JINX PROLOGUE The Unstained Blade Ancient Earth A memory recovered in 2171 By noon, the prisoners had stopped believing there would be a trial. Ten thousand men stood on the salt plain below Orun, where the river had once run before the king diverted it. Their standards lay trampled behind them. Their officers had been hanged at dawn. Now the surviving soldiers waited inside a ring of cavalry, carrying the weapons their captors had inexplicably returned. Tarek had been given someone else's spear. The shaft was too short. He kept noticing this, as though a properly fitted weapon might have made the afternoon ordinary. His younger brother stood beside him with a strip of cloth wrapped around his hand. "When they open the road," the boy said, "we run west." Tarek looked west. Horsemen stood against the white horizon. "Stay behind me." On a platform above the plain, King Veyr sat beneath a purple canopy. Beside his chair stood twenty-three strangers in chains. Their clothes had been strange once, before six years of captivity reduced them to the same color as the dust. One woman among them watched the plain without blinking. The herald unrolled a document. The men of Orun had refused incorporation into the king's dominion. Their refusal had continued after the surrender of their city. Therefore, by decree, they had chosen death. "We chose our homes!" someone shouted. The herald rolled the document shut. A gate opened in the cavalry line. One man walked through. He wore no helmet. His hair was gray at the temples, his tunic dark, his boots made from material Tarek had never seen. A thin scar crossed his left palm. He carried a sword so narrow that, viewed edge-on, it seemed to disappear. The soldiers began to laugh. Not because anything was funny. They had been waiting all morning to feel something other than fear. The stranger stopped within speaking distance. "Listen carefully." His accent belonged nowhere. "If one of you kills me, the rest go free. If one of you can so much as scratch me, I will put down the blade and leave." The woman on the platform pulled against her chain. "You don't have to do this!" The king's guard struck her across the mouth. The stranger looked up. For a moment, Tarek thought he would turn around. Then the man lowered his eyes. "Come together," he told the soldiers. "If you come, come together." An arrow passed through the space beside his head. He moved the sword. There was no clash, no sound of steel meeting wood. A pale line appeared in the air, a crease opening across the afternoon. The front rank came apart. Tarek saw a shield split while its owner was still lifting it. A man's legs took another step after the rest of him had fallen. The soldiers behind them received the blood before they understood what had happened. The laughter stopped. The stranger swung again. Air cracked. Spears fell in shortened pieces. Men collapsed into the white dust, some immediately silent, others discovering that their voices could outlast terrible wounds. Tarek shoved his brother to the ground. "Down!" The cut passed above them. Someone's severed hand landed against his neck. For several breaths there was only the sound of the wounded. Then the ten thousand broke. Some rushed the stranger because the horses behind them offered no escape. Others dropped their weapons and ran toward the riverbed. Hundreds pressed west, where the cavalry lowered its lances. The stranger walked after them. He did not rage. That was what Tarek would remember for the remainder of his life, which had become a very short distance. The man looked like a laborer performing work he hated and had nevertheless agreed to finish. A soldier reached him with an axe. The stranger stepped aside, struck once, and continued walking. Another crawled through the bodies with a knife in his teeth. The narrow blade descended. The knife remained between teeth that would never open again. Tarek dragged his brother toward a drainage ditch. They crawled beneath the collapsed frames of two supply wagons. Through a gap in the wood, he watched the stranger pursue a group into the dry reeds. The reeds bent without wind. Red mist rose behind them. His brother was praying. "Quiet." "I'm not making a sound." He wasn't. His lips moved against a mouthful of dust. Above the ditch, a wounded man kept calling for his father. The stranger stopped. For the first time, his face changed. He knelt beside the wounded man and said something too softly for Tarek to hear. Then he ended the calling. Tarek pushed his brother farther beneath the wagon. "When I move, you stay." "No." "You stay." He took the ill-fitting spear and climbed out. The stranger turned. Up close, his eyes were ordinary. Brown. Exhausted. Tarek hated him more for that. "There are children in our city," Tarek said. "I know." "Then what are you?" The stranger's mouth tightened. "A man who keeps choosing the next wrong thing." Tarek thrust the spear. He aimed not for the man's chest but for his open hand. A scratch. That was all. The point came close enough to catch a thread from the dark sleeve. Then the spear was two pieces. Tarek fell beside it. Under the wagon, his brother screamed his name. The stranger closed his eyes. Then he opened them and turned toward the sound. *** In the fourth hour, the king's scribes stopped trying to describe individual deaths. They counted instead. Men who had hidden beneath corpses were found when they coughed. Men who pretended to be dead were found when the narrow blade hovered above them and the dust lifted from their clothes. Men who begged were heard, and then killed. The stranger never asked anyone to forgive him. Once, a horse broke from the cavalry and ran across the plain. He let it pass. The chained woman saw this. When he came within earshot again, she said, "So you can still decide." He stood beneath the platform, blood drying on his face. "They said they would release you." "They also said there would be a trial." The king raised one finger. A guard drew his knife against the throat of the prisoner beside her. A little blood appeared. The stranger looked away first. He went back to the plain. By late afternoon, the survivors had crowded into the abandoned river channel. They tried to climb its walls. The dry earth broke under their hands. The stranger stood on the bank. A man below held up an empty palm. "You won." The sword trembled. "You won," the man repeated. The stranger made the final sweeping cut. The riverbed filled with the sound of bodies striking earth. *** At sunset, the scribes agreed on the number. Ten thousand. The stranger climbed the steps to the king's platform. Blood had soaked his clothes and dried in the seams of his boots. It lay thick in his hair and beneath his nails. None of it was his. He stopped before the throne. The chained woman would not look at him. "My people," he said. King Veyr regarded the plain. "Tomorrow we will discuss your people." The stranger's hand tightened around the sword. Guards stepped close to the prisoners. For a long moment, nobody moved. Then the king smiled and leaned forward to examine the weapon that had purchased him a kingdom. No notch interrupted its edge. No stain dulled its surface. Not one drop of blood clung to the metal. Against the red ruin below, the blade remained perfectly clean.