A Fall of Princes (12 page)

The summit was a triumph and a disappointment. Hirel had
conquered the Wall of Han-Gilen, but he had gained no sight of the fabled City
of the Sun. A broad plain stretched away below him, the plain of Han-Gilen
watered by the flood of Suvien, but though the sky was clear above and behind
him, all before lay under a pall of storm. Clouds boiled; lightning cracked.
Rain cloaked the heart of the Sun’s empire.

The wind blew fierce in Hirel’s face. Challenging him, son
of the Golden Throne, trespasser in the land of his enemies.

He flung up his arms, defying it. It buffeted him on his
precarious perch. He stood firm; with infinite reluctance it surrendered. With a
snap of laughter, he turned away.

o0o

He followed Ulan down, slipping and slithering, catching
himself on treetrunks. The sun had sunk with alarming rapidity; already it was
growing dim among the trees. Ulan descended more slowly, and Hirel caught the
thick fur of the cat’s neck, bracing himself against a sudden sharp incline.

He did not discover the hollow so much as he fell into it.
It was like the one in which they had camped, like many another along this
crannied wall of a mountain: an oval of grass hemmed in with trees and watered
by a spring. But here the trees crowded close, and a bastion of stone reared up
above the meadow, slanting inward into darkness.

It was a pretty enough place, but Hirel did not like it; and
not only because Ulan surveyed it with raised hackles. The cavemouth gaped like
a lair of dragons.

Because his body bristled and his heart thudded, Hirel
forced himself forward. It was only a clearing growing dim with evening. If
anything lived in the cave, surely it was no match for the ul-cat that stalked
stifflegged by his side.

The spring bubbled and sang into a basin of stone. Hirel
bent to drink, and froze. Something lay in the water. Something white and
shapely, a work of fine craftsmanship, shaped very like a skull. The skull of a
child or a small woman, delicate as it was, contemplating the sky with golden
jewel-eyes.

Hirel’s throat burned with thirst, but he backed away from
the water. Ulan crouched in front of the cave, snarling. Hirel came to his
side, moving slowly, helpless to hold back.

If this was a guide, the skull in the spring had belonged to
a child. This one had been a boy, one of the red-bronze people of this country,
finer-featured than most, his hair the color of tarnished copper.

He had not died swiftly, and he had not died easily. In the
emptied sockets of his eyes, twin topazes glinted, staring up at Hirel in a
horrible parody of awareness.

Hirel had known when he saw the skull, and had not credited
what he knew. The darkside rites of Uvarra Goldeneyes were not uncommon in
Asanion even in these enlightened days. But he had never thought to come upon
them so far east, so deep into Avaryan’s country, within sight of Endros
itself.

The Thousand Gods belonged to the west, and this one most of
all, queen of light, lord of the flaming darkness, goddess and god, redeemer
and destroyer. Hirel bore her name of the light; his name of the dark had been
bestowed on a lion’s cub and the beast sacrificed to Uvarra, that Asanion’s
heir be proof against all powers of the night.

Superstition, he had always called it. He had better night
eyes than most, and he had never been afraid of the dark, but that had nothing
to do with gods or demons. Uvarra was naught but that figment of man’s mind
which, borne eastward, had become Avaryan, and grown from deity of birth and
death into sole true god.

How like the east to call the bright face male, and name the
dark a goddess, and hate her and fear her and ban all her worship. In Asanion
they looked on it as a necessity, however grim, like death itself that was the
Dark One’s servant.

This was not a sacrifice to distorted and tongue-twisted
Uveryen. She did not make use of Eyes of Power. And carved on the boy’s breast
above the empty cavern of his belly were words in fine curving script, the holy
writing of Asanion in one of the older tongues, addressing the one whom Hirel,
Lightchild and night’s protected, was not supposed to name.

He had done it before, often. He did not do it now. He could
not.

He was remembering his logic. If there were mages . . .

Ulan moaned deep in his throat. The same keening sound
escaped Hirel before he could strangle it. He pulled himself onto the warm
comforting back and kicked the long sides as if the cat had been a senel. Ulan
snarled at Hirel’s presumption, but he wheeled about and bore the prince away.

o0o

Hirel saddled his mare with many pauses. She stood quietly
for once, as if she knew that he had been sick all night. Blackly,
stomach-wrenchingly, helplessly sick.

It was not only the hideousness of the sacrifice. All the
horrors of the world had come crashing on his head, all at once, without mercy.
And there was no one here who cared enough to minister to him.

Now, in the hour before sunrise, his emptied stomach lay
quiet. He was weak, but he felt light, purged, even the sourness in his mouth
put to flight by the herb that sweetened the mare’s breath.

He ran his hand over the black-and-dun silk of her neck. She
nibbled his hair. He laughed a little, for no reason, unless that the night was
over and the day was coming and he had emptied himself for a brief while of the
horror in the clearing.

The mare tensed to shy, but held her ground. Ulan ignored
her with lordly disdain. He dropped something at Hirel’s feet, turned away.

All the sickness flooded back. Hirel doubled up with it. An
eternity, and it passed, and still the hideous beautiful thing gleamed out of
the grass.

An orb of topaz the precise size and shape of a child’s eye.
It did not blast Hirel’s trembling fingers, but he shuddered at the touch of
it. He thrust it into the pouch at his belt, where it burned until his mind
schooled itself—almost—to forget. Until he must remember.

o0o

They rode hard, unsparing of mounts or selves. Sarevan had
fallen into unconsciousness like death, passed like baggage from hand to hand,
unmoving, oblivious.

They scaled the Wall, riding far from the place of
sacrifice, and there at last with its veil of storms cast aside was the city
they sought: Endros Avaryan, Throne of the Sun, white walls and towers of gold,
and the crag above the river, and the magewrought tower a black fang on the
summit. Darkness and light face to face across the rush of Suvien, but both
begotten of the mind and the hand of the Sunborn.

They spurred toward it. The mountain shrugged them off; the
plain unrolled itself before them, broad green-golden level scattered with
villages.

They were marked, a wild riding of lakeland savages with a
western prince, and one who seemed a savage borne lifeless on a saddlebow. They
were not challenged. They were a strong company, and this was the heart of an
empire at peace.

Hirel, exalted with emptiness and with the aftermath of
illness, gazed steadily on the walls of Endros. They mocked it in Kundri’j,
called it a whitewashed village, an encampment of stone, a rude mockery of the
Golden City itself. It was raw, they said, all harsh stone and bare stripped
earth, its white and gold too stark for beauty: the hubris of a barbarian
veneered with southern gentility, proclaiming for all to hear:
See, I too can make an empire, and raise up
a city, and dare to ordain that it will endure a thousand years
.

And yet, the nearer it came, the lovelier it seemed. Stark,
yes, but wrought in a harmony of curve and plane and angle. It looked clean and
young, like snow new-fallen in the morning, but not raw; it seemed to grow out
of the earth as a mountain does, sudden and splendid and inevitable.

Not that it failed of reality. People lived in it, traveled
to and from it, ate and chattered and sang, labored and idled, bought and sold
and traded, had need of cesspits and middens and graves.

They were a varied people, mannered according to their
breeding. Hirel saw black giants, painted and unpainted, bearded and shaven
smooth, the women bare to the waist or veiled to the eyes, striding as if they
owned the world; almond-eyed folk of the plains, red or bronze or brown, who
stared openly and speculated audibly and never knew what the outlanders carried
into their city; here and there a white oddity from the Eastern Isles, walking
aloof; and many a figure painful in its familiarity, small among the rest,
sleek and full-fleshed, with skin in every shade of gold from dun to old ivory,
and curling fair hair, and great-irised tawny eyes.

Though none had skin as pale as Hirel’s had been, or hair so
pure a gold, or eyes that often seemed all amber. They had courtesy; they did
not stare, and they kept their thoughts to themselves, going smoothly about
their business.

Ulan was gone again. He shunned cities; even this one, it
seemed. Well enough: if he were known, so might Sarevan be, and then would be
pandemonium.

But anonymity had its troubles. Hirel, bred in palaces, knew
of guards and their office. It had not occurred to him that his companions
might come within its sphere. To all appearances they were a ragtag company, a
pack of savages from the gods knew where, and Sarevan’s name was insufficient
passport to the inner reaches of the palace.

The outer reaches were splendid enough, to be sure, and
royally bewildering in their complexity; many persons offered guidance, for a
fee, and many more shied away from the redolent corpse in Rokan’s arms.
Somewhere among the courts, a number of armed men persuaded the Zhil’ari to
leave their mounts and their weapons behind, not without a broken head or
three.

They would have been ejected then, but for Zha’dan’s swift
hard words. Hirel had caught a glancing blow meant for someone else; he could
not fit his mind properly around any tongue. He heard only the name of Avaryan
and the overtones of menace. The guards let them by, afoot and unarmed and
drawing close together, with Sarevan shifted to the care of Gazhin who was
largest and strongest.

o0o

They wandered for an age, to no purpose. “We would see the
emperor,” Zha’dan kept saying in passable Gileni. He was laughed at or sneered
at or ignored. “We have your
prince
,
damn you. We have the emperor’s son!”

The laughter sharpened. That? men mocked. That had been a
stripling savage before it began to rot, and tricks did not succeed here. His
imperial majesty did not stoop to the raising of outland dead.

It was a brown man who said that, a plump jeweled creature
whose every pore breathed forth the air of a petty functionary. Someone else,
moved by their desperation if not by the name of their charge, had directed
them to him.

He sat in his gilded cranny and despised them, and his mind
was set in stone. He did not know their painted skeleton. Both its fists were
knotted in rictus and would not unclench for proof; and in any case it was well
known that the prince Sarevadin journeyed among his loyal subjects in the west.
They were lying in order to get at the emperor, he heard such lies all too
often, the whole world would sell itself into the hell of falsehood to gain a
moment of the Sunborn’s notice. Or his favor. Or his fabled magic.

They left him still expounding on the necessity of
protecting the emperor from his importunate people. Most of the Zhil’ari were
for storming the inner gates. Gazhin curled his lip at them. “You are perfect
idiots. You’ll end in chains, and all for nothing. I say we go to the temple.
They’ll know my lord, and they can bring his father to him. We should have gone
there first.”

Hirel scowled at the tiled pavement. That was his fault. He
had argued for the straight path to the emperor, and the Zhil’ari, ignorant of
palaces, had let him have his way. But they had learned quickly enough.

For all their urgency, they paused in the quiet courtyard to
which their contention had taken them. A fountain played in it; they bathed
their heated faces, and the wounded laved their bruises. Zha’dan sponged
Sarevan’s body. Hirel drank a little, found that he could keep it down if he
tried, wandered away from them.

In truth this was more garden than court. Tiles rimmed it
and circled the fountain; the rest was grass and flowers and one slender young
tree guarding a gate. It opened to Hirel’s touch.

Grass again, level, shaved smooth. A groom rode a senel
there, a black stallion of great beauty. It could not but be of the Ianyn
breed, that was reckoned the best in the world; though its horns curved in the
scimitars of age, it moved like a youngling. Leap, curvet, caracole; sedate
sidewise canter and sudden fiery plunge, with the perfect control of the dancer
or the warrior. And yet it wore no bridle, its rider motionless in the light flat
saddle, hands on his thighs.

Hirel’s eyes drew him across the grass. He had never seen
such riding. He wanted to learn it. Now. Utterly.

He was not seen. The stallion fixed inward on his art. The
man rode as in a trance. A young man, night-dark, one of the smooth-shaven
northerners.

He was a priest of Avaryan. Very like Sarevan, in truth, if
Sarevan had not had that fiery mane: his heavy braid swinging to his senel’s
rump, and his kilt threadbare above bare feet, and his chest bare and his
torque bright beneath the keen eagle-face. He was not outrageously handsome as
Sarevan was, but neither was he ugly; he was simply himself.

The senel gathered himself from a flying gallop into a dance
in place, cadenced like a drumbeat, stilling to stone.

Hirel’s numbed brain struggled. They were stone. Black man
on black stallion, with gold around the man’s neck and glinting in his ear, and
dun-drab paint fading on the sculpted kilt, and rubies feigning seneldi eyes.

The carven rider left the carven saddle, and Hirel stared.
For all his northern face and his northern garb, this stranger was no giant; he
was merely a tall man. Asanian-tall, middling in the south, small as a child
among the tribes.