Sword of Jashan (Book 2) (31 page)

The King swayed, stupid from sleep. All his power was useless now, as the ku’an magery left him helpless as a babe. It would be easy to slay him.

Still, Callo stood staring at the bespelled man on the bed and did not move.

Shouts came from the edge of camp. A horse neighed. Callo started, remembering what the Sword of Jashan risked so he could enter this tent on this night, while the King was out of his fortress and making his way to the Collaring ceremony.

Still, this sat ill with Callo. When they had planned this, he had not stopped to think what it would be like here tonight. It felt shameful to slay a man under the influence of the psychic magery, so that he swayed half-asleep while his death approached him.

This was what a Ha’lasi ku’an would do. What had Callo become, that he could do this thing in this way?

But outside, the Sword of Jashan fought so he could get this chance.

It was silent in the tent, as if the very air awaited his decision.

“Hurry!” someone shouted from the west. Was this warning intended for Callo? Were the rebels retreating now, under pressure from the well-armed and trained King’s guard? A scream rang out; someone had been wounded, badly from the sound of things. Thunder rolled in the distance, underscoring the sounds of battle.

Callo steeled himself. This was the man who had sold his own sister’s body for his plan to create an heir—who had manipulated Callo since before his birth—and who had Collared and slain Arias. Callo would complete this task and make the Sword of Jashan’s effort worthwhile. He would kill the King as he had sworn.

He thrust back thirty years of suppressing the ku’an magery, and all his scruples. It took all the strength he had, but he pulled the energy up from some deep reserve and prepared to blast the King where he sat.

A crack of thunder split the air seemingly right above the camp. Sharpeyes frowned and stirred, as Callo felt his fledgling control of his magery falter. Outside, he heard movement from the guards he was trying to keep somnolent. He had held it too long.

There was a clamor of noise from outside the tent as fighters clashed. A woman screamed, and for a moment Callo thought it was Kirian, followed into battle without his knowledge. His heart skipped a beat, and Callo lost his control. The ku’an influence stuttered. Callo leaped back as King Martan Alghasi Monteni woke from his stupor, rolled off the bed and seized his sword.

Callo cursed his own failure as he summoned the color magery once again.

“Hai! Guard!” the King shouted.

“Your guard will not come,” Callo bit off. “You are on your own. I am here as your fate, to pay you what you earned for the death of my half-brother, Arias Alkiran.” He summoned the color magery again, felt it build.

“Hah, revenge!” The King’s grin was fierce. He spun his sword. Callo did not let his eyes be drawn to it; he knew that was what Sharpeyes intended. “So this is your vaunted revenge, drawing off my people to leave me alone against your threat?”

“You are far from helpless,” Callo said.

As if to confirm that, Sharpeyes struck.

The sword came down like a weight. Callo spun out of the way and drew his own sword. He stood holding it like a talisman while he summoned the color magery and hoped it would be enough. He attacked. Blades of light arced from his hands at the King. They cast a jagged array of color across the inside walls of the King’s tent. If they struck, Callo was sure the King would die.

Sharpeyes backed off. He stood surrounded by a protective globe of translucent color such as Yhallin had created when they fled Deephold. Callo’s attack struck the sphere and scattered along its smooth surface. The sphere grew brighter, as if it had absorbed Callo’s mage energy.

Sharpeyes laughed.

“Do you think you can come here and defeat me with the color magery you have barely learned to use? I am a master, nephew. You will be a master, too. Oron will teach you what you need to know, so you can be strong when you are King after me.”

“I have no desire to be a master. Or to be King.” Callo struck out again. The mage energy dissipated uselessly into the King’s mage wall. Outside, he heard the clash of weapons.

“Callo!” someone shouted from outside. It sounded like Rhin, out of breath from running. “Hurry! They are awakening.”

“I think I can convince you,” Sharpeyes said. “You are all I wanted you to be, all those years ago when I commanded your mother to be with Si’lan. You knew it was Si’lan, did you not? Did you notice the resemblance? You even seem to have his inconvenient sense of fairness.”

Since his color magery appeared to be ineffective, Callo lifted his sword and struck at the mage barrier. The red mage energy screamed as the steel split its surface. For a moment, Callo thought he would succeed; he drove harder, fighting the heat and the resistance.

Then the sword hilt heated in his hands. He dropped it, hands burning through the wrappings, in the same places they had been burned just sennights ago. The sword glowed as if it had just come from the bladesmith’s forge.

“A King pays no attention to fairness,” Sharpeyes said, standing there in his nightgear surrounded by the fire of magery. “It only weakens him.”

Outside, weapons rang together. Rhin’s voice rose, swearing. Callo had not been able to maintain the psychic magery, and he knew the guards had awakened from their stupor. Even now, Rhin fought the remaining guards outside the King’s tent.

“To me!” one of the King’s guards yelled.

Others shouted back from the camp’s perimeter. Callo stepped backwards. If reinforcements were coming, it was time to go. He dared not risk Rhin’s death while he fought a battle doomed to failure; he must recoup, and come back stronger to fulfill his vow. He grabbed his sword with cloth-padded hands and ducked backwards out of the King’s tent, cursing his own delay. A King had no room for fairness; well, neither did he. He should have slain the King where he sat, as soon as he entered the tent. His own hesitation had defeated him. He would never make that mistake again.

Rhin was in trouble. The King’s guard had knocked his sword away. Two more armed men ran towards the King’s tent. Callo threw a wall of color magery at all of them, flinging the men backwards. He grabbed Rhin’s arm and shoved him back towards his horse.

“Go, now!” he said.

“I’m ta stay with ya!” Rhin argued.

One of the guardsmen rolled on the ground, coming up to slam into Rhin’s knees. Callo hauled him away and flung up a mage barrier, trying to mimic the one that had just defeated him. The barrier wavered, but held. The guardsmen cursed, struggling against the shield. They ran for the woods, Rhin pulling his horse by its lead rein. Callo struck the perimeter guard away as he challenged them. He knew the mage barrier would not last; he could feel the strength leaving him even as they went. It was too much magery in too short a time, and he shook with reaction.

They made it back to Miri, and Callo scrambled astride. Fast and careless of noise at this point, they rode back along their path with a glow of magery to light the way a few feet ahead. They heard sounds of pursuit behind them. With stress clamoring at his nerves, Callo led the way on a tangent away from their actual destination, to lead any followers astray.

The thunder was closer now. Light danced along the top of a nearby tree, phosphorescent as Jashan touched it, and lightning flew down. A crash split the air. Miri shrieked, and Rhin’s horse put its head down and refused to go on.

“Go on now, good one,” Callo said to Miri. “Rhin! Hand me your rein! I will lead you.”

He clutched the lead Rhin threw him, and urged the trembling Miri through the storm. There was almost no rain now; just a spit now and then so sharp and cold it almost hurt. Mostly the storm was wind and Jashan’s lightning, like color magery tracing the sky. Perhaps Jashan was angry that Callo had wasted the chance he had been given.

Miri snorted and blew as she ran. Callo’s hands shook from reaction, from his extravagant use of magery this night. He gritted his teeth and hung on, leading them where they should go. He began to see the outlines of tree trunks, barely distinct from the sky, and knew dawn was not far off. They must get to their meeting place in the foothills, and hope the others of Sword of Jashan made it safely out of the melee.

After a while, the sounds of the alarmed camp died behind them. Callo knew that did not mean there was no pursuit. They deviated from their path and began to use more stealth. They walked the horses across a farmer’s half-harvested field, led them across a stream, and angled up into the foothills on a different line than they had been following. Callo hoped they had led any pursuit away from their meeting place.

All the way, Callo forced his mind away from the mistake he had made in the King’s tent. Guilt lay heavy on him. The ku’an magery belonged to Som’ur, brutal god of the Ha’lasi; it was Callo’s brief hesitation to use it that had defeated his purpose. When the King was dead, that was the time to put the ku’an magery away where he would not touch it again. Until then he must remember it was a tool, like any other.

The sky began to take on a rose glow as the sun topped the hills and the tree line. People would be stirring in the few farmsteads in this lonely territory, waking to all their autumn tasks. If they were fortunate, the King’s men had followed their original path and were far away by now; or perhaps they had sent for aid from Lord Huy, and in that case would have lost their trail for good.

Rhin stopped his horse and pointed. Three stones topped a fallen branch in a manner that could have been, but was not, coincidental. Callo nodded. It was the sign they had agreed on. The meeting place was not far off.

In fact they would have ridden right through the meeting place if Lotna had not stood up practically under their horses’ noses as they passed a screen of red-leafed bushes.

Miri shied and then settled.

Lotna said, “Come this way.” She did not smile. She led them along a trail covered with fallen leaves, slippery from rain. Callo and Rhin were forced to dismount as they began climbing a narrow trail up a steeper hill. Lotna walked before them but did not speak.

They made their way around a boulder higher than their horses’ heads, dropped here by who knew what angry god. Beyond that mark were the rebels they had left behind. Callo’s eyes sought out Kirian and found her with the Ha’lasi refugees under a cloth lean-to. Then someone barreled out of a rock alcove and grabbed him by the arm, spinning him around.

“Two dead,” Hira Noh said. “And some are not yet returned. What happened, Royal Bastard? What happened?”

A man took Miri’s rein from his hand and led the horses away.

For a moment Callo could not speak, thinking of the lives lost that night. Then he said, “I am sorry. Who was lost?”

“You don’t care,” Hira Noh said. “Why should you; you don’t know them. We are only fodder for the sword in this personal battle you have with the King.” Her eyes were red.

“That is not true.” Callo looked at her until she stepped back. “Sometimes plans fail, Hon Hira Noh. You have been doing this a long time. You know this.”

She stepped back and sighed. “I did not expect this plan to fail. I am grieving, and not thinking. Come in and get some bread and tea.”

He sat on a rock and looked around at the strange place with flat rocks deposited here and there as if some mighty torrent had flung them there. The autumn gold of their surroundings became vibrant as full daylight arrived, but they were shaded from view by trees that reached for the sky with flame colored leaves.

“We saw the King’s tent lit up from within by color magery,” Hira Noh said. “It was red and gold, like a beacon. Was the King awake, then?”

Callo nodded. Lotna brought him tea and he sipped it. He saw Hira Noh watching his hands, and realized they still shook from reaction. He could not tell Hira Noh how he had hesitated, and thereby lost. She would think this meant he held the rebels’ lives at no account.

It was not true. The thought that people had died to give him his chance at the King weighed on him.
All the gods
, he thought.
Speed them safely on their way to you
. He had made a mistake that night. If he were to slay the King, he must dispense with his scruples. He must become as brutal as the man he would kill.

“He awakened. We fought—he never broke a sweat, and I could not breach his magery.” He would need to figure out how to break the King’s defense on his next attempt.

“You came out safe, though. We can try again,” Hira Noh said. She reached out and clasped his arm in a strong grip. Callo expected her anger, but instead she gave his arm a squeeze he thought was meant to be reassuring.

He looked at her, all at once feeling exhausted and humble before this show of her spirit. “Thank you, and all your people,” he said. “I do not deserve you.” He thought, if she knew what had happened, she would likely agree.

After Kel came back, not enraged as Callo had expected but weeping from the loss of one of his men, they had the ceremony. The bodies had been left at the site where they had died; there was nothing else to do, and it was certain the King would have men on guard, watching for any of the rebels fool enough to try to take back the bodies of their men. If there was a chance, they would go back after the King’s men had departed and make sure the men were given a decent burial, at least, Rhin said.

Callo stood straight-backed during the brief ceremony. When the others had retreated from the offerings left on the flat stone under the flame-red tree, he remained, keeping a personal vigil until Kirian came to get him. People died in battle, he knew this well; but these deaths were on him alone.

“Come and get some dinner,” Kirian said as she drew him away from the place where the memorial had been held. “It was not your fault, you know.”

Callo did not respond to that. Hira Noh watched him as he approached the shelter where soup was being served from a big pot. Her gaze was level, but there was no sign of accusation in her sharp stare.

The group treated its wounds and gathered supplies. The Ha’lasi refugees, once fed up a little so they were not dropping with fatigue, proved helpful to those who had helped them, though they avoided Callo and his amber eyes with a caution born of experience and superstition.