Raldnor found himself stirred to anger and icy dismay by the first part of the narrative. Further on, he laughed here and there. It surprised him. He had imagined himself in all ways emotionally, if not physically, dead. In turn Yannul did not press for information, and Raldnor told him nothing. His grief, and the burden of his grief were terrible; to relate them would be a superfluous, useless agony. Yet he found he needed Yannul; after all, the anchor of human company dulled his pain.
In the afternoon, Yannul settled his affairs at Yla. The following morning they were on the road to Hanassor and the sea, riding with two or three vendors and a cage of snarling black swamp beasts.
At a hostel on the road, they heard some news from Dorthar.
Amrek had seemed dead with his faithless bride; now he had left whatever emotional grave had held him. He returned with vigor and determination and set about that burning plan of his adult life—to sweep Vis clean of the sorcerous and defiled race of the Lowlanders. Already the edict had gone out: death to any Plains people inside the limits of Dorthar. His dragons were hard put to it to find them. They had scoured the minor towns and villages for their prey. Only a few remained, and these were the old, the sick and the unthinking. Execution had been haphazard, though total. A casual, ultimately competent butchering.
The twist to the story—what interested the Zakorians in the hostel much more than the Lowland slaughter—was the reaction to it by the King of Xarabiss, old Thann Rashek, sometimes called the Fox. Surely a fox should be more sly?
He had sent word to Amrek that he deplored the act. “Is it your ambition, Amrek, son of Rehdon, to make known your name by a shedding of blood? To begin with the death of my daughter’s daughter, Astaris Am Karmiss, whom you slew without trial or certainty; continuing with the massacre of virgins and babies?”
There had been an answer, too. The storm gods of Dorthar directed Amrek in his holy war—they would no longer brook the scum of the snake goddess. The earthquake which shook Koramvis had been their warning. Indeed, Amrek understood quite well that Xarabiss indulged herself in trade with the Lowlands, which enterprise must instantly cease. As to Rashek’s charge that he slew virgins, the Xarabians could set their minds at rest. There would not have been a single dead girl who could legitimately have claimed that title after capture by the dragon soldiery.
There was some laughter in the hostel over Amrek’s wit, though, on the whole the Zakorians thought him a shallow King, chasing after his phantoms like a peevish child.
To Raldnor, hunched by the murky fire in the cool of the jungle night, the discussion and the mirth came like a far-off baying, a cry of despair carried on the wind out of his past. A new pain pierced the old. He felt the wondrous agony come on him. “My people,” he thought. “My people.” The images crowded close as the chill night: Eraz, his mother, the men and women of his youth, the dragon, too, spitting in the snow, and the soldier who had hunted him through Lin Abissa; last, Anici, white as winter, a pale bone of death. And he had walked at Amrek’s side—Amrek, his brother, the murderer and the madman. And then came the final turn of the knife in him. He had taken that man’s woman. If he had never done so, would Amrek, in the shade of her serenity, have forgotten to wreak his vengeance on the Plains? It came too late, the guilt and the knowledge and the shame.
He saw Yannul looking at him in the red shadows.
“Black news for the Lowlanders,” Yannul said. “Perhaps their snake lady will strike Amrek down.”
“Like her people,” Raldnor said, “she has her teeth, but never uses them. And a thing grows rusty with disuse.”
And remembering how he had lost his naivety and his faith in Abissa when he read of Dorthar’s gods, he half smiled and thought: “And now I have lost everything.”
Hanassor. The Black Beehive of Zakoris, whose bees were known not for their honey, but their sting.
Built into the conical cliffs, the sea breaking on its lower walls red as wine in the sunset, not a light showing, everything encased, a city like a brain in a black granite skull.
Igur, the old king, was dead, and the brief period of mourning done. Igur’s eldest sons had fought for the throne, as was customary, for Zakoris had not forgotten her heritage of war. Yl had won the contest by breaking his brothers’ backs. He took three hundred wives to his throne with him, and crowned his first queen for slitting the throat, while heavy with his child, of a swamp leopard.
All this they learned at the gate.
It was always night in Hanassor under the rock, always torchlight and shadow.
They ate in a stony inn, where a fire-dancer scorched her gauzy clothes off her body with two spitting brands. There was a blue scar on her thigh. She had been careless once.
They made enquiries of the landlord, who spoke of a ship making for Saardos and offered to direct her captain to their table. Later, a black-burned man with a gold stud winking in his left nostril came and sat by them.
“I’m Drokler, ship lord of Rom’s Daughter. I hear you want to buy a passage to Saardos. I don’t take passengers, as a rule, you understand, excepting slaves.”
They bargained half an hour with him over the cost of their fare. In the end it was settled and a clerk called in to draw up their agreement, this being Zakoris and life and liberty on the whole rather cheap. Drokler could write only his name, but this he did with brutal flourish. They pocketed their deeds, paid off the clerk and sought their beds.
At first light a sailor came to guide them to the cellars of the city, and the great caverns where the ships of Hanassor lay at anchor. The man rowed them through the arching caves, among the frozen, albescent dripping of stalactites, and the dusky flickering forests of spars, into the morning and the wide mouth of the ocean.
Rorn’s Daughter was out, showing herself a tower ship of the western seas, triple oar banks spooning already at the glassy water, her sail bellying on the early wind, bright with the double moon and dragon device of Zakoris.
“She’s a fine thing,” Yannul said.
The sailor only grunted; he was an unenamored man, well used to his wife.
He got them aboard and showed them to their boxlike accommodation in the guts of the tower. They would be eating above in Drokler’s hall, he said, and gave them a sourly congratulatory look before going off about his duties.
Minutes later there came the judder and swerve beneath their feet that told of departure. The oar banks churned, and she sprang out from the bay, a great wooden she-animal, staring with the scarlet eyes painted on her prow.
It was a pull of fourteen days to Saardos, a leisurely, uneventful voyage, marked by the groaning of timbers and the crack of the sail, the screams of sea birds and the occasional brawls of the sailors, under a sky as clear as painted enamel.
Women worked with the crew, the ship’s prostitutes, for trade did not stop for Zastis. They were a tough, wild lot, willing and able to fight like swamp cats. Their hair was the same bleached-out gray-black as the sailors’ from the scouring of the acid salt winds.