Crossed Blades (26 page)

The man continued another dozen yards past my hiding place and then slipped into the limited shelter offered by a bend in the wall to light a small pipe—most likely some blend of tobacco and opium. He settled into a gap like the one I currently occupied to smoke. I might have simply moved on then if he hadn’t chuckled in the manner of a man enjoying a recent memory, perhaps replaying a bit of his handiwork. It was a small noise, barely audible above the wind, and his makeup hid any smile that might have gone with it. But it was that one step too far.

I crossed the intervening distance without really noticing I was doing it. Before the torturer had time to even register the sudden darkness that had cut him off from the safety of the prison walls, I formed my fingers into a spear and drove the tip deep into his throat. He let out a brief gagging cough as he spat out his pipe, but that was all. It’s hard to scream with a crushed larynx. Harder still when you’re falling a hundred feet onto jagged coral at the same time. One twisting punch in the chest and he was gone.

Fire and sun, Aral!
Triss yelped into my mind.
What was that?

Justice.
I turned and continued toward the cable-head.

I could feel my familiar’s startlement echoing down the link that connected us.
I can’t say that I disagree, but Namara preferred to aim at the masters that held the reins of that sort, the ones the law couldn’t touch.

I’m not Namara.

No . . .

And if you think the law was ever going to touch one of Thauvik’s personal abominations then you’ve learned nothing of humanity in your years among us.
I was absolutely spitting mad, and not entirely sure how I’d gotten there.

Calm down, I didn’t say that. You’re right enough about the chance of any normal sort of justice finding the likes of that one, and I’m not at all sorry to see him die. It’s just that I’m . . . surprised to see you act on that sort of impulse.

. . . So am I, actually. It needed to be done, so I did it.
Something that had been lying beneath the surface of my thoughts for a couple of months suddenly broke through into the light then.
Namara’s gone, Triss. She’s not coming back. I’ve known that for years, but I think I’ve been avoiding thinking about what that
meant
.

I had been groping toward what it meant to be a Blade without a goddess for more than a year now, ever since Maylien first hired me and forced me to confront what I’d become in the absence of the goddess. I think I finally had a big piece of it.

I can’t just let the world go to hell because I don’t have someone telling me how to fix things, Triss. Kings and high priests didn’t stop going bad when Namara died. They just stopped having to worry about paying for it.

Are you taking this where I think you are?

Maybe. People like that torturer shouldn’t be certain that they can make a life of hurting others without ever having to worry about paying for their crimes.

And you’re going to fix that?

I stopped moving to let a guard go by and shrugged.
Maybe? Sometimes? When I can? I’m a homeless drunk and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to see the world in the same black and white way I did when I was a young Blade, but sometimes the right thing to do is pretty clear. Not acting when I know what I
should
do is a kind of cowardice. I don’t think I can bear to indulge my fears anymore. Take the torturer back there. I knew that if I didn’t act to stop him, he was going to finish his pipe and go back downstairs to hurt and kill people. Could I really afford not to act in that circumstance?

While I applaud the sentiment,
sent Triss,
I do wonder where it’s coming from. Faran was right when she said you were sentimental for a Blade and that you didn’t like killing people who weren’t directly in your way. That was only a few months ago. What happened?

When we rescued the lost apprentices at the abbey we killed a couple of hundred of the Son of Heaven’s people. A lot of them weren’t in the way.

And?

It very nearly broke me, but it didn’t quite. I survived and I made the people who put me in a position where I had to kill like that suffer. I feel stronger now than I have in years, since before the fall of the temple. I think all that death was a fire that burned away some of the sentiment. I think it burned away a
lot
of the old me, actually.

I’m not sure I like the sound of that.
Triss’s mind voice sounded worried.

I’m not sure I like it much either, or whether what’s left of me is going to be someone I can live with, but I don’t see that I have a whole lot of choice in the matter.

I knew that I sounded hard and cold, and to some extent that’s the way I felt. At the same time, I didn’t think I was going to forget the crunch of the torturer’s throat under my fingers or the sight of him falling away to his death anytime soon. That was good. I had just killed a man, and it’s not something I ever wanted to do lightly, no matter how much someone deserved it.

I guess what I’m saying is this,
I continued.
I’m an assassin. I kill people. It’s what I do, and I’m very, very good at it. Talent, training, calling, they all point in the same direction. The world is an ugly place and it needs people who can do what the goddess made me to do. Her death doesn’t change that. By pretending it did, I’ve been betraying her memory, and, perhaps more importantly, I’ve been betraying what I am.

By then, we’d reached the cable-head and needed to get back to working our way out of the prison. So, as he so often did, Triss got the last word in.

I think that you may have finally found your way back to what you once were. It’s what I’ve wanted for years, and yet, now that it’s come, I’m not sure that I have been wishing the right thing for you.

*   *   *

The
Marchon baronial great house stood atop the Sovann Hill in the northwest corner of Tien proper. It bordered the royal park, occupying some of the most expensive real estate in the city, and if I lived a thousand years I would never grow comfortable with the sort of wealth and power expressed by the building and its grounds, beautiful though they were. I had been raised to
kill
the sort of people who owned places like this, not have tea with them. Namara’s priests brought us into the temple at the age of four and trained us in the arts of death for the purpose of bringing justice to the corrupt nobles and crooked priests who were too powerful to receive it in the courts or at the hands of their fellows. Royal monsters, too, like Maylien’s sister and father, both of whom had died by my hand, the latter in front of this very house.

Aral?
Triss spoke into my mind, and I realized it was the second time he had done so in as many minutes.

I blinked and mentally stepped back into the moment, refocusing my attention from the Marchon estate of the past to that of the present. I stood on the third floor balcony that opened off the baronial sitting rooms. Below me, a few lonely flowers bloomed here and there, testament to the mild winters of Tien and the dedication of the gardeners.

Sorry, old friend,
I sent.
I was far away.

And long ago,
he added.
I could see you wandering the streets of the past, and didn’t want to interrupt, but I think Maylien will be joining us shortly, and we have things to talk about before that happens.

I grinned.
Not
while
it’s happening?

Our ability to speak mind-to-mind was a relatively recent development and, as far as we knew, unique in the history of Shade/human pairings, though I, too, often took it for granted. The living shadows had provided my order with familiars and companions since our very inception, and when I remembered to think about it I rather enjoyed being the first of my kind to share such a deep bond with his partner.

I felt Triss’s answering smile.
Not if you don’t want Maylien to spend the evening giving you hard looks because you’re distracted. I would have thought that when Faran caught us at it, that would have been enough for you to want to be more cautious about when and where we speak so.

Before I could respond, the balcony doors opened and a pair of servants brought out a tablecloth and tea service. I noted that they only set two places, which meant that Maylien had won her argument with Heyin about this first conversation since my return from Darkwater Island. There were two pots as well as two cups, plus assorted plates and all the other paraphernalia that the nobility dragged into the simple act of having a cup of tea. That was because I really didn’t much like the stuff, so my pot was both cooler and much milder than the rich smoky green that Maylien and most of her fellow Zhani preferred.

She commented on it as she came out and took a seat at the table, placing Bontrang on a perch beside her. “Really, Aral, are you sure you wouldn’t prefer tea, instead of that lukewarm water you favor?”

I dropped into the chair across from her. “I don’t actually favor it. It’s just that it’s better for me than the whiskey I’d prefer, and the less I can taste it, the better. I’d prefer plain water or fruit juice, but the latter’s out of season and drinking city water without tea in it’s a sure recipe for spending the next three days in the privy.” Though, to be honest, I was with those who thought it was the act of heating the water rather than adding in the tea that prevented disease.

Maylien shook her head, but poured for me anyway, an action that would have given her footmen palpitations if she hadn’t already sent them back into the house. “At least stir it properly, so I can pretend that I’m not serving you slop.”

I sighed, but picked up the little brush and mixed the powdered tea at the bottom with my lukewarm water, giving it just the faintest yellow green tinge. The action made my teeth itch because it always reminded me of a hot cup of efik—the taste, the smell, the way it smoothed the harshest mood without the jangling of the nerves that accompanied strong tea. Mostly I didn’t think of it anymore, except when I had tea, or wanted a drink and couldn’t have one, or the muscles in my back knotted up over a mission, or . . . well, leave it there.

I had just taken my first sip when Maylien leaned forward and touched her fingers to my cheek. “I think I liked your old face better, though this one’s more handsome. I understand why you had to make the change, but I wish you hadn’t erased all the old lines when you did it. They gave you character.”

“An assassin doesn’t want character,” I replied. “Character makes people remember you. That’s a good way to get caught and killed.”

“I didn’t think you liked that word, ‘assassin.’ I’m not sure I do either. I still think of you as the ‘last Blade of fallen Namara.’” That was what she’d called me in the letter where she asked me to help her kill her sister and take the baronial seat.

“I don’t like it,” I replied. “Not really, but it’s more honest than the other. I’m no Blade anymore, and, truth be told, what was any Blade other than an assassin in Justice’s name?”

She dropped her hand away from my face and leaned back in her chair. “You’ve changed since the last time I saw you, and far more than your face.”

“I have that, and I think I’m not the only one.” It’d been over a year since the last time I’d seen Maylien, and she hadn’t looked half so comfortable with the trappings of her high state then. “But talking about what once was and is no more is not why I asked to see you today.”

Maylien nodded and her expression lost its wistfulness as she put on the face of a peer of the realm. It was . . . instructive, and for me, more than a touch off-putting. Maylien the Rover, whose bed I’d shared more than once, vanished underneath the surface of Baroness Marchon.

She picked up her tea and took a careful sip. “You have the floor. Tell me about Darkwater.”

“I was wrong and you were right. It’s impossible. Staging an assassination is nothing like breaking someone out of prison. Getting into Darkwater was actually much simpler than most of my old assignments for the goddess. I was able to get in close enough that I could have easily killed Jerik without ever being in any real danger of getting caught. But there’s simply no way I can get him out, especially not as weak and sick as he looks.”

Maylien nodded. “I told you as much.”

“You did. The prisoners are too closely watched. I wouldn’t have ten minutes from the time I cracked the wall and broke his chains to the alarm being sounded, and that assumes I kill the guard who’s in charge of the eyespy watching the cell and the one that’s stationed outside his door beforehand. Then I’d have to get him down to the water and out across the reef to a waiting boat.”

“Which wouldn’t set off nine and ninety alarms why?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“We could probably come up with a way of concealing the boat,” said Triss, shifting out of my shadow and into dragon shape to insert himself in the conversation. “Tie it to a landmark in the coral and leave it sunk till we get there, or something, but there’d be no way of hiding it that wouldn’t involve significant time to undo.”

“I’d be willing to support you with money and men,” said Maylien. “I still have ties to the underworld from the years I spent hiding from my sister. But I don’t see that they’d help enough to make this work.”

I shook my head. “They wouldn’t, and I could put together my own team if I thought it would do any good. I may have changed my face since my jack days, but I know who to talk to if I need hard things done shadowside. But there’s really no way to get Jerik out of there short of a major assault on the prison, and the chances are pretty good the main result of that would be getting him and a bunch of the others killed. All of the important prisoners have death wards inscribed on their manacles. Any guard can snuff out any of their lives with very little effort. More important guards, like the fellow watching the eyespys, can murder whole cell blocks with the touch of a ward. No, there’s only one sure way to get Jerik out.”