Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

“Well, Panyuma,” he said and snatched her breast. She thrust him off.

“You’re a fool, Slath. If Hmar heard of this, he’d kill us both. He understands the use of many slow and hideous poisons—”

“Be still, you slut. You know you come because you want. He’s not man enough to use you, and I am, and never tell me you don’t enjoy it. Besides, he thinks you protect him from this snake woman he says haunts him, and I—I protect him from his mortal enemies. In that last war we had up river, who brought him the heads of two lords?”

“You,” she said sneeringly.

He thrust her back against the wall and pulled up her skirts, and the moon stared with its fierce eye at the choreography and conclusion of their labors.

“I must go back now,” she whispered harshly. “He’ll call for me. He’s very fearful these past months—since the stories came over the mountains.”

“What? The Dortharian war? Why should that bother him?”

“I think he’s of their blood. And the snake woman—isn’t there a goddess with a snake’s tail, sacred to the yellow people? The traders said the yellow people took Alisaar and Zakoris and shook down the Dragon City, while their goddess sat on the mountains, watching,” Panyuma muttered in the hushed singsong voice she used for her forest spells.

Slath laced himself and spat scornfully at shadows of night or soul.

“Stories for brats.”

Panyuma said: “There are old things still, and strange things. Do you remember the slave you sold to Hmar?”

Slath nodded. A year since, Panyuma, irresistibly anxious to display her secret power, had shown him the hidden mausoleum, and, despite his casual brutality, his intestines had crawled at the row of undead dolls in their finery.

“I remember. A great waste. She was an ornamental bitch, my Seluchis.”

“He goes there to gloat,” Panyuma hissed. “He takes me sometimes. Their hair still grows, and their nails, and I must clip them, like a handmaiden. When the lamp fell on your slave, her hair had grown out red.”

Slath swore.

“By Zarduk!” He struggled with his memory and said: “The Storm Lord’s bride—didn’t she have a red mane?”

“So I’ve heard the traders say. Do you know what Hmar did then? He sweated and muttered and pulled me out. Then, when it was the black of night, he left our bed and went there with an iron bar—I followed, though he didn’t see. The thing in the floor which opens the stone—he took the bar to it and smashed it.”

“Perhaps he thinks she’ll come and strangle him with her red hair, like his snake lady.”

“Now he keeps to his rooms,” Panyuma said. “He has fever and screams all the time in his sleep.”

“That’s happened before.”

“Yes,” she said. Her black eyes glittered. “You were only a cutthroat mercenary when you came,” she said, “now you captain Hmar’s men. Since the war up river, they’d answer to you.”

“What’re you plotting, you bitch?”

“I have said nothing. Only woman’s talk. Men think for themselves when they’re men.”

The gold bits sparkled a cold yellow in her plaits as she slunk aside and hurried back toward the three-towered mass of the palace.

After almost a month, the man called Raldnor crossed the mountains into Thaddra under an expressionless sky of weary blue. It was a dead yet living land, choked up with black jungles and arid fields where nothing grew.

He rode through Tumesh, where, in a gaudy marketplace, slaves were sold, and, passing northward, he came to one of the nameless rivers and gave his mount in exchange for a raft. He used no company on the river, but poled himself upstream.

On the sixth day there was a challenge.

He had no password; he simply stood looking at the three men, seeing them with more than his eyes, gauging them with his senses, which were finer and more numerous than theirs—and on them he found, like a faint scent, an intimation of what he sought.

They breathed out oaths at the color of his hair. Something in his demeanor and face made them loath to apply their knives to his back and prod him up the track, like any other trespasser. They told him they would take him to Hmar, guardian of the eight kingdoms, and he thanked them.

And then, somehow, on the overgrown jungle road, they lost him. As night came on, they searched and shouted in the forests. They came to believe a leopard had seized him just too quickly for their eyes to see and, swift with hunger, had dragged him into the undergrowth and devoured him whole.

By that time Raldnor had reached the bursting Thaddrian town and was walking the refuse-scattered streets toward Hmar’s mansion of stone.

Amnorh, King’s Councilor, Warden of the High Council of Koramvis, opened his eyes on a chamber of guttering torch smoke. Amnorh, conceived of a Dortharian prince in an Iscaian wine girl’s reluctant womb. Amnorh, who had ridden Val Mala, the Storm Lord’s Queen, but never known he sired her child; Amnorh, who had murdered Rehdon, High King of Vis.

“Hmar,” he said, “I am Hmar.”

He thought of the secret room, and the woman standing waiting with her bloody hair. Ashne’e’s doing. Anackire rejected his gift.

“Oh, Mother mine,” he crooned. “I regret most bitterly I have offended you,” and he laughed crazily and in terror.

They had seen Her in Dorthar, too, in the sky like the sun, which had gone black. The city had been shaken down—it pleased him. Yet it was her revenge—Ashne’e’s, Anackire’s—the shadow of her vengeance had expunged Koramvis. Now it came reaching for his life—

“Who’s there?” Amnorh cried out. He had heard a cold footstep in the premature dark of the room. Was the assassin here already? Shivering and sweating, Amnorh stared and glimpsed Panyuma in the torch glare. She had carried a quartz phial in one hand, filched from a great chest against the far wall as he lay sleeping in his insane dozes. But she had slipped the phial between her dark round breasts before he noticed it.

“Only Panyuma, lord. Will you rise?”

“Yes. Tonight I’ll eat below. In my hall. You shall serve me.”

“I’m your slave, lord.”

He washed immaculately in the stone ewer, and she brought him his robe and the gold for his fingers.

When she went to fling the dirty water out from the window, she pulled free the phial from between her breasts and threw that down also a few moments later. It did not strike on the ground. Somewhere below a pair of hands had caught it.

Panyuma followed behind Hmar, descending the stairway into the hall. When he sat, she stood behind his chair and served him his meat.

Slath, Hmar’s captain and bodyguard, was laughing lower down the table. He had learned the good manners Hmar expected and learned them well. He had even learned the mode and forms of table talk once prevalent in Dorthar.

“This wine’s particularly good, Lord Hmar. I’ve had it in store for a year—Zakorian liquor. Can I offer you a cup?”

Hmar’s darting eyes, moving as ever here and there across the length and breadth of the hall, skittered over the flask. He nodded peremptorily. Panyuma emptied his goblet and swilled it with water. She went to Slath, who handed her the flask. She filled Hmar’s cup, let a swift trickle merely line the bottom of the captain’s flagon and bore the brimming vessel back to the Guardian.

Hmar drank and nodded again.

“A bitter fluid, but personable.”

He drained the liquor, his long fingers wrapped about the stem, his eyes once more in motion. Panyuma’s face was blank. Slath noisily gulped nothing and was jovial with alarm. They had poisoned their lord, but he did not seem to be aware of it. And it was a slow agent. With luck, he would die in his sleep.