She crossed to the long window and stared down.
The court was rectangular, laid with black and white flags and dominated by a curious fountain. The water and the spray were constructed from faceted crystal, and ivory lilies were set in. No doubt the deception was well suited to Kathaos’s tastes. Sometimes birds would fly to the surface and attempt to drink, their claws clicking among the frozen flowers.
At the fountain were two guards, dressed in Kathaos’s yellow, and between them was a small skeletal man, whose face and neck were splotched with sores. He was a Lowlander.
Lyki’s head swam; she clutched the upright of the window to steady herself. It was not the man below who produced this effect on her, but the emanation of another man, suddenly conjured in her brain.
A second after, Kathaos appeared in one of the doorways which opened onto the court.
He was quite calm, apparently uninterested. She had expected nothing else.
“What do you imagine that you want?”
A series of shudders ran over the Lowlander. His voice, when it came, was cold and muffled, as if it rose from a tomb.
“I can tell you something that will help you, Lord Councilor. I can tell you something about Raldnor, Ashne’e’s son, that will make Koramvis uneasy.”
Lyki felt fear burn her throat, fear and something else, as she gripped the window and recalled Raldnor the Sarite. At the court, and in the streets, the Lowland king was never accorded any other name than this. The lower city knew him as Raldnor Bride-Stealer, for they had nothing to gain by forgetting Astaris. Only in the presence of Amrek himself did they desist. There, men did not speak of Sar. Many of the captains and commanders grumbled amongst themselves concerning Kren, the Dragon Lord, who had harbored an enemy of Dorthar, but their weapons of spite were compulsorily sheathed.
“It will take more than a visitation of rats to make Koramvis afraid, Lowlander,” Kathaos said.
“But there are more rats than you think. Consider Saardos and Shaow. Raldnor doesn’t work alone. There are ships and men stealing in from a place beyond the sea, of which Dorthar, in her magnificence, knows nothing.”
“For an informer,” Kathaos murmured softly, “you’re notably arrogant. Why betray your own people? Can it be that it’s your Raldnor who sent you here? For some obscure reason—to create panic, perhaps?”
The man in the court smiled, but it was like the grinning of a skull.
“I no longer have a people. I have a wish. I want Raldnor to die, soon, and when he is dead, I want you to kill me, Lord Councilor.”
“On that point at least you can rest assured.” Kathaos turned to the guard. “Take him inside.”
As they moved in through the doorway, Kathaos said without raising his eyes to the window: “Follow us, Lyki. I shall expect you.”
Yet when she obeyed him, trembling with vague fright, she found herself shut out, to wait, presumably, on the Lowland creature’s mouthing.
Once she had heard a story in this house that Kathaos had long ago known Raldnor to be the child of Rehdon. Oh, how little she knew this devious man who now had such access to her life.
At last he let her in. The Plainsman was gone; she had no notion where—whether to reward or instant death.
Kathaos said immediately: “How is the child today?”
She looked at him without comprehension, startled at the seemingly irrelevant question.
“He does well enough.”
“Good.” Kathaos smiled. “I’ve been thinking it a great pity that Raldnor never saw his son.”
At once, though still without understanding, she was overwhelmed by terror.
The streets of Karith were empty. Although the plague had not penetrated here, three days since had come the news of Goparr’s fall, and the Ommos fled before a magician’s shadow. Only a few abandoned pet animals wandered to and fro, searching for shelter or food.
In the brain of the watchtower, a Dortharian soldier gnawed on a stick of roast meat and scanned the sky. He scarcely credited Kathaos with sanity, however the Council at Koramvis had seen things. As much expect ships to whistle out of the clouds as from a make-believe land over the sea. He doubted greatly if any such existed. The thought of the doomed garrison at Hetta Para bothered him also. Who knew for sure whether or not plague germs lurked here? Damned Kathaos, certainly, had no concern for a private pushed every way on other men’s business.
And he hated the deserted town, full of cold echoes and ghosts. It was hot in the tower, yet he felt the occasional urge to shiver. Zastis hung like a wicked scarlet rip in the night, and he wanted a woman; his need was distracting and imperative. He longed for the end of the watch. Every so often, from some hovel in the town, he heard a girl screaming. Most probably she was in labor, and her Ommos husband had thought her too cumbersome to take with him in his flight and left her to the will of Zarok. The soldier was not unduly concerned with her discomfort and certain terror, but whenever the cries came, they pared his nerves to the quick. He longed to go out and find her, and beat her into silence.
He finished with the meat, slung the bone from the open window and heard it crack on the court below. There was the patter of frenzied claws, and some small animal made off with it into the shadows. Beyond the court, the rock stretched down some forty feet to the pale smudge of the beach, where little ripples chased each other. On the sand he made out the stark line of catapults and, on the sea itself, the bobbing, anchored Ommos fishing boats extending away parallel to the shore as far as the eye could see.
Idly he looked farther out, toward the horizon. A dark, dimly smoking mass was moving there.
An instant’s sheer panic choked his throat. He remembered Alisaar, taken unaware in her sleep, by a fleet come from nowhere; then he flung himself to his feet, plunged up the three steps to the cupola where the giant bell hung on its ropes and dragged it into life.
Faintly, over the water, they heard the bell ringing in the hot silence.
They were soldiers of Vathcri and Vardish sailors, carried together in the great beaked vessels that had once been forest trees; there were also Shansarian pirate ships, their black sails like gall in the light of the Star. They had come a long way to see this strip of land, this fortressed town, and waited a long while for the signal-sending of the white-haired man they called now Raldanash.
Jarred of Vathcri stared ahead.
“Ships, captain.”
“So it is, my lord. But no men on ’em.”
Eyes scanned for any movement on those low decks. The movement came instead from the rocky beach beyond.
“Catapults!” Jarred cried. His urgency possessed him. He ordered his vessel to fire, but the white streamer fell short and sizzled in the sea.
“By Ashkar!” the captain shouted. “My lord—their gods have driven them mad! They’re not aiming at us, but at their own vessels.”
Orange flame burst and arrowed from the shore and lodged among the little rigs and skimmers lying idle on the water.
Men cursed and marveled. The Shansarians laughed and roared their contempt into the flaring night.
The first explosion burst from the Ommos boats as if a monster had woken in the sea.
A column of pure flame gushed outward and upward, eighty feet in height, accompanied by a waterspout of scalding blackness that crashed down upon the foremost Vathcrian galleys. Red light bled across the whirlpool, and flame ran after. In the wake of the first convulsion, a second followed, then a third, a fourth, each one giving rise more rapidly to others, as the inferno spread from vessel to vessel. The whole sea thrashed and boiled.