Crossed Blades (23 page)

The cost of the glass alone was staggering, without adding in construction or the magic and the staff to maintain it. The garden itself was filled with all manner of tropical rarities that had no business growing here in the north, on the cold side of the mountains.

Here, too, was that counterfeit of the Celestial City that the Son of Heaven claimed was blasphemy. The garden paths were strewn with chips of real ivory and bits of pearl, the balconies railed with jade that matched the jade tiles facing the walls. There was even a small gold-roofed pavilion beside the fishpond. The security was very tight here, with every pane of glass and tile on the roof marked by wards of alarm.

Without the Signet’s ring finger I would never have been able to approach from the rooftops. With it, not only was I apparently invisible to the wards, but I had a key that allowed me to open an access panel in the garden’s glass roof. From there it was no work at all for someone with my skills to make his way down onto the balcony to the left of the garden terrace—the most logical one to be attached to a bedroom or withdrawing room.

Peering through the curtains, I found that I had arrived outside the latter. The presence of a pair of the Swords of Heaven on either side of the doors to the inner chamber told me all that I needed to know about whether I’d found the right place. I paused then to set one of the few spells that I know well, a cantrip that would create a zone of silence around me for a quarter of an hour. I used that quiet to kill the Swords where they stood.

Then I was alone. Nothing but one door and at most a few short yards stood between me and the bed where the Son of Heaven lay sleeping. I was seconds from making the man responsible for the death of both my friends and my dreams pay for his crimes. I reached for the handle of the door and found that I was shaking. I backed up and took several deep breaths. I wanted to be calm for this, to completely occupy the moment so that I wouldn’t miss the slightest nuance of this most deserved of deaths. As I tried to recenter myself, I forced myself to look away from the door, and really see the room, and . . .

Aral, are you all right?

What?
I had no memory of releasing Triss.
I mean, of course I am. I just want to treasure this moment.

Then why are you standing with your back against the wall as far from the Son of Heaven’s door as you can get?

Am I.
I blinked, forcing my eyes to focus, and realized that I was.
So I am.

What’s wrong?

I looked around and once again my eyes fell on the large wooden plaque on the wall just to the left of the balcony door. This time I made myself take in the sight and think about what it meant.

It was a display mount of a sort more typically seen in the audience hall of a castle than the bedroom of a high priest. Someone had sawn a ring out of a giant ebony, trimming the edges to make it into a perfect circle, perhaps six feet across. It was polished to a brilliant sheen that showed off rings marking hundreds of years of growth. Spaced around the edge of the ring were iron brackets each of which held the hilt of a sword of my goddess, its point directed inward, so that they formed a sort of pinwheel.

Looking at it made me want to vomit, but now that I had really seen it, I couldn’t look away. Without any conscious thought, my feet took me slowly across the room toward this proud display of purest sacrilege against my goddess. As I went, I remembered the rumor that the soul daggers of the remaining living Blades, mine included, were supposed to be imbedded in the wall of the privy that lay beyond the bedroom where the Son slept now. That way, he could start each day by pissing on them.

Somewhere in the back of my head I had the sense that Triss was calling my name, but I couldn’t really hear him over the buzz that filled my mind with pain. I just kept walking forward, stopping only when I physically bumped into a small table standing directly in front of the ring. I hadn’t even seen it until I put my hand down to catch myself on its edge.

When I did, and looked more closely at what it held, I let out a screech of pure rage. Fortunately, my cantrip had not yet faded, and though I could feel the force of my scream tearing at my throat, no sound of it reached my ears. You see, on the table was another display, smaller, simpler, a low rack, designed to hold two swords. Loris’s swords. Nothing could have hurt me more just then, and no better tool for the death of the Son of Heaven could have been delivered into my hands.

Turning, I crossed the room in a couple of quick bounds before silently kicking open the inner door. The room beyond was huge and opulent with a great canopied bed at its center. The Son of Heaven lay on his back in the middle of the bed, his arms crossed on his breast as though someone had laid him out for burial. Though I had not seen his face in person since before the fall of my temple—and that at a distance—I had viewed its likeness in a thousand places. There was no mistaking the man . . . the monster.

In a moment I was standing over him, Loris’s swords raised for a double beheading stroke. Now, he would pay for all that he had done to me and mine.

I paused then for one brief instant, to savor what I was about to do. A mistake perhaps, for in that moment I began to do something I had not since I first entered the Son of Heaven’s suite. I began to think instead of simply reacting. By doing so, I missed my chance to kill the Son of Heaven from within my armor of rage, missed the moment when his death would have been the sweetest release.

Aral?

Yes?

Kelos?

One lone word. Nothing more, and yet, once he’d uttered it, I recognized the truth, and what had been driving me toward this moment, or rather, who. Still, I was here, and I needed to finish my business with the Son of Heaven before I dealt with my old master.

I did what needed doing, but I took no pleasure in it. It wasn’t my triumph at all. It belonged to Master Kelos. And when I was done with the Son of Heaven, I left the apartments and climbed back up the wall, passing through the glass panel to the roof. Once it was closed, I dropped my shroud.

“I know you’re here, Kelos. Come out where I can see you. We need to talk.”

Even knowing to expect him and what to look for, he surprised me, seeming to simply fade into existence a few yards directly in front of me.

“It’s done?” he asked.

I nodded.

He cocked his head to one side. “You don’t have Loris’s swords. I’m surprised. I expected you to take them back to Jax in Dalridia.”

“I’ll get them some other time. Them and all the others. I won’t take them to Jax, though. I will return them to the goddess as I returned mine, as they used to return themselves at the death of their owners. It’s the honorable thing to do, and I will always choose honor over revenge. It’s what I was taught by the man you once were.”

He raised the eyebrow of his good eye in a gesture I suddenly realized I had learned from him. “So it was honor that filled your heart when you killed the Son of Heaven?”

I smiled then, and I could see from his expression that Kelos didn’t like the color of my expression. Which was exactly as I wanted it.

“Oh, I didn’t kill him. He deserved it all right, and you gave me more than enough reasons. But then I stopped to think, and that was your undoing.”

“Aral, what are you talking about?” He spoke sharply, but his expression looked more curious than concerned.

“Everything I needed to know to figure it out, I learned in that little play you staged for me with the Signet back in Tien. I’m not sure if that was the one mistake on your part, or if she said something she wasn’t supposed to, or what. In any case, you won’t become the next Son of Heaven today. The throne still has its current ass to keep it warm. Actually, I don’t think you’ll become the next Son of Heaven at all.”

“It’s not like that,” said Kelos. “I don’t want the throne for the throne’s sake. I want the power it will give me to make things right in the world, and I
will
have that power even if you’re not the one who gives it to me.”

“No, I don’t think that you will. For a number of reasons. First, you can’t harm the Son yourself, nor any other member of the church hierarchy. Not directly. You’re bound by a mortal geas—harm so much as a single hair on the head of the least priest and you die. That’s half of why you just wedged the locks at the abbey, because you
couldn’t
act more directly. The other half, of course, was so that some of the prisoners would die, because you wanted me angry. Too angry to think or hesitate. You needed me to kill the Signet to make you the Son’s heir, before I killed the Son himself.”

“Very good, boy.” And he smiled, like he was proud of me, and damn me to hell but it still felt good to see him do it. “Very good. But you always were the best strategic thinker among my students. So, I can’t kill the Son of Heaven. Nor any of his servants. Funnily enough, that even includes my fellow apostates in Heaven’s Shadow. What else have you figured out?”

“That you need
me
to kill the Son of Heaven for you.”

“Why? Why can’t I just set up that brilliant young apprentice of yours to do the job? She’s got the hate for it, and once she recovers from that head injury—she will, you know—she’d do the job up very prettily.”

“I don’t know the why yet. Not that one nor some others that are important, like why the Son doesn’t like to have the Hand too close to him, though I’ll figure it all out, given time. No, it’s me you need. Well, needed. Killing the Son won’t put you on the throne anymore. Not now.”

“Really? What makes you say that? What could you have possibly done to prevent me?”

“I left Loris’s swords in the Son’s bedroom—sunk into the head of the bed to be specific. When he wakes he’s going to cut his face on them unless he gets very lucky.”

“And a couple of swords are going to turn the Son against his personal Shade.”

“Is that what you call yourself now? Really?”

Kelos shrugged. “I don’t much like it either. The head of the Hand of Heaven is the Signet. The chief of Heaven’s Shadow is the Shade. It’s a little cute for me, but then I intend to change it. I intend to change everything.”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“What makes you so sure of that, Aral?”

“Because the Swords weren’t all that I left him. There’s a note, too. It’s short, and insulting, but I think the paperweight I used when I set it on his chest will get the point across.”

“What have you done?” And, for the first time in all my years of dealing with the man, I finally saw him look alarmed. It was a tiny thing, barely a widening of his one good eye, but it was there.

“I think you know, but I’m going to tell you anyway, because I want to tell you I’ve beaten you, not just have you figure it out. I left the Son of Heaven a finger along with the warning, a living finger that’s connected unmistakably to your life force. Even a half-witted hedge wizard would be able to tie the magic in that thing back to you.”

“How did you get through the wards on your way back out?” he asked.

“You are not the only man to kill a Signet.”

Kelos nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“When the Son wakes,” I continued, “and I expect that to happen any minute now, the first thing he’s going to see are the sharp edges of a pair of swords. The second is incontrovertible proof that you’ve been playing him. And you can’t even raise your own sword to defend yourself against his soldiers. If I were you, I’d start running right now.”

Kelos nodded again, and then he did the last thing in the world that I might have expected. He threw his head back and he laughed. Not just a little laugh either, a full-throated roar that was probably loud enough to wake the Son of Heaven all by itself.

“I don’t understand. . . .” I said, and I really, really didn’t.

Don’t you?
Triss asked.
He’s proud of you.

Before I could respond, Kelos raised a hand. “Oh, very good, lad, very good indeed. I’ve been waiting two hundred years for someone to beat me fair and square, and you’re the one who’s finally done it. I can’t tell you how pleased I am that it was you.”

“You’re mad, you know that, right? Completely mad.”

“A little, certainly. But not completely. You are my child as much as any Blade I ever trained. I don’t know if you can understand what that means yet, but you may someday. When you killed Ashvik you showed the whole world that you had become exactly what I wanted to make you, a perfect weapon in the hand of the goddess, and I was damned proud.

“But this, this is so much more.” He smiled and shook his head, spreading his hands in a gesture that indicated all of me. “You have become the hand that wields the weapon, the mind behind the blade. That takes you beyond what I had hoped for you to someplace I can’t predict. That’s more reward than I expected to see this side of the grave.”

Now he was crying and so was I, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to cut his throat or hug him. Perhaps fortunately I was spared the decision when an alarm bell started ringing.

Kelos laughed again, more softly this time. “I believe that means I need to start running. You, too. Shall we run together at least as far as the edge of the temple precinct? It would be an honor.”

And damn me if I didn’t fall in beside him. “To the edge of the precinct, and not a step farther.”

“Done.”

You’re as crazy as he is.

You might just be right.

Epilogue

A
man walks into a bar. It’s the beginning of a thousand stories and the end of a thousand more.

This time the bar was a hole in the wall in a tiny town in western Zhan and the man was me. The passes to Dalridia would long since have closed for the winter and I had business yet in Tien, so I was taking the long way back to Faran and Jax and my new responsibilities.

Three weeks had passed since I said good-bye to Master Kelos at the edge of Heaven’s Reach, and he’d told me he was proud of me again. I still didn’t know how I felt about that or him. He hadn’t said where he was going, and I hadn’t asked.

He’d given me a message for Jax, too, but I wasn’t at all sure I was going to deliver it. No matter how much Kelos might have meant it, I don’t think Jax was going to be ready to hear that he was sorry about Loris. Not once she heard the rest of what I had to tell her.

Aren’t you going to find a seat?
Triss asked.

It was only then that I realized I’d frozen just inside the door. It wasn’t the first time in the last couple of weeks, and I didn’t think it would be the last. With Triss’s prompting I headed deeper into the bar, finding a seat beside the fire, where I could put my back to a wall and keep an eye on the door.

The talk was all about the Son of Heaven and the two parallel slices the Son now bore on his forehead and cheeks. The news of strange goings-on at Heaven’s Reach was traveling faster than I was. This time the story included a new detail: that nothing anyone could do would heal the Son’s wounds. That was a fresh variation on the story, and though I doubted it, I hoped it was true.

When the boy taking orders came to get mine, I asked for a plate of noodles and a pot of tea, and I could feel Triss smiling through our link. I’ve never liked tea and I still wanted whiskey, had even ordered it and gotten falling-down drunk a couple of times in the preceding days, but I wasn’t doing it every night, nor even most of them. It was a long battle and I had no idea if I was going to win it.

But for today, and just for today, I wasn’t going to drink. And when tomorrow came, well, maybe I would be able to say the same again. If I didn’t, I wasn’t going to beat myself up over it. I would just move on to the next day, and the next.

The tea that came with my meal was just as lacking in appeal as I’d expected it to be, but I drank it anyway.

I’m proud of you,
said Triss when I paid the bill and didn’t order anything more, and unlike my confusion with Kelos I knew exactly how it made me feel when Triss said it.

Proud.