#44 - Your Intrepid Correspondent

The Man Named Ahrimaz

-- By Teel James, Raconteur for the Chronicles of Inné and Innéthel and their environs, Late Winter

I am sitting in my study, with my cravat undone, a warming stone in my chair for my back and my feet in a pan of hot water and salt.  I am so fatigued that I am shaking and my head aches abominably, but I kept up with the current incarnation of Ahrimaz Kençyen during his training session with the great sword master Rutaçyen, and then on a run up to the Veil.  This means that I shall be able to continue interviewing the man and writing his story for my readers.

He looks like our Ahrimaz, except that he is bearded with faint strands of silver in his pale gold hair. He is thinner than our Ahrimaz and his eyes are more haunted, with deeper care lines.  He looks like our Ahrimaz, just after his rescue from imprisonment and torture by the old Cylak King.

But he is not our Beloved.  He is more akin to him than a brother but he clearly is a harder man.  He is learning that concern and compassion are not weaknesses and in all his life he’s known only a mother’s love, and had that untimely ripped away from him.

He has been trained for war, just as our Ahrimaz was, but in a school far more brutal than ours, and he pushes himself and everyone around him unmercifully.  Rutaçyen had the two of us sit and do ink sword practice… she watched me, great percheron that I am, huff around with her student who is more like a greyhound, and had mercy on me and had me as her student as well, as long as our bet holds.

You see, dear readers, as long as I can keep up with this man named Ahrimaz, I can interview him and if that is through wheezing gasps of words as I labour to breathe, as he lightly bounds ahead, so be it.  The things I do for a story.

The sword of ink, for any of my readers who have not had any martial training whatsoever is a technique developed hundreds of years ago, when we turned from a wandering people to a settled one, and our Innéan warmasters became fascinated with how a brush pen stroke flowed like a sword stroke.  Our sword masters teach ink, to teach the sword.  A swift and decisive slashing stroke with enormous control so that ink does not spatter.  A comfortable circle floated onto the page.  Wings and eyes and motion and life, all portrayed with a single stroke.

So there we were in the training salle of the House of the Hand, kneeling, grinding ink.  In my case struggling to haul my sadly neglected wind out of the basement of my torso.   

When I studied small sword, and great sword, my own teacher had me learn a fine hand.  I was secretly delighted to find that this astonishing warrior’s hand is frozen when presented with a blank page.

And then I found myself confounded.  He fought so hard, fear and terror ground into his smallest muscle, that sweat stood on his brow as he ruined or broke a dozen brushes.  He looked up at me, despair in his eyes and snarled “I don’t need your pity!”

“Indeed, ser. I do not pity you,” I responded.  “I’m merely glad to find that after having run me into the ground like a spavined horse, you have perhaps one thing that gives you a bit of trouble.”

He stared at me and then started laughing.  He laughed hard, waving his finger at me and sputtering ‘spavined horse’ sufficient to begin to be annoying, but as he subsided, Rutaçyen placed a new brush in his hand, a new page before him and with his attention still on me, he shrugged, still chuckling, and drew a single perfect line.

The brush fell from his hand and he threw his hands over his face. I rose and bowed to the sword master, who bowed back.  “I shall see you tomorrow, then, ser,” said I, and limped out to write this piece.

He is not our Beloved.  It is as though someone took our Beloved away from us and brutalized him, his whole life, till he believes that he deserves that brutality.  Our Beloved, twisted.  Only time will tell if the man that Rutaçyen and Limyé Ianmen, the Kenaçyen’s healer, is even in there.  Only time will tell if the shattered pieces of a man are knit back together to some kind of integrity.

Until that time, I am Teel James, your intrepid correspondent recounting from the House of the Hand.