Spear of Heaven (13 page)

From the other side of the Great Wards, Shurakan showed
itself clear, unveiled and unconcealed. The pillars of its gate stood on the
rim of a valley like a goblet, slopes and terraces descending half a league and
more to a lake like a blue jewel with a broad rim of green. Beside the lake was
a city of dark roofs and white towers. Other, smaller cities and towns and
villages scattered through the valley and up the slopes of its sides. On the
terrace just below and northward of the pillars, under the Spear of Heaven,
rose a second city. Its towers were airier than those of the city in the
valley, its walls higher, broader, running along the edge of the terrace.
Between terrace and walls, the city stood nigh half a league high; only a bird
would wish to fall from that wall.

Vanyi’s mages of the Gates had named both cities to her, and
she to Daruya a few evenings since beside a fire in the mountains. That in the
valley was the Winter City, that on the height its companion of the Summer.

The high ones, the lords and princes, court and king and
queen and all their followers and dependents, traveled from one to the other in
the long round of the year. Winter saw them below in the green warmth of the
valley, drinking sweet water from the lake and hunting on the forested slopes
to south and west. Summer brought sullen heat and pestilence and stinging
flies, and sent the court fleeing up the mountain to cool airs and clean stone
amid which they set their gardens.

Only the poor remained below, and the holy men and women in
their temples, and the folk who tilled the rich land beside the lake, preparing
for the harvest and the winter and the lords’ return. Then the Summer City was
silent in its mantle of snow, and only the hardy remained, and the holy ones in
the temples, and those commanded for their sins to hold the city until summer
came round again.

It was summer now—the very day of High Summer, Daruya
realized with a start: the greatest of festivals in the empire, and she had
forgotten it. The Summer City was full of princes.

On this longest day of the year, with the sun sinking fast
below the mountains but light lingering in the pellucid sky, the streets were
thronged with people, in the music of bells and drums. They all wore the faces
of plainsmen as she knew them in the Hundred Realms, familiar and yet subtly
strange: features both stronger and finer, hair dark but often with a ruddy
sheen, men as tall as she and broad with it, women walking proud in long coats
and wide-legged trousers. Many wore the open-sided robes of temples, men and
women shaven-headed alike, bare alike beneath the robes, and no more shame in
them than she might have seen in kilted tribesmen of Keruvarion’s own
mountains.

They had no fear. It was an odd thing to think as she rode
among them walled in guards, but it was true. They stared at the strangers,
commented openly on demon-eyes and shadow-gods and foreign horrors, seemed not
to care if they were understood, or if the strangers might take revenge for
what was said of them. They looked on what to them was superstition and terror,
and they shrugged at it. They were the people of the Kingdom of Heaven. Their
gods defended them. Nothing could touch them or do them harm.

And yet a Gate had fallen here. They knew fear of that,
surely, and hate. She did not find it in the faces that she passed. Even the
poor seemed decently fed and reasonably content.

They had entered the city through its eastern gate, the gate
of the dawn that looked upon the pillars and the mountain wall. Once past the
gate they turned northward and made their way up a road not much wider than a
cart-track in Asanion.

Here it was a broad thoroughfare. Blank walls lined it, set
with elaborate gates. Those that were open looked in on the jeweled
extravagance of temples, or on gardens full of flowers, lit with lamps in the
dusk.

Ahead of them rose a greater wall than any, strung with
lights like a necklace of firestones. Its gate was of bronze, the pillars like
those of the kingdom’s gate, mighty man-shapes in postures of guard. These were
freshly painted, their armor gilded, their helmets ornamented with lamps.

As with all gates once the sun had set, this one did not
open for them, but one lesser, to the side of the great gate, where new guards
waited to relieve the old. The guardians of the pillars turned without speaking
and went back to their duty, unmindful of the dark or the hour. The guardians
of the palace—for it could be nothing else—took them in hand with as little
ceremony.

First they wished to separate the strangers from their
animals. Daruya would have protested that people who had never seen a senel
could not know how to care for a herd of them, but Vanyi was before her. “Kadin,
go with them. Show them what to do.”

Daruya could hardly quarrel with that. Kadin surveyed the
persons waiting to take charge of the beasts, and was surveyed in turn. He was
by head and shoulders the tallest there, and dark to invisibility outside the
light of torches, but for the gleam of his eyes. After a long moment a man in a
coat that swept the ground, which seemed to indicate rank here, held up his
hand and said, “Show us.”

The others eased at that, as if at a master’s command. Kadin
went away with them, with seneldi and oxen following. Vanyi and Daruya and
Kimeri, the two remaining mages and the Olenyai, went onward on foot into the
lamplit palace.

oOo

Daruya would remember little of that first sight of the
Ushala, the palace of the brother-king and sister-queen in the Summer City of
Shurakan. Lamps, she remembered those, burning perfumed fat and faintly rancid
oil. Corridors that went on and on. Courtyards walled in darkness. Expectation
that, tired and filthy and road-weary as she was, she must face the king and
the queen and be as royal as they.

She was not asked to suffer that. She was taken through the
heart of the palace and out into its gardens and thence to the walls, where
stood a row of houses. Guesthouses, the guards said, with an intonation that
made her think pesthouses, houses set apart for the victims of a plague.

All but one were dark. That one was waiting, ready for them,
and it was surprisingly pleasant. Its rooms were not large but airy and clean,
clustered round a courtyard in which was a fountain, and flowers sending sweet
scents into the night. There were servants, soft-footed quiet people who
offered baths, food, drink, rest.

Daruya took them all, one after the other. Vanyi stayed with
her, and Kimeri. The others went away with most of the servants to baths and
food and rest of their own.

Chakan would have stayed, but the servants were persuasive,
and Daruya commanded him. “You’re dropping on your feet. Go and sleep, and come
back to nursemaid me in the morning.”

Vanyi she could not compel so, nor did she overmuch wish to.
There were great basins full of steaming water for both the women, and a
smaller one for Kimeri, who for once was too tired to object. The servants were
quiet and skilled. Daruya fell asleep under their hands; woke with a start to
find herself lying on soft cloths, having the aches stroked out of her.

Vanyi lay almost within reach, much wider awake than she,
and palpably on guard. Daruya knew a moment of shame—she should have been as
wary, she who had her daughter to think of. But there was no danger here. All
her senses assured her of it.

oOo

They were still assuring her of it when she woke to a
dazzling-bright morning and Kimeri bouncing on her stomach, caroling, “Mama,
see! See where we are!”

Daruya barely had time to scrub the sleep out of her eyes
before Kimeri was dragging her to the window through which all the light was
coming. It dazzled her; and yet it was not sunlight. That was away out of sight
to the eastward. She was receiving the full force of it reflected from the
Spear of Heaven, blinding white and seeming to hang directly before her, with a
brief dip of valley between.

The house, she realized with the sluggishness of the barely
awake, was built into the palace wall. There was nothing below her window but
eventually—very eventually—the valley’s floor.

Kimeri scrambled up onto the window’s broad sill, laughing
with delight. “Mama, isn’t it wonderful? We’re as high up as birds!”

“We were higher in the mountains,” Daruya said. “And on the
bridge.”

“But we couldn’t fly there.” Kimeri leaned out as if she
intended to do just that.

Daruya barred her with a stiffened arm. She had not been
this animated since Starios, nor this openly inclined toward mischief. It was a
relief in its way, but Daruya found herself wishing that the child could have
clung to her unwonted docility for a day or two longer.

“You won’t be flying here,” Daruya said sternly. “You’ll
scare people. They don’t have any magic, and they don’t know about people who
do.”

“I can teach them,” said Kimeri.

“Not today,” Daruya said.

That quelled her, for a wonder. She let herself be swung
back into the room and inspected. Rather to Daruya’s surprise, she was clean,
combed, and dressed, and yes, fed. The servants were marvels indeed, if they
could accomplish that much with this young imp.

Kimeri wriggled, impatient with motherly fussing. “May I go
now, mama? Chakan says I can play in the garden with Hunin if you say yes.”

“I say yes,” said Daruya. “But only the garden, and only as
long as Hunin says you may.”

“Yes, mama,” said Kimeri meekly.

Her tone warned of disobedience, but not for the moment.
Daruya decided to let it suffice. Hunin was the eldest of Chakan’s Olenyai,
sober and sensible. He would keep Kimeri in hand, nor hesitate to call on a
mage if there was need.

With Kimeri there probably would be.

Daruya sighed and let her go. Time enough to worry when the
child lost patience with her limits and went about testing them. For now Daruya
would see what could be had in the way of bath and breakfast—another bath, yes
indeed; after so long with nothing to bathe in but icy streams and water in
waterskins, she meant to be clean from morning till morning, and every moment
between.

oOo

Vanyi’s waking was easier and somewhat earlier, her bath
simple and brief, her breakfast likewise. Once she had disposed of both, she
said to the servant who attended her, “I would speak with the queen. Whom shall
I send with the message, and when may I be granted audience?”

The servant did not change expression, or ask why Vanyi
wished only to speak with the queen. He had been expecting the question, then,
and he had an answer ready.

“Madam should speak with the Minister of Protocol, since it
is he who determines who shall and shall not address the children of heaven.
This unworthy person may send one yet more unworthy with a message, if madam
wishes.”

“Madam does wish,” said Vanyi. “Madam is called Guildmaster,
or lady, or if one is suitably familiar, Vanyi.”

“Lady,” said the servant, bowing in the manner of this
country: hands folded on breast, head bent low. She doubted that it was proper
to bow in return.

oOo

The message went out as promised, but the answer was slow
to come back. While Vanyi waited, she discovered that none of them was being
held prisoner. They could come and go as they wished, not only in the palace
but in the city.

The guards who had brought them to this house had left them
in the care of the servants, none of whom showed inclination to be a warrior or
a jailer. They made no objection to Vanyi’s ordering the house as she pleased,
with Olenyai on guard, mages established in an inner room to set up wards and
begin their search for the destroyers of Gates, and seneldi stabled, after some
negotiation, in the house next door. Pastures they could not have, but they
were given ample grain and fodder, and the courtyard was large enough for them
to run in, two and three at a time.

It would do, Kadin conceded; he kept his position as groom
and guard. He was avoiding the other mages.

Naturally enough, Vanyi thought, though it grieved her. It
would throb like a raw wound to see Miyaz and Aledi together, weaving their
powers of dark and light. He made no effort to enter their sanctum, slept in a
room in the house that he had made a stable, devoted himself to the care of the
seneldi. He had even, since he came to the city, put off his violet robe and
put on the kilt of his people. He wore it with an air that defied his
Guildmaster to challenge it.

She did no such thing. When it was time for him to be a mage
again, she would see that he did so. Now he would mourn as he must, without her
to meddle. Jian had been lover and wife as well as lightmage. He was entitled
to a certain extravagance of grief.

oOo

“A visitor, lady,” said the servant whom, by the time the
sun reached zenith and sank slowly westward, Vanyi thought of as her own. She
was sitting in the room she had been given, watching the play of light over the
valley and testing the strength of the Great Ward. It had no weaknesses that
she could find.

When the servant spoke, she started out of a half-dream. “A
messenger?” she asked.

“A visitor, lady,” the servant repeated. “A guest who bids
you welcome to Su-Shaklan. We have given him the cakes of welcome, and the tea.
Will the lady receive him in the room that is proper for such things?”

The lady would, and with alacrity, no matter what the
servant thought of that. Vanyi was not noble born, to care for such
silliness—unless of course it suited her.

The visitor was waiting for her in a room that faced the
garden, nibbling the last of a plateful of cakes and sipping a tiny cup filled
with the hot herb-brew of Shurakan. He was not, as she had still dared to hope,
an emissary of the queen, not openly or obviously. He was a priest in a saffron
robe, with a pattern of flowers painted on his shaven skull.