Spear of Heaven Read online

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Vanyi said. “Something here is breaking Gates. Did you feel it? It was coming from outside—but not from the Gates in Starios.”

  “Then,” said Daruya, “it’s only this chain of Gates— only the ones bound to the Gate we departed from.”

  Vanyi opened her mouth to correct her again, but paused. She had felt all Gates from the worldroad, she was sure of it, and all had felt the blow. And yet . . .

  “It was strongest on this road,” she said. “So strong that maybe it deceived us into thinking it was greater than it was. If it’s only the Gates on this continent, the ones that we built and bound to the ninth Gate in Starios, then—”

  “Then we’re safer than we thought,” said Daruya. “And so are the rest of the Gates, and the Heart of the World.”

  “Certainly,” said Chakan, “no one will be assailing us from within the Gate. Nor will we be running back to Starios through it.”

  How like him, thought Vanyi, to say what none of the others would say. They were trapped here. Oh, they could go back, take the year and more, journey overland, find a ship, journey overland again. But the few moments’ walk from Gate to Gate—that was ended, for who knew how long.

  “Estarion will be beside himself,” she said. “Both of his heirs fled to the far end of the world, and no quick way back.”

  Daruya shot her a lambent glance. “You don’t think he’ll just walk through the gate of his Kasar and drag us all back home?”

  “You know I don’t,” Vanyi said levelly, “or you’d be doing it yourself.”

  “I can’t,” said Daruya, too shocked with the discovery even to be angry about it. “It’s all bound together somehow. When I came through, I felt it close behind me—everything. Every Gate and every road. There’s no way back. Except the simple human way.” She glared, though Vanyi had not said anything, nor changed expression. “I didn’t plan this!”

  “Certainly not,” said Vanyi. “You’re only an idiot when it comes to yourself. We were all fools for not expecting that the child would try to follow us. She’s always had a fascination with Gates.”

  “She was under guard,” said Daruya. “I saw to it myself—set priest-mages over her and commanded them not to let her out of their sight. I hope Grandfather rends them all limb from limb.”

  Chakan sat softly on the end of the bed and tucked up his feet. “It is interesting,” he mused, “that she eluded priest-mages. You can do that. Your grandfather certainly can. Would you be willing to wager that your daughter is as strong as either of you?”

  “She’s so young,” said Daruya. It was not a denial, not of what he said. She smoothed her daughter’s curls, gently. Kimeri smiled in her sleep. Daruya’s face set. “Wherever the fault lies, both of us are here. I may choose to think that the god wanted it so. Why else would he have allowed it?”

  Maybe he did not care. Vanyi was too circumspect to say it. “Well, then,” she said. “Here we all are, and here we stay until we know it’s safe to raise a new Gate. I’m going to go on as I intended, into the Kingdom of Heaven. The source of the trouble is there, by all the evidence I’ve seen, and we’re expected there.”

  “Maybe not now,” said Daruya. “Maybe that’s why the Gates were broken.”

  Vanyi grinned ferally. “Then we’ll surprise them. They don’t know us if they think a little matter of fallen Gates will keep us away from the expedition we’ve been planning since the first Gate went up.”

  “We are a tenacious people,” observed Chakan. His glance took in them all: the white-skinned Island woman with her sea-colored eyes, the wizened brown Guardian from the Nine Cities, the tall princess-heir of both Keruvarion and Asanion, and even himself, the Asanian bred-warrior. “And we are that, do you notice? All these years of fighting, and now we’re entirely we, and those out there are they.”

  “Even the worst of warring clans will unite against a common enemy.” Vanyi sat back in the chair that she had chosen, and rubbed her weary eyes. “Faliad, have you have word from the other Guardians?”

  “Not since before you came,” the Guardian said. He looked as tired as she felt, but his voice was strong enough. “They were well enough then, except for the Guardian in Shurakan—what we call the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  “Only the one Guardian?” Vanyi asked sharply. “There were to be more.”

  Faliad lowered his eyes. “Yes, Guildmaster. There were. But we had lost one to a fever, and another was recalled to Starios. Before any others could be sent for, the Gate fell. There was only Uruan to guard it, and he died in the breaking.”

  Kimeri stirred in her sleep. Faliad fell silent, but she was only dreaming. She pressed close against her mother, sighed, and was still.

  “It seems,” said Vanyi after a while, “that we made mistakes. Maybe building these Gates was a mistake. No mage ever built them in chains as we did, with intent to open them to those who weren’t mages. Nor were lesser chains bound to greater Gates. It may be that in making so many, and interweaving them in such complexity, we weakened the fabric of the whole.”

  “No,” said Daruya with such certainty that Vanyi shot her a look. But she was oblivious. “Somebody did this. I felt the thrust of will on the Gates, just before they started to fall. Somebody wanted them down.”

  “Can you prove that?” Vanyi demanded.

  “Not if you didn’t sense it for yourself.”

  Vanyi stiffened. She was Master of the Gates. How dared this haughty child tell her that she knew nothing of them?

  She caught herself before she spoke in anger, knocked down the anger and sat on it. When she was sure that she could speak reasonably, she said, “Maybe you saw what I was too preoccupied to see.”

  Daruya accepted the concession with surprising grace. “I was slower than you were to understand what was happening, and much slower to act. Too slow, or people wouldn’t have died.” That was grief; she caught it and hid it as soon as it escaped. “I had time to look, and to see what came at us. There was human will behind it. I know the taste and the smell of it. It was human, have no doubt. And it hates us.”

  “Us?” asked Chakan. “Foreigners? Gates? Mages?”

  “All of them,” Daruya answered.

  “Yes,” said Faliad slowly. “Yes, there is hate for us here. It’s not so strong in this place, where all the traders’ caravans come through, and strangers are a common thing. Out on the plains, in Merukarion—Su-Akar is their name for that country—strangers are mistrusted, and keep to their own places, apart from good native folk. They call us demons, in particular our Asanians, since demons here have yellow eyes. Our northerners they call gods, because the dark gods look so, taller than mortal men, and black as night without stars. Me they endure: I look like some of them. The rest recall the people of the Hundred Realms, with their bronze faces and their narrow eyes. Some are redheaded, did you know? like red Gileni.”

  Daruya, who was kin to the Red Princes of Han-Gilen, inspected her hand. It was long and narrow, with tapering fingers, the color of pale honey. She turned it palm up. The gold in it caught the lamplight and blazed. “The Guild would have done better,” she said, “to appoint only Guardians who were plainsmen.”

  “We considered that,” said Vanyi, “long ago. We decided not to hide ourselves. They’d find out in the end, whether we wanted it or no; best that we be honest from the beginning, and be as foreign as in fact we are.”

  “So they think that we’re all in league with demons and dark gods. Wait till they see our emperor. They’ll want to sweep us from the earth.”

  “They already do,” said Chakan. “Or if not us, then our Gates at least. You will go on, lady? In spite of that?”

  He was addressing Vanyi, his eyes on her—demon-eyes, she thought. They seemed very human to her, for all that they were as yellow as a cat’s. “Yes,” she answered him. “We go on, and the sooner the better. For now I think it best if we sleep. We’ll want to be awake and thinking clearly when Estarion comes roar
ing down the mindways. He’s going to be in a right rage.”

  “With the grandmother of headaches,” said Chakan. His voice was light, but his eyes were wide with alarm. “Ai! I won’t want to live, by the time he gets done with me.”

  “He won’t have time for you,” Daruya said. “He’ll be too busy tearing into me.”

  “You both should have thought of that before you colluded in this escapade,” said Vanyi coldly. Neither had the grace to look abashed.

  She pushed herself to her feet. “Well. Enough. Faliad, come with me. Olenyas, you got her into this, you guard her till she gets out of it. Me, I’m going to bed. I might even manage to sleep.”

  “Sleep well,” they said together. She looked sharply at them, but neither showed any sign of mockery.

  She sighed, considered another spate of advice, left them instead, without another word. When she glanced back, Daruya was sitting as she had been for much of their council, cradling her daughter. The Olenyas lay across the door with his swords clasped to his breast.

  “They’ll do,” she said. She was reasonably content, all things considered.

  oOo

  Faliad, poor man, looked ready to drop. She sent him to bed and made sure that he obeyed her. He took the younger Guardian’s cell as the Sunchildren had taken his own; Vanyi plied him with wine that she found there, until he fell asleep.

  She was weary to exhaustion, but there was no sleep in her. She wandered through the temple, peering at its strangenesses until they palled on her. By the time she found the door and opened it on a narrow street, it was dawn.

  No, she thought. Dusk, with the lamps just lit in sconces along the walls that lined the street. This was the other side of the world, where day was night, and night, day. There was still light in the sky, but it faded fast.

  The people walking by were not so strange. They were, as Faliad had said and she knew from her mages’ accounts of their travels in this land of Merukarion, as much like plainsmen of the Hundred Realms as made no matter. There were differences, but those were small: shorter stature, broader build, lighter skin—and yes, one or two even of the few she saw here had hair the color of copper. The rest were dark, of course, or grey with age.

  They were like Asanians in that they did not stare, except sidelong, under lowered eyelids. She was not dressed as they were, and her skin was white—white as a bone, they said in the empire. Her hair had been red once, but not the red of copper; a darker color by far, like moors in autumn, with brown lights and gold. Now it was all gone to ash.

  She leaned against the doorpost and watched the people pass. No hatred touched her, and no fear. Wariness, that was all, and a veiled curiosity, a whisper of thought: There’s another strange one in Shakryan’s temple. I wonder how they conjured it up? Is it a ghost? A ghoul? A shiver at that, but of the more pleasant sort. But then, as the thinker came level, disappointment. Only an old woman. Poor thing, she has a disease. It took all the color out of her.

  Vanyi laughed at that, but silently, drawing back into the shadow of the doorway lest she alarm the passersby. Northerners used to think that of her, too, even when she was young. Even Estarion had, at first: Estarion with his black-velvet skin and his black-velvet voice and his astonishing eyes.

  “Damn,” she said aloud, as she always did when she could not get him out of her head.

  And there he was in it, as if she had invoked him: spitting mad, she noted, and yes, as the Olenyas had predicted, he had a glorious headache. Not one bit of him was muted by coming from half around the world.

  She let him rage himself to a standstill. She could, if she put her mind to it, see him where he was, still in the Guildhall, with the sun shining through the high windows of her own morning-room. They must have taken him there after the Gate collapsed: he was sitting on the couch she liked to nap on, stripped to breeches, his hair worked out of its plait, and a gaggle of mages and priests hovering, looking frantic.

  He took no notice of them at all. His eyes glared straight into hers. She heard his voice as if he stood in front of her. “Damn you,” he said. His tone by now was almost reasonable. “Damn you, Vanyi. You’ve got both my heirs on your side of the world. And I can’t get there. My way is no more open than yours is.” He flung up his hand, a flash of gold. “It’s locked tight shut.”

  “I know,” said Vanyi. “Your elder heir said as much. Eloquently.”

  His eyes glittered. “And the younger? What did she say?

  “No,” he said quickly, before Vanyi could answer, “don’t bother. I don’t want to know.”

  “Believe me,” Vanyi said after a pause, “if I could send them back, I would. Were you the one who taught them the shadow-trick? Even the baby’s mastered it.”

  “No!” That much vehemence was too much for him: he winced and clutched his head. “God,” he said much more softly. “Goddess. What a ghastly mess this is.”

  “It would be worse,” she said, “if Daruya hadn’t been there to keep the road steady till we could all get past it. She’s worthy of her training, Starion.”

  “If her training had been adequate, she wouldn’t have gone at all.”

  “Granted,” said Vanyi, silencing him before he could go off in another rage. “I’ll undertake to complete it as I can.”

  “Has she left anyone a choice in the matter?”

  He was wry, which was reassuring: it meant that he was getting his temper back in hand. He ran shaking fingers through his hair, pulling out the last of the plait.

  Vanyi regarded him in something resembling sympathy. “We can still talk,” she said. “That’s not so ill.”

  “But I can’t be there.” He leaped to his feet, scattering priests and mages, and paced out his frustration. “If we muster all our power, ward it with all our strength, then raise another Gate—this time let me go through it. If the Gate alone isn’t enough, the Kasar may be—”

  She stopped him before he could go any further. “You will not! I don’t even dare raise one here. It’s deadly, Starion. And don’t tell me how strong you are,” she said, as he opened his mouth. “I know it to the last drop of power. It might be enough. But it might not. We can’t have the emperor dead, no matter where his heirs are, or how long it will take them to get back unless we raise the Gates again.”

  He was looking fully as rebellious as Daruya, and about as young. But he had more sense, or more cynicism. The rebellion faded from his face. He raised his hands, sighed. “Hells take you for being right. I’ll go mad here, waiting.”

  “Of course you won’t,” she said briskly. “You’ll be too busy. Isn’t today your judgment-day? You must be late already.”

  “I put it off,” he snapped. Good, she thought: he was thinking, even with his temper as chancy as it was. “See here, Vanyi. We’ve got to do something.”

  “And so I shall,” she said. “I’m going over the mountains, just as I planned to. Do think, next time you want to talk to me. The people here are sure I’m a lunatic, or a god’s plaything.”

  “Wise people,” said Estarion. “Vanyi, you’re not—”

  “I have to go,” she said.

  Even as he began his protests, she cut him off, raised the shields about her mind, withdrew into the temple, in the dimness and the strangeness and the scent of incense. Someone was chanting. The younger Guardian? Or did they keep a priest or two here, to preserve their pretense of holiness?

  She was too tired to hunt down the voice and ask. She could, in fact, have slept where she stood. Speaking across the world was harder than it looked while one did it.

  She found a bed, it little mattered where, and fell into it, clothes and all. Not even fear could keep her awake, nor her creaking bones, nor grief for the mages whom she had lost. She laid them all on the breast of Lady Night, and herself with them. If she had dreams, she remembered none of them, till it was morning again, and fear and pain and grief were locked once more about her neck.

  7

  Vanyi thrust aside the remna
nts of breakfast, unrolling the map that Faliad had brought for her, anchoring it with cups and bowls and a jug half-full of the local ale. The others—all of them, mages and Olenyai and Sunchildren—craned as best they could, to see what was drawn on the fine parchment.

  She ignored them. “So,” she said. “Here we are, out on the western edge of Merukarion—Su-Akar, we should be calling it, I suppose. This is the town called Kianat, and here are the mountains that are only foothills. What’s this?” She peered. “‘Here be demons’?”

  The younger Guardian of the fallen Gate, whose name was Talian, spoke quickly. “There are, truly. The mountains are full of them. They haunt the peaks, and lure travelers astray.”

  Vanyi shot her a glance. She was flushing under the sallow bronze of her skin and wishing transparently that Faliad were here to spare her the ordeal. But the elder Guardian, having slept little if at all, was standing watch in the outer temple.

  Vanyi decided to have mercy on this younger fool. “Ah well, we’re mages. We’ll raise the wards and chant the spells and keep the demons at bay.”

  “Lady,” said Talian with shaky determination, “you may smile, but this isn’t our own country. It shares a world and a sun with us, yes—but it’s as alien as any world on the far side of Gates.”

  “That’s well enough put,” said Vanyi, unperturbed by the girl’s presumption. She turned back to the map. “So. Demons in the mountains. There’s a pass, this says, that seneldi can cross. Yes?”

  “In this season,” Talian said with a little less trepidation, “lady, yes. You won’t want to delay too long, or go too slow. The snows close in early at those heights.”

  “There really are no seneldi here?” asked one of the Olenyai.

  “Really,” said Talian. “They have a kind of ox that draws their wagons, but no swift riding animal.”

  “Then how do they wage their wars?”

  “On foot,” Chakan answered for the Guardian, “and well enough for that, I’m sure. Our traders, once it’s safe for them to come here, should make a great profit from the sale of seneldi. A whole new realm, empty of them. Remarkable.”