“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 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 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.