Spear of Heaven

by Judith Tarr

  “I think he cursed you.” Bundur had to drink another cup of tea and devour another cake to calm himself. “What if your child dies?”

  “Your child’s child inherits.”

  “And if there is none?”

  “The god provides,” said Daruya. She found herself running her hand along her thigh. Her right hand, with its burning brand. She was not tempted to turn it palm upward to show him what she carried, the god’s seal and his promise that her line would not perish from the earth. It was no secret in the empire, but neither was it for every eye to goggle at.

  All the more so here. Her tea had cooled, but she drank it. It was wet; it quenched thirst after a fashion.

  “Do you have sisters?” she asked Bundur abruptly.

  “Seven of them,” he answered with some complacence. “Three gave themselves to temples. Two married into families of distinction. One is still unbound by either husband or god. One was our sacrifice.”

  Daruya frowned.

  He saw fit, at that, to explain. “You don’t have that? When sickness comes, or the gods’ displeasure, one child takes it all on herself. If she lives, the plague or the curse is ended. If she dies, likewise. The rest of her family is safe.”

  “That is barbaric,” said Daruya.

  “It’s great honor,” he said, unoffended, “and great courage. It increases the distinction of the house. I would have been the sacrifice myself, but I had no brothers. I wasn’t allowed.”

  “If she had had no sisters, would it have been allowed?”

  “Of course not,” said Bundur. “There must always be one sister and one brother. The gods decreed it.”

  “Even if only one child is born?”

  “Then,” he said, “the master of the house takes another wife. Or the mistress another husband. Or they adopt a child, if those expedients fail.”

  “How utterly strange.”

  He regarded her in mild surprise. “You don’t do that? Ah—but of course. Your gods allow one child. What do you do when none is born at all?”

  “In our line that never happens. In other lines, the lord takes another wife. Or adopts an heir.”

  “See, then? We’re more alike than you think.”

  “Our women don’t marry more than once at a time.”

  “Yet your men take many wives?”

  “Only in Asanion,” she said, “where the people look like your demons.”

  “Ah,” said Bundur. “Demons. They do as they please.”

  He seemed to think that that explained everything. She drew breath to set him right, sighed instead, let it go.

  “You have no husband,” he said, “and yet you have a daughter.”

  She stiffened. Her hand, reaching for the pot to fill her cup again, stopped short of pouring tea over the table and into his lap. “I have a daughter,” she said, tight-lipped. “Is that a sin in your country?”

  “Only if you bear no son to keep her company.”

  “There will be no son,” said Daruya, “whether I marry or no.”

  “Do you know that?”

  “I know that.” She filled the cup. Her hand was steady. She was proud of it. “Women of my country are not in the habit of discussing intimate matters with strangers in teahouses.”

  “Ah, so you are different. I thought so.”

  Her glare should have shattered him where he sat. He only smiled.

  “If this were my own city,” she said deliberately, “and you had said such things as you have said to me, you would be whipped and cast out.”

  “But this is my city,” he said, still smiling, “and I speak as I reckon it proper to speak. You’re sadly ugly, lady of the yellow eyes, but supremely interesting. May I speak with you again?”

  She could not speak at all, for outrage.

  He rose and bowed as low as she had ever seen a man bow in this country. He must wash his teeth in his own piss, she thought viciously, to keep them so white and to display them so freely. “I’ll visit you,” he said.

  She lunged. But he was gone, deceptively swift. She found herself on her knees, trembling with rage, in a circle of silence. All the eyes that had been fixed on her were now fixed scrupulously elsewhere. The voices began again after the faintest of pauses.

  She set hands to the table to hurl it in the nearest politely averted face. A brawl would be splendid, would be glorious.

  Would be most inadvisable in this country where her rank mattered nothing and her lineage met with massive indifference. If, that is, she could have started one at all. Teahouses did not seem given to the wilder extremes of conduct. One needed wine for that, or bad ale—the worse, the better.

  Carefully, meticulously, she gathered herself together and rose to her feet. It did nothing for her temper to discover that Bundur, damn him to the lowest of the hells, had paid her reckoning, or that, if he had not, the teahouse would not have accepted her good imperial gold.

  “You will want to change that,” said the polite personage in charge of the proceedings, from her seat under the tallest of the flowering trees. “The Street of the Moneyers takes gold sometimes, to melt down for the goldsmiths. One of them can give you proper coinage of our kingdom.”

  Daruya could have overturned that table, too, and the woman with it. But she was still in command of herself, still mindful of her position, although she would have given all her despised gold to have been able to forget. She said something not too rude—the personage did not bridle, and did not call for the watch, or whatever did duty for that here—and got herself out before she said or did something truly inadvisable.

  14

  While Daruya was discovering the extent of her self-control, Vanyi was testing her own against a master of obstruction.

  It had taken her five days to reach the Minister of Protocol. Five days of incessant campaigning, intriguing, and outright threats, against a phalanx of functionaries who made the Golden Palace in Asanion seem a haven of simplicity. But she had ruled the Mageguild for forty years, and she had learned to cut through obstruction with a sword of purest obstinacy.

  If a functionary would not pass her to the next highest of his kind, she did it herself: got up and walked to the office that she saw in the functionary’s mind. If the one above him, growing wise, sought to prevent her by slipping out the back door, he found her waiting there. If he set guards on her, she called her shadows forward.

  Olenyai, even swordless, were dangerous fighters. No one in Shurakan could match them. Shurakan, after all, had never known war, nor had occasion to make an art of it.

  And so, step by step, she won her way to the gate, as it were: to the Minister of Protocol, who alone barred her way to the queen. There she found herself halted.

  The Minister of Protocol did not affect the trappings of power. He wore a coat that fell discreetly to his ankles, the color of clouds, with the merest suggestion of embroidery about the hem. His shirt was simple, his trousers undistinguished by excessive width or richness of fabric. He wore his hair in a severe knot at his nape, and his thin beard and greying mustaches at an unassuming length, barely past the collar of his coat.

  She, who had mastered the art of discretion for herself long since, regarded him in jaundiced approval. He offered her tea. She accepted it and the cakes that came with it, ritual welcome everywhere in Shurakan. One could judge the degree of one’s welcome, she had been told, by the quality of the tea and the kind and quantity of the cakes.

  If so, then she was barely welcome here. The tea was simple, without adornment of flowers or sweetness. The cakes were plain redspice buns just touched with honey, and there were only two for each of them. But, considering the Minister of Protocol and his studied simplicity, she suspected that the frugal refreshment was a statement not of her insignificance but of his desire to be thought a harmless fool.

  That was a game she too could play. She drank her tea and ate both of her buns and sat waiting for him to begin, wearing an expression of mindless amiability.

  He
might be the most powerful man in Shurakan, but he lacked one thing that Vanyi had a world’s worth of: time. Her whole duty at the moment was to speak to the queen. His was manifold, and not all of it could wait for him to conquer her with superior patience.

  It was he, then, who spoke first, after the pot had been emptied and the basket of buns stripped bare. He chose the weapon of directness, as she had expected. The subtle never understood how predictable they could be when they tried to take Vanyi off guard. “Tell me why it is so urgent that you speak with the queen.”

  “Surely,” said Vanyi, still wearing her amiably vague expression, “her majesty is accustomed to greeting embassies from outland royalty. It’s a frequent duty of our imperial house.”

  “Surely,” he responded with a thin smile, “their celestial majesties are both accustomed to receive strangers in audience, when the press of their duties permits. You can be received . . .” He consulted a book that lay on his worktable, not the rolled and cord-bound books of Vanyi’s part of the world but a strange thing, plaques of horn as long as a man’s arm and as wide as his hand, hinged and jointed together. His finger ran down the long closely written columns. “Their majesties will admit you to their presence on the fourth day of the eighth round of the bright moon.”

  Even with magery Vanyi needed a moment to render that into the reckoning she knew. When she did, she heaved a mighty sigh. “Oh, come, don’t be ridiculous. That’s five rounds of the moon from now. I’ll confer with her majesty within this round, and sooner if possible.”

  “Their majesties,” said the Minister of Protocol, “have many matters of import to occupy them. You are fortunate that they can see you before the new year.”

  Or, his tone implied, that they would see her at all.

  He was a subtle man, enclosed within himself, but he let her see what passed behind his bland face. He loathed magic, despised mages. He believed that foreigners should summarily be cast from the kingdom. But for deep-grained courtesy and a not entirely illogical suspicion that Vanyi might prove useful to him or to the rulers he served, he would have refused to contend with her at all.

  She sat back in her chair, thoroughly at ease. “Very well then. Tell me why I shouldn’t just walk past you and hunt out the queen for myself.”

  “Tell me why you refuse to speak to the king.”

  Vanyi raised a brow. “Rhetoric for rhetoric, is it? Would the king allow me to pollute his presence?”

  “The son of heaven is no friend to what you are,” said the Minister of Protocol, “but he knows the value of circumspection. He would admit you. As he will, on the fourth day of the eighth round of the moon.”

  “By which time,” said Vanyi, “with any luck at all, our embassy will be finished and we’ll be gone. Don’t you want to hurry us through and be rid of us?”

  Clearly the Minister of Protocol would not have minded that. Equally clearly, his duty required that he impede her in any way he could. “You may not address the daughter of heaven alone in the absence of her brother. That is never done.”

  “No?” Vanyi inquired. “That’s odd. I distinctly heard one of your underlings granting a party of priests an audience with her majesty at the same time that same underling arranged for his majesty to participate in a rite of purification for a temple.”

  “Those were minor matters,” said the Minister of Protocol, unruffled. “Embassies are of greater import, and involve both children of heaven inseparably.”

  “But ours is a minor embassy, you’ve all been careful to make that clear to us. Our empire is as nothing to your celestial kingdom. Our emperor can never be equal to your queen and her king. Our gods bow at the feet of your myriad divinities. All of which,” said Vanyi, smiling sweetly, “is so self-evident that surely even you can’t deny we’re insignificant enough to speak to the queen alone.”

  “That is not done,” said the Minister of Protocol.

  “Why? Are you afraid she’ll let us corrupt her?”

  “The children of heaven are incorruptible.”

  “Therefore you have nothing to fear.”

  “What is there to fear?” asked the Minister of Protocol. “What haste compels you to press for an audience before the time their majesties have allotted?”

  Vanyi kept her smile, though it hurt. “I don’t suppose,” she said, “you know what became of the man we lost here, or the Gate he guarded.”

  “One of your people has died? Please accept my condolences.”

  Vanyi met his blandness with blandness. “Let’s suppose you do know, since I’ve been assured that all knowledge in Shurakan comes to you before it reaches their majesties’ ears. You don’t think that would have ended it, did you, to break our Gate and kill our Guardian?”

  “No rumor of such has come to me,” said the Minister of Protocol. His mind was as blank as his face, and as smoothly innocent. “You speak of . . . that, yes? That art of yours.” His nostrils thinned. “It was suffered here by the grace of the daughter of heaven and by the silence of her brother. If it failed, or if its servant proved too weak for his task, that is no concern of ours. So it was agreed when her majesty permitted the building of the temple that housed your Gate.”

  “Oh, I’m not blaming you,” Vanyi said. “But if you do know anything of it, or if the queen does, we’d welcome the knowledge. The man we lost was dear to us.”

  “And his Gate,” said the Minister of Protocol, “dearer still.”

  That was false, but Vanyi saw no profit in saying so. “You do understand why I should speak to the queen. What would destroy a Gate and a Guardian might not hesitate to destroy a kingdom.”

  “If that kingdom were such as the Gate was, perhaps. Ours is clean of such taint.”

  “Is it?” Vanyi asked. “Su-Shaklan is warded by magic. How else do you think it’s kept itself so safe for so long?” She stood, bowed slightly: an inclination of the head. “I’ll speak with you again. And then, I’m sure, with the queen.”

  oOo

  “And you left him? Just like that?” Aledi the lightmage was not surprised, not as well as she knew Vanyi, but she was amply bemused.

  Vanyi rubbed her aching eyes and thought of asking for a cool cloth to cover them. It was brutal work, waging war with ministers of protocol. “I launched my bolt and got out, yes. I thought I was being clever—showing him who was master. Probably I was a coward, not to mention a fool. If he believes me, I’ve talked myself out of a rather valuable weapon on our behalf.”

  “I doubt he will,” Miyaz said. He looked tired himself. The room in which they were sitting, the inner one in which the two mages had drawn their circle and set up their magics, had already acquired a faint reek, somewhat of sulfur, somewhat of flowers, that spoke of power wielded often and strongly.

  “They don’t believe in magic here,” he said. “They curse it and they fear it, and yet in their hearts they know there’s no such thing. It’s profoundly disconcerting.”

  Aledi rose from her cushion and knelt behind him, working the knots out of his shoulders. He rolled his head back onto her breast and sighed. She kissed the yellow-curled crown, just where the hair was thinning.

  “It’s worse than disconcerting, at least to me,” she said. “It’s frightening. Kadin goes out, you know, and prowls—poor boy, he’s all broken inside since Jian was lost. We found him in the house of the Gate. He was sitting in the middle of it, in dust and cobwebs that looked as if they’d been there for years and not for Brightmoon-cycles. He said what we were all feeling. ‘People say it’s haunted. But there’s nothing here. There might never have been a Gate at all.’”

  “Is he still there?” Vanyi asked a little sharply.

  “Oh, no,” said Aledi. “We made him come back with us. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in that house. He went there the first morning after we came to the city. It’s always the same, he says. Always empty.”

  “I sent him,” said Vanyi, “that first day.”

  The two mages stared at he
r. Aledi looked mildly hurt. Miyaz was only weary. “I rather thought so,” he said. “Why did you send us today?”

  “To see if you felt what he’s been feeling,” Vanyi said.

  Aledi bent her head, hiding her face in Miyaz’s hair. Her voice came muffled, ashamed. “I was afraid to go before you commanded me. It was so much easier to stay here and make the circle, and not think about what we made it for.”

  “Today you were ready to think about that,” said Vanyi. “Would you be willing or able to raise a circle in the house of the Gate itself, to see what you could find?”

  Aledi shivered. Miyaz looked pale. “We’ll do whatever you bid us do, Guildmaster,” he said.

  Vanyi considered them through the pounding in her skull. She had to make herself remember why she had brought these of all possible mages. The three who had died, Kadin who lived broken and grieving, had been stronger, wiser, bolder in the wielding of their power. These two were to have given her the graces of courtiers, well-bred as they were and raised to the Asanian High Court; they were to have been ambassadors more than mages, fellow warriors against the Minister of Protocol rather than against the less-than-shadow that had broken the Gate in Shurakan.

  But she needed mages now, when she must be ambassador and win through to the queen by proper channels. Forcing her way with magery would only prove to the Shurakani that mages were to be feared and hated.

  While she wasted her strength on the Minister of Protocol, these two had to be strong enough to raise and sustain wards about this house and to bolster Kadin in his watch on the house of the Gate. They were mages of great skill—she would hardly have chosen them otherwise—but she wondered, looking at them, if that skill would be enough. She said to them, “For now, rest easy. I won’t ask you to do anything but what I’ve had you doing here. But be ready to help Kadin if he needs you—whether he asks you or no.”

  Asanians had one virtue, preserved even in the melding of their empire into Keruvarion. They took orders, and if they asked questions they did not press for answers. Miyaz closed his eyes and to all appearances went to sleep. Aledi clung to him and kept silent.