Prodigal Steelwielder (Seals of the Duelists Book 3) (5 page)

Calder's molars ground together. The empire sanctioned few forms of suicide, but the most popular, especially by those who lived anywhere near Muggenhem, was to sacrifice themselves to the Godsmaw. The most disturbing part about their deaths was that they actually were followed by periods of calm seas.
I canna decide which is worse, living on the shore of a bloodthirsty sea or Muggenhem’s support of suicide.
“Well, at least we know that our jetty will last for the next holiday or two.”

Teos was still beside him, seemingly contemplating whether he should offer his usual disapproving glance for Calder’s dark humor. Instead, he gave his braided head a small shake and said, “That’s one way to look at it.”

Oh, sints, now he’s going easy on me because he wants something from me. I’m turning him into a bloody Dunfarroghan. I’m so proud.

Kiwani sat with her back to the wind, letting her legs dangle off the edge of the arena rim fifteen strides above the ground. Air currents whipped at her loose black leggings and teased strands of hair from the long braid down her back. The tiny, twirling hexlings she had crafted around her told her someone approached from behind, up the central steps in the arena stands. The heavy gait told her it was Gorwin, one of her denmates. Without turning, she asked, “Gorwin, what do you need?”

The footsteps paused, and Gorwin’s rich baritone reached her ears. “One of the villagers is offering to tend the arena land for us. Unpaid. We dueled last year for his daughter’s right to own a field under dispute. The family already paid us, but he wants to help more. What do you say?”

What do I say? I say, what were they thinking when they made me Head Duelist of this sints-forsaken arena in the middle of nowhere without a decent scarf shop for a hundred leagues?
“Who is it?”

“Washaw Gulaat. He’s a good, solid man.”

She shrugged. “He can’t live here. But give him a shed for his supplies. He can walk over once a week and tend to our land all he likes. But if he has a question, Gorwin, he deals with you. Not me. Understood?”

“Of course. I’ll inform him. Thank you.” The footsteps retreated, and soon Kiwani was alone with the wind again, her eyes locked on the distant, dimming horizon as if it held all the mysteries of the universe. For all she knew, perhaps it did. She knew she didn’t.

Then a voice spoke out of nowhere. “Kiwani?”

Her eyebrows lifted, but she remained otherwise still. Between her growing magic and her fading social skills, little surprised her anymore. “Hello, Tala. Are you here for your news or mine?”

“You have news?” Tala stepped through the bright white ring of her portal, bearing crystals on their brass stands. The singer sat beside her, facing the opposite direction. Her portal closed as she clasped her crystals. The singer’s hair, long and dark like Kiwani’s, wasn’t braided and floated freely in the breeze, wafting out over the edge of safety.

If she falls, her magic won’t be fast enough to save her. Lucky.
“No. Nothing new since your last visit.”

Tala cocked her head. “Then why did you say you had news?”

“You don’t want to hear my news. It’s not relevant.”

Tala sat up straight. “Well, I don’t really have news, either. But everyone says the only hex sessions you come to are your own. I thought you might like to visit the campus tonight, as an observer. It’s Eward’s turn.” Tala’s hand closed over hers unexpectedly. “I know you’re lonely out here. I’m so sorry. But you know this was never the plan. We all must do what we can. Just remember, you’re never truly alone. You have us, as often as you like.”

Kiwani let her hand go limp beneath Tala’s grip.
None of you are the one I want to see. I’m alone. And thanks to my former godfather, I always will be.

She turned her stunned expression back to the distant horizon and simply waited until Tala’s patience ran out and the singer left. Eventually, Kiwani stepped off the edge of the arena, let Stratus, her Wind avatar, catch her a stride above the ground, and made her way into the arena tunnel toward the living area.

Voices caught her ear: Akha and Gorwin, her fellow den duelists. Kiwani paused and leaned against the wall to listen.

“You really don’t think she’s losing it? I mean, look at what she wears. What is that supposed to mean?” Akha asked.

A sigh. “She’s fine, really. Remember what she’s been through. Considering that, I’d say she’s pretty stellar right now, compared to, say, Duelist Tarin. No one wants her handicap, even if she is one of those folk-hero Hexmates.”

“But Duelist Tarin had that handicap even at the Academy. She’s always been broken. No matter what all these Hexmage-worshipping nutmeats think, I’m frankly shocked that they wasted an entire duelist on minding her so she’s able to duel, and one from her own crazy hex, at that.”

Gorwin’s voice sharpened. “Enough of that now. You and I both know that even if we could hex our magic together, we’d still be no match for Duelist Kiwani. We get duel requests from as far away as Shaiwak and Najunaw. We even had the governor come all the way from Yewakma. That’s all because of her. All the attention we get? Her credit. Not to mention the creation of this duel den in the first place: it wouldn’t be here if Kiwani wasn’t. You let it be. Don’t draw attention. In fact, consider yourself lucky that you get to serve with a duelist of her repute.”

Akha grumbled under her breath. “It isn’t all bad, but I wouldn’t go so far as to count myself lucky to serve under this particular Hexmate. She’s not even truly here most of the time. She just stares whenever I talk to her. Even for simple things like ‘pass the salt.’ How are we supposed to live with someone like that, let alone duel with her?”

Eventually, the other duelists’ talk turned to other subjects, boring and pedantic. Kiwani had no appetite, so she returned to the outer edge of the arena tunnel and sat in the grass. She had no love for any denizen of the three towns that sat roughly equidistant from her arid southern home. The prison where they had made her Head Duelist. The only member of her hex to be given such distinction. The only member of her hex to be cast so far from civilization as to need an entire duel den to contain her.

Dark, wet clouds slugged by overhead, slicking their way from the Twervel Sea, blocking out the stars. The deepening dark of the evening matched her mood, her hair, her soul, her clothing, even the polish she applied to her nails. She clicked the lacquered beads of her necklace together. Unlike her hexmates’ necklaces, every bead on hers was black.

Tarin has her title now: Mistress of Flame. I am no one. A soul trapped in a chrysalis of my own making. I have given up what I was, but I’m nothing else yet. I’m still empty, so empty inside.
The beads clinked against one another, and she wrapped her fist around them, squeezing, feeling the firm edges bite into her palm.
And yet, overflowing.

The depths of her emotions sickened her—the leftmost bead represented self-loathing. Some nights, always the darkest ones, she toyed with the idea of casting Waarden’s Oblivion.
But I haven’t. Maybe I just like torturing myself too much to end it all. But I can’t stay here, not right now. Not sitting by the tunnel entrance like a beggar, for sints’ sake.

As she stood, Stratus formed beneath her feet, lifting her from the grass. Just below the cold, feathery brush of the clouds above, Kiwani halted her ascent and looked down. Her night-wide eyes could barely make out the gray stone ring of the arena near a crossroads of three dusty, crooked lines that twisted away to the nearby towns. The land at the southern end of the Shawnash Peninsula was rolling, scrubby. Its foliage grew large leaved and low to the ground, unlike most of the nearby tropical areas that were populated heavily with palm trees and the like. Further south, the pale, jumbled stones of the Shadow Canyons beckoned. The area was rife with strange geological formations as well as legends both dark and violent.

Kiwani felt quite at home there.

With a tip of her head, she pressed Stratus toward the rocky spires. The chill penetrated her clothing and numbed her skin, and Kiwani welcomed it. She closed her eyes, briefly wondering how much it would hurt if she toppled off her avatar and fell to her death. She decided not to bother. She’d practiced recovering her avatar too often after an accidental fall. A single, stray suicidal thought wouldn’t be able to overcome all those hours of practice and training
. That’s what training is for. To make us predictable, to force us to live to fight another day.

She landed at the entrance of one of the easternmost canyons. Its sheer, twisting walls rose high above her head then veered off to the left before joining into a single ribbon of rock. Kiwani inhaled deeply of the heavy air that the cave breathed out, metallic and ancient. She had come to the Shadow Canyons more and more often during her time at the duel den. It hadn’t taken her long to give in to her curiosity, but something about its labyrinthine pathways and endless loops and twirls, never seeming to be the same maze twice, both soothed and tantalized her lonely soul.

She closed her eyes and brought forth her elemental hexlings—small slices of elemental magic that she had previously created to accomplish specific purposes. She could easily recall to existence several at the same time: Flame to sense the day’s heat, Wind to propel her forward, Earth to guard against those sudden twisting turns. Then she shot into the canyon, riding the wind at a breakneck speed, feeling the world press around her like an uncaring womb. Her magic sensed the twists and turns of her passage, and she jinked up, then right, then down, losing herself in the maze, leaving behind all her inner darkness in exchange for darkness that surrounded her.

Time passed unheeded, and Kiwani felt a growing urge to slam herself into a wall of rock.
Even now, nothing touches me.
She wrenched to a sudden stop in the center of a lightless cavern and hovered in the silence and dust.
No, stop. Just stop it. This would never be what he wanted for me. Bayan…

Her heart spasmed, and she buried her face in her hands. Without thinking, she hexed anima and cast Lifeseeker, stretching out the spell as far as she could. Thousands of small cave-dwelling creatures registered, their soft orange lights blissfully unaware of either her or her agony.
He’s too far away. He’s always too far away.

A strange sensation filtered into her consciousness.
Why do I feel like I’m standing with my back to the sun?

Still hovering, Kiwani rotated until she faced directly upward toward an arching stone ceiling. Though no orange light emanated from the spell in that direction, something tugged at her so strongly that she felt nearly helpless against its pull. She rose until her fingers brushed the rough, crumbly surface of the cavern’s ceiling. Then she pressed both her palms hard against it, sending an Earth hexling along with the Lifeseeker spell. Her elemental magic told her there was indeed a void somewhere above her, a perfectly spherical gap in the rock. Her anima magic told her that somehow, something was some form of alive within it.

“What are you?” The words rose unbidden from her lips.

She dared not approach from below. Hard lessons had been learned over the last year within the mountain that supported the academy campus. She and her former hexmates had attempted to craft safe, enclosed practice arenas, with a series of disastrous results. Taban had been crushed nearly to death, and when he’d finally awakened after Doc’s hasty ministering, he wryly commented that he finally understood why trade duelists took twenty years to earn their titles: working outside of the duel den basically meant that they were at the mercy of Sint Nature with every spell. Tala made subtle inquiries with Earth-specialist trade duelists in order to learn the secrets of working with existing mountains, and eventually everyone had learned enough not to accidentally kill themselves.

Kiwani cast a dozen clones of one of her Wind hexlings, a delicate tendril of wind that sensed, like a cat’s whiskers, anything that brushed against it. She sent them through the canyons and tracked their progress with her mind, searching for a way to get around and above the strange void. One of her breezes found a clear path, but as she followed, it vanished, and she skidded to a halt in front of a sheer rock wall.

She lit the dead-end corridor with frustrated red flame and wielded Lifeseeker like a torch, determined to spot the orange glow that was playing with her.

But she saw nothing other than the caves’ small denizens and the conflagration, now somewhere off to her left. It should’ve been blinding in its fiery illumination. But it wasn’t.

Giving up on subtlety, Kiwani drilled straight through the rock toward the blinding absence that called to her like a beacon. Suspicious, she remained airborne within her fresh tunnel. She absentmindedly reached out to brace against the stone, and it rushed forward around her fingers like sea foam, locking her hand against it.

Startled, Kiwani hexed it away and clutched her hands to her chest. What stirred within her wasn’t fear and wasn’t shadow. A fast, unknowable force called to her, a mystery. And she felt equal to the task. She thrust the last few bits of stone ahead of her, then hovered within her tunnel’s mouth, alert.

The spherical void stretched before her, black and silent. But she would never have called it empty. On some level, she sensed it pulsing, throbbing, even manic with life. She brightened her flames until they were a dazzling white, but still nothing reacted to the light she created, nor to the stone she had moved. Still, she dared not put her feet down.

She readied Stratus in case she needed a quick escape then took a deep breath. “I know you’re there.”

Silence.

“Can you hear me? I found you. What are you?”

Can you hear me? I found you. What are you? I know you’re there.

Kiwani went still in complete and utter shock as the tiny, strange presence echoed her words back to her, within the confines of her mind. Her eyes darted from side to side, looking for any source for the strange force. Nothing moved. Nothing seemed to have changed at all. Her heartbeat ratcheted up, and one hand reached for her necklace. One of those beads represented fear, but somehow she’d never managed to force her magic to meld with abject terror.
That seems an obvious oversight now.
“I am here. Where are you?”