Arrows of the Sun

by Judith Tarr

  He could have killed her for that. He held himself rigid; smiled, even, wide and feral. “You can’t imagine what it’s made me.”

  “Oh, but I can.” Her own smile was sweetly terrible. “You are a menace, child. You think that you have yourself in hand; you imagine that you can go on as you are now, a little colder maybe, a little harder, but shouldn’t an emperor be cold and hard? That’s pride, too, and folly.”

  “You know nothing,” he said, low in his throat. “You are a nameless gangrel woman with more addlement than wits.”

  “I had a name once,” she said. She laid her hand on the empress’ cheek. “So beautiful,” she said, “and so cold. How Mirain would have raged to see a priestess of the goddess on the double throne, mother to its heir, regent of its empire. He was madder than any of us, and blinder. He could never see the dark for the blaze of the light.”

  “You speak treason,” Estarion said.

  She laughed long and free. “Oh, that word! So easy on the tongue; so deadly on the neck. I’ve spoken worse than that in my day, and to haughtier kings than you.”

  “How can anyone—”

  He caught himself. She grinned, reading him as easily as she ever had. “You’re nothing to some I’ve seen. You’re a gentle one for all your fierceness; you wear another’s skin too easily to be honestly cruel. Cruelty takes a certain lack of imagination, you see.”

  “I’d have thought it took the opposite.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s mere cleverness. True wit needs more.”

  “I have little enough of any of that,” he said, neither wry nor precisely angry. He was tired suddenly, tired of everything. Even of what he knew she would say: that he was a master of self-pity.

  But, being Sidani, she did not say it. “You were broken young, and you mended crooked. Surgeons know what to do when they see the like. They break again, then set anew, and this time set it straight.”

  “You’ll break me?” Estarion asked. Humoring her, he told himself. Passing the long night in this strange painful amusement.

  “You’re broken already,” she said. “Are your hands bleeding gold?”

  He clenched them, pressing them to his thighs. “No!”

  “You’re a dreadful liar, child.” She came round the bier again and took his hands.

  He mustered every scrap of will to resist her. None of it mattered in the least.

  Her fingers were cold, but there was heat within, a thread of fire. They pressed just so, and his hands unfolded.

  The left hand was trembling; blisters had risen on it, grey against the dark skin. The right was all gold, roiling and flowing in the bed of the Kasar.

  “Sages,” she said as if to herself, “would set the seat of power in the loins, or in the heart, or behind the eyes. And so it is, in all of them and none. But in Sun-blood, wherever it begins, it ends in the hands. There’s the god’s wit for you. Where else is pain so intense, or so delicately modulated?”

  Estarion had an answer for that. He bit his tongue, but she read it, perhaps, in his branded palm.

  She laughed. “Yes, there, too. But the god set fire there long ago, and in every man—and in a woman it’s not so easily got at, though it’s hotter once it starts, and lasts longer. The hands it had to be. Do you think you’re being brave, bearing pain that would lay strong warriors low?”

  “It’s no worse than it ever is,” Estarion said.

  “Liar,” she said tenderly. “Ah, child, what a muddle they’ve made of you.”

  “Isn’t that what we all are? Muddle and folly?”

  “Everyone doesn’t threaten empires with his muddlement.” She touched the Kasar with a finger. He gasped: not that it cost pain, but that it cost none. A ripple of coolness spread outward from her touch.

  “How—”

  She was not listening. “And you are a threat, youngling. Never doubt it. You’ll carry on for a while, and think yourself safe; but when you break again, you’ll break past mending. A Sunlord broken is a terrible thing. Pure power, and pure mindlessness.”

  Yes, a deep part of him whispered, looking down into the sea of fire. “No,” he said aloud. “What do you know of this? What do you know of anything?”

  “What do you know, my lord emperor? Have you looked on the face of the Sunborn in his sleep? Have you stood in the Tower that he made?”

  “It has no door,” Estarion said. “And if it did, what good would it do me?”

  “Why,” she said, “none, for all the use you’d have made of it. A door is a simple thing to make. It’s what it opens on that matters. Mirain made that Tower of magery, and sealed it with the Sun’s fire. His own fire, child. The same that burns in you and leaves trails of golden droplets wherever you go. It’s not simple power such as mages know, that they draw from earth and air and wield through their bodies. It’s a different thing, both stronger and stranger. Training alone doesn’t master it. It needs more. It needs what is in the Tower.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Strength,” she said. “Knowledge. It’s woven in the stones. It holds the Sunborn in his sleep, and guards the bones of his descendants. A night on the crag of Endros would drive a man mad; and so it still might, if anyone dared the Tower. But a man who is a Sunlord—he needs that madness, that snatching out of himself. It’s the source of his power.”

  Estarion laughed, startling himself. “Oh, you are a master of talespinners! You almost had me believing you.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “It’s almost too late for you. And that ‘almost’ is more hope than surety.”

  “Oh, come,” he said. “Now you’re trying to scare me, as if I were a child with the night-terrors. I need lessoning in reining in my power, I admit it. But once this rebellion is put down and the empire is quiet, I’ll withdraw to a temple; I’ll submit myself to its mages; I’ll learn to master myself.”

  “You have no time,” said Sidani. “Even tomorrow’s sunset might be too long. Look, you’re bleeding again. That’s blood, child: blood of power.”

  “Then I’ll bleed dry, and be no worse than before.”

  For the first time she seemed impatient. “Tcha! You are the most exasperating infant. Power doesn’t bleed like blood, not in Sunlords. It kills you, yes. But first it kills whatever else it lights on, and it grows stronger instead of weaker, the longer it bleeds, until there’s no will left, only the power. What you were when it killed a mage’s soul, what it was when it plucked mages free of their power as if they had been sea-spiders in their shells—that’s the barest beginning. Your high priest is dead because you had no mind to notice that it was he and not a Guildmage standing in your path. What, when you begin to feed on your priests here, and after them, priests and mages wherever your power finds them? And when they are gone and your hunger still unsated, what’s to do but seek the souls of simple men, and consume them?”

  “No!” cried Estarion, struggling against her grip, trying to block his ears, his mind, his awareness that whispered, Yes. Yes. “It’s all lies. You’re raving. How can you know this? Who are you?”

  “Sarevadin.”

  That was not her voice. It was colder by far, and somewhat deeper. It came out of the darkness, a shadow, golden-eyed. Another came behind it.

  He almost wept at the sight of them—and no matter the riddle of their coming in together, priestess and Olenyas, and standing there as if they had been so for a long while, watching, listening, waiting for their moment. “Korusan! Vanyi. Thank the god and goddess. I’ve fallen prey to a madwoman.”

  Then the name that Korusan had spoken pierced through the veils of befuddlement. Korusan spoke it again. “I know what she is. I followed her here, and your priestess after me. She is Sarevadin. Look, take her hand.”

  She had let Estarion go. Instinct cried out to him to thrust himself as far away as he might, but something made him do as Korusan bade. She did not resist him, did not seem dismayed, stood smiling faintly as he seized her hand and turned it palm up.
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br />   Gold and ash. Gold—and—

  He was not even awed. What struck him first was pity, and horror of the quenched and twisted thing. “What did you do to yourself?”

  “I tried to cut it out,” she said.

  He raised his eyes from the ruin of the Kasar to the ruin of her face.

  No; not ruin. He had always thought her beautiful, with her proud bones under the age-thinned skin. “You look like your portraits,” he said.

  “Not much, any longer,” she said.

  “No,” said Estarion. Obstinacy was a refuge. It kept him from having to think. “We all know you’re dead, you see. And we look at the portraits and see the hair, like copper and fire, and take little enough notice of what’s under it, except that it’s a woman, and beautiful.”

  “You’d never hide as I did,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She knew that he did not mean himself, or his eyes that could never be mistaken, not in such a face as his, but the fact of her abandoning it all, throne and empire and the power that she was born to hold. They had always understood one another. They were of the same blood.

  “If you were given a chance at freedom,” she asked him, “would you take it?”

  “That would depend on the price,” he said.

  “I paid in my lord’s life. I thought that I should die with him, and leave our son free to take the throne for which we bred him. I failed in courage once I’d taken the sword and set myself to fall on it; so I killed myself who was Sarevadin, but left the body alive. I became no one and nothing.”

  He looked at her. Something monstrous swelled in him, something that was not joy, nor terror, but a welter of both. “Then I have no right to any of this. It is yours. You are the empress who should be. You are the elder heir of the Sunborn.”

  “I think,” she said after a long pause, “that this is your revenge on me for keeping my secret so long.”

  Estarion was too numb with shock to be appalled. “You don’t want it?”

  “Youngling,” she said, “do you?”

  He sucked in a breath. Her hand was still in his, forgotten. He laid his own over it, Kasar to Kasar. It was a perilous thing to do, but he was past caring.

  The lightnings jolted through him. He was fiercer than they. She stood like a rock in a tiderace, head tilted back, half glaring, half laughing in his face.

  He had not stood face to face with living blood of his sun-born blood since his father was slain. He had forgotten, if he had ever known, what it was to know that whatever he was or willed to be, there was one who was his equal. Or—and that was stranger yet—his better.

  “Now will you believe me?” she asked him.

  He had almost forgotten what brought them to the quarrel. It was like her to remember.

  “It is true, Starion.” Vanyi, hard and clear. She stood behind Korusan still, her white robe like a shadow of his black one. “You will lose yourself in your power, unless you master it.”

  “And that needs the Tower in Endros?” Estarion spoke to them both, all, it hardly mattered. “If I ride out now, will I be alive when I come to it?”

  “There is another way,” said Sarevadin.

  Estarion’s glance leaped to Vanyi, caught on Korusan’s veiled face. That the women had conspired to trap him—he could credit that. But he did not think that the Olenyas had had any part in it. The boy’s eyes were wide, blank, astonished.

  “Gates,” Estarion said. “But the Mageguild wields them.”

  “Did I say it would be easy?” Vanyi was trembling as if with exhaustion, or with fury held rigidly in check. “You don’t know what you look like to eyes that can see. The whole of the mage-realm pulses as you breathe. She”—she would not name the name, Estarion took note of that; had she perhaps not known until he himself did?—“says that there is a way to tame your power, to teach you what you have to know without the years that you don’t have. You don’t even have days.”

  “I may be stronger than any of you can guess,” he said.

  “You are a worse idiot than we could have imagined.” Sarevadin slapped him lightly, just enough to sting. In the swift flare of his temper, she grinned her wild white grin. “There is a way, young one. Yon priestess says that she can raise a Gate. That’s dangerous; I don’t pretend it isn’t. But if we move quickly, and if we move as I know how to move, we’ll be there before the Guild knows what we’ve done.”

  “There,” said Estarion, “but not back again.”

  “You’ll take us back,” she said. “Or we’ll all die together.”

  “All?” Estarion asked.

  “I’m going,” Vanyi said. “I know Gates, and I can stand guard while you do—whatever you do.”

  “But you’re not—”

  “She’s not Sun-blood,” Sarevadin said. “She’s not male, either. She’ll not lose her wits in my father’s Tower.”

  Her father. One forgot, or could not encompass it. This was Sidani the wanderer woman with her wild wit and her scurrilous tales, putting guardsmen to the blush with the songs she could sing. And it was Sarevadin the empress, great beauty of her age, great mage, great queen, great lover and priestess. This, standing by the bier of another empress, bidding Estarion do the maddest thing that he had ever done.

  Walk through a Gate in defiance of the Guild that had risen against him. Enter the doorless Tower. Look on the sleeper who must not be waked, and mend his power that was broken, or die in the trying. With a priestess on Journey for defender, and a madwoman for a guide.

  He spread his arms. “Well? Shall we go?”

  “No,” said Sarevadin.

  His jaw had dropped. He picked it up again.

  “It needs time,” she said, “and your mother wants singing to her rest. And you should sleep. Tomorrow when the rite is sung and the feast is done, we go. Go light on the wine, youngling. You’ll want your head clear for the working.”

  The hot flush crawled up his cheeks. He fought it with temper. “All this desperate urgency, and you’ll dally at the end of it?”

  “You will dally,” she said. “We will labor long and hard to make ready. Gates aren’t raised in a heartbeat; Gates warded with secrecy are slower yet.”

  “But I can—”

  “You cannot,” she said, flat and implacable. “You will sleep, if I have to lay a wishing on you, and you will play the emperor as your people require, and when it’s over, you will find us waiting.” She softened somewhat. “Don’t worry, child. You’ll have enough and more to do, once you’re in the Tower.”

  47

  Korusan escaped in Estarion’s shadow. They all seemed to have forgotten him, the women caught up in the working that they must begin, Estarion in a temper at being sent to bed like a child. He went obediently enough, Korusan noticed, for all his snarling; he took the he-cub with him, which its dam did not appear to take amiss.

  Korusan did not follow Estarion to his chambers. At first not caring where he went, then only seeking solitude, he found himself in what seemed to be an ancient portion of the palace, dank and dim and long untenanted. A torch was thrust into a wall at one of the turnings. Korusan lit it with a flint that he carried, with much else, secreted in his robes, and the steel blade of one of his lesser daggers. It caught sullenly, but burned bright enough for the purpose.

  The cold was deep here, set in the stones. The walls were faded and peeling, the tiles of the floor broken or gone. The air was heavy with age and dust.

  A stair presented itself. Korusan climbed it. His lips twitched in spite of themselves. Estarion, when vexed with the need to think, always climbed as high as he could, and perched there above the babble of the world; and then, as often as not, did no thinking at all, but simply basked in the sun.

  No sun tonight, but stars like flecks of frost, and Brightmoon riding high. Her light was cold and pure and, Korusan thought, rather prim. She had no rival in the sky: Greatmoon would not rise until just before the dawn.

  Korusan stood on a roof that end
ed in a crumbling parapet. It gave way behind him to a landscape of peaks and sudden valleys that was the newer palace, but before him was nothing but a stretch of winter-bare garden, a high wall, and the roofs of the city. Every so often a guard walked the wall. The man did not see the shadow on the roof, or else did not reckon it worth remarking on.

  Korusan sank down, wrapped in his robes. He was shivering, the ache in his bones returning after its few hours’ grace. He drew up his knees and clasped them, and rocked.

  Now, he thought, was the time. Sarevadin had shown herself to her grandson’s grandson. He had offered her his throne, and she had laughed him down. And given Korusan, at last, the key to what he must do.

  He should go to the Master of the Olenyai. Once Estarion was gone on his wild hunt, the field would be free; the empire would be theirs, to win and to hold. And if Estarion came back, he would come back to a battle long since lost; and if he did not, then he was dead, and nothing that his people did could matter.

  They would think so, Olenyai and mages both. The mages would find a way, no doubt, to trap Estarion in his Tower, or at the least to confine him to Keruvarion. Estarion in Endros would set Asanion free.

  And yet. Korusan rocked, frowning at nothing.

  Suppose, he thought. Suppose that there was a way . . .

  The Sunborn was alive. The mages said so. Mages could lie, but in this they swore to truth. The great mage and traitor, the Red Prince of Han-Gilen, had laid a sleep on him within his own Tower, because he would not yield to the constraints of peace.

  That sleep preserved him, unaging and undying, until the end of days. Or, some said, until he was called anew to war. He was always a warrior king, was Mirain An-Sh’Endor.

  And if he woke, what then?

  He had been mad when he fell into his sleep. Mad as Sarevadin feared that Estarion would be: conquered by his magic. It seemed to be a hazard of Sun-blood, that the Sun overwhelmed the man.

  Suppose . . .

  Korusan counted the aches in his bones. The priestess had given him days, who might have had but hours before he died. He dreamed no longer that he would live to wear the mask of the emperor. If his own frailty did not kill him, the mages would see to it that he died before he took thought for rebellion.