Beautiful and warm, always ready to answer a question about the poisons that were her specialty and looking not a day over twenty-five. I’d had a burning crush on her for almost two years and a completely unrealistic hope that I might be able to do something about it once I’d finished my classes and earned myself a working name.
Once the priestess had returned Alinthide’s spirit knife to the goddess—casting the black steel kila into the shaded depths of Namara’s pool—we had taken a barge back across the lake from the holy island. When we docked, I had turned away from the temple and into the setting sun, walking blindly along the shores of the great lake, weeping. Triss hung at my back, gently rubbing my shoulders and whispering wordless comfort in my ears.
After perhaps a half mile, I took conscious notice of Devin trailing along at a polite distance—close enough that no one Blade-trained could have missed him but far enough back not to intrude. I waved him forward, and we walked a while in silence, the four of us, Blades-to-be ahead, Shades trailing behind.
When the tears finally stopped, I pulled a couple of roasted efik beans from the little pouch I always kept about me and began to chew. I nearly gagged at the bitterness, but I had neither the time nor the tools to steep and prepare a proper pot. I needed something to calm me down and take the edge off the pounding in my skull right now, and since the priests despised alcohol . . .
“Three!” The word burst out of me, almost against my will, and I felt Triss jerk in startlement as I turned to face Devin. “Three Blades dead in as many seasons. How can the goddess let Ashvik get away with it?”
“Namara is not the only goddess,” said Devin, his voice barely above a whisper. “Perhaps in this, she is too strongly opposed.”
Zass, who’d been slipping back and forth across our trail, jerked and vanished completely into Devin’s shadow at his words.
“Impossible!” I said, and in that moment I believed it utterly. “Namara is unstoppable.”
“Then why are there so very many Blades who return to her only as a black steel dagger cast into deep waters?” Devin asked. “So many whose bodies are burned on foreign pyres?”
At first I had no answer. But then, almost as if the goddess herself were putting it into my mind, I heard a phrase from the book of Namara. The words were spoken in the voice of that high priestess who had died in my first year at the temple, and whether they came from memory or from the goddess, I cannot say.
“The sheath must find the right Blade,” I said, and Triss nodded his agreement.
“Sure, and ‘those whom Namara would slay are like sheaths for her Blades.’” Devin didn’t quite roll his eyes, but I could see that he wanted to. “I’m familiar with that one.”
Zass slid back into view, peering up at me from the ground. “Alinthide was one of the very best. If she couldn’t do it, then who can?”
“I can.” The words came out of my mouth, but it didn’t feel like I’d said them, more like they had said me—as if everything I’d done up to this point, all my training, all of what I had become was a prelude to that simple statement. That I could kill a king.
Triss froze, and Devin started to argue with me, to tell me I was crazy and a fool and that I’d never even make it as far as Tien. I could barely hear him. Instead, I looked out over the deep blue waters of the sacred lake and listened to . . . what?
I don’t know. At the time, I thought I was listening to the goddess, and things that happened soon thereafter seemed to reinforce that idea. But I’m older now, and not so sure. Not of that, nor really, of anything. The world has become a gray place for me, filled with shadows where once it was all black and white. That inner voice might have been my pride, or folly, or simply a heart filled with anger by the death of someone I loved. Whatever the reason, in that moment I resolved that I would be the Blade who brought down Ashvik.
“I will kill the king,” I said, cutting across Devin’s argument, while Triss slumped unhappily against my back.
“You can’t mean that,” said Devin. “You’re not even a full Blade yet. You haven’t taken your kila. The Elite will tear you to pieces and feed the bits to the stone dogs.”
I should probably have felt fear then, but I didn’t. All I felt was certainty.
“The goddess has spoken to me.”
Perhaps it was the look on my face. Perhaps it was the tone in my voice. Perhaps Zass gave him a nudge. Whatever the reason, Devin stopped arguing.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he finally asked.
I nodded, and his expression changed. The look on his face held something of awe and something of pity, and maybe just the tiniest bit of envy. Yes, envy. I think that it started in that very instant when he finally believed me though I didn’t recognize it then, nor for a long time afterward.
“How will you do it?” asked Devin.
“I don’t know. I just know that I must.” For a brief instant, I felt the enormity of what I had to do pressing down on me like a great weight, could see the barriers ahead—the travel, the expense, the Elite and their stone dogs—but only for an instant.
“We’ll have to go to the goddess,” said Triss after a moment, “directly. Ask her to give you your kila early and make you a Blade. You have to sheathe the spirit knife in the altar before you leave, and you can’t go after Ashvik without an eye and your swords.”
He was right, of course. I needed to seek the formal blessing of the goddess. Without it, I would be nothing more than a common assassin.
“I’ll go now.” I turned on my heel and started back along the shore.
Devin caught my arm. “Don’t be a fool, Aral. Even if the goddess approves, the masters won’t want to let you go. The easiest way to prevent you is to keep you from ever crossing to the island. If you’re seen taking one of the boats, they’ll figure it out, and they’ll stop you. You’ll have to go after dark, and you’ll have to swim.”
“Point. But how will I get my blades back across?”
I had no worries about swimming out to the island. It was nearly half a mile, and there were things in the lake that devoured the unwary, but I’d swum farther in training, and the creatures would leave me alone because the goddess had called me. But the weight of all that steel would be a problem.
Then I had it. “I can borrow a rush basket from the temple fishermen.” They used the floating baskets to keep the fish fresh when they went spearing in the shallows.
Devin nodded. “Good plan.”
And Zass asked, “When?”
“I’ll wait till an hour past the sun’s setting to grab the basket—better not to ask for one, I think—then I’ll go. I wish I could leave it till later, but I’m going to want to be well on the road by dawn. It’ll take at least another hour just to swim out to the island and back with the basket slowing me down. As to the rest . . .” I shrugged.
I had to petition the goddess. How long it would take for her to decide what to answer, if anything, I wasn’t even going to try to guess. I knew that I had been called, but I also knew that the goddess worked when and how she wanted. If I approached her with arrogance in my heart . . .
For
perhaps the dozenth time I pressed my forehead against the age-smoothed granite of the flagstones that lay in a ring around the sacred pool, praying silently for permission to deliver the unblinking eye of justice to Ashvik. I was facing outward, toward the heart of the lake where the goddess made her home. A natural stone arch separated the pool from the greater waters while allowing for its continual refreshment.
Triss was with me, but nearly undetectable in the darkness since he chose not to insert himself in the process. Addressing the goddess was my challenge alone.
I tried to push earlier images of this place out of my head, to think only of the mission I wished the goddess to grant me. I tried to banish my memories of Alinthide’s kila held high in the hands of the priestess before she cast it into the pool, but I just couldn’t do it. Once again, the eyes of my heart followed the ghost of the spirit-dagger as it sailed through the air and landed in the water, watched as it sank with an unnatural slowness into the shaded deeps, stayed focused on the last place it had been visible, a sort of watery window into the darkness of death.
But this time, I found a sort of answer there in the peace of the grave and the stillness of deep water, a place I could lose all thought, even my sense of self. This time the thinking part of me plunged into the deeps, too, following a dead love into darkness and oblivion.
Time passed like a stream flowing through my mind. It could have been hours or minutes or days. Eventually, I raised my head. Now I faced Namara. An idol of polished granite, she seemed, risen from the deeps, cold and unmoving and yet somehow more alive than I could ever hope to be. No words passed her gray lips, nor expression touched the stone of her beautiful face, but I felt myself summoned. Without thinking or wondering, I stepped out onto the surface of the water, walking across it to meet my goddess.
From the waist down she was submerged, her lower half hidden in the darkness. Above, she was naked, her bared stone breasts hanging a few feet above my head, her six arms extended in front of her. Namara had come, risen from the deeps to accept me into her service.
I . . . how can I express it? Find a place on the side of a hill on a perfect summer evening. Lie back on the heather and look up. As the blue turns to red and then fades to black velvet, the stars spring out one by one. Imagine what it feels like to be the sky filling up with starlight and moonlight and liquid midnight and to know this is why you exist—to hold the beauty of the night. That’s how I felt when I bowed before my goddess and accepted her blessing.
Namara’s uppermost pair of hands held two daggers. The black kila that signified my service to the goddess was extended on the open palm of her right. Normally such magical blades would have glowed in magesight, but because this magic was divine, their light was hidden. The eye of my mission was gripped firmly in her left. Her middle pair of hands cradled twin swords, short and curved, unbreakable, unrusting, and forever sharp. With her lowest pair of hands she extended a tray that held the harness and sheaths of the three greater blades as well as many lesser knives and tokens, the hunting gear of the Blade.
First I took up the harness, sliding it over my shoulders and fastening the straps as I had been taught. It should have been wet, slippery, smelling of lake. It was dry and smooth and utterly devoid of any scent, even the faintest hint of fresh-cut leather. Then I took my swords, seating them firmly in their shoulder-draw rig and fastening the catches that would hold them in place.
Next I reached for the black steel of the kila. For the first time since the goddess had risen, I became aware of Triss as he flowed outward silkily along my arms so that we touched the spirit knife together. Clad now in shadow, I picked up the heavy black dagger with its tripled blade, clutching it in both hands.
“Wind and wave.” I raised its point to the sky, then lowered it to touch the water. “Stone and heart’s blood.” I pressed the tip between the breasts of the goddess, then reversed it to prick the left side of my chest. “I bind myself to the will of Namara, her Blade forevermore.” It flared brightly in magesight, then faded back to a normal dull black.
I lowered the kila to my side then, for there were only two possible sheaths for the spirit knife, and neither of them was a part of the Blade’s gear. Going to one knee before the goddess, I lowered my head and closed my eyes.
“Command me.”
Ashvik must die for the horror he wrought in Kadesh and for his crimes against his own blood and people in Zhan. Will you show the tyrant that Justice never sleeps?
The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
“I will,” I said, though I did not yet lift my head.
Then take him the unblinking eye.
Now I looked up. The stone hand that held the short straight dagger we called an eye was now open, though no sound had betrayed its movement.
I stood and took the eye. Pressing it to my lips, I whispered, “For Ashvik,” then slipped it into a downward-facing sheath fastened to one of the chest straps of my harness.
I looked one last time into the cool gray face of my goddess—beautiful and utterly still, a form carved in stone and yet so very, very alive. Then I turned and walked back across the waters to shore.
I see her like that sometimes, in my nightmares, just for an instant. Then she becomes nothing more than a statue on the bottom of the lake, dead granite bereft of all presence, the way she was the last time I saw her. I start drinking early on the days that follow such dreams.
Devin and Zass were waiting for us when we swam back from the island. “That was fast,” Devin said, when I stood up in the shallows. “I’m surprised you were even able to swim out and back. Did Namara refuse you?”
I was too surprised by his words to speak, so I reached into the basket and lifted out my kila by way of an answer. A sharply indrawn breath was his only response. Once I’d waded ashore, I set the spirit knife aside while I pulled out the harness. This time the collection of leather straps and sheaths dripped vigorously, and I caught the faint scent of lake water as I started to buckle it into place.