"The commandery shall be summoned to determine your fate," Charrow went on. "You will be judged before the brethren you have dishonored, and—"
"Just one moment, Sir Charrow." The knight-captain looked up quickly as a voice colder than a dagger's kiss interrupted him. Sir Vaijon turned more slowly, like a poorly managed puppet, and Bahzell bared his teeth in an icy smile that belonged on something from the depths of a Ghoul Moor winter.
"Yes, Milord Champion?" Charrow spoke with the same formality, but there was a worried crease between his brows as he tried to interpret Bahzell's expression, for no more than Vaijon had he ever seen the Rage in a hradani's eyes. There was anger in those eyes, that much the chapter master knew, but there was something else, as well. A deep, terrible something—a fusion of cruelty colder than Vonderland's ice and a dark passion crackling like heat from an opened furnace door—that reached out for all about Bahzell with talons of freezing flame.
"I'm thinking as how the insult was after being to me, not to your brethren," he rumbled.
"To you, and through you to the God Himself," Sir Charrow agreed, "but it was offered by a member of the Order, and so the dishonor is to us."
"As to that, himself can be taking care of his own insults, and I'm not so very interested in the dishonor," the hradani said in a voice of chill iron, and hardened warrior though he was, Sir Charrow felt himself shudder as the hungry smile that reached out almost lovingly to Vaijon drove a sliver of terror deep into him. "You've the right of it in that much, my lad," the Horse Stealer told the paralyzed young knight, "for I'm naught but what you see before you. Old Tomanāk 'd split his guts with laughter, like enough, if I was to go about calling myself 'Sir This' or 'Champion That,' and my family tree's not nearly so pretty as some, I'll wager. But it's me you've made your tongue so free of—not Sir Charrow, not the Order, just me, Bahzell Bahnakson. And so I'm thinking it's me you should be after answering to, not your brethren."
"Milord, you can't—" Charrow began in a quick, urgent voice, but a raised hand cut him off, and Bahzell's deadly eyes froze him into silence.
"You've been after calling me a champion of Tomanāk for days now," he said flatly. "Am I such?" Charrow nodded helplessly, and Bahzell bared his teeth again. "And would it happen a champion has the right to administer his own understanding of Scale-Balancer's justice?" Charrow nodded once more. "And would that justice be like to supersede your commandery's?" Charrow had no choice but to nod yet again, and Bahzell nodded back, then jerked his chin at Vaijon.
"In that case, you'd best be giving yonder lordling back his weapons, Sir Charrow, for he'll need them come morning."
He turned that blood-freezing smile directly upon Vaijon, and his hungry voice was soft as serpent scales on stone.
"You've plenty to say about barbarians and hradani and servants of the Dark, Vaijon of Almerhas. Well, come morning, here's one barbarian will show you what hradani truly are."
Chapter Five
Sir Vaijon did not spend a restful night.
In fairness, his insomnia owed little to fear. Never having lost in the last eight strenuous, often brutal, years of training, he simply could not conceive of losing now, to anyone, yet there was more to it than simple self-confidence could explain. Despite the unforgivable actions he knew his fury had betrayed him into committing, he was a knight of Tomanāk who had sworn obedience to the Order and to those set to command him. Now he was foresworn, disbarred in his own eyes, as well as his fellows', from their ranks, and he knew that, as well. Yet whatever failings Bahzell Bahnakson might have as a champion of Tomanāk , and whether he realized it or not, he had given Sir Vaijon an opportunity to reverse that judgment by making their confrontation what was, for all intents and purposes, a trial at arms to be judged by Tomanāk Himself.
It was a trial Sir Vaijon did not intend to lose, yet he found he could not approach it as he had any other contest under arms. Not because he doubted his own prowess, but because deep inside, some little piece of him whispered that he ought to lose. Hard as he might try, he could find no excuse for his conduct. Sir Charrow was right; he had disgraced himself and the Order. A defiant part of his heart might still cry out in bitter disillusionment that Tomanāk had no right to waste such honor on a barbarian, but even granting that, a true knight had no excuse for such behavior. And so, even as the thought of besting the hradani and proving Bahzell had no right to the position he claimed filled him with a fiery determination, he could not escape the unhappy suspicion—small and faint, but damnably persistent—that perhaps this time he did not deserve to win.
At first, as he watched that night beside his weapons, he pushed away any thought of defeat whenever it surfaced. Instead, he filled his mind with memories of how Bahzell had transgressed, of how the hradani's mere presence filled him with fury, and promised himself that the morrow would see all his anger and betrayal assuaged. But as the night crept slowly, slowly past, he made himself look the possibility that he might lose in the eye, and he was almost surprised by what he saw there, for Bahzell had made it a trial at arms. If Vaijon lost, he would probably die. He was too young to truly believe that, though he recognized the possibility in an intellectual sort of way, but the thought that if he did lose he would at least have been punished for his actions was obscurely comforting. He fully intended to emerge victorious and thus expunge the stain of those acts, yet defeat would erase them in another fashion, and the deep and abiding devotion to Tomanāk which had first brought him to the Order was glad that it would be so.
"Ah, you're not actually planning to, well—?" Brandark paused delicately and cocked his truncated ear at Bahzell as his friend buckled the straps joining his breast and back plates and adjusted them carefully.
"To what?" the huge Horse Stealer demanded, not looking up from his task.
"I realize Vaijon is a pain in the arse," Brandark replied somewhat indirectly, "and there've been times enough when I wanted to put him out of my misery. But I was only wondering exactly what you intended to do to him this morning."
" 'Do to him,' is it now?" Bahzell finished fiddling with the last strap and looked up at last, and his deep voice rumbled derisively. "Surely you've been after hearing the same as me, Brandark, my lad. Yon Vaijon is Tomanāk's own gift to mortals with sword or lance! Why, he's after being downright invincible, and my heart's all aflutter with terror of him." The Horse Stealer's smile was cold enough to confirm the suspicions Sir Charrow's oblique questions had awakened in Brandark, and he began to feel true alarm.
"Now let's not do anything hasty, Bahzell. No one could deny you've got every right to be angry, but he's only a youngster, and one who's been spoiled rotten, to boot. It's plain as the nose on your face—or my face, for that matter—no one ever told him—"
"It's too late to tell me such as that, Brandark," Bahzell said, lifting his sword down from the wall rack and slinging the baldric over his shoulder, and his voice was so grim Brandark frowned. "And Vaijon's no 'youngster,' " the Horse Stealer added even more grimly. "He's as old for his folk as either of us is after being for ours, and a belted knight, to boot. Well, he's always after yammering about knightly this and knightly that and chivalric the other, and the whole time he's sulking like a spoiled brat, and I'm thinking it's past time he was after finding out just what all that means. Aye, him and all the other nose-lifters minded to think like him."
"But—" Brandark began once more, then closed his mouth with a click at Bahzell's glower.
Sir Charrow Malakhai wrapped his cloak about himself and tried to hide his gnawing worry as he stood waiting in the center of the huge, echoing salle. The training room's floor had been covered with fresh sawdust, and the scent of it filled his nose with a resinous richness, spiced with the tang of coal smoke from the fires seething in the huge hearths at either end of the room.
Most northern chapters of the chivalric orders had salles like this one, and the weather raging outside the thick walls reminded Charrow of why that was. Blasts of wind rattled the skylights which admitted the gray, cold light of a snow-laced morning, and despite the fires, his breath was a thin mist before him. Outdoor weapons training in such weather was out of the question, although he supposed one could always teach courses in how to survive under blizzard conditions. But this morning the training salle would serve another, grimmer purpose, and he sighed as he checked the lighting once more.