Free Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover

TWO
    AS THE CRISP late-summer afternoon faded to evening, the shadow of
the God’s Teeth mountains stretched to the east and swallowed
first the mines, erasing their billowing towers of smoke, then wiped
across the Northwest Road and engulfed Thorncleft, the tiny
Transdeian capital city.
    The Monastic Ambassador to Transdeia, a young man the world named
Raithe of Ankhana, sat in a straight-backed, unadorned, unpadded, and
exceptionally uncomfortable chair, staring out at the shadow’s
grope with blank unseeing eyes.
    Most unsettling, those eyes were: the pale blue grey of winter ice,
set in a face as dark and leathery as that of a Korish desert
tribesman. The startling contrast made his stare a disturbing, almost
dangerous thing; few men could bear to match his gaze. Fewer still
would care to try, if they knew just how deeply those pale eyes could
see.
    Late in the afternoon, five elves had come to Thorncleft. Raithe had
seen them first from this very window: dusty, in clothing travel-worn
and stained, mounted on horses whose ribs showed even under their
mantles of green and black. Those mantles had been embroidered with
the star-browed raven that was the standard of House Mithondionne.
    Raithe had stared at them, memorizing every discernable curve of
shoulder and tangle of hair, every faded patch where the sun had
bleached color from their linen surcoats, all the details of posture
and gesture that made each of them individual, as the elves walked
their horses up high-sloping Tor Street. He had stepped from the
shadow of the half-built Monastic embassy into the street, shielding
his eyes against the lowering sun, had watched them answer the
challenge at the vaulted gate of Thornkeep, had watched as the gate
swung wide and the elves led their horses within.
    Then he went back into the embassy, into his office, and sat in this
chair so that he could see them more clearly.
    He held himself perfectly erect and controlled his breathing, timing
it by the subtle beats of his own heart: six beats in, hold for
three, nine beats out, hold for three. As his heart slowed, so did
the cycle of his breath. He built their image in the eye of his mind,
drawing details of their backs from his trained memory, since their
backs were what he had seen most clearly: a spray of platinum hair
pricked through by the barest hint of pointed ears, a diagonal
leather thong to support a waterskin, the inhuman grace of stance,
the way shoulders move when hands swing in small, light gestures.
    Slowly, slowly, with infinite patience, he fed details into the
image: the dark curls hand-tooled into their belts, the lace of scar
tissue across one’s forearm, the sideways duck of another’s
head as he whispered to one of his companions. These were details he
had not seen, could not have seen; these were details that he created
in his powerful imagination. Yet as he refined them, and brought them
more vividly before his mind’s eye, they became plastic,
shifted, and finally organized into plain, visible truth.
    Now ghosts of their surroundings materialized in his mind: the marble
floor, deeply worn but highly polished, on which their boots made
almost no sound, the long tongue of pale blue carpet that entered the
doorway before them. He got a vague sense of huge, high-vaulted
space, oaken beams blackened by years of smoldering torches below.
    He hummed satisfaction under his breath. This would be the Hall of
State.
    He had been inside that hall many times in the few months since he’d
been posted here from Ankhana; using his recollection of the details
of the hall brought the scene inside it into sharper and more
brilliant focus than he could have seen with the eyes of his
body—from the glittering steel of the ceremonial weapons that
bedizened the walls to the precise color of the sunlight that
struggled through the smoke-darkened windows. There before the elves
was the Gilt Throne, and upon it lounged Transdeia’s