Spear of Heaven (17 page)

Vanyi levered herself up. The circle of power was quiet, the
lamps that marked its wards burning steady. She could sleep, she thought, if no
one interfered. Sleep would be a pleasure.

Her mind reached to the limits of its wards and found no
danger. It touched Daruya—in a snit as usual, but not in trouble that Vanyi
could discern—and Kimeri playing contentedly with a companion or two. Nothing
to fear there, either. The other children meant her no harm beyond a small,
shivery, delightful conviction that they had made friends with a demon-child.
Only Kadin was cause for anxiety: he had gone back to the house of the Gate, to
sit in the dimness and the empty silence that matched the condition of his
heart.

He was not thinking of death, not at the moment. He was not
thinking of anything at all.

Better nothing than death. Vanyi could not help him; he was
not ready for that yet, if he would ever be. She left him alone, drew in the
boundaries of her power, became simply herself again, and a bone-tired self at
that.

oOo

Vanyi
.

She started out of a drowse. A moment longer and she would
have been asleep.

The voice spoke again, soft round the edges of her shields.
Vanyi
, let me in
.

Temper would have refused, but habit opened a gate in the
wall of her mind. He entered as he had so often before, fresh and
morning-bright—it was that on the other side of the world, and for an instant her
yearning to be there was as sharp as pain.

“Estarion,” she said without voice. “You woke me up.”

He did not look remarkably contrite. “Oh, it’s night there
again, isn’t it? Everything’s backwards. Do people have their faces in their
bellies or on the backs of their heads?”

“Don’t be silly,” she snapped, but he had lightened her
mood. Eased her headache, too, without her even being aware of it: a touch like
a cool hand, a fading of pain. He never asked permission, never thought he
needed to.

He looked about this room that was her mind’s conception of
itself, noted what had changed and what had not, and said, “I dislike this
Minister of Protocol. What a fishfaced fool!”

“So he would like us to think,” said Vanyi.

“He reckons himself clever and subtle and wise, and I
suppose he is, by his lights. He’s still a fool.” Estarion leaned against a
wall, insouciant as any young bravo in a tavern. His mind-self was much as his
bodily self was; he did not affect the image of youth, or feign more beauty
than he had. That was rare, but it was also Estarion.

Vanyi resigned herself to his presence. She was not entirely
displeased by it, though she would have welcomed the sleep that he had put to
flight.

He was a fairly restful guest. With her headache he had
taken some of the dragging tiredness, smoothing it away as easily as he
breathed.

“Do you know,” he said, “you’ve done a great deal for so
short a time in this place. I doubt a stranger would get so close to me in a
hand of days.”

“A stranger from the other side of the world would find you
in her sitting room before she was well settled in it, pouring out wine and
besetting her with questions.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging. “I suppose so. I’ve never been
particularly careful of my station. Perhaps I should get myself a Minister of
Protocol?”

“You already have one,” said Vanyi. “He’s sweet, elderly,
and erudite, and you drive him to distraction.”

“What? Who? Rezad? Is that what a Minister of Protocol is—a
chancellor of the palace? Well then. Rezad definitely won’t keep the filthy
commons from my presence, and I’d have his liver for breakfast if he tried. He
knows it, too. He’s very wise, is Rezad.”

“And very long-suffering.”

“Rezad is Asanian. He expects to suffer for his emperor. If
he didn’t, he’d think there was something wrong.”

Vanyi sighed. “This Minister of Protocol is no Rezad. He’s
going to give me what I ask—but I’ll have to fight for it.”

“Which is precisely why I call him a fool. It may be his
duty to protect his queen and her king from importunate strangers, but an
ambassador deserves greater consideration.”

“An ambassador from you in particular?”

He flashed his white smile. “Oh, but I’m nothing on this
side of the world! It’s courtesy, that’s all. Not to mention common sense. If I’m
as terrible a monster of a mage as he must think, I could be mounting armies of
dragons and preparing to descend on his kingdom.”

“Are you telling me you aren’t?” He grinned at her. She
resisted the urge to slap him—too common an urge, and too easy to gratify. “Estarion,
I need to sleep. Are you going to get to the point or will you go away and let
me rest?”

He looked briefly guilty. Too briefly. “I wanted to see that
you were well.”

“And your heirs? Both of them?”

It was difficult to catch him off guard. He regarded her
calmly, arms folded. “I see that they’re well. Have you tanned their hides yet?”

“No,” said Vanyi. “And I won’t, unless they try something
like that again. Daruya got us through the Gate. We’d have died without her.
Did you know she was that strong?”

“She’s Sun-bred and priestess-trained. All appearances to
the contrary, she has remarkable discipline—when it suits her to remember it.”

There, thought Vanyi. He was colder than he needed to be.
Irked, and afraid, too. His heirs had abandoned him; that pricked his pride, at
the very least, and roused him to the fact that if he lost them both, he was an
emperor without an heir.

She did not soften her voice for that, or treat him more
gently. “I know what Daruya is. I helped to train her. I’ll tell you what
worries me more. Ki-Merian. She hid herself from us all, and survived a
Gatestorm that should have killed a child so young and so untrained.”

“The god protected her,” Estarion said. “And her own power,
too.” He drew a long shaking breath. “God and goddess. What I wouldn’t give for
an ordinary, common, simple, mischievous child without a drop of magery in its
blood.”

“You’d be bored silly before the hour was out,” said Vanyi. “Live
with it, Estarion. You’re a mage and the father of mages. They do what it suits
them to do, and they make fools of us all when they’re minded, and if they
outlive us, why, it’s a miracle, and the god’s own mercy. We have nothing to do
with it.”

“That’s a lesson I’ve never been able to learn.” He
straightened, unfolding his arms. “I’ll let you sleep. I only wanted to know—”

“I know,” said Vanyi. She said it more softly than she might
have, after all. “Go on. I’ll do what I can to keep your descendants alive and
sane. If it will console you, I think they do that very well for themselves,
all things considered.”

He was consoled, perhaps. His farewell was like a brush of a
hand, a flicker of a smile. She took them both down with her into sleep.

Kimeri in Shurakan missed the demon of the mountains very
much at first. But it was out there beyond the wards that were so little really
to a mage with any power at all; and she was here, where it could never come.
Someday she would find it again. She did not think that would be very soon.

She dreamed about it now and then. She saw it teaching words
to the other demons of the mountains. None of them was as quick of wit as it
was, and most of them still ate travelers for dinner, but it seemed content
after its fashion.

It never did try to pass the wards into Shurakan. That, it
was sure and Kimeri supposed, would shake its poor airy self to pieces.

She, who was fire and earth and water too, was happy in
Shurakan. That was a little surprising. She still had her other dreams, the
ones about Gates, and the Guardian was still caught in the broken Gate. She
tried more than once to go where the Gate was, but an Olenyas always caught
her.

Once it was even Vanyi who was standing on the other side of
the door Kimeri was going out of. Vanyi was coming in: she had her clothes on
that she wore when she went to the palace and tried to talk to the queen.
Kimeri should have been more careful, but she was looking for Olenyai and not
finding any; she forgot to look for a mage.

Vanyi herded her straight back in, saying something about
mothers who let children run wild in enemy territory. Kimeri had heard that
before. When she could stop, which was all the way in and most of the way to
Vanyi’s rooms, she said in complete exasperation, “You have got to let me go
out.”

Vanyi’s brows went up. “Have I, your highness?” she asked. “And
why is that?”

She was being nasty and sweet at the same time. Kimeri was
aggravated enough to tell her the truth. “Because the Gate isn’t dead, and
neither is the Guardian. He’s trapped inside it. I’ve got to get him out.”

“You’ve been having dreams, haven’t you?” said Vanyi. But
before Kimeri could say yes, she had them every night, and they were horrible,
Vanyi went on, “There now. When people die, especially if they’ve been killed,
we always want them to be alive again. We dream about it, we wish for it. But
it doesn’t bring them back.”

“He is alive,” Kimeri insisted. “I know he is. I hear him.
He’s trapped in the Gate. He doesn’t know how to get out. If I went there, I
could—”

“Maybe you could,” said Vanyi, “someday, when you’re older.
If there’s anyone to rescue from a Gate that’s broken. But not now. It’s not
safe.”

“He’s trapped,” said Kimeri. “He hates it. He wants to get
out.”

She was almost in tears. That was never a wise thing with
grownfolk. It just convinced them that she was a baby, and too young to know anything.

Vanyi said things that she meant to be soothing, and handed
Kimeri over to the servants and told them to feed her a posset and put her to
bed. And never mind that the sun was only halfway down from noon. Nothing
Kimeri said made any difference to her at all. She simply was not listening.

Kimeri thought about a shrieking fit, but that was the sort
of thing babies did. She set her teeth and did what she was told. “Grownfolk
never listen,” she said to the walls when she was finally alone.

oOo

But it was not all like that. Vanyi was out most of the
time, and so was Kimeri’s mother. Kimeri could not go out in the city, and all
she could do to help the Guardian was tell him in her dream that she was
trying, and she would keep on trying. And yet, in everything else, she had more
freedom here than she had ever had at home.

It started with being able to spend as much time as she
liked in the stable with Kadin, which no one had ever allowed before. It got
better when she found out that there were children round about, and what was
better yet, none of them had nurses to make their lives miserable.

They did have nurses, that was true, but those were
indulgent when they were not outright lazy. Children here could do much as they
pleased, provided they were sensible about it and kept out of grownfolk’s way.
When they grew very big—seven whole summers’ worth—they had to go to the
temples to school, and many never came out of the temples again. But before
then they were as free as birds.

Kimeri, who had always had armies of nurses hovering and
fretting, found it wildly exciting to slip away from the stable, where Kadin
never took much notice of her anyway, and find the places where the children
liked to gather. Those were usually places where grownfolk never came, odd corners
or dusty passages or rooms full of things that no one knew the names of, the
makings of games that could range from one end of the palace to the other.

The first time Kimeri went to a gathering place, she had a
friend to speak for her. His name was Hani; he was older, almost old enough for
a temple, but he was not as tall as she was.

She found him straddling the wall of the stable the day
after she came to the city, staring at the seneldi. He was much too curious to
be afraid, and he was not shy at all. As soon as Kimeri saw him he grinned,
showing a mouthful of more gaps than teeth, and said, “You were our protect-us-against
at prayers this morning. What are you really?”

“Kimeri,” she answered, not knowing what else to say. Then
because he was thinking that she did not know his language: “That’s my name. I’m
a person. What are you?”

“What kind of person are you?” he asked her.

“A Kimeri person,” she said. “Me. Myself. I’m not a demon.
That’s stupid.”

“All right,” said Hani, sliding down from the wall and
landing neatly on his feet. He had straight black hair cut straight across his
forehead and straight around his head just below his ears, and he was wearing a
coat and a pair of trousers much like the ones she was wearing, and altogether
he looked like a perfectly ordinary person from the Hundred Realms. But so did
everybody here. There was nobody who looked like an Asanian, as Kimeri did, or
like a northerner, which was what Kadin was.

Hani stood in front of her, and he looked and sounded older
but he was definitely smaller. He looked her up and down. After a moment’s
thought, he stretched out a hand and tugged at one of her curls. She let him.
He was curious. He had never seen curly hair before, or hair the color of
yellow amber. “You’re very funny-looking,” he said. “What did they do to you to
make you look like this?”

“I was born this way,” she said. “You don’t look funny to
me. Lots of people where I come from look like you.”

“Of course they do,” said Hani. “People look like that.”

Out in the courtyard, where Daruya’s mare was loose with two
of the Olenyai geldings, the mare decided that the geldings had been taking too
many liberties, and went after them with teeth and horns. Hani watched them
with his narrow eyes gone wide. “They’re going to kill each other!”

“Of course they’re not,” said Kimeri, feeling superior. “The
striped one is a mare. She’s telling the other two to stop thinking they’re as
good as she is. Mares,” she explained, “are the center of the world.”