by Janet Morris
“It is the weapon with which I would meet you.”
I opened my eyes.
“That choice I have ceded you,” agreed Khys, his stance firm. But I knew him, and what was meant by the ridges upon his jaw and neck, by his knotted belly. And tears rolled out of my eyes onto Chayin’s hand as he crossed the mat. Slowly and with great dignity Khys approached, to take up the chosen weapon.
Sereth threw his head, his eyes narrowed. He stared at Khys’s back, his wrist and forearm of their own accord making ready.
Khys, as I had known he would, chose the chased blade, its hilt a single fire gem, which bore the seal of his own skin mimicked. When he raised up, his glance slid by me. Sickened by what the fathers had wrought, I was. And he knew. He touched gaze and mind to Chayin’s. They communed a time, and while it occurred, the cahndor’s every sinew pulled tight against my back.
“I will give you quarter,” said Khys, turning around to Sereth.
“I will give you quarter,” Sereth rejoined, his crouch belying his words.
“For the Lake of Horns, if you wish. For all of Silistra.”
“I can put nothing against that but my life.”
“It is enough. Witnesses have heard it.”
I moaned under Chayin’s hand and wriggled. He slid his other arm around my waist.
They stalked.
They circled, and as they did so found that infirmity had evened the odds between them. I saw it clear, in Khys’s uncertain advantage, and in Sereth, who slipped ever out of contest. I threw myself hard against the cahndor’s imprisoning grasp.
“Hush, crell,” he whispered. “We will know your new master soon enough.”
At first it seemed no battle of mind between them. Even the clash of stra was sporadic. They still tested, limbering, each awaiting his body’s own signs.
Through blurred eyes I saw Khys’s first strong pass—a slash across Sereth’s chest. And sobs racked me, that these two had come to contest. The wound seemed to wake Sereth, to free him, as if he had been elsewhere. He shook his head. He reached, and connected with a side cut to Khys’s neck; unexpected upstroke, a hair’s breadth from death cut.
Khys stepped back. The blood raced in a dozen streams, eager, down his chest. The shock of the cut, the burning, coupled with surprise at his own fragile, fickle flesh, came first. Life right warred with honor within him. It consumed his shield, pouring over me, freezing my tears. He noted. He could no longer afford attention to shielding, not even for privacy. Victory, cold, bitter triumph that his body would not understand, flooded him while his physical form poised shocked and shivering upon the edge of the abyss. He sorrowed, momentarily, that he had no time to explain to it, that collection of muscle and nerve that demanded to survive, that he had sold the years it held yet banked within for this moment, for freedom from all detested manipulation, for an act and consequence solely of himself. Poised there, by his will, he laughed through the waves of anguish and loss and his body’s terror that he would no longer heed its needs. He laughed again, realizing that at this moment, which he had chosen, even such an eloquent statement of fully actualized will became as nothing, for where he went no fathers reigned, nor self recalled. Freed of them, and even his mind’s craven judgment of the precipitousness of his folly, all that remained was the act itself. He strove desperately to retake control of his fear, grinding his teeth together to still their chatter. For out of presage came an awful foreboding, a terrible yawning chasm of possibility: that even this would be denied him, that this death toward which his life had labored would be aborted.
With an effort of will that had me lunging mindless against Chayin’s restraining arms, he closed with Sereth. Out of the sharper weapon of turmoil, wielded by ineluctable decision, he thrust.
Sereth met him. Sparks rained as the dharen’s edge rode grating to Sereth’s hilt. They hugged close, blades between them. I could not adjudge it.
They disengaged, closed again as if a wave thrust them asunder, swells dashing them together in its wake.
Ah, Khys was eager. He welcomed Sereth against him like some long-lost lover. Now, upon this moment! He begged it of the time, demanding, afraid he could no longer hold firm before his body’s lust for life. I felt the cold burn of the blades against my own breast; and a heat, blinding, borne on a rushing sigh that lasted forever in that convulsive moment when point impaled heart. The muscular contraction caused the blade to scrape between two ribs. Relief flooded him. It was done.
Then they backed from each other, facing off. Khys’s fingers, about the blade which pierced the spiral on his breast, did not feel the blood beneath them. He coughed, and choked, swallowing hard. He tasted metal, and salt, and success.
Sereth’s chest heaved, and sweat poured down his spine, rode the ridges of straining muscles, gleaming. That, only, I saw. But it was not sight that mattered then. I felt the sharp, clear heat, then vertigo, then rejoicing that it was all so easily accomplished. The pain receded, and sight and sound took on a different hue. Khys felt his legs, trembling, fail him, and a far-off thud as his distant, numbed flesh struck the mat—
Upon gasps of anguish, I merged with him, freed of tears: a cessation of pulsing, of final, sweet regard for those things left undone. Then even the victory evanesced, leaving only a last wonder as to what it had meant. He could barely feel his body fluids, draining, though a detached part of his mind bespoke the progress of his death, chronicling, one at a time, the failure of those systems that had long been the sum total of his world.
The grains that prickled his vision spread, multiplied, became all colors. A wind whirled him up and away.
He saw us, and Sereth, arm with upraised blade wavering, from a place above and behind the flesh he had known. Tenderly he bade farewell to it, the form that had so long and well served him. He knew a faint, sinking tingle, one last shiver of spasm along nerves he would never again command. Its counterpart trilled through his mind, a tardy quailing before the immutability he faced. This decision, made, could not be recalled, nor rethought, nor even recollected. He reached out tentatively for his body sprawled upon the mat. His attempt to move it from where it lay impaled upon his own blade, to see once more through the eyes of flesh, failed totally. He could not remember those skills, once employed without even need for thought.
And then that thickened dark birthed a new cataclysm of light, and from that beckoning change came a melody he must needs follow.
As he strained to find a way through all the coalescing beauty around him, a form which he first knew to be friend, then to be a woman, long passed and longer mourned, extended her hand to him. As he took it, a sound like shining attracted his attention to a door he had not before seen. Their hands met.
Sereth stepped from my view.
Khys lay crumpled small upon the mat, deflated, his body fluids a red pool all about. From out of the Shaper’s seal, Sereth drew the dharen’s sword, around which his life still bubbled forth in lesser and lesser spurts.
His eyes were closed.
I bit Chayin’s hand, grieving.
Sereth paused a moment, then retreated. And again advanced. To stop as if frozen in flesh lock, though his next stroke would have been fit and merciful.
Estrazi manifested there, standing bronze and incontestable, his great arms folded over his chest. Not since my conception had the Shaper come among Silistrans, and before that not for two thousand years.
Sereth retreated another pace. There he halted, and dropped his blade, and the dahren’s, before my father’s feet. His hands found his hips, curled into fists.
Estrazi surveyed us, and Khys upon the mat. “I will take him,” said my father, his cauldron eyes compassionate. He gathered Khys up in his arms. The dharen’s blood rolled down Shaper flesh. Like some child, Estrazi held him, his hand covering the seal he had put upon Khys’s chest, and the wound it hosted. Khys’s limbs dangled, swaying gently, his form limp and unknowing.
“He has left you no easy legacy, flesh son,” spoke Estrazi to S
ereth. The flame tongues over his dark form seemed to thicken, to envelop Khys. “You have in the past well served me.” So did Estrazi acknowledge Sereth, who had not moved.
“If again you use me,” said Sereth in his most quiet voice, “I would appreciate being informed beforehand.”
“Then,” allowed Estrazi, his form engulfed in the crucible of creation, “I will inform you.” The wave of his words hung in the air. He was gone. He had left without word to me, his daughter.
IX: The Law Within
“For the Lake of Horns,” whispered Sereth, half to himself. Upon the mat where Khys had been lay dark stains. Among them, gleaming wetly, lay the dharen’s chald.
He walked there, his stride slow and deliberate. Before it, he squatted down, a hand out to steady his weight. He took up the chald and ran it through his fists. He said a thing, too low for us to hear, and tossed his head.
He brought it with him to where we still knelt, and sat himself down.
“Find work to do, or I will assign you some,” called Chayin, his head twisted around. Only then did I turn and see the silent jiasks crowding the hole where the doors had been.
The cahndor rubbed his neck. He regarded Sereth and the chald a time.
“Witnesses have heard it.” He bespoke it as last.
“Think you it was still his to give?”
“In deed and truth, it was his. And a gift he made of it to you.”
Sereth, for the first time, raised his head to us. I saw two things unexpected: tears and anger. “I want no rule over men. All my life, men have sought to rule me. The law within is enough bondage for any man,”
“It is your chaldra.” said Chayin pointedly,
He looked down at the great chald of Silistra and back at Chayin. The wound on his chest rolled one last tear of blood.
“You know what I wanted. You stalked it for me. What there is left of that dream, I will take. And I would get out with her, out of the lands of men.”
“What will you do?” asked Chayin gruffly.
“Hunt, perhaps. I know not.”
The grief that shrouded Sereth then made me rock back and forth upon my knees. Barely could I withstand the impulse to keen. His eyes went over me, in great detail, as if finally he could fill his hunger replete. When his gaze met mine, I could not name the emotion there, for it was spawned of owkahen, and what it had done to us.
“It is my father’s sign,” I offered, very low, not wavering.
“It is not the marking of the flesh but the marking of the spirit that concerns me.” He rose up. Glowering, he snapped his fingers. I did for him what he required, as I had for Khys so many times.
“She is truly crell,” said Chayin. I saw nothing but the hair fallen around my face.
“It is not that. It is that she learned it at another’s hand, and to a different taste. Rise up.”
I did so, woodenly. He was grinning. He pulled me close. It seemed he touched every part of me, reacquainting himself. I protested.
Abruptly he spun me toward the cahndor.
“See for yourself,” said Sereth to Chayin.
I endured the cahndor’s probing, until I could not. Then I struck out with mind violence, all I could command. Without even a hesitation in what else he did, he parried the blow. “Do not ... No longer can you hold that above us. At my convenience, I will take reparation from you upon this account.” His dark eyes had no hint of film.
He pushed me from him. I stumbled, caught myself, straightened, halfway between them. I saw Sereth’s eyes, hard and resentful. But I had seen what else lurked there. I tore my hair from my face, squared my shoulders under his scrutiny.
“She called Khys’s name when he and I faced each other,” Sereth said to Chayin.
“Crells and owners—thus it often is with them. If she had been less to him, she would be less to you,” opined the cahndor. I heard jiasks, sharp laughter in the hallway. “But she was not obedient when I bade her stay her hand from these affairs.”
“Shall we take that chald off her?” Sereth suggested.
“Immediately,” the cahndor agreed.
They cut it from me. I did not object. It was of no value to me. My mind was full of them, and what they were, and the rightness of Khys’s predictions as regards them. Though I looked at Sereth, all my love offered up with my eyes, I said nothing. I was his—a spoil of the circle, crell, whatever he chose. That which had driven him to contest with Khys still raged in him. He would vent his anger on me, doubtless. I stood very still, pliant, that I might not worsen his temper.
I recalled a time I had seen Sereth and the cahndor match blades. They had been only working their skills. With weapons, I had never seen better. They were, perhaps, the best on Silistra. And I considered Khys, who had gone against Sereth with sword. Knowing his skill, Khys had fought him. And it had not been as other times I had seen Sereth wield stra. There had been no skittering of Khys’s blade from his grasp upon the first or second stroke. Khys had chosen his successor. Estrazi had ratified the choice. And Sereth stood regarding me from under his blood-matted hair, thinking.
“Tell me of your abduction,” he ordered.
“Do so,” added Chayin from the alcove window.
I thought of what concerned me, and I thought of something else. “Sereth, what choice will you make? I care not about the rest. My father and Khys both meant Silistra for your hands. Who will take it up? Chayin cannot, else he be ever engaged in riding around the perimeters of his holdings.” Parsets believe that to own a thing, one must make use of it.
“Tell me of your abduction,” repeated Sereth very quietly, approaching.
“Ask Dellin, who was there with me. Or M’tras, whose work it was.”
I retreated a step, halted, hopeless. He took hold of my shoulders. “Estri, at moon’s rising you are going to wish Khys yet ruled at the Lake of Horns.”
His fingers dug in my flesh. “Sereth,” I whispered. “Go into the prisons. See Dellin and M’tras, in keep twelve. Hear what they have to say. See the others, the killing, the carnage. Then tell me again that we will hunt, away from the lands of men.”
“I will tell you again. We will hunt.” But he stuffed Khys’s chald in his breech.
Chayin forsook the alcove in a flurry of cushions. His countenance was grim. “Let us go and see Dellin and this other. She is, after all, her father’s daughter. Though crell, of course.” His eyes, touching mine, softened.
“That is precisely the problem. But we will go.” He took up the fallen swords from the mat. Khys’s blade he tossed to Chayin, who found its sheath among the weapons upon the couch.
I followed the cahndor, thinking of the light blade. He put his arm around my shoulders. “You are superb,” he whispered, then released me. I backed from him, into Sereth. I shook my head, turning away. But I should have known that Chayin saw. He, too, had been with Sereth at the sack of Astria. He, as well as I, knew Sereth. Those three words sustained me, upon our foray through the halls to the undertunnels, past the groaning and the maimed and those who could groan no longer, those to whom bodily ills were not pertinent any longer.
We went the route of Sereth’s choosing, down the front stairs and through the main halls. As we proceeded through that Parset slaughter, his brow grew furrowed and his hand sought frequent communion with his hilt. Thrice he stopped and examined men left in the halls, those Jaheil’s Parsets had adjudged no further threat. One man he slew. The second was dead. The third he hoisted upon his shoulders and carried into the seven-cornered chamber, in which the Parset wounded and some few prisoners lay. With a forereader who had been freed to serve, he left instructions.
As he turned back to us, a banded woman was carried in. A blade had pierced her through.
Chayin stopped the man who bore her; Sereth strode close, his carriage ominous. The man explained that the woman had thrown herself upon his blade. His tone was one of amazement. Sereth bade him put her down. He knelt close to her, spoke very low. Her lids flick
ered and opened. She managed some soft words upon her death breath.
Sereth straightened. He took my arm and led me to the door. The cahndor stayed a moment, then followed.
“The man who put her in restraint was dead, slain before her eyes. She had no wish to live that way.” It was Chayin who informed me, when he gained my side. Sereth was far from the lands of speech.
“Speak to me of those we seek,” proposed Chayin, as we passed the barred gate. Sereth would take us through the maze that ended with the high-numbered cells. Upon that way, there would be sufficient time for him to think whatever thoughts he might choose.
“Only will I say to you that they must not be harmed. Khys put M’tras’ life into my hands for safe-keeping. Since I can no longer keep him, it falls to you both. He is to be taken to the plain of Astria. There he will find his helsar. Dellin also is to take a helsar.”
“Do not speak to me of Khys’s will, Estri. Not just yet.” And Sereth’s tone kept me mute the whole way through those extensive passages. We saw, as we had above, jiasks and tiasks. I wondered at this, when the first group of five challenged us, but then I recalled Chayin’s knowledge of the Lake of Horns. Maps can be made. Directions are easily passed from one hand to another. I had drawn a threxman upon the shores of which none are empowered to speak. Chayin had assured me of his safety, while in the tower holding keep. Khys had spoken of rebellious tiasks in the south.
We were approaching the cell corridors when it came clear to me, and I risked an inquiry.
“I had heard that there was great unrest in the south, that the tiasks roamed the lands in gangs. And yet I see tiasks wherever I look. Have you come to terms with the rebels’ leader, cahndor?”
His laugh rang out and back from the taernite. His white teeth gleamed in the torch flame. “The leader of the rebellion. Yes, you might say I came to terms with him. You see, he had access to my most secret thoughts. My most devious plans were always shown to him. Whatever steps I took to quell the tiasks, he was always an enth before me. More and more yras of jiasks did I send after the renegade tiasks. I but drove them farther north.”