Blademaster dip-shrugged. “Your words just now, spoken of your own volition, were your oath of fealty. And what could a final sparring match tell me of your skills that I do not know from a thousand training sessions? I would not have allowed you to take this final test if I didn’t think you an excellent fighter already. It was your reasons for fighting that I tested. And you passed.”
She laughed lightly, afraid even as she did so that it came across as flippant, but unable to suppress it. “Is it that easy, then?”
It was Blademaster’s turn to laugh. “Easy? No. But simple. Remember, they are not the same thing.” He backed fluidly away from their near-embrace, rolling the sleeves of his neutral robe back beyond the elbow. A mischievous smile pulled at one corner of his mouth. “Now, if you still want to spar, I’d be more than willing . . . but as your friend, not as your teacher.”
Shomoro grinned and began to roll up her sleeves.
The glazed earth arena echoed with the slap of their boots as Shomoro and Blademaster pivoted around each other, seeking openings. Thin metal stalls bated the points and edges of their blades. She blocked his swing at her flank, then threw Chakarsillim’s Overhead Slash at his head. It was a slow move—a feint move. He recognized the feint and dodged from beneath the arc of her swing rather than trying to block it. Shomoro parried his countermove and angled her slice toward its true target at his waist. Air whistled across her blade as she leaned into the cut, and Shomoro felt a thrill of pure battle joy. She was going to land the first blow this time—
His real countermove speared in a blurringly fast thrust toward her throat. She twisted away from the jab, the bated point of his blade passing so close it grazed her snout. She dropped into a defensive crouch and waited for him to press the attack.
Blademaster grinned as he drew heavy breaths through his snout. “Time to rest, I think.”
Panting, she straightened and wiped her extended blades clean of dust with a corner of her robe. She had the edge in speed, but Blademaster always seemed to know where her strikes were meant to land. She’d thought maybe this once she could land a blow on her teacher—except she supposed she couldn’t think of him that way anymore. The weatherbeaten male Osk leaning against the courtyard wall opposite her, contemplating one of the pale lamchra trees, was just Teru now.
She glanced up at the sky and realized how much time had passed: Choree had risen higher in the purple sky above them, brightening the twilight, and as the sun neared its zenith she could see the tiny crimson dot that lurked near the larger white sphere.
Oskaran’s second sun was a bloated red giant hundreds of times larger than Choree. Their own star revolved around the monster in an elongated orbit that kept the planet far from the red star’s fury . . . except once every 1296 years, when Choree’s complex orbit brought it and its satellite swinging far into the red giant’s domain.
The planet’s global temperatures rose over the decades of its approach, until Oskaran’s usual twilight dissipated into a year of seeming preternatural daylight. This day’s faint hint of starlight would become a constant red glare, its heat scorching the lush forests and dells of the planet to dry scrub. Anything that moved or grew on their world would rally its defenses against the storms, drought, and raging fires of the red star’s passage, retreating to Oskaran’s cooler poles and oceans or deep underground as did her people. Plants would retract their leaves into fire-hardened trunks and rhizomes, or die in the fires and scatter heat-germinating seeds as they withered. Then the entire planet would hunker down and wait for the Wrathful Seasons to pass.
The ferocious red star was officially named Chalee, Second Egg, but most Osk gave it a name more suited to its occupation: Krenkyr, the death-bringer.
“Chalee is ascendant,” Blademaster observed, shielding his eyes with one arm as he ambled over. She turned her gaze from Krenkyr’s seething red eye and jabbed a small yes. Oskaran and its parent star were beginning to swing back into Krenkyr’s hot zone; in a decade or so, maybe two, the Seasons would sweep the planet again. Then a thought struck her.
“You don’t say ‘Krenkyr?’” Shomoro had never lived through the Seasons—none of them had, as the last had been nearly thirteen hundred years ago—but the histories she’d read made it clear the name was apt.
Blademaster lowered his arm. “Even life can come from death.” His expression was wistful as he looked at a pale lamchra leaf in his hand, plucked from a tree beyond the wall. “Consider the lamchra forests that die in the Fire Season and scatter their seed; the pods crack and germinate only in that intense heat. Or the mother needle worm, who infests herself with her own larvae so they may feed on her flesh when they hatch.” He took the bone-white leaf and twisted it into a spiral, pensive. “Or you, Shomoro.” Tilting her head up, he slid the folded leaf into a twist of her onyx mane, where it sparkled against the black. “Though you leave me to become a seph—a killer, for I do not deny it—I believe that what comes of your path will be not death but life.”
Her hand flitted halfway to the leaf, then back. This tenderness was a side of her teacher she had rarely seen. Teru gave her a last quick smile, and slipped on the mask of Blademaster like an old and worn robe.
“Hold out your hand. There’s one last thing we must do.”
A much-imagined anticipation welled up inside her. Shomoro held her hand out palm up, retracting the blade and leaving the other extended to a quarter of its length. Moves she had practiced alone many times, standing before a reflecting panel in her room.
She watched Blademaster mirror the movements as he faced her, to begin the call and response that would ordain her as a seph. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I am seph.”
“What do you do?”
“I defend Oskaran.”
“Who is Oskaran?”
“Mother of us all.” Shomoro kept her eyes on his, took a steadying breath for the final, longest part of the oath. “For her water is my blood; her air, my breath. For I am she, and she is me. I am a pillar holding the covenant of peace over the world. I will not fall until my death. For I am seph.
“This I swear.” The last a whisper. She felt the welcome bite of pain as his blade lashed her palm and swept the edge of her own blade across his outstretched hand. As they clasped their bleeding palms together, letting the teal ichor mingle and drip into the dust, the old Osk across from her spoke as her teacher for the last time.
“Now that you are seph, there is no more I can teach you that you are incapable of finding for yourself. However, there is one last secret I must impart to you. To set a seal on your path, you must choose a bladename.”
She cocked her head for him to continue, still savoring the sting of good pain in her hand. He smiled.
“All Osk have a hatchname and a lineage name from the time they break shell; this you know. But those who become seph must choose a third name, a bladename. It is a tradition started by the first Blademaster.” Shomoro blinked and straightened, conscious again of the history around them. Her Blademaster chuckled softly. “Yes, he in whose courtyard we stand. When he stood in the ashes of his lineage house and vowed to fight for the Monarch and the covenant of peace, he chose a new name on which to seal that pact. His bladename was Ilesh of the Justice.
“I must warn you that the bladename is the most secret and valuable thing a seph can possess. Invoke it only in the most desperate of situations—when doing otherwise would mean the end of much more than your life.”
Shomoro stepped back, giving herself space to think. The blood on her hand was already cold, already almost dried. She tried to imagine a situation so desperate that her own death paled beside it—a circumstance as bleak as that of the first Blademaster—and failed. What difference would her own tiny life make then?
Then, a spark: “Life,” she whispered. Shomoro took the fragile leaf from her mane and looked at Teru. She glanced up at the white orb
of Choree, then back. “You believe my path will lead to life, not death. I thought of Choree just now: though it leads us through the path of death, the white sun itself is a creator of life. I have decided that perhaps I should be like Choree.
“I will be Shomoro of the White.”
Memories fade and bleed into each other, scraps of her life stitching themselves together:
It is her audience with the Monarch. Shomoro and the other sephs who have elected to leave the planet stand in front of his huge throne, a hunk of carved, polished bone lined with velvet. They gaze respectfully yet curiously at the ancient, withered Osk who rests upon it.
Then her last night on Oskaran: she spends a quiet evening alone with only the stars for company; this is how she likes it best, so near to departure . . .
She bids farewell the few friends she’s accumulated during her life, before boarding the small spherical shuttle which will ferry her to the Fleet ship hovering in orbit . . .
At last, both finally and too soon, Shomoro lies back in her crèche on the gargantuan craft as it jets her away from everything she has ever known. The ship passes Oskaran’s one large moon, then angles out of the ecliptic, the half-sphere of white and black and pale blue that has been her home shrinking to invisibility. Even the system’s twin suns—one a blinding, furiously burning speck of white, the other a smoldering globe of crimson fire—become no more than bright pinpricks as they circle each other in their eternal dance. Then the darkness of infinite space merges with the darkness behind Shomoro’s closed eyelids, and she rejoins the stream of time as it flows ever forward.
The ground was hard. That was the first discomfort, emerging out of a numb, floating blackness. Cold came next, prickling her bare skin like an itchy cloak, amplified along the side that lay on the ground. As each new feeling sharpened into focus, Shomoro slowly began to get a picture of where she was.
She lay on her side on a floor of damp concrete, a thin blanket draped over her lower body. The threadbare material did little to alleviate the chill, but that didn’t prevent her from tugging it over herself. She winced as the small movement shot a dull ache up both arms, and let the blanket drop, a gasp escaping from a throat that felt like someone had rubbed it with sand. Carefully she let an eye slip open.
A tiny cell surrounded her, its dark walls slick with moisture and filth. It was maybe two body lengths to a side; a hand span separated her snout from the concrete wall. A slit window in the thick steel door offered the only view out. Shomoro scented the air, then wrinkled her nostrils closed at the bevy of stenches that assaulted them. The whole cell—floor, ceiling, and walls—smelled of decay: a thick stench of dried urine and feces, overlaid with a bitter rime of fear. She smelled the faded panic pheromones of several species she knew from her own menagerie. The acrid ghosts of animal despair, sprayed on the walls or released into the air by the cell’s former tenants. Uninterestedly, she wondered what the purpose of this base had been before the war. There came a flicker of grim irony at the likelihood it had been a research station—not so different from the home where she’d conducted her own experiments.
Though she was groggy and cold, muscles aching as if from hours of hard training, Shomoro struggled to get up, to do more than just lie there waiting for whatever was going to happen next. She hugged her arms to her chest as she rested her lower body against one wall. Shivered as she remembered Berkyavik’s last words.
We want to show you the truth of what you are.
Then she caught a glimpse of herself in a puddle of dirty water near the wall.
Her breath stopped in her throat.
Shomoro’s mane fell around her face in a cascade of shimmering white—hair which had been obsidian black, leached of color as she slept until the strands resembled filaments of bone. With a trembling hand, she reached up to touch the mass of ivory strands that grew from the gray skin of her scalp; tug at them; make sure they were really a part of her. They were.
How . . . why would they do that to me? What sort of purpose could this serve?
It came to her in a dark flash of insight. She was marked. The White Arrows had marked her as theirs: her fate theirs to decide, her identity theirs to create and enforce upon her. That kind of ownership was impossible among Osk, though her kind had encountered other species who practiced it. She was a—what was the word the Urd used to describe their Arashal servants? So seldom used in O’o Nezz, the concept so alien that when the word finally came it was like a splash of freezing water in her face: a slave.
She was the White Arrows’ slave. Chattel. Property. And this white mane was meant to serve as a humiliating reminder of that fact.
If she went along with it. If she complied and remained the good little prisoner. Shomoro had no intention of complying. She didn’t have to let the Terrans make a fool of her, treating a citizen of Oskaran as property. She would not let them have that satisfaction.
She closed her eyes and lowered her stiff arms to the floor, flexing the muscles in them that would extend her blades to their full length. She was going to cut off every last strand of hair the Terrans had dared to pervert.
As she flexed, an unexpected sensation, not quite pain, brought her senses alert. It was an off-kilter feeling, a sense of wrongness attached to her own body. Eyes open now, she shifted her gaze away from the wall before her to the floor. Slowly, slowly, she turned her eyes to her left arm.
The blade had not come out. The sheath below her forearm felt as it always had, but the sharp bone inside had not sprung forth. Shomoro checked her right arm; it was the same. Her mind was still dazed, still not quite lucid enough to be afraid, but that did not prevent her body from realizing something was wrong.
Concentrating on a splotch of mold on the wall as a focus point, she brought her arms up in the familiar defensive cross. For the second time she flexed all the right muscles, felt the sliding sensation of bone and muscle moving closer to the open air as she willed with what felt like all of her being for her blades to come forth.
Her eyes opened on empty space before her.
Time stopped. Everything inside her froze, then thawed in a liquid rush of terror that resolved into the frantic beating of her heart.
Shomoro thrust one of her bare arms toward her face. The other caressed it desperately, her entire body shaking as she ran her fingertips down the length of her arm, searching around the end of the sheath below her wrist. She stuck her finger inside the opening, searching for a stubborn blade tip, hoping even as her mind repeated the truth over and over . . .
There was no blade tip. There was nothing, save for the little disc of bone and spurs of cartilage that usually rested at the narrow end of the sheath—the formations that had held her trusty blades in place and made them a part of her. Nothing more than that left, on either of her arms.
Nothing.
Her blades were gone.
8
Gone, completely gone, as if they had never existed. Her brain felt heavy, numb with shock and terrible loss. Shomoro crumpled slowly to the floor of her cell, covering her face with her hands as she curled her body into a tight ball, trying to block out all sensation.
She felt worse than the meanest slave who cringes and cowers before a merciless master. Felt beaten, crushed, violated. Great shuddering sobs racked her, dry heaves tearing through her body. With each exhalation and indrawn gasp of breath, she felt her strength depart, siphoned out with the used air.
As she lay on the filthy floor, her grief pouring out in long, keening wails, Shomoro realized in a distant way why Za had lost the war. Olios 3 had never been a war against the Terran Expansion, two sides grabbing for territory threatened by the other. It had been a war against the Universal Church. The Osk had known that from the beginning—yet Za had failed in what mattered most.
Blademaster: Know your enemy as yourself. How they think and feel, and most of all what they want. The
n you will be able to defeat them. Za had failed to really know their enemy. They’d fought the Church as though it were an opposing army, drawing up territory, battle lines, allocating ships and soldiers—but the Church was not an army. It was a virus, its influence an infection poisoning the living heart of the Terran Expansion. Infections could not be attacked from without, but must be eradicated from within. Perhaps even the doomed enclave had understood something of that, when they went after the leaders of the Church in Diego Two. Send a seph to cut out the poisoned flesh. That was the only way.
But all of Za’s sephs were dead except Shomoro . . . she whom the White Arrows had left alive to infect.
They had become worms inside her, parasites residing in an untouchable place from which they could complete their work with easy deliberation, hollowing her out and ripping her down like a frail, rotten tree.
Her strength and hope spent, she fled into the comforting darkness of a dreamless sleep.
Several hours had slipped by when the door to Shomoro’s cell creaked open. A slanting column of white light slid over her, huddled on the floor. Then silhouettes appeared in the doorway, devouring the light. Footsteps followed: the flat, dry sound of leather shoes intermingled with the harsh staccato of talons as three figures entered her cell.
She gave them no outward sign of her return to consciousness. Inside, she was already awake—awake and painfully, gut-wrenchingly aware of who had come to collect her. A shadow fell across her face. She opened one eye to a slit, her milky, narrow pupil a miniature version of the crack of light streaming through the doorway. The image above her looked distorted to her stunned brain, like a hologram that came on out of focus. As it cleared she found herself staring up at a depressingly familiar face: Berkyavik, her self-appointed tormentor, flanked by the angular heads of his two Urd guards. All three stared down at her pathetic form as if from high above.
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