Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (106 page)

But the moment was long enough.

Margret, daughter of Evallen, lifted her chin, struggling for control of her voice.

She gazed upon the face of a god for the first time.

She raised her shaking hands. Sen Margret had served him. Sen Margret had loved him. Had loved him in a way that she had never loved another; not her Lord, and not her husband; not her son; not even the Sanctum that had been her life.

But Margret of the Arkosa Voyani
hated
him. His servants had killed her mother, and his servants had killed her cousin. .

She raised those hands with a cry of denial greater than any she had uttered: a single word.

The golden mists shattered. The palace of stone and ice disappeared in the swirl of their storm. She cried out again as she was pulled back, pulled hard. Closed her eyes as the world flowed past her, as people she knew and people she would never know spiraled outward in images too numerous to contain.

The god called her name.

Margret.

She
felt
it, visceral and sudden, a terrible need, worse than any desert thirst.

But something else called her name as well. A hundred women. The Matriarchs of Arkosa.

And a single woman. The Serra Diora di'Marano. A hundred voices and one bound her in place, held her fast. Only one voice was silent.

She hated the Sen Margret, and she pitied her.

For the Sen Margret had never had voices such as these with which to deny that call; she had had only her own. Powerful woman. Powerful and terribly alone.

Come, Mother, all my mothers
—
this is why we were born
.

The lights leaped from the spheres. The fires raged in the room outside of the circle of Arkosa. And Margret held the Heart of Arkosa in blistering hands.

The earth sloughed off the thin layer of dry pale sand, not as snakes shed, who slide whole from the transparency of their casing, and not as animals who have passed through the cold threat of winter, but rather as men might cast off the enemies who have managed, for just a moment, to gain ascendance by virtue of their weight and size.

The winds had no time to grasp at those loose grains; fissures, deep and broad, formed in the ground, swallowing the looser, lighter sand.

Elena saw this from a distance that was no longer safe. She was not aware of how far she had run after she had forced her cousin to release her arm, but she knew, with a certainty that was bred in the bloodline, that this had been a bad idea.

The daughters were always left behind; they were ordered to wait, and they tested their endurance beneath the full glare of the Lord at his most powerful. She had water, she had the robes that had been manufactured year after year by the most august of aunts; she had the scarf behind which she might hide her face, if common sense overcame the visceral pride of being stronger than the Lord.

It did not cover her nose and mouth now.

The hands that had pulled at the back of a demon's robes slackened, but they did not fall away; her grip had been so tight that nerveless fingers still forced the shape of curved fist upon them.

She used that grip to pull herself across a hairline split in the sand, seen because of the sudden fall of loose, pale grains.

Lord Ishavriel turned to Lord Telakar. "You have cost me," he said, the night of his voice diminished somehow. "But perhaps you have done me a service by your interference." He drew his arms across his chest in a gesture that looked like ritual, it was so stilted. "In the Shining City, we will meet again."

But Lord Telakar laughed, his low voice wild enough that it reminded her of the keening of wind. "In the Shining City? I think not, Lord Ishavriel. Gather the Fist, if you will. Alert our Lord, if he needs such a warning. You have games to play in the South, but they are yours. Mine are here. Here, with the Cities of Man."

The Lord Ishavriel smiled. "When the Lord at last turns his attention to the South, when the war with the Generals has been won, he will find you, Telakar. If you were not beneath his notice, he would find you now, and he would call you. Or do you think that you have somehow escaped the binding?"

Telakar was silent.

The earth was not.

What had been flat plains for as far as the eye could clearly see now looked like slowly crumpling parchment that had yellowed with age. The desert was withering before her eyes; it was being peeled away, a rough, heavy blanket that crumbled with age and decay.

"I am
Kialli
, and I serve the Lord with as much grace as the strongest of his Generals," Lord Telakar said. "In my youth, I was beneath your notice. If I am beneath it now, it is of little consequence to me. Go back, Ishavriel, but I will stay. I will bear witness."

"You are a fool."

He shrugged. She felt the rise and fall of his shoulder beneath her cheek, and she pulled away as if stung.

Her cousin stumbled. For a moment she thought the earth would take him. She teetered between fear and desire. But she did not call his name.

"Do you think to see the Cities of Man rise again?" Ishavriel laughed. "What was interred was mortal; you witness the unearthing of its remains, no more."

"If that is true, why leave?"

Lord Telakar was trembling, but Elena could not tell if it was merely due to the movement of earth, for the earth's trembling matched his. "I have witnessed the unearthing of remains before," he said. Voice low, words imbued with a past that Elena both felt and was ignorant of, he added, "What, after all, is
this
?" and he lifted an arm.

What his sword had not done, his words did: Ishavriel took a step back, eyes wide.

And her cousin turned to him, eyes narrowed, face pale. His hair was as black as shadow beneath the folds of his hood, although he wore sand dust like a fine powder. "Will you leave now?" he cried. She heard the fury that followed betrayal in the way he extended the last word.

Ishavriel's smile was uglier. "There is nothing for me here. Not yet. And if you are wise, little mortal, you will leave as well."

Her cousin was silent, but the silence was a facade; he would have screamed without control if he had had the words at hand to express his rage. Her grip fell away from the demon.

She had seen him this way before, and although the fury was real—and dangerous—it had never evoked fear in her. Not for herself.

The air was dry. Her lips were cracked. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

He had
betrayed
her. He had betrayed Arkosa. He had broken the laws upon which the
Voyanne
itself was founded. She struggled to hold on to her anger and her contempt, to raise them, as the clansmen raised the heavy shields they wore when they rode to war.

But hers had been a temper like his; it was not a thing of fire, and not the heated glare of the endless sun, but rather the lightning's strike. It passed with the storm, but sometimes—sometimes it left bodies in its wake when the clouds had blown past.

Nicu
, she thought, betraying herself, her resolve.
Nicu, no
.

He raised the sword. With a cry, with an inarticulate cry, he launched himself.

Ishavriel's laughter was louder, for a moment, than the frenzied shudder of earth. She stumbled; fell awkwardly to one knee. She dropped her hands to either side of that leg, to steady herself, to preserve what little balance she could.

Head bowed, she still heard the clash of steel against steel.

Not flesh.

"If I had time, if I had the inclination, I would kill you for that. But it was pathetic. You are not worthy to bear the name Arkosa."

He laughed, and she lifted her head, her palms shifting as the surface of the plain shifted.

She met his gaze, and held it.

"I would do your work for you," he told her quietly, "but you will take more from it than I could. Enjoy yourself, little mortal. I have no doubt if you survive the next hour, that we will meet again."

He was gone.

Where he had stood, the first of the great stone buildings broke free from their casings and reached upward, and upward again, for the blue of clear sky.

She saw it lift itself from the dirt and she understood what it meant.

So, too, did Nicu, her foolish, stupid cousin.

He leaped for its flat, wide surface, for it alone did not seem in danger of answering the earth's rumble by shattering or breaking.

"
Nicu
!" she shouted, pointing.

Behind him, held by claws that were made of gold—but a gold that pulsed and danced—was a glowing sphere that was larger in all ways than he.

He didn't even notice. His eyes were wide as he found her by the combination of her voice and his name. "Elena!" He reached out with a hand that was ten yards too far away.

The earth convulsed.

She stumbled across its broken surface, running toward him, but it was far, far too late: the surface rose, and rose again, in jerky, sharp movements; had she been beneath the building upon which he now stood, it would have been too far above her by the time she reached him.

But she saw the look on his face as it ascended, and the fear of her own death did not destroy the sudden, painful desire to weep.

She did not, however, give in to desire. She reached up and shoved the robe's hood from her face, exposing her wild red hair to the dust-laden wind.

In the changing landscape, she saw other buildings rise, but they were miles away, sharp, rectangular hills in the newly exposed earth.

"Elena!"

Reversing course, she turned from her cousin's anguished expression and ran again, vaulting over crevices, staring ahead, always ahead. The earth that the building shed tumbled down like the deadly snows in the mountain passes, and she did not wish to be trapped beneath it.

But there were so many things she didn't want, and in the end, she had had to face almost all of them.

Three buildings. Four. Five. Six.

But they were deadly havens.

She ran away from the City as quickly as she could.

And she only missed her footing once, but once was enough.

Her foot gave way as the earth moved, sliding out from beneath her weight, and her full momentum, before she could change course; both of her hands flew out and slapped sand just before her face did.

Pain did different things to different people; she did not cry out. But she rolled along the flat of the sand, her knee to her chest, her hands gripping the boot that covered her left ankle, her breath a short, forced gasp that came again and again through clenched teeth.

Something grabbed at her robes, something dug itself into the flesh of her back. She struggled a moment and then she was airborne as the land threw her.

But what she struck was not sand, not stone; it was soft and warm. Her hands clutched at air, and then at fur, and she felt arms wrap themselves around her upper body. She opened her eyes, then, and saw antlers.

Antlers.

"My pardon, Serra," a voice said in her ear. The words were stilted, the accent formal. She twisted around to see the Serra Diora's seraf, his aged face cut and bruised, his robes torn. "I have her!" he shouted, and the world began to move.

She had ridden horses before, and she had always been the first to admit that she was a poor rider. At best. But the beast beneath her was no horse. She clutched his sides with her knees, and cried out as a shock of heat and pain traveled up her left leg.

"Do not hold fast," the seraf said roughly. "This creature—you cannot fall from his back if he wishes to carry you."

"But the ground—"

Broke. And broke again. But wherever sheer, flat earth presented itself, it was always to the side, never beneath the hooves, of the great stag.

She looked back.

Margret.

The pain was terrible.

Nicu.

They did not answer her.

But something did.

"Where do you flee to, daughter of Arkosa?"

She looked up; the air was thick with sand and heat. And shadow.

The Lord Telakar fell upon her like an ancient doom; she felt his hands beneath the pit of her arms as she was dragged from the back of the stag.

"Come. You. do not wish to miss the moment of your clan's triumph."

She rose, then. Felt the serafs hands on her leg as he tried to pull her down.

She bit back a scream because she did not wish to share it with a demon.

He rose, and she rose with him as his arms circled her chest and waist. "If you struggle, you will fall," he whispered. "And if you fall, you will die."

She could not see his face.

But she could see the ground fall away as he carried her up, and up, beyond the reach of the bones of the City below. And she could see the stag return for the seraf who had been pulled from its back by his attempt to save her.

They met across the impatient earth, the stag dipping head and antler to catch the fallen man.

"Come. If such as you can know gratitude, you will know it when this is done. I should have seen the hand of the hidden Court in this. Do you know what it is that you rode?"

No. But she could see the stag now; could see that he bounded from foothold to foothold without once staggering or stumbling, as if a path was visible to him, and him alone. And she could see that beyond him the ground quieted, the earth stilled. Only where the City rose was it treacherous.

She could not see Margret. Could not see the Serra Diora. But she could make out the wagons of Arkosa as they lay fallen against the desert floor, like lost ships.

The seventh building rose.

And in its center there was also a sphere, glowing like captured sun.

"The Seven Spheres," Lord Telakar said, the words tickling her ear, running the length of her spine. "They still burn. You were right, little mortal. Had I stayed my ground, I would have been devoured by their fire, their ice. Did you know?"

He laughed.

Had she feared for his life?

Did he even have one to lose? Such creatures came from the Hells, and to the Hells returned when they were vanquished. Thus went the stories, the songs, and the legends.