Darkened blade, p.23
Darkened Blade, page 23
I thought back to my own mad crushes and inseparable friendships from those days and laughed. “Those were interesting years. I wonder if what has happened between Devin and me since then would have turned out differently if we’d been lovers instead of just friends?”
Now it was Jax’s turn to laugh. “It might have done his obsession with you a world of good. Sharing your bed for a couple of years certainly disabused me of any notion that you were perfect. Too bad he’s never gone for guys.”
I nodded. “I did offer once, but he’s much firmer in his preferences than most of the rest of us. Or, most mages in general, for that matter.”
“The familiar gift does seem to walk hand in hand with a more omnivorous sort of desire,” said Jax. “I wonder why that is?”
“Does this mean we’ve finished with your list?” I asked.
“Not even close. Besides, you haven’t yet said whether you’ll take Roric and Maryam.”
“I will. I think you’re right about Kumi, whatever her reasons, and having her added officially with the other pair will make that all less awkward. So, what’s up next?”
“Mostly sorting out the shadow council and the succession in case you and Siri are both killed. There were ten members in the old days. I think we’ll want to halve that unless and until there are a lot more of us than the current total.”
I sighed. Jax was right that all of this really needed dealing with before we left, but it wasn’t going to be much fun. “All right, you’re obviously stuck with First Blade if I end up as a stuffed trophy in the Son of Heaven’s hunting lodge. That probably makes Javan magus, and . . .”
* * *
“Kill them?” asked Kelos.
I looked down on the campsite below us and pondered the question. The risen that had attempted the goddess’s island had come from here. That was clear enough, given the evidence of the wicker cage chariots and the fact that we were barely more than a couple of bowshots from the shores of the sacred lake. The Caeni troops would certainly kill us if they got the chance. So would the dozen or so heavily armored types wearing the insignia of the Sword of Heaven. The lone member of the Hand that they were escorting might or might not depending on who was watching and whether she was aligned with Toragana’s faction or more of a mind with Chomarr.
Finally, I shook my head and gestured for us to move back over the crest before speaking. “It’s tempting,” I said once we were far enough away to talk quietly without worrying about being overheard, “but no. I don’t think killing them would serve justice. They’re not directly in our way and, once the Son of Heaven is removed, none of them may even be enemies of ours anymore.”
I paused for a moment then as I found myself suddenly in want of more air. While we had been sorting out the matter of the students and the swords, I was able to put aside most of my worries about the Son of Heaven and what killing him might mean for the broader world. I had even been able to convince myself that I was comfortable with the decision to go after him.
But that was all a lie. Actually talking about it brought every one of the doubts and fears that had been lurking in the back of my mind roaring in again as if they’d only been waiting for the right moment to pounce.
There had been significant costs to this mission already, both on the personal front and the broader scale of nations. The battle at Wall. Dalridia engulfed in war. Jax’s brother falling to the invaders. The Avarsi we had slaughtered on our way out of Dalridia. Altia’s death in the mountains . . . Enormous amounts of blood had been spilled, and we hadn’t yet come within a thousand miles of Heaven’s Reach. I had no doubts that there would be more blood spilled before we reached our destination. By us if we were smart and lucky. Our own if we weren’t.
Even with Siri’s new powers, and if I recovered Signet Nea’s finger and it worked to our maximum advantage, I had my doubts about managing it. But if we somehow managed to succeed and make an end of the Son of Heaven and his risen puppets?
At the very least there would be wars and upheaval on a scale that hadn’t been seen in a thousand years. The lakes of blood we had created so far would become a vast sea of crimson. And however much it might ultimately be the fault of the Son of Heaven, proximally it would be my decision that triggered the coming days of long knives. . . .
Aral? Triss sent, his tone rife with concern. They’re waiting for you to finish your thought. Are you all right?
Not really, no, I replied. But that doesn’t change what I have to do. I gave myself a little mental shake. Thanks for the prompt, old friend.
“We’ll let them go,” I said, as though I’d never gotten lost in my own head. “Both because we don’t need to kill them, and because the death of that Hand down there would bring on a storm. That would seriously interfere with our progress if we take the lake path at the same time it alerted others to her fall.”
“It’s your call.” Kelos sounded disappointed.
I looked at him. “It is that, but I’m willing to entertain arguments that go the other way. Did you have something you wanted to add there?”
Kelos sighed, and for the first time in all the years I had known him, he looked embarrassed. “One thing only. I was hoping for a chance to test a bit of magic I spent most of last year working on.”
Siri cleared her throat before stepping in. “This is the first you’ve mentioned anything like that. Care to elaborate?”
Kelos looked from her to me, and then over her shoulder to where the others knelt in the darkness farther down the hill. “Not really, but I’d better. You know that when I took service with the Son of Heaven, my initial plan involved getting Aral to kill the man and becoming the new Son of Heaven myself. Not for the power, of course, but for the chance to smash the very idea of a noble class.”
“Of course.” Faran’s tone was deliberately colorless, but still managed to leave no doubt as to her true feelings about Kelos and his noble aims.
Kelos continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I presume Aral’s also mentioned why I couldn’t kill the Son myself?”
“You’re talking about the geas all you Shadow of Heaven types had to bind yourself with before he would let you into his presence?” said Siri. “Yes, it’s come up.”
Kelos nodded. “I thought it might have. However, I don’t know if Aral also told you that the geas bound me to do no harm to anyone who serves the Son either.”
Siri and Faran both nodded, while the other three young Blades simply remained quiet, so Kelos continued. “Obviously it doesn’t extend to the risen of his curse—the Son would have had to admit to what he is in order to set that condition. But, with that one exception, it was a very tight leash indeed that he bound us with. After Aral put me on the wrong side of my first plan, I suddenly found myself in need of a way to slip it.”
“And . . .” said Siri.
“And I still don’t know. I think I’ve found my loophole, but magical loopholes are inherently chancy things. Especially where god-magic is involved. I can’t even see the portion of the spell that the Son arranged through his god, and that means I can’t know if I’ve done the trick entire, short of a working test.”
“Hence the interest in yonder batch of Heaven’s Sword,” said Ssithra.
Kelos nodded. “Exactly. I was rather hoping to take a shot at these charming villains here while I have you all as backup, in case I couldn’t touch them, and when there were miles yet to go to Heaven’s Reach. Or, failing this particular bunch, others in the same sort of case. But if Aral’s going to go all no just cause on us, that will make the testing of things a bit more challenging.”
“I know you,” I said, flatly. “You wouldn’t have stopped experimenting with your spells unless you’d successfully managed some sort of test already. I would bet a pint of my own blood that you killed at least a couple of people wearing the Son’s livery before ever you came looking for the Key of Sylvaras back in the Sylvain.”
“Two Hands, four Swords, and three priests of the Voice.” Kelos nodded.
“Not to mention all those Kvani who invaded Dalridia on hidden orders from the Son,” added Faran.
Kelos shrugged. “Right enough, but every minion of his that I’ve killed has been far from home and short on any direct link to their master’s orders. That tells me that I’ve loosened the leash considerably, but I won’t know if I’m entirely free of it without facing off against someone operating directly under the Son’s orders while wearing his colors openly.”
“That does change the weight of things,” I said. “We need to know what your limitations are before we get someplace where they might cost us the mission.”
I thought the whole thing through again, and again decided against killing the group on the other side of the hill—in part because turning Kelos down would serve as something of a test of how he might react if our purposes eventually crossed for real.
“No,” I said. “This isn’t the time or the place. I still maintain that attacking this group wouldn’t advance justice and, whatever else we are, we are servants of justice first.”
Kelos sighed and nodded. “You always were the most stubborn of my students.”
I let out a little mental sigh of my own at his surrender of the point. That was a good sign, if a small one.
Now to throw him a bone to gnaw on. “Mind you, if it were Lieutenant Chomarr down there instead of some random Hand and her Sword backers, I would happily grant the exception. He seems the perfect test case for you.”
“True that.” Then Kelos grinned. “It’s not like we won’t have plenty more opportunities to eliminate opposition on our way to Heaven’s Reach. I imagine we’ll be tripping over enemies the whole way.”
“Which is exactly why I think we’ll do better taking the water route and the long way around,” I said. “If we go straight across the Kvanas we’re looking at weeks of flatland and little cover beyond the grass sea itself. That would be more than bad enough, given that the whole country is roused against us, and even if you didn’t add in the restless dead. With them? Getting caught out on the flats by the risen will get us all killed, goddess-forged swords or no. Anyone think otherwise?”
Nobody wanted to argue the point, so I continued. “That leaves three options. Skirting the mountains would be fastest, but it’s also what they’ll be expecting since it’d save us at least a month of travel time over the next shortest route.”
“I don’t much like the idea of following the Kvani scarp, either,” said Siri. “Yes, it offers cover on one flank, but it’s flat above and a hard scramble over broken rock below. Add in the Avarsi patrols and fortifications and it’s one of the least hospitable places I can think of.”
Three of the four Kvanas shared a high flat plateau. The scarp ran along its western edge, loosely defining the border between Avars and Radewald on the southwest and Dan Eyre on the northwest. It was a huge natural fortification, and the Avarsi had been using it to drop boulders on the neighbors for centuries. They had a thick network of forts strung along its whole length and they patrolled the area constantly.
“Which leads us back to the water route,” I said. “We’ll need to acquire a good boat or two, but once we’ve done that we can cross Leivas, exit by the river, pass Hove and most of Radewald on the west, and then take the river Dan much of the way back east to the foothills of the Almarn Mountains.”
“That or take the fork that leads past Luvarn Keep in Avars,” said Kelos. “I think you’re right either way, but it’s going to double the distance we have to cover and add nearly that much in terms of time.”
“But most of it spent on wild water,” said Faran. “That’s the thing that really sells me. The dead hate rivers and they’re none too fond of lakes, especially ones as big as Leivas. That’s without adding in the power of the Lady or a bunch of hungry Storm Eels. The risen will have a very hard job coming at us while we’re on a boat, and an even harder one following us.”
I looked at our other youngsters. “Do any of you have anything you want to add? You’re all full Blades now. That means pointing it out when the old guard fucks up. Maryam? You’re not one to shy away from speaking your mind. . . .”
“I’m fine.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“Really. Jax was very clear that we three are here to observe and to learn. So that’s what I’m doing. Observing.”
“Roric?” I said. “You’re Avarsi by birth. Anything to add?”
“No, sir.”
“Kumi?”
“I like boats and know them pretty well, so I can help with the sailing . . . or paddling . . . or whatever it is the particular boat we end up with requires. Beyond that, think of me as invisible.”
18
A knife slices through a sea of stars leaving the shattered universe rippling in its wake.
That image alone is enough to make me take back every bad thing I have ever said about boat travel, though really, it’s barges I hate. The sky was cloudless and moonless, the black waters deep and still. Where a barge is a battering ram forcing its heavy way through the water endlessly and tediously, the pair of slender hulled, sampan-like night runners we had purchased from a Varyan smuggler slashed through the water as effortlessly as a razor slitting an unsuspecting throat.
The boats were designed to move drugs and other small expensive packages back and forth across the lake between the Kvanas and Varya without submitting to silly things like taxes and customs inspections. Each one was long enough to hold six people, but had been rigged up for four paddlers with a couple of small watertight cargo cases in the middle. They had been stained a rough gray with the juice of the oris plant, and couldn’t have been much more than two feet wide at the beam. Both ends came to knifelike points.
Despite a shallow hull, they felt remarkably stable. Possibly because of the solid metal lance that hung about a foot underneath the boat. The lance provided both an easily removable second keel and a ramming beak designed to punch an ugly little hole below the waterline of any craft with a deeper draft than our own.
“Best way to deal with customs boats,” the smuggler who sold them to us had said. “Get up a fast run and give ’em a nice distracting fountain to think about.” He tapped a device on the floor of the boat. “Once the lance is sunk in good and hard you pull the pins here and upfront and leave it behind. If you place it right, it’ll foul either their oars or their rudder. Then you back-paddle, pivot hard, and run for the deep dark. Replacing the lance is an expensive bit of work, but it costs ever so much less than the headsman’s cut if they catch you with the wrong cargo.”
“Anything else we ought to know?” Kelos asked—I’d had him take point on haggling since he scared the resistance out of people even when they didn’t know who he was.
The smuggler nodded. “Don’t get caught out in the deep if a storm blows in. You probably won’t capsize, and you’ll stay afloat even if you do, but you’ll be miserable. And if you do fall in and can’t get back aboard on the quick, the hunters in the deep will take you. They love to come up to the surface when it gets nasty. Oh, and I wouldn’t run by daylight if I was you. These little beauties draw the wrong kinds of attention.”
“Not a problem we’ll have,” said Kelos.
“Somehow I didn’t think it would be. And now, if’n you don’t mind, I’m off to see a lady about replacing a couple of boats.”
“You won’t mention where these two went,” said Kelos, and it wasn’t anything even close to a question.
“She won’t ask and I won’t say. Building, buying, or using—these are the sort of fancies nobody talks about or admits to seeing. You’ve paid me more than fair instead of slitting my throat, which is what I feared you might do when first you showed up all dark and scary like there at the end of my little dock. As far as I’m concerned, you was never born and these here boats weren’t ever made. Good enough?”
“Good enough,” said Kelos, but as soon as the man was out of sight, he shook his head. “It would have been safer if you’d let me kill him.”
“I have no doubt of it,” I agreed. “That doesn’t change my mind. Let’s go.”
Our meager gear went into the cargo bins in practically no time at all with room to spare, and we’d launched within minutes of the smuggler’s departure. That first night we’d left Lake Evinduin behind quickly enough, but made slower work of moving downstream toward Leivas.
The boats took some getting used to, and we nearly capsized both of them more than once despite their relative stability. We’d also decided to put in well before dawn because we weren’t sure about how tough it would be to hide the boats. But they were easy to pull out of the water and stow under the whorled dark green tarps provided for the purpose.
The second night we’d gone farther and faster. By the time we reached Leivas and that sea full of stars late on the third night, we’d had plenty of practice at managing the runners, both in the water and ashore. Slipping quietly past the watch at Emain Tarn on the river’s mouth had been almost childishly easy—the Shades working together gave our little boats nearly as thorough a cover as they could give us individually.
Our plan for the lake was to hug the southern shore and put in each day a bit before dawn, but we wanted to start out by swinging wide to the north to avoid the most heavily populated section of the Varyan bank of the lake. That meant driving straight out from the river’s mouth initially.
Aral, Triss sent about a quarter of an hour after we left the river, I think you might want to look over at the other boat.
