Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
Shadow Walker
by Michael Wallace
Copyright ©2020 Michael Wallace
Balsalom Publishing
Cover art by Félix Ortiz
Welcome to a fantasy world torn by demons and demigods, where Narina, a sword master of the Bladedancer Temple, is called to join a larger conflict: the rise of the legendary Sword Saint, a warrior with the ability to single-handedly defeat an entire army.
The Sword Saint Series:
Book One: Sword Saint
Book Two: Crowlord
Book Three: Shadow Walker
Book Four: Bladedancer
Chapter One
Andras and Ruven were feeding the dogs when Narina approached carrying a leather-wrapped bundle clenched protectively to her chest. The ratters had set a number of traps during the night and caught two rabbits, some sort of winged night squirrel, and a pair of rats, which they’d set about cutting into pieces and sharing among the four terriers and two lurchers in the pack. The dogs fell upon the food, tearing it apart and then squabbling over the remains as if they were starving.
Which, to a certain extent, they were. Andras’s own stomach ached with hunger, and he noted the way his son eyed the rabbits as they were cutting them apart. Ruven was hoping his father would hold back at least one of them to spit and roast. No time for that. Couldn’t risk a campfire, either. Anyway, as hungry as they were, the dogs needed the food more.
Narina had bathed, and her hair gleamed, still damp, in a knot behind her head. Her clothes were clean, too; every morning she washed one set of clothing and changed into the other. She’d tied off her leggings to her kid leather shoes and buffed out the scuffs on her leather belt.
Andras wiped his knife on the grass and sheathed it, then rubbed his hands on the ground to clean off the animal blood. His clothes were filthy, covered with dirt and flecks of blood, and they still smelled strongly of the smoke from the mountains more than two weeks after descending onto the plains. He’d meant to get up early to wash, but he was always so bone weary that he could barely manage to put himself on the road every morning. Narina seemed to be surviving on about four hours of rest; how she managed, he had no idea.
She opened her arms slowly to show him what she was carrying. Her tone was reluctant. “I need you to carry this.”
Andras looked over the bundle, which was wrapped in thongs. He guessed from its size and shape what it was, and wanted nothing to do with it.
“Where did you get leather and cords?” he asked.
“Foraged. Remember the mill we passed yesterday evening? I doubled back this morning to have a closer look. Don’t worry, it was abandoned, mostly looted already—I didn’t rob anyone to get it.”
Andras frowned as he tried to think of when she might have gone back. The mill had to be two miles away by now.
They’d taken refuge last night in a small copse of brush and saplings growing at the bottom of an abandoned irrigation canal. It had taken effort to cut their way into the brush, in part because there had been soldiers about, and they’d needed to work in silence. Riders, too, had been moving up and down the road. At least three nearby encampments, plus a fair number of peasants and villagers, were on the move, all churning to mud the rice paddies and vegetable gardens of the people who’d lived nearby.
“When?” he asked.
“Last night. I couldn’t sleep. Spent some time scouting around, reading the auras.” She thrust the bundle at him. “Take it.”
He kept his hands at his sides. “I really don’t. . .what is the point?”
“The point is a bit of separation. So I won’t be tempted.”
“But if you want it, I can’t possibly keep you from taking it back,” he protested.
“That is obvious enough.” Her voice was sharp, as if she’d wanted to add a nasty comment and only just stopped herself. She took a deep breath. “We’re going through a village after breakfast. I can’t have my swords—my father’s swords—dangling at my waist. They’ll be in my hands and cutting off some poor fool’s head before I can think twice, all because he gave me a suspicious frown.”
“All that means is that you’ll go through me first. How is that any better? You’ll have your swords one way or another.”
Narina seized his wrist and shoved the bundle against his chest. He had no choice but to take it. For something so lethal, the bundle felt surprisingly light. She’d killed dozens of crowlord soldiers already, slaughtered Lord Zoltan himself, and even cut down another sword temple sohn, a firewalker by the name of Tankred who’d followed her from Riverrun and ambushed her.
“I’m not asking you to resist,” Narina said. “You cannot possibly struggle successfully against me. If I ask for the swords, you will hand them over at once.”
“Can I give them back now, in anticipation?”
“The point is only to delay me a moment.”
“We could delay by returning you to the bladedancer temple.”
She ignored him and continued. “Just a moment of reflection—I hope that will be sufficient. A brief instant where I have to look around for the swords, realize you have them, and hopefully regain control of my sowen before I’ve drawn my blades and killed a dozen people.”
“See, if we go into the mountains, get past the volcanoes, your people can help. Kozmer has got to know something, and your sister is there, too, right? They could cure you of this curse somehow.”
“I’m more dangerous than ever, you see.”
“Oh, I believe you, which is why—”
“Good, then it’s time to set out. We have several miles to go by midday, if my reading of the auras is correct. Prepare your son and dogs for a swift march.”
Ruven made a little noise, and Andras glanced over. He’d almost forgotten about his son in his reluctance to be Narina’s weapons bearer. The boy squatted to pick burrs out of the terriers’ coats. The lurchers, with their flat fur and taller profiles, weren’t as affected. Ruven had looked up at the mention of another hard march and now met his father’s gaze with a despairing shake of the head.
Andras cleared his throat loudly. “You mentioned breakfast first.”
“Yes, of course. I know the pair of you can’t draw sustenance from the air.”
And you can? Andras thought. What was fueling this incredible burst of energy?
“The thing is,” he said, “we need food.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“I feel faint myself, and my son is only ten. He can’t keep this up. I know what you say—we’re safer with you than on our own.”
She gave him a sharp look. “Are you doubting that?”
“Sure, we’re safe from soldiers and the like. Of course. But starvation is another matter. We’re at our limit, Narina. We can’t keep going without food.”
“Didn’t you check your pack?”
“We ate the last of it day before yesterday,” Andras said. “There’s nothing to check for.”
“I went foraging during the night—didn’t you get that part? What do you think I was doing out there? Go on, take a look. Should be enough for the both of you.”
Andras moved swiftly to the satchel he’d been hauling, filled with its salves and ointments, needles and threads, scraps of cloth, flint and steel for fires, and so on. Plus provisions, of course—when they existed. The bag had been light of these the last few days. Now, he could see the bulge in it. Somehow he’d missed that. He carefully set down the leather-wrapped bundle containing Narina’s swords and threw open the bag.
There was a bounty inside: apples and hard rounds of cheese, cured boar sausage, a half-loaf of bread, a small clay jar stopped up with wax that seemed to contain either honey or marmalade, a small wicker basket containing rice, already cooked, and strips of dried beef wrapped in cloth. There were dried peas, beans, and uncooked rice that could be prepared later, but what was ready to eat was itself a small feast. Ruven came and looked over his shoulder, gaping.
Andras looked up at Narina. “How did you. . .? There’s no village to buy these things within twenty miles, and every farmhouse has been ransacked.”
“People store things, hide them. I seem to have developed a talent for sniffing them out. They bend the auras, or. . .something.” A slight frown crossed her face. “Things look different to me, now. I can’t explain it, but I’m changing.”
Andras and Ruven fell onto the food, demolishing the bread and apples first. They moved on to the boar sausage, then used their fingers to shovel the cooked rice into their mouths. As father and son ate, Narina stood a few paces off. Not only was she not taking her share, but she didn’t look particularly tempted. The look she gave them was the same that Ruven wore when the dogs tore apart a rat.
“Don’t eat it all at once, though,” she warned. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
#
The strange thing about hunger, Andras thought as he trudged along a few minutes later with his belly full and a warm glow diffusing through his body, was how it could blot out almost any other emotion. He supposed if he’d been held under water, the need for air would have been greater, and there was an exhaustion at the end of every day on the road that could not be denied. Apart from that, he’d been obsessing about food.
Starving dogs, no matter how obedient and gentle when fed, had been known to turn on their master and eat him. They would feel terrible afterward, of course, but nothing would stop that ravenous hunger when its edge was sharp enough. It was part of the reason he’d fed his ratting dogs that morning instead of himself and his son. The dogs had also eaten less than the humans during the past week, and were showing signs of collapse. He’d only hoped to find something later in the day to keep himself and his son from fainting.
Now that his hunger was finally, gloriously sated, his mind shifted to other fears. They were in the heart of Zoltan’s fiefdom, and the remnants of the crowlord’s armies seemed to have thrown in with Damanja’s forces to fight off an invasion from Lord Balint. He’d expected the invasion to collapse when Narina killed the firewalker and Balint’s elite cavalry, but Andras’s former master was proving more resilient than expected.
The entire countryside was still in an uproar, and there was no sign of peasants returning to their lands. Fields and farms had been abandoned and destroyed for miles around, which meant that famine would soon be stalking the land, which the people they passed seemed to know. No peasant would abandon his land unless the threat was severe.
The point was, three travelers and a few dogs faced tremendous risk, and here they were trudging openly down a village lane, through an area infested with potential enemies. Smoke rose to the east, in the direction they were headed, and he heard the blare of a distant trumpet, this time coming from the south.
They came across an overturned cart, a dead cow—or what was left of it after someone had butchered it for meat—and later a human body lying in the ditch. Hard to tell if it was man, woman, or child, as the crows had picked it over. Andras gently told Ruven to look ahead and not at the body, but the boy was unable to stop gaping.
“You should take back your weapons,” he told Narina when they were past.
The bladedancer walked a few feet ahead, with one of the terriers pacing her. She didn’t turn around. “I thought we covered that. If I carry the swords heads will roll whether I want them to or not.”
“I’m going to assume that you won’t cut off my head. Or the boy’s.”
“I would never touch Ruven.”
She gave Ruven a side glance, and to Andras’s heartbreak, the boy returned a hopeful smile. Andras’s son trusted her to get them out of this nightmare. Narina, apparently catching the same thing, winced.
She returned her gaze forward and her expression turned to stone. “You know the boy is perfectly safe. But you? Well, you’re probably safe, too. Hopefully. I’ve forgiven you for poisoning the goat—you did what you needed to do.”
She sounded momentarily less on edge, with a bit of her old humor, and that emboldened Andras. “So if we’re ambushed, you’ll need your swords. Seems like there’s a risk either way, but I’d rather have you killing someone before it’s time than unable to defend yourself at all.”
“I don’t intend us to be found.”
“It’s only a matter of time. We’re walking right out in the open, strolling down a country lane in the middle of a war.”
“That’s what it looks like to you, yes.”
“Narina, what are you talking about?”
“I meant just what I said—we’re not in the open, not really. You should trust me when I tell you things.”
“How can I trust you when you won’t tell me what we’re doing or where we’re going? All I know is that you’re still on this, this. . .quest. And that you think you can control yourself now.”
Now she did look back, frowning. “I never said that.”
“You’re not on a quest?”
“I never said I could control myself. Nothing of the kind—I’m being driven by this thing. I must fight it out and hope to avoid committing certain excesses.”
“Oh.”
“If you thought I’d somehow change, that I’d be cured by your good intentions, then sorry, you were mistaken.” Her tone hardened to match her expression. “You shouldn’t have untied me, Andras—you should have let me burn up in the forest fire.”
“That would have meant us burning up, too.”
“Fine, then leave now. Why don’t you do that? Take your son and your dogs and go. There’s only more death and killing on the road ahead, and I can’t guarantee either of you will be spared.”
“But you said we’re safer with you than on our own.”
“You were. You may no longer be.” She cast a glance over her shoulder. “Why did you follow me in the first place?”
Andras didn’t have an answer to that. He wasn’t sure what had compelled him to stay with her once they’d escaped the fires. Surely he’d satisfied whatever debt he’d carried by now.
“My da isn’t like that,” Ruven said. He shifted the satchel, slinging the strap over his opposite shoulder. “He doesn’t run off just because it’s dangerous.”
“Yeah? Then why isn’t he following Lord Balint? Why doesn’t he run back to his crowlord if he’s as loyal as all that?”
Ruven glanced at Andras, who could only shake his head, uncertain how to answer. The boy made an attempt at it on his father’s behalf. “Because he was wrong about that. I mean, Balint isn’t loyal back to us, right? So it was. . .it was the wrong kind of loyalty.”
“I’m sure it was,” Narina said. “Misplaced, at the very least. Ruven, did you ever think your loyalty is just as misplaced now? That you should leave me to my fate and try to save your own lives?”
The boy thrust out his chin. “I don’t believe it.”
“You should, you definitely should. But at least you have an excuse for being a fool. You’re a child, but your father—”
“This way,” she said at last. Her tone was lower. “Keep back, Andras—I want the swords out of sight. Don’t give them to me, do you understand?”
Andras glanced down at the bundle still tucked under one arm. “But if you ask. . .? You told me I should—”
“I know what I said before,” she snapped, then took a deep breath. “Make me ask twice, is all I’m saying. Resist longer, if you can. The blades are already calling to me—I can’t draw them yet, for various reasons.” Narina pointed to the left, into a rice paddy just over a berm that bordered the lane. “This way.”
The direction seemed randomly chosen at first, but as they waded into the rice stalks, they soon came across a trampled pathway cutting through the fields. Boot prints pressed into the soft ground, along with horse droppings and hoof indentations, indicated the passing of cavalry.
Narina dropped to a knee and put her hand on the ground. “Damanja’s troops. Two hundred, maybe three. Marching on full bellies—they’ll have done some looting. The crowlord herself wasn’t here, though.”
“You can tell all that from touching the ground?” Andras asked.
“All of that and more.” She hesitated. “There was someone else here, someone who didn’t want to be seen. That’s interesting.”
They continued, and a few minutes later spotted soldiers milling about the ruins of a burned-out farm, some twenty or thirty men in all. Narina told Andras and Ruven to stay quiet and keep the dogs in check. Nevertheless, she kept moving forward, not bothering to deviate from their course.
The soldiers seemed to be enjoying a respite from a long march. Some sat down, pulling off boots and rubbing sore feet, while others leaned against spears on haphazard watch duty or rummaged through bags carried by a pair of pack mules. There was no sign of cavalry, or even any sort of lieutenant or captain. These men thought they were safely behind friendly lines and under no threat.
Here it was, Andras thought. The moment when Narina moved in that blurred speed she was capable of. Forget asking for her swords; she’d snatch them out of Andras’s hands and slaughter her way through the soldiers before they knew they were under attack. He held the bundle in front of him, hands loose so she wouldn’t knock him to the dirt as she ripped it away from him.
Shadow Walker (The Sword Saint Series Book 3) Page 1