Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (79 page)

"I did tell you."

"You just took a sword from a man you've never laid eyes on? You accepted an unblooded blade from someone who isn't even kin?" She couldn't keep the scorn and the disbelief out of her face—or she assumed she couldn't; she didn't try very hard.

He flushed. "Do you
know
how many clansmen I killed?" He said, voice low, chin slowly rising. "They would have been ours."

"We weren't in danger—or we wouldn't have been if you hadn't started killing them in their own home!"

"I was
tired
of hiding and mewling like a weakling!"

She felt her jaw lock. She raised her hand. Lowered it. "Nicu,". she said quietly. "We don't have anything to say to each other." She turned on her heel.

He caught her by the arm and then leaped back when she spun on him. As if he expected the fist to be wrapped round a dagger's shaft. "Don't ever do that again." She turned away. Thinking. Not wanting to think. Hoping to escape before he said the words she didn't want to hear.

"But I did it for you—don't you understand?"

Lady, please, not this, Lady, not this
. She kept walking.

"Elena!"

She turned. She almost hated him, but something buried deeper than affection made his pain unbearable.

"I did it because I love you."

"Nicu—"

"I did it because you deserve better than this!"

She started to speak. Stopped herself. Something twisted at her stomach with claws as sharp as any knife that had ever broken flesh. For just a moment, less, the scenery, shifted, breaking and regrouping as if it were a vessel and it had been shattered and rebuilt by hands that had a deeper understanding of clay.

She saw Nicu's face, eyes sightless but open, robbed of expression, of the ability to express itself. Circling him, dark shadows, burning him—although he was well past sensation—the unadorned face of the Lord.

And weeping, weeping into the desert, voices that she could not bear to listen to, because one of them was her own.

He'll do it
, she thought, numb because to feel at all was suddenly too dangerous. She closed her eyes to hold back tears, and when she opened them again, he was standing before her, ruddy faced, bruised, defiant. Young and—Lady help him—so very, very stupid. Had they let him be so stupid? How?

But the stupidity was precious because it was Nicu's, and because it meant he was still alive.

She opened her arms. Just as she had when they had been younger. She saw him, suspicion withering almost before it had a chance to take root—stupid, stupid, Nicu—greed overcoming sense as he swept in to take what he desired most.

What all children in pain desired most: comfort.

He smelled of sweat. He was the wrong shape—too tall now, and too broad—and she the wrong height. But she was 'Lena, he was Nicu.

Don't you do it, don't do it, Nicu
, she thought, the words like a prayer she didn't dare give voice to because the wind was capricious and might take the words to ears not meant to hear them.
Don
't
make her kill you
.

17th
of Scaral, 427 AA

Tor Leonne

Finding the Lyserran Matriarch proved challenging. Had it not been so close to the Festival of the Moon, Kallandras would have assumed that she had wisely chosen to forsake the city by which the Dominion would be defined for generations to come. But it
was
the Festival, and the Matriarchs, who avoided the cities of the clansmen at any other time of the year, made the trek to the Tor Leonne.

It was the Lord's City, for the man who held the City was the ruler of the Dominion. But it was the Lady's City, for it held the Lake that had been Her gift and their salvation. It drew them all: the people who claimed power by His law, and the people who claimed power by Her mystery.

He found her, not in the poorest sections of the clansmen's city, but in one of the wealthiest; found her, not as an obvious ruler within her own caravan, but as a guest, of sorts, within another's, and at that, a clansman's. A merchant clansman.

"Aiya," a man said, his voice a voice that, while soft in seeming, had been trained to carry the distance. Kallandras did not immediately look up, but he stopped a moment to admire the pale silks that had been painted for the moon's season. The work was very fine. Edged in gold—as most silks were that made it this far into the heart of the Dominion, it was adorned by no central work. Instead, the delicate impression of lilies had been created by minimal strokes of white and pink and a green the shade of muted jade.

"You seem to be a discerning man," the merchant said.

"I am," he replied, and this time he let his gaze move across the panoply of bolts and up.

The man he faced was large. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned; in all things, Annagarian. He spoke Torra as if he were a clansman, a sure indication that he was used to trading with moneyed men. He wore desert clothing, the heavy robes of the sandtraders, but his hands were ringed in fine gold. Heavy gold; his fingers were not small.

"The bolt you were looking at," the merchant said with a practiced smile, "was made as a special gift for a young Serra. But she passed away not two weeks ago and as the family is one of my best customers, I did not choose to press the issue of payment or delivery. If you desire it—"

"It is very fine," Kallandras said, with a smile that was far more natural—and far more practiced—than the merchant's. "But it is too pale and too youthful a pattern for my taste. I have no young daughters."

"No, indeed. Nor have I. Sons," he added. "But they are strong and useful. You have no wife?"

"I had one." His tone made clear that the subject was not open to discussion. "I seek a silk," he said, in case the merchant was not skilled at reading such a tone, "for a woman who will reach her prime during the Festival season. Something darker or cooler than these, less fancy, more elegant."

"Elegance such as that will be seen as poverty."

"I am not a man who lives by the opinion of other men. Those who know will know; those who do not will not. Neither concern me."

"Ah." The merchant nodded sagely. "As long as you understand that the price for such silk will not be much less than the price I must charge for these."

"I understand it might be more. But I am weary of searching. I have seen the very finest that three merchants have to offer already, and I am determined to seek the fourth. I will, I hope, end my quest here." He frowned. "These silks, these are all you possess?"

The man spit to the side in derision. He clapped his hands and two young men appeared from the flaps of the tenting at his back. They had much of his look about them, but they were as grim-faced as guards.

"My sons," he said. "You, Jonni, you sell these while I'm gone. This customer is looking for something special."

The son so addressed nodded.

"Mika, go to your mother and tell her, be ready."

The second son nodded.

The merchant turned to Kallandras. "Follow me." "Your sons," Kallandras- said, "will make fine warriors." The merchant looked pained. "They require some experience at the more gentle art of selling, yes. But they can be brought to smile."

"I'm not certain I'd like to see that."

The man shrugged. "All right, you're right. But at least they're marriageable, and they'll bring me daughters who might teach them some of the social graces." He grimaced. "If, that is, I can afford them."

He led them through a market that was thin with people. It was, indeed, the market at which the clansmen stooped to barter, and as men did not demean themselves by open discussion of something as vulgar as money, it was perfectly natural for the merchant to lead Kallandras to some private dwelling where arrangements might be made.

Equally natural was the presence of the Serras with their cerdan, Toran, or even Tyran. Wives were allowed by custom to trade with merchants—so long as they had the appropriate clan presence to preserve the aura of propriety. Even so, merchant wives often dealt with the Serras of the high clans. Or daughters.

The merchant, however, who claimed no daughters obviously intended to deal with Kallandras himself.

There was no merchant authority in the Tor Leonne; no laws that governed the merchants in the way the Imperial laws governed the various merchant guilds. But there was an old dwelling, the finest of the buildings in the city that existed beneath the plateau. Here, the ruling Tyr of the Terrean had once made his home, and he had made it out of the bones of the earth: stone and clay and wood.

No Tyr claimed it now; the stone and wood had protected the Tyr from all enemies save time and a weak heir. The man who had succeeded the weak son had in his turn been betrayed—by blood.

Songs had been written and sung about the fate of the men who had chosen to value their dwellings over their prowess and in the end—through some path that was not clear to Kallandras or most of the bards who carried this Southern tale—the building had come into the hands of merchants who managed, barely, to work in concert. They were, after all, men who valued money over the warrior ethic; a breed necessary but in the end as valued as women.

Seeing the merchant Court—unofficially called the whorehouse by many of the Southern clansmen, all of whom notably did not have the right to cross its threshold—he could well believe it was money that was the worshiped god within the building's confines.

The high clansmen had, about their lives, a starkness, a simplicity that was at once elegant and profound. The difference between the Tor Leonne, situated upon the plateau, and the merchant Court was the difference between an unbroken oath ring and the gaudy, jeweled creations so valued by the newly rich; the one was a statement of quiet power and endurance, the other a statement of riches. And power, of course; even in the Dominion, money and power were not easily separable.

The stairs, as wide across as three lesser buildings, forced those who would enter to acknowledge the lofty heights of the men who were privileged to call the Court their home. At the height of the stairs, stone leveled out, giving way to a mass of flower beds on either side. These flowers, watered and tended as the men in the streets below were not, were the merchant symbol: they thrived, no matter what the season, or the condition, of the world that lived at the foot of the stairs.

"Ah," the man said. "Here we are."

Kallandras stopped, his hand hovering an inch above the wide, gold-laced rails that punctuated the stairs in three places.

The merchant smiled, clearly pleased with himself. "I am," he said, "Tallos of the clan Jedera."

Tallos. A shadow passed over the sun.

"Have I said something to offend?" the merchant asked, looking somewhat annoyed by the lack of expected reaction.

"No, Ser Tallos. I—had a compatriot in my youth who perished in the war. He bore that name."

"Tallos is an overused name," the merchant replied, somewhat mollified.

"I think it, rather, well used. You are of the clan Jedera."

"Yes."