Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel (15 page)

“Faran’s right,” Triss agreed slipping out of my shadow. “We were only deeply bound to the buried god for a few seconds, and . . .” He shivered. “No. I love Siri and Kyrissa, but they cannot be trusted.”

“Maryam suggested Jax,” I said quickly. I felt like a caged beast.

“Jax is competent, caring and entirely inadequate to the demands of the job,” said Faran. “She is an excellent school teacher and den mother, and, from what I’ve heard, a hell of an assassin in her own right. But she is not going to be capable of making the kinds of hard decisions that a First Blade is going to have to make in the coming years. Can you imagine her sending one of us out on a mission that might kill us? It would shred her.”

“Point,” I said, in the exact same tone I used when someone snuck in an unfair hit on me in a fencing match.

“And, that leaves you,” said Faran. Before I could put up any other names, she held up a hand. “Who else is there? Really? Every other one of the Blades formally invested by Namara is a traitor to one degree or another. That lets them all out en masse.”

She touched a finger to the swords on her back. “Concede for a moment that the job doesn’t require a properly attuned pair of these, and move on to the younger generation. Kumi hasn’t the weight of personality. Neither does Xin. Roric might grow into it someday, but he’s not there yet. Maryam is too angry—she can be goaded like a bull. Javan is wonderful, but he doesn’t have the field experience and he never will now. Hell, lack of field experience is true of all the others, too.”

“And Faran Ghostwind?” I asked. “What about her?”

“Maybe, someday, if I ever manage to get enough of my humanity back.”

“You look plenty human to me.”

“Said the man who calls me young monster.”

I felt like she’d kicked me in the chest. “I’ve never meant it that way.”

She laughed. “No, you haven’t. But just as Siri is not wrong about how dangerous it would be to trust her, your joking name isn’t wrong about what I am. Oh, it’s more wrong now than it was when you rescued me from the Durkoth, and it gets a little wronger every day that I spend learning from you and Triss and the others how to be human again. But it’s not wrong. I am more of a killer than any of you except maybe Kelos. I’m good at, I like doing it, and I sleep like a baby afterward.

“I am learning in here”—she touched a finger to her forehead—“when it is and isn’t the right choice. But that’s all head and none of it heart. If I’m smart, and lucky, and I continue to spend time with people like you and Triss, I may feel it here someday, too.” She put her palm on her chest. “But until that day, the last thing in the world that anyone should do is hand me the leadership of an order of mage assassins. I want to not be a monster, Aral. I want it very badly, but I’m not there yet.”

Oh, Aral, I bleed for her.

Me, too, Triss. Me, too.

I reached out a hand and caught Faran’s shoulder. “Pause a moment, I want to look you in the eyes.”

We both stopped on the trail and Faran turned toward me. For the first time I understood in my heart that she really was a girl no longer. She was a smart, tough, badly damaged woman, and perhaps my closest friend in the world barring Triss.

“I know that you believe what you just said, Faran. And I know that there’s a good deal of truth to what you say about the girl I rescued. But I think you’re at least a little bit wrong about who you are now.” I touched a fingertip to the spot between her breasts. “I believe that you do feel these things here. I think that at least some of the stuff that you say you’ve only learned with your head is in your heart, too.”

“Aral—”

“Wait. I’m not finished. I know you don’t believe in yourself, but I want you to know that
I
believe in you. I want you to know that no matter what you think or what anyone else
says, there’s at least one person in the world who believes that you are no monster. You are a good woman. When you can’t believe that for yourself, please remember there’s someone out there who is believing it for you.”

Faran caught my hand and lifted it to her lips, kissing the palm of it as gently as a courtier. “Thank you, Aral. That was . . . just, thank you. It means the world to me. Now, come on, if we keep stopping like this, we’ll never catch up.” She let my hand go, turned away, and started into a slow jog.

I fell in behind her.

That was well done, Aral,
sent Triss.

Hey, every once in a while I get something right.

And, now
you’re
doing it,
he sent—his mental tone chiding.

Doing what?
I asked.

Selling yourself short. I have known you all the days of your life, and with a few notable exceptions, I think that you do get it right most of the time. Especially on the big stuff.

Thank you, Triss. I appreciate it.

Don’t think it means I won’t keep riding your ass and pushing you to do better, but you’re very welcome.

*   *   *

“Fuck!”
Faran snarled as she crawled back into the tent. “I nearly froze some very delicate bits of my plumbing pissing in that snowbank. I wish we had a pot around that we didn’t have to cook in later.”

Siri laughed. “I, for one, am glad that’s a bridge too far for you. I’ve known a few who would have chosen the dinner pot over even a short walk in a mountain blizzard.”

Faran rubbed her ass. “I can’t say that I might not change my mind later if the storm doesn’t ease up. It really is colder than a snow drake’s balls out there. Hell, it’s not all that warm in here.”

She settled down cross-legged between me and Kumi, which involved a good bit of adjustment on everyone’s part. The little silk tents were designed for four people to sleep in—if they didn’t mind getting close, and they left their gear
outside. We’d originally packed enough of the things so that each one would only have had to accommodate three sleepers. Unfortunately, most of them had gone wherever the missing agutes went. Which meant that now that we had caught up with students, the tents were splitting at the seams with seven occupants each, and all our gear.

Well, except ours. We only had five. The reason for that was that one of our five was Kelos. Jax didn’t trust herself in that small a space with him after the losses she’d suffered in the last few days, and she’d insisted on taking Javan with her to keep an eye on him. Since Kelos terrified the rest of the youngsters so badly that no one who hadn’t been part of the rear guard with us was willing to share a tent with him, it meant we had a tiny bit of extra space. It wasn’t much, but going on three days trapped by the blizzard, we had all come to appreciate it.

“We need to get down off this mountainside,” said Kelos. “We’ve been pinned up here too long already. And that’s even if the food weren’t running short. The agents of the Son of Heaven who are running the Kvani invasion will have sent messages on to whatever Varyan forces he controls at the base of the mountains, as well as the Caeni clans across the river. The longer we’re stuck here, the worse our odds of getting past whatever is waiting for us down below.”

I shrugged. “I can’t say I disagree, but the track is iced over where it’s exposed and buried where it’s not. We’ve got no good way to move on from here short of a melt. You remember what it was like hiking through the first rough edges of this storm. We nearly lost Javan and Maryam both when we hit that ice patch. I’m not sure we’d still be alive if we hadn’t come on this little hanging valley when we did. It’s provided a much needed refuge.”

“And a trap,” said Kelos. “If we hadn’t found such a good shelter, we might have pushed on and gotten down below the storm’s snow line.”

“Do you have a suggestion for how we get out of it?” asked Faran. “Or are you just complaining because you like the sound of your own voice?”

“The former,” he replied, dryly. “But it’s not going to be very popular.”

This should be a doozy,
sent Triss.

“Tell me,” I said.

“If we’re where I think we are,” said Kelos, “there’s a place about a mile down the trail where the path overlooks a deep ravine carved by the Evindine. The path itself curves on and goes around another small peak and down through a much gentler valley before it comes back to the river. The snow is going to be ten feet deep through that second valley if it’s an inch—maybe deeper if there’ve been avalanches. It’ll take us several days to get through if we go that way, and that’s assuming we can do it at all.”

“
If
we go that way?” I asked. “That’s the way the path goes. If you haven’t noticed, this isn’t great terrain for breaking new trail.”

Kelos shook his head. “No, it’s not. Not on foot at any rate.”

“I don’t . . .” And then a mad thought occurred to me. “Wait, are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting? Because that’s crazy.”

“Probably. I told you that you wouldn’t like it.”

“Hey, old man.” Faran poked me in the ribs. “I missed a step in that dance. Clue a girl in here, would you.”

I sighed. “He’s suggesting that we sail-jump down the ravine that holds the Evindine. He’s also insane. I came through this part of the mountains a time or two when I was in training. If it’s the place I remember . . .” I shook my head. “The clearance is what, fifteen feet side to side?”

“In the narrower spots.” Kelos nodded. “But most of the way down it’s a good twenty-five feet. It’s steep, too, excellent drop to distance ratio for a sail-jump. I think we could make it all the way to the base where it opens out, especially with the wind that’ll be blowing up from the bottom in this storm. It’ll slow the glide down, but it’ll provide a lot of lift.”

“Not to mention turbulence,” said Siri. “That’ll make it harder to stay centered.”

I looked at her. “You said that like it’s a done deal. You’re
not seriously agreeing with him, are you? What if he’s wrong and the valley isn’t steep enough for a sail-jumper to make it all the way to the bottom?”

Siri opened her hand in a what-are-you-going-to-do gesture.

“We still might be all right,” said Kelos. “It’s been brutally cold for a good seventy-five hours. The Evindine is shallow here, and the flow this time of year is pretty light. There’s a good chance it’s solid ice from top to bottom. Given how rough and stepped the bed is, I wouldn’t want to try to ride it if it’s not frozen. But if it is, it’s probably survivable.”

“Maybe,” I said. “If you’re lucky, and you don’t mind a few fractures.”

“I didn’t hear a
no
anywhere in there,” said Faran. “Just a lot of
I don’t like it
. Are you seriously considering this idea, Aral?”

You are, aren’t you?
sent Triss.

I nodded. “We’ve got two, maybe three days’ food if we keep eating the way we have to in order to stay warm. Five if we eat the goats. If Kelos is right about how hard getting through the valley the trail follows is going to be, we’re going to be mighty hungry by the time we get down to the flatlands. Even that presumes that the storm stops in the next day or two and we get a melt. It’s an unseasonable blizzard, but not so much so that it couldn’t simply be the start of winter.”

“Even if it’s not,” said Siri, “we’re going to have to do some hard digging to move on. That is, unless it warms up a lot and fast. . . .”

“In which case we’ll have to worry about flooding,” I added. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about the downsides of a melt, too. As much as I hate to admit it, Kelos may be right.”

The older man smiled his grim smile. “I’ll volunteer to take the first jump. I can signal when I get to the bottom if it works. If I’m wrong, and it doesn’t, then at least I’ll be too dead to have to listen to all the I told you sos.”

S
now
devoured the world in dreamy silence, swallowing sounds and sights with a cold, merciless hunger.

I glanced over my shoulder. The trail ended fifty feet behind us, vanishing into a white void. The snow-covered slopes both above and below disappeared even faster since they lacked the string of gray-clad walkers to contrast against the gently falling flakes. Ahead? Ahead simply didn’t exist. The trail bent steeply to the right for all of five feet before it opened out into the teeth of the north wind and whirled away into infinity.

The blizzard had slackened considerably in the two days since our discussion in the tent, shedding most of its power. But the snow continued to fall gently if heavily. Big fat flakes had taken the sky from us along with almost everything else. The only things that existed at the moment were my fellows and a yawning crack in the world ahead. The sides of the canyon were too steep for snow to cling. Though the snowfall hid the bottom of the ravine and the Evindine, we could see the stone along its upper edges for some distance, a dark and ominous slice cutting through the white void.

Kelos glanced over the edge again. “I wish I could see the far end. I remember it running more or less straight west from this point to where it opens out at the bottom, but even a slight bend could be a major problem with this visibility.”

He looked up into the falling snow and shook his head. “But then, wishes are terrible currency. You can spend all you want but they never buy you anything. If I make it, I’ll try to send my signal straight back up the canyon—you’ll never see it if I aim anywhere but right at you, and even then . . .” He shrugged. “I guess we’ll just have to find out.”

Without another word, or even a glance in our direction, he leaped up and out. Malthiss spun him shadow wings that hid his arms before he reached the top of his jump. He jerked hard to the left when he hit the main current of the wind and had to bank to compensate, but then he dropped below the edge of the canyon—out of the brunt of the wind, sliding down and away—a dark arrow shot at an invisible target. Within seconds, the snow devoured him as thoroughly as it had everything else.

When I turned away I saw that Faran had a dreamy smile on her face—a look I had rarely seen there. I quirked a questioning eyebrow at her—more conscious than ever that I had adopted the gesture from the man who had just left us.

The smile hardened into something predatory and wild, much more Faran. “Sorry, simply thinking that we’re ahead either way.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Jax shook her head from beyond Faran. “That’s because you can’t bring yourself to hate him the way most of us do. What she means is that either he will have found a way out of this trap”—she spread her arms to take in the falling snow—“or he will die. Either way, the rest of us win.”

I winced inwardly, though I think I hid it well enough. Not at Jax wishing Kelos dead, mind you. She had every right to that wish, and to the same for me frankly, after the ruin my return had brought to her life in the past week. No, I winced because she was right about my feelings. Even though Kelos had betrayed my goddess to her destruction
and was responsible for the death of so many of my friends and loved ones, I couldn’t hate him properly, couldn’t wipe away the memories of the man who had taught and nurtured me from the age of seven.

He might be the Traitor Kelos, but he was also the man who had sat beside me for two weeks straight when I nearly died from fever when I was nine. The man who had set my broken arm at twelve. The man who handed me a purse and wished me good hunting when the goddess had sent me after Ashvik in defiance of tradition, and who had done so knowing that the rest of the shadow council would be angry about someone so young being given the job. I
wanted
to hate him as the others did and, even more, to stop loving him as my father in service of Namara, but I couldn’t do it.

So, while the others were probably split about half and half between hoping he’d crash into a wall and fall to a very painful death, and wanting him to succeed and get us out of this mess, I found that I couldn’t wish for anything but his safe landing at the far end.

That’s why it hit all the harder when no signal came up the canyon. Not within what would have been a reasonable amount of time, nor even an unreasonable one. It slowly became clear that something had gone wrong.

“The question is: what now?” Siri asked after a half hour had passed with no sign from Kelos.

“That depends on whether he made it and simply landed someplace he can’t signal us from, or if his story has finally ended,” I replied. “One means flying forward into mystery, the other going back to our tents and hoping for a miracle.”

“He’s alive,” said Jax. “I can feel it in my bones. He’s too damned mean to die that quietly. Mind you, I have never liked this plan. But I think we have to go forward anyway. There’s no sign of the storm truly breaking, and we’ve got to get off this mountain. I think we have to send another sail-jumper down the run and hope that they make it,
and
that they land someplace better suited for signaling.”

Siri nodded. “I’m with Jax on that. I wouldn’t have agreed
to this in the first place if I thought we had any real alternative.”

Faran sighed. “So, who goes next?”

“I do,” I said.

“Javan’s a better sail-jumper,” said Faran.

“For that matter, so am I,” added Siri.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did I give the impression that this was up for discussion? Because it’s not.”

I don’t think—

I cut Triss off.
Nor with you either.

“I’m going,” I continued aloud. “I won’t send anyone else into that ahead of me.” I pointed into the crevasse below. “I
shouldn’t
have let Kelos go—sail-jumping is one of the few places where I ever surpassed him. You, too, Siri. Though you’re better at almost everything else a Blade does, I can outfly you.” I turned to Faran. “And we’re not even going to consider Javan for this.”

“We’ve had this conversation,” said Faran. “If we lose you, we lose our leader. We can’t afford that.”

“Too bad.” So, because I knew that we could go around on this argument for hours if I let it continue, I simply turned and jumped.

Dammit, Aral!
Triss snapped into my mind, but that was all he had time for as he got busy spinning shadow wings from the substance of his being. After that, he had to hand control over to me if he wanted to give us the best chance of surviving the glide.

Above and behind me I could hear all three women swearing angrily, but only briefly. Then distance and the muffling snow wrapped me in blessed silence. I loved sail-jumping as I loved few other things. There was a purity to it that I found in very few places. And this was an exceptional experience of its kind.

The snow hid the river below and blurred the passing walls of the canyon just enough so that it seemed as though I was hardly moving. The north wind barely touched the air down here. With no turbulence and no way to judge movement, it
felt like I was floating gently within a sea of white light. I could have lived the experience forever if not for my responsibilities.

For starters, surviving the flight and getting a message back to the others. The safest way to do the former was to stay high up in the canyon, as close to the top as possible, where the gap between the sides was widest and the chances of hitting some outthrust bit of floor or wall the lowest. But that’s certainly what Kelos had done, and, even so, something had gone wrong somewhere along the line. I needed to try a different tack.

I decided to get down low and see what the floor of the canyon looked like. Was the river frozen? Did Kelos hit a wall and go down somewhere along the line? I couldn’t tell any of that from up here. So I tilted my arms, angling my wings to steepen the angle of my glide. Down, down, do-ooooh! I flipped my wings back hard, braking and clawing for height. The river was indeed frozen or, at least, iced over and covered with a deep layer of snow that both made it almost invisible amidst the fall around me and silenced its burbling voice.

If not for a waterfall that suddenly dropped away below me, I might well have hit bottom hard enough to discover exactly how solidly it was frozen. I hadn’t even known I was close to crashing until that waterfall widened the distance between my feet and the surface of the ice-covered river, opening like a dark pit in one of the training mazes below Namara’s temple. My heart hammered wildly as I yawed from side to side while getting myself back under proper control.

This time when I headed down again, I knew what to look for when I approached the floor of the canyon. I stayed about ten feet above the stream from there on out—high enough to keep my feet above the level of the occasional upthrust boulder or low stone spire—while I watched for any sign of a crashed Kelos. But neither my old mentor nor any major trouble spot appeared. Time lost much of its meaning as I continued forward—a tiny bead of awareness
sliding down a long dark cord surrounded by white nothingness. It was mesmerizing, and I very nearly made the same mistake Kelos must have—would have but for the advent of a bright spear of orange pink spell-light ahead and to my left that jarred me back into the moment.

It came from below and in front of me at an angle that seemed ridiculously steep given the slant of the river thus far, and it was way out of line with my glide. I backwinged more out of startled reflex at the sight than from any conscious thought. That slowed me enough to spot a huge drop coming up in front of me, making possible a risky split-second decision on what to do about it.

First, I flipped my wings horizontal to the line of my forward progress, yanking myself almost to a standstill in the air. Then I released them back into shadow, and simply dropped the eight or so feet to the frozen river below. I hit hard—betting on the thickness of the ice among other things—and slid forward, almost going over the edge of a fifty-foot waterfall. But the snow was a good ten inches deep and that slowed me enough that I was able to catch myself with an outthrust foot, bracing myself against a ridge of stone that must split up the flow of the falls when they were running. A moment later, the bright spear of magelight repeated itself. The unusual orange pink color that Blades used for such things marked it unmistakably as a signal from Kelos.

Cautiously, I leaned out over the edge of the fall, and saw . . . well, a whole lot of nothing because of the snow. A change in the light suggested that the canyon opened or ended somewhere not too far ahead, but that was about it. I released my hold on Triss’s will after sending an answering flash back in the direction of the two I had seen so far. It was answered within seconds, and this time the light came straight back at me instead of pointing off to my left.

Remind me later to yell at you for not warning me in advance before you jumped off the cliff at the top of the canyon,
Triss sent grumpily.
I’d do it now, but we have more important things to manage.

Oh, absolutely. I will, without fail, remind you to make my life more difficult later.

Why do I think you’re lying?

No idea. I would no more do that than I would forget to ask for a grumpy lecture at some future point uncertain.

So that’s how it is, is it?
He did the mental equivalent of a haughty sniff.
By the way, where are we?

I don’t honestly know. Not beyond the fact that we’re sitting at the top of a big-ass waterfall somewhere close to the end of the canyon.

And Kelos?

I waved vaguely into the snow.
Down there somewhere, and apparently still in one piece.

Triss assumed dragon shape and crept out to peer over the edge of the fall.
That would explain why we couldn’t see his signal. Once he went over this edge his angle for sending signals would have gone all wrong. Any idea if he’s on the trail or not?

Nope. I wish we had some way to make conversation with these signals.
I created a tiny flash of the orange pink spell-light over the palm of my hand—visible only to mages and their familiars.

Blades typically worked alone. Even when we didn’t, there was normally a major premium on hiding in darkness. Flashy signals were generally a thing of last resort, so we’d never developed a system for using them to communicate, as we had with the squeeze code. I made a mental note to add that to my list of things to do if I ever got to really settle into the role of First Blade. Then I paused and reviewed the chain of thought that had gotten me there. . . .
Squeeze code, hmmm.

There might be something there. It was a rudimentary form of communication used between Blades on those rare occasions where we might be working together and need to communicate wordlessly. There were no more than fifty words, all of them of the
yes
,
no
,
stop
,
go
variety, and they were transmitted by holding hands and squeezing. What if I pulsed the light I was sending down to Kelos . . . ? I tried the sequence for “alert,” repeating it twice and then stopping.