He had been witness to a supernatural thing. For sure. What had that woman done, to have such bane hounding her?
Bemused, unsettled, Chacor resumed his walk down to the harbor, wondering what to make of this omen. His reflections sent him inward. He did not know, therefore, until he was fairly in the thick of it, that the evening was full of mischief and the waterfront in uproar.
On certain nights, if there had been a great catch, the market lit its torches and stayed open, but the fish by then was singing high. Added to this, now, was the smell of fear, and an electric crackle that made the fires spit. The night was very bright; Chacor thought absently of clear skies for tomorrow’s passage out—
But men were running about, and one barged into him.
“What’s up?” said Chacor.
“Got no eyes?”
Then Chacor did take notice. The clarity of the night was not due to torches or stars. He thought. The moon’s up early. No, it was not the moon—It must be a ship on fire down in the basin.
So he went along with the shoving, shouting crowd, to see.
The market ran to a palisade above the harbor wall. Here it was possible to look out at the bay, the beaches shelved away into it, and the curve of the harbor rimmed with watch-turrets. Leftward, a quarter of a mile off under the wall, the smaller craft rocked in their huddles, behind those a wood of spars, galleys, merchantmen and red-eyed towers, at anchor in the basin of Saardsinmey. The activity of the docks seemed also in suspension, or disarray. In one of the huge careening bays, Chacor’s keen sight made out men standing on the sides of a landed ship, pointing, or seeming to wrestle with each other in fear. Something was decidedly burning, but it was not a vessel. It was the sea itself.
(You heard, blue fire sometimes lit on the southwestern oceans. At sea, on the passage to the Second Continent, the phenomenon was often spotted. They called it Rorn’s Borderings, the fringes of his mantle, harmless, auspicious even.)
But if this was anything of Rorn’s it was not convivial to see.
It began just outside the harbor, inside the mouth of the bay, band on band of searing, restless flame, where there should have been only liquid. Now and then, out of the flame, a streamer or ray shot into the sky. This happened as Chacor elbowed a place at the palisade. There were cries of dismay. A big fat man nearby, well-dressed, and with a flower he had forgotten to hold to his nose, said, “I tell you, it’s an oil-spillage. Some skimmer’s messed on the sea, and it’s caught a spark.” But no one agreed with him, nor did he seemed convinced.
Then there was another cry. “Look! There it comes again!”
And all the crowd put round its collective head, Chacor’s with it. After a moment, he made out two more of the ghostly fireballs flowing across the market. One burst with a sudden implosion, the other vanished into an alleyway.
Thunder rumbled over the sea. Annoyed at the water’s antics, heaven was brewing a tempest. The sea began to shine upward on to heaving masses in the air. Lightning, blue or reddish, speared through, broke like an egg, and sizzled down the clouds.
A man beside Chacor said to him, brother in unease, “I know what I think. That Amanackire woman. She or her kind, they’ve sent it, a threat of revenge. Well, it stands to reason. They hate us and we hate them, with their white skins and their stinking snakes. Whoever killed her, no one’s sorry. She won’t rest quiet till—”
“The Amanackire,” said Chacor. “Did you say—?”
“—And they’ll bury her tonight. Have to be quick in this heat. But that won’t help any.”
“You said she died?”
But the man was moving off with his message of doom. The whole crowd, wanting to get away now from the evil spectacle in the bay, to seek advice or consolation, was pushing itself in all directions. A pale red moon stood vaguely gleaming on the horizon, but the moon had not risen yet.
Chacor had a vision of a girl’s white face, veiled in silver hair. A silver hand that lay on his shoulder. He was stirring amid some dark that seemed to be inside him. Like a great clock, the essence was dripping out of him, the water level sinking down, and when the weights grounded, the time he would tell would be his death. But the silver hand sent through him a rush of light, and the machinery of life shuddered. The levels gaped wide, and refilled themselves. He rose on the tide, as if the hand drew him, blood drumming, pulses racing—even his loins had answered—and his eyes, from which tears had coursed.
Chacor fell against the palisade. The air flickered and needled. He was not the only one on the verge of fainting—
He knew, now. And knowing, could not return to ignorance.
He had been as close to death as his fingers were to the wooden post he gripped. But she had healed him. The Amanackire. Ah—did they not worship the goddess, too, if wrongly? From the chasm of darkness, she had led him forth. And, while he lay on the girls of the whore-house, proving his life, his guide had herself been cast into the pit of endless night. Poisoned, it seemed, for others were talking of it now, murder and Lowland vengeance.
Chacor worked the iron spike atop the post into his palm, until the pain pulled him together.
As he straightened, the phantom moon went out over the blazing sea.
The Shalian temple stood below Tomb Street, in a grove of cibba trees. Its doors were made of cibba, too, highly polished and inlaid with gilded bronze. The rest was stone, dark, after the habit of Lowland temples, but faced with tawny and white marbles. Though not large it was a costly building, nor easy of entry. Even the colored glass in the high altar-window had a frame of black iron. It showed a bloody cumulus roped and tied by a golden serpent, on a purple base, a motif similar to one of the Lowlander-Dortharian sigils, after Raldnor’s sons had come to power.
In the beginning there had been several Shalian fanes in the city, to cater to the several Shansarians. Once Alisaar divided and the south became New, and Vis, only this one place remained, getting its sustenance from Sh’alis, now and then with a slogan scrawled on its marble overnight.
No one was scrawling any now. The discreet convoy sent by the Guardian had come earlier, ten crack guards armed to the ears, a captain, the body in a closed long-litter of the sort awarded the sick, or pregnant women. Thereafter the temple glowed with lights. The birds who nested in the cibba trees might have been forgiven for thinking dawn had come back, but it was the strange glare from the sea which had disturbed them. They had shrieked rather than chirruped, and lifted in a swarm. Most of the birds in Saardsinmey had behaved likewise, it was said. While the populace itself had gone down to the docks to inspect the show. Some were pleased with it. Generally they sought their own altars, where they were now offering and praying.
It was possible to observe the ocean from Tomb Street itself, but not the bay, which the spired bulk of the city hid from view. Along with the glare of mirrored incendiaries, the storm was raging there. No rain fell. And hardly any noise of thunder reached the temple. The air itself seemed dense as water. Only lightnings cleaved through it.
The thoroughbred the guard captain had ridden was restless. The zeebas of his men kicked and shied. The men themselves scratched, sneezed, shuffled.
The Shalian priests, not one of them a Shansarian but all mixes, seemed impervious to the electric tension of the night, and the affair at hand. They saw to the body in a back room. The written instructions she had left had been specific. She had requested only to be tidied. Though refusing fire, she wanted, naturally, no Vis embalming, no sprinkling or perfumes of flowers. No costume save the dress in which she had died. Death would see to her. It was the will of Anackire. And by those words, if by nothing else, she ensured cooperation.