Sword-Breaker

by Jennifer Roberson

  Freeing Samiel.

  If the sword was empty of Chosa…

  If.

  But emptying Samiel would mean filling me.

  With Chosa Dei.

  If.

  If I took him. If I let him come. If I let him have the body, forsaking the sword, would the sword then be strong enough to defeat him?

  But with no one able to wield it.

  Hoolies.

  Guts cramped. Teeth ground. Eyes bulged and refused to close.

  Black up to the elbows.

  Muscles contracted. Down through the air, slicing wind and wailing. Black light flashed. Clean steel glittered. Shoulders locked as I thrust the sword tip into the sand. Then deeper. Driving it down, down. Scouring steel flesh.

  Kneeling, I clutched the sword. Hung there, transfixed. Powerless before the sword. The sorcerer. Nothing more than the shell he wanted to fill.

  “No,” I mouthed.

  Vision flickered. Went out. Blindly, I stared wide-eyed into the scouring wind.

  “Tiger—” I husked. “Wizard’s wooden tiger…”

  The memory was distant. A small wooden sandtiger, shaped to catch the eye. It had been mine. Only mine. And I had petitioned it, begging it for power. For the means to escape.

  Sandtiger, I had called it. Sandtiger I had made it.

  In flesh: deliverance.

  Children and men, eaten. More killed in the attempt. Then I had tracked it down. I had found its lair. I had leveled the spear and plunged it into the belly.

  Screaming from shock and pain as the claws raked cheek. As the poison filled the body.

  I had killed the sandtiger. He had nearly killed me.

  Chosa was killing me.

  The flesh would go on living, but the spirit, the soul, would not.

  Vision flickered. Died.

  Inside me, something laughed.

  The inner eye opened. And Saw.

  “Del!” I screamed. “Del—Delilah— Del— Do it! Do it! Don’t let—don’t let— Del— Do what you have to do—”

  The inner eye Saw.

  “Del—” I croaked.

  Sandaled feet. Wind-whipped burnous. The glint of a Northern sword.

  I couldn’t see her expression. Maybe it was best. “Do it, Del—do it!”

  Wind stripped her face of hair, leaving it stark and bleached and anguished. In her hands, jivatma trembled.

  “—have to—” I managed. “You said—you could… you said… like Ajani—”

  Del flinched. The wind screamed around us, hiding her face again.

  Hoolies, bascha. Do it.

  Deep inside, something laughed.

  Chosa was amused.

  “Like Ajani,” I husked. “Quick. Clean. No risk to you— Del—”

  Why was she taking so long?

  The Northern sword glinted. It cut through the simoom’s howling and sang its own song. Of nightsky curtains of color; of the hue of a banshee-storm, screaming through Northern mountains.

  Too cold for me.

  I was Southron-born.

  My storm was the samiel.

  From the sand I ripped the sword. Blackness glistened.

  “Too late,” I mouthed. “—left it too late—”

  The wind stripped hair away. I saw her face once more: the architecture of bones framed in precise perfection; the smooth, flawless flesh; the contours of nose, of cheekbones; the symmetry of the jaw.

  The warped line of her mouth, parting to open.

  Delilah began to sing. Deathsong. Lifesong. The song of a sword-dancer’s life. Of a Southron chula’s passing from the world of free men he had tried to make his own.

  Don’t wait, bascha.

  A new determination came into Del’s expression. She cut off her song in mid-note and raised the deadly jivatma, whose name was Boreal.

  Even as I raised mine.

  As Chosa made me do it.

  “Samiel,” she said.

  But it was lost in the wail of wind.

  Fourteen

  —With his brother upon the pinnacle, staring across the vast expanse of the land they have created; marveling that they could, because they are sorcerers, not gods—

  He frowns.

  —or is it possible, he wonders, that gods are merely constructs of magic? A magic so deep and abiding and dangerous no one else has dared try it, before now; to summon it, collect it, wield it, shaping something out of nothing—

  —unmaking what had been, to make what now exists.

  He smiles.

  —I have done this.

  He pauses. Rephrases.

  WE have done this. Shaka and I.

  He glances at his brother. Chosa Dei and Shaka Obre, twin-born, inseparable, indistinguishable from one another. Matched in will, in strength, in power. In so very many things, offering two halves of a whole; the balance of dark and light.

  Matched in everything save ambition.

  “What we have done—” Chosa begins.

  Shaka smiles, completing it: “—is truly remarkable. A gift for the people.”

  Chosa frowns, distracted from triumph. “Gift?”

  “Surely you do not expect them to PAY for this,” Shaka says, laughing. “They did not ask it, did not request—”

  “—except in petitions to gods.”

  Laughter dying, Shaka shrugs. “Men petition for many things.”

  “But this time WE answered. We gave them what they wanted.”

  “And now you want payment?” Shaka shakes his head. “How is it we are so alike, but so different? The power we have wielded is compensation enough.” Shaka thrusts out an illustrative hand, encompassing the grasslands below. “Don’t you see? We’ve made the land lush. We’ve made the land fertile. In place of sand there is grass.”

  Chosa’s expression is grim. “We have answered their worthless petitions. Now they must compensate us.”

  Shaka sighs deeply. “With what? Coin? Goats? Daughters? Useless gems and domains?” He puts his hand upon his brother’s stiffened shoulder. “Look again, Chosa. Behold what we have wrought. We have remade the world.”

  Chosa’s face spasms. “I’m not so benevolent.”

  Shaka removes his hand from his brother’s shoulder. “No. You’ve always been impatient. You’ve always wanted more.”

  Chosa stares down across the vast expanse of grass that had once been sand. He speaks a truth no one has ever before considered, but he has long suspected: “We are two different people.”

  Shaka’s eyes widen. “But we want the same thing!”

  “No,” Chosa says bitterly. “No. You want THAT.” And points to the grass.

  “Chosa—don’t you?”

  Chosa shrugs. “I don’t know what I want. Just—more. MORE. I am bored… look what we’ve done, Shaka. As YOU said: Look what we have wrought. What is there left to do?”

  Shaka laughs. “We will think of something.”

  His brother scowls blackly. “We are very young, Shaka. There is so much time, so MUCH time.…”

  “We will find ways to fill it.” Shaka gazes at the grasslands below, nodding satisfaction. “We have given a dying people the gift of life, Chosa… I think I want to watch how they use it.”

  Chosa makes a dismissive, contemptuous gesture. “Watch all you like, then. I have better ways to spend my time.”

  “Oh? How?”

  Chosa Dei smiles. “I have acquired a taste for magic.”

  Shaka’s expression alters from indulgence to alert awareness. “We have always had magic, Chosa. What do you mean to do?”

  “Collect it,” Chosa says. “Find more, and collect it. Because if it was this easy to MAKE this, it will be more entertaining to destroy it.” He sees the shock in Shaka’s eyes, and shrugs offhandedly. “Oh, not at once. I’ll let you play with it a while. I’ll even let you keep part of it, if you like; exactly half, as always.” Chosa laughs. “After all, everything we’ve ever had has been divided precisely in two. Why not the land we’ve just created
?”

  “No,” Shaka says.

  Chosa’s eyes widen ingenuously. “But it’s the way we’ve ALWAYS done it. Half for you, half for me.”

  “No,” Shaka says. “This involves people.”

  Chosa leans close to his brother and speaks in a pointed whisper. “If any of them get broken, we’ll simply make MORE.”

  Shaka Obre recoils. “We will do no such thing. They are PEOPLE, Chosa—not things. You are to leave them be.”

  “Half of them are mine.”

  “Chosa—”

  “It’s the way we DO it, Shaka! Half and half. Remember?”

  Shaka glares. “Over my dead body.”

  Chosa considers it. “That might be fun,” he says finally. “We’ve never done that before.”

  Now Shaka is suspicious. “Done what?”

  “Tried to kill one another before. Do you suppose we could? Really die, I mean?” Excitement blossoms in Chosa’s face. “We have all those wards and spells… do you think we should try to counteract them, just to see if we really could?”

  “Go away,” Shaka says. “I don’t like you like this.”

  Chosa persists. “But wouldn’t it be FUN?”

  Shaka shakes his head.

  Frustration appears in Chosa’s eyes. “Why do you always have to be such a spoilsport, Shaka?”

  “Because I have more sense. I understand responsibility.” Shaka nods toward the grasslands. “We created this for people in need, Chosa. We sowed the field. Now we ought to tend the crop.”

  Chosa makes a derisive sound. “YOU tend the crop. I’m going collecting.”

  Shaka watches him turn away. “Don’t you do anything! Don’t you hurt those people, Chosa!”

  Chosa pauses. “Not yet. I’ll let you play with your toy. For a while. Until I can’t think of anything else to do. By then, centuries will have passed, and you’ll be tired of it, too. Ready for something NEW.” He smiles. “Yes?”

  Sound. No sight: I can’t open my eyes. Sound only, no more; flesh and bone won’t answer my need.

  “Curse you,” she whispered. “I hate you for this.”

  It was not what I might have expected.

  “I hate you for this!” A warped, throttled sound, breaking free of a too-taut throat. “I hate you for what you have done; for what you have become, in spite and because of this sorcerer—” She broke it off abruptly, then continued in a more controlled, but no less telling tone. “What am I to do? Let him have you? What am I to do? Turn my back? Walk away? Refuse to acknowledge the worth of the doing, the worth of the man, because it is easier not to do?”

  I had no answers for her. But then, she didn’t want them from me. Had she known I could hear her, she wouldn’t have said a thing… except maybe those words designed to draw blood. Even now, she tried to do that. All unknowing. Which more than anything underscored the strength of her anguish.

  “If you could see what he has done…” Despair crept into the tone. “If I could kill him, I would. If I could cut off his head as I cut off Ajani’s, I would. If I could use magic or whatever else it might take to free you, I would—” Then, on a rush, expelling words and emotions, “There are things I would say to you, could I do it, could I say them… but we are neither of us the kind to admit weaknesses, or failures, because to admit them opens the door to more. I know it. I understand it. But now, when I need to know who and what you are… you offer me nothing—and I can’t ask. I lack the courage for it.”

  Deep inside, I struggled. But no words were emitted. Eyelids did not lift.

  “What am I to do?” she rasped. “I am weak. I am afraid. I am not the person I need to be to vanquish this enemy. I am not the Sandtiger.”

  And then a spate of muttered uplander, all sibilant syllables of twisty, foreign words strung together into a litany made to ward off that fear.

  Silence. A hard, shattered silence. I wanted to fill it badly.

  “You have warped my song,” she declared. “You have reshaped all the words, and altered all the music.”

  Oh, bascha, I’m sorry.

  “Please,” Del said. “I have been so many things and sung so many songs, to make myself hard enough. To make myself strong enough. I am what I am. I am—not like others. I can’t be like others, because there is weakness in it. But you gave me something more… you make me something more. You don’t make me less than I am—less than I have had to be and still have to be… you make me more.”

  I wanted badly to answer, to tell her I made her nothing at all, but that she made me something; something better. Something more—

  The tone was raw. “What am I to do? Kill you for your own good?”

  Not what I had in mind.

  Nor Chosa Dei, either.

  Who stood once more on the overlook beside Shaka Obre.

  Again, sound. The hissing sibilance of edged steel pulled from lined sheath. The sluff and grate of Southron sandals. The subtle beat of a soft-stepping horse approaching across the sand.

  “So,” she murmured quietly. “He comes to us after all.”

  Metallic clatter: bridle brasses, bit shanks; the creak of Southron saddle. A horse, protesting vaguely, reined to a halt.

  “Come down,” she invited. “I give the honor to you: you may draw the circle.”

  The answering voice was male, catching oddly on broken syllables. “Why do I want a circle?”

  “Have you not come to challenge him?”

  He didn’t answer at once. Then, “He seems a bit indisposed.”

  “For the moment,” she agreed. “But there is always me.”

  “I didn’t come for you. At least—not to meet in the circle. Beds are much softer.”

  “A circle is the only place we will meet.”

  “Unless I beat you. If bedsport were the prize.” Creaking leather again. “But that’s not why I came.”

  “She sent you.”

  A trace of surprise underlay his tone. “You know about her?”

  “More, perhaps, than she would like.”

  “Well.” He cleared his throat, but the huskiness remained. “What has befallen him? Certainly not Nezbet… unless the Sandtiger has grown so old and careless even boys may defeat him.”

  Contempt laced her tone. “Nezbet didn’t beat him. This was—” She stopped. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Bridle brasses clattered as the horse shook its head. “What I understand is that he hasn’t been himself for some time. There are rumors in Iskandar, and even in Harquhal… tales that make good telling when men gather to drink and dice.”

  “You are undoubtedly the subject of such tales. How often are they truthful?”

  He laughed huskily. “Ah, but even I have seen he’s not the same. And he isn’t, Del… but then, you never saw him in his prime.”

  “His prime.” She was angry. “In his prime he was—is—three times the man you are.”

  “Three times.” He was amused. “And as for being a man—as a woman judges a man—only you can say. I’ve never slept with him.”

  “Three times the man,” she said coolly, “in bed—and in the circle.”

  The broken voice was dangerously mild. “And I’ve never slept with you.”

  “Nor will you,” she retorted.

  “Unless I win it from you.”

  The answering tone turned equally lethal. “Just like a man,” she said, “to make a woman’s body the issue instead of the woman’s skill.”

  He dismounted, jangling brasses. “I know you have the skill. We danced together, remember? I was, however briefly, shodo to—” he paused. “—the anishtoya?”

  “You served a purpose,” she answered, avoiding the question. “That is all, Abbu.”

  Steps sloughed through sand. Paused beside my head. “Is he dead?”

  “Of course not. Do you think I’m keeping vigil?”

  The voice was very close. “I don’t know what you might be doing. You’re Northern, not Southron—and you’re a woman. Women do odd th
ings.”

  “He’s exhausted. He’s resting.”

  “He’s unconscious, bascha. Do you think I can’t tell?” He paused. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Is that why he looks half dead?”

  “He’s not.”

  The tone was speculative. “I was in Iskandar, remember? I was in the middle of the fury just like everyone else. Only I’m not a man for religious ecstasy.” He paused. “Does the condition he’s in have something to do with magic?”

  Reluctantly: “Yes.”

  “I thought so,” he said. “And it begins to make me wonder.”

  “Wonder what?” she snapped.

  “The tribes think Ajani was the jhihadi.”

  “Yes. Because Ajani took pains to make it appear he was.”

  “But the Sandtiger took no pains at all, at anything, because it isn’t his way. He just does.” A single step nearer; the body knelt at my side. “What I’m wondering—now—is exactly how much he can do.”

  “Tiger is Tiger,” she said. “He isn’t the jhihadi, no matter what he says.”

  “He says he’s the jhihadi?”

  Silence.

  Dryly: “Of course, he could be saying it just to try and impress you.”

  “No.” Grudgingly. “He says my brother pointed at him.”

  “Your brother? What in hoolies does your brother have to do with any of this?”

  “He’s the Oracle.”

  Silence. Then, ironically. “Do I seem that gullible to you? Or is this a game you and the Sandtiger have cooked up?” He snorted. “If it is, I don’t think it’s working. Right now you have dozens of very angry warriors on your trail, not to mention ten or so sword-dancers hired by Aladar’s daughter.”

  “Believe what you wish to believe.” Sand grated as she shifted her position. “Will you draw the circle?”

  “Not now.” A husky chuckle. “You’ve frightened me badly, bascha. I don’t dare a dance with you.”

  She said something in eloquent uplander. I opened my mouth to answer.

  Fifteen

  Chosa Dei nods. “You’ll grow tired, Shaka. You’ll grow bored, like me. And there won’t be anything else to do, except start all over again.”