Fallen Blade 04 - Blade Reforged (8 page)

I froze as one of the stone dogs emerged from the floor a scant yard in front of me,
and held my breath when it sniffed once or twice and looked in my general direction.
I got a far closer look at the lion-like face of the great brute than I cared for
as it sniffed harder, working its heavy jowls and nostrils. But then its master called
and it turned away from me. I slipped forward another three feet, having to move a
good ten left and right to manage it. Finally, I was kneeling right over the crumpled
body of the Duchess of Tien.

The cone of the dart had already fallen to the floor, dropping away when the crystallized
poison that made up the point and shaft melted. In the scramble that followed, the
brittle ceramic cone had been crushed, leaving only a tiny, barely identifiable wound
in the duchess’s neck as evidence she’d been struck—more proof that it was a Blade
dart. Maylien’s proclamation of legitimacy was nowhere to be seen. I took a risk by
giving the corpse a shove to tip it aside, but it didn’t pay off. Then the stone dog
was coming back my way and I had to move, sliding to my left until I was practically
in the shadow of the throne.

As I tried to decide where to look next, I heard Thauvik speaking very quietly. “But
I don’t want to.” And then, after that, an angry hiss of, “Fine, let’s go then.”

The king rose and called out, “Vyan, come out from under that table and attend me.”

After a long beat, a querulous voice sounded from beneath the table, “Your Majesty?”

“Are you going to make me repeat myself?” the king asked, his voice low and dangerous.

The Lord Justicer practically shot out into the light, bowing deeply as he stood up.
“Of course not, Your Majesty.”

“Good. I would hate to lose another member of my high
council today.” The king turned and walked to the door behind his throne. At the threshold
he paused and said over his shoulder, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I didn’t
notice your craven dive under the table when you should have been thinking of my safety,
Vyan. Or that it will be easily forgiven.”

The Lord Justicer swallowed heavily. “Of course not, Your Majesty.” Then he started
after the king.

“Tell me, Vyan, what became of that paper my niece tried to foist off on us?”

“I’m not sure, Your Majesty. I thought the Duchess of Tien had it in her hand when
she…fell.” He stepped through the door behind the king.

For lack of a better plan, I followed them. I had just reached the threshold, when
my borrowed Shade senses gave a harsh jangle and I tasted the sharp smoky notes of
an extremely fresh shadow trail on the floor. Though I had been practicing regularly
with Faran much of the spring, I would never have a tenth the palate for such things
that Triss did. All I could really read from the trail was that it had been laid down
within the last few minutes. Ahead of me lay a small and very dimly lit presence chamber.
The king and the Lord Justicer had stopped in the middle of the room, and I slowed
and slipped to the left side as soon as I entered.

I could taste that the Blade who preceded me had done the same, so I froze. Rather
than take a single step farther, I leaned back against the wall and forced myself
to breathe shallowly and slowly. As always at moments like this, I found myself missing
the efik, which would have made the effort of controlling my heart rate and breathing
so
much easier. Using Triss’s senses I did a slow scan of the room. But if my rogue
Blade was in there with me, I simply couldn’t see them. Which was probably the express
purpose of whoever had hooded all the magelights in the room.

Triss, wake up,
I mentally whispered—no noise was involved but I couldn’t help but extend the effort
at silence to everything I did.

What is it?

I’m following the king and I’ve hit that shadow trail you mentioned earlier. But I’m
no good with the nuances. How close behind them am I?

Don’t move!

I’m not. That close?

That close, though I still don’t recognize the spoor. I never thought I’d say this,
but I wish this room were brighter. There’s just too many places one of us could hide
in here.

Before he could go on, the Lord Justicer said something that drew my attention back
to their ongoing conversation, and I mentally shushed him. I didn’t dare get Triss
to uncover my eyes, but he did let what information was coming through his senses
flow through the link that bound us, giving me a Shade’s-eye view of the situation.

“No, Your Majesty, I really don’t know what happened to the Marchon girl’s papers,”
the Justicer was saying. “I heard you order the Elite to find them. If they couldn’t,
I can only assume that she grabbed them when she fled. The chancellor had them last
I saw, and she practically fell on top of your niece. What
I
want to know is how the girl got out of the hall without getting caught.”

“We have some ideas about that, don’t we?”

Thauvik turned half away from the Lord Justicer and nodded to a rather darker patch
of thin air in a way that suggested his choice of “we” wasn’t the royal one. It was
always strange watching people through Triss’s unsight. He couldn’t see things in
the conventional sense, so, instead I had to interpret the textured interplay of light
and shadow through the focus of years of training. Faces and expressions were all
but impossible to read, and I had to rely on broader cues of movement and posture
to give me emotional context.

For example, the way that the Lord Justicer sagged slightly whenever the king’s focus
shifted away from him suggested both terror at being in the royal eye, and an underlying
exhaustion that prevented him from fully hiding his relief whenever he passed out
of the king’s direct focus. The shift back the other way was a much subtler thing.
He was
far too skilled a courtier to jerk tight when the king looked at him directly, but
with each passing second of royal regard his body tightened and grew more erect.

“You got a good look at the document, Vyan. Tell me about it. I would have preferred
to have it in hand, but since you couldn’t manage the simple task of hanging on to
it when my niece made her move against us, I’m stuck with your word for how the thing
looked. Do you think it was real, or just a ploy to get her close enough to issue
her illegal challenge?”

Fire and sun but what is he talking about?
Triss demanded.
There was no challenge and Maylien didn’t make a move to harm him.

I think we are seeing the official version being formulated,
I replied.

“Of course not, Your Majesty,” said the Lord Justicer. “How could it be real? Everyone
knows that you are your brother’s rightful heir. It had to be a forgery.”

Thauvik nodded. “True, but was it a well-made one? Do you think it might be used to
convince discontented peers to support a pretender?”

Tiny diamonds of reflected light had appeared on the Lord Justicer’s brow—beads of
sweat not at all in keeping with the chilly temperatures of the presence chamber.
Vyan knew he was dancing on the edge of the abyss with every question and every answer,
and this was the most dangerous yet.

“It would never convince anyone who gave it a proper examination, Your Majesty, I’m
sure. But who can say what a traitor already looking for an excuse might choose to
see in such a forgery.”

“Who indeed?” The king gave the Justicer a suspicious look. “I need you to draft a
proclamation declaring my niece outlaw and decrying her rebellion against the throne.
Be sure to include the complicity of the Duchess of Tien, and as many of the slain
as you think reasonable.” He canted his head to one side. “I think the Warden of the
Blood ought to be a martyr, slain while defending me from my niece’s
assassination attempt, don’t you? Oh, and have the formal Winter-Round court postponed
indefinitely.”

“Of course, Your Majesty. It will be just as you say. Would you like me to start now?
I can have one of the Elite bring me a list of the fallen.”

The king didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes, then he suddenly looked up at
the Justicer and glared. “Are you still here?”

“No, Your Majesty. I was just leaving.” He practically bolted for the door leading
deeper into the palace.

Once he was gone, the king reached up and started absently rubbing at his cheeks.
“That didn’t go well at all at all,” said the king in a half singsong, “it didn’t
go well at all.” He brushed distastefully at a blood spatter on his sleeve. “This
will have to be burned, and I need a bath.” Then he followed the Justicer out, still
rubbing away. “Yes, a long hot soak, that would be just the thing…”

Bring me up to date,
said Triss.
Thauvik seems to be following his late brother round the bend, and I need to know
if I missed anything important while I was in dreamland.
I did so as quickly as I could, and when I mentioned overhearing what sounded like
the king taking orders from our hidden Blade, Triss hissed mentally.
I don’t like the idea of Thauvik bowing the knee to one of Kelos’s traitors. That
implies a connection with the Son of Heaven that’s very worrisome.

I hadn’t thought it through that far yet, but you’re right. Still, we haven’t time
to do anything about it now. We need to catch up to Maylien and make sure she gets
clear of the city before we can worry about anything else.

I went back through the dining room, since I wanted to take one last look for the
missing adoption papers. But I had no more luck than the first time. The guards had
started to sort out the bodies, laying them along the back wall, starting with the
Duchess of Tien and the Warden of the Blood. As I looked at the row of corpses, my
eyes fell on the clan chief who’d had half his head blasted away by the Elite.

The ruin the wound had made of the man’s face reminded
me of Jerik and the huge scar where the gryphon had tried to bite his head off. A
sharp pang of guilt hit me, and I wondered how much my old friend was suffering right
now, and whether this mess was advancing the cause of getting him out or I was just
adding to the world’s pain to no point. But there was no way to know that until I
finished what I’d started or died in the attempt, so I pushed it aside and went on
to the next step.

With all the chaos created by the slaughter at the Council of Jade and the subsequent
rats heading for the exits effect, getting from there out into the grounds was a trivial
task. I didn’t bother to follow Maylien up the stairs. She was more than competent
to escape the council building on her own. By the time I reached the gates that led
out of the palace complex, the Elite had taken control. They were frantically checking
everyone who left, which told me they hadn’t grabbed Maylien yet.

I had a lot of faith in both her and Heyin’s abilities, so I slipped out of the gate
and started toward the Sovann Hill, scanning faces as I went. I found one of Heyin’s
sergeants waiting for me at the head of the Sanjin Island bridge. Her name was Lineya
and she’d ditched her jade and gold uniform for a peasant dress.

“They’re out?” I asked as I slipped up beside her.

She didn’t turn. “They are, lord, and heading for Marchon house on a couple of stolen
horses. Heyin wanted the baroness to leave the city immediately, but she refused to
go without warning her people at the house and collecting Bontrang.”

I was sure that latter was the more important of the two. If it were somehow possible
to separate us, I wouldn’t have let anyone else go after Triss for me either. “How
long ago was that?”

“You won’t catch them at the house if that’s what you mean,” said Lineya. “She said
that if you could come in the next few hours, you should meet her at the place where
the two of you landed on the glorious day that you flew together. Otherwise, she said
that you would have to seek her at Exile
House.” Then, without looking at me or saying another word, Lineya headed off into
the crowd.

“Crazy woman,” I said, though not without affection.

Lineya?
asked Triss.

No, Maylien, calling that desperate sail-jump we took off the Channery Hill cliff
a “glorious flight.” It was neither glorious nor flying. It was hardly even a sail-jump—more
like falling and getting it wrong.

Point…crazy woman?

I saw where he was going there, but this was a more mundane sort of craziness than
the hereditary insanity that had taken her father and now seemed to be at work in
her uncle.

Not that way, Triss. The only one whose safety Maylien ignores is her own. In that
way, she’s practically the polar opposite of Ashvik and Thauvik.

I didn’t include Maylien’s sister in the list. Sumey had fallen to the curse of the
restless dead. Somewhere in the years she spent in exile—far from the safety of the
court and the baronial guard—she had become one of the risen. How or where she’d encountered
the risen that had infected her with its particular variety of the curse of the restless
dead was something Sumey hadn’t shared before her death. Neither that nor how she’d
managed to learn how to prolong her human seeming far beyond what was normal among
her kind. While she had been subject to bloody hungers that somewhat mimicked the
madness of her older relations, they came from a wholly different source. It was a
fact Maylien would do well to remind herself of whenever she had one of her periodic
panic attacks about going the way of the rest of her family.

Come on,
I sent,
we need to meet Maylien.
I would have to get rid of the borrowed uniform on the way.

*

The
Downunders was one of the shabbiest neighborhoods in a city rife with slums. Lying
on the south side of the city, it had started out as a series of temporary markets
and
shelters for the drovers and teamsters who brought in the goods that didn’t travel
well by ship. That was half a millennia ago. The city bounds had long since swallowed
those temporary buildings whole, but it had never quite gotten around to tearing them
down and starting over. Instead, people had tacked brick sheds onto canvas tents,
and then later covered over the tarps with rough plank roofs, and replaced canvas
flaps with poorly fitted doors—all without ever knocking down the original tent posts.