Drawn Blades (21 page)

“Ash, then,” I said as I rolled over. “And you may call me Aral.”

I felt Triss come groggily awake.
What’s going on . . . Oh.

The tall Sylvani lord sat cross-legged on the ground a few yards away, his enormous not-quite-a-sword across his knees. It was unsheathed, but not exactly bare, as it had an intricate multicolored pattern of silk cords knotted around the blade. Spell-light ran through the network in weird pulsing lines. Daylight showed the fine lines in his face, and made his silver hair gleam. He was a beautiful man and one I would probably have found attractive in other circumstances.

I matched Ash’s pose, crossing my legs and putting my empty hands on my knees. “Kelos?”

“He would not have left you if he hadn’t felt certain of your safety. But he knew that you would be hungry when you woke, and he wanted to provide an answer to your need. He searched a wide circle before he went, making sure that you were alone and would remain so.”

“But he didn’t find you.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t want him to.”

“Neat trick, that.” I lifted an eyebrow. “I must admit that I’m surprised he left me at all, food or no.”

“I wanted to speak with you by yourself before having dealings with the Deathwalker. I gave him a bit of a nudge in the direction of finding you a meal.”

Spooky,
sent Triss.

Tell me about it.

“He’s not going to like that very much.”

“That doesn’t really concern me one way or the other, and I doubt that he’ll ever find out if you don’t choose to tell him. Now, as in our earlier meeting, we don’t have much time before we are likely to be interrupted, and there are things we should speak of.”

I had my doubts about his assessment of Kelos’s ability to discover his machinations, but I let it go. “Interesting sword you’ve got there.” I didn’t know about the Sylvani, but the blade with its grinning pommel was close to the top of
my
list.

Ash smiled in the manner of a man inviting you into his joke. “We both know it’s not a sword.”

“More a suspicion on my part than real knowledge,” I countered. “If you don’t mind my asking, what
is
it if it’s not a sword?”

“The trapped soul of a buried goddess, of course.”

“Of course.” I suppressed the urge to back away slowly.

That’s got to be all kinds of volatile and unstable,
Triss whispered into my mind, his tone rife with alarm.

“She was called Rakshifthra the Changer, and she wore two skins in life. One, a Kreyn priestess. The other, a filathalor . . .” His eyes went far away for a second. “I don’t think there is a word for them in your language—they died out before your people first walked in this world—call it a tiger-boar and you will be close enough.”

“Big bastard,” I said. “Stripes? Tusks? Way too many teeth? Bad attitude? Regenerates? I had one try to eat me at the beginning of this trip.”

Ash nodded. “So, I
do
owe you an apology.”

“For . . .”

“This.” He slapped the blade of his weapon, and it responded with an angry metallic growl. “The filathalor are extinct. If you’ve encountered one, it’s entirely because my watch on the goddess slipped and she managed to summon one up from the grave to send after you.”

“You seem pretty certain. How can you be sure it wasn’t simply frozen in a spell somewhere? Or summoned by some other mage?”

“The filathalor are beyond dead. Their breed-soul is bound to the lifeline of the Changer.” He touched his sword. “They
cannot
live in the world except through her will. The idea of one acting and existing independently of their goddess is as absurd as if I were to suggest that one of your hands might leave your body behind and go off on its own to strangle someone on the other side of the empire.”

Breed-souls?
sent Triss.

No idea.

I wanted to ask about that, and about how you bound a buried god into a sword, and all kinds of other things implied by his words, but it would have to wait. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about before Kelos gets back?”

Ash inclined his head ever so slightly. “You cannot trust Siri.”

“Uh . . .” Siri had told me much the same thing, but . . . “Given what she means to me, that’s a pretty bold statement coming from someone I’ve only barely met.”

“She is not alone in her head,” replied Ash. “As the dagger that binds the Smoldering Flame in the grave burns away, the god will have greater and greater influence over her thoughts and actions. Just as the Changer may slip the leash and visit a sending on you away north in Tien, so, too, may the Smoldering Flame work his will in the world from the deeps of his tomb.”

“I
owe
Siri—”

Ash cut me off. “I am not suggesting that you forsake her. Quite the contrary. I have great respect and affection for her. That one so young could bring low the Smoldering Flame—a mortal barely out of her second decade? That’s remarkable. I
want
you to help her, but I also need you to recognize that you can’t entirely trust her motives nor all of what she tells you.”

“Are you suggesting I should trust
you
?”

Ash snorted and lifted the hilt of his sword. “Does this look like I am free of the influence of the buried ones? Of course you can’t trust me.
I
don’t fully trust me. To be bound to a god is to lose something of yourself. For three thousand years I have wrestled with the goddess in my head. I second-guess every choice that I make if it goes beyond what to wear or have for breakfast. Mostly, I think that I get it right. But the true horror of the thing is that the only way I will ever find out if I’ve gotten it badly wrong is if my bound goddess awakes.”

Show him the ring?

“And this?” I held up my hand with its circle of smoke.

“Means that you can’t entirely trust you either.” He nodded. “I wish that Siri hadn’t done that, and I told her as much, though I understand the reasons for her choice. If you are as . . . strong of will as she suggested, I do not think the god can bend you too much to his purpose. Not unless he completely suborns Siri first.”

I felt the emotional equivalent of an amused grin echoing through my link with Triss.
Strong of will . . . Do you suppose that’s Sylvani for
pigheaded
?

Hush you.

“So, I can’t trust Siri, or you, or me, and certainly not Kelos. Is there anyone you think I can trust?” I didn’t mention Faran, and I wasn’t planning on taking his advice on the matter in any case, but I wanted to see how he would respond.

Ash smiled sadly and shook his head. “Of course not. We are in the Sylvain.” He said it like a man speaking a proverb. He opened his mouth as if to say more, then twisted suddenly and looked toward the river. “Kelos comes.”

I figured it would be better to give my old mentor something real to chew on, and there were still things I wanted to know, so, “What keeps the goddess in the sword? And how can you risk carrying it around like that? Perhaps more important than all the rest, how did
you
end up with it?”

Ash smiled and nodded faintly, clearly acknowledging the purpose of my ploy. “The sword itself is a greater binding crafted over long years for the express purpose of trapping a god within the steel. When I was young, barely out of my first millennium, I craved power. There is no greater power in the empire than our fallen gods, so I forged this prison to catch myself a god. Later, my priorities . . . shifted, I gave up my quest for power, and I put the godsword aside.”

Kelos appeared then, making rather more noise as he walked up than he needed to. He had a short string of fish slung over his shoulder. “If you gave up the quest, how did you come to be carrying around a bound goddess, Duke Kelreven?”

“Ash. The Changer came out of her grave on the edge of the lands ruled by my wife’s line. The goddess killed hundreds of Kreyn and enslaved thousands more. We had not yet met then, but in her search to find a cure for this divine plague, Kayla augured out the existence of the godsword. She came to seek it as a way of freeing her people. She was brilliant and beautiful and her need was dire. I fell in love with her, but I didn’t trust anyone with the kind of power this weapon might give them—not even her. Not then, at any rate. That left me only one option.”

“Convenient for you,” said Kelos.

“To be shackled to a devourer of souls? You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ash’s tone was light, but layered with an ancient bitterness. “Pray that you never find out, child.”

Kelos bristled. “I gave up praying long ago, velyn.”

“Oh good, I didn’t miss the dick-swinging contest.”

I started at the familiar voice. “Faran?”

My apprentice stepped out of the shadows a few yards beyond where Ash sat. “You didn’t really believe I was going to sit on my ass in that cave and wait for you to come back and rescue me like some frail princess from an old story, did you?”

I sighed. “No, more like an injured warrior smart enough to know when to rest and heal. Clearly, I gave you more credit for good sense than I ought.”

Faran snorted. “Point, and I might even have done so if I hadn’t caught this one’s scent overlying your backtrail.”

“Neat trick, that,” I said. “Sniffing Kelos out while lying flat on your back in your sickbed in the cave, I mean.”

She waved a hand around lightly. “I wanted to get some air. Which, I will admit, may not have been the smartest idea I’ve ever had. Getting up the cliff above the cave damn near knocked me flat. But, once I was up there, I didn’t have to go ten feet to latch onto Kelos’s scent. He was on you from the moment you cleared the top of the ravine.”

Malthiss lifted out of the tattoos on Kelos’s chest—the man still hadn’t replaced his shirt. “Ssithra?” he said.

The shadow at Faran’s feet twisted itself into the outline of a phoenix. “Yes, Malthiss?”

Triss gave a mental start.
Note that she doesn’t offer him the title
resshath
. That’s a very deliberate sort of disrespect.

I responded with the mindspoken equivalent of a whistle and a nod. It took a
lot
to get a Shade to let go of their hierarchy.

Malthiss continued as though he hadn’t noticed the slight, “You and your partner have grown much in skill. I did not sense the two of you until Faran spoke.”

“No, you didn’t,” interjected Faran. “Not even when I stood behind you in the shallows of the river, knife in hand. You live because I didn’t think that Aral would have approved of my killing you then. Well, more because of the fact that I didn’t want to have a giant screaming argument about it—not when my head still feels so fragile—but why quibble?”

Malthiss jerked his head back at that and Ssithra vanished into Faran’s shadow, but Kelos only laughed.

“Point,” said Kelos. “Your tongue cuts deep,
Master
Faran, and I have no doubt your knife cuts deeper still. Thank you for staying your hand.”

“It’s not me you need to thank,” replied Faran. “It’s Aral’s silly notions I’m indulging on this one.”

The blade in Ash’s lap rang sharply at that precise moment, sounding a note as clear as a struck bell, and continuing to jingle faintly afterward. The Sylvani lord stripped the cords off the blade and unfolded himself at that, rising to his feet in one smooth motion.

“If you don’t want to have a rather lengthy discussion with the Imperial Office of the Disquisition, I suggest you all come with me.” He crossed the small clearing to the base of an enormous and ancient tree—eucalyptus maybe. “A god-sniffer approaches, and I detect at least another couple of dozen breaks in my line of warding. I imagine it is the entire assault force that stormed the temple—or, all of it that survived.”

“I thought they were with you,” I said.

“Allies of convenience only. They would not slay me out of hand because of my rank and my marital alliance with the Oaken Throne. But love me, they do not. Were they to find me with one who wears such a pretty bauble as that ring on your finger, they might take it as an opportunity long hoped for.”

“All right, but how are we—”

But even as I began to speak, Ash spat out a liquid string of high Sylvani, and with it a cloud of spell-light—like some angry dragon’s breath. Then he turned on his heel and swung the enormous blade in an underhanded cut at the tree, splitting its bark from ground height to perhaps ten feet up the trunk. A moment later, Ash spoke another mouthful of Sylvani, and the split opened like some enormous mouth, exposing a swirling blue void of magelight.

“It will not remain open long.” Ash stepped into the whirl of color and was gone.

I crossed to the opening, but hadn’t yet decided whether I really wanted to go through when Kelos spoke. “Let him go. We don’t need him. We can shroud up and—”

I walked into the void.

S
ometimes
magic is as simple as walking through a door.

One moment, I was stepping into a tumbling mass of blue magelight. The next, I was stepping out the other side into a large and rather elegant parlor, rich with dark woods and stunning tapestries. I moved to the side as soon as I was through, pivoting to see what this end of the gate looked like. It was another tapestry, floor to ceiling, showing a stylized portrait of the woods I had just left, with Faran in the foreground, and Kelos scowling over her shoulder.

Then Faran vanished from the tapestry, reappearing in the parlor a heartbeat later. Kelos came right behind her, though he left the fish. The scene in the tapestry blurred and faded, like the world through a scud of mist. The mist became a fog, the fog a cloud, the cloud a sheet of milkstone. That held for perhaps three heartbeats before the process reversed itself. At the end, I found myself facing a tapestry depicting a thick tropical jungle where an impossibly beautiful velyn woman sat astride an unsaddled tiger-boar. Her face was set in an arrogant sneer, her gaze directed straight out at the viewer.

“Welcome to Castelle Filathalor,” said Ash. “Faran, Kelos, you may wait for us here. I have something I wish to show Aral because of his ring. We won’t be long.”

I followed our host as he headed through the larger of the room’s two doors. Faran looked rebellious and Kelos angry, but when I waved for them to stay there, they did.
And
visible. At least, they remained that way until I passed out of sight.

Do you think they’ll stay?
Triss asked.

I mentally shrugged.
Who can say?
The castle had
lots
of shadows.

Ash led me along a hall and down a long spiral of stairs that ended in an enormous room somewhere in the roots of the castle. The ceiling was cross vaulted and far above, the stone floor a single continuous piece as smooth as though someone had poured it in place and frozen it there. Lines had been etched into that surface and filled with some translucent gemlike substance. They formed a gigantic and intricate pattern centered around a half globe of black jade as big as a pony. Faint flickers of spell-light danced through the pattern in the floor and across the surface of the globe, like the pale echoes of some mighty spell long since broken.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Easier to show you.”

As he started toward the central sphere, the blade in his hands began to bell and jangle like steel scraped across rough stone. It also started jerking this way and that as though it wanted to get loose. The Sylvani lord held on tight, his face as grim as the grave.

When we reached the stone, Ash took the sword in a double-handed grip, point down, and raised it high over his head. This time when he spoke a long piece in high Sylvani, he did so slowly and carefully, as though his soul depended on the proper pronunciation of each syllable. The words came out in a rhythmic cadence that reminded me of Aveni vadric poetry, though I thought I detected a rhyming structure, which no Aveni would ever use. As he spoke, sparks of spell-light like the ones in the floor and the globe flew from his lips to dance along the edges of the godsword.

The blade continued to shake and chime the whole time Ash spoke. As he neared what sounded like the peroration of his chant, its motions became weaker and weaker. Finally, Ash cried out a last word in a voice twice as loud as any he had used before and slammed the sword point-first into the apex of the globe. It hit like a knife going into flesh rather than a chisel into stone, and it sank a good three feet into the jade.

Streaks of orange burned their way through the midnight jade, forking outward from the point where steel met stone to split and roll down the sides until the entire globe took on the aspect of a tiger’s hide. Once that process finished itself, the sphere began to bend and flow, taking on a new shape—the snarling head of a filathalor. The sword was buried deep in the center of its forehead. At the moment the transformation completed itself, and, all in an instant, the pattern on the floor crackled to life, filling with the most intense spell-light I’d ever seen.

That’s a hell of a piece of magery,
sent Triss.

Yeah, I think it might even impress Harad.

“The tomb of the goddess lies directly beneath the filathalor’s head.” Ash waved his arms to encompass the whole room. “It took me nearly a hundred years of work, every minute of it spent fighting the goddess, to inscribe the spell that encloses us now.
This
is what it takes to bind a buried god across the great deeps of time. Sheathing the sword puts her to sleep and holds her there, but even in her dreams she tests at the bonds, pushing and pulling and forever gnawing away at the edges.”

I had a hard time encompassing the scale of the spellwork involved in the Sylvani’s binding. “Why do you
ever
remove the sword from the stone?”

I was wondering about that, too,
Triss sent.

“Because the binding is tied to my soul every bit as strongly as the goddess is. Were I to go beyond the grounds of Castelle Filathalor without bringing the sword with me, even for so long as a day, the spell would fail and rebound on me. I would become a hollow shell inhabited only by the will of the Changer.”

“Is that what’s going to happen to Siri?” I found it hard to even ask the question and I could feel that Triss shared my worries.

“I hope not. Initially, I made the sword to bind the power of an unburied god into a tool that a man might wield. Later, after I understood what that really meant and recognized my foolish vanity, I gave up the quest to command that power. But I could only make slight alterations to the sword. Your Namara meant to slay a god, inasmuch as such a thing is possible, to force the Smoldering Flame back into the grave and keep him there, and that was Siri’s intent as well. That matters. Not enough perhaps, but it does matter.”

“Why am I not reassured?”

“You should be. The danger is still terrible, but Siri used god-magic to bind a god. Lesser god-magic perhaps, and too weak by far for the task, but god-magic nonetheless. That gives her a chance that I would not have if my wardings failed. With luck and your help, perhaps it will be possible to free her from the influence of the god, or merely to hold it back for a few short hundreds of years. That is another place where her plight is less . . . fraught than mine. Time allows her the chance to escape into death without having to embrace it. That door is closed to me.”

“Is that what this is really about? She told me that she called me here to help her with Kelos and the Key of Sylvaras.”

“The key doesn’t exist. I am seven thousand years old and I have never found any sign of it more substantial than the first whispers of the legend, though I looked for it long and hard in my youth. Others have devoted more years to that quest than I, some of them very great mages indeed, but no velyn has ever seen the thing. No, if it did exist, it would have come to light long years ago. And, if it had, every buried god within the compass of the wall would have torn themselves from the grave and made war on each other to possess it. There is no key.”

Do you think that’s true?
I mentally asked Triss.

It makes a lot of sense, especially the part about the thing igniting another round of godwar if it did exist. On the other hand, Siri seemed to think that Kelos believed in it, and he’s not easily gulled.

No, but he might be playing Siri to accomplish something else.

Or Siri might be playing us.

There’s that, too.

“If the key doesn’t exist,” I asked Ash, “then what is Kelos really after? And Siri?”

The Sylvani shrugged. “That is something you will have to sort out for yourself. But now, before we return to your companions above, I have one thing more to say to you, and this is the real reason I brought you here. I believe that here in this place, the godsword can free you of that ring you wear on your finger. Slide it along the exposed edge of the blade and the ring will break, trapping the smoke within the binding that surrounds us long enough for it to dissipate.”

I felt Triss tense at the offer, but he didn’t say anything one way or the other. Apparently, this one was up to me.

I looked at him. “I thought you wanted me to help Siri.”

“I do.” Ash nodded.

“But Siri said I would need the ring to do that.”

“You might. It will protect you from some of the powers of the god while making you more susceptible to others. Certainly, Siri thinks it will help you, and no one knows more about the Smoldering Flame than she does.”

“Then why are you offering to remove it?”

“Because I know what it means to bind yourself to a buried god for one you love. If I can help you to help Siri, I will. But if there is any shred of doubt in your heart about the rightness of what you’re doing, or the binding you have taken on, I owe it to my soul to offer you the chance to escape it.”

I looked at the smoke ring and thought about what I had learned over the last few weeks. “I’d walk into fire for her.”

“You already have.” His eyes were sad. “Is that your final word?”

I nodded.

“You’re sure it’s you speaking and not the god speaking
through
you?”

“I believe so.”

It is,
sent Triss.
I can feel it. I’m not sure that I agree with the decision, but it’s definitely all you.

Do
you
want me to cut the ring off?

I don’t know. I look at what has happened to Kyrissa, and that frightens me even more than the changes in Siri. But, at the same time, I am not willing to abandon them. And, if we must go up against a god . . . even a dead god, we’re going to need all the help we can get.

I think we have to keep it.

Triss sighed, but he didn’t argue. Ash had waited while Triss and I went silently back and forth, though whether he knew what was going on was an open question. Now he nodded very faintly.

“I can see that your decision is made. It’s the same one I would make”—Ash chuckled—“the same one that I
did
make.” He put a hand on my shoulder. It was warmer than a human’s, but the contact carried no hint of the sort of glamour the Durkoth wore. “I can’t say whether the choice is the right one, but I hope that it turns out for you better than mine has for me.”

Clear laughter sounded from the base of the stairs behind me. “Oh, Ash, my love, you make it sound like marrying me was the worst thing that could ever have happened to you.” The voice was beautiful and throaty, and it made me think of green leaves under moonlight.

Ash’s mood visibly lightened as he raised both his eyebrows and affected a stern demeanor. “You know very well that’s not the decision I was speaking of, Kayla.”

I turned then to see an achingly beautiful velyn woman approaching us. She was taller than I, though not so tall as her lord, with dark hair and darker eyes, and flawless skin the color of forest shadows.

She grinned and winked at me, dropping her voice into an excellent imitation of Ash. “‘I know what it means to bind yourself to a buried god for one you love.’” She swept her arms wide. “And so begins our play this evening: The Song of Kayla and Ashkent, a tragedy in three acts. Come, children, draw closer and listen to a tale of darkest woe and unplumbed pathos that would make the buried gods weep in their very graves. It begins in a glade where our intrepid hero broods over his terrible creation, the godsword.”

By then she had crossed the distance between us, and—after bestowing a kiss on Ash—she offered me her hands. “I am Kayla Nel Kaledren, called the Darkvelyn by my shocked and horrified in-laws . . . when they will speak of me at all. And, you can only be Aral Kingslayer. Siri has had much to say of you, and not all of it I think untrue.”

I was still trying to come up with anything that I could say that might stand up to such a tidal force of personality, when Triss formed himself out of my shadow and slipped between us.

“Cousin, well met.” He lowered his head briefly, touching his muzzle to her extended palms, then looked up into her eyes. “How did I not know that the Kreyn were shadow-kin?”

She smiled at him. “The alliance is a very old one, though not much remarked these days anyplace outside our ancient homes. I wonder, do they even speak of the Kreyn anymore in the lands beyond the wall? Or have we become simply another sort of Sylvani? More exotic perhaps, but still children of the light?”

Triss dropped down to stand by my side. Kayla’s hands were still extended, so I cautiously took them in my own. They were cool to the touch and free of any glamour, though her beauty and vitality provided her with an appeal that struck even deeper than the Durkoth’s—pulling at heartstrings rather than invoking sexual desire. I did not want to take Kayla Nel Kaledren to my bed, but I understood how very easy it would be to love her.

We only touched for a few brief heartbeats, but I could see that she read deeper into my heart than most ever would. She squeezed my hands once, then released them with a smile.