Joel Rosenberg - [D'Shai 01] - D'Shai

by Joel Rosenberg - [D'Shai 01]

  NaRee’s face was pale under her already white makeup; her hair was pulled back in a severe bun that looked like it hurt her ears. Her robes, green as spring grass, were gathered tightly at waist, neck and knees, and she was wearing boots instead of sandals.

  She came into my arms, trembling. “My father has given Felkoi permission to marry me.—No, Kami Khuzud, don’t look like that.”

  Anger pulled the words from my mouth. “It was Felkoi who did it. He killed Refle. He wanted you, and he eliminated both of his rivals with one stroke. But how?”

  That was the trouble. How? He couldn’t have come in over the branch; he could have gone out through the door, but not have locked it behind him; he couldn’t have come down from the window above without the collaboration of Orazhi.

  It was all getting too complicated. “No, he couldn’t have done it.”

  “Not for me.” She shook her head. “I’ve got a ... feeling for such things.”

  “Are you saying that he doesn’t want you?”

  She laughed, her voice silver bells, and kissed me.

  “Oh, Kami Khuzud, you are so foolish. Of course he does, but only a little. It’s not the same kind of hunger that you have for me, or the kind that Refle had. Trust me, please. I understand men, and it wouldn’t make sense. You think that my father wouldn’t prefer I be courted by a warrior like Felkoi rather than a barely noble armorer?”

  She was right. That didn’t make sense. Assuming that he was willing to murder for her, it still didn’t get him into the room, or out of it.

  Besides, if he’d wanted her, why not just court her?

  “What are you thinking of, Kami Khuzud?”

  I shrugged. “I’m just hoping that there are scratch marks on the right places.”

  * * *

  17

  Kami Dan Shir

  THE ERESTHAIS HAD set up the high wire to run from building to building, but the rest of us hadn’t been allowed on the third floor of the old donjon.

  I looked across the wire at the old donjon, and wondered. The thumb-thick cable ran from building to building, now singing-taut. I tapped on it; it gave a deep but tight basso rumble.

  I looked at the others, but mostly at Gray Khuzud, his face still a mirror to his pain. He tossed his head, his pigtail flopping limply.

  “It will be fine, Kami Khuzud,” Eno said, giving a turnbuckle another minuscule twist, then stroking a fingernail along the wire. “Josei is watching the other side, and it all will be fine.”

  Sala smiled at me. “You seem, I don’t know, different somehow.” She patted my arm. “But you’re still the same Kami Khuzud I’ve always loved. You know, we have a window only to our own heart, if that.”

  I chuckled, more out of tension than anything else.

  “What is so funny, Kami Khuzud?”

  I slipped an arm around her waist. “You’ve never doubted for a moment that I love you, Sala.”

  She was indignant. “Well, of course not.”

  “But you just said that—” I waved it away. “Never mind, Sala.” It would be pointless to try to keep Sala’s mind on the here and now. Besides, would I want to change her? Really? Or any of the rest? Evrem’s sliminess, perhaps. But Large Egda’s trustworthiness, or even Fhilt’s sarcasm, that revealed as much as concealed his caring?

  Not for a moment. You don’t change the people you love.

  “Better pay attention to the here, Kami Khuzud,” Sala said. “To the now.”

  “True enough.” I’d have to lead Toshtai to it, somehow. But how? “Nothing to worry about. All the juggling equipment is over on the other side?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she said, irritated. “And the musicians, as well.”

  After a snake-quick snatch into his snakebin, Evrem stuck a viper in a bag, and hung the bag from his belt.

  “Then I am off,” he said, unaffected.

  Fhilt was eying me curiously. “There’s something different about you today, at that. Can you still keep two wands in the air?”

  “Don’t you worry about me. I’ll do my part. Just let me get into the room across the way.”

  I’d find the evidence, and set it in front of Lord Toshtai in a way that he could choose to act on or ignore, and then ...

  And then I didn’t know what. But with a bit of luck, I would be out of Den Oroshtai, and back on the road again, where an acrobat belonged.

  Gray Khuzud stood. “Then we begin.”

  The act began plainly, with Gray Khuzud and Large Egda on the ground below, introducing first Evrem, and then Sala. Gray Khuzud picked up a theme from the drunk act: he did tumbling runs almost through their performances, seemingly not noticing Evrem’s snakes or Sala’s rings, but barely missing them as he cartwheeled idly about the sand, then turned the cartwheel into a series of handsprings and a final jump that brought him to Large Egda’s shoulders.

  Then it was Fhilt’s turn to bring the attention up to the wires, and he did, with a brilliant, weaving, barefoot wirewalk that had my fist in my mouth. Fhilt was playing above himself: it looked, time and time again, that he was going to lose his balance and fall, but he always pulled back from the brink of disaster.

  Finally, he made it to the center of the wire, and reached up to where the rope and pulley hung from the rigging. Below, Gray Khuzud seized the other end of the rope, just as Fhilt stepped off, Fhilt’s greater mass and downward motion neatly pulling Gray Khuzud up to the wire while depositing Fhilt safely on the ground below.

  Gray Khuzud quickly made his way from the middle of the wire to my end, and stepped out into the room.

  He pulled a pair of thick leather gloves from his belt and donned them. “Ready?”

  I nodded, and stepped up to the window.

  I hate wirewalking, but I’d spent enough years learning it.

  This time, I guess I stopped worrying about how bad I was at it, and just did it: slowly, working a trio of juggling sticks, I made my way across the wire.

  Behind me, Gray Khuzud had again stepped out on the wire—I could feel it, but I was supposed to not notice it—and walked quickly toward me, as though he wanted to pass me. But I, the buffoon of this act, didn’t notice him, as he kept catching up with me, and then standing, his arms irritatedly crossed over his chest, waiting for me to hurry up.

  And then I stopped in the middle of the wire, simply juggling as though there was nothing else of interest in the world.

  Below, the crowd laughed, perhaps a bit nervously; across, through the open window, I could see Lord Toshtai, sitting on a massive chair.

  Finally, unable to get my attention, Gray Khuzud shrugged, squatted and lowered himself to the wire, and then began to make his way, hand over hand, beneath the wire, while I continued at my same pace.

  It looked practiced, but it wasn’t—it all depended on Gray Khuzud raising kazuh enough to keep his hands out of the way of my feet.

  He passed underneath me to loud applause and shouts of approval, and then pulled himself up and into the far window, me coming in behind.

  With a bow in the direction of the two lords, I tossed the juggling wands to Josei, and moved away, toward the window at the far end of the large room, the one above the armory’s window. All I had to do was find evidence, of something-scratches from a rope over the windowsill, or over the beam.

  There was nothing.

  The sill was polished and pristine; the beam above was flush with the ceiling overhead. There was no hole in it where a support for a pulley could have been stuck or screwed.

  Nothing.

  One by one, the others of the troupe made their way up into the third-floor room for the juggling finale. The musicians picked up the pace, the silverhorns laughed mockingly at me.

  Everything was wrong. Not only hadn’t there been any evidence that somebody had been lowered from this room or raised to it, but my inspection of the window hadn’t drawn any attention, as it easily could have even if all of them were innocent, and as it surely would have if the guilty one were
there.

  Nobody cared what I was doing, because nobody felt endangered by what I was doing.

  I was trying to sort it out when I felt Gray Khuzud raise kazuh.

  His talent flared brightly in my mind, but I didn’t need to have that feel for kazuh: all I needed was a pair of eyes. He was working with three juggling knives, heading toward the finale, and his juggling had suddenly become keener, clearer, each of his moves as sharp as the edges of one of the knives.

  It burned as brightly as I ever had seen. That was the answer, of course: kazuh. It had always been the answer.

  Fhilt’s face creased in puzzlement. “What’s going on, Kami Khuzud?” he whispered. “This isn’t—”

  “Fhilt,” I said, knowing that he was my brother of the spirit, even though we were of different kinds, “by all that you love me, juggle.”

  I didn’t have to turn to Sala; she was smiling as she picked up the rings she had put away, and flung half a dozen into the air, reaching up and pulling them into a complex shower.

  The silverhorns roared, and the bassskin rasped.

  Toshtai’s brow furrowed microscopically for a moment; he’d felt the kazuh tugging at his own. As I had at mine, at whatever it was. It wasn’t the kazuh of the acrobat.

  It was something else, I knew. I was something else, I knew, as I stood there juggling, my own kazuh flaring bright in my mind.

  And then brighter, as the musicians caught fire;as it had before, their kazuh all flared at once: the cry of the silverhorns solidified in the air, becoming a glass snake that writhed and coiled in my ears and mind. The rapid notes of the chimer were a peppery rain, supported by the deep red rumble of the bassskin, the fast-picked zivver and pounding drum weaving golden notes into a net that supported the whole structure.

  Off in the distance, old Dun Lidjun’s nostrils flared, and while the old warrior didn’t move, I could feel that he too had raised kazuh, involuntarily, unwillingly, as the spark passed to him.

  I picked up my own juggling wands and tossed them into a simple shower, my eyes closed. I am a good juggler, although not a kazuh one, never a kazuh juggler, but a something else.

  In my mind, the flare of kazuh marked all of those who could practice zuhrir, all those who could raise kazuh, far further than my fleshy eyes could ever have seen:

  A cook stood in his kitchen slicing onions, his kazuh flaring, his slicing knife beating out an impossibly rapid staccato against the oak cutting board, he never for a moment slowing in his banter.

  A dozen warriors’ talents flashed into motionlessness, not blurring motion, their hands not nearing their blades, because a true warrior didn’t have to wave his sword around to raise kazuh.

  Somewhere in the village, a painter, his brush wet with ink, his mind filled with sky and grass and bird, and his soul now illuminated with his kazuh, set brush to paper with swift, sure strokes. A runner, dispatches bound to his skinny thighs, rose from his now-unnecessary meditations and blurred into movement, his kazuh cleaving him through the thick nectar that the air had become. A peasant stopped staggering through the paddies behind the plow; he steadied it with simple graceful movements as he became one with the ox and the plow and the earth.

  Others, more distant and indistinct, burned brightly in my brain.

  They and I shared something; I could feel more than see another kazuh flare into brightness, as well.

  My own.

  I could see it all now, all clear in my mind. There was no secret to be discovered. It was simple, logical, and it had always been in front of me, waiting for me to see.

  Written in stone, and sand, and kazuh.

  In mine, and in the killer’s.

  We had the crowd there, we owned the crowd as Fhilt, his kazuh fully upon him, began to exchange wands with me. We began to add the phantom wands, as we had before: instead of picking up my fourth wand, I pretended to, and substituted the phantom wand, and then another, and another, as Fhilt and I juggled wands real and phantom between us.

  The wands flew through the air, slapping into moving palms, as we moved through crisp throws and precise catches.

  All eyes were on us, and both Toshtai’s and Felkoi’s were glowing as I tossed a real wand to Sala and a phantom one to Gray Khuzud, and what the four of us were doing became a freeform weave of phantom juggling wands and real ones, Sala’s bright brassy rings and Gray Khuzud’s sharp knives all passing among and between us.

  Anyone could see in Sala’s and Fhilt’s and Gray Khuzud’s faces that they had raised kazuh, as we all had, and anybody could have heard the musicians catch the fire as the wail of the silverhorns cut through the room, followed momentarily by a firm, imposing run on the zivver, a raindrop spatter of sound from the drums, a heartbreakingly precise arpeggio all up and down the chimes, and a deep thrum of pleasure and power from the bassskin.

  It was all a matter of kazuh, after all.

  Imagine, if you would, that you were meant to be a warrior, but that you had been born wrongly, as a peasant. It was only right that you would, someday, be driven to prove that, even though you knew that picking up the challenge sword endangered your life. What did life matter next to your kazuh?

  Or me. Imagine that you were meant to be, ought to be, needed to be something that did not yet have a name, but were trapped in the life of an acrobat, knowing that no matter how good you became, you were misplaced.

  Start over again.

  Now, imagine that you knew, deep within you, that you really were an acrobat, that if you had only been born within the right womb, you would have spent your days with the juggling wands and the ropes, and the trapeze and highwire, moving through beauty, creating joy and laughter in motion.

  Imagine that you knew, deep within you, that you were a brother of spirit to the likes of Enki Duzun, a talented acrobat, one destined perhaps for the greatness of her father.

  Imagine, again, that you had finally allowed yourself to know that there was somebody who had murdered that acrobat, that particularly promising acrobat.

  It wasn’t a tribal loyalty, it wasn’t a personal matter—imagine that you knew that somebody had murdered not just the person of Enki Duzun, but all of the juggling and highwire and tumbling and beauty that she would have created.

  Could anything be more foul?

  Could you stand the stench of that in your nostrils?

  And imagine that you found yourself standing outside your brother’s armory in the rain, having fought with him, having argued with him, perhaps having gotten him to admit to you that he had tried to kill that useless acrobat, Kami Khuzud, only to murder his sister.

  Feel yourself looking up at the window into his shop as the rain spattered down upon you, as the lightning flashed and the thunder roared.

  Your anger would have grown, Felkoi, as you stood there, and then climbed up and into the tree, your fury at the desecration of that murder growing and flaring.

  A warrior couldn’t have walked across the branch, but a kazuh acrobat would take the first step, the body’s inertia resisting the motion as you pushed hard with calf and thigh, your balance on the slippery branch impeccable as you moved into the second step, your arms out to the side as lightning and thunder flashed and crashed all around the castle, your arms out to your side for balance, your speed increasing, the step becoming a bound, the bound becoming a spring, and your kazuh flaring into fury as you flung yourself outward through the window, into a flat somersault over the sill and into the room.

  And then you seized a sword and killed the slime that had foully murdered one who was my sister; one who was, soul to soul, your sister as well.

  I had touched on a truth as we buried Enki Duzun, Felkoi: we can’t do what we want to, but we do what we can.

  As you had, Felkoi.

  Nothing you could have done would have touched on the core of the matter, that Enki Duzun lay cold and dead in the ground, but you would do what you could, and you would do that with all the force of body and of will at your command. />
  And then, as you stood over the bloody body, a sword in your hand, you lost it. The anger, not the kazuh. Its fire had long been lit within you. But the anger had turned to fear, and you wouldn’t overcome that fear to admit to a crime when the suspect was clumsy Kami Khuzud, who would never be a kazuh acrobat. You might have traded your life for that of an Enki Duzun, or a Gray Khuzud, for a Fhilt or a Sala, but never for Kami Khuzud.

  I looked over at Felkoi.

  His tensed shoulders slumped in resignation. He knew that I knew, and he didn’t have the strength of will to deny it.

  Just a few moments of life left, eh, Felkoi?

  Idiot.

  No. Felkoi was, in his heart, in his soul, a kazuh acrobat, and not what I was, what I always had been: something that did not have a name, not yet. Somebody whose kazuh it was to see the last piece, the missing piece of a puzzle, to fit it all together neatly in a box.

  Let me show you the rest of the puzzle, Felkoi, I thought. Let the last of the pieces fall neatly, elegantly, exquisitely into place.

  Out of the jumble of flying wands, real and phantom, rings and knives, I reached in and grabbed a knife, and sent it tumbling through the air toward wide-eyed Felkoi.

  There was a relaxed smile on his face as he did what only a kazuh acrobat could have done: he reached out into the air and threw it back.

  I could see awareness dawn on Fhilt’s face first, and then Sala’s and finally Gray Khuzud’s, as they included him in the juggling. Knives flickered through the air in a freestyle pattern that only years of training and complete concentration could let me follow.

  But Felkoi was beautiful, his movements unpracticed, but precise, relaxed. He was there, kazuh taking him to a grace and ease to which work and skill could never have propelled me.

  It was beautiful.

  Somehow I stepped back out of the juggling, and let my hands drop down to my side, and watched them until Lord Toshtai caught my eye.

  A knowing smile barely moving across his broad face, a flipper of a hand beckoned to me, his eyes never leaving the flashing knives and rings, the real and phantom wands.