Broken Blade (29 page)

Read Broken Blade Online

Authors: Kelly McCullough

Triss screamed, and we jolted sharply to the right, dropping a dozen feet as he jerked in his wing on that side. The spell, whatever it was, had grazed him, and magic was one of the few things that could really harm a Shade. Below us, the people in the streets started running and shouting.
I ignored them in favor of feeding Triss even more of my rapidly failing magic. I took a risk by taking my eyes off our landing zone to glance back over my shoulder. I wanted to get a mark on the bastard who’d hurt my familiar. I couldn’t do much about the attack right now, but I promised myself a reckoning later. I’d just spotted a mounted figure on the slope now far above and behind us, when a second glowing chain of power lashed down toward us from his raised hands like some giant magical whip.
The spell missed by a much wider margin than the previous burst—Triss’s injury had transformed an already frighteningly erratic descent into something completely unpredictable and terrifying. The burst of light that accompanied the spell also gave me one instant’s bright and perfect view of the caster, burning his image into my mind. Colonel Deem, mounted atop his massive stone dog as if it were a horse. I had a brief moment to hope he hadn’t gotten an equally clear look at me. Then Maylien screamed, Triss screeched a warning, and I turned back frontward in time to see a thatch roof coming up to meet us.
The perfect, soft landing place. There was only one little problem. Deem’s spell had landed first. The roof was on fire.

 

16
We
missed the worst of the flames, crashing through the roof in a cascade of smoldering thatch and shattered bamboo poles. There was a sharp jerk up and back on my shoulders as Triss caught at the edges of the rotten bamboo roof supports in an attempt to slow us even further. Then they gave way like the rest, and we fell the last couple of feet with burning thatch raining down all around us. I’m not sure who was more surprised, the occupants of the little leather shop at the sudden fire and the manner of our entrance, or me at our having survived it.
But there was no time to worry about that or do more than marvel briefly at the fortune that had kept us from hitting a more solid roof. It was a good thing for us that the Downunders was one of the few parts of Tien where the odds of hitting a rotten roof were better than even. My feet had barely touched the floor when Maylien slipped from my arms and started for the door. Much as I needed to follow her, I paused a moment longer.
“Triss, are you all right?” I asked.
“Yesss,” he said, but I knew from the hiss in his speech that he was in pain. “Go! I will recover sssoon enough if I resst. Fire and sun, but that hurts.” Then he let go of his dragon form and collapsed into my shadow.
I wanted to do more for him, but the smoke was getting thicker by the second, and somewhere nearby the stone dogs were swimming through the earth in pursuit. I did take a moment to open my trick bag and pull out one of the half dozen heavy gold riels I kept there for direst emergency.
“Sorry,” I said, tossing it to the old man standing in openmouthed shock behind the counter. “Now, run.”
Then I took off after Maylien. As I crashed through the door and out onto the street, I was glad to see that a bucket brigade had already started to form. I couldn’t bear the thought of a second neighborhood burning in my wake. Better to let the Elite kill me than that—curse them! If I’d known they were going to do this, I’d have . . . what?
I honestly didn’t know the answer. I’d never succumbed to the particular cynicism endemic among the Blades that painted abusive rule as a thing of uttermost routine. No matter how many times I’d seen corrupt officials abuse their powers, it always shocked me when someone like an officer of the Elite casually harmed the people under his protection.
Even as that thought crossed my mind, another lash of the great magical chain fell from above. It struck across the street, about a half dozen buildings up, and ignited another fire. Two really, one in the just-blasted building and another within my heart. There was no way Colonel Deem could possibly have picked us out from the rest of the milling crowd at this distance. No, he was just blasting away and hoping to eliminate us in the general destruction. As I looked around at the flaming ruin authored by one of Zhan’s “authorities,” I swore that this would not go unanswered. I half turned back toward the bluff, though what I intended to do I couldn’t say.
Then Maylien caught my arm. “Do you have any of the money I paid you? Devin’s people stole what coin I had on me.”
“Sure,” I reached for my pouch, “how much do you need?”
“Five silver riels should do it.”
I handed them over, and Maylien darted away. “Wait, what do you need it for?”
“Come on,” she called back over her shoulder. “Hurry! There’s a man over here who’ll lend us his cart horses for a fee, and we need to ride.”
I shook myself free of the anger that had taken me, forcing it back down into the depths for later use, and followed Maylien across the street to where she was cutting a couple of horses loose from their traces. She was right, we needed to be gone, and I shouldn’t have lost sight of that. Nor let the weight of arranging our escape fall on her. I was the one who was supposed to be rescuing Maylien, wasn’t I?
Just who was rescuing whom became even more debatable when Maylien practically had to push me onto the back of one of the horses a few moments later. I’d stopped moving after catching up to her, lost track of everything for a moment, really. And not for the first time. Odd batches of seconds seemed to be slipping away from me and leaving no memory of their passing. It wasn’t until Maylien gave me a shove toward the horse and ordered me to mount up that I did so.
It was a damned good thing the two horses had been harness mates, because it meant that mine followed Maylien’s without any prompting on my part. Bits of the world kept vanishing into white nothingness around the edges of my vision as we rode, and it took most of my attention just to stay ahorse. The white blots rang old alarm bells in the back of my head, but I couldn’t make my mind work well enough to think of why.
 
Then,
without any sense of transition at all, I found myself sitting in a thick bed of ferns beside a fire, with a tin cup in my hand, and that seemed very strange. Especially since the sun had gone away somewhere along the line, replaced by the moon and a slice of starry sky bounded by overhanging branches.
What the hell . . . ?
“I said that you should try to take another drink.” It was Maylien’s voice, coming from somewhere off on the other side of the fire though I couldn’t see her. She sounded concerned.
That didn’t make any more sense than the darkness or the bed of ferns, but she seemed pretty sure about drinking. Almost absently, I raised the cup to my lips and took a big mouthful of some incredibly raw alcohol. It burned gloriously as it went down.
“What the hell is this stuff?” I asked, in something halfway between a cough and a croak.
“You’d have to ask the very sketchy-looking fellow I bought it from back at the crossroads for the details, but it probably started out as rice, and it’s certainly not legal.” Maylien laughed then, a wry, earthy sort of sound. “But I’ve told you that twice already. What are the chances it’s going to stick this time?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember asking before. Actually, I don’t remember anything much after we got on the horses. Where are we? What happened?”
One of the shadows on the left side of the fire moved, resolving itself into Maylien’s face as she pushed back the hood that had covered her until then. Beside her, Bontrang stirred, fixing me with one bright eye and making a small, inquisitive, trilling noise.
“You sounded almost coherent there,” she said to me. “And Bontrang’s paying attention to you for the first time in hours. Are you really back?” She got up and came to kneel beside me, looking into my eyes for several long beats. “I think you are.” She produced a rough clay bottle from somewhere and poured a clear liquid into my cup. “You’d better have some more of that.”
“I don’t think Triss would approve of . . . Wait, Triss!”
“Shh.” Maylien put a finger to my lips. “He’s sleeping, and he needs it even more than you do if I am any judge. Now have another drink. It’s the nastiest rotgut I’ve ever tasted, but it’ll do you a world of good to get more inside you.”
She eyed me sternly, and I sniffed at my cup—hellfire but it smelled raw—then took another drink. It tasted awful but somehow wonderful at the same time. And again I could feel it burning as it headed down my throat. At least at first. When it hit my stomach, the feeling simply went away.
“That’s really strange,” I said.
“What?” asked Maylien.
“Normally with liquor this strong I’d expect it to light a fire in my belly, but it’s just going away.”
Maylien laughed again, still earthy, but lighter this time. “Then it’s working. ‘Spirits for the drained spirit.’ That’s what the Rovers used to say, though
you’ve
probably never heard the phrase, what with the way Namara’s priests were down on booze.”
She cocked her head to one side. “Someday you’ll have to tell me how you ended up pretending to be a drunk. That was inspired, you know. The way you put away your whiskey at the Gryphon is why it took me six months to decide you really were Aral Kingslayer.”
My head started to spin, and I took another drink. Surprisingly, that seemed to bring things back into focus again, so I drained off the rest of the cup. Maylien topped me up again before I could argue.
“You need all you can get right now,” she said.
“Can we back up to the part where I asked you what happened and where we are? Only this time with you answering?”
Again the laugh. “All right. Where should I start?”
“How about what happened after we got on the horses? The world started to flash white around the edges about then, and I don’t really remember much between then and waking up here a couple of minutes ago.” I felt a sudden twinge. “You’re sure Triss is all right?”
“Yes, and stop saying his name. You’ll wake him.” Maylien settled back beside the little gryphinx. “Those white flashes are what happens when you overtap your nima. Which is why I’ve been feeding you the strongest moonshine I could find every chance I could get since we left the city shortly after sunrise.”
“‘Spirits for the spirit’ . . .” I said.
“Exactly. There’s nothing like strong drink to carry you over until you can get some sleep if you’re an overextended mage. It’s useless or even counterproductive under normal circumstances, but when you’ve pushed yourself beyond your limits, it can save your life. Of course, you didn’t know that, what with Namara’s followers being so notoriously down on alcohol. The thing that really surprised me was how very much of it you kept putting away without ever coming back to full consciousness.
“Well, that and the fact that you managed to stay on that horse even when you were nine-tenths unconscious. The first was your Shade’s fault, of course, though
I
didn’t know it till he explained it to me an hour or two ago, but I still don’t know how you can hang on to something as tight as you did that horse when no one’s at home in your skull.”
I took another drink from my cup, hoping to calm the head-spinning effect Maylien’s conversational style seemed to induce. “Well, if you spend much time climbing buildings while under fire or exhausted, you tend to develop a serious reflex for hanging on to things. But even so, you’ve lost me again. Twice. What did Triss tell you that explained my continued problems?”
“Nima, of course. Shades need to eat, the same as anyone. That’s what your Shade said, anyway. Now, during the night they can draw strength from the darkness itself, but in daytime, if they overextend themselves, they have nothing to feed on but the nima of their human companions. Your Shade got pretty badly clipped by that fire-chain spell. So, the only way he could keep it together was by tapping your nima. But you were
already
pretty much overtapped before that happened. Without that moonshine I’ve been feeding you, I think you’d probably both be dead. With it, I was able to get you through till nightfall, when your Shade could rest and soak up the dark.”
I took another drink while I let all of that settle in. It was frighteningly bad stuff, and yet I found myself wanting more, which meant it was probably time to put it down even if it had saved my life. I set my cup aside.

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