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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  “What?” Iminor growled.

  I glanced at him and sighed. “It’s been more than a year since the Essuvians lost Uxellia to the kharr. They could only survive so long on their reserves out in the desert. The Chiefs—the Essuvian tiarna—still remembered one thing from their people’s ranging days, and that was how to take their knights on the road and live off the land. On the other side of the mountains, it was cattle they lived on. For the past year it’s been the spoils of the lands they rode through. Why none of the righthe offered Rohini and her Chiefs proper sanctuary—why Conary Mourne never offered them refuge at Teamair—”

  I shook my head. “It’s done. But it’s a mess. Rohini and whatever knights she can muster will be the best blades possible against the Básghilae; they’ve been fighting that action longer than we have. But we’ll get no welcome in any place we enter in their company, unless it’s the house of a righ.”

  I glanced at Amien again, seeing frustration that no truth could ease, and returned my attention to the Tan. “All either of us can hope for is to find a loyalist captain, because the loyalists see how little choice the Essuvians had, while others just see what they did to survive. I absolutely agree that we should ask her to tap any captain she’s got access to. But it would be a mistake to sit here and wait for her to succeed. I’m going out, too. Hopefully all the loyalists left in Ballarona tonight are not in this house.”

  “Agreed,” Amien said, reluctant. “Also any intelligence you can gather about which of the Ruillin righthe may not yet have left for the Moot—”

  “—so we can involve their House Healers against the storm—”

  Amien nodded. “And meanwhile I will see what I can do about counteracting the damn thing from here. When you get back, maybe we’ll go outside and see if we can find a way up onto the city wall…”

  “Because that sounds safe,” Iminor said.

  The wizard glanced at him. “Any time you’d like to take over my job…”

  “I’m trying to suggest that maybe it’s important you remain alive,” the Tan retorted. “Seems to me that’s more important than reaching your Moot on time.”

  Amien frowned at him, but thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “Thank you.”

  I dug into my pack, pulled out my jacket, and slipped it over my mail shirt. Belatedly I realized Letitia hadn’t weighed in. I looked at her: lamplight slid like liquid gold through her shadowed hair, making her braid into something as mysterious and complex as any spell-weaving. Her angular face and abyssal eyes were unreadable in this light; her gaze ranged beyond places any human might understand. Her body was here, I realized, but her awareness was distant; horrifying imaginings crowded around me again.

  “Letitia?” I said gently.

  She looked at me, still half-tangled in whatever memory or dark imagining had snared her.

  “Art—” Not the intimate form again! “Are you—? Should we assume you agree with the plan?” A damning blush heated my face; I had to get out of here, now.

  She frowned, thoughtful.

  “To try to charter a ship and sail on?” Amien said.

  She blinked at me. “Of course, my lords.”

  I nodded. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said, and fled down the stairs.

  Thee? When had I progressed to thee with Letitia? When had I allowed personal affections to dictate tactical decisions—sacrificed noncombatants to strategic objectives—become afflicted with celibacy? How was it possible I had fixed all my devotion to a woman I was simply never going to have?

  I strode through the third-floor corridor; a lamp still burned there, but the second-floor salon was dark. Evidently Marla had given up hope that any patrons might turn up tonight. I found my way through the room by memory and the illumination of lightning, then scurried like a hare pursued down the back stair: I was clearly coming apart like a poorly-made shirt, and I needed to get out of here before I was called on to hold a sensible conversation.

  I made it through the door and walked out to the street; wind tore the breath from my throat and then shifted to drive rain into my face. The power of the storm raised ripples of gooseflesh over my entire body, but my mind still spun. I couldn’t make it latch onto anything useful: it shuttled senselessly between Letitia racing into my embrace this afternoon and the pain in her face as she settled on the bench. Thee.

  My judgment was utterly compromised; my effectiveness as a commander was sadly blunted; I had given my word not to leave again. Worst of all, I didn’t want to. Something perilously close to the surface of my mind wanted to wrest her from Iminor, to earn the right to celebrate Bealtan with her, to insert myself into her life. As if I could actually go back to Fíana after this whole thing was over and become the mor to her mora. As if, through her choice of me, my life might slip miraculously back into what my stars had promised: only better, more wondrously than I had ever imagined. All rights and pleasures within my grasp, and her chiefest of them all.

  Thee. Gods, I was a fool.

  Every so often, as I walked through the rain-drenched city, I heard skirmishing in the distance; but the moons hid behind the storm, and for the first time in my experience no one had lit the lamps on the streets. Powers Whose names I suspected but knew better than to confirm rang on the air, knocking against the edges of my awareness; the sounds of running and shouting and the periodic report of a cannon called up memories I’d thought long expunged. I thought about the people I’d known while I lived here: wondering whether they still lived in this city, whether they’d gotten out before the fighting started, whether they were all the loyalists I’d assumed they were. I didn’t spare the time to seek any of them out; none of those relationships had been close. Marla had been the only person here with whom I could be even half of my true self. And I didn’t walk down towards the end of the Balloo Road, where the Mumhan palace stands: Brion Cuilean’s problems were on the long list of things I couldn’t solve tonight, and I suspected he was already at Teamair. I wouldn’t want to be the one to bring him word of what had happened in his absence.

  All the loyalist taverns were as empty as the Orchid; a couple were actually locked. Yet another thing I’d never seen in Ballarona before tonight. I drew my sodden jacket about me, pointed the top of my head into the wind, and headed towards the docks: there was nothing for it but to go down there and try to read between the lines of the ships’ names for clues to which might be loyalist-owned. I wondered whether Marla’s boy had found Rohini, whether she might already have managed to engage a ship.

  On the bluff above the Ruillin, at the top of the ramp leading down to the docks, I paused, looking out. The air was different here. Inside the city, it felt like a winter rainstorm: a phenomenon uncomfortable and possibly dangerous but with its energetic potential firmly based in the physical. Here the wind was still fierce, but only a few incidental drops of rain fell; the electricity on the air raised thrills that only began with the promise of lightning. A dozen ships pitched and rolled in the furious waves, the strings of lights on their rails dancing in the darkness, but I couldn’t focus on them: within, throughout, all around the roiling black-purple-red of the clouds that stretched to the mountaintops and beyond, a fluid arcane mirror-box reflecting the seductive power of the Ruillin and redoubling it in endlessly-repeating black delight opened to my glance, revealing a fluid lattice of power that shifted and shifted again, inviting me into a dimension of delight that made the fog Amien had crafted this morning into a child’s copy of a master’s painting. A thousand shades that only appeared black until glimpsed through arcane vision swirled around me, tentacles of energy questing after an awareness that might understand them. Their motions slipped through extramundane colors into notes no harp or cittern or augmented pipe-set ever rendered, skipping in shuddering pleasure that tripped up my spine and lit a desire that should send me racing for cover. Instead I followed the shifting colors, the inexplicable pleasure of raw power that only seems to manifest in the body, the
paths of the weaving that answered the Ruillin with something deeper and darker, dark air to its dark water, until the whole working unfolded in my incautious mind—and I saw its maker. His grey eyes met mine, a thousand miles away, close enough to feel his breath on my lips; and I read his name in a zephyr with too many dimensions to fit into the mundane world.

  Nechton.

  This was how it would feel if a hole opened in the sky and I fell through. Astonishment and desperate urgency blasted me back into my own body, and I pulled a shield around my mind as quickly as I was able—then turned and sprinted back to the Orchid. The spell’s terrible beauty echoed through me as I ran; my breath tangled in my throat at the memory of the colors and sounds I had tasted. I shook with the need for more, stumbled, and flailed my way back through the rain and into the Orchid’s rear entrance. I clattered up the stairs, panted through the unlit public salon, blinked at the blistering light in the third-floor corridor, scrambled to unlock the attic door. At the top of the stairs, a woman stood among my companions: this must be Rohini. She was as tall as Amien had said; the shape of her profile and the long stretch of her legs and torso revealed Tanaan ancestry, and the sword at her side would have been too much for many men. Her stance and voice made it clear she was arguing.

  “No, we’ve got to—” she said firmly in the Tanaan language, then paused and glanced down the stairs at me, hand moving to the hilt of her sword. “Is that him?”

  Immediately Letitia hove into view above me, leaning out beyond the rail at the top of the landing. “OhSweetLordthankyou,” she breathed.

  I pelted up the stairs; Rohini said, “Then let’s go.”

  Letitia looked at me. “They want to sail now? Up the Aerona?”

  I nodded. “We need to take whatever exit we can make.” I glanced at Amien. “My lord, I have our enemy’s name.”

  “The Bard?” Rohini said contemptuously. “That—”

  “The wizard.” I looked at Amien again.

  He shook his head, relaxing; a smile began on his face. He glanced at Rohini, but she had turned her intense black eyes on me.

  “How?” she said.

  And thus ended the last of my defenses. I glanced at Letitia. “I read the spell. The storm.”

  Utter astonishment registered in Letitia’s face.

  “What?” Iminor blurted. “Now you’re a—?”

  I sighed. “I trained at Aballo. Yes. I don’t practice.” I looked at Amien again. “My lord, it’s Nechton.”

  A strangled noise escaped Letitia. “Nechton? The mora Carina’s… Nechton?”

  I nodded. The wizard stretched out a hand, steadied himself against the back of a chair. Even in this light it was clear he’d gone ashen.

  “Well, then,” he said, gravelly voice even rougher than usual. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  24. The Shadow of the Sun

  Rohini was not completely without allies in this place: she’d managed to bribe someone to unlock the Bormo Gate. The sound of it banging shut behind us echoed hollowly on the wild air.

  Outside the gate, her personal contingent waited: a dozen rough-edged men in shaggy black cloaks and brass-finished helms whose spear-tips glinted under the lightning and whose torches had long since gone out. They divided themselves without consulting us, half to the front of the party and half to the back, and if Rohini found anything to question in it she said nothing.

  We raced down to the Aerona Road and galloped beside the rising tide. The power of the storm wrapped itself around me again, begging me to open my mind and let it in. The world kept dissolving into lightning and extramundane colors; again and again I hauled myself closed, or tried to. It was hard to remember where I ended and the edges of the arcane storm began. When the party reined, I was late in noticing; my horse had to veer off the path to avoid a collision. I shook my head hard, but it didn’t clear.

  “Are you all right?” Amien said.

  I glanced at him: he seemed as insubstantial as a lacewing against the intense presence of the storm.

  “Oh, gods, this storm—” I began, and then clamped my jaws around the rest.

  “Fine,” I grated. “Thank you.”

  The boat Rohini had engaged rocked and shimmied beside several others at the Aerona dock. I was surprised to see other fools out here preparing to sail; but I supposed we were far from the only people desperate to get out of Ballarona tonight. I had to pull off my jacket and throw it over my horse’s head before he would cross the pitching gangway.

  We secured our horses, sent our gear down through a narrow hatch to the lower deck, distributed ourselves in the areas the captain, who had to shout to be heard over the wind and waves, designated—and held on as the crew cast off and the tide took the boat.

  The boat raced and jumped; waves splashed over the rails and crashed across the deck; lightning revealed far too much about the state of the waters we sailed and the proximity of the other boats out here with us, and then its absence made my eyes ache with trying to see what we would strike first. The energies of the storm snared my mind again, bound me with my own refusal to admit them, catapulted me into a place in which nothing existed besides denial and desire until I remembered I had a purpose and a name and reclaimed my own body, inch by quaking inch. For an interminable time which I had been told would last no more than twenty minutes, the uncontrol in which we rode echoed redoubling against the arcane tempest that had ensnared me; and then, suddenly, the waters unrolled into calm, steady currents pushing us upriver. A few minutes later the storm was far enough behind that the moons emerged and lit up the world, and rational thought became possible again.

  Soon I was able to find my boundaries, to look at the people around me and see them as whole and concrete rather than the constantly fracturing and reforming energy-shadows that most people become when the mind is open too far. Amien and Nuad sat near me; I realized the wizard had seen how the storm laid me open, had recruited Nuad to quietly guard me until I settled into the mundane world again. I leaned my shoulder against Amien’s, oddly peaceful: it was almost like coming out of a trance and discovering a group of colleagues and the glow of a ward-circle around me. He offered a smile that nearly concealed his agitation and looked forward again, letting me find my feet.

  The boat on which we sailed seemed to be out on this bizarrely picturesque, moonlit waterway alone. I wondered what had happened to the other vessels. Gradually I remembered we were sailing up the Aerona, which meant we were bound for Presatyn; but we had not thought beyond that, and all our assumptions must be taken out and re-examined.

  “Is the lower deck ours?” I said to Amien. “We’ve got to recast our strategy.”

  “Damned certain we do,” Amien said. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded.

  “Nuad, could you tell them we’re ready?” the wizard said. The Tan nodded and walked around to the other side of the little charthouse; the wizard turned his penetrating gaze on me again.

  “You’re certain of what you saw,” he said. It was a question, even though he had made it into a statement.

  I called the memory to mind: the terrible delight of dark air reflecting and redoubling through a mirror-box of power so complex it couldn’t manifest entirely in the physical world; the troubling sensation of intimate proximity with its author; the arcane signature, always impossible to eradicate on something that passes beyond the physical realm, but so cleverly and elegantly concealed that only a wizard with the fortitude or poor judgment to encompass the working’s full black glory would ever find it. It whispered through my mind again: not just the name, but the flavor of its colors and the wild caress of its unearthly sounds.

  “Ellion?”

  I remembered the question. “Yes.”

  The wizard cast me a long, quizzical look.

  “How long has it been?” he said finally.

  “What?”

  “Since you stopped.”

  I couldn’t believe he’d asked the question. “You know. S
ince—” I swallowed, glancing away. “My parents.”

  The wizard shook his head. “No, since you’ve drawn power at all.”

  I frowned at him. “I made a vow, my lord. I won’t—” I knew too well how very easy it was to forswear myself, and it usually started with the assertion that it would never happen. “I’ve upheld it.”

  Now he was staring at me, as if I’d said something truly unbelievable. Who knew better what a poor job I did of keeping sacred vows, after all: I glanced away.

  “Great Lord Ilesan,” he said finally. He shook his head. “Let’s go.”

  Illuminated only by a couple small lamps, the lower deck of the boat was empty except for the Tanaan, our gear, a few oddments of sailing supplies, and Rohini—whose intense black gaze made me want to turn around and climb right back up to the deck. That desire deepened when I realized everyone else had also chosen this moment to stare at me.

  “Are you—all right?” Letitia said finally.

  I shook my head, embarrassed, then realized it would be misinterpreted. I waved the question away, trying to find something on which to focus.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Every time someone has said that today, it’s been a lie,” Iminor observed quietly.

  I shrugged. “I really am all right.”

  “As you say,” the Tan answered. “So how long have you been a wizard?”

  “What?” I blurted, reeling all over again. “I’m not—” But I was still too entangled in the arcane to manage the lie. I sighed. “I don’t practice.”

  “That’s not what I asked you,” Iminor rejoined.

  I glanced at Amien, looked away. “I studied at Aballo… a little more than ten years ago.”

  Iminor cast me a speculative look. “For how long?”

  Where was this going? “About two years.”

  “Twenty months,” Amien said quietly. I nodded.