(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay (13 page)

He took a step toward her, swept the dowel down. She threw her hands up and shuffled backward.

“Wrong, child.” He handed the bar of wood to her. “Do the same to me.”

She looked at him, uncertain, then took a step forward, stabbing toward his chest, but unable to keep herself from holding back a little. Shaso put up a hand.

“No. Strike hard. I promise you will not hurt me.”

She took a breath and then lunged. His hand flew out so quickly she almost could not see it move, knocking her hand aside even as Shaso himself stepped toward her, then put his leg behind her and pushed with his other hand against her neck. Just before she fell backward over his leg he caught at the sleeve of her shirt and kept her upright. He gently took the wooden rod out of her hand.

“Now you try what I have done.”

It took her a dozen tries before she could get the trick of moving forward at the same time as she deflected his attack—it was different than swordfighting, far more intimate, the angles and speed affected by the small size of the weapon and the fact that she had no weapon of her own. When the old man was satisfied, he showed her several other blocks and leg-locks, and a few twisting moves meant not simply to deflect or stop an opponent’s thrust but to loose the weapon from his hand.

The sun, climbing toward noon, finally made an appearance through the clouds. Briony was sweating now, and she had fallen down three or four times on the hard stones of the courtyard, bruising her knee and hip. By contrast, Shaso looked as calm and unruffled as when the lesson had first started.

“Take some moments to catch your breath,” he said. “You are doing well.”

“Why are you teaching me this?” she said. “Why now?”

“Because you are not royalty any longer,” he said. “At least, you will have none of royalty’s privileges. No men to guard you, no castle walls to keep your enemies away. Are you ready to begin again?”

She rubbed her aching hip, wondered if it was wrong to ask Zoria to grant Shaso a painful cramp—wondered if Zoria could even hear her, in this house of Tuan’s Great Mother. “I’m ready,” was all she said.

They stopped once for water and so that Briony could eat some dried fruit and bread that a wide-eyed servant brought out into the courtyard. Later, several of the house’s women gathered under the covered walkway to watch, giggling inside their hooded robes, fascinated by the spectacle. Shaso showed her more unarmed blocks, grapple holds, kicks, and other methods of defending herself or even disarming an attacker, ways to break the arm of a man half again her size, or kick him in such a way that he would fight no more that day. When the old man was satisfied with her progress he brought out a second wooden dowel and gave it to her, then began to work with her on the skills of knife against knife.

“Do not let your enemy get his blade between you and him once you have closed,” Shaso said. “Then even a backhand thrust can be fatal. Always turn it away, force the knife-hand out. There—see! If your enemy brings it too close, you can slash the tendons on the back of his hand or his wrist. But do not let him take your blade with his other hand.”

By the time the sun had begun to slide behind the courtyard roof, and the women of the
hadar
had found even their deep curiosity satisfied and had gone back inside, Shaso let her stop and rest again. Her legs and arms were quivering with weariness and would not stop.

“We are finished for today,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “But we will do this again tomorrow and the days after, until I can sleep at night.” He put the dowels back in the oilskin bundle. Something else inside it clinked, but he closed the wrapping and she did not see what it was. “This is not the world you knew, Briony Eddon. This is not a world that anyone knows, and what it will become is yet to be seen. Your part may be great or small, but I am sworn to your family and I want you alive to play that part.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant, but as she looked at the old man and saw that for all his seeming invincibility his hands were trembling as much as hers and his breathing was short and rapid, she was filled with misery and a kind of love. “I am sorry we had you imprisoned, Shaso. I am ashamed.”

He gave her a strange look, not angry, but distant. “You did what you had to. As do we all, from the greatest to the smallest. Even the autarch in his palace is only a clay doll in the hands of the Great Mother.” He tucked his bundle under his arm. “Go now. You did well—for a woman, very well.”

The moment of affection disappeared in a burst of irritation. “You keep saying that. Why shouldn’t a woman fight as well as a man?”

“Some women can fight as well as some men, child,” he said with a sour smile. “But men are bigger, Briony, and stronger. Do you know what a lion is? It is a great cat that lives in the deserts near my country.”

“I’ve seen one.”

“Then you know its size and strength. The female lion is a great hunter, fierce and dangerous, a mighty killer. She brings down the gazelle and she slaughters the barking jackals that try to feed on her kill. But she gives way always before the male.”

“But I don’t want to be a male lion,” Briony said. “I’d be happy just to chase away the jackals.”

Shaso’s smile lightened, became something almost peaceful. “That, anyway, I can try to give you. Go now, and I will see you in the morning.”

“Won’t I see you at supper?”

“In this house, the men and women do not eat together in the evening. It is the way of Tuan.” He turned and walked, with just the hint of a limp, across the courtyard.

Dan-Mozan’s nephew was waiting for her in the hallway. She groaned quietly as he stepped away from the wall where he had been leaning, eyes averted as though he had not yet noticed her, as though he had not been waiting here on purpose. All she wanted was to get into a hot bath, if such a thing could be found, and steam the aches from her muscles and the dirt from her scratched knees and feet.

“You are wearing my clothes,” Talibo said.

“Yes, and thank you. Your uncle loaned them to me.”

“Why?”

“Because Lord Shaso wished me to practice knife-fighting.” She frowned at the expression of arrogant disbelief on his face, had to hold her tongue. How dare he look at her that way—Briony Eddon, a princess of all the March Kingdoms? He was no older than she was. It was true that he was not a bad-looking boy, she thought as she looked at his liquid brown eyes, the wispy mustache on his upper lip, but from the way his every feeling showed on his face he was still most definitely a boy. Seeing this one, she could imagine how Ludis’ envoy Dawet dan-Faar must have looked in his youth, imagine the same look of youthful pride. Warrantless pride, she thought, annoyed: what had this brown-skinned boy ever done, living in a house, surrounded by women who deferred to him just because he was not a girl? “I have to go now,” she said. “Thank you again for the use of these clothes.”

She brushed past him, aware that the young man had more to say but unwilling to stand around while he worked up the nerve to say it. She thought she could feel his eyes on her as she walked wearily back to the women’s quarters.

A
T TIMES LIKE THIS, when Pinimmon Vash had to look directly into his master’s pale, awful eyes, it was hard to remember that Autarch Sulepis had to be at least partly human.

“All will be done, Golden One,” Vash assured him, praying silently to be dismissed and released. Sometimes just being near his young ruler made him feel queasy. “All will be done just as you say.”

“Swiftly, old man. She has tried to escape me.” The autarch’s gaze slid upward until he seemed to be staring intently at something invisible to anyone else. “Besides, the gods…the gods are restless to be born.”

Confused by this strange remark, Vash hesitated. Was it something that needed to be understood and answered, or was he at last free to scurry away on his errand? He might be the paramount minister of mighty Xis, the old courtier reflected with some bitterness, and thus in theory more powerful than most kings, but he had no more real authority than a child. Still, being a minister who must jump to serve the autarch’s every whim was much better than being a
former
minister: the vulture shrines atop the Orchard Palace’s roofs were piled high with the bones of former ministers. “Yes, the gods, of course,” Vash said at last, with no idea of what he was agreeing to. “The gods must be born, it goes without…”

“Then let it be done
now
. Or heaven itself will weep.” Despite his harsh words, Sulepis began to laugh in a most inappropriate way.

Even as Vash hurried so swiftly from the bath chamber that he almost tripped over his own exquisite silk robes, he found himself hoping that one of the eunuchs shaving the autarch’s long, oiled limbs had accidentally tickled him. It would be disturbing to think the man with life-and-death power over oneself and virtually every other human being on the continent had just giggled like a madman for no reason.

Partly human,
Vash reminded himself.
He must be at least partly human.
Even if the autarch’s father Parnad had also been a living god, the autarch’s mother must surely have been a mortal woman, since she had come to the Seclusion as the gift of a foreign king. But whatever was mixed in with the heritage of godlike (although now fairly inarguably dead) Parnad, few mortal traits had made their way down to the son. The young autarch was as bright-eyed, remorseless, and inscrutable as his family’s heraldic falcon. Sulepis was also full of inexplicable, seemingly mad ideas, as proved by this latest strange whim—the errand on which Vash now bustled toward the guard barracks.

As he left the guarded fastness of the Mandrake Court and hurried through the cavernous ministerial audience chamber at the heart of the Pomegranate Court, lesser folk scattered from his path like pigeons, as frightened of his anger as he was terrified of the autarch’s. Pinimmon Vash reminded himself he should conduct a full sacrifice to Nushash and the other gods soon. After all, he was a very fortunate man—not just to have risen so high in the world, but also to have survived so many years of the father’s autarchy and this first year of the son’s: at least nine of Parnad’s other high ministers had been put to death just in the short months of Sulepis’ reign. In fact, should Vash need an example of how lucky he was compared to some, he only had to think about the man he was going to see, Hijam Marukh, the new captain of the Leopard guards—or more to the point, think about Marukh’s predecessor, the peasant-soldier Jeddin.

Even Pinimmon Vash, no stranger to torture and execution, had been disturbed by the agonies visited upon the former Leopard captain. The autarch had ordered the entertainment conducted in the famous Lepthian library, so he could read while keeping an eye on the proceedings. Vash had watched with well-hidden terror as the living god danced his gold finger-stalls in the air in rhythm with Jeddin’s shrieks, as though enjoying a charming performance. Many nights Vash still saw the terrible sights in his dreams, and the memory of the captain’s agonized screaming haunted his waking mind as well. Near the end of the prisoner’s suffering, Sulepis had even called for real musicians to play a careful, improvised accompaniment to his horrendous cries. At points, Sulepis had even sung along.

Vash had seen almost everything in his more than twenty years of service, but he had never seen anything like the young autarch.

But how could an ordinary man judge whether or not a god was mad?

“This makes no sense,” said Hijam Marukh.

“You are foolish to say so,” Vash hissed at him.

The officer known as Stoneheart allowed only a lifted eyebrow to animate his otherwise inexpressive face, but Vash could see that Marukh had realized his error—the kind that in Xis could swiftly prove fatal. Recently promoted to
kiliarch,
or captain, the Leopards’ squat, muscular new master had survived countless major battles and deadly skirmishes, but he was not quite so used to the dangers of the Xixian court, where it was assumed that every public word and most private ones would be overheard by someone, and that one of those listeners likely either wanted or needed you dead. Marukh might have been cut, stabbed, and scorched so many times that his dark skin was covered in white stripes like a camp mongrel’s, might have earned his famous nickname by passing unmoved through the worst carnage of war, but this was not the battlefield. In the Orchard Palace no man’s death came at in him from the front or in plain sight.

“Of course,” Hijam Stoneheart said now, slowly and clearly for the benefit of listening ears, “the Golden One must have his contest if he wills it so. But I am just a soldier and I don’t understand such things. Explain to me, Vash. What good is there in having my men fight with each other? Already several are badly wounded and will need weeks of healing.”

Vash took a breath. Nobody was obviously eavesdropping, but that meant nothing. “First of all, the Golden One is much wiser than we are, so perhaps we are not clever enough to understand his reasons—all we can know is that they must be good. Second, I must point out to you that it isn’t your men, the Leopards, who are fighting for the honor of the autarch’s special mission, Marukh. It is the White Hounds, and although they are valuable fighters they are only barbarians.”

Vash had no more idea than the captain of why Sulepis had demanded a contest of strength among his famous troop of White Hounds, foreign mercenaries whose fathers and grandfathers had come to Xand from the northern continent, but as Vash knew better than almost anyone, sometimes gods-on-earth just did things like that. When the autarch had woken from a prophetic dream one morning in the first weeks of his rule and ordered the destruction of all the wild cranes in the land of Xis, it had been Paramount Minister Vash who had called the lower ministers to the Pomegranate Court to make the autarch’s wishes known, and hundreds of thousands of the birds had been killed. When another day the autarch declared that every axhead shark in the city’s saltwater canals should be caught and dispatched, the streets of the capital stank with rotting shark flesh for months afterward.

Vash forced his attention back to the combat. The abruptness of the autarch’s demand had forced them to improvise this arena here in an unused audience chamber in the Tamarind Court, since the autarch’s miners and cannoneers were all over the parade field and could not move their equipment on such sudden notice, even at threat of their lives—some of the artillery pieces weighed tons. Two sweaty men were struggling now in the makeshift ring. One was big by any ordinary standard and muscled like a bullock, but his yellow-bearded opponent was a true giant of a man, a head taller, with shoulders wide as the bed of an oxcart. This fair-haired monster clearly had the upper hand and even seemed to be toying with his adversary.

“Why is it taking so long?” Vash complained. “You said Yaridoras was by far the strongest of the White Hounds. Why does he not defeat his opponent? The autarch is waiting.”

“Yaridoras will win.” Hijam Stoneheart laughed sharply. “Trust me, he is a fearsome brute. Ah, look.” The yellow-bearded one had just raised the other man over his head. The huge man held his opponent there just long enough for everyone to appreciate the glory of the moment, then flung him down onto the stony floor. The loser lay, senseless and bloody, as Yaridoras raised his arms above his head in triumph. The other White Hounds hooted in appreciation.

“Is that it?” Vash ached from standing and wanted only to lower himself into a hot bath, to be tended by his young boy and girl servants. He wished he had not been too proud to accept the
kiliarch
’s offer of a chair. “Is it over? Can we finish with this?”

“There is one more challenger,” said Marukh, “a fellow named Daikonas Vo. I am told he is the best swordsman of the White Hounds.”

“But the autarch ordererd them to prove themselves in bare-handed combat!” Vash shook his head in irritation, surveying the dozens of assembled Perikalese soldiers, perhaps four or five dozen in all. None of them looked big enough to give Yaridoras a contest. “Which one is he?”

For answer, Marukh stood and shouted, “Now the last fighter—step forth, Vo.”

The man who rose was so unremarkable that, discounting his Perikalese heritage—the telltale fair hair and skin that marked him as a foreigner—any man of Xis might have passed him on the street without a second look. He was wiry but slightly built; his head barely reached Yaridoras’ brawny chest.

“
That
one?” Vash snorted. “The big yellow-hair will snap his back like a twig.’

“Likely.” Marukh turned and bellowed, “You two may bring no weapons into the sacred space. So has our master Sulepis, the god-on-earth, the Great Tent, the Golden One, declared. You will fight until one of you can get up no longer. Are you ready?”

“Yes—and thirsty!” bellowed Yaridoras, making his fellow mercenaries laugh. “Let’s get this over with so I can have my beer.” The thin soldier, Daikonas Vo, only nodded.

“Very well,” said the captain. “Begin.”

At first, the smaller man put up a surprisingly good defense, moving with serpentine fluidity to stay out of Yaridoras’ powerful grasp, once even hooking his foot behind the big man’s heel and throwing him backward to the tile floor, which earned a percussive shout of surprised laughter from the other White Hounds, but the giant was up quickly, smiling in a way that suggested he himself was not very amused. After that Yaridoras was more careful, angling in to cut off his opponent’s retreat, and Vo began to find it increasingly difficult to stay out of his hands. Vo did not give in easily, and several times he landed swift blows whose power was clearly greater than his size would have suggested, one of them opening a cut above Yaridoras’ eye so that blood ran down one side of his face and into his beard. However inevitable the outcome seemed, the bigger man was clearly not enjoying the delay, and in the course of trying to get a finishing hold on his opponent left several long, bleeding weals across the small man’s face and arms. The shouts and rowdy suggestions that had filled the room at the beginning of the bout began to die down, replaced by a murmuring of unease as the match slowly took on the look of something more desperate.

The big man lunged. Vo ducked under the groping arms and put a knee into his opponent’s belly, so that Yaridoras’ surprised gasp sent red froth flying, but the big man’s knob-knuckled hand lashed out and caught Vo retreating, smashing him to the floor with an impact like a slaughterer’s hammer. Yaridoras threw himself on top of his opponent before Vo had recovered his wits and for a moment it seemed as though the smaller soldier had been swallowed whole.

It’s over now,
thought Vash.
But he fought a surprisingly good fight.
The paramount minister was more than a little surprised: he had always thought of the Perikalese foreigners as benefiting mostly from their size and barbaric savagery. It was strange, even disturbing, to see one who could think and plan.

For a moment as they grappled on the floor, Yaridoras caught the smaller man’s head between his legs. He began to squeeze, and Daikonas Vo’s face darkened to a bruised red before he managed to elbow his opponent in the crotch and wriggle free. He was injured and tired, though, and he did not get far before Yaridoras caught him again, this time with a massive arm around his throat. The giant rolled his body over on top of his opponent, then began trying to sweep away the bracing arms and legs which were all that kept Vo from being pressed belly-first onto the floor. The big man grinned ferociously through the sweat and blood, while Vo showed his own teeth in a grimace as he struggled to get air.

“He’ll kill him,” Vash said, fascinated.

“No, he’ll just choke him until he gives over,” said Marukh. “Yaridoras won’t kill anyone needlessly, especially another White Hound. He is a veteran of such matches.”

Daikonas Vo’s purpling face was sinking closer and closer to the floor, his elbows bowing outward as the bigger man’s weight overcame him. Then, to Pinimmon Vash’s astonishment, Vo deliberately took one hand off the tiles and, just before he was driven to the ground, brought his elbow down so hard against the floor that a noise loud as a musket shot echoed through the room. A moment later the two of them collapsed in a writhing, grunting heap, and for a moment it was hard to make sense of the tangle of limbs. Then the two bodies lay still.

Face and upper body shiny with blood, Daikonas Vo at last pulled himself out from under Yaridoras, rolling the giant aside so that the long shard of stone floor tile sticking in the yellow-bearded man’s eye rose into view like a sacred object being lifted above a parade of believers. The audience of White Hounds gasped and cursed in shock, then a roar of anger rose from them and several of them moved toward the exhausted, bloody Vo with murderous intent.

“Stop!”
cried Pinimmon Vash. When they realized it was the autarch’s chief minister who had commanded them, the White Hounds halted and fell into surly, murmuring attention. “Do not harm that man.”

“But he killed Yaridoras!” growled Marukh. “The autarch’s law was that no weapons could be used!”