Spear of Heaven (39 page)

All together they struck the wards. No such defense had been
made to withstand the full power of Sun and dark, wielded by one who cared not
at all whether it killed them. The light of the Sun seared the wards from end
to end of their expanse. The darkness in Kadin opened wide to swallow them.

And they were through, into the sanctuary.

oOo

The circle in its actual presence looked like a gathering
of priests about an elder. In magesight it was like one of the peaked round
towers that were so common in Shurakan, its many pillars holding up a tall
conical roof adorned with a glitter of ornaments, a spikiness of cupolas, a
bristle of rods that called away the lightnings from the rest of the tower. The
king’s crown of Shurakan was very like it in shape and semblance.

This was a tower of prayer—of magic, many-pillared but
rising to a common center. That was Esakai, anchoring the chant with his voice,
thinned with age as it was, but true.

He faltered not at all as his wards were broken, his shrine
invaded. His priests were rapt in the chant. Their minds were pure prayer, pure
magic.

Mages never let themselves be so lost in their workings, even
when they raised the circle. It was dangerous: it could cost them power and
sanity. But it was a mighty sacrifice. It left them all open to the wielding of
the one who led them, the one who preserved will and awareness, and directed
their power as he chose.

“As you choose,” said a voice, clear and cold and seeming
inhuman. It was Daruya’s, familiar yet unreachably strange. This was the
Sunchild pure, stripped of passion and of petulance, speaking with the clarity
of a god.

“You choose this, Esakai of Ushala temple. You work your
will upon this edifice of magic. No god speaks through you or wields you. Only
your own desire.”

“You are blind and deaf to my gods,” Esakai said—chanted,
weaving through the drone of the priests. “You know nothing. You are nothing.
You shall be nothing.”

Nothing, nothing,
nothing
. The echoes throbbed in the heart of power, sapped it of strength,
drained light away and made darkness dim and frail.

Vanyi’s own power lashed out in pure denial. She would
not
. She refused.

She almost laughed. Daruya, great artist of refusal, wove
power with Vanyi’s and strengthened it immeasurably. She saw the humor in it,
too: laughter, painful but true, and levity that turned the priests’ chant to a
shimmer of wry mirth.

Truly, Vanyi realized. The chant had faltered. Priests were
giggling or grinning or simply looking surprised.

“Yes, laugh,” said Daruya with sudden fierceness. “Laugh at
this liar who bids you work magic in the name of his gods. No god speaks to
him. He is a mage, no more, no less. A worker of his own will on the gods’
creation.”

“You are a demon,” sang Esakai, “sent to tempt us. See, my
holy ones! See how this child of the realms below has twisted and mocked all
that you are.”

“I am the Sun’s child,” said Daruya. “You are a mage and a
ruler of mages. Your kind drove the goddess’ children to Su-Shaklan and taught
them to hate the very name of magic. You defended yourselves with lies and
deceptions. You named yourselves priests, hid in your temples, worked your
magics in secret, under the name of prayer. But they are still magics. You are
still mages. You cannot deny the truth of what you are.”

There was more than conviction in her voice. There was
power. She spoke truth as only a mage could speak it.

It swayed those priests who had fallen already out of the
chant, but the rest were bound still, held by the power of the one who led
them. The circle was diminished, but it held.

Beyond the world of the senses, where magery came into its
own, Vanyi felt the trembling of ground beneath her feet. Gates were woven with
the substance of every world. This prayer, this working, sought to unweave it,
thread by thread on the loom of the worlds, Gate by Gate. One by one, from
Shurakan outward, through the place where its Gate had been, the Gate that was
now a living thing.

Vanyi heard a child’s voice, soft, frightened. “Mama. Mama,
I’m all strange inside.”

Daruya had Kimeri in her arms and such an expression on her
face as no enemy should ever live to see. Kimeri was bleeding light. The
swifter the chant, the swifter she bled. Her center was darkness, shot with
stars: the Gate, and the focus of the working.

Shadow swept across the circle. Silence rode it. Kadin the
darkmage wielded it, smiting it as he had smitten the wards on the door, with
the same perfect heedlessness of the cost.

He had won through the wards. The circle was stronger. It took
its strength from the toppling of Gates. The chant wavered, the Gates ceased to
fall, but only for a moment. It rose again, mightier than before. Kadin fell
reeling back.

He caught himself, sprang forward once more. He would do it
again and yet again, till he destroyed himself.

Vanyi called in all the power she had. She felt the
gathering of Daruya’s magery, bright blazing thing, feeding Kadin’s darkness,
giving him all her temper, all her pettiness, all her rebellions both lesser
and greater—all her weaknesses melded into one great strength.

She made of it not a weapon but a vision. Clarity. Truth
unalloyed, driven straight and clean and true, direct to the heart of the
circle. Full into the mind and soul of the one who led it, the priest who
believed that he served his gods.

He could refuse it, but Daruya was a master of refusal.

She knew precisely how to force it past his resistance. He
could blind himself to it, but she of all people knew the art of opening eyes
and mind that were shut, locked in stubborn certainty. He could even try to run
away from it—but she caught him and held him and made him see exactly what he
had done, the good and the ill, the piety and the folly. Gates opened rather
than broken, powers roused that had never known the name of Shurakan, worlds
shivered on their foundations, that must break under the weight of his beloved
kingdom.

He had fallen silent in shock and resistance. The chant went
on without him. It had its own power now, its own will to completion. The magic
wove itself, unweaving worlds.

Vanyi cut across it with her own strong force of truth, her
dart of power into each separate mind, rapt, entranced, lost in the working, it
did not matter. She spared nothing of her strength.

She met a force of darkness, darkmage striking with the same
truth and the same vision. He too spared nothing, not even mercy. Minds shrank
in horror from what they had done, from what they were trying to do. He showed
them their folly bare. He turned them on themselves, and their working with them.

One by one and then together, they fell from the working.

But the working was too far advanced. It sustained itself.
It fixed on the focus that was the youngest of all the Gates, the one that
dwelt in living flesh. It poised to strike, and in striking to fell them all,
Gates, worlds, whatever was woven in its substance and so must be unwoven.

One last time the darkmage sprang. He made himself a shield.
He took the force of the working full in his center.

It pierced him through. It unmade him. It shattered him from
center to farthest extent, body, mind, and power.

It veered aside not a hair’s breadth.

Kimeri could do nothing. She was in pain beyond anything
Vanyi could imagine, rent from within and without, and that only by the
beginning of the working. Her mother held her in silence more terrible than if
she had raged or wept.

Estarion would have Vanyi’s hide if she let both his heirs
be destroyed by a mage-working gone mad. She thrust her sluggish body toward
them, with its stumbling heart, its blurring sight, its cold feet. She was
dying, that was perfectly obvious. She would do her best to take the working
with her.

Kimeri gasped. It was loud in the silence. She struggled in
her mother’s arms. Daruya, taken off guard, dropped her.

She stumbled as her feet struck the floor, but she did not
fall. Her whole body shook. Her face was stark white, her eyes white-rimmed.
She raised her hand, the one that flashed gold. “No,” she said remarkably
clearly, remarkably steadily. “I don’t want to. I won’t.”

The working had no awareness to know what she said, or how
she resisted. It struck her hand.

And stopped. She did not pause to be amazed. She pushed
against it—only the one hand, only the
Kasar
,
with wisdom that must be instinct—and it gave way. It yielded. It flinched,
even, before that palmful of burning gold.

She braced her body and leaned into the working as if it had
been a vast unwieldy creature, an ox that stood in her way and sought to
trample her. She pushed it back and back.

Just as she began to waver, as the working began to resist,
Daruya set her hand above Kimeri’s. Gold as bright, but larger, woman-large,
with strong power behind it, and the force of the god.

Between the two of them they drove the working inward toward
the place where it was born, the circle’s center, the man standing alone there,
with his priests fallen or stunned or fled. It shrank as it retreated. Sun’s
power withered it, Sunchildren’s will overwhelmed it.

They might have tried to bend it aside from the man in the
circle. Or they might not. Vanyi had loved the Sun’s brood for forty years and
more, served them, protected them, been as kin to them. But she had never
understood them; never been part of them.

Whatever they willed, whatever they intended, the working,
shrunk now to the breadth of a javelin and as sharply deadly, pierced straight
through the priest’s heart.

He made no effort to escape it. Vanyi hoped she would never
see such despair again, such perfect awareness of what, all unwitting, he had
done. Even before the spear struck, he willed himself out of life, casting his
soul upon the wheel, seeking life on life of expiation.

Not in truth because he had tried to unmake the worlds.
Because he had failed, and in failing brought both magic and ruin to Shurakan.

The power was fallen that had ruled so short a time in
Shurakan. The people of the Summer City, both city and palace, woke as from a
dream to find their city half in ruins. In the palace, lords and servants
wandered as if lost.

All of them had seen the vision that Daruya forced upon the
priests in Matakan’s temple. All had known exactly what it was that they
followed, and exactly what it was that they feared.

She had never meant it to spread so far. The priests’
working had woven it into the fabric of the realm. They had the truth now,
whether they wanted it or no.

Most of them forgot it soon enough, either because their
minds could not absorb it or because they refused to accept it. Some few died
of it—her fault, and her grief forever after. The rest had learned something,
if only that magery was indeed something to fear.

The queen, who had seen and known it all, was strongest,
too. It was she who saw to the tending of the fallen priests, both the dead and
the living, and the cleansing of the temple.

Inevitably, people discovered who she was. They began to
trickle in as the night reeled into dawn, to look on her face that had gained
nothing of beauty in the long hours since she slept. None offered to speak to
her, still less to denounce her or to sink a dagger in her heart.

Word spread, soft on the morning wind.
The queen lives. She sits in the temple of the ox-god who defended
White Moon-Goddess and led her into Su-Shaklan. Now he defends her child. He
blesses her; he protects her as his own
.

oOo

The king came in the evening. He did not come willingly,
not he whose pride deafened his ears to the gods’ voices. His allies were
humbler or more sincerely afraid. They understood that their leader was dead,
his body laid before the god, and his priests dead or vanquished.

Their alliance was broken. They looked about them and saw
lords who had come out of their houses with armed men at their backs, and the
lord of Janabundur foremost. They saw a court diminished to nothing, its
ministers suddenly and numerously indisposed, and its Minister of Protocol
dead, who would have had the power to impose order on confusion.

They came to the queen one by one, mute, as suppliants to a
goddess, or transgressors to a ruler from whom they could not expect
forgiveness. She forgave them—how could she not? Without them she had no court
and no kingdom. And she was fond of them, as one is of one’s erring children,
one’s foolish servants.

Last and most lonely and most stiffly proud came the king.
He had been left all alone in his splendid new palace, without even a
bodyservant to wait on him. They were all gone. All fled, or huddled in and
about the temple in which the queen sat.

When he came, she was sitting at a table in the abbot’s
workroom, trying to eat a roast fowl. Kimeri, none the worse for her night’s
terrors, was up from sleeping the day away, and nibbling a wing. The others
were still asleep or pretending to be, in priests’ cells that had been emptied
for them, with Olenyai come from House Janabundur to guard them—except Rahai,
who insisted that he was going to guard Kimeri and nobody else.

People kept looking at her strangely and muttering about her
being a Gate. She was not, not exactly. She was a mage and a Sunchild who
happened to have a Gate inside of her, along with the Sun’s fire and her magery.
Vanyi wanted to pummel her with questions, but Vanyi was not going to be
pummeling anybody for a while. Aledi had got there just before she fell over,
and kept her heart beating when it tried again and determinedly to stop.

Vanyi was still alive, but it had been a near thing. She
should have told Aledi long ago that she was having trouble with her heart; it
was nothing a healer-mage could not mend, not if she knew about it soon enough.
As it was, Vanyi was going to be well, but it would take her a long time, and
she would have to be very careful. No mage-battles. No arguments, even, most of
all with Aledi, who stopped being gentle when she had to contend with difficult
invalids.