Nights Of Fire

by Laura Leone

  It was often said that there was no fighter anywhere in the three corners of the earth to equal a Kintish swordmaster; such a warrior had a special Kintish title which Koroll could not immediately recall. A Kintish swordmaster used two blades where others used one, and used them so fast that he could kill two armed men before either could even draw a sword. Of course, the training was said to take five years, and half the students reputedly died in the process. Therefore, it wasn't something the average Kintish soldier undertook; and so the Valdani beat Kintish armies as thoroughly as they beat everyone else's. Indeed, the ancient Kintish Kingdoms had lost much territory to the Empire in recent centuries.

  However, regardless of the stranger's origins or identity, the most intriguing item among his belongings was undoubtedly a single dagger, carefully wrapped in a finely painted silk scarf and hidden in a tightly laced pocket inside the satchel. After four years in Sileria, Koroll recognized the workmanship of both items. The scarf was a particularly fine example of centuries-old Silerian craftsmanship, covered with delicately painted flowers native to the island. Koroll had never seen a man carrying one, and it seemed incongruous for the stranger to have such feminine finery. However, it was the dagger which truly interested Koroll.

  He knew instantly what it was, though he had never actually seen one before. Having heard such weapons described for years, there was no mistaking this one. It was a shir, the exquisitely deadly, wavy-edged dagger of a Society assassin. Shir were made only by the waterlords, those unpredictable and secretive Silerian wizards who controlled the Honored Society and, if truth be known, much of Sileria, too. The Emperor had sworn to destroy the Society in his lifetime, and most of the waterlords now lived in hiding. Their power was not to be underestimated, though; they could bring Cavasar to its knees if they didn't receive their tribute from the people. They controlled water, the most precious commodity on Sileria, as easily as a man controlled the fingers of his own hand. While Koroll remained skeptical about the many whispered stories told about them, he had learned to regard them with respect.

  Moreover, he had just learned that at least one of those whispered stories was apparently true. It was said that only three people in the world could touch a shir with impunity: the waterlord who fashioned its deadly blade out of water, the assassin for whom it was made, and the man or woman who killed him. Having unfolded the delicate silk which hid the shir from view, Koroll found that it was bitterly cold, colder than anything he'd ever known, and the brief touch of it against his fingers made them ache with fierce pain long after he dropped the thing.

  Had the stranger killed a Society assassin and taken his shir? If so, then he just might be the right man to solve Koroll's problems. Surely killing one Silerian peasant would seem a small enough price to a mercenary who would otherwise be charged with inciting a riot and causing the deaths of two Outlookers. Of course, releasing such a man and giving him his weapons back was risky, but Koroll was counting on an extra incentive to ensure the warrior's cooperation; the final item of unusual interest among his possessions was a hefty bag of gold. If Koroll held onto that until the swordmaster brought him proof of the shallah's death...

  He heard a knock at the heavy door to the chamber. "Enter!"

  Four Outlookers, young and arrogant in their smooth gray tunics, leggings, and new boots, escorted the swordmaster into Koroll's presence. Koroll studied the shackled prisoner closely as he shuffled into the room. Now that the stranger's eyes were open, Koroll saw that they were the deep brown color typical of most Silerians; they were watchful and intelligent, and they gave away little as the warrior surveyed his belongings spread out on the long polished table. His skin had the rich olive tones of a typical shallah, and his facial bones were strong and faintly exotic-looking compared to the Valdani around him. Still a young man, he was lean and lithe, with whipcord muscles that looked honed to make him an agile fighter of great endurance.

  Even shackled, he looked fierce. Koroll rather marveled at the courage—or sheer foolhardiness—of the young Outlooker who had demanded this man's weapons this morning, and who had seized his tunic upon being denied. A pity the lad was dead now, gutted with a fish knife.

  "I am Commander Koroll, military governor of Cavasar and its district. One of my surviving men says that although you resisted a direct order and broke the law," Koroll began without preamble, "he thinks you did not intend to kill anyone, but merely to escape."

  The stranger's bland, closed expression didn't change. "That's true."

  "Why did you resist?"

  "I'm a shatai."

  "A swordmaster?"

  "Yes. How am I to earn a living without my swords?"

  Koroll hefted the bag of gold he'd found in the man's satchel. "You wouldn't have starved."

  "I was thinking of my future."

  "You could have applied to me to have your weapons returned to you."

  Despite his chains, the prisoner managed to look arrogant. "No shatai permits his swords to be taken from him."

  "I have seen shatai give up their swords. At the Emperor's palace in Valda."

  "We may choose to give them up, to show respect or to honor a truce. But no one is permitted to take them away."

  "And you didn't deem it appropriate to show respect and voluntarily relinquish them today?" Koroll challenged.

  "I was... not asked nicely," the stranger replied, lifting one dark brow.

  Koroll's lips twitched. "And you are accustomed to being asked nicely?"

  "Most men treat a shatai with more courtesy than I was shown today."

  "Yes, I imagine so. We don't see many shatai here, you understand," Koroll said cordially. He narrowed his eyes. "And you're not Kintish anyhow, are you?"

  "No."

  "I didn't know there were any shatai who weren't Kintish."

  "There aren't many."

  "But a Kintish shatai trained you?"

  "A shatai-kaj. One who trains shatai."

  "Why did he train you?"

  The stranger shrugged, then winced as the motion pulled at his wound. "He wanted to."

  "A better reason, if you please."

  This time the stranger smiled slightly. "The shatai-kaj give no better reasons. They are men who need explain themselves to no one."

  "But you..." Koroll's gaze lowered to the man's hands, to where he had seen the distinctive scars. "You're part-shallah, aren't you?"

  The stranger hesitated for only a moment. "Yes."

  "What are you doing in Cavasar?" He saw sweat on the prisoner's face and guessed he was in pain; certainly nothing about the man suggested nervousness.

  "I had only just arrived when your men—"

  "You came here on a boat?"

  "Yes."

  "From where?"

  "The Moorlands."

  "What were you doing there?"

  "Working."

  "What kind of work?"

  The warrior's gaze flashed to the two swords which lay unsheathed upon the table. "The kind of work I do."

  Pleased by the answer, Koroll dismissed two of the guards. "He may be seated," he said to the other two, noticing that the prisoner was starting to look a little light-headed. He had lost enough blood to miss it for the next few days. The guards shuffled him over to a chair that was near Koroll but strategically distant from the weapons on the table, then positioned themselves on either side of him, their swords drawn. Even wounded and shackled, Koroll suspected this shatai could take advantage of the situation if permitted.

  Koroll picked up one of the Kintish swords and noted that the stranger didn't like him touching them. "What is your name?"

  "Tansen."

  "Are you from here?"

  A brief nod. "I was born in Sileria."

  Koroll looked him over for a moment, then decided to try another tactic, for the stranger seemed more concerned about his swords than about himself. He traced his finger down the flat of one blade. "What are these inscriptions on your swords, these Kintish hieroglyphics?"<
br />
  Tansen's gaze rested possessively on the swords as Koroll handled them. "The left one... That's my teacher's motto."

  "What does it say?"

  "Why do you care?"

  "I'm curious." Seeing that Tansen intended to stay silent, Koroll pointed out, "You have caused the deaths of two Outlookers today. Normally, you would already have been sentenced to death by slow torture in a public execution."

  "Why haven't I been?"

  "Because I may have a better use for you," Koroll snapped, a little annoyed that his warning apparently aroused no concern, let alone fear. "Now answer the question. What does the inscription say?"

  Quietly, almost reflectively, Tansen answered, "Draw it with honor, sheathe it with courage."

  "Can you read?" Koroll probed. Very few shallaheen could. "Or did you memorize that?"

  "I can read the inscription," was the oblique response.

  "Why is the sword inscribed? A sentimental gesture?"

  For a moment he thought the question would be ignored. Finally, as if having decided that the information wouldn't profit his interrogator, Tansen said, "It identifies a shatai-kaj's students to each other, so when we meet, we will not fight each other."

  "Not even if you are opponents who have been paid to fight each other?"

  "We will not fight each other," Tansen repeated.

  "How noble," Koroll said dryly. "Does anyone ever cheat?"

  "If he did, then all shatai would be ordered to kill him on sight, and his shatai-kaj would lay a curse upon him."

  "Yes, I suppose that would make one think twice." Koroll picked up the other sword and noted that the hieroglyphics were different. "And what's written on this one?"

  "My own motto."

  "Ah! Which is?"

  Tansen's gaze met his and, for the first time, Koroll had a glimpse of the man who dwelt in this shallah's skin. "From one thing, another is born."

  "And what thing gave birth to the shatai, Tansen?" Koroll asked, held by that dark, steady gaze.

  "What 'better use' do you have for me?" Tansen countered.

  Deciding this was the right moment, Koroll shoved aside the empty satchel to reveal the shir which lay in a pool of painted silk. Tansen's expression gave away little; of course he would have guessed that Koroll had found it when searching his things.

  Bypassing the questions he had originally intended to ask, Koroll simply said, "Pick it up."

  Finally! He was rewarded with a look of genuine surprise.

  "Pick it up?" Tansen repeated.

  "Yes. Pick it up."

  Tansen glanced significantly at the guards to his right and left. At Koroll's order, they both held their blades to Tansen's throat. Tugging at the silk scarf upon which the shir lay, Koroll moved it within Tansen's reach.

  Koroll warned, "Just pick it up. If you try to use it, they will slit your throat like—"

  "A sacrificial goat. Yes, I know." Looking rather contemptuous of them all, Tansen lifted his hands and, moving awkwardly because of his shackles and his wound, took hold of the shir. His expression darkened as he looked down at it, resting in his scarred palms. Very quietly, almost as if he were unaware he spoke aloud, he said, "It's an evil thing, this."

  "Then it's true," Koroll breathed. "You killed a Society assassin."

  Tansen's gaze remained fixed on the dagger. "I killed him." His voice was soft, and he seemed lost in the memory for a moment.

  "Why did you keep the shir?" Koroll asked; Tansen clearly didn't relish possession of the thing.

  His bare, branded chest rose and fell with a deep breath. "Because that's what you do when you... do what I did. You take the shir. That's... the way it's done."

  Koroll had a feeling there was more to it than that, considerably more, but he didn't really care about the details of yet another bloody and pointless Silerian feud. These people relished killing each other so much that the Outlookers seldom had to bother doing it. Until recently.

  Tansen lay the shir back upon the table and asked, "Have I answered all of your questions now?"

  "There's just one more: do you want to live?"

  "Are you offering me a choice?"

  "Yes."

  "Ah. I see." A slow, cynical smile spread across Tansen's face. "Tell me, then: who do I have to kill?"

  Recognizing a man with whom he could do business, Koroll smiled in return. "His name is Josarian, and I need him killed soon. Very soon."

  ***

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  or visit www.LauraResnick.com for more information.

  Rejection, Romance, and Royalties:

  The Wacky World of a Working Writer (Excerpt)

  Copyright 2007 by Laura Resnick

  "A critic," a friend recently quoted to me, "is someone who goes out on the field after the battle and shoots the wounded."

  One of the most professionally educational books I've ever read is No Turn Unstoned, compiled by actress Diana Rigg. The book is a collection of some of the most devastating and venomous theatrical reviews ever written. No Turn Unstoned taught me several valuable lessons about reviews before I ever began my writing career. It thereby helped me gain a sense of perspective that I desperately need on occasions when I read comments about my work like this one (from an Amazon.com reader review): "The one good recommendation I can give [the book] is that it is a great cure for insomnia."

  One of the things I learned when I read No Turn Unstoned is that there have been nasty critics almost as long as there have been writers and actors. Rigg's book quotes scathing theatrical reviews written by social commentators as early as the sixth century B.C. Another useful lesson I keep in mind is that no writer or actor has ever completely eluded the venom of a critic's pen. Dorothy Parker wrote of Katharine Hepburn's performance in a 1933 play, The Lake, that she ran the gamut of emotion from A to B. When Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest first opened, a reviewer wrote, "The thing seemed to me so helpless, so crude, so bad, clumsy, feeble, and vulgar..." Bertrand Russell said of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, "It disgusted me." Imagine, for a moment, being the actress of whom a critic wrote, "What a personality that girl needs." Diana Rigg, still my heroine from her days as the elegant and deadly Mrs. Peel in The Avengers, bravely includes a casually vicious review about herself, from New York Magazine, which she found so wounding that, "I remember making my way to the theatre the following day, darting from doorway to doorway and praying I wouldn't meet anyone I knew."

  And speaking of casually vicious reviews…

  "Soapy and predictable and long-winded" is what Kirkus said about a novel of mine. Kirkus also said of a romantic suspense novel by Carole Bellacera, "It's neither romantic nor suspenseful." Indeed, Kirkus reviews are so notoriously nasty that I've heard the publicity department at one of my publishing houses makes a game of deliberately culling any accidentally positive phrases from bad Kirkus reviews and using them for promotional purposes. If true, this would explain why they went to all the trouble of culling a comically brief quote ("Well handled") from the scathing Kirkus review of In Legend Born, even though there were enough good reviews of the book that this certainly wasn't necessary. (The Kirkus review from which they culled this two-word "praise" indicated that a couple of minor elements are well handled in an otherwise awful novel.)

  Now that I think of it, though—what a great game! I can hardly wait for Kirkus' blistering review of my next novel so that I can play, too!

  However, I am forced to admit that Kirkus' scathing review of my book is a fair and valid example of a bad review; it simply expresses a negative opinion of the work. No matter how painful the writer may find such commentary, this is a legitimate (even necessary) function of a book reviewer.

  As reviewer, editor, and author Ann Lafarge notes, the issues a reviewer should address in a review are: "Did the writer accomplish what he was trying to do? If so, how? If not, why not?" Novelist P.G. Nagle suggests, "Negative reviews should be stated in a ration
al manner. Any person with a reasonable command of both himself and the English language should be able to express a negative opinion without resorting to insult. Objections should be explained, and opinionated statements should be supported."

  Art is subjective; therefore, of course, opinions about a novel will always be varied, and often even conflicting. I certainly don't enjoy bad reviews, but I accept that disliking my work is a perfectly fair and valid response when reviewing it.

  However, when reviewers get absorbed in their own speculative theories, make inaccurate accusations, are deliberately cruel, or get inappropriately personal, many writers—understandably—get annoyed.

  Bill Peschel, a reviewer for a newspaper in South Carolina, once wrote that mystery author Tamar Myers was obviously "trying to write like Carolyn Hart and Joan Hess, but fails miserably," and added that "the book smells of flopsweat." Since Myers had never read Hart or Hess at that point in her career, the real mystery is how she could possibly have been trying to emulate them. "And," Myers wonders, "what the hell is flopsweat? Sixteen very successful books later I would like to present Mr. Peschel with a vial of vile flopsweat."

  A critic in Albany said in a review of Tess Gerritsen's Gravity: "She has seen her books reach the best-seller lists, but it's almost impossible to understand why." In a review of Bloodstream, this same critic wrote, "[Gerritsen's] success as a writer is a sorry indicator of how far the book-buying public's standards have sunk. If quality was the determining factor, Gerritsen [a doctor] might well be on the phone as we speak, contacting health care companies for per-diem work." Perhaps you've already noticed that in two sentences comprising a total of more than forty words, this reviewer hasn't actually said a single thing about Bloodstream itself, but has instead spent his time castigating Gerritsen's readers and attempting to humiliate Gerritsen. Moreover, this reviewer was evidently too busy being clever to bother actually reading, since both of these reviews were based on audio books. I agree with Gerritsen, who asks, "How can reviewers judge our books based on an audio [version] that includes only about a third of our text?"