The great Osk Surarchy of Teluk had its seat in Ril, a port city most of a continent away, but it maintained a modest training facility in Anmerresh for visiting sephs . Shomoro was grateful both for the Surarchy’s largesse and for its distance from her. One of her considerations in choosing where to settle on Teluk was that it not be too close to the planet’s center of Osk influence. Better to forestall any uncomfortable questions about why she hadn’t officially registered with the Surarchy as a seph , and why not, and by the way, what were those strange shafts strapped to her flank?
The building itself was a windowless domed cylinder like one half of a medicine capsule, built of shiny gold-beige ceramic and situated at the confluence of several canal roads in the lower city. Inside, the low lobby featured amber recessed lighting and slightly rough-hewn sandstone walls that gave it the comforting feeling of a warren deep underground. Serving mostly visiting sephs and civilian Osk who sparred occasionally for sport, the facility never got too busy; as usual, the lobby was almost empty today, though she and Daikar always booked a private arena in advance. They signed in at the kiosk then separated to change, he to the communal fitting room, and she to a private room for which she paid a monthly fee out of her Council-provided stipend to maintain.
The tension lessened in her shoulders and back as soon as Shomoro crossed the threshold of her private room. The room was just two body lengths deep. About half of that was taken up by a locker coded to her palm print. Shomoro slid off her cloak and hung it on the door hook behind her without turning around. Beneath, she already wore the supple, skin-like armor underlayer, designed to increase freedom of movement and prevent chafing by providing a barrier between her skin and the articulated armor plates. A stiff fabric harness secured her prosthetic blades in their lacquer sheaths to her right flank.
Shomoro unbuckled the harness and laid it gently on the bench to one side as she approached the locker. The transit between the public lobby of the training facility and her fitting room was always a nerve-racking one; though she’d streamlined the harness as much as was practical, she always worried its shape under her cloak might one day prove fodder for questions she didn’t want to answer.
Shomoro supposed she could have stored her swords in the rented locker with her armor set—but the thought of being separated from them by more than a few meters, even on peaceful Teluk, made her more than willing to accept the risk of awkward questions.
The hairline crack in the metal slab of the locker widened with a hiss of pneumatic release when she palmed the pad. The two halves slid apart against the wall to reveal the plates of her armor, cupped in soft pockets of shaped velvet backing angled obtusely enough to keep them secure. It was a standard set of seph armor, interwoven nanocarbon and spun diamond giving the matte black plates a strength many times that of steel. She had a second identical set in her quarters, but found it convenient to keep a set here rather than tediously disassemble and pack the primary set every time she wanted to spar. In the interest of not alarming the populace, city regulations restricted sephs from going about in public in their armor.
You’re stalling, Shomoro of the White said from behind her eyes. What are you afraid of?
I—nothing, Shomoro answered her other self. It’s just a spar. And to prove it, to herself as much as to her alter ego, she grabbed the armor pieces from their case and started strapping them on. But the other Shomoro was ruthlessly perceptive, as usual. Deny it as she might, a metallic fog of dread was drifting up from the pit of her stomach to the back of her throat, ebbing and flowing in a nauseating tide.
Shomoro distracted herself by focusing on the methodical task of aligning each component of her armor with the rest and buckling it securely. She focused on inflating her lungs to the bottom and breathing out again until it felt like there was no more air in them. But what calmed her more than anything, what eventually made her able to turn from the room and go to meet Daikar, was the knowledge that as tense as she felt today, she would never feel as nervous as she had the very first time they’d fought.
The private arena enclosed Daikar in a windowless cylinder four body lengths in diameter. The walls currently had the texture of smooth golden sandstone, though that was an illusion projected by holofoil circuits. A variety of backgrounds could be selected to simulate a range of visual conditions, from the glare of a sun at its zenith on some world brighter than Teluk, to near-perfect darkness that even an Osk would find it challenging to orient themselves in. Likewise, fighters could select from a menu of ambient sounds and scents calculated to simulate the environmental distractions sephs must learn to filter out when survival demanded their absolute concentration on combat.
For this session, Daikar had left the default settings alone: sandstone lit by soft amber, the only sound the soft susurration of hidden vents circulating scentless air around the chamber. For this training session, he had a different type of challenge in mind than environmental distractions.
The wait was a bit longer than usual before the opposite door slid open and Shomoro emerged. Like him, she was clad in matte black helmet, chest and back plates, greaves, vambraces, and boots. The only difference in their loadout was the black harness strapped across her front hips and the two swords riding in their sheaths on one flank. That, and the swirl of acrid trepidation he caught from her, borne on the recirculated air. It was the smell more than anything else, long-unfamiliar in this familiar arena, that helped him put words to his thoughts.
“Do you remember the first time we trained together?”
Shomoro smiled wryly under her helmet. “I can hardly think of something I’m less likely to forget. I was shaking like the newest seph - in-training.” Her voice lowered as she slid the longer of the two swords from its sheath and held it before her.
“I was terrified of what would happen, once you knew what I’d become.”
“What was done to you,” he interjected softly.
She shrugged. “However you choose to put it, I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d wanted nothing more to do with me after.” Her voice cracked at the end, and she swiftly went on. “I had tried to delay what I thought was just such an eventuality since before we left Skraal. Why do you think I hid it so—”
He raised a gloved hand. “You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone, Shomoro. Least of all me.” How many times he’d said the same thing over the years of their friendship, Daikar wasn’t sure. He’d say it as often as he had to until she believed it.
She jabbed tightly, not looking entirely convinced.
“However,” he said slowly, “you may be facing an opponent who isn’t above using that fear and that shame against you. Even one who uses them to disrupt your concentration when you need it most.”
Her pupils dilated in surprise. “Would Mose Attarrish do that?”
“The Mose I knew never would have,” he said. A twinge of loss shot through his chest, surprisingly fresh after all this time. “But we can’t assume that’s who we’ll be dealing with.”
“Agreed,” she said. “So what do you propose?”
A skein of nerves was twisting his gut; Daikar inhaled and exhaled in a steady rhythm to settle them. Once, in Za, he’d put new-forged sephs through their paces, challenging their nascent skills and situational awareness, their ability to evaluate information and ignore distractions, physical discomfort, even pain. Still, he’d never subjected a trainee, let alone a friend, to the kind of emotional assault he had planned for her.
“I heard you were a brilliant seph in Za,” he said with a tongue that felt heavy as lead. “It’s disappointing I’m only facing you now you’ve lost your blades.” And before Shomoro could do more than open her mouth to respond, Daikar unsheathed his blades and lunged—
—as Shomoro skipped backward, her head ringing, unable to quite believe what he had said. But her feet were quicker than her mind: muscle memory took over, moving her out of the way as Daikar turned the lunge into a one-handed slash.
Sh
e backed out of range, both swords out now in a guard position in front of her, keeping the wall to her right as she circled.
Daikar mirrored her movement, inscribing the other half of their invisible circle. “Is that the best you can do? Retreat?” His voice was flat and colder than she’d ever heard it before. “Fight back, if you still can.”
He pivoted, breaking their circular stasis with a high, vicious thrust toward her throat. Shomoro stumbled as she turned the point aside with her longer sword, her initial shock making the parry clumsy and slower than it should have been. It was more instinct than anything that let her see the second blow coming for her side, the one his forward thrust had been meant to disguise. She seized the smaller sword’s hilt and yanked it half out of its sheath. The flat of the blade absorbed the swing meant for her flank.
A grimace at the reverberation of bone on steel passed over Daikar’s snout as they leapt apart. It turned into an exaggerated, bared-toothed snarl. “Look at you, fighting with these metal toys instead of your own blades!”
He pressed the attack, shielding the vulnerable chinks between his helmet and throat and chest plates with a flurry of quick jabs and sweeping cuts intended not so much to connect as keep her on the defensive.
But his words did the better job of that. “You’re a mockery of a seph , ” he shouted as she gave ground. “A cripple hiding behind the name and a long mane.”
His words slashed her with an edge keener than a honed blade. Her stomach was water, her breathing tight and shallow.
But even as she retreated, Shomoro tightened her grip on her katana’s hilt. “Stop it!”
“Mose won’t stop,” Daikar bellowed. His blade whistled centimeters above her head; if she hadn’t ducked it would have rung off her helmet. “He’d tell you you don’t deserve to be alive, that you should have killed yourself when they took your blades. What are you without them? Nothing!”
The air whistled as he swung his blades in an overhead slash. She raised the katana in a block with an arm that felt wooden and lifeless. His blades clashed onto it, and the muscles in her arm began to burn almost instantly. Soon they would go numb as the strength ebbed out of them.
She had to breathe, to keep her muscles aerated, but a vise crushed her chest. The blood seemed to surge through it, alternately sluggish and roaring, like a river trammeled by a series of bottlenecks. “That’s not true.”
“But it is.” He grunted with the effort of pushing against her guard. A bead of sweat rolled from under his helmet and spattered the floor. “You’re a failure of a seph . Look at what you let the White Arrows take from you. You could’ve fought back. You could have stopped them. How can you hope to save your life now when you couldn’t even save your blades?”
Her vision was going gray at the edges from prolonged hypoventilation, blurring in the middle in a wash of tears. The muscles in the arm holding the katana aloft were beginning to spasm. Tremors running down the backs of her legs begged for her to fold, collapse, give up.
“You’re no true seph,” he hissed, eyes narrowed to slits, his face a cold mask emblazoned by its silver slash of scar. “Just the White Arrows’ plaything. A Bladeless traitor!”
A wordless roar of outrage and anguish tore itself from her, propelled by more breath than it seemed could be in her lungs.
A cold, familiar presence filled her on its outflow, infusing her screaming muscles with a last burst of strength. Her left hand found the hilt of her wakizashi , halfway out of its sheath. She seized the pommel and drove the butt of the sword into the gap between Daikar’s chest and stomach plates.
The breath exploded out of him and he staggered backward, gulping for air that wouldn’t come. Still holding the sword point downward, Shomoro thrust it in a brutal upward jerk. The blunt hilt took Daikar under the jaw, in the soft tissue of his throat just above the guard. His aborted gasp turned to a liquid choke, and he stumbled backward, clutching his throat. Crouching, she hooked the blunt side of her katana under his forelegs, and Daikar fell to his front knees before her.
Surprise was just starting to unfold in his eyes when he looked up, wheezing, and found the point of her katana level with his throat.
Shomoro was distantly proud of how still she held the sword. Rage and grief seemed to pour through her every cell, thrumming along her nerves, superheating the air she drew greedily into her chest. But her voice was steady and cold as the blade as she said, “Would a Bladeless traitor have you on your knees right now?”
A pained, lopsided smile spread across Daikar’s scarred face. He tried to speak and immediately started coughing liquidly, her blade coming perilously close to giving him a new scar as he doubled over.
The awful sound brought Shomoro back to where she was. Shomoro of the White receded, and the smooth beige walls of the training studio came into focus as though her vision was a camera lens readjusting itself. Then she was crouching by Daikar’s side as he hacked and sputtered. Head bowed, he said something too low for her to hear.
“What?”
“I knew you could do it.” His voice was hoarse, strained an octave higher than normal, but she heard the pride in it.
She snorted, but something in her chest went loose with relief. “Some warning next time . . .” she started to say, but no—that would have defeated the whole point of the exercise.
So instead she sheathed her swords and pulled Daikar to his feet. She peered at the spot she’d struck under his jaw, where a blackish bruise was already spreading under the skin. “Let’s get you some salve for that throat.”
To Daikar’s endless relief, the communal fitting room was deserted this close to midday. There were none to watch him stagger in to sit hard on a bench, his breath rasping through his swollen throat. None except Shomoro: She’d offered him an elbow as they made their way from the training studio to the fitting room, but he didn’t feel right taking it—not when the injuries he’d suffered seemed inconsequential compared to those he’d inflicted on her. Sure enough, she’d withdrawn the offer quickly after he refused. Now she watched as he sloughed off his armor with an oldster’s slowness. He winced when bending over stressed the sore knot of muscles where her hilt had struck his stomach. After a glance around the empty room, she quickly piled her own armor on the bench and stood there with the sheathed swords clutched in her hands like an incriminating package she needed to get rid of.
“Heat room,” Daikar grunted. He waved at the door in one wall of the fitting room, labeled with O’o Nezz glyphs.
“But what about—” She glanced at the swords.
“Bring them,” he said. “If anyone asks, I’ll tell them where they can go.”
In silence, they shucked their armor underlayers and left them on the bench. The tiny room enfolded him in radiant heat, provided by steam pipes behind the stone walls. Dim red lighting gave the place the ambiance of a nesting chamber.
There was just room enough for two Osk to sit across from each other, in warm hollows cut into the floor in a cross pattern; the occupancy limit of this particular room was four individuals. In the center of the room crouched a low table; labeled pots of unguents for alleviating cramped and sore muscles were arrayed on its surface in ceramic jars.
Shomoro sat him down in one of the shaped depressions and rifled among the jars until she found an analgesic gel. With brisk but generous strokes, she rubbed the stuff into his aching throat and belly until his tissues had absorbed the medicine. It set to work almost instantly, numbing the bruised muscles. After a few minutes, Daikar knew he could no longer blame the hard knot in his stomach on the injury. It seemed to tighten the longer either of them went without speaking, the longer Shomoro went without looking him in the face, even as she treated him.
At last he felt he must say something or burst. “I’m sorry, Shomoro.” Her fingers paused on his stomach for an instant, then resumed rubbing in gel. She kept her eyes on the work, her expression placid and cold.
“I said vile things to you,” Daikar cont
inued. “Vile, disgusting things. Things no one has any right to say to you.” He swallowed. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to train with me anymore. Or . . . be around me.”
A salty note of surprise broke the still pool of her scent, and she looked at him at last. “I didn’t say that.”
“I didn’t want you to have to say it,” he said, in a small voice that wasn’t entirely the fault of his swollen throat.
She rocked back on her haunches, hands on her front hips. “I appreciate that.” A lopsided smile pulled at her lips, and her expression turned distant. “You know, it’s funny. Everything you said today, I’d already played in my head before that first time we sparred. It was just the reaction I feared you’d have then.”
“Prejudices never have the decency to be original, do they?”
He mirrored her smile hesitantly. “I’m glad I didn’t turn out to be the person you feared.”
He’d respected her privacy for that first year on Teluk, though not without a slight hurt that she’d apparently chosen someone else for a sparring partner. Only after his discreet inquiries revealed that she apparently trained with no one among Anmerresh’s stable of visiting sephs did Daikar’s curiosity get the better of him. The frozen courtesy with which she’d finally accepted his invitation to spar had only added to the mystery—until the moment when, facing her across the training circle, she’d pulled two mystifying shafts of sharpened metal from the contraption belted across her armor. Then the realization that they were prosthetic blades, and how she must have lost the originals, had come crashing in on him like a cave-in.
He’d lost that fight; pure shock dealt his poise an unrecoverable blow. But it hadn’t stopped him from inviting her to spar a week later. And the week after that. Together, with Shomoro taking the lead, they’d honed the sverdren style from serviceable into something truly formidable.
Shomoro laid a hand on his. “You certainly didn’t. I think that was the first day I truly considered you a friend.”
Alliance of Exiles Page 10