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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Tides of Darkness
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“I yearned for you,” she said, “but our dreams never met.”
“You don't hate me?”
He sounded so plaintive that she kissed him to console him. It might have led to other ends, but he was not as potent as that, even in dream. “I don't hate you,” she said. “I'm rather sure I love you.”
“You—”
“Yes, it is appalling, isn't it?” She meant to sound light; she hoped she did not seem too brittle. “Don't be afraid. I won't trouble you to love me in return. Give me what you have to give, and that will be enough.”
“What I have to—” He broke off. “Lady, every day I remember that one night. Every night I sleep, hoping to see you again, but knowing—dreading—that my dreams will be empty. That you gave way to my importuning, but when it was over, you fled in horror, loathing everything that I was. I never meant to violate you so.”
“Violate—” Now she was doing it: sputtering witlessly, too startled for sense. “I wanted every blessed moment of that. Every one. And every blessed inch of you.”
She had struck him speechless.
She drove him back and down and sat on him, stooping over him, glaring. “Have you really been tormenting yourself ever since?”
He nodded.
She slapped him, not quite hard enough to bruise. “Idiot! Indaros of the thousand loves, they call you—didn't one of them teach you how to tell when a woman is desperately in love with you?”
“But,” he said, “she usually is. But she's not you. She's not—
you
.”
It made no sense, and yet she understood it. “You never loved anyone before.”
“Not with my heart and soul,” he said. “Not with the worship of my
body. Not with the surety that if she truly hates me, truly I shall die of it. It's not … very pleasant.”
“What? Loving me?”
“Being afraid that you hate me. If you merely dislike me, or find me a hideous nuisance, I can bear that. If you find me useful in the manner of a stud bull, as your mother did your father, that's endurable. But hate—that I can't endure.”
“I do not hate you,” she said, though from the sound of it, he might think she lied. “Damn you, we're quarrelling. We're worlds apart, there's a sea of darkness between, I fought a battle last night and face another one tonight, and you can bicker with me as if we were a farmer and his wife.”
“You fought—” He had seized on that; of course he had. “It's come there?”
“Ten days ago,” she said. “No—eleven now.”
“We haven't seen it in five cycles of this world's moon,” he said. “The world is closed in; it's globed in shadow. The only Gate away from it is the gate of dreams. But the attacks have stopped.”
“It hasn't been that long since—” She stopped. Time ran differently on the other side of Gates. She of all people should know that. “Tell me what you know of this!”
“The bowl I sent you—didn't it reach you?”
“Yes!” she snapped. “And there is no answer in it. None. At all.”
“But that is the answer,” he said. “Nothingness. That's what the shadow is. You can't fight it. There's nothing to fight. It's absolute oblivion.”
“Last night,” she said, “we were attacked by men. Lightmagic destroyed them utterly.”
“Those are its servants—they are mortal. The shadow is not. As long as it exists, its servants will keep coming, and worlds will be destroyed.”
“How many of them are there? How many servants?”
“Legions,” he said. “They make more with every world they conquer. They serve darkness absolute. They are sworn to utter destruction.
What you did to that raiding party—you should take care, lady; they'll come in ever greater numbers, craving the blessing of oblivion.”
“What, they'll make me a saint of their cult?”
“A goddess,” he said. “A queen of destruction.”
She shuddered. He held her close to him, babbling apologies, but she silenced him with a hand over his mouth. “Stop that. I'm not fragile. I would rather not be what these madmen must think I am. But if it will serve this world or any other, I will exploit it to the utmost.”
“Cold-hearted royal lady.” But he said it tenderly, cradling her, covering her with kisses.
She caught his face in her hands and stopped him. It was not easy at all. She wanted to take him by storm. But this dream had given her all that she could have wished from the bowl of nothingness. She must take it back to the waking world. She could not tarry here, where her heart yearned to be.
“Beloved,” she said, brushing his lips with hers. “You know I have to go again. As time runs between Gates, it could be an hour before I come back, or it could be a year. Do trust me—that I will come back. That I do love you.”
“I do,” he said, though he gasped as he spoke. “I do trust you. I love you with all my heart.”
Such heart as he had, she might have thought once. But she knew him better now. With dragging reluctance she let go, relinquishing the dream, leaving behind the sun, the heat, the joy of his presence. She lay again in the winter cold, in the roaring of waves, in the midst of bitter war.
B
ATAN'S MEN HAD WROUGHT WONDERS WITH FALLEN STONE AND ships' timbers. It was not a large fort, but the wall was stout, and the tents within had been shifted out of range of the enemy's strange weapons. It happened that Merian's tent had become the center, where the general's tent was wont to be; it stood over the deep well of the city's magic. She woke in the embrace of it, and came out to find herself in the beginnings of a sturdy hill-fort.
The sun was still high, but had begun to sink toward the low swell of hills to the westward. The air was a little warmer than it had been, the wind a little less knife-edged. She kept the warmth of her dream inside her, wrapped about the fire in the earth. For a long moment as she stood in front of the tent, she remembered his arms about her and his voice in her ear, at once deep and clear: the kind of voice that could sing the full
range from flute to drumbeat. She wondered if he sang. Surely he did. Princes were trained to dance, to fight, to sing.
She was losing her sense of what was real and what was not: forgetting that this was but a dream. Her body felt as if it truly had been locked in embrace with a man. She ached a little, was a little raw, but more pleasurably than not. Places in her that had been shut and barred were open, filling with magic.
There was a cult of priests in Asanion who worshipped the gods of love, and made of it a rite and a sacrament. They professed that the act of love was a great working in itself, and that mages who joined so could double and redouble their power.
She did not feel as strong as that, but certainly she was stronger than she had been before she slept. She sought out Hani where he stood with Batan, overseeing the raising of the seaward wall. It was the last to go up, because it was the least likely to meet with attack, but they were not making it any less strong for that. There was an army of men at work, stripped in the cold, laboring feverishly to be done before the sun sank too much lower.
Batan bowed to her. Hani smiled. He was more at ease, the closer to danger they came. When death threatened, he would be perfectly calm. Had she noticed before how much like the Gileni prince he looked? That line came from his part of the world, long and long ago. In this proud bronze face, she could see it.
“It pleases me to see you well, lady,” Batan said, breaking in on her reflections. “It seems the rest did you good.”
“It did that,” Merian said, coolly as she thought, but Hani's glance sharpened. She ignored it. Batan's expression at least did not change. She was keenly aware just then of the weight of a man's eyes. This one wanted her, and would take her if he could, but not until the battle was over.
She was flattered. She was also inclined to geld him with a blunt knife. She regarded him without expression, until he flushed and looked away.
Be kind
, Hani said in her mind.
He's a man—he dreams
,
as all men do.
He could dream. She did not put it in words, not precisely, but Hani understood. He shrugged, half-smiled, sighed.
 
By nightfall the walls were raised, and the laborers rested under guard in the camp's heart. Most of them would rise to fight when the time came; weary they might be, but they had their pride. They would defend what they had built.
They had all eaten while the sun was still in the sky, even Merian, who surprised herself with hunger. She ate a solid ration and washed it down with well-watered wine. It stayed with her, feeding her strength, as the sun set and the darkness descended.
It was a long, cold night. Moons and stars shone undimmed; the sea quieted little by little. The men took turns to rest and share the fires. The guard on the walls changed again and yet again.
She had miscalculated. Wherever the shadow had gone tonight, if it had gone anywhere at all, it had not come here. She had driven it away.
Yet she did not put an end to the vigil. She was too stubborn; they had worked too hard. This hook was baited, and strongly.
It came well after midnight, yet swifter than before. Stars and moons winked out. A gust of icy air rocked the tents on their moorings. A hammer of darkness smote the raw new fort. In the same instant, wave on wave of warriors stormed the walls.
Merian lashed them with light. Her bolts struck shields. They cracked and buckled. She struck them again, again, as the forces behind them smote the walls. It was a battering of hammer on hammer, anvil on anvil.
Hani's magic poured like water beneath hers. It melted away the shields and lapped at the feet of the darkness. Light stabbed through the rents that it had made.
The enemy's slaves burned and died. But the darkness had swallowed the stars.
Hani raised wards about the walls. The remnant of the enemy
retreated. The defenders stood alone in darkness impenetrable, lit by their feeble sparks of fire.
 
Merian was almost startled to see the sun rise. It burned away the dark, and showed a ring of blasted heath round the walls. Seahold was still safe—Perel's wards had held—and nowhere else, as she cast her mind afar, had seen attack. She had succeeded: she had drawn the enemy's attention to this one place.
She could not keep it there forever. If it were possible to divide the enemy, to lure them to a number of guarded places, that might be a wiser course—“Now that we know they can be lured,” she said to her brother.
Hani was looking bruised about the eyes. He had worn himself thin in a long day of building and a long night of magical battle. Still, he kept his feet reasonably well, and he seemed to have his wits about him. “Another council?”
“In a while,” she said. “I need to think. Will you ride out with me?” He had strength enough for that. Batan, gods be thanked, had let go his iron resolve at last, and dropped into the first tent he happened upon. The camp was under the command of one of his seconds, a man in utter awe of the mages. He would never have presumed to object to their desertion.
They rode past the circle of the enemy's attack to the place where their track began, and then a little beyond it. There was a hill of sere grass and a ring of ancient stones: another place of power, such as seemed unwontedly common in this harsh country.
“Maybe we should have studied the mages of Anshan,” Merian said. “Were they as old as the dark brothers of the mountains?”
“Older, I would think,” Hani said. “Even the stories are dim and all but forgotten; all that's left are ruins like these, spread in a wide circle within the borders of the country, and a name for them all: the Ring of Fire. I can't remember anything of any enemy they may have fought, or whether they knew Gates. Mostly they fought one another and subjugated lesser mortals. They might have been gods.”
“They drew their power from the earth,” Merian said, “and from the fires far below. It's still here, waiting to be tapped. What if—”
Merian broke off. Hani's eyelids were drooping shut. He kept his seat on the senel's back as an old campaigner could, with no need of conscious awareness.
She let him sleep. She was fiercely, almost painfully awake. The longer she was in this place, the more its power filled her. She was drawing it as a tree draws water from the earth, through every root and vein.
It was not lightmagic, but Hani seemed to have no awareness of it. The enemy must not, either, or they would never have come here. She was conceiving a plan, but she needed time and solitude—which through Hani's exhaustion she had won for herself.
She left her mare, and Hani slumped in the gelding's saddle, and sought the center of the stone circle. The sun was warm inside the ring. Buried in the grass she found another stone, flat and smooth, somewhat hollowed in the middle. It was like a shallow basin filled with clear water, though no spring bubbled through the rock, nor had it rained since Merian came to this country.
The water was full of light. Merian dipped her hand in it, found it icy but not unbearable. She laved her face and sipped a little. Its taste was cold and pure, but as it sank to her stomach, it warmed miraculously. She drew a long wondering breath. She felt as if she had slept the night through.
The warmth settled deep within her, below her heart. She sat beside the stone, basking in the sun, and let her thoughts drift free.
Visions stirred in the water. She bent toward them, drawn through no will of her own. She saw a ring of cities, and foregatherings of mages, and great battles against powers that came by sea and land and air. Some were dark, though she could not tell if any was darkness absolute. They forged weapons of light and shadow, and wielded them against their enemies, and sometimes won and sometimes lost, but always kept their pride and the pride of their cities.
They were all gone long ago, sunk into the grass. Powers faded, cities
died; wars destroyed what weariness and neglect did not. Mages were seldom born now in Anshan.
The water shivered, though no wind had touched it. The ancient visions dissolved. A face stared up at her, a very strange face, somewhat like an owl's and somewhat like a man's. The round yellow eyes blinked once, slowly. “Help,” it said clearly. “Help …”
Merian bent closer to the water, but not so close that her breath disturbed it. The vision moved likewise, until its face filled the basin. “You are the rest of him,” it said. “You must meet. The worlds that float in void—they must touch. You must bring them together.”
“Who are you?” Merian asked of the creature. “What are you?”
“Mage,” it said. “He knows. Listen! Speak to him. He knows.”
It was not human, this vision. It did not think as humans thought. Merian struggled to understand it. “He? Who is he?”
“The rest of you,” the Mage said. Was it ever so slightly impatient? “You can end this. But you must listen.”
“I am listening,” she said as respectfully and patiently as she could.
“Listen,” the Mage said.
Its eyes flashed aside. It gasped. Before Merian could speak again, the vision vanished. Darkness filled the basin, darkness absolute.
She recoiled from it. Something caught her. She whipped about.
Hani blocked the blow before it knocked him flat. He seemed much rested and blessedly strong. She rested for a moment in that strength, before the power in the earth and the heat of the sun began again to restore her.
“Shall I call council?” he said.
“No,” she said. “After all, no. But I need more builders, and more mages. The Ring of Fire will rise again.”
“Have we time for that?”
“I think we do. We're not the heart of their war yet. These are raiding parties. I'll wager that the army itself is still worlds away.”
“I hope you win your wager,” Hani said.
So did she; but she was not about to confess it. When she mounted the mare, Hani was close behind her, swinging onto the gelding's back.
 
By day mages and makers rebuilt the Ring of Fire, the chain of hill-forts and sea-holdings round the rim of Anshan. By night they stood guard against the dark.
Merian remained in the first of the ruined cities, which had a name again: Ki-Oran, Heart of Fire. That had been its name in older days, the men of Seahold assured her. A fort had risen within the walls, a small citadel and quarters for a garrison.
The enemy had begun to raid abroad in Anshan, in the smaller towns and the fishing villages. Those, unlike the forts and cities, had no mages to ward them. They fell in black ash, their strong people taken, the weak slaughtered. What had become of those who were stolen, mages feared they knew: Batan's twelve wounded men were still in Asanion, healing slowly and incompletely when they healed at all.
Yet there was no lack of men to offer themselves for defense. Men in Anshan were all either pirates or bandits at heart, and they knew no fear. Given a fight, even a fight they could not win, and faced with a fate that truly was worse than death, they laughed long and hard, and brought their brothers and cousins to join them in the villages. They were bait, the lure that kept the sea-dragons away from the fish, and it was their pride to be so.
Merian had not forgotten the strange vision in the water, but its meaning eluded her. There was too much else to think of: finding mages to ward every village without weakening the guard and the wards outside of Anshan; building forts and strongholds; raising a wall of lightmagic that would, she hoped, keep the raids within its circle.
The gaps in the web of lesser Gates were closed, except here. It was a monstrous task, and strained the mages to the utmost. They were warding a world. Everywhere that human creatures were, they must be, and be strong.
Winter deepened. In the deepest of it, the raids grew less frequent. Then for a while they stopped. But only fools celebrated a victory. The world was still under shadow. The greater Gates were gone, the Heart of the World destroyed. A few brave souls had tried to raise the nexus again, or find some sign that it could be restored, but those that survived the attempt would never heal completely. Where the nexus had been was a maw of darkness, growing inexorably wider, deeper, stronger. It swallowed magic; it devoured mages. It was beyond any mortal strength to conquer.

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