Book 1 - A Shadow of All Night Falling by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

demands of llkazar. Varthlokkur spoke with the King, then rode to Gog-Ahlan.
    He found another conquered city, worse than the last. For resisting too long, all honor had been raped away. Her once proud men were permitted no income save what their women could earn serving the lusts of occupying soldiers. Again Varthlokkur spoke with a fallen King, then rode on.
    He crossed the passes west of Gog-Ahlan and turned south into Jebal al Alf Dhulquarneni, a black region, subject to no King. Eventually he reached the valley Sebil el Selib, Path of the Cross, where the first King-Emperor of Ilkazar had trapped and crucified a thousand rebellious nobles. There he, made camp and his preparations.
    A few days later, he entered the city that had given him life, and so much pain. At the gate he was met by wizards awaiting the annual message, which he refused to hand over to anyone but the King. It demanded the death by burning of Vilis and seven times seven of Ilkazar's wizards as atonement for the crime against Smyrena. The demand was refused, as expected. The message ended with promises of famine and pestilence, earthquakes and signs in the sky, the appearance of enemies countless as the stars, and was sealed 13.
    The seal remained cryptic for a time. Once the mystic number was noted, however, the wizards concluded that their enemy had been among them. They searched the city, but he was gone. They searched the Empire and still found nothing. Fear haunted their councils. Yet nothing happened. Or so it seemed for a time.
    The fall of Ilkazar, as recorded in The Wizards of Ilkazar, a dubious and doubtless exaggerated epic of King Vilis' end, which opens:
    How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow she has become that was great among the nations!
    Barbarians harried the borders of the Empire. Unrest grumbled through the tributary states. The armies were decimated and demoralized by a strange plague. A star exploded and died. From Ilkazar itself a dragon was seen crossing the full moon. An unseasonable storm wrecked shipping in the Sea of Kotsum. Trolledyngjan pirates raided the western coasts.
    And the song says:
    She weeps bitterly in the night, tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has none to comfort her;
    ******line lost******they have become her enemies.
    Tributary states rebelled. Entire armies were surprised and overwhelmed. Ilkazar's moneylenders grumbled because loans to the Empire were not being repaid. Those who dealt in booty murmured because there were no new conquests. The people muttered as supplies grew short.
    The King, in the traditional manner of politicians, tried to stem gloom's tide with speeches. He promised impossible things that he apparently believed himself...
    But he couldn't put the rebels down. They were too numerous, in too many places, and their numbers daily grew-and ill fortune invariably dogged armies sent against them: floods, spoiled rations, disease. And with each rebel victory, more conquered peoples rose.
    A whisper, dark, disturbing, ran through llkazar. The city would be spared no agony when the foreign soldiers came. The people fled-until the King declared emigration a capital offense. Fool. He should have rid himself of their hunger.
    There was no native crop that year. Rust, worms, weevils, and locusts destroyed everything. The only food available was that in storage and a dwindling trickle of tribute.
    Though in dread of the wizards of llkazar, the rebel Kings, and barbarians after spoil, gathered and united against the Empire.
    Says the poet:
    Happier were the victims of the sword than the victims of hunger, who pined away, stricken by the want of the fruits of the field. The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children; they became their food in the destruction of her people.
    There were armies before llkazar, well-fed armies high with the destruction of Imperial legions. They flaunted their fat herds before the watchers on the walls. Within the