“Let me by,” she said.
The man, like all Vis, knew of the Amanackire, what they were said to be, and to be able to do. But that Yllumite the Iron Ox had filleted, he was screaming now on and on, halting only to get breath. The man in the entrance said to the Amanackire, “Why don’t you, lady, go and find your goddess, and when you do, crawl up her hole.”
Then something hit him in the chest. Like some beefy fist, it knocked him back, into the upright of the doorway, winded. As he lay on the wall gasping, the Amanackire woman went by him, into the place beyond.
The murky room, stinking of hot metal, blood, offal and medicine, was very busy. The doctors bent to their work beneath the low-slung lamps. A gaggle of boys ran about with boiled water for the implements, the hooks and knives and bone-saws. Another made rounds with a pitcher of wine. He stared at the white being as he went by, and signed himself for divine protection.
The Yllumite had died abruptly and his cries were ended.
The surgeon straightened, washed his hands in the bowl one of the boys had brought. He turned, desultory, to the couch where another casualty lay, a sword wedged among splinters of shattered collarbone, in the meat of shoulder and breast.
The surgeon was anatomically impressed by the force of the blow; perhaps there had already been a weakness in the clavicle. . . .
“That must come out,” the surgeon said. “We don’t let him die by the long road. There’s not much left, but hold him,” he added. No one moved. The surgeon looked up and saw the woman who had come to the head of the couch. “Lady, you shouldn’t be here. Get out.” And heard how the boys muttered with fright that he had so addressed a white Lowlander.
For the woman, she took no notice.
“Lady,” he said, “I’m sorry if he was something to you, but he’s lost his race. You don’t want him to suffer? Go out, or move back. The blood’ll splash you.”
And he set his grip on the sword.
Before he could do more, one of the woman’s slender hands came down on his.
The hand was the color of snow. It repulsed him, its whiteness on his own black-copper—he expected her skin to be cold, but she was warm, as he was.
“I will do it,” she said.
“Daigoth’s eyes. Don’t be a fool, woman.”
“Stand away,” she said.
A silence had fallen over the whole wide room.
To his annoyance, the surgeon discovered he had stepped off as instructed.
Then, while the room watched, the Amanackire drew the sword backward out of the Corhlan’s body, as smoothly as from a sheath of silk.
A dew of blood scattered the wounded man’s flesh, the cover on the couch. Where the steel had divided him, a ragged purple stripe now crossed the top of his breast, from the base of the neck to just above the center of the rib cage. The woman, letting go of the sword she had extracted, leant forward, and her silver hair rained over him, hiding what she did. When she lifted her hands and her head, there was nothing on the surface of the Corhlan’s body at all, save a single bead of blood, which slowly trickled away.
Without another word, the Amanackire returned across the speechless frozen room, passed through its doorway, and was gone.
7
The King’s Mark
The sunset hung like a scarlet awning over the city. The day’s stadium events, which had ended with Zakorian wrestling and three nine-lap races, each with a favorite charioteer, had left the gamblers to rejoice or lick their aches.
A bizarre story was going round by lamplighting. The beserk young Corhl, given so obviously to death before the multitude, had been improbably saved by the surgeons.
Of the Lydian, immediately forgiven the Zastis-excess of killing him, there was no special news.
As the sun declined, leaving pools of red along the ground, Rehger was among the stalls of the hiddrax, up behind the stadium on the northwest side. Each racer of worth reckoned to have his own particular team by his twenty-second year, as he would expect his chariots built for him by the best carriage-makers of Alisaar.
Rehger’s hiddraxi, who had taken him to the summit of the Fire Ride, now stood kissing his shoulders and receiving fruit from his hands.
But for the humming of the sea-hemmed city, the evening was quiet here. A few grooms went about on their agenda, the hiddrax stirred the straw and ate. North, from the horse stables, there came a vague hubbub. There had been a horse-race, too, this afternoon, and the precious beasts were not yet settled.
“Listen, my soul,” said Rehger to the hiddraxi. “Listen to the uproar they’re making. And not one to race as you race, like wind and fire. Best on the earth, my loved ones.”
A groom came across the court, leading a black saddle thoroughbred, and stopped by the arch, where the team-hiddrax could not see too much of it.
Presently Rehger went out. He was to dine with a merchant-lord, the very one who had gifted him this mount two seasons ago.
As he stood in the rich light, checking the animal’s recently shod hoofs, the groom said, “Lydian, you’ll want to know. That Corhlan boy, he’s alive.”
Rehger did not hesitate, picked up another hoof.
“Yes. Not for much longer.”
“Something happened. There was a woman, one of the white Lowlanders. But she knew some trick, and they healed him.”
“No,” said Rehger. He let go the last hoof, straightened, rubbed his fingers along the thoroughbred’s neck.
“Yes, Lydian. I swear it. The whole stadium knows. Ask anyone.”
“Yes,” said Rehger.
“There’s not even a scar on him.”
Rehger mounted, and turned the thoroughbred out through the arch, into the mouth of the sunset, then south down the curve of the high, tree-lined avenue, with its view of the distant ocean, into the city.
It was Zastis after all, Saardsinmey more than usually frenetic. In less than a mile he had been approached more than ten times, always decorously, always part-sensually, to be told the Corhlan lived.
By the hour he rode into New Dagger Lane, he had come to credit it. He had destroyed the Corhlan. There was no chance any man might recover from such a stroke. Rehger had felt an extra guilt that he had not himself withdrawn the sword there and then and, if needful, ended the boy’s pain. But Rehger had not been able to take up that sword, that sword which had become a serpent.
A white Lowlander—the groom’s words. The sorcery that could accomplish one such trick—why not another? Blade to life, dead to life—
Sinking into the oblivion of fatigue, the victory diadem of poppies yet on his head, Rehger had dreamed the earth shook, columns toppled, and mountains. White seared on redness and rushed into a void of black. The Lowlanders had cast down the ancient capital of Dorthar by an earthquake. They had called gods from the sea.
“Lydian! Lydian!” Young tavern girls in the blushed dusk, gilded bells in their plaited hair. “Oh, Lydian—are you glad or sorry that boy’s alive?”
“Is he?”
“Yes, oh, yes.”
“Where is he then?” He laughed down at them as they laughed up at him, putting blossoms into the mane of the thoroughbred, touching his ankle or foot shyly, pressing their breasts against the animal, wanting the man.
“With her,” one said. “The white one. She healed him by Lowland witchcraft. He’s her prize then, isn’t he. He’s handsome, Lydian.” She gazed into his eyes, unable to help herself.
He put them softly aside, and rode on, and they let him go, standing to speak of him under one of the night-blooming torch-poles.
Nearly at the merchant’s doors, Rehger quickened the thoroughbred into a trot. They went straight by, down Sword Street, over Pillar Square, and through the maze of slighter roads that led south.
At the fountain on Gem-Jewel Street, he reined the beast in. Across the way, on the stair of a prosperous wine-shop, a man opened wide his arms.
“Thanks for my winnings, Lydian, may your gods always love you. Will you delight us by drinking here? Good wine, happy girls.”