Guardians Of The Keep tbod-2

by Carol Berg

  Then came a morning when I walked past the fencing yard, but did not see Gerick, only the swordmaster, fuming, his hands on his hips. “You, woman. Yes, you, dolt,” he shouted angrily to me. “Go to the young Lord’s chambers and find out why he leaves me here waiting. Be back apace or I’ll have you whipped.”

  When I reached the top of the stair, a slave informed me that the young Lord had injured his knee and would not be attending his lessons. I reported this to the swordmaster, who summoned the surgeon. From the shadowed corners of Gerick’s apartments, I watched the Zhid Healer work his vile perversion of Dar’Nethi healing. The air grew heavy and dim, laden with the foulness of that enchantment.

  Gerick threw Mellador out of his rooms, forcing the surgeon to carry the dead slave himself rather than wait for others to remove him. When Gerick was alone, he began speaking-to himself, I thought. But the oppressive air made me think of the Lords’ house, and the jewels in his ear gleamed bright and hot through the murk. He was speaking with the Lords.

  After a moment, he gave a quick shudder, and looked around the room as if he had just returned from some other place. I didn’t move, but he caught sight of me, registering no more surprise than if I’d been a convenient chair or table. “Tell my slaves they’re wanted in my bathing room.”

  I made my genuflection, but before starting down the steps, I looked back and saw my son standing alone in the center of his fine room. He had wrapped his arms tightly about himself and was shivering violently, as if he stood in the snows of Cer Dis rather than in the heart of the blazing desert. My heart clenched fiercely. He was not yet theirs.

  CHAPTER 37

  V’Saro

  My existence in Zhev’Na was little different from that in the desert camp. The pen itself was identical, though only five of the cells were occupied. The rules were the same. The food was the same. The stench… the vile washing sink… the storage building and surgeon’s room with iron rings in its stone walls… the blazing furnace of the sun that sapped the body and spirit… the bitter nights… the unending fighting, blood, and death… the collar… that, too, unchanged.

  The only difference was the quality and prestige of my opponents. They were the highest-ranking officers in Ce Uroth, and therefore the finest warriors, for the Zhid had no other criteria for advancement. I no longer had to run in place at the end of the day to make sure I was exhausted enough to sleep. Staying alive required everything I had.

  Staying sane was something else again. Only the nagging voices in my head kept me holding on, though I tried my best to silence them. Everything seemed to be slipping away from me-my identity, my memories, my life-while my strange and terrible dreams were taking on the harder edges of reality. Who could not view such happenings as madness?

  I squatted beside the stone sink, where I had just washed off the dried sweat and blood from the previous day to prepare for my morning’s opponent, a seasoned warrior named Gabdil. Gabdil’s slavehandler was late fetching me, so my tether chain had been fastened to a ring in the wall, and I was left shivering in the chill shadows of dawn, dully pondering how I was going to stay warmed up. I could afford no disadvantage with Gabdil.

  From outside the gate came a woman’s voice, asking the guards where she could find the slavekeeper. “I’ve a message from the chamberlain in the Gray House. A slave sparring with the young Lord has been wounded in the foot and needs to be brought back here. The house slavekeeper has no handlers to spare for the task.”

  I shot to my feet, my heart racing as it never did when I was fighting. It wasn’t that I’d not heard a woman’s voice in my time in Ce Uroth. A few female servants and slaves worked about the camps, and a surprising number of women could be found among the Zhid warriors. But this particular voice ripped through my head like a sharpened ax.

  “Keeper’s through the door there to the left, across from the cistern,” said the guard.

  I glimpsed only the back of her as she walked through the gate and into the room where the stores of graybread and tunics were kept. She wore the black skirt, brown tunic, and red kerchief of a Drudge. My cursed tether was too short, and I came near choking myself trying to get a better view. When the voice of Gabdil’s aide growled outside in the courtyard, panic bade me devise some ruse to prevent me being taken until the woman reappeared. But she finished her business quickly. When she walked out of the storehouse, the full light of dawn fell through the barred gate onto her face. Only five heartbeats… maybe ten… but I knew her, and knew she had no relationship to a swordmaster from Sen Ystar… and neither had I.

  The fantasy of V’Saro’s life crumbled in that instant, but before I could even begin to sort through the rubble, the Zhid slavehandler dragged me out to the sparring ground. Gabdil, a warrior with a reach a handspan longer than my own and upper arms as thick as my thighs, had already killed a slave that week, a man who had survived three months in Zhev’Na.

  Forget the woman, I told myself. If you don’t pay attention, you won’t live to learn anything.

  A hundred times that day the woman’s voice echoed in my mind, and her face floated before me in the glare. Brutally I forced myself to concentrate. In our initial sparring, I took a deep cut in my arm-happily not my sword arm- and Gabdil complained that I wasn’t as good as he’d been told. Fortunately, the rest of the day was restricted training, a set of patterned practice moves endlessly repeated, working on flow and control and fluid transitions between stances. There were ample opportunities to get hacked or skewered, but it was not as likely as in full combat when an instant’s lapse could mean your life.

  In mid-afternoon I was returned to the slave pen, trembling with fatigue, not from the work, which had been light as my days went, but from the sheer effort of concentration. The surgeon assigned to this slave pen set about stitching my arm, but I scarcely noticed, for as soon as I allowed my thoughts to wander, the world came into sharp and terrible focus, and I knew what a wicked predicament I was in. I remembered the woman’s name and my own, and was already beginning to retrace the events that had placed the anointed Heir of D’Arnath so abjectly at the mercy of his enemies.

  The slavemaster had died in his bath. Ludicrous. No wonder the news of it had thrown me-V’Saro-into such despair, for Gernald the Slavemaster, the Zhid whose soul Dassine had healed so long ago, had been the key to Exeget’s plan. Slowly, cruelly, carefully, over the years, Gernald had worked himself into a position of power in Ce Uroth, an impregnable position, so that he could safely open a portal to Avonar itself, knowing that such a breach in the armor of the Zhid might someday make all the difference in our long war. And then, at the very culmination of his long endeavors, his heart had given out, and he had slipped under the soapy water, stranding all of us in bondage.

  The plan had been ingenious, though to believe Exeget and Gar’Dena could transfer me out of the council chamber before I was dead required a great deal of trust on my part. To let me die again would be an enormous risk, and neither of them was a true Healer. But their enchantments had worked flawlessly. In four days I was completely recovered and living happily in Sen Ystar, trying to rebuild a life that had never existed. Then came the attack, and the desert, and the collar.

  I was never supposed to be sealed into the collar, of course. Gernald was to be waiting for V’Saro, the swordmaster of Sen Ystar, who was to be given a seal that would leave his powers intact, and who was to have his temporary identity removed so that he would know what he was about. But the slavemaster had died in his bath, and I was left as V’Saro the slave, who had terrible dreams and believed he was going mad. And the fourteenth day had long passed.

  Seri was here. Gods have mercy. I had assumed that the two who were to receive my signal and provide the information I needed to rescue my son were others like Gernald. But Seri, too, had been caught in Gernald’s disaster, abandoned in this villainous place, and my son had been left to the Lords’ mentoring for almost a year.

  “Your scars tell me you’ve had much worse wo
unds than this, V’Saro, and much less skilled care. Why do you look like death itself tonight? Is my needle too dull?”

  I just shook my head.

  Exeget had found it necessary to explain fifty times over why we couldn’t seize my son from the council chamber. As the man and boy had come together as suppliant to the Preceptorate, Ce’Aret and Ustele would not consider separating them, insisting that such interference would be a violation of our law. And neither Exeget nor Gar’Dena understood Darzid-who he was or what was the extent of his power. But their greatest concern lay with the jewels, the link between the boy’s mind and the Lords. Take him by force in the council chamber, and the Three would destroy him, or, if they had already corrupted him sufficiently, he could possibly channel all the power of the Lords into the very heart of Avonar. Listen, watch, observe, they had told me. Anything more was too great a risk. Stealth and surprise would get him back. A quick strike into the heart of the Lords’ stronghold. Stupid, how things work out.

  And of course, once I remembered all these things, they did me no good at all. Neither Karon nor D’Natheil could suggest any escape from my captivity that V’Saro had not already dismissed. The terrors of my dreams were banished, but those of my days were grown far more desperate. With Gernald dead, Exeget could not get Seri and Gerick out, and the odds of my living until I could find a way to do so were depressingly slim. If I were to die, Seri would likely live out her days in this vile place, and Gerick would become the instrument the Lords had long desired. And that was only if I died undiscovered. I could well imagine the unpleasantness if my identity became known.

  So I could not die, and I could not be discovered, which meant I had to keep up my deception. The difficulty was that I didn’t know how long I could manage it, now I was myself again. I had no defense against Zhid compulsions. One misstep and they would have the truth out of me. And even more disturbing… I had to fight. I had to continue doing my best to kill whoever walked onto a training ground with me, and doubt that I would be capable of such an act consumed me.

  For so many years I had believed that nothing… nothing… was worth taking a life, certainly not the preservation of my own life, and not even the preservation of the lives I cherished most. I had not yet come to terms with the dreadful consequences of my idealism, but on that night in the slave pen of Zhev’Na, I told myself that I no longer had the luxury of choice. I was fighting a war, and my son’s life was bound up with the safety of two worlds. I just didn’t know if that would be enough when next I faced a living man with a sword in my hand.

  I could not sleep for thinking of Seri and Gerick and preparing myself for the morning. Daylight arrived far too soon. As always, I was led to the day’s sparring ground by the chain hooked to my collar. Gabdil again.

  “These keepers insist that you can fight, slave. I don’t believe it.” The big man grinned and tossed me a two-handed great-sword-my favorite weapon. “I think you are Dar’Nethi vermin who plays at swords the same way your people play at sorcery. The Lords of Zhev’Na will teach you one discipline, and I will teach you the other.”

  Anger stirred in my gut. No blank-eyed, unimaginative, misbegotten Zhid knew more of swordplay than the Prince of Avonar. I lifted the weapon up to the light, letting the sun glint along its shining edge, and then I pointed it at the empty eyes staring at me, as if to say “I’ll put it there,” and took my ready stance.

  V’Saro had been but a mask, a flimsy veneer of experience and memory painted over my soul, with skills and inclinations that were very much my own. The Dar’Nethi Healer’s invocation was at the core of V’Saro’s being, and he risked mutilation to comfort his injured cellmates, because I was Karon, a Healer incapable of any other response to their suffering. And V’Saro knew how to wield a sword with deadly precision because I was D’Natheil, who valued nothing in life save the art of combat. It might take me a full lifetime to become accustomed to this other set of habits and instincts existing alongside my own, but when I raised my sword on the first morning of my second life in Zhev’Na, I was glad he was with me. D’Natheil did not think. He fought. And so my life continued.

  “The Wargreve Damon has asked for this one?” The slavekeeper ticked off an item on his list.

  The slavemaster, hands clasped behind his back, chuckled. “The wargreve asked for a challenge. Says our stock is poor these days; threatens to report unfavorably to the gensei if he doesn’t break a sweat today. We’ll see what he thinks of V’Saro.” The slavemaster had begun visiting the stable often, especially on days I fought wager matches.

  The keeper flicked a finger at a slavehandler who unlocked the cell gate and motioned me to kneel with my hands behind my back so they could shackle them together. I threw the piece of half-eaten graybread back into my basket and complied. As my wristbands were linked together and the handler’s boot informed me it was time to stand, my stomach constricted in the now-familiar anxiety. Uncounted days had passed since I had learned my identity. Nothing had changed. I had to keep fighting. I had to keep winning.

  “Wargreve Damon is a brilliant warrior,” said the keeper.

  “If he takes this one, he’ll be almost as good as he thinks. Of course, if V’Saro takes Damon, we’ll have grief to pay to the gensei. But it might be worth it.”

  Most unsettling to hear my day’s opponent was the protégé of a gensei-a general. The nearest I’d come to death in my months in the slave pens had not been from a wound of my own, but on the day I had lamed the protégé of another gensei. Only the intervention of the slavemaster on behalf of “the Lords’ property” had kept me alive.

  My spirits sank even lower when I was delivered to the training ground and saw Damon. He was big and young, and as I was unshackled and given a weapon and a thinly padded leather tunic, I watched him use his long-sword to hack a thickly padded practice drum into as precise, thin slices as if he were slicing butter with a dagger. This one was good.

  “Is this the best you can do?” He surveyed my battered body and shabby turnout scornfully. “I said I wanted a challenge.”

  The handler bowed. “The slavemaster says to report any dissatisfaction.”

  We set right to work. Interesting. The young Zhid used incredible speed and brilliant instincts to mask abysmally poor technique. He was every bit the dangerous opponent I had judged him, but in the first hour I spotted a weakness in his defense. Stubborn and prideful, he would never evade or step away from a strike, but always chose to parry, assuming that his quickness would allow him to reset and counter. But his favorite parry was soft, his blade angled improperly, a blatant opening that would permit me to kill him easily. Yet, as I had learned before, killing the fool would be a risky proposition.

  The Zhid had no children, but they were inordinately possessive of other warriors they had taken on as protégés in a murderous perversion of Dar’Nethi mentoring. To injure the wargreve would draw the angry notice of a gensei, but if I didn’t exploit this weakness, Damon could very possibly wear me down enough to take me. An untenable situation.

  We completed an exercise.

  “Excellent, Damon,” said the young man’s Zhid swordmaster. “Perhaps a bit forceful, but excellent overall. Shall we try it again? Position, slave!”

  The swordmaster spent most of his time praising his pupil’s skills and little giving any meaningful critique. As the hours of practice passed, he showed no sign that he had noticed the glaring weakness so obvious to me.

  By the time we stopped for a midday rest period, the wargreve had scarcely broken a sweat. I walked over to the water barrel, waiting until my back was turned to gulp for air and leaning casually on the wall as I drank, as if I didn’t really need the support for my aching shoulders.

  “Position, slave!”

  I returned to the center of the courtyard. The heat beat on my head and shoulders like the hammer of Arot, the Leiran god who forged his own weapons to battle chaos. I had to act. I ducked a stroke that came near removing what hair the slavekeeper�
�s hacking had left me and made a wide spin that brought me up next to the swordmaster, well away from my opponent. Quickly I slapped the back of my hand to my lips. The swordmaster looked puzzled-such a thing was unusual in the middle of a match-but he held up his hand to stay the wargreve’s blade that hung unpleasantly close to my head.

  “What is it, dog? Surely you recall that a slave cannot yield?”

  “Swordmaster, there’s been a dreadful mistake. You cannot mean for me to fight this youth.”

  “A mistake?” snarled the wargreve, not giving his instructor a chance to respond. “Our profound apologies. If you’re mismatched, then you’ll just die all the sooner. I’ll just have to sacrifice the day’s training.”

  “I am not the one matched above his skill. We Dar’Nethi hold our honor dear. I’m sworn to fight to the best of my ability, and that I will do, but when I’ve been put up against a beginner, I must issue a warning. If this fight continues, you will be the one to die.”

  The young man laughed harshly. “A beginner? I’ve not lost a match since I was transformed.”

  “I can well believe it, but I’d wager you’ve not fought one who was a swordmaster in his own right and sees the flaws in your training. I’ll take you before your swordmaster counts a hundred.”

  He snarled and raised his sword. “Raise your weapon, slave. Your futile existence ends here.”