Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (99 page)

She drew her sword again. Cut her palm, but this time more carefully; she had to be precise. Her hands trembled, but the trembling no longer disturbed her; she waited until it had stilled before she began.

Between the inner and the outer circle, she began to write, in blood, the oath by which Arkosa would be judged in the final reckoning.

We will live as free men, and we will fight as free men; not for power, nor for love, will we again serve the Lord of Night.

She felt his kiss upon her brow, and she wept.

The City will fall, but it will not be destroyed; it will slumber until the Lord of Night comes again. We will claim no lesser Dominion for our own, and when the End of Days is finally come, we will return to Arkosa and claim it again as our home.

So swear the Voyani of Arkosa, and by this blood and these oaths shall we be known.

She gestured; the stone beneath her feet spread across the ground in a narrow bridge. It held her weight as she walked toward the last of her works. She knelt, and placed both hands once more upon what was left of the sphere. It was cool to the touch.

She lifted it; held it against her chest.

And cradled it there, rocking, while the only world she had known ended.

Lord Telakar was not the master of the game. He knew it before he drew his sword, but to draw it
here
, in the heart of these lands, brought him a pleasure that even the Abyss had never brought him. Ishavriel roared, his voice full, loud; Telakar replied in kind.

They traded names as sharp as insults; they traded blows; they danced in the still, hot air, as they might once have danced in air, fire, water. Only the earth impeded their movements, but the earth had not yet been brought into play, and no matter how the battle went, neither lord would invoke it here.

Shadow trailed behind them, a scant cloak. To summon their Lord's power was a risk that at any other time they might have taken.

But a woman born to the bloodline now walked across the thin shallows of the slumbering earth, and the earth itself had been invoked to defy them.

No, he thought, twisting as he moved out of the gale of fire and force, it had been invoked to defy
the
Lord. The earth was deep and slow, but it would recognize them first by the mantle of their master.

Too great a risk.

Too great.

She watched them when she could bear to watch them. She listened to the wailing of the wind, for it moved at the whim of their weapons, and its voice was a dry, high whistle, a warning, a song. But she could not look at them for long; they invoked a dread in her that she could not name.

And something else that she was afraid to.

Her cousin had stopped as she stopped, and because she was aware of his presence, she waited, hands clenched. She had no weapon with which to defy him, but she was not certain he knew it; when his gaze flickered up from the fight, when it found her, it was wary.

She waited for Carmello to join him, but he did not appear. Her cousin was one man; she one woman.

He carried two swords. But he hesitated.

"Elena."

She almost answered. Bit her lip instead. She could barely hear him, after all; the creatures were roaring as they fought, and they spoke with the voice of the Serpent, the storm in the cadence of their wild anger.

But he did not listen to what she heard.

His face fell into the lines that she found most repugnant, that mixture of petulance and anger that belonged on the face of a child. A child, she could chide. A child, she could correct. He was beyond that now. He began to walk toward her, skirting the edge of the fight.

It almost killed him.

Were it not for the sword he carried, were it not for the speed of his reflexes, he would have been cut in two, for Telakar lashed out almost casually, his sword's edge twisting in the air, an afterthought as he launched himself forward.

The red blade struck the bright one.

Her cousin staggered back, across the invisible line the battle had drawn in the sands.

"She is
mine
, mortal. Serve who you will at your peril."

She shrank groundward, holding her place upon these sands, the heat of the sun a bane that did nothing to warm her.

Margret returned to herself slowly; her hands, empty, fell away from her chest. Her eyes were dry, but they were wide. She lifted her face from the stone and saw that the path she had taken was still surrounded, on all sides, by a thunderous sky.

No, not on all sides.

Crystal hedged her in from the right. She looked up.

Met the eyes of the Serra Diora.

In the flashing light of the seven spheres, she saw that Diora held the Heart of Arkosa in cupped palms.

Throw it away
, she thought grimly.
Give it back to the void. I will not take it
.

"Daughter," the woman said quietly. "You asked for the truth."

She rose, then, her feet planted as firmly as the twisting, narrow path would allow. Her boots were scored leather, worn and cracked; her robes were the robes of the Arkosan Voyani—harsh and heavy, stained with dust and blood.

She lifted her hands; they were as dark as a life beneath the open sky could make them, and they, like the leathers, were cracked. Strong hands; her own hands. They had never relied upon the labor—or the blood—of slaves.

"Do not call
me
daughter."

"You are the daughter of Tor Arkosa. You bear the blood of the Sen. If you did not, you would never have found the City."

She ignored the woman's words, and turned, lifting her feet with care, to face the Serra.

The Serra's face was white; her hands were white; her hair was black. No combs adorned it, no jewels, no flowers; it had been pulled, braided, and bound with a single long stick. Although she wore the boots and the robes of the open road, she had not been born to walk it.

And Margret had despised her for it, when they had first met.

She had no right to that contempt now. The Serra had undertaken the difficult task of walking the
Voyanne
with a grace that had both confounded and infuriated the Arkosan Matriarch. Both were gone; they were replaced instead by bitter knowledge. In her place, Margret could not have walked the thin, narrow path that had confined
her
. She could not have negotiated the halls and the tame, pretty gardens, the politics of silence, the politics of words that were never clear, never brutal, never direct. Not even had her life depended on it.

"Matriarch." The Serra said the word slowly, her voice turning the syllables into something that sounded like song.

Margret could not speak the word. The taste of ash was in her mouth, bitter and dry. "Did you see it?" she whispered. She hated herself for the hope that flared in the silence the Serra offered.

Hated herself more for the disappointment that followed the Serra's gentle nod.

"How can you stand there, then? How can you stand there with
that
in your hand? Do you not understand what we did?" She turned away. "She—the Sen Margret— planned to kill her son to create the Heart of Arkosa. She had always planned it that way. She knew she was too
valuable
to die in the chambers."

Diora nodded again, her hands steady beneath the pale light of the beating Heart. For it was beating. "I understand it now. I understand what it says." And the Serra smiled, her lips a shallow turn, a quirk of mouth, that no Court had produced.

"Look, Margret. Look." She lifted the Heart, and Margret finally understood what she saw: the chain dangled in the air, its links catching light and losing it as it swayed.

Margret turned to the woman who stood upon ground that had long since vanished, her delicate robes still although the voice of the wind in the cavern was strong. "Why did you show me what you showed me?"

"You asked for the truth."

"And what did you show my mother? What did you show my grandmother? What did they ask for? What—"

Diora's hand was upon her shoulder. She jumped, startled, and turned. The Heart of Arkosa now rested in one pale palm. "They can tell you," she said softly. "They can speak."

"They?"

"The Matriarchs, Margret. Your mother, your mother's mother, her mother before her. The Sen Maris did not lie. This crystal was created to hold memory, to hold the thoughts and experiences of the dead."

Margret glared at the Heart in silence. "Ask them," she said at last, the two words flat as blade's side.

"I do not know if they will answer me."

"Please."

The Serra's gaze was steady. "I am not their daughter," she said quietly. "I do not have the right to question them."

"You bear the Heart of Arkosa. It was given to you willingly. You have walked our road in order to wear it. You bear its weight better than I ever could, and I have never borne it. You
have
that right."

"I walked your road," she replied, "in order to walk mine. I walked the
Voyanne
because I thought it would lead me to the North, where the armies lie waiting. I did not expect to find anything else."

"And have you, Serra?"

She flinched.

And although she did not want to, Margret understood why. She looked away. Felt a terrible pain take the words from her throat.

"Ask them… something else, then."

But Diora closed her eyes, and her fingers left Margret's shoulder. Margret felt the absence, and was ashamed. She
hated
shame.

"They saw the fall of the City," Diora said.

"What?"

"You asked me to ask them what they saw when they entered this chamber. It was… different. They did not see endless depths and endless heights; they saw a large, large room; they saw the spheres. They—they spoke to their ancestors, as we did when we first met Constans. They saw the fall of the City. The death of their people at the hands of the demons who served Allasakar. They heard… they heard his claim."

"His claim?"

"He claimed the City and its inhabitants," the stranger said. Margret had almost forgotten she was there, a witness to the conversation.

"And because he had secured his alliance with his power, he was able to enforce it. The Tor—who had willingly accepted the gift of Allasakar's power, was unable to deny his command; that power turned upon him, and his own was not great enough to defy its master. He fell fighting, and six of the Seven adepts fell by his hand before he could be stopped.

"The Sen Maris was true to his word. When Allasakar came to the gates, he offered his power to the Spheres, invoking them with the aid of other adepts. The Seven… could not be easily breached, not even by the power of a god. Allasakar could have defeated one such City, but he would have squandered too much of his power in that defeat; he used subterfuge instead.

"The Sen adepts of the North tower attempted to destroy the Sphere it housed, and were it not for the sacrifice of Sen Adoll—who they did not name, because they did not know her—the sphere would have fallen, and the defense of the City would have been broken."

Margret lifted a hand to her forehead. She was shaking.

She remembered the memories of the woman she loathed. "He kissed her."

Diora frowned.

"He kissed her. The Sen Margret."

"Who kissed her?"

"The Lord of Night."

Diora's eyes widened; it was the first thing that Margret had said that disturbed her. Or that disturbed her enough that she was unable to hide the expression.

"That—that—is not possible."

"I
was
her, Serra. Diora. I was her. I felt what she felt. I asked for the truth—and that
is
the truth."

The Heart was glowing now. Its light was golden. "The Matriarchs say—they say it cannot be true."

But Margret turned to the woman who waited. "That's why she knew we had to leave quickly. We could not stay; we could not wait for Allasakar's armies to arrive."

"We do not speak that name in this room."

"I don't give a rat's ass what you don't do."

She heard Diora's intake of breath. It gave her a brief, and a gleeful, satisfaction.

"She had to leave because if she stayed, if she remained within these walls, she would have suffered the same fate as the Tor. The Lord of Night would have called her name, and she would have come, like the least of his creatures; she would have laid her life at his feet, been his weapon."

"You see deeply, Sen Margret," the woman said.

"Don't call me that!"

"Margret—"

"She used his power." But it was more than that. "She
wanted
to use his power."

"It is because she used his power that she understood his threat."

Margret spat. "I asked for the
truth
."

The woman fell silent.

"Did she ever stop missing it? Did she ever stop thinking about him?"

"What do you think, Daughter?"

Margret felt the kiss of the Lord of Night upon her brow, cool and graceful. Felt it more clearly than she felt the wound across her hand, her hands upon the sphere. "If no one had ever used his power at all—"

"Does it matter?" the woman replied. "What might have happened has long since passed; the possibilities vanished with the lives they clung to. The men and the women who began this long story have been dust, less than dust, for centuries. What the Sen Margret desired was not a simple thing. But what anyone desires is not simple. She weighed her desires, one against the other, and she made
this
choice. For the future. It was the only way she could think of to fight him and succeed."

"Margret," Diora whispered.

Margret chose to ignore her. "Who was she?"

"She was the Sen of the Sanctum. She was much as you see me now."

"And you are alive?"

"No. I am long dead, and my will, my desire, died with me."

"What were you called, when you lived?"

"I was the Sen of the Sanctum. I was the Seer majere. I was the—"

"What was your
name
?"