The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1)

by Kari Cordis

  Ari, heart in his mouth, watched in growing fascination. She followed NO rules. The grace, the rapidity…it was like a deadly, inescapable dance. She’d be denounced as a street fighter at any tournament, but she wasn’t fighting dirty so much as…pragmatically, like someone who knew what it meant to trade blows for real. She wasn’t working to gather points on technique, she was assaulting—!

  A cold chill traced down his back. Assaulting… He glanced at the rest of the group. Neither Melkin nor Banion were smiling. They stood grim, shocked, eyes narrowed at the unlikely scene playing out in front of them.

  He knew what was so unsettling about it, knew it instinctively, down in his gut. It wasn’t just that he’d never seen a street fighter so good or with such ‘independent style.’ It wasn’t her ‘technique’ or ‘signature moves’ or any other tournament jargon; she was fighting…to kill. Like she knew what it meant. This wasn’t a matter of learning skills in a ring; she fought with experience.

  “Enough!” a sharp voice cut through his thoughts, and he jumped, he was so on edge. Instantly, Voral leaped away from her onslaught and the two stared at each other warily through their hot blood, talking with their eyes until they both, slowly, sheathed blade.

  Kai had been bladed, Ari saw with alarm, and was immediately grateful he hadn’t had worse. His ridged torso was sleek with sweat and a couple lines of red were starting to show up.

  “Bring her over here.” It was Dorian’s voice, as commanding as Ari had ever heard it. He’d forgotten everything but the spectacle before him even after it had been interrupted. Turning around now, a scene that took even the recent fight out of his mind met his eyes.

  Irise had been wounded. Tiny, exquisite, sapphire-eyed Irise, who had come panting up the trail days ago to tell them two of the Whiteblades were trapped in the Swamps, was now being carefully carried into the clearing by Rhoda and Roxarta. Her fine little head with its masses of black curls hung limply, and across her back in horrible obscenity a great, gaping slash through the leathers surged with blood. Ari saw the sickening flash of rib as they lowered her to the ground. Yve dashed over, wadding cloth into the wound.

  “Healer,” Dorian said with low-voiced intensity, to a Jordan that had whirled and gone moments ago.

  “Irise,” Rhoda said worriedly, kneeling in front of her. She gently slapped her, rather tricky since she was face down, and used one of the cloths to prop the tiny nose up out of the dirt. “IRISE!”

  “What happened?” Dorian said crisply.

  Rhoda stood, readjusting her weaponry. She was dirty, her face streaked with sweat and reddish dust, her tunic soaked crimson with blood. But she reported calmly, “Tarq. Half-dozen. They were on to our trail.”

  Dorian looked down her nose at her. “You couldn’t handle six Sheelmen?” Her tone was completely neutral, strongly discouraging of excuses.

  Irise stirred at their feet, not moaning in pain, which is what Ari thought he’d be doing, but saying with clear exasperation, “Tricky devils.”

  Rhoda looked glum. “Things got complicated.”

  Rowena came flying, soft and swift as a dove on the wing, ignoring everybody and everything but the little prone figure. “Hot water, please, Yve,” she said quietly, even as her fingers flew, capable as Voral’s steel, over the horrible wounds.

  The boys turned away as she lifted shredded leather and shredded flesh, revealing all sorts of internal parts that just, really, shouldn’t see the light of day. Rodge gagged.

  Tense silence filled the clearing, then Rowena sat back from her examination, adeptly extracting wads of bleached cotton bandaging—shockingly white next to all their worn clothing—from a bag at her side. She used it to wash and then pack the gash.

  “How long?” Dorian asked curtly.

  “Two weeks,” Rowena answered professionally. “And she should not be moved for a week of it.”

  “We do not have that kind of time, Healer, and she should not have gotten herself bladed to begin with.”

  “I am completely unappreciated,” Irise was heard to observe.

  “Don’t talk,” Rowena told her without any evidence of compassion. “You’ll make the bleeding worse.”

  Atlanta came streaming with liquid Dra grace into the clearing. She was breathing hard but not desperately, her great bow and an arrow held ready in one hand. Dorian turned to her sharply.

  “Clear,” she panted. Her eyes were almost black, beautiful and bewitching in their alertness. “Isolated patrol.”

  Ari realized their camp was almost completely deserted. There was no sign of Voral or Kai; even Yve was gone from the fire.

  Voral came briefly back in later, gathering up the pile of weapons she’d dropped before the bladeplay. She looked blatantly disappointed. She walked over to where Irise lay unmoving and face down, which Ari thought looked terrible, like she was dead. The northern group sat a little ways from her, doubly subdued by the day, and glancing unhappily over at her once in a while.

  They were definitely close enough to hear Voral’s big voice say. “You’re pathetic. What were you thinking?”

  Irise turned her head and regarded the large foot a few inches from her face. “I really felt it was my best option at the time,” she said thoughtfully. Ari wondered if she’d had something for the pain. She was awfully calm.

  “That is because you are a suffocating idiot, and your head is full of cotton,” Voral said, enunciating clearly.

  “I can’t backswipe, Voral. My shoulder joints don’t move like that. We’ve been over this—”

  “DO NOT TALK.” Rowena came out of nowhere like an avenging angel, coming to a stop in a hover over Irise. “You’re disturbing her,” Rowena told Voral. “She mustn’t move.”

  The big Merranic just looked at her. “Disturbing her or disturbing you? ‘Cuz she seems fine.”

  “Both. When I need your medical opinion, I shall seek you out. Go away.”

  “What’s the matter?” a voice said almost in Ari’s ear, and he jumped. Adama had joined their circle, one of the few Whiteblades they’d even seen that evening; it was obvious everyone was on high alert. “You all look like you’re at a funeral.” She plopped a plum in her mouth and surveyed them brightly.

  “What is the matter with everyone?” Cerise asked with a touch of her old waspishness. “They’re treating Irise like she’s dirt. Does the healer not realize how serious that injury is?”

  Adama looked over at Rowena on the other side of the fire. “Probably,” she decided.

  “Will she be all right?” Loren asked, blue eyes wide. Adama smiled at him. “Yeah. It’s not the condition she was envisioning for the final showdown at Zkag…but she’ll get over it.” She grinned, but it faded when it got no response. She cleared her throat. “And as far as the casual manner in which her wounded state has been received…well, I mean…you have to understand, it gets a little old after a while.” The faces around her revealed ‘understanding’ was not the dominant emotion. “Getting injured,” she elaborated in a sing-song voice, “healing up, getting injured, healing up. It sort of loses its novelty after a couple dozen times. You’re just not as impressed with it anymore, you know?”

  There were positively chilly looks now on the faces of her companions, and Ari said hastily, “Was Dorian truly blaming her for getting hurt?”

  “Yeah,” Adama said, as if she completely agreed with this assessment. “We’re getting too close to action to have people getting carelessly damaged.”

  “There were SIX of them!” Cerise cried. “Against two?”

  “Yeah,” Adama repeated, unrelenting. “One of them got behind Rhoda—which is a classic Sheelman trick she should have been able to avoid in the first place—so quickly that Irise felt the only way she could keep a killing blow from falling was to leap in front of it.”

  “A killing blow?” Rodge asked faintly.

  Adama shrugged. “It was her judgment that if that blow went home, which looked to be inevitable given Rhoda’s preocc
upation with the other three Sheelmen, it would take her head clean off.” Inexplicably, the sparkle was suddenly back in Adama’s eye. “We don’t scar, and we don’t die, and we’ve healed up from every blow dealt us—but no one’s ever tried decapitation.” The thought seemed to bring her considerable pleasure. She chortled away with what the northerners thought rather unseemly delight, given the current circumstances.

  No one wanted to argue with her, though. Or talk about that immortality business…not with Voral’s performance of such unaccountable skill so recent in their memories.

  “Can’t…can’t Rowena heal her,” Loren said hesitatingly, waving his hands in little vague motions. “You know, with magic or something?”

  Adama stopped chuckling and raised a fascinated eyebrow. “No…” she answered slowly, and then her eyes brightened as she caught on. “Row heals because that is her Gift. Only the Empress has ever healed with the power of Il—miraculous healing. We’re not really into the…‘magic’ thing.”

  “Perhaps it would be worth calling in this Empress of yours,” Cerise suggested with a strained mildness. “If she exists. We still haven’t seen any evidence of it.”

  “It is not her job to provide you with evidence of it,” Adama answered easily. Unperturbed, she continued, “There is nothing there that Row can’t take care of, and honestly, we don’t know where the Empress is.”

  “But, somehow, you know she’s going to be at the Sheelshard, which has lain undiscovered in the middle of the desert for eons, at just the right time,” Cerise finished for her drily.

  “You seem to be the one reassuring everyone on that point,” Melkin noted. He didn’t say much anymore, just listened and watched with his sharp, shrewd eyes. Ari had wished more than once he could be in on the hushed discussions the Master had with Kai.

  Adama smiled mysteriously. “That’s my Gift.”

  “And this showdown at Zkag…How do you expect to make this one any different than the last one—the one where the Empress was turned into a statue to begin with?” Melkin continued quietly.

  Her lively eyes flashed appreciatively across the fire at him. “He probably won’t try that again. It would’ve been like being caged up with Il for half a millennium.” She nibbled plum off its pit for a few moments, thinking, long enough that Melkin had to shoot Cerise a look of daggers to keep her from interrupting. Finally, the Whiteblade said, “You are asking about some deep and sensitive things. Even if I could explain them to your satisfaction, I doubt you could believe them.”

  “We’re more intelligent than we appear,” Cerise said sarcastically.

  “But not as open-minded as you claim.” She was still looking at Melkin, though, and finally sighed, “Let me tell you this then, since you think yourselves capable of hearing these things, for it is one of the most important. Do not speak overmuch of the Empress.” Adama seemed to have two faces, two voices: the mischievous, irreverent youthful, and the grave, oracle-like serious. She was in the latter stage now, and the group around her grew quiet.

  “There is a strange bond between her and Raemon. We’re not talking healthy, mutual respect, either; he both hates her and desires her in a sick, twisted way. She has used it to her advantage many times, the Field at Montmorency not the least of them. But it has led to almost an obsession on his part. He stalks her mind across the Realms, using his mental touch to tell him where she is. That has served him many times, to her disadvantage. Well, now Raemon slumbers. The fight with her and Il has…you might think of it as having weakened him, though his power would be just as strong if he were to awake today and use it. But it’s probably easiest to think of him as resting, half-dozing. We want him that way until we reach his Hall. Great damage could be done, even mobilization of the forces of the Sheel, if he were to come fully aware before we get there. And the one thing that is guaranteed to bring him around, the one thing he is most sensitized to…is her. Even hearing her name spoken, the image of her in your mind, attracts his attention, especially if it’s repetitive.”

  “You’re saying Raemon can hear our thoughts?” Cerise said quickly. Her sarcasm was gone.

  “He is far too selfish to be concerned with anyone but himself,” Adama denied. “Think of it more like a pattern that he scans for. Like when you’re hunting through a column of numbers looking for, say, a five. You don’t so much look at every number as skim through them all with the picture of a five in your head. So, the less said of her, the less she’s thought of, the less chance he’ll be able to hone in on the pattern he’s looking for.”

  This was received with no little amazement.

  “But…but just because he’s sleeping,” Ari puzzled slowly, “doesn’t mean we’ll be able to sneak up on him or anything…does it?”

  “It will help more than you’d think. It is extraordinarily difficult to get into Zkag with him alert. We were never successful until the Peace.”

  Several eyebrows rose. Banion said, “You’ve been inside the Sheelshard?”

  She grinned engagingly at him. “Did you think we were just heading blindly into the sand, hoping everything would sort of come together there at the end?”

  “Aye,” he grunted bluntly. He stared at her for a moment. “And once in. We wake Raemon and…?”

  “Destroy him,” Ari said quietly, though he didn’t know why. He just knew it, all of a sudden. Everyone was looking at him, including Adama, when he lifted his head. “Why else go to all this trouble? What else would be worth the cost…?”

  “It is best that you do not know too much of this plan,” Adama said firmly, but she continued to stare into his eyes, the firelight bringing pulses of amber into her own in the dark.

  “Is it absolutely impossible that you people can consider anything that doesn’t involve violence?” Cerise asked, rather insensitive to the deep looks going on across the fire. “Has it ever even crossed your mind that there may be an answer here that doesn’t involve war? That perhaps it’s possible for all of us to live in peace?”

  Adama dragged her probing eyes off of Ari’s and gave her a steady look. “Nope.”

  “Now, now would be the time to try it,” Cerise insisted, warming to her attack. “Now, when he is ‘weak’ or whatever, when he’s just had this traumatic experience that may convince him he’s not invincible. He may be amenable to a treaty where he never would be again!”

  “When Raemon wakes,” Adama said patiently, “he will be maddened with fury. He doesn’t really have the right personality for what you’re suggesting. Some people get humble when they get humiliated, are ready to listen…Raemon will demand about a dozen human sacrifices—his own people if no one else is around—and then declare war on the North, Merrani, Cyrrh, the Rach, and whomever else he can think of. I would not advise you to suggest a treaty. In fact, were I you, I would not draw attention to myself at all.” She nodded persuasively.

  The faces around the fire had gone rather white. Again, there hadn’t been a lot of consideration of just what the full depth of a visit to the Sheelshard might mean, though you’d think ‘Hall of Sacrifices’ might have been a clue.

  “Maddened with fury,” Rodge repeated feebly.

  “Well,” Cerise said, acting manfully unafraid, “then why not talk to some of these Sheelmen we’ve been seeing. Rhoda and…and Irise”—she faltered just a little remembering that girl’s memento of the occasion—“just, er, saw some.”

  Adama stared at her, mesmerized. “Talk to them about what?”

  “About peace!” Cerise cried impatiently. “If Raemon’s such a bad influence on them, well, talk to them before he’s…he’s…back.”

  “A bad influence…” Adama whispered, obviously captivated by the whole concept. She shook her gingery curls as if coming out of a trance. “A meeting with Sheelmen invariable involves steel…they’re not the world’s best conversationalists. Think of them as like really angry Drae. I’m sorry to be the one to burst your lovely rainbow bubble,” she said, really sounding regretful, “bu
t no one exists south of the Ramparts—south of the Daroe, actually—that is the least bit interested in peace.”

  Cerise’s color was up, her thin, pale, haughty cheeks bright with pink spots. “I thought Il was supposed to be the god of peace—just wants everybody to be happy.”

  “That’s right!” Adama said, pleased.

  “Well, don’t you think he should be doing something about this if he’s so great and powerful and peace-loving?”

  Ari was never sure later if she intended to open a discussion about Il, or if she was just angry. But if there was one generality he’d learned to apply to the Whiteblades, it was that they would talk about Il at the least suggestion. Even without it, sometimes.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” Adama commented, and it occurred abruptly to Ari that she was by far the smarter of the two. She appeared to be musing. “You believe in Il?” she asked.

  “NO.”

  “And…yet…yet you have this feeling that He is responsible for, sort of owes the world…peacefulness. That it’s His fault, in a sense, for things being so bad?”

  Her eyes narrowed warily. “It is you all who claim such things—”

  “And it’s YOU who brought up this idea of Him ‘doing something.’ Now, tell me, what kind of a deal is that? You, a Northerner, are suggesting a contract in which one party is responsible for everything while the other party owes…?” Adama’s eyebrows rose questioningly. “No belief that the first party even exists? No sense of obligation or even gratitude for the party’s acts to date?”

  Cerise looked mutinous.

  “Why,” Adama continued relentlessly, “do you not demand such things of the gods you do believe in? Why are you not railing at them for their failure to bring this monster—partially their fault for being created in the first place—under control?”

  “Obviously, if they could have they would have already,” Banion growled. His brow was lowered dangerously. This was thin ground to a Vangothic.