Spear of Heaven (16 page)

Would be most inadvisable in this country where her rank
mattered nothing and her lineage met with massive indifference. If, that is,
she could have started one at all. Teahouses did not seem given to the wilder
extremes of conduct. One needed wine for that, or bad ale—the worse, the
better.

Carefully, meticulously, she gathered herself together and
rose to her feet. It did nothing for her temper to discover that Bundur, damn
him to the lowest of the hells, had paid her reckoning, or that, if he had not,
the teahouse would not have accepted her good imperial gold.

“You will want to change that,” said the polite personage in
charge of the proceedings, from her seat under the tallest of the flowering
trees. “The Street of the Moneyers takes gold sometimes, to melt down for the
goldsmiths. One of them can give you proper coinage of our kingdom.”

Daruya could have overturned that table, too, and the woman
with it. But she was still in command of herself, still mindful of her
position, although she would have given all her despised gold to have been able
to forget. She said something not too rude—the personage did not bridle, and
did not call for the watch, or whatever did duty for that here—and got herself
out before she said or did something truly inadvisable.

While Daruya was discovering the extent of her
self-control, Vanyi was testing her own against a master of obstruction.

It had taken her five days to reach the Minister of Protocol.
Five days of incessant campaigning, intriguing, and outright threats, against a
phalanx of functionaries who made the Golden Palace in Asanion seem a haven of
simplicity. But she had ruled the Mageguild for forty years, and she had
learned to cut through obstruction with a sword of purest obstinacy.

If a functionary would not pass her to the next highest of
his kind, she did it herself: got up and walked to the office that she saw in
the functionary’s mind. If the one above him, growing wise, sought to prevent
her by slipping out the back door, he found her waiting there. If he set guards
on her, she called her shadows forward.

Olenyai, even swordless, were dangerous fighters. No one in
Shurakan could match them. Shurakan, after all, had never known war, nor had
occasion to make an art of it.

And so, step by step, she won her way to the gate, as it
were: to the Minister of Protocol, who alone barred her way to the queen. There
she found herself halted.

The Minister of Protocol did not affect the trappings of
power. He wore a coat that fell discreetly to his ankles, the color of clouds,
with the merest suggestion of embroidery about the hem. His shirt was simple,
his trousers undistinguished by excessive width or richness of fabric. He wore
his hair in a severe knot at his nape, and his thin beard and greying mustaches
at an unassuming length, barely past the collar of his coat.

She, who had mastered the art of discretion for herself long
since, regarded him in jaundiced approval. He offered her tea. She accepted it
and the cakes that came with it, ritual welcome everywhere in Shurakan. One
could judge the degree of one’s welcome, she had been told, by the quality of
the tea and the kind and quantity of the cakes.

If so, then she was barely welcome here. The tea was simple,
without adornment of flowers or sweetness. The cakes were plain redspice buns
just touched with honey, and there were only two for each of them. But,
considering the Minister of Protocol and his studied simplicity, she suspected
that the frugal refreshment was a statement not of her insignificance but of
his desire to be thought a harmless fool.

That was a game she too could play. She drank her tea and
ate both of her buns and sat waiting for him to begin, wearing an expression of
mindless amiability.

He might be the most powerful man in Shurakan, but he lacked
one thing that Vanyi had a world’s worth of: time. Her whole duty at the moment
was to speak to the queen. His was manifold, and not all of it could wait for
him to conquer her with superior patience.

It was he, then, who spoke first, after the pot had been
emptied and the basket of buns stripped bare. He chose the weapon of
directness, as she had expected. The subtle never understood how predictable
they could be when they tried to take Vanyi off guard. “Tell me why it is so
urgent that you speak with the queen.”

“Surely,” said Vanyi, still wearing her amiably vague
expression, “her majesty is accustomed to greeting embassies from outland
royalty. It’s a frequent duty of our imperial house.”

“Surely,” he responded with a thin smile, “their celestial
majesties are both accustomed to receive strangers in audience, when the press
of their duties permits. You can be received . . .” He consulted
a book that lay on his worktable, not the rolled and cord-bound books of Vanyi’s
part of the world but a strange thing, plaques of horn as long as a man’s arm
and as wide as his hand, hinged and jointed together. His finger ran down the
long closely written columns. “Their majesties will admit you to their presence
on the fourth day of the eighth round of the bright moon.”

Even with magery Vanyi needed a moment to render that into
the reckoning she knew. When she did, she heaved a mighty sigh. “Oh, come, don’t
be ridiculous. That’s five rounds of the moon from now. I’ll confer with her
majesty within this round, and sooner if possible.”

“Their majesties,” said the Minister of Protocol, “have many
matters of import to occupy them. You are fortunate that they can see you
before the new year.”

Or, his tone implied, that they would see her at all.

He was a subtle man, enclosed within himself, but he let her
see what passed behind his bland face. He loathed magic, despised mages. He
believed that foreigners should summarily be cast from the kingdom. But for
deep-grained courtesy and a not entirely illogical suspicion that Vanyi might
prove useful to him or to the rulers he served, he would have refused to
contend with her at all.

She sat back in her chair, thoroughly at ease. “Very well
then. Tell me why I shouldn’t just walk past you and hunt out the queen for
myself.”

“Tell me why you refuse to speak to the king.”

Vanyi raised a brow. “Rhetoric for rhetoric, is it? Would
the king allow me to pollute his presence?”

“The son of heaven is no friend to what you are,” said the
Minister of Protocol, “but he knows the value of circumspection. He would admit
you. As he will, on the fourth day of the eighth round of the moon.”

“By which time,” said Vanyi, “with any luck at all, our
embassy will be finished and we’ll be gone. Don’t you want to hurry us through
and be rid of us?”

Clearly the Minister of Protocol would not have minded that.
Equally clearly, his duty required that he impede her in any way he could. “You
may not address the daughter of heaven alone in the absence of her brother.
That is never done.”

“No?” Vanyi inquired. “That’s odd. I distinctly heard one of
your underlings granting a party of priests an audience with her majesty at the
same time that same underling arranged for his majesty to participate in a rite
of purification for a temple.”

“Those were minor matters,” said the Minister of Protocol,
unruffled. “Embassies are of greater import, and involve both children of
heaven inseparably.”

“But ours is a minor embassy, you’ve all been careful to make
that clear to us. Our empire is as nothing to your celestial kingdom. Our
emperor can never be equal to your queen and her king. Our gods bow at the feet
of your myriad divinities. All of which,” said Vanyi, smiling sweetly, “is so
self-evident that surely even you can’t deny we’re insignificant enough to
speak to the queen alone.”

“That is not done,” said the Minister of Protocol.

“Why? Are you afraid she’ll let us corrupt her?”

“The children of heaven are incorruptible.”

“Therefore you have nothing to fear.”

“What is there to fear?” asked the Minister of Protocol. “What
haste compels you to press for an audience before the time their majesties have
allotted?”

Vanyi kept her smile, though it hurt. “I don’t suppose,” she
said, “you know what became of the man we lost here, or the Gate he guarded.”

“One of your people has died? Please accept my condolences.”

Vanyi met his blandness with blandness. “Let’s suppose you
do know, since I’ve been assured that all knowledge in Shurakan comes to you
before it reaches their majesties’ ears. You don’t think that would have ended
it, did you, to break our Gate and kill our Guardian?”

“No rumor of such has come to me,” said the Minister of
Protocol. His mind was as blank as his face, and as smoothly innocent. “You
speak of . . . that, yes? That art of yours.” His nostrils
thinned. “It was suffered here by the grace of the daughter of heaven and by
the silence of her brother. If it failed, or if its servant proved too weak for
his task, that is no concern of ours. So it was agreed when her majesty
permitted the building of the temple that housed your Gate.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming you,” Vanyi said. “But if you do know
anything of it, or if the queen does, we’d welcome the knowledge. The man we
lost was dear to us.”

“And his Gate,” said the Minister of Protocol, “dearer
still.”

That was false, but Vanyi saw no profit in saying so. “You
do understand why I should speak to the queen. What would destroy a Gate and a
Guardian might not hesitate to destroy a kingdom.”

“If that kingdom were such as the Gate was, perhaps. Ours is
clean of such taint.”

“Is it?” Vanyi asked. “Su-Shaklan is warded by magic. How
else do you think it’s kept itself so safe for so long?” She stood, bowed
slightly: an inclination of the head. “I’ll speak with you again. And then, I’m
sure, with the queen.”

oOo

“And you left him? Just like that?” Aledi the lightmage
was not surprised, not as well as she knew Vanyi, but she was amply bemused.

Vanyi rubbed her aching eyes and thought of asking for a
cool cloth to cover them. It was brutal work, waging war with ministers of
protocol. “I launched my bolt and got out, yes. I thought I was being
clever—showing him who was master. Probably I was a coward, not to mention a
fool. If he believes me, I’ve talked myself out of a rather valuable weapon on
our behalf.”

“I doubt he will,” Miyaz said. He looked tired himself. The
room in which they were sitting, the inner one in which the two mages had drawn
their circle and set up their magics, had already acquired a faint reek,
somewhat of sulfur, somewhat of flowers, that spoke of power wielded often and
strongly.

“They don’t believe in magic here,” he said. “They curse it
and they fear it, and yet in their hearts they know there’s no such thing. It’s
profoundly disconcerting.”

Aledi rose from her cushion and knelt behind him, working
the knots out of his shoulders. He rolled his head back onto her breast and
sighed. She kissed the yellow-curled crown, just where the hair was thinning.

“It’s worse than disconcerting, at least to me,” she said. “It’s
frightening. Kadin goes out, you know, and prowls—poor boy, he’s all broken
inside since Jian was lost. We found him in the house of the Gate. He was
sitting in the middle of it, in dust and cobwebs that looked as if they’d been
there for years and not for Brightmoon-cycles. He said what we were all
feeling. ‘People say it’s haunted. But there’s nothing here. There might never
have been a Gate at all.’”

“Is he still there?” Vanyi asked a little sharply.

“Oh, no,” said Aledi. “We made him come back with us. It
wasn’t the first time he’d been in that house. He went there the first morning
after we came to the city. It’s always the same, he says. Always empty.”

“I sent him,” said Vanyi, “that first day.”

The two mages stared at her. Aledi looked mildly hurt. Miyaz
was only weary. “I rather thought so,” he said. “Why did you send us today?”

“To see if you felt what he’s been feeling,” Vanyi said.

Aledi bent her head, hiding her face in Miyaz’s hair. Her
voice came muffled, ashamed. “I was afraid to go before you commanded me. It
was so much easier to stay here and make the circle, and not think about what
we made it for.”

“Today you were ready to think about that,” said Vanyi. “Would
you be willing or able to raise a circle in the house of the Gate itself, to
see what you could find?”

Aledi shivered. Miyaz looked pale. “We’ll do whatever you
bid us do, Guildmaster,” he said.

Vanyi considered them through the pounding in her skull. She
had to make herself remember why she had brought these of all possible mages.
The three who had died, Kadin who lived broken and grieving, had been stronger,
wiser, bolder in the wielding of their power. These two were to have given her
the graces of courtiers, well-bred as they were and raised to the Asanian High
Court; they were to have been ambassadors more than mages, fellow warriors
against the Minister of Protocol rather than against the less-than-shadow that
had broken the Gate in Shurakan.

But she needed mages now, when she must be ambassador and
win through to the queen by proper channels. Forcing her way with magery would
only prove to the Shurakani that mages were to be feared and hated.

While she wasted her strength on the Minister of Protocol,
these two had to be strong enough to raise and sustain wards about this house
and to bolster Kadin in his watch on the house of the Gate. They were mages of
great skill—she would hardly have chosen them otherwise—but she wondered,
looking at them, if that skill would be enough. She said to them, “For now,
rest easy. I won’t ask you to do anything but what I’ve had you doing here. But
be ready to help Kadin if he needs you—whether he asks you or no.”

Asanians had one virtue, preserved even in the melding of
their empire into Keruvarion. They took orders, and if they asked questions
they did not press for answers. Miyaz closed his eyes and to all appearances
went to sleep. Aledi clung to him and kept silent.