Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel (14 page)

“How’s the leg?” I asked.

He flexed golemite toes—there was little point in wearing a boot on that foot. “The magic side works well enough, First Blade, but my stump is aching something fierce. I train with it all the time, but I haven’t had to travel distances like this on it before. I’m learning that I should have pushed myself to go farther and faster.” He straightened his back. “But don’t worry, I’ll do this. I have to.”

I could see what saying that cost him, and I squeezed his shoulder lightly. “I know you will. Good lad.”

Once Faran and I had dropped back out of earshot, I said, “You spent a fair bit of time with Javan when you were both recovering from the fight at the abbey.” He’d lost his leg in the same battle that had nearly cost her an eye and left her with years of debilitating headaches. “How bad is he, really?”

She shrugged. “I’ve seen him worse, if not by much. But he’s tough and his endurance is amazing. He’ll make it even if he has to walk the last ten miles on a bleeding stump or crawl on hands and knees.”

“I wish we could put him on one of the agutes,” I said.

But there was just no way. The goats couldn’t carry much more than thirty pounds at the best of times, and they started to get balky at twenty. I kept one eye on Javan’s back after that, and I didn’t much like what I saw. Well before dawn he was swaying on his feet. As we went, I watched for any place we could conceivably leave him that he’d have a chance, but there was nothing.

The canyon itself offered no shelter beyond a few little half caves that would do no more than pin him in one spot for the dead. Above, the slopes were high and steep with hardly any cover between us and the snowline. The valley of Dalridia itself was barely low enough for trees. Within a few hours of starting up the path, we’d climbed past the place where even scrub brush could grow.

Oh, it was possible that he might find a narrow ledge well above the trail where he wouldn’t be visible to the risen passing below, but they didn’t hunt by sight alone. Hell, half of them didn’t have much left in the way of eyes. I had never
made a serious study of the restless dead, so I couldn’t have told you how they did hunt. It was hard to believe scent was involved when you considered how terribly and strongly they smelled, themselves, but they were known to follow trails well enough, and there had to be something there. Perhaps they had some life-sense or could follow life-scents in some way analogous to magesight.

Whatever their method, leaving Javan to rest would be the same as leaving him to die. On the other hand, though he swayed and stumbled and sweated, he kept up hour after hour in a way that I don’t know I’d have been able to manage if we swapped places.

Two hours past dawn and shortly after we crossed the highest point of the pass, we came on another little half cave. This one was scooped out of the wall on our left. On our right the mountain fell away steeply to the next loop of the switchback far below. It was early yet, but Kelos thought this was the best place we’d find to catch a little nap.

When Kelos waved us over for a break, Javan simply lay down on the bare rock and was snoring in seconds. The rest of us sorted out the pack animals and chewed a bit of jerky and some dusty trail cakes before finding places to curl up. I was just thinking about setting watches when Kelos caught my eye and shook his head.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “You sleep.” And damn if he didn’t look as fresh as if he’d only climbed out of a featherbed ten minutes ago—I swear that the man is made of dragon hide and tempered steel. Also, I hate the way he seems to read my mind.

“All right,” I said. “But wake someone if you feel tired.”

As I settled into an angle of the rock, Faran sidled over. “Do you want me to keep an eye on him? I’m still pretty fresh.”

“No. The last thing in the world that we need right now is for you to get one of your headaches. If Kelos wanted to kill us all in our sleep we’d be dead by now anyway.”

“You’re not saying that you trust him?!” she hissed angrily.

“Not as far as I could drive him back in a fencing match
with one hand tied behind my back. Not in the way that you’re asking about anyway. As long as our goals and his remain the same, he’s the best ally we could have.”

“And if that changes?”

“I promise to let you know far enough in advance to put a knife in his back before he suspects. Can I go to bed now?”

“Humph.” But she stopped arguing and her breathing eased into sleep shortly thereafter.

I had a bit more trouble, though I did fall eventually. When I blinked my eyes open next I had to assume that letting Kelos stand watch had worked out all right, since all of us woke with our throats yet uncut. He had stood guard over us for the whole five hours he thought we could afford to sleep without waking anyone. I’d have chewed on him a bit about not resting himself if he didn’t still look fresher than I felt.

We marched from just after noon to an hour or so before sunset without a break, and we only stopped then long enough to grab a mouthful of food and some cold tea from our waterskins. The mountains towered all around us, their reddish heads capped by white helms shining like polished steel in the clear light of a cloudless day.

Twice we had to slowly pick our way through the aftermath of major rockfalls, and once an ominous crack from above announced the imminent arrival of a huge slab of granite. It bounced once on the trail, shattering the edge, before spinning off into the void, barely missing both Javan and one of the goats as it passed. Not a good omen that.

Maybe an hour after sunset we arrived at Kelos’s ambush site. The trail ran ribbon thin around a thick curve of rock with a nearly sheer drop on the left. Perhaps four hundred feet below, a valley pointed down and away to the south, while the trail looped off to the west. I could see both why Kelos thought it would make a good spot to take on our foes and why he wished for a better one.

If we could get our undead in the right place and bring a chunk of the mountain down on top of them, it would certainly thin their ranks nicely. There wasn’t so much as a
jot of shelter to protect them. If the rocks didn’t crush the risen, the fall was such that even the dead would likely arrive at the bottom more in the form of loose sacks full of smashed bones than anything that might walk away.

At the same time, it was a big stretch of very narrow trail, which would string them out into a long line. So, the chances of bringing down enough of the slope to get them all were awfully slim. Also, simply climbing up the wall to get in position to bring on the avalanche would make for a hell of a task.

“Which means we’d best get to it,” Faran said with a sigh when I pointed that out. “How do you want to do this?”

I leaned back to get a better look at the slope above as we neared the sharpest part of the bend in the trail. “We can’t afford to let them scent us—or whatever it is they do—before they reach the place where the ambush is going to happen. That means the climbers are going to have to go around this corner, head up, and then work their way back past this spot above. I want you at the point farthest back toward the way we came, so you’re first up the wall.”

“Not Siri?” Faran sounded surprised.

“Entirely sensible,” said Siri with a laugh.

“What am I missing?” asked Faran.

Siri held up her stump. “This. The less of this sort of climbing I have to do, the smaller the chance I fall to my doom. I’m going to be holding down the back end of the line, with Javan just in front of me since we’re far and away the weakest climbers here.”

Javan nodded, and I couldn’t help but notice how pale and shaky he looked. I wished I could have spared him the climb completely, but that would have left him down on the trail with the risen—an even riskier proposal. I didn’t like putting Faran out front with her injury, but I trusted her more than anyone else there, Siri included, and that made her my point woman.

Faran actually struck her forehead with the heel of her palm. “Of course. I’m an idiot. So, who’s between Javan and me?”

“In order,” I said, “Kumi, Jax, Kelos, and Altia.”

That got me a very hard look. “Where are
you
going to be?” she demanded.

“I’m the tethered goat or, the plug in the bottle, if you prefer. Someone has to stay on the path and force the risen to bunch up before you drop the mountain on them.”

“That’s not acceptable,” Faran said in the same breath that Kelos insisted, “It ought to be me.”

Siri and Jax didn’t look happy about it either, but the former nodded and the latter looked away. Kumi, Javan, and Altia kept their heads down and played the part of the three monkeys of legend.

I addressed Kelos first. “You’re ten times the mage I am, and everyone here knows it. In fact, there’s not a one of you can’t cast rings around me—bright blue ones with fairy wings, even—and you all know it. You’d do better as the plug in the bottle than I will, too, but only by a narrow margin.”

I looked at Faran. “The same argument holds for you as far as to what happens above, and you’re not even in the running for down here. Not until you get those swords properly attuned. Of those remaining who have the weapons to match the dead, upside is Siri’s show for obvious reasons, and I’m a hell of a lot better brute-force swordsman than Jax, which is what matters most in going toe-to-toe with the dead.”

Faran’s face grew grimmer still and I put my hands on her shoulders. “The trail
has
to be held for this to work, and I’m the only logical choice. Tell me I’m wrong and why, if you can think of some other plan that works better. If not, you need to get climbing.”

She shook her head. “Dammit, Aral, that’s not fair.” Then, she leaned in to give me a quick kiss on the cheek and a punch on the shoulder before she started climbing.

She will not take it at all well if you allow yourself to get killed in the next few hours,
Triss said into my mind.

I’ll see what I can do,
I sent as dryly as I could manage.
I’m not all that thrilled about the prospect myself.

I suppose that will have to do.

You’re welcome.

Kumi was right behind Faran. Then Jax, who gave me a kiss as well before heading up, though hers was on the lips.

“What’s that for?” I asked her.

“Luck.”

I raised an eyebrow at Siri then, but she shook her head and winked as she stepped aside to let the others go first. “I’ll kiss you after, and maybe even a bit more than kiss if we’ve the chance.”

“You sound pretty certain there’s going to be an after.”

“I am. If you do die here, I’m going to catch your ghost before it makes it to the wheel of rebirth and wedge it back into your body somehow, because I am
not
going to let them make me First Blade again so soon, if ever.”

“Thanks?”

“Any time.”

Kelos paused for a long moment then, like he wanted to argue with me, but he, too, finally sighed and started up the mountainside.

Altia pressed her right fist into her left palm—a Kvani warrior’s salute to her khan, and whispered to me as she passed on her way to follow Kelos, “Thank you for trusting me to do this.”

Javan went next, moving more slowly and carefully than Altia, and Siri brought up the rear. Then Triss and I were alone on the trail with the other goats. I led the agutes far enough down the path to get them out of the avalanche zone, loosened their packs, and tied them lightly to various spurs of rock. None of them would get free easily, but all of them could manage it given sufficient time and motivation. There was no sense in them dying, too, if we didn’t pull this off.

I loosened my swords in their sheathes and walked back up the trail to meet the army of the dead with only Triss at my back.

I
have faced the imminent possibility of my own death many times. There is something freeing about the moment before the axe falls that I will always love, even though I no longer seek my ending as I did in the days right after the fall of the temple.

I do not wish to meet the lords of judgment before my time. Not anymore anyway, but with each passing year, the tower of weights on the balance against me climbs higher, and the stains on my soul grow darker. My passing will not be an easy one, but with every corpse I add to my tally I know that my final reckoning grows that much harder. Knowing that, I do not fear death when she comes the closest.

I will not embrace her, but I always blow her a kiss as she approaches.

When I saw the first of the risen come around a corner on the trail far above—their rotting flesh pale in the bright moon’s light—I did not flinch or blanch. I simply drew my swords, stretched my shoulders, and smiled. Even moving fast it would take them another quarter of an hour to reach me, but the waiting was almost over. One way or the other.

The risen hunt in silence, so I had no more warning that they were upon me than the time it took the first of them to cross the distance from coming around the last curve to lunging at my face. I had chosen my place carefully, and now I braced my back foot against the edge of a crack in the surface of the trail, snapping my arms wide in a scissoring cut with both swords that beheaded the monster. It felt like chopping through an inch-thick wooden staff, and the impact shocked through me, driving me down and back into the stone.

My footing held. Both then, and again when momentum carried the now headless and inanimate corpse forward to slam into my chest in a gruesome parody of a tackle. The bones of its neck scraped unpleasantly across my ribs, as it slid aside and fell into the void. I barely noticed, as I was already facing the next of its fellows. This one I skewered through the eyes and under the breast bone, twisting sideways to lever it off the cliff.

Again, I was driven back on my heels. Again, I held my ground. The third went over without any help from me, as the pressure from behind squeezed him up against the back of the second so that he was dragged along when that one fell.

If they had simply kept piling into me and each other at a full run, they might have carried me over the side at the cost of a dozen or fewer of their number. But they were either too dumb to realize that, or they cared more for their survival than my death.

Whatever the reason, by the time I faced the fourth, the front of the line had slowed down and forced those behind to do the same. In the brief moment of respite between three and four I heard a sort of gnawing crackle from somewhere far above, like a squirrel with stone teeth chewing away at a marble walnut.

This one swung at me with finger bones sharpened into claws where they punched through the rotting flesh of its hands. I took my first step back then, as I needed to give up some ground before the avalanche came. I parried at the same time, neatly cutting away its right hand. Before it could take another swing, I bent my knees and hacked sharply at
its left ankle. Bone splintered. Support faltered. Another risen fell into the abyss.

I backed up again, taking a moment to look both above and below my next opponent. Just as I had expected, the risen that couldn’t come at me directly had begun to climb—some up, some down. The stone walls were steep and sheer, but the creatures were finding grips enough to begin their advance around the bottleneck I had created. Far above, the gnawing away of stone grew louder, punctuated now by occasional sharp cracks and pops.

I levered another of the risen off the path, and tried to back up faster as I realized the first major flaw in my plan. I had seriously underestimated the speed with which the risen could climb along the rock face. They were faster there than I could have imagined. A dead hand snatching at my ankle emphasized that point, and I had to take a reckless leap backward to get clear—hoping madly as I did so that I hadn’t misjudged where the path behind me lay.

The next risen on the trail lunged forward into the gap my move created, clawing viciously at my face and chest. I felt my shirt tear as I backpedaled, and then my heel came down on air and I almost went over the edge. I probably would have, too, had not the one that leaped in then gotten a grip on my left wrist and yanked me forward, opening its rotted jaws wide to take a bite out of my face.

He’d have had me then, if not for Triss, who formed himself into a wire-like loop of darkness that neatly nipped off the hand that had hold of me. I staggered and flung my arms wide as I tried to recover my balance. Fortunately for my survival, the risen’s situation was even worse. It suddenly found itself pulling at nothing, stumbled, put a foot down on nothing at all, and started to fall. As it went over, it made a desperate grab for the edge with its remaining hand, but caught the shoulder of the foremost of the climbers instead. They fell away together to bounce and shatter on the rocks far below.

That gave me a tiny instant of room to think and to act. I used it to turn and bolt down the trail. I hated having to turn my back on the dead, but it was that or be swarmed
under. I knew I couldn’t keep ahead of them for long, but I also knew that I didn’t have to. I just had to stay ahead of them long enough to—

CRACKOOOM!

How do you describe it when the world comes apart around you? When a dozen things all happen at once? When you see some, and only hear about others later? This is the dilemma of the storyteller, whether they live the moment or only tell it later.

Let me begin with the sound of shattering stone, with a great wall of falling rock that rolled past behind me like a waterfall gone mad—noise and dust and the world’s ending. My people had outdone themselves almost to all of our ruin. A curtain of stone three feet thick and thirty feet tall let go along a front a hundred feet long. It hit the trail right behind me and obliterated it along with the dead there as well as those both above and below. In that, my plan succeeded beyond my wildest dreams when nearly all the risen were ground into paste by the avalanche.

But it failed, too. None of us had anticipated the sheer amount of destruction it would bring, nor what that would mean to the line of my people clinging to the rock face above the fall. That whole section of mountain
flexed
with the sudden change in the weight of stone. Faran and Jax and Kumi managed to hold on, if only barely.

Javan and Siri could not. Kelos and Altia, well . . . Let me take the four of them one at a time.

Siri first, as she is dearest to me. Siri felt her one-handed grip slipping, and anticipated what was to come. She flung herself up and out, kicking off the wall and spinning wings of shadow. Making the choice to do it intentionally gave her the extra height and time she needed to turn and wheel neatly. Her sail-jump carried her around and down to land a few hundred yards farther along the trail as cleanly as if she’d planned it from the start. And that is Siri to a tee.

Javan’s fall was less graceful. He tried to hang on, but could not. He would have died had not Thiess realized what was happening before his partner did and acted to save them both.
Thiess was one of the great gliders among the Shades; it was part of his reason for assuming the owl’s form as his use-shape. Javan’s sail-jump was nowhere near as neat as Siri’s, but he managed to glide down and around to a small ledge a hundred or so feet below the trail where Siri had landed. From there it was only a matter of climbing up to rejoin us.

Kelos? Kelos had a good enough grip to hang on if he chose, but he realized what was happening as quickly as Siri did and he made a different choice. When he explained it to me later, he said it this way: “I saw that the whole section of the mountain was coming apart, and I realized what it meant for you with the dead only inches behind you. So, I decided to fall upon them like lightning from above. The only thing I regret is calling out your name when I leaped—I fear that’s what made up Altia’s mind.”

Altia. Oh, my poor girl. I owe you my life and I will never have the opportunity to repay you. Altia’s magical power was everything that Jax had claimed and more. She was also smart and quick on the uptake and she had nerves of steel under that naïve front—or so I must assume. Because she saw what Kelos was up to, and also that it wouldn’t be enough. Not if the mountain fell on
me
, too. So, she let go of the wall, and she rode the avalanche down, using that enormous power of magic to steer the fall away from me and from Kelos, at the cost of her own life.

Jax watched the whole thing, watched as her favorite student chose to save my life at the cost of her own. There wasn’t a thing she could do to stop it. When she told me about it later, her voice broke as she described the power and control it had taken for Altia to turn that gigantic mass of stone away from us . . . and Jax’s voice never breaks. I do not think she will ever forgive me for what happened there, though she is proud in her grief.

Me? I ended up hanging over the edge of the trail, saved by Kelos, and Altia, and by the goat whose legs I clung to as he dangled from the rope I’d used to tie him to the rocks.

When the world stopped coming apart, Kelos pulled me and the goat back up—the fall and my weight had broken the
poor thing’s neck. Six of its fellows had simply vanished, though whether they were crushed or escaped is anyone’s guess.

It wasn’t until Jax and the others had climbed down and Siri and Javan up that I found out about Altia. Her name we carved deep in the stone where she had fallen, along with that of Olthiss, and the balance that holds all the grief and guilt I have generated in this world tipped a little bit farther against me.

I do not court death, but I do not turn away when she comes close, and when she finally takes me, I will not be sorry to leave the world behind.

*   *   *

“I
hope they saw that.” Faran let her arms fall back down to her sides once the last glimmers of the column of spell-light faded from the sky.

It was midnight, and she had just sent up the third round of signals to let those who had gone ahead know that we had stopped the oncoming dead. The spell-light was very bright and they were supposed to stop and look for that signal at the appointed hour, but there are many turns on the path that runs down from the mountains, and it was always possible that they might miss it.

We would know for sure in a matter of hours, when we caught up to them or failed to—ten at the most. They couldn’t have gotten any farther ahead of us than that. If they
did
miss our signal we had a backup plan to meet at the mouth of the Evindine where it fed into the sacred lake.

Faran rubbed her hands together. “It’s getting cold fast, and it’ll be worse before we see the sunrise. We should catch up with the others.” They had moved on ahead to get out of the wind—brutal there on the broad outside curve we had chosen for the signal.

Kelos was in the lead again, with Siri a half pace behind. Kumi had the much reduced string of agutes a bit farther back, while Javan staggered in their wake, looking more than half dead. Jax had taken on the task of shepherding him along and making sure he didn’t fall off the trail—as
much I think because it gave her something to think about besides Altia as because Javan really needed the help.

Altia.

“Why did she do it?” I asked aloud.

“She thought you were worth it,” said Faran. “I’d have made the same choice in her place.”

I didn’t have any answer to that, so I looked away into the darkness below the edge of the path.

“She told you the answer to that herself,” said Triss. “You were her khan.”

“That, too,” said Faran. “You are First Blade, a role that weighs all the heavier now that Namara is gone along with the priesthood. We have no other leader.”

“I don’t suppose I could resign my commission?” I kept my tone light, but I really did want to bolt.

Killing people who were just in the way of those who needed killing was bad enough. Being responsible for the deaths of those who followed me, of those I cared about . . . I shuddered in the cold wind. What if it
had
been Faran? Or Siri? The very thought of it made me want to slip quietly away in the night never to return. I found myself riding the ripping edge of panic in a way that I had not since before the temple fell. In all the time since, I had only ever been risking my own life, and that generally hadn’t mattered to me all that much.

“No, you can’t resign,” said Faran, her tone deadly serious. “Not if you want the dream of the goddess to survive. Not yet anyway.”

“What do you mean by not
yet
?” Had she thought of a way to get me out of this?

She laughed in a way that suggested she had read my tone if not my mind. “I mean not today, and not tomorrow, nor any time in the next year or two probably. You’re stuck for a goodly while yet because there is no one else right now.”

“Siri—”

“Siri can’t be trusted. She told you so herself, and she wasn’t wrong. Not until she gets her god problem under control. I saw what the Smoldering Flame did to her when he woke up. If she were First Blade, everything might be
fine, or it might result in handing the entire order over to a half-mad, half-dead god.”