She moved graciously among the important guests, her ladies drifting after her. The Zakorian was absent, he saw, but then that one was hardly for show.
Behind him, Kothon jerked to attention. Raldnor realized, with some initial surprise, that Val Mala had singled him out.
“Good evening, Dragon Lord.”
He bowed to her.
“Do you guard the princess well?”
He met her eyes then, and words caught in his throat. In her face was a meaning and an invitation quite apparent. Her sexuality breathed out of her, and a burning hot shiver crept along his spine.
“Koramvis is a safe city, madam,” he said presently.
“Not too safe, I trust. I’ve been told you’re something of a hero. A young hero shouldn’t become bored.”
Confronted with her like this, many men had grown afraid, he had heard. She was too potent, perhaps. But not for him. He had reacted to her already and the promise in her eyes. Besides, she was a power in this land, as Amrek was. He decided at once, and a cool, ambitious logic ruled the illogical ambition in his loins.
“One word from Dorthar’s Queen has dispelled any possible boredom forever.”
She laughed, the frivolous false laughter of a woman engaged. How old was she? She seemed only a few years his senior, even this close. She took his arm lightly. People marked their progress as they walked.
“You invest me with an unfair amount of ability. One woman compared to so many, Dragon. You can pick and choose, I hear.”
“Alas, no. The gods would make me happy if I could.”
“Who is this that you desire, then? This unobtainable one.”
“I wouldn’t dare, madam, to pronounce her name.”
“Well,” she said. She smiled at him, pleased with the little play. “You shouldn’t despair, my lord of Sar, the gods may be kinder than you think.”
Leaving him, she gave him her hand to kiss. He encountered her smooth, scented, painted flesh. Her rings were cold on his lips.
In the guest palace that night he slept poorly. A girl with a red wig shared his bed—half of them wore red wigs since Astaris had come here. He no longer wanted her. He wanted the white-skinned bitch queen. Zastis would be in the sky within a month. How long would she make him wait for her, or would she change her mind? He felt cast back to his uneasy beginnings by this uncertainty, and the palace, which the women said was full of ghosts—more specifically one ghost—oppressed him in the dark.
But Val Mala, as she lay under the Zakorian’s hands, had no intentions of delay.
Dathnat herself could have told Raldnor how brief would be his waiting. She knew this sleekness, this restlessness in her mistress from before. She was a student of Val Mala and had been taught well.
“Tell me, Dathnat,” said the sleepy, throaty voice, “what’s your opinion of Raldnor Am Sar?”
“Your majesty knows I am unqualified to judge.”
Val Mala laughed. Her spitefulness, too, was always at its sharpest before a new affair, and Kathaos had been long away—first in Xarabiss, now in Thaddra.
Dathnat hated the Queen, but her heritage had made her stoical and very patient.
She thought of the Queen’s pet kalinx. Once so beautiful, that creature, and so dangerous. It had lurked about these apartments, Val Mala’s second self, equated with her name in the city. Innumerable lovers had gone in fear of it. Now the cold blue of its eyes was filmed and rheumy, its fur molted, its teeth rotten with age. It smelled. Val Mala could not bear it near her, though neither would she have it killed. Dathnat understood, even if the Queen did not, that to Val Mala the ruined cat represented her own person—age which she had cheated and the deformities of age that would one day invade her body.
In her stony soul, Dathnat smiled. The gods, who had given her nothing, had nothing to rob her of. She was younger than her mistress and would see the ending of her.
She worked upon the Queen’s skin with relish, striving with her iron hands to preserve, her eyes watching greedily for the first signs of Val Mala’s punishment.
A man came to him, wearing the insignia of the Queen.
“Dragon Lord, Val Mala, the royal mother of the Storm Lord, requests your presence at noon,” he said. His eyes said other things.
The day was very hot. The Storm Palace seemed to burn with dry white fire. A mask-faced girl with glinting eyes took him to a suite of rooms and left him there.
Smoky draperies shut out the harsh sunlight, and incense rose in eddies from ornate bowls. When she came in from behind the heavy curtains, she wore a plain robe, her black hair loose on her shoulders and her breasts. She looked incredibly young and incredibly knowing and certain of what she could do to him, and his eyes blackened for a moment in an irrepressible torrent of desire.
“Please sit,” she said. “No, beside me. How restrained you seem. Have I called you away from some important duty? Some—further heroism?”
“Your majesty must know by now the effect of her loveliness.”
“Do I affect you, then?” She poured wine into a cup and handed it to him. He could not drink it, and set the cup aside. The servility of her gesture had been intimation enough. He lifted her hand to his mouth, caressing it in quite a different way from before. He felt the pulse in her wrist quicken. She said: “Are you daring to insult me?”
Part of his cleverness as a lover was that he had always understood with every woman, except one, her basic needs, her sexual requirements, and had responded to them intuitively. With Val Mala he sensed what she asked him for, and took possession of her mouth before she had finished speaking, and when she stirred, he held her still.
But she was, after all, the Queen. At length he let her go. He had no doubt she would give them what they both wanted, yet the decision was to be hers.
She rose and held out her hand to him.
“A little walk,” she said, very low.
In the colonnade she ran her teeth along the edge of his hand.
“How did you lose this finger, my hero? In some fight?”
He had lied, too, about the circumstances of his birth, as well as the geography. Enough rumors had already accrued. Yet he had kept the falsehoods as near the truth as possible; it was easier that way. He knew nothing of the damaged finger, so he said now, as he had said before to many of the nobility of Koramvis: “I lost it in infancy, madam. I’ve no recollection how.”
The carved door slid open; beyond lay her bedchamber. This symbol struck him—some hint of permanence to come, in that it was not merely a couch he was to have her on. But she had halted in the doorway, and her face, though still smiling, had become suddenly altered, as if the smile were only the garland left behind after the feast. She looked as if—he could not quite be sure—as if she had abruptly glimpsed another person standing in his place.
“In infancy,” she echoed him, and her voice was strangely colorless. “I’ve heard it said you have the blood of my husband. Do you think it likely?”
Her coldness infected him. Desire fell away; his hands grew clammy. He felt himself on the brink of a fear he could not even guess at.
“Most unlikely, madam.”
“You have yellow eyes,” she said. She said it as if she spoke of something quite different, something horrible, obscene—a murder. All at once she seemed to shrink and shrivel. He saw in her face the weight of years which would eventually find her out. He no longer wanted her, she appalled him—why, he was uncertain. But he had been so close to the power she offered, still wanted that—