A Fall of Princes Page 9

  “Great value that you lay on it,” said the cool bitter voice.

  “What would you have done in my place?”

  Sarevan pondered that, which was a victory in itself. At last he sighed. “I would have found a way to avoid giving my word.”

  “You demanded my word. You did not stipulate that it embody my honor.”

  Sarevan stared. Suddenly he laughed, hardly more than a cough. “Asanian oathtaking! Cubling, when I told Baron Ebraz that you were incorrigible, I never knew how right I was. Will you swear again, now that we’re so close to Endros? This time,” he added, “with honor in it.”

  Hirel’s silence was long enough to trouble even Sarevan’s complacency. But his pride had had enough of trying to force nature’s relief while a painted barbarian looked on and smirked. He held out his hands and said, “I give you my true word of honor, as high prince to high prince, that I will not attempt to escape until I stand before your father in Endros Avaryan.”

  “And I give you mine,” said Sarevan, “that we will accord you all honor, and return you to Kundri’j Asan as soon as we may.” He raised a spider-thin hand. “Cut the cords, Zha’dan.”

  He did it quickly, with a swift smile. Hirel leaped up and stretched wide, exultant.

  Sarevan’s grin was a white flash in the firelight. Hirel answered it before he could help himself. “Now,” he said, dropping down again, “what is this I hear of your dainty stomach? Here, eat. I command you.”

  Rather to his surprise, and much to everyone else’s, Sarevan obeyed. But of course; it took a prince to compel a prince.

  o0o

  When the Zhil’ari in council reckoned that they were two days’ ride from Endros, Hirel left his mare to run with the rest and swung onto Sarevan’s crupper.

  Sarevan cursed him in a hiss, but he took no notice. The body that so brief a time past had seemed so heavy was as light as a bundle of sticks.

  Hirel was in the saddle behind it, unbinding the lashings, before anyone could move, Zha’dan came when he called, and took the Varyani prince in his arms.

  Thereafter the Zhil’ari took turn and turn. “Consider it my revenge,” he said to the smoldering eyes. By then he was back on his mare again: she did not take kindly to infidelity.

  o0o

  That night there was a battle. The Zhil’ari would have them lodge in a town called Elei; they were curious, and they had discovered a great liking for southland wine. But Sarevan would not have it.

  “The temple will know,” he said in the whisper that was all the voice he had. “They will come for me. They will drug me to keep me quiet. They will try to heal me themselves before they send me to my father.” He struggled feebly in Gazhin’s arms. “Let me up, damn you. Let me ride. I can come to Endros sooner by myself.”

  “But—” Gazhin began.

  “No.” They all stared at Hirel, except Sarevan, whose effort had robbed him of his last strength. “Better that he rest tonight and ride another day, and gain the tending he needs.”

  o0o

  It was not so simple, and at times it was acrimonious, but in the end they rode through Elei without stopping. Beyond the town the land rose in a long ridge like a breaking wave. Trees clothed the ridge and crowded into its hollows, yet high up, almost to the summit, they found a haven: a green meadow, golden with the last long rays of Avaryan, starred with flowers. From a rock near its eastern edge bubbled a spring.

  It was early yet. Ulan had come as he always did, bringing a gift for the pot; he dropped it by the half-dug firepit and sought his lord.

  Sarevan, lost in a dim dream, knew nothing and no one. The cat nosed him from head to foot, growling on the edge of hearing. Sarevan stirred, but at random, unconscious.

  “Tomorrow, Ulan,” said Hirel through the tightness in his throat. He was not certain, but he thought that he had found a long tongue of greater heat on arm and side beyond the bandage, and the flesh was taut, swollen, unpleasant to the touch. “Tomorrow the Sunborn will work a miracle.” He turned away too quickly, striding he cared not where.

  The clamor of the camp faded behind him. The way was steep and stony, but trees clung there, gripping the rock with clawed fingers.

  He welcomed the pain, the breath beaten out of him, the earth that, though strong, yielded before him. He was dwarfed here, but only as all men were made small by the immensity of the world.

  A shadow sprang past him. He cried aloud in the anger of despair. But Ulan had not come to herd him back to his captivity. The cat climbed ahead of him, sometimes outstripping him, sometimes circling back, bearing him company.

  Yes, they were in the same straits, they two. Did Ulan’s anger match his own, that he could care so much, and come so close to grief, for a redheaded madman?

  The summit was a triumph and a disappointment. Hirel had conquered the Wall of Han-Gilen, but he had gained no sight of the fabled City of the Sun. A broad plain stretched away below him, the plain of Han-Gilen watered by the flood of Suvien, but though the sky was clear above and behind him, all before lay under a pall of storm. Clouds boiled; lightning cracked. Rain cloaked the heart of the Sun’s empire.

  The wind blew fierce in Hirel’s face. Challenging him, son of the Golden Throne, trespasser in the land of his enemies.

  He flung up his arms, defying it. It buffeted him on his precarious perch. He stood firm; with infinite reluctance it surrendered. With a snap of laughter, he turned away.

  o0o

  He followed Ulan down, slipping and slithering, catching himself on treetrunks. The sun had sunk with alarming rapidity; already it was growing dim among the trees. Ulan descended more slowly, and Hirel caught the thick fur of the cat’s neck, bracing himself against a sudden sharp incline.

  He did not discover the hollow so much as he fell into it. It was like the one in which they had camped, like many another along this crannied wall of a mountain: an oval of grass hemmed in with trees and watered by a spring. But here the trees crowded close, and a bastion of stone reared up above the meadow, slanting inward into darkness.

  It was a pretty enough place, but Hirel did not like it; and not only because Ulan surveyed it with raised hackles. The cavemouth gaped like a lair of dragons.

  Because his body bristled and his heart thudded, Hirel forced himself forward. It was only a clearing growing dim with evening. If anything lived in the cave, surely it was no match for the ul-cat that stalked stifflegged by his side.

  The spring bubbled and sang into a basin of stone. Hirel bent to drink, and froze. Something lay in the water. Something white and shapely, a work of fine craftsmanship, shaped very like a skull. The skull of a child or a small woman, delicate as it was, contemplating the sky with golden jewel-eyes.

  Hirel’s throat burned with thirst, but he backed away from the water. Ulan crouched in front of the cave, snarling. Hirel came to his side, moving slowly, helpless to hold back.

  If this was a guide, the skull in the spring had belonged to a child. This one had been a boy, one of the red-bronze people of this country, finer-featured than most, his hair the color of tarnished copper.

  He had not died swiftly, and he had not died easily. In the emptied sockets of his eyes, twin topazes glinted, staring up at Hirel in a horrible parody of awareness.

  Hirel had known when he saw the skull, and had not credited what he knew. The darkside rites of Uvarra Goldeneyes were not uncommon in Asanion even in these enlightened days. But he had never thought to come upon them so far east, so deep into Avaryan’s country, within sight of Endros itself.

  The Thousand Gods belonged to the west, and this one most of all, queen of light, lord of the flaming darkness, goddess and god, redeemer and destroyer. Hirel bore her name of the light; his name of the dark had been bestowed on a lion’s cub and the beast sacrificed to Uvarra, that Asanion’s heir be proof against all powers of the night.

  Superstition, he had always called it. He had better night eyes than most, and he had never been afraid of the dark, but that
had nothing to do with gods or demons. Uvarra was naught but that figment of man’s mind which, borne eastward, had become Avaryan, and grown from deity of birth and death into sole true god.

  How like the east to call the bright face male, and name the dark a goddess, and hate her and fear her and ban all her worship. In Asanion they looked on it as a necessity, however grim, like death itself that was the Dark One’s servant.

  This was not a sacrifice to distorted and tongue-twisted Uveryen. She did not make use of Eyes of Power. And carved on the boy’s breast above the empty cavern of his belly were words in fine curving script, the holy writing of Asanion in one of the older tongues, addressing the one whom Hirel, Lightchild and night’s protected, was not supposed to name.

  He had done it before, often. He did not do it now. He could not.

  He was remembering his logic. If there were mages . . .

  Ulan moaned deep in his throat. The same keening sound escaped Hirel before he could strangle it. He pulled himself onto the warm comforting back and kicked the long sides as if the cat had been a senel. Ulan snarled at Hirel’s presumption, but he wheeled about and bore the prince away.

  o0o

  Hirel saddled his mare with many pauses. She stood quietly for once, as if she knew that he had been sick all night. Blackly, stomach-wrenchingly, helplessly sick.

  It was not only the hideousness of the sacrifice. All the horrors of the world had come crashing on his head, all at once, without mercy. And there was no one here who cared enough to minister to him.

  Now, in the hour before sunrise, his emptied stomach lay quiet. He was weak, but he felt light, purged, even the sourness in his mouth put to flight by the herb that sweetened the mare’s breath.

  He ran his hand over the black-and-dun silk of her neck. She nibbled his hair. He laughed a little, for no reason, unless that the night was over and the day was coming and he had emptied himself for a brief while of the horror in the clearing.

  The mare tensed to shy, but held her ground. Ulan ignored her with lordly disdain. He dropped something at Hirel’s feet, turned away.

  All the sickness flooded back. Hirel doubled up with it. An eternity, and it passed, and still the hideous beautiful thing gleamed out of the grass.

  An orb of topaz the precise size and shape of a child’s eye. It did not blast Hirel’s trembling fingers, but he shuddered at the touch of it. He thrust it into the pouch at his belt, where it burned until his mind schooled itself—almost—to forget. Until he must remember.

  o0o

  They rode hard, unsparing of mounts or selves. Sarevan had fallen into unconsciousness like death, passed like baggage from hand to hand, unmoving, oblivious.

  They scaled the Wall, riding far from the place of sacrifice, and there at last with its veil of storms cast aside was the city they sought: Endros Avaryan, Throne of the Sun, white walls and towers of gold, and the crag above the river, and the magewrought tower a black fang on the summit. Darkness and light face to face across the rush of Suvien, but both begotten of the mind and the hand of the Sunborn.

  They spurred toward it. The mountain shrugged them off; the plain unrolled itself before them, broad green-golden level scattered with villages.

  They were marked, a wild riding of lakeland savages with a western prince, and one who seemed a savage borne lifeless on a saddlebow. They were not challenged. They were a strong company, and this was the heart of an empire at peace.

  Hirel, exalted with emptiness and with the aftermath of illness, gazed steadily on the walls of Endros. They mocked it in Kundri’j, called it a whitewashed village, an encampment of stone, a rude mockery of the Golden City itself. It was raw, they said, all harsh stone and bare stripped earth, its white and gold too stark for beauty: the hubris of a barbarian veneered with southern gentility, proclaiming for all to hear: See, I too can make an empire, and raise up a city, and dare to ordain that it will endure a thousand years.

  And yet, the nearer it came, the lovelier it seemed. Stark, yes, but wrought in a harmony of curve and plane and angle. It looked clean and young, like snow new-fallen in the morning, but not raw; it seemed to grow out of the earth as a mountain does, sudden and splendid and inevitable.

  Not that it failed of reality. People lived in it, traveled to and from it, ate and chattered and sang, labored and idled, bought and sold and traded, had need of cesspits and middens and graves.

  They were a varied people, mannered according to their breeding. Hirel saw black giants, painted and unpainted, bearded and shaven smooth, the women bare to the waist or veiled to the eyes, striding as if they owned the world; almond-eyed folk of the plains, red or bronze or brown, who stared openly and speculated audibly and never knew what the outlanders carried into their city; here and there a white oddity from the Eastern Isles, walking aloof; and many a figure painful in its familiarity, small among the rest, sleek and full-fleshed, with skin in every shade of gold from dun to old ivory, and curling fair hair, and great-irised tawny eyes.

  Though none had skin as pale as Hirel’s had been, or hair so pure a gold, or eyes that often seemed all amber. They had courtesy; they did not stare, and they kept their thoughts to themselves, going smoothly about their business.

  Ulan was gone again. He shunned cities; even this one, it seemed. Well enough: if he were known, so might Sarevan be, and then would be pandemonium.

  But anonymity had its troubles. Hirel, bred in palaces, knew of guards and their office. It had not occurred to him that his companions might come within its sphere. To all appearances they were a ragtag company, a pack of savages from the gods knew where, and Sarevan’s name was insufficient passport to the inner reaches of the palace.

  The outer reaches were splendid enough, to be sure, and royally bewildering in their complexity; many persons offered guidance, for a fee, and many more shied away from the redolent corpse in Rokan’s arms. Somewhere among the courts, a number of armed men persuaded the Zhil’ari to leave their mounts and their weapons behind, not without a broken head or three.

  They would have been ejected then, but for Zha’dan’s swift hard words. Hirel had caught a glancing blow meant for someone else; he could not fit his mind properly around any tongue. He heard only the name of Avaryan and the overtones of menace. The guards let them by, afoot and unarmed and drawing close together, with Sarevan shifted to the care of Gazhin who was largest and strongest.

  o0o

  They wandered for an age, to no purpose. “We would see the emperor,” Zha’dan kept saying in passable Gileni. He was laughed at or sneered at or ignored. “We have your prince, damn you. We have the emperor’s son!”

  The laughter sharpened. That? men mocked. That had been a stripling savage before it began to rot, and tricks did not succeed here. His imperial majesty did not stoop to the raising of outland dead.

  It was a brown man who said that, a plump jeweled creature whose every pore breathed forth the air of a petty functionary. Someone else, moved by their desperation if not by the name of their charge, had directed them to him.

  He sat in his gilded cranny and despised them, and his mind was set in stone. He did not know their painted skeleton. Both its fists were knotted in rictus and would not unclench for proof; and in any case it was well known that the prince Sarevadin journeyed among his loyal subjects in the west. They were lying in order to get at the emperor, he heard such lies all too often, the whole world would sell itself into the hell of falsehood to gain a moment of the Sunborn’s notice. Or his favor. Or his fabled magic.

  They left him still expounding on the necessity of protecting the emperor from his importunate people. Most of the Zhil’ari were for storming the inner gates. Gazhin curled his lip at them. “You are perfect idiots. You’ll end in chains, and all for nothing. I say we go to the temple. They’ll know my lord, and they can bring his father to him. We should have gone there first.”

  Hirel scowled at the tiled pavement. That was his fault. He had argued for the straight path to the emp
eror, and the Zhil’ari, ignorant of palaces, had let him have his way. But they had learned quickly enough.

  For all their urgency, they paused in the quiet courtyard to which their contention had taken them. A fountain played in it; they bathed their heated faces, and the wounded laved their bruises. Zha’dan sponged Sarevan’s body. Hirel drank a little, found that he could keep it down if he tried, wandered away from them.

  In truth this was more garden than court. Tiles rimmed it and circled the fountain; the rest was grass and flowers and one slender young tree guarding a gate. It opened to Hirel’s touch.

  Grass again, level, shaved smooth. A groom rode a senel there, a black stallion of great beauty. It could not but be of the Ianyn breed, that was reckoned the best in the world; though its horns curved in the scimitars of age, it moved like a youngling. Leap, curvet, caracole; sedate sidewise canter and sudden fiery plunge, with the perfect control of the dancer or the warrior. And yet it wore no bridle, its rider motionless in the light flat saddle, hands on his thighs.

  Hirel’s eyes drew him across the grass. He had never seen such riding. He wanted to learn it. Now. Utterly.

  He was not seen. The stallion fixed inward on his art. The man rode as in a trance. A young man, night-dark, one of the smooth-shaven northerners.

  He was a priest of Avaryan. Very like Sarevan, in truth, if Sarevan had not had that fiery mane: his heavy braid swinging to his senel’s rump, and his kilt threadbare above bare feet, and his chest bare and his torque bright beneath the keen eagle-face. He was not outrageously handsome as Sarevan was, but neither was he ugly; he was simply himself.

  The senel gathered himself from a flying gallop into a dance in place, cadenced like a drumbeat, stilling to stone.

  Hirel’s numbed brain struggled. They were stone. Black man on black stallion, with gold around the man’s neck and glinting in his ear, and dun-drab paint fading on the sculpted kilt, and rubies feigning seneldi eyes.

  The carven rider left the carven saddle, and Hirel stared. For all his northern face and his northern garb, this stranger was no giant; he was merely a tall man. Asanian-tall, middling in the south, small as a child among the tribes.