Michael Stackpole - Chartomancy

As he attacked, I lunged forward. My right leg slid down and planted itself just past his left heel. I leaned to the right and his blade shot over my left shoulder. My sword, held high, never even began to fall.

As we came face-to-face, I read his fear.

And he read my triumph.

My right hand closed on the hilt of my other sword and I drew it in an instant. The razored edge slashed up beneath his skirts and sank deep into the junction of thigh and groin. I drew it up in a long cut and it came free with a hot splash of femoral blood.

He began to fall backward slowly.

A heartbeat for me, forever for him.

He did try to flip his wrist and cut my throat as he toppled, but my robe’s collar blunted his feeble strike. I watched shock and betrayal blossom on his face as he fell, and knew it would melt into a mask of disdain.

My other sword whipped down and his head rolled away to spare me his opinion.

Ranai, standing closest to me, dropped to a knee. Her expression and the tone of her voice betrayed confusion and mild offense. “What have we just witnessed, Master?”

“An enemy who believes that by mirroring our forms, using our blades and ancient formulae, they are worthy of respect and honor.” I pointed a sword to the east. “Has anything they have done so far been honorable?”

She shook her head. “No, Master.”

“No matter how they appear, that is their nature. Do not forget it. Do not be lured in.” I kicked the sword from my foe’s lifeless hand. “They are not what they pretend to be, and we cannot be what they assume us to be. As Taichun once taught, one must know his foe to defeat him. This is true. We have one path to victory.”

She looked up. “Learn as much about them as possible?”

“No, Ranai.” I wiped my blades on the dead man’s robe, then slid them home again. “We will make ourselves unknowable, then they can never win.”

7th day, Month of the Dragon, Year of the Rat

9th Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court

163rd Year of the Komyr Dynasty

737th year since the Cataclysm

Ixyll

Try as he might, Ciras Dejote could not shake the feeling they were being watched. He saw no one in the Wastes; he found no footprints-even old ones-to indicate that anyone else was out there. But, regardless of an utter lack of evidence, he knew they were being watched-and Borosan didn’t help matters by agreeing with him.

He would have been happy to ascribe it to paranoia, or the influence of the sword he now bore, but it was rooted in something far more substantial than that. After killing whatever Dragright had become, he’d trailed out after the giant. At first the man’s panicked footprints were easy to follow. He’d run past where the looters had hobbled their horses and conveniently stepped in manure. That petered out eventually, so Ciras returned to the camp and waited for daylight to continue the pursuit.

In camp, they cleaned up the bodies and piled rocks over them to slow down whatever scavengers might lurk in Ixyll. They contented themselves with a cold meal that night, and both wrote out prayers on strips of cloth, which they left as streamers over the tomb entrance.

When they awoke, the streamers were still in place, and the hole in the tomb’s slab had been repaired fully. Ciras had run his hand over it and not only could feel no seam around where the repair had been performed, but could not even find any stray scars from where the sledge had hit off target.

To make matters worse, after they collected the looters’ horses and continued west, they found the giant’s body-or what was left of it. Something had stripped most of the meat off the bones and scattered them, but both men were able to reconstruct enough to determine this had been their quarry. More important, their work allowed them to make a rough guess at the cause of death.

Something, it appeared, roughly a foot in diameter, had punched through his chest, pulverized his spine, and powdered the rock upon which he lay. Borosan guessed he’d have to have been impaled by a wharf piling heaved by a ballista. The utter absence of so much as a splinter cast doubts on that explanation, but Ciras couldn’t come up with anything better.

But still, both events could have been dismissed as some sort of magical retribution for disturbing the grave. The problem with that explanation-aside from the fact that no one in the Nine knew how to lay such an enchantment since the Cataclysm-came from the fact that the sword had been left with Ciras. Even before they cleaned up the corpses, and even before he’d taken care of his own sword, he’d cleaned and oiled the blade. He’d slept that first night with it beside his own sword, and couldn’t imagine why it had been left to him.

As they rode around a hill, his left hand fell to the ancient sword’s hilt. In studying the blade he’d learned a lot about it. Though he did not recognize the maker’s mark stamped into the blade, the general form indicated it was of Virine manufacture.

The sigils worked along the blade defied deciphering, though both he and Borosan made attempts. They’d been written in the old Imperial script. While both men were literate, and had even been exposed to Imperial writing, in the time since the Cataclysm the Ministries of Harmony had revised and streamlined the six thousand, five hundred and sixty-one characters one needed to know to be considered educated. Clerks would be required to learn nine times that many-and ministers, it was said, could command even more.

But the true difficulty with picking out the message was that it seemed to change. Ciras had noticed that effect, but had said nothing. Borosan, without telling him, had written down the inscriptions, then found they changed. They tried to pin it to time of day, weather, and direction they were heading, but if there was a pattern, they couldn’t discern it.

Both of them reached the same conclusion about the sword: it had belonged to one of Prince Nelesquin’s vanyesh-although they each acknowledged knowing next to nothing about the vanyesh. Down through the years any truth about them had been lost. Aside from knowing they were sorcerers who traveled with an evil prince, neither man had any information.

Ciras reined his horse to a halt beside Borosan’s mount. They’d crested a hill that overlooked a vast but sunken plain, which angled off to the northwest between two lines of mountains. “We’ll be two days on that plain if we just strike out across it, don’t you think?”

Borosan nodded. “If we keep close to one set of mountains or the other, we should find water. All the green veins running into the plain indicate water, but I would just as soon avoid as many valleys as we can.”

“Agreed. And I believe you’re right. The wild magic flows like water and seeps into the low points. Every valley we’ve seen is more alive with it than elsewhere.”

Borosan nodded as if he’d only half heard. Ciras had become used to that. The inventor leaned back, pulled a journal from his saddlebags, and made a note. “Shall we camp here?”

“Back down the hill, yes, by the spring.”

They retraced their steps and made camp. Neither knew what Ixyll had been before the Cataclysm, and anticipating what it would be from day to day was impossible. The wild magic had scoured the world down to its stony bones in some places and yet, in others, grasses formed meadows and trees grew into groves. Granted, most often the trees were odd-like having gorgeous blossoms that became fist-sized fruit in a matter of hours, only to burst into flame shortly thereafter. The grasses seemed more normal. Though they were seldom a simple green, the horses ate them with no apparent ill effects.

They made camp on a bluesward and collected deadwood-first making sure it was truly dead and truly wood. Borosan made a fire and Ciras stepped well away from it before he started his exercises.