Spear of Heaven (38 page)

He was telling Borti who was king now, and enjoying thinking
about it. He was a little sorry to have had to kill Borti’s brother in order to
be king, but not very much. He had never liked the man—had found him
stiff-necked and stubborn.

He liked Borti better. He liked her rather a great deal, in
fact, which was good of him. But she was in his way, and he could see that she
was going to be difficult. He edged his hand toward a cord that hung by the
crown.

Kimeri tugged very lightly at Borti’s coat and whispered,
not even aloud, though Borti heard it that way.
Let’s go now, quickly. He’s ringing for the guards
.

Borti’s face did not change, though she heard Kimeri. She
did not move, either. “This magic that the priests work is dangerous. They’re
trying to close the foreigners’ Gate beyond all opening; they’ll open it
instead, and open gates all over Su-Shaklan, with the gods know what waiting to
come through.”

“So your mages tell you,” said Paltai, his mind tight shut. “You
owe them gratitude for sheltering you, certainly, but credulity was never a
flaw in your character. Have they bewitched you?”

“I believe that they know their own art and its failings,”
Borti said. “And that they have honor, as difficult as that is to believe.” She
steadied herself, and throttled the temper that had always got her in trouble. “Paltai.
People who could kill one king can very easily kill another—and if they remove
any thought of the queen, why not remove the king, too, and establish a rule of
abbots and priests? Wouldn’t that be logical? Do you want to be their proof
that the line of kings has failed, and the children of heaven have been
forsaken by their mother and by all the gods?”

She had not even ruffled the king’s composure. It was too
enormous for that. “The gods have chosen me. No priest will question that.”

Borti drew breath to argue, but Kimeri could hear the guards
coming. She caught at Borti’s hand and pulled her, no matter how strange it
might look to Paltai to see Borti being tugged away from him by a blur and a
shadow.

Borti came, which was more than Kimeri had quite dared to
hope for. She was sad and upset and furious, but she could see what was in
front of her. And that was a fool who believed more in himself than in the
gods.

The guards were at the door, hammering on it. The king ran
to open it. They would know where the passage was that had brought Borti here.
Kimeri kicked herself for not thinking about that till it was too late. If the
guards caught Borti, Borti was dead, just as dead as her brother who had been
the king before Paltai.

There was nowhere to go, nothing to do. Except one thing.
Kimeri had not known she had it till she reached inside and it was there. It was
in the Gate, and part of it. It showed her how to begin. She took a deep breath
and did it.

oOo

Guards poured into the room, bristling with pikes and
spears and swords. There was nobody there but the king. Nobody in the hidden
passageway or hiding behind the curtains. Nobody anywhere near that room, not
even wrapped in shadows.

Vanyi had got rid of Esakai at last, but not through any
doing of her own: he was going to the temple of Matakan, where the priests
raised the circle that would bind the Gate. He left her under guard, in
reasonable comfort, with food and drink and a bed. And he left her warded. It
was an effective ward, not strong but strong enough, that tangled her gently
and inextricably in strands like spidersilk when she tried to lay a wishing on
the guards and walk out of the room.

Clever, clever working. It used her own strength against
her. The harder she fought, the tighter she was bound.

She had outsmarted herself. Her brilliant plan to lull
Esakai into thinking he held her hostage, then to trust Daruya to move against
the priests in the temple while Vanyi escaped and sped to Daruya’s aid, was no
use at all if she could not get out of her prison.

Time ran on. The priests were gathering. She had no way of
knowing what Daruya was doing—the tangle of wards robbed her of any useful
magery. Her body at least was behaving itself. It was more tired than it should
be, but the tightening in her chest was gone, lost somewhere in the wards.

Something plucked at them. They quivered and tightened. The
touch came again, subtler this time, slipping through them like a thin
sharp-bladed knife, pausing, then slashing, sudden and swift. In the instant of
the wards’ breaking, the power—for power it had to be—caught Vanyi in a vast
but gentle hand, and lifted her as a woman might lift a fledgling from the
nest.

The hand vanished with breathtaking suddenness. Vanyi,
robbed of its strength, staggered and almost fell.

The floor under her had changed. She had been standing on
rugs. Now she stood on patterned tiles. The walls had grown both higher and
wider. Much higher. Rather wider. Where the bed had been stood a monstrosity of
wood and paint and gilding, several times taller than a man.

She had companions. The Queen of Shurakan, drab as a servant
and grey with shock, and ki-Merian regarding them both with a worried
expression. It took a moment to realize that the child was glowing like a lamp
at dusk, a pure golden light that neither blinded the eye or overwhelmed the
mind: sunlight as it shone in the palace courts of Starios on a fine day in
spring, just after the snows had gone but before the
ailith
-boughs burst into blossom.

Kimeri did not seem aware of the power that filled her full
and overflowed. Nor did she wonder at what it had done: taken a master of mages
out of a warded trap and set her down far from there, and the queen too from
the look of her, reaching as if to touch walls that were no longer there.

Avaryan and Uveryen
,
thought Vanyi, too astonished for awe.
God
and goddess. What that child can do, not even knowing it’s impossible . . .
she’s a living Gate
.

Vanyi should have seen it long since. But she had been blind
as they all were, looking at a child of three summers, almost four as the child
herself insisted, and deluding themselves that she was anything like an
ordinary young thing.

Vanyi should have known better. She had heard the tales of
what Estarion had been when he was a child, and she had seen his son and his
granddaughter—mages born, with the Sun’s fire in them even in the womb. None of
them had been as purely mageborn as this one, she did not think. Unless they
were better at hiding it, or had more determined guardianship.

None had been so surely bound to Gates. And none had been
caught in a Gate as it fell, not so young. Vanyi had seen what Daruya could do
on the worldroad, the glorious blaze of her power that she raised in that place
as easily as she breathed. Suppose that that power had roused her daughter’s
power as well. Then suppose that Kimeri’s magery had begun to grow, fed by the
Great Wards and by the troubles in Shurakan, and by the Gate she had awakened
and left blind after the Guardian was rescued from it.

Suppose that the Gate was not blind. Suppose that it was
part of the child. Suppose . . .

Vanyi was dizzy. She found herself sitting on the floor,
with Borti slapping her face lightly and Kimeri clinging to her hand, pouring
magery into her. “Your heart tried to stop,” Kimeri said. “Don’t let it do that
again.”

Vanyi felt strange. She could not shape words at all, and
yet her mind was dazzlingly clear. The pains in her body, in her arm—idiot. Of
course. Any herb-healer knew what that meant.

Her heart was beating oddly. It was scarred, distended, as
if it had tried to shake itself to pieces but been forestalled. But when—?

When she argued with Esakai. It had been happening for a
long while, but quietly, as these things did. She had refused to notice. She
was getting older, she tired more easily, how not? There was nothing wrong with
her.

Kimeri was beginning to be frightened. “I can’t make it
better,” she said, half in tears. “I don’t know how.”

“This is close enough,” Vanyi said. Ah: words again. And
breath that did not seem to tighten her chest every time she drew it in.

She tried standing up. Dizziness hovered, but she drove it
away. She could walk: she circled the place, which was a curtained sanctuary,
she saw, in a larger temple.

“Vanyi,” said Kimeri. Her voice trembled a little. “We have
to go now, if you can. They’ve started the magic.”

So they had. Vanyi found that the palace wards were not as
strong as they had been, or else and more likely the child’s power pierced
right through them. She heard the opening notes of the chant, felt in her bones
the shifting of powers about the circle.

The outer sanctuary was empty. She strode toward it.

“By the time we could run there,” Kimeri said behind her, “it
would be all over. We have to go the other way.”

“No,” said Vanyi. “You’re staying here, and I’m going there.”

“You’ll die,” Kimeri said. “Your heart will burst if you
run.”

So it would. Damn the child’s clear sight. But if she used
the Gate—

oOo

She was, abruptly, elsewhere. It did not grow easier with
use. The dizziness this time at least did not fell her, and her battered heart
stumbled but steadied. She saw it with her mage’s eyes as a great bruised fist.

She forced herself to understand where she was. Another
temple, a god with an ox’s body and human face and stance, a white ox drowsing
in a pen heaped high with offerings. People staring—painted images, she would
have thought, but they breathed. Their eyes were blank, bedazzled, lost in
dreams of woven darkness and light.

The weavers of the magery stood together where the
Gate-magic had set them, staring about as blankly as Vanyi must have the first
time she was swept away by the Gate. One or both had had the presence of mind
to catch and hold the priests in the sanctuary as soon as they all appeared out
of air, but that might have been instinct, or magery wiser than its bearers.

Daruya came to herself before Kadin. Her face woke to an
expression of pure, fierce glee—swiftly conquered as she guessed who must have
brought her here. “Vanyi! So you needed me after all.”

“Not I,” said Vanyi. She tilted her chin. “That one.”

Kimeri looked little enough like a child caught in mischief.
She was urgent but polite, as she had been trained to be. “Mama, could you tan
my hide later? They’re breaking Gates in there.”

“If they break Gates,” Vanyi said, “they’ll very likely
break her. Though I can’t be sure. I’ve heard of a living Gate—it’s supposed to
have been possible, long ago, if a mage were powerful enough. But I’ve never
seen one, or heard more than the mention.”

She was babbling. Daruya did not tax her with it, or silence
her, either, but went straight to the point. “Kimeri. Shield yourself, and stay
shielded. And stay close to me. It’s you they’ll break if they can—you’ve got
the Gate inside you.”

And how, Vanyi wondered, did she know that?

She was Sun-blood. They were all outside of ordinary human
reckoning, no matter how human they seemed—no matter how young or wild or
foolish.

Kimeri went to her mother as she had been commanded. She
took the hand her mother held out: the burning hand, that flamed so bright as
they touched that it put every shadow to flight.

The temple afterward seemed black dark despite the many
lamps that were lit in it, and the light of the Sun’s youngest child, as coolly
golden as ever, and as steady. Daruya shed no light but what had been in her
hand; she was shielded. “Kimeri,” she said, warning, reminding.

Kimeri’s light went out abruptly. She seemed shadowy without
it, insubstantial, small gold-and-ivory child with wide yellow eyes, more like
an owl’s than a lion’s.

A shadow shifted, startling them. Kadin glided toward the
inner sanctuary, toward the sound of chanting that came clear now that Vanyi
listened. There was nothing human in the way he moved. He was pure hunter, pure
panther.

Grief stabbed Vanyi, sudden and unexpected, twisting in her
struggling heart. He had been a beautiful boy, quiet but brilliant, with a great
gift for weaving shadows. Jian had cast light in his dark places, heart as well
as power. Without her he was a shell of himself.

Vanyi had hoped that he could be healed; that he could find
another lightmage and be, if not what he was before, then strong enough, and
whole. It had happened before with twinned mages left alone by death of body or
power. But not often. Not when they were bound in heart as in magery, as Kadin
had been with Jian.

There was little left of him now but air and darkness and a
great hate. She watched Daruya run after him—saw the brightness that yearned to
fill the dark, and the dark that would have welcomed it.

She thought briefly, wildly, that it was possible. That this
darkmage could join power with the heir of the Sun—law, custom, compacts be
damned. What did Daruya care for any of them?

But the dark was empty of aught but vengeance. The light was
too searing bright, its bearer too much the child of Avaryan. Even as the two
powers met, they recoiled. Kadin stumbled. Daruya nearly fell.

They recovered almost as one. Kadin flung himself toward the
door of the inner sanctuary. Daruya caught at him, too late.

When Vanyi was in great extremity she was at her calmest,
and at her coldest and most clearheaded. There was a way, she reflected, to
break any ward ever raised, even a Great Ward. One had to be mad to try it, or
so set on a goal that one took no notice of the wards at all. One leaped, body,
power, and all, full into the center of the warding.

If one was fortunate, one died. If one was not, one suffered
as Uruan had in the broken Gate: trapped and unable to escape.

Kadin was not fortunate. Nor was he trapped. As he touched
the wards, as they flared to light and life, his power snatched at Daruya’s and
seized it. Kimeri’s was woven in it, and in Kimeri’s was the Gate.