He followed her back to their little camp, looking at the stars in the sky.
And there they were, as the old woman had said they would be: the five bright points of light that would frame the Empress Moon when it hung directly overhead, the key to the names of Her Children.
Eight
The sword flashed down in a savage arc, the sun’s glow blazing from the metal as if the weapon itself was made of light.
Reza pitched himself to the right, dodging the blade, then kicked out with his left foot, his thigh like a massive piston that drove the air from Nyana-M’kher’s lungs and flung her to the ground. The few seconds of surprise his parry had given him was all he needed. Smoothly drawing the black shrekka from its holder on his left shoulder, he hurled the hand-held buzz saw and watched with satisfaction as it buried itself in the ground five centimeters from Nyana-M’kher’s head, showering her with sand from the arena’s floor.
“Enough!” called the arena’s umpire, a stocky warrior by the name of Syr-Kesh. A gesture of her hand made Reza’s victory official.
Reza collapsed on his knees into the sand next to Nyana-M’kher, who was also trying to get her breath back. She struggled to her knees, and the two of them bowed their heads to Syr-Kesh, Nyana-M’kher saluting as she did so. Then they both knelt there for the brief time that was allowed for meditation after one combat and before the next, a mental cool-down that the Kreelans considered an essential part of their routine.
Reza closed his eyes as his mind made the rounds of his body, sounding it out for damage and weakness, evaluating and relaxing each muscle in turn. Their combat had taken an unusually long time – nearly ten minutes, so evenly matched had they been – and his shoulders and legs ached fiercely from the duel. It had been the third one today for both of them, and this one had been Reza’s only win. He had lost the first match to a senior tresh in a spectacularly one-sided – and decidedly brief – engagement, and the other to a very young tresh who felled him with a lightning-swift cut to the legs that would have crippled him for life had the sword carried any edge.
In these moments, when he turned inward like this, he was amazed at how much control he was gaining over his body and his mind. With a handful of exceptions, notably in his mid-back and feet, he could flex each muscle individually, leaving those around it totally relaxed. His breathing and heart rate, too, were gradually coming under better control, and he found that he could hold his breath for nearly three minutes before he felt compelled to take a breath. Even then, he could force himself to breathe normally and keep his heart rate at a steady cadence, rather than take huge gulps of air as his heart raced to get oxygen back into his system and to his brain.
His fighting skills, while hardly impressive by Kreelan standards, had improved to the point where he was no longer the punching bag he had been when he had arrived. While he returned with Esah-Zhurah to their tiny camp each night bruised and often beaten, those who faced him in the arena treated him with respect for his cunning and tenacity, if not for his neophyte fighting skills. The days of underestimating the human, the human many of them had been convinced would simply wither away and die in those early days, were over. Reza had quickly come to understand the soul-deep importance of combat to the Kreelans, and had devoted himself to its study. He observed and mimicked the others, especially Esah-Zhurah, and invented his own tactics. He went over moves in his mind, awake and asleep, before putting them to the test in his waking hours.
And after the combat was finished for the day and they had eaten, Esah-Zhurah would lecture him for hours on the ways of her people, on the Way itself. Gradually, he came to understand that the Way was not just an ideology, a set of abstract concepts meant to structure their lives such as the laws of humankind sought to do, but it was also a physical thing. While he did not yet understand just how it worked, the Way was intertwined with their racial bloodline: when Esah-Zhurah described her people as the Children of the Empress, it was – literally – true. There was some physiological thread that bound them together in much the same way that ants or bees of a particular colony identified themselves and their functions as part of a much larger whole. But how this worked, he did not yet understand. Nor, surprisingly, did Esah-Zhurah.
“It simply is,” she had told him once. “Her will is as fundamental to us and as evident as is the air we breathe. I do not hear Her voice in my mind; I am not a telepath. But I sense in my blood that which She seeks for us, and I know my place in Her design.”
Reza had pondered those words many times since, with a vague sense of loneliness, and perhaps even jealousy, clouding his heart. For he did not know Her will, and he feared his own destiny within the strands of the web the Empress wove for Her people.
“Time,” Syr-Kesh called, and Reza’s reflection disappeared like sea mist blown clear by the morning wind. He bowed his head once more to Syr-Kesh before getting to his feet, walking to where Esah-Zhurah stood waiting for him near the entry to the arena. Behind him, several tresh frantically raked the sand smooth for the next contest.
“You did well, my tresh,” Esah-Zhurah said as he approached, and he bowed his head to her in respect. “Much better than I expected, especially without the sword on which you have so heavily depended to this time.” Reza ignored the barb, a ritual habit of hers that never failed to annoy him, but about which he could do nothing. A part of him hated her deeply, but another part, what he often hoped was the most human part, wanted her respect, wanted her to be proud of him. “But these practice sessions are as nothing compared to the Challenge you will face in four days. Your opponents here do not show all of their skill or their strength, they do not waste their energies here, as do you, but save them for the time when they will need them most.”
“What does it matter?” he asked angrily. “I can only do my best. If I am beaten in the first match of the first Challenge, then so be it.” He shrugged out of his armor, letting Esah-Zhurah open his black shirt to apply one of the writhing living bandages to the creased welt on his shoulder. Nyana-M’kher had brought her sword down on the joint between his shoulder armor and the metal backplate, pinching a hand’s breadth of Reza’s flesh into a puckering tear that had proved incredibly painful for the rest of the extended combat. “But one day,” he said, more to himself than to her, “I will stand in the final arena with the winning sword in my hands.”
“That,” Esah-Zhurah said as she massaged the oozing mottled mass of the bandage into the wound on Reza’s shoulder, her voice tinged with sarcasm that sounded all too human, “is a day I wish not to miss.”
Reza flinched as she pressed at the wound. A shudder of revulsion swept through him as he felt the amoebic mass of tissue begin to merge with his flesh, mysteriously healing it. It would leave a sculpted scar in its wake, a trophy of his tiny victory. He knew that whatever the thing was, however it and the things like it were made – or bred – it was infinitely beyond any comparable human technique he could imagine. The scope of wounds and injuries, even diseases that it could treat was apparently limitless. But having another living thing pressed into his flesh, and knowing that it would become a part of him, a perfect symbiosis, left him yearning for the cold touch and electric hum of the instruments and analyzers, the smells of ozone and alcohol, of the little clinic of House 48.