by Judith Tarr
“None of those, Mother,” Merian said. “He’s a remarkably good match, as breeding goes.”
“Then what is the impediment? There must be one, or you’d not be moping and glooming at me instead of rousing your mages to war.”
“There is a small matter,” Merian said, “of his having vanished into the shadow.”
Daruya sat on the bench beside her daughter. She was not slow of wit, nor was she blind. “Ah,” she said. “His lineage is impeccable, and a reputation, even one as … remarkable as his, can be outlived.”
“A man has to live to do it,” Merian said.
“Do you believe he’s dead?”
“I don’t know,” said Merian.
“No? You are a mage.”
“He’s gone into the darkness,” Merian said.
“So has our emperor,” said Daruya. “We have to expect that they’ll find one another, and hope that they come back.”
“Are you comforting me, Mother?”
“No,” said Daruya. “I’m comforting myself. That doesn’t make it any less true. Are you waiting for me to give you leave to go hunting them? You won’t get it. We need you here. You will be the Gate for them, if they can come back through the shadow.”
“I hate you,” Merian said mildly.
“Of course you do. I’m your mother.”
Merian sighed. “Duty is a horrible thing.”
“Yes,” said Daruya.
“And I should go back to it.” Merian stood. “Have I whined excessively?”
“No more than you ought.” Daruya smiled, which was rare enough to catch Merian by surprise. “You’ve chosen well. He’s had an unusually feckless youth, but then so did I. He’ll be a strong man.”
“I thought you despised him,” said Merian.
“Only a fool would do that,” Daruya said. “Go. Muster your mages. The tide is coming. You have reason now to survive it.”
“Selfish reason?”
“Hardly selfish,” her mother said. “You’re taking thought for the continuance of the line.”
“Am I? He doesn’t even know. He thinks I despise him.”
“Does he despise you?”
“I think he dislikes me intensely.”
“That need be no impediment,” said Daruya, “in a state marriage—and still less in such an arrangement as I had with your father. He’s notoriously free of his favors. You are beautiful, and royal. I doubt there will be a difficulty.”
Merian set her lips together. There was no profit in protesting to this of all women that she did not want to be bred like a prized mare, still less by a man who disliked her. She would have a lover or nothing.
She well might have nothing, when all was done. She left her mother still sitting in the sun, and returned to the temple and the shielded chamber and the enigma of the bowl.
It mocked her with its plainness and its perfect emptiness. Yet there was knowledge in it. He had found it. Both Perel and Kalyi had sworn to that. Truth was in this thing, if only she knew how to read it.
She had a council to sit in and young mages to teach. At evening she dined with her brother Hani. He was in a taciturn mood; they ate in silence and parted early.
She had been sleeping in the temple in the Brightmoon-cycle since the mages came back, taxing her mind and wits with the riddle that Daros had sent her. Tonight, partly for temper but partly for exhaustion, she stayed in this house. She was aware of Hani’s presence nearby and the servants below, and the city all about them. There were no wards on the house but what any mage would set on the place where she was minded to sleep. After so long in the heavily walled and shielded precincts of the temple, she felt oddly naked, as if she had laid herself bare to the stars.
It could be dangerous to be a mage on the verge of war, and to sleep within such light wards. She courted that danger tonight. Sleep was a Gate, and dreams could bear one to the worlds beyond. Waking, she had found no answers. Perhaps in sleep, something would come.
She composed herself in all ways, buried her fears and anxieties deep. Her power gathered in her center. She opened the gate of sleep and passed within.
He was asleep on a low frame of a bed, in a room of shadows and dim lamplight. His skin was darker, his hair brighter than she remembered, shot with streaks of gold. His face was less girlish-pretty but no less beautiful. Something had stripped the silliness from him.
There was shadow on this world, but she sensed it dimly, beyond strong wards. The nature of them, how they sustained themselves, intrigued her, but before she could study them further, he sighed and opened his eyes.
They were dark, unclouded with sleep. The strength of power in them made her catch her breath. They came to rest on her as she stood over him. A slow smile bloomed.
If he disliked her, in this dream he showed no sign of it. “Lady,” he said. “Oh, I am glad … lady, I thought never to see you again.”
“In dreams we can see whatever we please,” she said, as much to herself as to him.
“That depends on the dream,” he said. He stretched, arching like a cat.
She had no power over herself at all. She lay beside him. She was as naked as he, gold to his copper, ivory to his bronze. His skin was warm under her hand, solid and strikingly real. When she raked nails lightly down his ribs, he shivered conwlsively.
He tasted of salt, with an undertone of sweetness. He did not fling her off, nor did he shrink from the kiss. Not in the slightest. It was she who recoiled, poised above him, wide-eyed and wild. “That is not what I—”
“No?”
“Whose dream is this? Am I in your—”
His smile had come back. It made her dizzy, and drove the words out of her head. He closed his arms about her, but gently. She could have broken free if she had wished to. She did, truly she did, but when she tensed to pull away, she found herself stretched along the length of his body. Her breast on his breast. Her loins on—
He did not move to finish what she had begun. That was altogether unlike his reputation—but then he had never, in any tale that she had heard, been accused of taking a woman against her will. He was hot and hard between them, and his breath came somewhat quick, but he lay still.
She knew what one did. She was a mage, and no child. But she had never—
“Never?”
He was in her thoughts, soft as wind through grass. His surprise quivered between her shoulderblades.
“Never!” she snapped. But she did not wrench herself away.
“May I … ?”
No! her mind said. But her body, arching against him, cried, Yes!
He guided her softly, without haste. When she stiffened, he let be. After a while she eased a little; then he went on. The pain she had expected. The pleasure, so soon, she had not. She cried out in astonishment. He nearly let her go, but she held him fast. She knew this. She had been born knowing it.
It was so very, very real: the gusts of pleasure, the hot rush inside her, the gasp and muffled cry in her ear. Somehow they had shifted. It was his weight on hers, his body above her, his face gone suddenly, briefly slack.
He dropped beside her. She was thrumming like a plucked string. She barely had strength to lift her hand, and yet she had to do it, to stroke the sweat-dampened hair out of his face, to let her fingers drift across his lips.
He smiled with all the sweetness in any world. His eyes had been shut; he opened them, turning them toward her. The night was in them, and a glimmer of stars.
“I have to know,” she said. “The message—what—”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
She woke knotted in bedclothes. Her body was still throbbing. She fought to calm the beating of her heart. There was an ache in her secret places.
She stumbled to her feet. The water in the basin was chill—it made her gasp and shiver, but it cooled the heat in her. She washed herself with shaking hands, all over; and caught her breath.
There was blood on her thighs. The ache—the not-quite-pain—
Her courses. They were early. Had they bred this dream, then? She finished her bathing and did the necessary, then wrapped herself in a robe against the creeping cold. It was nearly dawn. She could try to sleep. Or she would take her aching self and seek out the library, and try to find something, anything, that might answer the riddle he had set.
Memory kept intruding. Lamplight on the high arch of his cheekbone, the proud curve of his nose. Salt taste of sweat. Fullness of him in her, fitting her perfectly, bringing her up and up to—
She shut that door and bolted it. The books told her nothing—just as he had. Nothing at all. She was left with memory that would not let her go, and a thoroughly improper desire to bring back the dream.
Of course she did not. She needed answers, not fruitless rutting born of impulses that should have been mastered long since. The books had none. The bowl offered nothing. The Gates were shut, the world walled off—yet she felt the shadow rolling toward it. There was no time for love, however real it had seemed, and however certain her body was that it wanted more.
EIGHTEEN
WIND HOWLED ACROSS THE PLAINS OF VOLSAVAAR, FAR IN THE west of Asanion. Snow had fallen in the night; the wind had whipped it away by morning, bringing bone-cracking cold. Even in a mantle of magery, Merian shivered.
She sat astride a slab-sided mare, with Perel beside her and the lord of Kuvaar a little ahead, looking down into the cleft of a valley. There had been a city there ten days ago, set on a crag at a meeting of roads. The traders’ route from inner Asanion ran westward here, crossing that from the north into the south, and fording the river that flowed from the mountains of gold and copper. It had been a rich city, rough-edged on this border of empire, but fat and prosperous.
Now it was gone. The land was scorched bare, the walls battered down. Towers lay in ruins, in a cawing of carrion birds.
“Every man of fighting age,” the Lord Zelis said. “Every woman able to bear a child—gone. All the dead are the old and the sick, and the children. Not one was left alive.”
“It’s the same in Varag Suvien,” said Perel, “and in the Isles, and in lanon—whole cities destroyed in a night, all across the empire.”
“Across the sea, too,” said Merian. “All shattered in the same way, and all in the night. This was the first, but a mountain fastness near Shurakan was next—on the other side of the world. Then Ianon and Varag Suvien, half a thousand leagues apart, both on the same night. There’s no pattern, nothing that tells us what will be next, or where.”
“They left traces here,” Zelis said. “Tracks that make no sense, and vanish within a bowshot of the walls.”
“Your mages? Did they find anything?” asked Perel.
“Nothing,” Zelis said. “The city was not warded. People here put little trust in mages; they reckon that strong walls and a trained army will be enough.”
“And in Ianon they reckon that there have been no such wars since the time of the Sunborn,” Perel said, “and in the Isles, mages are still shunned as changelings and drowned in the sea.”
“Whereas in the heart of the empire,” said Merian, “we were so flattened by the loss of our great Gates, and so broken by the blow to our magic, that we never took steps to keep the enemy from coming in through Gates of its own. It slipped through the gaps in such wards as we had, and caught us unawares.”
She sent the mare down from the top of the hill. The senel snorted and flattened ears and shied, but she was obedient enough. However reluctant she was, she did not spin and bolt.
Behind her, Perel said, “By your leave, my lord, your mages will meet in the morning in the holding. We’ll see to it that there’s no second attack here.”
“Then … the Gates within the world are open for them? Not only for you?”
“We will bring them,” Perel said in a silken purr, “from the places to which they’ve fled. You will be protected, whether they will or no.”
“For that we thank you,” said Zelis.
Merian sighed as she rode down to the ruined city. The empire had been at peace too long. Mages waged no wars, knew no adversity. They had become toothless scholars, working their magics for no greater stakes than curiosity. What threats had come upon them had barely taxed their powers. Those few that rebelled, or that seized too much, seeking their own gain, had been put down before they could grow strong enough to offer a threat.
Now this great enemy came, and none of them was ready. She rode the snorting, shying mare through the wilderness of devastation. There was a reek of smoke and burning, but not of decay. What the fire had not charred to ash, the carrion creatures had picked clean.
She felt no magic, no power. Nothing. No lost souls wandered the ruins. If this had been but one spate of destruction, she might have looked for an invasion, the beginning of a mortal war. But it had struck everywhere, all over the world. It came from the other side of the stars.
This city had fallen the night after she dreamed of Daros. She had been hunting him again through dream and shadow, but the shadow had been too deep. It had rolled like cloud across the stars, blinding her eyes and her magery. Lost in it, befuddled by it, she had wandered until dawn.
Word of the destruction had reached Starios on the third day, after Vadinyas fell in Ianon. The lord there was royal kin, and his daughter was an apprentice mage in Starios: one of the youngest, but very gifted, to her father’s great pride. She woke screaming, and screamed until her voice was gone. Not even the chief of healers could bring her out of the darkness into which she had fallen.
In desperation they had called for Merian. She was not a healer, but she was Sun-blood; she could bring light where no other mage could. She went far down into the child’s darkness, and brought her back, leading her by the hand. Merian washed her in light, gave her the sun to hold. Clutching it, speaking through tears, she told the tale of her kin and her people taken, the weak slaughtered, the land swept with lightless fire.
Then word came in from Volsavaar, from Varag Suvien, from the Isles. It was the same word, the same tale, without variation. The walls of the world were breached. The enemy had broken them down through Gates that owed nothing to any working of mortal mages.
Merian had come to Volsavaar first, because it was the first to be struck. She had come through the Gate within her, because it was swiftest and safest. No enemy had waited there, no darkness set to trap her. Yet she had felt the shadow, had known that if she tried to open a Gate from world to world, matters would have been otherwise.
She rode from end to end of that dead city, then back up the long road to the hill, where Perel and the lord of Kuvaar waited in silence. “You will do what needs to be done here,” she said to Perel. “I think I know where they will strike next.”
His eyes widened in the Olenyai veils. “Lady?”
He never called her by her title unless he was less than pleased with her. She chose to keep the title and ignore the displeasure. She turned to Zelis. “May I borrow this mare for yet a while?”
He bowed. He was baffled, but like all Asanians, he rested secure in one surety: she was the heir of the Lion, and was to be obeyed. She inclined her head to him, leveled a hard stare at Perel, and opened the Gate once more.
It was early afternoon in Volsavaar, but the sun hung much lower in the sky in Anshan-i-Ormal. Merian’s Gate brought her to the marches of the sea, to a wild and stony coast dashed by winter waves. A storm had blown off to westward; the sun was descending in a tumble of cloudwrack.
Merian rounded on Perel. He had slipped through the Gate behind her, as sly as a shadow. “Do you crave exile, too?” she flashed at him.
His golden eyes were bland. “I have no gift for calming children. Ushallin will come in the morning and hold yon mages’ hands. She will explain to them, with far more tact and diplomacy than I would ever be capable of, that unless they perform the office for which they were trained, they will be stripped of their power and whatever wealth it may have gained them, and sent home in disgrace
.”
“A penalty for which you may set the example.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I was born a mage, cousin, but I was bred and raised an Olenyas. I’m of more use here, guarding your back, than herding mages in Volsavaar.”
She hissed. “I am cursed with disobedient men. Stay at my back, then, and don’t get in my way.”
He bowed with correctness so punctilious that it skirted the edge of insolence. She turned her back on him, the better for him to guard it, and rode along the headland to the place that was calling her.
She was not a prophet; she had little prescience. But she had seen a pattern in the cities that fell, a shape in the web of lesser Gates that crossed this world. The shadow had struck in the gaps, in outlands, where mages were weak. But there was more to it than that.
“And that is?”
She did not turn to face Perel. Her thought had shaped itself where he could catch it if he wished. “Strength,” she answered him.
She could feel his puzzlement, his brows raised under the headcloth. “Mages are weak here,” he said. “Wards are feeble or nonexistent. Where is the strength?”
“In mortal hands,” she said. “Strong backs, Perel. Fertile wombs. If you were taking slaves, what would you look for? Where would you go?”
“Where magic is weak,” he said slowly, “and men and women are strong. To the outlands of empire. But how—”
“They have to strike here tonight,” she said. “The tide of the lesser Gates, the turning of moons and stars—it’s centered in this place. They’ll break through just … here.”
She paused on the edge of the headland. A sea-city crowned the promontory. There was a harbor below, a sheltered circle, full now with ships moored or drawn up against the aftermath of the storm. The walls were high and strong, topped with towers; she saw the gleam of metal, helmet and spearpoint. A chain protected the mouth of the harbor, breaking the storm-surge and, in gentler weather, keeping out invaders and pirates.
There were no wards on walls or harbor. She sensed a spark of magery here and there: a healer, a soothsayer, a seller of love-charms and pretty potions. Its temple of the Sun was tiny and deserted, its priest too ancient to perform the rites. The greater temples of the city were dedicated to the sea-gods, and those fostered no orders of mages.
