Spear of Heaven Read online

  There was more than conviction in her voice. There was power. She spoke truth as only a mage could speak it.

  It swayed those priests who had fallen already out of the chant, but the rest were bound still, held by the power of the one who led them. The circle was diminished, but it held.

  Beyond the world of the senses, where magery came into its own, Vanyi felt the trembling of ground beneath her feet. Gates were woven with the substance of every world. This prayer, this working, sought to unweave it, thread by thread on the loom of the worlds, Gate by Gate. One by one, from Shurakan outward, through the place where its Gate had been, the Gate that was now a living thing.

  Vanyi heard a child’s voice, soft, frightened. “Mama. Mama, I’m all strange inside.”

  Daruya had Kimeri in her arms and such an expression on her face as no enemy should ever live to see. Kimeri was bleeding light. The swifter the chant, the swifter she bled. Her center was darkness, shot with stars: the Gate, and the focus of the working.

  Shadow swept across the circle. Silence rode it. Kadin the darkmage wielded it, smiting it as he had smitten the wards on the door, with the same perfect heedlessness of the cost.

  He had won through the wards. The circle was stronger. It took its strength from the toppling of Gates. The chant wavered, the Gates ceased to fall, but only for a moment. It rose again, mightier than before. Kadin fell reeling back.

  He caught himself, sprang forward once more. He would do it again and yet again, till he destroyed himself.

  Vanyi called in all the power she had. She felt the gathering of Daruya’s magery, bright blazing thing, feeding Kadin’s darkness, giving him all her temper, all her pettiness, all her rebellions both lesser and greater—all her weaknesses melded into one great strength.

  She made of it not a weapon but a vision. Clarity. Truth unalloyed, driven straight and clean and true, direct to the heart of the circle. Full into the mind and soul of the one who led it, the priest who believed that he served his gods.

  He could refuse it, but Daruya was a master of refusal.

  She knew precisely how to force it past his resistance. He could blind himself to it, but she of all people knew the art of opening eyes and mind that were shut, locked in stubborn certainty. He could even try to run away from it—but she caught him and held him and made him see exactly what he had done, the good and the ill, the piety and the folly. Gates opened rather than broken, powers roused that had never known the name of Shurakan, worlds shivered on their foundations, that must break under the weight of his beloved kingdom.

  He had fallen silent in shock and resistance. The chant went on without him. It had its own power now, its own will to completion. The magic wove itself, unweaving worlds.

  Vanyi cut across it with her own strong force of truth, her dart of power into each separate mind, rapt, entranced, lost in the working, it did not matter. She spared nothing of her strength.

  She met a force of darkness, darkmage striking with the same truth and the same vision. He too spared nothing, not even mercy. Minds shrank in horror from what they had done, from what they were trying to do. He showed them their folly bare. He turned them on themselves, and their working with them.

  One by one and then together, they fell from the working.

  But the working was too far advanced. It sustained itself. It fixed on the focus that was the youngest of all the Gates, the one that dwelt in living flesh. It poised to strike, and in striking to fell them all, Gates, worlds, whatever was woven in its substance and so must be unwoven.

  One last time the darkmage sprang. He made himself a shield. He took the force of the working full in his center.

  It pierced him through. It unmade him. It shattered him from center to farthest extent, body, mind, and power.

  It veered aside not a hair’s breadth.

  Kimeri could do nothing. She was in pain beyond anything Vanyi could imagine, rent from within and without, and that only by the beginning of the working. Her mother held her in silence more terrible than if she had raged or wept.

  Estarion would have Vanyi’s hide if she let both his heirs be destroyed by a mage-working gone mad. She thrust her sluggish body toward them, with its stumbling heart, its blurring sight, its cold feet. She was dying, that was perfectly obvious. She would do her best to take the working with her.

  Kimeri gasped. It was loud in the silence. She struggled in her mother’s arms. Daruya, taken off guard, dropped her.

  She stumbled as her feet struck the floor, but she did not fall. Her whole body shook. Her face was stark white, her eyes white-rimmed. She raised her hand, the one that flashed gold. “No,” she said remarkably clearly, remarkably steadily. “I don’t want to. I won’t.”

  The working had no awareness to know what she said, or how she resisted. It struck her hand.

  And stopped. She did not pause to be amazed. She pushed against it—only the one hand, only the Kasar, with wisdom that must be instinct—and it gave way. It yielded. It flinched, even, before that palmful of burning gold.

  She braced her body and leaned into the working as if it had been a vast unwieldy creature, an ox that stood in her way and sought to trample her. She pushed it back and back.

  Just as she began to waver, as the working began to resist, Daruya set her hand above Kimeri’s. Gold as bright, but larger, woman-large, with strong power behind it, and the force of the god.

  Between the two of them they drove the working inward toward the place where it was born, the circle’s center, the man standing alone there, with his priests fallen or stunned or fled. It shrank as it retreated. Sun’s power withered it, Sunchildren’s will overwhelmed it.

  They might have tried to bend it aside from the man in the circle. Or they might not. Vanyi had loved the Sun’s brood for forty years and more, served them, protected them, been as kin to them. But she had never understood them; never been part of them.

  Whatever they willed, whatever they intended, the working, shrunk now to the breadth of a javelin and as sharply deadly, pierced straight through the priest’s heart.

  He made no effort to escape it. Vanyi hoped she would never see such despair again, such perfect awareness of what, all unwitting, he had done. Even before the spear struck, he willed himself out of life, casting his soul upon the wheel, seeking life on life of expiation.

  Not in truth because he had tried to unmake the worlds. Because he had failed, and in failing brought both magic and ruin to Shurakan.

  33

  The power was fallen that had ruled so short a time in Shurakan. The people of the Summer City, both city and palace, woke as from a dream to find their city half in ruins. In the palace, lords and servants wandered as if lost.

  All of them had seen the vision that Daruya forced upon the priests in Matakan’s temple. All had known exactly what it was that they followed, and exactly what it was that they feared.

  She had never meant it to spread so far. The priests’ working had woven it into the fabric of the realm. They had the truth now, whether they wanted it or no.

  Most of them forgot it soon enough, either because their minds could not absorb it or because they refused to accept it. Some few died of it—her fault, and her grief forever after. The rest had learned something, if only that magery was indeed something to fear.

  The queen, who had seen and known it all, was strongest, too. It was she who saw to the tending of the fallen priests, both the dead and the living, and the cleansing of the temple.

  Inevitably, people discovered who she was. They began to trickle in as the night reeled into dawn, to look on her face that had gained nothing of beauty in the long hours since she slept. None offered to speak to her, still less to denounce her or to sink a dagger in her heart.

  Word spread, soft on the morning wind. The queen lives. She sits in the temple of the ox-god who defended White Moon-Goddess and led her into Su-Shaklan. Now he defends her child. He blesses her; he protects her as his own.

  oOo
>
  The king came in the evening. He did not come willingly, not he whose pride deafened his ears to the gods’ voices. His allies were humbler or more sincerely afraid. They understood that their leader was dead, his body laid before the god, and his priests dead or vanquished.

  Their alliance was broken. They looked about them and saw lords who had come out of their houses with armed men at their backs, and the lord of Janabundur foremost. They saw a court diminished to nothing, its ministers suddenly and numerously indisposed, and its Minister of Protocol dead, who would have had the power to impose order on confusion.

  They came to the queen one by one, mute, as suppliants to a goddess, or transgressors to a ruler from whom they could not expect forgiveness. She forgave them—how could she not? Without them she had no court and no kingdom. And she was fond of them, as one is of one’s erring children, one’s foolish servants.

  Last and most lonely and most stiffly proud came the king. He had been left all alone in his splendid new palace, without even a bodyservant to wait on him. They were all gone. All fled, or huddled in and about the temple in which the queen sat.

  When he came, she was sitting at a table in the abbot’s workroom, trying to eat a roast fowl. Kimeri, none the worse for her night’s terrors, was up from sleeping the day away, and nibbling a wing. The others were still asleep or pretending to be, in priests’ cells that had been emptied for them, with Olenyai come from House Janabundur to guard them—except Rahai, who insisted that he was going to guard Kimeri and nobody else.

  People kept looking at her strangely and muttering about her being a Gate. She was not, not exactly. She was a mage and a Sunchild who happened to have a Gate inside of her, along with the Sun’s fire and her magery. Vanyi wanted to pummel her with questions, but Vanyi was not going to be pummeling anybody for a while. Aledi had got there just before she fell over, and kept her heart beating when it tried again and determinedly to stop.

  Vanyi was still alive, but it had been a near thing. She should have told Aledi long ago that she was having trouble with her heart; it was nothing a healer-mage could not mend, not if she knew about it soon enough. As it was, Vanyi was going to be well, but it would take her a long time, and she would have to be very careful. No mage-battles. No arguments, even, most of all with Aledi, who stopped being gentle when she had to contend with difficult invalids.

  So Vanyi was in bed trying to get better, and Daruya was asleep, and Kimeri was with Borti, who did not seem to mind that Kimeri was a living Gate. Borti was tired almost to tears, and fighting it, which made her look stiffer and more queenly than ever. She could persuade the priests to keep people out while she got a little rest, but they would not stop lingering and staring and offering her reverence.

  “You’d think I’d be used to it,” she said crossly round a bite of roast fowl, “but it’s downright embarrassing to have them groveling as if I were Moon Goddess herself, and not just the least of her children. If I’m not careful she’ll take offense, and I’ll be worse off than I was before.”

  “She won’t mind, I don’t think,” said Kimeri. “They’re scared. They don’t know what you’ll do to them. They helped the others kill your brother, after all, and they would have helped kill you, if they could have caught you.”

  “They thought they were doing the gods’ will,” Borti said. “Don’t they think I understand that? They were preeminently wrongheaded, but they meant well. And I need them. They prove that I’ve a right to my title.”

  The king came just then. Hunin brought him, because Miyaz the darkmage had insisted. Miyaz had been a prince of five robes in the High Courts of Asanion: he knew how to tell when a queen would want to be left alone, and when she would want to have a visitor.

  The king looked ruffled and surly. His extraordinarily long coat was dirty all along its trailing hem, and somebody had thrown a basket of ancient vegetables at him. He had wiped the worst of it off his face, but his coat was sadly stained.

  He had not worn the crown, at least, to come over to the temple. That would have got him killed. He was not much loved in the Summer City. He was a false king, and no son of heaven.

  The daughter of heaven, plain tired blunt-spoken Borti with her dinner in front of her half-eaten, looked at him and sighed. Particularly when he said nastily, “So now you accept the service of demons.”

  He meant Hunin, who was laughing behind his eyes. Hunin did not think much of this poor shift for a king.

  Borti could see that. She said to Kimeri, “Tell your warrior that I apologize for this my kinsman. He’s not so ill a man, when he’s getting his own way.”

  Hunin approved when Kimeri told him that in Asanian. He said, and Kimeri said for him to Borti, “That is the way of princes, lady.” He bowed as low as he would for a princess of seven robes in Asanion—not quite as he would for a nine-robe princess, which was what Kimeri was, and certainly not as for an empress, but from an Olenyas to a foreign queen it was a great honor. Kimeri said so.

  Borti smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said. He bowed again and made it clear that he was part of the wall, since she had to be polite to the king.

  She bit her lip. She was trying not to laugh. “Such a prince of servants!”

  She was learning to understand Olenyai in spite of their yellow eyes and their black veils and never being able to see their faces. She barely even thought of them as demons any longer. Kimeri was proud of her for that.

  The king was getting impatient, but he was too scared to show much of it. Borti looked him up and down. “Paltai,” she said, “you idiot. You should have come here in a priest’s robe. No one would have noticed you then.”

  He stood stiffly, reeking of ancient bloodroot and defunct ox-garlic. “I came in what was on my back. The servants are gone, and have taken the keys to the wardrobe with them.”

  “But there’s another key in the—” Borti stopped, then started again. “The king would know where to find his own key. And how to convince a priest of Ushala temple that it would be to his best advantage to lend a robe for a good cause.”

  “There are no priests in Ushala temple,” said Paltai. “They’re all gone, and the doors are locked. Every door in the palace is locked, except those that lead from the king’s chambers to the gate.”

  Borti’s face stayed calm, but inside she was exultant. She had not dared to hope for that, not even in her heart, where no one else—except Kimeri, but she did not know that—could know. A lord’s servants could tell him that they were no longer serving him. They did it by locking everything but the way out, and leaving him to find it before he froze or starved, since he could not get at his clothes or his dinner. It was a rare thing, but it had happened before, if not to a king.

  Paltai had to tell Borti that it had happened to him. That cost him a great deal of pride. But he was not too proud to do it. Real pride would have stayed in the palace till someone came to drag him out, or else slunk away to hide and brood and work mischief later. Paltai was more honest than that.

  He also thought Borti was soft in the heart. He was gambling on it, that she would not have him killed or sent to exile in the mountains. He had earned that, and would have had it if Kimeri had been the one to decide, but it was Borti’s place to say what she would do with him.

  She thought about it for a long while, while he stood stiffer and stiffer, till he started to tremble. He had been too angry and arrogant to be afraid. Now, in front of Borti, as ordinary as she looked and as indecisive as she seemed, he was suddenly terrified. Something about her reminded him at long last that she was the daughter of heaven, and his allies had killed her brother, who was also her husband and her king.

  After a long while she said, “There are many who would say that this upheaval in the kingdom is my fault and my brother’s, not only for letting foreigners in but for failing in our duty to the gods. Since we had no heirs—since the goddess never granted us children of our bodies.” She paused. That was an old pain, and one that went deep. “I
am not so old yet that I cannot bear a child. I may be barren—”

  “You aren’t,” said Kimeri. It was neither wise nor polite, but she hated to see Borti hurting. “It wasn’t you. It was the king. His seed was weak.”

  They both stared at her. She stopped herself before she started to fidget. “I can see,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

  “Child,” said Borti. “Oh, child.” Kimeri could not tell if she wanted to laugh or cry. She did not know which, herself. She made herself look back at Paltai, who was looking at Kimeri with wild speculation, seeing in her a power he could use. Borti said, “No, Paltai, don’t think of it. This child is my kin, if somewhat distant. She too is a daughter of heaven.”

  “And an heir?” Paltai asked with a twist of the lip.

  “Not to this kingdom,” said Borti. “And since I may not after all be barren, and my brother-king is dead, I’ll be needing a consort, to do my duty to the goddess. It would have to be someone of known ability to beget children, of high family, of the blood of heaven.”

  “It is a pity,” said Paltai, “that Lord Shakabundur is so recently unavailable.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” said Borti. “I blessed his wedding, too. They’re soulbound beyond any doubt, and beyond any hope of changing it.”

  “What’s to prevent him from doing stud-service in the palace for the kingdom’s sake?”

  “Why, little, I suppose.” Borti sighed again. “Paltai, you do have a terrible tongue on you. Hasn’t anybody ever taught you to be sparing with it?”

  He started as if she had slapped him. In a way she had. He was not used to that: it made him angry. But he bit his tongue and did not say any of the things he was thinking.

  Borti saw. She smiled. “I could ask Bundur to favor me, of course. It’s been done before. His lady might even allow it—one never knows. But there is another way. You’ve been king already. Would you return to the palace if I sanctioned you before the people?”