Arrows of the Sun (53 page)

The Islander draped his arm about her neck. She was smaller
than he but sturdy enough, no doubt from hauling nets since she was big enough
to stand.

One hand gripped his wrist. The other circled his middle and
closed on his belt. So joined, like drunken lovers, they swayed and staggered
homeward.

o0o

Such as home was, a palace sunk in the stillness of
exhaustion, guards alert to every shadow, and its heart a dead empress, a dying
priest, an emperor drugged into a stupor. Korusan was recovering somewhat, but
Vanyi was too strong for him. She half-carried, half-dragged him into a chamber
that must be her own, and lowered him to the narrow bed. She was gentler than
she looked.

He struggled to sit up. “I cannot—I must—”

She held him down with one hand. He struck it aside and
surged to his feet.

Pain ripped through him. He gasped. The gasp caught on hooks
and tore.

It was true, what they said. One could cough up one’s lungs.
One did it in racking agony, in bloody pieces.

His veils were gone. A basin hovered in front of him. Hands
held it, and eyes behind that, eyes as grey as flints.

“Yes,” she said. “Now you have to kill me. You can wait till
you’re done dying.”

“I am not—” he said. Tried to say. His throat was raw, his
voice scraped bare.

“Stop it,” she said. Damnable arrogant peasant. “The blood’s
given out, hasn’t it? It’s a miracle you’ve lived as long as you have.”

“Kill me, then,” he whispered, since he could not say it
louder. “Get it over.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “You belong to Estarion. He’s the one to
say whether you live or die.”

“What? Is he your god?”

She smiled a blade-thin smile. “No. But I think he’s yours.”

That outrage laid him flat. The knives at least were not
sunk so deep, the pain faded to a dull roar. He was weak beyond bearing, but he
would live, he thought, for yet a while.

She laid the basin aside without apparent revulsion at its
contents, and bent over him. Her hands ran down the length of him, not
touching.

His flesh quivered. Magery. Hers was less repellent than the
others he had known, the pain of it sharper, but it was a clean pain.

“Goddess,” she muttered. “You’re a patchwork of ill-matched
magics. What were they trying to do to you? Kill you quicker, or kill you more
slowly? Or couldn’t they make up their minds?”

He refused to answer. She took no notice. “That’s half the
trouble. Look, there, that mending goes to war with this, and this—” She spat a
word that must have been a curse. “Hedge-wizards! Why in the hells couldn’t
they have let you crumble away in peace?”

“Perhaps I wished to live,” he said.

She paused. She seemed surprised that he could speak, even
in a croak. But she did not know Olenyai hardihood.

“You are a pretty thing,” she said. “That must be why he
fancies you.”

He bit his tongue. He was feeling stronger. More magery; but
again it was different. He could, in a fashion, see through it into the mage
herself: a tang that was jealousy, a white heat that must be her magic, a great
bright singing thing that seemed to be part of Estarion, and yet was not.

It was for that that she healed him. Because she fancied
that she saw it in him also, and because she thought that he had power,
somehow, to guard the emperor. She, like the Guild-mages, believed that there
had been a test; that Korusan had passed it, and proved himself bound to
Estarion. And no one so bound could turn traitor. It was not possible.

Nor was this that she did. She could not make him whole.
That was beyond any mage’s power. But she could give him a few days’ life—cycles,
she was thinking, even years. But his bones knew better.

He rose carefully, drew a breath. It did not catch. He
flexed his shoulders. They ached, but no more than they should.

She sat on her heels, watching him. He could kill her now.
He had his swiftness back, and his strength. She was unarmed, unwary,
bone-weary as mages were after a working. She would die before she mustered
wits to move.

Estarion loved her. There was no accounting for it—she had
neither beauty nor lineage nor sweetness of temper to endear her to any man,
let alone an emperor—but Korusan could hardly escape the truth of it.

“I let you live,” he said to her, “because I am not
ungrateful. And because you belong to him.”

“I do
not
—”

Her anger startled him; it made him laugh, which startled
her. They stared at one another in sudden silence.

“I begin to understand,” she said, “what else he sees in
you.”

o0o

Not until he was long away from her did it strike Korusan
what she had done.

He was Olenyas. He was—or he thought he had been—warded against
magic. And she had worked magic on him. Easily, potently, as if there had been
no defenses on him at all.

He should be alarmed, but he was grimly delighted. Guild-mages
scorned her for her common lineage, her lack of training in their arts of
magic. And she made nothing of their magics on him; spat contempt at the
weaving of them. She was more than they could imagine, greater danger than they
might have anticipated.

It would be a pleasure to see their faces when they learned
what this priestess-witch was. Even if he died thereafter, he would die in some
measure of content.

When Estarion woke from his drugged sleep, he was alone.
But there was a memory of presence—piercing to senses that, dulled for so long,
were grown painfully keen.

Haliya. As easily as he breathed, his magery followed the
trail of her out of the room and through a maze of passages to the women’s
chambers. He did not track her within. She was safe there among his mother’s
guards.

Wild joy smote him. Mage—he was a mage again. But then with
memory came the stab of grief, felling him even as he rose.

Merian was dead. He had quarreled with her endlessly,
fretted the bonds of love, duty, honor, flown in the face of them all until
surely she would learn to hate him. But she never had, no more than he had
hated her for what she was: empress, priestess, mother of his body.

Robed as a priest but cloaked as a king, he went in to the
hall where she lay. They had given her a bier worthy of her royalty, coverlets
of silk, great pall of cloth of gold. She lay in the stillness of the dead, her
beautiful hair woven into the many plaits of a northern queen. Gold was on her
breast above the pall, and gold in her ears, and gold set with jewels on her
arms, her wrists, her fingers.

Her panoply, she had always called that, like the armor that
a king wore into battle. When she would be in comfort she wore an old
threadbare robe, her hair loose or braided down her back, and no jewel but the
armlet that her royal lover had given her before he made her his empress.

That she wore still, a plain thing amid the rest, copper
that was much prized among her people, inlaid with golden wires shaping a skein
of dancing women. She was the tall one, the one whose beauty shone even through
the rough unskillful work. For her Sunlord had made it himself, given it to her
in shyness that by all accounts was alien to him, and in accepting it, she had
accepted all of him—not the man alone but the empire he ruled.

Now they danced together on the other side of the night.
Their son knelt by her bier, hands fisted in the pall, and wept.

He wept hard, but he did not weep long. He raised his head.
Her guards, tall women in bright armor, had averted their eyes. Tears glistened
on their cheeks.

He scrubbed them from his own. His eyes had burned dry. He
would not weep again.

Rage swelled where grief had been, rage as white and cold
and pitiless as the sun that pierced the high windows of the hall.

It thrust him to his feet. It drove him through the palace
in a train of startled people, animals, even a lone brainless bird that had
escaped its cage.

The rebels who had begun it all were gone. He began to order
out the hunt; then paused. They were but puppets. Whether they thought they
acted of themselves, or knew that they were a feint, it did not matter. He
knew. He had memory of the Gate, and of the powers that sustained it.

First he must look to the care of his mother’s body. She
would not be burned as priests of the Sun were; she was priestess of the
goddess, and would be given to the dark and the silence. He did not know that
he wished her entombed here, unless he made the whole city her tomb; and that
was madder even than he was minded to be.

A place waited for her in Endros Avaryan beside the body of
her lord, in the tomb of the emperors beneath the Tower of the Sun. Yet that
was far to go, and revolt between, that might swell to war. And there was the
matter of revenge for her death.

Sunlords are above
revenge
. Her voice, his memory tricking him in a dart of sunlight.

Sunlords had never needed revenge; never, until Estarion,
been the playthings of hidden enemies. Sarevadin who had been taken by mages
and stripped of all but the raw self, had known by whom she was taken, and why.
Hers had been open war, mage against mage and no quarter given.

He was prey to poison, treason, assassins. They had taken
his father, his mother, his servant. They had robbed him of youth and strove
now to rob him of manhood.

No more.

“My lord.”

A priest, a mage in torque and braid, tawny head bent.
Estarion stared at him, empty for the moment of speech.

“My lord, will you come?”

“To what?” Estarion asked him. “Treachery?”

The priest’s head flew up. He was not pure Asanian: that
pride was a plainsman’s, and those eyes, yellow though they were, narrow above
the high cheekbones. Power shimmered on him, bright with anger. “Yes, my lord,
there has been treachery. The high priest of Avaryan in Endros is dying because
of it. Will you deign to visit him on his deathbed?”

No
, Estarion
thought. There was no reason in it, no mortal sense.

The priest had no pity for him. “I would not have troubled
you, sire. But he insisted.”

How odd to be despised. How rare. He was loved or he was
hated. Sometimes he was feared. But scorn—that was a new thing.

“Take me,” he said.

o0o

They had laid Iburan in a room that must have been a
servant’s, with a bed as narrow as a northerner’s, and no softening of silks or
velvets. Braziers there were none. He did not need them. He had his priests and
his priestesses, and the heat of their power.

He lay in the midst of them, burning with fever. His body
could bear no touch of coverlet; his weight upon the bed was pain. The torque
about his neck burned as if it had been molten, but none of them had dared to
take it off.

He should have been dead long ago, but he clung to life with
fierce persistence.

Estarion thrust through a wall of pain, and dropped to one
knee beside the bed. The face that had been so beautiful was ravaged with
poison. The body was grossly swollen, suppurating with sores. It stank.

Just so, he thought, remote and burning cold. Just so had
his father been.

“They lack imagination, our enemies,” he said.

Dark eyes opened in the ruined face. They warmed at sight of
Estarion. The voice was a husk of itself, but there should have been no voice
at all. “Starion. Still angry with me, then?”

“No,” Estarion said. “Never again, foster-father.”

Iburan’s eyes filled with tears. They scalded as they overflowed.
With infinite gentleness Estarion wiped them away. Even that cost Iburan pain.

“I took your power,” Estarion said. He had not known till he
said it. The horror came after; the bleak hatred of himself. “I have killed
you.”

“My own fault,” said Iburan, “for getting in the way.”

“Mine,” cried Estarion. “My fault. Oh, Avaryan! It’s I who
should be dead, and not you.”

“Stop that,” said Iburan. “Time enough when we’re all dead,
to squabble over the bones. Now listen to me. While you were dealing with
mages—and dealing surpassingly well, too; you were a marvel to watch—I happened
to notice a thing or two. It slowed me down when I should have been getting out
of your way, which was foolish of me, but I learned somewhat. Watch your
Olenyai, Starion. If they aren’t part of this, they know enough to damn them in
any court of justice.”

Estarion did not care. Iburan was dying, Merian was dead.
What did anything matter but that?

But Iburan’s intensity held him, and his hand, clasping
Estarion’s wrist with a shadow of its old strength. “Listen to me, Estarion.
Watch them. The one they set to spy on you—the young one with the lion-eyes—”

“He’s no spy,” Estarion snapped, forgetting to be gentle.

Iburan paid no attention. “He’ll kill you if he can. He’s
been ordered to do it.”

“He loves me,” Estarion said.

Iburan sighed. His breath rattled; he coughed. “No doubt he
does. He hates you, too. Watch him, Estarion. Promise me.”

The light in Iburan’s eyes was fading, his grip weakening.
It was only the mages’ light, Estarion tried to tell himself, flickering as it
was wont to do.

“Starion,” said Iburan, “when you sing the death-rite for
her—remember—how she loved best the hymn of the morning star. Sing that for
her, for me.”

“You’ll sing it yourself,” Estarion said with sudden
fierceness. “You won’t die. I won’t let you.”

He called his power. It was white fire, hot gold, sun’s splendor.
The priest-mages fell back, struck to fear. They remembered too well what that
torrent of magery had done. Its consequence lay before them, dying powerless.

“No.”

It was simple, barely to be heard, and it had no magic in
it. But it checked the calling of Estarion’s power. It held him motionless.

“Starion, don’t. I’m too far gone. And, son of my heart,
much as I love you, I think it’s time I left you. I’ve guarded you, bound you,
held you back till I nigh destroyed you. Better for you that I go. I’ve no fear
of the dark land. She’s waiting for me there, and her lord, my lord, whom I
loved.”