Spear of Heaven (34 page)

“I think not,” Kadin said. “It’s strong. The uproar stripped
its shields, I’ll wager, and I was hunting just when the shields went down. It
doesn’t know they’re down; it’s made no effort to raise them again.”

“A trap,” said Daruya.

“Possibly,” he said. His eyes were bright. His teeth flashed
in his beard. “Will you hunt with me, Sunlady?”

She should not. She should go to Vanyi, speak to Bundur and
his mother, talk it to death. Then sit in this cage while the others pursued
the hunt.

Ah well, she thought. He had asked; and he was strong, both
mage and man. What danger in simply finding the quarry, so that he could bring
sure word back to his Guildmaster?

Even the voice of temptation knew what folly that was. Kadin
would not play scout in this. He hunted to kill.

All the more need of her to keep him from doing something
rash. She unsaddled and rubbed down the mare and stabled her with the rest,
took the hooded cloak Kadin offered her and hid her alien face in it, and drew
shadows about her besides. He was a shadow beside her, following the scent that
he had found.

The city was quiet in the warm noon, as if it rested from
its exertions of the night. A pall of smoke hung over it; some of the markets
were shut, and some had suffered at the hands of rioters. There had been
efforts to keep order: streets with guards strolling or standing, wearing the
colors of one noble house or another, or else the shaved head and saffron
tabard of a temple. Not one of the temples that had been attacked; those,
Daruya suspected, were mostly the poorer or smaller, too weak to fight back.

Where guards were was greatest quiet, shops unlooted, houses
or temples unburned. Even so, too much of the city had suffered, she saw as she
ghosted through it with Kadin. Once or twice she saw desultory parties of
looters behind broken gates, gutting temple or house and setting fire to what
they left behind.

They did not think that they were serving the gods or
upholding the law. They were smashing and seizing, that was all, and taking
pleasure in it.

She had been sheltered from it in House Janabundur. How
much, she had not known till she passed through the middle of it. It was no
consolation that everyone who could had retreated behind walls and barred the
door. Too many had not been able to, or had seen their walls breached and their
door battered down.

The cold part of her, the part that was bred to rule, took
note of who had been the targets. Smaller temples, temples of the odder or more
exacting gods, particularly those without the numbers or the weapons to mount a
defense. Houses of simple citizens, physicians, herb-healers, astrologers,
diviners. Foreigners of any and every description.

None was as foreign as she: all were of Merukarion or of the
mountains. They had been driven out of houses or hostelries, beaten, robbed,
even killed.

She had been safe. She had lain abed with her Shurakani
prince, while people died.

Guilt was no alien thing to her. Guilt for being powerless
and accepting it—that was new.

She was doing something now. It was dangerous, it was badly
advised, but it was something. She was not idling in House Janabundur and
letting the city rack itself to pieces.

Kadin led her with a hunter’s speed, a hunter’s quiet. Her
magery touched his, found what he followed. It was more memory than present
reality: a scent, a taste, a quiver in the air. As he drew closer to the source
of it, he needed her to keep him hidden, to steer him round obstacles. He was
blind, focused on the one thing alone, the thing that had an air, however
faint, of magery.

He stopped abruptly. She nearly collided with him. His face
turned from side to side. His eyes were shut, his nostrils flared. He turned
till he faced straight away from the sun, and stopped, standing stiff, like a
hound at gaze; but his eyes were closed still.

Daruya looked where his power was focused. It was a temple;
she had learned to recognize the shape of the gate in the blank wall, and the
fact that it was open, inviting strangers in. It could dare that: the street
was guarded, the guards alert, armed with pikes.

People passed, going to and from the market at the street’s
end, where the guards were thickest and trade was almost brisk. Daruya caught a
scent of roasting meat, baking bread, spices, flowers. Ordinary scents of the
Summer City, eerie now with the stink of smoke and blood beneath.

Her stomach growled. She quelled it, and a completely unexpected
urge to laugh. The body always had its say, no matter what the mind might
think.

Kadin moved away from her so suddenly that she was left
flatfooted. He had forgotten his cloak of shadows; he slipped along the wall,
hunter-wise, but there was no mistaking his size or his foreignness. She darted
after him, shadow-shrouded, before anyone could see and raise the alarm.

At the temple gate he paused. Daruya felt it with him: the
faint hum of power, the skin-prickle of wards. Magic, in a place devoted to the
destruction of mages?

It was not strong, not a Great Ward. It was set against a
hostile mind, but not against a mage wrapped in shadow and shields.

Both of them slipped through carefully, for such wards were
delicate. Daruya did what she could to seem no more than a gust of air, a trick
of the light.

oOo

Inside was a temple like many another: outer court, inner
court, shrine and sanctuary, garden and cloister and dwellings for the priests
behind. It was not a large temple, nor particularly small. Its god was more
human-faced than most, but its body, though standing upright, was that of a
mountain ox, and on its head were great sweeping horns.

A white she-ox lay in a golden pen inside the shrine,
chewing her cud. Devotees might purchase a twist of green fodder and offer it
to her with bowings and prayers, and seek her consort’s favor for their
petitions.

If the ox saw the intruders, she did not betray them. Kadin
ran soft-footed past her, round a knot of worshippers, through the god’s shadow
and into the deeper sanctuary. Daruya heard sounds from within, the ringing of
bells, the echoing hum of a bronze gong, the sound of voices chanting. She
could not make out the words, if words there were.

So were the gods worshipped here, ceaselessly, in a long
drone of chants. She had felt before this the power that rode the chanting, the
strength of focused will that came close to magery. But never so clear. Never
so distinct.

The sense of it on her skin was strikingly familiar. She had
known just that brush as of wind, just that shiver beneath, as she approached a
circle of mages in a lesser working. Guard-magic, she thought; a touch of
wind-magic. Her own power woke to what it looked on: the swirl of winds in the
upper air, a gathering of clouds above the mountains. Left unattended, they
would swoop down into Shurakan in a storm of wind and hail, in a roll of summer
thunder.

The inner chamber was open, unguarded save by the shimmer of
wards. Daruya looked past Kadin to a circle of men—all men, no women—in crimson
tabards, each sitting on his heels, hands on thighs, head bent, eyes closed,
chanting. The light of magic on them was as bright as a beacon to her inner
eye.

And they did not know it. True mages—Guildmages,
priest-mages—would have done their working behind a layering of wards, one for
protection of their bodies, one for shielding of their minds from intrusion,
and one for the working itself, to turn aside the unwary or the hostile. The
warding here was weak, little more than a prayer for safety. The mind-shields
were all but nonexistent. Thoughts babbled without direction and without focus,
like a river beneath the ice that was the working.

They had no faintest conception of what they were doing.
They were praying away a storm, they thought, and asking their god to guard the
city, to defend their temple against the wrath of the mob. Here and there, like
a spark on flint, was a thought of greater intensity: fear of mages, relief
that they were nigh gone from the city, a wish that their kind had never been.

Suppose, thought Daruya, that the sparks found tinder: Gates
open and vulnerable, mages passing through. Suppose that this and nothing else
was the source of the Gates’ fall.

No. It was too simple, the circle too weak. There was real
magery in it, but feeble, undisciplined. What she had felt in the Gate had been
greater—had been a real and present malice, directed at the Gate and at the
mages within it. She did not sense it here.

Kadin, it seemed, did; or did not care that there was a
difference. The drawing in of his power sucked at her, reaching for the light
that was in her, seeking it to complete itself. Her power trembled in response.

She clamped it down, got a grip on Kadin, set her teeth and
hauled him back out of the doorway. He was too surprised to fight, too intent
on the circle and on the calling of his power. She struck him with her own
magery, a swift, fierce blow that rocked him on his feet.

“What in the name of—” he began, making no effort to be
quiet.

She clapped a hand over his mouth. “Shut up,” she gritted,
barely above a whisper.

He struggled. She held on. Her power was stronger, even
holding together shields and shadows. If it did not give way to the seduction
of his darkmagic—if the priests or their guards did not rouse to the presence
of strangers in their temple—if she could get him out before he unleashed a
blast of power on the men who, he was certain, had killed his lightmage—

The chanting went on, endless, unvarying. Its magic spun and
wove into a circle of dim light, stretching and elongating, curving up past the
temple’s roof. Weather-magic, and no awareness at all of the world’s balance.
Rain that did not fall here must fall elsewhere; that much a child knew. But
these pious priests did not. Ignorant, blind, utter fools.

Kadin wanted to blast them from the earth. “They’re not
worth it,” she hissed in his ear.

They killed Jian
.

Deprived of his mouth to speak, he resorted to mind-speech.
That too was perilous—more so than a whisper. Guards might not hear soft
voices, but wards woke to the inner speech of mages.

“We don’t know that,” Daruya whispered as fiercely as she
could. “Come out of here. We know there’s magic working in Shurakan—that much
you won for us. Now let’s take it to the Guildmaster. She’ll know what to do
about it.”

Kadin’s resistance was beyond words, his body coiled to
fling her aside, his power poised to leap, to destroy, to kill. That such use
of magery would destroy him, he knew. He was glad.

“No,” said Daruya, almost aloud. She caught a trailing edge
of his magery and did a thing no Guildmage would ever stoop to: looped and
bound him with it. He raged, he fought, but the harder he fought, the tighter
the bond grew. Enough of that and he would strangle his power, turn it inward
on itself. Then he would have the destruction he yearned for, but all within.

She had gambled rightly. He wanted to die, but not without
purpose. Not unless he took his enemies with him.

They got out of the temple, though it cost Daruya high,
sustaining shadows, shields, and mind-bond, and dragging a large, reluctant,
half-stunned darkmage bodily past the blind eyes of guards and the oblivious
faces of worshippers.

The white ox watched her, mildly curious. If she ever came
back, she would bring the beast a gift of sweet fodder, in thanks for keeping
her secret. She swore that as an oath in the silence of her mind, where only a
god—or a god’s white ox—could hear.

oOo

Kadin was nearly unconscious by the time he stumbled into
House Janabundur. Daruya was in little better case. But she found Vanyi first,
before her knees gave way: dropped the darkmage like a rolled carpet at the
Guildmaster’s feet and crumpled beside him, still awake, still aware, but no
more strength in her than in a newborn baby.

There was someone else there. She could not see him at
first; her power was too sorely strained.

It came back slowly, feeding itself on her stillness. She
was kneeling at Vanyi’s feet, yes. Vanyi was standing face to face with one who
was not here in body at all, and yet was visible: the more so, the longer she
stared.

How dark he was, she thought, how bright a gold his eyes.
And how young he seemed. He had always been ancient to her: her grandfather,
her emperor, source and cause of her rebellions. He was not a young man, no;
his hair was flecked with grey, his beard silvered. And yet he looked not much
older in truth than Bundur.

If he had been any less meticulously and brutally trained,
he would have been dancing with frustration. “You see?” he said. “You see?
There
is
magery in this wretched
little kingdom.”

“They don’t know that’s what it is,” Daruya said. Her voice
was faint, breathless.

“They have little discipline,” said Vanyi to Estarion, “except
in the raising of wards. That’s what deceived us for so long. But with the
uproar in the city, they got careless. Or their wards weren’t strong enough to
hold against the force of hate and fear that was beating on them. Then they betrayed
themselves.”

“And lured yonder darkmage into a trap,” said Estarion.

“They didn’t mean that,” Daruya said. “Can’t you hear me?
They don’t know.”

“I hear you,” he said, as maddening as ever, as if she were
no older than Kimeri. “I commend you, too, for saving him from himself.”

“How do you know what I did?”

“There now,” said Vanyi, coming between them as she so often
had before. “He’s got eyes, and he knows Kadin. It’s not hard to guess what you
two were up to, considering the storms that have been shivering the Great Ward
from end to end and shaking loose whole scores of lesser wards. This whole
kingdom is infested with them. Every temple and shrine and holy man’s hut must
have at least a warding or two, if not more.”