three black taloned fingers and thumb gripped a lance. The stranger wore no boots; the feet the startled humans saw sported three toes, also tipped with black claws. The largest was hooked in a ring serving as a stirrup.
With reptilian patience, rider and mount gazed upon the travellers. Behind her Moriana heard a low wail, rising into a shrill frightened yapping as a war dog panicked at the smell and nearness of the monstrous lizard – or perhaps of the being who rode it. Easing her bowstring forward, she clipped the arrow in the bowstaff with her thumb and snapped the fingers of her right hand. 'Enough,' she said, and the dog was still.
Her companions looked from the monsters blocking their path to the princess, sitting tall in her saddle, her golden hair thrown fearlessly back. A mixture of fear and confidence radiated from their gazes. Before Mortana said another word, the lizard rider spoke.
'Men.' The word came out oddly protracted, with an almost tubercular wheeze. 'Expected. Come.' With that abbreviated greeting, the lizard man goaded his mount with one knee. The monster lifted its belly from the dirt, turned its head and began crawling laboriously upslope. Moriana paused for a few seconds, considered and then followed, her dog shouldering past the cringing mount of the knight who had taken the lead. She forced herself not to look back. Not a soul of her party might be following her, but at this of all moments she couldn't show fear.
Only the emotion-sampling Ziore knew the princess's true condition.
She concentrated on studying as much of their peculiar guide as possible from the rear. He wore a breastplate and back of the same unfamiliar metal as his casque, and a skirt set with strips of the same stuff. His arms and legs flashed bare. They were dark green, almost black, like the needles of the pines that grew to either side of the wash they followed up the mountainside. From where she sat, the musculature looked human enough and the skin flexed as supplely as any human's. Now and then sunlight broke on the curve of the high muscle in a metallic glint, and Moriana guessed the being – the man, though unlike any she'd ever seen before – was covered in fine scales. The only jarring overt sign of his alienness, aside from his complexion, was his feet and hands. Somehow, Moriana found those small divergencies more unsettling than more obvious ones would have been.
'What do you think?' she said softly, directing her question to Ziore. She felt the genie's puzzlement before the mental answer came.
'I cannot tell. I sense no emotion that I can read. Or none that makes sense. A dark inchoate churning, shot through with – yes, with longing. And a feeling of fulfillment.' 'Fulfillment? How so?' Ziore paused long before answering.
'I can tell no more, she thought. The thoughts and passions of the creature are so… so other. The dog we ride is far more easily accessible than this Zr'gsz.
Moriana slid a hand inside her tunic and pulled the Amulet up so that only she could see it. Its surface was evenly divided between black and white. She grimaced in both annoyance and relief. She saw only ambiguous omen in the odd stone.
Letting the Amulet drop back cool and hard between her breasts, she marvelled at the craft of the long dead Athalar savants who had created the Amulet. Not only did it return life to the bearer but in some way it monitored the state of her fortunes. It seemed a facility of limited application. After all, someone blessed with good luck or afflicted with bad as a general rule needed no portents to tell her so.
But not always. And so she had come to consult the gem in situations such as the present that might bode good or ill.
And like now her answer was no answer at all. Equilibrium of black and white mocked her.
They neared the top of the round-crowned mountain. The lizard hoisted itself over the top, tail sweeping from side to side in a swirl of black dust. Moriana leaned forward and goaded her balky dog after.
What she saw made it hard to breathe. A horn of black rock rose before her, separated from the round- topped peak by a chasm so deep its bottom was lost to view in mist and shadow. Hung about the peak was a wreath of what she first mistook for cloud. With a quickening of her pulse Moriana finally realized it was in fact gray smoke from Omizantrim.
Far beneath them she saw a thin line spanning the void. A bridge? She scanned the peak with her eyes but saw no sign of keep or tower, nothing raised by hands, human or otherwise.
The princess became aware of the black-jasper scrutiny of the lizard man. She peered at the smoky wreath, finally catching some anomaly within. Slowly she made out shapes-but nothing like the battlemented walls she had expected. Instead, clinging to the mountain's shoulder was a clump of dark geometric shapes, blocks and angles jutting in disorder that appeared almost organic. A single emerald green gleam shone through the smoke.
The Zr'gsz did not turn at the sound of the rest of the party scrabbling up onto the mountain top. Still gazing impassively at Moriana, he raised his lance and pointed it unerringly toward the outcrop on the distant peak. Thendrun,' he said.
'You are welcome, humans.' The words were spoken with flawless diction, vowels duly voiced, plosives and labials properly enunciated. 'You may take for granted that many years indeed have passed since those words were uttered here.' Khirshagk, Instrumentality of the People, raised his goblet and smiled.
Before the beaten gold rim of the cup covered his mouth Moriana glimpsed blue-white teeth. Like the rest of him, they were almost human, incisors to the front, flat and shovel-tipped, and blunt grinding molars in the back. But his eyeteeth protruded like sabers, with a hollow behind the upper pair into which the equally formidable lower ones could socket when he locked his jaws. Humans and Khirshagk's ancestors, had shared a diet of both flesh and vegetation – but more of the former.
Otherwise, its owner was what Moriana could only honestly call handsome. His face, narrow and finely boned, sported high cheekbones and a lordly knife blade nose that she found oddly familiar. His skin was bluish green, darker still than the sentry who had guided them across the narrow bridge to the keep. His startling cat- green eyes shone with intelligence in the light of torches flickering in black wrought iron sconces on the walls of the chamber.
To her surprise the reptile man had hair, black and lustrous, combed back from his high, broad forehead. All in all, he had the appearance of a perfectly human male of more than average comeliness. Except for the clawed hands and feet.
Moriana sipped bitter green wine. Behind her she heard a whisper. Her head snapped around. She saw nothing but the curved wall of the Instrumentality's audience chamber. The wall was unadorned, of a dark green crystal. There were no hangings for furtive listeners to hide behind, and her eyes made out no seams revealing secret doorways. Moriana puzzled over the source of the sound. Nor do I know, came Ziore's soft thought mingling with her own. She was conscious of cool eyes on her. 'I am grateful for your hospitality, Lord Khirshagk.' He smiled.
'You pronounce my name quite well, Your Highness,' he said. 'But you need not name me lord. I am Instrumentality of the People; I am a tool in their hands. Not master over them.'
Moriana returned the smile, letting some of her skepticism show. Most human rulers claimed that it was the people who reigned, and that they themselves were merely servants of the popular will. The reality was inevitably the reverse. She doubted whether the Zr'gsz and humans differed much on that score.
Khirshagk had met them at the gate of Thendrun in a green-trimmed robe of what Moriana at first thought to be unadorned black. Now in the flickering light she made out faint hints of patterns and arcane figurations. To her eyes they appeared black on black; she assumed he saw the contrast more clearly.
'Lady Moriana,' he had said, 'and Lord Darl. In the name of the People, I bid you enter Thendrun.' After the inhuman accent of the lizard rider, the cultured perfection of Khirshagk's words was as startling as his knowledge of their names, and of the rest of the party as well, whom he named and greeted one by one as they filed between the great black gates into the keep.
All those who had started the ascent into the Mystic Mountains accompanied her into Thendrun. Perhaps her men felt that in this lair of ancient magic and evil the presence of a sorceress was more asset than liability. She didn't question this small bit of good luck on her part. It was about time things ran smoothly for her.
Lizard men whom Moriana took for servants, lighter of skin than the Instrumentality and the gate guards who stood by with two-handed maces and tall rectangular shields, stepped forward to lead the tired dogs to kennels. The beasts snapped at them so viciously that the riders had to lead their own mounts.
The retinue was led to a great table in an apartment carved out of one of the many jutting blocks of crystal that formed Thendrun. The block tilted at thirty degrees from the perpendicular, though the dining chamber was hewn out parallel to the ground. The princess's men cast dubious glances at the nothingness beyond the windows and surveyed the steaming joints served them on black jade platters with varying degrees of uneasiness; rumors
