IX
Stark saw it rising against the morning sky—a city of gold and marble, high on an island of rose-red coral laid bare by the vanished sea. Sinharat, the Ever-Living.
Yet it had died. As he came closer to it, plodding slowly through the sand, he saw that the place was no more than a beautiful corpse, the lovely towers broken, the roofless palaces open to the sky. Whatever life Kynon and his armies might have foisted upon Sinharat was no more than the fleeting passage of ants across the perfect bones of the dead.
"What was it like before?" he asked, "with the blue water around it, and the banners flying?"
Berild turned a dark, calculating look upon him.
"I told you before to forget that madness. If you talk it, no one will believe you."
"No one?"
"You had best not anger me, wild man," she said quietly. "I may be your only hope of life, before this is over."
They did not speak again, going with slow weary steps toward the city.
In the desert below the coral cliffs the armies of Kynon were encamped. The tall warriors of Kesh and Shun waiting, with their women and their beasts and their shining spears, for the pipers to cry them over the Border. The skin tents and the long picket lines were too many to count. In the distance, a convertible Kallman spacer that Stark recognized as Knighton's made an ugly, jarring incongruity.