The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (48 page)

By this time, these two statements didn
’t even seem remarkable.  What was disturbing was that he seemed to be done.  No more commentary, no more illumination, not even more observations about their skepticism.  They looked at each other furtively as he just sat there calmly, as if waiting for the next topic.  More than just disappointment, it was a faint sense of panic that stole over the little group.

This had been their last chance.  They had no other clues, no other options, short of a trip to the Sheelshard itself.  Ari, especially, felt the twinges of desperation working on him.  They
’d come so close.  They’d come so far.  How could it end here?  All they’d been through and it was just going to peter out into an even bigger mystery than when it had started?

Rodge sighed rather explosively, muttering under his breath with his resilient irreverence,
“Maybe we should ask the unicorns.”

Silverene gave him an even look. 
“This is not the time for the chasing of fairytales.”  Rodge stared, looking like someone had moved the earth out from underneath his feet. 

“
No,” he said faintly.  “What was I thinking?”

“
There is no other way to avoid this war?” Traive asked quietly.  “We feel time forbids the search for the Statue, that it lies somewhere far beyond our knowledge.”

“
War in some form wilt come, regardless.”  A fresh round of dismay circled the group.  Silverene, ignoring the despair he was causing, continued mercilessly, “But if Raemon returns, the Realms as we know them will cease to be.  The First Mage foresaw Truth.”

This wasn
’t improving any.  Ari fought the rising tide of defeat.  It couldn’t be over.  They couldn’t give up.  There had to be more, somewhere, somehow…his whole life had become wound up in this journey, the answers to his murky past hand-in-hand with the answers to their quest.  The finding of the Statue had somehow become indistinguishable from the finding of his own life’s history—

Suddenly he stopped.  Stopped breathing, thoughts frozen
.  Stopped moving, staring into space with a feeling like ice creeping over him from one end to the other.  His eyes watered with the import of what he’d just discovered, his mouth dry as cotton.

“
I know where it is,” he said hoarsely.  Silverene’s eyes, like sunlit mist, turned calmly, expectantly, unsurprised, to look at him.  So did everyone else’s.  It had been more dry garble than words, and Loren patted him bracingly, as if to ward off an awkward comment.  “Not now, Ari,” he whispered.

He sucked in a breath, then two. 
“I know where it is,” he managed, louder and more comprehensible.

“
Know where what is?” Melkin demanded, keen eyes impatient.

“
The Statue.”

No one made a sound.  Most stared at him blankly, like he
’d grown an ear out of the middle of his forehead. 

“
You couldn’t have mentioned this a few months ago?” Rodge asked in astonishment.  Ari felt the uncomfortable weight of everyone’s eyes boring into him, but before anyone else could speak, Silverene’s deep voice broke the silence.

“
Thou hast fireblood,” he said, as if remarking on the weather.  Ari had never heard that term before, but it didn’t take much intuition to figure it out.  He felt his face grow as hot as his tell-tale hair.

“
I’m an orphan,” he explained, tongue inexplicably loosened by the last few minutes.  It was as if releasing the memory of the Statue that he’d played around for all those years made it somehow easier to talk about, had brought the insecurity of his past into the sunlight.  He
knew
those memories were true now, in some sense, not just dreams he’d made up out of longing.

“
I was raised by Illian nuns, in a convent in southern Cyrrh.  When I was about four, Loren’s father found me on a trip south and took me in.”  He was rather proud at how steady his voice was, especially with those knowing eyes on him.  He glanced at his best friend, who was staring at him like he’d never seen him before.

“
Go on,” Melkin said, not one to be distracted by sentiment. “Where’s the Statue?”

“
The convent had a garden, overgrown, and I used to play in there all the time.  That’s where it is.  Buried under a bunch of old rose and bramblevines in this very Realm.”  He dropped his eyes, embarrassed it had taken so long to remember it, but mostly ridiculously warmed by the memory of the place.

Melkin whipped hi
s simmering intensity onto Kai, which would have reduced a lesser man to a gibbering idiot.

“
I know where it is,” the Dra assured him calmly.  Melkin, ready to go flying off the cliff right then with or without a gryphon, half rose and shot Traive a let’s-wrap-this-up look.

But Silverene was not done.  His eyes still rested heavily on Ari, unheeding of the machinations of the Wolfmaster and the fate of the world.
  He said very quietly, “There art no ‘Illian nuns.’  Nor is there anywhere a convent.  Thou wert raised, for some reason, by the Swords of Light themselves.”

Ari
’s jaw dropped.  Again everyone went quiet, eyes flicking uncomprehendingly from Ari to the centaur.  He swallowed, his throat so dry his adam’s apple grated.  A sweet warmth seemed to flow over his sore insides, an unbelievable relief at hearing such confirmation out loud.  He stared hungrily at the centaur with his brilliant eyes, wishing he dared ask how he knew. 
What
he knew.

“
Thou art more fortunate than thou canst know,” Silverene continued thoughtfully, and his deep voice dropped another octave, until it was more vibration than sound.  “The Swords do not raise mortal children.” 

CHAPTER
23

Sable, washed, dressed and impatient to start her first day at the Ramparts, met a startled Krysta at the door.  The Rach girl looked her over, nonplussed, and lamely offered her the breakfast tray, glancing out the window to see if she’d misgauged the daylight.  

“What is first this morning?” the Queen asked briskly, selecting fruit from the loaded tray and fresh, warm flat bread—none of last night
’s leftovers here.

Krysta looked uncertain.  “It was thought you might want to rest this morning.  It is a long trail from Crossing…though Kore said you rode with great endurance for a Northerner.”

“How kind,” Sable murmured sarcastically around a mouthful of apricot.  “I’m not an invalid,” she remonstrated crisply. 

“No, but you
’re Northern Royalty,” Krysta said, tone implying it was a marginally worse condition.

“What is the Lord Rach doing?” Sable asked
casually.

“There is usually swordplay for several hours in the morning—I expect he is there.”

Sword play.  Not sword practice, not training, but
play
.

So, Krysta led her down the long, wide flights of the Hilt stairs, accompanied by Evara, then Rorig, then two Hilt warriors—an accumulation of human baggage that reminded her again that her carefree days of comparative freedom were over.

Krysta took them to a ring encircled with waist-high stones that Rach were lying and leaning and lounging on.  The inside of the ring was heaped sand, empty but for two furiously sparring combatants.  None of this surprised Sable, nor did the level of noise or dust or heat this early in the morning.  What made her go still was the action in the ring.

They said that Drae swung the deadliest steel in the Realms.  That they moved like a striking snake and could use both swords simultaneously—and with equal effect.  Back in the days of Heroes, when it was in fashion to admire them, Drae swordwork had been called
‘dancing death’ for its lethal grace.  The furious clash of steel in front of her reminded Sable suddenly and strongly of all those romantic passages she’d found buried under dust in the Old Histories.

She wouldn
’t have wanted to pit any of them against a Rach.  Rorig moved up beside her, mesmerized, as well he might be.  This lightning fast spectacle was as different from the skill he’d used to win the Queensknight Challenge as North was from south.  In the North, they fought in pads and chainmail in the practice ring, as in war, but with wooden practice swords or—in the case of the Challenge—dulled steel.  Sable remembered it well (they were held every three years to make sure the freshest, sharpest skill was at the Queen’s elbow).  Remembered it as a long, tedious whacking and scuffling, with points going to first one opponent then the other in some mysterious assessment of skill determined by judges poring over rulebooks.

Here, the Rach were stripped to the waist, torsos bared to the blade and shining with sweat.  Naked, elegantly curved sabres flashed and arced and screeched against each other a hundred times a minute, a ceaseless, tumultuous exchange of rapid-fire blows and parries.  There was none of the great two-handed swings or dramatic footplay seen in Northern rings, and Sable had a feeling that no one was keeping track of points.

The two warriors shifted around in the boggy sand, steelsong never faltering, and the one whose back had been to them—turned out to be Kyr.

             
He had to practice, too, didn’t he? Sable asked herself, trying to quell the sharp spasm of    anxiety the sight of him produced.  Fortunately for her nerves, within the minute a bell was rung and the action abruptly ceased.  The two men, chests heaving, grinned and gripped each other’s forearms. 

             
“The Northern Queen!” someone bellowed suddenly, and instantly the ring went quiet as everyone fell to a knee.  She felt a flash of irritation, flavored with a tinge of regret; it wasn’t really her intent to disrupt everything in the surrounding area for the next week or so.  If Kyr was at Archemounte, he’d be lucky to get a nod from a serving maid.  He, of course, was the only one currently still on his feet, searching her out from across the ring.  He crossed quickly to her, face transparent with pleasure, still panting from his exertions.

             
Her cheeks pinkened against her will, and to forestall any of last night’s idiotic mental vacuum, she said, “A little sweat and steel to start the morning off?”

             
He grinned.  His smile could stop the world.  “I wanted to give you time to rest.”

             
“I’m rested,” she said briskly.  They treated her like she was made of glass.

             
“Good,” he crowed.  “Then let me show you around.”

             
“Don’t you want some breakfast first? Maybe…” she trailed off, gesturing vaguely at his slick chest and dripping hair. 
A bath.

             
But that was not the Rach way, everything at a set time, deliberate and scheduled.  The Rach, it seemed, liked to leave room for impulse and the unexpected, and Kyr was no exception.  He was tireless in his impetuousness, she’d found by the end of that first day, equally focused and flighty, able to be distracted by any toothless old woman or youngster wanting a ride in his strong arms.  And utterly consumed with the thought of the Enemy.  There was hardly any conversation that didn’t include them, somehow, so vital a part of the fabric of life here at the Ramparts of the Rach that they were virtually inseparable from it.

             
He showed her his horse—apparently a cultural mandate—who was a big, flaming red chestnut named Inferno that kicked the stable wall with enough force to topple a farm wagon and lunged at them across the stall door, screaming in fury. 

“We haven
’t been out in a couple days—he’s a little restless,” Kyr said fondly.  He showed her where Filigree was stabled nearby, shamelessly making eyes at the stallion, and how the great Stables of the Wings stretched the whole length of the Ramparts, separated from the outer wall by a broad causeway. 

             
“Sometimes they still breach the wall,” he confided.  “And we don’t want horses hurt…though it’s been a long time since we’ve seen action so close to the Ramparts.  For over a year now, there’ve been nothing but skirmishes far out in the Sheel, always instigated by the Wing patrols.”

             
The stalls were cavernous, the size of a small cottage, with arching ceilings far overhead that corresponded to the height of the outer wall.  They had deep water tubs of beaten copper, filled with water piped all the way from the Don Eshaid when it couldn’t be struck nearby.  Which was quite a feat for savages, Sable thought, a little smugly.  She was beginning to look forward to giving a report to her Council on the ‘primitive’ ways of these people.

             
Some of the stalls had tack hanging in sight in the soft, dust mote-ridden gloom, and she did a double-take at the first bridle she saw.  Intricately tooled leather, more evocative of Cyrrh than the Sheel, it was decorated in finely fashioned copper threading with unbelievable detail.  Copper was everywhere, but she saw silver and even gold decorating the saddles, bridles, blankets.

             
And a few yards away, exposed to the merciless sun in an endless row close alongside the whole length of the Ramparts, spread the beloved tents of the nomad.  It made Sable’s lips twitch.  There didn’t
exist
the Northern woman who would live in a tent while her husband’s horse wore silver and gold.

             
“Do they all live out here?” she asked Kyr, shading her eyes to try and see to the end of the line of gently billowing and highly decorated canvas housing.

             
“Aye,” he said in mock martyrdom.  “Only the Rach is bound by four walls, a sacrifice made in dedication to his people.”

             
During the early afternoon, when the Sheel lay shimmering like a furnace and the heat waves rose so thickly you could feel them as you walked across exposed ground, Kyr Stood in Judgment.  Most of the Ramparts were unabashedly napping during this time, (she thought she might leave that out of her report; it wasn’t the sort of thing a Northerner would understand), but Sable had to see at least one day of this.

             
He truly Stood—it wasn’t just an expression—one leg cocked, arms folded over his bare chest, the liquid pools of his eyes for once unmoving, whole being focused intently as he listened to his people.  She’d attended some of Kane’s vaunted Stone Bench sessions in Merrani, and the concept was roughly similar.  There was, of course, an utter absence of formality or ceremony, but that didn’t surprise her as much as the cases that came before him in that ancient sandstone chamber.

  A fifteen year-old Shaidian (all Rach were identified by the Wing they belonged to, and at fifteen this one was considered a man
and
a warrior) was fined for slighting his horse grain in order to give it to his comrade’s, who was sick.  A Faracen was ruled against for refusing landing to an insulting Merranic trader: contempt for your fellow man and dishonorable conduct.  Sentence: a year off the Ramparts herding cattle.  The warrior had tears in his eyes.

             
Two Phantoms, in what at first Sable thought was a standard water rights case, were in conflict because both refused the right from the other.  She listened with an increasing sense of unreality as Kyr carefully determined who had originally tapped the well and the reasons why neither would claim it.  He finally judged the one must take it out of responsibility to his wife, who was lame, and to his mother, who was gravely ill.  The loser left jubilant, arm consolingly around the winner’s shoulders.

             
But the last case had to top them all.  Two savage-looking men, bronzed dark by the sun and shaved completely bald, stalked to the center of the room.  One had boots made of some spotted wild cat and the other a belt that looked suspiciously like lion mane.  Their sign of submission and homage to the Rach was a fierce glare—they didn’t even pretend to dip their heads.  The outlandish dress apparently indicated the Sharhi-Tir, one of whom in this case had refused a gift of a horse from a warrior whose life he had saved.

             
Kyr’s response was to ask to see the horse.

             
This seemed perfectly normal and right-thinking, evidently; they’d even brought the horse with them, all the way from the Tamarisks in the far west.  It was led up the flight of stairs to the Rachar (also the name of the chamber where the Standings were held) and stood calmly with the unbelievable discipline of the Aerach.  Kyr walked measuringly around him, checking mouth and eyes and ears, picking up hooves, running his sure brown hands over the glossy coat.  He was a gorgeous bay with four white stockings, and Sable was quite sure there wasn’t an imperfection anywhere near him.

             
Kyr couldn’t find any, either.  He pronounced the gift must be accepted, though it would leave the owner temporarily without a warhorse—in order to honor the debt-burden.  And the two most feral, untamed-looking men Sable had ever seen acquiesced without a word.

             
That was the last case, and Sable remarked on the men as she left the chamber with Kyr.  He smiled wryly and said, “We joke that they’re Sheel-bred.”

             
She frowned up at him.  “Aren’t all Rach born on the Sheel?”

             
“Yes,” he said patiently.  “That’s what makes it funny—‘Sheel-bred’ is used to distinguish those beasts that have no purpose
off
the Sheel.”  Which humor escaped the Queen of the North.

             
The welcoming celebration started at dusk that night, in the magical peach-hued light of the desert’s setting sun.  The moon was out early, glowing silver in the rosy pink sky, and as they settled into the cushions laid out on brilliant woven mats (still no tables, chairs, or roof) it was easy to imagine she was back in the wilds of the Eshaid.  Sometimes it seemed the rugged traveling atmosphere of the Rach on the trail barely differed from the civilized air of the Rach at home.

             
Laughter and good will punctuated the glowing air as huge platters of grilled meat and fish (how had they kept fish cold enough to get it all the way to the Hilt?), desert tortoise soup (served out of an enormous orangey-tan carapace and into smaller ones), such an exotic variety of fruit that she couldn’t even name some of them, fresh coconut, dates and figs, creamy yogurt, and hot stacks of the delicious flat bread were all passed around.

             
Clear glass decanters (apparently, the Ishtans were glassmakers in their off-time) full of crystal cold water were kept filled, but there was no alcohol anywhere.  When she leaned over to ask Kyr teasingly if Rach couldn’t hold their liquor, he said drolly, “They’re more worried about missing a swordstroke—or worse, an entire battle—than in downing a glass of fermented fruit juice.”

             
Here, at the Ramparts, even festivals were tinged with the thought of the Enemy a wall’s thickness away.  What an odd thought, she considered as she nibbled an almond, to have such unpredictable danger, such insecurity, color your every activity and dictate your life.  Northerners would never stand for it.