Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel (11 page)

I took the sandwich as we continued on. “Thank you, I do need this.”

“Never ride out on an empty stomach,” she said, in the manner of one quoting a proverb.

Behind me I heard Jax speaking quietly but firmly with Garis. “I will not take the damned crown, and it should not fall into the hands of the invaders. Take it over the mountains to Ar in the Magelands. I’m going to give you an address. My cousin Jafsica is there—she runs our intelligence service in country. She will make a better queen than I ever could have. Don’t look at me like that. Get moving!”

T
he
line between fault and responsibility is a razor that cuts deep. Jax might claim that the ruin of Dalridia was not my fault. She might even be right. But when I had become First Blade again, all that remained of the order and all that we did had become my responsibility. That now included the destruction of an entire kingdom to strike at us, and the weight of it lay heavy on my shoulders as I tried to sort out what happened next.

Not counting Kelos and Faran—each of whose status was ambiguous for different reasons—we had three master Blades, nine journeymen, and nine apprentices. That was all that was left of the legacy of Justice, barely a score of survivors where once there had been four hundred masters and trainees. My original plan had called for taking three or four journeymen on to the temple and leaving the rest in Jax’s care until we sorted out the matter of the swords. Now?

Well, that
was
the question.

“How did the Son of Heaven know you were here?” asked Roric.

“What?” I looked up from the table.

“I mean, this attack had to have been at least a couple of weeks in the planning. I’m not foolish enough to believe it’s a coincidence. The Son must have known you were coming here almost as soon as you did.”

I sighed. That question had occurred to me as well, and there was only one answer that made any sense. “I imagine that Lieutenant Chomarr told him.”

“What?” demanded Triss.

“I said that Chomarr probably told the Son of Heaven where we were going and what we were planning.”

Triss began to swear venomously in the hissing tongue of the Shades, as he realized that I was almost certainly right.

“How long have you known?” asked Roric, and I could see that he stood on that line between placid and killing rage.

“Known?” I replied. “I don’t
know
even now, though I can’t imagine any other answer that’s half so likely.”

Roric leaped up from his chair. “I’ll kill him!”

“I hope so,” I said. “But do sit down. We have a castle to evacuate and Chomarr’s been gone for what, two days now? Kelos?”

The big man shrugged. “Could be nearly three. I haven’t seen him since we discussed the outer wall wards for the temple precinct the afternoon before yesterday.”

I nodded. “The timing’s about right. That night would have been when the Kvani attacked the fort at the base of the pass. That’s the latest he could have stayed without at least tripling his risks. He’s clearly a calculating man and a risk taker, but that’s the point when hanging on would have shifted from acceptably dangerous to foolhardy.”

It’s a damn good thing we never told him about Signet Nea’s finger and ring,
sent Triss.
Or about Siri’s powers over smoke.

It is that.
Siri had kept her own secret, and Kelos and I hadn’t even discussed the finger between ourselves. I’d thought about it, but the castle was full of young Blades with eager ears, and there was no need to share that bit of intelligence before its proper time.
Not that I have much hope in it being useful anymore. If I were the Son of Heaven and
I’d gone as paranoid about mages as he seems to have, I’d have had all those wards rekeyed first thing.

You’re probably right.
Triss sighed mentally.

Roric, who had been looking back and forth between Kelos and I for several seconds, finally asked, “How can you be so cold about it?” He still looked angry, but he had deflated somehow. “Aren’t you even going to check?”

“Kelos, we both know he’s gone, but why don’t you go take a look. If he’s still here, he’s a colder man than I imagined and too dangerous for any of the apprentices. I want someone who can handle him to deal with the problem.”

“He’s not here,” said Kelos, but then he nodded and ducked out through the door.

As he went, I saw Altia waiting patiently in the hall in case she was needed. When we had arrived at the council chamber she’d simply handed me the tray and taken up station with her back to the wall before it had even occurred to me to think about whether she ought to be in where the decisions were made. When I thanked her again for taking care of me, she’d looked a bit embarrassed and repeated her earlier comment about my being her khan. It wasn’t exactly proper Blade doctrine, but then, the temple was gone and if we were going to survive as an order there would have to be many changes in doctrine.

I turned back to Roric once the door was closed. “You didn’t get to finish your temple training and you were never sent into the field, so you didn’t get to learn the most important lessons. The things that only experience can teach.” I held up a finger. “One, the plan always goes wrong.” Another finger. “Two, you never know how it will go wrong until it happens. Three, don’t panic when it all goes in the shit, and don’t get angry—you don’t have time for any of that. Four, cut your losses and move on. Do it smart, do it now, and don’t look back until it’s all over.
That’s
how I can be cold about it.”

“But . . .”

“No buts. I fucked up. Badly. People died. I can wallow, or I can salvage what I can from the situation. Jax reminded me of that rather forcefully earlier. I have some idea what it cost her to do that and I am not going to throw that away. Later—if
I have a later after I do what I can to deal with all the problems in front of me right now—I’ll take my pain out of its box and wallow in it. Until then, I can’t afford the luxury.”

Roric nodded and I could see him forcing a return of his usual calm. “Thank you for the lesson, First Blade. I think I have some idea of what it cost you.”

He’s about five times as sharp as he appears, isn’t he?
sent Triss.

He is that. Those who survived the fall of the temple and escaped the Hand did so because they were the best of their generation. You know, I think he even echoed me back just now for the right reasons.

The door opened and Jax came through. “Is Kelos off to check on Chomarr?”

“You think it was him as well.”

She nodded. “If it’s not Chomarr it’s Kelos himself, and I think that you and Siri are right about him. We can trust Kelos as long as killing the Son of Heaven is your plan and until you’ve carried it out. His insane focus on bringing the whole system down is the only thing that makes any sense of his motivations so far.”

“I’m glad that you believe me.”

Jax laughed. “You’re a sentimentalist, but you’re also damned smart. Mind, I wouldn’t buy it if Siri hadn’t also been convinced. She doesn’t have a sentimental bone in her body, and she will have gotten to her conclusions in a very different way. Of course, I think that young Faran is right as well and that Kelos really ought to be killed now. No matter how useful he is. He’s too dangerous to leave alive.”

“There’s that,” I said. “But I’ll need his help if I’m going to face the Son of Heaven and have any chance of getting out alive afterward. Especially now. Chomarr knew that Devin had thrown in with Toragana’s plot. Which means that Devin is either dead, imprisoned, or fled. We aren’t going to have anybody on the inside to help us out. Kelos is the only one we have left who really knows the inside of the temple precinct in depth. We have to have him or this just won’t work.”

Jax nodded, her expression grim. “That’s why I haven’t
let anyone kill him in his sleep, though I’ve had several offers. You might piss me off, but Siri’s right that you’re our best bet for putting the order back together for the future. I want you back in one piece.” She sighed. “You know, this all could have been avoided if you’d just killed the Son of Heaven when you went after him the first time.”

“Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me. Of course, if I’d done that, Kelos would have become the next Son of Heaven right in the middle of the greatest upheaval in the history of the eleven kingdoms. He’d have ended up ruling the world.”

“And that’s not an acceptable answer, either,” said Jax. “I know. It’s just so frustrating to be playing a game where no matter what you do, Kelos the Traitor wins.”

“It’s hard to beat a man at a game of strategy when he started planning his moves out five years before you were even born.”

“Do you really think it reaches back so far?” she asked.

“Some of it probably goes back farther, but if Kelos is telling the truth, thirty-one eighty-five is when the Kitsune told him about the Son of Heaven’s risen curse and how she wanted to use it to bring down the entire ruling structure of the eleven kingdoms.” I closed my eyes. “So much blood, and it will all be on my hands.”

“You take too much on yourself,” snapped Triss. “What blood is spilled with the Son’s fall will be on his own head. Well, his and the Kitsune’s and Kelos’s.”

I didn’t agree with Triss, but neither did I want to argue with him, so I turned to Jax. “Are
you
going to be all right?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not. But that’s not really what you’re asking. You want to know if I’ll hold it together and get through this.” She smiled the bitterest smile I’d ever seen. “And the answer to that is yes. I have no other choice. Not if I want to keep my students alive. We had the same training, Aral. I can put my pain in a box as well as you.”

“I hope you can do a better job than that,” I replied. “Mine broke me, if you’ll remember. If it hadn’t been for Maylien Dan Marchon, my lady of the red dress, I’d very likely be dead by now.”

Maylien had figured out who I was and more or less pressed me into helping her remove her sister, Sumey, from the baronial seat that rightly belonged to Maylien. In the process we had discovered that Sumey was a hidden risen, and I had used one of Devin’s swords to end her. That had been the start of me recovering my soul and climbing out of the gutter.

I continued. “She showed me that I could still do some good in the world and helped me find a new purpose.” It was a bittersweet memory, as our relationship had broken hard a few years later, after I helped her to the throne of Zhan. “I wish that we had parted friends.”

“How will she fare when the Son dies?” asked Jax.

“Well enough, I think. Her magery has kept her safe from becoming one of his slaves. She’s going to lose a lot of nobles when this goes down, but she’s tough and she’s smart. Once she rides out the chaos, she may well be able to build a better kingdom.”

“That’s something,” said Jax. “I’d like to believe that there are those who will come through the next few months unscarred. That some kingdoms will remain standing . . .” She paused for a long moment, looked away—out the window. “I was four when the temple took me. Four. My brother was six. He barely knew me as a person, and yet he gave me sanctuary without even a moment’s hesitation. I was a fugitive with half the world against me and he handed me the keys to his kingdom. Do you know why?”

I shook my head.

“I asked him, you know. More than once, because I couldn’t believe his answer. Not the first time anyway.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Simply that I was his sister . . . and that he loved me. No worries over all the years I had been gone, or the fact that I had trained to kill men like him. None of that mattered to him. What mattered was that a six-year-old boy had loved his sister, and that he had missed her, and that he was glad that she had finally returned to him. He was a fool. A glorious, glorious fool, and I will mourn him all the days of my life.”

She took a deep breath, and I could see her locking her
pain away. “But not right now. Right now, we have plans to form. Which means that you have a decision to make. Do I take the bulk of the students east into the Magelands where the Son of Heaven cannot easily reach us? Or do we all go west to the temple in the hope of finding the lost swords?”

“How many of your students are ready to take their oaths?” I asked.

Jax paused for a long moment. “That depends. By the standards of Namara? I don’t honestly know. There are deep flaws in some of them, scars left by the fall of the temple and the wandering time before Loris and I brought them here. They are, every one of them, wounded in ways that can never be cured. I do not know how many of them the goddess would have taken into her full service. Roric here, certainly. Inaya, Xin, Kumi. Probably Javan. Before her torture at the abbey I would have said Maryam was the readiest of them all. Now . . . my answer remains yes, though I worry about the rage that lives in her heart.”

I held up a hand before she could continue. “Namara is dead, Jax. The only opinion that matters to me right now is yours. You are the chancellor of the order’s school. How many of your students would you trust with one of these?” I drew my swords and set them on the table between us.

“Entirely?”

I snorted. “No splitting hairs. The question is practical and immediate.”

She sighed. “All of them except Malok . . . and, maybe, Altia.” I raised an eyebrow in question, since the girl had impressed me with her efficiency and no-nonsense attitude over the last hour, and Jax continued. “Malok is still too young at fifteen. He was only seven at the fall, barely bonded with Yinthiss—I honestly don’t know how he managed to escape.”

“And Altia?” asked Triss. “She was one of Faran’s closest friends before the fall, and I remember her as being a very promising young mage. She has done very well this morning, or so it seems to me.”