by Matt Wallace
“So now we’ll try to kill each other, then?” Evie asks.
“I imagine you might contend that I owe you, that I should allow you to walk away as you allowed me to do.”
“You don’t owe me anything. After what you’ve just told me… I almost feel I owe you.”
“We shall call it even, then.”
Evie manages a nod.
“Well, then. This time, yes,” Sirach pronounces. “I’m afraid one of us dies.”
Sirach reaches behind both hips and draws forth a pair of matched daggers, their blades long and thin and so sharply curved they’re almost half circles.
“Delicate,” Evie remarks.
Sirach grins cattishly. “Aren’t we all?”
They square off, standing just several strides apart, both women bending their knees slightly and leveling their feet with their shoulders.
Evie grips the tsuka of her sword in both hands and holds it at the ready.
Sirach holds her matched blades at different angles, her arms sweeping in hypnotic arcs as she executes a few practice form movements to loosen herself up.
The bolt strikes Sirach dead center of her chest. Upon impact her body folds inward before being flung back against the rocks. She collapses in the dirt in almost the precise spot she was sitting before.
This time, however, there’s no visible sign she’s breathing.
Evie turns toward the direction of the sudden crossbow bolt, raising her sword just in time to intercept a squat figure that leaps at her from atop the larger boulders, blotting out the sun in the process. The switch from burning bright to pitch dark temporarily blinds Evie as the impact knocks her off her feet. She feels something bite into the blade of her short sword. She instinctually tightens her grip on the tsuka and pushes back against that weapon or sudden force, even as her back hits the unyielding ground.
Once she blinks the world back into focus, she finds herself staring at her blade entangled in a field of spikes. Those spikes are embedded in the half-face of a man Evie remembers as Namrok, the blood coin hunter. There is no mistaking him with a dominant feature such as that. His right arm is occupied with the crossbow it still supports, but his left hand has gripped her wrist and is attempting to wrest her hand from the tsuka. Evie responds by dragging the blade horizontally through the spikes, its bottom slicing across Namrok’s ear, drawing blood.
The blood coin hunter growls until spittle dangles from his scarred half-mouth. He jerks his head viciously to one side, the spikes embedded in his cheek snapping the blade of Evie’s short sword cleanly at its center.
Evie seizes the opportunity to smash the hardest part of her skull into the fleshy side of the blood coin hunter’s face. Namrok’s head snaps back awkwardly, and he freezes atop her, stunned. Evie pulls her knees toward her chest, wriggling her legs between their bodies, and shoves him back into the rocks with her feet. She nips back up to her feet quickly, readying herself for him.
Leaping away from the boulder, Namrok tosses aside his empty crossbow and draws a dull wide blade with a tanto tip and jaggedly serrated edge that’s more machete than short sword.
Evie has no idea how she’ll defend against that wicked-looking thing with three inches of broken blade, but she clings to the tsuka all the same. Her mind races for a strategy, a method of attack, but her body and brain are weary.
Fortunately and unfortunately for Evie, her mind is relieved of that responsibility when an unseen force crashes into her side and sends her careening against the nearest boulder. The broken short sword flies from her hand and her body bounces against the surface of the stone in a wholly unnatural and remarkably painful fashion. She rolls across the bottom of the narrow path in a daze, the world continuing to spin around her even after she’s stopped moving.
Evie stares up from the gritty earth at armored legs and an equally armored torso that seem to rise all the way to the sun. The armor is composed of huge animal bones, ending in a bear’s skull helm with jaws full of teeth as large and jagged as stone arrowheads. Evie remembers Tomoe, the giantess, as the other hunter Laython introduced her batch of Savage recruits to before blood coins were forced down their gullets. The bone-armored warrior is still cradling the poleax that’s as tall as she is; its foot-long wedged pommel must be what struck Evie to the ground.
In the next moment the slanted tip of Namrok’s dull blade is at her throat and the ugly lump of a man is laughing through the side of his mouth that remains intact.
“I’d’a had her,” he gleefully insists.
“I was becoming bored,” Tomoe says, tapping the edge of her boot’s sole against the pommel gently as if she’s concerned that Evie’s broken body damaged it somehow.
The slanted tip of Namrok’s machete flits down to Evie’s belly.
“She sliced up my good ear,” he says. “I want her coin while she’s still alive.”
“She fought like a warrior,” Tomoe reminds him. “She will receive a warrior’s death.”
“Damn your codes!” Namrok growls.
“There will be plenty of runners and beggars left among the others, I am certain. You will save your butcher’s wrath for them.”
Namrok grumbles unintelligibly, but his blade continues to hover harmlessly above her.
The bone-armored giantess steps forward, looming directly above Evie as tall as a centuries-old tree. Tomoe twirls the haft of her poleax with practiced ease as she raises it above her head. Evie watches the sunlight blink through the revolutions of that massive blade, catching in the steel and burning even brighter for a sliver of a moment each time.
Dying in the sun, Evie thinks. That’s not so bad, is it?
At the very least, she will finally be allowed to rest.
Evie closes her eyes just after that poleax ceases to twirl, as Tomoe steadies her grip on the haft in preparation to strike. She hears Namrok laugh; an ugly, gravelly noise that she deeply wishes wasn’t the last sound she’ll hear.
The impending strike doesn’t come, and Namrok’s laughing is abruptly replaced by the sound of Tomoe screaming.
Evie opens her eyes. Sirach has ripped the bolt from of her chest and leaped onto Tomoe’s back. The Sicclunan agent hooks both curved blades deep beneath Tomoe’s armor, sinking them through the meat and sinew just below her shoulders.
Namrok’s attention turns to his distressed companion. Evie doesn’t hesitate, first batting her forearm against the flat of his blade to remove its threat from her neck and then burying the sole of her foot deep into the blood coin hunter’s groin. The kick doubles him over where Evie meets the whole side of his face with a sharp elbow strike. She rolls from beneath him and retrieves her broken sword from the dirt, springing to her feet.
Behind her Tomoe is screaming her rage and pain unbidden, thrashing from side-to-side in an effort to unseat Sirach despite the agony every movement causes her. Sirach answers by sliding another half inch of blade beneath each of Tomoe’s shoulders, her legs wrapped around the waist of the giantess with her ankles and feet locked together. Tomoe finally ceases thrashing and instead backpedals toward the rocks, her long strides quickly building up a lethal momentum. Sirach has no choice, she rips her blades from the blood coin hunter’s back as roughly as possible and lets her body fall to the ground, where she quickly rolls between Tomoe’s legs.
Despite being half blinded by the intense pain in her back, the giantess has enough facility to bring the thick haft of her poleax down atop the Sicclunan. Sirach raises both her daggers from one knee, the deep curves of their blades catching and holding the poleax haft. She stands, hooking the weapon with her daggers and twisting her body into Tomoe’s, leveraging more than brute force disarming the larger woman and flinging her poleax into the opposite wall of rock.
As Sirach turns to face the hunter and deliver as many killing blows as it takes, Tomoe draws her pair of matched daggers from the scabbards tooled into her forearm gauntlets. Seeing the flash of steel clearing leather causes Sirach to quickly back up se
veral steps rather than advance.
Only feet away, Namrok swings his machete wildly at Evie. She ducks each feral strike, steeling her nerves, waiting for an opening to present itself. In his frustration the blood coin hunter puts too much power behind his next swing. When the slash misses its mark, Namrok is overextended and thrown off-balance. Evie quickly slips behind him and drives the broken end of her blade into his back, piercing his right kidney.
That side of Namrok’s body shrinks in upon itself, and he drops to one knee. His sword arm is held aloft and momentarily forgotten. Evie reaches out and takes that arm by the wrist, delivering a blow into Namrok’s elbow that breaks it cleanly. The new source of pain causes him to growl like an animal caught in a trap, and the machete falls from his suddenly limp fingers.
Evie half kneels and snatches up the bone handle of the weapon almost before it hits the dirt. Namrok has just enough time to twist his neck and bring his one remaining eye angrily to bear on her before Evie swings the wide, heavy blade in both hands and separates his neck from his shoulders completely with one slash. The force of that swing carries the blade through and strikes the nearest boulder, the crooked serrations in the blade’s edge catching in several cracks zigzagging the rock face.
As Evie wrestles with Namrok’s machete, Tomoe and Sirach duel their matched daggers. The towering blood coin hunter swings her long arms heavily and mechanically, relying on size and strength to intimidate and overwhelm her opponent. Sirach is the exact opposite, using speed and finesse and the curved blades of her daggers to deflect and parry and slash. She manages to slip through the falling-tree blows of Tomoe’s arms and lacerate her armor several times, finally drawing blood from her side. It only serves to further enrage the giantess, who answers the slash by growling ferociously and launching a straight kick into Sirach’s chest.
It’s like a hammer hitting an anvil made of mud. Sirach flies backward several feet until her back collides with the rocks, her entire torso seizing under waves of intense pain. As she stumbles away from the boulders, Tomoe sweeps Sirach’s feet out from under her with another powerful swipe of the hunter’s leg. Tomoe quickly reverses her grip on both daggers, but before she can raise them to stab down at Sirach, her arms seize, along with the rest of her body.
Sirach looks up to see the woman’s eyes have gone wide and glazed. She doesn’t understand until the hunter topples forward. Sirach has to roll from the path of the falling giantess to avoid being crushed.
Evie has swung Namrok’s severed head into the back of Tomoe’s skull, shattering her bone helm and planting most of those face spikes through her brain. Blood is still spilling down her neck and over the white bones of her armor’s back plates.
Evie offers Sirach a hand caked in dirt and blood from three different bodies. The Sicclunan agent takes it and stifles a shriek as her body’s every fiber lights in pain at being forced to stand.
The two women stand above the elongated form of the slain blood coin hunter, less than an arm’s length apart. Their shoulders rise and fall with each labored breath almost in perfect time with each other. Eventually they both look up from their shared enemy.
Their eyes meet, and Sirach’s grip tightens around the handles of her curved daggers.
Evie holds no weapon, but her hands begin to rise.
Neither woman strikes, however.
“Now,” Sirach says, “now I owe you.”
Evie shakes her head. “I’d say we’re even.”
Sirach doesn’t answer her right away, and Evie can see the heavy clouds of thought swelling in her eyes.
“Then perhaps I just don’t want to kill you anymore.”
Evie grins. “Perhaps I feel the same way.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“Well… if we aren’t enemies, that does narrow our remaining options, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose it does.”
Evie slowly relaxes her posture, allowing her tired body to fold forward just enough to give relief to the frayed muscles of her upper body. She braces her hands against her knees and lowers her head, sighing deeply.
Sirach watches her, again with that quietly marveling gaze, but she’s also lowered her weapons to her sides.
“I think I have an idea,” Evie says a few moments later.
Sirach continues staring at Evie in silence, then looks between the crescent blades of her daggers. With a sigh of her own, she sheathes them both behind her hips in their scabbards.
The cattish grin returns to her lips.
“I’m listening,” she says.
RIDDLES SHAPED IN STONE
RIKO HANGS SUSPENDED FROM THE ceiling above the massive scale model of the Capitol on the maps level. She blows a dark tanto-tipped bang from her face as she concentrates on affixing the experimental sundial over the great stone awning that crowns the entrance to the Spectrum.
Dyeawan is lying on her stomach in the street outside the Spectrum, chin propped on her small balled fists as she scrutinizes every inch of the building’s perfectly replicated-in-miniature form. She takes a break from her staring to look up at Riko.
“Are you mad at me?” she asks Riko. “Because Edger wants me to be a planner?”
The fine young features of Riko’s face twist up as if she’s just swallowed something sour. “ ’Course not. I’m really happy for you. And I know you’ve got the brain. I’ve never seen anyone pick things up as fast as you do.”
A cool and genuine relief rushes through Dyeawan’s torso. “I’m glad for that, Riko. I don’t think Tahei feels the same way.”
“Tahei worships Edger, and he’s Edger’s favorite builder. Tahei is amazing with his hands. But Tahei isn’t a planner and he knows it. Deep down. That has nothing to do with you.”
“What about you?”
“Me? I just like tinkering with things. I’m lucky to be here at all.”
There are several tiny mirrors resting atop crooked pole arms that extend from the sundial’s outer rim. The face of each mirror is partially obscured by intricately painted lines as black as night. It is Riko’s hope that her sundial will be able to measure time in smaller, more exact increments. She’s not certain it will work, but she believes deeply in the idea, and she’s often found that when she refuses to relent on an idea, she finds the path to its realization.
“Why do you think we need more time?” Dyeawan asks.
Riko laughs. “It’s the same amount of time, yeah? It will just be measured more precisely.”
“Then why do you think we need that?”
“You can never create too much precision. That’s why it’s called precision. That’s what Edger says, anyway. Besides, you can’t tell me you can’t think of a million ways this will be useful.”
“Of course I can. I asked why you think we need it.”
“Oh.”
Riko’s hands pause in what they’re doing. The only sound for the next few moments is her body swaying just so in the leather harness cradling it.
“I suppose that is a different question, isn’t it?” she says.
Dyeawan squints up at her friend. “You don’t just ‘tinker’ with things, you know. You have as keen a mind as anyone I’ve met in the Cadre. I just think you don’t know you do. You’re more clever than Tahei. You’re probably more clever than Edger.”
“No one is more clever than Edger,” Riko insists.
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Dyeawan says quietly. “I think you not knowing how smart you are holds you back. In the same way Edger is convinced he is smarter than everyone. That can be even more dangerous, I think.”
Riko’s eyes on the models below her turn dark. “Slider, I know you’re just saying what you see, but you should know it can sound… bad, the way it comes out.”
Dyeawan frowns. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I just think… the things you make are so beautiful, and so…”
She can’t think of the word, despite all the new ones she’s learned in her time here.
“You’ve been staring at that thing for hours, you know,” Riko observes, changing the subject.
Dyeawan looks back at the Spectrum, frowning for a different reason now.
She finally says aloud what she’s been thinking for the last hour. “It could’ve been cut and chiseled, just like any stone. Why couldn’t it have been shaped and smoothed like any stone?”
“There isn’t a single grain on the stone’s surface, outside or inside the entire Spectrum. There isn’t a mason in Crache who can polish stone like that. Besides which, there is no other stone like that.”
“It was probably a mountain,” Dyeawan muses. “No one could have moved one solid piece of rock that big from somewhere else.”
Riko nods. “That makes sense, but you know it won’t satisfy the planners, yeah? It’s not enough to know what it was before. You have to know how they turned it into what it is now.”
Dyeawan nods. Nothing she’s seen or read since coming to the Planning Cadre provides an answer to that question, and she remembers all of it, all she sees and all she reads, in every exacting detail.
Concentrating so intensely on a single problem is making her head ache. Dyeawan returns her attention to Riko, more for relief than anything.
“How did you come to be here at the Planning Cadre?” she asks.
Riko’s tongue is occupied between her teeth, its tip just barely visible at the corner of her mouth as she finishes securing the sundial to the model of the Spectrum.
“Aha!” she proclaims triumphantly.
Dyeawan hangs her head, grinning. Riko’s seemingly inexhaustible excitement and enthusiasm are the qualities she admires most in the older girl.
“I, uh, what?” Riko asks, distracted.
“I asked how you came to be here.”
“Oh! Right. Sorry. Well…”
She reaches down and takes up a lengthy wooden pole lying in the street ahead of Dyeawan. Jerking her body to the right, Riko’s harness pivots easily, turning her around. There’s a lamp hanging from the ceiling several feet above her. It’s not an ordinary lamp, however. Instead of a flame or even a luminescent insect encased in glass, it’s a series of mirrors bolted together, harnessing the rays of the sun pouring into the maps level from an open skylight.