by Judith Tarr
“It’s not,” mused Chakan, “as if you’d never had training elsewhere. You’ve ridden to war with your grandfather. You’ve accompanied him on all his progresses since you were old enough to sit a senel, and sat in his councils and attended his courts. You’ve done your year in the temple in Endros Avaryan, and gone up to the Tower at the end of it, and come into your power before the bier where the Sunborn sleeps.”
“But that’s not everything,” she said. “It’s not complete. You know how a smith makes a sword—how he forges the blade over and over, and shapes it, and makes it into an image of what it will be. But it’s only a bar of steel until it’s tempered. Then, and only then, is it a sword.”
“You don’t call all that tempering?” He went on before she could answer. “No, maybe it wasn’t. You know enough for a whole college of mages, and a court of lords, too. But you haven’t turned that knowledge to use. You need to grow yourself up, I think.”
“That’s what he says,” said Daruya. “He doesn’t understand that I can’t do it here. He’s here, do you see? He’ll pick me up if I stumble. He’ll smile if I make a mistake, and be oh so forbearing, but I’ll always know that he could do it better and faster and stronger. I need to be somewhere where he can’t meddle.”
“Does it have to be the other side of the world? You could ask for a princedom anywhere in the empire. He’d give it.”
“He gave me this embassy,” she said. “Now he’s taken it away.”
“He’s only being sensible,” said Chakan. “Whoever’s broken a Gate isn’t likely to balk at killing an emperor’s heir.”
“Does it need to be the act of an enemy? It could have been the Gate itself that was flawed.”
“All the more reason to be cautious, then, if as I’m told the expedition goes to the Gate nearest the one that fell, and goes overland from there. That Gate could fall, too, and with the heir to the empire in it.”
Daruya shivered in her bones, but fear was a little thing to this yearning of hers to be out, off, away. “And if that happened, would it be any worse than my getting killed in battle, or being stabbed in my bed by an assassin, or breaking my mind in entering the Tower of Endros? My grandfather led me to battle and the Tower. What’s the difference in this, except that he won’t be there to pick me up if I fall?”
“The difference could be exactly that,” said Chakan. “Or that you want it so badly. That much wanting is dangerous. It closes off sense.”
“Maybe it’s something I have to do,” said Daruya. “Have you thought of that? Maybe I’m called to it.”
“If so, then you just realized it.”
Daruya walked to the edge where the Wall fell sheer, down and down to the plain of Keruvarion. She poised there, rocked lightly by the wind. Chakan said nothing, made no move to pull her back.
He knew her too well. She would never leap unless she knew she could fly. Death was not what she yearned for. Not at all. Life—she wanted life, great gleaming handfuls of it. More than she could ever have under the emperor’s loving tyranny, his light hand that weighed more than the world.
“I need to do this,” she said. “I need it, Chakan. I don’t feel death in it. Only necessity. And I think the expedition needs me, now more than ever. The place it goes to is all strange to us, and its people are afraid of magic. Or, no, maybe not afraid, but wary of it; inclined to hate it, because they don’t trust it. If something happened to the Guardian because of that, and broke the Gate, then it may be that I can use what I am for once, use it to teach these strangers that magic is nothing to fear or hate.”
Once she had said it, it sounded hollow, bombastic, a child’s arrogance. Chakan said nothing of that. He said, “What can you do that the Master of mages can’t?”
“Be my grandfather’s heir,” she answered without even thinking. “Speak for him with the authority of his own blood.”
“So you won’t escape him even on the other side of the world.”
Daruya hissed at him. “I’m not trying to run away from my inheritance! I just want to stand on my own feet.”
“And make your own mistakes.” He lay back on his flat stone. After a moment he slipped the fastenings of his veils and let them fall free, baring his face to the wind and the sun.
It was a handsome face, beautiful in fact, as Asanians of pure blood and long, close breeding could be: smoothly oval, white as new ivory, nose straight and finely carved, lips full, chin as sweetly rounded as a girl’s. And yet it was not a girlish face, not at all. The right cheek bore healed scars, four thin parallel lines running from cheekbone to jaw; and a fifth, matched to the rest, so new that it still bled a little.
Daruya caught her breath at that. “You didn’t tell me you were being raised to the fifth rank.”
He slanted a glance at her. “I didn’t know. My Master called me in in the middle of the night, ordered me to unveil, and marked me as soon as he saw my face.”
“He didn’t by any chance say why?” she said.
“Eventually,” said Chakan. “I’m to take ten Olenyai to the other side of the world, to guard the mages.”
Daruya’s fury was so perfect that it did not even blur her senses. “Mages don’t need guarding.”
“For this they might,” he said. He laced his fingers beneath his head, raised a knee, looked utterly off guard.
That, she knew, was a complete deception. She was fast, and Olenyai-trained—but if she leaped, he would meet her in the air, and give her a ferocious fight.
She might have welcomed it. But she was stalking other prey. “Tell me why they chose you.”
“Because I’m very good at what I do,” he said honestly. “And because I’m used to mages.”
“And,” she said, “because they can’t get at you with magic. That’s it, isn’t it? That shield of yours—they want it. Maybe need it, if it’s mages they fight.”
“They also want my skill with the swords, and the ten bred-warriors I can lead. I’m going to ask for Rahai. He’s so good with his hands, he never has to use his swords.”
He was happy, hells take him—brimming over with his good fortune.
She sprang. To her startlement, he did not meet her in midair. When she struck the rock with bruising force, he was gone.
She lay winded, gasping for air. His voice sounded above her head. “I was thinking. You can’t wear the robes and the veils—you’re too tall. But there’s another way.”
She rolled onto her back, still wheezing. “What—in hells—”
“It is a pity you overtop the tallest of us by a head,” he said, maddeningly roundabout as Asanians were when one most wanted them to be direct. “Your eyes would do. Your skin is darker than most, but in veils that’s less noticeable. Do you think your daughter will be another long tall creature? She’s shaping for it already, poor thing.”
“You babble like a flutterbird,” said Daruya. She could breathe again, if shallowly. Her ribs hurt. “I can’t play the Olenyas. It would cost you your honor at least.”
“It would cost me my life,” he said with no perceptible apprehension. “It might be worth it, mind, for the splendor of the trick. But not unless you’re mage enough to make yourself smaller.”
She cut through his nonsense with a voice like a blade. “You said there was another way.”
“There might be,” he said. “It would cost, too, seeing as to how I’m sworn in service to the emperor, and the emperor has forbidden you to go.”
“Swear yourself in service to me,” she said.
“I can’t do that,” said Chakan. He said it lightly, but there was no yielding in it.
She sat up carefully, glaring at him. “You’d sacrifice your honor to dress me in Olenyai robes, but you won’t honorably swear yourself to the heir of the blood royal?”
“Robes are the outer garments of honor. Oaths are its heart. I’m sworn to the throne, and through it to the emperor. When you are empress,” he said reasonably, “I’ll serve you till death, with all my h
eart.”
“But you’ll break your oath if you help me escape the emperor.”
“I will not,” he said. “You’ll serve the emperor on this embassy, though he may think, at the moment, that you won’t.”
Daruya’s head was spinning. It might, to be sure, be the shock of her fall. But one did not have to plunge middle first onto a rock to reel before Asanian logic.
He held her and patted her while she emptied her stomach on the stones. “There,” he said. “Next time you attack me, do it somewhere where you can land soft.”
She snarled at him. He smiled sweetly, sadly, and buried the evidence of her foolishness, producing from the depths of his robes what looked for all the world like a gardener’s trowel. Probably it was. Olenyai robes could conceal anything, and often did.
When he was done, he crouched in front of her, arms resting on knees. “You do want to go, and he did give you leave, though he rescinded it. I’m thinking he might be overcautious as you say—emperor or not, he’s a grandfather, too, and he dotes on you. I’m also thinking you may have the right of it; they’ll need you out there, your Sun-blood and your training, and your power to speak for the emperor in the emperor’s absence.”
“You think too much,” muttered Daruya.
He grinned at that. “Yes, don’t I? I never learned to shut myself off and be simple muscle. It’s a flaw in a warrior. It’s rather useful in a commander.”
“If he lives long enough to become one.” She leaned forward, no matter what it did to her ribs and her uncertain stomach. “Are you going to roll me up in a blanket and hide me in the baggage?”
“Very near,” he answered. “I’m not visible to mages, yes? One told me once—unwisely, I’m sure—that I cast a kind of shadow; when someone stands in it, he vanishes, too. Suppose you dressed in black, not Olenyai, not exactly, but cloaked and hooded, and rode one of my remounts. You can become a shadow, yes? If you blur the eyes and I blur the mind, what will anyone see but a troop of Olenyai and their seneldi, and nothing more?”
Daruya wanted it to be so easy—wanted it with all that was in her. But she had learned to be wary. Yes, even she, with her name for recklessness. “If I’m caught, there’s hells to pay.”
“Don’t be caught,” he said with grand assurance.
“It’s not sensible,” she said.
“Of course it is,” said Chakan. “Not that I don’t think your grandfather is perfectly right, as far as he goes. You should stay safe where he can protect you. But that’s no way to fly a hawk. You have to let it off the fist, or it never learns to hunt.”
“Asanian logic,” she said. “And I’ve nothing left in my stomach, to cast at your feet.”
“I’ll survive the lack,” said Chakan. He sat on his heels, comfortable, quite clearly pleased with himself. “The Guildmaster means to leave as soon as may be—before sunset today, I’m told. You’ll have to be quick if you’re to do it; and clever, too, to make your farewells without being caught.”
“I can mask my face and my thoughts,” she said. “I was trained to rule an empire.”
He was impervious to irony as to the weapons of mages: it sank into the shadow of his self and vanished. “Well and good. We meet in the Guildhall in the hour of the sixth prayer. You’ll be a shadow, remember. A whisper in the air.”
She stood. It was amazing how elation could kill pain, even of ribs that, she suspected, were cracked. She met his grin with one at least as wide. Hers had edges in it, the sharpness of teeth. “You could have told me this before you let me play the ranting fool.”
“But you needed to rant,” he said. “And who knew? You might see sense. This isn’t sense that we’re up to.”
“No. It’s necessity.” She reached out a hand for him to grasp, pulled him up. In the moment of unbalance he shifted, treacherous, seeking to pull her down. But she was ready for him. She set her feet, made herself a rock in the earth.
He laughed up at her, for, standing, she was much taller than he. “No, it won’t be as splendid as if you were one of my Olenyai, but riding as my shadow—yes, that will do. We’ll sing it when we’re done, like the song of the prince and the beggar’s daughter. She was dead, you see, but he loved her withal.”
“I don’t intend to die on this journey,” said Daruya, “or for a long time after. I’ll live to take your oath from the Throne of the Sun, Olenyas. You have my word on it.”
“And the word of a Sunchild,” he said, half laughing, half deadly earnest, “is unalterable law.”
4
The hall of the ninth Gate was quiet. With its Gate hidden behind a veil, a curtain of white silk no paler than the walls, it seemed but an empty chamber, the hall of a temple, perhaps.
Its floor of inlaid tiles made a map of the world as mages knew it. Half was wrought in intricate detail, with cities marked in colored stones. One that was gold, heart of the west, was Kundri’j Asan. One that was a firestone, heart of the east, was Endros Avaryan that the first of the Sunlords had built. Between them lay a great jewel like a star: Asan-Gilen, Estarion’s city, that had brought together the realms of Sun and Lion, and given them a place where neither claimed the sovereignty.
The other half of the map was vaguer, its shape less clearly defined. Its cities were few. Crystals marked the Gates, a thin line across the broad mass of the land. Mages had traveled to each place, the first sailing in ships across the wide and terrible sea, coming to land and building the first Gate. New mages had come through the Gate, traveling on foot across a vast plain, and at each Brightmoon-cycle’s journey, building a new Gate through which yet newer mages could come.
The eighth Gate was set on the knees of mountains that to its builders had seemed mighty. But those who followed discovered that the mountains were but foothills, and low at that. They climbed to the summit of the world, and nearly died in doing it; but when they would have turned back, too feeble to build their Gate, strangers found them and led them to safety.
There in the mountains that touched the sky, they found a valley, and in the valley a kingdom: the Kingdom of Heaven, its people called it. There was the ninth Gate, the Gate that had fallen. On the map it was unharmed, a crystal of amethyst—the color, said the mages who came back, of the sky above the mountains’ peaks.
Vanyi stood pondering the color of the sky and the integrity of a crystal and other such inconsequentialities, while the others came together near the veil of the Gate. They were not many as expeditions went; dangerously few, if they were to be an army. Six mages, three of the light and their twinned mages of the dark. Ten black-robed Olenyai with their commander. Mounts and remounts for them all, since there were no seneldi on that side of the world, laden with such baggage as they could not live without; the Guardian of the eighth Gate would provide what more was needed for the ascent into the mountains.
All together they crowded that end of the hall, with much clattering and snorting. One senel in particular, a handsome dun mare, was being difficult. The Olenyai commander took her in hand, gentling her with soft words.
Vanyi recognized his voice and, as she came out of her reverie, his hands, strong for their smallness and beautifully shaped. Her brows rose. She had hoped that the Master of Olenyai would send his best, but she had not expected him to send Chakan.
Chakan the prince, some called him, because he was so free of the emperor’s courts and counsels. He had been raised with the princess-heir, and was as close to her as a brother. He managed somehow to avoid the malice and the envy of courts, to be both foster-brother and perfect servant. His only flaw, in Vanyi’s estimation, was that no mage could read him.
He made Vanyi think of another who had worn the veils and the swords, who also had been born with shields against magic. But that had been no Olenyas, for all the purity of his blood and the strictness of his training. He as much as duty and empire and her own obstinacy had taken Estarion from her.
That one was long dead. Estarion had killed him, killed the last descendant—
save only himself—of the Golden Emperors. This was no long-lost Son of the Lion. The eyes in the veil were yellow gold, to be sure, but they were not lion-eyes, not so great-irised that they seemed to have no whites at all unless they opened wide; nor did they bear such a weight of bitterness as Koru-Asan had borne. Chakan of the Olenyai, for all his gifts and his skill, was an innocent, and devoted to his emperor.
Which, no doubt, was precisely why the Master had sent him. Vanyi liked him. She even trusted him—as long as he was not called on to do anything that would run counter to his emperor’s purposes.
Vanyi met eyes that were true eyes of the Lion, set in the face of a black king from the north. Estarion regarded her unsmiling. She had not seen him come in. He could walk like a shadow when it suited him, even before the Master of the mages.
“Did you lock your granddaughter in her rooms?” Vanyi asked him. “I thought I’d see her by now, trying to beg or cajole or threaten me into taking her in spite of you.”
“I left her in an imperial sulk,” he said, “but I didn’t think it necessary to lock the door. She understands her duty, however much she may resist it.”
“I hope so,” said Vanyi. She held out her hands. He took them without constraint, and set a kiss in each palm.
Her breath caught. She turned it into a flicker of laughter. “I’m going to miss you. Who’d have thought it?”
“Maybe you’ll find someone there who’ll give you grand arguments, and slap you down when you get above yourself.”
“I get above myself!” She mimed mighty indignation. “You, sir, were arrogant in the womb.”
“Well,” he said, “it’s an honest arrogance.” He went somber all at once, as he could do; looking suddenly much older, though never as old as he was. “Guard yourself, Vanyi. Whatever breaks Gates can break mages, too. Even Masters of mages.”
“Oh, I’m too mean to die,” she said; but she too sobered, gripping his hands tightly and then letting them go. “We have to know what broke the Gate, before it breaks another. If it’s a weakness, you see—if we’re doing something amiss in the building—we have to know, before there’s too much passing back and forth of mages, and we lose more than a single Gate, or a single Guardian.”
