The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods)

by Barbara Friend Ish

  I needed to question the assassin. I must do anything necessary to extract whatever he knew. How long had it been since the poison-gas vials hit the floor? My father’s security master had drilled into me the necessity of waiting a full thousand-count before allowing anyone back into the room; but once, when it wasn’t a drill, the man had gone back inside after only a hundred. I wondered whether the assassin’s ungodly mask was capable of keeping the gas out of his lungs and I would find him hampered by nothing more than a knife in his gut. It would mean I’d have time to question him—but that he was the only one who was armed. Or dressed.

  “Stay here,” I said to Letitia. *Call me if anything at all is wrong.*

  She nodded understanding. I drew a series of deep breaths, trying to oversaturate my body the way one does before a dive, and filled my lungs one last time. With a final glance at Letitia I opened the door just far enough to slip inside, and closed it behind me.

  I stood there alone. The assassin had vanished as if on the steam, and he’d taken my knife with him. Only a small pool of blood and a mass of broken glass showed anything had happened here at all. Rage blasted through me; I needed to put my fist through something, but there was nothing in this room not carved from stone. A roar forced its way up through my throat; I choked it back down and looked for possible avenues of escape.

  There was none: I knew this. It had been the same wizard who disappeared after our encounters at Irisa and Dianann, who somehow survived not only bleeding to death but immolation on a pyre. Nevertheless I hauled open the door and glanced out to the main chamber, hoping he might have found some underwater passage between the pools. Letitia glanced at me, surprised; the room behind her was empty except for steam and yellow lamplight. I shook my head and shut the door again, casting an idiotic glance around the room as if my enemy might have reappeared while my back was turned.

  He hadn’t, of course. Steam still hung on the air, but otherwise the air seemed clear; my eyes didn’t sting. I drew a cautious sip of breath, as if that would keep me alive. My throat and lungs felt fine, so I began to breathe. It seemed I should check the depths of this pool for some underwater passage that might have taken the assassin in a different direction; but I doubted a man who had just been knifed in the gut could manage such an escape, and he’d needed no such exit at Dianann: only ten seconds of my inattention.

  Fury mounted in me, and only some of it was for my enemy: I should have known he would escape as soon as I looked away. I should have withdrawn from Letitia’s presence long ago, should have known better than to relax at all, ever, anywhere. I prayed he would return, so I could keep my undivided attention on him, take him apart by pieces, teach him the names of all my friends before he died in slow agony. I would extract the name of the man who had bought my death, but the pain I inflicted on my assassin would last far longer than necessary for that goal. And that would be nothing compared to what I visited on the man who hired him.

  If I was to have this revenge, I must devote much more focus to the problem. Starting now. Unlikely as it was that he’d escaped by swimming through some underwater passage, it would nag at me if I didn’t check. Long training for poison gas made me hesitate over filling my lungs in here, but the alternative was to step outside and get drawn into a discussion of the matter with Letitia. And I couldn’t afford to tell her anything. I drew a deep breath, coughed again, then gathered up my self-discipline and forced sulfurous air into my lungs. My head swam a bit, but I didn’t seem to be dying, so I dove into the pool.

  The water stung my eyes. Lamplight faltered before reaching the bottom of the pool: I had to drag my hands all the way around the perimeter down in those last few feet of darkness. As my body’s clamor for breath mounted, the pool became Tílimya’s Abyss, my fruitless search not for pursuit but for escape. Behind me I heard men who had been here longer laughing.

  *Ellion?*

  Letitia’s voice reminded me who and where I was.

  *All clear. Come in. I’m down in the pool. ’Ware the glass and the blood on the floor.*

  At least I had those things. Hastily I finished sweeping the base of the pool, finding only the fissure through which the waters entered, and pushed myself back up to the surface. Letitia stood just inside the door, staring at me.

  “Where is he?”

  I should have worked out a story before inviting her in. I shook my head and climbed out, buying time to formulate an answer; coming up with nothing. My head still swam.

  “Good damn question,” I said. “All I can tell you is he didn’t swim out, and he didn’t walk out the door. You might as well get dressed; I’m going to see what I can learn from the things he left behind.”

  “Don’t pass out.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Should I stay?”

  I should send her away for her own safety. “Please.”

  “How do I know when to get Amien?”

  I glanced at her, considering. His discretion with her honor could be trusted, but he would ask all the wrong questions—while Letitia seemed to have made the error of trusting me. Faint nausea gathered in my throat.

  “Give me an hour,” I said finally. I picked up my shirt and dried the water from my hands, then knelt on the stone before the little pool of blood. Dipping my fingertips into it yielded no impressions beyond what ordinary senses might convey: it had cooled to the temperature of the stone and was beginning to congeal. I touched my fingertips to my mouth—and new awareness roared through me, blasting me so far beyond ordinary consciousness that I lost contact with the chamber in which I assumed I still knelt.

  There was no trace of arcane power in the blood: the man was no wizard, of no discernible Talent at all. But through that blood I tasted the presence of things in his body that the blood brushed up against but had no congress with: things that didn’t live, even though their energies ebbed and flowed as if they did; things more mundane that served to hold him together in the aftermaths of a seemingly endless series of dire injuries. Through that taste I knew, as if in my own misplaced body, the searings of arcane castings and flash-weapon discharges that should have killed him dozens of times; stab wounds and deep slices and near-dismemberments from knives and swords; bloody bruisings and broken bones inflicted with blunt objects and bare hands; the ravages of fire and explosion and even the deep-lung burns of poison gas. The blood remembered all this, and yet the body lived. I reeled under the weight of so much injury, finding myself lying with my forehead in the midst of a pool of cold sticky blood: the chill of the stone beneath me seeping into my bones, a dozen lifetimes’ worth of injuries echoing in my body. I groaned and rolled away, finding Letitia sitting within arm’s reach.

  He wasn’t a wizard. And yet he had the capacity to come and go like a wraith in a fireside tale, and he seemed to be absolutely indestructible. Unkillable. I reached out and touched Letitia, to reassure myself I still occupied my own body and we both still lived.

  “What?” she said softly. Even from this upside-down angle the distress in her face was plain to read. “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, head still swimming.

  “Are—you—all—right?” she repeated, in Ilesian this time.

  I waved the question away. “Yes. Thank you. Gods, what the hell…”

  Abruptly I realized I was still naked, and I was being far too honest. She needed to think I had control of the situation; I needed her to not think too deeply about what had happened here. I dragged my collection of phantom injuries to the pool, washed the blood from my face, and began pulling on my clothes. When I was dressed I cupped my hands in the pool and brought water to the place where my assassin had fallen, washing away the blood.

  A room-darkening reel of exhaustion came over me as I knelt before the shards of glass near the door. Had there been someone I could trust, I would have called on him to examine the fragments. If I’d had any silk besides what I wore, I would have gathered them up for later examination, t
rusting the silk to hold the energies intact. But even more than rest I needed security: I drew a deep breath and released it, watching yellow lamplight wink in the shards.

  “Maybe you should wait,” Letitia said softly. “You must need rest.”

  I shook my head, still looking at the glass. “The longer I delay, the greater the chance of discovery. I can’t afford even for allies to know…” Speak the truth or hold on to that slim shield of security; reveal the price on my neck or let her think it hung on hers: I’d backed into yet another corner with her. Silently I damned myself for a fool—and then for a traitor.

  And then discovered I couldn’t speak the lie.

  I swallowed against sudden searing pain in my throat and reached for the largest of the shards. This time I was vaguely aware of Letitia trying to catch me as I collapsed.

  I stood so close to where I had knelt half a second before that my mind twisted sideways, the disorientation fading into a lingering sense of falling-darkness/wrenching-drop: eyes full of inverse night sky swirling and resolving into an image of myself and Letitia in the pool, her wet incandescent beauty and the raw ecstasy in both our faces sending me reeling into a mix of sudden aching desire and the despair of another damned noncombatant who would die at my hand. My head flashed with raining fire on a field full of children and animals—a public square occupied by innocent people—What the hell am I doing?—and then I found myself spilling across Letitia, legs sprawled sideways, head ringing with someone else’s need for an honorable death.

  “Ohdeargods,” I breathed, and pushed myself to sit. Nausea welled in me, so powerfully that I nearly gave in to it. I swallowed, coughed, swallowed again. “Oh dear gods.”

  “Ellion?” Letitia said, smoothing back hair from my brow. I froze at the contact, fought against the need to pull back from tenderness I didn’t deserve and lost. Hurt manifested in her face.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and reached for her hand. And just like last time I’d said those words, the magnitude of what I needed to apologize for crashed over me. This time I bit it back, but my voice took on a rough edge anyway. “Ah, I’m sorry, Letitia. You deserve better. There’s a reason wizards never marry.”

  She cast me a look of shock. “Is that the rule?”

  An unwilling smile came over me; I shook my head. “No, there’s no rule. Except what our natures impose. There’s some sort of poison in us, every

  one…”

  And none more deeply poisoned than I. I shook my head again, rose and manufactured a smile, handed her up. I bent and gathered the shards of glass in my hands.

  “Could you get the door?”

  She opened it; I nodded thanks and followed her through.

  “It would probably be best,” I said, as we stepped along the slick walkway towards the stairs, “if we didn’t mention this. To anyone.”

  “Yes,” she said softly, and mounted the first step. “I appreciate your discretion.”

  Something inside me putrified. I felt the goddess’s eyes on me again. I couldn’t speak the lie, but I also couldn’t speak the truth: I carried the damning shards upstairs and dumped them into the first fireplace I passed.

  Map: The Royal Precinct and Central Realms

  Ilnemedon: Royal Map Collection no. 887

  32. Abu al-righ

  If my assassin had left me a hundred new questions last night, it was the thing he carried off that nagged at me. I could only suppose my knife had still been lodged in his gut when he performed whatever magic-without-Talent allowed him to disappear. No matter what prompted the choice to take the weapon rather than leave it behind, he left me with no recourse: this morning, I dug deep in my pack and found the knife I’d recovered from him a hundred years ago at Tyra, on the night I was foolish enough to think him dead, and I tucked it into the sheath in my right boot.

  In the west, when men trade knives, it has deep significance. Not infrequently they will mark one another’s flesh with the blades and share blood as well, but that fillip isn’t necessary: exchanging knives amounts to a blood oath of brotherhood. It was a thing Tellan had instilled in me; I was surprised to discover it still lurking in the depths of my mind. There seemed a troubling symmetry to this exchange, despite the fact that the blood on both blades had been his.

  Wizards know such rituals do not hold the force of magic. Western men know these things bind them to one another beyond life. All I knew was the knife fit perfectly into the sheath, but its clean smooth hilt worried against my calf as if it had been improperly finished. The things I’d read in his blood and on the shard of the vial hung on my mind like the awareness of a binding or a god; like some hideous portent in a song.

  Hordes of Fair travelers crowded the road out of Sucello. These were the stragglers: by tradition the Fair begins a twelvenight before the Moot, which meant it had been under way before we entered the human realms. The people around us seemed nearly insubstantial, remote and mundane with their carts full of children and wares and their silly banners proclaiming support for one Moot candidate or another: no more than tools for gods and would-be ard-righthe. Nevertheless they appeared to be enjoying the trip far more than the party with which I rode.

  Pleasantly-ordered urban environs gave way to small villages and increasingly isolated farm-holdings. The road unfurled, from places a man might call Granniu and be sure of the designation, to ill-defined Taillte and its pale excuses for satellite towns: where once men looked to the Esusdian righ at Esunertos; where later the tiarna tithed to the Granniu righ and locked the gates against dark spirits and rumors of old gods; where now the kharr held sway, turning the city’s face towards Esus again. And Nechton and his ally the Bard.

  Outside Taillte, we ignored the conventional wisdom of holding to the Precinct Road at all costs, turned and rode south into the forest rather than risk skirmishing with the kharr who held the place. Despite the proximity of the city, there were no trails here, nor even signs on the land that showed where hunters might range: as if everything south of the road had been somehow poisoned, and not even locals would venture there. We rode quietly towards the spot west of Taillte where distance and terrain conspire to conceal the road from the city, trying to make the best time we might; trees older than Amien gathered and hushed around us, whispering of long-abandoned communities and local deities Who had starved for lack of the people who once lived in this place. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t lay hands on what; when we finally rode out of the forest and back to the road, I was grateful to return to a less troubling route. Meanwhile the people who had prudently kept the road received us as if we had become Básghilae on our detour: drawing beyond the margins to allow us passage; halting and staring until we passed beyond whatever they imagined to be safe distance.

  Silent as ghouls we trooped down the shank of the day and the increasingly deserted road. Forests faltered into vacant grasslands. Those abandoned places gave way to barren stretches of broken basalt, where westering sunlight fractured into ruddy reflection and black shadows. Across those blasted spaces came the energies I recognized as Esus, winding their ways into my faithless heart and magic-enslaved bones: lighting me up with pleasures whose transgression only increased their delight, until I caught myself and tried fruitlessly to realign my mind; laying themselves around my neck in the form of a torc no mundane eye would ever see and welding that ornament invisibly to my flesh. A whisper blew across the broken stone, stirring the tail of my hair and raising mixed terror and rapture up the length of my spine: Abu al-righ.

  Hail forever. I hadn’t heard that salute since my deposement: it is one only a righ may receive.

  How much of last night’s dreaming in the grotto had been the goddess of that place toying with me? How much had come directly from Esus? I felt the invisible torc around my neck as the seal on last night’s mandate: take up Esus’s cause; root out Nechton; return to the promise of my stars, serving Him as Prince and ard-righ; finally, when I had gathered enough strength to accomplish it, free Hi
m from the Abyss. Hakaid the shadow of the Sun. As above, so below: then would both of Us be free. And the first task on that road would be the re-taking of Esunertos.

  It was a thing that had to be done anyway. Who would care whether I did it in Tella’s Name or that of Esus? What did it matter which god set me on the throne?

  I wrenched myself into ordinary awareness, heart hammering. How was it possible I even allowed these ideas to roll around in my mind? I was sworn to the true gods; I had vowed to give up magic. I could not be a part of the arcane assault to re-take Esunertos, and it would be a terrible violation to render it into Esus’s Hands after all those men dedicated to the true gods laid their lives on the line for its recovery.

  I was supposed to be Lady Tella’s man. I didn’t need Her to accost me in grottoes to understand what She required. I could do no more for Esunertos than contribute to the development of Aballo’s strategy: I resolved for the thousandth time to lay further ambitions aside.

  But when the unsleeping eye the Riga traces around Esunertos hove into view, and red sunset light skipped from the water’s surface and straight into my brain, the pull of the power still welling in that wrecked city raised a tempest inside me. I reined without thinking, peripherally aware that everyone around me had done the same.

  “Sweet Lord Endeáril,” Iminor croaked. I glanced at him: his eyes looked haunted. I couldn’t recall him saying anything all day. I suspected I hadn’t said much more. “Is that—Esunertos?”

  “Yes,” Amien said, in a voice that suggested he’d aimed for neutrality and missed. Wind sang across the river, carrying the scents of campfires and centuries-old arcane warfare into my suddenly tightening chest.