In Dorthar the laughter presently stopped.
News limped in of fires along the Zakorian coast and Hanassor besieged, while the remnants of the fleet driven off from Ommos had fallen in frenzy on Karmiss, and her nights also were now full of smoke.
From the river quarters on the Ommos border the dispatches were very late. At last a solitary man reached Dorthar and died of his wounds in the streets of Koramvis, like a warning.
The Lowland force was alive; he had seen them. They had razed Hetta Para and crossed the river, wiping out the small camp there with ease.
No trepidation or superstition had really prepared the Vis. It seemed unthinkable. The scum of the Serpent Woman had touched the soil of Dorthar with its feet, had drawn in lungfuls of her dragon air. Despite all hindrance and all probability, they had, at last, become all too real.
23
Kathaos smiled at his guest.
“I hope the wine is agreeable to you, Lord Mathon. A subtle vintage from Karmiss, which I fear may never produce grapes again. We must make the most of it.”
Mathon shivered and set aside the wine, which had the color and suddenly the taste of blood.
“Yes, this thing seems to have grown unstoppable.”
“That, my Lord Warden, is because inadequate steps were taken.”
“But a rabble, and so few of them—Ultimately they must fall before the strength of Dorthar’s arm,” Mathon concluded querulously.
“I am soothed to find that you think so, my lord.” Casually Kathaos added: “Had you heard? Two days ago some of the Sarite’s Vis troops rode east and sacked Kuma. As I ascertain, merely for provisions and exercise.”
“Kuma. The Queen’s birthplace.”
“Indeed. A minor town yet a healthy one, and under the circumstance that it has produced royalty, worth repayment. But still, I believe, the Lord Amrek considers it unwise to meet the Lowlanders in battle.” These words were spoken without inflection, but Mathon twitched, sensing an awkward drift in the conversation.
“It’s near, then. Siege perhaps,” he muttered.
“Such a thing seems incredible. But yes, my lord, I think it may even come to that. I gather that several of our most notable citizens are making for Thaddra, and the dregs of the lower city are already gone. In addition we have the soldiery which Yl Am Zakoris has so kindly loaned us, kicking its heels at every corner. Soldiers become bored with inaction and pick quarrels. They also eat a good deal.”
“I’m certain, Lord Councilor, that Amrek will move when the time is right . . .” Mathon said uneasily.
Kathaos smiled at him again.
“Indeed yes. Besides, we have our own garrison, do we not?”
Mathon balked at this hint of Kren. He made some excuse about his duties and rose. He thought: “I am an old man. I cannot be expected to parry the thrusts of this intriguer. What does he want me to do? Very well, so he has saved us from the pirates by strategy, and is more clever than Amrek. Can I make him King of Dorthar? He has the Council already in ferment. Ah, why cannot Amrek rouse himself?”
In the taverns where they had been billeted, Yl’s mercenaries boasted and swore, picked their teeth and spat out wine that was not to their liking. Occasionally they would clash with Amrek’s soldiers, churning the byways into arenas of dust and blood. Their commanders agitated at the palace, seeking an audience with the Storm Lord. The streets became rowdy and unsafe after twilight. A well-born girl of twelve was raped near the river bank in the upper city by a Zakorian captain, and the matter hastily smothered. Dorthar had no wish to insult her benefactor, Yl, by a public whipping.
The great brazen heat of the warm months became unbearable. The sky pulsed like a tautened skin; clouds painted on it in white ink never moved. The Okris withered and shrank in its margin, sucked dry, showing its stagnant dirt now, and the harvest of garbage and discarded furniture thrown in by the people. A stench rose from the low water, and river things crawled up the mud and died on the paving at the top. Slaves were sent to clear the wreckage before the rotting plates and bedclothes bred an infection.
The priests in the temples raised their arms, spilling the blood of black bulls and pale birds. Rolling in trances, they declared that the drought was a sign of coming thunder. The Storm gods were preparing to strike the Lowlander down.
Crops burnt up in the fields like tinder. Slaves took their meager possessions in the night and fled to Thaddra, though sometimes their masters caught up with them. All along the white road leading through the plain before Koramvis, men and women were hung on poles to die.
Koramvis, the thinking jewel, the heart-brain, had become a refuse pit of dying things and their decay.
In the last month of Zastis a scarlet signal shot from the watchtower on the plain.
A man in Kathaos’s livery rode through the shouting streets.
At the gate of Kathaos’s villa a crowd of supplicants had gathered, pleading for his aid, shrieking for transport with which to abandon the city. Guards stood massed, keeping the hordes back with a hedge of spears. Men in despair beat their fists against the wall. The rider forced his way into the courtyard, flung himself down and ran in through the high doorway.
Kathaos met him in the striped shadows of a colonnade, and his face, for once, was as fierce as a leopard’s. Beyond a filmy curtain, the messenger made out a woman standing with her hands pressed to her mouth.
“Well?”
“My lord, they’re half a day’s march from us.”
“And Amrek—”
“—is sick, my lord, unable to leave his bed.”
Kathaos nodded, turned without a word and thrust aside the curtain with his hand. Lyki stared up at him. The paint on her eyes and lips was too vivid, for she was suddenly very pale.
Into the small room where he sat the dusk came crowding, full of shadows and unheard sounds. It filled the corners and swirled about the chair like the sea. Beyond the high window only the mountains showed—vast looming blocks, with the color and apparent substance of the tinted sky.
“You are ours,” the mountains said to him. “The son of our mornings, conceived beneath the shade of our bones. Come up, come with the dark. We will conceal you and keep you safe.”
“No,” Amrek said aloud. The noises and flickerings of the dusk flurried and resettled. “No. I am a king. My penance for that is that I must grapple with devils tomorrow, with the firstborn of the Lowland serpent-witch. Yes, I’ve sent them word that we fight, that I’ll lead them. And I’m afraid, afraid, afraid. And I can’t keep from thinking it: Here is my doom, my destiny. A coward. Yes. What else? Last of the line of Rarnammon, and I have no son to follow me. Wait, Raldnor. Hold off until I’ve had time to marry and get myself a boy on her.”
Amrek laughed softly. He shut his eyes. The room was suddenly full of a dark garden and the scent of trees. A voice at his elbow said to him: “One day, my lord, long after you’ve seen me dangle on a gallows, a man may slip a knife in your back or a powder in your cup, which I, had I been there, would have prevented. I can deal with my enemies, my lord, if I live. And yours, too.”
“Well, Raldnor,” Amrek said aloud. “Well. The enemy is at the gate, the men with their knives. How will you defend me?”
At the brink of the plain below Koramvis, Raldnor’s army made its camp in the twilight.
Red smoke still floated in the still air over the watchtower, a mile away down the valley. A road began among the burned-out orchards and wound off toward the elevation of the lower hills and the distant, silhouetted diadem of towers that was the city. There were no lights on the plain, but they had made out that marching line of poles where slaves had been hung, rotting in the fire of day.