“Where?” the woman demanded of the tanzeer. And when he told her she dug them out of the jewelled pouch hanging from his jewelled belt.
She ignored the iron collar around her own throat. Instead, unlocked the cuffs from his ankles, waist, neck—and finally as he twisted the loops more tightly around the tanzeer’s throat, she unlocked the cuffs from his wrists.
He shed them all. Sloughed off the serpent’s coils as if he sloughed his skin. And all the iron rang down on the floor and cracked the careful patterns.
With the iron he shed his captivity, as much as he could, and she saw in the beast’s place a trace of the man she had known. Only a trace, but a trace was better than nothing. Tentatively, she smiled. “Tiger?”
I shoved Aladar up against the nearest wall and took the knife from Del as she offered it. Placed the tip against his flat, tissue-clad belly and bared my teeth at him. “One claw left, tanzeer. Care to feel it?”
He stared back at me, saffron-colored from shock, but he didn’t give in. He had too much pride for it.
I flicked a glance at Del. I didn’t have much voice left—three months of silence, except for occasional outcries in my sleep, had leached me of the facility—but she seemed to comprehend my abbreviated speech well enough. “Swords and knives. Clothes. Anything. I’ll wait.”
She ran, leaving me with Aladar.
I was shaking. Reaction had set in. I could almost hear my chains rattling, except I didn’t wear them anymore. But I heard them. I hear them still.
I sucked in a deep breath. Bared my teeth again at Aladar. “Ten-year-old boy, five years ago. Northerner. Omar’s slaveblock. Jamail. Looks like her.” It was all I could manage. I didn’t dare let him see how shaky I was; it wouldn’t be difficult for him to break free. The mine had stolen strength, flexibility, speed. All I had left was hatred.
A wild, killing rage.
“Do you expect me to know what happens to every slave in Julah?” he demanded.
He had a point. But so did I, and it was pressing against his gut. “What happened to this one?”
“He was a chula!” Aladar hissed. “I buy them, I sell them … I can’t keep track of every one!”
The little knife wasn’t worth much as a real weapon, but its steel was very sharp. It sliced through the cloth easily enough; I had the feeling it would slice through flesh equally so. “I’m going to cut you, tanzeer, and spill your guts out onto the floor like ropes, so you can trip over them.”
Apparently he believed me. Just as well; I meant it. “I had such a boy,” he admitted. “I let him go three years ago.”
“Where?”
“Vashni.” Clearly, Aladar knew what he was saying. His pallor deepened. “I gave him as a gift to the chief.”
Hoolies. “You have trade with the Vashni?” No one else did. I wondered if he lied.
Aladar swallowed heavily. “I needed it. With this particular clan. I needed access to the mountains, to the mine, for the gold. With—with the Vashni settled there, I stood no chance. So—I sent all manner of things, including chula. One of them was a Northern boy. He was twelve.”
The age fit. “Where?” I asked grimly.
Aladar’s brown eyes were black with fear and hatred. “Just ride due south, into the foothills. The Vashni find you even when you don’t want them to.”
That was undoubtedly true. “The boy’s name?”
“I don’t know!” Aladar shouted. “Do you expect me to know the name of a chula?”
“Tiger,” Del said.
I turned my head and saw she wore her tunic again, complete with sword harness. The silver hilt stood up above her left shoulder. She carried a black burnous, sandals and Singlestroke, along with knife and harness. A white burnous was draped over her other arm.
She dropped everything into a pile as she reached up to draw her sword. “Get dressed,” she said calmly. “I’ll watch Aladar.”
I stepped away from him. Del saw my face as I turned my back on the tanzeer; something in hers told me I wasn’t maintaining as well as I’d hoped. The ornamental knife was slippery in my hand. From sweat. The sweat of tension and emotion.
I let Del go past me to Aladar. Carefully, I bent and picked up the black burnous, concentrating on cutting a slit in the shoulder seam for Singlestroke’s hilt. My hands shook. The seam split. The tip of the knife nicked a finger. I didn’t feel it. My hands were too callused.
I shrugged into my harness, dismayed to discover I didn’t need to undo the buckles. No. I needed to punch new holes. To make the harness smaller. But that would have to wait.
The sandals were hard to lace up. Eventually, I knotted them. Pulled the burnous over my head, glad to cover most of my stinking, scarred hide. Felt a wave of weakness break over my head and threaten to suck me down.
I turned. Del watched me. I felt sluggish heat rise into my face. Sweat stung my armpits. Singlestroke was in my hands, but I didn’t raise him. I didn’t sheathe him. I looked at Del, and I saw her turn back to Aladar and spit him on her rune-worked blade.
“No—” But the shout was little more than a tearing in my throat. “By hoolies, woman, that death was mine!”
Del didn’t answer.
“Bascha—mine—”
Still she didn’t answer.
My mouth opened. Closed. I said nothing. I watched as she pulled the blade free. The body, sagging against the wall, slowly slid toward the floor. It bled gently through cloth-of-gold and crimson embroidery.
Del turned, and at last she answered me. “That was for you.” The soft voice was incredibly intimate. “For what he did to you.”
She was unreadable. I saw the stark harshness of the bones beneath pale flesh and realized she’d lost her tan. She was a Northern bascha again, as I’d seen her originally.
And an incredibly dangerous woman.
There wasn’t much room in my throat for my voice. “Del—I do my own killing.”
She looked directly back at me. “Not this time, Tiger. No.”
Something jumped deep in my chest. A cramp. Something spasmodic. “Is that how you killed the an-kaidin? Is that how you blooded that blade?”
I saw her twitch of shock. Her face was paler still; had I shocked her that much with my question? Del was aware I knew what had happened to her sword-master, and how. Just not all the reasons for it.
Or was it the tone of my accusation that had drawn the reaction from her?
“This was for you,” she said at last.
“Was it?” I croaked. “Or was it for Del?”
She looked down at her sword. Blood ran from the blade. It filled up the runes, then dripped raggedly from the steel to puddle on the tessellated floor.
Her mouth twitched a moment, but it wasn’t an expression of humor. It was Del dealing with an emotion I couldn’t name. “For us both.” But she said it so quietly I wasn’t certain what words were said.
Three months apart. We owed each other nothing. Not now. The thing had gone past employer and employee. Del and I were free to go our separate ways.
“Jamail is with the Vashni,” I told her. “A mountain clan.”
“I heard him.”
“You’re going?”
Her jaw was a blade beneath taut flesh. “I’m going.”
After a moment, I nodded. I was incapable of anything else.
Del picked up the white burnous. She slid the sword home in the sheath behind her shoulder—she’d clean it later, I knew—and went out of the room.
But not before she relieved Aladar’s body of his jewelled pouch.
I love a practical woman.
Twenty-Two
Del bought our way into a disreputable inn on the disreputable side of Julah. We made an odd pair; I wasn’t much surprised at the odd looks we got as we climbed the narrow adobe staircase to the second floor and the tiny room Del had rented for us. She ordered a bath with lots of hot water, and when the serving girl muttered about the extra work, Del cracked her across the face with the f
lat of her hand. With the mark still blazing red on the girl’s tawny skin, Del promised her gold if she hurried. The girl hurried.
I sat on the edge of the threadbare, rumpled cot. I stared blankly at Del, recalling how easily she had slipped the sword blade into Aladar’s belly. For me, she had said. But I’ve long been accustomed to doing my own killing when it needed doing; I couldn’t imagine why she would do it for me. Or what it was in me that had triggered her lethal response.
No. More likely it had been for her brother and for the treatment she had known at Aladar’s hands.
“You’ll feel better when you’re clean again,” Del said.
The burnous covered most of me. But I could see my sandaled feet, callused hands. Finger- and toenails were split, broken, missing, peeled back, blackened. Nicks and ingrained ore dust discolored faded copper flesh. Across the back of my left hand was a jagged scar, healed over: a chisel had slipped once, in the shaking hands of a dying man chained next to me.
I turned my hands over and looked at the palms. Once they had been callused from years of sword-dancing. It had only been months since they had known the seductive flesh of Singlestroke’s hilt, and yet I knew it was too long.
The door crashed open. Del swung around, hands on sword hilt; she didn’t unsheathe the Northern blade because it was the serving girl and a fat man. He rolled a wooden cask into the room, dumped it on end, left. The girl began lugging buckets of hot water in one by one, pouring them into the cask.
Del waited until the cask was filled. Then she gestured dismissal to the girl, who took one hard look at me and did as Del suggested. She left. And after a moment, so did Del.
I picked at the knots in my laces. Untied them, stripped off the leather. Dropped burnous and dhoti. Lastly, shed harness and sword. And climbed into the hot water, not even caring that all the cuts and nicks and scrapes clamored protest at the heat.
I slid down into the cask until the water lapped at my chest. Carefully, I leaned my skull against the edge of the cask, giving myself over to the heat. I didn’t even bother with the soap. I just soaked. And then I slept.
—the rattle of iron … the chink of mallet against chisel, chisel against stone … the yips and cries of sleeping men … the sobs of dying men—
I woke up with a jerk. Disoriented, I was aware of flaxen light in the room, slanting through the slatted window … a room, not a tunnel! No more torchlight. No more darkness. No more iron.
A hand, against my back. Scrubbing soap into the flesh, until I was coated with yellow-brown lather. Del’s hand pressed down on my head as I began to rise. “No. I’ll do it. Be easy.”
But I couldn’t. I sat stiffly in the cask as she scrubbed, working the brown soap into the filthy skin. Her fingers were strong, very strong; she kneaded at the tension knotting shoulders, neck, spine.
“Be easy,” she said softly.
But I couldn’t. “What did that bastard do to you?”
I could feel her shrug. “It doesn’t matter. He’s dead.”
“Bascha.” I reached and caught one of her hands. “Tell me.”
“Will you tell me?”
At once I was back in the mine, swallowed up by darkness and despair. I felt the emptiness teasing the edges of my mind. “No.” It was all I could do to form the word, to expel a sound from my mouth. I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her.
“Shave?” she asked. “You need a haircut, too.”
I nodded. Washed hair and beard. Nodded again.
Considerate of my modesty, Del turned away while I heaved myself up in the cask, washed the parts of me which Del hadn’t, rinsed, and dripped across the floor to the rough sacking on the cot. There was also a fresh dhoti and brown burnous. I dried myself, pulled the dhoti on, told her she could turn around.
She did. I saw momentary pity in her eyes. “You’re too thin.”
“So are you.” I sat down. “Rid me of this rat’s-nest, bascha. Make me a man again.”
Carefully, she cut my hair. Carefully, she stripped the beard away. I watched her face as she tended mine. The flesh was drawn tight over her bones. Aladar had kept her indoors for three months; the honey-tan had faded. Except for the sun-frost in her hair, she looked so very much like the Northern woman I’d met in the little cantina in the nameless town on the edge of the Punja.
Except I knew what she was, now. Not a witch. Not a sorceress, though some might name her that because of the jivatma and all its power. No. Del was just a woman bent on doing whatever it was she had to do. No matter what the odds.
Finally she smiled. I felt gentle fingers briefly touch the claw marks on my face. “Sandtiger.” It was all she said. All she needed to say.
“Hungry?” When she nodded, I pulled on the burnous and Singlestroke, and we went down to the common room.
The food was spicy and tangy; not the best, not the worst. Certainly better than what I’d known in the mine. And I learned I couldn’t eat much more than I’d eaten for the last three months. My belly rebelled. And so I turned to aqivi instead.
Finally, Del reached out and put a hand over the rim of my cup. “No more.” Gently said, but firmly.
“I’ll drink what I want.”
“Tiger—” She hesitated. “Too much will make you sick.”
“It’ll make me drunk,” I corrected. “Right about now, drunk is precisely what I’d like to be.”
Her eyes were very direct. “Why?”
I thought she probably knew why. But I said it anyway. “It’ll help me forget.”
“You can’t forget that, Tiger. No more than you could forget your days with the Salset.” She shook her head a little. “There are things about my life I’d like to forget; I can’t, so I live with them. I think them through, deal with them, put them in their place. So they don’t affect the other things I must do.”
“Have you forgotten the blood-guilt, then?” I couldn’t help myself; the aqivi made me hostile. I looked at her whitening face. “How did you deal with that, bascha?”
“What do you know of blood-guilt, Sandtiger?”
I shrugged beneath brown silk. “A little. I recall how the chula felt when he realized his conjuring—his wishful thinking—had made a dream come true, at the cost of innocent lives.” I sighed. “And another story about an ishtoya who killed an an-kaidin. Because of a blooding-blade.” I looked at the hilt standing up behind her shoulder. “It had to be quenched in the blood of a skillful man, so the ishtoya could seek revenge.”
“There are needs in this world that supersede the importance of other things.” Flat, unwavering tone.
“Selfish.” I swallowed more liquor. “I saw what you did to Aladar, and I know you’re capable of killing for the sake of revenge. Of need.” I paused. “Obsession, bascha. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Del smiled a little. “Maybe.” And the word had an edge, like the blade of her Northern sword.
I put down my brimming cup. “I’m going to bed.”
Del let me go. She didn’t say a word.
A shadowed figure approached from the end of the tunnel. The light was stark behind it, throwing it into sharp relief: a silhouette wihtout features. Without shape. Simply a form in a black burnous. And in its hands was a sword, a Northern sword, silver-hilted and worked with alien runes.
The figure approached the first slave slowly. He was chained five men down from me. The sword flashed briefly in the muted light. I saw two hands lift it, rest the tip against the man’s upstanding ribs, push. The blade slid in silently, killing without a sound. The man sagged against his chains. Only the rattling of the iron told me he was dead.
Withdrawn. Blood shone on the blade, but in the strange light from beyond the tunnel it shone black, not red.
The figure came closer. The next man died, silently as the first. The next. Blood dripped from the blade. I saw, as the figure approached, that it was hooded, and the black burnous wasn’t black at all, but white.
Two more men died and the figure stood before me: De
l. I looked into her hooded face and saw blue, blue eyes, pale, fair skin, and a mouth. A mouth filled with blood as if she had drunk that which spilled from each man she had killed.
“Bascha,” I whispered.
She lifted the sword and placed the tip against my chest. Her eyes did not waver from my face.
The Northern sword pierced my flesh and sank into my heart. Soundlessly, but for the rattle of the chains, I sank against the wall.
I died.
I woke up with a hand on my shoulder. I thrust myself into a sitting position, reaching for Singlestroke; realized it was Del. Realized I had, in my drunken stupor, gone to sleep on the floor, as if I were still in the mine. And I realized it was my own fear I smelled, filling up the darkness.
I heard my breath rasping raggedly in the silence of the room, and I couldn’t stop the sound.
“Tiger.” Del knelt at my side. “You were dreaming.”
I shoved an arm across my face and knew I’d been doing more than that. I’d been crying. The realization, and the instant humiliation, was horrible.
“No,” she said softly, and I knew she’d seen it.
I was shaking. I couldn’t help it. I was cold and scared and sick on too much aqivi; lost on the borderland of illusion and reality. Aqivi rolled in my belly, threatening to spew out of my mouth; it didn’t only because I put my head down on my upthrust knees. Trembling, I swore softly, repeatedly, until Del’s arms slid around my neck from behind and hugged me like a child.
“It’s all right,” she whispered into the shadows. “It’s all right.”
I threw off her arms and lurched to my feet, staring at her. The candle was gone but the moonlight crept between the slats covering the window. It slanted across her pale face and striped it: dark—light—dark—light. Her eyes were hidden in shadow.
“It was you.” The shaking renewed itself. “You.”
She knelt on the floor and stared up at me. “You dreamed about me?”
I tried to speak evenly. “One by one, you killed them. With your sword. You spitted them. And then you came to me.” I saw the hooded face before me. “Hoolies, woman, you stuck that sword into me as easily as you stuck it into Aladar!”
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