Michael A. Stackpole Read Online Free PDF Page B

donned a sash that bore a badge marking him as a citizen of Garik and another proclaiming his rank as a Bladesmaster. The black triskele badge of Garik had been fastened to the sash with green thread, as it was his home province, while gold had been used to sew the Bladesmaster badge on. This let everyone know Audin made his living as a Bladesmaster and that he could take on students if he so desired, but only a stranger wouldn’t know that anyway.
    As was appropriate, we all wore sashes with our rank badges, too, but the people of Stone Rapids really paid scant notice. All of them could have worn a Garik badge as we had, but there seemed no purpose to it. Within our little community we knew each other, and many folks found the formality of rank badges unfriendly. Still, when two young men were vying for the hand of a girl, rank badges tended to proliferate like mosquitoes in a swamp.
    Here, within the world of the caravan, rank counted for everything. I quickly bought and sewed a Garik badge to the front of my coat, just above the Apprentice swordsman badge. Because I wore a Garik triskele, those people from Herak naturally treated me as an inferior. This did not bother me overmuch both because of what my grandfather had told me before I left and because the triskele also won me instant company among the folks of Garik. My Apprentice badge, on the other hand, brought me no end of snide comments and piteous headshakes from Journeymen and Sworders employed by the merchants.
    To watch this one particular fight, 1 worked myself into the circle of spectators between one of Kasir’s guards and a caravan guard. Kasir’s man wore the badge of a Sworder, which placed him a rank above either one of the lourneymen dueling on the strip and supposedly made him Dalt’s equal in skill. The caravan guard, a tall, slender man wearing a black eye patch covering his left eye, bore the four-ax badge of an Axman, making him the equal of Kasir’s man in level of skill. They had used gold thread to secure those badges to their belts, but I already knew they made their living through being guards. Both of them, according to their province badges, were from Garik, and both wore other badges, but 1 only glanced at them as I focused on the fight.
    The man at the south end of the strip held his blade in an unconventional guard that left the forte high and the tip pointing down toward his foe’s knee. His foe clearly did not like it, and 1 knew, from fencing with Geoff during one of his periods of experimentation, that particular guard was annoying if the person facing it was unimaginative. As the other man dropped his blade down in a weak attempt to imitate his enemy, the first man snapped his blade around and smacked it against his foe’s thigh.
    As the struck man yelped and limped backward, Kasir’s man turned to the Axman. “Well, Roarke, do you still think Timon can be beaten? More to the point, does your gold think he can be beaten?”
    I turned at looked at Roarke, unconsciously nodding my head in answer to the other man’s question. Roarke cocked his left eyebrow above the patch and grinned with half his mouth. “It must be so, Ferris, because our little Apprentice here thinks he can be beaten.”
    Ferris, firelight clinging to and evaporating from his bald pate, frowned heavily. “What can this little one know? If your gold bets with him, it is only because it rides on the belt of a fool.”
    Roarke leaned over toward me. “What say you, little one? Can Timon be beaten?”
    “Y-yes, sir,” I stammered, not because of any fear that I might be wrong, but because of the good look I had gotten of Roarke’s face. Three parallel scars started at the middle of his forehead and slashed down beneath the eye patch to reappear again to score his left cheek. His right eye, which I saw as predominantly blue, had hints of other lights glowing it in. That meant only one thing to me—Roarke had been in Chaos because Chaosfire had begun to burn