“Yes. That is true enough,” he remarked quietly. He turned a little, looking off into his past. “In the days of the glory at White Desert, when the Alliance held, I was the nephew of Eshkorek’s Javhovor, and I was not content. One sundown when I had gone hawking in the waste, my party met a company from Ezlann, and with it, Vazkor. They had come for the spring horse-catching, for the finest mounts were the mad ones of Eshkorek. He was only a young man, not much older than you, my savage; but 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. That night’s camp we shared on the desert’s fringe, and he made a plan with me, piece by piece, like the fitting of a puzzle. Though it was some years later that the goddess opportunely struck down my uncle, and Vazkor set me in the royal chair of Eshkorek.” He glanced back at me. He seemed bound to tell me those things, and weary of them and weary of telling them, for I could see he had spoken of them many times inside his own head. “When Vazkor’s power was on the wane, when he had overreached himself, I threw in my lot with the five cities of the Alliance. I don’t think he felt a particular hate for me; he was incapable of hate as he was incapable of pleasure. 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.”

He went to the torch and took it again, then came close to me, staring up into my face, seeming to nerve himself to do it, and his eyes behind the amber glass were fixed and wide.

“Son of Vazkor,” he said, “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.”

His voice, dead calm and empty as a dry well, made me fear the prospect suddenly as I had avoided fearing it before. Where there was this blankness, there seemed no hope of a weakening, and none of any sort of clemency. I would rather have Demizdor’s lashing, that even then I think I knew was only love wrung in another shape. I swallowed, for there was a hemlock taste in my throat.