Arrows of the Sun (33 page)

Korusan walked round the senel. Umizan’s ear followed him,
but did not go flat.

That interested Estarion. Umizan did not like strangers, and
he detested Asanians. This one he suffered even to touch him, to run a hand
down his neck and flank, to exchange senel-courtesies, nose to shrouded nose.

“He is very beautiful,” said the Olenyas.

“You may ride him if you like,” said Estarion, out of
nowhere that he could think of.

“He will suffer me?”

“Ask him,” Estarion said.

Korusan stroked the stallion’s muzzle, taking his time about
it. He did not speak. Umizan blew gently into his palm. He took reins, wound
fingers in mane, vaulted lightly astride.

He rode well. Asanians often did. His hands were light,
which was not common. He put Umizan through the dance of his paces. There was
no telling behind the veils, but Estarion thought he might be smiling.

He brought the stallion to a halt in front of Estarion. His
eyes were bright but his voice was cool. “Yes, you should send him away. He
does not thrive in this confinement.”

“So. He talks to you, too,” Estarion said. He did not know
that he was jealous. Interested, rather. Wary.

“He is not difficult to understand.” Korusan swung down,
stepped away, leaving the senel to his master. He did not do it easily: there
was a drag in the movement, quick though it was.

Estarion had won in hard battle the right to tend his own
senel. Korusan lent a hand, capable in that as in everything else he did. They
were almost companionable, walking up from the stable, man and shadow, emperor
and Olenyas.

Vanyi stood unmoving for a long while after Estarion went
away. The trembling began in her center and spread swiftly outward, till it
buckled her knees and toppled her to the floor, gasping, fighting the tears
that she would not, must not shed.

But she had fought them too long. She had no defenses left.
She wept hard and she wept long, till her throat was raw and her ribs ached.
And when she had no tears left, she lay where her fit had cast her, and she
began to laugh. Weak laughter, laughter that, in its way, both sobered and
steadied her.

She went down to the Gate. It was not yet her time to stand
guard, but one of the priests there was pleased to gain an early escape, and
the others did not vex her with questions. There had been nothing, no sign, no
suspicion, either before or after the attempt on the emperor’s life. It must be
as rumor said: an assassin hired by rebels, with a warding on him, a common
enough magic, within the powers even of a streetcorner mage. It had nothing to
do with Gates or with the great magics.

There were no mages strong enough to oppose the priests of
the temple. Those who served lords and princes in Asanion were trained often
enough in Endros or in the Nine Cities, or trained one another under the eye of
the temples. The wild ones, the herb-healers and wisewomen and purveyors of
village curses, could do no harm beyond their narrow reach. What harm they did
was punished swiftly by priests passing through on Journey, or by hunters sent
out from the temples, or by lords’ mages who did not suffer rivals.

That much good the Sunborn had done. Magic was a known thing
now. Dark magic and death-magic were forbidden or carefully circumscribed. The
mageborn need not suffer the sins of ignorance; the sorcerers, those who came
to power through the word and the work and not through the gift of birth, had
leave to learn their arts in peace.

Vanyi, mageborn and temple-trained, let her power bathe in
the shimmer of the Gate. Its fire was cold and clean, its strength unwearied.

She had been in the Heart of the World, that place like a
fortress, where all guardians of Gates must go before they took up their
charge. She had seen the flame in the hearth, walked in it and through it as
part of her testing.

She wondered now as she did then, that human creatures
should have wrought such a thing, and made it everlasting. Not all or even most
that was of the Guild was evil. It had striven to take power in the world,
which was its downfall. In its day it had been a great and glorious thing, each
mage a master of one of the faces of power, dark or light, and each paired with
his opposite.

That, the temples had lost. Some priest-mages served the
god, some the goddess; they did not work together save in great need.

She was distracting herself from her folly, and from the
lover she had driven away. And why not? This was hers, this duty and this
calling.

As she stood her watch, a shadow paced through the door. It
had been barred and warded; but the shadow took no notice of it. It wore a
cat’s shape, a cat’s lambent eyes, its belly heavy with young.

Vanyi had been kneeling by the Gate. She rose slowly. The
other Guardians were mute and motionless, as if enspelled. “Ulyai,” she said,
or willed to say.

Estarion’s sister-in-fur heard: her ear cocked. She took no
other notice. She approached the Gate as calmly as if it had been a door. It
shifted, shimmered. She sat on her haunches to watch.

“Ulyai,” said Vanyi. “How did you get in here?”

Ulyai set to work washing her paws. Where she had been, how
she had hunted, there was no telling. She was no more magical than she ever had
been, and no less.

The ul-cats of Endros’ palace were a law unto themselves.
They had their own courtyard and their own garden, lived and bred and hunted as
they chose, came and went at will, and answered to none but the emperor or
their chosen kin-without-fur. Ulyai had been Estarion’s companion since he came
back from his first sojourn in the west.

She had not followed him into Kundri’j. Wise cat. Yet now
she was here, magical unmagical beast, watching the dance of the worlds.

Vanyi made no move to touch her. It was only prudence. She
was as large as a child’s pony, with fangs as long as knives.

She washed herself all over, meticulous as a lady’s lapcat.
Then she rose, stretched each separate muscle—was that where Estarion had
learned it, or had she learned it from him?—and yawned enormously.

The world-dance had slowed as it sometimes did. Ulyai’s ears
pricked. These were green worlds now, fields and plains and forests.

She crouched. Vanyi goggled like an idiot as the cat leaped
long and high and light, into the Gate.

She caught herself the instant before she sprang in pursuit.
The Gate pulsed and began to sing, a deep musical humming. Vanyi’s magery
uncoiled of its own accord, to slow the pulse, to damp the power.

Something.

Something watching.

Something flitting, shadow-quick, shadow-subtle.

Something in the Gate.

Not Ulyai. The cat was gone. Vanyi stalked the shadow
through the flicker and shimmer of the Gate. Unwise, unwise, her training
yattered at her, to do this alone, unwarded, unwatched—the priests with her
worse than useless, rapt in a dream of Gatesong.

Nothing.

There had been something. Vanyi was sure of it.
Something—someone—some power in the Gate, using it, passing through it.

All those worlds—might not they too have mages, guardians,
wielders of Gates?

So they might. But this had a feel of this world, and not a
beast, not a cat or a senel or a lesser creature stumbling into an ill-warded
Gate. This shadow had moved with will and purpose, with intelligence, as a man
would. A mage.

Priest-mages used Gates—rarely, with great caution, and
never alone, for Gates were dangerous. But there had been none such since the
emperor left Endros, no need and no occasion. If there had, she would have known;
and likewise every other Guardian in the twofold empire.

She could not go to Iburan, even if he had been in the
temple and not in the empress’ bed. Not until she knew certainly what she had
sensed. They had alarms enough, with the attempt on the emperor’s life. They
did not need this, which came to no more than a passage of shadows.

And maybe, she thought, she had dreamed it all. Her
companions, who had seemed bewitched, were awake now and on watch; they
remembered nothing, no ul-cat coming out of the night, no disturbance in the
Gate. Both were her elders, and more skilled in magecraft than she; and she had
had night-terrors of Gates before, eyes in the dark, presences on the edge of
her senses. Nothing had ever come of them.

She had too much magery, she always had. It made her see
shadows where no shadows were.

Tonight in particular she was not the best of judges. She
would wait and watch and see. If another shadow passed, another power betrayed
itself, she would be ready. She would discover what it was that wielded Gates,
and took no heed of wards or guards. And if it was not dream or delusion, was
the Guild as she had feared for so long, feared and yes, hoped . . .

Then she would go to Iburan and the others. Then they would
do what they must do.

Korusan sat in the shadow of a pillar, glowering at the
door to the emperor’s harem. He could pass it easily, if he were minded.
Neither eunuch nor armored woman could stop him.

At the moment it did not suit his fancy to walk where, of
men entire, only the emperor should walk. His majesty was within, doing what a
man did in his own harem. He had taken an unconscionable while to work himself
up to it, but since the night he went to the priestess in the Mages’ temple, he
had visited his concubines every evening and often nightlong.

Concubine. It was only the one, the Vinicharyas, and not the
beauty of the pair either. A fair number of wagers had been won and lost over
that. Korusan had a fine new sword and a string of firestones, for opining that
a barbarian would more likely choose a woman who could ride and shoot than one
whose only skill was to please her lord in the inner room.

They said that the barbarian was not unskilled in pleasing
his lady and servant. For a barbarian. The lady was looking well satisfied.

Korusan had seen her. She rode her hammer-headed mare
without a veil, thinking herself safe from scrutiny. Her hair was the true gold
and her eyes were like the beaten metal, but her face was a little better than
plain, and her mouth was too wide, and where the sun touched her, she freckled.

He did not think, from what he saw of her in tunic and
trousers, that she was very much more remarkable beneath them. A good depth of
breast, yes, and ample hips, but no more than any woman should have if she was
to breed strong sons.

His scowl deepened. If he had been a mage, he could have
burned down the door with his glare. His majesty was going about it with a good
will, to be sure. And it was no secret where Korusan walked and listened, that
the emperor had succeeded already in breaking the mage-bonds laid on his
priestess. They had been strong enough to lose her the child, but she should
never have conceived at all.

There were no bonds on the lady in the harem. She was young,
hale, of good fertile stock—her father had a dozen sons and daughters
innumerable, and four of the sons were born of her mother. Wages now turned not
on whether, but on when.

Korusan would get no sons. The pain of that was old now, the
wound scarred over. It still ached when the soul’s wind blew cold.

And that one, that upstart, that mongrel, could not fail
even when he wished to. Such irony, thought Korusan. The Sun’s whelp was getting
sons behind that door, not even knowing that his shadow waited alone, nor
troubling himself to care.

It would be a nuisance to dispose of the woman and the
infant, if any of them lived so long. And suppose that there was no child. It
was possible. Even Sun-bolts were not unerring to every target.

Suppose that the Varyani emperor went back to his priestess.
She had driven him away ruthlessly—strong-willed as an Olenyas, and prickly
proud. But suppose that she softened. She would not allow herself to bear a
child until she was initiate; she wanted that, for a surety, and now that she
had warning, she could guard herself against it.

She was besotted with the emperor. That was obvious even
when she drove him out with curses. He was besotted with her. He talked about
her endlessly, pacing and prowling, till Korusan knew every word she had ever
spoken, every move she had ever made. He did not speak of his concubine at all,
except to mutter that she was a sensible woman, she did not scream and strike
at him for daring to breathe in her presence.

Korusan rose, working knots out of knees and back. The ache
in his bones was fierce tonight.

It was always there, gnawing on the edges, biding its time
until it killed him. But he was its master still. He drove it out with a swift
turn of the warrior’s dance, leap and curvet, stamp and whirl and swift
slashing stroke, down the length of the passage; and at the end a tumbler’s
leap and plummet and somersault. He came up breathing hard, laughing silent
Olenyai laughter, striding out past astonished, staring eunuchs.

He had not expected to enter the temple as easily as the
emperor had. Nor did he. There was a guard at the gate this night, a large and
deceptively idle young clean-shaven northerner in a priest’s robe and braid and
torque. But there was no one watching the wall in the back, nor any magic to
prevent a shadow from going over it.

The priestess was not in her chamber. Korusan tracked her by
scent and sense and instinct to a room redolent with the scents of ink and
parchment, bursting-full with books in their rolls and cases.

A table stood in the middle of it, with a light like a star
hanging in the air, magelight, clear and pure and blindingly bright. In that
uncanny splendor her hair was the color of sweetwood, red and brown and gold
intermingled, and her eyes the clear grey of flint.

She had a pen in her hand and a roll of parchment before
her, with words written on it, copied from the ancient and crumbling book at
her elbow; but her head was up, her gaze fixed on the dark beyond the light.
She did not look angry or sullen, or even sad.