An infant shrieked, far far away upon the walls, the note piercing the haze gathering upon Andrion’s thought. His mind ignited. He saw Eldrafel, and himself dancing to Eldrafel’s lead. He saw Rue circling behind Sumitra, her hand reaching inside her gown. He saw Dana start violently at the baby’s cry. He realized Tembujin was calling to him, urgently, right at his side, “Andrion! Do you see darkness? There are only ashes in his hand, cinders and wrack, feeble illusion!”
Rowan rushed toward Andrion’s back, dagger upraised, Minrans and a few corrupt legionaries at his back. Sarasvati swept Gard aside. The star-shield leaped up and rang like a huge gong. Dana’s sword struck, and Kerith’s javelin with it, in perfect synchrony. With a hideous garbled cry Rowan fell. His armband sizzled into cinders; Rue snatched hers off with a wail of pain. The Sabazian guard struck down those men, Minran and a handful of Sardians, who threatened them. The watching legionaries opened an arena around them but did not raise their own weapons.
Andrion threw back his head, grinning fiercely. No shadows. Rowan impaled on sword and javelin like a fly upon pins, eyes glazed in death. His own friends, his people, steadfast. He lunged and Eldrafel pirouetted.
The demon’s face warped; his hand leaked darkness, but Andrion did not try to parry it. Stung, he laughed. The smoke and shadow thinned. “You grow weak,” he said. “You have gone too far, tried too much, asked more than that corpse your father had to give.”
Rue jerked a dagger from her gown and fell upon Sumitra. The escort started. Sumi instinctively struck back. With a clangor of tearing strings the zamtak struck Rue on the shoulder. Bone and wood both fractured; the erstwhile serving woman fell to the ground with a cry and was surrounded by swords. Sumitra shot one quick appalled but gratified look at Rue—her nemesis, felled at last—before turning back to Andrion, the zamtak only an irrelevant bundle of wood and wire in her hands.
Tembujin nocked an arrow. Dana leaped onto the dais, shield raised. Andrion lunged again. Eldrafel spun from one to another to another. His features melted and ran, their perfection distorted into a grotesque parody of themselves. Shadows dribbled from his fingertips.
With a snarl he turned his back. Not surrender, never surrender—lofty contempt for the gnats that annoyed him in this world … Simultaneously Tembujin fired and Dana struck, scoring both legs. Eldrafel shrieked. His face twisted even further, becoming unrecognizable. Slowly, slowly, the only moving object in the great silent throng, he staggered, fell to his knees, and bowed before Andrion.
Andrion’s breath wheezed between his lips. His heart racketed in his chest. Now! He raised Solifrax and with all the force of his body brought it down onto the slender nape beneath the golden curls.
A shock nearly jerked the sword from his hand, his arm from his body. The nape was vulnerable, yes, and gaped with a gory wound. But the demon’s head twisted suddenly around to face upward. The mouth opened in a reverberating shriek, split, peeled away. Like a huge chrysalis tearing open, Eldrafel’s body emitted a monstrous shadow that swelled up and up and up, blotting out the sun, stilling the wind with a fell scream.
The shadow shaped itself into a gargoyle, bat’s wings flapping, nose meeting chin in an evil leer, eyes distant shards of ice. A taloned hand grabbed at Andrion.
Andrion wrenched his wits into coherence. Solifrax fountained fire and thrust back the grasping hand. Dana stepped to his side, the shield a caldron of light. Tembujin stood calmly drawing back his bowstring and saying, “Only a little dark cloud—strike again, Andrion, and kill him!”
The shadow, Andrion saw through slitted eyes, was a spectral gray, tenuous, not like the dense smokes of self-immolated Taurmenios. The sun glancing through the cloud rained coruscating sparks upon the terrified faces of the multitude.
With a cry of his own, the name of a god, most likely, Andrion touched the sword to the shield. Lightning blasted every shape around him into nothingness. Only the shadow remained, transfixed by light, face amazed and dismayed … A wind howled down from Cylandra, and the dark form shredded into nothing.
At last, Andrion told himself. At long bloody last. The faces, the pennons, the Horn Gate, the distant mountains, wavered and solidified around him. At his feet lay a perfectly formed human body, blond hair ruffled by the wind, gray eyes transparent with bafflement. Andrion stared, expecting it to putrefy before his eyes. But it remained as still and lifeless as the marble statue it had most resembled in life.
His ears roared. No, it was the people around him calling his name in a glorious litany, “Andrion Bellasteros, Andrion Bellasteros!” Even an overtone of women’s voices unashamedly acknowledged his title.
Dana lowered the shield. The lines in her face eased. Sarasvati and Gard stepped onto the dais. Andrion’s loyal sister lifted the helmet from his head, letting the wind kiss his hair; she placed the diadem upon his brow and his nephew pressed the necklace of the moon and star into his hand. “My thanks,” he croaked. He cleared his throat, shouted, “My thanks!” to all his people who, as weary of games as he was, welcomed him home.
Deafening cheers, led by Patros and Nikander. A few legionaries struck out or tried to run, but most submitted with haggard faces to their colleagues. Thanks be, thought Andrion, that they choose to pay in tears, not blood.
Miklos raised the falcon standard. “The emperor himself is the god from the sea!” he exclaimed. Pandemonium. Dana’s mouth crimped, nonplussed and amused.
Very clever, Andrion thought. Someone stood beside him, took the necklace, fastened it about his throat. Ah, Sumitra. He was going to tremble, chilled to the marrow. But he clasped her to his side with his free arm, and she steadied him. The diadem tingled, and the necklace sparked, and Solifrax hummed some satisfied tune of its own until he seemed to stand in a swarm of bees. The blade of the sword was unsullied, a clear crystalline crescent like a new moon. With a sigh he sheathed it.
Kerith’s features were links of chain mail. “You know the law,” she said to Andrion. “Remove these men from my borders!”
“Kerith,” Andrion returned amiably, “shut up.”
Her eyes snapped, but she desisted when Dana tucked her arm beneath her own and the light of the shield bathed her face. “With your permission, my lord,” said Dana, “we will keep Rue with us, in Sabazel. Justice?”
“Justice,” nodded Andrion. The serving woman, supported by two Sabazians each a head taller than she, wriggled with the slimy disgruntlement of a grub plucked from underneath its rock and thrust into sunlight.
Bonifacio crawled to Andrion’s feet. “My apologies,” said Andrion to Tembujin’s dark features. “I underestimated this creature’s spite, and overestimated his virtue.”
“A serpent,” the priest burbled, “I nourished a serpent in my bosom; surely the emperor in his godlike anger will see fit to kill me mercifully …”
His flaccid face brought bile into Andrion’s throat. “No,” he said, “you chose corruption, you may choose a place of exile in which to rot. Get out.” Bonifacio scrabbled at Andrion’s greaves, blubbering, until soldiers carried him away.
“I accept your apology,” said Tembujin, with a half salute that came very close to being an obscene gesture. But he grinned as he did it.
The wind keened, the pennons bellying like sails before it. Surely there was no scent of lotus in that clean air? Andrion inhaled. No, there was not. It was a pure blast; the gods only knew he needed to be purified. The voices of the multitude were a tidal wave foaming through his mind. Above him a falcon skimmed the vault of the sky.
Eldrafel’s body lay at his feet, aloofly, incongruously beautiful. He looked closer. A maggot crawled from between the parted lips.
He turned away and ordered, “Burn it.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Andrion had expected the smoke of the pyre to be thick, black, and foul. But it was only a colorless strand, coiling up into the twilight like supplicating hands, emitting no odor at all.
“He was not truly human flesh,” said Te
mbujin.
Andrion’s consciousness was bloated by too many disparate images, too many emotions. His mind flapped painfully from thought to thought; his body was askew, borne sideways by the sheathed weight of Solifrax. He replied, “No, something of him was human flesh. See?”
Gard sat stiffly on the edge of the dais, suffering his newfound aunt, Sarasvati, to stroke his hair, which was almost the color of her own. All Bellasteros’s children had red hair, Andrion told himself, a legacy of that stranger in Sabazel. Of the god, his will made flesh indeed.
Gard had watched impassively as the shell that had been his father was consumed by fire. As he had watched his entire world consumed by fire and wind and wave. It might take years before it would hurt. Until then, Andrion would hurt for him.
Tembujin said quietly, “I shall take Gard to live with me. Horses and camels to ride, and children to play with—he will heal.”
“Gods,” Andrion said, part epithet, part prayer. The diadem branded his brow, the necklace was a band of flame about his throat. The sun bled across the horizon, draining the sky to a clear turquoise luminescence against which every rock, every tree, stood in sharp outline. “Come,” he said, and led Tembujin toward the pavilion.
The scene inside was not a divine tableau; the torches flickered and smoked and the arms were tarnished bronze. The people who looked up at his entrance, summoning smiles to their exhausted faces, were human beings. He loved their every imperfection.
Valeria ran into Tembujin’s arms; he hid his face in her hair, so that Andrion could not see the expression on it. They stood like an island amid their children, who tugged at Tembujin’s breeches demanding, “What did you bring us? What did you bring us?”
Andrion smiled; their ordeal had been despite, not because of, their parents. Perhaps their impishness could in time scour those grim lines from Gard’s face.
Nikander greeted Andrion with a bow. “My centurions and I thought we were mad, to be so drawn toward Sabazel. But my scouts revealed the truth soon enough. My apologies, lord, for not realizing you called.” Andrion shrugged away the apology and thanked the gods for laconic Nikander. He collapsed into his own armchair, not caring if Eldrafel had sat there. It had never been his.
“Please, sit,” Andrion told Patros, who dropped gratefully back into his own chair. Kleothera stood on one side, Declan’s little face gurgling above her shoulder; Ilanit seated herself on the other. Patros and Ilanit were similarly gaunt and white-haired; Kleothera seemed a turtledove beside two ibis. So this was the Queen of Sabazel, her attitude seemed to say. So what if she has been my husband’s lover these twenty-five years or more. Is she not a mother, and a grandmother to boot? Declan slobbered into a toothless grin as Ilanit, her grave humor undefiled, winked at him.
Sumitra seated herself at Andrion’s side, regarding the ruined zamtak on her lap with an expression so mingled of wistfulness and relief that Andrion said quickly, “We shall find you another.”
“Not like this,” she returned. “But its purpose has been served.” She set it aside, laid her sleek head against Andrion’s arm, laid her hand on her stomach. “And I shall have other matters to occupy my time.”
A centurion bellowed outside, and another farther away. The measured tread of a work crew approached and faded. Surely, Andrion thought, his distended head was illuminated like a lamp, his thoughts revealed for inspection by everyone before him. But then, he had nothing to conceal. Bring on the petitioners, the secretaries, the accounts. Such concerns would be as intoxicating as new wine.
Miklos stood holding the falcon standard, well content. “Have you ever had a yen for the priesthood?” Andrion asked him.
“My lord?”
“Well, I suppose there is some acolyte, from Farsahn, perhaps, who will be found to be loyal. Perhaps you would prefer a generalship.”
“My lord!” Miklos grinned. “I am hardly of mature enough years.”
“But surely of mature enough initiative,” said Nikander.
Something odd tickled Andrion’s chest. He realized it was laughter. He let it bubble from his lips.
The doorway opened. A sentry snapped smartly to attention. Dana and Kerith entered and strolled to the dais. Equal tenacity of spirit, Andrion thought, but thankfully somewhat mellowed at the moment. “Sabazel was once at the rim of the world,” said Dana without preamble or honorific. “I am perturbed to find it now a Sardian parade ground.”
“We shall move tomorrow, I promise.”
“While sparing a few men for the winter rites?”
Andrion, to his intense discomfiture, flushed as red as the sunset. “I shall ask for volunteers,” he said. And silently to Dana’s bleak but somehow amused green eyes, not now, love. Forgive me.
She allowed him a wan smile. That was not what I asked, love. After Minras, I am not quite ready to recognize the demands of the body.
“May I offer you birthday greetings, my lord?” said Patros, filling an awkward silence. “And may I ask a favor?”
“Thank you,” Andrion replied. “Yes, of course.”
“May I have your permission to retire? You and your father have led me a merry life; have I not earned some rest?”
“Certainly,” grinned Andrion. “With my compliments.”
Some time later he left the voices in the pavilion—which were compelling by familiarity, not magic—to escort the Sabazians to the edge of the camp. The bonfires lit for the benefit of the work crews cast a faint blush across the indigo sky. Several soldiers watched his colloquy with the women, curious but not critical. Had he ever really feared their knowing his birth? That game was over.
The full moon, a serene white circle nestled in a silver corona, hung unstained a handsbreadth above the horizon. The eastern face of Cylandra was spangled with its light. The shadows were so innocent as to be banal. “Would we bless the light if we had no darkness?” Dana asked.
“We hide in shadows when the sun glares too brightly,” Andrion replied. “Thank Ashtar on my behalf. I shall come again soon to celebrate the rites, I promise.”
He kissed Kerith’s cool cheek. He embraced his sister Ilanit and his cousin Dana. He laid his hand on the simmering surface of the shield, evoking a chime. He stood, armored by diadem and necklace and sword, as the women crossed the empty ground toward the Horn gate and the torches, like distant stars, beside it.
A small shape, a child, rushed to meet them. The moonsheen picked red from her hair. Astra. Andrion lingered to see Dana sweep up their daughter, the heir to Sabazel, before he turned to his own borders and went inside.
*
Sumitra laid the skeins of yarn on the handiest flat surface, the top of her distended stomach, and considered them. Lustrous purple, and crimson for the sun—yes, just right. She threaded her needle with the chosen strand. The rejected skeins bounced to a thrust from underneath. She soothed the restive baby with a pat; not much longer, little one, not much longer.
From the opposite side of the tapestry Valeria laughed. “You look like an overripe melon,” she said. “Surely I was never that big.” Her needle flashed, pulling taut a silver strand that defined the rim of the star-shield.
“Oh yes you were.” Laboriously, Sumi shifted in her chair, leaning sideways to reach the tapestry. One stitch, two; the smooth yarn between her fingers, the swoop and tug of the needle, the slow revelation of the image—a purple cloak draping the shoulders of an auburn-haired man—was deliciously mesmerizing.
The living man sat at his desk nearby. “I think Sumi has been waiting until you arrived,” he told Sarasvati with a teasing smile. “All is well in Sabazel?”
“The first buds were just breaking when I left,” she replied. “For such a cold, dark winter, I do believe spring has come early.”
“Yes,” said Andrion. His eye sought and found Sumitra’s rotund form, and rested there as if admiring a work of art.
Another stitch, and another. She glanced up at him, and around the room. Each familiar face, each ordinary
object had an aura that fell upon her eye like a benison. She contemplated the play of lamplight upon texture—creamy stone, dark wood, and pale linen drapery—rich in substance, not in decoration. Rich in nuance, as different voices blended in ever-changing, ever-similar harmonies, and a cool jasmine-tinted breeze caressed her skin.
The children there, one red head bent beside the black ones over a game, small faces intelligently intent—a pattern to savor, indeed … She realized the thread dangled slack from her fingers, and she smiled at herself. Her mind moved with the somnolence of her body, constantly pausing to appreciate the smallest things.
“Well,” said Sarasvati, so quietly that Tembujin looked up from the dagger he honed, ears pricked, “I do have one bit of grim news. Rue miscarried of a—a monster; she cried that Queen Chrysais had cursed her, that the woman’s ghost haunted her. At last we found her beneath a precipice on Cylandra, dead. I did not know if Sumi wanted the ruby stud, so I brought it.”
For a moment the room was so silent Sumitra could hear the tread of the sentries outside. And yet those measured steps were more vivid than the memory of Rue’s face, with or without the ruby. The tiny hole in Sumi’s nostril had closed; it had been only affectation, after all. “Sell it,” she said quietly, “and hold a feast for the people when the child is born.”
Perhaps Valeria had no more memory of Rowan’s face; she nodded, cut her thread, tied it. The shield sparked in Dana’s hand, and her green yarn eyes gazed with their own truculent honesty upon the world outside Sabazel.
“So Rue killed herself,” Andrion said. “I hope she took with her the last of Eldrafel’s poison.”
“Hey!” protested Ethan. “You moved my piece!”
“I did not,” Gard retorted. “I was ahead!”
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