Authors: Kelly McCullough
“Don’t be ridiculous, Aral. I didn’t do it to be nice. You should know me better than that. Nice isn’t a part of my character. I did it because I wanted them out and alive so that I could bring them back into the fold later, once they’d had some time to let the memories fade a bit. Neither did I
arrange
for the fall of the temple. The Son of Heaven was going to move against Namara one way or another. What I arranged was a way to salvage something from the ashes of our collective ruin.”
What could I say to that? What could I do? When I was twenty-one, a building came apart around me in the middle of an escape. I got clipped upside the head by a chunk of falling beam in the process. It’d left me seeing double for a while and screwed up my thinking for days afterward. I felt that same sick confusion now, but instead of pain in my head I felt a vicious gnawing void in my chest and gut.
Aral?
Triss spoke into my mind, and he sounded every bit as anguished as I felt.
What do we do?
I don’t know. I’m lost. One second I want to cut out his heart and feed it to him. But the next, I remember how much he did to make me who I am, and I want so desperately to have a reason to forgive him that I can almost believe that the only way he could save any of us was by betraying Namara.
Kelos reached into the trick bag at his side and pulled out a small package tightly wrapped in black silk. “I know you don’t trust me. You shouldn’t. You have no reason to. But I have to go now, and I don’t know whether I’ll get the chance to see you again before you have to deal with the Signet’s ambush. You’re going to need this. Here.” He tossed it over.
As I caught it, Kelos shrouded up, vanishing into shadow. For a few beats I could still pretty much guess where he was by a combination of experience, intuition, and observation. But that quickly passed, and Triss and I were alone.
Silently, I opened the package and found two items. The first was a Shade stick—a short length of thick wooden rod with numerous holes drilled through it at a variety of angles. It would hold a message or, more likely, a map readable only with the help of a Shade. I put it aside for later perusal.
The second item was a small silver box with a piece of parchment across the latch that said “Do NOT remove the ring.” Flipping it open, I exposed a gold signet ring still on the finger that had once worn it. Though I wanted nothing more than to close the box and throw it away—I’ve killed plenty of people, but the idea of keeping trophies turned my stomach—I forced myself to look at it closely. Where it had connected to the hand someone had attached a thick disk of bone or antler. Both the ring and the disk glowed brightly in magesight. There was a second, much smaller Shade stick tucked in next to the finger.
Grisly little package.
Triss extended a tendril of shadow.
Let’s see . . . the big stick’s a map. The little one’s a note about the ring, but I can’t tell more without doing this properly and this is neither the time nor the place.
Shaking my head, I carefully closed the box and rewrapped the little package, tucking it away in my trick bag. We needed to examine the contents more closely, but Triss was right. Then I stripped off my wrist sheaths and dropped them into the bag beside the package. Tomorrow, before we got on the boat I would have to buy some leather so that I could make new straps.
I’d have to be careful not to let Jax see them or the package, or she’d want to know what happened. That would pose a problem, since I wasn’t yet willing to tell her about Kelos and didn’t think I’d be up to making something up anytime soon. Next, I moved to pulling my swords out of the roof, which proved harder than expected. Kelos was an exceedingly strong man, and I ultimately had to get Triss to help me.
My final Kelos-delivered surprise of the evening came when I tried to pull the wardblack off the wall behind me. It was a clever piece of work, and I wanted to stash it somewhere for later study. But, as soon as it came free of the wards it had kept muffled, it became briefly too hot to touch, and then came apart in a puff of ashes when I dropped it.
All my elaborate planning with Faran went for nothing when Jax didn’t make it home till after I’d gotten back. I told Faran enough of the story to satisfy her curiosity, though I omitted any mention of the finger. Before I could show her the map, Jax came in, deliberately making noise as she opened the roof hatch to let us know she’d arrived. After the others dropped off to sleep, I pulled out the tucker bottle of Kyle’s that I’d picked up on the way home and got quietly drunk. Triss didn’t say a word.
* * *
The
day to day of travel is really only interesting to the participants. The riverboat gave the three of us more time to spar and train together, which was going to be key to making things work if Jax ever came clean, or to dealing with her if she didn’t, for that matter. It also gave us plenty of time in too-close quarters to get on each other’s nerves and inflict loads of mutual misery.
I drank more than I should have and obsessed about Kelos and his mysterious package—which I still hadn’t gotten a chance to examine privately in any detail. Jax spent much of her time sinking into an ever more visible slough of despond. Faran sharpened her knives and spent a lot of time staring at the back of Jax’s neck. The Shades quietly talked amongst themselves, enjoying the trip far more than their respective bond-mates. Whenever I asked Triss what they were talking about he told me I wouldn’t understand. Mostly, I believed him.
It took us nearly three weeks to travel against the current from Ar to the landing stage where the road to Tavan met the river at Fi Township. There, we rented a mule to carry our gear and started walking south. Since horses are my next least favorite way to travel after boats, walking was just fine by me. The road ran between low rolling hills covered with small copses of trees and long stretches of farmland. This part of the Magelands provided the bulk of the food consumed in the big university cities: Ar, Gat, Tavan, Uln, and Har.
Periodically a small town or village straddled the road, and even here, several days travel from the nearest of the universities, magic sparkled and shone a hundred times more densely than anywhere in Tien. The spells were mostly small ones, just as the local mages tended to be hedge witches and petty wizards. But every lock had a keytrue charm and every window a shatternot.
The first night off the boat we stayed at an inn, delighted to have separate rooms and more privacy than at any time since we’d left Tien. That’s when Triss and I finally got a chance to examine the package in detail. We started with the big Shade stick.
First, I doused all the lamps in the room but one. Then I held the stick up to the light at an angle that cast its shadow on the wall precisely six feet away. Turning it slowly, I worked until I got the alignment just right, with light passing through two larger holes at either end to make pinpoints of brightness in the shadow. Then Triss flowed down my arm, completely covering the stick in darkness.
Projecting himself into and through the holes, he made cross connections following some formula only the Shades knew, and sketched out a three dimensional line drawing in the air. At its center stood a large multistory building with a half dozen major outbuildings around it, the whole enclosed by a high wall.
Looks like an abbey,
I sent rather than said, in case one of the others was listening through the wall.
Yes, almost certainly the one where Loris and the others are being held. We’ll have to memorize it.
I nodded.
Is there anything else?
Yes.
He shifted and the abbey faded away to be replaced by densely written text in Kelos’s hand but the language of the Shades.
Looks like a list of the abbey’s inhabitants, and another of the Signet’s current entourage. Do you want me to read it to you?
Later, after I’ve got the layout memorized.
Do you want to work on that first? Or should we look at the message that came with the finger?
Finger. Better to get it over with.
I shuddered at the thought of the thing Kelos had given me. Though I knew of a number of peoples who made trophies of their fallen enemies—skulls for cups and the like—it was not something that Blades did. Not sane ones anyway. Knowing Kelos, I doubted that was its main purpose, but I still really hated the idea of touching the thing. With extreme reluctance, I retrieved the box from my bag and opened it.
I can lift it out of there if you’d like,
Triss offered.
No, I’ll do it. I’m going to have to touch it sometime, and I might as well get it over with now.
I reached down . . . and promptly dropped both box and finger, spilling the latter on the ground along with the smaller Shade stick. I managed not to let out a shriek, but only just. The finger was still warm. Somehow, against all logic and reason, and after three weeks of riding around in my bag, it was still warm.
In fact, it felt exactly as if it were still attached to a living hand.
13
F
ear
touches everyone. The soldier who panics at the sight of snakes, the torturer afraid of the dark, the murderer who abhors the deep blue sea. No matter how hard you think life has made you, no matter how many lives you’ve ended, no matter how many darkened alleys you’ve walked down, you have a breaking point. Apparently, a severed but still living finger was one of mine.
Aral!
Triss wrapped himself around my shoulders, a cool but firm presence.
Are you all right?
I nodded.
I will be. I just wasn’t expecting it to still be warm.
I pushed at the finger with my boot tip.
I’m sorry, I should have warned you. I felt it when I first touched it.
It’s all right, Triss. How is it . . . no, that’s silly. It’s magic, of course. But why?
Breathing deeply as I had been taught—by Kelos, ironically—I forced myself to relax.
Calm the body and the mind will follow.
He must have told me that a thousand times.
Once I felt like myself again, I reached down and picked up the finger. It felt disturbingly alive, and it took every shred of discipline I had to turn it so that I could look at the bone disk instead of flinging the damn thing across the room. I was so going to need a drink after this.
A silver nail head centered the disk, presumably driven through and into the bone of the finger on the other side. It was surrounded by a tracery of tiny glyphs and a single word carved in the runic alphabet of Aven—Kelos’s name. I had to suppress another shudder at that. Though I hadn’t yet parsed the spell’s specifics, I instantly knew the only possible reason for Kelos to include his name like that. He had tied the functioning of the spell to the magical force of his own life, his nima.
The vast majority of magic happens in the moment, for the moment. What we call “low magic”—things like magefire, or summoning an item across a room—is the simple manipulation of forces. But even most high magic is temporary. Wards, for example, require regular renewal—weekly or even daily. Things like my thieveslamp or a window’s shatternot are longer lasting. They might survive a year or more depending on who casts them, but those, too, will fade without regular renewal.
Permanent enchantments take a lot of power. Far more than any one spellcaster can muster in a single session. They need to be built one step at a time over days or weeks, layering in spell after spell to achieve the desired results. That’s for the simplest of things. Greatspells take months or even years to build, though the most powerful sorcerers can collapse the process somewhat and a god can do even more.
Namara had created my temple swords in a seeming instant and those embodied multiple greatspells—though again, there were limits even to what a goddess could do. It was a rare year that saw more than a half dozen Blades become masters. That many usually died as well and their swords returned to the goddess, so she was able to use the power from the old to create the new, more often than not.
There are other ways around the time constraints, for those who are willing to find the price. Blood magic in all its forms is the most obvious. At the darkest extreme of that scale lies necromancy, which uses stolen life force to fuel magic out of all proportion to the caster’s strength. What Kelos had done lay at the other end of the same line, tying his own life to a spell in a small but steady draw that would last as long as he did. No one was harmed by it except for Kelos, but it was still blood magic and fundamentally unclean.
Unicorn horn,
said Triss.
What?
The bone plug on the end of the finger. It’s a segment of unicorn horn. It’s been carefully polished. But you can still see the spiral structure if you look closely at the edges, especially down in the bottoms of the glyphs carved around the outside.
I whistled low and quiet. Unicorn horn is fucking expensive, right up there with dragon bones and salamander blood. The original owners are magical creatures of enormous power and homicidal disposition, and they do not look kindly on corpse robbers. Still, I could see why Kelos had chosen it, no better medium existed for spells of vitality. It would make what had been done with this finger much easier to pull off.
Aral!
Triss voice rang loud in my mind.
Yes?
Look at the ring.
I’d almost forgotten about it in my revulsion at the thing that wore it. Now, I turned my gaze on the gold signet . . . and nearly dropped the damn finger again. It was a starkly simple design. The band was watermarked in a cloud pattern, but otherwise unremarkable. The seal itself was an oval surrounded by a jagged band of lightning and imprinted with a six-fingered hand—the emblem of Heaven’s Hand.
Is this what I think it is?
I asked Triss.
I’m pretty sure that it is, but let’s see what the Shade stick has to say.
We repeated the process we’d used earlier. This time there was no map, just a page or so of text in Shade. Triss read it, translating for me as he went along.
“Aral,
“This is the ring and finger of Eilif Uvarkas, Signet to the Daughter of Heaven and master of Heaven’s Hand in the year 3130. I took his life of my own choice rather than at the command of Namara, though I think she would have ordered his execution soon enough had he lived. He abused his power and he deserved to die.
“This finger is the reason I could not wait for Namara’s sanction. Had his life fallen to her decree, his body would have been left as a warning for others and the loss of hand and ring might have come to light. I refused to allow that to happen, sending the body into the everdark and burning a castle to hide its loss. Otherwise, the least response of the Daughter of Heaven would have been to change the spells on all the locks of all the temples of Shan, and that would not have suited my plans.
“As long as this ring stays on this living finger, the bearer has a key that will open any lock in Heaven’s mortal kingdom. Do not let it fall into the wrong hands. Do not show it to anyone. I expect its safe return at the end of your present mission for me.
“Kelos.”
I looked at the ring and finger again. Kelos had been holding onto this magical skeleton key for almost a hundred years. That led to a whole mess of questions. Like, why did he make it in the first place? And, what was he planning on doing with it when he got it back from me? Or, why trust me with it now?
I didn’t think I’d much like any of the answers, though I knew that ultimately I needed to find them. Without saying another word, I put both ring and finger back in their box. The accompanying note from Kelos I destroyed. Then I asked Triss to show me the map again. The abbey was large and complex, and my memory was not what it once was. I knew it would take some hours over several sessions to really set it in my mind.
Fortunately, we spent the next couple of days traveling through populated country and our nights at inns, which gave me the time I needed. Our fourth day on the road found us high on a spur of foothills that came down off the Hurnic Mountains to the west. With so much good land north and east, no one had bothered to colonize these stony ridges, and we were, ourselves, alone and far from any inns or houses when the light started to fail.
The weather was fine and we had nothing to fear from bandits or any but the most fearsome of beasts. So, when we came to a small oak wood, we turned off the road and looked for a good place to lay in a fire and camp for the night. While I got the fire going, the women went out a-hunting. Faran and Ssithra killed a good sized huddle bird, and Jax and Sshayar turned up some lovely fat mushrooms and a few apples that we could roast along with the fowl.
The fire was merry and the Shades took delight in slipping in and out amidst the flickering shadows it created, playing a sort of dancing game of tag—phoenix, tiger, and dragon. The meal was excellent, and wanted only a bottle of wine or whiskey to make a real feast of it. But the small beer didn’t taste half bad. After most of a skin—neither Jax nor Faran would touch the stuff despite how weak it was—I felt very nearly relaxed for the first time in more weeks than I cared to count.
I think Faran felt the same way, and we bantered back and forth for quite a while before I noticed that Jax had gone silent. When I shot her a questioning look, she quietly backed away from the fire and shook her head.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Stomach’s not sitting quite right.” She put her hand to her mouth. “I need to go off a bit and deal with it.” Before I could say another thing, she turned away and hurried into the darkness beyond the fire.
Faran sat up and looked after her. “Do you think she’s going to be all right?”
“No,” said Triss. “She’s poisoned herself, though it’s not the mushrooms she fed you that did the job. It’s bottling up fear and guilt and six years of unrelenting anger. I hope she figures out how to let it go before it kills her.”
Faran cocked her head to one side. “Can something like that really kill you?”
Triss looked at me in a way that made me very uncomfortable before he spoke, “Oh yes. Not directly perhaps, but there are as many ways to die as there are stars in the night sky. If a person starts looking for their own death, they’re bound to find it eventually.”
Faran’s face creased with a pain I’d seen there too often these last few months, and she turned to stare into the fire. Fifteen and full of bitter memory. I hated to see her hurting but I was too wounded myself to believe anything would help her but time.
She nodded lightly toward the flames. “They started with fire, did you know that?”
“No. I saw the scorch marks in the rubble, of course, but by the time I got there it was far too late to make any sense of the mess.” I didn’t have to ask what she was talking about—the fall of the temple was still a raw wound for me six years later. “The buildings were all shattered and the rubble had been pushed into the cellars. They’d plowed up the fields and sown salt in the furrows.”
Faran nodded. “I saw all that when I went back a year or two after.” She closed her eyes tight as a fist. “It started with lightning all around, igniting the orchards and the wheat in the fields. The Storms, of course, though we didn’t know it at first. They came at noon and late in the summer when the sun is strong and the Shades are weak. The whole complex was ringed with fire in minutes, miles and miles of fire.”
“That’s why we couldn’t take the little ones to safety,” whispered Ssithra. “Between the fire and the sun, the heat and the light were simply too intense for us to do much of anything but hide in our bond-mates’s shadows.”
“Then the lightning started to fall inside the walls,” continued Faran. “Master Tamerlen was leading a few of us toward the main building when she was struck. Her hair caught fire and her eyes boiled. I see it again and again in my dreams. . . . I don’t think I’ll ever be able to unsee it.”
I got up from where I’d been lying with my feet to the fire and walked over to kneel beside Faran, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.” Faran didn’t reply, but she did lean her head against my forearm.
“You wouldn’t have changed anything, Aral.” Jax’s voice came from behind me. “You’d have died with so many of the others . . . if you were lucky. If you weren’t you’d have been taken by the Hand.”
I turned to look over my shoulder, but couldn’t see Jax in the darkness. I realized that if Master Kelos were there right now, I wouldn’t have hesitated to kill him. How could he have done this to them? To us?
I shook my head and started to answer Jax, “But—”
“But me no buts,” she said quietly but firmly. “I know what I’m talking about. I dreamed about how things might have gone differently if you’d been there to help. You and Siri and Kaman. We were short a dozen of our very best that day.”
A darker shadow slid out from between the trees, and Jax continued, though she didn’t yet show herself. “When they had me on the rack I fantasized about how you all might have changed things, and I hated each and every last one of you for not being there for us.”
My throat constricted. “Jax, I . . .” What? What could I say that would make the slightest bit of difference?
“It’s all right, Aral. Even then, I knew I was lying to myself, that your presence would have done nothing but increased the body count. I needed the lie then. Needed it for years afterward. I couldn’t have done . . . well, a lot of things over the time since then without it. Most especially I couldn’t have done what I’ve been doing since that day at the Gryphon’s Head.”
She dropped her shroud as she got closer to the fire and to us. “Without lying to myself, I couldn’t have lied to you. But I’m done with the lies now. We need to talk.”
“It’s about damned time!” Sshayar twisted herself out of Jax’s shadow and into the shape of a tiger slipping around in front of her. “I thought sure you were going to force Faran into killing you. Or worse, Aral.”
“What?” Jax looked completely flabbergasted.
“Oh, Jax, I do despair of humans sometimes. You know how good Aral is, and you’ve seen a bit of what Faran can do. Did you honestly think that one or both of them wouldn’t figure it out given time? I didn’t even have to tell them, they already knew.”
Jax looked from me to Faran and back again, her expression shocked. “You know that the Hand is using Loris and the others as hostages to force me into betraying Aral to them?”
I nodded.
Jax rolled her eyes. “Then why in the name of all that was once holy have you been sitting here with your faces to the fire and your backs to the shadows and me? And why did you let me feed you mushrooms of unknown provenance?”
I smiled at her, though it wasn’t a happy smile. “Because I thought I owed it to you to give you the chance to do what you’re doing right now.”
“You are a complete and total madman, and infuriating to boot. You do know that, right?”
Triss said, “If he doesn’t, it’s not for lack of hearing it from me. But really, in this case I agree with him. Sshithra and Sshayar and I have been talking it over, and contrary to Sshayar’s worries, none of us would have let you harm each other. We’ve been quietly trying to figure out amongst the three of us if there wasn’t some way we could get you to just get on with your confession so we could start working on a real plan.”