Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (57 page)

Two men who, far from having fallen in a heap, seemed to be laid out, side by side, arms and legs straight. As if they were statues on the tops of those fancy cenotaphs that rich people bought by dying. Except they weren't statues. As his face grazed the floor, he could hear the whuffling snort of breath: sleeping. They were sleeping.

He desperately wanted to believe that they'd just fallen asleep on duty. Gods, he wished he were stupid.

But he wasn't, so he knew damned well that he didn't want to join them. His palm found cold links of cloth covered chain; he pushed himself up, stopping for just long enough to steal a long knife from the sheath of the nearest guard. It was big enough to be a sword to Aidan.

Awkward and heavy, but better than nothing.

He gained his feet. He started to run.

"Stand back," Kallandras said.

He wasn't Astari, but he was an equal, and in this, as much a comrade at arms as the Astari were. Devon asked no questions. He stood back.

Stood back while the bard stepped forward. Stood back while the bard lifted his hand, his right hand, and placed it palm first against the door. The line of his body stiffened, as if in pain. No, Devon thought;
in
pain.

"Be ready," the bard said, through visibly clenched teeth. "They know we're here now."

"They—"

From a clear and cloudless sky, lightning fell—and Kallandras was the conduit.

The door buckled, shivering under the flare of light, the heat of it, the weight of it. But it buckled the way a tent wall will; the way something flexible will; undulated in the darkness of night, in the light of Kallandras' hand.

For the first time in years, in more, Devon heard Kallandras of Senniel swear. He said nothing; offered no aid. Instead, he saw to his weapons.

In the darkness—and it Has dark, even with the huge windows and the moonlight—the great hall looked different. Different enough that Aidan lost his bearings. He found it hard to run because the long dagger he held was ungainly, and the bodies that were lined up, neatly and evenly, in the hall couldn't quite be ignored. He had to know where they were.

But he knew there was a door here somewhere. Sam had pointed it out—she was a nosybody, noticed everything—and because he thought it was so stupid, he remembered it.

He wondered—because he couldn't stop himself from wondering—whether or not that scream had come from Sam's room. Because he didn't remember where her room was. Hells, he'd barely remembered his own. She had.

He didn't know her well enough to recognize her scream.

Door. He had to think. The
door
. Breath was painful, hard to take. He wasn't sure why; he'd run a helluvalot faster than this, and he'd certainly run for longer.

Someone shouted something. Foreign words.

But the meaning was clear enough.

They'd seen him. They knew where he was.

Kalliaris, Kalliaris, please
—
please let me get there before they do
.

What did he owe her already?

The footsteps at his back stopped; the room fell into a silence that he didn't realize
was
silence over the sound of his own breath, the intensity of his internal prayer. No one moved. He should have been happy. He should have looked at it as a gift from the goddess.

But it was
too
quiet. It was just wrong.

He made the door with more than enough room to spare. Grabbed the handle, pulled for all he was worth. Which apparently wasn't enough. The door didn't budge.

"Well," someone said, and it took him a minute to realize that he understood the word, "you've led my associates a fine chase, but I believe, Aidan Cooper, that your dalliance is at an end."

He turned the dagger clutched in both hands—both shaking hands. Standing in the middle of the hall, coming quickly toward him, was a very tall, very large man.

A man with hands as black as mourning, both outstretched, and both filled with something that seemed to be blue light, thickly pooled in palms and around fingers. "If you make this more difficult, you will suffer," the man said. "Suffering is not, however, required."

As the light he held grew brighter, Aidan could see that the man wore gloves, supple and dark beneath the moving flow of whatever it was he carried.

"What—what is that?"

"It is… a gift," the man replied smoothly. "It will do you no more harm than was done to the men who sleep here. You will feel no pain."

That's why you're wearing the gloves?

He turned to the side, either side, and saw that the foreigners— he recognized them now. and felt, of all things, betrayed—had come upon him. They did not seek to hold him—but they wouldn't let him pass.

He weighed the worth of the dagger against a man who was— who must be, although he didn't bear the marks—a mage, and men who were probably just thugs. Made his decision.

"Aidan, hit the floor. Now!"

And unmade it. His knees buckled almost before the words made themselves understood.

There was nothing so sweet in his life to date as the sound of splintering wood.

Devon stepped past Kallandras through the shattered door, the splintered frame. The boy lay aground at his feet, his back harbor to wooden splinters; blood had been drawn by the force of the door's opening. He saw that, although he spared the boy the second of recognition, no more.

"Do not interfere in what does not concern you."

Devon was not short, but the height of the man who spoke those words forced him to look up. The whole of the building was dark; he was haloed in a light that was unpleasant and cold; it drew the eye and repelled it at the same time.

Had he been almost anyone else, the whole of his attention would have been absorbed by this. He was Devon ATerafin. He counted four men to either side of the door: they had not drawn weapons.

Nine in total. How surprising.

Steel's rasp completed the thought. Not his, of course; when Devon wanted to draw a blade, he didn't give himself away so carelessly.

"You'll pardon me," he replied, "if 1 decide for myself what my concerns are." In the night beyond the words, the bodies of the Kings' Swords had been laid out against the floor. The heat of his momentary anger surprised him.

Why
? Because war hadn't been declared yet?

"I would pardon you," the man replied, in flawless, uninflected Weston. "But I feel that my companion is less likely to be patient." Blue fire, shot through with shadow that was fine enough.

delicate enough, to be black lace, writhed in his hands, illuminated his face. "I will offer one further warning because I am feeling generous and because I am at heart a peaceful man. Leave. Now."

Magic had its own particular smell, its own taste. Devon ATerafin had spent much of his adult life studying it. There was a particular feel to a magery gleaned by years of developing talent; the man who carried magic in his hands didn't—quite—have it.

There was no denying magic itself. Many men who were not mages were versed in crafts similar in seeming. Few of those worked with allies of the Shining Lord—and this man did not look insane enough to be Allasakari. A puzzle.

Devon never appreciated mystery when lives were at stake.

The darkened great hall of the guesthouse could have been a cathedral. The ceilings were tall enough to disappear into night's shadow; the window, crossed by lead and filled by colored glass, was built to catch the sun's rise and fall, from ground to beam.

The only fight he'd ever been in in a cathedral had nearly killed him.

As if to remind him of that night, the large man—the only man he was certain would not be among the roster of challengers' witnesses—nodded. The movement was minimalist enough to be significant. Devon crossed his arms, the movement a quick snap of forearm and elbow.

Two men fell.

"I'm afraid," he said softly, "that I will have to disappoint your less patient—and less visible—friend. Boy." he said, speaking to the vicinity of his feet without once looking down, "I believe it's time for you to leave now."

"A pity," the man replied. "Believe that my regret is genuine. The matter, however, is now out of my hands." And as he finished the last word, Devon realized that he had, in a fashion, a sense of humor.

He threw the blue fire.

Afterward he would be certain it only took a second to recover; he could judge time by feel; they had trained him that well. But the ring obeyed its own laws. He had learned over time that it was not a tool, it was a wild ally. It did not negotiate. If you needed its power, you took it; it took what it required in its turn.

Time. Which was bad.

He had not called the lightning in years. Not the lightning, which was difficult enough, and not the wind. The wind's voice was a terrible thing. It scoured him. It emptied him from the inside, and he understood, as he stood in the emptiness of the wind's voice, what the wind meant to the Southerners. Why damnation was an eternity in the wind's wake.

But he was already damned.

And because he was already damned, he could return to the world when he heard a familiar voice. Could recognize it, although he had, in fact, never heard Devon ATerafin scream before.

Devon ATerafin wore two rings; a gift of the magi. Wore as well a vest that weighed less than gauze, less, he thought, than the webs out of which it was woven, it was that fine, that supple, like captured light. However, none were remarkable to the eye; indeed, the rings were plain and of a quality rivaled only by the offerings of apprentices to questionable goldsmiths. No matter; they were not meant to adorn.

They were meant to protect, to ward, to guard.

To guard against fire, mage-fire, the magelight that brought not illumination, but death—or worse.

Devon
moved
. That came more naturally than breathing. As did seeing the boy, half-crouched, in the mage's path, his dull shirt almost white in the glow of traveling light. What did not: breaking the flow of the jump itself; halting the motion; changing its course.

Devon stood.

He was the wall behind which the boy might survive the blast.

Until the light struck, he thought it
was
light—some artifact of magery, dangerous yes, but not more so than a well aimed quarrel or swordmaster's weapon. He had seen mage-fire before, had, in fact, been burned by it. This had not looked that strong.

But when it struck, it clung not like fire, but rather, webbing— and it whispered in his ears as it climbed up his face in a moving, liquid sheet.

Devon ATerafin
, it said. Just that. His name.

But he knew, hearing it, just how visceral a power the name of a demon held for the demon in whom it was rooted.

Because as the light entered him he felt that name begin to dissolve.

He could not stop himself: he screamed. Just once.

The light wrapped around him laughed.

Kallandras heard the laughter.

It was brief, but heavy, sensual; it lingered like a caress that is both unexpected and forbidden, but not—not quite—undesired or undesirable; there was about it a satisfaction and a cruelty that was so natural it was the most striking element of the voice itself. Wilderness there. Power.

It was also kin to voices he had heard before, in a past that was never far enough away.

Demon.
Kialli
. Kin.

Devon.

He armed himself. Lifted his hand and armored himself by that motion.

And stepped into the hall.

The man's scream had faded into a terrible silence.

Aidan was mute, as mute as the man, as terrified as he had ever been.

The man in black gloves came up to him then and grabbed both shoulders. He struggled; his captor released one shoulder for as long as it took him to swing an open hand.

Aidan understood the unspoken command better than most; he stilled at once.

The man spoke in the foreign tongue. No one answered.

He spoke again, his voice colder. Again there was no answer.

The next set of words was a question; Aidan thought his collarbone would snap at the momentary clenching of large hands.

No answer.

But that third time, that third time Aidan realized his captor was speaking
to
the light. The light itself seemed to be alive.

And it was wrapped around the man who'd come to help him. Wrapped around him, and then, somehow, sunk in as if it weren't light at all, but a shining, shimmering liquid, something thick and oily and heavy.

The man's body began to twitch and spasm; his hands reached up; he clawed at his face, drawing blood. Or it seemed like blood; it was dark a moment across a sheen of black-speckled blue light. The light seemed to pool there, where the wounds were, glimmering darkly.

Feeding.

This was going to be his fate.

He knew better than to struggle.

He knew better, but he did.

* * *

There were nine men in the room. Nine men, the boy, and the man that was—and he admitted this only to himself—of all his allies closest to him in nature, in ability. Devon ATerafin. Not a brother, never that; they had chosen different masters. But they had chosen masters, and they both knew the price and the value of service.

He walked quietly: silence was the first of the arts that he, a man born to speech and the vice of song, had had to master. His footfall did not disturb the man who seemed at the center of things, perhaps because his attention had been absorbed, momentarily, in the beating of a boy. A short task, that: not a challenge, not even a real distraction; he spoke above the sound of his own open palms.

It did not disturb his conversation.

But unfortunately, the creature to whom he spoke was not so absorbed, not so inattentive. "I believe," he said, in his nonlanguage, "that we have another… guest." He spoke in a voice that was in tone and texture so similar to Devon ATerafin's that were he not bard-born Kallandras might not have heard the difference.

The man whose most distinguishable feature was his stature looked up from the height of a boy's shoulders. His face was impassive. But he offered Kallandras none of the warning, none of the threatening conversation, that he had offered Devon.