by Judith Tarr
Merian knelt across from Varani. “He did it,” she said. “He opened the gate of the light.”
Varani’s eyes were burning dry. “Yes, he redeemed himself. Now he’ll die. May I have your leave to go, to take his body back to Han-Gilen?”
“He won’t die,” Merian said. “I won’t let him.”
“Do you have that power? Even you, Sunlady?”
“No,” said Merian. “But he does.” She laid her hand over his heart. At her touch, the garment that had covered him shredded and frayed, falling away. It was woven of the dark; it could not bear the touch of the Sun.
His skin felt strange: now burning cold, now searing hot. His heart was beating too fast almost to sense, fluttering like a bird’s. It could not go on: man’s heart was not meant for such a thing. A little longer, and it would burst asunder.
Light was her substance. The Sun was in her blood. Yet she was not purely a lightmage. The dark was in her, soft and deep—not the dark that had devoured the stars, but the softness of a summer night, the sweet coolness of evening after the heat of the day, the blessing of clean water on flesh burned by the sun.
She gave him that blessing. She cooled the fire that consumed him; she softened the dark with light, and made the light gentle, easing the torment of body and spirit. His heart slowed. He drew a long deep breath, and then another.
She slipped the shield from his eyes. They had squeezed tight shut, in horror of the light. She brushed her fingers across them. “Look at me,” she said.
With an effort that was almost a convulsion, he opened his eyes. Darkness coiled in them, writhed and melted and was gone. He looked into her face, and saw as a mortal man could see, by the plain light of day.
She looked up herself, in astonishment. The roof of the tower was gone, vanished like the darkness in him. Clear sky arched overhead; a sun shone in it, undimmed by cloud. Her eyes returned to Daros. He lay in the light, bathing in it. With no thought at all, she kissed him, tasting on his cheeks the salt of tears.
“I’m dreaming you,” he said. “I must be. The emperor, the dark, this light—it can’t be real.”
“It’s very real,” she said.
She helped him to sit up. She would have reckoned that enough, but he insisted on trying to rise, though he did it in a drunken stagger. She braced him with her shoulder. His mother, to both their surprise, bolstered him on the other side.
Little by little he steadied. When he essayed a step, his knees did not buckle too badly.
By the time they reached the door, he was almost supporting his own weight. Merian contemplated the long stair in something like despair. She could not lift him down it: her power was too weak. It would come back, but not soon enough.
But one power was always hers, no matter how weak she was. The Gate inside her was free again, with no darkness to bind it. She could not pass from world to world, not yet; but from citadel to plain, that she could do. The others linked their magery with hers and followed, a skein of Gatemages dropping out of air at Perel’s feet.
The battle was over. Mages and soldiers of the Sun moved among the slain. Parties of soldiers and freed slaves had begun to clear the field. Tents were up, and the wounded limping or being carried to them.
Perel stood with the commander of the Olenyai and the general of the armies, looking out from a hilltop over the field. Merian and the rest emerged from the Gate just below them.
Perel was in motion almost before they touched the ground, leaping toward Merian, catching her as she fell. She beat him off with fierce impatience, thrusting him toward Daros. “Forget me! Help him!”
But Daros alone of them all was solid on his feet, oblivious to any of them, staring at the aftermath of battle. He did not seem aware that he was naked, or that the air, though sunlit, was chill. She began to wonder, with sinking heart, if the light had taken more of him than the dark that had lodged in his soul; if his mind was gone, too, burned away by the cleansing fire.
He took no notice of Perel at all. But Merian he did see as she scrambled herself up and came round to face him, gripping his arms, shaking him. It was like shaking a stone pillar: he never shifted.
His eyes were clear. He recognized her, though he frowned slightly, as if even yet he did not believe that she was real.
She wrapped her cloak about them both. That woke memory; he started slightly, and stared harder. “I remember …”
“We’re not dreamwalking,” she said. “Not any longer. This is true. It’s over. The dark is gone. The war has ended. We can go home again.”
“Home.” A gust of laughter escaped him, almost like a gasp of pain. “Where is that, for me?”
“With me,” she said. “Wherever I go.”
“You don’t want me. After what I did—”
“You were the key to the gate,” she said. “Every world should honor you.”
He shook his head, but he was wiser than to keep protesting. She turned in his arms. Everyone was watching them: the lords and mages on the hilltop, the soldiers and slaves below. “This is my lord,” she said to them, “my prince and consort. But for him, this victory would never have been.”
There was a long pause. Just before she would have burst out in anger at their discourtesy, first Verani, then Perel and the lord of the Olenyai, and after them the rest, went down in homage. All of them: every living being on that field.
It was no more than his due, though he hardly knew where to look. For a prince, he had precious little sense of his own importance.
“You’ll learn,” she said.
“Is that a command, my lady?”
“It is, my lord,” said Merian.
A smile touched the corner of his mouth. It was a frail shadow of his old insouciant grin, but it would do, for the moment. “I have no gift for obedience.”
“But love—you have a great gift for that.”
“Ah: I’m an infamous libertine. Are you sure you want that beside you for the rest of your days?”
“How many women have you lain with since you met me?”
He had lost the stain of the sun that had so darkened him in the land of the river: a blush was clear to see, turning his cheeks to ruddy bronze. “None,” he said indistinctly; then clearer: “None at all. But, lady, while I dreamed of you, I never—”
“Our daughter is in your father’s care,” she said.
She felt the shock in his body. “Our—”
“It was real,” she said. “Every moment of it. The proof is in Han-Gilen.”
“Han-Gilen? Not Starios?”
She nodded.
“Why—” He shook himself. “Questions later. And answers—many of them. But now, the war. There are still dark lords alive. If you would have me find them—”
“You need do nothing but go home and rest,” she said.
“Not until it’s over,” he said. “All of it. My lords, if someone could find clothes for me, and boots—boots would be welcome—I’ll begin the hunt.”
“You will hunt nothing but sleep,” Merian said firmly.
But he was equally firm in resistance. “I belonged to them. They’re in my bones. Give me men, mages, a mount—I’ll find them all and bring them back to you.”
She searched his face, and the mind behind it, which he made no effort to conceal from her. The anger in him was deep and abiding; but he was sane. He was not wild with vengeance.
“Bring them to me,” she said, “and I will sentence them. My lords, you will obey him as you would obey me. Whatever he asks for, see that he has it.”
There were no objections, spoken or unspoken, save one. “You do insist on this?” his mother asked him.
He would not meet her gaze. He had shrunk, all at once, into a sulky child.
She gripped his arms. One could see, watching them, whence came his height and breadth of shoulder; she was a strong woman, in body as in mind. Her eyes burned on his face. “Do as you must,” she said, “and do it well. You are worthy of your lineage. Though p
erhaps,” she said, “your parents are not worthy of you.”
That astonished him. He stared at her, his sulkiness forgotten. “How can you say that? I have never been—”
“You have redeemed yourself many times over. Whereas we have acquitted ourselves poorly in every respect. If you can find it in you to pardon us—”
He silenced her with a finger to her lips. “Mother, don’t. Don’t talk like that. Let’s forgive each other; let’s forget if we can. There’s a long stretch of darkness behind us, and, one hopes, a long stretch of light ahead. Maybe we can learn to be proper kin to one another.”
“I can hope for that,” she said.
He smiled, bowed and kissed her hands. “Then may I have your blessing?”
“You may have it,” she said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes were brimming. She drew his head down and set a kiss on his forehead, then let him go. “You honor us all, my child. You give us great pride.”
As long as the fight had been and as weary as they all were, the sheer number of those who came to Daros’ muster was astonishing. He had his pick of warriors and of mages; and among them two whom he had thought never to see again.
Neither Menkare nor Nefret had taken physical harm from the battle. Their power was intact, indeed stronger than ever. They had been tempered like steel: forged in fire. They looked long and hard at him, as everyone did now; but like the others, they eased visibly after a while.
“You look,” said Nefret, “as if you’ve been burned clean.”
“That is precisely how it feels,” said Daros.
She clasped him tight, squeezing the breath out of him, but there were no words left in her. It was Menkare who said, “We mourned you for dead. Thank the greater gods that we grieved too soon.”
“I am rather grateful myself,” Daros said. “And you? Are you of a mind to go hunting with me?”
“Rats or lions?” Menkare asked.
“Rats in the barley,” said Daros.
“I’m in the mood to hunt rats,” said Nefret.
“And I,” Menkare said. “Pity we have no cats here; they’re the best hunters of all.”
“You are my cats,” Daros said, “my mages of the river. Come, hunt with me.”
They grinned at that; Nefret’s pointed face and small white teeth were not at all unlike a cat’s. With a much lighter heart, Daros turned to the task of choosing the rest of his hunters.
The hunt was not long, as rat-hunts went. Those lords whose slaves had not turned on them and rent them in pieces had gone to ground, away from hunters and the horror of the sun and, come the night, the stars and the dance of a dozen little moons about this barren and stony world.
Daros tracked them by the shudder under his skin. Nefret with her gift of prescience was even better at it than he, and Menkare was blindingly quick in the capture. It grieved them somewhat that they could not kill what they hunted, as it would have grieved the little fierce cats of their own world, but they submitted to the will of the gods—and most especially the goddess of gold, as they called Merian.
They were enthralled with her. It gave them no end of pleasure to discover—and not from Daros—that their lord was her consort; that there was an heir, a child so like her father that no one in the world of the gods could deny her parentage.
That was a thought so strange, so patently impossible, that Daros could hardly think it at all. That Merian loved him, that she wanted him, was shock enough; he doubted it more often than he believed it. But that their dreamwalking had brought forth a child—he could not make himself believe it. He kept his mind on his hunt instead, and left the rest for when the hunt was over.
He hunted through a chain of lesser Gates. Merian and her mages had closed the Worldgates to prevent an escape, but the Gates within this world were open. There were many; most had the soullessness of the dark lords’ devices. Those he broke as he found them, scattered them into the elements from which they were made. After the first three or four or five, mages ran ahead of him, seeking out these false Gates and destroying them, while he hunted through Gates that had no need of forged metal or trapped magic.
The lords were barred from both. Their power was broken. The Mage was dead, its prison destroyed in the blaze of light that had overcome the dark. Their devices of metal were only metal now; the lords had no magic with which to bring them to life.
Daros still could not think too much on these matters. The memory of the cage was too strong, the horror of it too close to his spirit. The hunt was his release, the cleansing of his mind and soul.
The last nest was the worst. They had come full circle, back to the citadel and the deep halls beneath, dungeons that descended into the bowels of the earth. There the last of the lords had barricaded themselves with walls of stone and steel. And there, at last, were the women: blind, gravid things locked in cells like the children of bees. Whether they were born or made so, he did not know or care to know. But it made him all the more grimly determined to expunge this race from the worlds.
Daros had to go down into the dark from which he had so barely escaped. The mages and the warriors of the Sun brought light with them, but Menkare and Nefret knew the same horror that he knew: the horror of return to endless night.
They did not flinch from the long descent. He could hardly be less brave than the mages whom he had made. He steadied his mind and firmed his steps and led them all into the darkness.
One weapon he had which he had not been able to use during his long deception: the flame of his power, which was born of the sun. He clothed himself in it, and sent it before him, a wall of light. He struck their wall of stone and steel and shattered it.
They came out fighting. Desperation made them vicious; they laughed at wounds, and courted death. They would take Daros and his hunters with them if they could.
Daros had had enough of fighting. He struck them down with a mighty blow of power, laid them low without ever drawing his sword. It was yet another broken law, he supposed; mages had so many. But he was long past caring. He gathered them up and bound them, and flung them through the Gate within him, on their faces before the princessheir where she sat in judgment.
FORTY-ONE
MERIAN HAD LONG SINCE LEARNED TO BE SURPRISED BY NOTHING Daros did. Daros was a law unto himself; there would never be any changing it.
Even so, the arrival of a score of dark lords, beaten unconscious by a stroke of power, was more than slightly startling. Outrageous, some of her mother’s generals declared. They were not mages, but they were most careful of mages’ laws—both those which they understood and those which they did not.
It happened that she was judging captives whom Daros had brought in in the days before. They would not use the citadel; that would come down, she had decided, and the slave-cities would be razed, and new cities built for and by the slaves who still wished to live on this world. Her place of judgment was the plain on which the battle for the citadel had been fought, just outside the camp that her armies had made. Many of them were present even so late in the judging, watching and listening as she heard such defenses as could be offered.
There were not many, but she heard them all, over and over again. She was putting off the decision, and avoiding the sentence that must be levied. There truly was no choice. Death for them all, every one. Nothing that they had said had persuaded her to let them live.
And now they were all captured, all brought before her, and Daros standing above the last of them in borrowed armor. She still was not accustomed to the changes that this world had wrought in him. He was thinner but no narrower: he had grown into a man since she first saw him, an idle drunken princeling in the ridiculous height of fashion. His face had lost its prettiness but gained in beauty. Time and pain had drawn it fine; the smile was never so quick as it had been, and the expression into which it had settled was somber—a prince’s face, lordly and stern.
He was distracting her now with his presence. She made herself focus on the prisoners, all of t
hem, conscious and unconscious. Those who were awake were sour with scorn, looking with contempt on the beasts that had conquered them. To them, all not of their blood kin were no more than animals; slaves, bred for servitude.
She rose from the seat of judgment. “These are all of them?” she asked Daros.
He nodded. He had a tight-drawn look, as if he had snapped, but somehow put himself together again. “All but the women,” he said, “but those are no more threat to us than a nest of maggots.”
She raised a brow at the thickness of disgust in his voice, but left it until she had dealt with the men of that nation. “Wake them,” she said to him.
He bared his teeth. It was not a smile. His power lashed out, sharp as the crack of a whip. Every one of his newest captives snapped erect.
The emotion with which all of them regarded him was not entirely or even mostly contempt. It was hate. He basked in it; courted it. He dared them to turn against him.
“I have heard all that I have need to hear,” she said through that fog of loathing. “My judgment is made. My sentence is—”
“Lady,” said Daros. He did not speak loudly, but his voice carried without effort across the field of the judging. “Lady, may I speak?”
Can I prevent you?
She did not say it aloud, but with him she had no need. The twitch of his smile, though slight, was genuine.
“Lady, you choose death. I can well see why: it would seem to be inevitable. And yet, will you give them what they long for above all else? Will you offer them free passage into oblivion?”
“You would have me keep them alive?” she asked him. “Are you so eager to fight this war again?”
“Not at all,” said Daros. “But, lady, death is a reward. Shouldn’t your sentence be a punishment?”
