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…