Crossed Blades (6 page)

“If you’ll tell me what we’re looking for, I’ll help.” Jax was heading for the other end of the bulkhead on hands and knees.

“I don’t know exactly. A loose joining peg maybe, or a knothole that can be pulled out, if we’re lucky. If not, something completely invisible and devilishly clever.”

Turned out to be a loose peg high on the starboard side of the bulkhead. Push it in hard and it popped back out far enough to reveal a release. Pull that and it exposed a gently glowing glyph. A moment in shadow’s skin and a word of opening and a large section of bulkhead swung out and down, becoming a short set of stairs leading up into darkness. I poked my head through the opening. The compartment was about four feet in depth by eight high and it probably ran the width of the ship. I couldn’t say for sure because they’d packed it tight.

“Here.” I helped Jax up onto a seat on the steps to get her out of the water and handed her my light. “Hold this.

“Triss, see if you can’t slip back into the depths and check for anything dangerous.” I started pulling out enough of the stuff right around the hatch to make room for Jax and me, as he slithered through gaps that would have stymied anything bigger than a nipperkin. “Looks like they’re on their way out of port.”

“How can you tell?” asked Jax.

“This.” I dropped a small bale of exceptionally fine silk regretfully into the water sloshing around the bottom of the bigger compartment. “And this.” I added a tiny crate of tea stamped with the seal of the Duke of Jenua—everything had to be packed small enough to fit through the flood ports.

“I think I must have missed a step, Aral.”

“You don’t smuggle tea and silk
into
Zhan. Though
this
they might.” I pulled out another small crate labeled with a familiar distiller’s mark and set it on the top step—Aveni whiskey, though not my favorite Kyle’s.

“How do you know so much about smuggling?” she asked as I pulled my remaining hip dagger out and jammed the tip of it under one edge of the crate’s lid.

I pounded on the pommel with the heel of my hand. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing since the temple fell, but I needed something to pay my rent and my bar bill.” I leaned gently on the dagger—I’d lost three knives already tonight—and the lid started to lift. “Turns out the smugglers will pay pretty well for a courier who never gets stopped by the Stingers.”

“Stingers?”

“City watch. That’s what the underworld types call them because they wear gold and black. And . . . oh, there we go.” I lifted out a bottle of Skaate’s finest eighteen, sliced the seal, and pulled the cork with my teeth. “Beautiful.”

And so very delicious. I took a long swig off the bottle.

“Aral, that’s disgusting! Don’t you remember what the priests had to say about alcohol?”

I pulled the bottle away from my lips and looked down to meet her eyes. With the way she was holding the thieveslight I couldn’t see them clearly, but the way her lip curled spoke to the contempt I couldn’t see.

“Every word, Jax. Every word.” I lifted the bottle and took another long drink—damn but I needed that. “I also remember how much good all those words did when the Hand of Heaven came knocking on the temple door. There was a lot the priests didn’t know.”

“Aral’s a little bitter,” said Triss from the mouth of the smuggling compartment. “In case you hadn’t guessed.”

“So am I,” said Jax. “But drinking that way? How could you?”

“I’ll show you.” I took my third drink in as many minutes.

I hadn’t drunk like this in a while—Triss hated my drinking and I tried to control it for him even when I couldn’t for me. In my better moments, I succeeded. This wasn’t one of my better moments, and that felt fucking wonderful, though the booze hadn’t hit me nearly as hard as it should have. In fact, I’d burned so much nima that it felt like it was mostly just vanishing. Too bad. Sticking the cork back in the bottle I set it beside Jax.

“It’s there in case you want some.” Her jaw tightened in an all-too-familiar anger. “Before you throw the bottle across the room, or start yelling at me, I’ve got two things to say. One, we’re trying to stay hidden here. Two, ‘spirits for the drained spirit.’”

“What the hell are you talking about, Aral?”

I was pleased to note that despite the obvious anger in her voice, she kept it low and quiet.

“Nima,” Triss said to Jax. “It’s something we learned from . . . another mage. If you’ve overtapped the well of your soul—as Aral did getting us all here alive—you can temporarily recover some of what you’ve lost by drinking. That’s why Aral hasn’t fallen over yet, neither from exhaustion, nor from drinking half a pint of cask-strength whiskey.”

Jax’s expression calmed and she bit her lip. “Really?”

“I take it there’s nothing back in there that we have to worry about, Triss?” My question came out a lot grumpier than I’d intended and I knew the reason for that.

It hadn’t escaped me that in the years after Jax and I stopped being an us, she’d continued to get along beautifully with Triss, and vice versa. I resented that, though it made me feel petty. When Triss didn’t answer me, I went back to making space.

“That seems an awfully useful thing to know,” Jax said after a while. “Why wouldn’t the priests have told us about it?”

“Because it only works when you’ve pushed yourself too far,” replied Triss, his voice low and worried. “And, if you do it very often, it’ll hollow you out like a piece of old bamboo. Pretty soon you’ll start to feel like the only thing that can fill that void is more booze. It works in the short term, and sometimes I’ll even say it’s a good idea, but what drink does to your kind, over time, is ugly.”

I closed my eyes and bit back my instinctive response. Then I pulled out one last crate of expensive tea and dumped it in the water.

“And there we go. Your bower awaits, Master Jax.”

She looked up at me and I was shocked to see tears on her cheeks. “I’m sorry I didn’t come looking for you earlier, Aral.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I waited until I needed your help. And because of that, I think I missed the time when you needed mine.”

I felt my throat go tight, but I didn’t have any good answer for that, so I turned away. I wanted to yell at her. Not because she was wrong, but because she almost certainly wasn’t. Eight years on from the mess we’d made of what should have been the best thing that ever happened to me, and she still knew me better than I’d ever known myself. Two sentences and she’d cut straight through all the armor and all the cynicism and drawn blood. She had no fucking right to still be able to do that to me. Not anymore.

When I finally turned back around, she’d crawled up the stairs into the smuggler’s stash, though I hadn’t heard her move. A glance through the hatch showed her curled tightly in a hundred silver riels worth of silk and dead asleep. She’d left just enough room for me to stretch out beside her like I had so many times before.

I looked up at the shadow tiger keeping watch on the wall above Jax’s head. Sshayar’s subtle stripes just barely showed in the red glow of the thieveslamp. I knew she was looking back at me, but not even a Blade can read the expression on a shadow’s face, so I didn’t know what she was thinking. I reached for the bottle and took another deep drink. This one I felt all the way down to my toes, which was good. I needed it to get me to put my foot on that first step. But it wasn’t quite enough for me to take the rest of that short walk.

If it weren’t for the fact that I’d probably drown if I stayed out there, I don’t think all the whiskey in the world would have put me in bed with Jax again, even if it was only for sleeping. I raised the bottle again, then paused with it against my lips as I noticed the shadowy dragon take a spot on the wall beside the tiger. I looked into the place where his eyes would have been, for several long seconds, then raised one brow in question. I knew I couldn’t trust my judgment on the booze, so I left it up to him.

Triss looked down at Jax, then back at me, and finally he nodded ever so slightly, though I could see it cost him.

I took another drink.

5

I
ntentions
are ice. Results are diamonds. Both can be hard and cold or sparkle and shine, but intentions only matter as long as the heat doesn’t melt them away to nothing. Results can’t be gotten rid of half so easily. You can split them or polish them, even burn them in a hot enough fire, but you have to work if you want to change them.

Waking up with your ex and a hangover when you’d only intended to have a quiet conversation with her will bring that point home with stunning clarity. More so if you wake up wedged into a tightly enclosed space the gods have decided to use as a dice box. At least, that was how it felt, between the way the world had started to roll and pitch and the stuffiness of the air. Things had gone completely dark back when I closed the thieveslamp, so my eyes were useless unless I dug it out again. The heavy smells of tea and sweat and old whiskey in the air made me long for a fresh breeze.

Triss, how long have I been out? And what the hell is going on?

Maybe four hours. The storm’s still hammering us. If anything it’s gotten worse. We’re getting serious waves now.

I hope Faran made it out of the river all right.
There was nothing I could do about it now or anytime soon, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

I’m sure she’s fine,
sent Triss. But he didn’t
sound
sure.

I forced the thought aside, burying it in the back of my mind for the time being—mental discipline had always been at least as important as physical for a Blade, and
much
harder. I lifted my left arm—Jax was asleep on my right shoulder—and felt along the wall, finding the hatch closed tight.

What happened?
I asked Triss.

When the big waves first started to hit, the captain or somebody opened up the outer ports to let the compartment flood. The back of the ship was practically underwater at the time and it came in so fast Sshayar and I barely had time to get the stairs closed. The seals are tight enough that not even a shadow can pass, but as far as I can tell the ballast tank is still full of water.

I nodded.
So, for the moment at least, the only way anyone is getting in or out is by cutting through the forward bulkhead into the hold. Not my first choice, but I guess I can live with that. Though it’s a good thing I don’t mind enclosed spaces, and that I’m not prone to motion sickness.

The hidey-hole I’d hollowed out for us up at the top of the stowed contraband couldn’t have run much more than two feet high by four deep and seven long.

I took a deep breath by way of a test.
I notice the air isn’t getting any worse.

The planks between us and the ship’s inner hold are pretty tightly fitted, but the caulking’s only good enough to make it
look
like a watertight bulkhead. Sshayar and I popped some of the seams to improve the air.

Sounds like you’ve got everything covered and I can go back to sleep.

I really needed it, but both the pounding pressure at my temples and a growing thirst that the whiskey would ultimately only worsen gave me doubts. The fact that Jax had put my right arm to sleep and that the whole world was pitching about like I’d had six drinks too many didn’t help. I might have managed to get past all the physical discomfort anyway—I’d slept with worse—if only I could have quieted my mind.

But now that I was awake, the questions had started. Both proximate: where was the ship going and how were we going to get off without being noticed? And, more remote: What had really been going on back at the cemetery? Could I even trust Jax? I massaged my forehead, but it didn’t help, either with the pain or the thinking.

After a minute or so I gave it up only to have my hand replaced by a sudden cool pressure running from temple to temple like a damp cloth—Triss, doing what he could to ease my pain with a shadow’s touch. That surprised me. It had been years since he’d been willing to help with any of my bottle-born and self-inflicted wounds.

You hit the booze pretty hard last night, on top of all the things that hit you.
Triss’s mental voice sounded cautious and worried, not at all his usual bitter morning-after demeanor.
How do you feel?

I did a quick mental inventory, comparing the ache in my head and the rot in my gut to the cold and the exhaustion of the night before and came up with a mostly positive balance.

Less like I’m about to die, but more like I might be happier if I did,
I teased.

That’s not funny.

No, I suppose it’s not.

Jax stirred against my side, then drew a sharp breath—probably when she felt the pain in her side. “Aral?”

“I’m here.”

“Why is the world moving?”

“Storm.”

“Then we really are stuffed in some tiny little smuggler’s stash on board a ship somewhere off the coast of Zhan?”

I nodded in the darkness. “Yes.”

“Damn. For a few blissful seconds there I thought I’d just had the longest and worst nightmare in the history of dreaming. But the goddess is still dead, isn’t she?”

“Would that it
were
a dream.”

“And you and I are not a we?”

“No. Not for a very long time.”

Jax drew a ragged breath. “Well at least that’s one small mercy, though I think getting back together would have been worth it if it erased all the other bad stuff.”

“Jax!” I growled. I so didn’t need this shit.

She gave my ribs a squeeze. “I’m sorry, Aral. I was joking. Well, not really joking so much as desperately trying to keep myself from going quietly mad. It’s an ugly habit I picked up from Loris when the Hand had us. Laughing was the only thing that really seemed to put the torturers off balance. They hurt us all the more when we did it, but they didn’t enjoy it half so much.”

What do you say to that?

“You’ve changed,” is what finally came out, though it seemed both inadequate and obvious. I thought briefly about digging out the thieveslight, but somehow the dark made it easier to say the things that needed saying. “And I guess it’s my turn to be sorry. I wish there was something I could have done. . . .”

“You’ve changed, too,” she said.

More than she could imagine. Another small grace of leaving the light closed was that it meant we didn’t have to talk about my face quite yet.

“I think the old Aral would have tried to match my joke with one of his own,” continued Jax. “Perhaps the Hand did something of a transfer there. If I got your sense of humor, what gift did the Hand give you?”

“I can’t think of a single thing.” It came out harder and flatter than I’d intended, and I felt Jax stiffen against my side.

“Rage,” Triss said quietly—it was hard to hear him over the noises of the tossing ship.

“What?” I asked in the same breath as Jax.

“Anger is a terrible gift,” said Triss. “It cuts the hand that wields it every bit as deeply as its target, but I think you needed it in the years right after the temple fell. Without anger, we would not have survived.”

Sshayar let out a low growling chuckle somewhere in the darkness. “If so, it was a good choice. Jax has always had plenty to spare.”

“Hey now,” started Jax, but then I felt her shrug against my side, and then wince and put a hand to her wound. “I guess you may have a point there.”

“Of course I do,” replied Sshayar. “It’s ironic really. If you had possessed more humor or Aral more anger, you might even have stayed together.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, it came like another punch in the gut. I closed my eyes, though it didn’t matter in the dark.

“I doubt it,” said Triss. “They were too much of an age to do well together.”

“There is that,” said Sshayar. “She does not fight with Loris half so much as she did with Aral, or with Devin for that matter.”

“You’re with Loris now?” I asked before I could stop myself.

Jax drew a deep ragged breath, then let it go as she pulled away from me. “I am. Our experiences in the dungeons of Heaven’s Reach gave us a close bond. After we escaped, it grew from companionship into something more.”

I couldn’t see, but from the sounds of things, I guessed she’d taken advantage of her diminutive size to wedge herself in the far corner, probably in the cross-legged pose she’d always favored. I didn’t say anything right away, because I needed time to process the idea of Jax with Loris.

It really shouldn’t have surprised me. Loris was perhaps twenty years older than Jax, a large gap for the general run of humanity, but like all the greater mages, Blades measured their lives by the span of our familiars. A dragon-bound mage might last a thousand years if they were lucky enough. The longest I’d ever heard of a Blade living was three hundred years, but it wasn’t old age that killed her, it was a bodyguard’s sword. When Blades died, we died by violence in action, and mostly we died young.

Lifespan was part of the reason Blades tended to form partnerships across generations rather than within them, but lifestyle had a lot to do with it, too. Jax and I had literally grown up together. From the age of four on we had spent much of our waking lives together. What lay between us included every childish mistake and every adolescent cruelty as much as it included our onetime love. Little surprise then that it hadn’t worked out, that it almost never worked out.

Thinking about it, better by far Loris than Devin. I wasn’t looking forward to being the one to break the news of Devin’s betrayal to Jax if she hadn’t already heard it. I reached for the whiskey bottle, though I didn’t yet twist the cork free.

“That’s why I’m here, actually,” Jax said, finally breaking the long silence. “The Hand has Loris.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s terrible. Do you know if he’s still alive?”

“I believe that he is, but I can’t know without going after him . . . them actually, and I don’t want to do that until I’m ready to break them out. I need your help.”

“You’ll have it,” I said, there could be no other choice. There were very few situations that I could imagine where Jax would need help from anybody, but taking on the people who’d destroyed the temple and murdered so many of our brethren was definitely one of them. “But back up a moment, I think I may have missed a step. ‘Them’?”

“After we broke out of Heaven’s Reach, Loris and I tried to gather as many of the escaped journeymen and apprentices as we could find. We’ve been bringing them back to a sort of fallback we set up in Dalridia at Cairmor. It’s a minor castle my brother owns.”

“Your brother?” I asked. “I don’t remember you ever talking about your family when we were together.”

Jax sighed. “My father was the younger brother of the King of Dalridia. It never seemed like a great thing to bring up among a group of people dedicated to enforcing justice on the royalty of the world. Between my induction into the order and taking my journeyman’s swords, the priests and masters made sure I had no contact with my family, nor heard any news of them. After though, I had the freedom to seek out that news, or even my family, I went out of my way to avoid it and them.”

I could understand that. Though my own family had been merchants of some sort and lived within sight of the temple, I’d never sought them out, nor talked to them in the city those few times I encountered them by accident. It was simply not the way things were done.

“Then the temple fell,” I said.

“Exactly. After Loris and I escaped from the Hand we needed a place to lie up and heal. Loris comes from the Kvanas where the Son of Heaven’s word is as good as any of the great Khans, so Dalridia and my family seemed like our safest option. When we arrived, I found out my uncle and father had both died. That left my brother King of Dalridia, since my uncle had chosen to honor the commitment he’d made to his prince consort rather than succumb to the pressure to produce an heir, and thus had no children of his own.”

“How did your brother feel about taking in a fugitive from the Son of Heaven?”

“It’s been ten generations since Namara had to send a Blade after a noble of Dalridia, though not a few noble heads have fallen to the royal executioner. My family takes pride in that record. My brother, Eian, was likewise proud of me and what I’d become.”

“But,” said Sshayar, “after what happened to the temple, Dalridia must be cautious about being seen to be in opposition to the high church of the eleven kingdoms. Eian was glad to see us and to offer us shelter, but politics forced him to ask us to keep as low a profile as possible.”

“That’s why he put us at Cairmor,” added Jax. “It’s a royal retreat high in the mountains at the southwest end of the kingdom, far from the major passes and any foreign influence. The villagers are personally loyal to my brother, and no else ever comes there. It’s served us admirably as we’ve slowly gathered up what we could of the surviving Blade trainees.”

Jax shifted in the darkness, then let out a little gasp of pain. “Damn, but this hole in my side hurts. Cairmor is nothing like what we had at the temple, but we’ve made it more than just a place of refuge. We’re trying to teach the old skills so they won’t be lost . . . though I’m not sure if that can ever matter again.”

“How many have you brought there?” asked Triss, and I could hear the eagerness in his voice, the longing.

The destruction of the temple and our years in hiding had been even harder on him than on me. I might have lost my friends, my goddess, even my faith in myself and my mission in life, but at least I still lived in my own world among my own kind. The familiar bond could only be severed by death. When Triss had tied himself to me, he had left behind the quiet deeps of his home in the everdark, never to return.

Here in the sunlands, his only possible connection back to the life he had been born to came from congress with his fellow exiles. We’d only encountered three other Shades in the past few years, and never since the fall of the temple had he had a chance to talk to more than one of his fellows at a time.

“There were twenty-one of us at Cairmor before this latest attack by the Hand.” Jax’s breath and speech sounded more labored now.