“Since you entreat me for news of her, my mother is unharmed, and keeps her apartments with every recompense I can give her.”

  “Why should I entreat for news, Prince, when you say I took her only as a means to the Emperor’s Chair? As for recompense, Prince, I should guess she’ll scarcely notice it.”

  He crashed his fist down upon the table, so the wine cup spilled its draft of water.

  “Tomorrow,” he grated out, “you ride with my cortege to the Temple. The people expect to see you there. You will be guarded, and there will also be priests in case you should try sorcery. After the ceremony, you’ll wait till sunfall, when you Will be escorted from BarIbithni.”

  “Very well,” I said. “What’s one day more or less?”

  “You speak as if the world will end tomorrow,” he said

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  acidly. “I assure you it won’t, despite any machinations of yours.”

  The lamp was burning low, the room nearly in darkness. He suddenly shivered, then came over to me and set his hand on my shoulder.

  “Vazkor,” he said very softly, “this enmity is ridiculous. If you will swear to me, by your own gods, that you have never plotted against me-“

  I met his eye, and I said, “I am finished with your kingdom, Sorem. And I have no gods. Do as you wish.”

  His eyes blurred and his hand gripped my shoulder as if he could not stand without it, and then he walked away. But I had seen what I had been too blind to see before-I think perhaps because I had not wanted to.

  “I will grieve for this for many years,” he said, “that you would not swear and cleanse yourself of suspicion.”

  Then he rapped on the door and they let him out.

  I tightened the last peg of the viol. Somewhere nightingales sang, but it is possible to tire even of nightingales.

  Part IV

  The Cloud

  1

  The flies came with the morning. I woke, and the air of my chamber buzzed with them. They flickered across the panes of the windows inside the lattice and crawled along the table-ten flies, or twelve, or more; it was hard to be certain, for they were forever in motion. Their noise and agitation disturbed me, so I turned slayer of flies till the rooms were quiet again.

  A girl brought me a Masrian breakfast, fruit stewed in honey, sugarbread, and similar stuff. She did not seem afraid of me as my male guard had been; perhaps she did not know who I was. Then, as she set down the silver platters, she saw the corpses of the flies and cried out.

  “What is it?” I said. I felt sorry for her; I seemed to see only decaying bones where she stood, emblem of approaching death. The whole city had such a look for me that day.

  “The flies-” she said, “everywhere. In the Horse Market the herds are mad with flies. One woke me at sunrise, crawling hi my ear.”

  “The summer heat, no doubt,” I said, but she put her hand to her lips and said, “The blind priest who begs by Winged Horse Gate-he said it is the god of the Hessek slaves, the dark one they call Shepherd of Swarms. His vengeance-a plague of flies.”

  “Well, there could be worse things,” I said. “See, I’ve killed them.”

  I could eat nothing when she had gone.

  The bells were ringing in the Palm Quarter. The sun shone bright as a dagger on this day of coronation.

  An hour later they brought my ceremonial robes, creamcolored linen embroidered with gold and silver, the kilt diago-

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  nally fringed with indigo, the boots of white bull hide studded with red bronze. There was a heavy collar of gold and alcum set with blue gems, and the border of the looped cloak of scarlet silk depicted a whole boar hunt, done in silver, green, and blue thread. Nothing had been omitted, even the theatrical sword with its soft golden blade and hilt warted with pearls. I was to be shown favor before the people, Sorem’s brother, the sorcerer. He did not lack cunning in his own way. What tale did he mean to give them to account for my abrupt departure tonight? Not that he would need to give it. Not now.

  The invisible sword above the city would fall today.

  I felt as sickly numb and as deadly indifferent as only a man can who is going to his execution.

  Bales of crimson silk had been set down all along the tracks and the roads that led to the great southern Masrimas Temple. They bloomed like a river of poppies before us; after we had passed they were in rags from the booted feet, the wheels, and the trampling of horses, but still the people ran to them, and ripped the rags into smaller rags, and bore them away as trophies of this imperial moment. Even before we got outside the gate, I could hear the cheering and cries of the crowd. They had filled the groves, hanging in the trees to watch. Men had even climbed the ancient cedar that leaned above the secretive well. As the tracks bore around and descended into the terrace streets, the throng stood in a crush so thick they could barely move their arms. They gaped and shouted as if we were their sustenance, a vicarious show that made them all kings for a day.

  As tradition dictated, Sorem had remained in the holy precinct. He would come out to us, dressed in plain black, meeting us in the open square before the Temple. Here, the spokesman of the council would greet him, a man of eightyodd years, strong, tough, stubborn old fool who reveled in such customs and the part they gave him. Sorem would ask why we had come to him, and be told we had come to make him our Emperor. Sorem would immediately refuse, pleading his unsuitability. The council would then severally state his virtues and fitness for the job, and we should troop in the Temple to effect the matter. This theatrical imbecility, a ceremony that had evolved two hundred years ago, or more, was Hessek custom rather than Masrian, incorporated by

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  Hragon-Dat into his own coronation, apparently to please the mixes of the city, but more likely to titillate himself.

  In the rays of the young sun, the Temple was a pile of shining light, everything of it faced with gold or bronze. Massive pillars of yellow marble, broadening slightly as they rose their thirty feet, supported a portico roof of brazen god-figures. Six slender pointing towers fenced in the vast central dome, which was a wonder of gold leaf and jeweled enamel. All about the Temple square reared winged horses of cast bronze, on this day garlanded with late blue-black hyacinths, roses, and similar flowers. Flowers had been thrown on the red silk roadway and on the stairs.

  I looked at the scene as intently as if I must learn it by heart, as if remembrance of it would comfort me in my grave. Actually, I saw only an empty concourse, the crowd all gone to brown bones, and ravens perching on the upper parapets of the Temple, with scraps of flesh in their beaks.

  I had been paralyzed, my brain empty, already dead. I have observed insects in this condition, stored in the spider’s web.

  Malmiranet had ridden somewhere ahead of me in the procession. At occasional turns of the road I had glimpsed the lily tapestry of an empress, which traveled before her on its silver poles. Her skirts were of emerald and purple, fringed with gold, and her gemmed bodice flashed like a fire. She wore a tall diadem, a veil of purple brocade pleated from a sunburst of gold. She was borne in one of the low open chariots, drawn not by animals but by men, each naked save for the skin of a spotted panther around his loins and the silver horse-head that encased his own. A girl in white held a fringed parasol above Malmiranet’s head, the color of yellow asphodel. All this I could see with no difficulty, but not clearly the face of Malmiranet, which seemed expressionless.

  I thought dully, Does she feel this, too, the mechanism of our lives running down? Then again I would think, Why bother to act this out? But I was past original action of any sort, or so it appeared to me.

  There had been some trouble with flies. They had irritated the crowds, and the horses. But the light seemed to lick them up, dry them off the earth, as the day grew hotter and the sun higher.

  The procession came to its halt in the square, among the

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  bronzes and the thronged people. Ten priests emerged from the Temple porch, with Sorem walking in their midst.

  There had been enough jokes to tell me. Even she had known, my lover who had birthed him. There had never been a father or a brother for Sorem to respect, and among the men about him whom he valued, not one who would stand in the way of his decisions, not one who was sufficiently discourteous to make his own rules, to be stronger and more able than a Hragon prince. Maybe it was simply that, that he had liked me, but the woman in him had wanted to be mastered. God help him, any other man in BarIbithni, I think, would have been more accommodating than I. It was their fashion; they were part bred to it. Even those who would marry and get sons might have their fancy boys on the side. I think, too, he did not realize it of himself till Basnurmon opened his eyes with that statuette of porcelain. His change to me had been suspicion of himself rather than of me. He had condemned me out of frightened desire, not because he believed the stories of a plot.

  I looked at him as he stood there, speaking intelligently and calmly the absurd phrases of the ritual, making it more than it was by the strength of his own worth. It was true, he had everything to tempt me-his looks, his valor, the basic soundness of his nature which, molded carefully, could have been made much of-everything, in fact, if I had not been myself.

  Anyway, he would not suffer it long, that shame of his and that denial.

  The old ass of the council was puffed up and ranting his lines like a third-rate orator of the lowest Masrian school. Under that noise was a stillness such as comes on a mountain when the wind drops, the silence of desert and wilderness. Not a murmur from the city, the crowd peculiarly quiet, not a bird singing, not a dog to bark. It was apt. BarIbithni in the spider’s web was waiting, paralyzed, motionless, and without a whimper.

  A shadow passed between us and the sun.

  It had been so bright, that sky-torch of Masrimas; it had seemed impossible that a cloud should blot it out. But suddenly the golden light turned dun, then brown; the gilded bronze facings of the Temple ceased to burn and faded to a leaden yellow, and the air was sodden with darkness.

  The council orator broke off in full spate. He felt the chill to his marrow, and tilted back his old man’s head to stare.

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  The mass of people rippled and surged, muttering, thousands of heads tilted back similarly. Then a burst of cries and imprecations. Then again, silence.

  I, too, had lifted my head, and gazed as they did.

  A streamer of cloud, like a bolt of cloth spun off a huge loom in the western horizon, was unfurling over the deep blue of the sky. A black, curiously flickering, curiously dazzling cloud had spread across the sun’s orb, masking it, smothering it, while all about the blue sky shaded into umber.

  Some pointed in the crowd, without necessity, for all looked upward. Some started to pray, afraid of this phenomenon; indeed, it would be hard to regard such a sight without fear. The black-sequined dazzling of that cloud seemed not to pass, but to gather there, directly above, swelling larger with each moment.

  The horses began to toss their heads and stamp nervously. The priests on the steps behind Sorem swung their censers of gold and chanted aloud to Masrimas to push aside the veil from his face. But the cloud did not lessen, rather broadened and deepened. The square became dark as evening, and women screamed, and stifled their screaming.

  There was a new sound now, the sound the cloud made as it descended toward us, a high-pitched singing buzz.

  Then the black cloud fragmented into many million pieces, and fell on us.

  Flies.

  Like a rain of mud, quivering droplets of mud that spangled and adhered to whatever they touched; the air swirling like a pool in which the sediment had been stirred up. Into the open eyes the black sentience dashed, into the ears and nostrils. Open one’s mouth to cry out and this cavity was also packed with seething blackness. Limbs thick with them, hair crawling as if water ran through it. Choking, blind, and in mad terror, horses and men thrashed in the maelstrom.

  My own horse reared up, its eyes clotted as if with black gum, and I glimpsed its fore hooves smash in the skull of my nearest guard as he struggled from his saddle. Then I was on the ground amid a forest of such hooves.

  I got a kick in my side, not a bad one, but it set me rolling. I was brought up against one of the bronze horses, itself black and glittering with the flies, which, finding it unliving, abandoned it, only to be replaced by hundreds more. Here I tore the silk cloak off my back and wrapped it about my head, mashing what swarmed beneath it into a treacle of

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  death on my face, gagging and spitting out what had invaded my mouth. I was capable of action after all. I cannot say thought; what I did was purely reflexive.

  It was Tinsen silk, the cloak, just fine enough that I could see through it a little. What I saw was horrible enough. Not a yard from me a man had gone crazy, and had been flailing about at the flies with his knife, mutilating or killing those men and women who blundered into him, till he himself toppled and was trodden under. Presently I stumbled into a child choked to death by the insects that had poured down his screaming throat. I saw several in this condition, several more thrashing in wild spasms on the paving. Here and there, one had done as I had, wrapping up his face, but, without the benefit of thin silk, could not see, and blundered hither and thither, or else, lifting the muffler in panic, was again overwhelmed by the flies. Some beat on the doors of adjacent houses, but the houses were also infested through their many unshuttered summer windows.

  Where the procession had halted was a mass of shrilling horses and floundering soldiery. I could not be sure of a great deal through the blur of the red cloak. I was trying to force my way through to where Malmiranet’s chariot had been; Sorem I could not discover anywhere.

  The buzzing, whirring noise of wings was like some ceaseless engine.

  Again I stumbled, this time over a Temple priest. He lay full length, and near his hand, where the golden censer smoked, was a little island of free air. The flies avoided the perfumed vapor. I wrenched off the lid and exposed the burning coal and crumbled incense sticks under their grille, next swinging the censer by its chain in an arc about me.

  I made out the Empress Banner of the Lilies first, one pole caught in the chariot wheel, which kept it partially upright, the other on the ground. Malmiranet herself stood inside the chariot, a landmark to any who had tried to find her. She, too, had muffled her face and the face also of the girl beside her-Nasmet-who had held the parasol in the purple brocade of the diadem veil. These two were pressed together in their wrapping, neither making a sound, quite still, and the flies jeweled their arms and shoulders like beads of jet. Even so early, I had noticed the preference of the flies for living tissue. Briefly they would crawl on metal or cloth, discarding it instantly for flesh.

  By the chariot was a final proof of mindless fear. The men

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  who had drawn the vehicle, their heads protectively cased in the silver horse casques, had torn these off in their alarm and bared their facial orifices to invasion.

  I got into the chariot, which rocked unsteadily, and put my hand-itself gloved in insects-on her waist.

  “Malmiranet-” I said.

  She jerked as if she had come alive.

  “You-are you here?” She put out her fingers to me, then flinched them back, shuddering at their burden. “Where is Sorem?”

  “Close,” I said, to reassure her. “We must get into the Temple; there will be some windowless place there we can take shelter.”

  “Is that a smell of incense?” she asked hoarsely.

  “Yes. Take the censer and keep it near your face. These black ones dislike the smoke.”

  She did as I told her, but when her palm crushed flies between itself and the chain, she gave a low thin groan. Nasmet started to sob.

  I guided them from the chariot and toward the great stairway, where a dead woman lay among the sprinkled flowers with flies massed on her in a shining mantle.

  When we were halfway up the stair, a horse bolted past us, shrieking in that terrible voice that frightened horses have. Its eyes closed with insects, and insane with terror, it ran head on into one of the massive columns. The smack its skull made turned my guts over inside me even after all I had witnessed. The horse wheeled up and crashed over on its back, and the disturbed flies poured in on it again like a tide.

  Nasmet’s sobbing had turned to breathless gasps. Malmiranet muttered to her, soft, coaxing love words special to women, and kept her moving up the steps. Beyond that one cry, Malmiranet herself had not faltered.

  We reached the portico and went in. The lamplight gloom of the Temple made it almost impossible to visualize through the cloak, yet there was a noticeable alteration, for gradually, as we felt our way slowly on, the whining buzz of wings grew less. A strangeness on my arms and chest told me the things were dropping from me in clusters. The incense smell was strong here, and dim ruddy flares indicated countless burning lights. Pausing, I began to hear the whimpering of children, the whisper of human movement in the visionless red dusk.