Like Rarmon, he knew that his father had never valued him. To inherit the temporal kingdom with such knowledge was hard.
In the end the imagery of Raldnor, the very name of “Raldnor” began, at some most private level, to offend and so to disturb Raldanash. Knowing himself as others might not have done, for this reason he had banned use of the name in those who were most often about him. Raldanash was aware, how in the depths of things, it might now and then be possible to confuse intrinsic aversion to a name with its bearer. Those he stripped were not informed of his logic. They took the act to heart, as did Yannul’s son, and were insulted.
The window closed with darkness. Someone came to light the lamps, and then the frost-bitten messenger bowed his way in.
“I am sorry,” said Raldanash, “about your hand.”
The messenger was dazzled and knocked off balance. The King was never humane, he had heard.
“My own fault, Storm Lord. I was careless. But it isn’t my swordhand, thank the goodness.”
“And this other matter?”
“Highness—” the messenger hesitated, uncertain. Then launched into his story with awkward brevity. It had seemed relevant. Now he was less sure.
He had been in Ommos, investigating the movements of Ommish troops and their reactions to the rumors he himself had helped spread of Free Zakorian infamy. When the cold started to gnaw off his fingers, he took refuge at Hetta Para where the Amanackire guardian ruled the sketchy new city, and the wrecked elder capital festered under the snow.
There had already been some murmurings in Xarabiss. They concerned a Lowlander priestess, or witch, depending on who told them, or their point of origin. There had been a peasant’s story of a spirit or even a goddess. She traveled north, and some said she rode a golden chariot drawn by white wolves, and some said she rode in a wagon hung with amber and glowing with an amber luminescence. One or two such mutters would have meant nothing. In troubled times supernatural madness frequently took hold. Gods and dead heroes were seen walking about, calves with two heads were born, loaves bled and water changed into wine or urine. However, these tales of a blonde priestess had decided similarities. Eventually, one began to glean a picture of some holy woman of significance on the road, as it seemed for Dorthar itself.
Then, in Hetta Para, going at nightfall into the unsavory lower quarter of the old city, he had seen, across great mounds of rubble and burnt-out houses, a section of the alleys below moving and bright with torches. Sensing the momentous, for this end of Hetta Para was a dubious sink, the messenger got down and blended with the crowd.
He followed it into a pit, and then considered if he had been wise. First off, he had believed they revived their worship of Zarok—the cousin to the Zakorians’ fire god. A statue, formerly flung down into the pit, was upright, and its oven-belly red with fire.
It was only after the crowd had inadvertently pushed him nearer that the messenger beheld the god, whom he had seen depicted previously, was altered.
“It was no longer ugly, my lord. I can’t explain it. Something had been done to the features, and the teeth—it wasn’t like itself. But that wasn’t everything.” The messenger shook his head slightly at the recollection. He said, “There was part of a broken wall behind the statue, about sixty feet high, before the roof had sheared away. All up the wall there was a mark, a sort of scorch, very faint, but the torches showed it.” Raldanash asked nothing, so the messenger said: “It was most of the shape of a colossal anckyra, the tail, the torso and the arms up to the elbows. . . . eight of them.” The messenger, who was also a spy, had uncharacteristically failed to probe the crowd. He had merely stood in the pit while the crowd did, and come out when it came out.
But by the time he reached the northern border and caught up with his comrades, he had added to his collection of stories. The witch-priestess performed miracles. Some of these involved manifestations of the Lady of Snakes, eighty or ninety feet high. Someone had declared the woman was the daughter of the Storm Lord Raldnor. The Dortharians had got no sign of her, but he guessed she and her people—for she went in company, if not with giant wolves, serpents and docile playful tirr—could already be here, in Dorthar itself.
When the man was dismissed, Raldanash also left the room.
He passed through the palace, its halls and courts, out into a snowy sloping garden, and so to the private temple he had caused to be built ten years before.
The grove itself was fleeced with snow, and the blackness of the temple stood out under it in slabs. As he entered Raldanash remembered, with a dull insistent clenching of the brain, how Rarmon had been proved to him here. Rarmon who now, like Raldanash himself, lay dashed in the uppermost hand of Anackire.
The lamp was lit. Raldanash stretched himself on the stone floor, and prepared swiftly for the trancelike meditatory state, in which the priests of Vathcri, and later the Amanackire themselves, had trained him.
He had long been sensitized, as the Amanackire were, many of them, sensitized, to such an imminence. It had been abstract, until now.
Presently, drifting free, he gazed across the mists of inner sight and made out a slim flame, pale golden, like the eye of some inexplicable creature from another dimension.
Where the river curved and fragmented, heavy and curded now with ice, an ancient watchtower, only a stone shell, marked the northwest reaches of the Ommish-Dortharian border. Not far from here, almost three decades ago, the traitor Ras had crossed, on his mission to destroy the Lowland offensive. He had gifted—not even sold—his people, out of hatred for Raldnor, to Amrek’s Counselor, a man named Kathaos, who now went by another, like, name in Yl Am Zakoris’ service.
In and about the shell of the tower was a small encampment. Rough walls built of gathered stones lent added shelter to the three or four wagons crouched in their lee. Zeebas and men stayed mostly within the yawn of the tower, from which a drizzle of smoke rose up to a smoke-colored sky.
At a glance, you saw none of the attendant magic, no hint of miracles and sorceries. The bivouac was comfortless and gray. No wolves danced in the snow.
Haut the Vardian, one of his servants, and a Lowland man from Moiyah who had joined them near Xarabiss, were returning from a hunt. They had found nothing, which was not unusual. The sheep had all been eaten, save a couple of ewes kept for their milk. The slaughterings had been curious. The girl touched the animals’ foreheads and they fell asleep, nor woke when the knife sliced through them. Ashni herself did not eat the meat. She lived on mysterious things, maybe roots and grasses and now, it seemed, the snow. Yet her slightness was the burnished slenderness of health not wasting.
They had been speaking, out on the cold white slopes of Dorthar, about homelands—Moiyah, on the edge of the Inner Sea, blue-walled Vardath over the ocean. They remembered they were human men, for all she had changed them. But she had brought a great stillness into their lives. And even though they had spoken in words of home, those words were uttered only within their echoing brains.
They were familiar with strangeness.
So, as they reached the outskirt of their camp and saw the smoke rising, they did not balk at the other sight, that of a phantom walking before them through the snow.
One she has summoned, the Moiyan thought aloud.
Or one seeking her, Haut answered.