Guardians Of The Keep tbod-2

by Carol Berg

  The swordmaster rubbed his jaw uneasily. If harm befell the young commander, the fellow would likely not see another sunrise. “Wait, Damon… Tell me, slave, what do you see?”

  “A fatal flaw. If the wargreve will agree to instant immobility when I say halt, I’ll show you.”

  The two discussed it out of my hearing. Eventually- reluctantly-the wargreve agreed. My reputation carried some weight. So we began again, and I led him through the moves that would create my opening. Praying that his curiosity would outweigh his pride and stupidity, I called, “Halt!” The edge of my sword rested on the heart vein in his neck. If he had continued his move, he would have driven it home. He looked like death-even for a Zhid.

  “Though I delight in killing Zhid, I cannot fight one so overmatched,” I said, speaking slowly and deliberately so he couldn’t see how winded I was. I lowered my weapon.

  “I’ll show you who is overmatched, you insolent pig!” He came at me again. I led him again and cried, “Halt!” He dared not do otherwise. His glare might have ripped a hole in plate armor. My edge was in exactly the same spot as before. I thought it excellent that Damon was so well disciplined.

  “You must show him this move, slave,” said the swordmaster. “Command the slave to show you the move, Damon. Then you will be flawless.”

  I shook my head.

  “You dare refuse me?” said Damon, with a menacing glare.

  “I can show you this move, but you’ll be far from flawless. You’re a beginner, a brilliant one, but a beginner, nonetheless. I could move on you a hundred different ways and have the same result.” A slight exaggeration, to be sure, as I could scarcely hit my arms. “Speed and instinct will never best craft. Send me back, and pick a new sparring partner of your own level.”

  The Zhid’s glare of cold hatred shivered my gut. “For today I’ll send you back… but only for today. I’ll speak to the gensei”-he sneered and laid his hand on my collar-“but you’d best learn to control your impudent tongue. You are, and will ever be, a walking corpse. Am I right?”

  Doubled over in the dirt, retching, I nodded. No chance I could forget it.

  On the next day I was informed that my primary duty was now to be swordmaster to the Wargreve Damon. I would not be released from the pen and put under compulsions of obedience as might be expected, however, because I would still be assigned to fight matches as the Slavemaster of Zhev’Na would require. Evidently someone besides the surgeon Gorag had prospered on my longevity.

  Though I could not see where such a change might lead, it gave me a glimmer of hope. I was required to be out of the pen for most of the day, tethered in the fortress’s primary training ground, awaiting the wargreve’s pleasure. Damon trained for perhaps four hours a day, sometimes mornings, sometimes afternoons or evenings, and during that time I could allow myself to think of nothing else. But in the other hours, if I didn’t have an assigned match, I was able to watch the comings and goings of Drudges, slaves, and Zhid of all ranks. The training ground was surrounded on three sides by solid stone walls. The fourth side opened onto a vast stableyard. The slave pen was across the stableyard, beyond the forge and saddlery. Seri might be among the passersby sometime, but I wouldn’t admit to myself how I longed to see her again. It would be better not.

  Many Zhid officers shared the training ground with the Wargreve Damon. Knowing I was swordmaster to such a renowned warrior, they would ask me for pointers now and then. I made sure to ask Damon’s permission before responding, but he didn’t care. After a few weeks I had several pupils, although the wargreve always had priority.

  On one blistering afternoon I was huddled into the tiny strip of shade within reach of my tether chain. A warrior that was not one of the regulars brought in a new slave for a practice match. I hadn’t heard the new man’s name as yet, but I saluted him before he went to work. The slave, a compact, sturdy man, smiled and did the same. He was good, a little better than the Zhid, but the Zhid was quite unaffected by the terrible heat, whereas the slave was soon sweating profusely. As the match went on, the Dar’Nethi’s face grew pale. At every pause he would rub his eyes, and I could see his arms growing heavy and his breath beginning to labor.

  When the Zhid called a pause to try a new blade, I jumped to my feet and asked for permission to speak. “May I offer a pointer or two? As you know I am swordmaster to Wargreve Damon.” Volunteering for any duty was not my habit, but it might give the slave a chance to cool off.

  “I take no pointers from slaves,” said the Zhid with a snarl. “Damon is a fool to think a slave would teach anything worth hearing. You should all have your tongues removed.”

  The new slave was in the corner of the yard, fighting to keep water down, a sure sign of heat distress.

  “But you lean too far forward in every stance, leaving you off-balance and slow in your counter-strikes, a vulnerability I would not expect in a warrior of your rank.”

  “How dare you?” The warrior was near apoplectic, knowing full well that what I said was true, and that I had revealed it to his opponent. “I’ll show you my weakness. Give this insolent vermin a blade.”

  A stupid thing to do. I’d spent a rough morning with Damon and was scheduled for a wager match with my old friend Gabdil an hour before sunset. A small crowd of warriors and Drudges gathered to watch. Everyone was placing wagers while Damon’s slavehandler detached me from the wall and gave me the weapon the warrior had discarded. My opponent heard the bettors, and his face turned purple.

  The match took half an hour. The Zhid was as strong as a bull, and his technique wasn’t as bad as I’d implied. Happily, he decided to yield rather than make me kill him. When I knelt and spread my arms at his command, I steeled myself for a touch of the collar, but he chose a powerful kick in the belly instead.

  The forgotten slave sat in the corner to await the slave-handler, and while I worked to get air in my lungs, and my stomach returned to its proper place, he raised his open palms to me. A gracious gesture, though he was unlikely to be in the position to do anyone a service anytime soon. Most likely he could have taken care of himself-but perhaps not. He looked as sick as I felt.

  The swordmaster reattached my tether, and I leaned against the stone wall, watching the crowd break up. The sun was in my eyes, so I could not make out one figure that stayed longer than the rest, standing stock still in the middle of the moving mass of people. All I could see in the glare was that it was a Drudge. No red kerchief covering the hair, so it wasn’t a woman… wasn’t Seri. Soon everyone was gone, and I drifted off to sleep.

  The match with Gabdil went well. He gave me a painful slash on my back which made him feel accomplished, so that he wasn’t too angry when he had to yield. The wound wasn’t deep or in a place where it would cripple me, which pleased me. A number of people watched the match. Drudges, Zhid, slaves. Impossible to see through the sweat dripping in my eyes. The slavehandler bound my hands and led me back to the surgeon and my cell.

  Late that night, I dreamed of snow. Seri and I had loved walking in the snow. She preferred clear winter days when the light was so brittle it would shatter on the ice-glazed gardens of Windham. I loved the quiet, blue-gray days when the drifting flakes seemed to muffle and soften the harshness of the world. In this particular dream, I stood by a frozen lake in the high mountains, while Seri strolled along on the far side of it. I was trying to pick my way across the icy boulders that crowded the shoreline to get to her, but whenever I looked up, she had moved farther away. I wanted to call out to her, but I beat my hand against my mouth and no one would tell me I could speak. At last I decided that the only way to reach her was to cross the lake, so I stepped onto the ice, trying to avoid the center where the color warned me that the glaze was thin and treacherous. But I couldn’t see because it had started to snow, and the ice crystals pelted my face…

  I brushed my hand against my face. It wasn’t snow, but straw. The cold was only the familiar dry chill of the desert night. I burrowed deeper in the straw
, determined to find out if I made it across the lake, but a straw pricked my face again, and it was not the wind that whispered outside the bars of my cell. “Ssst.”

  I glanced around before I moved. No one stood in the aisle between the rows of cells, and the cells to either side of me were empty. With so few of us, they could keep us wide apart. So the sound was from outside the pen. Shifting sluggishly toward the outside, as anyone might while sleeping, I peered through the close-set bars… straight into a grimy, freckled face that split into a grin as I’d not seen in a lifetime.

  “Blazes! I knew it. Holy, great damn! I knew it all along… it’s you!”

  “Paulo!” Our exclamations were muffled whispers, but no less filled with astonishment.

  “I knew you weren’t dead. We both knew it, though we didn’t say it to nobody, not even to each other… and then today, when I saw you save that fellow’s life… blazes!”

  “You were the third. You and Seri.”

  “You know she’s here, then?”

  “I saw her. Just for a moment. Does she know-?”

  “She don’t know you’re here-nor me. They weren’t going to send me, but I made ‘em do it. Were you the one supposed to give the signal then-to take us out?”

  “Things didn’t go quite right.”

  “Guessed not.” He paused for a moment, a rosy flush dousing his freckles. “Except for being here like this… are you all right? Together in your head?”

  “I remember everything.”

  “All of before I knew you… and when you showed up in Dunfarrie… and this time, when you fixed my legs and all?”

  “Everything.”

  “Blazes.” His gaze fell to the ground, but not before I saw innocent awe overtake him.

  “I remember Sunlight, now. You told me you’d taken care of him, but I couldn’t figure how you had come to have a horse of mine. You’re the first one from those times-from our world-the first one I get to meet again. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  “Makes my head hurt to think on it.”

  “Mine, too.”

  We were both quiet for a moment. Life was such a wonder.

  Then Paulo screwed up his face, lifted his gaze, and took up again, evidently deciding that awe of royalty or dead sorcerers come back to life was minor beside the business of the moment. “So what went wrong? How’d you get in this fix?”

  “The only way I could get into Zhev’Na was as a slave. Once everyone believed I was dead, our allies put a mask on me-an enchantment that made me believe I was someone else-so I could pass the initial interrogations and be brought here. The man who was supposed to help me when I arrived-to remove the mask and leave me free-died unexpectedly. Only when I caught a glimpse of Seri a few weeks ago did I finally remember who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. But of course, penned up like this, I can’t do much of anything.”

  His gaze roamed the row of cages. “Maybe I can steal the key and let you out.”

  “Don’t! It’s too risky-and not of any use. As long as I wear this collar, I’ve not a scrap of power. Even if we could get Seri and Gerick, we’ve no way out of Ce Uroth, because I can’t take us.”

  “I could get something to cut off the thing, maybe.”

  “I wish you could. More than you’ll ever know. But sorcery is the only way to take it off.”

  “Well, I’ll think on it. We’ll figure some way.”

  “You mustn’t put yourself at risk, Paulo. I- Listen to me. To know that you’re here… with her… You have to keep yourself safe. Do you understand? So there will be someone…”

  “I understand. But nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  “I’m not exactly in a secure profession.”

  A guard relieved himself just outside the cell across from me, close enough to remind me of our precarious position.

  “Keep yourself safe, Paulo. It’s so good to see you, to know a faithful friend is nearby, but you must stay away from me. There’s nothing to be done here. Not yet.”

  “Well, you just watch yourself. I’m going to take care of this. You’ll see.”

  He slipped away as quietly as he had come. I sat for a long time watching the flickering lights of the Zhid forges across the dark courtyard, pondering the wonders of a universe that would place its future so confidently in the hands of an illiterate fourteen-year-old boy. For the first time since Dassine’s death, I went to sleep with a smile on my lips.

  CHAPTER 38

  Gerick

  Something strange was happening in my house. Ever since Mellador had killed that slave to heal my knee, I had taken care of my own injuries. I could ignore scrapes, cuts, and bruises. Even gashes and sprains went away of themselves eventually. But one day a sparring partner got in a lucky slash and gave me a deep cut in the upper arm. I got back to my room before anyone noticed, and dismissed my slaves, saying I was going to practice sorcery for a while. I didn’t want them telling anyone I was injured.

  I wished I could use the things Notole had taught me about slowing bleeding or making wounds not hurt, but that is one of the impossible things about sorcery. You can’t lay compulsions on yourself or do yourself an injury with enchantments, but that means you can’t heal yourself either, even if you have the skill for it. So I ripped up a clean towel and tied it about my arm. To get the rag tight enough with only one hand and my mouth was hard. I put on a thick shirt and a dark-colored tunic that wouldn’t show any blood, and hoped my arm would stop hurting and stop bleeding before I gave myself away.

  When I came back from my hand combat practice after all that, I felt light-headed, sweating and cold at the same time. The pain in my arm had eased to a dull ache, but the towel and my shirt were soaked with blood. I tried again to tie up the wound, put on a different shirt and tunic, burned the bloody ones, and went to my riding lesson, but I had to cut the lesson short before I fell off the horse. I screamed at my riding master that his lessons were too hard.

  I returned to the house just after sunset. All I wanted was to get to my bed, but I kept finding myself in the wrong room. When I finally came to the stairs, I made it only halfway to the first landing before I had to rest. Then I couldn’t seem to get up again. I thought for a bit about calling my slaves back. Sefaro would help. But then I remembered that Sefaro was dead. Dead because of me, like all the others. I couldn’t ask anybody to help me. And I had to be careful or the Lords would know everything; to keep up my barriers took concentration.

  In the middle of the night I woke in my bed. Someone was doing something to my arm, and I was afraid that if I opened my eyes, I would meet the eyes of a slave being tied to it. But no rush of power burned my blood and no smirking Mellador showed up in my mind. The person cleaned the wound, put something cool on it, and tied it up tight. Whoever it was dribbled watered wine in my mouth, and I soon fell back to sleep.

  The sun was already high when I woke, and my swordmaster had sent three messages asking where I was. But I told Notole that I wanted to work with her that day, that I had questions about making illusions, the most interesting sorcery I had learned so far. She agreed. When she asked why I was so sleepy and inattentive, I told her I’d been having strange dreams again-which I believed I had. But I couldn’t pretend it was dreams when I touched the knotted strip of linen under my shirt. And I couldn’t figure out who could have put it there.

  By evening I felt sick again and came near losing my way from the Lords’ house to mine. I went straight to bed without any supper. The person came again that night. The bandage was changed, and cool cloths put on my face, and I was given sweetened wine to drink several times in the night while I drifted in and out of sleep. I kept telling myself I was going to open my eyes to see who it was, but my eyes were too heavy, and I didn’t really want to know. If I found out who it was, I would probably have to do something terrible to them.

  Though I still felt weak, I was able to go back to training the next day, and after a few more days had passed, I convinced myself that it h
ad all been my imagination. I must have done the things myself, but because I was feverish, it just seemed to be someone else. But then I started finding things-odd things-left here and there in my rooms.

  The first was a small, egg-shaped rock sitting exactly in the center of the table in my sitting room. It was smooth and grayish blue with a clear vein through it. I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten there. I tossed it into the firegrate, but immediately picked it up again and ran my fingers over it. Just a rock. No enchantments attached. But perhaps the Lords had sent it. I threw it onto the bench where I left my grinding stones, oil, and rags for my weapons.

  A few days later I found a small chunk of wood just in the same place on my eating table. The wood was dark and hard as iron, and when I looked close I could see crystals inside its seams, almost like the wood had become a stone. No one in Zhev’Na would have remarked it. I wouldn’t have either, except that I hadn’t put it there, and I couldn’t imagine who might have done so. I put it with the rock.

  And then I found a nasty-looking pit from a purplish fruit called a darupe on my bed pillows. I didn’t make a connection with the other two things until I picked it up in disgust, ready to throw it into the fire, and it fell apart in my hand. It had been carefully and evenly split in two. The insides of the pit were smooth and deep brown, with dark veins like polished rosewood, and the kernel was a deep, shining red, with swirls of black in it. I tossed the thing onto the bench with the others.

  Several weeks passed without anything more out of the ordinary, but then I returned from a long day’s training to find a small, cracked glass dish-a piece of a broken lamp perhaps-filled with sand and sitting on the table by the stool where I always sat to take off my boots. Why would anyone collect sand in a dish? There was enough sand in Ce Uroth to fill every dish in the whole world. But as I pulled off one boot, I found myself staring at the dish. The sand in it had not been scooped up from the ground at random.

  It was easy to think of the desert as an endless expanse of red sand and rock, and to believe that any change in its appearance was caused solely by changing light, but there were actually hundreds of shades of red and brown to the land itself. Someone had collected grains of many different colors and laid them in the glass dish in layers, one and then the other, thick and thin, to make a rippling pattern. I had never seen anything like it. I turned it around to examine it from every angle. This wasn’t the Lords’ work.