As I waited under the edge of the parapet for the guard to pass by on his rounds, I reached into my trick bag for the case holding the last of my opium-and-efik-packed eggs. What I got when I opened it was a handful of eggshell shards and drug-dusted fingers. Dammit! It was all right before the sail-jump, so it must have shattered when we smacked into the base of the wall despite the special packaging. One of the hazards of working with eggs.
I’d lost the easiest way of dealing with the guard, which meant I had to revisit whether it wouldn’t be better simply to ghost him. It was much easier to kill a man silently than it was to knock him out without making a lot of noise or seriously hurting him. But I found that making the right decision about when to kill had become the hardest task of all, and I froze.
A younger me wouldn’t have hesitated for an instant if a man’s life had lain between me and the most efficient execution of my charge. But that version of me had the certainty of the goddess as the bedrock underneath his feet. My definition of justice had been no more and no less than whatever my goddess desired. If she chose to order a person killed and another stood in the way, then killing that other was a necessary expedient. You couldn’t let sentiment, or pride, or any other emotion get in the way of duty and professionalism.
But the goddess was dead, and I had only the shifting sands of my own conscience to stand on. Here and now, the choice was mine, no matter what I told Maylien. If I spilled this young guard’s blood, the stain would be on my hands. Long seconds slid past as I hung there dithering.
“What’s wrong?” Triss whispered in the faintest ghost of a voice.
I just shook my head because I needed to work it through on my own. I’d been avoiding this choice for five years though I hadn’t realized it until now. This was really why I’d chosen to lose myself in minor sorts of shadow work instead of trying to hunt down the Son of Heaven or looking for some other real purpose for my life.
I was a trained killer, one of the half dozen best in the world. In the five years I had served the goddess as a full Blade, I had taken at least a hundred lives. I had been a human weapon, honed to the finest edge possible by the training of the temple. The Blade of Justice made flesh. I knew my purpose then: to bring death to those who deserved it. I was so very, very good at the job, and I loved my work and my goddess.
More than efik, or alcohol, I had been hooked on the feeling that came with being the living embodiment of Namara’s will. Not the killing—that had brought me no pleasure—but the certainty. Knowing that I was born to destroy the enemies of justice was the sweetest feeling in the world. When the other gods killed Namara, I’d lost that along with everything else.
That was the problem with relying on gods instead of thinking for yourself. When you base your morality on what heaven tells you to do, heaven can always cut you off at the knees by changing its mind.
Oh, I’d killed since the temple fell. Mostly it had been in self-defense, though I would cheerfully have killed Lok and his men for what they did to Triss. But until this moment, I hadn’t had to face the choice whether or not to kill someone in pursuit of some other goal. The temptation, really, as I now realized. That was the real reason I’d tried to put the decision off on Maylien, to make it her mission instead of mine. More than anything, I’d wanted to give my will over into another’s hand again, to do what I did best without having to take the weight of decision on my own shoulders.
It would be so easy to do, to kill this faceless guard and believe that I’d done it because Maylien had ordered me to. That I owed her Triss’s life and mine and that paying that debt meant doing whatever she asked of me. It would be so easy to let her become my new goddess, if only for a little while. And I wanted it. I wanted it so badly, the luxury of turning off my mind and simply being what my training and aptitude had shaped me into. A weapon for another’s hand.
A scuffing sound from above told me that the guard had come close again. If he followed his pattern, he would look out over the woods behind me for a count of five, then turn around and walk to the other side of the tower.
One.
Through Triss’s unvision I watched as he leaned out above me craning his neck and exposing the pale skin under his chin.
Two.
All I had to do was flick a dagger into my hand, bring my arm up, straighten my legs . . . he’d die without a sound.
Three.
So easy to let my reflexes decide for me.
Four.
I pressed my face into the limestone, drawing its dusty smell deep into my lungs.
Five.
He started to turn away, but I could still just manage it . . . if I let myself.
Six.
And he was gone, stepping back from the edge in the same moment that I did.
Seven.
A hand up onto the lip of the parapet.
Eight.
Another.
Nine.
Pull myself up and over.
Ten.
Drop down and grab. I hit him fast and from behind, wrapping my left arm tight around his neck, cutting off air and blood flow at the same time that I pinned his right arm to his side with my own. I lifted him back off his feet as Triss wrapped around his legs and his other arm, holding him immobile.
It would have been simpler to break his neck. Much simpler. Even then. I fought the temptation, keeping the pressure on until he went limp. Counted carefully. Cut off the blood too long, and something happened to the mind. Too short, and he’d wake up within minutes. Finally, I let off and eased him to the ground, hoping I’d gotten it right. A gag, bindings at wrists and ankles, a couple of loops of cord tying him tight against the base of the catapult, and done. He still might die—bound and unconscious people did sometimes—but I had made my own decision, taken the hard road and done what I could to preserve his life within the constraints of my assignment.
I signaled Maylien, and she sent Bontrang over to take the end of a rope back to her. We pulled it tight between the nearest tree and one of the crenellations and she hand-over-handed her way up the slightly inclined rope.
Maylien
peered through a low, barred window in the back of the central keep. “That looks familiar.”
“All too,” I agreed. The dimly magelit room was a much-expanded version of the torture chamber where I’d been held.
“Except here she hasn’t bothered hiring out an illusion to keep the neighbors from seeing what goes on down there. Maybe you
should
have killed that guard. He had to know what happens here. As soon as I can get a big enough force together, I’m going to destroy this place.”
“Why wait?” I asked. The sight of the glyph rack and memories of what its twin had done to Triss had my blood burning.
“You can’t be serious. A keep this size must hold at least thirty of my sister’s guards. I know Blades are good, but there’s just the two of us.”
I opened my mouth to point out that two mages, one a former Blade, with the element of surprise to help ought to be more than adequate to the job. Before I could say a word, several drops of cold rank water fell on my face and Triss slapped my shoulder, hard. I caught Maylien around the waist, dragging her with me as I dove to the left.
“What are you doing!” she demanded as she landed atop me.
“Moving!” I started us rolling across the cobbles.
Something that smelled like it ought to have been buried a long time ago landed with a soggy thump in front of the window where we had been kneeling only a moment before. Chalk one up for those rumors of the night-walking dead and another for Triss’s concern about things in the moat.
19
The
undead moved fast. Rising from where it had just missed its pounce, the creature threw itself after us within seconds. Because we were already rolling onward, it missed again, this time ending up flat on its belly.
I threw Maylien a few yards beyond where the roll had carried us, then flipped back to my feet before it came at me again. I went right back down a moment later when I couldn’t get my new swords clear of their sheaths in time to prevent the creature’s clawing hands from striking me full in the chest. Maylien had given me a beautiful pair to replace the ones I’d lost at Devin’s, but they were a tiny bit too wide for my old hip-draw rig—a problem I thought I’d fixed already.
Triss briefly shaped himself into a shadowy breastplate then, or the thing would have torn my heart out. As filthy fingernails skittered across hardened shadow, I had a moment to desperately hope Triss’s efforts would also suffice to keep the creature from passing its horrible curse along to me. With the death of the goddess, I’d almost certainly lost my magical immunity to the restless dead.
Then I went ass over ears and had to let go of my still-sheathed swords as I turned the fall into a clumsy backward roll. I expected to have to fend off another attack as I came to my feet again, but Maylien had entered the fray by then, scything in with a crouching spin-kick that knocked the legs out from under the risen. Or whatever it was—it was hard to get enough of a fix on it in the moonlit courtyard to make more than a guess.
Maylien’s maneuver finally gave me time to free my swords. As the monster started to push itself to its feet, I stepped in and swung simultaneous cuts from both sides. Aiming to take the damned thing’s arms off just above the elbows, I struck with maximum force. Instead, of shearing neatly through rotted flesh and decaying bone, as I’d expected, I felt more like I’d chopped into wet oak. And, where the magical swords of my goddess might have done the trick anyway, I had only ordinary steel.
It wasn’t enough, and my swords stuck fast as undead muscles bunched and twisted, pinching tight like a half-sawn branch nipping a saw blade. I had to leave them behind a moment later as I threw myself backward into another roll when the risen lunged toward my groin, its mouth gaping wide to tear and rend.
Bontrang tried to claw the monster’s eyes out then, but it batted him aside. Even with my swords stuck deep in its biceps hampering its movements, the thing moved scary fast. Maylien snarled something incoherent as Bontrang fluttered weakly back to land on her shoulder, then she sent a wave of magefire washing over the creature.
The flames momentarily filled the narrow courtyard between the keep and the outer wall with light and heat, wiping out my night vision in the process. The risen screamed as the horrible smell of burning rotted flesh filled the air. Bits of cracked and blackened skin fall away, but the risen was far too soggy from its time in the moat to actually catch fire. Still screaming, it turned and lurched toward Maylien.
She’d drawn her own sword by then, a slender double-edged dueling blade of the sort favored by the Zhani nobility. She swung a backhanded cut as she dodged out of the way of the creature’s charge. Several of its fingers fell to the ground with a noise like demented hail. I had a perfect opportunity then to sink a dagger in the back of its neck, but didn’t bother. This was a chopping job if I’d ever seen one.
What it really wanted was an axe. Failing that, I needed to get at least one of my swords back. Short and broad, they’d do a much better job on the risen than Maylien’s dueling blade. So I lunged forward, catching hold of the sword sunk in the creature’s left arm. Putting one hand on the hilt and the other on the crosspiece, I applied my whole weight, twisting and torquing the blade out and down.
The blade bent alarmingly, then came free with a wrench and a ringing sound, as it sprang back straight. Somewhere in there, I caught a sharp knock on the side of the head. It sent me spinning away, with red sparks dancing across my vision and the taste of blood in my mouth from a cheek torn by my own teeth. If Triss hadn’t taken the worst of the blow, I’d have lost my ear. I whispered a quick thanks, then the risen was coming at me again.
I wasn’t in a good position for an effective shot with my sword, so I turned side on and kicked the thing full in the chest. A knee to the groin would have been easier and a more effective target on a living man, but I didn’t think it’d help much here. What I really wanted was to shove it back and away long enough to let me think. I managed that, knocking it onto its ass, but only at the cost of filthy hands and undead fingers digging painfully at my shin and calf. Triss was there again, sheathing my leg in shadow, and again I hoped it would be enough to spare me the risen curse.
As the creature clambered back to its feet, Bontrang dove at its head from the side, slapping the creature with his wings, then shearing off before it could make any move to catch him. An instant later, Maylien hit it with more magefire. It snarled and turned toward her, and I finally saw my chance.