CHAPTER 5
CALIBAN TOOK THE SWORD out to the yard behind the inn the next morning, to see how much he had lost. The yard was for storing carriages when their owners were staying the night, but there weren’t any in residence at the moment.
Barrels of lamp oil and the less perishable supplies lined the walls, but there was a broad, empty space in the center. Grass grew up through the bricks.
He set his teeth and stepped out from the comforting closeness of the inn, directly into the emptiness.
Nothing happened. He did not fall into the sky. His stomach stayed quiet.
He exhaled.
Very well, then.
He knelt in the center of the yard, the sword in front of him, and tried to pray.
Dreaming God, who holds us all within His dreams, I thank you for this day you have set before me, for the sword I am given to serve you. I thank you—
And there he stopped, because the next line was I thank you for my life, and that seemed an odd mockery. He was a dead man, after all.
He hadn’t even meant to pray. He had done it because you started the sword practice with prayer, every time. It was automatic. You drew the sword, you went to your knees, you bowed your head. It was part of the sword practice.
It was useless. The temple had thrown him out. The god had obviously turned away, or the demon would never have gained entrance. He could still feel the hollowness in his soul where the god’s presence had once been.
Ngha, maha, kalikalikali…
No. I cannot believe that. I must believe that the gods do not send us trials that we cannot endure.
It would have been easier to believe that if he hadn’t seen so many people broken by the trials they had endured.
He’d broken a few in his time. Exorcisms were not gentle things.
He had prayed in the cell for hours. Days. He had kept vigil on his knees, praying. Not for forgiveness, not for mercy—he deserved neither—but simply for a death.
The god had not answered. The hollow place in his soul stayed empty. Weeks had stretched to months, and he had stopped believing that there would ever be an answer. His faith had turned to bitterness and bile.
And then a little brown sparrow of a woman had come to the cell door and begun to sneeze.
The temple had abandoned him. Did the Dreaming God still have a use for him after all? Or had the god, too, washed His hands of His former paladin?
If He was still there, wouldn’t I feel Him? Or does what’s left of the demon keep even gods away?
Caliban sighed, got up, and drew his sword.
It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. He’d lost a fair bit of tone, but no worse than the time he’d been laid up with a broken leg. The memories were all still there, ground into slow, stupid muscle until it was second nature.
He ran through the sword forms, separately at first, then together in sequence. It was a crisp morning, but even so, within a very few minutes, sweat was dripping off him and his breath was coming fast.
He sheathed the sword and went to dunk his head in the horse trough.
When he came up for air, Brenner was sitting on one of the barrels, watching him. There was a cigarette between his lips.
Caliban saluted him, somewhat ironically, with the sword. “I did not get a chance to thank you. It’s an excellent blade.”
Brenner nodded. “Are you going to ask where I got it?”
“Should I?”
The assassin grinned. “Perhaps I killed a temple paladin for it.”
“Perhaps you did,” said Caliban evenly, giving no sign of how his stomach lurched at the thought.
“Ah, you disappoint me.” Brenner chuckled. “No, I went to a weaponsmith. He does very fine work, and he occasionally supplies the temples.”
“Now you disappoint me,” said Caliban. “Did you at least steal it?”
“Tchah!” Brenner clucked his tongue. “One does not steal from weaponsmiths. They’re skilled labor. You do your part to keep them in business. Stealing from them is short-sighted.”
Caliban scratched his chin. This was an unexpected social conscience for an assassin.
“Of course, as Mistress Slate reminds me, we’re all going to die shortly, so does one have the luxury of being anything but shortsighted?”
“Aww.” Brenner slid off the barrel, grinning, grinding the cigarette end out under his heel. “Our Slate is a dear little fatalist, isn’t she?”
“I take it you don’t share her view,” said Caliban, practicing a lunge that took him away from the assassin’s grin.
“Nah. The trip’s bad enough, mind you, but she’s got her own reasons for not wanting to go to Anuket City. And it’s different for me, you understand—I expect to die any day, so one more suicide mission isn’t any different. Our Slate’s in a much lower-risk line of work.”
Caliban raised an eyebrow at that. “You’re both breaking into people’s houses at night, aren’t you?”
“Yes, yes, but it’s different. You wake up and find a teeny little girl with big eyes like our Slate going through your papers, you call the watch. You wake up and find me standing over you with a knife, and…well, now.”
A knife appeared in his hand. He waved it under Caliban’s nose, perhaps by way of demonstration. The former knight-champion stood his ground.
I recognize a test when it draws steel on me. He sighed internally. I wonder how this will go down.
“It occurs to me…” drawled Brenner, “that if you’re going to be watching our backs, it would be nice to know how good you are.”
“You’ve been watching me for a few minutes now, unless I miss my guess,” Caliban said.
“Chopping at shadows, while very pretty, is not quite the same thing.”
“I suppose not. What do you propose, then?”
Brenner lunged at him, his body unfolding like a preying mantis closing on an insect.
Caliban had been expecting it, practically since the assassin had showed up, and he still barely managed to get out of the way.
Dreaming God, he’s fast!
He leapt backwards, swung his sword, saw it going directly at Brenner’s head, and pulled the blow with a brutal snap that left his wrists throbbing.
Ow. Ow. Ow.
“You idiot!” he yelled. “This is live steel! You can’t—if I hit you—”
“I’d best make sure you don’t hit me then,” said the assassin cheerfully, circling on the balls of his feet. He was indeed presenting just a profile.
Knife-fighter. Yep. Damn.
“This is not a good idea, Brenner!”
“It’s a great idea!”
I’ve got a good bit of reach on him, particularly with the sword, for all the good it does. I know I’m stronger. And it doesn’t bloody well matter because whether I cut him or he cuts me, I lose. Damn, damn, damn.
“Put some armor on, at least!”
“Oh, quit whining, paladin. I’m hardly the first person you’ll have killed.”
“If you’re trying to annoy me, you’re succeeding.”
“Aww.”
They closed again. Rather, Brenner closed, and Caliban dodged backward and swung his sword in an easily avoidable arc.
“Surely you can do better than that.”
“Yes, but I’d rather leave you both legs.”
Brenner was getting bold now, realizing that the knight didn’t dare hit him. Caliban gritted his teeth and watched for an opening.
“So which is it for our knight, eh? Do you think you’re going to live, like me, or are you waiting for your death, like our Slate?”
Caliban kept his eyes on the man’s hands. Another knife had joined the first.
“Hoping for a heroic death to wash away all those sins?”
“Spare me the assassin’s psychology,” muttered Caliban, practically without hearing himself. There had to be an opening, he knew just what it would look like…
It came. Brenner lunged again, a knife in each hand.
Caliban slapped the leading blade away with a blow to his wrist, wished badly for gauntlets—I’d crush his bloody fingers if I had some decent gauntlets—and the assassin was coming up beside him now, hip to hip, and that was a bad place for a man with a knife to be, and if he turned, he could take his head right off with the sword, but not before he got a knife in the kidneys—
“What in hell are you people doing?” Slate snarled from the doorway.
Both men froze. Since there was quite a lot of momentum going on at the moment, this meant that Brenner, ducking under the sword, actually fell to one knee, arms extended around Caliban’s waist in a sort of lethal hug.
Caliban tried to pull the sword up short one-handed.
His wrist laughed at him. Something went poing!
inside his arm, and his fingers opened. The sword jerked, wavered, fell, and landed—flat first, thank the gods—on Brenner’s shoulder.
“Oof,” said the assassin.
“Are you killing him or knighting him?” asked Slate, emerging from the door and pacing around the two of them as if they were a peculiar bit of statuary she’d discovered in the courtyard.
“Um,” said Brenner. “We were sparring.”
“Yes,” said Caliban. “Sparring.”
They exchanged a brief look, unified in the face of a common enemy.
“Is that what they call it? Do you need to get a room? Do you want me to go away, come back with a bucket of water, maybe?”
“I think we’re good,” said Caliban, picking his sword off the assassin’s shoulder, very carefully.
“I think so,” said Brenner, moving his knives delicately away from Caliban’s kidneys.
“Good to know.” She glared at both of them. “I realize we’re all going to die, but I’d just as soon we do it there and not here.”
“Awww….”
Caliban saluted her with the sword. She snorted and stalked off.
The men looked at each other.
“Next time, maybe.”
“Oh, yes.”
As truces went, it wasn’t much, but Caliban figured he’d take what he could get.
“I don’t suppose you could find some armor as easily as you found a blade?”
“I could probably manage that,” said Brenner, and smiled.
“Madam Slate?”
Slate looked up from her work. “You can skip the madam bit. It makes me sound like my mother.”
“Was her name also Slate?”
“No, but she was a madame.” Slate leaned back in her chair, enjoying the expression that Caliban was trying (and failing) to hide. “What do you need?”
“I wish to attend a service at the temple,” he said.