“Pack? Two is not a pack, goodman. Two is debris circling a drain.” He looks me over. “You’re in denial, boss. Afraid to face the facts. Sefi and her Volk abandoned the Free Legions to steal a kingdom on Mars. The White Fleet is gone. Orion is dead. Free Legions are dust. Senate hung us out to die. Virginia didn’t send reinforcements to Mercury. Sevro dumped us for his little Gold family. Clown and Pebble pixied out. Our pack’s done. Our army’s rotting on the pales. I don’t blame you. I don’t blame me. I don’t blame the troops. I blame the mobs that balked and the politicians that connived.”
So much for that spark I was seeking. I leave Aurae’s book in my bag. Screw doesn’t need words. He needs to go home.
“All the same…bitch to me, not the men,” I say.
“Yeah. Yeah.” He sips his coffee. “My bad.”
* * *
—
Leaving Screwface no better but also hopefully no worse than when I found him, I head to the Archimedes’s sparring chamber via the umbilical that attaches the ship to the base. The white padding of the chamber is stained by years of sweat. Most of it belongs to Cassius and Lysander, but I’ve made my own marks in their absence. Since Lysander broke my blade, I’ve been reduced to using the room’s practice razors—the very same ones Lysander would have trained with. Fetching one from the wall, I feel silly. Screw’s words eat at me more than I’d like.
What’s the use in training? The blade in my hand can’t fix what’s broken.
Much as I hate to admit it, resentment toward Sevro gnaws at me like it gnaws at Screwface. Sevro abandoned me when I needed him most. I could forgive him that. It’s harder to forgive his betrayal of the army. He was the first brother of the Free Legions: when he left, doubt crept into the rank and file. Into me. Worse, Sevro’s choice indicted my own choice. More than anything I wanted to return to Pax when he was kidnapped. To rescue him. To prove in the end I was there for him. I chose the duty of an Imperator over the duty of a father. Now I’m alone playing with blades.
The silence strangles me.
I almost turn back around. No one will notice if I take a day’s leave. No one will dare say I didn’t work hard enough. I yawn again. Maybe just a stretch today. Body could use it. Better to face tomorrow rested.
I almost cave. But I know by now that voice of reason is the enemy. Inside me there is a coward who fears discomfort. That coward will offer solace in the form of excuses. But it is the coward who grooms a man for his defeats. The coward who makes him accept them because he is accustomed to finding a good reason to quit. The coward inside can only be killed one way. I toss down my pack and don my training kit.
“Hello, teacher,” I say to the sphere’s computer.
“Welcome, blademaster three.” The computer’s voice is feminine and seductive, just the sort Cassius would choose. Ten years ago, I would have marveled at speaking to a computer, but the tech boom of the Republic has made the once-forbidden technology eerily commonplace. Compared with some of Quicksilver’s systems, this computer is a troglodyte.
“Martian gravity profile again?”
“No.”
“Asteroid combat profile?”
“No. Randomized intervals to a floor of point two and a ceiling of four point five G’s. Let’s run the system today. We’ll finish on Mars.” I rub my left forearm hoping it will hold over four G’s.
“Affirmative. Duration?”
“Dealer’s choice.”
“Affirmative, blademaster three. Preparing session one six eight.”
I fight back another yawn as the room warms up. I roll out my shoulders. They’re stiff from the welding and from countless dislocations over the years. A tightness seizes my left lung as I take a deep breath, a souvenir of the razor Lysander drove into my chest in Heliopolis. I shake out my left arm, which had shattered when my slingBlade clashed with the blade Lysander took from Alexandar’s corpse. Aurae, suspiciously versed in medicine, pinned the bones of my left arm back in place and applied a calcium catalyst, but I’ll need a carver’s work to regain full functionality.
My arm throbs. A good reminder of unfinished business.
A thought comes to me as the room’s gravity wells warm up. When I trained with Lorn, he would speak to me as I flowed through the forms of the Willow Way. I miss the metronomic company of his voice, and I’m tired of silence.
“Computer, link to my datapad.” I fish out my datapad and Aurae’s book from my bag and scan in the first two dozen pages. I instruct the computer to narrate the text, then ease into the winter stance of the Willow Way, blade above my head held with both hands. I pause. “Computer. Voice sample from holofile one three one: Sovereign’s Saturnalia Address.”
A moment later, Virginia’s voice fills the room.
“To those who wrote that we might read, to those who fell so we might walk, to those who came before so we might come after, gratitude.”
The sphere begins its program. The gravity shifts are slow at first, alternating orientation as I move through the first branch of the winter stance and sweep the blade diagonally in descending cuts. I grunt in pain as my body warms up and the stiffness dissolves. Soon the only sounds are the whisper of the practice blade, the shuffle of my feet, my breathing, and Virginia’s voice.
“The first understanding: The path to the Vale is inscrutable, eternal, and perfect. It cannot be seen with the eyes, nor felt underfoot. It winds as it wills. It ends where it must. It climbs when it does. It falls when it should.”
I flow into the autumn strikes, bending back and lashing forward in attack.
“It stretches deep into the rocks we dig, and back into our hearts. It winds on before and after us, in all directions and none. Though we may walk it, we may never master it. Though we may see the path, we can never know the truth. The path to the Vale is inscrutable, eternal, and perfect. It must be followed at all cost.”
Six more understandings follow the first as I pass through the seasons of the Willow Way to fluctuations in gravity. Over the course of the hour, the narration loops a dozen times, playing on when I lay heaving on my back.
“The fourth understanding: The supreme good is the wind of the deepmines. It flows through rock, around people, and over all lands. The wind is oblivious to obstacles though they shape her path. When you smell rust on her breeze, or hear the echo of tools in the dark, smile and be glad. The path is upon you, and you are upon it. All you must do is walk.”
My left arm aches. My lung is tight and on fire, but my mind is blessedly empty as I lay listening to Virginia’s voice. The words of the book are, as I first thought, opaque. I do not understand them yet, much less accept them, but they remind me of something I read long ago when I trained with Matteo. Not Dumas, not the Greeks, something that fell between the cracks. The book is familiar, as comforting as the echo of a lullaby from my childhood.
I return to my quarters in a trancelike state. With water scarce, I use a dull knife to strigil off the sweat and dead skin before continuing my nightly rituals. I record a message to my wife as though we’d just been talking and store it with the rest without review. Then I record my message for my son, another chapter in the testimony of an absentee father.