Crossed Blades (10 page)

“Which is?”

“Do you want me to kill Jax for you?”

I stopped with a biscuit halfway to my mouth. “What?”

“Well, she
was
your fiancée once upon a time. It seems awfully harsh to make you do it.”

“Nobody’s going to kill Jax.”

Are you sure of that?
Triss asked me.

Faran raised an eyebrow. “What does Triss have to say about that?”

“Never mind what Triss thinks. I’m making the call here, and no one is killing Jax. It’s that simple.” But really it wasn’t. So, I added, “At least not anytime soon. She’s not working with the Hand because she wants to, that’s for damn sure. I don’t know what Kelos’s game is here either. And, even if it
is
a setup, somebody has to free Loris and the journeymen. Maybe we can find a way to make it all work out.”

“Do you really believe that will happen?” Faran spoke with all the corrosive cynicism of a girl who’d had her entire life destroyed at the age of nine.

“I’d like to.”

“That’s all the answer I need.” She touched the long dagger at her right hip. “Just say the word when the time comes.”

I put my biscuit back on the plate. I was no longer hungry. When the waiter came by again I ordered a small bottle of sake. Neither Triss nor Faran said a word about it.

*   *   *

Jax
turned and opened her mouth to say something to me, a smile on her face. That put her back to Faran, a fatal mistake. My apprentice stepped in silently and drove a short broad-bladed dagger into the place where Jax’s skull met her neck. She collapsed at my feet, turning as she fell, so that her dead smiling face looked up at me.

Wake up!
Triss shouted into my dreams, and I did.

For the fourth time in as many hours, I lay panting in my sweat-soaked bed, as out of breath as if I’d just finished a ten mile roof-run. I couldn’t say which variation of the nightmare cut deeper, the one where Faran made the kill perfectly, or the one where she stepped on a squeaking board and Jax turned and neatly split her skull.

In either case, sleeping any more sounded like a terrible idea. My room occupied the eastern half of the second floor of the little house Faran had rented for us. Even through the thick mud-brick of the walls the heat of the morning sun had started to drive the temperature up toward unbearable. Without getting up, I cracked the shutters in hopes of catching an ocean breeze. The bright light drew bands of hot gold across my bed. For a moment it touched the shadow of a dragon stretched out atop my sheet, his chin on my chest, then Triss hissed and slipped around behind the headboard.

“Warn me next time,” he said from his place in the dark. “This time of year the sun stings when I’m not ready for it.”

“Sorry, old friend. I wanted to chase the nightmares away, not you. Thanks for waking me up.”

“You’re welcome, but it was self-defense. The images are so vivid they’re spilling over into my dreams.” He poked his head over the back of the headboard and peered down at me. “I find it deeply weird looking at the world as you humans do. You see things very strangely, and I may be the only one of my kind ever to view it so.”

His wings popped into sight as he flapped them agitatedly. “This two-way mindspeech is not an unmixed blessing. I’m glad I only get the images when you are dreaming or intentionally projecting them. I’ll have to discuss it with Ssithra now that she knows that you and I can mindspeak, see what she thinks of your bizarre view of the world.”

“Just don’t tell her about the contents of this particular dream. The more I think about it the less I like the idea of Jax and Faran spending two weeks in close proximity shipboard. I’m going to have to figure out a way to leave Faran here. That’ll be plenty hard enough without Ssithra giving her any reasons to be suspicious.”

Triss shot out a long forked tongue, touching the top of it to my forehead. “It’s funny, you don’t
feel
feverish.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you really think Faran is going to agree to anything that prevents her from coming on this trip? She’s a teenager. She’s deeply devoted to you, even if she pretends not to be most of the time. She doesn’t trust Jax, and has already offered to kill her for you. There’s nothing you can possibly say that will convince her to meekly wait here for you.”

“You’re right. Which is why I to have to trick her into missing the boat somehow.”

Triss sighed. “This isn’t going to end well. You know that, right?”

“But you’ll help me, won’t you?”

“No, I don’t think that I shall. Not this time. I see no reason to put myself in a situation where I have to apologize to Ssithra and Faran for trying to implement a plan so obviously doomed to failure.”

“But I’ve got to keep Jax and Faran apart. You see that, don’t you? I can’t let Faran kill Jax, and I won’t let Jax endanger Faran in any way.”

“This is not the temple, you have no authority over Faran other than that which she chooses to give you. I know you want to shield her from the cruelties of this world, but she’s nearly a grown woman and you can barely take care of yourself.”

“She’s fifteen!”

“And you’re not yet thirty, and more an older brother than a father figure to her, no matter how you see things. She survived six years all by herself in the hard cold aftermath of the temple falling. Thrived even. She and Ssithra managed a hell of a lot more than we did in those years.”

“But I’ve got to protect her. I’ve got to protect both of them.”

“Jax is your age and twice as responsible as you ever were and I’ve already said all I intend to about Faran. Leave the job of protecting the women to the women. Or, if that’s not enough of an argument, leave it to Sshayar and Ssithra. It’s their job, not yours.”

“But—”

Triss just shook his head and dropped down behind the bed again. “This is exactly the same sort of sentimental nonsense that kept you from killing Devin. You can’t save the whole world from itself, no matter what they taught us at the temple. Now, I’m going back to sleep. Wake me when you get out of bed or come to your senses. No. Scratch that latter, I’d prefer to wake up sometime before the end of the century. Wake me when you get out of bed.”

I reached for the book I’d borrowed from Harad, the librarian at the Ismere, but gave it up after a few pages when it became clear that reading wasn’t going to be enough to push the nightmare images away. Still, I remained in bed. I had about fifteen hours till my meeting with Jax and I needed to figure out how to get Faran out of harm’s way between now and then.

*   *   *

It’s
amazing how fast a day can pass when you would rather it didn’t. I’d spent practically the whole time trying to find an answer to the problem of keeping Faran and Jax away from each other. Yet here I was walking into the Spinnerfish for my meeting with the latter without so much as a clue’s ghost.

About the only thing I could claim to have accomplished on that front was convincing Faran to play the hidden ace to my faced jack. Instead of sitting in on the meeting, Faran and Ssithra were dancing a slow circle around the Spinnerfish looking for the Hand. I didn’t think Jax would have changed her mind about how she wanted to run things with the forces of Heaven’s Reach, but I trusted the Signet to keep her word even less than I currently trusted Jax.

My stomach twisted around on itself like a knotsnake with an itch. That I even had to think this way about someone I’d nearly married at one point was so beyond fucked, it made me want to crawl into a whiskey barrel and have someone hammer the top shut. At least I’d have a little fun before I drowned that way.

I half expected Erk Endfast to slide out from behind the bar when I came through the front door of the Spinnerfish and tell me to turn right the hell around and march back out. A onetime black jack, he’d given up the blood trade when he left the Magelands one step ahead of an official execution order. He said he’d had enough of living shadowside after that, but it didn’t keep him from making a ghost of anyone who threatened the peace of his establishment. And, whether I wanted things that way or not, I threatened the peace of the Spinnerfish just by walking in the door.

But Erk just nodded hello and kept on puttering away at something below the level of the bar top. He’d known my old face back in the days before ever it got pasted up on wanted posters across the eleven kingdoms, but my new one didn’t belong to anyone who mattered. I was finding that I liked being a ghost even less than I liked being a legend. When I got closer to the bar, Erk smiled vaguely.

“You meeting Captain Fei again?”

I’d been in maybe a half dozen times since the change, mostly to have dinner with Kaelin Fei, Tien’s number one corrupt cop and one of the very few people in on my secret.

I shook my head and spoke with a deliberate husk, “Afraid not, but I will need a private booth for two. I’d prefer not to be seen while I’m waiting.”

“You know your way back. Take the third table past Fei’s on the right. I’ll send your guest back when they get here. Who should I be on the lookout for, the kid?” Faran had joined Fei and me on a couple of occasions.

“No. A woman, tiny with pale skin and long brown hair. Pretty, too.”

“Anything really distinctive about her?”

“Besides her height? She’s got a net of thin scars on her face and arms like finest lace. She’ll probably be wearing two swords in a double sheath on her hip. Oh, and if you get on the wrong side of her she’ll give you a look that’d cut diamonds.”

“Two swords, huh?” Erk gave me the second look he hadn’t earlier, though his expression didn’t change. “I knew a man who used to carry two swords once. About your height and build actually. I haven’t seen him around in a while, and that’s too bad. Dangerous man, but a good one on his sober days. I liked him.” He smiled now. “If you see him, give him my best.”

“Doesn’t seem likely, but I’ll keep it in mind.” I started toward the back room.

“Hang on,” said Erk.

“Why?”

“I think your friend’s just arrived.”

I looked over my shoulder and found Jax heading my way.

“Jax,” I said quietly as I went to meet her. “Your timing is perfect, as always.”

“Aral.” She caught my hands in her own and pulled me down to give me a kiss on the cheek.

I couldn’t help but glance at Erk out of the corner of my eye to see whether he’d heard her name me. But if he had, he didn’t give any indication of it. Still, I frowned. What was Jax’s play there? I didn’t make the mistake of believing she’d slipped. She was better than that.

I pulled one of my hands free of hers and guided her around me with the other. “We’ve got a private table waiting. It’s this way.”

Like all of Erk’s private tables, ours sat in an alcove off one of the many little halls that made a maze of the back of the Spinnerfish. Designed to seat no more than two people, the narrow table had built-in bench seats on either side. I let the shimmering green gold curtains fall behind us as we settled in across from each other.

Jax touched the fabric. “It’s subtle, but these are spelled.”

“For privacy, nothing more, part of why I chose this place.”

“Nice. How did your business go?” she asked.

“Just fine. Yours?”

“Much the same.”

Then, forcing the words to come out smoothly despite the tightness in my throat and back, I asked, “Anything I should know about?”

It was a test. Like all Blades, Jax had been trained to lie smoothly and seamlessly, but she’d never been good at lying to anyone she cared about. Not in the old days.

She smiled and looked me straight in the eye. “Not really. Routine stuff all, though I can go into it if you’re worried about it.” There wasn’t so much as a flicker of her eyelashes out of place.

“No, that’s all right,” I lied back at her, though probably not half so well. “I’m more interested in planning for what comes next. This is going to be very dangerous, too dangerous for a half-trained girl like Faran. I want to leave her in Tien, and I’m going to need your help to make sure she stays here.”

9

T
he
rising sun spilled blood across the waves, red and wrathful and full of portent, like the dreams that drove me out into the light. I am a creature of the night, an assassin and companion to shadows. The morning sun is my enemy. I do not seek it out, it hunts me. Today it caught me high in the rigging of the
Fortunate Lamia
.

I had come looking for the winds, hoping they would blow away the thick cobwebs of my nightmares. I found only melancholy and the burning edge of morning. For perhaps the hundredth time I rubbed at my eyes, trying to scrub away the images of Jax and Faran, each dead at the other’s hand. Even leaving Faran behind hadn’t been enough to banish my dreams. Maybe because I still had no idea how to deal with Jax, much less evade the trap that was waiting for me, and get Loris and the others free. I couldn’t see any way to make things come out right.

Things had been so much simpler before the temple’s fall. I never had to figure out what was the right thing to do, the Just thing. My goddess told me what needed doing, and I did it. The world was black and white. Or, at least, it had looked that way at the time. Among the many things I had come to understand since then was that the world was rarely as simple as I wanted it to be. A fact that was very hard to forget with Jax and Faran murdering each other behind my eyelids every night.

I never thought that I would miss my old nightmares,
I sent to Triss.

Excuse me?
His mind voice sounded muzzy and unsettled—he likes the morning even less than I.

Usually, I dream my failures or the dead face of the goddess.

And that’s better how, exactly?

I prefer the scar that aches to the fresh cut that has yet to start bleeding. These nightmares remind me of how much I have left to lose.

Not how much you have left to save?

I shook my head.
Since the temple fell my glass has always been half empty.

Is
that
why you keep adding whiskey?

I snorted.
Perhaps it is, the need to fill that which can never be filled.
Then I shrugged.
I don’t know.

The lookout is very nervous about you being up here,
Triss sent, tapping my arm by way of pointing at the man.

I’d taken a perch on the rope strung along below the yard of the big junk’s foremast. The one the lookout atop the big mast had referred to as the “footrope” when he called out for me to use that instead of trying to walk the yard itself, “for Orisa’s sake.”

I snorted.
There’s barely a wind and the swells can’t be running much over three feet. I’m in no danger of falling.

I know that, and you know that, but the poor lookout is practically in hysterics. The captain doesn’t look any too happy either.

The captain? When did he come out on deck?

Just now, he’s having some very harsh words with the steerswoman, and his face is beginning to turn red.

I suppose we ought to get down before he orders us down. That would be awkward, since I’ve no intention of setting the precedent of obedience. Maybe if we show him we’re in no danger it’ll help calm him.

Before Triss could argue, I braced hands and feet and vaulted up onto the yard. Then I ran lightly back to the mast and jumped to one of the ropes that ran from it to the deck, quickly hand-over-handing my way down. The
Lamia
’s captain, a small round fellow, was there to meet me when my feet touched down, his face red and swollen with anger.

He opened his mouth, presumably to start yelling at me. I gave him the look that I used on the occasional footpad foolish enough to follow me into an alley. It was something I’d learned from Kelos, and the captain, who had been leaning forward, closed his mouth and took a small half step back.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said a moment later, but it sounded more plaintive than demanding.

“Getting some exercise. I woke up too early and needed to work out the kinks before I get in a practice duel with my partner.” I arched my back and put my hands on my hips inches from the hilts of my swords—I’d put them on as a sort of talisman against the nightmares. “Why, is there a problem?”

“You gave me a bit of a start is all. I thought you’d fall and hurt yourself, or mess something up, but you seem to know your way around a ship’s rigging. I didn’t know you were a sailor.”

“I’m afraid that I’m not really.”

“Then where’d you learn to climb like that?”

“You really don’t want to know.” I smiled a predatory smile and the last of his color faded.

He looked from my face to the well-worn sword hilts at the base of my spine and jumped to what was almost certainly the wrong conclusion. There’d never been that many Blades to begin with, and now we were all but extinct. “Maybe I don’t at that.”

That wasn’t very nice, Aral.

No, it wasn’t.

You don’t sound sorry.

I’m not. Oh, I didn’t really want to step on him, but it was that or take a lecture and stay out of the rigging thereafter, and I’m already feeling trapped enough on this damned boat.

I suppose it’s better than having you hitting the bottle again.
I winced as Triss’s mental voice scored a direct hit.

While I talked to Triss, the foredeck quickly cleared as the captain and what crew were awake found things to do elsewhere. I was just wondering if I might not be able to go back to sleep when Jax came up the ladder from the lower deck. The sun highlighted the scars on her cheeks and I felt a little stab in my heart. She still looked every bit as wild and appealing as she had when we were together, but the gentler side of her beauty was gone. Her face was a battlefield, gorgeous still, but marked forever by blood and pain.

“Was that wise?” she quietly asked me.

“Probably not, but I’m in no mood for an argument.”

“From him? Or from me?”

“Either, both. If I’d thought about it, I might not have climbed up above, but it felt damned good, and I’ll certainly do it again. I had a rough night and I wanted to get away from my dreams.”

“Feeling guilty about leaving Faran behind?” Jax asked with a lift of her eyebrows.

“No. That’s one of the few things I actually feel
good
about. I don’t want her involved in what’s coming. This business is going to get damned ugly.”

Jax turned away when I said that, walking to the rail to look out over the sea. “Yes, I’m afraid that it will.”

Was she ever going to stop lying to me? But I couldn’t ask her that, so instead I asked, “How much of my little chat with the captain did you hear?”

“All of it. I don’t sleep so well myself these days.” She turned back to me, resting a hip against the railing. “You woke me when you climbed out of your bunk. I followed you out of the cabin after I saw you put on your swords.”

“Worried about what I’d do?”

Jax frowned. “No. More about what you might have heard that made you feel you needed to arm yourself.” Her expression slid into something more melancholy and she hugged herself. “You have nightmares?”

I pictured her smiling corpse lying at my feet the way my dreams had painted it so many times in the last few days, and I nodded.

“I get them, too. Almost every night. The torturers coming for me, the fall of the temple, dead friends cursing me for living when they didn’t—all my failures.” She shook herself and forced a grin. “Were you serious about a practice duel?”

“If you’re interested, yes.”

“Good, it’ll give me something to think about besides evil dreams.” She drew her swords, one overhand, one under and slid forward into a guard position.

I reached for my own, then froze with them half out of their sheaths. It was the first time I’d seen Jax draw her swords since she’d come back into my life, and I simply wasn’t ready for the sight that greeted me now. The hilts and hip sheath had betrayed me into believing she had chosen to put aside the swords of Namara and make do with lesser steel, as I had. But those were temple blades in her hands.

“Are you all right, Aral?”

I nodded, completing my draw. “You had them rehilted.” The words came out harsher than I’d intended, angry.

Namara’s swords had simple oval guards that divided blade from hilt, all of it enchanted by the goddess to never break or wear. The guards were faced with lapis so that looking at them point-on you saw what appeared to be a blue eye widely opened—the unblinking eye of justice. Jax had replaced the oval guards and black sharkskin grips with traditional Dalridian style basket hilts. The cups and guards were shaped of bent steel, the grips surfaced with braided bronze wire.

But the short, lightly curved blades with their distinctive smoky blue steel that absorbed light rather than reflecting it, and their absolute unmarred perfection of line, were unmistakable. The swords of the goddess didn’t look so much forged as wished into existence.

“Of course I did.” Jax shifted a step to her right, and raised her right sword to point at my throat. “I couldn’t bear to see the old hilts every time I looked down, and these are much less obtrusive in Dalridia. Would you prefer to spar with wood? I’m sure the captain must have some practice blades around here somewhere.”

I snorted and shook my head, recognizing it as more of a tease than a serious offer. We’d both trained under Master Kelos, and while he might prefer that the apprentices and journeymen didn’t cut each other to ribbons, he’d always been adamant that there was no substitute for working with live steel for the expert. With a practice weapon you always knew that a fuckup wouldn’t really cost you. That changed the calculus of attack and response for the worse. It made you more likely to take stupid risks or deliver imprecise attacks.

“Do you want to do this or not?” I asked.

“Whenever you’re ready then.”

I feinted a cut at her left wrist, she parried and tried to catch my blade in a bind that I slipped. She flipped her underhand blade to an overhand grip, spinning in close as she did so with a cut that would have taken my feet off if I hadn’t hopped over it.

“Not much of a jump,” she said, as she flicked a thrust at my forward thigh. “The old Aral would have gone a good foot higher.”

I parried and forced her sword down and out, opening up a line on her biceps. “The old Aral would have been wasting his energy.” As I attempted the cut, she followed her out-of-line sword into a spin that put her arm out of my reach while bringing her other sword around to slice at my collar bone.

“Why should I move even a half inch more than I need to?” A strategy I implemented by twisting just out of reach of her blade. As I riposted toward her heart I found myself wondering whether I ought to stop my thrust if Jax didn’t.

But she beat my blade neatly aside, and delivered a heel tap to the top of my forward foot. “That would have broken your foot if I’d followed through.”

“Point,” I said.

Stung by the ease with which she’d taken the point, I jumped out of the way of her next thrust, leaping back and up onto the rail that separated the foredeck from the drop to the ship’s waist. Then, before Jax could adjust to my higher position, I did a front flip over her, slapping the flat of my left blade against the back of her neck as I went past.

“Point,” replied Jax, “and much more the old Aral.”

Nice,
added Triss.

In other circumstances, he and Sshayar might have joined in with our sparring, making it a partners match. Or, Jax and I might have taken control of our respective shadows to attempt maneuvers impossible to the Shadeless duelist. With the ship’s crew watching, that wasn’t really an option, so they stayed out of it. Even though our reduced circumstances dictated that Faran and I practice without our Shades as often as with, it felt strangely lonely to do so against Jax.

Now we really picked up our game. Lunge, parry, thrust, block, cut, bind, spin, flip, thrust again, cartwheel, slice, kick, and so on. I picked up a half dozen nasty bruises and three minor cuts in the exchange and inflicted a similar bill of damage on Jax. We kept it up for a good ten minutes before simultaneously throwing up our blades and stepping back. I think I scored more points, but I was gasping like an asthmatic dragon by then, and felt as though I’d just run the roofs from Westen to the Spicemarket and back without a break. Jax was sweating and breathing heavy as well, but she didn’t look half so blown as I felt.

“More?” She flashed me that wicked smile of hers, daring me to pretend she hadn’t run me into the ground.

“How about I take a turn,” said a smug and all-too-familiar voice from behind me.

“Faran?” I wheezed, more than half in shock.

Not that anyone but a Blade could have hidden themselves in the tiny triangle of space at the front of the ship, or that I had any doubt who that voice belonged to. But she couldn’t have picked a better moment to lay me out with a few words.

“Of course. You didn’t really believe I was going to let you out of my sight that easily, did you, Master Aral?”

The “Master Aral” waved all kinds of warning flags. The only times she’d called me that since I first found her in the sewers of Tien was when she was well and truly pissed off.

I was still trying to find the wind to come up with a good response when Jax spoke up. “Oh, very nicely done, Faran! I presume you’ve been here this whole time, but I didn’t catch so much as a hint of your presence. Later, I’d love to hear how you managed to get aboard at all. I’d swear no one else was riding that sampan Aral hired to deliver him to the ship right as we sailed out of the harbor.”

“Maybe if you ask nicely, I’ll even tell you,” said Faran, and I could hear the hard cold undertone to her words.

“If you’re half as good with your steel as you are with your shadow-slipping then you’ll be a damned worthy opponent. Come on, give me a try.”

“Done.” Faran stepped past me to face Jax, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could think to do about it.

Faran held a pair of cane knives instead of swords. She much preferred the heavy, forward-curved blades that fell somewhere on the range between a long dagger and a short sword with a side order of hatchet. The weapons had come out of Kadesh originally, where they used them to harvest cane and bamboo, as well as the occasional enemy head. They weren’t a traditional weapon for the servants of Namara, and Faran had never talked about how she’d come to pick up a set, but she used them with a brutal efficiency that often scored points against my longer and more elegant Zhani dueling swords.