by Judith Tarr
Even enspelled, Mirain was a mighty power. The mage who mastered him would be master of aught that he desired. And if that desire was the Mageguild’s power, its strength reborn, its puppet on the throne—then so might it be.
“You do lack imagination,” Vanyi said. She did not trouble to keep it to herself. “You tried that once, and failed resoundingly. What makes you think you’ll win it now?”
The Heartfire flared. Power beat on her shields. She rocked before it but did not fall.
“You are cowards,” she said, “and always were: working through slaves and servants, hiding behind walls, lurking in Gates. Now you leave everything to a dying child, while you shiver in shadows.”
They beat harder. She would crack, but not, she prayed, too soon.
“You’re afraid of the Tower and the sleeper. You think that you can rule both—but no one can do that, unless he bears the Kasar. You haven’t found a way to counterfeit that, have you? And you never will. You are small men, cravens and fools. True bravura would have attacked the Tower long ago. Maybe no mortal man can master it, but who’s to say it can’t be broken, and the sleeper taken in its fall? He may be a mage and he may be mad beyond recovery, but he’s no more than a man.”
“Would you do better?”
He came out of a Gate, one that had shown a mountain against stars and a constellation of moons, blood-red, sea-green, foam-white. He looked like a merchant grown discontented with prosperity. He fostered that impression: well-fed, well-clad, sleek, yet petulant about the eyes. There was a new and livid scar on his brow.
To a mage who could see, he was both more and less than his body’s seeming. He walked in power as in a cloak, as one who is master of it, and certain of that mastery. Yet he was not content with it. He was one who wanted. It almost did not matter what, or why, only that what he did not have, he wished to possess.
That too might be a mask, a temptation to contempt. Vanyi armored herself as she might. She would not be anything to incite the admiration of an Asanian with pretensions to rank: undersized Islander woman in clothes that, though serviceable, were near enough to rags. Of her power, little showed itself that might not be reflected glory of the Sun’s blood.
Behind the mage who must have been the Guildmaster came others robed in violet or in grey. They were all Asanian. She did not find that surprising. The Guild had been born in the Nine Cities, but those had given themselves to the temple. Asanion never had.
They spread in a circle about her, but not, she noticed, between her and the fire. Maybe they feared it. Maybe they thought she did.
She did indeed. But she feared more what they might do if they seized the Tower and the king who slept in it.
She was a very poor guardian of this Gate. Her strength was not for battle. Her knowledge was in making, not in breaking.
She remembered the tale as it had been sung in Shon’ai by a eunuch singer. His clear voice rang in her memory. Mages in the Heart of the World, battle of power that turned to battle of steel and fist, and ended in the Tower of the Sun.
This was the same battle. They had won a truce only, Sarevadin and her lion’s cub. Now it was broken. Now it would end.
Vanyi shook herself free of despair that was a working of mages, even through her shields. The mages’ Master shrugged slightly. “Our slave will do what must be done in the Tower,” he said. “Do you think that you can stop him?”
“He’s not your slave,” she said.
“He serves us,” said the Master.
“I think not.” Her feet ached with standing. She sat cross-legged in as much comfort as she could feign. “You shouldn’t trust the emperor’s Olenyai. They serve the throne, and nothing less.”
“The throne belongs by right to the one who serves us.”
“The water-blooded offspring of a female line? A man whose seed has failed, who will sire no sons? What, after him? The bastard of a slave?”
She had pricked his temper. Good: it weakened his magery, eased its grip on her. “He is the emperor.”
“Then he cannot serve you,” she said reasonably. “Quite the opposite.”
They were closing in behind. No doubt they had knives. They could not even live their own tale; they must thieve from another.
She had a dagger, but it was small, good for little but cutting meat. She had her power, which was no greater than it should be. Her best weapon, her tongue, would not be useful much longer. They would see that she was delaying them, and ride over her.
Unless . . .
She rose slowly, with as much grace as she could muster. She opened her mind by degrees, touching the Gates one by one. Her Gate-sense was overwhelmed here, where all Gates began and ended. She thrust blindly with her power.
The worldwalls stilled. The Heartfire burned steady.
The mages glanced at one another. She felt the leaping of thoughts, the forging of the web that bound mage to mage.
Now, she thought, while the web was still half-woven. A dart—there, where the web was not weakest but strongest. And in the instant of confusion, mind and body gathered, leaped.
Pain.
She shut it out.
Agony.
She willed it away.
Torment.
She flung herself through it.
o0o
Estarion fell to his knees. Korusan writhed in his arms. Death-throes; no life, no sense left, only the broken, witless shell. He clutched it to him and wept.
A body tumbled out of air, spun, righted itself. It had come through a Gate. The Gate slammed shut, bolted with power.
He stared blankly. The body had a name. Vanyi. And a voice, grating in his ears. “What in the hells—”
She was not looking at him, or at the death that he had made. He followed the line of her gaze, because it was less pain than that dead face.
Sarevadin stood where Korusan had been standing, bent over the body of her father. She seemed intent, almost curious, tracing the lines of his face, murmuring something that had the cadence of a chant.
Vanyi’s breath hissed between her teeth. “He’s waking.”
And Sarevadin was singing him out of his sleep.
If a woman wanted to die so much that she did not care what died with her own death—if she were years gone in madness—might she not turn on all that she had been? Might she not undo the magics that she had wrought at such great cost, and rouse the power that she had sung to sleep? Would she even know what she did, save that she saw her death, and moved to embrace it?
The Tower healed the wounds of Sunchildren. If life was a wound, and healing was death, and death came only through the sleeper’s waking, then the Tower itself would feed Sarevadin’s will. It would do as it was wrought to do—even if it destroyed itself in the doing.
Vanyi was moving, trailing tatters of light. She gathered it in her hands, knotting swiftly.
Sarevadin’s hands lowered over the sleeper. If she touched, if she spoke his name, he would wake. Wake angry. Wake in a torrent of fire.
Vanyi flung her net of magic.
It fell short and shattered on the floor. Its strands of broken light blurred into the shifting, pulsing patterns of the stone.
Estarion laid Korusan aside gently, without haste but with speed enough. He was moving as he moved in the dance, slow to his own senses, swift to those of the world without.
The flames were rising. The sleeper breathed in time with them. His fingers flexed on his breast. The faint line of a frown creased his brow.
Estarion glided forward. Vanyi had fallen. She had put all of herself into the net; she had no strength left to stand. She stirred, but feebly.
Sarevadin swayed. Her face was rapt.
Estarion closed arms about her and gasped. She was wise, and wily in her madness. She was shielded against his power.
He set his teeth. His body convulsed, but he held. His power fluxed. His blood was boiling. His brain was like to burst from his skull.
And he held. She could not
finish her working while he killed himself on her shield.
She poured power into it. He poured it away. It roared through blood and bone. It battered the barrier of his skin. It found exit in the Kasar.
He barred it. He did not know how. He did not care. He shut the gate that would have saved him.
“Stop it!” she shrieked at him. “You’ll burn alive!”
And he would not when the Sunborn woke?
She raked nails across his face.
So low she had sunk, she who had been both prince and princess, Sunlord and Sunborn empress. He counted the sting of those small wounds with all the rest, and laughed. It was pain, not mirth. His throat was full of fire. He could hold no more of it.
And more came. He would break, he would die.
Or he would grow to hold it.
As a flower grows, or a child, because it must; because its nature is to become greater than it is. Swiftly, of necessity; slowly, in the order of things, little by little, each small part of it full and complete before the next began. One could lose oneself in the wonder of it.
His body was healing. His soul would not. Grief was nothing that even mages could mend, except with forgetfulness.
And still the power came. She was draining it out of herself, and out of the working she had made, and—dear god—into the spell that bound the Sunborn.
She had not been waking the sleeper at all. She had been fighting him. Estarion, mistaking her, had come deathly close to breaking the spell himself.
The flow of power had stopped. Sarevadin was not empty; she could not be while she lived. But she was weakened, and sorely.
Vanyi was weaving her web again. She took its strands from her own substance, plaiting it with threads of stonelight.
She murmured to herself as she wove. It sounded less like a spell than like a string of curses.
“Help her.”
He glanced down startled.
Sarevadin’s eyes were open, no anger in them, no scorn of his idiocy. “She’s not strong enough to do it alone. Help her.”
Estarion tossed his aching head. “What can I do? What if I go wrong again? What if I finish what I began, and wake the Sunborn?”
Her brows drew together as if with temper, but she sighed. “I don’t suppose I should expect you to trust your power, after all you’ve done to it. But you have to learn, and quickly. She thinks she’s enough. She’s not. With you she may be.”
“What can I—”
“Shut up and do it.”
He could not. He did not know how.
Sarevadin climbed the ladder of his body. He tensed to thrust her away. She caught at his arms. Her hands were burning cold. “Do it,” she gritted. “Do it, damn you.”
He loosed a thread of power. It met Vanyi’s shields and snapped back.
Sarevadin shook him, nearly oversetting them both. “Do it!”
He could not. His touch was too strong. Even the brush of it frayed the web.
“Fool of a boy,” muttered Sarevadin. She closed her eyes.
He clutched her before she fell. But she was firm enough on her feet, with him for a prop. Power hissed and crackled about her. It stung. He was caught; he could not let go.
Her power seized his with ruthless strength and wielded it. Full in the heart of the weaving. Darting through the knots and plaiting, needle-thin, needle-sharp. Drawing them in. Making them strong. Plucking the net from the hands that had made it, and casting it over the man on the bier.
He tossed beneath it, raising hands that clawed to rend it to rags. He was not awake, not yet, but his anger was roused, and it ruled him.
Sarevadin crooned: to herself, it might have been, or to the web that strained and tore. Estarion’s power was in her hands still. She poured her own through it, taking from it what she needed: youth, strength, raw unshaped will. She gave it shape. She wove the web anew, and herself into it, as Vanyi had.
Vanyi had kept her soul apart from the making. Sarevadin’s soul was the making. Her life was her power. Her body was wrought of it. She shifted as she had on the worldroad, a woman to man to maiden to youth to shape of both and neither. And still she wove, singing her wordless song.
The sleeper fought her with mindless rage. His dream had turned to fire.
She sang it down. She cooled it with water of the soul, sweet spring of light, soft rain on parched earth. She sang calm; she sang sleep. She sang a soft green stillness into which his wrath subsided. She bound it there. She gave it dreams; dreams of peace.
The Sunborn lay still under the pall of power. He was not all resigned to it: one hand had fallen to his side, clenched into a fist. But he was bound. He would learn perforce the ways of peace, who had ever been a man of war.
Sarevadin sighed in Estarion’s arms. She was herself again, fragile with great age, and her eyes were calm, almost happy. More truly so, maybe, than they had been since Hirel died.
She smiled. Her voice was a thread, almost too thin to bear the weight of words. “That will keep him for a while. Do you trust me now, a little?”
“I always trusted you,” Estarion said.
“Don’t lie. It makes you twitch.” She shifted; he settled her more comfortably. She weighed no more than a child. “You’d better lay me here. It’s a long way down to the tombs, and I’ll be dust before you come there.”
“You’re not dying,” said Estarion, but his heart clenched. She was withering as he watched.
“They said I couldn’t die. They didn’t think I’d strip myself of power. They didn’t know I could. No more,” she admitted, “did I, until I did it.” She smiled. “I’m not sorry I tried. It gave you yourself. And it gave me . . . it gave me . . .”
“Death,” Vanyi said. She was white and shaking, but she was alive. She stretched out a hand, not quite daring to touch the cheek that was thin skin stretched over bone. “Wouldn’t a simple cliff have done as well, with rocks at the foot of it, and the sea to sweep you away?”
Sarevadin was beyond answering, but her eyes laughed.
The Sunborn’s bier was broad enough for two. Estarion laid her on it, gently, and straightened her limbs. He had nothing to cover her with, but she was too frail to bear the weight of cloak or pall, even if it were made of light. Her life was ebbing softly, slowly, like water from a broken cup.
Her body sank with it. Flesh melted from bone. Bone crumbled to dust. No pain went with her dying, no fear, no thought but joy. And that was a splendid, soaring, bright-winged thing, casting off the memory of flesh, leaping into the light.
52
The Sunborn dreamed again his long dream. Beside him on his bier lay a shape of ash that fell in upon itself and scattered in the wind from the Gate.
Estarion whirled. There had been no Gate, once Vanyi was in the Tower. Yet the wall behind him was open, and beyond it the Heart of the World.
Mages stood there, one in robes that mingled dark and light, and those behind him like guards, some in violet, some in grey; and in a half-circle about them the black shadows of Olenyai. One Olenyas stood beside and a little behind the master of the mages, hands on swordhilts, so like Korusan that Estarion almost cried his name. But Korusan lay beyond the bier, crumpled, twisted, dead.
Vanyi’s voice shocked Estarion into his senses. It was clear, hard, and perfectly fearless. “I forbid you to trespass here.”
“Are you Sun-blood,” demanded the Master of the mages, “to permit or forbid?”
“Are you Sun-blood,” she countered, “to set foot in this place? Men go mad here, mage. Men die.”
“Old jests,” said the mage. “Old nonsense.”
“Then come,” she said. “We killed your spy. Our own madwoman is dead. The Sunborn is not likely to wake in this age of the world; and no thanks to your plotting for that.”
The mage’s eyes widened slightly. He seemed for the first time to see the bier, the Sunlord beside it, the body of the Lion’s cub with the ul-cub crouching over it as if on guard.
The Oleny
as had seen it long since. His eyes were on Estarion, level, betraying no emotion.
“Yes, I killed him,” Estarion said. “It was my right. His life was mine, as mine was his.”
The Olenyas inclined his head. “Majesty,” he said.
Estarion stiffened. He was being given—something. He did not dare to hope, yet, that it was acceptance. “Do you serve me, Olenyas?”
“I serve the emperor,” said the Olenyas.
“You,” said Estarion as knowledge came clear, voice and eyes and set of the body in the robes, “are the captain of Olenyai in the Golden Palace.”
“I am the Master of the Olenyai,” said the Olenyas, “majesty.”
Estarion drew a breath. “Am I the emperor?”
The Olenyas paused. Estarion did not breathe, did not move. Nor, he noticed with distant clarity, did the mages. Their Master looked as if he would have spoken, but did not dare.
“Yes,” said the Olenyas. “You are the emperor.”
They won their veils in battle and their rank in combat, man to man. In slaying their prince and champion, Estarion had won their service. He even bore their brand: the sting and throb of the long cut in his cheek, that Korusan had made before he died.
It gave him no joy. “If you are mine,” he said, “then serve me now. Take these traitors to my throne. Kill any who resists.”
The mages seemed unable to believe what they had heard. Even after their allies closed in upon them, taking them captive; even, some of them, when they broke and ran, and swift steel cut them down.
The Master of mages was quicker than his fellows, and closer to the Gate. As the Olenyai closed in, he bolted for what he thought was safety.
Estarion sprang to seize Vanyi and fling her out of the mage’s path. She ducked, slid, broke free.
The mage hung in the Gate. Her power pulsed, holding him there. He raised lightnings against her.