Broken Blade (8 page)

Read Broken Blade Online

Authors: Kelly McCullough

As a Blade, you learn that it’s all right to choose not to act. Choosing not to think is another thing entirely. Though I was no longer a Blade, the lesson remained.
With a sigh I opened the trunk again and retrieved the letter. As Triss had noted, there were things we could do now in regard to exposing its secrets that we couldn’t have when I’d cared about keeping it intact. I was running through some of those in my head when I took a closer look and discovered it was going to be a simpler task than I’d expected. Since I’d last examined the letter, words had appeared on the previously blank space above the seal.
“For Aral Kingslayer, last Blade of fallen Namara.”
Un-fucking-believable. I laughed then, and it was a bitter and black sound like efik left too long a-steeping. I cracked the seal and began to read, with Triss following along over my shoulder. “I seek the redress of Justice,” it began.
After the first few lines, I reached for the whiskey bottle. This time Triss didn’t try to stop me.

 

4
My
day started with pain. Throbbing pain and cruel light and a truly foul taste in my mouth. Nothing I hadn’t experienced before. In fact, I’d been there often enough that I knew better than to open my eyes right away. I groped upward with my left hand, feeling along the top edge of my pallet until I found a plump wineskin.
Keeping my eyes firmly closed, I brought it down and pressed the cool leather against my forehead while I fiddled with the seal. Finally, I very carefully placed the neck in my mouth and took a long pull of small beer. It was bitter and harsh and warm, and it tasted like ambrosia. Good country water would have been better yet, but in a city like Tien, only the crazy and the desperate drank from the wells. Some might have preferred tea, but since I gave up efik, I no longer drink hot drinks. Not if there’s any polite way to avoid it.
I didn’t try to move or open my eyes till I’d downed half the skin. At that point I still felt like week-old shit, but I knew that just lying there wouldn’t help anymore, so I reluctantly cracked an eyelid.
The first thing I saw was the shadow of a dragon. Triss peered down into my face from a position on the angled ceiling a few feet above my head and gently shook his own. That put my shadow ninety degrees away from where the light would have and announced Triss’s unhappiness with me. It wasn’t the first time
that
had happened either.
“Morning, Triss,” I said. Husked really, since my throat felt like I’d been pouring paint thinner down it. “How are you?”
“It is
not
morning, and I am very angry.” His voice came out flat and hard, but quiet enough that it didn’t hurt my head. Much. “But you knew the latter and ought to have known the former.”
He was right, my one window faced west. Sunlight slipped between the slats of its battered shutters. From the angle it had to be five or six hours past midday. Bad sign. I took another long pull of small beer, then discovered a worse one. When I recapped the skin and tossed it aside it landed with a clink of bottles. Plural.
“What day is it?” I asked.
“Atherasday, the tenth of Seedsdown.”
“Oh, thank you.” I paused for a moment, hoping for memory to allow me to sidestep the next question. But it failed me, and I had to ask, “What day was it when we saw Devin?”
Triss growled low in his throat and shook his head again. “It was in the last hour of the eighth day of Seedsdown.”
“That could be a problem.” I sat up and forced myself to stay that way.
I didn’t much enjoy it, but it didn’t kill me. I had about five hours to make a decision on Devin’s offer. No, that’s not true. I already knew my answer. There was no way in hell I was going to make common cause with my former brothers and sisters if it wasn’t in service to the goddess. Not when any alliance would be made atop her divine corpse. No, what I had to decide was what to do about Devin.
“I need a drink,” I said, then felt ashamed of myself. I knew what I had become, but that didn’t make me proud of it.
“No,” said Triss, “you may want a drink, but it’s the last thing in the world that you need.”
“Point. What would you suggest instead?”
“That you pack up and we leave this city and never return.”
That surprised me. “You don’t think we should seek Devin out? Devin and . . . Zass with him?”
“No. I do not want to join anyone who would betray the goddess’s memory as they have. I do not want to have to kill them or, more likely considering the way you’ve let yourself go the last few years, be killed by them.” There was a lot of anger in his voice, and I really couldn’t blame him.
“So why run?” I asked. “Why not just stay here and ignore them? Them, and that damn girl both.” More of my night-before was coming back to me. I found myself glancing into the corner where I’d thrown Maylien’s crumpled letter when burning it proved beyond me.
“The girl found you. Do you really think Devin won’t if he tries? Or the Elite, should Devin choose to keep his own hands clean? The only reason we have remained safe here for so long is because no one who wanted to find us would have believed we were foolish enough to come back to Tien after we killed its king.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Instead, I made a show of dragging myself across the room to retrieve the letter. There were smoke stains along the edges from where I’d held it in the flames of one of Jerik’s filthy oil lamps, but no other evidence of my attempts at burning. As I sat down at the table, I glanced at the front again.
 
For Aral Kingslayer, last Blade of fallen Namara.
 
I should have torn the letter into shreds. It wasn’t for me anyway. The Kingslayer had died with his goddess. All he’d left behind was a broken-down wreck who wore his face. A shadow jack who drank himself unconscious most nights because that was the only way he could get to sleep. I opened the letter again. It beat facing Triss’s reproach. Besides, I couldn’t remember what was in it.
I seek the redress of Justice. My name is Maylien Tal Marchon and I am the true heir to the Barony of Marchon. If you are alive to read this, then I know that you are the Kingslayer and the one person who can help me regain my baronial seat.
If I’m your only hope, Lady, you might as well walk away from that chair right now.
I thought it was you from the moment I first saw you across the common room of the Gryphon’s Head several months ago, but I had to make certain. I knew that the baroness’s pet assassin—I won’t sully the title of Blade by applying it to that Devin-creature—could never hope to stand against you in open combat.
Against the Kingslayer, maybe not. Against me . . . now those were much shorter odds. I shook my head. Devin. What was I going to do about Devin? That was still the only question that mattered. Triss was almost certainly right. We
should
run. But when I thought about walking away, something deep down in my soul said “no.” It wasn’t a loud voice, barely a whisper even, but it was very firm. My eyes flicked to the page again.
I’ll have to lie low for a while after this, but I will look for you in the Gryphon’s Head as soon as I am able.
The rest of the letter babbled on and on about her bona fides and the horrors the current Baroness Marchon was visiting on the heads of her people. Doors broken down in the middle of the night, people disappearing, burned-out crofts, all the usual mayhem and murder and exactly the sort of thing that would once have drawn the attention of the goddess. What Maylien completely failed to mention was anything that I actually cared about at the moment. Like how she knew who Devin was and what he’d been up to these last five years. I crumpled the letter and threw it into the corner again.
“You don’t seem to like the contents any more today than you did the first time you read them,” said Triss, his voice acid. “I hope that doesn’t mean you’re about to replay the drunken binge the last reading brought on.”
“I don’t really have time for that, now do I?”
The shadow of a dragon flicked his wings in a shrug, then flitted down to the table in front of me. “That hasn’t stopped you in the past.”
“In the past, I didn’t know about Devin or any deal my former brethren might have made with the Son of Heaven.”
Triss raised his head to stare at me. “That almost sounds like the old Aral, the stubborn one. I take it that we won’t be leaving town?”
“Not till we find out a bit more about what happened at the fall of the temple.”
“What of Maylien and unseating her wicked baroness?”
“Getting rid of the baroness isn’t my problem. My interest in Maylien goes only as far as finding out what she knows about Devin. Oh, and collecting the rest of my fee, of course.”
Triss cocked his head to one side skeptically.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “I delivered her damned letter, didn’t I? That’s
all
I contracted for—none of this baronial seat bullshit. Come on, let’s go have a look around.”
I slid from my seat on the trunk to my knees, moving gently to avoid jarring my head. Then, drawing Triss around me, I reached for the lock.
 
The
Spinnerfish was a good tavern in a bad neighborhood. It lay a few streets in from the docks on the Smuggler’s Rest end of the harbor. That wasn’t what anyone official called the area. Not where they could be heard at any rate. But everyone knew what happened down there.
The shadow port was one-third of what made the Spinnerfish such a successful venue. The second third was Manny Three Fingers, the best seafood cook in the city. Last was Manny’s boss, Erk Endfast: a onetime shadow captain and black jack from Oen in the Magelands—he’d left rather quickly as an alternative to making a command performance on the Magearch’s gallows. Now he ran the Spinnerfish as neutral territory, a safe place to meet or simply relax for all the players in Tien’s shadow trades.
It was also a good place to dig for information. Devin’s current company put him well beyond the ken of the sort of dregs and drifters that frequented the Gryphon. Though I didn’t normally run in the richer circles of the shadow world, I knew most of the faces, and I knew how the game was played at that level. Perhaps more importantly, I had enough of a rep as a straight-back jack to spring a few locked doors.
I arrived at the Spinnerfish as the sun was setting, which put me ahead of the crowd. So I was able to snag a small table in a corner of the front room. When the waitress came around, I tossed her a silver riel and told her to bring me a tucker of Kyle’s with a clean glass and the catch of the day, whatever it happened to be.
The place filled with people at about the same rate as my belly filled with peppered snapper. Things were really hopping by the time I put aside my plate and poured myself a second glass of whiskey from the small bottle. About halfway through sipping it down I noticed Erk himself making his way among the tables, waving at this one, leaning down to have a word with that, asking all and sundry about the fish.
He was tall and very fit and all-over brown, from his hair to his skin to his conservatively expensive outfit. He openly wore a pair of cane knives on his belt, forward curved and heavy—brutally effective weapons and better by far than a sword in a crowded and enclosed space like the Spinnerfish. I was rather surprised when his progress brought him to a halt across from me.
“Aral, how have you been?” he asked, his voice pitched to carry to the nearby tables. “It’s been an age. I don’t see you down this close to the docks very often. Mind if I join you? I’ve maybe got some jack work for you.”
I pasted a smile on my face and waved at the other seat though I was feeling mighty uneasy. “I always have time for a man in need of a jack.” I knew that Erk knew my jack face, but we’d never been on a casual basis.
As he sat down, he pulled a small bronze bell from some inner pocket and set it in the center of the table. “Drum-ringer.”
“Sensitive business then?” I could feel Triss clinging tightly to my back as he paid extra attention.
The bell was an expensive little piece of permanent magic. Anyone more than a few feet away who tried to casually listen in would hear nothing but the distant ringing of bells. If someone employed magic to stick an ear in, the ringing would get a whole lot louder. Possibly even deafeningly so if the drum-ringer was a sufficiently powerful one as the spell-glow of this one suggested.

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