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Authors: Judith Tarr

Tides of Darkness (39 page)

BOOK: Tides of Darkness
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He had no power to see what she was, and perhaps no spirit for it, either. He had courage; that, she could not doubt. His men fell before they could even lift their weapons, but he neither wavered nor flinched. “Whatever becomes of us,” he said, “the dark will rule.”
“That might be true,” she said, “or it might not. Either way, you will be dead. You were condemned long ages ago for crimes beyond the reach of mercy. Your crimes have only grown worse since you fled that sentence. If there could ever have been hope of appeal, that is altogether gone.”
“Indeed?” said the dark king. “And who are you to stand in judgment?”
“I am everything you ever feared or fought against. I am the destroyer of darkness, the bringer of light. The Sun begot me. The light reared me. I rule in the Sun's name.”
He flung back his head and laughed. “Brave little maidchild! When ours are so puny, we drown them. How were you let live? Pity? Scorn? Weakness of spirit?”
“Only the weak resort to mockery.” She raised her hand. The Sun in it roared and flamed.
Just as she gathered power to blast him, a shadow darted past her toward the shape in the cage. The bolt of light flew wide. The king sprang. Merian stumbled aside, warrior skills forgotten, fixed on Varani, who had flung herself at the cage, and at the thing that whirred and spun on top of it.
The king howled and leaped toward Varani. Merian clutched wildly at his arm and spun him about. He slashed at her with a steel claw.
Merian's arm and side burned. She snatched her sword from its sheath, stabbing with all the strength she had. The blade struck armor, turned and snapped. The king spat in contempt. She slashed her second blade, the long sharp dagger, across his throat. The hot spray of blood spattered her face and drenched her armor.
She gagged in disgust, but she had already forgotten him. Varani tore at the cage with bleeding fingers. Merian caught her hands and held them, though she struggled, cursing.
“Lady,” Merian said. “Lady, stop.”
After a stretching while, Varani yielded. Merian kept a grip on her until she had eased completely, then let her go, but warily. The cage showed no sign of her efforts. The thing of metal spun faster, that was all. The shape within the cage was visible as if through dark glass. The width of the shoulders, the copper brightness of the hair, were unmistakable, though the rest was lost in shadow.
He was alive—just. The king and his guard were dead, the rulers of this world gone away to the war, but the soulless thing that held him cared nothing for that. It ate at his mind and power, sustaining the life in him when he would have let it go, and bleeding away his magery like a slow wound.
The
Kasar
was a white agony in Merian's hand. She raised it to unlock the bonds of the cage, but hesitated. If he was deeply enslaved, wholly bound to the dark, she would unleash a horror that would put the Sunborn's madness to shame.
Varani read it in her eyes. Merian braced for recrimination, but in some deep corner of her spirit, the lady had found both strength and sanity. “If he must be killed,” she said steadily, “I beg your leave to do it. I gave him life. Let me take it away.”
“Not yet,” said Merian. She could barely speak. The tide of the dark was rising. The magery in her, doubled and trebled, strained to hold together. The effort of sustaining it across the worlds, against the force of the dark, had begun to wear on both the powers within.
The dark, like the cage, had neither mind nor soul. It simply and inexorably was. A mage, even a god, one could fight. But how could any fleshly being stand against the universe itself?
“Light,” said Estarion within her. “Fight darkness with light.”
“Darkness so vast?” she demanded of him. “Oblivion so absolute?”
“Can you see any other way?” asked Daruya.
“No,” said Merian. “But—”
“Tides of light,” said Estarion. “If all the mages could be gathered—if he could be freed, and persuaded to lend his power—”
“He is dead or corrupted,” said Daruya. “The other mages must be enough.”
“The other mages are fighting a war across the face of a world,” Merian said.
“Call them in,” said Estarion.
“There's no time.” Merian swayed as she spoke, buffeted by the force of the dark. It smote the bond that joined the three of them, and battered the edges of the light. The war was a bloody confusion; the lords had rallied, and the armies of freed slaves were flagging, their numbers terribly depleted, their makeshift weapons broken or lost. She could feel their despair in her skin, in the outer reaches of her magery.
With no thought at all, she set the
Kasar
to the cage. Its cold metal resisted, but Sun's fire was stronger than any work of hands. The whirring thing spun faster, faster, until it was a blur. It burst asunder in a flash of blinding light. In the sudden and enormous silence, the bars of the cage drew in upon themselves. The shell of glass crumbled into the sand from which it was made.
The captive lay on a bier within, robed in darkness. No breath stirred. His eyes were open, empty of light. His flesh was cold.
His mother breathed warmth upon him. She gave him light; she poured out her own life to feed his. Merian laid her hands over Varani's, not to stop her, but to give her what strength there was to spare.
It might be madness. She could find no light in him. They had taken
his eyes, his life, his spirit. There might be nothing left of him at all. But she could not stop herself. She was corrupted, maybe; enspelled. It mattered nothing. There was no hope. The light could not win this war. Not without all the power that they could bring to bear.
D
AROS SWAM UP OUT OF DEEP WATER. HE LEFT THE ARMS OF Mother Night and drifted through stars, drawn inexorably upward.
The thing that he had fled, the ceaseless, whispering temptation, had faded greatly, but it was not gone. It had set in his bones. It murmured through his walls and barriers; it thrummed in the stones of the dark world.
Darkness and corruption. Doom and damnation. He dived back into oblivion, but strong hands held him up. He struggled; he fought. They would not let go. They were too many, too strong.
They wrenched him out of darkness and into searing, agonizing light. He twisted, gasping, biting back the cry. The taste of blood filled his mouth: he had bitten his tongue.
Something hard and cold clasped his face. He lay in blessed dimness. His eyes were shielded. He looked into faces recognizable even to what his sight had become. Mages: Kalyi, Urziad, a stranger or two. Merian. And—
He could flee, but there was nowhere to run. He could not hide. She had seen—she knew—
“Later,” his mother said. Her voice was taut with pain. “Help us. The dark—”
The dark was rising. A great hunger was in it, a craving for the blood and bones of living worlds. It beckoned to him, whispering, tempting. He would be its greatest servant, its most dearly beloved. The light was bitter pain. Darkness was sweet; was blessed. It would embrace him and make him its own. He would be the great lord, the emperor of the night. All worlds would bow before him.
“Indaros!”
The light of the Sun's child was bitter beyond endurance. She was made of light; filled with it, brimming over. She touched him with it; he gasped. She, merciless, gripped tighter. “Remember,” Merian said fiercely. “Remember what you are!”
Doomed. Damned. Lost to darkness.
“Indaros.”
Foolish child. Did she imagine that she could bind him with that name? In the darkness, all names were taken away.
“Indaros!”
It struck like a scorpion whip. It seared him with light and filled his veins with fire. It shot him like an arrow, full into the heart of the dark.
He laughed. Death, had he yearned for? Here was the death of the shooting star: pure glory. He was a conflagration across the firmament, a stream of fire in the face of the night.
The dark fought back, thrusting again and again into his heart. Its whisper rose to a roar. Death, oblivion, annihilation—the surcease of purest nothingness.
 
 
Estarion could not hold. It was too far, the dark too deep. The weight of flesh dragged at him. If he could but cast it off, he would be free. He could fight untrammeled.
There was the answer to every riddle, the key to every door. Cast off the flesh; be pure light. Be magic bare, untainted by mortal substance. Become the light, and so embrace the dark, and swallow it as it had swallowed light.
The flesh disliked that thought intensely. Foolish flesh.
“Great-grandfather.” Merian was in his thoughts as he was in hers, interwoven with them. “I'm in the center. Your heir behind me, my heir before me—I'm unnecessary. I stand in the heart of the dark world. If I let go—if I loose the fire—all of it will end.”
“And you,” he said. “You will end, too.”
“I don't matter. I'll be in the light.”
“No,” said Estarion. The truth unfolded in him, in glory and splendor. What he was; what he was meant for. Why the gods had brought him to the land of the river and set him on the far side of the dark. He understood at last why he had been moved to surrender the key of his life to Seti-re. If he had not so divided his soul, the flesh would have bound him too tightly; he could not have escaped, whole and free. That surrender, that bit of folly, would save them all.
He was not afraid. There was a strange, aching joy in it. Tanit—Menes—
If he did not do this thing, there would be no world for them to live in, no sun to warm them, no life to live to its fulfillment. The dark would rule. The worlds would crumble into ash.
Merian was still rebelling, still insistent, and Daruya beyond her, for once remembering her headlong youth. “Empress,” he said to them, “and empress who will be. Rule well. Remember me.”
They babbled in protest. He took no notice. The dark gaped to swallow them all.
Someone stood at the gate of it, a lone still figure, eyes full of darkness
but heart blooming suddenly with light. Daros had lit the spark. Estarion fanned it into flame.
The young fool tried to thrust him aside; to take the glory for himself. But Estarion was too strong for that. He eased the boy gently out of the gate. The fire was in him now, consuming him. The pain of it was exquisite. It seared away the flesh; let go the constraints of living existence.
Great blazing wings unfurled. He was a bird of flame, soaring up into the darkness. Song poured out of him: the morning hymn to the Sun that every priest in his empire sang at the coming of every morning; that he had sung to his son in the land of the river, and so consecrated him to the god his forefather.
It was pure adoration; pure light. Pure joy. Freedom beyond imagining—glory, splendor. Beauty unveiled.
Dawn broke over the dark world: true dawn, the rising of the sun above the king's citadel. The last slaves of the darkness burned and died. The armies of the Sun stood blinking in the light, bloodied, battered, but victorious.
N
O LIGHT CAME THROUGH WINDOWLESS STONE, AND YET MERIAN felt it like a wash of warmth over her skin. The threefold power that had been within her was gone. She was herself again, separate. Her mother blessed her with startling sweetness before slipping away out of this world. Estarion …
The name called forth a vision of singing light: a bird of flame soaring up to heaven. In that death was no oblivion. He was gone from all the worlds—and yet a part of every one, embodied in the suns that shone upon them, and the stars that brought beauty to the night. There was no grief, no loss. Only joy.
She laughed, there in that dark place, even though she wept. How like Estarion to find a way out of the world that none had ever ventured.
She came back to herself to find her mages staring at her, standing
half-stunned amid the slain. Only Varani had forgotten her existence. She knelt beside her son. He was conscious, but barely. Flickers of flame ran over his body, tongues of fire born of the power that was in him. It fed on the darkness inside him, burning deep, searing all of it away.
Merian knelt across from Varani. “He did it,” she said. “He opened the gate of the light.”
Varani's eyes were burning dry. “Yes, he redeemed himself. Now he'll die. May I have your leave to go, to take his body back to Han-Gilen?”
“He won't die,” Merian said. “I won't let him.”
“Do you have that power? Even you, Sunlady?”
“No,” said Merian. “But he does.” She laid her hand over his heart. At her touch, the garment that had covered him shredded and frayed, falling away. It was woven of the dark; it could not bear the touch of the Sun.
His skin felt strange: now burning cold, now searing hot. His heart was beating too fast almost to sense, fluttering like a bird's. It could not go on: man's heart was not meant for such a thing. A little longer, and it would burst asunder.
Light was her substance. The Sun was in her blood. Yet she was not purely a lightmage. The dark was in her, soft and deep—not the dark that had devoured the stars, but the softness of a summer night, the sweet coolness of evening after the heat of the day, the blessing of clean water on flesh burned by the sun.
She gave him that blessing. She cooled the fire that consumed him; she softened the dark with light, and made the light gentle, easing the torment of body and spirit. His heart slowed. He drew a long deep breath, and then another.
She slipped the shield from his eyes. They had squeezed tight shut, in horror of the light. She brushed her fingers across them. “Look at me,” she said.
With an effort that was almost a convulsion, he opened his eyes. Darkness coiled in them, writhed and melted and was gone. He looked into her face, and saw as a mortal man could see, by the plain light of day.
She looked up herself, in astonishment. The roof of the tower was gone, vanished like the darkness in him. Clear sky arched overhead; a sun shone in it, undimmed by cloud. Her eyes returned to Daros. He lay in the light, bathing in it. With no thought at all, she kissed him, tasting on his cheeks the salt of tears.
“I'm dreaming you,” he said. “I must be. The emperor, the dark, this light—it can't be real.”
“It's very real,” she said.
She helped him to sit up. She would have reckoned that enough, but he insisted on trying to rise, though he did it in a drunken stagger. She braced him with her shoulder. His mother, to both their surprise, bolstered him on the other side.
Little by little he steadied. When he essayed a step, his knees did not buckle too badly.
By the time they reached the door, he was almost supporting his own weight. Merian contemplated the long stair in something like despair. She could not lift him down it: her power was too weak. It would come back, but not soon enough.
But one power was always hers, no matter how weak she was. The Gate inside her was free again, with no darkness to bind it. She could not pass from world to world, not yet; but from citadel to plain, that she could do. The others linked their magery with hers and followed, a skein of Gatemages dropping out of air at Perel's feet.
 
The battle was over. Mages and soldiers of the Sun moved among the slain. Parties of soldiers and freed slaves had begun to clear the field. Tents were up, and the wounded limping or being carried to them.
Perel stood with the commander of the Olenyai and the general of the armies, looking out from a hilltop over the field. Merian and the rest emerged from the Gate just below them.
Perel was in motion almost before they touched the ground, leaping toward Merian, catching her as she fell. She beat him off with fierce impatience, thrusting him toward Daros. “Forget me! Help him!”
But Daros alone of them all was solid on his feet, oblivious to any of them, staring at the aftermath of battle. He did not seem aware that he was naked, or that the air, though sunlit, was chill. She began to wonder, with sinking heart, if the light had taken more of him than the dark that had lodged in his soul; if his mind was gone, too, burned away by the cleansing fire.
He took no notice of Perel at all. But Merian he did see as she scrambled herself up and came round to face him, gripping his arms, shaking him. It was like shaking a stone pillar: he never shifted.
His eyes were clear. He recognized her, though he frowned slightly, as if even yet he did not believe that she was real.
She wrapped her cloak about them both. That woke memory; he started slightly, and stared harder. “I remember …”
“We're not dreamwalking,” she said. “Not any longer. This is true. It's over. The dark is gone. The war has ended. We can go home again.”
“Home.” A gust of laughter escaped him, almost like a gasp of pain. “Where is that, for me?”
“With me,” she said. “Wherever I go.”
“You don't want me. After what I did—”
“You were the key to the gate,” she said. “Every world should honor you.”
He shook his head, but he was wiser than to keep protesting. She turned in his arms. Everyone was watching them: the lords and mages on the hilltop, the soldiers and slaves below. “This is my lord,” she said to them, “my prince and consort. But for him, this victory would never have been.”
There was a long pause. Just before she would have burst out in anger at their discourtesy, first Verani, then Perel and the lord of the Olenyai, and after them the rest, went down in homage. All of them: every living being on that field.
It was no more than his due, though he hardly knew where to look. For a prince, he had precious little sense of his own importance.
“You'll learn,” she said.
“Is that a command, my lady?”
“It is, my lord,” said Merian.
A smile touched the corner of his mouth. It was a frail shadow of his old insouciant grin, but it would do, for the moment. “I have no gift for obedience.”
“But love—you have a great gift for that.”
“Ah: I'm an infamous libertine. Are you sure you want that beside you for the rest of your days?”
“How many women have you lain with since you met me?”
He had lost the stain of the sun that had so darkened him in the land of the river: a blush was clear to see, turning his cheeks to ruddy bronze. “None,” he said indistinctly; then clearer: “None at all. But, lady, while I dreamed of you, I never—”
“Our daughter is in your father's care,” she said.
She felt the shock in his body. “Our—”
“It was real,” she said. “Every moment of it. The proof is in Han-Gilen.”
“Han-Gilen? Not Starios?”
She nodded.
“Why—” He shook himself. “Questions later. And answers—many of them. But now, the war. There are still dark lords alive. If you would have me find them—”
“You need do nothing but go home and rest,” she said.
“Not until it's over,” he said. “All of it. My lords, if someone could find clothes for me, and boots—boots would be welcome—I'll begin the hunt.”
“You will hunt nothing but sleep,” Merian said firmly.
But he was equally firm in resistance. “I belonged to them. They're in my bones. Give me men, mages, a mount—I'll find them all and bring them back to you.”
She searched his face, and the mind behind it, which he made no effort to conceal from her. The anger in him was deep and abiding; but he was sane. He was not wild with vengeance.
“Bring them to me,” she said, “and I will sentence them. My lords, you will obey him as you would obey me. Whatever he asks for, see that he has it.”
There were no objections, spoken or unspoken, save one. “You do insist on this?” his mother asked him.
He would not meet her gaze. He had shrunk, all at once, into a sulky child.
She gripped his arms. One could see, watching them, whence came his height and breadth of shoulder; she was a strong woman, in body as in mind. Her eyes burned on his face. “Do as you must,” she said, “and do it well. You are worthy of your lineage. Though perhaps,” she said, “your parents are not worthy of you.”
That astonished him. He stared at her, his sulkiness forgotten. “How can you say that? I have never been—”
“You have redeemed yourself many times over. Whereas we have acquitted ourselves poorly in every respect. If you can find it in you to pardon us—”
He silenced her with a finger to her lips. “Mother, don't. Don't talk like that. Let's forgive each other; let's forget if we can. There's a long stretch of darkness behind us, and, one hopes, a long stretch of light ahead. Maybe we can learn to be proper kin to one another.”
“I can hope for that,” she said.
He smiled, bowed and kissed her hands. “Then may I have your blessing?”
“You may have it,” she said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes were brimming. She drew his head down and set a kiss on his forehead, then let him go. “You honor us all, my child. You give us great pride.”
 
As long as the fight had been and as weary as they all were, the sheer number of those who came to Daros' muster was astonishing. He had his pick of warriors and of mages; and among them two whom he had thought never to see again.
Neither Menkare nor Nefret had taken physical harm from the battle.
Their power was intact, indeed stronger than ever. They had been tempered like steel: forged in fire. They looked long and hard at him, as everyone did now; but like the others, they eased visibly after a while.
“You look,” said Nefret, “as if you've been burned clean.”
“That is precisely how it feels,” said Daros.
She clasped him tight, squeezing the breath out of him, but there were no words left in her. It was Menkare who said, “We mourned you for dead. Thank the greater gods that we grieved too soon.”
“I am rather grateful myself,” Daros said. “And you? Are you of a mind to go hunting with me?”
“Rats or lions?” Menkare asked.
“Rats in the barley,” said Daros.
“I'm in the mood to hunt rats,” said Nefret.
“And I,” Menkare said. “Pity we have no cats here; they're the best hunters of all.”
“You are my cats,” Daros said, “my mages of the river. Come, hunt with me.”
They grinned at that; Nefret's pointed face and small white teeth were not at all unlike a cat's. With a much lighter heart, Daros turned to the task of choosing the rest of his hunters.
 
The hunt was not long, as rat-hunts went. Those lords whose slaves had not turned on them and rent them in pieces had gone to ground, away from hunters and the horror of the sun and, come the night, the stars and the dance of a dozen little moons about this barren and stony world.
Daros tracked them by the shudder under his skin. Nefret with her gift of prescience was even better at it than he, and Menkare was blindingly quick in the capture. It grieved them somewhat that they could not kill what they hunted, as it would have grieved the little fierce cats of their own world, but they submitted to the will of the gods—and most especially the goddess of gold, as they called Merian.
They were enthralled with her. It gave them no end of pleasure to discover—and not from Daros—that their lord was her consort; that
there was an heir, a child so like her father that no one in the world of the gods could deny her parentage.
That was a thought so strange, so patently impossible, that Daros could hardly think it at all. That Merian loved him, that she wanted him, was shock enough; he doubted it more often than he believed it. But that their dreamwalking had brought forth a child—he could not make himself believe it. He kept his mind on his hunt instead, and left the rest for when the hunt was over.
BOOK: Tides of Darkness
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