Sword Breaker-Sword Dancer 4 (25 page)

Del nodded absently. Then smiled a little, going back to something seemingly inconsequential, because it was a thing she could grasp, banishing helplessness.

"Then--we stay together. And nothing I do and say now will alter anything."

"Oh, it might. It could. It would." I spread my hands, laughing feebly in frustration. "Do you see, Delilah? There is no knowing the truth, because the truth is everchanging. The moment one truth becomes another, the old truth becomes a lie."

Del wiped away the dampness stippling her upper lip. "I don't understand you. You're not the man I knew."

I forced a grin. "Don't you take credit for that? Isn't it what a woman wants?"

She spat a Northern curse. "I don't know what to say. You have twisted me all up."

"Me," I said, with feeling. Then, before she could stop me, I closed my hand on Boreal's blade. "I am not Chosa Dei. A piece of him is in me, but most of me is me." I paused.

"Could Chosa Dei do this without swallowing her up? Without swallowing you?"

She gazed down at the hand upon the blade. At flesh-colored forearms, fuzzed with fine, sunbronzed hair, and normal fingernails.

"I know her name," I said. "She's mine, if I want her. If I were Chosa Dei."

"And me?" she asked. "Am I yours, if you want me?"

Slowly, I shook my head. "I'd never make that choice for you. You've taught me better than that."

A long moment passed. Then, "Let go, Tiger." When I did, she sheathed the sword.

I sat down on our bedding, glad that was over. Too much aqivi for wits confused by new and complex truths. "What I want to know is, how did you drink so much aqivi without passing out?"

Del smiled. "Part of training on Staal-Ysta."

"Training. In drinking?"

She knelt, crossed legs, leaned against the wall. "It is believed liquor makes sword-dancers careless; I have told you that often."

"Yes. Very often. Go on."

"Therefore it is a lesson we must learn before we risk ourselves."

"What?"

"We are made to drink through the night. Then again through the next day."

"All night--and all day?"

"Yes."

"Hoolies, you must have been sick!"

"That is the point."

"To make you sick?"

"To make us so sick we have no desire to drink again."

"But--you drank. Tonight."

"Drunkenness destroys balance."

"That's one of the things."

"So we are made drunk. Several times each year of our training, to increase our tolerance. So that should we drink too much, we do not lose the dance."

I thought about it. Twisted as it was, it made a kind of sense. "I've been drinking a lot of years... what about my tolerance?"

"Mine was perfected through discipline. Control. Yours--is merely yours, and subject to certain weaknesses in self-control."

"Northern pompousness." I thought about it some more. "So all that business about being able to drink more than me ..." I let it trail off.

"I can," Del said softly.

I smiled, smug. "But I can piss farther."

She froze, and then she thawed. "I will forfeit that victory."

"Good." I stood up. "Now why don't you get some sleep while I go check on the horses?"

"I can go with you."

I smiled. "I know you're not drunk, bascha. But I did hit you pretty hard, and I'm betting your head hurts."

She put her hand to her jaw. "It does. I wasn't expecting that." Brows slanted downward.

"I should repay you for it."

"You will," I declared. "With your tongue, if not your fist." I smiled, blunting it. "Get some sleep, bascha." I headed toward the curtain. "Oh--one more thing ..."

Del lifted brows.

"What in hoolies possessed you to challenge that Punja-mite?"

"Which one?"

"The rich one. The one who wanted to buy you."

"Oh. Him." She scowled. "He made me very angry."

I eyed her suspiciously. "You were enjoying yourself."

Del grinned. "Yes."

"Go to sleep." I turned.

"Tiger?"

I paused, turned back. "What?"

Del's eyes were steady. "If you drew a binding circle to keep Chosa Dei in, why did you not leave your sword?"

"My sword?" And then I understood. "I could have."

"And Chosa would have been trapped."

I nodded.

Del frowned blackly. "Is that not what we're trying to do? Find a way to keep him trapped?"

I nodded again. "There is a way. I found it. My jivatma is the key."

Blue eyes blazed. Her words were carefully measured, as was her emphasis. "Then why not simply do it and be done with this foolishness?"

"Because," I answered simply.

"Because? Because what?"

I smiled sadly. "I'd have to stay in the circle."

"You--?"

"He's in me, bascha. There's more to do now than discharge a sword--there's also me to discharge."

Del's face went white. "Oh, hoolies..." she murmured.

"I thought you might see it my way." I turned back and went out of the room.

Twenty-seven

I didn't go to check on the horses. I went to see the old man.

Mehmet's aketni had set up camp in what had become the caravan quarter. Originally it had been a sprawling bazaar, in the days when Quumi was bustling, and caravans had encamped outside the city. But as Quumi's strength and presence faded, borjuni took to preying on caravans and travelers outside the walls. The bazaar, slowly deserted as Quumi died, altered purpose. Now it housed small caravans on the way to Harquhal and the North.

The sunbleached, dome-canopied wagons were easy to find, even in starlight and the crescent moon's dim luminescence. I made my way across the dust-layered, open-air bazaar and went looking for the hustapha's wagon.

In his typical uncanny way, the old man was waiting for me.

Or else he was simply awake, and made it look that way.

He was alone, seated on the ground on his cushion at the back of his wagon.

Dun-colored danjacs, dyed silver and saffron by pale light, were hobbled a distance away, whuffling and snuffling in dust as they lipped up grain and fodder. Immense, tapered ears flicked this way and that; frazzled tails snapped a warning to inquisitive insects.

Bright black eyes glittered as I came to stand before him. "Did you see this?" I asked.

"Me coming here?"

He smiled, stretching wide the wrinkled lips accustomed to folding unimpeded upon a toothless mouth.

I knelt down, drew my knife, drew patterns in the packed dirt of the bazaar. Not words; I can't read or write. Not even runes, though I have some understanding of those. Nor symbols, either, denoting water, or blessing, or warning.

Just--lines. Some straight, some curving, some with intersections. And then I put away my knife and looked at the old man.

For some time he didn't even look at the drawings. He just stared at me, into my eyes, as if he read my mind. I knew he couldn't do that--well, maybe he could; but a sandcaster usually only reads sand--so I assumed he was looking for something else.

Some sort of sign. A confirmation. Maybe acknowledgment. But I didn't know what to give him, or even if I could.

At last he looked at my drawings. He studied them a long moment, moving eyes only as he followed the lines. Then he leaned down, wheezing, and slapped the flat of his fragile, palsied hand into the middle. It left a cloudy, fuzzy-edged print that obscured most of the patterns. Then he took his hand away and drew a line across his brow.

Which told me a whole lot of nothing.

Or maybe a lot of something; the gesture in his aketni referred to the jhihadi.

I drew in an exquisitely deep breath, filling my head with air. "Am I the jhihadi?"

He stared back at me: an old, shriveled man with a streak of grit across his forehead.

"If I am," I persisted, "what in hoolies do I do? I'm a sword-dancer, not a holy man...

not a messiah with the ability to change sand to grass!" I paused, arrested, thinking about alternate possibilities. And feeling silly for it. "Or--is it supposed to be changed to glass?"

Black eyes glittered. In accented Desert he told me his aketni comported itself solely in expectation of Iskandar's prophecy coming true.

Ah, yes. Iskandar. The so-called jhihadi who got himself kicked in the head, and died before he could do any of the miraculous things he said he'd do.

Of course, before he died he also said he'd come back, one way or another. Apparently, if Jamail--in his Oracle guise--was correct, it didn't necessarily mean Iskandar himself would be back, but someone assuming his role.

I had no plans to assume anyone's role, thank you very much.

Without warning, consciousness flickered. Memories bubbled haphazardly to the surface of my awareness: alien, eerie, sideways memories painting pictures of a land as yet lush and green and fertile. I recognized it with effort, blotting out my own far different version: Chosa's recollections of the South before the disagreement with his brother.

Thanks to Chosa, I "recalled" very well Shaka Obre declaring he would find a way to restore it--he would find someone to restore it--no matter what Chosa did.

And it was possible he had, in Iskandar the jhihadi. No one knew much about him, except the city was named after him, and his own horse kicked him in the head--which is enough to get most messiahs remembered, irrespective of holiness. So Iskandar the man might not have been a man, not as we reckon men.

After all, no one really knows how magic works, where it comes from, or how it can be controlled. Not entirely. Not absolutely. They just borrow pieces of it, and hope they do it right.

Which meant, odd as it sounds, Iskandar might have been a construct, an aspect of Shaka's magic, meant to restore the South by changing the sand to grass.

Construct. A man Made for something, as Chosa Dei Made things. It seemed entirely possible Shaka Obre could Make things, too, even men--

I stood up abruptly, shaken to the marrow. A whole new possibility unfolded itself before me. And I didn't like it one bit.

"No," I declared.

The hustapha sat on his cushion, grit glittering on his brow.

"No," I repeated, with every bit of determination in my Chosa-remade body.

The old man shrugged, renouncing his intention to tell me anything.

Or was it he didn't know?

Breath came faster. "I'm a man," I said urgently. "A man man, not a construct. Not a conjured thing--"

Mehmet came around the wagon and stopped, staring at me in mild surprise, which altered quickly enough as he took in the tableau. His expression reproached me for taxing the old man.

"What is a jhihadi?" I asked Mehmet intently. "Messiah?--or magicked man conjured by a wizard for reasons of his own?"

He was scandalized. "The jhihadi is the most holy of all!"

"Not 'the' jhihadi--a jhihadi," I clarified in something approaching desperation. It hurt to breathe through the constriction of chest and throat. "Do you know where one comes from?"

Mehmet shrugged. "Does it matter? A past is not necessary--only the present and future.

What he does is important, not what he is."

I swallowed painfully. Then turned on my heel and strode rapidly away from them both.

Away from the possibility--no, the impossibility--I didn't want to acknowledge.

I broke one of the most important rules a sword-dancer can ever have beaten into his brain--and body--by tongue-lashing, wooden practice swords, and real blades.

That is: not to be so distracted by your thoughts, no matter how chaotic, that you neglect to take note of your surroundings.

Especially if those surroundings decide for some unknown reason to become hostile.

Which my surroundings did.

To my pronounced--and painful--regret.

I never even made it out of the bazaar into the sidestreets, alleys, and passageways. Not completely, at any rate; I got about halfway, just on the verge of trading open space for the confinement of warrenlike streets, when a whole army of men converged upon me.

Well, maybe not an army. It just felt like one.

Maybe half.

Usually, when you get ambushed in a city, it's by one or two--or three or four--opportunistic thieves who want your money. If they're that open about everything, they arrive one by one like gathering wolves, trying to intimidate by numbers and attitude. It works with a lot of people. But with a man trained as a sword-dancer, such tactics serve only to give him the time to unsheathe his blade. And once there's a weapon in the hands of a trained, skilled sword-dancer, there's not a whole hoolies of a lot the attackers can do. Because usually one of them loses a hand, an arm--maybe even a head, if he insists--and the others generally decide they have something better to do.

Usually. But these friendly folk were not thieves. At least, I don't think they were. They didn't use thieflike tactics. They just descended, en masse, swarming over me all at once.

I wound up smack on my back in the middle of the street, spitting sand, dung, blood, and cursing.

Lying on my sheathed sword, I might add.

Hoolies, how embarrassing.

Once I was there, arms and legs spread-eagled, they were actually rather restrained. A few kicks, a couple of snatches, pinches, rabbit punches; no more.

Until someone quietly reminded them I was neither predictable nor to be trusted, and that if they lost me, none of them would survive. That he would have them killed, if I didn't do it myself.

Which did a good job of convincing them they ought not to waste any more time, and then someone whacked me in the side of the head with something very hard.

I woke up in the dimness, swearing, aware my kidneys were killing me. And my head, but that was nothing new. The kidneys, though; that's pretty coldblooded. Also effective: a man doesn't feel much like struggling when every move tells him it'll hurt like hoolies, and make him piss blood the next couple of days.

Inside. A room of some kind. It was dry, musty, and dusty, stinking of rats and insects and stale urine. I seemed to be near a wall or some sort of partition, because I sensed a blockage behind me. I lay on my right hip and shoulder, bundled up like a rug merchant's wares. From behind me came a dim, nacreous glow. Sickly yellow-green. It illuminated very little, but I caught a glimpse of something--or someone--across the room, hidden in deeper shadows.