P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

“Not to my family. We have some natural immunity. Here.”

Shade dumped Addy into Jame’s lap.

“Aaiiee,” said Jame, trying to grip the triangular head without getting bitten while the muscular body writhed against her legs. Be damned if she was going to pin the thing by sitting on it.

Drawing a knife, the Randir cut a cross between the primary punctures, then sucked and spat blood on the floor where it ate into the wood.

Addy’s flailing quieted. Her black eyes contracted back to their usual fierce, unblinking orange.

As Shade wound a cloth around her hand, paws thundered up the stair and Jorin was back, still wildly excited, in search of the diminishing horde. Empty exoskeletons crunched under his feet. The hoppers clinging to Gari had also fallen silent.

The Falconer collapsed on a bench, panting, as his merlin returned sullenly to her perch on his padded shoulder. “I think . . . that’s enough . . . for today. Class dismissed.”

Slinging the loosened coils around her neck, Shade left the mews without another word or backward glance.

Jame stared after her. It had suddenly come to her why Rawneth had gifted her granddaughter with the snake: as a spy.

“My name is legion,” the Randir Matriarch had told Jame through her servant Simmel, just before Jame had smashed his head in, “as are my forms and the eyes through which I see.”

What she hoped to see through the swamp adder wasn’t clear. Perhaps any view inside the college would interest that voracious collector of secrets.

Trinity. Was it possible that Shade was a blood-binder? If so, had she just inadvertently challenged and perhaps broken Rawneth’s grip on the serpent? If so, what next?

“Look,” said Gari, holding out a strangely translucent hopper. It had regressed, one molted transparent shell within another, smaller and smaller, hopper within hopper. From somewhere inside came the sand-grain death rattle of an egg that would never quicken to life again.

The morning’s second class also took place in Old Tentir, this time in the large, familiar, first floor room where the more obscure weaponry of the Kencyrath was taught.

Jame’s ten-command was already there, inspecting the strange blades that the scar-faced Brandan weapons-master had laid out for them. The last time she had been here, Jame had been introduced to the clawed gloves of the Arrin-thar and, in the process, had accidentally betrayed the existence of her own ivory nails, to her own horror and to everyone else’s apparent delight.

“We knew you were a true Knorth!”

She still wasn’t used to taking them so casually. However, practice with another natural Arrin-thari, Bear, was beginning to help.

“The scythe-arm,” announced Randon Bran, holding up one of the curved blades. It looked like two swords without hilts, joined along a sharp crescent edge, with a wicked point at each end. There was room between the two sides to insert one’s arm, with leather straps at the inner elbow and palm. They came in different lengths, one roughly a yard long and the other about two-thirds that. For practice purposes, a leather strip sheathed the edge, capped at each end with a wooden ball.

“Choose two, one long, one short,” the randon said. “Test until you find the length and weight that suit you best. Think of them as swords. You’ve practiced enough to know the advantages and disadvantages of both lengths, depending on how close to your opponent you want to get and on your own strength.”

Jame noticed that Brier found a pair at once and donned them with the ease of long familiarity. When Dar, as usual overenthusiastic, drew back with a flourish into the guard position, Brier parried his unintended elbow jab at her face.

“Watch the spurs,” the instructor warned. “You can very easily put out the eye of the cadet behind you, and those we don’t grow back.”

He should know, thought Jame. Bear had slashed him across the face when he had helped to force the brain-damaged Shanir into the room that still served as his prison—this, after Bear had mauled a cadet stupid enough to taunt him. To this day, he was only formally let out for her training.

“Here, lady.” Brier handed Jame two scythe-arms shorter than her own. “Try these. They’re Southron weapons,” she added, to explain her own expertise.

Jame slipped them on, the first easily, the second with some fumbling and unintended clashing of steel. Unlike most Kencyr, she favored her right hand. Also, as a rule, she disliked edged weapons. However, the balance and heft of these pleased her.

“I still want to learn Kothifir street-fighting.”

Brier gave her a sidelong look. Such informal techniques had lost the Southron vital points in their initial ranking at the college, and Jame one of her front teeth, since regrown.

“Whenever you like . . . Lordan.”

The second ten-command due for this lesson hadn’t yet appeared.

“Huh,” said Randon Bran, annoyed.

With that, he set the Knorth ten at a safe distance from each other and began to teach them the kantirs of this new form.

Jame liked it more and more. Think of all weapons as part of your body, Randiroc had taught her on the journey south, and all techniques as variations of the Senethar. Other randon had told her much the same, but for the first time the words clicked. These, then, were projections of her claws, both before her and behind, the latter more of a challenge in that each move had double consequences, potentially unintended and lethal. She had deliberately placed herself to one side slightly behind Brier so as to watch the Southron flow through the forms—slash, high guard, low, parry, thrust—and tried to follow her. Around her, blades flashed in the measured cadences of offense and defense, fire and water. Oh, how elegant, as formal as some deadly dance.

Belatedly, Gorbel arrived with his new ten-command, looking even more morose than before.

“Sorry, Ran. Higbert fell into the manure pit and insisted on returning to the barracks to change his clothes.”

“But not his boots,” remarked the instructor, sniffing.

Tigger tapped his nose. “No sense of smell, Ran.” His tone was solemn, but his eyes glittered with mischief.

“Bastard,” Higbert snarled at him. “You deliberately tripped me.

Fash said something, laughing, into the lordan’s ear, and got no response. Gorbel didn’t make friends easily. Jame wondered what had drawn these two together, and then so thoroughly broken them apart.

Dure was anxiously searching his pockets. Jame hadn’t noticed his right hand before, as it was usually out of sight. The nails were chewed to the quick and the fingertips were padded with old scars.

The other Caineron were selecting and donning their scythe-arms. Higbert defiantly chose the two longest he could find. He hadn’t been here when Bran had given his instructions but still, thought Jame, how stupid.

Tigger drifted past behind him, and suddenly the former ten-commander seemed to go mad.

Higbert spun around with a yell, blindsiding the randon and knocking him into the wall. Everyone heard Bran’s head crack against the stone; then he was down. Cadets scrambled out of Higbert’s way and the wild flailing of his blades. He seemed oblivious to them, intent only on his mad gyrations. His roars contained words:

“ . . . get it off, get it off, GET IT OFF!”

Jame backed into a corner by a window, wondering if she should follow Corrudin’s example and jump out. Too late. Higbert had her pinned, without realizing it. In fact, his back was to her and her blades were up, parrying the wild, reverse slashes of his spurs. She couldn’t get at him with her hands to deliver an incapacitating pressure-point blow: six inches of steel projecting from one hand and nearly a foot from the other kept them literally at sword’s point.