Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (31 page)

She swung the sword that hung in midair in the direction of his words. It was not an accident.

"I mean no challenge," he said softly.

She said nothing at all, and the silence was eloquent.

He watched her carefully for a time before speaking, and when he did, he said simply, "The Lord was displeased by your departure."

She nodded.

"I would not have known to look for you here, had you not carried the sword. But I know where the sword is, Kiriel. Until you bind it with your own offering, some part of it is mine. I had hoped for a different resolution," he added again. "But who would have imagined that you, of all the godborn, would end up in the only remaining mortal City our Lord has cause to fear? Who could have foreseen that you would walk its streets—its busy, crowded streets, where every moving creature's soul has a color and a texture just waiting to be explored—and abide by its
laws
and its
rules'
?

"You have not killed. You
must
kill."

"I've killed demons."

"Three," he said quietly, "over too long a time."

"And how do I know you're telling me the truth?"

He raised a pale brow, but his expression did not otherwise change.

"How do you ever know a
Kialli
lord speaks truth?"

"I don't."

"Indeed. But nor do we, without blood-binding, and there are few whose words are worth listening to who can be so bound."

"How will I die?"

His brows rose. After a moment he said, "You are truly surprising. How? I do not know. I have never seen it happen in all of the time I have crafted such swords."

"Never?"

"Think of who they were made for." He paused. "You are not in any way what you seemed to be while you occupied a Tower in the Shining City. But I have my own reasons for wishing this resolved in a fashion that does not end with your death."

"Can you remove the compulsion?"

"No. It is… not as simple as that."

"Then," the god-born girl said, hands shaking with the effort of holding the blade still, "Not even you survived the transition to, and from, the Hells intact."

She heard two things simultaneously: Evayne's sharp intake of breath, and Lord Anduvin's utter silence. He became a thing of ice; the mountains she had seen from her windows every morning were not as cold and still as this. But he chose to break that stillness with a smile.

She was well trained; she did not take a step back. But it was a near thing.

"If you were
Kialli
, child," he said quietly, "I would kill you for that."

"Why? Because it's true?"

"No," he replied. He lifted his hand, palm out, and she saw for the second time, the Swordsmith's blade as it coalesced out of air at his whim. "Because it is an attack, a challenge, and there
is
only one answer to such a challenge between the kin."

"I was raised among the
Kialli
," she said coldly. "I'm not a human child; I know what I've chosen to do."

"The fact that you could be raised at all—"

"And I understand
Kiallinan
," she added, and her hands shook for the first time. "I understand it all."

His brows, pale and perfect, rose. And fell. He bowed his head a moment. "Your master," he said quietly, "gave you a gift that you cannot comprehend, if you both understand that at his hands, and live; he has taken a risk that no other among us would have taken. Not even I."

His eyes narrowed. "Do you think to offer the blade my life in the stead of the mortal's?"

"Yes."

He laughed. It was a lovely, wild sound, arresting because it was so powerful, so vibrant. So unlike the
Kialli
. "Well then, why not? Why
not
?" He lifted his left hand, and she saw, for the first time, his shield. It was unlike any shield she had ever seen; it ran the length of his body from knee to shoulder, and spanned his width, although he was slender. It shone brightly with reflected light, and the sun traced the contours of worked metal that formed the head of… a dragon.

The dragon
roared
.

Had she been another person, that roar would have cost her her life. But she had been trained by Lord Isladar; every possible use of illusion, every inverted use of magic, every lie—
every lie
—that could possibly be used against her had been so used. Whether or not the dragon was real, contained by the Smith's craft, or illusion, was immaterial.

This was a combat.

This was something she understood.

Clarity.

Death.

He waited for her; she waited for him. They stood in the stillness of the summer heat a long time. Evayne's shadow fell between them, and it grew taller as the minutes passed.

"You offered the challenge," he said, a gentle rebuke. "Will you wait upon my attack?"

"I offered the challenge," she replied, "to a lord, not mere kin. I don't know what you call me, any of you, but
I am
no
Kialli
lord."

He raised a brow. "You are different from what I expected. You have held your own against the machinations of the Lord's Fist; I expected you to be a more easily controlled weapon. But you are so very mortal."

She swallowed air. "And you are so very immortal. But immortal and eternal aren't the same: you die, just the way any mortal does on failing in combat."

"Is this a challenge, Kiriel? Or is this a challenge of the sword?"

"I don't care which. The sword is my weapon; I'll use it."

"But you
do
care, little one." A different voice. A voice from above.

They both turned, slowly, unwilling to let their opponent out of the field of their vision, but equally unwilling to ignore the threat from the air.

Lord Isladar of the
Kialli
stood on the edge of the closest building, looking down.

"You!"

"Kiriel," Evayne snapped. "Remember his teachings; they have value, even if he no longer does.
Remember
them!"

"I remember
everything
."

"Do not let anger guide you, then."

She turned her back on Evayne. On the woman who had taken her away from the mountains that had been her only home; had brought her here; had given her to the Ospreys. Had given her the treacherous ring that singed her hand.

"Lord Anduvin," Lord Isladar said, bowing. "I must respectfully request that you decline the challenge that she has not—quite—put into foolish words."

Lord Anduvin lifted his blade; he held it, edge on side, before his face. The
Kialli
ready stance. "And can you make her kill what you could not force her to kill when the sword was first gifted?"

"Hardly."

"She has not offered challenge idly."

"No. So I understand from my tenure upon the rooftop." He took a step from the edge of the short half wall upon which he'd been standing and hovered a moment in the air before descending.

Kiriel was paralyzed as she watched him land.

Paralyzed as she watched him do what he had never done for her: he summoned his blade. She had wondered, every time he took up wooden sword, or later, simple metal, if he truly had one; he had not chosen to reveal it where she could experience the momentary wonder of a sword that came at call, like a servant, like a blood-bound demon. He had relied instead on magic, on magery, on deception and threat.

She had seen him fight with sword once.

To save
her
.

Bitter, bitter truth.

Her eyes stung, and she
hated
it. Hated him. Hated the memory of Ashaf that was tainted in all ways by the memory of Isladar.

The screaming…

She cried out suddenly, her breath an enemy's advantage, her viscera clenching in a terrible, inexplicable pain. She
would not
think about that. That
could not
be her final memory.

And Lord Isladar of the
Kialli
looked upon her as if he could—as he had always done—use every nuance of her expression to invade the privacy of her thoughts.

"You understand only the seeds of
Kiallinan
, Kiriel. You have not decided to accept what it has become for the
Kialli
."

"What is there to accept?" she shouted—and was ashamed of the lack of control that stripped her voice of ice and quiet.

"She's dead," he said quietly.

"/
know that
!"

"I killed her. I enjoyed it."

She raised the sword, twisting away from the Swordsmith as if Isladar had pulled strings. She lunged at the lord who had taught her everything she knew, wild now; the roar that broke the silence of the city was a dragon's roar, a sound that she should never have been able to make.

She
had
to stop him. She had to make him stop.

He evaded her thrust, stepping fluidly to the side and parrying; she had left her side open, and he cut her as momentum forced her to travel past.

He cut her, but he did not kill her, and he could have.

And it wouldn't have mattered. Just for this one second, just for this moment, it was not the sword's need that drove her; not the shadow's need. It was the need of the child who had lost an old woman's lap—and everything that lap represented—and was fighting in a frenzy to preserve what remained of that comfort: memory.

But memory is not inviolable.

She staggered at the force of the blow. Turned, placing her feet more carefully upon the road; shattered stone surrounded the pit she had made with her sword, and on either side of it, they stood: master and student.

Some of the wildness left her with her blood. Like a slap in the face, the wound brought a moment's clarity. She didn't bother to look at her side; she knew it was bleeding.

"You do not need to face him," Evayne said.

She would have been furious at the interruption once. But she answered, without looking away from her opponent. "I do."

"You don't, Kiriel."

"If for no other reason than that the sword needs to be fed, I do."

"Killing him will change nothing."

Kiriel laughed. It was an ugly sound, and she cursed herself silently the moment it left her. She couldn't contain it. She was all things ugly. That was her truth. "You understand nothing," she snarled. "Nothing at all."

"Kiriel, you are what you are. You will
always
be darkness born. You will always feel other people's pain in a way that dwarfs what the kin themselves are capable of feeling. It's—"

The words broke as Isladar gestured; the ground broke as well, as the earth around Evayne a'Nolan swallowed her whole.

Rock flew; earth flew; the air was a haze of painful, flying things. Kiriel summoned shadow, and the shadow failed to answer; she ducked to ground, protecting her face from the worst of the debris with her mailed arms. Her hand was cool. The ring was dormant.

They're never going to let us get away with this
, Kiriel thought, and realized that the thought itself made no sense.

"I will brook no interruptions," Lord Isladar said, as the winds died. "Rise, Kiriel."

She had been his only student. When he commanded her, she rose, pushing herself from the earth with the flat of one palm, while the other gripped—had never let go of—the sword. Against the hand splayed across the ground, a single band caught the light. A ring.

A ring.

"You should have paid the sword's price when you were given the opportunity," Isladar said gravely.

Said it in a tone of voice with which she was intimately familiar. She had failed him; she had paid. He had always made certain that she understood the high price for failure, while making certain that she survived it.

She had refused Ashaf a near painless death.

A death far kinder than the one she had met.

"You are not my match, Kiriel."

She said nothing.

But she raised the sword. "You have a blade Lord Anduvin crafted before the Sundering. I have the only blade he crafted after it.

"You said the
Kialli
are made by
Kiallinan
. That might make my sword stronger. It might make it weaker."

"The strength of the sword," he replied softly, "is defined by the one who wields it. No more, no less. You offered a challenge."

Her hands were shaking. She hated that they shook. But she stared across a pit that had been shorn of detritus by the force and howl of wind, and her lips formed the word
why
, but her voice had lost all strength to utter it.

Perhaps because it would have sounded too much like a plea, and he had never been particularly gentle with anything that sounded like weakness.

"You are not going to kill me, Kiriel," he said quietly. "But you have taken a step away; you have asserted an independence that has yet to be… tested."

He gestured.

She lifted a hand to ward his spell, and fire struck her, lambent in its warmth. His expression, if it were possible, became even icier in its disapproval.

It underwent an infinitesimal thaw as the ring again caught light. "What is that that you wear, Kiriel?"

"A ring."

"I see… I suggest you remove it before we begin."

She wondered, then, if he knew how trapped, how diminished, she was by the ring's presence. True to his teachings, she did not choose to enlighten him.

When he struck, he was faster than she had ever seen him; she was slower than she had been since he had first begun to teach her.

The edge of the blade cut four of her fingers to the bone; the ring was unscathed, although the sound of the metals meeting—sword and ring—echoed unnaturally.

She lifted her blade. The anger she had felt, the anger he had evoked—it had drained with the blood of the two wounds. She fell into a stance that he had taught her, one of many; she felt the heat of the summer sun across her dark hair, her pale skin—although the sun was waning, had waned, and provided heat only by its echo; felt the weight of his gaze, felt the tendrils of her father's legacy in the darkness that pooled at her feet.