Drawn Blades (26 page)

“She should know better than to go after a pair of Heaven’s Shadows without me,” I said. “And that’s without adding in Kelos and whatever game he might be playing.”

“That’s not entirely fair,” said Siri. “Not when we didn’t make any attempt to track her down before going after them ourselves.”

“That’s different. She’s eighteen, incompletely trained, and you and I were both First Blades once upon a time.”

“She snuck up on Kelos as recently as yesterday. Close enough to cut his throat as I recall the story. She survived completely on her own for years with a price on her head starting at the age of nine, and came out of it wealthy. If the temple hadn’t fallen, what are the odds she’d have become First Blade herself somewhere along the line?”

“Point. But don’t
ever
tell her I said so. She’s hard enough to manage without anyone doing anything to add to her extraordinarily good opinion of herself.”

“Said the man who went to the goddess to ask her to make him a Blade ahead of his year so that he could be given a mission that had already claimed the lives of three of his far more experienced elders. Is that not right, oh Kingslayer?”

“Again, that’s
different
.” But this time I said it with a laugh.

The trail led us through a series of narrow alleys and gaps between buildings back to the Mouse Gate.

“That doesn’t look good,” I said from our vantage across the plaza from the gate.

“Not one little bit, no.”

Smoke was rising from the arch of the magical gate, and showers of sparks periodically shot out of the dark hole that centered it. Spell-light danced along the edges as well, and the whole plaza smelled like burning hair.

“What do you think happened?” I didn’t know a tenth as much about spellwork as Siri and I had no idea what might have gone wrong.

“At a guess, servants of the buried gods happened.”

“You lost me.”

“Kayla told us that the gates wouldn’t pass velyn unless the Asavi made special adjustments to them. I imagine the cultists used some sort of god-magic to force the passage, and that it wasn’t a gentle process. It doesn’t look like it did the gate any favors.”

“Do we chance it?” Given that the shadow trail clearly headed that way I didn’t see any alternatives, but Siri was the magic expert.

“I wish we had a choice,” replied Siri. “But the gate is obviously close to failing, which means we’d better get through it as quickly as we can. Come on.” She caught my hand and headed straight across the plaza at a dash, forsaking the trail and dramatically increasing our risk of being sighted.

I was more than a bit surprised that she had chosen to abandon the direct trail even if we were likely to pick it up again on the far side, but I picked up my pace to match hers anyway. “What happens if the gate gives up while we’re passing through?”

“No idea. At the moment I’m much more worried about what happens if it fails
before
we get through it.”

I started to ask, “Why . . . Oh.” Then trailed off as an ugly thought occurred. “It’s going to flare off the excess nima, isn’t it?”

“At the very least. Anyone who passed through this or any other forced gate who doesn’t get back out before they fail is going to end up cooking in their own skins. We should be damned glad Faran has preceded us.”

I felt sweat break out over my whole body at her words. We were almost to the gate by then, and it was
probably
just a nervous response to the idea of suddenly bursting into flame, but I put on more speed nonetheless. We hit the darkened opening of the gate together. This time, instead of cobwebs, the resistance to our passage was more like diving deep and hitting a muddy river bottom. It felt much thicker and harder to pass through, for one, and I got the distinct impression that things were only going to get worse and worse the farther we went.

I hadn’t gone two steps before my shroud simply collapsed in on itself. I tried to wake Triss in response to see if he knew what had happened and why, but I couldn’t pierce his dreams to bring him back to the surface. It didn’t feel like he was in pain, but all that I could hear of his mindvoice was a distant sort of delirious babbling. The kind of thing you might expect from someone caught in a heavy fever. I wanted to do more for him, but I had to let it go as I devoted more and more of my attention and will to forcing myself through the gate.

Ice and fire thrilled along my skin in weird tiptoe spatters, and I lost all sense of which way was up and which down. The only reason I could tell forward from back was that forward was more difficult—a sort of cold resistance that felt like it
wanted
me to stop. Once or twice I stuttered to a near halt, but then Siri would tug on my hand, and I would push on again. I did the same for her, or thought that I did at least. It was hard to know anything for sure in that bizarre maelstrom of sensation.

Eventually, we did break through into the gullet of the gate, though the far end was obscured by a wall of hammering rain brought on by the death of the Storms. On the way in, spell threads had gently fastened themselves to hands and feet, neck, heart, and face.

Now firelike ropes burned down from the walls, reaching deep and painfully into my flesh, and I could feel a torrent of nima pouring into me. It came in faster and faster as I staggered along the gullet and back toward my normal size—filling the well of my soul to overflowing. It burned inside me, bright and hot and harsh, more by far than I had given up on the way in.

“What’s happening?” My words sounded long and warped in my ears—like noises heard underwater or through a fresh concussion.

“’S beginning . . . to flare out,” Siri answered, though I found her speech hard to parse through the garbling effect of the gate. “We’re caught in . . . overflow.”

Moved by an impulse I barely understood, I lifted my free hand and pointed my palm out toward the open mouth of the gate ahead of us. A burst of magelightning as thick around as my leg and far more powerful than anything I’d ever dreamed of attempting blasted out of my palm and the tips of my fingers. It felt raw and wild and somehow wicked, and it brought with it a sort of deep relief in my chest, like some impossible weight of pressure draining away. When the lightning hit the sheeting rain at the mouth of the gate, droplets flashed into steam with a hiss and a crackle, filling the air with a hot fog.

“Aral, that’s brilliant! If we can bleed off enough of the flare . . .”

Siri’s hand lifted to match mine and something dense and black, like liquid tar or condensed night, speared out ahead of us. It branched and twisted in the air, sending out smoky tendrils. Where they met the threading forks of my magelightning they clung and twisted, braiding darkness with light and drawing the two streams of magic closer and closer together.

Within seconds, they met and spiraled into a whirling phantasmagorical spike of black and silver destruction that built and built as the gate poured nima into us and we vented it forward in turn. I felt a deep connection with Siri then, as if the blending of our magic was somehow twining our souls together as well. It started at our joined hands and worked up and through my whole body. Somewhere in there I lost any sense that I controlled the lightning blasting forth from the palm of my free hand. I had become little more than a channel for the magic to pass through and I knew that I couldn’t have stopped it if I offered up my heart on a platter in exchange.

From the inside, I couldn’t say how long the mad scramble to escape the failing gate continued. Seconds? Minutes? Ten thousand years? Time had no meaning within the compass of the event. It went on forever and a day, and was over in an instant when we stumbled our way out through the jaws of the gate. We made it a half dozen steps before collapsing to our knees with a splash, still holding hands. My other arm remained fixed at full extension for a few heartbeats longer as the power of the gate continued to flow through me and on into the lightning.

It tapered off in bursts, like blood flowing from a mortal wound—a slow pulsing that falls away with each new cycle of ebb and surge from the dying heart as it fails. As the gush of power faded almost to nothing, the silver and black spike burst asunder. I felt a faint crackling in my other hand, then looked down to see a globe of that same mixed energy where Siri’s hand met my own, obscuring our flesh. It continued to hold there for one long beat before I felt my ring heat, and smoke rose from it, devouring the globe from within.

What the hell?

No idea.
It was Triss, returning from wherever the power of the gate had sent him just in time to answer the question I hadn’t realized I was asking.
What happened? How did it get so dark, and why are we kneeling over Parsi’s corpse?

Huh?

Parsi. A generation and a half older than you. Paired with Shade Zissatha who took the form of a huge rat. Are you all right, Aral?

Of themselves, the words made individual sense. But it wasn’t until I actually looked in front of me and saw the corpse half-afloat in the puddle where Siri and I had ended our staggering progress that I understood their meaning.

One of the ex-Blades we were following had ended her journey here, her red-tinged grays now stained a deeper crimson with the blood that flowed out of the gaping hole in her lower back. Another cut ran across the top of her shoulders where someone had sliced away her sword rig after she died. Looking beyond her, I spotted another dozen or so corpses, mostly Sylvani or Tolar.

As I watched, one of the latter started to drift slowly from left to right when the water flowing down the middle of the cross street deepened enough to float the body. I had no doubt that more would follow, as the storm showed no signs of abating. Beside me, Siri coughed and pulled her hand free of mine.

“You alive?” she asked, her voice husky.

“I think so.”

“Good.” She took a deep breath and braced her palms against the street, clearly preparing to get up.

I didn’t yet have the ambition to join her, but knew I would have to move soon. As I gathered myself to take that first step, my eyes flicked across the bodies, sorting out the scene. There had been another battle here, smaller, but still with at least three sides. I saw at least one filathalor badge and another that displayed a disembodied eyeball trailing a raw optic nerve. The symbol of a third buried god, perhaps.

Aral, I can taste a shadow trail here. Faran following Kelos following . . . Iander and Ssalassiss maybe. Were you following them?

Yes.
I tried to think back to what I had seen of Iander’s skill. He was two generations older than I and quite good, but never good enough to break through to the very top of the Blade hierarchy. Ssalassiss I remembered less well—elephant formed, perhaps . . . I pushed it aside as not worth worrying about.
Whoever it is, they probably have the key.

Damn. I hate to say this because I can feel how tired you are, but we have to go after him right now . . . if it’s not too late already.

What? Too late?
I asked.
Why?

The trail leads into the street.

I don’t . . . Oh, fuck.

Running water is one of the few things that can break a shadow trail nearly as fast as fire or sunlight. I forced myself upright, then had to lean forward and brace my hands on my knees to keep from blacking out as the blood rushed out of my head.

“Aral, what is it?” Siri touched my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

I was about to answer when a half dozen Sylvani wearing the badge of the disquisition came splashing into view from down the street. They wore cuirasses and half helms, but no other armor, and they were coming straight toward us. Two had obviously magical rods that they now pointed our way, and all had weapons at the ready.

“You there, don’t move!” the leader called out.

S
ometimes,
all you can do is what you must.

Triss, tell Kyrissa to relay a message to Siri. We don’t have time to do this nicely. I’m moving on five.

Done.

I took a deep breath and stood, letting my hands fall to my sides, inches from the hilts of my swords. If I’d had the time, I would have offered the disquisitors the opportunity to find someone else to bother. But I was all out of time. And so were they.

Triss released control as my mental count hit four. I shrouded up, drew my swords, and dove forward all in one continuous flow of motion. I hit the water-slicked surface of the street on my belly and chest, sliding toward the nearest of the disquisitors with my blades crossed in front of me.

When I felt my edges bite into his shins I drew the hilts back and down toward my sides, scissoring the tips together and taking his feet off a few inches above the ankles. The motion slowed my slide but didn’t stop it, and the disquisitor tumbled into the street behind me. Borrowed darksight showed me another of the Sylvani lining her rod up on the forward point of my wake. I snapped my arms in tight and rolled sideways, cutting my own cheek as one of my blade tips jarred into the low curbing along the street’s edge.

I barely noticed it through the blinding pain I felt as the rod sent a thick spear of brilliant light into the water where I would have been had I continued forward on my original path. The blast didn’t touch me, but the brightness burned a vicious trail across my darksight and feathered the edge of my shroud. Through my borrowed Shade senses the intense flash tasted of morning sun shining across fields of ice and new snow. It hurt
cold
and suddenly there were chunks of ice floating in the water around me.

My initial plan had called for moving on to the other, closer rod wielder after cutting the feet out from under their leader. I revised that in light of the near miss. Smart enough to aim at a wake meant smart enough for other tricks. She needed to die fast. I rocked back onto my shoulders and vaulted to my feet, facing toward her. I needn’t have bothered. The rodswoman’s head left her shoulders before I could take two steps. Siri dropped her shroud then and threw me a reckless salute.

The remaining disquisitors all focused on her as she had intended, with the remaining rodsman dropping to one knee to steady his aim. Before any of them could follow through, smoke and shadow boiled around Siri and she vanished again. The rodsman whipped his head back and forth in confusion as he tried to spot his target. I leaped toward him, extending my right-hand sword in a sliding lunge that ended when my point stabbed into the side of the rod an inch or so below its fluted tip.

I didn’t know what sort of spell structure had been used in the weapon’s creation, so it was a calculated risk—one that paid mixed dividends. The thing came apart with a really spectacular bang, killing its wielder. But the blast grabbed me by the point of my sword and tossed me away, a motion I converted into a series of spinning jump kicks to stay on my feet in the sloppy street. I managed to hang on to my right-hand blade through the whole thing, though my hand and arm felt like a giant had slapped me.

I heard a scream and turned my head far enough to see a swordswoman lose her weapon and the hand holding it out of the corner of one eye. The cry turned into a breathy gurgle an instant later as Siri’s second sword skewered her throat.

When the remaining disquisitor broke and ran, I would have let her go. Siri was less forgiving. A rope of bubbling night hit the back of the disquisitor’s neck in the gap between helm and back plate and she suddenly collapsed in on herself.

Elapsed time? Less than two minutes.

I was just reaching back to sheathe my swords when the Mouse Gate exploded.

Heat and light hit me like a sledgehammer, throwing me backward through the air. Somehow, I managed to get my swords out of the way before I landed on my back in the street, but I lost them both in the process. If there hadn’t been a foot and a half of water to cushion my fall, I’d probably have died when my head smacked into the roughened diamond surface. As it was, the world went bright red for several long seconds and I sucked what felt like a pint of rainwater into my lungs when my body went limp and floppy.

For a moment, I thought I might drown, but then I got enough feeling back to roll over and force my head back above the surface. I came up coughing and gagging, and nearly went back under when one hand slipped as I vomited up most of the water I’d just swallowed. For perhaps a dozen heartbeats I stayed there on hands and knees wishing I could just give up on the whole damned thing and go home to Tien.

You and me both,
Triss sent, surprising me.

Shouldn’t you still be under?

You lost control rather spectacularly when you hit your head. It was hard to sleep through. Oh, and I’ve got your swords pinned against the current.

It was only then that I realized my shroud was gone and Triss had extended himself forward through the water—that said a great deal about just how hard I’d hit my head.
Thanks! Are they that way?
I pointed along the line of shadow with my chin.

Yes, maybe eight feet. And, hurry. Something took a real bite out of me while I was out, and the effort’s costing more than it should.

Disquisition.
I crawled slowly forward.
Some kind of enchanted rod. Lots of light, but viciously cold. Might be designed to trap rather than kill. Not sure. Ah, there.

Using my link to Triss as a guide, I had found one of my hilts. I put the sword back in its sheath before looking for the other. My hands were shaky and I needed both of them to get it in place safely. I couldn’t help but think how very much better a hot pot of brewed efik would make me feel just then, or even a couple of beans. I could almost feel them crunching between my teeth, and I don’t believe that I could have resisted the impulse if I’d had any to hand.

As I secured my second blade, I heard a splash over the hammering of the rain and glanced up. Siri was slogging her way toward me, looking as drowned rat as I felt. I forced myself not to ask if she had any efik. It was harder than it had any right to be.

“I found the trail,” she said. “It goes that way.” She waved an arm vaguely uphill, then leaned down to offer me her hand. “Come on.”

“What about all the water?” I asked as she dragged me onto my feet. “Hasn’t it broken the trail?” Leaning against each other, we started to force our way upslope against the current.

“’S not deep enough. The reason you can’t trace a shadow trail across deep water is that the scent is dispersed by the movement. As long as whoever we’re after is walking along the bottom instead of swimming, we can follow them.”

“Oh. I guess I hadn’t realized.” All the times I’d tried to follow a shadow trail into water had involved a river. “That’s good.”

We both shrouded up, though I let Triss run the show this time. I wanted the advantage of his insights as well as his elemental abilities. We spent the next three hours following a shadow trail through the backstreets and alleys of Sylvas as Iander slipped his way ever deeper into the heart of the giant city. If there had been any doubt we were on the right track, the occasional scatter of corpses would have disabused us of the notion. Mostly they came in twos and threes, though we also hit a number of singletons, and two more significant battle sites with over a dozen dead.

The vast majority of the bodies that had any kind of identifying marks wore either the snarling filathalor or the smoking ember—no surprise given the extra time the Changer and the Smoldering Flame had to prepare after Kelos revealed the possible existence of the key to Siri and, through her, to Ash. But, I also saw the badge of the eyeball again twice, three officers of the disquisition, a lightning bolt, a fanged and grinning mouth, and something abstract that reminded me of nothing so much as a half-eaten egg roll. There might well have been others, but we were in too much of a hurry to give the bodies more than the most cursory of examinations.

In addition to the variety of allegiances displayed by the various corpses, the methods of their deaths showed more than the average level of creativity. The fallen had succumbed to spell and sword, spear, bites both massive and minor, and at least two had taken Asavi darts. That last had me eyeing the skies warily and wishing the rain didn’t make it all but impossible to keep an eye out for tiny flyers.

“At least we’re gaining on them,” I said as I toed the latest victim onto her back. Blood from a torn-out throat almost obscured the filathalor badge at her collar.

“Not fast enough,” replied Siri. “It’s clear the buried gods have some way of tracking the key now that it’s out in the open. And, we’re stuck trailing along at the end of the parade.”

“Look at the upside,” said Triss. “If they
couldn’t
track the key, Iander would be long gone by now. It’s only the fact that all the fighting is slowing him down that’s letting us catch up to him at all. Even with a fresh scent, we’d be moving slower than he is if we didn’t have the cultists running interference.”

“True,” replied Siri. “But I
hate
playing catch-up. It leaves us way too vulnerable to the unexpected move.”

It was a worry that proved all too prescient a half hour later when we followed the trail to the mouth of an alley that opened into a broad plaza. A spike of malachite vanished into the rain-drenched skies at its center—the tallest tower I’d yet seen in a city filled with high buildings.

The area was lit with dozens of bright magelights on portable stands. They illuminated the site of a significant battle that had claimed the lives of at least a double score of velyn—mostly Sylvani. Soldiers were everywhere digging through the aftermath, as were the city watch and dozens of officers of the disquisition. The gates of the tower lay in twisted ruin, and the fighting had clearly been thickest at its base.

“Fuck!” Siri caught my wrist and pulled me back into the depths of the alley before I’d had a chance to fully register the scene. “We’re too late, by far. I should have realized the trail was leading us here and tried to cut them off. We’ll never catch them now. Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

I grabbed her shoulders. “Siri, stop swearing and tell me what we’re seeing.” I’d never been to the Sylvani capital before. “We can get through the soldiers if we have to.” I wasn’t sure how, but we could find a way.

“Doesn’t matter. If Iander’s still got the key, he’s out of the city by now and there’s no way to follow his trail.”

“Back up.”

“That’s the Tower of the Voice, Aral—the Inspirium Vo!” Siri snapped as if that explained everything.

“And?”

“What? Oh, right. You’ve hardly spent any time in the empire. Come on, the disquisition’s all over back there and we need to move away from any god-sniffers they might have. We can walk and talk.”

I let one of my hands fall away, but left the other on her shoulder as she turned and started leading me back the way we’d come. “Tell me about the tower.”

“Sometimes, the empress needs to convey a physical message which, for ritual reasons, can’t be sent via a teleport gate. Don’t ask me about the whys. I’ve had it explained to me a half dozen times and it still doesn’t make any sense. Suffice to say that the Sylvani have fundamentally different priorities than we do, and let it go. In those cases she will send the sealed scroll to the tower.”

“All right, I’m with you so far.”

“The Inspirium Vo is over a mile high, and they keep a stock of wind-carpets at the top.”

“And, there you’ve lost me.”

“Enchanted rugs, fifteen feet wide and twenty-five long. They’re woven with a pattern that attracts the more powerful sort of wind elemental—breeds that can only be found in the upper air. Launch a wind-carpet off the edge of the tower and the elementals will catch it and keep it aloft indefinitely because of the power of the pattern. It’s nowhere near as fast as a gryphon or a roc, but you can carry more, and any idiot can fly one with minimal training.”

“How do you land it?”

“Once you’ve got an elemental engaged, they’ll usually stay with the carpet long enough to see it safely to ground. But it’s a one-way trip. None of the greater winds will spend more than a few seconds that close to the earth, and you’ll never get it back into the air without them. The rugs usually make their way back to the tower rolled up in the back of a cart.”

“So, what you’re telling me is that Iander is
flying
north to the wall even as we speak.”

“Assuming he’s still alive, yes.”

“What about Faran and Kelos?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. If they made it up the tower before that mess back there filled up the plaza they might have gone after him, either alone or together. But even if we could get through, there’s no point. We have no way to track the key through the air. Fuck!” Siri turned and slid down the wall of the alley we’d been walking along, slipping my grip in the process and landing with a faint splash. “I don’t know
what
we do now.”