The Prince of Shadow (9 page)

It felt . . . right. Not familiar, like the trident, which reminded him of the rake he used to play at battles with in the bay. When his fingers closed around the shaft of the spear, he felt the “click” of a soul finding its completion, hand meeting matching hand. Mine. He knew he had never held such a weapon before, just as he knew he would not willingly give it up now that he had found it. Not even if he died. Memories far older than the body he wore stirred in the back of his mind, roiling in the muck of time and terror. That part of him that was here and now, a slave with fifteen summers, could not shake the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach; the spear was poisoned, old memory whispered. He threw it away from him, shuddering in disgust even as a longing he did not understand urged him to snatch it up again.

Compelled by that terrifying desire, Llesho crouched to retrieve the spear. Poised, but certain now that the test was, indeed, a trap, and it had just closed on his neck, he tightened his hand into a fist, grasping only air. Master Den watched him out of deep sorrowful eyes, but Jaks picked up the spear where Llesho had let it fall and pointed to the table with it. “Tri dent, but we'll hold off on the short spear,” he said in his most efficient voice, passing the spear to the woman, who slipped it into her sleeve. “Now try the close-in weapons.”

The woman watched Llesho with the hypnotic fascination of a cobra, and with about as much emotion. Llesho gave Den a pleading glance, but his teacher's blank mask did not change.

“No one is going to hurt you,” Jaks urged him. “We just want to know how to train you that most ensures your success.”

That was only half the truth. Llesho didn't know where the other half lay, but he knew he couldn't see his way to it through the secrets clouding the air between them. He followed the direction Jaks indicated with the tilt of his head, and considered the weapons spread out on the table. A knife rested there, older than the others, with a haft that seemed alien among the scattered blades. He reached for it, felt the weight settle in his hand, flipped it to an overhand grasp, and held it above his head, shifting through an exercise that reminded him of the prayer forms Den led in the morning. Knife and hand were one, flowing into his arm, and he stepped though the form with slow grace, then snapped through it with lightning speed that surprised even himself. When he had come to rest again, Jaks took the knife out of his hand and set it down. “No knifework,” he said with finality, “What else suits you?”

But Llesho would not let it go this time. That knife was a part of him, and he wanted, needed to know how. “What is it?” he asked Jaks, seizing the knife from its place on the table and holding it up in confusion. “I know this knife! But I don't remember—”

The woman reached across the table and touched his wrist with the same stroking fingertips that had brushed the tattoo on Jaks' arm. “You will,” she said, with something like hunger in her voice. She wrapped her fingers around the blade of the knife and tugged it from his hand. Llesho released it quickly, shrinking from the cold, white fingers that did not bleed though the knife should have cut them deeply. When the blade had disappeared after the spear into her sleeve, Jaks took him by the shoulder and turned him back to the table.

“Try something else.”

Llesho glared at him. He wanted answers he could understand, but the hand on his shoulder triggered one of those flashes of almost-vision, confused images like memories of things he'd never seen. This one showed him Jaks' arm, but clean of the marks that banded it. Somehow, the vision related to the woman and the knife.

“Your arm,” he nodded at the tattoos on the arm that held his shoulder. “What do the tattoos mean?” He couldn't believe he'd asked, but the visions drove him with their own need, and he gritted his teeth and waited for the next flash, or for his teacher to knock him into the dirt for his impertinence.

Jaks refused to answer, but his expression turned to stone.

“They are his kills.” The mysterious woman answered his question and he shivered, wishing she had ignored him as well. “Each stands for a death.”

“In the arena?” Llesho turned to face Jaks, wanting explanations from his teacher, not the cold threat in the voice of the stranger. And he wanted the answer to be yes, clean kills, in equal combat.

The woman shook her head, once, slowly, her cobra eyes devouring him with their cold stare. “Assassina tions,” she said. “The simple bands for lower ranked targets, the more complex bands for targets of a higher rank.” She smiled. “Jaks excels at his profession.”

Llesho trembled. He was out of his depth, way out of his depth, and had been since Lleck's spirit had appeared to him in the waters of the bay.

“What do you want of me?” he asked, though he dreaded the answer. He'd been on the wrong end of an assassination attempt when he was seven, and he couldn't imagine doing that to someone else's child. He would die first, even if it did sink Minister Lleck's plans for him.

The woman smiled, and something eased in her eyes, which did not come alive, but ceased, at least, to suck him into the black darkness of her soul. “Sur vival,” she said, though he couldn't tell whose, or why. “Shall we continue?”

Jaks turned to the table of weapons and held up two short swords. “Try this.”

None of the other weapons triggered a response like the knife or the short spear, but Llesho found himself generally at ease with the blade weapons, and awkward with the hammers and axes, more inclined to trip over his own net than trap an opponent, and for no reason he could set to words, just a feeling that set his external organs clawing their way up inside him that he would not, could not, touch the chain whip. He passed over it three times, and thankfully, Jaks did not pressure him to pick it up. When they were done, the woman took him by the chin and smiled. “We have before us a pearl of great value, Masters. Let us take care that he does not wind up food for the swine.”

Llesho's entire body froze beneath her hand. Did she know about the treasure Lleck had given him, that sometimes pulsed in his mouth like a sore tooth? Or had the comment landed like a stray bolt from a crossbow shot into the air? He doubted that the lady ever spoke without thought. She released him without another word, however, and gave a bow to the masters before slipping out the way she had come.

Jaks visibly relaxed when she had departed. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Tomorrow, after breakfast, report for arms practice with the novice class.” he said to Llesho, and added, “Ask Bixei—he will show you.”

Den frowned from his place by the door, but said nothing, which was just as well. Llesho didn't need a warning to keep the woman's presence secret. He wanted an explanation if his teachers expected his silence for very long, but at the moment, he felt unready for any answers they might give him. Better to pretend the afternoon hadn't happened. Something of this must have shown on Llesho's face, because Den's frown smoothed into his more usual bland nonexpres sion. He didn't look happy, though, which Llesho found more reassuring than not. And then he was gone, through the door into the smithy and back to his laundry, and Jaks was staring down at the table covered with small arms as if it held the secrets of the universe.

Llesho gave a perfunctory bow, although Jaks wasn't looking, and went out into the practice yard. The heat danced in waves off the sawdust, but the stir at the corner of his eye was more than an illusion of hot air. The figure disappearing around the corner of the barracks looked like the guard who had greeted Bixei at the inner entrance to the compound on Llesho's first day, but what the man would be doing skulking around the weapons room at rest time he could not figure, except that he didn't trust the man, and hadn't from his first sight of him.

The tense session in the weapons room had set his nerves on edge; Llesho knew the man could be completely innocent of everything but an unpleasant disposition, but it couldn't hurt to keep a watchful eye on him. Some plot was moving in the camp. The woman was one clue. The guard could be her creature or set to spy on her by an enemy. Where one faction stirred, however, he knew that another was surely nearby.

Whatever that meant to the plotters, Llesho figured none of it was good for him. The awareness that he was unskilled and vulnerable, surrounded by professional killers, prickled his skin. The sooner he became one of them, the better for his survival. The word, crossing his mind, reminded him again of the woman's answer to his question, “What do you want of me?” As a means to an end, he believed she meant him to survive. Safer, he knew, to go unnoticed, but if factions were forming in the camp, he was glad to know that he had allies—formidable ones, if his teachers' reactions were anything to go by—whatever his side turned out to be. And whatever interests of their own motivated them to care.

Powerful or not, however, he would have traded the mysterious woman for Lling at his side any day. At least he understood Lling's motives, could anticipate her. Didn't worry that she'd decide he was not as valuable as she'd thought and send an assassin to dispose of him in his sleep.

He didn't realize how much time had passed in the weapons room until the smell of dinner wafting on the late afternoon breeze reminded him that he was hungry. Resting on the long porch that fronted the barracks, Stipes waved a cheerful arm for him to join them, which Bixei accepted with just a fleeting glint of resentment in his eyes. Llesho dropped onto a bench and tried to let neither his uneasiness at the strange afternoon nor his excitement at finally becoming a gladiator show. “Jaks is starting me on weapons tomorrow.”

A hungry gleam settled in Bixei's expression then. “That will be fun.” He smiled a shark's grin full of teeth and promise. Llesho hoped that Jaks would not let the other boy kill him—at least not on the first day.

Chapter Six

WEAPONS instruction for the four novices—Llesho and Bixei, and the older Radimus and Pei—took place at the center of the practice yard. Around them, the more experienced gladiators clashed in pairs, sword against spear, pike against trident and net, stave against sword. In front of them, a table laden with small arms settled into the sawdust. Long weapons leaning against the table's side bounced sunlight into Llesho's eyes, blurring his mind as well as his body with the heat.

The novices themselves stood weaponless and at formal attention while the sun beat down on their bare heads. Sweat beaded under Llesho's hair and ran down his face to fall unceremoniously from the tip of his nose. Like his companions, however, he did not move until Master Jaks had joined them with a ceremonial bow. They returned the bow, and Master Jaks began his instruction. “Long sword.” He lifted the sword, turned it so the sun ran down the curve of blade like liquid gold, and demonstrated a slash-and-thrust move before putting it down in favor of two shorter, fatter blades with a dull gleam on their rough surfaces. “Paired swords,” he said, and the blades twirled in his hands, faster than Llesho could see, while Master Jaks moved forward, then leaned back so far that his head brushed the sawdust on the practice yard. Leaping up off the ground, he executed a turn in the air and landed again without breaking the rhythm of the crossing blades. Llesho made a mental note to learn that trick.

“Pike.” Master Jaks set the swords down on the table and took up the long-shafted weapon set with a curved hook at its head. He made several lunges and turns with it, spun it overhead, and brought it down again. “Trident.” He replaced one weapon and took up the other, and Llesho saw how foolish he must have seemed with his companions, playing at tridents with their muckrakes in the bay. The pearl divers had bashed gracelessly at each other: Master Jaks did a precise dance of death. In fact, Llesho concluded, work with the long weapons compared closely with dance, while short weapons, like hand-to-hand, evoked the prayer forms.

After his demonstration, Master Jaks took the measure of his students, leveling a piercing stare on each in turn. He let that burning gaze rest on Bixei as he explained, “Part of weapons work is knowing how to kill; the greater part is knowing how to control one's own impulses, by the use of superior technique to control both weapon and opponent without doing harm.”

Bixei would have spoken out in his own defense, but Master Jaks put up a hand to forestall him. He left them briefly to pass through the ranks of fighting men, tapping a shoulder here, whispering a word in an ear there. He returned with four hardened gladiators, Stipes among them, and took his place again in front of his class.

“Show me what you can do. Bixei?” Master Jaks stood aside while Bixei chose his weapons, paired swords, with one of his shark's grins, which disappeared when Master Jaks added, “Your practice partner today will be Stipes.”