“‘Blades for All Occasions,’” Cheris read. She had been saving for this moment throughout her first two years of academy, and practicing for it besides. Orua didn’t understand her fondness for the sport of dueling, but she had agreed to come along for moral support.
“Well, no sense in lingering outside,” Orua said. She grinned at Cheris and walked forward. The door swished open for her.
Cheris followed her in. A tame (?) falcon on a perch twisted its head sideways to peer at her as she entered. The falcon was either genetically engineered or dyed, although she wasn’t sure how she felt about either alternative: its primary feathers shaded from black to blood red, with striking metallic gold bands toward the tips. It looked horrendously gaudy and quintessentially Kel.
Orua was busy suppressing a giggle at the falcon’s aesthetics. Cheris poked her in the side to get her to stop, then looked around at the displays, wide-eyed. Her eyes stung suspiciously at the sight of all these weapons, everything from tactical knives to ornamented daggers with rough-hewn gems in their pommels and pragmatic machetes.
Best of all were the calendrical swords. Deactivated, they looked deceptively harmless, bladeless hilts of metal in varying colors and finishes. Cheris’s gaze was drawn inexorably to one made of voidmetal chased in gold, with an unusual basket hilt. It was showy, extremely Kel, and an invitation to trouble. Only a cadet who had an exemplary record and was an excellent duelist would dare carry such a calendrical sword. Besides, the lack of a price tag told her there was no way she could afford it even if she could, in honor, lay claim to such a thing.
Cheris sighed, then looked up into her girlfriend’s eyes. “I wish,” she said, her voice soft.
“Let me help you pick,” Orua said, pointedly ignoring the sales assistant who was watching them with his arms folded behind his back.
Cheris blinked. “I thought you didn’t know anything about dueling?” she teased. Orua paid more attention to the special effects and makeup on dueling shows than the actual dueling.
“I don’t know anything about dueling,” Orua said as the sales assistant’s expression turned imperturbable, “but I know a lot about you.” Her eyes became sly, and Cheris hoped that Orua wouldn’t get too specific here of all places. Orua grabbed Cheris’s hand and tugged her to a completely different display. “Look!”
At first Cheris wasn’t impressed by the calligraphy-stroke plainness of the calendrical swords in the case. Then she made out a faint iridescence on the metal, like that of a raven’s feather. She particularly liked the one whose textured design incorporated the first digits of the base of the natural logarithm.
Orua stooped to whisper right in Cheris’s ear, “Tonight I’m going to see how many digits of that number you can recite before I get you to—”
“I’ll buy this one,” Cheris interrupted, very loudly, and pointed.
The sales assistant smiled ever so faintly.
Author’s Note
I took a semester of Classical Fencing in college, which formed the shaky basis of all the dueling in the hexarchate setting. I kept things vague because there is only so much you can learn in one semester, and additionally I was not notably good at it. As I write this, I am once again a novice fencer, this time doing electric foil at the Red Stick School of Fencing. I’ve only been taking classes for a year, and I’m pretty sure I am literally the worst student in the Advanced Adult class. I’m still working on a functional parry in four (quarte)! But it doesn’t matter, in a way. Coming to fencing at the age of thirty-nine, I don’t expect to become good at a competitive level. I love the discipline of fencing and the tactics and the lore and the drills, and that’s why I do it. And who knows? Maybe someday I’ll score a touch.
Persimmons
SERVITOR 135799 REPORTED to the kitchens first thing upon its arrival at Kel Academy—or it tried, anyway. It had asked its enclave specifically for the transfer, not least because it loved the idea of working with Kel cadets. The older servitors in its old home, a quiet village, had clicked and whirred and made concerned noises about its fascination with the warlike Kel, but in the end they had said that if it wanted the job so badly, it should see the truth of matters for itself.
135799 had a map of Kel Academy loaded into its memory by another servitor, along with a basic list of protocols and procedures. Relying on the map was what led it astray to begin with. Its village didn’t use variable layout at all. The warning on the map even said that, but 135799 was too dazzled to take heed of it until it was well and thoroughly lost.
Kel Academy, for its part, was anything but a backwater village. 135799 had passed the parade grounds, with their immense, fluttering ashhawk banners; an outdoors dueling arena where calendrical swords sizzled against each other as Kel sparred; what appeared to be the edges of a forbidding wood, used, perhaps, for survival exercises; and, most mysteriously of all, a junkyard where scrapped flitters and warmoth parts sketched jagged silhouettes against the murky sky.
A servitor diligently organizing the debris at the junkyard’s edge took pity on 135799. “New here?” it asked.
135799 affirmed that it was, in sheepish pink-lavender lights.
“Where are you trying to go?” the stranger-servitor asked.
135799 indicated that it was supposed to have reached the kitchens a couple of hours ago.
“Well, here’s what you’ll do,” the stranger-servitor said in soothing greens and blues. “Go to these coordinates. That’s a section of the Academy that’s almost never location-shifted. You will find some fruiting persimmon trees. Pick some ripe persimmons and take them to the second set of coordinates. They’ll tell you what to do from there.”
135799 thanked the stranger-servitor for its kindness. Mystified but eager all the same, it headed off toward the indicated coordinates. On its way, it was passed by clusters of Kel cadets in their black uniforms, some somber, others chattering to each other, and once, a magnificent black peacock with a train of iridescent feathers and a golden collar around its neck.
It located the persimmon trees in the gardens, not far from a collection of wilting black-and-yellow roses. The trees were indeed in fruit. It hovered up and gathered a few of the choicest, orange and plump and ripe.
An adult Kel passed beneath it, resplendent in full formal uniform, braid and all. 135799 paused, wondering if the Kel would countermand its instructions—it knew the unspoken rule that humans must never be openly defied—but the Kel merely nodded affably at it before continuing on their way. Even this acknowledgment was more than 135799 was used to, from humans, so it took that as a good sign and continued to the kitchens.
At the kitchens, a deltaform servitor welcomed 135799 and its treasure-haul of persimmons. “I was told to expect a newcomer,” it said in friendly pinks and oranges. “Hello! You’ll get used to the variable layout soon enough. And I see you brought the persimmons.”
135799 couldn’t resist its curiosity. “Where should I put the persimmons? And what are they for?”