Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

The great upturned bowl of the Plains’s sky was drenched with the blood of sunset. The sun itself had fallen beyond the Edge of the World. Now, before the rising of the moon, only a single scarlet star gemmed the cloak of gathering twilight.

A group of about twenty men were crossing the arid slopes—hunters, but not of the Plains. They rode thoroughbred animals, with here and there a light hunting chariot of Xarabian design, yet they were not Xarabians. They moved with a special, almost a specific, arrogance, which pronounced them alien to this landscape far more than did their black hair and black-bronze burnish of skin. Yet it was the scale markings of their metal that told the precise nature of their menace, for they were Dortharians, dragons, and they carried a High King in their midst.

Rehdon, King of Dorthar, the Storm Lord, that god-given title which essentially meant mastery of the entire continent of Vis, this now darkening planet: a king, ruler of kings. Even the hunting helm bore the spiked Dragon Crest. Beneath it, age had infected, with its own reptilian markers, a pair of eyes that were staring upward, toward the gem of the scarlet star.

Zastis. In Elyr, the withdrawn and euphemistic, they called this the time of marriages. But it was more vile and prosaic. It was the time of greatest sexual need, the tyranny of the flesh, strong in all, but in the royalty of Dorthar a domination brooking no denial, a bizarre badge of the line of Rarnammon.

The moon rose. A moon red from the star.

Rehdon’s charioteer glanced back at him, a thin graceful man with a face which, at no time, said anything, except where the long narrow slits of eyes led down into a machinery of intellect. His position as chariot driver was misleading. This man was Amnorh, King’s Councilor, the Warden of the High Council of Koramvis, in certain ways the nearest power beside the throne.

“Amnorh, we’re far from Xarar,” Rehdon said suddenly. He had a king’s voice—deep, resonant. He had in fact every appurtenance suited to a king, but it ran shallow. Amnorh knew this well.

“My lord’s restless? There’s a village near here. The serf we questioned mentioned it, you’ll recall.”

“This accursed No-Land. Why do we hunt so far from the borders of Xarabiss?”

“I hoped your lordship would get better sport here in the Lowlands. The borders of Xarabiss are hunted out.”

“This place,” Rehdon said again. The star made him uneasy, peevish, as always. “What name did you give it before?”

“Oh, the native name, my lord. The Shadowless Plains.”

Abruptly the land dipped. They were among sparse grain fields, blush-colored from the red moonlight. A small shrine appeared between stalks and was gone—probably a field altar to the Plains goddess Anackire, half woman and half serpent. Amnorh knew of such things. He glanced back again, this time beyond Rehdon, to the place in the party where the Prince Orhn rode with his men. Orhn, Rehdon’s cousin, had little time for Xarabiss and her elegant ways. He would be happy enough to pitch a camp here for the night. As for Xarar, Rehdon’s visit of courtesy to his king-held fiefs was almost at an end.

Presently, Amnorh made out a flicker of lights.

It was one of the Lowland villages indeed, an uneven track, groups of poor dwellings, a dark religious building with a grove of red trees.

The hunting party drew to a halt.

Three or four women stared from the grove. Unlike the Vis, the master race, the Plains People were pale, light-haired, yellow-eyed. No children showed themselves, and no men. Perhaps a disease had taken them or they were away, hunting plain wolves—those the Dortharians had unsuccessfully tracked all day—or the venom-clawed tirr that shrieked from the forests at the Edge of the World.

“Where are your men?” Amnorh called out.

The women remained blank-faced, and immobile.

“We are Dortharians,” a voice said harshly. “You’ll give us the best you have to offer for the night, and be honored.”

Amnorh turned and saw Prince Orhn. The racial intonation amused Amnorh, also the great and powerful body on the granite-black animal, a symbolic strident aggression, achieving apparently nothing. More softly, Amnorh said:

“We’re in need of food. And the Red Moon troubles us.”

The women stared unflinchingly back, but he guessed this threat might have touched them. The Lowlanders were immune to Zastis, it was said.

Rehdon moved impatiently behind him. The reptilian eyes ran over the women, already hungry, already dissatisfied. Irritably, he turned his head.

He saw, framed by the uprights of the temple doorway, a girl.

Motionless, expressionless, she seemed carved from white crystal, translucent eyes, like discs of yellow amber, open wide on his, the tawny cloud of hair fixed as frozen vapor.

“You. Girl,” he said. “Come forward,” and his voice held all the majesty of thunder, was even echoed by thunder low above the dune-dark slopes. If it spoke power to her she did not show it, but she obeyed him. “Tonight you lie with me,” Rehdon said. There was the briefest pause, a drop of silence, like the first drop of a great rain.

“Yes,” she said then. And strangely, for there was no other answer she might give, her voice carried all the meaning, all the accepting in the world.

They pitched their camp at the edge of the straggle of village, small owar-hide campaign tents; the grooms and charioteers would sleep in the open. They had taken what they wanted in the way of food and drink, careless that their demands would make the thin yield of the fields harder for the village to bear. Vis servants had slaughtered a cow in the temple square, and roasted it whole above a pit of coals.

But, unlike their King, they did not take the women, although the need was already on them. Even the coarsest groom had shied away from a vision of white-limbed passivity and wide eyes. Plains women, it was rumored, knew strange arts. Knew, too, how to stare in at a soul stripped naked by the pleasure spasms of the flesh. So the women slipped unmolested away, and not a light showed from their hovels, not a sound came out.

In Rehdon’s tent the meal was finished. Amnorh leaned forward, filling the King’s goblet with the stolen bitter potent Lowland wine. Orhn was absent—his animal was lame and must be seen to, he had said, but it was Amnorh’s presence he abhorred. Amnorh half smiled at the thought. Orhn Am Alisaar, waiting on a tyrannical sire who would not die and give up his kingdom for his bevy of sons to fight for. Orhn sought power rather at the side of his cousin, and Amnorh, sly Amnorh, came between them in subtle ways. And not only between cousin and cousin, for there was also the matter of Rehdon’s Queen.

The man posted outside the tent showed himself.

“Storm Lord, your pardon. There’re priests here from the village, asking for audience. Do we send them packing, my lord?”

“They were hiding in their temple until now,” Rehdon said. “What reason to emerge?”

“The girl your lordship honored with speech.”

Amnorh said:

“Your lordship might be amused by them.”

Rehdon, oblivious of most things save his waiting lust, nodded to the guard.

The man ducked out. A moment later the priests entered, three in all, long black robes, faces blanked out by shadow from their hoods. Priests in Dorthar were gaudy, vivid with their oracles and their miracles and the corruption of a thousand greeds. These intruders carried their own mystery, they seemed to have no presence, as if some smell of humanity were absent from them.