Crossed Blades (16 page)

Jax’s face slowly twisted into the same hate-filled expression I’d seen in the temple of Shan earlier. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I wish to everything I ever once held as holy that I weren’t. . . .”

“Then it’s all his fault. The death of the goddess. The fall of the temple. All the ones we’ve lost then and since. Kaman, Tamerlen, Viera. My torture. The wreck you’ve made of yourself. Even what’s happening to Loris right now. It’s all down to Kelos, and you’re working with him now?” Jax leaped to her feet and leaned down over me.

She’s going to hit you.
Triss’s mental voice sounded dry, almost detached.

I know.

And then she did, a full-armed backhanded slap intended to inflict maximum pain without causing real harm. I rolled with the blow, but it still stung and it would probably bruise. It was exactly the same way she’d hit me when I broke our engagement. It told me two things. First, she was really mad at me. Second, she was fundamentally still in control of herself. She knew what she wanted to do to me and how far she wanted to go, and she’d chosen the exact tool she wanted to accomplish that task.

“Feel any better?” I asked. I kept my voice calm because I knew it would irritate her.

“No! And you’re an asshole, you know that, right?”

“You’re certainly not the first to say so. Are you going to hit me again?”

“No. I’m sorry, that was a stupid move.”

“See, I told you she could be taught,” Sshayar said from her place up on the lip of the water tank.

“And fuck you, too, dear,” replied Jax, this time without the heat, then she laughed.

Quick to anger. Quick to cool down. Quick to move on to the next step. That was Jax all the way, and that’s why I’d pushed her. I wanted her to hit the top and bounce back so we could move on. I wasn’t one jot less furious than she was, but we didn’t have time to waste on theatrics.

She flopped back down on the roof and gave me a hard look. “Don’t think I didn’t see what you just did there. You used to do the same damn thing when we were engaged. On the upside, the make-up sex generally made up for how much that calm mask thing you do used to piss me off. Do you ever miss that? What we had together.”

“No,” I lied, pushing aside memories of Jax naked and wanting to make up for the bad times. It wasn’t easy. “I don’t.”

“You’re lying.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “But it’s still true. Can we talk about how we’re going to make the Hand pay for what they’ve done?”

“Soon. You still haven’t explained why you’re working with the man who destroyed us. I’m not doing anything till you answer that.”

“I think the Son of Heaven and his god probably have to take some of the blame for the fall of the temple, too.”

“But Kelos was complicit. Without him . . .”

“Maybe.” I held out my hands like balances. “I don’t honestly know what would have happened if he’d tried to stop things dead instead of cutting a deal.”

“You’re starting to piss me off again. Answer the fucking question, Aral.”

“I’m not working with him. I’m using him. I’m taking his help to do something I was going to do anyway.”

“Don’t give me weasel words. That’s not what I’m asking, and you know it.”

“Fine. I’m doing it because I don’t see that I have a lot of choice. When I drew on him, he knocked me down and disarmed me as easily as I might do the same to some back-alley pinch-purse. He’s
the
master, Jax. If he wants to help us, I’m not seeing any good way to get him out of the picture. Unless
you
think you can take him?”

Jax shook her head. “Of course not.”

“Well then, what do you want me to do? Throw away the map? Give up the other advantages his help can give us in getting Loris and the others free?”

“No.” She looked at her feet.

“How about blowing off the mission completely and letting them all die? Would that be better? Because that’s the only other fucking option we have!”

I bounced to my feet and started to pace in a tight little circle. “Do you think I like that fact that when he called me I came to him like a dog? Do you think I like that I can’t figure out how I should feel about the man who was the closest thing I had to a father? Do you think I like the fact that I don’t have any clue if I’m doing this because he’s our best chance, or just because it’s Kelos telling me to do it? Because I sure as shit don’t like any of it one tiny fucking bit!”

“Old man, you need to get a hold of yourself or you’re going to wake the whole damned neighborhood.” The familiar voice came up from somewhere below us.

“Little monster,” I sighed. “Get your ass up here, Faran. How much have you heard?”

“Pretty much everything after the slap.” She pulled herself up over the lip of the tank. “I figured that you’d both be hot enough for a bit then that you wouldn’t hear my getting in close.”

“Triss?”

“She’s damned good. I didn’t so much as catch a hint of her.”

“Me either,” agreed Sshayar.

“Have you told her about the finger yet?” Faran asked as she took a seat a few feet to Jax’s left.

“No. Just the map. As I recall, I didn’t tell you about the finger yet either.”

She shook her head sadly. “That’s right. I had to pick your pouch to find it, and I’m really quite hurt about that.”

“I don’t think I beat you enough. You are a most disobedient sort of apprentice.”

“Probably because I’m only your apprentice for the assassin stuff. Where it comes to spying, I kick your ass.”

I looked at Jax. “Are your students like this?”

She smiled. “Only the very best of them. Come on, Aral. Don’t pull that obedience line with me. I know what kinds of crap you used to get up to. In fact, I’m pretty sure that you broke about six dozen rules by sneaking out to the sacred island and asking Namara to give you the Ashvik assignment a year before you were slated to become a full Blade. That was right before you vanished into the night without a word to anyone including the council, right?”

“I can verify that,” said Triss. “Though, Master Kelos did wish us good hunting, and Devin knew about it even before we went out to the island.”

“Thanks, Triss.” I sighed. “Can we move on now?”

“Sure,” replied Jax. “You were just going to tell me about the
finger
.”

“Oh good,” said Faran. “I’ve been wondering about it for days now. I mean, I’ve seen it. And I think I can guess what it’s for, but if there were instructions that came with it, somebody destroyed them before I got a chance to read them.”

I told them about the ring and what it could do, and while I was at it, I told them about the moving statue, and brought Faran up to date on what had happened at the temple. When I was done, they both wanted to see the finger. So I pulled out the box and opened it up.

“Damn,” said Jax. “That could come in very handy.” She poked it with the tip of her own finger and shuddered.

Jax didn’t like touching it any more than I did, but Faran blithely reached over and pulled it out of its box, turning it this way and that to get a better look at the glyphs. She seemed completely blasé about the idea of a living finger preserved a hundred years after the death of the hand that had once worn it.

“That’s one tricky little spell,” she said after a moment. “I’m sure I could replicate it easy enough, but I don’t know if I’d be able to cook it up from scratch.” She shrugged. “No surprise, I guess. After Master Siri, Master Kelos was always the one who taught us the most about practical magic.”

“That’s a hit,” said Jax touching a fingertip to her chest. “Point, Faran.”

“Huh?” Faran canted her head to one side quizzically. “What’d I do?”

“You just made me feel incredibly old,” replied Jax. “Siri is nearly a year younger than I am. No one should ever refer to her as Master Siri with the same tone as they refer to Master Kelos when talking about their teachers. It’s wrong.”

“Weird.” Faran looked genuinely puzzled. “I can’t imagine that. You all looked pretty much the same age from where I was sitting in those days. You know . . . old.”

Jax’s eyes widened and she started to open her mouth. Then she paused and scowled for a moment. “You’re pulling my leg aren’t you?”

Faran held her wide-eyed innocent look for one more beat, then dropped it for a wicked smile.

“No wonder you call her little monster,” Jax growled at me.

“Oh come on,” said Faran. “It was a fair point.” She jabbed the Signet’s finger at Jax for emphasis. “I mean, you
are
old, right? Maybe not as old as Aral, but then, he’s half as old as Kelos.”

“Not yet thirty!” I said.

“Children, please.” Triss plucked the finger from Faran’s hand and put it back in its box. “We’ve got things to plan. If we’re done with the show-and-tell part of the evening, maybe we could move on to the main event?”

“I don’t know how much planning we have time for,” I replied. “The Hand will be expecting us the night after next. If we’re going to have any chance at taking them by surprise we’ll have to hit them tomorrow, and without surprise the hostages are all dead.”

“Point.” Jax’s voice was grim. “We know the where, and our window really narrows down the when. We might manage a bit of extra surprise by coming in during the day, but that would cost us too much of our Shades’s strength. It’s still summer, which cuts down the available hours of full dark, and it’s going to take at least a couple of hours to manage the job. So, sometime between full dark and the first hour after midnight.”

“Agreed.” Faran nodded. “These are the people who killed Namara and the order and they’ve taken people we care about, so there’s no question of tactics. We kill everyone we see without hesitation or mercy. What’s left to discuss; which door we use?”

“That and who goes for the prisoners,” I replied.

“You do,” Jax and Faran said in near perfect unison.

“Why me?”

“Loris is my lover and the others are my students,” said Jax. “That’s going to make my thinking less clear overall, and more so as I get closer to them. I
want
to be the one to free them, and we both know that means I’ll be less professional and more likely to get them or us killed.”

She closed her eyes for a second and her jaw muscles tightened. “It also means that if something goes wrong and someone dies, I’m going to regret it forever. I’d take point if I had to, but I don’t know if I can hold it together if everything goes to hell. Not after what I went through when the temple fell. That puts me on eliminating the reinforcements duty.”

I nodded, and didn’t add that if things went to shit, it’d probably be better for her to have someone else to blame. Me, for example. “Faran?”

“You’re too sentimental. You don’t really like killing people who aren’t directly in the way. If you’re going after the hostages, everyone you meet will be directly in the way, and you won’t think twice. But someone’s going to have to do clean up on the periphery. That’s going to involve cutting a lot of not obviously guilty throats. I won’t hesitate. You might. End of story.”

“I guess that means I’m going after the hostages.”

“And we’ll make corpses,” said Jax, and there was a cold fire in her eyes. “Lots and lots of corpses.”

15

K
illing
people. It’s what I do best, my art as well as my craft. It’s not nice. It’s not pretty. It’s not romantic. Any number of times I’ve found myself wishing for a world where it wasn’t so often necessary. But in the end, I’m an assassin, one of the best, and I love my work even when I don’t like it. But these were the people who’d destroyed the temple, some of them had killed people I loved. This time I would get to do both.

We arrived outside the high stone walls of the abbey just as the trailing edge of the sun kissed the horizon good-bye. We’d spent much of the day in a coach, which had allowed Faran and Jax time to memorize the map along the way, and Ssithra and Sshayar time to make copies just in case. We’d left the coach hidden in a ruined barn a few miles back, with the coachman inside wrapped in spells of sleep.

With sunrise, the spells would fade and he would be able to depart the barn with a much heavier purse. If anyone touched him or the barn before then, the whole place and all its contents would burn away to nothing in an instant.

“Last check,” said a dragon-form Triss. “Everyone know what they’re doing?

“We go in through the escape tunnel that comes out in the southwest tower,” I said. It was about a third of the way around the abbey from the route that had been picked out for Jax and me by the Signet. “The ring opens the doors and the wards for us. There’ll almost certainly be a guard in the tunnel proper.” Under normal operations, there wouldn’t have been, to help preserve the route’s secrecy. But with the nature of the current situation, they’d have a trusted noncom down there.

“If we’re lucky,” I continued, “it’ll be one of the Swords of Heaven, and he’ll have some sort of alarm ward on him triggered by death because he’ll be out of touch with the main perimeter. If we’re not lucky, we’ll be facing a member of the Hand. In either case, they go down, and they die as soon as we silence any death wards. Then we split up.”

Blades rarely work together in close proximity. In the vast majority of situations over the many centuries of our history one of us has usually been enough to get the job done. Beyond that, our greatest asset is stealth. Working as a team throws a significant portion of that advantage away.

When you’re functionally invisible, visual signals don’t do you a lot of good. Add in that people tend to notice it when the shadows start talking to each other, and any attempt at communication significantly compromises your effectiveness. Shades can communicate silently to a degree, but with the lone exception of Triss and myself, that communication doesn’t extend to their bond-mates.

Also, when you can’t see your compatriots, you are much more likely to accidentally hit one with something lethal. So, on those rare occasions where it becomes necessary to act together, we generally prefer to split up and spread out. It preserves our advantages and reduces the chances of killing one another.

“Once we make the split, I’ll take the most direct route possible to the crypt,” I continued. “Depending on who and what Triss and I run into, I hope to have the first cell open somewhere between twenty and forty minutes from now. I’ll arm the prisoners and we’ll start cutting our way out. Once we’re clear of the main building, I’ll light things up to let you know we’ve made it.”

“I’ll start by heading back to the wall and clearing out the perimeter guards on this side of the abbey.” Faran smiled a nasty little smile and Ssithra flexed shadowy phoenix claws. “Call it twenty minutes if nothing goes awry. Then I’ll work my way inward with a goal of leaving you a wide-open path to freedom.”

Jax rolled her shoulders to loosen the thick pack hung from her sword rig, while Sshayar stalked back and forth behind her looking every inch the hunting tiger. “I’ll go straight for the guesthouse and set glyphs of destruction on the main supports and bindings on the doors. That’s where the Hand will be quartered. Once we’ve prepared the way, Sshayar and I will bring the building down and try to kill the lot of them in their sleep. I’d prefer to slit throats, but . . .”

I nodded. For every Storm that died with their bond-mate, the weather was likely to get that much worse. That was going to wake people up sooner rather than later, which is why we’d picked up the destruction wards. That was one place where having this go down in the Magelands made our lives much easier. The destruction glyphs were devilishly tricky to make, and damned expensive.

Jax’s brother was going to have palpitations when he saw the bill for that, but we’d had no choice. None of us had the skills to make them in quantity, even if we’d had the leisure. Time had foreclosed the theft option as well, that kind of play took serious planning. One useful side effect of the truly horrendous weather the destruction of the Storms was going to bring down on us was that it would make for a hell of a distraction once it hit.

Triss flexed his wings and looked at us all very seriously. “And if anything goes wrong?”

Jax snorted. “If it happens before Aral’s signal, I try to make sure that if I die, I do it very quietly and take the bastards with me.”

“Likewise,” said Faran.

“I blow the roof off and holler for help,” I added.

“Then we’re off.” Triss nodded and then collapsed back into my shadow.

From there he climbed my body, briefly covering me in a chilly skin of shadow before blossoming outward into a full shroud of darkness. The others followed suit, and we headed for the concealed entrance to the tunnel. According to our map, it was hidden in a rough outcropping of rocks in the side of a deep-carved creek bed that ran parallel to the nearer wall of the abbey.

We probably could have gotten in over the wall undetected, though it stood a good fifteen feet, and had both spikes and obvious wards protecting it. Those defenses were the kind of things that Blades dealt with all the time, and the abbey had been built more with an eye to holding off the occasional bandit attack or rampaging manticore than a group of assassins. But the tunnel had two major advantages.

First, it would get us past the outer wall and into the very heart of the abbey in one step. Second, the over-the-wall route was the way we were supposed to come in tomorrow, which meant there might well be extra layers of defensive spells in place at the moment.

“They really did a good job on this,” Jax whispered when I finally came to a stop in front of a slightly higher section of the creek bank.

Without the map and accompanying instructions we’d never have found the spot. Even with it, I couldn’t be positive we’d gotten it right until I actually got the door open. I reluctantly slipped the warm finger out of the little pouch I’d hung on the straps of my sword rig at chest level—I wanted it quickly and easily accessible.

Suppressing a desire to “accidentally” lose the awful thing in the stream, I stuck the finger and my whole arm into a deep hole half-concealed by the root of an old oak. It had a shallow bend about eight inches in, that prevented anyone from seeing the spell-light from the ward that was supposed to be at the back of the hole.

“I hope we’ve got the right spot and nothing poisonous has moved in since the last time someone did this,” I said.

“Don’t be such a worrier,” said Faran. “There’ll be a nest-not ward to keep the creepy crawlies out.” She laughed. “Well, there will if you’re sticking your arm in the right hole. If not, I’m sure we’ve got some antivenom around here somewhere.”

“
Very
reassuring,” I grumbled with my cheek pressed against the stone. “Why don’t you stick your advice where . . .” But then there was a faint but definite sense of magical contact as I poked around the back of the hole with the severed finger. “I think I just got it.”

“Yeah, we can tell.” That was Jax. “I’m impressed.”

“What?” I craned my neck back to see what she was talking about but didn’t pull the ring out yet. “Oh. Wow. That
is
impressive.”

Without making any noise or giving any other sign, a portion of the rock face had simply vanished. That bit wasn’t all that unheard of. The fact that the door lay mostly below the stream’s surface on the other hand . . .

About two feet of the low stone archway stuck up above the waterline. The rest extended down to the floor of the streambed. Opening the door should have filled the tunnel with water. It probably would have, too, if we hadn’t used the Signet’s finger or some other authorized magical key to open it—I imagined that the abbot’s ring would have worked as well.

But not only was the water not pouring in across the threshold, it was actually flowing away from the hole in a very definite pattern. One that formed a flight of liquid steps leading down to the entrance. The entire shallow stairwell shone with a deep blue spell-light.

“Do you think we can actually walk on the stairs?” Jax asked rather dubiously.

“One way to find out.” Faran jumped lightly down onto the top step . . . and didn’t go through. “Huh.” She scampered down the five remaining liquid stairs to the entrance. “Feels a bit like walking on planks laid over mud. I’ll go ahead and look for guards.”

Before either of us could say a word, she was gone.

“Jax,” I said.

“I know, go after her.” Then she, too, jumped down to the watery stairs and vanished.

“I sure hope this thing stays open for a while after I pull the ring away from the seal,” I said aloud.

It wouldn’t be a very well-designed spell if it didn’t,
Triss replied into my mind.
This is a very pretty piece of magic, I doubt they’d flub the exit.

You’re probably right.

No, I’m
always
right.

Smug shadow.

Silly human.

I think Faran might be a bad influence on you, Triss.

Just do it.

All right.
I pulled the finger free of the seal and jumped down to follow the others.

The stairs did indeed feel like planks over mud, and I very much wished I had time to study the spell that made it work. But I kept picturing them suddenly collapsing, or the stone wall reappearing before I’d gotten all the way through the gap, so I hurried. I needn’t have worried though. There was a rather obvious seal of opening and closing a few yards into the tunnel. When I touched the ring and finger to the seal, the dim light filtering in through the doorway abruptly went away. Hell of an enchantment that.

I took control of Triss so that I could use his senses to suss out the lay of the land. The tunnel was perhaps seven feet tall by three wide, and rough finished. From the entrance it sloped down and away from me in a none-too-straight line.

Jax and Faran were nowhere in evidence, but there was only one direction they could have gone. Adjusting the slender but heavy pack I’d strapped between the sheaths of my swords—it held weapons for our imprisoned brethren—I headed down into the dark after the women. I caught up to them after perhaps a quarter mile, at a sharp bend.

“About time you got here,” said Jax when I came around the corner. She was waiting with her back against the wall, swords drawn.

“Finger,” said Faran. She was squatting on the floor hunched over a cocoon of shadow, just beyond Jax.

I pulled the finger out of its pouch and leaned forward to hand it to her. She glanced back and neatly snatched it. Once she had the finger in hand, she pressed it against something inside the dark cocoon Ssithra had spun for her.

“Yes! It works.” She pulled the finger free and handed it back to me.

Her shoulders bunched briefly, as though she were making some physical effort. In response, the cocoon gave a single pulse before flowing back to hide Faran in a lacuna of shadow once again. It left behind the body of a young man in the uniform of Heaven’s Sword. A corporal, dying now as blood poured from his freshly torn out throat. Faran touched a dull brass badge pinned to his chest.

“Death ward, and completely deactivated by the old Signet’s signet. That’s a hell of a toy Master Kelos loaned you. I’m glad you’re willing to share it with the other children.”

I blinked several times—though no one could see it through my shroud. A sudden sense of wrongness was tugging at my mind. This magical key Kelos had given me went way beyond toy. Too far. The Shade stick would have been sufficient to set us up for this mission. More than sufficient. With a full map of the abbey showing all the modifications the Hand had made to hold our fellow Blades prisoner and three of us to carry out the task, we didn’t really need the finger.

Oh, it would make things a good bit easier, but the most likely ways this could go wrong had never been about getting through the locks and wards. If we failed, it would be because we ran afoul of a too-alert Hand or Sword, not because bypassing some warded door took us an extra minute to open silently without the key.

So, if we didn’t absolutely need the finger to make this work, why had Kelos loaned it to me? What did he want me to do with the finger that I couldn’t do without it? He had to have a damned good reason to give me such a powerful tool to use against his new masters. Unfortunately, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he wanted or why he wanted it. At least, not now, with the fate of so many of our remaining brethren at stake and precious minutes dripping away into the dark.

“Aral?” Jax touched my shoulder through the shadows that surrounded us both. “Are you all right? Because you didn’t respond the first time I spoke your name.”

“Sorry. Just thinking.”

“About Kelos,” she stated flatly. “And what his game might be. I’ve been wondering that, too, from the first moment I found out about his involvement.” There was a definite reproach there. “But we can’t worry about it right now.”

“Can we afford to wait?” I countered. “What if he’s setting us up for something right here, right now?”

“Then we’re fucked,” she said. “This is our one chance to get the others out alive. If we don’t take it, they die. The Signet’s deal has always been a lie, and tomorrow is too late.”

“I know. But it just feels like we’re walking into a trap.”

“At least today’s trap, if there is one, belongs to Kelos and not the Signet. Kelos wants something more than seeing us all dead, and that’s a hell of a lot better than the Signet’s vision.”