Prodigal Steelwielder (Seals of the Duelists Book 3) (26 page)

A wry smile thinned Taban’s lips. “Aye, I have the perfect place.” He turned to Tarin and Ignaas. “His old office, that fancy one with all those exquisite statues and the fine wood paneling. Hexmagic Instructor Paat ordered it boarded up because not even he wants to be associated with that traitor.”

Tarin smirked, and Ignaas’s brows drew together in hurt.

After a bit of description and a rough map sketch, Tala began opening test portals to pinpoint Ignaas’s locked office. On her third try, her portal opened just inside the door of the small, private classroom where the former instructor had taught his invitation-only classes. In back lay his vast personal office.

Several of Dakila’s men dashed through first, making sure the area was empty and clear. Then Tarin shuffled Ignaas through, followed by more guards. Taban waited until they were all through then stepped across the portal threshold just before Tala. She closed the portal and left everyone in musty, close darkness, crammed into two adjoining rooms with somewhere upward of three score people.

Taban cast a warm yellow light, and Dakila’s men uttered gasps of awe and admiration for Ignaas’s exotic collection of knickknacks, statues, and other prized possessions. The guards shifted around the room, ostensibly checking for windows or other doors or something, but their fingers darted out to touch fragile vases and plates, delicate embroidery, and bright feathers on stuffed birds.

In the crowded space, a sudden thud snapped all of Taban’s senses to alert. But the source was only Ignaas dropping to his knees. A small space cleared around him despite the crowded conditions, and Taban saw the former Hexmagic Instructor staring upward at his many beautiful belongings. His eyes streamed with tears. “Such beauty. All lost, all gone. Only the ugliness remains.”

Both disturbed and impressed, Taban could only think of the uncomfortable truths that seemed to come from the minds of the mad.

Dakila approached him. “How long are we staying here? These quarters are rather tight.”

Taban glanced up at one of the high, narrow windows. “I’ll see if there’s any sign of attack. If we’re clear, we’ll remain here until dawn. Either way, I’ll alert the headmaster that we’re here.”

Tarin called to him across the crowded room. “Even Ignaas? You’ll tell him he’s here?”

“Langlaren is Warmaster. He deserves to know about this thrilling new weapon in his arsenal, doesna he?”

Tarin shrugged. Taban gave her a curt nod then parted the iron bolts on the door and reattached them once he was outside in the cold.

Taban stood still for a long moment, sending Wind, Earth, and Lifeseeker in all directions. But he found no threat, no gathering of forces. The campus was quiet and the students clustered in their barracks. He leapt adisc and shot up into the sky, shrouded in a cloak of warm air to fend off the chill. The full moon was high, shedding its light over the uneven tunnels, valleys, and arches that made up the Academy campus. Bridges and walkways punctuated the chiaroscuro of the scene below, and Taban felt a twinge of homesickness.
Once, long ago, my world was as black and white as this night. Even now, I’m not so sure this battle is going to happen, or what the emperor truly intends by having us bring Ignaas here.

He did a quick circuit of the campus, veering close to the sheer cliffs and scanning with Lifeseeker for knots of life in the surrounding valleys. Finding all clear, he was about to return to Ignaas’s old office, but a narrow window of opportunity blazed at him. He changed direction over the campus and headed toward the cozy faculty bungalows.

He knocked on one of the doors, and eventually it opened to reveal a sleepy eunuch with close-cropped brown hair. Kipri blinked a few times in incomprehension. “Taban? What are you doing here? Has the attack begun? Where’s Tarin?” The eunuch’s questions became more aggressive, and he stepped out onto his porch in his nightshirt. In the sharp moonlight, the Aklaa’s hooded eyes took on a distinctly sinister cast.

“We’re not under attack. All’s well. Tarin and I were given an assignment by the emperor. I can take you to her, if you like.”

“Absolutely. Let me find some clothes.”

Taban waited awkwardly on the porch, not having been invited inside, until Kipri emerged, swathed in a heavy cloak and wearing his most ordinary wig: the plain brown bouffant Philo had given him. “Where is she?”

“I canna tell you because of our mission. But I can take you there if you let me cover your eyes.”

Kipri stared at him, his face all angles and sharp shadows, for so long that Taban feared he was about to fly into a rage. Instead, to Taban’s complete and utter surprise, the eunuch threw his arms around him and hugged him fiercely.

“There’s no way I can thank you enough for what you have done for Tarin. You keep her safe during her savant lessons and in the duel den. You keep her alive.” He pulled back and stared Taban in the eye.

Taban was surprised to realize that he and the eunuch were of the same height. Kipri had always seemed so slender and willowy that Taban had assumed the Aklaa was taller.

“I know you give her the one thing I cannot, and I won’t pretend that on some level, it doesn’t bother me. But we are all imperfect. My imperfections don’t matter to Tarin, and Tarin’s imperfections don’t matter to me. I think that’s why we need each other so much. I’m sorry that you didn’t get a choice in your den assignment. I hope you don’t mind too much that I’ve basically forced you to sleep with my woman for two years.”

Taban coughed in surprise. “What?”

A rare, genuine smile crossed Kipri’s face. “You don’t think I’m above pulling a few strings with the Minister of Information when it comes to making sure Tarin’s safe in her new duel den assignment, do you? Come now, I served under Philo for several years in the Kheerzaal, aside from the year I spent in Balanganam with him. I’ve picked up a few tricks.”

Taban tried to shout down the thoughts clamoring in his head. “You said Philo arranged our assignments? I thought they were supposed to be a punishment.”

Kipri nodded. “They were, originally. But Philo knew everything you did about the duelism book’s secrets—or near enough for practical purposes—and he knew how you felt after what happened to Bayan. He couldn’t help you overtly, but he did his best to make sure that you would all be safe and in strategic placements for his benefit. I simply made sure he was aware that Tarin would need your help to fulfill his goals for her. Why do you think the singers visit you so often?”

Horning in on Dunfarroghans’ rightful chicanery, are we? Cheeky.
“Oh, I don’t know. For our winning personalities?”

Kipri tipped his head in respect. “He’s a sly one, Philo. If I hadn’t seen him risk his own life for the sake of the empire, I might worry that he was following in the footsteps and philosophy of Ignaas witten Oost.”

Taban’s schooled his face to smoothness before his surprise could show, but he wondered whether Kipri was already aware of his and Tarin’s secret mission. If he was, did the emperor know it, or just Philo?
The emperor seems to be rubbing off on our dear Minister of Information, or maybe it is the other way around. Either way, I’m sure they’ll be very happy with each other
. “Come, then, I don’t know how much time we have until the casters figure out where we’ve hidden this lovely piece of land, so if you want to see your girl tonight, you’d better step onto my fine magical disc.”

He didn’t bother explaining that once Kipri saw whom he and Tarin were guarding, he couldn’t be let back out until certain things were resolved. It likely didn’t matter. Kipri would be in no hurry to leave Tarin, no matter how large an audience they had for their reunion.

I canna wait to see the expression on Langlaren’s face when I fly into his bedchamber after this. At least he willna be hoping for a private reunion in a traitor’s office.

Bayan stood with one hand on the front door latch of his family home. Memories flooded his mind, happy and young and innocent: pushing Lailani into a paddy his father was flooding; racing a young, playful Timbool along the forest path; following his father along a raised road and trying to remember his every word as he waved his hands at this or that paddy and described a season’s worth of farming out of order.
I was never destined to be a farmer, was I? I was only fooling myself
—
myself and my family.

He slid the latch downward and let himself in. The large front room, which had always been bursting with people when he was a child, was empty at the moment. Bayan inhaled the old, familiar scents: the buttery yellow, sweet wax his mother used to smooth the worn floors, her arrangements of dried seerwine leaves and rice stalks, symbols of the farm’s prosperity and products. Food smells wafted in from the kitchen, and Bayan was reminded of his last meal from home, when Tala had brought him a plate laden with food created by his mother’s hands.

He perched a hip on the corner of the large table, its surface flat and worn after decades of constant use.
Mindo’s turned working for the sint into his own little business. I wonder what my sisters are up to. Probably learning to sew, weave, and negotiate with merchants.

“Bayan?” Datu stood in the kitchen doorway, holding a plate of mishmash stew over rice.

Bayan shifted his thigh off the table at the sight of his father. “Father. I don’t mean to intrude—”

His father’s face broke into a wide grin. He hurried to the table to set down his plate. Relief flooded Bayan—his father was genuinely pleased to see him. Bayan expected the man to rush him for a fatherly bear hug, but to his consternation, the strong farmer he had known all his life dropped to one knee and bowed his head. “Great duelist, I am honored by your presence. All of Pangusay is abuzz with your astonishing act of bravery in bringing the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies safely to our mountains. One of the singers even sought me out afterward to inform me that you have been restored to citizenship and may once more claim your family name. We’re very honored by your presence. Anything you require, it is yours.”

Bayan’s dismay turned bitter, and an acidic chill drilled through his chest. “Father, stand up. I’m not here to demand things of you. I just stopped by… I mean, I saw Mindo… I wanted to see you again.”

Hesitantly, Datu got to his feet and met Bayan’s eyes. “You are well, then?”

Bayan shifted his feet. “Nothing’s killed me yet. Though the Corona is very interested in trying. ”

Datu’s heavy brows lowered, crowding his hooded eyes. “The Corona? When the singer came, his robe was smeared with blood and soot. Is there war?”

“It seems so. The duelists will do what they can. You should be safe here.”

“Well. Well then.” Datu looked around his front room as if its familiar items were new and fascinating. “You should take care of yourself and your friends. The empire needs its strongest defenders. Before you go, is there anything I can provide for you?”

Before I go. I still have no idea how I’m going to go. I could blow myself over to the Temple and see if there any singers there who aren’t too busy planning a war to give me a ride.
A new thought nibbled at his mind.
No, the sky being put me here for a reason. Until I find out what it is, I’m not ready to go yet.
To his father, he said, “I wouldn’t say no to a plate of that mishmash stew.”

Bayan and his father sat at the large family table and ate together. Bayan listened as his father quietly rambled about various farm events and impediments, shared gossip from downtown Pangusay, and bragged about Bayan’s sisters’ progress at boarding school in the prestigious university city of Malamanay. “After all, one of their brothers is a duelist, and the other is the voice for the only sint in Balanganam. Our family has a different kind of standing than I could ever have envisioned for us, and I’m not about to let my children live a lesser life than they could.”

“Some parts of my life seem lesser than if I had remained a farmer.” That brought a smile to his father’s face. When they finished eating, Datu asked once again if there was anything he required. Trying not to cringe at his father’s obsequious tone, Bayan shook his head. “I’ll not keep you from your duties.

That explanation was apparently more than sufficient for his father, for he gave another deep bow and left the room.

Ay, Bhattara.
Bayan dropped his face into his hands. A warm body nudged his leg, and he looked down to see the old farm hound, Timbool, leaning against him with his tongue lolling out. Bayan grinned at the sight of the animal. Giving the sleek-furred beast some scratching behind his ears, Bayan said, “Ay, Timbool, if you had any idea the great stone avatar you inspired me to create years ago, you’d probably turn tail and run. You helped me save the emperor’s life. Did you know that, old boy? Yes, you did. Yes, you did, you good dog, you.” The old farm hound released a happy wheeze and swiped at Bayan’s hand with his long, warm tongue. As the beast lay atop one of Bayan’s feet, Bayan let his thoughts take over.

I used to trust that my family would benefit from my rank. I used to be content with my lot because of my friends.
Bayan felt his teeth clenching. His hands balled into fists on the old wood.
Jaap separated me from my reasons for loyalty, and now he expects me to step back into my old role.

The tabletop sprouted with tiny plant seedlings that formed straight, long rows like a garden plot. Timbool, at Bayan’s feet, whined. Bayan peeled the seedlings away from the table with a wave of his hand, restoring its smoothness, and wove their trailing stems together in a delicate wreath that hovered before him. He let it spin on a puff of wind, like the windmills the Waarden built to pump water into their irrigated fields.
I’ve outgrown the role the emperor first offered me. I’m someone else now, someone he made me into when he exiled me. I have to be true to who I’ve become.

The seedling wreath frosted over with spikes of ice then blackened as the ice morphed into flame, devouring the young green plants. Bayan hardened the circle of ash into a ring of stone, then shot it through with a delicate tracery of steel and electrified it with a bolt of Shock.
I hate to say it, but it looks like Ignaas wasn’t completely wrong. We may not be better than the villagers across the empire, but we are very different. Sometime soon, I need to have a conversation with Emperor Jaap about acknowledging that difference.

But in the meantime, Bayan had friends to support and an enemy to defeat. He recalled as much detail as he could of Ordomiro’s sacrifice, his portal that had thrown Bayan and Sabella deep into the Waarden Empire. His magic had dwelt in ink, and fluid shapes formed the six sacred motions. When he hadn’t had enough ink, Ordomiro and opened his veins and bent the world with his blood.
Is that his strength or his limitation? I don’t use ink. What can I use to bend the world? The singers do it all the time with sound. It doesn’t kill them.

A breathless sort of deep concentration overtook Bayan’s mind, silencing all thought. He felt as if the flat rock beneath his feet were the very top of a massive mountain buried under the soil. The tiniest part of a new concept pressed against his mind.

Singers use song. Ordomiro used liquid.
“
Your babies call you master
.
”
The meaning of the sky creature’s words slammed into the back of Bayan’s eyeballs, and he lurched forward, pressing his palms flat against the tabletop. At his feet, Timbool jerked into a sitting position and stared up at him. Bayan looked down at the dog. “Master Duelist. One who can will the world to bend. No hand gestures, old boy. No focused magic. No spells to limit the scope of my will.”

Snatches of memory flared in Bayan’s mind. On the day his magic had revealed its secret before his father and Philo, Bayan had killed a swamp viper in a paddy. He had never been sure how he’d sensed the creature behind him when it was under the water’s surface.
A savant form of Lifeseeker.
On the day Ignaas witten Oost had been potioneered, an angry young student had flung a stone at him from above, and Bayan had simply willed it into flower petals. No gestures necessary. During his days with Ordomiro and his nights with Sabella, he had begun more and more to simply will small things to happen.
Power unlimited by spells.

Suddenly, Bayan felt tiny, insignificant, a small speck on the vast surface of the world with everything stretching away from him, demanding his attention, his focus. He recoiled, gasping.
It’s too much. I can’t think of it all at once. I’m still too attached to my body. Its perspective makes me small. That’s what the creature meant: someday, my body will be too small to contain me because my thoughts will outgrow it. Without my body, what will I be?

Several tiny strands tied together all at once. Clues from the ancient book, from his celestial kidnapper, from his time on campus, from the history he had learned from Instructor de Rood, they all fit.
Am I the last one to figure this out or the first?
He became aware of every speck of his physical body as the thought washed over him, permeating his skin. His flesh.

A Master Duelist without his flesh… Shall I, too, bend the world from my cave?

An eternity of possibility stretched out in Bayan’s mind, but its infinity terrified him, so he shied back. He snapped into the moment and stood up abruptly. His chair tumbled to the floor with a clatter that startled the dog. Timbool trotted a few steps away then turned and sat, watching him.

Bayan stepped away from the table and wafted the chair back into an upright position with a flick of Wind. He turned to face the open portion of the room. In the endless distance beyond the wall of his father’s house, the Corona’s steelwielder army was amassing. The sky being—the first sint?—had said that Bayan’s foot still hung in the air, that he was still taking his very first step on a long journey.
Time to put my foot down.
“They wanted to play with portals, Timbool. So we’ll play with portals.”

Bayan fingered his necklace with the fat, heavy black bead in the center.
I’ve always been angry. Always. I’ve harnessed it, controlled it, made it work for me. It is the strongest single piece of who I am. And right now, I’m really very angry.
He took a deep breath and tensed his torso, squinting forward at the air.

Bend
.

He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been, when a small black spot appeared in midair. It spread, peeling open a pitch-black tunnel before him. The edges streamed away, black flames in the wind. Bayan willed the hole larger, forced its distant end farther. He felt it stretching across the world.

Wait. I don’t have to go alone. And I don’t want to.

The far end of the tunnel, which appeared before him as a gap in the blackness a hand’s breadth wide and a dozen strides away, veered aside, seeking a new anchor, then spread open like a twisting vortex and dissipated into nothingness, leaving a black ring reminiscent of the bright white singer portals. On the far side of it lay a small, private garden at the Kheerzaal, where he spotted his two favorite people in the world. Calder and Kiwani clutched each other’s hands and murmured quietly together.

Bayan felt one eyebrow climb his forehead. “Am I interrupting something?”

Kiwani and Calder broke apart with twin gasps. Kiwani’s face froze with what looked like a combination of ecstasy and pain, but Calder let out a whoop and dashed toward Bayan with open arms.

Not wanting Calder to disrupt his brand new portal, Bayan hopped through into Calder’s arms and embraced his friend. Calder crafted a wind disc under their feet and spun it wildly. “I knew he wasna dead!” Kiwani’s tolerant look informed Calder that such had been patently obvious to her as well.

Bayan stopped the disc before his full stomach rebelled. “Why did you think I was dead?”

Calder's wide eyes protested his innocence. “
We
dinna. But most everyone else did. See, your body started leaking all this magic all over the floor. Lifeseeker said you werena home anymore. But I knew you were out there somewhere. Look how smart I am. Aren’t you glad you have such a clever friend?”

Bayan grinned. “Yes, yes I am.”

“How did you make that portal? What was that spell?” Kiwani breathed. She hadn’t moved toward Bayan yet.

Rather than pride, Bayan felt a chill of terror at the vastness of the first step on his journey. What would the second step do to his already vastly altered perceptions? The millionth? “I learned it from a friend in the Corona.”

Calder punched him on the shoulder. “And you’re just telling us this now? We could’ve used that during the battle! You great stupid prat, always hoarding your secrets. Next time, share, sints curse you.”

Bayan twitched at Calder’s mention of sints.

“Oh, and speaking of sharing…” Calder cleared his throat. “I understand you had a friend with you. Sabella?” Bayan nodded. Calder took a deep breath but wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I’ve some shite news, I’m afraid. She got caught up in a battle with Iulan, Odjin, some Potioneers Savant, and a load of steelwielders disguised as Tuathi.”

Bayan’s eyebrows shot up. “She’s dead?”