Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel (5 page)

Faran pulled a bundle free of her sword rig then and handed it to me. “I did manage to grab your poncho on the way out. You don’t know how relieved I was when your signal arrow passed me back that way.” She nodded over her shoulder.

“It came so far?” I was surprised because I hadn’t specified a duration for the spell, just let it fly, but I’m no great shakes with magic.

“No idea. It passed me a quarter mile or so from the inn and kept right on going. A little gaudy maybe, but good for me, and . . .” She wobbled and suddenly sat down on the roof, putting her head between her knees. “Oh my.”

“Can you do anything for her?” asked Ssithra. “Between the blood she’s lost and my needing to play tourniquet, we haven’t had the resources for any sort of healing magic.”

“Lie down,” Siri told Faran. “Aral, cut that bandage away.”

“Shouldn’t we get in out of the rain first?” I asked.

“After. The longer we wait, the worse it will get.”

I did as ordered, hissing sharply when I got a look at the tight seam of shadow sealing the wound beneath. Faran had carved a strip at least three inches wide and half an inch deep out of her upper arm.

“Nasty,” I said.

“Less wouldn’t have been enough,” replied Ssithra. “I could see the curse moving through her flesh and showed her where to strike.”

Meanwhile, Siri had knelt beside Faran. Now she reached out to touch the injury with both hands and . . . wait a second. I did a double take as I looked for Siri’s missing hand. The limb was still gone from about halfway down her
forearm, but, where the flesh used to continue on, a sort of ghost wrist and hand had formed out of whirling smoke.

“Is that . . .” I didn’t even know what I wanted to ask and trailed off.

“I’ve been experimenting with the connection between me and the buried god,” said Siri. “With my sword in old Smokey’s black heart, the link’s even stronger than it was when I put him in his grave the first time. But I have more freedom now. The sword is binding him much tighter than the eye dagger ever did. Now, shut up, I’ve a tricky task to perform.”

I shut up, because that’s how orders work.

“Faran, this is going to hurt, probably a lot. Are you—”

“Do it!” snapped Faran.

“All right.” The smoke defining Siri’s left hand grew darker and thicker, especially around the base of her fingers, like it was coming straight off a flame. The palm there took on a faint orange cast. “Ssithra, I will need you to move in three, two, one. Now.”

The shadow slid away from Faran’s arm and blood welled up behind it. Before it could go farther than that, Siri placed her smoking palm against the wound. There came a sizzle like a freshly forged sword going into the quenching trough. Faran whimpered and then fainted. A moment later, Siri pulled her hand away and promptly tumbled over onto her back with a splash. Where she had touched Faran’s arm, the flesh looked hot and pink and shiny, like a new burn scar, and the bleeding had stopped, though a clear fluid was oozing out here and there.

Before I could examine it any closer, Ssithra hissed angrily and wrapped herself around her injured companion’s arm again. The Shade’s tone didn’t invite any further prodding. So, I checked Faran’s pulse quickly—thready but distinct—then turned my attention to Siri, who looked very nearly as wrung out as Faran. Her eyes were closed and she had her stump pressed tight against her forehead. The hand of smoke was gone.

“Siri, are you all right?”

“Not really, no, but I think I might be later . . . after I’ve
had a bath or six. I had to touch
him
pretty deeply to do that, and it’s left me feeling unclean inside and out. That and like a troll just used me as a chew toy. Now, be quiet and let me meditate here in the rain for a little while. I need to put this aside, and the storm will help me wash my soul clean.”

I stood and walked to the nearer edge of the roof, leaving Siri in peace as I began a slow circuit of the building. I didn’t have to ask her who “him” was or why she felt unclean. She meant the buried god known as the Smoldering Flame. As I had once been bound to him, too, however briefly, I knew something of the sense of violation his presence brought with it. One of the two swords our goddess had forged for Siri was buried in his heart now and would remain there unless the god’s own magic burned it away over the next thousand years or so—it was the only way that we knew of to keep him safely in his grave.

The buried gods had once been almost inconceivably mighty sorcerers of the Others, or First as they called themselves. The Sylvani, Durkoth, Vesh’An, Asavi, and all their lesser known brethren. In the days before the birth of humanity they had grown in power to rival the gods themselves, and that had resulted in their downfall. The gods are jealous of their place, and they had gone to war to break the strength of the First.

It was a close-run thing, and ultimately, while the gods defeated those who had risen against them, they could not destroy them. So, the gods had entombed their enemies and created the Wall to bind the power of the First. Mostly, the buried ones remained in something like sleep, deep in their tombs, but now and then one would rise for a time and trouble the living.

The buried gods were enormously powerful still, and couldn’t be slain, though they were something less than alive. They were also incredibly alien in their thinking and desires, and being bound to one, as Siri was, meant sharing the dreams of a sleeping abomination. Much of the time she could push that awareness back and down, keep it in a sort
of box of the mind, as we had been taught to deal with the guilts and horrors that our profession sometimes brought.

But here, for Faran’s sake, she had chosen to actively broaden and deepen her connection with the Smoldering Flame if only briefly. I shuddered at the thought. I had seen into his mind, and I do not think that I would have had the strength to do what Siri had just done. Once again, she had demonstrated the will and skill that had led her to supplant me as First Blade back in the days before the temple fell.

I was just passing the women for a second time, when I heard a faint splashing sound from the far edge of the roof. Even as I drew my swords, Kelos stepped out of shadow and waved to me. There was something hunched about his outline and it took me a moment to realize that he had a body slung over one shoulder. I raised an eyebrow as he came closer.

“Hand. We were close together when you gave the signal to make a break for it, so I brought him along. I’d have been here sooner, but I was on the Fallows side of things and had to get out that way when the building got blown over by the storm. We rode the wreckage down, which event turned out to be a good thing, as that was where the risen were thickest and the fall of the building squashed or buried a fair few of them. Then I had to run most of a mile out of my way before I could cut back to the wall.”

“Why are you carrying him? Did the risen get to him?”

“He’s missing an ear and a healthy strip of scalp, but I’m pretty sure I saved him from the curse with that cut. Even so, he wanted to stay behind.” Kelos shook his head. “I presume he intended to die there, taking as many of them with him as he could to avenge his Signet—damned Hand fanatic!”

Kelos had left out an important detail. “But then you talked him into it somehow?”

Right . . .
sent Triss.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I knocked him on the other side of his head with the flat of my blade, threw him over my shoulder, and started running.”

“So, he might wake up angry,” I said dryly.

“Good chance, if he wakes up at all. I hit him pretty hard, and head injuries are funny things. I didn’t have time to sort it out gently, and he was the last of the Signet’s personal guard. Have to admit he’s a hell of a fighter. . . . But the important thing is that he might know something we need.”

“I’m so glad that you continue to place such a high value on other people’s decisions,” I said.

“I value other people’s decisions exactly to the degree that they make good sense.”

“To you!” I snapped.

“Is there any other measure a man can make beside what’s reasonable to him? If I think a person’s making a bad mistake, should I pretend it’s not so? Because that sure as hell won’t help things.”

Aral, let it go. You won’t change him.

I know, it’s just that he makes me crazy!
I took a deep breath and tried to push my anger away.

It wasn’t productive right now, and it was clouding my thinking. It’s funny how the people who raised you can knock your best efforts at reacting like a reasonable person on the head. There’s something about having been a child to someone’s adult that leaves marks on you that can never be wholly erased. Somewhere in every exchange you have, there is the ghost of that old relationship trying to make itself felt.

“Speaking of which,” continued Kelos, “what are you doing up on a rooftop in rain like this with wounded? I thought I taught you both better than this.” He included Siri in his gesture.

She had abandoned her meditation and come up beside me while we were speaking. Now she used her remaining hand to flip Kelos a rude gesture.

That’s when I started to laugh. It was that or kill Kelos, and, as tempting as I found the idea, all the old arguments still held. I still needed what was in his head.

“Fine, we’ll get in out of the damned rain, Grandpa.”

And then what? That was the real question.

“Y
ou
may rob a grave, but you cannot steal from the dead.” This was not the first variation we’d had on this particular conversation, but it didn’t hurt to say it again.

“If that’s not it, then why won’t these work for me, Aral?” Faran whipped her swords angrily through the air, then winced and rolled her injured shoulder.

It had been nearly a week, but even with much better magical care than we could provide, that arm was going to trouble her for a very long time . . . if not the rest of her life. We had camped for the night in the loft of an abandoned barn somewhere east of Tavan in the Magelands.

We should have made it to the city by now, but the risen continued to hunt us, and avoiding both them and the locals working to exterminate them was slowing us down—the last thing any of us wanted to do was to try to explain the whole thing to anyone official. Nursing the priest of the Hand we’d dragged along was another factor in our travel time. Kelos’s blow had left him with both a concussion and a pretty scrambled view of what had happened at the inn—a fact that
became incredibly apparent during those few brief moments when he came awake enough to attempt conversation.

It would have been simplest to abandon him at another inn, or, better yet, a church facility, but there was still the chance that we might get important information out of him. Also, he might draw the risen down on whomever we left him with, and I didn’t need that on my already stained conscience if it could be avoided. At the moment, our unwelcome guest was sleeping in a corner.

“Namara’s swords will slay the risen for you.” Faran jabbed one of her swords in my direction. “And for Siri.” Another jab. “Hell, they even work for old one eye!” She jerked her chin at Kelos. “And he
betrayed
the temple!”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but the fact that you took them from Parsi’s corpse isn’t the problem. What made her Parsi was gone by then, moved on to face the lords of judgment and the wheel of rebirth. There was no one there to steal
from
, and we know there are other reasons that may cause the enchantment of the swords to fail. Devin’s wouldn’t work against the risen either, not for him anyway.”

“Are you saying I’m like Devin?” Faran’s voice went up a half octave as she stabbed the blades deep into the floorboards of the old barn loft.

Way to put your foot in it, my friend,
sent Triss.

I took a deep breath. “No, Faran, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just noting that it’s possible to have been handed your swords by Namara herself and for them still not to do everything they’re supposed to. And no I don’t know why that is.”

A shadowy cobralike head lifted over Kelos’s shoulder. “I have been pondering it for some time, and I begin to think that I might know the answer. In this case, at least. Devin is another thing entirely.”

Triss flicked his wings sharply.
Interesting . . .

He wasn’t the only one who started at Malthiss intruding himself into the conversation. The old Shade had always leaned toward the quiet side, a trait that seemed only to have deepened in the years since Kelos had betrayed the temple.
Faran’s reaction was sharpest. When she wasn’t advocating for chopping Kelos’s head off, she tended to pretend that neither he nor his familiar existed. The fact that the two of them might know something she desperately wanted to obviously caused her considerable distress. I refrained from welcoming her to my world, but only by chewing on my tongue.

After several strained seconds, Faran turned to Malthiss, and nodded a jerky sort of nod that didn’t quite cross the line into a formal bow. “You have something to add, Resshath Malthiss?”

“Kelos won’t remember the conversation, but when I was much younger than I am now, I once spent a long evening discussing the swords with Falissil.”

“Falissil?” I didn’t recognize the name, and I found it difficult to imagine why Kelos wouldn’t have remembered the conversation.

Kelos actually blushed. “He was companion to Master Voros, who was First Blade a hundred years before I was born. Voros taught me to fence, and later, in my fifties, we had something of an . . . understanding.” He snorted. “It’s hard to believe I was ever that young.”

I nodded. That would explain Kelos missing that conversation
and
his blush. The Shades always tried to give their human partners at least the illusion of privacy when sex was involved. Kelos’s preference for bedding women was a fair bit stronger than my own, though he had been known to make exceptions over the years as well. But he wouldn’t have wanted to discuss the thing if it were a woman, either—he is too private a person.

Malthiss continued as though the interjection had never happened. “Falissil and Voros had moved on to teaching the younglings about the history of the order and the way of Justice. Part of that was sword lore, and Falissil knew much that I did not. It was a passion of both his and Voros’s and they had learned many things that lay outside the scope of the teaching of basics to children.”

I thought back to my own time in those classes. More than anything, what they had been about was channeling youthful
energy and habits of thought into the pursuit of the right. A Blade has to walk a narrow path between loving death and being crushed by it.

From the day we entered the order at the age of four or five we were trained to kill the unjust, and to do so without regret or hesitation. That requires a ruthlessness that can all too easily slip over into a sort of blood hunger where killing becomes a goal in itself. More than one Blade or Blade in training has become the very sort of monster that the order existed to destroy.

But it is all too easy to tip the other way instead, to feel the deaths of those we must kill too keenly. If you are raised to see injustice and to look at its costs with unflinching eyes, you will see much of the aftermath of death. You will see the harm it does reflected in the eyes of the survivors, those who have lost friends, parents, lovers. . . . If you have any compassion at all, you cannot help but see that the Ashviks and other monsters also have friends, parents, lovers. . . . Most Blades die by violence, but it is not always an enemy that spills their blood. Too many die by their own hand.

I had come closer to that edge than I would ever admit to anyone, even Triss. . . . No,
especially
Triss. I shook off the thought, and forced myself to listen as Malthiss continued.

He was speaking directly to Faran. “. . . and so, the goddess only ever made around six hundred swords. Even with all of her strength, it took her centuries to manage that many. The swords that Kelos carries, or Aral or Siri, once belonged to another Blade, just as yours did. But where their swords were rededicated by the goddess herself and consecrated to their new wielders, yours are still attuned to she who used them last.”

“Hang on.” I held up a hand. “I knew that the swords returned to the goddess, but I don’t think I knew that.” It wasn’t a complete surprise—some things I had been told over the years implied it in retrospect—but I hadn’t ever really thought about it. I drew one of my swords and looked down its length at Malthiss. “I wonder who this belonged to before me.”

Malthiss leaned forward and touched the tip of his forked tongue to the steel. “Alinthide Poisonhand.”

I very nearly dropped the sword. Alinthide had been one of my favorite teachers, a smart, strong, wonderful woman. She was one of the Blades who had died trying to kill Ashvik, and I had held a mad secret crush for her in my heart from the age of fifteen to seventeen. Her death was the thing that had driven me to ask Namara to make me a Blade before my time and to give me Ashvik as my first assignment.

“Are you sure?” I asked him. “There were several killed in the time between when I was made a Blade and the investiture of the journeyman who came before me.”

Malthiss nodded. “There were also a hundred or more sets of inactive swords at that time without counting the two that were reforged into one for the Kitsune. It had been more than three hundred years since the goddess had last had a full complement of Blades.” He twisted his head in a gesture that took in the four of us. “Making
you
was a much harder task than making the swords.”

“Then how do you know that these were Alinthide’s?” I found that I desperately wanted it to be true, to know that something of that old love lived on.

“I can taste Serass in the swords,” said Malthiss, naming Alinthide’s companion. “Part of the darkness of the steel comes from the way it is bound to the Shade who partners its master. That leaves a record that only a great length of time, or the conscious effort of the goddess can erase. Falissil showed me how to touch the echo of that in the rededicated blade, though it only works if you knew the Shade personally. It’s something like recognizing a shadow trail, though fainter and more complex.”

Let me try.
Triss rose up and touched his tongue to the sword. “I don’t . . . I’m not . . .”

Malthiss said something long and complicated in the hissing tongue of the Shades, and Triss responded in kind. Kyrissa came forward then to touch the sword as well, though Ssithra held back.

“Ssithra?” I asked.

The phoenix shrugged her wings. “Alinthide died before we came to the temple. I wouldn’t recognize her taste.”

“Perhaps not,” said Triss. “But you know mine. This is important knowledge and Malthiss may be the last of the old Shades who knows it. You should learn, too, so that it doesn’t die out.”

Ssithra nodded and moved forward. “Oh. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Thank you, Resshath Triss.”

Well?
I sent. I didn’t trust Malthiss and I wanted this to be true, but I was unwilling to ask my question aloud, for fear of the answer.

Serass,
he sent, very firmly.
Now that I know what to
—he sent something incomprehensible in Shade—
for, there is no doubt
.

Why do you think Namara gave me Alinthide’s swords?

Do you really have to ask?

No, I guess I don’t.
I closed my eyes and sent a silent thanks to a fallen goddess for a grace that I only now recognized—both for the connection to one I had loved and for the rightness of the thing. Ashvik might have killed Alinthide, but in the end it was Alinthide’s sword that killed Ashvik.

“All right,” asked Faran, “but what does that mean for me with Parsi’s swords?”

“I think that we might be able to attune them to you,” said Malthiss. “The six of us working together.”

“Even with the goddess gone?” Faran’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“Even so.”

Is that possible?
I sent to Triss.

You’ll have to ask Malthiss. I don’t know enough about it yet.
There was a long pause, then he added, rather reluctantly,
But I can’t imagine that it will be easy, especially given Faran’s . . . loyalties.

What does that mean?

Justice matters here. It has to for anything that addresses the power of the goddess. And justice is not Faran’s first loyalty, nor has it been since at least the fall of the temple.

I couldn’t argue with that.
She had to make hard choices. Without that self-reliance and self-centeredness she wouldn’t have survived.

No, she would not. But that, too, has passed.

What do you mean?

These days, her loyalty belongs to you. She is a warrior and you are her captain.

I didn’t know how to answer that, and the conversation was moving on without us, so I remained quiet.

“How soon can we try it?” asked Faran.

“That depends on our route,” replied Malthiss.

Faran frowned. “I think I missed a step in there somewhere.”

“The ritual I envision will have to be performed at a place holy to Namara, probably the grotto on her island in Lake Evinduin. It still may not work, but, from what I know of the swords, that is the only way it could.”

Faran turned to look at me now. “Aral?”

It was almost a thousand miles out of the way if our plan was to go after the Son of Heaven straightaway, which brought up another thing that needed addressing.

“Siri is senior to me.” Both Faran and Kelos had taken to treating our course as though the final authority for choosing it lay with me. “The decision belongs to her.”

Siri shook her head. “I don’t think so. Faran is your apprentice, and dealing with her needs is a choice you have to make.” I opened my mouth to demure, but Siri held up a hand. “But that’s not all. I know that you still think of me as First Blade, Aral, but that’s over. Namara is dead and the temple has fallen.”

I shook my head. “You are still my better in the skills of the Blade
and
Namara’s final choice to lead the order.”

“That was before this.” She raised her stump and formed a hand of smoke. “The injury isn’t a problem, but the Smoldering Flame is. I owe my allegiance to Namara’s ghost, but my soul is bound to another god now, one who seeks to subvert my will even in his dreams. To be tied to one of the buried gods is to be forever compromised. Without Namara to protect me from his influence I can never fully trust my judgment again, and you shouldn’t either.”