Spear of Heaven

by Judith Tarr

  “A trap,” said Daruya.

  “Possibly,” he said. His eyes were bright. His teeth flashed in his beard. “Will you hunt with me, Sunlady?”

  She should not. She should go to Vanyi, speak to Bundur and his mother, talk it to death. Then sit in this cage while the others pursued the hunt.

  Ah well, she thought. He had asked; and he was strong, both mage and man. What danger in simply finding the quarry, so that he could bring sure word back to his Guildmaster?

  Even the voice of temptation knew what folly that was. Kadin would not play scout in this. He hunted to kill.

  All the more need of her to keep him from doing something rash. She unsaddled and rubbed down the mare and stabled her with the rest, took the hooded cloak Kadin offered her and hid her alien face in it, and drew shadows about her besides. He was a shadow beside her, following the scent that he had found.

  28

  The city was quiet in the warm noon, as if it rested from its exertions of the night. A pall of smoke hung over it; some of the markets were shut, and some had suffered at the hands of rioters. There had been efforts to keep order: streets with guards strolling or standing, wearing the colors of one noble house or another, or else the shaved head and saffron tabard of a temple. Not one of the temples that had been attacked; those, Daruya suspected, were mostly the poorer or smaller, too weak to fight back.

  Where guards were was greatest quiet, shops unlooted, houses or temples unburned. Even so, too much of the city had suffered, she saw as she ghosted through it with Kadin. Once or twice she saw desultory parties of looters behind broken gates, gutting temple or house and setting fire to what they left behind.

  They did not think that they were serving the gods or upholding the law. They were smashing and seizing, that was all, and taking pleasure in it.

  She had been sheltered from it in House Janabundur. How much, she had not known till she passed through the middle of it. It was no consolation that everyone who could had retreated behind walls and barred the door. Too many had not been able to, or had seen their walls breached and their door battered down.

  The cold part of her, the part that was bred to rule, took note of who had been the targets. Smaller temples, temples of the odder or more exacting gods, particularly those without the numbers or the weapons to mount a defense. Houses of simple citizens, physicians, herb-healers, astrologers, diviners. Foreigners of any and every description.

  None was as foreign as she: all were of Merukarion or of the mountains. They had been driven out of houses or hostelries, beaten, robbed, even killed.

  She had been safe. She had lain abed with her Shurakani prince, while people died.

  Guilt was no alien thing to her. Guilt for being powerless and accepting it—that was new.

  She was doing something now. It was dangerous, it was badly advised, but it was something. She was not idling in House Janabundur and letting the city rack itself to pieces.

  Kadin led her with a hunter’s speed, a hunter’s quiet. Her magery touched his, found what he followed. It was more memory than present reality: a scent, a taste, a quiver in the air. As he drew closer to the source of it, he needed her to keep him hidden, to steer him round obstacles. He was blind, focused on the one thing alone, the thing that had an air, however faint, of magery.

  He stopped abruptly. She nearly collided with him. His face turned from side to side. His eyes were shut, his nostrils flared. He turned till he faced straight away from the sun, and stopped, standing stiff, like a hound at gaze; but his eyes were closed still.

  Daruya looked where his power was focused. It was a temple; she had learned to recognize the shape of the gate in the blank wall, and the fact that it was open, inviting strangers in. It could dare that: the street was guarded, the guards alert, armed with pikes.

  People passed, going to and from the market at the street’s end, where the guards were thickest and trade was almost brisk. Daruya caught a scent of roasting meat, baking bread, spices, flowers. Ordinary scents of the Summer City, eerie now with the stink of smoke and blood beneath.

  Her stomach growled. She quelled it, and a completely unexpected urge to laugh. The body always had its say, no matter what the mind might think.

  Kadin moved away from her so suddenly that she was left flatfooted. He had forgotten his cloak of shadows; he slipped along the wall, hunter-wise, but there was no mistaking his size or his foreignness. She darted after him, shadow-shrouded, before anyone could see and raise the alarm.

  At the temple gate he paused. Daruya felt it with him: the faint hum of power, the skin-prickle of wards. Magic, in a place devoted to the destruction of mages?

  It was not strong, not a Great Ward. It was set against a hostile mind, but not against a mage wrapped in shadow and shields.

  Both of them slipped through carefully, for such wards were delicate. Daruya did what she could to seem no more than a gust of air, a trick of the light.

  oOo

  Inside was a temple like many another: outer court, inner court, shrine and sanctuary, garden and cloister and dwellings for the priests behind. It was not a large temple, nor particularly small. Its god was more human-faced than most, but its body, though standing upright, was that of a mountain ox, and on its head were great sweeping horns.

  A white she-ox lay in a golden pen inside the shrine, chewing her cud. Devotees might purchase a twist of green fodder and offer it to her with bowings and prayers, and seek her consort’s favor for their petitions.

  If the ox saw the intruders, she did not betray them. Kadin ran soft-footed past her, round a knot of worshippers, through the god’s shadow and into the deeper sanctuary. Daruya heard sounds from within, the ringing of bells, the echoing hum of a bronze gong, the sound of voices chanting. She could not make out the words, if words there were.

  So were the gods worshipped here, ceaselessly, in a long drone of chants. She had felt before this the power that rode the chanting, the strength of focused will that came close to magery. But never so clear. Never so distinct.

  The sense of it on her skin was strikingly familiar. She had known just that brush as of wind, just that shiver beneath, as she approached a circle of mages in a lesser working. Guard-magic, she thought; a touch of wind-magic. Her own power woke to what it looked on: the swirl of winds in the upper air, a gathering of clouds above the mountains. Left unattended, they would swoop down into Shurakan in a storm of wind and hail, in a roll of summer thunder.

  The inner chamber was open, unguarded save by the shimmer of wards. Daruya looked past Kadin to a circle of men—all men, no women—in crimson tabards, each sitting on his heels, hands on thighs, head bent, eyes closed, chanting. The light of magic on them was as bright as a beacon to her inner eye.

  And they did not know it. True mages—Guildmages, priest-mages—would have done their working behind a layering of wards, one for protection of their bodies, one for shielding of their minds from intrusion, and one for the working itself, to turn aside the unwary or the hostile. The warding here was weak, little more than a prayer for safety. The mind-shields were all but nonexistent. Thoughts babbled without direction and without focus, like a river beneath the ice that was the working.

  They had no faintest conception of what they were doing. They were praying away a storm, they thought, and asking their god to guard the city, to defend their temple against the wrath of the mob. Here and there, like a spark on flint, was a thought of greater intensity: fear of mages, relief that they were nigh gone from the city, a wish that their kind had never been.

  Suppose, thought Daruya, that the sparks found tinder: Gates open and vulnerable, mages passing through. Suppose that this and nothing else was the source of the Gates’ fall.

  No. It was too simple, the circle too weak. There was real magery in it, but feeble, undisciplined. What she had felt in the Gate had been greater—had been a real and present malice, directed at the Gate and at the mages within it. She did not sense it here.

  Kadi
n, it seemed, did; or did not care that there was a difference. The drawing in of his power sucked at her, reaching for the light that was in her, seeking it to complete itself. Her power trembled in response.

  She clamped it down, got a grip on Kadin, set her teeth and hauled him back out of the doorway. He was too surprised to fight, too intent on the circle and on the calling of his power. She struck him with her own magery, a swift, fierce blow that rocked him on his feet.

  “What in the name of—” he began, making no effort to be quiet.

  She clapped a hand over his mouth. “Shut up,” she gritted, barely above a whisper.

  He struggled. She held on. Her power was stronger, even holding together shields and shadows. If it did not give way to the seduction of his darkmagic—if the priests or their guards did not rouse to the presence of strangers in their temple—if she could get him out before he unleashed a blast of power on the men who, he was certain, had killed his lightmage—

  The chanting went on, endless, unvarying. Its magic spun and wove into a circle of dim light, stretching and elongating, curving up past the temple’s roof. Weather-magic, and no awareness at all of the world’s balance. Rain that did not fall here must fall elsewhere; that much a child knew. But these pious priests did not. Ignorant, blind, utter fools.

  Kadin wanted to blast them from the earth. “They’re not worth it,” she hissed in his ear.

  They killed Jian.

  Deprived of his mouth to speak, he resorted to mind-speech. That too was perilous—more so than a whisper. Guards might not hear soft voices, but wards woke to the inner speech of mages.

  “We don’t know that,” Daruya whispered as fiercely as she could. “Come out of here. We know there’s magic working in Shurakan—that much you won for us. Now let’s take it to the Guildmaster. She’ll know what to do about it.”

  Kadin’s resistance was beyond words, his body coiled to fling her aside, his power poised to leap, to destroy, to kill. That such use of magery would destroy him, he knew. He was glad.

  “No,” said Daruya, almost aloud. She caught a trailing edge of his magery and did a thing no Guildmage would ever stoop to: looped and bound him with it. He raged, he fought, but the harder he fought, the tighter the bond grew. Enough of that and he would strangle his power, turn it inward on itself. Then he would have the destruction he yearned for, but all within.

  She had gambled rightly. He wanted to die, but not without purpose. Not unless he took his enemies with him.

  They got out of the temple, though it cost Daruya high, sustaining shadows, shields, and mind-bond, and dragging a large, reluctant, half-stunned darkmage bodily past the blind eyes of guards and the oblivious faces of worshippers.

  The white ox watched her, mildly curious. If she ever came back, she would bring the beast a gift of sweet fodder, in thanks for keeping her secret. She swore that as an oath in the silence of her mind, where only a god—or a god’s white ox—could hear.

  oOo

  Kadin was nearly unconscious by the time he stumbled into House Janabundur. Daruya was in little better case. But she found Vanyi first, before her knees gave way: dropped the darkmage like a rolled carpet at the Guildmaster’s feet and crumpled beside him, still awake, still aware, but no more strength in her than in a newborn baby.

  There was someone else there. She could not see him at first; her power was too sorely strained.

  It came back slowly, feeding itself on her stillness. She was kneeling at Vanyi’s feet, yes. Vanyi was standing face to face with one who was not here in body at all, and yet was visible: the more so, the longer she stared.

  How dark he was, she thought, how bright a gold his eyes. And how young he seemed. He had always been ancient to her: her grandfather, her emperor, source and cause of her rebellions. He was not a young man, no; his hair was flecked with grey, his beard silvered. And yet he looked not much older in truth than Bundur.

  If he had been any less meticulously and brutally trained, he would have been dancing with frustration. “You see?” he said. “You see? There is magery in this wretched little kingdom.”

  “They don’t know that’s what it is,” Daruya said. Her voice was faint, breathless.

  “They have little discipline,” said Vanyi to Estarion, “except in the raising of wards. That’s what deceived us for so long. But with the uproar in the city, they got careless. Or their wards weren’t strong enough to hold against the force of hate and fear that was beating on them. Then they betrayed themselves.”

  “And lured yonder darkmage into a trap,” said Estarion.

  “They didn’t mean that,” Daruya said. “Can’t you hear me? They don’t know.”

  “I hear you,” he said, as maddening as ever, as if she were no older than Kimeri. “I commend you, too, for saving him from himself.”

  “How do you know what I did?”

  “There now,” said Vanyi, coming between them as she so often had before. “He’s got eyes, and he knows Kadin. It’s not hard to guess what you two were up to, considering the storms that have been shivering the Great Ward from end to end and shaking loose whole scores of lesser wards. This whole kingdom is infested with them. Every temple and shrine and holy man’s hut must have at least a warding or two, if not more.”

  “It’s prayer to them,” said Daruya. “When they work magic, they think it a miracle, and the gift of a god.”

  “And isn’t it exactly that?” Estarion sat on a cushion, for all the world as if he were there in the flesh. He looked comfortable but tired—as he would be, for it must be late night in Starios, and he did not look as if he had slept.

  Daruya had no sympathy to spare for him. “But they don’t know,” she said, stubborn. “They don’t see what they are or what they do. They just do it.”

  “And hate us, and pray their gods to destroy us—and so, in their minds, the gods do.” Vanyi sighed. “They won’t thank us for telling them what they’re really doing.”

  “They won’t believe it,” said Estarion. “That kind never does.”

  “Unless we can prove it to them,” Daruya said. “Somehow. Show them that they’re as much mages as we.”

  “That’s for later,” said Vanyi. “Much later. Now we have a greater urgency to face: to be rid of the mages who broke the Gate.”

  “We don’t know it’s those mages,” Daruya said. “It could be any circle of priests in Shurakan—any holy man, if it comes to that, who has reason to hate mages and Gates.”

  “It could,” said Vanyi, “but I think not. Do you know what temple that is?”

  “Should I? It has a god like an ox with a man’s face, and a white she-ox for his consort.”

  “Yes,” said Vanyi. “That is Matakan, whose father is the greater moon, and whose mother is the white moon-goddess, the mother goddess of Shurakan. The king and the queen are his kin. His chief power is the blessing of crops and the fields, and the guidance of princes. His legend calls him friend of the earth, brother of the children of heaven, and destroyer of unclean magics.”

  “Magic,” said Daruya in dawning comprehension. “Ox-droppings. Excrement of Matakan—the evil that he casts out when he consumes the fruits of the earth.”

  “Exactly,” Vanyi said. “What would you like to wager that Matakan’s temple is the place where the new king’s faction gathered before it seized the palace, where behind wards they conceived their plots and broke the Gates?”

  “I saw none of that,” said Daruya. “I saw a circle of priests turning aside a storm. They hate mages, yes, that’s underneath everything they do, but there’s no clear intention in it. No malice.”

  “Not in the priests you saw,” Estarion said. “But wouldn’t those be the lesser ones, the ones who aren’t needed to hold the palace? They perform the offices, keep the storms at bay, while their masters go about the greater business of their order.”

  That made too much sense. And it had to come from Estarion, at whose every Yes she shouted, by instinct, a vehement No!r />
  Not now. She was too tired, there was that. And he could not do anything here but talk, no matter how solid he seemed.

  “So,” said Vanyi, “we find the masters. That should be simple enough. They’ll be in the palace, ruling it and its king.”

  “Warded, guarded, and praying you’ll fall into their hands.” Estarion reached but did not try to touch her. “Prayer here is magery. Remember that.”

  “I’m hardly likely to forget it,” Vanyi said. Her voice was tart.

  Kadin stirred suddenly at her feet, thrashed, flailed at air. Daruya flung herself on him and wrestled him into stillness.

  The silence was much larger than it should have been. Much deeper. Much more . . . numerous.

  Kadin was awake, but he was quiet, breathing hard, staring toward the door. Daruya followed the line of his gaze.

  What Bundur must be seeing, she could well imagine. His wife on the floor with the black mage, in a posture she had more than once assumed in the marriage bed. The Guildmaster standing over them. And the stranger who sat by the wall, the dark man with the lion-eyes, whose like he could never have seen before, nor ever imagined.

  Estarion looked both real and unreal. Solid, yet not quite there—as if he were more distant than he should be. His edges shimmered.

  A demon, Bundur was thinking. A dark god. Both and neither.

  “Grandfather,” said Daruya steadily in Bundur’s language, “this is my husband.”

  Estarion inclined his head. He had grace; he carried himself as one who had been emperor from his childhood.

  Bundur saw it. Understood it. “Sir,” he said, a little abrupt perhaps, but courteous. And to Daruya: “This is your emperor?”

  “This is the Lord of Sun and Lion,” she said. She rose carefully. Kadin sat up but offered no violence. She could forget him, she thought, until she had dealt with the rest of it.

  They were measuring one another, her grandfather and her husband. Finding one another immensely strange, and very foreign. There was no leap of liking, no meeting of minds that she could discern. And yet somehow they agreed.