Tides of Darkness

by Judith Tarr

  The guards took him for one of the many messengers who came and went on Merian’s business. They passed him easily enough, but without the pomp to which he must be accustomed. She thought he might be offended, but his dark eyes were glinting as Izarel admitted him to her receiving-room. He bowed low, and waved away her apologies for neither rising nor offering him proper respect.

  “Lady,” he said in a much warmer voice than she had expected, “we need not stand on ceremony. Aren’t we kin from long ago?”

  Much more so than he knew, she thought. She smiled and held out her hand. He took it and kissed it with gallantry that made her laugh. “May I?” he asked, tilting his head toward the swell of her middle.

  It was an uncommon request, but among mages, a considerable courtesy: to pay tribute to the child, and bless it. The child, as far as she could tell, had survived the flood of magic from Varani’s mind, and taken no harm from it. She was aware of the prince’s presence: Merian sensed curiosity, but no fear.

  This was a mage of great power, of whom Merian had never heard an ill word. He was also, and that decided it for her, the child’s grandfather. He was kin; it was his right. She nodded.

  He laid his hand where the child was, coiled with her thumb in her mouth, dreaming the long dream of the womb. She roused at his touch. Merian felt a thing both familiar and utterly strange: a tendril of magery uncoiling, reaching out, brushing her mother and her grandfather with a flicker of wonder, a gleam of delight.

  Merian gasped. The prince’s expression was astonished. “But—this is—”

  There was no lying to a mage. Merian looked him steadily in the face. “It is.”

  “But how?”

  “Dreamwalking,” Merian said.

  His eyes widened slightly. “Indeed? There are ancient texts that speak of dreamwalking in the reality of the flesh, but no mage in this age of the world has succeeded.”

  “He said,” she said somewhat delicately, “that you were a great scholar of magic from long ago. He intimated that we might have done well to consult you before we raced blindly ahead.”

  “As he did?” the prince said. His voice was cold.

  “My lord,” said Merian, “I need your wisdom badly. I need your understanding as well. Will you allow me to give you the message that he sent to us last night?”

  The prince inclined his head. So, she thought: his lady had not told him. Had there been a quarrel, then, that sent the ruling lady of a great realm to be a village mage on the coast of Anshan? Had their son had something to do with it?

  She must trust in her instinct, and the urging of her magery. She took his hands and gave him all that Varani had given.

  For a long while after it was done, he sat beside the couch, very still, his eyes as blank as his son’s had been. Merian slipped her hands free from his unresisting fingers and took the opportunity to rest a little.

  When she opened her eyes again, he had just begun to stir. His face had aged years. “I … see why you summoned me,” he said. “This is far from mere fecklessness. This is treason, high and deadly.”

  “Is it?” Merian asked him. “Do you believe that, my lord?”

  “What am I to believe, lady? What he did to his mother was one of the forbidden arts. It was, in a word, rape. Even if the rest can be true, and he continues to play the game of masks, that is profoundly damning.”

  “Would he know that it’s forbidden? He was never formally a mage.”

  “My fault,” the prince said as his lady had, heavily. “He has so little gift or talent for constraint. I thought that if I left him to find his own way, he would find the right one. His every choice since he became a man has been wrong. Every one.”

  She rested her hand where the child lay, listening to the echo of their voices within the domed chamber of the womb. “Every choice?” she asked.

  “He could have chosen a less difficult time.”

  “I don’t think that was his choice to make,” she said gently but with firmness that would remind him, she hoped, of who and what she was. “The gods do as the gods will. I ask you: dare we trust the message that he sent?”

  “You ask me, lady? I would have condemned him to death when first he broke the law of Gates. He has done nothing creditable since. Great grief though it costs me, I must face the truth: that my only son is flawed beyond redemption. He was born without the instinct for order that is the mark of a civilized being.”

  “I ask you to consider,” she said, “what you would do if you were in his place. Tell me that, my lord.”

  She watched him gather his thoughts and turn them away from the bitterness that was his son. “If it were I,” he said slowly, “I would play the game of masks to the end. I would do what I could to protect where I was sent to destroy: to slay few or none, and to send word to my people of what I knew.”

  “That is exactly what he did,” she said. “No one died where he raided. I would wager that the slaves he took will not stay slaves long. There was word among the rest, of the mages’ freeing slaves and mounting a revolt. He asks us to be ready, to gather our power, to strike when the time comes.

  “If he can be trusted,” his father said.

  “Can we trust you?”

  “To the ends of life,” he said.

  “I believe that he is your son,” she said, “and that whatever darkness may have taken him, in the end he will prove his loyalty to his world and his kin.”

  “And his daughter?”

  “He knows nothing of her,” she said.

  “And you say that you trust him?”

  “I do,” she said. “Enough not to put him to such a test.”

  “Then you need me not at all.”

  “I need you, my lord,” she said. “I need the knowledge that is in you. The Mage who drives the darkness is dying. If we can hasten its death, might not the darkness die?”

  “The Mage did not create the darkness,” the prince said. “The armies of night may weaken once the Mage is dead, but the dark is like a river. It will hardly fade away because the one who opened the floodgates is dead.”

  “Even so,” she said, “with the Mage gone and the slaves freed, we may be able to destroy the men who serve the darkness. Then maybe—if there is knowledge somewhere, some spell, some working, that can conquer the shadow—”

  “I will need my library, lady,” he said, “and as many scholars as you can spare. They need not be mages, as long as they can read, and remember what they read.”

  “I will send you scholars,” she said, “and instruct them to read quickly. I think there may not be much time left.”

  “I, too,” he said. “May I have your leave to begin?”

  “My lord, you may,” she said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE PRINCE OF HAN-GILEN RETURNED TO HIS PRINCEDOM AND his library, to find a dozen keen-witted scholars already exclaiming over the trove of treasure that they had found among the shelves and bins and chests. His lady spoke no word of rebuke for being left to sleep while her lord had come and gone. She asked only that she be allowed to return to her village. “They need me there,” she said.

  Merian sighed and let her go. If there was to be peace in that family, it would not come tonight.

  Already, even before the sun set, she knew that the night would be difficult. It was barely dark before the attacks began. Again they were raids for provisions and slaves; there was little killing and no destruction. Mages and fighters were able to drive back a raid deep in Asanion and another in the north, but the cost of that was high: the enemy would kill if provoked. They swept the defenders with dark fire.

  Swords and spears were of no use against that. Arrows had some little effect, and mage-bolts more, but the mages were shackled by their own laws. They could not kill a thinking being with magic. Defend, yes; destroy the dark things that sometimes came with the enemy and fed on blood; but when they faced a raider armed with dark fire, they could strike to wound but not to kill. So were they killed while the enem
y escaped.

  No word came from Han-Gilen, nor was there another message from the dark world. Mages seeking to pierce through shadow to the world in which Estarion was imprisoned, could not come near him. They could only hold fast, strengthen their armies as they could, and wait.

  Greatmoon came to the full five days after Daros raided the village in Anshan. He had not been seen again; if he had been one of the armored and mounted raiders, he had not revealed himself to anyone who fought against him.

  Every night Merian dreamed of him. They were honest dreams, not dreamwalking; some were memories, but many were fragments of the message that he had sent. He had left her another key, but it remained as cryptically impenetrable as the bowl that she had bidden Hani bring her from Starios.

  She was sitting in her receiving-room that evening, staring fixedly at it by the light of the setting sun. It offered no more answers than it ever had. There was no writing on it, no spell woven in it that she could find. It was only a worn clay bowl with a dark stain inside it.

  Water. The thought came from everywhere and nowhere. Fill it with water.

  They had tried that long before, summoned a mage skilled in scrying and asked that she practice her art on the bowl. She had found nothing. “Worse than nothing,” she had said. “This a dead thing. It kills visions.”

  But the voice in her head was very clear. It was, she realized with a shock, a child’s voice. As if to upbraid her for her slowness of wit, the child within rolled and kicked, hard, so that she gasped.

  She fetched water from the jar on the table and filled the bowl just to the brim, being very careful to spill none of it. She drew slow breaths to focus, to draw inward to her center. Someone was waiting for her there: a young person with a riot of copper-colored curls, and gold-green eyes with a hint of a tilt to them, and Daros’ face carved in dark ivory.

  They joined hands and bent over the water. The light of sunset shimmered in it. Then the dark came, much swifter than in the world without.

  They looked down into a place Merian had not seen before, yet remembered: it had come to her within Daros’ message. The Mage—this was its prison, and the strange angular figure was the Mage itself. It lay bound with cords of metal, yet it also stood upright, wrapped in a shimmer that at first she took for a cloak. After a moment she saw the shimmer of plumes and knew: they were wings.

  It was impossibly strange, and weirdly beautiful. It met her stare, gold to gold, and said, “Kill me.”

  “How?” said Merian.

  “Kill me,” it said. “Kill me now. Great sorrow comes unless you kill me.”

  “I see you,” said Merian, “but I have no power to come to you.”

  “Kill me,” it said. “Kill me now.”

  It would say nothing else. She could do nothing. The Worldgates were shut, barred by shadow. The Heart of the World was lost. After a while the Mage’s fetch collapsed into its body, withering and vanishing with a long sigh.

  She drew back from the water. Both the Mage and the dream-child were gone. She was left with a sense of failure, though what she could have done, or whether she should have done it at all, she could not have said.

  Night was falling. Gates were opening, armies advancing. She took up the many threads of duty, the wards, the sendings of mages.

  Something thrust a dagger in her belly, and twisted.

  She had been sitting at the table, knowing full well that Izarel would object when he came back from running errands and found her. She had a flash of regret for that defiance as she crumpled to the floor.

  It was too early. She could not lose this child. She could not—

  People were lifting her, carrying her. She saw a blur that might be Izarel’s face. There were others: mages, and—Batan?

  He did not have the blank, shocked look of many men in the presence of a woman giving birth. The mages twittered, but he waded through them to sit beside her, and took her hand. “You won’t be able to claim this one,” she said.

  He laughed. “But I might claim you after—if this one’s father doesn’t. Maybe he’ll have to fight me for you.”

  “Do that and I’ll feed you both to the sea-drakes,” she said.

  His grin was broad and insolent and very comforting. “At least then I’ll get to see who snatched you out from under my nose.”

  Pain seized her, rent her asunder, passed. One did not become accustomed to it. She doubted that one forgot it, either, whatever the mothers of many might say. Batan had both her hands in his. The mages had drawn back before the force of his glare. But he smiled at her.

  “He’d be jealous if he could see us now,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, trying to be light, though her breath came in gasps. “He would be furious.”

  “Good,” said Batan.

  “Don’t you have a holding to defend?”

  “Not tonight,” he said. “I came here to see you.”

  She raised her brows.

  He did not oblige her with an answer.

  There was no midwife in Ki-Oran. She had reckoned it too soon to summon one to a fortress full of warriors. When the baby reached her time, then the chief of the mage-healers in Starios would come, and a small army of midwives and nurses.

  The baby was coming. There were mages; Vian was a healer. No one else could come, not at night, not with the enemy infesting every Gate.

  They were all more frightened than she. It was too soon—everyone knew that. But the child, for all the shock of the pains that forced her into the world, was unafraid. Her calm flowed into Merian, calming her in turn. This was as it should be, it said. This was the gods’ will.

  Dream had wrought her. Magic sustained her. She was doubly mageborn, doubly bred of Gates. Was it so astonishing that she should not be born in quite the same way as other children?

  She came swiftly, although the pain stretched each moment into endlessness. The mages had raised a wall of light. The child was born in it, wrapped in it as if in sunlight, bearing a Sun in her hand.

  Vian the healer laid her on Merian’s emptied belly. Merian would not have been surprised at all to see the child of the dream, but this was a newborn infant like any other: tiny, red, bellowing in rage at the shock of the air. Even her supernal calm had been no match for that.

  Merian cradled her. Her cries faded to gasps and then to silence. She looked up as her mother looked down, with the clear eyes of a mage in a face so young it hardly had shape yet. She was very small, but perfectly complete: fingers, toes, all tiny but all perfect. The strength of her lungs she had already proved. Her eyes were infant blue, her skin too angry yet from the birth to be sure of its color, but the damp sparse curls that grew on her skull had an unmistakable coppery sheen.

  Merian laughed at the splendor of the jest. This was the very image and likeness of her father. Once she began to grow, no one with eyes could fail to know what lineage she had.

  Out of that thought, Merian drew her name. “Elian,” she said. “Elian Kimerian.”

  She was too young to smile, but the warmth that came from her was as like to it as made no matter. Yes, that was her name. She was Elian, and Merian-too. Other names would come to her later, but her truename, the name of her spirit, sealed her to the world.

  Morning brought the invasion. The princess regent opened a Gate in Merian’s very chamber. Her arrival was like a blast of wind. Merian shielded her daughter from it, but Elian was unperturbed; she was nursing, and that took precedence over any distraction.

  Daruya stood over them, fists planted on hips, glaring with a ferocity that Merian had not seen in her since she was as young as this child’s father. “You could have died,” she said.

  “But I didn’t.” Merian folded back the blanket from Elian’s face. “Elian,” she said, “greet your grandmother.”

  “And not before time,” Daruya said. She held out her hands. Elian turned her face away from the breast; she deigned to let her grandmother lift her.

  Daruya’s inspection
was swift but thorough. She folded back the fingers from the tiny right hand; a sigh escaped her at the spark of gold there. Of the rest, she saw everything that was to be seen. “The young lord or the old?” she asked.

  “Do you need to ask that?”

  “No,” said Daruya. “Nor will I demand an explanation—yet. You truly believe that I can approve of this?”

  “Of course you can,” Merian said. “This is a twofold heir; and the father’s half of her inheritance is one that our line has never been able to claim.”

  “He knows?”

  “The father, no. The grandfather, yes.”

  Daruya’s brows rose. “You will not explain that, either—yet. So that was how you lured him out of his princedom. No one has been able to do that for time out of mind.”

  “I summoned him,” said Merian. “He came. He never knew how close our kinship was until after he had come.”

  “Perhaps he suspected.” Daruya dismissed the thought, and him, with a toss of the head. “Pack up your belongings. I’m bringing you back to Starios.”

  “No,” Merian said.

  Her mother ignored her. Izarel had come in, drawn by the scent of magic. Daruya addressed him peremptorily. “Call the servants. Your lady is going home.”

  “I am home,” said Merian.

  Izarel hung on his heel.

  “I am not leaving,” Merian said to him. “Go now. When I need you again, I’ll summon you.”

  He left with palpable relief. Merian faced her mother. She had been lying down long enough. Rising made her dizzy, but that passed quickly. She held out her arms. Rather blindly, Daruya laid Elian in them. In the manner of very young creatures, Elian was deep asleep.

  “Mother,” Merian said, “it’s touching of you to come roaring in here like the wrath of the gods, but I haven’t needed setting in order for some while now.”

  “This is a fortress on the front of battle,” Daruya said. “It is no place for a newborn child.”