Broken Blade (23 page)

Read Broken Blade Online

Authors: Kelly McCullough

The withdrawing room was dark save for a thin line of light coming under the door that corresponded to the bedchamber in the room below. I was at the most dangerous stage of my mission, with the king likely sleeping behind one door and Elite bodyguards and stone dogs possibly behind the other. The temptation to go for the king as quickly and quietly as possible was almost overwhelming. Instead, I drew my left-hand sword and forced myself to listen at the door to the sitting room. There I heard . . .
Nothing.
It was empty. I checked the eye the goddess had given me for the king. It was loose in its sheath, ready to find a home in a royal heart. I crossed to check the door to the bedchamber. Faint noises of habitation came from within, little creaks of the sort furniture made when you shifted position, the occasional deep breath . . . the king was in, and likely awake. The door opened away from me and was hinged on the left side, so I switched to my right-hand sword.
Now!
I turned the handle and quickly pushed the door open. Ashvik was sitting on the edge of a chaise, facing a window that looked out over the palace, his back to me.
“I told you I was
not
to be bothered,” he growled without even turning my way. “If you’re here for anything less than an invasion from Kodamia, I’ll have you boiled alive. Maybe in the bath right here.” He pointed at a big red marble tub in the corner.
I slipped my second sword free of its sheath.
“Well,” he demanded, “spit it out. Why have you come?”
“To bring you justice.”
“What!” Ashvik spun in his seat. “I—”
His words ended in a rasping gurgle as I plunged one sword into his chest and the other into his throat. For a couple of heartbeats his eyes blazed hate at me, but then, as easily as a sheep slaughtered for the table, he died. I don’t know what I had expected to happen at that point, a suddenly hammering alarm, a great cloud of evil smoke rising from the corpse, wild cries of celebration? Whatever the answer, I didn’t get it.
Ashvik VI, King of Zhan, Butcher of Kadesh, and murderer of his own royal sons simply slumped gently backward and slid off my blades, and I felt nothing.
As I had been taught, I flicked the swords to clear the blood, then resheathed them at my back. Next I arranged the dead king on the chaise as though he were sleeping. I took the Eye of Namara from its sheath and sank it deep into Ashvik’s chest, making sure that the blue lapis eye on its pommel stared straight at the door. And still, I felt nothing, not even satisfaction at a task well done.
With a lesser villain, the goddess might have given me a scroll detailing the man’s wrongdoing to leave at the scene of the execution. But Ashvik’s crimes were great and known to all. His next life would not be a good one.
Turning away from the body, I left the room and closed the door behind me, never looking back. In the withdrawing room, I used magic to lock the king’s bedroom door. Then I took a second paper ward from my bag and put it in place across the outer door. This one would howl like the wolf of the underworld when the paper tore. Then into the garderobe, shut the door, drop down, seal the trap with the fire ward, and on through the dead prince’s apartments. Five minutes after the death of the king, I was back in the small council chamber, sealing the door to the hall with the last of my spelled straps. They wouldn’t stop the Elite and their stone dogs, but they’d buy me a few precious seconds each.
Taking a small risk, I slipped out onto the balcony and tucked myself up against the railing in a shadowy corner. Now I just needed the body to go undiscovered for the hour or so until the next shift change gave me a chance to slip out without being spotted by the Elite in the courtyard below. It was hard to fight the impulse to just go now, but my chances of getting away clean would go up dramatically if I was patient.
Haste kills.
After about ten minutes, the enormity of what I’d just done started to sink in. Not the part about killing my first man, that particular horror wouldn’t hit me until months later, when I first had to kill a guard. No, for me on the balcony that night, Ashvik wasn’t yet human. He was simply evil.
What I started feeling then was another thing entirely, religious ecstasy riding atop a golden wave of triumph. My goddess had set me a task, and I had succeeded where three older and more experienced Blades had failed. Namara had put her faith in me, just as I put my faith in her, and for her I had removed a monster from the world. More, I had done it clean without being spotted or harming a living soul other than my target. The risen, being neither alive nor possessing a soul, I felt I could discount.
Though it took months for the name to attach itself to me, I was in that moment more Kingslayer than I would ever be again. I really and truly believed in myself as some kind of invincible weapon of justice in the hand of Namara. I
knew
I was going to rid the world of evil. The feeling lasted about thirty seconds.
That’s how long it took before my alarm ward got triggered. A single hellish howl from above alerted me that someone had just entered the royal withdrawing room. Which meant I needed to go, middle of the guard shift or not. I rose into a crouch and peered down through the rails of the balcony, waiting for the general alarm to go up and counting seconds in my head. The call would bring chaos in its wake, brief but exploitable, and I wanted to wait until that happened if I had the time, hence the count.
One. Two.
At three, the Elite who had set off the ward would have crossed the room and tried the king’s door. He wouldn’t bother knocking, not with my ward howling away.
Four.
At five he would break the door in.
Eight. Nine.
By ten he would have checked the body and found it still warm though not warm enough. After that, things got fuzzier.
Eleven.
If I was lucky, the Elite would make a quick search and find the trapdoor I’d cut in the garderobe floor before sounding the alarm.
Seventeen.
Opening it would trigger my fire ward and light the smudge candle I’d left in the waste shaft.
Nineteen.
The logical conclusion then would—My thoughts were interrupted at
twenty
by the sound of a door crashing open a floor above me and halfway round the tower.
A magically augmented voice cried out, “Assassins in the sewers!”
A half second later, alarm trumpets started blaring out all over the palace—more magic. The Crown Guards below me had begun looking around anxiously in the first seconds after the howl of my ward. But their Elite commander, a young lieutenant, had held his ground with complete professionalism, keeping his area under tight watch. Now he started barking orders though he didn’t move otherwise.
There was no way he’d miss me blotting out the stars as I sail-jumped across the courtyard above him nor fail to see me when he looked up, but I couldn’t wait for a better opportunity. I stood, took two running steps, jumped, and launched myself from the rail of the balcony, spreading my arms wide and commanding Triss to spin us wings of shadow.
I traded a two-story drop for about seventy feet of horizontal glide to land on the curtain wall that separated the Grand Tower from the main palace. At that point, I had to make a sudden change of plans when what looked like half the Zhani army stampeded out of their barracks and into the middle of my exit strategy. I’d intended to make another sail-jump down to the grounds and leg it for the outer wall, but I didn’t think gliding into a seething mass of armed soldiers would do much for my long-term survival prospects.
Instead, I turned and ran along the top of the wall to the farther of the two towers it connected, the one that housed the royal kitchens. From there, I started working my way toward the formal ballroom. That’s when I ran into an Elite lieutenant named Deem and his stone dog—name unknown. I won the pass but almost lost a leg in the process.
The rest of my trip out of the palace went by in a sort of nightmare blur. At Triss’s insistence, I took a couple of extra efik beans to help ward off shock while he clamped a bandage of shadows over the gashes on my calf and heel. Of course, he had to thin himself out everywhere else to do so, and that made me a whole lot less invisible. Combine that with the attention summoned by the wild grating howls of the fallen lieutenant’s stone dog and the deep tearing pain in my leg at every step, and I honestly can’t tell you how I managed to come out the other end in one piece.
I don’t even remember how I got from there to the snug I’d set up as my fallback in case I couldn’t get out of Tien immediately after the execution. I’d like to say that Namara guided and guarded me, and I know I thought so at the time. But these days I’ve come to doubt that the gods intervene so directly. If Namara were that powerful, why did she need us to act as her hands? No, the answer is probably Triss, whispering in my ear and guiding my steps in the right direction, just as he so often has.
My snug was an attic storeroom in a great house not too far from the palace. It belonged to an out-of-favor viscount who had removed himself to his country estates for “health reasons.” In other words, he thought it healthier to stay far away from the king, whose displeasure he’d incurred. The place had only a skeleton staff for the duration, and the room I’d adopted as my own chiefly held storm shutters and other winter necessities.
I spent the next several days wandering the edges of delirium, waking only now and then to chew a few efik beans handed me by Triss and wash them down with tepid water out of a skin I’d cached the week before—I didn’t have the energy to brew up a proper pot. I would have recovered a lot faster if I could have put my teeth to the dried fruit and jerky I’d left with the skin instead of all that efik, but for the first time in my life, I simply had no appetite.
I felt terribly weak and shaky when I finally decided to venture out on the fourth day, but I’d run out of beans the night before, and I needed efik then more than I’ve ever needed alcohol since. Wrapping bandages around my torn calf made the flesh feel like I’d poured boiling water over it. Up to that point, Triss had kept my wounds bound in his own shadow-stuff, providing another of the many benefits to partnering a Shade. For reasons we didn’t understand, that proximity to the everdark cooled and soothed as well as any snowpack while simultaneously warding against wound rot.
When I felt up to moving, I slipped downstairs to the master’s quarters. There I borrowed a beautifully made but long-out-of-fashion suit of court clothes from the depths of a wardrobe that looked like it might not have been opened in the last century. Green and gold silk patterned with water tigers and twining vines, cut loose for ease of dueling. It was part of a set with a beautiful, if antiquated, matching court dress that had no doubt belonged to the lady of the house. I also found a pair of overlarge riding boots that accommodated my bandages though I had to pack the other boot with rags to make it fit.
Sandals or light court shoes would have been more appropriate considering the weather and my attire, but I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I had a badly ripped-up leg right at the moment. Not after leaving so much blood and a boot behind in the palace. Besides, if I stole a shabby enough horse, the boots and the unfashionable clothes would blend right into a cover identity as some noble’s down-at-the-heels rural cousin. Though I’d also need to do some careful work with cosmetics if I wanted anyone to believe I was a Zhani noble from anything closer than a few yards away.
Getting one of the cart horses saddled and out of the stables was easy enough once I’d set the mulch pile on the far side of the house afire. Everything but my swords packed down into the saddlebags with room to spare. After I removed the guards, the swords slid easily into a pair of thick bamboo tool handles I’d prepared for the purpose.
As I rode out onto the road in front of the estate and turned left toward the palace, Triss hissed quietly in my ear.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Little Varya,” I whispered back.
“That’s on the wrong side of Tien!” His voice rose, and I made a quelling gesture.
“That’s what they’ll be thinking, too, if the search hasn’t already moved out of the city. If the lieutenant lived, he’ll have told them it was a Blade. They’ll be watching the roads to Kodamia, so I’m going to go south along the coast into the Magelands. Then I can cross the mountains through the high passes at Dalridia. It’ll take longer, but it’s less risky.”
“Except for the part where we have to ride so close to the palace.”
“I need efik for the trip home, Triss, and Little Varya’s the only place in Tien I can get it. My leg’s still pretty bad.”
Triss hissed. “True, though I wish it wasn’t. All right. But we’ll have to be quick about it.”
I nodded. “Really, Triss, it’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.” But if I didn’t get another bag of beans soon, I was going to shake myself to pieces. “I know what I’m doing.”

 

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