I withdrew from the door and crossed to the corner of the stables.
Strovi followed, lantern held high. “What is it?” he whispered.
“Something is dead inside,” I said softly.
His eyes grew wide. “Sanctum…You’re sure?”
“Yes, sir. And no animal’s been in these stables for days. Yet here, many boot prints. It rained mere hours ago. So they are very recent—but the death inside is not.”
Strovi turned to the house, head cocked. Then he placed the lantern on the ground and shut its chimney, killing its light.
“They’re still in there,” he whispered. “Aren’t they.”
I said nothing.
“I shall go and fetch a Legion patrol,” he said. “They’ll come and we can round them up.”
I looked down at the lantern at our feet, thinking. Panic began unspooling in my belly.
“Wait. Open the light back up,” I said.
“What? Damn it all, they’ll see the light!”
“They’ll have already seen the light, from the front windows. They’d have seen us come.”
“So?”
“So if the light’s suddenly gone out, and they didn’t see it leave, then they’ll worry, and—”
Then the side door opened, and they came out.
* * *
—
I COUNTED FIVE of them in the dark, large men in light armor, their buckles and buttons winking in the dim light—along with the points of their swords, of course.
Imperial longswords. Bright and glimmering. Finely made tools for quick and easy killing. They offered no shout or cry of warning. They just advanced, swords unsheathed.
Strovi reacted much faster than I, raising his weapon to guard position quickly. His attacker moved in, swinging his sword in a diagonal downward slash, left to right. Strovi caught the blow with his blade and stepped forward into his stance, and I watched him, waiting to see if the gallant captain would live more than a second longer. But then a second attacker was on me, his sword raised high, and all I could think about was the edge of his blade.
I watched the sword approach, unable to comprehend or believe what was happening—and then my eyes shivered and trembled.
Everything slowed down.
I read the swords and the feet and the positions of their shoulders of all those about me. Angles of wrists, of knees, of hips. Grips and crossguards and the tilt of a sword’s edge. I read it all, engraved it all…
And then I was moved.
This was the only word for it: I did not move, but rather my muscles moved me, like my skeleton was being thoughtlessly shoved about by the flesh around it.
I leapt backward as my attacker approached, mindful of the stable wall behind me. Then I drew my wooden blade, raised it with both hands, and caught the attacker’s blow, my right elbow angled high.
My attacker’s sword should have cut clean through my practice weapon, yet I had angled it in just such a way that his sword did not cut straight through, but rather at an angle to it, as if trying to shave off the edge. This meant his sword got lodged within my own, trapped inside my wood and leaden blade. My attacker grunted in surprise, evidently not expecting such a thing.
My eyes fluttered. Memories of my training poured into my mind, and my muscles.
Instantly I recalled my old dueling coach Princeps Trof bellowing—Stop a swing at the right position, children, and you open up the whole of their body. And remember—you don’t swordfight with just a fucking sword!
Old Trof had shown us what to do then.
And I remembered.
I was moved, again.
I stepped forward and shoved my right elbow into where I gauged my attacker’s throat to be in the darkness, as hard as I could. My elbow instead met the crunch of cartilage, and the splash of hot blood—his nose.
A howl in the darkness, but I had no attention for it: my muscles were moving me, guiding me mindlessly through the countless dueling steps I’d learned so many months ago. I reached forward with my left hand, grabbed my attacker’s wrist, wrenched down, and used my own sword to twist his blade to his left.
His grip broke, and his sword fell free. I snatched the handle as my attacker fell back, wrenched his imperial longsword out of my shabby wooden one, and assumed a two-handed stance.
I had a sword now, a real one, for the first time in my imperial career.
I surveyed the darkened yard before me.
Strovi was still on his feet, engaged with two attackers. The one I’d disarmed was crumpled to my right. A fourth approached me to my left, growling and swinging his longsword across his body from left to right, intending to strike me on the shoulder or neck.
My eyes fluttered. Read the movement, read the position.
His choice, I saw, was a bad one.
Old Trof’s voice in my ear—A fight with blades is all about exposure and leverages! Which swings and slashes and cuts offer your opponent the most openings? Where and when can a movement be stopped? Where shall the sword’s path start and end? This is the language of steel, my children!
My muscles were moving me again, stepping me forward with my sword straight upright to catch my attacker’s blade before it could cross their body.
The steels struck, the reverberations dancing up my wrist. Yet because I had stopped the swing so early, the whole of his body was open to me.
Three smallspan, cried Trof’s voice in my memories. Three smallspan, my children! A sword point must only penetrate three smallspan deep on the trunk or neck of a person to disable and kill them. Don’t do any more fucking work than you have to!
I angled my blade to my left, trapping the strong of their sword against my crossguard; and then I jabbed the point left and up, and into their throat.
A cough, a gurgle, and the hot splash of blood in the dark. A salty flavor in my mouth, a stinging in my eyes. I blinked, and the figure fell backward into darkness.
I kept moving.
Another man was coming on my right, screaming, thrusting forward with his sword. If I had been even slightly slower he would have scored a devastating hit; yet I was jittering with clar-tea, and my eyes recognized the movement, and my muscles summoned up the memory of when Trof had forced me to train against such an attack.
I danced to the right, away from the path of his blade. I hacked down hard against the narrow of his blade, putting maximal twist on his grip (The grip, children, screamed old Trof in my ears, is always, always the weakest point of all fights!), and then I kept moving forward and hacked down again, this time closer to his crossguard, trusting that my destabilizing blow would make it too hard to respond.
I felt the crunch of the bones in his hands, my blade perhaps severing a thumb. He cried out, swung around, and tried to raise his sword with his good hand, but it was too late. My muscles shoved me forward, thrusting my blade into his shoulder; and then, when he turned, into the side of his knee. He collapsed into the mud, shrieking.
A grunt to my right. The man whose nose I’d broken was charging at me, howling. No sword in his hand. I responded instantly, thoughtlessly: a simple jab into his midsection, near the neck, then dancing back. He staggered, tried to turn to see me, and kicked over Strovi’s mai-lantern as he did so. Blue light strobed the yard as the lantern fell open, and I saw him clearly: a man of thirty or forty, nose broken and dribbling blood, and blood spurting from the deep gash just below his left collarbone.
He locked eyes with me, mouth working. A piteous, lost look, as if he’d awoken from a bad dream. Then he fell to the side.
I was moving again, being moved, being pulled, dancing through the muddy yard. Strovi was there in the corner, still fighting two men at once, both with their backs to me.
Trof’s voice in my mind, screaming, howling—Rathras cavalry knew that when chasing down fleeing souls, strike at the backs of their knees with a spear! Down them first, then kill them!
I watched almost helplessly as my sword licked forward, its point diving down to shred the tissue at the back of the man’s knee. But then…