Drawn Blades (18 page)

I shrugged.
Siri might know, but the deep theory stuff’s beyond me.

Get some sleep. I’ll wake you if anything changes or if it gets too bright for me.

I closed my eyes and let Triss push me under. I surfaced for a few hours right around noon, but spent most of that time in a sort of half trance. Much of an assassin’s job consists of long waits in uncomfortable circumstances. Efik’s the perfect answer for easing you through those times without going mad, but that path was no longer open to me. That forced me to fall back on my meditation training, which was simultaneously less effective and harder to maintain. I was only too happy to sleep again when the sun sank low enough for Triss to take over again.

*   *   *

What
do you think is our best approach?
Triss sent.

We were hanging upside down in the top of the crevice that concealed the door. I quickly reviewed what the god had given me, then shook my head.

We don’t have a lot of options. There are alcoves on both sides of the passage a couple yards in from the door. The guards are relieved every four hours. A human in that position would lose a good bit of their edge by the end of the third hour. Especially here in the wilderness where the chance of actually having to deal with intruders approaches zero. But that’s hardly an eyeblink for one of the Others, so there’s not much point in waiting. I say we pop the door and go in fast and lethal.

I don’t like going straight in like that. Not if we can avoid it. What if we open the door and slip back up here—lure them o
ut?

I don’t think so. They’ve the means to sound an alarm. An open door with no one coming through it is as likely to make them call for help as anything. I wish I could do that shadow folding thing Siri invented for traveling short distances through the everdark, but the magic’s way too complex for me.

Triss hissed.
And, I’m incredibly glad you can’t. It’s crazy dangerous even when you understand all the principles. That’s why the council banned it. Faran was absolutely right to refuse to teach you.

Faran was something of a magical prodigy. Back when she was playing the spy, she’d independently developed a variant on Siri’s shadow origami trick that allowed her to tuck small items away in the everdark. Having a place to hide papers and the like where no one but she could get at them had come in very handy.

Later, when we were trapped in a collapsed tunnel, she’d been able to back-figure Siri’s version of the thing with the help of Master Loris, who had been part of the council when it was originally banned. Since then, Faran had flatly refused to even try to teach me the trick. She said I didn’t have the mathimagical underpinnings, and until I did it was nothing but an especially fancy way to commit suicide by stupid.

I sighed.
You’re probably right, but it still rankles.

I’m definitely right, and you’ll get over it. Now, if there really isn’t a subtle way to do this, I guess we’re stuck with a frontal assault.

Only, sneaky like.
I punctuated my sending with a mental wink.

Yeah, that,
Triss replied wryly.

Might as well get it over with.
I took a deep breath, and then another, focusing my attention entirely on this moment until nothing else existed. Then it was time to begin.

. . . I kick off with my feet, pivoting around the friction point of my braced hands. Rotating in the air, I land facing the concealed door. Slipping my fingers into the crack that hides the catch, I yank the right side of the door outward, using the same impulse to fling myself into the narrow passage beyond.

Short daggers drop into my hands when I flick my wrists. I hear clattering as the guards start to react to the door crashing open, hands slapping on sword hilts, the shush of steel sliding against leather.

Two lunging steps and I’m in the wide space between the guards in their alcoves. Though they can’t see me, the one on the right has her sword more than half out of its sheath already. The other is slower, with barely three inches of steel showing. Bright reflections spike across my borrowed darksight—polished steel rather than cursed iron.

They are too far apart for me to take both simultaneously. I spin to the right, slicing my dagger across the throat of the faster guard. It cuts deep and catches. I let it go as blood fountains. At the same time, I collapse my shroud into a thick rope of darkness and solidify it with a burst of magic, snapping it across the eyes of the other guard like the tip of a whip. He yelps and turns toward the alarm bell—belatedly recognizing what he should have done from the first.

The first guard lets go of her sword as she tries to staunch the gush of blood from her throat. I catch the hilt out of the air and fling the sword at the other’s shins. It doesn’t really hurt him, but he stumbles as he reflexively tries to dodge the spinning blade. I put a foot on the wall at the back of the first guard’s alcove and launch myself into a diving thrust that ends with my second dagger snapping as the point wedges under his kneecap.

He catches me across the shoulders with a downward swing of his sword. It’s a brutal blow, but his blade breaks when it hits the goddess-forged swords in my back sheaths. I roll and come up behind him, flipping my rope of darkness around his neck like a garrote. He drags me forward as he staggers toward the alarm once more. I spin more magic into the rope, tighten my focus . . . The line across his throat contracts, becoming a black wire no thicker than one of the hairs on my head. The loop closes, and the guard loses his head.

Messy,
Triss sent when I released him a moment later, dropping back into a more normal perception of time.

Tell me about it.
I dashed back to close the hidden door. It had been open less than a minute.
See what you can do about that.

Triss worked to clear the worst of the blood from my skin and clothes—sending some of it into the everdark and scraping away much of the rest.

I won’t be able to do much about the stuff that’s soaked in, not without investing time we don’t have right now.

I know.
Triss could probably clean the cloth out pore by pore, but washing it in cold water would be quicker and more efficient.
Just do what you can.

Drawing one of my swords, I cut the alarm free of the wall and stomped on it.
That’ll slow things down a bit if someone discovers the bodies, but from here on out, we’re mostly going to have to rely on speed and luck.

Pushing aside the past and thinking only far enough into the future to guide my immediate choices, I raced down the hall. Thanks to the Smoldering Flame I knew where I was going and what I would have to do to release Siri from the binding that has trapped her smoke form within the temple’s ever-burning flames. The plan was a simple one, driven by the physical structure of the complex and the necessity of speed.

The passage angled slowly down into the depths of the earth, bending to the right as it went—toward the waterfall. An arch opened ahead of me and the passage widened beyond. There were more guards here in a room just beyond the arch. An iron gate stood ready to close the passage. But I was practically invisible and they were lax—relying on the first pair of sentries to give them the warning they would need to take action.

As I passed them, I spared a moment to be thankful that the Durkoth won’t cross the wall back into the empire. The earth would reveal my footsteps to them, where the Sylvani noticed nothing. A few yards farther on, a small doorway opened onto a narrow spiral staircase on my right. I ducked through and catfooted my way down the short flight of steps.

The main passage—now behind me—went on, driving deeper into the stone as it wound through the living areas to reach the sanctum and the ever-burning cultic fires. These stairs led to a series of maintenance-ways running close to the surface of the rock face behind the waterfall to allow easy access to the chimneys and sluices.

As I left the bottom of the steps, I encountered a cultist returning from some cleaning task. He had an empty bucket and a large sponge. There was no way to slip past him in the narrow passage. I drew a short knife from my boot.

He paused a few feet short of me and rubbed his eyes—it’s hard
not
to notice the blind spot when it completely obscures the path in front of you. Stepping forward, I hammered my knife between two ribs and into his heart. As he slumped, I grabbed the bucket, using it to catch the blood that spilled when I withdrew my knife.

A few seconds later I left body and bucket both hanging in an airshaft. Somewhere below, a room or complex of rooms would eventually start to catch the worst of a bad smell. But not soon enough to affect my plans. I was alone again, and unlikely to encounter more cultists, at least for a while.

I passed a whole series of such shafts and sluiceways as I worked my way along the back side of the cliff face. They were all large enough for a good-sized man to crawl through, allowing for proper maintenance. Farther along, a second spiral staircase plunged deep below the main levels, giving access to the waste outflows that flushed sewage into the cauldron at the base of the waterfall. But I moved quickly past it since my business was with that which went up.

Finally, at the very end of the tunnel, I came to the chimneys that vented the smoke from the temple fires into the void behind the waterfall. There were three, and they were the biggest shafts yet. The fires were never allowed to die, so any work on the chimneys had to happen with the smoke flowing through them. Make them too tight, and your chimney sweeps were likely to suffocate. I wanted the central shaft, which opened out of a hood directly above the fire pit that centered the temple.

Pulling my hood and cowl tight to block as much smoke as possible, I opened the iron hatch on the angled wall above me. The shaft climbed past at a steep but not impossible pitch. It was smooth and polished under the layers of soot, but there were no handholds. Once inside I closed the door and released my shroud.

Triss, can you drop the bar?

Reassuming his dragon shape, Triss nosed his way along the seal at the edge of the hatch. It was tight, but after a moment he stopped, sniffed carefully at one spot, and nodded. With obvious effort, he pushed his head and one foreleg through the paper-thin gap. A moment later, I heard a muffled clang. I kicked the door to check the seal, and it didn’t even rattle. That was good. I needed it to stay tight.

Thanks, Triss, you know what to do next.

On it.
Triss shrank and tightened, squeezing himself down into a shape he’d never assumed before.

This was where my plan diverged from what I had told the Smoldering Flame. He expected me to climb down through the smoke and drop into the temple below where he would protect me from the heat of the flames while I recovered a stone glyph buried amidst the coals. Removing the glyph from the fire and putting it in an airtight bag would break the first half of the summoning that held Siri trapped in smoke form
without
extinguishing the symbol of the Smoldering Flame’s sacred presence. That part was very important to him.

Which was too bad. I braced my hands and feet on opposite sides of the shaft and started to climb up instead of down. Within seconds I noticed the smoke ring on my finger beginning to swirl and twist angrily.

What are you doing?
the god roared into my mind.

Freeing Siri.

This is not how you told me you would do it.

And
you
agreed to stay out of my head. In my book that makes us even.
I paused in my climb.
Oh, and before you try anything fancy like trying to possess me, let me direct your attention to the second ring on that finger, the one that lies below yours, the one made of shadow.

Your familiar.

Yes. If I do anything but what I have told Triss to expect me to do, he’s going to snip that finger right off my hand and you with it. We worked out the details on our way to the temple.

It had been a nerve-wracking conversation to begin, relying as it did on the god’s seeming inattention and my untested ability to detect him if he intruded on my mind again. Because of the potential presence in my head, we’d carried the conversation out in whispers rather than mind-to-mind, hoping that would help keep from tipping him off. I honestly hadn’t been entirely certain we’d pulled it off until Triss finally settled in place beneath the smoke ring right before I started my climb.

I began to move upward once again.
After Triss removes my finger I will continue on to free Siri in the manner I choose without you. Do you understand?

I felt the god probing at my mind and chose not to resist this time. I had some thoughts about how I might fight such a battle should I need to, but I wasn’t sure any of it would work twice. Since I didn’t want to give any of that away prematurely, I pushed my current intent right to the top where he couldn’t miss it. Hopefully, that would make him so mad that he wouldn’t think to dig deeper.

A moment later, the god snarled into my mind,
What you are planning is basest sacrilege!

I can’t transgress against a creed I don’t believe. Now, get out of my head and let me work.

I will make you pay for this,
he growled—and I had no doubts that he would if he ever got the chance. But then he retreated and I was alone once again.

Soon I reached the top of the shaft. It opened less than ten feet below the lip of the falls, taking advantage of a deep overhang that kept water from rolling down into the shaft. Balancing on the lip, I leaned as far out as I could and sent a chain of jagged lightning out from my palm to strike the rock wall above me. Shards of stone exploded outward from the point of contact as the water permeating the top layers flashed into steam.

A shallow irregular channel formed, and I walked it up to the overhang, then started working the lightning back and forth laterally. After two or three passes a portion of the waterfall’s lip gave way and I ducked back into the chimney shaft as water started sheeting down the cliff face. Most of it continued on toward the basin below, but the channel I’d carved directed enough into my shaft to more than half fill it. I held on to the lip for twenty long heartbeats as it hammered away at me. When I was done, I took a deep breath and let go, letting the raging flow carry me down into darkness.