all white, and transparent, like crystal. It hung like a mask in the air.

“Anici,” he murmured.

No one was near enough to hear him, or to pry into his mind; he was very careful to sleep alone.

High overhead, a violet lightning expanded the sky.

Ras started awake. This was his agony, for awake, he knew her to be dead and himself alive. Awake, he forgot her face, remembering only the faint image.

When the spear had opened his skull, and he had murdered Yr Dakan in the upper room, it had come to him, as a sudden revelation, what must be done.

He must kill Raldnor.

Never before had such a solution to his pain presented itself, yet, in the act of killing, he saw how easy and how nourishing to his bloodless soul that act of blood would be.

Yet Raldnor was no longer human. He was a golem now, soulless also, capable of dying, but, to a human executioner—impervious. Only events, not hands, could slay the preternatural creature he had become.

Ras got to his feet. He made toward the zeeba pens. Passing two Lowland sentries, he shuttered and locked up the sparkling fever of his mind.

He had visualized the creeping black swans sailing on Zakoris, waiting off Dorthar and the Ommos coast. A jumble of possibilities cascaded through his thoughts. As another had once done, he had been recently at great pains to learn of the Dortharians. Yet he did not see them as enemies. They had become a means to an end.

He took a zeeba from the pen and mounted it.

Musky foliage flashed past and overhead were glimpses of a faded moon. No one halted him. Such was Lowland unity that there seemed no reason.

Three miles from the camp, he remembered his hair and skin and pulled up his hood.

22

Koramvis, when he came to it, seemed composed of white flame.

The Zastian months had begun. The days were now very hot—heat of a dull sickening variety, heat like an omen, which to Ras meant nothing. The guards in the great gateway, expecting nothing extraordinary of a single man on foot, and oppressed by the sun and the Star, barely glanced at him.

Some miles beyond Hetta Para, Ras had become part of a great Ommos flight, intent on putting as much distance between themselves and the Plains people as possible. By that time he had darkened his hair and skin haphazardly with a sour water dye. Doing it, he had no sense of a perfidious irony—nor when he entered Koramvis. He had forgotten Raldnor’s past, for Raldnor had become for him a target—no more, no less.

The dye infected his flesh; scalp and skin broke out in dribbling sores which he scarcely noticed. The Ommos, however, avoided him, fearing this disease of scabs to be a new variety of the plague.

Due to the plague, the sprawling caravan found itself halted at the river border of Dorthar. Soldiers menaced with spears. They did not want the sickness carried over. Ras went downstream, forded the river in the deep of night and went on alone.

The journey slid off his senses; only the city awoke him—not to itself, but to his purpose. The pure white bird of Koramvis on her nest of fire left him unmoved. There was no room in him for curiosity; the capacity for observation had long since starved on the aridness of his soul. So he saw nothing beautiful, and neither did he see the turmoil which was eating like a worm between the whiteness.

In almost every thoroughfare there were soldiers—mostly mercenaries of Iscah and Corhl, or black Zakorians. In other parts, mainly the narrower, poorer byways of the city, families were packing their belongings in readiness for flight. Cooking utensils and piles of clothes and furniture were stacked precariously in carts. In a shadowless doorway a carrier was extracting his fee from a cow-faced whore.

Everywhere there was an aching tension, an absence of children playing in the streets. Wine shops had closed their shutters like pursed lips.

To these things Ras was impervious. He rode, gazing ahead of him, slow and dumb, an ugly apparition—a tangible form to some, perhaps, of the sudden, unlooked-for superstitious fear that held Koramvis. For here, too, they had begun to believe in magicians.

He crossed the Okris at noon and began to ask the road he must take. Men laughed at him and spat on the blazing pavements.

Kathaos! Listen, Yull, this wants Kathaos, by the gods.”

A woman crouched on the steps of a temple where sweet smokes rose into the sky glanced up and pointed in answer to his toneless query. Later, an urchin led him to the wall of a great villa and picked his pockets of all their little coins.

Above the gate, the dragon of Alisaar was worked in bronze. Two guards slouched with narrow eyes.

Ras hesitated. His mind saw only the immediacies of entry. He turned back a street to where he had half seen a well.

Minutes later Am Kathaos’s two guards metamorphosed from their slouching with oaths, for a Lowlander stood on the paving, looking up at them with gelatinous, mosaic eyes.

Lyki straightened and idly began to rock the cradle in which her child was lying. Her child, and the son of Raldnor. Its nurses had taken to calling it Rarnammon, and she imagined they did so to spite her. Its hair was a series of coiled darknesses, like flower buds growing on its small skull. Its eyes were curious—neither dark nor golden but strangely both at once—and its face was sullen and apt to turn purple, like a bruised fruit, when its digestion or its emotions troubled it.

Lyki rocked passionlessly, and the child stared at her with an aloof distrust to match her own.

Several gems glittered on her hand. Her dress was of a rare embroidered silk. Her rank, since Astaris Am Karmiss had perished, was considerably improved. She enjoyed, as Koramvis had observed, the personal protection of the lord Kathaos. Many of Astaris’s handmaidens had not been so fortunate.

Lyki herself was unsure of her position. While she had carried the child, Kathaos had made no proposition of any kind, save that she remain within his house, and she felt this gallantry due not to courtesy on his part either toward her or her condition, but merely to the fact he had no immediate need of her and yet foresaw a need at some future time. She knew that he would use her in whatever manner seemed good to him, and the knowledge made her nervous, even while she could discover no alternative. Once the child had been born and he had bethought himself of the matter, he had wooed her with all the lascivious pertinacity of a lover. Again, she realized, he did so with no sincerity, but because it amused him to do so. And indeed, his goal once achieved, his amatory interest had been brief.

She took her hand from the cradle. The baby kicked among the covers. She saw, with a strange and bitter gladness, that it would not develop Raldnor’s beauty.

There was a sudden noise in the inner court. Lyki heard feet running and voices calling for Kathaos. With a swift start of terror, she envisaged the enemy already at the gates, but the quietness of Koramvis all around her instructed her that whatever the event, it belonged to this house alone.