The Mountain's Call

by Caitlin Brennan

  “What do you know of the Unmaking?”

  The man who asked that question was not hostile. He was an old man, and after a moment she realized that he was an Augur. He was not wearing the formal robes she had seen in the Dance, but a plain gown like a priest’s. It was white, and priests always wore brown or black or grey or, if they were high priests, red. White was for Augurs.

  The Augur waited patiently for her to answer his question. She thought she might trust him, but in front of so many people, all she dared to say was, “I know more than I want to know.”

  He nodded. It was almost a bow. “Lady,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Not a lady. I’m a rider, that’s all.”

  His lips twitched. He bowed lower than before. “Rider,” he said.

  It was only a word, but it had an odd effect on the people who were watching. There was still a great deal of fear and confusion, but the resistance had gone out of them. It was as if a spell had broken.

  One by one, then in twos and fours, they came together again, but this time they were not arguing. They were making decisions and settling on strategies. The city would settle, then the empire—for a while. They all knew what the spring would bring.

  Now Valeria could fade into the background. Or so she would have done, if the emperor and his daughter had not kept her between them, and if a new arrival had not focused attention on her once again.

  Master Nikos was haggard and hollow-eyed, but he was steady on his feet. Kerrec walked close enough to offer him an arm if necessary. Paulus and Iliya and Batu followed.

  They brought with them the same kind of silence that Valeria had. There was a tinge of awe in it, reverence for the keepers of a mystery.

  People only stared at them for a few moments before turning back to Valeria with even more avid curiosity than before. Male riders were almost common. She was unique.

  She would have hidden if she could, but there was no hope of that. Briana’s arm slipped through Valeria’s. It was not a subtle gesture, and it was not meant to be. Whether Valeria liked it or not, she had fallen into high places.

  The Master halted in front of Valeria. She knew what it cost him to offer her that inclination of the head. It was all she expected, and all he gave her. He was not there to honor her, or, it seemed, to dishonor her, either.

  Kerrec’s face was expressionless. She had expected that, too. She was past the time when it would have made her angry. She knew what was behind that mask, and why he wore it. Someday she would teach him that he did not need a mask, that his own face was good enough and strong enough to wear in front of the world.

  Briana had no such compunction. “Good day, riders,” she said, “and welcome. I’m glad to see you up and about. Have you come to claim this rider of yours? Because, sirs, if you don’t mind, we’d like to keep her for a while. It seems she has a talent for making order out of chaos.”

  “So I have noticed,” Master Nikos said. His tone was dry.

  “But then,” said Briana, “that’s part of a rider’s power, isn’t it? To see patterns. To make sense of them. To shape them if he can. Or, in this case, she.”

  That was a challenge. She smiled, all sweet innocence, but Valeria could sense the steel beneath.

  So, evidently, could Master Nikos. “That is a rider’s power,” he said coolly. “Ours is at your disposal, if you have need of it.”

  “We do welcome it,” Briana said. This was not over, her manner said, but it seemed she was not about to start a battle in this overly public place.

  Valeria went limp with relief. The mood here was too brittle to tolerate any further conflict. People were stirring, twitching like nervous horses. They needed to be soothed and comforted.

  She slipped free of her royal allies. Whether it was intentional or not, there was a place for her with the riders, beside Paulus at the end. His glance as she took it was sour, but he made no effort to push her out of it. Neither, and that was more important, did Master Nikos.

  A sigh ran across the portico. Tension eased. People saw what they needed to see. The riders were together as they should be. Those who could see patterns were reassured. The rest were less inclined to be at odds with one another.

  Chapter Fifty

  By tradition, after the Great Dance the empire kept festival for eight days, and the riders stayed for all of it. Then on the ninth day they went back to the Mountain.

  The emperor’s festival had turned into the aftermath of a battle, but by the second day after the Dance, the city had settled enough to allow a somewhat muted celebration. The emperor proclaimed it from the porch of the palace, with characteristic brevity. “Our enemies have done their best to take our joy away from us. I refuse to give them the pleasure. We’ll mourn our dead as they deserve, but for now let us celebrate the living.”

  Valeria was still Briana’s guest. That was the heir’s decision, and neither Valeria nor the riders contested it. It put off a little longer the need to confront the inevitable.

  The first night after she had stood with the riders on the porch of the palace, Valeria fully expected to sleep alone. She went to bed feeling a little cold and bereft, but telling herself that she was being foolish. The riders needed Kerrec far more than she did.

  Just as she sank into a restless doze, she felt a weight on the side of the bed, and heard the slight catch of his breathing as Kerrec stretched out beside her. Without opening her eyes, she slid into the shelter of his arms.

  Then she could sleep. As before, he was gone when she woke, but this time she knew why. It was enough for her that he had come at all.

  That went on for four nights. She never saw or spoke to him, only felt him beside her shortly before she fell asleep. The days were full. She spent them with Briana, going from council to festival and back to council again, and spending part of each day riding or walking through the city.

  It was Sabata who brought matters to a head. On the seventh morning after the Dance, Valeria had just come back from an early walk through the city with Briana. There was a formal breakfast to attend, then a ceremony in the temple of the Moon, and after that a round of councils.

  Sabata cared nothing for any such human foolishness. He broke down the gate to Briana’s wing of the palace, blew past her guards, and terrorized the servants who were trying to bathe and dress their lady and her guest.

  Briana seemed not at all dismayed to find a highly and somewhat dangerously annoyed stallion in her bath. She rose dripping from the basin, wrapped a towel around herself, and bowed to him with deep respect. “My lord,” she said.

  Valeria had finished bathing and was standing in a shift, waiting for the servants to put on the morning dress that, after days of resistance, she had let herself be bullied into. She was in no way sorry to be rescued, although she glared at Sabata. “That was not necessary,” she said.

  He tossed his head and stamped. She had been away from him long enough. Her arm was healing and her spirit was healed. It was time to stop this nonsense and go where she was meant to go.

  He had never been so clear about what he wanted, or so close to human words. “Where am I meant to go?” she asked him. “The riders don’t want me, whereas here I’m welcome. I’m useful—they need me.”

  The riders need you.

  It cost his pride dearly to stoop to words. He swung around, scattering servants and sponges and bowls of soap and herbs and ointment, and presented himself for her to mount.

  She opened her mouth to protest, but his eye rolled at her, glaring a warning. She hiked up her shift and pulled herself one-handed onto his back.

  With her weight to carry, he had to move cautiously on the tiled floors. That gave Briana time to throw on the clothes she had taken off to bathe, and run up beside Valeria.

  “He’s taking me to the riders,” Valeria said. “You don’t need to—”

  “I think I do,” said Briana. She was perfectly cheerful and perfectly immovable. As she went, she sent a servant with her regrets to
the host, another to put off the rest of her obligations, and yet a third to tell her father where she had gone.

  By the time they left her wing of the palace, Sabata was moving more quickly and Briana was trotting doggedly alongside. He kept that pace, Valeria noticed, although he could have gone much faster.

  They went down through the riders’ passage, avoiding the public ways. Briana said nothing—all her breath was devoted to keeping up with the stallion. Valeria would have dismounted and walked with her, but whenever she tried, Sabata warned her against it with a curve of the neck and a snap of teeth. He was carrying her and that was that.

  Between two such manifestly stubborn creatures, all Valeria could do was keep quiet and let herself be taken wherever Sabata had in mind. Matters were coming to a head. Sabata was forcing an issue that the riders as well as Valeria had been avoiding.

  Although it was two days yet until their departure, the riders’ house already looked half deserted. Boxes and bags waited in the outermost court, piled in the shelter of the colonnade.

  Valeria began to wonder if the riders were leaving early. It certainly looked that way.

  The innermost court had a most peculiar scent to it. Sabata curled his lip and shook his head as if in disgust. Valeria realized what it was when she saw a shrouded figure gliding across the court.

  The riders who had died had not been taken to the embalmers’ house as she had thought. They had come here. The smell that pervaded the air was the smell of death, thick and sickly sweet, heavily overlaid with the pungency of spices and the sharp dry scent of natron.

  There were six stone vats in the hall beyond the colonnade, and a pair of embalmers attending each. Their faces were shrouded and their tongues mute. Master Nikos knelt beside the rearmost of the vats, which was carved with images of death and rebirth.

  Sabata clattered to a halt behind him and pawed imperiously. The dead were gone. The living needed him.

  Master Nikos finished his prayer, then rose slowly and turned. His grief was immediate and personal. These had been his students, his masters, his friends. Even the oldest of them should have had years yet to live. This kind of death, like death in battle, was not something a rider would have expected.

  It shook Valeria to see so clearly into his heart. He was making no effort to conceal himself from her. For the first time she saw him as a man and not the Master. She saw his sorrow and confusion, and his core of stubborn strength.

  “You’re leaving early,” she said.

  “I think it’s best,” Nikos said.

  She nodded. “And these?” she asked, tilting her chin toward the dead. “Are they going, too?”

  “They’ll be sent to the gods here,” Nikos said, “tonight.”

  “Were you going to invite me?”

  “Would you have wanted to be?”

  “If I’m a rider,” she said, “I should be here. If I’m not, then not.”

  “That is the question,” he said. “Are you a rider?”

  “I would like to think so,” she said, “but the answer lies with you.”

  Sabata shook his head and stamped. Even through the deep lines of grief on his face, Master Nikos mustered a smile. “It doesn’t, does it?” he said to the stallion. “You’ve done your best to make that clear.”

  “The school belongs to the riders,” Valeria said. “If the riders can’t tolerate me, I have no place there, no matter what the stallions may say.”

  While she spoke, she felt in her skin that others had come into the court of the dead. Sabata had called all the riders who were still alive, from rider-candidate to First Rider. They stood in a half circle behind her.

  In Master Nikos’ eyes she saw how it looked. Whether they knew it or not, they had taken the stance of guards protecting a royal charge.

  She turned to face them. Even Paulus seemed to have resigned himself to the inevitable. Kerrec was almost smiling. She could feel the warmth in him beneath the stern mask of his face. Batu grinned openly.

  Briana had stood quietly apart, but now she came into the circle. Sabata graciously allowed her to rest a hand on his neck. “It seems to me,” she said, “that the decision has been made. The riders will learn to tolerate one of their own, even if she wears a somewhat different suit of flesh than the rest of them.”

  “But I don’t want—” Valeria began.

  Briana turned that sweetly implacable smile on her. “Do you think Sabata cares for that?”

  Valeria shut her mouth with a snap. Sabata was laughing.

  So were the rest of the stallions. They had not been there a moment before, but now they all were, standing erect and still. She had a doubled guard of gods and mages, who could be either jailers or protectors.

  And there it was. She had what she had wanted so badly, just when she had decided she could live without it. That was always the way of things.

  She looked from face to face around the half circle of riders, and saw none of the hostility that she had expected. Like the people on the portico, they saw what she had done rather than what she was, but these mages understood it. She was not a woman to them now, or an interloper, but the mage who had commanded all the stallions.

  Master Nikos spoke with care, as if he had thought hard and long about what he would say and how he would say it. “We owe you thanks. But for you, all that we have made would be undone.”

  There were any number of things that Valeria could have said in reply. She thought about justice, and about modesty. She thought about what she had nearly done, and how close she had come to the Unmaking.

  In the end she said, “I only did what I had to do.”

  “We were guilty of poor judgment,” Nikos said. “By clinging to tradition and ignoring the gods’ manifest will, we nearly lost everything.”

  “You’ve lost enough,” she said, “and will be a long time recovering. I’ll help with that as I can, if you want my help.”

  “It may not be a question of wanting,” he said. “We need it. We need you—if you really are willing to come back to us. Our enemies offered you far more power than we can give you. You’ll be back among the Called of this year, subject to the same teaching and the same tests as they. The fact that you can command all the stallions is a matter for legend, I suppose, but there is more to our magic than that.”

  “Much more,” Valeria agreed. “I know there’s much I don’t know. Are you willing to teach it? Is that what you want? Because if you only do this because you feel obligated, and not because you believe that I have a right to it, then I’ll walk away.”

  “Indeed?” said Kerrec. “What would you walk to?”

  Master Nikos shot him a quelling glance, but neither he nor Valeria paid attention. “I’ll find a place,” she said. “Somewhere where I’m welcome.”

  Briana stirred beside her but kept quiet. Kerrec’s brows went up. “What makes you think you won’t be welcome on the Mountain?”

  “What makes you think I will be?”

  “I will welcome you,” Master Nikos said. “You are a rider. You were Called. There’s no one alive now to deny it.”

  Valeria surprised herself with a surge of grief. The riders who had died had not been her friends at all. But they had been great mages and masters of the art. Their loss was a bitter blow. “The Mountain needs us all,” she said.

  As she said it, she knew that she had made a choice. She was a rider, too, as the Master had said. There never had been another alternative.

  That feeling inside her, that sense of bubbling over, she realized was joy. There was plenty of grief to temper it, but just for a moment she let herself be happy.

  The sun had set, but the sky was still full of light. In the court of the dead, the fallen riders had been lifted from the vats of natron and the vats taken away by the silent priesthood. Six bodies, shrouded in white linen, lay on biers of fragrant cedar.

  There was no panoply of a noble funeral. There were no mourners paid to wail and tear their hair, no priests circling t
he biers with chants and incense. No crowds of family and friends filled the court. There were only the riders, the stallions and Briana, who had gone away early in the day but come back as the sun touched the horizon.

  Valeria was glad to see her. She was a friend, as well as a rider’s kin. She made no effort to put herself forward, but stayed on the edge of the courtyard, watching in silence.

  Just as the rite was beginning, someone else joined her. The emperor had come also to bid farewell to the riders who had died for his Dance.

  Valeria, in the stiff new uniform of a rider-candidate, was standing between Batu and Paulus. Her place was to keep quiet, manifest reverence and, when the time came, join her magic to the rest. Rather oddly, there was no sense of sorrow in the gathering. Grief remained and would linger long past this night, but the riders were beyond any earthly pain.

  As the light began to fade from the sky, Master Nikos came forward into the circle. He was plainly dressed as always, but there was a shimmer of power on him. He raised his hands.

  “Regan,” he said. “Gallus. Mikel. Andres. Carinius. Petros.”

  As he spoke each name, a stallion paced toward one of the biers and stood motionless, head bowed over the shrouded dead. Deep silence surrounded them. No wind blew, no night bird cried. The living riders barely seemed to breathe.

  This was a Dance—a Dance of stillness. The patterns that crowded everywhere had gone motionless. The tides of time were at the ebb.

  And yet the Unmaking was nowhere near this place. Even the spell that still laired in Valeria was quiescent.

  “Death is a rite of passage,” Master Nikos said softly, so much a part of Valeria’s reflections that at first she did not realize he had spoken, “the opening of one door and the closing of another. Our brothers have passed out of earth and into the realm of the gods. They are the blessed dead, who died in battle. Their names shall be remembered.” And he spoke them again. “Regan. Gallus. Mikel. Andres. Carinius. Petros.”