Sworn in Steel

by Douglas Hulick

  A man who was recognizable to me, even in two hundred year old drapes, even in miniature.

  A man who was a degan. Ivory Degan.

  Heron.

  The library doors swung open to admit Heron, trailed by a pair of men in iridescent white-enameled armor. The two had their swords out—shining, curving things that, pretty as they might be, were nonetheless clearly designed to see use.

  Opal Guardsmen, if I had to guess.

  All three paused when they spotted me sitting in the chair directly below the fan, the steward trussed up at my feet, the sword from the wall lying unsheathed across my lap. I held Simonis’s book open in my hand.

  Heron took in the scene at a glance and held up his hand before the guardsmen could take another step.

  “Leave us,” he said.

  The guardsmen hesitated, exchanging a doubtful look behind his back.

  “With respect, master, we—”

  “There’s been a misunderstanding,” said Heron, his eyes meeting mine. “This man and I had an appointment. I forgot.”

  Another shared look. “I’m no expert on etiquette, but that doesn’t explain the binding and gagging of your man there. Are you sure you don’t—”

  “Take my man with you,” said Heron. “Untie him. And if he says anything to you . . .” Here the secretary dropped his gaze to meet that of his steward’s. “ . . . anything at all, kill him. Am I understood?”

  Both the guardsmen and the steward nodded. A minute later the door closed behind them, and Heron and I were alone.

  He’d clearly had a long night, and was none the happier for it. Hair disheveled, face drawn, ash and sweat and someone’s blood smeared into his robes. He looked as if he’d come off a small battlefield, or out of one big damn tavern brawl.

  “I expect you have questions,” he said.

  “I’ve got a hell of a lot more than that.”

  “Yes, well.” He stepped farther into the room. “Can I at least ask you to put my sword down?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re worried I’ll use it.”

  “Let’s just say I find the image of you holding it . . . aesthetically displeasing.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Heron sighed. “Do you really want me to take it away from you?”

  I leaned the sword against the chair. “Better?”

  “And now the book, if you please.”

  “Which one? The original draft, in your wife’s hand, with your suggestions in the margins,” I said, reaching behind me and pulling out the earlier edition, fronted by thin laurel wood boards and leather bindings, “or the finished version”—I raised the one I’d been holding when he walked in—“with her handwritten dedication to you below the frontispiece?”

  I’d spent enough time around Baldezar back in Ildrecca to develop a basic appreciation of the forger’s art: evaluating the age of a document, distinguishing between real signs of wear and the tricks a Jarkman can use to prematurely age a piece, recognizing the natural flow of a person’s hand versus the hesitancy of a forger’s later additions. Simonis’s hand was identical in both books—a tight, efficient script, favoring a rigidity of form. Classical, if you will. The other hand, by comparison, was relaxed and flowing, favoring the abbreviations and blurring of figures favored by scribes, or secretaries. And, in this case, identical to the writing on some of Heron’s other papers I’d found among the shelves.

  Heron’s gaze went from the books to the fan over my head, then returned to me. There was a carefully banked fire in his eyes now. “You will put both of them down.”

  I closed the volumes and settled them in my lap. “Ivory Degan?” I said.

  He bowed at the waist. “I used to be, yes.”

  “The same one who founded the Order of the Degans?”

  “Once; now I’m simply Heron.”

  Even though I’d been half expecting the answer, I still wasn’t sure what to make of it; wasn’t even sure if I fully believed it. What do you say to someone who’s managed to pull off what even the emperor hasn’t been able to do?

  I decided to start with “How is that possible?”

  “I resigned from the Order and surrendered my name.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  We stared at each other for a long moment. I wondered, belatedly, if I was going to be allowed to walk out of here, given what I knew.

  “Are you like him?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The emperor.”

  “You mean have I been reincarnated?” Heron chuckled and shook his head. “No. Nothing so simple.”

  “Then tell me how,” I said. “Explain to me how a man—how a degan—can live for over two hundred years, while Stephen Dorminikos, with the resources of the empire and a troop of Paragons at his disposal, had to fragment his soul and turn himself into three recurring people.”

  “Easy,” said Ivory, folding his hands before himself. “Dorminikos wanted to keep his soul; I was willing to give mine up.”

  “Give up your . . .” I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because . . . it’s your soul,” I said. “Paragons need one to cast Imperial magic; the emperors need parts of one to be reincarnated; people need one—”

  “So the Angels can weigh your life?” he said.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “Or, at least, so people think they will. I’m not so sure anymore.” Ever since I’d found out that the emperor had lied about the Angels choosing him to be the perpetual ruler of the Dorminikan Empire, and that they in turn hadn’t seen fit to exact any kind of retribution, my use for the Angels had dropped even lower—not that it had been all that high to begin with.

  “And you think a man can’t live without a soul?” said Ivory.

  It sounded too much like a question that could lead someplace I wouldn’t like, so instead of answering, I said, “I think you’re spouting theology instead of answers.”

  A tired smile played across Ivory’s face. “It’s all one and the same in some ways, isn’t it? But you’re not interested in that: You want to know how I can be here, two hundred and eleven years after I helped create the Order of the Degans.”

  “It’s a good place to start.”

  “The answer’s simple enough: the Oath.”

  “Which one?” I said.

  I admit it: I smiled when Ivory took an unconscious step back in surprise. “What do you mean?” he said, too late to cover for his error.

  I stood. “I mean,” I said, stepping forward, “which Oath? The original one you crafted for the Order, or the Oath the degans used to use for their clients before you walked away. Or did you make a different promise? To the emperor, maybe, or a Paragon somewhere? Some Oath of service in exchange for a couple centuries’ worth of life?” I was halfway across the library now, Ivory standing straight and stern at the other end. Even from here, I could make out the uncertainty dancing in the corners of his eyes. He hid it well—after spending two hundred years as an Imperial living in Djan, I’d expect no less—but they were still there if you knew how to look. And looking had been, and still was, part of my job.

  “I’m told you got disenchanted with things,” I said, running with the theories now, putting the few pieces I had together to make up new pictures, new accusations. All to push him. Four lifetimes was a long time to sit on something, after all. “But was that even it? Maybe it wasn’t theology; maybe it was politics. Maybe your Order was too much of a threat to the emperor . . .” A thought occurred. “Or to his White Sashes. They’re sworn to protect the emperor, too, after all.” I stopped two paces before Ivory, the better to be able to look up into his eyes. “Did they complain about you? Did your new club step over some kind of line?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You have no idea—”

  “I know people,” I said. “And I especially know people with power: how they don’t like to have up-and-comers threaten their tidy litt
le arrangements. You don’t put as much effort into building something like the degans as you did and then simply walk away; you don’t swear to protect someone like the emperor and then abandon him. Something pushed you out.”

  “Put the books down and leave.”

  “Was it the emperor or his Sashes?” I said, ignoring the offer. “The Paragons maybe? We’re talking souls here, after all. Did they promise you a long life, or did they threaten you with something worse?”

  Ivory’s eyes flicked away from my face, to the wall behind me, and then back.

  I jerked a thumb over my shoulder, pointing at the fan. “Or did they threaten her?”

  He was a degan, all right: I didn’t even see him move before his fist connected with my face. The punch sent me sprawling on the floor, my limbs splayed, the books skidding away on the wooden floor. An instant later, he was bent over me, a fistful of my doublet in one hand, pulling me up.

  “You dare!” he hissed through clenched teeth, his other arm drawing back for another blow.

  “I dare,” I said, laying the steel of my wrist knife across the artery on the inside of his thigh. “More than you know.” I’d used my reaction to his punch as an excuse to flick the blade down into my palm and keep it there.

  Ivory froze, brow knit, fist raised. “You think I can’t kill you before your cut is finished?”

  “I know you can,” I said. “But now I also know you can die; otherwise, you wouldn’t have stopped for my steel.”

  Ivory grunted and lowered his arm. “Maybe I just don’t want to ruin these pants.”

  I admit, I’ve had my life saved by less over the years. Still, out loud I said, “Either way, I think it’s time we stopped dancing and started talking.” And I withdrew my knife.

  To my relief, Ivory didn’t kill me; instead, he hoisted me to my feet and then approached the chair. Carefully, he retrieved the books and replaced them on the shelves: Simonis’s book among the other degan materials, and the wooden-fronted draft with the old codexes on imperial philosophy, where it blended in nicely. It wasn’t until I’d seen the fan and put all the pieces together that I knew a book entitled Promises Through Time might have been more than it appeared.

  “You’re here with someone from the Order, aren’t you?” said Ivory, still facing the bookcase. “They hired you to track me down so I wouldn’t see them coming.”

  “I wasn’t hired,” I said. “And I’m not so much here with someone as for someone.” When Ivory glanced over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow, I added, “It’s complicated.”

  “But a degan?”

  “I’d say yes; he’d say otherwise.”

  Now Ivory did turn all the way around. “The one who killed Iron?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to talk out of turn, not sure how Degan would feel about me spilling his deeds to . . . what? A living legend? A fallen exemplar? How would he consider Ivory, anyhow?

  “If there’s anyone who can commiserate with your friend,” said Ivory, “it’s me. I felled five brothers and sisters before I was done. I won’t judge his actions.”

  He had a point. And it wasn’t as if they wouldn’t be seeing each other before long, if I had any say in it. The man before me was more than Degan could have hoped for when it came to information about the laws and purposes of his Order.

  “Bronze Degan,” I said.

  Ivory’s eyes widened for a fraction of an instant; then his face was passive again. He turned back to the bookshelf. “I assume he had his reasons.”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “No, it isn’t. Good for you.” Ivory pulled a codex from high up on the wall—higher than I was likely to reach without climbing shelves or using a library stool—and began flipping absently through the pages. I could hear the dry creak of the vellum and the whisper of his fingers on the pages from here. “And he wants to see me why?”

  “Same answer.”

  “But it has something to do with his killing Iron and leaving the Order, yes?”

  Instead of answering, I wandered back over to the chair and looked down at Ivory’s long sword. Despite all the elegance of the chiseled cross guard, it was a straightforward thing: a tapered, double-edged blade meant to be used with one or two hands, a sword equally as elegant in its use as my own, but from an earlier era. A weapon more for the battlefield than the street.

  I reached down to run my finger along the ridges of the tulip’s leaves.

  “Don’t,” said Ivory, not turning around.

  I withdrew my hand and instead moved around to place them against the back of the chair. “How does a degan become a clerk?” I said.

  “A better question would be, how does a clerk become a degan?” He shrugged. “I was educated in both the pen and the sword when I was young, along with any number of other things. I’ve lived by most of them at one point or another.”

  “You’ve certainly had the time.” I said. “Remind me how that’s possible again?”

  Ivory let out a slow breath. He kept his eyes on the page before him rather than looking at me. “You asked earlier why the emperor didn’t follow the path I have,” he said. “The answer’s simple: The option wasn’t available. When Dorminikos was trying to become immortal, reincarnation was the best his Paragons could manage. But that didn’t mean they stopped examining magic and the soul; didn’t stop trying to push the boundaries of what you call Imperial magic. A little over two centuries ago, a couple of them figured out a way to . . . well, I won’t say a way to become immortal: rather, a way to not die easily.”

  “And it involves removing your soul?” I said.

  “It involved many things, most of which His Divinity, the emperor, chose not to do, out of either faith or fear. Questions of theology aside, no one was sure how that kind of magic would effect someone whose soul had already been shattered, let alone reborn as many times as his. Given what the man had already done to himself to rule forever, he decided it wasn’t worth the risk.”

  “But you did.”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, at that point, I was sworn to serve him with my life and my soul. It seemed an easy choice at the time.”

  My life and my soul: I’d heard that expression before. I felt my eyes go wide. “A White Sash?” I said, straightening up. “Are you telling me you used to be a Sash?”

  Ivory’s head snapped up, a genuine look of shock on his face. “What? No, of course not!”

  “Good,” I said, letting myself lean back down on the chair. “Because if—”

  “I wasn’t a White,” said Ivory haughtily. “I was a Paragon.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  An hour later, I stepped out of Ivory’s house and back into the darkness of the padishah’s grounds.

  A thin crescent of the moon shone overhead. It felt as if it should be later, as if the sun should be rising, as if the world outside should somehow have changed since I’d crossed the threshold and had the world inside me shift. Again.

  This shit was getting old.

  I moved farther into the shadows at the end of the walkway and waited for my night vision to awaken. As the world sketched itself in amber, I reached over and ran the back of my hand against the folded piece of paper in my opposite sleeve. No more dusting guards for me: The paper was my pardon, as well as my pass in and out of the estate.

  Ivory had agreed to see Degan. It hadn’t been an easy argument to make: Ivory had been avoiding his former brothers and sisters for ages, and wasn’t inclined to make an exception. He’d still refused to tell me his side of why he’d left the Order, but he hadn’t been as shy about discussing the founding of the Order itself. Once I’d explained to him what Degan was looking for and why I felt obliged to help him, the former degan had warmed considerably. He remembered not only what it was like to walk away with his brothers’ blood on his hands, he’d said, but also how it felt to break his word to them as well.

  “The biggest mistake I made, tho
ugh,” Ivory had said, a cup of tea steaming in his hand as we sat at his study table, his sword remounted on the wall behind him, “was turning to the imperial elites for initial membership in the Order in the first place.”

  “Why’s that?” I said. I sipped at my own brew and tried not to make a face. There was a reason I preferred coffee over tea, and this particular batch of tepid, sour, soggy leaf-water was an excellent example of why that was. Still, it’s best to be polite when you’re trying to pump a two-hundred–year-old sword master and former imperial magician for information. I added another dollop of honey.

  “Because Emperor Lucien created the Order of the Degans to stand separate from the Black Sashes of the imperial military and Gold Sashes of the house guards,” he said. “If you’re going to do that, you probably shouldn’t recruit a bunch of Sashes into the Order. Or, at least, you’d think that, but neither I nor the emperor knew where else to turn. He wanted people he could trust with not just his life, but the empire’s well-being. That makes for a small pool of candidates.”

  “Wait,” I said, setting my cup aside. “You created the degans at the behest of the emperors? They know about this?”

  “I was a Paragon; who else do you think would, or could, tell me to surrender my soul?”

  “Well, I—”

  “And it wasn’t the whole of the Eternal Triumvirate who did this: We were Lucien’s project, and his alone. He’d been growing distrustful of the Gold Sashes for a while. Ever since the Coup of the Unborn that forced Theodoi the Sixth into exile, each incarnation has been trying to build a faction loyal to himself among the guard. By my time, the politics had started to get ugly, and Lucien saw it. He decided to step outside the Imperial structure and create the degans.”

  “By recruiting among the White Sashes?” I said. “But the Whites were put together specifically to take on Isidore and the Kin. They didn’t become personal bodyguards to the emperor until later, I thought.”