Bladedancer
by Michael Wallace
Copyright ©2020 Michael Wallace
Balsalom Publishing
Cover art by Félix Ortiz
Welcome to a fantasy world torn by demons and demigods, where Narina, a sword master of the Bladedancer Temple, is called to join a larger conflict: the rise of the legendary Sword Saint, a warrior with the ability to single-handedly defeat an entire army.
The Sword Saint Series:
Book One: Sword Saint
Book Two: Crowlord
Book Three: Shadow Walker
Book Four: Bladedancer
Chapter One
Narina was working a piece of steel when a frater came down from the shrine to watch her hammering. The young man’s sowen was thin and unsettled, and she paid him no attention as she turned the steel over on the anvil and struck it again and again until sweat dripped from her forehead and fell hissing onto the blade. When the steel grew too cool to work, she carried it into the shed with the tongs, thrust it into the coals, and pumped at the bellows. The coals flared to life, and smoke roiled into the chimney.
The frater had followed her inside, and now she spared him a glance. His name was Bartal, and he was only a year younger than she was. She remembered sparring against him when she was a student, before her skills outstripped his and their paths diverged.
“Master, can I help?” he asked.
Narina turned the piece of steel and gave the bellows another pump. “Thank you, but I don’t need help.”
“I know you don’t need it, but I want to.”
“I’m sorry, Bartal, this is a master blade—you don’t have the skill.” That last part came out more dismissively than she’d intended, but she had a good deal of work left to do, and little energy for conversation.
“I don’t mean working the sword. I mean, can I help you time your strokes?”
This drew a frown. “Is that what the fraters are saying? That I’m so weak I need someone to measure my work?”
He cleared his throat and licked his lips. “Nobody is saying anything against you. If not the strokes, how about the bellows? Can I do that, at least? I need the training.”
“What do you mean, training? You’re a frater—your training ended years ago.” Narina gave Bartal a sharp look. “Were you injured? Is that it?”
He didn’t have the look of someone who’d been taken by the demigods’ curse, but she couldn’t be sure. There were enemies lurking, and even a frater called to the fight could wreak havoc were he not controlled.
“No, Master. It’s just that you lost your student, and, well. . .I’ve always thought maybe I gave up too early. I wasn’t pushed out, you know. Nobody made me become a frater or took me off the training sands. I just woke up one day and knew that I’d failed. Or, I don’t know, realized that I wouldn’t be good enough.”
“And now you’ve changed your mind?”
“I don’t know,” Bartal said. “But I want to get stronger. I might be needed for the fight.”
Narina thought of her student Gyorgy and his horrible death at Damanja’s hands, when the crowlord shoved her shadow blade through the boy’s chest. No, Narina most definitely did not need a student right now, let alone someone else’s failed apprentice. Who had Bartal studied with, anyway? She couldn’t remember, but it must have been five or six years since he’d abandoned his training and fallen from the ranks of aspiring sohns.
“I don’t want a student right now, Bartal.”
“Let me help. That’s all I’m asking. I helped make Lord Balint’s weapons—I know how to work. I’m good at it, and I don’t tire easily.”
Narina sighed. “Take the bellows.”
He took over pumping them. The fire grew hotter and hotter, and she used the tongs to turn over the steel core of her new sword.
“Do you need me to go faster?” he asked.
“No, this is a good temperature. We’re just heating thoroughly so that I can make another fold.”
“Which blade is this?” he asked.
“The dragon. The demon would be hotter—it needs to be imbued with the heat of the underworld. Fire as hot as lava. This is the dragon blade—cooler, but more subtle.”
Bartal gave a brief nod, but kept his attention on the even wheeze in and out of the bellows, keeping a steady rhythm. Cooler was relative; it was sweltering in the shed, and sweat stood out on his forehead. His eyes narrowed in concentration, and he didn’t falter. Narina had to admit he was doing well so far.
“Good,” she said, when satisfied that the steel was hot enough. “Grab a hammer.”
“Thank you, Master.”
She pulled the metal out of the coals. “Let’s be clear—you’re not my student. A temple frater—that’s good enough, believe me.”
Narina carried the glowing piece of steel back to the anvil. She waited for Bartal to get settled into a rhythm with the tink of a small hammer on the horn, then threw herself back into her work.
Her right arm had grown stronger over the past week, and the tremble was gone, but she was still unsatisfied with the results of the work itself. There was something unsettled in the steel that she couldn’t seem to tease out no matter how many times she folded the core. This was to be her master dragon blade, but in its current condition it was no better than all the other swords she’d made. Not good enough, not yet.
Bartal stayed quiet as she hammered, but spoke up again when the time came to reheat the steel. “The auras seem perfect to me. What’s missing? Why haven’t you started shaping it yet?”
She held it up and turned it over for him to have a closer look. It was still hot enough that the air shimmered around it.
“There’s a flaw. Can you feel it?”
A tentative prod from his sowen. “No, I can’t.” He sounded frustrated.
“Don’t be discouraged—it’s very subtle. A few years ago I might have given up myself, said it was enough. The swords I used to carry, that was what they were. Just good enough to serve, but nothing to be proud of. Are you sure you were trying hard enough?”
“Yes,” Bartal said after a moment of hesitation. Not a long enough moment, she thought. “I always do my best. Like with the spear points I made for the crowlord. I did as well as I could and never saw anything wrong with them. My master said they would do, but he obviously saw something wrong with them. I don’t know what that was, what was wrong. It’s not that I wasn’t trying to understand. I just couldn’t.”
Narina nodded. For better or worse, she’d always been cursed with the ability to know where she fell short. Maybe that was the only difference between her and Bartal, a stronger sense of her own weaknesses.
“We could try some different angles,” she said. “Try sending in your sowen from below.”
“That’s what Sohn Abelard used to say. Told me to look at it from a different direction. We tried again and again.”
Abelard. Ah, so that’s who Bartal had trained with. No wonder the young man felt lost and drifting, with his former teacher dead, killed in a fight at the firewalker temple.
“I never figured out what he meant by that,” Bartal continued. “After a while I stopped progressing, but I never quite knew what I was doing wrong.” He studied the steel she was holding in the tongs. “What are you seeing, where is the weakness you’re talking about?”
“Look along this side,” she told him. “There’s a slight flaw about a third of the way up from the tongs. If left in place, it will cause a cascading series of bent auras, and that will weaken the strength of the entire sword.”
“It looks. . .it feels right to me. A good piece of steel, ready to be shaped to the next stage. But you say it’s flawed. So I guess it must be.”
He looked and sounded so discou
raged at this that Narina made one more attempt. They were standing in the shade of some nearby pines, so she stepped into the sunlight, the steel still gripped in the tongs, and gestured for him to follow. She held it up against the sun, which gleamed dimly through the haze of volcanic smoke and ash.
“Look at the shadow falling off the sword and onto the ground. Can you see it?” When he nodded, she continued, “Good, now see how the shadow bends here, about two thirds of the way up?”
“It looks straight to me.”
“Don’t use your eyes. Look with your sowen.”
Bartal squinted for a long moment, then sighed. “I’m sorry, I can’t see it. Maybe you can teach me how. It could be that I gave up too early.”
“You don’t want to be my student, Bartal. Believe me, you do not. I killed the last person who followed me.”
“You didn’t kill Gyorgy, master, don’t ever say that.”
“He followed me, didn’t he? He’s dead, isn’t he?” Narina carried the partially shaped blade back into the shed and returned it to the coals. “I don’t need a student, and you don’t need training. What you need is to prepare your swords and sowen the best you can and ready yourself to defend the temple. We’ll need everyone if we’re attacked, and you’re more than capable of contributing.”
He still didn’t get the hint, and continued to follow her as she removed the steel from the coals and carried it outside toward the anvil, but she shook her head. “No, not today. I’m sorry. I need to be alone.”
The young man finally gave up and turned without another word, though his expression was discouraged enough that Narina briefly had second thoughts. Bartal crossed paths with Katalinka and Miklos coming down the hill in the opposite direction. To combat the cold, Miklos wore his heavier boots, while Katalinka wore a cape. Both of the sohns carried their weapons strapped in place.
Katalinka glanced back over her shoulder as Bartal disappeared from sight, passing through pine trees and following the curve of the hill up toward the mill. “You sent him away already?”
“Are you the one who told him to find me?” Narina asked, surprised.
“It was his idea. I gave him permission is all.”
“He was never going to be my student. Look at him, look how quickly he gave up.”
“Oh, I know that. There’s a reason Bartal stopped his training in the first place. It wasn’t for his sake I sent him down, it was for yours. You need someone to work with.”
Narina raised an eyebrow at her sister’s suggestion. “It could be you. You’re the expert at sword making, not me—I could use your help.”
“You don’t need my help. You don’t want my help—not to make your master sword. I’ll put my auras into it without even thinking. But you could use someone. You’re lonely down here without your student.”
“Gyorgy wasn’t a pet. He’s not a dog you can replace by choosing a new pup.”
“I wouldn’t use that analogy around your ratter friend if I were you,” Katalinka said. “Or his boy. A dog isn’t just a dog with those two.”
“You know what I mean,” Narina said. “Anyway, I’m nowhere near finishing the dragon blade, and haven’t even begun to think about the demon yet.”
Miklos spoke up for the first time. “You’d better start making progress, then, because speaking of the ratters, Andras and Ruven came back from their scouting expedition, and the news is. . .well, not what I expected.”
“Then the post road isn’t closed off?” Narina asked him.
The warbrand gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Oh, it’s closed off. Completely sealed to the point where the river has backed up and flooded the road two full mile markers up the canyon. Andras climbed the hillside for a better look and said the lava has hardened into a dam with the river flowing over it like a waterfall.”
A lava dam didn’t sound particularly stable. It would eventually break and the resulting flood would wreak havoc on whoever was living downstream.
Narina had let the steel cool too much, so she returned it to the shed. The others followed her inside as she thrust it into the coals.
“But the blocked river isn’t the point,” Miklos continued. “It’s what Andras saw on the mountainside opposite that bears investigating. It’s what’s flowing out of the volcano.”
She’d started pumping the bellows again, and now looked up in confusion. “Manet Tuzzia?”
“Those weren’t spontaneous eruptions we saw,” Miklos said. “They were caused by demons pushing up from the abyss. The elders think that all of those volcanoes, all of those breakthroughs, are connected to Manet Tuzzia. And now there’s a system of. . .well, Andras said it looked like canals running down from the peak. Like the kind rice farmers build through their paddies. Only these are carrying lava from the volcano.”
“And we’re talking about the lava flow above Hooffent, right?” Narina asked. “The same flow we passed earlier, where you saw the demigods and demons fighting?”
Miklos nodded. “Right.”
“But the village is at least ten miles down the canyon from where the river is blocked. Are you claiming the lava flowed through these channels uphill?”
Katalinka put a hand on Narina’s arm. “We have no idea. That’s the point. Something strange is happening, and we need to investigate.”
“I should go with you. If it comes to fighting demons, it should be me. I’ll take a pair of dragon swords.”
Her sister gestured at the glowing, partially shaped lump of steel as Narina turned it over in the coals. “With that?”
Narina gave her a sideways glance. “My old dragon will do, with Father’s sword in my other hand.”
“No, you stay here. You have work to do, and someone needs to protect the temple while we’re gone.” Katalinka glanced back up the hill. “Unless you think the likes of Bartal stand a chance against Lujza. Or against your friend with the crows,” she added.
“Damanja? What’s she got to do with this?”
“Damanja’s a crowlord,” Miklos said. “It’s power she’s after, pure and simple. You’re standing in her way, which means that sooner or later she’ll be looking to finish what she started.”
As if in response to his words, Narina’s shoulder gave a twinge, an echo of the withering injury she’d suffered from Damanja’s shadow attack. “All right,” she said. “I’ll stay here and defend the temple.”
To be honest, she was relieved by the decision, not yet ready to think about fighting demons, or anyone else, for that matter. The weight of past battles, slaughters, wounds inflicted and delivered, still felt suffocating. Defense of the temple grounds she could manage. Provoking a fight with the monsters lurking at Manet Tuzzia was another matter.
“And the two of you?” she asked. “You think you’re ready to face demons again?”
Katalinka let out a dry chuckle. “What do you think? We barely survived last time, and that was with dragons on the road, blasting our enemies with snow and ice.”
“They were blasting us with snow and ice, too,” Miklos said. “Don’t forget that part. In any event, I don’t expect the dragons to be on the scene, which means we fight alone. For better or worse.”
“Assuming it comes to that,” Katalinka said. “We’re not looking for a fight, necessarily.” She turned back to Narina. “We need to know what we’re facing, that’s all. Andras saw things. We need to understand them.”
“Good,” Narina said. “I’ll stay here and work, keep vigilant with my sowen. You can take Andras and the dogs if you need help scouting the area, but leave Ruven. That boy has faced enough danger already.” She nodded toward the steel, now ready to be worked again.
“Very good,” Miklos said curtly.
“What about Sarika?” Narina added, her thoughts turning to the firewalker sohn. The woman had been ranging the nearby hills looking for her lost companion, only to return last night when Lujza couldn’t be found.
“She’ll come with us, too,” Katalinka said.
“You’re not alone, remember that,” Katalinka said. “There are warbrands and firewalkers. Elders, fraters. If it comes to a fight, they’re here to help.” She put a hand on Narina’s arm. “People like that young man you dismissed just now, if you know what I mean.”
Narina did know what her sister meant. Katalinka wasn’t afraid that Narina was defenseless; she was reminding her of her responsibilities as leader of the temple warriors.
Narina pulled the steel out with a sigh and turned the tongs to have a look. That same damned flaw lingered on the edge, resisting all efforts to hammer it out. But what could she do? She couldn’t give up, she had to keep hammering it until she’d brought out its best qualities. And maybe that statement referred to more than a single piece of steel.
“All right,” she said at last. “If you see Bartal, send him back down. Tell him I need his help.”
Chapter Two
Lady Damanja dropped toward the hillside with her crow wings pulled into a dive. The meadow rushed up at her, and wind ruffled the tips of her feathers. At the last moment she spread her wings, extended her legs, and came to a halt. Her surroundings blurred, and shadow bled away from her as she returned to a human form.
She brushed away a few feathers clinging to her cloak and took in her surroundings. There was one final strange moment where she felt the long-seeing eyesight of a crow fade, while the colors of everything became sharper, more vibrant. A crow’s eyesight was superior in some ways, but not in others.
Damanja had landed on a mountainside overlooking a canyon. A volcano on the opposite side of the range was erupting. There were a number active along the range—when she rode high on the currents, she could see their plumes stretching to the heavens for a distance of fifty miles or more to the north, and even farther to the south. This one, however, had fingers of lava extending across its slopes, and it sent out explosive shocks at regular intervals, even as its cone continued to grow.
Not a scrap of vegetation remained on the mountain, and the surrounding forests had burned to wastelands of ash punctuated here and there by scorched, blackened remnants where the fire seemed to have been extinguished before the destruction was complete. Probably halted by the freak snow and ice storms of the past two months, she thought. The gaunt remnants of trees somehow made the desolation even more complete.
Bladedancer Page 1