Sword Sworn-Sword Dancer 6 (9 page)

our ground, aware of the mental circle despite the lack of a physical one, and fought.

It was, as always, noisy. Steel slammed into steel, scraped, tore away, screamed, shrieked, chimed.

Breath ran harshly through rigid throats and issued hissing from our mouths. Grunts and gasps of effort

overrode the murmuring of the spectators, the low verbal thrum of excitement.

I countered yet another blow, threw the blade back at him with main strength. I felt a twinge in my

right hand, and another in my left wrist. The hilt shifted slightly in my hands.

All of the things Del and I had discussed had indeed become factors: The loss of a finger on each

hand did affect my grip, and that, in turn, affected wrists, forearms, elbows, clear up into the shoulders

and back. I had worked ceaselessly since leaving Skandi to compensate for the loss of those fingers by

retraining my body, but only a real fight would prove if I'd succeeded. Now that I was in one, I realized

my body wanted to revert to postures, grips, and responses I'd learned more than twenty years before.

The new mind had not yet taught the old body to surrender.

I could not afford a lengthy battle, because I could not win it. I needed to make it short.

I raised the blade high overhead, gripped in my right hand, wrist cocked so the point tipped down

toward my left shoulder.

Khashi saw the opening I gave him, the opportunity to win. He did not believe it. But he lunged,

unable to pass up the target I'd made of my torso. The audience drew in a single startled breath.

I brought the sword down diagonally in a hard, slashing cross-body blow, rolling the edge with a

twist of my wrist even as I adjusted my elbow. The inelegant but powerful maneuver swept Khashi's

blade down and aside. Another flick of the wrist, the punch through flesh and muscle, and I slid steel into

his belly. A quick scooping twist carved the intestines out of abdominal cavity, and then I pulled the

blade free of flesh and viscera.

Khashi dropped his sword. His hands went to his belly. His mouth hung open. Then his knees folded

out from under him. He knelt there in the street clutching ropy guts, weaving in shock as his gaping mouth

emitted a keening wail of shock and terror.

I did him the honor of kicking his blade away, though he had no strength to pick it up, and turned my

back on him. I intended to go directly to the stud. But three paces away stood the stupid kid from Haziz.

His sword was unsheathed, gripped in one hand.

Blood ran from mine. I watched his startled eyes as they followed the motion along the steel, red,

wet runnels sliding from hilt to tip, dripping onto hardpacked dirt.

He looked at me then. Saw me, saw something in my face, my eyes. His own face was pale. But he

swallowed hard and managed to speak. "There was no honor in that."

I'd expected a second challenge, not accusation. After a moment I found my own voice. "This wasn't

about honor."

His brown eyes were stunned in a tanned face formed of planes and angles gone suddenly sharp as

blades. "But you need not kill a man to win. Not in the circle."

"This isn't about the circle," I said. "Not about rites, rituals, honor codes, or oaths sworn to such. It's

just about dying."

"But—you're a sword-dancer."

I shook my head. "Not anymore. Now I'm only a target."

"You're the Sandtiger!"

"That, yes," I agreed. "But I swore
elaii-ali-ma
."

Color was creeping back into his face. The honey-brown eyes were steady, if no less shocked. "I

don't know what that is."

A jerk of my head indicated Khashi's sprawled body, limp as soiled laundry. "Ask him."

I walked past him then, because I knew he wouldn't challenge me. Not now. Likely not ever again.

But others would.

Before mounting I wiped my blade clean of blood on my burnous, sheathed it, and took the rein

back from Del. Then swung up into the saddle. "Let's go."

The mask of her face remained, giving away nothing to any who looked. But her eyes were all

compassion.

I heard the chanting of my name as we headed out of Julah.

Not far out of the city, after a brief but silent ride, I abruptly turned off the road. I rode to the top of

a low rise crowned with cactus and twisted trees, dismounted, let the reins go, and managed to make it

several paces down the other side, sliding in shale and slate, before I bent and gave up everything in my

belly in one giant heaving spasm.

I remained bent over, coughing and spitting when the residual retching stopped, and heard the chink

of hoof on stone. It might be the stud. But in case it was Del, I thrust out a splayed hand that told her to

stay away.

I didn't need an audience. I'd had one already, in Julah.

Finally I straightened, scraping at my mouth with the sleeve of my burnous. When I turned to hike

back up to the stud, I found Del holding his reins. Silent no longer.

"Are you cut?" she asked.

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Have you looked?"

Sighing, I inspected my arms, then ran my hands down the front of burnous and harness, checking

for complaints of the flesh, though I was fairly certain Khashi had not broken my guard. I was spattered

with blood, but none of it appeared to be mine. And nothing hurt beyond the edges of my palms where

the fingers were missing.

"I'm fine." I climbed to the stud, took the reins from her, then pulled one of the botas free and filled

my mouth with water. I rinsed, spat, scrubbed again at my mouth, then released a noisy breath from the

environs of my toes. "Butchery," I muttered hoarsely, throat burned by bile.

"It was necessary."

"I've killed men, beheaded men, cut men into collops before. Borjuni. Bandits. Thieves. It never

bothered me; it was survival, no more. But this—" I shook my head.

"It was necessary," she repeated. "How better to warn other sword-dancers you will not be easy

prey?"

That was precisely why I had done it, knowing the tale would be told. Embellished into legend. But

the aftermath was far more difficult to deal with than I had anticipated.

"Tiger," Del said quietly, "you spent many years learning all the rituals of the sword-dance. The

requirements of the circle. It was your escape, your freedom, but also a way of life woven of rules, rites,

codes. The formal sword-dance is not about killing but about the honor of the dance and victory. What

you did today was the antithesis of everything you learned, all that you embraced, when you swore the

oaths of a sword-dancer before your shodo at Alimat."

"I've been in death-dances before." They were rare, as most sword-dances were a relatively

peaceful way of settling disputes for our employers, but they did occur.

"Still formalized," she observed. "It's an elegant way to die. An honorable way to die."

Killing Khashi had been neither. But necessary, yes.

"On another day, you and he would have danced a proper dance. One of you would have won. And

then likely afterwards you'd have gone to a cantina together and gotten gloriously drunk. It is different,

Tiger, what was done today."

"You can't know, bascha—"

"I can. I do. I killed Bron."

It took me a moment. Then I remembered. Del had killed a friend, a training partner, who otherwise

would have kept her from returning to the Northern island known as Staal-Ysta, where her daughter

lived.

But still.

I squirted more water into my mouth, spat again, then drank. Stared hard across the landscape,

remembering the stink of severed bowels, the expression on his face as his life ran out, the weight of the

blade as I opened his abdomen.

Butchery.

"Would you feel better if you had died?"

For the first time since the fight I looked directly at her. Felt the tug of a wry smile at my mouth. Trust

Delilah to put it in perspective.

"You don't have to like it," she said. "If you did, if you began to, I would not share your bed. But

this, too, is survival, and in its rawest, most primitive form. There
will
be others. Kill them quickly, Tiger,

and ruthlessly. Show them no mercy. Because they will surely show none to you."

What she didn't say, what she didn't need to say, was that some of those others would be better than

Khashi.

SIX

DEL
was initially resistent to going after my
jivatma.
She truly saw no sense in it, since very likely

the sword was buried under tons of rock, and we had new blades. I still hadn't told her about the dreams

of the woman commanding me to take up the sword, because I couldn't find words that didn't make me

sound like a sandsick fool. Instead, I relied on Del's own respect for the Northern blades and on the loss

of Boreal. As I had by declaring
elaii-ali-ma,
she had made the only choice possible in breaking the

sword, but that didn't mean she was immune to regret. Eventually she gave in.

There was not a road where we wanted to go, because no one else, apparently, had ever wanted to

go there. Del and I made our own way, recalling the direction from our visit to Shaka Obre's domain

nearly a year before. We left behind the flat but relatively lush desert of Julah and traded it for foothills,

the precursors of the mountain where we had encountered strong magic, where Chosa Dei, living in my

sword, had vacated it first to fill—and kill—Sabra, then to encounter his brother. They hadn't been living

beings, Chosa Dei and Shaka Obre, merely power incarnate, but that was enough. What was left of

them battled fiercely within the hollowed rock formation that shaped, inside a huge chimney of stone, a

circle. And Del and Chosa Dei, using my sword, my body, had danced.

Here there was rock in place of soil, intermixed with hardpan and seasonings of sand. Drifts of stone

were like the bones of the earth peeping through the flesh, but there were tumbled piles of it as well as

that beneath the dirt. Brownish, porous smokerock, the variegations of slate, sharply faceted shale, the

milky glow of quartz, the glitter of mica coupled with glinting splashes of false gold. The Punja, with its

crystalline sands, was yet miles away. This was a land of rock swelling like boils into looming stone

formations crowning ragged foothills, merging slowly into mountains. Not the high, huge ranges of Del's

North, shaped of wind and snow and ice, but the whimsy of Southron nature in sudden bubbles of burst

rock, scattered remnants of wholeness and order, abrupt, towering upthrustings of striated stone shoved

loose from the desert floor.

Movement against the uneven horizon of foothills and rock formations caught my eye. I looked, saw,

and reined in sharply. Del, not watching me as she and her gelding picked their way through, nearly

allowed her gelding to walk into the back of the stud. There was a moment of tension in the body

beneath me, but he, too, knew what lay before us was far more threatening than what was behind.

"What—" Del began; but then she, like me, held her silence, and waited.

I had half expected it. We were in the land of the Vashni. No one knew where the borders were, or

even if there
were
borders, but there was always the awareness of risk when one traveled here.

Four warriors. Vashni are not large, nor are their horses. But size wasn't what mattered. It was the

willingness to kill, and the way in which they did it.

Four warriors, kilted in leather, wearing wreaths of fingerbone pectorals against oiled chests. Black

hair was also oiled, worn in single, fur-wrapped plaits. Bone-handled knives and swords decorated their

persons.

Del's voice was a breath of sound. "Could these be the same four who met us when we had Sabra?"

I answered as quietly. "I don't know. Maybe. No one sees the Vashni often enough to recognize

individuals." At least, no one
lived
long enough to recognize individuals.

The warriors eased their small, dark horses into motion. They rode down from the rocky hilltop and

approached, marking our faces, harnesses, swords. I felt the first tickle of sweat springing up on my skin.

Is it possible to fight a Vashni? Of course. I imagine it has happened. But no one, no one has ever

survived the battle. They are killed, then boiled. When the bones are free of flesh, the Vashni make

jewelry and weapons of it. The flesh is fed to dogs.

The only reason I know this is the Vashni don't kill children. It is their 'mercy' to take children into

their villages, to feed them, have them watch what becomes of their parents, then deliver them to a road

where they will be found by others.

If they are found. Some of them have been.

Del and I had been in a Vashni village once, when searching for her brother. They had treated us

with honor; Jamail was considered a holy man, and she was his sister. Jamail, castrated, mute, had not

wanted to leave the people who gave him a twisted sort of kindness after years of slavery elsewhere.

Later—known by then as the Oracle—he had been killed, but it hadn't been Vashni doing. They revered

his memory.

"Del," I said quietly, "come up beside me so they can see you better."

She didn't question it; possibly she also realized safety might lie in her resemblence to the Oracle, her

brother. She moved the gelding out from behind the stud, guided him next to me, and reined in. Again,