The Golden Sword

“Do not take my chald from me.” I faced him, my back against the laced tent flap, my hands clenched behind me.

“Crells do not wear chalds,” Chayin said flatly. “It lessens their beauty, their usefulness, their humility. It slows their adjustment. Remove it.”

I put my hands to my chald, running the strands through my fingers. I found the juncture, took the tiny key from its housing, and fitted the key in the lock. The ends parted. I took my eighteen-strand chald in my palms and looked at it.

I saw the silver chain with white interwoven, that of Well Astria. I saw the six brass mixed, of my schooling, and the Well-Keepress’ chain, of white gold set with fire gems. That one had been mine when I was born. The others I had spent three hundred and two years acquiring. What is a Silistran without chaldra?

I would kill him.

ISBN: 0-671-55919-2

to Sydny Weinberg

• Replication
  
• I. Ors Yris-tera
  
• II. Chosen Son of Tar-Kesa
  
• III. Crell
  
• Clearing the Way
  
• IV. Tiaskchan
  
• V. The Golden Sword
  
• Stalking
  
• VI. The Ebvrasea
  
• VII. The Liason First
  
• The Viable
  
• VIII. Well Astria Revisited
  
• IX. “I Am the Hest and the Sort”
  
• Postscript
  
• Glossary
  
• Silistran Calendar
  

The dayglass, alone, posited upon the black square of controlling Will on the board of catalysts.

As events are conceived by all-pervading Will and brought into time by the Weathers, so are they given spatial reality by Replication.

Replication gives instruction and molds the world in its image.

Replication has no foes, nor can a thousand armies stand against it. There is no obstructing the time of Replication, when the crux wind blows across the earth and all things assume their true nature.

The wind of the First Weather blows across the sea and the tides are remade in their rhythm. It blows upon the land and great forests are tumbled to the ground. In this way is the old made new and that which has served its purpose cleared away. In such times it services one to delve into one’s own fitness and make ready.

Adjuration: The dayglass is upended and the salts begin the journey that divines time within space. Each grain must wait its turn and pass through the narrowed middle in a predetermined sequence. No grain may refuse to pass from top to bottom, nor is the order of passage subject to alteration or review. Should a stubborn grain thwart its destiny it will be ground to bits by its fellows and the resultant powder will in the end assume its place.

With the woman as agent:

Around the waist there is nothing. That task to be accomplished is of such gravity that a chald of eighteen chains becomes, meaningless by comparison.

The inward ear hears success and is not discouraged by the message. Replication suspends natural law. That which is folly by reason is demanded in times of Replication.

She receives the light of the north star Clous into her right hand and is not blinded by its beauty. In times of Replication, when only that which is preordained may be done, a material sign is always given at the outset.

Adjuration: She who receives the light knows herself not exalted, but drafted into exacting service.

—excerpted from
Ors Yris-tera
(Book of the Weathers of Life), by the dharen Khys, hide-year sixty-three

In the bloody sun’s rising, the desert was a sea of gore, the crack-riddled, barren earth between it and the ravening crags east and west a vitrified corpse. The fuming sun straddled the mountains, triumphant. Vanquished was the beneficent night. All creatures great and small scuttled for cover, lest the vampire in the sky suck them dry of life.

A dry wind sprang up out of the desert. From the southwest it came, driving the sand before it in great clouds. Red-dark up from the south met the dawn and devoured it. Deracou, the wind that devours, is such a storm called in Parset. Deracou stalked the cloaked figure. The sighing, groaning sand it drove scoured the dead sea bottom, until every crack was filled, making it, again sea; roaring sea, sea of sand. Deracou claimed the waste, covered it, drowned it, and the high tide wave of it made once again shore of the rocky place where the still form lay. I lay quiet as the desert, back turned to its courting. As it had claimed the cracked wasted dead sea, so would Deracou claim me.

Out of caprice, it reached out its arm to me, when I thought I had escaped. The temptation was strong within me to sleep. To let my body be covered forever by the sand, to take the peace nature offered. I had, after all, fulfilled the chaldra of the mother. To fulfill the chaldra of the soil, to give back what I had borrowed, to die here upon Silistra—indeed, the temptation was strong within me.

The Shaper’s seal sign of my father, its great spiral, myriad points of light worked into my cloak’s back, glittered and twinkled before my sand-sealed eyes. My father; it said, did not deliver me home to Silistra, to the Parset Desert, to die. My father, it reminded me, had need of me. My father, Estrazi, it cajoled, would expect more from his daughter.

I lay, arms crossed over my head, with the cloak pulled close about me. When the south wind died away, all that could be seen of me was the scintillating spiral sparkling in the sand.

The receding wind bore the darkness with it, and the light of sun’s rising was again upon the land. It rainbowed the Shaper’s seal that was upon the cloak that my father had given his daughter.

Sensation consumed me. My eyes and nose and mouth were filled with grit. My swollen tongue was unable to give comfort to my cracked and blistered lips. My savaged feet throbbed and pulsed.

Surely, I told myself, my father had good reason for depositing me here. Doubtless, I comforted myself as I lay in the dark under my cloak, that reason would be made clear. My lungs burned and ached. They had been hard put to adjust to the thinner Silistran air, although it was Silistran air I had breathed for three hundred years, until my need to discharge the chaldra of the mother had led me to the Falls of Santha, to the cavern beneath them, and to Mi’ysten.

I thought of Mi’ysten, that world out of time, of Estrazi and Raet, child of the Shapers, while my body lay resting. I could not ask more from my tortured flesh, not now, with the heat of the day upon the land.

Estrazi, my father, for whom I had forsaken my position as Well-Keepress of Astria, for whom I had searched so long; it was he who had put me here. By his design was I created, in his hands was I pawn. On Mi’ysten had I given back to him his ring that I had worn threaded through my chald across the plain to Arlet, amid the mountains of the Sabembe range, below the Falls of Santha. Even in the solitary confinement of the crystal cube of Mi’ysten had I worn it, even while at the mercy of Raet had I retained it. To give it back to him. To discharge my chaldra, my responsibility and my duty, to my dead mother, Hadrath, had I withstood Raet and met with Estrazi upon his world, Mi’ysten.

And when it was done, when the ring was removed by my hand from my chald belt of interwoven chains and placed in the bronze-glowing hand of my father, Estrazi, I had found myself, naked but for cloak and chald, upon my back in the Parset desert, looking upon the constellations of the night sky of Silistra. So many questions unanswered, he had delivered me home. I had lain a long while looking up at the sky. That the sand under me was Parset sand I had determined from the placement of the stars above me. Groistu, the stones-wielder, was only half-risen in the north. Wiurer, the winged hulion, held court directly above Groistu’s head. The tip of his tufted left ear, where the north star Clous twinkled, was barely discernible upon the horizon. From no other place upon Silistra would the night sky so display herself.

I had wept for joy, to feel Silistra again supporting my flesh, to breathe the thinner, righter air of the planet of my birth. I had not thought, then, of what the desert day would bring. I had been so long away from the cycle of day and night, and from weather, and from nature herself, I had forgotten. But the morning sun taught me, after I had wasted the night cool in introspection. I quickly relearned my vulnerability. My Mi’ysten schooling did me little good. I had shaped water, creating a bare trickle with my limited power, and the desert sucked it away. As it tried to suck away my life in the three days that followed. By the north star Clous, and the crouching crags of the southern-most tip of the Sabembe range, did I set my course, northeast to Arlet.

I had, I reminded myself in the dark of my tented cloak, come far in three days. I blew breath hard out of my mouth, trying to spit the grit from my gullet.

In a little while, I would set out again. I was safe, in the heat of the day, from dorkat, the stalking carnivore, from slitsa, the slithering fork-tongued, from friysou, the leather-winged scavenger, and from all that scuttled and crawled upon the desert sands. In the heat of the day, the desert slept. Doubtless I could sleep, unmolested. Truly, I had no choice. My limbs would no longer obey me, and my dreaming mind would no longer hold a train of thought. I sank into the cool dark, where pain could not find me, nor heat, nor hunger, nor thirst.

I dreamed of Raet, son of the Shapers, and that he worked his will once again in the worlds of time and space. I dreamed that he came and bound my hands behind me, and caused my chald-belt to rust and fall from my body. I knelt where it had fallen, but it was only powder on the sand. I protested to him, and he replied to me that I could not be allowed to interfere. And my father was beside him, nodding, the bronze glow from his skin growing brighter and brighter, until I buried my head in the sand to shield my eyes from the glare. And I was lifted up from the ground; Raet’s arms were so hot they seared my skin. But that was wrong. Mi’ysten flesh is always cool. I struggled, crying out.

“It is more than a jeweled cloak Deracou has blown you, Cahndor.” The voice belonged to the face that swam blurred before me. It was a Parset face, dusky brown, severe; the whites of the eyes staring into mine were softened by the Parset nictitating membrane. The language was Parset, and my sluggish mind took long to make sense of it. The sun’s set shadowed the forms before me. Dreamecho chased their words into my ears.

I would have raised my hands to wipe the sand and sleep from my eyes. I could not move them. But I knew I no longer dreamed, for my body’s complaints were loud within me, the pain a rippling film between me and the shadowed forms bending down in the fading light.

I opened my mouth to speak, to explain, but no sound could I coax from my parched throat.

And then I smelled it. My nostrils drank first, of the particles the air carried to me. I will never forget the strength of that odor, the coolness, the life my nose and throat received from the very air. Water. It was on my lips and in my mouth and spreading through my dust-covered innards. The feel of it as it dribbled upon my chin will stay with me as long as I live. My throat knew no longer how to swallow, my tongue
_,
had forgotten its task.