Full-Blood Half-Breed

Paladin was late for temple.

So he ran.

Autumn gusts rolled through the city streets, kicking stinging grit into his face. He wiped his snotty nose and dark eyes with the back of his sleeve and sprinted down a narrow walk, congested despite the predawn gloom. Santuario del Guerrero was always a hectic city crowded with visitors, but there were five times more
turistas
clogging the streets than usual, and that would be doubled by evenfall. Torneo began on the morrow and folk from every corner of the Thirteen Kingdoms would come for the games, transforming the city into a buzzing hive filled near to bursting with manic insects.

Paladin darted into the cobblestone road, a filth-strewn obstacle course of trotting horses and clattering wheels. He danced between shabby wagons filled with crates of food and fancy coaches bearing silk-draped nobles as they raced for inns and hostels that would soon overflow with Torneo revelers.

“Move it, you stupid half-breed!” the driver of a coach-for-hire bellowed, pushing his horses recklessly through the street.

Paladin spun out of the rushing horse’s path and leapt onto the walkway. As the coach roared past, he greeted the driver with his extended middle finger. The driver shouted something vulgar, but Paladin paid it no heed. He was already on the move, dodging through crowds of sleepy-eyed merchants and rubbernecking turistas.

“Perdón!”
he yelled, spinning through a small crowd of Nord girls gawking at the upper levels of the arena, which were just visible behind the towering pagodas of Eastgate. The broad-shouldered, yellow-haired girls stood clumped together, pointing up to where rectangular columns of stone projected from the curving concrete outer
wall of the arena to frame decorative shields. “Please, señoritas!
Perdónadme!
Fräuleins, please! Make way!”

He whirled through the tangle of giggling girls without a single collision, and upped his pace through a stretch of clear walk. He made good time, all things considered. Though he had overslept, he might still have time for his morning devotion. He had stayed up way too late working in the smithy, but even after his chores were done, he had lingered, listening to his father’s journeymen trade bawdy tales of bachelorhood and the days when they all competed in Torneo. Though Paladin had heard his father tell the story of his first Black Spear win a hundred times, he never wearied of it. Hearing the tales of Rebelde’s Torneo victories filled Paladin with pride, and maybe just a little jealousy. He longed for the day when he might step into the arena and show off his warrior acumen, but Rebelde had forbidden his competing, on the grounds that it was too dangerous.

Paladin arrived at the temple compound and marked the position of Grandfather Sun, just peeking over the eastern horizon. He might still have time for a thirty- or forty-minute communion with the goddess.

“Good morning, Paladin-san,” Nao the Sharptongue, one of two guards at the temple gates, called to him as he approached the wrought-iron fence surrounding the compound. She grinned. “Running late today, no?”

“There is a first time for everything, I suppose,” the second guard, Hitoshi the Oxstrong, said amiably. The two
bushi
had ushered Paladin through the temple gates every morning since he had joined Temple Seisakusha a year or so before. He had never arrived so late.

“Hola, Nao-san, Hitoshi-san.” He nodded to the Shimabito guards and hurried through the compound gates. He wanted to get to his favorite room before the monks and other disciples rose for the morning.

Silently, he entered the small chamber used to glorify the goddess of the East, Seisakusha. The singular odor of old sweat and melted wax permeated the sparse communion cell, but he had long ago grown used to it and took comfort in its familiarity. The many-limbed Blessed Hands Idol sat in the middle of the room, and small clay candleholders rested on a shelf on one side of the door. On the other side was a peg on the wall, on which he hung his cloak. He laid his staff, Sunderbones, on the floor and lit the authorized, violet-hued Praise Candle for Seisakusha, then lit the three others he had brought from home, one brown, one scarlet, and one gray.

His eyes moved over the wooden limbs of the Blessed Hands Idol. It was a few inches under six feet, the height of the average Shimabito man, with eight spinning wooden arms located at head, shoulder, torso, and leg levels, all connected through a complex series of weights, wheels, and spring mechanisms. He inhaled a deep, calming breath to focus his
ki
, the spiritual center controlling the flow of energy through his body. Then, committing the whole of his heart to destruction, he kicked the Blessed Hands Idol hard enough to shatter it had it been made of lesser wood. He screamed at it and punched it. He savaged the holy icon with his callused, honey-brown knuckles and booted feet, his praise of the goddess as fervent as it was brutal.