Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (90 page)

Sendari turned, fire gathered in his palms and in the center of his chest, burning there like elemental anger. Like elemental pain. "Oh?"

"Do you think to threaten me?
You
? You who are less than servant to the Sword's Edge? Do you know who I am?"

"You are probably," Sendari replied in a mild voice, "
Kialli
. I doubt Lord Ishavriel would send anything less for a mission of this import."

"Clever indeed. Not powerful, of course, but clever. I enjoy the deaths of clever people because they understand exactly what is happening to them. Unfortunately," he added, his features elongating in a way that suggest a jaw that was serpentine and no longer human in nature, "we have so little time. Your friend is dealing with magic that is a bit before its time. Or a bit before our preferred time.

"The Sword of Knowledge is famed for its curiosity," he continued. "A great pity for you, Widan. You would have seen magic that has not been seen for millennia. Perhaps in another life." His laughter was slick and unpleasant. "No, let me be truthful. Most certainly in another life, but perhaps you will not be in a position to appreciate the results." He stepped forward, hands elongating into lovely, slender blades, jaws lengthening yet again. Nothing human remained.

He turned to the motionless, sightless Widan who knelt on the floor in front of burning parchment, helpless.

Sendari di'Marano said something. Or thought he said something; his lips moved; his throat constricted and sound filled the room.

The fire that he had contained in bits and pieces for so many years, the anger at mockery, the pain at loss and betrayal, the desperate desire to fill the void with something, with the only thing he had ever been competent at, destroyed reserve entirely.

His weaponsmaster would have humiliated him publicly, and with ease, at such a loss of control. That had been his first lesson: Never lose control.

It was gone.

It had been his second lesson as an aspiring Widan, as a seeker of knowledge.

That, too, was gone.

What was here: a demon, an enemy, a target—something to look at that was not
himself
.

When the fires came, they were almost beyond him.

And unfolding slowly in mat flame, the
Kialli
. It was an almost perfect moment. He had never heard a demon scream quite that way before. He listened, the fires burning, the ground now scorched and blackened at the creature's withering feet, until the cry was only a memory.

A man stepped around the flame.

Not Mikalis, although Mikalis had shakily gained his feet; not Cortano, although Cortano was the only other man to have easy access to this room of Widan study and contemplation.

No: It was Alesso di'Alesso, the Tyr'agar. His sword's flat reflected the lamp that now seemed a poverty of light's expression. "Sendari," he said, over the crackle and hiss of flame and burning demon. He said it again, and again, as if he expected the word to have meaning.

I am not Kialli
, Sendari thought,
to be controlled by the use of a name
.

But he looked at Mikalis and he understood that a whole life's truth, more complicated and much more difficult to retrieve, could be taken from him and exposed as the masks would expose all. He wondered if, looking at the face of a man who wore such a creation, he would be able to name him.

Wondered, and knew the answer at the same time.

Yes.

"
Sendari
," Alesso said. He lowered the blade.

Sendari understood. At last, he understood. The flames guttered instantly. The chill began to set in.

Do not let the fire control you
, his former master had said,
For the fevers will devour you in its wake. You have power, Sendari di'Marano; but you have something more precious to me as a teacher: common sense. Wisdom. Use them. Do not let the power use
you.

Shaking.

He fell to a knee before the only man in front of whom he felt no need to be ashamed of such weakness. "Why… are you here?"

Alesso di'Alesso sheathed his sword. Smiled, the corners of his lips quirking in a way that they had not done since he had taken the crown and the Tor. "To have a fight," he said, "but it appears I was late."

"You are not… allowed… entry here. Cortano—"

"Is not here."

"How… did you know?" Alesso's arms were beneath his arms.

"Enough, Sendari. I will answer your questions when you are . able to ask them."

"But I—"

"Enough. I think, if I am any judge, that you have the answers that we need."

"No," he said. "Alesso—a favor. I was too weak to do what had to be done."

"What favor?"

"Destroy the circle."

"The circle?"

"The burning circle. The masks. Do not look at them—just— destroy the circle."

Alesso's eyes narrowed.

"A favor," Sendari said again.

It was as much of a plea as he had ever made to anyone who was not his wife or the man who could have saved her. Alesso closed his eyes. Nodded. Turned, letting Sendari's knees crumple.

From the vantage of the floor, Sendari di'Marano saw his only friend lift
Terra Fuerre
, the sword which Alesso had promised would leave its mark in the history of the Dominion, and destroy fire and masks without hesitation.

He wondered if Alesso could not see what he had seen, for Mikalis was there, alive, in the faces the masks had become. Alesso missed little; Sendari wondered how he could raise and lower his sword with such destructive ease, but he did not ask; the favor had been granted; the cost was Alesso's to bear.

As was the weight of the Widan who was his friend.

20th of Scaral, 427 AA

Tor Leonne

The streets were busy.

They were always busy during the Festival season, Sun or Moon, but there was, in the hurried movements of the crowds that streamed through the grip of frustrated merchants, a tension and a furtive silence that was unusual given that the Lady neared Her time. The dawn came; the Lord prepared to give way for the three days that ended with the full Festival Moon. Lady's gift, that final night, although the spill of wildness often began, hesitantly, on the night prior to it. She was, after all, nearest Her ascendancy; She forgave much.

But the Lady was angry this year; there were dead to prove it. And the Tyr was no Leonne; the streets whispered the truth, the cobbled stones carried the words. No man could be heard to speak them—no clansman—and no one listened to the whispers of the women or the mutterings of the serafs, but the words traveled, wind-borne, like the locusts that occasionally destroyed whole harvests beneath the Lord's careless gaze.

Even so, the serafs cleaned the founts; they polished brass and silver; they cleaned and repaired the banners and flags, the hangings and tapestries, the tenting and the awnings that were a part of the Lady's Festival. Wine came in barrels and on wagons; merchants—the less timorous, or those with the tacit alliance of one of the older clans—dragged their horses or camels—depending on the direction they traveled into the heartlands from. Some were turned back by the Voyani warnings, but many simply didn't have the luxury; die by the Lady's hand or the Lord's—starvation was starvation—and the Festival season could make or break a small merchant family's fortunes.

But the large merchant families worried no less.

Behind the gated entrances to homes that would impress even the Tyrs, surrounded by the best cerdan money could buy, swathed in their silks and surrounded by things which drew the attention of men of quality and power, it could be argued that they had more to lose.

By some.

But the worries, in the end, were the same: family first, then fortune. "Maria, I
don't like it
."

The Serra Maria en'Jedera bowed gracefully to her husband. In fact, to his great annoyance, and the amusement of her younger son—the carefully hidden amusement—she fell into the full supplicant posture. It looked very strange, coming as it did from a woman dressed as a barely free merchant's mother.

Mika, her oldest child, was thundering around the circumference of the most private of her chambers, lifting the mats with his heavy thumping stride. "You should listen to Da," he said, the words heavy with an anger that was a thin covering over fear. "Not mock him!"

"Na'mi," she said gently, lifting herself from her position without her husband's permission, such as it was. These were, after all, her rooms, and in them—in them she was allowed, as all Serras were who did not have the misfortune to have married monsters, some control of her life. And such a small space to have control in. For a moment she pitied the clanswomen. But only for a moment.

Mika blushed. The rebuke in her use of a child's name was enough, for at least the span of one long breath, to stop his heavy tread. And in truth, the elegance and grace of a Serra was no deception; she disliked the loud and the ugly wherever she saw it.

It caused her difficulty among her kin. She lifted a pale hand to the chain at her throat; the heart of the Lyserran Voyani beat there more, strongly than her own; it was as if, this night, it absorbed breath, and blood, and spirit: everything she was. Everything she had to offer.

Or perhaps it was as if it demanded no less.

But unlike the other three Voyani Matriarchs, Maria's path had led her down a life that was split between the two Dominions: the one ruled by men like the clansman she had married— paler, lesser versions, of course—and the one covered in the crisscrossing web of the never-ending
Voyanne
.

"Maria?"

She looked up at her husband, and tightened her palm around a gem that Ser Tallos kai di'Jedera had
never
been able to see, although Mika and Jonni could see it quite well, and Aviana, her eldest girl, could sense it when it was within the building. Lorra was sensitive to it as well, but she said nothing; Aviana was Matriarch's daughter and heir, and Lorra adored her; she did nothing to draw attention away.

Or perhaps, Maria thought, she was like her mother and knew it: she was not quite of the
Voyanne
, and the clansmen resented what they saw as the obvious domestication of their own. Had Maria not been found by the Lysseran heart—a story in its own right—she would never have been accepted by the Voyani.

As it was, they were uneasy around her, as if she might break with a loud word, a badly drawn breath. And she had learned to put an edge into her words; to reveal more of herself; to be open with her grief and her anger—but to hide, to always hide, all scent or trace of fear. In that, at least, the clans and the Voyani were alike.

The heart steadied her. It brought back the memories of the childhood that lay buried beneath the memories of her induction into the graces of the Dominion's high society. "Tallos," she said,, in a voice that was rougher than he liked, and gentler than she should have been, "what choice do I have?"

"You know what I want, Maria."

"And you know, my love, that you
cannot
accompany me. The summons was clear."