Spear of Heaven (37 page)

“Don’t you see?” she said. “We were thinking to honor Shurakan
by sending our best and highest: the Master of the Mageguild, the princess-heir
of Sun and Lion. What if Shurakan didn’t see the honor? What if it saw
something else?”

“Conquest,” said Chakan. “Yes.”

“Not all of us saw that,” Bundur said. “Not even most. We
were honored, as far as we knew how to be.”

“But a few saw the Gate, and saw armies riding through it,”
said Chakan. “So did the emperor, for the matter of that. Vanyi prevented him
from doing more than think, but would Shurakan know or trust that she would do
it?”

“I would wager,” said Daruya slowly, “that she thinks she
can convince her captor of that, and talk him round—or at least confuse him
enough to let us escape.”

“Not escape,” Bundur said. “Or exile, either, I don’t think.
She wouldn’t give up that easily. She thinks she can gain time somehow, maybe
for us to bring back the queen.”

“There is that,” said Daruya. “Borti—majesty—what do you—?”

There was no answer. Borti’s chair was empty. Hani was alone
on the floor in a wrack of scattered toys, looking dazed and somewhat sleepy.
Daruya throttled an urge to seize him and shake the truth out of him.

His father spoke before she had mastered her voice. “Hani,
where did Kimeri go?”

Hani blinked. “I don’t know,” he said. “She went away.”

Bundur would have pressed, but Daruya forestalled him. “No,
don’t. The imp put a wishing on him. If he ever knew where she went, or even
when, he’s forgotten.”

Bundur’s eyes rolled like a startled senel’s. She caught
him, shook him till he looked her in the face. “There. There, stop it. You’re
supposed to be reining me in, not the other way about.”

He gripped her arms hard enough to bruise, and sucked in a
breath. But he was calmer; he was seeing sense again.

His hands loosened but did not let go. “I’ll tan her hide,”
he said.

“You’ll have to wait till I’m done first.” Daruya glanced
about. No one else was gone. If they were quick—if they raised a hunt—

“They might only have gone to the privy,” said Chakan, “or
the imp might be getting into perfectly reasonable mischief with the hounds or
the seneldi.”

Daruya did not believe it, much as she wanted to. But she
let him send his hunters through the house, to discover what she had known
already: that her daughter and the queen of Shurakan were gone. Together, she
was sure. To the palace, most possibly. Where Daruya could not in good sense
go—not while Vanyi was there and doing whatever she was doing to protect the
embassy.

It was nothing different from what she had done since she
arrived in Shurakan: waited, fretted, found nothing useful to do with herself.

The queen, whom she barely knew, whom she did not truly
trust, had taken her daughter and vanished. Another hostage; another prisoner.
Another and most compelling reason to do as Vanyi forbade, and descend on the
palace with fire and sword.

There was a hand on her. There were two. One was broad and
bronze-dark, one smaller, narrower, ivory-pale. She met two pairs of eyes:
narrow and black, wide and yellow-golden.

Such unlikely allies. They did not know or like each other,
or even speak the same language. And yet, when it came to Daruya, they agreed
altogether too often.

“Wait,” said Chakan.

“Be patient,” said Bundur. “You’ll have your gallop, I’m
sure, and your cup of blood, too, that you seem so thirsty for. But wait a bit.
Give Vanyi time to work.”

“If she’s not dead,” said Daruya, “or too badly hurt to do
anything at all.”

“You’d know,” Chakan said.

She would. Damn him for knowing it. Damn Vanyi for forcing
her to think about sense. Damn Borti, and damn Kimeri, and damn her own self,
because she could do nothing at all but wait and seethe and, when she had wits
enough, pray.

Borti in her plainest self seemed no more in the mind’s
eye than a servant. Kimeri being nobody in particular struck anyone who looked
at her as simple child-shaped object moving in shadow of adult object, and
therefore safe and not to be noticed. It was easier than wearing shadows, and
harder for mages to track, though they would after a while.

They walked into the palace as if they belonged there, which
in fact Borti did. Vanyi’s traces were in front of them, clear to a mage’s
sight, like the track a star leaves when it falls.

She was safe, Kimeri had made sure of that. She was eating a
very good dinner and talking to the priest who thought he was her captor, and
thinking about going to sleep. Her thoughts were clear inside the palace;
outside of it they had been blurred, shadowy, not quite there.

The palace was warded, of course. For people who insisted
that they were not mages, Shurakani were very good at raising wards. Kimeri
could only do mind-shields and shadows and nothing-in-particular, yet. She did
not know how to protect a whole palace or a whole city.

She was shaking inside. Not because Vanyi was caught, or
because she was in the palace and it was full of people who hated what she was.
No; she was used to that. But she could see inside the priest’s mind, and it
was gentle and pious and very determined, and he was going to make a magic in
the night that would break every Gate in every world.

He did not really know that that was what he would do. He
thought he was going to pray to his gods to keep the Gate in Shurakan closed
forever, and invaders on the other side of it.

oOo

As soon as she could do it without making anybody notice,
she let Borti know that she was there. They were in a passage that was empty,
with empty rooms opening out of it, and an empty stair at the end. There was no
light in it, but Kimeri could take care of that.

Borti stopped when the clear yellow light welled out of
Kimeri’s burning hand, and stared, shocked to her bones. “Child! Where in the
world did you come from?”

“I’ve been right beside you,” Kimeri said. “You couldn’t go
away all by yourself. You could get caught. They’d kill you.”

Borti paid no attention. “You must go back,” she said.

“You’re going the wrong way,” Kimeri said. “You need to go
where Vanyi is.”

“I am going where the king is,” Borti said.

“You can do that after. We have to find Vanyi first. And the
priest. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do.”

“Then I’m sure she’ll keep him suitably confused,” said
Borti. She sighed. “Child, you should have stayed with your mother. I can’t
trust a guard to take you back. Unless one of your shadow-men came with you?”

“They’re all with Mother,” Kimeri said. “You don’t
understand. Esakai is going to sing a prayer, and he thinks he’s going to keep
anybody from ever opening the Gate again. He’s really going to break Gates
everywhere. All of them.”

Borti blinked. “Gates? All? How many are there?”

“Millions,” said Kimeri. “Mages only use a tiny bit of them,
but they’re everywhere, on all the worlds. And they’ll all fall down if Esakai
says his prayer.”

“Is that so terrible?” asked Borti. “It would be
inconvenient, I suppose, not to be able to go from end to end of the world in a
step, but people weren’t meant to do that in any case. Gates are unnatural. How
can it hurt any world to be rid of them?”

Kimeri was glad she was used to grownfolk who were willfully
stupid. If she had not been, she would have stamped her foot and screamed.
Instead she said, “Gates aren’t unnatural. They’re part of the worlds. Mages
find them where they are, that’s all, and open them. If they all break,
anything can happen. Worlds might—might fall in on themselves, and Things come
off the worldroads.” She was shuddering. She tried to stop. “Terrible Things,
Borti. Things that nobody should ever want to see.”

She was scaring Borti. She had to make that better, or Borti
would not want to move at all. “It might not be that bad,” she said. “It might
only be, if enough Gates are broken, the rest won’t be able to shut. And new
Gates might open by themselves. Most of them probably will open here, because
this is where the first Gate broke, and it’s the weakest of them all.”

Finally she had said something that Borti could understand,
mostly. “If Esakai tries to shut the Gate, he’ll not only fail, he’ll open
Gates all over Su-Shaklan?”

Kimeri bobbed her head the way people did here, to say yes.

“Oh, goddess,” Borti sighed. “It’s like an old story. The
more they try to make things better, the worse things get.”

“Well,” said Kimeri, “maybe the prayer will fold this world
in on itself, and we’ll all fall off the wheel together and have nowhere to be born
again. That’s not so bad, is it? Being unborn is like not knowing you exist at
all. Hani told me that.”

Borti shivered. “It’s . . . a little more
complicated than that. You don’t want that to happen, you really don’t.”

“But if it has to,” Kimeri said, “it will. Can we go find
Esakai now?”

Borti thought about it for much longer than Kimeri thought
she needed to. She was not a mage, though she had a bright and shining soul
inside her; she did not know how to think about magery, except with fear
wrapped around it. She had to cut through the fear first, then see what she
had.

After a while she asked, “How long do we have before Esakai
says his prayer?”

“A while,” Kimeri admitted, not wanting to, but she hated to
tell lies. “He’ll wait till middle night, to make it stronger, with dreams in
it.”

“We have time, then,” said Borti. “We’ll go to the king
first. He may be interested to know what his allies are doing, since they don’t
know it themselves.”

“I don’t think—” said Kimeri.

“Child,” Borti said, and she sounded exactly like Kimeri’s
great-grandfather when he had made up his mind and that was that, “I would have
time to take you back to Janabundur, too, if I pressed it close.”

She did not. But Kimeri shut her mouth and kept it shut.

Borti bobbed her head, satisfied. “Come with me, then. How
good can your manners be? Paltai was never a monster, but he is frightfully
stiff about protocol. He’ll be worse, now he calls himself king.”

“I can be very polite,” said Kimeri, “even when I have to go
to the privy and I’m in High Court and I can’t.”

Borti gaped at her, then laughed, hardly more than a snort. “Yes,
we’ll stop at a garderobe before we visit Paltai. Come, child.”

oOo

Paltai the pretender king was a handsome man, like Bundur
but not so big, and with a much more fashionable air. He grew his mustaches to
his breastbone and wore his hair in a lacquered tower, even in bed. He looked
rather ridiculous, except for his eyes. Those were cold and clever, and they
did not look as if they had ever worried about hurting anyone.

Kimeri wondered how he got the crown on the edifice of his
hair. At the moment the glittering thing was sitting on a cushion next to his
bed, where he had been playing with a servant when Borti walked in through a
door that maybe he had not known was there.

The servant squawked and ran away. The king scrambled all
the bedclothes together around his middle and glowered at Borti, who was all he
could see; Kimeri was wearing shadows again. “Woman! Did I summon you? Out, and
come back in the morning.”

He thought Borti was a servant, and not a very bright one,
either. Borti knew it. She smiled, not a pleasant smile at all, and said, “Paltai.
I’m devastated. You don’t recognize your last mistress but six?”

The black eyes blinked, reckoning names and connecting
faces. None of them was a plain-faced servant of early middle years. But one
had been a strong-faced queen whose maids had a particular talent with paint
and perfumes.

Borti showed her teeth, which were not bad for a woman her
age in Shurakan. “Not much to look at, am I, without a little help from my
ladies. Still, I’d thought better of you. You claimed never to forget a face or
a lover.”

“I never forgot you—as I knew you then,” he said. “You were
magnificent. You look sadly fallen now.”

“I always looked like this when I wasn’t being beautiful for
a bedmate.” Borti sounded calmer than she was. “Do you think you can rule
Su-Shaklan without a queen?”

He did. But he was not going to tell Borti that. “When I’ve
had time to settle the kingdom, I’ll take a bride.”

“I’m sure,” said Borti. She did not believe him. “Tell me,
Paltai. Did you know that your mage-killers are working magery themselves?”

“Are they?” He was not shocked at all. He was amused. “Who
told you that? Your pet mages?”

It sounded like “your pet ox-droppings.” Kimeri wanted to
giggle, but that would have given her away.

Borti was not even thinking about giggling. “I’ve seen what
mages do. I’ve seen what the priests do. It’s the same thing, Paltai.”

“Except,” he said, “that mages do it of their own will, in
overweening pride, and priests do it of the gods’ will, in fitting humility.”

“Such humility as this?” Borti picked up a shimmer of folded
silk. It slithered down into a coat twice as long as Borti was tall, and it was
real silk, worth more in Borti’s mind than Kimeri could easily imagine.

Kimeri realized something that she had been too busy to
notice. Paltai was a priest. His hair was a wig and his mustaches were false.
He was pretending to be beautiful as he thought of it, and enjoying looking the
way he meant to look when he had been king for years and years. It made him
feel more like a stallion.

It was a twisty feeling. She did not like it. She was much
happier when he got up, taking his blankets with him, and took off his wig and
his mustaches and looked like a priest again—peculiar with his bald head and
shaven face, both of them starting to grow out in a furze of black down, but
not as peculiar as he had in the wig. She could see that the crown went on his
head, and fit, too, though he only rested his hand on it and stroked its tall
jeweled peaks.