The Sword Chronicles: Child of the Empire Read online

  She held him back.

  The tears had ceased.

  6

  The return trip did not last long. And when they landed the Emperor himself was waiting for them. He stood alone on the air-dock, a single form on the wood planks. Dawn was unreeling skeins of bright light, individual threads that cast through the darkness and left tapestries of pinks, oranges, and reds behind.

  Samira couldn't ever remember being this tired.

  And yet, at the same time, she felt alive. The feeling always came after a fight: the guilt at surviving by taking a life, the near glee at the mere fact that she had lived to see another day. Life was a precious possession, and for more years than she cared to count it had been her only possession.

  And Devar had held her. No one had ever held her like that before. Not in real life – only in the Dream could she remember anything approaching the feeling of love and caring she felt from him in the flight home.

  The moment they stepped off the ramp the Emperor took each of their hands in turn – Riada's first, then The Poppet's, then Samira's. He kissed them on the cheeks. He hung a black disc on a gold chain around each of their necks.

  "Usually the Chancellor does this," he said. His voice quivered a bit, as though he were nervous. "I hope I do you proper justice." Then he coughed. Straightened his shoulders. He looked at the sky. "It is appropriate that this be done in the moment between dark and dawn. For you have died and been reborn in the service of the Empire. You have given all, and will be given all in return. There is no pomp to this ceremony, for you will work in secret, and the fewer who know you the safer you will be. And the works you do will be done in secret, that you may serve the Empire in ways that will cause her enemies to fear and tremble in the darkness, and will let her friends bask in the life of the light."

  He paused, then looked at each of them in turn. "You have names. But you shall be given new names. Names by which you shall be known to us from henceforth, and which shall be spoken of in fearful whispers to our enemies." He looked at Riada. "You are now Garden." She nodded. Held aloft her black disc. He looked at The Poppet. "You have been called The Poppet, but now shall be called simply Marionette." She nodded, but did not raise her disc, or lose the dreamy expression she always wore. The Emperor seemed to jerk in place for a moment, as though surprised at her break with the ceremony.

  Then he turned to Samira. And though she had had her own name for only a few months, now she shed it and was born yet again.

  "And you," said the Emperor, "are my blade. You are my sharp edge of justice. You are Sword."

  7

  The three newly-named Blessed Ones parted without a word. It seemed right, and to Samira –

  (No. I am Sword now. I am a Blessed One, and my only name is the name that signifies what I am and what I do in service of the Empire.)

  – it seemed like the only thing she could do under the circumstances. Like she had just spent time in the innermost sanctuaries of the Grand Cathedral of Faith. She had been reborn, and to speak so soon after her birth would be to soil the newness and cleansing that came with such things.

  She stopped for a moment to hold Riada –

  (Garden!)

  – in a tight embrace that meant more to her than any riches she could think of. She knew the black disc she now wore would grant her entrance to any door, give her right to any material thing in the Empire, but this moment with a true sister… it was beyond price.

  She did not look at Marionette. And the girl left before her embrace with Garden had ended, for which she was grateful.

  When Sword was done holding Garden, Devar –

  (What is his true name, I wonder?)

  – touched her lightly on the shoulder. There was none of the heat she had felt before, none of the half-hidden desire. There was only friendship, and a promise to be there for her, spoken without words but all the louder for that fact.

  She went to her room in silence.

  She slept.

  She Dreamed. The Man and the Woman, reaching out in love, then reaching out in blood and pain. She saw their faces, but knew them not.

  This time her Dream had something new. This time, she heard screaming, high and young, and realized it was her own voice. Shrieking, crying out.

  She woke with the scream on her own lips, barely biting it back. As always, the faces she saw in her Dream quickly faded and were gone. But this time the panic, the terror remained.

  They are dead. They are dead. They are dead.

  But who are they?

  She had no answer.

  The light streaming through her window – she had been given a new room months before, one that overlooked her favorite practice field – was the bright blue-white of midday.

  A soft knock sounded. She knew who it would be before she called, "Enter."

  Armor stepped in. He looked impeccable as always: red and black uniform pressed to knife-creases at all the right places, gold braid on his shoulder falling just so, mustache waxed to perfect upward curls. He was smiling, but his eyes were sad. She did not understand the sadness – it was not the mad grief of mourning, exactly, but something both lighter and deeper. A sadness for something past, something lost.

  "Good morn, my dear," he said softly. Then he chuffed as though chiding himself. "Or, better said, good afternoon."

  Sword nodded and swung her feet out of bed. She didn't mind that Armor saw her like this – she was still dressed in the black outfit she had worn last night. But Armor averted his eyes as though she had slid out of bed in her skin alone.

  She loved him for that. For that and a million other things.

  Is this what killing an evil man does? Killing in the arena brought me a long period of emptiness, a numbness that felt like bits of my soul had been sliced away and slowly destroyed. Now, I feel… alive.

  She did not know. She hoped so. Because she sensed that this was the real job of a Blessed One. To hunt and kill those who would overthrow the Empire from within.

  "It's all right, Armor," she said. And giggled, which surprised her. "I'm dressed, you know."

  "I suppose." He didn't sound convinced. He looked back at her, and traces of a blush danced across his cheeks. He cleared his throat. "I just wanted to congratulate you. And to say I was sorry. I heard that your final test was… a difficult one."

  She nodded, and all traces of laughter died. "How could the Emperor make Marionette a Blessed One?" She leaned toward Armor, as though proximity might lend sincerity. "She's mad."

  He looked uncomfortable. "It is because of the Emperor's great goodness," he finally said.

  "What does that mean?"

  Armor cleared his throat and held himself a bit straighter. She had come to recognize this as his "official" stance. He was going to say something hard, something that came directly from Devar – whom she had come to realize was in some way Armor's superior – or from the Chancellor or the Emperor Malal himself.

  "Had you seen the product of the Gifts before Devar took you from the kennels?" he asked.

  She shook her head. "Not really, not much – I saw glo-globes and Riflemen with their bullets the Pushes enchant so they will fly when the guns let them loose."

  He nodded. "Did you ever see something that looked like it had been done by a Blessed One?"

  She thought. Her experiences were still so limited to the world of a slave – she had lived in the kennels as long as she could remember – but in all that time, had she seen anything beyond the work of Pushes, of Patches, of Threads and Calls?

  She shook her head. Armor nodded as she did. "No, you have not. And there is a reason for that. There are none of the greater Gifts who work on their own. None of them work for coin, none of them serve their own interests. All are Blessed Ones. All of them."

  He waited a moment, and Sword parsed his words in her mind, trying to understand what it was he was saying, what he really meant.

  "How is that possible?" she finally said. "Some people with greater Gifts must wa
nt to work on their own, or at least –" Her next words died on her lips. Fell to earth as quickly and surely as the men who had faced her in Creed's villa. "They're killed," she whispered. "We kill them."

  "Yes."

  The word was delivered without inflection. As though it did not carry the deaths of untold numbers in its simplicity.

  A snake seemed to writhe around Sword's guts. To curl in tight and squeeze until she could draw no breath, and her life compressed to a single point.

  "How can the Emperor – how can we do this?"

  "Because every Blessed One – every single one – that has not been pressed into service for the Empire, has eventually sought its overthrow. Has sought to place himself or herself in the Silver Seat, to rule the five States and become a god."

  She absorbed this in silence. "So the Emperor permits Marionette…."

  "Because to refuse her service would be to sign her death warrant. And the Emperor is loath to do this." Armor drew a hand over his eyes. He looked for a moment older, his eyes and mustache no longer the color of iron but simply the gray of a man passing his prime.

  "Why? I don't understand."

  Armor sighed. "Would you have the Empire end?" he asked. "Would you have us be cast into civil war, with nowhere for those innocent to flee to? Nowhere to run from the war and the destruction? It has happened before, and the lesson we learned is this: the one thing that can never happen is for war to come to this place above the clouds. The Empire must always stand, and we the Blessed are the first and last and best keepers of its peace and its security."

  Then the look – that aged look that made him for the moment seem a completely different person – passed and Armor was himself again: strong, steadfast, immovable… proper.

  He straightened his shoulders and plucked a nonexistent bit of lint from his sleeve. "But enough of this," he said. "This was to be a congratulatory visit, not a solemn one." He smiled at her. "You did well, my dear."

  She smiled. Then remembered something. "Armor, when I was fighting…."

  "Yes?"

  "Something happened. To my katana."

  Armor cocked his head. "What?"

  She tried to understand what she had seen; to put it into words. "While I was fighting, when everything was at its most intense… there seemed to be a kind of flame on it. Like it was catching fire, but there was no fire anywhere around me. And I've never heard of burning metal."

  Armor stared at her for a long, long time. But he didn't seem at all lost in thought, with that faded look that people get when they are thinking so deeply they have forgotten where they are and who they are with. Rather, he seemed suddenly more completely present and focused on her than he had ever been before.

  "Interesting," he finally said.

  "What does it mean?" she asked.

  "I hesitate to guess," he said. "Not yet. But tell me if it ever happens again, all right?"

  She nodded.

  He went to the door, and when he took a last look at her that intense stare was gone, replaced by one of pride and happiness. "You really did do well last night, my dear. My Sword. My daughter."

  The snake in her guts disappeared. Replaced by a bloom of something so hot it should have burned her, but instead only made her feel innocent as she had not felt since before her first fight in the arena.

  My daughter.

  She would hear the words forever, she knew.

  She did not embrace Armor. It would not be right, and he would not let it happen. But she smiled. At the closest thing she could remember to a father, and the best man she had ever met.

  "Now," he said, and pointed a large finger at her. "You have to change. A Blessed One represents the Empire. And if that really is true, then according to you we are a nation of filthy half-savage creatures with wild hair and bits of leaves and dirt all over ourselves." His nose wrinkled as he looked at her bed. "And I shall send a maid to change your bedding."

  She laughed. No matter what happened, Armor would always be Armor, and that was good. People need things that will always be there, that can always be counted on, and she had that in her friend.

  In her new father.

  8

  Armor left her, saying she should rest, for "Tomorrow new classes begin, and more."

  She asked him what the "more" was, and he only smiled. The twinkle in his eyes promised something good.

  She did not Dream, but only dreamed. Still, that was bad enough. In her dream she held her katana against Armor's throat, and a little boy clung to him and pleaded with her not to kill her father, and then Malal appeared with the Chancellor and the Chancellor said, "Kill him." The Emperor nodded and she cut Armor's throat and he fell and then rose again as one of Marionette's poppets.

  She woke before dawn and did not sleep again.

  The classes each morning began at the practice field, training to evade enemies, to pick locks, to walk soundlessly, and (for the others – Sword had no need of the training) to kill silently with any weapon. Sword was always first to arrive, then Garden would come, and eventually Marionette would appear – when she came at all, since she was often absent.

  When Sword asked Devar about Marionette's absence once, he merely smiled and said, "Her training is a bit different than yours," and would say no more.

  Today, though, was different. Sword was not the first one on the field. Instead there were three others waiting for her. They all swiveled to look as she appeared at the door to the building that housed the bedrooms.

  One was a tall, thin man in his early twenties. He had to be twenty hands tall, but looked like he weighed little more than Sword. He held the leg of a boar in his hands, and as she watched he tore off great chunks of meat and wolfed them down.

  He needs it, she thought. A single blow could break him in half.

  Next to the tall man was a short, fat woman in her thirties who wore too much makeup and too little clothing. The effect was one of a person who wanted to appear appealing but did not quite understand how to do so.

  Beside them stood a lanky man of perhaps nineteen Turns, dressed in the black suit coat and pants, white button-up shirt, and black tie that indicated a graduate of the University. One of the hats favored by the Academics – she thought they were called fedoras – also perched atop his head at a jaunty angle.

  He wore spectacles – indication of a rich family, since glass was so hard to work with, and even harder to grind fine enough to make someone see better.

  Each wore a black disc on a chain around his or her throat.

  Blessed Ones.

  The realization brought a twin thrill: the evidence that these were others like her, and the concrete idea that she could really have anything she wanted. Could go into any shop and demand food, clothing….

  And what?

  She realized she wanted for nothing. She had food. Had clothing. Had a sword finer than any she could ask for at the bazaar. And she lived at the Imperial Palace.

  She had everything she needed, and after a lifetime in the kennels, "everything she needed" was all she really wanted.

  She heard someone behind her, and turned to see Garden approaching. Her friend wore an expression that was mixed equally between confusion and excitement: the same expression Sword suspected was on her own face.

  This is something new. Something different.

  But is it to be feared? Or to be desired?

  She waited until Garden was standing beside her, then turned back to the other three. They stared at her, the only sounds the faraway noises of some of the Emperor's Guard practicing on the far side of the field and the wet sucking of the tall man yanking great strips of meat away from the boar's leg.

  He had almost stripped the bone clean in less than a minute. When it was empty of meat he tossed it over his shoulder and wiped his hands on his shirt, which Sword noted were covered with grease and oil stains, along with other colorful blotches and smudges she could not identify.

  The man extended a hand toward her and Garden.
She looked at it, not really wanting to shake it, but decided Armor would take her to task for rudeness if he found out she had refused such a courteous gesture. She took the hand and found it – surprisingly – dry and clean-feeling.

  "Teeth," said the man.

  Sword blinked. "Sorry?" she said. She had the strange urge to say, "Lungs," as though they had engaged in a strange game where they would race to name as many body parts as possible.

  The man laughed and pumped her hand. "It's my name, girl."

  She bridled a bit at that. "I'm not a girl," she said.

  "I beg to differ," he said, and gave her a glance and a half-grin that made her feel like putting on another tunic. And a robe. And some armor. "What's your name?" he said.

  "I…." She didn't know how to answer.

  "Oh, you still think you're under injunction," said the man. "You've been blooded, haven't you?"

  Sword felt her mouth drift into a full-open position, but was helpless to stop it. Nothing this man said made sense.

  The lanky man in the garb of an Academic came to her rescue. He stepped forward and gently plied Teeth's hand away from hers. Replaced it with his own. "You will have to forgive my friend," he said. "He is a man of great appetites and little thought."

  "Hey!" shouted Teeth. But he didn't really sound mad.

  "Hey yourself!" shouted the Academic. "If you did not earn repeatedly and tenaciously the words then I would not say them!"

  "But I –"

  "Do you really want to get in an argument with me? With me?"

  Teeth shut his mouth with a near-audible snap. The Academic turned back to Sword with a shake of the head. "It's like contending with an infant," he muttered. Then he said, "I am Scholar. This," he said, gesturing at the fat woman, "is Siren." She curtsied, a move that was surprisingly dainty – almost elegant. "We are Blessed Ones. And I gather by your reticence to divulge your identities that you, too, belong to that sacred fraternity?"

  Sword's head was spinning.

  Mad. They're all mad. Or I'm mad.