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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  There was no choice: I must do what I could, without drawing power. Maybe if I showed her the power already in the talisman, let her feel how light transformed through her into something infinitely more intoxicating than the original source, she would recognize whatever she was already doing. That was ninety percent of the battle, after all: acquaintance with the power sought. It is where every wizard’s initiation starts.

  “Look,” I said, catching and holding her gaze. I popped the talisman into my mouth again: the smooth facets and precise angles like candy on my tongue, the chain trailing from my mouth like the reins on some faery horse. I touched it to the roof of my mouth.

  This time it wasn’t just my head that fired, but every power center along the length of my spine: cascading in a series of flares that fed one another like a sequence of explosive charges, building in intensity as the power descended, raising me instantly to desperate aching readiness for a joining that would only begin with the physical. Incandescence blasted me beyond reason, stretching me until I lost track of where I ended and she began. I could think of nothing beyond the necessity of sharing the energy with her, of rousing in her the madness she wrought in me: I flung myself across the bed, eyes still echoing with brilliance so intense that light and dark seemed to trade places, rolled her over and delivered the kiss of power in the place where it would have more effect than her heart.

  The power redoubled in the transfer, knocking me out of every mundane orbit, spinning through me in raw pleasure that echoed yet again. She gave voice to the sort of scream that usually precedes a lover losing consciousness. But she didn’t faint: instead she twisted around to take me again, surrounding me with the sort of ecstasy that presages total loss of control. Simultaneously another echo hit me through our accidental mindlink, grown somehow stronger yet. I heard myself cry out, found myself moving in desperate shivering thrusts while her brilliance permeated my entire diffusing being.

  I was binding myself, felt it happening; couldn’t imagine what it meant. When she found her completion, need came over me like a tempest: to surrender the magical essence with which I might conceive a child, to consign myself to utter oblivion, to seal the binding. I could only avoid the release by pouring my own energy into her instead. After the mayhem ended I was atypically sweaty and half-drained; and all I wanted to do was kiss her, as if by perpetuating the physical circuit I might find some of that surrendered energy flowing back into myself.

  “Did you feel that?” I panted.

  She fell back and laughed, giving voice to the sort of wondrous madness that a truly mind-wrecking working will leave behind.

  I found myself laughing too, but quietly. “That’s the energy you’re creating. That’s what’s in the talisman. Once you’ve found the connection, the rest will go more easily.”

  “Oh, I think I will need far more than one lesson,” she purred, gaze wandering the ceiling.

  I smiled. “Lady, I might die.”

  She laughed again, low in her throat. I stretched out beside her, listening to the slowing of my heart and the incomprehensible normality in the street outside. It seemed impossible that life could be continuing as it ever had, somewhere outside these walls: that people might spend today on exactly the same pursuits as ever, with the Fair and the Moot as happenings of seemingly no more than passing importance, with the things bent on our destruction beyond their direst nightmares. I couldn’t imagine whether it would be a source of relief or a disappointment to find events of such wildness and importance passing one entirely by. I couldn’t imagine what it was to be a person who might answer such a question.

  It seemed as if we lay inside a bubble, in some space in which reality had been suspended or somehow banished. In a few hours we would step out of it, climb onto a boat if we were lucky, tread the shores of reality again; but for now, we existed outside. I lay still for a moment, letting that idea roll around in my mind: there was something important about it that my mind was failing to grasp.

  Finally, slowly, the significance of this extraordinary moment stumbled into the light. Separation from ordinary reality is the first imperative of truly powerful magic: the farther from the mundane realm one stands, the more influence one accrues. In this separate space, so far removed from the commonplace that we stood even beyond the bizarre crucible of blood-prices and pursuit we’d occupied all month, we might make choices in the sort of stillness one usually finds only inside a ceremonial circle, might find our decisions rippling far beyond the place in which we lay. So how should I use this moment? In what direction should I seek to move us?

  Once I asked myself the question, the answer was obvious: Aballo. With Letitia safe there, I might give my whole attention to the strategic issues of defeating her enemy. There she had the greatest chance of finding someone who knew enough about the ancient Tanaan metallurgies to repair Fíana’s Great Spear. And through investigating that weapon we might discover much about Carina’s centuries-long war with Nechton: if I had guessed correctly, and she was the one who wrecked the Spear, that damage must have occurred in one of their engagements. How many of the energies of that battle still lay on the fragments Letitia carried? What treasures of intelligence about Nechton would we discover in Carina’s grimoire? In centuries of battle she must have learned much about his strengths and weaknesses, his methods and preferred practices, even the sort of mundane details that would offer a strategic mind avenues of attack he would never think to defend.

  Frustration mounted in me, propelling me to sit: for almost a month I’d had access to some of the best sources of strategic and tactical information available, and it hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder about them.

  “What?” Letitia said, turning her head to bestow a sleepy-eyed glance.

  “Carina’s grimoire,” I said. “Her journal.”

  Letitia’s gaze turned wary. “What about it?”

  “Where is it?” I asked. Letitia rolled out of bed and plucked her shirt from the floor.

  “Believe it or not,” I continued, “her engagements with Nechton were probably the most success anyone ever had against him.”

  Letitia glanced at me and pulled the shirt over her head.

  “I need to learn—”

  “No,” she said, glancing at me and then away. “I’m sorry—my lord, honor precludes—”

  “Again?” I blurted, recognizing in that one unplanned utterance how far past exhaustion I had run. I had lost all semblance of discretion: I should beg her pardon, stumble away and sleep until it was time to leave. But the part of me that is unable to release an unsolved puzzle had its teeth in this one now.

  “Letitia,” I said, striving for a tone of gentle reason, “if I have not yet demonstrated my circumspection to you, I beg you tell me what it will take. That grimoire holds the intelligence I need—”

  Letitia shook her head, golden hair scattering across the smudged white silk of her shirt. “I’m sorry. The dead must be allowed their secrets. Bad enough that I have read—”

  “I can’t believe she would rather you—”

  I couldn’t allow myself to say it, couldn’t even think it. I swallowed and gathered myself to try again.

  But Letitia’s mouth was set. “It’s not for me to say what she would choose. It’s for me to guard her secrets.”

  “Well, can’t we work around the places you can’t allow—”

  Again Letitia shook her head. The Tanaan concept of honor seemed to be growing stupider by the second.

  Unless the secrets Letitia protected were just this damning. Wild, fierce curiosity roused in me; my mind spun imaginings that defied belief, and I was too tired to hold them at bay. Carina as a devotee of Aechering; Nechton fighting her cloaked in Esus. Duels that razed entire cities. The ruin of Arian flashed through my mind.

  The truth, I knew, was much less dramatic. But for someone unacquainted with arcane practice, it must seem shocking just the same.

  “Annu,” I said gently. “Many of the things wizards take
for granted as matters of practice would shock you. Some of the things we do would bring anyone else before an executioner. I promise you, none of what I might read of Carina’s writings is likely to strike me as at all outlandish, and the vows I have taken to protect the silence of the circle—”

  Letitia shook her head again. “I wish I could.”

  I closed my eyes against frustration and rising fear; and I began to see things differently. For all the well-deserved humiliation it brought on me, it was a lucky thing I had not confessed fully, fortunate I didn’t leave. Even now, even in this privacy, there remained secrets she would die rather than reveal. I must protect her despite herself, must find some way to get at the truth she hid.

  My presence was less a risk than what would certainly happen if she came within range of Nechton. As long as she didn’t fall victim to the danger pursuing me, I would endure the dishonor of whatever other damage I caused. If I didn’t stay with her, who else would recognize how unprepared she was for the burden Amien expected her to carry? Who else would guard her back?

  I swallowed and pulled a semblance of calm about me, opened my eyes and met her gaze. “Then let me see the Spear.”

  She stared at me, intent and distractingly charming in her shirt and nothing else, for several seconds. She nodded, crossed the room, hefted her pack and carried it to the bed. I pulled on my clothes, but I had done no more than lace my pants and reach for the first button on my shirt before the pack opened and pieces of the Great Spear of Lugh Lámfhada, Fíana’s Gaé Assail, tumbled clanking across the blanket. The jumbled wreck of the greatest weapon ever forged glinted in the morning light.

  I fought down the impulse to reach for the pieces and begin rearranging them as if they were a child’s puzzle: I would get only one first touch, and that would be the moment when I might usefully encompass the Spear and explore whatever memories and residual energies previous hands had left behind. But I could very nearly see the form the weapon had taken when it was intact; though there was so much more to it than any spear or lance I had ever seen, calling this weapon Spear had been inevitable.

  There had been a long, narrow shaft of intricately pierced and carved stone—and Iminor was right: it seemed to be the same stone from which was formed the Tuaoh, the great Hy-Breasaílian righ-stone that Amien tapped with disastrous results atop the Temple Mount on Ilunmore. A once-beautiful orichalus-plated findargat housing enclosed the fragments of the shaft, wrapping the stone in sweeps and spirals and complex lattices of gleaming red-gold. Where the shaft had broken, the housing lay twisted and fractured, in irregular patterns that suggested whatever destroyed it had been more complex than a simple smashing against a stone.

  A sort of grip and pommel at one end reminded me of the hilt of a sword; but this area was longer and considerably thicker than the parts of a sword it called to mind, even in proportion to the shaft, and the weapon had clearly been far too long to wield in such a fashion. Whatever its purpose, the hilt area was densely inlaid with squares of some crystalline material that winked in the subdued light and marred by a long, jagged crack wide enough to accommodate a fingernail. The weapon’s tip, which protruded beyond the housing, bore no cutting point: only a graceful, flared pyramid that called to mind the top of the obelisk that stands in the great plaza at Teamair. It was the most profoundly male weapon I’d ever seen; strange to think of women wielding it. Tangled around the whole disaster was a long, gleaming strap wrought of a sort of mesh or mail as thick as the leather of a boot but sinuous as silk. I didn’t recognize the material.

  I realized Letitia was staring at me, not at the weapon. I glanced at her, reading fear, embarrassment, and hesitant hope in her lovely face.

  I nodded. “Incredible. Who besides you has touched it?”

  Surprise manifested in her eyes. “I—No one besides the previous morae. That I know of. It was in a locked trunk inside the mora Carina’s private…” She faltered, obviously uncertain of the word she needed.

  “Workshop?” I said. “The room in which she practiced?”

  Letitia nodded. “As far as I know, that room had stood locked since—since she left. I suspect she locked it behind her; she hadn’t cleaned up from her

  last…”

  “Working,” I supplied. “What did you see there?”

  Letitia glanced away. “She had… drawn… on the floor. And the walls.”

  “Blood or chalk?”

  Letitia’s eyes fixed on me again, astonishment written in her face.

  “Both,” she said, voice barely above a whisper.

  I nodded. “A circle on the floor.” A common technique for practitioners who lack the power to cast true wards.

  “And—writing. I couldn’t read it.”

  I nodded again. “What was on the wall?”

  Letitia folded her hands in front of her mouth, almost as if she were praying; but a desperate tension was developing around her eyes. I’d reached the limit of what she could allow herself to admit.

  “The goddesses,” she whispered, not looking at me. “I—think it was the goddesses.”

  That was interesting. No wizard who believed he was practicing in defiance of the Will of his goddess would call Her into his workshop.

  “Tell me,” I said softly. Letitia’s face shifted into despair. “Are there still people in the Four Realms who practice magic?”

  “No!” Letitia said quickly, as if the idea were too terrible to contemplate. She glanced at the Spear again, turned her gaze on me. Some peculiarly Tanaan expression I couldn’t fathom came over her.

  “No,” she said again, quietly. “As far as I know, the practice of magic is long gone.”

  More’s the pity, I thought, but didn’t give it voice. Letitia’s chances would be so much better if the tradition had remained alive. But I was in no position to criticize people who turned away from the Work.

  “Well, then,” I said evenly. Excitement and dread sparked in me: I fought both down. I would no more be drawing power for this investigation than I had when I showed Letitia the power inside her own talisman: energies would run through me, and I would feel their charge, but it would work no change on anything but me, would be no violation of my vow. As recently as Dromineer I had assisted in a very similar operation. It was only long habit that forestalled me now.

  “I need to touch the Spear,” I said in a calm voice. “Is there a reason why I should not?”

  “Is it… dangerous?”

  I shrugged. “I have no reason to expect so. I just want your permission.”

  She gave me a long, unreadable look. I met her mesmerizing eyes; the contact nearly pulled me out of myself. Finally she nodded.

  “Proceed, my lord.”

  I nodded and reached for the weapon’s cracked hilt. The nubbly texture of the inlays rolled satisfyingly beneath my fingers and palms; the hilt’s cylindrical form invited my hands to encompass it. The sinuous strap clung to a fastening on the finely-etched pommel; the other end tugged against the jumble of fragments on the bed. But I couldn’t address that now; layers of old, rich energies permeated the metal and stone I held, teasing my unguarded mind so immediately open that they rushed into me too fast to regulate. I recognized the traces of Letitia’s energy as they passed; glanced over layer upon layer of women whose minds and energies hovered just beyond my capacity to comprehend; felt the paths traced by millennia of bright broad energy manifesting from sources to which the stone held no intrinsic connection, saw them circulating among spiraling veins and crystalline structures and moving according to the personalities and mental idioms of the women who held it. Deeper, much longer ago, I sensed men’s energies, too.

  That mystery and the temptation to investigate it further sent my focus back into my own awareness. I realized I had been merely absorbing, allowing countless centuries to flit through and move beyond me, into spaces of memory only gods might touch. This was my opportunity; I wished I’d been able to take it when I had sufficient time and strength to make a
long study of it, but there was no choice but to extract from it what I could. I gathered up my meager focus and reapplied myself, drawing my awareness almost into the here-and-now, pulling back to the surface to regain my bearings.

  Here were Letitia’s familiar, delicious energies again. Immediately beneath those delightful ripples lay a mindshadow of stunning quickness and intensity, a presence shaped by long temperance from blinding arrogance to an intriguing blend of determination, self-awareness, and passion wrapped around an unbreakable core. This was a woman who had spent centuries confronting the immediate possibility of her own death and somehow come to love it. Was she the Carina with whom Amien had fallen so desperately in love? More likely this was the woman she became, after countless years of facing Nechton.

  But there was little time to examine her energies; the contact tripped me into the memories she’d left on the Spear, sent me tumbling from physical connection with the here-and-now and into a place that incited a shock of recognition in me: the summit of the Temple Mount at Ilunmore. The sun circle of gold-flecked stones stood half-wrecked again, and the subterranean hum of the Tuaoh ran half-apprehended beneath Carina’s awareness. I was vaguely aware of my suddenly-distant body pitching face-first into a jumble of fragments on a bed.

  Carina settled over me like a fog. Through her I felt cool breezes stir her hair and move in her jacket, felt the weight of the Spear through the strap slung from her shoulder and the familiar way it couched against her arm and hip. The structures of her thoughts eluded me; they felt as upside-down as the power of any Tanaan sacred site, and though I heard her thoughts, I didn’t understand them. But the rest of her tumbled through me in raw intensity, and I felt her waiting: for the arrival of someone she knew and anticipated and dreaded to face.