A Fall of Princes

by Judith Tarr

  o0o

  It was dark. It was damp. It stank. It was a dungeon, and it was vile, and Sarevan smiled at it.

  “Spacious,” he said to the guard who stood nearest, “and well lit; the straw is clean, I see. Rats? Yes? Ah well, what would a dungeon be without rats?”

  They had taken off Hirel’s chain. He bolted for the door. A guard caught him with contemptuous ease, and took his time letting go, groping down Hirel’s trousers. Hirel laid him flat.

  Sarevan laughed. “Isn’t he a wonder? Protects his virtue better than any maid. But with a little persuasion . . .”

  The guards were grinning. Hirel’s victim got up painfully, but the murder had retreated from his eyes. He did not try to touch Hirel again.

  They left the dim lamp high in its niche, where it bred more shadows than it vanquished. The door thudded shut; bolts rattled across it. Hirel turned on Sarevan. “You unspeakable—”

  “Yes, I held your tongue for you, and it was well for you I did. If my elegant lord had taken any notice of you, he would have kept you. He likes a pretty boy now and then. But he likes them docile and he likes them devoted, and I made sure that he thought I might have tainted you with my sorceries. Why, your very face could have been a trap.”

  “What do you think you have led me into? I could have been free. I could have proven my rank and had an escort to my father.”

  “You could have been held hostage well apart from me, with no hope of escape.”

  “What hope is there now?”

  “More than none.” Before Hirel could muster a riposte, Sarevan had withdrawn, turning his eyes toward the deepest of deep shadows.

  His breath hissed. He swooped on something.

  Hirel’s eyes were sharpening to the gloom. He saw what Sarevan knelt beside. A bundle of rags. A tangle of—

  Hair like black water flecked with white. The tatters of a robe such as all priests wore by law in Asanion, torn most on the breast where the badge of the god should be. The prisoner had on something beneath, something dark and indistinct, but glinting on the edge of vision.

  Hirel’s stomach heaved. It was no garment at all, but flesh flayed to the bone. And the face—the face—

  It had been a woman once. It could still speak with a clarity horrible amid the ruin, and the voice was sweet. It was a young voice, light and pure despite the greying hair. “Avar’charin?” It shifted to accented Asanian. “Brother. Brother my lord, Avar’charin. I see you in the darkness. How bright is the light of you!”

  Sarevan stroked the beautiful hair. His face was deadly still. “Hush,” he murmured. “Hush.”

  She stirred. Though it must have roused her to agony, she touched his hand. His fingers closed over hers, gently, infinitely gently, for they were little more than blood and broken bone. “My lord,” she cried with sudden urgency, “you should not be here! This land is death for you.”

  “It has been worse for you.” His voice was as still as his face.

  “I am no one. My pain belongs to the god; it is nearly done. But you—Endros iVaryan, you were mad to pass your father’s borders.”

  “The god is leading me. He brought me to you. Give me your pain, sister. Give me your suffering, that I may heal it.”

  “No. No, you must not.”

  “I must.”

  She clutched him, though she gasped, though her broken body writhed with the effort and the anguish of it. “No. Oh, no. They left me alive for this. They left lips and tongue. They knew—they wanted—”

  Sarevan’s face was set, closed, implacable. He laid his hands on that head with its bitter paradox of beauty and ruin.

  The air sang; Hirel’s flesh prickled. Almost he could see. Almost he could hear. Almost know. Power like wind and fire, solid as a sword, ghostly as a dream, terrible as the lightning.

  Gathering, waxing, focusing. Reaching within the shattered body, willing it to live, to mend, to be whole.

  “No!” cried the priestess, high and despairing.

  The bait was taken, the trap was sprung. The hunter came in wind and fire, but his fire was black and his wind bore the stink of darkness.

  The healing frayed and chilled and broke. Sarevan reared up, and the masks were gone, torn away from purest, reddest rage. He roared, and it was no man who sprang, but a great cat the color of night, with eyes of fire.

  Hirel had no pride in the face of a world gone mad. He cowered in the farthest comer. Perhaps he whimpered. He scrabbled at the wall, hoping hopelessly that it would give way and free him from this horror.

  As far from him as the cell’s walls permitted, and much too hideously close, there was nothing to see, and there was everything. A cat crouched over a shapeless thing that had been a woman. A cat that was also a redheaded northerner, locked in combat with something that was now Lord Ebraz’ tame sorcerer and now a direwolf with bloody jaws.

  The cat’s fangs closed on the wolf’s throat. It howled; it fought. The cat grunted, perhaps with effort, perhaps with the laughter of the prey turned hunter and slayer.

  The wolf slashed helplessly at air. Cruel claws rent its body. Its blood bubbled and flamed like the blood of mountains.

  With a last vicious stroke, the cat flung down his enemy. A man, broken and bleeding, and his blood had still that fiery, sorcerous strangeness.

  Power, Hirel knew without knowing how. The mage bled his magic at Sarevan’s feet.

  “Thus,” said the priest, cold and proud, “do you learn the law. A journeyman does not challenge a master. Go now; reap the reward your folly has won you. Live without power and without magic, and know that Avaryan’s line cannot be cast down by any mortal man.”

  The enemy vanished. Sarevan began to sink down beside the body of the priestess.

  Wind swept over him, with fire in its jaws. It caught him unawares. He reeled and fell. Hirel’s wandering wits observed the priest’s braid, how bright it was as he toppled, bright as new copper, clashing with the blood on his bandages.

  He twisted in the air, supple, impossible, feline. His form blurred and steadied, human shape grappling with living shadow.

  There were eyes in the shapeless darkness. Terrible eyes: golden, luminous, and infinitely sad. I must, they said, as the sky speaks of rain. You threaten us all. I cannot grant you mercy.

  “Mercy?” Sarevan’s wrath had gone quiet. “Was it mercy you granted my torque-sister? Share it, then. Share it in its fullness.”

  They closed, darkness and darkness, flesh and shadow. The shadow—

  Hirel giggled, quite contentedly mad. The shadow had the voice of a woman and the suggestion of a woman’s shape; a soft curve of cheek, a swell of breasts, a slimness of waist. So close and so fiercely did they do battle that they looked to be locked in an embrace less of war than of love.

  Hirel’s manhood rose in fancied sympathy. His breathing quickened. It was a woman, that shadow, and such a woman, ineffably beautiful, ineffably sad. All Asanion dwelt in her body and in her great grieving eyes.

  Sarevan destroyed them.

  Hirel howled. Now that he must move, he could not. He raged and wept. He forsook the last rags of his sanity. Yet through it all, his eyes saw with perfect and hideous clarity.

  As Sarevan had broken the wolf, so he broke the lady of the empire and cast her down. But she clung to consciousness. She smiled as he set his foot on her. Her smile was beautiful, and yet it was horrible; for it was a smile of triumph.

  “The battle,” she said, “is yours, O slave of the burning god. But the war is mine.”

  She grasped his foot with her last desperate strength, and thrust it up and back. Lightnings leaped from her hands.

  She laughed, high and sweet and taunting. It was laughter made to madden a man, if he were young and proud and filled with the wrath of his god.

  It pricked, it stung. It drove Sarevan back; it roused his power anew. He wielded the lightning like a sword. He swooped upon his tormentor and smote her where she lay.

  FOUR

 
The silence was abrupt and absolute.

  Sarevan stood empty-handed. His face was grey, his bandage scarlet.

  Slowly, stiffly, he knelt. He touched the body of the sorceress. It lay whole and unmarred, as if it slept; but no breath stirred.

  Sarevan sat on his heels. “’Varyan,” he whispered. “O Avaryan.”

  Hirel, having tasted the warmth of madness, found sanity grim and cold. He stood over the priest and the sorceress. The priestess was gone, if she had ever been aught but illusion.

  Sarevan raised his head. His eyes were dull. Even his hair seemed dim, faded, the brightness gone from it. He scraped it out of his eyes. “I killed her,” he said calmly.

  “So I see,” responded Hirel.

  “Do you? Can you?” Sarevan laughed. It was not comfortable to hear. “That was the trap. To make me kill her. To make—me—” His voice cracked like a boy’s. He leaped to his feet, staggered, caught himself. “Quick now. Walk.”

  “Where?”

  Sarevan swayed again. He looked about, peering as if he could not see; he drew a breath that caught in his throat. “Walk,” he gritted. “Walk, damn you.”

  They walked. The door melted away before them.

  No one saw them, and they saw no one. Perhaps they did not walk in the world at all. They came up out of the dungeon, and they walked through a high house richly furnished, part of which Hirel thought he could remember; but not even an insect stirred. And the gate opened not on the city of Shon’ai but on greenness and sunlight and a whisper of water.

  Sarevan stumbled and fell to his knees. Hirel snatched at him; he pushed the hands away. His head tossed from side to side. His eyes were wide and blind.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “All of it. All gone.” A sound escaped him, half laughter, half sob. “I gave her the death she longed for. She—she gave me worse. Infinitely worse.”

  “What—” Hirel began.

  Sarevan’s eyes rolled up. Slowly, bonelessly, he toppled.

  Hirel caught too late, managed only to drag himself down under a surprising weight. It ended across his lap, leaden heavy, barely breathing. Trapping him, pinning him to the ground. He struggled briefly and wildly.

  Abruptly he stilled. Willing himself to be calm, to think. It was the fiercest battle he had ever known, and the greatest victory.

  Hirel regarded the face upturned in his lap. It was much the same as ever, dark, high-nosed, haughty; even unconscious it was hollowed with exhaustion.

  Hirel shivered in the sun’s warmth. This creature had called on a power that could not, should not exist. Had flown without wings, and wielded the lightning, and destroyed two mages who had come against him. Sarevan who had found an Asanian prince in a fernbrake and condescended to be his guard; who never wore more than he must, who was conspicuously vain of his body, who ate and drank and slept and sometimes had bad dreams. He sweated when the sun was hot and shivered when the night was cold, and bathed when he needed it, which was often enough, and relieved himself exactly as every other man must. No showers of enchanted gold.

  Hirel bit his lips until they bled. There were mages, and Sarevan was one, and if mages could be, then what of gods?

  Perhaps it had been a dream.

  The earth was solid beneath him, cool, a little damp. The air bore a scent of sunlight and of wilderness. The weight across his thighs was considerable, and inescapable.

  Sarevan. Sarevan Is’kelion, Sarevan Stormborn, Sa’van lo’ndros who could not be what he could not but be. Sa’van lo’ndros, Sarevadin li Endros in the high Gileni tongue that Hirel’s father had commanded he learn: Sarevadin the prince.

  Hirel had some excuse for idiocy. When a high prince of Asanion was born, all menchildren born that day and for a Greatmoon-cycle round about were given his name. It confused the demons, people said, and spread the gods’ blessing abroad upon the empire. And some of the Sunborn’s Ianyn savages had taken wives among the women of the Hundred Realms, and many more had not troubled with such niceties, with mongrels enough to show for it. And surely the heir of a very god would not be walking the highroad of his own free will with all his worldly goods in a battered bag.

  Sarevadin the prince, son of the Sunborn.

  What a hostage.

  What an irony.

  But there was one wild tale at least—

  Hirel lifted one long limp hand. The right, that one that had shown itself to be Sarevan’s great weakness.

  A shaft of sun caught in its palm and flamed. Ilu’Kasar, the brand of the god, that he had from his father.

  Suddenly Hirel was whitely, gloriously angry. Sarevan had said no word, not even one; had taken a wicked delight in Hirel’s stupidity. Letting Hirel look on him as lowborn, driving Hirel wild with his arrogance, laughing all the while at the blind and witless child. Hoping very likely to play the game clear to Kundri’j Asan, and melt away unknown, and rise up in Keruvarion and tell the tale to all who would hear. How the High Prince of Keruvarion saved the life of the High Prince of Asanion, and took him back to his safe nest and his doting father, and won scarcely a civil word in return.

  “Why,” Sarevan would say as he quaffed ale with his father’s bearded chieftains, “the poor infant could hardly recall his own name, let alone mine, he was so prostrated by the shock of having to do up his own trousers.”

  Hirel bit down on the back of his hand. He was going to howl. With rage, with laughter, what matter? He had been a prisoner in the dungeon of one of his own lords, with a sorcery on his tongue whenever he tried to speak his name, and the son of An-Sh’Endor had set him free. Casting them both here, wherever here might be, in a welter of magic and a flood of words that, uncomprehended, roused nothing but dread.

  Hirel’s eyes flinched from the dazzle of the Kasar. It was true gold, bright metal in the shape of the sun’s disk, many-rayed, born there, bred in the flesh by a god’s power.

  It burned, the tales said, like living fire. Small wonder Sarevan had nearly fainted when Hirel sank his teeth into it.

  Hirel laid the hand on Sarevan’s breast. “Consider,” he said to it, "what I know and what I surmise. Your god is being driven from Asanion as quietly as may be, and as completely. The Order of Mages has withdrawn from the Nine Cities and reappeared in Kundri’j Asan under the open protection of the Charlatans’ Guild and the secret sanction of the emperor my father. He wields them as he wields every weapon, as a counter to the power of the emperor your father.

  “And here we lie, you and I, only your god knows where. Is that the heart of your plot, High Prince of Keruvarion? To bewitch and abduct the High Prince of Asanion?”

  Sarevan did not move.

  “Sarevadin Halenan Kurelian Miranion iVaryan. See, I know you. I have you wholly in my power. Shall I slay you while you lie helpless? Shall I bear you away to be my slave in Kundri’j?”

  Not a sound, not a flicker. Sarevan was alive, but little more; somehow he had thwarted the surgeon’s close stitching, and he was ghastly grey, and perhaps there was more amiss that Hirel could not understand. Something uncanny, something sorcerous. And they were alone, foodless and waterless, without weapon or baggage; and a pair of trousers for each, neither excessively clean, and a single torn shirt. And a torque of gold, for what that was worth.

  Much, even if it were no more than gilded lead. Hirel had only to unclasp it and run and hide, and twist it out of recognition and hammer it with a stone and sell a bit of it in the next town he came to. If there was a town. If it was close enough to find before he starved.

  What a blow to Keruvarion his empire’s enemy, if he left its high prince to die in a nameless wood. No matter if he died himself; he would only make truth of Sarevan’s deception, and his father had a surfeit of sons. He might even win free to tell the tale. Magics and sorceries and all.

  Carefully, patiently, Hirel extricated himself from beneath the limp body. It was not difficult, now that he was calm.

  He stood over Sarevan. The Varyani prince sprawled gracelessly in t
he leafmold that had so bound Hirel. Truly, if he had not died yet, he would die soon.

  With a small hoarse sound, Hirel bent over him. The torque gleamed no more brightly than the Sun in the branded hand. Hirel caught the wrist, drew the slack arm around his neck, set his teeth and heaved.

  Sarevan came up by degrees, so slowly that Hirel shook with the strain, so awkwardly that he almost despaired. Half carrying, half dragging the long body behind him, he lurched and stumbled toward the whisper of water.

  Light burst upon him, and treelessness: a broad stretch of lake girdled with trees and sharp stones, ringed with the white teeth of mountains. He lowered Sarevan to the sand that lapped to the forest’s edge, and tried to stand erect, gasping, as his sight swelled and faded and settled to a dark-edged blur. Through it he dipped water in his hands, drank what he might, and poured a pitiful few drops into Sarevan.

  Hirel lay on the sun-warmed sand. Only for a moment. Only until he had his breath back.

  Sarevan lay deathly still beside him. He surged up in dread; the bandaged breast lifted, fell again. Clumsily, swallowing bile, he loosened the bloodied wrappings.

  The bleeding had ebbed. Whether that was good or ill, Hirel did not know. The small tidy wound had grown to an ugly gaping mouth.

  Hirel tore at his shirt, shaking, wanting desperately to cry. He had no skill in this. He had no skill in anything that mattered. The Dance of the Sunbird, the seventeen inflections of the imperial salutation, the precise degree of the bow accorded by a lord of the ninth rank of the Middle Court to a prince of the blood . . .

  His hands made a bandage, of sorts. It was not pretty. Perhaps it was too tight. He tied it off with a bowman’s knot, which skill at least he had, and sat on his heels, spent.

  The sun’s heat stroked his aching shoulders. He turned his face to it, eyes slitted against its brightness. “What now?” he demanded, as if it could answer; as if it were truly a god and not merely the closest of the stars. “What can I do? I am but a pampered prince. I know nothing but courts and palaces. What use am I here?”

  The sun shone on oblivious. A small wind played across the water. Far out, a fish leaped. Hirel’s entrails knotted with hunger.