Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (97 page)

It had not, although she had, in fact, learned. Learned the cracks in the walls of his powers; the weaknesses in the more hidden streams that flowed like silk chains between them. She understood that distance was, indeed, a factor; understood that there were places she could go in which his magic could not survive.

He had had to be subtle. He could not be the direct cause of torment or pain, although if his protections did cause pain, this was acceptable. And when her life was truly in danger, he had always intervened, becoming in fact her savior. She desired that from him—but she was canny and wise in a way that made no sense. She did not trust him.

She was far too powerful.

Far too unpredictable.

He wondered, this night, after years of playing the game; of having Anya slip his gentle leash, of leashing her again, of losing her, whether this particular and unpleasant game had been encouraged.

There was only one other Lord who could influence Anya at all. Isladar. And if she were part of Isladar's game, he was of concern. But not of much concern; Lord Isladar had failed. He had attempted to gain power by the expedient of the bastard child who had escaped the city after causing so many deaths.

So many very surprising deaths. Lord Ishavriel was still im-pressed. Kiriel was, in her fashion, as deadly as Anya; she had, as advantage to her enemies, a less cluttered insanity. Predictability. Weakness. The two were friends, in the way that mortals formed friendships.

He had taken much of value from it; Anya could not be silent and she was a source of information when it came to Kiriel's abilities, and Kiriel's activities.

Until, of course, Kiriel had so abruptly departed the city.

He paused. The crowd no longer flowed, roughly or smoothly to either side of him; it stopped, in a series of jagged but concentric circles, men lifting children to shoulder height so that they might see what was not immediately obvious to a man of Ishavriel's height. He did not have difficulty clearing a spot for himself, although he chose the nuances of expression over overt magic; the wildness was close, and he was on the verge of its great hunger. Caution.

Caution.

Within the smallest circle, he found what had captivated the attention of so many, although he had heard the strike and slide of blades long before his eyes witnessed what lay behind their song.

Two men were dressed in white and black in such a way that they looked not twinned, but in opposition. One wore white shirt and black collar, the other wore black shirt and white; where one sash was ivory silk knotted carefully at the back; the other, again, a deep blue-black. They wore the same boots; they had about them the same fluidity of motion, the same easy grace. And it was easy to judge that: they did not stop moving or spinning; they lunged and leaped and managed to be where their blades weren't for just the split second necessary to avoid shed blood. The two blades in this odd dance were, in weight and length, of a kind. He thought they must be forged by the same maker; certainly sharpened by the same stone.

With a small gesture, accompanied by a word spoken in a language of power that he had learned so long ago it was almost easier to remember when he had first drawn—and last required— breath for sustenance, he caused one of the men, spinning on the point of a toe, to stumble.

He smiled as he heard the intake of the crowd's breath; smiled as he anticipated the blood; the end of the dance.

Frowned when it did not follow.

Misstep, and misstep, but somehow the blade that should have pierced him was not there to cut skin, and the stumbling motion was mimed by his partner, built into the dance, made one with it, a part of the odd beauty of their animal rhythm.

He could have pressed the point, but the pressure lacked the subtlety he'd desired, and one of the most powerful of the
Kialli
Lords turned, the dance forgotten, the failure remembered. He was not here, could not be here, for his own enjoyment. The task had been set by his Lord.

Anya was no longer bound to him. He could not be certain where she was unless she desired to be found, and clearly she did not. She could lead him on a chase—if she was aware that he looked for her at all—for a very long time. And if that chase somehow occurred during the night of the Dark Conjunction itself…

He looked forward to an eternity in the Hells with her, although her soul was not bound yet for a place in which the Lord had dominion.

The moment the Lord's gate was open, and the forces of the
Kialli
could finally return to the world unhindered, he would kill her at his leisure. Although he doubted there would be satisfaction in it; the deaths of the mad were… unsavory.
Miara
protected her own against the predations of his kind.

A woman offered him food; something round and artificially bright. He took it, wondering what it was. Wondering and remembering. The air was heavy with scent: sweat and wine, joy and fear, silk, cotton, leather; plant, leaf and vine creeping—at the behest of clever gardeners—in just such a way as to frame what did not grow, and did not change: brass. Stone.

For a moment, surrounded by these, jostled on all sides by those too careless to actually meet his gaze, he felt like the brass or the stone; unchanged, unchanging, the life moving around him like a halo or an aurora of its own. He felt a fascination, a hunger, that had no possible existence in the Hells; the dead were dead, and as unchanging in their fashion as those who had chosen to accept the responsibility of long justice.

For a moment, that hard fruit in his hand, that young woman's hesitant face before him, he could remember a time before this time; a time when that sense of justice had meant something other than pleasure and indulgence and joy at the pain of the damned—

He killed her quickly. Efficiently. Her basket fell, scattering fruit along the cobbled road.

One nameless red item rolled along the ground, caught in the crevice worn by feet and wheels between the stones, until it came to rest at the base of the Western Fount.

Water caught light's reflection; it would be some time before her body was discovered. His magics had made certain of that. But he found himself by that Fount, bent over, his hand around the redness of a food that he had been promised he need never eat again.

And he cursed Isladar as he had not cursed an enemy in millennia.

Festival Night.

There were festivals in the Empire. The Challenge season, with its merchants, its would-be heroes, its barbaric Southerners and its aloof Northerners, was perhaps the closest to this mix of bodies—but the atmosphere in the Tor was very different from Challenge time: It reminded Jewel of the last six days of Henden, called the six dark days, a commemoration, in ritual, of the devastation of the Empire in the wars of the Blood Barons before the return of Veralaan with her sons: Cormalyn and Reymalyn, called the Twin Kings. Jewel suspected they'd never particularly looked alike, and weren't born at the same time. History left these details to the imagination.

Many things were left to the imagination.

She walked behind a silent woman, a woman who, in gait and movement, might have been a slender man, hair pulled taut and slicked back in a warrior's knot; sword half visible beneath the swell of cape, pants wide for ease of movement, boots flat, ugly, practical. She walked slightly ahead of them, cocky, an arrogance to the freedom of her movement that spoke of rank and power. She had it; the clothing that she wore was simple but costly. Jewel's favorite kind of clothing. She had no doubt that the sword was the same, although she only caught a glimpse of it. Wondered if the woman—introduced by Kallandras as Serra Teresa di'Marano—knew how to use it. It was hard to imagine, watching the ease with which she navigated the crowds—mostly by staring down her slender nose until the people unfortunate enough to be standing in her way moved—that there was anything she couldn't do well.

And that type of person always made Jewel feel either sick or inferior. Or both. It would have been easier if the Serra was friendly; she was not. She was cool and distant and her manners, whether woman or man, were elegant and refined. She made Jewel feel clumsy and awkward without saying a single word.

Jewel navigated—a pretty overstatement which meant that she was dragged along—the streets behind Kallandras. She had been given two choices: bind her breasts—a painful but swift process— or travel as a poorer clanswoman. Jewel had chosen to travel as a clanswoman and spare herself the pain, but she decided, the fifth time that Kallandras gently corrected her position so that she was walking slightly
behind
him, that she should have gone for the binding and passed, in the faded evening light, as a young man.

Then again, she'd suffer by comparison to the Serra Teresa, and she wasn't much interested in that.

She had originally planned on traveling as one of the Voyani women; she was good at that, and her Torra, imperfect when it came to dealing with the high nobility of the Dominion, was much like the Torra the Havallan Matriarch spoke. But she hadn't counted on that being unsafe in the city; the Voyani
always
journeyed to the Tor Leonne for the two Festivals. Or they did in the tales her Oma used to tell her when she perched on the lap bent legs made.

The streets here were both exotic and familiar. The buildings, flat and white from ground to oddly tiled ceiling, looked nothing like the brick or wood that she was used to; there were no grand trees, no merchant Common, no large temples to the various deities who did not make their home on the Isle. But there were votive offerings, she thought, and small fount-stones, which bore fruits and flowers in deliberate, delicate array; she assumed these must be places where the Lady was worshiped. Night places.

And there were serafs, marked and unmarked, who bent back under the watchful eye of overseers to do the real work this Festival demanded. Polishing brass and cleaning tile, their clothing simple but of a quality that reflected the status of their owner, they seemed much like any laborer to Jewel; some harried, some quiet, some happy.

It made her wonder about the nature of freedom.

Until she saw the young boy being beaten. She could not see the boy's face, but she could hear his whimpering pleas, and she wasn't about to walk away from it. It had been a long time since she'd had to.

She was wrong, of course. But the memories it brought back were the least pleasant of all her memories. The helplessness. What was the point of having power if you had to stand back and watch people being beaten or killed? What was the point? Kallandras caught her arm as she started toward the man with the cudgel. She knew by the type of grip he used he would not let go.

And that he was
right
, damn him. She was a clanswoman of low birth, and that man had every right to do as he wished. Festival or no. She hoped, come the Night of the Festival Moon, the seraf had the right to slit his master's throat, if they had Festival at all.

The Serra Teresa returned, stopping a moment before she came to stand beside them. It was the first hesitation that Jewel had seen, and she didn't like what she thought it meant. But the Serra offered no criticism; in fact, all she said—when she chose to speak at all— was, "These are the Lord's lands. On every day, every night, but the one we approach, the laws that govern our lives are His."

She spoke flawless Weston, and in the mix of that flawless voice, Jewel thought she heard, faint and distant—and cool as desert night was supposed to be—pity. For her. And gods knew, Jewel wasn't the one who needed it.

"But that boy—"

"Not here," Avandar said, and she knew no one else would hear his words. What she wanted to say in reply, on the other hand, would probably be heard by the entire Tor. She bit her lip until it bled. She'd done it once or twice at very irritating political meetings—a comparison she felt instantly guilty making. "Make him stop," she said, as quietly as she could, "Or I will."

"At your command," Kallandras replied, and his voice was so smooth, so incredibly soft, that she wasn't certain if it held sarcasm or not.

He left her side. She stopped; Avandar came to stand just in front of her, hiding her from the easy view of unscrupulous men— or at least, she thought that must be the so-called reasoning behind this stupid half step behind movement that was so unnatural she had to work to maintain it.

Kallandras walked quickly to where the boy alternated between sobbing and screaming beneath the shadow and the arm of the man who clearly owned him. In the evening light, she saw no mark across his face—no brand except the bruising, the split lip, the bleeding. Brand enough.

She started forward again, convulsively, and Avandar caught her arm as Kallandras had done. Exactly the same grip. She wondered if killers so confident in their ability that they didn't need to strut like peacocks were all alike; steel and silence.

"Watch," Avandar said, shaking her. "Understand subtlety. You
are
capable of it on occasion."

"But I—"

"Jewel," he continued, "you will never learn to lead if you cannot trust those you give orders to follow them. You have given an order. Learn to rule."

"That's leadership?" she hissed, pressing him, pressing herself. "Telling everyone else what to do while you do nothing?"

The look he gave was contempt mingled with something that she couldn't quite name. "No," he said at last. "It is partly choosing the men and women who will follow the orders you have given, but will perform them in a way you could not.

"Watch," he said quietly.

What else could she do?

But she wondered, as she watched Kallandras depart, if Avandar's words and his almost unquestioning acceptance of her command were part of the same lesson. Wondered if, in fact, he knew what she had accepted as her last order from The Terafin. He probably did.

What have you seen
? she thought, not of the bard but of the woman who was arguably his master.
What have you seen for me and mine, and when will I know it
?

He stopped, Northern bard, hair darkened by Margret's swift work, skin colored, but still somehow a thing out of place in the Tor. It was his movement, she decided; graceful and lithe, he was completely silent. His feet against the uneven ground gave no hint of his approach; he hoarded all information that might grant an enemy any leeway.