TRIAL AND ERROR | short stories + snippets

The final guard is already in a battle stance when her comrade slides off my sword and drops to the floor. She shows no grief for her fallen peers; her focus does not stray to the ripple of Death's cloak even for a heartbeat.

Her body alone is twice the size of mine, to say nothing of the armour that scrapes against itself with each breath she heaves. She is better protected than the others, from the bear skull that protects her face and throat to the treated hide that covers her palms. Even her eyes are hidden behind fine chainmail. She is iron on steel on bone.

But she must be capable of movement to fight. Which means there is a weak point.

I have no armour. The Masters had taught me that armour is to the warrior like a flight spell to a bird. If one needs armour, they simply do not know how to fight. It is nothing but a restriction, hazardous weight.

As I approach with dragging steps, I study the rise and fall of her breathing, the way she shifts her weight from foot to foot to keep her muscles alert. Her armour is faultless, crafted for her skeleton as carefully as her organic body has been, and just as in her organic body, her sides where the plackart transitions into faulds are vulnerable. There are gaps, the plates fused only at the front and the back.

If I get her to twist her torso, I will have a moment's opening to drive the sword into her side. It won't be a quick death—I have no access to her brain nor her heart, but a death it will be nonetheless.

Witness yourself, slaughterer. The point of my sword scrapes against the stone floor as I drag it beside me. Didn't I always tell you it was inevitable? Didn't I tell you the moment your finger first caressed my blade?

The chain of the guard's kusarigama clatters as she adjusts her grip, prepares to strike.

Do you still remember your first kill? The way your hands trembled as you wept? How your swordsmanship was so poor that you had to strike thrice before the wounds became fatal?

I'm close enough to smell the sweat beneath her armour, close enough to hear the pulse of her heart. Somewhere behind the bear skull and chainmail, I might catch the glint of her eyes. Maybe I even see fear in them, after all.

I still taste the blood of your father. And your brother's after his.

I raise my sword and charge. It is an arrogant move, but sometimes arrogance makes for the best strategy.

The guard's blade swings mere millimetres away from my face, entirely unprotected, unlike her own hidden behind the bear skull. The chain clicks taut, and she yanks it back. As I dodge to stop it from winding around my neck, the kusarigama cuts the shell off my ear. A drop of blood clings to the silver blade when the ball at the end of the chain flies past my head and into the guard's hand.

When I was trained in The Wells of Silence, years after I had killed my father and my brother, I was told to be even less than water. To untether my atoms into mist, to become so dispersed that I did not even cast a shadow. To manage somehow to be nowhere and everywhere at once.

There is no such fluidity in the guard's movement. She is so heavy with armour that it's miraculous for her to be able to lift her arms. And yet, she does not need to be fast. I can flow around her, somewhere between liquid and gas, and have no hope of victory. She is as firm as a boulder, managing somehow to surround me like a mountain range. I will only exhaust myself trying to damage her from the valley.

What is this weakness? my sword asks when it whistles through the air only for the guard to block it with the armour of her forearm. Did you not come here on the mission for blood? Did you not promise me that I would taste that which is sweetest across all the worlds?

The voice sparks red in my vision. I promised this blade that blood twenty years ago. Now that I have returned, now that I have killed my path all the way to her door, there is nothing that will stop me.

Slaughterer, the sword calls me. And Slaughterer I will be.

The chain of the guard's kusarigama tangles around my sword, and with one yank, it flies out of my grip. I stumble from the force of the pull, stumble close enough for her to get her blade to my neck. It splits a layer of skin, a crimson hairline left on my throat, a seal of her victory.

The guard may be a mountain. The misfortune of mountains is, however, that they have caves.

When my dagger sinks between the plates of her armour and through the treated bear hide beneath it, she is not afraid. Like all who serve in the Empire, she has been taught since her youth to withstand pain. The dagger does not sink deeper than a thumb. It will be a quick enough recovery.

Her kusarigama, which barely wavers from my stab, presses against my throat again. She does not manage to make the fatal cut, however, before she drops the weapon. The chain remains looped around her wrists but both ball and blade clatter against the floor.

We are close enough now that I can see her eyes through the fine chainmail welded into the inside of her bear skull. Her eyes are pitch black until they are hollowed by terror.

"I am sorry," I say as I pull the dagger out.

It is not blood she bleeds. The essence that leaves her is something imperceptible to the human eye. It seems to flow between blue and silver, seems to both drip to the floor and drift into the air.

"I did not intend this for you."

The guard should have accepted the sword. The sword was crafted in and by the Empire, after all. The weapons of the Wells of Silence are something else entirely. No matter how many people I slay, I rarely muster the cruelty needed to wield them.

I step away from her. She is frozen in time, her body unable to collapse like all her comrades in my wake. It only makes it easier for me to unclasp the key from beneath her breastplate.

My sword says nothing about the blood I have denied from it. When I pick it up, it remains silent. It knows what waits behind the door. It knows I will finally deliver what I promised decades ago.

The lock and the key are plain iron. It is as if the door has been locked only to offer me the dramatics of unlocking it, a reward for managing to best every other defence the Empire has set up.

The door opens to beckon me into a room shrouded in shadow. Directly ahead of me is a daybed, cast in the quivering light of only two candles. There she is.

Despite it being the middle of the night, she has managed to dress herself in a gown, black with red embroidery. The finest of her rhodonite jewellery embellishes her clavicles and every type of red gemstone that can be found within this world is pronged to her fingers.

She smiles. "I wondered when you would return. Regardless of the circumstances, it is lovely to see you, darling."

My sword scrapes against the floor as I step inside the chamber. The blood in her veins sings. The blade can already taste it. Slaughterer, it demands.

"Hello, Mother."