by Judith Tarr
“Isn’t it? I do love that child, but if she learned to laugh, she might be happier.”
“Maybe someday you will teach her.”
“I’m afraid it’s far too late,” he said wryly. “Her daughter, too—poor things, they’re children of grim duty from the cradle. They honor me as an ancestor, but it’s been a relief to them that I’ve retreated from the field. I’m much too light-minded for the cares of empires.”
“Now you mock yourself,” she said. She folded her hands on his breast and propped her chin on them, and contemplated his face. It seemed to give her no little pleasure. “The gods have no humor—all the priests assure us of that. It seems to me your heirs are very proper goddesses, and you are a properly fallen god. The priests will not be reassured.”
“Should they be?”
“About this? Maybe not. They’ll do well not to take you for granted.”
“Such a delicate balance,” he said, “between scandal and contempt.”
“You are not only light-minded,” she said, “you are wicked. What shall I do with you?”
“Love me,” he said.
Her smile bloomed, slow and wonderful, transforming her face from loveliness into breathtaking beauty. Dear gods, he loved her. He had not known such fullness of the heart since he had loved a priestess who was a commoner, long ago in the turning of the worlds. With her too it had been the matter of a moment: a glimpse, a glance, a word spoken.
They had not been lovers long, though they had remained friends until the day she died. This one was sworn to him by vows that he meant to keep.
As if she had followed his thoughts, she said, “You’ll leave me in the end.”
“No,” he said. “No, I will not.”
“Of course you will.” She sounded undismayed. “Your blood and kin will call you, and you’ll go. Only give me what you can, and help our kingdom as you may, and we’ll all be content.”
“Even you?”
Her gaze was level under the strongly painted brows. “I never looked for this, never hoped or dreamed for it. Every moment that I have it is a gift of the gods. When it ends, I’ll weep. I’m not made of stone; but neither am I a crumbling reed. I’ll carry on, my lord, and remember that I loved you.”
“I might surprise you,” he said, “and stay.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said. “You’ve given me yourself while you can. That’s enough. Now love me, my lord, and be glad of these hours together. Long after they’re gone, they’ll hold us in memory.”
He shook his head, but he was not inclined to argue with her, not just then. The sun was coming. The shadow had let this world be for one blessed night. She was ready to be loved again, and he, he discovered, was ready to do the loving. He laughed for the simple of joy of that, and took her in his arms again, and kissed her as deep as either of them could bear.
She wrapped arms and legs about him and took him in her turn. She was no meek submissive woman; not she. He loved her for it, as for everything that she was or promised to be.
The shadow did not come back the next night, either, nor the next. People began to say that it was gone; that the god’s coming, the walls of magic he had taught them to raise, the marriage he had made with their queen, had driven the enemy away. They would hardly lay aside years of fear and hiding, not in three days or four, but the young and reckless took it on themselves to go out at night, to see the stars; and there was festival in daylight, feasting and rejoicing, until between weariness and simple need to bake the bread and brew the beer, the festival ended and the people returned to their daily tasks.
When ten days had passed with no taint on the stars, even the most wary began to wonder if it were true—if the darkness had been driven away. It had become a game and a fashion to brave the night. At first it had been enough to ascend to the roofs, and the boldest slept there in the cool and the breezes. But youth was not to be outdone. Gatherings of young men walked beyond walls and wards, emboldened by an ample ration of beer and palm wine. Then some headlong soul took it into his head to embark on the river with lamps and torches and a troupe of musicians as mad as he was, for a carousal that echoed over the water and sounded faintly within the palace.
Tanit was ready to call out the guard, but the Lord Seramon stopped her. “They’re safe enough tonight,” he said.
“And tomorrow night? Will they be safe?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You think it will come back.”
“I know it will,” he said.
She did not know why her heart should sink. She had had no illusions; she had not imagined that this was more than a respite. But her heart had persisted in hoping against hope.
She rose from their bed and clapped her hands for her maid. He lay for a while, watching her, but when Tisheri had come, he disentangled himself from the coverlets and vanished in the direction of his own chambers. He would be back. There was less need for words between them, the longer they were bound together.
Tisheri did not approve of what she clearly was going to do, but it was not a maid’s place to gainsay her queen. She dressed Tanit and arranged her hair, and adorned her in some of the lesser jewels. Then, with paling face but determined expression, she accompanied her lady out into the night.
The royal boat was waiting, the boatmen yawning but steadfast, and the Lord Seramon standing at the steering-oar, a shadow on shadow with a gleam of golden eyes. At first she thought with a small shock that he had come out as naked as he had left his bed, but when he moved, the torchlight caught the folds of a dark kilt. She rebuked herself for the quiver of regret.
It was very dark, even with torches. The stars were small and far away. The moon hung low. The world was a strange place, so full of hidden things, and yet while he was there, her fear could not consume her. She could see beauty in this darkness, as she saw in him.
The revelers on the water were not too far gone in wine and beer to be astonished that the queen and her consort had joined them. The tone of their carousing muted sharply; they were suddenly, painfully constrained. Tanit had herself lifted into their boat; they hastened to find a seat for her, to offer drink and what little food there was, and to cover their naked drunken women as best they might.
She kept her amusement carefully veiled. As she had expected, once they were burdened with the task of entertaining her, they grew much less enamored of their exploit—particularly the ringleaders, whose fathers were lords of her council. One tried to hide; the other covered his embarrassment with bravado, and might have offered impertinence if her consort had not appeared at her side.
The Lord Seramon was even more terrifying in the dark than in the light. His presence dampened the last of their enthusiasm. But when they would have ordered their boatmen to turn toward the bank, the Lord Seramon said, “Oh, no. It’s not so very far to dawn. We’ll see the sun rise on the river. Isn’t that what you had in mind?”
Tanit doubted that they had thought so far ahead, but they would hardly say so to him. They were all too neatly trapped, and had no choice but to give way to his whim.
He folded himself at her feet, smiling at the young idiots from the city. The musicians, less far gone in beer and perhaps wiser, too, began to play a softer tune than they had been playing heretofore. Their singer had a remarkably sweet voice. The sound of it in starlight, trilling out over the water, was like nothing Tanit had known.
In a strange way it made her angry. The night should be hers, just as the day was. The shadow had robbed her of that.
She would take it back for always, not just for what brief time this respite gave her. She would have the stars and the moon, and the river flowing black but aflicker with starlight. The night was glorious. She would claim it for her own, as she had claimed this child of gods who lay at her feet.
SIXTEEN
DAROS FELL FROM DARKNESS INTO DARKNESS. THE SPARK OF light that had drawn him winked out just before the Gate took hold of him. He fell, ro
lling and tumbling, with his magery in tatters and his wits all scattered. He fetched up with bruising force against something that might, perhaps, be a wall.
He lay winded, throbbing with aches. He did not think his neck was broken. He could move his fingers, his toes. He could roll groaning onto his back.
Almost he might have thought he had fallen back into the chamber of the rite in the dark fortress, but he knew deep in his bruised bones that that was gone. This was a different room in a different world. Tall slits of windows surrounded it. Strangeness flickered in them, like flame, if flame could be dark.
A pale blue light welled slowly. In this darkness it seemed as bright as moonlight. He sat up with care. His hands were glowing with that sickly light; it seemed to come from within him, though he had done nothing, raised no magic, nor willed it at all.
Something stirred in the circle of light. It unfolded, straightened.
It had a man’s shape: it stood on two legs, lifted two arms. But it was not quite a man. The face was too long, the chin too sharp, the mouth lipless. The nose was a sharp hooked curve. Its eyes were round and huge, like an owl’s. They blinked at him.
His power was drained almost to nothing, but he had enough, just, to raise a shield about his mind. And none too soon, either. The blow that struck it swayed him to his knees.
He crouched on the cold stone floor. He had no weapon, no magery to wield. The creature stood above him. In some remote way he supposed that he should be afraid.
It lifted him to his feet. Its hands were four-fingered, like a bird’s, and the fingers were very long, thin pale skin stretched over bones that flexed in too many ways, in too many places. It brushed them over his face, ruffling his hair. It spoke in a voice like a flute played far away.
He had the gift of tongues; it was common enough among mages. He understood the words, though there was a strange stretching, as if they did not mean quite what his sore-taxed magic tried to make them mean. “Recover quickly, please, and go. You are not safe here.”
“You brought me here,” he said, realizing it even as he said it. “Now you send me away?”
“You are not what I expected,” the creature said.
“I disappoint you?”
The owl-eyes blinked slowly. “You are young,” it said. “Your spirit is light. What I called … it was strong; a sun burned in it.”
A bark of laughter escaped him. The creature recoiled as if an animal had snapped in its face. “I know what you called. I was hunting him. Shall I find him for you?”
“I called you,” the creature said. “You, too. You both. He would come, you would come. One more would come. But not only you.”
“Why?”
“I need you both,” it said. “You are young, your spirit is light. He is a little less young, and strong—so very strong. Almost as strong as you.”
“I am not—”
“You will be.” The creature straightened. What had seemed a cowl, veiling its head, unfurled and shook itself free and rose, fanning like the crest of some great bird. It glowed in the blue light, shimmering in bands of white and blue and icy green.
He was gaping like an idiot. The creature loomed over him, beautiful and unspeakably strange. And yet, looking into those round pale-golden eyes, he saw a spirit that was not, after all, so very different from his own. “You are a mage,” he said.
“Mage,” it said. “You may call me that. Mage.”
“Mage,” he said. “What do you need of us?”
“I need you,” it said. “This place—this prison—this thing I am compelled to do-”
Daros’ head ached with making sense of alien words. He had little power left, barely enough to be certain that the walls of this place were more than stone, they were wards as well. What they guarded, what they forced upon the prisoner …
That was the knowledge he had brought from the citadel. The darkness was made, and magic had made it. There were oaths, covenants—
“But you are not a dark god,” he said. “You’re a mage, no more if no less. How could you have brought that into being?”
“Simply,” it said. “You could do it. Be afraid of what might come from beyond the stars; ward your world. Build the wards to renew themselves. Bind them with darkness because it is stronger for this than light. Let the darkness grow too strong. Then—then—” It stopped, as if it had lost the courage to go on.
“Then see the darkness gain a will of its own?”
“Not its own will,” the Mage said. “What I was afraid of—it came. My wards brought it, my darkness. It found me and took me prisoner. It compelled me to do its bidding.”
“It? What is it?”
“Will to conquer,” it said.
He did not understand.
The Mage furled its crest and lifted him without effort: though its limbs were stick-thin, they were strong. It cradled him as if he had been an infant. He struggled, but it ignored him. It flung him through one of the many narrow windows.
It was, as he had thought, a Gate. The Mage’s awareness was about him, its power on him, though its body could not leave its prison. Enfolded in that half-alien, half-familiar magic, he slipped through mists and shadow onto a wide and barren plain. Wind blew across it, sighing with endless regret. Clouds veiled the stars, if stars there were.
A city rose on the plain. It was a city of night, lit by no moon or star. There were people in it—human people. He could have no doubt of that. Weak with exhaustion though his magery was, the Mage’s power sustained him, and lent him a little of what he lacked.
It bore him on silent wings, soaring above the walls and towers, the dark windows and blank doorways. People moved through the streets, passed through the doors. They were blind: they had no eyes. There were no mages among them.
They labored with grim and endless persistence. What they did, he could not always understand. They ground grain, they forged metal. There were no fields to till; the grain must come from lands where the sun shone: lands that were raided, stripped and emptied of their riches. Just so were the people made captive, bound and enslaved, their eyes taken and their minds darkened and their souls held prisoner.
It was conquest, and absolute. “But why?” he cried to the power that cradled him. “Who would do this?”
It carried him onward, up through the levels of the city to a nest of towers at its summit. There was darkness visible, lightlessness so profound that he felt it on his face like the weight of heavy wool, clinging close, trapping his breath.
It tore away. He saw again with mage-sight, clear in the darkness. He looked down into a hall that, though alien in its lines and the shape of its pillars, was surely royal. Figures stood in ranks there. They were cloaked, cowled. He looked for faces, but saw none.
They were not like the Mage. They were men, he could have sworn to it—yet men who could not abide the light. They lived in darkness. Darkness was their element. They wielded it as a weapon. They clung to it as a haven.
They would blind the stars, and darken the sun of every world. They sang of it, a slow rolling chant, very like the chant of the priests in the citadel on his own world. The god or power to which they sang was the darkness itself. The Mage had opened its way into the worlds, fed it and nurtured it, and made it strong.
They had no magic, these men who lived in night. They were empty of it; and yet that emptiness lured the dark, and gave it substance.
He began to see as he hovered above them, why they had captured the Mage; what they needed of it, that they were so utterly lacking. The Mage was a weapon in their long and holy war. Light into darkness, darkness into silence, silence into oblivion.
He fled before it engulfed him. He twisted free of the Mage’s grip, broke the wards, and with the last strength that was in him, flung himself through the Gate.
Death’s wings beat close, so close that they brushed him with the wind of their passing. His bones cracked with the cold of it. He was stripped bare of will and wit. One thing was left, one
memory, one presence. It drew him irresistibly from darkness into darkness.
He opened his eyes on the Mage’s face. Its crest was upraised like a strange crown. “You are strong,” it said, “but not yet wise. Do you see, young mage? Do you understand?”
“No,” he said. His voice was a strangled gasp.
“The fabric of what is,” it said. “I tore it. My world is gone, my people …” It made a strange whistling sound, like wind in a wasteland, eerie and unbearably sad. “They who came, they worship the void; they bind their souls to nothingness. They conquer in order to destroy. They would unmake the worlds.”
“It seems they’re succeeding,” he said.
“You are too light of spirit,” it said. “You do not know that you are mortal—even now, even believing what I tell you. You expect to live forever.”
“I do believe that my soul will,” he said. “Or are they going to destroy that, too? Will they even slay the gods?”
“Everything,” said the Mage. “All that is.”
He shivered. “There is no hope, is there?”
“Most likely not,” the Mage said, “but I am alive, and I cannot keep myself from hoping. I called you to me, you and the other, with the strongest spell that was left to me. I set it to find the one thing that could stop this tide of nothingness.”
“I? And my emperor?”
“He is an emperor?” The Mage seemed … disappointed?
Daros thought he could understand. “He’s been a shepherd since before I was born.”
“Ah,” said the Mage in evident relief. “Kings and kings of kings, they are no use to us. It will not be pride or power that wins this war, if it can be won.”
“I am a prince,” Daros said. “Is that an impediment?”
“You are a well-bred animal,” said the Mage. “It seems hardly to trouble you. You must go now—I have held us out of time, but now it turns in spite of me. I give you this. Keep it safe; when the time comes, you will know its use.”
Daros found that his hand was clenched about something narrow and strangely supple. When he looked down, he saw that it was a feather, glowing blue in mage-sight. He slipped it into the purse that hung from his belt. Even as his hand withdrew, the Mage and the room and the myriad windows whirled away. He spun like a leaf in a whirlwind.