Read Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged Online
Authors: Kelly McCullough
Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (2 page)
Penguin folks: Kat Sherbo, Anne Sowards’s wonderful assistant; production editor Michelle
Kasper; assistant production editor Jamie Snider; interior text designer Laura Corless;
publicist Brad Brownson; and my copy editor Mary Pell.
T
he
present
is
the past. Every today is built atop the mounded corpses of a thousand yesterdays.
Mine was no exception. Broken furniture and filth surrounded me in what had once been
the tavern known as the Gryphon’s Head. A place that had once been my home was now
a shattered ruin, empty save for myself, my partner, and trouble. The past calling
the present to account, as it always does.
Trouble wears a thousand faces and comes in a million shapes. In my case, trouble
had herself a new dress. It looked damn good on her, too, and no surprise there. My
trouble had a name: the baroness Maylien Dan Marchon Tal Pridu, and she always looked
good. Tall and lithe, with long brown hair and a lovely set of curves that she’d sheathed
in green velvet. My sometime lover, sometime client, and the unacknowledged heir to
the throne of Zhan was a beautiful woman…and trouble. Lots and lots of trouble.
“Have a seat.” I gestured to the open chair across from me with the half-empty bottle
I’d found in the wreckage, and whiskey slopped out over the cracked lip. “Let me pour
you a drink.”
“I don’t think either of those would be such a good idea, Aral,” said Maylien. “In
fact, I was rather hoping I could convince you to leave with me so we could have this
conversation someplace else. Someplace safe.”
“But I like it here.” I swung the bottle around to take in the whole of the dark and
empty bar, with its boarded-up windows, tumbled and broken furniture, and thick layers
of dust over everything. “It’s one of the few places I’ve ever felt at home.” I was
slurring my words. Not a good sign, but I didn’t care. “Or at least, I used to, before
whatever the hell happened here happened. Speaking of which, I’m guessing you showing
up here right now, means you know something about that.”
Maylien sighed and directed her attention to the dim shadow I cast across the table
in front of me. “Triss, is there any chance of you talking some sense into Aral? Or
do I need to play this out here?”
The shadow shifted, transforming itself from a darkened mirror of my own form into
the silhouette of a small winged dragon.
It, or rather, he, flicked his wings angrily. “If I could talk sense into Aral, would
he be sitting here drinking and waiting for the fucking Elite to show up and nail
his hide to the wall and mine with it? No, of course not. But why would he listen
to me? I’m just his familiar. It’s not like I’m right nine times out of every ten
that we disagree. Or, wait…no, it’s exactly like that.” Triss shook his head. “He’s
hopeless.”
“There you may have a point.” Maylien pushed her dueling blade to one side and sat
down on the dusty chair across from me, doing untold damage to that fancy dress. “What
do you want, Aral?”
That was a good question. What did I want? Once upon a time, I could have answered
that question with ease: I wanted to be the instrument of Justice. That was back in
the old days, when they had called me Aral Kingslayer and I was among the most feared
assassins in the world, one of the fabled Blades of Namara, the goddess of justice.
But that
was before the other gods murdered her and ordered her followers put to the sword.
For a long time after that, what I most wanted was to turn back time to the days when
Namara yet lived, to restore the temple, and to return my friends and fellows to life.
To undestroy my world. Some days I still wanted that more than anything. But life
wasn’t as simple as I’d once thought it was. Or, maybe, I wasn’t as simple. These
days I couldn’t even mourn the me I’d once been without second-guessing everything.
Fuck it. I took another drink, careful to avoid the jagged edge. The whiskey tasted
of smoke and honey as it burned its way down my throat. Damn but it was good. Even
so, I sighed and set the bottle down, because I didn’t really want to drink myself
unconscious either. Not the way I would have a year or two ago.
I snorted, then looked Maylien square in the eyes. “I honestly have no fucking idea
what I want, but why don’t you start by telling me what happened here.”
The Gryphon’s Head was a sleazy tavern in the depths of one of Tien’s worst slums,
or it had been anyway. Now it was a boarded-up ruin. For years after the fall of the
temple I’d lived in a rented room over the stables. I worked out of the taproom then,
paying my bar bill by playing the shadow jack—a freelancer on the wrong side of the
law. But that me, Aral the jack, was gone, too. Not as dead as the Kingslayer maybe,
but definitely sleeping.
“Well?” I prompted, when Maylien didn’t answer me right away.
“My uncle happened here,” she said finally, her voice bitter.
Maylien’s uncle was Thauvik Tal Pridu, current king of Zhan and successor to the one
I’d slain for my goddess all those years ago. Not one of my biggest admirers. Despite
shedding no tears over the assassination of his half brother, Thauvik had set the
largest price on my head of any of my enemies. He seemed to feel that letting me live
after I’d
removed his predecessor from the throne might set a bad example. His involvement told
me all that I needed to know about the destruction of the Gryphon’s Head.
“What you mean,” I said, “but are entirely too polite to say, is that
I
happened here. The king would never have even known this place existed if I hadn’t
made it my home.”
“My
uncle
did this, not you—” Maylien began hotly.
But I cut her off. “He did it because of me, because he wanted to punish those who’d
once given me shelter, whether they knew who I was or not.”
She shook her head. “He did it because he’s a monster, Aral. Just like my father and
my sister. In case you hadn’t noticed, the poisoned apple doesn’t often fall far from
the Pridu family tree.”
The shadow of a dragon suddenly rose up between us, flapping his wings angrily. “How
about we actually
do
something about the problem instead of sitting here and playing
guiltier than thou
until the king’s men show up to cart us all off to the headsman? I know that’s less
dark and brooding and ‘oh the world is an awful place’ than either of you like to
do things, but I’ve had about all I can take of that shit for the moment.”
Maylien’s answering grin was pained but genuine. “You sounded just like Heyin there.”
I didn’t smile, but I had to admit that Triss might have a point. Heyin, too. The
chief of Maylien’s baronial guard and her oldest friend, Heyin didn’t like me much
at all. That didn’t make him one bit less wise. Quite the contrary. He disliked me
because he felt I made a wholly inappropriate bedmate for his baroness. He was absolutely
right. Maylien had more than enough strikes against her in the eyes of her fellow
nobles without adding a broken-down ex-assassin to the list.
First off, she was a mage, which meant she had certain advantages that undermined
the entire central structure of the Zhani hierarchy—the formal duel of precedence
by which anyone of noble blood could challenge any relative for their titles. Secondly,
her brand of magery was
particularly scandalous. She’d once been a member of the Rovers, a traveling order
dedicated to keeping the roads free of brigandage. She’d spent most of her formative
years as a homeless wanderer rubbing elbows with the sorts of people most Zhani nobles
wouldn’t deign to spit on.
Just then, a harsh squawk sounded from the kitchen—where both Maylien and I had entered.
It was followed a moment later by the advent of a miniature gryphon by the name of
Bontrang. The little tabby-patterned gryphinx was Maylien’s familiar and he flew straight
to his mistress. Landing on the thick pad sewn into the shoulder of her dress, he
mrped worriedly in her ear.
She nodded and rose from her seat. “The guard is on its way, Aral. We have to leave.
Or, I do, at least. I can’t draw the shadows around me like a cloak the way you can.”
She looked pointedly at Triss. “Will you come with me? I can tell you more of what
I know about what happened here if you give me the time.”
“Is Jerik dead?” I asked. The owner of the Gryphon’s Head was…well, not exactly a
friend, but I owed him.
“Not the last I heard.”
“Will you help me find him?”
She nodded. “I know where he’s being held.”
“I’ll come.”
*
Jerik
looked terrible, sallow and pale with loose skin on his cheeks and neck where he’d
lost weight, and red blotches all across the old scar tissue where his left eye and
much of his scalp had been ripped away by a gryphon. The fact that he was upside down,
or rather, that I was and he wasn’t, didn’t help things. No one looks good that way.
There’s just no getting him out of there,
I mindspoke to Triss.
Not from here, no. We’ll have to try another route, but why don’t we talk about it
later, someplace a bit less hazardous?
Point.
I bent double and caught hold of the rope looped around my right ankle, hand-over-handing
my way up the few yards that put me in the shadow of the overhang. I’d set a pair
of spikes into the gaps between blocks there. Anyone watching from a distance would
have seen little more than the merging of one shadow into another, larger one. That’s
if they saw anything at all in the dim light of the waning moon.
The greatest advantage the Blades of Namara possessed was our partnership with the
Shades, elemental creatures of darkness, bonded both to our souls and our shadows.
Semi-corporeal shapechangers, they were capable of expanding into a cloud of darkness
to hide their human companions. In a world where spells cast their own light for those
with the eyes to see it, a Shade’s penumbra was the closest thing there was to true
invisibility. Triss had shifted away from my eyes so that I could see Jerik for myself,
but other than that I was entirely contained and concealed within an enveloping cloud
of darkness.
Once I had a grip on the line connecting my spikes, I reached down and slipped my
ankle free. Then, bracing myself between two of the corbels that supported the overhang,
I started working the spikes free. Whether I ended up coming back this way or not,
I didn’t want to leave any traces for the guards to find.
