"It was necessary," she repeated. "How better to warn other sword-dancers you will not be easy prey?"

That was precisely why I had done it, knowing the tale would be told. Embellished into legend. But the aftermath was far more difficult to deal with than I had anticipated.

"Tiger," Del said quietly, "you spent many years learning all the rituals of the sword-dance. The requirements of the circle. It was your escape, your freedom, but also a way of life woven of rules, rites, codes. The formal sword-dance is not about killing but about the honor of the dance and victory. What you did today was the antithesis of everything you learned, all that you embraced, when you swore the oaths of a sword-dancer before your shodo at Alimat."

"I've been in death-dances before." They were rare, as most sword-dances were a relatively peaceful way of settling disputes for our employers, but they did occur.

"Still formalized," she observed. "It's an elegant way to die. An honorable way to die."

Killing Khashi had been neither. But necessary, yes.

"On another day, you and he would have danced a proper dance. One of you would have won. And then likely afterwards you'd have gone to a cantina together and gotten gloriously drunk. It is different, Tiger, what was done today."

"You can't know, bascha—"

"I can. I do. I killed Bron."

It took me a moment. Then I remembered. Del had killed a friend, a training partner, who otherwise would have kept her from returning to the Northern island known as Staal-Ysta, where her daughter lived.

But still.

I squirted more water into my mouth, spat again, then drank. Stared hard across the landscape, remembering the stink of severed bowels, the expression on his face as his life ran out, the weight of the blade as I opened his abdomen.

Butchery.

"Would you feel better if you had died?"

For the first time since the fight I looked directly at her. Felt the tug of a wry smile at my mouth. Trust Delilah to put it in perspective.

"You don't have to like it," she said. "If you did, if you began to, I would not share your bed. But this, too, is survival, and in its rawest, most primitive form. There will be others. Kill them quickly, Tiger, and ruthlessly. Show them no mercy. Because they will surely show none to you."

What she didn't say, what she didn't need to say, was that some of those others would be better than Khashi.

DELwas initially resistent to going after my jivatma. She truly saw no sense in it, since very likely the sword was buried under tons of rock, and we had new blades. I still hadn't told her about the dreams of the woman commanding me to take up the sword, because I couldn't find words that didn't make me sound like a sandsick fool. Instead, I relied on Del's own respect for the Northern blades and on the loss of Boreal. As I had by declaring elaii-ali-ma, she had made the only choice possible in breaking the sword, but that didn't mean she was immune to regret. Eventually she gave in.

There was not a road where we wanted to go, because no one else, apparently, had ever wanted to go there. Del and I made our own way, recalling the direction from our visit to Shaka Obre's domain nearly a year before. We left behind the flat but relatively lush desert of Julah and traded it for foothills, the precursors of the mountain where we had encountered strong magic, where Chosa Dei, living in my sword, had vacated it first to fill—and kill—Sabra, then to encounter his brother. They hadn't been living beings, Chosa Dei and Shaka Obre, merely power incarnate, but that was enough. What was left of them battled fiercely within the hollowed rock formation that shaped, inside a huge chimney of stone, a circle. And Del and Chosa Dei, using my sword, my body, had danced.

Here there was rock in place of soil, intermixed with hardpan and seasonings of sand. Drifts of stone were like the bones of the earth peeping through the flesh, but there were tumbled piles of it as well as that beneath the dirt. Brownish, porous smokerock, the variegations of slate, sharply faceted shale, the milky glow of quartz, the glitter of mica coupled with glinting splashes of false gold. The Punja, with its crystalline sands, was yet miles away. This was a land of rock swelling like boils into looming stone formations crowning ragged foothills, merging slowly into mountains. Not the high, huge ranges of Del's North, shaped of wind and snow and ice, but the whimsy of Southron nature in sudden bubbles of burst rock, scattered remnants of wholeness and order, abrupt, towering upthrustings of striated stone shoved loose from the desert floor.

Movement against the uneven horizon of foothills and rock formations caught my eye. I looked, saw, and reined in sharply. Del, not watching me as she and her gelding picked their way through, nearly allowed her gelding to walk into the back of the stud. There was a moment of tension in the body beneath me, but he, too, knew what lay before us was far more threatening than what was behind.

"What—" Del began; but then she, like me, held her silence, and waited.

I had half expected it. We were in the land of the Vashni. No one knew where the borders were, or even if there were borders, but there was always the awareness of risk when one traveled here.

Four warriors. Vashni are not large, nor are their horses. But size wasn't what mattered. It was the willingness to kill, and the way in which they did it.

Four warriors, kilted in leather, wearing wreaths of fingerbone pectorals against oiled chests. Black hair was also oiled, worn in single, fur-wrapped plaits. Bone-handled knives and swords decorated their persons.

Del's voice was a breath of sound. "Could these be the same four who met us when we had Sabra?"

I answered as quietly. "I don't know. Maybe. No one sees the Vashni often enough to recognize individuals." At least, no one lived long enough to recognize individuals.

The warriors eased their small, dark horses into motion. They rode down from the rocky hilltop and approached, marking our faces, harnesses, swords. I felt the first tickle of sweat springing up on my skin.

Is it possible to fight a Vashni? Of course. I imagine it has happened. But no one, no one has ever survived the battle. They are killed, then boiled. When the bones are free of flesh, the Vashni make jewelry and weapons of it. The flesh is fed to dogs.

The only reason I know this is the Vashni don't kill children. It is their 'mercy' to take children into their villages, to feed them, have them watch what becomes of their parents, then deliver them to a road where they will be found by others.

If they are found. Some of them have been.

Del and I had been in a Vashni village once, when searching for her brother. They had treated us with honor; Jamail was considered a holy man, and she was his sister. Jamail, castrated, mute, had not wanted to leave the people who gave him a twisted sort of kindness after years of slavery elsewhere. Later—known by then as the Oracle—he had been killed, but it hadn't been Vashni doing. They revered his memory.

"Del," I said quietly, "come up beside me so they can see you better."

She didn't question it; possibly she also realized safety might lie in her resemblence to the Oracle, her brother. She moved the gelding out from behind the stud, guided him next to me, and reined in. Again, we waited.

That triggered a response in the Vashni. One of them stayed back, but three others rode down. One stationed himself in front of me, approximately three paces away; the other two took up positions on either side of us.

The fourth rode down then. When he was close enough, I saw his eyes were lighter than the others, the shape of his face somewhat different. I'd never heard of Vashni breeding with other tribes, but anything was possible. They had taken a Northerner into their midst. Del's brother, by the time we found him, had become one of them.