“You Zakor sow, don’t mark my face with your talons—” Just then, with a shudder, the column jarred to a halt.
All of this had lasted less than a minute. Breathless, and in abject wrath, the actor now scrabbled over Panduv to release the hinges of the drum. After some difficulty, he succeeded, and crawled out into the darkened theater. Something crunched under his knee. With undeductive surprise, he realized it was the piece of a lamp which seemed to have come down from the ceiling. Perhaps the column had struck it in the air.
Then, and only then, it came to him the atmosphere was full of a thick abrasive dust. He began to cough, cursing the damage to his voice. As he did so, the second revelation occurred, and on its heels, another. There was a most bizarre music playing in the city beyond the theater courts. It had elements of pipes possibly, a wild wailing song. More than ten thousand throats seemed to make it up. Instinct caused him to glance overhead. He saw, through the cloud of ocher, something flash and flicker in the roof. It was lightning. The roof had become sky—
“Oh, Panduv—” he said, his tone inadvertently laced with high tragedy, for once genuine.
Then there came a groaning boom. It passed through the ground beneath and the open sky above. The world started again to vibrate. The actor sprawled on his face.
Panduv, in her turn, had been listening to the music in Saardsinmey. It had held her spellbound on her belly, shrinking, immobile. And now, while she lay there still and the earth quaked and thundered a second time, her companion’s desperate feet spasmodically kicked shut the partitions of the column. As all the tiers of the theater lifted slowly from their beds, and glided down on the stage.
In Velva’s tiny cubicle at the inn on Five Mile Street, there was space only for a bed, a slender cabinet, a mirror of bronze upon the wall. No space at all for the earthquake.
Most of the inn had collapsed into the street and surrounding yards. The wing which housed the tavern slaves and girls, only one story high and tucked into rising ground, had largely survived both shocks. But internally it was a shambles, and full of the electrifying sawing wailing sound that now seemed to hang densely on the city as the dust.
Velva had not been sleeping. The deed of the previous morning, the gossip-borne news of its accomplishment, had held her ever since in a kind of paralysis. She performed her tasks in an orderly way, but when the night’s service was over, coming into the cubicle, she lay down fully-clothed, straight as a rod, her hands clasped across her waist—the position of one buried.
Neither dread of accusation, nor remorse, had affected her. She had felt herself to be merely an instrument of some great will. Maybe it was in itself this epic picture of the murder that now wrung her out. For sure, she had no thought of elemental punishment. When the earth tilted, throwing her from the bed, and from her apathy, she was only terrified, nothing more.
The first shock tore through the world. And passed. Perhaps thirty seconds elapsed, filled by crashings and subsidences, the human hymn of pain and fear. The aftershock, in itself far less, but needing solely to strum the weakened structures of the city to bring them down, seemed if anything stronger than the first. That too passed.
A beam had dropped from the ceiling and smashed the bed. Had Velva not been ejected, it would have crushed her. But she had no fancy either she had been spared.
The boy had run away. That was not amazing. But he would not have expected it of Rehger. Was the boy Rehger? Rehger was a man, now—Katemval lay on rubble of the Jewel Steps and brooded on these things. Then, his eyes wandering, he saw after all the boy who was not Rehger had also not deserted him. A cascade of stones from a nearby house, covering the steps, had killed him outright. This brought Katemval an instant of extreme grief. Then, his consciousness moving inevitably outward, he realized such motives for sorrow were everywhere around.
Katemval crawled to his knees, and wrapped the edge of his mantle over his lower face, against the smother of stone dust and plaster. He stared in a sort of emotionless acceptance, finding that he could now look out to sea from Jewel Steps, for every wall and building in between seemed to have collapsed.
The dawn was coming, too, carelessly out of the east. It burnished the whirling pillars of the dust, revealing or suggesting distances. Here and there, like lamps underwater, fires had broken out and were burning, attractive sweet colors through the murk, rosy, and soft white—The whole city, on one breath, seemed to scream.
Katemval felt anger then. He looked at the sky, the ghostly sketch of sea. He might have spoken against the gods. But the ground began to shake again. The thundering rumble came from far away, pouring toward him. And like a beaten dog he cowered before the stick.
Then a god rose in front of him, a scarlet blazing tower. Or it was the misplaced sun exploding as it was hurled up from the southern sea, eight miles away, had he known it, turning the sky to blood.
The sea in its sequins had gone this time two miles out. It had run from Saardsinmey as if itself afraid of the quaking of the earth. The water left the ribbed mud behind it, shining still, littered with thrashing sea-life and the slovenly nets of weeds.
The ships in the harbor basin, dashed and buffeted by the rocking of the world, several alight, were now grounded, ineffectual as huge toys.
Of those people still alive in the vicinity, few paid heed to the sea’s escape.
It had waited out its while, a thousand years perhaps, the thing under the ocean. Once or twice, playfully, it had turned in its sleep, and the coasts of Alisaar trembled. Nothing sleeps forever. Feeling its quickening upon it, it woke, and lifted itself into the darkness of the day.
There came then the bellowing crack of doom. Those who could, craning in horror toward it, saw this:
A funnel of brilliant white, a hammerhead of blackness. Then red, red for New Alisaar, the red of roses and fire and blood, bursting, hitting heaven, streaming down.
The landmass seemed lit by it, end to end. The sky recoiled. All hint of sunrise was put out.
Black and red the turmoil now, and through the upsurge, silver snakes that twisted, wreathing the stormclouds, clutching, strangling them, never letting them go.
The submarine volcano, brother or child of countless others located far from shore, south and west, the mountains of fire which had given those oceans their legends of Helclass="underline" Its frenzy was flame against flame, so the water, running into it, was gulped and burned away. Steam and magma, liquid rock, salt and boiling smoke, gushed a quarter of a mile into the atmosphere. The volcano raped the sky. The sea churned, caught between waves of moving earth and fire. The sea fell in upon itself, and, repulsed by the phallus of Aarl, turned back for land.
Sixteen years of age, Tarla, her clothes torn, her face freshly painted with dirt, sobbing, framed in the upper window of a room that had no longer any actual walls; Tarla with dead women heaped around her on the cushions and the wreckage, saw—across the flattened chaos of ten thoroughfares, a market, a descending terrace that finished in midair—saw Rorn come out of the sea. Or thought she did.
The towering fire-cloud with its lightning coils of white serpents coming and going, that made no sense to her. Nor had the earthquake done so. It was a nightmare, although she could not surface from it. Only an hour ago, she had been arguing for the hopes of a hypothetical embryo, lodged in her womb by some Corhlan wanderer—Now, those ideas had vanished. She clung to the window-shape. She sobbed, and the red sky heaved and fissured.