by RW Krpoun
The question was who to ask? Hunter, for all his better attitude brought on by our strange circumstances, was not likely, and Provine Sael was not the sort who looked positively on too much conversation. Worse, asking her might bring on her planned discussion about killing and dying, which I would rather avoid. Which reminded me, Hunter was supposed to have examined my sword days ago, but once again it had been forgotten.
That left Pieter or Hatcher, and the latter chose that very moment to rip off a fart like an old timber snapping, followed by poorly-muffled giggles. I decided to ask Pieter, as he would stay on subject and not start asking me a lot of questions.
The next fart was louder and closer: Hatcher was up and heading towards me, wearing a nightshirt that reached to her ankles and wood-soled clogs, Rose in one arm and one of her knives, unsheathed, in her other hand. “I need to go cop a squat,” she whispered, grinning. “There’s no putting it off.”
“All right.” I thought that she should eat less sauce and more food with each meal, but I kept that to myself.
“I just need to stop using the sludge at the bottom of the flask; that always gives me the gut-wallies. Without warning she plopped Rose into my lap. “Keep an eye on her until I come back.”
“What? I’m on guard!”
“So kill anyone who gets close to her.” Hatcher scampered over the chests around the cart for a moment, and then vanished into the darkness in the direction of the latrines.
Scowling at the retreating Nisker, I carefully hefted Rose into the crook of my left arm the way Hatcher insisted she be held. Looking down I saw that the baby’s large dark eyes were open and staring at me. “Just be still,” I whispered. “You might have fooled Hatcher, but I know you’re slacking. You should be walking by now.” Rose gave a toothless, wet grin and slapped at my chin. “I’m pretty sure I was drilling by the time I was your age, although I don’t remember much about being little.” I frowned into the past. “There wasn’t any coddling or kissing or such things, that I know. If you want to make real progress, you are going to have to start applying yourself. People aren’t going to look out for you forever.” It occurred to me that growing up was probably a lot like becoming free: all at once you were on your own, with thinking and decisions, and poor planning on every side.
I pondered that for a while, keeping my eyes moving as I thought. Glancing down, I saw Rose was gumming the hem of the blanket, her eyes half-closed, each blink as slow as a butterfly flexing its wings. Even in the silver starlight I could see her long dark eyelashes against her cheek as her eyes closed. Hatcher said that someday she would be beautiful, and break hearts, and it occurred to me that a baby was sort of like a seed: someday it would grow into a person.
That was interesting, and I thought about that for a bit.
Hatcher finally came back, swinging her knife. “That was rough,” she noted. “Mostly for the poor bastard on the next hole; Bekker sauce is a cruel mistress. How is she?”
“Asleep.” I happily handed Rose over.
“What a little angel,” Hatcher hugged her close.
“When will she start walking?”
“When she’s ready.” Hatcher kissed the sleeping baby. “They don’t stay little very long.”
No discipline: Rose wasn’t going to be walking anytime soon with Hatcher taking that sort of attitude.
Hunter showed up just as we were finishing breakfast, looking pleased and carrying a sheathed Buryan saber with a hilt that had a lot of gold in it on one shoulder.
“You’re not nearly as drunk as I expected,” Hatcher grinned at him.
“This isn’t the sort of place you want to get too drunk in,” the ‘slinger tossed the saber to Pieter and took a seat. “Keep that handy: the owner will be sending fifty Marks to get it back.”
“Fifty Marks?” Hatcher whistled. “Who did you kill?”
“Gambling,” The ‘slinger shoved two stiff strips of fried sowbelly onto a round of flatbread and folded it all together. “These herders love to gamble, and they’re not good at numbers.” He took a crunching bite.
“Have your actions upset any of the local gentry?” Provine Sael asked.
“None that you will have to deal with. If I was willing to accept the use of horses to cover bets, I would have cleaned up even more, and then there might have been hard feelings.”
“One would think that the odds will turn against you at some point,” Provine Sael drained the last of her tea.
“That seldom happens when you cheat,” Hatcher noted. “For Hunter, the gamble is whether the other marks at the table figure out how he’s doing it.”
“Cheating is unethical.” The Dellian shook her head.
“So is beating your wife, but it never stayed a Buryan’s hand,” Hunter grinned. “And these bumpkins obviously never heard about counting cards, or in this case, ivory tiles. Besides, they were cheating, too, just not as well as I was.”
“What were they playing?” Hatcher asked with interest.
Provine Sael stood and walked away, shaking her head; Torl trailed after her.
Hatcher and Hunter discussed some game as the ‘slinger ate, and then she took Burk and left. When Hunter had finished eating I tapped his knee. “A while ago Provine Sael said you needed to examine my sword, but we never got around to it.”
He nodded. “I suppose.”
I handed Fallsblade over, and he examined its construction carefully before producing a pair of scraps of paper covered with spiky handwriting. He muttered under his breath, and the notes crumbled to dust.
He was frowning when he finished. “Where did you get this?”
“When I was separated from you, a Man helped me escape from the water and then showed me the way out of the karst. In return I buried a coffin for him.”
“So where did the sword come into it?”
“There were five bandits camping at the exit out of the karst, and he loaned me this sword to help with the killing. When it was done and I was ready to leave, he said to keep it since he had no use for it.”
“Why did he have a sword if he had no use for it.”
I thought about that. “Well, he didn’t actually have it on him. He led me to where the coffin was, and when I told him that I couldn’t kill five men with just a dirk, he pointed out where the sword was.”
“And all this for a coffin being buried?”
“Yeah, he wanted it buried outside the karst.” I frowned, digging back. “He wanted it buried on high ground well away from the karst, and that it not be marked. Which I did.”
“Why didn’t he bury it himself?”
“I don’t know; he never left the karst.”
Hunter rubbed his goatee. “What was his name?”
“He said he had many, but his mother called him ‘Fall’. That’s why I named the sword Fallsblade.”
“What did he look like?”
“Tall, taller than Burk, close to my height, and thin. His head was shaved.” I thought carefully. “He had a mustache and goatee like yours, but gone gray. He dressed like Pieter, only in dark blue, and he wore a belt that looked like it was metal plates, which might have been silver.”
“Anything else?”
I thought some more. “Well, he seemed educated, and tough. He had a spark of blue light that followed him around; it got brighter when we needed light. The coffin was small, less than half the usual size, and it was made of the same wood as the Emperor’s.”
“You’re sure about the wood?”
“Yes. Oh, and I carried it quite a while, and nothing rattled or moved inside.”
“Was it heavy?”
“No, no more than the weight of the wood. It didn’t smell bad, either.”
Hunter stared at Fallsblade for a long moment before handing it back.
“Is it enchanted?” I asked as I replaced it in its scabbard.
“Not the way you mean, no. It is what is called a legacy blade; when I looked at it in the Emperor’s tomb I though it was a death bla
de, which a common form of enchantment, but I was in a hurry.”
I waited for him to continue, but he just stared at the ground, frowning.
“So what is a legacy blade?” I finally asked.
“A weapon that gets around the need for special alloys,” Hunter said, not looking up. “It is an arcane aberration bound into a physical object.”
“What’s an ‘aberration’?”
“In this case…well, there are places where the Arts…,” he rubbed his face. “Look, there’s places where things are not exactly what they are supposed to be, not in a physical sense, but in a way that someone trained in the Arts can sense. It will be a small place, a couple paces wide, and very rare. Certain practitioners are able to trap the aberration within a physical form, nearly always a weapon. That’s a legacy weapon.”
“What does it do?”
“Things a sword shouldn’t: it won’t rust, chip, bend, break, get dull, get sharper…that sort of thing. For the sake of discussion, let us say that the thing in the sword is a terrible poison to anything imbued with mystic power: Undead, unnatural creatures, that sort of thing.” He shook his head. “Provine Sael is going to be furious when she finds out.”
“Why?”
“Because we brought you into the Place of Mounds; that sword…well, it probably had something to do with the fact that we ended up half a continent away. You know your sums, right?”
“Most. I’m learning the rest.”
“So you understand two plus two plus three equals, right?”
“Seven,” I said, after a moment.
“Right. Now say that I am a two, and Provine Sael is a two, and the Place of Mounds is a three, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that sword was another number that Provine Sael and I didn’t know about, say a five. So we set out to create a seven, only we ended up with a twelve because we didn’t know there were other numbers in play. Still following me?”
“Mostly.”
“If we had known about your sword, we would have done things differently, and what would have happened would once again equal seven.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The only thing is, your sword is pretty passive and contained…” he suddenly stood and vaulted the cart’s tail gate. “Pieter, when was the last time you checked the plates?”
“Which plates?”
“The glass ones.”
“Merrywine.”
“Yeah,” Hunter stood, greenish sand trickling through his fingers. “That’s about right.”
“So should I do anything special with Fallsblade?” I asked Hunter after he climbed back down.
“Don’t lose it. Otherwise, it is just a very lethal sword.” He hesitated, staring at the hilt over my shoulder. “Is there anything else about how you acquired it?”
I considered. “Fall said he could feel my life as I was in the water coming to where he was.”
Hunter nodded, started to turn away, then stopped. “Did you ever see this ‘Fall’ touch or handle anything?”
I pondered that. “Well…he had a fire built when I met him, but otherwise…I don’t recall him doing anything that involved touching anything.”
“What sort of fire?”
“Wood, maybe driftwood, in a fire pit. Why?”
Hunter produced a strip of paper with writing on it and sort of snapped the fingers that were holding it; in our fire pit, the unburnt half of a piece of split wood burst into flame. “Just trying to make sense of things. I’ll let you know if I do.”
I sat on a handy box and watched the piece of wood burn. That Fall knew the Arts wasn’t a surprise: the blue light alone told me that. I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid. I had wondered why he had given me the best sword I had ever held for a simple chore, but the times had been too hectic to wonder too hard, and my years as a slave had taught me not to question the motivations of my betters. Plus it is never wise to question luck too hard: I had gotten the sword, after all.
As the wood burned, I poked and prodded at several things, wandering around in my skull. Hunter knew more than he had said, of that I was certain. He didn’t feel the need to share everything because I was stupid, just like Provine Sael kept counsel with Torl, Hatcher, and Hunter because they all were smart. Burk and me were there for killing and heavy lifting, things we were good at, and when you engage the Ebon Blades you get quality work, that is the rule.
But a little voice in my head was angry. Yes, I had needed Fall to escape the karst caverns, but once out I had crossed a lot of distance, and figured out how to find the group all by myself. I wasn’t smart, but I wasn’t useless, either.
Of course, I had no clue about the Arts, or the Elder Ones, or a lot of other things, so the odds were they weren’t wrong, either, I reasoned. On the other hand, it didn’t always have to be that way: I had learned to read, was learning my sums, and was learning ranged combat.
Maybe Rose wasn’t the only one lacking discipline, I concluded: if I wanted to be taken as something other than a hired killer, I had best have something to offer.
“Pieter?”
“Yes?” he didn’t look up from the book he was reading.
“Can you teach me how to tell dates?”
He looked up. “You mean the calendar?”
“Yeah.” You have to start somewhere.
Chapter Fifteen
I was sitting cross-legged on the ground, Fallsblade in my baldric lying beside me, using a travel chest as a desk, when a shadow fell across the papers and two slates I was working on.
I looked up to find Moina standing over me, grinning. “You make the most unlikely clerk I have ever seen.”
Scrambling to my feet, both knees popping, I shrugged. “I’m trying to wrap my head around the calendar.”
“You never learned before?”
I shrugged again. “I was a slave up until a couple months ago. You don’t need a calendar to tell the seasons.”
She nodded. “You stayed in one spot; we kept moving around, so I learned it fast.”
“I just wish the names of the month weren’t so hard to pronounce.”
A frown furrowed her brow. “Wait,” she gestured to the chest-top. “You can read?”
“Well, yeah. I’m still learning my sums.”
“Huh. I can do basic sums, but I can’t read. Did the Ebon Blades teach you?”
“Sort of,” I said sort of truthfully. “But it really didn’t sink in until my friend Hatcher showed me the details.”
“Hatcher, that’s the Nisker girl? I met her, she was the one that told me about you.” Moina frowned. “I wish your group were heading back to the Empire with us; maybe she would help me learn.”
“Doesn’t your employer have clerks?”
“They’re too good to speak to the hired blades,” she shook her head. “Your group is a lot more informal and friendly.” She tossed her hair. “I have to be going, I’m on my way to collect a payment.”
I grabbed up my baldric. “Mind if I tag along? I need to check on how my new armor is coming.”
“Company would be nice. What did you order?”
“Two replacement breastplates. My last breastplate got hacked to scrap; the back-plate is still fine.”
“Hard to imagine a steel breastplate getting cut off you.”
“It was easier than you might expect.”
“I notice your group have Dusman camp gear.”
“They do good work. Or their slaves do, anyway.”
We passed through the trading area; Moina moved with confidence, pausing now and again to look at things for sale, but she didn’t talk much, which I liked. The armorer had made a good start on my order, and was confident he could finish by tomorrow afternoon.
The place Moina led me to was a sort of café under an awning; Buryan men reclined around low wood tables set on fancy carpets, leaning back against saddles as they sipped tiny handle-less cups of some hot, dark drink, and smoked from long small-bowled pipes made of el
aborately decorated wood and brass. The air was thick with the smoke from the pipes, and reeked of horse sweat.
The horsemen smirked and made comments about Moina to one another in their own language, but she ignored them, moving between the low tables to one occupied by a Buryan whose braid was iron-gray.
She said something in the Buryan tongue, a greeting I suppose. “I’m here to collect the payment for the red oak.”
The old Buryan slurped from his tiny cup, tilting his head to look up at her. “You shouldn’t walk around here dressed like that.”
“Sixty Marks,” Moina kept her voice level.
Every eye in the place was on us, and none were friendly; some of the dark, slightly slanted eyes just held the calculating look of warriors sizing up a potential foe, but most had a look I was getting all too familiar with in my time here: the Buryan were mean little bastards, quick to whip a wife, child, or any animal except a horse. They swaggered around with the hilts of their sabers close to hand, full of fight and spite, and looking for trouble. They were really getting on my nerves.
“My nephew fancies you.” The Buryan jerked his head to indicate a younger warrior lounging nearby, who grinned.
“Perhaps you pledged more than you can afford?” Moina inquired sweetly, and the man flushed. He made a curt gesture to another of the loungers around his table, and that warrior tossed a bag that clinked at Moina’s feet.
She raked the bag against her left boot with her right toe, and made a sort of right knee kick or high step that lofted the bag into the air high enough to catch, a neat move in my opinion. Opening it, she poked through the contents. “All right,” she nodded to the gray-braided man.
“Are we going to see you at the fighting pits?” another lounger asked her, an older man, although not as gray as the one who had owed for the wood.
She smiled and shook her head as she turned to leave, but I stepped up to the table. “What sort of fighting do you have at the pits?”
He gave me a practiced once-over glance. “Bears and wolves, fighting dogs, maybe a mountain cat.”
I shook my head. “I don’t fight animals anymore.”
