Tides of Darkness (35 page)

Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Tides of Darkness

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That only slightly surprised him. Word was out, she could see; there were already rumors enough of a redheaded child and the rare gift of the Red Prince's presence. “Not to the princess in Starios?” he asked.

“Take her to the prince,” said Merian, “if it's no longer safe here.”

“You're riding with the army.”

She had been fool enough to hope that he would not come to that conclusionâat least, not until she was safely gone. She should have known better. “Don't tell my mother,” she said.

“She probably will come after me, at that,” he mused. “How much of an army will I need to defend myself?”

“None,” said Merian. “She has a virtue rare in princes: she only blames those who are worthy to be blamed.”

“And I won't be, for letting you go?”

“All of that blame is mine,” she said. “Will you promise? Take my daughter to the prince; keep silent to the princess until I'm well gone.”

“I will promise,” he said, “on one condition.”

“I will not give you my firstborn,” she said swiftly.

He laughed. “Of course you won't. She's already spoken for. A kiss, lady. That's all I ask. Give me a kiss, and I'll be your servant to the death.”

That was so preposterous and so utterly presumptuous that she could think of no better response than to give him what he asked for. He was a man of experience; he was thorough, and he much enjoyed the taking of the gift.

She felt nothing. As soon as she courteously could, she withdrew, and resisted the urge to wipe her mouth. He was flushed; it spoke much in his favor that he had not fallen on her in blind passion.

Many men would have deluded themselves with hope, but he looked into her face and saw the truth. His sigh was full of regret, but she sensed no anger in it. “Lady,” he said, “whoever has your heart, I envy him with all that's in me. If you aren't the very world to him, then he's the greatest fool there ever was.”

She could find no answer for that. What was she to Daros? Did he even remember her? Or had the darkness faded all memory to oblivion?

Batan did not linger long. People were calling him; there was work to do before dark. Merian had her own lengthy tally of duties, but she evaded them for yet a while. This was the last breathing space she would have, maybe, before her mother took the war to the enemy.

Daruya would not ride into the dark world. The regent could not; her place was in the rear, directing the armies. Lords and generals would lead, men Merian knew well enough, and mages of her own order, the strongest and the most skilled. Merian was not expected to have a part in it. She would stand guard over the Ring of Fire, and nurse her child, and let her soldiers and her mages protect her. She was the heart of the empire: the heir to the regent, the empress who would be.

Indeed it was very wise and prudent. Time was when she would have accepted it without a murmur, nor ever dreamed of running off as Daros had, over and over, headlong and heedless and caring only for the whim of the moment. She knew what that had won him: exile and worse, perhaps even his soul's destruction.

She had a sudden, overwhelming need to see her daughter, to hold her, to draw in the sight and scent and feel of her. Elian was asleep when her mother came to her; she roused, but not into the infant's outraged wail. Although her eyes were still newborn blue, Merian fancied she could see the gold-green beneath.

“Please understand,” she said, “and if it is in you, forgiveâif I don't come back, it was never because I didn't love you. I'm going to find your father and save him, and maybe, if the gods allow, I'll save the world.”

Elian did not tax her with the arrogance of that. She was Sun-blood, too; she knew in her bones what they were born for.

Merian sat with her for a long while, marking every moment and sealing it in memory. When she had gone into the dark, this would sustain her. It would, gods willing, give her victory.

THIRTY-FIVE

T
HE BLACK LAND WAS UNDER SIEGE. NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, raiders burst out of gates, stripped and pillaged, then vanished with their booty. Estarion had strung a cord of magic from Waset to Sakhra, dispersed the magelings along it, and anchored it with the priest Seti-re. It protected the cities and the greater towns, but the villages had only men with spears and arrows to defend them.

With Daros gone, there was no one to make new mages. Estarion tried with the best that he had: the young priest who, with Seti, was as strong as mages could be here. The headache lasted for days. The priest felt nothing whatever, except alarm when Estarion collapsed ignominiously at his feet.

The humiliation passed. The ache of grief did not. He had come to love that maddening and gifted boy as a son, and the boy was gone.

That was the way of the worlds. His task was to defend this one, but it was all too evident that, even with the half-dozen magelings that Daros had left him, he could not do it.

The next dark of the moon after Daros' departure was harrowing. A score of villages were raided, stripped, and abandoned. For a long while after the raiders stormed back through their Gates, the darkness lingered, obscuring the stars.

The sun vanquished it, but it seemed reluctant to submit. Streamers that might have been cloud, but had the depth of darkness, melted away into the morning light.

Estarion had gone up to the roof of the palace to watch the sun rise. Tanit was there when he came. She had his penchant for high places, and a custom of reassuring herself that the sun indeed had risen and the day was come, and for a while the dark was held at bay.

She smiled at his coming and slid in under his arm, resting comfortably against him. Her sigh was weary, but contentment for the moment overrode exhaustion. “A long night,” she said.

“And a welcome morning.” He bent to kiss the crown of her head. “Tonight you should sleep. The rest of us will stand guard for you.”

“When will the rest of you sleep? Do you even remember the last time you saw your bed?”

“Vaguely,” he said. “I slept in council yesterday. Was anyone too terribly offended?”

“Most of them were too deep asleep to notice.” She looked up into his face. Her eyes were hollowed, her face worn. She was as beautiful as he had ever known her to be. “We can't go on like this. Sometimes I think, if we simply surrender, can slavery be any worse than what we're suffering now?”

“It is worse,” Estarion said. “Much worse.”

“How so? Slaves have no minds left. They don't even know they're enslaved.”

“Their souls do.”

She shook her head. “No. No, I shouldn't talk like this. It's the dark; it gets into all of us. Except you. It can't touch the Sun inside you.”

“It does try,” he said. He ran his finger down her cheek, and coaxed her into a smile. “Are you hungry? I could eat half an ox.”

“And I the other half,” she said with a flicker of laughter.

They went down hand in hand, to find the nurse waiting with their son and a grand announcement: his first word. “Sun!” he declared. “Sun!”

His father met his mother's glance. It was an omen, that word. It was hope where there had been none, and joy where they had all been sinking into despair.

Estarion swept Menes into his arms and spun him about in the splendor of the morning sun; and sang to him the morning hymn to Avaryan that every priest sang at sunrise of his own world. Menes clapped his hands and crowed, and echoed bits of the hymn, the melody perfect, bright and clear as the song of a bird.

Estarion needed that memory for what he had decided to do. He saw to it that Tanit lay down to rest in the cool of her chamber, tended by maids with fans and watched over by a pair of her own guards. He promised solemnly that he too would sleep, once he had attended to an errand.

She refrained from asking him what it was. Her spies would tell her in any case; Estarion would have found them at fault if they had not.

The temple rested in midmorning quiet. The rites of the morning were over; the priests had dispersed to their daily tasks. There were fewer of them than there had been; some had gone to aid in the defense of towns and villages, some had been killed or taken, and a few had gone home to their kin. Those who remained had much to do to keep the temple in order and to perform all the rites as custom prescribed.

The old priest Seti was sweeping a corridor between the shrine of the god and the priests' houses. He looked like a servant, wizened and frail, but his eyes were as bright as ever.

Estarion deftly extracted the broom from his hands and plied it himself. Seti shook his head. “We're two of a kind, aren't we? Do your keepers
fret as much as mine do when you dare set your hand to anything ordinary?”

“Probably more,” Estarion said, “though never as much as they did when I was a king of kings. In Asanion especiallyâin the land of the Lionâit was a great horror to them if I so much as set foot on common earth.”

“It is difficult,” Seti said, “to be a great lord's servant.”

They had reached the end of the passage, and the gate that opened on the court of the priests. Estarion bowed Seti through it and followed with the broom in his hand. Withered and bent though he was, Seti moved briskly enough; Estarion did not have to shorten his stride by much, to keep pace.

The old priest led him to one of the houses, not his own; this one was deserted. It was clean, but a little sand had sifted across the floor; the bed was a bare frame. There was a pair of stools by the wall, and a fan hanging limp from a cord.

It was not so warm yet that the fan was a necessity. Seti drew the stools into the center of the room, sat on one and cocked his head at Estarion.

Estarion sat cross-legged on the floor. Stools here were lower than his long limbs liked, and the floor was comfortable enough, spread with a reed mat over the trodden earth.

“Tell me what you're thinking of,” Seti said.

Estarion's lips twitched. “Mischief,” he said, “of a particularly dreadful kind. Will you aid and abet me?”

“Need you ask?”

Estarion laughed. “You were a hellion when you were a boy. Weren't you?”

“Not at all,” said Seti. “I was disgustingly dutiful and frightfully censorious. Thank the gods, I grew out of it. Tell me, then: what are we going to do?”

“I am going to sit here,” Estarion said, “and you are going to watch
over me. Don't be alarmed by anything I do, unless I stop breathing. If I do that, rouse me at once. If I vanish, go to my queen and stay with her. Bid her strengthen all the defenses that she can; if it's necessary to abandon the villages, then she must do so. Then pray, because nothing else will save this world.”

Seti heard him out calmly. “I understand,” he said.

That was Seti: no nonsense about him. Estarion drew long steadying breaths, settling more comfortably, drawing his awareness in toward his center. Seti watched in silence. His presence was a focus, an anchor to this world.

He cast his consciousness outward and upward, into the sun. Without Sun-blood he would never have dared such a thing. Even with it, the roaring blaze of heat and light nigh seared his spirit-self to ash. But the dark could not come near it. He spread wings of flame and flew like a falcon through that living furnace.

It buffeted and battered him. It burned the wits out of him. But he had a purpose, and that purpose was woven into the fabric of his being: to find the otherâflesh of his flesh, scion of his blood and bone.

The worldwinds blew him hither and yon. The dark groped for him. But the sun shot him like an arrow from the bow, direct to the target.

He opened his eyes on simple mortal light. His sight was blurred, uncertain. He could not seem to focus. His body yielded to his will, but reluctantly; limbs flailed when he would have stretched out his hand, and a sound escaped him that sounded exactly like an infant's cry.

Dear gods. Whatâhowâ

A giant loomed above him. These eyes would not come altogether clear, but the ivory oval of face and the riot of hot-gold curls sparked recognition. Her voice was loud and its timbre strange; he struggled to make sense of the words. “Hush, baby. Hush.”

The body only howled the louder. He was as confused as the eyes he wore; only after a long moment did he remember that he did not need a mortal voice to speak.

Merian,
he said in his mind.
Merian! Look within
.

She started visibly. “Great-grandfather? Whereâ”

Here
!

Thank the gods, she was not as fuddled as he was. She bent closer, peering; her breath hissedânot in astonishment but in anger. “Get out of there! You madmanâshe's but a few days old. You'll burn out her mind!”

He would not. The mind he was in was much more elegant and complex a structure than the body it inhabited. Yet for Merian's sake, and out of courtesy to the young mage into whose body his working had cast him, he slipped free of it and stood in more or less his own shape. It wavered; it was transparent. He could not sustain it for as long as if he had had a body to inhabit. He prayed it would be enough.

He looked down at the body that had drawn him to this world, then up at the one who was incontestably her mother. “Great joy to you,” he said, “and to this heir of the Sun.”

“So there will be,” she said sharply, “now that she has slightly more hope of living to inherit. But you didn't know, did you? You were aiming for me.”

“Yes,” he said. “Would it be possible â¦ ?”

He never finished. Her shields had dropped, her power enfolded him. Her body was grown and trained in its magery. It set him in a place of safety, in the outer reaches of awareness. There he could stand as if in the green pasture on the slope of Mount Uveryen, dressed as a shepherd of the north, and she faced him in the mingled grey and violet robes of a mage of Gates.

Her temper had cooled considerably. She embraced him, holding tight for a long moment. He hated to let her go. But time was short.

He took from her, with her consent, the knowledge of the child, her birth and parentage, and all that had happened since he left this world. There was so much of it, so strong and some of it so strange, that he could not absorb it all at once. Yet three things he saw clearly. What Daruya intended, and what Daros had become, and last and least
expected, the knowledge that the Red Prince had brought from Han-Gilen.

To take the war into the dark world, that was sense enough in this mad age. Daros â¦ His heart mourned, but his head was clear and cold. “That is not well,” he said, “for I'd hoped to make use of his presence there. I have a thing in mind, child, but it needs a mage of great power.”

“There are over a score of mages there,” she said. “Surely one or more of themâ”

“Don't be a fool. You know what he is.”

“I know what he's been turned into.”

“Are you sure of that?” he asked her.

“His own mother saw him. He took her mind by force, and never knew her at all.”

“That's grievous,” he said, “and in many more ways than one. For what I have in mind, I need mages who can match me, or near enough. One in your world. One in the heart of the dark. And I here, on the other side of the night.”

“Why, that's simple,” she said. “I'll be the mage in the dark world. My mother will stand here. That's Sun-blood threefold.”

“Your mother?” Estarion made no effort to keep the disbelief from his voice. “Even if she would let you do so profoundly irresponsible a thing, what makes you think that she would have anything to do with this?”

“I'll convince her,” Merian said.

“How long will it take you? Time is running out, child. We have but days left. Then it will endâone way or another.”

“Yes,” she said, as intractable as Sun-blood could be. “Tell me what you would do. How mad is it?”

“That depends,” he said. “It cost me high to come here, because the dark is so strong between. If we forge a Great Binding, each of us, in the dark and in the light, we may bring light to the dark world. I think, if we do that, we may cleave the darkness itself.”

“For that you need Sun-blood,” she said: “Sun's fire. Magery alone isn't enoughâeven as potent as his.”

“He knows the dark world,” said Estarion, “and the Mage who created it.”

“Therefore the darkness is in him,” she said.

“But your motherâ”

“When did you stop trusting her?” Merian asked him. “Or did you ever trust her at all?”

That stung, though he reckoned himself strong enough to keep his temper. “I gave her my empire.”