Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (5 page)

9th of Lattan, 427 AA

Averalaan, Merchant Holdings

There were some things you didn't need language for.

Aidan couldn't understand a word the old man's students spoke—but he knew from the widening and the narrowing of their eyes that they weren't much pleased that he was to come along with them. There was even an argument or two among some of the men—but that died the minute the old man came into earshot. At least that's what Aidan would have thought—but judging from what followed, all of it in words that were completely foreign to him, the old man's earshot was a damned sight better than any of theirs.

They were humbled.

They shut up.

They ignored Aidan entirely. And he'd learned, with time, that to be ignored by the bigger and the stronger was at worst a mixed blessing. At worst. Today it was just a blessing.

The only uncomfortable moment came when they left the grand building—because instead of walking into the streets themselves, they headed toward the stables.

"What—what are you doing?"

The old man looked down his shoulder at Aidan. "We are retrieving our horses."

"Why?"

The corners of the man's mouth lifted a moment. "Because we are riding to combat, be it limited, unsatisfying, or unchalleng-ing; we treat it with the respect combat is due, and therefore go as men."

"But there are—there are more than ten of you!"

"There are, I believe, thirteen at the moment."

"You—the streets are really crowded—you—"

The old man's smile deepened. "Have you never been on the back of a horse?"

Aidan went mute. He wasn't going to look like a complete fool in front of everyone.

But the man's voice softened slightly. "Boy, you are young. There is no crime, there is
never
a crime, in being what you are, in being true to what you were born to. Some struggle and strive to surpass that, and there is no crime or shame in ambition—but to be what you
are
is the test of any man, be he seraf or clansman, warrior or no.

"You come from the North. Your traditions are not our traditions. Your bravery is not our bravery—but I have seen the Northern warriors, and I have seen them exercise their control and their prowess defending those things that
are
considered a matter of men in the Empire. I am not a fool; I respect the respectworthy, and I know it when I see it."

"Wish
I
did," Aidan muttered.

"You have good instinct," was the old man's reply. "Trust it."

The horses were brought. They were huge. Far larger than the carriage horses that the rich used, or the wagon horses and mules that the merchants did. One of them, big and black and sharp-hooved, snapped at Aidan, his teeth closing on the air an inch in front of Aidan's face.

Aidan leaped behind the old man.

The old man's students burst into unpleasant laughter.

He spoke sharply, the old man, and one of the men sauntered forward to grab at the horse's reins. Aidan dearly hoped the huge beast would snap at the closest hand, but no such luck; the demon beast snorted and allowed himself to be led away.

And it wasn't just the one horse that was dangerous; it was about half of 'em. They even snapped at each other, moving restively against dirt and cobbled stone. There was going to be damage to the grounds, that much was clear, and the stable hands all looked queasy.

It was the old man who spoke again, and Aidan found the cadence of the foreign tongue almost comforting, although he was grateful that he wasn't on the receiving end of the incomprehensible words themselves. The horses were forced apart by sullen men, mounted, and ridden out the gates that led from the stable yards to the street.

"Do they know where they're going?" Aidan asked.

"No. But I thought you might wish to mount without the benefit of an audience. We will join them when you are ready."

"Mount?"

"Yes. You do not have a horse, but the one I have—I call her Abani—will serve us both very well." He smiled. "I am an old man, and I have proved myself time and again. The choice of a mare over a stallion does not seem to cause me any loss of status."

"They were
all
stallions?"

"Not all, no. There are some men for whom the patina of success, and not necessarily success itself, is important: half here ride stallions that would beggar small families. The other half ride mares. You do not know my two best students. They are studies in opposites. The desire for obvious glory does not, sadly, preclude success—and perhaps it does not even hinder it. But come; we are guests here, and supplicants of a kind: we do not wish to be late for our granted appointment."

Aidan closed his eyes, opened them, closed them. The old man's hands were as sure as, as strong as, his father's had ever been when Aidan had been younger and easier to lift. When his mother had been alive.

The horse was
wide
. He thought his feet would dangle over either side of the saddle: he was not large for his age.

"I will sit behind you; you will have to trust that I will not let you fall off."

Aidan nodded.

The old man's mount was graceful and easy; he hardly disturbed the saddle whose bridge Aidan almost straddled. They settled into their place upon the horse, and the old man reached round Aidan to either side and grasped the reins. As if it were actually safe to ride, the creature began to move forward at a stately, almost smooth, walk.

"You trust," the old man said, "far more easily than many a Southern boy."

Aidan shrugged. "You told me to trust my instincts."

He was rewarded by a low, brief laugh. "We are often caught by our own words. Very well, boy. The Challenge."

It was a long, winding journey from the hotel to the testing grounds, and until they were mired in the height and the ancient facades of the many buildings that comprised the Merchant holdings, Aidan wasn't certain where they were going. He rarely ventured this far into the Merchant holdings; the merchants tended to hire their own guards, and if the guards broke the laws the Magisterium set out, they would eventually be in trouble—but you had to survive them, and if they broke something like an arm, leg, or a jaw—yours, of course—you usually just had to pray that it turned out all right in the end.

Healing cost money, after all. Everything did.

There are things that money can't buy, Aidan
, his mother had said, and he could hear the lost sweetness that had been her voice; it was one of her favorite things to tell him. But he'd learned the hard way that if there
were
things money couldn't buy, they weren't really things he wanted anyway.

His mother would have loved the Merchant holdings. Stonemasons had done their work here, and although the trees in the Common were her favorite, she also loved the great cut stone buildings that signaled wealth, as if money could build a fortress in the streets of the city. She loved the gargoyles and the way that both gargoyle faces and building walls seemed to stand unchanged with the passing of years; no staining and wear with time, no timbers to be bowed by moisture or worse.

But she did not often walk among those buildings.

Certainly she had never come to them riding on the back of a beast several times her weight and with a vastly poorer temper.

People stopped to stare, and although the roads here were almost as wide as the roads in the Common itself, they became crowded with curiosity seekers. Crowded, and hard to pass through. There were children underfoot—it astonished Aidan, to see children here, in the stronghold of the merchants, and he wished irritably that they would go back to their fathers or mothers or nursemaids.

But even wishing it, he knew, guiltily, that had he been lucky enough to be in the streets when so many armed men were riding by, he would have stared, too. From a safer distance. Maybe.

It was hot. Heat was one of the tests a man faced when upholding the Lord's honor. So the old man had said. The heat had never troubled Aidan.

"That is because you've never spent a day in armor, let alone when your life depended on the wearing of it." He lifted a hand before Aidan could speak, although how he knew Aidan was going to speak, Aidan didn't know. He certainly couldn't see it from the back of his head. "In the Dominion, there are two kinds of armor that men wear. The most obvious is the armor you see on Andaro there; leather, metal, a thing upon which life depends. It can be bought if you've the coin for it, fashioned if you've the skill. It is second to only your horse or sword in importance. But armor wears; it breaks and it can be stolen. A fool with money can purchase the best. It takes no skill to wear it and little enough to learn how to put it on.

"There are men who define themselves by the things they own, the things they buy. Owning these things, they put much of their wealth into hiring others to protect them." His tone of voice was deceptively soft. Aidan heard the steel in it, the winter chill. "But hiring others guarantees nothing. This is a lesson that the Tyr'agar himself—the king, if you will, of the Dominion—learned, to his regret. We all learn it, Aidan: there are times when the plans of other men will prevail." His voice became soft, and Aidan heard in that softness a hint of his mother's thoughtful distance.

What are you thinking
? he would ask her when he saw that look. As a young child, he'd asked not because he wanted the answer, but because answering would bring her back to him, and he hated when she was far away. But as she got older, she would smile, sometimes sadly, and tell him,
I am thinking of far away
.

Very far?

Not so far that I can't reach it by making a quiet space for myself and taking time to think in it. And not so far that I can't be called back by you.

That was how she told him she loved him.

And now she was too far. He couldn't bring her back with anything as simple as a question because she couldn't hear him ask it.

As if he could hear the sudden ghost of old pain, the old man continued, returning from the place that he'd been, just as Aidan's mother had. "There is armor that we wear in the service of, for the glory of, the Lord. And there is armor we wear as protection
against
him, for he tests us, always; he destroys the things that weaken us, and if we prove weak, he destroys
us
. He will not be served by the inferior.

"This second armor I speak of, nothing pierces, nothing destroys. It cannot be bought, have you more money than a Tyr, and it cannot be made by any hand other than your own. Forge well, boy, and the world will never know that it can hurt you, and it will find some weaker man to torment in your stead."

"Do you have it, this armor?"

"Yes." The old man chuckled. "It does not stop pain, boy. Only death does that. But it prevents you from revealing the things that cause you pain. If they do not know the difference between the things that hurt you and things that do not, your enemies can make many mistakes."

Aidan was quiet for a long time. At last he said, "So can your friends, though."

The old man's arms tightened a moment; Aidan should have worried about being tossed off the horse. But he didn't. "You are young," the old man said at length. "You don't yet realize that in truth, we have no friends. There is the will of the Lord. The will of powerful men."

"There has to be more than that," Aidan said.

"Does there?"

"Yeah. Why else would you come to the Challenge?"

"What makes you think that I do not travel at the will of other, more powerful men?" Bitter, bitter words.

"Because," Aidan said, "you're the master."

Silence, punctuated by the clipped weight of shod hooves on exposed stone. "You are very observant, boy. If you stay where you are in the life that you have, it will be a crime in the Lord's eyes."

"The Lord doesn't rule these lands."

"No, perhaps he does not."

"Can I ask a question?"

"You have asked more questions in this last hour than anyone of my acquaintance has dared to ask in the last ten years," he replied.

Aidan took that as a yes. "Why do you serve the Lord? You don't even sound like you like him."

"You do not particularly care for
Kalliaris
, but if I had to guess, I would say that you pray to her far more often than you pray to any of your other gods."

Aidan shrugged. "She is what she is. But I like the Mother, and the Kings' fathers."

"They are none of them powerful enough to stand alone," the old man replied, with the faintest hint of scorn.

"Maybe they don't feel they have to. They don't have a lot to prove."

Dry chuckle. "Your point, Aidan. Perhaps if I lived in the North, I would believe as you believe, worship as you worship. But the Lord
is
the Dominion, and he shapes us all. I do not follow him any more than you follow
Kalliaris
. He
is
. I am. But before the winds take me, I will stand up to his heat; I will stand. And if he destroys the things I value, I will have vengeance.

"Because creatures of power only understand power; everything else is in a tone too delicate, a nuance to subtle, to catch their attention, to force their acknowledgment."

"Nobody lives alone," Aidan said. "My—my mother used to say that."

"She was a woman of the North."

"She was smart."

"Wise, I think, would be the better word. What else did your mother say?"

"All the old stuff. Stand up for what you believe in. Do the right thing, even when it's easier to do the wrong one. Give when you can. Take only what you need." He shrugged, uncomfortably close to himself, to the fact that he was slipping away from his mother's words because he couldn't figure out how to live with his father. She'd've hated that. "Stuff like that. Girl stuff."

The old man said, softly, "Once, there was a woman in my life who said very much what your mother said. I, too, thought her very foolish. Very, very foolish."

And Aidan, who found his eyes stinging a moment as memory blending into the present became sharp and twisted, understood that this man had lost someone, and that he, too, would take no comfort at all in the telling of it.