“Emel son of Suthamun,” Raldnor said to them. And then he knelt, in the Vis-Karmian way, at Emel’s feet.
There was a long, long noiselessness, during which Raldnor held his breath. Then one by one, group by group, battalion by battalion, almost two thousand men began to applaud.
Kesarh’s replacement Guardian, riding into night-black Amlan with thirty men, found nothing amiss on the streets. The garrison seemed wide-awake, and far better regulated than the sloppy mess at the port. He was politely saluted and conducted inside the palace. In the corridor leading to Am Ioli’s apartments, doors flung wide and an attack occurred. The men of Lan’s new Protector tried valiantly to fight, but were hampered by the narrow aisle, sea-and-snow-fatigue and shock. Raldnor had not been supposed to panic. Even if he had, no one had foreseen the whole inland garrison going over to him. How had he managed it? If they wondered, they died wondering.
At length Kesarh’s replacement Guardian was peeled alive off the wall, disarmed and deposited in a room.
There was a dispatch. It purported to be his own, and it informed Kesarh of the success of his replacement’s mission. Raldnor invited him to sign it. .
“How long do you think you can keep this quiet?”
“Until the thaw. Long enough.”
“If I sign this, I’m dead.”
“So you are. And dead if you refuse. The difference being only in the manner.”
Kesarh’s replacement Guardian signed. His body was come across two nights later, stripped to the skin and lifeless, somewhere in the hills.
Meanwhile, the Karmian ship pulled away from Lan’s icy shore for her long, weather-slow voyage of return. She was laden with one dispatch, lightened only of passengers.
There followed a series of wildnesses in Amlan. Celebrating soldiers, as the east had found, tended to commit arson, rape and burglary, and to cast spears at anything which ran.
Raldnor let the festivity continue. He was busy preparing his approaches, so the rest of Karmiss-In-Lan should come over to him.
Ten days after his sparkling coup, while striding across the royal gardens, he was suddenly set on by a yelling Lan with a knife. The man fled before the undisciplined soldiery could catch him. His entry and getaway seemed professionally managed, if the assault itself was rather desperate. Actually, he had intended to kill Raldnor, as Kesarh had suggested, riding disgraced to the ship along the port road. But Raldnor had not obliged in this. The assassin had had to be inventive. Either way, it looked like the work of an incensed patriot, which was what Kesarh had wanted.
Raldnor Am Ioli lay in the snow, eyeing the soldiers who came to pick him up. At first they thought he would speak to them again. But his eyes set. He had said forever all he was going to.
They bore him in with the dramatic dignity the undignified demand at such times. Uproar in their wake, they went on to break the tidings to King Emel.
19
On the Lanelyrian border of Elyr, something strange had happened.
He had sheltered in a deserted steading through the night. The weather-shy Karmian patrols were few and far between, but he had spotted a big, dull star up in the hills that might be a burning village, and taken no chances, setting off again before the sun rose.
Near dawn, then, Lur Raldnor saw two wolves, their smoking jaws clamped in some edible death. They stared with red eyes and red drooling mouths, but as their spit steamed in the snow he realized, with a sudden shift of perspective, that it was not a carcass they were devouring but a crimson flame which ran along the ground. Then as he watched, too amazed yet to doubt, they vanished and the fire with them.
Days and nights of snow could confuse the eyes. Mirages were not uncommon. But the image stayed with Yannul’s son, those petals of flame spilling from the jaws of wolves, not harming them, and not harmed.
Some reports stated Kesarh had put just short of eight thousand men into the east. Others said it was nearer ten. In the little stretch of Elyr there was scant evidence of them. And yet villages lay empty, doors swinging, a broken pot lying to catch fresh snow, everything human melted away to the secret places, the hollow hills, the ancient towers. Once he heard the whirr of a wheel, a spinning-loom such as was used here and on the Plains. But it was the wind moved it. If he came on edible food he ate some, not all, and left payment under their hearth stones, in case they should ever come back. Each time, he felt a dread. The world was tumbling toward darkness and chaos. Who could ever stop it? Who could ever come back?
Only last summer he had dreamed of standing in the way of the shadow, driving it off. Victory, through passion. It was Rem—Rarmon—who somehow, distanced, no longer by him, had shown him the futility of the dream. The sword could only beget the sword. And yet, to lay down the sword was only death by other means.
Prosaically, it disgusted him, too, that having got in such a fix to secure a ship from Xarabiss to Lan, here he was racing almost full circle to the northern Plains, Hamos, and maybe on to the border of Xarabiss again.
The cold and the whiteness and the silence began to break his heart. He was soul-sick. He sat the wretched exhausted zeeba under the dark silver sky of noon, looking off into pallor and nothingness.
He had begun to speak aloud to the zeeba by then, and now he said to it: “I shan’t find them.”
And he went on sitting there in the emptiness a great while, the blade of the wind in his face, but not moving, saying over and over, “I shan’t find them.”
In the area now where he should have made a definite turn to the west and north, he saw he had no faith in this direction. Hamos lay that way, and another Lowland town whose name he had forgotten. He knew, unreasonably, his family was not there.
He discovered he wished to go southwest. This was also unreasonable. There was hardly anything to the south. Except, of course, the old Lowland city. And they would never have gone there. Medaci could never have borne it. And yet.
Yannul had gone by this route, returning from Lan in the Lowland War, riding through the drifts and the cold, with the answer his country would neither hinder nor help.
Lur Raldnor turned south.
It was a kind of drawing. Difficult to do anything else.
But the city was another mirage. Sometimes he saw it, transparent blackness between the winds and the white earth.
Signs of habitation were less frequent than the phantoms of snow-sight. Once he passed a hovel with an old woman standing in the door. He asked her for food, if she could spare any. She gave him a folded lump of bread with meat in it. When he tried to pay her, she shook her head. She never spoke. A pure Lowlander, he wondered if she had only ever used the mind speech. He had had this with his mother, as a child; in adolescence—that age of the clandestine—the open door had partly closed between them. Just sometimes some bright joy or flash of hurt would break through the door. To the stranger, he could not speak within.
He inquired after the city.
She pointed, without words, southwest. So he went on.
The snow blizzard started in the middle of the day.
There was no shelter.
At first, he tried to ride through, but his beast was faltering. They would be beaten, and their sight put out. The zeeba might die, and he, too, might die. Dismounting, he tied cloth over the animal’s head, and bound his own eyes. Then he led the zeeba, a blind man, cautious and with a terrible essential leisure, through the frenzy of ice and wind.