Sword Breaker-Sword Dancer 4 (15 page)

One finger stabs toward the valley below. "I will remake it into hoolies!"

Shaka shrugs. "And I will restore it. One day."

"Not if you're destroyed. Not if YOU'RE unmade!"

"Someone will," Shaka says. "If not me, someone else will. Hoolies can't last forever."

"I'll make it last," Chosa threatens.

Shaka merely smiles. "Do try," he suggests. "You're ruining a perfectly beautiful day with your danjac's braying."

Chosa's expression is malignant. "You'll see," he says. "You'll SEE what I can do."

Shaka Obre strokes a languid hand through dark hair. "I'm still waiting."

Chosa stares. "You mean it," he says finally.

"Yes."

"But you're my brother."

"You're not mine. My brother would never have done this. BECOME this." Shaka's dark-eyed stare is harsh. "You must have unmade your brain when you were playing all your games."

"I'll send you to hoolies!" Chosa shrieks.

Shaka's smile is wintry. "After I send you."

"Shaka!" I screamed. "Shaka--"

Hands closed over my wrists, clamped down, forced me back against the blanket.

"Shaka!" I cried. My voice was a mockery.

Another set of hands joined the first. "Hoolies," Abbu breathed.

"Do you see?" Del pressed spread fingers against my chest, speaking quietly. "Lie still, Tiger. Shaka isn't here. Shaka's never been here."

"The wards," I rasped. "Don't you see? Chosa destroyed them. He did. Shaka's magic didn't hold--Chosa was too powerful--" A bone-deep shudder wracked my body. "He unmade the wards--"

"And thereby imprisoned himself; remember?" Del asked. "That's how the story goes."

Breathing was difficult. My lungs felt constricted. Abdomen contracted as I labored to draw in breath, then expell it. "I don't know the story. I only know the truth. I was there

--"

"There!" Del's fingers tightened.

"--bascha... gods, Del--" I tasted blood in my mouth.

"He's delirious," Abbu commented. "Remember how he was when his horse kicked him in the head?"

"--bascha, I can't see."

"You will," she promised. "You're not blind. But too much sand got into your eyes... they need to heal, that is all."

"I have to see ..." I tried to pull my hands from Abbu's grip, and could not. "Let go.

Abbu--take your paws off me!"

He did. I dragged the cloth from my eyes and realized what Del meant at once. My eyes were gritty, itchy, and very sore. Sunlight made them water.

But I forgot about my eyes. What I wanted was my hands.

Flat on my back, I thrust them into the air and inspected every inch of them. Then expelled a gusty breath of relief. "He's gone," I murmured dully. And then to myself, bewildered, afraid to say it aloud: No, he's not. He's IN me. I can feel him.

I sprang up, hurling myself against their arms; fell back as my knee collapsed. I was weak, trembling, undone. "Hoolies," I choked. "Am I him?"

A thin line of moisture dotted Del's upper lip. She scraped it away with a forearm. "But you said he was gone." She exchanged a glance with Abbu Bensir. "Do you believe me now?"

His face was ashen. "Sandtiger ..." But he let it trail off, as if not knowing what to say.

"Am I him?" I repeated. And then: "Where's my sword?"

Del pointed. "There."

I looked. "There" was not so far. Unsheathed, it lay in the sand. Sunlight bathed charred steel.

"Black," I blurted in relief. "Half of it, now... but that's better than none of it. Better than--" I let it go, slumping back against the blanket, and stared again at my arms and hands, lifting them against the sun. Turned them this way and that. "Not black," I murmured.

No. Pallid white. Like they'd been left too long in the snow. But the hair was all burned off, and the flesh was flaky and scaled. From elbows to fingertips. The nails were all discolored, as if they'd been frozen.

Del drew in a deep breath. "You asked me to kill you," she said. '"You begged me to kill you."

I stared at my hands, working blue-nailed fingers in distracted fascination. "Something tells me you didn't do it."

"No. I did something else. I knew it might kill you, but since that was what you wanted anyway ..." Wearily, she scrubbed hair back from her face. Tension had drained her of color, of life. "I sang a song, and then I knocked your sword away. Chosa hadn't taken all of you yet, just some. I thought it worth the risk."

I frowned, chewing my lip. "And by separating me from the sword ..."

Del nodded. "I hoped that because part of Chosa remained in the steel, he would have to let you go."

I avoided the truth by denying it aloud. "It could have gone the other way. Chosa could have jumped to me."

"Yes," she agreed. "And had I judged that accomplished, I'd have done to you what you begged me to do."

Memories were not clear; at least, not my memories. They were all jumbled up with Chosa's. "What was it?" I asked warily. "What was it I asked you to do?"

"Cut off your head," she answered. "Like I did with Ajani."

"Hoolies." Abbu again.

Which distracted me. "What are you doing here?" I asked. "Making time with Del?" It hadn't been beneath him before.

Fleetingly, he grinned. "No, but now that you mention it--" He waved it away. "Nezbet appeared at my campfire, mouthing nonsense about a white-haired woman sword-dancer." He shrugged. "I knew right away who he meant. And since I was well ahead of the others, I sent him on his way and came on myself."

"Doesn't Nezbet have any idea who I am?" Del asked. "You'd think Tiger was the only one involved, the way that boy talked."

"That boy" was probably all of two or three years younger than Del.

Which made me feel all the older.

"Nezbet's a fool." Abbu rubbed a hand through gray-frosted black hair. "Like most Southroners, he bears little respect for women--except as bedpartners. Then again, neither do I." He grinned at Del; she'd changed a lot of his opinions, but he wasn't about to admit it. "So if he heard anything about a woman being involved, he dismissed it as unimportant." He shrugged. "So Tiger's taking the blame for Ajani's murder."

"People saw me," she declared. "Have they all gone sandsick? Hundreds of them saw me cut off his head!"

"Ah, but there's a story going around that you're a Northern afreet conjured by Tiger to distract the jhihadi's attention long enough for Tiger to kill him." He laughed. "I told you about the stories."

"Afreet! " Del was astounded. "I'm not a spirit!"

Abbu leered pointedly. "I know that."

It made me irritable. I shifted against the blanket, aware of aches and itches; the protests of a body driven beyond its final reserves. "Bascha--"

But what I'd intended to say wisped into nothingness.

"Tiger?" she asked.

No, bascha.

Chosa.

Sixteen

Dawn. Three of us gathered as the sun broke over the horizon. Two of them would watch. I would do more than that.

Del's frown was clearly worried, drawing pale brows together. Boreal glinted in her hands, as Abbu's blade in his. Only I lacked a weapon; mine lay on the ground.

"You don't--" But she broke it off.

"Yes, I do," I told her.

"Why?" Abbu asked in his half-throttled, broken voice. "If it's that dangerous..." His tone was a mixture of disbelief and disgust, that he could give any of it credence.

Underscored by reluctant acknowledgment: he, like so many others, had seen me call fire from the sky.

"Because I can't just leave it here," I told him. "Believe me, if I could I would... but Del's told me time and time again that it's too much of a risk to take. If someone else wound up with this sword... someone innocent ..." I shrugged, suppressing a shiver born of morning chill. I still wore only a dhoti, wishing I'd pulled my other burnous from the saddle-pouches. But there had been other things to concern us.

"Or someone Chosa Dei could unmake, then remake for his own uses," Del added.

"But--I wish ..." She sighed, raking loose hair from her eyes. She had yet to confine it in a tightly woven plait. It spilled across her shoulders, tumbled down her spine, lingered at her breasts. Snagged on the rune-broidered leather tunic that bared so much arm and leg.

Chosa Dei had seen her. Deep in Dragon Mountain, when he'd asked her for the sword that could break imprisoning wards set by Shaka Obre. Chosa remembered her.

With effort, I shut him out. "You know what to do," I said harshly. "Don't wait for me to invite you ... I can't--I don't think--" I stopped, sucked air, tried to speak more evenly. "I don't have the strength to hold him off. Not this time." But I couldn't tell her why.

"Tiger--" But she bit her lip on the rest.

I flicked a glance at Abbu. "If she can't--or won't--you'll have to be the one."

His dark Southron face, older than mine, was oddly gaunt and tight. Silently, he nodded.

I bared my teeth in a grin. "Look at it this way, Abbu--you'll finally be able to say you really are the best."

He raised his Southron sword. He managed a ghost of a smile. "Any way it comes."

I didn't look at Del. I bent and picked up the sword.

--nothing--

"Tiger?" she ventured, and I realized I'd been standing there for gods' knew how long, waiting for something to happen.

I considered things. "My knee hurts," I said. "My eyes itch like hoolies. I'm still in need of a bath." I arched eyebrows. "Nothing seems to have changed."

"Is he--in there?"

I looked down at the sword in my hands. Samiel was blackened to the halfway point of the blade. My hands on the grip were blue-nailed, pallid white, still cracked and scaly, but not a drop of blackness touched them.

Nothing on the outside. How much was on the inside?

"He's in there," I confirmed, offering part of the truth. "But--I think he's hurt."

"Hurt?" Abbu blurted. "First you expect me to believe there's a sorcerer in your sword, and now you say he's hurt?" He snapped his own back into its sheath, harnessed diagonally. "I think you've made this up. I think there's no truth in this at all, and you are using it to keep from dancing against me. Because you know you will lose."

"Oh, I'd lose," I agreed. "I've only got one knee."

He scowled. "And how long will you use that as a crutch, Sandtiger?"

"It's true," Del said quietly. "What would you have me swear on, that you will believe me?"

Abbu grinned. "Oh, bascha--"

"Never mind that," I interjected. "Like I said, I think he's hurt." I scowled down at the sword. "I can't tell you why. It just feels different. Sort of--bruised." I glared at both of them, knowing how it sounded. "It feels a lot like I do: a horse ridden hard and put away wet."

"Poetic," Abbu said dryly. He rubbed idly at the scarred flesh of his throat, where my wooden sword had nearly killed him so many years before. "So, is this how we leave it?

You on one knee, with a bruised magical sword ..." He let it go, laughing. "I should challenge you anyway."

Del stiffened. We both knew what she intended to say, except Abbu cut her off with a raised hand.

He eyed her thoughtfully as he lowered it. "We never finished the dance we began in Iskandar."

"And you won't," I snapped. "Knee or no knee, I'll dance. I'm tired of you taking on Del in my place."

The smile was as expected; his unspoken rejoinder was implicit.

"Well?" Del asked curtly, wise to the ways--and thoughts--of men. "How is this to be settled?"

Abbu and I stared meaningfully at one another for a long moment. Then he ended the contest. "Hoolies," he said affably, "there's nothing in this for me. Not enough coin, anyway." He patted the coin-pouch hanging from his belt. "The shodo always said money couldn't buy friendship--or rivalry. When the Sandtiger and I dance our final dance, it will be for another reason."

"More money?" I gibed.

"Undoubtedly," he drawled, turning away toward his horse. "If I were you, either of you, I would not go to Julah."

"Why?" Del asked. "If there is a need--"

He overrode her. "There is a need not to." All pretense was dismissed; Abbu was no longer amused. "Yes, I was asked to track both of you, catch you, and bring you back to Iskandar. Because Sabra knows exactly who killed her father. Unlike all the tribes, she doesn't care about the jhihadi. She just wants revenge."

"And you're working for her," I said.

"Me work for a woman?" He grinned. "What do you think, Sandtiger? You were a Southroner, once."

It got to me, as he intended. "Once?"

Abbu swung up into the saddle and turned his horse to face us. "Before you crossed the border, so to speak." He gestured negligently, indicating Del and Samiel. "Northern sword. Northern woman." His grin was sly and crooked. "But one might be worth the trouble."

I scowled at him. "Get the hoolies out of here."

"Wait," Del said.

He reined in his horse, eyebrows arched.

"Are you working for her?" Del asked quietly.

"You should know the answer," he told her. He hooked his head in my direction. "Tiger knows. Ask him."

Del waited till he was gone. "Well?"

"No," I answered.

Her eyes narrowed. "How can you be certain? You yourself have said you are not friends, and so has he. How do you know he isn't lying?"

"He isn't working for her. Because if he were, he'd do exactly what he'd hired on to do: invite me into a circle, beat the hoolies out of me, then haul me back to Iskandar."

Del's expression was odd. "Do you think he can beat you?"

"Right now, with this knee, Rhashad's mother can beat me." I hefted the sword. "Believe me, if he'd hired on--woman tanzeer or no--he'd finish the job. Abbu Bensir always finishes what he starts."

Del watched me maneuver my knee, extending it to pop it, then bending it back again, testing flexibility. "How are you? How are you really?"

It had nothing to do with my knee. The woman knows me well, but not well enough.

I expelled a breathy half grunt, half laugh. "How am I? I don't know. Sore. Tired. Itchy.

Smelly. Beat to death inside and out." I turned gingerly, hobbling back toward my blanket spread next to the tiny cairn. "Pretty well bored with the whole situation."