by Judith Tarr
She did not ease for that. Eyes were on them, unseen, not truly hostile but not friendly, either. The beasts were quiet, which was well. She combed her mare’s mane with her fingers, shifted in the saddle, stretched a kink out of her shoulder.
A glance found Kimeri riding on Chakan’s crupper. The child had wanted a mount of her own this morning—sure sign that she had come back to herself. Maybe tomorrow, Daruya thought, she would have one of the remounts saddled and let Kimeri ride it for at least a part of the day.
The walls of the cleft opened slowly and sank by degrees into the land beyond, until they rode through a stony valley, steep-sided, with grass growing amid the remnants of winter’s snow. They paused to drink from a stream, found it clean and bitter cold: snow-water. The sun was high enough to reach beyond the walls of the valley, and warm enough that the guides took off their coats and their furred hats and rode in their shirts.
Daruya, less hardy, still pulled off her hat and let the wind run fingers through her hair. A gust blew it in her face, a heavy curtain of amber-gold curls. She laughed for no reason that she could name, and shook it back.
Her laughter ran its course. There were smiles about her, in Olenyai eyes or mages’ faces. But she was watching the summit of the ridge, where sunlight dazzled and shadows seemed to dance. Shadows born of living bodies, and within them a glitter of metal, and awareness keen and sharply pointed and very clear.
She said to Chakan, very calmly, “Look up. No, not there. Up. East wall.”
The soft hiss of sword from sheath was his answer, and his voice, as calm as hers, and no louder. “Eyes up, Olenyai. We have company.”
It was not a good place to be at the bottom of. The east slope was too steep for a senel, but not for a man with the surefootedness of the mountain born. There were men and weapons ahead, too, and behind. They were nicely trapped.
Daruya caught Vanyi’s eye. The Guildmaster raised a brow. Daruya tilted her hand till gold caught the sun and flashed. Vanyi smiled a cold white smile.
Briefly Daruya considered the guides, and the lack of magic and mages in Su-Akar. Let them learn, she thought. She had not called in her power in long and long, not since the Gate. It came gladly, swift as a hawk to the fist. The sun fed it.
She was aware of Vanyi calling her own magic, a weaving of dark and light, shadow and sun; and the mages summoning each his own, even Kadin who never spoke, never sang, rode always mute and wrapped in grief.
His gladness was a dark thing, tinged with blood. He wanted to take life, to kill as his lightmage had been killed. She brushed him with a finger of power, bright Sun-gold to his black dark.
He recoiled in startlement. She gentled him with patience, pressing no harder than she must with raiders closing in on every side. Softly, she willed him. Be calm. You’ll have revenge—but not now. These fools are unworthy of you.
He begged to differ, but she was stronger. He subsided, sullen but obedient, letting her direct him as she judged best. She was not his lightmage, yet the familiar force of matched yet opposing power comforted him, filled a fraction of his emptiness, muted his grief.
Instinct had taken her to him, as if even she, priestess-mage and Sunchild, had need of the dark one, the power that lay in shadows. Yet she could not bond with it; could not be his lightmage. That was forbidden her.
She would ponder that later, when there was leisure. For now she took it as it offered itself, and used it as it asked to be used. Hilt to her blade of light, haft to her spear of the sun, bow to the arrow of power that flew flame-bright from her hand.
It was beautiful and terrible. Mere earthly arrows shot down from above flared to ash and vanished. Swords melted in a fire hotter than any forge. Men shrieked—pain in those who found themselves clutching white-hot hilts, and fear in archers whose bows crumbled in their hands, whose arrows were ash in the quivers. What they saw, Daruya saw through them: a small odd caravan trapped in the valley that was so perfectly suited for ambush, mounted on strange beasts, and guards in black ringed about a towering shape of light.
Back of the light was shadow. It waited to take what the light left, to drown souls that held no more substance than a moth’s flutter. Seductive thought, alluring prospect, to be rid of these bandits with no fear of reprisal.
But Daruya’s training was too strong. One did not slay with power. Above all, one did not destroy the soul, even of an enemy. The price for that was the power that had destroyed so much, but not—cruelly—the life of the mage.
The shadow struggled, resisting. She reined and bound it and loosed a last, blinding blaze of light. There was no harm in it, only terror. The bandits broke and fled.
oOo
“Well done,” said Vanyi dryly.
Daruya quelled a hot retort. She had done it again: swept in and done what needed doing without regard for the Guildmaster’s precedence. In the Gates it would have been death to wait. Here, she should have yielded; should have waited upon the rest.
Vanyi did not say any of that. She did not think it, either, that Daruya could discern. She simply nudged her senel forward past the still and staring guides. The others, mages first, then Olenyai, followed slowly.
Only Daruya did not move; and the guides. The men had a look she had seen in battle, in warriors who had seen too much, whose minds had stopped, leaving them blankly still. The woman was stronger, or more resilient. She flinched at the brush of Daruya’s glance, but she steadied herself, lifted her eyes, met Daruya’s.
Daruya was prey to both arrogance and impatience, as her elders never wearied of telling her. But she was not a fool. She spoke very carefully, choosing her words as meticulously as if she had been addressing the emperor of a nation with which she could be, if she failed of diplomacy, at war. “I swear to you by all that I hold holy, that I have harmed not a hair of their heads, nor done aught but win us free of ambush.”
Aku’s eyes narrowed. “You did it? Only you?”
Daruya felt the flush climb her cheeks. “If there is blame, yes, it is mine alone.”
“But the other could,” said Aku. “Could have done the same.”
She meant Vanyi. Daruya hesitated. To lie, to prevaricate, to tell the truth . . . “She did nothing.”
“She would have,” Aku said. Perceptive, for a woman who had no magic. She was no longer quite so afraid. “I see that you’re very foreign.”
“Very,” said Daruya, a little at a loss. She thought she understood what the woman was getting at. But she could not be certain—even knowing what thoughts ran through that brain, both the spoken and the unspoken. “We’re still mortal,” she said. “Still human. We’re not gods, nor demons, either.”
“So you say,” said Aku. She struck her ox with the goad, urging it forward onto the track the caravan had taken. Her husbands, stirring at last, fell in behind her.
Daruya, left alone, baffled, a little angry, had the presence of mind to sweep the land round about. Nothing threatened. The bandits were still running. Already the tale had grown, the caravan swelled into an army of devils armed with thunderbolts. By the time it passed into rumor, it would be a battle of gods, into which the bandits had fallen by accident and barely escaped alive.
None of which mattered now, with guides who could turn traitor and lead them all into a crevasse. What dishonor would there be in that? Not only were they foreigners; they were mages.
Fear would be enough, Daruya hoped. And common sense. Aku had that. She would want her payment, her scarlet silk. And maybe she would see the profit in seeing this journey to its end, the tales she could tell, the travelers who would pay high to pass through the mountains with a woman who had guided a caravan of demons safely into Shurakan.
And they were safe. Whether word spread swifter than they could travel, or whether they were simply blessed with good fortune, they met no further ambush. No one tried to rob them in the villages, nor were they fallen on in camp and forced to give up their valuables. The snows that were not uncommon even at this t
ime of year veiled the upper peaks from day’s end to day’s end, but never came down upon their track. All their passes were open, the ways unblocked by snow or rockfall or avalanche.
oOo
The luck was with them. Kimeri heard the Olenyai saying that to one another, in whispers so as not to frighten it away.
They could not see the demons who followed, spying on them, or clustered round their camp at night, round-eyed as owls, staring and wondering. The mages, who should have been able to see, were not looking. The guides had made themselves blind, because seeing made them so afraid.
Demons kept bandits away, though her mother’s magic helped. The one whom she had come to think of as her demon, the white-feathered one that she had met at the spring, actually chased off a ragged man who was too desperately hungry to care about the rumor of fire and terror.
Kimeri was angry at the demon for that. She made sure there was food for the man to steal, left some of her supper and some of her breakfast behind, and hoped he found them and was not too frightened to eat.
The demon understood anger, but its memory was very short. It was like the wind: changeable. But its fascination for her went on and on, and made it as solid as it could be, almost solid enough to touch.
Other demons came and went. There were different kinds. The ones with feathers were actually not common. Most had a great quantity of horns and teeth and claws, and scales and tails and leathery wings, and always the yellow eyes. The ones that drank blood looked at the men and the seneldi and thought hunger, but Kimeri’s demon warned them off with growls and teeth-gnashings.
It was not the largest demon and certainly not the most terrible to look at, but the others seemed to listen to it. Maybe, she thought, it was like her: royal born.
When her mother actually let her have a senel to ride all by herself, the demon came to sit on her crupper. The bay gelding did not like that at all. Kimeri calmed it down, shaking for fear her mother would think it was too much for her and make her ride like a baby again, the way the demon wanted to ride.
It was a good senel, sweet-tempered and quiet, just not prepared to carry a thing that had substance but no weight, and looked so odd besides. Once she had explained, it pinned its ears and fretted but gave in, and put up with the demon. The demon helped by being quiet and not moving around too much, except when it forgot and stood up on the senel’s rump and made faces at demons that peered down from the sides of mountains.
It was a very happy demon, riding behind Kimeri, being invisible to everybody else. Sometimes she thought Vanyi might know it was there, but Vanyi said nothing. Kimeri was careful not to talk to it aloud, and when she talked to it in her head to make sure nobody else could listen. It took a little thinking to manage that, but it was not hard once she began.
At first the demon never thought in words, but the longer they went on, the clearer the demon’s thoughts became, until they were having conversations, long hours of them, as the senel climbed up and climbed down and scrambled from mountaintop to mountaintop along the roof of the world. Demons had been there always, like the rocks and the snow and the sky—
“From forever,” the demon said. It liked the thought of forever, played often with it, turned it around in its head like a bright and shining toy. “Forever and ever and ever. We fly in the air, we swim through the earth, we dance on the waters that come out of the dark. We are here always. Always.”
“Do you go anywhere else?” Kimeri asked it once in her head, after they had ridden through a valley with a waterfall. The demon had shown her how it danced on water. She had set out to try it, too, but her mother had caught her just as she began, and scolded her for getting wet, and made her change all her clothes, even the ones that were dry. “Do you only live in the mountains?”
“Where else is there to live?” the demon asked.
“Why,” said Kimeri, “everywhere. There’s a whole world beyond the mountains.”
“The mountains are the world,” the demon said.
“No,” said Kimeri patiently. “The mountains are the roof of the world. The world is much larger than they are. There’s the plain out past them, and the ocean, and more mountains, though not so high, and more plains, and rivers, and forests, and home, where I come from.”
“You come from the mountains,” the demon said. “You come from the thick places—the low mountains, the ones on the edge of the world, where air is heavy and easy to ride on.”
“That’s not the edge of the world,” Kimeri said. “That’s only the edge of the mountains.”
“The edge of the world,” the demon said.
It was a stubborn demon. She tried to show it home, the palace, the plain and the forest, even the Gate. But it insisted that home was the mountains, and the palace was like the palace in the place she was going to, which the demon thought of with a shudder. “The walled place,” it said. “The place that burns.” It meant wards, she thought, because it said the mages’ wards burned, too, but only a little, and once she let it ride with her, it could ignore them completely.
But the wards that made it so afraid were Great Wards, or something like them—wards stronger than any few mages could raise. It scared itself right off the senel and into nothingness, scaring her so much that she thought she had killed it. But it came back a long time later, after they stopped to camp, and it acted as if it could not remember what had scared it away. It would not talk about the walled place again; she did not ask, for fear that it really would go away and not come back.
10
“The burning place is near,” the demon said. It was almost as hard to see as it had been the first time Kimeri saw it. Quivers ran through it, ripples of fear, but it clung stubbornly to the back of her saddle.
She would be afraid of the place herself if she had not heard her mother and Vanyi talking about it. To them it was a human place, that was all, and maybe it was dangerous, but it was nothing to frighten a mage. Demons, who were mostly air, had more to fear, and more to be wary of.
Her demon stood up on the senel’s rump. “Stay here,” it said.
It was not talking to the senel. It caught at her hair with claws like a brush of wind. “Stay in the mountains,” it said. “Don’t go down to the burning place.”
“But,” she said, in her head as always, “what would I do here?”
“Be,” the demon answered. “Be with me.”
“I’m not going to get hurt in the burning place,” she said, trying to comfort it. “I have my own burning inside of me, that keeps me safe.”
“Stay in the mountains,” said the demon. “We can fly. We can play with the wind. You can sing, and I can dance. Stay.”
She was usually careful not to act as if there was anyone with her, but now she turned and looked at the demon. It looked like a shadow on glass, with eyes that glowed like yellow moons. Its whole self was a wanting.
She remembered that some of its kind drank blood, and some had claws that could rip an ox to pieces. But not her demon. It wanted her to stay, that was all, and keep it company.
“I learned words from you,” the demon said. “Who will talk with me, if you go away?”
Kimeri’s throat started to hurt. Her eyes were blurry. “I have to go.”
“You can stay,” said the demon.
“No,” said Kimeri. An idea struck her. “You can teach the others words. Then they can talk to you.”
“I want you,” the demon said.
“I have to go,” Kimeri said. “I have something to do. I can’t not do it. Even to talk with you, and play on the wind.”
The demon’s claws tightened in her hair. They were more solid now, but still no stronger than the wind. Gently, because she did not want to hurt it, she let out a flicker of magery. The demon tried to cling, but the burning, even as little of it as there was, was too much for it. It wailed and let go.
“I’m sorry,” said Kimeri, “but I can’t stay. I’ll try to come back.”
“That is not now,�
� the demon said.
There was nothing that Kimeri could say to that. She had more than a demon to think of, a Gate and a Guardian and a place where they both were, as terrible in its way as the burning place. She could not stop her throat from hurting and her eyes from filling up, but she could not do what the demon wanted, either.
It was too much for a very young person, even a princess with a Sun in her hand. The wind whipped the tears from her eyes, and kept the others from asking questions and being awkward. But her senel’s saddle was too cold a comfort, its mane too rough to bury her face in. She made her way to where her mother was riding, talking to Chakan; pulled herself over behind her mother’s saddle and wrapped her arms about that narrow middle and clung.
oOo
Kimeri was acting strangely again, clinging and refusing to let go. Daruya worried, but magery found nothing wrong except a sourceless grief. Homesick, she decided, and afraid of this bleak steep country that seemed to go on and on without end. It was disturbing enough for a grown mage; for a child it must be terrifying.
She gave what comfort she could, and it seemed to be enough. Kimeri grew calmer, though she still did not ask to go back to her own saddle. Daruya let her stay where she was, glad of her warmth and her presence.
oOo
It seemed that they had been traveling for whole lives of men, ascending each mountain only to find another beyond, crossing each pass into a new and higher country. The air blew thin and bitter cold. Spring lagged behind, then vanished in endless fields of snow.
This was the summit of the world, as high as any simple man could go and live. Mages could have gone higher, but even Vanyi was not moved to that degree of curiosity, not with what she faced, ahead in Shurakan.
There were peaks above her, white jagged teeth, and sky the color of evening although it was midday. Both moons were up, Brightmoon a white shadow of the sun, Greatmoon like a shield of ruddy copper, hanging above the crenellations of the Worldwall.
Those who needed mages’ help to breathe had that help and welcome. That was most of them now, all but the guides, who were born to this country.