The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods)

by Barbara Friend Ish

  “Abu al-righ,” I said, Hail forever.

  Pain twisted Coran’s face. He drained his glass quickly and refilled it.

  “I’m sorry,” Coran said, voice gravelly. “The day came far too fast. Let’s not—How about a game of chess?”

  “Chess?” I echoed. I was tempted to break my long-standing moratorium against looking into other people’s minds. I knew Coran as well as any man; what horrors could I possibly find in there that would outweigh what I carried inside myself? But I’d learned the hard way that knowing too much about what goes on inside other men’s heads makes it difficult to like them. And Coran was the only real friend I’d had in ten years.

  “If you like,” I said finally.

  We set up the board in silence. Once we began to play, Coran stopped glancing outside at the crows, and the conversation turned to calmer topics: the arrivals of Coran’s tiarna and other vassals for tonight’s pyre; the expected improvement in the weather in time for the ceremony; the feast being prepared for afterward. Coran was an excellent chess player, but I had seen all his strategies before, and the one he was developing could only be characterized as tired. In five moves, he would land his king’s admiral to the queen’s side, and that would be the beginning of my checkmate.

  “Of all enemies, a bard,” Coran said. “How does a man defeat a bard? He shouldn’t be able to do what he’s doing at all.”

  I made a sympathetic noise and moved my king’s knight into position.

  “Who musters for him?” Coran continued. “Who commands the companies in the field?” He sighed. “Of course it’s not like that.” Out came his queen’s wizard, right on schedule.

  “No, it isn’t.” The kharr didn’t have a proper army: just spies, and pirates, and farmers and tradesmen who suddenly took up makeshift arms. I saw no honor in any of it, just madness in the name of a false god. I sidestepped the trap awaiting my queen three moves hence and moved a pawn instead.

  Coran sat back in his chair, surveying the board with a look of disgust, then turned that same look on me. “You already know. Damn you.”

  He sighed and looked down at the board again, plotting a new strategy.

  “I shall be grateful to have your sharp eye beside mine, when the time comes to order the strategy at Teamair,” Coran said without looking up.

  I flinched. Coran was right to be thinking beyond the election of the next ard-righ to the battles the ard-righ must lead, and to expect that he would be the one the righthe chose. But the high throne of the ard-righ of all the nations should have been mine, and it would bypass me through no one’s fault but my own.

  Finally, realization hit me, with all the force of a charging destrier. I knew what would happen this spring: a Grand Moot. I had known since the ard-righ died. But now I really grasped what a Moot would mean. It would take place on Bealtan Day; my old teacher Amien would summon all the righthe, and probably a number of tiarna, to the Moot grounds outside Teamair. They would all be there, every man I had spent the last ten years avoiding: Amien and Uncle Pariccan; Sanglin and Dandem and every other wizard I knew. I would be summoned, too; and to refuse the summons of the Prince of the Aballo Order means absolute exile.

  Every man of Tellan would know all the details of my disgrace, and everyone else would soon hear the tale: the untimely death of my parents, the way Uncle Pariccan raised the Tellan tiarna against me and wrested the righ’s torc from my neck. As long as Pariccan failed to produce a male heir, I was, arguably, once again next in line for the Tellan throne; but that would never happen. Tellan memory is longer than that. It would be as if ten years of self-imposed exile had never been.

  I slumped back and leaned my head against the top of the chair, staring at the shadows on the arched ceiling.

  “I need you beside me now, Ellion,” Coran said. “You’re the only man in Ilnemedon who can keep me honest.”

  I laughed. It sounded empty in my own ears. I felt Coran’s gaze on me again: I sat up and met the righ’s eyes.

  “Listen, I know—Look, there’s no point in discussing ancient history,” Coran continued. “But you and I both know you’re absolutely wasted as a harpist.”

  “Ah, Coran,” I began, pushing the chair back from the table.

  “No, really. Listen. You are one of the great military minds of our time. You should be ordering the field, not singing about it afterward.”

  There was no arguing with this truth. I could have ordered both the military and the arcane aspects of the war creeping eastward across the human lands, from the ard-righ’s throne. It was what I had been born to do.

  “I have decided to grant you the Tiarnate of Louth and the title of Ard-Tiarn,” Coran said, grey hawk-eyes steady on mine. “And I’d like you to stay on here in Ilnemedon as War-Lord.”

  Not merely tiarn, but ard-tiarn: Lord Most High. My hand itched for my sword and someone to turn it on; but of course I had surrendered my blade at the palace door. Coran’s affection for me had always been unqualified; he was the one man to whom my undefined status didn’t seem to matter. But the new righ was a proud man. If I didn’t accept the title, the insult might be more than our friendship could bear. And there was no way I could accept.

  “Hell, you could marry that woman none of us ever meet—What’s her name?”

  “Laverna,” I said, before I could control the impulse. Shock flashed in Coran’s face: Laverna is a goddess of the old religion, the patroness of whores.

  I shook my head, rising. “There’s no woman, Coran. It’s kind of you to offer, but you of all men should understand I can’t—”

  “Can’t what?” Coran’s fair face flushed. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to lay aside a title! That ship has long since sailed!”

  With a gale-force wind in the tail. But to accept Coran’s offer would remove me irrevocably from the rank of royalty, however dark and ill-explored a corner of that rank I might now occupy.

  I bowed, throat tight. “I thank you, my lord. Your offer is beyond generous. But what I need you cannot give me, and my presence among your peerage would be nothing but a source of strife.”

  Coran’s grip on the glass tightened visibly. I wondered remotely whether it would snap. “Hardly more than your presence among my vassals’ wives!”

  I bowed again. “My military mind remains ever at your disposal—”

  “If you truly think a deposed righ of an upstart backwater commands more honor than the ard-tiarn of Ilesia, you’re a greater fool than anyone imagined!”

  An upstart backwater. Only the righ of Ilesia could hold such a view of Tellan, the nation chartered by the goddess Tella Herself. But Coran was angry, and with good reason: I inclined my head.

  “I’m sorry. I will miss your father—but I have absolute faith in you. I’ll see you this evening.”

  “Get the hell out.”

  The interior of my apartment in the Harpist Gorsedd Hall had grown impossibly dark and confining. I could barely breathe for the staleness of the air. How was it possible I had thought this place comfortable? I stalked through the outer rooms, fighting down the temptation to sweep the stacks of memoranda and correspondence and the half-completed score from my desks, smudged the heel of my hand through the note one of the lords of the gorsedd had scrawled on the slate beside the door, and strode into the private chambers.

  What insanity had I been pursuing for the past ten years? Where had I gotten the idea that the Harpist Gorsedd was in any way relevant? You should be ordering the field, not singing about it afterward. Even that was only a half-measure of approach to the truth. But all the bridges between me and the things that mattered had long since collapsed in fire, and I’d been the one applying the torch. All that was left to me now was to play the role I’d spent these wasted years building.

  Tradition rather than fashion dictated what I put on for the ceremony: formal mourning white, an uncomfortable color relieved only by the double-handbreadth of gold that is my right by virtue of royal birth. When I was fully d
ressed, my hair brushed into a proper fall, I went and stood in front of the wardrobe to stare at the speckle-feathered cloak, the ard-harpist’s mark of office, and work my mind around accepting the inevitable.

  There was no question that I must wear the cloak tonight: it was a necessary part of the protocol for representing the Harpist Gorsedd at a state funeral of its host nation. I had spent years earning the right to wear it, and every other man in the gorsedd would mortgage his firstborn for the privilege. But tonight the speckle-feathered cloak felt like a mummer’s costume, not something befitting royalty. How could it embarrass me to wear something other men sacrificed their personal and social lives trying to win? The gods seemed more perverse than usual.

  At sunset I joined the procession up the mountain, the feathered cloak heavier on my shoulders than a full harness of armor, to witness the dead righ’s cremation and pay my respects to the living one. Coran barely glanced at me: a behavior that, on such a day, wouldn’t have merited a moment’s thought if I hadn’t just turned down the most generous gift a righ could offer a foreign-born man. My heart felt as if it had been replaced by an anvil.

  The dead righ already lay atop the pyre, surrounded by knights from his personal contingent, when the procession arrived. Airships bobbed in the skies around the summit, the silks of their canopies rippling with the colors of houses whose ranks were insufficient to merit places at the pyre and the fires in their braziers winking against the darkening sky. The competing breezes raised by their windcallers pushed the air of the summit into strange swirls that whispered seduction against the back of my neck.

  Coran stepped into his proper place at his father’s feet, pale face reflecting exhaustion; his brother Niall, now also his tanist, stood at his right hand, facing south. The tanist’s torc, which until yesterday had graced Coran’s neck, hung loosely about Niall’s slender sinewy throat. I stood well back among the tiarna and other dignitaries of Ilesia, allowing them precedence at the pyre. I could see over the tops of most of their heads, anyway. Athramail stepped into the customary spot for a wizard, facing east, and began calling the fires to the pyre’s compass points.

  “All glory to Lord Ilesan, by Whose Will the Waters of Chaos quickened into Life,” Athramail sang, wind rippling in his ceremonial robe. He cast fire from his knob-knuckled hand to the wood piled near the ard-righ’s head, igniting the pyre. My palms and fingers tingled. But I must not open myself to power, not ever.

  “All glory to Lady Tella, by Whose Will the Air of Thought condensed into Form,” Athramail sang. Fire sprang up in the wood at the ard-righ’s feet. Had the goddess been watching me, that last time? Shame erupted inside me. Before my parents’ deaths, before my entire life collapsed, She’d always been watching over me. There was no reason to believe She hadn’t seen everything. She’d certainly had no use for me since.

  “All glory to Par, Lord of Warriors, Whose glory Conary Mourne served and Whose favor will yet set Conary among the heroes at the Feast Hereafter,” Athramail intoned. Fire sparked at Athramail’s gesture, and for half a second I found myself in Tellan again, standing at the foot of my father’s pyre wishing I were the one who had died. I wrenched myself back into the present.

  “All glory to Lady Ara, Whose bounty nourishes all Her children.” The pyre blazed yellow and orange, billowing white smoke towards the darkening sky. A short distance away, as deeply buried in the crowd as I, pale-haired round-hipped Findabhair, wife of an important Ilesian tiarn, caught my eye with a significant look. Fatigue washed over me; I closed my eyes. Historically speaking, this wouldn’t have been the most indecorous moment at which I slipped out of a gathering with a wife not my own; but tonight, it just seemed too banal.

  “A warrior comes to the Great Feast, bedecked with the badges of his battles,” Athramail intoned.

  I chanted the expected response with the rest of the crowd: “Lords and Ladies, welcome him!”

  “A lover returns to the One he has missed, bringing stories and songs of glory!”

  “Lords and Ladies, welcome him!”

  “May he sit at the Great Feast, ride with the Great Hunt, enjoy the accolades of a true warrior. And may he greet us when we arrive at the Gate!”

  “Lords and Ladies, welcome him!”

  Athramail stilled. A silence broken only by the crackling of the fire settled over the crowd. The fire climbed steadily across the well-seasoned wood and engulfed the bier. Within a minute, the ard-righ’s body was no longer visible, and only the fire remained, brilliant yellows and oranges sliding through deep reds and elusive hints of cobalt and green, blazing against indigo sky. Arcane consciousness wrapped stealthy tendrils around my mind, and for a moment I relaxed into it. Then I realized what I was doing and wrenched myself into the ordinary moment, clenching my teeth around profanity. Coran glanced at me, meeting my eyes across the tops of a hundred heads, then returned his attention to the pyre.

  During the procession back down the mountain, men were already talking about the war in the west and the upcoming Moot. They traded all the same stories my own sources had brought me a twelvenight or more ago as if they were fresh. My mind slipped forward to the Moot again.

  It was too easy to imagine what it would be to ride into Teamair for the festival as ard-righ-apparent, to perform the triple sacrifice on Bealtan Eve, to step up to the high throne in the Star Chamber, to order the battle strategies. I would have been the first ard-righ who the wizards of the Aballo Order couldn’t lead by the nose; I would have deployed my resources to consolidate my power, rather than yielding it all up to the Order as ard-righthe always do.

  But that long-expected future wasn’t coming. Instead, I would be present in the Star Chamber as ard-harpist on Bealtan Day, swearing fealty to Amien with the rest of them, enduring all the cheek-cuts and left-handed comments of wizard and righ alike.

  How proud my father had been, showing me around Teamair during the Moot at which Conary was elected ard-righ! The stars in my birth chart were clear, and my father had reveled in what they portended, even though the man knew he would already be dead when the day of my election came.

  How crushed he would have been by the current circumstances, if he were alive.

  There wasn’t even any comfort in the fact that death had spared my father the humiliation. His death was my fault, too. I couldn’t face the Moot, or the summons that was coming. I couldn’t look any of those people in the face again.

  There was no possibility of defying the Aballo Prince’s summons—and only one alternative. When Amien’s herald arrived in Ilnemedon after the feast of Estra, the man would find me gone.

  2. Stranger in a Strange Land

  *Wake up.*

  I opened my eyes, elation sweeping through me: the goddess’s voice in my mind was a miracle. But a blade arced down through the darkness towards my throat.

  I grabbed the assassin’s wrist and twisted, deflecting the knife, grappling for a second hold and trying to kick him away. He hung on stubbornly; we tumbled over the side of the bed to the floor. I cracked my shoulder on an unfamiliar bedside table and scratch-landed on a wool rug, fists still full of assassin.

  Where was I? The assassin rolled on top of me, twisting his wrist in my grasp; I pushed and rolled us over again. Fear forced my mind into a sort of spurious wakefulness, but everything still felt unreal. I leaned on the man’s throat, grappling for the knife, while the man yanked on my hair and rolled on top again. My spine scraped across a painful transition between the rug and a hard plank floor. I struggled to wrap my fingers around the hilt, wrenched the knife free, and stabbed the assassin in the chest.

  Blood splashed sticky and warm over my skin. I pulled the knife free, releasing a torrent that showered me again. Gods, I was a fool! I shoved the assassin’s inert body away, throat clenching and heart pounding; I scrambled to my knees for a look around the room.

  Once I’d wiped my eyes clear, I saw: the assassin and I were alone. Everything looked unfamiliar; I felt as if I might be en
meshed in one of those dreams of waking from a dream. But then my brain shook off sleep like a dog emerging from a river, and I remembered.

  I wasn’t in Ilnemedon; this was why everything looked strange. I knelt in a guest chamber at Tyra, the summer home of the legendary Tanaan Lady Carina of Finias, heroine of a ballad and a war four centuries past. And, at least when I retired this evening, no one here had seemed interested in killing me. A shudder tripped up my spine.

  Lady Tella had spoken to me. After ten years of silence, after the wreck I’d made of everything, She finally had words for me again. She’d intervened to keep me alive, when She could simply have allowed my life to end on a fool’s errand in an alien land. Had She decided to grant me a second chance? Hope flickered in my chest, but for the moment that was just a distraction. I yanked the tight-fitting hood from the assassin’s head.

  The man was human, and still alive. His breath came in shallow gasps. He sported well-made clothing, expensive boots, and a top-quality knife. The weapon was well balanced, either new or well cared for: much like the knife I always tucked into the concealed sheath in my right boot. Hatred overtook me: I’d left the human realms almost a twelvenight ago; the bastard must have been tracking me for at least that long. But my father’s security master had spent years drilling this lesson into me: the time for emotion would come later. First I must understand.

  “Who?” I said.