Arrows of the Sun (50 page)

The world reeled. That was fur that hampered his feet, a
great sweep of cloak spattered bright with blood. There was a body in it.

“No,” he said. He said it very clearly. Battle raged about
him. None of it touched him.

He knelt beside his mother. She breathing still. The knife
in her breast pulsed with the beating of her heart. No blood flowed there; the
blade stanched it.

It was not the only wound, not by far. The rest were less
clean, if less deadly.

Her head rested on Iburan’s knee. The priest looked
immeasurably weary; his head had fallen forward, his beard fanning on his
breast. Her eyes wandered from his to Estarion’s.

“Take,” she said, a bare breath of sound. “Take the knife.”

“You’ll die,” Estarion protested.

“Yes,” she said. “Take it.”

Estarion tossed his head in furious refusal. “No! We’ll get
you out of this—call healers—mages—”

“I am mage,” Iburan said, “and healer. I can do nothing.”

“Of course you can.” Estarion looked about. A wall of black
and scarlet circled them. White pierced it briefly, but fell to the flash of a
sword. Arrows were flying; one arced over him singing. And the people—the poor
people—would be dying, trapped like cattle in a pen.

“Hold her,” Estarion said to Iburan. “Keep her alive.”

He thrust himself to his feet. The scaffold was at his back.
He gathered, leaped, half-fell to the splintered wood of the floor. He cast a
glance about. The dreamer was dead. The rest were gone—alive, he hoped, and
under guard.

The battle was not as fierce as he had feared. The knot of
his guards was the worst of it. People fled the fighting, trampling one
another, sounding at last like human beasts, yelling their terror.

He was calm. Perfectly, icily, immovably calm. His mother
was dying. Mages had killed her. They thought maybe to deceive him, to feign
their coming through the crowd of his people, his Asanians. But he had felt the
Gate; he had known the wound it rent in the earth of his empire.

Something stirred in him; something shifted. It was not
anger. No. Nor fear. Nor even irony. These rebels whom he had punished had been
no more than a mask, their punishment a pretext. Now the enemy had shown his
hand.

Mages.

Mages of the Gates.

He looked down. Iburan looked up, and deliberately, coolly,
drew the knife from the wound in the empress’ breast. She sighed. And her
heart, her great wise heart, burst asunder.

Estarion’s skull was beating like a heart, beating fit to
burst. He clutched at it, rocking, dislodging the ul-cub. The cat fell yowling.

The empress was dead. Godri was dead. His father was dead.
All dead, all slain. Because of him. Because of Estarion.

He howled. There were no words in it, only rage. And power.
Raw, pulsing, blood-red power.

He had driven it down deep and bound it with chains of guilt
and terror, and sworn a vow beyond the limits of memory. Never to wield it
again, never to take a life, never to destroy a soul.

He had done it, and done it surpassingly well: he had shut
the door of memory, and made truth of the lie. Even mages had not seen the
deception. They called him cripple, feeble, maimed and all but powerless. But
his power lived, far down below his remembrance, waiting. Yearning to break
free.

He was dizzy, reeling, stunned with the shock of magic
reborn, but he was master of it still. He remembered the ways of it. He drew it
like a sword, great gleaming deadly thing, and raised it, and poised.

Mages, yes. Gate: so. Land weeping with pain, people a knot
of shadowy fear. He soothed them with blade turned to gentleness, calmed them,
brought them under his shield. And turned then. Outward.

So it had been when his father was dead, before the dark
came upon him. This clarity. This bright strength with its edge of blood.

It was never as they had taught him, those who called
themselves masters of mages. They feigned that it was difficult; that a mage
must struggle to see what was as clear as sun in a glass, and as simple to
encompass. Here were mages, little lights like candles in a wind, and the
threads of their lives stretched spider-thin behind them. To cut, so, one had
but to raise the sword. To snuff them out, one needed but a breath.

No. That too was memory, though dim. One should not wield
the sword so; and never the breath that was the soul. There was a price—prices.

And what was the price of his mother’s life, his father’s,
his friend and brother’s?

Not so high. Not, again, so bitter. They had suffered death
of the body. He would slay souls. And in that, be doomed and damned.

So simple. So very simple.

Starion
.

Iburan. Again. And another.

“Mother?” Gladness; soaring, singing joy. “Mother! You
live?”

No
. Faint, that,
but clear.
Starion, no. Never be tempted.
Never for me.

“Mother!” No answer. “
Mother
!”

She was gone. He raged and wept, but she would not come back
for him, nor for any mortal pleading.

Mages bobbed and glimmered like corpselights. He caught the
stink of them: self-delight and surety, and contempt for his frailty. They
could not even see the light that was in him. They were too weak. He struck
them blind, and they never knew.

He writhed in the darkness, twisting and coiling like a
dragon of fire. A magelight darted at him, wielding what no doubt it reckoned
deadly power. Estarion batted it aside.

It reeled. He caught it. He considered the thread that spun
from it, the light that flickered in it, and gently, most gently, plucked
thread and minute guttering spark from the bubble of light, and pricked the
bubble with a sharpened claw.

So simple. So precise. Body, soul, he left entire. Magery he
took away. And when the last corpse-pale glimmer was gone, he drifted alone in
the dark.

That too he had forgotten. What peace was here; what quiet,
where no storms came.

He coiled, uncoiled. So supple, this shape, freed from the
stiffness that was humanity. He had thought it madness to linger here. It had
been madness to depart.

Now at last he would stay. The dark was sweet and deep, the
silence blessed, and absolute.
Peace
,
his soul sang.
Peace
.

Vanyi had a few breaths’ warning. She should have had more
than that. Her Gate-sense had been uneasy for long days now, a broad sourceless
uneasiness, but nothing on which she could set hand or mind. Estarion’s
insistence on making a spectacle of himself was purely Estarion, and no more foolish
than anything else he might have taken it into his head to do. He was guarded
with all the vigilance that any of them might muster; she was part of the
wards, set among a faceless rank of Olenyai, weaving her strand of
autumn-colored silk into the greater web.

The warding that the blackrobes wore was a hindrance, until
realization came to her in a blaze of sudden light. Olenyai wards were made for
shield and guard against attack. In the face of power that would weave with
them and not oppose them, they yielded with astonishing ease. She was just
finding the way of it, just beginning to know the pride of her accomplishment,
when the web of the world began to fray.

She had never seen the opening of a Gate, never thought to
see it. Yet there was no denying it; no hoping that it was something else,
something less, something that did not pierce straight to the heart of the
wards and shatter them.

The breaking was not even deliberate. Estarion’s mages had
armed themselves against attack of steel or magery, but not against the forging
of a Gate. It drained the power out of their working and wielded it for itself,
drank deep of the resistance that some of them—fools, idiots, blind brave
hopeless innocents—mustered against it.

But not Vanyi. The Olenyai shields protected her, woven with
them as she was.

She dropped out of the web half-stunned but conscious, and
able to see with eyes of the body. She saw the battle begin, white-robed
assassins against Guardsmen in scarlet, Queen’s Guards in green.

No Olenyai. The assassins veered aside from them.

She saw the empress fall, and Iburan go down with her. She
saw Estarion leap shouting to his mother’s side. He wore a sword; he seemed to
have forgotten it, or he was trusting his guards beyond life and hope.

Or he had merely taken leave of his wits. When he struggled
back to the scaffold, bright target for any assassin with a bow or a throwing
knife, Vanyi remembered how to move.

She struggled within a suddenly solid wall of bodies. Yellow
eyes fixed on her, hard and flat as stones. No lion-eyes; all of these were
plain Asanian.

Even yet she had the key of their wards. She set it in its
lock and turned it carefully, not too swift, not too slow. Beyond the circle
the world was breaking-—the empress dead, the mages fallen, blood feeding the
Gate, and above them all, miraculously unharmed, the emperor.

She slid hands between two stone-still Olenyai and opened
them like the leaves of a door. Beyond their circle was havoc. More magery;
more Gate-work, taking its strength from the cattle-panic of the people as they
fled the blood and the battle.

Estarion stood erect on the scaffold. His face was perfectly
blank. His eyes were pure and burning gold.

“God,” Vanyi said, her voice lost in the tumult. “Oh,
goddess.”

No one else seemed even to see him. His guards held off the
assassins, taking bitter toll in blood and lives.

He was no man to them then, no living, breathing, fallible
human creature, but prize and victim of the battle. Those who fought to guard
him, those who fought to kill him, were oblivious to him else. And mages, both
his own and those others, knew that he had no power for the wielding.

She had heard his outcry in his riding: how he was nothing
to anyone but a child or a ruined mage; a weak thing, a thing to be guarded and
protected, with no strength of his own.

They were all going to regret that, she thought, remote and
very clear. He was like a mountain asleep under the moons, motionless,
lifeless, deep sunk in snow. But his heart was sun-bright fire. And soon,
between one breath and the next, it was going to shatter.

Vanyi wrenched eyes and mind away from him. The ring of
guards had widened. The assassins were falling back. The Varyani captain and
the captain of Olenyai had matters well in hand; they had even, gods knew how,
brought Lord Shurichan’s men under their command.

Within the ring, Estarion’s mages were beginning to recover.
But there were others among them, and that mountain of fire above them, and no
knowledge in any of them that there was danger apart from steel or simple
magery.

Down
! she cried
with her power.
My mages, my people—for
your lives’ sake, down! Shield!

Oromin touched her with incomprehension, but shielded as if
by instinct. Shaiyel and his little priestess were now clear in her awareness,
now locked in walls. The others fled before the lash of Vanyi’s urgency. But
one resisted.

Iburan
, Vanyi
pleaded.
Shield yourself He’s going to—

And where are
your
shields
? Iburan lashed back. And when
she wavered, struck so fiercely that she must shield or fall.

And the fire came down.

In the world of the living was nothing to see. A scattering
of priests fallen on their faces. A battle that went on unheeding. A lone
motionless figure on a scaffold, with the wind tugging at his scarlet cloak,
and the sun in his eyes.

But in the world of power, even behind the strongest of
shields, that figure was a tower of light. Corpse-candles danced and flickered
about it.

Mages, and none of Vanyi’s kind, either. If they had heard
her call to shield, they had chosen not to heed it. And they paid.

So would she have done if she had laid herself open to him.

He stripped the mages of their magery as easily as a child
strips a sea-snail of its shell, but left them alive to know what he had done
to them. He shut down the Gate without even thinking of it, healed the rent in
the land and the air, and as an afterthought, in passing, herded the last of
the assassins into the swords of his guard.

And then was silence.

Vanyi dragged herself to her feet. The fighting was ended.
The people were fled, all but the dead. No one stood in all that wide and windy
place but Estarion’s Guard and Lord Shurichan’s best, and a handful of
stumbling, staggering priest-mages, and she.

Scarlet pooled on the scaffold. Not blood, thank god and
goddess, but the emperor’s cloak, blood-red for war.

Estarion lay as if asleep. He did not wake when she touched
him. His ul-cub crouched beside him, bristling, but did not snarl or threaten.

A shadow' fell across her. She looked up into Olenyai veils,
and eyes all amber-gold.

A great anger swelled in her. It was not reasonable, she
knew it was not, but she was past reason. “You,” she said. “Where were you when
he needed you?”

“Fighting,” the Olenyas said. His voice was as cool as
always, but there was a tremor in it. “I could not come to him.”

Yes, he was shaking, and trying not to. She had no pity to
spare. “Look after him now, then. And by all gods there are, if you lay hand on
him except to guard him, I’ll flay your hide with a blunt knife.”

“He is not,” said the Olenyas, as if he struggled with the
words. “He is not—he is not dead.”

“We all may wish he were,” Vanyi said, “before the day is
out. See to him, damn you, and stop fluttering.”

That stiffened his back for him. He called up others of his
kind, and did as he was bidden.

She looked up. She was being stared at. Dark eyes, yellow
eyes, eyes of every shade between. No sea-grey or sea-green or sea-blue. That
mattered suddenly, very much. They were all alien here. And they were all
begging her to do their thinking for them.