Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

  "Yes." Cortano's single word was succinct. "You've seen as I've seen; the air is… unsettled." His pause was loud because it was almost hesitant. Almost. "Can you tell me what the air did?"

  "Not with certainty." The scored and scorched wood grain beneath his feet—wood that had once been perfectly chosen, perfectly stained, perfectly polished and tended—held more of his interest as he made his admission of ignorance than floors generally did for Widan. "But I would say it carried at least one, and possibly as many as four, through the fires of your own power."

  "Unscathed."

  "It would appear so." He knew what Cortano would ask for next, and he strongly desired to avoid it. So strongly that he turned without permission to see the open skies beyond the personal chambers of the Sword's Edge. To seek the Lady's Moon, her face still shadowed and veiled, her power coming into its zenith as she approached the Festival that, in the Dominion of Annagar, signaled the one night of true freedom any man knew.

  But that was Festival Night; this was a night, like and unlike any other; power dictated, less power obeyed.

  "The bodies, Mikalis?"

  He could not avoid them, then.

  No spell of preservation had been placed upon them; the Sword's Edge desired—rightly and intelligently—to contaminate them with no foreign magic. Not until they had been thoroughly studied, thoroughly examined. But although the Lady's Festival occurred at the coolest time of year, it was never that cool in the Tor Leonne; the bodies had stiffened and then relaxed, and those parts of them that had been laid open with such casual violence—for it seemed, to Mikalis, that they had had little time to prepare for defense, let alone defend themselves, against whatever force had chosen to attack them—had already begun to decline.

  He recognized two of the men. No, he recognized all of them, but two he had considered—inasmuch as any Widan considers another Widan to be so—friends. Men whose search was similar enough to his own that he might be unguarded in his zeal and his enthusiasm from time to time. They were, neither of them, from the High Court; nor was he. The manners of the Court confounded them all, embarrassed them at times, made them aware of their deficiencies. Magic was easy; politics was death. How many times had they said that, and laughed or smiled bitterly?

  He had not counted. It was over, that easy camaraderie. He was left with death, and the order of the Sword's Edge. It made him wish—Lady knew it, even if he would never utter the words where she might hear them—that he had never set foot upon the Voyanne, for the dust of that bloodstained road now carried the name Mikalis di'Arretta, and he knew what his duties were.

  He knelt, not beside a friend, but beside a headless corpse. He had studied the dead many times, and as he stilled his breath, he found his center, found the distance that had always served him well in the past. He placed his hand on the ruined, clawed chest. Closed his eyes.

  Lady, he thought. Lady, guide me. Give me a sign. Grant me your wisdom.

  His hands burst into flame.

  Had he been any other man, he would have cried out at the shock of it, but he had faced flame before and emerged—as they all must, who have been tested by the Wind and the Wind's guardian—Widan. He held his tongue, held his shock, let that shock turn into something else in the temper of the fire: determination. Knowledge.

  The fires did not burn him; after the shock of first heat, he spoke the words of the triad and they melted to either side of his skin as if the skin of a man who could speak the three were anathema.

  He rose. Cortano's eyes were as black as the night sky that knows no dawn. No one asked him what he had found; he circumnavigated their perfectly still forms as if they were statues, some perfectly chiseled, well-placed stones around which he must pass to find truth. To find their truth.

  The next man, then.

  The next.

  The next.

  All burned at the touch of his hands, the taint of his magic. For he, Mikalis di'Arretta, had indeed walked the Voyanne, and he had seen the shadows that waited by road's edge. They taught him of those, when they would teach him nothing else, because the shadows were the enemy of all men, and not merely the Voyani. No private quarrels existed when the Lord of Night rose.

  Was it true?

  In the eyes of the Lord, private quarrels were all that existed, and strength was the test of the Lord's favor. Lose or win; that was his judgment. Day, Night—did it make a difference? Men with power fueled men with less power; the weak died, in either case.

  Ah. The last body. The last.

  He hovered a moment above it, knowing that once he had finished here he would face the men who ruled the realm. He had no desire to do so; no way of avoiding the task. Power had been granted him in his life, but it was never enough power.

  In the search for enough, a man might do many, many things. He bent; his robes brushed dried blood and rent skin; his hand hovered a moment above gaping throat, wide, sightless eyes. It was almost a matter of compulsion with him, to leave those eyes open. As if the dead could bear witness to the crimes of the living.

  The fires came. He expected no less.

  They came in a pillar, in a column that spoke of blistering heat and scorched earth, of death as the only rightful dominion of the element.

  They had been taught thus: let the elements take control and death is their only dominion. Fire will scorch you and water will drown you; earth will suffocate you and air—ah, air was the wind itself, and no one who lived in the Dominion of Annagar could doubt the howling fury of the winds. Even when they were gentle—even then—a wise man questioned the seedlings that they brought as gifts for another season.

  "Sword's Edge," he said, his living eyes trapped a moment in the thrall of dead ones.

  "Widan."

  "My examination is complete."

  "Are you prepared to discuss your findings, or is there work to be done before the results are clear?" Ritual, that. Performance.

  "I am prepared to discuss the preliminary magics I believe to be at work—pending, of course, the results of subsequent study and possible correction." He did not want to rise; he did not want to remove his hand from the skin of a dead man. The dead, for a moment, were an anchor, and once he left them behind, he would drift away. Into the shadows, where men waited.

  But the shadows, men or no, also waited; the Lady watched. He had trained all his life to uncover the knowledge that granted him power, and with that power came, if not notoriety, than at least reputation; he could not step past the name he had with such cursed pride made for himself. He rose, lifting his hand. Letting the dead go.

  Lord knew there would be more of them, and in far greater numbers; after all, rumor had it that the new Tyr'agar would finally declare his war against the North at the Festival's height. It was not that war which concerned him, although it intrigued him because it so obviously involved the Sword's Edge, a man seldom given to the intricacies of the realm political when magic itself was not involved.

  It was this war. These dead. This Festival. Those masks.

  He bowed to the Tyr'agar, and then, as deeply but not more so, to the Sword's Edge. "These men," he said softly to the man who ruled his Order, wielding it as if it were the weapon after which he was named, "were not killed by a magic that you or I are capable of wielding. Here, and here," he added, bending at the knee without actually kneeling, "are the killing blows, and the killing blows themselves bear the taint of—"

  "Yes, Mikalis?"

  "Of the creatures that we would best know as demons." He had been about to call them something else: Leonne's Wyrd. He hoped that his lapse had in no way been obvious; it was a mis-take that a lesser man would pay for with his life. He did not dare a glance at the Tyr'agar.

  "And you say this because?"

  "You know well why I say it," he replied, his voice as sharp as the Sword's Edge. "You summoned me for the knowledge that I might have gleaned in my passage through the Dominion at the side of the Voyani. This—this rudimentary spell—is one of the
few they would willingly teach me; it is a spell that they teach to anyone who has the capability of learning it. Simple detection."

  "And you are certain that you are detecting what they've chosen to tell you you're detecting?"

  Cortano was silent. Sendari, silent as well, had the grace to wince as the man he served, both as adviser and ally, waited for the answer to a question that no Widan would ever ask. Significant, to Mikalis, that neither man moved to enlighten the Tyr'agar; significant as well that the Tyr'agar did not know enough of magic's practice to render the question meaningless.

  He blunted the edge in his voice. Bowed, letting his knee hit the ground as his chin clipped his chest. "Tyr'agar," he said, the title heavier for the respect with which he chose to burden those three syllables. "No Widan—not especially one who has studied under this particular Sword's Edge—is capable of casting a spell whose nature he does not clearly understand. Our magic is a magic of precision."

  "Granted," the Tyr'agar replied, unfazed. "But the Voyani magic is said to be," and he paused to take in the breadth and the rich, quiet darkness of the clear night sky above them all, "a thing of night and shadow, a gift of the Lady's, a power of intuition."

  "The Voyani are also said to be able to see the future, and they fleece the young and the old alike on the strength of that belief when they travel through our cities." Thankfully, it was Sendari who replied. Sendari, whose voice was as dry as desert night, but less chill.

  Of the three men gathered, he understood Sendari best and least. A ripple creased the former General's brow; it left the shadow of displeasure across the whole of his face, although Mikalis would have been hard pressed to say why; this Tyr'agar was a more cunning man than the last one had been; he gave nothing away.

  "Very well. The Voyani magic, then, has much in common with the Sword's?"

  "It has enough in common that we can learn much of what they teach, and they, much of what we do."

  "And did you trade our knowledge for theirs, Widan?" Now he spoke with an edge in his voice to rival Cortano's. Mikalis stiffened, glad for a moment to be on his knees: it made taking a step back impossible, and the step back would have been the greater gaffe.

  "I traded my knowledge, Tyr'agar, and at that, the knowledge was not magical in nature."

  "Oh?"

  "I aided them in a matter of folklore, an area of study which has often led me to discoveries more germane to the Sword of Knowledge, and the Sword's Edge, than a more direct approach would." He stood slowly, unbending at knee and neck. "And, in turn, they offered me two spells." His glance grazed Sendari's; their eyes met. Between Widan it was understood that no man of power ever exposed the full extent of his knowledge; secrecy preserved power. He wondered if the Tyr'agar would view the… omission… should it come to light, as a lie. Wondered what kind death he would be granted, if that were so. "Two. One, they said, was a minor protection against their ancient enemy, and the other, a detection of that enemy's residual magic. The latter spell can be used as I have used it, but I believe that it is more commonly used to cleanse the corpse of taint than it is to determine the nature of the creature that caused the death. In fact, I would hazard a guess that the Voyani would not think of using the spell as a confirmation of a suspicion, or as a tool of detection; they would feel no such need because—"

  The Tyr'agar raised a hand. The gesture stemmed the flow of words that might otherwise have continued for at least the quarter hour, and it evoked the evening's first smile across the face of the Lord of the Dominion. "You are, indeed, one of the Widan," he said softly. "And I have never been a man with enough patience to listen to the minutiae that rules the Widan's life. This spell is a spell to cleanse a corpse."

  "Or an object, yes—although that object must be an object that has been casually handled or affected by the creature in question; it cannot be one of the creature's manufacture—such a spell as I have worked tonight would not be up to the greater task."

  "What, exactly, does it cleanse the… object… of?"

  He froze a moment. Took a deep breath, tasted the night air as it passed his lips.

  "The demon darkness," he said at last. "The shadows of the Lord of Night."

  Mikalis was certain, as he watched a different darkness settle into the harsh contours of the Tyr'agar's face, that there were shadows just as unpleasant, and just as deadly, as the shadows that had killed the men whose bodies he studied.

  * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Alesso did not ask for confirmation of Mikalis' information. He did not, in fact, ask any further questions. Sendari counted to himself beneath the silence of a quiet sky. When he reached a full twenty, the Tyr'agar bowed to both the Sword's Edge and the Widan who had given them all information of value.

  He nodded to Sendari.

  A world separated the formal bow and the casual nod; Sendari had been, by that simple gesture, summoned; Cortano and Mikalis, by full bow, dismissed. The Sword's Edge did not appear to find the gesture offensive; he, too, had the look of barely hooded anger about the cast of his features.

  They repaired to the Lake for which the Tor Leonne was so justly famous, standing not upon one of the many platforms that had been built for the pleasure and privilege of viewing the moon—or the waters—at night, but rather to the edge of the water itself, on the eastern side of the Lake, where rushes were allowed to grow so that they might catch lilies and make a statement about cultivated wilderness that Sendari and Alesso understood well.

  Their lives were here. On a night like this one, they had crossed the boundaries that separated the clansmen from the rulers, and they had stood, two men without attendants, by waters that lapped reeds and shore, speaking of death, of the will to kill, of the desire for power that did not demand the clan-crime of murdering their respective kai.

  They had come far, these two.

  Sendari bowed to the face of the Festival Moon. He did so automatically, the bend of body in a gesture of respect as natural as breath. Alesso, as always, waited; he was not a man who had ever granted the Lady her due, and as such, his respect was not expected, its lack no slight to her.

  After the silks had stopped swaying in an echo of his motion, the Widan cast, speaking to wind, to water, to earth, and to fires that burned upon a distant pavilion. He trapped his own words in an envelope of magic that separated his friend and himself from the rest of the Tor; tested the casement that held them. After a moment, poised just so, he nodded.

  "Well?" Alesso said quietly, aware of what that barely conscious nod meant.

  "I am not the politician," Sendari replied. "That has always been your role, and Cortano's."

  Alesso laughed. "So you claim. So you consistently claim. But you are Sendari di'Sendari, and he is as he has always been. Come, Counselor. I am in need of your advice."

  Sendari might have snorted, but the deaths of the Widan cast long, dark shadows, and he had no desire to dishonor their new memory when their spirits—or so it was commonly held—hovered in breeze and wind, seeking, seeing, listening to voices that distance and wall and earth kept from their living bodies. "Will you take any advice that you ask for?"

  "I will, as always," his friend replied, in a tone heavy with irony, "consider and weigh each precious word carefully."

  "And singly, thus depriving them of their aggregate meaning, no doubt."

  He was rewarded by laughter, although it was brief. It made him wonder how often he had heard the laughter of the previous man who had worn both Crown and Sword by the edge of the Lady's Lake. The dead kai Leonne had been a cruel and dour man.

  "As you say, old friend."

  "It is a moon night."

  "The Lord has ruled my life; it is not my way or my whim to beg for the favor of a woman who might just as easily smile as frown; might just as easily grant me my desire and drown me in the waters that bear Her name. The Lord, a man understands. But women?" He laughed; the laughter was as sharp as the edge of his blade. "I will not ask the Lady for
Her intervention."

  "You will pardon me if I am not so… proud."

  "I will, indeed, pardon you for any perceived plea you might make. But you are who you are and I, I am Alesso." His smile stripped the years from his face, or rather, it made the years ineffectual; it was the same smile, the same expression, that had so often attracted men and women alike, from the day that Sendari— no Widan then, but merely a seeker of knowledge and truth—and Alesso had first met. Sendari had not been proof against it; was not proof against it now; there was an easy power there, if one knew power on sight. An easy power, and more: loyalty. To invoke it, on the other hand, was as easy as gaining the ear of the Lady; Sendari had it, but could not clearly say why.

  It was the gift of Alesso's presence that the Widan never questioned that loyalty, or the friendship that had been tested by winds and fire over the years. Never questioned, no—but he had tested it, and Alesso had replied in kind. What they had built endured.

  "What advice would you have me give?"

  "What game, Sendari? What game are they playing?"

  The Widan shrugged. "It is to discover the answer to that question that we have been working these past weeks."

  "No, you have been working to discover how they will play their hand, if they choose to play it. The masks are weapons, no more, no less. I want you to turn your mind to the game itself."

  "They play at games of power, Alesso. You are the Lord's man. What power will they gain by turning against us? Perhaps they have managed to damage the Northern Imperials in such a way that they no longer need to wage a good war."

  "And they turn to us?"

  Sendari shrugged. "The Widan were killed protecting one of the Voyani. She is gone—and the spells Cortano used to track her presence have been shattered like Northern glass. They were costly spells," he added, almost as an afterthought.