Demizdor seemed recovered, though she was not, and rode consistently as any of the men. For me the journey was less uneventful. A broken rib had pierced my right lung; I was choking up blood, and finally they began to believe with chagrin that their prize would expire before they got him home. So they took the space to bind my ribs, and fed me, as they always did, like a sick animal that disgusted them. I healed quickly enough to be surprising to them, and soon rode upright, bound in my saddle.
“This is Vazkor’s, no doubt of it,” Zrenn said. “I have heard stories that he recovered from a slit throat on a certain occasion.”
A couple of the men declined to accept the tale. They were all of the silver rank, comrades and not master and hirelings.
Zrenn only glanced at me, and said for my benefit in slurred krarl speech, “If it heals so well from wounds, it will be able to endure a good deal of wounding before it dies. Poor puppy-dog. It would like to bite and cannot find its teeth.”
Indeed, some of my marrow was returning into me. I had
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been near gone, and not lamenting, but as my ribs knit and the pain and debility left me, life burned up, and I could have howled like a dog in earnest to get out of the ropes they had locked me into, and caress Zrenn’s gullet with my boot. Then I would glimpse Demizdor, and the lead would sink in. me again.
She was waiting for a chance to aid me, I thought at first, like a child. At length this puerile deception would not do. 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. But this would not do either. As the last red-brown autumn days sloughed from the land and my life, I realized she had turned cold bitch on me, and no lover’s stroke remained to break her ice.
I was still sick enough that it made me sicker. But we were in the mountains eventually, and I began to have other events to dwell on. For one, my future as scapegoat in the city.
The city, I saw it in its cage of mountains, black on the yellow sky of sunset. And two hours after, having entered its walls, I saw it by the light of torches, yellow on the black sky of night.
I had never encountered a city before. The occasional great tribal gatherings when there were pitched a thousand black and indigo tents, had seemed huge to me. The eastern towns had impressed me as complex. But this thing unnerved me, not only because of its enormity, its grandeur, its leaning Weight of centuries, but because of its ruin and wreck. For Eshkorek, pitted with cannon blasts, scorched by fires, decaying, was an ancient yellow skull.
Yet there were lights ablaze in the skull, and sounds of the living. ,
From the high road that plunged down to it-a road marked by shattered columns, and the surface all broken paving that would have made any horse but an Eshkir Stumble-it seemed a phantom city. Whole areas dark, and rising from those dark wounds tiers of starry windows. I remembered how the ruined fortress had stirred the fancy of Death’s Court. The city also was like that.
Within the walls there were several broad thoroughfares, torchlit but unoccupied. The flares rebounded from shattered crystal panes and hollow entrances. Rats, perhaps, haunted
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behind the crumbling facades, but made no noise. Instead, borne on the night wind, a ghostly faint music came in snatches, pure as a bell in the silence. The thoroughfare shortly branched and the Eshkiri turned along the left-hand way. At the end of it, half a mile off along the straight street, a colossal palace tower reared up, its oval windows alive with lamps, the only animate in a whole avenue of dead mansions.
My escort had moved quietly, almost stealthily, ever since coming in the unguarded gates. I wondered what they were nervous of, here, in their own place. Suddenly, about twothirds of the distance down the avenue, a group of men stepped out of the shadows onto the road. They wore the same shabby patchwork black as my captors, but the bronze masks were shaped like the heads of birds. More important, they were armed for a fight.
“Halt, sirs,” one said. “Who is your lord?”
“We serve Kortis, Phoenix, Javhovor.”
At this the bronze-masks put up their swords, and murmured. The spokesman asked, “Is it you, Captain Zrenn?”
“It is I. And my brother Orek. All the hunting band, save a few who lost heart before the game was done, and are already home.”
Further soldiery was moving out on the street. I could see they had been fair set for an ambush if our party had not proved to their liking.
A quota of these bronze-masks formed in around us, and the horses were trotted up the road and in through the tall gateway before the lighted palace.
It was a giant tower, some seven or eight stories high. In some of its windows colored glass remained, amber, turquoise, ruby, and flares smoked in the lion-yellow walls of it. The music had its source here, too, far up in some hidden chamber.
We crossed the outer court, and rode up shallow steps and in at a portico whose vast doors of iron-work stood wide but presently roared shut behind us.
Here the Eshkiri dismounted, and the bronze soldiery dragged me from the saddle at a word from Zrenn. The horses were led away. We climbed the marble stairway to the floors above. Orek gave his arm to Demizdor on the stair, I noted it as I was absently noting everything, the sumptuous necrosis of the palace, and the city speech, my understanding
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of which had continued unabated since I woke to hear it on the journey. I was yet enough not myself to let this miracle go unanalyzed. In the same uncanny mood I had experienced before, I felt it as a mark of Power lingering in me, the Power of my father Vazkor in this, his enemies’ stronghold.
We arrived in a room as massive as any room would have to be to accommodate five hundred men ranked shoulder to Shoulder. Not that five hundred men were currently in it. It Was deserted prior to our entry and not much crowded thereafter.
There were pillars down the room, slim as swords they seemed, made of silver, and constructed to resemble trees. The silver branches of these trees fashioned the decoration of the ceiling, and set in them were flowers of faceted glass, wine-red and blue. The floor had a mosaic at its center of wide-winged swans in cobalt, scarlet, and gold. There had been precious stones in the walls but they had mostly been prised out, probably during some past sack of Eshkorek. Tapestries drooped there now, but their goldwork was turning green, and mice had tasted the tassels.
A copper lamp hung from the roof, big as a man, on a chain of bronze. The candles in it burned under jade-green crystal, flecking the gargantuan hall with the lights of a summer forest. There was no hearth, yet an airy warmth rose from the walls and the floor.
While I gazed, a man had come in at a narrow doorway. He wore a long womanish garment of dull yellow, and a golden face.
At once every bronze and silver mask was whipped off. Every person in the hall bowed low, saving myself, but my discourtesy did not abide. A moment later my legs were kicked from under me and I crashed at the gold-mask’s feet.
This winded me, and for a while I lost track of the words they were exchanging. Then I heard Zrenn speaking of a black-haired savage who might well be the bastard of Vazkor.
The gold-mask said in a cold impatient voice, “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.”
“But observe, Javhovor,” Zrenn said, “he has a look of him,
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does he not? We should have shaved his beard; you would have seen the likeness better.”
And Zrenn got my hair and pulled my head back to let the gold-mask observe me.
This man was their prince, and they called him Javhovor-High-Lord, a king’s title. His mask of gold wassomething like the bronze masks of the lower soldiers in that it represented a similar curious bird, a phoenix, for so they also titled him: Kortis, Phoenix, Javhovor. His eyes were shielded behind amber glass, but his neck and ringed fingers were knotty and aging. He, too, like the men in the fort, was old enough to recall the features of Vazkor.