Bladedancer (The Sword Saint Series Book 4)

by Michael Wallace

  “Not us, only me, but yes, I will go back to the mountain. For a start. And it has to be now. There’s only one dragon awake at the moment—the other two have retreated to their lakes to nurse their wounds. That won’t last forever, not with their elder brother calling for them to resume the war.”

  Kozmer twisted his hands on his staff. “If you go alone, you’ll die.”

  “That is the likely result, yes. Whether I go alone or with the lot of you.” Narina turned to Katalinka. “Keep pumping the bellows. I want it good and hot.”

  “Then it’s suicide you’re intending,” Kozmer said. “Narina, I know you want to save the boy, but this is not the way to do it.”

  She ignored him. “Drazul, you can resist fire. That’s how you train your apprentices, isn’t it? That’s how you maintain your own power. Stick your hand into the coals and show me.”

  The firewalker elder gave her a sharp look. “I can resist it. But it hurts, and not all fires are created equal. A forge isn’t like walking over glowing coals. It’s a good deal hotter.”

  “It had better be. It needs to melt the auras of steel so they can be folded into a master blade. But what’s that to you? You were swallowed by a demon. You stayed alive in its belly for how long? A couple of minutes maybe? You didn’t burn alive. Go ahead, I want to see.”

  “Drazul had the help of sowen when the demon took him,” Kozmer said, “his own and Sarika’s. And it was hardly by choice that he went down the monster’s throat. Do you really need him to do this?”

  “He still has his sowen, and you can help him resist if you can. In fact, it’s better if you do. I need to see something.” When he gave her a sharp look, she added, “There’s a point to this, Kozmer, a deadly serious one. I would never hurt Drazul on a whim.”

  “Go on,” Miklos said. “Do what she asks.” A funny look came over his face. “I’m interested, at least. If the old man can stand the heat, that is.”

  Drazul furrowed his brow into a look of intense concentration. He rolled up his sleeve and thrust his hand toward the glowing mass of coals. His sowen wrapped around his hand and wrist, and Kozmer threw his into further buffering the old man from the heat and pain.

  Narina didn’t take her eyes off Drazul as his hand inched toward the fire. “I’ve been wondering what happened to Sarika’s sword when the demon king ate her,” she said. “I assume the monster swallowed the weapon. I didn’t think about it at the time, but then I started wondering about the steel as it went down.”

  Narina took over the pumping of the bellows while Drazul put his hand onto the coals, no change in his expression. She’d worked the bellows hundreds of times and knew the exact amount of time to let pass between each pump. She counted her strokes carefully as the firewalker elder pushed his entire hand into the coals. Beads of sweat stood out on his brow, and a vein throbbed in his forehead, but he did not cry out.

  “The lava emerging from the volcano was bright orange,” Narina said. “That’s the hottest color. By the time the lava came down the canals, it had faded to a dull red. Cooler, more sluggish. The demons are roughly that hot when they leave the fire. They can survive cooler temperatures for a few minutes, fight on until they’ve hardened. Then there are their weapons—fiery lashes, spears, clubs, and the like—but I’ve been hit by those, and I think they’re cooler still.”

  Drazul gasped and withdrew his hand. The skin was scorched an angry red, and Narina winced at the pain she’d caused in order to make a point. No, that was wrong. She needed to prove her theory.

  Narina stopped working the bellows and went outside, where there was a bucket of water that had been used for quenching steel. A cap of ice had formed over the top, and she broke it and fished it out. Once back inside, she pushed aside the others and ordered Drazul to stick his hand into the bucket. He winced and drew in his breath sharply as his flesh hit the water.

  “Have you made your point?” Katalinka asked. “Can we heal Drazul yet?”

  “Go ahead.”

  With all of them working together, it wasn’t difficult to ease the old man’s pain, and within moments the skin had formed blisters, shed them, and begun to heal, even as the hand remained submerged. Drazul looked a little gray, but otherwise all right as he pulled his hand out of the water.

  “I have to know,” Narina said, when Drazul seemed well enough to talk. “Is the fire in the forge hotter or colder than the inside of a demon?”

  Drazul looked thoughtful. “The forge is hotter. It broke through my defenses. Would have charred my hand black in another few seconds.”

  Narina gave a satisfied nod. “That’s what I thought. Not as hot as the bright orange lava coming out of the volcano, but hotter than the canals the demons were crawling out of. The demons on the road you saw fighting the dragons must have cooled further. The inside of the demon would have been hotter than the outside, hotter than their weapons.”

  Drazul looked down at his healing skin, still dripping water. “Believe me, I was lucky to be alive when Sarika cut me out.”

  “But the demon’s belly was cooler than the forge, that’s my point.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Katalinka had looked skeptical through all of this, and now shook her head. “What does this have to do with anything?”

  Narina smiled. “The demons wounded two dragons. They did it with fire and heat, turning snow into rain, then steam, and cutting the dragons with their lashes and attacking with claws and teeth. My point is that all of their weapons are cooler than the heat of this forge.”

  “Narina, there were a lot of demons that day,” Katalinka said. “A whole army of them.”

  “I know, and it wasn’t just that day. It was a hard-fought battle over many fronts before the dragons fled to their lakes. But the dragons can be wounded. They are not invulnerable. It takes the right weapons. It takes fire.”

  Narina let that sink in before continuing.

  “I have two demon swords, forged right here in this shed. My father made one, I made the other. They are strong enough to cut through a dragon’s frozen hide.”

  “Not a dragon,” her sister said. “The Great Drake. You think your swords are sufficient?”

  “I’m not fool enough to think I could kill it, but I could do some damage. And if I’m lucky, I’ll accomplish that before it destroys me. That’s the first step of my plan.”

  Kozmer, Drazul, and Katalinka still looked skeptical and confused, but a thoughtful expression came over Miklos’s face, and a smile touched the corner of his mouth, not entirely confident, but not the smile of a man about to die, either. That gave Narina hope that her plan wasn’t pure foolishness.

  “And then what?” Kozmer asked. “You’ve gone to Manet Tuzzia, provoked a fight, and wounded the monster. Not enough to drive it back to its lake, but enough to make it angry. Make it try to kill you. How do you win the battle?”

  “I’m not intending to defeat the dragon at the mountain. Only provoke it. A bee sting, and then I’ll run for my life. I’ll run here.” Narina gestured at the coals, still glowing from the bellow pumping moments earlier. “Where the three of you will be waiting with tools of heat and fire to ambush it.”

  “Demons take me,” Miklos said, his smile fading. “When you put it that way. . .you want us to mount an ambush? It sounds like suicide. Did you see the size of that thing?”

  “I saw its shadow,” she said. “It’s big, but I’m not sure its size is the most terrifying thing about it.”

  “Well, then?” Miklos said.

  “Ruven is dying,” Narina said. “He has a day or two left, at most, and that’s with everyone fighting to keep his heart from freezing.”

  “He’s one child,” Miklos said. “Not to be callous, but thousands have died in this war. Each of them was important to someone. You are important to people, to your temple. Don’t throw your life away for the sake of the boy.”

  “It isn’t just Ruven,” she said. “There’s a dragon plugging Manet Tuzzia wit
h ice. A glacier will flow from its heights and crush the surrounding land. Winter will come, and the snowfalls will be measured by the foot, each and every day. The other two dragons will heal themselves of their wounds and emerge from their lakes. The land will freeze, and everything will die. Everything and everyone. Peasants, crowlords, temple warriors.”

  Narina paused, waiting for someone to refute her or come up with an alternate plan.

  “We could let that happen,” she said, “or we could take this chance and fight the one dragon while it’s alone.”

  They took deep breaths and looked at each other, as if searching for some way out of what she’d proposed.

  “I’ll come back,” she added. “I’ll stand by your side when we attack it with the heat of our forge. We’ll either win this together, or we’ll die together. Either way, we’ll have done everything we can.”

  Kozmer cleared his throat. “So this is your plan. You go to the mountain, you wound it, you somehow survive. You then make it home in time to face the inevitable counterattack.”

  Narina nodded. Yes, exactly. There were hard swallows from the others.

  “How will you sneak up on it?” Kozmer asked. “The dragon can see through your sowen. It can sense your intent from a distance. It can move faster than you, and attack before you get within two hundred yards. It can pummel you with ice and snow just by opening its mouth.”

  “I know.”

  “And even then,” he pressed, “when you wound it, it will hunt you down on the road—which is now covered with three feet of ice and snow, remember—and crush you from above. How will you possibly get to the volcano and back without dying?”

  Narina forced a smile that she didn’t feel. “Getting there and back again is the easy part,” she said. “I’m going to fly.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Narina’s breath came out in puffs as dawn rose over the plains. She’d scaled the hillside above the temple hoping to get a view of the crown of Manet Tuzzia. She was unsure how this flying thing would work—she probably wouldn’t be turning into a crow like Damanja had managed—but thought if she could see her destination, she’d have a better chance of at least traveling in the right direction.

  The wind blowing from the heights was chill, but also very dry. It picked up snow left from yesterday’s attack, drove it into drifts in the woods, and left a suspended, crystalline haze shimmering in the air as the first rays of dawn struck. In its light she glimpsed the plains beyond the canyon peaks. A pall still hung over the farthest eastern stretches, but most of the smoke looked to have been pushed toward the sea by the mountain winds.

  How many people lived on those plains? Millions, perhaps, living in thousands of villages along the entire length of the island. They’d always suffered under the whip and sword of their masters, but the war between demons and dragons had spread untold misery beyond their experience or comprehension. War had burned them from their homes, and now a killing frost would destroy what remained of their crops.

  If she didn’t stop the Great Drake, it wouldn’t be only Ruven and the temple warriors who died, but all the survivors below. Winter would come, a winter without end.

  This thought dragged her gaze to Manet Tuzzia, which lurked to the south, growing above the eastern edge of the range. The volcano, so recently silenced, now sported a white crown, and there was a huge, ominous cloud overhead. A line of smaller, but equally dark clouds came scudding in from higher in the range, moving at a good clip. They struck the cloud over Manet Tuzzia, and there seemed to stall as the dark mass continued to grow.

  Narina closed her eyes against a stiff gust that blew her cloak behind her. She rested her hands on the hilts of her demon blades. They were warm, as if carrying the residual heat of the forge. In reality, it was her sowen heating them. She slid her father’s sword clear and felt its comforting, familiar weight in her hand. A weapon that she knew, and that knew her. It was very nearly an extension of her arm. She removed the more recently forged master demon next. It was restless in her grip. Eager to be tested, eager to kill.

  She’d bathed, put on clean clothes, and strapped her leggings to her calves. Pulled back her hair into a bun with her mother’s silver clasp holding it in place. Gathered her sowen through meditation, followed by a brief, almost ritual-like sparring session with Katalinka. The sisters had used real swords—each armed with a pair of black demon blades—but had moved in a dance through the battle, swinging and dodging and blocking each other’s swings with exaggerated movements, not designed to break through defenses, but rather to prepare them for the battle ahead.

  “It might come down to you,” Narina had told her. “If I fall, you’re the last defense.”

  “I’m too slow. You’ve moved beyond me with your mastery.”

  “You won’t be fighting me. You’ll be attacking the Great Drake.”

  Katalinka’s lips had pressed briefly into a line. “Yes, exactly. If I’m fighting the dragon, it means you’ve fallen. And if you’ve fallen, what hope do I have?”

  “We don’t know that. We don’t know anything.” Narina had kept her tone warm, encouraging. Like a master sohn speaking to her student at a moment of maximum vulnerability. Hopefully, her sister didn’t take that the wrong way. “You were called to battle, and so was Miklos. Each of you has the same set of weaknesses and advantages I have in understanding what it takes to defeat this creature.”

  Now, as she stood on the ledge, preparing her sowen, a flicker of doubt crossed her mind. So many had fallen already. One temple had been destroyed, and its last sohn master killed. The other was abandoned, its people a remnant of their former strength and reliant on the mercy of others to survive.

  And then there was the bladedancer temple. Looking down at the shrine, with frost clinging to its roof, and the forge below, already busy with smoke, with a multitude of clanking hammers ringing through the chill air, it was hard not to remember that this might be their last day. By tonight, the temple might lay crushed beneath thirty feet of ice and snow, its people frozen corpses and its buildings obliterated from the earth. If the ice ever did thaw some generations hence, and people resettled this land from across the Narrow Sea, the moving, grinding sheets of ice would have assured that no remnant would remain, no clue as to the people who had given their lives to defend this place.

  These thoughts were poisonous, debilitating. Narina shook them from her head, angry with herself. She could allow no doubt, not if she were to master the task ahead of her. She closed her eyes, crossed her swords in front of her, and crouched at the very lip of the rocky ledge. She let her sowen feel her surroundings, test the auras of the ground, the trees, the soil. Finally, she reached for the wind itself.

  I am a bird. I am a crow. The wind will lift me and carry me where I wish, even into the clouds themselves. Raise me on wings, and speed me to my destination.

  Narina jumped.

  #

  Katalinka was standing over the forge, hammering at an arrowhead with sweat pouring down her temples, when she heard a tremendous whooshing sound, felt the air suck past her with a blast so strong it practically lifted her from her feet, and glanced up to see a figure overhead, dark against the morning sky.

  It was Narina. She soared through the sky with her cloak flapping behind like the tail of some giant bird. Katalinka’s sister had clipped back her hair, but the rush of wind had already torn loose whatever she’d pinned it with, and it spread behind her. She held her demon blades overhead, and they glinted like black obsidian. The sword saint—for that was what Narina had truly become—rose higher and higher, moving faster and faster, until she’d disappeared out of view.

  There had been a brief pause as those working outside had stopped to watch, and then the clanking, banging, and shouting started again, faster than ever. Warbrand students carried in blocks of steel with faces straining from the effort, while firewalkers, covered in soot and dripping with sweat, heaved baskets of charcoal to feed the forge. Fraters worked at the
forge or ran in and out of the shed to the anvils placed outside, where the two sohns worked their respective crafts.

  Miklos labored at an anvil next to her, wielding hammers in both hands, which he used to pummel at a spear point as long as Katalinka’s forearm, while a young woman from his temple held the steel with tongs, turning it over again and again as it cooled. He looked like a man possessed, his bare chest steaming in the cold air, muscles bulging in his arms and shoulders, and a vein throbbing at his neck. The auras of the steel shimmered as he folded them.

  Katalinka returned to her own efforts, holding a pair of smaller hammers, while Bartal swapped pieces of hot steel in and out for her to work. Arrowheads weren’t her specialty, but Kozmer stood over her left shoulder, offering advice in a low voice while he gave her boosts from his sowen whenever she flagged or misstruck an arrowhead.

  “How are we going to fire these things?” she asked as Bartal quenched the arrowhead and grabbed a pair of tongs holding a glowing shard of steel from a frater, who then took the quenched piece back to the forge.

  “The warbrands are at the mill,” Kozmer said, “making spear and arrow shafts from staves of ash wood. The firewalkers are working there, too, crafting bows.”

  Katalinka hammered at the new piece of steel in silence until she had it flattened out. Somewhere behind her came the grind of a sharpening stone. A number of points were already waiting to be fit to their shafts. When she finished, she turned back to the elder.

  “I’m no expert on bows, but anything made in so short a time is going to be clumsy at best. What about the strings? Do we have enough sinew?”

  “Rawhide,” Kozmer said. “It will serve. Drazul is there, making sure everything is as skillfully made as possible. Given our limitations, that is.” He cleared his throat. “The point is not the delivery mechanism—don’t focus on that. Sowen will see the shots fly true. It’s the steel, the auras, and the heat we put into it.”

  She had to stop again to work the next arrowhead, and then there was a steady pace of the things coming and going, and she concentrated on the work at hand. They’d been working for several hours already, and some of the others were starting to flag, even as she and Miklos seemed to be gaining strength. The curse had worked permanent changes, it seemed.