***
Three figures appeared in the seventh Circle. A seventh Circle. One more seventh Circle. The second seventh Circle, to be exact. As they had done in the first seventh Circle, Prince Akish, Rafiq, and Kako examined the circular chopping block. This time, however, Kako lingered behind the other two. It was evident that she could see the chopping block between the two men: it was likewise evident that she understood exactly what it was meant for, and between her fingers grew a small, potent, cobwebby piece of magic. It remained unused but undismissed while they explored to the edges of the room, and even when the red knight stalked from nothingness and into unpleasant reality she kept it still. It wasn’t until they became aware of the creeping movement of the walls that it grew in intensity.
Rafiq’s eyes flickered toward it once or twice, but he didn’t remark on it until the knight had appeared for the second time, and the walls began to move more swiftly. Then he said at last: “What’s that?”
Kako looked up at him with a bland face. “What?”
“Kako.”
She smiled faintly. “You’re really not very good at this game. For a man—dragon—who speaks as little as you do, you seem to have trouble getting right to the point.”
“What is the spell you’ve been making?”
“I’ll show you that in a bit,” said Kako. She seemed to be breathing slightly faster now, a nervous in and out that drove the colour to her cheeks. “There’s something more important that you should know.”
Rafiq looked down at her curiously. “Another of your games?”
“Oh no. Deadly serious.” Kako ran her free hand along the wall and then laid her ear against it. She continued: “I stole something from Akish a little while ago.”
“I remember,” said Rafiq. “You smuggled it to Dai and Zen.”
“Yes. I had some ideas about it. It turns out that those ideas were correct.”
“What was it?”
Kako shrugged her shoulder. “I’m still not exactly sure what it is. But I knew what it was being used for.”
Rafiq, perhaps in an attempt to be as close to the point as possible, repeated her words back to her: “What was it being used for?”
“Your Thrall, mostly.”
Rafiq’s eyes fixed on her face, burning bright. “He was carrying the source of my Thrall on him? And you have it?”
“Yes.”
“Give it to me!”
“It wouldn’t do you any good,” Kako said. She was certainly smiling now, though that smile had an edge of sadness to it.
Perhaps Rafiq caught the amusement, because he smiled in spite of his patent eagerness. “What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, well done!” said Kako. “A day or two ago you would have asked me ‘Why?’ and I could have spun that out for a very long time. What I mean by it is two things: one, that even if you had the source, you wouldn’t be able to break it. It’s specifically spelled against you. The second is that I’ve already unbound you from it. You’ve not been under Thrall these last few days.”
“Not under Thrall! But I’ve felt– there was–” began Rafiq. He stopped, thoughts working visibly across his face, and at last he laughed, low and long. “I’ve been so long under Thrall that I’ve made a habit of it.”
“You remember I said once that you were inured to the Thrall?”
“It was broken then?”
“The night before,” nodded Kako. “It was simple enough to break because it wasn’t what the original maker intended. Akish’s father was very clever about it, but once I had a loose end it was as easy to unravel as a piece of knit. I only wonder that he used it for something like this when it has such potential.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“I thought you might,” nodded Kako. She flicked a quick look at Akish, who was searching at the base of the chopping block, then passed Rafiq a small glinting thing with a sharp edge.
“It’s part of a sword,” he said quietly, turning it over. Again there was the play of swift and revelatory thought over his face. “I know something of a sword, a broken sword.”
Kako’s eyes snapped to his face, and she laughed once, oddly. “Of course you do! When this Circle is done, you’ll have to tell Dai. She’s got some ideas about it as well: she thinks it might be capable of keeping the Fae from invading.”
“I thought you were the one trying to keep the Fae from Shinpo.”
“Well, I am,” said Kako, looking vaguely uncomfortable. “But so is Dai, and she’s already experimented with the shard. I suppose there are more pieces to it?”
Rafiq nodded. “At least five. When pieced together it’s supposed to become a powerful talisman.”
“Do you know what sort of talisman?”
“Something about binding and protection. I suppose that’s why Akish’s father was able to use it on me.”
“I suppose,” agreed Kako. She sent a brief, covert look over her shoulder to the alcove that would soon hold the red knight. Then she said to Rafiq: “I suppose we shouldn’t talk about it when Akish could overhear. What were we talking about before the sword?”
“You said you’d show me the spell you’ve been working since we discovered the alcove.”
“So I did,” said Kako. “All right. It’s really a very simple one.”
“What does it do?”
Kako held out the spell, stretched now between the fingers of both hands. “It’s easier if I show you,” she said, in a voice so light, so reasonable. And Rafiq, who still hadn’t mastered all the games, leaned closer.
The webbing of spell caught him fairly in the face, spreading rapidly over his features until it knit at the back of his head. Rafiq swayed, began to speak, and fell. He was unconscious before he hit the tiles.
Prince Akish, who was watching from the other side of the room, said: “A clever little piece of work. I was going to hit you over the head in any case, wench.”
Kako gave a particularly elegant shrug. “I doubt it would have done you any good. I’ve got the distinct feeling that it has to be a personal sacrifice. If you’d slaughtered me I think you’d only have found the walls moving a little more quickly. Then one of you would have had to sacrifice yourselves anyway.”
“I wouldn’t have slaughtered you,” said Akish loftily. “Rafiq would have done it. And I rather fancy that it would have been a sacrifice.”
“You can’t sacrifice what doesn’t belong to you,” said Kako. “I’m the only one who can sacrifice me.”
“It’s nearly the top of the hour,” Prince Akish said. His eyes were bright and excited.
Kako looked at him meditatively. “I don’t really want to talk to you any more,” she said. “Perhaps you could be kind enough to shut up now.”
Prince Akish’s jaw dropped open. “How dare you, you misbegotten wench!”
“I’m not, actually,” said Kako. She settled herself beside the chopping block quite calmly, but from the way she quickly dashed the palms of her hands against her silk trousers, it was clear she had begun to sweat. “Misbegotten, I mean. Oh, and I’d be very careful when you get through the seventh Circle, if I were you.”
The red knight was appearing, sharp, metallic and menacing.
Jeeringly, the prince said: “Indeed? And why is that?”
Kako looked up at the knight once, and then away again. She removed her neck scarf with an almost ceremonial solemnity, then stooped to lay her head on the block, warm flesh meeting cold marble.
“I broke your Thrall on him,” she said. “It won’t be long before he realises it.”
“A forfeit is paid,” said the knight. The axe rose, dripping with bloody shadows.
Kako said: “If I were you, I would want to be very far away from him when he discovers that fact.”
Akish’s face froze in a mask of fear, fury, and eye-bulging incredulity. “You misbegotten daughter of a pig! What have you done?”
Kako laughed, and the blade laughed with her. Then there was only ringing silenc
e.
The Seventh Circle is ended
The Circles Broken
There was a fraction of a moment when Rafiq was certain he was dead. He felt the cold slice of steel across the side of his neck and through his throat, and there was an instant of absolute extinguishment. Then he found himself alive and whole, kneeling on cold, hard tile with one hand supporting him. He was shaking, left with the horrible certainty that he had indeed died and was yet still alive.
At length Rafiq rose carefully and stood upright on the blood-red tiles. Where was Kako? She should have made it through the seventh Circle as well, unless– had the Keep been playing its tricks again? The air—no, space and time—seemed to split, and then Kako was there, too. She was kneeling as he had been, her face almost powder-white, and as he stepped forward swiftly she raised her head, shivering. Her scarf had been removed, baring her neck: it was clenched in her left hand, the fingers white about it.
Rafiq dropped to one knee beside her and pulled her close, acting on another of those human instincts that were taking him by surprise so much lately. When Kako ceased to shake he took her scarf and draped it around her neck again, pinning it to her head-dress with more goodwill than skill.
By way of taking her mind off the death she’d encountered and overcome, he said: “Where’s Akish?”
“I don’t think he’ll be coming through,” she said.
Rafiq’s heart sank. If Akish was dead, Rafiq’s Burden would pass back to the Crown and he would soon be forced to fly back to Illisr under duress.
“You think he’s dead?”
“I’m sure of it,” said Kako. A moment later, Rafiq was sure of it too.
At first the yells were angry ones: and it was certainly Prince Akish’s voice. Then they became shouts of fear. Within moments the prince was screaming as the Keep rumbled beneath their feet. Kako had her hands pressed to her ears, the tears gliding down her unnaturally white cheeks, but Rafiq listened until the screams died away. It didn’t take long. There was no pleasure in it, but he wanted to be sure that Akish really was dead, that he wouldn’t suddenly appear next to Kako.
When the screams stopped, Kako took her hands away from her ears and wiped away her tears. “I told him he shouldn’t enter the seventh Circle,” she said quietly, without quite meeting Rafiq’s eyes. “I told him.”
“The Burden,” Rafiq said, his voice slightly hoarse. He couldn’t help remembering those moving walls, and he wasn’t sure that Prince Akish’s screams had really faded from the stones of the Keep. “It should be bearing down on me, pulling me back to Illisr.”
Much to his relief, his remark had the effect of taking the sick look away from Kako’s eyes. “Oh, that’s interesting,” she said. “I already had this conversation with you. Well, with a version of you, I suppose. The Burden won’t bother you again. Actually, you haven’t been really Burdened since the third Circle, when I picked Prince Akish’s pockets. He had a shard of sword in a hidden pocket; I felt it the moment he entered the Keep, but it wasn’t until I investigated a bit that I realised he was using it to control you.”
“Since the third Circle? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought it would be best to let you get used to it slowly,” she said. “You’ve been Burdened for a long time. I didn’t want you to feel overwhelmed.”
There was a little part of Rafiq’s mind that suggested this answered the question of why he had been able to do certain things that he shouldn’t have been able to do. There were several times when he had obeyed Prince Akish sheerly out of habit, when the—shard, was it?—had been out of the prince’s possession.
Kako was still looking a little bit crushed and pale when he finally opened his mouth to speak, so instead of saying any of the frustrated, furious things that he wanted to say to her, Rafiq merely said: “You said it was a shard of sword the Burden was held in. Show me.”
“It wasn’t exactly held in there,” Kako said, reaching into one all-but-invisible pocket in her pink silk trousers. “It’s more that the sword piece has a specific kind of enchantment laid upon it, and the king was able to twist it a bit to make your Thrall. I untwisted it.”
She passed him the small piece of metal carefully; almost reverently. Rafiq took it just as carefully, and hissed between his teeth. “It’s part of a Faery blade!”
“Yes,” she said. “But the enchantment on it– it’s not Fae.”
“No,” said Rafiq. “It’s not. I’ve heard stories of a blade once whole and then broken.”
“What stories?” demanded Kako. “I think this piece of sword can help us get rid of the Fae who’ve migrated here.”
Rafiq turned it in his fingers, a smile playing on his lips. It was almost tangibly delicious to know something that Kako, pert little thing that she was, didn’t know. “I’m certain it can,” he said. He slipped the shard into his own pocket, ignoring Kako’s wrathful look, and added: “Since we’re here, we may as well rescue the princess.”
“She doesn’t need rescuing,” Kako said, her cheeks dusky with annoyance. “She came here specifically to get away from that kind of thing. She’s been trying to find a way to get rid of the Fae and close the doors to Faery, and she couldn’t do that while suitors were calling.”
“She ran away from suitors?”
“There were a lot of them! And they would keep calling in the mornings, when she was trying to work on her theories and searching through the library. She couldn’t even travel to visit libraries in other countries without people thinking that a match between Shinpo and them would be a rather good idea.”
“Beautiful, is she?” asked Rafiq, really looking around the room for the first time. It was a surprisingly small one, tiled with the same red tiles that Rafiq had come to expect of the Keep proper, but here the walls and the ceiling were also the same shade of vermillion. The effect, after the seventh Circle, was reminiscent of blood covering and subsuming the whole room.
“Not really,” muttered Kako. “But Shinpo has a lot of nobles, and it’s a good match for any of their young men. Not to mention that she’s third to the throne, so the surrounding kingdoms don’t find it a bad match, either. And then there are princes like Akish, who think it’s useful to have a Shinpoan princess in their power.”
“We’ve come all this way,” said Rafiq, unwilling to be swayed. The princess would be the one possible obstacle to his staying at the Keep, and he would rather have that obstacle out of the way as quickly as possible.
“I’d like to see her. You said she’s usually under enchanted sleep anyway, didn’t you?”
“Not exactly,” said Kako, moving with him as he walked toward the only door in the room. She was tugging on his arm ineffectively; almost amusingly. “Rafiq!”
But he had already opened the door, impelled by his sense of curiosity as much as by his sense of mischief. He found himself in a large suite, its gently curving walls formed from the tower’s outer walls: this, then was the highest room of the tower. There were two heavily veiled sections—the powder-room and the bathing-room, Rafiq guessed—and one large canopied bed that should have been occupied.
It wasn’t. And as he stepped further into the suite, his eyes sweeping over the room, the cobwebby disuse of it began to sink in. As magnificent as everything was, it was a decayed magnificence. There was deep, oily dust on all the furniture: it hadn’t been dusted in months, perhaps years. The rich veiling, seen closer to, proved to be full of moths and trailing threads. With each step that Rafiq took he made a footprint on the mildewy tiles and rugs alike.
“It’s not a very comfortable room,” said Kako, with a sigh. When it became evident that she couldn’t stop him, she’d ceased to try, and had sat down glumly on a dusty wooden chair instead. “The wind shakes it so loudly that you can’t sleep, and the fire either roars so high it’s abominably hot, or dies away and leaves you to freeze. Besides, some of the challengers were bright enough to try to scale the tower from the outside. It wasn’t safe.”
&
nbsp; Rafiq only half heard her. He was remembering something Kako had said many days ago. She had said that the princess was kept under enchanted sleep while the dragon was out of the Keep. Akish had assumed that this was because the dragon didn’t want her to escape, and Rafiq, who didn’t at that stage know that Kako was herself the dragon, had found it a reasonable assumption. Now, however, he did know it. His eyes dwelt thoughtfully and a little amusedly on Kako, who was looking at the floor. What was it that Zen had said, later on? Kako had immediately silenced him, but during the game in the fourth Circle she had admitted that when she turned dragon, she kept her human form. That form, she had said, remained in a deep sleep while her consciousness inhabited the form of a dragon.
The princess slept while the dragon was active because the princess was the dragon.
Rafiq, slightly stunned, said: “You’re the princess! You’re the princess!”
“Oh, well done!” Kako said, irritably sarcastic.
“But I met your mother! Your sisters and your brother!”
“Yes. Queen Shiori of Shinpo to almost everyone else. Oh, and Crown Princess Akira, second Princess Suki, Princess Dai, Prince Zen and little Princess Mee. I think the only one you didn’t meet was my father. He’s the king-consort, in case it wasn’t obvious to you.”
“Then why did you–” Rafiq stopped the bewildered thought where it started, and began to laugh. It was obvious why she had pretended to be the princess’ maid. How else could she fend off would-be suitors? Much easier to go along with the men that made it past the first Circle, and sabotage them where she could.
“Exactly,” said Kako. She was watching him again. “I’d appreciate it if you don’t spread it about.”
“Who would I spread it to? Does the Keep get so many visitors?”
“No, barely any. Wait, what do you mean by that?”
“I like it here,” said Rafiq. “And as a dragon I’m faster, stronger, and deadlier than you.”
Shards of a Broken Sword Page 24