“But then,” he said aloud, laughing, “what mortal man, king or otherwise, can compare to me?”

  Kwasin recovered his ax and headed down toward the battle.

  3

  By the time Kwasin stepped into the pass, the bulk of the Sixth Army was in retreat, their advance guard dead or dying. The Dythbethans shouted taunts and insults at the fleeing soldiers while the victorious king got to the business of reining in his men to scavenge the bodies of the fallen for precious armor and weaponry. The accoutrements of war, always valuable commodities, would become even more crucial to the Dythbethans now that trade was cut off from the capital and the other cities over which Minruth held his sway. The latter would be many, at least according to the rumors Kwasin had heard while imprisoned in Minruth’s dungeons. Still, other whisperings among his former guards told of thousands of Kho’s worshipers who had formed a resistance in the mountains across the island. Of all the cities on Khokarsa, only proud Dythbeth stood any chance of holding out against Minruth’s blasphemous new order.

  When Kwasin approached, many of the soldiers stood up from their task of foraging among the dead. The jaws of the men gaped wide at the giant warrior, who might have been a hero stepping out of an epic of ancient times. Kwasin watched with amusement as the soldiers dropped their loot and backed slowly away as he passed. Murmurs of “Defiler of the Great Mother!” and “Traitor to Kho!” shot between the men. They must not have seen his exploits on the mountainside above and how he had saved them from certain defeat. Or if they had, they did not care. To them he was a blasphemer, excommunicated by the oracle for his sacrilege against the high priestess of Dythbeth. Only a pronouncement from the city’s oracle, endorsed by Queen Weth, would change their minds.

  One man, however, did not step out of Kwasin’s way but instead navigated through the carnage, making straight for the giant. Ankle-length priestly robes hung from the gaunt frame of the long-faced man, and a stiff roach of greased hair, running from the nape of the neck to the forehead, stuck up on his otherwise shaven head. In disobedience to Minruth’s decree that all priests grow beards, the man sported a clean-shaven face, though on his forehead he had painted in yellow ochre an inverted arrow on a horizontal line, the character in the syllabary that represented Resu, the sungod. He stopped about twenty paces from Kwasin and made the sign of Kho, touching his forehead with his three longest fingers, then circling the fingers out and over his loins before returning them to his forehead.

  “Are you all cowards?” The man shouted his question at the soldiers. “In the name of Kho and Resu, take custody of this man! He is the criminal Kwasin, exiled from the land by the oracle!”

  At the priest’s words, the soldiers stopped backing away and yet did not advance. The face of the priest reddened and his fist shook at the men.

  “Where are the valiant warriors of Dythbeth? Detain this man or I’ll have your hides skinned and used as drapes in the temple of Resu!”

  Kwasin, hefting his ax onto a shoulder, narrowed his eyes and stopped within arm’s reach of the priest.

  “Priest of Resu,” Kwasin rumbled, “you speak of Kho from one side of your mouth but from the other cry forth the name of Resu. Can you blame the men of Dythbeth for hesitating to carry out your orders in this Time of Troubles, when an outlaw has saved them from Minruth’s treacherous army and the words of the priests are as mutable as the face of the Shapeless Shaper?”

  The priest’s lips pruned as if he had just taken a bite of rotten pomegranate. “You? You saved them?”

  “Lo!” Kwasin swept a mightily thewed arm to indicate the great boulder lying in the midst of the dead on the field of battle. “You think this rock fell from the sky? The oracle who banished me from the empire said one day I would return, and so I have, in the hour of my people’s greatest need.”

  Slowly, and with caution written clearly on their faces, a number of soldiers crept closer until they crowded round Kwasin and the priest. The soldiers’ attitude, Kwasin noted, was not threatening, and though some of the men carried the swords, spears, and slings they had looted from the dead, none of them presented the weapons menacingly. Instead, the eyes of the fighting men of Dythbeth seemed to sparkle with growing awe and admiration.

  The priest’s hands shook and his already reddened face grew darker. “Though a priest of Resu,” he said, “I, Taphiru, have not forsaken Kho as many of my brethren have so foolishly done.” As the man spoke, he looked up into the eyes of the giant before him, but his words projected loudly so that Kwasin knew the real audience was the group of soldiers about them.

  “Yes, I remember you well, Kwasin the Troublemaker, from the days of your rabble-rousing youth. Always causing grief, ever the bully. And always in the company of that.. .what was that lout’s name? Ah, yes, that good for nothing ass, Pwamkhu. He bragged he was such a great warrior until one day that tiny little daughter of Besbesbes buzzed his way and stung him in the ass.” Taphiru pealed with laughter. “Why, he just puffed up like a toad and died!”

  All too keenly did Kwasin recall the story of Pwamkhu’s death, and indeed, what a shameful end it had been for the hero of his childhood. After leaving Dythbeth to live in the caves with his uncle, Kwasin had never seen his godfather again. Years later, when Kwasin returned to his native city, he had visited Pwamkhu’s grave, with its pitiful marker consisting of a mere brick instead of a grand pylon and a hero’s tomb; and on that sorry grave Kwasin had sworn never to let live any creature that dishonored the memory of the one man who had befriended him in his youth.

  For a moment it seemed to Kwasin that the fury inside him would erupt like wrathful Khowot. Then he did explode, though in laughter, not rage.

  “I will not fall into your trap, priest!” Kwasin’s cavernous voice boomed. “Though it is easy enough to see how the fork-tongued followers of Resu convinced so many to join their wicked cause.. .and how they yet seek to divide the allies of the Goddess.” Then Kwasin’s eyes narrowed slightly. “By the way, where is the army’s priestess? Surely the king has not gone into battle with only a priest to guide him?”

  “The priestess Waneth has taken ill,” Taphiru said, and Kwasin thought he saw a slight curl of satisfaction upon the man’s lips. “Her attendants nurse her inside the fort.”

  Kwasin suspected the man had poisoned Waneth so that he could broaden his sway over the army, but he said nothing of his surmise. Instead, he put a hand to his forehead and staggered about the men, feigning a swoon. “I too feel ill,” he moaned. “Summon the doctor! Now! Lest the plague vapors carried on this priest’s putrid breath lay the whole army to waste!”

  The soldiers standing about hooted at Kwasin’s buffoonery and the priest’s redfaced outrage. Taphiru seemed about to launch himself on Kwasin despite their disparity in size when a measured voice rang out from behind the man.

  “What goes on here?”

  The group of soldiers parted and a stocky, long-bearded man of about fifty, wearing battle-worn armor and a golden crown in the place of an iron helmet, stepped forward. Kwasin had never met King Roteka in person, although he had seen the old soldier about Dythbeth in the years before the man’s marriage to Weth and his subsequent sovereignty. In his youth, Roteka had earned a generalship under Minruth when he turned back a much larger force of barbarians that had crossed the Saasares and threatened the coastal city of Mukha. The man seemed to wear his armor more comfortably than his crown, and Kwasin took an immediate liking to him.

  When Taphiru, his voice quavering with outrage, explained that the infamous exile—and undoubtedly a spy for Minruth—-stood before them, and that the king’s soldiers had better do their duty and arrest Kwasin, King Roteka pulled at his graying beard and nodded.

  “No,” he said, “this man has opened the way for victory. Did you not see him, Taphiru, high on the mountain fighting our enemy? Like a thunder-god he hurled this great stone from the mountain and made Minruth’s pawns scatter so that we might rout them. And a messenger has just arrived this morning from Q’okwoqo to the north, bringing news of how Kwasin freed the village from the sun worshipers’ tyranny.”

  “But this is the man who defiled the high priestess, your wife!” Taphiru exclaimed in disbelief.

  Roteka regarded the priest, and Kwasin thought the king’s eyes carried a look of shrewd suspicion. Then the king took hold of Taphiru’s arm and whispered something in the priest’s ear. Taphiru did not speak after that, though his temples pulsed with what seemed suppressed rage.

  “I know well who this man is,” the king said, “and the heinous crimes for which he has been sentenced.” Roteka stared fiercely up at Kwasin, then looked away. “But I remember too that the oracle didn’t order him killed outright for his transgressions. I can only trust in the Goddess that the Voice of Kho knew what she was doing when she spared him castration and death. For that reason, and for the good of the people, I must put my personal feelings aside, as well as those of the queen... at least for the moment. Another Time of Troubles is upon us, and Dythbeth is in dire need of its own troublemaker. I won’t so hastily dispose of a man who, by his recent actions, has demonstrated his capacity to leave our enemy reeling.”

  Then King Roteka, clearly uncomfortable and not hiding his disgust, lifted his gaze to meet Kwasin’s. “Will you not join the men of Dythbeth in the struggle against the blasphemers? I could use your brawn almost as much as your reputation. In payment for your conscription, when we return within the city gates I shall petition the queen to consult the oracle on your behalf. It has been many years since you departed in exile and old Wasemquth may have changed her mind. But if she has not, you must agree to obey the oracle’s pronouncement, no matter if that order be your immediate execution or the proclamation of your freedom.”

  Kwasin did not need any convincing. Even if he hadn’t desired the old king’s help in clearing his name, he knew accepting Roteka’s offer still benefited him. Minruth had put a price on his head. Unless Kwasin gave up and returned to the Wild Lands, he would not be able to rest until someone defeated Minruth and returned suzerainty to Kho and her priestesses. He had to take the risk that the oracle would revoke his sentence. And besides, Kwasin thought, who better to break Minruth’s neck than himself?

  And so he who was loath to bow before any man dropped to a knee and, laying his great ax on the ground before him, swore his allegiance to the King of Dythbeth. For now, he thought, at least while Minruth yet lived.

  When Kwasin arose, the surrounding troops broke out in a throaty cheer, apparently overjoyed to have the frightful, ax-wielding colossus fighting on their side and not against them. Kwasin, his spirits lifting, hefted up his ax and stood grim and terrible before them.

  “Enough!” Roteka said before the cheer had yet quieted. “The enemy is in retreat and we must rout them out while the piss still wets their kilts. You, Kwasin, will fight by my side where I can keep an eye on you.” The king turned to the priest. “And you, Taphiru, will return to the fort where your slick words won’t confound the decisions of war.”

  The priest hesitated a moment, his brow creased with fury; then, still fuming, he obeyed his king and left for the fort while Kwasin set off with Roteka, a thousand strong surging behind them as they marched up the pass.

  At the cross-pass they again engaged Minruth’s troops, and throughout the day many men tell beneath the giant Kwasin’s ax and the long tenu of King Roteka. At times it seemed as if the Dythbethans would inflict enough damage to again send the Khokarsans running. Then, late in the day, a courier arrived.

  The man brought intelligence that a large enemy contingent moved along the vast plain to the south of Qoqada. The soldiers garrisoned at Dythbeth numbered too few to repel the new wave of invaders, and if Roteka and his men remained holed up in the mountains, the city would be taken.

  King Roteka ordered an immediate pullback, ceding the mountain fort and the surrounding terrain to the enemy. The twenty-mile march back to Dythbeth would take two and a half days for the large contingent, and as they moved through the passes to the grasslands, they would be vulnerable to attack. Fortunately, as Roteka’s troops pulled out, the Sixth Army made no move to pursue them. The fatigued and severely battered enemy seemed content to occupy the fort and lick their wounds.

  On the trip out of the mountains, Kwasin spoke with the king and learned the reason for the presence of the Dythbethan troops in the high passes. “I received a plea of help,” Roteka said, “from a group of guerillas fighting in the mountains. These were refugees from Awamuka whose allegiance stands with Kho. There are still some of them up here, though when we arrived we found many mutilated corpses strung up by the enemy. My intelligence had brought me word that Qoqada and Minanlu were in revolt. I thought that would buy me time, and so I left my best general, Hahinqo, in charge at Dythbeth and took half of my troops to the mountains to reclaim some of my old glory. I wanted to bloody the nose of Minruth the Mad, but I’ve been a fool—I should have stayed in Dythbeth!”

  When, two days later, the Fifth Army bridged the ford of the Karhokoly, Kwasin could already see a dark mass moving across the great plain toward the city. The king ordered his men to cut a beeline across the plain and intercept the invaders. Soon, however, it became evident that if Roteka did not take his men directly to the city, the enemy would reach it first. Roteka had his lieutenants issue orders for the drivers to abandon their oxen and wagons and to hike it as fast as they could on foot. They arrived none too soon. As the bloody red eye of Resu cast its sickly light upon the city’s proud towers and high granite walls, the two armies clashed on the great plain before Dythbeth.

  The warring did not go well for King Roteka’s already combat-weary forces. The battle consisted of a series of advances and retreats, and after each lull the Dythbethans found themselves pushed farther back. By early evening they were forced to retreat across the plain to the city. There they entered the eastern gate and took up position atop the city’s fortified walls, launching spears and sling-stones and catapulting vessels of flaming oil down upon the invaders.

  On fought Kwasin, bolstering the exhausted troops of Dythbeth with his crude taunts at the enemy and his unending vigor. When the Sixth Army’s supply train brought hastily constructed wooden ladders across the plain and propped them up against the walls, Kwasin was the first among the defenders to jump upon one, scale down it, and meet the ascending soldiers halfway, his blood-covered ax swinging.

  The soldiers below began to climb back toward the ground. Apparently they recognized the man on the ladder as the terrible giant who had single-handedly slain so many of them during the battle on the plain. Kwasin, seeing the men descend, clambered upward as quickly as he could. By the time he reached the ladder’s top, the men below had already begun to swing the ladder back from the wall.

  The gap between Kwasin and the wall widened to almost two yards. He hurled his ax to the battlement. Now three yards from the wall, the ladder stood almost vertical. He footed his way, handless, to the top rung and, just as the ladder was about to swing out from under his feet, launched himself into the air.

  Kwasin hit the wall hard, narrowly managing to wrap his arms over the wall’s upper edge. His legs flailed in the air, and for a moment he thought his prodigious strength would fail him. Then a hand reached out of the void of night. Kwasin grasped it, heaved himself onto the wall, and looked into the grimly smiling face of King Roteka.

  “Like a hero of old!” he said to Kwasin. “I had my doubts about you, but no more. The day has darkened with men’s blood, but because of you I still hold out hope.”

  Kwasin grasped arms with the old king and grinned. “Do not worry, O King! In the morning Resu will once again look down upon a free and gallant Dythbeth!”

  The king seemed about to speak, but suddenly his body jolted and fell forward into Kwasin’s arms. Blood spurted from Roteka’s mouth and down his regal beard, and a long spear stuck out from his back.

  Kwasin lowered the king’s body to the wall, looking for a sign of life, but the man was already dead.

  He cursed. Squinting into the darkness, Kwasin scanned for any evidence that an enemy soldier might have somehow surmounted the wall unnoticed. Right now the defenders of Dythbeth had moved along the wall to the south, battling more of the ladder-climbing enemy. No other soldiers remained in the vicinity.

  Then Kwasin saw something: a dark form moving among the shadows of the inner wall.

  A burning bottle of oil hurled out of the night and exploded in flames along the wall top. For just a second, the fiery blaze illuminated the fleer, the only person who could have held a position to cast the spear into King Roteka’s back—Taphiru, the high priest of Resu.

  4

  Kwasin had no time to pursue the treacherous priest. The enemy, climbing off . their ladders, swarmed en masse onto the wall.

  He rose from the king’s lifeless form. Then, raising his ax before him, Kwasin charged in among the men of Dythbeth in their attempt to beat back the attackers.

  The Dythbethans rallied around Kwasin, and the first wave of Minruth’s troops to come over the wall fell beneath their fury. When Kwasin smote down four men with a single swoop of his ax and then heaved two of the enemy ladders—-heavily laden with climbers—to the ground, the men looked to the giant as if a god stood among them in the flesh. At least for the moment, the attack on the walls had been repelled.

  Then a shout of despair rang out in the night.

  “Kho help us! The king is dead!”

  A member of the king’s guard had found Roteka’s body. Kwasin wondered why Roteka’s guard had been absent when their king had needed them most. Of course, they might have been separated from him in the confusion of the Khokarsan assault, or else the king had ordered them to assist in repelling the attackers. But another thought made Kwasin’s blood turn as frigid as the ice flows north of the Ringing Sea: the guard might have abandoned Roteka on purpose and been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate him.