Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

  "Counter it?" Mikalis interrupted, hands curling into tightening fists. "But—"

  "Two headless bodies were found in the Tor Leonne yesterday. They had been disposed of carelessly, and perhaps too casually. The heads, we did not find; nor could we find markings or rings of any sort that would give us a clear indication of who those men were."

  "Not serafs, then."

  "No. We assumed that someone would eventually lodge an inquiry or complaint."

  "And there have been none?"

  "No. It had only been a day, judging by the condition of the bodies themselves. But the Tyr'agar is a man of… instinct. He had the bodies brought to the Sword of Knowledge, and he demanded answers."

  "From headless corpses?"

  "Indeed."

  "You found them."

  Cortano's brow rose a half inch. Sendari cursed himself inwardly. He was usually far, far more politic than this. Far better able to hide the extent of his knowledge of the abilities of the other Widan.

  Diora. Here, where he could least afford it, weakness.

  "We found answers, yes."

  Sendari did not speak, smoothing the lines of his face into neutrality, into the safeness of silence instead.

  "The Radann have been sent out. The Hand of God."

  It took Sendari a moment, a long one, before the words made any sense at all.

  Mikalis di'Arretta, however, did not understand the exchange, and he was not so well-trained or well-schooled that he knew better than to reveal his ignorance by asking. "Why?"

  "Assume that we were able to put face, and therefore identity, to the bodies in question. There had been no inquiries—and there would likely be none for some time—because the two men who belonged to those bodies were demonstrably not dead."

  "My apologies, Sword's Edge, but I do not understand."

  The Sword's Edge gestured; magic's fine arc lit hands that were rarely exposed to the Lord's glare with a glow that was both white and violet. A cloud rose in the near-airless room, sparking and struggling as if seeking a life of its own.

  They waited; as folds of billowing light coalesced at the cloud's heart, they were given the beginning of an answer to Mikalis' question. Two men stood, arms folded, expressions both wary and anticipatory. They were not tall men, but not short either; they had dark hair and the beards of the clans, but their manner of dress put them near the bottom of the clan heirarchy.

  Sendari recognized them at once. The maskmakers.

  "They were not dead?"

  "No, indeed. They have been working, at our request, on the masks that were to replace those given us by the Shining Court."

  "And the Radann?"

  "We have not received word, but I expect it shortly."

  "You suspect—"

  "Yes."

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  427 AA

  Stone Deepings

  She woke with a start to the sound of horns.

  She was tired of waking that way; stumbling from the darkness of sleep and the certainty of nightmare into a waking world that was distinctly not better.

  Avandar was at her side before she had left all of nightmare behind. His face, in the constant gloom of star-broken night, was pale. "Calliastra," he said quietly, "is gone."

  That should have been good news. Jewel's lips had started up in the reflex of a smile before they froze there, stupidly.

  The horns, dirgelike and loud, gave meaning to the phrase shattered silence. Avandar did not glance up; did not so much as look in the direction that she thought the sound came from. She did. And then she turned, as the first notes were answered, in the distance, by a second set, by a third. At her back, the wind howled, and above it, carried by it, she heard the frenetic growling of stone: Gargoyle.

  She knew, then.

  "Jewel?"

  "What would scare Calliastra off?" Jewel asked softly, in the momentary lull between the rise and fall of the horns' voices.

  "Very little," was his quiet reply. "She has… angered many in her time, but is proof against almost any retribution."

  "And that almost would be?"

  "She would not tempt the wrath of her father."

  "Okay… let's try for the less obvious. As in, someone I wouldn't know." She matched his silence for a moment, and then said, "Avandar, what do the horns mean?"

  He closed his eyes. "I would never have brought you here," he said quietly, "had I known what you would meet on this road."

  "Tell me."

  "Tell you ?" He laughed, the laughter in time with the strongest of the horn calls. "Jewel, of the many I have lost to this road, a handful have met one of the Firstborn. You have met two: Calliastra and Corallonne. I can protect you from Calliastra, and to my knowledge, excepting only situations in which her gardens are threatened, Corallonne sheds no blood that is not her own.

  "But even I have not met what I fear you are about to on this road."

  "Avandar—"

  "They call her Arianne, the Winter Queen."

  "That's what I was afraid of."

  His turn to look nonplussed.

  "I met the Winter King, remember?" She lifted her head. "Why all the horns?"

  "The horns characteristically mean two things. She is on the trail in a Hunt or she is gathering her host. She does not hunt— she cannot now that the ways are closed—except at the height of Scarran, the Old Winter, when her power is at its peak."

  "When is Scarran?"

  "By Weston reckoning? The fourth Motherday of the month of Scaral."

  "The twenty-second of Scaral. Why?"

  "In the lore of the heavens," he replied, in the tone that indicated she already had the information she was asking for if she wasn't too lazy to think about it, "it would be the shortest day of the year, or conversely—"

  "The longest night. I get it. Can I assume it's not—"

  "You can assume nothing within the depths of the Deepings, but the Stone Deepings are the least treacherous that way. I do not believe, however, that it is Scarran."

  "Which means she's gathering her host."

  "Which means, indeed, she is gathering her host."

  Jewel looked down to the road that lay beneath her feet, broken by rock and bracketed on either side by the faces of sheer cliff dusted with snow and ice. "Tell me," she said softly, "that there's another way through here."

  "There is another way through here," he responded obediently.

  "Good."

  "But if you can hear her horns, she will not be taking it."

  "What?"

  "She is summoning the host," he replied, staring into the darkness, "to this road, or you would not hear her at all." He turned, having absorbed that darkness into the core of his eyes, until the darkness seemed to be all that they were. "Why you?" he asked her.

  She stepped back.

  Stand your ground, her Oma's voice said, snapping like a whip's lash.

  Oh, right, Jewel replied, sarcasm asserting itself. What's the worst he can do?

  He stepped into the space she defined as her own, and, taking about half a second for deliberate thought, she slapped him. Hard.

  It was almost worth the look on his face.

  Reality reasserted itself; he was ashen, and the smile he offered her was the grimmest of the limited set he used. "I would never have thought," he said softly, "that you possessed so much power. A pity. In times gone by, that power would have saved your life, and more; you might have stood shoulder to shoulder with the men who ruled the only human citadels to stand against the power of the gods and survive their hubris unchanged.

  "You will, of course, never realize that potential in these diminished times."

  / 'm going to slap him again, Jewel thought, compressing her lips into a thin line. Arrogant sonofabitch.

  She heard her Oma's grim laugh. He won't let it by, this time. He's not your servant, whatever else he's promised. Don't cross that line, Na'jay; he is far older, and far more accomplished in those parti
cular games, when he cares to play them.

  Games? she thought. But she held her hand.

  16th of Scaral, 427 AA

  Tor Leonne

  The dwelling was humble. In appearance, it was poorly kept; the mud clay that formed and protected the outer wall had cracked and crumbled from years of poor care. Odd, that; one would expect men who worked with their hands, who worked, in fact, with clays and muds, to keep their domicile in a fit state. But it was not, in the end, the cracks in the worn walls that caught his attention; it was what they surrounded. A door.

  Doors such as this—heavy, solid wood—were rare; they were found in the studies of most of the Sword of Knowledge; they graced the shrine of the Sun Sword; they graced the private entrances of the palace and the temple of the Radann. But they seldom graced the dwellings of poor clansmen, who lived packed cheek by jowl in crowded, small places. No, the heavy, colorful hangings woven—usually with a claim to clan's colors—by lowborn women were the norm.

  The Radann kai el'Sol, unattended by the usual servitors who performed—as free men—the essential duties of a seraf in the Lord's name, stepped forward. Lifted his hand to knock.

  Light flashed over the entire surface of his hand, like a thin sheen of water across the skin of a man newly risen from the Lake. Heat. He did not cry out.

  None of the men who watched did.

  "Kai el'Sol," Marakas par el'Sol said softly. It was a question.

  "Yes," Peder replied, dropping his hand to the hilt of his sword. Saval was hot to the touch. He looked down; frowned, looked back up at the door—"

  And dived out of the thin, flat-dirt road.

  The door followed, thrown off its hinges with enough force it appeared, for long seconds, to take flight. In the distance, he heard a crash, a scream, another scream. None of that mattered.

  Because although the door was gone, its frame was not empty.

  "Did you think," the creature who filled it said, "I wouldn't notice your stench?"

  "There are four faces," the Serra Teresa said, repeating an obvious fact. "Kallandras, where did these masks come from?"

  "They were distributed in the Tor Leonne," he said quietly, "by men who purported to serve the Tyr'agar."

  "Purported?"

  "I heard the voice," he replied softly. "I think the Tyr'agar's allies—if they are allies at all—work without his permission. It was a single day, perhaps two, and few enough of the masks were given to their intended bearers before the distribution was stopped completely."

  "Ah." Teresa held up the finest, and the simplest, of the four, searching for moonlight through the holes meant to surround the eyes. "Four faces. Four principles. Yollana, could they be somehow elemental?"

  "You are… learned for a clansman."

  "Indeed. And I had a fine, if somewhat brusque, teacher."

  The Matriarch shrugged. "I've thought about it. It seems to me that they'd more likely represent the four faces of mortality."

  "The four?"

  "Birth. Life. Death."

  "I apologize; I am slow. The fourth?"

  "The soul itself, fully freed. Wind. The most dangerous breeze blows on the Festival Night. You've heard it."

  "I have seen deaths on Festival Night before."

  "And you've not seen the wildness that follows them? The stir of the wind, the restless movement of fire, the shuddering of earth?"

  The Serra's fine brow rose delicately. "I have felt none of these things."

  "Then the death you saw took place in some other city," the older woman replied. She rose, stumbled, and accepted Kallandras' help as if it were a natural occurrence.

  "This city has significance?"

  Yollana's eyes flickered like fire as they met Margret's.

  "We are in the heart's circle," Margret said softly.

  "And we are accompanied by two strangers; two who are not, and will not be, of the blood."

  Margret shrugged.

  "You're too casual." Yollana's frown was a momentary heat in the lines of her face. "You'll make mistakes."

  "I am not the one who invited them."

  "You drew the circle, Matriarch."

  "And I should decide. I know. You've made this clear." She lifted her head. Met the Serra's gaze. Turned slightly and met the gaze of the man who stood watch beside her. Kallandras of Senniel. Kallandras of the North. Kallandras of the Lady. Against her will, she thought him handsome, but in a cold, cold way.

  "Trust them." Her voice. Her words. "And trust me," she added, humor creeping into the words just enough to rob them of gravity. "I haven't heard this either."

  "I know," the Havallan Matriarch replied gravely.

  There was blood on the creature's hands; blood across the breadth of his chest. But both hands and chest looked human in appearance.

  It was the face that made a mockery of humanity. Eyes were in the right place, but they were as black as the ebony that adorned the sheaths of fine swords or the kohl that emphasized the eyes of fine Serras.

  "You are such pathetic fools," the creature said, his voice the storm's voice. "Did you think to stand against the will of the Shining Court? You will learn better, in time." It was not the display of teeth—and there were many—that was disturbing; it was the expression itself. The smile that spread across his face grew beyond the simple boundaries of his almost human appearance. "You are too late. The masks are gone."

  Peder kai el'Sol smiled; it was an expression the Lord would have recognized. And approved of. "We did not come here for masks."

  "Oh?"

  He lifted Saval. "We came here for you." At his back, Marakas, Samadar, and Samiel fanned out.

  "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I am summoned to the Court, and I—unlike your master—know better than to disobey."

  Shadows engulfed him in an instant, defying day and day's light. Defying natural darkness.

  He was gone.

  "There is, well, there was, a belief that the four elements and the four faces of mortality were somehow linked. It is an old belief, and sadly I have seen it transcribed exactly twice, both times in a language that was dead before the Voyanne was born."

  "And when did you learn how to read at all, never mind a dead tongue?"

  "You sound like your mother," Yollana replied. "But she eventually stopped whining and started studying as well. It's an art that even the clansmen practice on occasion. Do you want the story or not?"

  "I want the story more than I want the nagging."

  "Then don't interrupt me. Birth was tied to the element of water. Life to the element of earth. Death to the element of fire. And the spirit, of course, to the element of air."

  The Serra was silent. She still handled the mask with care. "That would make sense, Yollana. And yet…" She turned the ivory face over, seeking its interior. It told her nothing, of course. Very much like the people of the Dominion themselves. "You have not told me why you feel that a death in this city on the night of the Festival Moon would usher in the wildness."

  "Perhaps," Kallandras of Senniel said, "it is better not to speak of it at all." He might have added more, but something about the quality of her silence enjoined him to be silent himself. She was listening.

  Mikalis was pale. Pale as moonlight, as if the Lady's grace had descended, and he had consumed, and been consumed, by her. "Sword's Edge," he said, after a few minutes of silence, awkward and crowded with the unsaid, had passed.

  "Yes?"

  "I have not—I think it—You—"

  Cortano was a patient man, in a fashion. He sought power, but in all else was as much unlike Alesso di'Marente as a powerful man could be. He was also less merciful.

  "I do not mean to criticize your choices," Mikalis managed to say at last.

  "No. You have always been wise. Wise enough, in fact, to surprise us all by surviving the test of the Sword." It was a threat. All three men in the uncomfortable and well-protected room understood that.

  "The woman you held captive—the woman you to
rtured—we need her."

  "I doubt that there will be much of her left if the Kialli have chosen to question her; they take poorly to failure, and they are not as patient as I. Nor as careful."

  "She is not without power."

  "She was without power here."

  "You are not Kialli."

  "Enough," Cortano said. An edge of irritation lined the single word, sharpening it.

  Mikalis continued anyway. "We need the Voyani."

  "And their rustic, half-fraudulent magics will accomplish what the Sword of Knowledge cannot?"

  Tread carefully, Mikalis. Sendari was silent, weighing the cost of speech.

  Or he should have been gone. That much was clear from the mild consternation that rippled his ebony brow. But the shadows parted like harem silk, exposing him.

  Saval was in the hands of the kai el'Sol. Peder could hear—as if at the edge of a conversation—something that sounded like words; they were cold as steel in shadow.

  "Oh, very clever," the creature said. The shadows that had sur-rounded his body did not disperse; they grew dense with shape, heavy with gathering power. In just such a way, the clouds gathered water and lightning before the storm. "We were told that you would not be a threat. Luckily, no one in the Court trusts the word of the man who holds your leash."

  "No one in the Court," Marakas par el'Sol said unexpectedly, "trusts anyone else in the Court."

  "I will grant you that, mortal. Accept it; I will grant you nothing else, no matter how hard you plead."

  The words were so slow, so languid and sensuous, that Peder kai el'Sol barely had time to parry the claws that came within a fine silk's thickness of the middle of his chest.

  His armor would bear the scar in his stead.

  The Serra Teresa looked past Margret, past Yollana; Ramdan knelt at her side and unstoppered an entirely unremarkable waterskin, offering it to her. She drank from it slowly, gathering her words as the sky paled above them, never taking her eyes from Kallandras.

  Kallandras of Senniel College.

  "No," he said at last, waiting patiently for the question until it became clear she would not ask it. "Whatever it is you hear, or think you hear, Serra Teresa, it is not a voice that speaks to me."