The walls were high and thick. There was something in that. Until a few years ago, all but the royal area had been unwalled.
White stone, touched with white crystal and white gold: White fire. Young—she was younger than Rem himself. Beautiful she was too, naturally. They had donated to her all the glories of aftermath. On raised terraces her ten goddess-temples blazed back the sun.
But she did not feel young, or beautiful, or even old under the youngness and beauty, antique Vis crying out in anger at her chains. She tasted of—nothing.
Yet, something there was.
The heat had come early, and there was a curious styptic quality to the air. Rem consoled the neck of the zeeba he rode, gauging its tension, which maybe it had only caught from him.
But there was a stillness, too, which was not possible, for ever since they had got in the gate, the crowds, packed by the road, on balconies and rooftops, had been screaming and calling, and the clatter and music of the entourage itself was enough to deafen a man. Yet those crowd noises, which were at first too loud to have patience with, now seemed engulfed, bat-squeaks in some colossal and echo-less cave.
In Anackyra, as in Koramvis, there was an Avenue of Rarnammon, this one far longer. It was ten chariot-lengths wide, lined by massive statuary—dragons, serpents, and mere human giants. Where the avenue opened out before the terraced approach to the palace, the square was dominated by Rarnammon himself, gigantic above the giants, in a chariot on a plinth. The monument was all gold and gold-washed bronze, with windows for the eyes of saffron glass behind which twin torches were kept lit. In the shadow of this, the Storm Lord would give public welcome to his Xarabian bride.
The stillness was heavy as a blanket, now.
Ahead, the chariots, Iros’ smart men, the ruby-haired woman in her car decked by flowers.
“Storm coming,” someone said just behind Rem. “Look how the trees’re thrashing about.”
Involuntarily Rem turned to see. The trees above the walls were motionless. There was no one close enough at his shoulder to have spoken so hoarsely and been heard.
“Magic,” someone else said, directly before him. He almost felt the breath strike his face and there was no one so near. “Oh gods—what is it?”
Rem looked up and saw the hills above the city. There were white towers there, but only for a moment. He saw the red spout and gush of powdered rock explode silently from beneath Koramvis’ walls. Then the hills ran together and the towers were lifted like an offering to an ink-black sky.
Even as it happened, he was aware it was not real; he felt the zeeba beneath him and kept it in hand. His eyes were open and he knew where he was. Then he seemed to blink, and the hills were calm, the summer morning light spread through them.
He thought, without hurry., precisely, Prophecy, this time. There’s about to be an earthquake.
The zeeba tossed its head and mouthed the reins. You could see it now, all along the route the animals were growing fractious. Men, irritably forcing them to keep the line, were responding too, unknowingly.
In the grip of it, Rem felt only an enormous distancing, no terror. He understood he would be aware to the second. He rode on, holding the zeeba steady.
The Avenue widened and gave on to the great square. Ahead, the mighty Rarnammon statue, behind that the Imperial Hill, the terraced rise with the palace, and higher, framed in forest, the oldest temple of the Dortharian Anackire. Across the nearer space, the glint of other caparisons, banners, the figurines of the Storm Lord and his officials. And the crowd everywhere, and more running in to pile up against the buildings. Some had even climbed the Rarnammon to gain vantage from its chariot wheels.
Inside the body of the procession there was abruptly more room. Rem found he was advancing between the chariots as they widened their phalanx, and through them.
Before he was quite through he felt the pulse of the earth stop. That was what it was like. The earth’s pulse, or his own. Then under the cheering and the hubbub, there came a low strong roar. At first, they mistook it for themselves.
Then bells began to ring, the curiously noted stringed bells brought here from Koramvis. The bells knew the grasp of the earthquake, it had shaken them before. They seemed to be crying out a warning. It was recognized.
All at once the screams of excitement turned to shrieks of horror. The crowd pushed against itself. He could hear the prayer-screams, too. “Anack! Anack!” The Xarabians of the entourage were if anything more afraid than the Vis of the city. This was not even their country that they be expected to die in it. Already all was out of control, beasts struggling and rearing, chariots dragged sideways, men tumbled, and the crowd on every side milling and howling, no one able to move. But the ground itself moving.
The zeeba danced to keep its balance. Something of Rem’s iron command came through to it, just negating the primal urge to kick and run. He looked at the sky. A man was falling from the Rarnammon, screeching. He burst down into the crowd. The great statue, however, did not shift, only trembling at its roots, its human cargo clinging to it.
Rem was through the chariots, up to the place where the rear guard of Iros’ soldiery had flanked the procession’s gaudy center, its core Ulis Anet’s ceremonial car. But something had happened to the order of the procession.
One of the Yasmis carts had overturned. One of the Yasmis girls lay dead where a kalinx, expelled from the shafts and its tether snapped, had torn out her heart and stood now, in her blood and the crushed sweets, irresolute between fear and viciousness. No one had killed it. When the quake ended it might attack again. Rem leaned, met its glacial eyes, and swiftly cut its throat. He rode over the cadaver, the zeeba snorting, and into the clamor of mounted men beyond.
The Xarabians were shouting, invoking gods. A sword, drawn to hack a passage somewhere, into another world maybe, where the earth was solid, slashed blind over his unmailed shoulder and drew blood. Rem turned and struck the sword-waver unconscious. As the man slumped, Rem saw across him to the garlanded chariot of the Princess. The driver was gone and the banners had fallen. Caught in the maelstrom it was pulled now one way now another, the panic-stricken chariot-animals, bred for strength in speed and little else, leaping and cavorting in the shafts, screaming as human women screamed all about. The reins were gone, she could not have taken them up even if she had had the weight to hold the team, which she did not. Beyond this, he saw again the flash of metal; swords were out everywhere. Iros and his captains were cutting a way to her through the crowd, their own men and the naked dancing girls.
The quake was almost done, the earth merely shivering now, like a man after sickness. It needed only moments more for the complementary dousing of panic, a cold despairing relief, to come down on them. The beasts would feel it first.
But before the dousing came, the freakish flailing of Iros’ guard had cleared a road before the Princess’ chariot. The animals did at once what they had wished to do all along, bolting forward, their screams trailing like torn flags. The very men who had striven toward her went down before them. Rem saw Iros dashed aside, the long glancing rip of his sword across the breasts of the team serving to madden them further.