Raldnor drew his knife.
“I’m the Storm Lord’s man. Watch yourself.”
The creature checked. With bewildered accusation he said: “You shouldn’t’ve made her yell.”
“I did nothing. I asked her about her necklace. Did you thieve it for her?”
“I? No, lord. She’s a fool, an insect. I have to beat her . . .”
The woman whimpered as she heard him.
“Ask her where she got it.”
The man lurched to her and pulled her up. He stared at the jewels as she made little sounds of terror.
“Where’d you get this glass, slut?”
“There—up there—a man came out and I took them when he slept.”
Raldnor stared up again, where she pointed, into the solitary, ink-black nostril of the rock. A feverish coldness filled his body.
There had been a legend. Eraz had told it to him when he was a child. The jewel of the goddess, the Serpent’s Eye . . .
He took a coin from his belt and threw it to the man. Then moved on up the slope towards the hole of night.
Near midnight, certain lovers strolling still in gardens, or human vermin abroad on their various business, heard a chariot pass them on the road. Women glanced from saffron windows and sighed theatrically, for it was the Sarite who drove beneath on the streets of Koramvis.
On the terrace of the Palace of Peace two or three late watch ceased laughing together and stood to attention. When he came, he had a look about him that kept them very quiet. They discussed it after—perhaps some pleasure drug of Xarabiss, or some woman who had at last proved too much even for Raldnor Am Sar . . .
In an inner room an officer of the Queen’s guard was lounging—Kloris. Raldnor’s mind moved sluggishly. He supposed the man had been after Lyki once again, but Kloris bowed with insolent, exaggerated courtesy and said: “Her majesty sent me to relieve you of your post. That is, as guard to the Princess Astaris. Here’s the relevant paper and the Queen’s seal. My men escorted the royal Karmian at dusk—she now occupies a suite in the Storm Palace.” He smiled, promoting conspiracy. “No doubt the Lord Amrek would expect to find her there.”
Raldnor stirred within himself a little way from the stupor of the mountain. He had sensed her gone. He took the ornate scroll, glanced at Val Mala’s seal. Kothon would already have done as much. He had half expected this sudden reverse of tactics because of fright at Amrek’s return. He said what was necessary, but Kloris did not go.
“There’s another matter—I discovered a creature skulking about by your apartments an hour ago, while I was awaiting your return.”
Kloris’s insufferable smile wavered a little as Raldnor looked at him.
“Well,” he said, “I apprehended the man for you. He’s dumb, but your—er—Wolves—ascertained from his signalings that it was you he wanted. They have him now.”
Raldnor gave him the briefest nod and went below to the guard room. Kloris, summarily dismissed, continued to idle about the place with a great show of nonchalance.
Like a shade come from the dead, the dumb man gazed at him with torpid eyes. He was a beggar, his feet scarred and dusty, yet he held out a little pouch of black velvet. In the pouch was a strand of blood-red silk—hair that could only have come from one woman’s head.
Raldnor, the drug dream of the cave still on him, responded to this new urge like a sleepwalker. Pausing only to wrap about himself a black anonymous cloak and not once to think, he followed the mute out into the midnight city.
They passed behind the Storm Palace, on the broad white boulevards, under a cyclamen moon.
Soon the streets became narrower. Pole lights were infrequent here. At last he grew uneasy. A woman’s lazy voice, calling to him from one of the timbered doorways, brought her for a moment nearer death than she knew.
The dank, foggy odor of the river seeped into the air. Raldnor’s guide turned into a street of villas, on whose tall leaning gates broken escutcheons of ancient houses showed. Water snakes and rats were the present tenants of these crumbling palaces, and probably the robber, cutthroat and procurer.
The dumb man hurried down the pavement and went under the ebony shadow of an arch.
An ideal place for a murder, Raldnor thought, but he followed.
There was a wild garden beyond the high wall. He stared at the overgrown lawns, the pallor of toppled statuary. The dumb man had halted. He stretched out his arm, pointing through a tangled growth of trees toward the ruined hulk of a mansion. It had blind-eyed empty windows, and beyond its ivy-webbed towers lay the iron gleam of the river.
Raldnor’s guide slipped sideways into darkness and was immediately gone.
Raldnor drew the knife from his belt. It had been her silken hair, none other, yet the ruin filled him with a sense of leaden distrust. He went forward through the blowing grasses.
The garden was empty. Whatever shadows proved to be assassins searched for smaller prey than himself.
He passed between the fallen columns. The moon sent spears in intermittent pale hot shafts through the damaged roof. Ahead was a hint of the faint topaz glow of a lamp.
He threaded the dilapidation toward it and came out into a rectangular salon, open on one side to the Okris and the river-sounding night. Across the water temple lights burned on the far bank; here a little bronze lamp flickered on its pedestal. There was a great bed with transparent curtains. He touched them, and a fine powder of dust and rotten gauze fell from his fingers.
He felt a cool, soft, searching question open in his brain.
He turned swiftly. There was a woman in a hooded cloak standing in the doorway. He crossed to her and gently pushed back the hood and slid his hands into the flames of her hair.
“How did you discover this place?”
“I’ve been listening to gossip at last. This has been a lovers’ trysting place for many years. The old caretaker is blind.”
“So he says. You should never have exposed yourself to danger in this way.”
“We have so little time,” she said quietly.
It was an expression of despair, yet not uttered in sadness. It was so unarguable, he answered nothing. Then she touched his face and said: “Your goddess spoke to you.”
He held her back a way and the river silence settled round them.
“No, Astaris.”
Very slowly he opened his mind to her and let her see what he had seen. The shock, the numbing fear; the exaltation he lessened for her, partly forgetting that some of its impact on him had sprung from the beliefs of his childhood and the inherited memories of his race. He gave to her the stumbling dark cave, the tingling of the water drops, the singing soundlessness and the inner region where the light swelled from some unimaginable source. And then the soaring whiteness of the giantess with her whorling golden tail. Anackire, the Lady of Snakes. His bones had seemed to melt.
But the awful ecstasy was brief. He saw her for what she was, the magnificent symbol, not the thing itself. Even her serpent tail was damaged, some of its golden plates displaced and lost. Yet She had stood in Dorthar, the heart and hub of Vis, for uncountable centuries, this yellow-haired, white-faced Lowlander. How many other men had found her and fled? Not many. Only one, it seemed, had looted her, and there was no word of her in Dorthar—only those legends of mountain banaliks and demons so common to all lands.
He felt the woman tremble in his arms and drew her closer.
“I thought you had been granted a vision,” she said, “but She, too, was only an image.”
“No, She gave me something, something too subtle for me to understand as yet. But it will come. Besides, you’re all and everything I want. And there’ll be an answer for us. I know it.”