The sky raced, and then the sky was still. I had been stitched into a sack of pain. When I breathed, a knife between my ribs gored at my life’s blood.

“For all his spear-brothers’ kind attentions, he will live till Eshkorek,” one said.

“That is his misfortune,” another answered, and laughed gently. “See, Demizdor.”

And, against the sky that just then was still, I discovered the face of a silver deer with eyes of green glass, and behind, a fall of hair like golden frost.

“Yes,” she said, “I see him.” Her tone was not as I recollected.

“He shall sing a new song in Eshkorek,” the man said.

“He shall die there,” she said.

There was blood in my mouth and I could not have spoken, even if I had had words. But I had no words, for they were speaking in the city tongue, and somehow I could follow but not use it.

Then she leaned near, the deer-faced woman who was no longer quite Demizdor, and she raked my face with the nails of her hand.

“Be happy, oh king,” she whispered. “You shall have a sweet welcome in Eshkorek Arnor.”

Book Two

Part I: Yellow City

1

DEMIZDOR HAD WARRIOR kin among the Eshkiri; she had never told me of them, and I had never considered it. Her former life had seemed to die from her when she entered mine. That was my blindness, as well as hers, for which both of us would pay, and heavily.

Her mother, the gold-mask’s mistress, had also a sister, and the sister two sons, the cousins of Demizdor, like her of the silver rank, and proud and jealous of the much or little they had.

The raid on the Dagkta spring gathering to get slaves had been a wild notion—a bet between princes, for so they did things in the cities, gambling with men’s lives and liberty. A force of eighty mask-faces set out on the sport, and, with the cannon, they expected no hindrance, and indeed received none to begin with. Having captured their slaves, they camped at the ruined fortress, but eighteen men rode on ahead to Eshkorek, traveling light, to bring the news home. When the bulk of the force did not follow, presently, some went back to seek the missing princes and their soldiery. Going to the ruin, the searchers quickly found all that I and the Dagkta braves—and after us, the ravens and the foxes—had left of them. Then there was an uproar. 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.

At length they formed a vengeance party, and in the party were the male cousins of Demizdor. That a high-woman of their blood should become the drab of a krarl had them in a hot and cold rage.

It took them most of the summer to achieve their goal. They greatly demeaned themselves to do it, sometimes journeying as ordinary humans among the trader Moi who, blond as they were, had ever been close with them as sheath with sword. Going about in this manner, they eventually imbibed the myth that had sprung up, as tall stories do, from a small grain of truth. The myth said that one warrior alone had taken the fort-camp of the Eshkiri slavers. He slew them all, and left them unburied and took away a city woman as his whore. The warrior of course was black-haired, and without tattoo, unique among the red tribes. I had occasion to recollect, when I learned this, how Moka had babbled to Moi traders of her handsome husband and his new flaxen slave-wife. There were no Eshkiri in the Moi band, but gradually the word ran through the yellow krarls and reached the right ears.