I felt I stared at it, this brazen passing of legions, this pealing of light on white swords and the red-blood splash of leather, as the mage-priest stares, in the old mural on the temple wall, at the world in a sphere of crystal. Even though my mouth was dry because I went toward Old Hessek, I seemed to have no part in my own fear.
A woman stood on the parapet, a woman in man’s clothing, with a little gold snake wound about her wrist. Malmiranet also watched us from the Citadel, regarding the show as a lioness regards from a rock the dawn of fine hunting weather. But she, too, I beheld in the crystal. In a hundred years, or much less, she would be dust in a tomb, and I a dead god.
Hessek slaves, left outside, whimpered and implored and slunk away.
Then the city was before us, raw with its fires, and I was back in my body, a man again, and an enemy ahead of me I meant to kill.
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4
Dushum’s thousand galloped east through the Palm Quarter; Denades’ jerd and Bailgar’s Shields took the highway south to stem the haphazard advance three thousand Hesseks had made upon the suburbs. Ustorth’s jerd went south, then west, crossing into the Commercial City where the line of Hragon’s inner wall came to an end, turning finally north to liberate the port and close in the Hessek four thousand from the rear, cutting them in the flank where possible and driving them forward to meet Sorem’s jerd along Hragon’s Wall itself and at Winged Horse Gate.
The desperate crowd on Amber Road, getting no mercy from that closed gate, had already cascaded south before the Bit-Hessian thrust, leaving corpses thick on the ground, all slaughtered accidentally or in panic by their fellow citizens. The Market of the World and its neighboring alleys, markets, shops, and warehouses, were alive with the rats of Bit-Hessee, or blazing where they had flung their fires and run on.
But something was slowing them now. Not the greed or curiosity of the invading army, pausing to loot and rape, or simply to gawk at the alien treasures on which it comes. Old Hessek appeared to have no interest in these ordinary diversions. It was the lack of a leader which turned them lethargic and aimless. They had risen at the will of Shaythun-Kem, they had sung their chant to him in the thoroughfares, but God-Made-Visible was nowhere to be seen.
I never thought that I had betrayed them. I saw only filth to be wiped away, a nest of vipers to be crushed.
The forty jerdiers who had held Winged Horse Gate against a frightened, innocuous crowd lay dead from Hessek missiles. Beyond the bastions of the wall the light jumped, now scarlet, now flaring black, and a second wall of smoke obscured the near distance, out of which rose the intermittent crashing of timbers, cries for help or of pure agony and terror. The Hessek mass milled before the Gate, at least a thousand of them packed up to it, with a makeshift ram-the doorposts of some nearby inn wrenched off for the purpose-thudding on the alcum barrier. Over this nightmarish
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scene, so like a disturbed colony of ants at work upon a carcass, had descended this strange pall of slackening blank-eyed silence. Their shouting was done and their inspiration quiescent.
They noted the advent of armed men on the slope the other side of the wall, and left off battering, but the pale “Old Blood” faces were all the same it seemed to me, wells without a floor, imbecilic almost, with a dreadful unyielding imbecility.
The jerd reined in and waited, glittering clean as new bronze in the coming and going of the light.
As I had arranged it, I rode forward alone, up the ramp to the wall’s head, and onto the crown of Winged Horse Gate. I removed my helm as I went, and glad enough to do it for it was stifling me. My palms were clammy and my guts cold, but the iron was still there in me, my sanity, my pride. They had turned my Power against me, but I would master them. They must finish here. After them, one other must be finished.
I dismounted, and stood alone on that high place, gazing down. Presently the voice of some hag shrieked out my name and the name they had allotted me.
“Vazkor! Ei Shaythun-Kem!”
Only she; no other perpetuated that calling, but their faces altered, raised themselves to me. I had seen women who thought they loved me look at me that way, and wolves which were hungry.
The pressure built itself inside my skull.
I lifted myself upward, levitating from the wall into the spark-ridden murk. There was no effort, as with the horse, the storm, the ocean-walk; it had the ease of the perfect thing, what is meant to be.
They watched, their faces tilting like pale plates, after the rising of their star. I struck them, even as they worshiped me.
The fire that sprang from me was no longer white, but red, blinding, a hurt, a sheet of scarlet hate that wrapped around them and me.
I slew three hundred or more with that first blow, six hundred at the next. Death shot from me in vast waves of sightless brillance, and they fell like dolls of melting wax, not attempting to evade me, motionless till they toppled, then motionless once again.
I remember everything that followed with great clarity.
The jerd was moving, had opened the Gate and raced
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through it, over the mounds of blasted human flesh. I, regaining the wall, caught the bridle of my horse, which shied from me, squealing, till I touched its brain with mine. I mounted and caught up to Sorem’s men, and went through them and beyond, unaccompanied, into the fire-fog that swirled before us.
They had their own strong sorcery that night, the rats of Old Hessek, for somehow they became instantaneously aware^ scattered as they were across the length and breadth of BarIbithni, that in that second their messiah had rejected them, and that the bolts of his lightning were turned on them. I broke the spine of their rising with the first blow I dealt them at Winged Horse Gate, but did not guess it, and besides, had not done with the beating.
To fight an enemy in a trap, in the dark, to feel his stranglehold on my windpipe, and then abruptly to discover a knife under my hand, that was how it was. I struck him again and again, my foe who could no longer cloud himself with shadow, shield himself with my own body. Long after the stranglehold was broken, I stuck that red knife in his side.
In every direction, crackling fires, the voices and the shrieks, and before me a carpet of dead Hesseks. I left the jerd small need for swords or bows. But they had a city to rescue, fire to tame, honor to win. That was their portion, Sorem’s garland, not mine.
There was eventually a different luminance in the sky. Dawn in the east, the color of decaying leaves from the smoke. A huge quiet descended with the darkness into the marsh.
The streets were coming out of the night clad in soot, charcoal wrecks leaning on the air, and up and down them the damned were journeying, some with their garments burned from them, others with the skin similarly gone. I healed no one and no one came to me for healing. Probably, my face smeared with grime and my eyes red, like the faces and eyes of all those about me, they did not know Vazkor. I must have appeared, too, a man capable of murder, but not of compassion. For, to this hour, that act of death has left its sign on me. That act and the deeds that pursued it.
Presently, some order emerged with the city from the darkness.
The fires were dying, for it had begun to rain-a boon from Masrimas perhaps, his seal on the victory of the light.
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Though quite a few believed the sorcerer ordered the rain down from heaven.
It was the first dawn I had seen in Bar-Ibithni and no morning hymn had risen from the prayer-towers in the Palm Quarter. Everywhere the priests were busy doctoring .the injured (I even noticed the orange fire-eaters genuinely abroad, with baskets of salves and amulets), or else they had gathered their temple riches and hidden themselves.
The rain splashed through the sullen dawn. Soldiers were collecting the unclaimed dead, Hessek and Masrian, and throwing the bodies into road-sweepers’ carts harnessed to mules. There was a great traffic of these carts. Despite the rain, such a quantity of unburied business could not be left long in the midsummer heat of the south.
Some Hesseks still lived, those who had had no part in the rising, mostly of mixed blood, scared of the whole world now, of Masrian and Bit-Hessee alike. Generally, the only Hessek to be found that day was one the sorcerer had slain, or the jerds, if one traveled farther south or east.