Authors: Kelly McCullough
When it comes, I throw myself backward, rolling desperately as I hit the floor. The Signet gets off two or three blasts, none of which connect, but I pick up a lot of bruises and a couple of burns from the near misses. Then comes the noise I’ve been hoping for, an enormous crash that ends in a scream. I bounce back to my feet and see that Jax has come through.
She’s taken the finger I threw her and pressed it to the side of the altar, triggering the movement of the giant statue’s mighty stone arms. Its
badly cracked
stone arms. With my last attack, I pushed the Signet back just far enough to put her under the hand of her own damned god.
I don’t know if Namara’s ghost heard my prayer. I don’t know if she answered me in the voice of the woman I once loved. I don’t know if this struck her as the perfect justice for one of those most responsible for the destruction of her temple and her legacy. All that I know is that the five-thousand-pound fractured stone hand of Shan has fallen from its broken wrist as I hoped it would, crushing the Signet like the mantis she so resembles.
She’s been touched by the hand of her god,
Triss said into my mind.
It doesn’t seem to have worked out for her.
He’s got the Storm pinned now against the chest of Shan’s statue. It’s still struggling, so I know the Signet isn’t dead yet, but it’s only a matter of time. No one survives the kind of injuries she has now. The entire right side of her skull is dished in and covered in blood, that and one arm is all that’s visible under the broken stone, but it’s enough. The Storm jerks violently, and there’s a sharp crackle like carefully sequenced miniature lightning.
I’m letting it go,
says Triss a moment later.
It wants to go to her and it promises not to attack us.
If you’re sure.
He doesn’t answer, just releases his grip on the thing. It flits down to hover over the great stone hand, a wild woeful keening coming from somewhere in the vicinity of its head. I dismiss it from my mind and move toward Jax as Triss reshrouds me. I can’t see her, but there’s a deeper patch of shadow near the front of the dais.
“Jax?” I don’t like that I can’t see her and her injuries. “How bad it is?”
“Later.” Her voice comes out of the shadow, sounding even weaker than it had in my ear earlier. I wonder how she did that but this isn’t the time to ask. “Now, you need to finish this.”
“You’re right.” She is, but I need to tell her about Loris. Especially if she’s dying.
“That may be the first time you’ve ever told me I was right.”
I relax a little. If she’s up to giving me a jab, she can’t be quite at death’s door.
“It may be the first time it’s been true. Look, I have to go back to the fight, but . . .” There’s no gentle way to say it. “Loris is dead.” I hear a sharp hiss of indrawn breath, but Jax doesn’t say anything, and I can’t stay. “He saved us all, but he didn’t make it.”
Faran screams then—an agonized sound—and I turn and run back to the fight. I can’t find her in the darkness, which is good. It means she’s still shrouded and not dead, but it doesn’t reassure. As I’m looking for her, I see a Hand swing an axe low and fast into a patch of shadow. The scream is deeper this time, Javan to judge by the foot and calf left behind when the shadow rolls aside. I split the Hand’s skull down to the teeth, losing my sword when it wedges in bone. A small group of Swords rushes me then.
Killing them takes me more time than it has any right to—I’m exhausted. More keep coming, drawn by the little knot of fighting perhaps. When it stops, I realize that I can’t see any movement anywhere. I turn a slow circle there in the middle of the sanctum floor and still don’t see anything but the falling rain and flashing lightning.
Unshroud me, Triss. I need to find the others.
He doesn’t say anything, just collapses, first to a thin skin of darkness, and then down into my normal shadow.
Are you all right?
I ask.
Have to rest a bit. That’s all. Wake me if you need me.
I can feel him letting go then, dropping almost instantly into sleep, and wish that I could do the same.
“I’ve been watching your back.” It’s Faran, speaking through gritted teeth from somewhere close by. “They’re all dead. We won.”
She releases her shroud and I feel a sick weight in my stomach. The entire left side of her head is covered in blood, and she’s got a strip of cloth bound across her eye.
“It’s better than it looks,” she says. “At least I really hope it is.”
Roric appears at her shoulder, close but beyond easy stabbing range—sensible under the circumstances. “Let me see it, Faran. Master Loris was training me in healing magics.”
I want to help, but I can see that Roric’s got it under control, and I’ve just remembered Javan. “Thiess!” I yell. “Where are you? It’s over.”
“Here! Hurry!” The Shade’s voice is shaky with fear.
As I head in that direction, Maryam steps out of shadows in front of me, coming from the other direction. Judging by the stains on the shirt Faran had brought her from the dead Sword earlier, she’s got a deep gash across the ribs under her right breast. Probably some broken ribs, too, but she seems to be handling the injuries all right. In a moment she’s kneeling over the suddenly visible Javan. He’s pale from loss of blood and covered in sweat, but still breathing.
“Can you handle him for the moment?” I ask. “I left Jax by the altar and she’s badly hurt, too.”
“Go,” says Maryam, and I do.
I’m halfway back across the sanctum floor when it really sinks in that we’ve won. My knees go soggy, and I can suddenly feel every bruise and cut. My nose feels like some demented squirrel has been using it to hide walnuts. I’m going to have to get one of the others to set it for me, but that will have to wait. Jax first.
By the time I reach her, I’ve started to settle back into something resembling a normal relationship with my sense of time and space. The Signet’s storm is curled against the fallen stone hand. Tiny lightnings are still occasionally crackling here and there in its wings, but faintly. They’re taking a long painful time dying, but it won’t be long now. If I were a better person, I might feel badly about that. I’m not and I don’t.
“Jax? It’s over.”
“My students?” She dropped her shroud.
I winced at the sight of her—she’d broken her left leg and arm at the very least, judging by the angle of the one and the sling holding the other. There was probably more I couldn’t easily see, but I knew better than to ask about her injuries before answering her question.
“Roric and Maryam are mostly fine but Javan’s lost his right leg below the knee. I don’t know if he’ll make it, but Maryam’s trying.”
“Leyan?”
“Dead, crushed in a cave-in engineered by the Signet.”
“Bastards. Faran?”
“All right, I hope. She’s bloodied up pretty badly and she’s got a bandage over her left eye.”
“Why are you here with me then?”
“Roric’s taking care of her, and I was the only one who knew you were even present. How bad are you?”
“Leg’s broken in two places, arm in one. Cracked some ribs and I was coughing up blood earlier, but that seems to have settled down, so it’s probably not going to kill me right away. Worst is my left hand.” She touched the sling with her other hand, and I noticed the blood soaking it for the first time. “I’ll be shocked if I don’t lose a couple of fingers.”
“The Son of Heaven is going to pay for this!” The words come from somewhere deep down inside me, and it felt more like they were speaking themselves through my mouth than that I was saying them. “I’ll
make
him pay for it.”
Before I could say anything further, there was a tremendous flash from behind me and another enormous crash of thunder as the Signet and her bond-mate died. Good. It was a start. Then a thought occurred to me, but if I was going to make it a reality, I would have to move
very
quickly.
“Jax, can you hold on a few minutes more? I’ve business with the Signet, or what’s left of her.”
She gave me an odd look but nodded. “Do what you have to.”
20
I
stared at the mountainside and saw my soul. The snow above the old Dalridian castle burned white in the sun, hurting my eyes, but I couldn’t turn away. It perfectly reflected the cold anger I felt in my bones, frozen, deadly, and utterly unmelting even here at the tail end of summer.
More than three weeks had passed since the debacle at the abbey in the Magelands. Three weeks spent mostly in traveling to this place, Jax and Loris’s refuge in the mountains. We’d started out on the river coming up from below Tavan to Uln by barge and boat, the gentlest transport we could find for our wounded.
We’d had to hire porters to carry the stretchers that held Jax and Javan over the goat tracks above Uln that were the only way into Dalridia this far south. Roric and I had ended up trading off carrying Faran for a good part of that leg, too, when she went delirious on us. We’d made the final passage of the journey by royal Dalridian coach which provided some luxury, but we’d never once stopped moving.
We all would have liked to rest and recover a while in Tavan, at the healer’s hall attached to the university, right at the beginning. But we didn’t dare risk staying longer than it took them to treat the worst of our collective injuries. It was just too dangerous to stay anywhere there was any chance the Son of Heaven’s people might find us. We had hurt him as no one had since Namara’s fall.
More than three hundred followers of Shan had died at the abbey, nearly a third at our hands, the rest in the great storm and the flood that came with it. The temple proper was the only building that had even two walls standing at the end of the night. Not long after the end of the battle it had lost the rest of its roof when the main vault gave way. We’d have been crushed if we hadn’t already retreated to the storage space under the stairs to get out of the worst of the wind and the rain.
Roric and Maryam and I had spent most of the next morning digging our way out of the wreckage with the help of our three Shades, where muscle simply wouldn’t do the trick. The devastation we found when we finally broke through into the daylight was like nothing I’d ever seen. The abbey had been destroyed utterly and the bodies of most of its inhabitants would never be found. For that matter so had a huge swath of the surrounding countryside.
For several miles in every direction it looked like the aftermath of some mad cyclonic country dance. Great slithering tracks of destruction crisscrossed the landscape in a pattern centered on the temple’s sanctum. Not a tree stood unbroken in the surrounding orchards, nor a single stalk of wheat in the fields. Death had taken everything that lived, a death that I had brought with me into this place.
The sight filled me with a sick anger that I hadn’t felt in such measure since I saw my goddess lying broken and dead on the bottom of the sacred lake. If I’d had a bottle of whiskey or anything else with alcohol in it I’d have drunk it down without a thought. But I didn’t, I had to face that destruction sober and without anything to blur my understanding of my part in it.
I think that’s what cemented my decision to kill the Son of Heaven more than anything. Faran was right when she’d accused me of sentimentality. I didn’t like killing anyone I didn’t have to. For most of my career as a Blade I’d managed to avoid ghosting very many people who didn’t deserve it, mostly keeping the deaths confined to my targets and the people who guarded them. Probably no more than a couple of score total, and most of those in self-defense. Till now.
I didn’t regret the Hand or the Sword, the people we killed directly with steel and magic. As far as I was concerned, they had earned their deaths on the day my goddess died. But the clergy and the lay brothers and sisters who made up the bulk of the abbey’s regular inhabitants had done nothing directly to me or mine. If they were not quite innocent of the blood of my brethren and my goddess, still they hadn’t done anything to deserve this. That was without counting any farmers or other bystanders taken by the storms or the floods as they flowed away downstream.
Those deaths now belonged on my tally, and I would answer for them when I faced the lords of judgment. But I would not answer for them alone. Not one drop of blood would have been spilled here had not the Son and his Signet struck the first blow by taking Loris and the others prisoner. The Signet I had already taken to account—absently, I touched the pouch at my side where two beringed fingers now resided in near matching boxes. But the Son had yet to pay his share of the butcher’s bill. Both for the deaths at the abbey last month, and for the deaths at Namara’s temple six years ago.
It was time Shan’s chief priest faced justice. And if it was a justice tainted with that ideal’s darker cousin, revenge, than that, too, was something I was willing to have on my account when I faced my own judgment. The priests and Blades who raised me had taught me that revenge was not the province of Namara, that it lessened her glory when the two commingled. But Namara was dead, and her priests with her, and my frozen heart wanted hot blood spilled to warm it.
“Master Aral, are you up here again?” It was Faran’s voice, still weak and weary nearly a month on, and the sound of it made the ice in my heart burn a little colder.
I turned back to the stairhead where Faran had just poked her nose out the door. She looked gaunt and pale, and the scar that ran from her forehead down under her eyepatch and out onto her cheekbone stood out red and raw. The healers had saved the eye, though they said she had at best even odds of recovering her vision or of ever seeing the end of the headaches that had started in the days after the injury. She was under strict orders to rest as much as she could, and oughtn’t have been climbing the stairs to the castle’s highest tower, but I had no one to blame for that but myself.
“I’m here,” I said. “Just looking at the mountains again.”
“Well, Jax was asking after you, and I said I’d come find you, though Roric tried to take the task for himself. Will you come down?” She sounded sad and quiet, unsure of herself in a way that was utterly out of character—more ice around my heart.
“Tell her I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
You should go now.
Triss sounded more than a little sad and unsure himself.
Don’t send Faran away alone. Not again.
He was worried about me, and not without reason. I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since the abbey. Not because I hadn’t wanted to. Damn me, but I wanted a drink. Wanted one more than almost anything I’d ever wanted before. Wanted to surrender to the bottle and let it blur away some of the pain.
But I didn’t want it more than I wanted to hand the Son of Heaven his own heart before he died. And I was
not
going to let anything get in the way of that goal, nor let go of one shred of the pain and anger that drove me toward it. If I lived through the experience, there would be plenty of time to get drunk after the Son of Heaven was dead. Until then, nothing could get in my way.
She’s still waiting,
said Triss,
and you owe her more than the Son of Heaven’s heart served up in a pretty package.
He was right, of course. I shook myself free of the cold rage, or at least as much as I could.
“Come here, Faran. I’ve been neglecting you, and I’m sorry for that.”
She crossed the short distance from stairhead to tower wall to stand beside me. “It’s all right, really. I’ve been spending time with the other students. Altia’s here and she was one of my best friends back at the temple. Jaeris, too.” Her face clouded even more. “We’ve grown apart though, since then. Their experiences were so different. Especially Altia’s. She was one of the first Loris and Jax found. . . .”
I put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her in tight against my side, though I didn’t have any comforting words.
“For her it’s almost like the fall of the temple was a brief nightmare between safe havens, horrible but fleeting,” continued Faran. “She doesn’t understand what I went through or what I had to do to survive. I think she believes I’ve betrayed my training a little. It makes me feel like some sort of actual monster, where you calling me one never did.”
“You aren’t and never have been any kind of monster but mine. You’ve done nothing that you should be ashamed of, and if Altia says that you have, perhaps I should have a few words with her . . . my young monster.”
She wrinkled her nose, then smiled and squeezed me back. “You really are a horrible old man, and thank you for offering, but please don’t. She hasn’t said a word. It’s just the way she looks at me, and I think that it will pass with time. We were good friends once.” Then she settled in against my side and was quiet for a little while.
I’ll deal with it,
Triss said angrily into my mind.
Olthiss knows better than to let her bond-mate get away with that sort of judgmental rubbish. And if she doesn’t, she will when I’m done with her. Probably best if you don’t tell Faran though. Some things are better handled among Shades. We don’t have silly illusions about our companion’s better natures.
Thank you. We’re going to have to go after the Son of Heaven soon, and I want Faran to feel at home here while we’re gone.
Triss made a sort of mental tut-tutting noise.
Speaking of not having illusions, I’m a bit worried about the state of the Blade you’ve chosen for this mission, companion mine. While I approve of parting the Son of Heaven from this life as soon as ever it becomes possible, making it personal makes for mistakes.
That’s Kelos talking,
I replied.
And right now he’s only sitting a tiny jot below the death mark on my list himself. If he’d done more than just jam those locks, Loris and Issaru might still be with us along with Leyan and Ulriss. I still don’t know what his game is in all this, nor his exact role in the death of Namara, but I don’t trust him as far as I could toss a stone dog, and I don’t like what he’s become one little bit. If he gets in my way, I may have to kill him, too.
Or die trying,
Triss sighed.
Or die trying,
I acknowledged.
At least he hasn’t come after that finger yet. I half expected him to show up at the abbey as we were digging out and demand it back.
Me, too, which is why I made the second one from Nea’s hand. I just wish I’d done half as good a job with mine as Kelos did with his. I don’t know if it’ll even work.
You had a few distractions to deal with, and less time to prepare.
There is that.
Faran sighed, gave me another squeeze, and then slipped out from under my arm. “We’d better go. Jax was already sounding pretty irritated when she first asked after you, and that’s a while ago now.”
“I don’t doubt it. She doesn’t like being laid up any more than you do, and she’s a lot less capable of getting around right now.”
Bones took forever to heal if you wanted to make sure they did so fully and properly, even with magic speeding the process. And Jax’s left leg was broken in four places, not the two I’d initially thought. She was lucky she hadn’t lost it at the knee the way Javan had. She couldn’t use a crutch yet either, not with that arm broken and almost half her hand gone—her luck had failed her there, though she’d probably be able to hold a sword again in a few months.
One more thing to add to the bloody bill I intended to deliver to the Son of Heaven. My broken nose and couple of dozen stitches barely even figured into it compared to the others. Only Roric had come off lighter in the battle, though the torturers of the Hand had done him enough injury to balance us pretty evenly. If the temple yet stood, we would both have been cleared back to active service, with Maryam perhaps a week or two behind us while she waited for her cracked ribs to finish healing.
I helped Faran down the stairs, though she claimed repeatedly that she was fine. Judging by the sheen of sweat on her forehead when we hit bottom, I probably should have insisted on carrying her. She led me to the solar where Jax was taking her lunch, then vanished, obviously on earlier instruction. That left just the two of us and our Shades once Jax sent away the servant who’d carried her up from her rooms.
I raised an eyebrow. “You wanted to see me?”
“Obviously. Are you still planning on going after the Son of Heaven?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t the first time she’d asked, nor even the fifth, and I didn’t much feel like talking about it anymore.
She looked at my shadow. “Triss, what do you think of this?” It was the first time she’d put him on the spot about it.
He shifted into dragon form to speak, and Ssithra matched his change out of courtesy. “I think that the Son of Heaven needs to die,” he said.
Jax rolled her eyes. “So do I. So does everyone in this whole castle not excluding the grooms and potboys. What I want to know is what you think about Aral doing it, and insisting on doing it right now.”
“I’m not leaving for a week, Jax. I’d put it off longer than that if I wasn’t worried about an early snow closing the passes.”
“Dammit Aral, what’s the hurry?” asked Jax. “It’s going to take you two months to get there no matter when you leave. Why can’t you at least wait till next spring?”
I sighed. I didn’t want to tell her the truth, but I didn’t think she was going to stop arguing with me until I did. “I’m afraid I’ll lose my resolve.”
“That would be fabulous, as far as I’m concerned,” snapped Jax. “This entire plan is crazy, and we need you here. With Loris gone, I’m alone now. You’re a full Blade, and a better one in most ways than I ever was. You have so much to teach my students, why can’t you stay here and do it?”
“Because I’m not going to do your students one damn bit of good as an alcohol-soaked sponge sitting in the corner and drooling! And that’s what’s going to happen to me if I lose my resolve. I want a drink right now, Jax. I wanted one when I got up this morning, and when I went to bed last night. I want one like I haven’t in more than a year.”
“You haven’t had one drink since we got here,” she said.
“That’s because I have a goal that matters to me more than my soul right now. The only way I’m holding it together is by picturing the look on the Son of Heaven’s face when I feed him his own liver. That’s what the fucking fight at the abbey did to me, Jax. It pushed me right back over the edge, and now I’m clinging by my fingernails. I have to go, and I have to do it soon or I’m going to fall apart.”