Bared Blade (32 page)

“No magic there, but then I didn’t expect any. Do you really think this Qethar won’t figure out who you are?”

I shrugged. “I honestly have no idea. He’s got to know I don’t trust him. That means my cover story of being a go-between from the real Aral should be plausible enough, as long as Triss stays out of sight. I guess if I’d thought it through I might have waited to use the bonewright spell till after we’d had our conversation. But then again, I might not. There’s some real advantage to be had in convincing him I’m someone else.”

“Hmm.” Harad stroked his beard. “All right, I haven’t had much to do with the Durkoth, though I know their Sylvani and Vesh’An cousins well enough. Whatever happens,
it should be quite interesting. I’ll set the grand balcony up for you if you don’t complain about my keeping a scrying eye on the whole thing from a safe distance.”

Triss snorted. “Does anything happen in this library that you don’t keep an eye on?”

“No.”

Setting
the pebble on the limestone floor of the Ismere’s grand balcony, I put the heel of my boot on it and …paused. Now that the moment had come, I found myself very reluctant to take the next step. In my mind’s eye I pictured Qethar’s pale inhuman perfection and shivered. I really didn’t want to face him and his glamour again. But then, I didn’t have a whole lot of choice, not if I wanted to break my associates out of durance vile and solve the problem of the Kothmerk.

Fucking magic rings.

I pushed down hard, expecting resistance, but the heavy little stone broke as easily as if it were a blown-glass bubble. While I waited for Qethar to appear, I hopped up to stand on the sweeping stone rail of the huge half-moon balcony. I wanted nothing between me and the river but air. I didn’t have to wait long either.

Within ten minutes, Triss gave me a gentle tap on the heel of my right foot.
The corner of the building. Something’s happening there. I can feel movement in the shadows.

The library’s foundations had been built right at the river’s edge so that it seemed as though the stone wall grew straight out of the flowing water below. For a brief instant, the corner of the building seemed to ripple in sympathy with the water. Then Qethar was there in all his white marble glory, having simply slid around the corner on a narrow stone projection that grew out of what had been a smooth stone wall only moments before. He stood perfectly still, looking for all the world like the statue of some important past library patron. Though he faced me, the blank white orbs of his eyes could have been looking anywhere.

Like a low wave sliding in to break on a sandy beach, the Durkoth’s little ledge rolled up the wall, leaving unmarked stone in its wake. When it reached the level of the balcony, the wave changed direction, sliding across the wall to a place just beyond the balcony’s rail. Qethar inclined his head in my direction and stepped forward onto the balcony, passing through the railing as though it were merely the ghost of a barrier. Behind him, the ledge sank back into the wall around it, vanishing as if it had never been.

Though I’m sure he could have persuaded the stone of the balcony to bring him to me, he chose to walk instead. I suspected it was because he knew just how much it unnerved humans to watch his kind moving, and he wanted to throw me off balance. It was a ploy that I was quite sure he’d employed to excellent effect any number of times in the past, and not one iota less effective for the realization.

I couldn’t take my eyes off him, or forget how his too-hot skin had felt against the palm of my hand. The smile he threw me when he finally came to a stop a few feet away was almost terminally self-satisfied—call it
Portrait of the God of Hauteur in Marble
by Sebastian Vainglorious and you could have sold it to any art collector in the eleven kingdoms.

I wanted to slap myself for the gut-level reactions I felt for him, both the unease and the desire. If I was going to have to work with Qethar to get Fei and the others free, I needed to break the …not a spell exactly, since the Others had no magic. Glamour or geas or simply the human fascination with perfection. Whatever you called it, I needed to figure out a way to neutralize my fascination with its object. As had so often happened at times of trouble in the past, the words of one of my teachers at the temple spoke to me out of memory.

In this case, I heard Mistress Alinthide saying,
“The key to solving any problem is understanding it. Observe, identify, analyze. Think!”

Start with observation. Qethar looked like a statue, or really, the realized ideal of a statue; gorgeous, permanent,
eternal. It was, I suspected, that illusion of eternality that lay at the heart of the Durkoth’s weird mixture of allure and repulsion. The senses revolted against the idea of that which should not move moving.

That thought touched a chord in my memory. I’d felt something like it before. When?

Neither of us had spoken yet and now Qethar raised a sardonic eyebrow at me, but I ignored him. I had to if I wanted to regain and retain my equilibrium in the face of his glamour.

Find the memory …there. I had it. Walking through one of the Emperor of Heaven’s temples as a very young boy—maybe even before I was given to Namara. It was a midnight service for Winter-Round. In honor of the solstice the temple was lit with torches rather than the brighter and steadier magelights used for most worship.

The gallery that led to the inner sanctum was lined with statues of Heaven’s Court, gods and goddesses looking nearly as beautiful and haughty as the Durkoth glaring at me now. In the flickering torchlight the carven deities had seemed to shift position between eye blinks. I never actually caught a statue moving, but every time I looked, I felt as though something had changed from the last time.

It was one of my earliest memories. One that had lived on in the nightmares of childhood, and one that Qethar echoed simply by existing. Statues shouldn’t change position. So, instead of seeing Qethar move, my mind registered a series of discrete and apparently unrelated poses, each of them feeling as though the Durkoth had
always
been in that position. That was profoundly creepy all on its own, but there was more to my response than that if I could only ferret it out.

Before I could pin it down, Qethar spoke. “I presume you summoned me for something other than a staring contest, Blade. What do you want of me?”

I was still badly off my game, but I couldn’t let that pass. “I think you’ve got the wrong man. I’m no Blade.” I turned so that the light from the windows fell more fully on my face. “Though I’ve come at the word of one.”

Qethar’s face didn’t move but somehow I got the impression of a frown. “Are you daft, Blade? I told the pebble to only break for you. There’s no way I could have been summoned by anyone else. Even if such were possible, your shekat does not lie. I can see that you’re the same human I contended with in the street the other night. The one since identified as the Kingslayer.”

“My what?” I’d never heard the word “shekat” before.

“Your soul-fire, human, your nima.”

“You can see nima?” I’d never heard that about the Durkoth.

Qethar seemed genuinely surprised. “Of course, far more clearly than I can see the evanescent housing of flesh in which it resides. In the deep dark under the mountains, the essence of a thing is infinitely more important than how it might look under the light of sun and sky. Yours is an especially strong shekat for an ephemeral, perhaps because the shadow that lives within your shadow has strengthened your lifeline by tying it to his own.”

And with that I had the final piece to understanding my response to Qethar. It was in his soul or apparent lack of one. Among my strongest and dearest memories is the day my goddess made me a Blade.

Namara is …or rather,
was
the Soul of Justice.
Was.
It’s such a simple word and so sad—it stabs my heart every time I have to remember that she is gone.
Lock it away, Aral, focus on the Durkoth and what you need to do about him.

Namara had manifested herself on this plane as a great granite idol sunk deep within the temple’s sacred pool. When she made new Blades, she would come to the surface to test the initiates and to give them their swords if she found them worthy. Like the Durkoth, she never seemed to move, though her position changed. But with my goddess, there had been one incredibly vital difference.

The goddess didn’t
feel
like a statue. The statue that was my goddess had a soul. No, the mightiest of souls. When you were in her presence you could feel that with every fiber of your being. You couldn’t
not
feel it, whereas the Durkoth
felt dead to me. If he had any soul at all, it was hidden deep under stone, reinforcing the illusion of untouchable statue.

But he wasn’t a statue and he wasn’t untouchable, a fact demonstrated by his obvious and growing irritation. “I have very little patience left for your kind, Blade. I gave you the pebble so that you could call me when you decided you needed my help to find the Kothmerk, and that is the most important thing in your entire stinking human city. If you’ve summoned me just so you can play games, it will go very hard with you.”

“Don’t threaten me, stone face. I’ve been threatened by the best. Push me and you’ll just be one more name on the very long list of the dead I have to answer for when I face the lords of judgment. You won’t get very far in the quest for the Kothmerk if I kill you, Qethar.”

Triss spoke into my mind,
Let me handle this please.
Before I could answer, he reversed his position, moving against the light so that my shadow briefly stretched toward the bright windows behind Qethar.

Then he shifted, becoming the dragon. “Qethar, you want to find the Kothmerk. So do we. At the moment, your best chance and ours is to work together. Once we have it, then we can argue about what to do with it.”

“I knew you’d see it my way,” he said rather smugly. “Where do we start?”

“With Captain Fei and the Dyad,” replied Triss, which was a hell of a lot more diplomatic than what I’d have said. “The Elite and some of your out-of-town cousins have them locked away in the deeps beneath the palace. We need your help to get them out.”

Qethar went perfectly still. For perhaps forty heartbeats there was absolutely nothing to distinguish him from the statue he so resembled.

“The Elite have the Dyad?” he asked when he finally spoke again, and the only thing that moved were his lips. “How did you discover this?”

“I have my ways,” I said. I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that Fei was an unfaced mage.

“And you say that the creature is being kept in the hidden vaults beneath the palace?”

I nodded. “You know of them?”

“I do.”

“That’s good because my source is a bit hazy on the exact location. And it’s not just the Dyad, but Captain Fei of the watch, too. I need your help if I’m going to get them out in one piece, and that’s the first step toward finding the ring. What do you say?”

“If I help you with this, you will help me to recover the Kothmerk?”

“I’ll work with you to find it.” Which wasn’t quite the same thing, but I felt pretty sure Qethar wasn’t being completely straight with me either.

“Then, let us go and see what we can find out.”

“
A
ren’t
you worried they’ll be able to sense us here, so close, Qethar?” Triss breathed the question as he slid off my skin to peer through the narrow slit of the air shaft.

We stood in a sort of bubble in the rock with only a thin curtain of stone between us and the cavelike kitchen where several Crown Guards sat quietly drinking tea and chatting under the eye of the Elite officer commanding them. His stone dog lay against the far wall, a few feet from the doorway, where a quietly scowling Durkoth stood like a sculpture dedicated to the personification of disapproval. He wore robes rather than local garb, so I assumed he belonged to the raiders who’d attacked VoS’s people. Another Elite could be seen down the hallway beyond him.

“No,” replied Qethar in a voice softer than any whisper. “Several may be near kin of the earth as well, but none are so dear to her as I. She will not betray our presence. Not even to my cousin of the North kingdom.”

Meanwhile, I kept my mouth shut and tried to hang onto my breakfast. I am not easily frightened, but our passage through the silent deeps of the earth had left me with the
feeling that I had blind and many legged things crawling all over my skin. I almost wished that I had not borrowed Triss’s senses for the trip, for my eyes would never have shown me what his unvision had made all too clear.

With silent tugs, wafted scents, and gentle brushes, Scheroc had led us to the place where a narrow and cleverly concealed air shaft emerged from the stone face of the riverside cliffs just north of the palace. Qethar had asked me to take the lead as he wasn’t sure where in the complex Fei and the Dyad might be, and it was clear I had sources he did not. I’d worried at first that the simple little spirit might accidentally reveal itself to him in the process, but I needn’t have bothered.