The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1)

by Kari Cordis

  The Northerners looked around curiously as they settled in cross-legged at one end of one of the buildings. At the other end, little persons—which may or may not have been female, it was hard to tell—moved busily around a fire, cooking something that smelled strongly of fish. Dorian had disappeared.

  “Did you know about these people?” Melkin asked in an undertone of Traive and Kai. Traive nodded. “The Fox know of them: Swamp dwellers, they call themselves. They’re very simple, but have never failed to be hospitable to the Fox that come through. They were chased out to such isolated places by the bullying and power struggles in Skoline, choosing seclusion and peace over convenience and strife.”

  “Skoline,” Banion murmured. Sitting down, he was still almost too tall for the huts. “That’s Swamp Town?”

  Traive nodded.

  “I don’t suppose they have running water and hot baths there?” Loren asked longingly, wrinkling his nose at Rodge.

  “The only thing running in that town is the citizens,” Traive remarked drily. “Usually for their lives. It’s got to be the most dangerous community in the Realms, controlled almost completely now by the Asps.” Ari tensed at the name, meeting Melkin’s eyes. “Through sheer ruthlessness and intimidation, over the years they’ve climbed to the top of the dog-eat-dog social ladder.”

  “What does the town live on?” Banion asked. “You can’t tell me there’s any industry or trade that far into the Swamps. I know Merrani has never traded with them.”

  “Maybe not directly,” Traive said, exchanging a knowing look with Kai. “But they do trade—not always by, er, traditional methods—and surreptitiously get their few goods on the market. They’re on a major inlet from the Western Sea—”

  “Aye, the Goudget,” Banion said readily, not to be outdone in maritime knowledge.

  “Mm. But their main income is from dasht snuck through the Torques, and from contracts.”

  The hairs crawled upright on Ari’s neck. “Contracts,” he repeated carefully. “What kind of contracts?” Traive looked at him quietly, but it was Kai who answered, “Anything that pays.”

  Everyone adopted gracious faces then, for one of the little people was approaching with an enormous tray. He (or she) put it down in front of them, revealing a small mountain of rice littered with whole greyish-green fish, mouths open to reveal double rows of pointed teeth.

  “Maybe one is the one that bit you,” the person offered shyly, gesturing at Banion’s bandaged hand. The Merranic forced a smile, muttering under his breath, “Isn’t he cute?”

  “Please, eat.” He gestured with his little hands. The Northerners especially noticed the lack of utensils, and to avoid the necessity unfolding before them, Melkin asked, “Do you know where Dorian went?”

  He looked puzzled, and Traive reiterated quietly, “The Lady of Light.”

  His face cleared. “Ah. She goes to see the other Light.”

  “The other light?”

  “The other Ivory,” Traive translated, experimentally lifting an oozing, mud-colored fish.

  “Why do you call them Light?” Ari asked.

  The person cocked his head. “They are Light. They shine in the Darkness. Their Light is a light to all, a reflection of the Great Light which does not fade.” His voice was practical, as if everybody knew these things.

  “How long have you known her?” Ari asked curiously.

  “Oh, very long time,” he assured them. “She is a good friend, help us much, many years. You know the one called ‘Nerissa?’” he confided proudly, and at their nods, continued, “Her mother was a Swamp Dweller. Many hundreds of years ago, she was born right here, in a hut just like this!” He beamed. Nobody answered him, though he certainly had everyone’s attention.

  “How illuminating,” Cerise remarked wryly when he left. They all began to pick half-heartedly at the pile of…food.

  “What if it’s true?” Loren said slowly, dreamily putting a single, safe grain of rice in his mouth. “What if they really are hundreds of years old?”

  “What if it were really true?” Rodge looked at him askance. “What if you really did have a brain and just—no one could tell?”

  “I’m serious—look at all the things they know. Look at how they move. How many girls in their twenties could have done, known, some of the things they have?”

  “Dorian is no twenty-year old,” Cerise said cattily.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying!”

  “I am NOT agreeing with you.”

  “What do you think, Banion?”

  “Witches,” he muttered uncompromisingly. He was the only one brave enough to try the fish—it didn’t look like it was going very well. There were tiny bones scattered all over his facial hairs.

  “Traive?”

  Traive looked up at them all. “I do not think you could believe it if the incontrovertible truth were laid right in front of you,” he said in amusement.

  “You believe it.” Loren pointed a greasy finger at him, grinning slyly.

  “Cyrrhideans believe in dragons,” Rodge pointed out.

  “They also believe in gryphons and centaurs,” Loren shot back. Traive was still his hero.

  One of the little people was back, a different one, they thought. “You would like your lower clothes washed?” he (she?) offered Rodge. “The Lady of Light said this.”

  “Yes!” Loren agreed eagerly.

  Rodge said, “Uh, thanks, but I don’t have another pair.”

  “I won’t look,” Cerise promised, with great emphasis. Though truthfully, Kai smelled so bad by now, what with his repeated dunkings, that you could hardly stand to be around him, but no one had said anything to him.

  “No problem,” the person beamed. “Loaner,” he said, and held up a pair of pants that might cover Rodge’s skinny shanks to, maybe, just above the knee.

  Pleasant as it was to be in something resembling a house, no one wept when they left the next morning.

  Jordan accompanied them for a while that day. She came up, deftly pulling her boat alongside Ari’s with a wink and a sunshine smile, to tell Dorian that Sylvar had been darted by orchids. Which on the surface you might think was serious, but since neither of them seemed to give it more than their cursory attention, Ari decided it must sound worse than it was.

  Rodge, who after his raving success with the Cyrrhidean ladies was under the mistaken impression that he was Quite the Catch, and who had been unfortunately rowed up on the other side of Jordan’s canoe by an eager Loren, looked like he was ready to pounce on her.

  Ari ignored him, elated to finally get a few words with this living memory, but when she said, “The light will get brighter and this fog lift the closer we get to the Tamarisks—” Rodge threw in, “I dabble around with light myself.”

  She turned to look at him blankly. “You know,” he elaborated, “wave theory, frequency gradient…”

  Her pale, silken yellow eyebrows rose, “Are you talking physics?”

  At which point such a torrent of technical jargon filled the air that it was barely recognizable as intelligible. Her canoe drifted away. Ari wanted to hit himself on the head with a paddle.

  He heard them all afternoon, jabbering away in delight about mass and velocity, and was so glum by the time they beached the boats that night that he didn’t say a word to anyone. Why could he never get a moment alone with these women?

  All of them came in that night, except Adama and Brook, a silent materializing at the periphery of camp just as the party was finishing up dinner. The group from the north went quiet, looking around. Especially in the fog, and when none of them were moving or speaking, it was more than a little ethereal, like something out of a dream. They had met everyone there—well, not been introduced—but there was an unmistakable otherworldly quality to them in that light, in that setting, that made them seem like strangers, like they were hardly real. Like they were something out of a fairytale.

  Sunny Jordan was there, unsmiling and spectral. Next to h
er, Rowena shimmered with almost celestial beauty in the misty light. There was the lovely Dra Vashti, the one Rodge and Loren had nick-named Brown Beauty, hair stirring faintly in the currents of mist. Across the clearing, the other Dra, the tall lioness named Atlanta, stood so absolutely immobile she could have been a statue in a garden of fog. There was tiny, raven-haired Nerissa, and impish Sylvar, trying to weave a black-heart bracelet. She was the only one moving at all, her little pink tongue protruding as she tried to grab the mewling, darting ends of the hickory twigs.

  “Nothing has changed,” Dorian addressed them without preamble. “The word the Messenger brought is not for us. Nothing must swerve us from this path, nor are the stones that are being moved now all on our game board. Our way lies straight before us.” She had stepped away from the fire to the almost phantom-like circle of the other Whiteblades, and her voice floated back oddly disembodied, as if she’d stepped into a place that lay at the boundary of northerner senses.

  The faces, bright in that odd way that had nothing to do with the ordinary five senses, showed no emotion. Even Sylvar was still now, and the northerners were struck by the supernatural aura of the scene. How long had it been since such a gathering had been witnessed? For once it seemed perfectly appropriate that Dorian’s words were veiled, her meaning hidden.

  Jordan broke the silence. “I don’t suppose we could put a rush on this…it is an unprecedented opportunity, their being so distracted and all.”

  “How can we?” Dorian said huskily, fine voice thrumming with faint frustration. “We are less than half.” She gestured with one of her elegant hands at the circle of girls, mere whispers of vision in the quivering, mist-strewn light.

  Jordan, who was either a confidante or third-in-command, or something, said as if in reassurance, “Voral and Rhoda will be in soon after we’re out of the Swamps. Verrena should be there shortly after with the horses. And Rox and Yve will meet us at the Falls of Tiramina.”

  Loren started, glancing at Ari.

  Dorian didn’t respond. Without any word of dismissal or farewell, the Whiteblades melted back into the mist, and blinking, the northerners looked around at each other, like they were all waking up from the same dream.

  Loren said in awe, “Voral…”

  Ari scratched absently at his legs, itchy from where his trousers had been soaked in filthy swamp water. Voral was one of the Great Heroes of the Realms, from the Ages of War. Every Northern boy wanted to be Voral in the bruising game of Heroes Chance.

  “Yeah,” Loren said slowly, face lighting with excitement. “Remember the rumor that he’d been a woman in disguise all those years, had joined the Whiteblades after he was supposedly killed in that Merranic battle?”

  Banion gave a great snort, hair flying up around his face. “He was the finest blade that ever swung steel,” he said crushingly. It obviously followed that he couldn’t be female, or a Whiteblade.

  Loren’s eyes brightened. He grabbed Rodge’s arm. “Rodge! Voral was the finest swordsman that ever lived!”

  “Yeah, Lor, I know,” Rodge said impatiently, trying to extract his bicep. “I was sitting right next to you in class when we learned about him.”

  “The greatest swordsman ever,” Loren repeated buoyantly. “Don’t you see? There’s no way any girl playing a part could ever get to be that good—it’ll be obvious!”

  Rodge looked at him like he was crazy. “You wave a blade around in the air—it’s not that hard.” Ari, Loren and Banion all looked at him. He was possibly not the best judge of swordwork in the Realms.

  “Voral started at, what, seven or something, at the Merrani Academy of Knights?” Loren asked Banion, who grunted an affirmative. “How many girls you think get that kind of training today, could sneak through a crowd of Merranic boys pretending she was one?” Banion frowned darkly. “It was a once-in-a-five-hundred-year chance she got away with it.” Banion glowered threateningly. “Or he,” Loren said appeasingly, noticing the large and unhappy Merranic nearby. “Maybe it’s all just make-believe. All I’m saying is, we’re going to know. For sure.”

  “We still, however, won’t know about your brain,” Rodge quipped, rolling his eyes.

  A vague feeling of well-being accompanied the Northerners to bed that night, deepened by the memory of the mystical gathering of their escort. Lying under the sweltering, bug-infested sky, Ari had the fleeting impression that they were coming to the end of this part of the journey, that these endless, grey days were finally coming to a close. Maybe, finally, the emergencies and catastrophes and life-threatening dangers would taper off and he’d have a chance to talk to one of these elusive women.

  CHAPTER 29

  Ari’d hardly been asleep more than an hour when it began to rain. Stirring, awakened by the pattering, the Northerners sat up suddenly in surprise—the camp was seething with quiet activity. Dorian was bending low over the fire, trying to bring it back to life. Rowena darted in as they watched, arms full of long rope. Her gentle face was a mask of intensity, the beautiful big eyes dilated with the dark—and alarm.

  “We need to go,” Dorian said to them, noticing they were awake. “Now.”

  “It’s just a little rain,” Rodge protested. It felt good, actually. It wasn’t even cold.

  Nerissa dashed into camp. She was carrying all the wood she could, long, thick, knobby sticks of it. She dumped it next to the rope and was followed promptly by Sylvar, who couldn’t even see around her armful. Deftly, Dorian thrust one of the sticks into the reluctant coals, and it flared into light. She handed it to Kai, standing nearby. Traive—they were the only two up—scooped up the rope and they disappeared down to the waterline.

  Ari sprung up, rolling his blankets and readying his saddlebags, which seemed to inspire the others. Something was going on, you could tell by the feeling of urgency, but he didn’t know what. Surely it was more dangerous being out on the water in this pitch blackness than it was to wait out the rainstorm in camp.

  “What’s going on?” Rodge said plaintively.

  “It’s raining. Get down to the boats,” Dorian said briskly.

  Banion stopped by the fire once everyone was ready, grabbing two more of the smoky torches, and they all headed down to the muddy shore. Loren and Melkin began to help tie the canoes together, and Ari, feeling useless, went back for an armload of torches. At camp, Dorian scuffed dirt in the direction of the fire even as he bent to gather the last load, and without waiting, whisked off down the trail in front of him.

  “Will these stay lit if the rains get worse?” Ari asked, for something to say as he trotted after her. Here was a few, brief moments to talk—

  “It’s greasewood,” she said laconically. So much for a heart-to-heart.

  The rain was coming down harder, and as they all got carefully into the canoes, a gust of wind sent the torchlight into ghoulish contortions. Ari, with a faint sense of uneasy awe, thought they made the darkness even darker. He couldn’t believe they were doing this—you couldn’t see a thing.

  It was a slow, awkward start, partly because of the nonexistent visibility and partly because of the unfamiliar tugging of their connecting rope. It wasn’t long before they realized the dead, still water of the Swamp that had become so drearily familiar was completely different this night. It surged under the canoes, fighting the paddles, driven by the rising gusts of wind and whatever other forces stirred its black depths. The rain pattered harder, steadier, and the air was filled with the moan of trees and the keen of the wind through their branches. Great swathes of the gauzy moss, torn loose, whipped through the air, swinging like vengeful ghosts out of the blackness so suddenly that it had them all on edge.

  Cerise had already screamed several times when she let out such a prolonged, really meaningful one, that everyone turned to see what the matter was. Ari, in the boat just ahead of theirs, saw Banion martially attacking a rat the size of a tom cat that was trying to climb into their canoe. After flattening every inch of wood around it, he finally connected
and it slid in limply two-dimensional form back into the water.

  “Row, Ari!” Dorian shouted over the storm and he set to the oars with a renewed sense of purpose. It seemed a long, long time before daylight began to slowly lighten things up, and the Swamps (arguably not the most well-lit place on their best day) stayed deep grey as the day dragged on. Although the usual heavy fog was in tatters from the rising wind, the sky was so stormy that it was dimmer than even a normal day in the swamps. Dorian kept the torches lit.

  They rowed, and rowed, and rowed. They had all expected the weather to calm down as the day wore on, but it was growing unmistakably worse. They were all drenched to the skin, but in the torrid heat that wasn’t much of an issue. It was the unrelenting energy of the storm that was so disturbing. The deathly still water of the Swamps was surging now, tossing the canoes around and sending them back a stroke for every two pulls on the oars. Limbs and logs and various creatures were being flung through the water, helpless in the current, careening off their boats and in the case of the bigger varieties, knocking them off course. Airborne denizens, ability to navigate destroyed by the growing gale, smashed into them if the humans couldn’t see them coming in time to duck, and the flying branches became a real hazard. One connected solidly with Banion’s head, snapping in half with a thunderous crack. Ari turned in his seat in time to see the Merranic scowling at it and rubbing his forehead. The end that had fallen in his canoe was the size of a small log and would’ve brained a normal human.

  Through the rain, which lashed against them in great sheets, they could make out the Whiteblade canoes. None of this appearing mysteriously out of the trees today. They clung within sight of them, paddling skillfully to mirror the party’s path when waves pushed them off course. Ari didn’t even know how Kai was keeping track of their course. He personally was so disoriented by the heaving water and the blinding rain and the occasional unhappy swamp bird in his face that he could barely follow Dorian, in the same canoe.