Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (15 page)

My footsteps echoed hollowly in the back gallery where Maylien had set up her temporary
offices, and raised the
smell of damp stone and old ashes. The series of abandoned sewers we’d moved into
had once housed an illegal tavern called the Nonesuch. It had been destroyed by fire
and the collapse of a couple of galleries during a running battle I’d had with the
Elite and a group of Durkoth the previous summer.

Later, Faran and I had dug a new entrance and a couple of rabbit runs to set the place
up as a fallback. At some point, some other enterprising soul would almost certainly
crack into it from one of the rebuilt buildings above, and then it would lose its
utility. In the meantime it made an excellent base of operations for Maylien while
she was in Tien—hidden, relatively secure, and big enough to house both her and her
guard with their own separate rooms.

We’d returned to the city a few days before because Maylien needed to meet with several
wavering peers in hopes of talking them over to her side, something no proxy could
do for her half so well. It was another step in the slow buildup of the alliances
we would need to carry the battle to Thauvik, a process that had been greatly hampered
by the king’s bizarrely passive and gentle behavior since the massacre. The blood-mad
impulses that had become an ever more prominent part of his reign over the past few
years were nowhere in evidence at the moment.

“I hate this,” I said. “I don’t understand what’s going on with the king, or the Blade
he’s got up his sleeve, or the freaking court politics you’re having to play out,
or even the way the war is going. I’m no good at the things you need, Maylien.”

“You’re doing a fine job as the head of my bodyguard,” she replied. “No one’s assassinated
me yet.”

“No one’s tried,” I replied, flatly. “That’s got nothing to do with me. Heyin is more
than competent to keep your back covered and your escape routes open.”

“But he can’t stop a Blade.” She put her hand out and caught my arm as I passed by
her chair.

I shrugged it off. “I can’t either,” I said, finally admitting to Maylien what it
had taken me most of the last six weeks
to admit to myself. “Not with the resources you’ve got. Give me a major strong point
like the fortress at Kao-li, the guards to defend it properly,
and
your promise not to move from the royal apartments, and I could
probably
keep you safe from a Blade. But the second you left, you’d be vulnerable again.”

“Thauvik holds Kao-li,” said Maylien. “Even if he didn’t, I couldn’t afford to stay
in one place like that, not with the army and half the peers still siding with Thauvik.
I’ve got to keep moving and working to shift the opinion of the more important nobles.
You know that.”

“I do. It’s my whole point, actually. I can’t protect you from a Blade. Not by following
you around and trying to catch the assassin at the point of attack, anyway. Triss
and I have been discussing it, and there’s just no way.”

“What do you think of that, Triss?” Maylien shifted her gaze to my shadow.

In turn, my shadow flowed up the curve of the nearest wall and into dragon form. “I
don’t think either of us ever realized just how badly the mere existence of a hostile
Blade/Shade pair changes things for one of our targets. Not until we started trying
to figure out how we could stop one. I mean, we
knew
it, that’s part of our training. But knowing in the abstract and knowing in your
gut are very different things.”

“Look at what happened to Ashvik,” I said. “He had some of the best bodyguards in
the world in the person of the Elite and their stone dogs. He had a multilayered defense
that included using the restless dead to hunt the sewer beneath the palace. He had
it all, enough to kill the first three Blades that tried even.”

“But in the end,” Triss continued, “Aral and I were able to get through and kill him
in his bedroom. No one is completely safe.”

I nodded, and once again felt the sick feeling that had been building in my stomach
for over a week. “Triss is leaving out the worst of it.”

“No one is safe isn’t the worst of it?” said Maylien.

“Well, it is, but maybe not in the way that immediately comes to mind. I wouldn’t
have believed it was possible then, but the destruction of the temple was actually
even more horrible than I had imagined at the time. In destroying our goddess while
allowing some of us to escape, the Son of Heaven and his god removed the only outside
check on our actions. While Namara lived, no one but the unjust ever had to fear a
Blade. Now, the only thing preventing any of us from slipping out into the night and
killing whoever we want, is conscience. Fine for me, maybe. At least for now.”

“But not for Devin,” said Maylien.

“No, not for Devin. Nor probably for any of the other Blades the Son took into his
service. The sort of people who are willing to give their allegiance to the very priest
who’s just murdered their friends and family are not people you want running around
with the power of a Blade, and nothing to hold them back but conscience.”

“So, what do you propose to do about it?” asked Maylien.

“Why does it have to be me?” I whispered. But I wasn’t really asking Maylien, nor
even myself. It wasn’t even a question. It was a lament to the goddess who had failed
to save herself and her followers.

“Who else is there?” Maylien countered.

“No one,” I replied.

“Then it falls to you, or it fails,” she replied, and I couldn’t help but remember
that this woman wanted nothing more than to be a wandering vagabond, but was well
on her way to becoming a queen. It shamed me.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve known for at least a week, but I haven’t wanted to face it.
They’re my friends, Maylien, my family even. Or they were once, and I love them still.
Even Devin.” I paused then because that wasn’t quite true. “At least, I love the idea
of what they were, though I hate the idea of what they’ve become. It’s hard.”

“Again, I ask: what are you going to do about it?” There was no pity in her tone,
just as there had been none for her sister two years previously.

“I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m useless in the role I’m playing for you
right now. I think that duty calls for me to do what I can to put you on the throne
first, since I got you into this mess.” She raised a skeptical eyebrow at that, but
didn’t respond otherwise. “Besides, there’s a Blade involved here, and any effort
to right the wrongs of my fellows begins by finding out about the connection with
Thauvik. I need to get into the palace to find out what’s going on, and to kill Thauvik
if I get the chance.”

“So, you’ll be leaving me?”

“Yes, for now, though I’ll contact you as I can.”

“When will you go?”

“Now that the decision’s made I can’t see any reason to stay longer than it takes
to bring Heyin up to speed on what few ideas I have for slowing down a Blade. This
evening? Certainly no later than tomorrow night.”

“You might want to hang around a little while longer,” a voice called from the entrance
to the next gallery.

Captain Fei ducked through the low arch and came up the sewer’s dry spillway, with
Heyin following close behind. The barrel-vaulted gallery Maylien had adopted as her
apartment fed into the main line—where her guards had set up their headquarters—at
about a thirty-degree angle. It was much lower ceilinged than the larger sewer it
had once fed. A normal-sized person could only stand upright in the center of what
used to be the channel.

“I take it you have news?” said Maylien.

“She does indeed,” said Heyin.

“So, what is it?” Triss was still hanging on the wall behind Maylien and I could feel
a sort of satisfaction coming from him—probably because he didn’t have to hide here
and with these people. The necessity of always concealing his existence wore at him.

“A little bird tells me one of the king’s high officers is thinking about switching
sides.”

“Who?” demanded Maylien.

“Lord Justicer Vyan.”

“That’s excellent news,” said Maylien. “If he’s sincere.
I’ve never trusted the man, and the events at and after the Council of Jade haven’t
improved my feelings. Do you think he knows about the king’s Blade?” She inclined
her head my way with the question.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It didn’t seem like it during the conversation in the
presence chamber, but things will have changed since then. With the chancellor and
the Warden of the Blood both as yet unreplaced and Thauvik himself falling into this
passive funk, Vyan’s more or less running the place in consultation with the Royal
Monetist.”

“Tell me more,” Maylien directed Fei.

“My source says that he’s growing more and more worried about Thauvik and the state
of the kingdom. I think the main reason he hasn’t already tried to sell the king out
is that he fears the king. That and he doesn’t know who he can trust as a go-between.”

“What makes you so sure of your information?” asked Heyin. “He could be loyal to Thauvik.”

“I don’t think so. He’s holding one of the high cards in the play for the throne,
and has been since the day of the massacre, one no true loyalist would conceal from
the king.”

“He’s got the adoption papers,” I said. “
That’s
what he was hiding from Thauvik when I listened in.”

“Put a golden badge of merit on the man’s cap,” said Fei. “He does indeed. He’s not
sleeping much either, and he’s talking to himself rather a lot.”

“I don’t suppose you want to tell us how you got the information this time, either,”
said Heyin.

Fei shook her head. “I protect my sources.”

I didn’t say anything either, though it was obvious to me that Scheroc was listening
to the Lord Justicer gibber to himself. Fei hadn’t chosen to share her secret with
Maylien’s people and I had no reason to betray her.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Maylien. “You haven’t steered us wrong yet. Can you contact
the Lord Justicer for us? Or do we need to take care of that?”

“My source inside the palace is one-way at the moment.
I don’t dare expose them to the kind of scrutiny sending messages in would generate,
and Vyan hasn’t been getting out into the city much of late.”

Maylien turned back to me. “Aral, you’ll handle that.”

I nodded. “I wanted to go have a look around the palace anyway. Do you want me to
talk with the Lord Justicer directly, or would you prefer I deliver a note?”

“A note.” She grinned. “It’ll be like old times.”

I smiled back at her. When we’d first met, it was because she wanted me to break into
the Marchon estate and deliver a letter. Of course, the person I’d actually been delivering
the letter to was me, though I hadn’t known it at the time. And the only reason I
had to bring it to Marchon House was so that I would be forced to see events that
took place there.

“I’ll write it up in a moment,” said Maylien. “Leave it someplace Vyan can’t miss
it, and if you scare him a bit, that’s all to the good. If fear of my uncle is the
main thing keeping him from switching sides, letting him know that he’s not safe from
me either will give him something to think about. Do it tonight.”

*

I’d
slipped into and out of the palace complex dozens of times over the years. With a
perimeter more than a mile around, it was virtually impossible to secure against any
talented mage, much less a Blade. I climbed in over the wall that looked out across
the Highside streets toward the sea. There, the additional height of the bluff on
which the compound sat added about thirty feet to the climb. A bit more work, but
worth the effort to avoid repeating the path from my most recent visits to the palace.

It also had the advantage of somewhat reduced guard vigilance. Highside was a well-lit
neighborhood, heavily populated by the city’s more wealthy sort of Crown loyalist.
The patrols on its streets, both public and private, meant that any thieves or assassins
would have to run quite a gauntlet to even get to the palace. It wasn’t as vulnerable
on that
front as the back slope, but it was still easier to crack than the riverside, where
the Crown Guard focused their attention most heavily.

Getting into the palace proper presented a slightly greater challenge, but it was
still a great sprawling building, with hundreds of windows, and only moderately difficult
for someone like me to penetrate. I’d never had any call to sneak into the apartments
set aside for the Lord Justicer before, as they were at the far end of the palace
from the tower that housed the royal family. Since the Lord Justicer was second only
to the chancellor among the great officers of the kingdom under Thauvik, who acted
as his own chief marshal, I expected to encounter some real challenges once I got
close.

Imagine my surprise then as I kept finding tiny, but perfectly placed holes in the
security arrangements as I went along. Here, a patrol didn’t come quickly enough on
the heels of the one that preceded it. There, a corner that should have had an extra
magelight to expose a narrow hiding place high on the wall between two intersecting
arches remained dark. Around the corner, a ward of alarm was of an older design that
allowed it to be effectively nullified by a charm of blinding and the presence of
a Shade. It was subtle, and I don’t think anyone but a Blade could have exploited
all of the holes that I found. But for any Blade, the web of guards and wards around
the Lord Justicer was little more than a cleverly crafted illusion.

It made my bones itch. I kept looking for the teeth in the trap, but I couldn’t find
any hint of them. By the time I was one floor below my target and slipping into the
shaft of the dumbwaiter that fed the Lord Justicer’s private dining room, I wanted
nothing more than to turn right the fuck around and head for anyplace that wasn’t
so easy to get into. I had just closed the little door behind me and started up the
narrow stone chimney when I tasted a patch of something very faintly through Triss’s
senses. It was an odd sort of almost-trace like a Shade’s ghost might leave, but too
faint for me to make anything of it. It was perhaps a yard above the door.