Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (39 page)

“What?” I finally managed, though the word sounded dragged out and dull in my own
ears.

“You deserve the best death I can give you,” said Nuriko. “Do you want to face the
sword? Or would you rather meet it as you are, bowed and on your knees.”

How could that possibly make any difference?
I wondered as I looked again at the jagged point standing out from my thigh.
The blade of the goddess is broken, and it’s all been a pointless…wait…

“Well?” she asked. “What is your choice?”

Madness,
I thought. But isn’t inspiration a sort of madness? “Face,” I husked, forcing myself
not to think about what I had to do next, lest I give something away by action or
omission.

Focus on the steps,
I told myself,
not the plan.
And…begin. I dragged myself to my feet, using the side of the bath and my free hand.
Razor-edged steel did further irreparable harm to my thigh. The pain…didn’t matter.
I remained bent over, thinking, judging, still trying to win. I turned slowly, facing
my fate one way or the other. Nuriko shifted her stance slightly, waiting for me.

I began to unbend, my eyes slowly rising till they were level with Nuriko’s chest.
Pause. Breathe. Everything came down to this point. I jerked myself upright with one
great convulsive effort. With the same impulse, I clenched my hand even tighter around
the sword in my leg and yanked. I felt it cutting my thigh and my fingers, slicing
deep into already torn flesh as I wrenched it free of my leg. Then I drove the broken
end of the sword into the soft spot under Nuriko’s ribs, angling that jagged second
point up into her heart and twisting it sharply.

For one brief moment, Nuriko’s face and mine were only
inches apart, her eyes looking straight into mine. She smiled at me. She smiled at
me and she died. I wanted to do the same, but I couldn’t. Not quite yet. The real
job was still undone, and there was no one to do it but me.

Before I could begin to think about what to do next or how, Nuriko’s shadow boiled
up from the floor. Sliding in under her clothes and covering her in a second skin
of liquid night, Thiussus took Nuriko within herself. I’d never seen anything like
it. But then, the only Blade I’d ever seen die had been Kaman, and Ssilar had been
staked to the ground in front of him when I killed him. Maybe we normally went like
Nuriko when the time came, ending our lives in one final embrace of shadow. It was
a comforting thought.

For one more beat of my heart I looked into Nuriko’s dead eyes, darkened by lenses
of shadow. Thiussus started to change then, becoming darker, and darker still. Finally
Nuriko’s eyes were gone and I could see only the impossible blackness of the everdark.
With a pop like a bubble sighing its last, she was gone, leaving behind an empty suit
of clothes, and two falling swords. I caught Nuriko’s out of the air with my good
hand. Then, pivoting on my one working leg, I swung it around in a whistling arc that
severed Thauvik’s head.

I got one good look at the shocked expression on the undead king’s face before it
landed in the tub with a red splash, and I had a moment to hope that Nuriko’s sword
of the goddess retained enough of its holy enchantments to slay him. Then, the world
went away for a time. When it came back I was leaning against the tub and Devin was
standing over me holding his remaining unbroken blade like he wanted to split my skull.
I didn’t…couldn’t, blame him for that.

“I should kill you now,” said Devin. “I really should. But I can’t decide if that
would hurt you more than letting you live knowing you’re responsible for that.” He
kicked the hilt of his broken sword into my lap. “What do you think? Is that suffering
enough, when you add in the fact that you’ll never walk without a limp again? Or hold
a sword with that
hand?” He pointed a finger at the ruin I’d made of my right hand.

But I wasn’t really paying attention to him anymore. I was looking at the hilt on
my lap and the broken blade on the floor beside me. How could I go on living knowing
what I did now? How could I move past the breaking of the unbreakable? With my good
hand I reached down and picked up the fallen shard, cutting that hand, as well, as
I did so.

“Are you even listening to me?” I recognized Devin’s words. Understood them even,
but they didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered but the broken blade. Somehow, despite fingers that could no longer
close properly, I picked up the hilt with my ruined hand. How could I have done something
that led to
this
? Helplessly and hopelessly I fitted the broken ends together, both now smeared with
my blood. The match was perfect—a perfect break for a perfect blade—but there was
nothing more I could do.

It burned my soul to see this last symbol of my goddess broken, just as she herself
was broken. Broken and dead, a stone corpse lying on the floor of the sacred lake.

“I would give my life to fix this,” I whispered. “Without thought or hesitation.”

Then, from an impossible distance, a voice spoke into my mind.
I know that you would.
For a long lingering moment I felt a cool touch on my brow, a touch that held something
of healing and something of benediction.
I know that you would.

Triss? Is that you?

There was a long silence, and then I felt a stirring.
Whazza? Do we yet live?
The voice sounded so very like the one I’d heard a moment earlier, but somehow I
knew that it was not the same.

I started to reach out with my mind again, sending Triss reassurance, but not yet
finding any words that were adequate to the moment. Before I could complete the impulse,
I was interrupted by Devin, speaking my name in a frightened hiss, “Aral!”

“What?” I asked.

“Give me my sword,” Devin said in that same fearful tone.

It was only as I reversed the hilt and offered it to him that I realized the sword
was whole once again. Covered in my blood, but a single unbroken piece of steel. Devin
gave the sword a flick that cleared the mess from the steel—another magical gift of
the goddess—and held it up in the light. There was no evidence that it had ever been
broken.

I reached for the sword, wanting to take it back and look at it more closely. “That’s
not”—I stopped as I realized that it was my right hand that I’d used and that it no
longer hurt—“possible.”

I turned my hand around and looked at the palm. It too looked as though it had never
taken any injury. My thigh was the same, though the long cut over my ribs where the
Kitsune had nearly speared me remained. So did the bloody gash on my head and every
other wound that I’d taken from her. I braced myself on the bath and pulled myself
to my feet.

Devin hadn’t spoken since he cleared the blood from his blade. Now he held it up between
us, looking at me over its edge with something of awe and something of terror in his
eyes. “How did…what
are
you?”

I didn’t know what I had done or how, or how to answer him. But the shadow of a dragon
appeared between us then and spoke. “The better man,” said Triss.

Devin looked down and away. “Maybe you really are.” He sheathed his swords and walked
to the window, shrouding up as he went. An instant later he vanished into the greater
darkness of the night beyond.

D
im
green light filtered down from the surface far above, painting the broken stone form
of a goddess in stripes of sunlight and shadow. Namara was still dead.

The sight tore at my heart every bit as painfully as it had the last time I was here,
seven long years before. But after the events at Kao-li I knew I had to come back,
and Triss had agreed.

Not to check. Never that. The dead do not return to us, no matter how much we might
wish that they did. No, I had returned for a different reason, the narrow wool-wrapped
bundle that lay in the fallen hand of my goddess. As I set Nuriko’s sword in that
open hand and reached for the bundle I could feel Triss’s approving presence in my
mind, though he said nothing.

My lungs were practically bursting as I attached it to my belt and turned to stroke
for the surface. I could have used a spell to allow me to breathe underwater for a
time, but that seemed somehow wrong given what I had come to do and prove. Stars danced
in the darkness around the edges of my vision by the time I finally broke the surface
of the sacred
lake. I had to tread water and rest for a time before swimming back to the island
and diving under the arch that led to the pool of Namara.

There, in the same place that I had first accepted my Namara-made swords, I laid the
woolen bundle on the stone. It was soggy and cold, but no weeds grew in the folds
of the fabric, nor barnacles clung to the weave. A high contrast to the state of the
goddess herself—covered in lumpy green and gray as time slowly blurred away her form.
The sheaths and hilts within were equally pristine, with the lapis eye of the goddess
staring at me from each of the paired guards.

Unsheathed, they were virtually identical to the blades I’d borrowed from Devin, dark,
sharp, perfectly balanced, and yet I could feel the difference. These were the swords
of the Kingslayer. The old Kingslayer, the one who’d drawn his name with Ashvik’s
blood. I smiled and reached into the bag I’d left behind on the grass while I made
my dive.

Are you sure about this?
Triss asked.

Absolutely.
I lifted out a small brush and went to work.

I’d borrowed it and the black paint from Harad after telling him what had happened
at Kao-li and promising him that I would fetch Faran back for his ministrations as
quickly as I could manage. I’d also asked him about what might have happened with
Devin’s sword, but he’d had no better ideas than mine. He did promise to look through
the library catalogs and see if he couldn’t find a volume or two that might help me
understand the matter. It was an interesting conversation, one of many I’d had in
the previous weeks and perhaps the most rewarding.

The one time I’d spoken with Maylien had probably counted more as an argument. It
had come shortly after she rode in through the gates of Kao-li with Prixia at her
right hand and an army behind her. I was mad that she’d tricked me into believing
she was only sending a raiding force when she had actually intended to make a real
battle of it. She was mad because my plan had ended with Heyin losing a leg. Our meeting
hadn’t gone well, though she had promised to lift the Crown’s price on my head and
restore Jerik to his bar.

Jerik was another of the good talks. To my surprise he hadn’t held his imprisonment
against me, though he
was
a bit grumpy about my swearing off whiskey. Said he was losing one of his best customers.
Then he gave me a completely unexpected hug and told me to get out and come back when
I could make him some profits.

I finished my first careful bit of brushwork then and laid my sword aside to let the
paint dry.

Fei was another talk that went well. She’d promised me that if I ever needed anything
at all, including Prixia boxed up and shipped off to Kanjuri as fish cakes, I need
only ask.

It was a favor I hadn’t needed to call in. Prixia and I had settled things…for now.
When I offered to meet her so we could finish what lay between us, she’d declined.
That had surprised me. So, I asked her why she was willing to let it go. I expected
her to tell me to go to hell, of course. Instead, she told me exactly why she had
made the choice she did. Mostly, I think, it was because she thought knowing would
bother me more than not knowing. She might even have been right. It seemed that when
Heyin was first wounded and everyone thought he was done for, he’d asked Prixia to
promise not to complete her duel with me.

“You’ll lose,” he’d told her. “You’ll lose, and I’ll be gone and there won’t be anyone
standing between that bastard and Maylien, and there needs to be someone. There needs
to be a wall between them. You be that wall.”

And she had promised him that she would, and now I would always have a nemesis in
Tien’s royal house. Which was probably for the best, though I didn’t tell
her
that.

I finished the second sword and set it to drying beside the other. Once it was done,
I would mount up and head for Dalridia. I had business there with Jax and her school
as well as with Faran. One more of the many unfinished things I had to do.

Like making sense of Triss’s explanation of why Thiussus had been so overwhelming
and how he’d come to fight it off. It had involved a lot of untranslatable Shade words
and how touching Thiussus felt like an
actual
return to the
everdark whereas other Shades simply felt like Shades. Thiussus made him homesick,
because Thiussus
was
home in some incomprehensible Shade way, and knowing that had allowed Triss to do
something…I still didn’t understand that part beyond the fact that the words involved
a lot of esses and long vowels.