A Fall of Princes (39 page)

They all waited. Sarevan did not intend to speak first. He
glanced at the scroll nearest: a treatise on the arts of the dark.

His grandfather the Red Prince had made him read it. “A mage
must know all the uses of his power,” Prince Orsan had said.

“And its abuses,” Sarevan had countered.

“The dark arts are not abuse of power. They are as native to
it as the arts of the light; but where light heals, the dark destroys.”

“I would never fall so low,” Sarevan had declared. “My blood
is Sun-blood. The dark is my sworn enemy. I will always heal; I will never
destroy.”

He smiled now, bitterly, remembering. He had been too proud
of himself. And now he was here, traitor to Keruvarion, facing the master of
the guild that had turned its back on his father.

“Because,” said its master, “he would have constrained us to
his will alone. We will not deny the dark; we will not ban the practice of its
arts. That would be to deny the world’s balance.”

Sarevan held himself still. The man had read his face, that
was all. His mind was barred as firmly as ever, despite all assaults upon it.
“I have heard,” he said, “that you will ban the arts of light and turn
altogether to the dark.”

“There are those who would do so, out of greed or out of
bitterness. I am not one of them.”

“And yet you suffer them.”

“While they obey me, I do not cast them out.”

“Even though they work abominations in the name of their
magic?”

“What are abominations, prince? Refusal to deny their gods
and worship Avaryan? Insistence upon their own rites and prayers? Resistance to
laws which they reckon tyranny?”

“If it is tyranny to forbid the slaughter of children,”
answered Sarevan, “yes. I know what rites you speak of. The Midwinter
sacrifice. The calling up of the dead and the feeding of the gods below. The
making of Eyes of Power.”

The master folded his long beautiful hands. He wore a ring,
a topaz.

Sarevan shivered a little. He could no longer abide topazes.

Quietly the mage said, “The world is not gentle. Nor are the
gods. If they must have blood, then blood they will have. It is not for us to
judge them.”

“We contend that they demand no blood. That that is human
avarice and cruelty and grasping after power.”

“Is your Avaryan pure, prince? Has he spurned the blood shed
in his name? Did he spare even his bride the pain of death?”

“Human cruelty, guildmaster. Human envy and betrayal.”

“The worse for those who perpetrated it, that they had no
god to make their bloodshed holy.”

Sarevan sat back, stroking his beard: sure sign of his
tension, but he could not stop it. “Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe you are. Balance
could be another name for spinelessness. Avaryan has made himself known in the
world; no other god has done that. No other god will. There is none but the
one.”

“Save, by your belief, his sister. The dark to his light.
The ice to his fire. The silence to his great roar of power. The other side of
his self.”

“That is Asanian teaching. We say that they are separate. He
has chained her, lest she plunge the world into everlasting night.”

“Or lest she prevent him from tipping the balance. The sun
gives life yet also destroys it. Excess of light condemns a man to blindness.”

“Not if he be pure of soul.”

“Are you, prince?”

“Hardly.” Sarevan smiled, little more than a grimace. “If I
were, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be Journeying in blissful ignorance, or kinging
it in Ianon.”

The master was silent. Waiting.

Sarevan let him have that victory. “Yes. Yes, I doubt my
god. I wonder if my father is mad. If the Asanians, after all, worship the
truth: twofold Uvarra who is above the gods.”

“Have you come to me for an answer?”

Sarevan laughed sharply. “I spent an hour in Uvarra’s
temple. It’s much like all the others. Crusted with jewels, fogged with
incense, infested with priests who know no god but gold. The image of the deity
would rouse blushes in a Suvieni brothel. And yet,” he said, “and yet, for all
of that, when I bowed down and prayed to Avaryan, a madness struck me. I
thought it was Uvarra who heard. Uvarra of the light and Ivuryas of the dark,
all one. And the dark was beautiful, guildmaster. It called to me. It offered
me my power, the dark power which I refused and which is still within me, if
only I will free it.”

“There is no law which forbids the gods to lie.”

“Precisely my response,” said Sarevan. “But if I can taste a
lie, I can also taste the truth. And there I tasted truth.”

“There is always a price.”

“Of course. And for this, my mother’s life and my father’s
heart. I refused. It was too easy, mage. Much too easy.” Sarevan leaned across
the table. “Choices should be difficult. I think I’ve yet to be given one. I
know you have something to do with it.”

“How do you know that?”

Sarevan frowned. It hurt. He cradled his head in his hands.
“Maybe the god drives me: whichever god is the true one. Maybe I’m mad. I think
I’ve been chosen for something. If only for a traitor’s death.”

“Are you asking for a foreseeing?”

“I am asking for the truth. I know what I’ve done and why I
did it. But it’s been too smooth, mage. Too simple. I think I’ve had help that
hasn’t chosen to uncover itself.”

The master raised his brows. “Indeed?”

“Indeed,” said Sarevan, throttling his impatience. The
tactics of the sword worked wonders with Asanian courtiers, but this was a
mage, in that mage’s own demesne. He chose his words with care. “Consider. A
trap laid in Asanion; a prince’s pride caught in it, his power taken from him.
A hunt through two empires by a mighty master of power, who could find nothing;
but an Eye of Power found the one for whom it was meant. Chance, maybe; a god’s
inscrutable will. But for two princes and two seneldi and an ul-cat to pass
through the heart of Keruvarion, under the eye of the Sunborn, with treason on
their minds—for them to pass so, with no whisper of their passing, no rumor of
their betrayal, no sign of a hunt raised against them, that is not chance. That
is magecraft.”

“Or skillful deception.”

“No,” said Sarevan. “It takes power to lie to my father.
Power, and great bravery. And someone has done it. Someone ventured to cover my
going; to open my road through Keruvarion.”

“We are not the only mages in the world.”

“You are the only mages, aside from the Sun-priests in
Endros, who gather together under a firm rule. And they would never have woven
this web: it smacks too much of treason against my father. The little prince is
part of it. He professes not to be the master of it; and that’s unlikely enough
to be true. He’s no servant, he’s serving himself and no one else, but at the
moment it suits him to be a loyal conspirator. He’d not be loyal to anyone whom
he didn’t at least pretend to respect.”

“You see great complexities in what may be no more than luck
and chance and a prince’s plotting.”

“Maybe I do. I’m a prince myself; I’m an only son. I’m
spoiled. Indulge me.” Sarevan smiled his whitest smile. “Your people can have
no love for my father. He was too inflexible with them. Either he would rule
them or they would leave his empire. They chose exile. Now suppose,” he said,
“that some of them have seen a path of both revenge and peace. A conspiracy. To
deny him his war, rob him of his heir, and in the end, it may be, to have their
own country back again. With the Sunborn safely dead and someone young,
malleable, and comfortably powerless to stand in his place.”

“Logical,” the master said.

Sarevan bowed to the tribute. “My insanity has been a
godsend. I’m not only well out of the way; I’m in debt to your plotting. Don’t
you think it’s time for a truth or two? A man can’t pay a debt if he doesn’t
even know to whom he owes it.”

“If you knew,” inquired the master, “would you be willing to
pay?”

“That depends. There may be more to this web than I’ve been
allowed to see. It may lead to a blacker infamy even than I’m willing to
stomach.”

“Have your deeds been as vile as that?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

The guildmaster smiled. “I was warned, Sun-prince. Your
father is called the greatest courtesan in Keruvarion, but there are many who
would contest that primacy; who would give it to Sarevan Is’kelion.”

“Would you?”

The smile widened a fraction. “The Sunborn does not know
that he is beautiful.”

“He knows that he has never betrayed a trust.”

The silence sang, hurting-sweet. Slowly the master said, “He
has never been forced to choose. I envy that certainty. I would that it had
been granted to me.”

“Neither of us is the son of a god.”

The master’s head bowed. “This much, high prince, I can give
you. A web has been spun about you. I will not say that you are the center of
it. There is more to the world and the power than a pair of warring empires. Yet
what you have done has been woven into the pattern.”

“And the pattern?”

“You have seen it.”

Sarevan rose. He leaned on his hands, keeping temper at bay,
willing a smile over his clenched teeth. “You have told me nothing that I did
not already know. Do you expect me to leave and be content?”

The master looked up at him, resting cool eyes on his
burning face. “You were not born for contentment. I would give you what you ask
for, or as much as concerns you, yet I may not.” And as Sarevan straightened,
thunderous: “Not yet. I am the Master of the Guild. No more than the Prince
Aranos do I command my allies. That is given to no one of us. I must speak with
the rest; I must win their consent before I uncover our secrets.”

Sarevan snorted in disgust. “What did you model this mummery
on? The Syndics of the Nine Cities?”

“Any tribe in the north is so ruled. Keruvarion’s emperor
himself pays heed to his lords in council.”

“But in the end he rules,” said Sarevan. “So. You have to
agree to make me part of what I’ve been part of since it began. You’ll pardon
me if I feel used. And ill-used, at that.”

The master spread his hands. “Prince. It shall be redressed.
That I promise you.”

Sarevan turned his hand palm up on the table. It burned and
blazed. “On this?”

The master drew a breath as if in apprehension. He touched a
finger to the
Kasar
. A spark leaped; he drew back. “Upon your power,” he
said.

Sarevan’s fist clenched. Its pain was no greater for the
mage’s touch, though the man looked pale and shaken, as if he had gained more
than he bargained for. “I accept your promise.”

“It shall be kept,” the master said. “And you shall have as
much of the truth as you may. I will speak with my allies. When it is done,
have I your leave to summon you?”

Sarevan considered the mage, and his words, and his honor.
“You have my leave,” he said.

o0o

Sarevan had his honest miracle. Hirel had been not merely
civil to Sarevan after their quarrel. He had been magnanimous. He had been
princely. He had chosen to forgive even the most bitter of Sarevan’s words.

Sarevan found it harder to forgive himself. It was not Hirel
who told him what had become of Vuad and Sayel.

A courtier related it, half in admiration, half in
incredulity: how the princes had languished shaven-headed in a cell of the emperor’s
prisons, and how after a night and a day in which they went well-nigh out of
their wits with dread of the gelders’ coming, Hirel himself had come with a
choice. A life of ease and power as eunuchs of the Lower Court in the far
reaches of the empire, or a tour of duty as officers of the imperial army, with
the strong likelihood of falling in battle, but the chance also of surviving to
regain their rank and their brother’s favor.

Vuad had found the choice ridiculously easy. Sayel, it was
said, had wavered. But Sayel was not well loved in the Golden Courts. He had
gone with his brother to serve on the marches of the east; and before they
left, they swore great oaths of loyalty to their high prince.

o0o

Hirel was in the harem when Sarevan looked for him, doing
his duty by his twice ninescore concubines. It was just, Sarevan conceded, that
he should have to wait, and for such a cause. He did not have to like it.

He prowled his own rooms. He prowled Hirel’s. He drank
rather more wine than he needed, and worked it off in a heated mock battle with
Zha’dan. He came very close to deciding that Hirel did not deserve an apology.

The wine was stronger than Sarevan had expected. It made him
see what he should do: and that was outrageous. It kept him from hanging back.

He had a little sense. He left Zha’dan in Hirel’s rooms,
rebellious but subdued. Ulan would be guard enough, and would be less likely to
pay in blood.

They passed the empty courtyards and traversed an
unfrequented passage. Today no sweet voices called through hidden lattices.
Sarevan strode beyond them on ways that he had not taken before.

The Golden Palace stood in two worlds. The outer was all of
men and eunuchs. The inner was all of women and eunuchs.

The unmanned walked freely in both. A whole man walked
within only where he was unquestioned master: only among the women who were his
own.

Sarevan was alien in the outer world. In the inner, there
was no word for him. The women who dwelt there had never seen sky unbounded by
walls. They had never stood face to face with any man but father or brother or
master. Husband, few of them could claim. Not here, where every one of fifty
princes had his proper number of concubines.

Sarevan had learned what every concubine prayed for. That
her lord might marry, for then by custom he might set her free. Or better far,
that she might bear him a son. Then was she not only freed; she gained honor
and power among the ladies of the palace.