Authors: Kelly McCullough
Broken Blade (20 page)
“How long was I gone?”
“A bit more than an hour,” replied Devin. “You’re a faster swimmer with that basket than I would be. And that must have been the shortest investiture vigil in the history of the order. Did you sprint from shore to pool?”
“No. It felt like I was there for ages and ages, much longer than I was gone, even without the swimming.” I snapped my last buckle into place and rolled my shoulders to make sure everything was hanging properly. “Are you certain it’s only been an hour?”
Devin nodded, and I thought I saw Zass do so as well though he was nearly invisible in that light. “Perhaps the goddess bent time for you,” said the Shade. “Triss?”
My familiar poked his head over my shoulder, and I felt his shadowy scales rub my cheek. “I don’t know. Whatever happened, I was inside it and felt nothing. But time is running now, and we have to be quick if we want to avoid days wasted in arguing with the masters.”
As usual, Triss was right. I scooped up the kila again and turned to Devin. “Will you come with me to witness the ceremony?”
His teeth shone white in the dark, marking a brief smile. “Of course.”
It was easy enough for two Shade-cloaked boys to slip past the priest attendants at the door to the inner temple and move on from there to the Sanctuary of the Blades undetected. We paused there at the entrance to draw aside the shadows over our eyes and look for any senior Blades within. I couldn’t see anyone, but that meant less than it might in any other place. Blades often paid Namara their respects or made prayers while hidden in shadow.
Still, as a new-forged Blade, I had both the right and the duty. Signaling my intent to Triss with a gesture, I stepped across the threshold and out of his shadow. The sanctuary was a large, domed oval with tapered ends, perhaps thirty feet across at its narrowest and entered by doors at either end.
Over the very center of the room was a circular skylight open to the weather. Underneath the opening lay a wide circle of lapis lazuli with a great sphere of obsidian sunk in its center. From above and in concert with the white oval of the dome, it presented the aspect of a great unblinking eye with the globe as its pupil.
Walking quickly but silently as I had been taught, I crossed from the door to the edge of the lapis band, where I knelt briefly and bowed my head to the orb. I couldn’t tell whether Devin had accompanied me in shadow or if he hung back a bit, somewhere behind me, and I realized that it didn’t really matter. Not that or the presence of any other Blade. This was between me and my goddess.
Rising, I approached the chest-high sphere. The obsidian was smooth and polished. I could see my own face in a reflection clearer than the lake on the calmest day. The only thing marring the perfection of the stone was the hilts of the kila standing out from the surface here and there. Unlike pitons hammered into rock, they looked as though they’d been simply slid into the orb as cleanly as the sharpest stiletto going into an unprotected back.
I looked for the place where the high priestess had withdrawn Alinthide’s spirit knife, but there was no hole to mark its passing and I could only make a rough guess. Bending forward, I kissed the stone where I thought it had been and whispered a prayer for her soul. Then I lifted my own kila high over my head and drove it down toward that same spot with all the strength in my body.
I had seen the investiture of other Blades several times in the past. But some part of me still expected the black steel to glance away from the black stone with a ringing sound and a shower of sparks, braced for the shock of that impact to transmit itself up my hand and arm to my shoulder, anticipated numbness and pain and the shame of failure.
None of that happened. The kila went into the sphere as neatly and smoothly as a practice thrust going into the throat of a hog or goat—when the cooks needed an animal slaughtered, it was always done by a trainee. It slid in until the guard touched stone, then stopped smoothly. But when I tugged at the hilt briefly before releasing my grip, the blade felt as firmly planted as if it had been welded in place. There it would remain until I died, and some future priest or priestess came to return it to Namara. Or so I believed at the time.
I was wrong.
11
It’s
funny how two disparate moments in time can become forever tied together by memory and pain. I can’t look back on the transcendent joy of the night of my investiture as a Blade without also seeing what came later. It’s part of why I try never to think about something that was once one of my most important memories.
funny how two disparate moments in time can become forever tied together by memory and pain. I can’t look back on the transcendent joy of the night of my investiture as a Blade without also seeing what came later. It’s part of why I try never to think about something that was once one of my most important memories.
When I do let the memories loose, it’s impossible for me to revisit the moment when my kila joined me to the goddess through her great orb without also returning to the day five years later, when I came home from a mission and found the temple in ruins and my goddess murdered. In one memory, the orb sits in the heart of the temple, whole and symbolically wedding the goddess to her Blades through the marriage of stone and steel. In the other, the orb is cracked and ruined, a broken stone promise lying just outside the temple gate. The kila were pried loose and carried off to lie at the feet of the Son of Heaven.
I’ve been told that the knives of the last few living Blades are sunk in the back wall of the Son of Heaven’s privy, where the man can piss on them each morning. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that several of the surviving masters died trying to recover the lost kila over the last five years. I wonder if the Son pulled their blades out when they died and let them splash into the depths below. It would have a certain sort of obscene symmetry, wouldn’t it?
Pain from the cramping of clenched muscles drew my attention back to the now. I pushed even the thought of memory aside for a moment, forced myself to see only the library and the present. It was that or go and find a bottle of Kyle’s, knowing I wouldn’t stop drinking till I hit the bottom. I wanted that drink, I wanted it so very badly, and I might have gone looking for it if not for my debts to the living and dead. That, and my unspoken promise to Triss, not to give up drinking—I hadn’t the strength for that—just to stop being a drunk.
I went to the balcony and looked out over the city. It was dark and still, almost quiet here at the nadir of the day in a wealthy part of town. It was a few hours yet before the delivery people and the house servants responsible for feeding the well-to-do would start to make their scurrying pre-breakfast rounds. A sharp contrast with the Stumbles or Smuggler’s Rest, neighborhoods where things never quieted down completely.
Places like the Gryphon and the Spinnerfish never closed. The night traders needed havens where they could meet and eat. The whores and their clients wanted dark corners and beds by the hour. And always, always, always in those neighborhoods there were damned souls in need of a drink. That last was half of why
I’d
taken a room there once upon a time.
I’d
taken a room there once upon a time.
Turning away from the balcony and its doorway on the night, I pried my hands loose from the death grip they’d taken on my shoulders and prepared to dive back into the deeps of my own past once again. I didn’t want to go there, but I still hadn’t gotten what I needed, and I didn’t know where else I could find it.
Turn back the years and find . . .
After I’d placed my kila in the great orb, a voice came out of the darkness, and it hadn’t belonged to Devin.
“Ashvik?” Master Kelos had asked.
“Ashvik,” I’d answered, ready to argue with him. “For the goddess and for Alinthide.”
“Good hunting,” was all he’d said.
I’d nodded and turned back toward the door. I saw neither Kelos, nor Devin, though as I went out into the hall, a hand had briefly squeezed my shoulder. Another had placed a small fat purse in my hand. Devin and Kelos? That’s what I’d believed at the time, but things that came later make me wonder if both weren’t Kelos.
But that wasn’t the memory I needed right now. Perhaps I could find it in my first visit to Tien, in the months leading up to the night I killed a king. During the first few weeks, I’d tried to catch him away from the palace, twice at the Marchon place when he went to bed his mistress, once on a progress through the Duchy of Jenua, and another time when he met with his brother Thauvik at military headquarters. Each time I’d been thwarted by the Elite and their stone dogs, unable to get within even a long bowshot of the king.
Ashvik was guarded too well. I began to understand why Alinthide and the others had died. It should have been frightening, or, at the very least, sobering. Instead, I found it the reverse. The challenge intoxicated me.
I
was going to succeed where the great had failed. I was going to deliver justice to the tyrant. I was going to prove the power of Namara to the world. All that because only I could, and because she had chosen
me
, and most of all because I was the best there was.
I
was going to succeed where the great had failed. I was going to deliver justice to the tyrant. I was going to prove the power of Namara to the world. All that because only I could, and because she had chosen
me
, and most of all because I was the best there was.
I was an arrogant fool. I was lucky. I was also right.
At that time and for that situation, I really was the best in the world, and that was why the goddess had chosen me for the mission. I won’t lie to myself and deny it, but neither will I lie to myself about my sins of arrogance and ignorance. Being one of the world’s best at anything is a funny sort of situation. It’s a bit like walking along a fence top between two very deep pits. On the one side is overconfidence, on the other self-doubt. A misstep in either direction can set you up for a fall into ruin. And lying to yourself is one of the easiest missteps to make.
That’s part of why I say that I was the best, because it’s the truth. I was, for a year or two. I’m not anymore, not with what I’ve become. For that matter, I wouldn’t be even if I were the Kingslayer still, not if Siri the Mythkiller is alive at any rate. She took the honors from me when I was at my best and held the title for a little less than half a decade before the temple fell, which isn’t a quarter so long as Kelos held it fifty years ago when he was in his prime.
But back then, I was so very, very good. I watched and I waited and I worked my way ever closer to the king. First, I learned the guard routines in the grounds, penetrating a little closer to the castle every night, slipping past dogs and guards, groundskeepers, and courtiers out for clandestine fucks in the gardens.
When I could come and go as easily as any shadow in the night, I moved in closer, entering the castle proper, moving through the halls, burrowing my way steadily deeper. It took a month and a half from when I started to sniff out the palace’s secrets to finding my doorway into the Grand Tower where the royal apartments lay.
The details don’t really matter except in the broadest sense. I could enter the grounds any of a dozen ways, up through a culvert, over the walls in five places, through the main gates with the nonresident courtiers, in by the postern with the deliveries . . .
From there my path narrowed. Only three routes into the castle proper left me in a good position to approach the Grand Tower. Via the kitchens and up the shaft of the dumbwaiter to the monarch’s informal dining chamber, hanging in wait in the rafters of the audience hall after the court had retired, or trailing behind the shift change of the Crown Guard as they made their way from the barracks to their positions around the outer perimeter of the Tower.
All had their problems. The route from the audience hall was long and heavily guarded. The dumbwaiter was a rat trap, hard to climb undetected and easy to seal if they spotted us. Trailing the guards meant treading very close behind the soldiers and the pair of Elite who officered them for close to ten minutes, plenty of time for the stone dogs to hear an extra pair of feet.
Unfortunately, that last was also the best route because of timing. The Crown Guard’s officers checked in with the Elite providing internal security for the Grand Tower while their own men took up position. Likewise, the exiting troop’s Elite checked in then. It gave everyone an important chance to compare notes. It also gave Triss and me a brief window when there was no exterior Elite presence covering the wall where the gate from the pleasure gardens entered the Tower.
The gate itself was hopeless, but a fast climber with the right equipment could make it up the outside of the wall to a small overhung niche between the supports of a fifth-floor balcony, and he could do it before the Elite lieutenant who supervised the gate finished his conference with his fellows.
The first time we’d made the climb, I’d bored two small holes in the mortar where the stone corbels met the wall—completely invisible from the ground level—so that I could set a pair of anchors whenever I wanted. Of course, by the time I was done, the lieutenant had arrived, so Triss and I had to wait for the next shift change to descend. But that was the whole point of the anchors, they allowed me to hang a narrow rope sling between the corbels like a sailor’s hammock. There we could lie safe while I observed the security arrangements.
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