by Judith Tarr
Borti was not even thinking about giggling. “I’ve seen what mages do. I’ve seen what the priests do. It’s the same thing, Paltai.”
“Except,” he said, “that mages do it of their own will, in overweening pride, and priests do it of the gods’ will, in fitting humility.”
“Such humility as this?” Borti picked up a shimmer of folded silk. It slithered down into a coat twice as long as Borti was tall, and it was real silk, worth more in Borti’s mind than Kimeri could easily imagine.
Kimeri realized something that she had been too busy to notice. Paltai was a priest. His hair was a wig and his mustaches were false. He was pretending to be beautiful as he thought of it, and enjoying looking the way he meant to look when he had been king for years and years. It made him feel more like a stallion.
It was a twisty feeling. She did not like it. She was much happier when he got up, taking his blankets with him, and took off his wig and his mustaches and looked like a priest again—peculiar with his bald head and shaven face, both of them starting to grow out in a furze of black down, but not as peculiar as he had in the wig. She could see that the crown went on his head, and fit, too, though he only rested his hand on it and stroked its tall jeweled peaks.
He was telling Borti who was king now, and enjoying thinking about it. He was a little sorry to have had to kill Borti’s brother in order to be king, but not very much. He had never liked the man—had found him stiff-necked and stubborn.
He liked Borti better. He liked her rather a great deal, in fact, which was good of him. But she was in his way, and he could see that she was going to be difficult. He edged his hand toward a cord that hung by the crown.
Kimeri tugged very lightly at Borti’s coat and whispered, not even aloud, though Borti heard it that way. Let’s go now, quickly. He’s ringing for the guards.
Borti’s face did not change, though she heard Kimeri. She did not move, either. “This magic that the priests work is dangerous. They’re trying to close the foreigners’ Gate beyond all opening; they’ll open it instead, and open gates all over Su-Shaklan, with the gods know what waiting to come through.”
“So your mages tell you,” said Paltai, his mind tight shut. “You owe them gratitude for sheltering you, certainly, but credulity was never a flaw in your character. Have they bewitched you?”
“I believe that they know their own art and its failings,” Borti said. “And that they have honor, as difficult as that is to believe.” She steadied herself, and throttled the temper that had always got her in trouble. “Paltai. People who could kill one king can very easily kill another—and if they remove any thought of the queen, why not remove the king, too, and establish a rule of abbots and priests? Wouldn’t that be logical? Do you want to be their proof that the line of kings has failed, and the children of heaven have been forsaken by their mother and by all the gods?”
She had not even ruffled the king’s composure. It was too enormous for that. “The gods have chosen me. No priest will question that.”
Borti drew breath to argue, but Kimeri could hear the guards coming. She caught at Borti’s hand and pulled her, no matter how strange it might look to Paltai to see Borti being tugged away from him by a blur and a shadow.
Borti came, which was more than Kimeri had quite dared to hope for. She was sad and upset and furious, but she could see what was in front of her. And that was a fool who believed more in himself than in the gods.
The guards were at the door, hammering on it. The king ran to open it. They would know where the passage was that had brought Borti here. Kimeri kicked herself for not thinking about that till it was too late. If the guards caught Borti, Borti was dead, just as dead as her brother who had been the king before Paltai.
There was nowhere to go, nothing to do. Except one thing. Kimeri had not known she had it till she reached inside and it was there. It was in the Gate, and part of it. It showed her how to begin. She took a deep breath and did it.
oOo
Guards poured into the room, bristling with pikes and spears and swords. There was nobody there but the king. Nobody in the hidden passageway or hiding behind the curtains. Nobody anywhere near that room, not even wrapped in shadows.
32
Vanyi had got rid of Esakai at last, but not through any doing of her own: he was going to the temple of Matakan, where the priests raised the circle that would bind the Gate. He left her under guard, in reasonable comfort, with food and drink and a bed. And he left her warded. It was an effective ward, not strong but strong enough, that tangled her gently and inextricably in strands like spidersilk when she tried to lay a wishing on the guards and walk out of the room.
Clever, clever working. It used her own strength against her. The harder she fought, the tighter she was bound.
She had outsmarted herself. Her brilliant plan to lull Esakai into thinking he held her hostage, then to trust Daruya to move against the priests in the temple while Vanyi escaped and sped to Daruya’s aid, was no use at all if she could not get out of her prison.
Time ran on. The priests were gathering. She had no way of knowing what Daruya was doing—the tangle of wards robbed her of any useful magery. Her body at least was behaving itself. It was more tired than it should be, but the tightening in her chest was gone, lost somewhere in the wards.
Something plucked at them. They quivered and tightened. The touch came again, subtler this time, slipping through them like a thin sharp-bladed knife, pausing, then slashing, sudden and swift. In the instant of the wards’ breaking, the power—for power it had to be—caught Vanyi in a vast but gentle hand, and lifted her as a woman might lift a fledgling from the nest.
The hand vanished with breathtaking suddenness. Vanyi, robbed of its strength, staggered and almost fell.
The floor under her had changed. She had been standing on rugs. Now she stood on patterned tiles. The walls had grown both higher and wider. Much higher. Rather wider. Where the bed had been stood a monstrosity of wood and paint and gilding, several times taller than a man.
She had companions. The Queen of Shurakan, drab as a servant and grey with shock, and ki-Merian regarding them both with a worried expression. It took a moment to realize that the child was glowing like a lamp at dusk, a pure golden light that neither blinded the eye or overwhelmed the mind: sunlight as it shone in the palace courts of Starios on a fine day in spring, just after the snows had gone but before the ailith-boughs burst into blossom.
Kimeri did not seem aware of the power that filled her full and overflowed. Nor did she wonder at what it had done: taken a master of mages out of a warded trap and set her down far from there, and the queen too from the look of her, reaching as if to touch walls that were no longer there.
Avaryan and Uveryen, thought Vanyi, too astonished for awe. God and goddess. What that child can do, not even knowing it’s impossible . . . she’s a living Gate.
Vanyi should have seen it long since. But she had been blind as they all were, looking at a child of three summers, almost four as the child herself insisted, and deluding themselves that she was anything like an ordinary young thing.
Vanyi should have known better. She had heard the tales of what Estarion had been when he was a child, and she had seen his son and his granddaughter—mages born, with the Sun’s fire in them even in the womb. None of them had been as purely mageborn as this one, she did not think. Unless they were better at hiding it, or had more determined guardianship.
None had been so surely bound to Gates. And none had been caught in a Gate as it fell, not so young. Vanyi had seen what Daruya could do on the worldroad, the glorious blaze of her power that she raised in that place as easily as she breathed. Suppose that that power had roused her daughter’s power as well. Then suppose that Kimeri’s magery had begun to grow, fed by the Great Wards and by the troubles in Shurakan, and by the Gate she had awakened and left blind after the Guardian was rescued from it.
Suppose that the Gate was not blind. Suppose that it was part o
f the child. Suppose . . .
Vanyi was dizzy. She found herself sitting on the floor, with Borti slapping her face lightly and Kimeri clinging to her hand, pouring magery into her. “Your heart tried to stop,” Kimeri said. “Don’t let it do that again.”
Vanyi felt strange. She could not shape words at all, and yet her mind was dazzlingly clear. The pains in her body, in her arm—idiot. Of course. Any herb-healer knew what that meant.
Her heart was beating oddly. It was scarred, distended, as if it had tried to shake itself to pieces but been forestalled. But when—?
When she argued with Esakai. It had been happening for a long while, but quietly, as these things did. She had refused to notice. She was getting older, she tired more easily, how not? There was nothing wrong with her.
Kimeri was beginning to be frightened. “I can’t make it better,” she said, half in tears. “I don’t know how.”
“This is close enough,” Vanyi said. Ah: words again. And breath that did not seem to tighten her chest every time she drew it in.
She tried standing up. Dizziness hovered, but she drove it away. She could walk: she circled the place, which was a curtained sanctuary, she saw, in a larger temple.
“Vanyi,” said Kimeri. Her voice trembled a little. “We have to go now, if you can. They’ve started the magic.”
So they had. Vanyi found that the palace wards were not as strong as they had been, or else and more likely the child’s power pierced right through them. She heard the opening notes of the chant, felt in her bones the shifting of powers about the circle.
The outer sanctuary was empty. She strode toward it.
“By the time we could run there,” Kimeri said behind her, “it would be all over. We have to go the other way.”
“No,” said Vanyi. “You’re staying here, and I’m going there.”
“You’ll die,” Kimeri said. “Your heart will burst if you run.”
So it would. Damn the child’s clear sight. But if she used the Gate—
oOo
She was, abruptly, elsewhere. It did not grow easier with use. The dizziness this time at least did not fell her, and her battered heart stumbled but steadied. She saw it with her mage’s eyes as a great bruised fist.
She forced herself to understand where she was. Another temple, a god with an ox’s body and human face and stance, a white ox drowsing in a pen heaped high with offerings. People staring—painted images, she would have thought, but they breathed. Their eyes were blank, bedazzled, lost in dreams of woven darkness and light.
The weavers of the magery stood together where the Gate-magic had set them, staring about as blankly as Vanyi must have the first time she was swept away by the Gate. One or both had had the presence of mind to catch and hold the priests in the sanctuary as soon as they all appeared out of air, but that might have been instinct, or magery wiser than its bearers.
Daruya came to herself before Kadin. Her face woke to an expression of pure, fierce glee—swiftly conquered as she guessed who must have brought her here. “Vanyi! So you needed me after all.”
“Not I,” said Vanyi. She tilted her chin. “That one.”
Kimeri looked little enough like a child caught in mischief. She was urgent but polite, as she had been trained to be. “Mama, could you tan my hide later? They’re breaking Gates in there.”
“If they break Gates,” Vanyi said, “they’ll very likely break her. Though I can’t be sure. I’ve heard of a living Gate—it’s supposed to have been possible, long ago, if a mage were powerful enough. But I’ve never seen one, or heard more than the mention.”
She was babbling. Daruya did not tax her with it, or silence her, either, but went straight to the point. “Kimeri. Shield yourself, and stay shielded. And stay close to me. It’s you they’ll break if they can—you’ve got the Gate inside you.”
And how, Vanyi wondered, did she know that?
She was Sun-blood. They were all outside of ordinary human reckoning, no matter how human they seemed—no matter how young or wild or foolish.
Kimeri went to her mother as she had been commanded. She took the hand her mother held out: the burning hand, that flamed so bright as they touched that it put every shadow to flight.
The temple afterward seemed black dark despite the many lamps that were lit in it, and the light of the Sun’s youngest child, as coolly golden as ever, and as steady. Daruya shed no light but what had been in her hand; she was shielded. “Kimeri,” she said, warning, reminding.
Kimeri’s light went out abruptly. She seemed shadowy without it, insubstantial, small gold-and-ivory child with wide yellow eyes, more like an owl’s than a lion’s.
A shadow shifted, startling them. Kadin glided toward the inner sanctuary, toward the sound of chanting that came clear now that Vanyi listened. There was nothing human in the way he moved. He was pure hunter, pure panther.
Grief stabbed Vanyi, sudden and unexpected, twisting in her struggling heart. He had been a beautiful boy, quiet but brilliant, with a great gift for weaving shadows. Jian had cast light in his dark places, heart as well as power. Without her he was a shell of himself.
Vanyi had hoped that he could be healed; that he could find another lightmage and be, if not what he was before, then strong enough, and whole. It had happened before with twinned mages left alone by death of body or power. But not often. Not when they were bound in heart as in magery, as Kadin had been with Jian.
There was little left of him now but air and darkness and a great hate. She watched Daruya run after him—saw the brightness that yearned to fill the dark, and the dark that would have welcomed it.
She thought briefly, wildly, that it was possible. That this darkmage could join power with the heir of the Sun—law, custom, compacts be damned. What did Daruya care for any of them?
But the dark was empty of aught but vengeance. The light was too searing bright, its bearer too much the child of Avaryan. Even as the two powers met, they recoiled. Kadin stumbled. Daruya nearly fell.
They recovered almost as one. Kadin flung himself toward the door of the inner sanctuary. Daruya caught at him, too late.
When Vanyi was in great extremity she was at her calmest, and at her coldest and most clearheaded. There was a way, she reflected, to break any ward ever raised, even a Great Ward. One had to be mad to try it, or so set on a goal that one took no notice of the wards at all. One leaped, body, power, and all, full into the center of the warding.
If one was fortunate, one died. If one was not, one suffered as Uruan had in the broken Gate: trapped and unable to escape.
Kadin was not fortunate. Nor was he trapped. As he touched the wards, as they flared to light and life, his power snatched at Daruya’s and seized it. Kimeri’s was woven in it, and in Kimeri’s was the Gate.
All together they struck the wards. No such defense had been made to withstand the full power of Sun and dark, wielded by one who cared not at all whether it killed them. The light of the Sun seared the wards from end to end of their expanse. The darkness in Kadin opened wide to swallow them.
And they were through, into the sanctuary.
oOo
The circle in its actual presence looked like a gathering of priests about an elder. In magesight it was like one of the peaked round towers that were so common in Shurakan, its many pillars holding up a tall conical roof adorned with a glitter of ornaments, a spikiness of cupolas, a bristle of rods that called away the lightnings from the rest of the tower. The king’s crown of Shurakan was very like it in shape and semblance.
This was a tower of prayer—of magic, many-pillared but rising to a common center. That was Esakai, anchoring the chant with his voice, thinned with age as it was, but true.
He faltered not at all as his wards were broken, his shrine invaded. His priests were rapt in the chant. Their minds were pure prayer, pure magic.
Mages never let themselves be so lost in their workings, even when they raised the circle. It was dangerous: it could cost them power
and sanity. But it was a mighty sacrifice. It left them all open to the wielding of the one who led them, the one who preserved will and awareness, and directed their power as he chose.
“As you choose,” said a voice, clear and cold and seeming inhuman. It was Daruya’s, familiar yet unreachably strange. This was the Sunchild pure, stripped of passion and of petulance, speaking with the clarity of a god.
“You choose this, Esakai of Ushala temple. You work your will upon this edifice of magic. No god speaks through you or wields you. Only your own desire.”
“You are blind and deaf to my gods,” Esakai said—chanted, weaving through the drone of the priests. “You know nothing. You are nothing. You shall be nothing.”
Nothing, nothing, nothing. The echoes throbbed in the heart of power, sapped it of strength, drained light away and made darkness dim and frail.
Vanyi’s own power lashed out in pure denial. She would not. She refused.
She almost laughed. Daruya, great artist of refusal, wove power with Vanyi’s and strengthened it immeasurably. She saw the humor in it, too: laughter, painful but true, and levity that turned the priests’ chant to a shimmer of wry mirth.
Truly, Vanyi realized. The chant had faltered. Priests were giggling or grinning or simply looking surprised.
“Yes, laugh,” said Daruya with sudden fierceness. “Laugh at this liar who bids you work magic in the name of his gods. No god speaks to him. He is a mage, no more, no less. A worker of his own will on the gods’ creation.”
“You are a demon,” sang Esakai, “sent to tempt us. See, my holy ones! See how this child of the realms below has twisted and mocked all that you are.”
“I am the Sun’s child,” said Daruya. “You are a mage and a ruler of mages. Your kind drove the goddess’ children to Su-Shaklan and taught them to hate the very name of magic. You defended yourselves with lies and deceptions. You named yourselves priests, hid in your temples, worked your magics in secret, under the name of prayer. But they are still magics. You are still mages. You cannot deny the truth of what you are.”
