Spear of Heaven (6 page)

The light was dying behind them, the road breaking apart.
The mare’s hind feet found purchase in the last of it before it melted into
nothingness, and thrust them through the wavering Gate.

oOo

Light. Solidity. A waft of scent, pungent and strange.

They had come through. The Gate was fallen: its posts were
broken, its lintel shattered. But they were on the other side, in a place so
strange that Vanyi could find no thing to rest her eyes upon, except a pair of
Guardians, mute and still: one on her feet and looking whitely shocked, one
sitting up as if he had fallen and just now come to his senses.

Her arms, she discovered, were locked in a deathgrip about
the rider’s waist. Grimly she pried them free.

She slid from the back of the motionless senel. No one else
was moving, not even the animals.

She counted. All seneldi present and safe except for the one
that had died early in the battle. One Olenyas lying too still across a saddle.
Three mages—she bit back a cry. Of six that had left the Guildhall, only three
had come through the Gate: darkmage and lightmage, slender elegant Miyaz and
quiet-eyed Aledi, and one lone stark-faced darkmage, young Kadin who had lost
his lightmage to the shadow.

Her eyes returned to the rider who had brought her out of
the Gate, the rider whose light had kept them alive to come this far. Now that
there was no way back, all concealment was gone, hood and veil thrust aside,
golden lion-eyes holding hers with remarkably little defiance. “You did need
me,” said Daruya.

“I’ll tan your hide,” said Vanyi.

She turned slowly. The place was beginning to make sense. It
was a temple, she knew that already: safest, her mages had said, for the
raising of a Gate, and least likely to attract attention with its comings and
goings.

Ah, but such a temple. Every level surface was carved and
painted and glittering with gilt. She could, if she struggled, recognize the
shapes of leaves and flowers, birds, beasts, men, things that were all of them
and none and everything between.

At the end of the hall opposite the broken Gate stood the
greatest monstrosity of all. It was supposed to be a god, she supposed. Its
shape was manlike, but it had—she counted—a full score of arms, each hand
clasping a different object: a sword, a flower, a bow, a basket of fruit. Its
face was fully human and yet profoundly alien, a smooth mask of beaten bronze,
high-cheeked, proud-nosed, thin-mouthed. Its eyes were black and quiet. Its
lips were smiling.

It
indeed. The
full breasts were a woman’s, but the organ below, vastly and proudly erect, was
indubitably a man’s.

She stared at it. She had never, she thought in a dim corner
of her mind, been so purely aware that she had come to a foreign place. No, not
even when, fresh from the boats and the fish and the peasant simplicity of the
Isles, she came to Endros Avaryan that the Sunborn had built, and came face to
face on the public street with a young man who happened to be the emperor. And
she had thought him strange, with his face like a northern tribesman’s and his
startling eyes.

Estarion had been as common as sea-wrack compared to this.
And yet it was all part of her own world. The same sun shone through louvers in
the roof, catching fire in the gilding. The same moons would rise in the same
sky. No sun like an orb of blood, or twin suns, or triple, or more. She could
have traveled here, given a year or five and a ship and a herd of strong
seneldi.

She was in shock. Gates were broken, mages dead. Her power
had strained itself to the utmost in doing what little she had done. Estarion
had done more, before she trapped him on the other side of the Gate; and
Daruya, rebellious, reckless fool, but for whom they would all have died.

It dawned on her, slowly, that Daruya was receiving a shock
of her own. One of the packs in the baggage stirred, shook itself, sat up on
its senel’s back. “Mama,” said ki-Merian fretfully, “my head hurts.”

Chakan swore by all the Asanian gods that he had had
nothing to do with this second shadow among his baggage. Vanyi was inclined to
believe him. He confessed without shame to the concealment of the
princess-heir, but the princess-heir’s daughter had come entirely of her own
volition.

Kimeri said as much when Vanyi pressed her. “I had to come,”
she said. “The Gate’s crying. Can’t you hear it?”

And that was all she would say, except to burst into tears
herself, wailing, “
Mama
! My head
hurts!”

It was nothing, Vanyi assured herself, but a headache—the
child had taken no harm, by the god’s mercy. Once Kimeri was put to bed in the
elder Guardian’s own chamber, with a warm posset in her and a cool cloth on her
brow, they held their council there, speaking soft so as not to wake the
sleeping child.

There were four of them: Daruya, Vanyi, Chakan, and the
elder Guardian looking worn and haggard. The younger had insisted on standing
watch though the Gate was broken. The rest, mages and Olenyai both, slept as
they could in rooms that had been prepared for them, or tended the seneldi in
the stable, or mourned their dead in quiet corners of the temple.

None of those here suggested that they move elsewhere, even
to the outer chamber. Daruya, who had never struck Vanyi as the most attentive
of mothers, stayed fiercely close to her daughter, with a look about her that
defied any force of hells or heaven to harm a hair of that head. “Not,” she
said, “that I fear anything here. All threats to us are in the empire or on the
worldroad.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Vanyi said. “Something here is
breaking Gates. Did you feel it? It was coming from outside—but not from the
Gates in Starios.”

“Then,” said Daruya, “it’s only this chain of Gates— only
the ones bound to the Gate we departed from.”

Vanyi opened her mouth to correct her again, but paused. She
had felt all Gates from the worldroad, she was sure of it, and all had felt the
blow. And yet . . .

“It was strongest on this road,” she said. “So strong that
maybe it deceived us into thinking it was greater than it was. If it’s only the
Gates on this continent, the ones that we built and bound to the ninth Gate in
Starios, then—”

“Then we’re safer than we thought,” said Daruya. “And so are
the rest of the Gates, and the Heart of the World.”

“Certainly,” said Chakan, “no one will be assailing us from
within the Gate. Nor will we be running back to Starios through it.”

How like him, thought Vanyi, to say what none of the others
would say. They were trapped here. Oh, they could go back, take the year and
more, journey overland, find a ship, journey overland again. But the few
moments’ walk from Gate to Gate—that was ended, for who knew how long.

“Estarion will be beside himself,” she said. “Both of his
heirs fled to the far end of the world, and no quick way back.”

Daruya shot her a lambent glance. “You don’t think he’ll
just walk through the gate of his
Kasar
and drag us all back home?”

“You know I don’t,” Vanyi said levelly, “or you’d be doing
it yourself.”

“I can’t,” said Daruya, too shocked with the discovery even
to be angry about it. “It’s all bound together somehow. When I came through, I
felt it close behind me—everything. Every Gate and every road. There’s no way
back. Except the simple human way.” She glared, though Vanyi had not said
anything, nor changed expression. “I didn’t plan this!”

“Certainly not,” said Vanyi. “You’re only an idiot when it
comes to yourself. We were all fools for not expecting that the child would try
to follow us. She’s always had a fascination with Gates.”

“She was under guard,” said Daruya. “I saw to it myself—set
priest-mages over her and commanded them not to let her out of their sight. I
hope Grandfather rends them all limb from limb.”

Chakan sat softly on the end of the bed and tucked up his
feet. “It is interesting,” he mused, “that she eluded priest-mages. You can do
that. Your grandfather certainly can. Would you be willing to wager that your
daughter is as strong as either of you?”

“She’s so young,” said Daruya. It was not a denial, not of
what he said. She smoothed her daughter’s curls, gently. Kimeri smiled in her
sleep. Daruya’s face set. “Wherever the fault lies, both of us are here. I may
choose to think that the god wanted it so. Why else would he have allowed it?”

Maybe he did not care. Vanyi was too circumspect to say it. “Well,
then,” she said. “Here we all are, and here we stay until we know it’s safe to
raise a new Gate. I’m going to go on as I intended, into the Kingdom of Heaven.
The source of the trouble is there, by all the evidence I’ve seen, and we’re
expected there.”

“Maybe not now,” said Daruya. “Maybe that’s why the Gates
were broken.”

Vanyi grinned ferally. “Then we’ll surprise them. They don’t
know us if they think a little matter of fallen Gates will keep us away from
the expedition we’ve been planning since the first Gate went up.”

“We are a tenacious people,” observed Chakan. His glance
took in them all: the white-skinned Island woman with her sea-colored eyes, the
wizened brown Guardian from the Nine Cities, the tall princess-heir of both
Keruvarion and Asanion, and even himself, the Asanian bred-warrior. “And we are
that, do you notice? All these years of fighting, and now we’re entirely
we
, and those out there are
they
.”

“Even the worst of warring clans will unite against a common
enemy.” Vanyi sat back in the chair that she had chosen, and rubbed her weary
eyes. “Faliad, have you have word from the other Guardians?”

“Not since before you came,” the Guardian said. He looked as
tired as she felt, but his voice was strong enough. “They were well enough
then, except for the Guardian in Shurakan—what we call the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“Only the one Guardian?” Vanyi asked sharply. “There were to
be more.”

Faliad lowered his eyes. “Yes, Guildmaster. There were. But
we had lost one to a fever, and another was recalled to Starios. Before any
others could be sent for, the Gate fell. There was only Uruan to guard it, and
he died in the breaking.”

Kimeri stirred in her sleep. Faliad fell silent, but she was
only dreaming. She pressed close against her mother, sighed, and was still.

“It seems,” said Vanyi after a while, “that we made
mistakes. Maybe building these Gates was a mistake. No mage ever built them in
chains as we did, with intent to open them to those who weren’t mages. Nor were
lesser chains bound to greater Gates. It may be that in making so many, and
interweaving them in such complexity, we weakened the fabric of the whole.”

“No,” said Daruya with such certainty that Vanyi shot her a
look. But she was oblivious. “Somebody did this. I felt the thrust of will on
the Gates, just before they started to fall. Somebody wanted them down.”

“Can you prove that?” Vanyi demanded.

“Not if you didn’t sense it for yourself.”

Vanyi stiffened. She was Master of the Gates. How dared this
haughty child tell her that she knew nothing of them?

She caught herself before she spoke in anger, knocked down
the anger and sat on it. When she was sure that she could speak reasonably, she
said, “Maybe you saw what I was too preoccupied to see.”

Daruya accepted the concession with surprising grace. “I was
slower than you were to understand what was happening, and much slower to act.
Too slow, or people wouldn’t have died.” That was grief; she caught it and hid
it as soon as it escaped. “I had time to look, and to see what came at us.
There was human will behind it. I know the taste and the smell of it. It was
human, have no doubt. And it hates us.”

“Us?” asked Chakan. “Foreigners? Gates? Mages?”

“All of them,” Daruya answered.

“Yes,” said Faliad slowly. “Yes, there is hate for us here.
It’s not so strong in this place, where all the traders’ caravans come through,
and strangers are a common thing. Out on the plains, in Merukarion—Su-Akar is
their name for that country—strangers are mistrusted, and keep to their own
places, apart from good native folk. They call us demons, in particular our
Asanians, since demons here have yellow eyes. Our northerners they call gods,
because the dark gods look so, taller than mortal men, and black as night
without stars. Me they endure: I look like some of them. The rest recall the
people of the Hundred Realms, with their bronze faces and their narrow eyes.
Some are redheaded, did you know? like red Gileni.”

Daruya, who was kin to the Red Princes of Han-Gilen,
inspected her hand. It was long and narrow, with tapering fingers, the color of
pale honey. She turned it palm up. The gold in it caught the lamplight and
blazed. “The Guild would have done better,” she said, “to appoint only
Guardians who were plainsmen.”

“We considered that,” said Vanyi, “long ago. We decided not
to hide ourselves. They’d find out in the end, whether we wanted it or no; best
that we be honest from the beginning, and be as foreign as in fact we are.”

“So they think that we’re all in league with demons and dark
gods. Wait till they see our emperor. They’ll want to sweep us from the earth.”

“They already do,” said Chakan. “Or if not us, then our
Gates at least. You will go on, lady? In spite of that?”

He was addressing Vanyi, his eyes on her—demon-eyes, she
thought. They seemed very human to her, for all that they were as yellow as a
cat’s. “Yes,” she answered him. “We go on, and the sooner the better. For now I
think it best if we sleep. We’ll want to be awake and thinking clearly when
Estarion comes roaring down the mindways. He’s going to be in a right rage.”

“With the grandmother of headaches,” said Chakan. His voice
was light, but his eyes were wide with alarm. “
Ai
! I won’t want to live, by the time he gets done with me.”