CHAPTER 3
ANARYAN
I returned to the Islis di Albulkam and the Fire School as the sun was setting. Hundreds of miles of celadon- and azure-damasked sea passed below like the carpets of the crystal palace of the moon, and the carnelian light of the giant sun filled all the sky as we circled the blasted cone of the Hephaistos.
Disembarking, I thanked the pilot officer and ascended the steps into Volcano House, where I stopped a neophyte and asked if the evening meal had already been served. He shook his head.
“Hydarnes’s pupils are in the Court of Swans, domi,” the boy said, glad to have a break from his task scrubbing the checkerboard tile.
“Has them doing the Tower Dance again, does he?”
The boy nodded. “Si, domi.”
I thanked the lad and hurried on up the red-carpeted stair and along corridor after black-and-white-tiled corridor. A short elevator ride brought me to the upper hall, where racks of ancient swords and polearms hung darkly oiled on the wood-paneled walls. Already I could hear the clacking of wooden swords from the court outside, but I tarried as I often did in that high hall. Tall windows on my left looked down over the Grand Canal, and the hell light of magma glowed up at me even as the red light of day began to fade from the heavens above. The vaults of the ceiling half a hundred feet above were decorated with mandala designs of every color, resplendent in the best Jaddian tilework. The great pillars, too, were similarly tiled, and seemed to glitter like jewels—for indeed many of the tiles were jewels. Lapis and carnelian, malachite and jade, onyx and sardonyx and opals bright and pale as fire.
The great wooden doors stood open, and a pair of neophytes in white stood guard in the arch. One straightened as I approached. The other pretended—as he ought—that I was not even there.
Those double doors opened directly upon Il Cortil di Bujatani, the Court of Swans. It was a quadrangle wrapped in covered colonnades, with the side at my left open to the air and overlooking the canal. Often in the night, one might find one or two of the masters in prayer or contemplation, looking down on the magma or up at the fires of the numerous little agiary temples that dotted the mountainside. But the court drew its name not from the fire of the mountain, but from the deep pool dug in the center. Walled and bottomed with volcanic glass and thick with nenuphars whose white and lapis blooms shone in the black water like stars, the pool courted the great swans—black and white—so beloved of the Jaddian people.
There were none in it at that hour.
The presence of the neophytes and of Master Hydarnes had driven them all away.
The ringing of false swords filled the air, and the laughter and shouting of Jaddian voices.
As I made to circle toward the rail overlooking the canal, I heard a cry and a great splash. Between the two sounds had stretched a silence so profound that I did not think any of the two dozen men and women standing gathered at the narrow end of the pool had breathed during it.
A moment later, one black-haired head popped out of the water, disturbing the floating nenuphars and sending ripples black as space across the dark pool’s surface.
Two other white-clad forms stood above the water, bare feet carefully planted upon the slim wooden posts that rose from the pool, both women. As I watched, one retreated, moving her foot carefully from one post to the next. The girl advancing on her took the pole the first girl had just vacated, false sword flashing in an overhead arc.
The young man who had fallen into the water swam and found the edge. Two of his brothers pulled him back onto the lip of the pool, and he leaned on his bamboo sword. I circled, placed myself in the shadow of a pillar with the lava at my back, and watched, a thin smile on my face.
I had not thought to find her in the heat of the moment, had expected to have to pick her out of the waiting ranks on the side of the pool.
Cassandra parried the other girl’s sword, then leaped with delicate care to a higher pillar, forcing her opponent to follow. She teetered a moment on the narrow post, keeping her weight low, her arms thrust out. One foot rested on a metal spike protruding from her pillar a foot below its crown, and she caught an overhand cut with a neat parry-in-third before returning the blow toward the other’s girl’s head. The other girl parried, and braced herself on a second nearby column. She rallied, thrust at Cassandra’s breast, but Cassandra swept the offending blade aside and—transitioning from a one- to a two-handed grip—delivered a sweeping blow that caught the other girl in the shoulder. But the other girl did not fall, retreating instead to the lower of her two footholds.
“Bad show, Parastu!” said tall, black-robed Master Hydarnes from the water’s edge. “You dropped your guard too low. She’s a high-hand, that one. You’re lucky she didn’t box your ears!” He raised a hand. “Farid! You’re next!”
In the deeps of time, I heard Sir Felix bang his sword against the flagstone floor and shout Again!
A young man in dripping whites leaped onto the shorter pillar near the water’s edge and rushed up to join the fray. The towers were all of uneven height, but averaged perhaps ten feet above the surface of the water, save where those at the end nearest the House allowed the fencers to climb to that higher level, so that those upon the pillars might peer over the roof of the encircling colonnade to the sea.
This was the Tower Dance, and its object was footwork.
The boy Farid reached the top, and bounded toward the two women. I misliked the Jaddian practice of pitting boys and girls together, though I had battled women in the Colosso pits of Emesh. I winced as Farid struck at Parastu, and she fell, plummeting from her height to strike the water.
But Cassandra had seen him coming, and adjusted her footing in anticipation.
“Amuhia!” exclaimed Master Hydarnes, “Alle!”
Again!
Another girl bounded up the columns after Farid. “Farid!” she shouted, reaching the top. “Mazi!”
Together.
Hearing this, Cassandra checked her footing, braced herself against two of the metal spikes. Even had she not been atop the pillars when I entered, I would have known her instantly. Hers was the single marble face in that collection of cast bronzes. She had the Marlowe coloring—I had insisted on it. The same snow-white complexion, the same ink-dark hair. She wore it long in Jaddian fashion, in twin braids that began at her hairline and hung down at either shoulder. But she had her mother’s high cheekbones, her cutting manner, her almond eyes.
She slashed Farid across the chest. The boy staggered back, but caught himself on a nearby post and did not fall. Seeing her advantage, my Cassandra thrust her blade at Farid’s chest. He parried, recovered forward, keeping his one leg bent and weight low as he fended off a flurry of blows from my daughter.
My daughter.
Forty years she’d been by my side, and still it seemed like yesterday the Jaddian natalists had decanted her from the vat. She was no longer the little girl who had chased crabs on the beach and played in the pools of the Alcaz with the princes and princesses of Jadd, gone was the girl who had stolen lemon cakes from the cellar in the dead of night—much to the displeasure of poor Neema—and the young woman who had cried when Arman du Karaj told her that no Prince of Jadd could love a false Jaddian like herself.
In her place, there was a woman grown, tall and perilous, every inch her father’s daughter—and her mother’s, though neither woman would ever know it as I could.
My hand went to the pendant at my throat. It was a half a disc of polished silver, about two inches across. In its heart remained a sample of blood made crystal, preserved for all time.
Valka’s blood.
At my urging, Prince Aldia had sent for his natalists—the best in all the galaxy, save perhaps for those who ministered to the Imperial family itself. They had worked their magic, extracting Valka’s genome from that drop of crystal blood. Injecting it into the yolk of an empty egg. This they mingled with a dram of my own contributions, and for eighteen months I watched her grow suspended in clear fluid.
She was perfect in every way.
I only wished that Valka could have watched her grow with me.
I want a child, she’d said to me, in the dim light of the bunker. Our child.
Cassandra parried a strike from the girl called Amuhia and leaped from pillar to post, trying to separate her two opponents. Farid leaped after her, but the boy slipped and slammed into the black water, eliciting laughter and jeers from the students.
Hydarnes’s clear voice rang out. “Leonato! Go!”
Again!
Another boy mounted the posts. My Cassandra locked blades with Amuhia, staggered as the other girl’s slash bled through her parry. Still, she did not fall, but dropped her weight, one foot dangling in the open air as she fended off a flurry of short cuts. When I first met Olorin on Emesh long ago and saw him fight the Cielcin in Calagah, I had been struck by the spiderlike precision of his movements, the deliberate nature of his footwork. That deliberateness had been born here, in the Court of Swans.
Leonato—evidently picking up on Amuhia’s suggestion to Farid that they work together—circled round, coming at Cassandra from the far side, so that the two of them in their dropping tunics might trap my daughter against the wall. Unknowingly, I took a couple steps out from the shadow of the colonnade. One of the nearer students waiting on the edge saw me and nudged his friend.
Up on the posts, Cassandra turned a thrust from Leonato to one side and rapped the boy across the knuckles. Leonato winced, and Amuhia slashed Cassandra in the thigh, but Cassandra parried just in time and returned the other girl a slash she barely caught against the strong of her blade. For a moment, my daughter fended off both her opponents, turning left and right in sequence, as though the three of them were clockwork figures moved by unseen gears. Then Cassandra leapt away, the boy hard on her heels.
She was running nearly straight toward me, and saw me standing there at the water’s edge. That proved her undoing, for she faltered, swaying atop her pillar. Our eyes met, and I marked the surprise there.
“Get her!” Amuhia’s voice cracked the evening air.
An instant later, Leonato barreled into Cassandra, wrapping arms about her to tackle her from the post. Both the boy and Cassandra lost their swords in that moment, and both plunged into the water.
She broke the surface an instant later, spraying water from her mouth. When Leonato surfaced an instant later, she wasted no time. Spouting an expletive in Jaddian, she boxed the other neophyte on the ear. “You cheated!” she said.
“No grappling, Leonato! You know the rules!” bellowed Master Hydarnes, coming forward. “Get out now and hold Karani’s Chair until I release you!”
Leonato pulled himself out of the water and padded away toward the pillars, where he crouched as though sitting on a chair, arms thrust forward, palms out. Hydarnes was bound to leave the boy until he collapsed.
Cassandra swam toward where I stood at the water’s edge, and I stooped to help her out. “You distracted me!” she said, and took the offered hand, permitting me to haul her up onto the stones.
“You did well!” I said, gripping her by the shoulder.
“I was the last to fall,” she said, and only as she said it did I realize it was true. She had been dry fighting on the pillars.
“When did you go up?” I asked.
“I was fifth,” she said.
There were twenty-seven in the class.
“Leonato was the last, and it was a low trick he took me with.”
Master Hydarnes was dismissing his students to the showers. The red sun was nearly down—I could see the first stars of the Jaddian night peering through day’s moth-eaten curtain to the east. Soon it would be Aiwisruthrem, the watch between sundown and midnight, and there would be dinner in the Volcano House refectory. Those journeymen whose day it was to cook were doubtless even then preparing grilled meats and flatbreads for the masters and the neophytes. I glanced over my shoulder, smiled at Leonato, whose legs had begun to shake by then from the effort of holding Karani’s Chair.
“Abba, why are you here?” Cassandra was looking at me intently, green eyes narrow. “You never come to watch practice.”
“I need an excuse now, do I?” I smiled, but felt my disquiet yawning wide deep in my chest.
What does your daughter think of all this?
I had told her nothing, of course. Nothing of the Emperor’s letter, or my father’s death, or of Lieutenant Albé’s visit. I had hardly seen her since the young officer arrived, and had rebuffed her every question.
“Is this about the man from the Empire?” she asked. “Did the prince say something?”
I found my mouth had been hanging open, and promptly shut it. “It’s nothing,” I decided then and there.
Let it lie, whispered that tired voice within me. Let it lie until the lieutenant and his ship depart. Aldia had wanted me to talk to Cassandra, to see myself reflected in her face, as I might have seen it reflected in the faces of any of the children in the Alcaz. He had wanted me to see Hadrian Halfmortal once again, had said that I was free to go—had always been free, though a part of me remained on Jadd forever, in a crystal vial like the one contained in the phylactery about my throat.
But he didn’t understand.
He believed I had forgotten the face in the mirror, forgotten the man I once had been. But I remembered, and that was precisely the problem. The man in the mirror was not Hadrian Halfmortal at all, but a walking shadow. I knew that if I was to see the Halfmortal, the Hero of Aptucca, the Demon in White, reflected in Cassandra’s or any other face, it would destroy me.
Life is very long.
“Al Brutan!” I was saved the necessity of trying to answer Cassandra by the arrival of a tall, rapier-thin man with pointed beard and mustache. Hydarnes du Novarra had been a master of the Fire School since long before I arrived on the planet. He was a master of the First Circle, the highest honor the swordmasters could convey. In all the Principalities of Jadd—in all the galaxy—there were perhaps half a hundred men, and they were all men, who could claim that honor. He clapped me on the arm as he drew near and said, “How is our dear prince?”
I returned the gesture, doing my best to smile. “Immovable as ever.”
Hydarnes’s smile widened. “His is our most exalted bloodline. May he live to see one thousand.”
“He may live another hundred years at the rate he’s been going.”
“Master, I wonder if I might borrow my daughter for the evening?” I said, looking to Cassandra, who had turned away to wring out her hair. Her eyes flashed at my words. “Assuming she has no other duties to attend to?”
Hydarnes raised and opened one hand, as though releasing a songbird to the airs. “Done!” He turned to his students, shouted an order for two to remain behind and mop the flagstones where the lot of them had dripped upon the margin of the pool. When he turned back, it was with an almost conspiratorial air. “When am I going to get you up there, my friend?” He pointed to the poles.
“You have the wrong creation, Hydarnes,” I said in answer, almost laughing. “In the next universe, maybe.” It was an old joke, comfortable and well-worn between us.
Hydarnes shook his head, but rather than answer he called to his straggling pupil, “Bend your knees, Leonato! Lower! Lower! Good!” He turned his attention back to me, a wicked smile on his satyr’s face. “We’ll see you tomorrow, perhaps?”
“Very likely,” I said, and turning to Cassandra, asked, “Do you want to change first?”
We followed Hydarnes and his students at some distance, Cassandra with her bamboo sword over her shoulders like a yoke, me with my hands deep in the pockets of my gabardine coat. Somewhere in the gloam behind us, I heard a cry and a thud as Karani’s Chair broke poor Leonato at last.
Cassandra smirked.
“You’re sure you’re all right, Abba?” she asked when we reached the grand stair to the entrance hall. “It’s like you’re trying not to talk.” She stopped me at the top of the stair, allowing time for Hydarnes and the class to vanish through one of the left-hand doors.
I offered her a thin and crooked smile. She was so like her mother in that. Those emerald eyes saw right through me. “I’ll tell you later, Anaryan.”