by Murray, Dean
Fi'lin spun around to see what everyone was watching, and drawing his own practice blade, sprinted across the massive cavern towards them. "Half strength, you fools!"
For a split second Jain clung to the hope the weapons master would get there in time to stop the fight, but Va'del was completely on the defensive now. While Fi'lin was still more than ten feet away the younger boy went down, his slowing defenses failing to stop one of Be'ter's blows, which crunched into his ribs with bone-crushing force before the backstroke slammed into his right leg.
Be'ter seemed to pause for a heartbeat before his weapon licked out once more towards Va'del's lightly-protected face. Jain felt her world tremble as what even she knew was a killing blow raced towards the only person who'd really loved her since her parents had given her up to the Daughters. Miraculously, Fi'lin's blade knocked Be'ter's sword away and then swooped back in and disarmed Be'ter of both his practice weapons.
Jain found herself at Va'del's side unsure of how she'd made it there. Fi'lin looked at the sickly gray hue and broken bones of the fallen trainee and bellowed for a stretcher.
The tears filling her eyes blurred her vision, hiding Va'del's gasping form and making it impossible to see the light slap that Fi'lin administered to penetrate her near hysterics. "Can you block pain, foolish child?"
Trying to pull herself together, Jain nodded, and reached out to pull in the necessary power as one of her instructors came running up. The familiar burning of the raw power focused Jain's thoughts. Reflexes she'd spent a third of her life developing took over as she stopped the pain signals racing along Va'del's nerves from completing their trip to his brain.
Pain blocking was just minor enough of a working that Jain was still able to stumble along with the stretcher as she powered it, but before she'd taken more than a few steps, she was grateful for the strong arm that snaked around her waist to help guide her. It had never before seemed that the healers' rooms were so far away from the practice area.
Just as Jain thought she was about to lose control of her working, the arm guided her to a chair. She collapsed into it gratefully, turning almost all of her attention to keeping the pain block up, maintaining only a slight awareness of what was going on around her as she'd been trained to do.
Alone inside her mind except for worry over Va'del, and the white-hot power she was channeling, Jain almost didn't hear her name when a familiar voice called it out for the second time.
"You go ahead and keep that pain block up, Jain, but don't you dare strain yourself. If you don't let us know when you start getting tired, I'll see that you're soundly switched. Do you understand?"
Jain suppressed a surge of annoyance. The voice was one she somehow knew needed to be obeyed, so she mumbled something that passed for an affirmative.
As it always did for Jain when she was touching the power, time seemed to move slower than normal. As a result, the multiple color cycles it seemed like passed while she was blocking Va'del's pain probably really only represented half a color cycle or so. All the same, Jain had developed the fine tremble that was the first sign of exhaustion by the time she noticed a decrease in the signals making their fiery way along his nerves.
They must have repaired most of the damage. They've probably drugged him by now as well.
A few moments later someone shook her, and Jain opened her eyes to find Ah'bi's tired eyes looking her over critically.
"I thought I told you not to push too hard."
Jain thought about pointing out that Ah'bi's normally-stately features were marred with exhaustion, but suppressed the desire and instead nodded as contritely as she was able. "Yes, Guadel Ah'bi. I had just realized how tired I was getting when you shook me."
Ah'bi nodded and looked away, but Jain was fairly sure that she hadn't fooled the intelligent woman who also served as the law instructor for both the candidates and the Daughters.
"Well, it was lucky that Fi'lin had you block pain, and that he sent one of his boys for me. Poor Mandi wouldn't have been able to do much more than keep him alive, and even the two of us would have been hard pressed to do everything that needed to be done if we'd had to worry about blocking pain too. You did a good job, young lady."
Jain looked around and realized that there weren't enough people in the sick room. "Where is Mandi?"
The Guadel pointed at the door. "She collapsed a little while ago and Fi'lin carried her out. The poor thing was spent."
Jain nodded distractedly as she looked over at Va'del. The very fact that Ah'bi wasn't still working on him was plenty of proof that he must be okay now, but he looked so frail. Only the fact that she was officially not supposed to be near him kept her from pulling herself to her feet and walking over to check on him.
As Fi'lin returned, his wife pointed at Jain. "She hasn't collapsed yet, but she's almost as tired as Mandi was. Could you get her back to the dormitories for me, and let the appropriate people know that she was helping me, so she doesn't get in trouble?"
The whip-thin Guadel started to nod distractedly, and then fixed Ah'bi with a piercing glare. "I can do that, but maybe we should all talk first. You've said this little thing is your prize pupil, can we trust her to keep her mouth shut?"
Jain watched in amazement as her normally composed instructor looked back and forth between her husband and her student in shocked astonishment. "I think so. Jain's never been as flighty as most of the girls. Obviously there hasn't been any hint that she's talked to any of the others about having linked, or we would have been forced to bury her somewhere under enough chores to ensure that nobody else got any ideas."
Fi'lin nodded, and raised a hand to forestall the question of what they could possibly need Jain to keep a secret. "You know that Be'ter did this to the boy, and that it wasn't the training accident that he and his sponsors will no doubt try to explain it away as."
"I assumed as much."
"What you may not have thought through yet is that this will change the whole dynamic among the candidates. I've been able to use Va'del as a counterweight against Be'ter with the more easily-swayed boys. Once they saw someone successfully stand up to that piece of filth, more of them started growing spines. I even started hoping we'd be able to salvage the bulk of them."
Jain felt her eyes go wide at the frank discussion of the impact Be'ter had made on the other candidates. All of this time and she'd never even suspected that the adults realized what a snake Be'ter was. Be'ter had always implied that he was too smart to get caught and all of the candidates and Daughters had assumed he was right. It had just seemed too impossible to believe that their instructors would know but choose not to do anything about it.
Ah'bi nodded. "Of course, I should have realized that. With Va'del having been beaten so severely, those same boys will start following Be'ter around like gurra lambs again. Powers! I wish we could do something to kick him out of the candidate pool."
Fi'lin was pacing across the smooth, rock floor of the sick room now. "There isn't anything that can be done there, he's got his sponsors so tightly wrapped around his fingers they don't believe any of the bad they hear about him, despite the fact it's come from nearly every instructor who's ever spent any time around the boy. They're convinced it's all some kind of political effort to get him kicked out before he can become the greatest leader their bloodline has ever known."
Ah'bi had a look of concentration on her face that made it seem as though she were doing sums. "But how can we possibly...no, you can't be suggesting that. Do you have any idea how much trouble we'd get into if anyone ever found out?"
I don't know why he cared if I could keep a secret. They don't even have to talk to each other to communicate.
"Dear heart, we don't have a choice if we want to stop him from ruining every candidate we currently have in training. They've already done it to Be'ter. I could tell, he moved too quickly for it to be anything else, not in the short time he's been gone."
Ah'bi looked at Fi'lin for several seconds. "That isn't all
, is it? You're not just worried about stopping Be'ter, you're worried about Va'del, aren't you?"
Fi'lin didn't answer, but his wife finally nodded and turned to Jain. "You probably didn't catch much of that other than the fact that Va'del needs to be able to stand up to Be'ter, but there are other ways besides the linking augmentation to make a man more deadly. I'm going to do some of them to Va'del, and then, if you're willing, and can keep it secret, you'll make sure that they continue to function correctly. I'd do it myself, but if I visited him that frequently it would eventually make people suspicious."
Jain looked uncertainly back and forth between the two Guadel before letting her gaze settle on Va'del's blanketed form. "Yes, whatever it is, if it helps Va'del I'll do it, and if necessary I'll take it to my grave."
The admission had been harder than she'd expected. Not that she wasn't willing to help, she just couldn't help worrying that this was all just a test to see how many rules she was willing to break.
Ah'bi took a deep breath and nodded. Jain's niggling fears evaporated over the next two color cycles as Ah'bi proceeded to use what Jain had thought were unrelated techniques and pieces of knowledge to work changes on Va'del's body she never would have imagined were possible.
"The bones are fairly easy, you just have to change their structure. Everything has a structure, but some structures are stronger than others. We need something that is strong enough that it won't break as easily."
As Jain watched, Ah'bi sent out little trickles of power that changed parts of Va'del's bones to something that was harder. Soon all of the major bones in his body had little sections of material that wasn't normal bone running through them. It vaguely reminded Jain of a wire frame, or the supports that the miners sometimes used in areas of the Capital where the stone wasn't as strong.
"There, that's as much as can be done today. Each time you are able to talk to him privately you'll need to strengthen the reinforcement, expanding the amount of material that has been changed until you reach a point where the red part in his blood no longer seems as plentiful, then go in and change some of it back. Especially in the larger bones here and here."
The older woman seemed to sense her student's confusion. "The red part has something to do with oxygen, that's why it's one of the things we modify to make it so those who have to go outside don't get sick and die."
Jain nodded. "But what does that have to do with the bones?"
"We're not completely sure, there's still so much about the body we don't understand, but somehow the bones are involved in the making of the oxygen-carrying part of the blood. If you change too much of the bones, they no longer produce what the blood needs. That or maybe it just can't get out once it's made. I think it is the latter, but there isn't a good way to be sure."
By the time they finished, Jain knew how to change strands of muscle so that they were marginally stronger, how to slightly speed up selected parts of a person's nervous system, and had promised never to reveal what she knew to either the other Daughters or the healers.
Looking at Va'del's fragile form in the pale violet light of the time stone, Jain just hoped that it would be enough to keep him from being killed the next time he faced off against Be'ter.
Chapter 4
On'li tried to lean back in her chair and relax, but the last item on the agenda for the day was listed as a petition from one of the Guadel. It was a relatively nonthreatening description for something that could range from a simple marriage request to some kind of unimaginable problem that would shift the balance of power in the Council entirely. Javin still occasionally teased her about her penchant for expecting the worst, but today the suspense looked like it was starting to get to him as well.
Tradition held that all petitions remained anonymous until the actual time of delivery so that the petitioner couldn't be threatened into silence. On'li knew it was a sound practice that, along with the ability of village headmen to do the same, helped guarantee the Council stayed connected to the actual needs of the People. Even so, that never stopped her from trying to ferret out what was in the works each time a petition showed up on the Council agenda.
Her track record to date had been fairly respectable, but this time there wasn't even the slightest hint of what the petition was about. None of the unmarried Daughters were old enough to be considering marriage proposals, and she wasn't aware of any outstanding disputes that might justify a formal hearing by the Council.
The large, iron knocker on the other side of the door announced the arrival of the petitioner and On'li felt her stomach sink a little further. She spared a second for a brief prayer that it was at least something less grave than the earlier news that Bob'ae had been killed while helping mop up what appeared to be the last group of bandits.
It had been incredibly fortunate that so many of the bandits had been gone when Va'del and Cindi had attacked their base, but it had meant the remaining bandits had been expecting further retaliation and finishing them off had been messier than anyone had expected.
The loss of one Guadel was bad enough in normal times, with the other losses that had been sustained, it was even worse than usual. For the first time in a couple of hundred years the Council wasn't worried about finding enough potential candidates to fill out the number of potential sponsors. Instead it was very much looking like, as a group, they were going to be hard pressed to find enough sponsors to replenish their ranks.
On'li had spent the occasional few moments exploring possible ways that she and Javin might be able to use the need to get more Guadel trained as a way to push through Va'del's candidacy. Mar'li had been especially hopeful that they'd be able to line up some allies, but every scenario On'li had been able to contrive to date instead seemed to actually decrease Va'del's chances.
A'vril motioned for her husband to open the massive door that shut the Council room off from the rest of the world during meetings, and On'li felt another flash of relief that the other woman didn't seem to be holding any grudges over the fact that Cindi and Va'del hadn't been punished. For all that A'vril was woefully naive about the way the world worked, she did have a good heart.
Almost as one, the Council members turned to see who followed the Goddess' Arm back into the room. Cindi was absolutely the last person On'li would have expected. There wasn't anything prohibiting the other woman from remarrying so soon after Oh'scir's death, but her prospective husband should have been the one doing the petitioning. Of course, Cindi hadn't ever been one to do things in the normal way.
For all that On'li still didn't consider the other woman a friend of any sort, she found she couldn't generate the kind of distaste she'd always felt previously. That was at least partly because of what Cindi had done for Va'del. The other piece of the picture was that despite being well on her way back to her old habits, and her old size, she wasn't quite as abrasive now as she'd been previously. She moved more tentatively too, a bit like a frightened gurra. It was hard to hate someone who'd lost her husband and come so close to dying herself. She'd paid a hefty price on behalf of every single member of the People and some part of On'li understood that, despite her previous distaste for Cindi.
Cindi stood in the petitioner's spot at the table and cleared her throat, bringing On'li back to the problem at hand. "Honorable Councilors, I appreciate your willingness to hear my petition."
Everyone at the table nodded with varying degrees of hostility or warmth depending on how badly Cindi had offended them in the past. On'li noticed that the head of the widowed Guadel's bloodline was one of the ones who looked like he was choking on something particularly nasty.
"In light of all he has accomplished on behalf of the People, I formally request that trainee Va'del be admitted as a candidate."
The absolute silence that followed Cindi's statement was as telling to On'li as the entire Council room breaking into furious debate would have been. The politically astute Guadel tried to catch Cindi's eye to motion for her to withdraw her request.
They k
new this was coming.
The only possible explanation was that Cindi had decided to pursue a petition after Ma'ark and his wife had refused to champion the idea as the leaders of her bloodline. She should have known better. Powers knew she'd had plenty of experience playing nasty tricks on people, a complete novice should have seen this coming, let alone her.
Ja'dir broke the silence as he rose to his feet. "Traditionally, one must be married to sponsor a young man. Rather than asking us to approve your sponsoring the boy now, wouldn't it be wise to wait until you've selected a husband? After all, Va'del will no doubt still be here desperately hoping to be sponsored later, just as he is now."
Javin stiffened beside her, but On'li was too focused on Cindi's next words to do anything more than place a hand on his arm.
"You misunderstood me. I'm not requesting permission to sponsor him myself. He's earned the right to be a candidate with or without a sponsor after what he has accomplished."
The smile that flickered across Ja'dir's face was enough to tell On'li that Cindi had just said exactly what he'd been hoping she would.
"Why would you make such a request? Unlike Javin and On'li who are proscribed from sponsoring while sitting on the Council, you could very easily sponsor the boy once you've remarried, and do so without any of us stopping you. Could it be that you can't in good conscience sponsor the boy yourself?"
Her petition had been defeated in that second, but Cindi apparently didn't realize that. Instead, she continued on, damaging their cause more and more with each word.
However, seeing how haunted the once formidable woman looked, On'li still couldn't hate her. That was the missing piece. Cindi wasn't just devastated by losing her husband and nearly dying. She'd seen what Va'del was capable of when she linked with him, and it was almost more than she could handle. It was likely that she'd recover with enough time, but right now the thought of facing that kind of potential violence was obviously too much for her.
