Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

  The Lord values power, and we are the Lord's servants. But Fredero kai el'Sol, the man everyone called the Lambertan kai even though the Radann forsook their blood families when they took their oaths, had been both powerful and above the squabbles of the powerful; he had made no excuses because he had never had cause to need them.

  The winds howled in the ears of Peder kai el'Sol, and they howled with Fredero's voice.

  At his back, he heard Samadar's reasonable tones and Samiel's quick ones. They were as unlike as two men could be who fought for the same goal. Fredero kai el'Sol had always held them in check; they both respected him.

  Peder felt the lack of that unique respect keenly. He had never thought it would bother him, because until this moment, with so much depending on him, it never had.

  He had never particularly liked Fredero kai el'Sol. He had planned, with clear conscience, the death that would remove the sole obstacle between Peder and the only position he desired. And he had discovered that, with the success of the scheme—and it was a very empty success, a bitter loss—he had instead achieved the responsibility of saving the Radann from the plans of the Lord of Night. He had always wondered how the Radann could have once been so foolish that they could worship and respect that Lord, but he understood it well enough now: The Lord of Night's face was dark, but it was kin to the Lord's. They were both creatures of power.

  And power exerted its own influence, its own seduction. It was his bitter truth, because he had lived it.

  Luckily, judgment was not his vocation. Nor atonement. Fredero had given him the Radann, and had made himself legend, by offering a death that no one who had seen it—or heard of it— could ignore.

  "Kai el'Sol."

  He turned slightly; Marakas, always soft-spoken, had lost the gift of speech after Fredero's death. When it returned, it returned somewhat broken. His face would bear the shadow of the loss for longer, Peder thought dispassionately, than most mothers remember the deaths of their infants. Had Marakas not been gifted in his particular way, Peder would have had him disposed of. The Radann could not afford to be weakened by someone whose mourning was so open and so against the Lord's grain.

  But the Radann could ill afford to lose a man whose hands could hold off all but death with a single touch. He held his temper, although his words were often curt.

  "Marakas?"

  Marakas par el'Sol held up Verragar. It was hard to see it—or perhaps hard only for Peder himself—but when it was pointed out, there was the faintest luminescence along the edge of the blade. The cutting edge.

  "I cannot make it out," Samadar said quietly. "My eyes have seen sun for too long. Samiel?"

  "It glows."

  Their eyes met.

  Marakas said, "The sword is alive."

  Significant words from a healer.

  "I did not realize it, until today. Whatever it is we seek, we've found. And finding it has woken the blade."

  The words should have been a comfort. Peder glanced at the shortness of his shadow in the height of the day's light.

  Samadar spoke the words that Peder would not. "And what will put it to sleep again?"

  But Marakas the meek, Marakas the quiet, Marakas the last shed the words as if they were dirty clothing and he about to enter the baths for the first time in months.

  In, Peder thought, six months.

  "I am not certain, Brother," he said, although his eyes lingered upon the line of the blade, upon Verragar, "but I want to find out."

  "Well?"

  The shadows were longer and darker than any the sun could cast. A man stood in their center, dressed in the finest of human conceits: silks of a brilliant dye, gold chains around throat and wrist. At his feet, literally paralyzed by her own fear, was a woman who would perish when her heart stopped beating. She bore no marks, of course; Lord Ishavriel had forbidden them all but the most invisible of torments.

  He had forbidden them this, but this they could, with speed and delicacy, take. In a city of souls—especially souls with this blend of light and dark, this shade of peculiar gray, this uncertainty— that was as much self-control as they could muster. The rules were clear: the powerful preyed. The powerless served, in one fashion or another.

  "Telkar," the creature said.

  Telkar ad'Ishavriel never acknowledged his Lord's name when his Lord was not present. He looked down upon the prone form of the fallen woman; her hands were trembling as he forced her to slowly unwind the silks that covered her body. The humiliation was delicate; for one newly come from the Hells it was almost beneath notice.

  But Telkar had arrived early, at his Lord's behest, and he had been held in check a long time. This was as close to freedom as he had yet come in a world so full of textures, shades, colors, light. The hunger was more than visceral; it had become so strong there was almost nothing left.

  "I am almost done."

  "There is… trouble."

  "Ishavriel-Malak," he replied, using the subservient form of the name, "you are beginning to annoy me."

  "A pity," a voice said, in a language that was not, and had never been, of the Kialli. "As a servant, he is wiser than the master."

  The woman at his feet was forgotten in that instant, as was his momentary irritation; all hungers were taken by the so-called Southern winds. The shadows were torn from the wall and ground, from the element of sky he had taken, and from his victim, before he could finish pivoting in the direction of this unforeseen enemy.

  The sun rose in an instant over the poorest streets of the Tor Leonne, and the clansmen there—men who were often forced, in penury, to sell their children to the seraf houses—saw the light, and knew that god no longer dwelled in the heavens alone.

  They had seen evil before, but they had never seen it stripped of familiar form, familiar word, familiar gesture. They had seen it before—and behind—swords; had seen it in the evidence of butchery along the roads during the hungry season, where quick death might have served the bandit's purpose just as well; had seen it in the death a man gives his wives for the purpose of his guest's pleasure; had seen it in a multitude of ways, each act a shard of a broken whole.

  They had seen it in themselves, had never named it, had perhaps used and worked with it in their time. Shadows, secrets, lies—elements of the foundation upon which power was built.

  But when Verragar called the sun's light, and the sun's light came, the shadows were burned away in its harshness. They saw themselves, for a moment, truly—but before they could be broken by that vision, they saw something more: what they could, what they must become.

  The Radann held drawn swords.

  Verragar sang first, and perhaps because of it, hers was the strongest voice, the brightest light. Radann Marakas par el'Sol fell silent as his flame washed over the creature the sword called demon, and when the flames parted, there was nothing human left.

  Saval, Arral, and Mordagar joined in.

  There were two demons in the streets of the Tor Leonne. And four angels.

  Peder kai el'Sol heard the screaming as the flames stripped the disguise from the only enemies that he now had. Politics were forgotten. The streets of the city consumed them; there was the creature, with his great, furled wings, his elongated body, the fine, long arms that ended in a set of gleaming claws. His skin gleamed in the sunlight as if it were forged and polished.

  Ebony was paler than the whole of his eyes.

  "You do not know what you interfere with, mortal," the creature said, speaking in a language that resonated with depth and history—a language that Peder both heard as itself and as Torra. Saval's gift.

  Had he desired Balagar? He would never feel that envy again. No man would take Saval from him while he lived, nor force his hand to another blade while he could wield one.

  "This is impossible. Telkar—we were told—"

  "That the mortals had forgotten our existence." The creature's smile was a predator's smile, a movement of long jaw and sharp teeth that looked nothing like a hum
an expression of enjoyment or mirth, but nonetheless suggested it. He gestured.

  To Peder's great surprise, a sword came to his clawed hand, emerging from air and darkness. "Did you expect Ishavriel to tell no lie? You are blood-bound for a reason."

  "Telkar—"

  "They are mortal. We are not. They recognize us because they have shiny toys. But they are not among the wise; they do not understand the nature of their weapons, and I see that they are only barely fit to wield them. One of them," he said, and his eyes cut the distance between Peder and the men who followed his orders, "will not be tolerated long."

  The kai el'Sol understood exactly what was meant by the words. The sword he held had a song, but no voice; no method of telling him that he was, or was not, worthy as a bearer. And if he was not?

  Fredero kai el'Sol had died for less.

  Had died, in the end—Peder understood it now, completely, exactly—for more.

  "If I am not worthy of the sword," Peder kai el'Sol said coolly, "the sword will judge." It almost cost him his life.

  The beast descended, as if from a height, the red flame of his sword a living creature.

  A creature answered by white flame, by light, by heat. Saval rose at once, a hair's breadth faster than Peder himself. They clashed, these swords.

  The screams at his back grew louder and lesser; most, wise enough to understand how close they stood to death, had fled, but those that fear paralyzed remained as a chorus.

  The second creature, the one that had seen them and offered a warning, was as meek as the merely mortal. One moment he was there, and the next, gone; the shadows swallowed him, but did not hide him. Nothing could hide one of the demon kind from the Light of the Lord.

  To the music of fear, they fought, four men and one demon. Swords rose and swords fell. White light, white fire, white heat; red blood. They were silent, and when the creature laughed—and he laughed once, they allowed him that—the silence became heavy with anger, with determination. The Radann were not Northern priests; they were the Lord's men. They had been trained not to dither and plead and stay for hours on bended knee, but to fight. To kill.

  Marakas, healer-born, the weakest of the four, took the creature's arm, separating it at the shoulder with a clean stroke of blade, a savage movement. The creature grunted and replied; the great pinion of either wing snapped shut and flew wide in an eye blink. Marakas was thrown wide; Verragar's light was extinguished as the sword skittered against the dirt and stone over which they fought.

  Peder heard what he thought was the sound of snapping bone; over the clatter of mail it was hard to tell what, if anything, had broken. There was no other acknowledgment of pain.

  But he was the kai el'Sol, not Samiel, who was next to wound the creature, and not Samadar, the oldest of their number. They cut flesh and were cut in turn, their armor becoming his weapon and not their defense as it began to take heat and hold it.

  One of you will not be tolerated long.

  He saw the flame in the creature's eyes, the flame on the edge of Saval. Fire such as this he had seen at the end of the Festival of the Sun, when the kai el'Sol had bearded the newly crowned Tyr'agar while standing in the very symbol of the Tyr's power.

  Fredero had defined the Radann, and Balagar—he saw this clearly now—would take no less a man.

  But he had Saval. He would prove himself worthy of Saval.

  With a cry that was half roar and half something he would not—could not, for he was the Lord's man—name, he called fire and light. They came in a winding twist of motion that reminded him of the wind and the wind's price.

  The creature's roar was a marvel of contempt and amusement. He called fire and the light of it dwarfed the bonfires made of bodies at the end of great wars.

  Kallandras looked up an instant before the sun's light changed. To either side, his uneasy allies did the same, stiffening and paling in the glow of red light. It was day's height.

  "Is this how it starts?" Yollana asked him.

  "I thank the Lady every day," he replied, his voice remote, his eyes upon the Tor Leonne's lower streets, "that I was not born a seer. I do not know where it starts or where it ends, Matriarch."

  Margret said nothing; the light faded, the blue sky of sun's height returned. Watching her, Kallandras was reminded that the harshest of shadows cast across a person's face were never banished by light.

  Against such a fire as the demon's were three swords and three men. But the three were the Lord's men, and they were his most powerful. They attacked in concert, their white light not extinguished by his red, even if it could not be seen across as great a distance.

  Samadar was pierced by steel, his flesh puckered by fire. The pain forced a grunt from his lips, but the sword never faltered.

  Samiel took the creature's left pinion.

  Peder took his right.

  They struck as one man, and when the creature reared up, his throat exposed in a roar that would have shamed the mythical dragons of the Northern wastelands, Mordagar pierced his chest.

  And Verragar, once again in Marakas' grip, rose to sever his spine.

  The roar became a scream. The creature's form dissolved in the red, red glow of the fire it had summoned, eaten from within by both blade and light. Its last act was to lose form entirely; fire spread in a sudden blaze of heat, red leaving black in its wake.

  It was meant to be their deaths.

  Baptized by flame and fire, blackened by the ash of their sur-coats and the tendrils of hair and beard, four men were reborn in the poorest streets of the Tor Leonne. Three stood, one knelt; the body of their enemy dissolved and was taken, as all things were in the Dominion, by the wind.

  The Tyr'agar was resplendent in ceremonial robes; white and gold lay beneath the face of the sun ascendant. The merciless blue of sky edged his robes, and the fall of two swords, one long and one short, had been perfectly arranged so that the casual observer might understand that this ruler was prepared for war. They caught the eye first, before sun, before robes, before finery.

  He noted this dispassionately; the seraf who had been bold enough to aid him had been—of course—trained by the Serra Teresa di'Marano. Like a Northern miner, she could sift through the driest of dirt and find, cast aside by Lord and Lady alike, a perfect gem.

  This seraf, a young man with broad shoulders and absolutely exquisite grace, was bred for personal service. He had been offered to the Tyr'agar by the kai Marano, Sendari's older brother. He had been accepted, his name—Aaran—unchanged.

  The Serra herself seemed neither pleased nor displeased by the offering—which meant, if Alesso was any judge of the sternness of her mood, that she was in fact ill-pleased. The seraf that she traveled with was now an older man, and almost at the end of his useful service. He could be consigned, as the serafs were, to the Lady, having fulfilled the serafs course and acquitted himself with visible honor. He was attractive in the way that older men are: he had about him that aura of wisdom so unsuitable, and therefore so beguiling, in a seraf.

  He was not embarrassed to know the serafs name, although he would never speak it aloud in the presence of others. Serafs' names were matters of practicality, but only those valued as wives were acknowledged to have them. And Alesso had taken no new wives.

  Ramdan.

  The youth had the same breadth of shoulders and the same height that the older seraf possessed; he had hints of the same wisdom. A fine gift. A fine gift, indeed, and one he was pleased to have accepted.

  It was the only pleasant thought afforded him by the day's events.

  "Tyr'agar."

  He nodded, cool as the waters of the Lake, but infinitely less pleasant.

  The Tyr'agnate of Oerta, Eduardo kai di'Garrardi, bowed, the gesture as pleasant and voluntary as the Tyr'agar's nod. Three serafs moved immediately to offer this most important of dignitaries the waters for which Alesso had risked so much.

  He accepted the water—and then passed it, untasted, to one of the four Tyran he was
, by custom, allowed in the presence of his Lord.

  Silence fell like a sword, stilling the words of any who had seen the Tyr'agnate's action. Like contagion the silence spread to those less aware; the platform, with its cerdan, Tyran, and serafs, with its high clansmen, and Widan, became more silent than the Lake itself.

  Even the winds deserted them.

  The Tyran so honored—and so singled out—took a slow, loud sip of the water, lifting a hand to mouth and back as if the goblet offered him were a common tin cup and not the finest of Northern crystal. Had any cared to think the Tyr'agnate's action a gesture of boorish ignorance, the Tyran's action denied them the ability. He handed the cup back to the Tyr his life was sworn to.

  Then, and only then, did Eduardo choose to drink.

  / will kill him, Alesso thought; it was an effort to contain the words, to cage them. But not so great an effort as it was to keep his hand from the hilt of his sword; to deny Eduardo the satisfaction of his anger.

  An angry Tyr was seen as weak if he did not act, and he could not afford to kill this man, not yet. Nor could Eduardo openly move against him. They were separated—as if they were errant young men—from the fight they both desired. But that would not always be the case.

  He waited a moment; when words did not return to the platform of the Summer Sky, he turned to the Sword's Edge. He had the privilege of seeing a very rare anger minutely change the lines of the older man's face. Eduardo would miss that, of course. He would also miss the fact that when motion began to return to the serafs whom Alesso owned, and from them to the gathering at large, that it did not return to the hand that had stopped in mid-curl around strands of a beard.

  Unfortunately for Alesso—and Eduardo, although he neither knew nor cared—that anger, on a day like this, meant one thing: Cortano was thinking of the Serra Diora. And he only thought of her—or spoke of her—when he wished her dead. He was wise enough, political enough, to understand the folly of his desire. But to see the Tyr'agnate behave so disgracefully over a girl, and to see the Tyr'agar he had personally chosen to support join Garrardi in this struggle, was enough to make him think the political risk of her death worth taking.