Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (27 page)

Do you know what’s hardest for me? The fucking uncertainty. When she lived, I was
her instrument, and I always knew exactly what I had to do and who I was. After, when
they had slain her and I was a ruin, I knew that she would hate what I had become
and what I had to do to live. It was a dark mirror of the way things had been before.
Now, now when I am once again trying to follow the path she set me on, I don’t know
if what I am doing is what I should be doing. I only know that I have to try.

And I know that you will succeed. I can’t give you your certainty back, but I can
be certain for you. I am so proud of what you just did.

I looked down into the shadowy green depths where I could still see the empty bottle
lying on the stone floor.
It’s funny. It was hard, it’s hard every time, but not because of the booze itself.
Hell, I hated the stuff when I started drinking, and just did it to get away from
the efik, since I
knew
that would kill me. No, it’s hard because it’s come to represent the things I started
drinking to replace, if that makes any sense.

Triss didn’t say anything, but I felt shadowy wings settle around my shoulders briefly.
After a few minutes I got up and went back to the amphora, rummaging around for something
to eat. I found salted pork and rice cakes wrapped in oilcloth, and a small skin of
beer that didn’t tempt me at all—stuff tasted like horse piss at the best of times.
I poured that into the sea and tucked the skin back into the jar, wishing for perhaps
the first time in my life that I had some tea and a pot to steep it in. Clearly I
was going to have to make changes to the way I stored my emergency supplies, since
only a fool or a suicide would willingly drink the waters of Tien straight. Even the
deepest wells tasted faintly of the sewers.

Once I’d eaten as much of the pork and rice cakes as I could stand without a drink,
I pissed into the sea and checked the tide level. It was going down. Soon I’d be able
to float the basket that held my clothes out through the gap. I could have swum out
now if I had to, or even at the highest of tides, but my gear would get soaked in
the process, and it would be nice if I only had to wash the salt out of my hair and
hide. While I waited I dug through my trick bag and the amphorae to see how much coin
I had available. I needed to shop for new swords since Devin wasn’t in a position
to give me his yet. Not without the Kitsune noticing they were gone, and nothing good
could come of that. It was a good thing that Maylien and several of the others I had
worked for in the last two years were generous, or I’d have had to play the thief
at some poor armorer’s shop. It wouldn’t be the first time I was thus reduced, nor
probably the last, but every time I did it, it was another small betrayal of my goddess’s
memory.

*

“Perhaps
this one?” The smith showed me yet another Zhani dueling blade, the fifteenth I’d
seen over the last hour.

The steel was excellent and the weight and length were
both good. There was another just like it in the rack, and I might even be able to
fit them into the sheaths I already owned. Still, I turned it aside with a shake of
my head and a feigned yawn, part of the role I’d put on for my shopping. I wanted
him to remember me as a pain-in-the-ass of the lesser nobility, not the vaguely foreign-looking
fellow who came in knowing exactly what he wanted and bought something quite out of
the ordinary.

“No, those won’t do at all. I’ve got dozens like them. Oh, never mind, this is getting
me nowhere.” I turned toward the door.

“Wait,” said the smith, who’d been eyeing my obviously fat purse avariciously for
quite some time, “don’t go yet. If you’re really bored with the usual, I might be
able to find something a bit more out of the ordinary.”

I’d picked this armorer because I knew him and his stock well. Though that was from
back in the days of my old face, so he didn’t recognize me. He did good work, he didn’t
overprice it, and he mucked around with odd foreign designs now and then, both to
work on his skills and for the simple joy of it. He took the dueling blade and set
it back in the cabinet with the others, carefully locking it as he did so.

“Just stay right there.” He ducked through the door into the back of his shop, though
he left it open behind so he could hear the bell. A minute or two later he returned
wheeling another little cabinet on a handcart, which he brought around the counter.
“Don’t get much call for this stuff, so there’s no point taking up precious space
out front. Hang on.”

He unlocked the cabinet and opened it. Lined up in hanging slots along the back were
a score or so of mixed swords. Hangers on the backs of the doors held more, along
with some bigger and stranger knives. I started poking around, first pulling out a
forward curving Kadeshi cane knife, then, a hook-ended Sylvani dragon sword. As I
worked my way through the offered blades, I kept up a mumbled monologue.

“No. Hmm, nice. Nope. Maybe…too heavy. What’s this thing? That’s a little odd.”

Finally, after going through about half the lot I touched
the hilt of a short, single-edged, lightly curved sword in the modern Varyan pattern.
This was why I had come here, a sword modeled after those my goddess gave her Blades.
Though he obviously hated the idea, Devin had known as well as I did that going up
against the Kitsune with mortal steel was suicide and that I would need to use his
swords to have any chance at victory. Our own fight had driven the point home hard.

That meant I needed to get back into practice, as it had been seven long years since
I last used their like. And since Devin couldn’t yet lend me his, I had to find my
own swords, and here they were. I lifted the first one free of its hanger and brought
it up into a Zhani guard position twisting it this way and that as I did so.

“Hmm, now this is interesting.” My words rang strange and tinny in my own ears and
the hilt felt like I had caught magelightning in my hand, sending a series of little
shocks of memory up my arm and straight into my heart. I
wanted
this sword. “This is Aveni, right?”

The smith managed not to roll his eyes or call me an idiot, but I could see it cost
him. “Varyan, actually, but you’re very close, my lord. Do you like it?”

I stepped back so I could run it through a couple of Zhani cuts and thrusts. “The
weight’s a little off.”
No, it damned well wasn’t, this was what a sword was
supposed
to feel like.
“And I’m not sure about the grip.”
Like hell.
“But yes, this might be what I’m looking for.”
Wantwantwant!
“Does it come with a sheath?”

The smith nodded. “It does, and a custom belt, since it’s actually a double sheath.
The Varyans use a two-sword style, so these blades are always sold in pairs.”

“Really? How odd.” The style had been adapted from half-true reports of the way Namara’s
Blades fought, just as the swords themselves had been. Even in Varya, the home of
the temple, we were not often seen or spoken to by any but our own.

“It sounds like a sneaky way to roll up an extra sale.” I started to put the sword
back on its hanger, then paused, and
took its mate out instead, weighing both in my hands and pretending I had no idea
how I ought to hold them.
Need!
“Oh, what the hell, it’d be different at least. How much are they?”

The smith quoted a ridiculous price, and I responded with a scandalous counteroffer,
and we went on from there. In the end, I got my swords and the smith got more than
they were worth here in Zhan but far less than I’d been willing to pay. Once I’d forked
over most of my cash, I put them on. It felt very strange to settle the cross-draw
belt around my waist and carry the weight of the sword on my hips. I resolved that
the first thing I needed to do was slice away three quarters of the seaming along
one side of each sheath so I could rig them for back-draw.

They’re good swords,
Triss sent as I stepped out into the street.
They cast a shadow very like the swords of the goddess, though they’re in the wrong
place right now. Add in the proper grays underneath your poncho, and I very nearly
feel like I live in a Blade’s shadow again.
He’d been strangely silent all during my shopping, and I wondered if this was why.

I very nearly feel like a Blade again,
I responded.
Isn’t it odd that it took trying to put someone on a throne to get me here?
I turned into a tinker’s shop then to pick up a small hammer, a punch, and an awl—the
tools I’d need to rebuild my new sheaths. I also bought half a dozen buckles, some
metal rings, leather strapping, and a bottle of oris juice to darken everything.
Do you think I should set them up for hip-draw like my old sheaths, or shoulder-draw
like a proper blade?

Hip. Shoulder would feel more natural. But I like the way hip-draw allows you to conceal
your weapons with the simple addition of a cape instead of having to rehang them on
your rig.

Point.
It also felt a bit like the reversal of my own personal flag—a universal sign of
something not right, and since I would never be quite right again…
Next a visit with Captain Fei so I can bring her up to date. Then I’ll need to
hang my pack, collect some supplies, and we can head for the country to find Maylien.

So, we’re going to trust Devin then?
Triss sounded dubious.

No. I’m never going to trust Devin again, but this might give us a chance to shut
Thauvik down short of a full-scale civil war.

Do you think Maylien will agree?

I don’t know, Triss, I really don’t, but I have to try.

*

“There.”
I tapped the last rivet into place on the second sheath. “Let’s give them a test.”

The sheaths weren’t originally designed to hang down my back, so I’d added straps
to hold the swords in place while upside down. I’d also opened up the seams that ran
along the back of the blades for all but the last couple of inches. That allowed me
to draw by lowering them so that the tips cleared and then pivoting them free of the
sheaths instead of having to draw them full length like a sword hanging on your hip.
I’d also added leather loops at the top and bottom so that they could be fastened
to the steel rings of my Blade’s harness without jingling.

I rigged that now, setting the harness up as though I was about to go on a mission,
with knives fastened to the straps on my chest and my trick bag hanging on my right
hip. Then, because I couldn’t resist, I looked into the nearby stream to see the effect.

A dragon’s shadow looked back at me, occluding my reflection. “You look fine, every
inch a Blade. What you need is practice.”

And he was right. So, I headed back into the middle of the little clearing where we’d
set up our camp—a poachers’ site Maylien had shown me once upon a time. I took a series
of long slow breaths to ground myself. Though I’d done a bit of practice with my new
swords already, this was different, more real. I was about to try a proper Blade sword
form for the first time in seven years.

Now.

I popped the thumb releases on my swords and pivoted them around with a snap—a slight
modification I’d had to add to account for my reversed sheaths. Seven years…and not
one of them mattered here in the place where my soul would always live—the flow of
the swords from instant to instant. Oh, I slipped up and made minor mistakes—I was
rusty and my steel was new and unfamiliar—but the heart of the thing felt exactly
as it always had.

I was home.

My ghosts were there with me, both the living and the dead. Master Kelos leaned against
a tree and I could feel his disapproval with every slipup. Siri stood silently waiting
her turn, a pillar of stone, practicing her art even as I practiced mine—as deadly
serious on the field as she was wickedly irreverent off. Loris frowned at me from
a tower that had long since fallen, and I knew that he wished I would show his lessons
the same dedication I gave to sword and shadow. Jax, my onetime fiancée, looked promise
from the sidelines. Devin was there, too, laughing with me at the start but closed
and withdrawn as I finished my forms.

It hurt me now, as it had not when I was young and oblivious. He was my best friend
once, and might have been more had he had the inclination. But he had not, so we had
mostly commiserated about our studies and our problems with women, which I preferred,
though not exclusively as Devin did. There was Alinthide, a teacher I had loved with
a mad schoolboy crush, Jax, whom I nearly married, Siri, who bedded many but favored
none of us, and others who left memories less vivid. What had gone wrong between me
and Devin? Was it purely the jealousy that Jax had described so starkly when we had
met again last summer? Or, was there some inherent flaw in his soul that made him
betray me as he had our goddess?

I had a thousand memories of Devin. Hell, if you divided my world into before and
after, with the fall of the temple as the inflection point, the Aral who lived in
the kingdom of before had very few memories without him. Nowhere in them could I see
the flaw, nor more than normal jealousy.

Maybe that was the hardest lesson of them all, that nothing separated us, that the
potential to do what Devin had done lived within my own heart as well. Did we all
walk the line between man and monster, deciding whether or not to cross it each and
every time the opportunity arose? It was simultaneously a profoundly uncomfortable
thought and one that freed something deep down in my soul, something I hadn’t even
known was under lock and key.

I finished my last form then, feeling physically much closer to the old me than I
had in years, though it would take many more hours to fully recover my feel for Varyan-style
swords. I slipped them back into their sheaths, closed the snaps, and bowed deeply
to the memory of my goddess.