Shattered Dance

by Caitlin Brennan

  One of her guides touched her hand. She turned where the priestess directed her. A narrow track ran along the edge of the crag, ending at the gate of a tiny and visibly ancient temple.

  The gate was open. Light shone from within. It was as simple and homely as candlelight, but it was born of magic.

  “Come and pray,” the priestess said—the first words any of them had spoken since they came to her in the palace.

  Briana inclined her head. When she paced toward the shrine, her guides stayed behind. This was hers to do alone, as Aurelius had been when he followed his vision.

  She was serene inside herself, basking in the long light and the stark beauty of the place. Aurelius’s bafflement and slowly dawning hope shimmered around her, set deep in the memory of these stones. Each heir of his line had remembered as she was doing, and each memory had made the magic stronger. After a thousand years, this was a place of power like few others in the world.

  The Mountain was stronger by far, and yet it drew its magic from the same source. That source was inside her, growing and blooming, until in eight days she became indelibly a part of it.

  She paused just inside the gate. It was a very small temple indeed, hardly larger than a stall in the palace stable. Pillars of dove-grey stone held up a dome that had once been painted to imitate the sky. Faint suggestions of blue paint lingered along the edges, and she could see where a sun had been—with flakes of gold still clinging to the plastered stone—and a silver moon.

  If the walls had ever been painted, none of that was left. They were starkly plain and simply beautiful. She stood in the center under the opening of the dome and looked up. Directly overhead, still wan with daylight, shone a single star.

  Briana reached as if to touch it, then smiled at herself. She was at peace here as she had not been since last she went to the Mountain. All of her troubles and confusion had faded away. This was her place and this was her world. She was born to rule it.

  It seemed appropriate that she should kneel in the light of that star. She offered no formal prayer. As with the Lady, words were superfluous. She gave her heart and spirit and offered her magic to the empire that had begun in this place.

  Night was falling. So was Briana. Darkness came not from the sky but up from below, rising out of the earth that a moment before had been so perfectly hers.

  This was nothing that she or any mortal could ever own. It was absolute darkness, night everlasting, oblivion incarnate.

  The trap had been waiting, baited with serenity and poisoned with complacence. The Unmaking opened under her feet. The star above the dome shifted and changed. It was a spear of diamond, a weapon forged of living malice.

  Behind it she saw a man’s face. He seemed to be standing in a tower window, spear poised in his hand. She might have taken him for a priest, with his gaunt cheeks and black-robed body, but there was nothing holy about him.

  His eyes were so pale they seemed blind, but they all too obviously were not. He balanced the spear easily, lightly, as a warrior might. His lips curved in a faint, mocking smile.

  Briana was not a hot-tempered person, but that smile woke in her such rage that she reached down into the earth, even against the Unmaking, and drew from the well of the empire’s magic. The tides of oblivion did their utmost to overwhelm it, but it held its ground. It roared up in her.

  Far from flinching, the man in black laughed. She snatched at the thing she had unleashed—but it was too late. The trap was sprung.

  The mage-bolt flew unerring toward its target. He flicked the spear sidewise. The bolt struck it amidships—and rebounded.

  She was a poor strategist and a worse ruler, and there was nothing whatsoever she could do about it. The blast of power that should have smitten the black priest turned back on her with redoubled force.

  She had no time to raise a shield. She had all the time in the world to see it coming and know that when it struck, it would destroy her.

  She wrenched herself aside. The bolt missed the heart—but only just. The lash of it cracked through her body.

  The Unmaking receded. The sky was clean again. Both the priest and the false star had vanished. Briana could not feel anything at all.

  She floated above the temple, as remote as a god. If she deigned to look down, she could see the tiny charred thing that had belonged to her.

  Others were scattered not far from it, broken figures in fire-darkened saffron and singed and blackened white. They were all dead, her priests and priestesses. The flames had devoured them.

  A shadow of the rage that had brought all this on was still in her. She should never have let it overwhelm her. But this was a welcome warmth, a focus in the vagueness that had become the world.

  She would not surrender. Oblivion beckoned, but she refused the temptation. Sorrow and pain lay below in the flesh she had escaped.

  She was not afraid of pain. Sorrow was harder. She steeled herself to face it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Briana was a long time coming. Valeria slipped into the kitchen for a loaf of bread and a nub of sausage. She got her hands slapped for the theft, but her belly was glad of it.

  Kerrec and the Master were made of sterner stuff. They spent the time in meditation, preparing for the gathering of magic that would begin in the morning.

  When she had eaten enough to hold her, she took the most leisurely way back to the room where they were sitting. The kitchen had a garden with a wall that, if one climbed to the top and perched on one corner, allowed one to look down across the city to the harbor. It was a pleasant place to watch the sun set.

  Valeria should have been in a bright mood. She was safe in Aurelia, no one had been hurt or captured on the way from the Mountain and she was about to dine with a dear friend. But her mind had darkened as the day waned.

  As she drew near the wall, an odd sound made her shoulders tighten. It was like the growl of the sea when a storm was coming in, but the sky was clear and the air serene.

  The small hairs rose on her arms. That was no human or mortal sound. Somewhere close by, a mage was fighting for her life—and her enemy wielded the Unmaking.

  The seed of it within Valeria called to that other power. It took every scrap of will she had to keep it warded and apart.

  The cooks—even those who had a smattering of magic—had sensed nothing. No use to alarm them. Valeria made her way through them as quickly but as casually as she could, then once she was out of sight, bolted toward the riders’ tower.

  The Master and the First Rider were just as she had left them. Clear evening light fell across their faces. They looked remarkably alike, the old and the young, both with the sharp-cut features of old emperors.

  A rider had no family but the school and no past but the Call. That was tradition. Kerrec and Valeria had not been able or willing to observe it.

  Master Nikos came from an older time. Valeria had never paused to reflect on who he might have been or what town or lineage he had left behind. It had never mattered.

  Still, in this pellucid and deceptively peaceful evening, she could not help but notice the resemblance between the late imperial prince and the Master of the riders. Probably they were kin. Gods knew, enough nobles had been Called from this city, though before Kerrec, the Mountain had never gone so far as to Call the emperor’s firstborn son.

  It mattered no more now than it ever had. Her mind was avoiding the thing that had brought it here. Something had roused the Unmaking, and something else had fought it and lost.

  Valeria gathered herself to break into the riders’ trance. Master Nikos was closer to full awareness than Kerrec. His eyes moved under the lids, flicking as if they scanned swiftly down a written page.

  She drew breath to speak.

  Kerrec’s eyes snapped open. They were the color of molten silver.

  A bolt of pure white agony lanced through Valeria. The pains of birth had been nothing to this. They, for all their deadliness, had ended in joy.

  There was no jo
y in this. Somehow she kept her feet. She saw the same terrible pain in Kerrec’s eyes.

  “Briana,” she said. “Oh, dear gods.”

  Kerrec was on his feet. Valeria was already running. She was dimly aware of Master Nikos following with remarkable speed.

  He kept his wits enough to summon the rest of the riders as he ran. Valeria’s summons aimed higher.

  Their stallions were waiting in the outer court. They were saddled and bridled and ready to go.

  Valeria caught Quintus’ eye in the shadow of a corner and nodded slightly. Maybe he had failed the testing after the Call, but he was a horse mage. He had known.

  She sprang astride Sabata and aimed him toward the gate. It opened just before he burst through it.

  The rest of the stallions followed. None of the riders carried a weapon, but they needed none. They had their magic and the white gods.

  They roared through the city like a wave of the sea. Valeria made no effort to direct Sabata. He was following paths that had little to do with mortal roads.

  The gate he chose was not one she had seen before. It was small and hidden in a corner of the wall. It was barely wide enough for one rider and just tall enough for Gunnar to pass.

  They rode out onto a long pale-grey strand. Breakers rolled in and sighed out again. There had been a road once, but wind and waves had battered it and sand had drifted over it.

  The stallions ran light-footed where it had been. Up above them rose a promontory. It seemed hardly taller than one of the city’s towers, but as they drew nearer, Valeria could see that it was both steep and high.

  A track wound up it. Like the gate, it was barely wider than a single horse. Sabata ascended as if it had been a level street. The rest of the stallions clattered and scrambled behind.

  Valeria would have given a year of her life for a gull’s wings. Then she could have flown up over the crag toward the thing that waited on the summit. What had risen there should never have touched that high and holy place. It should never have been at all, not in this world or any other.

  Valeria was tainted with it. It hounded the empire and its rulers. Enemies wielded it, but it was older by far than they.

  It had killed the Emperor Artorius on the battlefield. Now it had struck Briana.

  Valeria was deeply and viscerally angry. That anger carried her almost as strongly as Sabata did. He sprang up over the summit onto a brief level.

  There on the windy height in the last of the daylight, she saw the temple in smoldering ruin and eight priests and priestesses lying where the fire had flung them. She did not remember leaving the saddle. As she sprinted toward the fallen columns and the melted and broken gate, someone else passed her.

  Kerrec’s feet barely touched the ground. He darted through the wreckage toward a crumpled shape that lay in the center. Valeria followed only a little more slowly.

  Briana was neither a tiny nor a childlike woman. She was as tall as Valeria and somewhat more strongly built. For all the hours she spent sitting in court or council, she devoted nearly as many to riding and dancing and practicing with weapons.

  This shrunken thing could not be Briana. It lay on its back, its eyes open and blank, staring sightlessly at the sky.

  She looked as if she had been washed in fire. Her face and hands were blistered and her clothes were charred. In places they still smoldered.

  Valeria knew too well the mark of a mage-bolt. This had not killed—not quite. Briana clung to life by a thread.

  Kerrec knelt by his sister’s side. With exquisite and painful care, he gathered her in his arms.

  Petra picked his way through the rubble and lowered himself to his knees. Kerrec mounted, cradling Briana. The stallion rose as smoothly as he could.

  The rest of the riders moved among the dead, gathering them together and laying them reverently in the broken temple. None but Briana had survived. Whatever defenses they had had, those had not saved them.

  Sabata pawed imperiously. They were done here. It was time to go.

  His impatience shook Valeria out of the trance of shock. She mounted with much less than her usual grace and let him carry her where he would.

  Petra led the line on the descent. Sabata brought up the rear. As he bore Valeria away from the temple and its burden of dead, the anger rose so high and strong that she could not contain it. She loosed it in fire—striking with the knowledge even as she did it that Briana had done exactly the same thing. It was written in the patterns that coiled all around this place.

  Valeria was fortunate that whatever enemy Briana had been trying to destroy was gone. There was nothing to fight, and no trap left. Her bolt, unlike Briana’s, flew true.

  The temple collapsed in a cloud of ash and acrid smoke. Valeria shuddered. Almost inadvertently, she had unmade it.

  Gods forbid it be an omen.

  It was dark when the riders returned to the city. All the gates were shut and the walls warded against the night, but the stallions had no concern for such things. They passed through as if there had been no barrier at all, either mortal or magical.

  The city appeared to know nothing of what the riders carried back to the palace. The ways they took were almost empty, although the larger streets and alleyways were full of people crowding in for the coronation.

  The palace blazed with light. Lords and servants alike labored far into the night to prepare for the great festival and holy rite. The arrival of a full quadrille of stallions and their grim-faced riders, the foremost of whom cradled the lifeless body of their empress, struck them with devastating force.

  Kerrec knew how to speak to servants. It was bred into him as the Dance was bred into the stallions. He had hardly passed through the palace gate before he had a small army running to do his bidding.

  By the time he reached Briana’s rooms, a Healer was waiting and promising that the Master of the order would follow shortly. A bath was drawn, pungent with medicinal salts. Half a dozen mages of various orders either stood about already or came running while Kerrec surrendered his sister to the bath.

  No one asked questions yet. First they had to keep Briana alive. Once she was carried out of the bath and wrapped in a light robe, the Healer set to work. The rest of the mages assisted him.

  Valeria had nothing to do here. The other riders had either gone hunting whoever or whatever had done this or ridden to the temple with the news of the priests’ destruction.

  Kerrec was still giving orders in a brisk, dispassionate voice. The palace stirred and seethed like a hive with a wounded queen.

  If Valeria had any sense she would retrieve her stallion and Kerrec’s and go back to Riders’ Hall. But neither Sabata nor Petra had stayed in the stable where she had left them. She could not tell exactly where they were, except it was somewhere within reach of the bay Lady.

  They were being gods, damn them. And she was being useless.

  Briana lay in a web of spells like a tangle of shining threads. Valeria could see what each was meant to do, but she could also see how each had failed.

  The mages did not seem to understand. They kept weaving their spells and applying their ointments and potions, treating the symptoms without comprehension of the disease.

  Some wounds were best left open to heal. Bandages made them fester. These spells were bandages, and they were doing Briana no good at all.

  Kerrec should have said something. He had the rank and the right. But he had found another focus for his anger and grief. As if his sister’s fall had brought the late prince to life again, he summoned councils and commanded servants and sent guards to learn the causes and consequences of this devastation.

  How like a man, Valeria thought, to turn away from human pain toward bloodless politics. Even while she thought it, she knew she was not being charitable. In the mood she was in, she could not make herself care.

  It was not Valeria’s place to argue with the Master of the Healers, or the Master of the Seers or the Mistress of the Wisewomen or the Chief Augur, either.
But they were killing Briana.

  The wisewoman stepped to the fore with chants and smokes and infusions of sweet-smelling herbs. As she passed her hands over Briana’s body, Valeria reached across the bed and stopped them.

  The spell dissipated in the smoke of sage and juniper and cedar. The wisewoman’s anger rocked Valeria, but she was prepared for it.

  She met that fierce, cold glare. “Stop,” she said. “You’re not helping.”

  “Child,” said the wisewoman, “it is our great good fortune that your interference broke the spell and not the lot of us.”

  “Lady,” said Valeria, “you are breaking her.” She let go the wisewoman’s hands and scattered the tangle of spells. It shredded like mist and spider silk.

  All those master mages hissed and sputtered. Valeria ignored them. Briana lay barely breathing. Her robe was light enough that Valeria could see the burned and blistered skin beneath.

  Her whole body was seared as if by strong sun, but the bolt had struck hardest in the center. Valeria folded back the robe and caught her breath.

  Most of the burns would heal with little or no scarring. But not this. Flesh had melted and fused to itself or to the scaffolding of bone.

  Valeria had learned from her mother to be coldly dispassionate in the face of ruin. Part of her wanted to weep and part wanted to howl in rage, but she kept her face calm and her emotions rigidly in check.

  It was less difficult than it used to be. Rider’s discipline had set in her bones. It helped her call forth power from the stallions who were always inside her.

  She had not been absolutely certain that they would give it, but they offered no objection. They were not her enemies or Briana’s—however hard that was to believe just then.

  Valeria had to stop and take deep breaths, reaching far down within herself for calm. Now more than ever she could not afford to lose that inner stillness. She needed every scrap of it for what she had to do.

  Through the white gods’ power she traced the patterns of life and blood and breath that ran through Briana’s body. They were terribly burned and twisted, their clear flow disrupted. Still, under them she could see what had been before.