The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1)

by Kari Cordis

  Dorian had not left them. She was sitting, uncompromisingly beautiful this early in the morning, fussing with the fire. Kai and Traive were both with her, murmuring, and as Ari watched, Melkin rose and joined them. He threw off the corner of cloak he’d been laying under and rushed, without much grace, to join them.

  “Ari,” Dorian greeted him quietly, looking squarely into his eyes as he hurried up. Without a lot of social dexterity, he blurted, “Why are the Asps after me—us?”

  She raised one of those exquisite brows. “You don’t believe in waking up slowly, do you?”

  He flushed, mumbling an apology, realizing he’d probably interrupted other conversations. But Traive flashed him a grin, and even Melkin didn’t say anything, perhaps out of self-interest. Melkin could forgive a lot for a few answers.

  She moved back a little as Traive began with breakfast, but, to her credit, didn’t try to avoid the question. “The White Asps are mercenaries—to think they are personally interested in you or your activities is almost without doubt inaccurate.”

  “Then who’s hiring them?” Melkin demanded, his low voice even more gravelly after a night’s sleep.

  She hesitated. “We are not completely certain. They are being paid quite well, though,” she said at length, “which explains why they’ve been so conscientious in their pursuit of you.”

  “They are after me, aren’t they?” Ari asked quietly. In the face of her obvious interest in him and her matter-of-fact tone, it didn’t seem so ridiculous to say it out loud. None of the men around the fire thought so either, their eyes all glancing over to the goldenesque creature sharing their fire, waiting for confirmation.

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know for sure,” she said again.

  “For women willing to forecast a lengthy world peace on the strength of a hunch, I would think you could go out on a limb and make a guess here,” Melkin observed acidly.

  “We don’t know,” she repeated, serene as ever. “We do not have a script.”

  There was so much more he wanted to ask, but not in front of anybody. And the rest of the party was stirring, wandering over to the fire with various expressions of befuddlement. Rodge observed the sun wasn’t even up yet, to which Loren replied in a cracking voice of affected cheer that they were and wasn’t that the best way to start the day (with an ingratiating smile at their hostess)? The resulting argument lasted well into mid-day, and whenever the trail widened, Ari moved as far up the column away from them as he could. There was a great jockeying to be up front, however, where Dorian strode trim and tireless just behind the close-scouting Dra, so he couldn’t usually get very far.

  It was a long, long day. Dorian pushed them harder and longer than Melkin, or even Traive in his rush to get through the Torques, ever had. They had lunch in the saddle and didn’t leave them until well after dark again. Had they not been so conditioned already by the weeks of travel, they all would have been in deep hurt.

  There was hardly any conversation that night. Melkin asked with a marked lack of sweetness where exactly their trail led, to which Dorian responded, “Straight south, into the Tamarisks and then along their length. The Sheelshard lies just east of them, but one hard day’s ride.”

  Which made the majority of them wonder if she counted their current traveling routine as “hard,” or if it had to be more taxing to really qualify as difficult.

  “Straight south of here,” Melkin repeated with narrowing eyes, “takes us right through the Swamps.” His glance met Traive’s quiet one across the fire.

  She looked at him steadily. “That is the route Ari and I must take. Your way is your own.”

  Banion and the young Northerners exchanged disheartened looks. Without even knowing what the Swamps entailed, it didn’t sound very promising.

  “I don’t do well in overly moist environments,” Rodge mentioned, pained.

  Dorian gave him an unimpressed look. “Do you mold?”

  Loren and Ari burst out laughing—which hadn’t happened in so long that Ari went to bed feeling better than he had in weeks.

  By their second full day on the trail with Dorian, the novelty of the adventure was wearing thin. They were all saddle sore and exhausted, the answers had dried up, and they were headed right to the heart of Enemy territory without any idea why or what they were going to do when they got there. Even Ari, as enamored as he was with Whiteblades, was not feeling particularly enthusiastic. He still hadn’t had a single moment alone with her; she hung like a topaz jewel, shining just out of reach.

  They had all begun to scrounge around in their saddlebags for trail food in the late morning, resigned to another endless day on horseback, when the column came to a stop. Inquisitive, hoping for something to break the monotony—like a lunch break—they all pushed up curiously to see what was going on.

  Dorian was staring moodily into the forest ahead of them, which looked exactly like the boring scenery they’d been passing through for almost a week now. Then Rodge wrinkled his nose.

  “What’s that smell?”

  Traive pointed wordlessly to the trail immediately inside the next patch of trees. A thick, blackish mud puddle lay there in a wallow, the edges slimed with a greenish crust. Beyond it, the trail looked normal, but it grew darker, as if the trees were thickening beyond. The boys and Cerise looked at each other in uncomfortable silence.

  Dorian turned, looking west as if for an optional route, and Ari jerked, startled. There, out of nowhere, without even a whisper to herald her coming, stood a woman.

  Rodge, no slacker when it came to situational awareness, said, “Hey, there’s another one.” Unlike fair-skinned Dorian, this one was deeply tanned, with a wealth of fine, crinkly brown hair done into small braids at her temples. And unlike Dorian, she was loaded with weapons: a sword, a hunting knife, four daggers in boot sheaths, axes across her back, a bulging quiver, and a hunting bow in one hand.

  She glided up to Dorian, graceful as a dancer, and the blonde asked her a low, inaudible question. They all heard her answer, though, staring at her as intently as they were.

  “No sign,” she said, with a slight shake of her brown head. The long hair danced around her in a cloud, as if it had a life of its own.

  “How are our flanks?”

  “Some of them are rather nice,” Rodge said, and Cerise shot him a dark look. He patted his dumpy pony in innocent explanation. After the fruitful pickings of Lirralhisa, these last weeks with Cerise as the only feminine company had seemed especially hard to the boys.

  “Quiet so far,” the girl answered. “All the interesting stuff is ahead.” She had a rich, velvety voice and a very…still face. She glanced at them all, then back to Dorian with a look of disbelief, before melting back into the bushes the same way she’d come out—imperceptibly.

  That one full-on glance had them all surprised enough they didn’t pay much attention to her leave-taking. Beautiful brown eyes…a perfect oval of expressionless face…

  “What do you call a Dra woman?” Loren asked, stunned, of no one in particular. It was rare enough to see Drae in the Empire. You never, ever, saw their women.

  Kai didn’t bother to respond, circling the mud puddle waiting ahead of them and trotting down the trail.

  “A Draina,” Banion answered, sounding a little surprised himself. He glanced blankly at Melkin, continuing as if his mind were on other things, “though it’s a term usually reserved for the mate of the Dra.”

  A Dra. Ari’s mind raced as they all continued on, the horses’ hooves churning up a terrible smell as they plunked through the mud puddle. What else had he forgotten from the Book of Ivory?

  As the hours passed, the surroundings began to subtly change. The dirt of the trail darkened and thickened into a pasty mud wherever there was a spot of low ground. That nasty smell began to seep into the atmosphere, the rare breezes bringing strong, distasteful puffs of it. The air, which had been the perfect warm weather of late summer, turned wa
rmer, moister, thicker, and the breezes brought barely any relief from its humidity. The woods were full of strange trees that Ari had never seen before, with thick grey trunks and low branches that kept them all ducking. Or, in Rodge’s case, with a constant headache.

  They camped that night with their backs up against a splayed pile of big boulders, a little rivulet of fresh water allowing them to refill flaccid waterskins and wash up a little. It was the first time since Dorian had joined them that they had stopped before full dark, and everyone could feel the gloom settle in like a physical thing as the light faded. Even the Jungle, at its densest and most terrifying, had not had this same sense of …oppressiveness to it.

  They gathered close around the fire as Loren did his best to make some kind of dinner, and the mess in the skillet made Ari think longingly of Selah. She’d been a renewed ache on his mind since his little trial of prayer, though it was becoming harder to imagine her ever catching up with them now. Of all her wonderful attributes, cooking had been right up there with the best of them.

  He wasn’t the only one thinking of female companionship. Rodge casually asked, as soon as Dorian had seated herself (Traive had brought his saddle for her, which made Ari want to kick himself for not thinking of it first), “So, who was that woman we met on the trail today?”

  “Vashti,” Dorian answered, shooting him a knowing glance.

  They all waited politely for her to go on, but Rodge, eventually feeling she needed encouragement, prodded her, “She’s a Dra?”

  “She was.”

  The boys exchanged glances. “What is she now?”

  “A Follower.”

  Cerise rolled her eyes.

  Melkin, feeling perhaps this wasn’t going anywhere—or at least nowhere he was interested in—changed topics. “What do we do once we reach the Sheelshard?” he asked bluntly.

  “Nothing.” Dorian looked at him sternly. “It is imperative that you stay out of the way, both for your own sakes and for the success of the mission.”

  “And what exactly is our mission?” he growled, leaning toward her. There were times he seemed truly wild, as if any civility were only a nod to social convention; his grey eyes gleamed yellowish in the small cook fire, his lips were drawn back from his teeth.

  As composed as ever, she merely looked gravely back at him. “The less you know of that, the better. If the Sheelmen catch you, they will kill you. If they think you know something, they will torture you until you’ll wish they had.”

  The fire went very quiet. Rodge looked horrified. It was one thing to be told there was danger ahead; it was quite another to be handed a nice specific example of what dropping in on Zkag might actually entail. Ari, feeling worse than ever, exchanged serious looks with Loren. What had he done? None of his friends would be here if he hadn’t agreed to come. Was he going to feel this horrible sense of responsibility for them all until this was over?

  “The First Mage of Merrani,” Banion began in his slow rumble, apparently not much disturbed by thoughts of torture, “prophesied Raemon would return so powerful that he would destroy the gods. Can we stop him?”

  Dorian fixed her glowing eyes on his big, hairy face, her own suddenly still. She usually looked at all of them but Ari as if they were uninteresting children, to be tolerated and tended. One of the kids had accidentally stumbled onto something worth notice, apparently.

  “It is impossible for the gods to destroy each other,” she said quietly. “No matter how powerful Raemon is—and he has not gotten any more so while being time-locked with the Empress—they have an elaborate system of protections in place to prevent such a thing.”

  “Mmm,” Banion grunted. “Thought he was a little loopy anyway.”

  But Dorian was not so quick to dismiss it. She continued to look thoughtfully at the Merranic, eyes so golden in the firelight they could hardly be called brown. “Perraneus’s death was most…unusual,” she mused.

  By now it didn’t even occur to anybody to wonder—let alone ask—how she managed to come by that knowledge, and Banion, shrugging, said, “Vangoth isn’t one to mince words.”

  “No,” she agreed wryly. “His choice of violence as his preferred problem-solving tactic is not one of his more endearing traits. However, he at least reserves these drastic kinds of penal measures for cases he feels are truly a threat…”

  Banion and Melkin looked at each other, and Melkin asked slowly, “You’re saying…the Mage wasn’t just crazy? You think he was on to something?”

  “Evidence would suggest it…” she said. “If he was foretelling Raemon’s return with a blaze of power that would make him, finally, supreme over the other gods…well, that would be the sort of thing he would hear from Raemon.” She looked at them both now, very directly. “There’s no chance he could have been under his influence, is there?”

  “Under his influence!?” Melkin snarled, looking like he was going to leap for her throat. Ari stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth at the vehemence—until he remembered Perraneus had once been Melkin’s friend. And then he remembered something else.

  “There was that box,” he said slowly. Melkin turned livid eyes on him, but he had Dorian’s interest, too. Narrowing her eyes, she said quietly and very distinctly, “What box?”

  He described it as best as he could, that box with the red stone on Perraneus’s desk in the cluttered tower, straining to remember the physical details. It was mostly the feel of it that had struck him, an oily sort of smear on his mind. Melkin, calming down after a minute, remembered it, too, much better than Ari.

  And Dorian, when they had finished, said like one of the boulders around them suddenly dropping into their midst, “That sounds like one of Raemon’s trieles.” Mouths fell open. Loren said, awed, “I didn’t even know he had trieles,” at the same time that Cerise echoed in disbelief, “Trieles!”

  “Explain,” Melkin said tightly. “How could there be a triele of Raemon’s in Merrani—without Vangoth knowing about it?”

  “Perhaps he did,” Banion suggested thoughtfully, glancing at Dorian.

  She nodded at him and said, “The gods of the other Realms keep their trieles close: The Rainbow Scepter of the North, the Lance and the Gate of the Sea in Merrani, the main Torque Gates in Cyrrh, plus all the Trieles themselves in the Temple, the Forges, and the Skypalace. Raemon is different. His Triele lies in the Hall of Sacrifices at Zkag, but the rest of them are scattered as far as he can spread them. It has been so since he first left Ethlond, for his purpose is different. He is not on the defensive, trying to protect his people from the scourge of the Enemy; he is the Enemy, trying to seed his evil across the Realms.”

  There was something affecting about that quiet, rich, sure voice, something that made silence seep into the little group around the campfire. They had seen a triele of the Ruby god. It made it somehow more real, more possible. It was easy to think of Raemon in an intellectual sense—everyone knew there were four gods. You learned it at your mother’s knee. But it was very different than dwelling on the idea of his presence, of his being evil, of his being the leader, the director, the whole reason behind the creation of, the Enemy.

  Dorian turned her head and said into empty air, “Scholar.” Surrounded by the pressing weight of the gloomy forest and by dark thoughts of Raemon, more than one of them jumped when a young woman materialized out of the gloom.

  Ignoring the surprise this engendered, Dorian asked her thoughtfully, “What happened to the Coffer of Gkri?”

  The young woman looked at her just as thoughtfully out of light-colored eyes, shaking very fine, pale hair off her face. She rested her bow—she was packed with weapons, too—on the ground and said, as if concentrating, “I know the Faracens had found it, and were bent on destroying it…but I think it was lost—taken, I’m sure—before they got around to it.” Despite the fact that her boots were muddied with the dark, slimy stuff they’d been walking through all day, her fitted leathers stained from the wilds, she seemed enveloped with a se
nse of cleanliness, a brightness that had nothing to do with dingy clothes or mussed hair. Rodge and Loren, radiating approval at the sight of more females, inconspicuously craned their heads around to see if the other one had come with her.

  “The First Mage of Merrani may have had it.” Dorian indicated the group around the fire with her chin. “They describe it almost exactly, as a box they’d seen in his chambers.”

  The Whiteblade looked over at them. She was younger than Dorian, and had an up-tilted nose and an air of mischief sparkling about her, even when she was serious. “That’s not good, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Dorian looked at her, considering, “It’s a hard two to three week ride…”

  The pale eyebrows rose on the new one’s face. “Each way!” she said, considerably more expressive than the dignified blonde she was addressing. For a moment she stared, then elaborated, “Dor, we are stood to! Would you stand us down to go chasing after Raemon’s toys?”

  “They’re hardly toys,” Dorian said quellingly. The Northerners looked between the two, fascinated.

  “We don’t even have the horses, yet!”

  For the first time any of them could remember seeing it, a flash of irritation crossed Dorian’s well-controlled countenance. “Where are those horses?”

  “At least a week out.”

  The two went quiet, Dorian deep in thought. Finally she looked up and said quietly: “Oratrix.”

  CHAPTER 27

  It wasn’t a very restful night, despite their weariness. Like their first night in the jungle, where every sound startled them awake, they tossed fitfully in their blankets. There was an almost sepulchral silence, the normal nocturnal sounds nonexistent, like the cheerlessness of the place had run out all the animal life.

  Grumpy and ill-tempered, they were just mounting up the next morning when the clear young voice of last night’s Whiteblade came across their campsite: “She should be in by tonight.” Heads picked up interestedly, eyeing the morning version of last night’s vision.