by Judith Tarr
Then they would rule. Or not. He cared little. He did not have Estarion’s soft heart for the people who lived outside of palaces. Veilless, swordless, halfwit multitudes; they were no kin of his. If he freed them from the barbarian yoke, then that was no more than his duty. He could not be expected to love them on top of it.
Mages of the Guild would be no worse for the empire than mages of the Temple. And Asanion would be Asanion again. Let Keruvarion have its conquerors. The Golden Empire would suffer no rule but its own.
Estarion could live, if that were so. Emperor of half an empire, to be sure; but so had he been before his mother pricked him into entering Asanion.
Korusan’s arms tightened about his knees. Estarion alive, not dead. Estarion alive without Korusan. For Korusan would be dead, and soon. That was as certain as the cycles of the moons.
Korusan alive without Estarion was inconceivable. Estarion without Korusan . . .
“No,” said Korusan, loud in the stillness. “He is mine. No one else shall have him. No woman, no man, no throne or empire. No one.”
o0o
Estarion stalked snarling into his chambers, with the he-cub stalking at his heels. His vigil was broken, his mood ungodly. And it was barely midnight; long hours yet till dawn.
He had stripped, flinging garments and ornaments at anything that would stop them, before he knew that he was not alone. The ul-cub crouched in front of a small huddled person with eyes even yellower than the cub’s. They watched one another with equal, wary intentness.
“Did he grow overnight?” Haliya asked, looking up into Estarion’s face.
Estarion bit off sharp words. She looked cold sitting there, even wrapped in furs, white and amber and spotted gold. He, naked, was like a fire burning. He knelt and wrapped arms about her.
Haliya was tense in the circle of his embrace. “He has a name now, I think,” she said. “Has he told you what it is?”
“No,” Estarion said, startled. “You said you weren’t a mage.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m a Vinicharyas, which is something different. He’ll tell you when he’s ready, I suppose. Do you have a fever? You’re hot as iron in the forge.”
“That’s Sun-blood,” he said. “The colder it is, the hotter I burn.”
“And you’re angry,” said Haliya. “She got at you, didn’t she? That horrible old woman. She says she’s dead. Her body just hasn’t admitted it yet.”
“Her body has been failing to admit it for fifty years.” Estarion shuddered in his skin. “I used to worship the memory of her. The reality . . . it’s so much more. And so much less.”
“That’s usually the way of it.” She eased a little, enough to stroke his face. “The dead should stay decently dead.”
Her hand was small and cold and yet surprisingly strong. He turned his head, kissed her palm. There was no desire in him, not for her, not tonight, but he was not sorry, after all, that she was here. Friends had been simple for him once, and many, and since he came to this cursed half of his empire he had lost them all. But he had gained Haliya.
She was warming as he held her. Her shivering had stopped.
“You were with me,” he said, “while I slept, and worse than slept. You kept running away before I could wake. Did I frighten you so much?”
“No,” she said. It was not precisely a lie, but she could not meet his eyes while she said it. “I didn’t want to trouble you.”
“You could never do that,” he said.
The he-cub thrust in between them. Haliya went rigid. The cub sprang into her lap. He filled the space between them.
Her face was white beyond the cat’s shadow-dark head. Estarion let her go, moved to thrust the beast away.
“No,” she said, catching his hand. “No, don’t.”
“You’re terrified of him.”
Temper brought her eyes flashing up. “I will learn not to be. He’s young, he’s small. By the time he’s grown I’ll be as brave as you.”
“By the time he’s grown he’ll be big enough to ride.”
She put out a hand. It trembled, but it stroked the cub capably enough. He filled her lap and flowed over, lolling in her furs, butting against the curve of her belly.
Estarion was not terribly surprised. Not then. Not after all the rest. Ulyai’s son traced the shape of her with remarkable clarity.
She must have conceived the first time Estarion went in to her, or the second. Unless—
No. She had been a maiden. She had known no man since. And he knew already how determined the Sun’s arrows could be.
He laid his hand where the life in her was strongest, where it swam and rolled and dreamed.
It, no. He. Bright web of Sun-blood, its center a spark of fire. He would be mageborn; was mage already, waking to the touch of the Kasar.
Her hand leaped to cover Estarion’s. “He moved! He kicked me.”
“He hasn’t before?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “but never so hard. He knows you, my lord.”
“Estarion.”
“My lord Estarion.”
She was laughing at him, crazy with relief. He narrowed his eyes. “That’s why you were afraid. Why you hid. You didn’t want me to know.”
“I was afraid you’d send me back.”
“So I would have,” he said.
“You can’t now,” said Haliya. “It’s safer here than anywhere out there.”
“Gods,” he said. “If my enemies knew . . .”
“They don’t,” said Haliya. Her face was hard, her voice was iron. “Nor shall they. I won’t give them another target.”
“You won’t be able to hide it much longer,” he said, “even wrapped in furs and hiding among the women.”
“They guard me well,” she said. “Especially your mother’s armored women. And your priestess.”
“Am I the only one who didn’t know?”
She barely flinched. “Your priestess has known for a long time. The others either guessed, or I told them when your mother died. They had to know, to guard the heir.”
“The heir.” His tongue stumbled on the word. “You . . . really . . .”
“I won’t lose him,” said Haliya. “Vanyi has promised me that. He will be born alive, and he will be born strong.”
“Vanyi knows.” Estarion did not know what he felt. Pity, maybe. Fury, that she had tricked and trapped him, and never told him that it did not matter; that if he died, it was not ended. There was an heir. The line would go on. “She let me think that I was all there was.”
“Maybe she thought it would be easier for you if you didn’t know.”
“Or easier for you,” he said, “or for herself. She’s a bitter, cruel creature sometimes, like the sea she comes from.”
“And you love her,” said Haliya.
She said it without pain, and without jealousy that he could perceive. “I love you,” he said. He meant it. And not only for the child pressing against his hand, seeking the light of his presence.
“A man can love many women,” said Haliya. “A woman finds it easier to love one man. I love you, I think. I like you more. Love’s uncomfortable; it burns out. Liking is made to last.”
“You’ll teach him well, this son of ours,” Estarion said.
“And you.” She let fall her armor of furs and flung arms about his neck. The ul-cub spilled squalling to the door. She did not notice.
His altered senses would have known her for a Vinicharyas even without the proof of her name. She made the world a clearer place while she held him in her arms. He was quiet there, at rest if not content.
Even his power was gentled, tamed and harnessed to his will. But this new clarity forbade him to dream that he might not after all be bound to seek his healing, or his death, in the Tower. There was no hope of escaping that.
He did not know that he wanted any. It was comforting in its bleak way, this knowledge that in two days, three at the utmost, he would most probably be dead.
She said nothing of it. She knew—he felt it in her. Vanyi had told her. Vanyi was not one to spare any creature pain, if she reckoned that pain necessary.
Haliya yawned, sighed, like the child she still in great part was. He carried her to bed. She would never be the singing fire that Vanyi was, or even Ziana; she did not need to be. Tonight she was content to hold and to be held, warm in his warmth, quiet in his quiet that she had made.
o0o
He closed his eyes, briefly as he thought. When he opened them, the air had changed to the chill that promises the dawn, and Haliya had left him. Servants were waiting with lamps and candles and the robes of the rite.
He was calm, greeting them. He submitted himself without protest; but it was not the empty passivity of his time in Kundri’j. He allowed this. He willed it. Tonight, by the god’s mercy, he would end it.
V
The Tower of the Sun
48
Darkness was the goddess’ portion, and silence. But an empress must have the light and the singing for her honor’s sake, now that she was dead.
Merian had never been one to shun the sunlight. She had mated with it, keeping the rites of the moon’s dark, but when they were past, she stood in the sun when it was strongest, and loved it for its bright fire. Her child was the sun’s child, but night’s child, too, with his dark face and his sun-gold eyes.
He gave her honor, and the music she had loved, singing the death-rite over her in the bitter-bright morning. The shell of her was cold under his hands, with ice in its still heart.
He could have warmed her; burned her as he had her lover. But she would have the darker comfort of the tomb, and her emperor’s bones beside her under the black Tower of Endros. Her cortege was chosen, her bier in the making. When the embalmers had done with her, she would go, across the long leagues of empire to the City of the Sun.
He would go before her. Tonight, at sunset and Greatmoonrise, god and goddess passing in the door of the night, the Gate would open. He would do what he must do. She might find him there when she came, laid on the stone beside his father.
He was calm now, empty even of grief. Some thought him numbed with wine, but he had touched none since before the death-vigil. He had not eaten, either, or drunk aught but a little water when he woke.
There would be a feast after this rite. He would pretend to eat, although he did not need it. The sun was enough, and the cold clean air.
The hall was full of people, a glitter and shift of myriad minds in his mage-sight. He was seeing almost wholly with it, had been since he left his chambers. It was a potent effort to see with eyes of the body, to look on dull flesh, mere stone, plain light of lamps and candles. So much simpler, so much more beautiful, to ignore the flesh and look on spirit bare.
And he had reckoned himself content without magery. It had come close to killing him, in soul if not in body. No spell of the Golden Palace, that, but a twisting in his own will.
And yet, he thought as the rite left him standing still and silent, and the choir of priests and priestesses sang the last of the great hymns: and yet it was an ill thing, what he had suffered this empire to become. He had not begun it, no, nor done more than continue what his fathers had done before him. But he had fostered it.
There should have been one empire, one people, and there were two, eagle of the Sun and lion of Asanion yoked to the single chariot. They hated one another. They spoke of conquest and of conquerors. Keruvarion looked in scorn on fallen Asanion. Asanion turned on its Varyani emperor—not its own, never its own, always the barbarian, the alien, the foreigner—in murderous resentment.
They must be one. He might have said it aloud. No one heard him: the priestesses’ descant soared high and piercing clear over the deep voices of the priests, drowning any lesser voice. He shaped the words again in the silence of his mind. They must be one. Whatever comes of this that I do, whether I come back alive or lie dead in the Tower, the empires must be one empire. Or they break and fall, and shatter into warring shards.
And if that would be so, then there could be no Golden Palace set apart, and no Palace of the Sun in the heart of the Hundred Realms. Kundri’j and Endros must not be separated. There must be a new city, a city that was of both and neither, set between the empires. And a new court, not Court of the Sun and Courts of the Lion but both together, Varyani, Asanian, and no distinction made between them.
And was he the Sunborn, to conceive such a purpose? He would be dead when the sun rose again, or worse than dead.
Nothing that he thought or willed or dreamed could be. He was a broken thing, a marred beginning. He would never come to more than that.
But his son might. He would give the child that, write it down when the rite was done, entrust it to the child’s mother. Who would, god and goddess help her, be empress when he was gone.
The hymn soared to its crescendo and faded. He must sing the last words, the words that sealed the rite. For a terrible moment he had no words at all, no memory, only darkness and silence.
Then again he was full of light, and in the light, the music, and in the music, the words. “Dark lady, lady of the silence, Lady Night: come now, take your child, grant her rest. May the sun be gentle upon her. May the wind caress her. May the years tread light upon her bones.”
o0o
Vanyi heard the singing from the heart of her own working. She was never there; there was always a duty to keep her away, always something to be done in Estarion’s name.
She should resent him profoundly. But she was not a reasonable creature when it came to Estarion. He knew what prices she paid—she had felt it when Iburan died, a tendril of thought that uncurled to touch her, then shrank away. He had expected her to be enraged.
That, not the necessity of her absence, roused her temper. So little he knew her. So ill he judged her.
And had she done anything to prove him false? What he had done in Asanion was as much her fault as anyone’s. If she had not driven him away, he would not have gone to his yellow women. Haliya would not be huddled in her phalanx of guards, watching her emperor sing the empress mother to rest and reflecting in spite of herself upon the child she carried—how he too would sing these words, if the gods willed.
She knew no sadness in the thought, and no fear that Vanyi could discern. She was not expecting to be empress as Merian had been. Women in Asanion did not rule like men, with their faces naked to the world.
This would be empress-by-right if the night’s working failed. This would rule, whether she willed it or no. This child, this innocent, this creature who was neither mage nor simple woman, but something between.
“She won’t do badly,” said Sarevadin, startling Vanyi back into herself.
The walls of the palace chapel closed in once more, the wards set but not sealed, the substance of the Gate gathered but unformed. There was nothing to see with eyes of the body, and little with eyes of the mind but a mist of raw power under a shield and a ward. It was lumpen to the touch of her senses, inert.
Sarevadin crouched in front of it as if beside a wanderer’s fire, arms resting on knees, eyes fixed on Vanyi. The angle of the light caught the scars on her neck, brands of the torque that she had worn as priest and priestess, until she cast it away.
“She’s a child,” she went on, “but she’s wiser than she knows, and stronger than she thinks. He chose her with his temper, true enough; but a Sunlord always judges best when he’s not trying to think.”
“Are you saying,” Vanyi asked, “that Sun-blood is better brainless?”
“Often,” said the Sunborn’s child, “yes. If the god exists—if he’s not the dream of a mage afraid of his own power—then I think we may be one of his more splendid failures. Or maybe we’re the joke he plays on the world’s fools. My father honestly believed that he was sent to bind the goddess in chains and raise up an imperishable empire. I learned what folly that was; I lost my magery to it, and my very self. But I had my own idiocy. I thought that I was to make one empi
re of two, I and my lord. I thought that I had done it; or close enough, once my lord was dead and I had killed my name. When I left, I meant to leave forever—to become nothing, a nameless thing, a leaf on the wind.
“And I did, priestess. For a lifetime of simple men, I did. Then I wandered back through the empire I had forsaken and by then nearly forgotten. I paused by a river, and saw a young man fishing. He looked like any other princely idiot with a line and a hook and a bag of Islander tricks, which made me smug, because I had brought the Isles into the empire.
“Then he turned his eyes on me. I had no name yet. I refused to have one. But he forced me into his orbit. He made me remember. He spelled me as my father spelled the princes he would conquer, or as I would trap my lords of the warring empires. I was the biter bit, priestess. I was a Sunlord’s slave.”
“What are you trying to do?” Vanyi asked her mildly enough, all things considered. “You don’t need to snare me in lies. You won’t snare him. He’s past that.”
“Well,” said Sarevadin, unruffled. “It’s not untrue. He did startle me. He did remind me of what I’d been. And he’s lethally charming when he wants to be.”
“So are you,” Vanyi said. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me how you got in here. There are wards. Or didn’t you notice?”
“Isn’t it a little late to wonder?”
“You aren’t a mage. I think that much is true. But you’re something else.” Vanyi’s eyes narrowed. “You are magic. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what the mages did to you. They shattered you and made you anew; but when they did that, they made you a new thing: a human shape, a human soul, but sealed with power. I could sever myself from my magic, if I were driven to it; or Estarion could, as he did to the mages who fought him. You can’t do that. Every part of you is woven with magery.”
Sarevadin shrugged. Perhaps she truly did not care; perhaps she had known it for so long that it no longer seemed to her a wonder.