Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel (16 page)

Kelos flashed it back at me a moment later, followed by “safe,” and “in place.” He had caught on instantly, and the play was moving again. Fifty words isn’t much, but it allowed me to figure out that Kelos had shot out the end of the canyon and passed right on over the trail and the edge of the deep valley it skirted here. He’d had little choice at that point except to keep going, until he landed on a slope on the far side. From there, he’d eventually slithered his way down to the trail again where it continued on that side. Or, at least, that’s what I think he was telling me. In any case, he wanted the rest of us to come ahead and join him.

With that established, I signaled back up the valley, hoping that the many smaller waterfalls I’d passed over wouldn’t block
my
signal. After a few minutes of flashing spell-light up the canyon, I was beginning to think that I couldn’t reach them either. But then, finally, I got an answering flash. I tried my new idea for emulating squeeze code with spell-light, signaling “safe” and “come.” It was a simple enough concept once it occurred to a person, and I wasn’t surprised when someone up there signaled “yes” back at me. And “I come.”

Since I wanted the sail-jumpers to pass over me and go on down to join Kelos, I stopped lighting things up once I got that and sent a message to Kelos instead, telling him I would signal him when I wanted him to provide a light for the sail-jumpers to steer toward. Not long after that, I saw the first of a series of barely visible blots of darkness pass high above me, up near the top of the canyon. Once I was sure whoever it was had passed beyond the falls, I signaled Kelos.

An hour later we were all assembled on the trail far below, with only one broken arm, two sprained wrists, and a dislocated shoulder spread across four of our youngsters by way of an injuries-incurred list. I got the rest of the story from Kelos then.

Overshooting the trail and the valley meant that he had landed more than a mile’s hike below where he expected to come down, an all but impossible distance, given conditions and the waterfall he would have had to climb at the end of it.
Sensibly, he’d decided to wait there for a bit, sending signals back in the direction he thought the canyon must lie. He wanted to see if some better solution presented itself before he tried to make the long icy hike back up to the base of the canyon.

We had come down close to two thousand feet between the canyon run and the long steep glide from there to the segment of trail where Kelos finally ended up. There was snow down here, but significantly less of it than where we’d started from. It was warmer here, too, and not long after we started making our slow way along the trail, the snow shifted over into a frigid, brutal rain that slowly melted the way clear.

There were still icy patches here and there for the rest of that day and into the next, so we went slowly and roped together. The damp cold made a map of my body, pointing out every major scar and deep injury I’d ever suffered in fine detail. But after a long, slow, miserable twenty hours of hiking with only short breaks for snacks and shivering, the storm slacked off and we finally began to warm up a bit.

That process picked up considerably when we hit the place where the Demon’s Brew fed into the Evindine. The Demon’s Brew ran hot, coming as it did from steaming sulfurous springs in the Demon’s Mouth, a long wide valley full of mud pots and fumaroles that ran north-south here, following the line of the mountains. There were a number of similar places on the western side of Hurn’s Spine.

Some of the more accessible ones had become the sites of great baths, claiming all sorts of health benefits to be had from soaking in them, but not the Demon’s Mouth. The valley was both hard to reach and carried an ill reputation thanks to the choking fumes that sometimes rolled out of the various smoking fissures and rifts that cleft the ground.

If that weren’t enough to keep people away, there was also the fact that they had a much better location for a health bath some miles farther down the mountains at Yellow Springs. The Demon’s Brew was too hot to bathe in of itself, but a deep pool not too far below the confluence of the two small rivers provided us with a chance to get really warm
and clean for the first time since we had left Jax’s castle in Dalridia.

I didn’t even bother to strip off my clothes—it wasn’t as though they could get any wetter—just dropped my pack and dove in once we’d established that the water there wouldn’t boil the flesh off our bones. At first, the heat burned along my skin like dilute acid. After a few minutes, though, the worst of my cold faded and the waters began to soothe and relax.

Despite the sulfur stink and the metallic tang to the water, that deep pool felt like the best thing that had happened to me in ages. A pure animal pleasure that required neither thought nor effort. I didn’t even mind when the cold rain picked up again. It was actually kind of pleasant to soak there with only my head above the surface, watching the icy drops strike the water and send up little fountains at the impact.

There is something about hot water when you are bone cold that beats even the finest of dry heat. My aches faded slowly from the outside inward: skin, muscle, and finally bone and joint. Below me I could feel Triss gliding around on the bottom of the pool with the other Shades, enjoying the water in his own utterly alien way. It was a brief interval of peace in a life that hadn’t seen many. Which, of course, meant that it couldn’t last.

Not long after I finally felt well and truly relaxed, Siri slid over from where she’d been lounging in the shallows and talking quietly with Jax. “Any thoughts on what comes next?”

“You mean besides soaking until I dissolve completely away? And then sleeping the sun from east to west? Nope. Not a one.”

She canted her head to the side and gave me a very skeptical look.

“All right, all right. We’re going to have to move on, and do it sooner than exhaustion would like. You obviously have some ideas on that front. So why don’t we start there.”

As if he had sensed the change in conversational mode, Kelos appeared then, surfacing silently, like one of the
enormous marine crocodiles that hunted the salty marshes of the Ruvan Delta in the Sylvani Empire. I nodded at him and quietly spoke Faran’s name. Siri hadn’t been on Kelos watch, so I figured my apprentice must be. She slid out of shadows behind Kelos moments later, followed, somewhat to my surprise, by Kumi.

“Do you want Jax to join us?” I asked Siri.

She smiled and shook her head. “No, we’ve already had a little chat, and she likes my thinking well enough. It’s the pool here that gave me the idea.”

“Which is?” asked Kelos.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the trail shallows out a lot another day or so down that way.” Siri pointed along the line of the river.

“It does,” said Kelos. “There’s one more really nasty bit right after the Evindine goes over a long falls, but once we’re past that, it’s easy going.”

“Which means that we’ll start running into whatever the Son of Heaven has cooked up for us somewhere in there,” said Siri. Kelos nodded, and she continued. “We don’t know how much sway he has in this part of Varya, but I’m guessing we’re going to have most of an army to play tag with all the way from that falls down to the sacred lake. Two armies, if you count whatever the Caeni park on their side of the river. That could make for very slow going.”

“And you think you have some way to speed things up?” asked Triss, who had surfaced to listen shortly after Kelos arrived.

“I do,” said Siri. “Between the Demon’s Brew and, lower down, the Yellowtide, the Evindine runs fast and fairly warm all the way from here to the sacred lake. Given that, why don’t we play at being Vesh’An?”

“That’s got a lot of potential,” said Faran.

The Vesh’An were aquatic cousins of the Sylvani, Others who had forsaken magic after the godwar instead of returning from their ocean halls to the area warded in by the Wall of the Sylvain. We couldn’t change our shapes the way the Vesh’An did—assuming the form of dolphins—but with the
right spells we might well use the river as our road west. Breathing water and hugging the bottom could take us far and fast. It wasn’t something I’d have tried on my own—the magic was far too intricate for me. But with Siri and Kelos sorting out the spell work, the chances of us all drowning went down dramatically. . . .

*   *   *

“Fucking
dukes of Seldan!” Jax snarled as soon as she’d finished coughing the water out of her lungs. “Always neck deep in anything rotten in Varya. I still think you should have let me slip out of the river and add a third Seldan to my total back there.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, pointing back up the Evindine. “The duke’s tent was within spitting distance of the river. I could have done it with no one the wiser.”

I shook my head, just as I had earlier when she tried to convince me of the idea via underwater charades. “However clean you got in and out, leaving a dead duke in the middle of an army encampment pretty much screams
Blade
.”

Siri added, “And not just any Blade, Madam Seldansbane. The fact that you already racked up the father and uncle of the one currently warming the ducal seat is not something that would be missed by anyone thinking about who exactly might have made a corpse of this one.”

“Hey,” said Jax, “I’m not the only Blade ever to kill a Seldan. At least nine of that name have fallen to the order over the years. The Seldan family tree is a poison oak.” She nodded toward Kelos. “Hell, I’m not the only Blade standing on this riverbank who has killed a Seldan.”

“It’s been nearly two centuries since I bagged mine,” said Kelos. “With the seven who’ve fallen since, I doubt they even think of me that way anymore. Especially after the manner in which you left the last one you ended for Namara.”

Jax grinned—a thoroughly bloodthirsty expression. “The goddess told me to: ‘Make of this one an example they will not forget for a generation.’ So, I did.”

“You don’t think that hanging him naked from the bell
tower of Shan was a touch beyond the scope of your assignment?” I asked mildly.

“Do they remember his death a generation later?” asked Jax. “Oh yes, I think that they do. Given how much of his history involved rape and murder, I think that stuffing his dick halfway down his throat was an inspired touch. Don’t give me that look! I killed him clean and quick. The nastier bits all happened to the corpse. Now, if you’re all sure you’re not going to let me go back and make this one into my third-time good luck charm, we should probably get moving.”

Jax pointed across the broad lake toward the far shore—invisible at this distance. There lay the ruins of the temple and our order’s best chance of rising from its own ashes. We had a long hike ahead of us. While a straight shot across the bottom of the lake might have served us better in terms of concealment, we had actually crawled out of the river a few yards shy of its mouth. There were things that swam in the deep waters of Lake Evinduin that we had chosen not to disturb just yet. Historically, they had avoided taking Blades, but the goddess was dead, and we did not want to tempt them before we had to.

There would be plenty of risk on that front when we reached the sacred island.

M
y
shattered heart lay before me, a vision of the unreachable past written in broken stone.

Namara’s temple had stood on a low hill above Lake Evinduin and the sacred island of the goddess for nearly eight hundred years, its great dome staring up into the vault of heaven with the Unblinking Eye of Justice. I had first seen the temple at the age of four when I entered the service of the goddess. From that day until its fall twenty years later, it had been my home, and my refuge, the center of my life, and the hallowed cradle of my religion.

Now . . . I took a deep breath and tried to release the lump of pain that filled my chest. Now, it was as dead as the goddess who had made it holy and the priests and laity who had been slain when she fell. Nothing grew on that hill, nor in the fields that surrounded it. The temple centered a dead zone that ran a long bow shot in every direction but lakeside, where the barren ground ran down only as far as the shore.

After the slaughter and the fire, the Sword of Heaven had brought in peasants from the surrounding farms and forced them to sow the fields and grounds with salt, turning the dirt
over and over until the top foot was as barren as a sun-baked rock in the deepest desert. Spells they had laid, too, of desolation and blight and sterility. The Son of Heaven had pronounced the site cursed in the eyes of the gods and ordered that nothing be built there for a thousand years, nor any stone taken from the shattered buildings for use elsewhere.

Eight hundred years the temple had lasted, and now it might take another eight hundred years before nature even began to reclaim the ruins from the horrors wrought there by Heaven’s Son in the name of his gods. I stared at the shattered remnants of my only true home from our place of concealment in a little copse of fruit trees, with tears on my cheeks. Nor was I alone in crying. I could hear more than one of my companions quietly sobbing.

Faran stood beside me, her eyes dry and utterly bleak. “I haven’t been back but the once, since . . .” She shook her head.

Kelos had vanished into shadow before we got close enough to see the devastation—an entirely sensible move on his part, and one that he had warned me was coming. He would meet those of us who were performing the ritual of attunement later, on the sacred island—presuming the scaly monsters that haunted the deeps of the lake didn’t devour him along the way.

At the moment, I rather hoped that they would, though I doubted it. Professional courtesy between ancient horrors and all that. It would make the ritual that much harder, but I thought we could manage it without him, and with the ruins there in front of me, it seemed a small price to pay for that particular piece of long delayed justice.

“We’re here,” said Jax from behind me, her voice rough and throaty. “Now what?”

I turned to face her. “We need to find someplace to lay up for the day. Then, once night falls, the four of us will cross over to the island and attempt the attunement.”

“More than four, if you’re willing,” said Jax. “I’d like to bring Roric and Kumi with, if I might, as representatives for the younger generation.”

“Not Maryam?” I asked.

Jax shook her head. “No, this is a task that wants devotion more than anything. Roric and Kumi have more faith in Namara than any of my other charges retain. If she had survived, I would have wanted to bring Altia as well, but . . .” She clenched her jaw so hard I half expected to hear teeth cracking, but then she forced herself to relax.

Faran spoke into the suddenly charged silence that lay between us. “Any thoughts on
where
we can hide out till sunset?”

Siri leaned forward. “There are deep places under the temple that the invaders never reached, prayer rooms, a section of training labyrinth, even a long forgotten shrine to the Eye of Justice. There are rooms down there that haven’t been visited by any Blade but me in at least a century. The locals view the grounds as cursed and they will not enter them, so we’ll be safer down there than anyplace this side of the salt line.”

“Really?” I asked. “A hidden shrine? I’ve never heard a rumor of anything like that. Not even when I was First Blade the last go-round . . . How did you find out about that? About all of it?”

Siri flushed, and touched a finger to the smoke that threaded her hair. “My divine affliction. When I came back here after my final mission for Namara, the temple was still smoldering. The Sword and the Hand burned everything that they could, furnishings, panes, doors, bodies. . . .”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Much was brought out and torched under the sky, but those things that were nailed down or otherwise inconvenient to move, they burned in place. Smoke was everywhere in the deeps, and smoke passes where people cannot. There were secret ways under the temple, passages long forgotten or that only the priests knew. Smoke found a way in, and I followed it.”

“But you didn’t find the lost swords.” It was a statement rather than a question—I was quite sure she’d have told us if she knew where they were.

Siri shook her head. “I suspect that if they reside
anywhere within this mortal plane, they’re on or near Namara’s island. The pool there was sacred to the goddess millennia before the advent of our order, if Kayla and Ashkent are right, and I’ve no reason to doubt it. They told me that Namara hallowed that island before the first humans ever walked under sun or stars.”

I blinked at that; it was the first time Siri had mentioned her Other connections in weeks. “They spoke of Namara?”

“Only when I begged them to,” said Siri. “The First do not like to talk about
your gods
as they call them, though Namara they hated least.”

I would have loved to hear more about what they’d had to say, but Siri’s expression didn’t invite questions. Instead, I waved a hand toward the ruined temple. “I think we’ve given everyone enough time to get over the initial shock of seeing it again. It’s probably best if we got under cover now.”

I turned to Faran. “Once Siri’s shown us to our temporary refuge, I think you and I should pay a visit to the village up the coast and collect a couple of those floating baskets that the fishermen use in shallow water—it’ll make hauling our gear across to the island much simpler.”

*   *   *

This
is giving me a case of the horrors like you wouldn’t believe.
I sent the words silently to Triss because I couldn’t very well admit it out loud.

The First Blade wasn’t allowed to fear, not even when he stood on the edge of the desecrated grave of his entire religion. Not where his followers could see him, anyway. In the years since the fall I had returned to this place twice. I had not lingered either time, and this creeping horror was why.

The first time I returned was only a few weeks after the fall, and I had only briefly passed the outer gates of the temple and gone no deeper than that. After seeing the names of the dead and the banned on the stele out front, along with the ruined stone orb that once held the spirit knives of the Blades, I’d had no reason to believe that anyone yet lived within those walls. On my second visit, when I recovered
my swords from the deeps of the lake, I hadn’t so much as set foot on the salted ground, swimming out to the island at an angle from the still living part of the shore to avoid having to do so.

We came in to the temple from the lake side now, avoiding the stele and the desecrated orb—both to keep from passing too close to the still active road and out of mercy for the feelings of the students. In through the postern gate we went, a narrow slit in the white stone wall that had once allowed access to the docks and the lake without having to circle the whole of the temple complex. In the old days it had been concealed from casual observers by a thicket of gnarled thornbrindle, but that had burned away with all the other trees and shrubs.

The gate itself lay twisted and broken beneath a pile of stones torn from the roof of the arched passage that led into the inner gardens. There were holes aplenty in the wall around the gate, but I chose to climb over heaped rubble rather than to further violate the integrity of the old building, and the others had followed in my footsteps without complaint. The gardens within had suffered even more than the outer dead zone, having been planed flat and covered with a good inch of salt. Rain and sun had hammered that into a dusty white sheet almost too bright to look at, and I led us past it quickly.

I couldn’t give the temple proper the same courtesy I had the postern gate. The forces of Heaven’s Reach had been more thorough there, bringing down the entire section of wall that had once held the door to the kitchens. This whole part of the building was little more than an unevenly mounded pile of broken stone. The inner temple, though, was made of sterner stuff, its walls yards thick and reinforced with deep magic. Though they had torn the roof off, exposing the passages to the elements, much of the structure remained. Somehow, that made the hurt all the worse.

Once we passed the ruined arch that had led into the inner temple, we moved beyond any place I had visited since before the fall. We let our shrouds drop away then and Siri
took the lead. When we passed through the door that opened into the Sanctuary of the Blades, I bit my lips hard. It was that or scream and bolt.

The Sanctuary was a great oval with ends that came to points. In the old days a high stone dome sheathed in white marble had covered it over except for a cutaway circle in the center that remained open to the sky. Under that circle had been a huge obsidian orb set in a wide ring of lapis tiling. From above, the orb had played the role of the iris in a huge unblinking eye fixed on the heavens—Justice fixing her gaze on her peers.

The orb had held our kila in those days—tri-bladed spirit knives given to each Blade by the goddess herself on their investiture. The first task of every Blade was to bring his or her knife from the sacred island here to the orb where they sank it deep into the stone in a ceremonial marriage with Justice. The orb was gone from the Sanctuary now, of course. Its broken remnants lay beside the stele that the Son of Heaven had caused to be erected in front of the temple to proclaim the ban of the gods on our order.

The kila had been chopped free of the stone, and it was rumored that those that were associated with living Blades now adorned the back wall of the Son of Heaven’s privy so that he could piss on them every morning. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to check the one time I had been in his quarters, so I couldn’t say whether that was truth or a petty fiction.

The missing kila I had known about. What I had not was that the stones from the shattered dome had been neatly moved aside to leave the lapis ring free of any debris. Then, someone had gone through and very carefully pulled up and destroyed hundreds of individual pieces of lapis, leaving behind voids that converted the whole into a necromantic circle of binding.

I forced my voice to a calm I didn’t feel. “Siri, was the spell circle here when you came through last time?” I pitched my voice low and soft, so that only those closest could hear it, and I waved for the students behind Jax to stop moving.

“It was.” She pointed to a place where the circle had been broken, the tiles shattered and burned by extreme heat, her voice equally quiet. “I broke the ring with lightning.”

“Do you know what it was binding?” Faran and Jax had moved forward, and Kumi followed Faran, but I didn’t think any of the others were close enough to hear.

Siri nodded. “I believe so.” A long silence followed, and I began to wonder if she wasn’t going to say more. “I believe that it imprisoned the souls of many of our fallen—bound here in torment. Though I didn’t know it then, I think that it held those whose bodies the Son’s servants had converted to host his risen curse.”

“So, some of the dead we have fought in the last few months . . .”

“Might have once been our own, yes,” said Siri. “Though, I don’t think it likely, given the long passage of time. Whatever the case, they would be very far gone from human at this point, and it would be impossible to tell who they once were without some extremely fancy divining magic.”

“That’s obscene,” whispered Faran. “Why would someone do that?”

“I don’t know,” replied Siri. “Necromancy is something I’ve never
wanted
to know more about. Maybe it makes the associated risen stronger or more durable.”

In my head, Triss was cursing viciously in the Shade tongue. The Resshath-ra wasn’t allowed to show his horror visibly either. Not here. Not now.

“I should have searched the ruins when I came back,” I said. “I should have known about this.”

“There was no point in you doing that,” said Siri. “You didn’t get back till weeks later, and I had already taken care of this. There was nothing you could have done, and no reason to believe that the Son of Heaven could be responsible for something this horrible. None of us knew what he was then. I doubt most of his people had any clue about this—not the living ones anyway—though he needed at least one mage to manage it. There was no reason for you to know, which is why I never mentioned it till now.”