The Last Hour of Gann (17 page)

“Arug’s debts have been such this year that he sought to squeeze in an extra harvest between
riak’s reap and sweet-pod’s sowing. He couldn’t afford to compensate his farmers with coin, so he promised those who met his demands that they would have one-half the final crop of the year rather than the customary quarter. For a surprise, he held to his word. But one of the farming households under his sovereignty went out to find that most of his share of the field’s crop had already been harvested. He suspects a certain farmer, a man who had suspiciously great yield in his own rows, but there is no proof. Both men claim to be wronged, one by theft and one by slander.”

“And as Arug is lord over both, he cannot
find for either man without appearing to show favor,” finished Meoraq. He glanced heavenward through the ceiling and sighed.

“Glamorous, I know.” Shuiv gave his spines a rueful flick. “He brought them both here so that they could see how assiduously he serves the interests of his protected, but really, he wants the mediators to make a ruling for him that neither man can hold against him. And probably offer them each a daughter in commiseration, ha
. I know he’s brought a few.”

Meoraq grunted his disapproval, but felt his belly warm.

“They’ve made him sit all day in the antechamber while they heard every other dispute in the logs,” Shuiv went on, “but he’s refused to leave and now that you are here, the mediators will surely take it for proof that Sheul has a will in this matter and send the whole stupid thing to trial.”

“Surely. Yet tria
ls have been called over smaller disputes.”

“Not a spear of grass grows save by His design, so my training master told me. And even Arug must serve Him in some way, I suppose. Yet I wonder if I see no more omen in you than a Sheulek coming in out o
f the rain.” Shuiv settled back against the wall once more, letting his eyes slide shut. “What did bring you, brother?”

“I received a summons. Many summons, to be precise. Commanding me by name. May I be safe in assuming they do not come from House Arug?”

“I shouldn’t think so. If secrets were teeth, Arug still could not keep them in his mouth and I would remember if I heard him utter your name.” A sly peek beneath heavy lids. “It is rather a well-known name.”

“It is not the sword, but the hand that wields it,” Meoraq replied, just as if he were not flattered. “I have been hal
f a year ignoring these summons and so Sheul sent me one of His own.”

Shu
iv did not ask his meaning, but studied him with new interest. “I was in meditation that night. I never saw it. They said it filled the sky.”

“I would not say so, but it was tall enough at its first rising to touch the clouds, to pierce them.”

“And you think it was set for you? Truth?”

“I think it was set by Sheul. I think it was tall enough that there might be a thousand men who saw it and believed it for their eyes alone.”

Shuiv waited, faintly smiling.

“I
t was mine,” said Meoraq.

Shuiv grunted, closed his eyes, and quite some time later said, “The man who has been summoned by Sheul’s own torch must have further to go than Tothax.”

“Then there will be some other sign to lead me on, if it was indeed for my eye. All things indeed serve Sheul, but I can’t think how the squabbles of two farmers and a few rows of riak could be dire enough to warrant a tower of fire on a rainy night.”

“It was gruu
, actually.”

“Ah, well that makes
all the difference then. For gruu, I should be surprised there wasn’t a hammer of ice to go with it.”

Shuiv snorted.

“I hear,” mused Meoraq, “there is also an exarch who wishes my audience.”

“
An exarch in Tothax is rare enough that word has even reached lowly House Arug,” Shuiv replied, eyes shut. “But as he only arrived twenty days and some ago, I can’t think how he could have been sending summons half the year, as you say. As for the exarch himself, I hear nothing save that he has a scandalously gilded taste for drink and a free hand with the abbot’s coin, but there may be more envy in that than truth.”

Meoraq grunted, inviting the conversation to continue if it was the other man’s wish, although the politics of priests and farmers and the eternal rift between them were of no interest to him. Perhaps it would be different if he were a Sheulteb, shut up every day of the year in that common House with its common problems and common tongues forever flapping, but he was not.

“I used to wish for exciting trials when I was young and stupid,” Shuiv said after a companionable silence. “Well, younger. And less stupid. Then I had my first trial…” Shuiv hesitated a glance at him, seeking censure, but Meoraq merely waved at him to speak on. “And as proud as I was to burn with Him, I found myself wishing afterwards for a long, boring post. Which was given to me. And on the way here for—I don’t even know anymore—the sixth time? The tenth? I wished again that something real would happen, something meaningful. And here you are.” There was quiet between them and then Shuiv laughed a little. “It does not bode well for me in the trial to come. May I ask you a brother’s consideration?”

Meoraq tipped his head, knowing what was coming.

“My woman bore my child near the freshening of the year. If it opens a son, will you see him taken to my father? Knowing Arug, he’ll have married its mother off again before my bones are even black and I don’t think I can die completely if I have to worry over another man raising my son. Especially the sorts of men Arug’s been hawking daughters to.”

“My oath is yours, brother. If I stand in Sheul’s favor, I shall pass through
Tothax in the early spring.”

“It should be proved by then.
My thanks.”

The door opened. Not the door to the hall, through which Meoraq had come, but the door to the arena. The
bailiff entered, bowing low. “Honored ones, the court of Tothax under High Judge Sen’sui requests your judgment at trial.”

Shuiv pushed himself off the wall, his smile broad and guileless, eager as only a young man could be. He offered his arm and they cla
sped shoulders, then left the hold. The bailiff lowered the stair for them. Meoraq descended first—the Swords were equal in the eyes of Sheul, but he reasoned that he had more years of service and if he didn’t take the initiative, they risked standing in the doorway saluting each other like idiots while everyone watched—and Shuiv came after, but they went together to the center of the ring and bent their necks.

It was not a large room, really. They never were. A man could count off fifty paces if he crossed at its widest point, but only if he was sparing with his stride. The corners were rounded; the floor was bare stone, sloping toward its center where the drain was set, to make cleaning easier; the mediators and witnesses had no access to this level, but watc
hed from behind a screen from the floor above. There were no furnishings, no banners, no embellishments. The one indication of this room’s singular importance was the window set high in the ceiling, round as an open eye and stained with colors. In the right hours of day, the light that fell through that window seemed to pour fire itself over the arena floor, but it was growing late now and the arena was mostly dark.

One panel of the enclosing screen slid open, revealing the witnesses’ box.
Meoraq knew Arug by his garish clothing and the frantic way he was hissing at his manservant, who then left at a run. He could guess the reason easily enough, but did not dwell on it. What happened after the trial was not important. All his mind and body now belonged to God.

The high judge raised both hands, although there was only solemn silence around him to begin with, and said, “The trial of
Ezethu, a man of House Arug, against Mihuun, a man of House Arug, is hereby brought to light before Sheul.”

The men were not identified, but Meoraq knew them for their staring faces, where horror painted itself as thick as awe. Simple farmers with a petty squabble, neither man could have possibly foreseen this dispute going to trial and both clearly feared the consequences—a sure sign that both carried some measure of guilt.

The bailiff came while the high judge read the formal charges, to paint the sign of the Sword in white upon Shuiv’s chest. Somewhere behind the high half-wall, one of the farmers was marked in the same fashion, just as the other would be wearing the hammer now being painted in red over Meoraq’s own heart. He acknowledged the bailiff’s murmur of apology for taking such liberties, but scarcely felt the touch. His muscles were tightening, anticipating. He had fought three hundred battles and more; they were all the first and only one.

“—and submit ourselves before You, g
reat Father. We await Your judgment. Do the Swords of Sheul stand ready?”

Meoraq saluted. Beside him, Shuiv did the same.

The bailiff retracted the stair and shut the door to the arena hold. The high judge brought his hammer down against the top of the half-wall with a flat, unimportant rapport and closed the screen. He could see shadows moving as Arug and his farmers drew slightly back, unsure what to expect, and hear the stern rumble of a judge’s voice warning them to be still. He closed his eyes as Meoraq the man to clear his mind of these distractions and opened them again as Meoraq the Sword.

As the ranking warrior between them, Meoraq began
, drawing his sabks. “I do not spill my brother’s blood,” he said, facing Shuiv. “I do not bare my blades for men. I am not Uyane Meoraq within this ring.”

“I am not Ni’ichok Shuiv.”
Shuiv smiled as he drew his new, shining knives. There was already color coming in at his throat. “I have no heart and no will in this hour,” he said, now in unison with Meoraq. “I know no fear and no vengeance. I am no more than a sword in Your hand, O my Father. Let them behold me, drawn. And let Your will be done.”

Shuiv began with the same ritual movements they had been taught as children, stylized expressions of balance more than battle whose familiarity helped to focus and center him. Meoraq’s body knew just how to meet him; his mind drifted, counting breaths while he watched his hands work. Their blades clashed and scraped, clashed and fell, clashed and whirled. He knew no urgency, no fear, nothing but the heat rising in his throat and belly, and the simple pleasure that could always be had from indulging in something fine after a long and difficult day.

How long that first, formal stage of battle lasted, he could not say. Shuiv’s movements became steadily more ragged as the color at his throat grew stronger. Meoraq could hear his breaths falling roughly out of rhythm, see the fires burning high in his eyes. He knew the moment that Shuiv let go and became the sword in Sheul’s hand, but he did not soon follow. So perhaps it was not for him after all, he mused, parrying the younger man’s increasingly savage lunges and thinking of the tower of fire. Or if it had been, strange that it should have been all to bring him this far to Tothax only to end him in the arena over a few rows of gruu and some bitter words. Perhaps it was Shuiv who was meant to go on. For a young Sheulteb to take victory over a veteran Sheulek of so grand a House as Uyane was certainly the start of a damned good story.

But his own breaths were coarsening now, his thoughts becoming more difficult to grasp even as they slipped through his mind. He was aware, vaguely, of that curious blankness stealing in while he pondered Shuiv and whatever fate awaited him, replacing words he knew with timeless stretches of empty heat.
He stood against it for as long as he could, because the struggle was as glorious as the burning, but his world became a blackness.

He burned.

Fire. He felt it every time, but this time, disturbingly, he saw it. It spilled upwards from the heart of the black, filling his vision and searing at his soul’s flesh, brighter than it had been that night on the rooftop of Xheoth. Not beckoning.
Demanding
. And in that endless moment between Meoraq the man and Meoraq the Sword, there was only stillness and his heart beating and that tower of fire burning his eyes, and he said or heard or perhaps only imagined the word, “sukaga.”

It caught in him like a fishing hook, almost familiar…

And then the blackness slipped away again. Weight and substance fell back onto his bones; he staggered, catching blindly at a man’s shoulder to steady him until he could see Shuiv’s face through the flames that still coursed through him. He looked down, confused, and saw the black blade of one sabk deep in the younger man’s chest. He had no idea where the other one was.

The high judge’s hammer struck twice, invisible. Meoraq leapt back with a mindless hiss, slashing at the empty air before he could master himself. The fire rose again, but this time, he closed his eyes and made himself breathe until it cooled. Shuiv was dead and Sheul’s judgment, known to all. He was Uyane Meoraq once again; the Sword of Sheul was sheathed.

He closed his eyes, counting his breaths the way every boy born to his caste was taught, with the primary verse for the Six. A slow count, they called that. Slow and calm and even. A Sheulek must be the master of his clay and so, ‘One for the Prophet, the wide open eye…Two for his brunt and the sign of the fist…’

He couldn’t believe he was standing here. His palms ached, but apart from that slight pain, he didn’t think he’d even been scratched, although he felt worn enough that surely the battle had been a long one. Shuiv had started to burn so quickly…but not for the honest man, it seemed. And now House Arug had his widow to care fo
r, at least until her infant had opened and Meoraq could judge it for a son or daughter and see it placed accordingly.