Three Coins for Confession (46 page)

“The Laneldenari knew that, but it made no difference to what
they saw in you. The Calala knew that Chanist held the blade after Caradar
fell, but never said a word to connect the prince to the prophecy. Hidden or in
hand, the Valnirata believe the blade’s fate ties to you, now.”

Chriani told himself that the anger was just from fear, told
himself it meant nothing. The pieces of the puzzle were shifting, but he forced
them aside in his mind.

“If you know so much, tell me why the Ilvani seek the blade.”

“I know the history, not the will of the cult. Veassen spoke
truth as well when he said the Laneldenari don’t know. Just that the cultists
seek the power of the past, and they believe the blade to be the key that
unlocks that.”

Within the silver sphere, they were passing now alongside
platforms and terraces lit by mage-light. Chriani could see cots and bedrolls
set out as makeshift barracks, but these were deserted. All the cultists on the
move, searching for him.

“The cult found that power here,” Chriani said, staring to the
darkness. “You sold it to them.” It was only a guess, left over from when
Tician had been bound before them in the forest. He saw the truth of it in her
eyes now as he had then.

“Uissa discovered the temple when we fell back to the Ghostwood,”
she said. “Nowhere else to go, thanks to the duke of Teillai. We stumbled
across the site but found no sign that even the Crithnalerean had walked here
in a century. They were as afraid of the power here as the Ilvani that fled
from it a hundred generations before.”

“And that didn’t give you pause?”

“We’re mercenaries, warrior.” Tician smiled. “We act for what we
can earn. We found the temple, but there was no power here. Only ruins, and the
coins of the confessor, hidden away. The amulet the dark sorcerer wears. You
saw it.”

“And you gave it to them.”

“We sold the coins to the Calala, because we had no means to assess
what they might do. But we knew the Ilvani did. We kept our contacts with the
Calala to stay close to them. We waited. We watched.”

“And you’ve seen. You were with us with Taelendar turned. You saw
what happened to Farenna. You were watching when Dargana died.”

The assassin said nothing in response.

Below them now were terraces flooded by water, pouring out from
shattered fountains. Their wood and stone had broken away, but the magic at
their heart still produced its endless bright flow. None of it had been
restored, none of it so much as touched from what Chriani could see. It was as
if the Ilvani’s reverence for the power of the past had forced them to a
fearful worship of that past. Insinuating themselves into what was here, for
fear of what might happen if they disturbed it.

“You won’t have the blade,” he said quietly. “If that’s your goal
in saving me.”

“A novel plan, except I’m certain you’d kill yourself before you
led me to it. I promise I’m not tempted by the price on your head, Chriani.”

“Then what?”

“The coins of the amulet channel the power of this place,” Tician
said. “They’re bound to the shadow well and the sorcerer. Viranar, they call
her. White hair, black robes. You saw her. We didn’t know the power the coins
held. But then the Calala Ilvani made a full-scale invasion of Crithnalerean
while we watched. We saw the golden-eyed ones set out on their hunt. We
discovered what they were hunting for. And we don’t like the idea of them
getting it any more than you do.”

“So what are you planning?”

“Not what I’m planning, warrior, but what we’re planning. This is
for both of us.”

Chriani heard the tone of careful diplomacy in the assassin’s
voice. The bravado had vanished beneath it for a moment, the bright blue eyes
expectant.

“We’re going to steal the coins of the confessor,” Tician said
evenly. “We’re seizing the amulet. You want to break the cult’s power. I’m here
to help you do it. I’ve saved your life to take you back with me to Uissa. Give
you a place and purpose, because you know in your heart, Chriani, that you have
nowhere else to go.”

Something had changed. He felt it.

Outside the silver sphere, Chriani saw the rough platform camps
of the Ilvani surrounded by the furnishings and features that had once filled
those platforms, scattered like shadows now. Stone benches were shattered and
slumped across rubble-strewn floors. The remains of lacquered screens stood
even where their paper had rotted away, long ropes of mold hanging now from
black frames.

“I walk my own path,” he said at last.

“The paths you once walked are closed, warrior. You’re an exile
from two lands. Always caught between two worlds, and now cut off from both.
And when the road behind is closed, you can look only ahead. There’s another
future in front of you, starting here tonight. The coins represent the future
of the balance of power in the Ilmar…”

“And Uissa wants to control that.”

Tician smiled. “We will control it, one way or another. But
you’re connected to the power here. I was listening when you spoke in the
council at Sylonna.”

“I said nothing in council. Veassen was in my mind. The blind
seer.” Chriani shook his head, dismissive. “And even if I believed a word of
what Veassen had said, why in fate’s name would you think I’d follow you?”

“Because I believe it,” Tician said, and Chriani saw the light of
truth flash in the bright blue eyes. “I believe in all the fates that wend
through us. I’ve seen those fates laid down, seen them shattered and rebuilt.
Your princes seek to chart the fate of peoples and nations with the movement of
armies and merchant fleets. They set a future of chaos into motion, hoping it
resolves to a world somehow richer and less terrible than they began with.
Uissa seeks order. We chart change by manipulating one line of fate at a time.
Save a thousand lives on a battlefield by engineering a single death whose
effects can ripple through a thousand-thousand lives…”

The assassin’s words cut off to rough silence even before Chriani
shot the bloodblade to her throat, as if she’d realized just a moment too late
what she was saying. How he would hear it.

He locked himself tight to the sphere, but his boots were
slipping, edging the blade along the assassin’s neck. She made no move to
defend herself, her hands still locked together, set against the silver light.

“You need to stop talking now,” Chriani said. The blue eyes
blinked once to mark a minimal nod of Tician’s head. Chriani let the blade
drop. His hand was shaking. “Uissa’s contract to kill the Princess Lauresa
would have plunged all the Ilmar into war. You don’t talk of saving lives.”

Tician nodded again. She let her gaze slip back to the view
outside the sphere. Her hands shifted to set the spaceless sanctuary rising
once more, drifting through mage-light and green shadow. “The coins could
change all that,” she said carefully. “You know their power. The means of
sharing intelligence across whole armies. Soldiers bound by the magic of the
past.”

“The coins channel the shadow. They’ll have no power away from
here.”

“The coins can channel any power you wish to send through them,”
Tician said. “We didn’t understand that when we found them, but we know it now,
as we know their full potential. The Ilvani kept the coins here because of the
natural power bound here. They knew what this place once was.”

“Laneldenar and the Ilmar will raze the temple. If you were at
the council, you know our goal.”

“But the coins will endure, and in the hands of the Ilmar or
Laneldenar, their power leads to the same end, warrior. And you know what that
end will be.”

The skein of shadow shimmered below them. Chriani looked down,
saw a figure moving along a wide expanse of white, glimmering in the mage-light.
He slipped the bloodblade back to his belt.

“Take us down,” he said.

Tician glanced down to follow his gaze, squinting. Her eyes would
see only shadow, Chriani knew, but she shook her head just the same.

“The magic of the well of shadow is too powerful. It bends the
fabric of the world, just as this sanctuary does. It’ll destroy dweomer as
easily as it destroyed your friend and the sentries he took with him. We’ll
have to get closer on foot. If you’re with me, Chriani.”

Below them, the shadow rippled again. It was the dark sorcerer,
Chriani saw. Her hands were in motion around her, tracing out the lines of
golden light that hung in the air for a long moment, then faded away.

An understanding settled in Chriani’s mind.

“If I join…” He felt the words catch in his throat, couldn’t
speak them. “If I help you. How does this end?”

The assassin smiled. Her hands shifted as the silver sphere rose.
“With the coins in the hands of the only force in the Ilmar who can keep their
power in check. Uissa doesn’t seek to rule, warrior. We simply want to be, and
to carry on our craft and trade.”

“Murder.”

“Order,” the assassin said. “Intelligence. Knowledge that the
rest of the Ilmar has long forgotten.”

Chriani said nothing. He focused his thoughts, shook his head to
clear it.

“Think on it, warrior. Memory is the true threat of the coins.
The confession drains away the past. A hole carved out in the mind, and the
power of the cult threaded through that hole to hang all their supplicants like
the coins on their chain.” A sense of earnestness was in Tician’s voice. A
sense of careful persuasion. “Armies of Ilvani with any memory of morality
stripped from them. Armies of Ilmari who’ve forgotten how to fear death.
Soldiers who remember every skirmish ever fought, who can recognize and name
every enemy that any ally on their side has ever seen. Knowing every battle
plan as soon as it’s uncovered.”

“The blind agents,” Chriani said. As much as he wanted not to, he
saw it exactly as the assassin meant him to. “Spies and assassins bound by the
coins. Undetectable until the magic triggers in them.”

“And the Ilmari will have a distinct advantage in that regard,” Tician
said. “If you were thinking that your princes claiming the coins from the
Ilvani would make a difference. The Valnirata have a short supply of Ilmari
they could bind to their service. But the Ilmari have you, warrior, and plenty
of others like you. Loyal Ilvani and half-bloods. You’ll be the first ones
forced to your knees to take the rites. The memory of your lives lost so they
can send you to the Greatwood, then wait as you fall into a life you never had.
And they’ll know everything you see while they wait for whatever trigger turns
your eyes to gold and forces you to kill everyone around you in their name.”

“The coins are Ilvani magic. The Ilmari won’t be able to…”

“The war-mages of your princes won’t let anything stand in the
way of their understanding the coins’ magic. They’ll invade Crithnalerean for a
start. They’ll tear the Ghostwood apart in search of its secrets.”

All his life, Chriani had looked out to see a future in front of
him that it seemed he would never touch. Then death and fate had pushed him
forward to seize that future, unexpectedly. Had torn it from him just as fast.
And in thinking on it, he understood that the assassin was right.

He was gone from his own past, as if that past might have been a
story told about someone else. No place for him among the Ilvani. No way back
to the Ilmari. Everything lost and nowhere to look now but forward. Chart a new
course. Draw his fate out from the tangle of torn threads that had been his
life. And out of all that, what would he find? What would be left to him when
everything else was gone?

Kathlan.

The thought came to him unbidden. The question and the answer,
the same. Kathlan was what was left to him, because Kathlan had been all there
ever was.

He wished he’d known it sooner.

Kathlan was all that was left to him, but all he could do now was
make sure she was safe. Make sure that the worst of all the Ilmar’s futures
never came to pass.

The silver sphere drifted through a dense screen of branches
again, Chriani feeling the same sense of unease as they turned to shadows and
passed through him. He shuddered with the sensation, felt himself slip down,
half-stumbling as he tried to hold on. He was next to Tician, his healed leg
touching hers. Blood came away from his leather, darkening the stains on her
leggings as he tried to shift away.

Her fingers were long and smooth, Chriani not noticing them
before. Not so much as a tremor in them, though she’d had her hands held out
before her all this time. He remembered the Ilvani sentry dying so quickly that
he hadn’t had time to realize it. He knew how fast those hands could move.

He would have to be faster.

“The mercenary who came for the princess,” Chriani said quietly.
“The events in Rheran, and along the Clearwater Way. What was his name?” It was
something he had wanted to know for so long now, but had never thought to have
a chance to ask.

Tician hesitated. “Valoch.”

“Did you know him?”

“Yes.”

Chriani was silent a moment, his eyes on Tician’s. Closer to her
now.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You have nothing to be sorry for. Fate works its way through all
of us. We don’t wait for it to find us, for it waits for us in the end.”

When Chriani had gone after Lauresa, there had been no hesitation
in him. No sense of waiting for fate to find him. He had chosen his path with a
clarity he had never known before, had put his life on the line and nearly paid
with it. Telling himself along the full length of that winter road from Rheran
and back again that Lauresa was worth that price.

He hadn’t been wrong about that. Not exactly. But he remembered
something now, felt the emotion as raw as it had been in those first days of
his return to the Bastion. He remembered understanding that if he had died on
that path, he would have lost something whose worth he’d never truly known. The
value of his own life. Something that had come to him only after the darkness
of those days had overwhelmed him. Left him broken and made whole once more.