Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (83 page)

Perhaps that anger betrayed him, for the first lesson taught was that there were two things that must never precede a killing: pleasure or anger.

His brother turned.

His brother.

"Tallos," he said, because he could not help himself. And Tallos said, "Kallatin," as his arm left his side.

He had been from his brother long enough, and there was no like longing in Tallos; there was hatred, anger, a bitterness that, living as he had always lived, had had no chance to fade. Not as Kallandras' bitterness had done, exposed to time, to sun, to a life outside of the
Kovaschaü
. A life he had never wanted; a life he did not want.

And did.

He was in motion, and if the flying metal blade struck him, it drew scant blood. First blood.

He offered no other words. Tallos was the Lady's. Kallandras was less and more.
After what they did to us
, he wanted to cry out,
how can you serve the Lord of Night? How can you serve His purpose? She all but made her vow
!

But there would be no answer to that question.

Out of this, out of this night there would be a death. A death, that was all.

He called upon his reserves; Tallos called his. They had both used their training this day, and their energy, and they both knew that behind stone walls perforated by lead and glass, three men would soon be watching.

The master bard called upon his voice.

The
Kovaschaü
, expecting it, called upon his will; the voice was stronger. It slowed him.

Kallandras struck; Tallos parried. Second blood, first for Kallandras.

He had not put the whole of his voice into the fight. Could not, more fool he. For no other necessary death would he fall into the trap of honor.

He fell here. Blood fell, too; his.

And if he died, this brother would leave him, fallen refuse; he would be trapped within his corpse, no brother to guide the Lady to him, no dance along the hidden star to light her way. No Lady to return to him his name, and to see him to her halls or the halls of Mandaros.

Tallos was three years his elder, and a master of the second tier; so, too, was Kallandras. They seemed born and bred in different lands; where Kallandras was fair in color, Tallos was as Southern as the Serra Alina. As hawklike, as merciless. But they had both been taken from Southern streets.

Blade-dancers played their games, in the South, danced on death's edge. Were any watching, had any witnessed, they would have thought that Kallandras and his brother
were
such blade-dancers, for Tallos deigned to draw weapon and close. Hard, to speak with the bardic voice when every breath you drew was necessary; harder, when the voice could never—never quite—be made as instinctive a weapon as a sword. There was a power in it that did not lend itself to death. Even by Kallandras.

Tallos was no fool; the deaths at the broken window were deaths he had promised—but unlike Estravim so very long ago, he made no attempt to throw his life away completing the task that had been promised to the Lady. A single death, and he might have.

But he might not have.

The
Kovaschaü
were human in their fashion.

This death was not a death that had been promised to the Lady; it was a death that had been promised to the brotherhood, by the brotherhood, decades past. Tallos would not forget. As Kallandras could not.

These two, they had trained together. Worked together. Taken flight on their first—and only—task together, as brothers were allowed to do when they had not yet been deemed capable enough.

Kallandras remembered.

He started to offer the ritual greeting, the respect due a brother. At least the last
Kovaschaü
he had met had given that much. He snapped his arm up, and in the night's scant light, gold and silver glinted; the ten-point star that neither man needed to see to understand the presence of. He lifted his sword to draw the sigil and the challenge; to declare his tier, and his ability.

Not so Tallos; not so, a man for whom the betrayal was both collective
and
personal. He came at once, the swing of his arm, the slight doubling of his step, unmistakable. All nicety, all hope for even the convention of the brotherhood here, was gone.

Kallandras replied in kind.

Bound in memories, bound in the anger that comes
only
from memory, their swords struck and slid off one another, strike and slide, strike and slide; timed, as all things were timed—by the heart, the heart's beat, the movement of air into lung: the rhythm that marked their lives.

Ellora was first off the floor.

It wasn't that her hearing was keener—or so she would later say—it was that she loathed the smell of stone. And this close to stone, side of mouth and cheek pressed into its flat, cool surface, air dragged into mouth along its length, she'd argue that it damned well did have a smell.

But she also heard the blades dance.

"Ellora," Bruce said; he and Devran had retreated to a safe place beneath the table. Silly thing—none of the Commanders had thought to carry either crossbow or longbow to a private, if heated, meeting.

They had swords, though. The scabbard of hers made an unpleasant noise as she dragged it up across ground with her. The blade made a different sound as she separated it from scabbard; she held it, knees bent, the sound of a dozen blades filtering in through the broken glass.

"Ellora."

She heard the scrape of chair against stone; it grated. She knew that Bruce was going to be annoyed. Oddly enough, he'd be more annoyed than Devran; Devran ABerriliya—The Berriliya now— expected no less from her, and probably privately hoped she'd get pincushioned for her lack of caution. Her ostensible irresponsibility.

Slowly, she made her way to the windows, cursing the fact that the Kings had enough money to make the damned things so grand— and so very long.

Blood and blood; blood and blood; they exchanged these cuts as lovers exchanged caresses; angry lovers who are not quite distant enough to let go of what they had when what they have is so bitter. They called upon the reserves of their training, not for strength, but for
speed
, burning that reserve in a flare of motion, of movement.

No fight between brothers ever lasted long.

Or rather, no sparring did; how many brothers fought, and how many killed each other?

He was weakened by the morning's fight and the loss of blood; Tallos should have been able to kill him. Should have. But the wind was strong in this small courtyard; leaves were torn from trees out of season, falling in swirls like a green rain, at his whim. He would pay. He would pay for it all.
This
power had come a little too easily.

He could not speak; he desired it, but the price for speech was death. Here, Tallos knew his weaknesses and his strengths, and he had, it seemed, never forgotten them.

Blood and blood: touch and touch.

He thought there might be no distinctive strike, ho final blow; they would whittle each other's lives away in this courtyard, in a battle that showed the bruises of Kallatin's choice, decades past, across both of them.

But he was wrong. -

In mid-strike, Tallos lost his rhythm; his sword flew
back
inexplicably, and Kallandras heard, as if from a great distance, metal striking metal, and the curse, cut short, of a woman's voice.

Heard it at a distance that did not allow him to stop; his sword was in motion; Tallos was in motion; the two connected perfectly.

No last words, even. He found the assassin's heart, and stilled it with the runneled steel of blade. It took a long moment for the body to fall, and in that moment, Kallandras had dropped his sword. His arms were under the arms of his brother, to ease him in his fall.

"I don't think," he heard someone say, and hated her for it, "I've ever seen you fight. Master Bard. You're good."

The Kalakar stood in the moonlight.

Holding his brother under both arms, he acknowledged the compliment with a toss of the head. Acknowledged what lay beneath it as well; suspicion, curiosity.

"Who was he?"

He shrugged. And then he did what he was sworn, by Senniel's oath, not to do.
"If you would, Kalakar, the Kings' Swords should be summoned."

She didn't notice, or didn't appear to, the use of the bardic gift, the laying of compulsion beneath words that were reasonable in their own right. Kallandras
was
a master. In the poor light, she bent, searching the flagstones, and then the tamed wild blooms, for the sword that Tallos. in breaking his rhythm to deflect, had lost his life to.

He could be patient; patience was an art that the
Kovaschaü
worked hard to force their younger brothers to develop—for death required patience, of a sort, and an attention to detail that only the patient ever achieved.

But he could not be patient now, not with this woman, not in this place, the body a demand and a responsibility.

He lifted his brother as she lifted her sword; held him as she sheathed it. "I will send for the Kings," she said, and she left him. Left him for just long enough.

He carried the body into the shadows, cursing her, cursing the Challenge, cursing the crowds that robbed him of the thing he most required. Privacy. Peace.

Framed by the waved curve of broken glass. Commander Bruce Allen watched the master bard leave. "I think it's safe, Devran," he said. "Ellora will join us shortly."

The Berriliya, dour, was silent; Commander Allen laughed. Ellora was a woman who could fall face first into a pigsty and come up with a rose between her teeth—or at least a wholesome meal; she habitually challenged wisdom and common sense as if they were her enemies. It did not always work, but she had never quite been humbled enough to fall prey to the mixture of fear and experience that most men called caution.

No; that was unfair. She was cautious much of the time.

And had there been AKalakar here, they would have served her purpose. But in a room with only two men, neither of whom were under her direct command, she did what she felt she had to do.

Remarkable.

As remarkable as the fact that she had taken the request of the bardic master as if it were an order. He made a note, and kept his own counsel.

He danced.

In a tiny room in Senniel College, a place that defined him, and that he—against his early will—had come to define, there was refuge and privacy. Journeymen crowded the walls, of course, and the hopefuls who might be chosen as apprentices should they impress a master, but as he
was
such a master, they neither questioned him nor followed when he bid them go.

He had passed beneath the arch of the great hall that separated the masters from the rest, and rested a moment there; death had achieved what his brother had never achieved in life: Tallos was graceless and heavy.-

But at last he found his room, and pushed the door wide; he carried Tallos across the threshold and closed that door behind him, as if it were more than aged wood, iron hinges.

Then he'd laid the body out in the five point star.

He danced, his body not so graceful as it once was, nor so artful. But if youth is passion—as all songs suggest—there was a wild quality to the dance that showed any who witnessed it that there were parts of his heart that were protected from age and time, from change.

And
she
witnessed it, of course. She heard the song that words didn't carry; saw the way he leaped and landed, each strike of foot against floor a part of the star that was hidden, the secret self.

The room was given to mist, to the half-world, to the land where the gods might roam freely and the mortals might join them. And standing in shadows that were colder than the Northern seas, and far older, stood the Lady.

"Tallos," she said, and her voice was a revelation, "born Simeon, I return to you your name." A gift. But not for one such as he.

Tallos rose, shedding his body as if it were clothing in which he had traveled months of dusty road. Kallandras could see his back, and not the expression upon his face; he did not know if there was rapture at being, finally, united with the Lady, with his name—this true self—and with the brothers that lay beyond death, above death.

But he knew, when Tallos turned, that not all of his life had been left behind. He did not speak.

"You have summoned me," the Lady said. "You have freed your brother." Her voice was cool. "I have not forgotten," she added softly, "that you braved the ruins of Vexusa to free two we could not find." She placed a hand upon Tallos' stiff shoulder, drawing him closer. "I have forgotten nothing."

He knelt, the force of desire sapping the strength from his knees, as if a desire that strong left no strength for anything else.

And this, too, she understood. It was not for her; it was for Tallos. For his brothers. "Lady," he said, belying the truth in the only way he knew how.

"One of my own would have found him, bard," she replied softly, a warning there.

"I did not dance his death because no one else could dance it. I danced it because—" He looked up.

Met the eyes of Tallos, the Tallos of his youth, the man-boy whom the sun had darkened. Tallos said nothing.

"You danced," she said. "It is enough."

"No one will dance for you," Tallos said, speaking at last.

"Do you think I don't know it?" He could hide bitterness when he chose; he could make a mask of his voice just as most men made masks of their faces when the situation demanded it. He spoke softly, the words measured, the truth, or the fact that he had accepted it long ago, evident.

"No, Kallatin," Tallos said softly, "I think you
do
know it. Of all my brothers, you were the one I—" He glanced at the Lady; Kallandras heard the shift in his voice, but did not curse it; he was bard-born, and heard what had almost been said. "The one I least understood." He bowed, then.

"Lady," Kallandras said, still upon his knees, abased in every way a man could be abased and still be what Kallandras had become. "A question."