Broken Blade (16 page)

Read Broken Blade Online

Authors: Kelly McCullough

“All right . . . I guess we’ll go with taste then. If you can taste where Zass has been, can he do the same for you?”
“Of course.”
“Why have I never heard about this before?”
Triss’s wings sagged, and he looked ashamed. “The Shade elders and the senior masters instructed us not to speak of it to our companions, said it was a secret of Namara. I never liked that, but I could not disobey the elders, not while . . .” He trailed off and didn’t speak of the goddess’s death though I knew that was what he meant. “Then, after the fall of the temple, it didn’t come up since we never saw any other Shades.”
“How does it work?”
“When a shadow falls on something, it leaves a sort of . . .” More hissing. “Call it an
afterflavor
of itself that gets slicked on the surface, at least for a little while. The darker the shadow, the stronger the
flavor
.” He spread his wings, then flicked the tips back and forth in a gesture I’d come to recognize as searching after a thought. “Every shadow, no matter how faint or briefly cast, partakes of the everdark. We who are born from the substance of the everdark can sense where shadows have touched—taste the flavor of home in the darkness. If the impressions are strong enough, we can follow them like a trail.”
“Could you teach me to do that?” I was grasping after something here, but I still hadn’t gotten hold of enough of it to know what its final shape would be. “Or someone else?”
Triss shook his head. “No. You don’t have the . . .” He hissed again, sharper this time. “Your mind isn’t shaped right.”
“What about a spell? Could you help me cook up something that would have the same effect? Magically? Or at least that would let me follow a . . . a taste trail?”
“Maybe.” Triss flitted back and forth across the slates like a pacing cat. “If the spells were set on a spyglass or a dark lantern, it could probably be made to”—long, involved hissing—“the trail so you could follow it, but only for the very”—more hissing—“
Everdarkest
-tasting shadows, like yours where it has been reinforced by my presence.”
“Or Devin’s because of Zass?”
“Yes, or any Blade’s, really. A shadow that holds a Shade is much”—hissing—“realer than a regular shadow, yes, realer. And the more the Shade is present in the shadow at the time, the realer the impression it will leave.”
“I’m not sure I followed that one,” I said.
“When I am hiding in your shadow, as I did with the colonel a few minutes ago, the shadow would taste stronger than a regular shadow but only to a”—hissing—“truly refined palate. Whereas when I am in my chosen shape”—he flapped his wings for emphasis—“I will leave a much stronger and longer-lasting flavor, easier to track—more real. And the same would happen when I enshroud you.”
Now he cocked his head to one side. “Yes, the more I think about it, the more I think it would be possible to set a spell in some item that would allow such a trail to be followed. This is how we are being found, yes?”
“I think so, but it still leaves me confused. Lok’s people seemed genuinely to want to know everything I could tell them about Devin. If they’re working with or for Devin, why would they need that information? And if they’re not, how did they get ahold of such a tracking spell? I seriously doubt there’s a third Blade involved. There were never that many of us to start with, and I can’t imagine
any
Blade going along with building that rack-thing they had us strapped to.”
“Perhaps Devin’s allies do not intend to stay his allies.”
A little electric thrill danced across my shoulders, like the aftereffects of a big burst of magelightning. Yes. That felt right, a double cross. I nodded.
Don’t fight your instincts. A trained mind works on multiple levels, and you have to learn to listen to yourself even when there are no words.
“I think you’ve got it, Triss. The baroness and Devin struck me as very uneasy partners. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there’s a betrayal on someone’s schedule. Or, considering what we know of the new Devin, more than one someone’s. We’ll use that as our working assumption going forward. Next question, what breaks a shadow trail?”
“Summer sunlight is best, but fire will work, too.”
“Like the Old Mews.”
“Like the Old Mews,” agreed Triss.
“Do you think Devin started . . .” But I couldn’t finish the question, still couldn’t even imagine the answer being yes. It would be too big a betrayal of what the goddess had expected of us.
“No!” Triss sounded utterly emphatic. “A fire that big in that kind of neighborhood had to involve magic, and Zass would never help in such a thing.”
I really hoped Triss was right about that, but I couldn’t help imagining the arguments I might make if I were Devin, and I wanted it bad enough. I remembered how angry Triss had gotten at the people who had held us prisoner, how willing, even eager he had been to kill and destroy. Zass hadn’t been bound to the rack as we had, but if Devin had wanted to start the burning with that glyph, how much of a push would it have taken?
Evil thoughts. I shook my head and tried to push them aside. We had things that needed doing and . . . hey, maybe I’d just figured out how to manage them.
“Why don’t we use our enemies’ own tools against them?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The fire in the Old Mews.”
“I don’t understand,” said Triss. “I know you’re not suggesting we start a fire to cover our trail.”
“Heat and light you said, right?”
“Yes . . .”
 
Even
with the torn-away sleeve of my old shirt tied across my mouth and nose to fend off the worst of the smoke, I couldn’t stop coughing as we jumped from one field of coals to another through what had once been a thriving neighborhood. Triss had wrapped himself around me from the knees up to keep away from the fire. I could feel his comforting presence against my skin like cool silk, and I needed all the comfort I could get. The stench from the burning of the Old Mews was horrific.
Wood, of course, a hundred kinds, horsehair that had been used to reinforce plaster and stucco or stuff furniture, straw, cotton, wool, silk. Those were the good smells. The paint and lacquer, lead, copper, the shit from the chamber pots, those were worse. But worst of all was the horrible smell of burned meat. Horse. Dog. Human. Whoever had done this had to die.
“I’m going to find out who started this fire, and I’m going to kill him,” I said between coughs. “I owe it to the dead.”
And as I said that, I stopped right there. In the middle of a ruined house with smoke rising from the soles of my slowly burning boots and the sweat pouring off me in sheets, I listened to the words coming out of my own mouth, and I really heard them. It froze me where I stood because I had realized a great and terrible truth.
Someone had done real evil here and they needed to die for it. I owed it to the dead. Not just those killed in the fire. I owed it to my goddess and to all my fallen comrades, who would never again have the chance to bring justice to the guilty.
For five years, I had forgotten or chosen to ignore what I was and why I had been given the gifts I had been given. I might not be a Blade of the goddess anymore, or the Kingslayer, or even the kind of man who could consistently tell good from evil—there was too much gray in my world now to ever be sure of the black and white again. But I had no right to ignore wrong when it slapped me in the face. I would stop whoever did this and I would stop them forever. I had to.
I owed it to the dead.

 

9
The
Ismere, a club for gentlemen-merchants, stood only one narrow alley away from the private library of the same name. The former also provided the opportunity for a necessary stop along the way to the latter. My second round of coal-walking through the burned-over Old Mews neighborhood had left me even more committed to tracking down those responsible than the first round had. People were going to die for that. It also left me hot, sweaty, and covered in filth. So when I finally slid into the shadows beneath the club’s rooftop water tank, I did so with a rather intense feeling of relief.
After carefully unfastening my heavy pack from the steel rings that attached it to my sword rig, I tucked it into a niche in the tank’s supports. Then I stripped off my smoke-stained clothes and briefly contemplated tossing them into the river behind the building. Having recovered the rest of Maylien’s silver, I was flush enough to replace my whole wardrobe and use my current best and cleanest to replenish the cache in my fallback. But you never know when a set of old rags might come in handy, so I stowed them beside the pack instead.
Then, naked except for a pair of daggers in wrist sheaths, I climbed the short ladder to the top of the tank, opened the trapdoor, fastened a length of rope to the edge, and lowered myself into darkness. The reservoir was on the low side, less than a quarter full, and a long day in the sun had turned the chest-deep water in the dark-roofed and -sided tank blood-warm. I sank into it with a happy sigh. In the dark, I couldn’t see Triss, but I could feel him sliding about on the bottom of the tank, enjoying the water in his own alien way.
Washing the smoke stink out of my hair and skin felt wonderful, despite the extra attention I felt the need to give to my myriad of small cuts and bruises. Unfortunately, I lost my little bar of rough soap when I was still half a leg short of clean. As I made do with even harder scrubbing, I idly wondered if it would survive long enough to slip through the big clay pipes and slide down into one of the large private soaking pools that made club membership so popular with the traveling merchants and wealthier caravaneers. Honestly, I would have liked nothing better than to stay and have an hours-long soak myself, but I had urgent debts to both the living and the dead and couldn’t afford to tarry.
Besides, there was always the chance that one of the club’s servants might decide to have a quick bath. The exposed rope would make them very suspicious—they always went to such care to hide it from the owners. I could almost certainly fade my way out of any such encounter without having to hurt anyone, but it would be much smarter to avoid the need.
With a regretful sigh I hand-over-handed my way out of the tank. After I’d restowed the rope and changed into clean grays, I sorted my pack into two smaller bundles and carefully hid the larger, smellier one in the top of one of the club’s chimneys—cold and dark at this time of year but with enough of a smoke smell of its own to mask the stink of my gear.
Next, six running steps and a Triss-assisted leap carried me across the narrow alley to the Ismere Library. I touched down on the steeply sloping lead roof of the library, then let myself slide down and over the edge to land on a third-floor balcony. The slatted doors were latched but not barred, and the thin strip of copper from my trick bag opened them neatly. The ward of alarm on the door was more tricky, but I’d had plenty of practice at bypassing it over the years.
Inside was a marble-floored reading room with a central table, and several smaller study carrels lined up along the rough mulberry-paper panels that served it for walls. The panels were often used in places where flexibility of floor plan might come in handy or where it was advantageous to let light bleed from room to room. Stopping only long enough to pull out a small leather-wrapped package, I left my swords and pack in one of the carrels. I didn’t think I’d missed anything with smoke smell, but caution is always the best strategy when dealing with a librarian, and anything that might harm one of his books. Especially if he’s a sorcerer of some repute.
Dealing with a dead king’s bodyguard is much less fraught than facing a librarian who thinks you’ve just taken one of his precious charges through a fire, even a fire as burned-out as the Old Mews. Before slipping out into the main part of the library, I sniffed at the leather I’d wrapped around the book one last time. Clean, or at least, clean enough. Partially hooded magelights mounted on the ends of the shelves cast a dim yellow glow that could easily be brightened by raising the shutters.
I’d once asked Harad, the master librarian, about that and about why there were no actual windows in the stacks. He’d told me that prolonged exposure to direct sunlight was bad for books and that intense magelight was worse. Whatever the reason, I liked the way the shadows lay thick in the library, and Triss liked it even more—it gave him greater freedom. That and the peace and the smell of the books reminded me of the more contemplative parts of Namara’s great temple. It wasn’t quite like coming home, but it was as close as I was ever likely to get again.

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