Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (3 page)

Below me the surf snarled and slithered through the miles of jagged coral surrounding
the little island where the prison stood. The angry noise more than covered the quiet
grating of steel on stone as I pried my anchors loose. The next bit was going to be
tricky, so I reached through the link that connected me with Triss and gave him a
gentle nudge. In response, he let go of consciousness, sinking down into a sort of
dream state as he released control of his physical self to me.

My world expanded to include the darkened cloud around me when I added Triss’s inhuman
senses to my own. Light and shadow took on something like taste where they directly
impinged on the diffuse blob of shadow that was Triss’s substance. The effect was
intense and visceral, with bright
spots registering as a spice too hot for the tongue, and the deepest bits of darkness
reminding me of the richer notes in a good whiskey. For dealing with greater distances
Triss possessed something I thought of as unvision.

His field of view encompassed a complete globe, looking outward in every direction,
but it was dimmer than human sight and darker. He had no real ability to distinguish
color and only a limited sense of shape. Light intensity and textures dominated. Was
something flat and reflective, or nubbly and absorptive? Those were the questions
that Triss’s unvision answered best. Once I’d grounded myself firmly in Triss’s alien
worldview, I reached out and found the edges of my larger self, pulling inward until
what had been a broad, spherical, cloud of shadow contracted to little more than a
second skin a few inches thick.

That freed up enough shadow-stuff that I was able to form thin claws on my finger
and toe tips. Drawing nima from the well of my soul, I poured that life energy through
the familiar link that bound us, hardening shadow claws into something truly corporeal.
Moving quickly, because it was no trivial drain on my soul, I reached out and up,
inserting points of congealed darkness into the narrow gap between stones in the overhanging
wall. Like some wall-crawling lizard, I made my way past the bulge that underlay the
crenellations and up onto the battlements of the prison fortress known as Darkwater
Island.

Jerik’s cell stood high in the easternmost corner of the prison, facing the open ocean,
and continually hammered by wind and wave. A giant magelight topped the tower that
rose up from where I slipped onto the wall. It warned ships away from the jagged reef
lying inches below the surface for miles in every direction. I paused briefly in the
lee of the tower to release Triss again.

He returned to full shroud form, leaving only the thinnest slit for me to see through.
While he was doing that, I mapped out my route back to the supply ship that had brought
me here. It was docked at a narrow pier extending out from the landward side of the
reefs about a half mile from the prison
proper. At the head of the pier a small building stood on stone pilings anchored deep
in the coral—the same construction used on the prison.

On a calm day, a lucky man might be able to make his heavy-booted way from the base
of the prison wall to the pier by walking carefully along ridges in the submerged
coral. More likely, he would slip and fall into one of the many deeper channels that
ran through the reef. Between the currents, the razor edges of the coral, and the
colony of demon’s-head-eels the Crown had encouraged to infest the reefs, it wasn’t
the best place to go for a swim. The only reliable way to get from the dock to the
prison was riding in one of the long narrow baskets that traveled back and forth along
an enchanted cable between the two points. Or, in my case,
underneath
the basket.

I had to avoid several guards walking the rounds as I made my way back to the cable-head,
a trivial task given their general lack of interest in their surroundings and my shroud.
It was sloppy, but not surprising considering the isolation and reputation of Darkwater
Island. No one escaped from the island, and very few were released. Mostly it was
a place the Crown sent prisoners to die slowly. And to suffer.

The latter came home rather forcefully when one of the doors that led down from the
battlements into the prison depths opened and spat out one of Thauvik’s torturers.
Through the narrow gap in my shadow covering I watched him come toward me. The stylized,
laughing devil face-paint made him look utterly inhuman, matching appearance to soul
by my lights.

The Ashvik whom I had slain had mandated the masklike paint when he first created
the royal office of agony. The official reason was to increase the fear the masters
of pain instilled in their victims. If it also served the purpose of effectively masking
the identity of Ashvik’s pet monsters from those who might be moved to retribution,
well, that was just fine, too.

I hopped up into the darker shadow between two merlons and crouched down as the torturer
passed, briefly closing
my eyes to avoid reflections. Triss hissed angrily but silently into my mind as he
went by, and I found myself in hot agreement with the sentiment. There is never any
excuse for torture.

This man might not be one of those who had tortured my fellow Blades after the fall
of the temple. That distinction belonged to the office of Heaven’s Hand. But he was
of the same monstrous breed as those who served as the disciplinary arm of the Son
of Heaven, chief priest of the eleven kingdoms, and the man I hated more than any
other that lived.

The torturer continued another dozen yards past my hiding place and then slipped into
the limited shelter offered by a bend in the wall to light a small pipe—most likely
some blend of tobacco and opium. He settled into a gap like the one I currently occupied
to have his smoke. I might have simply moved on then if he hadn’t rubbed red-stained
fingers together and chuckled happily in the manner of a man enjoying a recent memory.
It was a small noise, barely audible above the wind, and his makeup hid any smile
that might have gone with it. But it was that one step too far.

I crossed the intervening distance without really noticing I was doing it. Before
the torturer had time to even register the sudden darkness that had cut him off from
the safety of the prison walls, I formed my fingers into a spear and drove the tip
deep into his throat. He let out a brief gagging cough as he spat out his pipe, but
that was all. It’s hard to scream with a crushed larynx. Harder still when you’re
falling a hundred feet onto jagged coral at the same time. One twisting punch in the
chest and he was gone.

Fire and sun, Aral!
Triss yelped into my mind.
What was that?

Justice.
I turned and continued toward the cable-head, easily slipping past a guard.

I could feel my familiar’s startlement echoing down the link that connected us.
I can’t say that I disagree, but Namara preferred to aim at the masters that held
the reins of that sort, the ones the law couldn’t touch.

I’m not Namara.

No…

And if you think the law was ever going to touch one of Thauvik’s personal abominations,
then you’ve learned nothing of humanity in your years among us.
I was absolutely spitting mad, and not entirely sure how I’d gotten there.

Calm down, I didn’t say that. You’re right enough about the chance of any normal sort
of justice finding the likes of that one, and I’m not at all sorry to see him die.
It’s just that I’m…surprised to see you act on that sort of impulse.

…So am I, actually. It needed to be done, so I did it.
Something that had been lying beneath the surface of my thoughts for a couple of
months suddenly broke through into the light then.
Namara’s gone, Triss. She’s not coming back. I’ve known that for years, but I think
I’ve been avoiding thinking about what that
meant.

I had been groping toward what it meant to be a Blade without a goddess for more than
a year now, ever since Maylien first hired me and forced me to confront what I’d become
in the absence of the goddess. I think I finally had a big piece of it.

I can’t just let the world go to hell because I don’t have someone telling me how
to fix things, Triss. Kings and generals and high priests didn’t stop going bad when
Namara died. They just stopped having to worry about paying for it.

Are you taking this where I think you are?

Maybe. People like that torturer shouldn’t be certain that they can make a life of
hurting others without ever having to worry about paying for their crimes.

And you’re going to fix that?

Hold on.

I paused and let another guard go by. At night, or in any environment with heavy shadows,
the shroud form of the Shade all but guaranteed his companion Blade would remain unseen.
Even in bright light, most people simply ignored the blind spot it created unless
it stopped directly between them and something they were looking at.

Master Kaman had told us it was because the human
mind wasn’t properly equipped to cope with the magic of elemental shadow, especially
expressed in the diffuse-boundaried form of a shroud. I didn’t know if that was what
was really going on, or if it was some gift of the goddess that had continued beyond
her death, or something else entirely. What I did know was that even with intense
training, my own eyes had tended to slip right past shrouded friends without registering
them, day or night, unless I was actively looking for the telltales.

I started moving again, considering Triss’s question as I went.
Am I going to fix it?
I shrugged.
Maybe? Sometimes? When I can? I’m a homeless drunk and I don’t know that I’ll ever
be able to see the world in the same black and white way I did when I was a young
Blade, but sometimes the right thing to do is pretty clear. Not acting when I know
what I
should
do is a kind of cowardice. I don’t think I can bear to indulge my fears anymore. Take
the torturer back there. I knew that if I didn’t act to stop him, he was going to
finish his pipe and go back downstairs to hurt and kill people. Could I really afford
not to act in that circumstance?

While I applaud the sentiment,
sent Triss,
I do wonder where it’s coming from. Faran was right when she called you sentimental
for a Blade and said you didn’t like killing people who weren’t directly in your way.
That was only a few months ago. What happened?

When we rescued the lost apprentices at the abbey we killed a couple hundred of the
Son of Heaven’s people. A lot of them weren’t in the way.

And?

It very nearly broke me, but it didn’t quite. I survived and I made the people who
put me in a position where I had to kill like that suffer.
I spared a moment then to worry about how my apprentice was healing—Faran had been
badly injured in the abbey assault—but there was nothing I could do about it but hope
the healers could mend what I could not.
I feel stronger now than I have in years, Triss—since before the fall of the temple,
really. I think all that death
was a fire that burned away some of the sentiment. I think it burned away a
lot
of the old me, actually.

I’m not sure I like the sound of that.
Triss’s mindvoice sounded worried.

I’m not sure I like it much either, or whether what’s left of me is going to be someone
I can live with, but I don’t see that I have a whole lot of choice in the matter.

I knew that I sounded hard and cold, and to some extent that’s the way I felt. At
the same time, I didn’t think I was going to forget the crunch of the torturer’s throat
under my fingers or the sight of him falling away to his death anytime soon. That
was good. I had just killed a man, and it’s not something I ever wanted to do lightly,
no matter how much someone deserved it.

I guess what I’m saying is this,
I continued.
I’m an assassin. I kill people. It’s what I do, and I’m very, very good at it. Talent,
training, calling, they all point in the same direction. The world is an ugly place
and it needs people who can do what the goddess made me to do. Her death doesn’t change
that. By pretending it did, I’ve been betraying her memory, and, perhaps more importantly,
I’ve been betraying what I am.

By then, we’d reached the cable-head and I needed to focus on getting aboard a basket
to work our way out of the prison. So, as he so often did, Triss got the last word.

I think that you may have finally found your way back to what you once were. It’s
what I’ve wanted for years, and yet, now that it’s come, I’m not sure that I have
been wishing the right thing for you.

T
he
Marchon baronial great house stood atop the Sovann Hill in the northwest corner of
Tien proper. It bordered the royal park, occupying some of the most expensive real
estate in the city. If I lived a thousand years, I would never grow comfortable with
the sort of wealth and power expressed by the building and its grounds, beautiful
though they were. I had been raised to
kill
people who owned places like this, not have tea with them. Namara’s priests brought
us into the temple at the age of four and trained us in the arts of death for the
purpose of bringing justice to the corrupt nobles and crooked priests who were too
powerful to receive it in the courts of the eleven kingdoms or at the hands of their
fellows. Royal monsters, too, like Maylien’s sister and father, both of whom had died
by my hand, the latter in front of this very house.