The Gauntlet and the Burning Blade, page 10
Floré let the envelope drop and clutched the silk. Peering at the string she could see it was knotted complexly, a dozen turns… a hangman’s noose. Floré shivered, and she pictured the noose hanging over the inn in Ossen-Tyr. The inn where I lost my sword. She could picture the leader of the gang who made their base there, a woman in a blue dress with a cruel mouth and a tumble of red hair. A woman I beat into the dirt. She stared at the boy.
‘Who gave you this?’ she said, and he shrugged, feeling at his shoulder where she had grabbed him. Floré knew this could only mean trouble. But trouble for my return, she thought, not for now.
‘Fella,’ he said and Floré blinked and stared up the quayside. The docks were silent in the morning light, the only sound her own breath and the lapping of waves and the creaking of ropes and wood. Floré bit her lip and dug a gold coin from her belt pouch and pushed it into the boy’s hand, ten times the amount he should be getting for delivering a simple message.
‘Buy a warm hat,’ she said, and grabbing her bag of gear from the dock she stalked up the gangway and onto Basira’s Dance.
*
‘I just sail,’ Captain Muirgainas said when Floré introduced herself. ‘I sail you to Riven, I wait, I sail back. You keep your soldiers away from the sheets and sails, and we’ll do fine. No pirates this far west – nowhere to go after Undal City but the Stormwall and the blight-waters, and pirates won’t risk the reefs between here and Iskander. Heard about the boats not coming back. The Dance will outrun anything this side of Carob’s Strait, and we know paths through the reefs that the Undal haven’t dreamt of. We run fast; we run quiet.’
The man was surly and dour-faced and Floré was more than happy not to get involved with the crew of Basira’s Dance. As the ship left Undal she stood at the rear railing and watched the city walls recede. She couldn’t remember if the back of the ship was named the bow or the stern. She had been out in the small boats on Loch Hassel a handful of times, once to check sabotaged fishing traps in a dispute between neighbours, once to cross quick to an outlying farm where screams had been heard – a woman beating her wife bloody with an iron pan, it turned out, after she caught her with one of the farmhands. The waters of Loch Hassel were calm and blue, not this iron-cold nightmare of white-tipped waves and endless horizons.
The rolling of the ship in the waves made her stomach ache and she was gripping the railing hard, but the whole world still seemed to sway. Yselda stood a few paces from her looking similarly troubled, but Cuss was at the front of the ship with a few of the corporals, no doubt listening to their stories as they bragged about the rotstorm. The ship passed the old Ferron lighthouse just outside the harbour, a mirror to the one in Dal a few miles up the coast closer to home. This one the Undal sailors called False Friend. Like the lighthouse at Dal it rose from the waves, a sheer column of seamless black stone a hundred feet straight up. It was the same dark seamless stone as the Ferron overseer forts, including the fort that made up the foundation of Protector’s Keep; the same dark stone as the Ferron slave roads that Undal still used for trade with Isken. The same dark stone the orbs are made of, Floré realised. Of all Undal perhaps only she and Tomas had been inside one of those orbs of light and lived to tell, but they were the same seamless dark stone as the lighthouse, with a crystal strip bisecting horizontally, the interior a mix of metal and crystal and stone that should be too heavy to exist, let alone fly.
Floré stared at the lighthouse. It still called true of a safe passage to harbour, but a century back it had acted as a beacon to the Isken navy when they had assaulted the city under the rule of their now dethroned princes. A hundred years may pass, but the Undal could hold a grudge. A hundred foot up that shaft of dark stone was an opaque glass orb that shone all night with a warm yellow light. In the cool of the morning, the glass or crystal of the orb was dim. Floré shook her head. Tomas knew all of what she knew, and likely more. The mysteries of the orbs were not her mission. Her focus needed to be sharper. Marta is all that matters.
The air seemed even colder out there at sea, as the coast fell away from them. Floré pulled her new commander’s cloak close – the shoulder was trimmed in fur, the interior lined with thick fleece. Marta’s fingers had pulled at the fleece that morning when she said farewell, when she handed her daughter to the orphans’ barracks. The Stormguard had always taken orphans, given them hearth and home, trained them into soldiers for the protectorate. Floré felt a flush of shame. Marta had lost her father, and now her mother was abandoning her. Floré knew it had to be done but she could not convince Marta of that – Marta so young, so frail.
Whitestaff Mallendroit had promised her to check in on her every day. The children’s barracks were painted in bright pastel colours, yellow and blue, and some children played games even so early in the morning. Floré had forgotten the children playing games. The orphan barracks in Undal were a far cry from the austere barracks she had called home as a child, but the games felt the same. Run for the bear; spear in the mud. As she sailed from Undal City, she remembered Marta sullen and silent in the arms of a member of the keep staff, and the other silent and sullen children in the barracks beyond – new orphans of the fighting in the Northern Marches, or the attacks of the orbs before that. Only a few had been playing games, those who had been there long enough to forget where they came from.
Will she forget me?
Floré let her tears flow. There was nobody to see them save Yselda, and the girl seemed lost in her own troubles. As the cold bit at her fingers Floré reached beneath her heavy red cloak and unhooked the gauntlets from her belt. New gauntlets. A gift from Starbeck, wrapped up with the sword, passed to her by the old quartermaster. She pulled the gauntlets on. They were black steel, truly black, and where most Stormguard gauntlets had a ridge to clip in a silver coin in case of a last desperate fight against a demon, these gauntlets had an entirely silver knuckle ridge protruding outward, and on the back of each fist the claw of Anshuka was embossed proudly: ᛘ. The gloves below the metalwork were a supple red leather.
Floré sighed. She hated them. She liked her own gauntlets, the gauntlets that had seen her through storm and strife – no ornamentation, only pure utility. These were for show. She had no trust that the silver ridge would last more than one fight. Her own gauntlets were at the bottom of her kitbag.
With her hands covered, Floré wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve and checked on Yselda.
‘All fair, Private?’ she asked, and the girl came to from her stupor with a few blinks.
‘Aye, Sergeant. Captain. Commander! Sorry.’
Floré smiled at her. ‘Nash and Esme would be proud of you, Yselda,’ she said, ‘your parents as well. The commandos are the best of the Stormguard.’
Yselda shrugged awkwardly, her fingers running against the trim of her tabard. Her new gauntlets were hooked on her belt.
‘I’m not sure I deserve it,’ she said at last. Floré eyed her up and down. Yselda had ever been her most dutiful cadet but the girl had seen horrors in the last Claw Winter, her family taken by the wild wolves that had descended to Hookstone forest from the Cimber hills. She had seen worse since then, her adopted family lost in the orb attack on Hasselberry. There is fear in her, she thought, perhaps too much.
‘Put on your steel,’ Floré said, tapping the girl’s gauntlets, ‘and remember the knot on your hilt. It is time to learn the Gauntlet. Benazir will show you some of her tactics and strategies of the Balanced Blade, but one without the other is useless. You need the strength to back up your cunning.’
The two spent the morning going through defensive and offensive use of the gauntlets and the new longsword at Yselda’s hip. Cuss joined them when he saw what they were about, and the handful of corporals not set to watching the seas as well. Floré knew that, since the burning of Urforren and the campaign before, her own actions in the Stormguard had become something of a tall tale to the newer recruits. They did not work on footwork or sparring, with the roll of the deck below them, but stances and posture.
‘Is it true you flew an orb?’ one of the corporals asked as she corrected his knife grip, and the rest fell silent.
‘If you’re stabbing someone in the chest, hold the blade horizontally – it’s less likely to stick on a rib that way,’ she responded, then scratched the scar below her right eye. It was itching. They were heading west along the coast, hugging close so the reefs wouldn’t bother them. Once they were in line with the island of Iskander they would head south. She presumed the captain knew some waymark to pick his way through the brutal reefs. It was a longer course than the other ships had taken, a course that seemed at first to lead them away – but none of the other ships returned. High above, the clouds were a pattern of herringbone blowing from west to east, herringbone against a pale blue. Across the deck sailors dutifully fussed with ropes and sails and all sorts, all of them wrapped up tight against the cold.
‘Sir?’ the corporal said. Floré drew her own dagger and showed him the correct grip for stabbing.
‘Don’t just thrust,’ she said, ‘use their weight against them. If you can get them falling onto your blade, all the better.’
She demonstrated with a piece of wood in her hand, pulling the corporal down towards her, getting her front leg amongst his to scupper his attempts at righting his balance. They went through the motion a few times, and then she had him try it on her. The dull piece of wood had been slotted into a hole in the railing for no purpose she could see, but it was roughly the right length.
The next corporal along was a thin woman with pale skin and a tight braid of brown hair. Her eyes were a watery blue, her mouth wide. Floré nodded to the woman and she dropped into a knife-fighting stance. Floré circled her looking for flaws. With her foot she tapped the woman’s left toes.
‘Turn them out a little further for balance,’ she said. The woman nodded and complied then came back to a standing position.
‘I heard you flew an orb, crashed some other orbs, killed a dozen crow-men, and saved Anshuka all by yourself, sir,’ the woman said with an almost hidden smirk. Cocky, Floré thought, but was I any different? The Stormguard commandos were the best of the best, and they faced hell in the rotstorm. If she had made it to corporal, the woman was probably right to be confident. Floré stared out at the sea to the south. The water was dark save for white-capped waves that seemed always to press against the ship. Floré turned and stared at the woman until the other’s gaze dropped, then she leaned forward and straightened the corporal’s tunic and tugged her gauntlets tight.
‘Nonsense,’ she said quietly, though she was sure the other commandos training with them could all hear her. ‘I wasn’t alone. Cuss and Yselda were with me.’
With that she gave a curt nod to the assembled troops and descended from the rear raised deck. Is it the aftcastle? Is that what it’s called? The sailor at the helm stared after her as she left, and as soon as she dropped out of sight she heard the excited chatter of the corporals. She focused on her breathing, and allowed herself to think of Marta. Would you like to sail, little one, across the ocean?
Standing for a long moment in front of the closed door of her cabin, Floré closed her eyes and pictured the beach north of their house in Hasselberry, through the woods, the old rough pine trunk that served as a bench as they swam and played and built castles. In her mind it was crystal clear. Marta slept on a thick blanket and Floré lay where the sand met the forest grass with her head on Janos’s leg, staring up at clouds above, no sound but the lapping of water and the fingertips of the towering pines lingering on one another as they swayed in the breeze, that faintest rustle of contact.
*
A day before Ashbringer entered Undal City she repeated her ritual, singing to the melody underlying the world, asking it a question. She sought the pattern of the blade, Varratim’s blade. When last she had sought a vague suggestion of this the direction had come to her, but now she felt nothing, only cold. She had nestled herself high in an oak tree, a tree left by the Undal in one of their fields in the farmland surrounding the city. They left a solitary tree in each field – when it was used as pasture, the animals could shelter below its boughs. Ashbringer had thought it sad, a tree with no community around it, but as she dropped her mind into the pattern of the world and pressed herself against the trunk she felt the strength in the tree. It was still connected, root to soil, leaf and twig to air. It was still part of the cycle and the myriad dance of pattern.
Ashbringer let her focus deepen, let her senses expand until she could see no specifics in the pattern but great currents cutting across the world. Undal City to her south was a tangled morass, a village a mile west a smaller mote of complexity. A herd of deer in a copse a few miles north. A flock of sheep closer, and stray points of light, the creatures of the night. If she focused, any one of those would have an incredible complexity to it. The more you look at something the more you will always see, a recursive observational loop she had to avoid lest she spend the night focusing on a ladybug. The wheat in the field around her faded to a gentle haze, but she could have spent a day studying a single stalk. Wherever you look, she thought, smiling, there is something further to learn.
She drew her eye further and further back and pushed to the limit of her senses and thought of the knife, that oddity in the skein. She focused on it, let the part of her mind that found patterns, the legacy of predation, hunt it down. If she looked at a tree twitching in the breeze her eyes would find the squirrel sat still on a branch; this was the same, on a much grander scale. The dagger was an oddity in the skein, and she would seek it. Where does it come from, so different from everything else? She could not begin to guess.
She did not find it. She could not feel it. She had almost closed off her connection but she felt a familiar presence, somewhere in the tangle of Undal City. Deathless. High in her oak, Ashbringer had pressed her palms together and blown out a long breath. Tullen One-Eye is in Undal City. The mad skein-wreck of the Ferron Empire, perhaps the greatest manipulator of the skein to ever live. Anshuka had cursed him to watch his people fall, to wander for eternity. He seemed unable to interfere, only able to wander and watch, unchanging, undying. Her charge was to kill him, as Anshuka bade her ancestor, but no blade or spell would bring him harm. Anshuka tests my faith, she thought, and I must be true. In the mire of Undal City she could not sense anything specific – only that somewhere in that throng, Tullen One-Eye was hiding.
Ashbringer entered Undal City the next night by the northern gate. The forest gate, they called it, though trees were in scarce supply. She had slipped boots over her feet so close to the city, and long gloves to hide her blue skin. She looked strange still, but a tall willowy woman clad in a dark cloak and carrying a pack and staff was not enough to warrant comment. It was cold enough that her scarf and hood looked like measures against the bite of the air, rather than attempts to hide her serrated teeth, the sigils scarred on her flesh, the taper of her ears. The Undal would think her a mad barbarian who ate human flesh and read minds. The thought made her smile.
When she reached the looming gate the guards were checking entrants in a random manner, opening carts and bags of any they thought looked suspicious. The gates were tall and wide and heavy, banded wood and iron below a rampart of stone and well-lit braziers. Everywhere there were Stormguard, patrolling. Ashbringer hung close to a cart and then cut behind one guard as he questioned its owner, leaning heavily on her staff and affecting a limp. The staff was simply her bow unstrung, the silver of its wood dulled with muck from the road. Her bristling quiver was slung beneath her cloak along with her broken sword and one of the wands taken from Varratim’s corpse – a faceted gem of blue at the end of a simple metal rod.
Entering the city, Ashbringer saw the truth of the refugees. At the forest gate, in what had been the market square when last she visited, an impromptu tent-town had sprung, and people gathered around communal cookfires. She could hear children crying, could see wounds and fear. Stormguard were there in the severe grey of the City Watch and the vibrant blue of the Lancers, distributing food and warm clothing and blankets. Ashbringer stepped lightly from the market square and, along the avenues, the evening streetlamps flickered against the dark and cold. She felt cold stone through the thin soles of her boots and she walked fast.
The city had a pattern but Ashbringer loved the trees of the forest, and couldn’t but pity those poor creatures straining for light and space amidst storeys of industry and the tumult of human life. She loved the calm of the forest, the exultation of the moor. The pattern of the city was a febrile thing, pulsing with life and chaos. The pattern of the forest was a quiet beauty, a moment measured in seconds and centuries. I will never live in a city, she thought, and laughed to herself. She knew as an Orubor she would never truly live anywhere outside of the wood surrounding Anshuka’s sleeping form. She might leave, but ever it called to her.
Making her way through the northern ward of the town Ashbringer stopped for a moment at the base of the castrum, the protectorate’s skein-mage centre for training and research. Eight years before, she had broken in there and spent a long week living in the attic, perusing tomes of research she thought might unlock the secret of killing Deathless Tullen One-Eye. There had been nothing to help. Most skein-wrecks seemed to heal better than other humans, but they still died, and normally if someone was in the process of murdering them, they certainly made sure. She passed the castrum with a little bow and made her way to Protector’s Keep seeking the advice of the new Orubor ambassador there, Highmother Ash.
She did not make it.
She was still many streets distant when the orb of light came. It flew in low, from the north, a brilliant white light pouring from it in all directions, obscuring the form beneath. It was the size of a lumber wagon, an ovoid of light that cut through the sky as fast as any bird but unperturbed by currents of wind. Ashbringer heard the screams around her, and the few people on the street so late began to run for cover. She peered upward. The orb traced a lazy arc around the city then began to dance over it, cutting back and forth.
