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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  It was too easy to imagine him passing untouched by the petty failings that snare a man in the Grey Lands and reaching Dóiteán, the flaming river of blood. In that stream boil murderers and perpetrators of other bloody crimes; I remembered all the murders I had committed, all the blood on my hands: blood shed in rage and cold fury, blood my sword drank in the names of military objectives, blood spilled beneath an oak to feed an illicit god. Murder lay on my soul, yes; how much less hope would remain for me when I finally broke my oath, too? Or would it change anything at all?

  When the boatman arrived to bear the traveler across the river, I recognized him from a hundred other tales: Ankou, clad in his bones and a huge black cloak, the broad brim of his immense black hat pulled low over the glowing abysses of his eyes. When he travels the lands of the living, Ankou usually comes on a cart, preceded by a blast of cold dank wind; but who would notice such a wind on the banks of a boiling river of blood?

  Just to gain the deck of Ankou’s boat the hero must demonstrate both forbearance and timing, but when he meets the boatman, the traveler’s real trial begins: the price of his passage is the truth of his greatest sin. It is only honesty that can redeem him. But how hard could that test be for Iminor? His greatest sin would be something I committed before lunch. I, on the other hand, would require a journey far longer than the crossing of a river to determine which of my multitude of sins was the greatest—and had every reason to fear that admitting the truth would see me cast into that flaming river before there was time to confront the greater perils beyond. I should probably start working on my answer to the question now.

  Naturally Gwydion, or Iminor, faced the trial with insight and grace, and disembarked unharmed on the opposite shore. But as he turned his attention on the obstacles to entering Tílimya, I glanced at the Iminor who sat in the drawing room—and found my mind pulled irresistibly back to the present.

  There is an unmistakable look that comes over a wizard in trance. For all the different flavors and purposes of arcane trances, they all look the same from outside; and Iminor had that look now. I unwound the rest of the song with less than half my attention, all the times I’d played it carrying me through. A quick glance around the room showed an audience in a sort of almost-trance, the mundane flavor of involvement that will capture listeners when a harpist is doing his job: no one else seemed aware of what had snared Iminor. But I remembered returning after the last attempt on my life, finding Amien had cast wards around the section of road they occupied—because he had deduced that Tiaran’s Talent ran true, and her natural heir had been entirely misapplied as Letitia’s consort. I had never before been in the presence of a seer in the throes of his gift, but I had no doubt whatsoever of what I saw.

  One does not disturb a seer in a trance: I played straight through the long trial in the Fortress of the Well and Gwydion’s encounter with the Guardian. Midway through, I finally managed to catch Amien’s attention, and gestured with my eyes at Iminor several times before the wizard caught my meaning. He nodded and rose in silence, garnering curious looks from our companions which he waved away, and withdrew just far enough to encompass the room with the sort of circle one casts to protect a wizard in the throes. The song unwound to its conclusion; I drew out the final chords into the best transition to routine consciousness I could manage; still as the final notes hummed into silence Iminor gave a violent start and returned staring to something that was not quite ordinary awareness, horrified gaze on me.

  “No!” he said, gesturing as if he would ward me off. He surged halfway out of his chair—then seemed to recognize where we were and sat down again.

  “Zhev,” he muttered, and rested his forehead against the palm of his hand, propping it against the chair as if it were too heavy for his neck to support. Letitia laid a hand on his knee, face a mask of worry.

  “Iminor?” Amien said gently, crossing the room to settle on his heels before the Tan. He rested a hand on Iminor’s free arm, looking up into the Tan’s face. “Iminor. Where are you?”

  The Tan shook his head, frowning. “Ah, zhev,” he said again, and glanced at Muiredach. “My lord, I apologize. I can’t seem to stop falling asleep.”

  “What?” Amien said.

  Iminor shook his head. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me today. I fell asleep in the bath this afternoon, too. I just keep having the damnedest—” He shut his mouth abruptly, face still but horrified realization in his depthless eyes.

  “No blood lost, sian,” Muiredach said. “Our grottoes can do that to a man. My grandmother—well, she had a touch of the Sight, you know—and she would never bathe down there. Always said it brought on troubling dreams. My entire life, she always bathed in a tub upstairs…”

  A visible tremor passed through Iminor; my throat knotted. I remembered too well what it is to have Talent begin intruding on what should have been a reasonably normal life. But he rose, shaking his head, and bowed.

  “I’m just too many days on the road, sian. With your indulgence, I think I’d better retire. Amien—what’s this…?” He trailed off, eyes beseeching the wizard to offer any explanation for his circle but the truth.

  “It’s no longer necessary,” the wizard said, and banished it. “Will you be all right?”

  “Oh, indeed,” Iminor said, with an attempt at certainty that fell short of the mark. “I just need sleep.”

  “Pleasant dreams,” Emer said, smiling a sincere and oblivious smile that made Iminor stare as if she’d taken leave of her senses. Finally he bowed and left the room. Nuad glanced from me to Amien and back.

  “Excuse me,” he said in carefully-enunciated Ilesian, rising; he bowed and followed Iminor out the door.

  The servants poured more brandy, but I had lost interest in the whole proceeding. As soon as I politely could, I excused myself and sought out the grottoes that had given Iminor so much trouble. I still needed a bath: now even more than before. I needed to wash away the crawling feeling that while I had been imagining him as the hero pure enough to bring back the Water of Life from Tílimya’s Well, Iminor had Seen true evil—and the shape it had worn was me.

  31. Dark Water

  The waters of Lake Nanno and the well at the Taidgh family shrine to Ara are cool and sweet; a different source feeds the baths below the castle. Steam and the taste of sulfur greeted me long before I reached the base of the slick, winding stair one must descend to reach the grottoes; lamplight ran yellow up the grey stone of the walls.

  At the base of the stairs, the narrow passage opened to a large, nearly rectangular pool the spring had carved from the stone. The dark rippling water lay hemmed by broad walkways, around which lamps on the sweating walls illuminated the rising steam. Several smaller chambers opened from the walkways around the pool; the resounding quiet of the place suggested I was down here alone.

  Except for the goddess. She infiltrated me on the steam, hung as an invisible Presence in the shadows that gathered in the corners and small alcoves, hummed in stray echoes against the stone. This was not the gentle goddess Who welcomed me at Presatyn and sheltered me on the Aerona: this Being and I had glimpsed one another at the Taidgh family shrine this afternoon, and Her regard had left me uncertain of my welcome even as the fruitless habits of a man sworn to the true gods made me recoil from Her Presence. Down here, Her regard was further weighted by sulfurous vapors and untold tons of granite pressing down on me from above; it made me uneasy. I stepped carefully across the slick stone of the walkway and into one of the smaller alcoves, hoping the smaller space would reduce the stress of Her Presence, and shut the door.

  Her Energy felt less oppressive in here, but the steam still swirled grey-white in the heavy air, making my mind melt towards dream. I would not stay long, just wash away the things I’d done and the disasters I’d caused since Nemetona: I pulled off my clothes, gathered up soap and a razor, paused long enough to unsheath my knife and settle it within arm’s reach, and slipped into the water.

  Why did I want
the knife? It seemed utterly unwarranted. But that reminded me too well of how irrelevant my sword had seemed in the inn at Nemetona, and how naked that had left me in the streets below. If I were a fool—and there seemed little question of that—I would be a live one. And, for a while at least, clean.

  The heat of the pool turned my muscles to jelly; the sulfurous vapors uncurling above its surface made my mind run blank. I sank into the water up to my chin, resting my arms on ledges beneath the surface that seemed designed for the purpose and finding my feet floating up from the base of the pool. After a few moments I remembered my errand, washed and shaved, then shut my eyes and submerged in the darkly-sparkling water. When I surfaced, the steam on the air and the water in my lashes made haloes around the lamps, and fatigue made the effect unreasonably interesting: I leaned my arms against the ledge again, rested my head against the lip of the pool, and floated.

  Pale tendrils of vapor swirled and settled and rose again; after some measureless moments a dream wafted up from the water and infiltrated me. I knew it for what it was, and yet it held me below the surface of consciousness, making me breathe it in.

  I hung on the tree again, feet trailing roots deep into the earth while my head lay in the midst of the milky-bright Way of the Gods that stretches across the sky. My hair and fingertips buzzed with stars. I looked across the vastness into Tílimya’s Abyss, meeting Esus’s gaze. His face bore a startling resemblance to the visage I saw in mirrors, but His eyes were the black of the deepest parts of the universe. And without words, understanding passed between us: I was to be His champion, to take back the Power Nechton usurped; to defeat the interloping gods and restore Him to His natural place at the center. I would become His Prince and ard-righ, and return the world to what it should be, and no one would miss the gods Who had temporarily occupied His place. Aechering’s words rang in my head. I suspected it was Esus’s voice I heard.

  Hakaid the shadow of the Sun

  And open the Abyss

  Tonight the verses made sense, though I couldn’t have explained them. I saw the reason and the symmetry in all of it. I unbound myself from the tree as easily as a man might rise from a chair—but once I stood on the earth, in the midst of the sun-circle surrounding the tree from which I had hung, a new decision swept through me; and I kicked down the standing stones and drew the god’s Mantle about Myself, then used that newfound power to reach across the universe and shove Esus more deeply into the Abyss.

  Abruptly I found myself sitting on a little boat, looking across a campfire at Tílimya’s boatman Ankou. Instead of a flaming river, all the stars of the universe hung around us: stretching from the edges of the boat to places impossibly distant, shimmering in a breathtaking range of hues from pale blue-white to vibrant red to colors for which men have no names.

  The reach of the shadow of the Sun is infinite, they whispered.

  Ankou’s immense black hat blocked out huge stretches of the universe; his cloak, pushed back from his shoulders, revealed the gleam of starlight on all his bones. He rattled on in affronted tones about Sissyphus and what the god Zev had done to the man. My head whirled with the aftermath of some magic I couldn’t remember committing, and all I could do was nod.

  Now I stood in the keep at the Fortress of the Well, smelling the power and pure life-giving freshness of the water within. The Well rippled and shimmered in starlight; reflections of cherry trees danced in the moving water, and pale blossoms rained down in the darkness, illuminated by some light I couldn’t find. The goddess Who guards the Well looked at me from depthless Tanaan eyes as emerald-bright as Letitia’s; but Her hair was dark as the spaces between the stars.

  Let the heir of Tílimya

  Woo the Virgin Star

  I had the nagging feeling that I should recognize Her, that I had met or seen Her before. Somewhere a harp played the ballad Tílimya’s Well, and I remembered my lines.

  Who are You? I said to Her; I didn’t speak, but the question echoed on the nonexistent air. In the ballad, when Gwydion asks that fateful question, the Guardian shifts from the form She first presents him, revealing Herself in all Her aspects from the wrenchingly hideous to the incomprehensibly magnificent, changing from form to form and on to another form again, until finally She settles on the aspect of a queen. But instead this half-remembered goddess with black hair and emerald eyes fixed me with an inescapable stare and said, again without speaking, Well, who are you? And I felt myself begin to shift.

  The water rocked around me; I opened my eyes. Letitia bobbed up to the surface, shaking out her unbound hair across the water, and came to rest beside me, leaning one arm against the ledge that supported me and trailing the wet fingers of her other hand across my chest. The dim steamy room and the water in Letitia’s hair conspired to darken her tresses from their usual gleaming gold, and her eyes were the same as those of the goddess in the dream; but she was still herself. I wanted to ask how Iminor was weathering his bout: early intrusions of Talent tend to be uncomfortable at best. But her eyes told me she hadn’t come here to talk. I should take advantage of the opportunity to push it all away for a while.

  Join the Sun and the Moon in Darkness

  Thus results the Union of Silver and Gold

  “Hand me the soap?” she said silkily.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” I said, and smiled for her: I wasn’t feeling the smile yet, but I soon would be. Even now the ache of readiness gathered, and it intensified as I lathered up my hands and began to wash her, beginning with the hand that rested on my chest. I started with a smiling pretense of innocence, washing her hands and arms, cradling her against me so she could feel my desire as I washed her hair; but soon enough she had shifted to wrap herself around me until I nearly drowned in her kiss.

  “Ah, but you are not clean yet,” I murmured, and pulled back to wash her neck and back and linger over the task of soaping her breasts, while she gasped and tried again to wrap herself around me. I was on the verge of slipping inside when Iminor’s jolt into wakefulness after his vision knifed through my head. Cold crashed through me at the memory of what I’d seen in his eyes, the way his gaze reflected my own evil back at me—and I pulled back and lifted Letitia to the walkway at the pool’s perimeter, filling my mind with the textures of her feet and legs as I washed them, with her flavors and soft cries as I laid her back and kissed the space between. When she began to wail with the pleasure of it I could no longer remember anything but her, so I drew her into the water and applied myself to dragging us both into oblivion. Immediately all the pent-up need she’d raised in me this afternoon roared to life again; I quivered with the need for release, steam and unreason swirling through my mind until I couldn’t remember why, could only remember I must not, nearly succumbing when she found release herself. And in that moment of near-unconsciousness, I felt a shift on the heavy air, heard glass crash and shatter on the stone floor.

  The sound impelled my mouth away from hers; I glanced across the chamber just as a second glass vessel hit the floor. A man stood there, half occluded by rising vapors: a warrior in black with his face covered by an assassin’s hood. Dark red smoke rose from the shattered mess on the floor: poison gas, a favorite of the assassins of the Order of Par. The vessels would have held saltpeter, a decoction of horse’s urine, and things only the Order know in hermetic chambers; the explosive combination of ingredients produced a thick, noxious vapor that would mutate into harmless indetectability within minutes.

  *Poison gas,* I sent. *Don’t breathe! We’ve got to get out.*

  I drew back and scrambled out of the pool, head swimming with steam and breathlessness and the madness of near-release; and I grabbed the knife and launched myself across the slippery floor towards the assassin, nearly falling on the slick stone. The assassin beat me to the door, but rather than racing out into the larger cavern, the man stood his ground as if planning to die in here with us. Smoke stung in my tearing eyes; I rushed the assassin, knife poised to slash his throat. But instead of th
e hood I expected, he wore a peculiar bug-faced mask. Its protruding snout and staring glass eyes sent cold racing up my spine; its thick material extended down his throat.

  I shifted the knife to stab him in the gut, lungs screaming for air. The assassin bounced against the door; I staggered, feet slipping on the slick stone, and nearly fell. The assassin crumpled. I shoved him out of the way, gestured frantically to Letitia, hauled the door open and dragged us outside, slamming it shut behind me.

  I sucked in a huge lungful of sulfurous air; rage, terror, and a bout of coughing crashed in on me. The coughing doubled me over so I had to lean against the wall: eyes streaming, body spiraling so far beyond control that darkness gathered around the edges of my vision and the ground seemed to shift beneath my feet. But raw anger catapulted my mind past that momentary problem. I had friends to avenge, and the man who had killed them lay inside that poisoned chamber.

  “Did you breathe?” I panted as soon as I could form the words, glancing at Letitia.

  She shook her head, still wracked with coughing.

  “What the—?” she managed, and began coughing again.

  “Fouzhir assassin!” I said, then stopped myself from saying more. Was I really going to admit that he’d come for me, that Letitia’s presence had been merely incidental? That my enemy had mastered techniques that made Nechton look like a green apprentice, and he roused Lady Tella to personally intervene? If I did, and Letitia finally agreed to dismiss me, we would part with her having knowledge I could entrust to no one. It shamed me to realize I was not prepared to put that sort of faith in her.