Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

"You here to kill me?" she asked quietly, shrugging that unwanted hand clear.

  "Na'jay," her Oma said, voice as sour as vinegar.

  "Maybe." Duster's shrug was more pointed than Jewel's, less useful.

  "Maybe?"

  "Maybe."

  Silence. Heavy with the unsaid. Jewel struggled for that elusive breath. This is what love was like. Damn foolish. Be honest. Be honest, for once. You didn't love her in spite of the fact that she was a killer, you loved her because she was one.

  Because she could do the things you were afraid to without thinking twice. Because she could do the things that had to be done without flinching, or throwing up, or looking over her shoul-der and waiting for the hand of Mandaros to descend from the heavens in judgment.

  Because her mother, some backstreet whore who had gone home with the wrong man and had never come out again, hadn't invested her with the same guiding principles that Oma and Jewel's mother had; because Duster, wild and dark, eyes and hair like shadow, voice like fire, was a freedom that seemed like power.

  She looked it, now: Thin and unbowed, her lip dimpled by some old knife fight that had happened before they'd met. Her eyes, gods, her eyes, larger than full crowns, expressive enough that you watched them no matter what they told you. And they told Jewel a lot, almost as much as the dagger did.

  "Yeah," she said, was saying, as Jewel stared. "I think I want to kill you."

  "Too bad."

  Duster raised a dark brow. "You and me in a fight, and you think you'd win?"

  "Not much. But I couldn't have won then, either. See the big idiot to my left? He's smaller than Arann, but still. Mean sonofabitch."

  Duster spat. "Too pretty."

  "Well, yeah. But he's mean anyway."

  "And he's hanging with you? Not that bright. Or didn't you tell him what happens to most of your followers?"

  She flinched. Shouldn't have. Knew it. She'd had to walk the edge with Duster more than once, and Duster knew how to find all the weak spots. "Not most of 'em."

  "No." She shrugged. Threw heavy hair over her shoulder. "Just the killers."

  "You want to get this over with?"

  "Nah. I'll keep you guessing. You have to walk past me sooner or later." Duster laughed. "Besides. You can't call the hired help. They can't see me."

  Jewel grimaced. The starlight was as clear as the knife's edge, the walls of the cliffs to either side sheer and daunting in their barren beauty. "Avandar," she said quietly, not taking her eyes from Duster, which wasn't hard. "Please tell me I'm not talking to myself."

  "Not only will I not tell you that," he replied, "but I will also insult your intelligence by pointing out that it is extremely easy, in the Stone Deepings, to commit suicide. In fact," he added softly, with an edge to his voice that she'd always disliked, "it's the only way to die here."

  "Great." She shrugged. Started to walk. "I hate you, you know that?" The knife's edge shadowed her face.

  Duster laughed. "Yeah. I know." She fell into an easy walk beside her. "Hate me enough, and I won't be able to kill you. Hate me too much, and you won't be able to kill me."

  "You were never this smart," Jewel snapped back.

  "Of course not. I was never you." And she pulled the knife back and shoved it forward so suddenly Jewel only had time to bleed.

  14th of Scaral, 427 AA

  Desert of Sorrows

  The night was not very black. It seldom was in these lands; no cloud seemed to settle across the sky for long, and the stars were piercing in their clarity. Nor were the nights long. The Northern Wastes had that as their advantage, although the Lord Ishavriel preferred the Southern desert to the Winter one. For one, there was life in the South that the Wastes did not boast, and where there was life, there was hunting.

  But at night, the life was hidden.

  Lord Ishavriel turned from his contemplation of the night sky. The constellations, unlike the world itself, had not changed much in the long absence of the Kialli; he therefore took some obscure comfort in naming them all. Humanity named the stars, attaching the brightest of their lights to the oldest of their stories. Even when the stories faded, the names remained, shorn of the depth of meaning.

  But not shorn of all power.

  The longest night was coming.

  He had witnessed it, time and again, in the isolation of the Northern Wastes. He had marked its passing in the Lord's basin, while the Lord devoured what he had forbidden them: mortal souls. Lord Ishavriel had seen the brightest and the darkest of souls offered as sustenance to Allasakar. He had also destroyed a handful of his followers when the sight had driven them to the edge of madness. None of them were among the Kialli.

  The Kialli had memory to sustain them. Memory of those places. Memory of these ones. Memory of the coming night.

  But although they had marked the night, they had not used it. The seasons had been slow to return to them. The Northern Wastes, in particular, seemed a continuous piece of winter and winter's unchanging cold. But sooner or later—sooner, in Ishavriel's case— the sense of the old seasons returned.

  The Winter road would be at its strongest when the night was longest.

  In the South, they called it the Lady's Night. Arianne, in all of her glorious finery, might have approved. He wondered, briefly, where she was. If she still survived. They had warred, her people and his.

  But never on Scarran.

  No, on Scarran, they had often turned their time and attention to this: the desert. Because once, once before mortal memory, where the desert now stood there had been life. A gathering of mortals so vast it was almost impossible to believe it had dwindled into the pathetic Southern Terreans and the inscrutable Voyani caravans.

  It was almost enough to cast all memory into doubt. Almost.

  And that was a direction in which he did not wish to travel. He had much work to do, and little time to do it in. There was power here, buried in the same way a human heart is: beneath the flesh of the world and the cage of the desert. The other Kialli had not been wakened sufficiently; they did not seek from the desert what he did.

  But in this desert, and only this one, all memory played him false. His Lord had decreed, and in anger, the desert had responded. The Cities of Man had been devoured. Lost to the world, lost to the men who had graced both wall and home, they had become part of the desert's heart.

  And no one, perhaps not even the Lord Himself, knew where that heart now lay.

  But those with the magic waking—waking quickly with the passage of days—were developing ambitions of their own. He knew that now he could find the resting place of at least one of those cities.

  He began to cast.

  To his great surprise, the desert resisted.

  14th of Scaral, 427 AA

  Tor Leonne

  She woke from her troubled sleep with a start and rolled out of the bed, coming up against wooden planks on her heels, with both daggers gleaming in the moon's light.

  "Steady," a familiar voice said.

  The shadows resolved themselves into the shape of Elena. Elena with two daggers and no lamp.

  She took a deep breath, and the daggers found their sheaths again. It would be minutes before her heart's beat returned to the steadiness she was familiar with. "What are you doing here?"

  "You obviously didn't hear yourself shout," her cousin said, snorting at either end of the sentence. "I'd imagine we'll see—Ah."

  In the moonlight, Kallandras the stranger had pulled back the flaps of her wagon. He stood like the definition of shadow, his face hidden, his hands free of the daggers that Elena had armed herself with.

  Weaponless or no, she knew he was the more dangerous of the two.

  "Matriarch," he said, and he offered her a Northern bow. "You are well?"

  "Well, yes, and half-naked. Do you mind?" She stumbled into the edge of the pull-down table the wagon boasted, cursing. Her mother had never left it down.

  "Here," Elena said, handing her the shirt that had become a pile benea
th that table. "And here." She paused. "It's freezing, Margret. Are you wind-taken?"

  "No. I'm tired of wearing last week's shirt."

  Kallandras had not moved.

  "Bard," Margret said, as she struggled into the shirt, teeth beginning to chatter as the truth of the night's chill bit a little more deeply. "If you were one of mine, I'd've broken your jaw by now. Can you learn to take a hint?"

  "I can," he said. "Do you know what you said, Margret?"

  "Said? I was sleeping!"

  And then, at his back, she heard a voice that made his sound welcome. "You were sleeping, yes, but in sleep we're at our most defenseless, and the visions we can ignore while waking strike then."

  She cursed as she struggled into her shirt and wound the sash over it, but she cursed quietly. Elena had already bent, albeit briefly, in two. "Yollana."

  "Tell him," Yollana said.

  "There's a slight problem with that," Margret replied, catching her unruly hair and knotting it.

  "Which is?"

  "I don't remember myself."

  "You spoke in the old tongue," Elena prompted her softly. "And you sounded—"

  "Terrified," Kallandras supplied, when Elena's groping for an appropriate word extended that hair's breadth too long.

  "He's right," her cousin said. "Terrified. I didn't recognize your voice at all."

  "You thought I was murdering someone in the privacy of my wagon?"

  "Wouldn't be the first time you'd come close."

  "Ha ha ha." She closed her eyes. Opened them almost immediately. Narrowed them. You could do a lot with eyes. "Matriarch," she said, to the oldest woman in the crowded wagon. "There is no circle here."

  "No."

  "And if someone listens to what we say?"

  "We will be heard."

  Margret nodded. She was silent for a long time, but it was obvious that she was thinking; her eyes had closed again. When she opened them, Elena, Kallandras, and Yollana were still waiting, clustered around her, and she had a sense, suddenly, that she had been in this room before, and would be again, with these three. There was a fourth shadow that was indistinct but present. She wondered whose it was.

  "I was fighting for my life. I was bound," she added, "but the binding itself did not make me feel entrapped. It was as if—as if the binding were clothing or armor; I couldn't move while I was in it, but the fact that I couldn't move made me feel safe." She shrugged. "Not something I'd try when I was awake. I take no responsibility for any stupid thing I do in my dreams."

  "Start," Yollana said unexpectedly.

  "Pardon?"

  "Start taking that responsibility." The old woman's voice was pinched and grave. Much as her own mother's had been when she was being peculiarly serious.

  She knew that tone of voice. It was Matriarch business.

  Frustration made her bite her lip, and then chew on it. Yollana knew it was Matriarch business, but Margret hadn't. Hells, Yollana wasn't even Arkosan.

  "And finish," Yollana insisted. "The dream."

  Margret counted to three. Calmed down.

  "Did I mention that I couldn't see? No? I couldn't see. I couldn't speak." She slid on her boots in the darkness. Took a deep breath. "Lady, I'm glad this isn't a story circle."

  "Don't be. If it were, you wouldn't be in it for much longer."

  "Thanks, Cousin.

  "Let me start at the beginning." She closed her eyes. Let the edges of sleep return to her, as if it were a vast ocean and she a child, forbidden the water, playing with toes at that water's edge. "I—I can't see. I am lying someplace dark and warm, but the warmth is unnatural; the cold is waiting. But I'm comfortable with the cold, the same way I'd be comfortable with the idea of hunger just after I'd been very well fed. It's—" she hesitated a moment. "It's night."

  "Yes," Yollana said softly. "It's night. During the day you would feel the heat at a distance, not the chill."

  Margret nodded slowly. "You've had this dream."

  "Yes. But I've never woken from it the way you did. You screamed, Margret."

  "Because something was trying to let the cold in," she replied. Her eyes snapped open as she stared at the older woman's face. It was said, among the Voyani, that dreams were significant, and as Margret had been daughter to the Matriarch, she had never had cause to doubt it. She wished she could. "Do all Matriarchs have these dreams?"

  "Yes," Yollana replied, "And no. This is your first?"

  "No—not the first. I've dreamed of this before, but never so strongly."

  "Mother's daughter," Yollana said softly. "We do not speak of the dreams among ourselves. It is enough to know that they speak to us in different ways, but they speak the same language."

  The wagon was dark. The night, cold.

  "I dream of it," the Havallan Matriarch continued softly, "as being wrapped in a great cocoon, one of my own making. It is the labor, not of years, but of centuries, of millennia, and I am content. I have been born. I am waiting, in the warmth of the darkness, for rebirth."

  "And it is not the time."

  "No, Margret. It is not." The old woman bowed her head.

  "That's what I screamed."

  "Yes."

  "In the old tongue." She could feel the words, thick and heavy in her mouth.

  "Yes."

  "Because something was trying to destroy that cocoon. To force me into the world before my time. To kill me." "Yes."

  "What was it? What was I dreaming of, Yollana? "Arkosa."

  She started to speak. Stopped. Her face was as pale as the moon, but shadowed in the poor light. At last she said, "Is that what this is about? Is that why my mother—"

  In her voice, he heard the sudden strength of certainty. And fear.

  "Yes," Yollana replied starkly. Her voice hid much, much more than Margret's. Oddly enough, her face did not.

  The younger woman folded at the knees; the thin, flat bed that was, among the Voyani, a luxury caught her weight with a creak.

  "Yollana—"

  The older woman lifted a hand; the gesture demanded silence. Margret was a young woman, the youngest—for now—of the four Matriarchs. She obeyed.

  But only for a moment. Then she began a mad scramble in the darkness, opening the drawers of a large chest that hunkered against the wall, its line softened by night. Cloth went flying like heavy, formless shadow; some of it fell at Kallandras' feet.

  Almost absently he bent to retrieve it, but his gaze in the scant light did not leave Margret's face. He was surprised at the very fine feel of silk against his palms; the Voyani did not often acquire such material for personal use.

  But she found what she sought; she stilled suddenly, the flight of clothes ended. "Yollana?"

  "Turn, Margret."

  She did, again as ordered. In her hands she held the round, fat stub of a candle; wax drippings had changed what must have been cylindrical in shape before fire's touch.

  The Havallan Matriarch spoke a sharp word, a soft one, a sharp word, a soft one. Then she lifted her hands, cupping weathered palms in a single motion.

  Fire came, caught there in the smallest of sparks. She opened her hands and it leaped, as if for safety, to the candle's wick.

  "This will protect us a moment or two, but not more."

  "And not," the older woman added quietly, "if anyone with true power is intent upon listening. It is not heart's fire."

  "No." Margret set the candle down. "Yollana, not long after the Festival of the Sun I met a clanswoman. She spoke to me of my mother's fate."

  "That would be the Serra Teresa?"

  "That would be," Margret said, her expression wry, "the Serra Teresa. But while we spoke, another came to interrupt us. He was—he was far too handsome. I never trust that in a man."

  "I never knew you noticed it in a man," Elena muttered. Margret did not choose to hear her. Or perhaps she couldn't; Kallandras' hearing was second to none.

  "He said, 'We have the keys to Arkosa, and we are willing to grant them to its ri
ghtful owners.' "

  "You did not believe him."

  "How could I? You know the fate of the Cities." Her voice was stark, stripped of almost everything that made her voice her own. Kallandras turned in the darkness. Elena's profile had suddenly become as stiff, as cold, as the daggers she still carried. Elena, the heir to Arkosa now that Margret was Matriarch, and without daughter. "But she told me. I should have known."

  "She?"

  "The blue-robed witch."

  "Ah. What truth did she offer?"

  "She told me that the Lord of Night… was here." Margret lifted a hand; encompassed the outer world with a sweeping, a shaking, gesture. "Who else?" she asked, almost whispering. "Who else has the keys?"

  "Margret, carefully."

  "No. I would see Arkosa destroyed before I would let Him open the door." She turned to face them, her face orange in the candlelight; orange and black but somehow as bright as new silver in sunlight. Faces lit from within, Kallandras thought, were filled with light, and beautiful for it; the light cut. "I didn't know it. I didn't know it until tonight."

  Yollana was silent for a time. They might have been kin, these two, the older woman and the younger. Between them, the candle suddenly sputtered. A reminder.

  "That," the Havallan Matriarch said, breaking the silence that bound them, "is the choice of the Matriarch; you've made it, without vows, without oaths, without bearing witness to the ancient truths. Arkosan blood is strong in you. Aie, Margret, what you've said. What you've dreamed." She lifted a hand to her forehead. Kallandras had known her long enough to know it was not a coincidence that she covered her eyes. "We cannot afford to wait for the heart to find us; we must find it, and quickly."

  "Easier said than done. If it were that easy—"

  "It is that easy, compared with what you will face. I don't know why our ancient enemies chose Arkosa. I don't even know, for fact, that it is the only family chosen. But I know that it will be tried first. And if it fails, we fail."

  "No."

  "Yes, Margret. You will have to trust an older and wiser voice in this. And if you will not trust my voice, trust this: I am the strongest of the seers the Havalla line has had since Michaela the Blind. I know it to be true. We are coming, now, to our final test. Fail, and the Voyanne means—and meant—nothing."