by sun sword
When had the shadows gathered, seeping from her eyes, her lips, the tips of her fingers, leaving the mask the The Kalakar and her advisers had shied away from inspecting? One moment her face was the shuttered face of a foreigner, and the next—the next, it was a thing stripped of humanity. Of mortality.
She did not speak, but the sword was in her hand as if it had no sheath, no bonds to hold it. Ellora had not drawn breath before Kiriel gripped the rail and vaulted herself over it in a type of graceful, deadly flight. Beneath her, three rows of spectators felt her shadow passing; they had no time to glance up before she was beyond them, and into the arena itself.
"Kiriel!" Duarte shouted, finding the voice that had deserted his Commander. "Kiriel, stop!"
Men of Annagar did not often think women a threat, but there was about this one a shade and a grimness that spoke of death, and only death. To call her girl—or woman—was unthinkable. Unthought. Shadow wreathed and darkened her face, but it was no Lady's shade, no Lady's veil. This darkness, he knew at once, for he saw in it the hand of the Lord of Night, whom no Annagarian named.
Leonne.
Ramiro di'Callesta reached for his sword and froze, mid-motion, as he saw the gleaming light in Valedan's hand; Baredan di'Navarre began to draw blade. Neither man moved as quickly as she; shock held them that necessary moment.
But as she bore down upon them—past them—in utter silence, The Kalakar noted grimly that Ramiro di'Callesta hit the floor and rolled away from the reach of her blade, but General Baredan di'Navarre threw himself toward it—in front of the man that he had come, from the heart of the Tor Leonne, to retrieve.
Kiriel snarled; there were no other words to describe the sound that filled the vaulted chamber, unless it be roar. And then she leaped, up and over, landing a foot beyond Baredan's stiffening back, well clear of the reach of his weapon. The older General had time to lose all color, but not hope; he began to turn as her feet touched ground.
Not the boy, Ellora thought, with horror. Kiriel—not the boy.
But Kiriel could not hear what she could not even say. Turning to Duarte, Ellora shouted, "Stop her!"
"Too late!" Duarte cried, although his hands were in motion. "She's too damned fast!"
Helpless, they watched her blade rise.
He heard the roar, a single sound as vast as movements of earth in the audience chamber. He, who had come seeking the lives of his compatriots—and himself—forgot politics; no fear that came out of the machination of human treacheries could be so visceral, so immediate.
Wheeling, moving faster than he had ever moved in his life, he saw death wrapped around a slender, sharp face and a long, clean blade. Tyr Ramiro had placed Bloodhame in his hands as a gesture of his fealty; he held her, still, both hands wrapped tight around her grip, as if she were the Sun Sword herself. As if he were her master.
The edge beneath his feet was an edge made of, and sharpened by, fear; to one side, flight, the other defense. It would not bear his weight for long.
Decide.
His own voice.
Beyond her moving body, he thought he saw Baredan di'Navarre, his father's man, frozen in place, a statue of past times and past failure. He did not have the time to understand, although it would come, that Bloodhame was older than Averda—but she was not older than the war between the clans of the Lord of the Sun and the creatures of the Lord of the Night; she had been crafted for that war, and the sight of this enemy was waking her.
Valedan di'Leonne, the last surviving member of the clan that, by blood-right, ruled the Dominion of Annagar, looked up in shock as his blade struck hers. The creature's—the girl's?—charge was broken; he saw her eyes widen, although there were no whites to their depth. His grip tightened; it was all that kept the Sword of Callesta from spinning useless across the chamber floor.
"Get down," she said, and his knees almost buckled at the force of the single word. "Run. "
A confidence buoyed him, then. The blade of Callesta seemed to shiver in his hands, as he brought it back. She did not move.
"Run," she said again. But there was no darkness in the word.
"I am—"
She moved. He barely saw her. But he felt her hands around his shirt, his collar, his cloak. He cried out; he'd time for it, and little else.
"Take him away!" She threw him.
Into the waiting arms of General Baredan di'Navarre.
The older man lurched under the sudden burden, dropping his only means of protection that he might catch Valedan safely. They both staggered as they collided, but to Valedan's great surprise, Baredan held his ground, bracing his knees and his back to do so.
Two things occurred to Valedan as he gained his bearing: The first, that he was still alive, that somehow the shadow-hollowed girl had not killed him, and the second, that General Baredan di'Navarre had not—yet-offered him the sword from the position that spoke of preferred loyalty. He steadied himself against the General's arms, and then cried out in dismay.
Bloodhame had found her mark across the older man's left cheek; he bled. He did not seem to notice the wound; it was slight enough. But he said, "When you wield a weapon, it's always a danger. It doesn't matter where you are, or with who." He looked up. "Come. We've time, but I don't know how much of it. Let us join the Tyr."
Valedan nodded, but something caught his attention; something made him stop, turn, look back.
The strange, terrifying girl stood where he had, moments before, made his stiff plea for justice to the grim-faced, dour Twin Kings, blade ready, legs planted like spikes against the floor. The cerdan who wore Callestan crests backed away from her; the Kings' Swords held their ground. Men of two nations stood, side by side, in uneasy alliance, waiting the commands of their King and their Tyr, swords drawn and shields raised against a common enemy.
The Kings said, "Hold!"
And Tyr'agnate Ramiro di'Callesta said, "Hold!" as if all men who ruled spoke with a common voice. They stood a moment, held by incomprehension.
She drew her blade back and darkness shattered the light that came from the windows and open spaces above. It also destroyed the perfectly worked floor, scattering shards of gold-inlaid marble in a wide, deadly circle. From beneath the ground, seeped in blackness that was armor and shield and weapon, a shadow rose, taking on obsidian, perfect form. He gestured, and the benches that seated the Exalted exploded in a burst of white heat and flame. There were screams that carried a moment above the crackle of wood, the shivering of timber and stone.
Cerdan cried out and stumbled, as did the Kings' Swords, although both were armored. The Tyr, standing closest to the gallery of all the men upon the audience chamber's floor, raised his arms and caught the little daggers the explosion had made in sinew and flesh, grinding his teeth to a close over the cry he might have made. He stumbled back, felt the common rail beneath his shoulders, and lowered his hands a moment to look.
"I apologize for the intrusion," the creature said, lifting his hands, "But I'm afraid that we cannot allow the Leonne pawn to be played on the field."
Darkness fell like a curtain, and with it came the ceiling. But the hands that had made this room, these chambers, were no ordinary hands; the ceiling resisted the darkness a moment, and a moment was—barely—enough. Only the center dropped, like stone into water, at the creature's command.
And in the center of the audience chamber, faces upturned in silence, stood Valedan di'Leonne and Bare-dan di'Navarre—the Tyr'agar and his General. The rock buried them, splintering the floor yet again with its terrible weight.
Tyr Ramiro di'Callesta pulled himself over the stone walls that separated the thrones from the floor, blooding them as the cuts and ruptures of opened skin and cloth rubbed against their surfaces. He sought the floor; the thin safety of chairs and rails and quarter-walls.
"Allasakar-Etridian," Kiriel said, standing her ground upon the broken floor as if terrain were illusion.
He spit, showing teeth that were—almost—human. "Too slow
, half-breed."
Of all things to offer a creature twice her height and three times her weight, she gave laughter, and the laughter was grim and chill. "Failure." Threw an arm—not her sword arm—behind her in a wide arc. There, as dust cleared, stood Valedan kai di'Leonne and General Baredan kai di'Navarre in a grim, shocked silence beside blocks of fallen stone that had been sheared smooth in a circle—a circle that encompassed them both.
The obsidian creature snarled in rage, and hesitated a fraction of a second; his gaze went to the mages in the gallery, and to the Exalted, who rose, bloodied but unbowed, from the pyre he had made of their thrones. The desire for battle warred with the desire for survival; survival won.
Only the young woman who faced him knew how close the contest was.
"Take this back," she said, "and tell them that Kiriel sent it."
Before the mage-fires descended into the broken pit that the chamber floor had become; before the Exalted could recover and put to use those magics which were their blood heritage; before the bards could speak their words of angry command, she gestured, her arm moving so quickly it could not be seen in the shadows.
The creature cried out in fury and pain.
But his spell was cast, and the shadows took him, injured and insulted, to a safety that his enemies could not prevent him from attaining.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ser Valedan kai di'Leonne slowly lowered the sword that he had clung to so fiercely. Lowered it, seeing beyond the circle in which he and General Baredan di'Navarre stood, as if he were waking from a nightmare—and discovering that reality was far worse. Before him, between the cracks of stone and timbers that should have been his death, he could see the black back of the person who had, somehow, saved his life. He saw her sword rise and fall, as if the motion were linked to her breath; heard that breath, loud and heavy, as she brought the blade down, as she struggled to sheath it.
And he knew, as he watched, that it was a struggle.
General Baredan di'Navarre stared down at the floor— at what remained of the floor beneath the huge stone blocks and joists and beams. He cursed, and the sound was so welcome—so human—it drew Valedan's almost grateful attention, breaking her spell.
"What is it? What's wrong?" As if, surrounded by the ruins of a ceiling that had stood for four centuries, fires being banked by magical means to one side, something else needed to be wrong.
"My sun-scorched sword!" Baredan replied. He added a few words, a few colorful words, and then a few more for good measure. Serra Alina would doubtless let him understand, by the ice of her perfectly proper stare, how grave a crime he had just committed in the presence of the Tyr'agar, were she here. She was not.
"Tyr'agar," the General said, recovering with a humor that only those who walked close to death could know. He bowed. "It appears that I must forgo the usual ceremonies in favor of practicality."
Bemused, Valedan nodded, and then he frowned slightly. But only slightly; Serra Alina had been, in most things, his teacher; he understood form well. And he understood, as he met Baredan's grim smile, that the General had lost his sword. He could not imagine that his own father, his own dead, distant father, would ever have smiled, grimly or no, at such a loss, regardless of circumstance.
He started to speak, but Baredan lifted a hand, as if he did not know what the young man was about to say. "You must forgive me, Tyr'agar. We are on foreign soil, and I would say—although it is less clear now—that we are not among friends. We will guard our words and our clans."
But as he stopped speaking, he looked at Valedan di'Leonne as if seeing him for the first time. His blood had dried along the edge of Bloodhame because the boy had refused to let go of his weapon in what was, undoubtedly, the first real combat of any sort that he'd faced.
Baredan smiled. And his smile was as sharp as the Callestan blade.
The Greater Assembly was not recalled that day. The Exalted survived the flames, but their priests did not—and the death that should have been quick was both slow and terrible for each and every one of their attendants.
The Kings called for—and received—order in the hall, and then quickly disbanded the gathering; their Swords came, and those mages who served the Crowns within the Order. The Ten chose to accept the dismissal as a request, and they left the hall with their chosen guards, on the understanding that they would reconvene on the morrow.
All, of course, except for The Kalakar.
"What-exactly-did-you-think-you-were-doing?"
Kiriel, looking very much like the girl that they could never again believe she was, met Duarte's angry words with a slightly crimson face. She said nothing.
Behind the leader of the Ospreys stood The Kalakar, with Verrus Vernon and Verrus Korama to the right and left. Beside Duarte stood Alexis, her lovely hair twisted into a knot that the most nimble-fingered of the Ospreys could not have untied. She was angry. They all were.
"Sentrus Kiriel," The Kalakar said, "I'd advise you to answer the question. We are about to be called into private session with the Crowns and the Exalted; I wish to have something to say to them. It is a matter of no little import." The Swords that lined the walls of the largest of the chambers reserved for dignitaries who waited entry to the Hall of Wise Counsel were proof enough, if it were needed, of the truth of those words. But The Kalakar was certain that Kiriel did not know the Astari were present— if the girl even knew who the Astari were. She didn't know it herself for fact, but she'd known the Kings for years, and she was a good judge of their mood. "Kiriel."
"I was saving his life," Kiriel said, each word cool and civil.
"And you didn't think to warn anyone else? Twenty-seven men and women died in that attack." Verrus Korama took a breath, held it, and then expelled it.
"Korama, please."
He had the grace to look embarrassed, and the presence of mind to bring his fist sharply to his chest. "Kalakar." As a military man, he had seen death before; he would, no doubt, see it again. But not here, now now, and not in this manner: The screams of the priests echoed, a building and an hour away. The fire that the creature had thrown upon them had been in some way alive. It hollowed them, slowly.
"Thank you. Kiriel," The Kalakar continued as if there had been no interruption. "When did you know that the danger existed?"
"When the boy walked into the room." It was not as difficult as it should have been to hear her call the heir-presumptive to the Annagarian crown a boy.
Duarte turned purple; Cook turned white.
"And it didn't occur to you to warn any of the rest of us?"
"Duarte." The Kalakar again, sounding less and less pleased by the interruptions, which was no easy task.
But Duarte was an Osprey. The Osprey.
"Primus Duarte," Kiriel said very formally, "if I had uttered any warning at all, the boy would be dead. I thought—and I apologize for the thinking—that The Kalakar wished him to live."
"And the other twenty-seven?" It was Alexis' voice, strained and heated as she met the younger woman's implacable dark eyes. Her hand hovered above her dagger's hilt.
"The other twenty-seven were not important to The Kalakar." The dark-haired, pale girl turned to face The Kalakar, in whose name she had just dismissed two dozen lives. "The Kings were not in danger; their thrones—as the thrones of the Exalted—have been magicked in a way that I do not understand. They might have been injured, but I do not believe that Etridian could have killed them without risking his own existence. He chose not to try.
"Have I done wrong?"
The Kalakar met Kiriel's too-dark eyes. Then she turned her head slightly, and found Korama's gaze upon her. Am I that obvious? she thought, and was surprised at the discomfort that she felt. But she was an honest woman—at least with herself; she did not refute Kiriel's claim.
It's war, she thought, and knew it for truth. Knew it, intellectually, far later than she had on some more visceral level. Old instincts. A lot more than twenty-seven people are
going to be dead. Some of them in worse ways. Although that, bless the Mother, was hard to imagine.
"No," she heard herself say. "But in the future, you're going to have to learn some of the Kalakar signals. Not only does your commanding officer—Primus Duarte, in this case—have the right to know of present danger, he has the obligation." She raised a hand to her temple and massaged her forehead. "Kiriel, you know the Kalakar rules, and you are a part of the House Guards. I have not-asked you the questions that you will be asked when we approach the Crowns."
The young girl shrugged a slender shoulder.
"Who are you, Kiriel?"
"Kiriel di'Ashaf," the girl replied grimly, the set of her lips white.
Ser Fillipo par di'Callesta expected many things from this grim, cloudless day. He felt the heat on the back of his neck and raised his head, a man's gesture of defiance under the eyes of the Lord. He was almost done with praying; the hours had dragged. And dragged. Serra Tara, his dutiful wife, had come and gone in the cool air, offering him water and sweet breads. He took some of each, enjoying neither. It took a certain strength to face death, to face a man's death, and he intended to have it.
Where was Valedan?
The Imperials were hard to understand. They did not value family, they did not cleave to blood; they did not spend their hours in the practice of war, preferring dance and letters and unfathomable art. Yet they knew how to fight. Some even understood death as well as a clansman.
His shadow, turning slowly, marked the passage of time. His hands itched; it had been many years since, in a time of danger, he had had to forgo weaponry. Were Ser Kyro di'Lorenza not at his side, he would have borne it less graciously; less gracefully. But he knew that it was his lead these men followed, with or without the presence of the boy.
And he intended to lead them into whatever glory the Lord allowed unarmed prisoners in a foreign land. His gaze crossed the fountain, and came to rest upon the stone boy, whose pathetic blindfold and spindly body told the tale of Annagarian justice.