Arrows of the Sun

by Judith Tarr

  Korusan rose, working knots out of knees and back. The ache in his bones was fierce tonight.

  It was always there, gnawing on the edges, biding its time until it killed him. But he was its master still. He drove it out with a swift turn of the warrior’s dance, leap and curvet, stamp and whirl and swift slashing stroke, down the length of the passage; and at the end a tumbler’s leap and plummet and somersault. He came up breathing hard, laughing silent Olenyai laughter, striding out past astonished, staring eunuchs.

  He had not expected to enter the temple as easily as the emperor had. Nor did he. There was a guard at the gate this night, a large and deceptively idle young clean-shaven northerner in a priest’s robe and braid and torque. But there was no one watching the wall in the back, nor any magic to prevent a shadow from going over it.

  The priestess was not in her chamber. Korusan tracked her by scent and sense and instinct to a room redolent with the scents of ink and parchment, bursting-full with books in their rolls and cases.

  A table stood in the middle of it, with a light like a star hanging in the air, magelight, clear and pure and blindingly bright. In that uncanny splendor her hair was the color of sweetwood, red and brown and gold intermingled, and her eyes the clear grey of flint.

  She had a pen in her hand and a roll of parchment before her, with words written on it, copied from the ancient and crumbling book at her elbow; but her head was up, her gaze fixed on the dark beyond the light. She did not look angry or sullen, or even sad.

  As he watched, she lifted the hand that did not hold the pen, and traced an intricate pattern in the air. It shaped itself in red-gold fire, hovering after her hand retreated. She inspected it without astonishment, frowning a little, retracing one of its many woven curves. It flexed like a living thing, smoothed, flattened, sank down to the written page and spread itself there, as if it had been a bird and that its nest. Korusan fancied that it tucked its lacework beak beneath a latticed wing and went placidly to sleep.

  A shiver ran down his spine. He had seen mages at their workings. They had worked on him more often than it comforted him to recall. But this was magic so calm, so matter-of-fact, performed with such ease and apparent pleasure, that it took him aback.

  The priestess smiled at her handiwork and applied pen to parchment, writing smoothly and swiftly, as one who did it often. He recognized the characters of the Gileni script, but not the words.

  He came to stand at her shoulder, moving as soft as a cat or an Olenyas. He watched her become aware of him. She was not alarmed. What Keruvarion must be like, that everyone he saw who came from it would let anyone walk up behind, and know no fear: he could not imagine it.

  Maybe it was that so many of them were mages. They thought themselves invulnerable.

  Out of curiosity, and because she needed the lesson, he leaned forward, peering at the image she had made with magic. She started most satisfactorily. “Who—”

  He met her eyes. Her mouth snapped shut. What came then was tight and hard, as through gritted teeth. “Tell him no. I will not go to him, summoned or unsummoned.”

  Korusan should not have been surprised. “He has not summoned you,” he said. “He is with his ladies.”

  That might have been a misjudgment: she had a temper, and it thrust her to her feet. She was smaller than he. Interesting. He had thought of her as tall. She was so, if she had been Asanian, but for an easterner she was a small woman. “Then why are you here?” she demanded.

  Presence of mind, too. Korusan was beginning to like this odd fierce creature. He shrugged at her question. “I had thought,” he said, “that you might wish to know to what you drove him.”

  “Why? What profit is in it for you?”

  He gave her a part of the truth. “I would wish that a lady of good family not bear mongrel offspring.”

  She very nearly struck him. He could have eluded her, if he chose to. She knew that: she showed him her teeth, and her flattened hand. “Sometimes,” she said, “you people are repellent.”

  “And you, madam, are without flaw?”

  She returned to her seat. She was not wary of him, which was either courage or great folly. She took up the pen and turned it in her fingers, but her eyes lingered on him. “You’re his shadow,” she said. “They all call you that. Do you dog his steps because you love him, or because it pleases you to hold his life in your hand?”

  “I am his guard and his servant,” said Korusan. “But for me, when the assassin struck, he would have died. Do your people understand life-debt?”

  “We understand that Asanians are anciently inscrutable, and Olenyai worst of all. Does life-debt mean that you are bound to him until you set him free?”

  “And he to me.” Korusan inclined his head. “You understand much.”

  “He wouldn’t agree with you.” The pen snapped between her fingers. She laid down the shards of it carefully, as if she feared to break them further. “What do you want with me?”

  “To understand you,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “my master loves you.”

  Her fists struck the table. “Stop it! Will you stop it? Bad enough that he hounds me and haunts me and drives me to distraction. Must I have his every slave and servant doing the same?”

  “Why?” asked Korusan. “Has anyone else come to you?”

  “No!” She lowered her head into her hands. It was not defeat, nor was it weariness. It was violence grimly throttled. “Go away,” she said.

  o0o

  He went. She had not expected him to. But he was not Estarion, to resist will as well as word.

  She raised her head from her hands. The shadow of him lingered in the room: a shape of veils and silent movement, soft voice and wide bright eyes. Feverish, she thought. As if he were ill, or touched with something of his master’s fire.

  She swept up the first thing that came to hand: an empty scroll-case, solid and heavy. With all her force, she hurled it at the wall.

  The silence afterward was blessed. She stared at the dent the case had made in the plastered wall, and called to mind each line of that faceless shape.

  He had eyes like Estarion’s, lion-eyes as they called them here. She had thought them plain Asanian until she came to this place and found that eyes in the Golden Empire were much as elsewhere, more often yellow than brown, but never whiteless like an animal’s.

  o0o

  Shaiyel was not unduly disturbed to be roused in the middle of the night, although the priestess with him blushed and hid her face from the light. It was a sin in Asanion, Vanyi recalled out of nowhere in particular, for a grown man to lie in bed alone. Shaiyel smiled at her, welcoming her, offering what hospitality a priest could in his cell: a seat on the stool, a cup of water from the jar.

  She declined them. “Shaiyel,” she said. “Tell me about eyes of the Lion.”

  His own widened. They were amber-gold, large, round, and quite human. “They are the mark of the blood imperial,” he said.

  “Always?” Vanyi demanded.

  He clutched a robe about him and rose, pouring a cup of water, sipping it before he spoke. “There have been lines of slaves,” he said, “but they never prospered. Too many defectives. Too many incorrigibles. It’s something in the blood. It goes with the eyes, maybe; I don’t know. I’m neither physician nor healer.”

  “What of the Olenyai? Do they have a strain of it, too?”

  “Very little is known of them,” Shaiyel said. “I suppose it’s possible. I’ve never seen one who, as far as I could tell, was anything but plain Asanian. Purer blood than most, maybe, and better breeding; but there are lordly houses that can claim as much.”

  “Have you noticed the emperor’s shadow?” She spoke of Estarion without her voice breaking. She was proud of that.

  “Ah,” said Shaiyel. “That one. He has life-debt. I wonder if Starion knows what that means.”

  “I doubt it,” said Vanyi. So: that much was true. “Do you think tha
t any of the old royal line survived?”

  “Certainly,” said Shaiyel, drawing her into a knot until he said, “Starion is the last of it. He even has the eyes. His son will, too, if he goes on as he’s begun.”

  “No,” said Vanyi, thrusting pain aside. “I don’t mean Estarion. Could there have been others who were full Asanian? Didn’t Hirel let one of his sisters marry?”

  “Jania,” said Shaiyel. “Yes. But that was far away in the west, almost to the sea. And her line died out, I heard, as the slave-lines did, and for much the same cause.”

  “And,” said Vanyi to herself, “there’s no way they could have gone among the Olenyai. The blackrobes don’t take in strangers. Do they?”

  “So we’re told,” Shaiyel said. “Their lines are more sacred to them than our altars are to us. We can break an altar if we must. They won’t break their bloodlines.”

  Vanyi shook herself. “This place . . . I’m starting at shadows. He came this evening, you see. The Olenyas. He seemed curious, as if he were inspecting me. I think he wants to breed me to his emperor.”

  It did not come out as lightly as she wanted it to. Shaiyel touched her hand in sympathy. “There’s no understanding Olenyai. Maybe he wanted to see what you were, and he’ll come back again when he judges it time, and ask you the question that’s in his mind.”

  “Probably not,” she said. “I told him to go away. If he wants his fortune told, there are mountebanks in the market who can do it better than I.”

  “But is any of them the emperor’s beloved?”

  “I don’t want to be—” She broke off. “Shaiyel, I don’t like it, that he came to me. He’s not what he seems to be. I know, Olenyai can’t be read, they have a magery on them. But there’s something under it. And it frightens me.”

  Shaiyel had no comfort to offer. She left him as soon as she could, sooner maybe than was polite.

  o0o

  Dawn surprised her. She had been walking nightlong, back and forth through the temple, round about its gardens, up the street and back again. When she realized that she could see her hand in front of her without the aid of the lamps, she was standing at the crossing, poised to turn back toward the temple.

  She drew a breath. The city was waking about her. Some of it had never gone to sleep.

  A woman without a veil, walking the open street, was a scandal, but a priestess in robe and torque, hair plaited behind her, was not reckoned as other women were. Once or twice people spat just past her. More often they bowed or gave her room.

  The palace admitted her without question. Some of the guards were Estarion’s own from Endros. It half warmed, half pained her that they were still there.

  They greeted her with pleasure, even with fondness. They were all full of the emperor’s nights in the harem: not meaning to be cruel, but it was clear, was it not, that she had set him free. And it would be a wonderful thing, or a dreadful one, if he sired a son in Asanion, of an Asanian woman.

  She was almost glad to enter the perfumed confines of the queen’s palace. The empress had done what she could to make it bearable: torn down hangings, discarded cushions and carpets, flung windows wide. It was still a stifling prison.

  Vanyi had to wait to be admitted. She did not mind overmuch. Servants brought breakfast, which she nibbled at, and offered diversion. She accepted the book. She refused the lute-player.

  She was beginning to think that she had acted too quickly. What could the empress do? Vanyi had nothing more than vague suspicions, an intrusion in a Gate, an Olenyas with the eyes of an emperor. Plain sense would bid her consider that she was a woman still unbalanced from the loss of a child, further shaken by the loss of a lover, and prey to wild fancies.

  Just as she gathered to rise and escape, a eunuch entered and bowed. “The empress will see you now,” he said.

  o0o

  The empress had been celebrating the rite of the goddess: she was still in her robes with her hair loose down her back, and a look on her as of one who has not quite returned from the gods’ realm to mortal reality.

  Vanyi, who had forgotten the sunrise-rite in her distraction, knew a stab of guilt. It did nothing to sweeten her mood. She managed a punctilious obeisance, even a proper greeting.

  Merian forestalled it before it went on too long. “Enough. This may be Asanion, but I prefer the usages of Keruvarion. Will you sit? Have you eaten?”

  “Your servants saw to it, lady,” Vanyi said.

  “Then you will pardon me if I break my fast in front of you.”

  Vanyi inclined her head. Merian’s servants brought a much lighter repast than they had offered Vanyi, bread only, and fruit, and water scented with the sour-sweetness of starfruit.

  The empress seemed to take an endless time about her frugal meal, chewing each minute bite, swallowing, pausing as if in prayer before she took another. Vanyi was ready to scream by the time Merian put down the last bit of fruit half-tasted and waved the rest away, and said, “Tell me.”

  “I know about Estarion,” Vanyi said, which was not how she had meant to begin at all.

  “Everyone knows about Estarion,” said his mother. “Do you want him back?”

  “No,” Vanyi said, “damn it. Everyone asks me that, too.”

  “Including Estarion?”

  “I’m the one who drove him to it.”

  “So you both may like to think.” Merian sat back in her tall chair, as much at ease as she ever allowed herself to be. “My son is quite excessively dutiful, and quite clever at casting blame on others for the pain it costs him.”

  “I had a great deal to do with it,” Vanyi said. “Don’t try to tell me I didn’t. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? I hear she’s even a hoyden, as Asanians go. He gave her a senel, and she rides it every day.”

  “She is quite charming,” said Merian, “and very forthright in her opinions.”

  “I’m sure that delights him.”

  “It is what he is accustomed to.”

  Vanyi wanted to laugh, but if she did, she would burst into tears. “He does like a woman who will give as good as she gets.”

  “Even now,” said Merian. She sighed. “He is changing. Asanion has altered him.”

  “For the better?”

  “For the worse.” The empress rose and began to pace. Vanyi had never seen her restless before. She walked to the wall and spun. “No. Not for the worse. I cannot reckon it, or him. He comes to me, he speaks, he is courteous, he is everything a son should be. And yet he seems to me to be walking in a dream.”

  “A nightmare,” said Vanyi.

  “Yes.” Merian closed her eyes for a moment. “And since his squire died, there is no touching him at all, mind or body. He has closed himself off altogether.”

  “He . . . came to me,” Vanyi said through a narrowing throat. “He wanted . . .”

  “Of course you refused,” said Merian. Vanyi could not judge her tone, whether she meant to lend comfort or to prick with scorn. “If you had accepted, you would have broken your vows.”

  Comfort or scorn, it did not matter. “So he went to the Asanian woman,” Vanyi said. “And now he belongs to her.”

  “You should not envision her as a snare or a temptress,” Merian said. “She is a child who was born to breed princes.”

  “And so she will,” said Vanyi. “But I didn’t come to speak of her. Or even, directly, of him.”

  Merian waited, one brow lifted.

  “You know his Olenyas,” Vanyi said. “The one who never leaves him.”

  “The one who bears the life-debt.” Merian sighed. “I know him.”

  “Have you noticed his eyes?”

  “Should I?”

  “Have you?”

  Merian half-smiled. “You think that he is a lost heir to the Golden Throne?”

  “Couldn’t he be?”

  “It is possible,” Merian said. “And if it were, would he have slain the assassin who was striking at my son?”

  “He might, if he had in mind
more than simple assassination.”

  “Such as?”

  “Revenge,” said Vanyi. “Payment for all the years of Varyani rule in Asanion. That’s why your husband died, isn’t it? Because he dared to be emperor, and to be a foreigner. Estarion has an advantage his father lacked: the one thing, the sign that marks Asanian royalty.”

  “There is somewhat more to him, and it, than that.”

  “Of course there is,” said Vanyi. “And there’s more to this blackrobe than life-debt or loyalty or any other Asian claim to virtue. He’s shielded from magery—”

  “They all are,” said Merian, cutting her off. “They wear a talisman; they have done so for as long as anyone remembers.”

  “Yes, and who makes the talismans? Who raises the wards?”

  “Mages,” said Merian.

  “Mages of the Guild?”

  “The Guild is dead.”

  “What if it’s not?”

  Merian stood in front of her, eyes level upon her face. It was not a challenge. She was not, Vanyi thought, the enemy. “Do you have proof?”

  “No,” said Vanyi. “Not yet.”

  “Why do you think it, then? Might there not be mages in Asanion as elsewhere, who may be willing, for a price, to set a simple spell? Or they may be Olenyai themselves, those mages. Why not? It is a useful thing for a warrior and a guardsman to be protected against magic. We do the same for our own, when we think of it.”

  “I can’t explain,” Vanyi said, though she hated to show that weakness. “It has to do, a little, with Gates, and feelings in my bones. If I can gather proof—if I can prove that the Guild survives, and that it is using the Gates—will you stand by me?”

  “What will you do if you find proof?”

  “Confront them,” said Vanyi. “Discover their purposes. If they mean the empire no harm, then well for them. If they’re up to their old tricks . . .”

  “You may of course be obsessed,” the empress observed.

  “I know that.” Vanyi quelled her temper. “My lady, much of magery is in the bones and the instincts. We forget that, with our training and our tests, our rules and laws and vows.”

  “You would instruct me, priestess?”