Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (99 page)

"Not hard," Jewel said.

"But it is. You are already comfortable. She could slap you, and you'd rub your cheek as if you were one of her children and she a short-tempered mother who had that right."

"Avandar, you take the fun out of everything, you know that?"

He raised a dark brow; did not dignify the comment. It was not the type of thing she would usually say to him. She fell silent and watched as Teresa and Kallandras traced the circles. They seemed almost like kin; tall and lithe and slender and silent; they worked at opposite ends of the Fount until Teresa nodded. "The West," she said softly, "is secure." She took the things that Evayne had given them and very carefully apportioned a small amount of the liquid from the crystal flask. This she poured into the water. Then she unstoppered the clay jar, and she frowned.

Jewel froze.

Avandar's hand caught her shoulder.

"Jewel?"

"Where did she get those masks?" Jewel said softly.

"Pardon?"

"Evayne. The four masks, Avandar, where did she get them?"

He was silent. But as she watched the gray powder fall into the waters of the Fount as Teresa murmured, she knew that it was ash, and that it had once been human, and alive.

20th of Scaral, 427 AA

Tor Leonne

He watched them from the darkness. This had been his game from the start, and although he could not have foreseen—for that had been little part of his talent—the direction the game would take, he found it interesting. Fascinating. Too much so; the Lord of the Shining City expected all of His subjects, with the single exception of the Lord Ishavriel and his chosen servitors, to attend Him at the midnight hour of the Dark Conjunction.

Lord Isladar had survived millennia by understanding what the word exception meant, and when he might reasonably expect to use it; this was not that time.

But the moon across the face of the mortal world was cold and white, and the night chillier than the nights in the Northern Empire's capital, where the greatest threat to his Lord lay; the elements were wild with a whisper and a song that had not been properly heard, or joined—

He bowed his head.

One day and one night away; the world was poised on the brink of a conjunction that would be invoked for the first time in centuries. Longer. And Lord Isladar, without mission or order, was left to spend his personal power both in leaving and in joining the City again.

Lord Ishavriel was in the city, searching for Anya a'Cooper; his scattered minions spreading the masks of such importance to his plan. He was clever, the Lord Ishavriel, and understood human ambition, human greed; he understood the mask of power that the men who ruled the Dominion wore, and he assumed that he therefore understood the men themselves.

A flaw. A flaw in his reasoning.

But Lord Isladar of the Shining Court did not feel responsible for pointing out such a flaw; it would be perceived as—would be, in fact—an insult. Isladar's smile was soft and perfect in the light of the Tor.

The
Kialli
disliked a particular type of subterfuge. To hide, in human guise, among the humans, was particularly odious to most of them; a trial that only the command of a more powerful Lord would be sufficient incentive to endure. But Isladar found it interesting. Here, as seraf, he was invisible in a way that magic could not detect; in a way that clansmen and women of power would be above noticing. He noticed everything, touched very little, polished brass and swept stone.

He had found it expedient not to kill a seraf and replace him; he merely became another possession in a powerful and stupid man's keep by the expedience of magical suggestion. In all things, Isladar did what was not obvious to the
Kialli
and many of the kinlords found him either beneath contempt or worthy of constant scrutiny. It was almost… human… to distrust the obvious outsider, or to dismiss him, so thoroughly.

It amused Lord Isladar. In truth, he felt the same hunger the
Kialli
did; the desire for the pain that lingered, the final reward for those who had made the choice of the
Kialli
so long ago it was not even a whisper of memory to the weak of will. He, too, desired an end to the self-imposed centuries of restraint. But it was not the only desire that ruled him. Isladar was among the oldest of the
Kialli
and he remembered.

He remembered the voice of the old earth. The crackling shout of the fire; the voice, heavy and cumbersome, slow and cool, of the ocean that was so close to the shores of Averalaan the desire to lose days standing at the foot of its near silent ebb and flow had been almost paralyzing. The air had come to him first, because
the
Lord had chosen a home in the Northern Wastes, and the winds howled fiercely, untrammeled by tree or lake or rushing water. But the other voices, slow to waken, quickened now; as if they could sense, in the
Kialli
, what the
Kialli
sensed in their Lord: freedom, a way back to power.

A costly promise. In the Hells, the kinlords had felt it a certainty: what other gods now walked these lands to thwart the power of their Lord?

But His manifestation here, on the plane forbidden Him, had been weakened, the vessel damaged, by the interference of just such a god. One god. The Oathbinder. The Oathtaker.

The kinlords had cause to resent him; desire, and more, to see him trapped in animal state, sentience denied him except for a few days of the mortal year. Yet, although they had planned everything perfectly, much had not come to pass.

Isladar did not believe in coincidence. He was
Kialli;
he did not believe that the plan itself had been wrong. So much of it had been, through subtle machination, his own. And yet; they were here. Kiriel, gone; the number of the Kinlords decimated by her hand, and in a way that had been difficult to recover from. It had occasioned a change of plan; although he had argued against it.

And so he watched, his desires thwarted, the child whom he had caused to be born—the biggest risk he had ever taken—in the hands of the Northern humans His Lord feared most. She was not in the Tor Leonne; he would sense it immediately; she could not hide from him.

But Jewel ATerafin, the woman he had tried and failed to kill because her influence had threatened what had been built, stood not at Kiriel's side, as he had feared, but rather at the side of an old, old ally, and an old enemy: the Warlord. A man who understood the
Kialli
as if he'd been born to them, bred by them. Bred for them.

Perhaps he was part of the puzzle. And perhaps not. But certainly, the puzzle was changing face again. He watched; the two mortals walked the perimeter of the old circle, they cleansed the water; they spoke in a language that he could not hear, although he could see their lips move; their eyes flicker a moment to each other and back as they acknowledged what had been said. Interesting.

The girl was seer-born. But she was young, and she was untrained…

Untrained. He looked at her, eyes narrowing. There was about her some difference, a darkening of aura that
Kialli
eyes might be sensitive to if they knew what to look for. He regretted the fact that she still lived, not because it was a personal failure, but because she was an element at play that he no longer understood.

But he understood all else.

Isladar took his risk, to come this distance and watch this play unfold; his hand was not invisible in it and it had been many, many years since he had deliberately undermined the efforts of his kin.

In fact, he had only taken an obvious risk in one way in all of his years of service at the side of the Lord of the Hells. Only one: the rearing of Kiriel, lost for the moment in the streets of some far-off city, but coming, in the end—coming to him, via the war that would start on the morning after the Festival.

He smiled as the circle was made. He had never been witness to this particular rite, although he had once—from a distance— seen it in play. He was curious.

Lord Ishavriel's plan, in this instance, was counter in some fashion to his own. He desired balance to the war, and for balance to be achieved, the mortals had to have some say in their destiny.

For the time being.

He bowed to them: ATerafin, Warlord, and the two strangers who worked at their side. One of them looked up, the movement as natural as all movements had been.

For a moment, no more, they locked gazes; Isladar looked away, as any good seraf should. Impressed, in spite of himself. That was the beauty, had always been the beauty, of things that knew birth, growth, death, and decay: nothing was static, and occasionally the change in the cycle between birth and death was beautiful, deadly, fascinating.

He bowed again. And he left quietly.

The Northern Fount.

Of the Founts, it was the finest, although this changed in season and with Festivals. The North and the South were aligned with the Lady; the East and the West with the Lord, or so it was said; tonight, moon almost full and the sky so clear she was glad no window separated them although she loved glass, Jewel believed it was the finest.

There were flowers in the Fount itself, white, delicate lilies of a type that Jewel had only seen once—and then, in the cultivated wilds of the footpaths in
Avantari
. In the center of those lilies, a statue rose from the waters; its features were muted; a suggestion of detail rather than its embodiment. That face, rather than looking unfinished, seemed to be the face of every woman, eyes suggested by a dimple in stone; lips by a swell, cheeks and chin neither remarkably high nor remarkably shaped. You might, Jewel thought, see yourself in that face should you choose to come here for comfort. If you could find the room to pray.

It was busy.

That was a problem only until Kallandras nodded quietly to the Serra Teresa and unstrapped the instrument Jewel would have said he wasn't carrying. He moved as if completely unencumbered, and it hadn't occurred to her to inspect him. But Salla was there, his weapon and his enticement, and he moved out of the gates which at other times of year protected the Fount, singing. In Torra. At her Oma's knee, she had heard stories about the bard-born who led whole villages to the slaughter, and when she was old enough to finally meet real bards and recognize them for what they were, she had doubted them; she knew enough about the powers of the voice to know what it cost to force a single man to do anything against his will. But watching Kallandras sing, she wondered.

And she wondered if, were it necessary, he would lead the people who listened, entwined in his words and music like flies in a different web, to their deaths. Trusting in beauty, she decided— for his voice was hypnotically beautiful—was so often fatal.

But the people of the Tor did trust in it, and they left, and even before the last man was gone, his hands loosely holding a wineskin, his cheeks flushed with the effort of actually moving, Teresa had already begun to inspect the perimeter of the circle. She knelt. Rose.

"There is a problem," she said.

Jewel came forward at once.