Drawn Blades (30 page)

Stingers—
Slang term for Tienese city watch.

Stone Dog—
A living statue, roughly the size of a small horse. The familiar of the Elite.

Straight-Back Jack—
A shadow jack who gets the job done and keeps his promises.

Stumbles, the—
Neighborhood of Tien that houses the Gryphon’s Head tavern.

Sumey Dan Marchon Tal Pridu—
Baroness Marchon and sister of Maylien.

Sunside—
The shadowside term for more legitimate operations.

Sunside Jack—
A jack who works aboveboard, similar to a modern detective.

Sylvani Empire—
Sometimes called the Sylvain, a huge empire covering much of the southern half of the continent. Ruled by a nonhuman race, it is ancient, and hostile to the human lands of the north.

Tailor’s Wynd—
An upscale neighborhood in Tien.

Tangara—
God of glyphs and runes and other magical writing.

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.

Thalis Nut—
A nut that produces a poisonous oil.

Thalis Oil—
A toxic oil used by the Blades both as a poison and for the oiling of hinges and other hardware.

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

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

Thiussus—
A Shade, familiar of Nuriko Shadowfox.

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

Tien, Duchess of—
Jiahui Dan Tien, cousin of the king.

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

Travelers—
A seminomadic order of mages dedicated to making the roads safe for all.

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.

Underhills—
An upscale neighborhood in Tien.

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.

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.

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.

Xankou—
A clanate on the Chenjou Peninsula, near Kadesh.

Xaran Tal Xaia—
Bastard half brother of Prixia Dan Xaia.

Zass—
A Shade, familiar of Devin.

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

Zishin—
A sergeant of the watch answering to Captain Fei.

Bronze Sixth Kip (sixer)

Bronze Kip

Bronze Shen

Silver Half Riel

Silver Riel

Gold Half Riel

Gold Riel

Gold Oriel

(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
    

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 book in the Fallen Blade series

DARKENED BLADE

by Kelly McCullough

Coming May 2015 from Ace Books!

T
he
dead should stay dead.

For six years after the fall of the temple, I believed that Kelos had died defending our goddess and our people. Then I discovered what really happened and that he was still alive. I wish that he’d stayed dead.

I had climbed to the top of our little tower, an octagonal deck surrounded by a low wooden wall. The sun had long since set, but the moon was bright for eyes trained to the darkness, and I could see well enough. The wall stretched away east and west, its shape picked out by the magelights and oil lanterns glowing along its length, like some phosphorescent eel from the deep ocean.

“I liked him better when he was a corpse,” I said.

“It’s never too late. . . .” Faran’s voice spoke from behind me.

I turned, looking for the deeper bit of shadow I must have missed when I first came out on the rooftop. I found it in an angle of the wall not far from the stairhead, or at least thought that I did—a shrouded Blade is all but invisible, especially at night. I crossed my arms and waited silently. A moment later the shadow thinned and resumed Ssithra’s phoenix shape, revealing Faran, who sat cross-legged with her back against the boards.

She lifted her chin. “It’s really not too late, you know. I could go back downstairs and kill him right now. Or . . . you could.”

“That wouldn’t solve the problem.”

“It would put an end to it.”

“No, it would only put an end to Kelos. It wouldn’t undo the fall of the temple or the death of Namara or any of the other horrors he helped perpetrate.”

And it wouldn’t salvage your memories of the man he was before he did those things,
Triss said quietly into my mind.
That man is already dead, and with him a part of you.

That, too.

Faran rose to face me, and her eyes were on a level with mine. “Then what is the lesson?”

“Huh?” I asked.

“You took me on as your apprentice, right?”

I nodded.

“So, teach me. How can you stand to let him live after all that he’s done? How can that be right? Namara’s Blades exist to bring justice to those who would not otherwise receive it, those who are protected by power from the results of their actions. Doesn’t Kelos fit the bill?”

“Namara’s Blades are gone.”

“That’s a dodge, Aral, and a pretty bad one at that. You’re still here and the ghost of the goddess told you herself that you should seek justice, that you should continue down the path she set you on.”

“I don’t know.” I turned my back on Faran and looked out into the darkness again. “I don’t want to kill him.”

“Not two minutes ago you said that you liked him better as a corpse.”

I nodded. “I did that. But the corpse I liked him as was a martyr to our goddess, not a traitor to her. That ship sank. Now he wants me to kill him, or if I won’t do it, Siri or you. He believes that he deserves to die for his treachery.”

Faran put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face her. “He’s not wrong.”

“No, he’s not. But what will it accomplish? He wants to die for his crimes, but he doesn’t repent them. He would do the same thing tomorrow in the same circumstances. He believed then and still does that by giving people hope for justice, Namara was relieving pressure that otherwise would have destroyed a corrupt system of governance. Is he wrong about that?”

“I don’t know.” Faran sighed. “In the lost years I made my way in the world by spying and commissioned theft. I saw a lot of corruption in the ruling classes, and I didn’t do anything about it because: hey, my goddess is dead and it’s not my fucking job. Then I found you, and you showed me that there may be something to this whole justice business even without Namara to show us the way. But I don’t see it as clearly as you do.
Is
the system so corrupt that the only thing to do is burn it down and start over? Or is it more important that we keep righting the individual wrongs?”

“That’s really the question, isn’t it?” asked Triss. “The big one that we’re all fighting about without actually talking about it. Do we kill Kelos because of what he did to Namara, or do we back his play and move against the Son of Heaven?”

“And even that oversimplifies things,” I growled. “Killing the Son is surely justice of the kind we were raised to deliver. He is practically the personification of injustice rendered untouchable by power. If ever there was a man who deserved to die on the sword of a Blade, it’s the Son. Killing him would certainly serve the old ideal.”

“But then there’s the risen problem,” said Faran.

I nodded and began to pace. The Son was more than just a priest; he was a rapportomancer—a very specialized sort of magic user as well, one with the familiar gift but no talent for actual spells, and his familiar . . . That was the rub. His familiar was a sort of death elemental, a strand of the curse of the restless dead.

In the shape of the risen, the Son’s familiar wore the bodies of thousands of nobles and priests all through the eleven kingdoms, maybe even tens of thousands. They were hidden risen, monsters who used the blood of the living to disguise their undead condition. Killing them individually was as just as killing the Son himself. But all at once . . . that was another thing entirely. What happens to a civilization when you remove the structures that rule it?

Kelos believed that a new, more just system would arise from the ashes of the old, that the inevitable civil wars and banditry and bloodshed would all ultimately prove to be worth it. Nuriko Shadowfox, his sometime lover, sometime foe who had started him down the path he now walked, had been even more radical in her plans. She didn’t believe in government at all, thought that somehow eliminating it would lead to a new and better world. Her plan had been to destroy the system and then to spend the rest of her life preventing a new one from growing in its place.

I didn’t know what I believed, but I knew damned well that killing the Son would result in a bloodbath of epic proportion. For every one of the risen that died with the Son, tens or even hundreds of innocents would fall in the chaos left behind. If the weight of my dead was already crushing me when they numbered in the hundreds . . .

“I don’t know what to do, Faran. It was so much easier when the goddess told me where to go and who to kill. The responsibility was hers. I
hate
being the one who has to make the decisions.”

“Would you go back to living that way . . . ? If you could?” Faran’s tone was gentle, her expression sympathetic, but the question was as sharp as any knife and cut straight through to the pain that knotted my gut.

I desperately wanted to say yes. But . . . “No. I have seen too much of life’s grays to ever go back to that kind of certainty. Even knowing, as I now do, that Namara herself was uncertain . . . No. I lie to myself when I say the responsibility was hers. My actions were and always have been my own, and somewhere down deep I’ve always known that. If the responsibility for what I do belongs to me, so do the choices. I couldn’t go back to being a tool in another’s hand if my soul depended on it.”

“Then stop letting Kelos manipulate you.”

Her mind is as sharp as her blades,
sent Triss.
She’s grown so much since we first found her.

I laughed a grim little laugh. “That would be much easier to do if I knew what he was trying to bend me into doing, and whether or not what he wants of me is the wrong thing to do. Because the flip side of the risen problem is that allowing the Son to live is a decision with heavy consequences of its own. How much of the evil done by and for him am I responsible for if I refuse to end his life?”

That was the question that made me feel as though I were carrying shards of broken glass around in my chest.

Triss rose up and wrapped his wings around my shoulders. “Sometimes you come to a place where there are no right decisions and all paths lead to fell ends.”

“And then?” I whispered.

“You still must choose your way,” said Triss.

“But I don’t know how. . . .”

Faran stepped closer then, taking my hands in her own. “You do, you know.”

“If so, I can’t see it.”

“That’s because you’re looking at it the wrong way. The question is not, what should you do? It’s: who do you want to be?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You cannot control everything that will result from your actions; you can only control the actions themselves. If you died tomorrow, how would you want to be remembered?” She put one palm on my chest where the goddess had touched me. “Who are you, in here?”

I thought back to the decisions I had made over the last few years as I’d crawled my way back out of the bottle and the gutter, what I had done that had made me proud, where I had failed. . . . I might hate the answer that led me to, but I couldn’t deny it any longer.

I took a deep breath. “I must kill the Son of Heaven, or attempt it, at least.”

Faran nodded, but she also asked, “Why?”

“I am a killer, a slayer of monsters. It’s what I was born to do. It’s what I trained to do. It’s who I am. Who knows, that may even make me into something of a monster myself. But if so, I am a monster whose job is taking greater monsters out of the world. I may not be able to stop new ones from rising up where I have slain the old, but I can’t let that stop me from doing the job I was made for, and the Son is a very great monster indeed.”

It was a scary decision, but it was the right one; I could feel it in my heart where it beat under Faran’s hand. I covered it with my own. “How did you get to be so wise, my young apprentice?”

“I have a good teacher, old man.” She pulled her hand free of mine and very gently leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. “Who is also a good man, and no monster.” She turned and walked back to the head of the stairs.

“Thank you,” I said as she started to descend.

She nodded but didn’t answer me back.

“What about Kelos?” asked Triss.

“I don’t know. But it matters less now.”

“How so?”

“If I must kill the Son of Heaven, he can help me—none better. But even with all the help in the world, this will be a very difficult play. The chances that either of us will survive the attempt are not great, much less both of us.”

Triss snorted. “What you mean is that you’re hoping to push off the decision long enough for it to become somebody else’s problem.”

“Or no problem at all, yes. Is that so wrong?”

“No. If we’re going to go against the Son of Heaven, we will need all the help we can get, and, sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is enough to get you through to the end.”

I had made my decision, and I believed it was the right one, but somewhere, down deep in the back of my mind, a voice kept saying:
But what if you’re wrong?

*   *   *

I
appreciate irony as much as the next man. I just wish it didn’t have to be quite so biting when you were on the receiving end.

“Absolutely not.” I slammed my palm down on the tabletop. “I will not have anything to do with that woman.” Faran had already stormed out, while Siri sat quietly behind me, radiating a sort of cold rage.

Kelos looked stubborn. “Don’t go all squishy on me now, Aral. We need allies and I can’t think of a better one. At least talk to her. We share a common enemy.”

“Yes, and she’s part of it.”

Kelos crossed his arms and waited. Siri leaned forward and put her hand on my shoulder. It reminded me of the one she’d lost—a price willingly paid for ending a greater evil.

I sighed. “All right, I’ll talk to her, but I won’t promise not to kill her when we’re done.”

Kelos grinned. “That works for me. If you come to an agreement, we advance things in one way. If you kill her, we do it another. Chaos to our enemies and all that. I’ll tell her you’re on your way down.”

He went to the stairs and headed down to the pub below.

“Siri, am I doing the right thing here? I mean, this is the fucking Signet of Heaven we’re talking about.”

She shrugged. “Probably, but I wouldn’t let Jax in on this part of the deal when we bring her into the matter.”

I shuddered at the very thought. The Signet was the head of Heaven’s Hand, the Son’s own personal sorcerous storm troopers, and the people who had tortured Jax more than half to death when she was taken prisoner in the fall of the temple. Actually, there were any number of things I didn’t want to mention to Jax. Like the way Siri had lost her hand, for one. Jax was my ex-fiancée, and I didn’t fancy explaining the weird magical mess that was my brief and unexpected marriage to Siri, or the bloody but amicable divorce that had ended it. . . .

Triss had followed Kelos to the head of the stairs. Now he looked back at me, his posture questioning.

“All right, I’m coming.” As I reached the head of the stairs, he let his dragon shape go and faded back into my shadow.

The taproom below was all but empty, a very unusual circumstance here in the early hours of the night. The only members of the local crowd who remained belonged to the staff of the inn, and
they
didn’t look any too happy about being there. I couldn’t fault them for wanting to leave given the newcomers—a half dozen members of Heaven’s Hand. Priests and sorcerers of the most deadly and fanatical sort. I wanted to leave, too.

They had shed their uniforms for loose dark pants and shirts cut in the style of the steppe riders of the Kvanas. They weren’t fooling anyone. Everything about them spoke to their true origins, from the hard, cold expressions on their faces to their military bearing and the many weapons that hung in use-worn sheaths at hips and shoulders or tucked into boot tops. Long ponytails bound with the ritual knots of their order identified them more exactly for any who knew what to look for. And then there were the Storms.

Each of the six companioned a cloud-winged familiar. The Storms were elemental creatures of air that assumed a myriad of forms, everything from the lucent shapes of huge gemstones to wheels of golden flame and abstract swirls of color. Their only commonality one to another was that they flew on wings of cloud.