The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5

by Michelle West

  Of the men who had served the kai so poorly, only one had chosen to stand his ground; only one had remained by the side of the fallen. He was a young man, his face slender, his eyes large, dark. When the Radann approached the body, he had drawn sword a moment, but he had not lifted that sword against them.

  The kai el’Sol’s expression was as dark as this stranger’s eyes, but older, wiser. He said nothing, but he lingered, waiting for the man to speak.

  Nor was his wait in vain.

  “Kai el’Sol,” the young man said, surprising Marakas with the depth of his bow.

  The kai el’Sol said, simply, “Ser Alessandro.” He turned to Marakas, and added, “Radann Marakas el’Sol, may I present Ser Alessandro par di’Clemente.”

  Marakas bowed stiffly. He did not—at that time—recognize the clan. But the fact that Fredero did, and more, recognized the man, said something.

  “There will be a price to pay,” Ser Alessandro said, gazing down upon the body of the kai di’Manelo. “For this day’s work, there will be a price.”

  “Did you think to tell him that, before he embarked upon it?” Fredero asked.

  “Very clever, kai el’Sol. I do not judge. I do not threaten. I merely observe. He was impulsive. He was—as many men are—attracted to beauty. He was powerful, in a fashion, competent with a sword, deadly when it was necessary.” He knelt by the man he spoke so softly of. Very gently, he brushed strands of dark hair from a face that death had made noble. The Radann had chosen to close eyes left wide by the surprise of a death unforeseen at the start of an ordinary, unremarkable day. He did not touch them.

  Instead, he reached for the sword held below the awkward repose of crossed arms. The kai el’Sol did not see fit to stop him; Marakas therefore said nothing.

  But he was surprised when Ser Alessandro rolled back his sleeve until he had exposed his arm from wrist to elbow. Shocked when the par Clemente laid his arm against the blade’s edge, its outer curve, and, tightening fist, drawing sharp breath, cut himself. The blade was a fine one; sharp and true; the wound itself would only sting after the blood began to flow. Ser Alessandro waited until blood pooled visibly in the runnels along the sword’s edge; it didn’t take long. The cut was deep.

  Radann Paolo el’Sol offered him a long, pale cloth. As that cloth passed from sun-darkened hands to pale ones, Paolo also bowed; there was nothing in the gesture that spoke of falsity. Alessandro raised his head, for he still knelt and he had to look up to meet the Radann’s dark eyes. Something passed, wordless, between them before he chose to tend to the wound. He asked for no aid, and Marakas knew that he was warrior born; he would ask for none. Accept none.

  Marakas looked to Fredero, but the kai el’Sol was watching the stranger closely, his expression impenetrable. At last, stiffly, he said, “You honor the kai Manelo.”

  Ser Alessandro did not reply, although he chose to speak. “If I am not mistaken, kai el’Sol, there is thunder within the cloudless sky.”

  Fredero nodded, although Marakas could hear nothing.

  “What would you have done, kai el’Sol, if the Tor’agnate had arrived before the Lord’s test?”

  “What do you think, Ser Alessandro?”

  Alessandro smiled, but it was a thin smile. “I think you are Lambertan, kai el’Sol.”

  “So is the Tyr’agnate.”

  “Indeed.” He had finished binding the wound tightly, and now drew his sleeve across his arm. He had been careful, his cut had been exact, precise. No blood had fallen from blade to sleeve, and if the bandages had been bound tightly enough, none would be immediately obvious for perhaps an hour.

  “They come,” Ser Alessandro said, rising. “And as you seem to persist in valuing those who barely value themselves, I must make haste to greet them outside of the village. I will bring them, kai el’Sol.”

  The kai el’Sol said nothing, but he watched Ser Alessandro leave, and Marakas noted that, in the entire time they had been within sword’s reach, Fredero kai el’Sol had not once taken his hand from the hilt of his blade.

  When he was gone, Fredero said quietly, “There are some lessons that must be learned time and again. There are some that need only be learned once.” He raised his hand to his eyes, as if sheltering vision from the glare of the sun over the moving sheen of emerald and gold that comprised the field of the Sambali youth.

  “Perhaps, kai el’Sol. But in my experience, in villages such as these, the truth is slanted. We say there are men who learn quickly and easily, and men who are only capable of remembering their own names because they hear them shouted so often.”

  Fredero’s smile was slight. “True enough. And which of these are you, Radann?”

  “I? I am a man who learns quickly.”

  Fredero raised a brow.

  “It is truth. I learn so quickly, in fact, that I find myself in the position, often, of being forced to relearn, reexamine, reinterpret. Today is one of those days.” He lifted his hands; found to his surprise that they shook and trembled—and that he was willing to expose this weakness to the kai el’Sol, and to the Lord he served. “I thought never to heal again. I thought to abjure what I could not use to save those to whom my greatest duty lay.” He bowed. “Had you asked, I would have vowed it; I would have offered you my life as proof of the truth of that vow.

  “And yet, today, because of a stranger’s wife, a young girl with a pretty face, I have healed. I walked in the darkness, and the light that I see, now that I have returned, is not the light of the sun I left behind.” He lowered his hands. “I am Sol’dan,” he said quietly. “I understand that you will bring justice to the Dominion, with the Radann in your service, in the name of the Lord.”

  “Does that concern you?”

  He could have pretended to misunderstand the question; he was tempted. “No. I would not have given you the same answer had you asked me that question yesterday.

  “I do not care for the Lord. I understand that many a man, driven by perfect nobility, finds clarity, and purity, in a life led as a warrior, but I am not one of those. The Lord is concerned with men of power; you are a man of power. Let me be beneath his notice, beneath either his contempt or his benediction, while you stand in his glare without flinching. You are the shield, kai el’Sol, and I am a man who can make the riven shield whole, time and again, without question, without conflict.”

  “There will come a day, Radann Marakas el’Sol, when you will find the safe side of such a shield no longer suits your purpose.”

  “I am no longer certain that I have a purpose.”

  Fredero’s frown was subtle, but it altered the lines of his face. He offered Marakas his silence, and when he chose to break it, he spoke as if Marakas had not. “And when that day comes, I will be waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “An ally. A man who can also be a shield; who can bear the scrutiny of the Lord without once stepping away from the road I have chosen. I do not fear the Lord. I serve him. I desire power, and all power I have gained, both before I joined the Radann, and after, was at the expense of others who sought the same.

  “You have already learned how costly it is to be bereft of power.”

  Marakas closed his eyes.

  “You will come in time to understand how costly it is to have power. But without it—without it, Radann—how can we force our will upon others?”

  Fredero added quietly, as he looked down at the carefully arranged corpse upon the white sheets, “This is only one death, Healer. There will be others. Many, many others.”

  Marakas was silent.

  “Justice, in these lands, is a sword. A sword.” His hand touched the hilt of Balagar as if the gesture were a benediction. “And what, in the end, can we say of swords? Does the Lord make them? Does he temper them? Is it his eye that inspects the ores, his hands that make first the one sword that will be so hard it is brittle, and the other, that will withstand the ravages of water and blood so completely that it cannot hold an edge? No. With almost no
exceptions, a sword is made by men, wielded by men. Only men.”

  “You wear Balagar,” Marakas said quietly.

  Fredero’s glance fell to the scabbard that housed the second most famous blade in the Dominion. “And yet, wield it or no, in the end, it is I who decide what it kills, and when, and why; it is thus with all swords, be they famous or unknown. And by our choices, we who wield these weapons, we are judged.”

  “By who?”

  “By who?”

  “Who judges the kai el’Sol?”

  Fredero’s smile was weary. “A fair question, Radann. A fair question. In the Dominion, it is said that in the end, there is no judgment. The winds take us all; we are trapped in the howl of its voice, and the eternity of its caprice.

  “And perhaps that is even true; I cannot say. But if this is to be our only life, should it not be a life in which honor is valued, and justice is preserved? Aye, ask. Who judges the kai el’Sol? I have taken power—and I will keep it—for the purpose of imposing my will, my desire, and my vision upon others.”

  He knelt then, beside the dead kai Manelo, and placed his hand against the curved skin of his closed eyes.

  Jevri, silent until that moment, spoke. “The kai el’Sol will face the harshest of all judges, and the least forgiving,” the former seraf to the clan Lamberto said. “He himself.”

  So many words.

  Words were a measure of time, their absence a measure of distance. Fredero was silent. The only words he would speak again would be spoken in memories such as these; there would be no new wisdom, no guidance.

  Marakas par el’Sol placed his hand on the hilt of the sword that hung—as no other had before it—so comfortably by his side. Verragar was guide, ally, protector—but in spite of that fact, Marakas admitted privately what many of the Radann seemed incapable of realizing: A sword was not a man.

  Fredero, he thought quietly. I have allies. I have a worthy weapon. I have a cause that will define the Dominion—and more—forever. What is this shadow?

  But he knew. There had always been a difference between allies and friends.

  He continued to walk. The sun began to creep upward, inch by inch, a slow return of warmth and color to the desert landscape.

  Memory was a funny thing. Of his rise from the ranks of the Radann, he cared to remember little, and events remained shadowy; where light fell upon them at all, it was moon’s light, some brightness cast by the memories of the man he had chosen to follow. In the contrasting harshness of day, they were almost pleasant, but drained of color, as much else was: the sand, the flats, the scrub. Even his arms were now dusted, and his robes gray with the weight of fine grains. He sat in the lee of his tent, and only when water touched cracked lips did he close his eyes.

  “I will not serve Peder. If he is responsible for your death—”

  The kai el’Sol lifted a hand. “Enough. He is not an assassin. He is a man. He cannot be ‘responsible’ as you so quaintly put it, for my death. To speak in such a fashion does not insult him, par el’Sol. It insults me.”

  Jevri glanced up from his place at a workbench that spread from one end of the room to the other, its flat, continuous surface broken only by bolts of fabric, containers that held crystal beads, pearls, small decorations of raw silk and linen that were meant to be the minimalist’s abstraction of flowers.

  The bench was not usually used for storage in this fashion, but the breadth of the tables over which Jevri el’Sol ruled were covered in ivory silks. Marakas had never understood Jevri’s devotion to the craft of dressmaking. He tolerated it because Fredero tolerated it, but he found nothing in it to admire.

  And yet, acknowledging that, he found Jevri at work to be a compelling figure; his hands did not shake; his gaze did not waver; he did not seem to draw a bead or a pearl, a spray of lace or a small gemstone, that did not conform to a larger working that unfolded, beyond Marakas’ ability to follow, beneath his hands.

  “But you tolerate him.”

  “He is a capable man,” Fredero replied dispassionately. “And he is canny in ways that you—or I—are not.”

  Marakas was silent. He had known Fredero for many years, and although he had often observed Fredero in session with those who intended to succeed him, he had seldom seen the mask he now wore when such Radann were absent; it pained him. Will you play at politics with me, Fredero? Will you hide the truth?

  “Kai el’Sol,” Jevri said, his hands continuing their dance of needle, of thread, “Explain it.”

  “Jevri—”

  “But, if you would be merciful, be brief. I have much to do here, and I am in need of the assistance denied me by this conversation.”

  Fredero’s brows rose; Marakas was not certain that the expression, transformed for a moment by shock, would not descend into anger. But anger did not follow.

  “He is canny,” Fredero said quietly, “but that is a talent either you—when you are cautious—or I, possess. He is capable with a sword. He has danced with the fire. He is ambitious. All of these are traits that the par el’Sol must possess.” He lifted a hand to forestall Marakas. “Agree that you are the exception, Marakas, or there is little point in continuing to force Jevri’s aged hands to work alone.”

  Marakas bowed.

  “You cannot treat with the enemy. What you desire is not a thing they could understand, and if they do not understand it, they will not work with you.”

  “He did not begin—”

  “Enough.” Fredero’s expression was hard. Distant. “What is of concern is what exists now. He is a capable liar. And that, in the end, is what we need at this time. The time may come—will come—when that is not the case, and at that time, you have my leave to judge him, and to find him wanting, if that is your perception.”

  “And of honor?”

  “Marakas.”

  “What of all that we have struggled for? You speak as if you have already lost, Fredero.”

  At that, the kai el’Sol looked up, and the anger that he had not bestowed upon Jevri, he now granted the par el’Sol, anger was as rare as distance. Marakas held his ground because the Radann did not step back in the face of hostility, but for the first time in many years, such steadiness took effort.

  “Understand, par el’Sol,” he said, in the chilliest of voices, “that Peder par el’Sol came to me. I understand your fear, and I remind you that such fear is unacceptable in a Radann of your stature. Was he plotting against me? Of course. But he is Radann. He serves the Lord of Day.”

  Speaking seemed to bleed the anger out of his tone, although the corners of his lips were drawn tight. “We no longer fight the same war, and the war that we fight is a war that we must win. Lose it, and all of our past victories mean nothing.”

  “All battles are battles we must win,” Marakas replied quietly. “They have been so for many years.”

  Jevri, working in silence, lifted a brow. “Well, Fredero?”

  “Enough. Enough, both of you.” He lifted a hand. “Remember your stories. Do I speak of defeat? No. But in any war, victory has many guises.”

  And in this conflict?

  Fredero had won a battle, and had left the war in the hands of the par el’Sol.

  Significant, then, that although Peder had immediately adorned himself with a title and the vestments that the High Court best understood, he had not taken up Balagar.

  Marakas was tired. He understood the nature of the war that drove them all, forcing them to cooperate in ways that no one—except perhaps Fredero himself—could have foreseen. But the desert sun was high, and the road that he traveled seemed interminably long and empty.

  He did not pray.

  He had been Radann for long enough that he understood the futility of that action. But had he understood it less well, had he been the younger self that he barely remembered—if he remembered himself truly at all—he might have.

  Instead, as men do, he turned the whining edge from his thoughts, blunting them; he gathered his anger instead, honing i
t, and demanded some acknowledgment from the Lord of the Sun.

  The Radann served, but they served not as Tyran, not as cerdan; their Lord stood robed in a harsh light that destroyed the sight of those who dared to gaze upon his glory in an attempt to discern his desire, to extract his commands. Such service demanded, in its turn, men who could speak in the Lord’s name, and with the Lord’s voice, for the lesser among the Radann desired some sense that they served more than the capricious voice of the wind.

  Those men, guided by the kai el’Sol, served faithfully and with devotion from the moment they arrived at temples across the Dominion. They almost always brought swords; they almost never brought anything else of value, although the scions of the High Clans, those few, like Fredero—who were wed to privilege and power—often gifted the temple of their initiation with gold, or wheat, or rice.

  Fredero had come with nothing but his name.

  The Radann knew, when he arrived at their doors, that his father desired them to turn him aside. And his father, the Tyr’agnate, was Lambertan; he held much sway among the Radann.

  Jevri had told him this much, but not more.

  The rest, Marakas had been forced to forage for, as wild animals forage for food when the lands are dry. Such foraging had been poor.

  He knew, of course, that the Radann had not rejected the par di’Lamberto. But the reasons, given the pressure—and the threatened displeasure—of the Tyr’agnate, were less clear. He suspected that had the decision been left solely in the Hand of the Lord, Fredero would have returned to his family; the par el’Sol and the kai el’Sol were born to, and of, the High Courts.

  All, thought Marakas, save himself.

  Men like he, though, might rise in the unnamed ranks that guided the temples in the cities ruled by the Tors; they might, with luck and skill, become part of those temples that graced the capitals in which the Tyr’agnati made their homes.