Arrows of the Sun (62 page)

She poured power into it. He poured it away. It roared
through blood and bone. It battered the barrier of his skin. It found exit in
the
Kasar
.

He barred it. He did not know how. He did not care. He shut
the gate that would have saved him.

“Stop it!” she shrieked at him. “You’ll burn alive!”

And he would not when the Sunborn woke?

She raked nails across his face.

So low she had sunk, she who had been both prince and
princess, Sunlord and Sunborn empress. He counted the sting of those small
wounds with all the rest, and laughed. It was pain, not mirth. His throat was
full of fire. He could hold no more of it.

And more came. He would break, he would die.

Or he would grow to hold it.

As a flower grows, or a child, because it must; because its
nature is to become greater than it is. Swiftly, of necessity; slowly, in the
order of things, little by little, each small part of it full and complete
before the next began. One could lose oneself in the wonder of it.

His body was healing. His soul would not. Grief was nothing
that even mages could mend, except with forgetfulness.

And still the power came. She was draining it out of
herself, and out of the working she had made, and—dear god—into the spell that
bound the Sunborn.

She had not been waking the sleeper at all. She had been
fighting him. Estarion, mistaking her, had come deathly close to breaking the
spell himself.

The flow of power had stopped. Sarevadin was not empty; she
could not be while she lived. But she was weakened, and sorely.

Vanyi was weaving her web again. She took its strands from
her own substance, plaiting it with threads of stonelight.

She murmured to herself as she wove. It sounded less like a
spell than like a string of curses.

“Help her.”

He glanced down startled.

Sarevadin’s eyes were open, no anger in them, no scorn of
his idiocy. “She’s not strong enough to do it alone. Help her.”

Estarion tossed his aching head. “What can I do? What if I
go wrong again? What if I finish what I began, and wake the Sunborn?”

Her brows drew together as if with temper, but she sighed.
“I don’t suppose I should expect you to trust your power, after all you’ve done
to it. But you have to learn, and quickly. She thinks she’s enough. She’s not.
With you she may be.”

“What can I—”

“Shut up and do it.”

He could not. He did not know how.

Sarevadin climbed the ladder of his body. He tensed to
thrust her away. She caught at his arms. Her hands were burning cold. “Do it,”
she gritted. “Do it, damn you.”

He loosed a thread of power. It met Vanyi’s shields and
snapped back.

Sarevadin shook him, nearly oversetting them both.
“Do it!”

He could not. His touch was too strong. Even the brush of it
frayed the web.

“Fool of a boy,” muttered Sarevadin. She closed her eyes.

He clutched her before she fell. But she was firm enough on
her feet, with him for a prop. Power hissed and crackled about her. It stung.
He was caught; he could not let go.

Her power seized his with ruthless strength and wielded it.
Full in the heart of the weaving. Darting through the knots and plaiting,
needle-thin, needle-sharp. Drawing them in. Making them strong. Plucking the
net from the hands that had made it, and casting it over the man on the bier.

He tossed beneath it, raising hands that clawed to rend it
to rags. He was not awake, not yet, but his anger was roused, and it ruled him.

Sarevadin crooned: to herself, it might have been, or to the
web that strained and tore. Estarion’s power was in her hands still. She poured
her own through it, taking from it what she needed: youth, strength, raw
unshaped will. She gave it shape. She wove the web anew, and herself into it,
as Vanyi had.

Vanyi had kept her soul apart from the making. Sarevadin’s
soul was the making. Her life was her power. Her body was wrought of it. She
shifted as she had on the worldroad, a woman to man to maiden to youth to shape
of both and neither. And still she wove, singing her wordless song.

The sleeper fought her with mindless rage. His dream had
turned to fire.

She sang it down. She cooled it with water of the soul,
sweet spring of light, soft rain on parched earth. She sang calm; she sang
sleep. She sang a soft green stillness into which his wrath subsided. She bound
it there. She gave it dreams; dreams of peace.

The Sunborn lay still under the pall of power. He was not
all resigned to it: one hand had fallen to his side, clenched into a fist. But
he was bound. He would learn perforce the ways of peace, who had ever been a
man of war.

Sarevadin sighed in Estarion’s arms. She was herself again,
fragile with great age, and her eyes were calm, almost happy. More truly so,
maybe, than they had been since Hirel died.

She smiled. Her voice was a thread, almost too thin to bear
the weight of words. “That will keep him for a while. Do you trust me now, a
little?”

“I always trusted you,” Estarion said.

“Don’t lie. It makes you twitch.” She shifted; he settled
her more comfortably. She weighed no more than a child. “You’d better lay me
here. It’s a long way down to the tombs, and I’ll be dust before you come
there.”

“You’re not dying,” said Estarion, but his heart clenched.
She was withering as he watched.

“They said I couldn’t die. They didn’t think I’d strip
myself of power. They didn’t know I could. No more,” she admitted, “did I,
until I did it.” She smiled. “I’m not sorry I tried. It gave you yourself. And
it gave me . . . it gave me . . .”

“Death,” Vanyi said. She was white and shaking, but she was
alive. She stretched out a hand, not quite daring to touch the cheek that was
thin skin stretched over bone. “Wouldn’t a simple cliff have done as well, with
rocks at the foot of it, and the sea to sweep you away?”

Sarevadin was beyond answering, but her eyes laughed.

The Sunborn’s bier was broad enough for two. Estarion laid
her on it, gently, and straightened her limbs. He had nothing to cover her
with, but she was too frail to bear the weight of cloak or pall, even if it
were made of light. Her life was ebbing softly, slowly, like water from a
broken cup.

Her body sank with it. Flesh melted from bone. Bone crumbled
to dust. No pain went with her dying, no fear, no thought but joy. And that was
a splendid, soaring, bright-winged thing, casting off the memory of flesh,
leaping into the light.

The Sunborn dreamed again his long dream. Beside him on
his bier lay a shape of ash that fell in upon itself and scattered in the wind
from the Gate.

Estarion whirled. There had been no Gate, once Vanyi was in
the Tower. Yet the wall behind him was open, and beyond it the Heart of the
World.

Mages stood there, one in robes that mingled dark and light,
and those behind him like guards, some in violet, some in grey; and in a
half-circle about them the black shadows of Olenyai. One Olenyas stood beside
and a little behind the master of the mages, hands on swordhilts, so like
Korusan that Estarion almost cried his name. But Korusan lay beyond the bier,
crumpled, twisted, dead.

Vanyi’s voice shocked Estarion into his senses. It was
clear, hard, and perfectly fearless. “I forbid you to trespass here.”

“Are you Sun-blood,” demanded the Master of the mages, “to
permit or forbid?”

“Are you Sun-blood,” she countered, “to set foot in this
place? Men go mad here, mage. Men die.”

“Old jests,” said the mage. “Old nonsense.”

“Then come,” she said. “We killed your spy. Our own madwoman
is dead. The Sunborn is not likely to wake in this age of the world; and no
thanks to your plotting for that.”

The mage’s eyes widened slightly. He seemed for the first
time to see the bier, the Sunlord beside it, the body of the Lion’s cub with
the ul-cub crouching over it as if on guard.

The Olenyas had seen it long since. His eyes were on
Estarion, level, betraying no emotion.

“Yes, I killed him,” Estarion said. “It was my right. His
life was mine, as mine was his.”

The Olenyas inclined his head. “Majesty,” he said.

Estarion stiffened. He was being given—something. He did not
dare to hope, yet, that it was acceptance. “Do you serve me, Olenyas?”

“I serve the emperor,” said the Olenyas.

“You,” said Estarion as knowledge came clear, voice and eyes
and set of the body in the robes, “are the captain of Olenyai in the Golden
Palace.”

“I am the Master of the Olenyai,” said the Olenyas, “majesty.”

Estarion drew a breath. “Am I the emperor?”

The Olenyas paused. Estarion did not breathe, did not move.
Nor, he noticed with distant clarity, did the mages. Their Master looked as if
he would have spoken, but did not dare.

“Yes,” said the Olenyas. “You are the emperor.”

They won their veils in battle and their rank in combat, man
to man. In slaying their prince and champion, Estarion had won their service. He
even bore their brand: the sting and throb of the long cut in his cheek, that
Korusan had made before he died.

It gave him no joy. “If you are mine,” he said, “then serve
me now. Take these traitors to my throne. Kill any who resists.”

The mages seemed unable to believe what they had heard. Even
after their allies closed in upon them, taking them captive; even, some of
them, when they broke and ran, and swift steel cut them down.

The Master of mages was quicker than his fellows, and closer
to the Gate. As the Olenyai closed in, he bolted for what he thought was
safety.

Estarion sprang to seize Vanyi and fling her out of the
mage’s path. She ducked, slid, broke free.

The mage hung in the Gate. Her power pulsed, holding him
there. He raised lightnings against her.

She hurled them back at him, reckless, in a blind fury, as
if all of it were seething out of her—grief, rage, guilt, fear, hate, love that
had bent awry and turned to pain.

The mage seized on that pain and twisted. She lunged into
the Gate and went for his throat.

He laughed in his bonds. He had trapped her.

He caught her in midleap. She kicked and flailed. He held
her just out of reach of eyes and throat, and while she raged, forgetful of
power, he smote her with his magery.

She sagged. He drew her in. He would kill her with his
hands, bind her with his power, seal her to his will—any or all of them.
Estarion, helpless on the far side of the Gate, barred from it by magewalls,
could only watch and rage.

The mage clasped her tightly. His power uncoiled.

She erupted, body and power. He toppled astonished. She
bound him as he lay, her movements swift, furious, and heaved him up.

He hung again in the void of power that was the Gate, wound
in cords like a spider’s prey. And like a spider’s prey, he looked living on
the face of his death. Shadows gathered about him. Watchers: dim shapes like
wolves, grinning wide wolf-grins.

The ul-cub yowled and sprang. The watchers scattered.

The cub in the Gate was larger than they, black beast
sun-eyed. He bared his fangs at the mage. The mage began to struggle.

Vanyi stood back, watching, saying nothing.

The mage spoke with remarkable steadiness under the circumstances,
but there was no mistaking the desperation in his voice. “Let me go,” he said.
“Lady, priestess, whatever you wish, whatever I can give—”

“What have you given us,” she asked him coldly, “but death
and betrayal?”

“I erred, I confess it. I’ll serve you faithfully. Only let
me go.”

“No,” said Vanyi.

He offered her gold. He offered her slaves. He offered her
empires—and what right, Estarion wondered, had he to do that? She ignored him.

He offered her magic. She clapped hands over her ears. He
offered her the Gates and all that was in them, if she would set him free.

“Take him,” she said to the ul-cub.

The cat flowed toward him. He began to scream.

“Goddess,” she said in disgust. “Nothing’s even touched
him.”

Nothing, Estarion thought, but terror.

The ul-cub circled the mage, tail tip twitching. He fought
harder against his bonds.

They snapped. He dropped, still screaming. The ul-cub
sprang.

It was a clean kill. One spring, one snap of jaws in the
neck. The ul-cub stood atop the body, treading it with half-flexed claws, as if
to ask it why it jerked and twitched.

Slowly it stilled. He sniffed it. His nose wrinkled. He
stepped away fastidiously, shaking a paw that had drawn blood, pausing to lick
it clean.

The watchers had stood back in respect, but once he had
retreated they closed in, surrounding the body. Their chieftain sniffed the
blood on it, tasted it. He barked once. The pack fell yelping on the feast.

The ul-cub ignored them. He sprang out of the Gate and flung
himself at Estarion’s feet, and set to washing himself thoroughly, with much
snarling and sneezing at the stink of mageblood.

Vanyi followed the cat, walking steadily. Only Estarion,
maybe, saw how pale she was, how pinched her face. He yearned to clasp her to
him, to stroke her pain away. But he had grown wise: he did not touch her.

When she turned again to the Gate, she was calm. She said to
the Olenyai, “By your emperor’s leave, take the prisoners back to Pri’nai. He
will follow when he is finished here.”

The Olenyai glanced at Estarion. He hesitated. The Gate sang
faintly to itself. The watchers were still feeding.

Below the Tower was the crag of Endros and the river, and
his own city. He had but to find the door to that doorless place, and walk out
of it, into his palace.

Or he could pass the Gate, enter the Heart of the World,
walk from it to Pri’nai and Asanion and rebellion that was not ended for that
its prophet was dead.