A Sword Named Truth

by Sherwood Smith

  So he said, “No. I would not.”

  Clair nodded. “Then I have something to tell you. In Wan-Edhe’s magic chambers, Senrid, one of the people who went there yesterday, said there is a book on the big table, open to a page you ought to see, first thing.”

  Jilo found no point in saying anything more. He gathered his concentration enough to make a short transfer spell, to the usual Destination point at the base of Mount Marcus, at the edge of the Shadowland.

  The transfer worked, leaving him with the usual vertigo. He blinked, breathing deeply, his eyes tearing up from the strong sunlight. He raised a hand to shade them as best he could, and squinted around.

  Instead of the long stretch of darkness to the east, shrouded by the dense vapor-bounded city above, he perceived the sloping line of the mountain, visible in the bright sunlight. Terraced down the east side, the tile rooftops clearly visible from where he stood, was the Mearsiean capital, roads a jumble of brick and tile. It would take a year to clean that up, he thought.

  More important, it had completely buried the Shadowland fortress and its outlying buildings. The Shadowland really was gone. A faint pall of dust still scintillated high in the air, and another tiny quake rolled through.

  Jilo stared at the aprons of rockfall that had cascaded down the rest of the mountain, smothering scrubby brush. This was all that was left of Kwenz’s castle. All Kwenz’s belongings. All Jilo’s, not that he’d owned much beside the clothes he stood up in. Chwahir prentices were always dependent on their masters. Now all of it was gone.

  Where were Kwenz’s servants? Though Wan-Edhe would have had no compunctions about squashing them under a mountainside—in fact, he would have enjoyed the prospect—Jilo suspected that the waxers would have a moral objection to crushing enemies who hadn’t been on the attack. Oh, yes, Puddlenose had said something about scuttling in all directions.

  Now Jilo understood what that meant: the Mearsieans had gone through the Shadowland chasing people out while the cloud was descending.

  Jilo squinted up the mountain, the daylight painful on his magically altered eyes. Tears leaked down his cheeks, but he ignored them as he studied the few spires of Clair’s castle that were visible from this vantage, glinting in a sky murderously bright.

  Wan-Edhe’s harsh voice echoed in his ears, You have a single goal. One goal! To take that white castle. And you can’t even do that.

  And Prince Kwenz’s snivelly reply, You don’t understand how much magic is on that castle. To which Wan-Edhe would snarl, Of course I do. Which is why I want it!

  Jilo turned away, hating the place all over again. Looking at that glaring whiteness in sunlight was like knives stabbing his eyeballs. He’d have to find the spell to restore his eyes to normal, or he’d go blind.

  But first, he had to contemplate the idea that he was free.

  He belonged nowhere.

  He could do anything. Well, except he had only one skill, magic. According to Wan-Edhe he was incompetent at that, because the white castle on the mountain remained unconquered, in spite of all Prince Kwenz’s labors and Jilo’s mad studying of wards and how to break them.

  He turned around slowly. Southward, grassy hills stretched away into the meadows of No One’s Land, buffer between the Shadow and Wesset North, the Mearsiean province. To the west, the green line of the vast woodland that occupied the entire center of the kingdom, somewhere in the center of which lay Clair’s underground hideout. To the north, the mountain, bulking above him, and right there on his eastern side, the Mearsiean capital with its jumble of colorful tile roofs dotted the mountainside, connected by broken streets. He couldn’t see much beyond that.

  Jilo thought of the Land of the Chwahir, vast, desolate, its huge army waiting for its master to return from his latest gambit against his old enemies.

  Now no one was there.

  He gathered his strength, and concentrated, and made the transfer spell to take him halfway around the world.

  Chapter Six

  Narad, capital of Chwahirsland

  THE transfer room in Wan-Edhe’s great fortress was empty.

  Jilo steadied himself on the wall.

  Transfer magic was always wrenching, but for some reason, transferring to Narad hurt so very much worse.

  When the black spots faded from his vision, he opened the heavy, iron-reinforced oaken door and took a cautious peek down the torchlit stone corridor. As always the light worried at his eyes, sending stabbing pains through his head, but that was part of life in Narad Fortress. In the Shadowland castle, Kwenz had kept the torches high, above his soldiers’ lines of sight. Wan-Edhe would never have made any such accommodation. Flickering light did not bother his eyes, and as long as he was comfortable, anything else was pandering to weakness.

  If Norsunder had held the city, Jilo knew he would have transferred straight into a trap. Perhaps Norsunder was going to permit Wan-Edhe to return if he performed whatever it was they had required of him. A quick look around disclosed that nothing had changed. The fortress, the city, the kingdom waited, without the tiniest deviation from standing orders, for Wan-Edhe to return.

  Jilo had nowhere else to go. Nothing to do. If Wan-Edhe or Norsunder appeared, he would be dead anyway. So why not see how far he got?

  So. The first thing Jilo needed to do was find the spell to restore his eyes to normal. He left the heavy door open and proceeded with care.

  Jilo did not know how Clair and her allies had managed to gain entry, but it couldn’t have been through the regular transfer room. The way from there to Wan-Edhe’s private chambers was so laden with traps that the air felt thick, and smelled of burnt metal. Jilo used one of the secret passages.

  How silent the fortress was! It had been afternoon in Mearsies Heili, so it had to be hours short of dawn in Narad, Chwahirsland’s capital city.

  The weight of stone seemed to press on Jilo’s bones. Strange. Jilo had felt no such weight when he was the Mearsieans’ prisoner, and yet he’d been underground.

  He smelled dust, and mildew, and stone, and steel, and stale sweat: the smells of power, and of fear, familiar as his own hands.

  The stone wall of a secret passage slid silently open on judiciously greased pintles. At the top of the narrow stairs, he slid another door open, into an empty corridor leading to rows of uninhabited rooms.

  This was the private Sonscarna family wing, where the magical wards had always been thickest, as Wan-Edhe did not trust his own guards in his private quarters. The fortress guard clustered below, company upon company, guarding night and day against an attack that no one had dared to mount since Wan-Edhe had caught his last grandson in a plot, and had him and his twi, and their families’ twia, all put to death before the entire city.

  Jilo entered the magic chambers. The glowglobes cast blue-white light at the edge of Jilo’s tolerance, making that lump at the back of his head throb. The shelves of books seemed untouched, oldest on top, some snow-gray with piled dust. Old records, those. And old lists of proclamations and laws.

  On the great work table, just as Clair had said, lay one of Wan-Edhe’s private workbooks. There was the tiny, crabbed handwriting, a combination spellbook and diary, which surprised Jilo. Maybe it shouldn’t. The only person Wan-Edhe really trusted besides his dungeon master was himself. Of course he would write a journal about himself. Puddlenose had said once that Wan-Edhe found himself the most interesting, as well as the most important, person in the world. He is, Jilo remembered saying. Stupidly. No, he spends a lot of time and power making you think he is, Puddlenose had said. And then escaped, yet again, helped by some mysterious mage Puddlenose called Rosey.

  Jilo had never been able to escape, much less discover who Rosey was and why he aided Puddlenose. Because he was stupid.

  A quill lay at an angle across one page, and all the wards had been lifted from the book. Jilo lifted the quill, and nothing
happened. He bent to decipher the writing, which was a mix of dark magic language and Chwahir.

  The date was three years previous. Someone had been paging through the book.

  Kwenz does not want the loyalty spell on that fool he’s training. He will know if I perform it, so I will give the fool this instead. And, after he’s proven to be worthless, he will be replaced with someone of my choosing.

  ‘The fool.’ Wan-Edhe had never granted anyone the dignity of their name. He’d always issued a label for others, usually diminishing, mostly insulting. Like Puddlenose. Jilo was the fool.

  Jilo blinked against eyestrain, a headache already throbbing through his skull as he labored to recover his previous thought. Fool? Names? Oh yes. The book. Eyes. Below that bit pointed out by the quill was a notation, the name of a spell. Jilo looked at the book lying next to the great one. It was an older one, slim, its binding cracked. Jilo followed the cryptic notation—categories of numbers—until he found a match to the notation.

  He read the antidote to the spell three times, and then—slowly—performed it. The faint snap made him dizzy and skin-prickly, followed rapidly by a rush of sensation so strong that he stumbled backward into Wan-Edhe’s big wingchair, which smelled rank with old grime, sweat, and mildew. He breathed through his mouth, his heartbeat loud in his ears. Sensation streamed through his mind, the mental fireflies so plenteous and bright that he became more giddy, not less. He blinked rapidly, then looked around, dazed. The dull stone, begrimed by centuries, glinted with thousands of subtle shades.

  Was he dying?

  No. Death could not be this amazing breadth of subtle coloration, the speed of thoughts, the heightened detail of sound: his own breathing, wind soughing against stone, and, beyond the window slits, the rhythmic clatter of marching sentries in one of the stone courtyards far below. Even the variety of odors in the stale air.

  The meaning of the note seeped through the sensory brilliance.

  He had been enchanted. These things he was seeing, feeling, thinking? This was normal thought and sensation! This was the way he’d been when he was little, when Kwenz had taken Jilo from the lowly Quartermaster Dzan and made him his apprentice.

  Wan-Edhe had befogged his mind and his movements, quite deliberately. A fogged mind would never lead a coup. Would never originate one.

  Anger burned corrosively through Jilo.

  He stood up, and again almost overbalanced. Had his strength increased? He tried jumping around, then slammed his hand on the table. Ow. No, no extra strength. The change was more subtle; he felt easier in his body, a readiness to move. Before, it had taken more thought, more concentration just to walk around without colliding into unexpected doorways, corners, furniture, as his depth perception had been untrustworthy.

  Before, he couldn’t have even had that thought about depth perception.

  Jilo laid aside the book of mind-altering spells for later study, and searched for the spells that altered the physical self. Though he could perceive color, he could also perceive a sense of glare, of visual distortion: the Shadow spell enhancing darkness vision.

  His stomach growled, reminding him of the Mearsieans, with their astonishing variety of foods.

  No one knew what Wan-Edhe ate because he never ate with anyone, but Kwenz, in recent years, had only taken gruel. Old man’s food. Jilo had had a choice: either eat gruel with Kwenz, or go to the mess with the soldiers. Their food wasn’t much better, all the ingredients boiled together except for the bread. That was life in the military. Anything else was decadent weakness.

  Prisoners got what the soldiers didn’t, or wouldn’t, eat, days old and cold. Once a day. If that. He wasn’t hungry enough to face mess hall food, so he bent over the books again and got to work.

  * * *

  —

  The light of day grayed the narrow slit window out in the hall when at last he found the spell to restore his eyes to normal. He performed it, and pain lanced through his head. When he dared to open his eyes again, the chamber had shadowed to gloom. He swayed, dizzy, then clapped, and the glowglobes brightened.

  Color had both intensified and become more subtle in its gradations. Light didn’t hurt. He thought of the Shadowland warriors on board ship, and how painful their vision must be out on the water, with little shadow to protect them. He’d have to remove the spell, but he needed strength first.

  He walked to the window, and looked down.

  There in the great courtyard, the first drill of the day had commenced. Jilo watched the wheeling soldiery marching, turning, raising swords, slashing, all in unison.

  It was like a body moving when the head was gone.

  He turned around. There lay the great book, it and the antidote to that spell an unexpected gift from Clair of Mearsies Heili, the old enemy. It was an inexplicable gift. She could have kept it from him. Jilo remembered the fogginess of his mind, and shook his head. He never would have found the book, much less the spell: he would have blundered into one of the wards or traps he could feel all around him.

  Experience dictated wariness. He’d endured lengthy sessions with Wan-Edhe lecturing about how no one gave gifts without expectation. Life was a struggle for power. Offense, defense.

  Jilo looked around, sensing thick skeins of dark magic. A few minor protection wards were gone, but a dense miasma of enchantment still bound the old stone. Wan-Edhe had never trusted anyone; his favorite experiments were control of mind and will. And his favorite victims had been his own family, and then Puddlenose’s family, first his uncle. Wan-Edhe had loved the exquisite cruelty inherent in the idea of sending Clair’s own cousin against her.

  The first thing to do was to find the wards and traps, and then maybe to turn them all against Wan-Edhe. That, too, would take strength. But then, there was no one else to do it. And Jilo had spent ten long, and very hard, years being tutored in one area of dark magic: wards. The idea of turning all that learning against Wan-Edhe instead of that blinding white castle burned through Jilo in such intense joy it made him giddy. Or maybe that was hunger.

  As Jilo walked to the door, his stomach growled more insistently. His last meal had been the braised fish and rice with chopped greens that Puddlenose had brought him . . . when? It didn’t matter.

  He stood there thinking. No one would dare to walk into the throne room at the other end of the wing and sit down. Jilo knew his fellow Chwahir. Wan-Edhe had picked his subordinates for their steadfast, unquestioning obedience, and horrific punishments awaited anyone who erred. Wan-Edhe was also reputed to have spent magic in fashioning spy-windows all over the castle, so he could be watching at any time.

  But one thing Jilo had learned in his secret reading of Chwahir history: if enough time went by, and things got really bad, there would be mass uprisings. Unless someone stepped in, right now, and took command. Not just of this room, or the fortress.

  Right now.

  Someone like . . .

  Someone . . .

  Why not? He loved magic studies, and puzzles, and here was a wealth of both. He had nowhere to go, and nothing to lose. Nothing but his life, and that had been in danger for so long that it was a given.

  He walked out of Wan-Edhe’s library, his shoes scuffing on the stones. In the heavy, stale, burnt-metal air, the silence reminded Jilo of snakes moving, or of the whisper of bound spirits.

  He looked around, but the idea refused to settle into his mind; instead, questions flickered through, leaves on a cold wind, whirling with increasing speed.

  He stopped at the great double doors. It took both hands and all his strength to throw back the huge cast-iron bolt. Usually the guard did that in the morning.

  Jilo gripped the door, and swung it open. He let it crash into the wall, a dull, flat sound.

  Three runners sat silently on their bench, waiting to be summoned. All three looked up in mute question, not quite surprise. The miasma o
f heavy magic was too dense for that.

  “Wan-Edhe is gone,” Jilo said, watching them recoil reflexively. “And Prince Kwenz. The Shadowland over on the Toaran continent is no more as well.”

  Shock stripped all personality from the three faces. The first reaction, when the shock began to diffuse, was fear.

  “For now, carry on as before.” And then he knew instinctively what his second command ought to be. “Tonight, double rations for all, including ale.”

  The only reward they’d felt reasonably sure of was food. Promotion had been rare, and arbitrary; much more frequent had been punishment.

  Food. Jilo’s stomach growled, and he remembered his own hunger, and he thought of what waited down in the kitchens. Food the only reward, and that was stuff that a bunch of barefoot girls in Mearsies Heili—enemies all—would turn their noses up at.

  What pitiful lives we have, Jilo thought, continuing past the runners down the stairs to the great halls. He would change that.

  He heard whispers, one fierce, another voice edged with nerve-grating anxiety: “What does he mean, Wan-Edhe is gone? Wan-Edhe will never be gone. He said so himself.”

  And the answer, “It’s a loyalty test. Didn’t he just say ‘carry on as before’?”

  “When Wan-Edhe comes back, he’ll want to see everything as he left it.”

  When Wan-Edhe comes back.

  Jilo walked away, aware of the tightened gut, the tremble in his limbs, the fear gripping the back of his neck, aware that he believed in Wad-Edhe’s return as strongly as they did.

  Norsunder couldn’t stop Wan-Edhe. Nothing could.

  * * *

  Mearsies Heili, the Junky

  We are coming at last to the birth of the alliance, which was the result of no grand council or far-seeing strategy on the part of the wise and powerful.

  Quite the opposite.

  As soon as Jilo left the girls’ hideout, the rest of Clair’s gang began to appear from their bedrooms, until all seven girls joined Clair and CJ. They were a disparate group, ages roughly from eleven to fifteen, from all kinds of backgrounds. All were either outcasts or runaways, adopted by Clair.