Spear of Heaven (21 page)

“At sunset, on festival night,” said Bundur.

“Does one do anything in particular? Bring a gift? Offer
flowers? A prayer?”

“A gift isn’t necessary.” Which meant that it was. “Flowers
are welcome, and prayers, always.”

“I see,” she said. “At sunset, then.”

“At sunset.” His voice was a little strange—thick. He was
excited. Not, she hoped in the depths of her stomach, because she had fallen
into a trap and would be dead by midnight.

oOo

Chakan was sure that it was a trap. Vanyi, most strangely,
was not.

She had made her point indeed, let the queen see her and
left the woman to make the next move in the long game. When she came home to a
near-war in the dining room between Daruya and Chakan, she ascertained its
cause at once and stopped it with a pair of words. “We’ll go.”

Chakan rounded on her in such fury that Daruya flinched.
Vanyi did no such thing. “Down, young lion,” she said. “Draw in your claws. You
don’t have the faintest understanding of what this means.”

“I know that it lures us all to the house of strangers,
shuts us therein, and leaves us easy prey to the king’s assassins.”

“So it might,” said Vanyi, “if it were any other night and
any other festival. This the festival of the summer moon. It’s for kin; for
heart’s friends; for lovers. Enemies are never hunted on festival day. No wars
are fought, no feuds pursued. If a man meets his brother’s murderer in the
street on festival night, he smiles and wishes him joy and goes on. In the
morning they go back to killing one another—but while the festival’s peace is
in force, no man ever breaks it.”

“What better chance,” demanded Chakan, “to destroy the unsuspecting
with the semblance of perfect peace?”

“Not during the festival,” said Vanyi.

“In the mountains,” he said, “no one steals from anyone
else. But foreigners are fair prey. Theft from them is no dishonor. How can it
fail to be the same here? We’re outlanders. We don’t keep festival. We can be
killed, and no one will look askance.”

“This isn’t the mountains,” Vanyi said. “Honor is truly
honor here. We’ve been bidden to keep festival in the highest house in Shurakan
short of the royal house itself. If it’s the house most closely connected with
the king, then so much the better. The queen is at least not disposed to murder
us out of hand. The king would happily see us dead and burned. Let his sister
see us, know us, learn that we’re not monsters, and maybe she’ll talk to him,
and maybe, for a miracle, he’ll listen.”

“Minds like that never open,” said Chakan. “They’re locked
shut.”

“Maybe,” Vanyi said. “Maybe it doesn’t matter, if we can get
a foothold in the king’s faction. It’s not just a matter of finding out who
broke the Gate here, Olenyas. When we do that, when we’ve got the Gate up and
working again, then we’ll want to use it. We’ll need friends here, to keep us
from being attacked all over again. Those friends may be in House Janabundur.”

“Or they may not,” said Chakan.

“We can’t know that till we go there, can we?” Vanyi
dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Go. Get ready to guard us tonight. I
need to talk to Daruya.”

He snarled, but he went.

Daruya rather wished he had not. Once he was gone, the door
shut and an Olenyas on the other side of it, Vanyi fixed her with a profoundly
disconcerting stare.

“Well?” Daruya snapped after it had gone on for quite long
enough. “Are you thinking what everybody else seems to be thinking? No, I haven’t
been tumbling the master of House Janabundur in a senel’s stall.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Vanyi imperturbably. “He’s a
handsome buck, isn’t he?”

“I can’t say I ever noticed,” Daruya said. But she felt the
heat in her cheeks. She had never been a good liar.

Vanyi saw it, raised a brow at it. “Maybe you didn’t know
you were noticing. He’d be old to you, I suppose. He must be thirty winters
old, give or take a few.”

“He has twenty-seven summers,” Daruya said stiffly, “and
that is hardly old at all. He rides a senel very well for someone who was never
on one before this past Brightmoon-cycle. But then he’s ridden oxen since he
was Kimeri’s age. The skills do translate.”

“As do a few other things,” Vanyi observed. She inspected
the daymeal that had been laid on the table some untold number of hours ago,
picked out a fruit that was still fresh and a loaf that was not too dry, and
ate each in alternating bites. In between she said, “Consider this. When our
mages first came to Shurakan, a faction in the court welcomed them, admitted
them to the kingdom, gave them a house for the Gate, and gave them leave to
come and go as they pleased. Through the Guardian of the Gate they invited an
embassy from the guild in Starios, and promised to receive that embassy with
honor and respect.

“Then the Gate fell. The faction fell, too, it seems, either
just before the Gate or just after. Certainly I’ve seen no evidence of it. We’ve
been admitted, yes, and given a place to dwell in, and freedom of the city. But
no one comes to us with any direct purpose except curiosity. I got at the queen
today, but only because I’m a brash foreigner and I seized a chance. They won’t
let me loose to do that again. To all appearances we came here on our own,
uninvited by any person or persons in Shurakan, and we’re being treated as
humble petitioners to their celestial majesties, not as invited ambassadors.”
She finished the loaf, deposited the fruit-pit in a fine bronze bowl, poured a
cup of the inevitable tea. “I haven’t said any of that to the Minister of Protocol,
you know. It isn’t something I’ll say to someone whom I’m not sure I trust.

“And in any case,” she said, “if this faction is indeed
discredited, its members, if they live, are lying low. They aren’t letting
themselves be seen to speak with us or approach us. Unless one of them, their
leader even, is the man who will be our host.”

“I don’t think he’s that subtle,” said Daruya.

“Does he need to be?” Vanyi asked. She paused, as if she
needed to ponder what she said next. “I think you ought to know what it means
when a man comes in his own person, without a messenger, and bids a woman and
her kin to dine with his kin on festival night.”

Daruya could well guess. The catch in her throat was temper.
Of course. “It’s a dreadfully public way to ask her to bed with him, isn’t it?”

“Not if it’s marriage he has in mind.”

“That’s preposterous,” said Daruya. “I’m a foreigner. I’m
nobody that his benighted people will acknowledge: no family, no kin, no power
in the kingdom. And if that isn’t enough, I’m hideously ugly.”

“None of that would matter,” said Vanyi, “if he thought he
had something to gain. Or if he could persuade his enemies to think exactly
that. Is there a better way to blind them to what he’s really doing, if he’s
leading his faction back to power and using us as his weapons?”

“That’s supposing there’s a faction at all, and he’s part of
it. He’s the king’s sister-son. Could he turn traitor to his own kin?”

“He might not think of it that way. His faction—if it is
his—believes that Shurakan can’t be forever shut within its walls, and has to
learn to contend with foreigners on their own ground. Even foreigners who are
mages.”

Daruya could not see it. She tried; she battered her brain
with it. But she could only see Bundur riding the star-browed bay, trying to sit
gracefully in a jouncing trot.

Vanyi broke in on the vision. “I’m thinking that we’ve been
kept here in careful isolation, handled at arm’s length, and ignored as much as
possible. Someone is keeping us from being cast out altogether. That someone
may have sent us a message through your Bundur—or may be that gentleman, as
innocuous as he seems. No nobleman of his age in Shurakan is a complete
innocent. I’d say none could be completely honorable, either, but I haven’t
seen all of them yet, to be sure. He’s up to something, if only a campaign to
get you in his bed.”

“That’s all it probably is,” said Daruya. “I’ll tell him he
doesn’t need to make a grand performance of that—I’ll bed him happily enough,
and never mind the priests and the words.”

“What if he wants those? For honor’s sake?”

Daruya laughed a little shrilly. “Then he’s a fool. I didn’t
marry the man who sired Kimeri. I haven’t married any man I’ve bedded since—and
many’s the one who’s hoped for it. It’s not greatly likely I’ll marry this one,
either. Who is he at all but a petty princeling of a kingdom on the other side
of the world?”

“And you will be empress of all the realms of Sun and Lion,”
said Vanyi. Her tone was perfectly flat. “Which, if your grandfather has his
way, will include Shurakan and the lands between. With armies to hold them. And
Gates to march the armies through.”

“Then maybe,” said Daruya with sudden bitterness, “it’s as
well the Gates fell when they did, and they should never be raised again.”

“What, you don’t want to conquer the world?”

“I don’t want to make a fool of myself,” snapped Daruya. “My
grandfather never troubled his head with such nonsense. I’m vainer than he is,
and weaker, too.”

“Which,” said Vanyi, “may be your great strength.” And while
Daruya stared at her, for once emptied of words: “Go get dressed. It’s getting
late.”

She sounded exactly like a mother. Daruya bristled, but as
Chakan had done long since, she obeyed.

There was, she told herself, no great profit in refusing;
and yes, the sun was low, slanting through the windows and pouring gold upon
the floor. She took a handful of it, part for defiance of Shurakani propriety,
part for warmth in a world that could grow too quickly cold.

House Janabundur stood on a promontory of the city
westward of the palace, sharing its eminence with an assortment of temples, one
or two other lordly houses, and untold warrens of common folk. It was very like
the kingdom it was built in, Daruya thought, waiting at the gate in the last
rays of sunlight for her company to be recognized and let in.

They had done their best to look like the ambassadors of a
mighty empire. Chakan had brought half his Olenyai and left the others to guard
the house by the palace walls; they could show no weapons, but their robes were
impeccable, their veils raised and fastened just so, their baldrics oiled and
polished and crossed exactly. Vanyi had put on the robes of the Mageguild’s
Master, as she almost never did.

They were cut in the Asanian fashion of robes within robes
within robes, seven in all, grey and violet interleaved, and the outermost was
of silk and woven in both violet and grey, a subtle play of color and no-color
that shimmered in the long light. Her hair was plaited and knotted at her nape,
bound with a circlet of silver; she wore no other jewel but the torque of the
priestess that she had been from her youth, plain twisted gold about her
throat.

Kimeri, clinging to her mother’s hand, wore a
gold-embroidered coat and silken trousers, with a jeweled cap on her head and
rings of gold and amber in her ears.

Daruya had caused the servants an hour’s panic, but the
result, she rather thought, was worth the trouble. She had traveled light
perforce, and brought nothing suitable for a state occasion. By dint of
ransacking the embassy’s stores and taking the market by storm, the servants
had made do handsomely.

The shirt and trousers were her own, of fine white linen
woven in Starios; and the boots were made in Shurakan, white leather
golden-heeled. The coat over them, like Kimeri’s, was new-made of silk from
Vanyi’s stores, a shimmer of fallow gold brocaded with suns and lions, gold on
gold on gold. Along its hem and sleeves ran a wandering line of firestones. Her
hair was in its braids still, but its beads were amber and gold. There were
rings in her ears and about her wrists, plates of amber set in gold. Her belt
was gold, its clasp of amber. But lest the eye weary of so much white and amber
and gold, she wore a necklace of amber beads interwoven with firestones,
shimmering red and blue and green.

She smoothed the long coat with the hand that did not hold
Kimeri’s, a nervous gesture, quickly suppressed. Chakan had struck the gong
that hung in front of the gate; its reverberations sang through her bones.

Kimeri fidgeted. “Mama, can I take my boots off, please? My
feet hurt.”

Daruya swallowed a sigh. The boots were new, of necessity,
and made for the child, with room to grow in—and they were stiff, and she had
walked half across the city in them. “When you get inside,” said Daruya, “we’ll
ask if it’s not too unpardonably rude for you to go barefoot to a festival
dinner.”

“Why would it be rude?” Kimeri wanted to know. “My feet
hurt.”

Daruya was spared the effort of a reply by the scraping of
bolts within and the opening of the gate. An aged but still burly porter
scowled at them all impartially, but said nothing, merely stepped back and
bowed, hands clasped to breast.

Vanyi interpreted the gesture as an invitation. She entered
in a sweep of robes. The others followed a little raggedly, Olenyai last and darting
wary glances at the walls that closed in beyond the gate.

That was only the entryway. The wonted court opened beyond,
lamplit, with the inevitable fountain. A servant waited there, elderly and
august, to lead them up a stair to a wide airy hall full of sunset light.

Daruya saw nothing of it at first but the light, which
poured through a long bank of windows framed in a tracery of carved wood and
molded iron. Slowly she accustomed her eyes to the splendor. The room was long
and high but not particularly wide, stone-vaulted, with slender pillars holding
up the roof. The floor was of the patterned tiles that were so common here, the
walls hung with embroideries, too bright and many-figured to make sense of in a
swift glance. At one end of the hall, near a broad stone hearth, a table was
set.