He had long since made his own offering to Corrah, precious oil and wine. Blood sacrifice was not the vogue in Moih for any of the gods, except at certain seasons when the carcasses were immediately portioned and distributed to the needy. They never sacrificed to Anackire. So far as he knew they never gave her anything.
In the morning, he rode out again for the fort, soldierly and somewhat admired on the streets.
Then, in Sheep Lane, at a silversmith’s, he saw Elissi, perhaps a foot high and made of silver, standing in the shop-front.
He stopped his mount and stared. In the end, he walked into the shop. A curlicued Xarab came out at him, and Chacor, aggrieved, pointed at the statuette.
“You wish to buy?” The Xarab seemed dubious. “This isn’t cheap.”
“Who made it?”
“I see you are a connoisseur. I will be honest with you.” (Dishonesty shone radiant from his brow). “Not a master. An apprentice, but of a reputable studio, the worthy Vanek’s. Obviously a pupil of mighty promise, you will agree? Would I, indeed, accept an inferior cast?”
A strange suspicion made Chacor say slowly, “An Alisaarian.”
“So I am led to believe. From that tragic city torn by the hell mountain last year.”
Looking more closely, Chacor saw the resemblance to Elissi was fleeting. Some memory had lodged, or else the model was a girl rather like her, but only in build and style of hair.
“Very fine,” said Chacor, dazed.
He went out of the shop, nothing bought, and the Xarab bowed to him in such a way that adjacent booths began to chortle, but Chacor did not hear.
The bandit, whose other choice was an escort to Sar, elected to betray his leader’s hideout. Moiyah was reckoned lenient to criminals; she fined or imprisoned them. Xarabian-Dortharian Sar, on the other hand, tended to maim or crucify them on the terrace under the altar of the wind gods.
Of Chacor’s detachment, twenty-five men, he sent five back to the fort with their debilitated captives. The engagement, an ambush in a stony defile, Chacor had foreseen. It was not too difficult, for the terrain begged for something of the sort. The dead robbers they buried; Moih, who burned her own dead Lowlander-wise, gave specific instructions.
So far the fort had not lost a man on this expedition. The local bandit population had been decimated. Chacor was justly not displeased, and his men were positively jolly, although the Moiyans tended to crow less over killing.
The fort meanwhile was now some days behind them. The mission had sent them northeastward. Technically they were out of Moih, on the map of the Plains, and that evening they made camp on a low eminence with a view of the Xarabian border. The hideaway should be a task for the morning, but Chacor fancied a night attack, which he was keeping from any of the bandit king’s spies who might be about.
As the cook-fires sent up lazy smoke, Chacor’s scout noticed a movement three miles off, over the barren folds of landscape. The sun-blushed dust was skirling there, intermittently, but only in one generalized spot.
“Dust devils?” said Chacor, who was not yet properly used to the Plains.
“No sir. Not really late enough in the year. Not enough dust.”
“You joke with me,” said Chacor. Like the scout, he was powdered head to foot.
The scout grinned. “Unless I have it wrong, sir, that’s the Dragon Gate smack against the border, where that dust dance is.”
Chacor had seen the Gate several times by now, going up and down to and from Sar. It gave him an eerie sensation that caused him to invoke Corrah, but that was all. He said, they had better go and see, put the camp on dignified alert not to excite possible watchers, and with three men galloped off northward, with the sun in a sinking rage on the left hand.
As he rode along then, Chacor came to feel that there was something uncanny about the evening. It was nothing he could put a hand on—maybe only the red sideways light, the success of the jaunt, the little command he now had going to his head, in the warrior fellowship of fighting shoulder to shoulder. Or maybe it was something in the weather. They had been hearing of summer hail and flash-floods farther north, and that a series of earth tremors in Dorthar, where they had become a triviality and were mostly ignored, had nonetheless created enough damage to send the population to its temples. Yet, he was not uneasy, merely sensitized. Even if the moving dust were a ploy of the bandit lord’s—which he doubted—four armed men, mailed, on cavalry zeebas, would be a match for it.
As they crossed the last mile, and the dim shape of the pillars of the Gate came visible like ghosts through the dust, Chacor’s skin prickled. It was the sensation a Lowlander would have called flatly Anackire—their label it seemed to him for any random otherness.
Then he heard the shouting. It was human, both irate and desperate. And then, the long-drawn, gut-twisting screech of tirr.
Two of the three men he had brought along were expert javelineers. As he gave them the word, they were already reaching, ready.
They sprinted through the dust.
It was almost a tableau. A slope with boulders and a stand of sunburnt trees. A wagon with empty shafts, now and then slipping and bucking on the slope, hitting the dust up in spouts. Two men were on the wagon, trying to hold it, and at the same moment whirling a staff apiece—torches, smoking and invisibly flaring in the sunset. Six tirr crouching, mauling the wagon sides. Abruptly one beast, two, springing, meeting fire and slewing aside.
“Anack!” swore the mix javelineer.
No one waited. Next instant two of the tirr were pinned by iron. A third spun and came at them. Chacor kicked his zeeba, leaned forward and rode straight at the tirr, seeing only the death-ripe claws, the red coins of the eyes, swerving, and his sword coming edgeways down across the mangey neck. The beast collapsed and he jerked his mount away from the death throe and the talons—Looked up and saw a third javelin had done its work, and the third man had another tirr on its back, not yet risking pulling out his sword. That one was a female with sallow furrowed nipples—she had been suckling young not long before.
The last of the creatures crouched hesitating, vicious, unnerved. Once you had hunted them, you knew they were inclined more to kill than to preserve themselves. Gaining some fluke of escape, often they would not take it if they might inflict another wound.
Full grown men seldom survived a single scratch, unless cauterized within five minutes. A slender woman or a child—it was hopeless.
Chacor sat there staring into the red eyes. The hiatus was unnatural. Were they considering, he and his men, they would spare the brute?
Suddenly Chacor was thinking of a name. It was the name by which Rehger had called his lover, the Amanackire—Aztira. This had a likeness to the other name—tirr. The notion was irrelevant, disquieting.
“Finish!” Chacor shouted.
A fourth javelin went over. The tirr seemed to leap snapping toward it, to embrace it, and fell back heavily, stone dead. One of the other tirr was still spasming. You could not dare go and put it out of its misery even, that was too chancy.
The two men from the wagon had stopped making a noise and lowered their torches. One, a Xarabian, jumping down, with help from the mix soldier shoved stones under the wheels.
The other man, not Xarabian, but Vis-dark (and Plains dusty), had also swung down.
“Soldiers from the Moih fort, aren’t you?”
“Our respects,” said Chacor.
“Well, sergeant, you’ve saved our chops this evening. But we deserved it. What a day we’ve had. First we were robbed—hence our lack of zeebas or any knives, not to mention my employer’s irreplaceable samples—then attacked by tirr. Your sublime goddess must have sent you to our aid.”
The goddess Corrah, thought Chacor resolutely. But he inclined his head. His men were occupied with carcasses. The one kicking tirr was now lifeless. Chacor dismounted. He went over to the man, and saw he was very tall, and in earliest middle-age, which his agility and energy had perhaps belied. The flaming sky was behind him, then as he, too, came forward, holding out a commodious hand, Chacor received a shock. The man off the wagon was Rehger. Rehger in twenty years’ time.