Crossed Blades (25 page)

Tangle—
Charms of confusion and befuddlement, mostly used by thieves in the Magelands.

Tavan—
One of the five great university cities of the Magelands.

Tavan North—
The Magelanders’ quarter of Tien.

Thauvik IV, or Thauvik Tal Pridu, the Bastard King—
King of Zhan and bastard half brother of the late Ashvik.

Thera—
A Master Blade, killed in a magical experiment.

Thiess—
A Shade, familiar of Javan.

Thieveslamp/Thieveslight—
A dim red magelight in a tiny bull’s-eye lantern.

Tien—
A coastal city, the thousand-year-old capital of Zhan.

Timesman—
The keeper of the hours at the temple of Shan, Emperor of Heaven.

Triss—
Aral’s familiar. A Shade that inhabits Aral’s shadow.

Tuckaside—
A place to stash goods, usually stolen.

Tucker—
Tucker bottle, a quarter-sized liquor bottle, suitable for two or for one heavy drinker.

Twins, the—
Eyn and Eva, the patron goddess or goddesses of the Dyads. Sometimes represented as one goddess with two faces, sometimes as a pair of twins, either identical or conjoined.

Ulriss—
A Shade, familiar of Leyan.

Underhills—
An upscale neighborhood in Tien.

Urayal—
A Master Blade, killed in an attempt on Ashvik.

Vangzien—
Zhani city at the confluence where the Vang River flows into the Zien River in the foothills of the Hurnic Mountains. Home of the summer palace.

Veira—
A Master Blade, killed after the fall of the temple.

Vesh’An—
Shapechanging Others. Originally a part of the same breed that split into the Sylvani and Durkoth, the Vesh’An have adopted a nomadic life in the sea.

Vrass—
A Shade, familiar of Maryam.

Wandersea Ceremony—
A ceremony propitiating the Vesh’An and asking for their protection.

Warboard—
Chesslike game.

Wardblack—
A custom-built magical rug that blocks the function of a specific ward.

Westbridge—
A bridge over the Zien, upriver from the palace and the neighborhood around it.

Worrymoth—
An herb believed to drive away moths.

Wound-Tailor—
Shadowside slang for a healer for hire.

Zass—
A Shade, familiar of Devin.

Zhan—
One of the eleven human kingdoms of the East. Home to the city of Tien.

Currency

Bronze Sixth Kip (sixer)

Bronze Kip

Bronze Shen

Silver Half Riel

Silver Riel

Gold Half Riel

Gold Riel

Gold Oriel

Calendar

(370 days in 11 months of 32 days each, plus two extra 9-day holiday weeks: Summer-Round in the middle of Midsummer, and Winter-Round between Darktide and Coldfast)

1. Coldfast
   
2. Meltentide
   
3. Greening
   
4. Seedsdown
   
5. Opening
   
6. Midsummer
   
7. Sunshammer
   
8. Firstgrain
   
9. Harvestide
   
10. Talewynd
    
11. Darktide
    

Days of the Week

1. Calrensday—
   In the beginning.
   
2. Atherasday—
   Hearth and home.
   
3. Durkothsday—
   Holdover from the prehuman tale of days.
   
4. Shansday—
   The middle time.
   
5. Namarsday—
   Traditional day for nobles to sit in judgment.
   
6. Sylvasday—
   Holdover from the prehuman tale of days.
   
7. Balorsday—
   Day of the dead.
   
8. Madensday—
   The day of madness when no work is done.
   

Read on for an exciting excerpt from the next Fallen Blade novel

BLADE REFORGED

by Kelly McCullough

Coming July 2013 from Ace Books!

T
rouble
had a new dress, and it looked damn good on her. But that was no surprise. The Baroness Maylien Dan Marchon Tal Pridu always looked good, tall and lithe with long brown hair and a lovely set of curves currently sheathed in green velvet. My sometime lover, sometime client, and the unacknowledged heir to the throne of Zhan was a beautiful woman . . . and trouble. Lots and lots of trouble.

“Have a seat.” I gestured to the open chair across from me with the half-empty bottle I’d found in the wreckage of the Gryphon’s Head. “Let me pour you a drink.”

“I don’t think either of those would be such a good idea, Aral,” said Maylien. “In fact, I was rather hoping I could convince you to leave with me so we could have this conversation someplace else. Someplace safe.”

“But I like it here”—I swung the bottle around to take in the whole of the dark and empty bar, with its boarded-up windows, tumbled and broken furniture, and thick layers of dust over everything. “It’s one of the few places I’ve ever felt at home.” I was slurring my words. Not a good sign, but I didn’t care. “Or at least, I used to, before whatever the hell happened here happened. Speaking of which, I’m guessing you showing up here right now, means you know something about that.”

Maylien sighed and directed her attention to the dim shadow I cast across the table in front of me. “Triss, is there any chance of you talking some sense into Aral? Or do I need to play this out here?”

The shadow shifted, transforming itself from a darkened mirror of my own form into the silhouette of a small winged dragon.

It, or rather, he, flicked his wings angrily. “If I could talk sense into Aral, would he be sitting here drinking and waiting for the fucking Elite to show up and nail his hide to the wall and mine with it? But why would he listen to me? I’m just his familiar. It’s not like I’m right nine times out of every ten that we disagree. Or, wait . . . no, it’s exactly like that.” Triss shook his head. “He’s hopeless.”

“You may have a point there.” Maylien pushed her dueling blade to one side and sat down on the dusty chair across from me, doing untold damage to that fancy dress. “What do you want, Aral?”

That was a good question. What did I want? Once upon a time, I could have answered that question with ease, I wanted to be the instrument of Justice. That was back in the old days, when they called me Aral Kingslayer and I was among the most feared assassins in the world, one of the fabled Blades of Namara, goddess of Justice. But that was before the other gods murdered her and ordered her followers put to the sword. For a long time after that, what I most wanted was to turn back time to the days when Namara yet lived, to restore the temple, and to return my friends and fellows to life. To undestroy my world. Some days I still wanted that more than anything, but life wasn’t as simple as I’d once thought it was. Or maybe I wasn’t as simple. These days I couldn’t even mourn the me I’d once been without second-guessing everything.

Fuck it. I took another drink. The whiskey tasted of smoke and honey as it burned its way down my throat. Damn but it was good. Even so, I sighed and set the bottle down because I didn’t really want to drink myself unconscious either. Not the way I would have even a year or two ago.

I snorted, then looked Maylien square in the eyes. “I honestly have no fucking idea what I want, but why don’t you start by telling me what happened here.”

The Gryphon’s Head was a sleazy tavern in the depths of one of Tien’s worst slums, or it had been anyway. Now it was a boarded-up ruin. For years after the fall of the temple I’d lived in a room over the stables. I worked out of the taproom then, paying my bar bill by playing the shadow jack, a freelancer on the wrong side of the law. But that me, Aral the jack, was gone, too. Not as dead as the Kingslayer, but sleeping certainly.

“Well?” I prompted, when Maylien didn’t answer me right away.

“My uncle happened here,” she said finally, her voice sad.

Maylien’s uncle was Thauvik Tal Pridu, current King of Zhan and successor to the one I’d slain for my goddess all those years ago. Not one of my biggest admirers. Despite shedding no tears over the assassination of his half brother, he’d set the biggest price on my head of any of my enemies. He seemed to feel that letting me live after my removal of his predecessor from the throne would set a bad example. His involvement told me all that I needed to know about the destruction of the Gryphon’s Head.

“What you mean,” I said, “but are entirely too polite to say, is that
I
happened here. The king would never have even known this place existed if I hadn’t made it my home.”

“My
uncle
did this, not you—” Maylien began hotly.

But I cut her off. “He did it because of me, because he wanted to punish those who’d once given me shelter, whether they knew who I was or not.”

She shook her head. “He did it because he’s a monster, Aral. Just like my father and my sister. In case you hadn’t noticed, the poisoned apple doesn’t often fall far from the Pridu family tree.”

The shadow of a dragon suddenly rose up between us, flapping his wings angrily. “How about we actually
do
something about the problem instead of sitting here and playing guiltier than thou until the king’s men show up to cart us all off to the headsman? I know that’s less dark and brooding and ‘oh the world is an awful place’ than either of you like to do things, but I’ve had about all I can take of that shit for the moment.”

Maylien’s answering grin was pained but genuine. “You sounded just like Heyin there.”

I didn’t smile, but I had to admit that Triss might have a point. Heyin, too. The chief of Maylien’s baronial guard didn’t like me much at all, but that didn’t make him one bit less wise. Quite the contrary. He disliked me because he felt that I made a wholly inappropriate bedmate for his baroness. He was absolutely right. Maylien had more than enough strikes against her in the eyes of her fellow nobles without adding a broken down ex-assassin to the list.

First off, she was a mage, which meant that she had certain advantages that undermined the entire central structure of the Zhani hierarchy—the formal duel of precedence by which anyone of noble blood could challenge any relative for their titles. Secondly, her brand of magery was particularly scandalous, as she’d once been a member of the Rovers, a traveling order dedicated to keeping the roads free of brigandage. She’d spent most of her formative years as a homeless wanderer rubbing elbows with the sorts of people most Zhani nobles wouldn’t deign to spit on.

Just then, a harsh squawk sounded from the kitchen—where both Maylien and I had entered. It was followed a moment later by the advent of a miniature gryphon. Bontrang. The little tabby-patterned gryphinx was Maylien’s familiar, and now he flew straight to his mistress. Landing on the thick pad sewn into the shoulder of her dress, he mrped worriedly in her ear.

She nodded and rose from her seat. “The guard is on its way, Aral. We have to leave. Or, I do, at least. I can’t draw the shadows around me like a cloak the way you can.” She looked pointedly at Triss. “Will you come with me? I can tell you more of what I know about what happened if you give me the time.”

“Is Jerik dead?” I asked. The owner of the Gryphon’s Head was . . . well not exactly a friend, but I owed him.

“Not the last I heard.”

“Will you help me find him?”

She nodded. “I know where he’s being held.”

“I’ll come.”

*   *   *

Jerik
looked terrible, sallow and pale with loose skin on his cheeks and neck where he’d lost weight, and red blotches all across the old scar tissue where his left eye and much of his scalp had been ripped away by a gryphon. The fact that he was upside down, or rather, that I was and he wasn’t, didn’t help things. No one looks good that way.

There’s just no getting him out of there,
I mind spoke to Triss.

Not from here, no. We’ll have to try another route, but why don’t we talk about it later, someplace a bit less hazardous?

Point.

I bent double and caught hold of the rope looped around my right ankle, hand over handing my way up the few yards that put me in the shadow of the overhang. I’d set a pair of spikes into the gaps between blocks there. Anyone watching from a distance would have seen little more than the merging of one shadow into another, larger one. That’s if they saw anything at all in the dim light of the waning moon.

The greatest advantage the Blades of Namara possessed was our partnership with the Shades, elemental creatures of darkness bonded both to our souls and our shadows. Semi-corporeal shapechangers, they were capable of expanding into a cloud of darkness to hide their human companions. In a world where spells cast their own light for those with eyes to see it, a Shade’s penumbra was the closest thing there was to true invisibility. Triss had uncovered my eyes so that I could see Jerik for myself, but other than that I was entirely contained and concealed within an enveloping cloud of darkness.

Once I had a grip on the line connecting my spikes, I reached down and slipped my ankle free. Then, bracing myself between two of the corbels that supported the overhang, I started working the spikes free. Whether I ended up coming back this way or not, I didn’t want to leave any traces that the guards might find.

Below me, the surf snarled as it slithered through the miles of jagged coral that surrounded the little island where the prison stood. The noise more than covered the quiet grating of steel on stone as I pried my anchors loose. The next bit was going to be tricky, so I reached through the link that connected me with Triss and gave him a gentle nudge. In response, he let go of consciousness, sinking down into a sort of dream state as he released control of his physical self to me.

My world expanded to include the darkened cloud around me as I added Triss’s inhuman senses to my own. Light and shadow took on something like taste where they directly impinged on the diffuse blob of shadow that was Triss’s substance. The effect was intense and visceral, with bright spots registering as a spice too hot for the tongue, and the deepest bits of darkness reminding me of the richer notes in a good whiskey. For dealing with greater distances, Triss possessed something I called unvision.

His field of view encompassed a complete globe, looking outward in every direction, but dimmer than human sight and darker. He had no real ability to distinguish color and only a limited sense of shape. Light intensity and textures dominated. Was something flat and reflective, or nubbly and absorptive? Those were the questions that Triss’s unvision answered best. Once I’d grounded myself firmly in Triss’s changed worldview, I reached out and found the edges of my larger self, pulling inward until what had been a broad spherical cloud of shadow contracted to little more than a second skin a few inches thick.

That freed up enough shadow-stuff that I was able to form thin claws on finger- and toe-tips. Drawing nima from the well of my soul, I poured that life energy through the familiar link that bound us, hardening shadow claws into something truly corporeal. Moving quickly, because it was no trivial drain on my soul, I reached out and up, inserting points of congealed darkness into the narrow gap between stones in the overhanging wall. Like some wall-crawling lizard, I made my way past the bulge that underlay the crenellations and up onto the battlements of the prison fortress known as Darkwater Island.

Jerik’s cell stood high in the easternmost corner of the prison, facing the open ocean and continually hammered by wind and wave. A giant magelight topped the tower that rose up from where I slipped onto the wall. It warned ships away from the jagged reef lying inches below the surface and stretching for miles in every direction. I paused briefly in the lee of the tower to release Triss. He returned to full shroud form, leaving only the thinnest slit for me to see out. While he was doing that, I mapped out my route back to the supply ship that had brought me here. It was docked at a narrow pier extending out from the landward side of the reefs about a half mile from the prison proper. At the head of the pier a small building stood on stone pilings anchored deep in the coral—the same construction used on the prison.

On a calm day, a lucky man might be able to make his heavy-booted way from the base of the prison wall to the pier by walking carefully along ridges in the submerged coral. More likely, he would slip and fall into one of the many deeper channels that ran through the reef. Between the currents, the razor-edged coral, and the colony of demon’s-head-eels the crown had encouraged to infest the reefs, it wasn’t the best place to go for a swim. The only reliable way to get from the dock to the prison was by riding in one of the long narrow baskets that traveled back and forth along an enchanted cable between the two points. Or, in my case,
underneath
the basket.

I had to avoid several guards walking the rounds as I made my way back to the cable-head, a trivial task given their general lack of interest in their surroundings. It was sloppy, but not surprising given the isolation and reputation of Darkwater Island. No one escaped from the island and very few were released. Mostly it was a place the Crown sent prisoners to die slowly. And to suffer.

The latter came home rather forcefully when one of the doors that led down from the battlements into the prison depths opened and spat out one of Thauvik’s torturers. Through the narrow gap in my shadow covering I watched him come toward me. The stylized laughing devil face paint made him look utterly inhuman, matching appearance to soul by my lights. The Ashvik whom I had slain had mandated the masklike paint when he first created the royal office of agony. The official reason was to increase the fear the masters of pain instilled in their victims. If it also served the purpose of effectively masking the identity of Ashvik’s pet monsters from those who might be moved to retribution, well that was just fine, too.

I hopped up into the darker shadow between two merlons and crouched down as the torturer passed, briefly closing my eyes to avoid reflections. Triss hissed angrily but silently into my mind as he went by, and I found myself in hot agreement with the sentiment. While this man might not be one of those who had tortured my fellow Blades after the fall of the temple—that distinction belonged to the servants of the Son of Heaven and the office of Heaven’s Hand—he was of the same monstrous breed. There is never any excuse for torture.