Outcaste

by Fletcher DeLancey

  “She’s probably telling him that outcastes don’t have it so bad,” a woman commented.

  Rahel wanted to strike her.

  Lancer Tal and Shantu touched their sword grips together, sealing the challenge, and extended their swords. The combat began.

  Shantu was all fluid movement, his skill evidenced by the grace of his thrusts and parries. Lancer Tal was far more careful and conserved her energy. She had to, given both her disadvantage with the sword and her much smaller stature.

  She found an opening and kicked Shantu in the leg, barely missing his knee.

  “What the shek?” a woman called out. “I thought it was a sword fight!”

  “Rules don’t say they can’t use their hands and feet,” a man called back.

  Shortly after that, Lancer Tal broke Shantu’s nose and then crushed his weapon shoulder with the pommel of her sword. He paid her back with a slash to her ribs. Both of them paused, panting and probably shocked by their injuries.

  Lancer Tal was the first to resume the fight. Shantu switched hands and barely caught her blade in time. Their swords slid to the cross guards, and she kicked him again, this time right where she intended. Shantu nearly went down on his injured knee.

  Shouts and whistles rang through the tavern. “She’s whittling him down to size!” someone yelled.

  The fight grew more desperate after that. They battled across the chamber and back again, and Rahel frowned as Lancer Tal took one injury after another. Shantu’s superior skills were showing, and he was slicing her like a fish on deck, but she was still fighting.

  There was something odd about it. Of course Lancer Tal would be driven by desperation and the will to live, but she was fighting with the strength of two. She should have gone down by now. There were physical limits to what a body could do, no matter the incentive, and Rahel thought she was long past them.

  Then she did go down, kicked onto her back after Shantu disarmed her with a direct strike to her weapon arm. Many of the onlookers cried out in dismay as he stepped forward for the killing blow.

  “No!” someone sobbed in the far corner. “He can’t!”

  Lancer Tal was trying to push herself upright. Just before Shantu’s sword point could connect, she lashed out with a kick to his wounded knee.

  Rahel could not hear Shantu’s howl of pain over the shouts of relief and triumph in the tavern. But she saw it on his face as he fell. He struggled up again, trying to balance on his uninjured leg.

  Lancer Tal did not struggle. She leaped to her feet, strong and fresh as if she hadn’t been utterly exhausted five pipticks earlier, and raced to pick up her sword with her good hand. Then she whirled, took two steps, and drove it through Shantu’s chest.

  Rahel watched in horror as he folded over the blade impaled through his body, then slid to the floor. Blood pooled out beneath him as if a valve had been turned.

  The tavern erupted in ear-splitting cheers and a few groans. From what Rahel could tell, the groans came from those who had lost their bet. No one seemed to support Shantu’s cause.

  She stared at the vidscreen, staggered by the collapse of her world. Lancer Tal was sealing her victory, shouting that Fahla had chosen her champion, but all Rahel could see was the body on the floor.

  Shantu was dead. He had gambled everything on a sword fight and lost.

  She had lost with him. Her true father was gone, her career was gone, her protection was gone.

  Her honor was gone.

  Shantu would be made an outcaste, and without the legitimacy he could have given her actions, they were now the acts of a criminal.

  Any application she might make for a new job would instigate a check of her real caste records. Not only would that reveal her oath holder of the past sixteen cycles, but it would also unlock her biometric data. Shantu had locked it long ago, allowing her biometrics to show only for her Periso caste records. The two sets of records would be linked and everything would unravel.

  She was an outcaste again.

  48

  SOLACE IN THE STORM

  Rahel did not want to set foot in Blacksun. But if she had to live without a legitimate salary for the foreseeable future, she needed to sell her house.

  She was in the city when the merchants and warriors voted on whether or not to strip Parser and Shantu of their castes. While casting her vote, she wondered if it might be the sole one in the “no” column. Shantu’s death had elevated Lancer Tal to new heights of popularity while afflicting most of the population with a case of amnesia regarding his accomplishments. How people could forget what he had done for them—especially the people of Whitesun—she did not know.

  But they did. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of stripping, and by the next day, his name was already lost. When referring to him in news reports, journalists called him “the Challenger.”

  She wept the first time she heard it.

  He was not even given a proper pyre, instead buried in the ground for the worms to eat. Rahel wanted to dig up that abomination of a grave and send him to his Return properly, but the grave’s location was kept secret, no doubt to prevent people like her from doing the right thing.

  Her nightmares, debilitating even at the best of times, now hammered her with a vengeance. She was lucky to get two hanticks of sleep in a row. Sometimes she startled awake, managed to get back to sleep, and fell right back into the same nightmare.

  All she could think about was going home. She needed to stand on Dock One and listen to Wildwind Bay breathe. She needed to curl up in a hole somewhere on the bayfront and drink until she could sleep . . . and forget.

  When she had sold or donated most of her possessions, she cleaned out her house and put it up for sale. The market was good; it sold within two ninedays.

  By that time, she was already in Whitesun and very, very drunk.

  She never had much tolerance for warriors who drank to excess. They compromised their health, their training, their performance, and anyone who depended on them.

  These days, she had a better understanding of what might drive them. Perhaps they had the kinds of nightmares that would not let them sleep. Perhaps they had the kinds of regrets they could not think about. Perhaps their losses had shattered them to such a degree that spirits were the only thing that helped.

  Perhaps, like her, they had been pushed into a hole by an intolerable combination of all three.

  She went to Dock One only once. The wooden planks were new. The Voloth had blown up her Dock One, and the rebuilt version neither looked nor smelled right. It was just another loss to add to her pile, along with the new buildings that had replaced old, familiar ones which were too damaged to repair. She felt like a stranger in her own city every time she turned a corner and looked for a landmark that was no longer there.

  At least the builders had reconstructed their caste house to the same design, using the original stones. It had been a citywide effort, with volunteers from all six castes pitching in to collect and sort the stones. Rahel had not been there for the grand reopening, but heard it was an enormous party that took over the entire central park.

  Her new apartment was an easy magtran ride from her mother and Sharro, but she never went to their house. She didn’t even tell them she was in town. She had not called after Shantu’s death because she didn’t know what to say, and after that it became more and more difficult. How could she call now and say, “Yes, I’ve been here for two moons; sorry I never came by”?

  Worse than that, how could she ever explain why the name Hedron Periso was in the news as a criminal wanted for kidnapping and attempted murder?

  The bonding ceremony of Lancer Tal and Salomen Opah was a global holiday. For Rahel, it was a colossal inconvenience because all of the spirits shops were closed. She had not thought to stock up in advance and, of course, the event fell on a day when she ran out. She considered breaking into a store to get what she needed, but decided she hadn’t lost quite that much honor yet.

  When she watche
d the ceremony on the small vidscreen in her apartment, she wished she hadn’t been so honorable. The Lancer looked noble and happy, and Rahel hated her for it. That woman had killed Shantu. She had killed him and she had cheated to do it. Rahel had watched that footage a hundred times, and she knew something was wrong with it. There was no other explanation for why Lancer Tal’s strength had lasted so long, or the way it flagged and suddenly returned at the very end.

  She had killed Shantu, she had let the Voloth settle on Alsea, she had made Rahel an outcaste, and she didn’t deserve to be so shekking happy.

  At the ceremony’s end, the Lancer and Bondlancer laid their hands on the temple’s molwyn tree and made it burst into flaming radiance, just like in the old legends. The announcer babbled on about witnessing a miracle, while outside her window Rahel could hear people shouting and banging spoons on pans in celebration.

  Was she the only one who knew it was a fake? Lancer Tal had no shame; she would even cheat in a temple. There was no possibility that she, of all Alseans, was so beloved by Fahla as to produce an actual miracle.

  Rahel added this latest offense to her list of grievances.

  When the Lancer and Bondlancer returned from their bonding break, the matter printers were finally brought on line and made available to the public. People had talked as if there would be matter printers in every house, but they were kept in special warehouses that stored the base materials from which items were printed. A person who wanted to print something had to go to the nearest warehouse for it. Rahel did it once, just to see how it worked, and found the list of available items more limited than she had expected.

  “What if I want tailored trousers?” she asked the engineer who was explaining its operation to customers. “Can’t I just input my measurements and print them out?”

  The engineer shook her head. “You can print baseline trousers, but you’d have to take them to a tailor to have them fitted. They’ve had this tech in the Protectorate for a generation, and they still don’t print tailored clothing. The energy and base material cost is too high relative to the value of the product. It’s still cheaper to have a skilled person do the detail work.”

  “I want a new steering mechanism for my boat,” said a man next to Rahel. “Can I get that?”

  “Static design, complex assembly—now that’s a product worth the energy and base material cost. Yes, I can print that for you. We have the patterns for most boat, skimmer, and transport parts.”

  “What about a bottle of Whitesun Rise?” Rahel was determined to walk out of here with something.

  Once again she got a shake of the head. “The distillery has a proprietary recipe. We can’t duplicate that. We do have the pattern for what I’d call a generic bottle of grain spirits.”

  “Fine, I want that.”

  She had to admit it was magical to watch the printer create the bottle. It appeared to grow from the bottom up, glass and liquid together, until the bottle narrowed at the neck and finished off with a sealed top. It cost less than a bottle of Whitesun Rise.

  When she got home and opened it, the printed spirits tasted . . . flat, somehow, and a little harsh. Though they did help her sleep.

  There had been an outcry against the matter printers a few moons back, led by a coalition of economists. Shantu had thought Lancer Tal was mishandling the tech and that it could be her fatal mistake, especially after street protests and predictions of global economic collapse had forced Tal to go on a speaking tour to calm the furor.

  It all seemed rather silly now, as Rahel held her bottle of generic grain spirits. This was not going to put the Whitesun Rise distillery out of business. She guessed that other food products would have the same issue—a taste that was acceptable, but not anything to sing about. People who wanted the real thing would still pay for it. They would still pay for her mother’s sculptures, too, because crafter products were protected by programming lockouts. In exchange, the crafter caste had agreed to lower prices on products in keeping with the lower prices of their materials. Ravenel had been in full support of the bargain.

  Some businesses would suffer, but it seemed as if Alsea would adapt, just as Lancer Tal had said it would. Shantu had been wrong.

  She hated the Lancer for that, too.

  The nightmares did not let up. Her sleep patterns were in disarray now that she was no longer working and had no schedule to keep. She had thought that losing her career would at least bring an end to the sleep deprivation, but it didn’t work out that way.

  She didn’t practice with her stave. She didn’t go for runs. She barely remembered to get food. Occasionally, a voice that sounded like Hasil spoke deep in her mind and asked, Are you done with self-pity yet?

  She only wished it were as simple as self-pity. That could be resolved. This bleak, ongoing misery . . . there was no way out of it.

  Sometime late in the fourth moon after her return—she had difficulty keeping track of dates these days—she came out of a spirits shop with her purchase in hand and was shocked to see her mother across the street. Like a frightened winden, she ducked back into the doorway, bumping against an exiting customer.

  “Hoi!”

  “Sorry.”

  He grumbled something and moved past her, but she paid no attention. Ravenel was striding up the opposite walkway, her spine straight and head high. As she crossed the entrance of a dock, passing from shadow into full sun, her auburn hair flamed in the light. She seemed bigger than life, a beacon for Rahel’s longing gaze, until she stepped onto the next walkway and into the shadow of another shop.

  Rahel reached for her own hair, lying limp on her shoulders. It should have been the same auburn as her mother’s, but when she glanced at the lock she had pulled forward, it was three shades darker. She couldn’t remember when she had last washed it. Bathing already took more effort than she was willing to expend most of the time; she needed a burst of energy to go so far as to wash her hair. Those bursts had been few and far between.

  She looked down at her wrinkled clothing, hanging loose on a frame that had lost too much weight, and saw for the first time what a wreck she had become. She was a pathetic excuse for a warrior who had lain down and given up, while her mother had lost an entire family and was still going, still healthy and full of life.

  When Rahel raised her head, Ravenel had vanished in the crowd of shoppers.

  No. No, that wasn’t enough. She scanned the walkway, willing her mother to show herself at least once more—and had her second shock of the day.

  Sharro was here, too. She stood in front of a restaurant, her body slightly tense as she searched the crowd. Then the tension melted away and a glorious smile overtook her face.

  Ravenel appeared from behind a knot of slow-moving, chattering older men, her own smile lighting up the shadows as she walked straight into a warmron with her bondmate.

  The older men had moved past them before they released each other, and Rahel coughed out a tiny, rusty chuckle. Most public warmrons were quick affairs, but this was Sharro. She would give nothing less than a full-quality warmron no matter who was watching.

  Her amusement faded as the two women turned and entered the restaurant, hand in hand. She clutched her bottle as she looked after them. Had they worried about her? Had they tried to find her?

  She could talk to them. It would be as easy as crossing the street and walking through that door.

  And they would look at her and see what she had become.

  She went back into the shop and bought another bottle.

  As the days passed, she could not get that encounter out of her mind. Since Shantu’s death, she had been slowly self-destructing without noticing how far she had gone. Seeing Ravenel and Sharro had jerked her back to awareness, forcing her to view herself through their eyes. Her mother would be frantic with worry, while Sharro would be calmer but no less resolute about getting help. In her lowest moments, Rahel wished they would magically appear at her door and take charge. It was the ultimate sign of how
far she had fallen: the fierce warrior who had stood on her own two feet from the age of fifteen was now longing for her mother’s care.

  It would be so easy, a traitorous voice whispered. Just call them. You know they’ll come.

  But if they came, they would see. She could never let them see. She had spent her life striving to be the best, and now she was the worst. A failure twice over, a warrior without honor . . . an outcaste. Even if she made that call, even if they somehow saved her, they could not change that truth. She was an outcaste and always would be.

  Two ninedays after seeing her mother and Sharro, and five moons after Shantu’s death, a violent storm swept into the bay. Rahel watched the water streaming down the window, saw the rain blowing sideways, and suddenly needed to be out in it.

  She took nothing with her. Not her stave, not her ID, not even her rain cloak. She walked out in the clothes she was wearing and did not falter when she exited her building into a maelstrom of howling winds and stinging rain.

  It was ten blocks to the bayfront. The shops were closed and the road deserted; sane people stayed home on days like this.

  Wildwind Bay was not breathing. It was roaring, shouting, raging against the seawall, occasionally throwing waves all the way over the wall and onto the road itself.

  Rahel watched its fury and thought it was probably suicide to walk along the road’s edge, next to those waves.

  She did it anyway.

  The thrill of anticipation, of waiting to be hit by a wave, was the most alive she had felt since Shantu died. She lifted her face to the angry sky and smiled as the rain lashed her skin. Then she turned toward the bay and spread her arms.

  “Go on!” she shouted. “Do it!”

  Wildwind Bay roared and foamed, but it did not send a wave to get her.

  She began to run, and within one block was surprised to find herself out of breath. When had she ever been this unfit? She walked and stumbled and caught her breath, then tried again. Once again she was gasping after a block.