by Judith Tarr
Nandi bobbed her head. “Oh, he did indeed. Will you come? A servant’s coat, a properly humble bearing . . . no one will know you.”
“No,” said Borti. Her voice was harsh; she softened it with a perceptible effort. “No, it’s too chancy. If even one servant recognizes me, I’ve lost us everything.”
“I would trust you not to be indiscreet,” Nandi said.
Borti’s hands faltered in their spinning. Her face was calm, even cold. “I thank you. Trust is no easy thing to earn. But I won’t risk it. When you bring him back, with all such news as you can gather, and goodwill in the court, too, I’ll perform the rites with you. If, of course, you permit.”
“I permit it,” said Nandi with formal precision. “I wish it.”
“Make them pity you greatly,” Borti said. “Win their hearts for us.”
oOo
Before the Lady Nandi could risk herself on such an errand, before she could even finish preparing to go, a guest was brought to Vanyi as she tried to read in the library that was next to the hall. She never remembered afterward which book it had been, or even what kind of book it was.
The man who stumbled and fell at her feet was a preposterous creature, naked but for festoons of charms and amulets; his face and body were painted, often garishly, but the bright scarlet and the livid blue were blood and bruises. He had been beaten, and badly; it was a wonder he was walking, let alone running ahead of the servant.
Vanyi abandoned her book with open relief and knelt to turn the fallen man onto his back. Her hands were as gentle as they could be. Even at that, he groaned and struggled, but stilled as he understood that she meant him no harm.
As she had expected, it was the odd creature who had helped to bring Uruan back from the house of the Gate: the exorcist, who appeared to have no name, or none that his sect would let him confess to. There was a scent of magery on him, weak but distinct.
His eyes opened in the bruised and swollen face. Much of the paint had rubbed away; the features under it were unremarkable except where they were swollen out of their wonted shape. His nose was broken, Vanyi noted, and he had lost a tooth or two.
“You were lucky,” she said, “that they didn’t break anything more vital.”
He blinked at her, struggling to make sense of her. His magery, as ill-trained and twisted as it was, recognized hers, but he did not know what he was seeing; only that she seemed more real than the world about her.
She made no effort to soften the effect. He would learn what it was that made him see her so; or he would not.
“Tell me why you came here,” she said when he kept staring, blinking, poised on a thin edge of pain and panic. “Why here, and to me in particular?”
Her voice anchored him as she had hoped it would. “I ask you for sanctuary, lady of the mages,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “I’ll be killed else. They’ve stripped my temple bare and burned it. They’ve beaten or killed the priests. They’re doing it all through the city, wherever the whim strikes them. They say—” He had to stop and swallow bile. “They say that they’re cleansing the city and the kingdom. Of—of—”
“Of evil magic?”
His head bobbed assent, unwisely: he gasped with pain and dizziness, and retched. But his stomach was empty. Those who beat him had seen to that.
“Why did you come here?” Vanyi asked. “You don’t know us.”
“You are—that. What they said we were.”
“What, mages? We’re no more evil than any other mortals.”
“Mages,” he said. “M—mages. And strong. And they said—I heard them say—they can’t touch you, not while Janabundur speaks for you.”
“Not yet,” Vanyi said.
“So I came to you,” he said. “You can fight. You have light and dark in your hands like swords, and demons at your call. And gods; and the little goddess.”
“What—” Vanyi laughed, but not with mirth. “I suppose you could call the imp that.”
“I want to fight with you,” he said. “I want to see them fall as my temple fell, in bloody ruin.”
He was fierce as only the young can be, and muddled beyond belief. “I’m not going to kill anyone right at the moment,” Vanyi said, “and never with magic, in any case. It’s forbidden.”
He did not understand. He said, “I want them to fall.”
“From what I can gather,” Vanyi said dryly, “your temple was sacked and burned by half the rabble in the city.”
“They were led,” he said. “Led from behind by those who called themselves pious and lovers of the gods. Lovers of their own greed, I call them. I saw how they took the best things for themselves, and stood back for the mob to scrape up the leavings.” He scrambled himself erect, mustering a surprising degree of dignity. “I have no magic such as you have, but I can serve you and run errands for you and be your hands and feet.”
Vanyi looked at him and sighed. She did not need servants; she had more than enough. But there was no graceful way to turn him out, not as battered as he was, and in such need of a bath and a physician.
“Ah well,” she said. “What’s one more mouth to feed? Go on, follow the servant, bathe yourself and rest. I’ll send someone to look after your hurts.”
“I don’t need to rest,” he said, though he was wobbling on his feet. “I want to serve you.”
“Later,” she said. “Now, off with you.”
oOo
Kimeri heard the exorcist come in. She listened as he spoke to Vanyi, and was ahead of him when he went to the servants’ wing, where they had a bathhouse and an extra room or two. In the big wooden tub, with his amulets off and his paint washed away, he was a perfectly ordinary, rather skinny and gangly person with a spectacular crop of bruises and cuts, and that poor broken nose.
“I’m sorry I can’t mend your nose,” she said, clambering up on the rim of the tub. He had been left to get himself clean, which was not very kind of the servants. They thought exorcists were as bad as mages, and smelled worse. It did make it easier to talk to him, since there was no one about to stop her, except her Olenyas; but it was Rahai again, and Rahai never got in the way unless she tried to leave the house.
The exorcist almost drowned himself trying to bow in the water while scrambling away from Rahai’s shadow.
“Stop that,” Kimeri said. “You’ll hurt yourself. And stop thinking that I’m a goddess. I’m a god’s get, but I’m nothing to fall at the feet of. I’m not even a beauty yet.”
He was so confused that he obeyed her. By the time he thought about what she had said, he was safe on the ledge in the tub, scrubbing gingerly at the last of his paint. He kept looking at Rahai as if the Olenyas were something to be afraid of, but since Rahai was doing nothing more threatening than standing by the door, he at least stopped trying to hide under the water.
“I’m sorry about your temple,” said Kimeri. “And about your nose. Vanyi’s going to send Aledi to look at it. Aledi’s got a little healing magic. You’ll be afraid of her: she’s Asanian, and her eyes are yellow. But she’s very gentle.”
“Your eyes are yellow,” the exorcist said.
“That’s because my father is Asanian, and my mother is mostly Asanian, and so were her mother and father. But I’ll be taller, because my great-grandfather’s mother was from the north, where everybody is as tall as a tree.”
“North is the Spear of Heaven,” said the exorcist. “There are no man-trees there.”
“Not in your north,” Kimeri said. “You should get out of the water now, before your bruises get stiff. Do you mind wearing clothes? Everybody seems to, here.”
He did not mind wearing clothes. All the amulets and the paint were really only for formal occasions; his temple had been having one of its great exorcisms, when they tried to drive all the evil out of the kingdom for another turning of the moons.
Evil had found them instead, and broken the temple. Kimeri watched him think about that as he cli
mbed into the shirt and trousers and coat.
He left his amulets in the box the servants had set out for them. He was not afraid that anyone would steal them. They all had curses on them, and everybody knew it.
All but one, which he put on. It was a leather cord with a stone on it, smooth and round and grey, with a hole worn in the middle. “To keep my soul safe,” he said.
If he thought it would, then it might. Kimeri thought the stone was rather pretty.
Aledi came in then and chased Kimeri out, not meaning to be impolite, but she was thinking much too clearly that small children had no place in the middle of magic.
Aledi did not understand Sunchildren at all. Kimeri could not expect her to. She was Asanian, and High Court Asanian at that. But it stung.
Hani could not play with her. He had lessons in a temple near the house, just for the morning but enough to keep him away when she needed him. She was too young for lessons, even if she had been Shurakani. She was supposed to do what young children did, which, as far as she could see, was nothing at all but be chased out of people’s way.
If she could have gone outside of the house, she would have been able to find something to do. But the Olenyai would not let her. It was too dangerous, they said. People were hunting mages. They were burning temples and chasing people out of houses and beating up anybody who looked or sounded or acted different. The air, even in the house, had a foul smell, like blood mixed with the thing that men and women did, that her mother was doing with Bundur and not bothering to hide it.
Except that what her mother and Bundur did was a joyful thing, like singing. What the people were doing in the city was ugly. It made Kimeri want to scrub herself over and over, to take the stink away.
Kimeri went to where her mother was. She stayed outside while they finished what they were doing, then waited a little longer, in case they started again. They got up instead and put on their clothes, and talked about eating.
She went in. Bundur was sitting on the window-ledge. Kimeri’s mother was braiding his hair.
Kimeri climbed up on his lap, not even asking him if he minded, and buried her face in his shirt. He smelled of clean man and clean wool and the thing that, in this place, was joy. He did not push her away but gathered her in, though he looked a question at Daruya.
“She’s . . . what I am,” Daruya said after a little while. “She knows what’s happening in the city.”
He was shocked. “All of it?”
“All that matters.” Daruya’s hand brushed Kimeri’s head, bringing calm. “You should be flattered. She never goes to people she doesn’t trust.”
That was not exactly true, but Kimeri did not say it. He was warm and solid, and yes, she trusted him. He made her feel safe.
He kept on being solid and warm, and being glad that she was there. That must be what it was like to have a father. Great-Grandfather felt the same way about her, mostly, and he understood her, too, and Bundur did not, yet; but this was different somehow. This was nearer to her, with her mother in it, being part of it and part of him. While she was with them, the ugliness could not touch her, or make her afraid.
27
That night was full of fires and shouting, broken temples and shattered gods and mobs that raged from end to end of the city. House Janabundur was as safe as a house could be: it was high up on a hill, with no roofs overlooking it, and its walls were strong and its gates were barred.
Olenyai guarded them, side by side with Janabundur’s strongest servants. Daruya was not surprised to see how many of those there were, or how loyal. Janabundur had an army of its own if it chose to raise one. Many of its best men had been finding their way to the house over past days, coming from houses in the city, farmsteads in the valley, holdings along the mountain walls. They brought with them bundles that, when opened, revealed well-kept weapons and armor of leather plates strengthened with bronze.
It was not war, Bundur insisted. Fools in the palace had raised the mob, and would pay dearly for it, come the cold light of morning and the colder eye of the law.
He had no comprehension of the discrepancy between a rule of law and a palace coup leading to rampage and riot. “The law has always banned magic,” he said. “They’ve spread the net so broad that they’re sweeping in innocents. Then, when every sane person recoils from what’s been done in the name of law, another law will save us all: the law that protects the innocent, and the law of the human heart, which is always contrary. They’ll be favoring mages, you’ll see, out of pity and guilt. Out of that we’ll make a new decree, one that softens the strictures against magic.”
“It should remove them altogether,” Daruya said.
“Someday,” he said, “it may.”
They could not sleep in one another’s arms: Kimeri was between them, and Hani, who had crept in to have his own fears soothed away. It was peculiarly comfortable to lie all of them in a bed, demurely clothed, the children asleep in the circle of their parents’ protection, lulled by their voices.
oOo
Morning came with crawling slowness and a sense as of a long debauch barely begun. Daruya had been in a siege once, in her grandfather’s wars. She remembered this sense of being trapped in walls and yet sheltered by them, the determined cheerfulness, the refusal to consider what would happen if the enemy broke through their defenses.
Hani would not go to his lessons this morning. Bundur took both children to the kitchen, where a hound bitch had whelped in the night.
Daruya was glad to be away from him, to be herself again for a little while, and yet she missed him keenly, the touch of his hand, the smell and the taste of him. She had not been out of his sight since she married him, nor he out of hers.
Truly, then, it was past time. She put on her riding clothes and went to see which of the seneldi would be amenable to a canter round the garden.
oOo
Daruya brought her dun mare to a neat halt precisely in the center of the circle that had marked the limits of her exercises. As she dismounted, Kadin came through the gap in the hedge. He too was in riding clothes, but no senel followed him.
It was not noble of her, but whenever she saw him she shivered. His grief seemed to shape all that he was; that, and the darkness that was his magery. She, bred of the Sun, could with utter ease have matched him, light to his shadow.
It was not the matching of souls that bound her to Bundur. It was another kind of twinning, one that by the laws of her inheritance she could not accept. She had never known exactly why, unless it had to do with her firstfather’s conviction that light and only light must rule, or with Vanyi’s refusal to submit the Mageguild to the emperor’s will.
The Guild served him when it could, which was often, but it remained distinct. All worlds were its concern; it would not bind itself to the lord of this one, however great a mage he might be.
And yet, faced with this darkmage whose power so craved the light that would complete it, Daruya suffered sore temptation. She was all edges and angles, shocked by the marriage that had been thrust on her, the murder of a king, the fall of Gates. One more shock surely could not matter, one more transgression, one more count against her in the minds of her people.
She was tired of being wild. It struck her as she stood there, loosening the saddle-girth and rubbing an itch out of the mare’s neck. She was weary of resisting; of breaking law and discipline simply because they discommoded her.
The trouble, she thought, was that Bundur would not fight back. He yielded; he smiled; he slid smoothly round her and showed her her own face in the mirror of his mind. She was usually scowling. She was always rebelling. It was her art and her gift.
But here in the face of a rebellion that would put all the rest to shame, she sickened of it. Kadin did not know what he did, how his darkness lured her, how even his grief made it easy to succumb. He would not want her for a lover; twinned mages need not be bedmates, or even friends. They raised power together, that was all. They made each other complete.
No, she thought. Resistance again; she almost laughed at that—bitterly, again. She was a pattern of repetitions. Could she not vary it?
Kadin was oblivious to her maundering. He caught the mare’s bridle as Daruya began to lead her out of the hedged circle that had become the riding-ground. “Lady,” he said, “wait.”
Daruya paused. She had grown accustomed to men who were her own height or smaller; it was odd to have to look up. He was keeping his hair cropped short, she noticed, but letting his beard grow. That was like a northerner, as was the gold ring in his ear. Northerners felt naked without their beards and their gauds.
“Lady,” Kadin said again. “Daruya. If I named a quarry, would you hunt with me?”
For all her noble intentions and her real weariness, her heart leaped. “A hunt? Where?”
“In this city,” he answered. “For breakers of Gates.”
“Yes,” breathed Daruya. “Oh, yes.” But— “Did the Guildmaster send you to me?”
“No,” said Kadin. “I came to you first.”
He was speaking the truth: he opened himself to let her see it. He also let her see why. Vanyi would wish him to be cautious, to be circumspect. Daruya, he thought, would be eager for a wild hunt, for the revenge that twisted like hunger in his belly.
He approved her wildness; admired it. She was not as flattered as she might once have been—and not long ago, either.
Still. A hunt, and a quarry. “Who is it?” she asked. “Where did you find him?”
“I’m not sure yet,” said Kadin. “I know that my magic has found a place, a lair of . . . something, and a remembrance of fallen Gates.”
“You really should have gone to Vanyi,” Daruya said, but not as a rebuke. “If it’s this uncertain still—you could be catching the death of the one who did it, killed in the confusion. Maybe he was the target of it all.”
“I think not,” Kadin said. “It’s strong. The uproar stripped its shields, I’ll wager, and I was hunting just when the shields went down. It doesn’t know they’re down; it’s made no effort to raise them again.”
