Spear of Heaven

by Judith Tarr

  “And well before those who aren’t mages begin to cross,” he said, agreeing with her. “I’ve a pack of merchants already clamoring to explore this new country. They don’t care that it takes a mage to direct a Gate, and a mage to guide the crossing. They’re drunk on dreams of profit.”

  “They’ll dream for yet a while,” she said dryly. “You, too, my lord emperor. I’ll come back, I give you my word.”

  “Alive?”

  “What, afraid of windy ghosts?” He looked so stark that she patted his cheek, a touch that stopped just sort of a caress. “Yes, I’ll come back alive, or close enough to make no difference. Don’t wait about for me. I’ll be taking my time at it.”

  “Not too much,” he said. “And send me word when you can.”

  “That I can do,” said Vanyi. She stepped away from him. It was an odd sensation, not quite like pain.

  Well, she thought; they had been apart often enough, and once for a whole hand of years, while he fought his wars in the far west of Asanion, and she ruled mages in the raw new city that would be Asan-Gilen. But that had come after a quarrel, and they had parted with bitter words. Parting in amity, when god and goddess knew when they might meet again—that was harder.

  Best get it over. Mages were drawing back the veil that hid the Gate. It was sleeping, showing no passage of worlds, only a grey nothingness.

  As she approached, it began to wake. She felt it in her bones.

  Likewise she felt a wrench, a little like envy, a little like grief, that after a moment she recognized as not her own. It came from Estarion, standing on the map, with his foot beside the broken Gate. There was a shadow just behind him, a cat as large as a small senel, as dark and golden-eyed as he was himself: one of his ul-cats, the king of them from its size and its air of lazy power. It blinked at Vanyi and yawned, baring fangs as long as her hand.

  Estarion took no notice, seemed to be aware of little apart from Vanyi and the Gate and his own solitude. He did not look like a king or a conqueror. He looked like a man who must remain behind while his friend journeys to the other side of the world.

  Looks were deceptive, she thought, drawing nearer to the Gate. Meruvan Estarion was emperor to the marrow of his bones. As she was mage and master of Gates.

  She raised her hands. The Gate woke to the touch of her power, woke and began to sing.

  oOo

  Daruya thought silence, thought shadows, thought nothingness. It was a delicate balance, a sensation not a little like the moment before one was disastrously sick—a dissonance between the fact of her existence and the illusion that she was not there at all.

  She was cloaked for further safety, wrapped in black, with her face shrouded, though not in an Olenyai veil. Her one indulgence and indiscretion, the mare she rode, seemed to have attracted no attention even when she indulged herself in a flurry of temper. Striped duns were not uncommon, and Olenyai were fond of them. One of the bred-warriors even had a rarity, a silver dun, grey bars on white.

  For all her care and caution, she nearly forgot herself when she realized that the emperor was there. He must have come in under the same sort of protection that concealed her. She strained her ears to hear what he said; relaxed in every muscle when he spoke of her being safely shut up in her rooms. She thrust aside the niggling of guilt. He trusted her—he had not locked her in.

  No. He trusted his own vanity, his conviction that she would yield to him simply because he asked. By the time he found out that she was gone, it would be too late to call her back. Then she could prove how groundless his fears had been, and how much he needed her where she was going.

  The Guildmaster had left the emperor standing alone and come to wake the Gate. Daruya, divided between watching Vanyi and sustaining her deception, still kept her eyes on the emperor. He was watching Vanyi. He always did. A blind man could see that they had been lovers, could still be, if either one of them were even a fraction less stiff-necked.

  Her grandmother the empress was excuse, not obstacle. Haliya, great lady and queen, knew perfectly well how it was between her husband and her husband’s friend and frequent rival.

  It had never troubled her. Little to do with men and women did. She had not even blinked when Daruya came to her first, pregnant and defiant and scared, because her plan had succeeded and now she was not so sure she wanted to face the consequences. Without Haliya’s quiet good sense, those consequences might have been even less pleasant than they were.

  Daruya had visited the empress before she came to the Guildhall. She did so every day and at much the same time: after the daymeal was done, when the emperor was occupied with matters of state, but before the empress held her own court. Today Daruya had thought of turning coward and staying away, but she found her courage and her cunning. If she did not go to see her grandmother, people would wonder, and perhaps be suspicious.

  Haliya was lying on a couch in her day-room as she too often was of late, fully and properly dressed in the Asanian manner, except for the threefold outer robe that she would assume when she held her audience. She seemed tiny in the swathing of robes, shrunken, bleached to the color of old ivory. All but her eyes, which were the true Asanian gold, bright and vivid still in the withered face.

  She had grown so old so suddenly. Her hair had been white for as long as Daruya remembered, but as late as Autumn Firstday she had been riding with the emperor’s hunt, keeping pace with him through the wild coverts, and shooting a fine big buck for the evening’s feast. Somehow, in the winter, the life had drained out of her.

  They did not say anything of consequence. Daruya did not confess what she was about to do, nor did she hint at it. Sitting her senel on the threshold of the Gate, feeling the Gate-music that throbbed in her center, she remembered the softness of her grandmother’s cheek as she kissed it, the sweet husky sound of the voice that like the eyes was still perversely young, the scent of ailith-blossoms that the empress had always loved.

  Daruya would not be there in full spring, to fill the empress’ rooms with flowering branches. But in the autumn, when the fruit was heavy and sweet—then, she promised herself and the memory of her grandmother, she would come back. She was not going away forever. Only for a while, because she must.

  oOo

  The Gate sang its deep pure song. Vanyi matched the measure of her power to it. She felt the resonance that rang sixfold from the mages who would cross with her, the quiver of discord that was the company of Olenyai with their beasts and baggage.

  A strong sweet note rose through the dissonance, smoothed it, shaped it into harmony. She started a little in the working, but caught herself. Estarion had made himself a part of the Gate-magic. He was no mage of the Guild, nor could ever be; that was forbidden him as emperor. But he was mage and master.

  She was wise enough not to resent the help he gave, though it stung her pride. Six mages and a Master should have been enough to open this Gate. Still, his strength was welcome. It made her task simpler, spared her power for when she would need it most, past the Gate’s threshold on the worldroad.

  The grey blankness of the Gate had shifted, transmuted, come alive. As with all Gates, it strove ever to change through the turning of the worlds. But she had set her will on it. It fixed on the eighth Gate of that other half of this world, holding pace like twin seneldi in a race, each desirous of outrunning the other, but held level by their riders’ compulsion.

  The Guardians on the other side were holding likewise, their task the less because their Gate was lesser, bound in servitude to this one. Any who passed that Gate could only come here, although from here he could pass anywhere in the worlds, even to the Heart of the World itself, which was master of all Gates.

  In the moment when the two Gates matched, Vanyi brought them all together with a word. Two mages passed first, and then the Olenyai and the animals, and after them the rest of the mages. She was last of all, and Estarion who would not pass the Gate.

  They did not speak, even when, briefly, they were a
lone. He was holding the whole force of the Gate in the hands of his power, even that part which she could well have held. It was by no means the limit of his capacity, but he showed the strain a little: a tightness about the nostrils, a rim of white about the eyes.

  It did not prevent him from smiling his old, white smile. She took the memory with her into the Gate.

  5

  The storm struck as Vanyi crossed the threshold. She knew a moment of calm, a vision of the worldroad as it should be: grey road, grey land, grey sky, and before them the glimmer of the Gate to which they traveled. Then the sky shattered.

  All Gates were present in her awareness, no more or less to it than the parts of her own body. But as a body convulses with pain of a blow, now the Gates reeled. The whole great chain of them, from world to world, shivered and cracked and began to break.

  The road heaved under her feet. She staggered. Shadows milled ahead of her, men, beasts, the glimmering shapes of mages with their power laid bare. She started toward them, wavered, turned back.

  The Gate through which she had come was there still, though its lintel sagged. Estarion stood in it, arms braced, holding it up. His power surged toward her like a tide of light.

  “The chain!” he cried, faint amid the howl of the storm. “The Gates—let me—”

  Her own power reared up like a wall. The tide crashed against it and recoiled. As it rolled back upon Estarion, she thrust the wall behind it. It struck the Gate with the clap of stone on stone, locked and barred and sealed it until she should open it again.

  Estarion would suffer for that. But he would not die—and die he would have done, if he had done what he was setting out to do, and tried to restore the chain of Gates with his sole and unaided power. No one man, even the Lord of Sun and Lion, was strong enough to do such a thing alone.

  All such thoughts encompassed but a moment of the worlds’ time. Even as she thought them, Vanyi was wheeling away from the sealed Gate, back to the tumult on the worldroad.

  One at least of the seneldi was down—dead, and its rider beneath it, unnaturally still. Shadows beset the rest, driving them together. Mages fought with bolts of power. Olenyai fought with swords, useless against shadows—far better for them were the amulets they wore, that protected them against magic.

  The watchers of the road were nowhere to be perceived. She called them, received no answer. If they had come, they could have driven off the shadows, the dark things without substance and yet with deadly strength. Even as she fought through a road turned to clinging mire, catching her feet and causing her to stumble, a shadow enfolded a lightmage, Jian who was youngest of all.

  In desperation Vanyi formed and aimed a dart of power. But she was too far, too weak, and the shadow too swift. She felt, they all felt, the mage’s fear, her resolve to be strong, to resist pain; pain mounting to agony, till nothing was in the world but that, and agony beyond agony, and abruptly, without warning or transition, nothing.

  Jian was gone. Her darkmage cried out, a raw, anguished sound, and flung himself at the shadows. They slipped away from him, eluded his grasp, his power, the maddened stabbing of his dagger.

  They seemed to mock him. With a spring like a cat’s, one of them fell on the darkmage who was farthest from him, who had stopped to stare aghast, and was too slow to escape. His lightmage, leaping to his defense, fell into the shadow’s maw.

  A blaze like the sun blinded them all, even Vanyi in the raising of her power. Shadows withered and died. The road’s heaving steadied. The chain of Gates, at the point of rending asunder, subsided into a kind of quiet.

  In the center of it, soft and calm but rather strained, a voice said, “I can’t hold this for long. Do you think you could all stop goggling and get a move on?”

  “God and goddess,” said Vanyi, astonished that she had any voice at all, let alone one that could be heard in this place. The road was solid underfoot. She forced her creaking knees to drive her forward. “You heard her. Move!”

  They were deadly slow, but once they had begun, they gained speed. Those who were mounted pulled those on foot up behind, even the one who struggled and fought and tried to fling himself back to the place where his lightmage had died.

  A tiger-patterned gelding—no, it was a mare, a horned queen mare, and a black shadow on her back—wheeled in front of Vanyi. Its rider thrust out a hand. Vanyi caught it, let it and the mare’s movement swing her up. Even as she settled on the crupper, strong muscles bunched beneath her and surged toward the glimmer of the Gate.

  The light was dying behind them, the road breaking apart. The mare’s hind feet found purchase in the last of it before it melted into nothingness, and thrust them through the wavering Gate.

  oOo

  Light. Solidity. A waft of scent, pungent and strange.

  They had come through. The Gate was fallen: its posts were broken, its lintel shattered. But they were on the other side, in a place so strange that Vanyi could find no thing to rest her eyes upon, except a pair of Guardians, mute and still: one on her feet and looking whitely shocked, one sitting up as if he had fallen and just now come to his senses.

  Her arms, she discovered, were locked in a deathgrip about the rider’s waist. Grimly she pried them free.

  She slid from the back of the motionless senel. No one else was moving, not even the animals.

  She counted. All seneldi present and safe except for the one that had died early in the battle. One Olenyas lying too still across a saddle. Three mages—she bit back a cry. Of six that had left the Guildhall, only three had come through the Gate: darkmage and lightmage, slender elegant Miyaz and quiet-eyed Aledi, and one lone stark-faced darkmage, young Kadin who had lost his lightmage to the shadow.

  Her eyes returned to the rider who had brought her out of the Gate, the rider whose light had kept them alive to come this far. Now that there was no way back, all concealment was gone, hood and veil thrust aside, golden lion-eyes holding hers with remarkably little defiance. “You did need me,” said Daruya.

  “I’ll tan your hide,” said Vanyi.

  She turned slowly. The place was beginning to make sense. It was a temple, she knew that already: safest, her mages had said, for the raising of a Gate, and least likely to attract attention with its comings and goings.

  Ah, but such a temple. Every level surface was carved and painted and glittering with gilt. She could, if she struggled, recognize the shapes of leaves and flowers, birds, beasts, men, things that were all of them and none and everything between.

  At the end of the hall opposite the broken Gate stood the greatest monstrosity of all. It was supposed to be a god, she supposed. Its shape was manlike, but it had—she counted—a full score of arms, each hand clasping a different object: a sword, a flower, a bow, a basket of fruit. Its face was fully human and yet profoundly alien, a smooth mask of beaten bronze, high-cheeked, proud-nosed, thin-mouthed. Its eyes were black and quiet. Its lips were smiling.

  It indeed. The full breasts were a woman’s, but the organ below, vastly and proudly erect, was indubitably a man’s.

  She stared at it. She had never, she thought in a dim corner of her mind, been so purely aware that she had come to a foreign place. No, not even when, fresh from the boats and the fish and the peasant simplicity of the Isles, she came to Endros Avaryan that the Sunborn had built, and came face to face on the public street with a young man who happened to be the emperor. And she had thought him strange, with his face like a northern tribesman’s and his startling eyes.

  Estarion had been as common as sea-wrack compared to this. And yet it was all part of her own world. The same sun shone through louvers in the roof, catching fire in the gilding. The same moons would rise in the same sky. No sun like an orb of blood, or twin suns, or triple, or more. She could have traveled here, given a year or five and a ship and a herd of strong seneldi.

  She was in shock. Gates were broken, mages dead. Her power had strained itself to the utmost in doing what little she had done. Estarion ha
d done more, before she trapped him on the other side of the Gate; and Daruya, rebellious, reckless fool, but for whom they would all have died.

  It dawned on her, slowly, that Daruya was receiving a shock of her own. One of the packs in the baggage stirred, shook itself, sat up on its senel’s back. “Mama,” said ki-Merian fretfully, “my head hurts.”

  6

  Chakan swore by all the Asanian gods that he had had nothing to do with this second shadow among his baggage. Vanyi was inclined to believe him. He confessed without shame to the concealment of the princess-heir, but the princess-heir’s daughter had come entirely of her own volition.

  Kimeri said as much when Vanyi pressed her. “I had to come,” she said. “The Gate’s crying. Can’t you hear it?”

  And that was all she would say, except to burst into tears herself, wailing, “Mama! My head hurts!”

  It was nothing, Vanyi assured herself, but a headache—the child had taken no harm, by the god’s mercy. Once Kimeri was put to bed in the elder Guardian’s own chamber, with a warm posset in her and a cool cloth on her brow, they held their council there, speaking soft so as not to wake the sleeping child.

  There were four of them: Daruya, Vanyi, Chakan, and the elder Guardian looking worn and haggard. The younger had insisted on standing watch though the Gate was broken. The rest, mages and Olenyai both, slept as they could in rooms that had been prepared for them, or tended the seneldi in the stable, or mourned their dead in quiet corners of the temple.

  None of those here suggested that they move elsewhere, even to the outer chamber. Daruya, who had never struck Vanyi as the most attentive of mothers, stayed fiercely close to her daughter, with a look about her that defied any force of hells or heaven to harm a hair of that head. “Not,” she said, “that I fear anything here. All threats to us are in the empire or on the worldroad.”