Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (69 page)

Margret was not happy.

"The choice is not yours to make," the Serra Teresa said quietly. All eyes suddenly turned to the younger of the two Matriarchs. Teresa's reminder was unwelcome, but it was there: Margret was the undisputed—ha!—ruler of the Arkosan Voyani, and both Teresa and Yollana were her guests.

Oh, the woman could be a bitch. Smart, vicious, cold as desert night.

As Lady's Night.

"How can she even start to make these safe if she doesn't understand their power?" Her voice. She was hedging. Anyone watching would know it, but Matriarchs were expected to be cautious.

"I didn't say I didn't understand it," the Havallan Matriarch replied. "I said I didn't—and don't—understand the purpose the power is put to."

Ah. "Not the same thing."

"Not at all."

"Yollana, we're in this together. You've no right to withhold information."

"No?" The older Matriarch pushed herself to her feet, teetering imperiously as she gained solid footing with the aid of a cane.

"This is not the Lord's power."

"No. That we would all recognize—Widan, Radann, and Voyani alike. They know us well enough to know that, Matriarch."

"Then what is the power that drives this mask?"

Yollana bowed her head a moment. When she lifted it, her face was somehow sterner. "I believe it is a magic that was lost before the
Voyanne
opened to swallow us all; it was old, even then, and wild."

There was a minute pause between question and answer, one they all heard. But only Margret could fill in the words that Yollana could not speak aloud: Before the fall of the Cities.

"Yollana—"

"I can touch it, yes. I can manipulate it to some small extent, for reasons it is forbidden to speak of. But the power at work here is vast and almost endless." She spun in a slow circle before adding, "If I am not mistaken in its source."

"What is it supposed to do?"

"I… cannot be certain."

"Yollana!"

Yollana turned a critical eye upon the Serra Teresa; an appraising eye. "They cannot, themselves, be certain that the masks will have all of their intended effect."

"
What is that effect? "

"I believe," Yollana said quietly, "It is a summoning." She was silent a moment.

"Matriarch." Yollana turned at the interruption; Margret turned as well, but not as if the title fit her. She recognized the voice. The fire of the heart circle she had build let no word out that she did not wish heard, but it let word in when that word was carried by her blood relatives.

Adam stood respectfully at the fire's edge, his eyes orange with flame's reflection.

She spoke the words that would break the circle just long enough to allow him entry. She saw his eyes narrow a moment; read the thought that stabbed him in passing:
Mother used to do this
.

Aie, yes, this had been hers, and the fact that she didn't rule the circle was sure proof, if it were needed, that she was gone.
Everything
Margret would do from now until her own death would be certain proof that she was gone.

"Adam?"

This close, and without the heat to distort him, she saw that his chest was heaving.

"Is it Nicu?"

"Nicu?" he frowned. "No. Nicu's with Donatella and Tamara."

She relaxed slightly. "Then what?"

"The clansmen."

"Adam,
please
. Faster."

"Stavos set us to watch, Alanos and I. We've been in the streets of the Tor. He's still there. I had to come to tell the Matri—to tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"There are lineups in the city streets. Long lines, patrolled, sort of, by the Tyr's cerdan. We don't look that different from most of the people in the Tor, so we joined one."

"Risky, you idiot."

"Stavos said—"

"I'm your sister. You listen to me, not Stavos. Go on."

"Alanos thought maybe it had something to do with food."

"Alanos thinks everything has something to do with food."

"Anyway, we joined the line. It took a while to really start moving. There was some man at the head of the line, and when he finally reached him, he took our hands for a minute, and then he, well, he gave us each something."

"Adam!"

He jumped at the tone of voice; she could squeeze a lot of expression into his name. Years of practice. She could also squeeze a lot into other forms of expression, and he was less fond of those: Matriarch's privilege, and one that their mother had practiced more often on Margret than on her brother. He pulled something from the folds of his shirt. It was pale, flat clay, whitened by heat, shaped like the undetailed upper half of a face. A mask.

"It is not a god's magic; we would know it. Both of us have studied the antiquities, but where you have chosen to remain in the South, I have traveled. Bluntly, I have touched the working of the Northern 'gods,' and I recognize the feel of their power.

"If this were the work of the Lord of Night himself, it would chill us; his work could not pass beneath our hands so disguised. It is not in his nature; it is not in ours."

"Mikalis, what you've said—"

"I know."

"We must speak with Cortano."

"Indeed," a third voice said quietly.

Both men turned at once. They were seated, but before they could leave mats and sparse cushions, the Sword's Edge lifted a hand, silently negating the need for the gesture his rank demanded. "What have you discovered?"

Mikalis replied, speaking smoothly. Smoothly, Sendari thought, and with vastly less comfort. Sendari understood why; it was risky to say that one knew anything—anything at all—about Cortano's power.

"Ah." Cortano's expression was unreadable. In another man, that would have been a bad sign; Cortano was often unreadable. "It happens, gentlemen, that your discovery is relevant to… current events."

"You have news," Sendari said. Not a question.

"Perceptive."

"Is any of it welcome?"

"Be the judge, Sendari. We now have no choice. Not only must we understand the magic the masks are part of, but we must also be able to counter their power."

"Counter it?" Mikalis interrupted, hands curling into tightening fists. "But—"

"Two headless bodies were found in the Tor Leonne yesterday. They had been disposed of carelessly, and perhaps too casually. The heads, we did not find; nor could we find markings or rings of any sort that would give us a clear indication of who those men were."

"Not serafs, then."

"No. We assumed that someone would eventually lodge an inquiry or complaint."

"And there have been none?"

"No. It had only been a day, judging by the condition of the bodies themselves. But the Tyr'agar is a man of… instinct. He had the bodies brought to the Sword of Knowledge, and he demanded answers."

"From headless corpses?"

"Indeed."

"You found them."

Cortano's brow rose a half inch. Sendari cursed himself inwardly. He was usually far, far more politic than this. Far better able to hide the extent of his knowledge of the abilities of the other Widan.

Diora
. Here, where he could least afford it, weakness.

"We found answers, yes."

Sendari did not speak, smoothing the lines of his face into neutrality, into the safeness of silence instead.

"The Radann have been sent out. The Hand of God."

It took Sendari a moment, a long one, before the words made any sense at all.

Mikalis di'Arretta, however, did not understand the exchange, and he was not so well-trained or well-schooled that he knew better than to reveal his ignorance by asking. "Why?"

"Assume that we were able to put face, and therefore identity, to the bodies in question. There had been no inquiries—and there would likely be none for some time—because the two men who belonged to those bodies were demonstrably not dead."

"My apologies, Sword's Edge, but I do not understand."

The Sword's Edge gestured; magic's fine arc lit hands that were rarely exposed to the Lord's glare with a glow that was both white and violet. A cloud rose in the near-airless room, sparking and struggling as if seeking a life of its own.

They waited; as folds of billowing light coalesced at the cloud's heart, they were given the beginning of an answer to Mikalis' question. Two men stood, arms folded, expressions both wary and anticipatory. They were not tall men, but not short either; they had dark hair and the beards of the clans, but their manner of dress put them near the bottom of the clan heirarchy.

Sendari recognized them at once. The maskmakers.

"They were not dead?"

"No, indeed. They have been working, at
our
request, on the masks that were to replace those given us by the Shining Court."

"And the Radann?"

"We have not received word, but I expect it shortly."

"You suspect—"

"Yes."

427 AA

Stone Deepings

She woke with a start to the sound of horns.

She was tired of waking that way; stumbling from the darkness of sleep and the certainty of nightmare into a waking world that was distinctly not better.

Avandar was at her side before she had left all of nightmare behind. His face, in the constant gloom of star-broken night, was pale. "Calliastra," he said quietly, "is gone."

That should have been good news. Jewel's lips had started up in the reflex of a smile before they froze there, stupidly.

The horns, dirgelike and loud, gave meaning to the phrase
shattered silence
. Avandar did not glance up; did not so much as look in the direction that she thought the sound came from. She did. And then she turned, as the first notes were answered, in the distance, by a second set, by a third. At her back, the wind howled, and above it, carried by it, she heard the frenetic growling of stone: Gargoyle.

She knew, then.

"Jewel?"

"What would scare Calliastra off?" Jewel asked softly, in the momentary lull between the rise and fall of the horns' voices.

"Very little," was his quiet reply. "She has… angered many in her time, but is proof against almost any retribution."

"And that almost would be?"

"She would not tempt the wrath of her father."

"Okay… let's try for the less obvious. As in, someone
I
wouldn't know." She matched his silence for a moment, and then said, "Avandar, what do the horns mean?"

He closed his eyes. "I would never have brought you here," he said quietly, "had I known what you would meet on this road."

"Tell me."

"Tell
you
?" He laughed, the laughter in time with the strongest of the horn calls. "Jewel, of the many I have lost to this road, a handful have met one of the Firstborn. You have met two: Calliastra and Corallonne. I can protect you from Calliastra, and to my knowledge, excepting only situations in which her gardens are threatened, Corallonne sheds no blood that is not her own.

"But even I have not met what I fear you are about to on this road."

"Avandar—"

"They call her Arianne, the Winter Queen."