Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (43 page)

The roar became a scream. The creature's form dissolved in the red, red glow of the fire it had summoned, eaten from within by both blade and light. Its last act was to lose form entirely; fire spread in a sudden blaze of heat, red leaving black in its wake.

It was meant to be their deaths.

Baptized by flame and fire, blackened by the ash of their sur-coats and the tendrils of hair and beard, four men were reborn in the poorest streets of the Tor Leonne. Three stood, one knelt; the body of their enemy dissolved and was taken, as all things were in the Dominion, by the wind.

The Tyr'agar was resplendent in ceremonial robes; white and gold lay beneath the face of the sun ascendant. The merciless blue of sky edged his robes, and the fall of two swords, one long and one short, had been perfectly arranged so that the casual observer might understand that
this
ruler was prepared for war. They caught the eye first, before sun, before robes, before finery.

He noted this dispassionately; the seraf who had been bold enough to aid him had been—of course—trained by the Serra Teresa di'Marano. Like a Northern miner, she could sift through the driest of dirt and find, cast aside by Lord and Lady alike, a perfect gem.

This seraf, a young man with broad shoulders and absolutely exquisite grace, was bred for personal service. He had been offered to the Tyr'agar by the kai Marano, Sendari's older brother. He had been accepted, his name—Aaran—unchanged.

The Serra herself seemed neither pleased nor displeased by the offering—which meant, if Alesso was any judge of the sternness of her mood, that she was in fact ill-pleased. The seraf that she traveled with was now an older man, and almost at the end of his useful service. He could be consigned, as the serafs were, to the Lady, having fulfilled the serafs course and acquitted himself with visible honor. He was attractive in the way that older men are: he had about him that aura of wisdom so unsuitable, and therefore so beguiling, in a seraf.

He was not embarrassed to know the serafs name, although he would never speak it aloud in the presence of others. Serafs' names were matters of practicality, but only those valued as wives were acknowledged to have them. And Alesso had taken no new wives.

Ramdan.

The youth had the same breadth of shoulders and the same height that the older seraf possessed; he had hints of the same wisdom. A fine gift. A fine gift, indeed, and one he was pleased to have accepted.

It was the only pleasant thought afforded him by the day's events.

"Tyr'agar."

He nodded, cool as the waters of the Lake, but infinitely less pleasant.

The Tyr'agnate of Oerta, Eduardo kai di'Garrardi, bowed, the gesture as pleasant and voluntary as the Tyr'agar's nod. Three serafs moved immediately to offer this most important of dignitaries the waters for which Alesso had risked so much.

He accepted the water—and then passed it, untasted, to one of the four Tyran he was, by custom, allowed in the presence of his Lord.

Silence fell like a sword, stilling the words of any who had seen the Tyr'agnate's action. Like contagion the silence spread to those less aware; the platform, with its cerdan, Tyran, and serafs, with its high clansmen, and Widan, became more silent than the Lake itself.

Even the winds deserted them.

The Tyran so honored—and so singled out—took a slow, loud sip of the water, lifting a hand to mouth and back as if the goblet offered him were a common tin cup and not the finest of Northern crystal. Had any cared to think the Tyr'agnate's action a gesture of boorish ignorance, the Tyran's action denied them the ability. He handed the cup back to the Tyr his life was sworn to.

Then, and only then, did Eduardo choose to drink.

/
will kill him
, Alesso thought; it was an effort to contain the words, to cage them. But not so great an effort as it was to keep his hand from the hilt of his sword; to deny Eduardo the satisfaction of his anger.

An angry Tyr was seen as weak if he did not act, and he could not afford to kill this man, not yet. Nor could Eduardo openly move against him. They were separated—as if they were errant young men—from the fight they both desired. But that would not always be the case.

He waited a moment; when words did not return to the platform of the Summer Sky, he turned to the Sword's Edge. He had the privilege of seeing a very rare anger minutely change the lines of the older man's face. Eduardo would miss that, of course. He would also miss the fact that when motion began to return to the serafs whom Alesso owned, and from them to the gathering at large, that it did not return to the hand that had stopped in mid-curl around strands of a beard.

Unfortunately for Alesso—and Eduardo, although he neither knew nor cared—that anger, on a day like this, meant one thing: Cortano was thinking of the Serra Diora. And he only thought of her—or spoke of her—when he wished her dead. He was wise enough, political enough, to understand the folly of his desire. But to see the Tyr'agnate behave so disgracefully over a
girl
, and to see the Tyr'agar he had personally chosen to support join Garrardi in this struggle, was enough to make him think the political risk of her death worth taking.

Sendari was utterly mute.

They were saved from further awkwardness.

Red light blossomed in the sky to the South.

Into the stillness the wind returned bearing two things: heat, and the sound of screaming. Fire. Sudden, intense, and compelling in its beauty—a beauty that Widan fire and hearth fire had
never
possessed.

Eduardo was forgotten in that instant. Alesso turned to Cortano; Cortano's eyes were wide. His hand had left his beard and hovered midway between chest and face. He had cast something; Alesso was certain of it.

"Sendari?" he said, his voice deceptively calm.

The Widan who was his closest friend was gray as new ash. But he did not answer the question.

And that was answer enough.

The flames grew higher, brighter, wider; they seemed capable of taking the sky from the Lord himself.

Alesso drew his sword. He shouted an order, and then another, bowing to his guests before he departed in the direction of the fire.

Too late: the fire faltered. Noise returned, silence followed, words broke it and then retreated; the conversation moved like the Averdan ocean. He had seen that ocean so seldom it still contained mystery and wilderness.

Conversation, on the other hand, held only danger.

Eyes to the sky, he watched as the fires that had reached for the sun itself were banked. In the glimmering death of burned copper light, he thought he saw lightning, although the skies were as clear as the Lord could desire.

Alesso gathered his Tyran to him, and dismissed Eduardo almost summarily. The Sword's Edge was his shadow; Sendari his second. They began to walk down the road to the main gates, and stopped when they saw the four men.

They were almost bald—in fact, to Alesso's eye they
were
bald, but they were still some distance away—and they wore full armor, which was unusual in the Tor. They carried naked blades, which were forbidden almost all men who walked that road, but they had passed the Tyran and cerdan whose sole purpose was to weed out the acceptable from the unacceptable when granting passage.

Obviously, they were acceptable.

Although the cerdan paid with their lives, and the Tyran with their ranks, for any mistakes made, Alesso was not completely certain that he would trust them to stop these four regardless: they walked abreast, they strode with purpose, they carried blades that not only reflected the sun's light, but seemed to have swallowed it.

Lightning
, he thought, and as the distance between the four men and the waiting Tyr dwindled, he recognized at least one of them by gait: Peder kai el'Sol.

Only the man's features were the same; his hair had been singed off, and the resulting ash had dusted his face into darkness. His eyes were narrow, his lips slightly thinned.

"It would not be wise," a voice to his left said quietly, "to greet them."

He turned, then, to see a face that he had never encountered before in broad daylight, exposed to the eyes of his enemies and his sometime ally. He was, quite literally, speechless.

"They have been tested," Lord Isladar of the Shining Court said, "and they have not yet been found wanting. They burn with the fire; they are the instruments of their weapons, not the masters." As he spoke the words, he fell to bended knee, and only then did Alesso—Alesso who took in all detail in a single glance— realize that he was dressed, and had been acting
all along
, as seraf.

The two, kinlord and seraf, were separated by such a distance that he could not easily combine them; in the attempt, he was silent.

"If Peder kai el' Sol served you before—and I will not question his service, as you accepted it and you are more conversant with mortal politics than I—he will serve you no longer, no matter what he chooses to say. And perhaps
that
will serve you against Ishavriel, perhaps not. I cannot stay, General; the events of this day have already begun to cast shadows in the Shining Court.

"But I advise you to clear the road, and to allow no obstruction to the Radann. They are… almost new. The swords they carry have been invoked for the first time in centuries; they have encountered the enemy they were forged to destroy, and they have emerged victorious.

"The Radann will return to their residence, unless they see you first. If they see you first, I believe they will behave in a fashion that is both imprudent and unlikely with the passage of but a single evening."

His bow held for a moment longer, and then he rose.

"Widan," he said quietly, to the silent Cortano. "The Shining Court has grown too large for subtlety; we have always warred among ourselves when our numbers are large, and they have grown. There may be culling. Be prepared."

He was gone.

Alesso turned to Cortano. "Sendari," he said. "Disperse these men in my name."

Sendari bowed at once.

The General was known for his instinct; he trusted it when he trusted little else. He chose. "Let them pass unhindered." He turned to the Sword's Edge. "Accompany me, please."

The word at the end of the curt, short sentence was only barely a request; had he been speaking to any other man, it wouldn't have been spoken at all. Cortano chose to ignore the slight.

Even before they had found shelter in the cultivated wilderness, the Widan had bent his will to silence, enveloping and protecting the words they would speak from eavesdroppers, no matter how powerful they might be.

"Ishavriel?" Alesso asked softly, in a tone of voice that he could not quite make free of threat.

"I do not know. No two members of the
Kialli
cooperate for long. Isladar plays his own game."

"Isladar," the General replied, "would not—if I read him correctly—allow demons to fight in the streets of
my
city before he owned it entirely."

"Am I to suddenly understand the minds of the
Kialli
?" Cortano frowned. "I am not Sendari, Tyr'agar."

"No." The silence was long. At last, Alesso said, "I ask your opinion only."

"Then in my opinion, no. Lord Isladar is cautious. He has rarely if ever offered advice. He has never shown interest in the domination—the obvious domination—of the merely human." There was irony in the words he spoke; irony in the words that followed. "Had he been human, I am certain he would have been Widan—one of mine, in fact."

He was willing to let go of his anger. It was wise, after all. Cortano di'Alexes had his pride, but he was no fool.

"Cortano, I have trusted your guidance, and I have even taken your orders on occasion. Forgive me mine, if you find fault with them, but find out what game is being played."

The Sword's Edge bowed.

9th of Scaral, 427 AA

Evereve

The nature of Jewel's rooms shifted during the first four hours she managed to sleep in something that did, after all, feel very much like her own bed. It was the first calming moment she'd had in this place.

She rose slowly because she didn't want to leave the familiarity of that bed; she dressed in clothing that would never again be so terribly, expensively gaudy, and she walked to the door. Took a breath. Opened it. Gold and gaudiness, high, domed ceilings, the quartered golden circle of bright magelights—all had vanished as if they were a waking dream. His halls were outside, but inside—she'd somehow made it hers.

Almost. The curtains remained closed, and she didn't have the courage to open them. She turned her head to the side and wondered, eyes tracing their straight, heavy fall, if she would any time soon.

The day had passed; although she was afraid her absence would let the rooms revert to their former state, she was also hungry, and she made the trek to the dining hall, following the lights as if they were servants; as if, in fact, they were somehow alive, and trapped and broken by their service just as the statues had been.

After dinner, however, she took advantage of Avandar's awkward silence, broken only by sentences he fractured with a word or two from a different language, to come back to the room as quickly as possible.

She saw the doors as she drew near, and when she did see them she felt her shoulders drop two inches as she relaxed.

That night, she slept with the oldest and most worn of the blankets closest to her skin, drawing them up to her mouth and tucking them under her chin. She made certain that no stray limb, not even a toe, was exposed; there was comfort in that. Home.

What was missing were the sounds of the wing itself. As magelight, in the halls of Terafin, was not considered too great an expense, Teller and Finch often worked late into the night. Even when their voices couldn't be heard—and as they were the quiet ones, that was often—the comfort of their familiar footsteps could. Here, the silence was absolute. She filled it with her breathing.

The pack, cracked leather now fully round and almost ball shaped, was tucked into the corner nearest the doors. Avandar had told her just how useful he thought it would be—not at all— but she felt safer having it ready, and she wanted to leave it that way. Or so she'd told him. It was half true.