Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (12 page)

       
“What was his name?” Imre found himself asking. “The man we fought.”

       
Ariosa spoke solemnly, and when Naldo translated, Imre felt a chill despite the heat. “The Theca will say this and no more: the dead have no names.”

       
Bellico gestured to his son, the linguist, and the boy leapt to his feet. He saluted Imre by bowing at the waist and clapping his stone fist at his breast. “My name is Eroico,” he said in accented Adala, the Jinan tongue.

       
 
“Imre Usaym Balgas.”

       
The boy whistled. “All three are yours? Do all in your clan have this many names?”

       
“Very nearly.”

       
The cragger boy found this immensely funny and said so before explaining the price Imre was judged to pay. “Work when you are told, speak when you are told, and walk humbly until your debt is paid.”

       
“In other words, be a slave.”

       
The boy nodded, ingenuous. “Do you pledge?”

       
Imre watched Naldo as the surgeons, at Bellico’s command, appeared with a litter and began arranging Naldo upon it. The old man clutched his blade shard like a relic, but showed not the slightest interest in this boy speaking their home tongue. Naldo was prone to flights of whimsy, could spend hours studying the petals of a single blossom, the whole time deaf and blind to the world. And this was piece of a cragger’s sword, after all.

       
Then what is this dread I’m feeling?
Imre wondered. He wiped the sweat from his brow then held up his own shard with one hand and knelt in the grass. “If your father will spare the life of Arbiter Naldo Randal and treat him well, I will pledge my wit, my sword, and my strength to Bellico and his clan until he deems the debt paid.”

       
Eroico frowned. “There is no bargain. There is a choice: pay or sing.”

       
“
Quet, Eroico
,” Bellico said. The cragger boy answered his father, and while they spoke, the late day sun slapped heat down upon their heads. Imre’s stomach growled.

       
“We accept your pledge,” Eroico said finally. “The Sage has made Father curious, and will be his guest. You are to serve as debtor and work among the slaves daily. And...”—the boy frowned, thinking, before—”oh, yes, and you are to speak our tongue within three months.”

       
“Understood,” Imre said. Three months. Three months ago he’d been planning his breakout show in Adalheid, an eighty-puppet comedy with the Dry Well Sands Choir. The thought of chatteling about for these people even that long made Imre sick to his stomach. How long before Bellico was satisfied? How long before one of the craggers broke his skull or cleaved his spine or dealt some other wound that wouldn’t heal? How long before the traitorous cities of the League sent their dogs sniffing around this place? A dozen worries swarmed his thoughts, but he swallowed them all down and kept his countenance.

       
“You will report to me daily for your duties, starting now,” the boy told him. “Follow me. We first find you living quarters.”

       
“And what about her?” Imre asked with a nod toward the sullen wench rising from her seat. She caught his stare, and matched it with her own.

       
“My sister?” Eroico cocked a sly smile as he led Imre from the garden. “Be on your guard, peregrin. I think she is in love.”

* * *

Chorus

       
Imre felt his throat wound stretch and mend even as Eroico stabbed at him, driving forward like a bronze and sapphire arrow. With a cross-step Imre caught Eroico’s thrust along the curved edge of his hymn. The two blades scraped and shrieked—Imre fighting to keep his balance—but in less than a blink Eroico had sprung away, bounced to the left, and was speeding in again. Imre had time only to replant his feet before Eroico feinted then leapt into Imre’s blind. Cloth and flesh tore as a line of fire opened across the back of Imre’s leg. But against the pain he pivoted hard and managed to bump Eroico, sending him stumbling to the turf. From there it was a simple step and slash and he’d opened a red welt across Eroico’s shoulder.

       
“A song and two kisses!” boomed across the yard. Imre startled and spun to see Bellico standing upon the dais, stone arm raised to the cheering assembly. “Continue?” the Maestro asked him.

       
Imre’s heart was pounding as Eroico righted himself with a sportive grin and trotted back to stand near his father. A song and two kisses? Would it only be two cuts? If this was true, the firstblood power of his House would more than suffice: he’d have moments to rest between duels, moments to heal. As Eroico told it, Imre was facing a long, long day. But just two cuts each....

       
“Continue,” Imre said, his breast swelling with hope.

       
A raven-haired Silici stepped from the front of the assembly, and in an instant the cheers doubled in volume. “
Rado!
Rado!
Rado!
” called the Baremescre peers.

       
Imre’s hope faltered.

       
His name was Glissando, and Imre knew his prowess from the campaign in the lesser isles. A distant cousin of Ariosa’s, he was tall, even for a Baremescre, and thickly muscled. His most obvious feature was his
vesti ferre
—its color a riot of burnt oranges and golds and eye-searing reds, as iron glowing fresh from the forge; its stone surface smooth and unblemished; and from shoulder to wrist flared a serrated crest standing out like an oasis bird’s plume. Glissando was the only Silici Imre had encountered to have named his hymn.
Rado
, he called the toothed crimson blade. “Scrape.”

       
Glissando came ready, his hymn gripped firm in his left hand, his right clenched into a fist with that terrible crest turned outward. He saluted.

       
Imre returned.

       
And in a flash Glissando was upon him.

* * *

Verse

       
As long as Imre lived among the Baremescre, he would fight sinister like a Baremescre, and he’d always been more comfortable with a curved blade in his left. Somehow the shard of Dewberry’s sword knew this and grew fitly. The edge of a Silici child’s hymn took many years to develop: Imre’s had grown within a week. Battle scars on most blades required a season or more to smooth: Imre’s would often disappear within hours. His hymn, black as a midnight sea, had leapt from a foot-long shard to a sleek killing weapon in less time than it took him to learn all the Silici names for stone.

       
In the four-hundred-fifty-two days since his pledge to the Baremescre, he’d fought on average three songs per day. One-thousand-three-hundred-fifty-seven songs total. Two-hundred-six of them had been lessons, thrashings to curb his wanton staring or his spitting or his mangling of the Silici tongue. One-hundred-thirteen were chance encounters with surly, half-stone strangers venting wraths that had naught to do with him. Three times he’d raised his blade against other slaves, and of those duels he felt ashamed. But the remaining one-thousand-thirty-five, in those Imre spilt his blood for the honor of his House. He remembered every detail from every slash and parry. He was a better swordsman now than his great-uncle Gideon had ever been. And still, against the Baremescre, Imre had never won a single match.

       
One-thousand-thirty-
six, Imre thought from on his back.

       
The Silici man standing over him held a three-pronged hymn in a closed fist. The prongs jutted from between his fingers, razor-sharp, like claws.

       
These Baremescre—they wielded their blades preternaturally, responding to Imre’s slashes and parries
before
his muscles twitched. He couldn’t understand such skill, and for that he was labeled a deaf-mute. To the Baremescre, this made him about the measure of a halfwit, a mockery he would not tolerate.

       
“Be warned!” spat Three-Prong, the latest to mutter that slur. “And harass me no more!”

       
Imre said nothing as he stood, wiped the dirt and blood from his chest, recovered his hymn, and rejoined the queue of slaves that meandered across the front of the Hall of Elders. They greeted him with nods weighed slow by hollow-eyed fatigue, the mark of men who spent their days hauling sea salt and pots of night soil, clearing roads, and plowing the fields with only the strength of their backs. One handed Imre his water pan, another his rag.

       
Three-Prong, consternation knotting the flesh about his eyes, jammed his hymn into its sling and stalked away.

       
Imre smiled. Then he settled against the Hall’s cool marble front and waited for his turn to wash feet.

       
The Baremescre peers crisscrossed the Piazza in ones and twos, rolling their lean shoulders and oiling the dust from their
vesti
with good-natured weariness. On occasion a song victim was carried past the heroically poised sculptures that fronted the surgeon’s station, though at this hour these were few and far between. Far more bore the tools and callused hands of builders or the dirty fingernails of gardeners, or the clay-stained linens of the myriad sculptors that seemed to Imre an infestation amidst this stone-obsessed clan. The Baremescre held combat above all, but labor was a near second. And this was a time for work. Not even the elders were exempt.

       
As one of them, dusty from the day’s labor, climbed the foot-worn stairs to enter the hall, the next two slaves in queue entered at his heels armed with water pan and washing rag. The routine ran on as the Hall filled and the queue shrank, until at last Imre followed a gray-haired woman through the yawning entryway that was shaded by the fragrant leaves of enormous potted gum trees.

       
“This afternoon finds you hale, peregrin,” declared a low silken voice.

       
Imre stopped in his tracks, water sloshing over the lip of his pan, for Ariosa stood in the entryway waiting for him.

       
Imre bowed, thumped, answered, “It does.”

       
“I am relieving you of your duty for the moment,” she said. “We have something to discuss.” She exchanged words with the gray-haired woman then replaced Imre with another slave from the queue outside. When that was settled, she led Imre across the Piazza to a shaded corner beside a fountain.

       
Ariosa stretched herself across one of the Baremescre’s ubiquitous hard stone benches. “My clansmen say you harass them daily, peregrin. Challenges at every turn. Explain.”

       
Imre forced himself to meet her stare. “Though I am a near-man and the property of your honored husband, the right to sing is mine as a hymn-bearer.” It was Ariosa who had given Imre his hymn, so it was Ariosa who gave him the privilege to challenge whom he would.

       
Her laugh was throaty. “Indeed, peregrin. You know your rights.”

       
Imre bowed at the compliment. “Your clansmen have been fine teachers of Silici custom.”
You brutal bastards
.

       
“Good,” Ariosa said. “Those lessons will serve you well when you sail in the morning to war.”

       
Her dark eyes weighed him, steady as deep pools. Imre met their gaze, though it was with a dry mouth that he replied, “I was not aware—”

       
“The Maestro decided only within the hour. You will join the near-man compliment that supports our clan on the warpath. Be at the family villa at dawn. You are excused from your duties until then.”

       
She propped her chin against her indigo fist. Her flesh hand settled on the hilt of her hymn. Imre was dismissed.