Tides of Darkness Read online

  “Tell your master, then,” she said, “and let him choose whether to tell me.”

  “What if he won’t?”

  “That is between the two of us,” she said levelly.

  He glowered at the sky, which was growing a thin fleece of cloud. Even without wishing to walk in his thoughts, she could feel the roil of confusion, the anger and defiance and childish resentment, mingled hopelessly with that same fear for the world which had brought her to this place and this aggravating person. He did care for what might come; his masks were a defense. Beneath them he was remarkably, almost shockingly passionate in his convictions.

  She escaped before he caught her in the inner halls of his self. She was just in time: he focused abruptly, sat straight on the bench, and said, “I’ll do what I can. I won’t be your servant. Bad enough that I’m his—I don’t need two of you ordering me about.”

  “No?” she asked silkily. “Is he not your emperor? Am I not the heir of his heir?”

  “When you are empress on the throne of Sun and Lion,” he said, “I will give you reverence as your rank deserves. But while you are mistress of Gate-mages, I am none of yours. You can kill me after all, if you like. You won’t change my mind.”

  “Nor do I intend to,” she said. “I am thinking … if I give you freedom of Gates, will you promise, for the world’s safety, to do nothing that will endanger you or any of us?”

  He sucked in a breath, shocked out of all sensible speech. She resisted the urge to shake him until he stopped gaping at her. In time he mastered himself; he found words to say. “You’re—letting me—”

  “With conditions,” she said. “You go nowhere alone. Either my great-grandfather goes with you, or I, or another mage of suitable power and good sense. Observe that stricture, and the worlds are yours. Search among them; find what you can find. Bring back such knowledge as you gain. And guard yourself. It would be a pity to lose you.”

  “It would? What if I won’t suffer a nursemaid? If I go out alone, what will you do? Kill me after all?”

  “I doubt we’ll need to,” she said.

  He eyed her suspiciously. “You can’t be changing the laws this easily. Are you that afraid?”

  “I am that uneasy,” she said.

  “You’re afraid.” That seemed to comfort him in some odd way. “Very well. I’ll do it. Not for you, princess; don’t delude yourself. I don’t want to see this world burned to ash, and all its people taken away into darkness.”

  “Yourself among them?”

  His eyes flashed at her under the lowered brows. “I could escape.”

  She had to incline her head at that; it was a just stroke.

  He thrust out his hand. “Allies?”

  “Certainly not enemies,” she said as she completed the handclasp.

  FOUR

  ESTARION KNEW WHEN MERIAN LEFT HIS HOUSE, AND KNEW quite well what Daros did afterward. He was rather surprised that the boy did not leap at once into a Gate and vanish among the worlds. That had been his plan, and Estarion had watched while he refined it and elaborated on it. He was quite a subtle creature when he wanted to be, and astonishing in his gift for Gates. Did he know how strikingly unusual it was? Estarion would have said unique, but he shared not inconsiderable portions of it with Estarion himself, and with Merian—and with no one else that Estarion knew of, in their world at least.

  Daros should have taken his freedom and run with it. But he was devotedly contrary, and he had no intention of gratifying anyone’s expectations. Therefore he stayed about the hut, tending it and its garden as a good servant should, and waiting conspicuously for its master to return.

  Its master would do that, but in his own good time. He had been hunting as the children believed, but his hunt was for nothing as simple as the mountain deer. He hunted among Gates, following the track of a shadow.

  It was a subtle track, well hidden, and protected behind strong walls. The strength of the magic that sustained it made him catch his breath. He was strong; there was none stronger in his world. To this, he was but a feeble child.

  He had not felt either young or weak in longer than he cared to remember. It was rather refreshing. He shielded himself as best he might, and hunted with all the stealth of which he was capable. That was considerable: even Merian could not find him unless he wished to be found.

  The darkness ran in tides like a sea. It seemed to come from farther out, beyond the reach of his world’s Gates, but with each ebb and surge it drew closer. It had buried worlds that he had walked on not so very long ago, distant worlds, far down the worldroads. It lapped the shores of several that he had passed by, or that he had not marked before. He prowled soft-footed round the edges, glimpsing bits of worlds: a flash of green, a spray of foam, a stretch of stark red sand.

  It struck him without warning, falling on him from behind. Such substance as it had was like a great cat made of darkness visible, fanged and lethally clawed. He twisted, lashing out with a crack of power. The thing drank it as if it had been water, waxing with the force of it, rising up over him. He flung himself out and away.

  The thing smote him so hard that his senses reeled. He was dimly aware of a Gate, and of falling. Then darkness was about him, black and deep.

  The gods’ curse had fallen on this land between the river and the desert. Their demon-servants stalked the night, rending any who ventured the darkness. The king was dead because of them, foraying out one long blue evening to avenge the slaughter of his people, and returning at dawn on the shoulders of his guards, so torn and broken that the priests despaired of mending his body for its journey into everlasting.

  The king’s wife had taken the scepter in her lap, close against her womb that had borne him six sons, but none of them had lived to see the men’s house. She was all there was to rule the city, now that he was dead; his brothers had died of sickness and war, and his nobles were not of the true line. Kings and lords of other realms up and down the river were as sore beset by the unknown enemy as she, and as incapable of either war or invasion. And above all, in the end, the priests favored her. They fancied her a weak and pliant woman, a wife but not a queen.

  She had played that part well while she lived as the king’s wife. Now for this past year of her widowhood, she had smiled and listened and pretended to be awed, and ruled as her husband had done, with care to do nothing too untoward—not yet. In secret she brought out the weapons that had come with her from her mother’s house, and began anew the exercises that she had practiced in her youth. She was not so young now, and not so supple, but she set her teeth and persevered; her servants, who were loyal, helped her as they could.

  Even a queen might leave her city by daylight, if she professed a fondness for hunting on the river. However dread the night, the day was still safe; and a hunt was welcome—to bring in fresh meat for the pot and to restore spirits too long confined within walls of mudbrick and fear.

  It was also opportunity to practice her archery, which was difficult within the palace. She could manage to be separated from the rest of the hunt, to wander among the reeds until there seemed no other boat in the world, and no other people but the boatmen and servants who accompanied her. They were all part of her secret, and glad of it, she reckoned as she ran her eyes over their faces. It was a warm day: they were gleaming with sweat, though even the rowers were resting, letting the current carry them along the reed-grown bank.

  When they were well out of sight of the city and the hunt, she bade the boatmen steer the boat to the bank and moor it there. This was rich country for waterfowl, thick with flocks so numerous and so bold that they barely troubled to shift themselves out of range.

  She would hunt them later. At the moment she had a desire in her heart to walk for a while between the green land and the red, between the nurturing earth and the stark hostility of the desert. It was a thing her husband had done, to remind himself of what his country was: rich yet precarious, and sharply divided from the world of gods and jackals.

/>   The division was sharper than ever now, the desert more inimical. It was searingly bright in this hot and sunstruck morning: red sand and sharp stone and a clutter of scrub, and cliffs rising sheer beyond, a wall between the river and the deep desert. After the flocks that teemed on and above the river, and the fish and the crocodiles that fought their perpetual war in the water, this place seemed empty of life, save for a falcon that hovered against the sun.

  She bowed to him, in homage to the god that he was. The air here was harsher, drier than it had been beside the river. Dust caught at her throat. Her maid offered her a skin of water, but she declined. She was thirsty, but not enough, yet, to act upon it.

  She began to feel, deep in her heart, that she was called to this place. The gods were speaking, if she had ears to hear. Something waited for her, something wonderful. She went forward eagerly, with great lightness of spirit.

  Only her maid and the captain of her guard went with her into the red land. She left the rest on the edge of the green, with orders to wait for her return. They were not unhappy to be left behind; the desert was a dread place, and more so since the night had become full of death.

  There was a track out upon the sand, narrow and barely visible. She did not think that humans had made it. It led, she knew from long ago, up over the high hill and through a narrow cleft, to a valley with a spring and a shy hint of green. Gazelle came there to drink from the spring, and lions, too, and jackals questing for carrion.

  Vultures were circling as she struggled up the steep slope. Lions’ kill, she thought, but the lions must be gone: she caught no sound or scent of them. The call was strong in her. She could not have turned back even if she would.

  She went on cautiously, with her bow strung and an arrow fitted to the string. Her guard would have gone ahead of her if he could, but the track was too narrow.

  She reached the top with heart beating as much from excitement as from the exertion of the climb. She dropped there and crept forward like a snake over the stones, until she could see through the cleft into the valley.

  It was almost devoid of green in this season, but the spring bubbled from its rock, ran into a pool hardly larger than a woman’s hand, and sank back into the sand. A human figure lay by that bit of dampness, sprawled on its face. It was dressed in the kilt and broad belt of the people of the river, but the length and breadth of its body, and the nightdarkness of the skin, spoke of a man from the south, where the sun had burned the earth’s children black.

  At first, with crushing certainty, she knew that he was dead. But as she watched, his hand stirred, long fingers closing into a fist, then opening again. Completely without thought, drawn irresistibly, she rose to go down into the valley.

  The captain of guards caught her arm. “Lady! He could be one of the night’s demons.”

  “In the full light of day?” She stared at his hand until it removed itself from her person. “Bring your spear, and be on guard. But don’t harm him unless he threatens me.”

  He was not happy, but he was a good servant. He lowered his eyes, firmed his grip on his spear, and followed her down into the valley.

  It was a large man indeed, and very dark. His hair was thick and plaited to the waist. Its blue-black waves were threaded lightly with grey, but his body was a young man’s, taut and strong. With care, and very much against her captain’s wishes, she turned him onto his back.

  She had not seen a face like that before, not on the blunt-featured men of the south; this had the profile of the hawk that had come to circle overhead, driving off the vulture with its divine presence. The shadow of its wings seemed for a moment to enfold him.

  She closed her eyes briefly. That face—that hawk’s shadow. She knew it. How or where or when, she did not know. But to her heart he was no stranger, no more than one of her souls.

  Her mind was very clear, not clouded at all. “Help me,” she said to her captain, and to the maid who had trailed behind them both. Among the three of them, however unwilling two might be, they lifted him and carried him the long hot way to the river. When they came in sight of the rest of her guard, those strong young men came to relieve them of their burden; they carried him to the boat, and laid him in the shade of the canopy.

  He had stirred now and then on the journey, but he had not roused. Once he was laid in the boat, he sighed and was still, except for the rise and fall of his breast as he breathed.

  That was the gods’ mercy. They could be kind to one of their own.

  That this was a god or a son of gods, she had no doubt whatever. She would offer him honor, and not lock him in the granary as half her advisors bade her do; the rest would prefer that she have him killed before he could wake and doom them all.

  None of them, not even the priests, could see what she saw. When she looked at him, she saw the sun’s fire encased in the dark wood of the south. A night-demon, she was certain, would be dark to the heart of it.

  She tended him herself. Tomorrow she would have duties that could not be escaped, but for this day she would do as she pleased, and as the gods willed. She saw him bathed in cool water and scented with oils, his hair combed and plaited and his beard smoothed into order. Only his right hand would not yield to their ministrations. It was clenched tight about a gleam of gold: some treasure, perhaps, that he guarded even in his dream.

  When he was clean, the queen’s servants laid him in the bed that had been the king’s, in the colonnade that opened on the garden. Coolness washed him there, the breeze of fans wetted in water, and sweet scents, and relief from the glare of the sun.

  The priests would not speak their spells over him to heal him, nor would they pray to the gods on his behalf. She said such prayers as a queen might say, sitting beside him, watching as the light shifted slowly from the blaze of noon to the softer glow of evening.

  In that long light, at last, he stirred and gasped. He opened his eyes.

  They were full of the sun. She fell before them, on her face as even a queen should do before a god. She heard the catch of his breath, the rustle of coverlets as he rose, and felt the warmth of his hands on her, raising her. She would let him lift her to her feet, but she would not look at him. One did not stare a god in the face.

  She could stare at his hands clasping hers, and as he let her go, at the thing that he had guarded with such care. The sun again, but set in his hand, burning in it as fiercely as it ever did in the sky. It cast sparks of golden light across her face, and glinted on the walls and the floor.

  He clenched his fist about it once more and said in a voice as warm as it was deep, “Don’t be afraid.” The words had a strange sound to them, as if they had begun in a language she had never heard, but had shifted and transmuted into words that she could understand.

  “One should fear the gods,” she said, still with her eyes turned resolutely down.

  “God? I? You worship the sun here?”

  “Is not the sun most greatly to be worshiped?”

  “We do believe so,” he said.

  She was silent.

  When the silence had grown almost awkward, he said, “Tell me if you will—where is this?”

  “You are in my city,” she said, “by the river that feeds the black land. We found you in the red land, where gods and demons walk. We cry your pardon if we acted in error.”

  “No,” he said. “No, you did well. That’s no friendly country, this red land of yours.”

  “It is not ours,” she said, politely, but firm nonetheless. “This is ours: the green and the water, and the black earth. It was blessed once. Now … one thing we do fear, even more than gods. We fear the night.”

  He stiffened just visibly. “What do you fear in the night?”

  He must know, as gods did. But it seemed he needed to hear it spoken. “We fear the things that walk in the dark; that rend flesh and devour souls. My people believe that you must be one such. But I see the sun blazing in the darkness.”

  “Ah,” he said. “No wonder you won’t lo
ok me in the face. I won’t blind you, lady, or suck out your soul. I am a man, though one or two of my forebears were gods.”

  She did not believe him, but she nerved herself to look up.

  If he was a man, he was like no man that she had ever seen. He was smiling at her. His golden eyes were warm. He did not frighten her, but neither did he put her at ease. “You came from the gods’ country,” she said, “from the land beyond the horizon. Don’t deny it; I see it in you. You are not of mortal kin.”

  “Not of this world,” he admitted. “The things you fear—I came hunting them. Your world is in great danger.”

  “You hunt them?” she said. She was not daring to hope, not yet. “You have weapons that will kill them? Powers? Magics?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Her face fell; he brushed it with a fingertip, a touch as light as a whisper of wind. “Lady, we’ve only now become aware of them; we don’t know what they are, where they come from, or anything but that they are destroying worlds. If I can discover the truth, I will. But you shouldn’t hope for too much. I’m only one man.”

  “But surely,” she said, “there are others where you come from. They can come here, too, yes? They can join us in our war.”

  “There are others,” he said, but his face for once was somber. “Whether they can come here … I barely managed it, and the darkness had had no warning of my coming. I don’t know whether I can go back, or whether my people can find me. There are so many worlds. And none of my people knows—none of them believes—that any of them is occupied.”

  She did not understand him, except that he was troubled, and that he might not be able to summon reinforcements. The rest was a matter for gods.

  This she understood: that he was still weak from his passage from the gods’ world to that of men; and that she was sorely remiss in her hospitality. She summoned the servants, bidding them bring food, drink, cooling fans, and a basin of water in which had been scattered a handful of sweet-scented petals.