The ragged blade, p.1
The Ragged Blade, page 1
part #1 of Century of Sand Series
The Ragged Blade
by Christopher Ruz
Parvus Press, LLC
1572 Silo Rd
Yardley, PA 19067
ParvusPress.com
The Ragged Blade
Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Ruz
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, magical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.
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I don't like sand. It's coarse, rough, and irritating... and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here, everything's epic Aussie storytelling.
ISBN 13 978-0-9997842-9-7
Ebook ISBN 978-0-9997842-8-0
Editor: Kaelyn Considine
Cover art by Connor Sheehan
Cover design by R J Theodore
Designed and typeset by Catspaw DTP Services
Dedication:
To my parents, who told me I could
To my friends, who told me I should
To Nyssa, for telling me to finish the bloody thing already
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Acknowledgements
About the Author
A Word From Parvus Press
The Ragged Blade
by Christopher Ruz
Chapter One
The cell was dark but for a single oil lamp, the flame thin and blue, hissing, a scribble of smoke curling black across the ceiling. Light trembled over bambau bars, the dirt floor, the piss trough, and the rope double-knotted around Richard’s wrists. The rope ran to a stake hammered into the soil in the center of the cell. He’d pulled on the rope until his wrists were bloody, but the stake was buried deep and wouldn’t budge.
The light didn’t extend so far as the next cell, but Richard could hear his daughter there, her breath wheezing.
“Ana,” he whispered. “Ana, are you listening?”
A slow inhalation, whistling, air drawn over teeth. A pause that seemed to stretch for hours. Then a bubbling breath out, like she was exhaling through blood.
He prayed the Meritrans hadn’t hurt her when they’d dragged her into the dungeon, for their sake as much as hers. He’d answer every bruise with blood. Every cut with an opened throat. “Don’t worry, Ana. I’ll get us out of here, even if I have to kill every man for a hundred miles.”
And it would come to killing. These weren’t the Eastern kingdoms, where the law was simple, blunt, remorseless, where every man obeyed out of fear of losing their hands. Richard was two hundred miles past the border and into the great Western Desert. A land of searing plains and savage cities. Heathen wastes that had never felt the Risen Daughter’s embrace. A place without code or reason, where a mute eleven-year-old girl could be thrown into a cell for unwittingly stealing a pear.
Richard had visited the Western Desert years before. He’d survived file-toothed Meritrans and demons that devoured peoples’ minds. But he’d been a younger man then, full of bravado, with a hundred soldiers at his back and a Magician to guide them.
Now all he had was Ana.
Bare feet shuffled across the dirt floor outside the cell. Richard squinted into the gloom. Slow breaths. Two sets—one calm and unhurried, the other keen with anticipation.
The first was almost certainly their jailer. The second? They kept well back from the lamplight, hidden at the end of the corridor. An interrogator perhaps, or maybe the mayor of the little mud-hut village in which they’d been jailed.
They could sit in the dark and listen all they wanted. All Richard cared about was the cell, the rope, and Ana.
He glanced at the rope tethering him to the floor. Six feet, end to end. Enough so he could reach the back walls or the bars, but no more. Even if he got the door open or busted through the bambau, he couldn’t get to Ana.
Maybe he didn’t have to leave the cell. All he needed was for his jailer to step through the door. Six feet of rope was more than enough to loop around the man’s neck, to cinch and twist. After that, he’d cut himself loose with the jailer’s sword and kick down the bars to Ana’s cell.
And if the jailer was wise enough to leave his blade outside the cell, beyond Richard’s reach? He’d chew through the knots. Break every tooth, if that’s what it took to get to his girl. Next, cut a path free of the cells, back into the sunlight. Then they’d steal a horse, a mule, even a camel. Break through the town gates, race for the North.
Back on the trail of Eluah.
Another slow, evaluating breath. Steady footsteps as their observer paced. The long stride of a man with time to spare.
From the darkness, the stranger said, “Your girl doesn’t speak. Why?”
A low voice. No echoes. The Meritran’s words were damped by soft earth. The cells were underground, but exactly how far Richard couldn’t tell. He couldn’t remember much of what happened after Ana took the pear. Shouts of outrage. Accusing eyes. A crack across the back of the head before a series of jolts, like he was being carried down a ladder. There was a bruise below his ribs to match the one on the back of his skull. A gash bled sluggishly over his left eye. The fingers on his right hand hurt too much to make a fist. Swollen, but not broken. He hoped.
“You don’t speak either,” the stranger continued. “Are you afraid?”
Clipped syllables. Practiced. Not many Meritrans spoke the Eastern tongue, and Richard had never met one with such honey in his words.
It reminded him of the way the Magician spoke. How easily he charmed. A few hours in his presence and everyone gave the Magician their secrets. Even his enemies bent to his commands, in time.
He hated the man already.
“Will you speak to me? Will you tell me why you came? Why are you here, all the way from the East?”
Richard clenched his hands into fists. “Come closer.”
“So you do speak.”
“I want to see the man who hurt my girl.”
One more step and the stranger came into the lamp glow. A dark man, darker than the guards who’d manned the town gates and the trader whose pear Ana had stolen, skin a rich, royal black that swallowed the flame whole. The sort of skin that came from west of the West, past the Meritran divide, where there were no clouds and the sun turned the sand to glass. He had a rigid nobility about him, upright, feet set solid in the dirt. Richard could imagine the stranger leaning into the rough surf on Tanacca Beach, the ocean breaking around him, salt spraying against his cheeks, unflinching, unblinking.
“I saw you arrive,” the dark man said. He spoke softly, sweetly. The sleeves of his robe were embroidered in gold and there was more gold thread woven through his black hair. Around his neck was a single braid of silver. The ghost of a scar ran from his chin to the tip of his left ear. “Come to trade, you said. That is no crime.”
“And what about hurting a child? That’s the worst crime of all. Do that and you’re damned.”
“Nobody meant for that. She is a wild one, though. She scratched my friend, here.” The Meritran pointed to his left eye. “He may go blind. Few children have that fire in them.”
Richard tried to read the stranger’s expression, but the man’s face was a mask. The few Meritrans he’d met in the Eastern kingdoms were crude people, severe to a fault. Quick to laugh but only out of cruelty. And they had a habit of answering insults with blades.
He inched closer to the cell door. The bambau bars were woven with desert reed, speckled with little spikes like rosebush thorns. The lock was a knot of reed as fat as Richard’s fist.
If he’d had his throwing knives, he’d have sawed through the knot in moments. If they’d left him his collection of powders he could’ve mixed a nitrum concoction strong enough to burn the bars to ash. But they’d stripped him, left him bare and bleeding.
“I ask again,” the stranger said. “Why are you—”
“Understand this, Meritran. If you or your men have left a single bruise on my girl, I’ll ruin you and everything you love. Now, show me my daughter.”
The dark man dabbed his lips. “You demand. You should not demand, not in my town.” But he unhooked the lamp from where it hung outside Richard’s cell, walked to the second cell and, with great care, slipped the oil lamp through the gap between the bars.
Ana lay curled in the dirt, knees hugged to her chest, naked. She was only ever a small girl but, balled up in the muck, she seemed even smaller, so fragile she could be broken by a hard gust of wind. Her eyes were closed, lips pursed, mud drying on her cheeks. Her hair, once the golden shade of sunlight on bales of straw, was now roped with filth. Her fingernails were bloody.
Richard could have screamed, could have pulled against the rope until his wrists snapped. But he steadied himself, breathed deep, tamped the fury down, and reached through the bars between their cells.
The rope stopped him short; he could only brush her bare feet with the tips of his fingers. They were cold and still.
“Goddamn savages,” Richard hissed. “What’d you do?”
“She fought hard,” the dark man said. “Not easy to make her sit. She is unhurt, truly. We have lost so many children here, you see. Not enough laughter in the streets. A town is nothing without children, can we agree? She is your greatest treasure. I know this. I am a father too.” He pulled the lamp back and Ana was swallowed by the dark. “Why did you come?”
It was hard to speak through the thirst. “So you’re the king here?”
“Kabbah. You would say . . . warlord.”
“Where’d you learn my language?”
“I learn from everyone. I speak everything. But you come here not knowing a word of Meritran. A shame. We could have avoided . . . misunderstandings.” The Kabbah paced, the lamp swinging in his grip. “You have powders and silver. Are you an alchemist? A scholar? Where from, the Horn? The Ash Coast? Did you walk here? Or . . . did you ride?”
Richard tried to read the Kabbah’s expression. Calm eyes, lips curled into a wearied smile, but his brow was furrowed like he was barely holding in his anger.
He had to treat the man carefully. No telling what would set him off. “We brought silver to trade. You’ve taken everything I have, so the silver’s yours now. Keep it. Just let me and my daughter go.”
“Seven days ago,” the Kabbah said, “I sent brothers south to scout the oasis of Meile Sonyara. You know of it?”
“Take the silver and don’t ask questions, Kabbah. You don’t want the answers.”
The Kabbah scratched his ear, where a chunk the size of a finger had been cut away and scarred over into a ropy lump. “I sent them,” he said, “and yesterday a man and a girl arrive at the gates, riding my brothers’ horses. A man who refuses gifts, who only speaks the Eastern tongue. Who carries daggers beneath his shirt.” The Kabbah motioned for the guard to come into the light. He carried Richard’s bandolier—eight slim throwing knives, elegantly weighted, molded to fit Richard’s grip. “Not a scholar, then. An assassin. Did you come to kill me?”
A perceptive Meritran? That made him doubly dangerous. But the Kabbah was only half-right—an assassin needed a patron, a master, a client. Richard had none. Not anymore. Not since running from the Magician.
“Come to kill you?” Richard shook his head. “You don’t matter. You’re nothing. You want the truth, Kabbah?” The warlord looked on, impassive, through the bars, but Richard couldn’t keep from laughing. How many hundreds of miles had he and Ana already crossed? How many hundreds to go? And all of it ruined, his plans crushed, his daughter doomed, because he’d camped at the wrong oasis and stolen the wrong horses. “Listen. There’s a man coming for us. A Magician. The Magician, the one who killed old King Lowe and took my country’s throne. Heard of him? You should’ve, by now. We’ve been running from him for weeks. If you want to live, if you want anyone in this village to see tomorrow, you have to let us go.”
The Kabbah leaned in, almost touching the bars. Richard could feel the heat rising off his skin. “Maybe a scholar. Maybe an assassin. Or even a soldier? Yes, I see it now. You are all three. And yes, I hear the stories. Tales of a man with fire in his hands, coming west with his army. Did he send you? What sort of men send little girls to spy for them?”
“I told you to listen, Kabbah. My girl belonged to the Magician, once. His experiment, his . . . pet. He wants her back, and he’ll crush anyone in his way.”
“And you want me to simply . . . let you leave?”
“I’m not begging, Kabbah. I’m warning you. If we’re locked up in here when the Magician arrives, he’ll crush you and everyone you love to get to us. He has a monster with him, a thing he built for hunting. It kills everything it . . . Don’t look away from me! Listen! The Magician can turn every one of your soldiers to ash. He’s broken in his head. He doesn’t know mercy. Cruelty only makes him hungry. When you stripped me, did you find the poison? It was around my neck.”
The Kabbah nodded.
“It’s not for me. It’s for her, in case the bastard catches us. Do you understand? I’d kill my own daughter before letting him touch her again. That’s the man he is.”
The Kabbah leaned in until he and Richard were nose to nose, his eyes afire in the guttering light of the oil lamp. Richard was pinned. He didn’t blink.
Finally, the warlord took a step back. “This is a bad place for scholars. Men who look into the darkness find themselves caught in dark places. And if this Magician is as cruel as you say . . . better I kill you now and send your soul cleanly along the wheel.”
Richard reached into Ana’s cell again, questing out until he found her ankle. She twitched against his touch. Such a small motion, but it was enough to leave his eyes burning.
He barely knew his girl. Hadn’t seen her for ten years. He’d been stupid and trusting enough to pass her into the Magician’s arms when she was only an infant, and now that he had her back he was about to lose her again. What sort of man was he, to drag a child out of a dungeon and haul her halfway across the mapped kingdoms, only to let her die in a different dark cell?
“She doesn’t deserve this,” he said.
“No. She has a warrior spirit. I saw that when we brought her down here. But you . . . you are a man. You wear your own decisions.” The Kabbah was barely visible in the gloom, leaning against the far wall of the corridor, arms crossed, patient. “Tell me this. You run from your own lands, run from this Magician and his army. To where? This desert is no place for your kind. It eats men like you.”
“There aren’t many men like me, Kabbah. I’ve been here before, a long time back. Walked these wastes from end to end. There’s an old friend I need to see. Someone who can get the Magician off my back. Maybe even put him in the ground.”
“And what friend,” the Kabbah said, “would stand between you and an army?”
Richard’s smile flashed in the dark.
“A demon.”
Chapter Two
The ceiling shook with the low rhythm of men running to and fro in the corridors above. Particles of dirt, fine as smoke, drifted down into Richard’s hair. Morning now, surely, although it was impossible to follow the passage of time in the gloom.
The Kabbah had left hours before, chewing on Richard’s story. He needed to consider, the warlord said. Consider what? Richard had told him everything. Their flight from Stonebridge Castle. The hard weeks they’d spent hopping from town to town, staying silent and hidden, always expecting shouts of recognition, for the Magician’s troops to fasten irons around their ankles and wrists.
He’d even told the Kabbah about the demon Eluah, waiting in the north. An undead, impossible thing bound inside a tower of earth, waiting for their return. To give them sanctuary.
