Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (34 page)

But her second instinct was truer: She knew that she could not let go of the sword. Not yet.

His arms paralleled her arms. The top of her head barely came to his shoulders; she felt the presence of his chin hovering above her hair; felt it dip, touch, settle. In just such a way, Ashaf had often hugged her when she was an older, recalcitrant child. But his reach was longer; the span of his hand wider. His hand traveled the length of both her arm and the sword he had crafted until it had passed the place where both blood and grip marked it.

He then said, quietly, "No matter what we do, you will never recover from this."

He was not speaking to her.

Isladar said nothing. But he watched as Lord Anduvin of the
Kialli
drew the inside of his palm along the sword's edge until it rested just above Kiriel's.

He grunted as he cut himself. His fingers curled, as Kiriel's had done, around the flawless steel.

"Now," he told her softly. "Pull."

She was confused. His back and his arms enveloped her; she was small enough to feel like the child she had sworn she would never be again. Tired enough to obey, to time her strength to follow his. To
pull
with everything she had.

It wasn't much.

"The sword," he said, through gritted teeth, his voice reverberating in her ear until her spine tingled, "is yours. It is not just effort that will move it."

"But—"

"Do you not understand what has been offered you? Take it. Command the blade."

No
, she wanted to tell him,
I don't understand
.

But she did; the facts were facts, even if the motivations had been pared away.

She had never owned a
Kialli
blade before. Understood that, in a strange way, she did not own one now. A sword had been given to her when she was—she could say this now, at the remove of years—a child; it had been fed when she was a child; it had been forged when she was a child.

That was gone, with childhood; what remained was complex, complicated, and painfully simple.

She willed the blade to
go away
.

And it refused.

Not in words, of course; it was not that type of sword.

As if he could feel its refusal—and he probably could, as he had forged it—Lord Anduvin cursed. He looked up, his brow creased, his lips thinned by effort and by things unsaid. "Is this the end you desired, Brother?"

"I desired, in truth, no end," Isladar's reply was mild.

Kiriel couldn't see his expression clearly, and she knew why; her eyes were filmed with water. If she cried, he would be worse than angry: he would be contemptuous.

She ordered the blade to go away, and again, it refused. It had not, she knew, finished feeding.

Wasn't this what you wanted
? she asked herself.

She hated the answer so much she couldn't acknowledge it. Instead, she turned the anger and the confusion on the blade.

And was not surprised when she failed to move it.

Her hand stung. Her hand did not bleed.

Or rather, it did, but the blade absorbed that blood, just as it had Auralis'. What had Lord Isladar said?
A blade must know its master, and the taste of its master's blood is not the way in which to teach it that lesson
.

But he was wrong.

She looked up at him, looked up at Lord Anduvin, and said, without thinking, "But blood binds."

"Indeed," Lord Isladar said, his voice fading. His lips curved in the thin, cold expression that had always been his signal of approval.

Anduvin looked up. Looked down to the place where steel and flesh intersected; the steel he had tempered; the flesh he now wore.

"A gamble," he said softly. And then he laughed, and his laughter… was painful and beautiful, a sound unlike any Kiriel had ever heard from the
Kialli
. It was almost mortal. "You were always impulsive, but I do not believe you were ever this reckless."

"I was always this reckless," Isladar replied. "Kiriel."

She was staring at him.

"This path is a path of your choosing. I am not without mercy, although it is a mercy that you are not perhaps ready to understand. I would have spared you this, had you been less headstrong. Remember that."

"But—"

He placed his own hands upon the sword's edge.

When he touched it, all light fled; the darkness that came from his hands seeped down the length of the blade, to be joined as it flowed by Lord Anduvin's shadow. And her own.

She cried out; the ring on her hand flared and the light from it traveled like lightning's fork. It struck them all; before searing white enveloped her entire field of vision, she could clearly see two tall, slender men with pale, falling hair and faces unlike any that she had seen within the Shining Court.

Do you have a soul
? she had once asked Isladar.

No, little one.

Do I?

Oh, yes.

She had had no reason to disbelieve him.

But the men she had seen in vision were not the men she saw in life. For the first time, she wondered what a soul was, what its value was, and how it could be weighed, judged, found wanting.

And when she could see again, she stood in the street, her hand on a sword's hilt, the tip of the sword resting against the upturned earth. She dropped to one knee, forgot to breathe, felt her chest constrict.

Felt a hand on her shoulder.

It was not Lord Isladar's hand.

"He is… not dead." The Swordsmith said, before she could speak, if she had intended to speak at all.

She did not reply. Instead, she lifted the sword, raised it slowly until the flat of the blade was before her eyes. With a deliberate slow twist of the wrist, she turned the blade; she faced its edge.

The blade did not vanish.

"You cannot simply gesture it away," The Swordsmith continued. "It is a matter of will and intent; a certain knowledge of complete ownership."

She lowered the blade slowly. After a long moment, she chose to sheath it—within the scabbard she had carried since the day the Swordsmith had come to visit.

"Kiriel. That is not the way to sheathe that sword. Not now."

She didn't look at him. Not directly. Did not even ask him why he was there, why he had stayed. The street, broken only by the blow she had struck in the cobbled stone, stretched out in peaceful isolation, and she began to follow it.

It didn't really matter where it led.

But he fell in behind her. She knew this not so much because of his footsteps—she couldn't honestly say she heard any—but because of sheer presence.

"Master APhaniel, should we act?" Gyrrick spoke quietly as he watched Kiriel di'Ashaf walk down the empty streets with her tall, slender companion.

The magi lifted a hand; the mage bowed instantly and retreated, passing the unspoken command to the others in a whisper that traveled like a dry breeze. Sigurne would have been displeased indeed by such a sobering display of obedience.

And at another time, he would have been pleased by it in equal measure.

But he was lost in momentary wonder at the complexity of what he had just witnessed. He had almost been forced to miss it; the darkness-born child's companion had been both energetic and disobliging. The threat of sending the bill for property damage—in addition to the extensive use of magic pursuant to saving the life of a member of the Kalakar Household who may or may not have been involved in questionable magical activity—failed to have the desired effect, and in the end, Meralonne had been forced to call upon Member Mellifas to deal with the situation as she saw fit. A certain privilege of rank. His smile was momentarily unpleasant. Power, in the Empire, was fraught with the dangerous need for diplomacy, tact, and the ability to offer a threat in a benign and gentle fashion.

For that reason, among many, he had refrained from actively seeking it. But… even with such restraint, he could not simply disappear into anonymity; he was of the magi, and the Council of the Magi; he was of the echelons in the Order that could boast both knowledge and the power to use it.

"Master?"

"The danger has passed, Gyrrick. Congratulate your men on their timing and their silence, and then instruct them to return to the Order. Return with them and deliver your report to Member Mellifas—and only that member."

"Master." He bowed again. Hesitated. "You will not be returning with us?"

Meralonne refrained from what would have been the obvious lecture in a different situation. These men were what passed for militia within the Order, but they would never quite be a military order unto themselves, and they would never have that perfect discipline—or, more significantly, obedience—that came with years of dedicated training.

"No, Gyrrick. There are one or two things that I must attend to here before I return."

"They are not dangerous?"

There was obedience and then there was obedience. The mage raised a silver brow. "Gyrrick, I have taught you everything that you currently know about martial arts. Believe for a moment that I am capable of actually using what I have taught."

He expected the mage to bow or kneel. The mage surprised him. "Master," he said, although it was technically not a title that the Order used, "you are currently the
only
member of the Order who could teach what you have taught us. We are all inclined toward the more… obvious… arts; none of us are men obsessed or consumed by the simple desire for knowledge."

"That desire is never simple. Continue."

"If anything happens to you, that knowledge is lost. We have discussed it among ourselves, and we have come to realize—"

"'Among ourselves'?"

"Myself and my fellow students."

"I see. Continue."

"We have come to realize that as a ward against future necessity it is of utmost import that your life be preserved."

"I… see."

"Therefore—"

"You understand that in my culture what you have just said would constitute deliberate and possibly dangerous insult?"

Gyrrick's expression was implacability itself. He did not answer.

But he did not, Meralonne noted, back down either. This was the result of the Empire and Imperial custom; it had given the City men of power who did not understand the meaning of either being a soldier or going to war.

"If I foresaw danger, Gyrrick, I would not send you back to the Order to make your report." He lifted a hand to forestall the obvious reply, and the gesture worked. "I will take what you have said under advisement for the moment. Return to the Order, assure Sigurne Mellifas that all is well within the Old City. I shall follow shortly.

"Ignore this at your peril; I am unused to having my orders questioned when they are stated this baldly."

Gyrrick struggled with silence and won; the words— whatever they were—remained unsaid. He bowed.

And Meralonne returned the bow with a nod.

These warriors were not what he would have fashioned for his own use when he was a younger man, but they were, in some ways, more rewarding for the challenge they represented.

He waited until he was certain they were gone, and then he stepped into the street and began a leisurely walk, the medallion of the Order tucked deliberately into the folds of his tunic.

"Where are you going?" she asked him, although the curiosity in her voice, if any, was muted. She felt oddly detached from herself, very light-headed. No, that wasn't it, not precisely. She felt as if she were
not
herself; as if she observed the streets of Averalaan through borrowed vision, walked them in borrowed form.

"I? I do not know. Does it matter?"

"Yes. No. I'm not sure." She stopped in the street, and the peaceful night was damp and cool, and her lips tasted of the salt that was a perpetual presence. She was very, very tired.

"I know," the Swordsmith said softly. But the tone of his words was strange. Hesitant.

She continued to walk, as if the presence of a
Kialli
lord by her side was an everyday occurrence. It had been, once. But never here, never where the mortals lived, in their crowded, hot city, with its myriad sounds and scents, its nooks and crannies carved not by wind and god, but by simple people.

By mortals.

She was one; she understood that now in a way that she had never understood it. She would age, as they aged; she would die—if she were lucky—as they died, taken by Mandaros or his servants to answer for her life, and to choose.

And she would regret the loss of what she loved so bitterly that an eternity of living with that regret made mortality seem… welcome. Because there would be an end.

For the first time, she wondered if she had lived before. What she had been if she had. What she would be if she was not consigned to the Hells for her failures in this life; they were profound.

"What happens to you. when you die?"

"Happens?"

"Happens. Mortals go to Mandaros, and come back, go and come back. To forget," she added softly. Ashamed of the words, of the fate.

"Until they choose."

"How can we choose if we don't remember?"

Lord Anduvin raised a winter brow. "I am
Kialli
," he said quietly. "You can ask me many questions, and almost all of them will be more relevant than that one. I do not know how mortal memory works; it is fragile; it is whimsical; it changes with time."

Her memory. She should have been insulted. But anger had to come from somewhere, and she felt… empty. Too empty to sustain such a raw emotion. "What happens to the
Kialli
! What happens to the kin?"

The Swordsmith frowned a moment, and then offered an elegant, graceful shrug. "Does it matter?"

"Yes."

"Then ask the gods, little one, when you die and meet them. Ask them who the Makers were, if there were indeed any, ask them what the plans of those Makers might have been, if such a thing as a plan existed. The world was a wild, wild place when the
Kialli
were at the height of their power and the peak of their youth."

She nodded, hearing the words but failing to absorb their meaning. "Why?" she questioned softly, looking toward the North. He seemed to expect this, and changed course as easily as a small river might when flowing around a rock.