by Judith Tarr
“It can’t be that easy.”
Merian had called council as soon as the sun came up, gathering it in the fire in front of Batan’s tent. She could see each one where he or she was: her kin in Starios, Ushallin in Kuvaar, Kalyi in the ruins ofYallin in the Isles, and Perel in Seahold, which had passed a peaceful night within the protection of his wards.
It was her brother Hani who had spoken, from the library that she missed with sudden intensity. “If a simple spell of fire could destroy them, they would never have come as far as this. Someone else would have lit them like torches long ago.”
“I took them by surprise,” Merian said. “They may come warded next.”
“I’m sure they will,” her mother said. “But do think. If they’re so vulnerable to light—if they travel in a cloak of absolute darkness—we have a weapon against them. Light is our simplest magic, one that even the least of mages can raise. We can muster our mages with that knowledge.”
“It is useful,” Hani granted her, “but I can’t help thinking, wouldn’t it be better to track them to their lair and destroy them? If all we do is defend, they can keep coming and coming. We should attack.”
“We need to know more,” said Merian. “I saw men, not mages. Someone or something is behind them, and that has power enough to blind the stars, to break or ignore Gates, and to overrun worlds.”
“Still an enigma,” her mother said, “but a little less of one than before. If we can capture one of them, discover what he knows …”
“We’ll try,” Merian said. “They may come back here to find out what became of their raiding party. I’ll be waiting for them.”
“You’ll have reinforcements,” Daruya said, “but we can’t spare many. We’re spread dangerously thin as it is.”
“We may be able to predict where they’ll come,” Merian said. “If we have mages ready to spring through lesser Gates at the first indication of the enemy’s coming, we’ll be able to do battle wherever he is.”
Daruya nodded briskly. “Yes. That’s well thought of. I’ll see to it. Look for the newcomers before sunset.”
“They’ll find us here,” Merian said. “I’ll have men fortifying this place as much as they can—walls seem to be of some use, and better walls of stone than walls of air.”
That ended the council. Merian lingered by the fire. She hardly needed its warmth: the magefire was still in her, burning with a steady flame.
Batan’s shadow fell across her. Those of his men who had been touched by the dark fire were laid together in one of the larger tents; he had been with them until a moment ago. His face was grim. “They’re blind,” he said. “They flinch and scream when the sun touches them, but they can’t see it. Their eyes are sealed shut.”
Merian rose stiffly. She was weary; she had not slept since before she could remember. “Let me see,” she said.
There were a dozen of them. The skin of those who were not already white-skinned seafolk was blanched to the color of bone. Their eyes were indeed sealed shut: the lids had melted into the faces. It might have seemed that they were eyeless, save that Merian could see the wild shifting of the eyes beneath the skin. When she came into the tent, bringing with her a shaft of sunlight, those nearest her writhed and moaned as if in pain.
Her lips tightened. Her anger was too deep for speech. She knelt beside the first man. He shrank from her; his skin shuddered convulsively. When she touched him, he shrieked.
She withdrew her hand, sat back on her heels, and drew a careful breath. The power she had was Sun’s power, power of light. These men had been so poisoned that the touch of it was agony.
“Darkmages,” she said. She spoke across the long leagues of the empire. “Mother. Send a darkmage. Quickly.”
Daruya’s mind touched hers, brushed it with assent, slipped away. She felt the press of power on the Gate within her. Here, she bade it. Outside.
She smiled in spite of herself at the one who came in, though she frowned immediately after. “Hani. You can’t—”
“My father is taking his turn in the library,” her brother said. He was dressed for travel in leather and fur, the common garb of Shurakan; his straight black hair was plaited behind him. He knelt beside her.
She had not even thought of him when she asked her mother for a darkmage. She never saw him so; he was her brother the scholar, the quiet and perpetual presence either in Starios or in Shurakan. He did not flaunt his power; even in councils of mages he spoke more often as a scholar than as a darkmage. Yet he was strong though he had come to it late; and he was skilled, as a scholar could be who had studied both the theory and the praxis of his art.
When he laid his hand on the wounded man’s brow, the man twitched, then sighed. Hani echoed that sigh. “This is an ill working,” he said, “well beyond my power to heal. Better all these men be taken where healers can look after them. There’s too much broken, too much twisted. This horror of the light—it goes to the heart of them. Can you see?”
Through the mirror of Hani’s power, she could. Without that, she was blinded by her own light. “We’ll send them to the Temple of Uveryen in Kundri’j,” she said. “You will stay here. If we manage to capture one of the enemy, he may be even more appalled by a lightmage than one of these men. We’ll need you then.”
“Very likely you will,” he agreed. He fixed her with a hard stare. “And now, sister, you will rest while I see to what needs to be done.”
“I can’t rest,” she said. “There’s too much to—”
“I’ll do it. You’re out on your feet. Tonight we need you alive and conscious. Shall I throw you over my shoulder and carry you to bed?”
She glared. He was more than capable of doing just that, and rather too often had. “I can walk,” she said tightly.
“Then walk.”
There was a tent for her, pitched long since. Her belongings were in it—rather more than she remembered bringing with her. Someone had laid out bread, salt fish, strong cheese. She was not hungry, but she ate as much of the bread as she could choke down, and made herself swallow a bite or two of fish, and drank the sour wine that had come with it.
While she ate, she felt the rising of power, the opening of the Gate that took the wounded men away. She heard men talking: Hani and Batan, the latter at first brusque, then softening before her brother’s unshakable good humor. The lord of Seahold was out of his depth, and not liking it; but she saw in him no taint of treachery. He would keep his oaths to the throne, however little it pleased him, and however poorly he understood the reasons.
The gods had been kind, to set this lord here, where such a man was most needed. She could rest. Hani would see that all was done that must be done.
She fell asleep to the sound of men arriving, masons and carpenters with the tools of their trade. They would build a wall to bolster her magic.
Her dream was drenched with sunlight. She caught a scent of flowers, and heard water lapping, waves of a lake or broad river on a green shore. The air was breathlessly hot, a great blessing after the damp and biting cold of winter by the sea.
He was standing on the bank, more deeply bronze than before, almost black against the dazzling white of his kilt. Sweat sheened his broad shoulders and ran in a runnel down his back. His hair had grown since last she dreamed him. It was cut in a way she had not seen before, straight across the brows and straight above the shoulders. A plaited band bound it above the brows. It was odd, but she rather liked it.
He had a bow in his hand and an arrow nocked to the string; he was watching a flock of birds that swam together on the water. They were large birds, grey and brown and white; their call was an odd and almost comical honking. In his mind was the thought that their flesh, when roasted, was very good to eat.
He was alone. She might have expected hunting companions, servants, a guard or two, but in this world of dream, there was only he.
He turned. The splendor of his joy weakened her knees. He caught her as she sank down, lifting her i
n a long delicious swoop. His laughter healed her of weariness and fear, cold and anger and the lingering touch of the shadow.
When he would have set her down, she drew him with her, body to his body, swept with a white heat of desire. He was ready for her after a moment’s startlement: beautiful dream-lover, giving her her every wish.
They lay naked in a bed of reeds, breathing hard, grinning at one another. He stroked her hair out of her face, letting his hand linger, caught in curling golden strands. “It’s been so long,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you, driven you away with my wantonness. You are no light woman, and I—”
“I yearned for you,” she said, “but our dreams never met.”
“You don’t hate me?”
He sounded so plaintive that she kissed him to console him. It might have led to other ends, but he was not as potent as that, even in dream. “I don’t hate you,” she said. “I’m rather sure I love you.”
“You—”
“Yes, it is appalling, isn’t it?” She meant to sound light; she hoped she did not seem too brittle. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t trouble you to love me in return. Give me what you have to give, and that will be enough.”
“What I have to—” He broke off. “Lady, every day I remember that one night. Every night I sleep, hoping to see you again, but knowing—dreading—that my dreams will be empty. That you gave way to my importuning, but when it was over, you fled in horror, loathing everything that I was. I never meant to violate you so.”
“Violate—” Now she was doing it: sputtering witlessly, too startled for sense. “I wanted every blessed moment of that. Every one. And every blessed inch of you.”
She had struck him speechless.
She drove him back and down and sat on him, stooping over him, glaring. “Have you really been tormenting yourself ever since?”
He nodded.
She slapped him, not quite hard enough to bruise. “Idiot! Indaros of the thousand loves, they call you—didn’t one of them teach you how to tell when a woman is desperately in love with you?”
“But,” he said, “she usually is. But she’s not you. She’s not—you.”
It made no sense, and yet she understood it. “You never loved anyone before.”
“Not with my heart and soul,” he said. “Not with the worship of my body. Not with the surety that if she truly hates me, truly I shall die of it. It’s not … very pleasant.”
“What? Loving me?”
“Being afraid that you hate me. If you merely dislike me, or find me a hideous nuisance, I can bear that. If you find me useful in the manner of a stud bull, as your mother did your father, that’s endurable. But hate—that I can’t endure.”
“I do not hate you,” she said, though from the sound of it, he might think she lied. “Damn you, we’re quarrelling. We’re worlds apart, there’s a sea of darkness between, I fought a battle last night and face another one tonight, and you can bicker with me as if we were a farmer and his wife.”
“You fought—” He had seized on that; of course he had. “It’s come there?”
“Ten days ago,” she said. “No—eleven now.”
“We haven’t seen it in five cycles of this world’s moon,” he said. “The world is closed in; it’s globed in shadow. The only Gate away from it is the gate of dreams. But the attacks have stopped.”
“It hasn’t been that long since—” She stopped. Time ran differently on the other side of Gates. She of all people should know that. “Tell me what you know of this!”
“The bowl I sent you—didn’t it reach you?”
“Yes!” she snapped. “And there is no answer in it. None. At all.”
“But that is the answer,” he said. “Nothingness. That’s what the shadow is. You can’t fight it. There’s nothing to fight. It’s absolute oblivion.”
“Last night,” she said, “we were attacked by men. Lightmagic destroyed them utterly.”
“Those are its servants—they are mortal. The shadow is not. As long as it exists, its servants will keep coming, and worlds will be destroyed.”
“How many of them are there? How many servants?”
“Legions,” he said. “They make more with every world they conquer. They serve darkness absolute. They are sworn to utter destruction. What you did to that raiding party—you should take care, lady; they’ll come in ever greater numbers, craving the blessing of oblivion.”
“What, they’ll make me a saint of their cult?”
“A goddess,” he said. “A queen of destruction.”
She shuddered. He held her close to him, babbling apologies, but she silenced him with a hand over his mouth. “Stop that. I’m not fragile. I would rather not be what these madmen must think I am. But if it will serve this world or any other, I will exploit it to the utmost.”
“Cold-hearted royal lady.” But he said it tenderly, cradling her, covering her with kisses.
She caught his face in her hands and stopped him. It was not easy at all. She wanted to take him by storm. But this dream had given her all that she could have wished from the bowl of nothingness. She must take it back to the waking world. She could not tarry here, where her heart yearned to be.
“Beloved,” she said, brushing his lips with hers. “You know I have to go again. As time runs between Gates, it could be an hour before I come back, or it could be a year. Do trust me—that I will come back. That I do love you.”
“I do,” he said, though he gasped as he spoke. “I do trust you. I love you with all my heart.”
Such heart as he had, she might have thought once. But she knew him better now. With dragging reluctance she let go, relinquishing the dream, leaving behind the sun, the heat, the joy of his presence. She lay again in the winter cold, in the roaring of waves, in the midst of bitter war.
TWENTY
BATAN’S MEN HAD WROUGHT WONDERS WITH FALLEN STONE AND ships’ timbers. It was not a large fort, but the wall was stout, and the tents within had been shifted out of range of the enemy’s strange weapons. It happened that Merian’s tent had become the center, where the general’s tent was wont to be; it stood over the deep well of the city’s magic. She woke in the embrace of it, and came out to find herself in the beginnings of a sturdy hill-fort.
The sun was still high, but had begun to sink toward the low swell of hills to the westward. The air was a little warmer than it had been, the wind a little less knife-edged. She kept the warmth of her dream inside her, wrapped about the fire in the earth. For a long moment as she stood in front of the tent, she remembered his arms about her and his voice in her ear, at once deep and clear: the kind of voice that could sing the full range from flute to drumbeat. She wondered if he sang. Surely he did. Princes were trained to dance, to fight, to sing.
She was losing her sense of what was real and what was not: forgetting that this was but a dream. Her body felt as if it truly had been locked in embrace with a man. She ached a little, was a little raw, but more pleasurably than not. Places in her that had been shut and barred were open, filling with magic.
There was a cult of priests in Asanion who worshipped the gods of love, and made of it a rite and a sacrament. They professed that the act of love was a great working in itself, and that mages who joined so could double and redouble their power.
She did not feel as strong as that, but certainly she was stronger than she had been before she slept. She sought out Hani where he stood with Batan, overseeing the raising of the seaward wall. It was the last to go up, because it was the least likely to meet with attack, but they were not making it any less strong for that. There was an army of men at work, stripped in the cold, laboring feverishly to be done before the sun sank too much lower.
Batan bowed to her. Hani smiled. He was more at ease, the closer to danger they came. When death threatened, he would be perfectly calm. Had she noticed before how much like the Gileni prince he looked? That line came from his part of the world, long and long ago. In this proud bronze face, she could see i
t.
“It pleases me to see you well, lady,” Batan said, breaking in on her reflections. “It seems the rest did you good.”
“It did that,” Merian said, coolly as she thought, but Hani’s glance sharpened. She ignored it. Batan’s expression at least did not change. She was keenly aware just then of the weight of a man’s eyes. This one wanted her, and would take her if he could, but not until the battle was over.
She was flattered. She was also inclined to geld him with a blunt knife. She regarded him without expression, until he flushed and looked away.
Be kind, Hani said in her mind. He’s a man—he dreams, as all men do.
He could dream. She did not put it in words, not precisely, but Hani understood. He shrugged, half-smiled, sighed.
By nightfall the walls were raised, and the laborers rested under guard in the camp’s heart. Most of them would rise to fight when the time came; weary they might be, but they had their pride. They would defend what they had built.
They had all eaten while the sun was still in the sky, even Merian, who surprised herself with hunger. She ate a solid ration and washed it down with well-watered wine. It stayed with her, feeding her strength, as the sun set and the darkness descended.
It was a long, cold night. Moons and stars shone undimmed; the sea quieted little by little. The men took turns to rest and share the fires. The guard on the walls changed again and yet again.
She had miscalculated. Wherever the shadow had gone tonight, if it had gone anywhere at all, it had not come here. She had driven it away.
Yet she did not put an end to the vigil. She was too stubborn; they had worked too hard. This hook was baited, and strongly.
It came well after midnight, yet swifter than before. Stars and moons winked out. A gust of icy air rocked the tents on their moorings. A hammer of darkness smote the raw new fort. In the same instant, wave on wave of warriors stormed the walls.