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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  Predictably, the assassin said nothing. I grimaced and laid the blood-streaked knife on the polished planks of the floor, well out of the assassin’s reach, then pushed back his sleeves, exposing his wrists and forearms to the moonlight. A gorsedd harpist in Regia, who had kept me well supplied with unusual tidbits of intelligence until that city fell to the kharr, mentioned seeing a peculiar tattoo on men he knew for kharr insiders: a redsnake coiled around the wrist. But the assassin’s wrists were unmarked. Did this mean he wasn’t kharr, or merely that he hadn’t earned the tattoo?

  I wrenched the assassin’s head to one side, pulling aside the blond tail of battle-bound hair and looking for another sort of tattoo at the base of the scalp: a stylized sun rendered in black, the mark of the Order of the Hidden Sun. Devotees of the god Par, members of the Order of the Hidden Sun hold beliefs so blasphemous they would all have been exiled long ago, if they weren’t the best spies and assassins in the world. The man’s neck was unmarked: whoever wanted me dead was neither tiarn nor royal. And that eliminated every readily-imagined enemy and agenda.

  I sighed and looked into the assassin’s glazing eyes. The man was going to die, but it would take a while. I knew what I had to do.

  Feelings didn’t matter here. I needed to discover who had purchased my death, and that easily outweighed the things I might endure when I touched the assassin’s mind. None of what I must do was a violation of my vow to give up magic: telepathic work is not an arcane operation, no matter what the uninitiated may think. A born telepath is little more than a man blessed with hearing among a society of the deaf. Nevertheless a knot of cold formed in my middle. To encompass the mind of a dying man is dangerous at best, and far too often fodder for weeks of screaming nightmares.

  No time to waste: I braced myself against the pain and dying-disorientation that would spill into me at the contact and brushed the man’s consciousness with my mind. But where I should have found a man’s mind, I encountered a wall.

  I sat back on my heels. Who was this man? Men who study the writings of the wizard Ransmith know how to shield against a telepath; I had seen those shields before. The wall around the assassin’s mind was unlike any of those: a prickly fog that resonated in my teeth, rather than the impermeable fortress a wizard trained in Ransmith’s methods would use. I sensed none of the telltales of Talent that allow members of the initiate to recognize one another: the assassin was neither wizard nor druid nor windcaller. And yet his mind was shielded. I searched the man’s drawn face: his expression betrayed nothing. His eyes wavered between my face and things only the dying can see.

  I drew a deep breath and touched the shield again. It wouldn’t be possible to force and shatter; but if I could stand the resonance, I might slip through.

  *Hello?* I sent.

  The man didn’t seem to hear: he wasn’t a telepath, then. Nor did he seem to notice when I gritted my teeth and dove through the disquieting electric fog, trying to ignore the lightning that shot up my spine and gathered in the back of my brain.

  Pain and breathlessness welled up to swallow me; the room swirled and sparkled towards deeper darkness. A miasma of guilt and grief invaded my consciousness, lodging painfully in my chest and throat. Fireproof bastard, the assassin thought. Why wouldn’t you die?

  I foundered for a second, nearly losing track of the contact. Fireproof? What the hell did that mean? With an effort I hung onto the link, pushing further inside.

  The assassin’s mind came into focus, and a face condensed out of the misty shimmer surrounding me: the same visage that stared at me from every mirror I’d ever encountered. Through the assassin’s eyes my face was unfamiliar, almost inhuman: intense and forbidding, its high planes and deep blue eyes awash in moonlight and stark shadow, its jaw as uncompromising as a knife at the ribs.

  Who? I thought. My hard-edged face melted into a memory of a half-familiar knife in my hand and a faintly-moonlit room condensing around me, a pair of startling blue eyes snapping open just a second too soon—

  —gut-wrenching slide out of normality into nowhere, darkness falling away beneath me until even the sensation of air rushing past is gone, lights spinning and flashing in unnamed hues at the edges of vision—

  —a golden-hued city basking in sunlight and summer warmth, air humming with unrecognizable languages and immense gleaming buildings scraping a lavender-and-indigo sky—

  —a beautiful, improbably-dressed Tana with eyes the color of emeralds, black hair swirling around her as she spins to face me—

  —a cramped ill-lit corridor suffused with acrid odors; a prickle of sudden defenselessness across my back; ageless golden eyes fixing on me in white-hot menace as the weapon in my hand explodes—

  —smoke in my eyes and blood in my mouth; the flaming remains of an earth-and-timber roof sailing down to pin me to a smoldering floor—

  I couldn’t breathe. Was that blood in my lungs? Would they find the time to torture me before I drowned? I very nearly hoped they would.

  Suddenly I found myself again. The sensation of finding my own mind from outside nearly splintered me. I clung to the tenuous connection, released the assassin’s mind and pulled back, the fog of the assassin’s failing awareness and the cloud-occluded stars of the man’s thoughts swirling backwards around me as I mindsailed away. I was getting rusty; I had nearly drowned in that death; and who would have come in after me? Sweet Lady Tella, when had I become such a fool?

  Finally the assassin’s pain-wracked face and battle-bound blond hair came into focus again; cold shivered through me as the lightning in my spine and hindbrain fizzled out. The assassin was too far gone to yield up anything coherent: there was no reason to prolong his suffering. I took a second to be sure my voice would sound steady before speaking.

  “Shall we end this?” I said.

  Something happened to his mouth, something that might have become a smile but then edged towards despair. He gave a barely perceptible nod.

  I nodded in return. I picked up the knife again, drew it across his jugular and through his trachea. I sat back on the ruined rug as the life flowed out of the man, trying to sort through the meager senseless clues I’d acquired; but I couldn’t get my attention off the assassin.

  This was far from the first death I had witnessed, far from the first man I had killed. Nevertheless there were words that should have been said, and I could have said them. The assassin could have used the assistance of someone who had walked the other side, and I knew the way. But those duties were the prerogatives of a place I had left behind. Now I could only offer dispatch, warrior to warrior; to do more would have been a lie.

  My Talent was becoming a rusty knife, grown both less effective and more apt to accidentally harm. I still smelled power everywhere; it had grown only more intoxicating in ten years of my refusing to yield to its call. But the skills that allow wizards to wield power safely were stiff with disuse.

  And yet Lady Tella had spoken to me, for the first time in ten years. She hadn’t forgotten me. She still had use for me. She might even have decided to forgive me. I had to find some way to become worthy of this second chance. I must understand what She required.

  But first I must figure out who had initiated this attack. Who hated me this much, and why?

  The halls of Tyra House stretched endlessly in the dark. My improvised blanket kilt dragged me slower still. My chest and arms still bore smears of blood; the stuff was begininning to dry in my hair, pasting it to my head and face. Now that the emergency was over, my mind spun over the attack and its context, seeking purchase. I wasn’t likely to discover who had set an assassin on my trail until I returned to the human lands, but I reeled at the irony: only after I spent a twelvenight alone on the road had the man finally pulled off an attack—while I was a guest of the royal Tanaan House of Finias.

  What had the assassin been doing since I left Ilnemedon, on all the days and nights when I presented a far easier target? Where were the Tanaan protocols and readiness for househo
ld attacks? How could a noble house this ill-prepared survive? In a human nobleman’s house, in a situation like this—no. In a human house, there would be no situation like this. The responsibility of protecting a guest is understood to be a geas overriding every other, and no danger would be allowed within a bowshot of a guest’s room at night.

  Unless, of course, the host had decided to murder the guest himself. That would be the gravest of all possible violations under human law; but who knew how the game was played out here, among people whose ancestors had been gods? Every story and song about the Tanaan is clear: there is no predicting, let alone really understanding, what Tanaan might decide to do. Gods know my experience with the one Tan I ever thought I knew had borne that out.

  Surprising how being in the Tanaan realms brought all those memories out of the dungeon where they belonged. I shoved them aside for the hundredth time this twelvenight and turned my mind to the problem I might yet solve.

  If no human can understand their moral codes, even Tanaan politics must be driven by power and necessity. I was a perfect stranger here; no one in Finias had any reason to kill me. The fact that I didn’t matter in Tanaan politics, whatever they might be, should have protected me. There should at least be a night watch or household security master I might call upon, someone to whom I could report the royal House of Finias’s complete failure to uphold its guest-responsibilities.

  I trailed cold fingers across the cabinets and presses spaced at intervals along the walls, trying to maintain my orientation between the areas of scant moonlight. I peered down darkened corridors, beginning to wonder whether anyone else remained alive.

  A half-familiar knife in my hand; startling blue eyes snapping open just a second too soon: the memory leapt out of my head to flash against the darkness. It had come from the assassin’s mind, and my own had called it up in a senseless attempt to focus on something: I recognized the eyes, just as I’d recognized my own face through the assassin’s vision. This was the assassin’s last coherent memory, the beginning of the man’s attempt to take my life. Why was the knife only half-familiar?

  I couldn’t find anybody; the entire wing in which I’d slept lay in darkness. Why were the guest rooms in the most insecure spot in the house? They should have been on an upper floor. I walked across the cold smooth marble of Tyra House’s grand reception space, then entered the opposite wing. The dining room and sitting rooms stood on this side, I remembered. In some of the oldest human houses, servants’ quarters are tucked away beyond the public areas. Maybe I would find someone of sufficient authority to handle my problem back there.

  Another assassin-image surfaced behind my light-deprived eyes: a gut-wrenching slide into nowhere, lights flashing at the edges of vision. I staggered, catching myself against a heavily-carved linen press. My bloodstained blanket began to un-kilt; I stopped to resettle it. I didn’t know what to do with this incomprehensible image. I’d never seen anything like it. Most likely it was just a dying-hallucination.

  A golden-hued city basking in sunlight and summer warmth, air humming with unrecognizable languages and immense gleaming buildings scraping a lavender-and-indigo sky. A faery realm? The elusive paradise of Hy-Breasaíl? A dream? I didn’t know. I shook my head, trying to regain focus on the here-and-now.

  The only areas beyond the public ones were the kitchen and the laundry, both of which were dark except for banked fires on the hearths. I was the only two-legged creature in either place.

  More ghost images: a beautiful young Tana with eyes the color of emeralds, black hair swirling around her as she spun to face me; ageless golden eyes pinning me as the weapon in my hand exploded. I’d never seen a Tana before this journey; even after a twelvenight in the Tanaan realms, they still seemed like myths come to life. None of the Tanaan I’d met here in Finias matched the intense warrior beauty who flashed in the assassin’s mind and was gone. But the golden eyes: those seemed familiar. I had the sense that I ought to remember who those eyes belonged to.

  Eventually I found myself in the marble-floored reception space again. I walked out to the center and looked up. Deep galleries on the second and third floors receded into cavernous darkness; the ceiling, which I remembered as delicately frescoed and perhaps four stories high, lay completely hidden in shadow. Evidently the Tanaan felt no more need for night-lighting in their houses than they did for security for their guests.

  Enough was enough. Proper projection could have filled the space with my voice, almost effortlessly; instead I channeled mounting frustration into a shout.

  “HELLO?” My voice reverberated from the ceiling and the galleries, bouncing like a rock skipping around the interior of a well. In very little time the galleries filled with people, who I sensed as disturbances of the air and deepenings of the shadows rather than really being able to see or even hear them.

  Someone lit a lamp: a Tan of typically elongated build and inestimable age whose dressing gown seemed not to have been buttoned properly. Nevertheless he carried a strange, otherworldly grace.

  Light struck me heavily in my dark-strained eyes. It splashed a small puddle of illumination across the southeast corner of the second-floor gallery, exposing a lissome blonde Tana with a couple small wide-eyed children clinging to her shift—and caught sparks of magic in three dozen pairs of Tanaan eyes arrayed around the shadowed balconies.

  Ripples of dismay ran through the galleries, and murmurs of blood and Beallan: the Tanaan word for human. Most of the eyes drew back; but a few leaned closer, as if for a better look at some exotic animal in a cage. I stood at the bottom of an observatory well, scions of the gods looking down on me; but this time I stared up at people rather than stars. For a moment awareness of mystery encompassed me. Then I remembered.

  “Hello?” said a Tan I couldn’t see.

  “Hello,” I answered, pitching my voice to the far side of the third-floor gallery for lack of a discernible target and hanging on to my civility. “Good evening.”

  Or was it morning? I set the problem aside.

  “There is a dead would-be—” I realized I didn’t know the Tanaan word for assassin. “—murderer in my room…”

  If minds had gears as some composers are fond of fancying, mine would have been grinding on Tanaan declensions. “And I’d appreciate it if someone could get the body out of there…”

  The sharp edges of Tanaan diphthongs felt like burrs rolling around in my mouth. “And I’m going to need a bath.”

  Silence stretched in the ill-lit hall. I couldn’t even hear any of them breathing.

  “…Anybody?” I said finally, putting real effort into sounding reasonable.

  “Ah, yes,” said a Tan I couldn’t see, after another pause. The Tyra seneschal? It seemed I should recognize the voice. “If you would be pleased to return to your room, Lord, I’ll join you there in a moment.”

  Someone should have brought me a towel. Instead I stood across the chamber from the assassin’s corpse, rivulets of dried blood on my chest and arms, while attenuated Tanaan servants flitted in and then scattered like rushes before a wind. The flush of combat ebbed from me; fatigue took its place. How long had I slept? Two hours? Three?

  I looked around the room. The fireplace at the center of the exterior wall stood clean and empty; the drafty flue was probably too narrow to admit a man. I hadn’t touched either of the windows this evening, all too aware of the security hazard they represented. The glass still appeared untouched. I needed to go outside and see if the man had come in that way—and then shut the window behind him? Why?

  Eventually a herald in the unmistakable white-and-gold of the Aballo Order glided into the room. I startled. Sweet Lady Tella, had Amien sent a herald all the way out here to find me? How had he known where to look?

  “Tiarn Ellion,” the herald said.

  Another start of surprise jolted me: the herald was no Ilesian bard or failed Aballo initiate, but a Tan. He must be a member of Lady Carina Finias’s staff. His dramatic facial bone structure ver
ged on unpleasant angularity, as those of Tanaan often do. His high prominent cheekbones, delicate jaw, and large wide-set eyes might have been beautiful—again I thought of Deaclan—had he weighed ten pounds more. He had the stretched, wispy look all Tanaan seem to share—and no excuse for passing himself off as a herald that I could discern. A herald should know better than to call me Tiarn.

  The herald’s unnerving grey eyes took in my bloodstained body and improvised blanket kilt. His gaze slipped away, to the corpse and the blood soaking into the patterns of the rug. The Tan’s translucent skin faded past the color of snowflowers and kept going.

  I glanced again at the door behind the Tan. It was undamaged; it had still been locked when I opened it after the assassin died. Had the assassin managed to pick the lock without damaging it, then locked the door behind him when he entered the room? No professional would go to so much trouble to cut off his own escape.

  Focus, I reminded myself. Contain, then investigate.

  “Where is your security master?” I said.

  The herald winced. “Tiarn, Mor Rishan is aware that Beallan customs are different from ours…”

  Rishan Murias here? With his Lady en route to their home. How were they going to celebrate Bealtan, two hundred miles apart?

  “But among the People it is taboo for—for a person under a death vendetta to accept hospitality from—”

  “What?” I snapped. “What about his responsibility as host to ensure a guest’s safety?”

  The herald made a gesture a human would intend as half placation, half supplication. I supposed it meant the same thing here. Probably.

  “Tiarn, Mor Rishan regrets this—incident, as I’m sure you do. He would like nothing better than to… resolve things simply and quietly.”

  I sighed. “Yes. That is exactly what I’d like.”

  The herald bowed. “Thank you, Tiarn. Mor Rishan will see you after you bathe.”