House of Blades Read online

  “Uh, my name is Simon. Kai told me to come down here and then come back up, so...”

  “Right, then!” Benson clapped his metal hands together with a sound like a handful of knives clashing. “Of course, you’ll have to have a go at the boys, first. Just to see if you can handle it, you understand.”

  “What? Have a go?”

  “Sure, yeah. You know. Fighting, and all that. Unless you’d rather dance a turn or two instead.”

  Benson cackled a laugh. Simon began to dream of a day that Kai would explain something before sending him headfirst into it.

  From the side, a deep voice, like a bear awakening from hibernation, rumbled forth. “I’d rather dance a turn or two. If you were wondering.”

  Simon cast his eyes everywhere to try and figure out who was speaking. He spotted a helmet twisting on metal shoulders before he realized that the speaker was one of the suits of armor.

  Somehow, it didn’t come as much of a surprise.

  Benson made a dismissive gesture towards the armor that had moved. “Ah, shut it, Borus. Nobody asked you.”

  “Who am I fighting, then?” Simon asked. Benson cackled again and waved his arms. With an enormous creak and a jangle of metal, all of the suits of armor stepped forward as one and turned to face him. As if controlled by one mind, they raised enormous weapons—maces, axes, broad cleaver-like swords—up to a ready position.

  Simon’s hands were moist on his sword, and the temptation to dash back up the stairs was almost too much to take. But he took the fear and shoved it to the back of his mind. His master obviously thought he was ready for this. Kai must have passed this training himself.

  Therefore, he would move forward.

  He crouched on the balls of his feet, assuming a low ready stance with his sword angled in front of him. The air between him and the iron giants trembled with tension.

  “All right,” Simon said. “Let’s go.”

  “Dancing?” said Borus.

  ***

  In the first few moments of the fight, Simon was almost overwhelmed by his own instincts. His mind screamed at him that he was facing two dozen opponents, all much bigger and stronger than he was, and the panic nearly got him killed.

  But after the initial fright, as well as a few near misses from shovel-sized axes, he realized that this actually might be easier than winning his supper from Chaka.

  The suits of armor and their weapons were too large for the narrow room, and there were so many of them that they crowded each other. He would only face, at most, two at a time, and even those would get in each other’s way. One tried an overhand swing with a sword that caught on the decorative spikes covering another’s shoulder; the gap that created was more than wide enough to allow Simon to slip under the armor’s elbow and thrust his blade into where one of the armor’s kidneys would have been.

  Or at least, he tried to. The sword screeched and scraped against the armor, but failed to make a dent.

  Another swung a mace at his head, and Simon stepped back to avoid it. He would be seriously injured if one of the attacks connected, but they were almost comically slow. As long as he kept moving, he would be in no real danger.

  He tried an overhand slash at the helmet, but of course the blow just rebounded off.

  “Interesting strategy,” Benson said, “attacking the opponent’s strong points. I never would have thought of it.”

  Simon dodged another couple of attacks, then tried what he probably should have done from the beginning. He slipped his sword up under the shoulder of one suit of armor, stabbing it into the weak point under the shoulder joint, where the armor was thin.

  The suit shuddered and crashed to the ground, as if the energy animating it had failed.

  Benson cackled and crashed his bony hands together again. “Bravo. Twenty-three more to go.”

  Simon fell into a rhythm, avoiding the slow, heavy attacks and waiting for an opening until he could slide in a single strike. Two more armors went down.

  Then he made a mistake.

  He stepped in too close as he aimed for underneath an arm, and a heavy iron fist came down on his shoulder. Once. Twice. It felt like his shoulder had shattered like a dropped glass. He took up his sword in his left hand and raised it, but the armor’s next blow snapped it in half. A shard from the broken blade flew towards his eye; he flinched, and it slashed across his temple.

  He looked up with blurring eyes and saw the fist coming down on his face.

  “Stop it, Borus,” Benson called out.

  The iron gauntlet froze not quite two inches from Simon’s forehead.

  “I’m glad,” Borus rumbled. He pulled his fist back and stood up straighter; all the other suits followed. “Your two-step is good, but your waltz could use a little work.”

  Simon looked up at him, dazed.

  “Honestly,” Benson said, “I never know what he’s talking about either.”

  ***

  After a quick visit to the imp-infested healing tub, Simon walked back into the garden to see Kai. He rolled his shoulder, trying to work out the stiffness in the newly restored joint.

  Kai sat in the grass next to Chaka. His legs were crossed, hands on his knees, head bowed, with Azura resting against his shoulder. His doll Lilia lay in his lap. Next to him, Chaka sat in the exact same pose.

  Simon had seen this before. Apparently it was Kai’s “meditation position,” whatever that meant. Simon supposed he would find out at some point in his training.

  “Kai, sir. I’ve come back.”

  “And how did it go?” Kai asked. He didn’t open his eyes. Or maybe he did; the white hair in his face made it hard to tell.

  “I managed to defeat three of the iron armors before I was taken down,” Simon said. He supposed that wasn’t bad, but of course Kai would have been able to do better.

  “I see.”

  “What was I supposed to learn?”

  “If you had learned it,” Kai said, “you would know. Try again tomorrow.”

  Simon held forward the shattered remnants of the weapon he had bought, secondhand, from a desperate merchant’s guard. It felt strange, letting the weapon go. “In that case, I’m going to need another sword.”

  “Then you’ll have to go get a spare.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “Good luck.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  RISKS AND REWARDS

  As it turned out, the armory was filled with traps.

  Simon recalled his first visit to the armory after opening the door and dodging a dart launched from the opposite wall. This time, another dart followed just as he relaxed and stood up, forcing him to dodge again.

  That hadn’t happened last time. Someone had to have changed the trap...unless the trap changed itself. That was a depressing thought.

  The room was lit by a bright, white light, though Simon could see no source. The light gleamed off weapons of every size, shape, and description, filling the room wall-to-wall and stretching back so that Simon could barely see the far wall. A rack of spears a hundred paces long stood against one wall, arranged from shortest—a spear that was scarcely longer than Simon’s forearm—to the longest, which had to be fifteen feet tall and looked as wide around as his neck. Axes of a thousand different shapes stood on individual wooden stands all around the room. Bow staves, some made of horn, some of a dozen different types of wood, and one that looked to be forged entirely of metal, sat in barrels near the door, with coils of bowstring on pegs nearby. Suits of armor—chain, plate, leather, snake scales, animal hides with shaggy fur still attached—were arranged on pedestals against the wall to the right, and Simon made sure not to step too close. They might come to life.

  Every step deeper into the armory sprung some new trap. A tripwire he hadn’t noticed caused a giant axe to come swinging down for his head. One innocent-looking tile was actually a switch that opened up a chasm in front of him; if he had taken one more step, he would have fallen in. He thought he
heard growling from the bottom.

  It wasn’t nearly as hard as it should have been to build up his courage and keep going. Simon realized some part of him was growing used to constant, unpredictable, mortal danger. He wondered if that was a good thing.

  Of course, the rack of swords rested against the back wall, as far as could be from the entrance. It stood right next to the rich wooden door leading into another room, deeper in the House. Simon hesitated, his hand hovering between the hilt of a new sword and the door handle. He had conquered the armory, hadn’t he? Surely a peek inside this room wouldn’t hurt anything.

  He grabbed the door handle and tugged on it, just a little. Nothing happened. The door stayed firmly shut. He pushed, and again the door didn’t budge. Maybe he could ask Kai for the key.

  Then again, there could be a thousand fiery snakes coiled up just beyond the door, waiting for a single crack so they could spring out and sink their burning fangs into his flesh. In this place it very well could be that, or even something worse. He shook his head to clear it. He really was getting overconfident, if he was trying to recklessly march ahead into an unknown danger. To keep himself distracted, he seized a sword from the rack. This new room could wait until he had conquered all the rooms before it, including the skeleton’s basement.

  Armed with a new sword, he marched back down to Benson. This time he suffered two fractured shins after defeating only a pair of the black armors. His trip up the stairs and back to the healing bathtub was one of the most agonizing experiences of his life, and he came close to asking Kai to take him back to the real world.

  But he didn’t.

  He settled into a new routine: wake up, challenge Chaka for breakfast, train with Kai all afternoon, then back to the basement before dinner. In time, he grew stronger. Faster. He could swing a sword all day, now, and barely feel it, and he shrugged off minor injuries as unworthy of his attention. Sometimes he could challenge the walking suits of armor twice a day, taking down seven or eight each time before he was defeated.

  He was making progress, certainly, but not enough. Not nearly enough. After a month of repeating the same pattern, he cornered Kai after dinner and demanded to know what he was doing wrong.

  Kai chuckled. “The little mouse is getting hungry, so he asks why he cannot swallow a tree whole. Like anything else worth doing, it takes time.”

  He held Otoku in his left hand, and he bent his head closer, listening. He cradled her carefully to avoid wrinkling her red dress.

  Otoku whispered in his ear, just on the edge of Simon’s hearing, but Simon barely gave it any thought. Amazing what he could get used to, with time.

  Kai nodded along with the whispers. “Yes. Good point. Otoku says that there is one rule in this house, above all others: what you want, you must earn.”

  “But what am I going to earn?” Simon knew his voice was too angry, but he went on. “If I can beat all of the suits of armor, and that skeleton besides, what have I earned? I’ve just proved that I’m better than they are.”

  Kai nodded slowly, head tilted like a bird’s, and then he rose to his feet.

  “You have my apology, little mouse. I have failed you. I have been leading you around by the hand, instead of leaving you to find your own way. And for that I am sorry.”

  And then he began to walk. Not back, through the bathroom and towards the hallway and the exit, but forward. Into the far door that Simon had never seen open.

  “I have earned my way through fourteen rooms of this house,” Kai said. “I will make my way through, room by room, at a pace I feel you should be able to manage. If you can find me, then we will travel together. If you do not find me in two weeks, I will consider you dead or a coward. In either case, I will remove you from Valinhall.”

  “What are you saying?” Simon cried. “You can’t just leave me here!”

  Kai continued as if he had not spoken, his long-legged strides eating up the grassy plains as Simon hurried to follow. “The door to the library will unlock once you have mastered the skeleton in the basement. I will wait in the library for a time. If you do not catch me there, I will move on.”

  At the edge of the plains, which dropped off into endless sky, Kai stopped. A door hung at the edge of the grassy plain. It was dark wood, marked with a candle and an open book, but the doorframe stood in emptiness. Surely it just opened up on air.

  “You must try harder, Simon,” Kai said. “You wanted the fast way? You have it.” Then he drew Azura from empty air and swung at Simon’s chest.

  It wasn’t the fastest blow Simon had seen his master deliver, but he was still forced to stumble several steps backward. By the time he caught himself and moved forward, Kai had already vanished through the doorway.

  Desperately Simon grabbed the handle and twisted. Nothing. He pulled, pushed, straining against it despite the vertigo that insisted he was about to fall over an endless cliff.

  The door was sealed shut. There really would be no appeal to Kai from now on.

  He made his way back to the bed in the bedroom even more carefully than usual. He had feared for his life here in the Valinhall House; in fact, hardly a day went by when he wasn’t convinced he was going to die. But Kai had always been there, a silent support even when he abandoned Simon to one danger or another. Simon had always had the comforting idea that Kai would only push him into danger that he felt his student could handle.

  And now Kai had left him alone. With the traps, the imps, the Nye, and who knew what else? With Kai gone, if Simon failed to beat Chaka too many times in a row, he might really starve to death. He supposed thirst would get him first, actually, unless he could drink his fill from the soapy water of the bathtub, but it hardly mattered. Something was going to kill him.

  When Simon reached Kai’s sleeping quarters, he curled up on the floor next to the bed and turned his gaze to the wall.

  He could stay here. As long as he could beat Chaka two out of three times, he would have all the food and water he needed. The entry room, bedroom, bathroom, and garden were relatively safe, and Simon could just live in this wing until Kai returned. But then he would fail.

  He would have let his people down, and he would have left Alin to save their village on his own. But he would also have let Kai down, failed to meet his master’s expectation, and that mattered more to Simon than he would have thought.

  But how? He wondered. How am I supposed to just get better all of a sudden? He supposed that he could just redouble his training, sparring against Chaka and against the black armors in the basement, and steadily learn through effort. But to improve even a little would take time, and somehow Simon doubted that Kai would sit in the library, even assuming it was safe and comfortable, for six months waiting for Simon to improve. Besides, six months here would be three on the outside, and he might not have that long.

  “Try harder,” Simon muttered. From his position on the floor, he kicked the post of the bed. His toes exploded with pain; he might as well have slammed his bare foot into a tree. The shoes he wore were only thin leather, crafted by the Nye while he slept. He decided not to care about the pain. He didn’t care either that kicking a bed was the action of a child.

  Anger and frustration boiled up in him, seething underneath his thoughts. He had asked for the training, true, but his abuse had been ridiculous. And now his master abandoned him without even telling him what to do next.

  He wanted to vent his emotions somewhere, so he stood up and lifted the mattress with both hands. He tried to flip it, but it was too heavy, and it ended up sliding pathetically to the ground.

  That was both unsatisfying and somewhat embarrassing, though no one else was around to see. Fortunately.

  He heard the faintest whisper of laughter coming from his left, but he ignored the dolls. Whispering all the time, driving people crazy. What gave them the right? Pulling a knife from a desk next to the bed—Kai always liked to have a weapon close to hand—he threw it at the wall.

&
nbsp; Instead of sticking, as he intended, it hit hilt-first and clattered to the floor, doing no damage. The hints laughter from the dolls grew louder.

  He grabbed a mirror from the wall and let out a yell of frustration as he slammed it to the ground.

  The glass didn’t break. He flipped it over and stomped on his reflection a few times. Nothing.

  Simon really could hear laughter now, though it sounded distant and somewhat warped, as though coming down a long hallway. His furious anger, matched now by embarrassment, made him want to grab the dolls and smash them next. He considered it for a moment, but discarded the idea. Even if the dolls themselves couldn’t hurt him—and he wasn’t entirely sure that was true—Kai might actually murder him if he found his beloved dolls broken.

  Besides, he told himself, they couldn’t really be laughing at him. Right? He still couldn’t make up his mind whether the dolls were somehow magically animated or if his contact with Kai was somehow making him insane.

  He sighed and slumped forward, head pressing against the bedpost. His frustration had only grown, but he felt so ridiculous trying to break things that his anger had faded. Still, what was he supposed to do?

  He was staring down at his feet, one of which still rested on the unbroken mirror, so he caught a glimpse of a dark hood just an instant before the black chain went around his throat.

  Simon’s anger flared back to life. He seized the Nye man’s wrists, which felt like squeezing a tightly packed bundle of laundry, and heaved it up and over his head. The Nye, lighter than a man of flesh, spun over Simon’s head and landed on his feet, though it twisted his arms badly.

  Simon kicked the Nye down onto the spilled mattress and picked up his sword, which he had left resting next to his cot. According to Kai, the Nye couldn’t really be killed by a sword, and in fact they sought such injuries as badges of honor.

  Finally, Simon had an outlet for his frustrations.

  Simon’s first strike was parried by the Nye’s chain, and his second dodged. He tried again and again, pouring his frustration into every strike, until he had backed the hooded figure into a corner.