energies which should be seen as part of their birthright: war.
If Khmar was angry with events in Gendormargensis, the line of defence chosen would appeal to him more than any grovelling apology.
As a footnote, Lord Alagrace could note that a band of women had dared to thwart the Lord Emperor's Lawmaker by denying him the oracle of his choice. However, thinking it would reflect badly on the emperor if his Lawmaker yielded to the Sisterhood, Lord Alagrace had taken the oracle south with him regardless…
As plans went, this one was shaky. However, it might serve to blunt Khmar's wrath, and Lord Alagrace, who had been unable to think of anything better, drafted the report and sent it on ahead – hoping it would reach its destination, and not be seized by the partisans who were managing to kill one courier in seven.
Travelling south, they entered recently occupied territory, and the pleasures of travel diminished. The countryside was restless; as thirty men could not guarantee their safety, they travelled with a hundred. They passed burnt-out ruins, body-pits and crucifixes burdened with bodies.
The road was passable, with slaves hard at work upgrading it to military standard. In many places, waystones had yet to be erected; it felt strange to travel without seeing those monoliths carved with glyphs proclaiming the texts of the Law. The southerners here were dour, sullen, alien – and, naturally enough, they had been conquered too recently to have learnt Eparget, though some of the people had picked up a few words of Ordhar from the troops.
In such situations, the command language ran a great risk of contamination. Despite the best efforts of imperial discipline, Ordhar refused to conform to the laws laid down for it, and was forever acquiring souvenirs from foreign lands, developing esoteric slang and allowing bits of alien tongues to be spliced into its fabric.
It was important that Ordhar be kept pure and simple, for it had been designed as a standard language for all the armies of the Red Emperor, Khmar. Where waystones had been erected, text-masters attached to the conquering armies posted lists of forbidden words, such as 'okaberry', a local word meaning 'rotten' or 'unsatisfactory', and now apparently increasingly used by the troops when speaking of their food, their officers and the weather.
The common soldiers were contaminated with such words when they slept with the local women, which they found easy enough to arrange, since there was the shortage of food usual in a war-ravaged countryside, and many women were selling their bodies to keep themselves and their families alive. Here there were no tea pavilions and no perfumed silk girls with downcast eyes and smooth-oiled thighs; Lord Alagrace found nothing to tempt him, and abstained.
While travelling, Lord Alagrace scarcely saw General Chonjara, who preferred to travel in the rearguard. When there had been tea pavilions, Chonjara had never patronized them; he had no taste for silk girls, preferring to slip away and find something else, although Lord Alagrace was not exactly sure what, and chose not to find out. Now that they were in hostile territory, Chonjara sat up late with the soldiers, drinking, singing and telling jokes. This raucous carousing kept the Princess Quenerain awake, so she complained bitterly. Lord Alagrace ignored her complaints, for the princess had not endeared herself to him on this journey; nothing was good enough for her, and she treated every inconvenience of the road and the weather as if it were a personal insult.
Yen Olass enjoyed the journey. To the south lay danger, but also hope. To the south, too, lay the sea. Every evening she practised the whistle she would use to summon the gaplax out of the water, and imagined how impressed everyone would be when they came trooping out of the sea to line up in front of her. Everyone would eat well, when they got to the sea.
Occasionally soldiers came to ask for a reading, so Yen Olass begged some paper from Lord Alagrace, and, using his writing brushes, she marked out a Casting Board and made 365 paper Indicators. Though the Sisterhood had withdrawn her right to practise as an oracle, the soldiers were scarcely concerned with the legal issues involved, and, this far from Gendormargensis, there were no other oracles to give her any competition.
Chonjara's bodyguard, Karahaj Nan Nulador, came to ask about his wife; she had been pregnant when he had said goodbye to her in Gendormargensis, and he was worried about her. He found it hard to sleep at nights. Yen Olass tried to reassure him. Failing, she worked on him with her hypnotic skills, reaching the point where she could put him to sleep with a word, and his worries were gone by the time they drew near the sea.
Yen Olass now began to get very excited. She regretted the professional dignity which prevented her from pestering people with questions: is it really salty? is it really wide as the cattle plains? are there really waves the size of houses? will there really be whales? do whales really exist?
But the sea, when they got there, turned out to be a cheat. It was a dull piece of water looking like a narrow lake. Yen Olass rode ahead of the convoy, following the highway down to the waterside. She dismounted, and scrambled over the shore, wrinkling her nose as she caught the smell of the water.
It did not look very promising.
The rocks were damp. Green stuff like moss grew on them, and they were very slippery. Yen Olass did her whistle, then waited. Nothing happened. She tried again. Maybe there weren't any gaplax on this part of the coast. She turned over a rock, to look for a male gaplax. To her great excitement, she found all kinds of tiny insects under the rock. But they were not like the gaplax. Some were green and some were brown, and they had claws like a scorpion she had once seen in a book. They scuttled away into hiding. When she tried to grab one, it bit her with its pincers, then held on relentlessly; finally, her eyes smarting, she had to smash it with a rock.
That made her remember about banging rocks together to call out the gaplax. She pounded stones together – to no effect. Finally, she took off her boots, waded into the sea, and started manhandling some of the larger rocks. But she never saw a gaplax, or even the empty nest of a gaplax.
Wet, frustrated and disappointed, Yen Olass gave up, and turned back toward the shore. Looking inland, she saw the entire convoy drawn up on the highway, watching her in silent amazement. She put on her foot bindings, put on her boots, then stumped over the stones toward her horse.
'Have you been enjoying yourself?' said Lord Alagrace.
'The sea stinks,' said Yen Olass, mounting up.
Then she galloped off down the road, swearing to herself. Later in the day, when Lord Alagrace caught up with her, he explained that the sea was much bigger than the part they had seen so far, and much cleaner.
'What?' said Yen Olass. 'Is it only this part that stinks?’
'All the sewage from Favanosin rides the tides into this fiord,' said Lord Alagrace. 'When we travel over the hills ahead…’
He told her what they would see, but Yen Olass did not believe him until her horse finally crested the heights, and there before her lay the sea – a vast plain of pewter stretching away to a southern horizon where thunderclouds black as coal dust were brewing one of the storms that the Pale was so notorious for,
'Down there,' said Lord Alagrace, riding beside her, 'that's Favanosin.’
But Yen Olass had no eyes yet for the town: she was still gaping at the sea.
'If you're impressed by natural phenomena,' said Lord Alagrace, 'then you've got a new treat in store. The Lord Emperor Khmar is down there, waiting for us.’
He was reminding her of the task at hand, and the challenge that awaited them.
'I'm ready for him,' said Yen Olass, sounding as confident as she felt – for some reason she always felt more confident when she was riding a horse, lording it over the world beneath her.
However, when the time came to actually face the emperor, some of that confidence disappeared: this would not have surprised anyone who knew Khmar.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Lord Emperor Khmar hated living inside buildings. Enclosed by four walls, he became uneasy, disturbed by the dead air, the muted sounds, the diminished contact with the weather. Appreciating the benefits of impressing the populace with his wealth and power, he allowed architects to build him palaces, but he refused to inhabit them; the glorious Retzet t'Dektez in Gendormargensis was empty but for guards and caretakers, as Khmar had never so
