Crossed Blades (5 page)

Having Jax across my shoulders ruined my swimming stroke, making it all but impossible to control my motion. The wild flood currents tumbled and torqued me around until I lost all sense of direction. If not for Triss’s constant tugs and nudges guiding me in the right direction I would never have found my way back to the air. As my head broke through the foam-frothed surface, I felt Sshayar cut the ties that held Jax to my shoulders and briefly panicked at the thought of losing her in this madness. I twisted wildly, trying to catch her as she slipped free.

It’s all right,
soothed Triss.
Sshayar and I have her. You just worry about getting us out of the river in as few pieces as possible.

Then Sshayar looped some of her substance around my chest and shoulders, snugging Jax in tight against my back like a trader’s pack.

I nodded my thanks.
Triss, can you see Faran at all?

In this? Are you crazed?

Point.

Between the winds, the rain, the hail, and the whirling masses of flotsam and jetsam that the storm had swept off of the streets and out of the sewers, the normally placid river had become a wave-wracked demon.

Most of the floating debris fell into the repulsive but harmless category of dead dogs and human waste, but there were bigger and more dangerous items to be avoided as well, like a jagged-edged broken cartwheel that nearly impaled me. I’d only been in the water a couple of minutes and I was already exhausted. The cold and the extra weight of Jax made for a punishing combination as I fought toward shore.

The huge stone pier came at me so fast I didn’t even have time to try to avoid it. I just threw my arm across my face and hoped for the best. A big eddy caught me at the last possible second and twisted me around and down, briefly sucking me under before it spat me out again beneath the bridge where the growling of the sharply narrowed waters echoed and reechoed like an angry dragon.

It wasn’t until the current spat me out the other side that I realized I’d just passed the foundations of the Sanjin Island bridge. I’d covered half of the distance from the north side of the palace to the bay, well over a mile, and faster than a galloping horse. I needed to get out of the water fast if I didn’t want to end up swimming home from Kanjuri with my ex strapped to my back. Actually, that sounded an awful lot like some Kadeshi vision of hell. But no matter how hard I swam across the current I couldn’t seem to get any closer to shore. Not compared to how fast I was heading for the bay. I started to worry more and more about which way the tide was running. If it was in we had a decent chance of making one of the piers. If it was out . . .

I think we may be well and truly fucked, my friend,
I sent to Triss.
Unless you’ve got something?

I don’t know,
replied Triss.
I’m doing what I can to keep us afloat, but this isn’t my element and the effort’s draining me, especially after that hit I took from the Hand.

A few moments later I started tasting salt in the water. I also had my first cramp threatening—my left calf where the scars I’d picked up along with the name Kingslayer ran deep.

It seems almost funny,
I sent.

What does?
Triss’s mind voice sounded weary and worried.

Between the Son of Heaven and the King of Zhan the price on my head’s over sixty thousand gold riels, enough to buy a palace with all the trimmings. That’s without mentioning all the other folks who’d pay to see me dead, and you with me. Or Jax and Sshayar for that matter. Literal armies of people have worked to kill us all, and here it’s going to be a storm that does the deed.

We’re not going to die here, Sshayar and I can keep us all afloat for quite a while.
The words sounded confident, but the mental voice behind them came through weak and thready.

It doesn’t have to be drowning. This water is cold, and there’s always exposure. Beyond that there’s sharks, sea serpents. . . .
My mind was starting to drift. Very bad sign.
I just hope we wash up where someone who really deserves the money can find the bodies.

Stop that!

What?
Triss sounded madder than he had since the last time I went on a bender. Speaking of which, I could really use a drink.
Kyle’s. That’s what I want right now, a big glass of Kyle’s. Or better yet, a hot pot of efik or a couple of beans . . .

Namara-dammit, Aral!

That cut through the fog. In our nearly twenty-five years together I’d never heard Triss use the name of our goddess to swear. I realized that I’d stopped swimming somewhere along the line and was just idly treading water as the swells rolling in from the deep water rocked me up and down.

You’re better than this, Aral. Come on, don’t give up on me.

Sorry, Triss, I’ll try.

I dunked my face to clear out the cobwebs. Somewhere along the line we’d transitioned from salty river water to actual saltwater. The water had warmed a little, too. Not enough to stop it from killing me, but enough to slow it down. The hail had tapered off as well. I thought about Faran then and worried, but survival had to come first.

Shadow me up, Triss, I want to use your eyes and I need to try a bit of magic.

I won’t be able to help keep you afloat. . . .

It won’t be long, and out here in the bay
—I hoped I was still in the bay—
the saltwater will help. Do it fast though, I don’t know how long I can stay focused.

I could tell he wanted to question and argue, but all he said was,
I trust you.

We settled in the water as Triss went incorporeal and stopped pushing from below, but Jax’s head stayed above the surface. Then I felt him sort of sink into my skin along the interface between us, and slowly spread outward from there.

Normally it felt a bit like someone wrapping me, head to toe, in tight silk, cold and sleek and vaguely sexy. This time it burned like sealing wax straight from the edge of the flame. He trickled his way along my skin under my clothes. Whether I had gotten so cold that Triss felt hot, or the nerves in my skin had just taken so much abuse that ice and fire met in the middle now, I couldn’t say.

I welcomed the sensation, any sensation. My mind was drifting and unseated, and the pain would help keep me in my head. Even the most minor sort of magic requires intense focus and real energy, and I had very little of either left to give. The well of my soul was nearly drained.

That meant it was time to place my final bet, and it was a long shot. I had no prepared spells for something like this, no long practiced tricks to fall back on, just my entirely inadequate magical skills. Unlike some of my peers, I’d always preferred the sword and the shadow to the word and the wand. I was going to have to improvise and that’s why I had Triss playing second skin.

Blade magic of any high order worked best when it was guided by a single will and executed within a cloak of shadow. We had now reached the point where I’d normally have centered myself with deep breathing and an attempt to wipe away all my cares. Instead, I just yanked out the long dagger that hung at my right hip and balanced it on the palm of my hand.

I picked the dagger because it had a teak grip as opposed to the slimmer knives at wrist and ankle with their simple leather-wrapped metal hilts. I wanted maximum sympathy. Focusing what little nima I had left, I strengthened and thickened the shadows on my palm. The dagger lifted free of my hand, floating within a ball of liquid darkness, as I pictured a lodestone seeking a mate.

The dagger slowly rotated widdershins until it pointed toward me and Jax and our sheathed swords—wood and steel together, and not unexpected. I shaped that finding into my working, made it a part of the sympathetic structure of my spell. The dagger’s point slid away from my chest, continuing to rotate slowly leftward until it had made a full circle. Another. I had to use my other hand to brace the raised one to keep it from shaking as both physical and magical reserves started to fail me. A third rotation. I couldn’t do this much longer.

The fourth round began and I didn’t think I’d be able to manage a fifth. The dagger bobbled. Stopped. Rotated back the other way an inch or two and froze. It was pointing somewhere ahead and to my right. If I’d done everything right there would be a ship lying along that line. If I was also lucky, it would be close, and lying at anchor instead of drifting with the tides. If I wasn’t lucky we were all dead. I released Triss and the dagger sank back down to rest on my palm.

Do you think you can keep us pointed in that direction?
I asked.

I can try.

Good.
I dropped the dagger and let it sink because I didn’t want to waste the time to put it away.

Is there a ship there?

I sure hope so.

4

P
ain
is a hone. Give it a chance and it will keep grinding till there’s nothing left but dust, but properly wielded it can create the sharpest of edges. I was starting to feel awfully gritty.

Every stroke of my arms or kick of my legs grated like stone rasping on stone and I knew that if I stopped I’d never start again. I’d been swimming a quarter hour at the most, but the rain and the cold and bearing the weight of the woman I’d once loved on my back had taken their toll. Soon, very soon, I would stop struggling, and that would be the end of me. But not yet.

Not quite yet.

Once again, I dragged an arm up out of the water and forced it forward, reaching out to take my next stroke. This time, something changed. I smashed my hand into rough wet planks, a ship’s hull. My hand was so cold I had to flex my fingers and check it with my other hand to see how badly I’d hurt myself. It was stiff and I’d jammed a knuckle but I didn’t think I’d broken anything—one small benefit of my exhaustion, I just wasn’t swimming hard enough to cause much damage.

Triss.

Nothing. He was tired and hurting, too, worn out from keeping me afloat and the hit he’d taken at the cemetery, though I knew he’d never have admitted it.

Triss!

What? Wait, we’re here?

We are.

I’d pushed myself out and away from the ship’s side so that I wouldn’t scrape up and down against the rough surface with every lift and fall of the swells. Despite the still brutal wind, the waves weren’t bad. Probably because the storm had blown up so quickly right on top of Tien rather than rolling in from the deeps. It hadn’t had the time or impetus to build the sort of waves that a big ocean blow brought with it.

Now we need to find a way aboard,
I mindspoke. Just for a little while really, until the storm blew itself out and we could return to Tien.

Looks like they lost the anchor, or cut it loose,
Triss replied.
So the easy way’s out.

Damn.
I couldn’t see that well through the murk, but had no reason to doubt him.
Maybe we can use the rudder somehow.
I turned and forced myself to swim slowly toward the back of the ship.

Namara had never sent me to the islands, so I didn’t know a lot about ships. I mean I knew the things everybody knows, like the pointy end goes in front, and right and left were called starboard and port. Beyond that my knowledge was spotty, a mix of the simple stuff you picked up hanging out in dockside bars, and the esoterica one gleaned from the odd courier job for smugglers.

It was a three-masted junk, and the thought of smugglers gave me another idea. On the big ocean-going junks like this one, there were often compartments, fore and aft, designed so they could be rapidly flooded to help the boat stay upright in strong winds and big waves. They called them ballast tanks or something like that, and the design was very different from the southern ships that came up out of the Magelands and the Sylvani Empire.

I’d been in and out of ships of both sorts while dealing with smugglers, and the tanks were great for that kind of work. If you put a secondary watertight compartment inside the big main one, and kept that main compartment flooded when you sailed into port, it made a perfect hidey-hole.

As I slipped around the back end of the ship, I was very happy to find a couple of flood ports at the waterline, along with a whole series of fist-sized ports slaved to the larger ones with magic. The main ports were just big enough for a man to slip through. They sat on each side of the rudder, just above a set of sailor’s wards. Of those, the only one I really recognized was the one to prevent fires, though I could guess at a couple of others since they were variations of the sorts of protections you’d see onshore for repelling vermin and the like.

Two questions remained: Was this a smuggling boat? And, did I have the strength to get both Jax and me aboard? On the first, I figured the odds were pretty good. Despite the storm, there wasn’t a light showing. Add that to the fact that it must have been lying at anchor out in the harbor instead of tied up at the docks, and the case was pretty damning. Either it was waiting for a fast cutter to come unload it, or it wanted to ride the tide out to sea before the sun rose. As for the latter question, there was only one way to find out.

Triss, hold us steady while I see if I can’t get the ports open.

I sank in the water while Triss shifted around, but then he got a grip on both me and the ship and lifted me partway free of the swells. A band of solidified shadow like a crescent moon now passed around my waist between me and Jax, then extended itself forward to sink its horns into the tarred seam between two planks. By bracing my boot tips against another seam lower down, I was able to position myself quite steadily in front of the nearer port.

The port looked like a giant’s closed eye. Starting at what would have been the outside corner of the eye, my magesight showed a line of silvery light running upward to the deck far above. Somewhere near the ship’s wheel it would connect to a tiny glyph. A simple thing, so that even the least of hedge witches would be able to close and open the port. The trick would come in activating the spell without also lighting up the glyph for anyone with the eyes to see.

I could cut the line, but then the glyph above would wink out and that would be almost as much of a problem. If I had time, tools, and energy—or really, any two of those—I could have managed it a dozen different ways. As it was, I had to go for an ugly little improvisation. Flicking my right wrist, I dropped the knife sheathed there into my hand . . . where it slipped straight through numbed fingers and vanished into the depths of the harbor.

Well, fuck. Moving more carefully, I reached across and very gently pulled the knife out of my left wrist sheath. Then I stabbed it into a plank so that the edge just touched the line of silver light.

“Sshayar,” I whispered, “can you take over for Triss for a moment?”

For a heartbeat or two there was no response, then Sshayar responded just as quietly, “If it’s brief. Between packing Jax’s wound and everything else, I’m very close to my limits. Holding the two of you up for any length of time is going to hurt.”

I’d partnered Triss long enough to read the subtleties in a Shade’s tones, and I could hear deep exhaustion and pain in Sshayar’s. But I didn’t have a lot of choice. “Do it.”

Triss, I need you to let me take over again as soon as Sshayar’s in position.

You don’t sound much better than Sshayar,
he replied.
Are you sure you can handle this?

No. But it’s this or climbing the rudder, and there’s no way we’re going to manage that without being spotted.

Triss sighed in my mind.
I suppose we can’t just yell for help and trust to the goodness of people’s hearts. Not with the likelihood that our soon-to-be hosts are smugglers, at least.

To say nothing of the combined prices on my head and Jax’s. Trust isn’t something any former Blade can afford.

Not even with each other,
Triss sent sadly.

No, not even that.

Then Sshayar was in place, and Triss vanished into dreams so that I could go to work. Placing my palm firmly against the center of the port, I reached for the well of my soul and found it . . . well, not exactly empty, but drained below the place where I could safely draw from it. Too bad I had no other choice. I could feel the drain in the deeps of my soul as I pulled energy from my core and fed it into the shadows that held me, extending the stuff of Triss’s being to cover the port.

I pushed it further, forcing a line of shadow up the line of the spell to the place where my knife stood out from the planks. My ears began to ring and little sparks danced around the edges of my vision. It felt like taking a deep cut in a fight, the kind where the blood comes out in pulses and you can bleed out in a matter of minutes if you don’t plug the hole.

I had seconds to act, and I did so, forcing the hatch with a brute application of magic. That sent a spike of light racing up the line of the spell toward the glyph above, light that burned away shadows, burned away the substance of my familiar, if only a little bit. When it hit the knife I forced it to shift course, forced it into the knife. There was a bright flare in my magesight, and the whole world went white for a moment as the knife softened and bent.

I lost control of my body and slumped forward, my feet slipping free of the planks. If not for Sshayar holding me up, I’d have smashed face-first into the ship’s hull and that would probably have been it. But Sshayar held onto me, and I held onto consciousness. Only barely, but barely was enough. I released Triss and he slid down my skin, collapsing into my natural shadow.

Sshayer collapsed, too, dropping us back into the water, but not before I reached out with one flailing hand and caught the lip of the port. As I dragged myself up and in, Jax slid free, staying in the water behind me. My back felt suddenly cold and unguarded. Necessary but scary—I’d never have fit through the opening with her there, but for the next few heartbeats I had no way of knowing if Sshayar had let go of me because she wanted to or simply because she’d reached her breaking point.

After I slid my hips through the gap I twisted myself around, so that I could bring my legs inboard without letting go of the port. I didn’t know how far up the inside wall the port would lie, and wasn’t up for jumping games. Then I pivoted and hung over the edge, reaching out and down toward the water, hoping I would find Sshayar waiting there, ready to catch my outflung hands. A swell rolled in first, dipping my hands in the water then raising them high into cold air and the rain.

Nothing. Nothing. Noth—

“What the hell!” A harsh whisper came in a familiar voice.

“Hussh!” Sshayar hissed. “Just reach where I guide you, Aral’s going to pull you up.”

A hand met mine. Jax! Another. I eeled backward off the lip of the port, losing some skin and nearly dislocating my elbows in the process. Turned out, the port was a bit higher than my shoulders, a fact I discovered as my feet splashed into calf-deep water. Up came Jax. I let go as her hands reached the lip, and fell back onto my ass with a splash. Jax hung for a moment on the edge of the port above me, still more out than in. Then another swell came along, and shoved her through, along with about a hundred gallons of saltwater. She landed beside me swearing. We were in.

“Where in Namara’s name are we?” Jax demanded in a whisper—even injured and disoriented she knew better than to make too much noise before she knew how the shadows lay.

“On board what I very much suspect is a smuggling vessel. Or,” I amended, “at least one with a smuggling compartment or two. We’re stuck till the storm’s over.”

“All right. That’s one. Here’s two: Why do I feel like pan-fried shit on a stick?”

“Because the Hand of Heaven put a very neat little hole in your left side. Luckily they used a self-cauterizing spell of some sort or you’d have bled out before I could even get to you.”

I heard something like a hand sliding along wet cloth. Then, “Son of a bitch, that hurts. The who did what now?”

But another swell slopped a big bunch of cold water in through the port just then. “Answer you in a minute. I need to close that before any more of the sea comes in to join us.” I dragged myself back upright and grabbed the lip of the port.

Standing hurt. Everything hurt. I could feel my teeth wanting to chatter in my aching jaw.

“After that, we’ll see if there’s a nice dry smuggling compartment around here where we can collapse for a while,” I said over my shoulder. “If not, I’m going to cut a hole in the nearest bulkhead and we’ll figure it out from there.”

“Triss, you still with me?” I asked aloud because I didn’t want to let Jax know about our newfound ability to communicate silently. A part of me might still love Jax, but I knew damn well better than to trust her.

His voice was weak and came after a brief pause, but it came, “Yeah, I’m here. What do you need?”

“Can you reach out there and pull what’s left of my knife free?” I asked.

In response, a tentacle of shadow slid past me. If I’d done this right . . . The hatch blinked itself shut like the great eye it had been painted to resemble.

I yanked my hands back just before it would have crushed my fingers. My knees buckled as I staggered back, and I went down hard, falling face-first into the water and sucking in a noseful. I came up gasping and coughing, glad it still barely topped my calves. Much deeper and I might have drowned. The irony didn’t escape me.

“You all right, Aral?” asked Jax.

“Not really. No. I feel pretty much like I came out of that deep-fried shit pan you mentioned a minute ago. But we can’t stop just yet.”

I wasn’t ready to stand, so I stayed on my knees as I pulled my trick bag around front and dug around inside. Everything water could hurt was a loss. So was some of the stuff I’d have expected to be fine. Fortunately, that didn’t include my little thieveslamp. Slightly smaller than a closed fist, it was basically a metal box with a shutter on one side and a dim, red, magelight inside. The mechanism didn’t much like all the time it had spent submerged in saltwater. It squeaked its unhappiness when I forced it open with my thumb, but it did open.

That revealed a large, flat, boxlike space with no apparent access other than the ports. Considering the size of the ship and the height of the ceiling, I didn’t like the odds of a smuggling compartment being concealed up top. Underfoot was possible, but unlikely as it would be easier to intuit from a quick glance at the hull and much harder to keep dry. That left the forward bulkhead.

“I don’t see anything,” said Jax.

“That’s kind of the point,” I replied. “Now be quiet and let me concentrate. I need to do this before I keel over, and I don’t think I’ve got a lot of time.” With some reluctance and a great deal of difficulty I forced myself back up onto my feet and stumbled my way over to the bulkhead.