Joel Rosenberg - [D'Shai 01] - D'Shai Read online

  “How did you get it?” Enki Duzun asked.

  “It was difficult, persuading Lord Toshtai to have two poachers executed by drowning instead of, well, instead of the usual, but it did keep both skeletons intact, as well as the sinew. There are many uses for sinew.” He clucked. “You wouldn’t believe how much trouble it is to bone a poacher, though,” Narantir went on, unfolding a strange device from his leather bag—it looked like a spike on a tripod, two coils of green-tinged copper wire projecting from the base of the tripod.

  He set the tripod down between me and the skeletons, then strung a long wire to the spike. “We shall see. This may not work well; it’s possible that you don’t have the standard complement of bones.”

  “Eh?”

  “Well, the slant-eyed Bhorlani tend to have an extra pair of ribs, and some people’s wrists don’t fuse quite properly.”

  Enki Duzun was getting interested. “Fuse? You mean, like what smiths do with metal?”

  “Oh, yes. Babies are born with more than three hundred bones—they fuse as the baby gets older. There are just too many combinations—I don’t have a good set of baby bones, not yet. Still collecting, young death by young death—boning a baby is fairly easy.” He brightened. “Ever regret not being a magician?”

  Enki Duzun shook her head. “Not really.”

  “Pity. I can usually dispel that regret, but only where it exists.”

  His wizard’s bag yielded two wooden boxes, a glass-stoppered bottle and a wad of cotton.

  “Now,” he said, warming to the subject—wizards always like to talk too much, in both senses—“we’ll have to calibrate the equipment. For that, we pick an unbroken bone. Is there one you’re sure isn’t broken?”

  “Several.” I tapped at my arm.

  “Very good. We run wires from each of these two ulnas to their coils, and then from both to your ulna.” He opened one of the wooden boxes to reveal a row of shiny needles.

  “My favorite part,” he said, fitting the needle to the end of one of the wires. He spat on a cotton ball and daubed both the needle and my arm, near the wrist.

  Then he stuck the needle in my arm, and again, I learned something I’d have been able to work out by myself: that no matter how much you’re aching from broken bones and a bruised body, if somebody sticks you with a needle, it hurts.

  “Ow.”

  “You like that, do you?” Enki Duzun glared at him.

  “Oh, yes.” The wizard smiled.

  “That’s really disgusting, you know—”

  “Shh,” I said. “He cares as much about me as Fhilt does.”

  “Eh?” Enki Duzun raised a slim eyebrow.

  “You heard Fhilt, complaining about the way he was being woken up at night.”

  She snorted. “Sometimes, Kami Khuzud, I despair of you, I really do,” Enki Duzun said, with an angry toss of her head that flicked her short black hair out of her eyes. “Some days I think you’ll never be able to listen past what anybody says to what they mean.”

  The wizard had left the needle stuck in my arm while he opened the second wooden box. Sitting inside, cushioned gently on purple velvet, was something that looked like a compass needle; he lifted it and gently set it on the tripod’s spike.

  “Law of Similarity,” he said. “Once I start the device, phlogiston will flow from similar to similar, and back. Now, since the bone is unbroken, more phlogiston will flow through the wire coil between your bone and the unbroken skeleton than between your bone and the broken one. Understand?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Wizards never wait for an answer; I don’t know why they bother to ask questions, given that—at least, if you listen to them—they always know everything. He just pulled out yet another box, opened it, extracted a piece of ordinary-looking chalk and scribbled a few quick runes on the leg of the tripod.

  “Now ...” he lowered his voice and whispered a few quiet syllables, and snapped his fingers.

  The runes flashed into flame, and I felt a strange tingling in my arm—along with the pain. My arm jerked, flinging the needle away.

  “I didn’t do that—” I started.

  “Hush, hush. It was my fault; I will handle it, Kami Khuzud, I will handle it.” The needle—the other one, the one that looked like a compass needle—had popped off the spike and now hung in the air between the two skeletons, what looked like little bolts of lightning flowing between it and the two skeletons.

  Narantir swallowed a curse; he muttered a quick phrase and snapped his fingers, and the compass needle dropped to the carpet. “That’s what you get for rushing me—”

  “My brother did not rush you,” Enki Duzun snapped. “It’s your own fault; you were too busy talking to do it right.”

  “And how would you know what’s right and what isn’t?” The wizard ran nail-bitten fingers through his beard, then wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “Never mind, never mind; I forgot to make the skeletons dissimilar to each other, and that’s just a matter of a moment’s work,” he said, his chalk at work on each of the white ulnas, scrawling a different set of runes on each before he traced over the ash on the tripod’s arm, then rewiped my arm and the needle, and reinserted it, again muttering.

  Again, the chalk flashed into flame, but this time, the needle stayed on the spike; it pointed unerringly toward the unbroken skeleton.

  “That seems adequate, doesn’t it? Now, let’s try your fourth rib.” He untied the wires, and re-tied them to corresponding ribs, then opened my tunic, felt down the side of my chest, wiped and speared me.

  The needle swung, this time pointing toward the broken skeleton.

  “Better than zuhrir and kazuh, eh, Kami Khuzud?” he said, shifting the wires again.

  “Not really.”

  “Better than zuhrir for finding broken bones,” he said. “Or do you think you can find your broken bones by balancing a ball on your buttocks?”

  By the end of the hour, Narantir had completed his inventory, I had a couple of hundred pinholes to accompany my bruises and broken bones, and Arefai was back for the wizard’s report. “Lord, we have six fractures, as well as the bruising.”

  “And you say that some masked man did this to you, lad?” Lord Arefai asked me. “Answer promptly when I speak to you.”

  “Yes, Lord. I can’t swear who it is, although I wouldn’t mind if you questioned Lord Refle. He’ll deny it.”

  The young lord looked over at Narantir. “That could be fixed, if need be.”

  “Now, don’t be looking at me, young lord, don’t be looking at me. Truth spells are very unreliable, and, if the truth be known, which it usually is, one way or another, I don’t like doing them—they’re too ... subtle, they are. Take far too much energy, too. Law of Similarity, yes, but it’s not a precise application of it. I’d have to kill something for extra power, a rabbit, at the very least, and if I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again now: necromancy is a bad habit to get into.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of similarity, Narantir. I was thinking of the Law of Contagion, or of Relevance.”

  The wizard snorted. “Ah. Of course, how very foolish of me, Your Lordship. Yes, yes, just find me the stick that cracked young Kami Khuzud on the head, and the glove that held the stick, and the hand that filled that glove—”

  “So, it would work?”

  “No,” the wizard said sharply, then apparently realized that that wouldn’t do. “Begging your pardon, Lord, but it won’t work. You can possibly fit the glove to the hand, if the glove still exists, which I doubt. The odds are, though—and I’ll cast some bones on it if you’d like—that the stick didn’t interact enough with the glove for Contagion to apply. For a certainty, the crack on his head is barely relevant to the stick that made it; to amplify the relevance and make it measurable—if we can—we’re back to necromancy again, and again you have me squatting naked over a pentagram with a knife in one hand and a cute little bunny in the other.”

  Enki Duzun cocked her head to one side. “I
t doesn’t bother you to bone a person, but you do mind killing rabbits!”

  “Idiot child—those who I have boned were already dead; they didn’t mind. The rabbit doesn’t like it; I’ve asked several.”

  “Father won’t like this,” Arefai said, lolling back in the chair, toying with a cup of urmon tea on a translucent, almost transparent bone saucer, which was probably the finest thing Madame Ru-pon owned. “He won’t have woken by now, but I will be prepared to speak to him when he rises. Yes, that is what I’ll do.”

  Suddenly, decisively, he leaped to his feet, setting the cup and saucer very gently on the table at his elbow. “In the meantime, heal the peasant boy, good Narantir.” He turned and stalked from the room, calling out a loud thank-you to fat Madame Rupon for her hospitality. Not all members of our beloved ruling class constantly make an effort to mistreat the lower classes.

  Narantir shook his head and pulled more apparatus from his wizard’s bag. “Waste of time and effort, and easier commanded than completed.” He clucked for a moment, considering. “Another Similarity spell, and now I have to fix this, too.” He produced a small steel knife and pried the lid off a clay pot. “Glue.”

  “Glue?” My voice squeaked around the edges. “You fix broken bones with glue?”

  “Not for you, idiot,” he said. “For it. Him.” He gestured at the broken skeleton. “Law of Similarity, like to like—I fix his bones, it fixes yours. I will have to get a new broken skeleton, mind, and poachers are hard to find.”

  Enki Duzun raised an eyebrow. “Why not just break the bones apart and clean off the glue?”

  “Ah. Everyone’s a magician.” Narantir chuckled. “Because you don’t want to have your brother’s bones break apart, little one. It won’t do your soft tissues any good at all, Kami Khuzud, but I’ll have you up on your feet and hobbling around by nightfall.”

  I was.

  But it was the strangest feeling: my bones felt like they were glued in place. Honest.

  * * *

  INTERLUDE:

  Way of the Warrior

  DUN LIDJUN LET the morning sun wash over his tired bones as he made his way out to the courtyard, Lord Arefai, seventh son of Lord Toshtai, at his side, the four warriors of his immediate guard at his heels, a physician and apothecary—both warriors in theory—tagging along behind them.

  The morning sun hit the sides of the granaries just right, the stone shattering the light into rainbow flickers. The stones of the path clicked beneath Dun Lidjun’s sandals, while a crow, its feathers glossy as fine oiled leather, mocked them from the branch of a mute, gnarled oak.

  “You should let me do the testing, Dun Lidjun,” Arefai said, giving an absent swing with one of the pair of wooden practice swords that he carried. “Father left it in your hands.”

  “Precisely, Lord,” Dun Lidjun said, choosing each word as carefully as an artist would choose each brushstroke. “So: when you are lord of Den Oroshtai, you may decide into whose hands to put the testing. For now, the decision remains in these old ones.”

  “Yes, yes, the decision is yours. And—”

  “And so I shall do the testing,” Dun Lidjun said. He had planned to allow Arefai to take charge this morning, but some distasteful undercurrent in the younger man’s manner had made Dun Lidjun change his mind.

  Perhaps he was irritated with the easy way that Arefai held the practice sword wrongly: tightly with his thumb and forefinger, loose with the outer fingers.

  Pulling at it, not balancing it. Treating it as a toy, not a simulacrum.

  That was not the Way.

  That was one of the things Dun Lidjun never liked, how men born into the noble class had to be treated as though they were warriors, even when you could see that they didn’t have the ka-zuh, would never have the kazuh.

  Unfair, old man, unfair, he chided himself.

  Arefai was a true kazuh warrior; Dun Lidjun had felt his kazuh flare a dozen times. The young lord was simply being thoughtless and lazy, a perquisite of youth, one rarely underexercised.

  Dun Lidjun worked his shoulders under his brightly burnished bone armor, the reticulated segments of his lacquered pauldron and gorget clicking like dice.

  Four young men waited for him around the challenge sword. They gathered about the stone altar where the sword lay protected from the elements by a silk fly, protected from theft by the certainty of Lord Toshtai’s retribution. An occasional killing was perhaps something to be shrugged off, but theft was not permitted in Den Oroshtai, or anywhere else within Lord Toshtai’s dominion.

  Lord Toshtai did things differently than most lords, and while much of that irritated Dun Lidjun—then again, the old man had to admit to himself, much of much irritated Dun Lidjun; it was part of getting old—some of it pleased him.

  The challenge sword was one example. Both the Scion’s law and even more ancient tradition required that a sword be kept available to the men of the lower classes who might claim the kazuh and status of a warrior; but in many baronies, the challenge sword was old and rusty or, if a sound weapon, kept within the walls of the lord’s keep.

  Lord Toshtai’s challenge sword was not only of fine gleaming nebbigin steel, it was a Sunder sword, one of the handful of the master’s blades remaining, and it lay in the open courtyard at the foot of the hill leading up through Old Town to the castle.

  The blade was available to anyone who wanted to challenge a warrior: to be tested, perhaps to the death.

  Everything was to be a lesson: the sword was there as a reminder to the lower classes that they were the lower classes, and not noble, not warriors; taking the testing was a reminder to the lower classes that they belonged in the lower classes; and doing the testing was a lesson to warriors on how to handle peasants, bourgeois, and middles who would dare to take up the sword.

  Arefai had irritated Dun Lidjun, but he couldn’t let his irritation affect the testing. That was not the Way of the Warrior—anger had no part it in.

  “Your name, boy,” Dun Lidjun asked of the first of the four boys, a well-made lad with brooding eyes and nervous hands.

  “I am Ben Der Donesey, Lord,” the boy said.

  “And you think yourself a warrior?”

  Ben Der Donesey cocked his head to one side. “I would hope so, Lord,” he said, too eagerly, too confidently.

  Far too confidently.

  Ignoring the wooden practice weapons, Dun Lidjun drew his own sword, once again reveling in the purity, the density of the dark striations of the fold-forged Eisenlith blade. It was a lovely sword, perhaps only two or three grades the inferior of a bright Sunder like the gleaming challenge sword, or a fine blue Greater Frosuffold like Lord Toshtai’s.

  It was, as was often true for a warrior, his single most prized possession, easily worth a third as much as all the rest of his belongings put together: his horses, his house, his tributary villages, the collection of ugly ancient Eremai watercolors that Lord Toshtai had given him, the lot of it. Not that he would trade as much again for the sword. His Eisenlith blade had saved his life dozens of times; could that be said for a dozen villages full of peasants?

  The boy’s eyes widened. “Not the practice sword, Lord?”

  “Not for you, Ben Der Donesey. Take up the challenge sword and come at me. Or leave.”

  Dun Lidjun waited, with lowered kazuh. One thing Dun Lidjun could do better than anybody he had ever met was to raise kazuh instantly.

  Not swiftly, quickly, or hurriedly—instantly.

  He stood with his head erect, releasing the tension in his mind and body until his forehead smoothed. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared as he gripped the sword properly in his right hand: a light, floating grip with thumb and forefinger, last two fingers tight, welded to the hilt, the middle finger neither tight nor loose.

  He held his neck straight, his belly tight, his shoulders down. Control flowed from his feet to his scalp, washing over him in a cool stream. He had raised kazuh, although at what moment, he couldn’t have said.
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  His kazuh was a river in which Dun Lidjun was a stone; the water rushed and flowed, and it was the water that was of consequence, not an unimportant slice of it. As a distant stream of kazuh flowed and spurted for just an instant, time washed Ben Der Donesey toward Dun Lidjun, the challenge sword held high. The boy cut downward, a stroke that would have done credit to a trained warrior.

  Dun Lidjun’s kazuh raged; riding the stream of kazuh and time, Dun Lidjun sliced down and in.

  Time split, a river dividing itself into many streams—

  In one, Dun Lidjun’s sword could have spun the challenge sword into the air and then carved the boy across the waist with a simple backslash—

  In another, his sword would have beaten the challenge sword up, and in a continuation of the same motion taken the boy’s head from his shoulders—

  In yet another, his sword should have parried as Dun Lidjun’s own lunge took him past, another stroke opening Ben Der Donesey’s back to white spine—

  —but in the real stream, in the one, true and only stream, Dun Lidjun gently batted the challenge sword aside and then stopped, the edge of his Eisenlith blade but a blade’s width from the frantic pulse at the youngster’s throat. Although neither of them moved, the stream of time slowed further, like honey in a honeypot: immobile, but potentially only a sluggish ooze. Time slowed even more, becoming like the years-slow flow of apparently motionless glass in a window, or the gentle seaward march of a mountain range.

  Dun Lidjun waited, warm and secure in that frozen moment, until Ben Der Donesey lowered the challenge sword.

  “You are accepted, Ben Der Donesey,” Dun Lidjun said, gesturing at one of the guards to lead the boy to one side. The arrogance would be a problem, but a curable one. You could beat the arrogance out of a boy, as Dun Lidjun knew from experience—on both ends of the stick.

  Dun Lidjun had felt the boy’s kazuh flow. Only a trickle of a spring, barely oozing kazuh out, yes, but kazuh nonetheless. It was rare for such an untutored one to raise kazuh at all. It happened, though: sometimes, under the proper sort of pressure, the hidden spring could be made to flow.