Crossed Blades (12 page)

Jax was giving me a very strange look now, so I opened my mouth and said, “I . . .” But that’s all the further I got. What did she know? What should I say?

Jax laughed. “What a look, Aral. You’d think I’d caught you plotting to murder someone’s puppy. No”—she waved me off before I could continue—“it’s all right. I don’t know what the two of you were talking about and I don’t want to know. She’s your apprentice and the two of you need a private space for that to happen.”

“I’m confused. If you don’t know what
we
were talking about, then what are
you
talking about?”

“I’ve spent most of the last six years gathering up and teaching the surviving students of the temple. It’s not at all how I’d planned to spend my life, but I’ve found it enormously rewarding. I’ve also learned a few things about how to handle the youngsters.”

“I have no idea where you’re going,” I said, feeling ever more lost.

“Faran is right on the line between child and adult and that’s a very hard place. Not just for the child either, but for everyone around them. I couldn’t hear what the two of you were saying, but I could see how you were saying it. She was upset after I told her about Omira and Garret, that was obvious. So she went to you. Am I right so far? I don’t want details.”

“Yes.”

“You gave her your full attention and you treated her with complete seriousness. I don’t know what you told her, but I could see from over there that you were talking about things that mattered to you. I could also see that Faran wasn’t entirely happy with what you had to say, but that it made her think. The hug at the end reinforced that you care about her even if you don’t always agree. In short, it was everything I try to do with my students.”

“So why do you look so torn up?” I asked, though I thought I knew at least part of the answer, or hoped I did anyway. I didn’t want to believe that the Jax I had once loved could be anything but torn up over the idea of betraying me to the Hand.

She looked away from me, then down at her feet. “Because I’m here, doing”—she flung her hands out to the sides—“this! I should be back in Dalridia taking care of
our
students, not feeling more than half jealous about you and yours. Fuck! I hate this.”

“Jax . . .” I put a hand out to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.

“I’m sorry, Aral. I should never have gotten you involved in this.” She looked up into the rigging at Faran. “Either of you. She’s good, Aral. Really, really good. She reminds me of the way you and Siri were at that age. But she’s fey and fragile, too, poised on the edge of disaster with only you between her and . . . I don’t know what exactly, but nothing good. It’s easy to see how many scars the fall of the temple left on her, but not so easy to see how she’s going to deal with them.”

“You’re not making a lot of sense,” I said.

“I know, and I’m sorry for that, too. This whole thing with Loris and the journeymen just has me all messed up.”

“Tell me about it, maybe I can help.” I put my hand on her shoulder again.

This time she left it there for several beats before shaking her head and slipping free. Without another word, she walked off.

I think she almost told us just then,
Triss sent.

But almost isn’t enough.

No. It’s not.

I don’t want to have to kill her.

Neither do I, but if it comes to it, I’d rather it was us than Ssithra and Faran.

*   *   *

Sendai
tossed a bottle to the Vesh’An just before we entered the harbor at Ar, and I hated that I couldn’t look away as it sank into the water. Hated the way I was backsliding on the booze in general. I was better than this. I could control my drinking. I’d proved that over the last year, and more than once. But dealing with Jax and Faran and all the lies and tension in the confined spaces of the boat had me thinking about drinking all the damned time again.

I shook my head. It wasn’t me, it was the situation. I just needed to get off the fucking boat and it would all be fine. But somewhere in the back of my head, a little voice was saying,
Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that, Aral.

Jax joined me at the rail as we came into the dock. “Ready to go?”

I nodded. “Packed my bag an hour ago. Is there a plan? Or are we winging it from here?”

“I’ve got a snug on the west edge of town by the last of the river docks. I’d like to hole up there for a day or two while I check with a few local contacts about what’s been going on in the month I’ve been gone. Then we hop a barge heading upriver.”

“I’m getting awfully tired of boats, Jax.”

“You and me both. I’m a mountains girl, both by birth and, more recent, experience. But in this case it beats walking. Come on, let’s get our gear.”

Faran was already grabbing her small bag out of the cabin when we arrived, and a few minutes later all three of us were crossing the gangway down to the dock. It felt damned good to be back on solid ground. I was going to walk back to Tien when this was all over. Assuming I survived the next couple of weeks, of course. No sure bet there.

I hadn’t been to Ar in years, and I’d almost forgotten what a bedlam it could be. The Magelands had a more disparate population than the rest of the eleven kingdoms to begin with—since anyone from anywhere could become a citizen if only they possessed one of magic’s gifts. Add to that Ar’s status as the largest and most populated human port on the outer sea, and the kaleidoscopic whirl of people alone would be more than enough to bewilder the average traveler.

But there was more to it than that. Much more. Ar was a mage city, built around the magical university that both provided its reason for being and its government. In Tien or Kadeshar, or even Dan Eyre, one person in a thousand might have some modicum of the mage gift, and most of those were hedge witches at best. In Ar or Uln or Tavan it was closer to one in twenty. Magic was everywhere.

In magesight the streets of Ar flashed and twinkled in every shade of every color of the rainbow. Walking through the city felt like walking through the middle of the annual fireworks display Tien put on for the king’s birthday. Windows bore charms that kept them forever clean. Canopies of light protected restaurant patios from the worst depredations of rain and sun. Even the sewer drains had glyphs inscribed on them to keep clogs from forming.

Much of the magic was ephemeral, minor spells that required constant renewal to keep them going. Permanent magic needed both expertise and significant expenditure of power. But the city had minor mages in plenty, and part of the training of young scholars at the university included maintaining the service spells that helped keep the city functioning. Nowhere but in the great university cities of the Magelands was magic so cheap and plentiful.

I had already developed a headache, but I knew from past experience that both the pain and the confusion would pass once my inner eye had a chance to adjust to the feast of light. Still, the visual cacophony of it almost made me wish I could shut down my second sight. Nor was I alone in my discomfort. A sidelong glance showed me that Faran was squinting as well, though Jax seemed more inured.

She leaned in close to Faran and said, “You’ll adapt faster if you look around for the biggest spells and brightest lights and stare at them a bit. It makes the rest of it a bit easier to bear.”

“I’ve been here before,” Faran snapped back at her. “I know what I’m doing. I’m not one of your poor little lost apprentices.” Then she stormed forward.

“Dammit,” Jax said to me, “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I’d better have a word with her,” I said.

But Jax shook her head. “No, if we’re going to be working together, she and I need to sort out our differences. I need to talk to her myself. Why don’t we make the best of this. If you let us get a block or so ahead it’ll give you a chance to see if we attract any undue attention.”

“Start with a block, then go two and three, split and double-round?” I asked.

“Even better,” said Jax. “It does double duty. If I tell Faran she’s given us a great opportunity it’ll make it easier for her to accept my apology. And a split and back around will definitely tell us if we’ve got a hound nosing after us. Keep going straight up this street till you hit University Way and then take a left. If we get separated we can meet back at the dock where we landed at sunset.”

“Fair enough.”

So, as Jax speeded up to catch Faran, I slowed down a little bit. One of the easiest ways to spot a hound is to split up. The hound has to decide who to follow, which makes the job much harder. It also gives you lots of options for circling around each other, and putting the hound in a trap. A good hound knows all that, but it leaves them with very limited options.

I didn’t want to be too obvious about what we were doing, so I pretended there was something wrong with my boot. As I knelt to adjust things I did a quick top of the eyes scan of my surroundings. Perhaps inevitably, I spotted the nearest alehouse. As I stared longingly at the place, a magic light flared on the rooftop of the low building.

I probably would have missed it among all the visual noise if not for the fact that it was a very distinctive shade of orange pink—not a common color for magic, and one I’d been trained to look for from the age of six. I glanced up, and there, crouched in the shade of a narrow dormer, was Master Kelos. He held up a hand, palm out, and magical light flashed again, this time drawing words, “Here Midnight Alone.”

11

T
he
past is never dead. It lives inside us, no matter how hard we might try to cut it out. As a child my parents gave me to the temple. Not long after that the temple gave me to Master Kelos. I had other teachers, other masters—we all did—but more than anyone else it was Kelos Deathwalker who shaped me into Aral Kingslayer.

Each of the children who went through the temple had a special master they answered to. For Siri and me, that master was Kelos. He taught me how to hold a sword, how to walk in shadow, how to kill. On the day the goddess made me a Blade and sent me after Ashvik, there were only two people at the temple who knew what I planned. Devin was one. He tried to convince me not to go. Kelos was the other. He wished me good hunting. I loved the man as you can only love the idols of your childhood.

Maybe that was the reason it didn’t even occur to me to try to follow him. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it was fear. Kelos didn’t want to see me right now, and for all that I had done in the years since I entered the temple, I was still afraid of making him mad at me because I knew all the way down to my bones that he could take me.

After sending his message, Kelos had nodded to me and walked away over the peak of the roof. I nodded back and I watched him go. And then, after he’d left, I walked away myself.

Are we going to do it?
Triss asked as we followed Jax and Faran up the road in the general direction of the university.

What?

Meet Kelos tonight.

I stopped dead. It was only in that instant that it even occurred to me that I
could
decline to show up. Somewhere deep down below the level of conscious thought, I had simply assumed that I would meet him. Master Kelos had summoned me. Period. Nothing after that involved a choice on my part.

Only, it did. It’s hard to describe what happened inside my head when I finally realized that. Even though I had seen Master Kelos talking to the Signet and heard him acknowledging the Son of Heaven as his master, it hadn’t really sunk in. It didn’t matter that I’d been filled to overflowing with a toxic mix of fury, betrayal, and a half dozen other awful emotions at the time. Somehow, down in the deeps of my soul, Master Kelos was still
my
Master Kelos.

In the hierarchy of my life it had always gone from Namara to Kelos to me. The high priestess of Justice had barely even entered into it. Now Namara was dead and Kelos was . . . what? A traitor certainly, but beyond that, he was no longer
my
master. Somehow, that was so much worse than things had been when he was simply dead along with my goddess.

Despite Triss’s companionship, I suddenly felt alone in a way that I never had before, like I’d lost a layer of protection between me and the void. Maybe this was what it felt like for a normal person to lose a parent. I don’t know. I wanted to scream or cry or send a pillar of magelightning blasting into the heavens.

I did none of those things. I couldn’t. Discipline held me back and got me moving again. Bitterly, ironically, even poisonously, the very discipline drilled into me by Kelos Deathwalker kept me from acknowledging the pain now inflicted by that same Kelos Deathwalker.

Aral?
Triss spoke into my mind, but I couldn’t answer him because I wasn’t really there.

I was walking through the past at the same time I walked up the street. The day I summoned Triss was the very same day the priests gave me to Kelos. I was seven.

“Greetings, young Aral.” Always a big man, Kelos had seemed a giant to me, but one who now crouched down to put our eyes on a level. “The priests tell me that your bonding ceremony was successful.” He extended his hand. “That makes you my brother as well as my student. Welcome to the order and our mission, young Blade.”

I wasn’t truly a Blade yet, merely an apprentice, but Master Kelos was treating me like a man and his brother. Kelos Deathwalker! The Blade that all the other Blades used as an example. Heady stuff for a child raised by the priests to believe nothing was more important than our sacred mission. I extended my own hand to shake his, trying as hard as I could to mirror the way that he had offered his.

“Greetings, Master Kelos.” I wanted nothing more in the entire world than to justify the serious way Master Kelos treated me as he shook my hand and then released it. “The priests have informed me that you are to be my master and teach me the ways of the Blade.”

“I am that, son, as well as your brother.”

“I will try to justify the honor Namara has done me by giving Triss into my care today and me into yours.”

My shadow shifted then, for the first time since the summoning ceremony ended, as Triss took on his dragon shape and folded his wings and bowed his head. “Masster Keloss, mosst honored Resshath Malthiss, I—” Triss’s continued in Shade then, as he seemed to have exhausted his knowledge of the tongue of Varya.

Malthiss changed, too, assuming the form of a great basilisk coiled around Kelos’s neck and shoulders. “Triss, Aral, welcome. We have much to teach you.”

“And that ends the formalities,” said Kelos, with a grin. “Now, let me get you a pair of proper swords and show you to your new room.”

I half expected him to pick me up then, but he never treated me like a child. Oh, he gave me hugs when I needed them, as well as the occasional hiding. But from the very first day I entered his care to the moment I placed my Kila in the great orb of Namara and became a full Blade, he always accorded me the respect due to one of his full brethren. Perhaps more importantly, he was one of the very few who didn’t treat me any differently after I became the Kingslayer.

Oh, he was proud of me, none more, and he told me so the very first chance he got. But that didn’t keep him from pounding me in the salle the very next day, or scolding me in exactly the same way as he always had when I fucked up. It was a blessed relief, especially compared to the way the younger trainees started treating me after I killed Ashvik.

The funny thing was that it didn’t occur to me until years later that he probably would have loved to have someone who treated him as just another Blade. Not until shortly before the temple fell, in fact. But he was still
Kelos Deathwalker
to me at that point, and I never quite worked my way up to it. And now, I never would.

Are we going to meet Kelos?
Triss sent after a time.
You never answered my question.

I shrugged.
I’d give you an answer if I had one, Triss, but I don’t. I just . . . don’t.
I didn’t want to, but I wasn’t at all sure that we had much of a choice.

*   *   *

“Nice
place,” I said to Jax.

The snug was a large open attic room on the top floor of a warehouse. It stood just above the river docks on the western edge of the city. Not a bad location, but not a prime spot either, not even for a warehouse. Most of those lay on the far side of the city, along the harbor front where you could easily shift things from the sea-going ships to river barges. But there was a secondary hub here where a spur of the Great Coast Road made a loop around the back of the city to give wagons and livestock a route that didn’t run through the heart of the university district.

For reasons known only to the original builder, the place stood seven stories tall, which was two more than any of its neighbors. No one sane hauls crates up above the third floor even with a crane. For that matter, there was no real call for that much space, that many stories off the ground, so far out from the center of the city. All of which meant that Jax’s brother had been able to pick the place up for about half what the floor space might otherwise have justified.

In addition to being the main port of the Magelands, Ar and its river provided the only real route for goods to move from the coast inland to Dalridia. That meant that the Dalridian Crown, in the person of Jax’s brother, had significant interests in the city. Those included wanting some unobtrusive storage space for the odd bit of goods, or royal sibling for that matter.

Jax had taken over the entire southwest corner of the top floor, which mostly consisted of a big open room with lots of shuttered windows and a trapdoor that provided roof access. At the moment, the shutters were all flung wide, providing a beautiful view that took in the river, a good chunk of the coast road, and miles of farmland. The furnishings were sparse, a couch, a couple of chairs, a table, and a couple of rolled-up futons for sleeping.

Fully half the high-ceilinged room was empty save for a dozen or so large and badly mildew-stained rugs that provided some padding for falls in what was obviously an improvised salle. The sanitary facilities consisted of a closetlike room with a porcelain bucket and a small balcony that allowed it to be emptied unobtrusively into the river—as illegal here as it would have been in Tien. Baths could be had at a public bathhouse across the way, a fact Jax had mentioned to Faran as we passed the place.

I walked over to the nearest window and leaned out. “Really a nice place.” Though what I was thinking was, “How the hell am I going to get out of here without having Faran and Jax follow me?”

“You mentioned that already.” Jax gave me a rather suspicious look. “Are you feeling all right? Because you’ve seemed a little dazed ever since we left the waterfront area.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t generally like boats, but I’m finding it shockingly hard to get used to ground that doesn’t rock back and forth under my feet.”

“Right. Well, I need to go out, and I don’t think I’ll be back till well after dark. There’s food and drink in the amphorae along the back wall. Is there anything more you two need to know before I leave?”

“It’s barely past noon now,” said Faran, joining the conversation. “What’s going to take you so long?”

“Mostly a lot of very boring business for the Dalridian Crown, though there’s also the odd bit of spymastering. Part of the way I pay my keep and that of my students is by helping out Dalridian intelligence. In service of which, I need to talk to a couple of people at the university, as well as a few at the docks. After that, I have to stop in at the Dalridian embassy to see what our local eavesmen have picked up.”

Jax smiled. “You’re welcome to join me for most of it, if Aral will allow it.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, I couldn’t bring you along, Aral. That would be out of character, but I’ve dragged my students through the city often enough that no one will remark on Faran if she wants to come.” She turned back to Faran. “Of course, you’ll have to wait outside for several of my stops.”

“It’s fine by me,” I said. It would provide the perfect opportunity for me to step out without having to explain myself beyond a note on the table saying that I thought I’d seen something.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Ssithra said quietly from within Faran’s shadow.

Faran nodded. “Point. Besides, I already know all that I need to about the eavesman business.”

Faran had made an extremely good living the last few years playing the independent spy for a number of Crowns and services. Without knowing in advance who Jax’s contacts were, she’d be running the risk of bumping into past employers. Or worse, competitors.

Jax shrugged. “Makes no nevermind to me. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .” When neither of us argued, she waved good-bye and left.

We’d had lunch—mushroom and sausage kebabs from a street vendor—on the way across town, otherwise I’d have sent Faran off to find us food while I had a look around. I was just trying to think of some other way to get Faran out the door when she preempted me.

“I’m going to that bathhouse Jax showed us, and I’m going to take a good long soak,” she said. “Two weeks of nothing but cold saltwater for washing up is two weeks too many. Do you want to join me? You need it.”

“No, I’ll get a bath in later.” Faran gave me an odd look, and I realized that I needed to explain a bit more.

“I know I stink, but I don’t trust Jax and I want to give this place a really thorough going over before we settle in. I also want to check out escape routes. All of that’s likely to involve a lot of dirt and sweating. No point in having to take two baths in one day.” All of which was true, though not primarily for the obvious reasons.

“Suit yourself. I’m gone.”

That gave me something in the neighborhood of an hour alone. I spent it crawling all over the upper floors and roof of the warehouse and coming to one inescapable conclusion.

“We’re going to have to tell Faran about the meeting with Kelos.” I was looking out over the river from the southern windows for the third time as I said it.

A sail-jump would carry me down to the roof of one of the near continuous stream of passing barges. From there I could get aboard a water taxi to bury my shadow trail. It was a good plan . . . for stage two of my little trip to talk to Kelos, and it wouldn’t work this side of sunset. Unfortunately, stage one—getting out the window without having either Jax, Faran, or their Shade companions see me go was a nonstarter.

“So, we’re going then?” He didn’t sound happy.

Neither was I, and I still wasn’t certain, but I didn’t see a good way to avoid it. “I expect that we are, yes.”

Triss sighed, but he didn’t try to argue with me—not then anyway. “If we’re going, why don’t we just leave now?” He had taken dragon shape, though he stayed on the floor beside me, where the sun would have put him.

I sat down on the window ledge. “If we go now, Faran will come looking immediately, no matter how clever a note we leave. We can’t sail-jump in broad daylight without flashing a sign that says ‘Blade here’ for anyone who knows how to read it. So the chance she won’t find our trail approaches zero. You saw Kelos’s message when he signaled us down by the harbor. He told me to come alone, and he might react violently if I don’t. That could get very ugly very fast.”

“Then, leave from the baths in a couple of hours. Find some reason to put off bathing till the sun’s almost down. Faran’s already soaked for nearly an hour, she’s not going to want to go back so soon. That would give us a good half hour’s head start. If we can’t make that work for us, we’re so far past it that we shouldn’t even be in the game anymore.”