“There.”
Her heart stabbed and she shivered in the boiling night.
When the flap was opened, yellow light spilled out, shocking her. Men moved away across the camp, two of them laughing together.
Ras got up.
“Come now.”
Lyki stared at him. She clung to the child and found she could not move.
“Come.” He crossed to her and took her arm, pulling her slowly, without menace and without gentleness.
“There will be a guard,” Ras said softly. “Walk toward him, and I’ll take him from behind.”
She nodded dumbly. Stumbling, she began to make her way between the cibba trunks. She saw the guard now, a Lowlander, leaning on his spear impassively.
He caught sight of her at once.
“How can I help you?”
Lyki opened her lips, but her mind had emptied. She knew that her terror must be evident in every part of her. While she stood there helplessly, Ras came from the dark and felled the guard with a stone.
“There’s no one to stop you now,” she hissed at Ras. “Go into the pavilion and kill him, and let me go.”
He glanced up. His eyes were like the eyes of a banalik, scalding her with hate, and she knew her plea was useless.
“You must kill him,” he said, “as Kathaos intended.” He smiled, but without humor, probably without even realizing he did so. “He would never let me kill him. He would come into my mind and stop me. You must do it.”
“Oh, but he’s a sorcerer,” she snarled scornfully, trembling. “Can’t he look into my mind too?”
“You are Vis. Your minds are shuttered, even to Raldnor.”
She turned away and took the flap of the tent entrance abruptly in her hand, and it astonished her—the reality of the leather between her fingers. She held it open a little way and stepped through, and let the fold slap shut behind her.
There was only one man in the tent, reading beneath a lamp. He looked up slowly, without surprise, and the lamplight fell on his face.
She had not known how she would look at him, but she could not take her eyes away. She had not known if he would seem different to her, and she found him changed, utterly, yet indefinably the same. His sheer physical beauty she had remembered well, yet not well enough, it seemed, for now she was amazed by it. She found that she could not believe that this was the man with whom she had locked limbs, whose shoulders she had imprinted with the marks of her kisses, and her teeth and her nails. Those memories of passion which had tortured her through Zastis, became terrible, awesome in this drab tent, as though she boasted copulation with a god.
“Lyki,” he said.
“Yes,” she whispered, “I’m Lyki.” She pushed the hood back from her hair and the cloak from her shoulders. She wore a black dress, without ornament, and carried the child pressed against her, wrapped in a shawl. She raised this burden now and held it out to him mechanically. “I’ve brought you your son.”
Despite Ras’s certainty, he seemed to see into her, piercing her brain with pitiless clarity. At last he came toward her, and his nearness made her afraid, as the eyes had done. He lifted the child lightly from her arms.
“Your son,” she repeated. “I never gave him a name, but my women call him Rarnammon. A joke you will no doubt appreciate.”
The baby in his hands awoke now, yet did not cry, and she felt a sudden fierce jealousy run through her and longed to snatch it back from him, and hide it again inside her cloak.
“Unfold the shawl,” she said. “He brings you a gift.”
The tiny gilded box lay on the child’s chest, tied there by a ribbon.
“This?”
He eased up the lid. She caught the glitter of the golden chain inside. The blood stamped in her skull.
Raldnor turned, holding out the box to her.
“Honor me, madam. Take out the chain and put it round my neck.”
“I?” She drew back. “No—”
“An Alisaarian trick,” he said. “A razor edge, lacquered with poison. Kathaos?” He shut the box and set it aside. “The second time, Lyki, you have betrayed me.”
“Don’t kill me,” she cried out. “I had no choice—Kathaos forced me to obey him—Let me live, for the sake of your son, at least—”
“If I were to say to you, Lyki, that I would spare your life on one condition, that condition being that I take your child and rip it open with this sword, you would let me do it, for that is how you are made.”
She shrank away from him. Then, when he held out the child to her, she seized it and buried her face in its shawl.
“Your death would be useless,” he said. “Therefore you shall not die.”
She longed to weep, but her eyes were dry as if the drought had burned them up. She could not look at him anymore.
Two hours before dawn, Yannul and Xaros, coming from the tent of two sweet-natured women, caught sight of something revolving slowly beneath the high bough of a cibba.
Going nearer, they found a man had hanged himself in the night.
“This is the strange one from Yr Dakan’s house,” Yannul said, “the one with the serpent-hiss name—Ras. Why in the world—?”
“Our traitor, perhaps,” Xaros said.
They cut him down and stowed him out of sight, for since the curious prayer on the slope, the mood of the camp had been too good to have it spoiled.
An hour before dawn the only coolness of the day lay in the burned gardens of the Storm Palace. Already white haze was forming on the shrunken river where decayed lilies stank, and on the river steps, before the palace temple, a flaccid water thing had crawled and died.
The man, dressed in black scale-plate, paused to look at this before turning aside under the portico.
A film of smoke still drifted in the huge and empty aisle. Amrek stood motionless, staring up at the black marble monsters which dominated the gloom. Their long irrids were slurs of dull radiance, their dragon features a blurred impression of some ancient and untranslatable nightmare, half lit by the cups of spooling flame beneath.
“Have no fear, great ones,” Amrek said softly, “I’m here in observance of tradition, no more. I’ll ask you for nothing, as I know quite well you will give me nothing.”
He thought of the child on the morning of the feast, hacking away his flesh with the agonizing and incompetent knife. Pain and revulsion and terror. That hand, that hand with its layered silver scales, which he had slashed over and over again, screaming out to those black gods to accept his blood, his blood, but let the curse of the serpent goddess be taken from him. The screams had circled in the great roof, echoing, becoming one continuous scream. Then Orhn had come, his mother’s bedfellow, the seal of horror and scorn, and later the scales grew back among the jagged scars.
Amrek touched now at the hand, covered by its black glove, the too-thick last finger held grimly by the dark blue jewel. He had known at eight years how potent was the Lady of Snakes, and how little the gods of Dorthar loved him.
“You have no admiration for the weak,” he said to them.
Their very shadow crushed him, buried him, blotted him out.
He opened his eyes and saw the figure of a woman standing facing him across the great, flagged space. The light was attracted dimly to her exquisitely painted face, and to white glimmering points on her throat and hands. He smelled perfume over the temple musk.
“I forbade you to wear that unguent,” he said.
“Did you, Amrek? I’d forgotten.”
He glanced at the gods.
“So it is. My mother comes before me on the day of the battle, wearing the white face of my enemy. What do you want?”
“I shall need transport and an escort. I intend to leave Koramvis.”
He turned to look at her fully. She was smiling, but her eyes were bright with fear, though she had done her best to hide it from him.