The Art of the Blade

They mustered us out after the Alterac campaign, and I hitched me a ride back to Stormwind on a courier’s gryphon with a smile on my face and a pretty penny in my pocket. I sweet-talked Elly Langston into lettin’ me a little room, and when I ain’t…when I’m not workin’ off my bar tab clearin’ tables, feedin’ chickens, or chopping up firewood, I been…I have been gettin’ some lessons in readin’ and elocution from Ms. Janey Anship, a girl about my age studyin’ magic from Crankyface Malin over in the Mage District. Magic ai…isn’t my thing in itself, but all the apprentices have to know how to read and write, and they’re always short of coin, so it works out all right for me.

It’s a mite creepy goin’ about in breezy street clothes and without my sharp-tongued girls, but it turns out edumacated folks like Janey get a little nervous ’bout them’s what’s pack…about those of us who carry weapons, so I have been leaving my young ladies wrapped up in oilcloth under the loose floorboard in my room. Makes me nervous not to be armed proper…ly, but I s’pose folks here manage to go about all the time without gettin’ shanked, so I can adjust too. And anyway, I still got a…I have a little shiv tucked away for special occasions where can’t nobody see it.

For practice, I…’ve been reading all the signs around town, and writin’ them down from memory on the backs of the old menu cards from the Pig. I bought a little pen and a pot of ink from a little shop in Magetown, and though I can’t write real pretty yet, Janey says I’m gettin’ a lot better, so I’ll keep at it. It ain’t no…isn’t a real fine pen, but I like the way the little silvery nibs move on the paper like the tip of a knife. Even if my letters do wind up lookin’ like bird-tracks.

Mornings after my chores are done, I go down the…to the practice yard outside SI:7 and put in a couple hours sparring with the trainees and beating up the target dummies. A girl’s got to keep her edge. I was a trainee here once too, not so long ago, so I don’t go too soft on them—you don’t do nobody any favors that way. They’ve got a recruitment poster up on the wall that says what you’ve got to do to work for SI:7, and I figure once I’ve got a little more spit ’n polish, I’ll go try to sign up. Meanwhile, I can help give these raw trainees a bit of practical experience, maybe help ’em live a little longer.

One morning I was sparrin’ with a fresh-faced young thing, not a day over sixteen and Westfall-bred just like me from the looks of him, when Master Shaw himself come…came out to the yard to watch. Marko ran at me with his wooden swords whirling out front, leanin’ way out forward like he’s scared of somethin’, which I guess probably he is. I slipped in across his path, scooted around behind him and gave him a soft boot in the seat. He was bent over so far he couldn’t hold his balance and he went down all a’tumble in the grass. He rolled over with his swords still in hand—a good sign—and scrambled to his feet red-faced.

“Don’t you lean forward so much,” I said, keeping just out of range, “you stick your neck out like that and somebody’s gonna hack it off. Look,” I bent way over forward, comically imitating his posture. “This is you. What you gonna do if I stand like this?” For answer he swung his right-hand chop stick around in a slow arc toward my neck, and I nodded. “That’s right.” And then I spun around inside the lazy fall of his arm and took a long step into his personal space with my right elbow up in his face and my left heel hooked behind his. Trying to back away, he tripped on my leg and sprawled on the grass again.

“Keep your feet under you,” I said. “It’s hard enough keepin’ your head attached without stickin’ your neck out like that.” I saw that he was shame-faced, so I gave him a smile and a hand up. “Buck up, kiddo. You handle your weapons real fine. All you got to do now is learn how to dance a little better.” I winked and nodded at him, “Let’s have it again.”

“Would the teacher have time for another student?” came Master Shaw’s voice from behind me outside the ring, as deep and full of mischief as ever. Marko’s eyes widened, and he lowered his swords, nodding to me as he backed out to the ringside. My pulse quickened, but I didn’t turn, even though I could feel the master’s presence. All of a sudden I’m fifteen again, trying desperately to score a hit against a teacher who, for all his imposing size and strength, is maybe the fastest thing I ever seen without feathers. Trying to, and failing: Almost none of us could ever hit him; Master Shaw moves like the spaces between the shadows.

I blew a wisp of red-gold hair out of my face and looked at him mockingly over my shoulder. “Go on,” I said, “we only take serious students here.” His deep brown eyes crinkled with a smile, but you could see he was coming to spar, his hands empty and loose at his sides, coming closer with footfalls so soft he was gliding more’n walking. I shook off my daze and slid around the outside of the ring, forcing him to turn, holding my short wooden practice knives so they lined up a broad triangle pointed at Master Shaw’s nose.

I circled slowly to the right, looking for an opening. Shaw moved slowly, cutting away my free space. He’d done it to me a hundred times in practice, be damned if I’m going to let him do it again. I flicked my eyes off him to look at Marko, standing rapt in the shade of a red maple, and pretended to stumble. Shaw didn’t look, but when he turned just enough that he could see that side, I spun leftward into the shadow world.

Most folk say that rogues operate in stealth, like wearing dark clothes and hiding in the shadow of a wall or a building, but that’s really not the way of it. Any shifty-eyed footpad can do that kind of thing to evade a drunken guard, and we can too, but the real art is in going in between things, if you like. It’s not just any cull can learn the trick of it. When it works right, it’s like slippin’ through the folds of a curtain nobody else can see; you aren’t so much gone as hidden. Anyway, I was always uncommon good at it, and I was feelin’ pretty smug about getting one over on my old teacher. I swung out wide along the edge of the fighting ring, angling for a clean shot at his back.

He stood in place, just turning slowly with his face cocked sideways like he was listening for something. I let my breath out real gentle and slid in closer, aiming to get an arm over one of his broad shoulders and knock his knees out from behind. I reached up to grab, but my arm came down on empty space: My arm got a sharp yank from behind and then my main gauche was gone; I started to spin around inside to evade a blow, but there was only empty space, and now I really did stumble. I tucked up and rolled hard against the turf, shocked out of the shadows by the fall, narrowly avoiding the backward sweep of his boot.

Spinning around on my rump, I grabbed his boot with both hands and twisted hard to the inside. He whipped around as he lost his balance, but by the time he’d have hit the ground, he was gone from sight. I growled a little, knowing what would be next. Desperately, I hopped up on my feet again and fixed my gaze on Marko, whose jaw was about unhinged at this point as he tried to follow the action. Any moment now, I thought.

And there it was: In a flurry of action, Shaw appeared at my left, clipping my head with an elbow, and before I could turn, he was on the right, cleaning out my leg from under me. As I fell, I fixed my gaze on Marko, and stepped through the shadows, appearing behind the poor lad and tumbling right into him just as Shaw reappeared where I’d been standing just a moment before. I gave Marko a shove, and he lurched right into Shaw’s chest, bowling him over. And then I fell down.

We all kinda lay there in the dust, breathin’ hard and laughing. Or at least I was, and Shaw was smilin’. I think Marko was too stunned to do much. Shaw gave him a hand up, told him he was doing good, and sent him on his way, and then he came and squatted down next to where I was lyin’ on the ground with a fit of giggles.

“Well, young lady, you’ve come along since I saw you last,” he said. My eyes widened a little, since I never figured Master Shaw would’ve known me from aught. “I’ve been watching you out here in the practice yard this past week, and you’ve made something of a stir among the instructors.” I raised an eyebrow, and he chuckled softly. “When a bunch of new students suddenly start displaying poise and…shall we say, martial creativity, it tends to attract attention.”

I smiled slyly. “Sorry if I messed up their program a bit,” I said. “I just can’t stand to see those nice kids pickin’ up bad habits.”

Shaw nodded, and folded himself up cross-legged on the ground across from me. “That’s why I came out here to talk to you, Kivrin.” I blinked hard a couple times. He knows my name, even? ”You’ve got a set of skills we at SI:7 can use, and your performance here today,” he gestured at the practice ring, “convinces me you’ve got the kind of initiative we sorely need.”

I looked askance at him. “Lemme get this straight,” I said. “Are you tryin’ to offer me a job?”

He laughed heartily at that.  ”Yes, ma’am, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

* * *

Working for SI:7 wasn’t exactly what I’d expected at first. I’d always imagined it’d be all politics and infiltration and spying sorts of things, but my first several assignments weren’t all that different from what I’d been doing before. The first job they gave me was to deliver some important paperwork to Danath Trollbane at Honor Hold. They flew me out to the scorched and pitted wreckage of the Blasted Lands, and sent me right through the Dark Portal itself. I was about scared enough to bust, but all the troops stationed around the Portal act like it’s no big deal, so I had to put on my tough-gal face and work it out. Turns out apart from feelin’ like you been stuffed into a sackful of snow and rolled down a steep hill, the Portal isn’t as scary as it looks.

Some other time, I can tell you about some exciting times I had in Hellfire Peninsula. The unofficial motto of SI:7 is “Travel to fascinating remote lands, meet interesting new people, and kill them,” and I got to experience that in spades. That first time, though, they just packed me off on a gryphon to Honor Hold, and I got to meet up with Old Man Trollbane straight away. He wasn’t super pleased with the news from Stormwind, which from what I was able to read had mostly to do with reinforcements, or more specifically, the lack thereof. Still, he gave me a little work shepherding a band of new recruits on a mission into Hellfire Citadel.

The fel orcs that took over the Citadel are a lot worse than your normal green-skinned kind. If anything, they’re bigger, stronger, meaner, and even less willin’ to listen to reason, if you could believe that. Still, they’re just as canny and clever as their Horde cousins back home, so we’d have to be careful about ’em. First order of business, though, was to bring down a nasty demon-lord hight Omor who’d dug into the lower ramparts of the Citadel.

My team, apart from me, consisted of an aloof-lookin’ Night Elf hunter, a Priest who I think was a bit of an airhead, and a twin pair of Death Knights, each about as thick as a fencepost but only half the brains. I’m actually not sure they’re twins, but you could hardly tell one from the other, so they might as well have been. We defeated the gate guards without too much trouble, and made our way across the bridge into the courtyard between the curtain walls.

At that point, things started to go to hell a bit. Watchkeeper Gargolmar had posted some pretty mean warlocks among the sentries, and when we engaged them they started rainin’ fire and brimstone down on our heads. I blackjacked one and knocked another a couple times hard in the kidneys to shut him up, but while I was busy with that, the Stump-head Brothers let a couple of guard-dogs get out of hand and take a couple nasty bites out of our Priest. And if that weren’t enough, the Hunter had some kind of a fit and wound up sending his semi-tame forest cat barreling down the hall into another pack of patrolling sentries. Things got pretty messy, and though we mostly survived the fight, everybody got pretty burnt up and mangulated, to the consternation of our priestly companion. A certain amount of undirected recrimination ensued, which I shan’t bother recounting in detail.

Now, here’s a thing I don’t really get. Even the greenest buck private up in the Basin had the sense to pay attention when a warlock or a Mage or other species of magic-slinging troublemaker cut in with the chanting and the funny gestures. Maybe you give ’em a little bootprint to the face, or a smack in the gob with a shield, or even a sweet little neck tourniquet to keep ’em quiet. Or, if you can’t do that, then any fool knows you don’t just stand around while they light you up like Greatfather Winter’s pine chandelier. Somehow this raw bunch managed to completely miss that lesson, resultin’ in a fair loss of blood and hair and other combustible personal property.

Worse’n that, Watchkeeper Gargolmar himself came down to check out the commotion, and we wound up in a pretty wild set-to between him, his Watcher companions, and a pack of bloody-minded Fel Orc warlocks that joined in the fray. I hushed up one of the Watchers, who was using some kind of bastard healing magic to keep the old Watchkeeper on his feet, but somebody smacked him around enough to snap him out, and then we really had a time of it. And of course all the while, the whole place was pounding down with a rain of burning stones and shadow-bolts and, well, it was just a big-ass mess and no mistake.

We did eventually find our way to Omor’s courtyard and defeat the old bastard, despite his protestations the contrary, but it was a long row to hoe. The Priest wound up deserting the assignment after being chewed up three times in a row by out-of-control guard dogs, and we had to send back to Honor Hold for a replacement—a burly Dwarven shaman with a predilection for loud belching. When we did finally drag our weary butts back to Honor Hold, carryin’ Omor’s smelly old hoof as proof of the deed, I was pretty sure I understood why Master Shaw had brought up this whole business about initiative when we’d talked.

Though now that I seen the problem firsthand, I suspect initiative isn’t even the half of it. A recruit who can’t even be bothered to get under cover when burning rocks are fallin’ from the sky has got way bigger problems than a lack of independent thinkin’. So I guess I’ve got my work cut out for me when I get back home.