In the orchards the cibbas were swaying like dancers. Men pointed at them and made religious signs, for there was no wind.
Then came a great brass mooing, up out of the ground at their feet. Animals reared in fright; men cried out to their gods. On the upper slopes a creaking catapult tilted slowly and fell flaming among the Dortharian ranks. But the ultimate voice came from behind them—the voice of the city, where a thousand bells began to toll.
They turned, struggling with their mounts, staring back toward the white towers of Koramvis, and in that moment they saw the red spout and gush of powdered rock explode silently from beneath her walls, after which the hills ran together, and she was lifted like an offering to the ink-black sky.
Above the city, in the cave of Lake Ibron, the steep sands let go their immemorial hold. Deep down, where colors bloodied into purple, ancient laws of balance became subtly altered, and tidal urges swept the hidden caves.
The first shock cracked through Koramvis. The noise of it was a low metal booming, the single note of a monstrous heart. Lightning turned the sky to glass.
At the second shock, paving lifted by its roots, and fissures spread in a spilling stain. In the lower city, walls burst apart. Lamp poles fell in rows. The river came running sideways up its banks into the collapsing hovels, its water as red as blood. The fleeing wagons overturned, or ran out of control along the roadways.
The great bridge that spanned the river to the south broke at its center, as if under the impact of a gigantic axe, letting go its human freight into the boiling mud.
In the Avenue of Rarnammon the Dragons tumbled from their bases, showering a rain of shattered obsidian across the streets.
Towers leaned and fell.
Fires burst into white flower.
Screaming, calling out to their tottering gods to save them, the terrified and the trapped wailed and shrieked in their agony.
In a celebration of doom, the thousand bells of Koramvis roiled and jangled.
Val Mala stood beside her chair in the tilting room, while gold lamps crashed from the ceiling.
“Dathnat!” she cried.
The bells seemed to beat inside her skull. Her legs were the feeble limbs of an old woman. She dared not cross the room. A girl lay dead before the archway with bloody hair, and in a moment she too would sink forward and the roof would come down across her back.
Miraculously, she felt iron fingers suddenly grasp her arm, supporting her.
“Dathnat—the ceiling will fall—”
“Lean against me, madam,” the dry voice said, without a trace of fear.
Weak with terror, Val Mala could do nothing else.
Dathnat half carried her up the impossible angle of the floor and under the arch. The corridor was full of smoke, for a fire had started in the lower rooms. A stream of ocher gushed from above.
“We must find a way out, Dathnat. Quickly, Dathnat.”
The Zakorian glanced about her, and ahead. The passage seemed blocked by fire; besides, there would be no time to reach the lower courts before the upper portions of the palace gave way. Even so, her gods had not been entirely unjust. Pausing beside an open gallery, Dathnat pointed.
“See how Koramvis burns, madam.”
“Dathnat—have you gone mad? Find a way for me to escape this place before the roof falls and kills us both.”
“There is the way, madam,” Dathnat said.
Val Mala looked down. She saw a terrace laid out with colored flags that seemed from here as small as a checkerboard.
Presentiment came, immediate and undeniable.
“Dathnat!” she screamed.
Dathnat, with one swift and irresistible blow, thrust the Queen over the broken ledge of the gallery. That one thing her gods had left her time to do. Complacently she watched Val Mala spin shrieking to meet the empty stones beneath. After the meeting, she was silent.
In the depths of the rock, Anackire stirred.
The margins of the pool within her had long since widened and filled up the room, bursting the door from its hinges and flooding the stone temple. Now the foaming water had lifted her a little and was thrusting up against the roof of the cave.
Her golden head grazed on the granite above. Over this place huge clefts had already spread themselves as the quake dissolved the structure of the hills. Now the land slid and fell away. Out of the chasm emerged the massive milk-white torso with its burning eyes and hair.
The third shock, the final shock which flung down the last of Koramvis, spewed Ibron up into the cave. The full force of the water came gushing out from the fractured rock, lifting the goddess with it.
Higher and higher the jetting liquid took her. She crested the hills and rose incredibly into the pitch-black sky, a towering moon of incendiary ice and flame.
In the plain, floundering among the craters and the fire, the dragons witnessed that last and most absolute omen. Her eyes like stars, Anackire soared and blazed, crushing them with the eight maledictions of her serpent arms. Now the known laws of their world, which had supported and nurtured them all their lives, betrayed them and brought about the final inrush of Chaos.
They had seen Nemesis. Their world was ended.
The goddess shone like a meteor in the black air, then sank, as the wave relinquished her, out of their sight, into the torn mirror of the lake.
But Kathaos lived and was unchanged. He imagined nothing at the sight of the creature in the sky. Even at the end of the world he was rational, and a cynic. She was a device. He knew it, though her origins at this time held no interest for him. For he understood quite well, despite his logic, that the things he had labored at carried neither significance nor hope in this altered landscape.
Only one thing, therefore, was left. An act that was fitting, if no longer useful.
He rode his chariot along the broken lines, past men clawing in the contrary earth, through the churning flame fight and the purple smoke, and the weeping and the prayers.
He came to Amrek at last. Amrek, the Storm Lord, who had become, through the admission of Chaos, accessible. He looked at Kathaos blankly, without trepidation or violence.
“I beg your pardon, my lord,” Kathaos said. He approached Amrek and stabbed him in the side where the mail was unaccountably rent, as if purposely for his knife. “It is an act compatible with our circumstances.”
Kathaos remounted the chariot and turned the heads of his team toward the first and only break in the sky.
Amrek lay still in the dark. He was not quite dead. Only formless thoughts disturbed him. He was tranquil, until terror came abruptly out of the ground.
Terror had glittering eyes and came sliding and narrow from its black home under the boulder. Terror was a snake.
Amrek’s body jerked helplessly.
The snake wove in circles, its head darting from side to side in frenzy. It, too, was afraid; the earth had also shaken down its world. Suddenly it discerned a refuge. It looped against Amrek’s face and trickled to rest against his throat. He felt its living pulse pressed strongly to his fading one. And abruptly terror stopped. Partnered with his flesh, the skin of the snake was dry and cool and layered like cameo.
“How can I fear this thing?” he thought quite clearly. “Something so beautiful.”
Presently, the snake, restless and seeking now the earth was quiet, left the shelter of the man’s dead body and shivered away across the slope.
Book Six
Sunrise
25
The huge, dull-red sun, poised on the final edge of the horizon, blistered the mountains into coral. A black tongue of shadow had already covered the tumbled angle of hills below and the ruins of the city which had once been Koramvis.