Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

The three women the tipsy officer now shoved into the hall wore saffron shifts, slit at the sides from ankle to thigh. Their arms and legs were bare gleaming whitenesses, each naked limb painted with the golden rope of a serpent. Their flaxen hair hung down their backs in coils; their lips and the lids of their eyes were stained with gold. They grinned as they came up the room to Riyul and thrust out their breasts. No man there had ever set eyes on a Lowland prostitute. There was an odd wickedness in their paper faces, leering mouths, and shimmering skin.

The Lan had edged over to Riyul’s chair.

“Temple girls,” he murmured. “I told them your lordship might be disposed to save them from the mines if they pleased you sufficiently. Whether you do so is your business, but have no doubt they’ll supply their best tricks for you tonight.”

Riyul gave a low drunken laugh.

“Engaging sluts.”

The first girl had reached Riyul’s place. She set her hands on the table top and vaulted lightly to sit among the gravy-crusted trenchers. Despite her full breasts, she was thin. Yannul saw the sharp bones of her hips stab momentarily through her shift. Curiously, the contrast stirred him, and he also, in that macabre instant, hardened for her core. His lust disconcerted him, knowing, as he did, what was to come.

She sat there, smiling, her eyelids flashing, while Riyul maneuvered his paw under the flap of her skirt. Suddenly she raised her long arms and began a sinuous torso dance, stretching and weaving like a snake. The two other girls drew narrow pipes out of their saffron. A formless, wandering melody came from their fingers and slid about the big room.

In Dakan’s hall, the Zarok god waited, like a beast that must be fed.

Yr Dakan had taken it into his head to eat in his chamber, and the hall was in darkness save for the coals in Zarok’s belly. Lit by its own flame light, the thing glared through the shadows, the long points of its teeth seeming to drip blood.

Orklos came late with the tray of slops; behind him the slave girl Medaci carried in narrow hands a vase of wine. The glow out of Zarok’s oven stained her hair bright gold, like the glass in a palace window. It showed a bruise mark where someone had struck her across the mouth, and her glistening eyes, boring into Orklos’s back.

With the stone shovel, Orklos replenished the coals and waited until flames sprang and crackled. Then he threw in the rinds of his master’s meal and watched the fire consume them. Orklos turned and took the vase, thrusting the shovel into Medaci’s hands.

He began to pour wine into the fire, lazily, aware of nothing save his task. His back to her, he did not see the sudden shudder that ran over the girl’s body.

She raised the shovel and struck at Orklos’s skull.

Stunned by this first blow, the Ommos staggered and the wine vase shattered at his feet. Raising herself on tiptoe, Medaci struck a second time with all her strength, and again, and again, until blood ran. Then, as the man tottered, she dropped the shovel and pushed at him with both her hands. As he fell, his head went into the oven.

Above, there came a crash and splintering of wood.

On the table top, the Lowland girl glared down at Riyul with her golden eyes.

Riyul was prepared to be good-natured.

“Look all you want at me, bitch,” he encouraged. “You’ll see more of me later.”

He raised his cup and was drinking deeply when the girl’s hand shot forward and buried a dagger to its hilt in his chest. Riyul grunted at her stupidly while wine spilled out of his mouth; then he fell into her lap, splashing her with crimson.

Yannul moved back from the table. Expectancy had not been enough. He tasted bile, for what he saw was nightmare.

The dragons had brought only women to their feast, planning to use them, when the festivities were at their height, in the orgiastic manner of the ancient feasts of Rarnammon. And these women had struck simultaneously, with daggers, with knives from the table, with heavy stone drinking cups. Thick blood ran on the flags and smeared the walls.

Those men still living were too drunk and too dumbfounded to retaliate. They watched the Lowlanders run toward them and did nothing to prevent the swooping blades, like beaks of thirsty birds. The thing was too sudden, and too terrible and too unlooked-for. In death, their faces were masks of surprise. Those who staggered toward the single door, stumbled on the heaped bodies of their officers and subordinates. Those who reached the corridors beyond the arch screamed out in frustration and fear.

Lowlanders had killed the sentries at the same moment that the women struck inside the garrison and were now bounding through the complexes of the building, seeking further prey.

All through this Yannul stood rooted to the spot. There was something unutterably horrible in the sight of these Lowland girls, their faces blotched, their hair striped with hot blood, killing and killing, without thought or hesitation, like machines with eyes of blanched steel.

Yet their hatred was discriminating. They did not touch him or the group of Elyrians at the center of the hall. They ran round them and past them, as if they were no more alive than other furniture which must be avoided. In honesty, neither he nor the Elyrians moved at all. Dazedly, he watched their own dazedness.

He had never shirked a fight in his life, but this fight was not his. For a long while he would remember every detail and, it seemed, every red-stippled face.

The garrison sentries who, unlike the men in the hall, had worn scale plate, lay with their throats open. A new soft snow fell over them and dropped into their wide eyes and mouths.

In the garrison there was a sudden quiet.

In Riyul’s hall, the Dortharians’ whores were too fearful to set up the keening that betokened death. They huddled by the fire pits, idiot-faced from fright.

In the web of streets that stretched away from the gate, dragon soldiers lay on their faces like broken toys under the falling, falling snow.

Yannul made his solitary way back toward the house of Yr Dakan. Frequently he passed the dead, their torches smoking on the paving, which was marbled with their persistent blood.

Sometimes, but not often, Lowlanders went by him, silent as wolves in the snow. Their eyes gleamed at him like icy moons, but they left him alone.

He was sick, and to his very soul. Not only because of what he had seen, but because of his part in it. He had hated and despised the Dortharians. Now, with an abrupt disintegration of purpose, he discovered a massacre of drunken babies, and discovered, too, the color of his skin and hair in this place of the yellow-haired men. And he had come to fear the Lowlanders, these people he had so pitied—to fear their awful certainty and efficiency, and their union of minds.

When he came to Dakan’s house, the guards were lying under the porch. The doors were wide open, but no lamp burned in the foyer. There was a faint glow seeping out of Dakan’s hall, presumably from the belly of the fire god.

He entered the archway and mounted the stairs to the upper apartment. Another Ommos lay here, a vicious boy whom Yannul recognized as one of Dakan’s playthings.

Dakan’s door, bolted as he had promised, had been forced inward, the iron bar torn out of its socket. Dakan himself lay across the bed, his eyes accusing the ceiling.

Yannul turned, taking with him the small lamp at the bedside. It threw gesturing shadows on the walls. Apart from the dead, the place seemed unoccupied.

Then, in the foyer again, he heard the sound—long retching sobs—and he smelled too, suddenly, the disgusting stench that hung about the entrance to the hall.

He went in, past the drawn curtain, and held up the lamp to see.