Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel (3 page)

I was beginning to wish that I’d had the sense to keep my dream a secret. But Siri had demanded an explanation for the fresh burn over my heart. And, whatever had happened to the temple, Siri was the last of us to wear the title of Namara’s First Blade—my superior in the order still. When she asked a question, old loyalties read an order.

“No,” I replied. “It’s not obvious. Not to me anyway, and I was told to follow
my
own heart in this and all things. She cautioned me, too, about how easy it is to stray from the path of justice and spoke of the great costs that follow. For that matter, I’m not sure the dream was anything more than wish fulfillment.”

“Which left you with a burn scar on your chest?” Siri asked mildly from her place beside the fire.

Wisps of smoke wafted off the fire to coil and curl around her before sliding back to roll up the chimney. More smoke ran through the long thick braids that hung down her back and across the coal black skin of shoulders exposed by the
tight vest she wore instead of a shirt. Likewise exposed was the fresh stump of her left arm, which ended just below the elbow. Her familiar, Kyrissa, took the form of a winged serpent. Alone among the Shades she was no longer a thing purely of shadow, but wore feathers of smoke on her wings and the coils of her body.

“Briefly . . . and maybe.” I opened my shirt to expose the smooth skin over my heart—the print had faded away. “Do you see a scar there now?”

“No, but it was there in the morning. Both Triss and Kyrissa witnessed it.”

Triss nodded, and whispered into my mind,
Sorry, but I have to agree with Siri here.

“There,” said Kelos. “The word of a First Blade is good enough for me.”

I shook my head. “Even if the dream was real, and Namara was somehow speaking to me from beyond death, that doesn’t mean I’m supposed to hare off after the Son of Heaven at this late date. She said I was already on the right path, and that I should follow justice. I had no plans to face the Son of Heaven when she said that. It could as easily have been a warning not to move against him.”

“What could be more just than killing the man who destroyed the temple?” demanded Kelos.

“You know”—Faran spoke up for the first time in several hours—“he’s got a point there.”

I started at that—Faran agreeing with Kelos? That would be a first. I turned to look at my apprentice. She was taller now than when I’d first met her, a young woman rather than a girl, and lovely in a hard and cold sort of way. Her hair was long and brown, her skin a bit paler than my own deep brown. A vicious scar carved its way down her forehead and across her cheek where she had nearly lost an eye—a scar that burned red now with barely suppressed anger.

“Those who destroyed the temple
do
deserve to die.” Faran drew her swords as she rose—swords of the goddess that had once belonged to a traitor Blade by the name of
Parsi. “I think we should start with this one.” She lifted the point of one of her swords to prick the skin at the base of Kelos’s throat.

Kelos shrugged, but didn’t otherwise move. “I’ve certainly earned it. I won’t stop you.”

Faran’s arm remained perfectly still, but a drop of blood welled up on Kelos’s skin and began to roll its way down the length of the sword toward her hand. Tension hovered in the air like the bright moment before lightning rips open a stormy sky. She was a child of nine at the fall of the temple, thrown out into the world to make her own way. None of us had suffered more than she had.

“Well,” she demanded after a few long beats, “isn’t one of you going to order me to back off again?”

“No,” I said, my voice flat.

“No?” She turned her head to look at me, but kept her sword up.

“No. You know all the arguments against killing him as well as the arguments for it. If you aren’t yet convinced, demanding that you change your mind isn’t going to change anything. The goddess told me to seek justice. I say the same to you.”

I waited for the lightning to strike, vaguely relieved that I wouldn’t be the one who had to make that decision. The red drop rolled on down the sword until it finally touched the lapis oval of the guard—Namara’s all seeing eye. It clung there for a long moment, then dripped to the floor like a bloody tear.

Faran muttered a curse and flicked the blade back and up, away from Kelos’s throat. Slamming it home in the sheath on her back, she turned and stalked silently out of the room.

“Interesting play there, Aral.” Kelos raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know whether she’d go for it or not.”

“And I didn’t care,” I replied. “You’re on your own with her from now on.” I followed Faran out.

T
he
dead should stay dead.

For six years after the fall of the temple I believed that Kelos had died defending our goddess and our people. Then I discovered what really happened and that he was still alive. I wish that he’d stayed dead.

I had climbed to the top of our little tower, an octagonal deck surrounded by a low wooden wall. The sun had long since set, but the moon was more than bright enough for eyes trained to the darkness, and I could see as well as I needed to. The wall stretched away east and west, its shape picked out by the magelights and oil lanterns glowing along its length, like some phosphorescent eel from the deep ocean.

“I liked him better when he was a corpse,” I said.

“It’s never too late. . . .” Faran’s voice spoke from behind me.

I turned, looking for the deeper bit of shadow I must have missed when I first came out on the rooftop. I found it in an angle of the wall not far from the stairhead. Or, at least, thought that I did—a shrouded Blade is all but invisible, especially at night. I crossed my arms and waited silently. A moment later the shadow thinned and resumed Ssithra’s
phoenix shape, revealing Faran, who sat cross-legged with her back against the boards.

She lifted her chin. “It’s really not too late, you know. I could go back downstairs and kill him right now. Or . . . you could.”

“That wouldn’t solve the problem.”

“It would put an end to it.”

“No, it would only put an end to Kelos. It wouldn’t undo the fall of the temple or the death of Namara or any of the other horrors he helped perpetrate.”

And it wouldn’t salvage your memories of the man he was before he did those things,
Triss said quietly into my mind.
That man is already dead, and with him a part of you.

That, too.

Faran rose to face me, and her eyes were on a level with mine. “Then what is the lesson?”

“Huh?” I asked.

“You took me on as your apprentice, right?”

I nodded.

“So, teach me. How can you stand to let him live after all that he’s done? How can that be right? Namara’s Blades exist to bring justice to those who would not otherwise receive it, those who are protected by power from the results of their actions. Doesn’t Kelos fit the bill?”

“Namara’s Blades are gone.”

“That’s a dodge, Aral, and a pretty bad one at that. You’re still here and the ghost of the goddess told you herself that you should seek justice, that you should continue down the path she set you on.”

“I don’t know.” I turned my back on Faran and looked out into the darkness again. “I don’t want to kill him.”

“Not two minutes ago you said that you ‘liked him better as a corpse.’”

I nodded. “I did that. But the corpse I liked him as was a martyr to our goddess, not a traitor to her. That ship sank. Now, he
wants
me to kill him, or if I won’t do it, Siri or you. He believes that he deserves to die for his treachery.”

Faran put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face her. “He’s not wrong.”

“No, he’s not. But what will it accomplish? He wants to die for his crimes, but he doesn’t repent them. He would do the same thing tomorrow in the same circumstances. He believed then and still does that by giving people hope for justice, Namara was relieving pressure that otherwise would have destroyed a corrupt system of governance. Is he wrong about that?”

“I don’t know.” Faran sighed. “In the lost years I made my way in the world by spying and commissioned theft. I saw a lot of corruption in the ruling classes, and I didn’t do anything about it because: hey, my goddess is dead and it’s not my fucking job. Then, I found you, and you showed me that there may be something to this whole justice business even without Namara to show us the way. But I don’t see it as clearly as you do.
Is
the system so corrupt that the only thing to do is burn it down and start over? Or is it more important that we keep righting the individual wrongs?”

“That’s really the question, isn’t it?” asked Triss. “The big one that we’re all fighting over without actually talking about it. Do we kill Kelos because of what he did to Namara, or do we back his play and move against the Son of Heaven?”

“Even that oversimplifies things,” I growled. “Is killing Heaven’s Son justice of the kind we were raised to deliver, or is it revenge? He is practically the personification of injustice rendered untouchable by power. If ever there was a man who deserved to die on the sword of a Blade, it’s the Son of Heaven. Killing him alone would certainly serve the old ideal.”

“But then there’s the problem of the risen,” said Faran.

I nodded and began to pace. The Son was more than just a priest, he was a rapportomancer—a very specialized sort of magic user, one with the familiar gift but no talent for actual magery, and his familiar . . . that was the rub. His familiar was a sort of death elemental, a strand of the curse of the restless dead—the one that gave birth to the risen.
Once the curse had advanced far enough, the risen were easy to spot, with their rotting hides, and mindless hunger for the flesh of the living. But there were ways to prevent or hold off that deterioration for months, or even years if you were willing to spill enough fresh blood.

In the shape of the hidden risen, the Son’s strain of the curse wore the bodies of thousands of nobles and priests all through the eleven kingdoms, maybe even tens of thousands. They bathed in the blood of the living to disguise their undead condition and they gave the Son of Heaven de facto control over much of the East. Individually, killing them was as just as killing the Son himself. But, all at once . . . that was another thing entirely. What happens to a civilization when you remove the structures that rule it? The people with the experience of governing? In destroying the risen we might destroy kingdoms entire. Would it be just to ignore that cost?

Kelos believed that a new, more just, system would arise from the ashes of the old, that the inevitable civil wars and banditry and bloodshed would all ultimately prove to be worth it. But his vision of justice had led to the death of Namara and nearly all of my brethren, and that was a cost I could never accept.

Nuriko Shadowfox, his sometime lover, sometime foe who had started him down the path he now walked, had been even more radical in her plans. She didn’t believe in government at all, that somehow eliminating it entirely would lead to a new and better world. Her plan had been to destroy the system and then to spend the rest of her life preventing a new one from growing in its place at a blood cost I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

I didn’t know what I believed, but I knew damned well that killing the Son of Heaven would result in a bloodbath of epic proportion. For every one of the risen that died with him, tens or even hundreds of innocents would fall in the chaos left behind. If the weight of my dead was already crushing me when they numbered in the hundreds . . .

“I don’t know what to do, Faran. It was so much easier
when the goddess told me where to go and who to kill. The responsibility was hers. I
hate
being the one who has to make the decisions.”

“Would you go back to living that way . . . ? If you could?” Faran’s tone was gentle, her expression sympathetic, but the question was as sharp as any knife, and it cut straight through to the pain that knotted my gut.

I desperately wanted to say yes. But . . . “No. I have seen too much of life’s grays to ever go back to that kind of certainty. Even knowing, as I now do, that Namara herself was uncertain . . . No. I lie to myself when I say the responsibility was hers. My actions were and always have been my own, and somewhere down deep I’ve always known that. If the responsibility for what I do belongs to me, so do the choices. I couldn’t go back to being a tool in another’s hand if my soul depended on it.”

“Then, stop letting Kelos manipulate you.”

Her mind is as sharp as her blades,
sent Triss.
She’s grown so much since we first found her.

I laughed a grim little laugh. “That would be much easier to do if I knew what he was trying to bend me into doing, and whether or not what he wants of me is the wrong thing to do. Because the flip side of the risen problem is that allowing the Son of Heaven to live is a decision with heavy consequences of its own. How much of the evil done by and for him am I responsible for if I refuse to end his life?”

That was the question that made me feel as though I was carrying shards of broken glass around in my chest.

Triss rose up and wrapped his wings around my shoulders. “Sometimes you come to a place where there are no right decisions and all paths lead to fell ends.”

“And then?” I whispered.

“You still must choose your way,” said Triss.

“But I don’t know how. . . .”

Faran stepped closer then, taking my hands in her own. “You do, you know.”

“If so, I can’t see it.”

“That’s because you’re looking at it the wrong way. The
question is not, what should you do? It’s: who do you want to be?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You can’t control everything that will result from your actions, you can only control the actions themselves. If you died tomorrow, how would you want to be remembered?” She put one palm on my chest where the goddess had touched me. “Who are you, in here?”

I thought back to the decisions I had made over the last few years as I crawled my way back out of the gutter, what I had done that had made me proud, where I had failed. . . .

I took a deep breath. “I fear that I must face the Son of Heaven.”

Faran nodded, but she also asked, “Why?”

“I am a hunter of monsters in human guise. It’s what I was born to do. It’s what I trained to do. It’s who I am. Who knows? That might even make me into something of a monster myself. But, if so, I am a monster whose job is taking greater monsters out of the world. I may not be able to stop new ones from rising up where I have brought down the old, but I can’t let that stop me from doing the job I was made for, and the Son is a very great monster indeed.”

Going after the Son of Heaven was a scary decision, but it felt like the right one in that moment and in my heart, where it beat under Faran’s hand. I covered it with my own. “How did you get to be so wise, my young monst—apprentice?” I clumsily switched words there as I realized that my usual nickname for her carried a different weight in this discussion.

She grinned. “This is the part where I’m supposed to say that I have a good teacher, right?” She pulled her hand free of mine and very gently leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. “Which, I do, and he is also a good man, and no monster.” She turned and walked back to the head of the stairs.

“Thank you,” I said as she started to descend.

She nodded, but didn’t answer me back.

“What about Kelos?” asked Triss.

“I don’t know. But it matters less now.”

“How so?” asked Triss.

“If I seek to confront the Son of Heaven, Kelos can help me—none better. But even with all the help in the world, this will be a very difficult play. The chances that either of us will survive the attempt are not great, much less both of us.”

Triss snorted. “What you mean is that you’re hoping to push off the decision long enough for it to become somebody else’s problem.”

“Or no problem at all, yes. Is that so wrong?”

“No. If we’re going to go against the Son of Heaven we will need all the help we can get, and, sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is enough to get you through to the end.”

I had made my choice, or thought I had, and I desperately hoped it was the right decision. But somewhere, down deep in the back of my mind, a voice kept saying:
But what is the cost if you’re wrong?

*   *   *

I
appreciate irony as much as the next man. I just wish it didn’t have to be quite so biting when you were on the receiving end.

“Absolutely not.” I slammed my palm down on the tabletop. “I will not have anything to do with that woman.” Faran had already stormed out, while Siri sat quietly behind me radiating a sort of cold rage.

Kelos looked stubborn. “Don’t go all squishy on me now, Aral. We need allies and I can’t think of a better one. At least talk to her. We share a common enemy.”

“Yes, and she’s part of it.”

Kelos crossed his arms and waited. Siri leaned forward and put her hand on my shoulder. It reminded me of the one she’d lost—a price willingly paid for ending a greater evil.

I sighed. “All right, I’ll talk to her, but I won’t promise not to kill her when we’re done.”

Kelos grinned. “That works for me. If you come to an agreement, we advance things in one manner. If you kill her, we do it in another. Chaos to our enemy either way. I’ll tell her you’ll be along momentarily.”

He went to the stairs and headed down into the pub below.

“Siri, am I doing the right thing here? I mean, this is the fucking Signet of Heaven we’re talking about.”

She shrugged. “Probably, but I wouldn’t let Jax in on this part of the deal when we bring her into the matter.”

I shuddered at the very thought. The Signet was the head of Heaven’s Hand, the Son’s own personal sorcerous storm troopers—the people who had tortured Jax more than half to death when she was taken prisoner in the fall of the temple. Actually, there were any number of things I didn’t want to mention to Jax. Like the way Siri had lost her hand, for one. Jax was my ex-fiancée as well as one of the handful of remaining Blades, and I didn’t fancy explaining the weird magical mess that was my brief and unexpected marriage to Siri, or the bloody but amicable divorce that had ended it. . . .