30 Million Years From Now

Eartherea has engulfed the Earth we knew.

One side faces only the Goddess Sun, burning into desert waste. Over the other side, the roving chariot of the jade Moon God rules unending Night. Only in twilight may life endure. Into the far North, where Elna chased and caged the warlike barbarians centuries ago, came the stranger, Ara-Karn. He was a renegade Southron, some said; others claimed he was the returned ghost of a long-dead King; others said he was an avenging demon.

Ara-Karn drew the tribes into his hand. Half the world he conquered, even Tarendahardil herself, the City Over the World. Only its black citadel yet defied him. Only the Golden Queen, Elna’s last descendant, would not yield to his advances.

Ampeánor, last Charan of Rukor, battled his way across the Southern continent to reach the citadel in time. Along with him he took a captive, the barbarian general Gundoen, the only man who knew the truth of the Conqueror, and his secret weakness.

Ampeánor brought his prisoner into the citadel. And he swore that he would wring the secret from Gundoen, and reveal the truth to the Golden Queen.

Also by asotir

Fiction:

Swan’s Road

The Island of Lost Women

Return to the Island of Lost Women

The Killing Sword

Crawlspace

Siren of Creepland

Blood by Moonlight

The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn:

1. The Former King

2. The Divine Queen

3. The Iron Gate

4. Darkbridge

Nonfiction:

Movie Letters, Winter 2009

Darkbridge

Canto Four of

The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn
§
by Adam Corby
& asotir

Copyright © 2009 by A. Adam Corby

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to
Creative Commons
171 Second Street, Suite 300
San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Contents

I. The Blood-Offering of Gundoen
II. Of the Tribes at Tarendahardil
III. Disgrace
IV. War
V. The Summons
VI. Glory
VII. Defeat
VIII. The Black Tent
IX. Freedom
X. The Dark Lands
XI. The Ancient Path
XII. The World Beyond
XIII. The Lady of the Sword
XIV. Refuge
XV. The Passing of the Queen
XVI. The Last Assembly
XVII. Whispers
XVIII. In Darkness
XIX. The Final Flight
XX. Judgment
Epilogue

Prologue:
The Song Sung Every Waking

IN THE MIDST of the haunted walls of High Town the ash-strewn streets resounded with the clattering of barbarian warriors riding down again to their camp; then silence crept back among the stones. It was a silence rendered only more profound by the light rain and the vague movements of a few dogs and rats. High above them the Brown Temple of Goddess seemed to preside over the scene, rising dark and undamaged against the sky like an outlined hill that had watched unmoved the turmoil of the ages.

Within the Temple’s gold-chased marble walls the echoes of a strange chanting might be heard. It was a low, slow chant, a chant of slumberous, seductive beauty. The voices of the chant shuddered as they sang, like flames held out in a stiff, sullen wind.

Let no one aid him, let all revile him and relish his pain.

Let him die in darkness alone and senseless.

Let nothing of him survive, O Lady. Nothing, not even the memory of his name.

Let his blood boil and his flesh scab, let his bones rot and fail him. Let the one he loves most strike the blow. O Goddess, hear our words!

O Goddess, O Dear One, O Lady Unequaled, grant us the strength to accomplish your will. Our hearts and bodies await you. Fill us with your fire. Let us be the flame of your anger, that scars and burns and blackens life to cinders. He has slain, he has destroyed, he has ravaged and burned. Now let him be burned!

Bare-footed, garbed hair to ankles in robes of black, their faces hidden behind golden masks worked by antique ways into the likeness of Goddess, even as their foregoers had done through all the centuries before them since the building of the Temple, the last half-score of holy virgin priestesses sang in a half-circle before the ancient altar.

When the barbarians had first overrun High Town, a few had entered these chambers. In the midst of their plundering the barbarians had discovered on the stone bench before the fire and high idol the broken, naked corpse of an aged woman. They had looked upon the corpse uneasily, thinking of the Gray Priestess: fear took them, they dropped their sacks of loot and fled.

Later, disturbed by certain strange reports, the chieftains had set men to watch in the Temple. These warriors found the high stone shelves of offerings restored to their former order. The chambers were empty of life, but the floors had been swept and the sacred fire still burned before the idol. There was no sign of the old woman’s corpse. The warriors made jokes and sat down to await whoever came, but they did not touch the offerings. When these men never returned to camp, no others might be ordered to follow them. So the Brown Temple was let be, and the dreaded armies of Ara-Karn rode wide of it on the far side of the square.

And now the last ten priestesses broke their half-circle and put an end to their ritual. Each in turn bowed to touch the lips of her mask to the stone bowl of the fire. Then they passed below to the secret chambers, there to await that time when the jade orb of dark God should fall into the dark horizon.

Before, there had always been fifty of them.

Now the others of the Fifty, those who yet lived, were journeyed to the bright horizon. There the heat and glare of Goddess were things unbearable, and the sands and ledges of the unbounded Desert began. Nothing could live there but the sands dancing in whirlwinds, driven mad by the nearness of Her. Beyond the shores of the Desert some rocks rose up in a high island out of the waves of sand. There were deep caves in the rocks, and even water. And there the priestesses of all the fallen cities had come to gather with their attendants.

There in that refuge beyond the lands where men dwell they had vowed to remain in prayer to await the downfall of the conqueror and the rebirth of Goddess’ cult.

The gentlewomen had learned much on the bitter road to that refuge. Already they knew how to seduce and steal and slay. Goddess guided their hands and taught them what was needful; Her bounty was generous. The older priestesses had perished, despairing of life under the hand of Ara-Karn; the younger ones remained, a different breed.

They had set about devising new rituals to maintain themselves. A new rank of priestesses had already been formed, of those who might lie with men and bring forth daughters to replenish the number of the initiates. But the male offspring were left on the heights of the rocky ledges in the light of Goddess, to suffer, dry, and die. And the few boys left alive were crippled, their leg-bones broken and bent, their hands broken and broken again, so that they could not run swiftly nor strike a blow. Nor was that a cruelty, because it had been ordered by Goddess, and the kindliness and mercy of Goddess were by-words.

So it was determined the last priestesses would refuge in the Desert until the one girl-child would be born, she who would be the Creature of Goddess. And she would lead the priestesses out from the sands and back into the green lands where men dwell, and there overthrow and extinguish the cult of Ara-Karn and restore the worship of Goddess.

* * *

When the jade orb of God fell at length into the dark horizon, nine priestesses departed the Temple. They rode the back roads of the City down to the Sea Way, to follow it unto the bright horizon and the hidden refuge. Silently and sadly the last priestess of Goddess kissed her sisters and bade them good-journeying.

She had been named Alsa, the Pointed Brightness, when she had been initiated. Some seeing her would have called her a girl, but in truth she was a girl no longer.

Alone she entered again the high hollow chamber of the altar. It would be her task to tend the sacred fire and await the coming of the Empress Allissál, the Body of Goddess. Those who still hid in the City would continue to support her with food and whatever else she wished. And perhaps it would not be long before the Divine One would appear, and Alsa’s wait would end. Then she could lead the earthly incarnation of Goddess away to the secret refuge, there to lead her priestesses in worship and in vengeance.

Laying her young body on the worn stones before the altar, Alsa prayed that it might be soon. Then she raised her golden face and bent her body back, sitting on her heels, and she raised her dark-swathed arms, and began again the song. Her voice resounded weirdly from beneath the golden, ancient mask and off the bloodstained walls.

O Goddess, O Dear One, O Lady Unequaled, hear me, hear my words. The Man has come and defiled your temples and ravished those made holy in your service. He has struck down your altars and reft you of offerings. Strike him, and reave him of life in return.

Let no one aid him, let all revile him and delight in his pain.

Let him die in darkness alone and senseless.

Let nothing of him survive, O Lady. Nothing, not even the memory of his name.

Let his blood boil and his flesh scab, let his bones bend and hurt him. Let the one he loves most strike the blow. O Goddess, hear my words!

Darkbridge

I
The Blood-Offering of Gundoen

‘HE IS TOO STRONG for that,’ Ampeánor said. ‘You saw him on the Iron Gate. Death is a thing he is half in love with.’

Allissál turned back to face him. Around the edges of the round roof of the White Tower, it was as if the world were far away. The winds were stronger and colder here, and the shrunken sunlit fields about the dead city mute and moveless. It was the second pass after Ampeánor’s return.

‘Are we now no better than the barbarians?’ she asked. She went to the support-pillar of the Disk of Goddess, and looked North toward Rukor.

There were four of them there: the Queen, Berowne, the Gerso and Ampeánor. Ampeánor had bathed, shaved and groomed as befit a lord of his stature, so that he was now as handsome as he had been when he had left.

‘I tell you my Queen, it is the only way.’

‘The only way,’ she repeated to the city below. ‘Why it is it then, my lord, that you do not say that regretfully?’

‘Who is the enemy we must fight?’ he asked. ‘We do not fight mere armies – if that were so, our League would have triumphed at Egland Downs. We fight a man – a name – a legend – a word. Against that, only another word of equal power can avail.

‘Once I too thought of Ara-Karn as a man. Then I went into his camp. His tents were empty, and yet his armies rolled on! He has not walked among them for two years, but his myth drives them and defeats us. The truth, and only the truth, will take the power from this man – this word. Let his armies see him for what he truly is, and Ara-Karn’s power will fade like cloud-shade in the wind. And who knows the truth? Only this one man, this Gundoen. That is his great value. Holding him, we hold the balance in the war. And now by dark God he will tell us the truth of Ara-Karn!’

‘He will not tell you,’ she said.

‘He will.’ The face of Ampeánor was scarred with eagerness; he moved about the small roof as if he might scarcely hold himself in. ‘I will make him.’

‘And who will you find to perform it?’ she asked scornfully. ‘Will you ask honest guardsmen? Captain Berowne, would you do this thing?’

Berowne looked back and forth between his lord and his Queen. ‘I am a soldier, your reverence,’ he said at length. ‘I will do as you command. Still, this is not a thing I would do willingly or well.’

‘You see,’ Allissál said. ‘Or will you choose out some poor folk from the Tarendahardilites to do it? – Or better yet, put your orders to slaves?’

‘If need be,’ said Ampeánor, ‘I would do it with my own hands.’

She turned again to look at him. For a space it was silent there, save for the whipping of their cloaks and garments in the cold winds.

‘I would remind you, my lord, that we stand here in the presence of the gods.’

‘Then I will swear before the Couple, that I would do the thing, and gladly!’

She shook her head. ‘Was it for this that I awaited your return throughout this long year? In all the time since you left on that mad quest, would not let them perform the rites of the dead for you. I was sure that you lived and would return. And now, after all this time, I find that I was wrong. You have returned, but you are not Ampeánor. I wish you had never come alive from Tezmon.’

‘Tezmon!’ The word was an oath torn from his lips. ‘Yes, Tezmon was the start of this! For it was in Tezmon I first saw the true nature of the masks and pretty shadows you are pleased to call our civilization. Are the tales of Arstomenes and his end true? If that is what it is to be one with the brightness of Goddess, then I renounce it and take up God’s banner instead! Let them call me what they will, but I will have the strength of heart to dare to do what must be done! – And you, Gerso, what is it that makes your foul lips grin so?’

Ennius Kandi’s face also was pale, his eyes narrow as he faced into the winds and Goddess. Dangerous lights played in those slitted green eyes, and the smile that twisted back his lips was hardly pleasant. ‘It was only that you spoke of what must be done, my lord, while I speak ever of what I will do.’

‘Enough! Enough!’ Allissál found she could stomach no more. ‘Go then and do this thing, Ampeánor, since you will not be denied. We cannot stop you – go then and do it, but let us hear of it no more!’

‘I am afraid, my Queen, that that will not be enough.’ His voice was calmer now; a rigor had taken it. He no longer spoke as if to win the hearts of friends, but as if to subdue enemies to his will. ‘You must yourself assent to this.’

‘That I will never do.’

‘You must. You are the Divine Queen, the last of the Imperial house, the final survivor of the Bordakasha. I am but your servant. I will not have it said, when this is done and you have reaped the profit of it, that I came to be your consort by force. We stood before the altar in the Brown Temple and announced our intentions – in the eyes of the world we are husband and wife already. Mine be the strength and lance, yours the heart and grace. You shall grant that this be done, and set your seal and signs to parchment for it. And more,’ he added, stepping toward her a pace, ‘and more, you shall sit above the pit with all your maidens, and watch what I shall order. With your own ears you shall hear the barbarian: for he may speak some truths that you will little like to learn.’

There was a wildness in his eyes, and something brutal about the lips and nostrils of the High Charan. Even his ears up-pricked in the winds, like those of some animal. He stood by the support-pillar of the Disk, and she backed to the rim of the roof, over a fall of two hundred fathoms and more.

Then she drew herself up before him. ‘My lord,’ she said, ‘I begin to believe I never knew you.’

‘We all learn unpleasant things, from time to time, about the ones we thought we knew.’

‘I think you might truly do this thing.’

‘I will do it. You will watch me do it. We will learn the truth about Ara-Karn, and this barbarian will give us the knowledge.’

‘That,’ she said, ‘will be for Charan Kandi to decide.’

‘I, your majesty?’

She turned to him, and fled from Ampeánor’s side. ‘You were born among the barbarians, if what you have told me is indeed the truth,’ she said. ‘You shall decide this, as you have decided all else. Is this secret of which Ampeánor speaks so valuable that it would be worth the payment of so great a price?’

‘Yes, Gerso,’ Ampeánor said. ‘Speak, enlighten us! You also shall agree to it – you also shall attend us!’

Slowly, the dark man brought his eyes to bear upon the lord of Rukor. Slowly he shook his head. In those black-green eyes of his an immense, gloomy amusement seemed to dwell.

‘My lord,’ he said, ‘a year and a half ago, in late spring, we two stood on a beach in Rukor, and at that time you swore to me, upon all the honor of your house, that you owed me a life. Then you said that I might come to you at any time and claim it of you, no matter what the circumstances.’

‘Do you dare mention that to me, Gerso, after what I saw among the charts in the tent of Ara-Karn? I vowed you a life, and grant you one; but Gerso, the life I grant you is your own.’

‘It seems you must choose, my lord,’ the Queen said. ‘Or do you know some reason why this barbarian need not undergo this thing?’

‘And your majesty will be bound by my decision?’ he asked softly.

‘So would we all be bound,’ she answered: ‘Captain Berowne, the High Charan, you, myself – and Gundoen.’

‘And if I say yes, you would go below and watch what transpires?’

‘I would watch it,’ she said.

‘I do not believe you, your majesty.’

‘If you say no,’ she answered, ‘you must give us your reason. And it must go beyond morality and pleasantness.’

He nodded. He looked into the upper reaches of the sky around them. High above, the orb of God ran toward the dark horizon. The Charan Ennius Kandi raised his hand, like a spade’s tongue against the sky. ‘And if I hold it thus,’ he said mournfully, ‘I can set it beside dark God as if I held Him in my palm. But not for all that could I halt the running of this pass. Let it be done.’

‘Ha!’ barked Ampeánor, twisting about the roof. ‘At last, this reaches an end!’

Allissál did not stir. She gazed at the Gerso, her robes rippling against her body.

‘I warned you once, your majesty,’ Ennius Kandi said, almost gently, ‘of what might come out of the doings of the Pass of God.’

* * *

Ampeánor walked through corridors giving onto the chambers of the last of Tarendahardil’s nobles.

Each province held its own story suitably ornamented and maintained. Ampeánor walked not on the level of Rukor, but that of Vapio. The doors open on both sides revealed chambers bright with riches, lamp-flames, and the aromatic smoke of the seven dream-herbs. Men and women of many cities gathered here; one would not have known it was a scene within a stronghold under siege for more than a year.

At the end of the corridor a group clustered about a small door half-concealed by hangings in purple and gold. There was an ineffable languor about those people. They melted to either side at Ampeánor’s approach. He opened the door and passed within. The low burst of a woman’s laughter from the corridor crimsoned his ears as he closed the door.

It was a small chamber without windows, lighted by three small candles in a welter of tallow at one corner. The candle-flames turned the hangings, couches, and lounging-pillows red. Even the air, swirling and pungent with smoke, was red.

On the couches two men were garbed and painted so alike they could have been taken for twins. They greeted the lord of Rukor fulsomely, offering him the empty couch, but Ampeánor stood with his fist squirming on the hilt of his war-knife. He had come directly from the roof of the White Tower, and still wore his armor.

‘There is a man who holds a secret I want to know,’ he said. ‘He has no fear of death. I have been told to see you two.’

The men upon the couches smiled. ‘This is your prisoner, my lord?’

‘Yes.’

‘A barbarian?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me then: is he so very strong?’

‘He threw a tall man from the battlements.’

The two nodded. ‘And you desire that we … persuade him to tell you what he knows?’

‘Yes.’

‘You will let us do as we please?’

‘I must know his secret.’

Again the two nodded, well pleased. ‘Then you may leave matters in our hands, my lord. We shall be ready after the shortsleep.’

‘How much?’ he asked.

A pained expression touched the twin faces. ‘My lord, we would not dream of demanding payment for this. We will do it,’ they added, lingering over the words, ‘for the sake of our nation, and the honor of the Queen.’

‘There is another thing.’

‘What is that, my lord?’

‘I do not want him to die before he has told all I want to learn. There are more secrets than one.’

Again their pain was made apparent. ‘My lord, do you consider us barbarians? We will not so much as cripple him, though the results may not be pleasant to behold. In pleasure, after all, it is the lightest touch which most stimulates; it is the same in pain.’

Ampeánor turned to the door.

‘But my lord, why are you in such haste? Do you not wish to know how our beloved mother fares?’

‘I have no mother,’ Ampeánor said.

‘Oh! dear brother, what a way to talk!’ laughed one.

Ampeánor pushed the door shut. ‘You will never call me that again.’

* * *

In an angle between the Palace and the Black Tower, enclosed on either side and above by stone, was a small, curious yard. High walls ran between it and the courtyards before the Palace and the southern wing, forming a narrow cobbled lane that emerged in front of the stables. Above this yard the massive, arch-supported stones joined the Palace with the Black Tower: the great, rudely-hewn stones arching over it made the court seem more like a cave. The winds tore down that way always, raising a low moan.

In shape, the yard was a square. It was paved with large stones that ran deep into the earth. In between the stones deep channels had been fashioned and lined with tiles: the channels ran the length of the passage to end as bright holes in the bulwark upon the edge of the cliff. No windows or balconies gave onto this court. No doors led into the Black Tower from it. There were only two broad, low doors, at the bottom of a series of steps, giving entrance into the underground level of the Palace, by the kitchens. In the square was set a platform of big, rude blocks set fast and close to one another in the shape of a diamond. There were channels carved in these stones also, leading into the yard. The channels and the stones were stained dark brown.

Such was the butcher-stone of the Black Citadel, and the slaughtering-yard for great beasts – pigs, cattle, horses, sheep.

Now Gundoen was bound upon those stones.

Around the stone, sheltered from the wind, were several couches. Upon the couches, not reclining, sat Captain Berowne, Ennius Kandi, the High Charan of Rukor, and the Empress with some of her maidens. At the end of the lane a crowd of Tarendahardilites gazed with awe at the naked body of the captive barbarian. Below, the two doors to the kitchens had been opened: a group of slaves stood there.

The twin Vapionil were dressed in saffron robes which left their long, lovely arms bare. They both had supple wrists and long, tapering fingers, like those of aliset players. Their eyes were kohl-streaked and herb-glazed.

‘If you will pardon us, my lords and majesty,’ said one, ‘we do not know this man’s tongue. So, if one of you would be gracious enough to ask the questions, we will, after a suitable time, ensure the answers.’

‘All three of us know the barbarian’s tongue,’ said Ampeánor, ‘but you, Gerso, are most at home in it. You will conduct the interview.’

Ennius Kandi looked at the Charan of Rukor. His eyes were like green fire in that light. Within their glints there might be read a secret, unshakable promise. ‘Certainly, my lord. What is it you wish to learn?’

‘Begin by asking him where Ara-Karn is now, and whether he is alive or dead. You might also ask him whether the barbarians have ever sent any spies into Tarendahardil.’

The supposed Gerso glanced at the Queen. Flanked by her maidens, she sat stiff and wide-eyed like some fine mare standing in the pen while her slaughter is awaiting her. She did not look at him.

My Lady, she prayed in her heart, Let him forbid this thing even now. It is not too late for it. Let him speak – let him reveal himself as Ara-Karn – let him not condemn this man, so full of life, to be tormented and blooded like a pig.

Why does he not speak? Why does he not open his mouth and shout it to the Couple, ‘I am Ara-Karn!’

‘Very well, my lord,’ said Ennius Kandi, who was Ara-Karn.

She shuddered, so that her maidens caressed her to ease her evident pain. Why did he not speak the truth? Why didn’t she?

The secret is his, she thought. Goddess, do not blame me, for I cannot tell it. But she knew in her heart that it was a lie, and she would bear the blame in full measure.

The twin Vapionil waited, with slight, shining instruments poised in their hands above the body of the barbarian. Gundoen could not see the spectators on the couches. His gaze went only upward like an arrow to the sky.

‘Gundoen,’ called the Gerso, Ara-Karn.

‘Gundoen, can you hear? You are to be tortured, Gundoen. There is no escape for you, you will be mutilated unto death. This will be no glorious end. Be wise then, answer truthfully, spare yourself. What do you owe Ara-Karn? What gift has he ever brought to you save for war and unrest? Do you think he led you to help the tribesmen? Do you think that, were he in your place now, he would hesitate to sacrifice you?

‘You think you serve him by keeping silence; how can you be sure? Perhaps he would urge you to speak instead.’

Now, helplessly, Allissál turned her gaze upon Ara-Karn. It was his voice that drew her, a voice perfectly calm and steady. She looked at his face and saw equal control there. How can he sit there so unconcerned? How can he go on speaking as though he tells an old friend what he had done that waking?

‘Gundoen, there are goals not worth the wining. And if luck will put the wining of such goals in our grasp, should we call it our fortune or our curse? Do you think any man enjoys his madness in the end? Does Ara-Karn?

‘You would never betray him, even were he himself to ask it, even if he wished it. Now you are free of that. To speak now is no betrayal. None would blame your words. Free yourself, free your master of the prison of dark dreams.

‘I give you the sacred word of the Empress of Tarendahardil, for whom I may now speak: if you answer now, your life will be spared and your freedom assured.

‘Speak, and live to sire real sons, sons worthy of your name. Where is Ara-Karn?’

There was silence in the windy way. The maidens stirred; the Vapionil smiled to each other. Then the barbarian, Gundoen, opened his mouth.

‘This will get you more glory, O thief from Rukor, than what you did in the Eglands.’

Ampeánor jerked his hand; the Vapionil set to work. They employed instruments that seemed to have been made for such work as this. Over the barbarian’s body they set a silver mirror on a stand, very highly polished, so that the barbarian might behold what they did to his body in close detail. Gundoen did not look to the mirror, but to the sky. He held his silence, though all there could see the agony in his slitted eyes.

The silence ran on with God, broken only by the terrible clicking of the strange implements.

Perhaps an hour passed.

Allissál could not watch it. Though she forced herself at moments to behold what went on, ever her eyes of their own need fled from the man upon the stone and wandered up across the towers of her ancestor’s Palace, to the clouds shining in the happy light of Goddess.

But once she looked askance at her formal husband. Ampeánor leered, snarled, and twisted in his seat as if he watched some wrestling-bout at the arena. Somehow the sight of him was worse than that of the flayed laid-open body. But Ara-Karn sat calm and still. One hand lay in his lap, the other on the armrest of his couch. Neither moved, each lay seemingly relaxed and easy. But in the face of the stranger, Allissál could see now his control begin to crack. The subtlest signs, which no one who knew him only casually would ever find or read, betrayed him. She knew him so well, she had seen him in bed, naked, spent, sweetly relaxed, his face open and young. And she could see in the slightest flaring of his nostril, the smallest pinch of the folds about his eyes, that he was in agony, suffering more than Gundoen seemed to be.

I know him as well, she considered, as he knows me.

As if sensing her gaze, Ara-Karn looked back at her. For one endless, frightening moment, she held his gaze and could not look away any more than he could. It was as if they two were alone in her dimchamber, naked before each other, fresh from love’s abandon. But into the silence of their eyes intruded the sounds of the Vapionils’ instruments, their horrible steel scissors, clamps and probes, and those sounds seemed to taint her every taking of delight from the arms, mouth, and hands of this man.

‘Majesty,’ whispered the maiden beside her, ‘are you well?’

But Allissál could not answer. Ara-Karn’s eyes held her, and she sat naked before him, the barbarian’s blood running like a stream between them, staining their feet, staining their legs … Goddess dimmed in heaven, Allissál felt her eyelids fluttering, she leaned back blinded. Within her ribs she felt her heart knocking and galloping.

The sound of the instruments returned. She took herself in hand, clenched the couch armrest, straightened her spine, and made herself watch once more.

The Vapionil worked with growing agitation. Disbelief was in their eyes, and they proceeded somewhat farther than they would have liked, and much farther than they had intended.

Gundoen, their victim, proved stronger than their methods. He had prepared himself for it. He had known he would face this before Ampeánor ever laid eyes upon him. Hertha-Toll foretold it; and Gundoen, in spite of his scornful words, had always believed his wife. He had accepted it and gone unto it willingly. So now he bore the pain not as a victim but proudly, as if he conquered. He made of his torment a blood-offering, as victim and sacrificer both.

Distantly the cries of hunting gerlins soaring on the airs beyond the Palace could be heard, and the bell-toll to signal the changing of the guard.

All at once Gundoen grinned, and he began to laugh as if he could not help it, as if it tickled him; only the laugh ended as a scream.

It did not cease. He screamed, he screamed, he screamed.

The full power of those ox-like lungs was unleashed in that scream. The very stones of the buildings echoed with it; the onlookers hid their ears in their hands. The echo of that cry filled the Citadel and made the men on the Iron Gate doubt what they did there; then ran beyond the Iron Gate to reach the tribesmen in the square below and chill their blood to jelly.

At last the scream wore out his voice. He croaked, coughed blood and slime, and lay silent. The mouth still gaped and the open, bleeding belly bulged – but now no further sounds came forth. Then the last movements ceased. Gundoen lay still.

The Vapionil paused, uncertain.

Ampeánor said, ‘Go on. Go on. Make him tell us what he knows!’

‘No.’

Allissál stood before her couch, straight as a statue. Did I rise? When did I rise?

Fearfully one of her maidens tugged at her sleeve and muttered something; Allissál looked upon her, saw the fear welling in the girl’s young uncomprehending eyes. She inclined her head, and in a group those women of incomparable beauty rose and fled, their loras rustling against the wind.

Allissál raised one black-swathed arm. ‘This—’ She could say no more. Then a deep shudder ran up and down her body. ‘Captain Berowne,’ she said, ‘return this man to his cell, please.’

‘Yes, your reverence.’

‘Here,’ Ennius Kandi said quietly. ‘Cover him with my cloak.’

‘Yes.’

Ampeánor sat on the edge of the couch. His eyes never strayed from the huge body laid open on the slaughtering-stone.

The guardsmen cut the bonds and brought the limbs together. Berowne shrouded the body with the cloak. They wove their lances underneath to make a litter.

‘When we led him here,’ said one, ‘he came proudly, like a soldier summoned up for honors.’

It took all of them to bear the weight of the body. They carried it away through the doors below. Before them the horrified slaves melted back, shunning the evil.

Ampeánor started, as if he had been released. He stepped up onto the raised stones about the slaughtering-stone. He pressed his hand upon the wet, stinking stone. He looked on his bloodied palm. His eyes shot toward the crowd at the end of the lane.

His face was the color of ash. He turned and opened his mouth as if to speak. But the Empress and the Gerso were gone, leaving him there alone with the wind and the stone and the two Vapionil, his brothers.

II
Of the Tribes at Tarendahardil

BUT IN THAT TIME the barbarians were not idle.

They met on the dusty, windy field brightward of the city, without the piled walls of the great camp. They met with their strongest armor, their sharpest swords, their heaviest axes, their stoutest spears, their deadliest bows.

They sat in a huge fat wheel and heeded the harangues of Nam-Rog and the Circle of Chieftains. Nam-Rog spoke, and Gorn-Tal the Orn, and Kul-Dro who led the men of Gundoen’s tribe; and the greatest chiefs and champions spoke as well. Skillfully by their words they turned the last of the warriors’ weariness into hatred and the dark, bitter, need for the madness of battle. So many months they had fought there now, most of them had all but forgotten why it was they had come and what it was that kept them. Now they remembered. Gundoen had compelled them to remember.

One last thing strengthened their hearts. It was decided that this was to be their final battle here. Conquer or give back, when this was over they would turn their faces Northward and seek their homes again.

Nam-Rog stood against this, but the other chieftains demanded it, mindless of the oaths they had sworn a year earlier. So Nam-Rog at length relented, at the end of the long counsels; yet he imposed this condition, that it be an assault like none before. The army was broken into five parts: each part would do battle in its turn. There would be no respite for the Southrons on the Iron Gate. Meals would be taken and sleeps passed, and warriors would battle on. When one part of the army wearied, the next would take its place. In this way Nam-Rog assured himself that this assault could be the last, because it would surely be enough.

The warriors cast out lots for the order of battle and arrayed themselves into great, iron-bristling bodies dark upon the trampled earth.

Nam-Rog met with Erion Sedeg, he of the painted face and reddened teeth, he who had once been a seaman, but was now leader of the mercenaries, and the most zealous follower of the cult of Ara-Karn. And Nam-Rog looked over the fields of men grown out of the ground, and nodded, worry and eagerness commingled in his lined blue-eyed face; and he said, not looking at Erion Sedeg,

‘That thing we spoke about in summer, is it done?’

‘Two weeks now it has been done,’ answered Erion Sedeg. ‘Now it stands on the Sea Way where a rise of the land conceals it from the eyes of our enemies. All the roads between are cleared. I have seen to it.’

Nam-Rog nodded. ‘The warriors’ hearts now run fierce as mountain streams. Get your men and all the oxen and rope you need. When the battle is strongest and the Southrons cannot see beyond the curtains of our arrows, bring the thing and prove your worth.’

‘I will,’ the man in the robes of the tent-dwellers said darkly. ‘And then the defenders of this false and fallen Goddess will die to the last, and we will pitch on the rooftop of the Palace the black tents of our lord God.’

‘You may think so, Southron,’ the aged chief of the Durbars answered gloomily. ‘You did not see her.’

They had all of them seen her, all those who had gone up to fill the square below the Iron Gate. The Gray Priestess had shown herself to them; during the next battle, therefore, they would die. The tribesmen accepted that and steeled themselves to fight more fiercely. Among the warriors of the far North, to face certain death scornfully was the highest honor, to flee it the greatest shame. Their very fear of the unnatural forged in their breasts a greater need to hurl themselves into the fray as recklessly as bull bandars, and be done with it.

Only one city before had given them any great trouble, and that had been Postio. Thirsting and weakened, the warriors had descended from the burning sands of the Taril, and the defenders of Postio had thrown them back several times. But in the end the warriors had realized that they must win or die, and the battle-hunger had taken them all in the belly, and they had swept down on Postio and left only long ugly ditches sowed with salt where once the finest vineyards in the world had flourished.

Now a like battle-hunger took them as they gathered in their separate armies and awaited the signal.

For a year they had struggled and labored and died beneath the accursed Iron Gate.

In less time than that, they had conquered all the North.

Truly, it was enough.

They surged to their feet, armor clanking and clattering, and brandished their weapons and uttered their war-shouts. The sound filled the plain and echoed from the ruins of the city. They set themselves in order, those on horse and those on foot, with all the mercenaries behind them. It was as if in this time of year the earth had been delivered of some new, hideous harvest of steel and death numerous as the seeds of the earth; or that the dark mountain beyond the camp had been opened in a thousand wounds, and disgorged all its tens of thousands dead.

There were the Borsos, whose chief was Ven-Vin-Van of the green eyes: they were from the long plains North of the Forest of Bandars, and raised long-maned ponies, the hardiest of the far North. Once they had been a clan of the tribe of El-Sabak, but they had grown numerous and, taking many women of other tribes in a score of raids, had gone North until they found the empty plains. They were famous for their endurance, and could run as fast and as long as their ponies: they had at Tarendahardil a score times a score of warriors.

There were the Mairpongils and the Naur-Kols, once clans of the Toll-Vulkors. They dwelt in the foothills below the mountains of the Spine, and were known for crafting cunning traps to bring down game. Sur-Pal was chief over the Mairpongils, and Bel-Kor Jin led the Naur-Kols. These two were like brothers for comradeship: both were of a height and girth, and always fought side-by-bide and supported each other’s suits in the Assembly. They had exchanged blood and wedded each other’s daughter, and together they led beneath the Iron Gate a score and fifteen times a score of strong-hearted warriors, among the finest bowmen of them all.

There were the Foruns, once a clan of the Durbars. Ren-Tionan was chief over them, having gained the chieftainship after Elrikal, his father’s brother’s son, had challenged Gen-Karn upon Urnostardil’s crown and been crippled so that he had not even had strength or heart enough to end his own useless life, and Ren-Tionan, who had loved Elrikal better even than his sweetest concubine, had had to leave his former chief upon the slopes above their village. When the winter snows had run in rivers down the darksides of the hills, then Ren-Tionan had gone up with some fellows, all the kin of Elrikal, and put the bones in a barge. They numbered there at Tarendahardil some two-score times a score.

The River’s-Bend tribe was there, short warriors of great chests and long, curling arms, great wrestlers and bear-killers. Bur-Knap was their chief, a stout man, with a great love of food and beer – leastways, so he had been before the long journey across the Taril. Now he was lean and dark under this Southron sun, and his hair was shot with gray, and his heart held only hatred of the Tarendahardilites. He had been one of Nam-Rog’s most outspoken supporters in the Circle of Chieftains. He had taken for his standard a black banner cut by a line of red, like a stream of blood. Most heavily had the men of the River’s-Bend tribe fallen on the barricades of High Town; now they had no more than half a score times a score of warriors.

And there were the Karghils and the Buzrahs, two tribes whose feuds were as old as the Stand on Urnostardil. But Cap-Tillarn had led his Buzrahs to Tezmon with Gen-Karn, and after Gen-Karn fell Gundoen for a punishment had sent the Buzrahs in wherever the battle was hardest, and now there remained but seven times a score of Buzrahs outside Tarendahardil, while Oro-Kang counted among his Karghils a score times a score, and schemed to put an end to the Buzrahs for all time once the stronghold fell. Oro-Kang was one of Nam-Rog’s greatest followers, while Cap-Tillarn was strong in his counsels that the army should depart for the homeland.

The Fire-Walk tribe was there, a tribe set apart from all others.

When at last great Elna had departed in defeat from Urnostardil, the Fire-Walkers had remained some years in the hills beyond the dusky border. Others of the survivors had stayed there too, but only the Fire-Walkers had returned to live in the lands where men dwell. By then the choicest dwelling-lands had been claimed by other tribes; the Fire-Walkers, who spoke with strange accents and had odd, reddish lights in their deep-hollowed eyes, sent out their men and settled at length on the slopes below the Peak of Goddess’ Wrath, which fumed and boiled without cease, and every generation poured out rivers of fire. So the Fire-Walkers won their name, but with their strange eyes and their jealous holding of the strange secrets of their arts, the Fire-Walkers were not well-liked among the other tribes. None but the most foolish ever stole women from the Fire-Walkers, and those who did, did not enjoy their prizes. As for the Fire-Walkers themselves, they left the other tribes alone, and would never have joined in the wars except that they had taken a love to Ara-Karn, who in the first winter of his Warlordship had joined them in their secret rituals. They were no more than a score times a score, but in their sure ruthlessness, their cruelty and the fear their looks and cries inspired in their enemies’ hearts, they were worth half a score for every man.

There were Nam-Rog’s own sturdy Durbars, of warriors three score and fifteen times a score; there was the Orn, Gorn-Tal, chief and warrior and counselor of himself. There were the Vul-Laistons of the strong shields, three score times a score of men; and the tribe of Loit-Garn who could follow the roads of the trees in Darkbole forest and could bring down the fiercest bandars using nothing but long knives – their number under the Iron Gate was five times a score. And there was the tribe of the Gray Hands, once a clan of the tall Morbynas – a tribe of stone-fisted men who could hurl stones farther than any other warriors, and stood there now in numbers greater than twelve times a score.

The Raznami were there as well: their chief was Ren-Gora, and he too had gone with Gen-Karn to Tezmon in the hope of greater treasure. But Gen-Karn had meted out all the best women and prizes among his own Orns, and Ren-Gora had liked it little better that the Orn would hold an alliance with the Southrons. It had been Ren-Gora who had led the rebellion in Tezmon when Gen-Karn had been found dead, slain by the spirit of Ara-Karn. It was said that in token and proof of his renewed allegiance to Ara-Karn, Ren-Gora had drunk the blood of Sol-Dat, Gen-Karn’s sunward man, before all the rebels. So Gundoen had accepted Ren-Gora back with open arms and honored him; and now before the Iron Gate the Raznami had a score times a score of men.

The Vorisals fought there, tall thin men of long beards and far-seeing eyes. They were men of the snows, who each winter journeyed far into the dimness of the snow-lands above the far North, there to hunt and take furs of strange beasts, pelts the hue of silver and shadowed snow, rarer in the world than gems, and bringing a price in Gerso greater even than the finest bandarskins. They were not over-great of girth, but were quick with their lances, and the finest bowmen after the warriors of Gundoen’s tribe, who had used the bow longest. Bar-East had been born of the Vorisals, but now he was of no tribe, being Speaker of the Law; and their chief had been Hilad-Dren, whom Haspeth had slain. Now their chief was Hilad-Dren’s sister’s husband, Roguil Arn the Axe-Bearer, a man of such height and girth that when he went abroad in winter in his fur cloak, he was often taken for a bear instead of a man. The Vorisals at Tarendahardil numbered eight times a score and more.

From the deep broad lake Pes-Tho, the Pes-Thos stood strong in the battle, their weapon a long barbed lance good for skewering deep-going fish – or men. They were ruled by three chiefs, brothers: Kan-Brin, Estar-Brin, and Aln-Brin-Daln. These were men of long, curling black beards, rare among the tribesmen: it was rumored their true father had been a Gerso merchant who had lain with old Brin-Gorin’s young wife, she of the dark-flashing eyes. That stain and insult had been with the brothers since their triple birth; it was to overcome it that they had grown to be such fearsome fighters. They each had killed a man before they gained ten winters; their counts before Gerso had been more than a score apiece. They ruled their tribe fiercely, as a man will a woman with roving thoughts or a pony hard to the bridle. Side by side, shield to sword, they fought as if they had but one heart and spirit among them, and it was their great boast that never once had any of them been wounded in battle. To Tarendahardil they led two score times a score of warriors, fierce and dreadful men.

The Jalijh were there among them, once a clan of the Pes-Thos. Gan-Birn was chief over them, a man of surpassing wisdom and honeyed words, but their greatest champion was Gan-Birn’s son Born-Oro-Tirb. Born-Oro-Tirb was the tallest man of all the warriors, a man who had never found a pony large enough to bear him in the far North, and so had won the name Tree-Legs; now he rode proudly on a chestnut stallion, the finest prize of the Charan Farnese’s stables. Born-Oro-Tirb was so strong, it was said that when he was still a boy he had brought his father a mare taken in a raid from the Undains, and had borne it on his back as a deed worth doing. Gan-Birn counseled, and Born-Oro-Tirb led the Jalijhas in battle, ten and a score times a score warriors who followed Born-Oro-Tirb as though he were the child of dark God Himself.

There too were the Vinkars, once a great tribe, one of the original eighteen that had descended Urnostardil’s crown: now they were few, and of small stature. One of every three of them had followed Gen-Karn to Tezmon; of those, one of six had lived to rejoin the forces of Ara-Karn. The Vinkars had taken sweet pastures near the Pass of Gerso, and had journeyed too often to the city, and known too well the Southron pleasures there. Their chief was named Vurnar, but everyone called him Filn-Par Ri, a term for a man who dressed in the skirts of women. Thirteen times a score of men Filn-Par Ri led, men as good as the Southrons in battle.

The Eldars, famed for their bitter, dark ales, stood in battle there. Poran-Dilg led them, but Farn-Jar-Gur was their chieftain. Farn-Jar-Gur kept to the North to oversee the conquered cities and send to the far North the endless streams of slaves and riches. Poran-Dilg was Farn-Jar-Gur’s brother, a man of tremendous girth, almost, it was said, the equal of Gundoen himself: of a long, squared beard gray and yellow, arms the thickness of a good woman’s thighs, and hands as big as buckets. Poran-Dilg alone of all the leaders there disdained the use of a bow, but fought only with his axe, a thing few others might even carry, let alone wield. Poran-Dilg laughed in battle, and the sound of it was like the beating of a great wooden drum to uplift the hearts of all his men and make his foes quake behind their shields. Between him and Roguil Arn of the Vorisals there was the sharpest rivalry. A score times a score of men Poran-Dilg had beneath him at Tarendahardil.

The Harvols were there, a tribe once a clan of Gundoen’s tribe. They dwelt on rocky cliffs high over the white-greenness of the Ocean of the Dead, and were famous for the flocks of green-winged birds they had bred up to hunt them the fishes of the sea. Kerrin-Kalk was their chieftain, a man who had more than enough reason to fear and to fight: for his daughter’s husband had been Bern-Dak, he who had beheld Allissál the autumn before and been the first to take her for the Gray Priestess. The very next assault, Bern-Dak had fallen from the ladders upon the sharp rocks below the man-devouring Iron Gate. Now Kerrin-Kalk had seen that vision himself, and it had haunted him so, that during the gathering of the Circle of Chieftains he had been strongly driven to counsel departure. But when he saw Gundoen it brought back to his mind their kinship, and how he and Gundoen had stood together against Gen-Karn when it had seemed that they would surely be destroyed. So now he put about himself the curving gray armor, and girt himself with his heaviest sword, a prize forged in Ul Raambar itself; and he slung across his back a sack heavy with arrows, and spoke brave words to his men. Nor did they, strong to the number of two score times a score, see any trace of fear in the eyes of Kerrin-Kalk in the shadow of his bright helm.

And there were the Undains, led by young Welo-Pharb after his mother’s brother Haln-Gaw lost his teeth and then his life beneath the Iron Gate. Welo-Pharb was counseled by Marn-Klarten of the dancing tongue: men of far-ranging schemes and ploys, clever in battle, counted at ten times a score – and the Korlas, those last few who had been at Orn guesting with Gen-Karn and so had escaped destruction at the angry hands of Ara-Karn and Gundoen: their chief was Estar Aln. And the Archeros were there, led by Ring-Sol, a young man of fiery blood. He had taken the chieftainship with bloody hands, but his men loved him, for he was always first in battle. He had been gravely wounded in the assault on Postio, and all but perished; but Gundoen came to his tent one sleep, holding in his thick hand a small leather bag. In that bag had been a herb ground by Hertha-Toll, and the herb closed the wound of Ring-Sol, so that his youth had returned him to health. And now he still had not learned from that lesson, but threw himself ever against the Iron Gate as if he had never been wounded in his life. Five and a score times a score of warriors were with him at Tarendahardil, and they all tall and feared in battle.

And still more there were of tribes and of tribesmen there. The Kamskals, whose chief was Grent-Hol, sister’s-son to Est-Hol, he who had been poisoned by Gen-Karn in Orn, were men of great singing war-cries, who used slings with sharp stones before Ara-Karn taught them the way of the bow. Seven times a score of men the Kamskals counted. And there were the warriors of the tribe of Tont-Ornoth, Gundoen’s tribe: Kul-Dro led five and four score times a score fierce, battle-marked men, among whom were the finest trackers, the bravest spearmen, and the most skillful bowmen of the tribes.

These and more there were of tribes and of tribesmen, for all the tribes were represented, even those most of whose warriors held garrisons over captive cities in the brightward South or the distant North: the Clargas, and those of the Lake-Tribe; the Toll-Vulkors and the Gise-Nathos and the Zisnonds and Yurlings; the Goat-Tribe, the Roighalnis, the Necistrols, the Kagions, the Ekilehs, the Gerinthars, the Sirgols, the Juehtsens, the Bolk-Girns, the Fulsars, whose totem was the fulsar-beast; the Morbynas and the Chalpions. And the warriors of all these tribes together were counted at ten and two score times a score. And beyond these were the mercenaries, the Southrons from the Delba and from Ilkas and from Bollakarvil herself, from Carftain and Mersaline and Ancha and other cities in the North: and these numbered a score times a score times a score.

All those men fought beneath the Iron Gate of the Black Citadel.

And alongside them fought ghosts, the unseen, implacable spirits of the dead and fallen of Urnostardil the mountain of the Last Stand. Ara-Karn himself had raised those spirits, bound them to their last living sons, and made those sons swear a binding oath to fight and never turn back, lest their own ancestors destroy them. There were not many of those spirits, maybe; no man could tell, for they rode and fought unseen by any eyes, unless Ara-Karn could see them, for he was half a ghost himself. No man saw them, but at times a warrior felt a chill touch him when no wind blew, and he felt his flesh creep as though it brushed by unfelt, unliving flesh. So the ghosts counted for more than their numbers, and had been the downfall of half the cities the armies had overwhelmed.

So, like the fishes of the sea, the leaves of the season, and the sands of the Desert were the armies of Ara-Karn marshaled in the plain brightward of the ruins.

And in this way were the armies divided: for the first part the Borsos, the Maurpongils, the Naur-Kolds, the Foruns, those of the River’s-Bend, the Buzrahs, the Fire-Walkers, the Durbars, the Vul-Laistons, the Loit-Garn, the tribe of the Gray-Hands, the Raznami, the Vorisals, and Gorn-Tal of Orn: five thousand, eight hundred and forty warriors and more. For the second part the Karghils, the Pes-Thos, the Vinkar, the Jalijh, the Eldars, the Harvols, the Undains, the Archeros, the Korlas, the Kamskals and the men of Gundoen’s tribe: five thousand, four hundred and thirty warriors and more. For the third part the Chalpions, the Morbynas, the Fulsars, the Bolk-Girns, the Juehtsens, the Sirgols, and two and a half thousands of the mercenaries: five thousand, nine hundred and eighty warriors and more. For the fourth part the Gerinthars, the Ekilehs, the Kagions, the Necistrols, the Roighalnis and three thousands of the mercenaries: five thousand, four hundred and fifty warriors and more. For the fifth part the men of the Goat-Tribe and the Yurlings and the Zisnonds and the Gise-Nathos and two and a half thousands of mercenaries: five thousand, three hundred and seventy warriors and more.

In all, they numbered more than twenty-eight thousand.

And against these there were some three hundred guardsmen left alive, and two hundred of the Tarendahardilites that Ennius Kandi had trained to do battle on the summit of the Iron Gate.

These now gathered quietly in the mountain winds and the tolling of the warning bells, awaiting the onslaught of the barbarians.

Amid the tents of the Tarendahardilites the voices fell off also. There was no cause for it, nor did it happen at a stroke. But the children stopped their play and the men and women looked one another in the eye. Even the babies were stilled.

They felt rather than knew the warning. For a year now they had dwelt on the mountaintop as on a drum, knowing the events in their lost city only through the resonance of the earth and stone below their feet. Now the breath caught in their throats and their mouths were dry. Those who had been sitting or lying on the ground stood into the cool winds. Then they heard it from above as well as from below. The tramp of shod feet, creak of wagon-axles, bleating of sheep, hoofbeats, clatter of weapons and the angry, ominous rumbling of men. Louder the din grew, echoing off the cowl of rock and the high walls of the Palace; it was joined by the tolling of the guardsmen’s bell. And in the sky beyond the cowl a bright tawny cloud of dust billowed up in a great fist-like ball.

The refugees shrank into the depths of the tents. Some were quick to stoop and intone prayers to the sun. They trusted in Her; but She lighted the way of the invaders too, and Her rays, sifting gently through branches of pine, had nurtured the refugees’ destruction.

III
Disgrace

EMSHA DID NOT KNOW what to do. The Queen’s old nurse walked in the rooms of the White Tower peacelessly, and a hundred times she blamed her frailty, that she could not bring herself to attend her mistress in the slaughtering-yard of the Palace. And a dozen times she had been on the verge of setting forth, when something held her back. She went to the private shrine and prayed to Goddess to spare her mistress what pain She could. Then Emsha rose and roamed the empty chambers, until through the thick stone of the walls the scream of Gundoen assailed her ears. She stopped, her old eyes big and dark.

‘Dear Lady,’ the old nurse breathed; ‘And did I pray to You on behalf of that?’

Shortly thereafter the maidens returned, their hair half undone, tears and terror in their eyes. Emsha stood by the doors as they passed her, and she chastised them sharply for having forsaken their mistress, heaping abuse on them in her own fear.

Then there was a stillness in the floors below. Emsha saw a lone, small figure standing like a shadow inside the Palace doors. It was the Empress.

Hastily the old nurse went down. But the Empress moved out of her nurse’s embrace.

‘Do not touch me, Emsha,’ she said. ‘I am unclean.’

‘Majesty, majesty…’

‘I must be purified,’ the Empress said, moving to the steps to the bath-chambers. ‘Until that hour when it is done, no hand is to touch me, no eye behold me. Emsha, see to the cleansing of the maidens. They have borne more this waking than I could properly ask.’

But Emsha followed her mistress and sat on a couch in the chamber outside the bath. She felt in the air about her, like the breath of some enormous beast of prey, the anger of Goddess.

Then footsteps sounded on the stair. A man appeared, Ampeánor, the Charan of Rukor. Emsha rose – their eyes met and parted – his went to the doors behind her.

‘You will not see her,’ Emsha said, moving into his path. Hatred surged within her for this man. He had done all this.

He scarcely looked at her. ‘I will see her,’ he muttered. Only then did Emsha see the madness in his eyes.

‘Her majesty is bathing in the ritual.’

‘I will see her.’

‘She is alone and unattended.’

‘That will not bother me.’

‘My lord, she is unrobed!’

He looked down at her. Annoyance flashed across his eyes. He caught her up and threw her aside. Truly, Ampeánor had recovered all his manly strength: the old nurse struck the wall and fell on the floor, the breath knocked out of her lungs. The man flung open the doors and entered the bath.

Emsha lay on the floor, trying to breathe. She heard the man’s steps; she heard the voice of her mistress:

‘Greetings, my lord. Do you come to take me prisoner now? What secrets would you wrest from me?’

Then his voice: ‘It was needful.’

‘Again that word?’

‘It was needful for another reason. One I did not tell you. I knew you would not believe it without proof. Do you not recall how once I spoke of a traitor among us? You did not believe it then. But in Tezmon I saw a map the Gerso had marked for me. You know his hand? Not another in ten thousand writes in that manner. I found another map. It was a map detailing all the defenses of this Citadel. It was written in the same hand. I found it, my Queen, in the tent of Ara-Karn.’

‘Why do you not leave? Do you think I take pleasure in your company?’ Emsha had heard those tones before, but only when her mistress addressed Dornan Ural.

‘You do not seem surprised,’ the man’s voice said.

‘Tell me then Ampeánor, when you were a young man full of dreams, did you ever dream that one pass you would order and watch what you have ordered and watched this pass? Or did somewhat nobler things fill your thoughts?’

There was silence. Then Emsha heard the plash of waters in the bath. ‘I came,’ she heard him say in a voice like struck iron, ‘to show you this.’

‘It is properly bloodied. Did you descend into the crypts to finish the work, then?’

‘You will be also. Did you think this soap would take the guilt from your head and heap it all on mine?’

‘What was it you did in the Eglands?’

‘What was it you did here, while I was a prisoner in Tezmon? Since then nothing has been right between us. Did you think I would never know? About you? And the Gerso? And the traitor?’

At those words, spoken so wildly, Emsha strove to go to her mistress’ aid, but she could not rise. The thought came to her to cry out to the guards above – she did not. Was it not enough that one man had seen the Empress in her nakedness?

‘So,’ said the man’s voice, deadly calm and weary, ‘now you wear the stain of his blood as I do, here beside this other mark, which far too many eyes have seen.’

The doorway darkened and the man returned. From within came the voice of the Queen: ‘From this moment on, Ampeánor, you are no longer the High Charan of Rukor, nor a citizen of Tarendahardil. If you ever attempt to see me again, your life will be forfeit. You are denied all water, food, shelter and fire within the frontiers of the Empire. Go prosper among the barbarians you so admire, if you can.’

The man stopped and turned. Emsha saw the palm of his hand was smeared with blood. For a moment, she feared for her mistress’ very life.

‘Do you think I’d even want to serve you again? You whore, I will go with pleasure once I have cut the life out of the Gerso’s body and proclaimed him for the traitor that he is.’

‘You are the traitor here.’ For the first time Emsha heard passion and fear in her mistress’ voice. ‘Never in your life were you so true as he.’

At that the rage showed in the Rukorian’s face like the bursting of a wound. He caught the door and slung it shut so that two of the hinges burst on their bronze pins.

Ampeánor stalked out. He stormed through the Palace. He went to the rooms of the Gerso, but they were empty. So he went through the Black Tower into the Southern Wing, to Rukor’s floor. Once within his own chambers he tore the garments from his body, threw lances from the wall, upset couches and shattered coffers, roaring and screaming. Pharnor Bittan stood by the door and watched his lord in fear and awe.

At last it ended, and like a chill rain shaken and chased by scattering winds, the mad childish rage left the body of the lord of Rukor. He lay on the floor, and awareness left him with his madness.

* * *

When he woke, Ampeánor looked at horror at himself. He lay on the floor. In his hands were the bunched, torn carpets. His left hand was black with Gundoen’s blood. Its stain was all over him.

Ampeánor beheld his retainer. He started up, at which Pharnor Bittan stepped back. Ampeánor fell back on the floor. Tears formed in his eyes.

‘Oh, do not run from me, Pharnor Bittan, I beg you! What have I done, what have I ordered, what have I dreamed, since I reached here from the fields beyond the city? Tell me, do you know? It has all passed from me, whatever it may have been. It was the fault of that half of me that comes from Vapio, maybe, or else the venom of the Darkbeast. Is Melkarth to be proven right then, in spite of all I can do? Pharnor Bittan, take pity on me. What state is this for a lord of the realm? Help me please, my old friend. Take these rags from me and gird me in my armor. Have the barbarians attacked? I would relish battle now. It is my only freedom.’

‘Aye, my lord,’ said Pharnor Bittan. There was no pity in the voice of the old master of the hunt, only dignity and respect. The sound of it helped bear up Ampeánor’s spirit.

‘There, that is better, surely,’ he said, borne up by the armor that now cased him. His eyes ran over the disordered rooms. He glanced at the painting of the Queen done by Qhelvin of Sorne. On a small sword-stand in a corner lay a longsword of blue Raamba steel. The handle was bossed with gold and worked with rubies, the blade shone sharp and cold as a warrior’s song. It was the most beautiful sword he had ever seen.

‘What is this?’ he asked, marveling at its quickness and balance.

‘He left it for you a year ago, my lord. It is the gift of the Lord Ankhan and Lady Lisalya of Ul Raambar. Father Ennius said it was meant for a wedding-gift for your lordship and her majesty.’

‘I will have to thank him for it personally,’ Ampeánor said.

At that a distant sound came to penetrate the stone walls.

‘What is that?’

‘The guardsmen’s bell, my lord. The enemy is at the Iron Gate again.’

‘Well,’ said Ampeánor, pleased. ‘For this I owe thanks to dark God. I will go to this battle – and let them beware, all those who come against me now!’

Calmly as he passed, he brought up the virgin Raamba sword and in a score of strokes split the wooden panel of Qhelvin’s masterwork and left her scattered upon the floor in a hundred jagged bits.

* * *

So the armies of Ara-Karn came.

They filled the square below the Iron Gate and spilled out along the edge of the plateau to either side. They filled courtyards and stood on the low remnants of palace walls, a hundred rows deep. No single glance of the eye could have held them all. Behind them the slaves drove up sheep and cattle and the wagons weighted with armor, grain, tent-cloth, ladders and swords. Dense clouds of death-birds showered over the battlements. Yurling stood beside Forun in no clear order. All the tribes were mixed; the renegades with the siege-ladders could not make their way through the masses of men. The warriors did not care. Drunk with fear and eagerness, they stamped their feet, brandished their weapons and roared open-mouthed at the gaping, unmanned line of the parapet.

But Nam-Rog stood upon a block of stone at the rear and called Durbars to him, a score of young trackers whose worth he knew. These Nam-Rog sent forth to find the other chieftains and have them raise their standards and totems so that all the warriors of each tribe might come together and be ruled by their chief. The trackers raised their spears and plunged into the seething mass of metal-clad men.

Atop the Iron Gate, at the rearward parapet of the battlements, Berowne stood in the thick of the showering arrows and bellowed down his orders into the yard between the gates. There the guardsmen bent their strong bodies to the task and pried up the massive stones they had stockpiled. Tossing basket-lines around the stones, they hoisted them up to the long arm of the Beak. The Beak spun about its greased support-poles; the stones swung out over the heads of the men on the battlements. Even as the Beak swept past the parapet, the men loosed the lines. They were expert at it now. The huge stones hurtled outward and down, crashed into the square, and men were mowed down, thrown skyward and crushed. Circling still, the dark-laughing Beak swung back round. The men in the yard caught the trailing basket-leads; the others bent again, driving their long pries beneath the next stones they had chosen. Again and again the Beak fulfilled its deadly circle; the barbarians pushed back, crowding away from the paths of the huge bounding blocks.

But now the standards and totems of the tribes gathered their followers, and the tribes of the first army moved to the forefront. Through open lanes the mercenaries ran, upbearing long ladders. A thousand hands grasped them and the ladders shot upward, bending hugely – upward, until they fell forward and their metal-shod tops clanged off the black stone of the parapet.

The first men leaped up on the lower rungs of the ladders. They were younger men, those most fired with the eagerness for blood and fighting and to be done with fear.

They steadied themselves on the rungs.

Then they began their race into the sky.

Lightly they ran up the ladders high above the heads of their comrades. Closer and closer approached the black sweep of the Beak. The dark line of the parapet loomed to meet them; above it suddenly appeared a line of gleaming shields, half-seen helms and out-thrust lances.

The young barbarians scampered up the last few steps, bending beneath and warding off the darting lances with their small shields. The bloodstained wall was in their faces; behind them the ruins of the huge city spread away into the bright distance. They tore free their eager weapons, axes, swords and spears. Metal broke on metal, and the cries of the wounded joined the tolling of the bell and the roar rising from below.

So the battle was joined, and Goddess blazed like fire off the burnished blades and battle-gear.

Gorn-Tal, the last Orn, ascended behind the younger men. He climbed to the uppermost steps of the middle ladder, the most honored and most dangerous place of battle. In his hands he held a strange weapon, one he himself had devised and forged on the stones of the smiths’-pits among the tents of the renegades. He had made it in the likeness of a lance, but with the addition of a cruelly-barbed hook a hand’s span below the iron leaf of the spear-point.

Gorn-Tal held himself low against the steps of the ladder. Then with the swiftness of a snake the long lance leaped upward and darted through the gap between two bright shields. The spear-point struck and wounded; the curved hook caught a guardsman’s arm.

Gorn-Tal hauled down on the lance-haft with all the strength in his gray-veined arms. The guardsman was dragged forward, over the parapet; suddenly before his eyes the dark supporting stone gave way to air and the distant crowds below. Again Gorn-Tal pulled, and the guardsman pitched forward. There was now a slight opening in the line of shields, and the guardsman to the right stood half-revealed. Gorn-Tal slipped the hook underneath the man’s corselet just in the opening under the armpit. And now this one too looked down, and beheld Gorn-Tal’s eyes in the moment before he fell. Then his body smashed like thunder on the stones filling the coomb; the armor bent in and the ribs burst, and death freed his spirit as it had freed his fellow’s, like the snapping of a thread.

These were the first defenders to die in this assault. They had lived through almost a full year of battle there and had faced a thousand foes apiece; but Gorn-Tal was their doom. Their names are forgotten, but it is said that they were both Fulmineans. So, far from the hills of their homeland, they fell from a great height to their deaths.

Now the break in the shields was large enough for a big man to stand into. Gorn-Tal leaped up and elbowed his way into that opening. With both hands he swung his weapon before him, uttering the death-cry of Orn. From below a great shout rose up at the sight of him. It had been rare in the course of that year for any of the warriors to gain the parapet, and those who had had mostly been slain straight away.

Now Gorn-Tal stood there, last chieftain of Orn. So terrible was he that the guardsmen fell back before him; he swept back the heads of their lances scornfully. Nakedly he stood before them on the edge of the parapet, scarcely holding his balance; but even so none of the guardsmen dared challenge him. Gorn-Tal laughed, and raising his strange weapon on high to God, brought it crashing down on the shoulder of one of his foes.

On the ladders on either side of him stood Sur-Pal of the Maurpongils and Bel-Kor Jin of the Naur-Kolds. With long, fire-hardened lances the two chiefs struck back guardsmen, supporting Gorn-Tal. Together they cleared enough space for the Orn to step down onto the first level of the battlements.

But now Berowne shouted to his men, encouraging them; they took heart and pressed forward. Against them Gorn-Tal drew back his weapon and hurled it. Full through the shield of one guardsman the weapon crashed; the lance-point stuck into the man’s throat, severing the veins and breaking into the windpipe. The guardsman fell, and death like sleep shut fast his eyes. Then Gorn-Tal drew his sword against the press of lances; and the battle broke over him like a storm-wave.

The first wave of men upon the ladders ceded to the second. The young warriors, those few who still lived, took hold of the rope ladders. These trailed from the metal peaks of the wooden ladders down the face of the Iron Gate. The wounded men went down slowly. They clambered down the piled stones in the coomb, through the corpses, and were received with cheers. Their wounds were bathed and dressed by slaves; the filth was sponged from their brows and arms, and they ate heartily, regaling one another with their tales of the encounter, laughing and glad to be still living. But the others, those men too weakened by blood-loss to descend the rope ladders, were swiftly slain by the guardsmen. Or else their own comrades, those behind them, smashed loose the clutching hands and shoved the bodies over, to die on the stones below.

It was the order of battle there. The man who did not choose to live deserved to die. The warriors of the second wave climbed up to take their places.

These were the chiefs and champions of their tribes. Ven-Vin-Van of the Borsos rose on the southernmost ladder and Ren-Tionan of the Foruns on the northernmost: these with heavy blows of their axes beat back the guardsmen at the ends of the lines. And Bur-Knap of the River’s-Bend tribe was eager in battle: he had stood by Gundoen’s side in the years before Ara-Karn’s coming, when only a handful of the tribes dared oppose Gen-Karn’s rule. Even Ren-Gora of the Raznami stood upon his ladder and gave the defenders blow for blow. And at Sur-Pal’s right Nam-Rog wielded his sword – old as he was he beat back the guardsmen above him.

Before that onslaught, the wearied guardsmen fell. The space around Gorn-Tal grew. Sur-Pal and Bel-Kor Jin and other chieftains surged onto the parapets. Arms rose and fell, and a spray of blood marked the sweep of the blades. Already the stone between their feet was littered with shattered bits of bronze and iron as well as the fallen. The line of guardsmen wavered and shrank back. Gaps began to appear between men.

But then Berowne ran up the steps by the southern lance-tower. Behind him, and below the northern lance-tower as well, came the men of the second watch. Berowne swept his massive arm forward, and the new men advanced alongside the wall of the lance-towers. Beneath stone symbols and the carven heads of Emperors the armored men entered the battle and forced themselves along the first level of the battlements, granting needed rest to the weary men of the front ranks.

Berowne himself stood like a middle lance-tower at the center: the very breadth and mass of him seemed to lend support to the line. The men locked shields and gripped their lance-hafts firmly: and the line held. Then Berowne began to lean forward into the battle, and the defenders seemed even to gain a little. Now they were only two steps away from regaining the parapet. In vain did Gorn-Tal, Sur-Pal and Bel-Kor Jin beat axes and swords against the shield-wall about Berowne. Gorn-Tal had cast the only one of his strange weapons he had borne up the ladder; and not all the strength or fury of the blows could budge Berowne once he planted his feet.

The guardsmen took heart and the barbarians began to take the worst of it. But then seven Fire-Walkers appeared on the parapet, and in their midst stood Roguil Arn the Axe-Bearer. He, the chieftain of the Vorisals, looked over the scene below him; and in the icy blue of his pale eyes, eyes that reflected the snows and frozen lakes of his homeland, burned now the flame and delight of battle.

The Fire-Walkers, men of long faces, square beards, and pinkish eyes, moved forward deliberately into the battle. They went like some good shepherds to the task of shearing, who cast their eyes sagely over the flocks, choosing in their minds which sheep should first be shorn, and how to go about the thing so that the flock stays calm. So the Fire-Walkers chose the weakest points in the battle, and went to support their fellows.

But Roguil Arn cast his eyes up and over the scene. He saw the yard beyond, and the inner gates closed fast against the invasion, leaving only one small brass door open at the side. And beyond that Roguil Arn saw the Palace of the Bordakasha rising against the clouds. He saw the White Tower and the Disk of Goddess burning like a welcome-torch to his appearance.

Then the eyes of the Vorisal fell again to the lines of the guardsmen standing thickly clustered upon the second and third steps of the battlements.

‘By dark God’s eye,’ laughed Roguil Arn, ‘Is this truly all the men who have held us in defeat for a year? Shame, shame upon all the tribes!’ He lifted back his head to the Walk of God in the sky, and opened his mouth wide to it, and shouted joyously the war-song of the Vorisals – a sound more like the barking of the northern dogs than any human voice. At that inhuman sound, the blood was chilled in the guardsmen’s veins.

Then Roguil Arn shook his wild locks, for he wore no helm; and he threw himself like a spear into the battle.

The huge, silver-chased axe of Roguil Arn smashed into Berowne’s shield first of all. It was heavy, that axe. Few others of the tribe could lift it one-handed, let alone wield it in battle. Swung by the hands of Roguil Arn, no metal or man might stand against it. Berowne’s huge round shield was shattered into a thousand slivers of bronze, wood and leather. It sounded like a thunderclap, deafening and staggering the captain. Quickly the guardsmen threw themselves between their captain and this new demon of an enemy. Roguil Arn hewed again with the great axe, carving huge hunks out of the shields.

Against that axe, nothing the guardsmen did availed. The barbarians now stood in a solid line the full length of the battlements, with men behind them; and Roguil Arn fought laughing with one foot raised upon the second step.

There was not a tribe of all the first army that did not have some warriors there to gain honor for their descendants. But there was fear in the eyes of the guardsmen, the fear of death. Southron bodies were strewn everywhere between the two sides, and the stones had gone slick with blood.

Behind the guardsmen on the third step, Berowne leaned like a mountain against the rearward parapet. Wordlessly he accepted water from some of the men. There was confusion in the Tarendahardilite’s amber eyes, and the fat left hand trembled where it hung by the huge thigh, as if it felt still the sting of Roguil Arn’s blow.

Then a new man ran up the steps to the battlements. Ullerath strapped on his helmet and approached the captain while a man told him how things went. The Eglander went down on one knee beside his rival and put his hands to the big man’s shoulders.

‘Will you dare fight once more, grandfather,’ he shouted above the din, ‘or should I now become the captain, and tell Kiva you will not defend her?’

‘Do you call me old, you puppy?’ Berowne snorted. Perhaps four summers separated them. ‘By Goddess’ sweet breath, I can smell her upon your arm!’ He rose, and took up his great hollow helmet.

‘She has been complaining about this bedlam you have risen here. Are you not considerate enough, in beating back these barbarians, even to be quiet about it?’

The captain laughed, and embraced his rival, the metal of their corselets clashing. ‘There is a Madpriest of a barbarian at their center,’ Berowne said lightly. ‘Shall we set him down together?’ So they made their way through the triple ranks and went against Roguil Arn.

Around the Vorisal now a whirlpool of guardsmen swirled, some attacking, others sprawling on the stones near death. Desperately, like bees swarming stinging about the snout of some great-pawed bear who has laid bare their nest, the bravest and most foolhardy of the guardsmen threw themselves at Roguil Arn. And had it not been for these few, hurling themselves to bitter death, then surely the chief of the Vorisals alone would have broken through the ranks and split the defenders in two – and then the barbarians would have won the battle.

Now Berowne and Ullerath stood against him. First Ullerath thrust at him with his lance, drawing blood – Roguil Arn swung the ponderous axe, but the Eglander was too swift, and danced back. Then Berowne held his shield close before him and hurled the full weight of his body against the barbarian. Roguil Arn, unbalanced by the blow he had aimed at Ullerath, fell back four paces beneath the weight of the captain, and leaned against the parapet gasping. Then he rose, shook again his wild locks and kissed the bloody axe. He felt no pain, only the gladness of a good fight and the pleasure of his strength. Not even that enormous blow from the captain’s huge body had been enough to tear the beloved weapon from the hands of its master.

But in those few moments Ullerath and Berowne had rallied the defenders. All together, they beat back the renewed onslaught of Roguil Arn. The shield-wall was in place again, and all the guardsmen’s feet were planted firmly on the stones of the second step. So they held their ground despite all the fury and strength of the barbarians’ attack.

Soon the chieftains and the champions gave place to their fellows, the last of the warriors of the first array. Almost six thousand men had gone now against only a few hundred, and still the few hundred held their ground. They had done more than any man would have thought possible. But now they were weary, and blood and sweat stung their eyes in the shadow of their helmets. They cried out for water, for sleep and for respite: it was not granted. Against them the more than five thousand warriors of the second army were even then readying themselves.

There among the bustling crowds of men, no warrior stood taller than Born-Oro-Tirb of the Jalijhas. He towered over all other men, so that a man might be judged tall if the crown of his head reached to the hollow between Born-Oro-Tirb’s collarbones. He was the greatest champion of his tribe, but it was his father Gan-Birn who was chief of the Jalijh. To Gan-Birn Gorn-Tal now went. ‘O Chief,’ the Orn said, ‘grant me this gift: adopt me into your tribe so that I may fight at the side of your son.’

Gan-Birn was a tall man, but not nearly of a height with his son. He had a bald pate, long white locks at the back and sides of the head, and a great gray bush of a beard. There were lines about the old chief’s eyes, and his gaze gleamed craftily. He looked at Gorn-Tal, and took a fistful of his beard in his hand.

‘Chieftain of Orn, you have already fought, and won great honor according to the words of those who have come down off the heights. You cannot want for riches, for all of your tribe’s share is yours alone, to do with as you please. Why are you so eager to return to the fight?’

‘I have had dreams and seen the Gray Priestess. This battle will be my last. So I would gain what glory I can and kill as many of our enemies as I can, so that their spirits will serve as my slaves in the lands beyond.’

The old Jalijha chieftain nodded. ‘That was well spoken, the word of a fine man. You would do me honor, Gorn-Tal of Orn, if you would take the blood of our tribe. My own son will be your sponsor.’

So it was arranged; and even as the first waves of men from the second army were swarming up the ladders, the ceremony was completed. Gorn-Tal learned and spoke the hidden words of Jalijh. He swore friendship to the tribe, and he and Born-Oro-Tirb intermingled their blood and drank from the same bowl of beer. Thus Gorn-Tal of Orn was brought into the tribe of Jalijh. Then, shaking their weapons, Gorn-Tal and Born-Oro-Tirb led the Jalijhas up the high ladders and into the windy battle beneath the southern lance-tower.

Beneath the southern lance-tower fought the Pes-Thos led by their three brother-chieftains, Kan-Brin, Estar-Brin, and Aln-Brin-Daln. Climbing the midmost ladder was the champion of the Eldars, Poran-Dilg, whose boast it was that he alone of all the tribesmen had never used the bow. Huge of girth was Poran-Dilg, and his hands were the biggest of any man’s in the armies. Between Poran-Dilg and Roguil Am there was the fiercest rivalry, for they were the two greatest champions of all the men who had followed the black standard of Ara-Karn, and each boasted that his weapon was heaviest and best-biting.

Poran-Dilg had heard the great praise accorded Roguil Arn in the first of the fighting, and his ears burned with blood to better the deeds of the Vorisal When he had come down off the rocks of the coomb, Roguil Arn had looked to the totems of the Eldars first of all, a boastful look. But Poran-Dilg, his gaze fixed firmly to the heights of the battlements, had ignored the Vorisal chief.

Now he stepped down heavily from the parapet and waded through men to the very place Roguil Arn had held. He was grim as an old boar, Poran-Dilg: silver-bristled, bent-toothed and evil-eyed. He gave no war-cry, but raised the great axe and hewed mightily at the blazing shield-wall. He aimed to win where his rival had failed, and split the defenders at the middle of their lines. At his first stroke the Eldar carved and ruined two of the guardsmen’s shields so that a break opened in the wall and the barbarian line surged forward. But swiftly the guardsmen closed the gap and so the line held. Again Poran-Dilg battered the bronze wall, and again – slowly, grudgingly, the lines of armored men shrank back before him. They left their limbs and broken bits of blades and shields as a welcome-carpet for the bronze-shod feet of the chieftain of the Eldars; and the dolorous cries of the slain rose like a chorus against the toll of the alarm-bell of the guardsmen.

* * *

Meanwhile Berowne and Ullerath ranged behind the triple lines, shouting words of encouragement and stepping in to do battle for any man weak with weariness or wounds. Youths from the refugees ran up and down the steps to the courtyard, bearing up vessels of food and drink to the embattled men. There was desperation there along the lines, for all the two officers could do. The men had had too little rest, and looked with dreadful eyes upon every man of them taken down on litters through the courtyard to the tent of the wounded. Ill could they afford the loss of a single man against those odds. They could not gain ground on the enemy, but lost it. Deep in their hearts they knew of only one hope, their last: that they might somehow force the barbarians back off the battlements. Then the advantage would lie heavily on the side of the guardsmen, and they might enjoy some brief breaths of rest. But the line of the parapet seemed a thousand steps away.

‘Ah!’ fretted Ullerath, ‘if only Father Ennius were here! Where is he, why does he not come?’ Restlessly the Eglander roamed behind the lines, gripping his lance firmly in his fist. He knew the confidence of the barbarians would be shaken only if one of their champions were slain. He cast his eyes over the barbarians to see which of them might be greatest, and his eyes fell easily on that one fighting beneath the southern lance-tower. There was none other of the stature of the Jalijha Born-Oro-Tirb.

Recklessly the Eglandic lieutenant ran the length of the triple lines, holding his shield before him and drawing back his lance. At the end of the lines he loosed the lance, leaning into the cast. True to Ullerath’s aim the heavy lance drove into the leather and metal shield and Born-Oro-Tirb’s sword shoulder, making the Jalijha howl.

Ullerath swept out his sword, broke out in front of the shield-wall and hurled himself at the towering man. Roaring, the champion of Jalijh tore the lance out of his shoulder and shield and threw it aside. Blood streamed from his shoulder; even so he raised sword and strove against the Southron. Great blows the swordsmen exchanged, battering each other’s shields.

But Ullerath had misjudged one thing. Death stood at the Jalijha’s side in human form, and it called itself Gorn-Tal. The Eglander did not face one barbarian champion, but two. Now these two, blood-brothers of the lesser sort, rained such blows on him that Ullerath could not strike back. He was driven against the lance-tower, sick with dread. The iron blades rained against his shield like smith’s hammers. Ullerath cast his eyes to the shield-wall. Weakly he cried for succor. Born-Oro-Tirb was laughing wildly, and in his heart the Orn prayed thanks to dark God, that He had granted Gorn-Tal such pleasure before he must die.

But Berowne, standing out of the triple lines once more, saw his lieutenant. With a sudden, savage thrust Berowne drove his lance deep into the shield-arm of the Orn so that the iron leaf burst out of the flesh on the far side. Berowne drew back on the lance, and the head in parting tore apart the bloody muscle, so that Gorn-Tal was stricken and had to fall back to the parapet. Then Berowne threw himself against the Jalijha’s chieftain’s son: the Tarendahardilite and the Eglander now joined forces against the barbarian, cutting him on the legs and arms until Berowne drove his lance against the Jalijha’s lower belly, deep into the vitals. The tall man paled and cried out. Then Berowne tore out the lance, and the black blood and juices gushed upon the stones.

Born-Oro-Tirb went down on his knees. Tears were streaming from his eyes and his young lips were moaning helplessly. But in his last moments he remembered his manhood, and glared on his foes who had slain him.

‘So,’ he mumbled, ‘you have slain me, you two – only two, and Southrons at that! This was my time, and no glory to you, for I saw the Gray Priestess and it was the Couple who have decreed that this should be. You will not live long, but the rest of us will rape and slay your famous Empress for all that you can do! – But leave my body here for my tribesmen to carry down to the encampment, and do not mutilate or boast over my corpse, or else Gan-Birn my father will seek you out, and roll both your bloody heads down the slopes of the roads of this city!’

So the Jalijha mocked Berowne and Ullerath – uselessly, for neither knew the tongue of the far North. Ullerath kicked the body aside, and the two friends stepped back behind the shields.

IV
War

ABOUT THIS TIME, the Charan Ennius Kandi was seen walking alone through the corridors of the darkward side of the Palace. His form passed before the windows and the balconies opening from the corridors above the cliffs. Rumor flew ahead of him; everyone in the Palace had heard Gundoen’s scream and learned its cause.

As ever, on the orders of the Queen since High Town had fallen, a single male slave followed quietly a hundred paces behind the Gerso.

At length the charan entered upon a long passageway that stretched empty before him. He followed its length for a while, then stopped and turned back suddenly, in the way of a man who has just remembered something he has forgotten. There were no open doorways there, so that the slave who had been following stood still, and bowed as the charan passed him.

The Gerso struck the slave in the head. The blow threw the man back, his head struck the wall, and he fell senseless to the floor.

Ennius Kandi dragged the body to an open balcony admitting Goddesslight and cool, sweet air. The Gerso lifted the body over the parapet.

In the winds the falling body turned over and over. The limbs flailed and twitched. Then it struck an outcropping of rock and was flung outwards, tumbling faster. At last it vanished in the Palace dump-heaps, smoky and blue in the distance.

‘Now dog my steps,’ said the Gerso, ‘if you can.’

He passed below. On the level of the kitchens and the slaves’ quarters, he followed a long dark passage hewn out of the mountain. At the end two of the Imperial household guards stood before an ancient door. The torchlight gleamed off their armor.

‘I am come at the Empress’ request, to look to the prisoner,’ said Ennius Kandi.

‘Certainly, Father Ennius,’ they said.

They entered the crypt and met the jailer, a guardsman recovering from a wound in his shoulder. He took torch and keys and led them down the passageway. The men passed low, round doors on their left. The musky, intimate smell of the mountain closed around them. The doors had no openings, only heavy, oiled bars and rings of bronze, and numbers burned into the wood. The four men reached the end of the first passage and were led back and down again. At the turning-back of this second passage the jailer stopped. He consulted the list upon the leather band on his wrist.

‘Here is the door,’ he said.

He undid the bar and, warily, kicked the door inward. The four men stooped below the low opening. The jailer thrust in the torch: the yellow flames cast their gleams off the crudely hewn little room beyond, and the unmoving bulk upon the floor.

‘Sweet Goddess!’ swore the jailer.

The Gerso crawled down into the cell. He drew up the cloak to cover the huge body, then looked back over his shoulder.

In the torchlight his face was awful to behold.

‘Help me bear him out.’ The voice equaled the face.

The guardsmen had tears in their eyes. ‘Not in all this year have I seen the like,’ said one. ‘Is it as bad as it seems, my lord?’

‘No,’ answered Ara-Karn. ‘He feels nothing. He is dead.’

* * *

They brought him, at Father Ennius’ guidance, to the tents below the Iron Gate where the dead and dying lay. The jailers laid the great body down on a cot at the rear of a tent and hastened back to their post.

Ara-Karn stood for some time, gazing down on the ruin that had been a chieftain of the far North.

It was some time later when he emerged. He slipped out through the corner where the canvas sides overlapped.

From the high black cowl of stone behind him the sounds of battle rang. Iron struck iron and screams and shouts of hatred bled into the air.

Those sounds found their match upon the face of the man with black-green eyes.

His skin, always darkened from sun and wind and the heat of his inner fires, had turned the black-blue of a thunderhead. Such a fury blazed in the dark eyes that perhaps no man had ever beheld in him, who ever held himself so well in hand when others lost their heads. His hands, long and sinewy, so fine and yet so powerful, worked, gripped, unclenched.

He walked apart from the gates.

Some of the Tarendahardilites saw him, and rushed to him, eager for some hopeful word of the defense. But when they beheld the aspect of his strides and face they fell back away from him, abashed and dismayed.

Himself he strode through them like a raging god, oblivious to them. He saw them no more than the insects crushed beneath his boots.

So he came to the dark grove, the last and most ancient stand of the Imperial gardens. He shoved through the thick pines and evergreens into the darkness, moving it seemed at hazard, unless it were his one aim to get himself apart from all manner of things human.

He burst out into the small clearing, where a stone basin stood above the pit. The sight of it brought him up short.

He stared at the crudely hewn stone. He knew its purpose: such things were scattered in dark places in all the lands where men dwell. He had himself partaken of the gruesome rituals such bowls were made for, when he and Gundoen had shared blood mixed with beer, and sworn undying fellowship and the common cause of vengeance.

Ara-Karn approached the stone basin. Just beyond it sank the pit where, of old, the beasts would have been sacrificed. Deep in that pit, though he did not know it, delved the steps Berowne and Kuln-Holn had descended, to find the secret way out of the citadel into the city below.

He had eyes only for the stone. It was centuries old. No doubt it had been chipped out long before Elna had first taken life. The blood of a thousand sacrifices had stained it so deeply, not any number of rains could ever hope to cleanse it.

He had no beast with him to make a sacrifice.

His sacrifice, maybe, he had left on the cot in the tent of the dying.

He plucked free the blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg, which held his cloak about his shoulders. The dark green hooded hunting-cloak fell unnoticed to the ground. He held out his arm over the bowl and clenched and let go his fist several times, until the veins stood out and the tendons were rigid leading into the wrist. His forearm gleamed with sweat like oil; strange markings mottled the skin, half drawing, half charactery; the markings seemed to match the eroded markings along the side of the stone basin.

He dug the point of the pin into his arm and let the blood flow freely. His blood was not bright red like the blood of common men. It was dark, almost black, and thick as syrup, with a pungent odor that filled the clearing in the ancient grove.

Then he stooped. He did not lift the bowl to Heaven on high, as was commonly done. But like an animal he lowered himself down to it, and lapped up his own blood like the beasts at fetid pools after the rains soak the earth.

His hands gripped the sides of the basin with such fury that it seemed the stone might crack beneath them.

He lifted up his head. His face dripped his own blood and his lips were black with the syrup he had drunk. And his eyes—!

He began to mutter words in a tongue so old, the stone of the basin might still have been forming deep in the bowels of the earth when they were first heard. Rage and madness shone from his face like the clouds above the bright horizon that reflect the light from the Blessed Shores.

His shadow at his feet darkened and grew. It crept up behind him, and reached high above him in the air. Then it bent and arched over, and reached its huge arms deep underground.

‘You who died here and were buried unvoyaged,’ he breathed, ‘O you slaves and conquered ones! Now is the hour of your vengeance! You knew him – knew his firstborn father, the one you called Tont-Ornoth. You were his kinsmen. Rise up, I command you, seek the light, stretch hands and arms out of the ground. Seek out those who did this to him, and let them feel your wrath!’

* * *

In the absence of their leaders the exhausted guardsmen wavered and gave back. Beneath the southern lance-tower there was no rest or comfort.

The three Pes-Thos brothers were fighting with a ferocity the guardsmen had never known. As one man, monstrous, three-headed and six-limbed, the chieftains fought. Kan-Brin used a double-barbed lance, Estar-Brin a sword as long as he was tall, and Aln-Brin-Daln, the most murderous, laid waste about him with a long stave, the end of which was iron-shod and forged to a studded iron ball. One brother struck home his blow while the second drew his weapon back and the third raised his on high. The shield-wall shrank from that terrible onslaught; the three brothers laughed in their black beards. There was no question of countering those blows – it was all the guardsmen could do to save their lives.

At the center of the lines Poran-Dilg beat back the men who faced him, strewing the stone with broken shields and broken men. All the ground that Roguil Arn had won, Poran-Dilg had now regained, and more. Through the press of men and metal the Eldar could see the inner gates. The guardsmen gave way, missing the supporting strength of their officers. But Berowne and his lieutenant lay strengthless atop the steps from the yard, stanching the blood of their wounds. Dearly had Ullerath’s recklessness cost the defenders.

So Poran-Dilg advanced onto the second step of the battlement.

Soon after him came the three brothers.

And then all at once that half of the barbarian line swept onto the second step, crowding the defenders back. Men fresh to battle swarmed over the black parapet: Kerrin-Kalk with his Harvols, Grent-Hol with his Kamskals, Vurnar and some Vinkars. The Karghils’ chieftain Oro-Kang was there, hot for battle. Welo-Pharb and five of his Undains stood on the parapet and bent back bows to shoot over the heads of their allies on the lines. Ring-Sol urged on his Archeros. Estar Aln strove to prove his Korlas loyal warriors of Ara-Karn.

And the men of Gundoen’s tribe were there as well, the tribe of Tont-Ornoth: big-shouldered Kul-Dro led them. As he drove home his blows the old spear-man sang out the war-chant of his tribe, loudly, in the hope that somehow in the stones of this dark place, Gundoen might hear them and take heart.

Before this onslaught, terrible and bloody, the guardsmen stumbled and collapsed.

The manfall among them was worse than their small numbers might bear. The wounded were borne to a tent pitched in the shadow of the cowl of rock. There the guardsmen lay on rags and straw, crawling with flies, in row upon long row. The dying men lay groaning with hideous dreams of ceaseless war and suffering.

Nor did their comrades on the battlements fare better. The front line still stood on the second step, but the other two were on the third. Groans and curses echoed among the metal-clad men; there was no longer room behind the men of the third line, they stood with their legs pressed against the rearward parapet. They were shaken most of all at the center beneath the blows of the monstrous axe of Poran-Dilg. The men there would have fled had there been the space for it. Only the close-shoving press pinned them there, like men chained to their doom.

They knew they would be driven backward over the rear parapet. Then the barbarians would break open the Iron Gate and overrun the Citadel. There would be no escape, no future battles, no life. It was the end. So, slaughtered ignominiously, their bodies would serve the glory of the new conqueror and his savage men.

‘We must fall back!’ Ullerath shouted to Berowne. ‘The men cannot hold here. Let us take our places on the summit of the inner gates! For what other reason was this fastness built with twin sets of gates? So we may trap the barbarians in the yard between the gates and batter them with stones and lances!’

The two men stood on the top steps by the southern lance-tower, close against the wall. Berowne looked back to the Palace and the squat Black Tower. ‘Truly, why do I fight here?’ he asked his heart. ‘My place is not here, I am no great captain in time of war; even Haspeth would outshine me here. I belong at Kiva’s side. That is how it were best for me to die, not here in a heap of men, but there at the door of her chambers, in her defense. Then at least I might hear her voice and drink in her scent as I died. Kiva, Kiva!’

So the captain thought to himself, ignoring the pleas of his lieutenant, while all along the battlements the guardsmen slipped and fell to their knees in the blood and muck, and groaned, and wept, and cried out to Goddess as they fought – to Goddess, who heeded them not. And then they cursed Her, and Elna and the barbarians and the Empress and Ara-Karn all alike, for bringing them to such a miserable end.

* * *

All this Ampeánor saw as he stood quietly in the little doorway beside the inner gates. He regarded the lines of men fighting, their weapons raised like black pen-marks upon the clouds’ pale parchment. At either side rose the lance-towers; above them a half-score gerlins circled and swooped.

A slight thrill of pleasure raced up the back of the lord of Rukor. The torments and anguish of his long wandering were forgotten. The Gerso and Allissál were forgotten. Battle waited on him, glorious battle of the sort he had dreamed of as a child, when he had shunned his father’s palace and his mother’s pleasure-fêtes. It was as if he had stepped from the cells of a madhouse into the open light of the world beyond.

With swift hungry strides he crossed the yard. The light of Goddess gleamed off the great shield he held as easily as if it had been of linen. He ran up the steps below the southern lance-tower, lightly, like a youth in search of his beloved, and plunged into the sweating, bleeding, swearing mass of men.

So the High Charan of Rukor entered the battle.

There was no order there, no one voice to be heard above the din. No man knew him. Ampeánor was driven against the wall of the lance-tower. Then he put his hands to the carvings and climbed up somewhat above the level of men. His eyes scanned the lines of the enemy. He drew back the long lance. His eyes found a man. The lance shot forward, driven by all the strength in the charan’s arm and torso.

Phal-Galn of Gundoen’s tribe, a broad-shouldered, unbearded youth fighting with abandon at the side of the three chieftains of Pes-Thos, used a square shield of polished wood and bull’s-hide: this he preferred to the metal shields because it was lighter to wield and because it was the sort his fathers had used. But the shield betrayed Phal-Galn, for the Rukorian lance flew through the nine folds of leather and bit into the spear-man’s chest. Phal-Galn was thrown backward onto the stones as though smitten by a thunderbolt, and death like sleep shut fast his eyes. He had no death-words, but his spirit broke from the corpse instantly.

The guardsmen nearby turned open-mouthed to behold the killer. Before the others could name him, Ampeánor jumped down, passed through the ranks and stood forth alone against the barbarians. One hand held the treasured shield, the other drew the long sword. Beautiful it was and blue, the perfection of the centuries of effort by the armorers of Ul Raambar. It sang as it sprang from its scabbard, and Goddess broke from it with a thousand-colored smile.

The uproar waned below the southern lance-tower.

The guardsmen drew in the air whole lungfuls at a time. The sweat from their brows and chins dripped upon the darker dew staining the black stone.

The barbarians wavered before this new foe. Perhaps they recognized him as that shining unknown warrior, the image of Elna, who had received the blessing of the Gray Priestess. A moment it lasted. Then they came at him.

First were the chieftains of Pes-Thos, brothers, not one by one but three at once. With lance and sword and stave they buried Ampeánor in blows; but the shield held true. The lord of Rukor struck back, and the bright blade drank the blood of Estar-Brin, who howled with rage. Again Ampeánor struck between the brothers’ blows, and the Raamba steel rang off the long lance of Kan-Brin. The sword shattered the flame-hardened wood, and Kan-Brin was cast back from battle. Aln-Brin-Daln swept back his manslaughtering stave, and he drove it against the Southron lord with all the power in his arms. It was a blow like none other the chieftain had in all his life sent forth; doubtless even those stones, ancient as they were, never witnessed its like. Against that blow the great shield was useless, but Ampeánor skipped back, and the stave swung short and shot like a hammer against the stone of the step, shattering it.

On the step was a loose stone, dropped from the Beak as it swung overhead: Ampeánor stooped over that stone. It was no paltry thing: two strong men, maybe, might have lifted it. Ampeánor gathered it in his arms and swung it up over his head. Then he cast it.

The stone smashed the body of the Pes-Thos. Aln-Brin-Daln flew back three paces. There he lay, the stone atop him. He groaned, and wildly tossed his head, but strangely, made no move to remove to the stone. Kan-Brin and Estar-Brin ran to his side. They lifted the stone from off the body of their brother. Then it could be seen, what damage the blow had done. The ribs were all bent in along that side, and half the flesh was torn away from the big shoulder, and the neck was bent strangely from the shoulders.

‘Brothers, aid me,’ groaned the great chieftain, piteously: ‘the sky flashes dark before my eyes, and I have no feeling in my limbs.’

The black-haired men bore up their brother and carried him to the rope ladders. His great form, bloody and gleaming, made a bridge between two ladders. He had killed his first man when he had had but eight winters, and his count before he came below the Iron Gate of Elna’s Citadel had been eight score and seventeen. He had been famous as one of the greatest of warriors and hunters, a man to leap a river in a bound in springtime; but beneath the terrible strength of Ampeánor of Rukor, Aln-Brin-Daln had found his doom, and he would do no fighting that pass.

Aln-Brin-Daln and Phal-Galn were not alone that waking. Many tribesmen fell beneath the Rukorian’s strokes. On the walls of Tezmon his allies had fled from around him, and he had fought hopelessly and alone, backed against the pillar of some unknown merchant’s palace. Below the walls of Bollakarvil he had fought shamefully, on the side of the enemy. Here, at the last stand of the Bordakasha Empire, atop this mountain in the sea-winds with lonely desolation stretching to all sides, Ampeánor, High Charan of Rukor and pledged Consort to the last Empress, had found the fulfillment and full flowering of the grand dreams of his youth. Tireless he was and terrible, and the barbarians fell below his bloody strokes. All the champions and chieftains of the second army who still remained upon the battlements went against him, and fell; the others, lesser men with fear dashing their hopes, fled from him.

Kerrin-Kalk of the Harvols and Grent-Hol of the Kamskals he killed; Oro-Kang of the Karghils fled from him, bloody, and had to be helped down the ladders. Estar-Aln of the Korlas was pushed before him, but ran without striking a blow. A warrior of the Undains, Jahln-Deg, stood upon his toes and aimed his bow at the Rukorian: the death-bird danced off the glorious armor and fell harmless to the stone, to be trampled underfoot in the surges of the battle. Ruas-Sthel, a spearman of Gundoen’s tribe, was unstrung by him and felt the Raamba sword sheathed in his vitals. Kuld-Fit-Valn of the Archeros, his mother’s sister’s son Lanh-Drom, Lang-Garn of the Kamskals, Ghol-Sli of the Jalijh, Woon-Bir-Karn of the Vinkars, Loit-Sert of the Pes-Thos – all fell before the Rukorian lord and were made ready for the barges of their tribes.

Poran-Dilg roused himself now. The warriors beside him had turned to confront this new threat from behind them – turned and died. Now Poran-Dilg slowly bent his head and shook his heavy, bloody axe. He drew it out of the crushed shield of a guardsman and, so close to the rear parapet, turned about.

The champion of the Eldars stood face to face with Ampeánor.

Both men were tall, but the Eldar was taller of the two, and by far the broader. His brawny arms might have served the Rukorian for legs. Both men were covered in the blood of their foes and as yet unwounded. They stood with weapons poised in the thick pungent air, and the roar of battle fell to stillness as all eyes went to them, the two greatest on the battlements.

Poran-Dilg raised his axe. ‘You have made me turn aside,’ he said. ‘Your skull I shall keep.’

The Eldar stepped forward, driving the huge axe in a mighty blow. The Rukorian stooped behind the wall of his shield. The axe smashed the metal, gouging out chunks of gold and bronze, but the iron held and the lord was unharmed. Now he stood, and struck a blow; Poran-Dilg parried it with the butt of the axe.

So they traded strokes, each man striving to pierce the defenses of his foe. The men around them counted the strokes. It seemed beyond belief that two mortals could sustain their strength so long, giving and getting such blows.

Then the Raamba blade of Ampeánor fell from the parry of Poran-Dilg and cut into the flesh of the leg of the Eldar just above the knee. It was not a grave wound, but blood sprang from it, and this drew a cheer from the guardsmen. Poran-Dilg feinted, and drove a blow above the rim of the bright shield. At the last instant Ampeánor saw it, the huge brutal axe bearing down, and he bent. The axe-blade smashed against the strengthening ridge atop the Rukorian helmet and tore the thing from Ampeánor’s head. Blood started from the lord of Rukor’s ears. He staggered back, and there was no understanding in his eyes or strength in his mouth; and the barbarians cheered hoarsely.

Ampeánor stumbled – his feet caught at a corpse – he fell.

Poran-Dilg jumped forward. Then Ullerath hurled a lance, and the heavy lance-head struck one of the Eldar’s ankles, smashing the bone. Poran-Dilg staggered, but held his footing. Ampeánor swung the brilliant blade two-handed. The sword cut in an arc that nothing might withstand. Like a black rainbow the blade flashed through the arm of Poran-Dilg, shearing off the huge hand wielding the axe. Axe and hand fell heavily on the stone; Poran-Dilg howled and fell to one knee.

Over him stood the lord of Rukor, bloody blade outstretched. The point of it ran under the Eldar’s chin through the thick beard, and touched the naked, corded throat.

‘So,’ gasped Poran-Dilg, ‘you scented, weakling Southron, you have killed me. Go on, finish what God alone has granted you: I have no life without that hand and my axe. Dark God gave them to me, and I repaid Him well with blood and slaughter; now, as is His right, He takes them back, and me with them. I go to Him gladly, for Poran-Dilg, best man of Eldar and strongest warrior in all the armies of Ara-Karn, will never be content to take pity from others or be less than the strongest. Death holds no terror for me: but by my blood upon these stones I curse this place and all who live here, and most of all you.’

Ampeánor brought the sword down upon the barbarian’s neck. Poran-Dilg did not even twitch beneath that blow, but stayed as he was and even brought up his neck to meet the blade.

And it is said that, when the body fell back in a tumble on the second step of the battlements, the eyes were still open, and the brows twisted in a glare of hateful triumph.

* * *

With the death of Poran-Dilg the sweet taste turned bitter in the mouths of the barbarians. They looked from the body on the stone to the Southron standing over it, bare-headed, furious.

It had been foretold long ago that if the barbarians should ever rise, then Elna would return. Elna, the unconquerable; Elna, the god.

Behind him the lines of guardsmen surged forward. They drove their wall of lance-points into the barbarians. Once more the clatter and clash of arms mounted from the peak. But now it was the barbarians who gave way, the guardsmen who drove forward. The barbarians were driven and penned in close together, so they no longer had space to wield their weapons. Man fell against man amidst murderous cursing. Those who fell beneath the press were trampled by their fellows. Back over the parapet – a few managed to catch at the ladders, but the rest leaped to their deaths on the stones below. Hundreds died in that butchering, and their groans rose ghastly against the Iron Gate.

The warriors in the square feared to touch the luckless ones whom dark God spurned.

So after so many hours of ceaseless fighting, the guardsmen regained the parapet.

* * *

In the square among the milling thousands, Gorn-Tal accosted Yan-Oro, chief of the Yurlings.

‘O Chief,’ said Gorn-Tal, ‘let me join your tribe, that I may fight alongside the Yurlings in the fifth army.’

Yan-Oro looked up at the Orn, who towered over the portly Yurling by a head and a half. ‘But how will you fight so, with your shield-arm torn and bandaged?’

The Orn grinned. ‘The fifth army will not do battle for a while. Maybe by then this will be healed.’

Yan-Oro’s eyes grew big at this, and swiftly enough he gave his assent, and let his kinsman Dairn-Yil sponsor the Orn. He revealed to Gorn-Tal the hidden word of the Yurlings, and mixed their blood together, and so Gorn-Tal of Orn entered the Yurling tribe.

Gorn-Tal went to Erin-Gar-Birn of the Roighalnis, and Gorn-Tal said ‘O chief, let me join your tribe, that I may fight at the side of the Roighalnis in the fourth army.’

Erin-Gar-Birn was a lean man, hard and shrewd. ‘But how will you fight, Orn, with your shield-arm torn and bandaged?’

‘The fourth army will not do battle for a while. Maybe by then this will be healed.’

Erin-Gar-Birn nodded. ‘I will let my uncle’s son sponsor you into our tribe,’ he said; and so it was done. Gorn-Tal learned the hidden word of Roighalni and mixed his blood with that of Erin-Gar-Birn’s uncle’s son.

Gorn-Tal went to Kurn-Vorna Aln, chief over the Fulsars, and Gorn-Tal said ‘O Chief, let me join your tribe, that I may fight at the side of the Fulsars in the third army.’

Kurn-Vorna Aln was even then binding on the last of his armor in the cool shade of his shelter. He was a small man, hairy, cunning, and suspicious, even as the little beast from whom his tribe had gained their name.

‘You have gone up the ladders already,’ he said. ‘You have done your part and more. Why would you wish to go again?’

Gorn-Tal answered simply, ‘I have had dreams and seen the Gray Priestess. This battle will be my last. So I would gain what glory I can and kill as many of our enemies as I can, so that their spirits will serve as my slaves in the lands beyond. Even so was I brothered to Born-Oro-Tirb and became a Jalijha to fight alongside their champion and bring glory to Gan-Birn and his son.’

‘Little luck you brought to either,’ Kurn-Vorna Aln said sourly. ‘Born-Oro-Tirb is slain, and Gan-Birn weeps like a woman in his tents. And how many of the Southrons will you kill so, with your shield-arm torn and bandaged? You will not even be able to climb the ladders, for we go even now into battle, and you are far from healed.’

Gorn-Tal signaled his slaves. With cords and linen they bound the wounded arm to the body of the chieftain, around the chest and from the neck; then they bound on the shield so that it could not fall or be struck off.

Kurn-Vorna Aln laughed. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘no man who seeks death so eagerly as you do, Orn, should be hindered. I myself will sponsor you, and be proud that such a man would wish to call himself a Fulsar.’ So it was done, and the tall grim spear-man became a member of his fifth tribe, and went up the ladders alongside Kurn-Vorna Aln.

* * *

Now order was restored upon the gate. Ampeánor sent messengers to go among the camp of the refugees and find there all the men the Gerso had trained. These men were sitting in a mass before the tents, waiting. They wore leathern armor and held staves and scythes and hammers and knives of all sorts. They had known by the noise that they would be summoned to this battle. There was no despair nor eagerness upon their faces. The memories of the battles on the barricades in High Town were still fresh in their minds, though Goddess Sun had danced to North and South for a whole year.

The trained men stood. They said nothing, but looked up to the black cowl with faces unfathomable.

The messengers went on into the Palace. There they spread through all the stories and chambers of the huge buildings to summon all men to the Iron Gate. To slave, merchant and highborn alike the guardsmen gave the summons, and were rewarded with men of good will but lacking weapons or skill. And with the consent of her majesty the Empress, passed down by the high maidens of the White Tower, all the guards of the Imperial Household and the slaves were freed of their duties to go to save the Citadel.

One last summons remained undelivered, and the last guardsman went to give it. But when he knocked upon the door to the chambers of Ennius Kandi, the guardsman got no answer.

Emboldened, he opened the door and entered, but the chambers were empty. Nor could any man tell him where the charan had gone. He was not in the Southern Wing, in the levels underground, among the refugees or in the tent of the wounded. It seemed the man had vanished from the Citadel.

The guardsman went to the doors of the White Tower, and sent up word asking if the Charan Father Ennius were in council with the Queen. The maidens returned to take from him his last hope. Bewildered, he climbed down to the meeting-place of his fellows. They said that doubtless Father Ennius even then showered his shafts of death on the barbarians from the southern lance-tower. So the guardsmen led the hundreds they had reaped back to the battlements. But not even there would they find Ara-Karn.

* * *

Now the tide of battle had utterly turned. The lord of Rukor rested from his first great outpouring of strength; he sat on the rear parapet and drank water greedily. By him, an armorer hammered the brilliant helm back into shape. Other men of the reserves gathered earth to scatter over the steps, so the blood should be absorbed and the footing bettered.

The third army of the barbarians were now climbing the ladders – warriors of lesser tribes, and half the mercenaries from the cities of the South. They went up the ladders, but even in the absence of Ampeánor the barbarians were struck dead by the score. The air below the Iron Gate was thick as in a slaughterhouse, despite all the mercenaries and slaves could do to cart away the corpses. The guardsmen and Tarendahardilites drove their lances pitilessly, happy for the groans and screams they were begetting. Not a single man of the barbarians could win again to the bloody parapet.

Forgotten now are those guardsmen and refugees, save for Berowne and Ullerath. Only some names are remembered: there was a Coriolarthil of Rukor, and a Shilvas of Vapio, and Egdar Borniltharn of the Eglands. There were two men named Ghirlando, Black Ghirlando and Bone Ghirlando. Their names alone survive, carved on the stone walls of the yard between the gates. The men themselves are gone. They did not fight as the barbarians, each man striving to do better than his comrades and gain a greater share of plunder. They fought together in the triple line under their leaders and their lord. Each man’s shield guarded his neighbor as well as himself, they thrust their lances in harmony and sang with one voice. So it is said that the barbarians fought only a single man upon the Iron Gate, a man of six hundred arms and heads, and but a single will.

Below them, the kinsmen of Ampeánor’s second victim were laying down their brother before the feet of Nam-Rog of the Durbars.

‘Nam-Rog, you know us,’ said Kan-Birn. ‘Always have we sided with you in the councils. Now our brother here has been wounded by the great Southron Elna-Ana, and though we have closed his wounds and wrapped cloths about his ribs, he lies in pain and cannot move. His breathing is clear, and he speaks and sees, but will not eat or move. It is said that you have skills of healing, and that you hold the herbs of Gundoen, which Hertha-Toll prepared for him before we crossed the Taril. Heal our brother, and be sure that henceforth the tribes of Durbars and Pes-Thos will be as one.’

The aged chief bent low, and passed his hands over the great sprawling body of Aln-Brin-Daln, he who once had been feared in all the huts of the far North.

‘Yes, I will heal him,’ he said, and drew his war-knife and cut the throat of the Pes-Thos. The black blood ran in great gouts out of the gaping flesh onto the stones.

Kan-Birn drew his own knife and would have fallen screaming on the Durbar chief had not a score of Durbar spearmen defended their chief.

Old Nam-Rog calmly wiped and sheathed his knife. ‘Rest easy, Kan-Brin, and you also, Estar-Brin. Did you not see that he was dying? Would you have enjoyed the hours of his pain? Or else he had somehow lived – then do you not see it must be only as a cripple, a man of no strength or mastery over his limbs or bowels? Men who live even a year so, will carry their deformities with them into the world beyond. Now he shall be reborn whole-bodied and clean, and be thankful for it.’

‘O Great Chieftain, and was this the best you could do for him, to complete the Southron’s work?’ cried Kan-Brin.

But Estar-Brin stood coldly by, his hands playing upon the long handle of his sword. ‘And have we not a hundred slaves who might have tended to him?’ he mused. ‘Had we not won three chests full of treasure, rightful payment for our deeds? O Chief, I do not blame you for your view. Maybe it is true. But the right to give the death-blow belonged to no one but Kan-Brin and me, and for that I blame you wholly. I go now to kill the Southron and avenge my brother. After that we shall put into a barge the body of our brother. And then I shall kill you.’

So the two brothers gave the corpse into the arms of some of their followers and went up the ladders in search of Ampeánor.

But Nam-Rog leaned against one of the stone disks of the fallen Pillar of Victory. He looked up to the men high on the narrow ladders, fighting and dying beneath the lance-thrusts of the Southrons. ‘May their wish be granted, and may they kill him soon,’ Nam-Rog murmured. ‘I do not like this Southron, the tales of him begin to trouble me.’

In long lines the slaves bore from the rocks the bodies of the slain. Nam-Rog and the chieftains had said that the order of the armies had been chosen by lot; in truth they had secretly ordered all the strongest tribes in the first two armies in the hope that they, in the first rush of battle, should conquer. Now of the last three armies there were few great champions, and the mercenaries, without Erion Sedeg, fought indifferently. The manfall was terrible, the gains scant, the hours over-long. The waiting warriors grew dispirited. The chiefs met in council, but did little more than count the men missing from the circle, men mowed down by the murderous strength of the Southron champion, him whom they could not cease from calling Elna-Ana, the Return of Elna.

Suddenly the battle on the Iron Gate waxed furious again. At one end of the wall Kurn-Vorna Aln and Gorn-Tal fought to gain the parapet; at the other Kan-Brin and Estar-Brin strove to reach Ampeánor. In great, battering strokes Estar-Brin swung his huge sword; even so, he could not pierce the shield wall. The others atop the ladders saw him, however, and fire kindled in their hearts.

The din mounted to the clouds, and the guardsmen began, very slightly, to waver.

Kurn-Vorna Aln saw it. He shouted into the ear of Gorn-Tal under cover of his shield; then the Fulsar stepped back down a rung. Gorn-Tal was fighting now with another of his weapons, a battle-axe one-bladed and backed with an iron spike. The Orn strove upward, battering and shattering the shields. A gap showed in the shield-wall. A groan of fear sounded from the lungs of the guardsmen there. They recognized this barbarian and were desperate to halt his onslaught. Four or five leaned out far over the parapet, driving their long lances at the twisting great body of the Orn. Then it was that Kurn-Vorna Aln shot up at the guardsmen with his short strong bow.

Those iron-beaked arrows at such short distance were not to be stopped by bronze, leather or bone.

They drove deep into the defenders’ bodies, to the feathers. The guardsmen cried out and died. They fell forward over the parapet. A break opened in the shield-wall. Gorn-Tal jumped up, shearing off lance-heads and shattering shields before him. Two fell beneath the blows, three more were wounded; the rest drew back.

Gorn-Tal stepped boldly on the parapet.

From the square below, the dark form of the Orn-Jalijha-Yurling-Roighalni-Fulsar seemed to burn in the sky like a beacon. All the warriors knew him. Lifting their weapons they screamed his praises into the stricken air. The uproar staggered the guardsmen.

It also brought Ampeánor back into the battle.

He saw the wild man on the parapet and the space around him. Quickly the lord of Rukor caught up his helmet and a lance and leapt forward.

Another barbarian was even then clambering onto the narrow parapet – Kurn-Vorna Aln of the Fulsars. Proudly he stood at the side of the Orn-Fulsar, his brother. Even then Ampeánor loosed his cast.

The lance flew true. The Fulsar brought up his small shield at an angle before his face, so the lance did not break through the layers of leather and studded wood, but skipped off and flew harmless into the deep empty air. Kurn-Vorna Aln, however, staggered back under the force of the blow.

The Fulsar chief stood at Gorn-Tal’s left. Had the Orn not been wounded in his shield-arm, maybe he could have reached out a steadying hand. But that arm was bound fast: and Kurn-Vorna Aln fell. Unwounded he toppled from the parapet, and his curses echoed off the iron as he fell. The men high on the ladders reached to catch him in vain. On the jagged bed of rocks the life broke from the Fulsar’s body. So his spirit rose to join those others hovering over the scene of the battle, in the hundreds, like two clouds, urging on with voiceless cries the deeds of their companions.

On the battlements the lord of Rukor moved to do battle with the chief of Orn. Gorn-Tal without a word aimed a ferocious blow. The axe smashed against the shield. Ampeánor kept his footing, leaned forward and swung the blue blade at the legs of his enemy, at the knees where the vital strings are bared. Gorn-Tal leapt back; unheard-of, such agility in a one-armed man. So, dancing and dodging on the slick lip of the parapet with empty death on one side, the two warriors did battle. Furiously they exchanged blows to the cheers of the opposing sides.

Madly and in vain did the two brothers Kan-Brin and Estar-Brin shout at the Orn to cease. Then, desperately, they strove to gain the battlements. It was as if they would have fought through half the length of the shield-wall to reach the High Charan. But Berowne hurled an enormous stone into Estar-Brin’s face; the Pes-Thos was too swift, and the stone rolled down half the length of the ladder behind him, crushing men as it rolled. It was a marvel the ladder did not snap beneath the weight. The Pes-Thos rose again, and opened five wounds on the body of his enemy with the greatsword, jabbing it like a lance, so that the guardsmen called on the captain to give back; but Berowne would not. Ullerath fought his way to the side of his rival, and together they beat back the barbarian. Bloodied in a score of places, the Pes-Thos chieftain had to relent. Weary and dazed, the battle-fury beaten out of him like fire out of iron beneath the blows of a smith’s hammer, Estar-Brin swung down the rope to the bloody stones below, where Kan-Brin awaited him.

‘Glad enough of the sight of you was I this time,’ Berowne breathed, leaning on the Eglander’s shoulder. ‘But why save me, when you know I will take Kiva away from you?’

Ullerath laughed. ‘Against your living presence my campaign has nothing to fear,’ he said, ‘but I will not contend with memories.’

Even then a tremendous cry went up from the throats of the guardsmen. Ampeánor had struck the last Orn warrior below the helmet, where the neck joins the skull. Now the bone was crushed, brains showed with blood, and the corpse of Gorn-Tal dropped like a stone to smash against the greedy rocks below.

At that sight the voices in the square were stilled; but the cheers of the guardsmen lifted high and joyous.

Wordlessly Kan-Brin and Estar-Brin gathered the broken body and bore it away. They laid it in the center of the circle of chieftains. Mutely they regarded it, twisted, bloody, grotesque. Then the slaves laid the corpse out formally on a bed of straw in a cart, and conveyed it to the camp.

There, far from the clatter of swords, what once had been Gorn-Tal, last living Orn, was taken by the nine, his beautiful bed-slaves. More by far he might have claimed from the conquered cities of the Southlands. But he had ever been a grim and lonely man, and the chatter of many voices about him had been to him a thing unbearable. So these nine had been all he took. Now with tears in their lovely eyes they washed the body of the blood and filth of battle. About his head they bound colored linens in the shape of the twisted headbands of sailors. Up and down his long limbs they ran soft sponges from the Southern Ocean, and over the flesh they sprinkled with their slim, long-fingered hands fragrant spices and crushed herbs blended in water and oils, to take from the corpse the hateful stench of wasteful death.

Thereafter the beautiful women arrayed the body of their conqueror in golden armor. And upon the death-bed beside him they laid his treasured weapons, axes and bows and curious lances and swords and knives. With these they strewed gemstones and bundles of flowers tied with stalks of rare herbs. And gently and lovingly with fragrant oil the maidens caressed the face of the great Orn, taking from his features all hatred and doom and suffering, leaving only peace. They brushed back his hair, making its long curls glossy. So it was said that never in his life had Gorn-Tal looked so beautiful as he did in death.

With that the slaves let fall the sides of the large tent and revealed their lord in death. Around the bed they set the coffers, open to reveal the wealth the Orn had won in battle. Gold and silver and fine silks were there aplenty, along with cups and drinking-bowls inlaid with gold, all of the finest craftwork.

And there came the Blind Ones, those warriors who had been first to go up the ladders in the season when the guardsmen had poured down on them the vicious potions of the Imperial Embalmers. Now scarred about their faces, their eyes burned out and ghastly, they tented together, attended by slaves. Some warriors had held it shameful to let them live, for in the far North any man who could not hunt or fish was sent into the wilderness to die. But others would not have it that the Southrons should claim as victims men they had not rightly slain; and besides, these were different times and the tribes were poor no longer. So the Blind Ones grew famous as tale-tellers and singers, and often made so great entertainments during the long misery of summer that some credited them alone with saving all the encampment from going mad and falling on one another.

Now these settled on all sides of the open tent of Gorn-Tal. They mourned the fallen one, and recited at length his deeds. More than the death of a man, this seemed to them the passing of a whole tribe, one of the mightiest in its time. And this man was the only Orn to defy Gen-Karn and live. And they told of his recent deeds, of how he had gone up the ladders again and again and had become a man of five tribes, a thing unheard of. Around the Blind Ones the halt and gravely wounded sat in silence and gave tears to the black earth in mourning for this man whom once none gave shelter. That had been in the winters of Gen-Karn’s strength, when all feared him and praised him as the greatest Warlord the tribes had ever known. But in Tezmon he had lost his life in a ghastly way spoken of only in whispers.

And later, when the lovely slaves took away the body and placed it in a barge in the sea, the warriors left the tent standing, a symbol of Orn in the camp. So they followed the customary death-rites for a chieftain, even though there were no other Orns there to succeed Gorn-Tal.

And long after the hour of the longsleep came the Blind Ones, the wounded, and the nine lovely bed-slaves remained about the body; and the music of their mourning went up sweetly into the warm, bright air of the southern fall.

* * *

In the square below the Iron Gate all was tumult and confusion. The last ranks of the third array were mounting the ladders, but over the Iron Gate Ampeánor of Rukor stalked the parapet, going between the shield-wall and the attackers from one end to the other, tall against the sky. Like a thorsa he roamed, ferocious, bloodthirsty; no man might stand against him. Goddess blazed off his armor and the great shield; red blood dripped from the iron leaf of the lance-head, and his eyes were twin terrible stones in the shadow of the helm. The barbarians struck token blows at him and leaped back onto the rope ladders. The mercenaries scarcely offered him even a blow. The name of Elna-Ana passed from mouth to mouth like the bitter, unfelt kiss of whores. Never had the tribesmen known such fear of an enemy: they masked it with anger, but defeat was in their hearts. Born-Oro-Tirb was dead, and Aln-Brin-Daln, and Poran-Dilg and now Gorn-Tal, he who had twice won the parapet. Who yet lived who could defeat this man?

Now a delegation went to the shelters of the Vorisals. Among them were the chiefs and counselors of all the tribes of the fourth and fifth armies. Yan-Oro, the chief of the Yurlings, spoke for them.

‘O Roguil Arn,’ the Yurling called into the shelter, ‘Chief of the Vorisals, now Gorn-Tal and Poran-Dilg lie dead, and there is not a single man of all the tribes who would deny that you are our greatest champion. I myself was always of this mind. It was you who won our greatest victory in this battle, and since you left the fighting things have gone against us. And now there seems no hope of victory so long as Elna-Ara stalks the battlements. This we will offer you, chieftain, if you will return to battle: one half of all the treasure we personally have been allotted from the campaigns of the South, and three parts out of every five which are granted our tribes when the fastness falls. All this we pledge to you, if only you will go up the ladders and kill this Southron.’

The Vorisal broke from the tent and stood tall over them, a strong young man broad-shouldered and pale-eyed. ‘Do you think my axe is for sale?’ he roared. ‘Do you take me for a Gerso merchant?’

At this they took pains to allay his anger, but with a sweep of his hand Roguil Arn silenced their babbling. ‘As for this Southron,’ he said, ‘I do not fear him. Not for all your gold would I do this thing; I will accept both deed and gold, however, as my proper due. But I do not go to battle without my tribesmen, and they are wounded and weary. What will you offer them?’

‘This,’ replied Yan-Oro boldly: ‘all the hunting and wood-felling rights of the Silver Forest, up to the banks of the Black River, will the Ekilehs and the Kagions yield to your tribe.’ The men of those tribes gaped to hear this, but assented.

‘That is well,’ Roguil Arn said, and dismissed them. The chiefs and counselors went away, for the most part well-content; but when they were gone, then the scowl broke from the Vorisal's face and he laughed. ‘Ah,’ he sighed, ‘I would have given them gold for the pleasure of fighting this Southron. Now I will prove to all men I was Poran-Dilg’s better. Wait for me, Elna-Ana: Roguil Arn claims you!’

And the young chief threw back his head and flung wide his arms to the setting Jade moon and laughed like the barking of a wild dog.

Nam-Rog was then pacing before his shelter. Anger and worry rode upon his features, and deep in thought he chewed his beard. Then at once he called to his side Avli-Oan, a tracker of the Durbars.

‘Avli-Oan, you are the swiftest man in our tribe on either foot or pony. Take horse now and ride down past the ruins of this place. Find Erion Sedeg, the leader of the mercenaries, and say to him these words from me: What has held him up so long? Are we to count on his big words no longer? His time has come to prove his loyalty to Ara-Karn. Bid him spur on his men and bring up with all haste what he has fashioned. Go now, or else this one Southron will prove the salvation of the last of Elna’s kin!’

* * *

In the shadow of the age-old stones of the Palace, a curious quiet reigned. Slaves and highborn alike remained shut in their chambers, and spoke only in undertones. A superstitious fear had taken hold of them, that what they did might have an ill effect upon the battle. It had begun among the slaves, who believed that it had been the dying scream of Ampeánor’s prisoner that had conjured up the assault. Quickly the fear had spread, reaching even to the story of the Vapionil in the Southern Wing. Even they, herb-quietened or wine-wrought, moved with an exaggerated delicateness. It was as if noise or cry might shatter the shell-like fragility of their yearlong shelter here.

So it was that when the Queen emerged from the White Tower into the long passageways of the upper levels of the Palace, she entered into silence as into a tunnel under the earth, and met no one before her. Behind her went two servants in the tunics of the middle stories, big men bearing the heavy wooden staves used to punish rebellious slaves. At length the Queen reached the recessed door of the Gerso Charan Ennius Kandi.

Softly she spoke to the two men. Their lamps shone strangely off the portions of her mask not shrouded by the black cowl.

‘And your fellow?’ she asked.

The men looked at each other. ‘Pardon, your reverence,’ stammered one, ‘but he is missing. Maybe he went to join the defense of the gates?’

She left the men at the entrance, and entered the chambers alone.

Heavy hangings covered all windows and the entrance to the balcony. The dark, almost unseeable figure of the black-clad woman stood a few paces from the closed door, at the end of the anteroom. What thoughts or memories may have passed beneath the smooth surface of the golden mask, no man might have said.

The figure started suddenly. There had been a noise from beyond the hangings to the balcony. A man appeared there; in the sudden flood of Goddesslight the woman was revealed before him. The man stopped short, seeing her; she, like a thirsla come upon the lair of a mountain-thorsa, was moveless.

Ara-Karn stepped into the room and closed the hangings behind him. His hair was in disarray from the wind, his arms half bare; he wore a hunting-tunic and the harness of Gerso; at his belt was a knife-sheath, which was empty. His soft leather shoes were wet.

The darkness filled the room like the warmth of a good fire. There is a certain safety in darkness, whatever its attendant fear – also freedom. Many are the words that may be spoken aloud in darkness that would die short of a whisper in the light of Goddess.

The Queen tossed back her head beneath the black cowl, like some fine-spirited blood horse. ‘I had not expected to find you here, my lord.’

He bowed courteously, extending his arms in the ritual gesture of hospitality. When he rose, his features were composed again. But had she been privileged to behold those features an hour before, in the gloom of the grove where the stone basin stood, she would not have been able to believe they were the features of the same man.

‘Tell me, why is it that the Savior of Tarendahardil is not on the battlements?’

‘I was waiting for you,’ he said gravely, ‘Alastaphele.’

As always at the mention of that name, Allissál felt a chill upon her breast. Reaching into the depths of her sleeve, she felt the jade handle of the dagger and was comforted. ‘It is over, this game of yours. The masks are fallen at last. When this attack ends and Ampeánor returns, there will be no more hiding for you.’

‘There is still one mask left to fall.’

‘Do you expect that I should save you?’

‘No.’

In truth, she had hoped to find him here. She had readied herself for him most assiduously. But first there was something she must know.

‘It appears you have murdered one of the servants I set to watch you. Also you have freed Ampeánor’s prisoner. Where did you take him? Is he here?’

‘He is dead.’

‘I see.’ There was the weight of iron in her tone. ‘Did you know that I would leave the choice up to you?’

‘That choice was always up to me.’ He took a slight step forward and to his right; she did likewise, to maintain the distance between them.

‘Did you hope that I would save him?’

‘I knew that you would not.’

‘And that – that thing they did to him: did you foresee that as well?’ Fear and anger welled within her. She disliked being alone with him. She no longer knew what to expect. They were speaking softly and quite calmly in the dim, enshrouded room; she longed for the shriek of light.

‘It was for that very thing that I returned to this Citadel a year ago.’

‘So,’ she said. ‘And it came to pass. Did it please you to behold your friend cut as not even a Madpriest should be? Did it gratify you that he did not betray you even then?’

‘Oh, yes.’

She saw his eyes, taunting and wild in the darkness. Greenish flecks sparked in their depths like laughter or murder. She noticed that beneath her robes she was shaking. She could scarcely control her voice. Her right hand gripped the dagger handle so tightly the bones ached.

‘That will be his fame,’ he said. His self-mastery was wonderful to behold: only his eyes and the twist of his lips betrayed him. ‘Had he stayed what he was, a hunter and chieftain childless and beer-loving, then he would soon have passed from the memory of his tribe. Gen-Karn would have finished him. I gave him generalship of the armies, and I gave him this. It was this trial which made him great. Now he will live in all the lands for as long as Elna did: the chieftain, the general, the warrior not even the Vapionil might break.’

‘Will you take the glory for that, too?’ The time had come. She would never fathom the depths of his heart. He knew what she wanted and denied her of it mockingly. The time had come. She knew it.

By now they had exchanged places: it was he who stood before the anteroom, she who had her back to the hangings of the balcony. Now she stopped. He did too.

Because Ampeánor must not learn the deeper secrets of this man – must not have the satisfaction either of killing him or of the farce of a public trial. Because this man was her enemy. Because it was her city he had laid waste, and herself he had betrayed and used. And because only she was Bordakasha

‘It was a test,’ she groaned. ‘It was meant only as a trial. I wished to see how far you would allow it to go on – how far he would order it to go on. But you were both too proud, too mad, and it went on. You failed the test, you both failed – and because you failed, I failed as well.’

‘Yes. Only Gundoen triumphed.’

Because he had murdered Qhelvin of Sorne. Because he had betrayed Ankhan and Lisalya and their city Ul Raambar. Because of Elnavis’ degradation. Because of Tarendahardil. Because of all his crimes. Because Elna would demand no less.

‘You might have slain Ampeánor on the beach in Rukor, and all this would have been avoided. Why didn’t you?’

‘In order that all this might come to pass.’

‘Why? Did that man mean nothing to you? Did his love for you mean nothing? Have you nothing in that heart of yours but a mad brooding for revenge? How could you endure it, to sit so calmly and watch him treated so?’

‘Because I knew you would then end up as you are: alone with me here.’

Because he remained a danger to all men and cities, and now more so than ever, since his mask threatened to fall. And because she feared him and the madness that rode him. And in the end, because she had to regain peace, peace within her soul as well as in her body. It had to be. It had to be.

‘May Goddess damn you,’ she moaned, half a cry. ‘May you be cursed and tormented for a thousand years for this, Ara-Karn.’

Never had she felt such anger in all her life. She was seizing and releasing the dagger; she could feel its sharpness chafing the skin of her arm. Again she tried to drive herself to do it, in a mindless fury if in no other way. She knew then something of the madness Ampeánor must have felt in the bath-chamber. She swept her hand out of the sleeve.

* * *

He saw the empty hand dart out of the sleeve, vague and pale in the dimness, and rise to the shoulder of the black robes. There was an iron brooch there, embellished with black cundan stones cut in the likeness of a chorjai blossom, the flower of death and mourning. The hand pulled the brooch free and let it fall to the floor. The thick, heavy folds of black linen fell apart, like the opening of a bud in springtime, to bare one high, red-tipped breast.

A shudder of suppressed passion took the body of the Queen.

The faint light seeping into the room from the balcony beyond the hangings outlined the dark-robed form as both hands drew back the heavy cowl and pulled free the mask of gold. The yellow gold, dulled in the dimness, revealed a finer radiance behind it, of silver-blue eyes, a high glowing brow, cheeks like flowers kissed by Goddess near the dark horizon, and wide, perfectly-shaped lips deep red with paint, all framed by golden, foaming hair bound up in luxuriant tight masses and snaky coils. The folds of the cowl had fallen open to display by contrast the long, sinuous curve of the neck responding to the quickening beat of a single vein.

In all their fierce love-bouts through the Spring and Summer, not once had she removed the mask. She had opened to him all the rest of her naked body, but not once had she let him behold her face.

The sounds of the battle seemed dulled and diminished in the close, dark room, even as time seemed to slow and grow heavy in its pace. The Queen reached with long, elegant fingers whose nails were stained a red darker than that upon her lips, to the second iron brooch. The single garment of the robe slid open and apart. For a moment the fabric caught on the angle of the shoulder, so that her form seemed halved, all dark folds of linen below an expanse of smooth flesh, flower-scented in the secret flat hollow between the twin high breasts, descending to the swell of the hip. Her skin was the hue of new-fallen snow in the mountains of the Spine at the Dusky Border, a soft chill pallor blushed with the rays of distant Goddess. Then she shrugged, or perhaps it was no more than another shudder – the linen slid from the shoulder. The long, flattened sweep of the beautiful legs spiraled naked from the mound of linen. The golden fur of her sex had been trimmed, shaped and scented, an ornament like a jewel to perfect and surmount the curves of the lower belly and the softness of the inner thighs. Below those delicately curling tufts, clasping like a lock the right upper thigh, was a band of gold adorned with blood-red rubies cut in the semblance of human hearts.

Again she raised her arms, revealing like a glance from downcast eyes the slight tufts of red-gold hair in the musky hollows where the arch of the breasts joined the arms. The twin daubs of hair above echoed the single patch below, forming a triad whose harmonies fell and rose and shuddered with her breath like the light of Goddess on wheat-fields in the burning airs of summer. In a few gestures she did out the jeweled pins and clasps imprisoning her hair. It fell free with a shower of coils and gleaming ringlets: she tossed her head, and the mass of hair waved out like a nimbus about the oval of her face and the horizon of her shoulders, releasing a perfume unbearably sweet.

The man, Ara-Karn, stood before this spectacle where he was, as if held helpless by a desire so wrenching and powerful it might have been a spear hurled through him.

From the soft-lipped mound of linen the woman stepped toward him. She was as naked, as blazing and as chaste as the fiery orb of Goddess Herself. There was fire too within her eyes, a fire cold with silver-blue. She had lost none of her anger, but now it mingled with something else, something more sure and more dangerous. She breathed deeply, and the breath swelled her ribs and brought up her breasts. The breath caught in her throat, behind the pink dance of the tongue and the small sharp teeth.

‘I hate you,’ she said.

‘I hate you more than any man or thing I have ever despised in my life. Because of you there is no peace in me. There will never be, not so long as you live. Everything is changed, and there will be no going back. Because of you. I cannot lie down to sleep without thinking of you. If I were not unworthy of my race, you would now be no more than a corpse upon that carpet. But there are two men beyond that door, and if you touch me, I will summon them and order them to beat you to death before my eyes. This I swear before the Couple.’

She reached forth with both hands. Upon the inner left wrist the Sign of the Couple was marked in black ink. She set her hands to the neck of his tunic, so that her knuckles brushed against the hollow of his throat and he could feel the ice cold hands. She tore down on his garment to the belted waist; the long opening bared the sunburnt flesh of his chest, and the torn linen hung down between his legs obscenely. Deliberately, never taking her eyes from his, she ran the nails of her hands over that denuded stretch, so that the skin blanched and bled.

She laid her hands upon either side of his face, filling the hollows of her scented pains with the bristles of his beard below the high cheekbones. Naked, soft and gleaming in the darkness, she rose upon her sweet-turned toes and kissed him full upon the opened mouth. Then she stepped back and struck his face with all her strength.

He all but fell over, but with an animal grace held his footing; impulsively he stepped forward until their bodies almost touched again. The green in the black depths of his eyes flashed, and his brows were as black as the lands beyond the Knife-Edged Border. But the fury in her gaze was the equal of his. Again she went up against him, the soft, curving expanse of her form yielding to the leather and iron of his garb. Again she kissed him, taking his mouth to hers with avid expertise – then broke free and struck him again with still greater force. All the left side of his face went pale, then blue beneath the hammer of that blow, and his hair whipped back like a banner.

He looked at her with wild laughter in his eyes. She had stepped back again, shaken by the force of her own blow. There was a hint of doubt in her eyes now – confusion, almost fear. She glanced down at her own breasts gleaming with his blood. He stepped forward again; their bodies came together.

She threw back her hair. ‘By Goddess’ cries, how I hate you.’ Again she kissed that mouth of his, needfully, holding his face down to hers. She kissed him longer this time, then broke it, throwing back his head – but this time he caught her wrist in the bond of his hand. The force of the blow swept back the length of her arm, twisting her upper body. She brought up her other arm, but again his hand was there to prison it.

* * *

She fought, but he held her wrists so strongly that she could see the veins and thews harden on his forearms. Soundlessly, except for slight grunts impossible to restrain, they struggled. She could feel the sweat break like an itch upon her back, in the flatness between her breasts, beneath her arms and between her legs. She struggled, but in vain. He held her wrists too tightly, and forced her body against his too closely for her to have done anything against him with her legs.

Then he twisted her arms upward and behind her shoulders. She arched back beneath him, as if yielding. Her hips were driven helplessly against his; one of his knees filled the hollow between her legs. He leaned forward, and a lock of his hair fell against her own. Their eyes were very close. A drop of sweat gathered and fell from the tip of his nose upon the tip of hers; it ran into her mouth. She tasted his salt and his lust in that drop, and threw her head forward to bite and draw blood from that laughing face, only his mouth was there to meet hers and he crushed her head back, grinding lips against each other and sucking the breath out of her lungs so that she became weakened and dizzy and fell.

She fell, and her long naked limbs writhed upon the heap of her own garments, and she could feel the iron brooch-pins underneath her shoulders, and the golden mask cold against her buttocks, and something else, hard and sharp beneath the linen, in the arch between her nether back and buttocks.

He was lying over her, pinioning her legs with his knees and pressing one hip against her middle so that the clasp of his belt cut into the wet flesh about her sex. He looked into her eyes long enough for her to know the wildness and madness in him; to know too that she was his then and that he might well do anything he pleased with her – even kill her with those strong hands, if she dared cry for aid. He looked at her, and it was as if he had been on the point of speaking – but he remained silent, as if his body had become his tongue now. Then, slowly and with care not to lessen any of the force by which he held her helpless, he slid his body forward.

The broad tunic rose above her face. He lowered himself upon her. The ragged leather hung open to swallow her face and blot the last of the light from her eyes. The sweating, bloody, naked chest pressed upon her mouth. Again he moved: her lips rolled beneath him and his blood and sweat smeared over her. She tasted its rankness and the stink of it was worse than the reek of any of the kills she had made hunting. She could not breathe or escape, and mewed weakly into his bones.

He lifted himself and moved back down. He looked into her eyes. There might have been even tenderness in his eyes. She thought for a flashing moment that he would kiss her, but instead he took her left hand, the Sign dark and smeared by the strength of his fingers, and placed it between his legs. He made her undo the thongs and bare him, then he put her hand between her own legs. There he ran her hand up and down, slowly and surely. Against that invasion, that monstrous use of her and the vileness of the knowledge it implied, she strove and bucked. He laughed and rolled over, so that she lay squirming and wet atop him. Still smiling, he loosed her wrists and dropped his arms on the floor behind his head.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘all the masks are fallen. You are free now: do as pleases you. If you came to taunt and torment me, and prove your power over me, rise and go. It is done, and I lie beneath you even as Gundoen lay below the Vapionil.’

She began to cry.

She lay against him, her hair falling a mantle over her back and shoulders. She could feel the side of one of his knees with the pads of her toes.

This was his cruelest gesture yet. She felt lost and confused as though she had been dropped a long way into an unknown land. She remembered when she had fallen from the roof of the stable to the ground when she had been young. She remembered the lonely darkness of the far side of the mountains. She saw nothing through the tears. Then at length, painfully, she raised her head.

She saw with wonder that his body bore more scars and bruises from her now than it did from all the battles of the wars he had commanded. She had left marks there that would remain upon him for the rest of his years. As he had left such marks upon her wrists. These marks with their secret tale would serve as chains between them, like the marks the ancient lords of Tarendahardil had put upon the bodies of their slaves. She arched forward, and licked his bloody chest. Then she kissed it.

‘Are you a demon or the spawn of dark God indeed,’ she said, ‘that you have such mastery over me?’

‘I am what I told you,’ he said. ‘As are you.’

‘You are insane. There is no heart in you but hatred and a lust for death. And I am so degraded that I would beg you for it.’

‘Then come.’ He lifted her in the crook of his powerful arms. Gently with his nose he brushed the hair from her face. ‘Come,’ he murmured, ‘Alastaphele.’

She nestled against him as he bore her to the bed. There he laid her down against the deep Tezmonian purple of his bed-coverings. And there she answered him, in the tones of a surrender, ‘Yes. Yes. Very well.’

V
The Summons

IT WAS NOW that, in the depths of a dark tent, the great bulk of a man began to stir.

A cloak was spread across the huge body, stained where it had stuck to drying blood. At one edge a few swollen bound knuckles emerged. The cloak was slowly dragged down below the face. It was a face of horror. Bleeding, bandaged, swollen, bluish. One eye closed forever beneath a mess of black and yellow scar. The other half-shut, lacking eyebrow and every other eyelash.

Gundoen struggled up on the rude pallet. Painfully and without understanding, the half-shut eye looked out from beneath the cloak. All about him lay the bodies of dead guardsmen. It occurred to Gundoen suddenly and with great surprise that he still lived.

He had survived the torments.

He looked around with greater interest. Where was he? He did not know. But it was safe. Ara-Karn, his son, had brought him here. Gundoen had known Ara-Karn would come. He had known he would not fail him. There at least Hertha-Toll had been wrong. He had told her so.

He placed the gross round paws of his bandaged hands on the ground. He tried to heave himself up. Pain like fire ran through him; he sat back with a grunt. He shook his head. He had no more strength than a child. Slowly he lowered his head and fell asleep. He dreamed of the crossing of the Taril and all the men he left there, unvoyaged at his command. He would join them now.

* * *

Avli-Oan rode out of the thunder of the encounter, past the ruins of the place and the ominous Brown Temple of Goddess. Fast as a river he rode. At the outskirts of the burned city he came upon a mass of men: in full war-gear, a thousand mercenaries reclined upon stones in the shade out of the sun. He was upon the men before he knew it. He reined in the braying war-horse, raising swirls of dust. The Eglandic war-horse pranced about, and Avli-Oan stared through the dust, the confusion of the battle still burning in his bright eyes.

Towering above him, dominating the entire quarter, was a monumental arch of grayish-white stone. Thousands of sculpted figures adorned it, surmounted by deep-cut characters that read, though the young tracker could not read them,

THE WAY OF KINGS OVER THE WORLD.

Avli-Oan looked up in amazement. It was not the monument of his people’s ancient conqueror that caught his breath. That he had seen many times. But now the way through the arch was dark with an enormous, square-based, wooden tower. It blotted out the sky, as high and broad as the archway itself. Six solid wheels as tall as the height of three men supported it; the axles passing into the wheels had been fashioned from the boles of trees centuries old. Bronze and iron spikes as big as the forearms of women had been driven into the wooden walls to hold the interlocking beams together. High overhead, just beneath the curve of the arch, the parapet of the tower was covered over with cured bull’s-hides many layers deep. Eight hundred warriors might have their quarters in this movable stronghold. Halfway up its face had been painted a large black Darkbeast tooth, the device of Ara-Karn.

Avli-Oan stepped off his horse among the mercenaries, but he did not look at them. His eyes rested raised upon the monstrous tower. Never had he dreamt of such a thing. But seeing it now, he knew straightway to what use it would be put.

‘Surely,’ the young warrior said within himself, ‘this is worthy of Ara-Karn himself.’

Then still in wonder he passed among the throngs of men, and found the leader of the mercenaries sitting on the forward lip of the tower, amid the massive bronze rings used to draw it.

‘Erion Sedeg! Nam-Rog, chief of the Durbars and leader of the chieftains of all the armies of Ara-Karn, sends me to find you and ask of you: What has held you up so long? Is there some trouble, do you need aid, or are we now to count on your promises and big words no longer? The time has come to prove your loyalty to Ara-Karn. Spur on your men and bring up what you have fashioned with all haste.’

The mercenary wore Desert-robes of black with a girdle of iron-studded leather. Beneath the head-robes he wore a bronze skullcap. Three knives were caught in the girdle, a strong-bow leaned beside him, and in his hands he held a small whip. The paint upon his face was white and red and black, the triple hues of death; the eyes were worse.

‘We wait,’ he said.

He spat out picsle juice and swatted at a fly.

‘We were not sure, after all, that you in all your thousands would have need of us. But it does not go well?’

‘We have slain them by the hundreds and twice gained the second step of the battlements. But a giant Southron has defeated us. Champions and chieftains he has slain, scattering their bones to the birds, and driven us back down the ladders. Many hours have passed and yet there is no weariness in this man. He rages on the battlements, and the men only poke at him and flee. It shames me to say this. Not even the strongest bows are of any use. Death-birds turn aside from him. Now they have begun to call him Elna-Ana and say that the Gray Priestess has blessed him so that he shall be invulnerable and unkillable.’

Erion Sedeg tossed aside the whip and gestured upward. ‘Go back now to your master, barbarian, and tell him all will be well. You have failed, but it is not yet the end. We will come now. As for this Southron—’ the mercenary smiled, baring his scarlet sharp teeth— ‘with this tower and the blessing of Ara-Karn, we will kill him.’

With that the leader of the mercenaries turned and, agile as a monkey, climbed the tower. He climbed over the wall of bull’s-hides and stood before the arch. Leaning out over the bull’s-hides, he gestured.

His men swarmed about the base of the tower. Avli-Oan was crowded back. He found his war-horse and calmed it, standing on the fringe of the throngs.

The man upon the tower began to speak. His words echoed off the stone.

‘Soldiers, your time has come, and my prayers are answered.

‘You are the finest of all who have joined here. I have chosen you for this hour. He has chosen you. You have come from a score of cities, from mountains, wood and plain. You have come from the shores of the unmeasured Desert. You have come here for this deed. The King watches and knows what is done here in his name. Now his eyes shall turn upon you. You have bows, you have strength and courage – and you have the tower.

‘The barbarians have failed. A single man defeated them. The Black Citadel still stands – the false goddess Allissál still lives. This is as it had to be. Dark God smiles upon you and accepts your offerings. It rests with you now, to break apart the Iron Gate and hurl the woman from the cliff. Your master, your King, demands no less.’

Around Avli-Oan the mercenaries and Southron traitors raised their voices in a chant. ‘Ara-Karn, Ara-Karn, Ara-Karn.’

‘I do not know what were the hopes and dreams of any of you before the war. I do not care. You came some as captives who had seen your cities broken and burned, others as hostages to the pacts your cities accepted when they sued the King for peace, others as thieves and outcasts seeking plunder and to be on the winning side. And some of you, perhaps, came as I came, to serve Him and give Him glory. We were noblemen and farmers, mine-diggers, swordsmen, slaves. Now we are more. Now we are the soldiers of Ara-Karn! We have waited for this, you and I. Now it has come. It calls us on. Behind us lies the wreckage of the former age; before us if we fail wait homelessness and hunger. But if we win, then we shall live as princes over the cities of the new age, the age of Ara-Karn!’

Loudly and hatefully the hundreds cheered the words of the Conqueror’s prophet. Driving together the trains of draught horses and oxen, the mercenaries took up the weighty cables and ropes, and began to pull against the tower.

An immense groaning and creaking of wood and rope issued in the midst of the desolation. At first Avli-Oan did not see that they accomplished much. Then the tower shuddered and started – the dark walls of wood moved forth from the arch. Slowly the big wheels turned, and men and beasts drove their legs against the ropes, and the stone-clad earth began to roll beneath the black shadow of the tower.

Avli-Oan shook himself. How many hours had gone by since he had come this way? He looked up. Dark God had risen again and stood already midway through the sky. The young tracker vaulted up on his horse and rode through the ruins ahead of the lurching tower, back to the Iron Gate.

* * *

Now the fifth army fought on the ladders, but they no more than the tribes of the fourth army were able to gain the battlements.

Not even Roguil Arn could get them there. He was young, and lacked Gorn-Tal’s cunning. And he was weary, and sweat ran from his face, and his strokes had no strength to them. So at last even he gave off and went down the rope ladders. He staggered down over the red rocks in the coomb and in his shelter was bathed and fed by his slaves, pretty girls who had won his heart in the camp long before. They led him to the dim place and sang to him. So, soothed, the champion of the Vorisals fell into a sleep as deep as a stone’s, and knew no more of battle or of strife.

Coming into the midst of the tents stretched between the blackened walls, Avli-Oan leaped from his horse and rushed to his chief.

Nam-Rog nodded to hear the words of his follower. Age and care fenced in the old chieftain’s eyes, but he held his beard firmly in his grasp.

‘I have won from the other chieftains the right to command one more assault upon the Iron Gate,’ he said. ‘They like it no better than we do, to be defeated here by one Southron. But it is to be the last assault, and only those who choose shall do battle. Maybe the sight of this thing will hearten them and swell our ranks. Only the finest will mount the ladders with us. Dark Lord and Lady, heed our wish, and I vow that the blood of one half of all the slaves we take here shall be given to you both!’

* * *

When the messengers of the guardsmen gave their appeal in the underground halls of the Palace slaves, they found few who would follow them. The many faces, dull and ignorant as those of animals, did not change in hearing the guardsmen’s words of the barbarians and the peril. After the guardsmen left, the slaves turned to one another. Some burst into furtive laughter; others scowled. Angry words passed among them, not without cause.

Ever had they done what was demanded of them, and for this long year they had seen to the needs of not just the many in the Palace but of the thousands of refugees as well. Now they were asked to man the Iron Gate as well! Could the guardsmen not do their job? And what of those in the high stories of the Palace? Let them go shed noble blood in defense of all their privileges. So the slaves muttered among themselves, sullenly.

But Iocantris went back to his family’s alcove with a heavy heart.

He sat down on the little bed, and let his eyes wander over the polished armor in the storage-niches. Iocantris they all called him here, Little Doughty. It had been months now since he had last heard spoken his tribal name, Kuln-Holn.

Now Kuln-Holn bent over the crib and with great gentleness bore up Bornin. He had become wise in the ways of infants now; his son did little more than gurgle.

Salizh issued out of the gloom. When their eyes caught each other, Kuln-Holn and his wife grew still. Unspoken words passed between them. Then Salizh took the baby from Kuln-Holn.

‘I came to feed him,’ she said. She sat on the bed and drew down her robes, baring the breasts. Little Bornin became excited at this. Greedily he began to suck. Kuln-Holn turned and began to take out the pieces of armor.

It was then that the young woman reached out and caught at Kuln-Holn’s arm.

‘Husband,’ she said, and at the hearing of that word Kuln-Holn shuddered as if wounded. ‘Husband, you will not go. I will not let you.’

Kuln-Holn neither looked at her nor spoke. He pulled on the padded linen tunic. He went on drawing out the shining tools of death.

‘Husband, are you afraid to look at me? Berrin was afraid. That was why, when he would follow you away to the barricades in High Town and his death, he only left me a note. But you, Iocantris, I see you now, you cannot escape my voice.’

‘Salizh,’ he said, ‘I am going.’ But he spoke it so lowly and chokingly into the depths of his beard it was doubtful she could hear.

‘Husband. Husband! One man I lost to all this, when he left me pregnant and alone. Must I lose another? What have I done to anger Goddess so? Are you the new weapon of Her vengeance, Iocantris?’

At this Kuln-Holn started. A deep blood-color spread across his face. But he went on girding the armor about him.

‘Husband, look at me. See my eyes. I tell you, I will not let you go. Have any of the others gone? Then why should you? Leave this to the soldiers, whose job it is. Why must you go?’ Tears were dripping from her eyes. ‘Is it your master who commands this?’

Kuln-Holn shook his head. He felt compassion at the suffering of his wife, but he did not embrace her. Had he done so, perhaps then he could not go.

‘Salizh,’ he said thickly, and repeated the word, louder so that she might hear his words above her sobs. The sobs were racking her body so that the baby had turned away from the swollen nipple. The shiny metal attracted his little eyes, and he stretched his little hand out toward the bright blue Raamba sword.

‘Salizh, do you think I want to go?’ Now Kuln-Holn was weeping too, and in his voice was terror. ‘Do you think I have become again the man I was on the barricades? He died on the steps of the Brown Temple. They are my people on both sides of the battlements: can I rightly lift a sword against either? One master I served, then forsook him to join the service of the Divine Queen. But it was she who commanded the torment of Gundoen. Now I serve neither.

‘The noise of the battle turns my stomach so I cannot eat or sleep; the thought brings sweat to my hands. I do not want to fight. I am frightened, I have never been so frightened. But I must. It is no order of the great ones. It is no wish of Goddess. It is not even my doom, for that is a part of an unmeasured weave, while this thing stands apart.

‘Listen. Just now I stood among the others, and they said why they would not fight to save their lives. This is not a thing the women and children of the tribes would say. Even if fear later drove them away, they would first go and do all their courage allowed, for the sake of their village and their tribe. So I was thinking as I returned here, all unaware of what was awaiting me. But I saw the armor, and I knew. There is something I will see there, something I will do.

‘Maybe I will see you again, maybe not. I have no sense of the doom. But need has taken hold, and it will drive me to the Iron Gate no matter what Kuln-Holn might want or choose. So I obey. With Her Sign I bless you both, Salizh and Bornin. May She smile on all you do. Farewell – I love you.’

‘Iocantris, husband,’ she moaned, ‘I am carrying another child. This one is yours.’

Kuln-Holn opened his mouth, but did not speak. There was a hardness about his face such as was strange and new to his wife. In the far North, the tribesmen did not stay at home merely because their wives or concubines were full once more.

His loud steps sounded hollowly down the underground passages. Many faces turned his way. After twenty paces he turned back for one last look at his wife and son. But Salizh had dashed out the tallow candle and the alcove was lost in darkness. Kuln-Holn sighed. Even there beneath the earth he felt the burden and unanswerable power of the immortal sky-borne gods, and he felt, too, how little and how weak a thing he was.

* * *

Now a doleful cry arose behind the shield-wall. Guardsmen recoiled from the parapet, pointing above their great shields. The shield-wall sundered.

The warriors on the ladders, however, took no advantage of the opening. They too broke off fighting and turned. The clash of swords died away along the Iron Gate. The tribes watching from the square called up to their fellows, wonderingly.

‘What goes on up there, hey? Why did you stop fighting?’

There was no answer from the men upon the ladders. The men in the square climbed on the disks of the fallen pillar. Then they all came to see it, from Ampeánor and his officers to the slaves standing among the shelters.

Dark against the burning jade sky, at first glance it seemed to be some building like the Brown Temple, which had somehow escaped unscathed the fires which had raged that way. But for a year now they had fought here and had not noticed it.

And then they saw it moved.

In confusion the men on the ladders descended, but in the square messengers went from the Durbars to the chieftains. In the absence of battle, an untoward silence consumed the scene. With awe in their hearts the barbarians watched the ominous structure inch up the slope; the guardsmen watched with fear. So slowly did it move that it seemed rather to grow. Its shadow stretched across the long lines of men and beasts laboring to draw it on. The noise of that labor grew – grunting and cursing of men, whinny and bellow of beasts, creak of the rope lines, squeals and thunder of huge wheels.

In the square a chant began to issue from a thousand savage throats. Weary, wounded and defeated, the tribesmen raised spears, swords, axes and bows and chanted out the name. The chant swelled, resounding off the Iron Gate into the ears of the defenders. They too had seen the black device on the forefront of the tower.

‘Ara-Karn, Ara-Karn, Ara-Karn!’

Thousands of mercenaries descended from the square. They surrounded the huge wooden base and bent their backs against it. They, more than the barbarians, knew the value of this thing and felt their hearts cheered. With shoulders and beams of wood they drove the tower into the square. Others ran ahead and began to clear the massive stone disks out of the way. Step by step, the thousands pushed the tower to the lip of the square. First to reach it were the horses; then the lines of horses and oxen were unhooked from the tower and driven back into High Town.

Gradually the gap closed between the tower and the blood-streaked Iron Gate. The square ended where the Imperial engineers had torn down the ancient bridge to the stronghold. Now the heap of stones filling the coomb began there. The stones fell into the shadow of the structure.

Then, at last, it halted.

The wide wheels could not surmount those stones. The mercenaries could impel the thing no farther. They took huge hammers as big as themselves and pounded blocks of wood beneath the wheels, fixing the tower in place some fifty steps from the face of the Iron Gate.

So, drawn on by his thousands, did Erion Sedeg make his appearance at the battle.

The sea-breeze filled his black robes. High above the square he stood, the lone inhabitant on the tower’s crown, worshiped, as it were, by the thousands chanting below him. Pleased, he rested his hands on the bull’s-hides and looked upon the defenders across the gap below him. From where he stood he could see over the rows of shields and helms to the rearward parapet of the battlements, even to a small brass door within the inner gates.

* * *

Now it was as Nam-Rog had foreseen, and the tribes flocked round, clamoring join this new attack. The prize of victory reared again before their eyes with the Darkbeast-tooth of Ara-Karn. The old chief smiled grimly, choosing out those men he thought the best fighters. The chosen ones laughed and rushed to their shelters to gird on armor and pick out their finest blades.

Roguil Arn pushed through the crowds and shouted, ‘Old chieftain, no man here among us doubts your valor, but you are greater with your counsel than a spear. Give me the center.’

When it was heard the Vorisal would lead them, the warriors cheered. But Nam-Rog answered, ‘Three armies now you have led against the Iron Gate, Roguil Arn. You have fought for hours without rest. Are you now taken with the same sickness that took Gorn-Tal?’

‘No, no madness dances in my veins,’ the champion answered, laughing. Young and eager as a boy he seemed before the chief of the Durbars. ‘I have slept deep since I last fought. And there is a man there on that Iron Gate, a warrior after my own heart. Three times now I have gone in search of him – each time the luck of battle parted us, but I have seen him fight. It was no whim of dark God that he slew Poran-Dilg. Now the need is upon me. I must match my strength against his! And then you will see a fight such as no man will soon forget!’

Nam-Rog lowered his head, giving his assent. ‘And may dark God take your side, Roguil Arn. For if you kill that one, then surely you will be deemed the greatest among us, and the man deserving of the hero’s share of what we take.’

‘For Poran-Dilg I will kill him,’ the Vorisal promised. ‘Now that he is dead I confess I begin to miss the Eldar’s boastful tongue. I never fought so strongly as I did to prove myself his better; now I will be hard-pressed to do so well.’

So Roguil Arn made his way through the crowds, cheered by the hundreds girding themselves for war. Proudly he accepted their praise, glorying in the awareness that now no man denied Roguil Arn first place among the champions. There was some sadness, too – for where among all the others would he find one even to rival him?

In front of his shelter the Vorisal chief found a man waiting for him. It was the bastard-born Pes-Thos chieftain, Estar-Brin.

The Pes-Tho stepped in Roguil Arn’s way. The man’s eyes burned like flames, and the growl of the wolf ran in his voice. ‘Vorisal,’ he said, ‘the word among the tribes is that you have been promised great treasure if you slay the Southron Elna-Ana, and that you have won from Nam-Rog the right to take the center line, where the Southron will stand.’

‘It is so,’ said Roguil Arn.

‘Vorisal, that man slew Aln-Brin-Daln my brother. Now I claim the sacred right of blood-vengeance. Give to me and my brother the center, and keep away from the Southron until either he or we lie dead.’

With knife-eyes the Vorisal appraised the older man. ‘Yes, I know you brothers of Brin,’ he said. ‘Aln-Brin-Daln was by far the best of you. Never did any of you fight alone against any man of strength. You two by yourselves have not the greatness to kill this Southron. He will kill you instead, if you have the luck to find him. I know myself that to go in search of Elna-Ana is not always to find him.’

‘That will fall with the pleasure of dark God,’ answered Estar-Brin. ‘But Vorisal, we bore down the body of our brother from battle. He still lived but had no mastery over his limbs and his body was deformed. How then could we pass our years if we were not the ones to kill his slayer? He would have reproached us rightly. Even now I would have gone to the old Durbar and claimed from him the right of the center, but he is as hateful to me as the Southron himself.’

The tall champion threw back his gleaming hair. ‘Estar-Brin, that was well spoken. Take what you want. I will go to the right end in your place. Nor will I seek the Southron – but if it falls out that he and I come face to face, then to the Darklands with my promises! I will lay on then with all my strength. See that you manage to kill him before his path crosses mine.’

‘That is well,’ growled the Pes-Thos. ‘Roguil Arn, when I have slain the Southron, I will make you a present of the spoils. The armor I will strip from his corpse, for that is vowed to my dead brother. But the wondrous sword he wields I will give to you.’

Roguil Arn nodded, and entered his shelter smiling. ‘There is more greatness in Estar-Brin’s little body than I guessed,’ he said. ‘Have I found myself another Poran-Dilg, and so soon? Well: battle, and Elna-Ana, will tell. If the Pes-Tho wins, all to the good! – and if he falls, then I will meet the Southron yet. The treasures are owed me now, for I led the fourth and fifth armies as I vowed – so whatever the cast, it shall be Roguil Arn who wins!’

But the Pes-Tho went back to his little shelter deeper among the ruins. Grimly and unspeaking he entered to behold his brother bent over the corpse of Aln-Brin-Daln and weeping.

From the heap of arms and armor by the tent-wall Estar-Brin picked up the heavy iron helmet of his brother and let it fall with a clangor on the stones by Kan-Brin’s feet. ‘Get up and gird yourself for battle. You have not moved since I left. Will all the army wait for us, do you think? And stop sniveling. Shed not tears but blood for Aln-Brin-Daln.’

Kan-Brin did not take his eyes from the face of his dead brother. ‘Go on and fight as you must, nor fear that there will be none to see to your voyaging. But I will fight no more.’

‘What you are saying? Will you not avenge him?’

‘No, I will not go. When we last strove against the wall of shields and the Southron fought Gorn-Tal on the parapet, then I looked into the Southron’s face and saw there, in the bright helm’s shade, the face not of a man but of a woman – the Gray Priestess! Even as she swung in the fiery ruins of Gerso, I saw her. You remember her face, for we three were among the Warlord’s guard that pass, and we all refused his order to murder her. Even so her death runs clutching after us. And after me most of all, for as we bound her wrists, I stole a gold ring off her finger. I never told this to you or Aln, but it has burned in my heart ever since. The ring I got rid of long ago. I threw it into a lake in the North, and gave lambs and golden bowls to Goddess with the promise of more. But my offerings were answered here in this accursed city, when I saw her face again. Now fear has taken me, and I do not have the heart to go into battle lest I perish unforgiven, and my bones roll forever on the floor of the Ocean of the Dead.’

‘Brother, this is a new thing you tell me.’ Estar-Brin spoke the words with a slow and heavy tongue. ‘The anger of Goddess is no little thing. But it is an old saying indeed, that no man can flee his doom. It is only by facing it that a man gains honor – only by laughing in its face that he wins glory. Come now with me, and if you die I will give you a voyaging that would do Ara-Karn himself justice. I will give Goddess so many offerings out of our treasures that She will have to guide your spirit to the world beyond.’

‘It may be so, that I will die here in spite of all I do,’ Kan-Brin groaned, miserably, ‘but I only know surely that if I face again the Southron I will die. And brother, I am afraid. Fear, fear – what do you know of it? Go on, and may you triumph! But I would be no help to you.’

The other gazed out onto the square. ‘They are gathering, soon they will be ready,’ he growled. ‘Brother, why snivel like a child? Do you want them all to have the proof that our father was a Gerso? We were called three, but that was a lie. We were one hand, one heart, one face. Can I go up alone now, and face the killer of Aln-Brin-Daln all by myself? Will you drive me to that shame?’

So once more Estar-Brin labored to win his brother’s heart to battle; but Kan-Brin, shaking with shame and fear, still would not go. With a thoughtless curse Estar-Brin left him – nor did either of them think that this would prove their final parting.

Now all along the end of the square, lines were forming, many rows deep between the dark base of the tower and the rock-filled coomb. There were some from almost every tribe there – the strongest, the most wild-hearted, the most famous. Ven-Vin-Van led the greatest Borsos, Sur-Pal and Bel-Kor Jin were there, with many Fire-Walkers, the strongest Durbars, knife-wielding Loit-Garni, Vorisals under the leadership of Roguil Arn; Pes-Thos, Jalijhas, Archeros, Kamskals, men of Gundoen’s tribe, led by Kul-Dro; Fulsars, Bolk-Girns, Sirgols, Erin-Gar-Birn and his finest Roighalnis, Gise-Nathos, men of the Goat-Tribe, Kagions, Gerinthars and Necistrols. Never before, never more, would such men fight together.

In deep rows they stood before the ladders, shifting helms, tightening straps and clasps, sharpening blades, loosening the thongs of arrow-sacks. The ash and stone dust had by now crept into their beards, nails, skin and wounds in spite of all their efforts to clean themselves. They stood discolored like the stones heaped about them. By degrees they ended their preparations. Their voices fell away. They looked up along the narrowing lines of the ladders to the dark cliff of the parapet. They were violently still.

Gigantic, primordial, they leaned against the sky and cast their eyes inward to the center, to the grimmest of them, Estar-Brin the Pes-Thos.

High above them, Erion Sedeg rested his hands on the bull’s-hides and looked upon the defenders somewhat below him. Erion Sedeg could see into their eyes, which dimmed with doubt and fear.

Erion Sedeg reached into a barrel that was by him. He drew an arrow. He strung his bow with care, as if the act were a pious observance. He drew the arrow to his ear. He cast his eyes over the men there, men with no armor who held their shields improperly. The death-bird flashed through the air and buried itself in a man’s belly – he screamed as he fell and died. Instantly the shields clashed together.

Erion Sedeg smiled. That scream had been more pleasing to his ears than the chanting that had gone before.

‘O my master,’ he whispered, ‘hear that, and know that I consecrate every death to you.’

He plucked another arrow out of the barrel. The barb plunged into a bare shoulder. His third shot tore off one guardsman’s ears. His fourth burst through a stout man’s throat. The defenders were surging about now, despite all the calls and curses of their commanders. Behind Erion Sedeg his men strung bows and set to work. Some used arrows wrapped with oil-soaked rags. Passing the arrows through the flames of the torches set along the sides of the platform, the bowmen sent them burning into the thick of the defenders.

The guardsmen and Tarendahardilites fell underneath that rain of fiery iron. The bitter smoke clouded their eyes. Fear like sickness caught them at the belly. They did not dare raise their heads above the rims of their shields. On their knees, they listened to the clatter of the iron rain. They shrank back a pace or two behind the parapet; the line of the shields was ragged; the lances lay useless on the stones.

Suddenly the barbarians were over the parapet and on the battlements. The rain of arrows went on, passing over the heads of the barbarians to afflict the rearmost guardsmen. Fifty shafts grew out of the poles of the Beak, setting it on fire. The barbarians swept the shield-wall back. The guardsmen drove desperately against the onrushing black forms, but their efforts were confused and did little. Shattering weapons and breaking shields thundered about them. The manfall was the heaviest yet in the battle, and on both sides. There were no voices raised save for grunts, screams, or groans. There was no order. Only madness, like a sea.

In the dark confusion Ampeánor was pushed back and lost in the midst of the defenders. Then he rose up and drove through the crowds. For a while he was as voiceless and unconscious as the rest. Then he found his voice.

‘For Rukor!’ he cried. ‘Rukornai! Rukornai!’

Desperately Ampeánor tried to peer through the press of men, the waving arms, smoke and flames, to make out what was going on. At the center the grim man with the long sword raged and fought like a maddened beast; to the south the tall barbarian matched him stroke for stroke, backed by Vorisals like him and seven Fire-Walkers, men terrible and unwoundable. Only beneath the southern lance-tower did the defenders stand firm, where Berowne and Ullerath fought like brothers against Sur-Pal and Bel-Kor Jin.

The press of men forced Ampeánor back; the tides of blood and steel set his place. Below the southern lance-tower, the guardsmen had all but despaired. At any moment they might be routed or slaughtered. Already they had given back to the door of the lance-tower, midway on the third step – less than three paces more, and they would be fighting on the steps down to the yard. If the barbarians gained the lance-tower door, they might descend into the Citadel grounds, storming the inner gates from within.

Ampeánor made his way back out of the press. He forgot the grim man with the long sword. He drove men out of his way, and reached the door of the southern lance-tower.

There the sword-blows rang like broken bells the high carven walls. Corpses littered the steps, making the footing treacherous. A knot of men followed at the lord of Rukor’s heels. Ampeánor and his men drove the barbarians back, adding to the heaps of the dead. Like stalks of grain in the mowing-time, when the farmer takes his bright sharp scythe in his weathered hands and sets to flailing in the easy rhythm the long years have taught him, and the stiff stalks go down in windrows – so the men fell there, heavily on both sides. In the end the corpses mounted waist-high, defining paths as obscure and tortuous as those of a Vapio pleasure-thicket. And Ampeánor alone of the defenders there was left alive, bent over, leaning gasping on his shield, sweat streaming over his face, his back against the door.

Before him, the barbarians hung back behind the sheltering bodies of the dead.

Only one moved forward: the huge man with the heavy battle-axe. Delight shone in his eyes. He stopped before the Rukorian, on the other side of a pile of bodies, and smiled.

‘So this is how He will have it,’ the giant said in the tongue of the far North. ‘Like this it is better.’ He spoke not boastfully, but loudly enough so that his onlookers could hear. ‘Only when the smaller trees have been lopped down do the tall ones on the hills stand out in their true glory.’

‘Barbarian,’ growled Ampeánor in that same coarse tongue, ‘have you lost all sense? These were good men who lie here, and their passing is a sadness and a waste.’

‘That is nothing,’ the giant said. ‘Their deaths add to our honor. Do not speak false, pious words, Southron – you feel it as I do. I see in your face how your hearts wants to laugh for the delight of victory and the deaths of your enemies by your hands: so laugh, and then we fight! By your death I will win my greatest victory. I will have my men bear your armor and sword around the camp three times to proclaim my strength. Who knows? I may even gain the Warlordship in my age! Listen if you do not already know it, and learn that I am Roguil Arn the Axe-Bearer, chief and champion of the Vorisals, a tribe that gives place to none other!’

‘Enough talk.’ Ampeánor was weary. He was tired of both the smell of death and the big man’s boasting. He raised his sword. The blue Raamba steel did not even have a bite broken from its long edge, after all the lives it had taken. ‘Come fight then, if you dare.’

Roguil Arn threw back his head laughing. ‘Southron, you speak like a tribesman! Why is it we have never heard of you before now? I deem it a shame to kill you, but such is the way of God.’

The Vorisal brought up his axe, as the Rukorian brought up shield and sword.

Then they fell upon each other.

Like rains in the hill country, like stallions waging war over a lovely, heated mare, like combat-gerlins, the two came together. The shock of it reached into the thick of the battle – even to the center of the barbarians’ lines – even to the ears of Estar-Brin.

The Rukorian fought with the Raamba sword and round shield; the Vorisal with his war-axe and a small targe of bull’s-hide and iron. The massive head of the axe crashed on Ampeánor’s shield, and any other shield would have burst into shivers from that blow. But Ampeánor’s shield held.

The blow of Rukor fell a heartbeat after the barbarian’s – the sword-blade struck off the haft of the axe and was driven down, so that it slashed open the leather at Roguil Arn’s left hip, drawing blood.

Again the barbarian swung his weapon, back-handed. Ampeánor ducked below the sweep of it, rose and slashed upward. But the blow caught on the Vorisal's small shield. Sparks flew from the iron, lighting in the barbarian’s sparse beard. Both men laughed, stepped back, and tore into each other anew.

So it went on, blow for blow.

The barbarians thereabouts fell back in awe of the combat they were witnessing. Any one of those blows would have been the death of lesser men. How long it lasted, no one there could say, but it seemed that surely hours passed while the two champions stood and hewed at each other. Now the Vorisal raised his axe over his head and struck down furiously, grunting, leaning into the blow – now the Rukorian twisted, and his swirling sword-blow flashed like smoke before Roguil Arn’s face. And at last, in the end, the blue blade met the down-rushing handle of the axe, and the wood was shattered. The huge axe-head broke off the handle and flew on twisting, to slam flatways with hideous force against the Rukorian’s naked shoulder.

Roguil Arn grunted, and looked bemusedly at the stump of his beloved weapon. The metal-studded wood had been sheared clean through. He blushed. It was as if he had been found naked among a strange tribe’s women.

Ampeánor was in a worse state.

There was no longer any feeling in his shield-arm. It hung limply at his side, and he could not raise it. The shoulder, where it was bared above the shield-rim and below the yoke of the armor, was black as a beetle. Purple blood oozed from it. The pain was greater beneath the armor, where the bones met. They were shattered, perhaps, or else the bone had been torn out of its socket. Black rings spun before his vision; what little he saw wheeled in pairs before him, and shapes and colors ran like rainwater on a wall.

His head was bowed, he could not lift it. He looked down. He saw twin swords there, faintly. He believed that he might fall. A distant, jarring, roaring rang in his ears. He did not even know that it was the sound of Roguil Arn’s laughter.

‘O God, I give you thanks!’ the young chief cried to the sky. ‘Truly, here is an enemy to behold! He has bereft me of my axe, and yet will not press on! Southron, to you also I give thanks. This was the best fight I was ever in. I look forward to our next! We will meet again, we two!’

So saying, Roguil Arn drew back, and with him went all the Vorisals who were there. They descended the rope ladders, went in a mass through all the crowds in the square, and drank water mixed with wine in the cool shelter. Their burning bodies were sponged clean of muck and blood; Roguil Arn waved the broken haft over his head, and his followers regaled the onlookers with the tales of that combat.

On the third step before the lance-tower door, Ampeánor swayed a little on his feet. The sweat ran stinging in his eyes. He was gasping. His fury had gone. Now he knew pain. Far away from him the battle raged on, and the guardsmen were driven backward into one another. Dire cries were raised between the lance-towers, beneath the red lines of the arrows.

Ampeánor shook his head. He felt sick, and his knees were trembling. He might have had some rest behind the lines, maybe. But that too was denied him. He was the sole guardian of the tower door. Slowly he raised his head, blinking away the tears.

A man stood before him, a barbarian.

Ampeánor recognized the grim warrior of the long sword.

Estar-Brin nodded. ‘So you are back,’ he said. His voice was thick; he might have been drinking. ‘Good.’ He lifted the great iron sword two-handed, and swept it up behind his head.

Only at the last moment was Ampeánor aware of the danger. Then he turned, bringing up the shield – so little, but enough. The staff-like blade struck off the metal, showering sparks. The force drove Ampeánor to one knee. His mouth was open and loose with pain, and dark tears sprang from his eyes like blood. Perhaps he cried out, a groaning prayer to the Mother Goddess; it went unheard in the clangor of the blow.

Again Estar-Brin drew back the blade. He swung it in a wide, easy loop into the sky, over his head and down. The sword smashed into the metal and slashed the Rukorian’s leg above the knee. Estar-Brin grunted, and gathered back the blade. He struck again. And again. Hatefully he did it, not to slay but to smash, not to eliminate but to destroy. At any time the Pes-Thos chief might have aimed his blows differently and killed. Instead he went on pounding on the crumpling shield.

The Charan of Rukor huddled helpless beneath those blows. Long since then had he lost the Raamba sword. He could not even move out of the way. The blows burst over him, echoing off the walls. Beyond the flawed circle of the shield he could see the barbarian draw back his arms and drive them forward again, bending his body into the blows. So might a man have done with a ponderous hammer, driving tent stakes into unyielding soil. Behind him the flaming arrows flew in long flat curves over the battle, orange and red against the blue-black of the southern lance-tower.

Then the shield split open on Ampeánor’s arm, even to the leather bands, and the pieces flew to either side. The force drove Ampeánor down so that he half lay on the bloodied stone. Around him the piles of corpses hid the battle. Awkwardly he leaned upon his left arm. That arm was all blue and gray. A long gash opened there. Only the locking of the bones of the elbow supported the weight of the upper body.

Estar-Brin paused. Drawing off his helmet, he wiped the sweat from his brow. He leaned against his sword then, and exulted in his triumph over his fallen foe, the killer of his brother:

‘So now at last I have you and you cannot run from me, Southron. No, there is no escaping for you now! I wish I could drag you even as you are before the deathbed of Aln-Brin-Daln and slay you at his feet. Then we would be sure to see his face smile in death. Then Kan-Brin would know there are no such things as portents. So I delight in your death, for it grants me not only vengeance for one brother’s life but the way to return courage to the heart of the other as well! He will see your severed head at least, stuck over the feet of Aln-Brin-Daln: and he will know that all he foresaw and feared was nothing but a lie.’

So Estar-Brin of the Pes-Thos vaunted his victory and lifted his sword for the death-blow; but his words were empty and even then death hung over him like a tent-roof, inescapable. Even as the sword was at its highest, an arrow shot by one of Erion Sedeg’s bowmen strayed and bit burning into Estar-Brin’s arm. The Pes-Tho swore, distracted; but Ampeánor with his last strength rose up and drove his war-knife to the hilt into the barbarian’s belly. Estar-Brin twisted away, and the blade tore free from his middle.

The High Charan staggered to his feet, ready to duck and lunge as he had learned as a boy, when a master seaman of the Rukorian Isles taught him the arts of knife-fighting. But the barbarian ignored his foe. Silently, holding his hands in vain over the opening in him, Estar-Brin left the fighting. At the parapet he encountered Sin-Galk and Tarestir Aln, two tribesmen of his. These he stopped and said,

‘I die. Dark God has forgotten me and all the blood-offerings I gave Him. Three were we, one hand, one heart, and one face; and when we fought together none could beat us. Now we are only one, and he I think will not survive me, if he prove a man. But I have done all that a man might ask of me, and sought vengeance for my brother. See that my body is brought to our shelter, for Estar-Brin will take passage in the barge of Aln-Brin-Daln, and together we will seek the World Beyond. As for my brother Kan-Brin, tell this to him from me: that a barge that holds three is not a thing unheard-of.’

So he died calmly, who had lived so fiercely, bastard-born and despised by the others of the tribes. He died unavenged and unavenging, but he knew neither hatred nor regret for the battle around him or for the man who had slain two brothers and unmanned the third. Estar-Brin thought only of his brothers, and died gladdened at heart that he should not leave the world parted from them, alone, but go in the company of one at least.

Sin-Galk and Tarestir Aln did all he had bid them, but not for all their strength could they unbend the dead fingers clutching the handle of the famous sword. And even when he heard his brother’s dying words and knew that all the camp would know them also, Kan-Brin shook his head and clasped his hands and would not go into battle.

And still the barbarians of the last army swarmed over the parapet and flung themselves against the dwindling defenders. Ampeánor had regained his sword and gotten another shield off one of the corpses.

He fell back into the lance-tower and bolted the door behind him.

‘Now,’ he said, only dimly aware that there was no one there to hear him, ‘you will pass this way only after I am dead.’

* * *

Once more Gundoen awoke. Slowly he wrung the sleep from his head. In the shelter of the dark cloak, he might have been some big, misshapen bear, rousing itself from its long winter bed. Resting on the rags the huge bandaged paws swelled and shrank. He did not know where he was; he had forgotten this place from his last waking and thought he was back in the little stone cell beneath the ground.

‘If I die, my son, do not forsake Hertha-Toll. Even as I am your father now, so too is she your mother. She was a good wife to me, little complaining. Never did she mistreat my concubines except when they deserved it. You will see to her needs, lord?’

‘Why should I have to, when you will be sitting beside her into your great age? But yes, Gundoen: I will see to her. You have the word of Ara-Karn on that.’

It seemed he had seen his son when he had first awakened here. Or had that been a dream? Just now, Gundoen had been dreaming of Hertha-Toll. That was what reminded him of the words. But what had the dream been like? He could not remember.

It was then that a woman of the Tarendahardilites, who was helping carry in the dead, halted before the awakened man’s pallet. Busy with all the newly-dead guardsmen, they had forgotten this one that Father Ennius had borne in. Now she was surprised to see that the dead man lived. But when she beheld that face uplifted below her, then words choked in her throat. She moved back, her face pale as the clouds of High Summer. Not even all the blood and slaughter of that red tent had readied her for what she had just then beheld.

Gundoen looked about him rather stupidly.

He had not seen the young Tarendahardilite, but it did seem to him that a woman stood before him. She was an old woman, leaning on a staff, and dressed in ragged robes adorned only by the leaves of autumn.

It seemed to Gundoen that Melkarth stood before him.

The old seeress regarded the chieftain searchingly. Her old eyes were dark with tears.

‘Gundoen Strong-In-Girth, I bring you a message from your wife. Hertha-Toll says, your hour has come. Rise up, go forth and kill your enemies.’

She let the tip of her staff touch thrice his twisted knee. Straightway a burning coursed through his body, as from spiced hot ale after a long hunt in wet snow. The pain waned, strength came back.

The chief opened his mouth as though to speak. But he saw only the back of the old woman as she walked away. Had she been afraid to say it? But Gundoen was not afraid to die.

From beneath the cloak he took up a large clay wine-jug, the gift of Ara-Karn. ‘Drink no other drink, but only this wine,’ the black-eyed man had said. There must be strong healing here, then. Gundoen unstopped the jug and drank, letting the juice run over his beard and chest. It was good biting wine, of the sort that came from the first southern city they had conquered, when the army emerged from the Taril.

Gundoen belched. He felt almost a man again. A light gleamed in his good eye. Again he searched among the rags of the pallet, and drew forth the second gift of his son. It was a sword, but not a small sword such as they used here in the South. This was a heavy sword of war from the far North. Gundoen laid it across his knees, and ran one of the bandaged paws along its clean edge: the layers of bandages opened in a sharp cut. A well-made blade, hardly used.

‘It was your birthing gift to me. Do you not remember? This is that blade you had forged upon the hilt of Tont-Ornoth, whose sword tasted the blood of Elna. I have kept it for you. It has scarcely been bloodied. I give it back to you. You are its rightful owner, chieftain.’

Gundoen let his two hands close about the massive hilt. All the chieftains of his tribe had kept this hilt, the treasured relic of their tribe’s founder. Now it had been forged anew to blade. Now it was whole again. Through all the generations the hilt had bided, waiting for this hour and for Gundoen.

And then Gundoen underwent the greatest trial of his life. He tried to stand up.

The pain burst upon his limbs and he knew again his mortality, and fell back gasping. Four times he essayed it, and only on the fifth succeeded. Only the words of his wife drew him on. Then he knew that it had been she who had somehow saved his life from the torments. She had saved him so that he might now hold this sword and die fighting.

Never had anyone granted him so fine a gift: he loved her all the more for it. ‘Thank you, Hertha-Toll. Thank you.’

He stood swaying as though he might fall. The cloak remained upon him, stuck fast to the wounds. Drawing the cloak about him, he trudged past the pallets of the dead.

He came out close by the inner gates. There a crowd of Tarendahardilites had gathered, many of them children. Gundoen pushed past them. The high inner gates were shut, but next to them a small brass door was open.

This is like Gerso, Gundoen thought, and went through. He entered the yard between the gates, and approached the shadow of the great battle raging above.

It was there that Kuln-Holn saw him.

VI
Glory

ON THE LAST STEP of the battlements the guardsmen struggled, their strokes weary and discordant. The barbarians had lost their most-feared foe. They crowded the guardsmen against the rearward parapet; but somehow the defenders rallied.

Berowne led them now. He planted himself in the middle of the lines, not so great a fighter as Ampeánor, but still, in the girth and weight of his body, a shield-wall in himself.

Even so the defenders despaired. With the passing of Ampeánor they lost all hope of victory. Their reserves were no more. Each time a man chanced for a moment to lift his eyes, he beheld through the dark-weaving weapons the summit of the wooden tower. Even if they could by some untoward burst of strength have hurled the barbarians back, they could not hold the parapet beneath that rain of arrows. They had their superior position no longer. That tower robbed them of it forever. They fought on hopelessly, for soon they knew they must all die.

‘We do no good here!’ Ullerath screamed in Berowne’s ears. ‘The way is too wide for our numbers. Fall back to the inner gates!’

‘No!’ Berowne shouted. ‘Flee, and the barbarians will spear us in the back. Not five of ten would gain the inner gates. Here we stand and here fall, if Goddess will have it so – but we will move at no command of mine!’

‘Why then were these defenses made with two sets of gates? I obey you, but you are wrong. Now let me take your place. For too long you have borne the main blows of the barbarians’ swords. Go rest, but leave me not long alone here, for I haven’t your waist!’

At that Berowne loosed his voice in laughter, and the sound, unwonted in that place, sang in the ears of the guardsmen. It set in their hearts thoughts of their relatives and beloveds in the Palace and tents behind them. Once more they remembered that for which they fought, and drove with renewed courage against the mass of savage bodies.

* * *

Like a pilgrim, Gundoen stood in the shadow and gazed up at the battle. He saw the upraised lances, toiling bodies and seething arms, but he heard it only faintly, as if it happened beyond a hillside. This gave Gundoen wonder, for he was not yet accustomed to his deafness. The Vapionil had burst one of his eardrums with long silver needles, nor had they left the other ear untouched. Ara-Karn had had almost to shout into his ear to make Gundoen hear him in the cell below the Palace.

He stood in the middle of the yard between the gates. In front of him beneath the battlements the outer gates closed in a smooth wall. To either side the face of the stone was broken by portals leading into barracks and supply-rooms hollowed out of the rock. Silent as a shadow, the adopted father of Ara-Karn crossed the yard and entered the portal nearest the gates.

He passed through empty rooms. In the room housing the mechanism controlling the gate in Gerso there had been huge wheels. Now in the half-darkness Gundoen studied the mechanism of the Iron Gate of Elna. He found no wheels here. The first blush of strength was fading now; not even Melkarth and wine could overcome for long the mutilations his body had suffered. Deafened, dizzy and purblind, Gundoen could not sort out the mechanism looming vaguely against the long wall before him. Then at length a kind of sense emerged from it.

He he saw a huge bar of bronze resting in wooden brackets. The bar was driven into the body of the Iron Gate, but not deeply. Another bar would be found in a similar chamber on the other side of the yard. Horizontal posts emerged from it at intervals; there were four such, each long enough for four men to bring their strength to bear against it. Sixteen men should trod the ancient upraised walkway to open the Iron Gate. There must have been another, simpler way to open the gate, but Gundoen could not fathom it.

Gundoen clambered up to the walkway.

Carefully, with reverence, he laid the sword with the hilt of Tont-Ornoth to one side.

He put his shoulder against one post, shifting to find the most advantageous position.

Then he began to push.

The veins of his brows burst out and his face waxed dark. His naked feet clawed the walkway. The muscles of his arms and legs swelled and strove; new stains darkened the cloak. Once he heaved, and again, and a third time.

The post yielded, a little. A dull groan sounded. The bar had moved. Gundoen threw himself against the post, careless of blinding pain. With each effort the bar moved a little more. When one shoulder was useless Gundoen turned the other to bear. Like some great living hammer he used himself, mindless of hurt. So at last it came to a point where the bar would move no more, no matter how Gundoen might hurl himself against it.

Gundoen staggered to the end of the walkway. He passed his arm between the end of the bar and the opening into the body of the gate. It was done and he was glad.

‘Now,’ he mumbled, ‘once more.’

He picked up the sword and drew the peak of the cloak over his head. Once more he passed through empty rooms, finding his way out of the rock. It seemed almost as gloom-ridden outside as it had been within. His sight, vague and dim, came to him coyly as Alli, his last concubine. She had been a bold-eyed wench, and sweet; but when she had failed to give him a son to grow to manhood, then Gundoen had let her go, never regretting the loss of the embrace of her soft thighs. Of all the women Gundoen had known, Hertha-Toll had proved the only one he could not have done without. He wished she could have seen his final deed.

A group of Southrons was in the yard talking together. Gundoen did not see them until he stumbled into them. One seemed to be saying something to him, but Gundoen pushed his way through. Another stood in his way; Gundoen swept up one of his massive arms like a club, knocking the man backwards. Then from behind Gundoen strong hands grabbed the cloak and tore it from his back.

‘Sweet Goddess!’ swore Berowne.

* * *

Now a rumor ran among the barbarians below, bright like the first green shoots of spring: the Southron Elna-Ana was dead, slain by Estar-Brin even as he avenged himself upon his slayer. Many scoffed at the report. How could Elna-Ana be dead, when he was deathless? Could a rock be killed, or a spirit? Roguil Arn most of all denied it. He could not bring himself to give up his cherished hope of another encounter with the Southron. So Roguil Arn climbed to the peak of Erion Sedeg’s tower to see for himself.

When Roguil Arn descended, his face was downcast. He pushed men away from him angrily, and proclaimed that, dead or alive, the Southron no longer fought in the battle.

‘Then he is dead,’ said Nam-Rog, and at his words a cheer went up. ‘Or else he is so wounded he can no longer hold a weapon. Roguil Arn, will you now lead a new force up the ladders to win the stronghold for us?’

‘No, I will not fight again in this place.’ Sourly he tore off the armor he had so recently girded on, and cast himself on the dusty ground. ‘How could he die, and rob me of our next encounter?’

So Nam-Rog himself raised his sword and spear, and the warriors around him shouted their war-cries. They leaped onto the ladders at his heels and ran upward. They hurled themselves over the parapet and across the battlements. First was Nam-Rog himself, bloodthirsty as few had ever seen him: with the first blow of his sword he split open the helmet and head of a guardsman from crown to chin, so that the blood sprayed, the brains splashed, and the teeth flew out like beads from a broken string. So Ullerath of Egland fell, and was trampled underfoot by the contesting forces.

* * *

A snarl burst from the barbarian’s lips as he crouched in the yard and faced the small band of men with his broadsword. Silently the guardsmen surrounded him. They gazed with horror upon the blackened lips, toothless mouth, gaping eyehole drooling pustulence, bandaged hands, scars, discolored secretions, twisted knees and twisted apelike feet. It was hard to believe that this thing had been the magnificent warrior who had hurled a guardsman from the parapet.

‘Listen to me, barbarian,’ Berowne called. ‘I have no heart to fight you. What they did to you was none of my doing, nor would I have your blood on my hands now. Give up your sword. We will see that you are treated in the tent of the wounded, and no man will harm you, not even if he is of the highest rank. You have my oath before Goddess.’

A bestial growl issued from the barbarian’s throat. He stepped forward, swinging the sword. The blade struck against one man’s shield.

‘Attack but do not kill him,’ Berowne called. ‘Maimed as he is, he will prove a small threat.’

But the captain did not know Gundoen. Again and again the ring of lances and swords closed on the nearly naked man, but each time the barbarian drove them back. Half a dozen men surrounded him; and yet the barbarian twisted and fought in sudden, savage flurries, and the guardsmen could not get at him. Gundoen had ever preferred wrestling to the sword, but in the battles of the wars he had learned swiftness and cunning. Now not all the numbers of his assailants availed then. Four he wounded, and two went down in death beneath the brutal blows of the sword of Tont-Ornoth.

From above, the chief of the Durbars saw through the press of men, for one flashing moment. He saw his friend. And he cried out, ‘Gundoen! Gundoen! Gundoen!’

Then one of the guards leaped behind Gundoen and with two heavy, chopping blows unstrung him. The lines closed again, and Nam-Rog saw no more.

Gundoen fell clumsily, and the sword spun from his hands. Another guardsman kicked the weapon away. Cursing, the barbarian flung his massive arms about. His huge thighs moved pathetically. The blood streamed from his legs where the blue steel had done its work. With his arms alone Gundoen crawled about, searching for his lost weapon.

‘By Goddess,’ swore one man, ‘is he blind?’

Then the guardsmen would have rushed at him but for Berowne. ‘I will have none of you murder him,’ the captain ordered. ‘He is defeated now and will harm us no more. And surely he has endured enough,’ Berowne mused, kneeling over the fallen man.

The massive arms lashed up and caught the captain in a bone-breaking hold. Berowne cried out. The two men, huge as bulls, strove furiously on the ground. In awe, for a moment, the others hung back. Berowne was the taller man, fresher and whole; but he could not overcome the cunning that long years had given the barbarian. Slowly Berowne bowed to the awful force brought to bear upon his nape. His face went purple and blue, he was choking, he heaved and flailed his arms – in vain.

A sudden, dreadful crack was heard. The life broke from the big body of Berowne, which never again would know the caress or the scent of the beloved Kiva.

With a savage bellow, Gundoen cast the corpse away. He leaned on one elbow, drinking in the air. ‘Thank you, Hertha-Toll,’ he said in a voice scarcely human, ‘It was a good gift.’

He thought of the rest of his enemies, whom he could not see beyond the rust-red fog that thickened about him. He sent them from his mind. They were only Southrons, after all. He wished he still had the wine. No, beer would have been better, the brown foaming beer of his tribe. He had always loved beer – too much, maybe. He shrugged. It had been a good life after all.

One regret he had, that he had never seen the Southern Ocean. It was said there were pools and grottoes there whose water was warmer than the air. Gundoen had wanted to bathe in those pools and search for shells in the grottoes. He had wanted to make a necklet of shells to give Hertha-Toll when he went back home.

‘And the Southron, lord – you will see to him? He betrayed me. Together we fought a Darkbeast, just the two of us, and slew it. He owed me life and brotherhood after that, but he was a Southron and caused my death. Avenge it as befits a son.’

And Ara-Karn had bowed his head. And it had seemed to Gundoen, beyond belief, that he saw tears in the black-green eyes. ‘I will avenge you, Gundoen. Before all the gods and demons, by the horrors of the Darklands, I swear it to you – my father…’

Gundoen leaned back, turning the sky to face him. He heard a step. Hertha-Toll stood over him. She was an old woman now, with wrinkles at her eyes and spots on her hands. Even so she was beautiful. He wanted to tell her he was sorry that he had gone off adventuring in these alien lands. But he was not sorry, he was glad. He had done some things, and won fame and glory.

‘Why didn’t you come to me when I sent for you? We could have been together.’

‘No, Gundoen,’ she answered. ‘I was born on Kaari Moldole, and there in the grove of women I will die. That is my way. But I loved you and chose you before you were ever aware of me.’

* * *

Filled with horror, the guardsmen hung back from the fallen barbarian. Nervously they fingered their weapons. Then without a word they all moved in, all but one, and stabbed and hacked at the great foundering bulk of putrid flesh. Blood and mucous splashed up over their armor, hands and faces. They tasted the death of Gundoen in their mouths and the reek of it consumed their nostrils. They drew back drunkenly. With relief and horror they watched the last spasms of the tortured body.

‘He was no man, but half a beast,’ swore one in a low voice. ‘The captain was wrong, despite his fine feelings.’

‘It was good he was tortured, or else we would never have brought him down.’

‘Even so, he would have beaten and killed us. If Iocantris had not unstrung him, we would all be dead now.’

‘Yes, all honor is owed Iocantris, not only for discovering the danger, but for having more courage than the best of us.’

So they all agreed, clapping hands on the victor’s rounded shoulders. But Kuln-Holn scarcely heard them. He was looking at the dismembered, thrashing carcass of Gundoen, a thing bursting with death horrible and bloody, and he was terrified.

* * *

Gundoen knew now where he was. Something of his sight returned to him. He was lying on the stone of a yard between the gates of the great fastness of the Southron Emperors. Above him the battle raged in silence. He had come so far, and had conquered all the North in the name of Ara-Karn. But his life was draining out of him, mixing with the blood of his victims. The spirits of those he had left unvoyaged in the Taril could now be appeased.

He saw the Southrons regarding him with fear, though he was helpless now and slain. He grinned, baring a bloody mouth. This was a good death. He had never hoped for one so fine. Men would hear of it. Ara-Karn would hear of it, and command that songs be made. Gundoen left behind him a son such as no other chieftain of his tribe had ever done; greater even than Tont-Ornoth was his son. Now there remained only one final deed for him to do here – one last cry to release the spirit and send it flying up to Goddess.

He opened his cavernous mouth. He filled his lungs with air. And he cried out in a voice echoing off the rocky walls, so that it might be heard by all there even above the din of combat, Gundoen’s final words:

‘O Ara-Karn, avenge my death my son!’

* * *

Something of that cry pierced even the thick door of the southern lance-tower, awakening Ampeánor.

He had piled barrels against the door, but the barbarians had not thought of passing through the lance-tower as Ampeánor had feared. So he was granted a few moments’ respite, and in the calm gloom of the tower weariness overtook him.

Now he woke, and looked about at the barrels of rope, stacked bundles of headless lance-hafts, amphorae of oil and other stores. Dimly, like the throbbing of a hollow heart, the rising and falling sounds of battle bore in upon him.

He stood. His wounds were cold, his limbs stiff and sore. He limped to the steps. He thrust back the door-panel and climbed into the wind.

In scores the barbarians were swarming over the parapet, crossing the battlements and hurling themselves against the guardsmen. From the wooden tower, bowmen aimed their fiery arrows. In the square below, twenty thousand men milled; against the rearward parapet less than a hundred guardsmen crowded together in a circle. The steps to the yard were empty and open. He saw no sign of Ullerath or Berowne. The last guardsmen fought fiercely but without guidance or reserves.

It was defeat, then.

Ampeánor looked past the inner gates. The Palace of the Bordakasha rose in age-old serenity. The White Tower was beautiful in Goddesslight. The Disk of Goddess atop the White Tower bespoke the pride and sureness that had gone into the Empire. It was said that the Disk of Goddess had been fashioned, upon the return of the armies from their victory at Urnostardil, as a gift to Elna from Torval, the only one of his ancestors that Ampeánor would acknowledge. The gift had so delighted Elna’s heart that he awarded Torval the charanship of Rukor, the strongest of the provinces.

Ampeánor thought of Elna’s last descendant. He was sick at heart for all he had put her through. What did it matter now, that in her loneliness she had proven unworthy and had taken other men to her couch? She was his Queen. And she had loved him, and he might have won her for his bride many years before the name of Ara-Karn ever sounded in the world. Then Dornan Ural would have been no hindrance to them; with a firm heart all the cities of North and South could have confronted the barbarian as one, and destroyed him with ease. It had been Ampeánor’s failing that had doomed their love. He had been a coward and a fool, and all the world must pay the price for it.

He lowered his head, struck his fists on the stone, groaned and gnashed his teeth. The golden armor was covered with blood and muck. Dirt stained his arms and legs. Then he rose and descended again into the lance-tower.

He slung two bundles of rope over his shoulders and picked up two amphorae of oil half as tall as he. He bent beneath the burden, feeling it in his damaged shoulder.

On the roof he passed the lengths of rope through the strong handles of the amphorae, tying them with seamen’s knots.

Then he turned to face the Sun.

‘O Lady, I have been no great follower of yours. I scorned your ways and gave nothing to your temples. So perhaps the old woman in the Sontil is right, and I am hateful to you. But if it is defeat, I pray you, do not let Ara-Karn say it was an easy one. Grant me one gift, Lady, only one, and a small one such as you should be pleased to grant: let Allissál live, and not hate my memory overmuch.’

He lifted an amphora by its rope. For a moment he doubted he could do it. Holding the rope above his head, he swung the amphora about his body. The vessel spun faster; Ampeánor let out the rope. Now he too was turning about. His arms were pulled straight from his shoulders, his back bent, his head tucked between his arms. His legs fought against the pull of the stones. The breath tore from his open mouth. All at once he made it out, dark and unmistakable. Thrice more he spun, watching for it; then loosed the rope into the winds.

The amphora arched over the earth. The warriors in the square saw it for a moment, suspended in the sky as if dark God had dropped it. They began to raise their arms and point. Then it fell.

The amphora crashed amidst of the bowmen on the tower, broke open and spewed its contents over them.

Ampeánor, gasping on the lance-tower roof, saw the anger and confusion among the bowmen. One man, dressed in the fashion of the nomad robbers of the Desert, pointed at Ampeánor, urging on the others with his gestures. Dimly over the clash of battle their cries reached him, as they aimed their bows at him.

The lord of Rukor staggered up. He took the second amphora. The arrows streaked past him as he turned. Round and round, bones aching, thews tearing. His grip was weaker now, he was dizzy, his steps wandered about the small round roof that had no parapet. He let go the rope clumsily and fell.

For a moment he saw the rocky coomb directly below him, its piled red stones bared like the Darkbeast’s teeth.

But this amphora flew true. It stuck down torches at the tower’s side, and the flames leaped up from the oil-washed platform.

Within moments the siege-tower became a beacon.

Ampeánor dragged himself back from the abyss and watched it burn.

The flames clawed at the bowmen’s legs. Their tunics caught and fired. Flames burst out of the barrels of oil-soaked arrows. Some bowmen, blinded by the smoke, fell over the sides. Others fought one another on the way down. The upper third of the tower was in flames. At last only the man from the Desert stood on the tower roof, his mouth open, his fists raised. All his robes were ablaze; like a living torch he staggered to the back of the platform and disappeared like a dropped stone down the black hole of the ladder-way.

From the shelters among the ruins the warriors of the tribes of the far North gaped at the blazing tower. Those on the battlements felt their hearts fall at the sight. Thick coils of bitter smoke engulfed them. They choked and spat in darkness. With a rush the guardsmen joined battle, closing their eyes and driving against the path of the smoke. With their last strength the guardsmen fought, slaughtering the barbarians. The barbarians fell back and dropped their blades. Red swords and cruel lances did their work, and hurled the Northerners off the parapet as a herd of sheep is driven by flood or fire over a cliff-side in the mountains by Bollakarvil.

* * *

Now in the square they saw their fellow-tribesmen falling and were sick at heart. Some had seen Ampeánor as he released the second amphora. The dreadful rumor of Elna-Ana sped among them once more. At that, the chief of the Vorisals emerged from his shelter. The hope of meeting again his enemy made Roguil Arn eager to mount the ladders again. He delighted in the towering pile of burning timbers, which reminded him of the fire Ara-Karn had lit on Urnostardil. With ringing words the Vorisal went among the tribes, daring men to follow him. None of them would have gone leaderless, but behind such a man as Roguil Arn was at that moment, they would have marched even into the Darklands. Seven hundred or a thousand men the Vorisal gathered and led grimly up the ladders.

* * *

Weakly the lord of Rukor leaned against the battlements. Strange quiet had fallen across the wide space between the lance-towers. Billows of smoke from the burning tower flowed across the stones, but otherwise all was still. The guardsmen lay empty-eyed on the third step, weapons scattered at their sides. They lay there almost naked, as if it were over.

Ampeánor stood over one who seemed to have more of his wits about him than the rest. ‘I don’t remember your name,’ Ampeánor said.

‘Sevirin Lirne, my lord.’

‘Sevirin Lirne, where is Berowne?’

‘The captain is dead, my lord.’

‘Ullerath?’

‘Him too.’

Ampeánor looked over the others. ‘Are these all who remain alive?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

There were twenty-four men on the third step.

With Ampeánor and Sevirin Lirne, there were twenty-six.

‘Shall I order to form ranks, my lord.’

‘No. What for? There is no more strength in them. They have no more life left to use. But you all did well. If there should still stand cities after all of this, then men shall sing of us. Sevirin Lirne, you are released from duty, as are all the rest of you. Go and do what pleases you.’

The lord of Rukor faced the empty line of the outer parapet. The smoke stung his face. One hand held the shield, the other drew the long sword. Beautiful it was even now, the perfection of the centuries of effort by the armorers of Ul Raambar. It sang as it sprang from its scabbard, weariless and sharp, and Goddess smiled from the stones in the cross-piece. That is the difference between things and men.

* * *

Eagerly Roguil Arn and his followers clambered up the ladders. They almost gained the iron-shod summits when the lone figure appeared above the parapet before them.

Roguil Arn stopped. All the warriors stopped. They knew this one.

‘Come,’ the Southron said in the barbarians’ own tongue, in a voice inhuman. ‘Come, and die.’

* * *

Roguil Arn looked up into the bronze-shaded, pitiless eyes, the eyes of the man who killed so many, and seemed himself unkillable. And Roguil Arn knew in his heart a thing inescapable – that if he went to the top of the ladder the dark man there would kill him. He, Roguil Arn, would die, and he would know no more of the sweet pleasures of life, not good wine nor the soft touch of a woman nor the glory of his strength. He would see his home village of the snows no more; his wives there and young children would never know his voice again. But his corpse would lie on that heap below with the others, vile birds would tear his flesh, and he would end his life unvoyaged.

Roguil Arn did not know fear even then, but the loss and evil of such a fate was abhorrent to him like sin to a lesser man. What pleasure or joy was there in dying? It was not fated that they should take this Citadel, but only hurl themselves against its Iron Gate and die. This year had proven that.

Slowly Roguil Arn shook his head and whispered, ‘No.’

The others on the ladders turned their gazes from the chieftain to the figure on the parapet. The first to go against that one would die. The second would also die, and the third, and the fourth, and the tenth. They all would die at his hands. This they knew. Dark God stood beside this one. There was no going against God. Ara-Karn would have done it. Gundoen might have dared. Roguil Arn would not. Nor would the rest go forward but at his lead.

There was no sound save for the crackle and roar of the fire. Roguil Arn backed down the ladder. When he came to the man behind him he pushed at him with his foot, and that one also moved. In silence they descended and gathered on the stones above the coomb. Looking to the figure high above them, they raised fists to him.

It was their sign of victory.

It was as if he had been one of them, and they praised the victory he had won for them.

Then they melted into the crowds beyond the fire.

* * *

The guardsmen rose. They would have joined their lord, but Ampeánor, not turning, signed them back.

‘Stay where you are,’ he commanded. ‘Let no man approach me.’

He stood on the parapet. In the square below, the barbarian armies were massed in deep rows bent like a half-wheel that had for its hub the base of the burning siege-tower. The flames gleamed in colors of blood-red and orange and purple off the black Iron Gate.

Perhaps an hour passed so, or maybe two. Ampeánor did not move. Neither did the tribesmen. From time to time a trembling took Ampeánor behind his knees and he was like to fall; with an iron will beyond his strength he held his body fast. He knew that if he showed the slightest weakness, the barbarians in all their thousands would come again.

When the jade orb of God rose to the middle heavens behind the smoke, Ampeánor leaned forward and with a lance pushed the scaling-ladders from the Iron Gate. One by one, the ladders skipped across the face of the stone; then they fell and broke with dry sounds into a thousand fragments on the coomb.

Only then did the barbarians bestir themselves. The waves of armored men broke and slunk back through the ruins as quietly as ghosts.

Then at last Ampeánor turned back his tortured, haggard, sweating, smoke-stained, dead man’s visage to his awestruck men.

‘The war is over,’ he said.

He was right.

VII
Defeat

HOURS HAD PASSED, and the grounds of the Citadel of Elna were alive to the sounds of celebration. The Tarendahardilites made a feast, they drew water from the cisterns and mixed it with the last of the wine, they drank and ate.

They were as yet unaware of the dark figures that gathered at the edges of the rock, and most of all about the gloom-ridden trees of the last grove of the Imperial gardens. They were as yet unaware of the wavering, smoke-like fingers that stretched up out of the ground between their feet, under the benches and tables. The Tarendahardilites filled their beakers and cups and bowls, broke bread hot from the ovens, and drank one another’s health. Victory was the watchword there, and the happy chorus rose everywhere about the grounds.

Over the bloodstained battlements, however, a solemn, spectral stillness reigned. Dark wreaths of smoke still curled over the parapet from the burning siege-tower, and a few gerlins wheeled and dove against heaven – else were all things there deathly still.

Faintly through the rending veils of smoke could be perceived the outlines of the body of the victor where he lay against the base of the southern lance-tower, stretched out like a river god from some rich and indolent land.

He lay there alone. All the bodies had been borne away, and so the last guardsmen had left him there to sleep where he had fallen, too weary even to descend into the yard. Above his head the lance-tower rose out of the smoke, gaunt like a reef of adamant in an icy sea adorned with rotten wrecks and bitter, chalk-white birds of evil portent, as watchful and malignant as the hooded man who had stood upon her crown shooting death down upon his own unsuspecting followers.

Ampeánor neither slept nor woke. His mind danced slowly within the globe of his bleeding skull. The eyelids stirred a little, the mouth twisted as if with pain – below the shoulders the rest of him lay still and heavy as a corpse. From time to time as the sounds of merriment reached him some memory would take him, and he tried in vain to bestir himself. Not even the gloved fingers half-open on the beautiful sword-hilt moved.

When at last he woke, the smoke was no more than a bitter odor in the breeze, and the gerlins were gone. The last iron-shod sticks of the barbarians’ assault tower lay in a heap beside the disks of Elna’s Pillar of Victory. Beyond them, opening like some gigantic, ghastly blossom, Tarendahardil stretched across the plateau and the plain in lonely, dismal splendor. Streams of men on horse and foot poured out of the camp of the barbarians in the field beyond the city, passing away brightward, fleeing in defeat.

Ampeánor hauled himself to his feet and leaned against the wall. Bareheaded, his hair a bird-nest of blood and dirt, his face greasy with smoke, tears, and sweat, the last lord of Rukor stood into the cool, peaceful airs of victory.

He drew off his gloves. He was well now, whole again. All the madness and fury had been taken from him, consumed in fire and killing. What he had said and done before this battle had been put upon him by the gods. Now he was at peace with all men, even himself.

He bent to pick up the lovely Raamba sword. The blade scraped against the stone, and Ampeánor was aware of a strangeness about the stronghold.

It was silent.

Stretched out on the steps were half a dozen guardsmen, their arms still pointing at the wine-jugs they had almost emptied. Those men were not drunk but dead.

Ampeánor descended into the yard and passed bewildered through the brass doorway. Before him the grounds of the Citadel were bedecked with ribands of bright colors, brilliant carpets, silken cushions, couches of seltiswood, and corpses.

A grand feast had been in progress. Platters of food and broken serving-jugs were scattered everywhere. The tents of the refugees shuddered in the cold wind. In the half-open tent of the wounded the last survivors moaned in thirst and anguish to their healers, who all lay dead. Shadows of gerlins flitted over the sprawled corpses of heroes. Men and women, children and cattle – they were everywhere about the silent grounds. Some had fallen with cups still at their lips; others had lived to walk about and feel the life burn out in the hollow of their bellies. And over all the grounds, out of all the thousands there, not a single one still lived.

* * *

During the long course of the battle, a crowd of Tarendahardilites had gathered in the shadow of the inner gates – the same crowd through which Gundoen had passed. They had come from the tents, where the more fearful stayed huddled out of sight. Three times the Tarendahardilites had lain down to the longsleep and lain awake, hearing ceaseless battle. They did not eat, and drank but little: they made themselves miserable, hoping to win somehow the pity of the gods who had doomed them long before.

Those at the Iron Gate numbered several hundred: most of the children were there. The name of the Gerso charan was strong on the lips of more than one of them. Why, they wondered – why was it that Father Ennius did not fight in this defense, the longest and most doubtful? Then they heard a frightful cry echo off the stones beyond the Iron Gate, horribly familiar, brief and bellowed in words they could not understand, but which made them tremble: they did not know the tongue of the far North, and so could not understand Gundoen’s last cry.

Shortly afterward the sounds of battle died away. Silently the Tarendahardilites looked at one another, then cast their eyes skyward. There an enormous, swirling serpent of black smoke spewed over the inner gates.

While the refugees were thus occupied, a man appeared in the brass doorway, unnoticed and alone. He wore the padded linen tunic some guardsmen wore underneath their armor, but he was himself unarmed. He was breathing heavily, sweat streaming down his broad face, traces of bloodstains upon his legs. He looked at the Tarendahardilites with a tormented look, seeming not to understand their murmuring. Quietly Kuln-Holn made his way through the crowd.

He stopped in front of the tent of the wounded.

There two men lay side by side. They were both dead now, but in their lives had burst with life. They were so great of girth that the weary corpse-bearers had not the strength to shoulder their bodies across the mountain. Or perhaps it was that Berowne had been so loved by all that they dared not drop him into the muck; while the body and features of Gundoen were a horror even corpse-bearers feared touch.

Kuln-Holn stood over the two corpses. He looked first upon Berowne, who had treated him with humor and honor, and with whom he had gone under the earth to spy upon the tribesmen. Then he looked on Gundoen. Gundoen had always mocked Kuln-Holn, calling him ‘Little Prophet’ and worse names. Once Gundoen had almost killed Kuln-Holn. But he had been his chief.

Kuln-Holn descended to the slaves’ quarters. She was waiting for him there, sitting beside the bed, her head buried in her hands.

‘Salizh, I am back,’ Kuln-Holn said.

The young woman looked up. She gazed with wonder at the form of her husband, then put her arms about him and wept.

‘I believed I would never see you again.’ Hungrily she clasped his legs and pressed her cheek against the stained end of the tunic. On the bed beside her, little Bornin cooed.

Kuln-Holn looked about the cavernous hall. All his dreams of belonging here, of family and friends, had fled like hearth-smoke. In the end, it was not enough that he was accepted here, that he wore the armor of a guardsman, that he had taken a wife who had borne a child and was now burdened with another. Kuln-Holn was a tribesman of the far North. He was of Gundoen’s tribe.

First in his pride Kuln-Holn had brought about the deaths of his first wife and newborn son; then in his piety he had almost made an outcast of his daughter; then in his fury he had slain his daughter’s husband on the steps of the Brown Temple when High Town had fallen. Now he had killed his chief.

Was it merciful Goddess, he wondered, or cruel God, who had driven him to this?

A commotion rose at the far end of the hall.

‘But it is true, I tell you! And now they say we should open all the storing-halls and prepare a great feast of thanksgiving. Cakes and sweet-pies are to be baked for all, and all the holy offerings for Goddess are to be made!’

Salizh looked at Kuln-Holn through her tears. ‘Oh, husband – can it be true?’

When the rumors of Gundoen’s torture reached him, Kuln-Holn had hidden here and clung to little Bornin; but when that scream entered even these halls, Kuln-Holn had been impelled to go up look through the kitchen doors into the little yard. He had been in time to see the guardsmen bear down a huge thing covered by a darkly stained cloak. Kuln-Holn had seen the Empress departing the scene. She had commanded the thing. All the slaves said so.

Kuln-Holn stroked Salizh’s hair. The women of his tribe did not have such fine hair. She was a stranger to him, this woman. What did she know but this Palace where she had been born, the latest in a long line of Southron slaves?

‘Salizh,’ he said. ‘Salizh, I am going.’

Her face grew pale. ‘Is the battle not over?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘That is over.’

‘Then that is well, Kuln-Holn. Now I can let you go freely, for I will be sure to see you again. I will save you things from the feast, and a place to sit beside me. Who do you go to see? Is it her majesty again?’

‘No,’ he said, pulling away from her, tearing apart the embrace. ‘It is my master.’

* * *

Two burly slaves stood before the doors to the chambers of Ara-Karn. ‘We were commanded to keep watch here by the Empress herself,’ they said. ‘We were to see that Father Ennius does not leave. But why her majesty ordered it, that we do not know.’

‘Did she say that he was to have no guests?’ Kuln-Holn asked. ‘You know me. I come from the fighting on the Iron Gate; I have no weapons or strength. I was his servant once. We share the same fate. Let me in.’

The men looked each other in the eye. ‘And what word of the battle, Iocantris?’ asked one. They had not heard.

Kuln-Holn passed within. ‘Bad,’ he answered, and shut the door behind him.

The hangings were drawn across the windows. No lamps burned to dispel the gloom. Kuln-Holn could make nothing out. ‘Lord,’ he called out, in his own tongue, ‘It’s me.’

He heard the sound of hangings pulled to one side, or perhaps it was a chuckle. ‘Enter then and be welcome, Kuln-Holn.’

‘Lord,’ said Kuln-Holn, not moving, ‘Gundoen is dead.’

There was a gentleness unheard-of in the master’s voice as he answered, ‘I know.’

‘Lord, it was I who killed him.’

The broad hangings of the balcony pulled apart, so that a bright serpentine line blazed into the chambers. Ara-Karn stepped through that line. He was dressed in a dark green hunting tunic of the style of the civilized folk of the North.

Kuln-Holn beheld once more, like a bad dream he could not shake, the death-barge in the waters of the Ocean of the Dead, the wrestling bodies in the sandy clearing in the midst of his village, the Darkbeast falling to the earth. He saw the burning waste they made of Gerso, he saw the falls of Ancha and Eliorite and Carftain. He saw his master’s face, orange against a heap of flaming logs; he saw Berrin’s corpse bent in a ball at his feet; he saw the Empress Allissál, the most beautiful, tearing petals from a dead blossom; he saw the desecrated corpse of Gundoen.

‘Lord,’ he said, unable to hold out anguish from his voice, ‘Why?’

The dark visage of Ara-Karn nodded. ‘You wish for release, Kuln-Holn, and relief from your pain. I cannot give you those with words.’

A shaking had taken hold of Kuln-Holn’s body. ‘Was it,’ he whispered, ‘was it the gods’ intentions?’

‘There are no gods, Kuln-Holn. Only hateful little mortals of no worth whatsoever, fleeing their own shadows. Had there been gods – had there been such a thing as divine retribution – then surely I should have encountered it by now. Instead, what do you see? I am a monster, and I rule the lands you know. What god would allow that, Kuln-Holn?’

‘But you are a god!’ cried Kuln-Holn.

‘No, Kuln-Holn, I am no god. I am only a wretched barge-robber. That was what Gundoen called me. He did not know that it was from my own barge that I robbed. And if those people on the grounds below discover who I truly am, do you not imagine their suffering and confusion would be even worse than your own? – But I say too much.’

Quietly he passed to a table, and poured from a ewer some liquid into a little silver cup. He offered the cup to Kuln-Holn.

‘Drink, Kuln-Holn,’ he said. His voice was gentler than any Kuln-Holn had ever known. ‘Drink of those waters wherefrom you rescued me. It is this you came to find.’

Kuln-Holn took the cup into his hand. There was water in the cup, sweet-smelling as though sprinkled with crushed blossoms. Kuln-Holn looked up into the eyes of Ara-Karn, the Fist of God, the Messenger of Goddess. And he was comforted. What he saw within those black, green, glittering stones surely went beyond the mortal.

Kuln-Holn brought the cup to his lips and drank. He had not known how great a thirst he had until that moment. Again he found the eyes of his master; then all about him darkened and he seemed to step back into a time twenty years past.

He heard the wash of his boat in the water, and smelled the brine all about him. Never had he known so marvelous a catch. A strong swell rocked the little boat in the wind, and Kuln-Holn was fearful that the storm they had spoken of would break and drown him. He slipped on some of the fish and fell on them as on a bed. Then he looked above him and laughed.

The storm-clouds were breaking. There would be no storm. This great catch would make Kuln-Holn rich, and his luck would make him respected in the counsels of the tribe. He might even have some say as to who should be the next chief, whether the young hunter Gundoen or some other. He felt a strange peace descend upon him. ‘I give you thanks,’ he prayed to Her.

Slowly his eyes closed. A wave of warmth broke over him. He thought of all the troubles of his life, and they were no more than fevered dreams.

‘And still,’ he heard himself ask, ‘what else could I have done?’ and an answer came in deep tones, of a voice familiar but never heard before, not in that side of the world.

‘Nothing else,’ the voice said.

So at last the heart of Kuln-Holn knew contentment, and he let the life pass from his body and flit across the swells toward the beckoning bright horizon, and the blessed World Beyond.

‘Not for nothing are they named alzhaale.’

Above the body stood the master, dark against the hangings. He stooped and unbent Kuln-Holn’s fingers from his shoes. As if by afterthought he rearranged the limbs of the body into the proper order, after the custom of the far North.

‘Sail well, Little Doughty,’ whispered Ara-Karn. ‘I told you once I had no pity, but now I have found some to spare you. But your father should have taught you, that though blown leaves may be portents, they are not the ones who summon and rule the storms of winter.’

He stepped out on the balcony and took up again his clamps. Once more he set them to bite and hold the cracks between the stones. Crab-wise he climbed across the face of the Palace, with only the winds for his companions – even the gerlins were all feasting on the bodies at the foot of the Iron Gate.

Ara-Karn ascended the base of the White Tower, a small figure mounting up the sky. He passed the windows of the lower levels and came round to the brightward curve and the topmost level. From that vantage-point all the Citadel could be seen as if from overhead, from the inner courtyards to the black cowl and the encampment, where rose the laughter of rejoicing. Above him the golden Disk of Goddess burned in the fine autumnal sky.

Ara-Karn put his hands to either side of the narrow opening over his head and pulled himself up and in.

Beyond the wall, the window opened into a large, gloomy, hive-like chamber. The window broke the wall just below the painted, domed ceiling; from there a series of steep stone steps ran into a well of shadow. Ara-Karn sat for a moment on the topmost step, smoothing his hair and beard. Then he stepped down into the room.

A great canopied bed was upraised in the room. Beyond it the room opened on a small raised chamber. In this chamber were two couches, a serving-stand, and a series of niches. In one niche was a ewer of drinking water, refilled at the beginning of every sleep.

On his way out, the dark figure of the intruder paused at the foot of the great bed. Beyond the saffron canopy, her nakedness only half-concealed by the silken bedclothes, lay the Empress Allissál. Lying there, her brow slightly troubled as if by dreams, she was surely lovelier by far than Qhelvin of Sorne had ever imagined.

‘Sleep on, sleep well,’ the intruder murmured. ‘I am sorry to have used you so, but my destiny commands that I sit once more in the throne of my ancestors; and only my vengeance, like blood, bread and breath, has sustained me. When you wake all will be done, you will remember and be mine again. Our destinies will be one. Until then I kiss you, Alastaphele.’

When he passed through the narrow deep window again, he poured the water into the thirsty winds, and threw the ewer after it.

* * *

In the hive-like dimplace the Empress Allissál slept on. But before the foot of the bed stood the barbarian Gundoen, naked, bloody, his body blackened with mutilations. He gestured at her and roared, ‘Here she is! Here!’

Then Allissál looked down into the Palace and saw, rising through all the many stories, spilling from chamber to chamber, a wash of thick black water engulfing all it touched. Story by story the black tide rose, until it oozed into the White Tower and swirled around the stairs, faster as it rose, until it spilled against the outer doors of her dimplace – and she woke in terror.

* * *

Now, perhaps an hour after that dream had stained the couch of the Divine Queen of Tarendahardil, the lord of Rukor made his way through the fields of bodies. Above him loomed the dark walls of the Palace. He entered by way of the colonnade leading into the Imperial Hall of Justice. The high ceiling was lost in the gloom overhead; thick silence had settled like dust upon the bottom of that hall, as upon the murky bottom of the sea. Ampeánor leaned against one of the seven roof-pillars, whose base was as broad as a house.

Before him on the inlaid floor lay some sixty corpses. The bodies lay in ordered, circular rows, the feet pointed at the dais and the heads, all of whose eyes were open, propped up on stones or on clay bowls. The light of Goddess fell mistily through the smoke outside, upon the ancient throne on the dais. The throne was carved from a single block of wood inlaid with dusky gold and shadowy silver and set with jewels of great price.

A man sat upon that throne, a shabby old man with a gold disk on his chest. Twined round the bald, bulbous head was a crown of green and purple leaves of the sort the people awarded their favorites at festive times.

Slowly the man raised his head off his chest and looked down on the lord of Rukor.

‘Dornan Ural,’ Ampeánor called across the hall, ‘do you know what has befallen us? Why are all the refugees dead? Was it some sudden pestilence, or a worse thing?’

‘I know,’ the old man said slowly, ‘that you have come. As I foretold. Why did you betray our city?’ The voice was cold as it rang off the stone walls. Ampeánor saw that the busts of the Emperors in the niches around the hall had been disfigured.

‘You went away, and our armies fell at Egland Downs. Now you return, and behold what occurs.’

‘Dornan Ural, what goes on here?’

The old man cast his eyes about the hall, lovingly over his people. Gently he answered, ‘It is a trial, my lord.’

‘You old fool, do you not understand what this means? Our defenses have vanished. At any hour the barbarians might learn of it. Have you forgotten the secret way? It was to you that the old Emperor entrusted the secret: you told it to her majesty, who related it to me. Go about the halls, gather those who yet live, and await me by the pine-grove. I will go to the White Tower and see to the safety of the Empress.’

Ampeánor left the hall and plunged into the dark byways of the Palace. His lonely steps rang off lightless stone walls. It was as gloomy as the Sontil. Now and again dark shapes crossed the sunlit ends of the passageways – shapes of other survivors, those who, like him, had divined in time the source of the danger. They fled from Ampeánor’s approach as if he were the enemy. Now and again he saw them. More often he stumbled over bodies stretched upon the floor.

In the uppermost story of the Palace, the stench of corruption and disease had already begun to congregate. At the end of the long black corridor, the entrance-way to the White Tower was brightened by the light of Goddess. The doors to the Tower were shut fast, and a tall dark man stood before them. For one fleeting, maddening moment, the light fell across that man’s face.

It was the Gerso.

Then all at once Ampeánor grasped what it seemed to him now he had known in his heart ever since he awoke in the cave in the hill in the Sontil: that thing he had learned in those very dreams which ever since had been his torment.

Ennius Kandi was Ara-Karn.

‘Traitor!’

He drew the Raamba sword. His cry rolled down the hallway, hollow and hard as a hound’s. The man, Ara-Karn or not, Gerso or not, was gone now; Ampeánor set out after him. At the entranceway he paused, gasping and listening above the roaring of his heart. He tried the doors to the tower, but they were sealed. The sound of footsteps reached him from the stairs below. He plunged down after them.

He did not see the man, but was led on by the footsteps and his own hatred, a thing so strong it must have been a gift of God. He crossed the Palace and the Black Tower into the Southern Wing. He was led to the floor of the Vapionil; he beheld his twin half-brothers where they had died amidst the others, choking amidst their final pleasure-fête. Some there might even still live. As he went through them, Ampeánor staggered. The bodies on the floor, nude, with drugged smiles still cut upon the stiffness of their dead faces, caught at his ankles and felled him.

But the Gerso’s footsteps called.

Ampeánor went after them, back into the Palace. Down he went into a low hall where a thousand support-pillars grew from floor to ceiling like insanely ordered trunks of a forest of stone.

At last he found himself in the blackness of the slaves’ quarters, where he felt ahead of him with chance thrusts of the sword. In the rank, fetid odor of the dead, Ampeánor stopped long enough to lift his head and howl,

‘Ara-Karn, stand and face me!’

—And it seemed to him that a voice issued from the darkness near at hand, a mocking, scornful voice he knew as well as that of his beloved; and it said to him, ‘Not yet, my lord: no, not yet!’

Ampeánor stumbled into the kitchens. There were no sounds about him now. His enemy had gone. Blindly he felt along the walls and drew down a long, heavy torch sticky with pitch, of the sort they used to rekindle hearth-fires.

He strode to the hearths, where he could just discern the white mounds of packed ash. He dug them open, baring dull embers to the air. The embers brightened; Ampeánor thrust the torch into their midst, twirling it until it blazed in the draught.

He had fashioned fire in the sightless belly of the mountain. The gleams shone luridly off the long walls thick with bronze and wooden implements, showing corpses on the floor. Ampeánor raised the torch on high and traversed the passageway that led into the rock beneath the slaves’ quarters. He knew how to draw his enemy.

The heavy door fell back clanging from his hand. Beyond it the rooms of the jailers were empty. From the hook on the wall he took down the heavy bunch of keys. He went down the passage hewn out of the stone of the mountain, down to the cell in which Berowne had told him he had left the barbarian. Loudly Ampeánor unlocked the door. He thrust in his torch.

The cell was empty.

From the rooms above a sudden sound reached him.

Ampeánor raced back. There he beheld a sight to horrify. The heavy bronze door was shut. He ran to it and struck it with the torch, but the only answer his cries brought forth was the dull, quavering voice that slipped through the door-crack to him.

‘My lord, you have been condemned,’ said the voice of Dornan Ural. ‘The people, your judges, have spoken. The woman you love is dead, and you, young fool, are my prisoner. Now it is I, Dornan Ural, who rules this place.’

* * *

From the camp below the city two score warriors rode forth, the last barbarians still girt for war. Nam-Rog and Kul-Dro rode with the strongest of their tribes up into the city, for the last time. Once more they went beneath the hateful gate of wood and bronze and iron. They shouted up to the battlements above the Iron Gate.

‘Southrons!’ shouted Nam-Rog, who had only a few words of Bordo. ‘We go now! Give us Gundoen! Death-barge for our friend!’

But the battlements were empty, and no voice answered him.

Again the Durbar called up to the empty battlement, to no avail. Kul-Dro looked nervously up at the haunted heights where so many lives had ended.

‘Let us be gone,’ he muttered. Nam-Rog looked back, sighed, and brought his horse around.

Then a scream of metal broke the stillness, and a long bright streak cut the Iron Gate open behind them. The ponies and war-horses bucked and pranced; the riders fell back about the black ruin of Erion Sedeg’s assault tower.

Noisily the Iron Gate fell open. It stopped a fathom or two apart.

Some of the tribesmen made as if to flee, but no army jostled there to surge forth: there was only the same dark quiet. The men on horseback looked one another in the eye, frowning.

A lone figure showed in the brightness of the opening. Kul-Dro and the men of his tribe looked upon him in unbelief. Nam-Rog shook his head and made the Sign of Goddess to ward away evil.

They had looked for Elna-Ana, and in his stead walked this man. There was no mistaking those eyes or the way he held himself before them, unarmored, unweaponed and unafraid.

Ara-Karn walked out through the Iron Gate, the first to do so in more than a year.

‘The lord Ampeánor you will take alive at all cost,’ he told them. ‘The Empress and her women are not to be touched. For the rest—’ he shrugged, a gloomy smile playing about the cruel lips— ‘deal with them as you like.’

VIII
The Black Tent

BY THE SEA’S BRIGHT EDGE a hundred huge, rough-hewn men stood along the stone line of an ancient road. Goddess gleamed off their burnished armor of bronze, silver and gold, and deepened their scarred limbs to purple. Behind them, on slopes leading up to the end of a sere, trampled plain, were gathered other men, older, bearing graver wounds; younger ones stood below, among the rocks in the warm waters. There were no women there. In silence the thousands stared into the sea, that surged and splashed against the rocks, never silent, never still.

Upon the waters a thousand little vessels danced, drawn by currents out to sea. The vessels were black with gold upon their prows, and every one unmanned. For cargo the barges bore clay and bronze bowls and pitchers, broken swords, reddened axes, bound sheafs of human hair, rings, cloaks and a long bag of tough sailcloth stitched tight and sealed with wax against the spray and air.

One vessel was manned: in it a mighty-armed champion rowed with the current, towing behind him the largest, most ornate barge. Alone of all the living the young warrior rowed before the armada of the slain, ensuring with the sweep of his strong-driven oars that the corpse bound in the bag in that barge went first.

Alongside the bag lay pieces of bronze armor, once beautiful, now stained and battered, and a gleaming blue longsword studded with gemstones and inlaid with gold and silver, a weapon worth a kingdom.

From the distant shore a faint keening was borne to the rower above the creak of his oars. The old blind warriors on the plain made their chant, bidding the last farewell to the voyaged ones. Hearing it, the warrior cut the tow-line and put his boat back for land. The thousands of death-barges, driven on by the current, surrounded him for a hundred fathoms on every side. A chill ran up his spine, and he rowed hard to be free of the voices rising from the dead around him.

* * *

Nam-Rog and his two score had passed through the Iron Gate at last. But they found little to delight them. Mutely they stared upon the scene of the last feast of the Tarendahardilites. It was a sight that stirred horror in them: like their horses, tossing their manes and stamping their hooves, the tribesmen longed to be free of that place. To die in battle or hunt was honorable, to die of sickness familiar, to die of hunger unavoidable. But poison smelled of sorcery, of vile charms and muttered curses against which no swords or strength availed.

Ara-Karn, their Warlord, their King, their divinity, had poisoned the wells and cisterns of the citadel.

The warriors covered their mouths and nostrils with linens, and would take no drink of water or wine that they found in that place.

Warily the warriors gathered what riches they could find while Nam-Rog arranged for the corpse of Gundoen to be borne down to the camp. The Empress and her women they left shut up in the White Tower. In half a waking the warriors left that unclean place they had battled so long to win, nor would they ever again willingly set foot within it.

Ara-Karn ordered a public mourning of thirty passes for Gundoen, a thing unheard-of among the tribes. But in truth they all had such rites to occupy them. Many and great were the warriors who had fallen in that battle. So for three weeks the fields echoed with hammer, chisel and saw, as the fleet of death-barges was constructed. The Blind Ones were much sought after. Each new chieftain and champion vied to do his foregoer the greater honor.

Many warriors went up into the stronghold to see it, nor would they re-sheathe their swords until they had beheld with their own eyes the body of the man who alone had turned back all their armies. They went below the earth, into the near-black room of the jailers behind the bronze door. There they gazed upon him in awe, even as the companions of Nam-Rog had discovered him. Elna-Ana, whom the Southrons called Ampeánor of Rukor, lay upon his side against the wall in a corner of the room. His ghastly face seemed to stare each newcomer in the eyes. The famous sword, held in both fists, was thrust entirely through the body.

The Warlord encouraged these visits and ordered, when the tribesmen and slaves should have had their fill of seeing it, that the corpse be hewn into pieces and scattered in ditches for the birds and worms. Such was their dread now of Ara-Karn, that no tribesman dared to disobey. Only Roguil Arn spoke out against it, calling it the deed of a weakling to treat so grand an enemy so shamefully. He stole the body and built a magnificent death-barge by himself, lest any other be blamed with him. With his own hands the greatest fighter of the far North hewed planks and carved that barge and painted its prow with gold. The jeweled blue sword he left beside the corpse-bag. None would take that sword now, not even for payment: it had slain its master and was luckless and untrustworthy.

The young chief of the Vorisals did not face the Warlord’s wrath for his disobedience. Ara-Karn did not attend the voyaging; he hardly stepped outside his tent. Only once did he address his followers after his return: a bitter speech few understood.

He had learned that one of the Imperial embalmers had survived the poisoning, and had him see to the body of Gundoen. Now, filled with herbs and surrounded by fragrant spices, the corpse reposed within a sealed jeweled coffer near the Warlord’s tent. It was decreed that the remains of Gundoen would voyage forth on no waters but those of the Ocean of Death, from the bay of his home village. And in this Nam-Rog agreed, though it flew in the face of all custom to keep a corpse so long.

In that mass voyaging it seemed as though an entire generation went out on the waters at once. And the young warriors on the rocks looked up past the chiefs and champions to the Blind Ones singing to the Sun. The young men felt as if they had spent their lives passing from one foreign city to the next. They wondered what it would be like to be home again. As children they had gone to war, as men they had known only these Southron lands.

When the last barge sank below the dark line of the sea, the barbarians returned to the camp upon the plain. They went back brooding. Three weeks, thirty passes of dark God overhead, had fled since the taking of the Citadel. It was now well into autumn, and the Darkland winds were chill. At last their vengeance was complete, and the Golden Woman of the South, last daughter of Elna, was in their hands.

Gloom and foul dreams descended upon the camp that longsleep. The barges had been seen off, but the spirits of the dead seemed to linger. So many in these wars had died badly. Hundreds had been left on the parched stones of the Taril. Hundreds more lay in the Palace dump-heaps. Thousands of tribesmen had died in the dim past during the building of that Citadel – and then there were the Southrons and their unclean, luckless deaths. They would not willingly leave this place. How could such spirits ever be appeased?

* * *

After long hours, the jade orb of God rose above the Sea of Elna. The strained, fretful silence ended in the camp. From all quarters the warriors converged about the central clearing. Soberly they gathered, with a sadness strange for victors.

Before them a large, elaborate tent rose above the camp at the summit of a low hill of earth shaped like the barge-mound of some old Southron King. Poles of ivory and seltiswood supported the black folds of silk and dyed bandar-skins drooping to kiss the dead earth. Above the tent a black banner hung unmoving on a pole, marked with a yellow Darkbeast-tooth.

To one side the golden coffer of Gundoen rested on ivory legs, sheltered from the light by a linen canopy like a shrine. To the other side a heap containing all the objects of value found within the Citadel lay open to the sky, awaiting division. Between them two empty high-seats of equal size and beauty had been raised.

All the byways of the camp bore the many marks of that year’s encampment. No tracks marred the awful virginity of the hard-packed earth of that mound. Such was the home of their Warlord-King, the Conqueror, the Returned One, Ara-Karn.

* * *

Inside the tent, the man wet his hard brown arms in a gleaming silver ewer of lustral water and let his attendants dry and array him. This he did naturally, as if long used to it. The walls of the tent surrounded like a treasure-vault the array of spoils, of carpets, statuary and weapons. The place suited the man, but there was something about the man that did not suit himself. Some traces of cheerfulness, of an almost hopeful anticipation. The attendants, noting this change in their master, were almost emboldened to speak and make jests; of course they did not. They were in the presence of Ara-Karn.

In the midst of these preparations three men were conducted into the presence.

His glance took them in. The cleansing and ritual purification of the citadel had been left to the slaves, for no barbarian would enter that place twice. These three newcomers were dark and wiry and appareled with elegance. Their faces were burned with the telltale marks of subtlety, fear and cruelty. In a word, they were Vapionil, and knew well the art and science of their slavery.

A number of Vapionil had survived the poisoning; the mercenaries of Erion Sedeg guarded the Citadel, but it was to the Vapionil that Ara-Karn gave the keeping of the Queen, trusting in their cowardice and venality. Not even the highest lieutenants of Erion Sedeg were allowed entrance to the White Tower.

Now great dread was apparent in their cunning faces, and they prostrated themselves before him with agitation.

‘Spare us, Great Kaan!’ they cried him from the ground. ‘Forgive us, for we are but helpless mortals who have done our best!’

‘What is it?’ he asked coldly. ‘Why have you not brought her as I commanded?’

‘That woman, O King of Kings, who some say is descended from Goddess, has fled!’

There was nothing of cheerfulness about him now. ‘And Erion Sedeg?’ he asked.

Erion Sedeg had survived the burning of the Tower, and was now a man whose power rivaled even Nam-Rog’s. When men spoke of the Warlord, it was now no longer in the terms which Kuln-Holn had taught them, but in those of Erion Sedeg. His flesh was blackened and hideously scarred, but the iron strength and evil will remained. As soon as he heard that Ara-Karn had returned, he ordered himself taken before the King.

Lying on the litter, Erion Sedeg gripped the Warlord’s arm and stared into the cold, impassive face with its hard, black-green eyes. Then he relaxed his grip. Already the rumors of the horror found within the stronghold were circulating about the camp. ‘Yes, you are the one,’ he said, shrinking back to sleep. ‘You are my Master, of whom I have spoken.’ The King of Kings did not respond.

‘Every chamber of the Citadel has been twice-searched, Great Conqueror! Her slaves are being questioned most expertly. The mercenaries of Erion Sedeg swear she did not pass through them – what else are we to think but that she took flight indeed, unless she had jewels hidden away, and the mercenaries do not speak the truth. Or again, some whisper she cast herself from the palace walls; but her women do not weep for nothing, so this seems unlikely.’

They babbled on swiftly in Bordo. A civilized lord, such as they were accustomed to, would have been amused by their extravagant protestations. A barbarian, such as this one was said to be, would have been flattered by their exaltations, or filled with such contempt that he scorned to punish them. But this one only looked at them, and in the bent of his lips might be read either amusement or scorn, and irony or despair in the greenish gleaming of his black eyes. At length, under that moveless gaze, the words of the Vapionil failed, as a brook will falter in the Desert when it sinks into the baking sands and is no more. Even so, the Warlord of the far North knew that the tale was not yet fully told.

‘What else?’ he asked in a calm voice.

They hesitated. ‘O Magnificence of the World, a word she left on parchment, addressed to your August Majesty. Yet it was our doubt whether you would wish to acknowledge it.’

Silently he extended a sinewy hand, its sparse black hairs curling from the intersections of its many lines, its flesh brown from sun and wind, and moveless as a monument’s.

With some agitation, the foremost slave bowed his head, lifted up the scroll, and felt it taken from his hands.

* * *

Among the barbarians below the mound were forty or fifty civilized men. They were dressed plainly, in undistinguished traveling-garb and the harness of many cities. They were Peshtrians, Pelthari, Belknuleans, Zaprolis, and men from all the lesser principalities and cities of the deeper South. They stood meekly and uncertainly among the piles of bales and chests and trunks brought as tribute for the Conqueror.

From time to time the legates cast nervous glances at the barbarians crowding in around them. Foremost were the proud chieftains and champions, light-haired, light-eyed giants bristling with weapons, bedecked with silver, gold and gaudy gems. Among them passed their beautiful women, herb-eyed, slow-moving, as though their every step or shudder produced in them an exquisite ache about the limbs. They were robed in loras of the finest silk, and their thin brown arms were weighted with bands of gold, ivory, silver, copper and electrum. Here was a ruby cut in the design of fallen Mersaline, there an emerald ringed with gold after the fashion of Postio. Evidence of the many conquests was everywhere, not least in the terrible scars of the barbarians, the gashes and mutilations they wore with more disdainful pride even than their jewels.

Without warning the tent-flaps sundered and a solitary man stepped out.

The chieftains straightened and held aloft their spears, swords, axes and bows, acclaiming him. The civilized men, their mouths dry of a sudden, fell to their knees in abasement.

‘Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn!’

The man gazed at the high-seats, then stepped forward. Silently he abode over the masses of men as the clamor of the warriors swelled into a roar.

‘Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn!’

At length the civilized men made bold to glance up from their abasements. It was not the proper form, but their curiosity had the better of them. So many were the tales they had heard of this man, that had he been larger than a war-horse and fashioned out of brass and flame, they would not have been surprised.

Yet here was a man not much above the middle height, with a short dark beard and hair of middle length. Over his torso he wore a black tunic cut after the fashion of no known city. He wore soft leather leggings after the manner of the far North, and on his shoulders a short mantle of brilliant green bandarskin. The black tunic rose into a cowl folded behind his head, in the way of the nomads of the Desert beyond the ruins of Postio. He wore no jewels, gold or silver. Yet upon his chest was spread a massive pectoral, all of great teeth curving and cruelly-pointed – the enormous teeth of the mythical Darkbeast.

The Conqueror of the World looked down upon those Southrons as if he knew their thoughts, and his mouth altered its bent somewhat. A dismal, unshrinking cold seemed to radiate from the dark figure, as though this were a thing belonging to no lands beneath Her broad face. At that moment the civilized men could well believe the whispered rumors that named Ara-Karn a Madpriest, one exiled from the Darklands for such deeds as revolted even those tormented souls.

When the acclaim subsided, he lifted his hand to the civilized men and spoke a few words. The legates eyed one another furtively; yet none of them knew the language of their conquerors.

One of the chieftains answered the Warlord, gesturing likewise toward the Southrons. He was an older man with streaks of gray in the ash-blond of his long hair and beard. Yet he stood up strong as a man half his age.

The Conqueror nodded curtly, and signed to the civilized men.

Uncertainly they rose, the knees of each man aching. They made their way up the tumulus and halted. Thirty steps away seemed close enough to this man. The men conferred among themselves. Helplessly they looked to the chieftains and their herb-eyed ladies.

‘Does no man of you speak the language of the South? How else may we give your great King our messages?’

The women looked upon them blankly. The old chieftain shook his head. In a Bordo savoring thickly of the tongue of the far North he told them, ‘No man speak for him now. Speak him. He speak.’

Doubtfully, the legates looked again to the brooding figure. He had not moved or given any sign of understanding. There was a monstrous intensity about his brows, as though he were capable of doing murder at any instant; yet his every action bespoke an all but inhuman patience. Again the legates consulted; at length one stood forth.

‘O Great King,’ he said slowly and loudly, ‘from several cities and nations have we come to pay you homage. We here are representative of all those lands not yet under your domain. I am called Engkor, of the house of Gonyaga of Zaproll on the Sea. Many gifts have we brought you to hail your majesty’s great triumphs.’

He gestured at the chests and bales. The Conqueror held his calm and terrible gaze upon the Zaproli.

‘Your majesty,’ Engkor said, ‘we have come to submit to your majesty the overlordships of all our lands, and to proclaim you the first Emperor of South and North, supreme King of all the lands where men dwell. In your presence we abase ourselves.’ So saying Engkor fell to his knees and leaned forward on his hands. The other legates followed his example, so that in short order each man held his face close to the earth and saw only the dirt. It was better than enduring those eyes.

Ara-Karn addressed the chieftains in the tongue of the far North, ignoring the legates.

‘All that is yours,’ he said, indicating the heaped gifts. ‘Take it as you please.’

But the chieftains did not move. The Warlord let a ripple of displeasure darken his brow. ‘Well? Why do you stop? Jump, jump: it is all yours.’

Gloomily the old chieftain replied, ‘Lord, we will not fall to this as dogs to corpses in the field, nor will we act like savages before these Southrons, bur rather follow your own example. Many such trifles have we already. Let the slaves apportion these to our tents later.’

‘What are you, that you would act as I?’ shot back the King. ‘If you will not accept my gifts when I offer them, perhaps they will be gone when you return. Yet Nam-Rog, I can recall the time when you would not have called such treasures trifles.’

‘Many times has God ridden past our Lady since then,’ the old warrior responded. ‘Few things on earth are the same now as they were then.’

The Warlord nodded. ‘You remind me of more than you know, old man.’ Abruptly speaking in Bordo for the first time he addressed the legates: ‘You have said all the unconquered cities are present here. What then of Ul Raambar?’

The Zaproli looked up, stung by the swift words so clearly spoken.

‘There is no Ul Raambar,’ he groaned.

A trace of pleasure – it might have been pain – crossed the dark face. ‘Ah, yes. I had forgotten. What then of Belknule? Is Yorkjax represented here?’

‘Lord, Great One, I am a Belknulean,’ said one. ‘Yorkjax is gone. Hearing of your majesty’s victory over this the ancient city of your enemies, the tyrant gathered his followers and sought to flee. Then at last the nobles and people would suffer no more, but fell upon Yorkjax and his men and put them to death, even to the last woman and child of theirs. Belknule is at last free: free to offer herself humbly at the feet of your most feared majesty.’

‘With such suppliants I will fear no lack,’ the Conqueror said. ‘As to your gifts, I will take them. Yet gifts are not sufficient. What is given bespeaks equality and independence. Therefore each of you will accompany one of my captains to your homeland and surrender all forms and fashions of power into his hands. In addition will I levy this tribute of you all: three golden Elnics for every man now in my armies. All your soldiers will give their weapons to my men, who are to be treated by you with all the honor I trust you would do me. More: those of you who have skilled shipwrights will send them North. Let them gather at Arpane on the Sea, and there await my orders.

‘Yet, that you may not consider your new master too harsh, this honor will I perform unto you. I will accept of you twenty children from each land or city. Let them be of your noblest and most wealthy houses, for they shall stay with me as my attendants. Let none of them be more than twelve summers in age, and let there be as many sons as daughters: for no doubt my future Queen will wish to partake equally of this pleasure.’ This last phrase was spoken with such strange intensity, the legates were at a loss to know quite what to make of it.

Silently and miserably they nodded acquiescence to his terms. Such subtle severity they had not expected of a rude general of red-handed barbarians. But well they knew their helplessness.

‘It is enough,’ said Ara-Karn, dismissing them. He turned to the chieftains. ‘Nam-Rog, you understood?’

Grimly the chieftain of the Durbars nodded. ‘Lord, it was our mind to return to the far North after this city fell. We have not seen our homes or wives since before we broke the Spine.’

‘When I have mine again, then perhaps I will allow you yours,’ the Warlord said. ‘Until then do as I command.’ He made a move as if he would go – then stopped. ‘Yet what is this?’ he mused.

The civilized men and their servants had risen and receded into the throngs. One however still knelt upon the earth, his aged head held close over the ground.

‘Lord, this was not one of these,’ Nam-Rog said. ‘Him we found in the Palace of the Citadel, on a high-seat in the great, empty hall. Dead men lay about him, but when he saw us he welcomed us. It was he who told us where to find the corpse of Elna-Ana. He called himself your ally, and carried on so that we thought him wrong-headed. We put him among these other Southrons rather than the captives. It seemed the best place for him.’

The Conqueror of the World gazed down upon the kneeling man. He sat in one of the high-seats.

‘Dornan Ural,’ he called softly. ‘Dornan Ural, did you seek me?’

The old man looked up. The former Regent was all but unrecognizable now. His hands were the color of dead earth. Strands of greasy hair fell about his face and ears. The unshaven bloated face was streaked with mud and tears, the eyes bleary, huge and hollowed. Yet, though his torn tunic was unspeakably filthy and vile, upon it hung a thing worth more than all the gifts of the legates: the pectoral of the High Regent of Tarendahardil.

What he had done, and what thoughts had passed through his skull since he had locked Ampeánor in the cell beneath the Palace, not even Dornan Ural himself might have said. Doubtless he did not remember welcoming the barbarians. But he could not forget his passage through the city’s ruins. Foremost in the long lines of captives, Dornan Ural felt his eyes grow ever larger as he beheld the dreadful wastes for the first time.

They had passed the burned, broken stones of Dornan Ural’s own hall on the edge of High Town; they passed marketplaces, theaters, and the offices of his officials. In the lower city where the poorer classes and merchants had lived and worked, the destruction had been complete. The buildings had been close-set and of wood, and the fire had raged among them without mercy. Only then did the knowledge take full hold in him. She was no more, and there was no other place quite like her. In years to come, no men would know her beauty or her splendors. Tarendahardil, his city, was dead.

‘Dornan Ural,’ reproved Ara-Karn gently and terribly, ‘what posture and condition is this for the High Regent of Tarendahardil, the Chief Administrator of all the Seven Ranks of the officials?’

The frog’s-eyes blinked. ‘Lord, majesty – you know me?’

‘Certainly I know you, my old fool. Do you not know me?’

‘You are the Conqueror, the King, the Returned One, his august majesty Ara-Karn, the Fist of God, the—’

‘Enough. And no more? You do not remember me?’

‘Great Majesty, never before in my life have I beheld you.’

‘Then why have you been so bold, Dornan Ural, as to venture your life here among these brigands and robbers who are your enemies?’

‘Great One, it was not enemies I came to find but rather friends, and a man more than man, to whom I hoped to render some small service.’

‘You flatter as well as ever. Your wits, it seems, have not yet completely failed. What service could you offer me?’

Dornan Ural tried to think. What had it been that had made him welcome the barbarians?

‘Divine One,’ he said slowly, choosing his words with care, ‘mighty are your armies, and many your conquests. But to conquer and to rule, these are different matters. I have gained many skills in almost a score of years of overseeing the Empire nal Bordakasha. Divine One, I would ask no more than the honor of serving you.’

‘Even as you served your former mistress?’

‘Even so, Divine One. In minor tasks I could relieve your majesty of much toil, and perhaps offer some instruction.’

‘How to ensure the loyalty of my servants, perhaps.’

‘That and many other matters, O King of South and North. For example, there exists a hidden passageway into and out of the Citadel. Its secret is known to me.’

The dark face of the King was expressionless. ‘So she did not throw herself from the walls. Dornan Ural, your former mistress still lives. Were you aware of it?’

Confusion crossed the ugly face. ‘Lord, if you say it is so, then I acknowledge it.’

‘Dornan Ural, her fate rests in my hands. Her golden body is in my grasp. Do you know what I will do to her? Imagine if you can. I am considering your offer, Dornan Ural. My answer depends on what you now say. You were her servant and her tutor, Dornan Ural. Was she a good monarch? Praise her if you can, and I will spare and honor her; otherwise— Well? Have you nothing to say?’

‘Great King, what can I say? She was your enemy. Her followers are still numerous. I would be a poor counselor indeed, if I advised your majesty to give power to one who would later use it against you.’

The King rose and signed for two of the lesser warriors to approach, ‘Your words are wise, Dornan Ural. I will be bound by them. Now follow me. There is something I would show you.’

The old man stood awkwardly. The four men walked round the dark tent to the brightward side. There the King halted. He indicated a side tent out of which the light of a hundred lamps seemed to stream.

‘Go you there and behold,’ said Ara-Karn to Dornan Ural.

Wonderingly the old man approached the tent. The flood of light caught hold of his dirtied leggings up to his trunk, transmuting his stocky legs into things of speckled gold. Dornan Ural stood dumbfounded. His legs wavered and he sank suddenly upon his knees, and the tide of light engulfed him, making him blink and weep. So perhaps old Kar Belthus would seem, confronted with his old charge horribly returned from his long voyagings.

The walls and floor of the little tent were covered with dark-dyed velvet, blue and green and black. Set upon spear-shafts near the back wall was a thing taller than a man, circular in shape, ornately carved and cast. A hundred spikes radiated outwards from its beaten rim, each set with a cluster of diamonds as large as a woman’s knuckle. The shield-like circle of it was of the finest electrum, gold and silver intermingled so that each should exalt the other’s glory. It caught the light of Goddess and hurled it back three-fold, so that before its glare Dornan Ural had to put his hands over his eyes.

Over and behind him the Warlord stood, implacable.

‘But, but—’ Dornan Ural stammered, ‘what is this?’

‘It is the Disk of Goddess,’ answered Ara-Karn.

Dornan Ural looked uncomprehendingly into the face of the barbarians’ king through a veil of sparks and orange blossoms.

‘Do you not understand even now, old fool?’ Ara-Karn said pitilessly, ‘This is the Disk of Goddess, symbol as well of your former mistress. Can you outshine it, Dornan Ural? Should I then keep you and destroy this? You betray your true worth with ever word and gesture. You have nothing to offer me save one thing – and that thing I will take indeed, though I think it will rather pain you to give it up.’

He spoke a word to the warriors. Grimly they nodded and neared the kneeling Dornan Ural, drawing their swords.

‘Please, please,’ the old man moaned, crawling to catch the King’s knees. ‘I have already done your majesty a service! It was no one else but I who captured the Charan of Rukor, who for years ordered the defense of the Citadel!’

‘You took him from my vengeance,’ Ara-Karn said, stepping to evade him. ‘You robbed me of him, and left only yourself in his place.’

‘Mercy, mercy, I beg of you—’

‘You beg?’ There was no passion in the voice of Ara-Karn, only a cold irony. ‘And what of her? What of those times she begged you, as far as her own proud nature would allow her to implore anyone? She trusted you, Dornan Ural – you betrayed her. Did you not once take oath to serve her? She was your mistress. You should have been her ally, her helpmeet, her man. And what did you ever do but disobey her wishes, subvert her every plan and hope, and in the end betray her?’ The voice went on, inhumanly cold, desperately calm. ‘You were willing even to sell her to these savage hordes. And would you have let her suffer that for only some gold and your own worthless life? By the gods who do not exist, you sicken me. But you shall sicken me no longer.’

He turned and began to walk back through the tent. The warriors reached for Dornan Ural. But terror made him quick – slipping between their arms, he crawled after Ara-Karn. The few steps around the tent seemed farther than between Zaproll and Arpane; ever behind him he heard the footfall of his executioners. The last corner fell back: he beheld bobbing before him the slope of dead earth, the twin thrones, clustered chieftains, and the thousand tents of the barbarians.

The legs of the King were before Dornan Ural. He gripped them fiercely, sobbing, ‘Mercy, mercy, I implore you! Show you are as great as men call you, by sparing me. If I displease you, I will go away to some island – only grant me life! Else how may you yourself ask mercy some pass from the gods above? Show kindness, and it will be shown to you! Please, please, your majesty…’

The two warriors stood behind the writhing man. Their faces were heavy with disgust. This was clearly not a task they relished; yet it might also be said that a thing so wretched as this before them were better slain. And, too, they were warriors of the far North, and knew not pity. Unwaveringly they looked into their Warlord’s eyes.

He nodded. ‘It will not grieve me overmuch if this garb is soiled.’ The words could scarcely be heard above the wailing of the old man.

Expertly they brought their swords into position. They must aim carefully, to avoid their Warlord’s legs.

Beyond, the herb-eyed ladies looked on blankly, perhaps with even a faint sparkle of cruel pleasure. But there was revulsion and anger in the eyes of the chieftains. So many times had they killed men in passion and battle, they could not have numbered them all. But they had never killed like this.

The warriors were on the down-stroke when Ara-Karn said suddenly, ‘Stay!’

Inexperienced men would have been helpless to obey him, but these were veterans of the wars for two score cities. The heavy blades flashed past the neck and shoulders of the prostrate man, slicing through the folds of his robes before they bit ringing into the stony earth.

Even as the blades whistled by the ears of Dornan Ural he, sure the very moment of his death had come, loosed a brittle squeal, so loud and piercing it seemed to hang over the outspread tents long after the two warriors had cleaned and sheathed their swords.

There was a quiet upon the scene as that shriek ceded to the low groan of the wind in the tents.

The chieftains looked with outrage upon the pile of soiled linen and flesh that once had ruled half the Southlands in the name of the Empress and her son. The two warriors seemed relieved that they had not befouled their blades upon such a man and such a death. Of them all, only Ara-Karn remained unmoved. With a gentle turn of his knees he freed his legs front the shaking arms.

‘Gather the warriors in the penalty-square,’ he said calmly, ‘and let them form the Tunnel of Spears. Drive this man through it. It is my will he have some life left to him when he emerges from the Tunnel. Then cut his body in pieces and scatter them over the fields, even as these Southrons would have done to Gundoen had they had the chance. Well? Why will you stop and look at me so?’

‘Lord,’ Nam-Rog said, ‘that this man was your enemy and has done you harm, I would not deny. Yet what else can you do to him? There is nothing left. How many times will you make as if to kill him? It was in my mind to call that a good act of yours, that you spared him now. Yet if you saved his life only to give him this crueler fate, then I know not what to say, except that I will have no hand in it.’

‘Did you not see Gundoen’s body?’

‘I will not equal these men’s vileness, whatever this one may have done against us.’

Ara-Karn frowned. ‘And do you think I make a trial of you now? – or is it rather you who would test my resolve? You grow dangerous, Nam-Rog. And you others, whose side will you take in this, his or mine?’

None dared speak, but their reply was evident in their eyes.

‘Well, I shall force you to do nothing distasteful, now that I have made you greater than kings and given you riches beyond your former imaginings. It strikes me that there are others in the camp who will perform this more as I would wish. Give him to the poorest harlots among the camp-followers, then. They shall work upon him as they please and as their cleverness bids, and be crueler by far than any of the warriors, one of whose spears might slip early and end the entertainment. Let the women know that she whose work is judged most novel in the way I would have it, shall be given his golden pectoral as her reward.’

‘And will you, lord, be the judge of this?’

For a moment the two men’s eyes held each other; but in the end it was Nam-Rog who let fall his gaze.

‘No, not I,’ Ara-Karn said calmly. ‘Choose out ten slaves from among my Vapionil and let them judge. Dress them in garb fit for princes, and put upon each man’s head a band of gold set with jade, and in his hand an ivory rule. You shall see I am no mean play-giver.’ As there was no word for ‘play’ in the tongue of the tribes, he used a Bordo term, but his words were understood.

Nam-Rog nodded. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘in this as in all other things, your will shall be law.’

The King heard the lie, and a gleam as of humor passed through his eyes; yet it was gone too swiftly to be surely known. ‘Nam-Rog of the Durbars, you will find a place in my court yet. When this spectacle is done, you chieftains shall ready yourselves to be guided by the ambassadors to their several cities. Take what men you like, and choose who shall have which city. One half of this tribute you may keep or distribute as you please; the other send North with the shipwrights to Arpane on the Sea. Now, what business is left?’

Nam-Rog was silent, but a lesser chief said, ‘Lord, we have gathered the servants and folk we found still living in the Citadel. What is your will for them?’

‘Let them be brought.’

The two warriors lifted the still-twitching Dornan Ural and carried him down among the tents. It was doubtful whether he knew even then what lay in hand for him, any more than a child will who plays beside a serpent. Soon other warriors appeared, driving before them the captives from the Citadel. Most were people of the City who had taken refuge in the Citadel when Tarendahardil fell, but some were of the Palace.

The Conqueror walked before them where they knelt, the last of his children. None knew him. This was not Father Ennius but the barbarian, Ara-Karn.

At length he drew to a halt.

Before him knelt a tall woman whose hair was a brilliant mixture of gold and vermilion. She was the loveliest there, more beautiful even than the companions of the chieftains: a chara of hetairai. It seemed a miracle that she should have emerged unscathed and unclaimed from the taking of the Citadel.

She bent her shoulders forward somewhat now, and glanced up to the Warlord briefly from beneath her dark lashes. Thereafter she held her gaze on the ground between his feet.

‘Bid the others depart, give them freedom,’ Ara-Karn said. The warriors gestured with their spears, and the hundreds of men and women rose and left. The Warlord, ignoring them, held his gaze upon the woman. At length, he bade her speak her name.

In a voice low and musical she responded, ‘O Great One, I am called Kiva.’

‘I asked you not what you were called,’ he rejoined coldly, ‘but rather what your name is.’

‘Mirso Lengan, O King.’

‘Yes. I know you. Are you not the woman kept by Berowne and others of the guardsmen?’

‘Indeed lord, I was that one,’ she answered sadly.

‘Your hair alone would set you apart from a thousand, Mirso Lengan. I have never beheld its like. Tell me, is it all of that same hue?’

‘No, your majesty. I have it dyed. The dyes of the Vapionil do not treat all hairs equally.’

‘False even in this. All the same, a pretty wench. Will you serve me in my chamber?’

‘Your majesty, to be the companion of one so high was an honor beyond even the most extravagant dreams of my girlhood. Yet surely your majesty has many women more lovely and pleasing than I.’

‘Woman, who said that you should be my companion? I only asked if you would serve.’

‘It was ever taught me, your majesty, that great men must bear burdens so heavy that their servants should only cheer them. I greatly fear I should fail in this, and be of little use to you.’

‘Do you grieve the deaths of men who paid you? Or do you merely sorrow at the loss of your former state, and say these things in the spirit of good bargaining?’

A ripple passed over Kiva’s slender shoulders, like a flaw upon a still lake. No other sign of her feeling was apparent, yet when she spoke, then bitterness and pain broke through her tones, a thing not even such an artist of herself could mask.

‘Great King, Merciful King,’ she said, ‘it may please your humor, now that all the lands where men dwell are subject to you and the fate of the races hangs from your lips, to have sport with the fallen and mock their losses. More than once did I plead with Captain Berowne and his lieutenant Ullerath, the only survivors among my men after Egland Downs, to take their possessions as I would take mine, and flee away with me to some island in the Southern Ocean where we would have peace together. But they remained here out of duty and obedience to their sovereign, she who is now your prisoner. So I too have fallen into the hands of your men, and you may call me whore and jest with me, and no man still living will call you wrong. But I, a poor bereaved woman who have known no other art or calling than the pleasing and happiness of men I found I liked – I say this ill becomes your majesty or the claims of greatness they make of you.’

Ara-Karn looked upon the kneeling woman. She knelt very still, so that not even her bosom moved. At last he spoke.

‘Perhaps you will find this jest more amusing,’ he said. ‘How would you like it if I made you chieftainess of Orn?’

She gazed up at him wonderingly.

He explained: ‘No Orn warriors survive. They are but women and children now, in Orn in the far North. You, as their leader, would receive the Orn’s share of tribute from the two piles, as well as what remains in the tents of Gorn-Tal, the last chief of that tribe. The other chieftains will lend you warriors. In addition, it pleases me to give you the rule of Tezmon, since Gen-Karn and his Orns conquered that city for me. Well? What have you to say to that?’

She did not alter her expression in the slightest. ‘Very well, your majesty. This is a great honor your majesty does me.’ There was no gratitude in her tone.

‘Now you may join your fellow chiefs in the circle,’ he said, smiling coldly. With his hand he helped her rise. In curt words he explained what he had done to the chieftains. They took his decision silently, without objecting that he had taken on himself what remained the right of the Orn tribesfolk.

‘There is one further matter, a small thing,’ the Warlord announced. ‘Doubtless there has been some talk in the camp concerning my plans for the former Empress, Allissál of the Bordakasha.’

‘A good deal of it,’ the Durbar chief replied. ‘It was rumored that you intended to offer the last of Elna’s kin in sacrifice to dark God as soon as the mourning was complete. But others claim that was not the way of Ara-Karn, and that you intend rather to give her to that man who won most honor during the siege of the stronghold. This pleased the followers of Roguil Arn.

‘But Erion Sedeg, who may know best the heart of Ara-Karn, says that as the full measure of your contempt for your fallen enemy, you will offer her to all the men in the camp who wish to have her, from chieftain to warrior to mercenary, even to the slaves, one man after another for so long as she might live. Though none have seen her, all dwell upon the legends of her beauty and burn to see her bared before us. The men did not like the first rumor much, and liked the last one best of all.’

‘I had sent for her,’ the King of Kings acknowledged. ‘I would have displayed her to you this waking. She has escaped and fled, however. Every chieftain will therefore send me the finest trackers of his tribes, and they will go in search of this woman through all the cities of the world. They will convey her to me – unharmed, and with all honor. When she is returned to me, then I will wed her before the Couple and make her my Queen over you all.’

He dismissed them then, mindless of their gaping mouths, and returned alone into the black tent.

* * *

There the chill of autumn winds did not reach, nor Her light nor Her heat. There no lamps or candles burned. Folds of darkness seemed to compress the heavy air. The chambers of the tent crowded with couches of silk and skin, chests of treasure, tables, rugs and pelts and cushions, ceremonial tripods, and an ornate heavy throne from one of the conquered cities of the South. All these, upon a train of ponies and ox-carts thirty riders long, the warriors of Ara-Karn had brought with them through the many lands of their long war-faring, dutifully erecting it first of all whenever a camp was made, though none would occupy it. Now, at long last, its owner had returned. But it had been a year and a half since he had played at being Ara-Karn.

From one tripod the solitary man drew an ember with a pair of tongs, and lighted a lamp. From a rack he pulled a scroll and spread it on the table before him. He began to read the lists he had ordered prepared, of the materials needed to build ships and carry an army of men a long ways overseas. Over the storm-wrought seas of the Ocean of Death, across to the far band of dusk on the other side of the world, where only, as all men knew, ghosts and evil demons dwelled.

He was half way down the third list when he paused. Though the walls of silk and linen and bandarskins were an effective barrier against the common murmur of the camp, overhead gaps had been cut in the tent roof, so cleverly designed that they allowed no light in – only letting out the smoky, scented inner air. Through them now entered a series of distant, wailing shrieks. They seemed not sounds but narrow wounds torn in the flesh of air.

The punishment of the traitor had begun. He had rendered her his final service.

‘And I wonder,’ he murmured, ‘whether your precious secret might have led me to her? Perhaps. But then you see my poor old fool, I would have been forced to spare your life after all. The honor of my men would have demanded it – and I cannot outrage them fully. I still have need of them.’

He cast his eyes down again, and saw that other scroll, the one his Vapionil had brought to him. It was the first scroll of the ancient Epic of the Bordakasha, which recounted the feats and lives of the first five Emperors of the South. In the space beside the title were written, in that lovely, familiar script, her final words to him:

You may keep your vengeance and your destiny. But leave me mine.

He had not seen her since he had beheld her naked in her bed in her dimchamber. But someone must have informed her that he meant to send for her this waking. She had planned well.

Ara-Karn nodded. The thin shrieks scarred the air.

They were a little comfort.

From behind him there arose a soft furtive sound. He turned, and beheld the foremost of his Vapionil slaves, a man with the slyly smiling face of a professional assassin. For a moment the two men regarded each other, as the distant cries of dying Dornan Ural pierced the tent. Then the King of half the world pointed to the scroll and said two words:

‘Find her.’

IX
Freedom

BUT ALLISSáL HAD GONE down to a land not even the cunning of the Vapionil could discover.

Even as the tribes were bidding the final farewell to their dead, she emerged into the light outside the Citadel. Concealed in a voluminous hooded traveling-cloak, the former Empress of half the world stood in the shelter of a broken pillar on the steps of the Hall of Kings.

For the first time she saw the ruin of her city close at hand: and she, no less than Dornan Ural, felt the emptiness of the loss. A few dark clouds rolled across the milky greenish sky, and beneath them gerlins wheeled. She remembered when she had first come to this place, and the crowds had cheered her in the rituals. She had been a girl then, and this city had been her Paradise.

She leaned against the broken pillar. An ungainly cart went by in the square, pulled by broken beasts guided by dirty men in rags. The cart left a stench in its wake: it was full of corpses. For three weeks this had been going on, and was yet undone. One cart more; a few bodies more.

When she had awakened from her bad dream, Allissál called her maidens to her side. She kept them in silence, forbidding them food and drink. Two she sent down to discover what was happening, but they found the doors of the White Tower barred and sealed. By then it was too late, and the ghastly feast had reached its end. The maidens cried in fear and misery; Allissál, looking down from her dimchamber window upon the corpse-strewn earth, only trembled.

What he had done, not even the worst barbarian would have done. He was, then, capable of any act, no matter how vile, no matter how brutal, no matter who fell victim to it – and she had answered him when he had called her by a dead woman’s name, and she had tasted joy in his body. She looked beyond the corpses of those who had worshiped him and called him father, to the dark grove. But already the many barbarians were riding into the grounds. She and her maidens were trapped there, the prisoners of a madman.

From that waking, her only thought had been of thwarting him. She waited and planned, and her women learned much from the Vapionil and mercenaries set to watch them.

Now in the shelter of the broken pillar she looked away brightward and saw the long voyaging procession of tribes returning to the camp. It was the first hour of the longsleep, and she felt tired. She wondered if he could sleep, after all he had done. Then she heard a nervous whinny and recognized the call of Kis Halá. Silent as the shadow of God, she passed below, to the alleyway between The Hall of Kings and the tombs of her ancestors in great stone barges.

Emsha was attempting to soothe the frightened animal. Allissál quieted the mare with a caress.

‘Oh – majesty!’ Emsha said. ‘You startled me, I did not know what … but what is this? Do you wear his garb now?’

Allissál was wearing a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg. She had found it where he had left it, in the dirt beside the stone blood-basin over the pit that was the mouth of the secret way.

‘It is a goodly cloak,’ she murmured, kissing the mare’s broad warm muzzle, delighting in the eager affection of the great animal. ‘Was there any difficulty in passing the Gates?’

‘No, majesty. I did even as you said, and told the guards I brought the horse to him. They did not question me after I had mentioned that name.’

‘Have you brought the basket with the food?’

‘Yes, there upon the saddle. Majesty, what—’

‘Emsha, call me “majesty” no more. The Divine Queen is gone.’ She climbed into the saddle. She felt Kis Halá moving beneath her, a movement like that of a deep sea swell, that knows no laws or limits.

‘I am going now, Emsha,’ she said, arranging her skirts. ‘As my final act here, I release you from servitude. Here in this pouch are my most valuable jewels: pick two of the finest, and settle in some quiet place far from these tragedies.’

A pained look entered the nurse’s broad wrinkled face. She pushed back the proffered bag. ‘Majesty, what are you saying? What should I do without you? Where would I go? I do not need these. I will go with you.’

Sadly Allissál reached out to touch the cheek of the only real mother she had known. ‘Do you think it will hurt me any less, dear one? But no, Emsha. Where I go now, you could never follow.’

Then she brought the great gleaming mare about, clapped her heels to the sleek golden flank, and rode out into the square. Down the slope of the plateau she rode and vanished among the ruins of the blackened lower city.

Behind her the old, weary woman stumbled out into the square. Through the curtain of her tears Emsha could see another cart pass by. Beyond, dark and squat against the gray-green sky, loomed the Brown Temple. Miserably Emsha crossed the square, and mounted the many steps in the hope of solace and guidance from the Merciful Lady.

* * *

Swiftly Allissál left the city behind. Only once did she run across some of his warriors: they were driving cattle up the Southern Way to feed the army’s maw. ‘Go quick, my darling,’ she muttered to the mare, digging in her heels.

But the barbarians did not give chase. They stood stupidly and stared and pointed. Vaguely from afar their cries reached her, carried on the wind: The Hooded Man! The Deathless One! She laughed; it pleased her that they took her for himself. She knew then that she was safe, shielded by the myth he had woven about his mask.

By little-traveled ways she sought the dark horizon. She skirted major roads and trade-routes, and rode many miles outside the cities in her path. Even so her progress was good. So, by wood and hill and devious stream, she came into the range of mountains that once had marked the marches of her Empire.

A pass or two she stayed to rest in the abandoned tower of Ghezbal Daan; there she bought cheese and meat and bread of the herders watering their flocks. Restless, she could not abide there long, even if Kis Halá needed rest. She rode down the steep slopes, and entered upon the Marches.

Straight before her she found her road, a wide dead swath of earth that was not marked upon any of her maps. There upon those empty plains she felt her heart expand, to fill and join with desolation. It was a sadness so immense and vague, that it seemed to blend with an unknown pleasure within her. And she thought to herself, that she would have liked to live out the rest of her years here, where she might never again have to hear another person’s voice. But even this small pleasure was denied her, for he would find her here. There was nowhere in this world where she might hide.

She urged the mare on. Before her Yron Ghadil rose and widened its embrace.

She rode on, eating in the saddle. Goddess did not stop Her light, she thought: why then should Her earthly body need to stop? But from time to time she did stop to rest Kis Halá. The long, hurried journey was wearing down the mare. ‘But soon enough,’ Allissál murmured, giving the mare stalks of verdure, ‘soon enough you may rest. On Darkbridge you will rest.’ So the weeks sped with none to count them.

At length, upon a stony hill, she granted her mare a good rest. For three passes Allissál lay upon the hard ground with her traveling-cloak for her blanket and mattress both. She scarcely felt her thighs or buttocks after that riding. She ate of brown bread and dried meat she had traded with the lonely plainsmen; she drank of the frosty waters of the Kabdary’s source; she slept with neither sense nor dream.

Upon the third pass she was awakened by Kis Halá’s warm tongue licking her face. shoved the long head out of her face; but Kis Halá looked back at her with bright, amused eyes.

‘Are you ready, then?’ Allissál asked. ‘Very well. But you need not bear my weight for this part of our road.’

She looked skyward. The mountains rose like a castle wall, and about them carrion birds wheeled. Even as Allissál watched, the jade chariot of God touched the peaks and passed beyond the lands where men dwell. Far away, at the opposite end of heaven, Goddess sat just above the bright horizon, fat and shining like a gorged blood-beetle.

The mountains of Yron Ghadil stretched to either side, in ramparts of crimson, violet and silver. Here so high and far away from Goddess the air was chill, and Allissál felt watched by angry eyes. Shuddering, she gave Kis Halá the last bit of sugar she had saved. She left the girths of the saddle loose, took the leads in hand, and began on foot to ascend the narrow path which led to Ul Raambar.

After a pass she gained the narrow stony field before the city where she had once been welcomed with great honor by the Charan Ankhan and Chara Lisalya. The high stone walls had arched here before her, to form the famous Iron Gates, those gates fashioned in likeness to the Gate of Elna’s fastness. The Raamba gates had been high things of iron and bronze with a frieze of poured warriors, and in blue steel characters worked with fire-opals, the name of the city. Now the walls were rubble, and the gates but scattered fragments bidding entrance to the leavings of the Madpriests, heaps of trash and clean-picked bones.

At her feet Allissál perceived a part of the gates’ device, robbed of fire-opals and broken on both sides so that only ‘AAM’ remained, like a voiceless moan testifying to the fate of the city and its people.

She turned away. The stones fell down to the Marches. And Goddess-sun shone on, as serene now as when Allissál stood here in the arms of Ankhan and Lisalya.

‘O Sun,’ she muttered, ‘be not such a whore, at least avert your face.’

Wearily, Allissál entered the wasteland.

She had loved Tarendahardil better than any city of the earth, but her heart had held a special place for Ul Raambar. Ever she had been forced to see the squalor and corruption of the City Over the World; Ul Raambar had had none. Tarendahardil had sprawled – Ul Raambar had perched on the rocks nice as a gerlin’s nest. Tarendahardil had been fat – Ul Raambar lean; Tarendahardil wealthy – Ul Raambar noble; Tarendahardil softened in her age – Ul Raambar hardened in hers. Tarendahardil had been the seat of the Bordakasha, the World-Rulers who gambled all on power and glory, and knew the risks they took; Ul Raambar had been innocent of guile. She had only sought to guard the lands of men from the Madpriests; now, for another’s whim or cruelty, she was waste.

Allissál saw broken arrows among the bones of the fallen. It had been upon her cause that Ara-Karn came here, to make friends with Ankhan and Lisalya even as he planned their death.

She walked on, leaving Kis Halá behind.

In the city center lay a flat field of stone. Once the palace of Ankhan had towered here. Allissál walked on, but the dirt clung to her feet, as if imploring remembrance of what once had been. Like a ghost wandering the grave-heaps of those too poor to build barges, Allissál passed on.

The ground sloped down beyond where the palace had stood, where trash-heaps were obscured in rising shadows. At the far end of the city the walls of the mountains loomed on either side. The streets ran together to one thoroughfare, like a river to the choke-point of the Pass, where the walls had been thickest, and Raamba soldiery had defied the red-eyed Madpriests.

The mountaintops gleamed bloody overhead, but their bottoms drowned in shadow. A wolf bayed somewhere from the darkside. Even the air seemed tainted by the darkness beyond.

It was the end of life, the edge of the world.

Once again Allissál had the feeling of being watched. She stopped. The wind pouring up from the Pass beyond caught her full in the face, tearing back her hood, scattering her hair, invading her mouth. She caught an odor unlike any she had ever known. An odor of foulness and sickness and cold and death and hatred. A nameless dread surged within her. She knew she could go no farther. She ran back up onto the field of the city, to find and embrace Kis Halá, the only other living thing.

* * *

She ate and slept and rested. So the passes fled, and Allissál huddled in the shelter of some stones, and dared go no farther.

Something held her there – therefore she waited. From time to time she wondered what he did, and how he had received the news of her flight. She stood outside the shattered Iron Gates and looked back on the world. What went on there, she wondered. It was a curiosity simple and without regret: an innocent wonder in a faraway land that she would never enter. She walked back to her shelter and lay down again in sleep. Now it seemed to her she slept more than she waked.

She woke from a dream she could not remember, and looked into the sky beyond the bloody peaks. God hung there, larger than ever, smiling-bright. He sank away, and was no more.

She stood. Her body seemed light as frost. She heard Kis Halá’s laughing whinny. Something stirred in her, a thing she had considered dead, lost to her forever.

She cast off the heavy cloak and began to move. A song played in her mind, a peasant song she had loved when she was a girl in the mountains. Her feet moved faster. She took up the steps of the dance she had learned with the song. She danced and let go of all thought, she danced and entered wholly into her body as it moved. She did not know what had come over her, except perhaps that she endured so much misery and unhappiness that now she could stomach no more: she became happy instead. Faster and faster she spun until she fell, laughing without breath or mirth.

She caught Kis Halá, pulled tight the girths and vaulted into the saddle. She drew the cloak about her shoulders and urged Kis Halá forward. Uneasily the mare obeyed.

She rode down the Pass. The shadows swallowed her; she took up and lighted a pine torch. It flared in the wind. She urged Kis Halá up and over the thick high walls, where the Madpriests had left their ramps. The mountain-stone rose smooth and soft beyond. Lifting the Torch in one hand, she read what had been graven there:

UL RAAMBAR HAS FALLEN,
ITS LORD AND LADY SLAIN.
WE GO TO SEEK MADPRIESTS
TO MAKE THEM PAY.

—Wrought in the four hundred and thirty-second year of the jewel city by Ghezbal Daan, last captain of Ul Raambar, and these others:

Below it in the soft stone were carven, chipped and scratched two hundred names, marks and devices: some of lords highly-titled, others of rude peasants unable to do more than chip out some design in place of a name. Riding closer, she reached out with the jade dagger and scratched:

Allissál
once Empress
once of the Bordakasha.
Loving the enemy, she fought him,
Despising him, surrendered;
Defeated by him, she conquered.

She leaned back in the saddle, surveying her work. Then she spat into the teeth of the wind, pricked her mare in the rump, and rode down into darkness.

But of a sudden she drew rein. She heard a human voice, faint against the winds from the waste above. She held the torch farther from her ears.

Again she heard it, faint and weak and prayerful, thrown into the Pass.

The voice was calling her by name.

X
The Dark Lands

FOR A MOMENT Allissál wondered whether it would be better to turn back and discover who called, or to ride on and sunder all her bonds to the world. In truth, this might have been some stratagem of his. But in the end she turned back – perhaps it was some quality in that voice she recognized which decided her.

For the one who called was Emsha.

‘Ah, majesty,’ the old nurse wheezed, ‘what a terror you put into this old heart! As if it weren’t enough that I have had to chase your majesty across half the world, and climb these cliffs at my age—! Then I reach here just in time to see your majesty ride off where even I would not be able to find you!’ She half laughed as she spoke, she was so happy to have outwitted her mistress.

Allissál was dazed. To discover Emsha here had been the thing farthest from her thoughts. ‘How did you follow me?’

‘Majesty, have I not been with you since before you even spoke? I know you, after all. This was the road you would take – I knew it as soon as I gave it a moment’s thought. Does your majesty not remember when you were young, and ran off into the mountains? I have not. Straightway I got this stout pony and rode for Ul Raambar – and made good going, too, for the wars are ended, and all the lands have taken him for the new Emperor.’

‘I followed the out-of-the-way roads,’ Allissál mused. ‘Else your little pony would never have caught Kis Halá.’

‘He got me here, that’s all I’ll say.’ A lock of hair had fallen aslant the old nurse’s brow, and she blew at it to set it back in place – but it only fell down farther.

Allissál sat back and laughed.

She had never felt so much love for anyone. She hugged the old nurse, and pinched her broad cheek hard, making Emsha cry out. ‘And what now, my old wise hen?’ she asked. ‘Are you willing even to follow me there, beyond the dark horizon?’

‘I have a basket of food here with me at least – more than I can say of your majesty, who was ever forgetful of little matters. But you have not asked me, majesty, why I came after you. I have news!’

The smile faded from Allissál’s face. ‘News of him?’

‘Oh, no – better. When you chose to be so cruel to me – but there, that’s forgotten – I went to the Brown Temple to pray to Goddess. And when I entered, I found that all was arranged properly, and the sacred fire still burned. Then I prayed, for a long while, it seemed to me, for guidances for what was to become of me lacking you to oversee and care for. When I arose there was a priestess before me, in the golden mask and ceremonial robes.

‘When she learned I was your majesty’s servant, she did me all honor, and guided me to chambers hidden beneath the altar. There I told her all that went on, and how you had gone away. It was she who sent me after you. She told me how the priestesses from all the lands and cities have gone to a place in the Desert, to build a city there and keep alive the worship of Goddess and of Elna. And majesty, she said they had left her there only that she might wait to see if she might reach you and take you to that secret city. There, she said, they still do you your proper worship, as the body of Goddess upon Earth.’

Allissál looked out to the bright horizon. ‘What else did she tell you, Emsha, of this city and the priestesses’ plans?’

‘That they will wait there until Goddess grants them Her fiery lance again. And until that pass they will work in secret against this new rule by the barbarians, and bear the word of Goddess to all true men and women.’

‘No,’ said Allissál: ‘that is a road I have already ridden. I will not fight him, Emsha. Let him be, and live on as happy as he can. I have put the world behind me. I am bound to go on, out of his power.’

‘But where is it we are going?’ Emsha asked. There was a touch of fear in her voice.

Allissál pointed down the shadows.

Emsha paled. Her eyes grew big and dark.

‘I am going there, Emsha, to seek out Darkbridge and the world beyond. If Darkbridge is anything more than a myth some men whisper. And you, old one – do you have the heart to seek that way with me?’

Emsha blushed happily. ‘Oh, no, your majesty. I have no courage. For I am so fearful to be parted from you, that even going that way seems to me a little thing.’

Allissál smiled, and held Emsha’s hands. ‘I am glad of it, you know. Oh, why did I not bring you along from the first?’

Again they laughed, but that was a little thing against the darkness beyond.

* * *

It was a full pass before they took their leave. Emsha would not hear of starting until all was properly done. At last all the bags and provisions met the old servant’s stern requirements; and they started down the road. At the great wall of rock beyond the battlements, Allissál showed Emsha the farewells of Ghezbal Daan’s army, and offered to carve her something; but Emsha shook her head.

‘I have no parting words. And anyway, who would be interested in the farewell of an old unimportant slave?’

So they rode on.

Soon the darkness grew so strong about them that the outlines of the battlements behind them were invisible.

And Emsha fiddled with her pony’s leads. Allissál heard her old nurse muttering old chants and prayers. She herself looked about them, and down into the maw of blackness that threatened to engulf them.

Her heart was beating fast. She felt hot and cold by turns. Something caught in her throat. She heard a dull roaring, and looked about before she knew it was the sound of her own blood rushing through her veins.

‘Majesty…’ The word was a little squeak. Allissál saw stark terror burning on the dim features of the nurse.

She rode alongside her servant, reached out, took her hand. The old nurse’s grip was fierce. For a moment they halted, looking into each other’s eyes.

All about them darkness loomed.

No dimplace was ever so dark as this. And yet there remained of Goddess a purplish glow cast over the rising peaks of silver-black mountains. The worst lay ahead of them.

The torches that they held seemed dwarfed and lost. All about the small halos of light swam an unmeasured sea of darkness and blackness. Darkness and blackness such as they had never known in all their lives!

There had been plays, fantastical poems, legends told of what lay beyond the dark horizon. But these had been the idle thoughts of childish minds. Nothing in them could compare to what lay all about them now.

There was the travel Book of Skhel, by the learned Inozelstus of Anoth, which claimed to tell truly of a journey one Horath had made into the darklands. There the Madpriests were said to live. Men – or half-bred men – who were born and bred in darkness! Ul Raambar was built to defend against them, but even so Allissál now wondered whether all that could have been truth. Was it not rather some dream? No one could endure such darkness.

‘Majesty,’ Emsha breathed. She snuffled. She was crying, weeping for sheer terror of the dark.

Allissál leaned over and hugged her oldest and best friend. ‘Go back, dearest servant. Go back into the light.’

‘Yes, majesty. Let’s be going far from here!’

But Allissál shook her head. ‘Dearest one … I cannot turn back. I have sworn … you know how stubborn I am … my heart would fail if I went back now … I would lose the last part of me…’ But the truth of it went beyond that. He was to blame, somehow. He was bound up in what she was doing. She had thought she would defy him. But was it not nearer the truth to admit that she still walked and rode where his will, his bodily existence upon her world, commanded?

‘I cannot go back,’ she said, at last.

The old nurse stiffened her back. She sat upright in her saddle, and shook her reins and clucked her tongue. She urged the stout pony forward against its will, and led the way.

Allissál rode after.

After a while, even the purplish glow over the silver mountain crowns was gone.

They chose their path with care, tightening their eyes to pierce the darkness beyond the torchlights. The grotesque bushes and stunted, writhing trees were like black talons eager to clutch and point out these intruders. Shortly after the sight of the peaks faded, a pack of wolves caught the scent of the horses and began to track them. Their eyes were red in the reflected glare from the torchlights. The pony shuddered at the smell of these predators, but Kis Halá held herself bravely.

At the base of the mountains, they followed for a while the muddy bed of a stream carven in the rock. It was a shallow tame flow now, but come the winter storms and the spring melting, and it would rage in torrents. The horse and pony picked their way warily down the twisting stream. It was about that time that the wolves left them, crawling back to their mountain lairs, as if there was that in this land of black-huddling hills which could frighten even them.

Thereafter they were left in relative peace – save that now and then they would hear some stealthy darting sound behind them. Allissál would turn about swiftly, to see a swift-vanishing gleam just beyond the light, as of something slimy and foul. Emsha refused to look back. ‘If they will come gobble me,’ she said, ‘let them come. But in the meanwhile don’t ask that I look at them.’

‘A wise policy, befitting such a dignified chara,’ Allissál said. In her heart, however, she was ill at ease. She had not known how terrible this darkness would be. It was the light that attracted the things, and the light only that held them at bay. She reached down to the bundle of torches at her saddle-side. When they were gone, she would have to try cutting branches from these malignant trees, if indeed they burned. Not well, by the look of them.

At the bank of the stream they found again the trail left by Ghezbal Daan, a swath of charred trees and stumps chasing the path of dark God. Here and there along the edges of the trail were bones and broken lance-points, as if this path had not been forged without price.

The air was deeply chill and damp, as if it had never been dry or warm. The ground seemed half frozen. They huddled together for the sleeps, and Allissál spread her cloak over both of them. Each sleep they gathered bundles of dead twigs and logs and built a fire. The fires kept the beasts away, but burned fitfully, with much smoke, and gave off little heat. No, Allissál thought grimly, such wood would not make torches. From time to time the pony woke them with a whimper, and Allissál gripped the hilt of the shortsword she had brought.

So they went on for half a dozen passes – or so Allissál guessed: for thick clouds hid the moon, and there was no other way to count time’s passing. For the first passes Allissál was heartened by Emsha’s chatter; but then the darkness overmastered the old nurse’s heart and the words died on her lips.

On the seventh pass or thereabouts they crested a small wooded hill and came upon the beginning of a great, hollowed plain. The horses seemed unwilling to go on. There was the smell of bitter cinders in the women’s nostrils. Kis Halá stumbled over something – Allissál saw by the torchlight two metal-clad figures lying in each other’s arms, fastened in the embrace of death. The stink of half-consumed flesh assaulted her.

The clouds parted briefly, as if by design. The full power of the restless jade eye stared down, flooding the plain with its evil light. A tangled patchwork of intricately grouped bodies of men and horses and dogs and wolves and other, unknown beasts, covered the great plain. Moonlight glinted off the icy metal of silver hauberks, notched axe-blades, torn iron mail and shields with curving slivers cut from them. For a long moment the two women stopped, entranced by the mute horror of that scene; then the clouds moved in, and darkness took again the plain.

At last Emsha, her shudder audible in her words, asked, ‘Majesty … what is it?’

‘The necropolis of Ghezbal Daan,’ Allissál replied. ‘Come.’

She rode down the field, picking a careful path among the bodies of the slain. Emsha hesitated, then muttering and making the Sign of Goddess ten times over, urged the pony after. In silence they wandered, holding cloaks over their mouths and nostrils. Allissál thought briefly of Ampeánor riding through Egland Downs. It was no wonder he had returned so near to madness. She wondered how this now might affect her; and she urged Kis Halá to a greater speed.

Twice round the circuit of that hollow plain Allissál led Emsha, searching for signs of another path leading away from the place. But there was none. Apparently all those who had gone with Ghezbal Daan had perished here. The last of Ul Raambar had ended their lives here, in a place where none would mourn them, nor give them proper rituals. Not even Goddess should know their end, unless it were that dark God told Her.

At the center of the plain, surmounting a tremendous pile of the stained broken bodies and the wolf-friends of the Madpriests, Allissál found the helm of Ghezbal Daan. Only the helm she found, and nothing more: but she knew it, for she had known Ghezbal Daan, and his helm had been like no other’s. She kissed it, tasting the salt and blood dried upon its dented crest. She placed it on the peak of those heaped bodies like a crown.

‘Please, majesty,’ Emsha said, ‘can we not leave this place?’

It had begun to rain, an ice-cold rain of winter. It pelted them, making of their cloaks sodden heavy masses. The hiss of it spattering from all the war-gear of the dead was the most mournful sound Allissál had ever heard. She lifted her face into the rain and opened her mouth. The chill drops bit her tongue. Even rainwater was bitter here.

‘Very well.’

The wind rose again, colder with the rain, as they left that verminous plain. They went at hazard, Allissál letting Kis Halá choose her own path through the woods and vales. How the little trees managed to live here she could not tell, but it seemed all the more horrible, and all the more mocking, that they did.

For three passes the rain fell unabating, gathering in flood-roaring streambeds and leaving icy sheens upon the undersides of rock ledges. The darkness was complete about them now, as if they had been driven into a bag tied tight: nor Goddess, nor God, nor even the little light of the torches lit their path, for the rain had killed them all. Finally they stumbled upon a small cave in a face of rock. There they huddled together wordlessly, wringing the water from their clothing and awaiting the rain’s end. It seemed as though it would never end; but at last it did.

They rose and took up again their journey. Allissál disdained now to carry the torches. Her eyes had grown big in the darkness, and bright things hurt them – moreover torches were beacons here, and she could not slough the feeling of being spied upon. They rode deeper into darkness. Though the rain had ceased, clouds still covered heaven. They rode, and felt the bushes and brambles catching at and scratching their legs, rending the hems of their cloaks.

There were other reasons to avoid the bushes, for slimy, creeping things congregated there, their pallid moistened eyes bulging in the darkness, then winking out. Once the pony started and all but bucked, and even Kis Halá lifted her massive head anxiously in the breeze. There was a strange odor in the cold air, unclean and loathsome, and from far off came the rumbling, shambling sound of some monstrous, reptilian beast. Thereafter Allissál kept to the rocky hills and ledge-plains, even though it exposed them more to wind and watchful eye.

The air grew colder. Now it seemed colder to Allissál than even the mountain air about her childhood castle in winter. Emsha began speaking again, in short hasty sentences. Allissál knew she spoke to distract herself from the cold. She felt a little ashamed of herself then, that she had allowed Emsha to accompany her.

They halted to rest and eat. The clouds broke open, and God blazed over their heads. Grudgingly and with great difficultly, Allissál built a small fire. Emsha huddled over it. Allissál beheld her old nurse’s hands and arms, calloused and grimy, and her legs filthy and scarred. She looked as filthy as any squat barbarian witch-woman of the far North. Allissál had often wondered how anyone could live like that. Then she thought, And do I look any better?

She rolled into a ball away from the fire. Still she could feel the dirt upon her body. She itched beneath her robes, her flesh crawling with insects. She shook her head angrily and crawled to the side of a small nearby pool.

‘Majesty, what is it you do?’

‘I am bathing,’ she answered angrily.

‘But majesty – the cold. You will fall ill.’

‘I care not.’ She threw off her robes and sank into the pond. The coldness of the water beat her like a blow, numbing her feet and knees and breasts; but she set herself against it and washed herself at her accustomed speed, scraping her flesh with chipped flat stones. Her hair she found in such knotted snarls it would have been better suited for a wild bird’s nest. She cursed beneath her breath. What had it ever brought her, this hair of hers, but misery, and a kind of fame she had not wanted? She caught it by the handful and slashed it with the dagger. The hair fell in thick sheafs onto the dark mud, gleaming in the glare of the fire. Now all that remained was a ragged brush. She rubbed it beneath her hands, liking the feel of it.

‘Majesty! Whatever have you done?’

She stood up out of the black pond into the toweling rough hands of the wind. ‘Only what should have been done long ago.’

Emsha took Allissál to the side of the fire and covered her with the heavy cloak. But the fire gave off little warmth as it hissed and spumed with what fell into it. For it had begun to snow.

The two women huddled together beside the fire. Allissál insisted on opening her cloak and arranging it over the both of them, so it served them like a little fallen tent. Down came the flakes of snow, whitening the back of the great cloak. Allissál abode silent for a space, listening with but half an ear to the tales Emsha told of colds and sicknesses. She shuddered and shook with cold. It was not sickness she looked for, but death, death by frost. It maddened her for a time, then she ceased to care.

She looked out beyond the fire in the meanwhile, and watched with wonder this black land turning white.

‘Emsha, were you ever in love?’ Her words were chattered; she could not rule her jaw, which shivered and shook.

‘I love your majesty.’

‘No. I meant a man.’

‘Ah.’ Emsha was still for a time. Then, ‘Yes,’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘Once, there was a man for me, majesty. He was in the Palace guard. He was a Fulminean – not tall or very handsome – in fact he was not what you would call a great man in any way. But he was sweet to me, and I loved him with all my heart. Ah, I sound like a foolish girl now. Then he was put into another command, and I bore his child apart from him. That was a strong fat boy, a beauty to behold; but he fell ill and died within passes of his birth. It was just then that your majesty was born; and the Merciful Lady granted that I be honored as your nurse. The man – Nerphalen Eron was his name, is that not a nice name? – he wrote me letters for a while, and then there was nothing. There have been times I have wondered what our boy might have become. He was free born, you know, since his father was free and would have owned him.’

‘Emsha, why have you never told me this before? I would have united you and your nicely-named Nerphalen Eron. I would have ordered it.’

‘Ah, majesty – perhaps that is why I did not tell you. Then I would have had to leave your majesty’s service. And it is not a fitting thing for a servant to complain about her life to her mistress.’

‘And you never saw him since?’

‘No. Yet I never left off loving him. Some sleeps I will lie and think of him, and remember the nice things he did for me, or the sweet way he had of doing little things. That gladdens me, especially when the sadness is upon me.’

‘Perhaps that is the best sort of man to love.’ Allissál’s fingers hurt her strangely, and there was a dizziness and lightness within her brow. She felt warmth and chill at once and wished only to lie and sleep forever beneath the snow; but not for anything would she tell Emsha.

‘Majesty, do not say it so,’ the old nurse protested. ‘Love is a wonder – the only thing we have from both the Lady and Her Lord. It is the most powerful force of all: for what else could hold even the sky-walking gods? Why, if I had never loved, I do not know what I might have become.’

‘It may be even as you say, my wise philosopher. And this way I love you is truly a pleasure to me. But of this love of men and women, it held little luck for me.’

Emsha was still a little while at that. Then softly she asked, ‘If you had the choice, majesty, would you then take back all the hours and passes you have spent loving men?’

Allissál did not answer for a long time. Then she answered, ‘No, Emsha, wise Emsha. I would not take back even so much as the most heartsick hour.’

‘Then there you are. Majesty, I have heard it said that only those who have never known love can speak a word against it.’

The snow fell thicklier about them now. The fire was dead. Allissál felt a dry ache about her throat, but would not cough. ‘There has been enough of philosophizing this pass, I think,’ she said as clearly as she could. ‘God should be falling low to the horizon now. Let us sleep, and see if His light will guide us when we wake.’

‘As you wish it, majesty.’ They lay very close together. Again Allissál felt the silent raging of the fever, and could not sleep at first, though she feigned it with her breath. She was starving, and wondered how it was Emsha could bear with the meager meals they shared. Even Kis Halá was but a remnant of herself. And this was but the first snow. The fantastic tales they told of Madpriests must be false. What sort of creatures could survive full winter in this land?

When she woke, it was from dreams of a winter she had spent in Vapio, where they wore thin loras all year long. Something heavy bore down upon her; she struggled, threw back the snow-laden cloak and sat upright in the darkness. Then she saw what had burdened her, and gave out a little choked cry.

Emsha lay stiff in the snow. She had died that sleep.

Quickly Allissál caught the old stout face between her hands and rubbed the pale, pale cheeks; but cold and stiff they stayed. Oddly, she herself felt better now. By some strange magic all her own, Emsha had rendered her a final service, and given her the vital heat of her own broad body.

Allissál sat silent for some minutes, weeping. Her fallen tears poked patterns in the silver snow.

At length, she bethought herself of Kis Halá. She heard a sound from close by, but it did not sound like her mare.

A black shape shot out of the silver and fell on her. An arm around her throat – a grunt in her ear – black robes over her eyes and mouth – a daring hand forcing its way up her robes—

She kicked and clawed at what she could. A mocking laugh greeted her efforts. She redoubled them. The man’s body pressed against her belly; she tried to reach the dagger but her cloak lay in the way. She beat at his arms, trying to keep his hand from choking her. Flecks of jade and fire-opal danced before her eyes.

For a moment she was above him and caught a glimpse of a half-muffled face and two gleaming, red-mad eyes staring into hers. They rolled again, and she was buried in his robes and the sour male stench of him. He pinched her about the buttocks. She brought up her knees between his legs. He grunted and hugged her closer and bit her cheek until she could taste the blood streaming into her mouth along with his spittle. Then her flailing hand struck a chipped stone beneath the snow and she drove it against his face. The stone slashed his cheekbone, scraping away flesh. With a foul oath, he released her.

But she was after him, striking him again and again. With a sweep of his long arm the Madpriest hurled her back. She fell, and lost the rock. But then Kis Halá reared and drove her heavy hooves against the black-swathed body.

Against those flashing weapons, not even a Madpriest had defense. Even after the man was dead the enraged mare would not leave off her attack, until Allissál clasped Kis Halá’s gleaming neck, speaking breathless words of calm into her ears.

Kis Halá at length consented to be soothed, and disdained the bloody mass below her hooves. Allissál swayed with the movements of the great beast, too weak to let go.

The sound of clapping hands brought back her strength. Snatching the dagger from her girdle she whirled about. Though the snow-clad land gleamed silver in the ceaseless darkness, the sky was black, and against it nothing could be seen.

‘Who is there?’ she cried.

‘Put away that toy,’ rejoined a rough masculine voice in a dialect oddly like to that of the barbarians of the far North. ‘Or I’ll rip those elegant robes from you and feed your body to my dogs.’

‘Who are you?’

There followed a slight, rasping chuckle.

‘Estar Kane.’

There was no title attached to that name; Allissál had never even heard it before. But the man spoke it as if he were the master of the world.

She glanced at Kis Halá’s back. But half a score of black shaggy mongrel shapes eyed her suspiciously, uttering low and hungry growls. She sheathed the blade.

‘And who are you, who dare to enter our lands alone and unprepared?’ inquired the voice beyond. ‘And in that cloak! It seems to me I have known that cloak before – but it was no woman who wore it!’

She bridled at his tone. ‘Address me with manners. I am the Empress Allissál nal Bordakasha, Divine Queen in Tarendahardil and last of the house of Elna.’

‘Elna!’ he said with scorn. ‘Elna was one of us! He sold his tribesmen to the women’s-cult for power. Do you think we get no news here? An empress without an empire is lower than a tavern slut. Now again, tell me who you are?’

Her shoulders fell. ‘No one.’

‘Better.’

A shape emerged from the darkness against a snowy hill. It was the figure of a man, tall, rangy, garbed wholly in black robes and close-swathed leggings. Even his head was concealed in those wrappings: only the eyes were bared, bright hard eyes wrinkled with ironic amusement, glinting the ruby red of madness. He stood casually, one hand lazily held on hip, the other holding in its black gauntlet a sword of exquisite workmanship, of bright flame-like blue steel and a hilt of silver and steel, upon which had been worked in gold and fire-opal an intricate device. Allissál had seen that device and that very sword before: it was the sword of Ankhan of the Strong Heart. Only by Ankhan’s murder could this man have gotten hold of this sword. Ankhan would never have surrendered it alive. The memory of the broken haunted ruins of Ul Raambar swept through her mind, and she grew warm with hatred. Now she knew the meaning of that name. This was the man who had destroyed the Jewel City.

He stepped forward, sheathing the sword with a swift smooth movement as he did so; knelt, and began rifling the body on the ground.

‘Better, but still not truth,’ he resumed in his barbarous tongue. ‘For now you are the slayer of Al-Tah, one of the most feared warriors in the Darklands; also one of my lieutenants. He was a demon of a fighter, Al-Tah.’

She recognized the respect in his voice and drew back a step. She had just murdered one of his friends. What was he likely to do to her in return?

He saw her movement and divined its motive. He chuckled. ‘Don’t think I will seek blood-price from you. If Al-Tah died, it was only his reward for having been stupid enough not to knock you senseless before he took you.’ He gathered the man’s valuables in one gloved hand, hefted them, then stowed them in a pouch at his side.

She was a tall woman, but she did not even reach his shoulders. His savage dogs growled and snapped. The wind blew oddly at his black wrappings. He was gazing at her with unmistakable desire within his sinister ruby eyes. ‘Do not think I would make the same mistake, beautiful one.’

Her hand felt for the hilt of the dagger. ‘Would you—’ she began, her voice a hiss.

His laughter stopped her: bitter, reeking laughter. ‘Fear not, She-Tooth! Those women hold no appeals to me I cannot buy or beat into submission. If I took my pleasure of you, I could never be certain when you might decide to let that knife of yours kiss me beneath my ribs. No doubt others have had equally delightful treatment at your hands, but not Estar Kane! – And I think it would be a waste to kill you, Golden One. Why do you come to my lands?’

‘To escape.’

‘From Ara-Karn?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

The old rumors recurred to her mind. She remembered words and artful hints, passages from the book of Skhel read between the lines, and the tales told at court. She spoke it then, that word upon which all her future had come to depend.

‘Darkbridge,’ she said.

He laughed.

‘Why do you laugh? Was it nothing but a myth, then? Does Darkbridge not exist?’

‘Dark Bridge! O She-Tooth, what do you know of a Dark Bridge?’

‘We know your people smuggle goods and refugees out of the South to somewhere. But beyond these lands are only the sunless Seas of God. Ships can be no good in darkness. You must have a way of doing that which no one else can.’

He studied her, still amused. ‘Perhaps we do. But you are wrong about the ships, straight one – so wrong! What could you offer us – what would you give to me, if I could gather you away from that world and its new lord, and bring you to a land of which you have scarcely dreamed?’

‘First you must tell me if this myth truly exists.’

‘Oh, it exists,’ he drawled. ‘But only to those who have paid the price.’

‘I have about me enough jewels to buy a crown.’

‘I have a crown.’ He shrugged. ‘The crown of Ul Raambar. One of my sluts plays with it: she thinks it a pretty toy. And a throne is only for those who wish to be seen sitting astride it. There is no sight here, Golden One. Tell me, what could you do if I decided to put an arrow between those sweet breasts, steal the jewels, and sell your body to the armies of Ara-Karn? I am sure they would pay much for you, in any condition – your majesty.’

‘Ara-Karn would not be pleased,’ she answered.

He sighed, perhaps hearing the conviction in her tones. ‘That is perhaps true. And what a waste! I sense fire in your loins, for the right man. This Ara-Karn, he is a strange man for one who casts a shadow. Unpredictable. He might even be one of us. And yet it would please him no more, if I helped you to escape from him. Give me the jewels.’

‘Not until I am safely in the world beyond.’

‘Woman, will you barter with me? Were you queen or grocer’s wife back there? Believe me when I say that, of all of us who cast no shadow, I am the only one who would, or could, see you across Darkbridge. Your life is in my hands. If it amused me (as it has amused me often in the past), I could lead you over a cliff in the darkness, and laugh as you fell to your death. Or I could be really cruel and leave you as I find you, to freeze and sicken in the darkness, wandering in circles until the Darkbeasts found your flesh!

‘Seven soldiers came into our lands some time after Ghezbal Daan sought my hospitality. They too sought this Darkbridge. They called it in the darkness, offering rewards or service for the favor: “Darkbridge! Darkbridge! Golden Elnics for word of Darkbridge!” But no one gave them answer. It pleased me rather to follow and watch them until they died – some sickened, the others starved. We had their gear and weapons afterwards, along with all their coins. And you would bicker with me over payment like some hag in the bazaar? You were of the gods, they tell me: gods despise gold. Give me your riches.’

He extended a gloved hand. She shrugged. Turning so that he would not see, she reached under the tatters of her skirts to where the small pouch rested between inner and outer lora. She handed it to him.

‘Heavy enough,’ he grunted, hefting it. He held it up to his swathed cheek and sniffed. ‘Warm still,’ he commented. ‘A subtle and not unpleasant fragrance. That is not all perfume either, I’ll wager. I only wish all my fees came thus.’ He stared at her, and she flushed beneath his gaze. Never before in all her life had anyone so humiliated and degraded her. Two years earlier, had someone done one-tenth of what this man had done to her, she would have had him taken and beaten until the blood flowed, and left him hanging in the Gardens.

Instead she bowed her head and said in low tones she could scarcely control, ‘And will you not show me the way to Darkbridge, Charan?’

‘Call me not by your titles, wench.’ He turned and gestured to his dogs. ‘Come.’

She had great ado to keep pace with him.

* * *

Twice-ten times the Eye of God rode overhead as they journeyed across that snowy darkness deathly-cold, toward the North beyond. The Madpriest took the reins of Kis Halá in one hand and guided her from the saddle of his own horse; Emsha’s pony he fed to his dogs. So too he gave them the body of his dead friend; but Allissál guarded Emsha’s corpse, much to his amusement, and covered it over with some dignity. More than that she might not do.

At their sides and before them roved his savage dogs, scenting the paths for the dung of the beasts of this vile land. He rode on surely, as if he knew exactly where he was and whither bound; she did no more than slump half-asleep in the saddle, rocking back and forth. Her fever had returned, but he would stop to rest no more than the horses required. Yet he did concede to give her a strong drink with a bitter taste, which gave her strength.

Beneath her robes she now wore the black wrappings of Al-Tah, which Estar Kane gave her as spoils of the kill. And so they rode across the snow-bound, Moon-bright land in silence.

She longed to see Goddess again and bask in Her warm rays, if only for an hour. But they only went farther into the darkness, so deep that not even a violet-blue existed over the horizon to show that there had ever been a Sun.

At times, in the rages of her fever, she wondered whether he would lead her into a trap and sacrifice her upon the black altar of his God, as was writ down in the book of Skhel. But then she thought, perhaps that was no more than a lie. And she knew she had no other hope than trust this arrogant, taciturn man.

They traveled along rocky paths and over the numerous ledge-plains, where the winds and harsh downpouring of rain so frequent in this land kept any soil from clinging. Below them she glimpse lowland vales where the tangled undergrowth grew even this far into darkness. They went on scarcely stopping, the Madpriest so sure of his path and his uncanny ability to see in darkness that not even the failing of God gave him pause.

It was then that she noticed, through the mists of her fever, stars.

Little quivering things they were, impossibly small and far away, seeming to enlarge the sky and force back the plashes of heaven to illimitable depths. She leaned back gazing up at them so long she grew dizzy and had to look down, clutching her saddle with both her hands.

But she feared to look upon the moon in His fullness. The sight of that silver green orb soaring through Heaven almost brought her to tears. It began as a crescent sickle-edged, scything the field of stars, at home among its followers leading them to blood and glory, as the Madpriest explained. Each moon devoured the stars, adding their brightness to His own, until at last all were eaten and no more food remained. Then, one last time, He sailed alone in empty, desolate skies; and so came to His death. Then the stars came warily back until He came again. Allissál shook her head at these superstitions, but could not smile at them. The sight of the moon riding alone and solitary never failed to inspire in her breast a profound pity and dread.

So they progressed, encountering no others in that harsh land, until they reached the top of a hill with the sound of far-off roaring in their ears. The Madpriest drew his horse to a halt and gestured.

‘There,’ he said over the sound of the surf. ‘That is Darkbridge.’

XI
The Ancient Path

ALLISSÁL STRAINED HER EYES in the gloom. God was but a sickle. His brightness danced coldly off the waters of the sea and the snow-mantled hills, and a sea-mist spread the light.

Stretched at the foot of the slopes below her, the silver ribbon of the beach sundered sea from land. At one point the ribbon was broken by a rocky outcrop shaped like a rude quay thrusting into the surf. Iron rods, shining with a skin of ice, were driven deep and twisted fast into the rock, and from those innumerable rods stretched the strands of an immense cable that ran through a ship grounded upon the shallows. From the first ship the cable ran to a second a few feet beyond, also parallel to the line of the shore. Beyond the second ship lay a third, beyond the third a fourth. So a train of ships curved across the deep swells of the sea. As far as her eye could see, the cable ran from ship to ship, vanishing at last in the glimmering mist.

‘Darkbridge,’ murmured Estar Kane. For the first and only time she heard in the Madpriest’s voice a note of respect – almost of religious reverence.

Then his horse stirred and one of his mongrel dogs growled, and he gestured roughly. ‘Come, will you stand here till the end of time?’

Wordlessly she followed him.

They rode down the slick ledges. The outcrop grew as she approached it: she had misjudged the stone’s immensity, and the number of rods fastened to it. As they neared the outcropping a dozen low shapes sprang from crevices in the rock.

‘Your name,’ the little figures cried, ‘and your goal!’

‘I am Estar Kane,’ the Madpriest answered in tones used opon inferiors. ‘I bring an exile who seeks the world beyond.’

They clapped their hands and piped, ‘The fee, the fee, great Estar Kane!’

‘Take it,’ he said, and threw them the pouch of jewels. ‘For my own part I take only a single diamond with the glitter of the Eye of God. Do you likewise take but a gem to share amongst you. Pay the rest to Darkbridge.’

‘It shall be done, it shall be done,’ they said, examining the jewels. ‘Is it not always so? But what else do you have, Great One, for Darkbridge?’

‘This, and these,’ he said, drawing from his belt a small pouch of bandarskin. He rode to the point where the great cable twisted together from the union of the many strands anchored on the rock. He leaned down from the saddle, and shook out the pouch over the joining-point, where the strands twisted into one.

Something shook out of the pouch, and entered the twisting maze of strands. It was not a thing Allissál could see – rather she heard it, like a hundred voices of men, groaning, fiercely striving, and dying.

The sounds faded, and seemed to echo from deeper in the cable where it passed away from ship to ship.

‘Souls for Darkbridge!’ the hooded creatures sang. ‘Truly, Great One, to take life is to give life to dark God!’

The Madpriest rode back down before Allissál. ‘They will take you the rest of the way. I do not go to the world beyond, or nearer to the sea than this. A prophecy once warned me I would meet my death from water. Go beyond and find your doom, O golden slayer of Al-Tah.’

He brought his horse about and whipped the dogs up the slope, galloping after them. She heard the clatter of his hooves upon the icy stone but did not watch him leave. She had a great desire to shout some parting curse upon his back, but as she considered her choices her detestation for him wilted. He had not molested her, had shared his food and drink, and had kept straitly to his bargain. It was true, he had also insulted her beyond all measure, but when she considered this world in which he lived, she did not wonder he was insane.

A wave of sudden understanding, almost of sympathy, washed over her. That man took no women he could not buy or beat into submission. She had seen with what respect he had treated the body of his friend. How lonely and pained must be the existence of such a man, who dwelt only with his own arrogant pride as a substitute for friendship! The thought of Ara-Karn occurred to her, alone in the Hall of Justice of the Black Citadel; then she looked up and saw the falling moon, an aged crescent ready to die.

‘Come, come!’ the voices chirped. Little bent hands tugged at her boots and black hose. ‘Come, the tide is high!’

‘Truly, yours is a handsome horse. A great beast, a noble beast! Will you take it Beyond?’

‘There will be danger is she does.’

‘But truly, she has paid well. Look at this jewel! Surely enough for two. Truly, Darkbridge receives his fees! He is thankful for these gifts from Ara-Karn!’

It was a shock to hear that name spoken so familiarly even here, far beyond the world. ‘What do you know of Ara-Karn?’

‘Ara-Karn, Son to Kaan!’ they chanted. ‘Such fees for Darkbridge! First the lord gives us Ul Raambar, and then he sweeps the lands, and so many wish to escape him – many rich enough for Darkbridge, the rest rich enough to rob!’

Clustering about Kis Halá’s flanks they brought her to the end of the huge rocky outcropping, where heavy planks led to the edge of the first ship.

‘Decide now, the tide slips. Will you take your horse? If so you must ride it all the way you can, and it will be your own charge. Few horses like the roll of ships and sound of water all around.’

‘I cannot leave her here.’ She looked back. Kis Halá in the hands of these starving, stunted wretches? – or worse, stumbling about in snowbound darkness until she was devoured by some great beast of prey? ‘Give me a moment to muffle her eyes and ears with this wrap.’

‘Yes, yes, but hurry, the tide beckons.’

‘…I am ready. Show me the way.’

They led Kis Halá across the planks. The deck of the ship was planked and re-planked many times, covered with damp straw and sand. Musty odors arose from it as of some well-traveled road in the rain.

The sound of the hooves on the planks brought other dark-robed figures from hatches on the ship. They stood in groups, gesturing and muttering in low tones.

‘What do they here?’ she asked her guides.

‘Truly they live here, woman with a shadow.’

One of the newcomers came forward. Larger than the others, still he would only have risen to the belt of Estar Kane. Her guide went to him, or her; they embraced and conferred. Kis Halá grew nervous, and stamped a hoof and shook her head as if to be rid of the wrappings over her eyes. Absently Allissál stroked the broad warm head. She tried to catch what the stunted people said. The words were hushed and spoken in that strange dialect of the barbarians’ tongue, but there were two words she caught: her guide saying ‘—Kane!’ and the other gasping in amazement, ‘No!’ Apparently her warrior-guide was feared throughout these dark lands. For a moment she wondered who he really was, and what he had been before he had gone mad and fled the Sun.

‘Haste, haste!’ urged another guide. ‘The tides move whether we do or not!’

The leader rejoined them and they started forward again. Across to the second ship they took her, then to the third. Here more of the creatures labored, repairing a hole in the prow. Her curiosity increased. ‘Who are these people?’ she asked.

‘Truly, we are the fleas in the mane of Darkbridge,’ they replied. ‘We are not like the warriors, the holy brigands like the great Estar Kane. We are humble folk, fishermen and carpenters and the like. We guide folk across and they make sure Darkbridge is well. Others still repair the Cable that is the spine of Darkbridge, twining rope and covering the cable with resin. And all is done in accordance with His will, with what we buy with fees and loot.’

‘There must be a good deal of that if you can maintain this great bridge against the storms,’ she said. Now they had reached the sixth ship.

‘Enough – and more than enough, since he came!’

‘Why are the ships not turned end to end? It must require many more ships this way.’

‘Truly. But only thus may Darkbridge ride the storms and currents without the Cable snapping like a hair from woman’s brow. Darkbridge is great, but greater still is the God-swollen Sea.’

‘How many ships are there in all? How far have we to go?’

‘Far, far, O woman with a shadow!’ They laughed. ‘Would you skip from world to world in a twinkling? And then, when the swells grow dangerous, we must stop and wait for the sea to rise again.’

‘How was Darkbridge built?’

‘It was long ago, lady with a shadow. Long, long! We were giants in those times, when they drove us from our lands. They chased us into the darkness to our deaths, and all in Her name – Hers! That is why we curse Her and spit upon Her robes! Oh, but they were giants then. Warlord Borun-Kane built it, bridging the seas in seven strides, gathering whole ships under his arms. Have you never heard of Borun-Kane?’

‘Never.’

‘Truly? Not so much as even his name?’

‘Never. Not a word.’

‘Blessed are the ignorant! Truly it was said that those who cast shadows are rendered mad by the blinding light. Never heard of Borun-Kane! – But then, you must have heard of the wizard Enpsit Ennahael who made the Cable, and put into its heart a single strand of Borun-Kane’s hair so long it spanned the distance, so that never has the Cable parted?’

‘No, nor of the wizard either.’

‘Truly, truly!’ They seemed amazed at her answers.

‘And do you do all these things,’ she asked, ‘—Repair the ships, fish, give birth, grow old and die – all in darkness hidden from the Sun?’

‘Ah! Do not speak that name! We spit upon Her skirts, we curse Her name! Speak not of Her lest you bring down His wroth and we be forced to throw you over the side in apology to Darkbridge!’ So they cried in terror and anger; and afterwards went on in stony silence as if she had offended them.

They crossed over many ships. When the tide fell they stopped in the hold of one ship, ate hot food and slept in small dark bunks beneath thick blankets. She refused such comfort, preferring the open deck by her mare, so that Kis Halá might not grow too afraid. The little people seemed to respect her moods without understanding them, treating her with as much real courtesy as she had ever received at court.

When the tide rose they went on. She became more and more impressed with Darkbridge and the knowledge required to construct and maintain such a formidable structure. Yet the little people seemed more interested with tales and legends of Ara-Karn; they asked her of him so many times that in the end she had to answer them.

‘I will tell you of him,’ she said, ‘if first you tell me what you know of Elna.’

‘Al-Nah, Al-Nah!’ they chanted. ‘Do you know nothing of the Traitor either then? Al-Nah was a mighty killer, and he won to chieftain of his tribe red-handed when he had but twelve winters. He led raids and was honored in blood-brotherhood by Tont Ornoth and Borun-Kane himself; but in the mountains of Bolla-Kar, Al-Nah was bewitched by the Whore-Priestess. She seduced Al-Nah from God, so that to become her consort he betrayed his tribesmen to the other priestesses, who slew them all with golden needles. Then Al-Nah led the Low Peoples against the tribes, and drove us into darkness.

‘Borun-Kane called down the Jade Eye from heaven, but even its magic was to no avail. So with their powers Borun-Kane and Enpsit Ennahael made the Darkness flower, and delivered us from the clutches of the women’s-cult, all thanks be given to the Two! But Al-Nah lost the battle in his heart, and grew weak. He came to depend upon the women’s-cult in all things; and when he woke from his sleep, he found that the Whore-Priestess was no longer beautiful but old and wrinkled and toothless, and serpents oozed out of her belly. Then in fear Al-Nah would have repented, and went to the mountains crying to Borun-Kane to admit him into the Darkness. But Borun-Kane his brother only laughed, and told him, “With women have you cast your lot, and betrayed your brothers – therefore with women you may stay, and watch them betray you in the arms of others.” So you are answered, O woman with a shadow. Now tell us truly of Ara-Karn. Has he indeed risen from the shores of the dead?’

‘So he says,’ she answered at last.

‘What it must be like to meet the Son of Kaan! Have you ever seen him? Is he truly without shadow even in those blinding lands? And does his touch bring death?’

‘He is a man like any other man,’ she said. Her tone admitted no further conversation – moreover they did not believe her.

They journeyed on over the ships rocking and groaning against one another, the sound of the waters in their ears.

A light snow began to fall, so that the moon above, starved to the thinness of a nail, gave but a faint glow in the darkness. A great wave swelled beneath them, sweeping by, swinging the planking back and forth, stretching without parting. Kis Halá became alarmed, and swung her head violently, shaking loose the muffler. She grew stiff with terror at the sight of the waves below: neighed, stumbled.

Another wave swung past; Allissál took Kis Halá’s head firmly in hand, trying to put back the wrappings, but it was too late. The mare’s left foreleg plunged over the edge of the planks, the ships rocked as a new wave passed. Kis Halá neighed with terror, Allissál screamed and there was a loud splash.

Again she screamed, her fingers bleeding from cuts the reins had left. There was a mad plashing from the ice below; a choked whinny. Then a loud thump sounded, as of a body knocking against the side of the ship.

And silence.

She was gone, now. Kis Halá was dead.

Gently, fearfully, a hand plucked at her robes. ‘Haste, haste,’ they murmured. ‘Did we not say that there would be danger? Perhaps the fee was not enough. Anyway now Darkbridge has your horse: you cannot have it back. The tide falls quickly. We go.’

‘Yes,’ she said. She did not move. The tears were falling blindly from her eyes, but otherwise she was strangely calm. What had she ever done, she wondered, to warrant such punishments? But she knew, she knew, and was transformed in suffering. And then it seemed all right. It was as if she had always known it must happen so.

She straightened, pushing back the hood from her head. The little flakes of snow bit the back of her neck. She looked up into the falling snow. Another wave rocked the ship. What was it he had said about swells of destiny? She took a step, feeling his dagger chafe her thigh. Once she had been a queen with handmaids at her call, once she had been the rider of a great horse. Now she was only a wretched woman standing in the cold.

She looked back to the ships stretching behind her, back to the world she had known, back where swift black currents carried Kis Halá’s corpse to the mouths of the great reptilian fishes of the Dark Seas.

The light snow fell like a wet mist upon her lips. The line of ships stretched before and behind, vanishing behind the veil of snow. The land was gone as utterly as the Sun. Only ships and waves existed. She stood there, her short hair wet with melting snow; unbound, without place or home or hearth, past or future or name or face in that onetime world, as she trod upon hollow planks at the side of dark unknown creatures going whither she knew not. A great, abiding emptiness filled her.

‘It is enough,’ the little ones were saying. ‘The tides are down and it is the last pass of God. It is the pass of the ritual! Go below and rest, but give over this weeping, O woman with a shadow! Do not act as though Darkbridge has offended you! Below, below!’

Passive and uncomprehending, she let them usher her below deck. The ancient hold was covered over to keep it dry from the storms. Yet it was visible to her eyes now. They had divided it into a rude hall, with sleeping-berths open to both sides. At the far end an open space was strewn with bundles of rope, used in repairing the cable.

Weary now beyond measure, Allissál sat upon the edge of one of the berths.

The melting ice slid from her hair to her shoulders and naked neck like cold, close kisses. She noticed she was weeping. Putting off the cloak, she curled up on the berth and slept.

And for the first time since she left Goddess, she dreamed.

* * *

She stood in the White Tower, hearing again the tread of the barbarian guards beyond the doors. Once again she gave Emsha instructions and had herself arrayed in a lora belonging to one of her maidens. Once again she went below, beneath the guardians’ watchful eyes, and once again she found the secret hollow and went beneath the earth.

She followed the caves and reached at length a vast hall arched over beneath the streets of High Town, near to the end of the road. Upon either side of that hall a row of ornately-carven stone benches stretched. And sitting hugely on the benches, all her ancestors, the Emperors and Queens nal Bordakasha, turned their heads and regarded her. There were Ilazrius and Phorantilar and Velarion and Merriskil and Jarilharijen and the others. And at their head Elna himself bestrode a great gold throne.

In deathly stillness they regarded her as she passed down among them. When she reached the throne she stopped. Elna looked into her eyes, put his huge hand over her head, and said in a great, booming, melancholy voice,

‘O Daughter, and will you let us all now die?’

‘But Father,’ she answered, ‘And was it all a lie?’

He bent his huge head and let close his broad moon’s-eyes; and she knew that the tales of the Madpriests were true. So she lowered herself before him and passed through the door in the wall between his legs, and awoke miserable and bereaved.

* * *

The sound of the rituals of the little folk rang in her ears. Silently she gathered her cloak and went up on deck.

They sat in a circle in the main deck. Muffled in green robes, they wore about their waists a green-dyed rope that tied them in a circle, so that, from above, they would have appeared as the outline of the jade Orb itself. The snow was still falling, making of the masts and riggings and coils of ropes and the railings spectral lines glowing in the darkness of Earth’s eternal shadow. Already the snow had coated the concealing cloaks of the small men and women, yet strangely, in the very center of their ring the snow melted and dried as soon as it fell. It seemed to Allissál as though that central dark circle was slowly, inexorably growing.

She sat behind them, unnoticed. In the snow she crossed her legs tight and close to her hips, so that she rested her forearms upon her knees and sat quite straight. She felt neither sadness nor dread, nor loneliness, nor joy, but she felt the alien beauty of the scene and was bound by it. She knew she would never behold its like again. There upon the snowy deck of a ship tied to a thousand others all rocking on the belly of the deep black sea, the Madpriests of Darkbridge chanted their old, old song:

O God, do not give off Wandering.
O God, do not leave us so.
Return once more
Renewed and strong,
To axe in twain the sky
And rain its blood your bounty in our mouths.

O God, do not weaken in desire.
O God, do not leave us so.
Renounce those suits,
Grow strong in lust,
And take from her your right.
So let her cries be music for our ears.

O God, do not grant them peace.
O God, do not leave us so.
Loose all the hates
And sicken them
With envy and your rage
Make them cut and make them howl,
Their war and death shall clothe and prosper us.

O God, O God, our only God:
We follow you and offer you
Blood and fire and largess of the slain,
Corpses high and deep.
O God, O God, our only God:
Lacking you we have lost all,
Our mind, our heart, our very flesh:
There is naught but you.
Rise up anew,
Be freed of death,
Hide not but hoe
And leave those weeds in slaughter.

O God, do not give off Wandering.
O God, do not leave us so
Return once more
Renewed and strong.
To axe in twain the sky
And rain its life our bounty on our heads!

Again the little folk sang their verses. She heard the same song echoed and re-echoed by all the circles on all the other ships; and the chant of them went aloft against the muffling silent snow, forlorn as the call of a maimed gerlin to its lost mate.

And Allissál thought of him.

XII
The World Beyond

SHE STRODE along the silver, snow-clad strand. The sound of the waves upon the ice and gleaming rocks was fragile and lovely as the tortured voices of flawed crystal bells. The salt mists ate into the stepped faces of ice above, and the delicate twisting ribbons of meltwater slid across the hard sands to be swallowed by the sea.

The little people had left her when she gained this other shore.

‘Have we not provided you with food, the best of our kitchens and catches?’ they asked. ‘You will find your road, never fear, tall one. Pray to God, He has traveled all the paths before us!’ So they bowed their little bodies and bade her farewell, uttering many a long and curious salutation, and went back on the bridge of ships.

After some hours she encountered what seemed like a road cut through the snow, and she followed it up a great cliff of black and violet stone whose facets were sharp as sword-points. Changeful God gleamed greenly off His sea below. She followed her shadow where it danced across the rock, beckoning her on.

For some passes she followed this path, taking back a sense of land that did not move to greet or flee her feet.

On that dark path she met nor men nor beasts. These lands were yet more barren than those where Estar Kane ruled. Snow fell in heavy drifts and the footing was cruel. Once she fell and the deep, hungry whiteness almost swallowed her. But beckoning her on always was the purple glow at the black sky’s edge, a dim and distant witness to the bright horizon.

Brighter and wider the jagged skyline grew before her, until she reached a hilltop and stepped once more into light. Far, far away through stark woods upon a distant hill, the halo of the Sun shone against the clouds.

Allissál sat in the snow, covering her eyes with the Madpriest’s robes. When she had blinked away the last of the pain and tears, then she turned back like a little girl, and laughed and cried at once.

* * *

The first city that emerged from the horizon stood out bravely above the sea. It struck her as beautiful and strange in the distance. A curious, quiet excitement stole over her. What sort of people would she meet in this new world? Would they have heard anything of her world? Others had gone this way before her, yet perhaps they, like her, had wished only to let their past sicken and die behind them. Here were new lands, new lives. For the first time she knew the full meaning of the myths of the Blessed Shores.

But when she was nearer, she saw that the towers of the city were gutted and the great buildings fallen in ruins. Once a huge white mole had run the length and breadth of the harbor: now only its pieces emerged from the waves, like teeth, and the sea washed freely past the gaunt shipless masts that stood in drunken postures like long-dead trees. Something about the scene struck her as vaguely, dreadfully familiar.

Within the city walls everything was still. The broken streets were void. The city had been taken and ravaged recently, and more than once.

A shadow crossed a side-street to her right. She shouted and made after it. It was a man short and ragged, dreadfully thin. She overtook him in a field of burnt stones that once had been an inn or a merchant’s house. The man fell against a stone and Allissál stood over him, the sword bright in her grasp.

‘Pray, pray, do not harm me, my lady! I have nothing, I swear it to heaven!’

She put up the sword. ‘I mean you no evil, man. I would but ask you some questions.’

‘But I don’t know anything!’

‘You know the name of this city. Or were you dropped out of the sky?’

A confused, or perhaps it was cunning look crossed the man’s features. ‘The name? Which name, my lady? Once we were called – but that is forbidden now by our masters. Are you not one of them? By God, I am loyal to the King! But listen, if you are not one of them – can you not hear them? His warriors ride nearby!’

‘Whose warriors?’

The man’s black eyes widened like chorjai flowers. He flung his arms so that they took in sea and sky and earth. ‘His – his – Ara-Karn’s!’

She let fall the sword beside her. The man saw his chance and slipped behind a blackened wall. Allissál scarcely noticed.

It had not even struck her that this man of another world should speak Bordo. Now the knowledge of it began to grow big in her like a tree, the leaves and branches blackening the bright sky. Now she knew what city this must be: knew it from wall-paintings in Tarendahardil of the varied fastnesses of Elna. In all the world, only Tezmon of the purple-weavers had boasted that great white mole. She looked with new eyes at the town where Ampeánor had twice gone and been twice disgraced. How like fate’s cruel humor, she thought, to bring her to this doomed place!

She heard hoofbeats nearing and mindful of the gaunt man’s words, vanished in the shadows of the ruins.

It had been all of it a lie. Darkbridge did not lead into another world, but back again into the same one. Elna’s Sea must narrow after it left the lands of men. Where the bridge of ships stretched from shore to shore, the sea must come to a narrow neck before widening again into the vast sunless sea. Estar Kane took her jewels knowing full well that what she sought was no more than smoke; doubtless he bade the little ones to carry on his jest.

Her first thought, as she flitted like a shade among the broken walls, was to flee the city straightway. But hunger assailed her. She put her back to the fallen craft-halls and followed the slopes to the high hill overlooking the harbor, where the merchants’ palaces had stood. She went carefully, hiding from the riders. They were more frequent where she went.

In the high old core of the city, the barbarians directed the last Tezmonians in labor to clear streets and rebuild palaces. The bruit of the labor held no voices raised in song or cheer. The dust rose in great dun balls, masking the Sun, raining dirt on the dark backs of the slaves.

Allissál watched them from the window of an empty tower. She turned over in her mind how to go on. In the Darklands she could have stolen bread and meat under the cloak of darkness, yet here the light went on forever. It would be needful to wait for the next sleep. She heard sounds in the corridor behind her, and hid in a cluttered corner.

Three barbarians, two men and a woman, entered and stood at the window where Allissál had been. The men had long hard arms much-scarred; the woman was red-haired and wore many jewels and little else. They spoke guttural, halting tones; the men pointing out the work to the woman in a way that indicated she was no common concubine. The woman nodded and said something in reply, at which the men left the chamber. Their heavy footsteps rose hollowly from the steps below. The woman stood quietly at the window looking out at the many men toiling.

Allissál crept up on her, dagger in hand. She gripped the woman’s shoulder. ‘Stay and do not cry out, or I’ll cut you,’ she said in the tongue of the far North.

The barbarian turned and regarded her with widening eyes. Then with grace she abased herself and exclaimed in courtly Bordo, ‘Your majesty!’

Allissál staggered back.

‘Your majesty will not recall this one, surely,’ the woman went on; ‘I was called Kiva, and was a woman of the High Town. Your majesty granted me shelter in the Citadel for the year of the siege. I was never presented at court, yet even so, so many times have I beheld your majesty in procession in the City, that I would know her even in rags.’

‘And are you the couch-slave of those barbarian lords now?’

‘Oh no, your majesty. Those men are mine. I am the chieftainess of Orn now, and my tribe rules this region, with Tezmon for our chief city.’

‘And whose plan was this?’

‘Ara-Karn’s, your majesty.’

Allissál put back the dagger. It was not what she would have expected of him, but now that she heard of it she was not surprised. There was no denying the woman’s prettiness. The hair was dyed, of course.

‘Your majesty, I know not how you have appeared here, or how many of your followers have accompanied you; yet howsoever many they may be, your majesty will not be safe here. I may call these men mine, but in truth they come from different tribes, and are jealous of one another. I do not rule here: only the fear of Ara-Karn quells them. Even so they compete for honors and boastfulness at all hours.

‘Your majesty has become a great prize in the world. The Riders of the King travel all roads South and North in search of you. Who finds your majesty and delivers you safely to the Black Citadel is promised the greatest treasures and power above all others. If there were but a whisper of your majesty’s presence here, these men would lay the city waste a third time in their efforts to bring you to the King. You must go, and do not, I pray you, tell me where you are bound; yet if there is aught else you would require of me, speak and it shall be yours.’

Allissál looked out across the rooftops of the blighted city.

‘Bring me then what I should need to travel a long way alone. I have nothing now but what you see. I should like a bow also.’

‘Certainly, your majesty.’

‘And Kiva, before you go, tell me – how goes it with Ara-Karn?’

The lovely red-haired woman lowered her long, darkened eyes. ‘Your majesty, I do not like to say. He has been good to me, for reasons only he knows, and so I should be grateful and loyal to him now. But there are strange tales the merchants bring us of what goes on the Black Citadel.’

* * *

That sleep, encamped on a high flattened hill in the cold, snow-flecked wilderness near the dusky border, Allissál drank wine and tended her little fire, and thought again of what the chieftainess of Orn had told her. There was no doubt of it, that one had been a superb lady of the couch. Allissál lifted her head and drew the warm, hooded hunting-cloak about her slim shoulders, and looked northward. Even more than after finding Emsha’s stiff body upon her or hearing Kis Halá’s death-struggles in the cold oily waters, she felt alone in the world.

XIII
The Lady of the Sword

IT HAD BEGUN LIFE as a fortress. Elna himself ordered the building of its gates. It had grown into a town, a city, and then a city-state rich with prosperous merchants who traded with the barbarians of the far North, and for cheap trinkets took possession of priceless raw goods and bandar-skins to sell at staggering profit to the civilized cities. And then it had fallen beneath a shadow, the shadow of Ara-Karn.

Now the haunted ruins of Gerso in the Pass of Gerso had become a memorial and a shrine to his dark worship.

None lived there now. But from a score of cities in the North, and from every village and tribe in the far North, streamed men and women to look with awe upon the Conqueror’s first footprint on the world.

Many came, and not all with pretty things to mutter about the Conqueror, to the Gray Oak.

The Gray Oak stood in a small hollow just outside the broken remnants of the gates. The tree rose majestic and fearless in the winds of the pass. It was dead and no leaves sprang from its branches, but when the storms of winter howled down through the pass, and broke trees just as great, no branch cracked or fell from the Gray Oak. No snow gathered on its branches or the sere dead circle of brown grass that surrounded it; no drop of rain could touch it. And it was said that the light of Goddess never fell upon that place.

Deep paths were worn down the valleys of the pass and up from the city ruins, to the circle about the Gray Oak. Many worshipers gathered there at all seasons of the year. They came to look upon the tree and what the tree embraced within its breast. The worshipers left offerings of flowers, green boughs, twigs of evergreen. They brought their infants there, and blessed them in its presence.

There were no paths worn within the dead circle. Every blade of withered grass stood as it had on that fateful pass when the city fell, and the Conquerer here had wrought one of his signal triumphs. It was whispered that a curse lay upon the spot, and no living thing might endure to enter there.

Mostly it was women who came. They were worshipers of Goddess from the barbarians and the civilized cities both. They came to offer what they could, to the body caught in the Gray Oak’s embrace.

One winter, a woman came up out of the North, and followed the pilgrims’ road through the blackened walls of Gerso. She wore rags and a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg. The woman wore the hood over her head, masking her features.

There was something about the woman that made the other pilgrims keep apart from her.

She walked beneath the mountain-high pillars that had once held the gates of legend. She made her way to the Gray Oak as though reluctant to go there, unwilling, but drawn against her own desire.

She walked about the circle three times. The hooded head did not rise, the woman in rags did not look up the tower of the tree. But its presence seemed to weigh down upon her shoulders.

She stopped when she reached for the third time the hollow spot heaped with treasures and green offerings to the Gray Priestess.

The woman knelt among the offerings, and faced the bole of the Gray Oak where Ara-Karn had worked his will, and there impaled the Gray Priestess, the Guardian of Gerso, upon the tree with the sword of Tont-Ornoth.

For a long time the woman knelt there. She spoke no word and made no gesture. The other pilgrims grew nervous at her silent presence. They moved aside and made their offerings at the cross-quarters of the circle instead. When the hour of the longsleep came, they seemed glad to go among the tents clustered under the feet of the mountains.

The woman in rags stood. She faced the tree. She stepped forward.

Her foot, booted in animal skins and bound with leather straps, was the first to touch the grass since the Conqueror’s.

She walked forward. Almost it seemed she walked like one in sleep or some trance, or like a priestess fulfilling an ancient ceremony.

She reached the base of the great tree.

Before her the bark and bole of the tree had embraced the frail, thin body, so that the form of the Gray Priestess sank half within the wood. The body had not decayed in the years since Gerso fell. The flesh was as supple as though life still coursed through it and the heart still beat. There was not even a stain of blood upon the gray linen of her robes, there where the hilt of Tont-Ornoth stood out of the chest.

The woman in rags stretched forth her hand, and touched the age-old hilt.

It shifted, and drew out of the body and the hard wood easily in her hand.

The Guardian of Gerso opened her eyes.

For a moment she looked, she the dead one, out of deeply tormented eyes, upon the woman who had come to draw the sword out of the tree. A slight breath, or wheeze, or it might have been a word, issued from the thin lips; but if it was a word, none heard it but the woman in rags.

Then the body of the Gray Priestess crumbled into dust, which sank into the ground.

Some few pilgrims had come forth from their tents. Some call or dream had troubled their sleep and drew them out. They stood at a distance from the dead circle; with awestruck eyes they beheld what the woman did.

She turned, holding the sword out away from her. She saw the others and stopped. She put up the sword within the folds of the hunting-cloak, and fled up the pilgrim’s path, up the valleys of the Pass of Gerso, into the wild lands of the far North.

Behind her the others gathered about the circle. They murmured in awe. Even those who had wakened in time to see with their own eyes how the woman had drawn the sword and given peace to the dead, even these found it hard to believe. Had it been a dream? they wondered. And yet there was the proof before them.

Snow began to fall. It drifted gently down from Heaven. And this snow touched the branches of the Gray Oak, and gathered in soft mounds on the dead grass between its roots.

And when dark God rose again as a thin cruel sickle from the bright horizon, the final magic appeared in the mingling of jade and golden light. For Goddess shone upon the tree, and the stalks that struggled up through the snow about the ancient oak were green. And green buds appeared on the tips of branches long thought dead.

XIV
Refuge

FAR AWAY from the happenings in the cities of the world, on the Ocean of Death in the far North, a little village stood. Compare it with Tarendahardil and it would seem of no importance whatsoever. In this village were three or four score huts of logs and mud, and seven larger buildings recently begun, whose walls were made of stone.

Women and children were there, tall, with light hair, large bones and wide, bright eyes. But there were few men to be seen, and they were small and lithe, with dark hair and eyes black like olive-stones. These men worked on the new buildings of stone and plowed the fields on the hillsides. A few women worked also in the fields, and the children went in bands into the forest, bows and long sacks slung across their shoulders. The children vanished in the dappled shade of the forest, their legs brushed by the light-green ferns. Spring had reached at last this final corner of the world, after a bitter winter: time to stock the storing-holes and eat fresh greens again.

Above the sandy clearing in the center of the village one hut stood apart from the others, built of stout logs thicker than a woman’s hips, sealed with bark and mud and straw. A long veranda faced the clearing, roofed with fresh green boughs. White smoke poured from the hut’s roof-hole, filling the village with the savor of roasting meat.

From the open doorway of that hut, a squat old woman walked on the veranda. She wore an old woolen dress with a shoulder-mantle pinned about her neck. Some women hailed her from below the sandy clearing; the old woman nodded and answered them.

She went through the village, moving slowly as though to soothe the ache out of her bones. A band of merchants had arrived and were unloading their packs and rich bundles from the backs of their ponies in the clearing. With boisterous cries the merchants called the women of the village, displaying their wares. Other women came running, but the old woman went her way.

At the edge of the village she looked out over the Ocean of Death. There for generations beyond memory the village had sent their dead in simple little barges. The stony beach was littered with fishing boats, most in ruins. Away from the fishing boats a marble shelter stood above the beach, six ornate columns with a roof tiles. Inside the shelter a death-barge hung on silk-rope lines. The beach was empty of people, all the women and their children having been drawn by the call of the merchants. But one woman, a stranger, stood in the shadow of the marble shelter, staring upon the death-barge.

It was a death-barge of curious workmanship. The rim was a band of hammered gold. On the prow there was a sunburst of gold half-eaten by the sea, and along the sides were ornate friezes of oddly-angled charactery impossible to make out, and stylized figures writhing in odd postures.

The woman looked at it as if awed by the barge’s frailty and seeming antiquity. She was not of the tribes, but she was young, tall, and in rags and a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a spider. The rags were open below the long throat, baring most of the bosom; before it the women was held a long jade-handled knife of workmanship as curious as that of the barge.

‘Are you a pilgrim, child?’

The stranger woman started. For a moment she stared at the old barbarian women, saying nothing; then thrust the dagger into her rags.

‘A pilgrim, yes.’ She spoke the tongue of the far North well for one born below the Spine. ‘Did he – did Ara-Karn truly cross in this?’

‘This very barge, to come to land upon this very spot,’ the older woman answered. ‘Kuln-Holn drew it ashore despite all the fear in his heart. We knew not what to make of him then. My man was the one to name him; yet he never received naming-gift.’ Heavily the bosom of the old woman rose and fell. ‘Well, and there was nothing else to do. I was afraid of him, but all the same I helped spare him, and so became his tool.’

She stooped and placed beneath the shrine the basket she had brought. In the basket were vessels of food, drink and clothing. In the straw-mixed sand around it were many other offerings. The tribeswoman seemed even older now, standing with her broad shoulders bowed as if in prayer. Strands of gray hair slipped from the shoulder-mantle and fluttered in the wind. She stooped lower, raised herself, and stepped back.

‘Of course the poor take most of it, and birds eat the rest,’ she said. ‘But still I have hope that Goddess will see that the offering has been made, and provide for my husband, who is unvoyaged. I am now the leader of this tribe in the name of the Warlord. I am called Hertha-Toll. Won’t you come with me, child?’

Silently they walked up from the beach. The older woman leaned a little on the arm of the younger when it came time to mount the slope just at the edge of the beach.

‘My husband was Gundoen Strong-In-Girth,’ the old woman said. ‘Many children I bore him, but none lived to reach the rites of blood and spear. And even so he loved me. He might have taken any of his concubines to wife, but would not. He was a hunter, a spearman, and chief over all our tribe, but he loved to wrestle best of all. And never once, not even in his youth, was he beaten, save only by Ara-Karn who fought with more than strength. What a fighter my husband was! But he perished in the wars, in one of the cities of the Southron folk. They would not tell me how he died. They only said he arose like the smoke of a feast-fire out of his own body and soared to the Happy Shores under the guidance of Ara-Karn himself. That is what they told me. But I know the truth of it, even if they do not.’

They reached the edge of the sandy clearing, where the women of the tribe clustered around the merchants’ wares. The women shouted as they tried to outbid one another, waving hands full of gold above their heads. Hertha-Toll tugged at the younger woman’s sleeve and led her past smaller, poorer huts.

‘Yes, he thought it was only a joke when it began,’ Hertha-Toll said. ‘A way to mock poor Kuln-Holn. Kuln-Holn was the man who readied our dead and took the barges out, and he was filled with the fear of Goddess and the promise of great things to come. You know, he was the only one who truly in his heart believed that man to be a god.’

They passed by a charred ruin. ‘That was Kuln-Holn’s hut. He gave it to his daughter and her husband and went away to serve that man. I always liked Turin Tim, she was a hard-working girl. When the word came that her man had been killed, she took to drinking the fiery southern wine. One pass her hut burned to the ground: she was dead, and her little boy too. No one knew what happened. They called it the work of the immortals, but that was ever the way with ignorant folk.’

The green branches cast webwork shadows over them, and the salt tang of the sea vied with the savor of the roasting meat. Above them on the hillside the dark-haired men labored to raise the long, gaunt walls of stone of the new buildings.

‘As you can see, ours is now a wealthy tribe. They bring us robes of silk, golden goblets, wines and linens. We are growing fat as Southrons, as poor Alli’s jest once went. Still, it does not suit us. We were not born for riches. The younger girls hardly know what work is anymore. We have too many slaves. Once we despised slaves – now we rely on them. Well, maybe it is just my age showing. Surely it is lonely here without the men, I cannot blame the younger women, whose blood is hotter. And Kuln-Holn foresaw it all. He prophesied an age of peace and fatness, and here it is come already. Myself I was not so wise, seeing death and burnings but not beyond.

‘Ara-Karn has given us much,’ she said suddenly, bitterly. ‘Even at his price. Do you know, my dear, that this winter, only six children died of hunger. Think of that: only six dead in the whole village.’

They stood now before the steps leading up into the great hut of Tont Ornoth. Here of a sudden the nameless woman hesitated, and seemed not to want to go on. But the dead chief’s wife held her by the arm and spoke soothingly to her, the way a hunter speaks to a bear, an untamed hound, or an unbroken pony.

‘Please, child,’ she said, ‘enter and guest with me. There will be a goodly meal for you and a soft dimplace, and unworn linens from southern looms. And we will bathe you with cleansing oils. It grows lonely here now, and I should be glad of the company. Why do you draw back? None will harm you or speak words against you here. There are no wars in this place. Come, and I will tell you of my husband and, if you like, of Ara-Karn.’ In the end the stranger ceased resisting, and let herself be drawn into the darkness of the smoky hut.

And so it came to pass even as Kuln-Holn had foretold, that the Empress of Tarendahardil the City Over the World came as a shabby beggar to the tribe that had fostered Ara-Karn.

XV
The Passing of the Queen

LATER, when the fires burned low and the voices fell still, the women sought their dimplaces. On the wide veranda overlooking the clearing Allissál stood alone.

The sleepy village was quiet at that hour. The wives, mothers and children of the men who had conquered all the South and North lay now alone on deep furs. Allissál had eaten of their food, but had neither bathed nor accepted the fine linens Hertha-Toll had offered her. She came out of the hut as she entered it. She leaned against one of the support-pillars. The rags slid down her arm and she saw the bruises on her wrist. After all these months she still bore his mark.

She had ridden upland from Tezmon, away from Elna’s Sea. The snows fell lightly on the stony highlands, revealing the tracks of the game she hunted. She had drifted with neither aim nor purpose, avoiding all towns and cities, meeting with no one, lost in these lands where she had never been before. Pure and purifying, the Goddess-filled blinding cold swirled around her, the lone traveler on the hills.

She broke the sword and her pony died, and so on foot, using only the bow, she wandered ever Northward, pursuing the game-tracks in the retreating snows. At length she came with the white desert to the skirts of a high wall of mountains running with the moon. This wall she followed and so, at length, reached a great gap in the mountains. By then the snow had retreated above her, where she had not the strength to go.

Wondering, she descended into the gap and walked among fields of stones and gray dead earth. Then she knew she stood in the Pass of Gerso, and that beyond her the gap opened upon the wild lands where once Elna had penned the barbarians. She had looked upon the Gray Oak and the Gray Priestess, and there did a thing she found so hard to believe, it now abode within her memory like a tale Emsha had told her when she was small. It was a memory she did not trust, for it bore within it the seed of a duty she would never accept. So she had fled from the gaping faces of the other pilgrims, she had hidden the sword away, and she had wandered far from the broad paths among the forests of the wilderness.

The trees were already greening on the far side, when she fell in with a band of merchants and asked the way to Gundoen’s tribe.

Now dark clouds gathered from the Ocean of the Dead. A storm was stirring, the last blow of winter. Lights sparked in the clouds in distant silence. It struck Allissál as somehow beautiful to know herself the sole spectator of that approaching fury.

Even now doubtless the buds broke like sores from the branches in the South, and the flowers opened like bright wounds, and the birds built black nests and sang the bloody praises of their land’s new master. All the world was one now, lying beneath him as sated as a well-paid whore. All but a small stone hive somewhere in the Desert, where a handful of crazed women sang their songs of fury and of hate.

Allissál ran her fingers through her ragged short hair. She felt dirty and ugly. She thought of him – of the stories Kiva had told her. He was alone now, in the dimness of his usurped Palace, sending men in search of her. She knew he was dying there, choking on his madness.

She looked into the storm. Its wind threw dust into her eyes, teasing out unfelt tears. She had escaped the armies of the Conqueror and evaded all his spies, but she had not crossed alone the back ways of the North. The spirits of the dead, of all those poisoned in the Citadel, still pursued her. They gathered over her even now, lashing up the storm. She felt their presence and their rage. They had been denied the world beyond, and there was no way she could appease them. They had been her people, their lives had rested in her care. She alone had known the danger, but she had done nothing to imprison him. Now their deaths weighed upon her. They could not cross the Ocean of Death without a guide.

She heard their whispers in the winds. The voices filled her with a weary weakness beyond all her power to shake. She did not hate him, did not love him, did not need him, did not fear him. All that had vanished with the snows. But this was his world now. What then was left for her?

Quietly she stepped down the wooden steps to the clearing. On the rail behind her she left a bag holding all the gold and riches that that red-haired couch-lady had given her in Tezmon. Hertha-Toll, the widow of the man Allissál’s orders had condemned, could leave them in her next basket-offering if she wished.

She walked through the village, touching the sand with her toes first at each step, soft as a maid gone to see her first lover. She liked the small rude huts, but did not look at the stone walls of his new buildings rising like vague threats.

The upturned fishing boats were weathering the winds well. The storm had not yet broken over the beach, but the distant lightning now had found its tongue. Allissál stood on the stony beach beneath the shrine, alone.

The Couple were vanished from the sky. Only the voices of the dead filled her ears, roaring in the wind and waves. The air pressed the rags against her body and stole the breath from her mouth. She felt a sudden weakness stab her, from the bent of her ribs through her belly and along her legs to the back of her knees. That was fear. For a moment she turned her face away. Then she turned back.

Her eyes were narrow against the winds as she drew the dagger.

The wind moaned in the roof tiles. Calmly and sternly she took the dagger and cut through the silk ropes that held the death-barge in place.

It was almost beyond her to drag it down the rocks. But when she reached the lapping mouths of water it was easy.

She turned back then to face the land, her feet cold in the turquoise water. The sense of fate was strong in her, and all her fear was gone. This was all the working out of destiny in a play whose author was centuries dead but whose words remained untouched. He had voyaged out of the ruins of his world, to make a ruin of hers. Now she would follow the same path, in the same barge. It was as it had to be.

‘Once you were everything to me,’ she murmured. The wind took her words and flung them across the hills. ‘But I will not live on as your slave or your prize, nor yet the actress in the play of your madness.’

So saying, the former queen put the barge out into the waves, toward the distant Goddess who awaited her behind the onrushing storm over the Ocean of the Dead.

* * *

For a full pass the storm lashed the coast with rain and wind, fierce, pitiless; then scornfully it passed over the little huddled village, and with it went the last of winter in the far North. Goddess emerged again, and the women of the tribe looked warily out of doors, even as they had done after that other storm years before – the storm that brought him.

At the beach they beheld with wonder the rifled shrine and its silk lines cleanly cut. But Hertha-Toll stood in the grass above the beach, and nodded. She showed no wonder that the stranger had left behind the dark green hooded hunting-cloak and its blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg. She only marveled when they found buried beneath the driftage and sand blown across the shrine, a great bright sword, with the hilt they all knew, which had been Tont-Ornoth’s, now brought back to them by some working even Hertha-Toll might not imagine.

Two thousands up the coast from the bay, the slaves found the wave-washed nude body of the blonde woman lying on the rocks, bleeding and still, with a few birds perched indifferently about it.

In a cart they bore it to the chief’s hall, before the chief’s wife. Hertha-Toll looked upon the body strangely. This she had not foreseen.

In her mind she saw Gundoen again as he had been in his youth, recalled how he had wooed her with flowers and the bodies of animals he had brought down in hunt. When he died, were there any healers about him? But for the others’ sake she felt the wounded torso and opened one salt-encrusted eye.

She went a few steps from the cart and stood a doubtfully. ‘Well,’ she muttered at length, ‘I will do what I know. But this one has passed beyond the shores of life already, and by her own choice. It will take a greater voice than mine to call her back.’

Curtly she bade them bear the cold, pallid body into the hut. She asked about the dagger, but it was not to be found.

‘One thing further,’ she said, bitterness like salt entering the sound of her voice. ‘Let none of you tell the King’s men of this. He has no right to hear of it, even if by some chance or grace she does return to life.’

XVI
The Last Assembly

WINTER ROLLED over Tarendahardil and the ambassadors came and went, the wheels of their tribute-wagons heavy with cold mud. No buildings had been restored in the old Imperial city, but life of a sort returned to her. The last surviving Tarendahardilites still dwelt there, unwilling or unable to surrender their city.

Others came as well, the fortune-seekers of change, desirous of wealth and power from the dominion of the barbarian. They swarmed in rude tents pitched against burned palaces, penning goats and pigs where charanti, philosophers and artists once had congregated. From time to time the streets came alive to the clatter of the Riders of the King, barbarians astride the strongest Eglandic stallions and bearing the black banners set with a yellow Darkbeast-tooth. The Riders never stayed long but shortly emerged pale-faced from the Citadel to set forth yet again, lashing to bloody froth the flanks of their steeds.

And the ambassadors came and went, bringing trains of tribute and hostage children up the old Way of Kings to enter the bleak, black stronghold on the mountaintop. They were ushered in by sly Vapionil slaves and the soldiers of Erion Sedeg, and after them went herds of cattle and sheep and baskets of grain, salt and sugar. And with a gray evil the cook-smoke went up from the black Palace into the rain and low clouds of the dull jade sky.

And so another Pass of God went by.

At the end of winter riots broke out in the poorer cities and bands of thieves roamed the hills and countryside, mostly in the North where the conquest had been longest and most harshly felt, but also along the Delba. Erion Sedeg set out with his armies, a mix of lesser barbarians and his own forces, and he crushed all resistance in the cities, killing the half-clothed rioters by the hundreds. But when Erion Sedeg moved on, the bands of thieves waxed into armies, and trade in the North ceased. Only Tezmon in the North was at peace.

In Fulmine meanwhile Erion Sedeg established himself in the fortress built by Lornof’s father, where he spent the spring increasing his power, ever-jealous of the worship of his high dark master, whose name he continued to exalt.

The greater barbarians gathered in Vapio, which had sprung up yet again like some fleshy ruby flower seductive and unkillable. There the warriors drank and ate and smoked and gamed in luxury, aided by their willing slaves, until their wits dulled and their arms softened. Feuds broke out anew among the tribes, there was some fighting but as yet little killing. Several Buzrahs were found dead in their couches: it was said they had eaten too heavily of the purple dream-herb, but a little afterward several Karghils were missing and never after seen.

A new feud began, one with the promise of even greater danger. The chiefs of the fourth and fifth armies refused to pay Roguil Arn the spoil they had promised, saying that since he had not slain Elna-Ana he did not deserve it. Roguil Arn descended on Vapio with fourscore men and murdered the chieftains of the Gerinthars, the Necistrols, the Goat-Tribe and the Gise-Nathos with seven-score of their followers. They caught them naked or in the robes of women, and butchered them to the delighted drunken screams of the Vapionil whores who serviced them. After this, the agreed-upon amounts were given over to the bloody-armed young champion, and pacts of peace were sworn. But sly whispers in the shadows of the purple towers in Vapio spoke of poisonings, and Roguil Arn, hunting and fishing along the mountains brightward, heard nothing of this. Other feuds also began over artful women or gaming-debts. Ill feelings grew stronger, but the warriors as yet dissembled it.

That winter Bar-East died. The old wanderer had been following the line of the shore toward Zaproll on the Sea, the last corner of the lighted lands he had yet to visit. The warriors mourned his passing and slew horses and slaves to the gods for Bar-East’s spirit, and the chieftains ordered a tower of stone built to mark the place where he had died. In Vapio there was some talk of destroying Zaproll on the Sea to make good the boast that Bar-East had gone everywhere, but that was mostly drunken talk and nothing was done as yet.

When spring did reach Tarendahardil, it did so grudgingly and late. It grew quieter there now, for the greater number of favor-seekers had gone away to Fulmine. The field brightward of the ruins was almost deserted: by the especial command of the King, only Nam-Rog and his Durbars were condemned to remain in the camp. They might have taken quarters in the Citadel, save that Nam-Rog quarreled with Erion Sedeg, and his warriors refused to dwell in that place. So they went back to the muddy camp where they had lived a year and a half. A week afterward half the warriors, led by Avli-Oan, defied Nam-Rog’s commands and pleas and left for Vapio. Those who stayed spoke of summoning their wives and children from the far North when spring cleared the roads; but when spring did come the robber armies roamed the North, and the warriors dared not send their bidding. They grumbled, and passed the summer sweating in the swelter of their tents in that accursed land.

Late in the summer, at the fall of autumn in the far North, the chieftains returned to Tarendahardil. Ara-Karn summoned them. But first they met in the Assembly.

They gathered in the broad dead field before the remnants of the piled camp-wall. Only the chiefs and high men of the tribes came, those who had been the leading hunters in the far North. Eleven chiefs scorned to attend. No Buzrahs or Karghils came. One who did come, oddly, was the red-haired Southron woman Ara-Karn had put over the Orns to insult and outrage the other chieftains.

They elected Kin-Sur, a Borso, to be the new Speaker of the Law. Kin-Sur dutifully recited the old laws of the Assembly before the small gathering. The chieftains drank and tossed bone-dice while he did this. Few heeded his words.

Nam-Rog, seated beside the Warlord’s empty place, shook his head. ‘Soon the very tribes will no longer exist,’ he muttered. ‘He might save us, if he would – but who can speak reason in the darkness of that foul tower?’

‘What are these words of yours, Nam-Rog?’ asked Pelk-Noem who was now chief over the River’s-Bend tribe. ‘Don’t you know that to speak words against the King is treason?’

‘That is a word of these Southrons, not of the tribes,’ growled old Gan-Birn of the Jalijhas, with a glance at the red-haired woman. ‘We have no king over us.’

‘Go and tattle on me to Erion Sedeg if you will,’ Nam-Rog said gloomily. ‘You were ever a Southron in your ways, Pelk-Noem, and stayed in your tents when we men went under the Iron Gate.’

‘Old man, you make me want to tell him,’ Pelk-Noem said, his face a mottled crimson.

‘Enough, enough,’ pleaded Welo-Pharb of the Undains. ‘Can we not meet together without bitter words, after all we have seen and done together? Nam-Rog, you have been here near the Warlord these months. Why has he summoned us now? What passes in the dark ways of his mind? Has it to do with the great fleet of ships that now cover the beaches at Arpane on the Sea? Over a year of toil, begun as soon as we took that city; now, as I hear it, abandoned since last winter. Will he settle now the feuds, or let us at last journey homeward again?’

Grimly the chief of the Durbars shook his head. ‘No. Not that.’

Shadows fell across the scarred and bearded visages, and the great strong hands reached for bowls of beer and wine.

‘By God’s jade balls,’ swore one, ‘will this never end?’

‘Nam-Rog, is there no speaking to him?’ asked Kul-Dro. ‘Outside of Gundoen and Kuln-Holn, you knew the Warlord best. Can you not persuade him?’

The old Durbar looked at the fortress on the mountain and its plume of gray smoke. In his tent he still kept the great brass-worked coffer in which were sealed the bones of Gundoen. All these months he had been holding it, haunted during his sleeps by the ghost, just to gain leave long enough to take it up to Hertha-Toll. He sighed and drank more beer. It was dark and bitter stuff. It was the way he preferred it now.

‘This is the way of him,’ he said at length. ‘He lives like a spirit of these Southrons, trapped after his death in a lightless stone hollow beneath the ground. All the window-holes of the Palace he has had covered over with stones and planks. No torches or lamps are allowed, and it is darker there than at the foot of Urnostardil. Only the cook-fires still burn, in kitchens underground. He is surrounded by the soldiers of Erion Sedeg, the children of the Southron princes, and slaves. You know the slaves – they are these Vapionil dogs.’

A groan of hatred and disgust went round the circle.

‘None of us has seen the Warlord since last winter, on the Pass of God. Even then he spent his wakings and sleeps in the tall tower, and no one brought food or drink to him. All his orders come through the mouths of Erion Sedeg and the Vapionil, nor is there any way of knowing which of the words are his and which their own. Even when we did reach him, he would hear no words on the rebellions, the feuds, or the cities. All he ever heard were the rumors about the former Empress, the last of Elna’s kin.’

‘But why should he be so eager to gain vengeance on her?’ asked Erin-Gan-Birn of the Roighalnis. ‘He is not of the tribes.’

‘She bewitched him,’ said Pelk-Noem, making a sign with his shadow-hand.

‘Who speaks treason now, Pelk-Noem?’ asked Farn-Jar-Gur of the Eldars. He had forsaken his duties in the South when Erion Sedeg had gone there. Instead he had gone to Vapio, and his eyes were heavy-lidded and bloody, and his words came out slurred like rain.

‘You never speak any, all men know,’ Pelk-Noem answered. ‘You will speak even less after I cut out your tongue.’

‘Be silent, you two, will you not?’ protested Ven-Vin Van of the Borsos, who sat with his head half wrapped in a cloak, miserable from dream-herb.

Ah Gundoen, thought Nam-Rog, you were right to die when you did, in the height of battle when our victory was full. You spared yourself these sights. I wish I had gone down at your side.

‘And what news is there of the far North, and home?’ Erin-Gar-Brin asked this: his city was Zaproll on the Sea, farthest from the news. At his words several faces brightened, and the talk ran over the tales that had reached them from the home villages. At length Roguil Arn lifted himself to his feet, cast down his bowl and proclaimed,

‘By Goddess, I care not what befalls, I will take my men home!’

The others looked on him for a moment – some with a hint of fear in their eyes, as though they looked for fire to come out of the sky and strike him dead. Then Tarx Taskas who represented the Fire-Walkers, rose and said quite calmly, ‘I will join you.’ Another followed him and another, until they had all sworn the same oath, all but three: Nam-Rog, Pelk-Noem, and Welo-Pharb. The Southron woman did not count, of course.

‘And Erion Sedeg?’ Nam-Rog asked.

Silence fell on his words. One by one the chieftains took their seats again. Then only Roguil Arn was left standing. ‘I care not,’ he said, ‘what is Erion Sedeg to me? He is a Southron. If the Warlord grants that I may go, what can that Southron do to oppose it? Would he dare go against my axe? Then let him, and by the count of three he will trouble me no longer.’

‘Much of his strength is still in the North,’ Nam-Rog said. ‘They are near the Pass of Gerso, they are many, and they have the bow. It is said Erion Sedeg has joined cause secretly with the Vapionil. It would be an easy matter for him to send word to his men to cross into the far North where are our wives, our children, our homes. And here too he is strong, in his high fortress. Will you have the stomach for another siege, Roguil Arn, when our men are scattered and half of them will do out of fear what the Warlord says, no matter what we tell them?’

‘I will not go against the wishes of the Warlord,’ Pelk-Noem said, looking at the ground. ‘I remember Gen-Karn’s fate. I was there when we went into the Citadel. A full year he suffered to abide among them, awaiting Gundoen’s return; then he moved his hand, and all fell dead…’

‘I tell you, I will go!’ insisted Roguil Arn.

‘Then you go alone,’ said Kan-Brin of the Pes-Thos, who blushed as he spoke.

‘There is still a way,’ said Marn-Klarten of the Undains. ‘In truth, how do we know that it has been the Warlord’s mind that we stay, and not merely what the Vapionil and Erion Sedeg have said that he says? What then if we saw him alone now, where there are none of these slaves? We could win him over, surely. He has Erion Sedeg: why should he need us? Surely he will let us free. We are free men, are we not? Are we not of the tribes of the far North? And if he does not…’ Marn-Klarten smiled wolfishly, and let his hand drop to his sword-belt.

Open-mouthed, the other chiefs regarded him long enough for a heart to beat a score of times. They could not believe it had been Marn-Klarten who had spoken these words. Not even Roguil Arn could believe it.

Then Farn-Jar-Gur took a mouthful of wine and swallowed noisily. ‘Ah, what is it we speak of?’ he asked. ‘The Warlord will not refuse us. It is these Vapionil.’ He hated them all the more for being in their power.

‘Yes, these slaves – these Southrons,’ said Roguil Arn. He set his big fist on the handle of the axe. Then Tarx Taskas did likewise with his weapon, and Erin-Gar-Birn and Ven-Vin Van, until soon all their hands were upon their weapons save for Pelk-Noem’s and Nam-Rog’s. The chieftains glanced about the circle. Great emotions passed over their countenances, and their strong fingers writhed upon metal, wood and bone. Then all at once they surged to their feet and drew their weapons so the bright metal tongues clashed against one another; and Tarx Taskas cried out, ‘Death to Southrons! Home!’ – and the others echoed him.

Kiva, pale-faced, looked on them with fear. They were like the wild beasts that had been penned beneath the Circus in Tarendahardil awaiting the next festival, the veterans who had grown accustomed to the savor of human blood. Rage and violence flashed from their eyes. These were not the same men she had met in this camp a year before, when she waited with the other prisoners for the decision of Ara-Karn. Then they had been silent and proud; now they despised themselves. No crime was beyond such men.

The chieftains’ blazing eyes fixed themselves on Pelk-Noem and Nam-Rog. ‘And you,’ they said: ‘will you now join us or oppose us?’

Pelk-Noem swallowed, and stood uncertainly. But gloomily from beneath his thick eyebrows the chieftain of the Durbars looked up at his fellows. For the greater part of his life he had seen these men every year at the Assembly of the Tribes; for years he had lived with them on the unending road of war. He had seen many of them grow to manhood, and had spoken of their progress with other men his age. His life had been saved by some there; others he had saved. Now he saw drunkenness, fear and hatred contort their faces.

He glanced at the red-haired Southron woman, and he felt ashamed. All at once he knew what the Southrons felt when they uttered the word, ‘barbarian.’ But then he thought of the bones of Gundoen, of Hertha-Toll alone and of his own sons, the last of whom fell in the last attack on the Citadel. And he thought of the man in the tower who had brought it all to pass – the man who was Gundoen’s adopted son.

He stood, and the others gave back a little before him. He ungirt his sword-belt, drew the sword and threw the belt behind him. He held the sword aloft with the point hanging down.

‘He has summoned us, hasn’t he?’ he said. ‘So let us see what he wants.’

Grimly pleased, the others nodded, and put back their weapons – all but Nam-Rog. Kiva followed them uncertainly and at a distance. She had that look about her of a child who has been thrown in among other children, older and bad: he dares not comment or protest, and fears what he is about to do, but fears even more to leave.

In a band of four score they rode up those streets they knew too well. But when they came upon the square and saw before them the high black wall of stone and the open gateway, then they drew rein. They seemed unwilling to go on. Through the gaping opening could be seen the dim, ugly grounds where three thousand corpses had lain, the victims of an unclean death. Ghosts hung about the place, and even the most drunken chieftains knew unease.

They rode into the fastness slowly, unspeaking, casting their eyes about them and making the Sign of Goddess. The mercenaries of Erion Sedeg gave way before them. The winds were cold here, and in the sky above the dismal Palace three gerlins wheeled, those hateful birds that had feasted for a year at the foot of the Iron Gate. The chieftains’ horses halted before the high buildings. The chieftains did not dismount. Their eyes passed over the windows and balconies walled up like gouged-out eyes. Some of them shivered. They looked to Nam-Rog to lead. But he would not.

Just before them, broad stone steps led up to a colonnade in the Palace like a cave into a cliff. Between the two central pillars a high-seat of kings had been upraised: next to the high-seat was a table littered with papers and a low footstool. The high-seat was empty, but Erion Sedeg sat on the footstool. He stood before the chiefs.

‘The Dark One, Ara-Karn the King of Kings, is displeased,’ said Erion Sedeg. ‘So he has summoned you. Behold now a full year gone by since he left you with a command – a simple thing, or so one would have thought. A woman was to be found, the last of the dynasty of the former age. She was to be found and brought before the King, so that he might forever put an end to those times. Well, where is this woman? Your men have brought us nothing but rumors and wild stories. Now your King, the Returned One, the Conqueror, gives you this final word. Bring to him this woman by the Pass of Goddess next summer, or be known as traitors and pay the penalty.’

Roguil Arn smiled, and began to unbind the peace-strings of his axe. But Nam-Rog raised his arm. He scorned even to speak to the painted Southron, but urged his horse on alongside the Palace, until he came to stand below the White Tower. The other chieftains likewise cast up their eyes to the peak of the Tower and its single brightward window boarded over. Nam-Rog lifted his naked blade.

‘Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn!’

His shout was echoed by the others until the noise of it shook loose the terror from the place.

‘Ara-Karn!’ the Durbar shouted once more. ‘Now five years have gone since you came among us, an outcast from your own kind and a suppliant. And four years have now gone by since we accepted you as a tribesman and our Warlord. We let you lead us, and put half a hundred cities beneath your rule. We crossed the Taril and left our bones to litter that desert. For a year we went in battle under the Iron Gate of this stronghold, for a year we gathered tribute and saw to the rule of these lands. And the nearer seemed our victory, the farther away was our homecoming. We sojourned in strange lands and ate the bitter flesh of beasts we did not hunt; we lay awake in terrible heat and learned the speaking of alien tongues.

‘Once we were hunters and proud, and we killed only for need or pleasure. We roamed the forests and drank of cold streams, and we raised our sons to carry on our tribes. Now we have killed for gold and for the good of others. We have learned lies and treachery. We have seen our sons and fathers and brothers go down in death far from their home villages. We have seen our fellows become drunkards and don the robes of Southrons. Enough!

‘We will go back to our home woods and our old ways. You have no more need of us. We have no more need of a Warlord. We will return to what we were.’

Silence grew in the fastness as the echoes of Nam-Rog’s words died. The haunting of the place seemed stronger than before. These spirits would never be appeased. The barbarians looked about them, grasping the handles of their weapons. They glanced at Erion Sedeg, daring him to order his men against them. But the face of the Southron was unreadable beneath its paint. He raised a hand and pointed.

‘Go,’ he said.

‘Take your spoils and go back behind the Spine. The King will allow this – if you will choose out thirteen of your number, chiefs or the kin of chiefs, to stay behind as hostages.’

‘Will he deal with us as he dealt with Southrons?’ Roguil Arn grumbled.

But Nam-Rog said to Erion Sedeg, ‘That is well. We will give you our oaths upon it. I myself will be one of the hostages, if that be his will.’

Dismally they left the Citadel. But when they were again riding in the streets of the city, then the chiefs raised their voices against the Durbar, complaining of the vow.

‘I gave a word,’ Nam-Rog answered, ‘A word once spoken is a free bird: it will fly where it pleases. I am going back with all my tribesmen, and let Ara-Karn be damned and die here alone among Southrons if he wants, but he will hold no kin of mine.’

The others grumbled their accord. ‘Aye, let him sit and rot,’ one said.

Kiva rode far behind the other chiefs, attended by ten men she had won to her cause in Tezmon that she had this waking lost. The warriors Ara-Karn had given her would cleave to their own tribes, and Tezmon would soon after fall prey to the armies of thieves roaming the North. But Kiva still had these men, and two coffers of treasure, and her beauty and her wit. From time to time she thought of the Divine Queen and of what might have befallen her. The thought saddened her.

And sad too was the look on Kul-Dro’s face. ‘He was so proud and strong and sure of himself,’ Kul-Dro muttered, ‘and we followed him as we would a god. Now it has come to this. Doom sits next to him, waiting; and yet he does nothing!’

So the chiefs went away brightward to the port-city at the mouth of the Delba, and from there summoned their men. They loaded ships with the heavy spoils of war. Erion Sedeg did not oppose them. On a waking late in autumn when the winds did not drive against them, the warriors of the tribes of the far North sailed across the Sea of Elna and left the South, Tarendahardil, and Ara-Karn behind.

The next waking the Riders of the King returned once more to the City Over the World, haggard, feverish, and weary unto death. They rested in the Black Citadel two passes. Then they rode brightward after the armies and their chiefs.

A week later the Vapionil came down from the Citadel and set their chariots upon the Southern Way. After them the last of the ambassadors departed for their cities.

Then even Erion Sedeg and his soldiers left the Black Citadel. They took the hostage children and went darkward, long lines of horsed and armored men beneath black and yellow banners.

At that, even the Tarendahardilites gave up and departed, scattering to the winds, leaving the city to the ghosts of its slain. For a full week afterward the now-empty Citadel sat as ever on the mountain, sending aloft its wind-curled plume of gray smoke.

Then the smoke stopped.

XVII
Whispers

SOME WEEKS PASSED.

The few barbarians that remained South of Elna’s Sea were either sunk in pleasured Vapio or ruled their cities as independent fiefs, vainly dreaming of dynastic rule. From his strongholds in Fulmine and Belknule, Erion Sedeg sent armies to gather tribute in the name of the King, but these armies were little better than bands of thieves. They took the best houses wherever they went, and ate the food and used the women without repayment.

In name, almost all the lands and cities were loyal to the King; in truth, all was chaos. There was not industry or trade. The cities crawled with desperate poor. The rule of princes had become the exercise of axemen. Bands of robbers swarmed the South. Men looked back now on the rule of the Bordakasha as a golden age, forever lost.

Only Rukor was not yet in ruins, for Rukor had never been subdued. Even Erion Sedeg had overlooked Rukor, for she feigned docility, and Ara-Karn – perhaps he had forgotten Rukor too. But there Haspeth, Captain-General to the Divine Queen, High Charan of Rukor, Fulmine, the Eglands and Vapio, completed the mustering of his army of vengeance, and led them secretly aboard a fleet of ships.

From the Isles the dark fleet sailed along the coast past deserted headlands, toward the unwalled ruins and the undefended man. Something else went before it, from city to city in South and North alike, so that not even Erion Sedeg with all his men and arms could quench it. A single, dire rumor that ran like a bright evil upon men’s tongues, sometimes in malice, sometimes in pleasure, sometimes in dread:

‘Ara-Karn is mad.’

XVIII
In Darkness

AMONG THE RUINS of Tarendahardil all rested shrouded and still. Weeds stood between the stones in the streets, silently bending in the wind. Gerlins, starving for prey, soared around the high-piled stones of the Imperial Palace, whose every opening was blocked up with stone or wood, as if they hungered for the blood they sensed within.

In the darkness of those forsaken halls walked the King of All the World.

Alone he trod the chambers of the Black Tower and through the fragrant rubbish left in the elegant rooms of the Southern Wing. With hands caught behind his back, he walked amidst the shades of the thousands who perished by his treachery. His thoughts were his own. Did he seek penance there? He was his own penance. Here, in the shadow of these halls, he had become a nameless man. For two years now it had been Erion Sedeg who had spoken in the name of Ara-Karn.

* * *

Long ago it seemed now, many years, since he sat in the throne in the black tent with the Song of Elna still upon his knee, and fell asleep to the thin bright screams of Dornan Ural...

In that hour he had dreamed of his former life, and fanned the flames of his ancient hatred and yearning for revenge. He saw a youth, a maiden, and a palace of red stone. Then a shadow fell across the dream, of the interloper, the enemy, the stranger: death and ruin, a pregnant woman’s anguish, blood dripping from a smoking sword… The inveterate hatred convulsed his limbs as he sat dreaming, until the dreams turned and twisted, and the maiden lay in the dim place atop the White Tower, and the youth was a weeping, frightened boy in the ruins of Gerso, and the interloper – it was himself, Ara-Karn, who cast that malformed shadow and held the smoking blade; and the hatred ran from him like water and he woke.

He stumbled out of the black tents. There were some clouds but otherwise it was fair and bright. He walked through the camp slowly, followed by his guards. He felt the eyes of all men on him. His presence called them forth. At a distance he saw the top of the tent of the chief of the Durbars. Remembering Gundoen, he had the brief desire to speak with Nam-Rog, but he did not. He was Ara-Karn.

In the penalty-square he beheld the last remnants of him who had once been called the most powerful man in the South. Now the most powerful man in the South was Ara-Karn. Still gazing at the scraps was a woman, the camp-follower who had won the contest. She looked up at his approach. She neither abased herself nor departed. It was as if they had been equals.

She wore a lora the colors of rust and blue and a black shoulder-mantle adorned with beads of glass. Here she was known as Elrialgis. Her hair was long, thick, and black. She was beautiful, but even more cruel. In the depths of her black flashing eyes she carried the scars of all that she had done since these wars had overturned her life.

She had been born in Postio, the tribesmen had told him. There she had been the prettiest and best-loved daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant until, in the midst of her wedding-ceremony to the young man she adored, the barbarians of Ara-Karn at last succeeded in breaking down the walls of that city. Elrialgis saw her bridegroom slaughtered on the altar before her, and she, the bride, was passed from man to man on the dirt before the heat of the burning city. She was added to the spoils of a Durbar warrior, a man high in Nam-Rog’s council; but during the long wait below Bollakarvil he had bad luck gaming, and Elrialgis passed to a warrior of the Archeros, a clever man. She was hardened by then, and the Archero had come to fear her: after the surrender of Ilkas he traded her to a Raznami for a Raamba sword.

After Vapio, many new women entered the camp, more artful and complaisant, and Elrialgis fell among the crowd of unclaimed women, those who must please all comers to survive. Then she learned well the lie, but even as she lay with those bored and sullen strangers, it was not their embraces but visions of their anguished deaths below the Iron Gate that gave her pleasure. She ran her delicate fingers along their scarce-healed scars and took her pleasure in questioning them on their fear and suffering in battle.

Now he, Ara-Karn, had dropped Dornan Ural like a ripe plum into her hands. How she had unleashed all the pent-up cruelty, hatred and pain of these years, and plied well her imagination in giving this old man she had never known to torments.

Ara-Karn looked at her silently. He saw the blood still fresh beneath her nails. She was bleak and vengeful and vicious, this girl still young in years but holding all the bitterness of great age. Never again would she know love or warmth or compassion. So had these wars, which he had loosed, made her. She was his daughter. She was his great handiwork.

For a moment he felt himself stirred by her dangerousness. Then he said to her, ‘The prize is yours. You have done well what I commanded. Now go, and never come near me again.’

She smiled, accepting the pectoral from him, and gave him a courtesy prettily as an innocent maid, and the foulness of her doing that reminded him of himself. ‘Your majesty, Great King, in one breath you have fulfilled both my dreams.’

He left the penalty-square and climbed alone into the Black Citadel. The mercenaries were still at work there, contesting with the gerlins over the stinking bodies of the slain. He entered the White Tower, and the dimplace at its summit where, so long a time before, he had seduced the Empress to the ringing of her own son’s mourning-rites. The place was empty except for the great bed. The maidens were in the hands of the Vapionil, and all the other belongings had been taken by the mercenaries. Even so the place smelled strongly of her presence.

He stepped about the room softly, lest he disturb their memories. He opened the saffron bed-curtains, holding them apart with arms extended. ‘Alastaphele,’ he murmured. The sound of it was as hard and hollow as that of a broken pin dropped down a dried-up well.

He never left the Palace thereafter.

* * *

He continued to let Erion Sedeg speak for him. Why not? By now that man knew him better than he did himself. The matters of the consolidation of his rule did not concern him. Only one thing concerned him.

Great Kaan, that woman was last seen traveling darkward. We have spoken with the peasants of the Marches. She passed in haste, paying for food with coins and jewels. She was alone, Divine One.

Have you spoken to the Madpriests?

Yes, Great King. The chiefs say they have no knowledge of her.

Ignore the chiefs. What did Estar Kane have to say?

Great Kaan, that thief only laughed at us. He threw meat to his pack of dogs, and told us that if she were in the Darkness he would find her.

What else did you do?

Nothing, August Majesty. We could do nothing else there. Estar Kane has said he will look for her.

And do you not realize what will befall her if he finds her? Go now and cast lots among yourselves, for one of you will be killed for this. Perhaps then the rest of you will think twice before deciding to do ‘nothing else.’

But not even his Vapionil spies could learn anything more.

She had been his only passageway back to the man he had been so long ago, that young king brilliant with light. Now she was gone. The wave had passed him by. He felt his own shadows surging to engulf him.

Once he asked the priests of Temaal why they hid themselves away in these caverns under the mountains so deep into the Desert. They, sitting as ever in a triangle three-rowed, smiled. To see a house, it is necessary to step outside it, they answered.

But what of those who seek you?

All those who seek and wish to find us are already here. To know where you are, that is to need go nowhere else.

And you miss nothing of the lands of men? The company of women, perhaps?

The company of women is a thing we would miss indeed, more than anything else. But we do not lack for that. We summon them in our hearts, bewitching, compassionate creatures beyond any that are known there. We are never without women here. Have you not yet seen them?

You speak of dreams and delusions formed of memories.

There are those of us who came here as mere boys with their fathers. These have never known the touch or scent of a woman, yet their dreams are the most powerful, beautiful, and informed. You have known the flesh of women, but you have never known women.

The flesh is the woman, he answered.

They tried to teach him their craft of inventing women for companions and heart-mates, but it had only sharpened his desire for the real Alastaphele and driven him back to his domains.

Now he wished he had learned the trick after all.

So he rested where he was, waiting for Alastaphele or for news of her. This was her place. She would return here if she lived. When she held that dagger to his throat by the palace of her father, then he had gone away. Now she had slipped his siege a second time, and he had departed without removing, in such a way that she must hear of it and know his meaning.

He let stop the work upon his fleet at Arpane on the Sea. As once he had left pleasure and strode into the burning Desert, so now he left vengeance and walked into darkness. He played with madness as a public penance, until it began to play with him. She would know of it. If she lived. But there was no word of her in the lands of men.

And what has Estar Kane to say now?

Divine Conqueror, he at first refused to answer our questions, denying that your majesty is his overlord. But we were mindful of your great majesty’s will, and we came in force. So at last he relented.

Continue.

Great Kaan, he has instructed us to say to you, that Estar Kane has searched diligently, and has found no one in the Darklands. And no one, he said, has passed by way of Darkbridge to those lands into which it leads.

No one?

Divine King, it was his very word.

The Riders came and went, and every report grew more fantastic. She was a blind beggar in the North; she was mustering a vast army on the islands deep in the Southern Ocean; she was dead, slain in a dozen ways and a score of places. She had ascended to Heaven and gained sanctuary by the throne of Golden Fire. She had been ravished again by God in the Darklands and taken to His fastness of jade and black stone in the middle of the sunless seas. It was avowed by the folk of the lands through which it was claimed she had passed, that her hands could heal all wounds and that her breath was defense against all illness. Hers had become a legend as almost as strong as his own.

In the long darkness of his waiting he taught the hostage children games of his native land, secret games their parents never knew. He put weapons and dark joy in their hands, and taught them words in his own tongue. This he did as an idle pastime – or at least, so he told himself. The truth was somewhat darker, as were all things about him now.

And the children, playing in the recesses of the lightless Palace, echoed mockingly the alien sounds of the land that gave birth to their conqueror. The long halls sprang alive with their laughter and their malice. They came to love him, these children being reared by Alastaphele’s maidens among Vapionil and the mercenaries of Erion Sedeg. They came to know him as well as they knew these passageways, until even the Vapionil feared and shunned them.

He, the High King whose name they all professed to worship, let that happen as he let all other things occur, of their own force and aim. He only watched it bring itself to pass. The wave was breaking against the land it destroyed, spending itself in foam.

You should know better than to look for me. If the Divine Queen shall choose not to be found, then not even a king, not Ara-Karn himself, will find her. She has gone down the ancient path, and you dare not follow her. Look for one seed in the fields of autumn before you seek an Empress in the lands of her enemies.

Once he thought he saw her, pale and dim like the image in a tarnished silver mirror. He went to her, his arms outstretched, but she eluded him and was gone. He cried to her to stop, but she laughed with a mocking voice very like his own, and would not turn.

Then he went down into the old Hall of Justice. The King’s Light still fell blind upon the worn old dais. There the Vapionil, Erion Sedeg and his mercenaries, and the Riders awaited him.

What news?

The leader of the Riders knelt upon the tiles, which still bore the stains of the corpses Dornan Ural had by some mad strength managed to drag here and arrange.

The leader of the Riders was a Borso. The ends of his long mustache trailed upon the tiles as he bent forward. His knees bent outward of his hips, and his back curved from all that year’s riding, the riding of two lifetimes of an ordinary man. In his prime, he had become old: even the legendary hardiness of the Borsos was failing in this task. He knelt before the King as if he had been accustomed to it all his life, like a beggar or a slave beyond all hope.

O Great Lord and God, we have searched again, the cities of the North and the South, and the Islands in the Sea of Elna, and in the Southern Ocean. We have gone along the shores of the Desert, we have lit signal-fires the length of the Dusky Border. We found nothing, nothing. The woman is dead, great Kaan. There is nothing to be found of a person. All that we find is a name, and it is always there before us. She is dead, lord, and we, we are tired. Will you not release us, Lord, and let us try to find some sort of peace?

The man in the throne on the dais looked upon them wearily. These too were his handiwork. He looked upon them coldly but without anger, as if from a great distance. They, encouraged by this, redoubled their pleas. He raised his hand, and they fell still.

Perhaps there will be others who will replace you.

Divine One, Great Conqueror, such was my thought also, said Erion Sedeg. I summoned the chiefs and ordered them to take up the search themselves. But the chiefs refused, and demanded leave, threatening armed rebellion if it were not given. This I allowed them if they would leave hostages; but they departed and left us none. They are dangerous, Great One. In time they might even become the enemies of Ara-Karn.

He looked on Erion Sedeg as he had looked on the old Borso. From the shadowy recesses behind him he heard whispers and sly laughter from the children. They spoke in his tongue, and he could see Erion Sedeg grow pale even though he did not understand what it was the children said. Jealousy shone in his red eyes.

Lord, Lord, may we not have peace?

O Divine One, the name of Ara-Karn has been insulted by those chiefs. Now these men are the only weapon Ara-Karn has to use against them.

Among the children were the last of Alastaphele’s maidens, impudent, shameless creatures. In despair and bitterness they had fallen at his will into the hands of the Vapionil; they had supped greedily at the unspeakable pleasures only Vapionil knew. Some had perished of those pleasures. And so now these last few, lovely and degraded, vicious and loose, garbed and painted themselves obscenely and served as nursemaids to the young children.

The old Borso lowered his head toward the ancient floor. It was clear he did so to conceal the dark tears welling in his cracked eyes. The old man still had some pride left. It was just that he did not have enough. If Ara-Karn ordered him to go out again in search or to remain here as a hostage, the Borso would accept the commandment of his King. There was no more spirit in him left to be broken.

You may go, he said.

The old tribesmen looked at him in wonder. Erion Sedeg showed consternation. Even the children fell silent.

Go, and do as you please, he said again. I have no further use for you.

The warriors spoke their gratitude fawningly, and departed. Then, surprisingly, it was the Vapionil who crept forward, and crawled on the tiles before the dais.

And what of us, High One? May we not also go?

They were lean and troubled here, these natives of a sun-burnt city. They had flocked to him at first, eager for the promise of indulgence at the side of the conqueror of the world. But they had failed to overcome the influence of Erion Sedeg; and the ascetic hostility of these barren halls was like death to them. And they feared him, for they sensed the bleakness and loss within him, and dreaded lest it turn violent.

Perhaps, if he could believe that she was truly dead, he might have enjoyed wreaking a dry hostility against them. He might have gone on destroying until at long last he had found his own death. But now he looked on them even with compassion. He had known their kind all his life, since his childhood in the palace of red stone. They were less than nothing to him now.

Go, he said.

After them Erion Sedeg stepped before him, and gave him worship after the fashion of the dwellers in the Desert. But when he looked upon his master, then he chewed his picsle leaf and words failed him.

The King looked down upon his last votary. How this man had come to divine his secret and fall beneath its spell he did not know. It was enough to have heard him speak to Berowne from below the Iron Gate to recognize in him more than a handiwork, but a brother of the kind few brothers of the flesh can boast. It might as well have been Erion Sedeg that Nam-Rog and Kul-Dro had beheld in the opening of the Iron Gate, for all that had come to pass since then.

Dark One, Great Kaan, few like to come here any longer, and it is not a secure place to hold. This is no place for your majesty’s armies. But there are strong-walled cities in Fulmine and Belknule. It is from there that I may best serve Ara-Karn.

Let him go, said the children in the tongue of the other world. Let us go along with him. We will watch him for you, Father.

For the first time in many months, a smile touched his lips. You will not rule well without the hostages.

Erion Sedeg hesitated. He looked behind the throne, trying, as vainly as he had tried to comprehend the words, to penetrate the shadows there. Great Conqueror, that is true.

Take them with you then, and go.

And will you be alone here, majesty? Will your majesty not rather come with us, and found a new seat to the rule and worship of Ara-Karn?

No, Erion Sedeg. You will not need another hostage.

But Divine King, who will serve you?

The gods, of course.

* * *

He was sitting in the throne again when the last of them departed. He heard their horses, muffled by the thick stone walls. His cheek still burned from the children’s malevolent kisses. He let them go. He remained.

He knew he would never find her now, never for so long as she did not wish him to. She would find him when she would. As long as he chased her, she would run, but when he turned back she would do likewise. She must.

Alastaphele.

His voice trailed away in the empty hall.

* * *

Shadows filled the halls, and yet he was not alone. He was never alone, who walked among the dead, being dead himself.

His eyes beheld the watery limbs and hateful eyes of those spirits he had fetched up with his own blood, at the stone basin in the grove of dark God. He had loosed them to wreak vengeance upon all those who had maimed and tortured Gundoen, and so they had. The Tarendahardilites lay dead and buried, left unvoyaged; Ampeánor's corpse had been given to dogs and pigs to feast upon.

But who had condemned Gundoen as thoroughly as himself?

And these were not all.

For the spirits of the fallen from Urnostardil, those things he had raised out of frozen ground and darkness on the waking he had taken with bloody hands the name of Warlord from Gen-Karn, had not retreated with the armies. The ghosts had not gone back into the far North, and not all the voyaging rites had served to appease them. He had raised them, and though he had bound them to the warriors by a binding oath, the ghosts had never sworn, and they had always looked to him.

Such things, once risen, are not so easily put down again.

And he had linked these spirits also with a curse, that should any of the tribesmen turn his back on vengeance yet undone, they should rend him. He had not meant himself, of course. But had not Gundoen taken Ara-Karn into the tribe of Tont-Ornoth, and was he not also a tribesman to whom the spirits of Urnostardil bound themselves?

And those dreaded specters were not the worst of the things that rove about him.

Shadows he had cast in his career, and now he lived within them. The Palace drowned in shadows; it was itself a shell brimming over with shadows and little light.

Among all those shadows, one above all would not be still.

He sensed it there, down the long passageways, in the great halls, in the small and privy rooms.

His Dark Man watched him everywhere.

The thing had come unbidden. He had performed none of the ceremonies. He had lost his jade dagger, and mumbled none of the terrible rhymes first uttered before the Sixth Fall of the world.

And yet the thing was here.

‘Begone,’ he swore, but the thing would not depart.

‘Then come nearer, and serve!’

Silence ensued. He waited, hardly breathing, hearkening into the depths of the shadow that he dwelled in. It was so dark there, and his mind so changeable, that he could not have said just where in the Palace he was. Ah yes, he remembered now: he lay upon her bed, in her dimchamber. He knew it was so, for when he breathed in, he inhaled the perfume her body had left in the hollows of the mattress.

He rose, stripped naked, and sat cross-legged on the raised floor at the foot of her bed.

‘Come nearer,’ he whispered. ‘Nearer, nearer to me.’

His fingers danced upon his knees. He rocked his head back and forth, and his lips uttered some of the enticements for such things as the Dark Man was.

He felt it. Something shifted, far down at the base of the White Tower. Slowly up the circling stairs it crept. It gathered without the doors to her chambers. Those doors were shut and locked, he was sure. He felt the thing seep through the cracks around the doors, like smoke, like the perfumed breath of a highborn assassin.

It hesitated outside the hangings that filled the opening into the dimchamber.

‘Be not shy or coy,’ he breathed, ‘with me. Are we not old friends?’

At that he sensed the thing leap inside the dimchamber and roam up and down the walls, arching over the vaulted ceiling. For a time, the thing danced and played, like a puppy that has found a long-lost plaything. He himself sat quietly, breathing in the rhythms he had been taught by things long dead.

At last the shadow, unseen in shadow, came to rest upon the wall facing him. It attended him as of old.

‘Go seek out the Empress,’ he commanded it, ‘and bring her back to me.’

But the shadow writhed and made answer, in the manner of tongueless, mouthless, voiceless things,

I know where she is. Does she not still bear the talisman?

‘Then go and fetch her.’

What then shall be brought to you? Do you want her body, or her heart?

‘I want her heart and body both,’ he told it. ‘This time I ask for the whole of the woman. Give her to me.’

I might go to her, it said, and when I reach her side I will rape her, and give her torments, and murder her. But I will not serve your love, though once I served your lust, and once again I served that lust, and would do so again, for lust is a thing I know. But love and all such matters lie beyond my reach, and I abhor them.

‘Then I have done with you,’ Ara-Karn said; ‘begone forever.’ But at this the thing upon the wall shook with laughter.

You have done with me? You will have done with me when I have done with you! Go I will, and where I go, and what I do when I reach that place, shall be mine and mine alone to decide!

Ara-Karn swept his arm forward and flung the death-bird at the heart of the voiceless words.

The thing flew true as its nature required; it struck something with a sound of the iron striking stone, and sparks flashed in the darkness.

And something screamed with tongueless voice, and something withered and shrank, and something was dispelled. But the thing was dark as the shadow that enwrapt it, nothing might be seen of what took place there. And yet there was a lessening of something in the Queen’s dimchamber, and a weight seemed to have been lifted, a weight more burdensome than the stones of which the White Tower had been made.

But it was the man at the foot of the bed who fell back and cried out.

His hand touched his breast, where the thick, sluggish life-blood oozed, and loosed an aromatic pungency throughout the hivelike chamber.

He struggled to rise; he stumbled through the hangings and fell against the outer doors. His hands scrabbled at the latches. Somehow he passed beyond into the stairway. But his strength failed him, he fell, and could not rise.

‘What weakness is this?’ he asked.

The thing that had been his strength had left him, and behind it had left only a husk or shell.

How long had it been since he had eaten? Too long to feel hunger’s pangs.

From the dimplace above, a weary, gray-washed light seeped like tears through the cracks about the boards that had been set over the lone window. The light fell past him, touching with indistinctness the stairs. The stairs coiled down into a fist-sized hole of blackness, like the tale of centuries, like the flight of winds that had begun their journey at the back of the dark half of the world, like the hours between a poor child’s meals. Time did not matter any longer. An instant or this year without her, it was all the same. He knew now he would not see her again. He had lost her. He had brought about her death through ignorance that first time, but now he had done so through what? Pride, or overlonging. It no longer mattered.

ALASTAPHELE!

The scream rang off the many steps like the dying cry of some wolf in the cold, which is sick from licking the blood of its own wounds and, in rage and sorrow, howls out one last mating-howl before darkness comes to close its weakened eyes. The echo that returned to assail his ears seemed the cry of a stranger.

He heard another sound from below as well.

Slowly he stumbled down the steps, surrendering his body to the eager beckoning of the depths of the earth. The darkness thickened about him almost tangibly, so that it was as if he walked down the deepening, ever-colder levels of the sea. He felt himself drawn down by the need of the spirits of all those he had murdered here. He remembered what he had asked Kuln-Holn about the gods. He remembered what the priests of Temaal had told him about the fate of the dead. Alastaphele, did she walk once more below the hills of Keldaroon?

He stopped before the open doors of the audience chamber. The long, low room was flooded with gray light. The boards that had been nailed over the narrow window were in pieces on the floor. Standing on them were a half dozen large gerlins. Perched on the arm of the throne, regarding him with an evil look, was Niad.

* * *

The man stepped into the room. The floor was bare stone, but the walls and ceiling still hung with heavy black linen. The birds eyed him watchfully. He felt their hunger as if it were his own. There was no sound there but the dripping of the rain that licked the stones outside.

‘Are you to be my judges, then?’ His voice sounded hoarsely in his ears.

Niad ceased preening and raised his great, wicked head.

Without warning he spread his wings and launched himself.

The black-winged shape filled the man’s vision. Unthinkingly he raised his arm in a protective gesture. The great beak jabbed his shoulder and the cruel talons raked his forearm. He felt the pain as liquid fire as he fell to the floor. The air boiled around him, beat up by the merciless strokes of wings. The room filled with raucous, avid cries. Dimly he saw the other gerlins start up into the air, their talons and wings contesting for the little space.

Again Niad struck, tearing open the man’s broad back. The reek of blood suffused the room, beat about by the rushing wings. The gerlins had starved in the cold season; many died. These, the strongest, were left. Led by Niad, they had at last succeeded in breaking into the Palace, but had not dared venture into the blackness beyond this room.

Now, maddened by the reek of blood, they flew about furiously and fought over their prey. The man covered his face and eyes with his arms and struggled to rise to his feet. They beat him back; he fell into a corner of the room. There the space was so narrow only one of them could come at him.

It was Niad who won the right. The monstrous bird swept in, struck, and wheeled back again. The man dragged himself up with a bloody hand clutching at the linen. He pulled at it between the bird’s attacks. The linen came loose from the wall, but along the floor and ceiling it was fastened more securely.

Again the huge bird swept in. The heavy talons caught linen and flesh and shredded both. Standing half-folded in the linen, the man saw the bird’s sharp turn. He saw the onrush of feathers, beak and talons. Then he fell, and held the linen open in his hands. Screeching, helpless now to turn, the bird flew into the hangings that the man twisted around it. The cries filled the room – different cries now, cries of helpless rage and fear muffled by the hangings. The black linen swelled and fell at the desperate thrashing. There was a heavy, hard sound. Then the roar of feathers was stilled, and the rippling hangings hung down grotesquely, bearing the broken body against the wall.

In fear the other gerlins alighted at the far corners of the room. One by one, doubtfully, they departed through the narrow window, and on the outer ledge spread their wings and pushed into the largeness of the rainy sky.

In the recesses of the room, the man leaned into the embrace of the stone and slowly sank onto the floor. Like some rich young chara’s doll, which she has discarded in the sudden blooming of her womanhood and left to lie in some out of the way corner of her wardrobe, so the High King lay unmoving in that corner in the tower of the abandoned Palace.

In time even the rain fell silent; but shortly afterward another deep-bellied cloud came to loose its veils over the mountain-top.

* * *

He came back to his senses. Weakness, loss of blood, pain, hunger and thirst made this difficult. He looked around the audience chamber, and remembered that time when he had first seen it shrouded so, two years and more before.

He lay resting, gathering his strength. He wanted to see her dimplace again before he died.

Later he stood, and walked unsurely to the door. He could see nothing at first in the well beyond, but he could clamber up the cold stone steps by feel. Slowly he crawled round the circles of the stairs. In truth he did not have the strength for it, not in his torn body. There was a time during which he thought he would not manage it, and would leave his corpse there upon the steps. But that would have been meaningless. If she lived, he wanted her to know he had died in her chamber, by her bed. He wanted her to know he had not forgotten. One last show-piece; and let her live with that.

He lost sight of the place for a while.

He was breathing heavily. He looked about.

Before him the doors were open into her dimplace. By the slivers of light through the cracks in the window he could see the faint, pale outlines of her bed. He took hold of the carved stone railing, and pulled himself to his feet. More he would not crawl.

He went in. He smelled the remnants of her presence. He remembered her troubled sleep that he had seen when he had come here like a thief to discard the water-ewer and guard her life – the last time he ever saw her. He was glad that she was gone. He was glad she had at least been spared this. He did not want to think of her as in any way his handiwork.

Weakly he knelt, then sat at the side of the bed. He rested his cheek against the saffron bed curtains. Breathing in the scent of peaceful flowers by a quiet riverbank, he let his eyes close.

And in death he dreamed.

XIX
The Final Flight

HE DREAMED he saw a forest’s edge, and from it a lonely rider broke and entered on the fringes of a vast and withered range. And in the dream he was himself the rider.

He rode a horse that once had been a noble beast, yet now its eyes were glazed and its coat befouled, and it bore him with a rolling, stuporous gait. And his own looks, beneath the tangle of his ragged hair and dirty garments, were those of one gently born – gently born, but fallen now from grace. His eyes were hollows, his mouth a whip-welt, his hands gripped the reins too tightly.

He looked not behind him, nor too far before. Alone upon that stark expanse, he rode as if all the hordes of bloodletting God rode at his tail, pursuing him or following his lead. Off to the right the blazing Goddess-sun sat like a fattened blood-beetle, half a fist above the horizon. Somewhat above Her the faint green God-moon was rising.

Sometime later he raised his head and looked about. The range spread to all sides, stopped only by sky. His horse’s gait was not so measured now. He drew back on the reins; and gratefully the horse slowed to a walk. Between his legs the stiff-ribbed barrel chest heaved and strove. With an effort he let fall the reins, and the horse stopped and swayed as if it might fall. He clambered to the ground, pulling after him his bags of food and drink.

He made an end to a brief meal and lay back on the harsh cushion of the grass.

He watched himself there. He had in the dream the look of a young man, but the lines of his face bore too many accounts unpaid-for.

Of a sudden he sat up and cried aloud a word. Convulsively his hands sought the sword that hung still beside the saddle. The range grew away from him, infinite and void. Dark against the moveless sun, the horse looked mournfully into his eyes.

He plucked stick-burrs from his cloak and urged the horse onwards. He held Goddess-sun firmly to his right hand side. Impassive and still She sat, far away, unmoved by the travails of tiny men.

Slowly he wended his way down the range. The verdure grew rarer; the air drier, choked with pungent dust. He found the track of an extinct river and followed it, deeper into the desert.

When his horse died he gathered the wood the river had left and cooked one of the haunches. The meat was acrid and left him thirstier. He tied the bags to his back and wandered on. Perched atop the bags, his heavy, bloody shortsword swung and gleamed. Behind him the desert carrion gathered, and nicely cleaned the bones.

A river fell out of the mountains far ahead, cold and bitter with the ceaseless darkness beyond; and at a bend in the river a small city rose. He stumbled down into the city, into air that was sweet with water.

He found an inn, and drank and ate. Then at last he seemed to slough off the last vestments of the desert, and looked about him at the others there, as if he were a man among men. In a voice unused to speaking, he asked if any of them knew the way to the city of Zaproll on the Sea.

‘That is no hard task,’ answered the innkeeper. ‘This river Somois is your road. Follow it to where it meets the sea and you will find what you seek.’

He strewed some coins across the table, took his bags and left. The men looked after him.

‘A queer sort,’ remarked the man at table. ‘But then, did you not say he came out of the desert?’

‘I marked me well his trappings,’ said the innkeeper. ‘Even so foul I knew them for the mark of the charanti of Gerso.’

‘Gerso,’ murmured the innkeeper’s winegirl, compassion on her pretty brown face. ‘That is a world away, on the border of the cold wilderness where they say Elna caged the barbarians. How has he come so far?’

‘How has Ara-Karn?’ answered her master.

* * *

South the Somois ran, down along the mountains, away from the moveless Sun. It broadened at its delta where, soft as columns of smoke against the dark-bright water beyond, rose the towers of the city of Zaproll on the Sea.

Shyly the Gerso entered the city, asking the way of those he passed. So at length he came to a great house by the vineyards and knocked upon its door. A slave admitted him. Then was it just past the time of the fifth meal, and the wealthy master and his family reclined on couches on the stoa, taking herb and enjoying the fine weather. Wordless he stood before them, then he cast down his bags and sank on his knees. Great tears welled from his eyes and fell upon the stone walk, dark as ink.

Three times he essayed to speak to them, but each time his voice choked in his throat.

‘O sir,’ he managed to say at last, ‘you will not know me now, but we are of a family, and once you loved my father. And once, when I was very young, my father sent me here to take a winter. And I slept in a chamber the color of pink sea-coral and played with your daughter, whom you called Asta.’

Thereat the master’s wife arose and exclaimed, ‘Look, my husband: it is none other than your kinsman’s only son from Gerso in the North.’

And the master nodded, and raised the youth to his feet. ‘Even had you stood in the crowds of Tarendahardil should I have known you,’ he said.

They bade him lie on a couch in the cool of the stoa, and they spoke of old family matters, tales of folk he had not seen in years. And the faces of his family grew dim before his eyes, and he ceased to move or smile.

Through the garden a young woman came, lovely in her grace. ‘They are bringing in the catch,’ she began; then beheld him on the couch. ‘But what man is this?’

‘Hush, Asta,’ said her mother. ‘This is one you should know well. Yet for now let him rest.’

So the slaves laid the Gerso to rest in the dimchamber for guests, whose walls were the color of pink sea-coral.

* * *

The long stone quays of the city of Zaproll on the Sea smelled of salt and fish-heads beneath the clustering birds. On the hillsides above the city the work of the wine went on, and the laborers bent over the grain, mowing with sickles and scythes the year’s second harvest. Below the city the many boats entered the harbor laden with shining fish. Asta walked with him along the stone ways above the boats.

She asked him with a pretty pouting, ‘Why do you draw away from me?’

He answered, ‘You would hate me, if you knew all I have done.’

‘What then?’ she teased.

He looked at her with a desolate humor, worse than pain, showing on his countenance. ‘Oh, I am not the same one you knew when we were both young, Asta. Then I was a little boy, but now I am a man and have had the best of tutors, and learned my lessons well. In Gerso he tutored me, among the burning ruins, on the art of hate and sorrow. Now I am a traitor to my kind, and the blood of thousands stains my hands.’ Seeing her look he laughed a laugh that ended too suddenly. He stood over her, and something terrible and fierce blazed out of his eyes, so that unthinkingly she turned away.

‘No,’ he said harshly, ‘there is no forgetfulness for me, not even here – of all places, not here! None of it might have been at but a single word from me. One word! And well I know the speaking of that word now. Tell me what you have heard of the fastness of Ul Raambar. Tell me, pretty Asta, have you not heard fair words of Ul Raambar? – Yet perhaps not the final word. Why did I not speak out, there or in Tarendahardil, in the garden of the Empress? What demon was it that seized my tongue in fear? Was it him? And yet I hate as much as he said I would – even more. All, all that he said was true!’

‘Who is this you speak of?’

‘Who? Who?’ he shouted. He flung wide his arms, sweeping them over sky and earth and sea. ‘Him! Him!’

Silently they returned to the great house. All the fury drained from him. The master and his wife, seeing his resignation, thought him almost well.

Before the fourth meal of the following pass he went down to the quays again. He walked the stone moles, and watched the ships pass in and out of harbor. Swirling in the sky above, the many sea-birds culled and cawed. The great, warm Southern Ocean glittered in the light of moveless Goddess, taunting him within its glitter. I am the end, it seemed to murmur. There shall be no flight beyond me, but one.

Against a shed leaned a low-slung boat, agleam with black and yellow paint. He looked upon it. That was a death-barge, which bears men’s corpses over the bright waves Goddess-ward where, upon the blessed shores of the far side of the world, poor men rise again as princes, and every drab is beauteous.

He looked to sea again where the currents ran, where the sky was a curtain of darkness. He closed his eyes. Then he took oars into the death-barge and laid it in the water. The shipwright, who had paused in his labors to drink a cup and let the paint dry, emerged and called for the thief to stop; but the Gerso heard him not.

* * *

Only the eye-gulls kept him company, wheeling in the pallid sky. Beneath the little barge the warm currents drew him on, deeper toward the darkness. Already Goddess sat half-quenched in the distant sea. And in Her light the clouds above were coppery, and his chest blood-red.

All at once She was no more, and his heart quailed, to be beneath a desolate darkling sky. He threw back the oars, lay in the bottom of the barge and slept. And still the currents drew him on.

He slept not long in the gloom. His head turned, his chest strove, the sweat stood on his brows and cheeks; and then his eyes were open. He heard the water beyond the sides of the barge, but saw only the sky. A deep violet green it was, smudged here and there with other colors, singular, miraculous, unworldly colors. He had never seen their like before. He lay enraptured by the sight. Throned high in splendor, changeful God passed mocking by, leading him on.

He opened his mouth. In his heart he felt such painful wonder, it was as if he lived now and had known only death or drugged dreams before. Darker grew the sky, darker. And out of it appeared between the clouds innumerable flecks of fire, monstrous and strange.

Then in the wonder of his heart an enormous knowledge burgeoned. He strove to raise himself, but there was no more strength within his limbs. His lips began to move, as if he would give voice to that boundless knowledge. But his lips said only a word, the word he had uttered in the burning wastelands, the word which broke his every sleep, the word as he had heard it from the lips of others, in curses, in horror, in despair and worshipful exaltation – the word – the name.

The pitiful sounds were one with the slapping of the waves. The darkness was complete. The death-barge was no more, and he himself was no more. But at times, such was the trick of the waves that they seemed to echo the hoarsely whispered words that were all that remained of him. It was as if thousands dimly chanted them:

‘Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn! Ara-Karn!’

* * *

He was himself once more in the dream. The currents bore him on toward the bottom of the world, the center of the Dark Seas opposite to Goddess. From there the light of Her rose faintly all along the ring-like rim of the sea like a corona of fire.

In front of his death-barge, a little flat rock broke from the sea.

A human figure stood waiting on the rock. He looked upon her and saw that she was Alastaphele, clad in her barge-raiment even as he had last seen her on the Ocean of Death.

‘Is it not beautiful?’ she asked.

All about her the flickering stars wheeled on unseen spheres, and the great funnel of dark-stained air within the rising lights pressed down about them both. In answer to that pressure the swells ran outward from the rock in ever-widening rings, each within and without the rest. But of all this he was scarcely aware. He was looking at her.

He knew again the sweet curve of her neck, the way she held her fingers over her breast, and the way the breezes lifted the strands of hair about her visage. These and other sights, so well known and so long lost, pierced him with longing. He wanted to step forward upon the rock and hold her. But he could not.

‘No,’ she said softly, ‘you may not yet join me upon this land. But we may speak; that much has been granted. Tell me then, and say truly, why have you done all these things so unlike you?

‘It was for you.’ Even as he said it he knew it was a lie.

She smiled. ‘You followed, and have found me. But my love, I do not blame you. And now you may tell me, where is Kar Belthus, and what has become of him?’

He looked from the glory of her eyes, in which he could see the starry sky, to the hem of her robe where it shuddered and caressed the wet round rim of the sea. He found he knew the answer to her question.

‘He is dead, and lives no more,’ he answered. ‘All his ambitions won him nothing but a violent end. Even as he reached for the power he craved, that influence and strength he had before was cut from him as by a scythe.’

She nodded gravely. ‘And do you love her very much?’

‘You and she,’ he answered, ‘you are the same.’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but no. You yourself said it, to the old priests in the caves. “The flesh is the woman.” How then could we be the same? You know better.’

‘Yes.’ He bent his head.

‘Return now. We shall not see each other more. Be happy and at peace, my love. It was not you who caused my death.’

Tears burst like blood from his eyes, and the hairs upon his head pricked up from the scalp. He knew the truth then, and the cause of all this, and the blame. And it was taken from his body suddenly, like something physical: he knew the release of it and the loss. She turned and walked beyond the island. But before the last radiance burned out in the air, he called after her.

‘Farewell, Gold,’ he called. His voice was shaking and faint.

‘Farewell. Farewell.’

And she was gone, finally and forever.

He turned about, and beheld rising above him the Tower of God, which was jade and iron and a black, black stone. It spanned in its girth an area as great as the city of Tarendahardil whole. It rose into the wind and rain, the rain that never stopped from falling here in the black world. It rose into the clouds and faded from sight, and he felt dizzy to look at it, for he guessed at what illimitable heights that tower climbed, like a handle to the Earth. And he sensed somewhere in the utter reaches of his soul, how at the topmost reaches of that tower something reached out into the void above. And it called, and the Green Star came, that star that the gods had named the Second Lodestar.

And his were the first mortal eyes to behold the Green Star since the Sixth Fall of the World. For none might see it now unless they stood far within the dark side of the world, near to this midmost point, where no mortal might walk and live.

And he saw then three stars that hung about the Jade Tower in the clouds, and each of those globes of light shone with a different hue and brightness. There were souls within those stars, strange hearts with nothing human about them, and they spoke to him, straight into his soul so that his heart smote in him and the blood hammered his skull, and he wanted to scream out for pain and fear.

‘You have done well,’ the stars said. But they spoke in no tongue he had ever heard or learned, and how it was he knew what they said, he could never fathom. But it was a dream and in dream impossible things are true. ‘All is accomplished but the end. We free you of your bonds.’

And something wrenched and tore inside him, like a great pressure, or a twisting and straining of mighty hands – and then it broke.

The hardness about his heart shattered away and the needs upon him, that he was only dimly aware of all those years, were gone. Ara-Karn staggered. It was like a death-blow, like the final stroke of pity and release, and he knew he now was dead.

But in the dream, upon that lost nameless isle dead in the center of the raging black sunless seas of God, at the root of His dark tower of jade, the former king fell upon his knees and wept. And his pain was such he would have welcomed death and an end to it all. And in that hour, his most wretched and last, he was foredone, and only the faint echo of a lost dear voice upheld him. He heard Alastaphele call his name, his true name, the name he had known from his birth, and the name he took when his first crown was set upon his brow. And her voice, and nothing else, stretched to him like a comforting hand, and held him, and drew him back to the world. Or was it another’s voice that called?

* * *

In the dimplace in the White Tower, the body of the King of Kings slumped on the dais by the bed. Thereafter the body lay still. There was no further movement.

XX
Judgment

ONE SLEEP, late in winter, a heavy mist came off the sea to cloak the ruins of Tarendahardil. Slowly the mist rose off the lower quarters, until only the plateau and the mountain remained in its embrace. And there was revealed in the harbor a fleet of ships of war, their masts vanishing into the wet gray ceiling of the cloud.

The black decks of the ships were empty, and the steering-oars pushed back and forth to the wash of the harbor currents. But on the marshaling-field brightward of the ruins a new encampment stood outside the crumbling wooden outworks of the barbarian camp. Over the encampment were raised the standards of Rukor, Vapio, the Eglands, Fulmine and the house of the Bordakasha. But the army made no move toward the mountain stronghold hidden beyond the mist. It was as if even Charan Haspeth feared as yet to walk the desert ways of the city of Ara-Karn.

* * *

O Goddess, O Dear One, O Lady Unequaled, hear me, hear my words. The Man has come and defiled your temples and ravished those made holy in your service. He has struck down your altars and reft you of offerings. Strike him, and reave him of life in return.

Let the one he loves most strike the blow. O Goddess, hear my words!

There was only one person still left alive in the city. In the Brown Temple Alsa, last of the priestesses, still tended the sacred fire. At the end of every sleep she rose and ate a small cup of millet mixed with water. Then she fed the fire and reconsecrated the black blade before the idol. This she did in the black robes and golden mask of the high ceremonies; all the other rites she performed unmasked in the gray robes.

She went about her labors silently, used to the unmanned stones outside. She only spoke for prayers. But long since had Alsa lost her faith in that vanished burning orb to which she prayed. In the quiet confinement of her little world, she continued her observances only out of habit and the hopelessness of change. Hatred born of silence and long brooding had replaced the faith in her. She had seventeen summers now, and had become a beautiful woman beneath the virginal robes, but her eyes were like hard stones.

Now, kneeling in black before the burning altar with the knife balanced on her outstretched fingers, she heard a footfall on the steps without.

Hastily she completed the formulae of consecration and rose to find concealment, too late. A woman stood in the doorway. Tall and handsome, she was dressed in Rukorian hunting garb: a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, fastened with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg; beneath this a white sleeveless linen tunic with a blue-patterned hem above the knee, a leather wristband, sandals laced up the calves, and a zone of leather and brass. At her side hung a pouch of arrows and a bow of the invaders. Water streamed from her hair and cloak.

‘Who are you?’ Alsa demanded.

The woman drew back the hood. ‘Do you not know?’

The priestess gaped.

‘You are the Body of Goddess.’

The woman nodded. ‘So they called me.’

‘It is true, then?’ Alsa could scarcely believe it. ‘You are the Empress, the Divine Queen? You have returned?’

‘And who are you, your reverence, that alone you keep the sacred fire?’

‘I am known to your majesty. I an Alsa; once I brought a message from the High Priestess to your majesty.’ She scarcely knew what to say. ‘Did your majesty come with the army? – But of course. Where are the others? All the cities speak your name. We have lacked only your voice to lead us in holy rebellion against the Cursed One.’

‘So I saw in my journey. But I traveled here alone, and told no man my name. I have only come to see him.’

‘Your majesty knows what pass we enter on, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is the Pass of God,’ Alsa said. ‘It is the Pass of Freedom. Goddess turns Her back this pass. She sees nothing of what we do. It does not come to pass, and no crime requires purification. Nothing is forbidden to us this pass. Nothing.’

‘My nurse brought me your message,’ the woman said. ‘So I stopped here on my way. They say he is alone. Will you come with me?’

‘With all my heart, your majesty.’

* * *

On the Way of Kings the fog closed about the women with an awful, secret silence. The cold rains passed in veils across the broken stones, fallen walls, and charred remains. There was no more dismal place in the world. Its face belonged to Ara-Karn. Its very soul was his.

In the square below the mountain they walked among the bones of Elna’s Pillar of Victory. The stone disks were defaced with the tribal marks of the barbarians. A wooden causeway bridged the coomb. In spite of all the rain, the stones below still bore the stains of the lives they had taken. The Iron Gate had been torn from their sockets in fury by the barbarians, dragged across the mountain-top and hurled down the cliff. The wall of black stone gaped like a malformed mouth, beyond which mists closed, removing all sight.

Into that mouth the women walked in silence.

At the Palace door the priestess stopped. She peered into the doorway. A breath of stagnant, musty air issued from within, as from some mountain-thorsa’s lair that has been broken into after being sealed for many years and, littered with bones and rotten bedding, gives pause to even the bravest hunters. So this black doorway gave pause to the priestess.

‘I am troubled,’ she moaned.

The Queen took her by the hand. ‘Come. There is no danger here for us.’

They went in, and the Queen shut the door behind. They stood in one of the servants’ entrances. The halls were narrow and the ceilings low. They waited while their eyes grew to drink the gloom. Then the Queen took the priestess by the hand and led her through the lightless labyrinth of the Palace of Ara-Karn.

Alsa, as she walked in the darkness, could not help but see again all the sights of violence she had witnessed these past years.

The broken, bloody body of the old High Priestess stretched naked on the altar; the burnt bodies in the streets and back ways of High Town; the wounded people who came to her in the Temple. She saw again the body of the young Emperor, the son of this woman who now, unknowing, led her in this labyrinth. Alsa herself had plunged the black stone blade into Elnavis’ heart – the same blade she held now. She had done that in a fit of religious frenzy, and even now remembered only the haze and smell of it, as a long debauch. Now she felt neither frenzy nor fear, only a cool, growing anger. This man alone had caused these things.

‘Where is he?’ she whispered.

‘He will be above,’ the Queen said, ‘in the White Tower. There stands the door. Are you still afraid?’

‘No. I am glad.’

Softly the Queen opened the door. The well of stairs was lighted by a dim gray light falling from above. The two women ascended the steps quietly. Despite herself, Alsa felt her belly tremble. She gripped the knife fiercely in her hand.

Upon the second landing they found that the source of the light was a doorway opening into a long, low chamber. The walls and ceiling of the room were covered with black linen; a narrow window, partly covered with a broken bit of board, let enter the misty winter light. There was a throne, black and gray feathers strewn about the floor, and a smell of blood in the air. Otherwise, the room was empty.

They went on. The light faded and failed about them as they ascended. At the summit of the steps the Queen stopped. She guided Alsa through a wide doorway. There was very little light there: Alsa could discern a large, pale shape, but could not make it out. From the echoes of their footsteps, she guessed it was a large room, almost as large as the chamber of the Goddess.

‘Where are we?’

‘My dimplace.’

‘Is he here?’

The Queen’s hand pointed Alsa’s in a certain direction. ‘There, cut into the wall, you will find steps leading to the window. Take down the boards that cover it.’

Hastily the young priestess obeyed. Feeling her way up the cold steps, she reached the window. She found a metal latch or catch at one side: releasing it, she let the boards fall on the ledge. The sound and sudden inpouring of light were startling. It took her some moments to regain her sight. Blinking, she looked down into the room.

It was a round, hive-like chamber barren of hangings, chairs, lamps or vessels. Only a large bed surrounded with pale bed-curtains remained: it was that which Alsa had seen vaguely in the darkness. The Divine Queen stood silent at the foot of the bed, looking down at the floor on the far side. Her face was hidden by the golden hair, and Alsa could not see her majesty’s expression.

Warily the young priestess descended and came round to the side of the Queen. She saw it then.

One wall was smeared with dark stuff that was like fungus, or lichen, or coal dust. It caked on the floor, where lay fragments of dark wood, three bright arrows, and a slag of metal like iron.

On the dais supporting the bed lay the body of a man.

He had been dressed in a simple tunic. His legs were bent and his feet bare. His arms were out-flung on the stones. His torso was twisted half round, and his face lay against the stone. His arms and back were bloody with long, raking wounds, as if torn by knives. The flesh was gray and blue with cold.

Blood lay about it in a wide ring, dark aromatic blood, as thick as jelly.

The body did not stir. It did not look as if it would ever stir again.

‘Are we too late, then?’ Alsa asked. ‘Is he dead?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’

The young woman stooped and laid him out in the position of the dead. She took care to let the weird blood leave no stain upon her. She made the signs of Goddess, of God, and of the Couple. She repeated breathlessly, mindless of the words in her rising excitement, the words of the ritual. Her breasts rose and fell and she felt the fabric of her robes brushing across the pointed peaks. Her thighs trembled softly.

She held the knife aloft in both hands. She looked to the Queen, for a final blessing.

‘Wait.’

The Queen had watched these gestures with thoughtful eyes. Now she undid the hooded cloak and draped it mercifully over the naked form. Upon the dark green fabric that covered the man’s heart she placed the blood-red opal cut in the shape of a serpent’s egg.

Then she tore free the cords of her tunic, baring her breast, and stepped between the priestess and her victim.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘you may strike.’

‘Your majesty, I do not understand! Will you spare this man?’

‘I offer myself in his place.’

‘But he is a monster!’

‘He is a part of me.’

‘Are you the Body of Goddess or some emissary of the Dark One come to ensnare me?’

‘Neither. I am a woman.’

‘No, I will not hear these words of yours!’

‘Strike then, and condemn yourself. So you will die untouched and hopeless.’

‘You speak of hope and defend this man, the enemy of all hope?’

‘I only speak as the words are torn from me.’

‘You were yourself his greatest enemy!’

‘I fought against myself. I was a stranger to myself.’

‘You brought me here, you asked me—’

‘—To come to know what lurks within your heart.’

‘Righteous anger, or the requirement of my order.’

‘There are but two paths for you. Your choice will prove you.’

‘I will not go near this crossing—’

‘Too late: you are upon it even now.’

‘And before me—’

‘—His way or Hers. It is for you to choose which is which.’

‘Divine one, Divine one!’

Alsa fell back. One arm was flung over the masked face, the other held out the black stone blade as if it were a charm. Sadly, the other woman shook her head.

‘Girl,’ she said, so softly that only they two might have heard the word, ‘listen to what I say. I call you girl because of your youth, but in truth you are not a girl but an unnatural thing, part maiden, part crone – even as I was once. Now it is time for you to put aside both of these. When I have spoken, then it will be for you to speak. Whatever the choice you make, I will obey it. Our fate will be for you to choose.

‘Once I thought of this man as you think now, and prayed for his death. And because I proved unworthy, I sought even the path of death. But this was not granted. An old woman, whom I had wronged terribly, brought me back to life and health. So, naked and cleansed in the Ocean of Death, I emerged and faced this same choice. And I knew I could never be free of this man until I had faced him one last time. The old woman warned me I must arrive no later than this very pass. But I could not make my choice until just now, when you broke the boards of the window and the gray light bared his body under me.

‘I see in him now the end of the path I might have chosen, the path you may choose now. Once indeed I swore to let nothing sway me from the darkness of my heart’s desire. And I led another down that way. He was a Rukorian captain in my service here, and is the general of the army camped now on the plain. You would call him a soldier in Her cause, but I have seen and spoken with him, and to me he seems a greater monster than this man ever was. He is implacable and terrible without relief, and if he stood where you stand now, he would not waver.

‘The same fate befell another man, one whom I once believed I loved. Even in my son I saw it, when he returned all bent from his former beauty, living only for death and cruelty. But now to me it seems a better thing to perish as a victim than to end in power as these men have.’

Alsa stood gestured with the stone blade, as if to dismiss the words. ‘And will you let this man escape unpunished, after all he has done?’

‘Can you look at him and think of this place that he has made his home, and still call him unpunished?’

Alsa looked down on the ashen body, bloody, lifeless, ready for a death-barge. She shook her head, and against her own belief heard her lips utter the word, ‘No.’

‘His full punishment, if he can endure it, would be in living on afterward. For if he chooses that, then he will face no small atonement.

‘Listen to me, child. Once I believed that we should be whole as the world is whole, both of darkness and of light, complete unto ourselves. But it is a lonely pleasure to be complete. Who will hear your voice, but you? Who will speak in answer, but you? What does a circle meet but itself? There is only one wholeness for me, and that is the wholeness between this man and me. When I saw him again, my body seemed to leap in anguish for all he has suffered and must suffer still. And that is more than you or I could have endured. There is a word – I will not say it here fully. What is love? I do not know, but it has mastered me.’

Alsa lowered the knife. But her fingers would not let it go.

‘And yet,’ she asked, ‘what would become of me? How could I return to the Temple or face the sisters?’

‘That life is not for you. You lack the simple faith of the old High Priestess. It was put upon you, even as being Queen was put upon me. I never knew its meaning or gave myself to it until the year that ends this pass. Then, seated at the knees of a rude woman and seeing how she ruled a little village, I chose to become again a queen.’

‘But what you speak of is forbidden.’

‘This is the Pass of God, and Goddess turns Her back. Nothing is forbidden on this pass. You yourself have said it.’

Once again Alsa took a step back. ‘I hear you,’ she said at last. ‘And I want to trust in this vision you offer me. But I do not see it. I cannot perform the ritual! But it is the only way I know! And I am afraid of what I will become if I perform it.’

‘You must choose from your heart. This will be no ritual, you are no priestess here, but only a young and nameless woman, come to murder her enemy. And if you choose murder, then you must kill me first before him, and swear that you will speak the rites for both of us together. That is my one demand.’

Alsa stood over the outstretched body. Slowly she sank to her knees beside it and laid one long, pale hand along the stiff, bloody neck.

‘Choose,’ said the Queen.

‘Do you call this mercy?’ she demanded.

‘Choose.’

Alsa flung the knife away. The stone blade broke against the wall. She stood to her feet and faced the older woman. ‘Small choice,’ she said hotly, ‘for I think he is already slain.’

Grave gladness kindled in the Queen’s eyes. She knelt beside her on the far side of the body.

‘Thank you,’ she said, so softly Alsa could scarcely hear it. ‘I know it is far from easy, above all to take the first step. Let me take it for you then.’

The hands lifted off the golden mask. Alsa tossed her head, stared around the room, touched her cheeks wet and chill with tears.

‘You are lovely, Alsa,’ said the Queen. ‘Put off these robes, say your last prayers at the altar and go into the world. Go to Hertha-Toll in the far North; ask the women there what it is like to be with a man, and without one. Rejoice in your youth and the desire you fire in men. Perhaps you will find some stirring within yourself also.’

She embraced the younger woman and kissed her on her brow.

Alsa bent her head. A great heaviness seemed to lift from her shoulders, and her body quivered the way a young colt will in the breezes of its first summer.

‘I had lost my faith,’ she said. ‘I had lost my faith, but now I believe I have seen Goddess in the flesh and heard Her words. Wherever I go I will say to all that here is a Queen worthy of worship.’

‘We will meet again before you go.’

The sounds of the priestess’ footsteps faded down the dark stairwell.

* * *

Allissál turned back to the man beside the bed. But all her efforts to restore him were in vain. She had told Alsa that he still lived, but in truth she was not sure. There was so little life in him.

She drew his head upon her lap and rocked him in her arms.

‘Jade, Jade, wake up, and live.’

There was no answer in the heavy body, not even a flickering of the fine black eyelashes. Her hair brushed across the anguished face. She was weeping. The cold of him seemed to pierce her like a weapon of despair.

‘Jade, Jade, wake up, and live.’

She bent lower over him. Her tears fell upon the brow and nose and bearded cheeks. She kissed the cold gray lips fiercely, as if the very desperation in her might somehow stir him. But the lips did not move.

Had she come too late? She stared at the lines about his eyes, the deep furrows on the brow, the cheeks sunken like caves under the sharp bones. The trail of his blood led across the floor from the dais to the black mouth of the doorway. No doubt the stairs were also painted with it. She had heard the tales they told in the South, of how the King was mad and the anger of the gods fell on him at last. She had taken the rumors for messages he sent to her, to ask her for her pardon. She had never guessed at this.

‘Jade, Jade, I beg of you, wake up and live, or I will surely die with you.’

Was it only in her hope? – there was a faint stirring of the eyes – and did not the lips move slightly?

She dragged the body on the bed, wrapped in the cloak. She roamed the chamber to find something for him. He needed food and drink. In her maidens’ old quarters she found a stoppered ewer half-full of water. Eagerly she climbed back up the narrow stairs. She found him as she had left him, no better and but no worse. She tilted the ewer against his lips; the water spilled over the bed-linens, but it seemed as though his lips did move, and drink, a little.

Then all at once in horror she remembered.

She cast the ewer down and recoiled from the body. She stared in terror at the ewer. Had it been left untouched because of that? She smelled of the water: it was faintly sweet, as though crushed dried blossoms had been sprinkled and dissolved in it. But her maidens had often left such water in basins beside their couches to perfume the air while they slept or lay in love.

Once more she looked at the body, cold and gray as winter’s light. Then she swept the ewer up to her lips and drank deeply. It was sweet and deadly cold, that water. She felt it spill like ice down the open front of her tunic. She sat beside him by the bed and drew the sheets over both of them. She held him in her arms and kissed the cold, cold cheek.

‘We follow the same path now,’ she murmured in his ear.

She lay down on the bed and curled against the cold, still form.

* * *

Some time passed. Then distantly she heard a faint, shuffling sound. It was issuing from deep below the Palace. From level to level the shuffling ascended, until it filled all the stories of the Palace – until it spilled up the tower steps and came from the very threshold of the room. An angry murmuring echoed the shuffling sound, like the buzz of swarming bees – but the doorway was still empty.

Fear took her. The hairs of her nape were upstanding. She was trembling.

The ghosts and spirits he had fetched from their unquiet, earthbound ends had been set free when his Dark Man had burned and failed. But still they filled the halls and pits of the Palace. Still they sought him out atop the White Tower. And she too was the object of their vengeance. The slain of Urnostardil, the murdered slaves who had built the citadel, had much to seek from the last daughter of Elna’s house.

‘Begone,’ she cried aloud. ‘You will not have him!’

She clasped the cold shrouded body fiercely. But the horrid sounds from beyond the door did not cease, nor did the hungry spirits of the dead give back. She knew who they were, but felt no shame to defy them.

‘Go back, and I promise you goodly offerings. The songs of Farewell will be sung at every crossroads of the city, and a hundred times more in the yard between the gates.’

But the angry murmurings only grew more dreadful in her ears.

‘Go back,’ she said, ‘and we will found a yearly festival in your memory. Each year for one week’s time men will think of you and bid you good fortune in the world beyond.’

But the anger beyond the door increased still more – and did she make out, faint like candle-cast shadows, vague hands grasping at the stones about the door?

‘Go back,’ she pleaded. ‘What do you want of me? Will your pain be less if ours is added to it? I will give over and consecrate this Citadel of my ancestors to you. Even this, the pride of Elna and Ilazrius, and the last remnant of my heritage, I will give you if you spare him. It will stand here over the sea throughout the centuries, the largest and finest barge in the world, and there will be thirteen shrines consecrated within it for prayers and offerings to be given you. Only, I beg of you, let him live.’

At that, at last, there was a lessening in the angry sounds. One by one, the sightless shades turned and sank down the many levels into the earth that was their prison.

Allissál, sobbing, leaned against the body beside her. Still he had not stirred, and she felt a sickness in her belly. What had she done? They were both dead, and she had sworn away her heritage. Elna himself had slept and died here in this room centuries before, ancient and revered in his great carven bed, surrounded by his many women, sons and grandsons.

She felt very tired. There was not even strength left for tears. But also she felt peace. At last she felt she knew the heart of her greatest ancestor, the barbarian, the lover, and the King.

So, prepared at last, she turned to have her final look at him, and found his eyes open upon her.

‘Good-waking, Jade,’ she said.

He smiled. It was a strange sight, that smile. Weakly he raised his hand and wiped at the traces of her tears. But he said nothing. His eyes were open with an empty wonder. They were the eyes of a newborn child, which showed only innocence. No memories darkened them. The blackness in the pupils had shrunk, leaving only the green, bright as a bandar-skin.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked him. But he only looked at her.

Slowly she drew down the hunting-cloak. His naked chest seemed wan and gray. But the wound over his heart had closed; the dark blood no longer oozed out. Even the scar seemed old and fading. She marveled at him, and wondered if he really was a man, or what his followers had claimed.

‘You need light and air,’ she told him, and helped him to his feet. She covered his nakedness in the cloak, and refastened the brooch-pin by his throat. In this and in the rest he let her do as she would; he offered no more objections or help than a toddling child would have done. He leaned upon her trustingly. His movements lacked that grace and sinuous strength they once had.

Slowly she helped him down the stairs and out upon the wide roof of the Palace in the gusting winds.

‘It is raining,’ she said. She drew the hood over his head, but he pushed it back and let the rain stream down his face.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is right to feel this rain. It is a good rain.’

He eyes looked far out beyond the roof-rim over the ruins of the city he had destroyed. The mists had risen, but in the murk of the rain little beyond the ruins could be seen. It was as if the world began and ended with what had been left here, lifeless and grim.

His lips moved, and his throat worked, but no sounds came out.

‘Ah, my poor love,’ she murmured, and kissed him. She kissed his mouth and his throat.

It was as if her kiss brought back the gift of speech to him. ‘Allissál,’ he said. She had never heard her name spoken in that way. It was as though he had placed in that one word all clouds and seas, lakes, mountains, cities, children, and every Queen that ever was.

His eyes mirrored the misty sky in peace. But then a shadow darkened the eyes, and the black swallowed much of the jade therein. A respite of calm followed, and then another bout of painful thoughts and memories. She watched all this as she might have looked on thunderclouds in the sky that come nearer and then are blown back, then threaten a deluge once more.

At last the balance of black and green in his eyes settled. Still it altered, somewhat, but slow and slight the changes that still took place. And she knew that he had faced what he had done, faced it as though it had been the deeds of another man; then acknowledged that the man who had done all that was himself after all. The worst, she knew, was past.

‘Good-waking, Jade,’ she said.

He looked at her. He drank in the sight of her. She felt a little dizzy to be looked on with such fierce delight and joy. ‘I want to call you Gold,’ he said, ‘but that was another.’

‘Call me what you will. I will even play her, if it pleases you.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘She is gone now. And it would not be right.’ He sighed. ‘And do you forgive me?’

She rose to her feet before him. ‘Behold.’

She lifted the hem of her tunic. High up the pale right thigh, the Raamba marriage-band gleamed in the mist like fire and sunlight. ‘Since you last saw this, it has not left my body. Even in the Ocean of the Dead I wore it.’

He nodded. Some small part of grace, of nobility and even of innocence, seemed to return to that blighted, blasted, darkened visage whose owner had set the world aflame.

‘Jade, there is an army below, in the field where your men camped. Now your men have deserted you, but at a word from me these will follow you and do your bidding.’

He was still caught in the contemplation of the ruins. ‘Tell them to go home.’

‘I meant no mockery. The army is there. They are Rukorians, and Haspeth leads them.’

‘Tell him to go home, then. I will wage no more wars.’

She rested her head upon his shoulder. ‘Then we must go away, as soon as you are able,’ she murmured. ‘For if they find us here and learn that you are Ara-Karn, then they will kill us both, and Haspeth will strike the first blow. I set them on their course and loosed them, but I cannot rule them now in this.’

‘The world is as wounded as I am,’ he said. ‘This was my doing. Now,’ he said, ‘I must heal it.’

Their faces were so close that the rain that dripped from their chins fell upon each other’s breast.

‘I will help you,’ she said. ‘I will not leave your side again.’

He leaned down and kissed her.

Epilogue

WHEN THE SOLDIERS found the Citadel empty, most of them returned to Rukor and put away their swords. But part of the army remained; Haspeth led them darkward and waged war upon Erion Sedeg in Fulmine. After some months’ campaigning the two armies joined on a muddy field in Belknule in the battle known thereafter as the Wolf’s-Feast. There fell Haspeth and all his followers, even to Haspeth’s son. Erion Sedeg lived, though wounded and weak. With him survived fewer than fifty of his mercenaries.

Upon his return to the horse-court of his fastness in Fulmine, the man who was called the King’s Tongue was murdered by the hostage children. For a prank they sketched these characters in his blood on the stones beside the corpse:

DA ELGA KAAN

The children scattered laughing to their home-born cities, where they were received with welcomes as heartfelt as they were brief.

But when the cities heard rumor of the return of the Divine Queen and that she had joined herself in marriage to the King in the old Imperial City, they sent legates to see if it were true. Bands of people flocked there as well, so that the ruins came alive again. Guided by the last priestess of the Brown Temple, they passed fire over the black mountain-top and cleansed the earth with seawater, and so purified the place of evil and consecrated it as a barge-tomb for the poisoned ones.

Alsa found that she could not leave behind her virgin’s robes so quickly, for there was much to be done that year, and she alone knew the rites which would ease the people’s minds. Messengers were sent to the other priestesses in the caves of the Desert, but they did not return.

At opposite ends over the welcoming gateway of the barge two statues were raised, of red stone, one at the north lance-tower and the other at the south. So different they had been in their hearts and all their ways, yet fate entangled their lives to end them. Now like sentinels the carven likenesses of Gundoen and Ampeánor stood atop the battlements of the barge and looked out over the reborn city, brightward and to the sea; and the gentle light of Goddess, loving and forgiving, fell upon them both in equal measure.

* * *

That spring Kiva returned to Tarendahardil. She and her followers stayed in the Hall of Kings and there did worship to the royal couple.

One sleep the King came to see Kiva alone. He showed her two ornate, gilded coffers. ‘I kept these for you,’ he told her, ‘but it was not until now I could bring myself to let you have them. It was not always irony. I knew them too.’

Kiva took the coffers out of the city brightward to the hill beside the sea. There, in the two beautiful barge-tombs she had had built a year earlier, she put the coffers along with clay vessels of food and Postio wine. Then in the strong ruddy light of Goddess she did off her robes and lay in the dirt between the tombs with the men who had accompanied her.

The two men returned to the city, but Kiva did not clothe herself. Naked in the dirt she abased herself and, lifting her face brightward prayed, ‘O Lady, you who are never far off when a woman knows joy or suffering, grant now that these two men, whom I loved beyond all the others I knew, be given free passage across the seas to the world beyond. Here I have honored them as best I could. Now give them strong and beautiful bodies there, laughter, riches, and peace, and the company of women no less lovely, no less skilled, and no less drunk in love with them, than I.’

A full waking and longsleep Kiva rested with only a cloak of black linen and a necklet of chorjai blossoms to conceal her nakedness. There she ate of the finest food and drank dark Postio unmixed, and wept and laughed and remembered, and so gave ease to the spirits of Ullerath and Berowne.

* * *

The rebel tribes did not reach home swiftly, for they were a large company burdened with many goods and followers, and the roads of the North were unsafe. More battles lay in store for them, but at length, in the fullness of summer of that year, they won their way to the Pass of Gerso and the ash-field of the city where they had begun.

Through the Pass at last they beheld again the woodlands and wild fields of the cold far North so dear to their savage hearts. Some went down on their knees and kissed the dirt of their native land. There had been little wine on the journey, and the going had been hard along those muddy, snow-flecked, outlaw roads. The tribesmen were lean again and hard, and their cold eyes glittered young once more.

They followed the paths and sought their own villages, Vorisal and Kamskal and Morbynar, Chalpion, Roighal, Karghil, River’s-Bend, Forun, Buzrah and Undain.

Last of all to reach home were Kul-Dro and the men of the tribe of Tont Ornoth, whose village lay farthest from the Pass. One week they had passed in Durbar, and now Nam-Rog came on with them, bearing still the jeweled coffer.

Hertha-Toll greeted the chieftain of the Durbars gravely amidst the wild cries and laughter of the warriors and their wives. Together they went down to the bay and placed the coffer in the barge the old woman had readied.

They went out in a fishing boat upon the Ocean of Death. Nam-Rog pulled the oars and Hertha-Toll held the line. They found the Current of the Dead and let the barge drift. And Hertha-Toll said the words, and so they bade their last farewell to him whose life had bound theirs, the bravest man, the ablest warrior, and the mightiest hunter of all the tribes of the far North.

* * *

Half a year passed, and spring wheeled round again to the far North. Then a ship came into the bay below Gundoen’s village. It was a ship from Arpane on the Sea, the only city on the Ocean of Death.

The ship drove its keel up aground, and men came ashore laden with trunks of riches and bales of silks and linens. And there stepped ashore a young woman, almost a girl, beautiful, of black eyes and lustrous dark hair.

‘I am called Alsa,’ she said.

In her arms she cradled an infant some months old, strong with bright jade eyes and golden hair.

The young woman presented the child to Hertha-Toll on the beach. ‘I bring him to you from the King and Queen in Tarendahardil,’ she told her through the interpreters. ‘He is their firstborn. It was their wish that you guide and raise him, if this pleases you. He has of course many names, but the one we all call him, is “Gundoen-Ana.” ’

The old woman took young Gundoen-Ana into her arms. He was sheltered from the cold in the folds of a dark green hooded hunting-cloak from Gerso, bound with a blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a spider.

Hertha-Toll held him up into the bright, bright sky.

‘So,’ she said to Nam-Rog at her side, ‘a child has come out of this after all.’

The Tale Behind the Tale

The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn I composed when quite young, and sold to the TimeScape imprint of Pocket Books. But since it was a long book, my editor, David Hartwell, asked that it be divided into three volumes. At the time I considered this to be a mistake: personally I love and prefer long tales, if they be good ones, and enjoy the prospect of a good long read when I heft a thick tome in my hand. But I agreed to David’s condition of publication because he knew his business, and I also saw opportunities for improving the tale by restructuring some chapters in the course of helping each volume to stand better on its own.

It took me a long time to recast the second volume, and years to rework the third. The book was long overdue; what’s more, the first two volumes had not sold well, and David Hartwell had left Pocket Books. The new editorial staff looked over my reworked third volume (now almost as long as the entire tale had been when it was deemed too long to publish in one volume), and declared it was unpublishable. They were right: the thing had run away from me.

And so no one but my friends has ever read the full story, or learned the final fate of Ara-Karn.

Now some thirty years after the book was first accepted for publication (and with asotir’s assistance), I can offer a revised and expanded 30th anniversary edition.

The first two volumes – The Former King and The Divine Queen – I reproduce much as they were first published, correcting only some typos and grammatical errors that slipped past me. The unhappy third volume I have shortened somewhat, and reworked it into two parts, now titled The Iron Gate and Darkbridge.

To those who read the first volumes long ago, and have wondered in the years since, ‘What happened, and how did it all end up?’ I offer my apologies. Now at last, if you have found this, you can find out.

— Adam Corby
Spring 2009

Also Available

The Naked Damsel

The armored men parted and the damsel stepped forth.

‘Now,’ said King Arthur, ‘what has brought you here?’

‘This,’ she answered, and let fall the mantle to the floor. Beneath the furs the damsel stood naked, and wore nothing beside the black veil and a heavy sword belted over her slim waist.

‘What is this sword you wear?’ asked the King. ‘Maiden, to stand so naked with a sword ill beseems you.’

‘The Lady Lille of Avalon,’ she answered, ‘has made me this scabbard and Belt of the Strange Clasp, so that the sword may not be drawn but by the best knight in the world, of the greatest heart and strength of arms, untouched by treachery, tricks or villainy. And I have come to your court, O King, to see if I may find that knight here among you…’

— from The Killing Sword

Lady Agatha was alone

Her lord had gone to take the measure of his lands, and his voice calling to his hounds came from far-off through her window, till it was hidden in the wind.

And she heard a great wave breaking on the stones of the Irish land, washing to the Western Sea; and a cry went with it, from a stricken old woman in a hut beyond the hill.

And Lady Agatha heard a third voice calling; and that was Aengus’ voice.

She shut the window to stop the voice, but the room waxed so warm she had to open up again. His song went on and on. And the beat of the riders was everywhere; and Lady Agatha fell asleep at last.

And Master Aengus’ song went right into her sleep.

She knew now why the riders came. They came for her.

— from Blood by Moonlight

The witch went out

in the snow in the night in her bare feet, naked under her nightdress. She carried an apple and a paring knife in a stone bowl. She set the bowl in the snow before the Juniper Tree, took the apple and pared the red skin from the white flesh…

The knife slipped and bit into the mound at the bottom of her thumb. She licked blood from her thumb and squatted over the bowl.

She sat in the snow drifting down on her hair, staring at her red blood on the white snow.

‘Give me a child,’ she said. ‘Give me a child as hot as blood and as pure as snow.’

And the witch slipped from her nightdress and embraced the Juniper Tree. The branches scratched her pale bare skin, leaving little trails of blood…

— from The Juniper Tree