A Glimmer on the Blade

by Rachel E. Baddorf

  “Good. Maximo?” prompted Ildiko.

  “Uh, the Earth God’s father, Califf the Sun God, became jealous that his son had found happiness. He s-smote his son with a great fire that burned the Earth. It filled the Earth with Califf’s Ozuk. And the Earth God died. The Goddess buried him under a gingko tree. She went to sleep under it, weeping.”

  “Good, Priya?”

  “Her tears became the sea, and her dreams became the lightfish, to swim in her s-sorrow.” Priya’s nose wrinkled. She asked, “What is sorrow?”

  “Sadness,” Ildiko gave her a little squeeze. “Go on.”

  “She would sleep until he lived again. Her children came back from the Moon in her silver ship. And her first son, Ardmore, led the children through the wilds to a place that was safe by the waters, and they built Aquillion. They would go out into the wilds and tame the beasts, and drive the ones they couldn’t tame out of her lands.”

  Ildiko waggled her eyebrows. “You’re doing very well with your reading Priya. I don’t think you really needed my help.”

  Priya giggled. “I just like it when you do the story.”

  “You should see it when the Sybil does it! There are lights and dancing bears!” Priya shrieked with giggles as the priestess tickled her. A loudly cleared throat made Ildiko go still, her smile disappearing. She looked back to find High Priestess Stellys in the doorway.

  Ildiko put Priya on her feet and got up, dusting herself off on her way to the door. “Children, please go back to your desks and continue reading book three.”

  Priya pretended to go to her desk as the other children moved, but she didn’t sit down; she walked slowly behind Ildiko and stood, pretending to make faces at Pepper, as the large lightfish circled in its globe. Priya was only as tall as the stand anyway. She strained to look like she wasn’t listening.

  Stellys patted Ildiko on the arm. “Dear, you really should be careful. Some of the noble parents would be skeptical of an underpreistess in the library section becoming too familiar with your charges.”

  “Yes, lady,” said Ildiko, shoulders slumped.

  Why is Ildiko staring at her feet? Priya wondered.

  “Franco needs your assistance in the library. He needs the financial records,” said Stellys.

  “Oh...yes lady. How is he doing?” asked Ildiko.

  “Ah, fine. The watch continues, but...” Stellys, like a hawk, craned her head around Ildiko. “Priya! What are you doing here? Go back to your desk!”

  “But...I—” stuttered Priya.

  “GO!” she yelled angrily.

  Priya almost fell over trying to back up. She didn’t know why Stellys had to be so mean. She seemed so nice to everyone. Usually she was. But every time she looked at Priya, she noticed the High Priestess’s smile went weird. Priya sat at her desk. Ildiko left in a hurry and Stellys called for a novice to bring in lunch.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sea Road

  Corin

  Ignazio Trokay and those of the survivors not too injured went through their last wagon, while the Dragons helped set up a rudimentary camp in the Hawk’s Hoop headman’s fallow field. The injured had been settled in the headman’s attic, with a bag of money to assure they were nursed until the priestess could arrive. Corin wondered in confusion why Mizrahi thought a clergy member would be on their way, but didn’t think it was worth the glare to ask. He sat at the campfire, following Tevix’s instructions for putting together a stew that would feed the nine from the caravan plus their own party on limited resources. He was cutting up rabbits Yupendra had caught earlier on the trail into chunks with a very sharp knife and coming very close to losing his fingers in the process. He kept getting distracted by the things the merchants brought out of the scorched wagon.

  He was used to having the best of everything, and generally whatever he wanted, within reason. The goods coming out of the wagon were shabby, sometimes used and patched, sometimes just so strange he couldn’t tell what they were. There were bags of herbs, huge bones, clockwork tin toys, and bits of rusted old tech and other things made of steel that he was sure were new knockoffs trying to look like old tech. Many of the goods were scorched, while some just needed a good airing and cleaning. A bundle he thought he recognized was handed down from the wagon into the arms of Julia Trokay, the merchant’s wife. Corin couldn’t look at her without seeing her beating that bandit with the rock, up to her elbows in blood.

  She came to sit on a log by the fire, carefully unwrapping the long neck and body of an old tech guitar. The pegs and frets flashed with bright chrome catching the fire in their gleam. The body was curvy, solid smooth wood with a rich swirling grain in a weird irregular shape. It took a moment for him to realize it had been carved from a piece of driftwood. The copper inlays popped up here and there, greening with age, and the control knobs were rusted, and one of the strings was broken, but otherwise it looked like it still worked.

  Corin nicked himself with the knife and started sucking the finger wound, distractedly putting the sharp little thing down. Wiping excited hands of rabbit blood, he stalked around the fire like a lusty young man who’s just given up vow of chastity and walked out of the temple to the first tavern of available women. One of the guards came over with a boxy contraption with a grill on the front and put it down next to the guitar.

  “It’s beautiful,” Corin said, sitting on a log next to Julia. His hands ached to touch the guitar.

  “Thank you. I don’t know if it still works after all this.” She ran a cloth over the fingerboard.

  “Maybe I can take a look at it for you.” He held out his hands, trying not to snatch it.

  She laid the guitar in them. “You play?”

  He didn’t reply, too busy caressing the satiny wood. “Do you have a cable? Is the amp charged?”

  She nodded. “We had it up on the wagon roof yesterday and the sunsmith panels were in good condition. It got a good eight hours in the sun.” She opened the catch on the back of the box, unfolding the azure sunsmith panels set in ornately engraved brass. As he ran a finger over the engraving, she turned to rummage through a box of equipment in search of a cable.

  The engraving was so detailed: a motif of rolling waves and fish. The azure panels they held changed sunlight into electricity. It was one of the things that made the amp nearly priceless. It took trained sunsmiths a long time to make a new panel. Electricity itself was rare, but turbines like the ones at the palace were more common. Thinking back to reports he had read recently from the Imperial Army, these panels were even more rare. Superstitious villagers had a tendency of drowning sunsmiths when they came across anyone with the sunmith’s blue sun tattoos. The villagers couldn’t separate the old tech that had brought Califf down on the world—said to attract Ozuk—from the harmless sunsmith technology.

  Julia found the cable, handed it over and flipped the switch on the amp. He plugged it in, not taking his eyes off the machine. Seeing the guitar was in good hands, Julia got up and went to the wagon as he fiddled with the amp knobs. There was a whine and a sputter of sound from the speaker. She was back in a moment, and handed over a coiled steel string to replace the broken one. He strung it and held his breath as he tried his first chord. It twanged clear into the night and grew louder into a metallic humming wail. He turned the tuning knobs, tweaking it to the right sound with a few more experimental strums. Laying down a few chords he tried to sing the lyrics he had written, but for the first time in his life, his voice failed him. His new body’s voice couldn’t handle it. He clenched his teeth and changed the song, putting his anger into it, and let the guitar be his voice. He played his anger, and his defiance of men out to kill him, of fire and wreckage, and survival. When he stopped because his new hands were tired, conspicuous silence greeted him. Looking up, he saw the whole camp and most of the town had gathered, watching him. The old man and his daughter were there, still hollow cheeked. He blushed, suddenly feeling naked, and handed the guitar back to the merchant’s wife. The crowd didn’
t clap or cheer, but some nodded and others patted him on the shoulder as they went back to their houses.

  “Sorry,” Corin said self-consciously.

  Julia just shook her head. “Sometimes you have to let the bastards know they haven’t killed you.”

  Smiling, he nodded. Exactly.

  “Take the guitar. You’ll put it to good use.” She offered it back.

  “I—I can’t. I don’t have the money,” said Corin. Music was a daily haven for him in the palace. His father had sung him to sleep as a child. Later, after the plague hit, he’d been quarantined to keep him safe. He was locked in an attic full of old things his family had kept in the generations. He had found a guitar in a dusty trunk. In the weeks that followed, his mother and brothers died in the plague and the Highlords fled the city. He’d coughed every time a cloud of smoke drifted in the window from the grave fires. Three times a day his hopes had risen that this time the guard coming to put food and water through hole kicked in the bottom in the attic door was coming at last to let him out. The guitar had gotten him through the weeks of fear.

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ll do more with it than the prince would,” said Julia, breaking into his revelry.

  Corin stilled in shock. “You got it for the prince?”

  “We heard he likes tech music.”

  “He does.” He took the guitar back from her. “All right. Thank you.”

  “You probably don’t want to take it with you on your journey. Can we leave it at the palace for you?”

  “Y-yes.” He was having the worst vertigo in this conversation. Picking up packages for himself under a different name, playing a guitar brought for him, and given to someone else, who was also him. He blurted, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you in the battle. I tried...but...”

  She patted him on the shoulder. “You aren’t a warrior. Sometimes, it’s enough to witness and give us a voice.” She reached over and gave the strings a thoughtful strum, and stood, going back to the wagon for the next load of half-burned goods. Corin wrapped up the guitar and went back to cooking, unable to name his feelings.

  They spent the night there in a hayloft. The next day they said goodbye to Hawk’s Hoop again and made good time that morning. He left the tech guitar for the merchants to take with them to the palace. The only hiccup was when he borrowed Giovicci’s guitar. First he tried to sing. At the second atonal crack, he stopped singing, feeling like someone was strangling him. His new body could not sing. He could still play though, and the tech guitar had reawakened that need in him. He let his fingers meander through old songs he had written, new tunes that struck him, and a few imitations of birds he heard along the way. He was one verse into a song he had written as a child when an arm shot out to yank his hand away from the strings.

  “Not that song.”

  He pulled his hand away from Mizrahi. The anger was back in Mizrahi’s amber eyes.

  “What?”

  “He wrote that for a friend. Don’t play it,” said Mizrahi with frozen intensity.

  Puzzled, he shrugged. “All right.”

  Mizrahi cleared his throat. “You remind me of him, sometimes.”

  “The prince?” asked Corin.

  Mizrahi nodded and said, “You must be a good friend to him.”

  “I suppose.”

  Mizrahi nodded, and rode up to the front of the column. Corin mentally shook himself and tried to get back into the music. Copelia started singing along to one of the city tunes with a warbling contralto.

  They camped that night in a clearing of fragrant long-needled pines. He lay on his back, on the flat tent under the stars, picking out plinking chords on the quieted guitar. Corin refused to return it and Giovicci didn’t seem to mind. Their party had to be settling into its rhythm, but he couldn’t seem to find his. The Dragons played tricks on each other, practiced weapons in their spare time, and told war stories. Copelia badgered them for instruction with the staff or glaive. Vansainté complained about his arm, and did off-hand exercises with his sword. Only Corin remained on the outside. He wanted a notebook more now than he had in years, but the Trokays had no extra paper. Paper burned quickly. The borrowed guitar, though, was a comfort. He let his mind drift, and woke a while later to see that someone had come along and wrapped up the guitar while he slept. It lay near his head.

  The next day they got going early, goaded by an insultingly chipper Wix. By lunch he was angry, and he didn’t even know why. It took several hours to realize it was not that the Dragons were stiff, disrespectful, sullen, and unsociable. They trusted each other with their lives and it made their community tighter than friends. He was angry because he was not part of that group. He was the alien.

  They pushed hard to make up for lost time and made it to the city gates of Skevelia just as the sun was going down. Corin would have thought the town a dung heap, had he not been through Hawk’s Hoop. At least this town was living. The main street was paved, offering two inns and several pleasure houses, and opened into the market square. In the square were outfitters, eating houses, a blacksmith, and a myriad of stalls hawking the “healing waters of Skevelia.” The normal shops were closing up, while those businesses dealing with the cleansing and pleasuring of their customers were just becoming busy. Through the crowd Corin noticed the circular white dome of the Moon Temple on the far side of the square. He froze for a moment while looking at the fourteen columns that made up the outside of the temple; they sent a chill down his spine as they reminded him of the Ordeal chamber.

  Their group followed Mizrahi into the yard of an inn called the Mossy Barrow, and waited as Vansainté negotiated rooms. He came back, followed by a couple of sandy-haired boys. The Dragons wearily took down their saddlebags and prepared the wagon for the night. Mizrahi called out guard shifts for the wagon. The boys—offspring of the innkeeper, he guessed—took their horses into the stable. Corin slumped against the inn’s wall, watching as Copelia fussed over Nightswift, her Delkeran, before letting him be stabled. It was the most animation he had seen out of her for a couple hours. She seemed as tired as he was. She wandered over, lounging against a hitching post with a sigh.

  “I can’t wait for a bath and a bed,” she said. It was reassuring that she had plans to go to bed quickly. After they had left Hawk’s Hoop again, she had latched onto him as her target for her talking. She may not be as oblivious as Corin thought if she noticed Mizrahi’s icy demeanor and continued avoidance. Mizrahi always found an excuse to be somewhere else in their group. Corin had watched as Copelia meandered her horse in Mizrahi’s direction, and Mizrahi wandered in the other direction. It was a court dance, and it would have made him laugh had it not left him as the next convenient target. Even before they had found the merchants, Corin had realized why Mizrahi let the pint-sized girl drive him around. The torrent of gossip that Copelia insisted on relating was at length mentally exhausting.

  Before the merchants, she had already exhausted general knowledge of her family in Oruno. After a half hour of quiet introspection at the fate of Ignazio, the head merchant, she was back, this time talking of Mizrahi. She was not in the least deflated by the near-death experiences they had all been through. At first, he listened avidly, for any clue to understand the dangerously crazy and frighteningly well-equipped Red Dragon. But after hearing how Vansainté had met Mizrahi in Oruno during a class on military strategy, through to the raiders that Mizrahi had slain one-handed during their collective time in the Daro Wastes, the story began to leave him hollow. Hero stories were entertaining, and made great fodder for ballads (he had written several), but it didn’t help in his current predicament.

  She described everything with a twinkle in her eye and a smile. He had no idea how a woman could twinkle for three hours on horseback over a rough road. More importantly, there was something missing from the description. Anything from before Oruno was not mentioned. When he asked why Mizrahi had decided to become a Dragon, she simply couldn’t fathom what he meant. To her, Mizrahi was the most se
lfless person in the world, sometimes daring and crazy, but always selfless. Protecting others was who he was.

  But Corin remembered the amber eyes filled with hatred in the audience chamber. The dangerous game Mizrahi had played in front of the court and the words he had challenged Corin with smacked of a personal grudge against the Prince. All Dragons were thoroughly investigated before they were allowed to enter the Imperial Bodyguard Corps. Somewhere, someone had to know what came before Mizrahi’s attaining his graduate sigil.

  Corin muttered a curse, hefting his saddlebags and guitar up as he noticed the Dragons had finished their chores and were going into the inn. He quickly jogged after the men and followed them through the common room and up the stairs. A large blaze filled a fireplace sized to cook a whole pig in the back wall of the main room. Brightly clothed merchants and the more sedate townsfolk ate and drank at trestle tables. Some in the back corner were dicing. The room was loud with the din of happy—if weary and a little drunk—people at the end of a day. It was the first time Corin had ever been allowed in a place like it. He counted it as an effect of being tired and grimy that he thought the Mossy Barrow charming.

  They settled their bags in the small rooms along a corridor upstairs. They were lucky the Mossy Barrow did so much business with visitors; even now they still had rooms free. The establishments in Aquillion may have been opulent, with satin on the beds, but they usually only had a handful of rooms. The Dragons doubled up again as did Vansainté and his sister. Mizrahi and he were given single rooms at the end of the hall. After dumping their bags, there was a small blow up about whether Dog was going to sleep in the inn that night. He wasn’t. Not because the Dragons were heartless as Copelia claimed, but because he didn’t fit in the room with two people. While the men went back down to the common room, Copelia settled Dog on a nest of blankets in the wagon outside and then rejoined them in the common room for a quick supper. After the meal of spiced lentils and chicken, Mizrahi went out into the night with a grunted explanation of errands, followed by Copelia, who was impatient to use one of the hot springs that the town was famous for. Corin was left at the table with the Dragons unsure of whether he should stay.