Thann Xa’ath had insufficient imagination to dwell on the price of defeat. He operated the engine of war pragmatically. His court, ostensibly, kept pace.
But out in the crystal cities, in their theaters, pleasure-houses, wine-shops, the talk and the imagery were more honest, or more illuminating. The plays put on were froth—farces, with often a bitter sting in the tail. Acrobats walked wires above the mouths of starving tirr. Escape; dancing with death. Conversation conveyed actual peril. Seers cried aloud in the streets that doom approached. No one laughed. All would be beaten flat, rinsed with blood, with flame—ashes.
There was nowhere to run to.
Even so, as the spring unlocked the roads, they streamed away, to villas, to farms, to remote plains and isolate hills, aristocrat and beggar alike.
Perhaps here, or there, the black and taloned paw would not find them out.
It was a curious fact. Most of them boasted a victory for Dorthar and the Middle Lands. None of them seemed able to trust in it.
Free Zakoris wanted, and would have. Karmiss, the unknown crouching thing, would go for the throat of whichever went down.
A few privately commandeered vessels put out to sea, making on battered sails for the Sister Continent. The weather was uncertain. No word came back from them. Nor any word or ship from those who had voyaged from Thos at the summer’s end.
Southward, the southern extremity of Vis: The Lowlands. It had remained generally a kind of desert, still. And here, the mantle of the snow yet held awhile. On the wide plains the villages had drawn in to themselves as they had always done, tight, unburgeoning pads behind their stockades, revealing no aptitude for spring, let alone politics. Closer to Xarabiss, the towns of the Plains—famous Hamos, coastal Moiyah and part-built Hibrel, having molded to the northern spirit, and the ways from over the ocean, had formed their armies long since. Dortharian and Vathcrian war leaders had drilled their men winter through in the stone courts. Even a band of Shansarian berserkers had remained, a couple of thousand men, at a camp a mile or so from Moiyah. There was a small Shansar fleet as well, thirty swan ships, ice-choked on the beaches there. But gossip said they would, troops and galleys both, be off to Shansarian Alisaar, when once the seas relented.
It was also known that with the thaw Dortharian troops would be garrisoned at Moiyah. She had come to represent a key position to the west and would certainly be threatened. So far the numbers were not noised abroad.
Of the arcane city, the ruin, nothing much was said. It was thought to be no prize either for Zakorian Leopard or Karmian jackal. Already fallen, hiding no treasures, unstrategic—it was left to its own devices, its own silences.
Report suggested certain villages of the southern south had packed up and traveled there wholesale, as had happened three decades before. For sanctuary, presumably.
An itinerant hunter, having come northwest to Moiyah, enlisting under one of the Vathcrian commands there, regaled his battalion—Lowland men, men of the other continent, mixes, Xarabs—with an inexplicit memory of something seen in or near the ruin, over the snow.
He was strongly called to account by his Vathcrian captain.
“I can’t say, sir.” A Lowlander and a peasant, knowing the linguistics of the dark races, his childhood spent with little speech, much telepathy, he seemed now calmly at a loss. “It was sunrise. The light hit the flank of the city—or maybe it was some other thing—it was far off, sir, perhaps only rocks or trees. But there looked to be great towers of gold.”
The Vathcrian, who was younger than the hunter, anxious and furious at the war, needing to fight something he could see and hack, rejoined:
“We’re up against a hell of a thing here, soldier. We don’t need visions and dreams and make-believe. We need guts and an army. No snow-mirage ever won a war. Do you understand?”
The hunter who was now a soldier said that he did.
Only later did the Vathcrian realize he had inadvertently communed in his home-tongue. The Lowlander, ignorant of it, had got the sense by reading his mind.
Across the Inner Sea, Alisaar, the Shansarian fortress, stared in all directions. Carved ships patrolled her waters, up and down, up and down, over and over, like clockwork things. The snow had only sugared her eastern and southern edges, as always. But the voracious winds of the cold months had lashed her. In the Ashara temples Shansar had set up, prophecies were made and auguries read. A secret worship had commenced, native Alisaar going back to her own gods, if she had ever left them.
Across the incoherent border. Old Zakoris, Sorm of Vardath’s dainty from the Lowland War, had also manned every perimeter. The three brief lands, Iscah, Ott, and Corhl, had been sworn to vassalage twenty-five years before, and were substantially under Vardian influence. But Alisaar had become an unknown element to the south. North, the watchtowers eyed the Thaddrian borders; mountains, forest. Particular attention was paid to that threat of Yl’s South Road.
Where Vardian Zakoris mountainously touched Dorthar, the passes were held by mutual armies. On the Dortharian side, the Storm Lord had instigated several Vathcrian companies, who now tended to squabble with Sorm’s Vardish men. One forgot, but Vathcri and Vardath, at home, had once been traditional enemies themselves.
In Old Zakoris, the Zakorian race had prospered under Sorm. He had not deprived them of their religion either, and the fire and water gods still exalted there, if no longer in some of their more brutal rites. Nevertheless, Zakoris was Zakoris. They had the same blood as the Black Leopard of Zakoris-In-Thaddra. Soon they would be called upon to slaughter their racial brothers, even, in some cases, their actual brothers. They had not deserted with or to Yl, which to the Leopard must be the unforgivable crime. A conqueror, he would give no quarter. The Mother-Kingdom would be destroyed. Not one stone would stand upon another, nor one skin upon one set of bones.
And so, belatedly, several did desert, somehow evading the watches and patrols, getting over the mountains or through the jungles into Thaddra, hurrying to Yl’s standard. Others simply ran—to Alisaar, to Dorthar—where they were betrayed and arrested instantly. Or into Thaddra also, but merely to be lost, as Thaddra’s custom was.
But it could not be told enough: In the end there was and would be nowhere to run to. This war was a wave, the world an open shore.
In Thaddra the sea was never obdurate. Snow, to Thaddra as to Zakoris, was only an infrequent crown upon some distant miles-high mountain.
The Leopard, feeling the spice-wind of spring, stretched itself.
The two great fleets, one hundred and three ships, one hundred and twenty-seven, flexed themselves in the deep-water bays. Farther northeastward, a scout fleet of fifteen vessels peeled off from the larger units, sentinel, waiting. With the coming of softer weather, others already drove toward the eastern seas.
On the South Road, the cadavers of slaves made paving. It would never be done in time, yet the whips bit and the flames ate up the trees. Charred birds made sacrifice to Zarduk.
In Ylmeshd the minor ceremonies were ended.
The cave of Rorn was already flooded by a valve, and sealed, left afloat with drowned beasts and men, who would now decompose to the satisfaction of the god. A young priest of Rorn, inspired by the drugged incense and the cries and the gongs, had flung himself down from a high ledge as the sea started to come in. Independent immolation was always pleasing to a deity. The omen was good.