Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (13 page)

“When do you want to leave?”

Before Fei could answer, a faint rap came at the door of the reading room and Harad
poked his head in. “Aral, Captain Fei, I think the two of you might want to see this.”
Then he turned away.

We followed him through the shelves to another reading room, this one on the corner
of the building where the alley met the street in front of the library. Harad put
his finger to his lips as he dimmed the reading light almost to nothing. Then he opened
the door onto a front-facing balcony and stepped out. Once we had joined him at the
railing, he pointed off to the right where a pair of Crown Guards were leading a half
dozen city watchmen along the front of the library.

As they were about to come even with us, a dozen men and women in the scaled armor
favored by the clans who occupied Zhan’s Chenjou Peninsula slipped out of the alley
mouth. Most were armed with long-bladed spears of the sort most often referred to
as woldos—essentially a short staff with a sword on the end. These had their blades
darkened with oris juice for night work. Their leader had a noble’s
dueling blade hung from her sash of mourning, and had blackened the steel monkey-face
of her helm, another sign of official mourning. More of the clan’s warriors cut off
the street behind the guards.

Fei looked like she wanted to intervene, “Are they going to—” but Harad raised a hand
sharply, cutting her off.

“Wait. Watch.”

I
have seen too many deaths. They no longer move me, and I am less human for it. When
you see a death or, worse, cause one, you lose something. Innocence certainly, but
so much more. A tiny part of yourself falls away with each new corpse.

We are, all of us, a part of each and every person we meet and it is that part that
dies in the instant of another’s death. Some, it drives mad. Some, it makes into monsters,
incapable of seeing themselves in others, cutting them off completely from any understanding
of others’ humanity. People become things for them. Most, it wounds too deeply ever
to heal, though the scars don’t show most of the time. A few, and I count myself in
this number, learn how to put that part of ourselves in a sort of box, to cut off
our own humanity for a little while.

It only works for a time, and never without a cost. Whenever you do it, whenever you
put your humanity into that box, even for a little while, you run the risk that you
won’t be able to find the key. And then, how different are you from the monsters?

Fei tensed beside me, but I put a hand on her shoulder, shaking my head. Now was the
time for boxes. Even if Fei could have gotten down to the street in time to intervene,
there was nothing she could do against such odds without giving away her mage status.
At which point, the very Crown Guards she would have just rescued, along with some
of her fellow city watch, would become her sworn enemies. There was no way she could
win here.

Fei deflated, perhaps realizing that. “I…damn.”

Harad spoke quietly, “Their previous clan chief had his head nailed up over the traitor’s
gate this morning. They are angry, but not without honor.” He looked over Fei’s shoulders
at me. “Or justice. You will see.”

The clan chief stepped forward, and formally bowed to the soldiers and guards. “My
father died in the palace yesterday, murdered by the Bastard King. His body was burned
to ashes, and his head is to follow once it rots. I am not allowed so much as a lock
of his hair to place in the family tomb. This cannot be forgiven or forgotten, and
I have vowed to place a score of heads in his empty coffin to appease his angry ghost.”

“You’ll have to take them,” the taller of the two Crown Guards said defiantly. “That
won’t be so easy, even twenty against eight.”

“Against two,” replied the clan chief. She looked past the Crown Guards to the watch.
“My quarrel is with the king, not the city. If you wish to claim the king’s side,
you may choose to do so. If not, you are free to go, taking your weapons and my blessings
with you.”

They didn’t hesitate for so much as an instant, putting their weapons up and backing
away from the doomed Crown Guards. After that, it was over quickly and quietly, with
the heads going into a pair of sacks and the bodies into the river. This clan had
obviously seen a lot of night raiding.

“That’s the second time tonight,” Harad said once we had returned inside. “Same spot,
same ambush, same results.”

“Which means that the first group of guards didn’t report the ambush,” said Fei.

“Would you?” I asked. Then it really hit me, and I whistled low and appreciatively.
“If she lives to be fifty, that woman stands a good chance of becoming chief of chiefs
for the Chenjou Peninsula.”

Triss poked a dragon-shaped head out of the top of my otherwise human-seeming shadow.
It was quite a disconcerting effect. “I think I missed something, there,” he said.

“Assume for a moment that she collects that score of heads in pairs,” I said, “and
that every time she does it, another half dozen city watch walk away without a scratch.”

“Yes…”

I smiled. It was kind of nice seeing something Triss didn’t for once. “Those six Stingers
have now more or less officially separated themselves from the side of the king, whether
they realize it yet or not. At some point they’re going to figure out that if the
king is victorious in the coming civil war, there will always be a chance that he’ll
find out what happened down there. We can’t have been the only witnesses, and the
clan chief was pitching her voice to carry.”

“That she was,” said Fei, who had clearly already seen where I was going.

I continued. “If the king does find out about what happened here tonight, each and
every one of those Stingers is going to wind up tortured to death. They all have to
know it. Where do you think that puts them for how they hope the war turns out? Along
with any friends they can convince? If our clan chief out there can talk any of her
fellows into taking their revenge in a similar manner, it’ll drive one hell of a wedge
between the two biggest armed forces in Tien.”

My shadow shifted fully into dragon form, his mouth agape. “Oh. My.”

“‘My quarrel is with the king, not the city,’” I quoted. “That’s fucking brilliant,
and I’m sure she didn’t come up with it by accident. Harad, do you happen to know
her name? I suspect that Maylien will want to have a word with her sometime in the
near future.”

“Her name’s Prixia Dan Xaia, and she’s the new clan chief of Xankou,” replied Harad.

“Given the pronunciation, that’s got to be somewhere near the base of the peninsula
on the north side, right up by Kadesh,” said Fei. “That’d explain how sharp her warriors
are. Lots of raiding back and forth across the borders, and none of it sanctioned
by either throne. You’re as likely to get hung by your own side as the other if you
get caught. Very dangerous game.”

Fei cocked her head to one side as if listening, then nodded. “And that’s my exit
line. Scheroc tells me that I have something that needs attending. Aral, how about
I meet you at Westgate an hour before sunset tomorrow and we go find your baroness?
I’m sure I’ll have more messages by then, and there are things I can do for her in
the city without compromising my position. We’ll have lots to talk about.”

I nodded.

Harad gestured toward the stairs. “I’ll see you out, Captain Fei. Aral, come find
me if you need anything more. Otherwise, good night.”

Again, I nodded.

Are you all right?
Triss asked as I started back toward the other reading room, and the balcony by which
we normally made our exit.

I don’t know. The fight in the street out front brought it home in a way that I couldn’t
ignore.

Brought what home?

By acting to put Maylien on the throne, I’ve just started a war. That wasn’t my intent,
of course, but I’m not entirely sure that matters. A lot of people are going to die
because of me, a lot of people who haven’t done anything wrong.

Maybe,
replied Triss,
though we’re a long way from armies facing each other in the field yet. But a smart
man once said to me that “Thauvik is a murderer and a torturer, and the only way he’ll
ever see justice is if we deliver it.” He also pointed out that if we had that power
and chose not to use it, we would be complicit in Thauvik’s evils going forward.

A smart man? Really? Because I sure don’t feel very smart right now.

I think so, yes, and an honorable one.
Triss shifted around in front of me and spread his wings, bringing me to a halt.
There is almost certainly going to be a war, and you can be said to have started it.
I can’t deny that. But you’ve seen what Thauvik is like, what he can do. Last year
we stopped him from starting a war between the Durkoth and Kodamia. How long before
he found a way to start another one? Look at what happened at the Council of Jade.
This is not a sane man. He has to be removed from the throne.

You make it sound so simple, Triss.

It’s not. It’s terribly, terribly hard, and there’s going to be a price, a damned
big one. But I don’t think you made the wrong choice. Everyone we’ve talked to agrees
that Thauvik’s been following in his brother’s footsteps. You remember where those
footsteps lead, don’t you? They lead straight to rivers of blood.

Can we be so sure of that?
I asked.
And, if we can’t, what right have we to start a war over what Thauvik
might
do?

Triss winced.
Perhaps we can’t know it, though I don’t doubt it for a moment. I don’t have a good
answer for your other question either. I don’t think there is a good answer. Let me
ask you a counter question. Knowing what we know about Thauvik, about the way he is
oppressing and murdering his people, could you really live with yourself if we’d walked
away without trying?

No, it’s just…dammit!
I slammed the heel of my hand into the wall in a killing strike. The thick wooden
paneling shivered with the impact, but neither it nor my hand broke.
This isn’t how it was supposed to go.

I know. Better by far if we could have done it quickly and neatly. But things don’t
always go the way they should, and we cannot allow ourselves to be prevented from
acting at all because of things that might happen. Sometimes you don’t get to choose
the right answer, just the least wrong one and then you have to do what you can to
make it better.

Any idea how we go about that?

Win the war, or better yet, find a way to kill Thauvik without fighting it in the
first place. That’s what we’re best at, isn’t it?

*

I’m
an assassin. There are very few people in the world who are better at killing than
I am, at least on an individual basis. I’m proud of that, but it means exactly shit
in the business of groups of people killing other groups of people. It probably shouldn’t
have come as such a surprise, but I’d never really thought about it before I started
trying to make sense of Heyin and Maylien discussing tactics and lamenting their lack
of a good field general with the strategic skills necessary for commanding larger
bodies of soldiers.

It wasn’t quite gibberish. I had been trained in the strategy and tactics of dealing
with small groups of soldiers in the shape of royal and clerical bodyguards. But the
techniques a lone assassin needs to employ against groups defending a single target
were radically different from those employed when even a score of soldiers faces another
similar body on a battlefield. Realizing that I wasn’t going to be a whole hell of
a lot of help with the actual war part of the war, and admitting it to Maylien, was
downright humbling.

It was also what had me clinging to the wall beside a third-floor window on a small
keep in the fief of Xankou. I quietly tapped on the shutter for the second time. In
response, a faint scraping sound came from the other side, followed by a gentle pitter-pattering
like rain in the distance.

I was still trying to figure out what might have caused that latter when a woman’s
voice called out, low and soft, “The shutters are open.”

I pushed lightly on the farther one, and it silently pivoted inward. “May I come in,
Clan Chief Xaia?”

“I should probably say no, but you seem too polite for an assassin, and too articulate
for one of the restless dead.
While I could be wrong about either case, I’m curious. Come ahead, but no further
than the window ledge, if you wish to prevent the conversation from escalating to
words of steel.”

I was rather charmed by her attitude and pushed the other shutter aside, though I
didn’t yet step down onto the window ledge. “What, no worries about the creatures
of wild magic?”

“Somehow, I don’t think the hunting host would speak Zhani with the accents of Tien.
They are not known for favoring cities.”