Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (98 page)

"You… bound… his magic?"

She shrugged. Answer enough.

"You were the author of that binding."

She did not answer.

"Mother, you know what I want. Your power will never again serve the family; it will never again serve the Sanctum. But I know my duty."

"And I am to give power to the man who has betrayed me?"

"I have not betrayed the family," he said simply. "Only one woman within its long line."

She had so desperately desired that her vision be fallible. It was a child's hope; a novice's hope. But she had not realized just how visceral that hope was until it died. Had she thought herself beyond pain?

She unsheathed her sword. He was not impressed, and not threatened, by the gesture; the sword was a simple steel artifact, no more. There was no magic upon it, no magic within it. And to summon a true weapon in this circumstance would invite her son to do the same.

She had no illusion; she knew that she could not stand against him in single combat.

She lifted the blade in a steady hand and drew it across her palm, spilling her blood upon the floor in the center of the room.

Her son approached her bent back.

"Do not touch me," she said quietly. "Do not disturb me. What is written in my blood must be written from beginning to end without interruption."

She
felt
the song of his power as he summoned his sword. Saw its glow across the stones; saw the shade of crimson change as golden light transformed it into a wet, ruby red.

She traced the circles of Tor Arkosa upon unyielding floor. Nothing absorbed the blood; nothing disturbed it. Outer circle, inner circle; the two crescents. She had made the cut a deep one; perhaps too deep. It was hard to keep up with the flow of the liquid that ran down her aching hand.

"The symbol of the City. Why the City, Mother? Why not the Sanctum? Why not the family?"

"Because, my son," she whispered, as the line of blood halved the inner circle, "the City will
not
be destroyed. We have made an alliance that is foolish in the extreme, and we will be betrayed by that alliance in ways that you cannot see.

"The Tor is a man of power. He understands everything about holding it; nothing about letting it go. If I had any other choice, I would have chosen a different course.

"But I have been touched by Allasakar. He knows me. He knows what motivates me, inasmuch as a god can ever understand the weakness and folly of mortality.
I
cannot stand against him; that was a part of his binding, and it burns me still with its weight and its imperative.

"But I have vowed that what I cannot do will still be done." She clenched her bleeding hand into a fist. "We are a proud people. But perhaps we have never been proud
enough
. My people will never serve Allasakar again. The cost may be written in blood; it may be written in time. But it is written."

She rose. "I give what I have valued. I give what I have honored."

He waited, his sword ready.

Her blood began to burn.

From the recesses of the ceiling that contained them both, that protected them from the watchful sky, the last sphere descended.

It was in form and substance no different from the spheres within the wall; it was the height of a man from the top of its curved surface to the bottom, a transparent bubble that might have been blown in delicate glass and offered to a spoiled child.

"What is this?" her son asked, the suspicion in his voice tainted by wonder. By a wonder she had not heard there since the death of his father a decade ago. Her pain was not a clean pain; it was complicated, and it clung.

She replied simply, "It is the sphere of invocation."

"Sen Maris?"

He, too, looked up, his gaze following the descent of the sphere. "It was not crafted by me, Sen Adar. It is… wholly of your mother's making."

"Impossible."

"Can you not see her signature?"

"My mother does not have the talent."

"The mother was not a clear judge of the character of her son; why should the son assume he has .seen everything that his mother is capable of?" He glanced away a moment, as if to give them privacy, although his words continued. "What a parent shows a child is not what she shows the world outside of her family, but it is not all that she is. You have no children, Sen Adar. Or none that you have cared to lay claim to."

Sen Margret turned to her son.

"Is this what you desire?" The question was soft.

He hesitated for a moment, and his hesitation was almost her undoing. But his face closed; his expression became the expression she had seen on the faces of the men who had ruled Tor Arkosa for all of her life.

The sphere came at her call; it descended slowly, as light and ethereal as morning mist in the cradle's magnificent valleys. She reached up with both of her hands, exposing her palms to the delicate touch of its rounded surface. It weighed almost nothing.

Contact.

Beneath her palms, ice and fire blossomed, both living forces. She bore the pain because it was a simpler, cleaner pain. Her power, such as it was, flowered as the crystal began to draw it in.

The surface that had been transparent sparked and shifted. A moment of fear crossed her face as she recalled Sen Maris' words. She did not know if she had crafted well enough, and she stood beneath the matrix as it descended, wondering if it would shatter.

Wondering if that would be a worse death than the one that faced her.

She felt the crystal pulse beneath her hands. Saw clarity give way to cloud, a great, rolling blanket that obscured the rounded curve of ceiling, the unornamented gray of stone. Sparks of light burst from their depths, sparking and crackling as they leaped from surface to surface.
Gold
, she thought.
Silver. Blue
.

She closed her eyes; she could see the scars of their passage on the insides of her lids.

Her eyes snapped open as she heard the crisp slap of her son's leather boots against bare stone. "Do not touch the sphere!" she cried.

He laughed. "I am no fool, Sen Margret. I do not seek to take this task from you. I wish merely to bear witness."

"Stay your ground, Sen Adar!"

Her voice was weak.

The sound of lightning was stronger; the sound of thunder stronger still. Gold gave way to orange; silver to gray, blue to purple; red tinged the clouds that now filled the crystal, twisting and gathered as if to spring.

She staggered beneath the sphere's sudden weight. Bent her arms as it continued to descend, drawn to ground by gravity. She dropped to one knee. The sphere continued to fall, and she braced herself against the ground as it absorbed her strength.

Not yet. Not yet.

The walls danced; the light grew brighter and more dizzying as the colors of the spectrum were birthed in cloud. They struggled against the surface of crystal, gathering strength and speed. She could not contain them. Knew she could not. But bowed by the weight she had undertaken, she did.

She lowered her head; her forehead touched the side of the sphere; it was hot, fevered now. It was almost time.

"Diora!" she cried.

Her sister came.

Her son glanced back, hand on sword, his attention divided between them, Sen and sister, master and servant. But he did not interfere, did not cut her down as she lengthened her stride, as she ran.

She skidded to a halt before the burning circles that contained her Sen, her pale face reflecting the shade and shadow of a magic she had never possessed.

"Margret, what must I do?"

Margret could not answer; her lip bled where teeth pierced it. Her arms shook. Her legs shook.

Diora's hands caught her shoulders; braced her upper arms. It helped, but it was not enough.

"Margret, what must I do?"

Margret could not answer. She did not know. But she looked up, as she knelt, and saw her sister's pale face, and was comforted by what she saw there. She dropped her other knee. Not enough. It was not enough.

And her sister did the unthinkable, the unpredictable: She lifted the skirt of her dress, raised it above the grasping leap of flame's tongue, and came to stand within the inner circle.

"Diora, no—"

She lifted her hands, but not nearly as smoothly as Margret had done; all grace had deserted her simple movements. But she turned her palms up, her fingers already bent, her shoulders locked to take the weight that Margret could no longer bear on her own.

Sen Adar was silent.

Sen Maris was not. "Sen Diora," he said, his voice stern and loud, "You do not know what you do. You
must not
interfere. You have no skill, no gift." Lightning punctuated his words, the rise and fall of syllables.

And she turned to him, this woman who had been deprived of husband, of family, of the ability to bear her own children, begin her own line; light was reflected across the glowing sheen of her skin. "I have what I was born with, Sen Maris. I have what Sen Margret granted me. I will take that risk."

Her hands touched the sphere.

Margret watched in mute horror. She had not seen this. Her son, yes. Sen Maris, yes. But not this.

The sphere's weight was gone in the instant her sister accepted it.

She screamed. She screamed because Diora could not. The sphere could not draw power from her; it had been designed—they had all been designed—for her blood, and hers alone.

But it could draw life; it could draw breath; it could devour sight and hearing, touch, taste, all sensation. She could not stop it; she did not have the strength.

And had she, had she, she would have destroyed a life's work in the process, for to break the sphere was to destroy the dedication for which it was intended.

The scream went on and on, but Diora did not; she was rigid as magic scoured her of all signs of identity.

But she held the sphere.

She held it for long enough.

Lightning burst from its chrysalis, breaching the folds of cloud, the surface of crystal, bathing it with its light. It erupted toward the ceiling in a flurry of bristling, crackling energy, seeking escape, seeking release. The ceiling shattered, and shattering, broke the light; it flew wide, trapped in a pinwheel, strands of energy that spun out from what had been the curvature of dome.

Seven strands.

And each, pale and tenuous, was connected to the sphere held above the burning ground in two pairs of hands, one living, and one dead.

This should have been the moment of her triumph; the moment at which all sacrifice, all loss, was justified. . But she could not see it; her eyes were filmed and watery; her gaze was locked upon Diora's blind eyes.

One by one, the strands of light snaked toward the spheres set in the wall. They touched the surface of crystal, clung there, slowly enveloping each globe in a lattice of light.

"Sen Margret," her son said.

She turned, her forehead grazing her sister's death, her eyes weak with tears, her knees against the ground.

"Enough. You will release the sphere now."

She laughed.

"I warn you, Sen Margret. Your power is gone. You cannot hope to stand against me. I do not desire your death, but if it happens, it will serve a purpose. The Tor will know that I chose his service over my own bloodline."

"And will you kill me, Sen Adar? Will you brave the circle to take what I have made?"

He hesitated, this son, this stranger.

She raised the sphere in both hands. Diora's hands fell away; she crumpled, a hollow shell, and the fire flared as it devoured what remained of her body.

He had never been a fool.

His eyes widened as she gained her feet. He lifted his sword, spoke a word; his shield appeared across his arm, shimmering opalescence.

But it did not matter; it served no purpose.

She threw the sphere.

He struck at it, and lost his blade; raised his shield, and lost that as well. The sphere descended upon him, its surface parting to swallow him whole.

He screamed.

Not in pain, for she had had enough mercy to spare him that. But she heard his rage give way to fear, his fear to terror, and his cries were not wordless.

The ground broke as he struggled. Gaps opened in the stone; earth rose and fell, like a slow, dark liquid. But the ground beneath her feet remained solid.

The light that was anchored by the sphere flared as it drew his power into the seven, feeding them, invoking them. She waited. Wept, for some part of her wanted to answer his pleas, to offer him a comfort that he would never have offered her.

She wrapped her arms around her body while her eyes slowly dried, and waited.

The silence was a blessing.

"Not my blood, Sen Maris," she said quietly. "But my bloodline."

Sen Maris did not speak. She did not look at him.

Instead, she continued to wait. The sphere collapsed in a rush of motion; clouds again broke the surface of the crystal and fled skyward, denying light. The earth broke at her feet.

"It is time," she told the Sen, "for you to leave. The Tor will know what we have built here. You had best be away when he comes."

"Sen Margret—"

"The scribes are already dead; they were expected, and measures were taken to deal with them. The adepts who accompanied them are dead as well. This is all that remains, and if you are witness to it, you must pay the same price. The spheres will have no choice."

"The Tor Arkosa," he said quietly, "will remember what you have done."

"Yes. Arkosa will remember."

She felt his sudden absence, but she did not look away as the sphere continued to dwindle. She had planned to kill him, but she had no taste for death now.

The fires around her began to bank. She waited. Heat gave way to warmth, and warmth gave way to a chill that she was certain would never leave her. Her eyes cleared; the light receded to the spheres that the walls had been magicked and built to contain.

She looked down. The blood that she had shed was a black mark across stone; the gash from which it had come, deep and painful, was gone.

As was the sphere. What had been the height of a man was now the size of a fist, hard and dense, its edges sharp and clear. Nothing of her son remained within it.