Sword-Singer Read online

  He was busy rearranging the folds of his saffron robe; delaying tactics.

  “Ajani,” I said gently.

  “The name is familiar.”

  “Remember what I said about lies, boy. How in the end they can trip you up.”

  “Only if you’re clumsy.” He grinned, reached beneath the robe to the small of his back, took from his belt three oddly shaped hand axes, or something like. I’d never seen such things before.

  Casually, effortlessly, Bellin the Cat began to toss them into the air, end over end, from one hand to the other, until the weapons were little more than a blur of wood and leather and steel. “On board ship,” he told me, “we often get very restless. This is one way to pass the time.”

  From the other side of the post, having dodged there somewhat more quickly than I intended—and paying the price with my aqivi-addled head—I watched the flying axes. Up. Down. Around. Closer to his head than I liked. And all the movement was beginning to make me dizzy.

  Bellin’s hands were supple and exceedingly quick. Undoubtedly he was a marvelous pickpocket or cutpurse, except his mastery of the axes indicated action of a higher level altogether.

  He caught them one, two, three, stopped throwing. And handed one to me.

  I examined it in silence. About a foot and a half in length, altogether, but oddly constructed. One side of the haft boasted a flattened steel blade, quite sharp, much like that of a normal single-bitted hand ax. But the other side was a rounded knob of metal. The wooden haft was leather-wrapped for a truer grip; for me, the balance was off, but obviously it suited Bellin perfectly.

  “Give it a try,” he suggested.

  “And do what with it? Chop down this post?” I looked at said post. “Right now I think I need it.”

  “No. No—here. Watch.” And threw an ax across the street into a wooden mounting block, where it stuck.

  I squinted across the distance and looked at the ax-bedecked block a long moment. Then at the ax in my hand. Lastly, at Bellin himself. “There are people,” I told him distinctly, “in the street.”

  Well, there had been. Most of them had panicked and quitted the street as soon as they figured out what Bellin was throwing. Or fell down to lie in the dirt, cursing him elaborately.

  “I know,” he said brightly, nodding agreement. “Part of the trick is in the timing, of course; it’s the real challenge.” His smile was eloquently innocent. “Once, I even missed.”

  “Uh-huh.” I gave him back his ax as Del approached from the left, and prepared to step out and meet her. “Maybe we’ll talk again some day.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance I might join up with you?” Bellin asked, following.

  I felt the weight of Theron’s sword across my shoulders. “Where we’re going,” I told him, “there isn’t room for three. And it’s personal.”

  Bellin stopped. Sighed. Nodded. And sank two more axes into the mounting block, ignoring renewed—and louder—curses.

  Del’s brows were raised as I fell into step beside her. Reading her face, I shrugged an answer. “Passing time.” I stumbled over a shadow, which elicited a brief breathy snort of amusement from her. “He really wants to join us.”

  “No.”

  We turned a corner and were funneled into a tighter, deserted street. “So I told him.” We bumped elbows twice as we strolled, and I heard Del sigh. Well, I’d had a lot of aqivi. “I told him—”

  I was unable to tell her what I’d told him because four shapes detached themselves from the shadows and came at us.

  “Ah, hoolies,” I muttered, unsheathing Theron’s sword, “couldn’t they have done this when I was sober?”

  It was, of course, a rhetorical question, and Del did not waste time on an answer. (Although undoubtedly she had one.) I heard the whine of Boreal as Del loosed her from the sheath. I also heard a snatch of song, and knew Del wasn’t going to waste much unaugmented effort on the Punja-mites. She was keying the sword, which means they stood less of a chance than ever.

  The light was bad, but only for a moment. Del’s blade burned salmon-silver in the darkness, and I saw four dark Southron faces suddenly thrown into relief: all planes and hollows and black blots for eyes and mouths. They squinted, swore, then advanced with appreciable determination.

  Two of them came at me, two at Del. At least they had learned that much by watching her fight.

  They wore baggy robes over equally baggy jodhpurs and tunics. All the excess material makes it more difficult to separate flesh from fabric and stab the part that counts before it can stab back. I shredded one robe, sliced through a silken sash, caught a rib, but little more. He was very fast, or else I had gotten slower. (Possible, in view of the aqivi sloshing in belly and head.)

  Something stung my left wrist. Providentially, as it turned out. The pain nagged me right out of my liquor haze and made me considerably more accurate; I spitted one man through the belly, sliced open the other lower still, so that he dropped his sword altogether and concentrated on keeping his entrails from spilling out to soil his silks.

  I caught my balance, turned, saw Del kill one of her assailants. And then, as she spun to dispatch the fourth, we discovered there was no need. The pock-faced Southroner was engaged in falling flat on his face, quite startled to discover himself dead, and landed with nary a protest.

  Protruding from his spine was one of Bellin’s axes.

  Del and I stared at the ax a moment, then looked up. The would-be panjandrum approached quietly, bent over the body, jerked the ax free. The sound was different than that made by a sword withdrawn; I decided the latter was less troubling to a man who had partaken too freely of aqivi.

  Bellin inspected the blade, cleaned it on the dead man’s robe, looked at us. “Missed the post again.”

  I sighed. “You still can’t come.”

  He thought it over, nodded, turned on his heel and marched away. Juggling his three deadly axes.

  “Well,” Del remarked, “at least the boy’s accurate.”

  “Boy?” I scowled at her. “He’s your age, at least.”

  She looked after Bellin. Then back at me. “Well,” she said again, “I guess he looks so young to me because I’ve been riding with you.”

  I did not dignify it with an answer.

  Del grinned and raised pale brows. “Now, what was it you were telling him?” She cleaned Boreal and slid her home again. “What was it you were saying before we were interrupted?”

  I grunted, doing my own clean-up duties. “That life was too short for him to waste it tagging along with us.”

  “Is that why you’re coming with me?”

  “You know why I’m coming.”

  “No,” she said as we headed down the street again, “you never told me. You just caught up to me that day, and you’ve been with me ever since.”

  “And I suppose you’re sorry.”

  She slanted me an eloquent sidelong glance, examining me at great length. “Have you ever given me reason to be sorry?”

  I scratched ferociously at an itching armpit and tried to recapture a belch. “Not me, bascha. You need me.”

  Del did not answer, which I took to be answer enough. The woman can be tricky, but not incomprehensible.

  “Here,” she said. “The inn.”

  “Watch the step,” I warned.

  Del said nothing. She just went inside and let the curtain slap me in the face.

  Again.

  Later, much later, I snapped out of sleep into wakefulness, fully alert, as Del slipped out of bed. Sword-dancers who desire to stay alive in the midst of enemies learn very quickly how to snatch sleep whenever possible; how also to wake with alacrity, with nothing lost in the transition.

  I thought, at first, she meant to relieve herself in the nightpot left for that purpose. But instead she retrieved her sword from the floor next to mine, unsheathed it, took two steps to the middle of the room. And there she knelt down, naked, with pale hair atumble around her breasts and the sword
blade pressed between them.

  There was no lamp, but the crescent moon slanted dim illumination through lath-slatted windows. The woman knelt on the floor, wrapped in shadows and silver moonlight. And I heard her begin to sing.

  It was such a little song. Barely more than a whisper of sound, threaded through with a hiss of withheld volume. She meant not to waken me, then, although Del knew my sleeping habits, now, as well as her own.

  I have a tin ear. To me, music is little more than noise; loud, soft, pitched high or low. I have heard her sing before, preparing to enter the circle, but it had meant nothing to me. Just—noise. Some personal petition to her gods or to her sword. Lifesong, deathsong; one and the same, to me. Little more than a Northern idiosyncrasy. Theron had done it also.

  But still Del sang, and the sword came alive in her hands.

  At first, I did not believe it. Moonlight is often fickle; clouds, I thought, moving across the crescent to alter the intensity of its light. But if anything, the moon paid homage to the sword. Its light was clearly diluted by the luminance of the blade.

  It started at the tip. First, the merest speck of light. A spark, steadfast and unflagging, welling like a drop of blood on a thorn-pricked fingertip. It pulsed, as if it lived, as if it breathed. And then it crept ever upward, finger by finger, bead by bead, slowly, like a necklet of Punja crystals. Frowning, I watched one become some become many, until the double-edged blade was ablaze with light, sparks joining to form a whole.

  Pulsing. Bright—brighter—brilliant…then dimming nearly to absence, until it renewed itself.

  Del sang on, and the blade burst into flame.

  “Hoolies, Del—” I was upright, awkward in my haste, meaning to knock the sword from her hands and succeeding only in nearly falling flat on my face. Tangled in bedclothes (and fuddled by too much aqivi), I staggered; in the flames, her face was stark.

  I fully expected to see her hair catch fire, but it did not. Neither did the flames touch her flesh. They clung to the blade, infatuated with double edges, flirting coyly with the runes. And then died, snuffed out, as her song wavered; her eyes were fixed on the runes.

  I reached out, but something in her face kept me from touching the sword. I knew I could, with impunity, because knowing the jivatma’s name allowed me some degree of familiarity: an ability to touch a portion of the power that Del knew in full measure. Once, in ignorance, before I had known the name, I grasped the silvered hilt with its everchanging shapes and lost layers of skin off my palm. I had been ice-marked for weeks. Now, the brand was gone but not the feelings it had engendered.

  Because of them, and Del’s eyes, I forbore to touch the sword.

  The last of the sparks winked out. The pulsing was vanquished by moonlight. The sword was a sword again, with nothing of magic divulged.

  I drew in a breath and wet my lips. “I’ve never seen it do that before.”

  “I took care to make sure you did not.” The blade, quiescent, was obscured by the twin falls of pale hair, hanging over her shoulders.

  I sighed, aware that too much aqivi had dulled my senses. The first startled response had faded, leaving me tasting the sourness of reaction and sensing the first twinges of a headache. “What in hoolies were you doing?”

  “Asking advice.” Del rose, took the sheath I retrieved for her, slid Boreal home. “I am—twisted.”

  “Twisted?” I raised brows. Her limbs were straight as ever.

  She frowned, shrugging one shoulder. “Twisted…bound up…divided—” She stopped, sensing her words altered intended meaning. Though she speaks Southron well, if curiously accented, there are times our decidedly diverse heritage makes communication difficult, if not downright impossible.

  “Mixed-up,” I translated. “Confused.”

  “Confused,” she echoed. “Yes.” She put the sheathed sword back on the floor next to mine, so close to the bed, then climbed onto the cot and dragged the bedclothes around her shoulders. “What am I to do?”

  It is not often Del offers me the chance to even suggest what she might do. But an outright question underscored the magnitude of the confusion she now admitted.

  I sat down on the edge of the cot. “Has this anything to do with the man you killed tonight?” I looked at the moon. “Last night?”

  Del sighed. Her expression was pensive. “Nothing and everything, and all at once.”

  “He was one of the raiders—”

  “Oh, yes. I recall him. I recall them all.” She shook her head in negligent dismissal. “At first I thought not, because I could not believe it…but I could not forget their faces if I wished to…too often I see them in my sleep.”

  “Yes, well, even dogs dream.”

  A poor attempt at offhanded empathy; she didn’t even smile. “I don’t wish, Tiger. I wish never to forget them, until the blood-debt is collected.”

  “Even then, you may not forget them.”

  One slender arm departed the protection of the bedclothes. She smoothed folds rucked up over knees doubled beneath her chin. After a moment, in an oddly vulnerable appeal, she touched my shoulder, found an old scar, traced it. Over and over.

  “It felt good to kill him,” she said.

  Her tone belied the words. “But not good enough.”

  The fingers halted a moment, then resumed their idle movement. “I am sworn.”

  “I know. To many things, bascha…and that is why you’re twisted.” I caught her hand and stilled it. “What did you ask the sword?”

  “Which risk I should assume.”

  I frowned. “What risk?”

  Del hooked her hair behind her left ear. “If I put myself on Ajani’s trail, the searching may take weeks. Months. Even years.” Her mouth twisted. “Longer than the time I have left before my sentence is levied.”

  “And yet if you go North to face the judgment of your peers and teachers, you may lose Ajani’s trail.” I nodded. “Not an easy choice.”

  “Oh, it is. Too easy.” She took her hand away and reached both up behind her neck. Unclasped something. Held it out into the moonlight. A string of lumpy amber, red-brown in the slanted light. “I made this,” she said quietly. “Ten years ago, I made this, as a birth-gift for my mother.”

  I recalled how she had taken something from the neck of the Southroner she had killed. How she had knotted it up in one fist without saying a word about it.

  “Risk,” I said quietly. “Hunt Ajani—yesterday, today, tomorrow—while others are hunting you.”

  Her hand shut away the necklet. “I owe my an-kaidin so much.”

  “And so you asked him his advice.” I heard her song again, in the confines of my head; saw again the flaming sword. “What did he say, bascha?”

  “Nothing,” Delilah whispered at last, and a tear ran down her cheek.

  We have been companions. Swordmates. Bedmates. But in many things we are strangers to one another, afraid to trespass where emotions may not be wanted. Having been locked so long in service to oneself, each of us, it is difficult to turn the key and unlock ourselves, saying the things we desire to say, to share the things that should be shared. And so the Northern woman and the Southron man, born of violence, shaped by an angry determination to overcome those who had beaten us, had learned to say nothing of fears, knowing the admission might make those fears come true.

  Del crying was enough to clear my head of aqivi befuddlement for good. And to know myself plunged into a divisive confusion; did I offer comfort? Or did I retreat to give her the privacy she demanded from me so often?

  Hoolies, how did other men deal with this?

  Well…women had cried in front of me before. But they were Southron women, with completely different outlooks and intentions. I had learned to take tears as a warning sign of an involvement no longer beneficial to my lifestyle.

  But this was Del. This was a woman who demanded equality, requiring and desiring no particular favors or consideration because of her sex.

  At least she didn’t sob
. Neither did she hastily wipe away the tears as another woman might—and had; a woman apparently afraid I might discover that somehow, beneath all the mess, she had become another person entirely, and not worthy of my interest.

  Del just—cried. Silently. Without fuss. She simply sat and let the tears run down her face.

  Oh, hoolies…why me?

  Well, there was one thing…

  She stirred as I touched her, showing her the best way I knew how that, regardless of her circumstances—and tears—I still wanted her. But, apparently, it wasn’t what she wanted.

  “Not now,” she said crossly, shifting away.

  “I just thought—”

  “I know what you thought.” Her face was wet, but no more tears wound their way down her cheeks. Instead, she scowled at me. That expression I understood well enough. “That isn’t always the answer, Tiger…though it may be hard for you—or any other man—to understand.”

  I’ll give her this much, she knows how and where to hit. And my pride, as always, smarted. My sense of helplessness increased in direct proportion to the sudden shrinkage of desire.

  “Hoolies, Del, what do you want from me? I try to help you out—”

  “Help me? Help yourself, you mean.” She got up, ripping the thin blanked from the bed to wind around her body; paced to the lath-slatted window and glared out.

  I was left with no blanket and very little patience. I plumped the single lumpy pillow across my lap, glad of some coverage, and did my own share of glaring. “What in hoolies is a man supposed to do, Del? Guess? Especially with you. You’re so prickly, I never know when you plan to stick me.”

  “I never plan it,” she said. “It just happens. You ask for it, sometimes.”

  “Like now?” I nodded. “Fine. Next time I’ll leave you alone.”

  She sighed heavily. “Sometimes a woman just wants to be held.”

  “And sometimes a man is more than willing just to hold,” I threw back, “but you’ve got to give him some sort of clue.”

  She said nothing.

  “Especially you,” I pointed out. “I never know if I’m in bed with the sword-dancer or the woman. Good as you are in the circle, Del, you’re more male than female. I know it has to be that way, and I know why. But in bed I want you, not the an-ishtoya.”