Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (7 page)

Maylien straightened the dueling blade that hung at her left hip. “For the third time—”

The king flicked his eyes at the Duchess of Tien and inclined his head the barest
fraction of an inch.

She rose from her chair and bowed to Maylien. “Provisional on the acceptance of your
claim, you may approach the throne and present me with the documents,
Baroness
Marchon.”

As Maylien slow-marched around the foot of the table and up the dais to hand her papers
to the chancellor, I slid back off the dais and paralleled her on the floor below.
I had to force myself to break training and let my feet make noise as I walked. Perfect
silence would actually have drawn more attention to me in the greater silence of that
long walk. When we reached the Duchess of Tien’s seat, Maylien stuck a hand
out to the side without looking and I passed her the silk-wrapped scroll—it would
have been beneath her formal dignity to carry it herself or to acknowledge my existence.
She slipped off the silk sheath and handed the document to the duchess.

The duchess took it without seeming to look at Maylien, much less pay any attention
to me. She continued to ignore Maylien as she unrolled the scroll and gave it an initial
glance. The proclamation of adoption and legitimization was short and simple—quickly
read. Within moments the duchess had moved on to checking the seals and chops. After
another minute or two, she looked up at Maylien and her expression was now deeply
troubled.

“Baroness Marchon, would you please step to my left”—the king’s side, a very telling
choice—“and make room for the Lord Justicer and the Warden of the Blood to join me.”
Respectively the chief legal authority of the realm and the woman charged with validating
all issues of family relations with regards to succession.

As Maylien passed to the duchess’s left, I did the same on the floor below.

Aral, another Shade’s been here!
Triss’s words came as a mental shout of alarm.
The shadow trail is very fresh, no more than two or three hours old and it leads toward
the throne.

I forced myself not to show any visible reaction to Triss’s news, but immediately
began scanning the area around the throne for deeper pools of shadow. Another Shade
almost certainly meant another Blade.

Do you recognize the spoor?
Best would have been my sometime apprentice Faran, come to keep an eye out for her
teacher, but I didn’t hold out much hope for that. Neither for her, nor for Siri or
Jax or any of the tiny handful of other survivors who still retained some loyalty
to the memory of Namara.

Not quite. It tastes almost familiar, an older master perhaps, but not one I know
well. There’s something else there, too, something…ancient and wrong.

How so?

I don’t know. It’s not a
knowing
thing. It’s tasting and feeling and shadows of something I can’t quite touch.

I didn’t like the sound of any of that, but I couldn’t do anything about it without
more information. If it wasn’t Siri or Faran or one of Jax’s people, it almost had
to be one of Kelos’s renegades—the Blades who had gone over to the Son of Heaven after
the destruction of the temple. Traitors to everything we had once held sacred, they
called themselves the Shadow of Heaven. My eyes flicked across the king on his throne
for perhaps the dozenth time as I tried to spot someplace where a shadow-cloaked assassin
might hide. Something about the position of Thauvik’s head drew my attention back
to him with a sudden snap. He was looking up and somewhat back, as though he were
trying to see something positioned above and behind his chair, but couldn’t afford
to be seen to turn his head and actually look.

The velvet curtain that created an alcove for the throne hung from four large marble
pillars that approached but didn’t reach the ceiling. I tried to see if I could make
anything out in the shadows that clung to the gaps above. The king—who had leaned
forward a bit, as though idly glancing at the documents his councilors were so carefully
reviewing—slid his left hand even further forward. Then he made a tiny cutting gesture
with one finger.

I moved without thinking, lunging to grab the back of Maylien’s belt and yank her
off the dais. As I pulled her down flat behind the Duchess of Tien, alarmed gasps
broke out from the lesser nobility behind us, as well as the dukes and earls seated
across the table. The duchess herself half turned in her chair, and I was looking
right into her eyes when the tiny poisoned dart meant for Maylien struck her in the
neck.

She let out a gasp and stood straight up, knocking her chair and the Lord Justicer
off the dais. Then she fell face-first onto Maylien and me. The room exploded into
cacophony. Several hundred people leaped to their feet, variously yelling, running
for the exits, or reaching for dueling weapons as the notion took them.

If I hadn’t been lying practically at the king’s feet, I would never have heard him
shouting over the uproar. “Kill them! Kill them all!” There was a wild, half-mad quality
to his tone that set fingers of ice clawing at my spine, and I knew in that instant
that something was deeply wrong with Thauvik.

Behind him, the door reserved for the king burst open and a pair of the Crown Elite
came rushing through. They had weapons in their hand and spells uncoiling like curls
of glimmering fire at their fingertips. On either side of the Elite, the giant stone
dogs who familiared them slid silently up through the marble tiles of the floor, rising
from the cold ground beneath, where they had been lying concealed. Elemental creatures
of earth, the stone dogs could swim through dirt and rock as easily as any fish through
water. They left no marks on the tiles when they emerged.

Grabbing Maylien, I cried out with my mind,
Triss, shroud!
Darkness swallowed us as he spun himself into a cloud of blackness.

I expected the king to make his exit then, drawn away by his most loyal guards. But
he waved them off, remaining on his throne to watch the carnage. The last thing I
saw before night blocked my sight was the king’s half-mad grin when one of the Elite
blasted the Warden of the Blood aside with a spell that nearly tore the woman’s head
off.

Dragging Maylien with me, I rolled wildly away from the dais. I aimed for a gap in
the first rank of ivory chairs where a wild-eyed clan chief had cleared herself some
fighting room. We smashed into her shins and sent her staggering toward the dais,
and she stabbed downward in response, snapping her sword on the stones. She swore
and turned, obviously trying to spot what had hit her, but we had already moved beyond
easy reach. Without the forced awareness of contact, she would have a hard time spotting
us now.

Even one of the Elite—who were trained for such work—would have had difficulties picking
us out amid the swirling chaos of angry lords, jumbled furniture, and fallen bodies.
Still, I spared a moment to thank the memory of my goddess
for whatever magic made it so hard for people to spy a shroud even in relatively good
light. And another to hope that the Elite who had come in past the king hadn’t spotted
me before we went dark. There was lots of visual turbulence to draw hostile attention
away from a shadow that wasn’t supposed to be there, but it would be better if they
weren’t actively looking.

Maylien hissed, “What the hell’s going on, Aral?” for perhaps the fifth time as I
staggered to my feet and pulled her with me.

I finally had the attention to respond. “Enemy Blade,” I said. Then I scooped her
onto my shoulder. “You need to stay inside the shroud if you don’t want to go the
way of the duchess, so hug me tight.”

I dashed toward the nearest wall—where I could hopefully find a servant’s door—zigging
and zagging as I ran.

D
own!
Triss shouted into my mind, and I dove for the floor.

A chain of green fire lashed across the wall in front of me, shattering thirty feet
of teak paneling and sending out a shower of burning splinters. A narrow gap was revealed
a couple of yards to my left—that servant’s passage I’d been hoping for. Steep stairs
spiraled away into darkness in both directions.

“Aral, stop, we have to go back,” Maylien gasped—I’d landed on her pretty hard. She
pushed herself off my shoulder.

I rose onto hands and knees, covering her with my body and the shadow that surrounded
me. “Like hell we do.” The green chain fell somewhere off to my left, destroying chairs
and drawing screams. I hoped that meant that the lash that had nearly cut us in half
was a lucky shot then, not aimed.

“We’ve got to get my adoption papers,” said Maylien. “This whole disaster will be
pointless if we don’t.” And damn me if she wasn’t right.

“Bad idea,” said Triss. “There are more Elite coming
through the king’s door right now, and an army of Crown Guard can’t be far behind.
To say nothing of the rogue Blade back there.”

Triss, my eyes.
He uncovered them as I glanced back over my shoulder toward the high table.

A few yards behind me a stone dog tore at the corpse of a fallen baronet. Beyond,
I could see a half dozen Elite fanning out from around the throne. They were blasting
away with magic, though nowhere near as indiscriminately as the king’s order had called
for. In fact, the vast majority of their spells were falling on inanimate targets.

One of the mage soldiers started to step over a fallen clan leader. The apparent corpse
suddenly whipped his sword up and across the Elite’s lower belly, spilling her guts.
Before he could do more, a spear of black fire punched a fist-sized hole in his skull
and he fell again, this time truly dead instead of shamming.

A glance in the other direction showed the main doors clogged with panicking and heavily
armed nobles. More than a few bleeding bodies showed where they had slain one another
in their haste to escape. Mercifully, the Elite seemed to be avoiding the crowd with
their magical attacks. But there was no way to tell how long that might last, or how
much worse things could get. I had to get Maylien clear.

I pointed her toward the servant’s stairs and started nudging her along. “I’ll go
back for the papers, but not till you’re through that door. They won’t do anyone any
good if you’re too dead to use them, and without Triss to cover you, you wouldn’t
make it ten feet. I’ve a much better chance of managing this alone.”

She looked mighty unhappy, but crawled with me toward the broken door anyway. It was
a long distance to go on hands and knees, but with the green chain smashing this way
and that, it seemed the better choice. As soon as Maylien had spiraled up the stairs
and out of sight, I slipped back down to the door, crouching in the shadows there
while I surveyed the hall and planned my approach. Much had changed in just the few
minutes since my last look around.

Though the king remained on his throne, most of the madness had faded from his expression.
He was leaning back and to his left, and looking more bemused than anything. The numbers
of the Elite had climbed to a dozen or so now, the nearest of whom was attending to
the one who’d had her guts opened, while two or three stuck close by the king. Others
were taking command of the numerous Crown Guards who had started to arrive on the
scene as well. Either at the king’s orders, or on their own recognizance, the Elite
had stopped flinging spells around.

The jam of screaming and fighting chaos around the main doors was still going strong,
though some of those at the back had started moving away from the conflict as they
realized that the immediate danger had passed. Some had sheathed their weapons, but
more had not, and all were eyeing the Crown Guard and the Elite with more than a little
hostility. Barring active combat breaking out between those two groups, this was probably
my best chance to collect Maylien’s document. The calmer things got, the harder it
would become to approach the throne unseen, and with the room as well lit as it was,
the thing was going to be damned hard no matter what. I assumed full control of Triss
and started forward.

As I shadow-danced my way through the king’s guards, I briefly entertained the idea
of simply killing Thauvik now. Though I was supposed to be unarmed and had been carefully
searched by the Crown Guard before being allowed to follow Maylien into the council
room, I had managed to secrete one or two things about my person that would allow
me to do the job without actually having to get close enough to touch him. But until
Maylien’s claims to the Crown had been officially acknowledged or refuted, killing
the king would only make Maylien’s road to the throne more difficult.

I was perhaps fifteen feet away when I finally noticed that the document in question
was no longer on the table in front of the duchess’s place.
Dammit.
I glanced at the floor where her body had fallen since either she or the Warden of
the Blood might have dragged the thing with them when they fell, but it wasn’t there
either. At least, not that I could see. As I edged closer still, one of the Crown
Guard rolled the body of the warden over, exposing the space beneath her and reducing
the possible number of hiding places by one.