by Judith Tarr
o0o
“He does have a talent for this,” the Guildmage said.
Korusan caught himself before he spoke untimely. He rose from the dais, taking no open notice of the mage, and stepped down to the carpeted floor. He was dizzy; he had to struggle not to shake. He drew long breaths, calming himself, bringing his temper to hand.
“He is bred for it,” said the Master of the Olenyai after a perceptible pause.
Korusan turned, still refusing to acknowledge the Guildmaster, and faced the Olenyas. “I trust that this mummery has been of use.”
“Of much use,” the Olenyas said. “Those were unprepossessing enough, but they have a great following. And now they know what they follow. They will serve you the more assiduously hereafter.”
“There are no lords among them,” said Korusan.
“Lords we have,” the Guildmage said, “and many. They have no need for this spectacle.”
“No? I should think that they would need it more.” Korusan straightened his robes and raised his veil once more to conceal his face. “Am I done? May I go?”
“The emperor may go as he wills,” the Guildmage said.
Ah, thought Korusan, but who was the emperor?
14
Dark. Darkness and blood. Voices gibbering. Eyes—
Estarion flung himself headlong out of sleep.
The lamp flickered, burning low. Ulyai blinked at him. Her mind saw a cub under her gentling paw, and her tongue licking him until he settled, comforted.
He half-fell on her, wrapping arms about her neck, burying his face in warm musky fur.
His breathing quieted. The sweat dried cold on his body. The shivering came and went. “I can’t remember,” he said to her. “I—can’t—”
But he could. That was the terrible thing. He could remember too well. Deep down, where the darkness was, and the long fall into death and the soul’s destruction.
Not his death, not his soul torn asunder and scattered to the winds of the mageworld. Oh, no. He had caused it. His power had done it, had killed the mage who killed his father, and in killing, slain itself. His power was maimed and perhaps would never be mended. The soul it had destroyed was lost beyond retrieving.
They thought they knew, those people who loved and guarded him. They gave him wisdom, gave him compassion, lashed him with impatience when they judged he needed it. But they did not know the truth of what he had done. To sunder a soul from a body: that was terrible. To shatter that soul—that was beyond any hope of forgiveness.
In the beginning, when the horror was new, he had let himself fall into the blessed dark. They had found him, dragged him back, shown him the way to the restoration of his power.
He was weak. He had let them. He thought he could atone, if only by living and remembering, and suffering that remembrance.
Instead he had forgotten, or chosen not to remember. It was simpler. It won him Vanyi, who was water in a dry place, coolness in the terrible heat of his desert. And it had lost her. There was no escaping what he was. Even his body betrayed him.
He struggled to his feet. Ulyai growled and batted at him.
She kept her claws sheathed. He evaded them, staggering away from the bed. His knees were as weak as a foal’s.
Standing steadied him. He pulled on a robe and let his feet take him where they would.
Ulyai followed him, but she did not try to stop him. He was glad of her presence. She held him up when he stumbled.
It was a peculiarity of Sun-blood that it sought the heights. Mountains if there were any. Roofs else, and the stars that seemed dim and strange, and the night air.
The roof of this house was made for standing on: it had a wall about the rim, and a garden of flowers sending their sweetness into the night. Estarion plucked one palm-wide moon-pale bloom and bore it with him to the parapet and leaned on the rail.
It was not far down. Five man-heights, maybe. Six. Hardly enough to break one’s neck. For that one needed a tower, or a crag.
“It doesn’t work in any case,” Sidani said from the shadows of the roof. “Mageblood saves itself. You’d find yourself flying, or landing as light as a bird on a treetop.”
She came to stand beside him, leaning as he leaned. Brightmoon was down. Greatmoon’s light limned her face in blood, dyed her hair as red as any Gileni prince’s.
“You’ve tried it?” he asked her.
She held up her clenched fists and her lean corded arms. Old scars seamed them, tracing the lines of the great veins. “I thought that this would be surer. It only made work for a healer.”
“But you’re not a mage. No more,” he said bitterly, “than I.”
Her brow went up. The irony was pure Sidani. “And why,” she asked, “does death seem so much more alluring than the life of an emperor?”
And why not tell her? He did not know her at all, no more than he could know a hawk in the sky or a fish in the sea. She could be his blood enemy. She could be the prophet Vanyi spoke of, though he doubted that Asanion would follow a woman, still less a woman who was a barbarian.
“Do you know,” he asked her, “that it’s possible, if one is a mage, to do more than kill the body of one’s enemy? That one can kill his soul?”
“Nothing can kill a soul.”
“I did.”
She neither laughed nor recoiled. “What makes you think that?”
“The man who killed my father hated us with a perfect hate,” he said: “so perfect that I could only kill it by matching it. And in matching it, I destroyed it.”
She pondered that. Either she chose to believe him, or she was better at feigning it than anyone he had ever seen. “Maybe it only fled too swiftly for you to follow.”
“No,” he said, though hope yammered at the corners of his mind. “I felt it shatter. It was indescribable. And where it had been, there was nothing. Not even the memory of a scream.”
“They say you can’t remember.”
“I don’t want to. Oh, there’s darkness in plenty. I can’t see my father fall. I don’t know what I did when he died, or after his assassin . . . ended. But the ending: that I’ll never forget. Not if I live a thousand lives.”
“So. You’re not as callow as you look.”
He rounded on her. She smiled her sword-edged smile. “We were all young once,” she said, “but it’s fools who say it’s either easy or simple. You looked the Dark in the face when you were twelve years old. You’ve been running from it ever since.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I’ve been running since before your grandfather was born.”
Stories. But in this light, almost, he could believe them.
A rumbling drew his eyes downward. Ulyai leaned against Sidani, purring thunderously, while the strong old fingers rubbed the sensitive places behind her ears.
“You’re not afraid of her,” he said.
“Should I be?”
He bit his tongue. A beast as large as a small senel, fangs as long as daggers, claws that could bring down a bull at the charge: a fair lapcat, that. “She’s not overfond of strangers,” he said.
“I’m hardly that,” said Sidani. “She’s been my blanket, most nights, since we left Kurion.”
“But—”
“Jealous, child?”
“No!”
Her teeth flashed white in the shadow that was her face. “Good. Then you won’t mind that she found herself a he-cat in the forest of Kurion.”
“There are no ul-cats in Kurion.”
“Tell that to the forest king who, at Greatmoon’s full, took a queen.” Sidani regarded him in high amusement. “Surely you wondered what was keeping her so long.”
“She goes her own way,” he said stiffly. He looked down into the green gleam of eyes. They closed, opened again, in lazy contentment. “You are smug,” he said to the cat.
“Well she might be. She’ll bear her cubs in Kundri’j. They’ll be purely delighted in the palace, to play host to a nest of ul-cats.”
“Gods,” said Estarion.
“So they will be. Asanians will worship anything, if it frightens them enough.”
He shook her babblings out of his head. The last of the darkness went with it. She had meant that, maybe. She was more like Ulyai than anything human should be.
“Keep her with you,” said Sidani, “until you come to Kundri’j.”
A great weariness came over Estarion. “You, too? Is everyone convinced that I’ll fall over dead if I’m not guarded every living moment?”
“You won’t fall. You’ll jump. Or someone will push you.”
“I’m not going to jump,” he said.
“Not tonight.”
She turned her face to the great bloodied orb of the moon. For a moment he saw what she must have been when she was young. Haughty as a queen. Free-spoken as a man, or an empress. And beautiful: a beauty that smote the heart.
None of it surprised him. She was a northern woman. They were often so, in the kingdoms and among the tribes.
They were formidable when they were young. When they were old, they were terrible. This one drove him back to his bed with the edge of her tongue, and sat by him until he slept, and stood guard on his dreams. She and the ul-cat, one on each side of the gate, and nothing dark allowed to pass.
15
Induverran was the gate to Asanion’s heart, a city of gold and lead, flowers and dung, fierce summer heat and sudden stony chill. The cities that Estarion had seen and heard of in the Golden Empire were all old beyond reckoning. All but Induverran.
There had been a city of that name in this place for years out of count, but the walls that framed it, the towers that rose within it, were none of them more than fourscore years old. Even Endros was older than that; but Endros was a white city, with a purity that time and men’s habitation could not sully. Induverran struck Estarion with an air both grandiose and shabby, as if the land’s weight had overwhelmed the new-raised stones, or memory bowed and stained them.
That memory was clear always beyond the walls. Induverran that was now stood apart from Induverran that had been, nearer a little river that had shifted since the first city was built. The old city stood in ruins like the charred bones of a demon’s feast, grown over but thinly though the land was rich round about.
No one walked there. Birds did not shun it, but neither did they linger, or build their nests amid the fallen pillars.
Induverran’s lord sat his senel on the edge of the ruined city. He was a prince of five robes, of blood as pure as any in the empire, and Estarion should have detested him. But he had a hard clear eye in that yellow-curled head, and when Estarion readied to ride out of the new city and into the old, he was there waiting, mounted on one of the golden stallions for which his domain was famous.
The senel switched its silver-tasseled tail and stamped. Lord Dushai quelled it with a hand on its neck. “There they fought,” he said in creditable Gileni. “There the mages hurled their blasts of power, and the beast of their mingled magics stalked and slew. And there,” he said, tilting his chin toward the open plain, “the armies met.”
“But not in battle,” Estarion said. “My forebears stopped them: the Asanian and the Varyani, riding down upon them out of the living air, and raising walls of magic and of light.”
“It was too late for the city,” said Lord Dushai.
“They did what they could,” Estarion said, struggling not to snap. That battle was nigh a century past. He was its consequence, with his lion-eyes and his northern face. They had faced one another across the broken city, the emperor of Asanion and the emperor of Keruvarion, son of the Lion and son of the Sun, and looked to end their rivalry in blood and fire. But their children had forged a peace. It had cost the high prince of Asanion his sole empire. It had cost the heir of Keruvarion far more.
Sarevadin. Estarion said the name to himself, like an incantation. Neither man’s name nor woman’s, given by a great mage and queen to the child of her body: manchild as he had been then, tall, redheaded, northern-skinned prince with a great gift of magery. Woman as she had ridden out of the Gate between the worlds, heavy with the heir of two empires, mage-wrought and magebound, but the Mages had had no power to sway her soul to their will. Only to rend her body asunder and make it anew, as they wished to do to the empire she was born to rule.
Estarion slid from Umizan’s back. The stallion did not lower his head to crop the thin pallid grass, but followed as Estarion walked into the broken city. Others came slowly behind: Lord Dushai on his fretting, skittering mount, a line of guards, a thin scatter of hangers-on. No one else had been willing to leave the comforts of the new city for this bleak battlefield, not even Sidani who, Estarion had thought, would go anywhere.
The stench of blood and burning was long since washed away. The taint of magery was faded almost to vanishing. And yet a power lingered in this place.
Here it began. Here the two empires met, fought, were joined into one. Here, where the grass began to grow green, the emperors faced their rebel children, and knew what they had done. Treason. Betrayal of all that their fathers had wrought, in the name of unlooked-for peace.
“They loved one another, the stories say,” Estarion said. He did not care overmuch who heard, nor expect an answer.
Nonetheless he received one. It came, it seemed, out of a stone, but in Sidani’s voice. “Only love would explain it,” she said.
She was sitting on the ground, wrapped in a mantle that had lost its color to years and weather. For once she looked honestly old, a thin and ancient creature who shivered in the heavy heat of Asanian summer. Or maybe she was living in another time, in another season, when the wind blew chill over the plain, and death walked, and powers moved in the earth.
“Were you there?” Estarion asked her, half expecting a lie, half expecting it to be the truth.
She gave him neither. “Cold here,” she said. “So cold.”
When he touched her, her skin was chill. And the air already nigh to furnace-heat, even so early, with the sun barely lifted over the horizon.
“You’re ill,” he said.
She did not hear him. She was in delirium, or in a trance. He gathered her in his arms. She was as light as a bundle of sticks, and nearly as fragile, who had seemed as strong as a swordblade.
“Lord,” someone said. Godri. Alidan stood behind him, and others of the guard, and a handful of Lord Dushai’s men. Lord Dushai kept a little apart, saying nothing. What the emperor chose to do, his stance said, was the emperor’s concern. Estarion almost loved him then, though he would never like so perfect an Asanian.
“Lord,” said Godri, “we can carry her. Let us—”
Estarion ignored him. Umizan waited, unwontedly patient. He would carry the fire’s child, for so he thought of her. Estarion saw briefly, dizzily, through the senel’s eye: a shape of flame, red-gold at the heart, but burning dim now, sinking into darkness and cold.
“She won’t die,” Estarion said fiercely. “Stop thinking it!”
Umizan’s ears were flat, but he did not shift or fret as Estarion set the shivering, burning body in the saddle. She was conscious enough to rouse as she felt the senel under her, to grip the beast’s sides with her knees, to wind fingers in the long plaited mane. He walked softly, as smoothly as ever senel could, bearing her as if she were made of glass.
o0o
Once she was stripped of her worn clothes and wrapped in a soft robe and laid in the bed that had been meant for Estarion, Sidani slept peacefully enough. Her brow when he laid his hand on it toward evening was as warm as it should be, no sign of fever or of unnatural cold. She breathed well and easily. Her sleep was deep and quiet, without dreams.
He exchanged glances with Ulyai, who had come to fill a solid half of the bed. “Watch over her,” he said.
The cat laid her head beside the woman’s and sighed. She had been negligent. She had let both the bright one and the fire’s child go out alone while she indulged herself in a fine fresh ha
unch of plowbeast. An ul-queen did not stoop to apology, but she could regret an indiscretion.
She would watch over Sidani. Estarion could wish himself as happily occupied.
Lord Dushai, perhaps mindful that a man could grow weary unto tears of banquets, had not laid on the usual feast or the usual parade of beauties. Both were to be had, but he had woven them into a new thing, as new as the hall into which he led his guest.
That was not the long narrow chamber Estarion was used to. It was as round as one of the moons, ringed in pillars and topped with a dome that seemed made of light. Nor was Estarion to sit at a high table, there to be stared at and remarked upon while he endured the fiery delights of the Asanian taste. There was a couch placed for him in the innermost of many rings of couches, a low table set between it and the couch beside, on which Dushai established himself, and in front of them the open center of the circle.
Others reclined in the widening circles, some alone on their couches, some accompanied. His mother faced him across the open space, with Iburan seated upright at her feet.
She raised a brow at him. He twitched a smile in return.
Servants brought food, drink. Estarion found that he was hungry. He was acquiring a taste for some of the Asanian sauces, though others were a sore test of his fortitude. The thin yellow Asanian wine went not ill with the more palatable of the dishes, and it was chilled with snow brought from mountains in the north and kept in deep cellars.
He had chosen to be cool, though it meant shocking his many-robed subjects. His kilt was of fine cream-pale silk broad-belted with gold and great plates of amber as yellow as his eyes. He was bare above it but for a pectoral of gold and amber and topaz, his hair plaited into the helmet-braids of the Ianyn kings.
He had almost sacrificed his beard in the name of coolness, but contrariness forestalled him. Asanians never grew their beards, if indeed they had any. They reckoned it a barbarism. Therefore he kept his.
Barefoot, bareheaded, lightly kilted, he was as cool as human body could be, and almost content. The servant who had brought him wine set the flagon on the table and took up a fan, waking wind where there was none. He stretched out on the couch, propped up with cushions, nibbling a bit of spiced sweetness.