Spear of Heaven

by Judith Tarr

  SPEAR OF HEAVEN

  Avaryan Resplendent Volume II

  Judith Tarr

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  August 27, 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-284-6

  Copyright © 1994 Judith Tarr

  Rudyard Kipling would have known where this came from.

  So would the lamas of Shangri-La.

  1

  The child slept, and dreamed of Worldgates. In her dream she sat in front of one, right on the threshold, and watched the worlds shift and change. She liked the green ones, and the ones that were all sea-wash and blown spume, and the ones where it was always morning, with the sun just coming up, and birds—or things like birds—singing in the unchanging light. But the fire-worlds were splendid, and the worlds of ice, though they made her shiver, and the worlds that were always night, with torrents of stars.

  They were always changing, never twice the same. A million worlds. Mother said it, and Great-Grandfather, and Vanyi who ought to know, since they were Vanyi’s worlds, or Vanyi’s Gates at least. Kimeri did not know what a million was, except that it was very many.

  She dreamed of a million worlds, and of sitting as she would have liked to sit if there had not always been Guardians to chase her away: not quite touching the Gate, and feeling all the other Gates inside herself, and the worlds inside of them, millions and millions and millions. She made a song of it, because songs were what she liked to make, this cycle.

  And as she sat and watched and sang, one of the Gates was gone. Like that. One moment there, like a bead on an endless string. The next moment, nothing. Except . . .

  She would cry, she thought, when she woke up. But not until then. In her dream there was no one to notice, no one to hold her and pet her and tell her there was no need to cry.

  She hugged her dream-knees to her dream-chest. The dead Gate was hurting worse now. It had not hurt at first; it had been too different, and too surprising. She had not known what it was until she felt how it crumbled and fell in on itself like the dry husk of an insect that she had found on a windowsill, that Great-Grandfather had said was dead. Dead was gone, except for a smear of dust and a bit of a wing.

  Not gone, said a voice that was not a voice, not really. It came from inside, from the place where Gates were. Not gone. Not dead. I am. I am . . . I still . . . help me!

  Kimeri tried to answer, but the voice, whoever owned it, could not hear her. Help me, it begged. The Gate—I can’t— help me!

  “I can’t,” said Kimeri aloud, because maybe that would make the voice hear. “I’m too little. I can’t do anything.”

  Help me, the voice said. Help me.

  No matter if it was a dream. Kimeri hurt. The Gates hurt, because one of them was dead. And inside the dead Gate was—someone. A voice. A person who could only cry for help, and could not hear when Kimeri answered. She was too little, and she was only dreaming. She could do nothing at all.

  She began to cry.

  oOo

  It was universal law, Vanyi thought. In time of crisis, everyone capable of contending with the disaster was either asleep, abroad, or overburdened. A Gate was broken, a Guardian lost, and the one Guardian who could be spared to watch over the inmost of the nine Gates in the Mage-hall of Starios was a silly chit of a boy with a horror of young children. Particularly young children who, he insisted, had appeared out of nowhere, sound asleep and weeping in it, on the threshold of his Gate.

  The Master of mages in the Empire of Sun and Lion, Guardian of all the Gates, priestess of Avaryan, right hand of the emperor who sat the throne in Starios, went in her own person to the hall of the ninth Gate, and found the child as the boy had said, drawn into a knot almost within the Gate.

  In spite of herself, Vanyi caught her breath. Even a handbreadth more, and the Gate would have taken the child.

  The young Guardian had fled. “Coward,” Vanyi said to the space where he had been. The emperor’s youngest heir—for it was she; the tangle of honey-amber hair was unmistakable—was deep asleep, and crying as if her heart would break.

  Vanyi lowered herself stiffly to the floor, gathered the dreaming, sobbing child in her lap and rocked her, crooning, “There, little terror. There.”

  The little terror woke slowly, hiccoughing, choking on tears. Vanyi shook her to steady her breathing, and slapped her once, not too hard, to get her attention.

  Her eyes opened wide, amber-gold and quite beautiful, even bleared with weeping; and angry, too, and bright with stung pride. “I’m not a baby,” she said fiercely.

  “Did I ever say you were?” Vanyi asked in her driest tone.

  That, as Vanyi had hoped, subdued the child’s temper, if not her pride. But she could hardly help that, with the breeding she had.

  “Now,” said Vanyi, “suppose you tell me what you’re doing here.”

  Kimeri looked about. She did not seem surprised, but then Vanyi had not expected her to. She would have crept in, of course, when the Guardian’s back was turned, and fallen asleep watching the Gate. She had done it before. She would do it again, no doubt, as long as her keepers persisted in falling asleep at their posts.

  “I was asleep,” Kimeri said. “I didn’t mean to be here. A Gate died, Vanyi. It hurts.”

  Vanyi told herself that that did not surprise her, either. Seeing that the child was who she was, and what she was.

  “A Gate died,” Vanyi agreed somberly, “and you should have stayed home, where you would be safe.”

  “I’m safe here,” Kimeri said. “Gates won’t hurt me. Even Gates that die.”

  “O innocence,” said Vanyi. Innocence stared at her with eyes the color of amber, in a face the color of old ivory. It was too young to understand. She smoothed the amber curls and sighed. “I had better return you to your keepers before they add their own panic to the rest.”

  “They don’t know I’m gone,” Kimeri said. “You won’t tell them, will you? They’ll carry on till nobody can think.”

  “You should have thought of that before you escaped,” said Vanyi.

  The golden eyes lowered. Vanyi knew better than to expect that the child was chastened. Quelled, yes. For the moment. It would have to do.

  oOo

  The Guildhall was rousing to uproar as awareness of the Gate’s fall spread outward. Vanyi was needed in a dozen places at once, for a dozen different tasks, all of which only she could perform. No Gate had ever fallen except as the Guild willed it—not ever, not in a thousand years. The shock resonated from Gate to Gate, from Guildhall to Guildhall across this one of all the worlds.

  It had not gone outward yet, she thought, affirming it as she knew how to do, from within. The worlds beyond this were quiet still, untroubled by the fall of a single Gate among the many. But that quiet would not hold. Her bones knew it, stiff with cold that was only in part born of the night’s chill and her own advancing years.

  All of that beset her; and she rose with the child in her arms, and said, “Come, then. I’ll take you home.”

  Home for Kimeri—ki-Merian, Merian of Asan-Gilen as she would be when she was older—was the palace that rose in the heart of the city as the Guildhall rose on its sunset edge. Vanyi brought her to it on the back of a mettlesome seneldi mare, riding without bridle or saddle, since fetching either would have meant waking the groom who slept in the back of the stable. Kimeri would have preferred a mount of her own, but Vanyi was in no mood for such nonsense.

  The guards at the palace gate were awake and too well trained to ask questions. They barely widened eyes at the sight of the Master of mages mounted bareback and bridleless with a small amber-gold child riding behind. They bowed low to the mage, a fraction lower to the child, and let them in without a word.


  2

  “I am going.”

  “You are not.”

  There was a pause. It was not the first, nor was it likely to be the last in an argument that had gone on since the night was young. It had begun with the two of them sitting reasonably civilly face to face across a game of kings-and-cities. The game now was long forgotten, and they were on their feet, he by the window where his pacing had taken him, she by the table, stiffly still, with her fists clenched at her sides.

  “I will go,” she said. “You gave me leave.”

  “That was before the Gate fell. The Gate which, I should remind you—”

  “Yet again,” she muttered.

  He ignored her. “—has just this night fallen, and none of us knows why, or how. I won’t risk my heir in an expedition that has gone from mildly dangerous to outright deadly.”

  “Oh, and am I your only heir?” she demanded with bitterness that was as much a part of her as her golden lion-eyes. “I’ve done my dynastic duty, Grandfather. I’ve given you another royal object to protect until it stifles.”

  He turned his back on her and stared out of the window into the dark. He all but vanished against it, dark as he was, and dressed in plain dark clothes as he had come from a walk in the city. The only light in him was the frosting of silver in his hair, and little enough of that.

  She was all light as he was all dark: all gold, golden skin, golden eyes, golden hair cut at the shoulders and held back from riot by a fillet of woven gold. But, as he turned to face her again, he had the same eyes, lion-colored, and much the same face, black-dark to her honey-gold: strong arched brows, strong arched nose, stubborn chin. His beard was greyer than his hair, but not overmuch.

  “Daruya,” he said a little wearily, “no one ever forgets that you have given the empire an heir. It’s still a remarkable scandal.”

  “What, that I wouldn’t name her father, let alone marry him? Believe me, Grandfather, you wouldn’t want him playing consort to my imperial majesty, when I come to it, which pray god and goddess won’t be for long years yet. He’s a beautiful, brilliant political idiot.”

  “And married,” said the emperor, “to a woman older than he, much wealthier, and possessed of considerable power in the western courts.” Her eyes had widened. He smiled. It was not a gentle smile, though there was affection in it, and a degree of amusement. “Yes, I know his name. You thought I wouldn’t learn it? I’ve had four years to hunt him down.”

  She sucked in a breath. “You haven’t killed him.”

  “Of course not,” the emperor said. “What do you take me for?”

  “Ruthless,” she answered.

  He laughed with a tinge of pain. “Well, and so I am, when I have to be. The man’s an idiot, as you say. And you knew it when you bedded him?”

  “I knew that he was fertile, though even if he hadn’t been, I was sure the god would find a way to alter it. I wanted his looks and his intelligence for my child.”

  “And you didn’t want a man who could bind you with the name of wife.” He came back to the table, studied the pieces laid out on the board, shifted the black king to face the golden warrior. “I could have forced you to marry a man whom I chose, to cover the shame of a child born without a father.”

  “There’s no such shame,” she said, “in the tribes of the north.”

  “Then it’s a pity you aren’t a tribesman, isn’t it?” He looked into her furious face and sighed. “We’re all rebellious in our youth. My rebellion was to refuse to rule the western half of my empire, then to insist on ruling only there, and nearly breaking the whole with my stubbornness. My son’s was to hunt aurochs at a gallop in country too rough for speed, and to break his neck doing it. Yours is mild to either of those. You gave us a scandal, no more, and an heir of your body. No breaking of necks or empires; merely of strict propriety.”

  She snatched the warrior from the board and flung it at him. He caught it in a hand that flashed gold—like her own, like her daughter’s. Like that of every heir to the throne of the Sun. They carried gold in their right hands like a burning brand, born there—set there by the god, the priests said. She did not know. It burned, that she knew, and worse, the more she fought it.

  “I’m going with the mages,” she said. “They’ll go still, you’ll see. They have to find out what broke their Gate. I can help them. I have a gift for Gates, and for that kind of magery.”

  “So do they,” he said, “and they aren’t heir to the empire.”

  “You promised me,” said Daruya. “When you refused me the right of Journey, when I became a priestess—you promised that I would have one later.”

  “As I recall,” he said, “what I refused you was permission to run away to sea when you were pregnant with ki-Merian. I very nearly had to chain you in the temple then.”

  “But you didn’t,” she said. “I stayed home. I did my duties like a proper humble heir to the throne. I delivered my daughter, I nursed her myself, I raised her and weaned her and taught her what I could. Now she’s old enough to be separated from me. I’ll leave her here; I’ll surrender her to you. But I’m going with the mages.”

  “No,” said the emperor, impervious to her sacrifice. “Not since the Worldgate broke.”

  Daruya heard a sound behind her. She whipped about.

  Vanyi smiled thinly at her. Daruya flung up her hands, the one that was simple human flesh, the one that flashed gold. “You, too, Guildmaster? And what did he pay you to keep me in my cage?”

  She gave Vanyi no chance to answer. Some time after she was gone, while the storm of her passing was still rumbling on the edge of awareness, Vanyi said, “Well. I presume you’ve told her she can’t go.”

  “You always were unusually perceptive,” said the emperor. He was not angry, nor particularly bitter. Wry, that was all, and a little sad. “I can’t let her, of course. Whether or not she’s been so generous as to leave an heir to come after me.”

  “Which, from the look of you, won’t happen for another forty years at least.” Vanyi spoke without envy. She had not grown old with excessive grace. Her hair, once the color of sea-moors in autumn, red and brown and gold intermingled, was winter-grey. Her pale skin was gone paler with age, the lines of laughter and of care drawn deep. She looked her threescore years and more.

  He, who was but a little younger, seemed a man still in his prime. He made a gesture as if to deny her, but she stopped him. “No, don’t say it. We’re what our breeding makes us. I like to see how little you’ve changed, except to grow into yourself. It comforts me.”

  She left the door and came into the room, and sat in the chair that Daruya had long since vacated. He stood with his hands on the back of his own chair, staring down at her from his not inconsiderable height. “You think she should go?”

  “No,” said Vanyi. “Not in the least. While the way was open, while it was a simple expedition to the other side of the world, what better ambassador than the heir to the empire? But now . . . we don’t know what we’re going into. We don’t even know what broke the Gate.”

  “And yet you’ll go?”

  “You can’t forbid me,” she said calmly.

  “I wouldn’t try,” he said. “That was our pact from long ago. The empire for me. The Mageguild for you, and the mastery of Gates. Alliance wherever we could. But where we could not . . . well. We’ve never been enemies, have we?”

  “Once or twice,” she said, “we did disagree on policy.”

  His lips twitched. “Rather more often than that, I recall. But enmity—we never came to that.”

  “No,” said Vanyi. She sat back in the tall chair and sighed. “I shouldn’t even be here. The Guild is in an utter taking. You’d think it had never seen a crisis before.”

  “It’s got used to having you in command,” he said.

  “Don’t flatter me,” she said with an edge of annoyance. “I’m running out on responsibility, much as your granddaughter would love to. Did you know that your great-granddaughter s
pent the night in the Guildhall, on the threshold of the ninth Gate?”

  She had taken him completely by surprise. He looked so startled that she laughed; and that roused his temper, which only made her laugh the harder.

  He shook her into some semblance of quiet. She looked up into his face, suddenly so close. He would kiss her, she thought. It was a fugitive thought, from nowhere that she could discern. It fled as swift as it had come, as he let her go and stepped back. She could not see that it cost him any effort.

  Forty years, she thought. Forty years since she last shared his bed, and lovers enough in between, and she could still go all to bits when he laid hands on her.

  He seemed long since cured of her. There had never been any hope in it to begin with, a fisherman’s daughter from Seiun Isle dreaming that she could wed as well as bed the Lord of Sun and Lion. They had parted long ago, and properly enough. He had taken nine concubines in Asanion, half in obedience to the custom of that ancient empire, half in defiance of it.

  The obedience was in the taking. The defiance was in the setting free, in giving them to choose whether to marry or to go where they would. In their own western country they would have had no choice but to remain in his harem; but in his eastern realm they could take the freedom he gave and do as they pleased with it.

  Most had chosen to marry among the lords and princelings of the east. Vanyi had reason to suspect that not all of them had gone maiden to the marriage bed; but none of the husbands had objected that Vanyi ever knew of.

  One of the royal concubines had desired no husband. She had gone away to rule a princedom in the east of the world, had prospered and grown old and adopted a daughter to rule after her.

  Only one had remained with the emperor, and that was exactly as he wished it. She had borne his son and heir, and held in great honor the name and the title of empress. She was aging sadly now in the way of her people, but she was still alive and still hale, and he was devoted to her. Of that, Vanyi had no doubt at all. She had only to read it in his eyes.