Shards of a Broken Sword

by W. R. Gingell

  When Prince Akish’ irregular in and out of breath had settled down to a rhythmic snore, Kako’s voice, low and muted, said: “Are you going to tell him?”

  “No,” said Rafiq. “But if he asks me–”

  “You’ll have to tell him. All right. I can work with that.”

  Rafiq, struggling to find a way to put his regret into words, rolled over onto his back once again and said to the ceiling: “I didn’t mean to tear your scarf. I’ll get you a new one.”

  Kako’s dragon aura had almost faded now, but he saw the faint edging of forgiving gold from the depths of the wardrobe and relaxed.

  “That’s all right,” said Kako. “I have others. Good night, Rafiq.”

  Kako was gone again. Rafiq, waking late in the night to the solitary snoring of Prince Akish, saw the empty, shadowed inside of the wardrobe in which she’d been sleeping. He was conscious of a feeling of relief mingled with disappointment: it was safer if she stayed away from Akish, but he’d really thought she meant it when she said she’d stay. He found himself regretful that he wouldn’t have the chance to ask Kako about her dragon form. He would have liked to know more about the construct– not to mention the small matter of why she wasn’t dead. He’d never heard of a human with fire in the blood surviving when they died in dragon form.

  Rafiq was still pondering the question when he heard slight scuffling sounds from across the room. It was Kako; carefully clambering across furniture piece by piece to make her way back to the wardrobe, and she appeared to be carrying a small bundle. It seemed good to Rafiq to close his eyes once again and feign sleep. He was surprised to discover himself smiling.

  He felt Kako hovering over him a little later. What was she about? Then there was a slight fumbling somewhere in the region of his right arm, and Rafiq heard the slight creak of the wardrobe as Kako climbed back in and made herself comfortable. He sat up and saw in the grey light of early morning that she had tucked a carefully folded handkerchief of food into the crook of his arm, along with a small flask of water. The food was simple fare—bread and some species of preserves that were tangy and a little bit sweet—but there was quite a lot of it. It was the sort of thing he would have expected of a hungry youth raiding the larder late at night. It was immensely satisfying; filling and delightfully piquant.

  When he had finished eating Rafiq folded the handkerchief neatly, took a long, refreshing draught of water, and lay back to gaze up at the silvery ceiling with his hands laced behind his head. It was very pretty, of course, but the silver did throw some strange reflections. The blue in the floor, for example, was nothing like the blue that the silver reflected back at him. It was more of a robin’s egg blue. And come to think of it, the yellow tiles reflected in the ceiling looked closer to robin’s egg blue than yellow, too.

  Rafiq blinked. Ah. They’d been looking for patterns in the wrong place. His eyes followed the pattern of blue across the ceiling and found that it led very precisely and easily to a window across the ballroom. Rafiq briefly considered pointing it out to Akish, but after the food and drink Kako had brought he wasn’t distractingly hungry or thirsty– or particularly inclined to assist the prince, if it came to that.

  Rafiq threw a look over at Kako and saw that she was watching him, her eyes glittering in the shadows. She had realised the same thing that he had; and like himself, was declining to tell the prince. Interesting. He closed his eyes and drifted back into a pleasant sleep.

  The day was one of annoyance and frustration. Prince Akish was frustrated, which meant that everyone around him was annoyed. It didn’t help, thought Rafiq tiredly, that by the time Kako had led them another few feet across the tiled floor, the pattern suddenly and explicably changed. The first indication they had of any such thing was the tiles heating painfully beneath their feet. By the time they’d scrambled for somewhere safe, Prince Akish’s boots were smoking gently and the soles of Kako’s feet were burnt into red, angry blisters.

  Kako looked more resigned than tearful, though her face had a carefully blank look that suggested she wasn’t giving in to her pain. Akish, on the other hand, was loud and vituperative in his distress both of burnt shoe-leather and lost path, and spent the next few hours eating his rations in an angry sort of way before climbing over some of the closer furniture to get a better look at the room. When Rafiq asked somewhat sarcastically for Commands, Akish only said: “Be silent, lizard. I am attempting to find the pattern again.”

  True to his word, he did find the pattern again. By that time Kako had managed to heal the burns on her feet, and though the scar was still on the bottom of her foot, the rest of the skin looked smooth and new.

  “How did you find it?” she asked Akish, accepting Rafiq’s hand to rise from the footstool upon which she had taken refuge.

  “The pattern was clear from above,” said Akish grandly, and led the way.

  Rafiq exchanged a look with Kako, brows raised. Akish was obviously in one of his more childish moods today. Rafiq had known him to go into terrifyingly infantile rages at the least pretext when he was in such a state, the prince’s vaunted prowess and battle cunning notwithstanding. Kako looked distinctly wary and Rafiq got the impression that she was used to dealing with such anger. He wondered if her princess often went into the same kind of paroxysms.

  Before long it was obvious to Rafiq that the pattern was not taking them in the direction he had discovered last night. That was unfortunate, given Akish’s current mood, but he saw no reason to enlighten the prince. He was beginning to think that Kako was by no means eager for them to get through the Circles of challenge, and since it was no part of Rafiq’s design to make things easy for Prince Akish, he continued to follow behind silently. The pattern ended at a small side-door at the other end of the ballroom from whence they had entered. Prince Akish, with a grunt of triumph, wrenched the door open, and an incongruous flood of late afternoon sunlight streamed into the room.

  “Oh well done,” said Kako. “You’ve found the Door Out.”

  Rafiq craned his neck to see around the seething Prince Akish, and found himself looking at the wide stairs and open courtyard by which he and Akish had entered the Keep.

  “This,” said Akish through his teeth, “Is insupportable! Wench, what is the meaning of this?”

  “It’s the Door Out,” Kako repeated. “I told you: there’s one for every Circle. We’ve been following the wrong pattern.”

  Much to Rafiq’s surprise, the prince didn’t immediately explode. Instead, he said: “You did inform me. This challenge is more irritating than I’d supposed. Can we go back to the entrance of this Circle?”

  “We can go back to the point at which we entered, but the door is closed to us. We can only go forward or out.”

  “You know a great deal, wench,” said Akish, closing the door again. He turned his back to it and looked very narrowly at Kako. “I’m beginning to believe I went too lightly on you in the last Circle.”

  “Oh, is Rafiq going to hold a knife to my throat again?”

  Prince Akish put one hand around her throat almost casually. “You’re remarkably forward for a maid.”

  “Yes,” said Kako. Her voice was strained, but she was otherwise unaffected. “The princess finds it very useful.”

  Rafiq made a restless move, powerless by Thrall to do anything to help; and Prince Akish, jerking Kako closer, shot him a smouldering look. “Keep back, lizard! I don’t need your help. How do we proceed to the next circle, wench?”

  “I’m sure we have to find the right pattern to follow,” said Kako chokingly. Her face was suffused with crimson, but when Rafiq opened his mouth to tell the Prince he’d found the way himself he saw Kako’s hand rise, the index finger slightly uplifted. “I don’t know anything else.”

  “I don’t believe you. You know entirely too much of this accursed place.”

  Kako rasped: “Live here. Know how it thinks.”

  “You’ll kill her,” Rafiq said shortly. Kako’s finger was still raised,
but she was beginning to droop. He opened his mouth to tell the prince the way out in spite of her wishes but Kako lost consciousness as he did so, dragging the prince forward with the unexpectedness of her weight. Akish gave vent to a series of unpleasant remarks regarding her parentage and said to Rafiq: “Plague take the wench, she knows nothing after all! Pick her up and carry her back with us. It’s possible she may yet prove useful.”

  They spent the afternoon back at the bed, where Kako took far longer than she should have to regain consciousness and the prince did a piece of magic that made a fat slab of architect’s paper appear, along with a winding fountain pen. It also made the colours in the floor disappear once again, which irritated the prince greatly.

  Rafiq deposited Kako on the chaise-lounge and removed himself to a nearby chair, worried by the amount of time that she spent unconscious until he saw her eyes open a slit to watch Prince Akish’s busily moving pen as it scrawled characters and numbers on the paper slab.

  He found himself grinning. How much of her faint had been real? None of it, he was inclined to think. He was also inclined to think that she’d deliberately needled the prince. There was no excuse for the prince’s behaviour, of course, but Kako had seen his mood and deliberately provoked him, Rafiq was certain. What did she have to gain from being physically attacked?

  When Kako finally deigned to wake from her self-imposed ‘faint’, the prince was still at his scribblings and Rafiq was amusedly watching her. She caught his eye and winked, then produced an entirely convincing, throbbing cough.

  “Not dead, then, I see,” said the prince, without looking up. “If I were you, I would begin to think of ways in which to be very useful. Your unhelpfulness is starting to pall.”

  “Oh,” said Kako, her voice slightly raspy. “How awful. Did you know that the colours in the floor have disappeared again?”

  “Yes,” the prince said sourly. “I worked some magic again and the Keep took exception to it.”

  “I see. Just trying to be helpful.”

  Akish violently scribbled out a section of his figures and barked at Rafiq: “Instead of smirking, lizard, why don’t you clamber over the furniture to see how far you can get?”

  “Of course,” said Rafiq, his grin just a little wider.

  “The Floor Is Quicksand!” sang Kako at him, and leapt from the chaise lounge to a nearby desk with surprising lightness of foot. Rafiq followed her, enjoying the feel of his muscles coiling and uncoiling. There was less exercise to be had as a human, and the fact that his arms were more useable as a human never quite made up for the fact that he was always flexing his shoulders in expectation of being able to use his wings.

  They enjoyed an afternoon of childish fun while the prince worked at his figures. Rafiq, chasing Kako over couch-back and under chandelier, saw Akish frequently flopping on his back on the bed and wondered that the prince didn’t see the same patterns on the ceiling that he had seen.

  Kako, noticing the direction of his gaze, stopped for a brief moment atop a dressing table and said: “It’s the canopy. It’s not just a curtained bed, it’s a fully canopied one. All he can see is drapes.”

  Rafiq gave a hiss of laughter. “Akish was never one for sleeping with his troops.”

  “Exactly,” said Kako. “Serves him right for taking the most comfortable bed.”

  “So you do know the way through this Circle!”

  “Oh yes,” Kako said, dropping lightly to the next piece of furniture by way of the chandelier. “I told you: I know the way this place thinks. I didn’t think you’d figure it out, actually.”

  “He will, too,” Rafiq warned her. “Eventually.”

  “Yes, but will he do it before he runs out of food?”

  It was a good question, Rafiq thought. The prince was clever, but he was used to commanding battles and planning raids, not solving puzzles that seemed ridiculously complicated while being actually quite simple. The Keep’s puzzles so far had been children’s games– right down to the dragon that guarded it; a child’s story if ever there was one. What chiefly interested him now, though, was whether Kako was a part of the Keep’s magic, or whether she was an actual person.

  That night when Kako carefully sneaked away, Rafiq was awake to follow her. She took a perilous route across a spaced-out series of armchairs that made a wandering line around furniture and finally came to a halt beside a knight that was guarding a shallow, curtained alcove. Rafiq, following her, discovered that the alcove became somewhat less shallow the closer one grew. By the time he was leaping from the second-last armchair to the last he could see down the alcove’s gloomy length as if it was a hall. A flutter of pink silk was just disappearing around a corner at the end of it. Rafiq made short work of the last armchair, springing lightly and silently into the alcove, and hurried after Kako. Now that he had been human for a few days his native lightness of foot was growing, just as Kako’s she-dragon aura faded further with each day that she didn’t turn dragon.

  The hall made an abrupt end in heavy curtains that were just barely parted. Rafiq had already felt the fiery magic that formed it, and if he had a guess, he would have said that Kako had joined the Keep to a room quite far away from it by the simple expedient of matching drapes.

  Carefully twitching the curtains back a little more, he took a cautious look around the room. It wasn’t a small one, but it looked distinctly crowded. Part of that impression was created by the sheer amount of books that had been crammed into the bookcases, corners, spare chairs and tables; but the fact that every chair not occupied by piles of books was occupied by a human of varying size, age, and sex didn’t help the room to look any less crowded. There was a boy sitting solemnly on a footstool with a book that was bigger than he was lying open on his crossed legs. On the top shelf of one of the bookcases was a very tiny girl alternately turning pages and tucking strands of hair behind her ear, from whence they immediately escaped again; and the fattest two-seater couch that Rafiq had ever seen was occupied by an older girl who evidently had no idea of the way that couches worked. She was sprawled on the seat with a book resting on her stomach, her hair hanging over the side and her legs resting comfortably against the back of it, crossed at the ankles. She was showing off a good deal more light brown skin than even Shinpoans would consider to be suitable.

  Across from her, as if in direct reproof, sat an elegant young woman with a gracefully straight back and correctly covered legs, reading something decorative and most likely poetical.

  When Kako walked into the room, each one of them looked up, smiles—and in the case of the tiny girl in the bookcase, squealing excitement—immediately in evidence. Even the girl sitting upside down on the couch, with her clever, sarcastic face, grinned briefly.

  “I see you’ve all sneaked out of bed again,” said Kako, in a congratulatory kind of way.

  “Did you make it to the third Circle?” asked the boy, his eyes bright and interested. “We’ve been tracking your progress on the map Dai’s drawing.”

  “We did,” Kako said. “Where’s mum?”

  “Probably restocking the pantry after you raided it last night,” said the boy. He looked vaguely reproachful. “Why didn’t you wake us?”

  “I wanted to speak to mum,” said Kako. “Besides, I saw you all two nights ago. And mum was the one who gave me the sandwiches, so there.”

  “You’ve tracked something nasty in,” suddenly said the girl with her legs propped against the back of the couch. She nodded toward Rafiq, who had thought that he was sufficiently well hidden, and he found himself under the gaze of five pairs of eyes. “How unfortunate. It’ll probably get stuck in the carpet, too.”

  Kako said: “Bother! What are you doing here?”

  “I followed you.”

  “Well, yes; that’s pretty obvious. I suppose you’d better come in. It’s not a good idea to spend too much time in the corridor: it doesn’t really exist.”

  “Dai!” hissed the older, elegant girl. “Cover your legs!”
<
br />   The girl called Dai looked Rafiq over once boredly and said: “It doesn’t matter. He’s only a human-form thing. What does he care about legs?”

  “Legs are full of flavour and wonderfully chewy,” said Rafiq. “Also humans can’t run away if you bite them off.”

  There was a soft plop as Dai’s legs hit the couch and a slight scuffle as they folded beneath her. Rafiq took a certain amount of satisfaction in the fact that her eyes were now very wide and suddenly no longer bored.

  “This is Rafiq,” Kako said, her eyes dancing. “He’s the Contender’s um...servant. He’s a dragon-human construct.”

  “Sort of the opposite of you,” said the boy. His eyes weren’t quite as obviously Shinpoan as the others’: not only were they bright blue, there was only a slight suggestion of slanting to them. “Do you eat, construct?”

  Rafiq’s eyes met Kako’s briefly. He said: “Yes. Not as much as a human-born, but I do require some sustenance.”

  “Now that’s interesting!” the boy said excitedly. “Kako doesn’t, you see. Where do you keep your dragon form?”

  “Keep it?”

  He nodded expectantly. “Yes, while you’re in a Constructed human body. Kako hides in wardrobes and under beds.”

  Rafiq looked from one to the other, frowning. “I don’t...I change. There’s no other body. First I’m dragon, then I’m man.”

  There was an immediate explosion of excited interest all over the room.

  “But Kako says–”

  “Kako has–”

  “How do you–”

  Kako, above the general hubbub, said sharply: “Enough! Rafiq isn’t interested in how I change from human to dragon–”

  “I am,” objected Rafiq, but she ignored him.

  “–he’s interested in eating. Zen, why don’t you get him something to eat?”

  “All right, but Akira’s used all of the preserves for that–”

  “–for our cousin?” said Kako swiftly.