The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 (49 page)

Kiriel nodded. “Telakar,” she said, without preamble, “release her.”

His grip tightened. It drew blood. She saw the crimson spill down the rise of her breast; it was dark enough that it looked like the spread of shadow. Warm shadow.

The pain followed.

Kiriel’s sword rose.

“She is my guest. Tyr’agnate,” Telakar turned to the man who ruled the Terrean. “Forgive this subterfuge. I was concerned about your ability to sense the kin; had I known who you keep as . . . guard? . . . here, I would have been less so.”

“Telakar,” Kiriel said again, her voice fuller now, louder. “Release the woman.”

Blood again, from her right shoulder this time. Spreading, absorbed by cloth. Elena was glad that she had lost her voice; she did not want to belittle Arkosa by screaming or crying. Or whimpering. The moon was sharp now, the light of it clear.

“I will release her in one way, and one way alone. You may take some joy from her corpse, but if you continue to press this, Kiriel
di’Ashaf
, it is the only thing you will have of her.”

“You cannot fight and hold her.”

“Indeed. If you force me to draw blade, I will kill her first. You have your mortals to play with, Kiriel. This one is
mine
.”

Kiriel did not blink. At all. She continued to meet Elena’s gaze, although it was to Telakar that she spoke. “You will kill her, and you will perish. Is that why you chose to come?”

“Oh, no, little Kiriel. Make no mistake. I did not intend to be so revealed in this diminished place, but I intended to deliver warning, in a fashion.”

“And that?”

“I fear that it is less relevant. Release me, and I will take my leave.”

“I do not hold you.”

Telakar was silent.

“Kiriel,” the Tyr’agar said quietly. “The Ospreys come. What would you have them do?”

She raised a brow, and the shadows dissipated. Moonlight, silver, remained across the fine porcelain of her skin. “He is
Kialli
,” she said softly, “and of necessity, no friend of ours.”

But the boy Tyr frowned. “I have seen you approach the kin before. You have never once hesitated. You have never once chosen to speak where attack was possible.”

“The
Kialli
have never held so obvious a hostage.” She turned to Valedan as an equal, her gaze intent. “Is the woman important?”

“She is important.”

“And her loss?”

He shook his head.

“You take too many risks,” she said calmly.

“And you. But this one?”

She turned to face Elena, to face Telakar. “I have not attacked because he did not. Had he desired it, he could have killed you, and ended the war in that instant; we were too far away when I . . . became aware of his presence.”

“Perhaps,” Telakar said, with an edge of amusement in his voice, “I did not recognize his import.”

She did not grace him with a reply. “It is what our enemies would have demanded, Tyr’agar. Your death. And perhaps the Tyr’agnate’s.”

Ramiro di’Callesta stepped forward. “What warning,” he said softly, “would it suit your purpose to give?” He spoke to the
Kialli
lord.

“I came with information,” he replied quietly. “First: The Tor Arkosa has risen in the Sea of Sorrows.”

Elena cried out in denial. She was bleeding now; the two wounds that were obvious were beneath notice; the third consumed her. “You cannot speak of that!”

Telakar laughed. “It may have escaped your notice, Elena Tamaraan, but you are not in a position to dictate.”

“I thank you for your information, but I confess that its meaning is not plain,” Ramiro kai di’Callesta said.

Telakar stilled. After a long pause, he said softly, “You are so diminished, and the greater part of your history has been buried more effectively than the Cities of Man. Very well, Tyr’agnate. It is a refuge of great power, a place which the
Kialli
cannot, without temerity, approach. There is knowledge there, old magic, old artifacts, that if bartered for, would make your cities a great deal safer from the incursion of the kin.”

“I . . . see.” He met Elena’s gaze; she turned away. She would not answer his questions; not about the Tor Arkosa.

Not even to save her life.

“Second,” Telakar continued, “to tell you that there are indeed demon kin within the city of Callesta; there are certainly kin, and kinlords, within the borders of Averda. Averda is a distant concern,” he added coolly, “compared to Callesta.”

“If that were true, would we not have seen evidence of their presence?” Ramiro kai di’Callesta continued, speaking softly, his gaze intent. As if demons were just another part of the political game that men of power played.

“I expect that you would see evidence, yes, but in time. I had not counted upon the quality of your . . . guards. If the kin are still present, and they are aware of just how much power resides within the walls of your city, they will bide their time.”

“There are ways,” Elena said, against her will, “to detect those who serve the Lord of Night.”

“Oh, indeed. And they are time-consuming, little one. They also depend greatly upon the kin’s inability to flee or fight. I had thought,” he said quietly, “to offer my services.”

“And in return?”

“Amusement,” Telakar replied. It was probably the only answer he could tender that would be acceptable to the Callestan Tyr. Elena saw that, now, in the lines of his face. She had not recognized him when she had first seen him; she would never forget him now. She was trapped between them, Telakar and Ramiro di’Callesta, and given a choice between the two, she was no longer certain in which direction she would run.

“My own amusement. War does not displease me, but if the odds are too uneven, it is a short and pathetic affair. I seek merely to prolong it until it reaches its inevitable conclusion.”

“And that?”

“Your defeat, of course.”

“Ah.”

But he shifted. “Kiriel di’Ashaf,” he said at last. “Will you grant me leave to depart?” He spoke coldly, but the words were softer than any he had used this eve. Certainly softer than any he had spoken to Elena.

“The woman?”

“She goes with me.”

“And if I grant you leave to remain?”

Telakar stilled. “I do not believe that such leave is yours to grant.”

It wasn’t; Elena knew it. Telakar knew it. But Kiriel did not seem to; she waited, her gaze inches above Elena’s. For the second time that eve, Elena desperately wished she could see Lord Telakar’s face.

“Tyr’agar,” Kiriel said quietly. “Tyr’agnate.”

She had their attention instantly; the titles she had chosen to invoke to gain it were of almost no import.

“Kiriel,” the Tyr’agar said. The Tyr’agnate, for his part, was silent.

Into the silence, footsteps came, like the fall of hail. His guards, she thought. Callestan Tyran. Nor was she mistaken.

“Tyr’agar,” Kiriel said again, as if the Tyran were of no concern.

“You cannot trust him.”

“No.”

“Will you release him, then?”

“To the Lord of Night and his
Kialli
lords? They can trust him even less than I,” she replied. “I believe that his destruction will aid their cause, even if they are unaware of it.”

“And you believe him when he says he came to offer warning?”

Her silence was as cold as the Callestan silence. Her eyes were once again upon Lord Telakar’s face, her gaze above Elena. “I believe him,” she said softly, gaze dropping, eyes once again meeting Elena’s. Cold comfort. Elena felt lightheaded.

“Why?”

She shook her head.

Auralis, the Northerner, stepped up to her side. Elena had heard the phrase closing ranks before, but it had always had some distant military meaning, had hinted at the neatly ordered posture of their foot soldiers, their legendary discipline and organization. The uniforms that graced the handful of men and women who had arrived at Kiriel di’Ashaf’s side were made mockery of by the disparity in their size, but they had done just that: had closed ranks.

“Tyr’agar,” Auralis said.

But the woman—the other woman—now lifted a slender hand. “Kiriel,” she said softly.

“Decarus.”

“The question?”

Kiriel shook her head.

The woman was poised to speak; the Tyr’agar simply nodded.

It was not to the liking of Ramiro di’Callesta. “Where are the kin?” he asked abruptly.

“Tell him,” Kiriel said to Telakar.

Elena’s shoulders stung. The wounds themselves had been clean: she was certain of it. But what had started as a sharp pain had spread, had become something very like a burden—one that her shoulders were no longer capable of supporting. She could feel the beat of her heart to either side of her bent neck. Her clothing was sticky.

Telakar’s words came at a distance.

“Come, come, Kiriel di’Ashaf. Not all of the
Kialli
are military creatures; some are born merchants. I do not consider myself a creature of war, although war is the crucible of preference.

“What will you give me in return for that information?”

“The value of the information you offer is not high; I am here. I found
you
.”

“Indeed. And that is curious to me, for I am almost certain that you have failed to find the others, and I can only guess that that failure has been deliberate. Of your choosing.”

Again, again the large man with the sword stepped toward them, toward Telakar, toward his shield. “Kiriel—”

“Auralis,
no
.”

This time, Auralis almost snarled. Elena didn’t understand what he chose to say; it was fast, Weston, guttural.

“We can hardly be trusted any
less
. Lord Telakar?”

“It appears you have made allies in the short time you have been absent. I would have thought it impossible, given how poorly you mingled with the human Court.” He shrugged. “What will you offer?”

Kiriel di’Ashaf was silent. For a moment. And then she smiled.

Elena swallowed. Closed her eyes. She could not step back. Could not, she thought, although she did not say it, stand for much longer. The world was losing color at the edges of her vision; night was spreading inward from all sides.

“If the information pleases me,” Kiriel replied, “and if it pleases the two men who rule these lands by mortal law, I will give you the life of the mortal you hold captive.”

“It is not yours to give,” he said coldly.

“No, but I fear that you’ve overestimated her ability to bear casual injury. It is . . . a failing . . . among the kin.”

Elena only barely understood the words.

She wondered, briefly, if she would be better off if she could actually
see
the face of the woman who had spoken them, and decided that, better or not, it didn’t matter.

The ground was a long way away.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

K
IRIEL di’Ashaf watched the stranger fall as if her injuries and her probable death were beneath concern. For a moment, they were.

Her vision had shifted again; the fires banking. She could not longer see. She saw Lord Telakar no more clearly than any mortal present could, but she
had
seen him. For a moment, for a handful of moments, she had seen his name as a fire, a nimbus of light, a thing that was woven through him, and
of
him, in a way that it could be of no other. Beauty, in that, beauty and danger, and a terrible, visceral desire. To speak the name, to speak it
well
, was to offer challenge; to win that challenge was to own it.

There were very, very few who could win that challenge; his name was a subtle binding, a thing of power far easier to destroy than subvert.

Her hand was warm; the ring, as she lifted it slightly, luminescent. Luminescent or no, Telakar’s gaze was not drawn to it; it was beneath his notice. Whatever she saw when it burned, he could not see. Comfort, there, but it was cold.

When she had first touched the ring, it had almost been beneath her, but the woman from whom it had fallen had shown the only moment of fear that Kiriel had yet seen, and she wore it to invoke that fear. To enjoy it.

She had paid. Small and perfect, it was the only cage she had ever lived in; it had taken her power. It had robbed her of self. She had been frenzied with the terror of being helpless. That frenzy could not sustain itself—or her—and she had moved from it to a terrible frustration as she was exposed, at last, to weakness and mortality: She felt the air’s humidity, the sun’s heat; she
sweated
and
burned
when she toiled, feckless, beneath it. She had always needed to sleep; she had always needed food. But the strength of those needs dismayed her.

Those, and others.

They had demeaned her.

For a while.

Her hand became fist. Closed. It had been months since she had felt the loss so sharply. She was not the power that she had been when she had dwelled within the Shining City—but her tenure there had taught her that power alone did not give her the ability to defend the things she most valued.

Aie. Loss, and here. What had her answer been?

To value nothing. To value nothing so highly that its loss could cause such a terrible, profound pain.

“Kiriel?” Auralis. Face long, almost gaunt in the evening shadow.

How weak had she become? How weak? Her first impulse had been to
send the Ospreys away
. But why? Without the certainty of her power, she needed the Ospreys. Or whatever it was they were now called.

She looked to Auralis, looked away. The Voyani woman’s knees had buckled; were it not for Telakar’s hands, she would have crumpled to the ground, struck it with chest and forehead, and lain there, still against the earth.

She wanted to tell Auralis the truth.

She had no idea how she’d been allowed to find Lord Telakar, although in the Shining City, such recognition had been the second nature upon which her life depended. Worse, she believed that he had come—for his own reasons, of course, always those—to deliver warning about the
Kialli
; believed implicitly that they existed, as he said, within the city of Callesta. Believed that he knew where they were to be found.

And worse, worst,
knew
that she would not be able to find them. Before she destroyed Telakar—if, indeed, she could in her weakened state—she wanted the information that he had come, in secrecy, to deliver.

Not for the first time, she cursed herself for her impulsive—or compulsive—behavior. She had, in triumph and joy, revealed herself too soon. Isladar had always—

No, no, no. Not here. Not here.

Valedan stepped toward the fallen woman.

Kiriel lifted a hand; touched the center of his chest. She never touched him; felt the contact as a small shock, although her hand was gloved and his chest, mailed.

“She’s dying,” he said sharply.

And she nodded. She had, after all, seen mortal death before. She knew the look of it. “Give him no other easy hostage,” she said coldly.

“I am not certain that it is as hostage that she is here,” he replied.

She shook her head.
Wait
.

And he, Tyr’agar, ruler of this vast, abundant place, nodded.

Lord Telakar frowned. His grip shifted, falling from shoulder to arms as he attempted to lift the Voyani woman to feet that had long since ceased to be able to bear her weight.

“I see that we conversed overlong,” he said quietly. “I am afraid, Kiriel di’Ashaf, that this conversation is at an end. Find the kin—or ignore them—as you choose; they are not a threat to you, and they will hardly prove a threat to those you guard. If you are vigilant.” His smile was a thing of beauty, all edge and glitter, all teeth. “Of course, if I am not mistaken, you do require sleep. How inelegant.”

Her turn; her turn to smile.

He saw it, and the ring, if it denied her all else, did not deny her this. She
smiled
.

And he, lord, kinlord, free as any of the
Kialli
could be, took a step back, shifting his grip upon his chosen burden.

“Before you flee, Lord Telakar, you might attempt what it is now clear you intend to attempt.”

He was still; he could afford to be still for only a few moments longer.

“Kai Leonne,” she said quietly, “if there is a healer who travels with you, if there is a doctor of note in the Tyr’s domicile, summon him.”

Lord Telakar growled.

Of all sounds, it was not one she expected. “I will kill them if they touch her.”

“No,” Kiriel said, the softness of the word a mockery of gentleness. “But you will kill her if they don’t.”

He hesitated. Laid bare, she reveled in his weakness. And there was more to follow: Lord Telakar touched the stranger’s face with the open palm of his hand; he took care not to pierce her skin, although his fingers left their mark. He gestured. Gestured again. The frown that grew upon his face was not so beautiful as his smile had been.

And it was. To Kiriel’s eyes, it was.

He knew, of course, but he did not choose to acknowledge it; the whole of his attention was now focused upon this stranger, this dying woman.

His left hand flew back, flew up, his palm cupped night air, moonlight, and shadow. There was a glow about it, a darkness that was beautiful as he was beautiful.

Kiriel waited.

And then, although she could not say why, she forced the smile from her lips. “Lord Telakar,” she said coldly.

His hands were in flight. His lips moved. He spoke words that should have held power; they held none. They were words, no more, and in a foreign tongue, a language that Kiriel could not understand.

Valedan moved again, steel shadow, and bright.

“Tyr’agar,” she said, remembering herself now. “Tyr’agnate.”

“Kiriel, what is happening here?” Valedan’s question was devoid of command.

She did not answer, not directly. “Lord Telakar.”

The
Kialli
lord’s hands stilled. The woman, pale and motionless, made no reply to the conversation of his movement, did not acknowledge the command in it, the insistence of its intensity.

His eyes met Kind’s over the face of the dying.

“Give her to us, and we will see to her care.”

“No.”

“Then keep her, and see to her burial.” She turned. Timed the turn, the movement of heels against the soft grass, the delicately laid stone, of the Callestan grounds. All around her, in a silence punctuated by breath, the Ospreys waited.

“Kiriel!”

She turned again. “Lord Telakar.”

“This woman is of value to her people. And if I understand her people at all, they are now of value to the men you stand among.”

She nodded.

“I . . . will allow . . . the interference of your healers.”

“Why?”

He weighed silence; weighed the passage of time. “She is mine,” he said softly.

“Ashaf was mine,” Kiriel replied. “And she was Isladar’s. And in the end, death was the only blessing granted her. I will not give this stranger to you. I will not give her over to the three days of containment.” She swallowed the harsh night air; it hurt her throat. The words were swollen there; she could not speak.

Telakar was still for a moment. Still, tasting pain, testing aura. She knew it. Braced herself for the cruelty of smile as she found her voice. “I will never again cede mortals to the kin.” The words contained a different type of shadow, a different power, than any she had spoken before. They were truth. Her truth, her chosen truth.

“Ah. And why, Daughter of Darkness? You know as well as any who have lived in the rivers of the Hells what joy lies within such a reaving.”

Time. They had no time. Kiriel shook her head; she had seen the edge of a larger truth and she wished to grasp it before it eluded her. It was almost hers. She had only one way of containing it; one way of holding it captive.

She drew the sword.

And the night was bright compared to the flat of its blade, the dark, moving surface of the things written in steel and forged by the Swordsmith. Her name was upon that blade; she saw it for the first time, although the weapon had been hers since she had stood upon the threshold of adulthood.

She drew blood; her own. The blade absorbed it; no evidence was left of the wound in either the mound of her palm or the subtle serrations of its edge.

His eyes widened.

He recognized the blood-binding; he was the only witness that would. He waited while she swore the oath that would, if broken, kill her.

“I will
never
grant it. Never again.”

“And the dark communion?”

“I am done with it,” she said, spitting the words into the night. Speaking them not to Telakar, but to a kinlord who was all of her history.

And then, of all things, Lord Telakar laughed, drawing the unconscious woman closer to his breast. “You think that I am interested in such paltry games? That I am so starved for the charnel wind and the song of the damned? You think that I would play such a game with her?”

Kiriel’s turn to frown. Valedan said something to Ramiro kai di’Callesta, but she lost the muted hush of his words; sensed only movement. Retreat.

“I am not a fool,” she told him, her hand upon the hilt of her sword. “Why else, Telakar? What other value have the mortals to the kin?”

He said, simply, “They burn.” Just that.

She spoke his name. His true name.

His eyes widened. The name itself was a whisper.

But he did not fight her. Instead, he gave her the whole of his attention, his form shifting subtly, his hold upon the stranger tightening. He bowed his head.

“I have seen the rise of the ancient Cities,” he said, speaking now in a tongue that no one but Kiriel might understand. “A gift, a gift unlooked for. They are diminished, these scions of that glory, but they are its heirs. The Cities are whole, Kiriel. They wake slowly, but when they wake, they will be a force to be reckoned with, even by the Lord we must serve.”

“He does not know where you are.”

“He has not turned his attention toward me,” Telakar replied. “But he has turned his attention to you, and you have somehow escaped his grasp.”

She shook her head. “What is mortal,” she said quietly, “cannot be bound by the mantle that the gods created. It can be killed. It can be tortured. It can be preyed upon by the powerful. But the nature of mortality—”

“Lord Isladar’s words.”

She almost lost her composure then.

“Ah, Lord Isladar,” Telakar said then, “I begin to understand.”

She didn’t. She didn’t, but she had been raised in the Shining Court, and she could not—for the paltry sake of enlightenment—expose the weakness of ignorance to the kneeling lord.

“She is mine,” he said again. “Accept that. She is mine, or she is no one’s.” The edge of his hand gleamed like steel beneath the moon’s bright face.

“And if I grant her to you, what will you offer in return? Think quickly, Lord Telakar.”

“That is not the way, Kiriel.”

“It is, here. It is, now.”

“What would you have of me?”

“Be part of
my
court,” she told him, speaking before she could think. “Be part of my court, Lord Telakar; be the first of my lords.”

“I will not be bound.”

“You are already bound.”

“Not by you, mortal. Never by you.”

Thought caught up with words. She heard movement at her back.

“Kiriel,” Valedan said, speaking in a foreign tongue, an interloper now, and unwelcome. “The healer has come.”

She lifted a hand, a call for silence. The Tyran saw her; saw Valedan fall silent. She had injured him by the simple action, and knew it.

“You served Isladar,” Kiriel told Telakar, delaying the healer, playing at death’s edge.