by Judith Tarr
“Why, have they declared me dead in the southlands?”
“No one knows,” Daros said. “You’ve not been seen for twenty years.”
“Ah,” said the emperor. “You’re asking if I’ve been tending woolbeasts since before you were born. It’s a good life. Peaceful. Useful, too. That cloak you’re wearing came from these beasts.”
“But you ruled the world,” Daros said.
“So I did,” said the emperor. “For years out of count I did it, from the time I was a child. When I left it, I was older than most men live to be; but it seems I have the family curse, to be unbearably long-lived. Either we die young, for foolish cause, or it seems we live forever.”
“Truly? Forever?”
“Do I look like dying at any time soon?” the emperor asked.
“No,” Daros said. “You look younger than my father.”
“I looked like this fifty years ago,” the emperor said. “I’m frozen in time, boy Are you horrified yet? Are you about to open your Gate and run away?”
Daros’ teeth clicked together. “You aren’t supposed to—”
The golden eyes narrowed. For an instant Daros saw the man who had indeed ruled the world: a lord of power and terror. Then he was the shepherd of Han-Uveryen again, sitting back on his stool, sighing and shrugging and saying, “It seems we both do a number of things we aren’t supposed to do. Don’t try to run away, boy; the Lady of Gates has set guardians on all the worldroads, with orders to kill anything that passes there without her leave. They most certainly will kill you.”
Daros needed no worldroads; his Gates were a different thing, and perhaps a thing that mages had not known before. But he had no intention of letting this man know that. As amiable as he was, he was still Daros’ jailer.
Daros bent his head and lowered his eyes and pretended to be suitably cowed. The emperor did not trust him: he could feel that. But he was let be. That was enough, for a while.
THREE
MERIAN WAS INTOLERABLY WEARY OF GATES. SHE HAD LIVED and breathed them for as long as she could remember; they were in her, part of her. But of late she had begun to understand how an emperor could give all his glory and power to his granddaughter and her consort, turn his back on them, and walk away.
This was no time to dream of flight, or even of escaping for an hour or a day, finding a quiet place and simply being whatever she pleased to be. At best she could steal a moment to dream—and when she did, she was startled and somewhat dismayed to see who waited for her there.
The Gileni boy was disposed of—well, she reckoned, though the rest of the Gate-mages begged to disagree. Her great-grandfather would keep him in hand. He would also, she hoped, learn what the boy could do; useless idle thing that he was, it seemed he had a gift for Gates that was little less than Merian’s own.
And there he was in her dream, this eve of Autumn Firstday, idling about in a garden of singing birds. He was as lovely as ever, with that face cast in bronze and those narrow uptilted dark eyes and that hair like new copper—mark of his lineage, and pride of his beauty, too. She had not troubled to notice the rest of him while she judged him, but her eyes had been marking every line. Under the soiled and ridiculous finery, he was not at all an ill figure of a man.
She had understood long ago, when she was younger than this boy, that there was no room in her for both Gates and lovers. It was her duty to produce an heir; she was royal born, she had no choice in the matter. But unlike her mother, who had bred her as if she had been a senel, Merian could not bring herself to do the necessary.
Maybe, she thought, she should let the dream lead her. The boy was as royally bred as she, and a famous beauty. He had magic in more than the usual measure—how much more, it might serve her well to discover. And he had a name for prowess in the bedchamber. The women of Han-Gilen, both noble and irretrievably common, had never an ill word to say of him, except that he could not choose just one of them. He had to have them all.
She fled the dream and the thought. All Gate-mages who could come to the city of Endros Avaryan had gathered for the rite of Autumn Firstday: celebration in the temple and feasting after, and then, as night fell, a council.
There were a dozen of them in Merian’s receiving room in the old palace, drinking wine or ale and nibbling festival cakes. Lamplight and magelight illumined faces of nearly every race that this world knew, from ivory-and-gold Asanian to night-dark northerner. But they were all mages of Gates, bound together by the same duty.
“I still say,” said Urziad of Asanion, “that all worlds but ours are empty of human life.”
“Something builds gardens and palaces,” said Kalyi of the Isles. “Something sets rings of stones on headlands and leaves the wrecks of ships by alien seas.”
“We know that there were people once,” Urziad said. “But we’ve been standing guard over the worlds for close on fourscore years, and none of us has seen a living soul. The worlds are empty, all but ours.”
“The worlds around Gates are empty,” Ushallin said. “That doesn’t mean the worlds themselves are. Maybe the Gates are shunned as evil; maybe people are afraid of them. Maybe—”
“Maybe all the people are gone,” said Urziad.
“But where? What would have happened to them?” Ushallin asked. She came from the Nine Cities; she was a skilled opener of Gates. She asked difficult questions, too, that none of the others could answer.
Kalyi at least was willing to venture a guess. “They may be greater mages than we can ever dream of being. Or they decided long ago to dispense with Gates, and left them behind as useless remembrances.”
“Hardly useless if they can still be opened,” Ushallin said. “It seems that we’ve been left alone amid all the worlds of Gates. What if there is a reason for that? What if something comes to Gates sooner or later, and devours all thinking beings in the worlds beyond them?”
A shudder ran round the circle. Urziad made a sign against evil—catching himself just too late. “Surely we have more to occupy us,” he said, “than fretting over children’s nightmares.”
“But are they?” Merian had been silent for so long that she startled them all. “Are they simple nightmares?” she asked them. “There are notes in the histories, commentaries on the people of Gates; there were meetings, conversations, suggestions that there might be embassies and alliances. But since my great-grandfather’s time, there’s been no mention of any such thing. It’s all empty worlds and silent shores. There has to be a reason. What if this is it? They’ve withdrawn or been driven back from the Gates. Something is stirring there, something enormous. Haven’t you felt it? It comes in the hour before dawn, or in the drowsy center of the afternoon, when we’re least on guard. It feels like a storm coming.”
They were silent. She looked from face to face. They were all respectful, but there was no spark of recognition in them. They had not sensed what she had sensed.
They were good men and women, and strong mages. But she would have given much just then to speak with one who understood the deeper matters.
The mages of Gates knew only what they had seen in living memory: empty worlds, open Gates, freedom to pass where they would—within the laws and the bindings, which none of them thought to question.
But there was one who remembered the times before, when the Guild of Mages ruled the Gates, and Gate-mages were unknown in the world. Merian excused herself as soon as she respectably could, and took refuge in her garden, sitting by the pool that was always still even when the wind blew strong. It reflected starlight at midday and the moons’ light at night, whether the moons were in the sky or no.
He was sitting between the moons, wearing the face he wore in dreams: much the same as the one he wore awake, black eagle with lion-eyes. They were lambent gold, those eyes; they smiled at her.
“Great-grandfather,” she said.
“Youngling,” said the emperor. “You’re troubled tonight.”
He was always direct. It had served him ill in d
ealing with the more subtle of his subjects, but Merian found it restful, in its way. “Is he still with you?” she asked. She had not meant to say it, but it escaped before she could catch it.
“He’s your trouble?” Estarion asked, though not quite as if he believed it.
She shook off folly—both his and hers. “He troubles me, but not in this.”
“He should,” said Estarion. “He’s a living Gate.”
“So I gather,” she said.
“Did you also gather that he’s not the idiot he pretends to be?”
“I did hope that there was more to him than he was letting us see,” she said.
“There is a great deal more,” said Estarion, “though he might not thank us for perceiving it. I was a considerable shock to him, but he’s recovered since; he’s decided that I must be at least a fraction senile, since I prefer a shepherd’s cot to the delights of my own cities.”
“I thought so once,” she said, “but not of late. Were mages as blind when you were young, as they are now?”
“If anything, they were blinder.” He raised himself up out of the pool, and stood dripping moonlight. “What are they not seeing now?”
“Gates,” she answered him. “The worlds weren’t always empty. Were they?”
“Ah,” he said. “So you’ve noticed that, have you? I wondered if anyone would. No, when I was as young as this spoiled child you’ve saddled me with, we all knew that the worlds were populated, though there was considerable debate as to whether any of that populace were mages. None of them traveled as we traveled, that we ever knew. None came into this world. And none ever spoke to us or acknowledged us. But the oldest mages, who had the tales from long before, said that there was a time when the Gates saw a great deal of travel, and mages were aware of presences on the worldroads, going their incomprehensible ways.”
“But none of them came into this world, or spoke to anyone from it.”
“Not in those days,” he said.
She frowned. “Tell me what you’re not telling me.”
“Not now, I think,” he said. He smiled, but she knew how little hope she had of moving him. “This I can tell you. The boy knows something. He may not even be aware that he knows it.”
“Would he divulge it to you?”
“I doubt it,” he said.
She hissed at him. He only went on smiling. “You are always welcome in my house,” he said.
He was gone before she could speak again. She considered flinging herself on the ground and indulging in a fit of pure useless fury. But she was too old for that, and maybe too much a coward.
Instead she walked through the Gate that was in her, and stood on a windy mountaintop, looking down into a starlit bowl of valley.
Estarion knew she had come. She felt the brush of his regard. What the other thought, she did not know him well enough to tell. If his reputation was to be trusted, he would not even be aware of her; but she placed little trust in rumor. Not about this one.
She waited out the night on the mountain, wrapped in a cloak of darkness and stars. The Gates lay quiet within her, save that, on the edge of awareness, she knew a glimmer of unease. Nothing troubled her, neither man nor beast nor bird of the air.
At sunrise she walked down to the shepherd’s cot that was all the palace Estarion wanted in this age of the world. He had gone out before dawn, striding long-legged across the valley; he carried a staff and a bag, and had a bow slung behind him, as if he were going hunting. He had not taken the boy with him. The boy, she was well aware, had roused to see him going, then rolled onto his face and plunged back into sleep.
A creature of cities, that one, to sleep while the sun was in the sky. He had made a nest for himself in a corner of the hut, a heap of furs and blankets, but he had kicked them off as he slept. She had a fine view of his shoulders and back and buttocks, and his ruffled bright hair that was growing out of its dreadful close cut.
She sat on her heels and waited as she had on the mountain, with the patience of a mage. While she waited, she explored the Gates, searching out the strangeness. It kept eluding her, until she began to wonder if she had sensed it at all.
After quite some time, the sleeper began to twitch. His shoulders flexed; he wriggled, as if to burrow into his bed. He groped blindly for coverlets.
She was sitting on them. He opened a clouded eye and stared blankly at her. She stared coolly back. The eye went wide. He scrambled up, still half in a dream, and seemed torn between the prince’s urge to bow and the fugitive’s urge to escape.
She stood between him and the only door. He was still too aggravated with her to offer royal courtesy. He settled for standing in the tumble of his bed and glaring at her.
“I would think,” she said, “that with your master gone out hunting, you would be expected to look after the flock.”
He started as if struck. Shock of remembrance chased guilt across his face and hid behind outraged temper. “Are you my master, too?”
“I might be,” she said, “if you prove to have a Gate-mage’s gift.”
“You don’t want me,” he said. He sounded just barely bitter.
“No? You imagine you’re the only scapegrace who ever vexed his betters’ peace?”
“I don’t imagine I’m worth much at all.”
She looked him up and down. It was a pleasant occupation, and one she was not inclined to finish overly soon; particularly when the slow flush crawled from his breastbone to his brow. “What is this play of worthlessness? Is it a fashion? A game? A way of tricking the dark gods into ignoring you?”
He shrugged, sullen. “Maybe it’s the truth.”
“You know it’s not.” She pulled a shirt from beneath her and tossed it at him. “Get dressed. I’ll help you with the flock.”
That startled him. “But you don’t—”
“I did a year of my priestess-Journey here,” she said. She tossed breeches in the wake of the shirt. He caught those, glowering, and pulled them on with rather more than necessary force. She caught herself regretting the breeches and the shirt, and the leather coat that went over them. They suited him better than his old finery, but his skin suited him best of all.
He was more adept at looking after woolbeasts than she might have expected. He was less sulky, too, once he had set to work. There were pens to mend and feet to trim and the ram to feed where he lived in his solitary splendor; young ones to count and older ones to look over for signs of trouble. There was a peaceful rhythm in it, that she remembered well.
The sun was high when they were done. They had not exchanged a word since they left the hut. When they went back to it, to dine ravenously on cheese and last night’s bread and flagons of bitter ale, the silence had set into crystal, too beautiful to shatter.
Yet shatter it she must. As pleasant as this idyll had been, she had duties waiting, and mages calling down the worldroads, needing her for this urgency or that. She drained the last of her flagon, sat back on the bench in front of the hut, and turned her face and hands to the sun. Her left hand was ordinary enough, but the right burned and flamed, bearing a sun of gold in its palm: the Kasar, brand and painful price of her lineage. “Tell me what you sense in Gates,” she said.
His silence changed abruptly, to the temper of heated bronze. Yet when he spoke, he sounded as light and useless as he ever could pretend to be. “What should I be sensing?”
“Tell me,” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
She moved so swiftly that he could have had no warning. Her hand clamped over his throat. She gave him the full flare of her royal temper, fierce enough that even he had the wits to blanch. “Stop,” she gritted. “Stop lying to me. There is something out there. You have seen it. Tell me what it is.”
“You’re not my master,” he said.
She flung him down and set a knee on his chest. He made no effort to resist. His eyes on her held no fear. She kissed him hard, until he must have bruised, and flung herse
lf away.
He lay where she had left him. His expression was blank, stunned. Slowly, as if in a dream, he said, “Something sweeps across the worlds. It feels like a storm coming, or like the sea rising. Moons shatter in its wake. What rides ahead of it … it rapes and pillages, burns and slashes and kills. People are dying, and worse than dying. You feel them, don’t you? I hear their cries when I sleep. I see the flames even awake.”
Whatever she had hoped for, it was nothing as distinct as this. She groped for the rags of her voice. “How long?”
“Since I came to this place,” he said. He sat up. His mask was gone. There was still not a man beneath, but the boy was less feckless; he had seen things that harrowed the heart. “When you caught me, I felt something—saw a broken world. I didn’t want to think anything of it. But after I came here, where there is little to do but tend woolbeasts and sleep, I saw more and more.” He peered at her. “You don’t see it. None of you does. Even he doesn’t know.”
“I think,” she said, “he does.” She would give way to that fit of anger later. “I’m beginning to feel it. The rest sense nothing.”
“That’s the guard on the Gates,” he said. “It protects you mages.”
“And not you?”
“I’m not bound by rites or vows,” he said.
“No?”
“I’m not going to swear to anything,” he said, “or be bound to anything.”
“Indeed?”
She was aggravating him in spite of his best efforts: his nostrils had thinned and his lips were tight. “Indeed, your royal highness.”
Her lips twitched, which piqued him even further. She forbore to laugh aloud. These matters were not for mirth, however amusing it might be to test his temper. “I do think it best that you remain as you are: renegade, apart from orders and guilds. But I would ask a thing of you, for this world’s sake if not for my own: that you will tell me of your dreams, and take me into them if you can.”
“Not likely,” he said, biting off the words.
