A Fall of Princes (7 page)

“Where?”

Sarevan swayed again. He looked about, peering as if he
could not see; he drew a breath that caught in his throat. “Walk,” he gritted.
“
Walk
, damn you.”

They walked. The door melted away before them.

No one saw them, and they saw no one. Perhaps they did not
walk in the world at all. They came up out of the dungeon, and they walked
through a high house richly furnished, part of which Hirel thought he could
remember; but not even an insect stirred. And the gate opened not on the city
of Shon’ai but on greenness and sunlight and a whisper of water.

Sarevan stumbled and fell to his knees. Hirel snatched at
him; he pushed the hands away. His head tossed from side to side. His eyes were
wide and blind.

“It’s gone,” he said. “All of it. All gone.” A sound escaped
him, half laughter, half sob. “I gave her the death she longed for. She—she
gave me worse. Infinitely worse.”

“What—” Hirel began.

Sarevan’s eyes rolled up. Slowly, bonelessly, he toppled.

Hirel caught too late, managed only to drag himself down
under a surprising weight. It ended across his lap, leaden heavy, barely
breathing. Trapping him, pinning him to the ground. He struggled briefly and
wildly.

Abruptly he stilled. Willing himself to be calm, to think.
It was the fiercest battle he had ever known, and the greatest victory.

Hirel regarded the face upturned in his lap. It was much the
same as ever, dark, high-nosed, haughty; even unconscious it was hollowed with
exhaustion.

Hirel shivered in the sun’s warmth. This creature had called
on a power that could not, should not exist. Had flown without wings, and
wielded the lightning, and destroyed two mages who had come against him.
Sarevan who had found an Asanian prince in a fernbrake and condescended to be
his guard; who never wore more than he must, who was conspicuously vain of his
body, who ate and drank and slept and sometimes had bad dreams. He sweated when
the sun was hot and shivered when the night was cold, and bathed when he needed
it, which was often enough, and relieved himself exactly as every other man
must. No showers of enchanted gold.

Hirel bit his lips until they bled. There were mages, and
Sarevan was one, and if mages could be, then what of gods?

Perhaps it had been a dream.

The earth was solid beneath him, cool, a little damp. The
air bore a scent of sunlight and of wilderness. The weight across his thighs
was considerable, and inescapable.

Sarevan. Sarevan Is’kelion, Sarevan Stormborn, Sa’van
lo’ndros who could not be what he could not but be. Sa’van lo’ndros, Sarevadin
li Endros in the high Gileni tongue that Hirel’s father had commanded he learn:
Sarevadin the prince.

Hirel had some excuse for idiocy. When a high prince of
Asanion was born, all menchildren born that day and for a Greatmoon-cycle round
about were given his name. It confused the demons, people said, and spread the
gods’ blessing abroad upon the empire. And some of the Sunborn’s Ianyn savages
had taken wives among the women of the Hundred Realms, and many more had not
troubled with such niceties, with mongrels enough to show for it. And surely
the heir of a very god would not be walking the highroad of his own free will
with all his worldly goods in a battered bag.

Sarevadin the prince, son of the Sunborn.

What a hostage.

What an irony.

But there was one wild tale at least—

Hirel lifted one long limp hand. The right, that one that
had shown itself to be Sarevan’s great weakness.

A shaft of sun caught in its palm and flamed.
Ilu’Kasar
, the brand of the god, that he
had from his father.

Suddenly Hirel was whitely, gloriously angry. Sarevan had
said no word, not even one; had taken a wicked delight in Hirel’s stupidity.
Letting Hirel look on him as lowborn, driving Hirel wild with his arrogance,
laughing all the while at the blind and witless child. Hoping very likely to
play the game clear to Kundri’j Asan, and melt away unknown, and rise up in
Keruvarion and tell the tale to all who would hear. How the High Prince of
Keruvarion saved the life of the High Prince of Asanion, and took him back to
his safe nest and his doting father, and won scarcely a civil word in return.

“Why,” Sarevan would say as he quaffed ale with his father’s
bearded chieftains, “the poor infant could hardly recall his own name, let
alone mine, he was so prostrated by the shock of having to do up his own
trousers.”

Hirel bit down on the back of his hand. He was going to howl.
With rage, with laughter, what matter? He had been a prisoner in the dungeon of
one of his own lords, with a sorcery on his tongue whenever he tried to speak
his name, and the son of An-Sh’Endor had set him free. Casting them both here,
wherever here might be, in a welter of magic and a flood of words that,
uncomprehended, roused nothing but dread.

Hirel’s eyes flinched from the dazzle of the
Kasar
. It was true gold, bright metal in
the shape of the sun’s disk, many-rayed, born there, bred in the flesh by a
god’s power.

It burned, the tales said, like living fire. Small wonder
Sarevan had nearly fainted when Hirel sank his teeth into it.

Hirel laid the hand on Sarevan’s breast. “Consider,” he said
to it, "what I know and what I surmise. Your god is being driven from
Asanion as quietly as may be, and as completely. The Order of Mages has
withdrawn from the Nine Cities and reappeared in Kundri’j Asan under the open
protection of the Charlatans’ Guild and the secret sanction of the emperor my
father. He wields them as he wields every weapon, as a counter to the power of
the emperor your father.

“And here we lie, you and I, only your god knows where. Is
that the heart of your plot, High Prince of Keruvarion? To bewitch and abduct
the High Prince of Asanion?”

Sarevan did not move.

“Sarevadin Halenan Kurelian Miranion iVaryan. See, I know
you. I have you wholly in my power. Shall I slay you while you lie helpless?
Shall I bear you away to be my slave in Kundri’j?”

Not a sound, not a flicker. Sarevan was alive, but little
more; somehow he had thwarted the surgeon’s close stitching, and he was ghastly
grey, and perhaps there was more amiss that Hirel could not understand.
Something uncanny, something sorcerous. And they were alone, foodless and
waterless, without weapon or baggage; and a pair of trousers for each, neither
excessively clean, and a single torn shirt. And a torque of gold, for what that
was worth.

Much, even if it were no more than gilded lead. Hirel had
only to unclasp it and run and hide, and twist it out of recognition and hammer
it with a stone and sell a bit of it in the next town he came to. If there was
a town. If it was close enough to find before he starved.

What a blow to Keruvarion his empire’s enemy, if he left its
high prince to die in a nameless wood. No matter if he died himself; he would
only make truth of Sarevan’s deception, and his father had a surfeit of sons.
He might even win free to tell the tale. Magics and sorceries and all.

Carefully, patiently, Hirel extricated himself from beneath
the limp body. It was not difficult, now that he was calm.

He stood over Sarevan. The Varyani prince sprawled
gracelessly in the leafmold that had so bound Hirel. Truly, if he had not died
yet, he would die soon.

With a small hoarse sound, Hirel bent over him. The torque
gleamed no more brightly than the Sun in the branded hand. Hirel caught the
wrist, drew the slack arm around his neck, set his teeth and heaved.

Sarevan came up by degrees, so slowly that Hirel shook with
the strain, so awkwardly that he almost despaired. Half carrying, half dragging
the long body behind him, he lurched and stumbled toward the whisper of water.

Light burst upon him, and treelessness: a broad stretch of
lake girdled with trees and sharp stones, ringed with the white teeth of
mountains. He lowered Sarevan to the sand that lapped to the forest’s edge, and
tried to stand erect, gasping, as his sight swelled and faded and settled to a
dark-edged blur. Through it he dipped water in his hands, drank what he might,
and poured a pitiful few drops into Sarevan.

Hirel lay on the sun-warmed sand. Only for a moment. Only
until he had his breath back.

Sarevan lay deathly still beside him. He surged up in dread;
the bandaged breast lifted, fell again. Clumsily, swallowing bile, he loosened
the bloodied wrappings.

The bleeding had ebbed. Whether that was good or ill, Hirel
did not know. The small tidy wound had grown to an ugly gaping mouth.

Hirel tore at his shirt, shaking, wanting desperately to
cry. He had no skill in this. He had no skill in anything that mattered. The
Dance of the Sunbird, the seventeen inflections of the imperial salutation, the
precise degree of the bow accorded by a lord of the ninth rank of the Middle
Court to a prince of the blood . . .

His hands made a bandage, of sorts. It was not pretty.
Perhaps it was too tight. He tied it off with a bowman’s knot, which skill at
least he had, and sat on his heels, spent.

The sun’s heat stroked his aching shoulders. He turned his
face to it, eyes slitted against its brightness. “What now?” he demanded, as if
it could answer; as if it were truly a god and not merely the closest of the
stars. “What can I do? I am but a pampered prince. I know nothing but courts
and palaces. What use am I here?”

The sun shone on oblivious. A small wind played across the
water. Far out, a fish leaped. Hirel’s entrails knotted with hunger.

He grasped Sarevan by the unwounded shoulder and began to
shake him. “Wake,” he said over and over. “
Wake
,
damn you.”

Cursed barbarian. Son of a fatherless man. Pitiful excuse
for a sorcerer, he, who swooned like a maid after the merest wizardly skirmish.
Would he die, then, and give Asanion a victory to rejoice in?

Hirel reared back and struck him, then struck again, ringing
broadhanded slaps that rocked the head on the lifeless neck.

It rocked of its own accord. Sarevan’s body twitched,
shuddered. Hirel smote it with all his strength.

The long limbs thrashed. Convulsed. Surely Hirel had killed
him.

Sarevan sat bolt upright, eyes stretched wide, white-rimmed,
lips drawn back from white sharp teeth. Before Hirel could move, the Varyani
prince had him, and the strength of those hands was terrible.

But it did not hold. Hirel braced Sarevan before he could
fall; he said half in a gasp, “I can’t—my power—I have no—” He drew a sharp
breath, and spoke more faintly but also more clearly. “I have no power to help
either of us. When I slew the sorceress, I slew it. That is the law which
constrains all mages.”

“You never used wizardry to feed us, that I knew of.”

“I walked into my enemies’ hands. I let my temper master me.
I let it destroy me.”

There was a silence. Hirel did not fill it.

Sarevan closed his eyes as if in pain, but he spoke with
some semblance of sanity. “What do we have with us?”

“Nothing,” Hirel answered flatly.

“Nothing at all?” Sarevan looked about, and his eyes closed
again. “I don’t remember this place.”

For a long moment Hirel could find no words to speak. When
they came, they were as faint and foolish as Sarevan’s own. “You cannot
remember? But you brought us here!”

A spasm crossed Sarevan’s face. His hand went to his brow.
“My head,” he said. “It’s an anvil, and Vihayel Smith’s own hammer beating down
on it. I can’t think. I can hardly—”

“We were in prison in Shon’ai,” Hirel said, shaping the
words with desperate care. The priest’s face was appalling, struggling so hard
to remember, and in such pain, that Hirel could not bear to look at it. “You
fought a sorcerer, then a sorceress. We left, and we came here, and you fell.
You slept.”

Sarevan touched his bandaged shoulder. His eyes were open,
and they had cleared a little; they were no longer quite so bewildered.
“This—this I remember. I’ve served you ill, cubling; I think we’re even farther
from your city than we were before. This place has a feel of Keruvarion.”

“Not of the Eastern Isles? Or the lands beyond the desert?
Or the uttermost west?”

“We’re not dead quite yet, cubling,” Sarevan said dryly;
“and even with my well of power gone dry, I know my own country. Somewhere
among the Lakes of the Moon, I would guess; though which of them this is, I
can’t tell you. My power brought us as far eastward as it could before it
failed.” His brows knit. “Us . . . The priestess. I couldn’t
heal her. I left her—I forgot—”

Hirel cut across his dismay. “She died before your battle
began. She is safe, if death is safety.”

Sarevan turned onto his good side, drawing up his knees.
Sweat sheened his brow and breast and trickled down his back. Sand clung to
him, dimming the brightness of his beard; his hair was knotted with it. He
would have been pathetic but for the sudden fierceness of his eyes. “She’s
free. I gave her that much. The god will grant her healing.”

“Add a prayer for yourself,” Hirel said sharply. “You are
alive to make use of it. Are these Lakes of the Moon a wilderness, or do people
dwell here?”

“There are people, offshoots of the northern tribes. They
wander with the beasts they hunt, and breed seneldi, and worship Avaryan in the
free places far from the temples.”

“Very well,” said Hirel. “We look for them. Lie here and be
quiet while I search out a way to carry you.”

“I’m not an invalid. I can walk.”

Sarevan proved it. He rose. His lips were nearly white.
Stepping with care, as if he walked on glass and not on white sand, he
approached the water and waded in.

Hirel was there when the fool’s knees gave way. The water
lightened him, and he was clinging grimly to his senses; Hirel dragged him out
of the lake and into the shade of a tree, propping him against the bole.