CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
AFTER THE LATEST high table, Jedao sat at his desk and contemplated the items on it. Two slates of different sizes. Styluses in a ceramic jar. A single flower, which had not been there before. It had velvet petals the color of a moon-moth’s wings, pale blue tinged silvery soft. Kujen, he supposed. In the language of flowers it meant heartsease, which was the last thing Jedao felt at the moment.
He had decided to catch up on administrative matters. Kujen had told him not to push himself so hard and to delegate more to Dhanneth. In what was either a brilliant gambit or a fit of exasperation, Kujen sent up twin courtesans as a distraction. (Jedao had had no idea they had courtesans on board. Who else was Kujen hiding in his quarters?) Jedao had spent an uncomfortable evening entertaining them or being entertained by them; it was hard to decide which. (The two men were excellent jugglers and taught him a few tricks.) The courtesans were much more gracious about the waste of their time than he would have been in their place.
The paperwork, while not fun, kept his mind off the impossible thing he wanted to achieve. He inspected the Revenant at intervals, always accompanied by an anxious Nirai. He filled out forms and read the reports his staff generated. It was not a bad existence. Unfortunately, it couldn’t endure forever.
After four days of this, Jedao decided he needed a break. He headed toward the dueling hall out of curiosity. Discreet queries had revealed that he had a background in dueling; how much of it did he remember?
The dueling hall was in the training and gymnasium section of the Revenant. He entered and looked around at the broad, flat expanse with dueling squares marked off in black on the floor, the sizzle-spark brightness of activated calendrical swords. The duelists studiously ignored him.
Jedao made his way to the benches at the edge for spectators and sat down to watch. Several pairs of duelists were busy at practice bouts. One of them was a Nirai, sure-footed, face blazing with a purity of purpose that Jedao wished he possessed. Jedao’s fingers twitched. He wouldn’t mind trying this.
As it turned out, Jedao lingered until Commander Talaw entered. Their eyes slitted when they saw him. Jedao inclined his head. They made a beeline for him.
“General,” Talaw said. “I’m surprised it took you this long to come here.”
Jedao wracked his memory for Talaw’s dueling record. Too much time had elapsed since he’d checked their profile. Then he remembered that he could query the grid through his augment. Talaw, it turned out, was a very good duelist.
“I didn’t die in a duel,” Jedao said. He didn’t care if everyone heard him.
Talaw smiled ferociously at him. “No. But you were a fabled duelist. Do you mean to take it up again?”
“I’m willing,” Jedao said, “but it’s been a while.”
He hadn’t meant it as a challenge, but of course Talaw took it as one. “Well,” Talaw said, “what about a practice bout? Since you feel yourself out of practice.”
If Talaw lopped his head off in a spontaneous assassination attempt, would it grow back? What a horrifying thought. He gestured toward the deactivated sword-hilt at their belt. “Where do I get a practice sword?”
“I suppose you can’t be blamed for misplacing your own after 400 years,” Talaw said.
“Ha.” Too bad he didn’t have more arms than the usual two. (Kujen could have built him that way if he’d cared to.) He could have fun waving around four swords at once and terrifying the everliving fuck out of poor innocent Kel. Or, more likely, impaling himself on his own swords.
“Here,” Talaw said with a sudden glint in their eyes. “I’ll use one too. It wouldn’t be proper for me to claim more honor than you.”
Jedao had caught the sarcastic dip of their voice on “honor,” but he wasn’t going to fight with them about it.
A stocky, nervous soldier checked out two practice swords to Jedao and Talaw. Talaw had to remind the soldier of the correct procedure, although they were professional rather than sharp with him. As Jedao examined the plain, bladeless hilt, Talaw said, “Full-power calendrical swords are standard issue for Kel infantry. The Compact doesn’t use them anymore except for parades.”
“Cheris’s calendar, I presume,” Jedao said. Using exotics must be an interesting exercise for them, considering the Compact had to rely on their soldiers’ voluntary participation.
“Indeed.”
Talaw showed Jedao how to work the sword. Light flared up and coalesced into numbers, the year and the day of your death, the old cold chant. Jedao was transfixed by the way the light of the blade edged Talaw’s gloves and sheened deep gold in the fabric. When he activated his, the blade lit up red-black.
Although the hall was spacious, Talaw led the way to one of the occupied corners. People drifted closer, but not too close. Jedao didn’t mind. His existence was a performance already.
Talaw demonstrated some warm-up exercises. Jedao didn’t mind the condescension. From the rising murmurs, Jedao gathered that the audience thought he was humoring Talaw. If only you knew.
They found a dueling square and faced off. Several servitors had joined the small crowd. Did they bet on the duels, and if so, with what currency? Too bad he couldn’t ask them.
A chime sounded four times. Talaw’s opening attack was orthodox, derived from a form he had seen someone practicing earlier. They were acclimating him to the sport.
That, or they were testing him.
What followed was not so much a bout as a demonstration of forms. The two of them were well-matched, Jedao with his occasional lapse into archaic variants, Talaw with their slower reflexes and tendency to treat Jedao like a gifted but wayward student. Jedao lost awareness of the audience, of the servitors, of everything but the flickering numbers, the traceries of light, the heady welcome exertion of his muscles.
His stamina gave out first. At last, by wordless agreement, they disengaged and saluted each other. The duelist’s salute, with the swords’ numbers sparking, rather than the more familiar fist-to-shoulder military salute.
“I need more exercise,” Jedao said when he had regained his breath and the crowd had, reluctantly, dispersed.
Talaw bowed from the waist. For once there was no antagonism in their eyes. “It was well-fought.”
“I’d better practice harder,” Jedao said, which pleased them. “I will try to be a more interesting opponent next time.”
“A few of the staff heads and I were going to play jeng-zai in the officers’ lounge in eighteen minutes,” Talaw said: another challenge. Talaw produced a deck from one of their pockets with a flourish, in a distinctive box of wood stained dark. “Would you care to join us?”
It was the first overture any Kel other than Dhanneth had made to Jedao. “Of course I would,” he said.
As he and Talaw wound their way out of the hall, he caught sight of Dhanneth. Dhanneth had entered sometime during the bout and taken up a position close by, presumably to watch. His expression was unreadable. Jedao almost called out to him. Dhanneth’s gaze slid past. Then Dhanneth spun on his heel and continued out of the hall. A hilt of black and leaf-green hung from his belt. Jedao wondered what color the blade would be, but Talaw was speaking to him, and Jedao didn’t want to jeopardize the small, fragile accord they’d reached. The matter with Dhanneth could wait.
ON THE NEXT day, Dhanneth requested a meeting. The excuse, which Jedao recognized as such, concerned a matter of discipline. The incident itself was genuine. The report called it an altercation over—Jedao wasn’t sure he was interpreting this correctly—a piece of fruit. Or possibly a sex toy in the shape of a piece of fruit. (A euphemism?) But this was something a sergeant should have been able to handle.