Sword Breaker-Sword Dancer 4 (13 page)

Not magic. I knew it. Not magic. Something worse. Something more powerful.

Something infinitely more dangerous.

The sword had been partly black. The discoloring had waxed and waned, like the moon, dependent upon Chosa Dei. Dependent upon me, and the strength of will I employed to drive the sorcerer down.

The entire blade was black. The hilt. The hands upon it.

Black-braceleted wrists.

He had been waiting for this.

I shouted. Tried to let go. Tried to cast off the blackened sword, to throw it arcing far into the wind, where the simoom would swallow it. But I could not let go of the weapon that imprisoned Chosa Dei.

Who now imprisoned me.

I felt him, then. A feather-touch. Caress. The merest whisper of breath across my soul.

Blackness spread.

"Del," I croaked. "Del, do it now--"

But Del didn't--or couldn't--hear me.

I thought, If I turn this on myself--wondering if my death would indeed destroy Chosa; remembering belatedly that by giving up my life I also gave up my body. Chosa had already proved himself capable of unmaking and remaking things he found suitable to his needs. A dying body would hardly stop him. Even mine.

The simoom howled on. It stopped up eyes, and ears; took residence in my soul. I felt Chosa's fingertip--or something--touch my right forearm. Then my left. Blackness welled coyly, flirting, then swallowed another portion of my flesh.

The hairs stood up on my flesh. My belly twisted and cramped, threatening to spew everything I'd eaten.

Oh, hoolies, what have I done?

Blackness.

So much blackness.

Eating me inch by inch.

Deep inside, bones ached.

Was he trying to unmake them?

Fear and sand had scoured my mouth dry. I swallowed painfully, wishing for water; for wine. For the strength and courage I needed so desperately.

I gripped the sword more tightly, squeezing leather wrappings until my knuckles complained. Toes curled against leather soles, cracking noisily. Even my good knee ached; I flexed muscle, reset, locked everything down once again.

One last try.

"Mine," I mouthed soundlessly. "This sword, this body, this soul--"

Abruptly my eyes snapped open. Staring sightlessly into the storm, unheeding of sand and grit and wind, I knew. I knew.

There were things Chosa didn't understand. About the spirit. He knew magic and flesh and bone; he knew nothing about the spirit.

Nothing about the obsessive compulsion of a young Southron chula sentenced to life as a beast of burden... and finally being given something no one else knew about.

Something secret. Something he could keep. Something he could touch, and stroke, and talk to, speaking of dreams of someday; of spells to destroy his demons, living and dead.

Something of his own.

I grinned grittily into simoom.

"Mine," I whispered triumphantly, with a powerful, peculiar virulence born of a chula's childhood; of the man-sized boy branded foreign, and strange, and stupid.

Who believed everything he was told.

"Mine," I said again.

This time Chosa heard me.

Pain.

It drove me to my knees.

Ground me into sand.

Fragmented wits and awareness and sense of self, stripping me of everything but fear and comprehension.

Chosa Dei was no legend. The story of his imprisonment at the hands of his brother-sorcerer, Shaka Obre, was truth, not a tale-spinner's unfounded maundering.

Chosa Dei was everything they said he was.

Chosa Dei was more.

In my hands, the sword turned. The blackened tip--no. Not black. The tip was silver.

Like steel. Clean, unblemished steel, tempered in Northern fires, cooled in Northern water, blessed by Northern gods.

Samiel?

Black light corruscated. Chosa Dei lashed out, swallowed another piece of me, climbed higher on my forearms. Halfway to my elbows.

The sword was aimed downward, twisting in my grip. Another sliver of Samiel showed his true colors.

And then I understood.

Chosa Dei was leaving. Chosa was deserting. Chosa was trading a Northern-made jivatma for a Southron-bred sword-dancer.

Freeing Samiel.

If the sword was empty of Chosa...

If.

But emptying Samiel would mean filling me.

With Chosa Dei.

If.

If I took him. If I let him come. If I let him have the body, forsaking the sword, would the sword then be strong enough to defeat him?

But with no one able to wield it.

Hoolies.

Guts cramped. Teeth ground. Eyes bulged and refused to close.

Black up to the elbows.

Muscles contracted. Down through the air, slicing wind and wailing. Black light flashed.

Clean steel glittered. Shoulders locked as I thrust the sword tip into the sand. Then deeper. Driving it down, down. Scouring steel flesh.

Kneeling, I clutched the sword. Hung there, transfixed. Powerless before the sword. The sorcerer. Nothing more than the shell he wanted to fill.

"No," I mouthed.

Vision flickered. Went out. Blindly, I stared wide-eyed into the scouring wind.

"Tiger--" I husked. "Wizard's wooden tiger ..."

The memory was distant. A small wooden sand-tiger, shaped to catch the eye. It had been mine. Only mine. And I had petitioned it, begging it for power. For the means to escape.

Sandtiger, I had called it. Sandtiger I had made it.

In flesh: deliverance.

Children and men, eaten. More killed in the attempt. Then I had tracked it down. I had found its lair. I had leveled the spear and plunged it into the belly.

Screaming from shock and pain as the claws raked cheek. As the poison filled the body.

I had killed the sandtiger. He had nearly killed me.

Chosa was killing me.

The flesh would go on living, but the spirit, the soul, would not.

Vision flickered. Died.

Inside me, something laughed.

The inner eye opened. And Saw.

"Del!" I screamed. "Del--Delilah--Del--Do it! Do it! Don't let--don't let--Del--Do what you have to do--"

The inner eye Saw.

"Del--" I croaked.

Sandaled feet. Wind-whipped burnous. The glint of a Northern sword.

I couldn't see her expression. Maybe it was best. "Do it, Del--do it!"

Wind stripped her face of hair, leaving it stark and bleached and anguished. In her hands, jivatma trembled.

"--have to--" I managed. "You said--you could... you said... like Ajani--"

Del flinched. The wind screamed around us, hiding her face again.

Hoolies, bascha. Do it.

Deep inside, something laughed.

Chosa was amused.

"Like Ajani," I husked. "Quick. Clean. No risk to you--Del--"

Why was she taking so long?

The Northern sword glinted. It cut through the simoom's howling and sang its own song. Of nightsky curtains of color; of the hue of a banshee-storm, screaming through Northern mountains.

Too cold for me.

I was Southron-born.

My storm was the samiel.

From the sand I ripped the sword. Blackness glistened.

"Too late," I mouthed, "--left it too late--"

The wind stripped hair away. I saw her face once more: the architecture of bones framed in precise perfection; the smooth, flawless flesh; the contours of nose, of cheekbones; the symmetry of the jaw.

The warped line of her mouth, parting to open.

Delilah began to sing. Deathsong. Lifesong. The song of a sword-dancer's life. Of a Southron chula's passing from the world of free men he had tried to make his own.

Don't wait, bascha.

A new determination came into Del's expression. She cut off her song in mid-note and raised the deadly jivatma, whose name was Boreal.

Even as I raised mine.

As Chosa made me do it.

"Samiel," she said.

But it was lost in the wail of wind.

Fourteen

--With his brother upon the pinnacle, staring across the vast expanse of the land they have created; marveling that they could, because they are sorcerers, not gods. He frowns.

--or is it possible, he wonders, that gods are merely constructs of magic? A magic so deep and abiding and dangerous no one else has dared try it, before now; to summon it, collect it, wield it, shaping something out of nothing--

--unmaking what had been, to make what now exists.

He smiles.

--I have done this

He pauses. Rephrases.

WE have done this. Shaka and I.

He glances at his brother. Chosa Dei and Shaka Obre, twin-born, inseparable, indistinguishable from one another. Matched in will, in strength, in power. In so very many things, offering two halves of a whole; the balance of dark and light.

Matched in everything save ambition.

"What we have done--" Chosa begins.

Shaka smiles, completing it: "--is truly remarkable. A gift for the people."

Chosa frowns, distracted from triumph. "Gift?"

"Surely you do not expect them to PAY for this," Shaka says, laughing. "They did not ask it, did not request--"

"--except in petitions to gods."

Laughter dying, Shaka shrugs. "Men petition for many things."

"But this time WE answered. We gave them what they wanted."

"And now you want payment?" Shaka shakes his head. "How is it we are so alike, but so different? The power we have wielded is compensation enough." Shaka thrusts out an illustrative hand, encompassing the grasslands below. "Don't you see? We've made the land lush. We've made the land fertile. In place of sand there is grass."

Chosa's expression is grim. "We have answered their worthless petitions. Now they must compensate us."

Shaka sighs deeply. "With what? Coin? Goats? Daughters? Useless gems and domains?"

He puts his hand upon his brother's stiffened shoulder. "Look again, Chosa. Behold what we have wrought. We have remade the world."

Chosa's face spasms. "I'm not so benevolent."

Shaka removes his hand from his brother's shoulder. "No. You've always been impatient.

You've always wanted more."

Chosa stares down across the vast expanse of grass that had once been sand. He speaks a truth no one has ever before considered, but he has long suspected: "We are two different people."

Shaka's eyes widen. "But we want the same thing!"

"No," Chosa says bitterly. "No. You want THAT." And points to the grass.

"Chosa--don't you?"

Chosa shrugs. "I don't know what I want. Just-more. MORE. I am bored... look what we've done, Shaka. As YOU said: Look what we have wrought. What is there left to do?"

Shaka laughs. "We will think of something."

His brother scowls blackly. "We are very young, Shaka. There is so much time, so MUCH

time. ..."

"We will find ways to fill it." Shaka gazes at the grasslands below, nodding satisfaction.

"We have given a dying people the gift of life, Chosa... I think I want to watch how they use it."

Chosa makes a dismissive, contemptuous gesture. "Watch all you like, then. I have better ways to spend my time."

"Oh? How?"

Chosa Dei smiles. "I have acquired a taste for magic."

Shaka's expression alters from indulgence to alert awareness. "We have always had magic, Chosa. What do you mean to do?"

"Collect it," Chosa says. "Find more, and collect it. Because if it was this easy to MAKE

this, it will be more entertaining to destroy it." He sees the shock in Shaka's eyes, and shrugs offhandedly. "Oh, not at once. I'll let you play with it a while. I'll even let you keep part of it, if you like; exactly half, as always." Chosa laughs. "After all, everything we've ever had has been divided precisely in two. Why not the land we've just created?"

"No," Shaka says.

Chosa's eyes widen ingenuously. "But it's the way we've ALWAYS done it. Half for you, half for me."

"No," Shaka says. "This involves people."

Chosa leans close to his brother and speaks in a pointed whisper. "If any of them get broken, we'll simply make MORE."

Shaka Obre recoils. "We will do no such thing. They are PEOPLE, Chosa--not things. You are to leave them be."

"Half of them are mine."

"Chosa--"

"It's the way we DO it, Shaka! Half and half. Remember?"

Shaka glares. "Over my dead body."

Chosa considers it. "That might be fun," he says finally. "We've never done that before."

Now Shaka is suspicious. "Done what?"

"Tried to kill one another before. Do you suppose we could? Really die, I mean?"

Excitement blossoms in Chosa's face. "We have all those wards and spells... do you think we should try to counteract them, just to see if we really could?"

"Go away," Shaka says. "I don't like you like this."

Chosa persists. "But wouldn't it be FUN?"

Shaka shakes his head.

Frustration appears in Chosa's eyes. "Why do you always have to be such a spoilsport, Shaka?"

"Because I have more sense. I understand responsibility. " Shaka nods toward the grasslands. "We created this for people in need, Chosa. We sowed the field. Now we ought to tend the crop."

Chosa makes a derisive sound. "YOU tend the crop. I'm going collecting."

Shaka watches him turn away. "Don't you do anything! Don't you hurt those people, Chosa!"

Chosa pauses. "Not yet. I'll let you play with your toy. For a while. Until I can't think of anything else to do. By then, centuries will have passed, and you'll be tired of it, too.

Ready for something NEW." He smiles. "Yes?"

Sound. No sight: I can't open my eyes. Sound only, no more; flesh and bone won't answer my need.

"Curse you," she whispered. "I hate you for this."

It was not what I might have expected.

"I hate you for this!" A warped, throttled sound, breaking free of a too-taut throat. "I hate you for what you have done; for what you have become, in spite and because of this sorcerer--" She broke it off abruptly, then continued in a more controlled, but no less telling tone. "What am I to do? Let him have you? What am I to do? Turn my back?