“Oil—” The captain wept, kneeling, blinded on the deck.
Men screamed as the heat peeled skin from flesh.
Jarred’s ship was the first to catch alight.
Her sail screwed itself into wizened papers, like a moth’s wings caught by a huge candle. The figurehead of Ashkar began to melt, dripping its ivory like wax. Timbers blazed up. The sea was a pool of liquid gold.
Men jumped from burning hulks and perished in the burning water. The air was thick with smoke and screaming.
The ships of Shansar, more to the rear, fell back, taking what men they could, leaving the pride of Vathcri to split and fry.
No other menace came from the shore. There was no need. The raging wall of fire ran every way.
The casks of oil in the Ommos boats continued to erupt, blotting out the sky. The conflagration lasted through the night.
In the pink smoldering fog that came with dawn, small sea creatures lay dead at the foot of Karith, and the stripped corpses of men floated and rapped with half-bone hands against her rocks. One of these bodies was Jarred’s. Of the enemy fleet there was no sign, save for those still-smoking ruined trees, with their curious charcoal prows lying broken sideways like the necks of swans.
“How does he know these things, Yannul my friend? Has this Raldnor I used to go whoring with become a sorcerer out of a book?”
Yannul shrugged. He and the Xarabian Xaros had struck up a wary camaraderie, partly to persuade the factious Lans and Xarabs in the camp that it might be done. At dusk the Vis sections of the army had been in good spirits. Goparr had fallen and was the first stronghold they had looted. She had tried treachery in her first surrender, and Raldnor had given her over to rape and sack with the merciless justice they had come to expect of him. The Lowlanders had taken no part in that. They sat silent at their cookfires, speaking no doubt in their skulls, Xaros sourly concluded. He too experienced that uneasy uncertainty about the Plains men and their mechanical, emotionless abilities.
Now the Sending had come, or whatever in Aarl it was. Somehow, by some mentally immoral method, Raldnor now knew that a segment of the allied fleet had been driven from Ommos, and more than half of the segment destroyed.
“Whatever else, one thing’s for certain,” Xaros said. “The Dortharian and Ommos soldiers at Karith will be out on the road to meet us, and no help from your otherland friends.”
“Their young King died in the sea,” Yannul said. For various reasons this had distressed him. He had come in some ways to equate Jarred with the boy-monarch of Lan.
“That’s bad, but reaches all of us. I regret I’ll never see my Helida again—a prize among women, who thinks with her brain more often than her pelvis, which is uncommon. Ah, nostalgia, Yannul. I wonder if she’ll put up a shrine for me, or simply hop into bed with one of my damned father’s rich and handsome younger brothers. And who is that girl you ache for these Zastis nights? Ah, yes, the golden Lowlander Medaci.”
Yannul grinned.
“And what of the Tarabithybannion—whatever-god-forgotten-name-it-is fleet off Dorthar? If the dragons know the plan, there’ll be trouble there as well. No, wait, I can surmise. Raldnor has sent to warn the ships.”
“So he has.”
“Oh, by the gods. I should have been resigned to it. I suppose he’ll settle the Karith force by magic, too.”
“Who knows, Xaros. The plague in Ommos was strange. And I told you of the dustwind at Vathcri.”
“On the assumption that we should save our pitiful strength for Koramvis, what stands between us and Dorthar now, apart from Karith?”
“Hetta Para due north, mostly evacuated. And a small Dortharian garrison across the river to keep out possible plague carriers.”
“I have a plan,” said Xaros, “improbable only in its genius. Come with me to Raldnor, and let’s show him what honest clods can do by a bit of verbal wrangling.”
When they went through it, the camp was bright with fires and there were Ommos women still about in it, though Goparr lay some miles behind. These at least seemed to have preferred Lannic and Xarabian rapine to Ommos peace.
Forgis of Ommos, the bullock fat captain of the mixed troops from Karith, sweated in the early sun and stared where his scout had pointed. He did not like this work in the heat, nor the five hundred Dortharians who laughed at him—and not behind his back, though it was broad enough.
“Well, well? What am I to be looking for?”
“A rider, on the slope, coming from the direction of the Lowlanders’ camp, sir.”
“Plains man?”
“No. See, sir—he’s dark.”
Forgis wiped sweat from his eyes, but could not make this out. Nevertheless, he struck a spearman on the shoulder.
“Ride, you oaf, and bring him down.”
The man plunged off in a wash of dust. But there was no need of him. The rider met with some sudden difficulty, his beast floundered and fell and the man rolled off, over and over down the scarp, to end in an untidy curl at the bottom.
Forgis rode up without undue haste. The man shifted, groaned, sat up, and rubbed his face gingerly with long brown fingers. The zeeba had wandered uncaringly away and was cropping the grass. Forgis let out a slow laugh. The man turned and stared at him vaguely. The fall seemed to have jolted the wits out of him.
“Xarabian, are you? Where do you come from? The Lowlanders’ camp?”
The Xarabian’s mouth worked anxiously.
“No—I—” He broke off and appeared to be searching for an adequate excuse for his presence there.
Forgis spat.
“We cut up dogs like you and feed them to the beasts. If you want to live, be hasty. Where are you going? And why running away?”
“I—the gods of Koramvis—”
“Gods?” Puzzled, Forgis frowned. “What is this talk of gods?”
“They’re dead,” the Xarabian suddenly said.
“Dead? Who is dead? These gods? Gods cannot die.”
“Sentries huddled at their fires, some in their sleep. All dead.”
The scout said in a dry excited voice: “Do you mean the Lowland army?”
“No longer,” the Xarabian said.
“If they’re dead, who has killed them?” Forgis grumbled.
The scout backed off.
“Plague, perhaps, sir. You, Xarabian, stand away. You may carry the disease.”
The Xarabian slunk aside.
Forgis barked orders, then turned and said: “You will guide a detachment of one hundred Dortharian foot soldiers to witness this thing.” He grinned at his own cunning. If there were sickness, let the accursed-of-Zarok catch it.
The Xarabian began to protest in terror, but a drawn sword quickly changed his mind.
So it was, an hour later, the Dortharians, emerging over a rise on the old Goparrian-Karith road, saw their enemies stretched out below them in the myriad ghastly attitudes of painful death.
The dragons went no closer and did not linger; neither did they retain their guide who had begun to clutch his belly and groan.
In a spume of dust they marched back along the road, and thence back to Dorthar and her white city, where, for a time, there were crazy rejoicings in the lower quarter.
There were rejoicings also in the camp of death once all the corpses had rubbed life back in to their stiff limbs, put out a burning tent and caught several strayed zeebas. It was the best and last joke of the march, and Xaros was a hero who would take his place thereafter in any decent saga, as a prince of deception.
“So much for magic,” Xaros remarked. “And now I think of it, I was lucky they didn’t turn the tables on me and grant me a quick death with a sword.”