Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (24 page)

Devin’s face twisted bitterly. “Gods above, but I’m going to enjoy this.”

Good-bye, Triss, we had a good run.

We did. I love you, Aral.

T
here
is a peace to knowing you’re about to die, a peace I never would have expected to
find there. It is the peace of surrender, of knowing that you will never again have
to fight for anything. No struggle, no pain, no nothing.

I took a deep breath rich with jasmine and osmanthus and surrendered myself to that
peace. Peace all too brief. I waited for the blow to come, for Devin to relieve me
of the weight of suffering I had borne since the day the temple fell. My only regret
was that Triss must die with me.

I waited…and waited, and waited some more. The blow didn’t come. Devin just stood
there, swords in hand, glaring at me, poised to strike, but unstriking.

Until, finally, he threw his swords down at my feet. “I hate you so much, Aral, I
can’t even express it. Unfortunately, I need you, too. At least for a little while.”

Relief mixed with a strange sort of disappointment in my heart. Triss would live,
but so must I. “You really did come to talk then? That wasn’t another lie.”

Devin shook his head. “I know you don’t have any reason
to trust what I say, but somehow, even now, I had hoped that you would.”

He turned away, leaving his swords at my feet and his back to me. I could have killed
him then, easily. He had to know that. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t. Maybe because
despite everything that had happened between us, he was still the best friend of my
childhood and somewhere in my heart he always would be.

I sighed. “Well then, say what you came to say and get out of my life. Oh, and pick
up your damned swords and put them away. I’m not going to put you out of your misery,
and you shame the memory of the goddess by leaving them in the dirt like that.”

Devin’s back tensed like he’d been struck, but then he took a deep breath and visibly
relaxed his muscles. “I need your help.”

“You
what
? What possible reason could I have for helping you, Devin? You’ve betrayed everything
that ever mattered to me. I wouldn’t cross the street to spit on you, if you were
on fire and that was the one thing you needed to save your fucking miserable excuse
for a life.”

Devin turned then and put a toe under his nearest sword, flipping it up into his hand,
where he flicked the dirt off before sheathing it over his shoulder. He repeated the
performance with the other sword, so that the hilts stuck up on either side of his
head. Then he crossed his arms and glared at me. All without saying a word.

Zass slid forward then. “Triss, Aral, I won’t make excuses for what happened when
the temple fell. All I can say is that you weren’t there. Nor will I excuse or defend
our behavior the last time we met. Devin has done what he thought was right.”

I hissed involuntarily.

“But that doesn’t matter,” continued Zass. “Not to what we have to say to you now.
Please hear this out. That’s all I ask.”

I wanted to walk away then, but I couldn’t help
remembering Zass breaking Devin’s bowstring in a moment when I might have otherwise
died. I might not owe Devin shit, but Zass was another thing entirely. It was not
easy for a familiar to go against their bond-mate’s will, but he had done so for me.

I nodded. “All right. Spill. Start with why I should care about helping you.”

“It might save the life of your little queen in waiting,” said Devin.

That got my attention. “Go on.”

“It’s the Kitsune. She’s quite, quite mad.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. I had a little encounter with her recently and it
ended very disturbingly.”

“In Ashvik’s tomb,” replied Devin. “I know. She told me she’d put you to bed with
the last king since you seemed to get such pleasure out of sleeping with the next
queen and she’d heard that you go both ways.” Devin looked at his feet. “I wanted
to go pull you out, but she told me she’d kill me if I did.”

“She’s good enough to make the threat stick?” asked Triss.

Devin nodded. “More than good enough, and I’ve no doubt she meant it, either. She
hates me. Actually, she hates pretty much everybody but Kelos—damn him for abandoning
us—and he’s not…” Devin trailed off, and suddenly looked very much younger and more
vulnerable than he had at any time since our earliest days together. “Look, this is
going to be a long story. Can we agree to stop with all the glaring and hating for
a little while and just have a cup of efik somewhere like the old days?”

“No. I don’t think we can.” It hurt me more than I would have expected to say that,
and not only because of the thought of efik—so sharp and strong that I had to suppress
a shiver from wanting it. I understood and even shared some of what I thought Devin
must be feeling right now—the whipsaw of emotions jerking back and forth between love
and hate—but I couldn’t let him back inside my guard. “You’ve made choices that closed
that door forever. I’ll sit with you and
listen to what you have to say, but I will not drink or break bread with you. Not
now. Not ever again.”

He smiled a bitter ironic smile at that. “Allies if I can convince you, but never
friends?”

“Pretty much.”

“Good to know where we stand,” he said.

“Not good,” I corrected, “but there’s no other way.”

Devin took a deep breath and then another, reasserting discipline in the way we had
both been taught. Emotion left his face, replaced with the stillness of the professional
killer.

“Let’s start this again,” said Devin. “I came to you because I need help with Nuriko
Shadowfox. If you don’t help me, she’s going to use Thauvik to kill an awful lot of
people, and your royal lover is right at the top of the list.”

Before I could say something angry, he held up a hand. “I know you have no reason
to take me at my word for that, which means I’m going to have to tell you enough of
the story to convince you. That’s going to take a while and, given the noise of our
recent clash, I don’t think this is the place for that. Will you take me somewhere
of your choice and hear me out? It should probably be someplace close. I’ve bought
myself a fair piece of time, but the Kitsune
will
start to wonder where I’ve gone at some point.”

He was right about the noise we’d made, and already I could hear the approach of people
from the great house. Either the earl’s guard checking on the noises in his garden,
or Maylien’s sent against my express request. I nodded. “Follow me.”

Triss, shroud me up.

Done.

Do you believe a word he says?

We’ll see.
Triss gave a mental shrug.
The Kitsune
is
crazy. Maybe the rest follows from that. If nothing else, I want to hear more about
the Kitsune and Kelos. That’s information that we may not be able to get anywhere
else.

The Earl of Anaryun’s estate stood on the Kanathean Hill, not far from Marchon House,
and right off the royal preserve with its hidden Elite chapter house. Not a great
neighborhood for any Blade to have a quiet conversation, not with the stone dogs swimming
about under the turf. So I laid a shadow trail for Devin to follow that led east into
the still-busy construction zone where they were rebuilding the Old Mews neighborhood
out of the ashes of the previous one, another legacy of our last encounter. There,
I found us a partially completed tenement, and headed up into the skeleton of the
upper floors. In a room with a half-laid floor and two walls I dropped my shroud and
waited for Devin to catch up. He was less than a minute behind me.

Devin dropped his shroud as well. “Good spot. High up, plenty of room to sail-jump
and glide away in any direction if we’re surprised. The only real downside is that
we run the risk of being silhouetted against the night sky in a couple of places.
I approve.” He stripped off his sword rig and threw himself flat on his back on the
boards to stare up into the stars—a pose I remembered from a thousand nights spent
talking the moon down. “Sit,” he said, “it’s a long story, even if we haven’t enough
time for me to tell you all of it.”

I tucked myself into the corner where the two walls met, while Triss slid over to
one of the open sides where he could keep a lookout. Zass joined him there and they
began to converse quietly in the way of shadows, a sort of barely audible susurration,
like gentle waves hissing across the sand of a distant beach. Again, I was reminded
of so many similar moments in my boyhood, though the smells were different here, with
fresh cut wood and the sharp notes of drying stucco taking the place of the incense
and garden smells of Namara’s temple grounds.

“How about you just skip to the point?” I suggested when Devin didn’t start right
away. I didn’t want to spend one instant longer with him than I had to.

“I can’t, not without some setup, not if I want you to really believe me.”

“Fine. Talk. I’ll listen.”

“You know the tale of how Nuriko joined our order and became the Shadowfox, so let
me skip forward to the night she had her falling out with the goddess, since that’s
where
the story we learned as boys grows sketchy. I don’t know all the true details now,
but I’ve heard Kelos and Nuriko talk about it enough to get a feeling for what happened.
It seems that after killing her third or fourth in a series of kings and khans in
a few short months, Nuriko decided the entire idea of government was corrupt.”

“I heard something similar from Kelos not all that long ago,” I said.

“Did you?” Devin turned his head my way. “I hadn’t heard that he’d talked to you.”

“It would have been shortly before he departed Heaven’s Reach for points far away.
I doubt he told anyone about it.”

“So, you had something to do with that, too? Why does that not surprise me?” Devin
frowned, then rubbed his forehead as though it pained him. “No. Never mind. It really
doesn’t matter right now.

“What matters is the Kitsune. She went to Namara and outlined her ideas about the
inherent corruption of any kind of government. It sounds like she also demanded that
she and her fellow Blades be given orders to kill every official and noble in the
eleven kingdoms and beyond from the lowliest village headman right up to the Sylvani
empress on her emerald throne. When Namara failed to agree to the Kitsune’s scheme,
she resigned, rather spectacularly, as you well know. You’ve heard what happened after
that.”

I nodded. “She vanished for a while, then took up a career as a paid assassin. Warfare
with our order followed, and she won every contest up until the one where Kelos is
supposed to have killed her. That’s where things get murky.”

“Tell me about it,” Devin agreed. “I never got a straight answer from either one of
them about what happened that night. I do know that Kelos really did bring her sword
back to the temple, and that they didn’t speak again for more than twenty years afterward.
But apparently, something she’d said that night got under his skin and he couldn’t
shake free of it. Because, every so often, in the last few years he’d go off on the
inherent corruption of government thing himself, along with Nuriko, and it was clear
they’d been having the
argument for a very long time. She insisted that the whole idea of one person being
set above their fellows is, in and of itself, immoral, while he argued that it wasn’t
the idea of government that had to go, but government as we know it.”

“Didn’t you find it the least bit odd that they were working for the Son of Heaven
with that kind of attitude?” I asked. I knew from my own conversations with Kelos
what his plans had been on that front, or, at least, what he’d claimed they were,
but I wanted to know what Devin thought about it.

“Not really. I figured it was all hot air and rage over being enslaved by the Son,
a way to pretend that something could be done about the chains that bind us to him.
The only thing they ever agreed on was that the current system needed to burn to the
ground. But they weren’t the only ones who had plans about what they were going to
do once they shook off the Son’s control. That whole order of the assassin mage thing
I asked you to join the last time we met, is mine. It does exist, but for now it’s
more idea than action. None of us are planning to serve the Son forever, and we’re
all working on what to do after he’s gone.”

Triss raised his head from where he’d been quietly whispering with Zass. “What
does
bind you to the Son?”

Devin grimaced. “The nastiest magical oath you’ve ever heard.”

“There’s always a way around those,” I said. Witness Devin’s betrayal of Namara.

“Not this one, at least not while the current Son is alive. It’s much more than your
usual magical binding. It draws on the authority of Shan as Emperor of Heaven, and
the Son as his mortal representative. It’s as much a thing of divine power as it is
of magic.” He reached over and touched the hilt of one of his swords. “Like these.
You can’t see the magic, but you can feel it in your bones whenever you even consider
breaking it.”