Oathblood Read online

  Tarma meanwhile had flung herself at the leader with the war cry of her clan—the shriek of an angry hawk. He parried her blade inches away from his throat, and answered with a cut that took part of her sleeve and bruised her arm beneath the mail. His companion swung at the same time; his sword did no more than graze her leg. She twisted to parry his second stroke, moving faster than either of them expected her to. She marked him as well, a cut bleeding freely over his eyes, but not before the leader gashed her where the chainmail shirt ended.

  There was an explosion behind her; she dared not turn to look, but it sounded as though one of the two mages would spin spells no more.

  She parried a slash from the leader only barely in time, and at the cost of a blow from her other opponent that did not penetrate her armor, but surely broke a rib. Either of these men was her equal; at this rate they’d wear her down and kill her soon—and yet, it hardly mattered. This was the fitting end to the whole business, that the last of the Tale‘sedrin should die with the killers of her Clan. For when they were gone, what else was there for her to do? A Shin’a‘in Clanless was a Shin’a‘in with no purpose in living. And no wish to live.

  Suddenly she found herself facing only one of them, the leader. The other was battling for his life against Kethry, who had appeared out of the mage smokes and was wielding her sword with all the skill of one of Tarma’s spirit-teachers.

  Tarna had just enough thought to spare for a moment of amazement. Everyone knew sorcerers had no skill with a blade—they had not the time to spare to learn such crafts.

  Yet—there was Kethry, cutting the man to ribbons.

  Tarma traded blows with her opponent; then saw her opening. To take advantage of it meant she must leave herself wide open, but she was far past caring. She struck—her blade entered his throat in a clean thrust. Dying, he swung; his sword caving in her side. They fell together.

  Grayness surrounded Tarma, a gray fog in which the light seemed to come from no particular direction, the grayness of a peculiarly restful quality. She found her hurts had vanished, and that she felt no particular need to move from where she was standing. Then a warm wind caressed her, the fog parted, and she found herself facing the first of her instructors.

  “So—” he said, hands (empty, for a change, of weapons) on hips, a certain amusement in his eyes.

  “Past all expectation, you have brought down your enemies. Remarkable, Sworn One, the more remarkable as you had the sense to follow my advice.”

  “You came for me, then?” It was less a question than a statement.

  “I, come for you?” He laughed heartily behind his veil. “Child, child, against all prediction you have not only won, but survived! No, I have come to tell you that your aid-time is over, though we shall continue to train you as we always have. From this moment, it is your actions alone that will put food in your mouth and coin in your purse. I would suggest you follow the path of the mercenary, as many another Sworn One has done when Clanless. And—” he began fading into the mist, “—remember that one can be Shin‘a’in without being born into the Clans. All it requires is the oath of she‘enedran.”

  “Wait!” she called after him—but he was gone.

  There was the sound of birds singing, and an astringent, medicinal tang in the air. Tarma opened eyes brimming with amazement and felt gingerly at the bandages wrapping various limbs and her chest. Somehow, unbelievable as it was, she was still alive.

  “It’s about time you woke up.” Kethry’s voice came from nearby. “I was getting tired of spooning broth down your throat. You’ve probably noticed this isn’t the House of Scarlet Joys. Madame wasn’t the only one interested in getting rid of the bandits; the whole town hired me to dispose of them. My original intention was to frighten them away, but then you came along and ruined my plans! By the way, you happen to be lying in the best bed in the inn. I hope you appreciate the honor. You’re quite a heroine now. These people have far more appreciation of good bladework than good magic.”

  Tarma slowly turned her head; Kethry was perched on the side of a second bed a few paces from hers and nearer the window. “Why did you save me?” she whispered hoarsely.

  “Why did you want to die?” Kethry countered.

  Tarma’s mouth opened, and the words spilled out. In the wake of this purging of her pain, came peace; not the numbing, false peace of the North Wind’s icy armor, but the true peace Tarma had never hoped to feel. Before she had finished, they were clinging to each other and weeping together.

  Kethry had said nothing—but in her eyes Tarma recognized the same unbearable loneliness that she was facing. And she was moved by something outside herself to speak.

  “My friend—” Tarma startled Kethry with the phrase; their eyes met, and Kethry saw that loneliness recognized like, “—we are both Clanless; would you swear bloodoath with me?”

  “Yes!” Kethry’s eager reply left nothing to be desired.

  Without speaking further, Tarma cut a thin, curving line like a crescent moon in her left palm; she handed the knife to Kethry, who did likewise. Tarma raised her hand to Kethry, who met it, palm to palm—

  Then came the unexpected; their joined hands flashed briefly, incandescently; too bright to look on. When their hands unjoined, there were silver scars where the cuts had been.

  Tarma looked askance at her she‘enedra—her blood sister.

  “Not of my doing,” Kethry said, awe in her voice.

  “The Goddess’ then.” Tarma was certain of it; with the certainty came the filling of the empty void within her left by the loss of her Clan.

  “In that case, I think perhaps I should give you my last secret,” Kethry replied, and pulled her sword from beneath her bed. “Hold out your hands.”

  Tarma obeyed, and Kethry laid the unsheathed sword across them.

  “Watch the blade,” she said, frowning in concentration.

  Writing, as fine as any scribe‘s, flared redly along the length of it. To her amazement it was in her own tongue.

  “If Iwere holding her, it would be in my language,” Kethry said, answering Tarma’s unspoken question. “‘Woman’s Need calls me/As Woman’s Need made me/Her Need must I answer/As my maker bade me.’ My geas, the one I told you of when we first met. She’s the reason I could help you after my magics were exhausted, because she works in a peculiar way. If you were to use her, she’d add nothing to your sword skill, but she’d protect you against almost any magics. But when I have her—”

  “No magic aid, but you fight like a sand-demon,” Tarma finished for her.

  “But only if I am attacked first, or defending another. And last, her magic only works for women. A fellow journeyman found that out the hard way.”

  “And the price of her protection?”

  “While I have her, I cannot leave any woman in trouble unaided. In fact, she’s actually taken me miles out of my way to help someone.” Kethry looked at the sword as fondly as if it were a living thing—which, perhaps, it was. “It’s been worth it—she brought us together.”

  She paused, as though something had occurred to her. “I’m not sure how to ask this—Tarma, now that we’re she‘enedran, do I have to be Swordsworn, too?” She looked troubled. “Because if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not. I have very healthy appetites that I’d rather not lose.”

  “Horned Moon, no!” Tarma chuckled, her facial muscles stretching in an unaccustomed smile. It felt good. “In fact, she‘enedra, I’d rather you found a lover or two. You’re all the Clan I have now, and my only hope of having more kin.”

  “Just a Shin‘a’in brood mare, huh?” Kethry’s infectious grin kept any sting out of the words.

  “Hardly,” Tarma replied, answering the smile with one of her own. “However, she‘enedra, I am going to make sure you—we—get paid for jobs like these in good, solid coin, because that’s something I think, by the look of you, you’ve been too lax about. After all, besides being horsebreeders, Shin’a‘in have a long tradition of
selling their swords—or in your case, magics! And are we not partners by being bloodsisters?”

  “True enough, oh, my keeper and partner,” Kethry replied, laughing—laughter in which Tarma joined. “Then mercenaries—and the very best!—we shall be.”

  TURNABOUT

  This was the original story I sent Marion which was rejected; I later broke it into “Sword-swom” and this one, and sold this one to Fantasy Book Magazine. It was my very first piece to appear in print!

  The verses are also part of an original song published by Firebird Arts and Music of Portland, Oregon, which actually predated the story. Can I recycle, or what?

  By the way, the song doesn’t exactly match the story; that was because I had left the only copy I had of the song with the folks at Firebird and I couldn’t remember who did what to whom. So, to cover the errors, I blamed them on the Bard Leslac, who began following the pair around to make songs about them—but kept getting the details wrong!

  “Deep into the stony hills

  Miles from keep or hold,

  A troupe of guards comes riding

  With a lady and her gold.

  Riding in the center,

  Shrouded in her cloak of fur

  Companioned by a maiden

  And a toothless, aged cur.”

  “And every packtrain we’ve sent out since has vanished without a trace—and without survivors,” the merchant Grumio concluded. “And yet the decoy trains were allowed to reach their destinations unmolested.”

  In the silence that followed his words, he studied the odd pair of mercenaries before him, knowing they knew he was doing so. Neither of the two women seemed in any great hurry to reply to his speech, and the crackle of the fire behind him in this tiny private eating room sounded unnaturally loud in the absence of conversation. So, too, did the steady whisking of a whetstone on blade-edge, and the muted murmur of voices from the common room of the inn beyond their closed door.

  The whetstone was being wielded by the swordswoman, Tarma by name, who was keeping to her self-appointed task with an indifference to Grumio’s words that might—or might not—be feigned. She sat straddling her bench in a position that left him mostly with a view of her back and the back of her head, what little he might have been able to see of her face screened by her unruly shock of coarse black hair. He was just as glad of that; there was something about that expressionless, hawklike face with its ice-cold blue eyes that sent shivers up his spine.

  The other partner cleared her throat, and gratefully he turned his attention to her. Now there was a face a man could easily rest his eyes on! She faced him squarely, this sorceress called Kethry, leaning on her folded arms that rested on the table between them. The light from the fire and the oil lamp on their table fell fully on her. A less canny man than Grumio might be tempted to dismiss her as being very much the inferior of the two; she was always soft of speech, her demeanor refined and gentle. She was sweet-faced and quite conventionally pretty, with hair like the finest amber and eyes of beryl-green, and it would have been easy to think of her as being the swordswoman’s vapid tagalong. But as he’d spoken, Grumio had now and then caught a disquieting glimmer in those calm eyes—nor had he missed the fact that she, too, bore a sword, and one with the marks of frequent use and a caring hand on it. That in itself was an anomaly; most sorcerers never wore more than an eating knife. They simply hadn’t the time—or the inclination—to attempt studying the art of the blade. To Grumio’s eyes the sword looked very odd slung over the plain, buff-colored, calf-length robe of a wandering sorceress.

  “I presume,” Kethry said when he turned to face her, “that the road patrols have been unable to find your bandits.”

  She had been studying the merchant in turn; he interested her. There was muscle beneath the fat of good living, and old sword-calluses on his hands. Unless she was wildly mistaken, there was also a sharp mind beneath that balding skull. He knew they didn’t come cheaply—it followed then that there was something more to this tale of banditry than he was telling. Certain signs seemed to confirm this; he looked as though he had not slept well of late, and there seemed to be a shadow of deeper sorrow upon him than the loss of mere goods would account for.

  Grumio snorted his contempt for the road patrols. “They rode up and down for a few days, never venturing off the trade road, and naturally found nothing. Overdressed, overpaid, underworked arrogant idiots!”

  Kethry toyed with a fruit left from their supper, and glanced up at the hound-faced merchant through long lashes that veiled her eyes and her thoughts.

  Tarma answered right on cue. “Then guard your packtrains, merchant, if guards keep these vermin hidden.” He started; her voice was as harsh as a raven‘s, and startled those not used to hearing it.

  Grumio saw at once the negotiating ploy these two were minded to use with him. The swordswoman was to be the antagonizer, the sorceress the sympathizer. His respect for them rose another notch. Most freelance mercenaries hadn’t the brains to count their pay, much less use subtle bargaining tricks. Their reputation was plainly well-founded.

  However he had no intention of falling for it. “Swordlady, to hire sufficient force requires we raise the price of goods above what people are willing to pay.”

  Odd—there was a current of communication and understanding running between these two that had him thoroughly puzzled. He dismissed without a second thought the notion that they might be lovers—the signals between them were all wrong for that. No, it was something else, something that you wouldn’t expect between a Shin‘a’in swordswoman and an outClansman—

  Tarma shook her head impatiently. “Then cease your interhouse rivalries, kadessa, and send all your trains together under a single large force.”

  Now she was trying to get him off-guard by insulting him, calling him after a little grasslands beast that only the Shin‘a’in ever saw, a rodent so notoriously greedy that it would, given food enough, eat itself to death; and one that was known for hoarding anything and everything it came across in its nest-tunnels. He refused to allow the insult to distract him. “Respect, swordlady,” he replied patiently, “but we tried that, too. The beasts of the train were driven off in the night, and the guards and traders were forced to return afoot. This is desert country, most of it, and all they dared burden themselves with was food and drink.”

  “Leaving the goods behind to be scavenged. Huh. Your bandits are clever, merchant,” the swordswoman replied thoughtfully. Grumio thought he could sense her indifference lifting.

  “You mentioned decoy trains—?” Kethry interjected.

  “Yes, lady.” Grumio’s mind was still worrying away at the puzzle these two presented. “Only I and the men in the train knew which were the decoys and which were not, yet the bandits were never deceived, not once. We had taken extra care that all the men in the train were known to us, too.”

  A glint of gold on the smallest finger of Kethry’s left hand gave him the clue he needed, and the crescent scar on the palm of that hand confirmed his surmise. He knew without looking the swordswoman would have an identical scar and ring. These two had sworn Shin‘a’in bloodoath, the strongest bond known to that notoriously kin-conscious race. The bloodoath made them closer than sisters, closer than lovers—so close they sometimes would think as one.

  “So who was it that passed judgement on your estimable guards?” Tarma’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  “I did, or my fellow merchants, or our own personal guards. No one was allowed on the trains but those who had served us in the past or were known to those who had.”

  Tarma held her blade up to catch the firelight and examined her work with a critical eye. Satisfied, she drove it home in the scabbard slung across her back with a fluid, unthinking grace, then swung one leg back over the bench to face him as her partner did. Grumio found the unflinching chill of her eyes disconcertingly hard to meet for long.

  In an effort to find something else to look at, he found his gaze caught by the penda
nt she wore, a thin silver crescent surrounding a tiny amber flame. That gave him the last bit of information he needed to make everything fall into place—although now he realized that her plain brown clothing should have tipped him off as well, since most Shin‘a’in favored garments heavy with bright embroideries. Tarma was a Sworn One, pledged to the service of the Shin‘a’in Warrior, the Goddess of the New Moon and the South Wind. Only two things were of any import to her at all—her Goddess and her clan (which, of course, would include her “sister” by bloodoath). The Sworn Ones were just as sexless and deadly as the weapons they wore.

  “So why come to us?” Tarma’s expression indicated she thought their time was being wasted. “What makes you think that we can solve your bandit problem?”

  “You—have a certain reputation,” he replied guardedly.

  A single bark of contemptuous laughter was Tarma’s reply.

  “If you know our reputation, then you also know that we only take those jobs that—shall we say— interest us,” Kethry said, looking wide-eyed and innocent. “What is there about your problem that could possibly be of any interest to us?”

  Good—they were intrigued, at least a little. Now, for the sake of poor little Lena, was the time to hook them and bring them in. His eyes stung a little with tears he would not shed—not now—

  “We have a custom, we small merchant houses. Our sons must remain with their fathers to learn the trade, and since there are seldom more than two or three houses in any town, there is little in the way of choice for them when it comes time for marriage. For that reason, we are given to exchanging daughters of the proper age with our trade allies in other towns, so that our young people can hopefully find mates to their liking.” His voice almost broke at the memory of watching Lena waving good-bye from the back of her little mare—but he regained control quickly. It was a poor merchant that could not school his emotions. “There were no less than a dozen sheltered, gently-reared maidens in the very first packtrain they took. One of them was my niece. My only heir.”