Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel (13 page)

“What is it?” I asked. “Have the risen come?”

She shook her head. “No. Nightmare. Yours. You were twitching and your breathing went off. I heard it from clear over there.” She flicked her chin back toward the place where she’d set her bedroll.

“I . . . it was a dream. That’s a relief.” I had put my horrible vision aside on waking, but now that she mentioned it, my dreaming murder of my goddess rushed back in to fill my heart with a guilty dread. “Sorry I was so loud.”

“It’s not the first time you’ve woken me up with a nightmare. I swear you get more of them than any of my other bedmates ever did. Was this the one about the stone dog that nearly killed you when you went after Ashvik?”

“Nope, this was a bright shiny new horror. I was at the pool of the goddess when she rose from the depths and . . .” I shivered at the memory and shook my head. The symbolism was entirely too obvious. “It was awful. I don’t want to speak of it.”

“Heavy lies the heart that holds command?” she asked, sympathetically.

“Something like that, yes.” I wanted a drink then as I had not for months—with my whole heart and more than half my soul.

Aral?
Triss could sense my mood if not my exact thoughts.

It’s nothing, Triss.
We both knew I was lying, but he didn’t press.

Siri spoke again. “Remind me sometime, under the morning sun when the world is bright and sleep is far away, to tell you about the nightmares I had in the early months of my run as First Blade. But not here, and not so close to night. Now, you should get some more sleep. It’s an hour still till the time you set for us to move on.”

“Not going to happen. I’ll take a turn around the perimeter and see how things stand with Altia and Jaeris and the other sentries.” I needed to get my mind off foul dreams.

Siri looked dubious for a moment, then shrugged and went back to her bedroll. She was asleep by the time I passed her on my way to the nearest of the guard posts less than a minute later. It was the one I’d given to Malok. I’d assigned
the duty to some of the younger students who had not participated in the slaying of the Avarsi, both because they were more rested, and to make them feel as though there were other things that they could do for the order. Important things.

Tell me about the dream,
sent Triss.
Bits of it bled over our link, but only bits. All I could tell was that it involved the goddess and that it frightened and revolted you. If Siri hadn’t woken you when she did, I soon would have.

It’s really nothing, Triss. Guilt at trying to take the place of the goddess in our order mostly.

Tell me.

All right.
So I did, spitting it out in bursts of mindspeech as I climbed up the steep rock wall to the spot where Malok and Yinthiss waited and watched.

The place where we had camped was little more than a flatter section of trail at the bottom of a long winding crevice carved into the mountainside by the spring floods. It was dry at the moment and very defensible, but also a potential death trap if a big rainstorm came through, and this was the season where storms could yet bring rain as easily as early snow here at the lower altitudes. I would have preferred not to risk sleeping there, but Kelos said this was the last good place we could stop short of the actual top of the pass, and that was at least another seven hours of hiking and climbing ahead of us. At that point, exhaustion had won over caution, and we had collapsed on the spot.

“Any sign of clouds?” I asked as I poked my head out of the narrow chimney I’d used to reach the ledge where the young man and his Shade perched.

Malok had assumed a cross-legged pose—it was that or let his legs dangle—with his back against a bend in the rock. He smiled at me, exposing white teeth in a face nearly as dark as Siri’s. That plus his straight black hair suggested that his family came from the high mountains in the northernmost part of Kadesh.

“Not so much as a wisp, First Blade. This sun has driven Yinthiss deep into my shadow. It’s really brutal—
much
worse than it would be at this height in the village where I was born.”

“Janpor Province?” I asked, naming the region I had guessed.

He nodded. “The western edge, more than three thousand miles north and east of here—mostly north—beyond Hurn’s Gate even.”

“That explains the difference in the sun. We’re close to the dividing line between north and south here, and the light is stronger at every height.” He gave me that look that youth reserve for when their elders tell them things that they already know, and I had to suppress a laugh. “I’ll leave you to your watching then, if you have nothing else to report.”

“Nothing at all, First Blade. The only things I’ve seen are the sun, a few birds, and a lone gryphon flying high up and far away an hour ago. I would have called an alert if it came closer, but it stooped on something not long after I spotted it, and I haven’t seen it since. So it must have downed its prey.”

That or fallen for a bait of some sort,
sent Triss, though he didn’t contradict the lad.
There are things that hunt gryphons here in the high mountains, and not just the rocs and garudas. . . .

He’s young yet, it’s better not to distract him with too many possibilities.
I began climbing back down to the trail.

By the time I’d checked in with our other three sentries, the rest of the camp was awake and making a cold sunset breakfast before heading out.

*   *   *

Around
midnight, Siri dropped back to find me at the trailing edge of our little column. As soon as Faran spotted her, she moved forward to put eyes on Kelos. If there was anyone who trusted him less than Jax, it was Faran. Siri nodded her thanks as they passed each other, then waved for me to stop.

Siri didn’t speak until the last of the trailing students was out of earshot and, when she did, she pitched her voice barely above a whisper. “The Kvani have found the remnants
of the fire we used to get rid of the bodies. It’s nearly burned out except for a few hot spots and wisps of smoke here and there, so I can’t see much but impressions from around the edges.”

“Can you tell how big the Kvani force is?” asked Triss.

Siri shook her head. “Not in any depth, but there are several dozen of them poking around the edges of the burn, and more near enough to register as blurry shadows, so it must be at least as many as were guarding the pass.”

“Risen?” I asked.

“None visible, but fire is one of the few things that will destroy them, so I can’t imagine the more obvious sorts would . . . hang on, something’s changing. They’ve lit a fire of their own. Let me just hop over and . . . there. Oh, dammit.”

“What?” I asked.

“If that’s not the main body of the Kvani it’s a reconnaissance in force. There must be a thousand horses at least. Also, risen, and lots of them. The Kvani have four-horse chariots with wicker cages mounted to them to hold the dead. The risen are packed in so tight they can’t even move their arms, maybe eight to a box, maybe ten.”

“Wicker? That’s ridiculous,” said Triss. “It wouldn’t hold the risen for two seconds if they really wanted out.”

Siri shrugged. “There are visibly glowing glyphs at the joints of the cages, and not just to magesight. That latter means they’re mostly for show, a way to make the troops feel safe around them. If this group of risen are all controlled by the Son of Heaven’s strain of the curse and the Kvani are led by more of the same, they have no need of fancy controls.”

“True enough,” I said. “How many chariots are there?”

“Hard to say. At least a dozen, but there could be more out of my line of sight. I wish I could hear what the khans and their lieutenants are saying, but at this distance I’m lucky to be able to see out of the smoke.”

I’d been meaning to ask about her limitations there, so: “Siri, how far away can you be from a smoke source and still touch it? We’re barely a day’s march beyond this one
and you’re having trouble, but you were able to contact me from nearly two thousand miles away.”

“It depends,” she replied. “Mostly, my range is right around a day’s hard travel on the flat, maybe fifty miles. But that’s only if I’ve got a solid connection of some kind to the fire, like the spell I set to burn the bodies, or the line of sight that allowed me to jump from that fire to the campfire. If I don’t have a good sympathetic link, I can only manage a mile or three under most circumstances.”

“And when you contacted me?”

“That took days of ritual preparations, a ton of help from Ashkent and Kayla, including their direct participation in the ritual,
and
a specially designed fire on my end that burned in the shape of a great glyph of communication. Oh, and the god wanted to possess you as well as me, so he boosted the power of my spell. Even with all of that, I don’t think I’d have been able to reach anyone I loved less, old friend. Love is the ultimate sympathetic link.”

She touched my cheek affectionately, and I covered her hand with my own. We might be divorced now, but that wasn’t from any lack of mutual affection. The marriage had served its ritual purpose, and we were neither of us the marrying kind. A circumstance I wished I had figured out
before
it blew up my relationship with Jax back in the day. It might have saved a lot of pain, and many years of estrangement.

“And afterward?” I asked.

“Afterward, we were married, which made us one person for the purposes of that particular magic, and I
still
had to stretch myself to the limit to contact you while you were on one side of the Wall of the Sylvain and I was on the other. That boundary is so much more than a great ward to keep the buried gods inside. I think sometimes that it is a divider between different worlds entirely.”

Kyrissa hissed then, startling all of us. She had always been a particularly quiet Shade, and her transformation into a mixed creature of smoke and shadow had only increased her reticence. Now that she could speak mind-to-mind with
Siri, as Triss and I did—another side effect of our brief marriage—she hardly ever made a sound.

Siri’s eyes went briefly far away as she listened to her familiar, and farther away still when she focused her attention on the fires below and behind us a moment later. “They’re opening up the cages.”

“That’s not good.”

“Most of the Kvani have moved to the far side of our burn. Only a few khans and shamans remain near the chariots, and I don’t think the shamans are much happier about it than the bulk of the raiders. But they have to stay close to maintain the show-magic on the cages.” She whistled. “They must have loosed a hundred or more of their risen.”

“What are the risen doing?”

“They’re milling around like a pack of hunting dogs waiting for the—there! They’re off and heading up the trail after us.”

T
here
is no good way to break the news that tireless legions of the undead are racing up your backtrail. There really isn’t. Especially not to people you still think of as kids on some level, not even when those kids are themselves assassins in training.

Given that, I went for the bald truth, and got us back on our way with only the briefest of stops. No one panicked, which was good. Very few of them even looked nervous, which was less so. It suggested that they had way too much faith in me, and/or themselves.

We
did
pick up the pace, loping along under the stars now in a slow jog where we could manage it—the fastest we could get the agutes to move, though how long the goats would be willing or able to keep at it was an open question. This time, instead of dropping to the back of the pack, I moved to the front. I needed to think through our options and make plans, and I wanted to talk things over with Kelos—damn him for being so useful! And, damn me for being a weak enough leader to need the help.

Siri, Faran, and Jax all moved forward, too, while we
sent Roric and Maryam to play tail guard. They didn’t have proper weapons for dealing with the risen, but we were a good ten hours ahead of our pursuers still. Even if the dead ran every minute of the night—they had no need of food or drink or rest—they wouldn’t catch up until sometime tomorrow night at the earliest. With a very few exceptions—the hidden risen being a notable entry on the list—the restless dead cannot bear the direct sun. That meant that our pursuers would have to hole up someplace shaded during most of the daylight hours, just as we had originally planned to do.

“How many are there?” asked Kelos.

“A hundred at least,” replied Siri. “Could be a hundred fifty. Maybe more. I only saw the chariots that came within about thirty feet of the fire.”

“Ugly, but not impossible,” said Faran. “We killed more than that back in Wall before we had to run.”

I shook my head. “We did, but only with a great deal of help and at bitter cost. Your shoulder is still healing, and if the cut had been so much as a quarter of an inch deeper you’d have lost the arm, and we might have lost you. I have a hard time regretting the warriors of the Hand that fell there, but I’ll note that they were on our side at the time. That means half of our force died in the fight, including a former Signet who was one of the most powerful mages I’ve ever seen.”

Kelos nodded. “Aral’s right. We probably killed a couple hundred of them at Wall, but the
we
that did that included some damn fine battle mages, and, once
they
fell, we had no choice but to run or be overwhelmed. If the risen hadn’t gotten bogged down in fighting the entire population of that part of Wall they might well have caught up to us and finished the job. The risen are tough as hell—hard to kill, even with Namara’s swords—and strong and fast to boot.”

“We do have a few advantages,” said Siri. “The dead are none too bright, and the nature of the trail means they can’t come against us more than two or three at a time. That’s a narrower fighting front than we had at the inn.”

“I wouldn’t bet money on that,” I said. “The first time I
met one of the Son’s breed of risen, it came up out of a five-story sewer shaft polished nice and slick. The second flung itself off a keep’s battlements at me right after scaling them. They can climb like insects, and they don’t mind falling substantial distances. If we stop to meet them in a canyon like this one, they’ll be dropping down on us from above within a matter of minutes.”

“A rain of the dead,” Jax said quietly. “That’s how the Kvani took the Dalridian fort at the base of the northern pass—flinging the risen over the walls with catapults. Aral’s right. I’d rather not reenact that particular defeat if we can avoid it.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” said Siri. “
Is
there a place on the trail ahead where a few could defend the way against many, Kelos?”

“I don’t think so. Not the way the risen climb. They’ll flank us in minutes if we stand to fight, and there are only four of us with the weapons to kill them reliably. Magic will do the job, too, but even our best aren’t one fifth the mage Signet Toragana was, and they tore her limb from limb.”

“Well,” said Faran, “we can’t outrun them either. Even if we push all through the day tomorrow, we have to stop sometime. Exhaustion will finish us as surely as the restless dead. They can move faster than we can and do it far longer.”

“So, what
can
we do?” Jax asked.

No one answered her.

That is the question, isn’t it?
Triss spoke into the silence of my mind.
You’re in much better training and shape than you were when those two almost killed you back while you were helping Maylien, but without the kind of magical support we had from the Signet and the Storms at the inn, I don’t think you and I could take even half a dozen coming at us together. With only four true Blades, we’d have trouble handling much more than two score, and that with a good strategic position and excellent battle mages of our own.

I know, Triss. It’s . . . ugly. We need some way of killing a bunch of them from a distance. And . . .
A thought occurred to me.

“We’ll have to use the mountains against them,” I said aloud.

“You have an idea?” asked Siri.

“Maybe. I’m thinking avalanche. It’s a classic, and human troops would know to be on the lookout for it, but it might take the dead by surprise where the living would see it coming.” I looked at Kelos. “Is there a place on the downward slopes where the trail runs along a ledge with cliffs above and a long fall below?”

“There are several,” he replied. “Let me think about whether any of them would be suitable. . . . It can’t be in among any of the switchbacks. An avalanche there might carry our own away, or wipe out the trail ahead—trapping us. There’s also the chance some of the risen will survive any fall and dig themselves out. We don’t want them getting ahead of us and coming in from two sides. What we need is a mountain shoulder above a valley that leads away from our line of travel. . . .”

While Kelos was mulling, I turned my attention to Siri. “You’re our resident magic expert. I want you to cook up some way to get a big chunk of mountainside moving all at once. Borrow Faran or anyone else if you think you can use them.”

Siri tapped Faran’s shoulder and the two of them fell back, muttering quietly between them.

“Jax, most of the students are just going to be in the way,” I said. “Pick someone to lead them and get as many of them out ahead of us as you can. Make them stretch those young legs. I’d send you to watch over them, but . . .”

“But if the risen catch up to us, you’ll need my swords if we’re to have any hope of thinning their numbers enough for the students to get away. I know. Let me think. . . . Malok’s a mountain boy originally and I know that Loris worked with him to keep those skills polished. I’ll have him take the lead, with Roric and Maryam to enforce his orders.” She paused. “I’m surprised you’re not sending Faran away, too, considering her injury.”

“You really think she’d leave me?” I asked. “You were
with me on the ship that time I tried to slip away from her in Tien.”

Jax snorted. “Fair point. Let me think. . . . Javan will have to stay with us. He’s already having trouble keeping up with that golemite leg of his,
and
he’s been working much harder on his magic since he lost the one it replaced. Kumi as well, I think. She’s smart and fast and the best of my mages despite her Kanjurese background.” Her eyes went far away for a moment. “The goddess almost refused her, you know.”

I didn’t. “Why?”

“She’s from a Hairi family, the same as Nuriko Shadowfox. Kumi is the first such Namara has allowed to join the order since Nuriko became the Kitsune and betrayed the order.”

The Hairi were the ruling class of Kanjuri, rapportomancers who bonded with the intelligent swords crafted by the mage smiths known as Gojuru. Sometimes a true mage was born on the islands—usually to a Hairi or Gojuru family—but they were never allowed to remain. There was some ancient prophecy about a mage sinking the island chain, and the Kanjurese took it
very
seriously. The only legal choices for a fullborn mage living in the islands were exile or death—though there were rumors of a secret cult-like order of mage criminals.

“Having gone up against the Kitsune and Thiussus, I can see why Namara might feel that the Hairi were a risk,” said Triss.

Sshayar suddenly formed herself out of Jax’s shadow—a shadow tiger pacing us along the wall—and shook her great head angrily. “The goddess made a mistake when she took on Nuriko. She would have made another if she refused Kumi. It was not where Nuriko came from that made her into the Kitsune. It was who she was. Just as what makes Kumi, Kumi, is about what she is, not who her parents were. Looking at bloodlines is a foolish way to judge people.”

The goddess was never foolish,
Triss harrumphed into my mind, though he didn’t verbally contradict Sshayar, for which I was grateful.

No,
I responded instead,
but she was sometimes wrong.
Aloud, I added to Jax, “So, Javan and Kumi. Anyone else?”

“It depends on what Siri and Faran come up with. Altia’s naïve and her technique is weaker than I like, but for sheer raw magical power there’s none of us can match her. I include Kelos and Siri in that. She really has the gift.” I could hear the worry and conflict riding just under the edge of her words—she really didn’t want to need Altia.

“I’m sure she’ll do fine if she has to, and we’ll keep her out of harm’s way as much as possible. The people setting off the avalanche shouldn’t be in much danger. It’s whoever ends up playing bait below that’s going to have to watch out.”

Jax shrugged, obviously unconvinced. “Let me check with Siri and then I’ll get the young ones moving—they’ll have to take some of the load the agutes are carrying now since the goats will never keep up, and they might need those supplies on the downslope if we don’t make it.” She slipped back to chat with the other two, leaving me alone just behind Kelos.

I moved forward. “Well, have you got anything?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think so. There are two places we could stage such an ambush, actually, but the better of them is too far away for my liking. We’d have to push damned hard to get there in time, and I don’t think the improved ground is a good enough trade for arriving blown. The nearer spot we can reach not long after nightfall tomorrow, and still manage a good four hours’ sleep during the highest sun.”

“What’s the rock like there?” Siri had moved up behind me silently.

“Some sort of reddish stone that spalls and cracks. There’s always fresh rockfall on that section of the trail, and at least once a decade they have to carve the trail deeper when it loses a chunk of ledge. Beyond that? I don’t know that much about rock in its natural state. I’m more a castles man.”

“You and me both,” said Siri. “There’s not much call for assassinating mountain goats, so I never bothered to learn about the stuff of mountains. I suspect I’m going to wish at
least one of us knew a lot more about it before this jaunt is over.” She sighed. “That means I’m going to have to err on the side of power over finesse.”

“Jax!” she called over her shoulder. “The answer is yes.”

At the next wide spot in the little canyon, we paused briefly to sort out the packs. If things went badly and we didn’t catch up with the youngsters, they were going to be on mighty thin rations by the time they got out of the mountains—eating the goats had always been the backup plan if things went pear shaped. But hungry was much better than undead. Once they were loaded up, the group of us who were going to attempt the ambush slid over to the side along with Maryam and let the rest pass on. As soon as the last of the line passed Maryam fell in at the back.

“Time to move!” she called, and the lot of them started into a steady lope that would see them over the top of the pass several hours ahead of the rest of us.

It was a good thing they had been training steadily in the mountains above Jax’s castle for several years, and that they were all young and fit, because the next few days were going to be brutal for them if we didn’t make it. The downward end of the trail extended much farther than the one running up had, since Dalridia was already so high to begin with.

Kelos led us off at a steady walk. The slower pace would open the distance with the students, and we needed the mages who were going to bring down the mountainside to arrive at the ambush site as rested as possible. Nima, the stuff of magic, comes from the well of the soul, and exhaustion will drain it as thoroughly as spellcasting.

I put Siri up with Kelos to sort out what they could of the plan short of actually looking over the site, while I started to drift back to the rear with Faran again. Jax took Altia tight under her wing, slotting in right behind Siri and leading half the string of agutes. Kumi and Javan fell in together next, talking quietly as they led another half-dozen goats. As I passed them on my way back, I couldn’t help noticing how pale and sweaty Javan looked in the moonlight.