The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (2 page)

It only took a second
and then he rose with a dagger in his brown, long-fingered hands.  He and Melkin exchanged a look as he gravely handed it to him.  “Sheelsteel,” he said quietly, his voice deep and rich in his expressionless face. Ari stared at him, half-admiring, half-horrified at his composure.  His eyes were almost black, glittering and powerful in the still, hatchet face.  He was really only a medium-sized man, but Ari had never known anyone to so thoroughly occupy space.  He was so caught up in the sense of power and danger coming off the man that it took him a minute to realize what he’d said.  Sheelsteel?  Sheelsteel came from the vast desert to the south of the Empire, an alloy used only in the Enemy’s weapons.  Where would a Northerner get that kind of blade?  It’s not like it was valuable, being way inferior to strong Northern steel.

“
This is Dra Kai,” the Master introduced him absently, his attention focused intently on the dagger blade he was drawing from its sheath.  Over and over he turned it in his hands, eyes narrowing.  They hardened as he looked up.  “Who’s
your
friend?” he asked softly, voice like sandpaper.

Ari and Loren blinked at him.  They looked at the man on the floor that was lying so still.  Then they looked at Rodge, who was never at a loss for words…unless he was unconscious.  Then they looked at each othe
r, until finally Melkin bellowed, “ANSWER ME!”

They both jumped and Loren immediately began to babble,
“We don’t know, Master Melkin, sir, we just walked in and he was here and the room was all a mess—”

“
You’ve never seen him before?” Melkin barked.

“
No!” Loren exclaimed, and would’ve continued, now that he had some momentum built up, except that Melkin cut him off.

“
Ari?” he demanded.

“
No, sir.” Ari tried not to sound as bewildered as he felt.  Both of the men facing him had rather uncomfortably penetrating eyes.  Although for all of Melkin’s noise, it was the Dra that seemed to dominate the general surroundings.

Melkin
glared at them for a moment, looking disgusted, then shared a quick look with the bronzed, muscled man next to him.  They seemed to agree on something.  Without a word, the Dra turned and knelt.  He tossed the body of the intruder up over a broad shoulder as if it was made of straw and slipped soundlessly out of the room.  It was a little surreal.  If Melkin hadn’t still been there, colder and more business-like than they’d ever seen him at the front of the classroom, the boys might have thought they’d dreamed it.

“
All right,” he grated out, piercing eyes boring into them.  “I want you to think.  By some misguidance of the gods you’ll be thrust out into the world as adults in a couple years, so start flaming acting like it.  That man didn’t drop by to check out the view. 
Why was he here?
” he snapped.

The boys gawked.  Rodge moaned in the background, coming to.  It was the start of a very long night.

Ari, lying sleepless on the floor hours later, still couldn’t quite believe it was all happening.  Melkin had brought them down to his office, interrogating them for hours, first individually, then together, then in pairs, then singly again—until it was obvious that despite his suspicions, even he was struggling to make anything reasonable out of the whole incident.

Rodge
had been dismissed first.  He was so unburdened with affluence that he had to scribe every spare moment just to scrape together tuition each semester.  He certainly didn’t have anything of value.  His parents were equally uninteresting.  Granted, they both worked in the Courts of Justice, but they were scribes, not even directly involved with Cases of Judgment.

Loren, of course, was the most likely suspect
to be a victim of crime, being of Landed blood and due to inherit Harthunters one day.  But the estate was almost a week’s ride away and he hadn’t brought anything of value to University with him.  As far as he knew, there were no enemies of the family, either.   His father, Lord Harthunter, was just and generous, as affable and well-liked as Loren.

And that left Ari, who was inexplicably the last to be released by a Master
almost frothing with frustration.  He would have thought he’d be the
least
likely to attract such unwholesome attention.  He had absolutely nothing to his name, did his best to avoid almost everyone but his roommates, and didn’t even
have
a family.  But Melkin wanted to hear his short, simple life story over and over, glaring at him the more keenly with every repetition.  There’d been a few years he barely remembered with the Illian nuns, then Lord Harthunter had run across him on a hunting trip in the southern Empire and adopted him, an orphan without a single bit of historical interest to his name, as a brother for Loren.

What a bizarre coincidence, Ari thought
as he lay staring into the dark and listening to Rodge snore.  That such an unwelcome probe into his personal life should afflict him just as he’d become so agonizingly aware of it himself.  Unbidden, Mistress Harthunter’s harping voice came echoing through his mind as it had a thousand times since that day over Midwin.

“
It’s time he moved on, Herron.  Your One Great Deed has been more than satisfied, and we are spending money on him that should be going to other purposes.”

“
He’s like our own son,” Lord Harthunter had protested in his warm, mild voice. “And a wonderful companion to Loren—”

“
He’s a TROUBLEMAKER and drags Loren into it with him!  He is not the kind of companion the future master of Harthunters needs, a penniless parasite that will be forever attached to his coinpurse…”

“
I think Loren’s actually more at fault for their trouble,”
Ari had heard Lord Harthunter chuckling.  Their voices had faded out behind Ari as he strode quickly away, so shocked he could hardly breathe.  It had never occurred to him that he wasn’t wanted, that he was a burden, that he was ever anything less than Loren’s brother.

It
had taken him the last several months to come to terms with it.  He was never going back, ever.  And Loren…well, Loren would never understand.

But
now, incredibly, he’d been given a respite from having to come up with a believable  excuse, which had been looking increasingly impossible the closer they got to end of term.  Melkin had decided to keep them in sight this summer, all of them—on his summer sabbatical trip.  Ari was still stunned; Rodge had been furious when his parents gushingly agreed, but Ari felt nothing but relief.  Cravenly, of course, because it meant he wouldn’t have to tell Loren a single thing for several months.  And who knew what kind of opportunities might present themselves as excuses in the course of such a trip?

He shifted uneasily on the stone floor.  Melkin had done little more than throw some old skins down for them, but Ari
’d spent more nights than he could count sleeping out on hard ground.  It wasn’t his bed making him restless…he’d seen a warm, living person turned into a cold corpse before his eyes today.  By a
Dra
, no less.  A living person that had meant them serious harm, judging by Melkin’s innuendos.  And then there was Melkin, who was somehow in cahoots with said Dra, and who for some reason was deeply and intensely involved in their suddenly flipped-over world.  If he was at all the sort of person you could have a normal conversation with, there were several things Ari would have liked to ask him. Not the least of which was…what that intruder was doing with Sheelsteel.

“Where are we going?” Rodge demanded irritably, a little out of breath because they were climbing the steep hill of the Mounte.  His travelsack jounced around on his skinny shoulders, a toothcleaner threatening to fall out one side and the toe of spare hose dangling out the other.  There had been little improvement in his mood overnight, despite the stone floor, terrifying interview, and traumatic events of the preceding hours, and he’d been clearly articulating why to anyone who would listen.  He’d be copying Mathematics and Physics scrolls all through the next semester to make up for this summer.  His parents were spineless sycophants for rolling over like trained pooches and gushing that their son had been invited to accompany his ‘esteemed professor’ on a research trip.  But loudest of all was his pronouncement that he HATED Applied Natural Sciences and had never spent a night outdoors in his life.

“
Maybe to the Palace,” Loren said eagerly.  As far as he was concerned, he and Ari would’ve spent the whole summer camping out and adventuring anyway—he’d agreed to Melkin’s announcement with perhaps unseemly enthusiasm, given the circumstances.

Rodge scowled at him. 
“Oh, doubtless.  I’m sure Queen Sable’s got nothing better to do than entertain demented subjects who fancy themselves Imperial Investigators and bestow her blessing on a trio of enslaved University students.  This isn’t exactly a quest for the honor and glory of the Empire, gravy-head—we’re probably going to be studying toad droppings.”

“
Why else would we climb Palace Hill?” Ari asked logically.  “We’d go around if we were trying to leave town by any of the Gates.”  If he thought logic would be soothing to Rodge’s outraged sense of justice, he was mistaken.  You could have grilled a steak with the look he was shot.

“
I wonder if she’ll have the Diamond Scepter,” Loren rattled on insensitively.  “I’ve heard it shoots rainbows in a thousand different directions when the sun hits it…”

“
That’s because it’s glass,” Rodge snapped in atrocious temper, “and that would be the prism effect—which you would know if you ever paid attention in Physics.”

“
It’s a Diamond!” Loren, a devout Marekite, insisted.  “Everyone knows it’s a triele.”

“
Do you honestly think the gods need stones to channel their power?”

This might have gone on
‘til the next Age had they not topped out on the Mounte…and taken the unmistakable turn towards the Palace Grounds.  Loren’s face lit up in delight.  Rodge looked almost comically astounded, which he quickly changed back to a scowl.

Ari
, grinning, quickened his pace to catch up with Melkin and Kai, who were striding ahead over the rough cobblestones.  Kai looked the same this morning—lethal—but Melkin had traded his rich robes for a traveler’s cloak, already stained and well-worn.  With old boots on his feet and his grey hair whipped by the wind, he looked like he’d already been on the road for weeks.

As the guards waved them through the gates and into the leafy forests of
the Grounds, Ari gazed around in respectful awe.  There’d been a huge controversy over the new Palace.  When tottering old King Carnelian had finally tottered over, the Imperial Council had leapt at the opportunity to update the Empire’s image for the new, young Queen.  This had been years before Ari and Loren had started University, but they’d been afflicted with the whole saga in History of the Modern North.  The Traditionalists had lost out overwhelmingly to the Progressives, and the old timber and stone survive-a-siege style fortress was torn down.  The new Palace was built using new technology, blocks lighter and cheaper than marble but the same look.  Wouldn’t stop an arrow, they said, but scored high in aesthetic value.  New, park-like Grounds filled in the moats, new statues and poet’s squares graced ground where the crumbling old walls had stood guard for centuries, and the old strictures about having nothing around to catch fire...well, it was a new Age, after all, and the Enemy was long gone.

             
The main, top-most Palace turret came into view with the huge red flag of the Imperial North snapping awesomely from its peak.  In the flag’s center, in bold, conical white, the outline of the Triple Mountain was stitched.  Below it, on another turret, flew a dark blue banner crossed with silver swords—and Ari remembered with a start that the King of Merrani was in town.

There was another brief stop
at the Gate to the Inner Keep, where one of the guards curled his lip as Kai passed, then they were entering a busy world of walls and gardens and courtyards and gates, all of it glass-smooth white stone and spring greenery.  Everywhere, Palace officials in the snow and scarlet scurried busily around on the thousand different errands and duties that kept the Realm running.

“
Harthunters isn’t even this busy on feast days,” Loren whispered, awed, to Ari.  Fond as he was of the estate, Ari figured the Imperial Palace of the North probably had an edge on it, both in duties and acreage.

They came up behind Melkin and Kai, stopped at a side door in the shadow of one of the soaring white walls. 
The boys crowded close up on them excitedly, but neither of the men seemed particularly affected—oddly at ease, in fact.  Ari felt like a country yokel.  Once they entered the Palace proper, he had to keep reminding himself to close his gaping mouth.

Inside, d
eep carpets of Imperial scarlet sank beneath their rough boots.  Walls of alabaster white filled their view, their endless corridors full of fabulous, fantastic works of art.  There were priceless Cyrrhidean vases with colors so brilliant they looked like bits of jewels.  Light glinted off the real copper woven into tapestry-quality Aerach rugs, making them glint like they were aflame.  A sumptuously detailed, damascened blade of some Great Hero hung encased in glass, the scabbard encrusted with enough gems to set Ari up for several lifetimes.