by Jonathan Olfert
in Issue 133, February 2023
On the errands of the King he loved, Vayel had crossed the palace courtyard ten thousand times, trained swordsmen here, guarded His Majesty against diplomats and other horrors. He’d thought he knew this place—cold marble flagstones, vaulted galleries, cherry trees with pale pink flowers. But now the King was mad, the palace empty, and Vayel had not left the courtyard in thirty-seven days.
“If anyone can do it, Sir Vayel,” Dejane the Ninth rumbled benevolently, a vast shadow on a blue-marble balcony, “it is you. You are the finest swordsman in the world. Again, please.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” said Vayel, and calmed the part of him that wanted to shriek with uncomprehending despair. Instead he took the starting stance of the sword-ritual that the King had found in the Iron Scroll of Kha Rava. The stance was a familiar one, but subtly wrong in ways that put unnatural strain on every muscle. On day twelve, Dejane had eased Vayel’s pain by warping his living joints. The new configuration made sitting uncomfortable, but after all, when did Vayel have time to sit? And it outright hurt to lie down, but then again he hadn’t needed sleep since day eighteen.
At Dejane’s nod, Vayel began the seven hundred distinct positions of the sword-ritual. Like many training sequences, it took the form of a fight against imagined opponents. From day fourteen to day twenty-three, Dejane had sent down skeletons to make those opponents less imaginary. In a much-regretted outburst, Vayel had turned those skeletons — his brothers, really, the farther he left normal mortality behind — into chips of bone that littered the edges of the courtyard.
His feet, magically bonded with the leather of his boots for comfort, followed and redefined the pattern worn in the stone. Thousands upon thousands of stances had given the dark-blue marble a silky gloss in specific places: points where he pivoted and planted his weight, sweeping tracks where his feet brushed the ground. Most training sequences followed something like a T-shape, but from the balcony to the great gates, the steps of this ritual created a vast, branching, strangely-angled pattern that suggested language.
Do it perfectly, and the heavens would open. Or so Dejane said, and though Vayel had no idea what blessing or wisdom or strength might fall on the King as a result, the goal was the goal regardless. He’d been a soldier before he was captain of the guard and swordmaster to the sons of the elite. He was no stranger to deadly-serious orders whose purpose was unclear. Or, perhaps, unknowable.
After all, the King was mad. Vayel had admitted this to himself on day nineteen.
But was it really Dejane’s fault that the illustrations in the ritual book were so contorted, the stances so unsuited to natural human capabilities? Perhaps the Iron Scroll’s nameless author had simply been a terrible artist, and Vayel was dying for nothing. —The terror of death—and worse, the end of his service—had festered since day thirty-three. Vayel blurred through the final steps of the ritual and brought his sword up in a flourishing salute. Long, gilded, slim, twin-edged, it had been Queen Karial’s final gift in better days, when the palace courtyard rang with laughter and music. Truth be told, neither Vayel nor Dejane had been capable of a smile since Her Majesty passed.
Do the ritual perfectly, and Dejane might smile again.
“Your Majesty,” Vayel said to the huge silhouette on the balcony, “may I ask a boon?”
Dejane lurched forward from the shadows. His shape was still manlike, but his studies had transformed him a piece at a time as profoundly as he’d transformed Vayel. He wore a fine and voluminous robe with a hood, all-concealing. The hands that closed on the balcony’s oaken rail were mostly bone these days. “Of course, old friend.”
“It’s been my honor to master this sequence under your eye. I intend to finish as I have begun. The pair of us, by your grace, have passed beyond the need for food and sleep. After I succeed, I fear I may not be fit to serve. Will you give me another purpose then?”
“Sir Vayel, I have much abused you. I know I have shaped you like a key to a lock, and the debt I owe you is no light thing.”
Vayel drew himself up. “My lord, you owe no such debt. You have asked no more of me than you ask of yourself.”
“Peace, Sir Vayel,” said Dejane. “So many have forsaken me; you alone have been faithful. Of course I will give you purpose. And rest, as much of it as you desire.”
Vayel nodded once and let himself be satisfied. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”
He began the ritual again. This time the seven hundred stances flowed together in a new, intuitive way. The sword flicked nimbly between inhuman variants of the grand old guards—ox, plow, roof, and fool—and Vayel’s weight shifted more fluidly than ever. A tingle in the back of his head suggested Dejane’s magic at work, some new and subtle reconfiguration of Vayel’s body. His Majesty’s powers were growing in delicacy, which Vayel appreciated.
Some days, to his shame, Vayel found his thoughts distant, caught up in dreamy memory, letting his body move through the familiar patterns alone. Today he was intensely present: the cold wind that soothed his body, the skitter of cherry-leaves and bone chips on the stones, the pleasant ache of each new stance and strike. His forked beard was shedding wiry gray hairs, tugged by the wind of his passage and the torque of his shifting stances. His hands—now knots of callus suited only for the sword—twisted easily from grip to grip, tight and loose and tight again, as he worked at his one and only task.
He fell crisply into the seven hundredth stance and held it, willing himself to greater rigor. Let this be the time, he prayed to gods he’d long forgotten. Let me get it right.
The leaves and bones went silent, froze along with him, and he held his breath for a more perfect stillness.
His eyes shied away from the pattern his feet had polished on the stone. He forced himself to focus on the pattern regardless. Bone grated against marble as the King leaned out over the rail, eager as a hawk lunging to take flight.
A silhouette took form above the starting point of the pattern, and Dejane and Vayel were no longer alone.
The shape—fleshless, a distortion in the air—was approximately as inhuman as the pair of them, either warped by magic or innately different. Though Vayel had lost much of his sense of smell when Dejane excised his appetite, the new arrival stank of rotten leaves in a smoldering fire. A suggestion of eyes flicked over Vayel and his sword, then turned upward to Dejane on the balcony.
A Lovulic, a spirit of covenants and bargains.
“Kha Rava,” said Dejane. “I would bargain with you for the resurrection of my Queen.”
Vayel had imagined many reasons for the ritual, and Her Majesty had played a role in most. Even now, ten years past her burial with much else on his mind, Dejane would have burned cities for a glimpse of her.
“Death poured her soul into the sea long ago,” said the shape, the Lovulic Kha Rava, in a voice that Vayel felt more than heard. “To reconstruct her is to refill her vessel with the very same drops of water—a feat far beyond you, sorcerer. I am no haggling craven. The price is the price.”
Dejane nodded; huge, misshapen bones grated under his robes. “Of course. Take what you must from me.”
Shock jolted Vayel, though his leathery, much-altered body barely shifted. “My lord—”
“My existence for hers,” said Dejane. “I shall sleep and she shall wake. For one perfect moment I will see her alive before I end.” His dark hood turned Vayel’s way.
Vayel whirled toward the fleshless silhouette of Kha Rava. “Take me instead, demon.”
“You were the price of my appearance,” said that voice, felt more than heard. “I find no value in a thing already sacrificed.”
Despite his bone-deep loyalty, Vayel flinched; he’d have drawn a sharp breath if that was something that his body still did. As Dejane came down the balcony’s side stairs, Vayel moved to place himself in the King’s path.
Up close, Dejane outmassed him by three or four times, and stood much taller. His face under the hood was much like Vayel’s: leather-fleshed, half dead and half alive and no longer human. It was a face that Vayel loved.
“My sword does not defy me,” said Dejane.
“I have killed for you, sire, it’s true—but I have always been your shield. Strike me down if you must.” Vayel turned his back to the King and set his stance toward the monster.
Kha Rava smiled wider than a human could. “Little man excised of disloyal thought and memory—little half-a-corpse with a steel pin — who are you to stand between us? Not who you think you are, that much I’ll say for free. Perhaps there’s—”
Dejane’s massive fist smashed into Vayel, batted him aside. The betrayal of it struck hard, sank deep, as Vayel skidded across the dark-blue marble in a tangle of dry limbs. His reworked hand kept a grip on his sword, not by choice, and the blade lacerated his body without blood or much pain. He came to a shaken halt with his face against a pillar, in a position so contorted that a living man would have died.
“…a side deal to be made,” said Kha Rava. “Well, perhaps not. To business then, O King? Your existence for hers, I believe you said?”
As Vayel looked up, Kha Rava’s warping silhouette disgorged the suggestion of a recurved blade. Dejane lurched forward eagerly to impale himself.
Vayel’s feet, long ago optimized for traction on this marble courtyard floor, found purchase. He came up in an awkward sprint—he hadn’t been redesigned with sprinting in mind. His sword met the Lovulic silhouette-blade and shoved it aside. But rather than place himself between Kha Rava and Dejane again, he carried on a few steps and settled into a stance where he could see them both. That was as close as he could get to setting his stance toward the King.
Who’d struck him, sacrificed him, warped him—and possibly worse.
“I am Sir Vayel,” he said, and tried to mean it, “captain of the guard.”
Kha Rava laughed. “You are a corpse, a traitor salvaged as a tool. Would you like to bargain for your name?”
“One covenant at a time,” Dejane growled. His bony fist closed around the arm of Kha Rava’s silhouette—the Lovulic jerked in surprise at the contact—and Dejane the Ninth spitted himself on Kha Rava’s unreal sword.
Bitter wrongness flooded Vayel: a gut-deep knowledge that he should feel more, that seeing Dejane impaled should fill him with horror and rage. Then—as Dejane fell clattering—came the satisfaction, and a colossal weight of guilt, all in a space of moments.
And then the fury. Not at Kha Rava, but at Dejane. Vayel’s mind refused to go there, found such thoughts treason, unthinkable. But here came reinforcements: the weight of thirty-seven days of perfect service beneath Dejane’s abuse that masked itself in shared purpose.
The shackles held—to attack the fallen King was still unthinkable—but Vayel, if he was Vayel, saw a way.
He fell into the ritual starting at the three hundred thirty-fourth position. His blade whipped through the air harmlessly, uselessly. His feet slid from stance to stance; his weight shifted just right, his hips twisted this way and that, a little flourish here and there, discarding his devotion to exactness. Kha Rava slid back easily to make room, and Vayel’s pattern took him through the place where the half-tangible Lovulic had stood.
Vayel closed his eyes and kept going, perfectly. And just as he’d known it would, at position three hundred fifty-nine, his sword sheared through Dejane’s leg.
Dejane was just starting to rise. Perhaps he saw the danger; perhaps he meant to lurch toward Kha Rava and finish sacrificing himself. Either way, as Vayel’s sword sheared through robe and leather and bone, the King’s huge form crashed down in a torrent of robes and a crack of breaking marble. Sorcery hissed around him, dissipated. He was growing weaker.
Vayel’s heart broke, but so did those shackles in his mind. Freedom settled over him, and horrified embarrassment at what he’d been until just moments ago. He took a step that diverged sharply from the ritual, then another, and brought up his sword again for a more serious strike.
Dejane ignored him.
One massive arm reached up toward a new silhouette taking form high above the courtyard: a woman, no more or less tangible than the Lovulic. She reached down: a gesture, not a practicality, not with such distance between her and her husband. And as she did, she spared a glance for Vayel—had she truly given him his sword, or was that memory false too?—and she flinched.
Her ghostly hand pulled back. A north wind, cold enough that even Vayel felt it, ripped at Dejane’s robes and blew the queen’s silhouette away like frantic smoke. Before Vayel could strike, Dejane collapsed, deflated, with a clatter of huge bones coming apart. His leathery skull, shaped wrong to roll, thunked on the marble and stayed there.
The storm in Vayel’s heart settled with the wind.
Kha Rava laid the long recurve blade across his shoulders like a peasant carrying buckets on a pole. The posture suggested casualness, but Vayel knew Kha Rava could shift into three or four of the ritual’s unique stances with ease. “So, little dead man,” said the Lovulic’s silhouette as if a king hadn’t just died at their feet, “what can you offer me for your name?”
“Your life,” said Vayel, and meant it.
That too-wide smile split the silhouette. “In what way, pray?”
“I already know my sword can meet yours. The King’s flesh could grasp your substance, and my body is much like his. And I know the seven hundred steps of the ritual to call you back until I’m done.”
“Ah, but little man, your threat presumes so much about me.” That recurve blade, longer than Vayel’s slim guardsman-sword, took on clearer reality. It looked a bit like steel now, not just a silhouette.
“And you’re welcome to presume in turn.”
Again that fleshless smile. Kha Rava’s blade came off his shoulders in the forty-seventh strike. Vayel committed to the six hundredth stance, a mirror to Kha Rava’s move, and steel rang against unreal steel.
The impact jolted his feet, but Vayel kept his balance by shifting into a warped stance that he’d have found agonizing in mortality. He sprang back in, lashed out, and the point of his sword slid through the near edge of Kha Rava’s silhouette, up across the gut.
The Lovulic fell back hissing and stumbled, without dignity, on the enrobed bones that had been Dejane. No stranger to the absurdities of combat, Vayel closed without a pause. He put the sword through Kha Rava again, a deeper thrust this time. The boneless substance of the Lovulic’s chest resisted the blade weakly, like stabbing a hay-stuffed dummy.
The silhouette didn’t bleed, might not even feel pain, but that great recurve blade came around with its edge out of line, a flailing and unprofessional cut. So rather than cleave Vayel in half, it merely smashed him out of his stance like Dejane’s fist.
Vayel landed better this time, a controlled skid on his boot-leather feet. In life he’d have been breathing hard, or dead. Right now the shattered ribs felt no worse than pebbles in his shoe.
“Why not,” said Kha Rava. “If I walk away with my life, yes: I will tell you your name.”
Vayel got up with a rasp of broken bone. His dry spine clicked back into alignment. “Twist my words as you like, demon, but one way or another, yes. You will tell me.”
The evisceration of his body and memory had stripped away however he used to fight. Blade against blade, he hammered at Kha Rava’s guard with the portions of the ritual that felt more like combat than arcane flourishing. He’d had thirty-seven days to ponder the utility of the Iron Scroll. He had plenty to work with.
Kha Rava knew these movements intimately and punished predictable combinations. But Kha Rava was a Lovulic, a spirit of bargains and gamesmanship, powerful but dissolute. Vayel took Kha Rava’s measure as a swordsman and found him wanting.
“Tell me this about myself, demon,” he said as Kha Rava drew back again. “Here in this courtyard, just how many fools did I teach to be men?”
The Lovulic was not smiling now. That long, recurved blade was clumsy on defense, and Vayel pressed his advantage, drove Kha Rava back against the courtyard wall. The half-real blade scored blue marble wildly, chopped divots out of the edge of Vayel’s beloved sword. At its core, the good steel held. Whatever risk it posed to Kha Rava, the Lovulic took it seriously. He fought like a man afraid. Vayel gave the monstrous silhouette no breathing room to find some grit.
This had to be a rare situation for such a being. Inexperience and panic had unmade better men than Kha Rava. Confusion slowed him, turned to indecision.
Vayel took his head off.
The notched steel slid through the half-real monster like a prayer through uncaring heavens, without leaving a mark. Kha Rava’s head fell almost of its own accord. The rest of him crumpled in a shapeless silhouette. His long, awkward blade clattered; Vayel considered and disdained it. He crouched by the head.
“Will you tell me now?”
“Never,” Kha Rava’s head whispered. It, like the body and the blade, began to fade back to wherever a Lovulic came from, the worlds behind the Iron Scroll. “My life for the name was your bargain, little man. I curse you to never know. Should you see your likeness, you will not recognize it; should you read your name, you will not know it. Your own mother could call you son and you would not hear.”
Vayel grabbed Kha Rava’s intangible head by the face and weighed it in his knobbled leather palm. “Learn this lesson, demon,” Vayel said quietly as the head dissolved slowly into the aether. “It’s one I think I taught a hundred boys, and it might have been my treason. Privilege sires callousness; callousness sires arrogance; arrogance sires failure.”
He found himself staring at the bones and crumpled robe of his mad King, hoping — despite himself — for a flicker of movement. Air stirred above Dejane, the silhouette of a woman bending over him. Vayel bowed to what he presumed to be the Queen’s ghost, and if she noticed or responded, he couldn’t tell. What he saw was fainter than cobwebs, gone faster and more subtly than the shadow of a cloud.
Of the four who’d met here, it seemed both unfair and fitting that Vayel was the only one with a future. A blank one, to be sure, without duty or discipline or old paths to follow, but perhaps all the better for its aimlessness. This inhuman form demanded a new kind of life, and he found himself hungry to chart that course alone.
With a lingering glance, he abandoned Dejane’s bones where they lay. The courtyard gates creaked open at Vayel’s touch. They’d never, after all, been locked.
©February 2023, Jonathan Olfert
Jonathan Olfert is a neurodivergent writer of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and paleofiction. Some of his work has backstabbed and skulked its way into Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Old Moon Quarterly, and other markets. He and his partner live in Atlantic Canada. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.