Free The Prince of Shadow by Curt Benjamin

penetrate his skull. As long as his opponent’s skill remained superior to his own, Llesho figured he’d be spending his afternoons with his face in the dirt and his arms twisted in knots at his back.
    Things didn’t much improve until prayer forms one morning at the end of Llesho’s first week of hand-to-hand combat training. His body passed through the forms under Den’s watchful eye until, halfway through the Flowing Water form, he stumbled. His body was trying to perform two completely different moves at that point in the exercise and the realization stopped him dead in the middle of the form.
    Den saw; the muscles in his face relaxed into a smile that never showed itself upon his lips, and Llesho knew he was right. Prayer forms and hand-to-hand were one, each growing out of the same body, the same nature, but leading to different conclusions: peace, or war. The move that he had stumbled on made sense then: he had reached the place in the form where a man must choose one path or the other, and when he had come to that place, Llesho had not known which path to take. But he did now. He completed the morning prayers with no further mishaps, and in the afternoon, in the shade of the drying yard, landed Bixei on his back for the first time. As a warning, he brought the blade of his hand perilously close to the throat of his enemy, then shifted into the more decorated style that would do no harm. The next morning, as he was putting away his mop and pail, Bixei came to him with a summons from Jaks to the weapons room. He was going to be a real gladiator at last!
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    He knew the way, but Bixei insisted that he’d been told to bring him, which he did. “Good luck,” he muttered at the door, and then he was gone, walking away as fast as he could without seeming to run, and in the direction of the barracks. To spread the tale, Llesho figured, and he opened the door and entered alone.
    The weapons room was long and narrow, with a beaten dirt floor and a single table running the length of it. Brackets set into all four walls held long-shafted weapons: pikes and staves and tridents, slim spears with gleaming heads as long as his hand and thicker ones hooked at the end of the blade. On the table, all manner of swords and knives and hammers and axes lay waiting next to nets and chain whips. Master Jaks stood rigidly straight, to the right of a door which led into the smith and repair shops ringing with the clangor of hammer on bronze and iron. Llesho hadn’t seen him since his first day in the compound, but he looked more terrifying and bleak than Llesho remembered, though only the occasional flex of the tattooed bands on his upper arms showed any of his tension. When Llesho had made his bow, Jaks turned to the door and rapped two sharp taps upon it.
    Den came through the door first and settled himself to the left of the jamb. A woman followed him. She wore the plain clothes of a servant covered by a coat with wide sleeves that fell away at her elbows. Llesho figured that for a disguise. She carried herself with haughty assurance, demanding a degree of deference his teachers would not owe a woman of her apparent youth in the lower ranks. Den’s mobile features, set in a frozen mask, told Llesho that the woman’s presence deeply disturbed him. It disturbed Llesho as well.
    â€œAre you a goddess?” he asked, and wondered if he could be any stupider, to draw her attention with a question that marked him as an uneducated fool, or as a Thebin raised at the center of a religious culture. A slave boy should have no knowledge of the gates of heaven, or the gods and goddesses who passed through them when they visited the living earth.
    â€œHe is impertinent,” she said to Master Den, but turned the dark, thoughtful pools of her eyes on Llesho and, he saw in them not age but history, and deep, deep, timeless knowledge.
    The woman turned to Jaks and touched a finger to the most