The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 (83 page)

She nodded.

“You will lose some of them,” he said evenly. His gaze was cold.

She swallowed and nodded again. “Better some than all.”

He bowed. When he rose, he held a golden sword, light pouring and swelling through the red glow of flesh.

“They’re counting on us,” she whispered. But she was afraid. Her hands shook as they clung to the tines of the Winter King’s crown.

Jewel
, the stag said.
Think carefully. Think long. There are many ways to lose a battle, and the worst of them do not end in death
.

“Let’s go,” she told Avandar. “Hide us, for now.”

Avandar gestured. She saw light; orange and blue cascaded down the length of his arms, billowing like cloud, like hidden fire. She stiffened as it touched her, but she held tight.

“This will protect us against the vision of men,” Avandar said. “But against the
Kialli
, no power of significance remains hidden.”

“It’ll do.”

The Tor’agnate of Manelo was silent.

So, too, the Tor’agar of Clemente.

Against the screams and shouted orders of the Clemente cerdan, words were too much of a shroud. They contained an anger that would add fire, and death, to the battle that now raged, distorted by water.

But silence offered no answer; silence was not a weapon. Ser Alessandro kai di’Clemente raised his head. “Will you kill me,
cousin
?” he said softly.

Ser Amando returned his cool gaze. “It was not my intent.”

Alessandro weighed the tone behind the scant words. Anger, there. Anger and not a little fear. The Widan—if he was Widan—ruled here; it was clear to Alessandro. But it was also clear to Ser Amando, and the illusion of command—necessary illusion, like all titles, all power, in the Dominion—had been stripped away with a brutal disregard for the consequences of the loss.

It was night, the Lady’s time.

But even at night, no Tor could afford to be unmanned in the view of those whose loyalty strength alone ensured. By such a crisis, men were judged.

Ser Alessandro could not even guess at the magicks that imperiled his cerdan, for the water was not like a Northern window; it moved constantly.

He waited with a patience that was entirely facade.

“The medallion,” Ser Amando said at last. Just that. His Toran hastened to obey him, but they, too, were shaken by what had transpired. Robbed of grace, they fumbled, and speed robbed them of even the dignity their rank demanded.

“So,” Alessandro said quietly.

Ser Amando bowed head. Acknowledgment.

It was a bitter gesture; among men who are no longer allies, truth is an expensive luxury.

With the medallion came the rest of the Widan. There were, in total, five, but only two wore the proud Sword, edge glittering with rubies arranged as if in fall. He met their eyes, but he could not hold them; they skittered away from his face as if in shame. Or fear.

And what, he thought, engendered fear in Widan?

The other three.

Ser Alessandro drew his sword. By his side, standing with the grace of purpose that now eluded the Manelan Toran, were the two men he trusted with not only his life, but his death. It would not be the first time; it would not, even if they had victory here, be the last. He had never placed faith in soldiers who had not taken to the field.

The medallion lay before him.

“What oath, cousin, would you swear?” he asked softly.

“That if you offer your allegiance to the Tyr’agar, your men will be spared, your lands will be yours to govern, your people and their supplies will be bartered for instead of taken.”

“And can you offer this?”

He said nothing. Instead, Ser Amando kai di’Manelo unsheathed his blade. He lifted it, its crescent flashing orange in the night light, the artificially contained fire.

It fell in a single stroke.

And it missed.

The Manelan Toran drew a single shared breath, ragged around the edges. The silence stretched out in a circle as men turned inward to stare at what they could not clearly see.

Ser Amando grimaced. When he lifted his sword again, the blade shook.

The shouts of Clemente cerdan mingled now with screams: Alessandro knew death when he heard it.

Still, he waited, watching the man he would never again claim as kin.

The blade fell, and this time, shaking, it made its mark. The mark was not clean; the wooden circle clung to the blade’s edge as he attempted to raise it.

Toran interceded; their hands touched the medallion that was meant to be cut by blade alone. They pulled it free; set it upon the stone pedestal that was meant to contain the oath wood.

Ser Alessandro kai di’Clemente raised his sword.

He drew breath; his gaze slanted toward the West, and the North, toward the forests that had bounded his clan’s lands for centuries. Out of that forest had come the people who might one day be legend; out of that forest, the first hope and the first fear.

But he had met them, these visiting strangers; he had taken their measure.

Against what now stood at his back—river water, raised as wall—their fleeting promise withered like false spring.

“I have hated the kai el’Sol in my time,” he said quietly. “For the death of my cousin. For the loss of his life.” Truth. To be used now, like any other weapon.

He met Ser Amando’s eyes; was surprised at how they flickered.

But I better understand him, cousin. I better understand what I refused to understand that day, that year, the years that followed
.

He lifted his sword. Met the eyes of the Tor’agnate without flinching or wavering.

His blade fell. Splinters of wood flew across the dais.

A sign.

Not even the Toran moved. Alessandro’s sword rested a hair’s breadth above the grinding surface of stone.

The Widan who was not Widan spoke.

“Another medallion, Tor’agnate?”

But Ser Amando stared at the wreckage and understood. His eyes narrowed. “Kill him,” he said softly.

His last words. A fitting epitaph for a man who would serve the Lord of Night.

Alessandro struck as the swords of Manelan Toran crested scabbards, filling the silence left in the wake of shattered wood with the song of steel. Amando began to bring his sword to bear, but the movement was slowed; clumsy.

The Lord’s men could not afford hesitation.

And Alessandro kai di’Clemente was the Lord’s man. The Lord of Day. His sword’s edge bit metal and flesh, seeking the short length of exposed neck. Finding it.

Adelos and Reymos were a step behind him; they were three, and they fought without expectation of mercy. Not for death had he come, but he accepted it: it was the sword’s only law.

They did not discuss tactics. They did not discuss strategy.

As they approached the river, the master bard of Senniel College and the lord of the Court of the Green Deepings spoke with the nuance of motion and gesture. They did not pause; they did not spare more than a glance at the wall of water that waited them, cleaving the town in two.

Celleriant moved toward the water, tensing for a leap. The breeze began to gather beneath the strands of his hair, pulling at his tunic.

Kallandras caught his shoulder, and Celleriant’s legs lengthened, losing tension and the strength of motion’s beginning; a brow rose in question, wind dying as water began to rumble in response.

Brother
, the bard said softly,
a change of plans.

“The mortals oft had a saying about battle plans and the length of their survival.”

The bard smiled. Lifting a hand, he pointed into the thicket of men that surrounded the dais and the Tors.

And the drums.

But death has many guises.

And into the Widan, it came, fair-haired and white, swift as wind, unlooked for.

The two who wore the Sword jumped back, unarmed, their hands raised in the complicated weave of dancing fingers and harsh words. They peeled away from the three who stood, beardless and tall, the robes of men of knowledge a poor fit for the length of their bodies, the growing width of their shoulders.

The Manelan cerdan gave way before the two Widan who had chosen flight, absorbing them whole into their ranks; they drew swords, but they did not know which way to turn: toward the man who had killed the Lord to whom they owed their allegiance, or toward their backs, where swords now spoke with voices that could not be denied.

The Clemente Toran were already at work; if they were few, they took advantage of chaos and uncertainty. It was the very essence of battle.

Ser Alessandro, given the vantage of height, drew his bloodied sword from his dying kin. He did not clean the blade; did not sheathe it; instead he took a moment to clearly see what the cerdan could not: Two men.

Ah, Lady, two Northern men.

One bore blue sword, blue shield; he walked—or so it seemed—in the air above the shoulders of the armed Manelan guards. Where his blade fell, it fell in silence, and when sword was raised to parry, metal shattered.

He was not mortal; did not look mortal; his hair was a thing of wind, a cloud and a storm. No man could fight thus encumbered. No man.

By his side, hair drawn back, was the Northern bard. In his hands he carried the weapons of the Dark Lady; they moved as if they were an extension of his body. Alessandro was frozen for a moment in recognition. The Dark Lady.
Kovaschaii
. He had never found a circumstance so dire that he had been willing to call upon the brotherhood; did not, in truth, know how to begin.

Bard, he thought. Northern bard. The words made no sense; they were foreign words, Northern words, nonsensical syllables.

And this bard offered no song; his lips were set in a slender line, and his expression was so still it seemed a mask had been set about his face—a mask of flesh, pale and reposed.

Two men. Against such two, the cerdan of Manelo retreated, shouting orders, raising a cry kin to the cries across the shattered bridge.

The bard brought his weapons down, seeking neither flesh nor armor.

In the night, the stretched skins of the drums that had beat greeting and warning
screamed
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

H
AD Kallandras been another man, had he in truth been born to the North and the halls of Senniel, or had he been entirely Southern, had he been raised in the domis of his father’s clan, the screams would have stilled all movement, all breath.

Although both of these men were some part of the man he had become, he had given his youth to death, and the passage of years, the songs of the bardic masters, had not deprived those lessons of strength: he leaped clear of the drums. But the gift of the magi, the weapons he bore, gained a sudden weight, drawn to the sounds of pain and death. They struggled against his tightening grip.

They were not his only weapons; had they been, he would have fallen; they rose too slowly to parry; the skins of the drums had closed around their edges, and whether it was the blades that clung or the instruments, the result was the same.

He struck out with his foot; caught an arm wielding blade just above the bend of elbow. A new cry joined the fading screams of drum, but it was brief.

He leaped up, into air, and his blades at last came free, but they were heavy in his hands, and their shape seemed to shift and change as he moved. He vaulted, shifting his weight to land, tensing his knees to leap again before his body acknowledged the full weight of gravity. Around these movements, steel, the dance of the blade, the promise of death.

The drums were beyond repair.

The makers of those instruments, however, came quick to the fray.

They shunted aside the unwieldy robes of the Widan; they dispensed with the pretense of diminished height. They were three, and they drew swords with the same perfect grace that Celleriant had: red fire to blue.

The Manelan Toran raised cry; their swords lost unison, and for a moment, purpose. Those that crowded the Widan at the dais’ edge paid for their duty with their lives; the red swords took them all.

They should have had quick deaths.

Kallandras did not pause to bear witness; he had seen death before, and he understood what he did not see. Instead, he took care not to join them.

But he was grateful for these kinlords and their red, red blades; his own sprang free of their unnatural weight as if called to battle. In the darkness, he could see the faintest trace of light across their edge—and it, too, was red.

Not even in the desert had the blades come to life.

They roared, or seemed to roar, as he raised them; they parried the sweeping arc of two swords. The third did not fall.

Instead, the water did.

From the back of the Winter King, she saw the river.

“Avandar!”

He acknowledged her without a word or a backward glance, for he saw what she saw; the river water gathered, losing the shape and form of wall. It rose, in coiling arms, limbs clear and undulating in the moonlight. Too many.

Too late
. She could not tell who spoke.

“Too late? Why?” Her knees bit into the flanks of the King. But he would not go forward.

The water is a difficult element
, the King said.
The most difficult to contain
.

“I thought the earth—”

Earth is the most difficult to call, the most difficult to wield; it sheds its form slowly. No one in need of haste will depend on it. Air and Fire come quickly, he added, but they are almost formless; Water is heavy, and if it can be held to form, the destruction it brings is vast. Be grateful that we are by a river and not an ocean; be grateful that the river is long and thin.

Gratitude was beyond her. Fear was not.

The watery limbs became tentacles.

“I don’t understand!”

Did you not hear it, Jewel? The drums that were used in invocation were . . . wounded. The power that they exerted over the water’s form was greatly weakened, but it was not broken; what they summoned remains. You see the water now as the water itself desires to be seen
.

“Kallandras,” Avandar said quietly, “Or Celleriant. They must have chosen to break the hold the
Kialli
have over the river. They failed,” he added, as if he spoke of the downturn in market prices. “One, at least one, of the
Kialli
must have been an adept. If he does not release the water, it will not subside—but he has imperfect control.”

She could see, for the moonlight was merciless, the sudden fall of liquid; could hear the crash of sundered timber in its wake. Water rose again, thin and graceful; in its center, she saw the flailing limbs of an armored man and cried out.

He is your enemy
, the Winter King said coldly.
He is not of Clemente
.

She didn’t tell him that she didn’t care; he knew it, and it angered him.

Instead, Jewel caught tines. Pressed her thumbs into the sharpest of their points. Blood ran down her palms.

Go
, she said.

There was no pretense of request. The Winter King leaped forward.

Kallandras was aware of the water.

It had a voice, and although he had never heard its waking strength, he had weathered storms in the lee of the seawall beyond which Senniel rose like a maker-made cliff. He had watched boats in harbor tossed against the rocks and the timber docks; had seen sails ripped from their moorings go to their resting place in the crook of waves made wild by storm.

Such storms had almost prepared him for this one.

Almost.

But bard-born, he was caught by the water’s voice: by its rage, its fury, its sense of betrayal.

In the desert, water had been the source of life, its absence the source of death.

What life this water offered had been scoured clean. It spoke with death’s voice.

Upon his finger, Myrddion’s ring began to burn.

He could not heed that burning; the two kinlords did not; they drove themselves against the blades, and he was forced to meet their attack.

They were angry; they did not trouble themselves to hide it.

He had been taught, time and again, that anger was a fool’s preserve; that in combat, there was only the blade dance and the blade’s song; the tracing of the stars, the points of the Lady’s circles.

His masters, he thought, had never faced
Kialli
lords.

They drew blood.

Lord Celleriant stood a moment between the scant safety of two mortal dwellings—the tallest that stood upon the edge of the river’s banks. They would not last, and indeed, in this mortal geography, they were a poor choice of hiding place.

If, that is, one thought to hide from the elemental water.

Only the Winter Queen could now speak clearly to the rivers; only the Winter Queen could control, with contempt and ease, the water’s anger, the water’s fall.

In his youth—and that youth so far beyond him it returned at unexpected times—he had seen Arianne lift white, white arms in the splendor of Summer sky; had seen her walk into the stream of rushing foam and roaring water made by the falls of Lamentine. Hair streaming down her shoulders as if it, too, were liquid, she had laughed, raising hands as if to catch the bounty of the falls.

And the falls had . . . stopped.

The water ceased its roar, pausing, trapped in place against the sharp edges of broken rocks, and the smooth contours of worn ones.

Others, greater lords than he, had taken the Queen’s challenge, but where she stood triumphant and at ease, they labored, the gray of their eyes turning now to silver, and now to gold.

Aie, she was gone.

Beyond him, for his failure in the cold of Winter.

But she could not command memory; he took what he could, as if he were mortal beggar in need of crumbs.

His blade he now lowered. His heart was its sheath; blue flame flickered and died, as if guttered by water.

He watched Kallandras as he danced between the kin-lords, and it brought a smile to his lips; a thin smile, but a genuine one.

The water struck the roof of the building on his right; he sprang clear of the falling debris, waving a hand to flick the timbers and shingles to one side.

It was not a casual gesture.

If he had any hope of returning to the Summer Court—or the Winter one—it lay with the mortal woman, Jewel ATerafin.

And she had commanded him, clumsily and without an understanding of the binding force of words, to use his power to
preserve
.

Brother
, he thought, lifting a hand as if to touch the mortal bard,
your guess was wise; the drums were the source of their containment
.

But they were not the source of their power. It is true: the world does not lie easy beneath the hands of those who chose to forsake it.

Ser Alessandro kai di’Clemente had cause to be grateful for his Toran. Adelos threw himself bodily across the man he had offered his life to as the water passed above them, flattening the dais that now seemed such a paltry, flimsy conceit. The body of the Tor’agnate was crushed in that instant, and only by Adelos’ reflexes did Alessandro fail to join him.

But he could not hold Adelos; could not prevent the water from taking him. He watched in a grim silence as one of the two men he
trusted
drowned in the moving column.

And then he picked up fallen blade, caught Reymos by the wrist, and began his retreat. Few were organized enough to stop it.

One man stood against the river, hands raised in fists. The cloak that had hidden him—the cloak that had
disgraced
him—he cast aside; the water reared the greatest of its many tentacles above his head, seeking him blindly. He did not duck, bow, hide; he did not seek to evade; he stood, a challenge to the majesty of the wild element. Debris gathered at his feet, sloughing off his back and his raised fists.

He spoke to the river water in a voice both ancient and broken with disuse. But the water’s response was simple rage; without the binding of drums and blood magic, he had no hold upon its depths.

Once, once he had.

He was bitterly aware that among the
Kialli
there existed lords of power whose will, and whose memory, held the skills of their shattered past—bitterly, because he was not among that number. Oh, his memory was intact, but everything else about his past had been burned away in the Hells. This mockery of magic, this bastard summoning, was all that was left.

That, and his sword. The shield, too, failed to come at his call.

Water took the mortals in number; what had been an army was broken by the sluggish whim of the living river.

He despised them, these broken, terrified
men
. Death took them all, soon or late; he could not understand their significance in the plans of the Lord. Could not understand the need for secrecy; the need to hide.

The water struck him.

He rose in its fist; felt it wash across his face; felt it exert the sudden pressure of an almost unimaginable weight. And he smiled.

What need had he of air? Only the living need draw breath.

He rose, encased in water; fell, encased in water. The ground at the river’s bed grew dry and cracked as the element summoned what it needed, and he exulted a moment in its raw fury; it was kin to his own.

The Tor’agnate was dead. Dead by the hands of mortals, by the hands of the clansmen. The Lord would be ill-pleased—but if the other Tor had offered truth, if the Sun Sword could be found, such a loss might be forgiven.

He let the water play. There were deaths on both sides of the river that could no longer be avoided.

Against the water’s rage, Lord Celleriant had several weapons. But only one might accomplish the task set him by the mortal he had been commanded to serve.

Viandaran’s warning was just, and justified; the elements hated each other with a strength that rivaled the enmity between the
Kialli
and the Arianni. But the Arianni had one advantage: they were of the world. Even hidden, even imprisoned upon the old ways, the wild roads, they were
of
it.

He called air, and it came, its voice a roar.

The drums had been a gamble.

An expensive one.

Kallandras had failed before. In his youth, in the labyrinths of Melesnea, and beyond it, in the streets of the Tor Leonne. But each failure had failed to buy his death; instead, it had brought his brothers, their varied voices and experience the steadying influence, the salvation, he required.

The voice that came to him now was none of these.

But he recognized it: the voice of the elemental air. His hand burned; the ring grew bright enough to blind. To a man who relied upon vision it might have been fatal, but Kallandras had been trained to darkness. He leaped clear of death, and the eddying currents of the air carried him above the shoulders of the kin.

Their voices joined air, a howl of anger, a hint of fear, blended into the harshness of a language he barely knew. And harmony to it, harsh and beautiful, wild with the promise of death, a brother’s voice.

Allele
.