Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

Raldnor felt a stirring of anger, and these first intimations of racial sensitivity were strange to him.

“Why let him exploit you? Can’t the people here band together against him?”

“That isn’t our way, Raldnor. We Lowlanders are a passive breed. You perhaps may not quite be able to accept this.”

“Because of my mother’s blood? Maybe. I don’t dispute the fact that if a man strikes me in the mouth, I’ll strike him back with interest.”

“There you have it,” Orhvan said.

“Possibly it was your philosophy that frightened Anici away. She generally waits for us.”

It was the first thing Ras had said, though he had looked at Raldnor intently from time to time since they had come in. Raldnor met his deep-set shadowy eyes. In the depths of them he thought he glimpsed a love-haunting. With contempt Raldnor said: “She seemed a timid girl. No doubt well taught by example.”

“Anici is a child still,” Ras said quietly.

“And you are ambitious that she remain one.”

Orhvan spread his hands.

“Be still, my friends. You bring discord on my house.”

“I apologize,” Raldnor said stiffly.

“No need, no need,” Orhvan said, but his heart troubled him. “You are Vis,” he thought. “Like the chameleon, you have assumed some of the color of your situation, but under all, you are a dark man with black hair, and a package of lust and anger and arrogance in your soul.” And then he thought with compassion: “Poor boy, poor boy, to be pulled thus two ways at once. There is a look there too, the pain of the blind and dumb.”

“It is the Storm Lord who makes these permits necessary,” he said aloud, deliberately ignoring the brief disturbance in the conversation. “He has no love for the Plains people. I’m afraid we shall suffer for that.”

“Storm Lord,” Raldnor said, “the Vis High King.”

“Yhaheil says,” Ras murmured, “that he has the scales of a serpent on his arm because a snake frightened his mother as she carried him.” His impenetrable gaze leveled, “and he has, so Yhaheil says, an extra finger on his left hand. An irony you will appreciate, Raldnor.”

Raldnor felt the malice sting him. Before he could answer there came a loud knocking on the street door.

“Orklos,” Orhvan said softly, and rose.

The open door revealed two thin Lowland male children dressed as pages, and behind them the looming figure of the unwelcome visitor. He moved into the room and seemed to fill it up with his scented smell and his well-fed body, and the barbaric-colored cloth of his robe.

“Good day, Orhvan.”

His speech was curiously slurred by his thick Ommos tongue. A ruby glinted in an upper canine. His black eyes rolled languidly toward the unknown face.

“Who?”

“My name is Raldnor.”

“Indeed. I have a message for this house. From my master, Yr Dakan.” He yawned and glanced again at Raldnor. He saw the stunted left finger and pointed at it immediately. “You gave it to a god?”

“No.”

“No. Well, well. In my land it is customary for a man to dedicate something valuable to his gods. Often it is more precious than a finger, hmm?” Orklos turned as if remembering Orhvan. “My message. Tell Orhvan the basketmaker that he is invited to dine at Yr Dakan’s house tomorrow night.”

“Thank your gracious master. But I asked for a permit.”

“So, so. You will not refuse a dinner. The permit will be granted, perhaps, after the food. You are all welcome. The little pale girl also. And this young man too. The hour after sunset.”

Without waiting for an answer, Orklos turned and swayed through the street door, the two pages running after him.

Through the afternoon Raldnor walked about the streets in the grip of a desolate and panic-ridden anguish. At first he could think only of the girl Anici and how, in that astonishing instant, his mind had seemed open to hers. If only—ah, goddess, if only. Might Anici be the key for him? Yet as a leaden sunset darkened the sky, he began to think again, and with increasing distress, of his foster mother Eraz. He felt, in some irrational way, that he had abandoned her. “I must find her,” he thought and was unsure if it were Anici or Eraz he visualized.

He made a vow to leave his copper counters on Orhvan’s table and be gone, and then remitted the vow at once.

In the night he lay awake on the pallet and heard the dim dismal wailing of wolves which seemed often very close about the house. He remembered Orhvan’s warning that wild beasts ran into the city in the cold.

“Perhaps she’ll come in the morning, as today. Perhaps. Perhaps,” he could not help hoping.

Finally he left the pallet and went down to the hall. Mauh widened her opal eyes at him from her place by the hearth, and he scratched between her ears, still unable to quench his instinctive reaction to her ancestry. A polite reserve existed between them.

It was not for some time that he realized there was another in the room. As before, it was a faint, moth-soft movement that gave away the presence of Yhaheil the Elyrian.

The man was seated on Ras’s bench, his dark hair falling round a waxen face.

“Raldnor,” he said, and his voice was a whisper that shivered on Raldnor’s spine.

“Yhaheil.”

“I’ve seen strange pathways in the stars on this night. The man who knows fear, who will comfort him?”

Raldnor flinched at the unemphatic doom of the words, but he was also suddenly heavy with sleep.

“Predictions are subject to error,” he said, but Yhaheil ignored him.

“It’s her doing. Ashne’e. She reaches out of time and stirs the world.”

“He’s eccentric or else mad,” Raldnor thought, but was not convinced of this.

Yhaheil went on murmuring. Buzz, buzz. A velvet bee droned round and round in Raldnor’s brain.

“Sometimes a light-haired girl is born with the face of Anackire. For her there is always a destiny. The Storm Lord took her from her temple, mounted her and died. The dragons carried her to their city, which is called Koramvis. She brought forth a child. Whose child? The King’s? Or the Councilor’s? The mob killed her and nothing is known of her child.”

Yhaheil folded his pale hands and was still. He saw that the young man had fallen asleep. What had he spoken of? He could not recall. In Elyr they had wanted to train him in the ways of a mystic, starve him and paint his eyes and feed him incenses so that he would fall down and babble intimately of psychic realms. But Yhaheil had been too swift for them, flying by night across the Elyrian wastes into the land of the Snake, from which his mother had come.

Remembering this, he gathered in his hands certain charts and stole out of the hall and up the stairway to the tower and to his stars, leaving the stranger sleeping below.

Yr Dakan’s house lay in the upper quarter of the city, a tumble of weather-blackened stone like all the rest, but, unlike all the rest, blazing with light. An alabaster lamp hung over the portico, reflecting on the imported brass gate pillars—shapeless logs to a height of eight feet with, as a capital, the hideous convulsed face of Zarok, the Ommos fire god.

“To that, they sacrifice their children,” Orhvan murmured.

They had all dutifully answered Orklos’s summons—even Raldnor. He felt he did not really know why he was here except, perhaps, that by coming with them he would see the girl once more. As they went through the gates and into the burning vestibule, he watched her walking close beside Ras. It made him angry to see this closeness, angry as the withdrawal of her mind made him, for he was aware of her mind, acutely aware now that she was near to him, yet only in the sense of being conscious of something locked away—a bolted door.