Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (35 page)

S
unrise
, the devourer of shadows. Even before first light, I could feel it prickling at the
edges of my shroud like the sharp feet of a thousand hungry locusts slowly shifting
in their hungry sleep. By the time the sun blossomed above the waters of the bay,
the locusts had long since begun to nibble and chew, fraying the darkness around me.
I was in Spicemarket and miles from the palace by the time the sun had risen to a
half disk, so I let Triss collapse down into my shadow rather than feeding him the
nima he would need to fight it.

Thanks,
he said sleepily.
It’s going to be a bright day, and I’m exhausted. Wake me if you need me.
Then he dropped away into a sort of semi-dozing state where he was vaguely aware
of what was going on, but not really all there—his normal response to my spending
time out in direct sunlight.

I found Fei at her fallback soon after. Or, rather, she found me. Like every smart
operator with a foot shadowside, Fei had multiple hideaways. Mine were in places like
that old smuggler’s cave and abandoned breweries with structural
problems. That was because I was broke. Fei was rich, which meant she didn’t need
to share her digs with rats and slinks. Her Spicemarket place was a very nice little
house. It was also compromised, and not just because I knew about it. Kodamia’s spy
services had put an eye on it, too—a side effect of the same mess that had seen the
place revealed to me.

I knew that if Fei really wanted to vanish completely, she would never come by the
place again. But it was the only fallback address I had for her, so I started there.
Of course, she wasn’t home. There was no evidence of her having been there anytime
recently, either. But just as I was leaving by the back door, a spritely little breeze
came up from nowhere. I followed and it led me straight to Fei. She was sitting at
a table in the nearly empty patio of a small cafe.

The interior tables were packed with spice merchants having breakfast on their way
to their stalls, with more waiting for an open seat. But, with the sun less than a
finger’s breadth above the waters of the bay, it was still a touch chilly for any
but the hardiest or most impatient to eat out of doors. That gave Fei an excellent
excuse to keep her cowl up as she sipped her steaming tea and ate fried bread with
a breakfast soup of boiled rice and fish. I followed her hooded example as I slipped
into the seat across from her.

“I’m sorry,” I said in the same breath that Fei said, “Thank you.”

“I didn’t mean to bring the Kitsune down on you,” I continued, “but I didn’t have
a lot of choice.”

She waved it aside. “You have nothing to apologize for, my friend. Not now. Not ever.”
She twisted a hand and a little swirl of air plucked at the edges of my cowl. “For
this one, I owe you everything. Besides, you didn’t bring anyone down on me. Scheroc
came straight back to let me know what had happened. I added that to what you’ve told
me in the past about your kind being able to track each other and figured I’d better
give the order for all of Silent Branch to rabbit.”

“So, you weren’t the only one who ran?” I asked. “I was
worried. I talked to Anjir and he said the Crown Guard nabbed Zishin.”

Fei’s jaw tensed and she looked down. “I was afraid that might happen, but he insisted
we needed someone to stay behind and warn the rest of our people off as they came
back from patrols and the like. He also insisted that it be him. Damned fool. I don’t
know how many times I’ve told him never to volunteer for anything.”

“They’ll send him to Darkwater,” I said, though I knew that they might as easily kill
him. “We’ll get him out along with Jerik after we’ve put Maylien on the throne.”

“Aren’t you just little Lord Sunshine this morning?” she said. “I suppose it’s possible,
but the smart money’s on them torturing him half to death and then feeding him to
the risen.”

“Is that the bet you want to make?”

“No, nor will I, but it’s the smart one, and it means I’ll owe Thauvik and the shadow
bitch a personal blood debt come the day.”

“I can help you collect on that,” I said. “Let me tell you where things stand. Then
you can tell me what you meant when you said everything was about to go to shit.”

Before I could start, a waiter came by and asked what I wanted. I was cold and tired
and half starved, so I ordered a huge bowl of the same conjee Fei was eating and brought
her up to date while I ate it. When I’d first moved to Tien it had taken me a few
years to warm to the idea of rice and fish for breakfast, despite temple training
that included learning to eat pretty much anything with a smile—part of teaching us
how to hide in plain sight.

In Varya, I’d grown up on breakfast that mostly involved sausages, slabs of bacon,
and porridge with bits of toasted bread to dip in it. These days that sounded positively
alien by comparison to the spicy soup the waiter had fetched me along with a pot of
dark and smoky tea. Though I normally disliked the more strongly flavored teas even
more than the regular kind, tired and cold worked wonders on the taste this time around.
To my surprise I found myself half enjoying its
bitterness. Before I’d finished telling my tale, I actually flagged the waiter to
bring me another pot.

“That clarifies things,” said Fei, as I poured myself a fresh cup. “Scheroc’s view
of events can be a might eccentric, and more so when something’s agitated him. Kao-li
is going to complicate things mightily, but there’s no way around it, and the move
fits well with what I was going to tell you earlier, which was that the Crown Guard
was packing up. That, and that several of Thauvik’s more prominent commanders and
Crown officers have vanished recently. Each one reappeared about a week later.”

“You think they’re undergoing the transformation to risen,” I said.

“I do. It fits with what Harad had to say about this version of the curse, and the
whole undead crusade thing. If we don’t shut the king down soon, Zhan is going to
end up looking like a prime slice of hell.”

“I guess I need to talk with Maylien about organizing our assault. Do you know a good
place we can meet near Kao-li?”

“I do, there’s a fishing village just downstream with a tavern under the sign of the
rooster and the monkey….”

*

“There’s
the tavern.” I nodded toward the Rooster and Monkey, its sign just visible in the
fading light.

“Why don’t Prixia and I wait over there,” Heyin pointed toward a gap between the tavern
and its nearest neighbor. “There are enough wanted posters with my face on them to
make me nervous this close to a royal fortress.”

Prixia’s face hadn’t turned up on any posters yet, but she followed Heyin into the
dark passage without a word—no doubt happy to get farther away from me. Since that
made two of us, I couldn’t object.

I wish we didn’t have her along,
sent Triss.

Me, too, but both she and Maylien insisted, and honestly, her plan is better than
the one Devin and I put together. She
understands war a hell of a lot better than I do. If she didn’t hate my guts, I’d
be delighted to have her here.

What happened on the bridge wasn’t your fault, Aral.

Actually, it was, and I have eight more unnecessary deaths on my tab because of it,
but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is whether this works.

There had been some deviations from Devin’s original proposition—most notably a second,
much larger group of raiders who would spread fire and chaos through the surrounding
countryside. That would help draw the attention of the royal army away from Kao-li
at the same time the assault group led by Heyin drew the Crown Guard away from whatever
part of the fortress housed the king and the Kitsune.

The sequence now ran: One, Triss and I would enter the fortress and meet up with Devin
and Zass so they could show us the layout. Two, while we were doing that, Prixia would
start fires and make a lot of noise on the riverbank on the opposite side of Kao-li
Island. Three, Devin would open the doors for Heyin and his volunteers to do an inside
the walls version of whooping and burning. Four, I would take out the Kitsune—I’d
been practicing alternate sword styles, but this was still where things were most
likely to go wrong. Hopefully, I would have Devin’s help for that—dealing with the
Kitsune, not making things going wrong, which would almost certainly take care of
itself.

Assuming I was still alive to make it worth his while we would move on to five, where
Devin would attempt to stab me in the back. It wasn’t on the official schedule, but
I had no doubt it was coming. Six, I would kill Thauvik. Seven, if I hadn’t had to
kill Devin in the process, he got his swords back. Eight, extract Heyin’s people from
the fight they would by now be losing. I figured Thauvik’s head on a spike would go
a long way toward convincing the Crown Guard that killing their new queen’s favorite
guard captain was a bad plan. Nine, collapse in a heap. There were more steps after
that, culminating in putting Maylien on the throne and getting
Jerik out of prison—which is where I had come in originally—but mostly those didn’t
need me in the picture.

But then I was stepping through the door of the tavern, and I found that I had more
immediate concerns. Like the fact that the place was packed with Crown Guards—most
of them looking idly at the newcomer. Or, that there were three Elite sitting at the
best table. I sent Triss an urgent
stay hidden
and suppressed the impulse to turn right around and march out the way I’d come in.
There was no better way to arouse suspicion. Instead, I stepped to the side of the
door and looked around the room as though I were planning to meet someone. I had been,
of course, but I no longer expected Fei to be there, not given the makeup of the crowd.

I was doing my second pretend scan of the tables and making damned sure I looked disappointed,
when I felt a brief little chill breeze along the back of my neck. Really? On my third
pass I actually looked at each table, but I still didn’t see Fei. I had just decided
that I’d imagined the breeze, and I was about to go over and lean on the bar for a
bit—pretending to wait—when it came again. This time, when I looked around for the
captain, I noticed a barrel-chested bald man lifting a finger as my eyes skipped across
his table. I stopped and took a closer look then. The skin was darker than it ought
to be, but there were scars on both of the man’s cheeks.

Fuck me,
I thought as I stepped out in the swirl of the taproom.

What is it?
sent Triss.

Lady doesn’t go in for half measures. Unless I’m going crazy, Fei’s over there with
a shaved head and bound-up breasts.
She’d picked a tiny table hanging off of one of the posts that supported the roof,
and the closer I got the more sure I was of my sanity.

Sounds imminently sensible on her part. Why the swearing?

It’s pretty drastic.
Only a few yards separated us now, and from this close there was no doubt it was
Fei. She just looked so…different.

Really? It sounds mostly cosmetic.

Well, yeah, but…
How do you explain to an inhuman shapechanger the meaning a woman like Fei might attach
to her hair?

The thick brown braid had always been perfectly groomed and cared for—the captain’s
one vanity of appearance. Seeing her without it felt almost like seeing her naked.
The impression was deepened by the worry I saw looking back at me out of her eyes.

But she didn’t wave me off, so I touched the back of the chair across from her. “Kind
of crowded in here, mind if I join you while I wait for a friend?”

She shrugged and drawled huskily, “If’n you don’t mind knocking knees a might. There’s
not much room under this ’un.”

“Fair enough.” I sat, even more exquisitely careful than usual to make sure my swords
didn’t clunk against the back of my chair.

After all these years, such caution was mostly a matter of reflex, but I couldn’t
help remembering that the swords in my sheaths now were of no ordinary steel. Though
they didn’t shine with spell-light, no one, mage or otherwise, would ever mistake
them for anything ordinary if they saw them unsheathed.

“It’s a bit busier than the last time I passed through town,” I said.

“It is that,” agreed Fei in that same husky voice that disguised her normal almost
sweet tones. “I’m just passin’ through my own self, an’ I asked about that. It’s cause
t’ king is up at Kao-li. Barkeep says every tavern and inn within walking distance
of t’ fort look t’ same.”

That was when a harried-looking waitress appeared at my elbow. “Could you get me a
bowl of the Anyang chicken with fried noodles,” I said—the house specialty according
to the board behind the bar. “Oh, and a pot of tea.”

“Of course.” Then she plunked a cheap sake cup down in front of me. It was empty but
still confusing.

“Excuse me?” I said, really looking at her for the first
time. In addition to the cup she’d brought me, she had a dark bottle and a ceramic
bowl on her tray.

“First drink is on the king.” She nodded toward the table with the Elite who were
all looking my way now. “They say it’s to make up for the crowds.”

I smiled and nodded, first at the Elite, and then at the waitress, even as my stomach
filled with acid. She lifted the bottle off the tray and I recognized a traditional
Varyan liquor—thick, black, and laced with efik. Niala. I needed every ounce of control
I’d learned in my years at the temple and since to keep my face blank. Even so, I
couldn’t do anything about the sweat I felt starting to break out all over my body.

She poured a good inch into the cup and it might as well have been blood for the way
it made me feel. Then she reached into the bowl and pulled out a perfectly roasted
efik bean to drop into the cup. Seven years since I’d last touched the stuff, all
of them gone in an instant.