Warchild

by Karin Lowachee

  There was no running from this place. Whatever they did to you, you’d just have to put it away. It might have started out with language learning, but it was just another card game. You had to learn the new rules and deal it.

  At least Nikolas-dan left me alone at night.

  He stood by the door, waiting on me. But if this was his game, I didn’t have to just lie back and play. He wasn’t as bad a teacher as Falcone, so maybe I could get something out of this. Maybe I could show him—maybe it would be different this time.

  I was on a planet. Time to move, Jos.

  So I went to my window. It was different this time. It was more than a month removed and after the truth of my ship, written in a slate. Don’t think back. Don’t dream.

  I pressed the panel to raise the screen. It folded up, spilling in moonlight. Slowly I leaned toward the clear glass and gazed out, down the slope at the shining, shadowed rooftops stuck in the rock, and out over the dark green trees, farther than I’d looked the first time. In the distance was an odd silver shimmer on the horizon and the bright high moon in two places, the lower of the two less clear and rippling. A mirror reflection. Stars lay scattered around the moon and across the sky, close and brilliant. Maybe because it was night I didn’t feel the dizziness I had the first time. I knew the stars. They’d once been my home.

  All the while I looked, Nikolas-dan said nothing. He didn’t try to tell me what I was looking at, as Falcone would’ve done. He had already taught me the words for everything I saw.

  * * *

  IX.

  The house was full of moonlight. I curled my hands at my sides and walked forward through the quiet rooms. Nikolas-dan padded behind me, soft steps at a distance. Never crowding as I walked from wide room to wide room—a common area, a kitchen, a dining area with walls of windows that looked on large entwined trees outside, dark and thick. The rooms were separated by sliding doors and filled with low furniture, black and red, like my room and Enas-dan’s room except decorated in even more detail, in those thorny shapes. Like a maze on everything you touched. Some of the doors we didn’t go through.

  The hallways between the common rooms curved like the garden path my parents had taken me to, once, in Austro Station’s arboretum. Except here the floor was smooth dark wood. Objects in alien designs sat on tables, in corners, some that I thought were supposed to be animals. Birds. Trees. People with swords and strange combinations of people and trees like some kind of genetic accident. Striviirc-na art.

  We ended up in a west-facing room with a window open to the cluster of trees outside. Night insects and birds talked. The scent of the sweet vine was everywhere. A whistle breeze moved the curtains around and made the trees shiver.

  “Won’t things come in?” I asked Nikolas-dan. He stood near one of the black screens, watching me.

  “We have guards,” he said.

  I’d meant animals and bugs.

  “Where’s your father?” I asked him. The house was quiet, not like a ship full of people on duty.

  He didn’t answer for a moment, but when he did he didn’t let me look away. “He’s dead, Jos-na. From a Hub battle three years ago.”

  For the seconds it took him to tell me, the usually composed expression on his face slid a little sideways. I almost heard the thoughts behind his eyes. They echoed in my own head.

  “Doesn’t that make you mad?”

  He shrugged. “How will that change things? I need only move ahead.”

  “I guess it’s easy for you.” He was older.

  “No, Jos-na. Never easy. Only necessary.” Then he quickly moved to the door and turned up the lights a little from a tiny pad on the wall. “Sit. I’ll bring the food.” And disappeared.

  So his father was dead too. Maybe he did understand me, just a little. Of course he’d never lived with pirates and he was a symp.

  I found a cushion, with my back to one of the screens, and sank down. Beside my foot, on the dark wood floor, a fingernail spider crawled. Its little black body skittered and stopped in jerks, as if it couldn’t decide where it wanted to go. I watched with a mix of disgust and fascination. When it came too close I pulled away.

  “They aren’t poisonous,” a throaty voice said.

  I looked up, startled. A man stood in the doorway, tall. He had a normal skin tone and for a moment I thought it was my teacher—they had the same tattoo around their right eyes and a definite resemblance—but something about the way he stood, I knew it wasn’t Nikolas-dan in the next second.

  Nikolas-dan said he found me on Chaos Station, where he’d gone to rescue his brother, a prisoner there. So he hadn’t been lying. At least he did have a brother. It was obvious in this man’s face and his gray eyes, darker than Enas-dan’s, but shaped the same.

  “Don’t be frightened,” the man said, in Ki’hade. “The poisonous spiders, eja, they aren’t in this area.” He approached, a slender figure in assassin-priest white robes, barefoot on the floor and soundless. All of them, they moved around like ghosts. Before I could say anything or slip away, he crouched and picked up the spider between his thumb and forefinger, and mashed it.

  I swallowed, dry-mouthed, and got caught looking in his eyes. How could he do that bare-handed?

  He smiled. It wasn’t my teacher’s quick, crooked expression. This one wrinkled the corners of his eyes, like a path often used. Tired. “You’re not scared of this little thing, are you? Never mind, it won’t hurt you now.” He stood and went to one of the tables, removed a single square of red cloth from the small pile there, and wiped his hand. “So you’re Niko’s student? Eja, we were beginning to wonder when he’d choose one. I admit I hadn’t thought it would be an orphan from the Hub.”

  Silence followed his words. He wanted a reaction from me and glanced my way, folding the cloth neatly once he was done with it.

  “What does eja mean?” I said, because I didn’t want to talk about the Hub.

  “Eja. What do you say in your Hub language? Like”—he waved his fingers a bit—“um? Hmm? Ah? You know?”

  He sounded like he was teasing me, and smiled again. Falcone had smiled a lot when it suited him too.

  “How do you like it here so far?” he said, sitting on one of the chairs and stretching out his legs. He reached behind his neck and drew his long hair into a knot. All loose, casual movements that put me on edge. I didn’t know why, but he acted too familiar. Or too much unlike the symps I’d met.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Your accent isn’t bad. Still too much of the Hub in it, though.”

  He didn’t say it meanly, but it made me frown. “I’ve only been here a couple months.”

  “Yes. We quite admire you for getting away from Falcone.”

  I picked at my pants leg. Did everybody know?

  “You’re one of the lucky few. I hear he guards his prisoners like a mother with a child.”

  Except my mother. That little thought crept in and I flushed, guilty. She’d tried and so had my father. Did he know that too? He sounded like he admired me, but like my teacher I felt an added weight behind the words.

  Except he wasn’t my teacher. “So you know Falcone? Had dinner with him?” Maybe it wasn’t smart to be mouthy with one of them, but I couldn’t help it.

  “I don’t know him personally. He’s notorious. Surely you’re aware.”

  “Nobody seemed to know him on Chaos.”

  “Maybe they did, but didn’t care.” His smile showed teeth.

  “Why wouldn’t they care? Two carriers were docked there.”

  “Maybe the carriers are bad.”

  I looked at him for a long second, but it didn’t help. I couldn’t guess what he was after any more than with the rest of them. “The carriers can’t be bad.”

  He hesitated, then laughed. “Eja, you’re right in this case.

  Those two carriers weren’t the kind you can bribe. Sraga.” And he smirked.

  “Sraga?”

  “Niko didn’t teach you that word? It
means ‘fuck.’ Or something like. Eja, it’s rather more rude in Ki’hade.”

  He liked to talk, but not like a teacher. I stared until it made him laugh again, and then I couldn’t look at him.

  “So how could Falcone go on Chaos and nobody know?” I asked before Nikolas-dan came in.

  “His notoriety forces him to change his appearance.” He sounded bored now, and shifted in his seat. “Eja, I suppose Niko hasn’t started your combat lessons yet?”

  A shadow appeared in the doorway.

  “I hadn’t mentioned them yet, Ash-dan,” Nikolas-dan said, sounding a little annoyed. He brought in a tray of food and set it in front of me on the floor. “Jos-na, this is my younger brother.”

  I said, “Combat lessons, Nikolas-dan?”

  “I’m sorry,” Ash-dan said. “I assumed you would’ve started the meditations at least.”

  Suddenly it seemed like I wasn’t in the room at all.

  “Not quite yet,” my teacher said. He didn’t sit beside me like he usually did when he brought me meals. Instead he stayed standing, facing his brother. “Have you spoken to Tkata yet?”

  “Just now. She’s on ship already.”

  “Yes, and the supplies?”

  “On schedule. Eja, I’ll have all the information for you tomorrow morning.”

  Nikolas-dan glanced down at me. “Then I’ll speak with you later, Ash.”

  Ash-dan looked at me and he didn’t smile. “The Hub will miss you, Niko. Are you sure it’s wise to teach one of its pups all the arts of the ka’redane?”

  Nikolas-dan gestured in a way I couldn’t read, and something in it made Ash-dan laugh, though it sounded a bit forced.

  “I do what I please,” Nikolas-dan said, “and in a minute it will please me to hit you.” But he wasn’t serious. Ash-dan stood and nudged his brother’s arm as he walked by to the door. My teacher did something fast with his elbow that nearly pitched Ash-dan into the wall. But Ash-dan kept his balance and just laughed, not looking back.

  “How did he get on Chaos?” I said, once the door slid shut.

  Nikolas-dan sat across from me and opened the dishes of food. “When I am on planet, Ash-dan co-captains Turundrlar—my ship.”

  I worked out the parts in my head. Turundrlar. Death-strike.

  Nikolas-dan continued, “He was in one of our fighters, on a rendezvous mission, when a Hub convoy jumped him.”

  “But you’re both here now.”

  “He had to take some time, and so did I.”

  A prisoner on Chaos, I remembered. A symp on a Hub station. And Nikolas-dan had rescued him. And me.

  “How long was he on Chaos?”

  The answer was short. “Weeks.” He sipped his tea. “He’s going off-planet soon, again. I will stay here.”

  With me. I looked down at the food and speared a vegetable with my double-pronged fork.

  “Now that it’s out,” Nikolas-dan said, “would you like to learn how to fight like a ka’redan?”

  “You’d teach a pup from the Hub?” I had to ask.

  “My brother and I differ on some things, but I choose my student and Ash has no voice in it. I choose you and you are no longer in the Hub. So tell me.”

  If I learned how to fight, nobody could ever take me again. I looked into his eyes, human eyes, and that contradicting tattoo on his face. The Warboy, whom all the Hub feared.

  “I’d like that very much, Nikolas-dan.”

  * * *

  X.

  Before fighting, I had to learn how to breathe. For this he took me to a new room at the other end of the blue and gold hall where our bedrooms were, set apart from the rest of the house—for privacy, Nikolas-dan said. It was early morning and already the house started to look different. Now the paneled doors at either end of the hall weren’t walls to my exploration, but windows.

  “Inidrla-na,” Nikolas-dan said. “The place of learning.”

  He led me into a wide, echoing room. I took one step inside and stopped.

  An entire wall was glass or some other transparent material. It let in the dawn—faint stars and a sky streaked with color. I couldn’t move, faced by that largeness, larger even than the view from my bedroom window. The water below the sky looked like the gems my mother had sometimes worn on her dresses for special events, winking and moving. Light made the world a banner, full of colors I didn’t even know the names of, rippling in the breeze, teasing my lazy eyes. I couldn’t seem to capture them all at once.

  I edged farther into the room, up against the glass. The world fell away from the other side of a long balcony. More buildings retreated below the edge, shadowed white steps in a staircase that seemed made for giants. All of them looked similar, flat and squarish and broad. Figures stood on some of the other balconies, but too far for me to tell if they were human or striviirc-na. The roofs were patterned in those swirls, but they weren’t all the same. The deep green trees sprouted like hair among them, growing from the gray and brown mountain rock.

  I had to remember to breathe.

  “Come,” Nikolas-dan said, from behind me. “Stand with me.”

  He taught me how to breathe. Facing each other on opposite sides of a small white circle embedded in the gloss-dark floor, he made me sit, stand, sometimes move my arms in and out, timed with my breaths. After a couple weeks he put weights in my hands or made me move in strict hands-and-feet gestures that tested my balance. I caught on quickly, he said, and he seemed pleased. I didn’t let him see how the praise affected me, but sometimes when he left me alone to practice I’d smile as I performed the movements. These weren’t Falcone’s military-styled exercises, and no guard stood over me to make sure I finished them. When Nikolas-dan stayed he kept out of my space and corrected me with a soft voice and by example.

  The point of these movements, he said, was for me to become so grounded in my place that nothing touched me. Not even my thoughts, my pain, or my hunger. It was useful. I could disconnect so well I lost awareness of time. I lost myself in those minutes.

  The days began this way, just breathing, instead of with my head in a slate. The new words I learned had to do with the new world I had entered, the one within Nan’hade. The ruling world. Nikolas-dan’s world.

  Ka’redan meant assassin-priest. Ki’redan, First Master assassin-priest. Kii’redan, Second Master assassin-priest.

  Ash-dan, long gone off-planet to fight the Hub in his brother’s place, was a Kii’redan. Enas-dan, who sometimes joined her son and me during meals to see how I was doing, was a ki’redan. Enas S’tlian, whose adopted striviirc-na last name meant “first among us.” But she hadn’t been born on Aaian-na, like her sons.

  My teacher was kia’redan bae: no other. Without comparison. The strivs had created a word for him because no other sympathizer had ever earned such a rank in the ka’redan-na. He was second only to the Caste Master and had never taken a student before me. Enas-dan said I was special, and lucky, and her son talked about me all the time, about how proud he was of the progress I made.

  At night, before I fell asleep, I turned the words around in my mind and let them catch the light. No matter how hard I looked I couldn’t see flaws in them. Like the sweet-smelling vine outside my window, they brought good dreams.

  * * *

  XI.

  After a few weeks of learning breathing exercises and memorizing different denie—the stylized gestures— Nikolas-dan met me in the inidrla-na, as usual, and disappeared behind one of the two unfolded black screens near the east wall. The screens were carved white in what was now a familiar style of striv figures and scenes of battle. Not with guns, but swords, like the hologames I used to play with Evan. Lined on the opposite wall were those same swords, the tallest in the middle set in an upright position, blade ceilingward. It was twice as long as my arm. Beside it on both sides were smaller and smaller swords in a line until they became daggers. They reminded me of the stories from striv history about caste assassinations and bloody betrayals that made EarthHub’s war
seem distant and mechanical. I’d read that the older homes of the Caste Masters were built with the enemy’s blood rubbed into the wood. I looked down. The floor was smooth, polished, deep brown almost to black, with faint lines of red in the grain. I wondered.

  My eyes kept drifting to the weapons. They were mysterious, dangerous, and beautiful. Dark silver with grips of carved black and white. Bone?

  Nikolas-dan emerged from behind the screen, carrying a smooth-edged sword made of black wood. He put the practice weapon in my right hand, then fixed my left hand below on the hilt. It was the size to fit a child’s grip.

  Who used swords now? It was fascinating but a gun might’ve been more useful. I had never heard of striviirc-na attacking soljets with swords.

  Nikolas-dan went to the wall and dislodged the largest sword. He stood directly opposite me about two meters away, holding the weapon by his thigh with the blade point in my direction.

  I wanted to step back, but didn’t.

  “Jii,” he said. “The blade. Jii-ko. The blade style.” He walked up to me and rested the point of his sword against my forehead. It took all of my will not to run while a snake of discomfort writhed in my stomach. He said, “Jii-klala. The blade mind. These three things you will learn first.”

  The level of my learning had just stepped up. I saw it on his face. Behind it he asked a question. Was I ready?

  The weapon felt awkward in my hand. Nikolas-dan moved back to give himself room, then stamped forward and swept his sword down with a cry. The breeze of its passing lifted a lock of my hair. I gripped my small blade, heart thudding. He demonstrated again. One easy movement. Easy until I tried it.

  There had been a hologame that spread like rumor aboard Mukudori, a fighting game using ancient weapons that played into the imaginations of kids raised on battles between ships and guns. Knights of Fire it was called, where men and women fought in single combat using swords of all shapes and sizes with the skill of their human controllers. I had adapted quickly to the game. My knight had racked up kill points like an “unrepentant crusader,” my father used to say—flashing sword moves that had made my shipmates laugh in amazement. This was nothing like that game.