Swords of Waar (10 page)

“Go on.”

“Again, I meant to return to you immediately, but my head was muddled, and as I struggled to bandage myself I… I lost consciousness.” He punched his leg, and almost tore my stitches. “An unforgivable weakness!”

I grabbed his arm. “Hey! Stay still! What happened next?”

He turned his head and went on. “What happened next is that I woke to Rian-Gi shaking me, and I discovered that it was morning.” He hid his face. “Your pardon, mistress, the shame of it is still unbearable.”

I rolled my eyes. “Lhan. You passed out. You can’t control that.”

“Can I not? The mind controls the flesh. The flesh does not control the mind.”

“Yeah yeah, so then what?”

“Then Rian saw to my wounds and begged me to leave, for he feared the priests would return and find me there.”

I bit my lip, not sure I should tattle, but then I caught myself. I didn’t see any shame in what Rian did. It was the priests who were the murdering bastards, not him. “They did return. That’s how they learned you were with the pirates. That’s how they followed you here. Y’see. It’s not your fault after all.”

Lhan looked up at me, and his face went in about six directions at once—shock, horror, anger, sadness—okay, only four. “Rian-Gi talked?” And then. “Of course. Of course he did. Any man would. They know their business, those villains. Did… did they kill him?”

“Not him. His boyfriend. Rian talked to save him, but they killed the poor guy anyway.”

Lhan closed his eyes and I stitched him up in silence for a full minute, then he shook his head. “You are wrong, Jae-En. It
is
my fault. It is I who killed Wae-Fen. And I who brought about Rian’s torture. For it is I who foolishly told him my plans. Had I kept it from him—”

“They would have tortured him anyway.
And
killed Wae-Fen. Come on, Lhan. You can’t blame yourself for the church’s evil shit.”

“I blame myself for knowing we were the subject of their scrutiny and not keeping away from my friends. My lack of proper caution allowed them to catch you, to torture Rian-Gi, to murder Wae-Fen and, by the One, I have hurt these poor pirates worse than all the rest. Thirteen ships burned, hundreds of men dead. Lo-Zhar is right to wish to cast me out and kill me. I am like a plague victim who kisses his children. I harm all I love. All I touch!”

He was close to popping his stitches again. “Lhan! You’re gonna hurt yourself!”

He stayed clenched for a long minute, then sagged back and let out a breath. “How… how did you know? About Rian and Wae-Fen?”

“I went to see him. I came back to Waar inside the Temple of Ormolu, and found out that the priests were hunting you in some place called Toaga. So when I escaped, I went to ask him for a map, and—”

Lhan was staring at me like I’d just grown horns and turned green. “You… you escaped from the Temple of Ormolu?”

“Yeah. There was a teleport gem thingy, and—”

“No one escapes from the temple of Ormolu. But for the priests, no one who has entered it has ever come out again. There are no doors, no windows, and no one is ever seen to enter or leave.”

I tied off the last stitch, then cut the thread and looked for more wounds. There was a nasty one that cut across his hip and halfway around to his butt. I started undoing his loincloth. “That’s because they have teleporters like I was saying. They don’t need—”

Lhan caught my hand as I started to strip him. “That is not necessary.”

“Bro, I’ve seen you naked, remember. And that’s infected.”

“Very well, then I will do it. Give me the salve.”

I started tugging again. “Come on, Lhan. Don’t be a prude. Let me—”

“No! I insist. I—”

The fabric ripped as he tried to pull my hand away, and the loincloth fell apart. He had a thin strip of leather tied around his waist, and there was some kind of stone hanging from it. It hadn’t been there the last time we got naked. He closed his hand around it.

I stared at his fist, shaking. The thing reminded me of the thing I’d seen around Kedac-Zir’s waist when I’d stripped him naked in front of the entire Oran court—a balurrah it was called—only his had been silver. A balurrah was a secret token people on Waar wore next to their skin to remind them of their lover, and it didn’t matter if you were married or engaged to somebody else, you were supposed to only wear the balurrah of the person you truly loved. It was meant only for their eyes. Nobody else’s. And Lhan was hiding his from me.

“What’s that?”

Lhan clenched tighter. “Nothing. Pay it no mind.”

“Lhan, don’t be a douche. Show me.”

He didn’t like it, but he opened his hand, then turned his head away. “Forgive me, mistress.”

I took the thing in my hand and looked at it, heart pounding. It was a smooth pink pebble, about the size and shape of a pocket watch, and there was something scratched into one side of it. It looked like a drawing of a knife with a blade that curved at the tip.

“This is a balurrah, right?”

“Aye.”

My heart sunk. “Whose is it?”

“It… it is yours, mistress.”

“M-mine?”

“Aye. That crude etching is meant to represent your sword, while the pebble is the color of your skin.”

Fucking hell. It
was
my sword. A breath went out of me that I hadn’t know I’d been holding. “Oh, god, Lhan. I—”

He gripped my hand. “I beg you to forgive me, mistress. It was presumptuous of me to make such a thing without knowing your heart, but I believed I would die, and did not want to—”

“Lhan, you fucking idiot!” I lay down beside him and hugged him so hard I heard him grunt. “What the fuck do you need to be forgiven for? Didn’t I tell you? I came back for you! All I wanted to do when the priests sent me to Earth was get back here. All I wanted was to find you again. I….” I held him away from me and looked into his eyes. “I decided I didn’t want to go back home the second we kissed.”

Lhan looked at me, still unsure. “Truly?”

“Truly.” I held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

It took a minute for Lhan’s brow to unwrinkle, but at last he clasped my hands and smiled. It was like a bath in warm whiskey, that smile. It made me all hot and gooshy inside.

“And I decided I would ask you to stay at precisely the same moment. I believed I had not a hope to convince you, but I knew I must try, or lose half my world.”

“Aw, Lhan.”

I leaned in to kiss him, but he held me off and looked into my eyes, all serious. “Mistress. Jae-En. ’Tis sudden, I know, but I fear we have little time left to us, so I would speak now.”

“Uh, speak about what?”

“This.” He took my hand. “That if we are truly of like minds, then I would pledge myself to you as a dhan of Ora should—heart, soul and arm. From this day forth, however few they may be, you will be my dhanshai and I will be your dhan. Your safety and well-being will be my only concern. Your love will be my only goal.”

He was so serious I wanted to laugh, but I kept it in. I couldn’t keep the tears in, though. They were running down my cheeks.

He took my hand and kissed it. “Will you have me?”

There was a dirty answer to that, but I kept that in too. Now wasn’t the time. “Yes, Lhan. I will,” was all I said.

“The One be praised.”

Lhan stretched up and kissed me, and that whiskey bath turned into a sauna. Wounds or no wounds, I was ready to push him down and “have him” as often as he could manage, but all of a sudden he went all floppy again and slumped back, his eyes fluttering.

“Lhan!”

He gripped my forearm. His hand was clammy and cold. “Forgive me… beloved. There has been no food for so long. I… I have little strength. At least we will be Dhan and Dhanshae when we die.”

I stared down at him, feeling helpless, then shook my head, angry. “Sorry, Lhan. Fuck dying. I’m not giving you up after I just found you again. I’m gettin’ us off this rock, and then we’re gonna go have a happily-ever-after somewhere.”

I stood and turned to the door. “Wait right here. I gotta go see some priests about a ship.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

BREAKOUT!

“I
don’t get it. I’ve seen y’all take on a navy ship before,
and win
. And that was twice as big as that boat out there. How did that one little ship wipe out thirteen of yours?”

Okay, yeah, I know I made it sound like I was gonna go handle shit all by myself, but I ain’t stupid. I knew going kamikaze wouldn’t get me anywhere but dead, and as I’d said to Lhan, fuck dying. So, instead of going to see the priests about a ship, I went to see the pirates about the priests, and now I was sitting around a dusty stone table with Kai-La and Burly and Lo-Zhar—yeah, him too—in what looked like an old kitchen.

Kai-La curled her lip. “A single wand of blue fire.”

I blinked. “Damn. Really?”

Lo-Zhar rolled his eyes.

Burly was a little more helpful. “The levitating air that fills our canopies is flammable, and the blue fire can burn through the envelope in the blink of an eye, and then… boom.”

Kai-La sighed. “We saw the ship on the horizon and took our time preparing to fly, thinking we had at least an hour before it would be close enough to engage. But a wand of blue fire…” She shook her head. “I know not the limits of its range, but it destroyed us from more than an iln away, every ship that was anchored here.”

Lo-Zhar bared his teeth. “I lost forty men.”

It still made no sense. “But then how the hell do y’all operate at all? If one wand of blue fire can burn a whole damn fleet out of the sky, what’s the percentage in being a pirate?”

Burly raised his head. “Because we never face them. Neither Ora’s army or navy possesses one, nor have I ever heard of a temple ship carrying one either.”

Lo-Zhar snorted. “Until now.”

“That is why we were taken by surprise.” Kai-La leaned back. “But for the two in the possession of the Aldhanan’s guard, only servants of the Temple are allowed to carry wands, and they are so rare, and so valuable, that they are almost never used, for fear of losing them or allowing one to fall into the hands of the enemy.”

“Huh. So why don’t they just make more?”

All three of ’em laughed at me this time.

“The wands are gifts of the Seven, lass, made by the gods themselves, and beyond the ken of mortal man to understand.” Burly chuckled. “The priests don’t even know how to fix them, let alone build another. If one breaks, it is gone for good, and there are so few now that they are named—Tyrant Slayer, The White Death, The Guardian of Modgalu, and the like.”

More Waarian Lord-of-the-Rings bullshit, giving a ray gun a fancy name. On the other hand, we did the same thing back on Earth all the time—The Peacemaker, Fat Man, Little Boy. Shit, I knew guys who named their dicks. Anyway, back to business.

“Okay. So there’s only one of these wands on the ship?”

Burly grunted. “One is enough.”

“I just wanna know what I’m gonna be up against once I get on board.”

Lo-Zhar snorted again. “
Once
you get on board? Shouldn’t your first worry be
how
you get on board? Do you mean to fly? That ship never comes closer than bows’ reach.”

Kai-La grinned. “You’ve not seen our girl in action, have you? She’ll get on board.”

I sat forward, trying not to look smug. “I hope I will, but what I want to know is, can you reel it in once I do? The last thing I want is to do something stupid and heroic and end up giving myself up to ’em.”

Lo-Zhar smiled, nasty. “It wouldn’t trouble me in the slightest.”

Kai-La and Burly gave him a dirty look, then Kai-La patted me on the wrist.

“Worry not, sister. A pirate always has a grappling hook or two lying about. We’ll hook your fish.”

“I just hope you do it before it swallows the bait.”

***

It took an hour for me and the thirty or so pirates who Kai-La and Lo-Zhar rounded up to get into position without being seen by the priests’ warship. I felt like we were a bunch of mice, trying to sneak across the kitchen floor while a fat orange cat walked around on the counters above. We could only move when the ship’s view was blocked by a wall or a tower, and we had to make sure wherever we stopped we couldn’t be seen from any angle, because the ship was constantly circling. The whole scheme woulda been impossible during the day, but with the big moon down and the little moon low on the horizon, the shadows were as black as caves, and there were plenty of them.

The whole plan hinged on that three-story building which I’d used as cover before. The battlement at the top of it was the only thing tall enough and close enough to the edge to get me to the level of the ship. It also had a pretty much intact stairway inside it that would give me enough run up for my jump. Unfortunately, it also had one big problem. When I was in position in the stairwell, I couldn’t see out, which meant I couldn’t tell when the ship was coming, which meant I didn’t know when to start my run. It’d be embarrassing as hell to do a perfect run up just to miss the boat and jump to my death.

In the end we worked out a system where Kai-La would stand watch outside the building and give me a whistle when the ship was coming in range. All I had to do was run when I heard her toot.

We finally got into position just as the ship passed the tower, and so we had to wait another endless fifteen minutes for it to circle all the way around again, but finally I started hearing the flap of its sails and the whispers from the pirates around the tower, and I went into a runner’s crouch at the bottom of the stairs.

Ten seconds later, “Weet!”

I tensed, but didn’t go. What if she’d whistled too soon? I better wait. One, two, three, four, five—okay go!

I launched like a sprinter coming off the blocks and pounded up the stairs as hard as I could, then kicked off the wall of the landing and ran up the second flight, skipping more and more steps with each stride. Another turn and there was night sky above me and I rocketed up onto the top of the tower, jumped onto the battlements, and kicked up into the air with the empty plains dropping away a thousand feet below me—and the priests’ ship slipping out from under from me to my right.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN