Guardians Of The Keep

CHAPTER 39

On the next morning, the sun rose gray and dim. I was going to have to tell the Lords. I wasn’t at all confident that eyesight would heal itself like bruises or twisted knees, and I certainly could not do any training the way I was. Notole, I called, I need to tell-

Good morning, young Lord. Before I could open my thoughts to them, Notole filled my head. Are you tired this morning? We went farther than I had planned in these past days-you are such a delightful student-so eager-and it can be quite wearing when one is starting to develop one’s talent as you are. You mustn’t be concerned about it.

“I was wondering-”

We’ve told your teachers that you need to rest today. Parven took up the conversation. Though his words were pleasant enough, anger rumbled in my belly as he spoke. I will put you to sleep, my young Lord, until such time as you can take up your proper business. My foolish sister has rushed things a bit.

They didn’t let me say anything. Parven laid an enchantment on me, while the three of them talked about other exercises they planned for the next few days. As I drowsed off, it occurred to me that none of them had mentioned anything about my eyes. I had a sense that they knew what was happening, but didn’t want me to know. Why else would they be in such a hurry to send me to sleep? As there were no mirrors anywhere in the Gray House, they wouldn’t think I’d seen it for myself, and no servant would dare speak of it.

At least a day had passed by the time I woke again. I was famished. Once I had eaten, I steeled myself to look in the mirror. Only a trace of gray remained in the brown. I decided that as long as my eyes would turn back right, they weren’t really damaged. I could still go to Notole and learn what she could teach. I needed to know about power and sorcery, so I could be strong enough to do whatever I wanted.

I worked hard at my sword training that day, enjoying moving and fighting after so many days of inactivity. Notole’s lessons were tiring, but as far as I knew my body didn’t move the whole time. Since I had returned from the desert and gotten so preoccupied with sorcery, my fighting skills had shown little improvement. If only I could use a little of my power… I tried making the air thick and heavy around my swordmaster’s blade.

You will not! Parven burst into my head. For now, true power and physical training are two separate aspects of your life, young Lord. You must be able to fight to your maximum capability with every weapon you possess.

“All right, all right.” And so I let the air go back to normal, and I slogged on, practicing one move after another. I trained with my swordmaster all day. Notole said she didn’t want me that night. I wasn’t surprised. The pattern said it would be six or seven days until we ventured out again. The thought of sorcery left me hollow inside, hungry, my skin buzzing like it did when you didn’t get enough sleep. To call down lightning…

That evening after my riding lesson, I took Firebreather for a gallop to help take my mind off of my craving for sorcery. It was near midnight when we got back to the stable, though this time we made the entire journey together. When I led Firebreather into his stall, I wasn’t too surprised to hear a voice from the corner. “Did he behave?”

“He expects oats.”

“Thought he would. I’ve brought some already.”

We rubbed Firebreather down and made sure he had an extra scoop of oats.

The Leiran boy kicked the straw into a pile in the corner of the stall and flopped onto it. “You’ve not been riding much lately.”

“I’ve had other things to do. Have you stayed out of trouble?”

“It came out all to the good. They think I’m a half-wit. Was it you who told ‘em?”

“I might have mentioned it.”

“You’re not the first to notice.” He grinned.

I patted Firebreather’s neck and gathered up my cloak and my pack to go. The Leiran boy glanced at my pack, and then looked away quickly.

“I’ve a packet of field rations in there,” I said. “You wouldn’t want it, would you?”

“If you were ever to run this place, I’d be happy to give you a word or two on improving the cooking.” I tossed him the greasy bag, and he laid back on the straw, groaning in pleasure as he chewed on a leathery strip of dried meat. “Blazes! You can promise Firebreather oats, but if you want to get me anywhere, promise me jack.”

“I don’t have any more tonight.” I rummaged through my bag and found a slightly battered darupe. “You can have this. That’s all I’ve got.”

“I’m not choosy.” He dispatched the fruit in half a heartbeat and tossed the pit over the gate of the stall.

I squatted down beside the gate. “You’re not good at riddles, are you?”

He blinked in surprise. “What makes you ask that?”

“Just seeing the fruit pit… It sounds strange, I know, but it makes me think of a riddle.”

“Never thought I was good at ‘em. Never had much call to. But once I helped somebody figure one out. We did pretty good.”

As the stable lamp faded and sputtered, leaving us sitting in the dark, I told him about the things I’d found in my house. “… So what do you think? Is it the Lords’ puzzle or not?”

The voice coming from across the dark stall was more serious than I expected. “I’d say somebody is trying to tell you something. Somebody that maybe can’t come out and say it for fear you wouldn’t allow it to be said. Not the Lords, though.”

“A slave, you mean?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it’s not important the who, but only the what.”

“I can’t figure it out. I’ve tried all kinds of solutions using the names of the things, the sizes, the substances; I’ve tried to match their names with other words, but they don’t seem to fit together at all.”

“Maybe they’re just to look at. No secret at all.”

“That sounds like a proper half-wit.”

“Bring me another bag of jack, and I’ll take another guess.”

“Don’t count on it.” I stood up, brushed the straw off my legs, and gave Firebreather another pat. “I’d best go or I’ll fall asleep over my sword in the morning.”

“Did you ever get a swordmaster that could teach you proper?”

“No. I’ve not learned anything new in a month. My swordmaster is a fine fighter, and he makes me work hard. I suppose I’m just not the best pupil.”

“But you want the best sword fighter-one who can teach you and show you, not just make you sweat. Maybe the best one isn’t one of them-the warriors.”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard some of ‘em talking the other day about a new slave, one that fights with the warriors, you know, to practice.”

“A sparring partner? A practice slave?”

“That’s it. They said he’s the best they’ve ever seen. Stayed alive longer than any slave’s ever done before. They’re making him teach them what he knows and not just fight any more. Maybe he’s the one you need.”

“Maybe he is.”

On the next day I asked my swordmaster, Drak, about the practice slave who had lasted longer than any ever had.

“I’ve heard of him. He’s bound to the Wargreve Damon, but still does training matches with other warriors. He’s not likely to last much longer, though. He fights Vruskot this afternoon, and Vruskot hasn’t lost a match in two hundred years. He’s had the Lords burn the words yield and surrender from his mind so he can’t speak them even if he wanted to.”

“I want to watch the match.”

“It could be instructional. Vruskot is well known for his attacks. I’ll demonstrate his basic techniques so you’ll know what to look for. The match will likely be over so fast you’ll miss it.”

We worked until just after midday and then went down to one of the training yards just beyond the warriors’ court. A good-sized crowd of warriors, Drudges, and slaves had gathered on the open side of the yard. Others were jammed around the walls. I wasn’t used to crowds, and it made me uneasy, especially when they parted to let me stand at the front.

It wasn’t difficult to decide which was Vruskot. I had learned early on that the Zhid didn’t age. They remained the same age at which they had been transformed, and it took a considerable wound to kill one. But there was something recognizable about the oldest Zhid. They were like old trees with rough bark that you just knew had the hardest, thickest wood and had stood up through every kind of storm. Though he looked no more than thirty or forty, Vruskot was very old. He wasn’t tall, but he had exceptionally long arms, knotted with muscles. His thighs were like tree trunks, and like all of the Zhid, his eyes were pale and empty.

Lots of slaves were standing along the walls, most of them personal attendants of high-ranking warriors. I couldn’t pick out the one who was to fight. He must be huge and fierce to have lasted so long. And he would be controlled, not allowed to wander about. But the only slave who wasn’t someone’s servant was sitting by the wall with his eyes closed and his head bowed as if he were asleep or afraid. A chain ran from his collar to the iron ring embedded in the stone wall above his head.

Sure enough, when a Zhid detached the chain from his collar, he stood up immediately. He was tall, topping Vruskot by a head. His shoulders and arms were big, sun-darkened to the color of old leather and criss-crossed with scars, but he didn’t look half so strong as the Zhid. Although he was lean and hard, built well for fighting, he didn’t have the look of a warrior. He was just another slave, standing there barefoot and quiet as his hands were un-manacled, keeping his eyes cast down as if he were scared to look at a real fighter. They weren’t going to allow him armor, so he stood barefoot on the blistering ground while Vruskot donned a thick leather cap, greaves, and a light mail shirt over his well-used gambeson. I would have bet my eyes the slave could never even scratch Vruskot.

But everything changed when they put the sword in the slave’s hand. He raised his head, and you would have thought his skin had turned to steel. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see a sword strike glance off his bare arms, or his eyes shoot off sparks. The small round shield they gave him seemed hardly necessary.

Vruskot didn’t see it. He looked the slave up and down and curled his lip. Then he touched the tip of his sword to the slave’s collar. “Through here,” he said. “I’ll take you right through it. You’ve forgotten your place, dog meat.”

The slave did not even blink, which did not please Vruskot. “Position, slave!” growled the Zhid.

There was no slow beginning, no circling, feinting, or testing to ferret out weakness or crucial points of style. From the opening, they were in the full fury of battle. They used long-swords, striking so powerfully that you could feel the movement of air. Three times I had watched my father-the man I had believed to be my father, Duke Tomas, the Champion of Leire-take on the finest challengers in the Four Realms. I had thought there could be no one in the world that moved with Papa’s speed and grace… until that day in Zhev’Na. The slave made Vruskot look like an ox.

An hour went by. The noise of the crowd-chattering, the placing of bets, gasps, and jeers-had faded into a silence broken only by the sounds of the battle. The clank and scrape of the swords, the dull thuds when sword struck shield. Harsh, gasping breaths. Vruskot’s mail shirt chinked with his every move, and his boots pounded and scuffed the iron-hard dirt. The barefoot slave moved in silence.

Vruskot drew first blood, a slice to the slave’s forward thigh. The Zhid pressed his advantage until the crowd had to move away from one of the walls. But he was too eager, so intent on his own next strike that he mistook the slave’s acceptance of his blows for weakness. When the slave was almost to the wall, the two men close enough to smell each other’s breath, the slave beat off Vruskot’s next hammering strike with his thrusting shield-a move that made my own left arm hurt even to think of it-while at the exact same time whirling his own blade from high behind his head in a powerful counter. Vruskot had to step out or lose his head, giving the slave room to duck, step past, and pivot, leaving the sun in Vruskot’s eyes. The Zhid wasn’t slow either, despite his thick legs, and had his sword and shield up before the slave’s next blow could take him. The sweat poured from the two in rivers.

Now the slave was pressing Vruskot with a flurry of cutting attacks-high and then low and then high again, moving from one to the other with fluid strength. Vruskot held his own. But then the Zhid caught the heel of his boot in a crack and went down right under the slave’s upraised sword. The crowd inhaled as one. The slave waited, his sword high-aimed directly for Vruskot’s neck. Vruskot just lay there breathing hard with such a murderous expression on his face that I wondered the slave could stand up before it. But the slave slapped the back of his sword hand against his mouth and pointed to the Zhid. Vruskot flared his nostrils and said nothing.

No one had told him! The slave didn’t know that the warrior couldn’t yield…

Instead of finishing the Zhid, the slave stepped back and allowed him to get up. What a fool! Did he think the Zhid would think kindly of him or have some code of honor that would keep him from gutting the slave if he got the chance? Vruskot’s face was scarlet-with more than the heat of the battle. He attacked with a fury. They moved slowly around the yard. The slave pressured the Zhid to his knees, this time with skill instead of chance, but again he signaled that Vruskot should yield, and again stepped back when Vruskot refused.

I wouldn’t have believed that either one of them could lift an arm any more, but so they did, circling and attacking as if they’d just begun. Even so, it would have to end soon. The slave’s thigh wound was deep. His whole leg was covered in blood. It pained him, too, and he was favoring it. Vruskot began to concentrate on that side, getting in extra kicks and blows whenever he could. But the slave kept moving, stepping out, evading, a parry, a short thrust, a small step. And then, in a vertical cut that left the air rumbling, the slave’s blade hacked right through Vruskot’s sword arm, severing it just below the shoulder.

For one instant, the silence was absolute. The slave stepped back and let his sword slip to the sand. Everyone stared at Vruskot’s arm lying on the red earth, its fingers still wrapped around the sword hilt. Then Vruskot bellowed in such pain and anger that the stones of the fortress rattled and the crowd shrank back from him. Dropping his shield and fumbling at his belt with his left hand, the Zhid drew his knife and swiped feebly at the slave. But the slave easily knocked his hand aside and shoved him to the ground. Vruskot screamed as his stump hit the ground and blood gushed onto the sand.

The slave, his breathing harsh and deep, threw down his shield and dropped to his knees beside Vruskot. None of the onlookers moved, even when the slave picked up Vruskot’s knife. I was sure he was going to finish the Zhid, but instead he cut the warrior’s shirt away, wadded up the damp linen, and pressed it against the warrior’s twitching stump, holding Vruskot still with his other hand and his knees. Damn! He was trying to stop the bleeding. His chest still heaving, the slave looked around the crowd for help. For one moment… one glimpse… something seemed familiar about that face, strained and exhausted under the close-cropped hair, but before I could figure it out, the crowd erupted.

A growling warrior bashed the slave in the head with his arm, knocking him to the ground, while three others picked up the screaming Vruskot and carried him away. The slave shook his head and dragged himself up to his hands and knees, but another Zhid triggered his collar and sent him into retching spasms. Then they bound his hands, dragged him to the wall, and chained him to the iron ring. He lay there gasping and heaving in the afternoon sun, flies settling on his bloody arms and legs.

I stood staring like a fool at the deserted training ground. Vruskot’s arm lay in the dirt, forgotten. The crowd had dispersed quickly. Drak, my swordmaster, shook his head and urged me to move on. “Well, an astounding match to be sure. Who could have imagined such a thing? I had no idea Vruskot had slipped so sorely in his skills.”

Of course, Vruskot hadn’t lost the match. The Dar’Nethi had won it. Only a blind fool would claim anything else. “Let’s get away from here,” I said. “I need to work.”

It was Vruskot I took for a swordmaster. Zhid were not easy to kill, but the swift actions of the slave V’Saro had saved his life until a surgeon could attend to him. Of course he was bitter; a warrior without his sword arm considers himself dead no matter what. I wouldn’t have been a Dar’Nethi slave in Vruskot’s service for any amount of power in the world. But he could not have failed to learn something from the slave who’d maimed him, and so perhaps he could teach me something of it, too. And, of course, Vruskot was a master swordsman in his own right-that’s why the Lords kept him alive one-armed, so he could teach or command swordsmen. Once Vruskot’s commanders convinced him that he had no choice, and he understood that it wasn’t a humiliation to instruct the honored guest of the Lords, he got into the job with a vengeance. I had no choice but to progress.

The slave would have been a masterful teacher. But if I asked for him, I would honor him, and therefore he would die. Sooner or later it would happen. And it didn’t seem at all fair to take such a man’s dying out of his own hands.

The days flew by. Notole taught me to take the world’s troubles for my own use. Such things existed-fear, hate, anger, pain-and I could do nothing about them, so I couldn’t see anything wrong with using them to my advantage. Once I came of age and controlled my own power, then perhaps things could be different.

The Lords still said nothing about the effects of what I was doing, only that light might bother my eyes after long nights working with Notole. After each session, I would sleep for most of a day, then go back to Vruskot and training until Notole called me to her again. Just as a test, I commanded my slaves to obtain a looking glass for me. I’d been having my slaves braid my hair into many thin plaits as Isker warriors did, and I said I wanted a glass to see how it looked. They groveled and claimed there were none to be had in Zhev’Na.

But the crude gift from my unknown benefactor told me the important tale. For a while, my eyes indeed turned back to normal every time. But soon they kept a muddy gray tint. And then they stayed black, and the center of them was bottomless darkness that became a little larger each time. It got to where I couldn’t go about in the noonday, but only in the morning or the late-afternoon light. I kept the draperies drawn in my apartments and moved my riding lessons to after dark.

I was afraid of what was happening, but I couldn’t stop. There was still so much to learn. Notole had promised that just before my anointing she would show me yet another source of power, more rich than those I already used. It was the greatest secret of the Lords, she told me, known to no other in the universe. I had to keep going until then.

I had been so caught up in my training that I’d given little thought to the puzzle of the gifts, but late one afternoon, as I sat bored in my dim apartments, waiting for the sun to go down, I decided to look at the things again. Something new had been left in the box-a scrap of paper with hundreds of tiny holes pricked in it. I almost laughed, it was so odd. If the earlier objects had been indecipherable, then this one was totally impossible. I could see no pattern to the marks. I was on the verge of crumpling it up, when a hot blast of wind allowed a stray sunbeam to penetrate the draperies and shine through the jumble of pinholes, casting a reverse shadow on the wall, like a compact universe of stars in a tiny square shadow of a sky.

Stars! That’s what it was! The paper converted the barren sunlight into stars-but not the stars of Ce Uroth that hovered behind the ever-present dust haze. There was the Watcher, the thick band of the Arch, the Bowman aiming his true arrow toward the Swan… the stars of northern Leire, the stars I would see from the towers of Comigor.

I hadn’t thought of home in so long. I tried to remember it. Gray towers, not angular and thin like those that faced me across the courtyard, but stout and thick, stained with six hundred years of smoke and weathering… sturdy walls with five round towers, built to hold the garrison in safety for uncounted days from any threat that might ride across the heath. Inside the main doors were the black and white floor tiles, and the rainbow light that arched down from the tall windows of the entry tower… so beautiful…

“Maybe they’re just to look at,” the Leiran boy had said.

I took out the stone with the clear vein in it and held it up close to my face and my brightest lamp. The light hurt my eyes, but I needed to see these things. The vein led deep into the blue-gray stone, a secret passage allowing light to penetrate the cool darkness and reveal the secrets of the stone that would otherwise lay hidden. Deep in the heart of the stone were delicate patterns of yellow and green and blue, arranged in spirals and sunbursts and flowery splashes, a tiny garden of color.

Each of the gifts was the same in a way. The iron-like wood hid a thousand tiny perfect crystals in its pores; the ugly fruit pit masked a miniature sculpture finer than any woodworker’s creation. The dish of sand had been only a piece of the ordinary desert, but presented in an unexpected way, intriguing. And the mirror… There my speculation came to an abrupt halt. My chest ached. Why a reflection of me?