Bared Blade (11 page)

“That depends on a couple of things. The value of the item. How dangerous the job is. How long it takes. Etc. Oh, and I don’t work in the dark. You tell me everything you know or think you know about the job, and you do it up front.”

“How do we know we can trust you?” asked Vala, who had resumed her pacing.

“You don’t. If you had time and knew the city, you could ask around about my rep, but that’s not a luxury you have, not with the amount of heat you’ve already generated.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said Stel. “We might surprise you there.”

“That’s certainly possible, but the impression I’ve gotten is that in addition to the heat coming from the guard, you’re under a lot of time pressure on this thing.”

“What if we tell you what you want and then you decide you don’t like the odds?” asked Vala.

“Easy. If I don’t like the job, I won’t take it, but I also won’t slink you out to the guard. That’s one of the things you’d know if you’d had time to check me out.”

“Actually,” said Vala, “that reputation is exactly why we came looking for you at the Gryphon’s Head, Jack Aral.”

I blinked several times then, and Triss jerked sharply, but only a few tiny fractions of an inch. If the Dyad noticed either gesture of surprise, neither of her faces betrayed it.

“That’s an interesting statement,” I said after a slightly too long silence. “If you were at the Gryphon looking for me, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Say that we were of three minds about it,” the Meld said from both sides of me, “and you will hit close enough to the mark.”

“I didn’t like the idea,” said Stel.

“I wasn’t thrilled with it either,” agreed Vala, “though I thought it worth investigating.”

“But I …felt we needed some sort of help,” said the Meld.

I noted the choice of “felt” as opposed to “knew” or “believed,” and could tell there was something interesting going on there, if not what. “It sounds like there’s some major significance to the way you phrased that. Or am I mishearing?”

“You have a good ear,” replied the Meld. “I …or in this case,
we
had not reached a formal decision about whether to consult with you in your professional capacity. We had hoped to spend some time observing you in your natural
surrounds before doing anything more. Several days, perhaps. But circumstances got away from us and now we are come to the choice prematurely.”

“I don’t know. In many ways you’ve had a better look at what I’m capable of than most of my clients ever get. I don’t normally let on that I’m up to dealing with Elite problems, if you know what I mean.” Nor would I have allowed that information to get out this time, if I’d had much in the way of a choice about it. “In fact, I generally flat refuse any job that would bring me in close contact with the king’s personal bonebreakers.”

“That’s only made the decision harder,” said the Meld, speaking through Stel. “Before, we thought you no more than a common jack. Now, you are revealed to be much more than we expected. But exactly how much more and in what ways is still a dangerous mystery. So, Aral, what are you?”

“Funnily enough, that’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.”

Anger flashed in Stel’s eyes and Vala stiffened. “We didn’t come here to play verbal games!” said the Meld.

“No, you came here because you need me.” I jumped to my feet and walked toward Stel, keeping her firmly in my shadow. “I offered you the best hope of a temporary refuge and redress for your problems. You made that choice after checking me out as much as you could from a distance and then you kept me in the dark about your intent until now. If I’ve got doubts about the arrangement, they’re no less valid than your own, so let’s not get all high-horse about things, shall we?”

Behind me I heard Vala quietly shifting to the side, presumably so that she could blast me without putting Stel at risk if she had to.

Without turning, I continued, “For starters, that means that your Vala mote stops pointing those wands at my back, Dyad, and you start trusting me at least a little bit. That or you take your best shot and only one of us walks away. Which is it going to be?”

I
tried not to let my tension show in any way as I waited to find out whether I was going to have to kill the Dyad. I had no doubt that I could, even if she decided to attack first. I just might not live through the experience.

“Well, I’m going to have to vote for shooting you in the back,” said Stel, her voice perfectly calm. “No offense, but there are a lot of jacks in this city. We can find another, one who doesn’t present so many unknowns and risks. And, I don’t see any way that we can lose the fight. Vala?”

“I’m leaning that way as well. But I am wondering why our jack friend here isn’t acting all that worried about the possibility.”

“Is that concern the only thing that’s keeping you from attacking me from behind right now?” I asked. “Because, if it is, then we’re never going to establish the kind of trust that we’re going to need to make this work, and we might as well get this over with.”

“No, it is not the only thing,” said the Meld, speaking through Vala’s mouth. “That would be me. I have chosen to overrule the thinking of my motes.”

And how did that work?
I wondered. Clearly there was more to the Meld than just the sum of its parts. There were definitely three distinct people sharing the two bodies.

“So far you’ve done us nothing but good turns,” continued the meld. “Most recently, giving us the chance to have this conversation, instead of simply killing Stel when Vala drew on you.”

“What?” Stel looked shocked. “He’s empty-handed. Even if he’s a mage, he hasn’t so much as pointed a finger in my direction.”

“Yeah, I’d have blasted him before he could even begin to get off a spell,” said Vala. “What haven’t you told us, Valor of Steel?” Vala sounded indignant, and I had to assume she was addressing the Meld by its formal title, a thing I’d heard rumored but never confirmed.

“He is a Blade,” said the Meld, speaking through Vala’s mouth. “Some would say
the
Blade, if I’m not wrong in my guess at his identity. You
are
the Aral known as Kingslayer, are you not?”

I nodded slightly, but said nothing. I don’t really think of myself as the Kingslayer anymore, but this weird conversation was far too fascinating to interrupt.

“I still don’t understand,” said Stel. “A Blade is just another type of mage, no matter what the legends say. What makes you think he could kill me before Vala could stop him?”

“You’re sitting in his
shadow
,” said the Meld, and exasperation crept into her voice. “His Shade holds your life in the palm of its hand, and has since before this conversation started. Honestly, motes, I sometimes wonder how I manage to think half so clearly as I do when it’s your minds I have to use to do all the work.”

“Oh,” said Stel, her voice gone suddenly very small, while somewhere behind me Vala swallowed audibly.

“You both know about Shades,” said the Meld. “I know you do because I can see the lessons about Blades in your memories. But apparently it’s never occurred to either of you to actually
think
about them. Not even when you’ve got one with its fingers wrapped around your throats.”

The Meld’s eyes looked out at me through Stel’s face. “I’ve turned the battle wands away, Kingslayer. Now I’m going to bring Vala over here so that we’re all where you can see us. At that point I’d take it as a gesture of good faith if you’d step out of the light.”

Again I nodded without saying a word. Creaking boards warned me of Vala’s approach. She paused as she passed, laying the battle wands on the ground in front of my feet without ever looking at me. Then she went to take a seat on Stel’s barrel with her back turned to both of us, thus preserving what I had already come to think of as the quintessential Dyad posture—looking both ways.

“My turn,” I said. “Though there’s no need to actually physically move out of the light. Triss?”

My shadow slid to the left and up onto the ceiling, uncovering Stel. Then it shifted shape, assuming the familiar outline of a small dragon and his normally concealed identity.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” he asked, his voice strangely diffident.

“If you like.” I wondered at the formality, but now wasn’t the time to ask him about it. “Triss, this is Stel, her bond-mate, Vala, and their Meld, Valor of Steel …At least I believe that’s how the Meld should be addressed—please correct me if I’m wrong.”

The Meld interjected, “VoS will do, actually. Valor of Steel is a formal thing worn only for formal moments. It is also, more rightly, the name of our Dyad, a sort of formalized rendition of the names my motes assumed when they bonded. I also answer to ‘hey you.’”

“My pardon. Triss, meet Vala, Stel, and VoS, collectively the Dyad Valor of Steel.”

Stel nodded, which was as much of a bow as could be managed in her present position and condition. Vala waved. The Meld repeated both gestures, somehow making them distinct from the originals.

“VoS, Vala, Stel, this is Triss, my familiar, and one of the finest Shades ever to grace our world of Gram.”

Triss tipped his wings back and bowed from the waist. “I’m very pleased to finally meet you all. I’m sure that Aral and I will be able to help you recover the Kothmerk.”

“What!” Vala spun half around, her hands reaching for the empty wand sheaths at her hips.

“How did you know about that?” demanded Stel, half drawing her fighting rods.

“Very clever.” VoS turned Vala back around and resheathed Stel’s rods. “You’re going to have to tell me how you know about that.”

“I’ll trade you,” I said. “You tell me how you realized who and what I was, and the story of how you ended up here, and I’ll tell you what I know about the Kothmerk and how I learned it.”

“Deal.” The Meld nodded both of her heads. “Oh, and in case you hadn’t guessed. You’re hired.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me how much I cost?”

“No. This is a matter that touches on the honor of the Archon. If we recover the Kothmerk, my government will pay whatever is necessary. If we don’t, it will be because we’re all dead. In which case, money is
really
no object.”

I chuckled. “I’m glad you’ve got such confidence in my dedication to your cause, though I’m not sure how you arrived there.”

“Start with the Shade, then,” said the Meld. “And with my half of our exchange of notes. A few moments ago, when Vala mentioned that we’d come to the Gryphon specifically to find Aral the jack, your shadow moved of its own accord. I didn’t register it at that moment, since I was too busy watching your expression and posture. But later, when you showed such confidence in the face of what seemed overwhelming odds, I knew that you had to be much more than you seemed, so I replayed all our memories of you.

“The movement of your shadow then was the clue I needed to make sense of the chaos at the Gryphon when my motes somehow lost track of you. You didn’t
seem
to vanish then, you did vanish, and without using magic. Therefore, you had to be a Blade.”

“Makes sense.” I nodded. “But it still doesn’t tell me why that makes you trust me so much.”

VoS looked at me like I was speaking a language she didn’t understand. “You are the Kingslayer, Blade of Namara, the living hand of Justice. And our cause is just. What else could we possibly need to know?”

She said it so simply and with such conviction that it felt like I’d taken a knife to the heart. My eyes burned with unshed tears as I remembered what it felt like to have that kind of unalloyed faith in the goddess and the cause I served. Not to mention in myself and my fellows.

That was all gone now; my faith in all things godly had been swept away by the Emperor of Heaven’s murder of Namara. Its remains were buried in the ruins of her temple by the Emperor’s chief priest, the Son of Heaven. My faith in my fellow Blades had gone into the grave when I found out that some few of my companions lived on, having cut a deal with the most abhorrent of new masters, that self-same Son of Heaven.

My first impulse was to tell the Dyad that, to warn her that we who had once been Blades were just as broken and betraying as anyone else, but somehow I couldn’t do it. She had a faith in me and my kind that I had long since lost, and I couldn’t bear to take that away from her. Not when I knew how much its loss had cost me. Perhaps because of that, I found myself wanting to help them more than anything I had wanted in a very long time, to see myself as I had once been, if only for a little while and through the eyes of another.

And if somewhere in the back of my head there was a cynical voice reminding me that appearances were not always what they seemed and that the Dyad might turn up on the wrong side of justice, and another voice pointing out that I had already promised to help Fei and that the Dyad’s goals and Fei’s were not necessarily in alignment …well, that was probably all to the good.

Vala might remind me of Jax, but she wasn’t Jax. She was part of a Dyad; a creature as alien as you could possibly
find inside of a human skin. And long after she had returned to Kodamia, I would still be dealing with Fei. My life would never again be as uncomplicated as it had been when I lived to obey my goddess, and there was no point in pretending otherwise.