Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (20 page)

While my lance of picked volunteers and I waited for our chance at the king and slowly
broiled in our armor, a steady stream of royal engineers and artificers flowed back
and forth across the bridge. They were erecting a high platform at one end of the
island’s temporarily closed and cleared market square. The goal was to give people
as far away as the riverbanks a good view of Thauvik and his Jade Council at work,
while still keeping them too far away for anything like a reasonable bow shot. In
addition to the six lances guarding the bridge, other Crown Guard units and officers
of the Elite were scattered all up and down the bank and across the nearer rooftops
to keep an eye out for any longer-ranged trouble.

The only people allowed across the bridges to Sanjin
Island beside the engineers and artificers were soldiers of the Crown and nobles of
the realm. There weren’t half so many of the latter as there had been at the original
council meeting. The holidays and ceremonies that had drawn the rural and outlying
nobles into the city had long since passed, and many of them couldn’t be summoned
back to Tien on the single day’s notice the king had given for this restaging of the
Winter-Round meeting. Among the few who did make it was a young clan chief named Prixia
Dan Xaia. The one servant her invitation allowed her was a tiny beautiful young woman
no one would ever suspect of being a deadly knife fighter.

Prixia had been much in the city of late, settling affairs related to her late father’s
holdings. At least, that was the official story given out to explain her presence
so far from home while she worked with Heyin and Maylien on plans for the civil war
we were all hoping to avert. Neither she nor her servant had so much as looked at
me or her half brother when they passed by my lance. She and several other nobles
who had gone over to Maylien were there to provide us with a small reserve force on
the island in case of an emergency. Another group of Prixia’s chosen fighters had
doffed their uniforms and positioned themselves among the many onlookers gathering
on the southern bank of the river—the palace side.

Shortly after the bells of Shan sounded the hour past noon, the gates of the palace
opened and the royal cortege began its march down to the island. My lance and I could
see the gates from the bridge, though buildings hid the actual procession for perhaps
five hundred yards from there until it turned onto Sanjin Bridge Road. The streets
between the palace and the island had been carefully cleared of any traffic, though
citizens had been allowed to take up places along the verge after being checked for
weapons.

The king’s cortege soon made the turn, following behind a column of Crown Guards and
flanked by a dozen of the Elite. Watching them come straight down the path the lance
and I had taken to reach the bridge, I was glad we had such
a hot bright day so early in the season despite the heat and the misery it had inflicted
on Triss. Even if Devin and the Kitsune had concealed themselves within the group
around the king, they wouldn’t have any warning of my presence. The sun would long
since have burned away every vestige of my shadow trail.

As the king and his company came closer and closer to my position at the center of
the bridge, I tried to guess what was going to go wrong with the plan. Something always
did. That was practically the first rule of plans. If I was lucky, it would be something
minor. But, just as the column of guards started to pass my lance, the sounds of a
disturbance came from somewhere at the back of the column. Vyan’s promised distraction
was arriving right on time. Heads turned and the whole procession slowed at the exact
moment the king passed in front of me.

I slammed my right fist into my breastplate right above my heart; the first half of
the royal salute. I felt like I had all the time in the world as I snapped my arm
forward, using the second part of the salute to flick the knife free of my wrist sheath.
The blade dragged against the straps of my vambrace as expected, but only for an instant.
Then it slid neatly into my hand as I continued the motion of my salute. Only, instead
of extending my fist at shoulder height, I flipped the knife around and stepped forward,
driving the blade in between Thauvik’s ribs. I stood on his left, and the knife went
in perfectly, punching straight into his heart.

That’s
when things went wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. I felt it first through the hilt
of my knife. I
knew
the blade had gone home properly, and yet it couldn’t have. When you stab someone
in the heart with a knife or sword, you can feel it beating through the hilt. It’s
a subtle thing and brief, easily missed the first couple of times, but after a while
you become attuned to it and the feeling is unmistakable. But there was no pulse here,
no indication that Thauvik was a living breathing person.

I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t realize what it was until the king turned
and smiled at me. That’s when
I knew that the reason Thauvik didn’t feel like a living man was that he wasn’t. He
was one of the restless dead. Risen, probably. Like his niece Sumey, sustained in
a human appearing state by frequently bathing in fresh blood, and, quite, quite immune
to my mortal steel.

H
ow
do you kill a dead man? It’s a ridiculous question, and yet, it was the only one
that mattered in that moment. Unfortunately, the answer was that you couldn’t. Not
with the resources I had to hand. Though my knife had pierced Thauvik’s heart, it
had no effect on a corpse that walked.

He leaned toward me then, still smiling and very deliberately drew a breath. “You
must be the Kingslayer.”

Even as he spoke, the Lord Justicer shouted a bit prematurely, “The usurper is dead,
long live Queen Maylien!” That was going to cost him.

Thauvik ignored Vyan, continuing to speak to me. “Nuriko warned me that you’d been
sniffing around, but I hadn’t expected to get the chance to meet you so soon. It’s
funny, you don’t look at all like the posters.”

But I wasn’t really listening anymore. I was acting. I took a deep breath, filling
my lungs even as the king swept his arm in a gesture that took in my whole lance and
said loudly and clearly, “Assassin! Seize him. Seize them all, and the Lord Justicer,
too.”

With a jerk Thauvik pulled himself free of my knife and stepped back, vanishing behind
an onrushing curtain of guards. Xaran leaped in front of me, trying to cover me, but
I was already in motion and hating myself for what I was about to do. Without turning,
I lunged backward. The coping atop the low stone railing of the bridge hit me in the
backs of the thighs and I flipped over, dropping backward into the river—abandoning
my men. Failing them just as I had thus far failed Jerik.

As I hit the water and started to sink into the dark and icy depths, I felt Triss
jolt back into full awareness. My ceremonial armor took me down fast. Triss and I
worked frantically to cut away the straps holding it in place while I twisted around
to get my feet underneath me before I hit bottom. The water was deep and fast and
I touched down in the muck somewhere under the arch of the bridge. That probably saved
my life as a chain of fiery green links lashed through the water above, drawing a
sizzling line of bubbles behind it.

Other spells struck around me as well, driving bright spikes of orange and purple
deep into the river with explosive results as water flashed into steam. I did my best
to ignore it all and kept working on the straps. I couldn’t hold my breath for too
much longer, despite training that included lowering my heart rate and slowing my
breathing to aid in concealment and ambush. Triss and I had barely gotten the breastplate
and greaves off when I felt a stirring in the silt surrounding my feet and calves.

Up!
I sent as I kicked off, and Triss pushed hard, too, helping me break free of the
thick sediment only just in time.

Something huge and heavy smashed into the balls of my feet, striking at an oblique
angle and sending me tumbling even as it threw me up and away from the river bottom.
My right leg went numb almost to the knee and I lost my sense of up and down when
the current caught me again.

Stone dog!
sent Triss.

You don’t say.
I wrenched off my helmet, leaving only
my vambraces and the cuisses that guarded my thighs to drag me down.

He ignored my sarcasm.
Yes, and there are more of them churning around in the muck down there. If we fall
back to the river’s floor, they’ll tear you to pieces.

If I don’t get to the surface and grab another breath soon, it won’t matter one way
or the other.

Triss tugged at my right ear.
Up.

I turned that way and started to kick—Triss had sliced my boots away with the greaves,
which helped.
You sure?

That’s where the sun is.
Then he flowed out and around me, briefly covering me in a cool second skin that
felt like iced silk, before pushing farther outward to enshroud me in shadow.

I could feel the weight of my remaining armor tugging at me, but it wasn’t enough
to keep me from breaking the surface and sucking in a huge lungful of air. I couldn’t
see with my own eyes because of the shroud, and borrowing Triss’s sense didn’t really
help at the moment. The bright afternoon light rendered him very nearly as blind as
I was, at least above the water. As soon as I’d drawn breath I let my armor pull me
under again, but that wasn’t fast enough to keep us both from catching the edge of
another lash of the green chain—a favorite spell of the Elite.

Triss shrieked into my mind as the spell fire burned a track through his cloud form.
Then he collapsed back into my shadow, unshrouding me. I swam down and away from the
light that I could now see filtering through from above. Working with the current,
I tried to put a weight of water between me and the Elite. I don’t think it would
have protected me for very long. But when the next couple of spellbursts struck around
me there was a great stirring in the waters of the river as
something
rose up from the bottom with a terrible roar that I could feel in my bones. A great
cloud of silt came with it and I had only a brief impression of a huge and scaly horror
before the roiling muck once again blotted out all sight.

Triss?
I mindspoke.

But I got no response and my bond-mate’s presence felt quiet and far away. Before
I could send so much as another word, something that simultaneously felt as big and
solid as a runaway cart and as soft and supple as a sheet of silk caught me. It dragged
me through the water first this way and then that until I lost all sense of direction.
After perhaps a double score of beats of my racing heart I felt the pressure change
around me, as though I had left the main course of the river and entered a much narrower
channel. The pulse beating in my temples became a slamming trip-hammer and I clenched
my jaws and pinched my nose, trying desperately to control the reflex that would have
me breathing in the churning water. If my ordeal didn’t end soon…

But just when I thought I couldn’t bear the pressure any longer and that I would have
to draw breath no matter the cost, the waters calmed and light returned. Magelight
now instead of sunlight. I stroked toward the light and my head broke the surface
a moment later.

Breathe! For several long moments that was all I could do, and damn me if the Elite
or some other enemy came. But in time the need passed, and I got a chance to look
around. I was treading water in a clear pool like a small reservoir, perhaps twenty
feet on a side and ten deep. It was housed in a cavern-like room half again the size.
Overhead, the stones of the barrel vault were studded with a dozen green and blue
magelights arranged in a shape like a Zhani glyph, though of such an ancient mode
that I couldn’t read it. More lights clustered around the open end of a passage that
entered the big room several feet above the level of the water.

A ladder was carved into the tank’s wall on that side and I swam to it now. But, when
I reached a hand out to grab the nearest rung, the water pushed me back and something
like a slow geyser bubbled up in front of me. It rose into a column and then rose
again, twisting and broadening itself to become the bearded face of a venerable river
dragon peering down at me with a somewhat troubled expression.

Now what am I going to do with you?
it asked in a mildly irritated mind voice that seemed strangely familiar.

Triss?
I called, hoping the river dragon wouldn’t hear.

Coming, give me a few minutes more.
Again, he sounded faint and far away.

You needn’t summon him to defend you,
sent the river dragon.
I won’t harm you. Not if I can find any better solution, anyway.

“Stop frightening the boy, Shanglun. It’s not kind.” The voice came from somewhere
behind the dragon, and echoed the familiar tones. “You can let them out of the tank
now.”