Spear of Heaven (9 page)

That meant riding in the rear and securing the edge of the
working. It also meant great trust, and a degree of concession that she had not
expected so soon. She sat her mare nonplussed, until she found her tongue
somewhere and put it to use. “I’ll ride anchor. Chakan, you, too. I can use
you.”

Vanyi’s approval was quick, sharp, and surprisingly warm.
Daruya began to wonder exactly how surprised the Guildmaster had been to find
her with them in the Gate—and exactly how unwelcome she had been.

Not at all, maybe. Vanyi did not share the emperor’s concern
for his heirs; or at least not his concern that they be kept close, and
therefore safe. Vanyi in fact cared little for royalty at all, that Daruya
could discern. She was a commoner, and an Islander into the bargain. Kings to
her were a blasted nuisance, no good at all for mending nets or catching fish or
sailing a boat in the teeth of a gale.

Daruya, who had learned from Vanyi herself to do all three,
caught the thread of power as it spun toward her, and drew it taut. On it she
strung a web of shadow. It was the same working she had used to conceal herself
on the way through the Gate, and she used Chakan’s shield as she had then, but
this was wider, stronger. Anyone not a mage who looked at the passing of their
company would see four oxen with their riders, the train of pack-oxen that
waited outside the temple, and a confused image of guards, riders, caravanners,
but no clear faces and no certainty as to their numbers.

With five of them working the concealment, it was a simple
enough thing, and no great effort. Daruya was able to see the town as they rode
through it, to be startled at its earthen plainness. After the wild
extravagance of the temple, she had expected the rest to be as gaudy.

The temples were eye-searing spectacles, to be sure, and
there were a great number of them, but in among them the houses of the people,
large and small, were simple blocky shapes of mud brick, unadorned even by a
scrap of gilding over a lintel. The people were of like mold: dressed in grey
or brown or at most a deep blue, hung with amulets but boasting no other
adornment—until she saw a procession of what must be priests.

They marched in a long undulating line, matching pace to the
deep clang of a bell, chanting in a slow drone. Their heads were shaven and
painted like the carvings in the temple. Their bodies were bare in what to her
was a wintry chill, but for the simplest of robes, a length of cloth, saffron
or scarlet or a searing green, falling to the ground before and behind, open
else, and hung about with a clashing array of gold, silver, copper, lumps of
amber, river pearls, firestones cut and uncut, strung together without art or
distinction. They made an astonishing spectacle, the more astonishing for that
passersby seemed to take no notice of them except to move out of their way.

The caravan bade fair to run afoul of the procession, but
just before the two collided, the priests swayed aside down another road. The
caravan paused, waited for the rest of the procession to pass.

Daruya, forced to leisure, took in as much of the town as
she could see. It was built on level ground, but beyond it reared the wall of a
mountain, so sheer and so high that it seemed to crown the sky. Snow gleamed on
its summit and far down its slopes—small wonder the air was so cold here. There
seemed no way over or past it.

She was warmly dressed in gleanings from the temple’s
stores, her coat lined with fur and a cloak over that, and a hat on her head,
but still she shivered. Kimeri, cradled in her arms, nuzzled toward her breast.
It ached as if in answer, though the child had been weaned since her second
year. Daruya brushed the warm smooth forehead with a kiss, and swayed as the
mare started forward again.

oOo

They left Kianat unseen and took the caravans’ road to the
north and west. It was steep, and in places it was very narrow, but it found the
pass that went over the mountain and climbed it, higher than Daruya had ever
been in her life.

When they came to the top, the second day out of Kianat,
unshielded now and riding openly as they were, demons and dark gods and all,
Daruya caught her breath. What she had fancied to be a lofty mountain was,
indeed, but slave and servant to the peaks that marched away before her, wave
on jagged snow-white wave of them, mounting up and up into the pitiless sky.

It was beyond imagining. She was ant-small, mote-small,
crushed under the immensity of mountains and sky. But the sun that rode over
them, casting fire on the snow, was her own, the face of her forefather. Its
fire burned in her hand. Her blood was full of it.

That raised her head before it bowed too low, and
straightened her back. She bore the weight of the sky. She faced the mountains’
vastness and gave it tribute, but no fear; no submission.

oOo

“Here,” said Chakan, “be demons.”

They had made camp just below the top of the pass, where the
land dropped away to a brief level. That this was a frequent resort of
caravans, Daruya could well see. There was grazing for beasts, with a
well-cropped look, and stone hearths to build fires in, with walls about them
that kept out the wind.

The guides unloaded a heap of tanned hides that, sewn
together swiftly with strips of leather and secured to the walls, made roofs
for a cluster of huts about the yard in which the beasts would be penned. They
were not to graze all night, it seemed, for the reason Chakan had hinted at.

“Just until sundown,” he said, “and then they come in, no
matter how hungry they still are. Demons eat oxen, we’re told, and would
discover a taste for senelflesh if given the opportunity.”

“You were told all that?” Daruya asked, prodding at the fire
she had built of dried ox-dung and dried grass and a flash of magery. “You don’t
speak their language at all.”

“No, and I’m not turning mage, either, to know what their
babble means.” He squatted on his heels, warming his hands at the blaze. “Still
and all, signs are clear enough, and the three husbands seem to think that when
a demon wants to know something about his cousins of the peaks, the demon
should get an answer however he may. Besides,” he added, “I asked a mage to
translate for me. We’re judged not to be the man-eating kind of demon, did you
know that? The Old Woman—that’s what they call the Guildmaster—has us enslaved,
and we’re condemned to live and eat like mortals until she lets us go.”

“Including me?” Daruya asked with lifted brows.

His eyes danced. He was grinning behind the veil. “Why, of
course. You’re the chief of us. We’re your husbands, so hideous that our faces
must never be seen lest they drive men mad; but you’re merely mortally ugly, so
you don’t hide yourself or your little demon, who they think was conceived of
the night wind and suckled on milk of the snow-cat. They’re not far off, are
they?”

She bit her tongue. He would laugh if she said what she
wanted to say, which was that if she was ugly, then what in the world did they
reckon beautiful?

Vanity. It stung her nonetheless. She had been the Beauty of
Starios for as long as she could remember. It could be a nuisance when men
young and not so young, and not a few women, flung themselves at her feet; but
she took no displeasure in what her mirror showed her, all honey and amber, and
queenly proud.

Chakan read her much too easily for a man with no magery at
all. “Beauty’s an odd thing. Changeable. Madam Aku’s a great beauty here.”

“She’s built like a brick,” said Daruya, with a snap in it.

“Maybe a brick is beautiful,” said Chakan serenely, “where
they don’t value gold. Silly of them, but there you are. It could be worse.
They could have decided that it would be an act of virtue to murder us in our
beds.”

“They may yet,” said Vanyi, lowering herself to sit beside
the fire. She had a flask in her hand, which she passed to Daruya.

Daruya sniffed, then tasted. Wine, and good wine too. She
drank a swallow, then two, and handed the flask to Chakan. He did not hesitate,
but slipped it under his veils and drank with practiced ease.

“Dinner’s coming when it’s had time to cook,” Vanyi said.

She looked about, drawing Daruya to do the same. This was
the largest of the huts, with room enough for a good half-dozen people. Through
the open side, the one that faced the yard, she saw the beasts being herded in,
in dusk that had fallen with startling suddenness.

The seneldi did not like to be crowded together with the
oxen, but they were getting better about it. There was only a little squealing
and kicking, and only one bellow as Daruya’s mare gored a dilatory ox.

It was a shallow gore, and little blood shed through that
shaggy pelt and thick hide. The mare looked pleased with herself. With the
contrariness of her sex and her kind, she settled to share a heap of fodder
with the offending ox, as peaceful as if the beast had been a herdmate, and one
she honored, at that.

Daruya sensed nothing beyond the circle of huts but empty
spaces, height and cold and raw wind. Her head ached vaguely with the thinness
of the air, and her breath came shorter than it should, but that was nothing to
take particular notice of. If there were demons, they avoided this place.

Even so, she ate with little appetite and slept ill. Height-sickness
again. One or two of the Olenyai and both the elder mages were in worse state
than she. She fretted for Kimeri, but the child was no more and no less well
than she had been since the journey began.

oOo

Kimeri kept wanting to fall asleep. She did not like it,
and at first she thought it was something her mother or Vanyi was doing to keep
her quiet. But they were worried. They tried to hide it, but she knew.

She could not think of anything to say that would make them
feel better. Certainly not that she kept seeing Gates and feeling them inside of
her, broken and hurting, and a Guardian who thought he was dead.

Something happened when they went over the pass. She stopped
being so terribly sleepy. She still saw Gates, but the mountains were stronger,
a little. She could look at them, at their sharp white teeth against the purple
sky, and even, almost, forget about the Guardian.

But only almost. The Guardian was inside of her too, now,
like the Gates.

The mountains outside of her were stubborn. They tried to
make her think that they were the only thing that mattered, but she knew
better. “There are people like you at home,” she said to them while everybody
was making camp for another cold restless night, but nobody was paying much
attention to her.

She was too wise to wander out of sight, too restless to
stay where she was put. She climbed on top of one of the big patient oxen, the
way she had seen its rider do, up its side with the harness like a ladder, and
sat on its back that was as broad as a table. The mountains stood all around
the place where they were, a high valley full of new green grass, with bits of
snow in the hollows, and a spring that bubbled out of a tree-root and filled a
bowl of rock; stood and stared.

The seneldi had decided after a great deal of fuss that the
oxen were sort of distant cousins. The oxen thought the seneldi very silly.
They got on well enough, and Daruya’s mare had made friends with the ox that
Kimeri was sitting on, the big queen ox who told the others what to do.

Now as they grazed side by side the mare threw up her head
and snorted. The ox kept on grazing peacefully, but it was awake inside its
armor of horns and shaggy hair. Kimeri looked where they were looking.

Something sat in the branches of the tree that overhung the
spring. It looked a little like a bird and a little like a man and a great deal
like neither. It had feathers, white and grey and silver and faint grassy
green, and a wide round face with wide round yellow eyes, and very sharp, very
pointed teeth. It showed them to her, and flexed curved claws like a cat’s, and
hissed.

The senel was ready to bolt, but the ox sighed and yawned
and chewed its cud. Kimeri decided that if the ox was not afraid, then neither
would she be.

It took some deciding. This was a demon. She had heard the
guides talking about them, especially their yellow eyes and their long fangs.
The guides thought the Olenyai wore veils to hide fangs just like these, though
of course Olenyai were only men, with plain Asanian faces and ordinary Asanian
eyes, yellow and gold and amber and ocher-brown.

This was not a man at all. It did not have a babble of
thoughts like a man, but neither was it the wordless nowness of an animal. It
felt most of all like a mage when he worked his magic—a singing presence, a
flicker like a fire on the skin. But it was not as strong as a mage, not as
solid on the earth. She thought of ice, that was like stone but very different.

She must be careful, she thought. She was Sun-blood—she
burned too fierce sometimes for magical things to bear. Things like spirits of
air, or fetches on their masters’ errands, or demons of the mountains come to
see what trespassed in their country.

The demon was surprised that she did not shriek and run away.
She was supposed to do that; all the earthborn did. Even earthborn who were
demon-eyed.

She stayed where she was. The demon tried jumping up and
down on its branch. It had no weight: the branch never moved. That was
interesting. The demon started to chitter and gnash its teeth.

“Why do you do all that?” she asked it. “You can’t hurt me.”

The demon stopped. Its big yellow eyes blinked. It filled
her mouth with the taste of blood, like iron but strangely sweet. That was the
blood of an earthborn man, fresh from his throat that the demon had torn.

“That was because he was afraid,” Kimeri said. “He let you
eat him. I’m not afraid of you.”

Her great-grandfather would know what to say to that. It was
a long word. Arrogance, that was it.