by Judith Tarr
The executioner mounted the block and readied his whips. One by one the prisoners ascended to face him.
He was big for an Asanian, almost as tall as Estarion, and broad, and startlingly young, with the long gentle face of a woolbeast. He went about his work with peaceful deliberation, taking no notice of the struggling, cursing captives, or the cries of the cowards among them. They would believe, maybe, that Estarion mocked them with clemency, and meant to see them flogged until they died.
The last of them stumbled to his place with the aid of a guard’s spearbutt. The executioner shook out the thongs of a many-headed whip, smoothed them, laid the whip carefully on the table beside the rest. He turned toward Estarion, bowing low.
“He is ready,” Lord Shurichan said, “majesty.”
Estarion hardly needed to be told. He raised his branded hand. The sun caught it, shot sparks from it.
People flinched. His lips stretched back from his teeth, but not in pleasure. None of this was pleasure. But he would do it. He could do no less, and still be emperor.
Justice, he thought as the whip rose and fell. Some of the prisoners screamed. Some cried and pleaded to be let go.
His stomach was a hard cold knot. His jaw ached with clenching. The ul-cub in his lap had dug claws into his thigh. He welcomed the pain.
They said that when the Sunborn wrought summary justice, he opened his mind to the one who suffered it. Lest, he said, he grow too fond of exacting punishment, and too free of his power to do so. No one had ever pretended that he grew the softer for it, or the less implacable.
Estarion had no such greatness in him, and no such steel. But he would not put a stop to this. These were fools; and fools they must be seen to be.
The last was the dreamer, blue with cold and bleak with want of dreamsmoke. He kept his air of insolence for all that, shook off the guards who would have dragged him to his punishment, walked there on his own feet and in his own time, and held up his hands to be bound to the post.
He managed as he walked to catch Estarion’s eye and hold it. Estarion met the hard yellow stare with one as hard and, he hoped, as flat.
The dreamer shrugged, turned his back, barely flinched as they stripped the robe from it. His shoulders were narrow and yellow-pale and thin, sharp-boned like a bird’s. He did not seem to mind as the others had, that he was naked. He grinned over his shoulder and wriggled his bony backside.
He did not scream until the tenth stroke, and then in a strangled squawk, as if it had been startled out of him. It took the edge off his mockery. Still he walked away when it was over, though his back was laid open with weals that would turn to scars, branding his shame until he died.
Estarion rose with the ul-cub on his shoulders. The crowd was quiet. The guards were watchful but at ease. They did not like what he did; they had argued loud and long against it. But his mind was fixed. He would go to the scaffold and speak to the prisoners, and let it be known in Pri’nai that the emperor’s justice was more than a cold word out of Kundri’j. It was here, present before them, and with his face behind it.
He began to descend the stair. His guards were ready for him, likewise his Olenyai, and his mother and his mages.
They did not have his consent, but they defied him. If he would indulge this folly, their eyes said, he would go full guarded, or he would not go at all.
He could not quarrel with them now. And too well they knew it, as surely they knew what comfort they were, warding his back with power as with weapons.
Half of the way down, he paused. The prisoners stood on their scaffold, held upright if need be. Some were waking to awareness that this was all they would suffer; that they were alive, and would indeed walk free.
There was a stir behind Estarion. Ulyai growled. Estarion glanced back. One of the guards had stumbled. His fellows caught him. He steadied, muttering curses at his own clumsiness.
Estarion smiled thinly. He was all nerves and twitches. His captives stood waiting for him, their rebellion broken. He had not won in the south, nor yet in all Asanion, but he was lord in Pri’nai; that, he had proved.
The way was open as it always was, the people on their faces in homage. He would teach them to stand like men. But first he must show them a Sunlord’s clemency.
He sprang lightly onto the scaffold, disdaining the steps that led up to it. He had caught his guards for once off guard. That made him laugh.
Ulyai lofted herself up beside him and crouched, tail twitching, muzzle wrinkled in a snarl. Poor queen of cats; she hated Asanian cities with a deathless passion. Her son, riding on Estarion’s shoulders, howled with ul-cat glee.
No, Estarion realized too late. Rage. The cub dug in claws, reversed himself, and sprang.
Estarion spun. The dreamer went down in a flurry of claws and teeth and steel.
Steel?
The air was full of wings, wind, knives. Ulyai roared.
“Starion!” Iburan’s voice, great bull-bellow. “Starion! ’Ware mages! ’Ware mages!”
Not mages, Estarion thought as the world slowed its turning and the wind died to a shriek. Not only mages. A Gate. And in the Gate, death.
They boiled out of the air, men in white, armed with knives. They sang as they came. They sang death, they sang oblivion, they sang numbing terror. All their eyes fixed on Estarion’s face.
Claws hooked in Estarion’s knee. He snatched up the he-cub, who was still snarling, bloody-mouthed but richly content.
He did not spare a glance for the dreamer. Ul-cats, even as young as this, did not leave living prey.
With the cub again on his shoulders, he leaped down into the roil that had been his escort. His throat was raw. He was shouting. Howling. “Here! I am here! Take me, fools. Take me if you can!”
He stumbled. Body. White. Assassin—but—
The world reeled. That was fur that hampered his feet, a great sweep of cloak spattered bright with blood. There was a body in it.
“No,” he said. He said it very clearly. Battle raged about him. None of it touched him.
He knelt beside his mother. She breathing still. The knife in her breast pulsed with the beating of her heart. No blood flowed there; the blade stanched it.
It was not the only wound, not by far. The rest were less clean, if less deadly.
Her head rested on Iburan’s knee. The priest looked immeasurably weary; his head had fallen forward, his beard fanning on his breast. Her eyes wandered from his to Estarion’s.
“Take,” she said, a bare breath of sound. “Take the knife.”
“You’ll die,” Estarion protested.
“Yes,” she said. “Take it.”
Estarion tossed his head in furious refusal. “No! We’ll get you out of this—call healers—mages—”
“I am mage,” Iburan said, “and healer. I can do nothing.”
“Of course you can.” Estarion looked about. A wall of black and scarlet circled them. White pierced it briefly, but fell to the flash of a sword. Arrows were flying; one arced over him singing. And the people—the poor people—would be dying, trapped like cattle in a pen.
“Hold her,” Estarion said to Iburan. “Keep her alive.”
He thrust himself to his feet. The scaffold was at his back. He gathered, leaped, half-fell to the splintered wood of the floor. He cast a glance about. The dreamer was dead. The rest were gone—alive, he hoped, and under guard.
The battle was not as fierce as he had feared. The knot of his guards was the worst of it. People fled the fighting, trampling one another, sounding at last like human beasts, yelling their terror.
He was calm. Perfectly, icily, immovably calm. His mother was dying. Mages had killed her. They thought maybe to deceive him, to feign their coming through the crowd of his people, his Asanians. But he had felt the Gate; he had known the wound it rent in the earth of his empire.
Something stirred in him; something shifted. It was not anger. No. Nor fear. Nor even irony. These rebels whom he had punished had been no more t
han a mask, their punishment a pretext. Now the enemy had shown his hand.
Mages.
Mages of the Gates.
He looked down. Iburan looked up, and deliberately, coolly, drew the knife from the wound in the empress’ breast. She sighed. And her heart, her great wise heart, burst asunder.
Estarion’s skull was beating like a heart, beating fit to burst. He clutched at it, rocking, dislodging the ul-cub. The cat fell yowling.
The empress was dead. Godri was dead. His father was dead. All dead, all slain. Because of him. Because of Estarion.
He howled. There were no words in it, only rage. And power. Raw, pulsing, blood-red power.
He had driven it down deep and bound it with chains of guilt and terror, and sworn a vow beyond the limits of memory. Never to wield it again, never to take a life, never to destroy a soul.
He had done it, and done it surpassingly well: he had shut the door of memory, and made truth of the lie. Even mages had not seen the deception. They called him cripple, feeble, maimed and all but powerless. But his power lived, far down below his remembrance, waiting. Yearning to break free.
He was dizzy, reeling, stunned with the shock of magic reborn, but he was master of it still. He remembered the ways of it. He drew it like a sword, great gleaming deadly thing, and raised it, and poised.
Mages, yes. Gate: so. Land weeping with pain, people a knot of shadowy fear. He soothed them with blade turned to gentleness, calmed them, brought them under his shield. And turned then. Outward.
So it had been when his father was dead, before the dark came upon him. This clarity. This bright strength with its edge of blood.
It was never as they had taught him, those who called themselves masters of mages. They feigned that it was difficult; that a mage must struggle to see what was as clear as sun in a glass, and as simple to encompass. Here were mages, little lights like candles in a wind, and the threads of their lives stretched spider-thin behind them. To cut, so, one had but to raise the sword. To snuff them out, one needed but a breath.
No. That too was memory, though dim. One should not wield the sword so; and never the breath that was the soul. There was a price—prices.
And what was the price of his mother’s life, his father’s, his friend and brother’s?
Not so high. Not, again, so bitter. They had suffered death of the body. He would slay souls. And in that, be doomed and damned.
So simple. So very simple.
Starion.
Iburan. Again. And another.
“Mother?” Gladness; soaring, singing joy. “Mother! You live?”
No. Faint, that, but clear. Starion, no. Never be tempted. Never for me.
“Mother!” No answer. “Mother!”
She was gone. He raged and wept, but she would not come back for him, nor for any mortal pleading.
Mages bobbed and glimmered like corpselights. He caught the stink of them: self-delight and surety, and contempt for his frailty. They could not even see the light that was in him. They were too weak. He struck them blind, and they never knew.
He writhed in the darkness, twisting and coiling like a dragon of fire. A magelight darted at him, wielding what no doubt it reckoned deadly power. Estarion batted it aside.
It reeled. He caught it. He considered the thread that spun from it, the light that flickered in it, and gently, most gently, plucked thread and minute guttering spark from the bubble of light, and pricked the bubble with a sharpened claw.
So simple. So precise. Body, soul, he left entire. Magery he took away. And when the last corpse-pale glimmer was gone, he drifted alone in the dark.
That too he had forgotten. What peace was here; what quiet, where no storms came.
He coiled, uncoiled. So supple, this shape, freed from the stiffness that was humanity. He had thought it madness to linger here. It had been madness to depart.
Now at last he would stay. The dark was sweet and deep, the silence blessed, and absolute. Peace, his soul sang. Peace.
43
Vanyi had a few breaths’ warning. She should have had more than that. Her Gate-sense had been uneasy for long days now, a broad sourceless uneasiness, but nothing on which she could set hand or mind. Estarion’s insistence on making a spectacle of himself was purely Estarion, and no more foolish than anything else he might have taken it into his head to do. He was guarded with all the vigilance that any of them might muster; she was part of the wards, set among a faceless rank of Olenyai, weaving her strand of autumn-colored silk into the greater web.
The warding that the blackrobes wore was a hindrance, until realization came to her in a blaze of sudden light. Olenyai wards were made for shield and guard against attack. In the face of power that would weave with them and not oppose them, they yielded with astonishing ease. She was just finding the way of it, just beginning to know the pride of her accomplishment, when the web of the world began to fray.
She had never seen the opening of a Gate, never thought to see it. Yet there was no denying it; no hoping that it was something else, something less, something that did not pierce straight to the heart of the wards and shatter them.
The breaking was not even deliberate. Estarion’s mages had armed themselves against attack of steel or magery, but not against the forging of a Gate. It drained the power out of their working and wielded it for itself, drank deep of the resistance that some of them—fools, idiots, blind brave hopeless innocents—mustered against it.
But not Vanyi. The Olenyai shields protected her, woven with them as she was.
She dropped out of the web half-stunned but conscious, and able to see with eyes of the body. She saw the battle begin, white-robed assassins against Guardsmen in scarlet, Queen’s Guards in green.
No Olenyai. The assassins veered aside from them.
She saw the empress fall, and Iburan go down with her. She saw Estarion leap shouting to his mother’s side. He wore a sword; he seemed to have forgotten it, or he was trusting his guards beyond life and hope.
Or he had merely taken leave of his wits. When he struggled back to the scaffold, bright target for any assassin with a bow or a throwing knife, Vanyi remembered how to move.
She struggled within a suddenly solid wall of bodies. Yellow eyes fixed on her, hard and flat as stones. No lion-eyes; all of these were plain Asanian.
Even yet she had the key of their wards. She set it in its lock and turned it carefully, not too swift, not too slow. Beyond the circle the world was breaking-—the empress dead, the mages fallen, blood feeding the Gate, and above them all, miraculously unharmed, the emperor.
She slid hands between two stone-still Olenyai and opened them like the leaves of a door. Beyond their circle was havoc. More magery; more Gate-work, taking its strength from the cattle-panic of the people as they fled the blood and the battle.
Estarion stood erect on the scaffold. His face was perfectly blank. His eyes were pure and burning gold.
“God,” Vanyi said, her voice lost in the tumult. “Oh, goddess.”
No one else seemed even to see him. His guards held off the assassins, taking bitter toll in blood and lives.
He was no man to them then, no living, breathing, fallible human creature, but prize and victim of the battle. Those who fought to guard him, those who fought to kill him, were oblivious to him else. And mages, both his own and those others, knew that he had no power for the wielding.
She had heard his outcry in his riding: how he was nothing to anyone but a child or a ruined mage; a weak thing, a thing to be guarded and protected, with no strength of his own.
They were all going to regret that, she thought, remote and very clear. He was like a mountain asleep under the moons, motionless, lifeless, deep sunk in snow. But his heart was sun-bright fire. And soon, between one breath and the next, it was going to shatter.
Vanyi wrenched eyes and mind away from him. The ring of guards had widened. The assassins were falling back. The Varyani captain and the captain of Olenyai had matters well
in hand; they had even, gods knew how, brought Lord Shurichan’s men under their command.
Within the ring, Estarion’s mages were beginning to recover. But there were others among them, and that mountain of fire above them, and no knowledge in any of them that there was danger apart from steel or simple magery.
Down! she cried with her power. My mages, my people—for your lives’ sake, down! Shield!
Oromin touched her with incomprehension, but shielded as if by instinct. Shaiyel and his little priestess were now clear in her awareness, now locked in walls. The others fled before the lash of Vanyi’s urgency. But one resisted.
Iburan, Vanyi pleaded. Shield yourself He’s going to—
And where are your shields? Iburan lashed back. And when she wavered, struck so fiercely that she must shield or fall.
And the fire came down.
In the world of the living was nothing to see. A scattering of priests fallen on their faces. A battle that went on unheeding. A lone motionless figure on a scaffold, with the wind tugging at his scarlet cloak, and the sun in his eyes.
But in the world of power, even behind the strongest of shields, that figure was a tower of light. Corpse-candles danced and flickered about it.
Mages, and none of Vanyi’s kind, either. If they had heard her call to shield, they had chosen not to heed it. And they paid.
So would she have done if she had laid herself open to him.
He stripped the mages of their magery as easily as a child strips a sea-snail of its shell, but left them alive to know what he had done to them. He shut down the Gate without even thinking of it, healed the rent in the land and the air, and as an afterthought, in passing, herded the last of the assassins into the swords of his guard.
And then was silence.
Vanyi dragged herself to her feet. The fighting was ended. The people were fled, all but the dead. No one stood in all that wide and windy place but Estarion’s Guard and Lord Shurichan’s best, and a handful of stumbling, staggering priest-mages, and she.
