[177] She took in the long black hair, the olive skin, the green eyes, and knew: Not enough. Not nearly enough.
“Verlein.”
“Hello, Kazhe. Long time.”
“Not long enough.”
“Longer than you know.” Verlein n’Tekla swung a leg around the lout’s stool and sat. “A lot’s happened while you wallowed in the bottom of a cask.”
Kazhe’s lips drew back in a snarl that would have passed for a grin in other company. “Straight to the point. I taught you to dance better than that.”
“I’ve made some modifications in your teachings.”
“I saw,” Kazhe said on a belch. “Your shielders waddle by now and then. You’ve done ill by those blades, lengthening them. Tapering them.”
“To a finer point,” Verlein said. “They thrust through the holes in mail.”
“The hole’s in the opponent’s guard. If it’s down to his mail he’s dead already.”
“I’m not here to argue bladecraft. We do things my way now.”
Kazhe barked out a laugh and wiped spittle from her mouth with the back of her hand. “And may the spirits save you all.”
“How long since you’ve eaten, Kazhe?”
Kazhe lifted her tankard. “This is the only food they serve here. And you won’t buy me with this or any other meal, whatever it is you want.” She drained it off, and the serving boy was right there to take it for a refill.
“You’ve trained him well,” Verlein said after passing him a tallystone to fetch her a brandy.
“Better than I did you.”
“I took what I could use and left the rest.”
Kazhe made a sloppy gesture toward a particular sheath at Verlein’s belt. “Yet you still wear that.”
Verlein touched the yellowed grip of the cheit and said, “A relic. It reminds me there’s a world out there. It’s proof that I can fight it when it comes.”
They didn’t know what substance the grip was crafted from, any more than they knew what black material, inset with bone-white triangles, wrapped the grip of Kazhe’s longblade. Some kind of animal horn, Kazhe thought, though how the makers had come by it she didn’t know. Perhaps they didn’t have bonefolk in the ancient world. She wondered if the bonefolk here would take it when Verlein fell, or leave it behind with the tang. That would answer the [178] animal-or-mineral question. If Verlein had become blademaster, she’d bequeath that cheit to a successor when she died. But Kazhe had chosen ill in choosing her.
The boy brought her freshened tankard. She washed the tightness from her throat with a long pull, then kept pulling, and handed it back to him empty. Her father’s shade was long gone to the spirits. If they were kind, he’d never know the fate of the dagger that had been his, and his master’s before him.
“Aren’t you going to tell me the outer realms are a tellers’ tale?” Verlein said.
Tellers. Holes. Didn’t they have tellers in this hole? She felt the maudlins coming on. A wistful tale to bring a tear to the eye, now, that would suit her. To have her heart lifted and crushed by events that hadn’t touched her, to exult and ache and grieve for things that never were. She wanted a teller, a fantasy, not some haunt of the past made flesh.
“You should have come at another time,” she said. Her words were blurred, distant. “Earlier. Or another day.”
Now was a time to be mawkish, to laugh and cry at wisps and vapors, to find the illusory camaraderie of vine and gram among shadowy strangers in a wayside place whose name she didn’t even know. To feel, for a space of breaths, something that felt like sentiment. To paint an illumination of life over the hard numb plank of herself—and then go black, know nothing, and wake under a table or in a ditch with simple, burning needs that could be met. A piss. A drink of water. A mug of elderbark tea. A thirst that could be quenched, an ache that could be soothed. She’d plunge her head into a stream, then spend the time from waking till noon with her longblade driven hilt-down into the ground. Watching its shadow contract against it. Waiting to see whether midday came before she accepted the blade’s justice. When midday won, she could unearth the blade, and sheath it, and walk through some alehouse door and feel the first cool blessed flow of relief in her gullet.
She would be happy then. She would be entertaining and entertained, she would welcome reminiscences of youth and fervent beliefs. That would have been the time for this. Not now.
“All the days are the same, for you,” Verlein said, and in that faraway voice, on that faraway face hazed by smoke and long years, Kazhe thought there was a quiet pity.
“Why do you plague me?” she snarled, expanding from her seat. Her voice came out of that distant, muted place and swelled into a roar: “Why do you plague me?”
“I need you, Kazhe. Sit down.”
[179] No tales. No laughter. No sweet tears. She sank back onto the stool, dead weary. “Go away, Verlein. You’re a ghost. Haunt someone else.”
“I’m real, Blademaster, and I have need of you.”
Kazhe drank, and when the mouthful struggled back up as bile, she drank again to wash it down. She waved a hand in resignation: Say what you will. She laughed, belatedly noting the honorific, and then sighed. Blademaster. Her father’s name. She’d never been meant to take it up so soon. But when she killed the turncloaks who’d killed him, she’d done it with his blade.
“We fought the Ennead,” Verlein was saying. “Together or apart, it was the same fight. But it’s not over. There’s one left of the Nine. There’s one left of you to kill her.”
Ennead. How long since she had heard that word? How much longer since she had cared? “We both only ever tried to keep what we loved alive,” someone had said to her once. “For me it was a way of life. For you it was a man.”
But Torrin fell, and Torrin died, while she was bashing herself against the magecrafted warding that kept her from his side, her throat screamed raw, her blade useless, and Torrin fell, and Torrin died, and all the long stream of ale had done nothing to soothe the burning screams.
“There’s no one left to fight, Verlein,” she said, so clearly that for a moment she thought someone spoke for her. “I lost the only fight that ever counted.”
“No, there’s one fight left,” Verlein replied. “And you’re losing that one.”
Kazhe came back to herself at the table, saw the undulating grain in the flame wood, the gouge her boot knife had made, the layers of polish, the pewter tankard in her hand. She tilted it, peering close, but the gray metal gave back no reflection.
As dull as the metal, she said, “Tell me who you want me to kill.”
“No. Not while you’re like this.” Verlein sipped her brandy—the first sip she’d taken—then rose from her seat. “I’m staying in the inn in Tilgard, down the road. Your blade was sworn to protect, Kazhe. The man you protected is gone. I’ll give you all Eiden Myr to protect in his stead—if you come to me tomorrow at sunset, clean and with no drink in you.”
Kazhe huffed in disbelief. “I won’t join your fool shield.”
“I wouldn’t have you. You don’t follow orders.”
“What, then?”
“Meet my terms and I’ll tell you.”
[180] “Fine,” Kazhe said, throwing her hands up. Then, with a twist to her mouth that was meant to be wry but turned out crafty, she said, “You going to drink that?”
Verlein stared at the brandy cup and said, “I remember the night we met.” No, Kazhe thought, don’t, but Verlein didn’t hear. “You were two nineyears old, all white-blond fluff of hair and blaming eyes. Full of rage and courage. Don’t drown that wild, bright flame. I loved you, Kazhe. So did Torrin, in his way. But my heart is still beating. My heart can still be broken.”
Then she was gone, on a swell of pain, leaving Kazhe alone in the midst of strangers, with a tankard of dark grief and failure at one hand, a cup of pungent Koeve brandy in the other.
“Till tomorrow,” she said, lifted the cup in a toast to the closing door, and downed the brandy in three
searing gulps.
She was wet. Not the river. From the stink, not a ditch.
“Wake up,” someone crooned, not for the first time. Then, harder, “Wake up, runt. I have to see you take the lesson.”
A fist in her shirt, pulling up, shoving back. The ooze and squish of an open midden under her back. She smelled a barn or stable. Another voice, lower. More than one of them. Life came back into her limbs on a surge of exhilarating fear, but she left them limp. She kept her eyes closed, and listened.
Only two. One was Arron. She knew the voice. He’d been alone. Or so she’d thought. The rest blurred. It didn’t matter. He had a friend now.
“Pick her up.”
“I’m not touching that. You pick her up.”
An oath. Muffled thuds of boots on dirt. A bucket swung by its handle, slapping into a stream. Maybe nine feet away. She cracked open a crusty eye. One had turned to watch the other fill the bucket.
Novices.
She took the near one out with an elbow across the jaw as he turned at the sound of her sucking rise, then a knee to the crotch, all before her body’s state caught up with her. She shoved him into the dungheap; she wobbled but didn’t go down. Arron was visible in the light of stars and a hangnail moon. Running from the stream, awkward with the bucket. She stepped back into the shadow of the barn. The bucket was too heavy to swing around in time. He flung the water at where she’d been, a pale arc. She came at him from the side, less an attack than a headlong stumble. He was just off balance enough for the impact to knock him down. In the Fist they wrestled [181] for sport. But he was a Highlander. Even impaired, she got his arms locked while he was still trying to flip over.
He swore at her, and she jerked hard, feeling ligaments strain-not all his. “Wasting your time,” she managed through a swollen, grit-thick mouth. “Taverner has your stones. Taverner has twice your bloody stones.”
He answered with a choking sound. The smell was unbearable. She grinned, feeling it soak into his clothes.
A yellow light came around the side of the stable barn. The taverner and his boy. The boy held the lantern. The taverner held her scabbarded longblade.
She pushed away from Arron and stumbled up. Not graceful, and she dropped the weapon when the overeager taverner tossed it to her, but once she had the grip in her hand the blade centered her. She stepped away as the louts got their feet. The friend had the worse of it, and was swearing at Arron, something about how this was supposed to be an easy one-off, just a scare. Kazhe frowned.
The taverner said, “They kicked through the bolt on the door. Good thing you were sleeping there, Blademaster. From the looks of it nothing was taken. But I told you you should have hung on to your weapon.”
The bloody taverner had heard the crash and cowered in his room while the two men dragged her out and around the side of the stable. Kazhe wanted to close her eyes and hold her head, but her line of sight along the blade was the only reason she hadn’t fallen. She supposed she should credit him for coming down to bring her the blade. She didn’t remember entrusting it to him, but at least that kept it out of the dungheap. Any of her eight smaller blades would have done if it came to that. Some instinct must have told her that Arron might return while she was passed out and take her blade as a consolation prize.
“I’ll only need the flat of this,” she said. “Neither of you will do much robbing with broken arms, I’d say, and if you’re careful, the gangrene shouldn’t get you.”
“Bloody spirits!” cried the friend. “We’re not robbers!”
“You could have just asked for the stones back,” Kazhe went on. “And if you take such insult from a knife stuck in a tabletop, you have no business drinking in taverns.”
“We were sent,” said the friend, ignoring Arron waving him to silence.
“Sent?” Her own raised voice sent a spike through her head, but didn’t kill the ironsmith using her skull for an anvil. She bit down on a groan. A fractured, painful glare haloed the lantern, and all [182] movement took on a throbbing translucence in the approach of dawn.
“Her shielders saw you drinking here, couple of days ago, and she sent us on ahead to see how far you could be pushed, then knock some sense into you,” Arron said at last, bitterly. “She told us the day you lost a fight because of drink, you’d never look at an alehouse again. She said if we could shame you enough ... But there’ll be no deal now that I’ve told you.”
“The deal broke when I didn’t lose the fight.” A little stable muck never hurt anyone, though it was going to be a cold job washing it off in the stream.
“They came here to mess you about?” the taverner said. “If not for you and them, I’d still have a bolt on my door?”
Kazhe nearly burst out laughing, but it would have hurt too much. Poor, naïve taverner. It was so nice when he was legendstruck. She’d be sleeping rough the rest of this night.
Unless she put it to better use.
She sent Arron and his friend off on foot with hard words and a slap of her blade. Let them walk back to Verlein, or the Highlands, or wherever they belonged. She told the taverner’s boy to fetch her horse; he glanced at his father or master for permission, got only a bewildered shrug, and went into the barn. I still have a horse, she thought with mild surprise. She remembered gambling it away somewhere, but perhaps she’d won it back. Or perhaps it was a different horse—but it was Comfrey led sleepy and rankled from the barn, and her saddle on his back.
“Which way is Tilgard?” she asked, taking the reins.
The taverner pointed downland. In the bluing light, she saw that the road followed the stream. That suited her. She’d have her wash, and clean and oil her blades, and the morning sun would dry her. She started off, leading the horse although he nipped her shoulder hard.
“Who were they talking about?” the taverner called after.
“Who sent them, you mean? That bladed Souther.”
“ ‘Her shielders,’ that man said. Was she ... ?”
Kazhe kept moving. “Verlein n’Tekla,” she called without turning. “You had the first of Eiden’s shield in your tavern.”
She left them to whisper excitedly about their new brush with legend, and contemplated the joys of stuffing legend’s beating heart down its throat.
You must go back into the world.
This is the world.
It is not the world you came from.
I’ve always been here. This is the world.
It is not your world.
I don’t understand. I’ve always been here. There is no place but this. I’m whole. I’m happy.
This is a passing place. Not a staying place.
I’ve always been here.
You dreamed yourself here. But you are flesh. You must go back to flesh.
I have flesh. Look. Hands, legs ... I have flesh here. I can be flesh here! You have flesh ... I can touch you ... I can love you ...
This is a passing place. Pass through.
Please. Don’t make me go.
You must. Fare you well, child who is not.
Pass through.
The Fist
Kazhe burst into the Tilgard inn at midmorning and strode toward the big oak table where Verlein and two seconds were only just breakfasting. Eowi and Girayal. New recruits, when she had last seen them, and no one she had taught. Hah. Too easy.
“An ale!” she called to the innkeeper, whose wide eyes peered from the cookroom. “Make it two. And none of that black stuff. One for now, and one for after I break the first shield over my knee.”
She dropped Eowi with an elbow to the stomach pit while he was reaching back for his longblade, and spun Girayal away with a kick to the hip so that her blade, coming into play, had only air to cleave. Her gloved hand closed on the blade of Verlein’s battle knife, forcing it wide, while her forearm across Verlein’s throat bore its wielder back against the wall. Fingers hooked around the knife’s guard twisted it from Verlein’s grasp, and she laid the blade on her own forearm, pressi
ng the tip up into the soft flesh under Verlein’s chin before the taller woman could land a blow or draw a different blade.
“Weapons turn on you if you misuse them,” she growled.
“The ale was a mistake,” Verlein managed through a constricted airway. “You have only till sundown to meet my terms.”
“I chewed up your terms,” Kazhe said. “They went in the midden.”
“And you, from the smell of it.”
[185] “I took your message boys with me.” Without looking, she said, “I’ll drive this through her brain in the death spasm, Eowi,” and he withdrew as noisily as he’d tried to sneak up.
“Stand down,” Verlein rasped at them. “She won’t hurt me.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Kazhe crooned.
“Don’t you want to know what the mission is?”
“Not on your terms.”
“State yours, then.”
Kazhe shoved back and flipped Verlein her knife. “Outside.”
The shielders obliged her on a nod from Verlein. Kazhe crooked a finger at the innkeeper, who stood frozen with two mugs in her hand, then swore and walked over to take one from her. She picked up an elderflower fritter on the way by, and washed it down with the tepid ale. “Ahhh,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Better already. My thanks.”
Eowi and Girayal had positioned themselves to either side of the door, which opened inward. Kazhe ducked out and back and let them tangle with each other in trying to grab her, then cocked her head at Verlein and waited.
“Good training for them,” Verlein said with a shrug, and gestured them back to her side.
Kazhe stepped into the grassy yard. Comfrey was tied to a hedge around the side of the building. Tilgard was a pleasant village, all whitewashed stone, thatched roofs, dark-leaved trees. Far enough into the heaths and downs that neither bogs nor sea was anywhere near. Salt air made her ill, and she never wanted to see the rocky coastline of the Fist again. “You and me,” she said, flipping knives into a neat column in a mulberry’s trunk. “Longblades. You best me, I do whatever it is.”
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 23