There had come a season of snows and rains—after this, a season of heat, when the urge to growth possessed the fertile northern land. And the fruitings of the soil were not idle in the city. The deserted gardens overspilled their boundaries; young trees burst from the broken streets. Soon the corpse of the metropolis was entirely claimed by a loose mantle of vegetation. Birds screamed and sang in the wrecked palaces, and in the upheavals of the broad roadways, orynx and wildcat established lairs. Of men, only the dead remained in Koramvis. Their tombs were haphazard and various. Others, clawed free by lovers, or discovered on the battlefield below, had achieved houses of earth and markers of stone. Of a King’s mound there was no trace. If Amrek had found burial was unknown. Perhaps the earth had swallowed him at last, or the running fires ironically given him Lowland rites. Certainly, no woman or man had come weeping to carry him to the privacy of the grave. Such was his destiny.
It was on the plain below that men lived and went about their work, in a town of wooden houses, with a few roughly made stone halls—an ugly, sprawling, makeshift place. To the west of it, on the lower forest slopes, a temple was being built before any other thing—a Vis temple of white stone, with a high tower and many pillars and steps. Incenses burned on the altar, grapes and fruit were spread out and blood spilt. They never forgot to worship here, nor to bring Her gifts, for now She was theirs. Adopted in their terror, She had assumed the character of their own. The Dortharian Anackire. They would name the new city for Her, when they built it, and Her priests were dark-skinned men who praised Her with fire, smoke and cymbals, experienced visions and practiced magics for Her sake.
And there were other Lowlanders in Dorthar now.
In one of the stone halls on the plain, two councils sat down. The first comprised Dortharians. Kren, who had once been a Dragon Lord in the city, was included in its ranks. Mathon, the old warden, miraculously protected from death by an eccentric formation of the collapsing house beams over his head, still held his familiar office in unfamiliar surroundings. In the second council sat Lans and Xarabians, and yellow-haired men from the Lowlands and elsewhere. Warriors of Tarabann and Vathcri were seen about the streets; pirates from Shansar turned politician and hero overnight. Sorm of Vardath was detained in Zakoris, where the black beehive of Hanassor had capitulated, starved to its deepest cellars; and in Karmiss the Shansarian vengeance fleet, having drunk its fill of blood and wine, had set up Ashkar as goddess of the island and began the business of making Her sons into kings. Karmiss was a malleable and docile land. She showed them her ways of pleasure and her forms of joy, and bowed to the yoke gracefully. And it was whispered behind the ivory lattices that the conquerors were beautiful and brave, and women, like another woman in Vardath, began to bleach out their black hair and tint it gold, paint their dark skins white, as once the Dortharian Queen had done. And amber, which had been of precious mystic value to the Plains people, now grew priceless as black Karmian pearls.
Across the breadth of Vis, alliances of the flesh began. In that second fading of the summer, the first crop of children was harvested from that first sowing. The obscure Sarish name of “Raldnor” invaded the nomenclature of those newborn sons whose blood was mixed.
And talk of the King who bore the name was rife as the weeds. He had wed a Vathcrian woman, but would he also take a wife of the dark races in the manner of the Vis? And would he live on, below the ruined city of Koramvis, or return to her ruined sister on the Shadowless Plains? Or did he live at all? There was a rumor that he had died in battle, for very few had seen him since the earth moved and shook down Koramvis.
As the last piece of the red sun slid behind the mountains, a chill breath of night blew down the wooden streets. The double council, seating itself in the dark stone hall, talked together, Vis to Vis, in stealthy whispers, while the Lowlanders merely kept still, as was their way.
The lamps were lit. A man entered and took his seat between them. He had never dressed as a king; now he wore a dark cloak, as if for traveling.
He heard their business out. Decisions were made, things settled. But there was a sense of the portentous in that place. At last he told them their responsibilities, and who he would leave in his stead as regent for the pale-haired son Sulvian had borne him across the sea.
There was clamor from the Vis. Men came to their feet.
“Storm Lord—the land is still in a state of flux—Where in the goddess’s name are you going, that you feel you can leave us like this?”
The Lowlanders kept quiet, knowing already.
“My work is done,” he said. “It finished when the city fell.”
He looked about at them. His face was curiously altered. Some of the great and terrible light had gone out of it, and yet the eyes, which had been empty of everything except those fires of will and power, now contained an infinite closed in shadow. The thing which had cast out his soul and possessed him had now let him go. He was, in the most essential sense, himself again.
He paid no attention to their altercation. Kren, the Dragon, saw something in Raldnor which told him as much as the Lowlanders could tell, for he was an excellent judge of men, whether the gods had chosen them or not. Yannul the Lan, because he had known Raldnor once, formed a picture in his mind as clear as if Plains telepathy had come to him. Xaros was at that time in Abissa, feted as a hero for his trick in Ommos by Xarabians who wished their aid remembered. When he heard how the King had lived solitary for several days, then come to the Council and given his kingship back into their hands, he also guessed.
How Raldnor found his way to it, they never knew. Yet his mind to theirs was like a bright machine—it might be turned to anything. And so they glimpsed this vast complex of thought—this brain, so enlarged, so alien, striving in some secret and deliberate frenzy of search. What had been the trigger to the searching was equally hidden—some infinitesimal tremor or stirring. Perhaps merely hope, or the thrust of buried yet insuppressible pain and loss. For he was still a man, after all. Those who saw him in the Council could no longer doubt it. It was to them an unnerving thing to witness a god reduced. They preferred to remember everything but that.
Outside, the night was cool and still and lit up by stars. A few men watched him ride up the slopes into the ruins of Koramvis, making for the mountains.
An hour later, in his wooden house, Yannul said to Medaci: “She’s alive then, after all. In Thaddra. Red-haired Astaris. And he’s gone to find her.”
There had been a child’s voice, a child’s voice calling across the black gulf, piercing his brain with its lost beseeching.
He had thought briefly of Sulvian’s son in Vathcri, more briefly still of Karmiss, and the black-haired baby Lyki had borne him and finally carried there. Flesh of his flesh cried out to him—not with words, for it had learned no speech, yet in an abstract, intimate tongue of the inner mind he had spoken only with one other. A perfect equation constructed itself.
His seed.
Astaris’s child.
Astaris.
When the thought was made clear to him, a formless presence gushed from him and was gone. He was emptied of the geas, the spiritual motivation which men explained as Anackire, that emanation of race which had possessed him. As in the past, the thought of a blood-haired woman took hold of him, flooding his brain like dawn, and left no room for any other thing.
The search was, at first, entirely of the mind. He had no different means to seek her or the thing in her which guided him. Through the medium of the embryo, he traveled dull continents, wide plateaus of darkness, and came eventually upon the flickering beacon, unmistakable in the featureless night.