The Sword of Skelos by Andrew Offutt Read Free Book Online

ruby of many facets, which was surrounded, in a six-pointed star, by twelve bright yellow topazes.
    “Take you this below, and my sword,” he bade the mage so recently an apprentice, and him not yet thirty years of age. “Thrust the sword into the floor. That will not affect the spell?”
    “No, my lord.”
    “Hang this then,” Akter said with a brief nod, “from its guard, and fetch up the other sword.”
    Without question Zafra took sword and pendant. Hitching up the left hem of his robe while he descended, stepping across the corpse of the second Iranistani slain, he paced to within a step of the other dead man. His first thrust failed to anchor the satrap’s blade in the floor of hard-packed black earth, so long cemented by human blood. He used both hands on his second attempt, and the sword was fixed. He hung his ruler’s chain and pendant over the guard, prettily draped and glinting as it swung in air, tinging gently against the blade, yellow gold on silvery steel.
    Both his hands and some exertion were required to force the other sword from the body of its victim, so deeply had the fell weapon imbedded itself. Zafra paused to stoop and wipe the blade, with care, in the dead man’s long black hair. It was dirty, but removed blood and incidentally oiled the blade. A servant would give it proper attention, later.
    The young mage mounted the steps. As he approached the landing that broadened rightward into the semi-gallery, he saw the girl appear in the door. The entirety of Farouz’s unhandsome, helmet-surmounted face was visible behind her, even from Zafra’s lack of vantage; so short was this beautiful maiden of twelve.
    Akter Khan turned at the sound of her gasp.
    “Ah,” he said, “my lovely desert flower! Come you in, pretty Derketari, and see what I have for you.” He reached for her hand.
    Beauties at twelve and raging beauties at thirteen, it was said of the daughters of the sands; and mothers at fifteen and raging hags at five-and-twenty. And this girl was twelve.
    Zafra was unable not to stare at her. He took in her mass of shining black hair, laced with pearls so that it was as the night sky besprent with stars; her sweet oval face with its cavalry archer’s bow of a mouth, stained crimson and shining; the great round beauty of her eyes that were like staring down into a well by night a moment after moonrise. And at least they had got those voluminous Shanki garments of scarlet off her!
    Her breastplates were of gold, and from each cup the tiniest golden chains dangled so that pendent gems danced before her and gently thumped her tiny belly with her slightest movement. Well below her navel, her girdle consisted only of three strands of cloth-of-gold braided into a cord no thicker than her smallest finger. From it shimmered down an arm’s length of snowy gauze sewn to white silk with pale blue thread; this pretense of a skirt was in width but the length of her hand. The strip of cloth was hemmed between her ankles, and the strip behind was only a little shorter. Cloth-of-gold straps climbed her lovely legs, criss-crossing, from soft little ankle boots of red felt sewn with pearls. The gaiters were tied off just at the lovely child’s knees.
    She might, Zafra mused, have been one of those tender young virgins with whose blood incantations had been writ on a sort of parchment made of serpents’ skin; incantations Zafra had read, and committed to memory without his mentor’s knowledge.
    The twelve-year-old gift of the Shanki wore only two decorations: a garnet-set tribal rite-ring of camel’s hair braided with one strand of her own tresses, and the little silver-and-opal pendant with which she had come to the satrap. On a silver chain of passing delicacy, the pendant hung in the center of the slight swell of her breast.
    She stared, huge-eyed, past Zafra at the two bodies below. She seemed unaware that her lord had taken her hand in his hairy one.
    Reaching the landing, Zafra pressed his own