“This wine’s particularly good, Lord Hmar. I’ve had it in store for a year—Zakorian liquor. Can I offer you a cup?”
Hmar’s darting eyes, moving as ever here and there across the length and breadth of the hall, skittered over the flask. He nodded peremptorily. Panyuma emptied his goblet and swilled it with water. She went to Slath, who handed her the flask. She filled Hmar’s cup, let a swift trickle merely line the bottom of the captain’s flagon and bore the brimming vessel back to the Guardian.
Hmar drank and nodded again.
“A bitter fluid, but personable.”
He drained the liquor, his long fingers wrapped about the stem, his eyes once more in motion. Panyuma’s face was blank. Slath noisily gulped nothing and was jovial with alarm. They had poisoned their lord, but he did not seem to be aware of it. And it was a slow agent. With luck, he would die in his sleep.
Beyond the high and narrow windows the last color left the sky.
At the far end of the hall one of the small doors opened. A man came through—a faceless, hooded man in a thick cloak. Hmar’s soldiers made a good deal of noise at their dinner, the newcomer was not discernible by sound, nor by anything else tangible. Nevertheless, Slath felt an odd, additional unease. He glanced at Hmar and was troubled, thinking the drink was working too quickly after all. For Hmar’s frenzied eyes had suddenly ceased their eternal search and were fixed on the stranger. Hmar’s face was sickly. He gave a sudden hoarse crow of laughter. A peculiar horrified sense of fulfillment seemed to have taken him, like that of a man condemned for months to die and confronted at last by the gallows.
Amnorh remembered. There had been a water-singing cave. The woman had tricked him in that cave, and he had grasped her arm.
“Perhaps I should abort my child from you, and leave you to the gentle mercies of the Lord Orhn.”
Incredibly, a smile rose like dawn over her white face. He had never seen her smile, nor any woman smile in this fashion: it seemed to freeze his blood. His hand fell away from her.
“Do so, Amnorh. Otherwise he will be my curse on you.”
Amnorh stared down the length of the hall, hearing only the blue tinkling of the water in his head. The man was not seated, but standing by one of the lower tables. Amnorh could see no face within the hood, no gaze answering his own.
A curious sensation gripped him, so that he seemed to look at her, not with his open eyes but with a third eye set in the center of his forehead. And it was not her he saw. Standing where she stood was a young man, indistinct, spectral, yet Amnorh could make out that he had the bronze skin of the Vis and, at the same time, eyes and hair as pale as the Lowland wine with which he had poisoned Rehdon during the first nights of the Red Moon. . . .
“He is here,” Amnorh thought. “She has sent him. Anackire’s messenger—my son—”
He chuckled grimly. No, not his son. Rehdon’s son, after all. Rehdon, whom he had poisoned with Lowland wine.
To Amnorh there came a vision. He saw Val Mala standing with her hand on his shoulder, staring with avid eyes at the liquor he had distilled to be Rehdon’s death—a bright cameo of the lord’s woman and the lord’s man conspiring to kill him. And suddenly, it was no longer Val Mala he saw, or himself. It was Panyuma, the Thaddrian, and Slath the mercenary, and the wine they had mixed was for him.
Amnorh let out a hoarse cry. He picked up his empty cup and slung it across the floor. He thrust from his chair.
“I am poisoned!”
Men left off eating and stared up at him.
“Poisoned!” Amnorh shouted, his eyes starting. He flung about, and struck Panyuma in the face. She fell down and cowered. “These two have murdered me. This bitch, and Slath, there, my captain—”
At every table men leapt to their feet. Treachery, they knew, was not greatly discriminating. They drew their knives or snatched blades off the board. Slath’s paid men began to roar for him; others began to strike about them in fear and anger. At once there was fighting. Blood and wine ran; a torch was knocked from its socket and inspired a blaze in the tapestry along the wall. Women shrilled.
Slath, growling with fury, pulled out a dagger, but Amnorh had spun round and fled—through the arch behind the dais, into the maze of corridors and stairs.
The stranger in the dark cloak, barely noticed now, began to make his way up the hall toward the arch, walking between the brawls and struggles as if unseeing. Near the dais a man jumped on his back with a crazy whoop of rage. The stranger gave a curious half turn, a sort of stumble and, as the man slid from him, cut his throat with a pitiless and accurate gesture. No others ran at him. Only the woman Panyuma saw him pass. His shadow fell over her as she crouched by the table. She made a magic sign against him, her eyes flashing dread, but then he was gone, silently, following dying Hmar into the dark of the mansion.
It was easy to find the place.
An unseen light, an unheard sound, an unfelt thread between his fingers—all guided him there. The way was half-lit by irregular banks of torches and the dim star-shine in windows.
Raldnor came eventually to a blank wall of stone and a broken machinery in the floor. It was here.
On the ground lay a narrow-eyed man, with gold on his hands, whimpering. He left off whimpering and said prosaically: “You’ve come, then.”
Raldnor looked at him. The man smiled.
“You kept me waiting a long time, son of Rehdon. Is it her you want—the red-haired woman?”
“Yes.”
“Retribution,” mused the man on the floor. “You note, confronted by the inescapable, I’ve become quite lucid. You’ll find the door inaccessible. The mechanism is damaged. I myself did this, in a fit of terror. But then, I’ve heard you brought an earthquake to Koramvis. Perhaps you can open the stone yourself.”
Raldnor kneeled by the broken levers, examining them intently. The hood slipped from his head. Amnorh stared at him. He began a dialogue concerning Ashne’e, but this was interrupted suddenly when the man struck sideways at the machinery with his fist, and then again, and, with a rusty protest, the stone began to pull reluctantly apart.
“Well, well. And clever also with his hands.”
Raldnor walked by Amnorh into the lightless gallery of the tomb.
A place of death, heavy with old embalming musk. Dead warriors and stone boxes of bones, and heaps of little treasure. At the far end of the gallery, ten women paralyzed in attitudes of marble. Their skin had turned to the texture of wood, their hair to wire. Soon real death would begin to eat their flesh.
His hands touched them and abandoned them. He came to an eleventh figure and found her suddenly, and her skin was as he remembered it, and her hair, with the frozen gems in it now, the Serpent’s Eye of Anackire.
A deeper shade of silence fell inside the opened tomb.
Amnorh babbled his elegant delirium at the door.
Below, a dull explosion rocked the palace. The wild impromptu battle had run out into the ragged town, fire had spread and smoke obscured the rising moon.
In her brain there was only darkness, a deserted hollow void, the shell of a citadel stripped bare by the motionless winds of time. Yet the essence of her being was somehow present—one last ghost in the ruin, and the far-off whisper of life which was the child.
Astaris.
He moved in her mind, calling her, and received no answer.
Then the image came.
It formed and hardened, a familiar configuration, now altered to undertake new horror.
Astaris stood waiting before him; the wind was washing through her scarlet hair. A red moon, the Zastis moon, shone behind her. She raised her arms, and long cracks appeared in her body—ink lines on amber. Then she crumbled all at once in blazing ashes, and the ashes blew away across the moon.