Black Steel

by Steve Perry

  She left the convoluted trail and went to find a restaurant.

  The recording was excellent, Cierto noted, and he mentally added a bonus to the operative’s pay. The woman sat in a small “outdoor” cafe on the starship, sipping at tea-the brand was included with the report-and having a light lunch. Some kind of fish, a vegetable salad, bread.

  She knew she was being watched.

  As Cierto replayed the recording for the third time, he looked for the moment again. There, in the park, as she sat upon the bench listening to the birds and insects, there had come a moment of … awareness.

  Very subtle; she didn’t leap up and begin digging through the shrubbery for a watcher, but she knew, even though she had given but the slightest sign. He had missed it on the first playing, caught it on the second, and now confirmed it to himself on the third viewing.

  Cierto leaned back in the form-chair and smiled. Wonderful. Truly a dangerous opponent, this woman.

  Of course, he had known that already; this merely confirmed it. The years had not made her duller, but had sharpened her edges. Ah, but such a woman would be perfect once she had been conquered. The winning of her would not be easy, but that made the victory plunge all that much sweeter, did it not?

  And the House of Black Steel did not ask for ease, but for challenge.

  The operative’s report indicated that the wounded matador, still healing, traveled with Fem Kildee Wu as she returned to Koji. That caused a frown to flit across Cierto’s features. Why? Surely a woman like Wu could not be attracted to a man who had proven himself as inept as this matador. Perhaps it was pity. Or was it something else? Cierto had other operatives poking into Wu’s and this man Sleel’s pasts, and if there was some other connection between them, it would be uncovered in due course. Meanwhile, he would not concern himself overly with this development. This Sleel had even stopped carrying his weapons, and certainly his spirit had been broken on that rocky hill where Cierto had beaten him. He had seen it before; brave men made cowards when they had been thoroughly overcome. He had done it to others himself often enough when he had walked the Flex

  He frowned. There were some bad memories that way, too. But that was long ago, and much had changed since.

  Now Cierto chuckled to himself. A man was allowed to be young and stupid, and were he lucky, he would survive to become older and wiser. He had done both. More, he had learned patience. There was no hurry in any of this. Some dishes were better eaten cold, and one had to wait for the temperature to drop before dining. When he took his pleasure with Kildee Wu, it would be at the proper moment; nothing less would serve.

  After all, she was to be the mother of his son, and such a thing must be perfect.

  It had been a long time since Sleel had been to Koji. He didn’t remember much about it; his visit had been short, part of his research for one of Gerard Repe’s books. He knew that Shtotsanto, the Holy City, was where Emile’s teacher Pen had been recruited by the prerevolutionaries setting themselves up against the Confed. But that was history. Sleel wasn’t sure why he had agreed to come here with Kee Wu. It was probably because he didn’t have anywhere else to go. He had learned that old literary lesson well enough: You couldn’t go home again. If there had been any doubts after seeing where he had grown up, they had been erased.

  His parents had not come to see him while he was in the medical center. He hadn’t really expected them to do so, but down deep had been a glimmer of hope that they would. That hope had been snuffed.

  Maybe for good this time.

  “This way,” Kee said.

  There were churches, kloysters, temples, synagogues, zendos, kyrkas and other houses of religion that Sleel did not recognize, all scattered through the port city as thick as slot machines in a gambling town.

  The rental flitter took him and Kee Wu through the port and into the outskirts of the place, then across a patch of empty woods and rolling farmland. Night came, and the lights of civilization were thin. Sleel stared through the window at the darkness, staying quiet, watching but not really seeing. He found himself nodding off, but it seemed too much effort to keep awake.

  Wu watched Sleel sleep as they drew nearer her dojo. They had left Rakkaus three hours ago, the programmed flitter would have them in Kyrktorn in a few minutes. The village was small enough so there was not much of a pool of potential students there. Wu wanted those who sought to study with her to have to overcome a few obstacles before they ever stepped into her dojo. There was no listing for it on the comlink and she did not advertise. To find and get to her were hardly major chores, but few people wandered in accidentally. Those who came through her doors generally did so because they were seeking what she offered and had done some research to locate it. Not much of an entrance exam, but it screened out the merely curious.

  Sleel slept, his forehead pressed against the flitter’s window, oblivious to the sometimes bumpy ride.

  Now, why had she brought him with her? He was sunk in the depths of selfpity and such a thing did not move her. True, he had been with Mayli when she had died, but Kee Wu did not live in the past to the extent that she had made her sister into a saint to be worshipped. He and she had a mutual enemy, but that in itself was hardly enough. So, why?

  She watched the plastic window fog with his expelled breath, clearing between exhalations. Why did she burden herself with this man? The reason danced outside her reasoning mind, a shadow against the darkness, enough that she was aware of it but not enough that she could tell what it was. That would have to do for now. Just as she had learned to sense a sword cut coming at her when sometimes she could not actually see it, there was about this man some sense of something that had made her realize he was important to her.

  The flitter slowed. The dojo was just ahead, the village mostly asleep at this hour, early though it was.

  “Sleek” she said softly.

  He came awake instantly, no sleep fog in his eyes when he looked at her. He knew where he was, she saw; there was no disorientation. Also in that moment she saw a depth she had not seen in him before.

  The moment passed.

  “We’re here.”

  His lips set tight, and he gave her a short nod. “Okay.”

  Was this a mistake? Should she have taken on this crippled man? Well, she guessed she would find out.

  Chapter SEVENTEEN

  THE EARLY SPRING night was only a little chilly, not enough for a jacket or heat threads. Sleel’s breath hardly fogged the air as he walked along the quiet street. It was late, nearly midnight, and save for a few people exercising themselves or their pets, he was mostly alone. Kyrktom was a small town, maybe ten thousand people altogether, and the majority of residents apparently went to bed early, which suited Sleel.

  There were sufficient street lights so that it was the darkness that seemed to pool here and there. This part of the town was mostly flat and residential, multiplexes and single-or double-family dwellings. The small yards had neatly trimmed ground cover, grasses or vines, with a fair number of assorted species of trees ranging from shrub-size to thirty meters or more high. Night birds peeped in a few of the taller trees. One of the birds had a cry that sounded like nothing so much as “Heyfool!” and Sleel wondered if some warped god had put the damned bird there for his personal benefit.

  Sleel’s boots sounded quite loud on the plastcrete walk. An occasional flitter fanned by, raising a little dust, its fans humming for a long way in the quiet.

  In the weeks that he had been in Kee’s village, he had spent a lot of time walking. At first it was to rehabilitate the knee, developing strength in the new muscles. The new hand was bare now, grown enough to be usable on its own without the glove, though not altogether full-sized. The eye was as good as it had ever been, probably better, since it was relatively unworn.

  He was able to do the sumito pattern, and he did that a few times a week, but the walking had become his chief focus. He didn’t keep track of it exactly, but he probably averaged twenty or twenty-five
klicks a day. Rain or shine, cold or warm, Sleel walked, trying not to think, and failing at that most of the time.

  Now and then, however, he did manage to lose himself in the crisscrossing of Kee’s town. That was reason enough to continue it.

  “Evening,” a man across the street called to him, waving. The man, dressed in a long cloth poncho, was walking his small dog, a floppy-eared, short-haired, stubby-legged beast of several colors. The dog bayed once at Sleel, then went back to sniffing out the urine trails of his distant canine cousins. Sleel had seen the man and dog a dozen times on his night walks. He waved back without any real enthusiasm.

  Ahead, a streetsweeper grumbled past the corner on the cross-street, warning lights flashing as it slowly made cleaner the already clean road. Sleel watched the flashing yellow and blue lights. It looked like some kind of organic thing, a dinosaurlike beast bellowing softly to itself as it grazed on civilization’s dirt.

  Sleel knew what his problem was. Psychologically speaking, he was still recovering from the shock of his failure. But knowing why lightened his depression not in the slightest. He ate, he slept, he stared into the distance, he answered when spoken to, and he walked, for hours at a time.

  The smell of the dampened dust behind the streetsweeper reached him as Sleel neared the corner. Kee had been very understanding. He had offered to pay her for lodging and she had shaken her head and smiled. She didn’t question him, didn’t demand anything, mostly just left him alone. She taught her classes went about her business, and he saw her briefly now and then. That suited him, too.

  And so Sleel had become familiar with the streets and alleys and walkways of Kyrktom in the ways only a walker can know. His body was nearly healed, but his mind was still crippled, and while he knew that, he couldn’t bring himself to care. His life was maybe a third over if something like a meteor didn’t drop out of the sky and kill him, and he had nothing to show for it.

  Poor Sleel, he thought. Poor, sad, miserable fucking Sleel.

  Cierto tended to his students. Among the new ones, there were six for whom he had hopes. Eight months, a year from now, and these six would, with sufficient training, be better than average swordplayers. As Cierto watched them practice lunges in the gym, he smiled. They were part of his plan, these six. They would be a gift to his unborn, to his yet-unconceived son. It was not given to many men to be able to give such a thing to their children, but Cierto was not just any man. His son would have a hero for a father, a man of honor and courage, and his mother too would be brave and adept. He would be able to demonstrate that to his son, Cierto knew, even if the boy’s mother were not around when he came of an age to appreciate it. These six would be instrumental in that demonstration.

  So, eight months, a year, and his carefully laid plan would come to fruition. Just as he had slain the thief who had dishonored him, so would Cierto achieve his next goal, of fathering a son to inherit his sword.

  He would raise the boy by the Code, and he would make his child in his own image. Such was his duty.

  And in this case, such would also be his pleasure, especially the fathering part.

  “No, no!” he called out to the students. “You move like cattle! Lightly! You are supposed to be dancing with your enemy, not crushing his toes under your clumsy feet!”

  He kept his face stem, but inwardly he grinned. They would learn. He would see to it.

  The last of the advanced class finished cleaning and putting away the kendo gear and left, bowing at the exit. Alone now in the dojo, Wu stretched tired muscles as she prepared to practice her kata. It had been a late session, to make up for a class missed due to a local holiday. It was past midnight. Sleel was out walking, dragging behind him as always his mountain of selfpity. Sometimes he walked all night, coming in as she was rising. She thought that he tried to exhaust himself so that he could sleep, but she had heard him moaning and thrashing around in his bed., Still, it was not her place to try and treat his wound. If you wanted to heal, you had to do it yourself. She had learned that lesson long ago.

  She took her sword from its stand and moved to the center of the floor, callused bare fleet sliding easily over the swept-clean and polished wood. Maybe it had been a mistake to pull Sleel from the wreckage of that flitter, compounded by bringing him back here. It had been what, almost three months, and he was still sunk into his own miseries, to depths she wasn’t sure she could reach even if she tried. Still, there was something there.

  Wouldn’t it be nice if she knew what it was?

  Wu assumed seiza, placing the sword next to her left leg. She closed her eyes, took a couple of cleansing breaths, and sent the thoughts away, reaching from zanshin. Awareness replaced thought, movement followed, and Kildee Wu leaped into the martial dance of hard flesh and harder steel.

  Sleel arrived at the dojo. Kee had finished her form and ryas moving to replace her sheathed sword on the rack where it usually lived. She bowed to the weapon, turned, and went to the showers.

  Sleel was recognized by the doorcom and admitted. The dojo had a pretty good security system; it was programmed to keep strangers out. Kee had told him there had never been a problem with theft, but that certain of her more valuable possessions were protected by coded transmitters. A very good thief could probably bypass the security system, say, but if he attempted to leave carrying a protected item, he would trigger a zap field designed to center on the stolen property. Unpleasant, that experience, and repeated to anyone trying to continue the crime where the unconscious thief left off.

  Sleel walked across the dojo floor toward Kee’s sword, smelling the sweat that laced the air. He hadn’t paid much attention to her art; he’d never been particularly interested in esoteric weaponry. Swords seemed fairly impractical in a modern society.

  Not so impractical that a man couldn’t use one to kill your client, hey, Sleel?

  Dammit. He didn’t need that thought.

  The few times he had seen Kee working out, she had been using either a wooden or a bamboo-slat sword. He had never seen the one inside the white-lacquered sheath. He glanced at the weapon as he came to stand in front of it.

  Behind him in the dressing room, the shower came on, the sound of the water obvious in the otherwise quiet building. He looked toward the dressing-room door. Kee was in the shower by now.

  Sleel reached out and caught the wooden sheath in his new hand. Maybe there was some kind of protocol about this kind of thing, looking at it required permission or whatever. But he was curious, somewhat surprised at himself for feeling that or any other emotion, and what the fuck, she was in the shower anyway.

  He took the sword’s grip in his right hand. It was warm to his touch, the wrapping and pattern oddly comfortable in his grip. He had a sudden sense of deja vu. He did not recall ever handling a weapon exactly like this one, but his thumb found a button that latched the sword into its sheath, pressing the release as though he had done it a thousand times before. Slowly, he began to withdraw the blade from its scabbard. As he looked at the blade, his eyes widened as he realized that the metal was black. As black as the swords of Cierto and his assassins had been.

  Black! Why-?

  From behind him, a voice said, “What are you doing?”

  Sleel spun, whipping the black steel blade all the way out and pointing it toward the sound. The sheath clattered on the floor as he locked his weak hand onto the butt of the sword’s handle behind his right hand. The sharp tip of the curved weapon moved as if guided by doppler, coming up-to point at Kee Wu’s throat.

  Naked, she stood in the doorway to the dressing room twelve meters away, dripping water into a small pool welling at her bare feet. Quite beautiful she was, tight and muscular and wet that way

  “Gods,” she said. “It’s you!”

  As Wu stood facing Sleel, it was as if she had been struck by a bolt of energy that welded her to the spot.

  It didn’t matter that she was naked and dripping from the interrupted shower. What mattered was the realization tha
t came over her when she saw Sleel standing there with her sword. It was a combination of what she saw-the way he handled the weapon, his expression, his stance-and what she felt, this a sense she could not define but also could not deny:

  Sleel. Sleel was her perfect student.

  “Gods,” she said. “It’s you!”

  Sleel was shaken, she could see that. As much as she herself was shaken? Wu did not know. She had finished her shower and dressed, trying to order her thoughts, but not managing that very well. Sleel was waiting for her when she emerged. He had replaced her sword and now stood next to the rack upon which the daito rested.

  They spoke at the same instant:

  “Why is it black?” he asked.

  “Where did you learn that?” she asked.

  There was a moment of impasse. Wu broke it. “The manufacture of black steel is a family secret,” she said. “Or rather, it was a family secret. “Brought from Earth by my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother.”

  “And Cierto … ?”

  “His ancestors stole the method from mine. Perhaps three hundred years ago. That sword”-she nodded toward the wooden stand-“is four hundred years old.”

  Sleel looked puzzled.

  “I think Cierto thinks that his family created the metal. One of his agents tried to steal this sword. Apparently he has a reward out for information on such weaponry. He must think that my family took the secret from his.” A short pause, then, “Why do you think Cierto wanted to kill your client?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think that I might. Our own legends tell about our theft, only we never knew who the thieves were. Until about fifty years ago. We-it was before I was born, but my grandmother-hired thieves of our own to retrieve our property.’

  “Jersey Reason.”

  “I never heard the name, but it could have been him.”

  Sleel took a big breath and let it out slowly. “He was on that world about then and he did steal something, but he didn’t even know what it was.” He looked at her. “How can you get back knowledge?”