I sighed, looping one rein over the stud’s neck as I extended the other to Del. “You talk too much, Khashi.”
Stung, but still focused on the task, he hooked his right leg over his horse’s neck, kicked his left foot clear of stirrup, and jumped down, throwing reins toward one of the boys. There were clusters of them lining the shop walls, and merchants and customers spilled out of doorways. The street was a canyon of staring faces. “Then we shall stop talking,” he said, “and fight.”
Unlike the stupid kid in Haziz, Khashi knew the difference between dance and fight. He stripped off burnous, sandals, and harness, wearing only the customary soft suede dhoti underneath, and set them aside. He did not pause to draw a circle, or to invite me to draw it, because there would be none. Lithely graceful, he strode forward, sword in hand.
I heard the simultaneous intake of breath from the impromptu audience as I stepped off the stud. I did not strip out of harness, burnous, or sandals. I simply unsheathed without excess dramatics and walked to meet my challenger in the middle of the street, six paces away.
He smiled, assessing his opponent. The infamous Sandtiger, but also an older, aging man who was too foolish to rid himself of such things as would impede his movements. I had given the advantage to the younger challenger.
Which is why he laughed incredulously as I halted within his reach.
I did nothing more than wait. After a moment’s hesitation—perhaps unconsciously expecting the traditional command to dance that wouldn’t come—Khashi flicked up his sword and obliged with the first move.
I obliged by countering the blow, and another, and a third, and a fourth, turning his blade away. I offered no offense, only defense. I conserved strength, while Khashi spent his.
Though we did not stand within a circle and thus were not required to remain within a fixed area, lest we lose by stepping outside the boundary, we’d both spent too many years honoring the codes and rituals. There was no dramatic leaping and running and rolling. It was a sword-fighter’s version of toe-to-toe battle, lacking elegance, ritual, the precision of expertise despite our training. We simply stood our ground, aware of the mental circle despite the lack of a physical one, and fought.
It was, as always, noisy. Steel slammed into steel, scraped, tore away, screamed, shrieked, chimed. Breath ran harshly through rigid throats and issued hissing from our mouths. Grunts and gasps of effort overrode the murmuring of the spectators, the low verbal thrum of excitement.
I countered yet another blow, threw the blade back at him with main strength. I felt a twinge in my right hand, and another in my left wrist. The hilt shifted slightly in my hands.
All of the things Del and I had discussed had indeed become factors: The loss of a finger on each hand did affect my grip, and that, in turn, affected wrists, forearms, elbows, clear up into the shoulders and back. I had worked ceaselessly since leaving Skandi to compensate for the loss of those fingers by retraining my body, but only a real fight would prove if I’d succeeded. Now that I was in one, I realized my body wanted to revert to postures, grips, and responses I’d learned more than twenty years before. The new mind had not yet taught the old body to surrender.
I could not afford a lengthy battle, because I could not win it. I needed to make it short.
I raised the blade high overhead, gripped in my right hand, wrist cocked so the point tipped down toward my left shoulder. Khashi saw the opening I gave him, the opportunity to win. He did not believe it. But he lunged, unable to pass up the target I’d made of my torso. The audience drew in a single startled breath.
I brought the sword down diagonally in a hard, slashing cross-body blow, rolling the edge with a twist of my wrist even as I adjusted my elbow. The inelegant but powerful maneuver swept Khashi’s blade down and aside. Another flick of the wrist, the punch through flesh and muscle, and I slid steel into his belly. A quick scooping twist carved the intestines out of abdominal cavity, and then I pulled the blade free of flesh and viscera.
Khashi dropped his sword. His hands went to his belly. His mouth hung open. Then his knees folded out from under him. He knelt there in the street clutching ropy guts, weaving in shock as his gaping mouth emitted a keening wail of shock and terror.
I did him the honor of kicking his blade away, though he had no strength to pick it up, and turned my back on him. I intended to go directly to the stud. But three paces away stood the stupid kid from Haziz. His sword was unsheathed, gripped in one hand.
Blood ran from mine. I watched his startled eyes as they followed the motion along the steel, red, wet runnels sliding from hilt to tip, dripping onto hardpacked dirt.
He looked at me then. Saw me, saw something in my face, my eyes. His own face was pale. But he swallowed hard and managed to speak. “There was no honor in that.”
I’d expected a second challenge, not accusation. After a moment I found my own voice. “This wasn’t about honor.”
His brown eyes were stunned in a tanned face formed of planes and angles gone suddenly sharp as blades. “But you need not kill a man to win. Not in the circle.”
“This isn’t about the circle,” I said. “Not about rites, rituals, honor codes, or oaths sworn to such. It’s just about dying.”
“But—you’re a sword-dancer.”
I shook my head. “Not anymore. Now I’m only a target.”
“You’re the Sandtiger!”
“That, yes,” I agreed. “But I swore elaii-ali-ma.”
Color was creeping back into his face. The honey-brown eyes were steady, if no less shocked. “I don’t know what that is.”
A jerk of my head indicated Khashi’s sprawled body, limp as soiled laundry. “Ask him.”
I walked past him then, because I knew he wouldn’t challenge me. Not now. Likely not ever again.
But others would.
Before mounting I wiped my blade clean of blood on my burnous, sheathed it, and took the rein back from Del. Then swung up into the saddle. “Let’s go.”
The mask of her face remained, giving away nothing to any who looked. But her eyes were all compassion.
I heard the chanting of my name as we headed out of Julah.
Not far out of the city, after a brief but silent ride, I abruptly turned off the road. I rode to the top of a low rise crowned with cactus and twisted trees, dismounted, let the reins go, and managed to make it several paces down the other side, sliding in shale and slate, before I bent and gave up everything in my belly in one giant heaving spasm.
I remained bent over, coughing and spitting when the residual retching stopped, and heard the chink of hoof on stone. It might be the stud. But in case it was Del, I thrust out a splayed hand that told her to stay away.
I didn’t need an audience. I’d had one already, in Julah.
Finally I straightened, scraping at my mouth with the sleeve of my burnous. When I turned to hike back up to the stud, I found Del holding his reins. Silent no longer.
“Are you cut?” she asked.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Have you looked?”
Sighing, I inspected my arms, then ran my hands down the front of burnous and harness, checking for complaints of the flesh, though I was fairly certain Khashi had not broken my guard. I was spattered with blood, but none of it appeared to be mine. And nothing hurt beyond the edges of my palms where the fingers were missing.
“I’m fine.” I climbed to the stud, took the reins from her, then pulled one of the botas free and filled my mouth with water. I rinsed, spat, scrubbed again at my mouth, then released a noisy breath from the environs of my toes. “Butchery,” I muttered hoarsely, throat burned by bile.
“It was necessary.”
“I’ve killed men, beheaded men, cut men into collops before. Borjuni. Bandits. Thieves. It never bothered me; it was survival, no more. But this—” I shook my head.
“It was necessary,” she repeated. “How better to warn other sword-dancers
you will not be easy prey?”
That was precisely why I had done it, knowing the tale would be told. Embellished into legend. But the aftermath was far more difficult to deal with than I had anticipated.
“Tiger,” Del said quietly, “you spent many years learning all the rituals of the sword-dance. The requirements of the circle. It was your escape, your freedom, but also a way of life woven of rules, rites, codes. The formal sword-dance is not about killing but about the honor of the dance and victory. What you did today was the antithesis of everything you learned, all that you embraced, when you swore the oaths of a sword-dancer before your shodo at Alimat.”
“I’ve been in death-dances before.” They were rare, as most sword-dances were a relatively peaceful way of settling disputes for our employers, but they did occur.
“Still formalized,” she observed. “It’s an elegant way to die. An honorable way to die.”
Killing Khashi had been neither. But necessary, yes.
“On another day, you and he would have danced a proper dance. One of you would have won. And then likely afterwards you’d have gone to a cantina together and gotten gloriously drunk. It is different, Tiger, what was done today.”
“You can’t know, bascha—”
“I can. I do. I killed Bron.”
It took me a moment. Then I remembered. Del had killed a friend, a training partner, who otherwise would have kept her from returning to the Northern island known as Staal-Ysta, where her daughter lived.
But still.
I squirted more water into my mouth, spat again, then drank. Stared hard across the landscape, remembering the stink of severed bowels, the expression on his face as his life ran out, the weight of the blade as I opened his abdomen.
Butchery.
“Would you feel better if you had died?”
For the first time since the fight I looked directly at her. Felt the tug of a wry smile at my mouth. Trust Delilah to put it in perspective.
“You don’t have to like it,” she said. “If you did, if you began to, I would not share your bed. But this, too, is survival, and in its rawest, most primitive form. There will be others. Kill them quickly, Tiger, and ruthlessly. Show them no mercy. Because they will surely show none to you.”
What she didn’t say, what she didn’t need to say, was that some of those others would be better than Khashi.
SIX
DEL was initially resistant to going after my jivatma. She truly saw no sense in it, since very likely the sword was buried under tons of rock, and we had new blades. I still hadn’t told her about the dreams of the woman commanding me to take up the sword, because I couldn’t find words that didn’t make me sound like a sandsick fool. Instead, I relied on Del’s own respect for the Northern blades and on the loss of Boreal. As I had by declaring elaii-ali-ma, she had made the only choice possible in breaking the sword, but that didn’t mean she was immune to regret. Eventually she gave in.
There was not a road where we wanted to go, because no one else, apparently, had ever wanted to go there. Del and I made our own way, recalling the direction from our visit to Shaka Obre’s domain nearly a year before. We left behind the flat but relatively lush desert of Julah and traded it for foothills, the precursors of the mountain where we had encountered strong magic, where Chosa Dei, living in my sword, had vacated it first to fill—and kill—Sabra, then to encounter his brother. They hadn’t been living beings, Chosa Dei and Shaka Obre, merely power incarnate, but that was enough. What was left of them battled fiercely within the hollowed rock formation that shaped, inside a huge chimney of stone, a circle. And Del and Chosa Dei, using my sword, my body, had danced.
Here there was rock in place of soil, intermixed with hardpan and seasonings of sand. Drifts of stone were like the bones of the earth peeping through the flesh, but there were tumbled piles of it as well as that beneath the dirt. Brownish, porous smokerock, the variegations of slate, sharply faceted shale, the milky glow of quartz, the glitter of mica coupled with glinting splashes of false gold. The Punja, with its crystalline sands, was yet miles away. This was a land of rock swelling like boils into looming stone formations crowning ragged foothills, merging slowly into mountains. Not the high, huge ranges of Del’s North, shaped of wind and snow and ice, but the whimsy of Southron nature in sudden bubbles of burst rock, scattered remnants of wholeness and order, abrupt, towering upthrustings of striated stone shoved loose from the desert floor.
Movement against the uneven horizon of foothills and rock formations caught my eye. I looked, saw, and reined in sharply. Del, not watching me as she and her gelding picked their way through, nearly allowed her gelding to walk into the back of the stud. There was a moment of tension in the body beneath me, but he, too, knew what lay before us was far more threatening than what was behind.
“What—” Del began; but then she, like me, held her silence, and waited.
I had half expected it. We were in the land of the Vashni. No one knew where the borders were, or even if there were borders, but there was always the awareness of risk when one traveled here.
Four warriors. Vashni are not large, nor are their horses. But size wasn’t what mattered. It was the willingness to kill, and the way in which they did it.
Four warriors, kilted in leather, wearing wreaths of fingerbone pectorals against oiled chests. Black hair was also oiled, worn in single, fur-wrapped plaits. Bone-handled knives and swords decorated their persons.
Del’s voice was a breath of sound. “Could these be the same four who met us when we had Sabra?”
I answered as quietly. “I don’t know. Maybe. No one sees the Vashni often enough to recognize individuals.” At least, no one lived long enough to recognize individuals.
The warriors eased their small, dark horses into motion. They rode down from the rocky hilltop and approached, marking our faces, harnesses, swords. I felt the first tickle of sweat springing up on my skin.
Is it possible to fight a Vashni? Of course. I imagine it has happened. But no one, no one has ever survived the battle. They are killed, then boiled. When the bones are free of flesh, the Vashni make jewelry and weapons of it. The flesh is fed to dogs.
The only reason I know this is the Vashni don’t kill children. It is their ‘mercy’ to take children into their villages, to feed them, have them watch what becomes of their parents, then deliver them to a road where they will be found by others.
If they are found. Some of them have been.
Del and I had been in a Vashni village once, when searching for her brother. They had treated us with honor; Jamail was considered a holy man, and she was his sister. Jamail, castrated, mute, had not wanted to leave the people who gave him a twisted sort of kindness after years of slavery elsewhere. Later—known by then as the Oracle—he had been killed, but it hadn’t been Vashni doing. They revered his memory.
“Del,” I said quietly, “come up beside me so they can see you better.”
She didn’t question it; possibly she also realized safety might lie in her resemblance to the Oracle, her brother. She moved the gelding out from behind the stud, guided him next to me, and reined in. Again, we waited.
That triggered a response in the Vashni. One of them stayed back, but three others rode down. One stationed himself in front of me, approximately three paces away; the other two took up positions on either side of us.
The fourth rode down then. When he was close enough, I saw his eyes were lighter than the others, the shape of his face somewhat different. I’d never heard of Vashni breeding with other tribes, but anything was possible. They had taken a Northerner into their midst. Del’s brother, by the time we found him, had become one of them.
The warrior pulled up near Del. This close, we could smell them. Apparently rancid oil was considered perfume in Vashni circles.
The warrior’s eyes were a dark gray. He looked hard at Del, then at me. Something moved in those eyes. He raised a hand to his face and touched one cheek, mimicking my scars.
/> I took it as invitation. “Sandtiger,” I said.
Now he looked at Del. Now the hand rose to his hair, then indicated his eyes.
Blue-eyed, fair-haired Del said, “The Oracle’s sister.”
The Vashni closed in. We followed—or were made to understand it was wise to follow—the man with gray eyes.
It was a camp, not a village. A tiny clearing surrounded by boulders, a grove of twisted, many-limbed trees, a fire ring set in the middle with blankets thrown down around it. The stink of blood and entrails as well as the piles of hides told us the Vashni were a hunting party, as did the skinned carcasses hanging from the trees. Likely the village was a day’s ride. Perhaps it was even the one where Jamail had been held.
Once in camp, Del and I were motioned off our horses. We dismounted, and one of the warriors led the stud and gelding away to tie them to a tree lacking the ornamentation of meat. The stud was not happy, but he didn’t protest. Del’s black-painted, fringe-bedecked gelding went placidly and stood where he was tied, lowering his head to forage in thatches of webby green grass spreading beneath the tree. The Vashni mounts were turned loose once their bridles were slipped; apparently even they knew better than to test a warrior’s mood.
Gravely the gray-eyed man unsheathed knife and sword and set them down upon a woven blanket. The other warriors followed suit. Then it was our turn.
Unarming before anyone was not something I enjoyed. Doing it before Vashni set a knot into my guts. But a single misstep could get us killed. And they seemed to be peaceable enough—for the moment.
Del and I added our weapons to the pile. The gray-eyed man, whom I took to be the leader, sat down, motioning us to be seated on the blanket across from him, on the other side of the fire ring. We did so. It was a comfortable spot out of the sun’s glare, shaded by trees. If we’d been with anyone besides Vashni, it might have been a nice little respite.
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