Arrows of the Sun (22 page)

He was too wise to ask them that. He drank the cool sweet
water, and never mind that the boy who brought it had sipped it first lest it
be poisoned. There were cakes, too, and something with spices in it, and fruit,
whole and sour-sweet.

He was wise with a priest’s wisdom. He did not gorge himself
on either food or drink, but partook slowly, sparingly, letting each sip or
bite settle well before he essayed another. The servants freed him from his
robes while he ate, combed the tangles from his hair, indicated with Asanian
subtlety that he could bathe when he was ready.

He wanted most to fall upon the couch that stood against the
wall, and not wake till morning; but a bath was a potent enticement. He let
himself be led into a chamber like a hall under the sea, green and blue and
sun-shot gold, with a play of tiled fishes, and a pool as wide as a lake, full
of warm and ever-flowing water. He opened his mind without thinking, reached
for the one who was not there, who had not been there in a bitter count of
Brightmoon-cycles.
Vanyi, look. Here’s a
bit of your sea, all in the dry land
.

But she was gone, her mind closed away as if she had never
been, or been part of him. He was alone.

Truly. None of his Guard had come so far, none of his court,
his priests, not even his mother. She was in the queen’s palace as was proper.
If he would speak with her, he must summon her.

He opened his mouth to do it. Then he shut it, and likewise
his mind. She had forced him to this. Let her know what she had done, and
suffer its consequences.

Vanyi was proud of herself. Having left Estarion to his
own devices, she devoted the whole of her self to her duties and her
priesthood. She was not even dreaming of him every night now, or missing him
for more than two heartbeats out of three. Sometimes, when they were still in
Induverran, she had seen him from a distance. He looked well, if harried, and
strikingly cool in the heat.

In Kundri’j Asan she did not see him. He was shut up in the
palace behind the gates and walls of gold, where no woman walked and no
commoner might go.

She had her place in the temple of the Two Powers within the
wall of lapis, in the third circle of the city. Its Worldgate was as potent as
that in Endros, with holiness on it beyond its simple power, for it had been
made by the Mageguild itself.

This had been the guildhall, this house like any other in
this circle of the city, neither the richest nor the poorest of those about it.
Priests of god and goddess had kept it so after the Guild died out, altering it
little save to set an altar in its central court.

Common people did not know, maybe, what power dwelt here.
Some came to worship, and the priests did turn and turn about in the rites, but
most chose other temples.

It was a quiet place, for all its weight of memory. Vanyi
could have been happy there, searching out its secrets, prowling its library
that had been left when the mages went away. Her old fascination with the Guild
was whetted here, tantalized with glimpses into their lore and their magics.

Iburan refused the place of chief priest although he far
outranked the mistress of the temple; he was content to serve where he was
needed, to stand guard on the Gate in his turn, and to go rarely to the upper
city and the high temple of Avaryan and Uveryen. He never said, nor indicated
by glance or strayed thought, but Vanyi suspected that he was not fond of the
high priestess. She was a proud cold creature of princely Asanian blood, such
as raised steadier hackles than Estarion’s; nor did she make a secret of her
dislike for Iburan. Great northern bear, she called him, and other things less
flattering.

Thus he did service like penance in the least of the temples
in Kundri’j, and bowed his head and was humble, and made no move to put himself
forward.

o0o

“She has no power,” he said to Vanyi not long after they
came to Kundri’j. She remembered it afterward as the day the lightning fell. In
that hour it was simply another breathless, airless, hideously hot day, its only
distinction that its sky was the color not of brass but of lead. She could feel
the heat building, hammer on the anvil of the earth.

This temple had a garden of strange flowers—fruit of
Magegates, Iburan said, and as secret as the rest of it. Vanyi plucked a
blood-red bloom with a scent that both dizzied and steadied her, like her
lover’s kiss. She almost cast it away, thinking of him, but tucked it in her
hair instead and sat on the rim of a fountain. The spray of water was cool on
her hand.

Iburan plucked a fruit the color of a maiden’s cheek in
Asanion, and bit into it. “She’s no mage, my lady Himazia,” he said when he had
chewed and swallowed. “She knows this temple only as a nuisance, a tendril of
my jurisdiction in the heart of her domain.”

“They don’t have priest-mages here,” Vanyi observed. “Not as
they do in the east.”

“They don’t like to believe in magery.” He spat out the
fruit-pit, knelt, buried it carefully in a bit of open earth, watering it with
handfuls from the fountain. “There now,” he said to it. “Sleep well; grow
strong, and bear fruit.”

“It’s not that there are no mages,” Vanyi said after a
pause, due respect to his invocation. “They have too many, maybe. Every lord
has his sorcerer in grey. Do you wonder, sometimes, if the Guild didn’t die out
after all, or subsume itself into our priesthood? What if it survived in
secret, in Asanion? A mage killed Ganiman the emperor. Maybe he wasn’t alone
when he did it.”

“We never found an accomplice,” Iburan said. He sat on the
fountain’s rim a little distance from her, and washed the fruit’s sweetness
from his beard. “The Guild died a natural death. Anyone will tell you so. After
it failed to raise a puppet emperor on the throne of the two lands, and was
subjugated to the will of Sarevadin and her consort, it withered into nothing.
Mages had no desire to join a guild of traitors. Those who were willing or able
to bear discipline accepted the torque. The rest took teaching from the priests
and went their ways, sworn and bound to work no harm.”

“All of which I know,” said Vanyi sharply. “I heard it the
first day I went to our priestess in Seiun and told her I wanted to learn. What
if she was wrong? Consider what Hirel did to the army of his brothers, any one
of whom could have supplanted him or his half-bred son. He shut them in the
palace, gave them all that they could ask for—but no women. No children. If the
palace galled them, they could leave freely, on one small condition. They must
leave their manhood behind and go out as eunuchs. His sisters were free to do
as they pleased, but they could never marry, never bear children to challenge
his heir. It was a brilliant solution. Merciful, even. What if he did the same
to the Guild?”

“He did, in his way,” Iburan said.

“And if the Guild saw it, and saw through it? What then?
Mightn’t they have pretended to dwindle and vanish, but only gone into hiding?”

“It would be difficult,” said Iburan, “to conceal such
powers as they would need to raise, simply to train their young mages. We would
know. We’d have sensed them long ago, and disposed of them.”

“Not if they used Gates,” Vanyi said.

Iburan sighed, but not with temper. “So. You’ve thought of
that, too? We’ve found nothing. You know that. You’re a Guardian.”

“I don’t think,” said Vanyi, “that we should grow lazy
simply because we haven’t found anything. They’d be expecting it, you know. The
last Guildmage who would admit to it died when Varuyan was emperor. It’s been a
solid generation since. Time enough to dig in deep and build the walls high.”

“Have you had a Seeing?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. She was irritable: that surprised her. “You
know that’s not one of my talents. I’m just thinking. Maybe it’s this place. It
remembers. It doesn’t like us much.”

“That it doesn’t.” He was smiling. His beard hid the curve
of his lips, but his eyes were warm, even wicked. “You are marvelously gifted
with power; more, one might think, than you have any right to be.”

That did not help Vanyi’s temper at all. “I’m not too badly
trained, and I have Gate-sense. I’m nothing more than that.”

“But you are,” said Avaryan’s high priest in Endros. “It’s
time you admitted it.”

“Why now?” she demanded. “Why here?”

“Because it pleases me,” he said, “and because you’ve made a
study of the Guild and its Gates, and your bones tell you to be uneasy. None of
the rest of us is so troubled.”

“Not even you?”

She had not meant her voice to sound as hard and mocking as
it did. Iburan did not take umbrage at it. “Not even I. I’m jealous, I confess.
If I were a shade less wise, I’d even be angry. Who are you, after all, but a
priestess on Journey, and a commoner at that?”

Her own frequent words, spoken with exquisite irony. She
blushed and glowered, and bit her tongue before she said something even more
unfortunate than she had already said.

“Priestess,” he said, wholly grave for once, “never let your
lack of rank or lineage shield you from the truth. If your power tells you that
you should be wary, listen to it. Heed it. Act as it bids you. And if you have
need of me, wherever you or I may be, call on me, and I will come.”

Vanyi shifted on the fountain’s rim. Her body was as
reluctant as her mind to accept what he was telling her. That she was not a
priestess-mage like any other. That she was—could be—more than that. Maybe much
more. More even than an empress.

Her body knew how to stop that thought before it ran wild.
It had been long cycles since she had had a man, and would be longer yet,
unless she let the priests restore the bindings. Her womb was open still,
unspelled. It made a useful refuge from a harder truth.

Useful; and safe, which her body well knew. Even if she had
not risked breaking her vows again, she would do no more than fidget under
Iburan’s splendid black eye. Everyone knew whose bed he went to when the temple
did not keep him for itself.

Everyone, that is, but Estarion. One way and another he had
failed to notice, and people had failed to enlighten him.

Wise of them. He would not be pleased to know how his mother
found comfort in her widowhood. Sons could be odd that way. Every man’s mother
a saint, and every man’s sister a maiden.

She stood up abruptly. “I have duties,” she said; or
something like it. She did not look to see if Iburan’s smile turned mocking; or
if he knew all of the reasons why she fled.

o0o

The Gate was at rest as Gates went, wandering with dream-
slowness through its manifold worlds. This one could, if one but asked, come to
the center and focus of the Gates’ power, the Heart of the World.

That stronghold stood amid bare and barren mountains under a
moonless sky, on a world that had no name. Its center was a blaze like a
hearthfire, but it was pure power. It had made the Gates in the beginning, and
it had made an empress of a Varyani high prince, and in the end it had betrayed
the mages who made it.

Sarevadin was part of it, wrought in it. She had mastered it
and the Guild, and drew its claws; but not before it had killed her mother and
her consort’s father, and driven her own father mad.

She never forgave the mages, never trusted them or granted
them power in her empire. Therefore they dwindled and the priest-mages of
Endros rose to take their place, but in subservience to the Sun’s blood, and
not in power over them.

The strength of the Gate here was such that three priests
watched by night, two by day when the sun’s power balanced that of the Gate.
The other who watched now was a stranger, an Asanian girlchild, mute with
shyness.

Vanyi let her be. She would warm in time, as young animals
did. Her magery was a bright and singing thing, as splendid as her outer
seeming was dull.

They sang the rites together, the child’s voice light,
almost without substance, Vanyi’s darker, smokier. The meeting of voice and
power bred a silent amity.

They settled to prayer, content in one another’s presence.
Vanyi was aware in her body of the Gate at rest, the land under her, the air
heavy with heat. The sky beyond the temple was like a roof, looming low,
breeding thunder.

Well indeed, thought Vanyi. Please the god, the heat would
break. She would be able to breathe again. People would stop snarling at one
another; the city would retreat from its raw edge of violence. Nothing had
erupted yet, perhaps for fear of the emperor’s presence, but it was there,
smoldering like fire under ash.

Almost without her willing it, her power divided itself.
Part went on warding the Gate. Part ranged over the city, testing its mood.

She glanced at the Asanian priestess. That one seemed
unperturbed. It was always so, her manner said. Kundri’j was an angry city. It
smoldered; sometimes it burst into flame. Then people rioted, and the soldiers
came, or if affairs were desperate, the Olenyai—this with a shiver of fear and
sharp dislike. Now the emperor was here. People did not love his outland self,
but his rank comforted them, and his presence in the palace.

Vanyi had no reason to be uneasy. She was not a seer. Old
tales were rankling in her, half-rotted fears, treason overheard in the temple
in Induverran, strangeness in the Gate of Endros.

This Gate was at peace. Its stars, when they shimmered past,
were simple stars. Its worlds were worlds without fear.

And suppose, she thought, the Guild survived. It had made
the Gates. Suppose that it could wield them, shape them to show only what the
Guardians wished to sec, while it drew in secret from their power.

There was an insect in the Isles. The male possessed a
maddening incessant buzz, but did not bite. The female was silent; she drank
blood, and left great itching welts where she had been. Silence was the
warning, people said. When there was no sound, no evidence of the creature’s
passing, then one did well to be wary.