Spear of Heaven (3 page)

“And aren’t you?”

Daruya flicked a glance at the stall door. A shadow leaned
on it, regarding her with golden eyes. He was faceless else—veiled, hooded,
black-robed from head to foot. He inspired no fear in her at all, and no
surprise. “Chakan,” she said. “What are you doing up at this hour?”

“Much the same as you are, I suspect,” he said. His voice
behind the veils was light, even laughing. “Let me guess. He won’t let you go
to the other side of the world.”

“Worse than that,” said Daruya. “The Gate we were to pass
through is broken, and the mages don’t know how, or why. Vanyi and the others
are still going, but to the Gate before the one that broke. I’m to stay home.
Just as I always do.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Chakan, folding his arms on the
half-door and resting his shrouded chin on them. “You’re not kept a prisoner.
Not even close.”

She glowered at him. Chakan the Olenyas was a cheerful soul,
for all his black veils and his face that none but another Olenyas or a heart’s
friend might see, his robes and his twin swords and his long bitter training.
She knew that he grinned at her behind those veils—his eyes were dancing.

“But there,” he said. “I cry your pardon. I’m supposed to
indulge your temper, and here I persist in being reasonable.”

“I hate you,” she said.

“Of course you do.” He straightened, stretched, yawned
audibly. “Are you contemplating a suitable punishment for his majesty? An
aurochs hunt, maybe? I’d rather a boar, myself, it being spring and all, and
the aurochs not in rut until the fall. They’re dreadfully peaceable at this
time of year. A boar, now—a boar will rip you to pieces no matter what the
season.”

She never could help it with Chakan—he always made her
laugh, even when she wanted to kill him.

He knew it, too. “There now,” he said. “It’s almost dawn. If
you won’t hunt boar, and I think you shouldn’t, seeing as to how we’d have to
rouse out the whole hunt, and they’re all sleeping off their night’s
carouse—shall we ride instead? I’ve a fancy to see the sun come up from the
Golden Wall.”

“If you wanted that,” said Daruya, “you should have left at
a gallop an hour ago.”

“Bet on it?” he asked.

Hells take him. He knew exactly how to twist her to his
will. “Six suns, gold, that we don’t reach the top before the sun is up.”

“Done,” said Chakan.

oOo

Daruya took the striped mare. Chakan had his own gelding
saddled already, waiting in the stableyard and sneering at the stallion in his
run. The stallion, who knew the cranky little beast, ignored him as a king
should.

It was very dark, but the stars were brilliant, and Brightmoon
rode the zenith. They rode down from the palace hill through a city already
awake, the markets rousing and setting up, the bakers baking the day’s bread, the
smiths working the bellows in their forges. Asan-Gilen, city of the two
empires, which everyone called Starios—Estarion’s city—was properly said never
to sleep. Rather, it changed guards. Even as the merchants set about opening
their stalls, the nightfolk drifted yawning to bed.

Some of them knew Daruya and greeted her, either with
silence in the western fashion or with a word and a dip of the head in the way
of the east. By the courtesy of Starios, none detained her, nor was she ever
beset with crowds. Unless of course she wanted them.

Spoiled, Chakan would say to that, and arrogant, too. Odd,
she thought, that he could say such things and barely ruffle her temper, but if
her grandfather even hinted at them, she flew into a rage.

She shut down the thought. The processional way, wide and
all but empty in the not-quite-dawn, ended in the Sunrise Gate, the gate that
looked on Keruvarion. That was shut still, but the lesser gate beside the great
one opened to let them through, with a grin and a salute from the guard.

She found herself grinning back. The wind blew straight out
of the east, full in her face. It smelled of morning, and of green things, and
of open places.

Chakan’s gelding was already out, already stretching into a
gallop on the grass that verged the emperor’s road. Daruya’s mare tossed her
unbitted head and snorted, and launched herself in pursuit.

East out of Starios they ran, across the fields new sown
with spring, through the arm of forest that stretched out toward the city, and
then up, veering off the great way to a narrower path. It wound upward through
the trees, till the trees gave up the pursuit. The land here was stony, the way
steep, tussocked with grass. Once, and then again, the seneldi leaped streams
that crossed the track.

The sky, that had been all dark and stars and bright arc of
moon, greyed as they rode, till it was silver, and the stars were gone, and the
moon a pallid glimmer. Chakan’s gelding stumbled in landing, after the second
stream; but he steadied it, and it went on undismayed, racing the sun.

Daruya let the other take the lead, narrow as the way was,
and difficult. Her mare was reasonably content to settle to the smaller senel’s
pace, flattening her ears and threatening his rump with her teeth only when he
seemed to slacken. Daruya, after all, was not trying to win the race.

This steep rock that they climbed was the Golden Wall, not
for its color, which was green in spring and brown in summer and white with
snow in the winter, but for that it marked the border between Keruvarion in the
east and the old Golden Empire in the west. Estarion had set his city just
beyond the shadow of it, where it sank into a rolling land of field and forest,
athwart the traders’ road from east to west. There was a little river running
through it, tributary in time to Suvien the mighty that was the lifeblood of
Keruvarion, opening westward of the city to a lake on which the people fished
and the high ones kept their summer villas.

All that, Daruya could see as she reached the summit of the
ridge. Her mare snorted and danced. Chakan laughed aloud. The sun, just rising,
shot a shaft of light straight into his eyes.

Daruya slid from the saddle and let the mare go in search of
grass. She was breathing hard, and her black mood was gone. She spread her arms
to the sun. The morning hymn poured out of her, pure white song.

When the last note had rung sweet and high up to heaven, she
stood still with her arms out, head flung back, drinking light. It had a taste
like wine.

Awareness came back slowly. Chakan was sitting cross-legged
on a stone, watching her in Asanian fashion, sidelong. His eyes were the same
color as the sunlight. “Sometimes,” he said as if to himself, “one . . .
forgets . . . exactly what you are.”

The exultation of light gave way to a more familiar
irritation. “Oh, not you, too. I get enough of that from my grandfather.”

“You do not,” he said, and he sounded like Chakan again,
immune to the awe of her rank. “He is utterly matter-of-fact about anything to
do with being a mage or being a Sunchild. It drives some people wild. He should
be a figure of awe and terror—not a quiet-spoken man in a plain coat, who can
drink light like water, and make the stars sing.”

“That’s just magery,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Mages can work great wonders, I’ll never
deny it. Sunlords are different. The god speaks to them directly.”

“Not in words,” said Daruya.

“Does he need them?”

That silenced her. She paced the rough level of the summit,
turning slowly as she went. Away eastward stretched forest and plain, the wide
reaches of the Hundred Realms. West was a broader level, forest that gave way
quickly to tilled fields and clustered towns. Below on its own hill and on the
level about was Starios beside its lake.

The sun had reached all she could see, turned it to gold,
melted mist that clung to hollows. She could if she wished gather the light in
her hands.

She knotted them behind her. The right hand with its golden
brand was burning fiercely; she shut her mind to it. Chakan, if he knew, would
say that the god was talking.

And did she not want to be what she was?

With a sudden movement she pulled off the fillet that bound
her brows, worked fingers into tangled curls. Priests and royalty did not cut
their hair. She had cropped hers short not long after Kimeri was weaned—chiefly,
Chakan had opined, out of petulance that the child’s birth had not been more of
a scandal. People expected Daruya to do outrageous things. Often they forgave
her, because she was their princess, and beautiful: the Beauty of Starios.

It was quite maddening. “Sometimes I think,” she said to the
wind, “that all royal heirs should be brought up far from court, in ignorance
of their rank, until they’re old enough to bear the weight of it.”

“It’s too late to try that with Kimeri,” said Chakan.

“Yes, and I was going to leave her with the burdens while I
ran away. Is that what you were thinking?”

“No,” he said.

He did not point out that she could read his thoughts if she
tried. In fact she could not. Olenyai were protected against magery; and
Chakan, like some few of his kind, was born shielded, unreadable even if he had
wished to be read. It could be disconcerting, if one heard his steps, saw him approaching,
but sensed nothing in the mind at all, not even the shadow of presence that
marked the rest of the Olenyai.

Daruya found it restful. He asked nothing of her as mage or
woman—he had never wished to bed her, that she knew of, nor been anything but
friend and, as much as anyone could be, brother. She had brothers in blood, or
so she was told, sons of her mother and her mother’s husband, but none of them
had ever come forward to claim the kinship. Chakan was more truly kin, Olenyas
though he was, bred and shaped to serve his emperor.

She, bred and shaped to be empress in her turn, said less
bitterly than wearily, “All priests, even royal priests, are given a little
freedom, a bit of Journey to teach them the ways of the world. I’ve not been
allowed it. Yes, I know it wasn’t safe before—there were still wars,
rebellions, assassins coming right into the palace and dying on Olenyai swords.
But that’s over. After forty years of war, we have peace. We’ve had festivals
from end to end of the empire, to celebrate the wars’ ending. It’s time now, if
it will ever be—time for me to have the rest of my training.”

“It’s not,” mused Chakan, “as if you’d never had training
elsewhere. You’ve ridden to war with your grandfather. You’ve accompanied him
on all his progresses since you were old enough to sit a senel, and sat in his
councils and attended his courts. You’ve done your year in the temple in Endros
Avaryan, and gone up to the Tower at the end of it, and come into your power
before the bier where the Sunborn sleeps.”

“But that’s not everything,” she said. “It’s not complete.
You know how a smith makes a sword—how he forges the blade over and over, and
shapes it, and makes it into an image of what it will be. But it’s only a bar
of steel until it’s tempered. Then, and only then, is it a sword.”

“You don’t call all that tempering?” He went on before she
could answer. “No, maybe it wasn’t. You know enough for a whole college of
mages, and a court of lords, too. But you haven’t turned that knowledge to use.
You need to grow yourself up, I think.”

“That’s what he says,” said Daruya. “He doesn’t understand
that I can’t do it here. He’s here, do you see? He’ll pick me up if I stumble.
He’ll smile if I make a mistake, and be oh so forbearing, but I’ll always know
that he could do it better and faster and stronger. I need to be somewhere
where he can’t meddle.”

“Does it have to be the other side of the world? You could
ask for a princedom anywhere in the empire. He’d give it.”

“He gave me this embassy,” she said. “Now he’s taken it
away.”

“He’s only being sensible,” said Chakan. “Whoever’s broken a
Gate isn’t likely to balk at killing an emperor’s heir.”

“Does it need to be the act of an enemy? It could have been
the Gate itself that was flawed.”

“All the more reason to be cautious, then, if as I’m told
the expedition goes to the Gate nearest the one that fell, and goes overland from
there. That Gate could fall, too, and with the heir to the empire in it.”

Daruya shivered in her bones, but fear was a little thing to
this yearning of hers to be out, off, away. “And if that happened, would it be
any worse than my getting killed in battle, or being stabbed in my bed by an
assassin, or breaking my mind in entering the Tower of Endros? My grandfather
led me to battle and the Tower. What’s the difference in this, except that he
won’t be there to pick me up if I fall?”

“The difference could be exactly that,” said Chakan. “Or
that you want it so badly. That much wanting is dangerous. It closes off sense.”

“Maybe it’s something I have to do,” said Daruya. “Have you
thought of that? Maybe I’m called to it.”

“If so, then you just realized it.”

Daruya walked to the edge where the Wall fell sheer, down
and down to the plain of Keruvarion. She poised there, rocked lightly by the
wind. Chakan said nothing, made no move to pull her back.

He knew her too well. She would never leap unless she knew
she could fly. Death was not what she yearned for. Not at all. Life—she wanted
life, great gleaming handfuls of it. More than she could ever have under the
emperor’s loving tyranny, his light hand that weighed more than the world.

“I need to do this,” she said. “I need it, Chakan. I don’t
feel death in it. Only necessity. And I think the expedition needs me, now more
than ever. The place it goes to is all strange to us, and its people are afraid
of magic. Or, no, maybe not afraid, but wary of it; inclined to hate it,
because they don’t trust it. If something happened to the Guardian because of
that, and broke the Gate, then it may be that I can use what I am for once, use
it to teach these strangers that magic is nothing to fear or hate.”