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Yet Demizdor had furnished the real horror in my confused thoughts, and their accusations drove me into a turmoil of uncontrollable struggling, at which they were much amused. They would doubtless kill her, too, but kill her by the immemorial practice of men with women, raping the life out of her, and they would hang me upside down from the pole to watch, until my brain burst.
like all their customs, even the darker ones were shallow cups.
I had no gods to pray to. I felt the lack of them then.
I had already grasped who the riders were, and where they hailed from. Not the pit, but Eshkir. Their black was tawdry, and the skulls were masks.
for so they did things in the cities, gambling with men’s lives and liberty.
It had never before been dreamed that the dregs of the world, the inferior clay of the tribes, should master gold and silver lords and feed them to carrion eaters.
they eventually imbibed the myth that had sprung up, as tall stories do, from a small grain of truth.
Even before I had learned my origin, they had been piecing it out. They determined the black-haired man was the bastard of Vazkor, a by-blow on some tribal she-goat, wrought in the last months of his life.
They could not reach the dead; he had cheated them, dying.
My other two wives, Moka and Asua, had not loved Chula. They waited on her successor like handmaidens, the same way they looked after my gear and war-spoil. Embroidering my shirts and brushing the hair of Demizdor were all one.
Ready to run to find me, she was ready, too, to run away. She had her horse; she could chance the wild, long way westward. Yet, like many a woman, part of her was nailed on her man’s fortunes still. So she hesitated.
She stabbed Urm in the throat, a clever, swift blow, but she had never killed a man before. She took him by surprise, but herself too. As she stood, letting the weapon go, paralyzed by what she had done, the three others came for her, and she was easy work for them.
Truth to tell, their party of reprisal had lost its strength during the months of searching, and was now thirty in number, and they had no cannon and were aware of the neighboring Dagkta campments across the slopes to east and north. Besides, they had me, the only warrior they actually yearned to harm, and they had got their lady back. And plainly, to her, all the faces of the braves who came in her had amalgamated into one face, and that one mine. I, the man who had forced her from her own life into his, and thereby brought the rest to pass on her.
despite the apparently masculine qualities many city women possessed, they were generally treated as fragile and precious by their men. Next,
(I picture Chula, barely conscious with terror, despoiled of that last treasure by a skull-headed demon of Sihharn.)
intuitively, that the structure of her self-respect depended on her hate and loathing for me.
She was the only one of the three confronting me masked, for she was the only one with something to hide.
His mouth smiled, but his eyes ate, feeding on pain and prophecies of pain.
fed me, as they always did, like a sick animal that disgusted them.
“If it heals so well from wounds, it will be able to endure a good deal of wounding before it dies.
I began to see how her pride hung on her disdain. Thus: Let me come close to her and I should win her once more.
I noted it as I was absently noting everything, the sumptuous necrosis of the palace, and the city speech, my understanding of which had continued unabated since I woke to hear it on the journey.
I felt it as a mark of Power lingering in me, the Power of my father Vazkor in this, his enemies’ stronghold.
There had been precious stones in the walls but they had mostly been prised out, probably during some past sack of Eshkorek.
“Vazkor was not a man of passions. He desired only to rule, not the bodies of women. His witch-wife was enough for him, and her he took only in order to make sons. I can’t believe a story that has Vazkor rutting for lust among the tribal scum.”
“I never dreamed to meet you in this room again, Black Wolf, Black Jackal of Ezlann.”
all the while I felt him there, dark fiery shadow at my side, the emanation of my father. I could remember only my inherited gift of magic power, which must come from him, how I had killed a man with it. I had merely to reach for strength and I should find it. All men, perhaps, must have a deity. Godless so far my entire life, Vazkor became my one true god.
It began to seem an hallucination. No shade was any longer at my shoulder to guide me. I had had the power to kill Ettook, but not enough to burst my bonds, it appeared.
I wondered if the sow who bore me had ever shed tears.
“The truth can’t be altered,” I said, “but I expected nothing more of your hospitality. There are rats in all the rooms. Some squeak, and some wear gold on their faces.”
he had a tongue like the adder’s bite, and his eyes made you believe him wise. I have heard it said he had slave blood, something of the Dark People in him, which may well be so. I have heard also he was a sorcerer, and that I have never doubted.
No man mattered enough to him that he should hate him, and no woman either. Apart from one, maybe. Uastis. I never set eyes on her, the risen goddess of Ezlann, but I believe her power matched his, and if she lived after him, then no doubt she, too, betrayed him, as I did.”
“if you have his sorcery in you, you had better use it. Eshkorek is split in factions, and I am no longer the only man bowed to as Javhovor. Yet we are united in one thing. To kill you by inches will be a rare dish for those of us who have known only the grim aftermath of Vazkor’s battles.”
Vengeance is a slender thing to make a truce from.
Nemarl’s joke. Yes, surely. To decide my punishment under the shadow of she who had been my father’s wife.
I had surmised already from their talk and whisperings that his corpse was never found beneath the fallen Tower.
If it was Zrenn’s joke, it was not a jest for me. No longer chained but clothed as a prince, I felt my courage come back to me, strong enough to make me wince at the fear I had felt before. If they were to kill me, they would do it. They should not at least be titillated by my cowardice into the bargain.
He was like a boy going on his first hunt, so joyous was he at the prospect of grief and torture to come. I was ready when he looked up smiling, and spit in his face.
Zrenn, if you have made a Vazkor of him, then you must honor him as a Vazkor.
No chance to make a break and no weapon in my belt.
Rather be free and die than live and live death.
all this in a kind of dire, calm, inner debate, numb as if every one of my nerves were gone—when
I would not give them that honey to sweeten their wine. I would not struggle with the fate they laid on me.
He glanced around at the company, the princes and their men. He said, “There’s some story, is there not, that Vazkor could heal from any hurt. We shall see—” and a tiny slender knife flicked out in his narrow hand.
said quietly, just loud enough for him to hear me, “You will never get a son this way, little man, spilling it in your drawers.”
I was trying to plot the stages of my execution as they were, in order to outwit them, and I think I was part out of my head, for never before, and only one time since, have I been so negative, so dull on the outskirts of my death.
“These are elegant sculptings. If he heals from them, I shall truly consider the dead has risen from his tomb.”
listening as they haggled away their honor and my life.
“May you eat dung and pass blood, and may the ravens squabble for your liver.”
Like any valuable buck ram, I had been captured, bought, sold, and finally thieved.
