The Storm Lord, Page 2

  “And what did you do, temple witch? Do you know who this man was before you killed him? Storm Lord, High King—Look at me!”

  Her gaze had slipped to Amnorh, and then, suddenly her eyes turned up and the lids fell over them as if in a fit. Orhn felt her skin grow chill under his hand and let her go, thinking she had fainted. Amnorh knew otherwise, said nothing.

  Orhn got to his feet.

  “No time for ceremony,” he said, “I’ll dispatch her now.” He stared upward at the pale sun newly risen, which already masked the inflamed star. “The Red Moon was a curse to Rehdon,” he said. “He was no longer a young man.” The knife shone in his hand.

  “However, lord prince, there’s one thing we forget,” Amnorh said softly.

  Orhn looked full at him.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, yes, my lord. It’s possible—merely possible—that Rehdon’s child is planted in this inferior body.”

  A deeper, more intense silence fell around them. The men stiffened in attitudes of almost superstitious unease.

  “She may have used the way of women to stop it,” Orhn said.

  “How can we be sure? There is no suitable test, lord prince. And permit me to remind you, my lord, that the last child conceived before the death of the king becomes, by the laws of Rarnammon, his ultimate heir.”

  “Not a by-blow on a peasant—the yellow scum-race of the Plains—”

  “Indeed, my lord, but dare we alone decide the matter?”

  Orhn’s eyes were flint; the contemptuous distaste he felt for Amnorh suffused his face like a blush.

  “My authority should be enough—”

  “Lord Orhn!” a man cried suddenly.

  On a low scarp a few yards away a guard waved his arm, then pointed off across the fields.

  Orhn turned and saw a dust cloud whirling up from the slopes.

  “What now?”

  “The village men,” Amnorh said softly, “perhaps returning?”

  Orhn moved with long strides up the side of the scarp and stood beside the guard, Amnorh following more leisurely.

  Sunlight touched the dust to silver, made it hard to distinguish shape inside the shining blur.

  “How many men to kick up that much dust?” Orhn snapped. “Fifty? Sixty?”

  “But they are only serfs, as you pointed out, lord prince,” Amnorh murmured succinctly.

  Orhn ignored him. He shouted down the hill: “Captain, get your pack into weapon drill.”

  Activity answered him about the smoking fires.

  “Men from more than this one village,” Orhn said. “Why?”

  “Possibly the priests called them,” Amnorh said.

  “Called them? Because of a girl?” Orhn cursed. “You profess to know a great deal about these Plains scum, Amnorh. What’ll they do then, do you suppose?”

  “They’re known for their passivity, lord prince. Probably nothing. But under the circumstances I think you’ll agree the girl should be spared your knife.”

  Orhn sneered, sheathing the blade.

  “For once, your counsel carries some weight. See, I’ve put the toy away. What now?”

  It was plain he had no enjoyment in deferring to Amnorh’s judgment, yet Amnorh did indeed seem to have some curious grasp of this unlooked-for situation.

  “I suggest this: Tell the village of Rehdon’s death, laying no blame on the girl. Say that she will in fact be honored as the vessel of the King’s heir.”

  “Heir!” Orhn spat. “Can you see any faction in Dorthar upholding such a claim?”

  “That scarcely affects us, lord prince. These are ignorant people, as your lordship has been heard to mention. It’s quite probable that they’ll accept such a story. It has a certain mythological quality that should appeal to them. Once in Koramvis, let the High Council decide what’s to be done.”

  “You’d take her to Koramvis?”

  “It’s always best, lord prince, in the face of the unprecedented, to be as cautious as possible. Who knows what view the Council would take of any hasty action?”

  Orhn frowned toward the dust cloud. He could make out zeebas now, and fair-haired men riding them.

  “There’s one small problem,” Amnorh said. “The girl must be seen to comply.”

  Orhn looked down at her, his dark features fraught with disgust.

  “Difficult, when to all intents and purposes she appears dead.”

  “Merely a trance state, my lord. Some Lowland acolytes are adept in such magics. I think, if you’ll permit me privacy with her, that I can bring her out of it.”

  “I bow to your wisdom. Do as you think fit.”

  • • •

  Light the color of a dead leaf circled in the brazier.

  Out of it Amnorh drew a flame-tipped brand, shook off candescent fire flakes that settled in the air above the girl’s naked body. She lay on his sleeping couch, where the two grooms had placed her, a white stasis in the darkly glowing tent.

  “Can you feel the heat of the fire, Ashne’e?” Amnorh murmured. He bent to her ear. “Let me tell you, Ashne’e, what I’m about to do to you.” Whispering like a lover, he scorched the down about her navel, but no more. “If I hold the torch to your throat the flesh will char to the bone. But you have presumed to kill a king of the Vis, Ashne’e, perhaps I should make you linger. Begin with your breasts—”

  Pearls of moisture broke on the girl’s forehead. With a sudden eruptive motion life regained possession of her. Her eyes opened and focused instantly on his.

  Amnorh smiled. He had outwitted the spark of her consciousness in its blind craving for existence—once the body was threatened she had fled back to succor it.

  “Did you think I’d do that? Scorch the gilded nipples from your white breasts?”

  She spoke for the first time.

  “You would do as it pleased you.”

  “Very perceptive. I would indeed. Most recently it’s been my pleasure to save your flesh from the Prince Orhn’s knife. Can you imagine why? No, I would think not. Prolonging your life will be more difficult. It depends in point of fact on whether or not Rehdon’s child is in you. With the Am Dorthar the last male conceived before the king’s death generally becomes his heir.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I am with child by the Storm Lord.”

  “Your brave self-confidence inspires me to help you.”

  The tent was filled with blind crimson light.

  He reached out and stroked her inert body. She seemed to have three eyes as she looked at him, two golden eyes set in her face, the third eye sputtering in her navel.

  “I have told you. The King’s child is in me.”

  “If not, there’s still time.”

  The urging of the star was on him, yet he was subtle, as in all things. But his caresses, which had pleased even Rehdon’s queen, were wasted on stone. The Lowland girl lay like a corpse beneath him, while her hair seemed to set the pillow alight. So he used her, and found her spoiled for him, and drew away, his eyes only showing how it might be at another time.

  • • •

  The dust cloud had settled on the fields, subsided like a swarm of insects in the grain.

  The Lowlanders sat still on their zeeba mounts. Not a sound came across from them to the Dortharian camp. The hunt guard stood in formal lines, an impassive defense formation, weightily outnumbered, yet supremely confident of superior military skills. What did they face, after all, save a rabble?

  “The Councilor takes his time,” Orhn remarked impatiently. The captain turned to send a man up the scarp to Amnorh’s tent, but Orhn caught his arm. Amnorh had requested absolute privacy, claiming his esoteric work to be a dangerous affair, and Orhn could do little but leave the matter in his hands.

  There was an oppression of waiting in the air. The staring sun l
aved the Plains with its furnace heat.

  “Movement from the temple, lord prince.”

  Orhn glanced aside.

  “A priest.”

  The black muffled figure slid across the track, as if on rollers, along the slope toward the Lowland men.

  “Some new scheme hatching,” Orhn said.

  He watched the hooded priest make some form of silent contact with the foremost rank of riders, and almost instantly a man came out to stand beside him. Man and priest then began to walk back, crossing between the grain at a different angle, making directly toward the Vis camp. Orhn followed their progress intently. He made out the man to be young, unremarkable; tanned, muscular, gaunt-boned, a boy whose body and mind had long been exposed to unluxurious hard living—good military material had he been born of Vis stock. The priest at his shoulder glided like his black shadow.

  At the outskirt of the encampment a guard stepped in the way, blocking their path.

  The young man stopped, amber eyes fixed on Orhn. “Storm Lord, you have kept a woman here to please you. Let her return to her people.”

  The guard struck him with contemptuous lightness on the chest.

  “Kneel when you address the prince, Plains dog.”

  The young man knelt immediately, not looking at the guard.

  “I ask again, Storm Lord.”

  “I am not the Lord,” Orhn barked. “The Lord is dead.”

  “That is sorrow. But I ask again for Ashne’e.”

  “Ashne’e possibly carries the King’s heir. Do you understand? She must go with us to Koramvis.”

  The young man stared back at him with pale immutable eyes.

  “Will you kill her there?”

  “If she carries, she’ll be honored.”

  “Why are you so concerned at what we do with Ashne’e?” a voice demanded, Amnorh’s voice. So the Lord Warden had at last emerged from seclusion, successfully it would seem. “She belongs to your goddess, not to you.”

  “My sister,” the Lowlander said slowly, “she is my sister.”

  “Very well. Follow me and bring your priest with you. You shall speak to Ashne’e. Ask her if she desires any greater joy than to enter the city of the Storm Lords.”

  The statement, brusque, imperative, seemed to strike responsive, relevant nerves. Orhn saw the Lowlander accepted at once both Amnorh’s authority and his words. Amnorh went up the scarp, the boy following; at the top Amnorh let him alone into the owar-hide tent.

  Orhn waited, and it was not in his nature to wait gladly. Would the girl speak as Amnorh instructed her? Damn her, she would have been better dead before talk of conception and the Council had clouded a perfectly clear issue. And what, in all this, were the Lord Warden’s personal motives?

  The Lowlander came out from the tent. Orhn saw at once a change in him—he seemed astonishingly blind and old, groping, not through a physical but a psychic darkness. He walked down the scarp, among the Dortharian lines into the sketchy wilderness of the fields, all the while the priest keeping like a black crow at his shoulder.

  A simultaneous movement ran through the Lowland ranks. Men and zeebas broke formation suddenly, wheeled, a flurry of fresh dust surging up to mask their departure.

  The captain swore beneath his breath.

  Orhn glanced at Amnorh.

  “Very clever, Councilor, very clever.”

  And Amnorh allowed himself a moment of childish answering inner scorn: “Certainly too clever for you, lord prince.”

  • • •

  As a form of inescapable etiquette, a messenger was sent ahead of them to Xarar. Consequently, Orhn grit his teeth as they passed beneath the white Dragon Gate and entered a city plunged into deep and poetic mourning.

  “Damn their mewling,” he thought as the women howled in the streets for Rehdon, whose momentarily glimpsed person they had most probably forgotten.

  Their host in Xarar, the King Thann Rashek, whose name in certain circles was Thann the Fox, sent a procession of embalmers to anoint and bind Rehdon’s body. Rashek’s numerous queens, women of Xarabiss, Karmiss and Corhl, and the troop of daughters, appeared in profound funereal magenta, while bards wailed of invented heroics—there had been no full-scale war since the time of Rarnammon in which a lord might earn or buy a hero’s name. The mummery sent Orhn into a tight-held towering rage. He gathered up the disorganized factions of Rehdon’s entourage with brutal haste. Within four days he had shrugged off the pomp and drama, the ubiquitous pale faces ready with histrionic tears and the eight-stringed laments.

  He moved the Dortharian party swiftly out across Xarabiss, the corpse as the excuse, and left her crystal cities in a pall of offering smokes.

  They entered the narrow land of Ommos, death in a closed golden Xarabian bier. Ashne’e—kept in exotic captivity in Xarar like a wild yet interesting beast, peered at, no doubt, through spy holes in the drapes—now dwelt in windowless gray rooms, and was spat at from low hovels flanking roadways. At twilight, in a white-stoned fortress by the sea, the warden personally killed a newborn child, brought into the world mere hours before their arrival by one of his dull-eyed wives. It was to mark his sorrow, he told them, yet it had been a girl and not a son and so, particularly in the case of an Ommos, no great loss to him.

  Not long after, Orhn heard the mother shrieking somewhere in the darkness, and for some barely explicable reason his thoughts turned to Rehdon’s Queen.

  Val Mala, Dortharian princess of a minor House in Kuma, raised to her position as Jointress of Koramvis because of her beauty and Rehdon’s weakness.

  How she would detest the Lowland girl.

  Orhn permitted himself a grim smile at the thought of the cruelties Val Mala would devise for her; in particular quarters Val Mala’s name was already a byword for cruelty. Certainly no woman who had maligned her in her early days of power was now to be seen about the court. He recalled her chosen pet—a white kalinx, a tuft-eared cat, devil of incalculable viciousness—which roamed her apartments more or less at will, and was a symbol to Koramvis at large of her own glamorous and inventive spite. Val Mala indeed would be an intriguing study on their return.

  And if the Lowland bitch were seeded? If there was to be public proof of the Vis Lord’s extramarital lust? Orhn wondered, with a not entirely idle malice: would the embraces of the Lord Councilor be sufficient consolation?

  2.

  DORTHAR, THE DRAGON LAND, Dorthar the dragon’s head, the mountains its jagged crest, the lake Ibron its white eye, Koramvis its thinking jewel of a hub, the heart-brain.

  The city lay on the foothills of the crest crags, elevated like a gigantic pure white bird on a nest of fire. Her foundations, bisected by a river, lay in the farthest recesses of time; like the Dragon Gate of Xarabiss, she was in part a remembrance, a physical creation burdened by essential legend, her ancestry a charred place where the Storm gods had come out of heaven, riding in the bellies of pale dragons.

  At mid-noon, in the first Zastian month, her watchtowers spoke to her across the plain, black scavenger clouds of death smoke, and Koramvis opened her gates to admit her King.

  • • •

  Val Mala’s apartments were filled with a dim smoky incense-light. Candles fluttered, her women were dressed in black. The girl who conducted them there had silver tears painted on her cheeks.

  Val Mala made them wait a good while, Amnorh the Lord Councilor and Orhn prince of Alisaar. When Orhn grew impatient, the girl stared at him and murmured: “The Queen mourns.”

  Orhn made a sound of derision, but presently the mourner came and he bit back his curses.

  Val Mala. Her Vis coloring was startlingly disguised by a creamy unguent, the Dortharian ebony of her hair hidden under a wig of hyacinth blue silk. She wore a funereal gown but the mood of it did not reflect in her face or her kalinx eyes, though they were as black as moonless lakes. She
was far younger than her dead consort, had never loved him. Even her pregnancy was as yet invisible. She seemed to have rejected every vestige of Rehdon, and the ritual phrase—“the Queen mourns”—had all the absurd obscenity of something scribbled on a wall. Yet her beauty had lost none of its familiar edge, its stunning magic, despite that faintest hint about her of a high-class whore, that pinpoint glint of something vulgar and unrefined.

  She glanced at Orhn, and then away.

  “Where is my Lord Rehdon?”

  “Coming unconducted through the palace courts since you, madam, called us to wait on you,” Orhn growled.

  “It’s a pity, Prince Orhn, that you didn’t conduct him better while he lived. He might, perhaps, still walk among us.”

  “It’s at once apparent, madam, how grief overwhelms you at your loss.”

  She flinched at his irony and clenched her ringed hands in a convulsive, furious spasm.

  “Oh, I am indeed overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by your malicious impropriety. You bring a gift for me, I hear.”

  “A gift, madam?”

  “So I hear. Your notion of a gift.” Her voice rose. “His whore! This filthy temple slut. A snake-worshiping devil-bitch he took for his pleasure because he couldn’t have me.”

  Am Alisaar said nothing, his face stony with his own anger.

  She spat at him: “You will not speak of this problematical child she carries. I won’t have her live! I am the mother of the King’s heir—I, and no other.”

  “You and many others, madam.”

  Her eyes grew suddenly enlarged and blank as if they saw in terror those other lesser children clamoring for their birthright. She turned and crossed to Orhn and looked in his face.

  “I,” she said, “I, alone. Your King is here, Orhn Am Alisaar,” and she snatched his hand and laid it over her belly. He felt the gentle swell of her body, the ribs of some jewel set in her navel beneath the folds of her dress. He felt, too, the blood thicken immediately in his temples and surge in his groin. Val Mala saw his breathing quicken and abruptly pushed his hand away. “Your King, to whom you will kneel,” she said, smiling contemptuously at how she and the star had moved him. “And now you have my leave to go. The Queen-widow, I believe, can give such an order to a mere prince of Alisaar.”