Wings of Power Read online

  Yes, Gard thought, bulls were sacrificed in my youth, too. And people. Many people.

  Andrion, as usual, sensed his nephew’s thought. His expression softened, anger eroded by regret. Tembujin tapped his bow against the side of the throne, clinging to his anger by pretending, presumably, that he had merely stumbled upon an academic discussion between dried-up scholars. But his features, too, struggled less with fury than with a dull and gnawing sorrow. These men are more my fathers than Eldrafel ever was, Gard thought glumly. They love me, and in return I put thorns in their boots.

  Andrion said, “When you were twenty I made you a centurion with the Second Legion. You gambled and drank with your men, and during the campaign you rushed into battle without them, so that they had to protect you instead of fighting the bandits. Now you are twenty-one. Now what?”

  Gard groped after contrition. No, he thought, I have accomplished nothing except to embarrass Andrion, who gave me this life I am wasting. Peasants tell stories about me in the marketplace, amusing stories for the most part, but none of them link my name with the duty and integrity and honor that follow Andrion the way sheep follow a shepherd.

  Still the footsteps padded up and down the corridor. An aggrieved husband, perhaps, enjoying Gard’s humiliation. Because humiliation was coming; he sensed it as surely as he could sense a thunderstorm building on a summer’s afternoon. He should have paid long since for his misdeeds, but always Andrion had protected him. Until at last he had gone too far.

  And he realized, as that sudden squall swamped and sank his small pleasure boat, they meant for him never to see Raisa again. His heart sank and abruptly he retrieved it.

  All right then. Commit justice—it is a rare enough commodity.

  Andrion had pulled something from behind his belt. No, not a weapon, more’s the pity; a silk purse bulging with coins. Gold solidi, if Gard knew Andrion. The Emperor’s dark eyes fixed on the purse he held just as surely as if he contemplated an executioner’s sword. But Andrion had not looked that sad when he had with his own hands executed Eldrafel. Gard shuddered. Tembujin shivered as if brushed by a chill breeze.

  Andrion looked up. “Gard,” he said, his voice husky with emotion.

  “Is it to be exile, then?”

  “Let us say rather a chance to find your own path.”

  “As long as it is outside the borders of the Empire?”

  “If that is where you wish to go.”

  Gard slowly raised his hand, palm open and empty. Andrion placed the purse in it. The coins were heavy and cold against his skin. On the whole, he would rather have had Raisa in his hands; she was much warmer than gold.

  Someone stepped from the doorway, shedding the cool, translucent shadows of the corridor like water. Gard started; more old sins, coming back to haunt him?

  Yes and no. It was Sumitra, Andrion’s first—and only—wife. Another face struggling for reason beneath the flood of his own irrationality. Her brows, like firm brush strokes above her eyes, were knitted in concern; her plump chin looked as if it might break, so tenaciously did she hold it steady. “Gard,” said her turtledove’s voice, “I have written a letter of introduction to my father, the Rajah Jamshid of Ferangipur in the valley of the Mohan. If you choose to go there.”

  Where should he go, then? North, to Sabazel, the kingdom of women? No, they would only admit him for the equinoctial rites, laughing both contemptuously and indulgently at his enthusiasm, but he could not make their land his. Northeast, to Sardis? No, he had already worn out his welcome there. Beyond, to the island province of Rhodope? A chill, sulfurous breath clogged his nostrils; no, that was too close to the blackened reef that had been Minras. Inland, he was both stifled and protected by the expanse of earth around him. The sea was as beautiful as it was deadly, he mused. No wonder sailors called it “she”.

  “There is unrest in the Mohan now,” Sumitra said, “with the rise of the Apsuri Alliance.”

  Oh? He fidgeted under her gold and cinnamon gaze which disconcertingly never condemned and never pitied. He knew that she saw much more than other women saw. To her his gray eyes were genuine, because his father’s gray eyes had been tarnished counterfeit. His red hair, the legacy of the god Harus to Bellasteros’ descendants, was particularly smooth and trim compared to his mother’s elaborate curls. And if Sumitra saw his lean and well-knit body as a shorter version of Andrion’s, she also saw its fluid movement as Eldrafel’s devilish grace reined in by uncertainty. He should, he supposed, be grateful for that uncertainty. Otherwise they would have thrown him out long since.

  “There is opportunity in the Mohan,” said Sumitra, “for a young man of considerable daring.”

  In spite of himself, Gard smiled. West to the Mohan; if Sumitra came from there, it could not be too bad a place. A place where no one would know him or his ancestry, and would expect nothing of him, good or ill. Although he would be damned before he would ask her father or anyone else for charity. He was no longer a child. He would make his own place in the world, and show them all what a man was. He took the proffered letter from her hand and thrust it behind his belt, where it crackled teasingly at every breath.

  He turned away from the eyes of his adoptive parents, and saw whose steps had been pacing the hallway. Tembujin’s three sons, Raisa’s brothers, Gard’s adoptive brothers, more eyes filled with anger and chagrin and pain. Gods, but he had played out many scrapes with the boys those men had once been. They had filched food from the palace kitchens, and raced ponies in the Khazyari camp, and wrestled and hunted rabbits and flirted with farmers’ daughters.

  A slightly smaller shape stood just behind the triptych of Khazyari faces; Marcos, Andrion’s son, who followed the older boys like an appealing puppy. He already wore, like his father, a certain quiet assertion—the numinous cloak of the god-touched, not god-haunted.

  Marcos’ ears were wagging, no doubt, although his as yet unmolded face was more confused than condemnatory. At thirteen, he, too, was beginning to fall under the spell of women. But as heir of the Empire he had his choice of any woman, to use or to wed.

  Choices. Gard’s smile dried into parody. He had made one choice in his life, at the age of eight; he had betrayed Eldrafel for Andrion. And for choosing good over evil, Furies followed him. Perhaps, just perhaps, their claws could not reach as far as the Mohan.

  He looked back to the Emperor, Sumitra, and Tembujin, and whispered, finding his throat closed, “Thank you for your care of me.”

  Andrion sank back upon the throne, somehow deflated, and, for just a moment, old. If you had never had sons, Gard asked him silently, and I were your heir . . .

  He turned away. The faint song of a lark drifted through the room, carried upon the breeze. But song and breeze were only daydreams, and it was the heaviness in his hand, in his heart, that was real.

  “No apologies?” asked Tembujin, so quietly Gard almost did not hear him.

  Gard could see the dark face, the sardonic eyes, without looking around. “No apologies,” he said.

  He heard the several breaths sigh as one, as if responding to some poignant rite. He heard the string snap as Tembujin released it from the bow. He heard Andrion’s sword slide with a reluctant hiss into its sheath. Its reflected light winked out. The shadows, no longer discouraged, flocked forward.

  “May the wings of Harus protect you,” said Andrion. “May Ashtar smile upon you.”

  Annoying, how everyone kept invoking those gods. “No,” Gard whispered, his breath breaking over his teeth like waves against a rocky beach, “No apologies.”

  He turned and strode from the room, the rhythmic stamp of his feet shattering the silence.

  Chapter Two

  I must, Gard thought, have come to the end of the world. He settled down in the lee of a camel and arranged his supper on a handy rock. The beast inspected him, shrugged superciliously, returned to its ruminations. Dust swirled from the stone into Gard’s eyes. Tears of irritation left pale tracks in the scum already on his face
.

  Cursing, he scrubbed his flesh with a corner of the gray kaffiyeh that had once, in the market in Iksandarun, been white. Something darted past his ear like an angry wasp, not so much buzzing as whirring tiny, insistent wings. A small voice jeered, “Hail, Lord of Darkness.”

  Gard started, blinking frantically to clear the mud smearing his sight. All he saw behind him was the caravan coalescing into an encampment; the camels’ self-pitying groans died away, the elephants knelt with ponderous gravity, the merchants and drivers squatted around tiny fires.

  On his left the sun drowned in a pool of blood-red light contained by the black rim of the horizon. On his right a faint silver aura dissolved sky and horizon alike, presaging the rising of a full moon. It had been one month, then, since he had left Iksandarun under another moon’s round and baleful eye.

  Nothing moved on the barren, windswept plateau before him. This was the caravan route’s most southerly reach, the Royal Road sweeping around the end of the great mountains before turning back north toward the vast flood-plain of the Mohan. Here the caravan was farthest from civilization, imperial or Mohendra. Here the sea was unimaginably remote, Gard’s memories of it as bizarre as a fever dream. No wonder the insects in this godforsaken place were miniature mocking demons.

  Again Gard settled down, drawing his burnoose like chain mail around him. A camel at his back was better than nothing; at least it cut the force of the everlasting wind. He lifted his wineskin from the rock.

  Exile was actually quite pleasant. No accusing glances, no suddenly concealed snickers, no exhortations to nobility. No laughter, no embraces . . . He drank. He grimaced. That had been a false economy; the cheap wine had already turned to vinegar. Penance, he assured himself virtuously, and took a bite of the stale bread and overripe cheese garnished with dirt.

  “Gath!” called a deep voice from the encampment. “Come here, boy!”

  The sun pool oozed over the horizon, drawing a veil of star-spangled indigo across the sky. Gard raised the skin, saluting the face of the moon as it peered over the encompassing peaks. “So, Ashtar, you thought you had me securely caught in your nets, but I have escaped.” He drank again, and this time he choked. From the corner of his eye he saw a rising spiral of darkness smudge the moon’s pristine silver glow. “Leave me alone!” he protested. “I am no longer annoying your son Andrion!”

  The cloud of bats winged their way into the north and disappeared. The camel shifted and muttered grumpily, its pungent odor permeating the scents of burning acacia, of steaming tea and hot bread. Gard put down his own food, scratched the dust that turned his short beard from copper to brown, and decided with characteristic contrariness that what he really wanted now was a bath. The one thing he could not have.

  “Gath!” the voice bellowed.

  With a sigh Gard loosened his kaffiyeh and pulled the concealing fabric from his head. Darkness had its benefits. At least the autumn sun had not quite turned his nose the same distinctive color as his hair.

  He cocked his head. There, on that escarpment, was a building. It was silhouetted so sharply in the grotesquely gravid face of the moon that it seemed to be hacked from it. Odd, he had not seen a building there earlier.

  Of course, earlier he had been unloading the wares of the merchant from whom he had bought passage with work; not as another economy but in a wish to keep his bag of gold solidi—and his identity—hidden. The King of Minras, working as a common laborer . . . But then, the theoretical King of nonexistent Minras had had no better offers of late.

  His thought broke an axle and lurched to a stop. Very odd that he had not seen that building earlier. But it had to be a building, the rim of rock shaped by design, not chance. A smooth strip, like a roof, was edged with right-angled eaves, and another roof ended in a funny bulbous tower; threads of darkness might be poles for banners or merely structural supports. He squinted. Those dark threads were spinning.

  Beyond the tower a wizened tree looked like a hand groping after the moon as it glided impassively away, leaving the rim of rock obscured by darkness. Was the structure an abandoned fort, a haunted ruin? No, there, one tiny lamp flickered beside a particularly opaque blot of blackness that might be a gateway.

  “Gath!”

  Gard started. Pinfeathers! The man was calling him! In a moment of mordant humor he had named himself after his mother’s ill-fated first husband, one of the numerous victims of Eldrafel, the Lord of . . .

  “Gath! Damn you, boy!”

  When he stops calling me “boy,” Gard thought, I shall answer.

  A soft voice like an errant zephyr queried in his ear, “. . . Lord of Darkness?” He surged to his feet, limbs flailing, and spun about. No one was there. His backrest complained vociferously. The full force of the wind struck him, as chill as the breath of a mountaintop ice field. “No,” he snarled under his breath, “I rejected the Lord of Darkness long ago. I am not his son. I am not his heir.”

  “So there you are!” roared Gard’s employer. “If it would please you to stir yourself, your highness, bring a bag of apples from my stores.”

  Gard started to retort and found his tongue seemingly turned to stone by his defiant whisper. He had to be content with an exaggerated bow and a lingering moment, shaking his robes free of sand and crumbs before sauntering toward the place where he had piled the merchant’s wares.

  Linen, brass, pistachios, Khazyari bows and arrows—Sumitra had spoken of unrest in the Mohan; anyone would be restless if their neighbors armed themselves with such weapons. The Khazyari had sacked parts of the Mohan two generations ago.

  He shouldered a large bag of dried apples, the knobby shapes pummeling his back and neck. He glanced toward the escarpment. The building was still there, no longer a furrow in the moon’s brilliance, but no longer obscure, either; in the moonlight it was an elegant, almost unearthly battlement painted in silver and ebony. The solitary lamp was like the golden eye of a Mohendra tiger.

  The merchant was talking to an old man, a stranger who was leading a donkey on a rope. The beast snuffled just beyond the edge of the firelight, the pots on its back clinking, like a little ghost too pathetic for chains. Where had they come from? Gard lowered his burden and stared. The old man wore a hooded robe. The sinister priests of Minras had slithered about in hooded robes.

  The merchant snatched the bag from Gard’s limp fingers and extracted a sample of his wares. The old man looked not at the merchant but at Gard.

  His hair and beard and brows were so bushy that his eyes seemed to be those of a feral cat peering from a haymow. Uncannily bright eyes, not reflecting firelight or moonlight, but gleaming like lamps from within. Their pale intensity seemed to see through Gard’s automatically lowered lashes and into the recesses of his mind, pausing to consider the images within as a shopper in a bazaar evaluates the merchandise displayed before him. Gard might have wondered if Andrion’s perceptive gaze was an act, but somewhere in his stuttering thought he knew that this was not.

  “Here.” The merchant handed the old man an apple. “Nice and sweet.”

  The stranger winked at Gard and lowered his scrutiny to the fruit.

  Gard sagged and shook his head, trying to jounce his senses into their accustomed places. As a boy, his playmates would toss him in a blanket until the palace walls danced before his eyes; he felt distinctly less steady now. A shape appeared from the darkness and elbowed Gard aside. “Ho, Senmut, is that you?” bellowed the caravan-master.

  “Still wearing this body,” the old man replied.

  Gard retreated into the ring of firelight. Light like pale cider vinegar, casting transparent shadows that camouflaged man and animal, cart and pack alike.

  “I see they let you out,” the caravan-master continued. “Discipline getting lax up at the monastery?”

  Ah. So the building on the escarpment was a monastery. That made sense; religious fanatics liked to live at the end of the world as well as at the end of their wits.

  Senmut grinned jaunt
ily. He had so many teeth his mouth resembled an ivory warehouse. “Darkness conceals many things, she-camels and she-elephants and women, so my eyes are not contaminated by the sight of them.”

  Gods! Gard exclaimed to himself; woman-hating fanatics—the worst kind. Was it not cheating to remove yourself from temptation instead of fighting it like a man? And succumbing to it like a man, some tiny voice said in that corner of his mind which Senmut had been contemplating with such interest.

  The master explained to the merchant in a stage whisper, “Place called Dhan Bagrat. No women allowed. No female animals. Not even female plants.”

  “How,” inquired the merchant, “can you tell whether a plant is female?”

  The master replied with a bawdy but good-natured joke.

  The monk listened, nodding and smiling with what Gard might have assumed was moronic affability. But after that piercing look, he knew that if the monk was anything, he was not a moron.

  In the midst of the pool of watery light, like some sea creature paddling from its lair, one of a merchant’s retinue of slave-girls began to dance. The bells on her wrists and ankles tinkled faint and shrill, not quite in time with her movements.

  An image surged from the depths of Gard’s mind; his half-demon father, Eldrafel, dancing with a grace and beauty so perfect as to be infernal, degrading those who watched . . . Senmut glanced up as if struck by the needle-sharp spray of Gard’s thought. The eyes snapped. “Hail, Lord of the Dance,” he murmured. “Hail, Leader of Souls.”

  The merchant eyed the master. The master’s forefinger traced circles in the air beside his ear. The merchant nodded in understanding.

  How in the Seven Hells did the old monk know? Gard shook himself again, his lightheadedness increasing. Catcalls greeted the girl’s performance. Several men began dicing with her owner in an effort to win her for the night. A camel driver, too eager to waste time with games of chance, secured the services of one of her sisters by the simple expedient of dropping a coin into the outstretched palm of the merchant. The buyer drove his sullen purchase into the shade of an elephant and dumped her unceremoniously onto the ground. The shadow was dark, but not quite dark enough.