David Weber - Oath of Swords

Shergahn’s dead, unblinking eyes stared up into the rain, and the Bloody Sword chuckled with grim, cold humor.

“So much for turncoats and traitors going over to the brigands!” he said. “I wish I’d gotten him myself, but I forgive you-and it ought to put paid to the rest of the mutterers, don’t you think?”

Bahzell nodded, staring down at the man he’d killed without even recognizing him, and Brandark gazed around at the bodies once more. He chuckled again, and the sound was lighter, with a ghost of his usual, sardonic humor.

“All the same,” he murmured, “it may be just a while before Rianthus or Hartan can convince anyone to drill with you again!”

There were no more attacks. In fact, some of the scouts found hastily abandoned campsites along their route, and Bahzell felt people turn to look at him whenever those reports came in. Yet the other guards, and especially Hartan’s command, seemed to regard him with a sort of rough sympathy, and not the horror he’d feared.

It was odd, he thought-and he had more time to think than he would have preferred, for Kilthan’s healers had never treated a hradani before. They weren’t prepared for the speed with which he recovered from his minor wounds, and they’d put him on light duty rather than simply stitching him up and sending him back to his regular position as a hradani healer would have done.

And so he rode in a wagon, arbalest ready, out of the rain, and considered the strangeness of it all. Everyone “knew” hradani were murderous, uncontrollable blood-letters, and the Esganians, who’d never seen him raise even his empty hand except in self-defense, hated and feared him. These men, who’d seen the full horror of the Rage, did neither. Perhaps it was only that they recognized what an asset he was to them, yet he thought not. He thought it went deeper, a recognition of the control he and Brandark exerted to hold the Rage in check that made them more willing to trust the hradani. And perhaps, just perhaps, some actually understood his shame, knew that even if they felt no horror of the thing that lived within him, he did.

He didn’t know about that, but he knew that while some of the other merchants and their men harbored doubts, Kilthan’s guard did not. If they were careful around him, they were no more so than they might have been around anyone whose temper was to be feared, and they treated him not just as a dangerous hireling but as a comrade who’d bled and fought with them. The officers cursed him as cheerfully as any of the others, the cooks grumbled over how much food it took to stoke his mountainous carcass, and his fellows included him in their coarse, rough-and-ready humor. It was the first time in two years he’d been given that sense of being among his own, and he treasured it even as he tried to push away his own guilty secret . . . that he longed to taste the Rage again and hungered for a target against which he might rightfully loose it.

The splendor of that moment, its transcendent glory and aliveness , haunted him. He could thrust it aside by day, but it poisoned his dreams by night, calling to him and pleading with him to unlock the chains he’d bound about it.

Yet that, at least, he understood, for this wasn’t the first time he’d faced the Rage down and whipped it back to its kennel. It was the other dreams which truly disturbed him, the ones he could never quite recall when he woke sweating and gasping in his blankets. Those dreams terrified him, and he couldn’t even say why, for he couldn’t remember , however hard he tried. There were only bits and pieces, a face he couldn’t quite recall, a voice he’d never heard with waking ears, and a sense of-

Of what? He didn’t know, yet it haunted him like the memory of the Rage. It was as if some purpose or cause or compulsion walked his dreaming mind, and a fear more dreadful than any he’d ever known followed in its footsteps, for he was hradani. His people knew in their very bones and blood what it was to be used and compelled. They’d been used and compelled, and the terrible things done to them during the Fall of Kontovar-the horrible things they’d been driven to do by the black wizards who’d turned them into ravening tools-haunted his people’s souls. That wizardry had left them with the Rage, and the thought of being used so again was the dark terror that horrified even their strongest, whether they would admit it or not . . . and the reason that voice he couldn’t remember and had never heard struck ice into Bahzell Bahnakson’s heart.

The dwarvish singer came to the end of his song, and Brandark let the last note linger, then stilled the strings with a gentle palm. There was a moment of total silence that died in applause, and he and Yahnath rose beside the fire to bow. Someone clapped harder, and Brandark slapped the stocky, bearded dwarf with the golden voice on the shoulder and grinned, trying to hide his envy even from himself as he accepted his share of the acclaim.

The moonlit night was cool, almost chill, clear, spangled with stars, and no longer soaked with rain. They were free of the hills, barely a day’s journey from Hildarth, capital of the Duchy of Moretz, and the men were relaxed, less tense. The easier going, coupled with the dearth of raiders and the easing of their duties as Rianthus integrated the more reliable of the independent guard detachments into his operations, meant there was energy for songs and tales now . . . and enough singers to spare them Brandark’s voice.

The Bloody Sword didn’t blame them. At least they’d been polite, and they still valued his playing, but it had needed only two or three performances for them to reach the same judgment Navahk had reached. And, listening to Yahnath, he could agree with them, however much he longed not to. So he gave one last sweeping bow, slung his balalaika, adjusted his embroidered jerkin, and began picking his way towards the tent he shared with Bahzell.

Familiar, bittersweet amusement at his own foolish ambitions filled him, and he stopped for a long moment, gazing up at the brilliant moon while his throat ached with the need to praise that loveliness, express the deep, complex longing it woke within him.

And he couldn’t. He knew how horrible his verse was. He longed for the rolling beauty of the written word, the cadenced purity, the exact, perfect word to express the very essence of a thought or emotion, and he produced . . . doggerel. Sometimes amusing or even witty doggerel, but doggerel, and everyone knew about his voice. He supposed it was funny, in a cruel way, that a barbaric hradani-and a Navahkan Bloody Sword, to boot-should spend nights staring into his lamp, begging the Singer of Light to touch him with her fire, lend him just a single spark from her glorious flame. But Chesmirsa had never answered him, any more than any god ever answered his people.

He closed his eyes in all too familiar pain, then shook himself and resumed his careful progress across the camp. There were birds and fish, he told himself, just as there were those who were meant to be bards and those who weren’t. Birds drowned, and fish couldn’t fly, but he knew something inside him would demand he go on trying, like a salmon perpetually hurling itself into the air in a desperate bid to become a hawk. Which was more stubborn than intelligent, perhaps, but what could one expect from a hradani? He grinned at the comfortable tartness of the thought, yet he knew his need to touch the true heart of the bard’s art was far less a part of his affectations-and far more important to him-than he’d ever realized in Navahk. That might not change reality, and, after all these years, surely anyone but a hradani should be able to accept that, and yet-