Child of Sorrows

by Michaelbrent Collings

  She cut him short with a flick of her wrist. A line of charred black skin now ran from his ear to his collarbone. He fell silent.

  Sword turned to the women, who shrank back from her. She bowed to them, deeply. "The Emperor has offered the children of Ansborn his protection. He knows that you have suffered, and suffered still more, and offers you this." She held out a purse that was filled with Royals – more than the woman would probably make in the next Turn.

  The mother waited, as though unsure whether to believe what was happening. Sword softened her voice. "Take it, please," she whispered. "Malal has promised to make the Empire a new place. He gives you this – use it yourself, or share it with family or friends. It is a gift, and the promise of a better tomorrow."

  The woman finally took it, her head bowed. Then she raised her gaze to the man who still whimpered nearby. She stood, and spat on him. The man flinched as though she had rained down her fist upon him.

  Sword nodded approvingly. She looked at the girl who had almost met with ruin and perhaps death. Not much younger than her, perhaps only a Turn or two. Sword suddenly saw herself in the girl, and seeing her, her rage came to the fore.

  "Take her to her room," she said to the girl's mother. "Stay there, both of you." She turned back to the officer. "Neither of you need see what comes next."

  The officer started whimpering louder, but another flash of her sword quieted him. His shoulders slumped as she motioned for him to precede her into the street. Another twitch of her sword moved him to an alley between a pair of nearby buildings.

  After the moonlit street, the alley seemed a thing of infinite shadow, more so as the blade disappeared from Sword's hand. Black pools swallowed the two figures.

  The officer stood, beaten, in the middle of the alley.

  "You were told the laws allowing officers to take the Empire's children had been rescinded," said Sword. Her voice was soft, barely a whisper.

  The man seemed to find some steel. His voice whipped out, harsh in the night. "The law has always been for us to take what we will. Who are you to take that from me?"

  "The Emperor took that from you."

  The officer's snarl deepened. "The false Emperor. Don't think we haven't noticed. All these changes, all the 'improvements.'" He held his wounded wrist close to his chest. "None of it's real. You can't take what we deserve." Now he shook the stump in her face. "You can't take what you don't deserve!" he repeated, this time shouting the words with more than a trace of hysteria tingeing his voice. He looked at his wrist. "It's not fair," he whispered, sounding suddenly like a lost child.

  "Very little in life is," said Sword. Then her sword flared again. She slashed, movements so quick and bright that anyone watching wouldn't have been able to follow them.

  The officer didn't cry out. He couldn't. He just fell in the dirt, his other hand cut off, his eyes gone, and a precise cut through his neck that would steal his voice forever.

  "I have left you your ears," she said, "so that you may hear the hatred and pity that surround you to the end of your days." A final cut, and his feet were gone as well. "Thus comes to those who prey on the weak in the rule of Malal."

  She turned and left him. He would be found and picked up when she notified the detail of soldiers assigned to the matter, what was left of him deposited outside the officers' barracks as a reminder of what happened to those who broke the Emperor's new laws.

  She looked to the sky. After Turns in the kennels, Turns where her only sky was the ugly roof of her cage, or the faraway roof of the arenas, she still couldn't get over how beautiful the sky could be. As she watched, dawn broke, the sun's light diffused by the clouds that so often crept up the five mountains of Ansborn to shade the Empire from below.

  "Beautiful," she whispered. Then returned to the castle. The guards on the walls let her in without a word. They knew who she was, and what her mission had been in recent months. And though they were all good men, still there was fear whenever she came among them.

  All men, no matter how innocent, fear their judgment.

  Then she was in the courtyard beyond the castle wall, and from there entered the palace proper. Malal's palace was a huge building – the largest in Ansborn since the fall of the Grand Cathedral – with so many rooms she had yet to visit them all. But right now she was only interested in one. Not her bedroom – there was no sleep to come on nights when she saw to the Emperor's Justice.

  The Imperial Library. A place where she had found much refuge, and much comfort. Strange to say – she had barely read only a Turn ago, and now she felt as home among the books as among any people save her closest friends.

  She found the books she had been looking at yesterday – replaced on their shelves as always – and began reading.

  "I thought I would find you in here."

  Sword jumped, and the book she had been reading slipped from her grasp and fell to the floor with a thud louder than the sound of a vanquished foe on a battlefield.

  And what does it say that I know that – and that it's my first thought?

  She turned away from the image, even as she turned to her teacher. The old man leaned partly on a crooked wooden cane, partly on the doorway of the library. She frowned a bit when she saw it – not him, but the lean.

  She frowned when he stepped away from the doorway, and now leaned almost completely on the cane in his hand. That he leaned so at all times was, she knew, her fault. And her fault alone. Brother Scieran had saved her from a crippling blow at the hands of a Greater Grift. But he had saved her by taking the blow upon himself – a blow so terrible that even the ministrations of the best Patches in the Empire had sufficed merely to save his life, not to save his strength.

  Pain can never be avoided completely. It can only be shifted from one place to another.

  But the worst of it wasn't the mere fact of his pain – wasn't even the fact that that pain had been meant for Sword. No, it was the fact that he had suffered it at the hands of Armor – at the first thing she could remember having that was like she imagined a father should be. And Brother Scieran was like a father, too, in his own way.

  One father hurting another. Such a thing should never be.

  Then she had done even worse. For she had killed Armor. And even though with his dying breath he told her he bore her no blame and expected it to happen and still loved her… even so, it still stung.

  Brother Scieran cleared his throat, and Sword realized she had been staring into space. Silently looking at memories that were more real sometimes than the present.

  Brother Scieran looked at the book on the floor. He shook his head – slowly; one of the things he'd lost when Armor crushed the right side of his body was full range of motion in his neck – and tsk-tsked lightly. "Have I taught you nothing of how to care for books in the past months?"

  "You scared me."

  "You don't get scared."

  "Well… startled me, then."

  "You still shouldn't have dropped it."

  "To be fair…," and she groaned as she levered the book back up to the table, "it is bigger than I am."

  "There is that." Brother Scieran hobbled over to look at what she was reading. "Ophel's Masterwork On The First Four Hundred Turns." He snorted. "Quite the prideful one, aren't you?"

  Sword felt her ears redden. "I've been practicing my letters. And I was curious."

  Brother Scieran shook his head quickly. "Oh, no, not you, my dear. You already read better than most of the Temple Faithful I've met in my long Turns. I was talking about him." He pointed at the book. "This Ophel fellow. Anyone who calls his own treatise a 'masterwork' has something to learn about humility."

  Sword turned back to the page she'd been reading. "It's only hubris if you're not really as good as you say you are."

  She practically heard Brother Scieran's jaw drop open, and had to work hard to keep herself from laughing.

  "Where in the name of all the Gods and all the Faithful – who ever would say…." He narrowed hi
s eyes. "Smoke taught you that, didn't he?" He threw up his hands in equal parts righteous frustration and virtuous rage. "That upstart thinks that just because he took the Emperor's place he actually…. Bah!" He stood silent for a moment, then curiosity finally got the better of him. He looked over Sword's shoulder. "How is it? A masterwork?"

  Sword sighed and swung the book shut. "Not really. It actually reads pretty much like Eka's own Rules and

  Commandments. Lots of 'thus must it be's and 'for I beheld it so's, but not a whole lot of actual history. Eka ascends the mountain, says a lot of high-sounding things about the greatness of his reign, then there's a huge jump to the Great Civil Wars, without much in between. Like the historians expect that anyone who reads these books will somehow just know what happened." She slammed down a fist in frustration. A spark actually flew out from beneath her hand.

  Brother Scieran took a quick step forward, and placed his one good hand over hers, calming her. When most people got angry, they threw a tantrum, or smoldered inside, or in extreme cases got in a fight. But Sword wasn't most people. She was a Greater Gift. One in a thousand people in the Empire were born with magic, and one in a thousand of them had powers so great they could change the course of history – as Sword had already done.

  Repeatedly.

  Her Gift was that she could wield weapons with greater skill than anyone who had ever lived – or ever would. She couldn't handle guns or bows or the like particularly well, but if it was a weapon that used only her strength – anything from a sword to a whip to a spear to a blunt rock – she had no equal.

  Beyond that, she was possessed of something even most Greater Gifts never saw – a Second Gift: a change to and amplification of her power that made her well-nigh unstoppable. Not only could she wield weapons with superhuman power, speed, and skill, she could actually call them into being from the very fabric of the universe – any weapon, at any time.

  And it didn't hurt that the weapons she called into being were made of an enchanted fire. The fire could be a cold one, without heat but harder than any steel; or a searing fire that could burn through, as far as she could determine, anything and everything.

  So though it wasn't likely that she would actually pull a flaming dirk into existence and use it to slice the offending book to pieces – setting fire to the Imperial Library as an incidental side effect – the slight chance of it was obviously enough to worry her friend and teacher.

  The spark disapppeared as fast as it came. She took a few breaths, then heaved the book into her arms and began the slow work of climbing up the nearby ladder that would let her return the book to its place on the shelves.

  Why are the huge, worthless ones always so high up?

  "Why are you so interested in the Imperial history, girl?" asked Brother Scieran as she climbed. He had asked the question before; many times, in fact. She had never answered. She wasn't avoiding the question, she just didn't know why. Ever since she and her friends – the revolutionary group dubbed the Cursed Ones – had overthrown the corrupt Imperial regime three months ago, she had spent nearly every free moment in the Imperial Library. She had stumbled upon it at first, during one of her many sleepless nights when she wandered the halls of the palace like the restless ghost of one of the many men and women she had slain. She turned the knob, opened the door, and felt she had found the answer to a question she never knew she had.

  Only I haven't found the answer yet. I just know it's in here.

  She realized she was talking. Speaking to Brother Scieran, her voice sounding automatically, as though her body had been inhabited in that moment by two different people at once.

  "History interests me."

  "Obviously. But saying you're interested in history because history interests you is a bit of a tautology, don't you think?"

  "I don't know that word." She finally managed to shove the four-foot-tall book back into its space on the shelf and start back down the ladder.

  "I'm surprised. I've never seen someone drink in knowledge like you before. A tautology is a circular argument. For example, if you say the sky is high and I ask how you know that and you point and say, 'Because look how high up it is!' It's an argument that just feeds on itself and goes nowhere at – are you even listening to me, girl?"

  "Yes, it's an argument about things that eat the sky." Sword leaned and pulled a book away from the shelf.

  "That's not what I said. Why aren't you – You're not listening to me again, are you?"

  She didn't respond. The book that she pulled away didn't look that interesting. Tales of To-To-Mo, which from its cover was some sort of children's book.

  But there was something behind it.

  One thing about the Imperial Library: it was carefully, precisely ordered. There was never a book out of place, never a speck of dust. On the rare occasions that she had left a tome out for the night, when she returned the next day she found it gone, returned to its original home on the shelves.

  The first few times that happened it enraged her – she hadn't noted where she found the volumes, and finding them again had been a challenge. But she learned quickly, and after that, if she wasn't finished with a book when she was ready to leave for the day, she either wrote down where she got it, or simply took it to her room with her.

  She had seen the man who did the re-stacking – a slim form in palace livery, with red hair that hung in a wave over his eyes, red hair that had gone prematurely gray in a single thin strip on one side of his head – but every time she thought about talking to him there was something about his gaze and his posture that stopped her. He seemed so… busy. Too engaged in what he was doing to be bothered by a paltry thing like another human being.

  The library was a place of supreme order. There was no place in this Imperial Library for misplaced items. No place for disorder. Certainly no place for a book to be carelessly shoved behind another book.

  She pulled the other book out, intending nothing more than to put it on a table and leave it for the phantom librarian to put it wherever it belonged. But when she looked at it, her intentions changed.

  She brought it down the rest of the way, nearly falling the last few steps down the ladder in her hurry to bring it to Brother Scieran. She showed him the cover. It was dusky leather, faded and with bits of it flaking away, others worn so smooth they felt almost as though they might simply fade out of existence.

  A weathered etching was on its surface, the rough outline of a tree, branches reaching into the sky and roots thrusting into the earth, with a smudged line across the top, as though someone had tried to erase words that had once spanned the length of it:

  "What do you make of this?" she said.

  Brother Scieran pursed his lips. He rubbed his fingers through his beard, and his normally playful eyes took on a serious cast. "Gods' eyes," he whispered. "Can it be?" He looked at her, and now his eyes were not serious, they were haunted. "I think this is…." He looked back at the etching for a moment, then returned his gaze to her. "I think, Sword, that this might be some kind of… a tree."

  It took a moment for that to sink in. Then she balled a fist and slowly held it in front of his face. "I could murder you."

  "But then who would you have these scintillating conversations with?" he said, and the smile returned to his eyes.

  "Arrow," she answered, and stuck out her tongue.

  "Really? Are you two actually talking now? I thought you just sat and made dove-eyes at one another while the rest of us felt vaguely ill."

  "I…." Her voice caught at that. She tried again. "I…." Her fist unclenched. "You win."

  "Yes. I rather think I do." He peered at the book, actually managing to be serious for a moment. "Why so interested? I see nothing of note about this tome."

  She frowned, biting her lip nervously. "I don't either."

  Brother Scieran cocked an eyebrow. "Then by all means, continue to make a fuss."

  She held the fist in front of his eyes again, but the action was playful, and h
e knew it. Then the play melted away. "I don't know what's special, but there's something. Something familiar."

  That made Brother Scieran take notice. "Is it from a dream?"

  She shook her head. Last time something had seemed "familiar" to her in a way she couldn't articulate, it had been something from a dream that had turned out to be a half-buried memory. And that memory had turned out to be the key to their attempt to overthrow the Emperor.

  Not that they had been successful. The Emperor had been killed, but so had the heir that would have taken his place – a friend of Sword's named Rune. Still, they had managed since another of the Cursed Ones' – a man named Smoke – Second Gift was that he could literally change into any person. He couldn't take over their memories, but in outer form he would actually be them – not a copy, but the same person; and no physical examination, no viewing by the most talented Reader, would reveal the deception.

  It was a one-way metamorphosis, though. Smoke was now the Emperor Malal. He hated it – not least because as Smoke he had been a big, strong man in the prime of early adulthood, and now was in the soft body of a pampered teen – but he had made the choice without a second thought.

  So many sacrifices.

  So many losses.

  More than once, Sword had second-guessed, had agonized, wondering: if she had only understood her dreams, those memories trying to be born again through the mists of her subconscious… would her friends still live? Would Rune and Armor, Garden and Siren and Scholar and Teeth and all the rest still be alive?

  She didn't know. She never would.

  Life is like that. Foresight is never perfect. And contrary to what most people say, hindsight is even less so, because mixed in with human doubts and fears is not just of what might be, but what actually had been. And nothing distorts faith in oneself quite so much as reality.

  Still, just because she hadn't been able to figure out what was happening, what her mind was trying to tell her, in time to save her friends last time didn't mean she wouldn't try this time. So when Brother Scieran asked if she was remembering this book –