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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  I turned my attention on the flow of power through his body. The opening was exactly where I remembered, in the palm of his hand. An unfortunate circumstance: if the opening had been in one of the median power centers, it would have been easy to establish a swift, balanced flow. As things stood, there was no choice but to let the power wind its distracted way through him. Again I traced the flow from his darkening hand, up through his cold-cramped arm and on a lazy trip around his heart and spine. The power circulated around the base of Iminor’s spine and up the bony shaft, then spun around inside his skull. Only a few wandering rivulets flickered in his left arm and legs. The sensible thing to do was to create an opening in his head.

  Which power center should I use? The one at the crown is both strongest and easiest to open; it should be possible to establish a reasonable flow there. Had the Tan not been a Talent, permanently opening his crown would be the obvious choice. But for a person already half-open to the whims of the gods, blocking that place open could be dangerous.

  Or, with power constantly flowing out through that opening, might he actually find himself shielded from eruptions of Sight? What little I knew of seers suggested relieving him of those episodes would be a blessing to him; but it might be a disservice to the gods.

  The waste in which we sat spoke more eloquently than any harpist: there was far too high a price on serving the gods.

  Terror of my own thoughts erupted in me again; I pushed that line of reasoning away. I was sworn to the true gods. It was the one facsimile of virtue I had left. I must do the best for Them I could. If it was Their Will that this Tan survive, all that remained to me was to do what I could for him and leave the rest in Their hands. It wasn’t as if anyone really knew how Sight worked, anyway. Maybe the power center at his crown had nothing to do with it at all.

  Oh, truly, either do it or slit my throat, Iminor thought. I’m sure the gods washed Their hands of you long ago.

  I couldn’t allow myself to think about how wrong he was, not with all my awareness open to him: instead I filled my mind with the energy flowing through him, letting it blast me up and around inside his skull. It lit me up until I barely remembered why I’d touched it. From inside his head I rode the flow, up to the place where it swirled around the edges of the power center at his crown; turned my attention on that place and teased its petals open; rode the sudden blast of energy out into the night. I hung on the air, looking down on the campsite, rising higher and higher towards the stars. I saw him groan and pull away from my suddenly vacant and crumpling body to bury his face in his knees; saw Letitia race across the campsite and then visibly hesitate over which of us to attend first; saw the white-hot stare he turned on her.

  “Iminor!” she breathed, reaching out towards him.

  He rose, ignoring the offered hand and staring down at her as all the color fled her face. Silence stretched again.

  “I didn’t do it for you,” he said at last, voice as cold as the spaces between the stars. “I did it for all those people who will never be safe until you do whatever the hell it is Nechton fears. Don’t be a coward.” He turned and stalked away from her, across the campsite, beyond the circle of firelight and into the echoing void, while she stood with hands over her mouth and a terrible devastation in every line of her body.

  Now I saw: whatever her feelings for me, she loved him in a way that would bind them all their lives and possibly longer. Whoever she took into her bed, his presence would always occupy the corners of the room. The awareness sent me crashing back into my own body, suddenly too heavy for the air to hold. I breathed in cold-dust air and pushed myself back up from the stone, finding her eyes on me.

  And oh, alas for Iminor: mind still entangled in the darkness, I glimpsed the terrible ties binding her to me as well. No wizard but me could ever undo them, and I had no idea how. Loeg could make this into a tragedy, but it would fail to win any sort of popular following. What sane person would grasp its sickness, after all?

  “Well, that’s done, then,” I said, and rose.

  “Thank you,” she said softly.

  A humorless laugh escaped me. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I nodded and walked past her to check on Amien. But before I reached the place in which the wizard sat, Nuad planted himself in my path.

  I stopped short, staring at the Tan: too wrecked to defend against the intensity of his sudden hatred.

  “You let Manannan die?”

  My throat clamped shut; there was no defense I could offer. A better commander would have kept a tighter rein on Manannan; would have maintained sufficient vigilance that the Tan never took the hit of a Básghilae blade at all.

  “You let Manannan die!” Nuad rasped. “You had the power to undo the spell—and you—” Nuad choked on rage; terrible, belated understanding arose in me. “You drank his memory with us, and the whole time you could have—”

  I shook my head, trying to figure out how to explain. The man I had been a twelvenight ago still understood what it meant to keep a vow. I hadn’t unraveled the spells involved until the last few days. But I knew the truth: I hadn’t tried. It hadn’t even occurred to me to try.

  The shame of it crashed down on me; I glanced away, discovering Rohini’s gaze on me. I felt as if she looked straight into the rot at my core. And remembered her man Luxin.

  And Vandabala, who took a minor hit with an enchanted blade on the night of our first Básghilae encounter. What would have happened if I’d attended to him myself, rather than insisting Amien assume the duty? Even without knowing the spells beforehand, might I have unraveled them and spared his life? If rechanneling the spell for Iminor had not been a violation of my vow, then why had I held back from aiding those others?

  Nuad had every right to demand satisfaction at swordpoint. In his position I would do the same. And I should let him slice me open. But I had given my word not to abandon Letitia.

  I swallowed against nausea, forced myself to look into his face. Better not to dance around it, lest he say something in which I found an excuse to win the duel.

  “I have no excuse to offer, ouirr,” I said quietly. “Reasons, shortcomings, failures; no excuses.” I waited, hands ostentatiously distant from the hilt of my sword, for the demand. But Nuad just stared at me. Gradually I realized the Tanaan tradition of dueling must have died with their magic and their warfare. He didn’t have the words.

  I restrained a sigh. “Ouirr, it is not my desire, but… do you seek satisfaction?”

  Nuad’s mouth twisted. “An honor-duel? Don’t you lack a basic requirement for such an event?”

  That, of course, was a dueling offense. Except that it was true. Nuad shook his head and walked away. For a moment I stood as if rooted to the spot; finally I remembered that I had not completed the task I’d so belatedly taken on, and closed the distance between Amien and myself. He stared up at me, face still and black eyes bottomless in this light. The haze of dark energy still hung on him, seeming to war with his natural power.

  “My lord?” I said quietly. “May I examine you?”

  The wizard’s jaw grew tight. “Leave it, Ellion. We’ve had enough for one night. Just let me rest.”

  I pursed my lips, tried to gather up a different approach; something in his face softened, just a bit.

  “Truly,” he said. “Let me rest. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.”

  I had no right to demand he submit. I certainly hadn’t earned his trust or anyone else’s. I inclined my head, turned away, finally went and tended my horse.

  It’s not what you DO that makes you evil, fool.

  I assumed the first arcane watch again, with no intention of waking Amien for the second. The look he cast me as he retired suggested he knew and couldn’t find it in himself to fight about it. Cold skittered up my back at what I saw in his face.

  Soon everyone but Busadi—and Iminor, who I sensed at the confluence of the stream and the river—lay bundled in cloaks or sleeping rolls nearby. Busadi haunted the darkness just o
utside the circle of firelight; I cast my awareness wide, diffusing into a state that wasn’t quite trance. And as everyone around me lapsed into exhausted sleep, the power in the darkness between the stars closed in and shimmered around my edges, filling me with a music never heard by earthly ears. It tingled over my skin like the spray of a waterfall, playing in a thousand shifting, spectral hues across the intense infinite dark of the sky and stretching time into strange irregular ripples. I should have pushed it away; instead I breathed in just a whiff of it. Aechering’s Shadow Working unfolded itself in my mind for the thousandth time.

  Hakaid the shadow of the Sun

  And open the Abyss

  Was it true that my stars marked me not for greatness but for great evil? If the Abyss was my destiny, there was no point in worrying about vows or the line between dark magic and light. I should just bring everything I had to protecting the people I loved. I should race to close the gap between Nechton and myself, so I might be ready for whatever he threw against Letitia next. So I might make it unnecessary for Amien to do more than marshal my resources. What would it mean to hakaid the shadow of the Sun?

  Aechering lived and worked before the arrival of the true gods: before the war that destroyed Esusdia, scattered her peoples and killed her language. His work is full of words for which no one living is certain of the proper translation, words that are sources of endless debate at Aballo. Even men who will never read more than this one working debate the meaning of hakaid the way harpists argue about Fare and Fir; men who read all of Aechering have many more words to puzzle over. Some say hakaid means to summon, others to know.

  I wondered whether anyone had ever pursued this working using the theory that hakaid means to invoke.

  Did a man invoke the shadow of the Sun, what would happen? If the Sun is Ilesan, the Lord of Gods—and though the Sun can mean no more than the male force in certain contexts, the Lord of Gods is the primary interpretation for any such formula—then the operator who invoked the Sun’s shadow would be consciously tapping the Dark. Tonight I knew the form it would take: that sparkle between the stars, invisible to mundane eyes, which killed good men and raised evil ones to raging readiness to become gods. I knew the rapture that would pound through me.

  The energy should repel me. But all the depthless sky sang with my need.

  The reach of the shadow of the Sun is infinite.

  Tonight it was easy to imagine being the heir of Tílimya: mortal successor to that ancient god Who men see as the very Incarnation of evil. If He long ago mastered every form of evil men will ever conceive, it was in order to defend all of creation from the men and gods who must be imprisoned in the Abyss. It was easy to imagine stretching myself across the sky and gathering up all the energy waiting there, letting it blast me beyond reason and into a place in which no matter what Nechton unveiled, it would seem no challenge at all. But I knew: invoke the shadow of the Sun, tap into the Dark, and I would be planting my standard in opposition to the true gods.

  Cold raced through me at the thought of making that declaration; my throat clamped shut. I looked across the campfire into the golden eyes of Ankou, Tílimya’s boatman.

  A sane man would have been terrified; I just felt the inevitability of it. I realized I had no idea which of my many offenses was my greatest sin. Why had he come for me now? I’d incurred no injuries today, and I still had much to do. Letitia and Amien still needed my protection. Could I persuade the Guardian of the Well to parole me long enough to see them safe?

  Let the heir of Tílimya

  Woo the Virgin Star

  I found myself taking Ankou in, even now enmeshed in a scholar’s habits of assessing facts. Strange that the descriptions in the stories failed on the single most important detail: clad in gleaming white bones and voluminous black cloak though he was, his grinning skull capped by an immense black hat, he definitely had eyes: nearly human, fleshly orbs with brilliant golden irises. They reminded me of something I couldn’t lay hands on. What had happened to the empty glowing sockets I’d been led to expect?

  “Ellion, braugh.” He stood looking at me, ghoulish and cordial, the spread of his immense hat blocking out half the stars. “Been a while, hasn’t it? Haven’t seen you since Tellan.”

  “What?” I blurted. There are protocols that wizards are taught to follow, should a god or a demon manifest in the course of a working. Senseless utterances do not figure in any of them.

  “Hel-lo, you called me?” There was no rancor in his singsong mockery. No sense that anything occurring here mattered at all.

  “What?” I said again. I drew a deep breath, swallowed, tried again. “I don’t think so.”

  “No, really!” He gave voice to a clear, unfettered laugh. “Oh, wallow in denial if you like. But we’ve got a lot to do. We were only just getting started, that day in Tellan, when that pain in the ass Fintan turned up and blew everything.”

  Fintan had been Tellan’s House Healer in my youth. Ankou—if that was who this being was—meant my duel with Deaclan. The memory settled over me: sitting on horseback in a not-so-vacant glade in Tellan, trying to focus on the invisible shimmer that teased my peripheral vision and listening to Deaclan’s horse approach. The prickle of remembered presence swept over me again.

  “That was you?” I said.

  Without planning it I cast out tendrils of awareness: a half-familiar otherness hovered all around. Racing power, laughter, and sheer wildness infected me; vast, unbridled consciousness tugged at me like an invitation to play. Hunger raged in me again.

  “Yes,” the ghoul said softly, voice rich with promise. “You remember? You were the one wearing the tanist’s torc; I was in my bones…”

  My fingers sought the place where no torc lay about my throat, coming up empty as usual. “I didn’t see you. Just heard you.”

  “Never heard from you after that.”

  Gods, had I called him? How was it possible I had summoned this being without conscious choice—without being conscious of it at all? And not once, apparently, but twice. If a man could summon such a being without conscious intention, what other magics might he work without being aware?

  “I haven’t been practicing,” I said finally.

  “Oh, no.” The ghoul shook his head, dismayed. “If you don’t practice, you get rusty. And you have no fun at all.”

  I didn’t answer. The ghoul sat down, arranging the voluminous black cloak around his bony legs.

  “Boyo,” he said, “why do you have this Talent?”

  A strange question, coming from a being who knows everything about the life of every mortal. I could only infer it was rhetorical, so I drew on the rhetorics I’d been taught.

  “Because the gods created me so.”

  “Fouzh, really?” Even without flesh on his face, he managed to produce a look of utter disgust. “Just recite the parrot’s answer? Come on, dig in!”

  I glanced around. The fire crackled and danced between us, one of the myriad sources of potential pleasure I couldn’t allow myself to touch. Stars crowded to within a hand’s breadth of the circle of light it cast: stretching from the pole above us, down to the ground and seemingly past that boundary. Sleeping people lay all around us; I could neither hear nor see Busadi. But when I looked more closely at Letitia and Amien, I realized I couldn’t see them breathing, though the color in Letitia’s face told me she yet lived. The constant wind across the barren plain had paused. I was no longer certain that plain still surrounded us at all.

  Gods can control even time—and the fabric of the universe. Finally it occurred to me to wonder why no one calls Ankou a god, but only a boatman.

  “You don’t get the credit you deserve, do you?” I said. “How many people are even aware that you’re a god?”

  “What?” he said, bones rattling as he leaned towards me. His voice suggested I’d struck a nerve—which struck me funny, since clearly he had none. I was nearly successful in controlling the smile—and reeled in surprise at his answering grin.


  “Don’t change the subject, braugh. Why do you have this Talent?”

  I wrapped my arms around my knees, allowing myself to sink into the problem. If I set aside the obvious answer—and being obvious, and yet a matter of the gods, was it not likely to be fallacious anyway?—then I was left with a much more concrete question: How—or from where—had I acquired this Talent? Natural philosophy recognizes different flavors of Talent: inherited Talents that are passed in the blood from father to son, including Sight and the druidic Talents that run in some families; the Talents granted by the gods, which allow wizards and windcallers to draw on natural forces and in some cases the Power of the true gods Themselves to accomplish the gods’ Will. It does not account for power that stands separate from or even opposed to the true gods: wizards are taught that tapping into Dark, declaring oneself outside the gods’ Embrace, is the short route to losing all access to power.

  For all I knew that was true for most men. But that theory didn’t account for Nechton, who was vastly more successful than Amien without any aid whatsoever from the true gods—and it didn’t account for the things I’d seen on this journey, for all the old gods Who offered, nay all but impregnated me with, Their Power. Nor for the physical sources of energy that could be mine would I but consent: the stars, the dark fire that lay between them, the cold river of energy that circled the skies above like some inverse of Dóiteán.

  My access to power was not dependent on the Will of the gods. It did not come from Them. The ghoul was right: the easy answer did not apply. But this conclusion led me back to the more difficult question after all.

  Why did I have this Talent?

  “I don’t know,” I said finally.

  “Yes!” the ghoul snapped his bony fingers. “Now we’re getting someplace! If we cannot say why you have a Talent, it is equally impossible to say with certainty what it is for. There is only the question of how you will use it.”

  “What if I use it for evil?”