Then, Rorn came up from the depths.
He had no form, as in the myths he did. No, he was only water. It piled up on itself, scaling into the sky until the sky was gone. It hid the mountain even, and the mountain’s fiery light. The world turned black. Yet the water glowed. It gleamed like bales of silk, up there, stretching to the roof of eternity.
In wonder, the girl had stopped crying. To cry had no meaning.
One moment the ocean was a glittering sheet on its side, distant, unbelievable, and real, and then you saw, too, the curling creamy head of it, pleating over, the breaker, two hundred feet high—
It looked utterly gentle, so smooth now was its passage. And gently, tenderly, it smoothed down the granite palisade of the harbor, the last fifty-foot standing stones. As it came, it drew up the galleys and the merchantmen, the turrets, the basalt slipway itself, in one cupped hand skillful and sure as a mother’s—
Tarla saw all things, whole or in portions, gathered to the sky. The needles of a fine spray pierced her face. The breath of Rorn rushed in her mouth, her lungs, as she opened them to call aloud. Then countless tons of water, the tidal wave, combed in across the shore, the street, the city, and her little protest, and silenced every one.
When the ground moved, men fell down as at a magician’s mantra in some theatrical comedy. When the ground moved a second time, they fell a second time. Here and there a tree uprooted, leaving behind a perfect impression in the soil. Stones shook out of tombsides, and fifty feet away a lamped statue was smashed in bits, and set the shrubbery in flames.
Farther off, the city had fared much worse. A smother of particles and smokes hazed up from it directly, obscuring and heightening the chaos. Otherwise only noise came out. It rumbled and moaned, and bells jangled—there was a long bass roaring that did not properly end, but seemed to go round and round in circles in the hollow shell of the earth.
Then the gout of bloody matter exploded like a lanced abcess on the horizon of the sea.
As the world flashed red, then darkened to a reborn night, having the clue, even those who had begun to flounder down toward the mass of the ravaged city—checked.
Not one of them had said a coherent sentence all this while. With blasphemies and oaths, pleas and wordless expletives, or total silence, so they had greeted the advent. The Shalian priests, who had scrambled out of the tomb for fear it would come down on them, had done no better than the unenlightened soldiery, the cursing stone-worshiper from Corhl, the Lydian Swordsman fighting, as he usually fought for life, without comment.
Panduv’s black tomb, abandoned, had nevertheless withstood both shocks. The quake, spreading from the hell-mouth in the ocean, was lessened here. It had been their fate to survive.
“There’re snakes in the sky,” said one of the soldiers, softly.
Then they could no longer see them. Something had risen, between the dust-pall of the land and the spasms of the volcano.
They could not make out what it was, this interruption. A couple asked each other. One man said, “I’ve heard of that—it’s water—it’s the sea—” And then he screamed and turned and ran away up the street of the dead, stumbling on the upraised paving, clawing through the shattered trees.
The rest stood quietly, looking out toward the curious, shimmering entity that was a wall of water taller than the tallest spire of Saardsinmey.
Chacor said, softly as the other man, “What does it do?”
“Nothing can stop it,” said the captain. “Look, it’s coming inland.”
“But the city—” said another of the soldiers. He added, very low, as if ashamed to tell the secret, “My son’s there. And my mother. If she got down into the cellar in time, do you think—No. It’ll flood the cellars. It’ll break everything above and fill up everything below. No. That can’t be. Rorn’s stinking guts, it can’t be.”
Some of the men began to murmur, solemnly, couthly. They stood on, looking out toward death, straight-shouldered, praying. The priests of Ashara were voiceless beside them. They waited also, trying, it would seem, to be faithful to the precepts of Shansar and Lowlander alike: Die well, live forever.
The sound of the water began to come, now. It was like a deep hoarse sigh. All other noise was lost in it, as everything would be lost.
The Lydian spoke-behind them.
“There’s the tomb. It’s solid, and the water has to push uphill, here. A chance.”
They turned, not all of them, and gazed at him, surprised he thought to refuse the gods. Chacor said, “He’s right. Move, you—” He shoved at the two men next to him. Suddenly the whole group was struggling back to the tomb, the priests coming after.
They got through the tangled aloes. No one properly paused on the threshold. A man hesitated to call after the fellow who had run away, but he was out of sight and did not answer, and the sound of the sea now was very raw and strong.
The last man in, they put muscle to the stone door and thrust it along the runner, closing it fast. Though mysteriously equipped for it, it would be more difficult to open from within. But maybe they would never need to try.
The mausoleum was an oval, divided into an outer and inner place. The priests’ torches flowed through ornate carvings, leaves and leopards and laughing moons, which sprawled all about the walls, seeming a sheer insanity at this minute.
Beyond a doorway, the inner tomb held shadows. They did not need to enter it. It was this, the antechamber, farthest from the wave, and doubly fenced by walls of stone, which would be the most secure. Nevertheless, the nervous torches spilled into the shadow. There were glimpses of something pale lying on its dais, another madness which they saw and did not see, comprehended and had no time for—
The ground was shaking once again, and fine dark powders sifted down. The noise of the enormous wave had altered to a steady howl—
They heard, through the surge, Rorn’s feet upon the hill—
If they noticed each other, or remembered their families or their gods, not one now who displayed it. Each man stood before death, as before death men, though mown down in millions, have always stood, companionless and lonely.
The torches dipped. Night gaped. Thunder. The wheels of giants bore up on them.
Then, shrieking, the water came.
Rehger thought, I forgot her warning. She was speakings then, of this. If she knew what she spoke of, that night she cried. And her death brought me here. Not to die. This isnt the unstoppable sword, the broken spine of the chariot’s flight. No glory in this, Katemval. And Amreky where is he? Under what slide of rock and turfy on the plain of Koramvis, listening in your envy to the footfall of men above—
He half reckoned she whispered to him, the dead girl with the gauze veil across her face, but he could not hear her.
His mother put into his hand a fruit. “Eat, before he sees.”
He was riding the dog Blackness, and the crowd cheered. The cheering clove through the stones. The fruit tasted of salt water.
10
Dispossessed
Terror, fire, water, and darkness, had bestridden the world. After a short century of obscurity, of thunders and chumings, and a great sweeping away, a slow, uncanny light began to come. And a silence thick as deafness, with, inside itself, the same inexplicable sounds that deafness knows—sudden long whistling notes, sudden inner boomings, a sharp snap like parting bone, a leaden pulse, a rushing sigh—
Miles out, the Aarl-mouth, the volcano, glowed a dark deep red. The huge column of its smoke seemed to stand quite still, though far overhead the cloud had opened into a parasol, magenta in color, and now and then chalked with dim reflected fire. Somewhere, in some other country, the sun had risen; it was noon. The sky here was that of an eternal sunset, all the somber crimsons, thin russets, heavy purples of decay. The sea looked nearly black, but for the streaks on it of the mountain’s sinking lamp.