Shattered Dance

by Caitlin Brennan

She looked wonderfully elegant in the grey coat with its silver piping, and the soft grey breeches and the polished black boots. No one could mistake her for a man, but Kerrec had never seen a woman to match her.

  He stopped short. Theodosia would be at court. Was that why Valeria insisted on doing this?

  If it was, it did not seem to dampen her mood. She was smiling, tugging at him. “Come! We’ll be late.”

  A last vestige of wariness slowed Kerrec’s response. He made himself see her clearly.

  She did look well, if thin. There was no sickness in her. The Healer had wrought well.

  He gave in abruptly, letting Valeria tug him toward the passage to the palace. Perhaps what she had to say to Briana would hold the answer to his forebodings. She might not know that she had it, but if it was there, he would find it.

  High court was a dazzle of color and light, voices and laughter and strains of music from every corner of the great hall. The speeches were mercifully over and the dancing had begun. It would go on for hours yet, until the doors were opened to the inner hall and the banquet that concluded the long and regal day.

  This year’s fashion seemed to veer between elaborate gowns of blue and silver and green like the face of the sea, and a palette of night and stars—black and deep blue flecked with diamond or opal or pearl. One or two brave souls had tried to combine the two. For the most part, to Valeria’s uncharitable eye, the result looked like a spectacular bruise.

  It all made her terribly dizzy. As she struggled to steady herself, a cup appeared in her hand. It was full of spiced wine. She had drunk half of it before Kerrec plucked it from her fingers.

  “That,” he said, “you don’t need. Come, there should be fruit ices—though maybe not in this weather—and tisanes and bits to eat that won’t unsettle your stomach.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she tried to tell him, but he was not listening.

  He drew her with him around the edge of the hall. It was set much higher than the rest, a ring of stairs that turned the upper reaches into a gallery. She stopped midway to look down at the dance.

  Humans unaided did not Dance as the white gods did. They had no such power. And yet the patterns below had the same intricacy as a Great Dance.

  Kerrec tugged, but she held her ground. She had to see the patterns. They meant something. If an Augur could stand here and look at them, he would know.

  She felt as if she stood above the sky. Its clear blues and ethereal greens had cracked like a bowl flung on the floor. Black nothingness yawned beneath.

  A flame darted through the vision. Briana had defied the dictates of fashion with a sweeping gown of crimson and gold. Her hair was piled high on her head, plaited with strings of rubies and golden topazes.

  She swooped and spun from hand to hand, knitting together the shards of the world. Her voice rose above the rest, bright with mirth.

  Where she was, there was no fear. Grim faces softened. Her people remembered how to smile and even to laugh.

  It was a great working, a wonder of its kind. Valeria clapped her hands in admiration.

  Briana looked up. Her eyes widened, then lit with joy. She altered the dance with a deft turn here and a dip and twirl there, aiming across the hall to the foot of the stair on which Valeria stood.

  The wildness brimmed over in Valeria. It cast a golden haze over the patterns below her, the storm above and Briana’s face amid the crowd of the court.

  There was something in Valeria’s hand. She did not remember searching in her purse, but Gothard’s stone clung to her fingers. She looked down into Unmaking.

  When she looked up, it was all around her, inside and out. The world was as thin as a film of water, a shimmer over oblivion. In that moment of cold revelation, she knew the mad glee that had possessed her for just that—possession.

  Someone else was seeing through her eyes and ruling what she felt and saw. That alien power set hooks in the Unmaking and tore.

  She flung the stone away in a spasm of revulsion. For a wonder, it let itself go. Even while it flew across the gallery, her fingers stung and burned.

  The stone struck the wall and shattered. Each shard was a piece of uncreation. Out of it rose a shape of mist and smoke that gained solidity as it grew.

  Gothard smiled his broad, mad smile. His eye glanced past her to the far side of the gallery, where another figure in black was standing as if it too had distilled out of air. The priest whom they had all been hunting stood brazenly above them, with his bleached eyes and his long colorless hair.

  The dance spun on below. The music was shrill, its rhythms frantic. The dancers were bound, caught in the spell, dancing their own dissolution.

  That same spell wound like chains around Valeria. The Unmaking was wide awake in her. She had no defenses left.

  She was the key. The dance was the door. Through them Gothard and the priest undertook to rouse the things that slept beneath the palace—old powers and ancient evil, bound to the Unmaking.

  Briana broke free of the dance. Her heavy skirts hampered her as she ran toward the stair, tangling her legs and slowing her pace to a rapid walk.

  Valeria’s power worked itself free of her will and lashed out with all its force. Briana was full in its path.

  Another sprang between. In flesh he was as drab as his sister was vivid. In spirit he was at least as fierce a fire.

  That fire seared Valeria to the center, the core of nothingness that opened to swallow the world. In her agony she willed them both to be gone, to stop, to be unmade.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Kerrec had been watching Valeria with increasing unease. He had never seen her so light or so wild. When it all began to unravel, he was almost ready for it.

  In his wariness he had raised defenses that were not enough—nothing would ever truly be enough—but they were a beginning. As Gothard and the priest took shape out of air, Kerrec gathered every scrap of power that he had.

  Even as he grasped it, it tried to shrivel and fray. The Unmaking was laired in Valeria, infecting everything around her. While Kerrec fought to keep the patterns from melting away, she turned against Briana.

  Briana drew herself together to fight back. Kerrec leaped between them. He had no coherent thought except that he could not let either one destroy the other.

  Unmaking tore at him. He clung desperately to shape, form, pattern. Words grew out of it, a high, fierce cry to the gods of earth and air, land and sea, and above all the white powers of the Mountain.

  That cry rang over the wild music and the ensorcelled dance, strong and clear as the trumpeting of a stallion.

  The earth was opening, its substance dissolving. Dancers shriveled like leaves in a black wind.

  Kerrec called again, even higher and fiercer than before. “Come! By all that is holy, by everything you ever wrought or were, come to us! Lords of the Mountain, Ladies, Powers—come. Help us. If we ever served you, if you ever loved us, defend us now. Save us from Unmaking.”

  He had no hope that he would be heard. The gods had allowed this to happen. They were weary of their creation—even that part of it which was their own selves. They were letting it be undone.

  Even as the thought took shape, Kerrec refused it. One last time he called up his power, spending it without care for the cost. He summoned the gods. He commanded them to save not only this world that they had made but the being they had created in order to destroy it.

  Valeria fought against that terrible destiny. Far down in the heart of her, even through the Unmaking, she struggled to resist the forces that bound her.

  “If you love her,” Kerrec said to the gods, whether they chose to listen or no, “help me save her.”

  White shapes appeared as Gothard had, spread in a wide circle through the hall. Each of them straddled a stretch of nothingness. In the center of the circle the Lady stood, dark beside their whiteness.

  They would stand sentinel at the world’s ending. It was coming swifter now. Gothard danced on the face of it,
dipping and whirling, black robes flying.

  His laughter was sweet and utterly mad. He had little power of his own—he had always relied on stones to heighten it. Now he relied on Valeria. There seemed to be no end to her strength, as if the Unmaking itself were feeding it.

  Despair gnawed at Kerrec’s spirit. As he faltered, losing hope, Briana’s hand slipped into his. Her fingers were warm, her grip firm.

  Riders appeared on the backs of the stallions. Kerrec recognized their faces, but their humanity was stripped away. There was nothing left of them but the raw power.

  Fear gripped him. He could not let go as they had. He dared not. What if he could not find his humanity again?

  What if they were all unmade?

  Petra’s back was solid under him. Briana was still on the stair, and yet he could feel her hand in his.

  Up above them, Valeria was a shape of living darkness. Below their feet, that same darkness roiled. Only the most fragile shell of existence stood between them and oblivion.

  They had to Dance. They could not ask how—they simply had to do it. Kerrec urged Petra into motion.

  The stallion obeyed as he always had. His brothers followed his lead. Only the Lady was still, the center of the turning wheel.

  Kerrec did not know or care what the others Danced for. He Danced to save Valeria’s soul. Every pattern he wove and every shape he transcribed in shimmering and unstable space was for her, to unmake the Unmaking and make her whole again.

  It was a hopeless thing, but he did it regardless. He loved her. He could not bear to live without her. If they were all going to be unmade, at least she could go whole and unbound into the night.

  A blast of Unmaking smote the Dance. Kerrec spun away from Valeria toward the sorcerer who had enspelled her.

  The patterns wavered like images in water. The hall’s edges were fading. He could not bear to think of what was happening to the world without.

  The only stability was in this wheel of white dancers and the bay Lady. They forsook the intricacy of the Dance of Time for the profound simplicity of the world’s own order. They walked and trotted and cantered through circles within circles within circles—rim and center, sun and planets, great wheel of creation that turned in everything that was, from the greatest to the infinitely small.

  Gothard’s dance spun onward, unmaking whatever the Dance sought to make. With each turn of his hand and each stamp of his foot, whole fields of stars died. And all the while, he fed on Valeria, consuming her magic and her substance.

  Valeria had been living in a dream. As it turned to nightmare, a tiny and essential part of her came awake. Gothard’s spell had crushed it far down and nearly unmade it—but not quite.

  She had been fighting the Unmaking for so long that the core of her will had actually grown stronger. It opened its eyes and saw what she had been made to do—all of it, every failure, every deception, every betrayal. Her reticence and secrecy had fed it, and her fits of pique had played directly into Gothard’s hands.

  Her magic was his now. He no longer cared for the petty revenge of seeing his brother and sister die in agony. He had found a better game. He would end it all, until only he remained, dancing over the abyss.

  It was because of Valeria that he could do it. He had no magic left. He had spent it all in his escape from death. What he had, and what he had brought back from that foray into ancient night, was the gift of taking other powers as his own.

  The priests of the One had been feeding him since he came back to life. His disciple, the priest who even now poured out his magic in the hall, had given him the last essential edge of imperial magic. With that he had lured and then captured Valeria.

  There was nothing left of her but a thought. That thought was deeply, abidingly angry—at him for destroying them all and at herself for being such a monstrous idiot.

  Anger burned like fire. Like mortal flame, when it found fuel, it grew.

  There was much for it to feed on. Gothard’s working and the Dance of desperation made the flames leap high. The courtiers dead or dying and the servants swallowed in Unmaking gave it an edge of potent grief. Even as her body dissolved into air and darkness, she looked on Gothard’s dance and knew the perfect whiteness of rage.

  In that perfection she found the white gods. They had always been there, forever a part of her, since before she wore this fading body. They Danced in their circle and so, for a little while, preserved the solidity of things. But the Unmaking was stronger than they.

  If it was so strong, how had anything ever been created? How could any creation endure?

  The Lady knew the answer to that. Maybe, with her sisters, she was the answer. She was the hub of the wheel, the heart of the Dance. Around her the earth turned in its orbit.

  Moon and stars were fading. Light was draining from the world. There was a strong seduction in it, a terrible sweetness in that utter absence of thought or struggle.

  Gothard’s mother had killed herself rather than live in madness. Gothard preferred to kill everything that was.

  He had his fair share of imperial hubris. Valeria the soldier’s daughter, the unregenerate commoner, had no use for that. With the last spark of self that she had, she understood perfectly her mother’s exasperation with foolishness of any kind—mortal or divine.

  She seized the Lady by the shoulders as if she had worn human form and shook her hard. “Enough,” she said. “Enough of this. We’ve learned our lesson. We’ll keep on learning it as long as we’re alive. Now give me what I need.”

  The Lady slipped free of her with boneless ease and stood as the bay mare she most loved to be. Stallions and riders had winked out of existence. There was only the dancer in his madness and the Unmaking in its immensity, and the sturdy, foursquare, insistently mortal form of the Lady.

  She stamped her foot. The dancer faltered.

  Her head tossed. Black mane flew. Oblivion streamed over her and wrapped around her.

  She strained against it. Its bonds tightened. Her eyes bulged. She was strangling—dying.

  Valeria did not know what to do. All she could offer was the honed edge of her temper.

  It slit the worst of the bonds, filling their nothingness with the essence of humanity. With a scream that rang in Valeria’s nonexistent skull, the Lady broke free. Stars sprayed like sparks across the emptiness.

  Valeria felt them as pinpricks of burning pain, as if they had been living embers and her body had been the Unmaking. That was the price she paid for her defiance—and she welcomed it. It proved that she was alive.

  She clasped it tight, deep in the heart of nothingness. It took root and grew, until all of her that still was, was part of it.

  The barbarians had the right of it. Pain was life. Its existence was blessed and its power divine. It burned away the darkness and brought back the light.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Kerrec looked around the circle of the Dance. The floor was no longer transparent underfoot. The walls were rising again and the roof taking shape overhead.

  The Lady was still in the center of the circle. Briana stood halfway up the stair that rimmed the edge of the hall, burning bright in her panoply of crimson and gold.

  A shadow hovered above her. It looked vaguely like Valeria, but its face was indistinct and its eyes were full of stars.

  Gothard had stopped his dance. He stood lightly, poised like a spearman about to cast, with Valeria’s magic gathered in his hand.

  There was no mistaking what he had. Kerrec would recognize it if he lost every vestige of either wits or power.

  This was the last throw, the final gamble. The shadow-Valeria was a shell around Unmaking. If that shell broke, whatever was bringing back the world would fail.

  Again and yet again, Gothard had waged this war through diversion. He was perilously close to winning it. Kerrec wrenched his mind away from Valeria—though it cost him bitter anguish—and focused the full power of it on Gothard.

  Valeria’s voice cried o
ut in pain and fear. Kerrec fixed his eyes grimly on his brother’s face. Hate was easy—and it was a diversion of its own.

  He set hate aside and anger and even fear. The world’s patterns hung on the brink, half made and half unmade.

  Gothard had no magic. That was Kerrec’s focus. Valeria’s magic belonged to the pattern that was Valeria. Gothard’s pattern was empty.

  Kerrec wove the patterns as they should be. Valeria’s magic was in Valeria. Gothard was nothing. No heart, no soul, no self. Gothard did not exist.

  Gothard howled in agony and rage. The white ball of magic had escaped him. He scrabbled after it.

  It wavered as if part of it were still bound to him. His fingers closed around it.

  It blasted him with fire. As he reeled, Kerrec struck—not with magic but the devastating simplicity of his clenched fist.

  Gothard dropped, sprawling on the floor that was nearly as solid now as it should be. He was breathing, but consciousness had fled.

  Kerrec had a brief thought of sparing him. It was not mercy. Gothard would die at the hands of a Brother of Pain, if Kerrec was given the right to decide his sentence.

  Gothard had cheated death once. This was the result of it. As long as he lived, nothing in this world was safe.

  One sharp snap would break his neck. Kerrec knelt and reached for Gothard’s throat.

  His heart was cold as a judge’s should be. His dreams of revenge had all been unmade. This was justice, no more and no less.

  Fiery pain stabbed his back, piercing a shoulder blade and glancing off it. Kerrec dropped and rolled. A knife flashed past his eye.

  Gothard’s priest lunged at him. He scrambled to his feet. One thing he owed Gothard’s torturer—he knew how to shut off pain.

  He balanced himself on the balls of his feet. The priest grinned. His face was like a skull, his eyes pale blue and clouded like a drowned man’s. He darted in, aiming low.

  Kerrec twisted aside. A second line of fire traced the edge of his hip.

  There was no time for this. Gothard would come to himself and escape.