The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (74 page)

             
“Yes, Sir!”  He snapped the packet professionally to his side.

             
“Dismissed.”  He was a good kid, had done a superb job.  Androssan had chosen him for that very openness—it would take a Northerner with at least a hint of romantic leanings to be able to get close enough to the Rach to understand them.  He’d be a fabulous personal aide, Androssan thought regretfully.  Intuitive, insightful…but he couldn’t very well ruin his career by keeping him in Staff his whole life. 

             
The Imperial General sighed and went back to his books.

CHAPTER 35

She was a Tarqina, to be exact.  The Chieftess of the Whiteblades had such brilliant orange and yellow highlights in her red hair that it looked like a cloud of fire around her lean, bronzed face, tendrils licking at her throat and shoulders.  Her eyes were a startling, brilliant azure, slightly slanted and so piercing, so knowing, that Ari almost winced as she looked at him.  And she seemed, unfortunately, to have eyes for no one but him.  No one had moved.  There wasn’t a rush of greetings or welcomings or anything.  Just a respectful silence from the loosely gathered Whiteblades and an electricity that crackled from those uncanny eyes.

             
“There are things,” she said in a light, sibilant voice and an accent he’d never heard anywhere, “we need to discuss.”

  Every word seemed to fall on Ari
’s ear like a bell tolling doom.  She was unmistakably talking to him, and for all his impassioned protestations about being kept in ignorance over the last few weeks, he suddenly didn’t want to know.  Anything.  The weeks and months and years of wondering about his past had come to an end, and the unwillingness to go a step farther down this path rose in him like a physical thing.  There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that nothing she was going to tell him was going to be good.

Dorian
’s voice came whispering through his memory, strangely bracing...
the courage that will be demanded of you will be of a different sort…
Well, here it was then.  He swallowed again, the third or fourth time, steeling himself, and managed a jerky nod.  When Rheine walked away into the woods, a flaming, graceful sprite, he followed by pure force of will.  He’d never dreaded anything so much in his life.

             
Rodge and Loren were off by themselves, fine-tuning their list, when Ari sought them out later.  He’d been cloistered with Rheine for hours, his world turned upside-down and backwards—again—but he came out of it clearer-headed than he’d been in a long time.

             
His friends had put the time to good use, making final adjustments to their rankings of the Whiteblades.  Qualifications were stringent:  beauty, shapeliness, and, well, that Certain Something.  Ari had frowned fiercely at them when they’d started, and he was no more interested now.

             
He flopped glumly down next to them, gathering his thoughts, and was interrupted as soon as he opened his mouth.

             
“She’s too distracting,” Loren disagreed.  “You can’t even have a conversation with her.”

Ari sighed in frustration.  He knew exactly who they were discussing.  Rodge held adamantly to the theory that Brook was the very embodiment of womanhood.  She
’d been at the top of his list unshakably for weeks now.

             
“Guys,” Ari said.

             
“Yeah,” Rodge said, deadpan and completely ignoring Ari, “I’ve noticed you’re QUITE cerebral when interacting with females.  A flaming intellectual.”

             
“I need to talk to you,” Ari said insistently.

             
“I just want someone who has more going for her than raw animal appeal,” Loren said.

             
“Liar,” Rodge accused him.

             
“I don’t think this is going to turn out well,” Ari plunged in.

             
“It’s no big deal, Ar,” Rodge waved away his concern.  “In fact, it’s probably better if we both don’t put the same one first.”

             
“Listen to me,” he insisted, and they both turned to look at him blankly.  “This isn’t going to end well,” he said again, miserable at the thought of what faced them.  It was different for him; there would be a purpose to his death if he didn’t make it, but them…

             
“What?” Rodge asked.  Ari, at a loss for words now that he had their attention, waved vaguely out at the busy meadow.  Whiteblades, Ivory, Swords of Light, Followers, whatever you wanted to call them, moved quietly here and there in the growing dusk, graceful and exquisite as butterflies.  The campfire, where Yve was creating something that smelled delectable, was reflected off the edges of dozens of razor sharp axes, swords, and knives, and buckets worth of arrow tips.             

             
“This quest?” Loren said, more romantically inclined.

             
Ari nodded heavily.  “I think,” he said quietly, “that you two should take Cerise and Selah and go back.”

             
Loren goggled at him.  “What?  Why?”

             
“Because it’s going to get dangerous.  Someone could get killed.”  There.  He’d said it.

             
They both looked at him, completely unimpressed.

             
“Really, Ar?” Rodge said dryly.  “If you were so worried about someone getting hurt, why didn’t you speak up back when we could do something about it—like before we left Archemounte?  Since ‘someone could’ve gotten killed’ on average once a day, I’d say, since we started this brainless trip.”

             
“But this time I
know
,” Ari said desperately.

             
“I’m pretty sure we all knew, every morning we opened our eyes in Cyrrh.”

             
Ari looked stubbornly between the two of them.  “Look, I have to go on…because…of what…of who…I just have to.  But you don’t.  You have another life waiting for you.  I don’t want you to come.”

             
Rodge and Loren looked at each other, then back at Ari’s earnest, set face.

             
“Get over yourself, Ar,” Rodge said bracingly.  “You’re not some all-important cog in the wheel of life.  And you’re nowhere near capable of making it through this without us.”

             
Loren laid a hand on his shoulder.  “We’re not leaving you,” he said firmly.

             
“Yeah, yeah, that’s what I meant,” Rodge amended.  “Hey, you got any more of that Cyrrhidean jerky?  I am completely out.”

             
“Besides,” Loren said, a slow smile spreading over his handsome face, “this is liable to be the biggest, best adventure of all.”

             
Ari smiled weakly.  It certainly was.

              Ari’s impatience with the past few weeks’ slow motion ended abruptly.  The very next day, Rheine came over to the fire at breakfast and captured their immediate collective attention.  Ari was on his third bowl of oats (Yve had added some kind of berry sweetening that made them pure ambrosia) and in silhouette looked about five months pregnant with oatmeal.  Groaning softly, he put down the bowl.

             
“Today we cross the Hzukghin Pass,” she told them in her strangely accented voice, without preamble.  She squatted near Traive, her thigh-high boots bunching in the middle of her long legs.  “This is the main route from Zkag to the Atarq port on the Western Sea and is closely guarded.” 

To be honest, few of them were actually paying much attention to what she was saying, alarming as it was.  She had to be the most fascinating person any of them had ever met—you literally could not keep from staring at that fierce, high cheek-boned face.  Her eyes were almost hypnotic, able to turn a perfectly intelligent male into a stuttering idiot in seconds, but even Cerise was subdued
in her presence.   Encircling her long neck was a wide band of some dull, hammered metal, which, despite the hours he’d spent looking so intently at her yesterday, Ari had somehow never noticed.

             
“Speed and silence are paramount,” she cautioned, her voice lingering over the ‘s’ sounds in the odd inflection she had.  “Tho ‘tis unlikely we’ll meet a large force, it only takes one Tarq escaping our notice to warn the entire Sheelshard against us.”  Her breath-stealing glance rested on Cerise and the boys, a singling out which they were used to—for some reason, it seemed to be assumed that the Dra, the Lord Regent of Cyrrh, the Imperial ex-Wolfmaster, and the Knight of the Steelmists didn’t require as much personalized instruction in the art of survival.

             
True to her word, by mid-morning the Whiteblades had virtually erased any evidence of their several days of camp and, with a few of them joining the northerners on horseback, they moved quietly south. 

Ari
’s heart was pounding like they were assaulting Zkag as they rode stealthily down the trail.  He hovered nervously close to Selah, sitting calm and capable on her roan.  He’d tried yesterday to talk her out of accompanying him, too, but his suggestion had been met with such composed, self-sufficient denial that he’d felt a little silly.  She gave the powerful impression that Zkag would simply require a few more frying pans upside the head, and how nonsensical was to it run from a motley collection of misguided thugs?  Ari had just stood there, looking lamely down at her, unable to come up with an argument, wanting her with him so badly it made his throat ache.  His chest didn’t flutter around anymore when he was with her; now she was lodged solidly in the center of it, a warm glow that was never going to fade. 

Rheine was at the head of their column, Dorian and at least half of the band somewhere else out of sight, and she led them down to the edge of a deep gully, turning warily to follow a switchback down to its floor.  The horses
’ hooves rattled like trumpets on the dry, rocky red ground, and Ari’s eyes flew up and down the crevasse, scanning nervously.  He could just barely see Whiteblades on foot down the canyon, keeping lookout from the cover of several big boulders.  The whole canyon was littered with boulders and rocks of varying sizes, and the horses had to pick their way carefully across all but the very middle.  There, where a span the width of a wagon showed impressions of wheels, it was relatively flat and clear.  They started up the other side, Ari cringing at what seemed a thunder of rocks kicked loose by hooves. 

They seemed to be in slow motion.  Ari was in an agony of suspense watching Rheine
’s stallion amble along as if he was simply on his way to a new pasture, which his horse brain probably thought he was.  He was nimble as a mountain goat, though, his delicate Aerach hooves as sure as suction on the narrow, steep switchback.  Edgy as Ari was, there were moments he wished he could stop time, wished he was a painter that could capture the scene in front of him.  Rheine would look back continuously, and sometimes, when the sun caught her and the stallion full on against the orange-red rocks, her fiery hair and his long, silken mane and tail streaming in the hot breeze of the gully…it was almost savagely beautiful.

Nothing happened.  He couldn
’t believe it, later.  For as much trepidation as he’d had about that one couple hours’ ride…Maybe it was a foreshadowing, he thought as he lay awake staring at the hot southern sky later that night.  Long after the talk was done, after the singing and dancing and the soaring of his soul were over, after he’d whispered good night to Selah, longing to take her in his arms one last time, late into the night he lay and thought about the path before him.  He thought about the danger and the excitement and he didn’t regret for a moment that he’d agreed to do it.  What a glorious use for a life that up until a few days ago had had no use at all.  And what memories he had now to take with him—the aching beauty of the White Wilds and the heart-leaping surges of the Eastern Sea, the lush treasure of Cyrrh and Lirralhisa and her great stags and gryphons…but most of all, the warmth of his friendships, of Selah, and the rare, vivid beauty of the Followers.  He would never forget the night he’d just lived.

Rheine had gathered them all earlier that evening.  As if they were totally secure south of the Pass, they didn
’t even mount a guard, and it would have been memorable enough just to have all twenty of those bright, gorgeous persons all together. 

But this was not to be a night of banter and laughter and camaraderie, at least not until later.  The group, to include the northerners, was subdued and serious, a strange, tight tension in the air.  Part of that was Rheine—not the sort you
’d want at a let-it-all-loose kind of party—and part of it was the knowledge of what lay before them.  The Whiteblades, at least, had known exactly what they were heading south for.             

Rheine drew a rough stick-figure plan in the soft dirt in the middle of the group, her long legs bending and rising effortlessly as she moved around inside their circle.

They were going to re-enter the canyon tomorrow around midday—late enough to give two other groups of Whiteblades time to move into position.

“We
’ll be caught by surprise roughly—here,” she pointed to a spot near the junction of the canyon pass with the Sheel.  Rodge leaned over and whispered to Ari, “We’re
planning
to be surprised?”  Ari shushed him.

“The Tarq will capture us and take us into the Sheelshard.”  She pivoted on her heels
in a crouch and lasered the northern group with those scintillant eyes.  “Do not fight overmuch, if at all.  The point is to be captured.  There is no use dying just to prove that you are surprised.”  Rodge nodded vigorously.

“Once in the
’Shard, we should be taken fairly directly to the Hall of Sacrifices.  It is important that we do not distract them from this—we must get to that Hall.”  She didn’t look at them this time, but Ari was pretty sure that comment was meant for young Northerners.