"They didn't know. I wasn't here. They couldn't have possibly known."

"They did not tell us that. They did not tell us anything. They said it would be dishonorable."

"Oh my G.o.ds." I held Kit tighter to me. "Oh my dear G.o.ds..."

"For what it is worth, they held you in very high esteem."

"It's worth nothing," I said between clenched teeth. "Nothing."

He shook his head, clearly put out. "You are correct. In seeking to honor you, they dishonored themselves. Their loyalty should be to their Imperior. Not to a strangely faced outsider who broughtdishonor to the Imperior as well."

"And so you killed them. Killed them all."

"They brought their deaths upon themselves," said the Hamunri.

"We were simply the instruments of those deaths."

"No," I told him, shaking my head. "I was. I brought this on them. This is on my head. Mine."

The Hamunri stared at me for a time. Then the leader turned to the others and gestured that they should gather around him. They held a hurried, whispered conference. What they were saying was of no consequence to me. I was stroking Kit's cheek. I wondered why I wasn't crying anymore. It was probably because I'd used up all my tears.

They broke ranks and turned to face me. "If you wish, you will be given one chance to do the honorable thing. It is, frankly, more than you deserve."

My mind should have been screaming at me to try and seek vengeance upon these cold-blooded b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Or desperately trying to find ways to run away.

But there was nothing. My inner voice, my first, best line of defense when it came to survival, was silent. Well, that was certainly a hint, wasn't it.

"Yes," I said slowly. "Yes... it is."

I eased Kit to the ground and stared at her. Then I gently arranged her hands so they were crisscrossing her chest. Her eyes were still open, so I pa.s.sed my hand over her lids and slid them closed.

I leaned back upon my knees then and gripped the tachi sword. The demon sword, they'd called it.

And I thought, Fine. Let it do the work of a demon. Let it send me to h.e.l.l.

I pulled the sword from its scabbard. I was surprised by how silent it was. No hiss of metal against the scabbard. It was as if I was drawing a phantom sword.

The entire moment had slowed to a crawl, as if the final moments of my life were going to be as painfully prolonged as possible. The sword seemed deliriously sharp. I knew it would be no effort at all to shove the blade into my heart and pierce it.

My life was over. As far as I was concerned, it was over the moment I set foot in the village and saw the first corpses.

The Hamunri seemed a bit surprised, as if antic.i.p.ating some sort of trick. "You do not resist?"

"No," I said tonelessly.

I turned the sword around, placed the point against my chest. It was as if I was dreaming.

The faces floated before me, as they had in times past when death seemed imminent. My mother, and Tacit, and Sharee, and Entipy, and the men of the king's court, and the lady Kate, and the soldiers dedicatedly serving the rapacious ambitions of the peacelord of Wuin, and King Meander, and the facesof all those who had been made to suffer because of me... an endless list, it seemed. They paraded across my mind's eye, and they all looked as if they felt... sorry for me. As if they pitied me.

And why not? Was I not a pitiful, hopeless thing? Was I not mired in despair, beyond help, beyond redemption, beyond anything?

"Yet before, you fled rather than do honor to the Imperior," growled the Hamunri. "Why do you not resist now?"

Apparently the successful completion of his mission was insufficient. He had to have every question answered, every dot connected.

"Because," I said, telling the truth for what I was certain would be the last time in my life, "I don't care."

Chapter 10.

The Breaking Loose of Aulhel

And then, as I prepared to thrust the sword into my breast, it started to tremble in my grasp.

The Hamunri looked contemptuous. One of the others called out, "He shakes in fear! Do the job for him!"

I screamed, but it was not in fear. Instead it was in pain.

The hilt of the sword had suddenly become scalding hot. Waves of heat blasted through my hands, and I thought they were being incinerated. Yet I could not release the sword. My hands, in fact, gripped the hilt even more tightly than before. They were shaking, but not of their own accord. It was the sword that was shaking. All I was doing was hanging on.

A high-pitched screech cut through the air. My teeth were chattering violently, my head snapping back and forth. It was at that point that the Hamunri realized something was definitely wrong, and it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the sword.

Obviously fearing a trick, seeking to end this before I pulled some sort of stunt, the leader of the Hamunri charged forward, yanking out his sword, intending to cut me down and end this.

He never even got close.

For the blade of my sword suddenly bent, twisted, distorted, and then came completely free of the hilt. There was a blinding flash of light, a discharge of energy, that knocked me onto my back. I held on to the hilt as if my life depended on it, which I was beginning to suspect might be the case.

It was as if a star had descended from the heavens and exploded onto the ground in front of me. I blinked furiously, trying to clear the glare from my eyes, and I heard a horrific roaring. Louder than the great cat that I had released from its cage. Louder than the crash of the surf in a storm. Louder than anything.

And then I heard the screams. And the rending and tearing, the sounds of bones breaking and flesh being torn from bodies, and muscles being stretched and torn, and other sounds, horrifying noises that I hadn't known the human body was capable of producing.

My vision started to clear then, and what I saw......I couldn't believe what I saw.

There was a creature there. A being, a... a thing. It was hunched over and thus it was difficult to determine its height, but I would have guessed over seven feet tall. It was naked save for a tattered loincloth, its skin unearthly white, its arms long and dangling. It had four fingers on each hand rather than five, but each finger ended in a cruel, curved talon. The talons were dripping with blood and gore.

And its face.

It turned, glanced at me over its shoulder, and its face was the stuff of nightmares. Burning red eyes, a long and pointed chin and hooklike nose. It had no ears, but instead small holes on either side of its head, and its teeth were jagged and sharp. It clicked those teeth several times rapidly.

The Hamunri were scattered about the ground in various states of dismemberment. Some of them had had time to draw their weapons, some hadn't. It hadn't made much difference in the end. They were all equally as dead.

I braced myself, waiting for it to turn upon me and dispose of me the same way it had them.

Slowly it approached me, its knuckles dragging upon the ground.

And then it went to bended knee.

"All are dead," it rasped in a voice that sounded like metal sc.r.a.ping on stone. "I have fulfilled my function. Are you done with me, master."

"M-Master...?"

It brought up one of its clawed hands and I reflexively flinched back, certain it was about to tear into me. "You hold the demon sword. You are master. Are you done with me?"

"I..." I licked my dried lips. Unfortunately there was no moisture in my tongue. "What... what are you?"

"I am Aulhel. I am the Slojinn of the demon sword. Destruction is mine to give. Merciless.

All-consuming. Aulhel the Destroyer am I. You released me."

"How?" "You spoke the words of power," he rasped. "Speak them again, that I may return and rest."

Frantically I ran through my head all that I had said.

And then I realized.

"I don't care," I told him.

In a flash of light and energy, he was gone once more. The hilt shook in my hand and I squinted against it lest I be blinded once more.

And then, just like that, it was over. The blade was intact once more. I no longer felt compelled to hold the hilt. I had been certain that the scorching heat had seared the flesh from my hands, but I looked at my palms and they were not even lightly blistered. For all the intensity of the heat that I had felt, I was undamaged.

"Aulhel the Destroyer," I muttered.

A Slojinn. I had never heard of such a creature. Obviously some sort of demon spat up from the netherworld, bound within this mystic sword.

This was the means by which Chinpan Ali had annihilated those thugs. He had spoken these words of power... the words that I had now uttered and that consequently caused the destruction of these soldiers.

My mind whirled back to when I had been training with him. I remembered how I had been about to say, "I don't care," and he had warned me away from doing so. Now I comprehended why. Even though I wasn't holding the sword at the time, he didn't want to take any chances that the words would trigger the unleas.h.i.+ng of the demon.

I sat there for the longest time, just staring at the blade. I turned it this way and that, looking at my reflection in it, imagining that the creature within was looking back.

Veruh w.a.n.g Ho had told me that Ali was a fraud. That he knew nothing of true disciplines. That he had just been trying to cover up his own ignorance by wasting my time with pointless lessons.

There might well have been some truth in that. And yet I now realized that much of what he had told me had its basis in other truths. The exercises might well have been mere distractions in hopes that my interest would wane and the fact that he was a fraud would never come to light. But the basic precept he had taught me was completely true.

I had emptied myself of everything, and because of that emptiness, I had been able to annihilate my opponents. Granted, I had required a magic sword to do it, but hey... destruction was destruction, was it not?

Destruction...

"I don't care," I said, closing my eyes and looking away to avoid any sort of damage to my eyes. They were only just now starting to clear, and I had no desire to start the process all over again.

Even though I was braced for it, the force of the energy unleashed still knocked me over. I shook myhead to clear it as the Slojinn stood over me, staring at me with fierce intensity. I thanked the G.o.ds I was the one holding the blade--or at least the hilt of the blade--because the prospect of the creature tearing into me was a horrifying one indeed.

"There are none to destroy," he growled, sounding rather irritated by it. "Why have you summoned me?"

"I do not desire to leave the bodies of these people," and I indicated the villagers, "for those." And I pointed to the crows.

"I don't do birds," the Slojinn snarled.

All right. The Slojinn wasn't the sharpest quill in the ink well. That was acceptable. "No. Not the birds. Can you burn the bodies? Reduce them to--"

The Slojinn's mouth opened wide, and I threw up my arms out of reflex as a huge jet of blue flame erupted from his mouth. He swept his head back and forth and within seconds there was nothing left of the villagers but small piles of ash.

He turned and looked at the bodies of the Hamunri. "What of them?"

"Leave them," I said grimly. "Let the birds pick them clean. And I hope they take their time doing so."

"May I leave?"

"I don't care."

And in a flash, he was gone again, the blade intact once more upon the hilt.

I stood there for a time, running the options through my mind. A tremendous change had just come over my world, a change I wouldn't have thought possible mere minutes ago.

I had been ready to die. I had wanted nothing but sweet, sweet oblivion. Because I had been convinced that in this world there could be no justice. No love without betrayal, no life that did not end in tragedy.

No hope.

Except I had found hope.

Hope... and a tool that gave me the potential for as many casualties as I cared to pile up.

That's what I was holding.

The ultimate weapon.

It was nothing less than that. Nothing could stand before it. Seven men, seven powerful, armed soldiers, part of the elite of this land, and the Slojinn had effortlessly torn them to pieces.

I had gone from being powerless to being the single most powerful individual in the whole of Chinpan. Nothing and no one could stand against me.

When I had been peacelord, I had known invincibility. That might have been another reason why I was so utterly without hope. Having been able to accomplish everything, how dispiriting, how debilitating it was to go from that to being unable to accomplish anything.

That was no longer the case, though. I was unstoppable once more.

But I had learned. Ohhhh, how I had learned. I had succ.u.mbed as peacelord to the temptations of power and, as a result, had become a mere shadow of my former self. That was not going to happen this time. I was not about to embark on some broad-ranging campaign of destruction and conquest. Those ambitions had no attraction for me.

No. I simply wanted revenge.

Yes, I know. I had considered acts of vengeance to be a hollow pursuit. But that was before I actually had the means to achieve that vengeance. Now that I did, the entire concept suited me just fine, thank you very much.