Echoes

by West, Michelle

  Where Arkady took a moment to gather and centre himself, to find his knees, Mikal was lunging. He used the points of the guards, and the edges of blade, as if they were lethal. They were. Kallandras leapt out of the way. Arkady was seldom that aggressive, and with reason; Mikal took the back of the hilt in the shoulder as Kallandras spun.

  Mikal was tall, his shoulders broad; he had strength and stamina. Kallandras, slender, had stamina; his strength had never been tested in this fashion. He was curious; he had seen Mikal fight with Torval for months, but none of that dance was in his step now; his rage—at what?—was unfettered, and it made him clumsy.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t rage. Perhaps it was simply lack of caution. He did not consider the practice blade a weapon. If it was not lethal, he could take risks he would otherwise never take.

  Foolish.

  Kallandras did not draw blood; he didn’t need to. Mikal’s knee touched the ground when he overbalanced in an attempt to take advantage of an illusory opening in an attempt to draw blood. The master called the match and sent them both to the wall, calling Arkady and Torval to take their place. Before they began, he lifted a hand.

  “The deadliest weapon does not make an opponent deadly. It may, however, make him foolish. A lesson should be taken from this; take the right one.” He lowered his hand.

  Torval and Arkady began to circle each other. Arkady was pale; his breath was too shallow. Kallandras wanted to shout at him; to correct him. You know better than this! But the master’s grim expression was a command. Torval was not Kallandras. Arkady was not Kallandras.

  “Your friend won’t last the round,” Mikal said, conversationally.

  Kallandras said, equally tonelessly, “That arrogance has already failed you once. Learn from the failure.”

  Mikal’s jaw snapped audibly shut. It was the last sound Kallandras allowed to distract him from the fight.

  Arkady could not see past sharp blade, ground point. Torval struck once; grazed Arkady’s slender thigh. Cloth parted; blood welled. It had not been a particularly graceful strike, but grace was not as useful as success.

  Arkady, he thought. Damn you, Torval is not playing a game. You’re better than this—

  Another misstep. Torval drove Arkady back, and Arkady, mesmerized by blood and the glint of light across polished steel, let his guard slip again. But he did not fall to his knees. He faltered, righted himself, continued.

  Kallandras reached for his practice blade, and a hand clenched his wrist when his fingers brushed the hilt.

  The master’s hand.

  “Our purpose here is not to kill each other!” he snarled. He could not suppress the rage that broke between words to crawl to the surface.

  “It is not for you to judge your purpose,” the master answered. His tone was cold and dark, but something beneath it reached pale-haired boy that Kallandras had once been. Pain. He bowed, then, in order to retrieve his wrist. And heard the clash of weapons.

  Arkady, you fool! Bend at the knees. He’s not half the fighter I am, and you can beat me! The edge is illusion; the guard points are illusion; the only thing that counts is the block and the counter. See me if you must see his face at all; see my weapon if you must see anything.

  The words died into stillness as they left him. He felt them go. But he had not felt his lips move. And the master’s eyes were upon the fight. He offered no censure.

  He didn’t hear me.

  No. For just a moment, fear came; fear of fire, of swords, of death. But behind that, satisfaction. Arkady had come to life. The stiffness of fear left his limbs; the fear of bleeding—of being carried away by masters, never to return—went with it.

  Who’s the old man now, Arkady?

  “Damn you, Kallatin!” Arkady shouted back. It was not, strictly speaking, forbidden, but the master frowned. His glare travelled the distance between the two boys. Only Kallandras saw it.

  But he didn’t care. Arkady had heard him. Arkady was safe.

  After the fight, the master nodded. He broke up the pairings of the others, but as Torval and Mikal were the only two who fought with true edges, the contests were even. Arkady ungraciously allowed Kallandras to tend the two wounds he’d received.

  “Scars are attractive to the right people,” he told Arkady, as he pulled the bandage taut around the thigh.

  “And we see the right people down here?” Arkady laughed. “You saved me out there. You know? I—I heard you, I heard you speak.”

  “You’re lucky that’s all you heard,” Kallandras said darkly. “If I were closer I would have slapped you.”

  Arkady laughed. The laughter walked the edge of hysteria without falling off. “I owe you.”

  “There is no debt between brothers.”

  “You’re too ugly to be my brother.”

  Kallandras laughed. “If we ever face each other again, you’ll pay for that.”

  * * *

  “Did you interfere in the fight today?”

  They sat on either side of a low table in the mid-meal eating room, but it was just after the meal had been cleared away. Kallandras looked away.

  “The master was most specific.”

  “If you already know the question, old man, why do you ask me? I have no desire to walk into your traps.”

  The old man laughed. “But you walk into them nonetheless. I—am surprised. You should not have been able to do that, not so quickly.”

  “I had to.”

  “Did you?”

  “Torval would have killed him.” He was silent for a moment, and then he added, “Or he would have wounded him badly, and that isn’t much different, is it?”

  The old man bowed his head a moment. When he lifted it, his expression made steel look soft. “No.”

  Although Kallandras knew—they all did— what must have happened to the injured and the fallen, the bluntness of the single, cold word cut him; he took a moment to gather breath. He did not bother to hide what he felt. The old man would hear it in the words that needed to be said. “Why? If we are to be brothers—”

  “If you cannot leave the scene of a battle of your own accord, you will die, and better so. The Kovaschaii are almost immune to torture, but they are not immune to magic. We guarantee our clients privacy, because in the end, we force them to reveal much about themselves. We cannot afford to risk exposure and destruction.”

  “But the scene of a battle is not the training ground.”

  “Kallandras, it is a test. You insisted on the practice blade. You endured mockery and scorn because you did not desire to injure your partner. He accepted this. The others did not.”

  “But they—”

  “It doesn’t matter why. Some mistakes are fatal. You of all people should understand this.”

  “This is a…harsh lesson.”

  For just a moment, the old man’s face softened. “It is not the harshest you will learn.” He reached across the table, and then let his hand fall to the flat, unadorned surface. “I have spoken too much.”

  “You have said almost nothing.”

  “I have used few words,” the old man countered. “Where you are concerned, they are not the same. When I first passed all tests—” He bowed his head a moment, and Kallandras heard small fissures in the surface of his voice; cracks that memory would widen, judging by the look on his face. He rose. “I envy you the chance to rediscover the brotherhood.”

  But not the cost. Not the cost.

  * * *

  Over the next few weeks, they moved from the three training rooms to others. Long, narrow rooms in which it was impossible to swing a weapon. Rooms where the floors were sloped from edge to centre, like a giant, stone funnel. Rooms in which stairs started nowhere and ended in the height of the wall.

  They also fought in the largest of the rooms, and honed their response to flight—both their own and their target’s.

  To Kallandras’ eye, they had improved—but the masters grew dour and silent.

  “Soon,” they said, in thei
r own ways, “it will all be over. Soon.”

  But no matter how soon that was to be, the training continued; Kallandras forgot what daylight looked like because the reality of shadow was much more visceral.

  “But they said only a few of us would—”

  Kallandras lifted a hand. He was not an authority, but when he spoke he could make people listen. “They said probably. It’s not as if they’ll set a limit of two or three and kill the rest of us. It’s a test.”

  “A test to see who is the fittest?” Mikal snapped.

  “Perhaps. But I think—”

  “No one cares what you think.”

  Arkady rose. “I do,” he said.

  “You are barely a separate person. He tells you what to eat, when to breathe, when to piss.”

  “He tells me everything I need to hear; he lets me decide the rest for myself,” Arkady snapped back. “Unlike the way you treat Torval, your seraf.”

  Torval rose as well. Hands touched the hilts of weapons and an ugly silence robbed the room of everything but harsh breath. The old man entered, and movement returned. But it was strained.

  Kallandras bowed.

  The old man said, almost against his will, “The weapons are not for use outside of the training rooms.”

  They nodded the way children nod when they’re not listening.

  Later, in the quiet of long, half-smooth halls, Arkady turned to Kallandras. “Aren’t you afraid?” he demanded, his voice both low and urgent. It was clear to Kallandras that Arkady was; also clear that he felt no need to hide it.

  “I am more afraid of being ordered to take my first life—to make my first kill.” It was true.

  “Kallandras—they’re all so tense now. They don’t even look at us as if we’re going to be their so-called brothers. I wake up in the morning—every morning—and I thank the Lady that I’m not dead.”

  Kallandras did not point out that a dead person had no thanks to offer. Instead, he said, “What do you expect them to do?”

  “Take us away,” was the blunt reply. “Just like they did with the others.”

  “No.” Kallandras said quietly.

  “No?”

  “If they do, they won’t take us without a fight. There are three masters here. There are ten of us.”

  “They’re Kovaschaii, Kallandras.”

  “True. And maybe we stand no chance against them. But if we’re to die anyway, without a word or a struggle, why not stand together instead of dying alone?”

  Arkady’s words were always full of the nuance of emotion. But he did not speak. He met Kallandras’ eyes in the poor light, and his own glimmered unnaturally bright.

  The old man did not come the next morning. He did not come the morning after, or the morning after that. The masters spoke very little. In the absence of a familiar voice Kallandras felt the tension that had infected Arkady and the others as if it were a disease. Something was going to happen.

  * * *

  “After dinner tonight, you will confine yourself to the sleeping chambers. On the morrow, we will come for you, and we will choose among you.”

  “C-choose?” Arkady said.

  The master frowned. “That is what I said. Those who are chosen will leave the Labyrinth. Those who are not, will not. We have need of the Labyrinth for the newcomers.”

  Ah, memory. The voices of his brothers, bound to him by ceremony, oath, blood and his own desire—to never be alone; to never have to face the world without someone trusted at one’s side—did change, subtly, with the passage of time. So did memories. As a young man, so much of what he had learned after being accepted by ritual and ceremony had loomed so large. Now, he remembered his beginnings. What he chose to remember ten years from now, if he lived, would be different again; he could not predict it.

  But ten years from now, Arkady would not be dying.

  * * *

  Darkness. Always darkness. Everything began when the shadows were too dense. Sound. Scuffling, the huff of breath that speaks of shock; silence. But something woke him as he lay across the mats in the dormitory. There was little light, but as the old man had promised that light had become enough to see clearly by with the passage of time.

  There was blood on the floor. The mats were slick with it. It dripped from two blades, and as Kallandras rose, those two blades came round. He knew that he could not take his eyes off these two, but his gaze slid past them anyway, risking death for a glimpse of death; his own death. The deaths of his…brothers.

  Mikal’s hands were wet. Torval’s chest, also wet.

  Kallandras shook his head in denial—just as he had shaken his head when wind had carried the sounds of his family’s death. He had thought that he would never have family again, and he had found the promise of something more. But that promise would never be fulfilled—not by the boys here. He reached for his blade, practice blade.

  “You don’t stand a chance against the two of us,” Mikal said conversationally. But he did not look at his hands, or at the sleepers who would never wake. Their bodies were still—of the injured, they at least would not be carried off and put down.

  Torval’s eyes were glinting as well. His hands were shaking.

  They were not, Kallandras realized, madmen. They were frightened, and they had chosen this way to appease their fear.

  As if they could hear his judgement, they said, “But we don’t have to fight. Help us, Kallatin, and there is room for you when the masters come tomorrow. They said three.”

  He said nothing. But with their words, the room’s focus changed. If they wanted help, they had not yet finished their work. He saw them at a remove of years: inefficient. Emotional. But in the Labyrinth, he had also been both of those things.

  When he spoke his voice filled the room; there was no space that escaped the command he put into the words.

  “WAKE!”

  They did. Not a shred of sleep remained; they were on their feet in an instant. Some rolled, hands hunting for the blunted weight of practice blades. Some leaped.

  They were quicker than he had been to take in the events that had occurred while they slept. There were cries of dismay, of anger, of outrage—but there was no room for fear.

  Not theirs.

  “You would have done the same!” Mikal shouted, as he backed toward a wall. “They’re going to choose in the morning—they’re going to pick who lives and who dies!”

  “And you thought you’d help them?”

  “I didn’t come here to die!”

  “None of us did,” Kallandras said softly. He lifted his weapon. Blunt. Heavy. “You betrayed us.”

  “There is no us!”

  Kallandras stepped forward. At his back, there were a handful of boys; he was not sure how many. More than two; probably four, judging from the way Mikal and Torval had chosen to stand.

  “You have no right to judge us.”

  “You had no right to kill them.”

  Mikal’s laugh was strained, terrible. “I had every right—all we’re going to do for the rest of our lives is kill people.”

  Kallandras hesitated. Every word that Mikal spoke was true; every word struck home in a way that a simple weapon had failed to do in their earlier combat.

  “If we can’t kill here, when our lives depend on it, where can we kill?”

  “Anywhere else,” another voice said. A familiar voice. The old man. For the first time, Kallandras noted that the old man did not wear the robes of the heartlands; he wore black; night’s color. He pushed the door of the sleeping rooms open and stepped into the room. The other masters followed them in. Kallandras spoke.

  “To me,” he said. And the four—there were four—obeyed instantly, although he had put no command in the word. They held their practice blades, and if they were blunt and unblooded, they were not without danger.

  Mikal and Torval turned to the door.

  “You have failed us,” the old man said quietly.

  Mikal’s voice contorted into a thing halfway betw
een roar and scream. Torval had always been the more cautious of the two.

  The old man gestured with both hands. Mikal charged, and the old man stepped out of his way; he ran into the hall and stumbled as he attempted to run. There was a thud and a crash, a clatter of steel against hard stone. In the torchlight, Kallandras could barely make out the toe of his boot. Torval did not run. He slumped. Fell.

  The old man bowed to Kallandras. To the other four. “Welcome,” he said softly, “to the brotherhood. There is much to be done before you are presented to the Lady, but you have earned the right to be presented.”

  But Kallandras shook his head.

  The old man’s brows rose until they were obscured by hair.

  “I’m not ready to leave yet.”

  “The Lady is waiting.”

  Kallandras met the gaze of the old man and held it for several heartbeats before he turned away. He looked closely at the four who waited—and it was clear that they did wait—for his word. None of them were Arkady. He walked past them then, quickly.

  His heartbeat was loud enough for two. Loud enough for two. “Arkady?”

  Silence.

  One of the masters lifted a brow; the old man lifted a hand in response, although he had not looked back to see the slight shift in expression. “Kallatin,” he said quietly. “The time has come to leave.”

  Arkady, answer me.

  The silence was broken by something like a cough. “K—Kall—”

  “Enough. Shut up now.” Kallandras knelt on the floor beside the pallet. It seemed impossible to him that Mikal could miss. But Mikal was not, then, a killer. Only another desperate person struggling to stay alive.

  “W-what happened?”

  “We have to go, Arkady.”

  “Kallatin,” the old man said. His voice should have been harsh; it was surprisingly gentle. “What I said was true. If he cannot leave on his own, he cannot leave.”

  It was not the only time he would ignore Constanso, although it was the first. He looped an arm beneath Arkady’s arm and brought him to his feet.

  “Kallatin,” the old man spoke again. “You make this hard on yourself.”