Spear of Heaven (33 page)

He was fierce as only the young can be, and muddled beyond
belief. “I’m not going to kill anyone right at the moment,” Vanyi said, “and
never with magic, in any case. It’s forbidden.”

He did not understand. He said, “I want them to fall.”

“From what I can gather,” Vanyi said dryly, “your temple was
sacked and burned by half the rabble in the city.”

“They were led,” he said. “Led from behind by those who
called themselves pious and lovers of the gods. Lovers of their own greed, I
call them. I saw how they took the best things for themselves, and stood back
for the mob to scrape up the leavings.” He scrambled himself erect, mustering a
surprising degree of dignity. “I have no magic such as you have, but I can
serve you and run errands for you and be your hands and feet.”

Vanyi looked at him and sighed. She did not need servants;
she had more than enough. But there was no graceful way to turn him out, not as
battered as he was, and in such need of a bath and a physician.

“Ah well,” she said. “What’s one more mouth to feed? Go on,
follow the servant, bathe yourself and rest. I’ll send someone to look after
your hurts.”

“I don’t need to rest,” he said, though he was wobbling on
his feet. “I want to serve you.”

“Later,” she said. “Now, off with you.”

oOo

Kimeri heard the exorcist come in. She listened as he
spoke to Vanyi, and was ahead of him when he went to the servants’ wing, where
they had a bathhouse and an extra room or two. In the big wooden tub, with his
amulets off and his paint washed away, he was a perfectly ordinary, rather
skinny and gangly person with a spectacular crop of bruises and cuts, and that
poor broken nose.

“I’m sorry I can’t mend your nose,” she said, clambering up
on the rim of the tub. He had been left to get himself clean, which was not
very kind of the servants. They thought exorcists were as bad as mages, and
smelled worse. It did make it easier to talk to him, since there was no one
about to stop her, except her Olenyas; but it was Rahai again, and Rahai never
got in the way unless she tried to leave the house.

The exorcist almost drowned himself trying to bow in the
water while scrambling away from Rahai’s shadow.

“Stop that,” Kimeri said. “You’ll hurt yourself. And stop
thinking that I’m a goddess. I’m a god’s get, but I’m nothing to fall at the
feet of. I’m not even a beauty yet.”

He was so confused that he obeyed her. By the time he
thought about what she had said, he was safe on the ledge in the tub, scrubbing
gingerly at the last of his paint. He kept looking at Rahai as if the Olenyas
were something to be afraid of, but since Rahai was doing nothing more threatening
than standing by the door, he at least stopped trying to hide under the water.

“I’m sorry about your temple,” said Kimeri. “And about your
nose. Vanyi’s going to send Aledi to look at it. Aledi’s got a little healing
magic. You’ll be afraid of her: she’s Asanian, and her eyes are yellow. But she’s
very gentle.”

“Your eyes are yellow,” the exorcist said.

“That’s because my father is Asanian, and my mother is
mostly Asanian, and so were her mother and father. But I’ll be taller, because
my great-grandfather’s mother was from the north, where everybody is as tall as
a tree.”

“North is the Spear of Heaven,” said the exorcist. “There
are no man-trees there.”

“Not in your north,” Kimeri said. “You should get out of the
water now, before your bruises get stiff. Do you mind wearing clothes?
Everybody seems to, here.”

He did not mind wearing clothes. All the amulets and the
paint were really only for formal occasions; his temple had been having one of
its great exorcisms, when they tried to drive all the evil out of the kingdom
for another turning of the moons.

Evil had found them instead, and broken the temple. Kimeri
watched him think about that as he climbed into the shirt and trousers and
coat.

He left his amulets in the box the servants had set out for
them. He was not afraid that anyone would steal them. They all had curses on
them, and everybody knew it.

All but one, which he put on. It was a leather cord with a
stone on it, smooth and round and grey, with a hole worn in the middle. “To
keep my soul safe,” he said.

If he thought it would, then it might. Kimeri thought the
stone was rather pretty.

Aledi came in then and chased Kimeri out, not meaning to be
impolite, but she was thinking much too clearly that small children had no
place in the middle of magic.

Aledi did not understand Sunchildren at all. Kimeri could
not expect her to. She was Asanian, and High Court Asanian at that. But it
stung.

Hani could not play with her. He had lessons in a temple
near the house, just for the morning but enough to keep him away when she
needed him. She was too young for lessons, even if she had been Shurakani. She
was supposed to do what young children did, which, as far as she could see, was
nothing at all but be chased out of people’s way.

If she could have gone outside of the house, she would have
been able to find something to do. But the Olenyai would not let her. It was
too dangerous, they said. People were hunting mages. They were burning temples
and chasing people out of houses and beating up anybody who looked or sounded
or acted different. The air, even in the house, had a foul smell, like blood
mixed with the thing that men and women did, that her mother was doing with
Bundur and not bothering to hide it.

Except that what her mother and Bundur did was a joyful
thing, like singing. What the people were doing in the city was ugly. It made
Kimeri want to scrub herself over and over, to take the stink away.

Kimeri went to where her mother was. She stayed outside
while they finished what they were doing, then waited a little longer, in case
they started again. They got up instead and put on their clothes, and talked
about eating.

She went in. Bundur was sitting on the window-ledge. Kimeri’s
mother was braiding his hair.

Kimeri climbed up on his lap, not even asking him if he
minded, and buried her face in his shirt. He smelled of clean man and clean
wool and the thing that, in this place, was joy. He did not push her away but
gathered her in, though he looked a question at Daruya.

“She’s . . . what I am,” Daruya said after a
little while. “She knows what’s happening in the city.”

He was shocked. “All of it?”

“All that matters.” Daruya’s hand brushed Kimeri’s head,
bringing calm. “You should be flattered. She never goes to people she doesn’t
trust.”

That was not exactly true, but Kimeri did not say it. He was
warm and solid, and yes, she trusted him. He made her feel safe.

He kept on being solid and warm, and being glad that she was
there. That must be what it was like to have a father. Great-Grandfather felt
the same way about her, mostly, and he understood her, too, and Bundur did not,
yet; but this was different somehow. This was nearer to her, with her mother in
it, being part of it and part of him. While she was with them, the ugliness
could not touch her, or make her afraid.

That night was full of fires and shouting, broken temples
and shattered gods and mobs that raged from end to end of the city. House
Janabundur was as safe as a house could be: it was high up on a hill, with no
roofs overlooking it, and its walls were strong and its gates were barred.

Olenyai guarded them, side by side with Janabundur’s
strongest servants. Daruya was not surprised to see how many of those there
were, or how loyal. Janabundur had an army of its own if it chose to raise one.
Many of its best men had been finding their way to the house over past days,
coming from houses in the city, farmsteads in the valley, holdings along the
mountain walls. They brought with them bundles that, when opened, revealed
well-kept weapons and armor of leather plates strengthened with bronze.

It was not war, Bundur insisted. Fools in the palace had
raised the mob, and would pay dearly for it, come the cold light of morning and
the colder eye of the law.

He had no comprehension of the discrepancy between a rule of
law and a palace coup leading to rampage and riot. “The law has always banned
magic,” he said. “They’ve spread the net so broad that they’re sweeping in
innocents. Then, when every sane person recoils from what’s been done in the
name of law, another law will save us all: the law that protects the innocent,
and the law of the human heart, which is always contrary. They’ll be favoring
mages, you’ll see, out of pity and guilt. Out of that we’ll make a new decree,
one that softens the strictures against magic.”

“It should remove them altogether,” Daruya said.

“Someday,” he said, “it may.”

They could not sleep in one another’s arms: Kimeri was
between them, and Hani, who had crept in to have his own fears soothed away. It
was peculiarly comfortable to lie all of them in a bed, demurely clothed, the
children asleep in the circle of their parents’ protection, lulled by their
voices.

oOo

Morning came with crawling slowness and a sense as of a
long debauch barely begun. Daruya had been in a siege once, in her grandfather’s
wars. She remembered this sense of being trapped in walls and yet sheltered by
them, the determined cheerfulness, the refusal to consider what would happen if
the enemy broke through their defenses.

Hani would not go to his lessons this morning. Bundur took
both children to the kitchen, where a hound bitch had whelped in the night.

Daruya was glad to be away from him, to be herself again for
a little while, and yet she missed him keenly, the touch of his hand, the smell
and the taste of him. She had not been out of his sight since she married him,
nor he out of hers.

Truly, then, it was past time. She put on her riding clothes
and went to see which of the seneldi would be amenable to a canter round the
garden.

oOo

Daruya brought her dun mare to a neat halt precisely in
the center of the circle that had marked the limits of her exercises. As she
dismounted, Kadin came through the gap in the hedge. He too was in riding
clothes, but no senel followed him.

It was not noble of her, but whenever she saw him she
shivered. His grief seemed to shape all that he was; that, and the darkness
that was his magery. She, bred of the Sun, could with utter ease have matched
him, light to his shadow.

It was not the matching of souls that bound her to Bundur.
It was another kind of twinning, one that by the laws of her inheritance she
could not accept. She had never known exactly why, unless it had to do with her
firstfather’s conviction that light and only light must rule, or with Vanyi’s
refusal to submit the Mageguild to the emperor’s will.

The Guild served him when it could, which was often, but it
remained distinct. All worlds were its concern; it would not bind itself to the
lord of this one, however great a mage he might be.

And yet, faced with this darkmage whose power so craved the
light that would complete it, Daruya suffered sore temptation. She was all
edges and angles, shocked by the marriage that had been thrust on her, the
murder of a king, the fall of Gates. One more shock surely could not matter,
one more transgression, one more count against her in the minds of her people.

She was tired of being wild. It struck her as she stood
there, loosening the saddle-girth and rubbing an itch out of the mare’s neck.
She was weary of resisting; of breaking law and discipline simply because they
discommoded her.

The trouble, she thought, was that Bundur would not fight
back. He yielded; he smiled; he slid smoothly round her and showed her her own
face in the mirror of his mind. She was usually scowling. She was always
rebelling. It was her art and her gift.

But here in the face of a rebellion that would put all the
rest to shame, she sickened of it. Kadin did not know what he did, how his
darkness lured her, how even his grief made it easy to succumb. He would not
want her for a lover; twinned mages need not be bedmates, or even friends. They
raised power together, that was all. They made each other complete.

No
, she thought.
Resistance again; she almost laughed at that—bitterly, again. She was a pattern
of repetitions. Could she not vary it?

Kadin was oblivious to her maundering. He caught the mare’s
bridle as Daruya began to lead her out of the hedged circle that had become the
riding-ground. “Lady,” he said, “wait.”

Daruya paused. She had grown accustomed to men who were her
own height or smaller; it was odd to have to look up. He was keeping his hair
cropped short, she noticed, but letting his beard grow. That was like a
northerner, as was the gold ring in his ear. Northerners felt naked without
their beards and their gauds.

“Lady,” Kadin said again. “Daruya. If I named a quarry,
would you hunt with me?”

For all her noble intentions and her real weariness, her
heart leaped. “A hunt? Where?”

“In this city,” he answered. “For breakers of Gates.”

“Yes,” breathed Daruya. “Oh, yes.” But— “Did the Guildmaster
send you to me?”

“No,” said Kadin. “I came to you first.”

He was speaking the truth: he opened himself to let her see
it. He also let her see why. Vanyi would wish him to be cautious, to be circumspect.
Daruya, he thought, would be eager for a wild hunt, for the revenge that
twisted like hunger in his belly.

He approved her wildness; admired it. She was not as
flattered as she might once have been—and not long ago, either.

Still. A hunt, and a quarry. “Who is it?” she asked. “Where
did you find him?”

“I’m not sure yet,” said Kadin. “I know that my magic has
found a place, a lair of . . . something, and a remembrance of
fallen Gates.”

“You really should have gone to Vanyi,” Daruya said, but not
as a rebuke. “If it’s this uncertain still—you could be catching the death of
the one who did it, killed in the confusion. Maybe he was the target of it all.”