Crossed Blades (3 page)

Aral! Come on, we’re losing Jax.
Triss gave me a sharp slap on the side of my foot and I got moving again.

But I’d lost my hunger for the chase and I hardly even blinked when we lost the trail as it left the narrow streets of the Stumbles and plunged into the human river of Market Street.

Fire and sun!
Triss growled into my mind.
It’s gone, and I can’t tell whether that’s an effect of the sun or if Jax did something clever to break her trail.

I found it very hard to care about the answer when what I really wanted was to go back to the Gryphon and drink until the world went away. I couldn’t tell Triss that though, not with the way he felt about my drinking. Instead I just stood and stared at the passing parade, full as it was of walkers and riders, carters and rickshaws, even the odd palanquin. Sandals and boots and hooves and wheels, all of them grinding away at the dust and dirt and . . .

Wait. Back up. Think, man!

There it was. So simple and elegant I had no idea why it hadn’t occurred to me before.

My guess would be she got into one of those.
I pointed at a passing oxcart.
If she made sure that her shadow didn’t spill over the edge of the bed, a cart would make a very good getaway vehicle. That or one of those closed palanquins. Hell, she could even have had a covered rickshaw waiting for her here.

I’m an idiot.
Triss sounded shocked.
The idea of a shadow trail is new enough to you that I can understand why you wouldn’t have thought of that before now. But, why didn’t it ever occur to me?

For the same reason it didn’t occur to me, probably. Blinkered thinking. We both knew fire and sun and running water can break a shadow’s trail, so it didn’t occur to either of us to think beyond the big and flashy to simpler means.

So now what?
Triss asked me.

The Gryphon, I think. Maybe Jax will come back.
Triss didn’t say anything, but I could feel his disapproval as he thought about me having another drink.
I could also use some dinner, and it’s Jerik’s cooking or go home where we’ll have to deal with Faran and Ssithra. . . .

I guess one more whiskey won’t kill you.

I thought you might see it my way.

Faran was almost sixteen and a problem and a half. She’d been eight when the temple fell. A combination of talent, smarts, luck, and utter ruthlessness had allowed her to escape an attack that killed most of her peers and teachers. For six years she and her familiar, Ssithra, had lived completely on their own, spying and thieving their way across the eleven kingdoms to stay alive. Her last assignment had gotten away from her in a way that would probably have killed her if it hadn’t also brought her to my doorstep. I’d had to abandon my old face as part of fixing that mess.

Now she’d become my . . . apprentice? Ward? Surrogate daughter? Faran and I were still working out the details of what we were to each other. So far, the process involved a lot of snarling and baring of teeth and I desperately wanted a little break before I faced the next round. Though Triss’s relationship with Ssithra was harder to parse, the level of hissing in Shade that went on between the two of them suggested to me it wasn’t any less fraught. In any case, the Gryphon sounded a hell of a lot more like home to me right at the moment than the rented house we shared with Faran and her familiar.

The Gryphon had started to fill up by the time I got back. Jerik just grunted and pointed me toward an empty seat at the end of the bar when I called out my order for whiskey and a bowl of fried noodles topped with shredded whatever-happened-to-fall-off-the-back-of-the-cart-today. His indifference stung a bit, since I was used to being treated like a regular. A few minutes later, he dropped off my bowl and a small loaf of black bread that I hadn’t ordered along with my glass, then turned away before I could say anything about getting my order wrong.

I was tempted to throw the bread at his retreating back, but just sighed and took a sip of my whiskey instead. It tasted smooth and silky, like liquid magic. Kyle’s eighteen, the special cask reserve if I knew my whiskeys. Nothing like what I’d ordered. As I paused before taking another drink, Jerik spun around to drop a beer in front of the smuggler sitting three stools to my right. I raised my glass ever so slightly in Jerik’s direction as well as an eyebrow. Jerik responded with something that could have been the faintest ghost of a wink or perhaps nothing at all.

I took another sip. It was top shelf Kyle’s all right, the spirit old Aral the jack had drunk whenever he felt deep enough in the pockets. Since I’d ordered nothing but Magelands whiskeys at the Gryphon since I changed my face, and the Kyle’s wasn’t sitting somewhere you’d get them confused, I had to figure the switch was intentional.

Which meant he’d recognized me, and wanted me to know it. I would have liked to believe that was impossible, but he’d been my landlord and bartender for five years and knew me as well as anyone in the city. It was hard to disguise a walk, and harder still if you were drunk.

But why was he letting me know about it now? To cover my confusion I took another sip of my excellent whiskey and then followed that with a mouthful of noodles. The hot pepper sauce almost covered the aging vintage of the fried bits of meat and vegetables. Almost.

I considered my bread then. Jerik makes a hard black loaf that will keep you alive for a long while if the effort of chewing it doesn’t kill you first. It’s cheap and awful, and over the years I’ve spent almost as much time living on it as I have avoiding it. This loaf looked more battered than most of its fellows, with several dents and dings and a wide crack splitting it nearly in half along one edge. Hmm. I jammed a thumb into the crack, then broke off a tiny corner of the loaf when I felt a bit of paper shoved deep into the bread.

As I was twisting the scrap of bread in my pepper sauce, Jerik slid back past me. “Tab?”

I nodded and he left. Jerik only runs a tab for serious regulars, and the face I was wearing now simply hadn’t been around long enough. I suppose I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was that he’d recognized me.

Jerik’s a damned clever man. He used to hunt monsters for a living, and mostly on crown lands, which adds dodging royal patrols to the list of dangers involved in the trade. The dumb die quick, and the smart can get rich if they live long enough. There’s a good deal of money to be made by selling the bits off to various magical supply houses, and Jerik was at it long enough that he really didn’t need to work for a living anymore.

He retired from the business after the gryphon he ultimately named his bar for ate about half of his scalp and one of his eyes. The scars are terrible and a good part of the reason he keeps the lights low, but I think he missed the thrill of it all. It wasn’t too many years after he got mauled that he first opened the Gryphon’s Head and nailed the damn thing’s skull up behind the bar. I’ve always figured he bought an inn down here in the Stumbles among the shadowside players, when he could have afforded a better location, because he missed spending time around dangerous predators.

Despite a burning desire to read my little note right then and there, I knew better. Instead, I just nibbled another corner off my bread and took a long slow sip of the Kyle’s. Golden, though I still missed efik. More now with the recent presence of another Blade to remind me of things left behind. Brewed or chewed, the effect of the beans was so much smoother than alcohol’s. Of course, if I hadn’t given it up I’d be dead by now. Or worse, a sleepwalker sitting in some alley and slicing my arms so I could rub powdered efik into the wounds for a bigger better ride to the place where nothing matters.

I pushed the thought aside. Thinking about efik made me want it, and that was the road to ruin. After I finished my noodles and carefully rationed out the rest of my Kyle’s, I scooped up the loaf and headed out into the Gryphon’s yard. I used to rent a room over the stables back there. Now, I took advantage of long familiarity to slip into the lower level and find an empty stall, before I cracked open my bread envelope.

By the time I’d gotten it split in half, Triss had defied the conventions that light normally enforced on shadows, by sliding up the wall to a place where he could read over my shoulder, and changing his shape. Most of the time, he pretends to be nothing more than light would make him, a darkened copy of my own human form. But when we’re alone, he will often reshape his silhouette to assume the outline of a small dragon complete with wings and a tail. When he does that, he assumes some of the other aspects as well, and now I reached out to give him a light scruff behind the ears, where his scales always seem to itch.

He made a happy little noise at that, but then shrugged me off and jerked his chin at the tightly rolled piece of paper I held.
What’s it say?

Unrolling it revealed a folded sheet with a small blob of black wax sealing it. There was no imprint in the wax and no name on the outside of the letter, but magesight revealed the faintest glow of magic on the seal. I held it up to Triss and he reached out with one clawed finger and touched the seal. There was a hiss and the wax dissolved. I raised an eyebrow at Triss and he nodded. As I had expected, it responded only to the touch of a Shade. Any other attempt to open it would have resulted in the whole thing burning instantly away to ash.

I opened the letter. Inside it said:
Ashvik’s tomb. Two hours past midnight. The anniversary of the day you broke my heart.
And that was all. No names. No signatures.

Clever, just a location, the time, and a date no one but I would know. The day I told Jax I wasn’t going to marry her. The fifth of Firstgrain, one week in the future. The whole thing was smart, and I wondered how many of these she had handed out, hoping one would get to me. There had been six kings of Tien with the name Ashvik, and their tombs were scattered widely through the royal cemetery. Anyone who intercepted the message and didn’t know it was intended for me would have to guess not only the date but which one was the intended meeting place. The tomb of Ashvik VI, the man who had died to give me the name Kingslayer.

2

M
y
earliest memories are filled with darkness. When I entered the service of Namara at the age of four I stepped into the shadows.

From my very first day, I trained in the lightless depths below the temple, learning to operate without sight to guide me. By the time I turned seven I was at least as comfortable in utter blackness as I was in brightest day. Then I bonded with Triss, and a shadow became my closest friend.

Most people think of darkness as the simple absence of light, but we who share our lives with Triss’s kind know that it can be a living presence. A Shade can take many forms. He can be a substanceless wraith hiding in the shadow of his bond-mate. He can command that same shadow, reshaping it to reflect his will, as Triss does when he assumes the form of a dragon or gives me claws to climb with. He can even become a thick cloud, like a black mist, and wrap his companion in a lacuna of darkness—the form Triss currently held.

The greatest advantage any Blade has is his familiar Shade. On the most basic level, the mage gift needs a familiar to act as a focus if it is going to function at all. A mage without a familiar who wants to cast a spell is in much the same position as a bird without wings who wants to fly. Beyond that, familiars shape the power of their bond-mates’ magic. If you want to wield fire, it helps to have a salamander to back your play.

Then there’s the power a familiar wields on its own. If you want to pass unseen in a world where any mage can see the glow of your invisibility spell, if not the person hiding within it, a familiar who can cloak you in shadow is the best bet going.

“Bide a moment,” I whispered into the darkness that surrounded me.

“Why?” Faran’s voice came from behind me, low and angry. “What are you worried I’m going to mess up this time?”

I wanted to bang my head on the rock face to my right. Instead, I released Triss from the dreaming state that allowed me to use his powers and senses as my own. It was possible to make use of the latter even when he was awake, but if I needed to use magic or shift the substance of his being around, I could do things
much
faster and more cleanly when I had direct control.

I replied, as calmly as I could manage, “I’m not concerned for you, Faran. I just want to look things over before we go in. It’s been a long time since I tried to sneak past palace security.”

“And I’ve been doing practically nothing else for the last few years. The Zhani variety doesn’t look any worse than Kodamia’s, at least not from up here. Why can’t we just
do
this?”

“Because it’s abysmal tradecraft,” Triss said in a much sharper tone than I’d have used. “The target could be a lone shepherd asleep in the middle of an open field, and it would still be foolishness to charge in without thoroughly assessing the situation. Did you learn nothing from the masters at the temple?”

Faran let out a very noisy, very fifteen-year-old sigh, but she didn’t argue. For some reason she took reprimands from Triss far better than she did the ones I gave her.

Thanks Triss. Could you uncover my eyes now?

If you wanted to see, you had to risk being seen. That was one of the first lessons a Blade learned. The enshrouding darkness a Shade could provide wasn’t quite invisibility, though it came damned close in all but the brightest daylight. One of the few disadvantages was that while no one could see in, neither could I see out. Not with my eyes anyway.

The senses I could borrow from Triss when he surrounded me included a sort of otherworldly cousin to human sight, but it was so differently focused that even with years of training and practice it couldn’t quite substitute for the real thing. It really paid to use my own eyes as a double check on what I was getting through my familiar.

Consider it done.
Triss rearranged himself so that the shadows thinned away to nothing in front of my face, allowing me to look down on the night-wrapped city.

As so often happened when I got my sight back, the first thing I noticed was how beautiful the world could be. Immediately below me, the palace sparkled like a great triangular crown studded with a thousand jewels glowing in every color imaginable. Even at this hour, the magelights shone so thickly on the lanes and winding paths through the gardens that they almost erased the night in places. In the wealthy neighborhoods immediately beyond the palace to the east, the lights made a looser net, outlining the streets in ribbons of white and blue and bright green.

As you moved farther away, the effect took on something of the nature of a patchwork quilt. While richer areas made extensive use of magic’s shining answer to the night, the bright hard points of magelighting became few and far between in poorer areas. Frequent thefts kept strapped neighborhood councils from using the expensive lights to illuminate their streets. But even in the true slums like the Downunders and the Stumbles there were lights. Small, dim, and too often the cheaper and more dangerous flickers of oil lamps or torches, but lights nonetheless.

What beauty the slum lights lacked in power they made up for with movement, flitting and flickering like ten thousand fireflies. When there were no streetlamps, people had to carry their own lights with them. Between the restless dead and the more common human predators, no one wanted to be without light. That necessity transformed static nets and ribbons of light into slow-moving streams where the sparks danced to the whims of the current and rippled with the wind. The lights of the city made a colorful contrast to the dimmer white stars in the lightly clouded sky above.

Regretfully, I pulled my focus back down onto the palace complex below us. Faran and I perched on a narrow horizontal lip of stone, high up on the bare broken slope that stood behind and above the palace. In terms of a straight military assault this approach represented the palace’s biggest weakness.

The top of the slope, which separated the spur of rock that held the palace compound from the taller Palace Hill behind it, lay a good fifty feet higher than the walls of the palace below. If you could get siege equipment up there you could bombard the compound with relative impunity. Of course, you’d have to fight your way through miles of one of the densest cities in the world to get there, and the royal family would long since have retreated to the island citadel or moved upriver to the great fortress of Kao-li.

The palace had been designed with the comfort and convenience of the Crown in mind rather than brute projection of power. The ruling family of Zhan had long preferred to keep their brass knuckles hidden inside elegant gloves. That didn’t mean that defense of the palace was neglected completely, just that it was geared much more toward keeping out thieves, assassins, and the occasional peasant uprising. In the case of the back slope, that meant constantly burning off any vegetation that tried to gain a foothold among the rocks, and doubling the height of the wall.

Further protection was afforded by the fact that the slope was bounded on the upper edge by the extremely well-guarded estates of several of Zhan’s greatest nobles including the Duchess of Tien. That was half of why I had chosen to come in this way. The combination of the massive rear wall and powerful neighbors who firmly supported the Crown meant the guards tended to pay less attention to this side of the compound.

Add in the fact that the royal cemetery stood tight against the wall—with many tombs actually burrowing down into the bedrock on which it stood—and you had one of the few places in the palace compound that a Blade could get inside with relative ease.

Which is exactly what we proceeded to do once I’d resumed control of Triss and his senses. Down the slope. Then wait for a gap in the guard patrols. Collapse the shroud to about half the optimum size. That freed up enough of Triss’s substance to spin myself finger and toe claws out of hardened shadow. Up the wall using cracks and crevices no unaided human could ever have hoped to find. Fully reshroud, and down the stairs from the battlements. Then up and over the low stone wall of the cemetery to drop into the shadows behind a free standing mausoleum, with every step mirrored perfectly by Faran and Ssithra.

“Told you it’d be easy,” Faran said as we briefly settled against the dark granite wall of the tomb—the meeting wasn’t supposed to happen for almost two hours yet, but I’d wanted to have plenty of time to scout and prepare the ground.

Triss’s senses provided a full circle of view, so I didn’t have to turn my head to look at Faran. Not that I could see her. Even a Shade’s . . . call it unvision, couldn’t see through the lacuna of another Shade. Faran and Ssithra simply registered as a deeper patch of shadow in a darkly shadowed world. Though the royal cemetery wasn’t wholly devoid of illumination—each tomb had a small magical flame burning eternally on the altar on the right side of its door—it was one of the darker parts of the compound.

Still, I could imagine the smug look she now wore on that slightly too-angular face. Faran was going to be beautiful once she grew into her bones and put an adult’s flesh on that lanky frame. Brown hair and eyes, skin a shade paler than my own, and nearing my own height. When people saw us together in the market they assumed she was my daughter.

“I never said that I expected it to be hard, Faran. Triss was absolutely right back there. A smart Blade practices caution even in the simplest of assignments, because it’s the unexpected difficulties that will trip you up.”

“With the exception of what happened with the Kothmerk, I’ve done all right for myself these last few years.” She sounded defiant, edging into angry. “Certainly better than you have, playing the jack here in Tien’s shadow world.”

I sighed. The Kothmerk was a big exception and one that had led to three different governments all trying to kill Faran and Ssithra. But give Faran her due. “Yes, in many ways you have.” After the fall of the temple she’d become a freelance spy, selling other people’s secrets to the highest bidder. “Certainly you made more money in your years on your own than I have in my entire life.” Which was why Faran was the one paying the rent on the small house where we lived on the skirts of the Kanathean Hill.

“Doesn’t that bother you?” For the first time that evening she sounded like she was asking a question she didn’t know the answer to.

“Not really. Before the death of the goddess I never cared about money. It was simply a tool the priests supplied me with when I needed it for a mission. Afterward, I didn’t care about anything except for Triss and where my next drink was coming from.”

I continued, “I don’t know what all you went through when the temple fell, or in the days immediately after.”

Faran didn’t say anything. She’d been nine at the time, a child trained in the arts of killing and not much else. From the way that her eyes narrowed and she changed the subject every time it came up, I knew she’d suffered. But I hadn’t ever pressed, and I wouldn’t now. The world can be a very bad place for a lost child, especially a little girl. If she wanted to tell me about it she would.

“I only know what I went through,” I said. “Almost everyone I’d ever cared about died that day along with my goddess and my faith. It hurt me that I wasn’t there to die with them, that I was spared when so many I loved had died. With my goddess dead I wanted to die, too.” Though he’d heard me talk about it before, I was still glad Triss was deep down in dream state for this conversation. It caused him a lot of pain when I spoke about it. “I’d probably have killed myself then if it wouldn’t have killed Triss, too.”

“That’s why you started drinking, right? Because it eased the pain.”

“That, and I rather hoped it would kill me, though I didn’t even admit that to myself until quite recently.”

Faran took a deep breath. “I got drunk once, maybe three weeks after the Son of Heaven’s soldiers killed everyone. I knew the priests of Namara were against alcohol, but I’d run out of the efik I took with me when I ran away, and I didn’t have anything else to dull the pain. And it hurt so very much to be me right then. I was hiding out in a charcoal burners’ camp while I tried to figure out what I should do next. I stole a bottle of rum and I drank until I passed out.”

Faran stopped speaking and there was a long silence, but I didn’t think she was done, so I let it run.

“There was a man at the camp, older, kind. He’d been feeding me, though I had no way to pay for it. He found me there asleep and he touched me.”

Faran made a tiny little choking noise, but then continued. “But not in a bad way, that would almost make what happened bearable. I was having a nightmare you see, about the soldiers at the temple and all the blood, and he was trying to wake me up. That’s what Ssithra thought anyway. He was just trying to wake me up. I seized control of Ssithra and I tore out his throat with claws of shadow. I didn’t mean to. I was still drunk and I was scared and . . . dammit!”

I heard the dull thud of a fist hitting a thigh, then there was another long silence.

“I’d never killed a man before,” she finally said. “I had the opportunity several times when I was escaping from the temple. I could have slaughtered half a dozen of the people who killed my friends. I wanted to, but I was too afraid. I was too afraid I’d get caught and killed myself. I was too afraid that I’d do it wrong. But mostly, I was too afraid of what killing them would do to my heart. So, instead, I killed the first good person I met outside of the temple.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“It’s almost funny how much that first death hurt me, when you consider how many I’ve killed since,” she said after a moment.

“I’m sorry, Faran. I . . . just . . . I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Aral, nor any of the Masters, though you all made me what I am. I blame the man who calls himself the Son of Heaven. He’s the one who sent the soldiers who drove me out into the world before I was ready, and someday I’m going to kill him for it.”

While I sincerely hoped she got that chance, a sudden feeling of presence from somewhere off to our left kept me from saying anything about it. Instead, I just leaned in close and extended my shroud to overlap Faran’s—a long established warning signal among Blades—so that she would know something was up.