Spear of Heaven (4 page)

Once she had said it, it sounded hollow, bombastic, a child’s
arrogance. Chakan said nothing of that. He said, “What can you do that the
Master of mages can’t?”

“Be my grandfather’s heir,” she answered without even
thinking. “Speak for him with the authority of his own blood.”

“So you won’t escape him even on the other side of the
world.”

Daruya hissed at him. “I’m not trying to run away from my
inheritance! I just want to stand on my own feet.”

“And make your own mistakes.” He lay back on his flat stone.
After a moment he slipped the fastenings of his veils and let them fall free,
baring his face to the wind and the sun.

It was a handsome face, beautiful in fact, as Asanians of
pure blood and long, close breeding could be: smoothly oval, white as new
ivory, nose straight and finely carved, lips full, chin as sweetly rounded as a
girl’s. And yet it was not a girlish face, not at all. The right cheek bore
healed scars, four thin parallel lines running from cheekbone to jaw; and a
fifth, matched to the rest, so new that it still bled a little.

Daruya caught her breath at that. “You didn’t tell me you
were being raised to the fifth rank.”

He slanted a glance at her. “I didn’t know. My Master called
me in in the middle of the night, ordered me to unveil, and marked me as soon
as he saw my face.”

“He didn’t by any chance say why?” she said.

“Eventually,” said Chakan. “I’m to take ten Olenyai to the
other side of the world, to guard the mages.”

Daruya’s fury was so perfect that it did not even blur her
senses. “Mages don’t need guarding.”

“For this they might,” he said. He laced his fingers beneath
his head, raised a knee, looked utterly off guard.

That, she knew, was a complete deception. She was fast, and
Olenyai-trained—but if she leaped, he would meet her in the air, and give her a
ferocious fight.

She might have welcomed it. But she was stalking other prey.
“Tell me why they chose you.”

“Because I’m very good at what I do,” he said honestly. “And
because I’m used to mages.”

“And,” she said, “because they can’t get at you with magic.
That’s it, isn’t it? That shield of yours—they want it. Maybe need it, if it’s
mages they fight.”

“They also want my skill with the swords, and the ten
bred-warriors I can lead. I’m going to ask for Rahai. He’s so good with his
hands, he never has to use his swords.”

He was happy, hells take him—brimming over with his good
fortune.

She sprang. To her startlement, he did not meet her in
midair. When she struck the rock with bruising force, he was gone.

She lay winded, gasping for air. His voice sounded above her
head. “I was thinking. You can’t wear the robes and the veils—you’re too tall.
But there’s another way.”

She rolled onto her back, still wheezing. “What—in hells—”

“It is a pity you overtop the tallest of us by a head,” he
said, maddeningly roundabout as Asanians were when one most wanted them to be
direct. “Your eyes would do. Your skin is darker than most, but in veils that’s
less noticeable. Do you think your daughter will be another long tall creature?
She’s shaping for it already, poor thing.”

“You babble like a flutterbird,” said Daruya. She could
breathe again, if shallowly. Her ribs hurt. “I can’t play the Olenyas. It would
cost you your honor at least.”

“It would cost me my life,” he said with no perceptible
apprehension. “It might be worth it, mind, for the splendor of the trick. But
not unless you’re mage enough to make yourself smaller.”

She cut through his nonsense with a voice like a blade. “You
said there was another way.”

“There might be,” he said. “It would cost, too, seeing as to
how I’m sworn in service to the emperor, and the emperor has forbidden you to
go.”

“Swear yourself in service to me,” she said.

“I can’t do that,” said Chakan. He said it lightly, but
there was no yielding in it.

She sat up carefully, glaring at him. “You’d sacrifice your
honor to dress me in Olenyai robes, but you won’t honorably swear yourself to
the heir of the blood royal?”

“Robes are the outer garments of honor. Oaths are its heart.
I’m sworn to the throne, and through it to the emperor. When you are empress,”
he said reasonably, “I’ll serve you till death, with all my heart.”

“But you’ll break your oath if you help me escape the
emperor.”

“I will not,” he said. “You’ll serve the emperor on this
embassy, though he may think, at the moment, that you won’t.”

Daruya’s head was spinning. It might, to be sure, be the
shock of her fall. But one did not have to plunge middle first onto a rock to
reel before Asanian logic.

He held her and patted her while she emptied her stomach on
the stones. “There,” he said. “Next time you attack me, do it somewhere where
you can land soft.”

She snarled at him. He smiled sweetly, sadly, and buried the
evidence of her foolishness, producing from the depths of his robes what looked
for all the world like a gardener’s trowel. Probably it was. Olenyai robes
could conceal anything, and often did.

When he was done, he crouched in front of her, arms resting
on knees. “You do want to go, and he did give you leave, though he rescinded
it. I’m thinking he might be overcautious as you say—emperor or not, he’s a
grandfather, too, and he dotes on you. I’m also thinking you may have the right
of it; they’ll need you out there, your Sun-blood and your training, and your
power to speak for the emperor in the emperor’s absence.”

“You think too much,” muttered Daruya.

He grinned at that. “Yes, don’t I? I never learned to shut
myself off and be simple muscle. It’s a flaw in a warrior. It’s rather useful
in a commander.”

“If he lives long enough to become one.” She leaned forward,
no matter what it did to her ribs and her uncertain stomach. “Are you going to
roll me up in a blanket and hide me in the baggage?”

“Very near,” he answered. “I’m not visible to mages, yes?
One told me once—unwisely, I’m sure—that I cast a kind of shadow; when someone
stands in it, he vanishes, too. Suppose you dressed in black, not Olenyai, not
exactly, but cloaked and hooded, and rode one of my remounts. You can become a
shadow, yes? If you blur the eyes and I blur the mind, what will anyone see but
a troop of Olenyai and their seneldi, and nothing more?”

Daruya wanted it to be so easy—wanted it with all that was
in her. But she had learned to be wary. Yes, even she, with her name for
recklessness. “If I’m caught, there’s hells to pay.”

“Don’t be caught,” he said with grand assurance.

“It’s not sensible,” she said.

“Of course it is,” said Chakan. “Not that I don’t think your
grandfather is perfectly right, as far as he goes. You should stay safe where
he can protect you. But that’s no way to fly a hawk. You have to let it off the
fist, or it never learns to hunt.”

“Asanian logic,” she said. “And I’ve nothing left in my
stomach, to cast at your feet.”

“I’ll survive the lack,” said Chakan. He sat on his heels,
comfortable, quite clearly pleased with himself. “The Guildmaster means to leave
as soon as may be—before sunset today, I’m told. You’ll have to be quick if you’re
to do it; and clever, too, to make your farewells without being caught.”

“I can mask my face and my thoughts,” she said. “I was
trained to rule an empire.”

He was impervious to irony as to the weapons of mages: it
sank into the shadow of his self and vanished. “Well and good. We meet in the
Guildhall in the hour of the sixth prayer. You’ll be a shadow, remember. A
whisper in the air.”

She stood. It was amazing how elation could kill pain, even
of ribs that, she suspected, were cracked. She met his grin with one at least
as wide. Hers had edges in it, the sharpness of teeth. “You could have told me
this before you let me play the ranting fool.”

“But you needed to rant,” he said. “And who knew? You might
see sense. This isn’t sense that we’re up to.”

“No. It’s necessity.” She reached out a hand for him to
grasp, pulled him up. In the moment of unbalance he shifted, treacherous,
seeking to pull her down. But she was ready for him. She set her feet, made
herself a rock in the earth.

He laughed up at her, for, standing, she was much taller
than he. “No, it won’t be as splendid as if you were one of my Olenyai, but
riding as my shadow—yes, that will do. We’ll sing it when we’re done, like the
song of the prince and the beggar’s daughter. She was dead, you see, but he
loved her withal.”

“I don’t intend to die on this journey,” said Daruya, “or
for a long time after. I’ll live to take your oath from the Throne of the Sun,
Olenyas. You have my word on it.”

“And the word of a Sunchild,” he said, half laughing, half
deadly earnest, “is unalterable law.”

The hall of the ninth Gate was quiet. With its Gate hidden
behind a veil, a curtain of white silk no paler than the walls, it seemed but
an empty chamber, the hall of a temple, perhaps.

Its floor of inlaid tiles made a map of the world as mages
knew it. Half was wrought in intricate detail, with cities marked in colored
stones. One that was gold, heart of the west, was Kundri’j Asan. One that was a
firestone, heart of the east, was Endros Avaryan that the first of the Sunlords
had built. Between them lay a great jewel like a star: Asan-Gilen, Estarion’s
city, that had brought together the realms of Sun and Lion, and given them a
place where neither claimed the sovereignty.

The other half of the map was vaguer, its shape less clearly
defined. Its cities were few. Crystals marked the Gates, a thin line across the
broad mass of the land. Mages had traveled to each place, the first sailing in
ships across the wide and terrible sea, coming to land and building the first
Gate. New mages had come through the Gate, traveling on foot across a vast
plain, and at each Brightmoon-cycle’s journey, building a new Gate through
which yet newer mages could come.

The eighth Gate was set on the knees of mountains that to
its builders had seemed mighty. But those who followed discovered that the
mountains were but foothills, and low at that. They climbed to the summit of
the world, and nearly died in doing it; but when they would have turned back,
too feeble to build their Gate, strangers found them and led them to safety.

There in the mountains that touched the sky, they found a
valley, and in the valley a kingdom: the Kingdom of Heaven, its people called
it. There was the ninth Gate, the Gate that had fallen. On the map it was
unharmed, a crystal of amethyst—the color, said the mages who came back, of the
sky above the mountains’ peaks.

Vanyi stood pondering the color of the sky and the integrity
of a crystal and other such inconsequentialities, while the others came
together near the veil of the Gate. They were not many as expeditions went;
dangerously few, if they were to be an army. Six mages, three of the light and
their twinned mages of the dark. Ten black-robed Olenyai with their commander.
Mounts and remounts for them all, since there were no seneldi on that side of
the world, laden with such baggage as they could not live without; the Guardian
of the eighth Gate would provide what more was needed for the ascent into the
mountains.

All together they crowded that end of the hall, with much
clattering and snorting. One senel in particular, a handsome dun mare, was
being difficult. The Olenyai commander took her in hand, gentling her with soft
words.

Vanyi recognized his voice and, as she came out of her
reverie, his hands, strong for their smallness and beautifully shaped. Her
brows rose. She had hoped that the Master of Olenyai would send his best, but
she had not expected him to send Chakan.

Chakan the prince, some called him, because he was so free
of the emperor’s courts and counsels. He had been raised with the
princess-heir, and was as close to her as a brother. He managed somehow to
avoid the malice and the envy of courts, to be both foster-brother and perfect
servant. His only flaw, in Vanyi’s estimation, was that no mage could read him.

He made Vanyi think of another who had worn the veils and
the swords, who also had been born with shields against magic. But that had
been no Olenyas, for all the purity of his blood and the strictness of his
training. He as much as duty and empire and her own obstinacy had taken
Estarion from her.

That one was long dead. Estarion had killed him, killed the
last descendant—save only himself—of the Golden Emperors. This was no long-lost
Son of the Lion. The eyes in the veil were yellow gold, to be sure, but they
were not lion-eyes, not so great-irised that they seemed to have no whites at
all unless they opened wide; nor did they bear such a weight of bitterness as
Koru-Asan had borne. Chakan of the Olenyai, for all his gifts and his skill,
was an innocent, and devoted to his emperor.

Which, no doubt, was precisely why the Master had sent him.
Vanyi liked him. She even trusted him—as long as he was not called on to do
anything that would run counter to his emperor’s purposes.

Vanyi met eyes that were true eyes of the Lion, set in the
face of a black king from the north. Estarion regarded her unsmiling. She had
not seen him come in. He could walk like a shadow when it suited him, even
before the Master of the mages.

“Did you lock your granddaughter in her rooms?” Vanyi asked
him. “I thought I’d see her by now, trying to beg or cajole or threaten me into
taking her in spite of you.”

“I left her in an imperial sulk,” he said, “but I didn’t
think it necessary to lock the door. She understands her duty, however much she
may resist it.”

“I hope so,” said Vanyi. She held out her hands. He took
them without constraint, and set a kiss in each palm.

Her breath caught. She turned it into a flicker of laughter.
“I’m going to miss you. Who’d have thought it?”