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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  I swallowed. “Mora, I cannot—”

  “But why?”

  I opened my mouth to deliver some courtly version of I really don’t want to talk about it, but the uiesquebae hijacked it.

  “Me on Aballo would spell the breaking of every vow I haven’t yet violated,” I heard myself say.

  “What?” she breathed.

  I stared at her, losing myself for some unquantified span of time in the emerald depths of her eyes. I had to get out before my mouth fired off again.

  “I am sorry. Truly, deeply sorry; I wish I were—” Words lodged in my throat. I swallowed. “You’re safer—” Oh, sweet Lady Tella, I couldn’t say that.

  “It has been a privilege,” I croaked, once again unable to look at her; I bowed and beat a hasty retreat.

  20. Ship of the Water, Ship of the Air

  Morning dawned grey and cloudy, but the light stabbed me in the eyes. Everything I owned was still damp. I packed it all anyway, even coiling the now-brittle gut strings into a side pocket of the harp case for no reason I could identify.

  In the inn’s main room I forced myself to eat, though getting the first few bites down was as great a struggle as it always is after that much uisquebae. The Tanaan, evidently observing the time-honored practice of not letting anything pass the lips until one can be certain it will remain there, stayed in the rooms; but after a few minutes Amien joined me at the table. We ate in a silence born of mutual understanding and aching skulls. My head cleared and my stomach settled, though neither as much as I would have wished; but at least I would be able to step into the street without moaning aloud. I wished I’d brought a hat with a good wide brim. Perhaps after the airship launched I would wander around Goibniu again until I found one.

  I paused between bites of porridge, looking at the wizard—and suddenly realized where I had developed the practice of forcing myself to eat: Aballo. It is de rigueur in that setting, understood by all: despite the most heinous after-effects of whatever mind-opening brew may have been used to facilitate a working, it is necessary for a wizard to be able to function again as soon as the brew wears off. Something inside me felt heavy; I wondered how many of the things I took for granted had grown from seeds planted during my time there. How much of what I was would never change, despite my heartfelt efforts.

  Amien met my gaze. “What?”

  I shrugged. “We are who we are.”

  “As the gods made us,” he said equably, and went back to his porridge.

  Eventually the Tanaan came downstairs. Hung-over Tanaan look essentially like hung-over humans, though for reasons I couldn’t have explained their hangovers are funnier. Letitia wore the scarf: I absorbed this in a single glance, and immediately discovered I was unable to look at her further.

  The launch grounds for airships lay just south of Goibniu’s wall, across the road from the river. The airship’s canopy, which had been crafted in a palette of blues, lay partially inflated across the vacant field, already tethered to one of the largest baskets I had yet seen. The basket still stood sideways, exposing the light planking of its base. A little distance farther from the river, another crew spread out their canopy preparatory to inflation. We drew up at the edge of the field and stopped, watching: perhaps a dozen men busied themselves around the airship, evidently controlling the canopy and adjusting the ropes and netting as the thing began to take shape.

  In the center of all the wandering ropes, between the basket and the canopy, a spare, dark-haired man stood alone, almost entirely still, watching the canopy unfold. His right hand moved slightly, then went still again, though the arm remained a little distance from his side. That would be the windcaller: the magic-worker who can resist making irrelevant gestures has yet to be trained. Another man walked out of the opening in the canopy, said something in passing to the windcaller, and crossed the field towards us. He was tall and as lean as airship crewmen always are, dressed in leather from broad-brimmed hat to boots; his smoky eyes took us all in without evident emotion, though they lingered over the Tana.

  “Mornin’,” he said. “Sian, I see you are thirteen, not twelve.”

  Amien shook his head. “Our friend—” He indicated me with a nod. “Will be taking our horses. Friends, this is Conaig Munh, the Aveta’s captain.”

  “Mornin’,” he said again; we all responded in kind. “Gentles, we’ll have the ship ready in a little while. If you could stack up your things over there, we’ll load them for you.”

  Letitia frowned, obviously on the verge of objecting; he held up a hand.

  “Milady, that’s the way we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to distribute the weight. Once the canopy rights up, and your bags and our supplies are aboard, we’ll invite you into the basket. You’ll want to put on jackets or what have you; it gets cold up there, and we may not be able to get your bags and packs back out before we land.

  “Your destination is Tonagal in Nagnata, if I remember?” he said to Amien.

  Amien smiled ruefully. “Aballo, actually.”

  The captain just raised his eyebrows. I wondered how many of his charters lied about their destinations until the morning of launch. He glanced at the Tanaan again, and then his gaze came to rest on Amien.

  “That place is magically protected, sian,” he said. “No one can—”

  “I know the release spells,” Amien said evenly. “When the time is right, I’ll handle them.”

  Again the captain granted the wizard a long, dispassionate look.

  “If we make our previous night’s stop at Tonagal, that puts us off the coast of Aballo at the end of a flying day. You can’t get us through, we’ll go down in the ocean. I’ll let you try it, but it’ll cost you two extra days, because I’m not risking this ship. We go in from Damona, in Ebdani.”

  “No,” Amien said. “We can’t spare the time. I’ve opened that binding a thousand times, and—”

  An odd, appraising shift occurred in the captain’s gaze, but he shook his head. “Take it or leave it. Two extra days. Ten extra gold, and another ten for the risk. I told you, I don’t fly into places under siege, and I don’t take charters that put my ship or crew at risk. You don’t like it, you’re welcome to hire a watership, but I guarantee you won’t get an airship captain to lay that bet.”

  Frustration gathered in Amien’s face. Across the field, the canopy surged suddenly upward, righting the basket. Men raced around the ship in a practiced dance, holding the ship by the ropes as it shimmied sideways. After a moment they brought it to rest again and tethered it to stakes in the ground. By the time I returned my attention to Amien’s argument, the windcaller strode up to join what he doubtless thought was a calm last-minute conversation.

  “We’re good,” he said to the captain. Then he caught sight of Amien, and goggled; he stared at me in silence for a moment as well.

  “My lord!” he said to Amien, sweeping into a bow that called to mind an albatross in flight. Relief and sudden worry chased one another across Amien’s face; I realized I should have expected this. Windcallers are specialized Talents, and their power generally doesn’t approach that of a man qualified to train or work at Aballo; but they have the same awareness of the extramundane as any wizard—and evidently the same ability to smell Talent on another man. Amien’s torc could mean only one thing in this context. The wizard waved him off.

  “Not here, if you please,” Amien said gruffly.

  The windcaller straightened up, swallowing, and glanced from Amien to me and back. “Lords, I’m Echtag Gand, and I took training at Matach. It is my honor to—”

  “We really need to be quiet about—” Amien said.

  “Who are these people?” the captain said to the windcaller.

  The windcaller glanced at the captain; his gaze ranged over the Tanaan. Understanding dawned in his eyes.

  “Your pardon, Lo—gentles,” he said to Amien and me. “We will get you safely through, I give you my word.”

  “This morning they say Aballo?” the capta
in pursued, eyes on the windcaller.

  The windcaller nodded, face full of wonder. “I’ve never been there, have you?”

  “No, you fool, no one has, because the place is sealed!”

  But the windcaller just smiled. “They will get us through.”

  “And we need to go in from Tonagal,” Amien said. “We’re running out of time.”

  The captain shook his head, resigned, but a certain thoughtfulness had developed in his eyes. “Who are you?”

  Finally Amien smiled. “I told you last night. My name is Rinnal Ruthin, and we’re en route to Tonagal in Nagnata.”

  “Just so,” the captain said slowly, looking at the Tanaan again. “And from there to Aballo, though no one other than the Tonagal station needs to know.”

  Amien nodded.

  “You still owe my crew an extra ten for the risk.”

  “Done,” Amien said.

  “Well, then,” the captain said to the group. “Stack up your gear; make your goodbyes; tonight you sleep in Nemetona, in Mumhan. Sian, we agreed to half this morning?”

  “We did,” Amien said. We all climbed out of the saddles; the Tanaan removed the saddlebags and other burdens from their horses. Iminor kept glancing across the field at the airship, his trepidation in stark contrast to the satisfaction of parting company with me that I had seen so clearly last night and today. They stacked their belongings near the airship; they helped me string their horses onto a pair of long lead-lines. The airship’s crew stowed things a few at a time, until the mound of belongings they had left disappeared into unseen recesses of the basket.

  “We’re ready, gentles,” the captain called. Iminor gave vent to a deep, nervous exhalation. Grief, guilt and anxiety surged inside me. How could I let them go on without me? Letitia needed every blade she could get, and three nights stood between her and the guarantee of safety. But how could I even contemplate going with them, when I knew my unconquerable flaws and illicit lusts, not to mention the price on my neck, put them at risk? And no righ of a human nation had a better personal guard: not anymore.

  I embraced each of the knights in turn, and we wished one another good luck. Most of them looked as worried as I felt, and Easca clutched me tight and long. I kissed her temple, finally, and stepped back, watching her follow the others into the basket. Nuad embraced me, too, drawing back to look into my face.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I will never forget the things you taught me.”

  An unexpected smile commandeered my mouth. “Few could have done what you did with this crew. It has been my privilege.”

  “The privilege was mine,” he said, smiling too, and climbed into the basket. I turned and looked into Iminor’s face.

  He gazed at me in silence; shared understanding passed between us. He didn’t like me, didn’t like the way I looked at Letitia—or, I realized in a flash of mind-wrecking insight, the way she looked at me. And I would have been compelled to torment him all the way from Irisa for his stiff uprightness and narrow judgment, had the situation been less dire. And yet.

  “We did this thing together,” he said as if he’d been thinking exactly the same things. “And I owe you a debt I can’t ever repay. Don’t imagine I’ll forget.”

  I nodded. “Be safe, and live long.”

  His mouth quirked in a reluctant smile; he climbed aboard. Now only Amien and Letitia remained. I turned to the wizard, and he caught me in a wiry embrace.

  “This has been—completely unexpected,” he said without releasing me. “I’m glad you were with me.”

  Pain clamped my throat shut; I nodded voicelessly, and he stepped back, meeting my eyes in a frank gaze.

  “See you at the Fair,” he said.

  And now I was trapped. It occurred to me that I had been trapped when he turned up at Irisa.

  “See you,” I said.

  He climbed aboard; Letitia met my eyes as if trying to decide what to say. I pulled her to me, burying my face in her hair, feeling her tremble through the spidersilk mail. I breathed in her sweet exotic scent, willing myself to remember. After far too little time, she drew back, eyes shuttered.

  “My lord,” she said, a dozen flavors of disappointment in her voice. Something wrapped cold fingers around my heart and squeezed. “Thank you.”

  Take it back, I wanted to say. Instead I bowed and stepped back, and she turned away. Iminor extended a hand to her; she climbed into the basket. A leather-clad crewman drew the door shut, and the men on the ground cast the stay-ropes to men in the basket. And they were aloft.

  The ship rose like a smoke-ring, sure and graceful: coasting slightly northeast on the wind of the incoming tide. I stood and watched, head craning back to track its flight, as it rose higher than the city wall, higher than the trees at the field’s southern edge, up towards the places where the thermals run. The ground crew had already lost interest and moved around pulling up stakes and doing other things I couldn’t pay attention to; I heard a horse whinny, restive. But I couldn’t stop watching. I felt as if some critical part of me had been loaded into the basket.

  And then, as if out of the blue cloudless sky, the awareness crashed down on me: I had made a terrible mistake. I could have traveled as far as Tonagal with them and still avoided crossing to Aballo; Letitia might have had one more blade, might still have had an experienced commander, for another three days.

  On the heels of that horrifying insight came another: I had been deceiving not only the others but myself. It wasn’t fear of whatever accident in which I might embroil Letitia that had left me standing on the ground this morning, but fear of how it would feel to know I had failed: fear of watching more knights die and knowing I should have shielded them, fear of the pain of knowing my failings had harmed her. I wasn’t protecting her; I was protecting myself. And my failure to try to overcome the ways in which I erred, my failure to give Letitia everything I might: those were far worse than whatever error I might have made in the course of giving her my all. There was no excuse for simply failing to try.

  Sudden, frigid wind surged in from the mountains behind the city, beating downward and east towards the river. Dust and chaff kicked up from the field, pelting my face until it stung. Above me, the airship wobbled, its upward flight halted; it dropped as if pushed from a table, only recovering a short distance above the city wall. I felt the surge of wind the windcaller pulled in from the river, in my hair and in senses arcane—and felt the arcane power in the answering blow that pushed the ship back towards the river. The power the windcaller fought was severalfold stronger; I knew, without having to consider the issue, who its author was. There was nothing I could do but watch as the ship fell helplessly back towards the shore.

  Within seconds it was clear the ship was going into the water. A great bubble of shimmering green manifested around the basket and canopy: Amien’s work, I knew. We might be back in the human realms, but the power here still ran in the wrong direction for a man attuned to the true gods; when Amien’s familiar signatures joined the next surge of air the windcaller summoned, the Bard’s Wizard overmastered it anyway. I raced back to my horse: when they went down in the river, they would need whatever help they could get. It took all my meager patience to grab the lead lines and pull the horses along behind us, to harry them into speed; but I would need them, too.

  We raced into the road, followed the airship half a mile or so south, then scrambled down the ragged slope towards the shore; the green bubble around the airship skittered east above me, throwing a moving shadow across my path. As the horse skidded down the last, treacherous yards to the bank, ship and bubble crashed into the water. They plunged into the oncoming tide—I hadn’t realized how deep the Ruillin was so close to the shore—then breached the surface and settled. The racing tide pulled them north, towards the busy Goibniu docks.

  I cast my awareness against the bubble, knowing Amien would recognize me in the shock that rippled around his perimeter—for a fraction of a second it was as if our eyes met, and all his fr
ustration and fear raced through me—and flung the lead-ropes into the same place I had just touched. Just as they reached the boundary, the arcane shield vanished; water crashed over the edge of the basket, and the canopy sagged into the tide, but Amien had caught the ropes. For a second he met my gaze across the water, something I couldn’t identify in his face; then the ship’s crew had the ropes in their hands.

  “Go!” Amien shouted; I cued my horse and he scrambled up the slope; I wrestled the ends of the lead lines free of the places I’d stowed them, pulled and gave the command. After a moment the horses got the message, and backed up. It wasn’t enough to tow the ship in, but the basket held steady as the crew wrestled the sodden canopy out of the clutches of the tide. And then the lines went slack again; the basket lifted out of the water, seemingly under its own power, passed dripping above me, and landed on the road above. When I finally returned my attention to the horses around me, I discovered the lead lines trailing into the water; I gathered them and coaxed the horses back up the steep bank.

  Everyone had scrambled out of the basket by the time I arrived. Amien met my gaze and smiled, in that rueful way he’d always had after things went wrong in the workshop; I found myself smiling in return.

  “Missed you,” I said to him.

  He cracked a reluctant grin. But then I saw Letitia watching me and scrambled from the saddle to stand before her.

  “Mora,” I said. “I’m a fool. Will you let a fool try again?”

  My breath hung in my chest as I waited for her answer. How could I blame her if she turned me away? She gave me a long look; and of all the things I saw in her gaze, trust was not among them.

  “Don’t leave me again,” she said.

  The words fell on me as a geas, and I inclined my head. “I won’t.”

  She nodded as if the matter were settled; Iminor glared at me. But I knew she’d be serving me a dozen flavors of humility over the next few days.

  Nothing for it but to endure. I’d brought this on myself, all of it. Time to shoulder the yoke, to figure out what to do next. There was little to discuss in that regard.