Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel (23 page)

I nodded because it was the obvious choice. “I’d say getting sleeping arrangements set up is our first order of business. We’ve been traveling hard, and I for one am ready for a long rest. Then come tomorrow night, we can start nosing around the temple precinct to see what it will take to crack the place under the new security regime.”

Siri grimaced. “We’re going to have to approach that with even more care than we normally would, given the betrayal of Lieutenant Chomarr.” She ticked points off with her fingers. “They know we’re coming, we can’t trust a thing he said, and every question we asked will have given him insights into how we think about these things.”

“In short,” said Faran, “we’re fucked.”

“Not entirely,” I replied. “But we
are
starting in a very big hole.”

“One thing Chomarr
didn’t
know about is the Signet’s finger with its ring,” said Kelos. “I presume you stashed it somewhere near the city, Aral. How fast can you get your hands on it?”

I blinked at the question and shrugged. “More than a day, less than a week.” I was surprised that now that Kelos had finally chosen to bring it up he did so in front of everyone, if not by the fact that he knew me well enough to know that I must have stashed it near the city.

“Do you really think we’ll have any use for the thing?”
I asked. “You saw Signet Toragana’s ring, and heard what she had to say about the changes in the system—how paranoid the Son of Heaven has become.” I didn’t pretend for a second that I believed he hadn’t been listening in on that conversation. “I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t have had all the wards rekeyed at the same time.”

That was a big part of why
I
hadn’t chosen to mention Nea’s finger to anyone else yet—I knew we’d have to try it, but I didn’t want to make anyone think we had an easy in and then disappoint them. Judging by the look on Faran’s face just then, I suspected that I might have made a mistake there, though she didn’t yet say anything about it.

“I can imagine it very easily,” said Kelos. “Think on what Toragana said about the
way
things have changed. The Son of Heaven banished all of his mages from the heart of the temple complex, replacing the sorcerer priests of the Hand who guarded him with hidden risen. I think the reason Toragana’s ring of office wasn’t a spell key, is exactly
because
the Son can’t control all of his wards now.”

Kelos began to pace. “He’s no mage, and he’s alienated himself from the vast majority of his followers who are. There are about a million and one warding structures inside the temple precinct. He simply won’t have had the resources to change them all after tossing out the bulk of his mages. I’m sure he’ll have ordered them to change the wards in the areas where he allows them entry, and he’s probably had some of the inner wards redone as well, especially around his quarters. It won’t help us at all with the outer defenses, but I think a lot of the inner temple may well remain vulnerable to the key provided by a Signet’s ring and finger.”

I found myself nodding. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way. All right, tomorrow night Triss and I will head off to fetch that finger—assuming it hasn’t rotted away. I’ll take Faran and Ssithra, and Kumi and Gryss to watch my back when I go.”

You didn’t even think to leave Faran behind,
and
you remembered that for now at least, that means Kumi as well. You’re learning.

I suppressed a snort.
Hey, if you hit me in the head with a blunt object often enough, it eventually makes an impression. For that matter, since we’re going to be heading toward the area where we think the Son has concentrated his risen, I’ll need someone to cover my back. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have between me and a knife.

Maryam held up a hand, and I couldn’t help noticing that the look on her face pretty well matched the growing storm on Faran’s.

“Yes?”

“I only understood about half of that,” she said. “I know that Jax went to you to get help to break us free of the Hand of Heaven back at the abbey, and that Kelos gave you Signet Eilif’s ring with his magically preserved living finger still in it as a key to the temple precinct at that time.”

She knew all that because Jax knew it. We’d used the finger when we busted her and Roric and Javan out of the abbey prison that had cost them each an ear.

“But I
thought
that you’d left the finger behind when you marked up the Son’s face,” she said, and I heard a distinct note of angry suspicion. “That’s what the letter you sent Jax said, anyway.”

“That’s all true, as far as it goes.” I nodded. “But after the fight at the abbey when I killed Signet Nea, I took her finger and ring and half-assed myself a second key. It’s not nearly as well crafted as Kelos’s version, but I believe it will still have some life left in it yet.”

“You never told me you still had a key to the temple quarter!” Faran said coldly, finally breaking her angry silence. “Don’t you think that’s something somebody besides you ought to have known about?”

“I never told
anyone
about the key, though there’s a letter Captain Fei is supposed to give you in the event of my death, and another to be sent to Jax.”

Part of my reason for keeping the secret from everyone was that I didn’t want anybody else getting ideas about taking a crack at the Son of Heaven—especially Faran, who had a rash streak—and possibly getting killed in the attempt.
I wouldn’t have been able to keep it at all if Faran hadn’t been so badly hurt during the fight where I’d harvested that finger. But she’d very nearly lost an eye a few minutes before and had incurred a nasty head wound in the process. That, plus the fact that I’d had to work the spell very quickly or lose my chance, had made it just barely possible.

“I’m sorry, Faran,” I said, “but it’s a secret I’ve kept very close.” And one that wouldn’t have mattered anymore if those letters ever got sent—since the life of the finger was dependent on my own continued health—but I rather hoped Faran wouldn’t think it through that far.

Faran’s eyes narrowed sharply, but then her tone lightened. “You are so going to pay for that the next time we spar. Speaking of which, remind me to take some time to beat the rest of your secrets out of you later.”

“So, how long
will
it take you to retrieve this finger?” asked Siri. “It’s obvious you’re not going all the way to Tien to get it.”

“Three days round-trip, if I’m quick. Maybe four or five if the patrols are heavy. I decided it was best to cache it close to where I’d need it if the time came, but I had to make damned certain no one had tailed me before I placed it.”

I shot a look at Kelos. At the time, he was the person I was most concerned about finding the finger. He smiled serenely back at me, and I suddenly suspected that he had known at the time exactly what I was going to do with the thing and simply hadn’t bothered to follow me for reasons of his own.

“If there’s nothing else,” I said, “we should try to get that sleep now.”

Nobody said anything, despite Faran’s hard looks my way, so I headed for the cubicle to fall down for a while. Behind me, the others split up to sort out the sleeping arrangements. I heard Faran ask where the hammocks were, and Kelos tell her they were in with the other mission gear, which made sense. Assassins spent a lot of time waiting for the opportune moment, and a small hammock or sling hung high in a tree or under the battlements of a castle made a
good place to lie hidden. I’d used one such when I killed Ashvik. Roric called out a moment later, asking how many people would prefer a rug, but I didn’t hear the answer because I had just opened the door to the sleeping cubicle and a sudden ringing in my ears blocked out everything else.

The square little room looked exactly like the ones we’d had back at the temple, right down to the furnishings. One small, spare wooden desk with a built-in set of shelves on one end for books or scrolls. One wardrobe/weapons cabinet combination with a set of hooks on the bed side for a sword rig. One thick rug suitable for extended bouts of prayer. And, one moderately sized rope-frame bed with a feather mattress—people who sleep in the day can use all the help they can get. The bed was designed for one, but could accommodate two readily enough if they were friendly—the goddess had never expected celibacy of her followers.

Aral?

What?
I realized then that I hadn’t moved since I’d pulled the door open.
Oh, sorry. It’s just . . .
My heart felt like someone had closed it in a mailed fist.
I’d better go in, hadn’t I?

The last time I’d seen a room that looked like this one was before the temple fell. The crushing homesickness the sight brought on now made me want to bolt from the underground vault never to return. Somehow, I forced myself across the threshold and quietly closed the door behind me. That plunged the room into utter darkness, and I felt a faint easing of the pain in my chest as I lost my ability to see anything.

What’s wrong?
sent Triss.
I can feel how much pain you’re in, but I don’t understand!

I wondered then if homesickness, like guilt, was a thing that didn’t affect Shades. I knew that Triss hated what had been done to the order and, even more, what had been done to me in the process, and that he had wished often enough that it could all be undone, but I don’t know that I had ever heard him express anything quite like what I was feeling then. No surprise either way, given that I had spent the first
few years after the fall refusing to talk about the temple and trying to drown my memories in Aveni whiskey.

For the first time in over a year, I didn’t think I’d have been able to put the bottle aside if I had one available . . . and I had to sleep here. Of course, I couldn’t tell Triss that. He was so damned proud of me for staying dry this long.

Just homesickness, my friend,
I sent.
I haven’t been in a room like this since the temple days.

Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.
He sounded genuinely puzzled.
It hardly seems like the temple at all to me. The polish of the walls makes them shine much brighter to my senses, and the furniture is more highly finished, too. All that reflection makes it feel very close and tight in here to me, hardly like the temple at all.

Somehow, I found that enormously reassuring. It freed me enough to step away from the door and pull off my sword rig. I wasn’t ready to hang it up yet, but I found that I could almost breathe again. That’s when Triss punched me in the gut.

Do you think Zass is still alive . . . ? And Devin? Or do you think that Chomarr’s betrayal means they’ve been killed?

He didn’t intend it as a gut punch, but there it was. If Devin was dead, it was due to my first major failure as the head of my order. Mind you, I had no love left for Devin. But I no longer hated him so much as I had when I’d first learned of his betrayal either. How could I?

Devin’s fundamental flaw was that he had no spine, no center. If
I
couldn’t bring myself to pass final justice on Kelos, how much harder would it have been for Devin to resist him when he was first approached about betraying the goddess?

Nor was Devin a long thinker. Kelos’s arguments about the underlying flaws in the way we went about producing justice, and about the inherent unfairness of government by a noble few, were quite compelling. Enough so that I had yet to find it in me to say that he was simply wrong. The system was unfair, and nearly a millennia of action by my
order under the direction of Namara hadn’t fundamentally changed that.

How easy would it be to succumb to the idea that you had the opportunity to do what even justice’s goddess couldn’t achieve? Hell, it was only by repeatedly reminding myself of the human costs of such a massive revolution that I could keep my perspective on the thing. Devin might well have seen this as his chance,
finally
, to become one of the great names among the champions of justice. I believed that history would judge him very harshly. But might he not have believed just the opposite?

Faran would say that I was being soft and a fool to excuse him like that, and she might well be right. But Devin had been like my brother once, and if my recent failure had caused his death it would be another heavy burden placed on my heart, however much he might have earned such a fate.

Aral, have I upset you further?

No, Triss. It’s not you. It’s this place and what we’ve come to do, and Devin and, well, everything. I should never have agreed to become First Blade. I have enough trouble living with the weight of my own actions.

Should you . . . resign?

I don’t know, maybe, but all of Siri’s arguments still hold true. I didn’t see how I could refuse the office then, and I don’t see how I can step away from it now. There isn’t anyone else.

But you’re in so much pain. What if it’s killing you?

I didn’t answer him.
I’m sure it will all look better tomorrow, and we can talk about it then.
I began to take off the rest of my gear.
For now, what I really need is sleep.

But I lay awake a long time in the darkness after that.

“C
an’t
we cut the tip off or something?” asked Faran. “That thing is really gross.”

I looked at the finger in its box on the floor, and shook my head. “I don’t think we should, though Kelos might know better. I was really just copying his spell, and I don’t understand all the finer points of it.”

We spoke quietly as we squatted there, using the sounds of the nearby waterwheel to cover our words. I’d hidden the box inside a watertight jar wedged into a gap I’d made in the foundations of one of the stone piers supporting the stream side of the mill. Given the newness of the construction, I’d figured it would be at least a decade before anyone even thought about messing around with those piers, barring a truly extraordinary flood.

After I retrieved the jar, we’d slipped into the mill—empty at this hour of the night—to open it up and visually inspect the finger. It didn’t look good, which was no surprise to me. Though I hadn’t mentioned it to the others, I’d been able to sense that something had gone a bit off about the
spell as soon as I’d gotten within a few miles of the finger. It was tied directly to my life force, after all.

I could feel the link as a sort of feathery itch that ran from inside the back of my skull and down my spine to whatever point of me was closest to the finger. When I had first made the thing, the sensation had been more like a tickle, but now it prickled and itched.

“That’s
so
disturbing.” Faran prodded the middle knuckle of the finger, and I felt the motion as a sort of tug on the invisible line between me and it. “It’s not quite blood warm down toward the stub, which is disturbing enough after two years, but up top where it’s gone all black and puffy. That’s just, eww.”

Kelos’s original spell had involved taking a finger from the living hand of Signet Eilif, affixing it to a carefully prepared disk of unicorn horn with a custom-made silver nail, and using that to bind it to Kelos’s own soul, keeping it alive indefinitely. It was only after he’d finished making the thing that Kelos let the Signet die.

I hadn’t had the luxury of planning my own version out in advance or preparing all the necessary materials ahead of time. Instead, I’d had to improvise on a short schedule, using a bent splinter of silver and a wedge of dracodon ivory, both hurriedly pried free of the abbey’s altar furnishings for the purpose. Not to mention that the Signet I’d taken my finger from had already stopped breathing for several possibly critical seconds by the time I harvested it.

Kumi frowned and leaned forward, but didn’t touch the box. “The finger is tied directly to your life force?”

I nodded, somewhat startled by her question. She’d been all but silent for most of the two days it had taken us to get to the ring, either by temperament or because she was following Jax’s orders to play the observer.

“That seems kind of risky,” she said.

I shrugged. “I didn’t have much choice, but yes. It’s not quite necromancy, but it comes from the same line of spell casting. An experienced mage could easily make that link into a weapon against me if they got hold of the finger and
managed to get close enough to use it before I could stop them.”

I nodded toward the place where I’d fetched it from the stream. “That’s part of why I was so careful about where I hid the thing, and why Kelos was concerned about my leaving the one he’d made in the hands of the Son of Heaven.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Kelos,” said Faran. “I’ve no doubt he figured out some way to cut the link before it caused him any problems. Maybe even before you left the temple that night. The man’s a master at weaseling out of situations that ought to result in his death.”

“I can’t argue with that.” I shrugged. “Honestly, given the way he thinks, he probably had the means to sever the connection before he even made the finger.”

“Of course he did,” agreed Triss. “He’s not one to leave a loose end hanging like that. Not when it could get him killed.”

“Actually”—Kumi shook her head—“that wasn’t the danger I was thinking of at all.”

“What do you mean?” Triss asked, his voice holding sudden concern.

She took a deep breath. “Well, I’m not as good at magical theory as someone like Faran or Master Siri, but I spent a bunch of time studying up on necromancy when I was seventeen—right after Loris and Jax found me.”

“That’s a bit . . . unusual,” I said. “Did Master Loris suggest it?”

“No. I was pretty broken up by the fall of the temple. Do you remember Master Zara?”

I nodded. “I remember her investiture. It happened a few weeks before my final mission.”

“We were . . . lovers, and more than that. She wanted me to marry her once I became a master. She was killed in the fighting at the fall. I never got the chance to say good-bye, and that gnawed at me. I wanted to fix it. Of course, I ultimately learned that necromancy can’t really touch a soul that died unbound, only the body left behind. But in the process, I spent a lot of time reading the more disturbing sorts of grimoires.”

“And somewhere in there you learned something that makes you worry about this?” I tapped the box with the finger in it.

“Yes.” She nodded. “It’s dying back from the tip.”

“That’s clear enough,” I agreed. As Faran noted, it had gone black and puffy. Also, the fingernail was visibly loose. A line of greenish skin marked the divide between the semi-living and obviously rotting tissue. It looked grotesque. “What about it?”

“Well,” said Kumi, “I’m wondering what happens when it dies all the way back to the ivory where the spell is anchored to your soul. Like you said, it’s not necromancy, but it does share a lot of means and methods with the darker art. One of the big reasons necromancy is so very dangerous is the tendency for the spells to backlash through the caster. What I want to know is, what kind of echo will the death of that”—she pointed at the finger—“produce in your soul?”

“Right.” Faran’s voice was bleak and angry. “We’re destroying this thing right now!” A ball of spell-light began to form around her clenched fist.

“Agreed,” said Triss.

Kumi put her hand over the box. “I wouldn’t do that. Without the proper precautions,
anything
you do to that finger could easily rebound back through Aral’s soul.”

“So what are the proper precautions, exactly?” asked Faran.

“I don’t know,” replied Kumi. “I was looking into a very different sort of necromantic spellwork. I didn’t cover anything like this.”

“That’s not good,” I said. “We’d better talk to Kelos and figure out how to sever the connection.”

*   *   *

“No
idea,” said Kelos, from his place in one of the three chairs around the little table in the fallback. “Not with the finger half-dead already. If you look closely at the spell-light in the glyphs on the base here, you can see that the whole magical structure’s gone corrupt. You say the rot has
progressed another quarter of an inch since you picked this up?”

I nodded. The line of decay had advanced significantly during the two days it had taken us to return to Heaven’s Reach.

“That seems like a mighty big coincidence.” Roric was sitting on the floor opposite Kelos. “That it just
happens
to go bad right when we get here, and then starts getting worse that fast.”

“It’s no coincidence,” said Siri, who had chosen to alternate standing with worried pacing. “I’d bet my eyeteeth the rot was triggered by Aral getting within some critical distance of the finger, and that the same effect is what’s causing it to move so quickly now.”

“So, what happens when it gets to the base of the finger?” asked Triss. He had taken on dragon form and settled on the floor in front of my chair, with his front legs up on the table.

“Nothing good,” said Siri. “I can’t say for sure, and necromancy’s not my specialty, but after talking it over with Kumi, I don’t like any of the answers. There’s a slim possibility it won’t have any effect at all, but I’d bet against that. Much more likely is that it will injure or kill Aral. It could even turn him into one of the restless dead, though that’s almost as unlikely as it failing to hurt him at all.”

“What!” Faran whipped around in her chair to glare at Kelos. “Did you know any of that when you made yours? Because that’s crazy dangerous magic you were playing with.”

Kelos shrugged. “I took precautions that Aral didn’t. Also, I’m not as convinced as Siri that we can make any meaningful guesses about what will happen if worse comes to worst. Besides, none of that will matter if we get the enchantment sorted before it reaches that point. That means we need to seriously expedite our schedule for cracking the temple precinct.”

“I think I must have missed a move somewhere in your play there.” Faran’s voice was low and dangerous. “Because if I
didn’t
mishear anything, then Siri said that this spell going
bad could turn Aral into something like the risen, and you responded with mouth noises that suggested fixing Aral’s problem is in some way contingent on breaking into the temple, instead of taking a new place as our signal priority.”

“It’s not my call to make,” said Kelos, “but if Aral really wants to solve the problem of the Son of Heaven, we need that finger in working condition. I don’t know what we’ll have to do to stop the spell from backlashing through Aral, but at the least it will involve severing the connection between the two of them and destroying the finger. But without that finger,
and
a major dose of luck, we’re screwed.”

Siri crossed her arms and nodded reluctant agreement.

Before Faran could argue further, I stepped in. “Let them explain.”

Siri went first. “I tried, Aral, I really did. But I couldn’t even
touch
the smoke inside the temple complex, much less use it as a way in. Part of that is simply distance. The farther I get from the Brimstone Vale and the tomb of the Smoldering Flame, the weaker the powers that come with being bound to the god. But there’s more to it than that. This is the place where the powers and attention of Heaven lie heaviest in the mortal world.

“See?” Siri touched a finger to one of her long braids.

For the first time in weeks I really looked at her hair. What can I say? I’d been too focused on what was going on inside my head and heart to pay close attention to
anything
in the outside world. The smoke that habitually looped and slithered through her tightly bound black curls had faded almost to nothing.

“It’s been like this since we scouted out the edge of the temple precinct three days ago,” she said.

“Kyrissa?” I asked.

Siri’s shadow reshaped itself into the form of a winged serpent, and I saw that the thick smoky feathers I had grown so used to were likewise faded and indistinct. Almost, she looked as she had in the days of our youth, before the fall of the temple and their entanglement with the buried god.

“I am much diminished,” said the Shade. “If that loss of
power came with less of a sense of presence, I would happily make the trade, but alas, it does not. If anything, I have felt the attention of the Smoldering Flame growing as we traveled closer to this place of his enemies. His hate beats at my mind, and I fear how it will grow and burn if Siri and I actually enter the deeps of the temple.”

I raised an eyebrow at Siri, and she nodded. “I don’t know how far in we’ll be able to go with you. Not all the way, certainly. There’s god-magic at work here, both the Smoldering Flame’s and Shan’s. I started to feel physically ill the moment that Kelos and I entered the outermost loop of the temple precinct. Nausea and dizziness. Not debilitating, but whatever was going on also completely blocked my sense of smoke.”

“And that’s all the farther we’ve been able to get,” said Kelos. “There are new installations atop most of the major gates. Ostensibly, they’re shrines, designed to look like those little pagodas the Shanites are so fond of. But really, they’re protective tombs—a safe place for the risen to lie up during the day. They come out at sunset. I spotted several of them slipping off to play gargoyle in the dark. Chomarr didn’t mention them, either because they’re new, or because he was playing us. Combine the dead with the way the wards on the wall tops will slow us down and we’ve got a major problem.”

“Ugly,” I said.

The temple precinct was a walled city within the greater city. It spiraled inward from the great gate through a series of inner baileys like the chambers of a nautilus. Each bailey had its own temples and shrines and its own gates, both inner and outer. As I had discovered on my previous sortie, all of the walls after you passed the outermost ring had wards built into the very stones, many of them created by or enhanced with god-magic—invisible to mage sight. The only thing that had allowed me to get past them the last time was the Signet-finger keys I had brought with me.

“Deeply ugly,” agreed Kelos. “I’m beginning to think we’ll have to do this in two stages. First, we go over the outer
wall shortly before dawn and hole up in one of the lesser temples until morning drives the risen off the walls. Then, when they’re clear, we do the rest of the job out in the sun.”

“That’s suicide,” said Triss. “We can’t hide you in the direct sun atop those walls.”