Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (38 page)

“Kingslayer!” Thauvik sat up, sloshing bloody water over the edge of the tub. “Where?”

Nuriko didn’t answer the king, choosing instead to make a slow scan of the room while
Thiussus darted this way and that sniffing at every shadow.

“I know you’re here, Aral, and that you’ve subverted Devin. That’s the only way this
makes any sense. He’s let the raiders in at the gates to draw attention away from
this tower and the king.
That’s
why you didn’t kill Devin when you took his swords. It wasn’t sentimentality on your
part, he gave them to you. I should have seen it before.”

She drew her greatsword. “Come on then. You wouldn’t have set this up if you didn’t
think you’d learned enough from our last fight to take me. Let’s see if you’re right.”
She turned her gaze to the window where I was hiding at the same time the nine-tailed
fox indicated the spot by pointing his nose like a hound. “Ah, there you are. Whenever
you’re ready, we can begin.”

Thauvik rose to stand naked in the tub. He had a double-bladed axe in one hand dripping
with red, and I wondered rather macabrely what else might be hiding under all the
bloody water.

The Kitsune turned her gaze on him. “Don’t. Aral made this personal at our last encounter
and he’s mine alone. Touch him before we’re finished and I will end you.”

“I’m immortal,” replied the king.

“Not when you’re chopped into tiny bits and stuffed into that fireplace over there,
you’re not. Stay out of my way.”

I thought they might come to blows for a moment, but then the king settled back down
into the tub like a man getting ready to watch a show.

Devin was still nowhere to be found, and I knew I might not get this clean a shot
at the Kitsune ever again. So, I dropped my shroud and slid headfirst into the room,
using the window ledge as a springboard to flip myself onto my feet. I was already
drawing the swords of my goddess as I landed, but the Kitsune hadn’t yet moved.

She nodded now. “We’re not playing this time, child. Say good-bye to your Shade and
let’s get this over with.”

Thiussus struck then, bounding forward and opening her jaws as she went for my leg.
She was pulled aside by a shadow dragon darting in from the side and biting her shoulder
at the last possible moment. I felt the shock of that contact through my link to Triss.
Hot-cold ecstasy echoed in my own jaws, but only for an instant—Thiussus doing whatever
the hell it was that she did to other Shades again. Triss released her as soon as
he’d diverted her attack.

You all right?
I sent.

No, but I think I can handle this if you don’t take too long about killi—
His mental voice went silent as the nine-tailed fox swiped wicked claws across one
of his wings.

He leaped back, and she pounced, trying to pin him to the floor. As soon as she landed,
he darted around and nipped at one of her tails. She spun and he jumped away, like
a small dog worrying a bear. With each contact I felt the shock again, but weaker
now, as whatever Triss had chosen to do about Thiussus seemed to be working.

That was the last I saw or thought of the battling Shades for some time. Nuriko had
slid silently forward in the brief moment while I was distracted by the clashing shadows
and swung a blow that very nearly beheaded me.

Reflex saved me, with a simultaneous parry and backward crowhop that I had no memory
of attempting. A moment later, reflex nearly killed me when I executed a
form-perfect riposte that went exactly where Nuriko expected it to. That allowed her
to hammer my righthand sword aside and go for my shoulder when I tried to recover.
I couldn’t afford to operate on pure bodythought against the Kitsune. I had to both
become my swords
and
plan ahead.

For the next several seconds I had no idea what was happening around me as I desperately
tried to bounce back from my initial mistake. By the time I was actually thinking
again instead of just reacting, she’d backed me around and past the tub. If Thauvik
had been in the game with us, I’d have died as he split my skull from behind. Fortunately
for me, he continued to follow Nuriko’s orders, playing the spectator with a happy
smirk on his undead face.

Back in control of myself now, if nowhere near in control of the fight, I parried
and parried again, as Nuriko pushed me back around to my starting point. I did manage
to get off one or two cuts of my own, forcing myself to stay within the weird hybrid
style I’d developed for the fight, but I didn’t come close to scoring on her. The
main reason I was still alive at that point was the slender advantage my second sword
gave me over her single blade, that and the fact that this time my steel was every
bit as unbreakable as the Kitsune’s.

“You’ve improved.” She spoke easily, a sharp contrast to my own heavy breathing. But
she didn’t let up for a moment, coming at me again and again with shockingly powerful
blows of her longer, heavier blade. “You’re more unpredictable.”

“Thanks.” I would have liked to respond with a bit of banter or a clever insult that
might put her off her game, but I had neither the wind nor the wit to spare. I needed
everything I had simply to keep from dying.

“Namara’s swords have saved you four times by my count. I’ll have to make Devin pay
for that.”

I didn’t answer, just parried and parried again…and spun, and jumped and generally
danced to the tune she was calling as she backed me toward Thauvik again. I resolved
to take a shot at the king this time if I got the chance. I also
spared a glance for the shadows that danced alongside us. They had shed their assumed
shapes for something more fluid and elemental, a pair of flickering patches of darkness
that I couldn’t have identified, one from the other, were it not for my soul-deep
ties to Triss.

“Thinking about trying the trick with the light again?” Nuriko asked, driving a thrust
at my left eye.

I limboed under it, flicking a backhanded cut at her forward knee with one sword while
I brought the other into position to deflect the drawing slice she made as she brought
her sword back into position for a more devastating attack. Again, I didn’t answer
her. I simply didn’t have the spare attention.

It would have been nice if I
could
have managed that ploy again, but it wasn’t going to happen. Not with Devin’s blades.
I’d tried a less drastic version in practice, but the same light-drinking enchantments
that made Namara’s swords so hard to see in the dark simply devoured any magelight
thrown at them. They belonged to the element of shadow as surely as any Shade.

Nuriko pressed in harder then, and I had no attention for anything else. Before I
knew it she’d pushed me past Thauvik’s bath again. He clapped lightly when she opened
a long shallow cut across my ribs.

“I’m happy that I chose not to interfere earlier,” he said into a lull. “I would have
missed a gladiatorial contest the likes of which no lesser king has ever staged.”

Nuriko was starting to breathe a touch harder now—little enough comfort when I was
practically gasping—and she eased off a tiny bit as the fight slid back around to
the window where I’d come in. As we approached Thauvik a third time, she picked up
again, and I realized that she was intentionally keeping me too busy to shift my attack
to the more vulnerable primary target. So, of course, I had to try. Leaping up and
back to go over the tub instead of going around this time, I spun a downward cut at
the king’s exposed throat.

It should have worked. Instead, it nearly killed me.
Nuriko moved forward impossibly fast, catching my sword with hers and twisting it
down and around to strike the heavy marble wall of the tub instead of Thauvik. The
impact felt like a hammer striking the palm of my hand and the stone chipped and flew.
I very nearly lost my suddenly numbed grip. The shifting of my sword had turned me
in the air as well, and I landed badly, stumbling into a backward roll as the Kitsune
vaulted the tub behind me.

I came to my feet with both swords low and parallel, and couldn’t get either up in
time to block the cut that burned a bloody line across my chest, nicking a collarbone
in the process. The pain was breathtaking, like someone had branded me. The traitor
that lived forever in the back of my mind cried out for efik. I managed not to die
for the next several beats by shifting to a wholly defensive strategy and backing
even faster than I had before.

In no time at all, Nuriko had driven me most of the way back to the king. Thauvik
had climbed out his bathtub and was now swinging his axe back and forth menacingly.
It looked like my luck was about to run out. But when Thauvik leaped forward with
an inarticulate yell and chopped at my neck, the Kitsune’s sword interposed itself,
spearing the haft of the axe and ripping it from the king’s grasp.

“I
said
, stay out of it,” she growled as she snapped her sword and sent the axe flying across
the room. “I meant it. That was your one warning. Interfere again and you won’t have
anyplace to wear a crown.”

I tried to take advantage of her momentary distraction and the weight of the axe on
her sword, flowing in to make a double attack. But even as she cast the axe aside,
she caught one of my swords on the hilt of her own, blocking my edge with the bare
half inch of grip between her hands, while skip-hopping over the other. I sliced open
the leg of her pants and left a bleeding nick along the outside of her calf, but that
was all.

“You’re a treasure,” Nuriko said as she gave me a third nasty cut, this one above
my right ear. “It really is going to be a shame when I kill you.”

That moment wasn’t far off now, and we both knew it. She was my better and by a longer
margin than either Siri or Kelos. I was only delaying the inevitable.

Then Devin finally arrived, though I didn’t know it at first. Slipping in through
the window directly behind Nuriko, he drove his knife straight for her left side.
I discovered his presence only after Nuriko dropped into a low, spinning, back kick
aimed somewhere behind her. In that same moment, she caught my left sword in a drawing
bind and yanked it out of my hand, catching it in the air.

Several things happened all at the same time then. A knife suddenly sprouted high
in Nuriko’s shoulder. Devin’s shroud fell away and he grunted as she swept his feet
out from under him, then shrieked as she used the sword she’d taken from me to pin
his right forearm to the floor, driving it between the bones and deep into the planks.
And, I slashed at the back of her neck with my remaining sword, slicing away her ponytail
and putting a deep cut in the scalp beneath it.

I grazed her skull, but missed the killing blow that would have severed Nuriko’s spine
by a couple of hairs. In response, she threw herself forward and away from me into
a diving roll. Shifting to a two-handed grip, I followed. But I was too tired and
slow now, and she was back on her feet and mostly facing me in time to take the huge
double-handed chop I aimed at her neck with the flat of her sword. Still, I knocked
her back into another roll, and for the next few beats, as I backed her up again and
again, I thought I might win.

I was wrong.

As I hammered my sword down at the top of her skull in what I was sure must be the
killing stroke, she simply slipped aside. It was only as my sword, driven with all
of my remaining strength, struck the rim of Thauvik’s bath for the second time that
I realized she’d played me. Shards of marble flew and both of my arms went momentarily
numb as my goddess-crafted steel shocked deep into the stone.

Before I could move or think, Nuriko brought her own blade around and down in a smashing
blow aimed at the
back of my trapped sword. I could see what was to come and I knew there was no way
I could hope to keep my grip, but I had to try if I wanted to live. So I called up
what will I had left in me, and braced for the impact. But nothing could have prepared
me for what happened next.

My sword broke. My blade of Namara, the unbreakable signature of my order and the
steel of my soul, snapped. Watching it break hurt me more than all of my wounds combined.

This could not be.

But it was.

I seemed to have all the time in the world to watch a dream shatter. The Kitsune’s
sword continued onward, sinking deep into the planks and giving me the opening that
I could have used to finish things if I’d had a sword in my hand or the wit to think
of my knives.

But all I could see was the breaking blade. The useless hilt fell from my nerveless
grasp in the same moment that the broken shaft of the blade rebounded from the marble,
spinning end over end. It was with a sort of mystical detachment that I watched the
point of my own sword sink deep into the meat of my left thigh.

Broken.

Jagged steel like a crooked lightning bolt tipped the dark blade where it stood out
from my thigh, but I couldn’t bear to believe it. Horrified, I reached down and caught
the blade where it pierced my leg, gripping the steel so tightly that the edge opened
deep gashes in my fingers. Despite the blood and the pain, I couldn’t bring myself
to let go. I was finished and I knew it.

I reached out for Triss to say good-bye, but there was only silence at the other end
of our link. Thiussus had beaten him as thoroughly as Nuriko had beaten me. All was
lost.

“You are the greatest champion to stand against me since I faced Kelos.”

At first the words registered as little more than a mad buzzing—a bee trapped in a
bottle. But on the second or third repetition they started to make sense. The Kitsune
was
talking to me, telling me something. Not that it mattered. Not like the broken sword
in my leg. My own death would be nothing beside that. I could see Nuriko’s feet and
shins from my hunched position. Hers and Thauvik’s, both on my right. She was within
easy striking distance and he was standing only a few feet beyond.