Spear of Heaven (5 page)

“Maybe you’ll find someone there who’ll give you grand
arguments, and slap you down when you get above yourself.”

“
I
get above
myself!” She mimed mighty indignation. “You, sir, were arrogant in the womb.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s an honest arrogance.” He went somber
all at once, as he could do; looking suddenly much older, though never as old
as he was. “Guard yourself, Vanyi. Whatever breaks Gates can break mages, too.
Even Masters of mages.”

“Oh, I’m too mean to die,” she said; but she too sobered,
gripping his hands tightly and then letting them go. “We have to know what
broke the Gate, before it breaks another. If it’s a weakness, you see—if we’re
doing something amiss in the building—we have to know, before there’s too much
passing back and forth of mages, and we lose more than a single Gate, or a
single Guardian.”

“And well before those who aren’t mages begin to cross,” he
said, agreeing with her. “I’ve a pack of merchants already clamoring to explore
this new country. They don’t care that it takes a mage to direct a Gate, and a
mage to guide the crossing. They’re drunk on dreams of profit.”

“They’ll dream for yet a while,” she said dryly. “You, too,
my lord emperor. I’ll come back, I give you my word.”

“Alive?”

“What, afraid of windy ghosts?” He looked so stark that she
patted his cheek, a touch that stopped just sort of a caress. “Yes, I’ll come
back alive, or close enough to make no difference. Don’t wait about for me. I’ll
be taking my time at it.”

“Not too much,” he said. “And send me word when you can.”

“That I can do,” said Vanyi. She stepped away from him. It
was an odd sensation, not quite like pain.

Well, she thought; they had been apart often enough, and
once for a whole hand of years, while he fought his wars in the far west of
Asanion, and she ruled mages in the raw new city that would be Asan-Gilen. But
that had come after a quarrel, and they had parted with bitter words. Parting
in amity, when god and goddess knew when they might meet again—that was harder.

Best get it over. Mages were drawing back the veil that hid
the Gate. It was sleeping, showing no passage of worlds, only a grey
nothingness.

As she approached, it began to wake. She felt it in her
bones.

Likewise she felt a wrench, a little like envy, a little
like grief, that after a moment she recognized as not her own. It came from
Estarion, standing on the map, with his foot beside the broken Gate. There was
a shadow just behind him, a cat as large as a small senel, as dark and
golden-eyed as he was himself: one of his ul-cats, the king of them from its
size and its air of lazy power. It blinked at Vanyi and yawned, baring fangs as
long as her hand.

Estarion took no notice, seemed to be aware of little apart
from Vanyi and the Gate and his own solitude. He did not look like a king or a
conqueror. He looked like a man who must remain behind while his friend
journeys to the other side of the world.

Looks were deceptive, she thought, drawing nearer to the
Gate. Meruvan Estarion was emperor to the marrow of his bones. As she was mage
and master of Gates.

She raised her hands. The Gate woke to the touch of her
power, woke and began to sing.

oOo

Daruya thought silence, thought shadows, thought
nothingness. It was a delicate balance, a sensation not a little like the
moment before one was disastrously sick—a dissonance between the fact of her
existence and the illusion that she was not there at all.

She was cloaked for further safety, wrapped in black, with
her face shrouded, though not in an Olenyai veil. Her one indulgence and
indiscretion, the mare she rode, seemed to have attracted no attention even
when she indulged herself in a flurry of temper. Striped duns were not
uncommon, and Olenyai were fond of them. One of the bred-warriors even had a
rarity, a silver dun, grey bars on white.

For all her care and caution, she nearly forgot herself when
she realized that the emperor was there. He must have come in under the same
sort of protection that concealed her. She strained her ears to hear what he
said; relaxed in every muscle when he spoke of her being safely shut up in her
rooms. She thrust aside the niggling of guilt. He trusted her—he had not locked
her in.

No. He trusted his own vanity, his conviction that she would
yield to him simply because he asked. By the time he found out that she was
gone, it would be too late to call her back. Then she could prove how
groundless his fears had been, and how much he needed her where she was going.

The Guildmaster had left the emperor standing alone and come
to wake the Gate. Daruya, divided between watching Vanyi and sustaining her
deception, still kept her eyes on the emperor. He was watching Vanyi. He always
did. A blind man could see that they had been lovers, could still be, if either
one of them were even a fraction less stiff-necked.

Her grandmother the empress was excuse, not obstacle.
Haliya, great lady and queen, knew perfectly well how it was between her
husband and her husband’s friend and frequent rival.

It had never troubled her. Little to do with men and women
did. She had not even blinked when Daruya came to her first, pregnant and
defiant and scared, because her plan had succeeded and now she was not so sure
she wanted to face the consequences. Without Haliya’s quiet good sense, those
consequences might have been even less pleasant than they were.

Daruya had visited the empress before she came to the
Guildhall. She did so every day and at much the same time: after the daymeal
was done, when the emperor was occupied with matters of state, but before the
empress held her own court. Today Daruya had thought of turning coward and
staying away, but she found her courage and her cunning. If she did not go to
see her grandmother, people would wonder, and perhaps be suspicious.

Haliya was lying on a couch in her day-room as she too often
was of late, fully and properly dressed in the Asanian manner, except for the
threefold outer robe that she would assume when she held her audience. She
seemed tiny in the swathing of robes, shrunken, bleached to the color of old
ivory. All but her eyes, which were the true Asanian gold, bright and vivid
still in the withered face.

She had grown so old so suddenly. Her hair had been white
for as long as Daruya remembered, but as late as Autumn Firstday she had been
riding with the emperor’s hunt, keeping pace with him through the wild coverts,
and shooting a fine big buck for the evening’s feast. Somehow, in the winter,
the life had drained out of her.

They did not say anything of consequence. Daruya did not
confess what she was about to do, nor did she hint at it. Sitting her senel on
the threshold of the Gate, feeling the Gate-music that throbbed in her center,
she remembered the softness of her grandmother’s cheek as she kissed it, the
sweet husky sound of the voice that like the eyes was still perversely young,
the scent of
ailith
-blossoms that the
empress had always loved.

Daruya would not be there in full spring, to fill the
empress’ rooms with flowering branches. But in the autumn, when the fruit was
heavy and sweet—then, she promised herself and the memory of her grandmother,
she would come back. She was not going away forever. Only for a while, because
she must.

oOo

The Gate sang its deep pure song. Vanyi matched the
measure of her power to it. She felt the resonance that rang sixfold from the
mages who would cross with her, the quiver of discord that was the company of
Olenyai with their beasts and baggage.

A strong sweet note rose through the dissonance, smoothed
it, shaped it into harmony. She started a little in the working, but caught
herself. Estarion had made himself a part of the Gate-magic. He was no mage of
the Guild, nor could ever be; that was forbidden him as emperor. But he was
mage and master.

She was wise enough not to resent the help he gave, though
it stung her pride. Six mages and a Master should have been enough to open this
Gate. Still, his strength was welcome. It made her task simpler, spared her
power for when she would need it most, past the Gate’s threshold on the
worldroad.

The grey blankness of the Gate had shifted, transmuted, come
alive. As with all Gates, it strove ever to change through the turning of the
worlds. But she had set her will on it. It fixed on the eighth Gate of that
other half of this world, holding pace like twin seneldi in a race, each desirous
of outrunning the other, but held level by their riders’ compulsion.

The Guardians on the other side were holding likewise, their
task the less because their Gate was lesser, bound in servitude to this one.
Any who passed that Gate could only come here, although from here he could pass
anywhere in the worlds, even to the Heart of the World itself, which was master
of all Gates.

In the moment when the two Gates matched, Vanyi brought them
all together with a word. Two mages passed first, and then the Olenyai and the
animals, and after them the rest of the mages. She was last of all, and
Estarion who would not pass the Gate.

They did not speak, even when, briefly, they were alone. He
was holding the whole force of the Gate in the hands of his power, even that
part which she could well have held. It was by no means the limit of his
capacity, but he showed the strain a little: a tightness about the nostrils, a
rim of white about the eyes.

It did not prevent him from smiling his old, white smile.
She took the memory with her into the Gate.

The storm struck as Vanyi crossed the threshold. She knew
a moment of calm, a vision of the worldroad as it should be: grey road, grey
land, grey sky, and before them the glimmer of the Gate to which they traveled.
Then the sky shattered.

All Gates were present in her awareness, no more or less to
it than the parts of her own body. But as a body convulses with pain of a blow,
now the Gates reeled. The whole great chain of them, from world to world,
shivered and cracked and began to break.

The road heaved under her feet. She staggered. Shadows
milled ahead of her, men, beasts, the glimmering shapes of mages with their
power laid bare. She started toward them, wavered, turned back.

The Gate through which she had come was there still, though
its lintel sagged. Estarion stood in it, arms braced, holding it up. His power
surged toward her like a tide of light.

“The chain!” he cried, faint amid the howl of the storm. “The
Gates—let me—”

Her own power reared up like a wall. The tide crashed
against it and recoiled. As it rolled back upon Estarion, she thrust the wall
behind it. It struck the Gate with the clap of stone on stone, locked and
barred and sealed it until she should open it again.

Estarion would suffer for that. But he would not die—and die
he would have done, if he had done what he was setting out to do, and tried to
restore the chain of Gates with his sole and unaided power. No one man, even
the Lord of Sun and Lion, was strong enough to do such a thing alone.

All such thoughts encompassed but a moment of the worlds’
time. Even as she thought them, Vanyi was wheeling away from the sealed Gate,
back to the tumult on the worldroad.

One at least of the seneldi was down—dead, and its rider beneath
it, unnaturally still. Shadows beset the rest, driving them together. Mages
fought with bolts of power. Olenyai fought with swords, useless against
shadows—far better for them were the amulets they wore, that protected them
against magic.

The watchers of the road were nowhere to be perceived. She
called them, received no answer. If they had come, they could have driven off
the shadows, the dark things without substance and yet with deadly strength.
Even as she fought through a road turned to clinging mire, catching her feet
and causing her to stumble, a shadow enfolded a lightmage, Jian who was
youngest of all.

In desperation Vanyi formed and aimed a dart of power. But
she was too far, too weak, and the shadow too swift. She felt, they all felt,
the mage’s fear, her resolve to be strong, to resist pain; pain mounting to
agony, till nothing was in the world but that, and agony beyond agony, and
abruptly, without warning or transition, nothing.

Jian was gone. Her darkmage cried out, a raw, anguished sound,
and flung himself at the shadows. They slipped away from him, eluded his grasp,
his power, the maddened stabbing of his dagger.

They seemed to mock him. With a spring like a cat’s, one of
them fell on the darkmage who was farthest from him, who had stopped to stare
aghast, and was too slow to escape. His lightmage, leaping to his defense, fell
into the shadow’s maw.

A blaze like the sun blinded them all, even Vanyi in the
raising of her power. Shadows withered and died. The road’s heaving steadied.
The chain of Gates, at the point of rending asunder, subsided into a kind of
quiet.

In the center of it, soft and calm but rather strained, a
voice said, “I can’t hold this for long. Do you think you could all stop
goggling and get a move on?”

“God and goddess,” said Vanyi, astonished that she had any
voice at all, let alone one that could be heard in this place. The road was
solid underfoot. She forced her creaking knees to drive her forward. “You heard
her. Move!”

They were deadly slow, but once they had begun, they gained
speed. Those who were mounted pulled those on foot up behind, even the one who
struggled and fought and tried to fling himself back to the place where his
lightmage had died.

A tiger-patterned gelding—no, it was a mare, a horned queen
mare, and a black shadow on her back—wheeled in front of Vanyi. Its rider
thrust out a hand. Vanyi caught it, let it and the mare’s movement swing her
up. Even as she settled on the crupper, strong muscles bunched beneath her and
surged toward the glimmer of the Gate.