Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

  Their cries were almost enough to drive her back. Almost. But she'd gotten tenacious over the years. The dying hadn't woken her.

  "Two crowns," she said, her voice breaking and reforming between the syllables. "Flanked by swords, and beneath them the Sword and the Rod. The edge of the flag is singed."

  "The Sun ascendant?"

  "I—I don't see it." She swallowed. "I'm looking. I'm—oh, gods, no…"

  He didn't speak. No one did. Had they, she wouldn't have heard them.

  "The screams are…" She shook herself. She didn't want to find the words to describe them. Swallowed the ones that were halfway there. "The dying are dying. I can't hear 'em anymore because the living are screaming. Screaming. I—I've never heard that before. Not from—" She stopped again, mesmerized, the dream in control now. "Someone's warned Valedan to pull back. A mage, I think—he's gone too quickly. Valedan says… says no. The—" She stopped again. "There's a monster on the field."

  "Jewel, tell me exactly what it looks like. Exactly."

  "I don't know. It's—the sun is in my eyes; I can only see its shadow and its shape. It's just—it's so damn big—I think its jaws are as wide as a man—wider. I—someone's riding it. Someone's on its back. I can see—I can see the reins.

  "Reins?"

  "The beast it—it's reined, somehow…"

  "How?"

  "There's a rider."

  Silence.

  "There's a rider. I can—I can see him. No, wait, I can see…"

  No!

  "Jewel?"

  No___

  "Na'jay?"

  She looked up. They all did. Standing in the road wearing her god-born, immortal beauty but speaking in the cracked, wind-broken voice of the old woman Jewel had loved and trusted, stood the Oracle.

  "The time has come to find your own road," she told the younger woman quietly. "You see the truth," she said. "You will always see the truth. But understanding the nature of truth is a difficult business, and one learned only after walking the true path. You will find your world. From there, you must search for me in mine. Come to me, Jewel. She will tell you when."

  Kiriel.

  "Wake now, Na'jay. And come. The Festival Moon is beginning to shine in the streets of the Tor Leonne, and you will be missed if you are not there to greet the Festival's start."

  "How long until the Festival's height?"

  "Clever child. Let me answer the question you have not asked. Scarran is the third and the last of the Lady's Nights."

  She began to walk, and without a qualm, Jewel followed.

  She would remember that later.

  19th of Scaral, 427 AA

  Tor Leonne

  Moonlight.

  So close to full, only the trained eye would know the difference. Sendari di'Marano's—for in truth, although he had been responsible for the deaths of many in order to merit a different title, this was still the name with which he felt most comfortable, and to which he returned, by slip of tongue or careless pen, again and again—was trained, and in both ways; he understood the moon and he did not look away from its slow arc across the sky.

  Mikalis di'Arretta was his sole companion, but this was not a vigil. He stared at the masks that had been laid out against enchanted parchment. They had been oiled with something Mikalis had concocted—a salve of sorts that contained not a small amount of his blood. The wounds had been deep but controlled.

  Sendari was no fool; the pallor of his friend's skin was not due to loss of blood alone. He had offered his own blood to the mixture, and Mikalis had rejected it flatly.

  The Widan did not ask why. This was not an art that the members of the Sword of Knowledge practiced. It was not, judging by the ease with which Mikalis worked—none at all—an art that Mikalis practiced. But it was one that he had stumbled across, or had been gifted with, in his travels.

  What, he thought, did you offer the Voyani that they shared their art with you? He wondered it frequently. He dared, in the strain of the weeks of fruitless searching, to wonder it aloud.

  Mikalis had looked up, eyes red with sleep's lack, jaw clenched in a perpetual frown that made his face a landscape immune to joy. "I wondered that myself, and often," he said, in the voice of a man who has arrived at a truth he doesn't like. "But I think. Sendari, it was simply this: The Voyani see deeply and see far.

  "It was not anything I had done that was considered worthy of their teachings."

  "No?"

  "No. It was what I would do, if the time were right and the portents… as they are." He was pale. He was old. Sendari thought that he would not regain the youth he had lost in the last week. "There is no love lost between the Voyani and the clans, and they understand that history better, I fear, than we."

  "Mikalis?"

  "They see far," he had said then.

  And now, gaunt, he simply said, "Widan, your gift is fire. I ask you… I ask you to do me the grace of using it when the time is right."

  "When will that time be?"

  "You'll know," Mikalis said, and he smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. "But you must satisfy my curiosity. What made you suspect that the masks served a purpose opposite to their function?"

  It was a question that Sendari did not want to answer. But he was Widan. "It is the Festival," he said softly, turning away to protect himself against involuntary facial expression. "And we wear masks during the Festival of the Moon so that we might do as we desire. So that we might reveal our true selves without fear."

  Sendari turned his attention to the masks. Four—one for each of the designs—lay in a quartered circle that had been drawn in more of Mikalis' blood. A battle, Sendari thought, would have cost his friend less.

  The significance of the circle was not well understood, but its history lay at the founding of the empire; the crossed circle was the highest symbol of the oath between two powerful men. Mikalis, after anointing the masks, handled them almost carelessly; he forbade Sendari to so much as touch them, even with the magic that was his art.

  "There is never a time," Mikalis said softly, "When we can reveal our true selves without fear. But, yes, there are those who prey on our hopes and our illusions. Now," he said. "Watch."

  Fire took the edge of the parchment, but slowly, the flames held back by some power invisible to Sendari's trained eye. Mikalis, he thought, They taught you much. For he was looking, and he could see no sign—but the obvious, that of moving fire— of magic. He said nothing.

  The flames crawled in, delicately curling and blackening paper until they hit the line the Widan had drawn in blood and unguent. Then they leaped into motion, dancing higher and higher until they seemed a warm, sensuous wall, a red veil that tantalized without concealing.

  "Watch now," Mikalis said, pale as the moon.

  Sendari's hand found his beard and began to stroke it absently; all thought was focused on what Mikalis was achieving by dint of a knowledge that Sendari did not possess. The contours of the masks, lit by this coruscating, eerie light, were consumed, or so it seemed, by the heat of the flame.

  Another man would have asked a question; would have said something. But Sendari was trained. When the contours of the masks began to change in the dance of fire, he said nothing at all, but his face grew as pale as the face of the Widan who had offered his blood for this rite.

  The simplest mask changed first, taking on the features of a child, pert nose, expression pensive. Where the eyeholes had been, Sendari could see the ghost of a child's eyes, pain in them, tears on the verge of being shed. He hoped for the boy's sake those tears would never fall; he had learned the hard way that they invoked a punishment far worse than whatever it was that had caused the tears themselves.

  But all boys who survived to be men learned that lesson. All boys.

  He started to speak—a mistake—and stopped. The second mask had begun to take shape. A youth's face. Defiant, even angry, but with an anger that knows fear. He had seen that expression before, but never so clearly from the outside;
it was almost uncomfortable to look at. He cast a sideways glance at Mikalis di'Arretta. The Widan stared straight ahead, his expression so rigid it gave away everything and nothing at the same time.

  There was something about that youth's face that was familiar; some breadth of cheekbone, some shape of forehead; it had no hair, of course but the eyeholes were again full, the eyes narrow and dark.

  He knew the face.

  Closed his eyes on the knowledge, but the spell had been cast; it went on, whether he chose to witness or no. And he was Widan, in the end. He opened his eyes.

  The third face was a man's face. Scarred in two places, eyes wide, expression shocked, hurt; vulnerable. He had to look away; he had to look away because he could not bear to see a friend unmanned so completely.

  But it was a younger face; he told himself that. A younger face, a face that had been left behind by the man he knew as Mikalis. He turned then. To watch the last face. And he understood, as it took on the contours of Mikalis' face—the lines, the wind-worn crevices in skin around eyes and mouth—that there was much, much more than mere appearance about it. It had been a slender, magnificent, monstrous face, a thing with feather and gilt, and a nose hooked like bird's beak, but grander, more ferocious.

  That was gone now; it melted into a thing of flesh. Into a thing that was familiar and worse: There was something about it that promised to reveal everything to Sendari's curiosity. Every indiscretion. Every fear. Every weakness.

  It was as if—as if the real Mikalis was being stripped of essence, as if the mask was somehow absorbing him, becoming him, becoming what he would be without the polite and necessary fiction of social grace.

  Sendari turned to look at his friend; his friend was transfixed, utterly transfixed. The hands that had drawn blood and spilled it, had mixed it with herb and unguent and potion, had circumscribed the circle in which the four masks might be contained, their magics examined, now lay almost flaccid in his lap, trembling at the loss of self.

  Loss of self.

  Or the revelation of it.

  The truth in that thought was profound: in the Dominion of Annagar self was like secret: the revelation destroyed its essence. He had watched deaths with less horror than he watched this unraveling.

  Mikalis had asked him to be ready with fire; to use it when the time was right. If the time existed it was now, but he could not lift hand to destroy that mask, that face, that man. He could more easily destroy the man beside him who seemed to be leeched of color and life.

  Paralyzed, as he had so often been paralyzed by death or tragedy, his gaze jumped between the two, trapped on either extreme by Mikalis di'Arretta.

  His father had said he would never make a warrior. His grandfather had said worse, favoring Teresa or Adano easily over the awkward Sendari. And he recognized the truth of it in the paralysis. Anger, and something very like what was on the face of three of the masks he now stared at, filled him; it was as if he now wore those faces, they had become so much his own.

  But he was not a child.

  He was not a youth to be bullied by either bigger boys—or worse, the large, unwieldy horse and the men who had nothing but contempt for a boy with a fear of horses.

  He was not a young man, and the loss of his wife was in the past; her death had opened the door to the only thing he now possessed with any certainty. Power.

  Power.

  Sendari di'Marano had learned to be a political man; had indeed become so politic and so polished as a Widan that his early awkwardness became simple memory. He had embraced power and the study of power, calling it knowledge. He had followed the trail that was set by curiosity; had turned that curiosity into the heart of the fire that he contained now, waiting for the moment. Waiting for the time that Mikalis had promised he would know.

  Waiting.

  And unbidden, while waiting, while seeing these truths about himself and about his friend, while fire burned everywhere, a name returned to him: Na 'dio.

  His daughter had saved his life.

  And—if his ill-loved, clear-eyed sister was correct, and Winds take her, Sun scorch her, she so often was—he had destroyed hers.

  Fire.

  Flame.

  Moonlight.

  "Oh, very clever," an unrecognized voice said. "My Lord was right about you. You are not as stupid as it appears you must be. But I'm afraid what you've discovered dies here. With the two of you."

  Sendari turned, fire gathered in his palms and in the center of his chest, burning there like elemental anger. Like elemental pain. "Oh?"

  "Do you think to threaten me? You? You who are less than servant to the Sword's Edge? Do you know who I am?"

  "You are probably," Sendari replied in a mild voice, "Kialli. I doubt Lord Ishavriel would send anything less for a mission of this import."

  "Clever indeed. Not powerful, of course, but clever. I enjoy the deaths of clever people because they understand exactly what is happening to them. Unfortunately," he added, his features elongating in a way that suggest a jaw that was serpentine and no longer human in nature, "we have so little time. Your friend is dealing with magic that is a bit before its time. Or a bit before our preferred time.

  "The Sword of Knowledge is famed for its curiosity," he continued. "A great pity for you, Widan. You would have seen magic that has not been seen for millennia. Perhaps in another life." His laughter was slick and unpleasant. "No, let me be truthful. Most certainly in another life, but perhaps you will not be in a position to appreciate the results." He stepped forward, hands elongating into lovely, slender blades, jaws lengthening yet again. Nothing human remained.

  He turned to the motionless, sightless Widan who knelt on the floor in front of burning parchment, helpless.

  Sendari di'Marano said something. Or thought he said something; his lips moved; his throat constricted and sound filled the room.

  The fire that he had contained in bits and pieces for so many years, the anger at mockery, the pain at loss and betrayal, the desperate desire to fill the void with something, with the only thing he had ever been competent at, destroyed reserve entirely.

  His weaponsmaster would have humiliated him publicly, and with ease, at such a loss of control. That had been his first lesson: Never lose control.

  It was gone.

  It had been his second lesson as an aspiring Widan, as a seeker of knowledge.

  That, too, was gone.

  What was here: a demon, an enemy, a target—something to look at that was not himself.

  When the fires came, they were almost beyond him.

  And unfolding slowly in mat flame, the Kialli. It was an almost perfect moment. He had never heard a demon scream quite that way before. He listened, the fires burning, the ground now scorched and blackened at the creature's withering feet, until the cry was only a memory.

  A man stepped around the flame.

  Not Mikalis, although Mikalis had shakily gained his feet; not Cortano, although Cortano was the only other man to have easy access to this room of Widan study and contemplation.

  No: It was Alesso di'Alesso, the Tyr'agar. His sword's flat reflected the lamp that now seemed a poverty of light's expression. "Sendari," he said, over the crackle and hiss of flame and burning demon. He said it again, and again, as if he expected the word to have meaning.

  I am not Kialli, Sendari thought, to be controlled by the use of a name.

  But he looked at Mikalis and he understood that a whole life's truth, more complicated and much more difficult to retrieve, could be taken from him and exposed as the masks would expose all. He wondered if, looking at the face of a man who wore such a creation, he would be able to name him.

  Wondered, and knew the answer at the same time.

  Yes.

  "Sendari," Alesso said. He lowered the blade.

  Sendari understood. At last, he understood. The flames guttered instantly. The chill began to set in.

  Do not let the fire control you, his former master had said, For the fevers w
ill devour you in its wake. You have power, Sendari di'Marano; but you have something more precious to me as a teacher: common sense. Wisdom. Use them. Do not let the power use you.

  Shaking.

  He fell to a knee before the only man in front of whom he felt no need to be ashamed of such weakness. "Why… are you here?"

  Alesso di'Alesso sheathed his sword. Smiled, the corners of his lips quirking in a way that they had not done since he had taken the crown and the Tor. "To have a fight," he said, "but it appears I was late."

  "You are not… allowed… entry here. Cortano—"

  "Is not here."

  "How… did you know?" Alesso's arms were beneath his arms.

  "Enough, Sendari. I will answer your questions when you are . able to ask them."

  "But I—"

  "Enough. I think, if I am any judge, that you have the answers that we need."

  "No," he said. "Alesso—a favor. I was too weak to do what had to be done."

  "What favor?"

  "Destroy the circle."

  "The circle?"

  "The burning circle. The masks. Do not look at them—just— destroy the circle."

  Alesso's eyes narrowed.

  "A favor," Sendari said again.

  It was as much of a plea as he had ever made to anyone who was not his wife or the man who could have saved her. Alesso closed his eyes. Nodded. Turned, letting Sendari's knees crumple.

  From the vantage of the floor, Sendari di'Marano saw his only friend lift Terra Fuerre, the sword which Alesso had promised would leave its mark in the history of the Dominion, and destroy fire and masks without hesitation.

  He wondered if Alesso could not see what he had seen, for Mikalis was there, alive, in the faces the masks had become. Alesso missed little; Sendari wondered how he could raise and lower his sword with such destructive ease, but he did not ask; the favor had been granted; the cost was Alesso's to bear.

  As was the weight of the Widan who was his friend.

  * * *