The Hidden Stars Read online

  A flock of birds flew overhead, dark against the reddening sky, and as the shadow of their wings passed over, two of the horses squealed and pulled at their pickets.

  Ruan’s head came suddenly up; his nose wrinkled, and his lip curled as though he, like the horses, caught a whiff of some unpleasant odor that eluded the others. The flock wheeled in a great circle, hanging briefly silhouetted against the round yellow face of the moon, and the Prince sprang to his feet, calling out a warning. “Wyvaerun—and they have seen us!”

  He and his guards all drew steel; the wizard reached for his staff. The horses stamped and whinnied their alarm. Sindérian darted looks in all directions, seeking some weapon with which to arm herself, something more effective than her small ivory-handled eating knife.

  But it was already too late. With thin piercing shrieks, the wyvaerun descended: black wings beating, iron beaks and claws slashing, scaly tails glittering in the ruddy light of sunset. A creature the size of an eagle died on the point of Aell’s blade; Jago beheaded another. Prince Ruan’s sword flashed in the dusky air, accounting for two with a single stroke, and Faolein’s staff burst into flame. For a moment, the wyvaerun bated and rose, hovering overhead, but then they attacked with redoubled fury.

  Raking talons struck at Sindérian’s face; she ducked to avoid them, and flung up her knife to ward off the next attack. But somehow, Prince Ruan and his sword were between her and the wyvaerun, reducing the creature to a heap of oily feathers and bloody scales. “For the Light’s sake, keep down,” he hissed at her furiously. “A blade that size is no use at all.” Then he turned his back on her and killed two more of the hybrids.

  Remembering, suddenly, the stream nearby, Sindérian slid down the grassy bank to the water’s edge. Bending low, she snatched up small stones from the shallow streambed, sent them whistling through the air with a spell of true-aiming. Four of her missiles struck home, killing two wyvaerun, and disabling two more.

  But as she reached for another stone, there was a storm of wings overhead, and steely claws fastened in her hair and cloak. Struggling to pull herself free, she felt herself lifted off the grass and into the air. And there she hung suspended, panic drumming in her blood, for what seemed like hours—six feet—eight feet—a dozen feet above the ground, with wings beating like thunder all around her, the musty serpentine odor of the hybrid filling her throat and lungs, and the wyvaerun, laboring under her added weight, striving to rise higher and still higher—

  Until Faolein’s flaming staff flew like a meteor through the night air and struck the creature dead. Sindérian heard the creature’s dying shriek, like rending metal, at the same moment the claws lost their grip; and she felt herself falling, helpless to stop her sudden descent.

  Then she hit the earth with such bruising force that the wind was knocked out of her and the world went dark.

  8

  On the night before the day he was to sail for Mirizandi, Prince Cuillioc was vexed and troubled by a remarkably vivid and unpleasing dream.

  For it seemed to him, as he drifted off to sleep in his great silver bed, that a nightmare—a little wizened bat-winged creature with basilisk eyes and tiny wrinkled hands—flew in through a high, arched window and sat gibbering atop one of the bedposts for all the long hours between midnight and dawn.

  There was little of sense to be gained from its rambling discourse, which climbed the scale from hysteria to delirium. Yet every now and again, as it chattered and stammered, while Cuillioc lay helpless and motionless under the brocade coverings and the silken canopy—unable to speak, to stir, to wake—he seemed to divine some secret, sinister meaning mixed in with all the nonsense. At cockcrow, the creature vanished. Released from its spell, the Prince sat up in bed, all quaking and sweating, threw off the bedclothes, and called for light.

  The house slaves came in, soft-footed across the tile floors, bearing flaming torches dipped in scented oils to perfume the air. They offered him potions and cordials to drive off the night-fears, brought him heated water in a malachite bowl. He sent them all away, muffled himself up in a great cloak, and went out to the balcony that opened from his bedchamber, to watch the sun rise over Apharos.

  The air was cool and very clear; as intoxicating sweet as wine. This was the one time of day when Ouriána’s capital was touched by beauty: the thorny towers and dagger-pointed obelisks burning crimson and gold, the tangled maze of lanes and alleys flooded with a warm orange light. On the rooftops and upper ledges of the great houses the stone monsters stretched their gilded wings as if poised to take flight; and, a mile to the south, that greater monstrosity which was the New Temple glittered with rare jewel-like colors. It was as though a kindly spell lay, however briefly, over Apharos—a transformation that seldom failed to raise Prince Cuillioc’s spirits. But the horror of the dream was still on him, cold serpents of fear still writhed in his belly, and it would have taken more than the sight of his city flaming into sudden beauty to raise the oppression that weighed on him.

  It was more than a hundred feet from the balcony where Cuillioc watched the sunrise to the hard dark stones of the courtyard below—and another hundred to a grove of wind-bent olives and plane trees below that—and a hundred more to the base of the cliffs, where the sea boiled white between jagged rocks. For the palace at Apharos is built upon a rocky spit of land, surrounded on three sides by water during a high tide. Nine great towers of rough-hewn dark marble perch on the heights, with gardens and orchards, groves, fountains, vineyards, and bowers descending in terraces on the south, east, and west, all enclosed within a mighty curtain wall shimmering with plates of beaten gold. It was built (some say) in imitation of that ancient citadel, now in ruins, which once stood at Ceir Eldig, the City of Princes, in Alluinn.

  At that hour, every sound seemed magnified: the pounding of the surf, the beating of his own blood, the shrill morning chorus of blackbirds in the grove below. Then a party of horsemen came riding round the curve of the bay from the harbor, passed through the gate of ivory and horn, and clattered through the stony streets. From Cuillioc’s vantage point on the balcony, he could just make out their colors of lavender and purple, though he was unable to recognize the devices. Nevertheless, their very haste was ominous. Remembering his dream, he felt another stir of apprehension; his hand closed hard on the marble railing.

  They disappeared from view behind the bulk of the hill; moments later, he heard armored fists hammering on the palace gate. Someone replied faintly from within. While the Prince strained to hear, words were exchanged, questions asked and answered. Then he heard timbers scraping, iron hinges creaking as the gate swung open, followed by the clamor of iron-shod hooves on flagstones as the men rode through.

  He was eating a halfhearted breakfast—spiced wine and honeycakes and small yellow grapes—when the summons arrived. A page in Ouriána’s livery stumbled through the doorway and out onto the balcony, breathless after the climb. The boy wheezed out a message: the Empress would see Prince Cuillioc.

  Springing up from his seat, Cuillioc brushed past the messenger. He entered his torchlit bedchamber, calling out for shaving water, his sword, his boots—He dressed swiftly, turning aside all offers of assistance. There was no time for ceremony. This early audience was almost without precedent, and he feared that something had occurred to arouse his mother’s displeasure.

  Buckling on his sword belt, he left the room, took the long spiral staircase to the ground floor, and emerged in a shadowy courtyard. The walls were so high, there were places where the sun rarely came; aconite, toadstool, mousefoot, and other strange funguses flourished in the damp shade. He followed a mossy pathway, passed through an avenue of yew and dark cypress struggling toward the sunlight, and came at last to the massive block of the central tower, which he entered through a high, narrow door.

  Despite the early hour, large groups of courtiers and officials had gathered in the wide corridors, looking interested and excited. Their garments, of silk and cloth of silver, of velvets
cunningly embroidered, displayed the new heraldry that honored the Empress, and was therefore watery and lunar: crabs, crayfish, clamshells, lymphads, the moon in all her phases, fish, eels, crocodiles. The hues were reds and purples, golds and oranges, sable and grey, a heraldry of subtle shadings, of intricate devices displayed on seal rings and brooches, on the borders of garments, stitched color on color—a heraldry of the court, meant to be appreciated at close quarters, not for the battlefield, where they all wore Ouriána’s colors and fought under her banner.

  As Cuillioc strode past, he heard voices rise to a greater pitch of excitement, saw faces avid with curiosity turn his way. He did not stop to learn what it was all about—yet again his stomach clenched tight with apprehension; a cold sweat came out on his skin.

  Outside the audience chamber, he paused for a moment to catch his breath and steady himself. If something had occurred to make his sailing impossible—if the Empress had decided to replace him as commander of the expedition—but no, he had done nothing these last weeks that could have possibly displeased her; there was no way he could have fallen even further from favor than he already was. Yet his pulse pounded, and his palms grew slick with sweat as he entered the immense chamber, walked past the guards, and passed between long rows of pearl-encrusted pillars leading up to the dais.

  Ouriána’s lovely face was blank, unreadable, as Cuillioc threw himself down kneeling on the top step, and she gave him, at arm’s length, her cool white hand.

  “Empress and Goddess,” he whispered, around the constriction in his throat. He pressed her long, smooth fingers reverently to his lips, then released them. “Have I offended?”

  There was a pause before she answered—hardly more than the pause between breath and breath, though it seemed to Cuillioc to last an age. As always, he was tremulous and amazed, as men must be in the presence of a goddess, even her own sons—almost afraid to look at her, for the dread of what he might see. It was a fearful thing to be the son of a divinity and mere mortal clay himself.

  At last, turning away with a little disdainful shrug, she said, “Your brother Guindeluc conquered nine cities for me before he died, but what have you done? You have lost me Quirabon!”

  Cuillioc’s head came up abruptly. His eyes met hers: greener than his own, with golden lights, and velvety-dark lashes. Not a line, not a blemish marred the smooth perfection of her skin, which glowed faintly in the dim chamber; yet looking into those eyes one could guess at her age; they held too much knowledge, too much experience. Oceans existed in her gaze, vast seas filled with living things: fish and whales, turtles, porpoises, eels, rays, and sinuous sea worms.

  “It was I who took Quirabon,” he said, stumbling over the words, though at last he understood what news the horsemen brought with them at dawn: the great city he had gained after a long, bitter siege seven months ago had changed hands once more. He felt himself go cold with shame at the realization he had disappointed her again.

  Ouriána sat down on her throne, which was decorated with seashells and coral, with bits of carved whalebone and silvery freshwater pearls. Her gown was of velvet, the luminous yellow-gold of the harvest moon; and gemstones—opals and moonstones and pearls—glittered in the heavy coils of her rich auburn hair. There was a sweet, almost cloying scent about her, which dizzied and confused him, making him think of strange hothouse flowers opening their white fleshy petals, or of bright many-tentacled anemones swaying in mermaid gardens under the sea.

  And just as it always did, her beauty wounded him like a knife, but crueler still was the edged contempt in her voice, in her words. “It was because you gave too easy terms when Lord Deryx surrendered that he and his men were able to take the city back.”

  Where he had been cold before, the Prince felt himself blushing hotly. And the words came tumbling out before he could stop them. “They were honorable terms. If we expect our foes to deal honorably with us—”

  “They were generous terms. You must learn, my son, that there is no place for generosity in war. Had Deryx and his sons been executed—or sent here to Phaôrax prisoners, as Guindeluc might have done it—we should have avoided another long, bloody, and wasteful battle. And so, for that matter, had the unfortunate people of Quirabon. Sometimes, one must be cruel to be kind.”

  Cuillioc felt himself flushing even more painfully than before; he started to speak, but the words withered on his tongue. There was nothing that he could say, for he knew that she spoke the truth: Guindeluc had had his chivalrous impulses, too—all the world spoke of his magnanimity, his open-handed noble courtesy—but he had always tempered that with wisdom and foresight. Lacking these qualities, Cuillioc’s attempts to emulate the brother he worshiped almost invariably fell short and produced some disaster.

  He remained on his knees, heartsick and shaken, waiting for his mother to speak the words that would crush his hopes. And he was suddenly aware that they were not alone. Two Furiádhin stood about twenty feet from the dais, grim, ghostly, and powerful in their crimson robes, flanked by a half-dozen acolytes in sooty black cloaks. They had not been there when he first entered the room.

  Ouriána raised her hand, and one of the priests mounted the steps with a rustle of scarlet silk. There were those who could hardly tell the creatures apart, who found them, in spite of their deformities, confusingly identical, with their bone-white faces and cloudy hair. But Cuillioc was not of that number, he knew them each one. He knew this one particularly well, one who dogged his mother’s footsteps on all occasions.

  “If you are an honorable fool, you brother Meriasec is an overconfident one,” the Empress told her son coldly. “There is not much to choose between you, if the truth were known. But now that Guindeluc is gone, you are the eldest—therefore my heir. It would not be wise to show a lack of faith in you; that might give our enemies too much to hope for. You will go to Mirizandi as I had originally planned, and you will retain the command. However, I am going to send an…advisor…with you. One on whom you may utterly rely for wise counsel, given without flattery or fear.” She turned, then, toward the priest. “Can you be ready to sail at the change of the tide this evening?”

  The furiádh prostrated himself before the throne. Cuillioc jumped to his feet and stood scowling down at him. “Iobhar? If you must send someone, why not Camhóinhann?”

  “Camhóinhann serves me best where he is. Should I recall him from his vital work elsewhere to suit your whim?” she said. As the priest rose gracefully to his feet, between Ouriána and her votary there passed a look, sudden, then gone; but Cuillioc saw it, and his heart sank. “Surely you can have no objection to Iobhar…or to anyone else I might decide to send with you.”

  The Prince could only bow his head, biting his lip almost until the blood came, for it was plain that the matter had already been settled.

  In the late afternoon, the Prince and his household went down to the courtyard outside the stables, where their horses were saddled and waiting. A pair of glossy black ravens settled on an archway, and watched with wicked yellow eyes as they rode out the gate.

  On his high-mettled silver stallion, Cuillioc moved through the complex maze of the city, going by chosen byways and streets less crowded and dirty. He rode in a brooding silence, looking neither to left or right, his mind much occupied with his dream. Some instinct told him there was a connection between his nightmare and the ambiguous prophecies of the old madman, Maelor.

  Look for a knife in every hand, poison in every cup, so said Maelor. Such were the stock phrases of the mountebank, as the Prince knew very well, trite and familiar. In this case, however, they rang true.

  Many of the lords who would sail with the fleet were men whom he could not trust. But that was nothing. There were only a handful in all Apharos that he did trust, and all were members of his own household. Men of honor, men of courage, men of integrity, the war had claimed far too many of them over the years, and those few who had survived were scattered across the map, fighting Ouriána’s battles, governing
conquered cities. And from the horde of petty schemers who made up her court, men of large ambitions and small talents, the Empress had chosen a half dozen, no better or worse than the rest, to accompany her son. Knowing them for what they were, he would be on his guard: but he did not fear any of them as he feared the priest, Iobhar.

  The Furiádhin had strange powers. Riding toward the harbor, under the baleful gaze of snakes and gargoyles, Cuillioc considered what he knew of Ouriána’s warrior-priests. They were no longer quite human. For the lame, the sick, the deformed, a man ought to feel compassion, but the Furiádhin had chosen to be as they were, had made themselves monstrous.

  Yet, the Prince thought confusedly, by doing so they served the Empress. Certain magics had their price, and her priests paid that price so that Ouriána—goddess though she was, imprisoned in a mortal body—need not pay it, ever.

  But, he reminded himself, they also served their own ambitions, their own hunger for power. Only Camhóinhann, the High Priest, was free of that taint, and over the years Cuillioc’s boyhood infatuation, his admiration for that great and tragic figure, had gradually waned. Camhóinhann, too, was a monster, though a splendid one, a glorious one. The other eight—those of the original twelve who were left after the disaster in the Cadmin Aernan nineteen years ago—they were simply loathsome.

  When Cuillioc reached the harbor, it was all hustle and bustle: wagons and oxcarts, barrows and pushcarts, went in and out, bringing supplies for the fleet. The Prince’s flagship, already provisioned, rode at anchor out in the bay, her scarlet sails furled and her sixty pair of oars at rest, and another galley of similar size was just being towed with much labor clear of the docks, by two small rowboats.

  When Cuillioc dismounted, handing the reins over to one of his grooms, he saw a sudden flurry of movement on the ceremonial barge that was to take him out to his ship. Apparently, no one had told them he was on his way. Waiting for all to be made ready, he glanced around him, and despite everything he felt his mood lighten, for the brawling life of the docks never failed to interest him.