by Judith Tarr
It was a war. He had never seen one; there had been no more than bandit raids in his world since before he was born. Yet he had heard of battles, and seen them through the memories of those who had fought in them.
Armies faced one another on a wide and windy plain. The beasts they rode, the armor they wore, were strange, but there was no mistaking what they were or what they did. One side was smaller by far, and had a desperate look. The other came on like a black wave.
There, he thought. He bent lower, peering as closely as he could. The dark warriors were all armored, their faces hidden, their shapes not quite human.
The sea surged, flinging him off his feet. A vast shape rolled over the world and its warriors. An eye opened, as wide as one of the worlds. It turned and bent, as if searching.
He was tiny, a mite, a speck of dust in the vastness of the worlds. He was nothing; no more than a breath of wind. The dark thing need take no notice of him. It was far too great a beast for such a speck as he was.
It rolled on beneath and left him gasping, tossed on the restless sea. He was lost; the land was gone. In concealing himself from the great guardian, he had concealed himself also from the Heart of the World.
SIX
MERIAN LEFT THE BOY TO SLEEP FOR PERHAPS TOO LONG. THERE was a great deal to do, and her mages, while willing to be obedient, lacked belief in the task. Even after she had let them see as much as she had seen, she still sensed the current of doubt and heard the murmur among them: “She’s a great mage, we all know that, but we also know that she is a living Gate. What if the Gate in her has driven her mad?”
That murmur would grow if she loosed her grip on any of them. There were always doubters and naysayers; nor was every mage her friend, though she had ruled them since she was little more than a child. If she was wise, she would give up this foolishness and return to her palace, and let the emperor find his own way home. Had he not done so before, and more than once?
But this was not the same. There was an urgency in her, a sense almost of desperation, as if there were no time left-as if each moment that she let pass, she wasted, without hope of replenishment. She must find the emperor; there was no hope otherwise.
This was nothing that she could say to any of her mages. They were blind to it, and worse than blind.
“It could be said,” said Urziad from amid the Heartfire, “that you are deluded and we see the simple truth.”
“My old friend and frequent adversary,” she said, “so it could. Do you believe it?”
“I believe that what you see terrifies you,” he said. “I dislike that you place your trust in a useless frippery of a boy.”
“He believes in what I see,” she said.
“Surely that should tell you how well to trust it, and him.”
“The emperor also believes,” she said. “And before you tell me that he’s a senile old man who has been questionably sane from his youth, do recall that no mage now living can equal him.”
“Except you,” said Urziad.
She shook that off, however true it might be. “I think this boy may be stronger than any of us imagines. He’s the hunting hound. I’m his huntsman. Will you see to it that there is a world for us to return to?”
“I would prefer that you never left at all,” Urziad said.
“So would I,” she said. “But needs must. Be watchful, my friend.”
“For your sake,” Urziad said, “and for no other reason.”
“Gods grant it be enough.”
He vanished from the Heartfire. She stretched and sighed. There was no measure of time here, but in the world of the sun her forefather, the day had come and gone. It was deep night, almost dawn.
The boy had had long enough to sleep. She went up to the room in which she had left him. He was sprawled on his face, perfectly still: the pose of one who had raised laziness to high art.
She laid a hand on his shoulder to wake him, and gasped. He was rigid. The skin of his neck was cold.
She heaved him onto his back. He was still breathing, shallowly. His face was grey-green, his eyes rolled up in his head.
She hissed at the folly of the child. He had fallen into a mage-dream; it had swallowed him whole. And she, worse fool yet, had left him alone. She should have known what he would do.
If there had been another mage to stand guard over her, she would have gone hunting him down the paths of his dream. But she was alone, and time was wasting. She flung him over her shoulder—grunting a little for he was not a light weight, but she was stronger than most men would have liked to know. She carried him out of the cell, down a passage and a stair, to a cavernous room in which glimmered a pool of everflowing water.
The water was cold—icy. A flicker of magic could have warmed it, but she had no interest in his comfort. Quite the contrary. She stripped him of his clothes and dropped him unceremoniously into the pool.
For a long moment she knew that she had erred; that he was too far gone. He sank down through the water, limbs sprawling, slack and lifeless.
Just as she was about to dive to his rescue, he jerked, twitched, thrashed. Eyes and mouth opened; he surged up out of the pool, gasping, choking, striking at air.
She moved back prudently out of the way and waited for him to find his sanity again, such as it was. He scrambled to the pool’s edge and lay there, breathing in gasps, skin pebbled with cold.
When it seemed clear that he would refrain from attack, she wrapped him in a cloth and rubbed him dry. His eyes were clouded still; he submitted without resistance. Only slowly did he seem to see her or to know who she was; even then he only stared at her dully.
Her heart constricted. Not, she told herself, that she cared overmuch whether he lived or died, but she needed him alert and sane, to hunt for the emperor. Indaros with his mind gone was of no use to her.
Little by little the light came back into his eyes. He straightened; he shuddered so hard that she heard the clacking of teeth. When he spoke, his voice was raw. “How long—”
“Part of a day and most of a night,” she said.
“Not so bad, then,” he said with a small sigh. “Lady, what I saw—” He was shaking uncontrollably. “Armies, lady. Wars. And something … I don’t know what it is, how they raise it, what sustains it, but it rolls ahead of them. We aren’t strong enough, lady. Not even all of us together.”
“We are going to have to be,” she said grimly. “Show me.”
He opened his eyes wide. They were as dark as the night between stars, and shimmering with bubbles that were worlds. Before she could speak, move, think, she was deep within his memory.
He was strong, she thought distantly. Stronger even than she had imagined. As strong as she. Untrained, yes, but far from undisciplined. He had taught himself—really, rather well.
She gathered everything that he had told her, found Urziad where he drifted on the tides of dream, and sent it all to him, whole, as it had been sent to her. His shock knotted her belly.
There would be no doubt among mages now. Not after this. She struggled free, raising every shield she had.
In the silence, alone within herself, she stood staring at the boy from Han-Gilen.
No—let him be the man and mage that he so evidently was. Let her give him his name, Indaros Kurelios, prince-heir of a small and yet powerful realm. “Why?” she asked him. “Why hide yourself so completely?”
“I never wanted temples,” he said, “or orders of mages. It seemed they never wanted me.”
“I am thinking,” she said slowly, “that it’s great good luck for us all that that was so.”
“What, that I’m a coward and a layabout?”
“Stop that,” she said. “This needed someone outside the walls. Someone who could see unimpeded; who could go where none of us was able to go.”
“Does that mean my sentence is commuted?” he asked sweetly.
“You still broke the law,” she said.
He sighed, shrugged. The color had come back to h
is face, the insouciance to his manner. She was growing used to it; it grated on her less now than it had. “And the emperor is still missing. I know he’s somewhere on the shores of the shadow—but where, I can’t tell.”
“We will find him,” she said, “if we have to walk on foot from world to world.”
“I don’t think there’s time for that,” he said.
“What else can we do?”
He bit his lip. It was odd and rather gratifying to see him so far removed from his easy insolence. “I can track him. I think … . if you ward me and protect me from the dark, I can find the trail he left. It’s still there; I can almost see it. But it will fade soon.”
She searched his face. He was speaking the truth, or as much of it as he could know. “Do it,” she said. “Do it now.”
He bent his head. She was prepared this time for the swiftness with which he acted. He had no deliberation; he knew no rituals. He simply gathered his magic and flung it forth. It was inelegant, but she had to admit that it was effective.
They flew on wings of bronze over a dark and tossing sea. What he followed was as subtle as a scent, as faint as a glimmer in the corner of an eye. She could find it only through him.
That piqued her. He was royal kin, but she was royal line.
He was her hunting hound. She let him draw her onward through the swirl of worlds. They clustered near the edge of the shadow, gleaming like foam on a dim and stony shore.
She who was a living Gate, had never seen nor imagined such a thing as this. There was no worldroad, no simple skein of worlds. It was a much greater, much more complex thing, too great for mortal comprehension.
He rode these shifting airs as if born to them. She, earthbound, could only cling to him and be drawn wherever he went.
He circled a cluster of worlds far down that grey shore. The tide lapped but did not quite overwhelm them. They gleamed like pearls, or like sea-glass.
He had begun to descend. Broad wings beat and hovered. His eyes were intent, fixed on the worlds below.
Without warning the sea rose up and clawed the sky. It seized the tiny thing circling in it, struck it, smote it down.
They whirled through darkness. Winds buffeted them. His wings were gone. He clung as tightly to her as she to him, rolling and tumbling through infinite space.
She flung out a lifeline, a thread of pure desperation. It caught something, pulling them up short, dangling in the maelstrom of wind and shadow. Hand over hand she climbed up the line, with his dead weight dragging at her until he gripped the line below her. She hesitated, dreading that he would let go and fall, but he was climbing steadily, if slowly.
Light glimmered above them. Wind buffeted them, striving to pluck them free. Her fingers cramped; her arms ached unbearably. She set her teeth and kept on.
The thread began to rise as if drawn from above. The wind howled, raking flesh from bone and body from spirit.
The Heart of the World hung below her. She reached for it with the tatters of her magic, seeking the power that had sustained her and every Gate-mage since the dawn of the world.
Just as she touched it, the darkness struck. It had been waiting like a great raptor poised above its prey. It roared down with power incalculable.
There were wards, walls, structures of magic so strong and so ancient that they had been reckoned impregnable. They melted as if they had been no more than a wish and a dream. All the woven elegance of spells and workings, remembrances of mages eons dead, great edifices of art and power, crumbled and fell into nothingness.
The Heart of the World was gone. It had whirled away below her, drowned in darkness. The place where it had been, woven in the core of her magery, was echoing, empty.
This could not be. The Heart of the World was not a place, nor a world. It was a living incarnation of magic.
The dark had devoured it, swallowed it, consumed it. It was rendered into nothingness, just as the worlds had been beyond the lost Gates.
Shocked, shattered, stunned almost out of her wits, she fell into light. A grunt and a gasp marked Daros’ fall beside her. She was far too comfortable on real and living ground to move or speak. That was cool stone under her, or—tiles?
Tiles indeed. She knew them well. Painfully she lifted her head. The two of them lay in a heap in the innermost shrine of the Temple of the Sun in Starios. The light about them was pure clean sunlight flooding through the dome of the roof. For a long blissful moment she basked in it, sighing as pain and fear melted away. Her whole being was a hymn of thanks to the god who had freed her soul from the black wind.
Daros groaned and rolled onto his back. His eyes narrowed against the light, but he did not flinch or cover them.
Movement caught Merian’s eye. A pair of priests stood staring at them. Both were young, in the robes of novices; their eyes were wide, their mouths open in astonishment. One of them held a basket of flowers, the other clutched an armful of clean linens. They had come to tend the altar.
She rose stiffly. The novice with the flowers dropped onto his face, hissing at his companion to do likewise. “Lady!” he bleated. “Lady, forgive, we didn’t recognize you, we—”
“Please,” she said, cutting across his babble. “Go on with what you were doing.”
He took it as an order, and no doubt as a sacred trust. The young and eager ones invariably did. Daros, to her relief, said nothing; he creaked even more than she, and when he followed her from the shrine, he walked lame. He did not complain, which rather surprised her. She would have expected, at the very least, an acid commentary on the ailments of mages.
Her aches eased as she walked, though the void in the heart of her felt as if it would never heal. He said nothing of what he might be suffering, if indeed he felt anything at all. He was not bound to Gates as she had been; the Heart of the World was no great matter to him as it was to her—and as it would be to every mage of Gates in this world.
She had taken the inner ways of the temple, away from the eyes of priests and the faithful; there was not even a servant to stop and stare. They descended by narrow steps into a maze of tunnels, lit by a wisp of magelight that bobbed ahead of them.
Daros stumbled. She was almost too late to catch him. His weight dragged at her; his breath rasped in her ear. He had overtaxed himself—fool; child. But she was worse than that, for allowing him to do it.
There was nothing for it but to press on with what speed she could. The urgency in her had come close to panic. It took all the discipline of both mage and priest to keep walking, and not to drop the stumbling, gasping boy and run back into the light.
An eon later, though not so long by the turning of the sun, they came out at last in a forgotten corner of the palace. There was still some distance to go before they were truly safe; she paused in the dim and dusty cellar, plotting her path from a memory decades old.
She heard no footstep, sensed no presence, and yet her hackles rose. She could not whip about: Daros impeded her. She had to turn slowly, every sense alert, braced to drop him and leap if she must.
She nearly collapsed in relief. Her stepbrother lifted Daros in strong arms, taking no notice of his feeble protests, and said, “The others are in the autumn garden. Can you walk that far?”
“Easily,” she said.
Hani’s glance raked her mistrustfully, but he shrugged, sighed, turned to lead her onward.
The autumn garden grew in a corner of the palace wall, where the sun was warmest in that season, and there was shelter from the first blasts of winter. Flowers grew there even into the dark of the year; the fountains flowed later than in any other of the gardens, and birds sang long after they had left that part of the world.
It was nearly summer-warm when Merian came there, the sun shining in cloudless heaven, the water singing into the tiers of stone basins. This world knew nothing of darkness or loss—not yet. It was almost painful in its beauty.
By the lowest of fountains, on the porch of the little house that ornamented the gar
den, her mother sat with Urziad and Kalyi and the high priestess of the temple with her golden torque and her eyes that, though blind, could pierce to the heart. Their faces mirrored the shock that seemed set indelibly in hers. That they were alive and conscious spoke of their strength and the strength of their power. Through their eyes she could see the losses: mages dead or broken, Gates fallen, spells and magics in ruins.
The princess regent stirred, drawing Merian’s eye. She shared the gift or curse of her line: she seemed hardly older than Kalyi, who was but a year past the Journey that had made her priestess as well as mage. People said that Merian was like her mother, though paler; she was gold and ivory, but Daruya was honey and bronze. Merian bowed to her as the chief of Gate-mages should to the regent of Sun and Lion. Even as she straightened, her mother drew her into a bruisingly tight embrace. “We thought we’d lost you, too,” she said. “Whatever possessed you—”
“I did.” Daros had startled them: he was conscious, struggling free of Hani’s grip, swaying on his own feet. “I found him. I found the emperor.”
Daruya wasted no time in foolish questions. “Where?”
“On the edge of the shadow,” he said, “almost inundated by the tide.”
“And you left him there?”
He faced her with a perfect lack of fear. “Lady, he’s trapped. I barely found him, and I knew where to look. Before I could come closer, the tide drove me away. I did try, lady. I’ll try again, but first I have to rest.” That was not a thing he admitted easily; he was young and male and proud. But he was brave enough to tell the truth.
“You will not try again,” Daruya said. “No one can. Do you understand, boy? The great Gates are gone. The Heart of the World—the center of our magic—is lost.”
“But that’s not—” Daros shut his mouth just before Merian would have shut it for him. He bent his head, concealing the rebellion in his eyes.
It seemed the pretense deceived the rest of them, though Merian was in no way taken in by it. Daruya addressed him as if the rest of it had never been said. She was not belittling the great loss; she was making it bearable by focusing on what might possibly be salvaged out of the ruin. “The emperor is safe? Only trapped?”