by Judith Tarr
Daros bowed again. The king laid a hand on his shoulder. He tensed, still bent in obeisance, but held his ground.
“You are not like the others,” the king said. “Serve me well and there may be more to hope for than the command of a simple company.”
Daros lifted his head. “Freedom?”
The king laughed. “Are you not free now? The worlds are yours—in our service. Would you not rather have power? Conquest? Blood in gleaming rivers?”
Daros set his teeth and was silent. The king patted him like a dog and left him to seethe in peace.
No one in this world had a name. That was the first sacrifice to the dark: the sound that embodied a man’s spirit. But some of the slave-warriors remembered who they had been before they were taken away. He who had passed the test with Daros was Chenyo; the giant was Mukassi. Others mattered less than those two, but Daros remembered names when he could.
He was not to take most of the slave-warriors in his company. Three, he could take; the rest would be true slaves, fighters from the courts below. He chose Chenyo and Mukassi and a man of his own world, a Shurakani who had been called Janur. Janur seldom spoke; in weapons-practice he was single-minded in his quest to be perfect. Daros suspected that he had kept more of his mind and will than many of the others.
He was not a mage. The lords killed mages wherever they found them, and shattered worlds in which magic was strong. So would they do to Daros’ world if they could break the wall that barred the Gates.
It was rather a pity that Janur had no magery, but it mattered little for what Daros had in mind. What mattered more was that there would be no nightwalkers on this raid, and no lords. Those, he had reason to know, were spread dangerously thin. They were mounting a monstrous assault on his world, of which this would be but a testing of the waters.
He knew perfectly well what that made him. He was bait for a trap, he and the dozen other leaders who would raid that same night, some on his own world, others elsewhere. If he came back alive, he would be accorded due honor. If he died, the lords would be rid of him. They could not lose, whichever way the dice fell.
He and his three lieutenants were given armor and mounts. The scaled beasts were not as dangerous as they looked: they were placid in the main, docile and rather sluggish. Still, in armor scaled like the beasts’ hides, in tall helms and sweeping cloaks and panoply of weapons, and mounted on the fanged, clawed creatures, they were a vision from a nightmare.
The slave-troops would march afoot, matched in pairs. They shepherded wagons drawn by more of the scaled beasts, and carried the shackles that Daros remembered too well. Those who would fight surrounded them, armed much as Daros was.
Menkare and Khafre were among the fighters. He found them as much by gait and feel as by sight. Their magery was a spark of fierce warmth, burning bright within the ruddy glow of their bodies.
He could not approach them. He was being watched. They must ride out with the rest of the companies, out onto the plain, and there the Gates would open. Their orders were simple: raid, rob, withdraw. They were to fight no more than they must.
They were the third of the companies to ride out. The others were of similar size, with the same orders. They marched in silence broken only by the rattle of cartwheels and the occasional squeal of a beast. No one laughed or spoke or sang. Only the commanders were free to think thoughts that were mostly their own. The rest were altogether enslaved.
They rode down from the citadel and out onto the plain. There where the land rolled to a long level, two pillars stood. They were thrice the height of a tall man, and that same distance apart. The wagons could pass easily between them, or six men abreast with room to spare.
Priests stood on either side, as still as the pillars. They held rods like smaller versions of the flamethrowers. As the first company drew near the gate, the priests raised their rods. Dark fire arced between them and leaped to the top of the pillars. A lintel shaped itself, so that it was a Gate indeed, and a swirling madness of worlds beyond it.
The priests chose the worlds to which the raiding parties would go, speaking a single word as each party came to the gate. The word that Daros heard was Avaryan. It was well that he was mounted and not afoot, or he would have stumbled. Did they understand how great was the irony, that they should direct the forces of dark with the name of the god of light?
The Gate hummed and throbbed. Magegates did no such thing. This, like the force or device or spell that the king guarded, had a flavor about it of a thing made by hands. A machine, thought Daros, driven by magic.
They made machines in the Nine Cities, automatons that walked and spoke a tinny word or two, or clocks in which they tried to trap time. None of them had ever, that he knew of, trapped a mage and fed his machines with the mage’s power.
That was a potent thought, but he had no time to think the whole of it. The Gate caught him and his following, and drew them in.
They came in under a shield of darkness. Yet with this sight he could see beyond it to the glory of the moons and the myriad of stars. He drew in the air of his own world, his body’s home. The earth’s power surged up and over him, drowning him in blessed strength.
They rode down a long line of headland, with the roar of the sea on their right hands, and sea-grass hissing as they marched through it. They had not so very far to go. A village huddled in a fold of the coast, ripe with the reek of fish. Nets were spread before the houses; boats were drawn up on the shingle. Even in these days, they were prosperous. They had herds of cattle and woolbeasts, and stores of grain and of salt fish—perhaps they traded the one for the other.
There were walls about the village, raw with newness, and wards on the walls. A mage was in the village. Daros thanked the gods for answering his prayer.
Dark fire broke the walls, crumbled them into dust. Raiders ran for the storehouses and the cattle-pens. People surged out of the houses, strong people, armed and ready. They had fire: torches and magefire. The light of them seared into Daros’ brain.
Almost too late, he dropped the visor of his helmet. He could see through it—it was like dark glass. He could ride, raid, fight where he must. He did not strike to kill. The terror of his mount held most of them off; they went for the fighters on foot. Those had orders: to defend the wagons and the herds, once they were taken.
The fighting was fierce, the defenders strong. Daros took little notice. The mage’s presence was a beacon before him. It was a woman; she wielded bolts of magefire, blasting attackers who came near. He in his armor, shielded with his own force of magery, struck aside a bolt aimed direct at his head. He overran her, heaved her across his mount’s saddle, and turned the beast about. It was remarkably agile for so large and cold-blooded an animal; it wheeled with uncanny speed, whipping its head from side to side, scattering and rending fighters who sprang to their mage’s defense.
She was winded, briefly shocked out of her senses. In that brief blankness of mind, he set in her the thing that he had prepared. It was memory and a message, and a compulsion laid on it. Just as she came to herself, he let her slip from his hands.
She leaped to the attack. He had not prepared for that. She surged upward toward his face, armed with lightnings, and struck his helm. It spun away, driven by more than mortal strength.
She hung in midair, eyes as wide as they would go, frozen in shock. He was hardly more in command of his wits. That face—he knew—
Mother?
He never spoke the word. She never dealt the deathblow. His mount leaped away from her, roaring and lashing its tail.
The battle was nearly done. With the mage distracted, the village had been easy prey. They had what they had come for: grain, fish, cattle. There were few slaves; the villagers had fought too hard. They did not linger to destroy the village. Raid only, the king had said. Daros would do exactly as the king had commanded.
The Gate was waiting. He gathered his forces, took swift count of the wounded, gritted his teeth while they were flamed to ash. Death had been
swift, and merciful. And none of them was a mageling.
It wrenched at his heart to pass through that Gate again, to abandon his own world for the dark land. But he could not stay, even if he could have abandoned his mages. He could no longer abide the light. He was a creature of darkness now. He could only pray that his spirit would not go the way of his eyes, and give him over altogether to the lords of the night.
THIRTY-TWO
LADY?”
Merian started awake. She had had no intention of falling asleep on this of all days, but the sun was warm and she was exhausted. The attacks had been growing stronger, the raids more numerous. The enemy had broken out of the bounds of Anshan and begun to raid again in random parts of the world.
Last night had been the worst of all: a dozen raids in a dozen places, towns and cities sacked, but for once no people killed—those who were not taken were left to do as they would. Tonight, she feared, would be even worse. And she dozed in the sun in Ki-Oran, weighed down with the burden of the child. It would be born soon, if there was any world for it to be born to.
“Lady!”
She blinked at the young mage who ran errands for her. He was Asanian, and unusually fair-skinned even for one of those gold-andivory people. His face was deathly white now. “Lady,” he said, “there is a mage here from the northern coast. She will speak to no one but you.”
Merian sighed and heaved herself up. Izarel steadied her; she scowled, but stopped herself before she snapped at him. Gods knew, her condition was not his fault. As for whose fault it was …
He was in the dark world. More than that she did not know.
She should have had the mage brought to her in the kitchen garden in which she had been sunning herself, but she was too stubborn and the sun too full of sleep that she needed badly but should not indulge in. In the cool of the tower, she roused a little more. She sent Izarel ahead to prepare her receiving-room. The word was rather too grand for that cupboard of a place, but it had a window to let in light and air, a small circle of chairs, and a couch on which she could rest her swollen body.
She turned her steps toward the least comfortable of the chairs. Izarel, ahead of her in mind as well as body, steered her deftly toward the couch. She was settled on it before she could raise an objection. He laid a light robe across her knees, set a cup and a jar—full of clean water very lightly laced with wine—on the table beside her, and arranged a bowl of fruit and a platter of bread and cakes to his fastidious satisfaction. Only then would he yield to her will and go to fetch the mage.
It was a woman of Shurakan, somewhat to her surprise: a strong woman, not beautiful, but her face was difficult to forget. Even so, Merian groped for a name to set to the face. It was never one she would have expected to come to her from a fishing village in the north of Anshan.
“Lady,” she said. “My lady of Han-Gilen. What—”
The Lady Varani sat where Izarel directed her. She ignored the wine that he poured and the cakes that he offered. She had the look of a woman at the edge of endurance, a bare hair’s breadth from breaking. She was pale under the bronze of her skin; her hands shook, though she clasped them tightly as if to still them.
For a brief, wild moment Merian wondered if the lady had discovered who had sired Merian’s child. It was generally accepted that, like her mother before her, Merian had bred an heir for herself alone. Easier to let the world think that and be suitably scandalized, than to try to explain how the exiled heir of Han-Gilen had begotten a child from the far side of a Worldgate.
But Varani barely took notice of Merian’s bloated body. Her eyes were fixed on another thing altogether. “Lady,” she said, “last night the dark ones raided us, stole our grain and fish, ran off our cattle; they took half a score of villagers, but left the rest.”
“Yes,” Merian said. “It has been reported to me. Your village suffered lightly in comparison with others.”
“Yes,” Varani said. Her eyes lowered. “And yes, lady, well you should wonder why that would require my presence here, away from the people I was assigned to guard.”
“I am wondering,” said Merian, “what the Lady of Han-Gilen is doing in a fishing village and not in one of the cities of the Hundred Realms.”
“I am a Gate-mage,” Varani said. “I go where I’m needed. And I asked … I asked for a humble place. I felt that it was necessary.”
“Atonement?” asked Merian.
“All of us have sins for which we should do penance.”
“You did not raise your son badly.”
She flung up her head. The pain in her face, in her eyes, made Merian gasp. “Did I not?” she said.
“Tell me,” said Merian. Her heart was cold and still.
Varani seized her hands. It happened so fast, was so strong, that Merian could raise no shields. It flooded her power, overwhelmed and drowned it. Even shock, even fear—it swept them away. Only one thought remained, with a glimmer of despair: I never told him about the child.
The child who was close to being born; the child who, doubly mageborn, doubly a mage of Gates, lay wide open and defenseless to that flood of power and knowledge.
Merian opened her eyes on sunlight, a broad river, a ripple of reeds. He was there as he had been in dream before, in the semblance and fashion of the world in which for a while he had been trapped.
He smiled, but his eyes were somber. “Beloved,” he said, “I beg your forgiveness for what I’ve had to do. As I stand here in this place, the forces are gathering. The Gates are being prepared. The war is truly beginning. Here in this burst of power, I’ve given you all I know. I would come to you if I could, but I won’t endanger you so. I’ll find a mage to bear the message; I’ll set it in him as best I can, and pray he takes no harm from it. This is not a thing I’ve tried before—I don’t even know if it can be done. But if it can, it must.”
All the while he spoke, so clear and yet so remote, his message unfolded itself in all its enormity. She knew, indeed, what he knew. All of it. And yet …
“He is alive,” she said, a long breath of thanks to the gods. “He is well. The mages are in place, and doing as they had intended to do. Lady, he’s done splendidly!”
“Has he?” Varani was still gripping her hands. “He would let us think that. How not?”
Merian’s moment of incredulous joy slipped away before she could grasp it. She wondered when she would know it again, if she ever did. “Tell me,” she said.
“You never asked how the message came to me,” said Varani. “Because I’m his mother? He didn’t even know me. See!”
Merian saw night; black darkness. Raiders broke down the walls of the little town by the sea. Varani fought as a mage could fight, with bolts of light. She had reckoned the number of attackers, and taken note that most of them were afoot; only four were riders, massive shapes in fantastical armor, as scaled and clawed and spined as the beasts they rode.
One of them took no apparent notice of the fight, but rode straight toward her, ignoring any who got in his way. She smote him with power, but the bolt flew wide. His beast reared up. He seized her and flung her with bruising force across the pommel of a high saddle.
As she lay winded, he struck her with a bolt of pure power. It pierced her brain; it ripped aside her shields, her protections, even her will to resist. It lodged deep and grew roots. Then at last it set her free.
She rose up in rage. She fought with her body, trusting no longer to her tainted power. She struck off the helm that shielded the gods knew what horrors.
She froze, as Merian froze within the memory. That face—oh, gods, that face. His hair was cut close to the skull as it had been when first Merian saw him. He was leaner, almost gaunt. His eyes …
They had taken away his eyes and left darkness in their place. He looked on his mother as if he could see her, but there was no recognition in that lightless stare. The dark was in him, was part of him. The son that she had known was gone.
“No,” said Merian—quietly, s
he thought; calmly enough, all things considered. “No. He can’t be. He can’t—”
“I think there can be no doubt that he is,” said Varani. Her voice was flat, bleak. “It was a risk; we all knew that. We gave him no training, taught him no discipline. Our fault; our failing. Now it has destroyed him.”
“No,” said Merian again. She knew perfectly well that she might be the worst of fools, but she could not, would not, believe that Daros was lost. “He gave us what we need. We know now what we face. He would never have done that if he had turned traitor.”
“He well might,” said Varani, “if his masters had in mind to fill us with lies and so overwhelm us.”
They are not lies. Merian did not speak the words. She called Izarel to wait on the lady, to see that she was given every comfort. Merian, for her part, called a council of the last resort: the most urgent of all. She summoned one who might have both the knowledge and the power to advise her.
The Prince of Han-Gilen resembled his son little except for the bright copper of his hair. He was a tall man and strongly built, but neither as tall nor as broad as Daros; nor did he have his son’s beauty. He had a proud and somber face, a face altogether of the plains, and an air of one whose forefathers had been princes since before there were kings in the world.
Merian did not know him well. His kin had been her kin’s oldest allies, but this prince kept for the most part to himself—as, before this war, had she. His lady she had known slightly better, since Varani was a Gate-mage, but they had crossed paths seldom. She had not even been certain that he would answer the summons. He was a very great prince, and more like his son than one might think: neither son nor father took orders well or obeyed them easily.
But he had come, nor had he kept her waiting for much longer than it would have taken him to free himself from his duties in his own city. He had paused to put aside court dress, to clothe himself sensibly in well-worn riding clothes; he came through a Gate of his own making, and presented himself at the gate of the fort.