Spear of Heaven (10 page)

“But it’s true,” she said. “You don’t need to drink blood.
You have the air up here, and the wind off the snow.”

Blood was sweet, the demon told her. It was warm.

“Mine would burn you,” she said. She clambered down off the
ox’s back, holding on to harness and pelt, and went to stand under the tree.

The demon stared down at her. She stared up. “You won’t be
drinking any blood here. If you do I’ll tell my mother. She’s much stronger
than I am. Her blood is like the sun.”

The demon shut its big round eyes. When it opened them, they
were all of the demon that was left; then they were gone, and so was the demon.
But it was near—she felt it, it and its brothers and sisters and cousins.

“Remember,” she said to them. “No bad tricks. I’ll know it
was you, and I’ll do something about it.”

There were people in this country. What seemed
inhospitable beyond believing and beautiful in the coldest way imaginable, a
jagged landscape of peaks and lofty valleys, snowfields and icefields and
sudden plunges into green oases, had its own thin tough populace. Villages
clung to the sides of crags or huddled round the warmth of a valley. There were
fortresses on peaks that should have been too steep for any creature to climb,
inhabited often by wind and dust and sky, but often again by a dirty scrabble
of people whose only pride seemed to be in the sharpness of their weapons.

The people were like the land they lived in, harsh, stark,
often cruel, but showing flashes of sudden beauty. In a town so steep it had no
streets, only ladders from house to stone-built house, and no open space but
the level in its center, where its market was set up and doing a brisk trade,
Daruya heard a singer whose voice could have called the stars out the sky. The
singer was blind, and therefore oblivious to Daruya’s strangeness; he sang on
even when the rest of the listeners drew back, giving her demon-eyes a wide space.

She heard a hiss and a scuffle behind her, where Chakan was
insisting on guarding her back. She glanced over her shoulder. The Olenyas had
a wizened townsman by the throat. He shook the man as a hound shakes a rat.
Something fell tinkling: a fistful of coins that wore familiar faces.

“Right out of my purse,” said Chakan, almost too amused to
be angry. “It’s no defense to be a demon, it seems. Not against thieves.”

The thief struggled in his grip. He laid the point of a
dagger against the man’s throat, just under the chin, and hissed. The man went
grey.

Chakan laughed and let him go. He bolted.

“That should warn off the rest,” said Chakan.

Daruya had her doubts. She had observed that demons in this
country were as fair game as any other travelers. She has also noticed that
they seemed to have no fear of theft among themselves. It was only dishonor,
she supposed, to steal from one’s own kind.

Her own valuables were wrapped in silk and hung between her
breasts. A thief would have to pass a heavy coat and a leather tunic and a pair
of shirts to reach the treasure. She wished him well of it if he came that far;
he would have earned it.

The singer’s song ended on a wailing note. It wound up and
up, spiraled down, and faded. She plucked a coin or two from Chakan’s hand and
tossed them into the bowl at the singer’s feet. They would be safe there, since
the singer was not a foreigner.

oOo

Daruya was still pondering thieves and honor and the relation
of foreigners to both as their caravan scrambled up yet another steep and stony
pass. The town on the crag was far behind. Shurakan, the guides said, was far
ahead: at least half a Brightmoon-month of journeying, as much time as lay
behind them since they left Kianat. It went slow; it always went slow in this
country of endless up and down and very little level.

This pass was like a knife-cut in the earth, a thin slash in
the mountain’s side. Steep as it was, its walls nearly sheer, closing in on
them as they went on, it seemed likely to narrow to nothing and so trap them,
and leave them at the mountain’s mercy.

She let out her breath at long last as the narrow wall—barely
wide enough for the oxen to scrape by—began to widen again, and the slope to
soften slightly. The caravan, with her in the middle, kept on at its plodding
pace; no wall in front of it yet, and light still in the gap. Echoes ran up and
down the walls: snort of senel, grunt of ox, thud of hooves, low mutter of
voices as Vanyi, up ahead, conferred with Aku the guide.

There was no getting closer. The way was too narrow. Daruya
tried stretching her ears to more than simple human keenness, but Vanyi was too
canny a mage for that; she and her companion rode as if globed in glass. Daruya
had to content herself with straining to catch the odd word, and praying for
the walls to open before she went out of her wits—the more so for that the one
word she caught was
ambush
.

Her eyes ran up the walls of the cleft. Too steep surely for
any man to come down, and too high to leap. If she were a bandit or mountain
lord, she would close off the ends of the cleft and trap her prey within. But
no one had done that. Her magery, seeking, found nothing. The way was open
behind as in front.

She did not ease for that. Eyes were on them, unseen, not
truly hostile but not friendly, either. The beasts were quiet, which was well.
She combed her mare’s mane with her fingers, shifted in the saddle, stretched a
kink out of her shoulder.

A glance found Kimeri riding on Chakan’s crupper. The child
had wanted a mount of her own this morning—sure sign that she had come back to
herself. Maybe tomorrow, Daruya thought, she would have one of the remounts
saddled and let Kimeri ride it for at least a part of the day.

The walls of the cleft opened slowly and sank by degrees
into the land beyond, until they rode through a stony valley, steep-sided, with
grass growing amid the remnants of winter’s snow. They paused to drink from a
stream, found it clean and bitter cold: snow-water. The sun was high enough to
reach beyond the walls of the valley, and warm enough that the guides took off
their coats and their furred hats and rode in their shirts.

Daruya, less hardy, still pulled off her hat and let the
wind run fingers through her hair. A gust blew it in her face, a heavy curtain
of amber-gold curls. She laughed for no reason that she could name, and shook
it back.

Her laughter ran its course. There were smiles about her, in
Olenyai eyes or mages’ faces. But she was watching the summit of the ridge,
where sunlight dazzled and shadows seemed to dance. Shadows born of living
bodies, and within them a glitter of metal, and awareness keen and sharply
pointed and very clear.

She said to Chakan, very calmly, “Look up. No, not there.
Up. East wall.”

The soft hiss of sword from sheath was his answer, and his
voice, as calm as hers, and no louder. “Eyes up, Olenyai. We have company.”

It was not a good place to be at the bottom of. The east
slope was too steep for a senel, but not for a man with the surefootedness of
the mountain born. There were men and weapons ahead, too, and behind. They were
nicely trapped.

Daruya caught Vanyi’s eye. The Guildmaster raised a brow.
Daruya tilted her hand till gold caught the sun and flashed. Vanyi smiled a
cold white smile.

Briefly Daruya considered the guides, and the lack of magic and
mages in Su-Akar. Let them learn, she thought. She had not called in her power
in long and long, not since the Gate. It came gladly, swift as a hawk to the
fist. The sun fed it.

She was aware of Vanyi calling her own magic, a weaving of
dark and light, shadow and sun; and the mages summoning each his own, even
Kadin who never spoke, never sang, rode always mute and wrapped in grief.

His gladness was a dark thing, tinged with blood. He wanted
to take life, to kill as his lightmage had been killed. She brushed him with a
finger of power, bright Sun-gold to his black dark.

He recoiled in startlement. She gentled him with patience,
pressing no harder than she must with raiders closing in on every side.
Softly
, she willed him.
Be calm. You’ll have revenge—but not now.
These fools are unworthy of you
.

He begged to differ, but she was stronger. He subsided,
sullen but obedient, letting her direct him as she judged best. She was not his
lightmage, yet the familiar force of matched yet opposing power comforted him,
filled a fraction of his emptiness, muted his grief.

Instinct had taken her to him, as if even she, priestess-mage
and Sunchild, had need of the dark one, the power that lay in shadows. Yet she
could not bond with it; could not be his lightmage. That was forbidden her.

She would ponder that later, when there was leisure. For now
she took it as it offered itself, and used it as it asked to be used. Hilt to
her blade of light, haft to her spear of the sun, bow to the arrow of power
that flew flame-bright from her hand.

It was beautiful and terrible. Mere earthly arrows shot down
from above flared to ash and vanished. Swords melted in a fire hotter than any
forge. Men shrieked—pain in those who found themselves clutching white-hot
hilts, and fear in archers whose bows crumbled in their hands, whose arrows
were ash in the quivers. What they saw, Daruya saw through them: a small odd
caravan trapped in the valley that was so perfectly suited for ambush, mounted
on strange beasts, and guards in black ringed about a towering shape of light.

Back of the light was shadow. It waited to take what the
light left, to drown souls that held no more substance than a moth’s flutter.
Seductive thought, alluring prospect, to be rid of these bandits with no fear
of reprisal.

But Daruya’s training was too strong. One did not slay with
power. Above all, one did not destroy the soul, even of an enemy. The price for
that was the power that had destroyed so much, but not—cruelly—the life of the
mage.

The shadow struggled, resisting. She reined and bound it and
loosed a last, blinding blaze of light. There was no harm in it, only terror.
The bandits broke and fled.

oOo

“Well done,” said Vanyi dryly.

Daruya quelled a hot retort. She had done it again: swept in
and done what needed doing without regard for the Guildmaster’s precedence. In
the Gates it would have been death to wait. Here, she should have yielded;
should have waited upon the rest.

Vanyi did not say any of that. She did not think it, either,
that Daruya could discern. She simply nudged her senel forward past the still
and staring guides. The others, mages first, then Olenyai, followed slowly.

Only Daruya did not move; and the guides. The men had a look
she had seen in battle, in warriors who had seen too much, whose minds had stopped,
leaving them blankly still. The woman was stronger, or more resilient. She
flinched at the brush of Daruya’s glance, but she steadied herself, lifted her
eyes, met Daruya’s.

Daruya was prey to both arrogance and impatience, as her
elders never wearied of telling her. But she was not a fool. She spoke very
carefully, choosing her words as meticulously as if she had been addressing the
emperor of a nation with which she could be, if she failed of diplomacy, at
war. “I swear to you by all that I hold holy, that I have harmed not a hair of
their heads, nor done aught but win us free of ambush.”

Aku’s eyes narrowed. “You did it? Only you?”

Daruya felt the flush climb her cheeks. “If there is blame,
yes, it is mine alone.”

“But the other could,” said Aku. “Could have done the same.”

She meant Vanyi. Daruya hesitated. To lie, to prevaricate,
to tell the truth . . . “She did nothing.”

“She would have,” Aku said. Perceptive, for a woman who had
no magic. She was no longer quite so afraid. “I see that you’re very foreign.”

“Very,” said Daruya, a little at a loss. She thought she
understood what the woman was getting at. But she could not be certain—even
knowing what thoughts ran through that brain, both the spoken and the unspoken.
“We’re still mortal,” she said. “Still human. We’re not gods, nor demons,
either.”

“So you say,” said Aku. She struck her ox with the goad,
urging it forward onto the track the caravan had taken. Her husbands, stirring
at last, fell in behind her.

Daruya, left alone, baffled, a little angry, had the
presence of mind to sweep the land round about. Nothing threatened. The bandits
were still running. Already the tale had grown, the caravan swelled into an
army of devils armed with thunderbolts. By the time it passed into rumor, it
would be a battle of gods, into which the bandits had fallen by accident and
barely escaped alive.

None of which mattered now, with guides who could turn
traitor and lead them all into a crevasse. What dishonor would there be in
that? Not only were they foreigners; they were mages.

Fear would be enough, Daruya hoped. And common sense. Aku
had that. She would want her payment, her scarlet silk. And maybe she would see
the profit in seeing this journey to its end, the tales she could tell, the
travelers who would pay high to pass through the mountains with a woman who had
guided a caravan of demons safely into Shurakan.

And they were safe. Whether word spread swifter than they
could travel, or whether they were simply blessed with good fortune, they met
no further ambush. No one tried to rob them in the villages, nor were they
fallen on in camp and forced to give up their valuables. The snows that were
not uncommon even at this time of year veiled the upper peaks from day’s end to
day’s end, but never came down upon their track. All their passes were open,
the ways unblocked by snow or rockfall or avalanche.

oOo

The luck was with them. Kimeri heard the Olenyai saying
that to one another, in whispers so as not to frighten it away.

They could not see the demons who followed, spying on them,
or clustered round their camp at night, round-eyed as owls, staring and
wondering. The mages, who should have been able to see, were not looking. The
guides had made themselves blind, because seeing made them so afraid.