Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

Outside the rain still ran in the gutters, but a dark shadow of change covered the landscape. Raldnor considered: “I’ll go back. Why? A soldier in their corrupt armies. I, the impostor, Lowland scum. And Dorthar—that reeking tomb of dead kings. What’s that dragon place to me?”

She rode into Lin Abissa, her grandfather’s capital, on the back of a rust red monster.

She and it were a dual thing of fire in the white afternoon, the apex of a procession made up of gaudy acrobats, fantastic dancers and incredible creatures dressed to resemble Xarabian legend. Amrek’s betrothed was piped, sung and magicked through the streets like a goddess from an era before time.

The beast that carried her was a giant palutorvus from the steamy swamps of Zakoris. She sat in a golden contraption with a roof of plumes. She wore a dull red gown, trimmed with chestnut fur and cut low in the neck, an orange jewel clenched between her breasts. From a tower of golden flowers at her skull fell a smoky drift of scarlet veil. Her hair was the precise color of blood.

The crowds murmured and craned up to see her. And, as with all things flawless, she seemed unreal. Instinctively they searched her person for humanity, some hint of dross, but this was a salamander beauty, burning, mythological, unbounded by any laws or levelings.

She rode without a glance to either side. She was an image of herself.

The procession halted on the avenue before the palace portico, and the red beast knelt.

A man took Astaris’s hand as she stepped from her gilded ladder of steps and bowed low.

“Madam, I welcome your grace to the Storm Lord’s court at Lin Abissa. I am the Lord Amrek’s Councilor, Kathaos. Account me your slave.” His voice was slightly slurred with the accent denoting Ommos or Zakorian, yet the triple-tailed dragon of Alisaar was the emblem on his robe.

She said nothing to his courtesy, and, meeting her eyes, he had the impression of endless depths of beautiful opacity.

Amrek waited for her on the palace steps in order that the crowds at the gates should get some oblique glimpses of their meeting. Kathaos led her to the King and stepped aside. The woman was confronted by the man who was to be, from this moment, her lord.

He was dark and cruel in his exterior, like an emblem of himself and his reputation. He leaned toward her and placed on her lips the traditional kiss of greeting that marked his approval.

Her mouth was very cool, and she seemed to wear no perfume, despite her finery, as if she were merely a doll that had allowed itself to be dressed. Something about her angered him. He was subject to such angers. Ostentatiously ignoring his Councilor, whom he hated for many various reasons, he took her hand roughly and pulled her into the palace with him. She made no complaint.

“Madam, I am unaccustomed to dangling women on my arm. I walk too fast for you, I think.”

“If you think so, you should walk more slowly,” she said. Her remark had a combination of insolence and wit, yet he sensed that both were somehow accidental. She had simply made a statement.

“So you have a tongue. I thought the swamp beast had bitten it out.”

They came into a huge room, the retinue left behind. He moved her to look about at things.

“Do you know what happened in this room, Astaris Am Karmiss? A woman died here because of her fear of me.”

“Did it pain you that she died?”

“Pain? No, she was a Lowland whore. Nothing. Don’t you want to know why she feared me? It was this—this gauntlet. But you, Astaris, have no need to fear it. I wear the glove to hide a knife scar—not a beautiful thing.”

“What is beauty?” she said.

Her curious responses disturbed him, and she also, this impossible jewel cast into his gloomy life to blaze there like a comet.

“You, Astaris, are beautiful,” he said.

“Yes, but I’m not a measure.”

He let go her hand.

“Were you afraid on the monster’s back? You must blame Kathaos if you were. His ideas become a village circus-master.”

“What should I fear?”

“Perhaps, despite what I said to you, you should fear me a little.”

“Why?”

“Why? I am the High King, more, I am her son—the bitch queen of Koramvis. I inherit all her foulness and her cruelty. And now I am to be your lord. While you please me, you’ll be safe enough. But not when I lose interest—unsurpassable loveliness might evoke boredom after a time, even yours. Especially yours. Your perfect symmetry will grate, madam.”

She only smiled. It was an enigmatic smile. Was it her hubris, her self-assurance, or was she perhaps unable to grasp his meaning? Either she was obscure or she was slightly insane. Perhaps this was the flaw—an imbecilic queen to rule Dorthar by his side.

Moving with unbelievable grace, she began to look at frescoes. He felt fleetingly unreal in her presence.

“Astaris, you’ll attend to me,” he shouted.

She turned and looked at him searchingly, though her eyes, as Kathaos had noted, were pools of bottomless dark amber glass.

“I attend,” she said, “to you.”

A late afternoon light was settling on Lin Abissa as Kathaos Am Alisaar crossed from Thann Rashek’s major palace to the guest mansion adjoining it. Such was Am Alisaar’s status as Councilor to the Storm Lord that the entire scope of the latter house had been given over to himself and his household.

Which was as well, Kathaos’s household being of an immodest yet clandestine nature.

Particularly, there was his private guard. Not that this was, in itself, an unusual acquisition; most nobles amassed them. Yet the dimension and ability of Kathaos’s guard would have been found notable had it been investigated. Chosen by Am Alisaar’s agents at random in the thoroughfares of several cities—a method which successfully evaded Amrek’s direct notice—they came from among the ranks of fortune hunters, thieves, malcontents. Once under Kathaos’s yellow blazon, however, they were arbitrarily amalgamated, specifically trained in the fighting techniques of the Imperial Academy in Koramvis and led into collective though no less dangerous modes of living. Not many rebelled or abused their school. Those who did vanished mysteriously, yet suitably, into the dark to which such men were subject. Those who persisted at their new trade did well by it, becoming almost inadvertently part of a large and well-oiled machine. For Kathaos’s aim was to possess at last a defense as traditionally geared, strong, elite, and deadly as the Dragon Guard of a Storm Lord.

Kathaos had, as it were, hereditary reasons for his ambition.

His father had been Orhn, ultimate King of Alisaar. Though it was generally said that by the time that Orhn moved to take Alisaar from the dying grasp of his sire, he had in truth lost all interest in her—for by then the reins of Dorthar were firmly in his hands. He had fathered Kathaos on a minor Zakorian queen during one of his brief forays to Saardos, but he was never away from his regency, or his mistress Val Mala, for long. Only death put an end to his to-ing and fro-ing. And now, ironically, it was Kathaos who was Val Mala’s lover—a pleasant enough situation, for the queen had taken care to age as little as possible and extended favors to those who amused her.

He wondered if Astaris would amuse her, and decided emphatically that she would not.

The junction of the palace and the guest mansion was marked by a pillar forest of crimson fluted glass, which now throbbed with mulberry embers of the low sun and clotted incarnadine shadow.

“Rashek’s architect seems to have had a certain vulgar genius,” Kathaos remarked.

“If you say so, my lord.”

Kathaos’s Guard Lord, Ryhgon, striding half a pace behind him, was not as a rule addicted to long sentences.