Spear of Heaven

SPEAR OF HEAVEN

Avaryan Resplendent Volume II

Judith Tarr

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
August 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-284-6
Copyright © 1994 Judith Tarr

Rudyard Kipling would
have known where this came from.
So would the lamas of
Shangri-La.

The child slept, and dreamed of Worldgates. In her dream
she sat in front of one, right on the threshold, and watched the worlds shift
and change. She liked the green ones, and the ones that were all sea-wash and
blown spume, and the ones where it was always morning, with the sun just coming
up, and birds—or things like birds—singing in the unchanging light. But the
fire-worlds were splendid, and the worlds of ice, though they made her shiver,
and the worlds that were always night, with torrents of stars.

They were always changing, never twice the same. A million
worlds. Mother said it, and Great-Grandfather, and Vanyi who ought to know,
since they were Vanyi’s worlds, or Vanyi’s Gates at least. Kimeri did not know
what a million was, except that it was very many.

She dreamed of a million worlds, and of sitting as she would
have liked to sit if there had not always been Guardians to chase her away: not
quite touching the Gate, and feeling all the other Gates inside herself, and
the worlds inside of them, millions and millions and millions. She made a song
of it, because songs were what she liked to make, this cycle.

And as she sat and watched and sang, one of the Gates was
gone. Like that. One moment there, like a bead on an endless string. The next
moment, nothing. Except . . .

She would cry, she thought, when she woke up. But not until
then. In her dream there was no one to notice, no one to hold her and pet her
and tell her there was no need to cry.

She hugged her dream-knees to her dream-chest. The dead Gate
was hurting worse now. It had not hurt at first; it had been too different, and
too surprising. She had not known what it was until she felt how it crumbled
and fell in on itself like the dry husk of an insect that she had found on a
windowsill, that Great-Grandfather had said was dead. Dead was gone, except for
a smear of dust and a bit of a wing.

Not gone
, said a
voice that was not a voice, not really. It came from inside, from the place
where Gates were.
Not gone. Not dead. I
am. I am . . . I still . . . help me!

Kimeri tried to answer, but the voice, whoever owned it,
could not hear her.
Help me
, it
begged.
The Gate—I can’t— help me!

“I can’t,” said Kimeri aloud, because maybe that would make
the voice hear. “I’m too little. I can’t do anything.”

Help me
, the voice
said.
Help me
.

No matter if it was a dream. Kimeri hurt. The Gates hurt,
because one of them was dead. And inside the dead Gate was—someone. A voice. A
person who could only cry for help, and could not hear when Kimeri answered.
She was too little, and she was only dreaming. She could do nothing at all.

She began to cry.

oOo

It was universal law, Vanyi thought. In time of crisis,
everyone capable of contending with the disaster was either asleep, abroad, or
overburdened. A Gate was broken, a Guardian lost, and the one Guardian who
could be spared to watch over the inmost of the nine Gates in the Mage-hall of
Starios was a silly chit of a boy with a horror of young children. Particularly
young children who, he insisted, had appeared out of nowhere, sound asleep and
weeping in it, on the threshold of his Gate.

The Master of mages in the Empire of Sun and Lion, Guardian
of all the Gates, priestess of Avaryan, right hand of the emperor who sat the
throne in Starios, went in her own person to the hall of the ninth Gate, and
found the child as the boy had said, drawn into a knot almost within the Gate.

In spite of herself, Vanyi caught her breath. Even a
handbreadth more, and the Gate would have taken the child.

The young Guardian had fled. “Coward,” Vanyi said to the
space where he had been. The emperor’s youngest heir—for it was she; the tangle
of honey-amber hair was unmistakable—was deep asleep, and crying as if her
heart would break.

Vanyi lowered herself stiffly to the floor, gathered the
dreaming, sobbing child in her lap and rocked her, crooning, “There, little
terror. There.”

The little terror woke slowly, hiccoughing, choking on
tears. Vanyi shook her to steady her breathing, and slapped her once, not too
hard, to get her attention.

Her eyes opened wide, amber-gold and quite beautiful, even
bleared with weeping; and angry, too, and bright with stung pride. “I’m not a
baby,” she said fiercely.

“Did I ever say you were?” Vanyi asked in her driest tone.

That, as Vanyi had hoped, subdued the child’s temper, if not
her pride. But she could hardly help that, with the breeding she had.

“Now,” said Vanyi, “suppose you tell me what you’re doing
here.”

Kimeri looked about. She did not seem surprised, but then
Vanyi had not expected her to. She would have crept in, of course, when the
Guardian’s back was turned, and fallen asleep watching the Gate. She had done
it before. She would do it again, no doubt, as long as her keepers persisted in
falling asleep at their posts.

“I was asleep,” Kimeri said. “I didn’t mean to be here. A
Gate died, Vanyi. It hurts.”

Vanyi told herself that that did not surprise her, either.
Seeing that the child was who she was, and what she was.

“A Gate died,” Vanyi agreed somberly, “and you should have
stayed home, where you would be safe.”

“I’m safe here,” Kimeri said. “Gates won’t hurt me. Even
Gates that die.”

“O innocence,” said Vanyi. Innocence stared at her with eyes
the color of amber, in a face the color of old ivory. It was too young to
understand. She smoothed the amber curls and sighed. “I had better return you
to your keepers before they add their own panic to the rest.”

“They don’t know I’m gone,” Kimeri said. “You won’t tell
them, will you? They’ll carry on till nobody can think.”

“You should have thought of that before you escaped,” said
Vanyi.

The golden eyes lowered. Vanyi knew better than to expect
that the child was chastened. Quelled, yes. For the moment. It would have to
do.

oOo

The Guildhall was rousing to uproar as awareness of the
Gate’s fall spread outward. Vanyi was needed in a dozen places at once, for a
dozen different tasks, all of which only she could perform. No Gate had ever
fallen except as the Guild willed it—not ever, not in a thousand years. The
shock resonated from Gate to Gate, from Guildhall to Guildhall across this one
of all the worlds.

It had not gone outward yet, she thought, affirming it as
she knew how to do, from within. The worlds beyond this were quiet still,
untroubled by the fall of a single Gate among the many. But that quiet would
not hold. Her bones knew it, stiff with cold that was only in part born of the
night’s chill and her own advancing years.

All of that beset her; and she rose with the child in her
arms, and said, “Come, then. I’ll take you home.”

Home for Kimeri—ki-Merian, Merian of Asan-Gilen as she would
be when she was older—was the palace that rose in the heart of the city as the
Guildhall rose on its sunset edge. Vanyi brought her to it on the back of a
mettlesome seneldi mare, riding without bridle or saddle, since fetching either
would have meant waking the groom who slept in the back of the stable. Kimeri
would have preferred a mount of her own, but Vanyi was in no mood for such
nonsense.

The guards at the palace gate were awake and too well
trained to ask questions. They barely widened eyes at the sight of the Master
of mages mounted bareback and bridleless with a small amber-gold child riding
behind. They bowed low to the mage, a fraction lower to the child, and let them
in without a word.

“I am going.”

“You are not.”

There was a pause. It was not the first, nor was it likely
to be the last in an argument that had gone on since the night was young. It
had begun with the two of them sitting reasonably civilly face to face across a
game of kings-and-cities. The game now was long forgotten, and they were on
their feet, he by the window where his pacing had taken him, she by the table,
stiffly still, with her fists clenched at her sides.

“I will go,” she said. “You gave me leave.”

“That was before the Gate fell. The Gate which, I should
remind you—”

“Yet again,” she muttered.

He ignored her. “—has just this night fallen, and none of us
knows why, or how. I won’t risk my heir in an expedition that has gone from
mildly dangerous to outright deadly.”

“Oh, and am I your only heir?” she demanded with bitterness
that was as much a part of her as her golden lion-eyes. “I’ve done my dynastic
duty, Grandfather. I’ve given you another royal object to protect until it
stifles.”

He turned his back on her and stared out of the window into
the dark. He all but vanished against it, dark as he was, and dressed in plain
dark clothes as he had come from a walk in the city. The only light in him was
the frosting of silver in his hair, and little enough of that.

She was all light as he was all dark: all gold, golden skin,
golden eyes, golden hair cut at the shoulders and held back from riot by a
fillet of woven gold. But, as he turned to face her again, he had the same
eyes, lion-colored, and much the same face, black-dark to her honey-gold:
strong arched brows, strong arched nose, stubborn chin. His beard was greyer
than his hair, but not overmuch.

“Daruya,” he said a little wearily, “no one ever forgets
that you have given the empire an heir. It’s still a remarkable scandal.”

“What, that I wouldn’t name her father, let alone marry him?
Believe me, Grandfather, you wouldn’t want him playing consort to my imperial
majesty, when I come to it, which pray god and goddess won’t be for long years
yet. He’s a beautiful, brilliant political idiot.”

“And married,” said the emperor, “to a woman older than he,
much wealthier, and possessed of considerable power in the western courts.” Her
eyes had widened. He smiled. It was not a gentle smile, though there was
affection in it, and a degree of amusement. “Yes, I know his name. You thought
I wouldn’t learn it? I’ve had four years to hunt him down.”

She sucked in a breath. “You haven’t killed him.”

“Of course not,” the emperor said. “What do you take me for?”

“Ruthless,” she answered.

He laughed with a tinge of pain. “Well, and so I am, when I
have to be. The man’s an idiot, as you say. And you knew it when you bedded
him?”

“I knew that he was fertile, though even if he hadn’t been,
I was sure the god would find a way to alter it. I wanted his looks and his
intelligence for my child.”

“And you didn’t want a man who could bind you with the name
of wife.” He came back to the table, studied the pieces laid out on the board,
shifted the black king to face the golden warrior. “I could have forced you to
marry a man whom I chose, to cover the shame of a child born without a father.”

“There’s no such shame,” she said, “in the tribes of the
north.”

“Then it’s a pity you aren’t a tribesman, isn’t it?” He
looked into her furious face and sighed. “We’re all rebellious in our youth. My
rebellion was to refuse to rule the western half of my empire, then to insist
on ruling only there, and nearly breaking the whole with my stubbornness. My
son’s was to hunt aurochs at a gallop in country too rough for speed, and to
break his neck doing it. Yours is mild to either of those. You gave us a
scandal, no more, and an heir of your body. No breaking of necks or empires;
merely of strict propriety.”

She snatched the warrior from the board and flung it at him.
He caught it in a hand that flashed gold—like her own, like her daughter’s.
Like that of every heir to the throne of the Sun. They carried gold in their
right hands like a burning brand, born there—set there by the god, the priests
said. She did not know. It burned, that she knew, and worse, the more she
fought it.