I hobbled off, tended my business, hobbled back. I was stiff, itchy from healing sand scrapes, smelly from lack of bath, stubbled on cheeks and chin. My knee hurt like hoolies. So did a few other things: namely, my pride.
“You talked,” Del mentioned, neatly folding her blanket aside.
It was, I thought, basically inconsequential. But since she’d brought it up… “Talked?”
“Last night. In your sleep.” Kneeling, she set about stirring life into the coals of the cairn. “I almost woke you, but—I was… well…”
“Afraid?” I bit it out between gritted teeth. “Did you think I’d snatch the sword out of my sheath and have at you with it in the middle of the night?”
Del said nothing.
Which hurt most of all: it meant there was a chance my sarcastic question was more accurate than I liked.
Explosively, I challenged her. “Hoolies, bascha, this is going to have to be settled once and for all. If you really are afraid of me—”
“For you,” she said quietly.
“For me? Why? For me?”
She bent, blew on the coals, looked through ash grit and smoke at me. “I am afraid of what he will do to you. What he would make of you, once you were unmade.”
I’ll admit it: it was unsettling. “Yes, well… I don’t think he’d get very far with me. I’m sort of stubborn about things like sorcerers trying to make me over into some sort of thing, like those men-turned-hounds.” A grimace of distaste warped my mouth. “Hoolies, what a way to die…” I let it go, forcibly thinking about something else as I sat down awkwardly. “What was it I said, in my sleep?”
“Patterns,” Del answered, tossing a bota to me. “Lines and patterns and furrows.”
I stared. “That’s what I talked about?”
“Some of it. Some I could not understand. Drawings in the sand, you said.” She pointed. “See?”
I looked. Beside my blanket, near to hand, was a “pattern” of four straight lines, with the hint of a curve at the bottom. As if someone had taken a stick and sketched one line after another.
I frowned. “I did that?”
She nodded, digging through saddle-pouches. “You muttered something about patterns and lines. Then you stuck all four fingers in the dirt and drew that.” She touched her cheek. “It looks like you.”
“You” meant my own cheek, beneath the stubble: four slashed lines, very straight, to the bottom of the jaw. Where the sandtiger had at last been persuaded to take his claws out of my face.
The lines in the dirt did look very much like claw marks. A “pattern,” I guess you could say.
I grunted, unimpressed. “Who knows? I don’t even remember dreaming.” I sucked down water, then replugged the bota. “Our best bet is to head toward Quumi. It’s a trade settlement on the edge of the Punja—that is, usually it’s on the edge. Depending on what the Punja feels like.”
Del nodded absently, staring beyond me toward the horizon. She squinted, frowning; the expression didn’t inspire trust.
I was instantly alert. “What?”
“Dust. I think. In thin light, it’s hard… no, it is. Dust.” She rose, dropping the pouch, and bent swiftly to retrieve the salmon-silver blade from its rune-worked sheath. “If it is borjuni—”
“—then we may as well offer them breakfast,” I finished. “I’m not exactly mobile…” But I tried anyway, levering myself up and dragging my own sword from its sheath.
Wishing I could trust it.
Wishing I could trust me.
Not borjuni. Sword-dancer. A young, Southron male, spare in frame but not arrogance; he stared down at me from atop a sand-colored horse and put his imperious desert-bladed nose into the air.
He wore a pale, bleached yellow burnous, and the hilt of a properly harnessed sword peeked over the set of his shoulder. “Sandtiger?” he asked.
It is not easy to put a considerable amount of contempt into a single word—into a single name, for that matter—without overdoing it when you’re eighteen or nineteen, but he managed. It takes practice; I wondered if he was as attentive to his dancing. The tone was mostly contempt, and a few other things—namely stupidity; did he really think I would start quivering in my sandals because he knew my name?
“If I said no,” I began mildly, “would it convince you to leave us alone and ride straight on into the Punja? With nearly empty botas, no less?”
Dark eyes glittered. His mount fidgeted. He stilled it with an impatient snatch at reins. “My botas are as they are because I chose to ride harder and faster than the others, so as to keep the honor for myself.”
The “honor” meant challenging me to a dance, no doubt. The reference to “others,” however—that bothered me.
“Pretty stupid, aren’t you?” I asked affably. “How will you get back on so little water?”
“You will forfeit your botas to me when I have won.” His eyes flicked briefly to Del, then back. “Botas—and your woman.”
“And my woman,” I echoed. “Well, let me give you a hint—you might want to ask her, first. She prefers being asked, generally… although I doubt you’d get very far. Del sort of does her own choosing when it comes to bedpartners.”
Idly, Del tilted her blade. It flashed in new light. He glared down his nose at her, clearly affronted to see a sword in the hands of a woman, any woman, but particularly a foreign one; then looked back at me. “My name is Nezbet. By all the honor codes of the Southron sword-dance, I challenge you to step into the circle, where we may settle the contention.”
“What is the contention?” I asked. “That I killed the jhihadi?” I smiled, shaking my head. “But I didn’t. I am the jhihadi. And I, most obviously, am not dead, so there is no need to dance at all.”
It worked about as well as expected. “I am Nezbet. I am a third-level sword-dancer. I have been hired to bring you back to Iskandar.”
“Third-level?” I grunted, leaned sideways, deliberately spat. “I’m seventh-level, boy. Haven’t they told you that?”
Elegant nostrils flared. “I know who—and what—you are. Will you step into the circle?”
I assessed him openly, provocatively, letting him see what I did. Then I lifted one shoulder in a lazy, eloquent shrug. “Not worth it,” I answered idly.
Dark color stained his face. “I need not be of your level to challenge you. Any level may challenge—that is a tenet contained in the honor codes—”
“I know what is and is not contained in the honor codes, boy. I learned them before you were born.” I altered my stance slightly, to take some of the weight off my sore knee. “I know many things Nezbet, in his youth, has yet to learn.”
Youthful Nezbet was disturbed. “Then, if you know them, you know also that if you refuse to dance against me after formal challenge has been laid—according to the codes—you can be proscribed.”
“Any man can refuse a dance,” I reminded him. “It’s not good for his reputation, and in the long run he’d lose any chance at making a living because people would stop hiring him, but he can still refuse.”
“This is formal challenge,” he stressed, and then uttered one of the long-winded, twisty phrases I’d labored so hard to learn myself, back when I was his age.
I bit out an oath short and sweet and succinct. Del glanced the question, as what the boy had said was in a Southron dialect only rarely spoken. A Northerner would not know it, not even one as well-traveled—and well-taught—as Del. The language of the circle, it was called in Desert; the more formal name is nearly unpronounceable.
“Shodo’s Challenge,” I told her, explaining the shortened—and comprehensible—idiomatic form. “Seems this boy and I learned from the same school, so to speak… my shodo is long dead, but he had apprentices. And one of them apparently trained this Punja-mite of a boy.” I smiled up at him insincerely, though I still spoke to Del. “It means I am required to dance against him, or forfeit my status. Which means I become little more than a borjuni, since no one will hire me.
” I glanced at her. “Remember how up north they said you were a blade without a name, stripped of honor and rights? Well, it’s sort of the same thing.”
“But—” she began, and stopped.
“But,” I agreed. I looked back at the Southron boy, whose pride in place was so evident. Had I ever been that cocky?
Rephrase that. Had I ever been that cocky so young?
“I can’t accept,” I told him. “Shodo’s Challenge or no. A true challenge is predicated on equality in health, if not rank—” another gibe; often, they work, “—and I have a very sore knee. See?” I pointed to the wrapping. “I’d just love to open up your guts with this sword, Nezbet, but I’m a bit hampered at the moment. And an injury forfeit is not a true forfeit, since we are not yet in the circle.”
His jaw worked. The beardless flesh was stretched tight over distinctly desert bones. He was, as are nearly all Southroners, swarthy of coloring. His age and attitude reminded me a little of Nabir, the Vashni halfling who had wanted my Chosa Dei-ridden sword. And had died for it. Horribly.
“I will wait,” he said at last. “I will follow you and wait, until your knee is whole.”
“You want me that bad?”
“Defeating you and taking you back will earn me another level. Possibly two.”
So that was it. More important than coin. It touched on pride, on status; on the name that would shape the boy, as mine had shaped me.
I swore. “You stupid little Punja-mite—the only true way of earning a level is by staying with your shodo! For however long it takes! There are no tasks to be done, no quests assigned and undertaken. It’s work, Nezbet, nothing more. Years and years of discipline, until the shodo declares you have reached the level for which you are judged the worthiest—” I broke it off, because I was too angry. Why is it so many young sword-dancers want to take shortcuts? Don’t they know their lives could depend on the extra training a year or two—or three—offers?
No. They don’t. Or they just don’t care.
Stupid Punja-mite.
Now I wished my knee was sound. So I could teach him a lesson.
“There is me,” Del offered.
I frowned. Nezbet said nothing, not comprehending what she meant; he wouldn’t: she’s a woman.
“There is me,” she repeated. “I will stand proxy for him.”
Nezbet stared at her. Then looked back at me. “I will wait. I will follow.”
Del moved forward a step. “And if the Sandtiger allows me to stand proxy for him? According to your codes?”
“You are a woman,” Nezbet said.
Del’s smile was cool. “And this is a sword.”
“And if it matters so much to you,” I interjected, “why are you working for a woman?”
“I am not.”
I frowned. “Why have you been hired to bring me back to Iskandar?”
“You murdered the tanzeer of Julah.”
Del scowled. She was never proud of killing, but undoubtedly she was weary of me getting credit for all of her doings. I didn’t really blame her.
“I didn’t,” I said mildly, “but at the moment it doesn’t really matter. Who hired you?”
“The new tanzeer of Julah.”
“She’s a woman, Nezbet! Or are you too young to notice things like that?”
Color stained his face. “I did not speak with the tanzeer himself.”
“Ah,” I said. “I see. So you’re going to persist in believing the tanzeer’s a man, because you didn’t really meet the tanzeer. And it couldn’t possibly be a woman.”
Dark eyes glittered. “I have laid formal challenge.”
“Would you unlay it if you believed the tanzeer was a woman?” I asked curiously.
Del stirred. “You can’t prove it,” she murmured. “He’s never going to believe you.”
No. He wasn’t. Any more than he’d believe Del was a sword-dancer.
Which brought us once more to the challenge.
“She’s my proxy,” I said, “formally designated.” I grinned cheerfully at Nezbet, leaning upon my planted weapon. “Too bad there aren’t enough people to lay a wager on this.”
Nezbet glared. “You would allow a woman—”
“Try her and find out.” I shrugged. “Might as well, you know. Find out what she’s like in the circle before you find out what she’s like in bed.”
Del winced. Indelicate, maybe. But it did the job.
Nezbet’s nose went up. “If she is proxy, it is done according to the proper codes. A loss equals a forfeit. If she loses, you lose… and will become my prisoner.”
“If,” I agreed, and bent to draw the circle.
Twelve
A farce. Pure and simple. The boy was young, strong, nimble, and trained. Del was that, and more. Del was simply herself: exquisite, elegant excellence. A potent, lethal enemy, more skilled than any he knew, regardless of the gender.
It didn’t take her long. She didn’t even bother to sing, which helps her focus. Del is not arrogant, nor is she interested in the games I like to play, designed to unbalance an opponent. She wastes no time at all, thinking merely of the dance and the ways to force a win. It doesn’t matter to her if it is exhibition, or to the death. She takes either equally seriously because, she’d told me once, a woman in any employment considered a man’s will be ignored unless she forces the issue, no matter what the game.
It was illuminating. It also taught me a lot about dispensing with entertainment and getting right to business. Wasted effort, she said, was wasted energy; she had no time for either.
Now that I was older, with aches and stiffness becoming a factor, I needed every edge. And Del was not a fool.
Nor was she one now. She caught and trapped Nezbet’s blade even as the dance opened, disallowing disengagement, and backed him easily to the thin curving line of the circle. There she stripped him of his sword, tossed it wheeling out of the circle, and pinned him at the perimeter with the faintest of Boreal’s kisses.
“How many?” she asked. “Who? And how far away?”
Nezbet’s already dark eyes glazed black with shock. Empty hands clutched air; the mouth gaped inelegantly. But he dared not leave the circle for fear Boreal would object. Her touch is never sanguine, nor lacking in promises. He knew as well as I that a single wayward step could result in his death. Del had won the right.
“A day or two,” he rasped, answering the last first. “Sword-dancers and warriors. The sword-dancers want the Sandtiger. The warriors want the jhihadi-killer.”
“Me,” she said tightly. “I killed them both: Aladar and Ajani.”
I saw the look in his eyes: masculine disbelief, underscored by a trace of doubt. The beginnings of comprehension, tempered by the overwhelming power of Southron beliefs. She would not convince him, not even here and now. But she had planted the seed of doubt. The seed of possibility.
“The jhihadi isn’t dead,” I told him, knowing the tribes offered more threat. Religion makes fools of people. “That man’s name was Ajani. He was a Northerner, and borjuni, riding both sides of the border. He told people he was the jhihadi, but none of it was true. The tribes are caught up in prophecy, not in the truth of things… they have only to ask the Oracle.” Who was Del’s brother.
Nezbet shrugged carefully. “They want to execute you. They saw you, in the city… they saw you summon fire from the sky with your sword.”
“That’s magic,” I said, having no time to marvel at my matter-of-factness. “Not perverted truth, just magic. Ajani was borjuni. Rapist and murderer. He sold this woman’s brother to slavers—he’d have sold her, too, but she got away from him. And became a sword-dancer.” I didn’t bother to smile; I didn’t care if he believed me. “He wasn’t the jhihadi. I am the jhihadi.”
Nezbet managed to spit. “You were a sword-dancer held up as an example. And now you come to this: liar and murderer.”
“I have lied,” I agreed. “And certainly I have murdered, if you count enemies trying to kill me.
But in this I am neither.” I drew in a breath, changing topics. “As for Aladar’s death, all I can say is he deserved it. It was personal. I’ll accept challenges as I have to, even if it was Del who killed him.” I flicked a glance at her, then looked back at Nezbet. “But no matter what you believe, you are working for a woman. She used a man to hire you, knowing how you would feel. Which means she hired you on a falsehood. The coin you accepted is tainted.”
“There is no payment until you are delivered!” he snapped.
“Really?” I arched brows. “Then you’re even stupider than I thought.”
“Tiger,” Del said; her way of asking a question.
I shrugged. “He’s lost. The dance is over. And unless he turns borjuni, sacrificing his status and pride, he won’t bother us again.” I gestured. “Let him go. Send him back to the others. He can tell them what we’ve said.” As she lowered Boreal, I caught his gaze with my own. “Hear me, Nezbet: one sword-dancer to another. I swear on my shodo’s name what they have told you is false. Tell the warriors that.”
Nostrils flared. The mouth, suddenly old, was a grim, flat line. “Then you are disgraced,” he spat, “and your shodo’s name dishonored.”
I waved dismissal at him. “Get out of here, Punja-mite. You’re too stupid to live, but I won’t be the one to kill you. My sword likes the taste of men.”
Nezbet scooped up his blade and snapped it back into the diagonal sheath. He cast me a final withering stare, then turned and mounted his sand-colored horse. Dust showered us as he jerked his mount around and rode off at a hard gallop.
I sighed heavily. “Short on water,” I said, “and now he runs his horse. He’ll be lucky to reach the others; we may yet be safe.”
“No,” Del said.
“No,” I agreed. “Time we rode on, too.”
“Tiger?”
“What?”
“Why didn’t you take his horse? The others are coming, he says… they could have picked him up.”
I thought about it. Scowled. Looked at Del. “Guess we’re just not cut out to be thieves, after all.”
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