by Judith Tarr
“She commanded us,” said Rahai, and not happily, either. “She was captured and is being held hostage.”
“In return for what?”
“She didn’t say,” said Rahai.
“You didn’t ask?”
He met her ferocity without blinking. “She didn’t tell us. They were speaking Shurakani. I caught the word for hostage, but the rest was babble.”
“I think,” said Uruan from the edge of the light, “that they were meant not to know, so that they couldn’t tell us. She doesn’t want us to surrender whatever it is they want.” He faced the Olenyai. “Did you know the men who captured her?”
“It was one man,” Hunin said. “He came here more than once: a priest of the palace temple. Esakai, his name was.”
“What is this?” Bundur demanded suddenly, his Shurakani voice running swift on the heels of Hunin’s Asanian. “What are you saying? What is this about Esakai the priest?”
“He is saying,” said Daruya, reining her patience tight, “that Vanyi has been captured and held hostage, and that she doesn’t want a rescue. He doesn’t know what she’s hostage for. He thinks she doesn’t want him, or us, to know.”
“I can guess,” Uruan said in Shurakani. “All foreigners out of the kingdom, and all mages dead or exiled.”
“It might be more than that,” Daruya said. She clenched her fists. “Damn her! I knew she’d do something like this. What is she trying for? To get herself killed and make a martyr, and bring down the wrath of the whole Mageguild, and the empire, too?”
The Olenyai did not understand her. The Shurakani, who did, did not know what to say.
She started to stamp in frustration; caught herself. “Damn,” she said, but much more mildly. “Uruan, come here. We’re wasting time, talking in two languages and getting nothing said. Translate for us.”
He was willing, even glad to oblige. He was still haggard and a little wild about the eyes, but he was in better case than Kadin. His ordeal inside the Gate seemed to be fading like a black dream; and he was strong as all his kin were, with a fierce resilience.
He would do. He rendered her outburst into Asanian, word for word. She could have done without quite so faithful a translation, but she had asked; she could hardly call back the asking.
Chakan responded at once and firmly. “The Guildmaster would do no such thing. She asked you to be sensible. To think.”
“I am thinking,” said Daruya. “I’m going to fetch her.”
“You are not.”
It came from both sides, in two voices, in two languages: Chakan, Bundur. They stared at each other in astonishment and swift anger—gods, even in that they were alike.
Suddenly they laughed. Chakan recovered first, and spoke in Daruya’s furious silence. “She was not, whatever you may think, telling you not to do it so that you actually would. She has a better opinion of you than that.”
“Not that I’ve ever noticed,” Daruya muttered.
“I have.” Bundur glanced at Chakan. “The warrior is right. She thinks she can accomplish something in the palace, and safely enough to send her guards away.”
“Or unsafely,” said Daruya. “These aren’t her warriors. They’re my grandfather’s and mine. It’s not her place to get them killed.”
“Daruya,” said Chakan, “as logical as that might be, it’s not like Vanyi. She’s in the palace, yes. She knows who’s been breaking Gates—he’s holding her hostage.” He turned toward Bundur. “My lord, do you know this priest?”
Even in a temper Daruya could note the enormity of the concession: Chakan the Olenyas had granted a foreigner his title.
Bundur could not be aware of the exact degree of the honor, but he seemed to notice that he had been admitted to favor. “I know this priest,” he said through Uruan. “He’s one of the oldest of the old guard, well known to everyone, with no enemies that I’ve ever heard of. I’m amazed if what your warriors think is true, that he’s been the mind behind the attacks on mages. It seems unlike him.”
“Yet he is of the old way of thinking, yes?” Chakan inquired. “He has the art of seeming less than he is—that’s not uncommon. Who notices a harmless old creature doddering about, mumbling a word here, casting a smile there? What if the word were that mages were to be destroyed and the foreigners cast out, and the smile were directed at those who did so with utmost dispatch?”
“He needn’t have done anything himself,” said Daruya. “He could just suggest. And hint. And deplore. Oh, so many foreigners, so many mages, and that ghastly Gate of theirs . . .”
She stopped. They thought her finished: Bundur said something, but she was not listening.
Gate, she thought. That was how it had begun—not with mages killed or hunted out, or foreigners expelled. With a Gate, through which an embassy was known to be coming, an embassy from a great and distant empire.
Suppose . . .
“Suppose,” she said, “that mages aren’t what he fears most. He’s afraid of them, there’s no one in Shurakan who isn’t, but they aren’t his great fear. No; he dreads what their magic has made. Their Gate. Their door to other worlds, that opens on a particular city in a particular realm. Now suppose he’s given word that an embassy has asked and been granted leave to use that Gate to enter Shurakan. The embassy is to be made up of mages—whom all Shurakani hate and fear—and of the heir to that foreign empire, which is ruled by mages who are also priests.” She paused. They were all silent, staring at her.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “We were thinking to honor Shurakan by sending our best and highest: the Master of the Mageguild, the princess-heir of Sun and Lion. What if Shurakan didn’t see the honor? What if it saw something else?”
“Conquest,” said Chakan. “Yes.”
“Not all of us saw that,” Bundur said. “Not even most. We were honored, as far as we knew how to be.”
“But a few saw the Gate, and saw armies riding through it,” said Chakan. “So did the emperor, for the matter of that. Vanyi prevented him from doing more than think, but would Shurakan know or trust that she would do it?”
“I would wager,” said Daruya slowly, “that she thinks she can convince her captor of that, and talk him round—or at least confuse him enough to let us escape.”
“Not escape,” Bundur said. “Or exile, either, I don’t think. She wouldn’t give up that easily. She thinks she can gain time somehow, maybe for us to bring back the queen.”
“There is that,” said Daruya. “Borti—majesty—what do you—?”
There was no answer. Borti’s chair was empty. Hani was alone on the floor in a wrack of scattered toys, looking dazed and somewhat sleepy. Daruya throttled an urge to seize him and shake the truth out of him.
His father spoke before she had mastered her voice. “Hani, where did Kimeri go?”
Hani blinked. “I don’t know,” he said. “She went away.”
Bundur would have pressed, but Daruya forestalled him. “No, don’t. The imp put a wishing on him. If he ever knew where she went, or even when, he’s forgotten.”
Bundur’s eyes rolled like a startled senel’s. She caught him, shook him till he looked her in the face. “There. There, stop it. You’re supposed to be reining me in, not the other way about.”
He gripped her arms hard enough to bruise, and sucked in a breath. But he was calmer; he was seeing sense again.
His hands loosened but did not let go. “I’ll tan her hide,” he said.
“You’ll have to wait till I’m done first.” Daruya glanced about. No one else was gone. If they were quick—if they raised a hunt—
“They might only have gone to the privy,” said Chakan, “or the imp might be getting into perfectly reasonable mischief with the hounds or the seneldi.”
Daruya did not believe it, much as she wanted to. But she let him send his hunters through the house, to discover what she had known already: that her daughter and the queen of Shurakan were gone. Together, she was sure. To the palace, most poss
ibly. Where Daruya could not in good sense go—not while Vanyi was there and doing whatever she was doing to protect the embassy.
It was nothing different from what she had done since she arrived in Shurakan: waited, fretted, found nothing useful to do with herself.
The queen, whom she barely knew, whom she did not truly trust, had taken her daughter and vanished. Another hostage; another prisoner. Another and most compelling reason to do as Vanyi forbade, and descend on the palace with fire and sword.
There was a hand on her. There were two. One was broad and bronze-dark, one smaller, narrower, ivory-pale. She met two pairs of eyes: narrow and black, wide and yellow-golden.
Such unlikely allies. They did not know or like each other, or even speak the same language. And yet, when it came to Daruya, they agreed altogether too often.
“Wait,” said Chakan.
“Be patient,” said Bundur. “You’ll have your gallop, I’m sure, and your cup of blood, too, that you seem so thirsty for. But wait a bit. Give Vanyi time to work.”
“If she’s not dead,” said Daruya, “or too badly hurt to do anything at all.”
“You’d know,” Chakan said.
She would. Damn him for knowing it. Damn Vanyi for forcing her to think about sense. Damn Borti, and damn Kimeri, and damn her own self, because she could do nothing at all but wait and seethe and, when she had wits enough, pray.
31
Borti in her plainest self seemed no more in the mind’s eye than a servant. Kimeri being nobody in particular struck anyone who looked at her as simple child-shaped object moving in shadow of adult object, and therefore safe and not to be noticed. It was easier than wearing shadows, and harder for mages to track, though they would after a while.
They walked into the palace as if they belonged there, which in fact Borti did. Vanyi’s traces were in front of them, clear to a mage’s sight, like the track a star leaves when it falls.
She was safe, Kimeri had made sure of that. She was eating a very good dinner and talking to the priest who thought he was her captor, and thinking about going to sleep. Her thoughts were clear inside the palace; outside of it they had been blurred, shadowy, not quite there.
The palace was warded, of course. For people who insisted that they were not mages, Shurakani were very good at raising wards. Kimeri could only do mind-shields and shadows and nothing-in-particular, yet. She did not know how to protect a whole palace or a whole city.
She was shaking inside. Not because Vanyi was caught, or because she was in the palace and it was full of people who hated what she was. No; she was used to that. But she could see inside the priest’s mind, and it was gentle and pious and very determined, and he was going to make a magic in the night that would break every Gate in every world.
He did not really know that that was what he would do. He thought he was going to pray to his gods to keep the Gate in Shurakan closed forever, and invaders on the other side of it.
oOo
As soon as she could do it without making anybody notice, she let Borti know that she was there. They were in a passage that was empty, with empty rooms opening out of it, and an empty stair at the end. There was no light in it, but Kimeri could take care of that.
Borti stopped when the clear yellow light welled out of Kimeri’s burning hand, and stared, shocked to her bones. “Child! Where in the world did you come from?”
“I’ve been right beside you,” Kimeri said. “You couldn’t go away all by yourself. You could get caught. They’d kill you.”
Borti paid no attention. “You must go back,” she said.
“You’re going the wrong way,” Kimeri said. “You need to go where Vanyi is.”
“I am going where the king is,” Borti said.
“You can do that after. We have to find Vanyi first. And the priest. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do.”
“Then I’m sure she’ll keep him suitably confused,” said Borti. She sighed. “Child, you should have stayed with your mother. I can’t trust a guard to take you back. Unless one of your shadow-men came with you?”
“They’re all with Mother,” Kimeri said. “You don’t understand. Esakai is going to sing a prayer, and he thinks he’s going to keep anybody from ever opening the Gate again. He’s really going to break Gates everywhere. All of them.”
Borti blinked. “Gates? All? How many are there?”
“Millions,” said Kimeri. “Mages only use a tiny bit of them, but they’re everywhere, on all the worlds. And they’ll all fall down if Esakai says his prayer.”
“Is that so terrible?” asked Borti. “It would be inconvenient, I suppose, not to be able to go from end to end of the world in a step, but people weren’t meant to do that in any case. Gates are unnatural. How can it hurt any world to be rid of them?”
Kimeri was glad she was used to grownfolk who were willfully stupid. If she had not been, she would have stamped her foot and screamed. Instead she said, “Gates aren’t unnatural. They’re part of the worlds. Mages find them where they are, that’s all, and open them. If they all break, anything can happen. Worlds might—might fall in on themselves, and Things come off the worldroads.” She was shuddering. She tried to stop. “Terrible Things, Borti. Things that nobody should ever want to see.”
She was scaring Borti. She had to make that better, or Borti would not want to move at all. “It might not be that bad,” she said. “It might only be, if enough Gates are broken, the rest won’t be able to shut. And new Gates might open by themselves. Most of them probably will open here, because this is where the first Gate broke, and it’s the weakest of them all.”
Finally she had said something that Borti could understand, mostly. “If Esakai tries to shut the Gate, he’ll not only fail, he’ll open Gates all over Su-Shaklan?”
Kimeri bobbed her head the way people did here, to say yes.
“Oh, goddess,” Borti sighed. “It’s like an old story. The more they try to make things better, the worse things get.”
“Well,” said Kimeri, “maybe the prayer will fold this world in on itself, and we’ll all fall off the wheel together and have nowhere to be born again. That’s not so bad, is it? Being unborn is like not knowing you exist at all. Hani told me that.”
Borti shivered. “It’s . . . a little more complicated than that. You don’t want that to happen, you really don’t.”
“But if it has to,” Kimeri said, “it will. Can we go find Esakai now?”
Borti thought about it for much longer than Kimeri thought she needed to. She was not a mage, though she had a bright and shining soul inside her; she did not know how to think about magery, except with fear wrapped around it. She had to cut through the fear first, then see what she had.
After a while she asked, “How long do we have before Esakai says his prayer?”
“A while,” Kimeri admitted, not wanting to, but she hated to tell lies. “He’ll wait till middle night, to make it stronger, with dreams in it.”
“We have time, then,” said Borti. “We’ll go to the king first. He may be interested to know what his allies are doing, since they don’t know it themselves.”
“I don’t think—” said Kimeri.
“Child,” Borti said, and she sounded exactly like Kimeri’s great-grandfather when he had made up his mind and that was that, “I would have time to take you back to Janabundur, too, if I pressed it close.”
She did not. But Kimeri shut her mouth and kept it shut.
Borti bobbed her head, satisfied. “Come with me, then. How good can your manners be? Paltai was never a monster, but he is frightfully stiff about protocol. He’ll be worse, now he calls himself king.”
“I can be very polite,” said Kimeri, “even when I have to go to the privy and I’m in High Court and I can’t.”
Borti gaped at her, then laughed, hardly more than a snort. “Yes, we’ll stop at a garderobe before we visit Paltai. Come, child.”
oOo
Paltai the pretender king was a han
dsome man, like Bundur but not so big, and with a much more fashionable air. He grew his mustaches to his breastbone and wore his hair in a lacquered tower, even in bed. He looked rather ridiculous, except for his eyes. Those were cold and clever, and they did not look as if they had ever worried about hurting anyone.
Kimeri wondered how he got the crown on the edifice of his hair. At the moment the glittering thing was sitting on a cushion next to his bed, where he had been playing with a servant when Borti walked in through a door that maybe he had not known was there.
The servant squawked and ran away. The king scrambled all the bedclothes together around his middle and glowered at Borti, who was all he could see; Kimeri was wearing shadows again. “Woman! Did I summon you? Out, and come back in the morning.”
He thought Borti was a servant, and not a very bright one, either. Borti knew it. She smiled, not a pleasant smile at all, and said, “Paltai. I’m devastated. You don’t recognize your last mistress but six?”
The black eyes blinked, reckoning names and connecting faces. None of them was a plain-faced servant of early middle years. But one had been a strong-faced queen whose maids had a particular talent with paint and perfumes.
Borti showed her teeth, which were not bad for a woman her age in Shurakan. “Not much to look at, am I, without a little help from my ladies. Still, I’d thought better of you. You claimed never to forget a face or a lover.”
“I never forgot you—as I knew you then,” he said. “You were magnificent. You look sadly fallen now.”
“I always looked like this when I wasn’t being beautiful for a bedmate.” Borti sounded calmer than she was. “Do you think you can rule Su-Shaklan without a queen?”
He did. But he was not going to tell Borti that. “When I’ve had time to settle the kingdom, I’ll take a bride.”
“I’m sure,” said Borti. She did not believe him. “Tell me, Paltai. Did you know that your mage-killers are working magery themselves?”
“Are they?” He was not shocked at all. He was amused. “Who told you that? Your pet mages?”
It sounded like “your pet ox-droppings.” Kimeri wanted to giggle, but that would have given her away.
