Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel (6 page)

“Siri . . .” I didn’t know what to say. I had felt the hand
of the Smoldering Flame close around my heart, and I knew that she was right, but still . . .

“No. I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few weeks, and I have made my choice.” She swallowed hard and raised her chin. “You are all witness to my words, and I call on you to pass them along to any other members of the order as and when you see them. This is my final command, for I am rendered unfit by circumstance and hereby resign my place as First Blade.”

“I . . .” Well, fuck. Now what?

“Further,” Siri continued as though I hadn’t said anything, “I wish to point out that with Namara dead and the temple fallen, there is no structure to replace me in that role and no higher authority in what remains of the order. That being the case, I think it is only right and proper that it fall to the Blade who preceded me in that role, and I, for one, intend to act accordingly.”

Before I had time to really make sense of what she had just said, Siri knelt before me. With a lightning-quick movement, she whipped the single sword that she still carried from its place on her back and laid it on the ground at my feet.

“First Blade Aral, I am yours to command.”

Kyrissa moved up alongside Siri and bowed her head. “As am I.”

Oh. Shit.

Faran was only a half second behind, wrenching her swords from the wooden floor and laying them at my feet. “I am no Blade, and, with Namara gone, may never be such. But you have my allegiance, First Blade . . . for what it is worth.” Ssithra joined her.

I didn’t want this, not any of it—I wasn’t strong enough for the role. I had proved that in my collapse after the fall of the temple, in my surrender to drink and darkness.

I felt utterly paralyzed, until Triss spoke into my mind.
Say something, idiot! She just handed you her soul with both hands. Be worthy of it.

I nodded jerkily and reached out to put my hand on Faran’s
forehead. “Your loyalty is worth the world, my apprentice, and I accept it. Likewise, yours, Siri.” I placed my other hand on her forehead. Whatever I might think about the way she’d trapped me as neat as neat could be, I owed her the same sort of consideration I owed Faran. “And you,” I nodded to their Shades, “I accept and honor this trust you give me.”

Triss moved around in front of me then and bowed his head. “First Blade Aral.”

Stinker, I’ll get you for this.
I bowed back and gave him the almost-never-used honorific of a chief Shade, “Resshath-ra Triss.” If I was stuck, so was he.

Kelos leaned forward then. “First Blade Aral, I know how you feel about my past, and I would not expect you to accept my service or my oath. I am no longer worthy to give you either, and I won’t put you in the awkward position of formally denying me by laying my swords at your feet. Nonetheless, they and my life are yours to spend as you see fit from this day forward.”

Malthiss bowed to me and then to Triss. “And mine as well. First Blade, Resshath-ra.”

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to punch Kelos in the face, or weep, or what. I hadn’t seen any of this coming and it was going to take me a while to deal with all the implications.

“The goddess is dead, and I think that you’re all crazy to offer yourselves up to a dried out wreck like me, but I thank you for your confidence and I will attempt to live up to the honor.” I lifted my hands away from the women’s heads. “Now, both of you, take your swords back and let’s figure out what happens next.”

“That’s entirely up to you,” replied Siri, and I saw a hint of her wickedest grin as she spoke, “oh, First Blade. I merely serve and obey.”

“As I recall,” I growled, “the First Blade has a council to rely on for good advice, Siri. And if you think you’re getting out of that particularly joyous duty, you are so very wrong. One of the traditional seats on that council belonged to the order’s most skilled mage. I believe that chair now belongs to you, Magus Siri.”

“A hit.” Siri mimed taking a blow to the heart and winked at me. “Well struck, sir, well struck.”

I turned an eye on Faran. “As for you—” But she shook her head.

“No. I am no Blade, Aral, nor likely to be named one with the goddess dead . . . however much I may wish it. Your council has no place for me.” There was a deadness there in her tone that worried me.

It also decided me. “I don’t think that I agree with you there, and I believe I know a way to prove you wrong.”

“What do you mean?” asked Faran.

In the same moment, Triss sent,
What are you up to?

You’ll find out soon enough.

I put my hands behind my back and stood up very straight. “We’ve been heading for the mountains above Tavan and the Goat’s Pass at Uln, so that we could cross into Dalridia and go on from there to the refuge that Jax and Loris built to gather in our surviving apprentices and journeymen on our way to Heaven’s Reach. I know we didn’t have anything as formal as a plan, but we all felt that with Jax being the only other surviving master who refused to go over to the Son of Heaven, it was necessary to bring her into the discussion of what happens next and to let her know what we have learned about the Son and his relationship to the risen.”

Siri raised an eyebrow. “I take it that’s not what we’re doing?”

I grinned as I started to find my footing. I might not believe I was up to the task, but that didn’t get me off the hook. Even if I failed, I would try to do what was right, both by the remnants of our order and the broader world.

“Oh no, that’s exactly what we’re doing, but now it’s official. It’s still on the way, and I want Jax on any future council I’m stuck leading. But more than that, we have a good dozen journeymen who ought to have been confirmed as Blades long ago. If we four are going to attempt to bring justice to the Son of Heaven, the chances are good that some or all of us will not come back. As First Blade it has become my responsibility to see that those who we leave behind are in the best possible position to carry on.”

“And?” asked Kelos.

“And, I had originally hoped to move on directly from Dalridia to Heaven’s Reach and the Son.”

“But not anymore,” he said.

“No. We’re going to the temple. We have to, if I am going to revive the order. When we get there, we are going to attempt to attune Parsi’s old swords to Faran and Ssithra. If we succeed, I will, under my authority as First Blade, invest her with all the duties and rights of a full member of our fallen order.”

Faran’s eyes had gone very wide, but she didn’t speak.

You realize that if this doesn’t work it will break her,
sent Triss.

Yes, but it’s the only thing I can think of that has any chance of making her into what she was meant to be, and the order needs her.

What do you mean?

You were right about her loyalty being to me first. If she is going to become a true Blade, it has to be to justice. That means I have to give her something to live up to. And, if you can think of something greater to live up to than swords consecrated to her on the goddess’s own island, we should just make you First Blade and have done.

Point. We do it your way.
Aloud, Triss added, “What about the other journeymen? You seem to have some ideas there as well.”

I turned. “I do. Malthiss, you said that there were over a hundred pairs of Namara’s swords that were inactive at the time of my investiture. The number would have been much the same at the fall of the temple only a few years later.”

Malthiss nodded. “Yes . . .”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, neither do I, but I intend to find out. If the order is going to live on, it needs those swords and the masters we will make with them.”

M
aking
a corpse of an enemy is infinitely simpler than trying to make a friend of one.

The Hand of Heaven had killed almost everyone I had ever cared about. They had done so without pity or remorse, and they had gone on to torture many of the survivors. Hell, Jax, whom I had loved and nearly married once upon a time, bore a network of fine scars that threaded her skin from head to toe from her time with them.

Later, these same sorcerer-priests had tried to blackmail her into setting me up for their nets. In the process of that confrontation they had been responsible for the death of one the four remaining free masters of my order, as well as the death or maiming of several of our onetime apprentices. During the fight I had been forced to take actions that led to the deaths of hundreds of souls who were innocent of anything but proximity. The guilt of that had nearly broken me, and I was a harder and colder man for the experience, one long step closer to the monsters. The deaths were accidental and I had done what I felt I had to do, but I could never erase the stain taking those innocent lives had left on my soul.

All of that went through my mind as I stared at the sleeping priest and his watchful Storm familiar. I
wanted
to kill him, to visit on him some of the horror his order had visited on mine. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to cut his throat there by the little stream where we had camped. To simply be done with the problem that he presented. Easier in many ways than abandoning him, and
much
easier than doing what I intended. For that matter, I would have enjoyed it, but that wouldn’t have served the mission.

I glanced at the Storm. “Do you understand Varyan?” I asked in the language of my birth. Then switched to the one I’d spoken most over the last decade. “Or Zhani?” I was moderately fluent in a half dozen more, including the formal church dialect of Heaven’s Reach, but I was best with those two.

The Storm, which took the shape of a hoop of braided silver centered by a catlike green eye the size of my head, flicked gray wings and rose into the air. It hovered there for a long beat before bobbing twice in an unmistakable nod.

“Both?”

Again, the Storm bobbed in place.

“But you don’t speak?”

It twisted back and forth in the air, and small lightnings danced in its wings.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

The Storm bobbed again.

Up to this point, Kelos and Siri had been the ones having the most to do with our addled priest. I hadn’t the magic for it, and Faran had neither the patience nor the mercy. She hated the Hand much more viscerally than any of the rest of us, for they had stolen more than friends and home from her—they had taken her childhood.

If we’d left him to her care he probably would have
died of his wounds, unexpectedly in the night . . . see
. After which, Faran would have pointed to the brand new slice in his throat and smiled sweetly. Which, admittedly, would have made my life simpler.

I sighed and looked at the Storm. “Do you know why he’s not recovering better?”

The Storm twisted in the air, its wings darkening noticeably.

“Neither do we, which means we need to take him to a real expert. The university at Tavan has one of the best healers’ halls in the eleven kingdoms, and we’ll arrive in that city tonight.”

The storm rocked in the air but the agitation of its wings faded.

I don’t think it understood all that,
sent Triss.
It’s not much brighter than Scheroc . . . or a big dog for that matter. Air elementals just don’t seem to have any real intellectual depth to them.

It really doesn’t matter as long as it calms down and lets us hide them both in a rug so that we can carry them up to the university without drawing too much attention.

Like all the cities of the Magelands, Tavan was centered around a great magical university whose governing council also ruled the city. The council was an elected body made up of senior members of the faculty, all of whom were mages. Likewise, most of the larger towns had magic colleges or individual mage orders making the important decisions. It was a land of refugees formed in the aftermath of the wars that had turned the West that was into an uninhabitable wasteland, and any mage from anywhere in the eleven kingdoms could ask for Magelands citizenship and expect to receive it.

That had the unintended but fortunate effect of rendering the country all but immune to the risen takeover the Son of Heaven had arranged throughout much of the rest of the eleven kingdoms. It did not, however, free the city from the usual pestilence of temples. There were many gods, and the Son was titular head of their various earthly hierarchies in his role as chief priest of the highest church of the East.

Most of the Son’s predecessors hadn’t managed to exert much control beyond the priesthood of Shan, current Emperor of Heaven, whose archpriest he was. But, there, too, the curse of the risen had allowed the current Son to change the balance of power by the simple expedient of converting
the majority of his fellow hierarchs into his undead servants. Now, the combined churches danced to his whim, and that made carrying an obviously injured Hand through the streets of any city in the East a dangerous prospect.

*   *   *

I
wonder where Siri found this rug,
I sent.
It smells like the wrong end of a manticore.
It was my turn to carry our guests.

Do manticores even have right ends?

They certainly have
better
ends,
I grumped as I rolled my shoulders.

We had covered about two-thirds of the distance from the outer edge of the city to the university. Normally, we’d have rented or bought some horses somewhere along the way, but the sudden and unexpected manner of our departure from the Roc and Diamond had cost us badly in both coin and gear.

There had been a time when I might have addressed our lack through a bit of minor burglary, but I was trying to put Aral the jack and all of his bad habits behind me. I was, once again, First Blade, and however much I might wish the job belonged to someone else, I would do my best to do it right while it was mine.

We all preferred to travel in the dark, so we had passed the walls of the city just shy of sundown—as late as we could push it before gate close. The night hunters were out and active by the time we arrived on their turf. Not that we worried about them attacking us. The local shadowside toughs had come sniffing around at first, but they’d veered away quick enough once they got a better look. Which is what you would expect given that Kelos all by himself is scary enough to make battle-hardened soldiers cross to the other side of the street when he gives them that one-eyed basilisk glare of his.

That’s why I was so surprised when Siri cried out, “Ware the roof, Aral!” from her place behind me.

I had let my guard relax, and it cost me then as something
dropped onto the rug across my shoulders with force enough to slam me to the ground. Even as my forehead bounced off the cobbles, I heard the heavy sounds of more attackers landing around me. I’d have been in real trouble then if I were alone, maybe even dead, but I had the best in the world covering my back, and
my
shadow bites.

I’m sorry, Aral!
Triss shouted into my mind.
I didn’t see—

I lost whatever he said then when the whole street lit up with a tremendous booming crash. Two bursts of magelightning and a lance of black ectoplasmic energy all intersected at a point about three inches above the back of my head. Whoever or whatever had landed on me came apart rather spectacularly at that point. There was a noise like someone had caught a burst of thunder in a bucket and mixed it with a cartful of crockery going over a cliff, followed by a spray of red mist, and a sudden lessening of the weight on my shoulders.

I slithered backward out from under the rug, and vaulted to my feet. My first instinct was to shroud up, but we were trying to keep our profile as low as possible, and vanishing like that would practically scream Blade for any who knew what to look for. Besides, there only seemed to have been about a dozen of them to start with, judging from what I could see—a mixed and very lightly armed group—and that number had already been halved by the time my swords cleared their sheaths.

It wasn’t until the nearest lunged for my throat, hands hooking like claws, that I got a good whiff of rotting breath and realized that they were risen—either recently converted or mostly preserved by frequent immersion in fresh blood. I changed the target and manner of my thrust then, jamming my sword through the creature’s left eye socket instead of skewering its throat, while I hopped back and away. My point lodged in the back of its skull, as intended, halting its rush and keeping it well beyond arm’s reach.

Torquing my whole body leftward, I twisted it off its feet and threw it to the ground. It landed hard on its back, and the true death took it as I slid my blade free. By that time,
the rest were also dead. Kelos had cut down two, Faran had beheaded another, and Siri’s black ectoplasm had devoured the remainder.

“You’re really going to have to show me how to do that someday,” I said as she approached. “It looks like it hits harder than magelightning.”

Less painful for a light-sensitive familiar, too,
sent Triss.

Siri shook her head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. It’s lightning’s smoky mirror, and much much riskier than it looks—Kayla Darkvelyn taught me the trick I built it on top of, but without the Smoldering Flame to buffer . . .” Then she trailed off, looking abashed. “But, all that’s beside the point. I’m sorry. I should have called out sooner. I didn’t see that risen until it was actually dropping toward you.”

“Don’t fault yourself too much,” said Kelos. “None of us saw it . . . saw any of them. They were in place long before we got here and they didn’t move at all until they attacked. It’s amazing how still something can hold when it doesn’t have to breathe. What makes me truly curious is that none of the street players seemed to know they were there either, and I’m not sure how they managed—”

A muffled yammering from the dropped carpet interrupted him then, and we all turned to look at it.

“Better check on him,” said Siri. “The rug caught it pretty nasty when Kelos and Faran’s lightning met my darkburst and vaporized the risen that was on your back. That’s a weird combination of elements, and no telling what it might have done to our guest.”

But, when we unrolled the carpet, we found the Hand not only unharmed but actually looking out at the world with real awareness for the first time since we’d started dragging him around. His Storm rose into the air above him and began flitting about like a kitten after its first mouse, which seemed another good sign.

He sat up and looked me in the eyes. “You’re the Blade, aren’t you? Aral? The one the Signet was talking to before . . .” He shook his head. “We were attacked, weren’t we? All of us.”

I nodded. “Yes, by the risen.”

He paled visibly. “The Signet?”

“Is dead.” Kelos spoke then, his voice flat, but almost gentle.

“Then, I’ve failed. We all did. Utterly.” He hid his face in his hands for a moment. But then, with a visible effort he lifted his eyes to mine. “The Son of Heaven sent them?”

“He did.”

“I will kill him myself.”

“Excellent sentiment that.” Kelos bent to offer the man his hand. “But we probably ought to hold off on the rest of this conversation until we get somewhere a bit less public. We should also see about making that whole less public thing happen sooner rather than later.”

I looked around as Kelos helped the man to his feet. The street had emptied as soon as the trouble started—it was that kind of neighborhood, where concerned citizens ran
from
rather than
to
—but there would be watchers at the windows and probably listeners in the alleys. And, even here, the guard would be along soon, given the circumstances. The risen were the sort of problem that drew official attention in force and with speed.

“You’re probably right.” The Hand smiled a crooked sort of smile. “It’s odd, really, to
be
the disruption of proper order rather than responding to it.” As we started moving, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, I should have said before, but my brain seems scrambled, my name is Chomarr.”

Aveni, then, though of the older, darker, families, since his skin was nearly as brown as mine. “I’m Aral.”

“The Kingslayer, yes.” He nodded. “No introductions needed, though it feels very strange to be talking to you instead of trying to kill you.” Before I could answer that, he continued. “I recognize the Deathwalker from his time at Heaven’s Reach.” He jerked his chin toward Siri. “And she can only be the Mythkiller.”

“Faran,” said Faran, before he could do much more than turn his eyes her way. “No other name.”

His expression went distant for a long beat. “Faran, the spy?”

She blinked surprisedly. “I’ve played the eavesman a time or three, yes, though I didn’t think that was widely known.”