Drawn Blades (2 page)

S
moke
without fire.

That’s how it began. With swirling darkness on a cold stone hearth. Or, in a bar, with a beautiful woman, who had a problem. It all depends on how you look at it.

I had come back to Tien after months away. Not for me, but for Faran, my apprentice. She needed help I couldn’t give her—delicate and difficult magical healing—so I had brought her to a friend. Treatment was slow and painful for Faran, but it seemed to be working. Her sight had fully returned and the headaches were much better. So I’d decided I could leave her alone for an evening and visit old haunts.

Mistake? It all depends on how you feel about powerful magical sendings and other people’s problems.

The Gryphon’s Head was a dive bar of the worst sort, full of criminals and other shady types. It was also coming home. I had spent six years living in a tiny room over the stables there. I’d made my money as a shadow jack in those days—the underworld’s all-purpose freelancer. It was a very long fall from the days when they’d first called me Aral Kingslayer and the mighty had feared the coming of my shadow. Well, and lately, they had begun to call me that again, but that’s another story entirely.

You see, I’m an assassin, or was once—one of the best in the world—and my shadow lives. His name is Triss. He is my familiar, a thing of elemental darkness and magic . . . which brings me back to the smoke.

Triss saw it first, and whispered into my mind,
Aral, ware the hearth!

I turned in my chair, and saw the first twisting coils of smoke begin to rise from the bare stones. I wasn’t the only one. A pair of Cobble-Runners—one of the local gangs—who were sitting closer, noticed it about then, too. They leaped out of their chairs and backed away from the hearth, shooting the occasional glance my way as the smoke built slowly.

They were only the first. Within a few moments the whole bar was shifting attention between whatever was building on the hearth and me. The bar’s owner, Jerik, came over as the ball reached the size of a kneeling human.

“Aral?” he called. “What have you brought into my bar this time?”

I wanted to tell him I hadn’t brought anything, but honesty forbade me. I didn’t know what the thing on the hearth was, or where it had come from, but the chances were good that it was there for me. My life has taught me to doubt coincidence, and the odds that a piece of magic like nothing I’d ever seen before would appear in the Gryphon’s hearth by chance on the same day that I finally returned after so long away . . . Well, let’s just say that I wouldn’t take that bet, and leave it there.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I . . .” I trailed off as the thing stood up.

I say “thing” where I should call it a woman, because that’s what it had become. A woman of smoke. Tall and slender and very familiar. She wore the loose pants and shirt of the order I had once belonged to, and the swirling loops of smoke perfectly mirrored the dyed patterns of my own grays.

The hood of her cowl was drawn up to hide her face, and the smoke blurred what features I could see within, but the shape of her body and the way that she moved were instantly recognizable, even in smoky avatar—which form made her slow and deliberate as though she were underwater or might come apart at any moment.

Siri, the Mythkiller, First Blade of Namara. I recognized her at a level below thinking and beyond question. This was Siri, my sister in the service of Justice, my better in the arts of magic and the assassin, and perhaps the only person in the world who could ask for my life and expect me to give it into her care without thought or question. Both duty and honor demanded no less. I met her halfway to the hearth.

“Siri?”

The smoke swirled under her cowl, and a twist of white might have been a smile, but the figure spoke no words. After a long moment, she nodded. It was a slow movement—as they all had been—and it feathered the edges of her cowl.

“What do you need?” I asked.

Triss whispered into my mind.
Careful, Aral. You can’t be sure it’s really her.

But I was.
No. This is her. I’m certain of it.

The figure extended its left hand, palm up. With the other it gestured me to touch the extended hand with my own. When flesh met smoke I felt a faint electrical tingle, like distant magelightning, but no other sensation of contact.

Her right hand came forward and began a slow but intricate dance of gesture over our joined palms. I almost jerked away then, as I recognized the motions a priest would make at a handfasting, but forced myself to stillness. No matter how strange the manifestation, this was something of Siri. I could feel it in my soul, and I owed her whatever she asked of me.

When she was done, that white swirl of a smile flashed within her cowl once more. Then she fell apart, splitting into a hundred wisps on the breeze.

“What was that all about?” asked Jerik.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “But I think I’d better find out.”

Aral,
Triss spoke into my mind,
she left you a ring.

Looking down, I saw that he was right. There, wrapped around my wedding finger, was a ring of smoke. It was only as I examined the ring that I realized none of what I had just seen bore any light of magic, and the only enchantments that I knew of that acted that way were god-magic. . . .

*   *   *

“It’s
marvelous. I’ve never encountered anything like it.” Harad moved careful fingers this way and that as though he were trying to twist my new ring. “It doesn’t
feel
like god-magic, but it certainly wasn’t made by any normal mortal sort of spell. I have no idea what it is.”

I gave the ancient librarian a hard look. “You don’t have to sound so happy about it.”

“I’m six hundred years old, Aral, and a master sorcerer for five hundred and fifty of those years. I have been the chancellor of one of the great Magelands universities and studied more varieties of magic than most spellwrights are even aware of. Finding something wholly new is a treasure beyond price.” He paused and rubbed his chin. “Though, I will be very sorry if it devours your soul before I have time to get it sorted out. . . .”

My shadow twisted itself into the silhouette of a small and rather worried-looking dragon. Triss rose up off the floor so that he could sniff at the smoke ring. “Don’t worry,” the Shade told me. “If it tries anything like that I’ll bite your finger off before it gets the chance.”

“Um . . . thanks, Triss.” I turned back Harad. “Is that really likely?”

“It was a small joke on my part, nothing more.” Harad frowned. “Though it seems to have gone wide of the mark. You didn’t look nearly as alarmed by that prospect as I had hoped you might, but then, it’s hard to read you. You do grim and blank as well as any man I know.”

I shrugged. “It’s not something I’m going to dance about, but my soul’s pretty badly mortgaged already. Between my failures since the death of my goddess and the need for efik chewing a hole in the back of my mind, there’s not much left for anything else to carve off a piece.”

Triss winced—because he worried—but he didn’t say anything.

“The cravings haven’t eased in the months since the Kitsune first forced you to eat those few beans, then?” It was the question of a healer who considered me one of his patients. “I had hoped it would pass, but with the death of Namara you seem to have lost your immunity to the darker side of the drug.”

That immunity wasn’t all I’d lost when the goddess of Justice was murdered. The list was long and brutal. Most of my magical protections. My home. My family. My friends. My reason for living. No, my efik problem didn’t even make the top five, however much harder it might make my life.

Again, I shrugged. “I have good days and bad, just like with the booze, though efik hunger is sharper, and the hooks in my soul are deeper. But what can you expect? I tried it first shortly after I entered the temple, though I didn’t really acquire the habit till my teens. But I never touched so much as a drop of alcohol until after my goddess was murdered.”

“Horrible stuff, whiskey.” A girl’s voice—drifting down from the shadows atop a nearby set of bookshelves.

“Ah, Faran,” I said to my apprentice. “I was wondering when you were going to let us know you were there.”

She released the shadow that enshrouded her as she dropped silently to the floor. She landed a few yards beyond Harad, and I revised my earlier “girl” to “young woman” when I met her gaze. At eighteen or thereabouts, I had to admit that she’d grown up a lot in the last year. The cloud of living darkness that had concealed her from view on the shelves now flowed down to the floor, becoming the shadow of a phoenix.

My eyes immediately went to the scar that ran down from her forehead across her left eyelid and onto her cheek. It looked better than it had before her sessions with Harad, but I still winced whenever I saw it. She’d picked it up guarding my back, which made it my fault.

“You knew I was there?” She flicked her dark hair angrily back over her shoulder. “How? My form was perfect, and I know you didn’t cross my shadow trail. What gave me away?”

“Your nature,” I replied. “I know you, and I know you wouldn’t have missed me coming in to consult with Harad. You didn’t greet us when we entered. That means you decided to make a game of stalking us.” I gestured around the large open reading area at the end of the narrow stacks. “There’s only one place in this entire room where you could both listen
and
be sure Triss wouldn’t sniff out Ssithra. That’s atop the shelves. Therefore . . .”

“Fair point.” Faran smiled and bowed to acknowledge the hit. “Now, let me see what the fuss is about.” She reached out to touch the smoke ring on my wedding finger, then abruptly snatched her hand back. “Hey, it bit me!”

Ssithra flapped shadow wings and lifted off the floor, putting herself between Faran and my ring.

“It bit you?” Harad asked brightly. “Let me see.”

Now it was Faran’s turn to give the librarian a hard look as he pulled her hand toward him. “The thing
bites
me, and you act like someone gave you a damned Winter-Round present?”

“Hush, child. I’m working. Hmm, no blood . . .” Harad reached through a hole in the air with his free hand and pulled an emerald quizzing glass from the pocket dimension where he kept most of his more delicate tools. He held the lens above Faran’s injured finger. “
Very
interesting.”

I looked over his shoulder. The crystalline lens showed four tiny black marks on Faran’s fingertip—marks invisible both to magesight and my mortal eyes. But only for a few heartbeats. Then the spots wisped up like smoke and blew away.

“What was that?” asked Triss.

“It really did bite her.” Harad dropped the emerald back through the hole in the air and it vanished. “Though, what it drew wasn’t blood.”

“I told you so,” said Faran.

“Why would it do that?” I asked. “And, how?”

A huge grin spread across Harad’s face. “I have
no
idea.” Then he paused and looked thoughtful. “I take that back. I have no idea about the how, but I think I can make an educated guess about the why.”

“Which is?” Faran demanded.

“Smoke or no, it’s a wedding ring. That’s a very specific and ancient sort of magic. My assumption would be that it saw you as a potential rival for Aral’s affections.”

“I . . . Wait, it what?” Faran blinked several times, blushed, then shook her head. “That’s idiotic!”

Harad grinned. “It quite likely is, but I don’t think the ring thinks so.”

“Stupid ring,” grumbled Faran. Then her expression shifted suddenly from annoyance to something like shock. “Hold it. If it’s a wedding ring, does that mean that Aral and Siri are married now, for real and legally?”

“I don’t know about legally,” said Harad. “But magically and symbolically, yes. That’s a sort of marriage that’s deeper and more profound than mere laws, and
far
less disseverable.”

Faran rounded on
me
now. “Aral, did you know that was going to happen when the smoke figure offered you that ring?”

I shrugged. “Siri didn’t offer me the ring precisely, but she did make it pretty clear she wanted my participation in something like a formal handfasting, and marriage is where these things typically lead, ring and all. Given that we had consummated our relationship in the traditional way long ago, I probably should have realized the implications.”

“And you’re all right with that?” she demanded.

“Of course. If Siri asked me for my life, I would give it to her. Why would I refuse to marry her if that’s what she needs of me?”

“You haven’t seen or heard from Siri in eight years!” Faran’s voice started angry and got angrier. “Then a smoke figure that may or may not even be her shows up, asks you to get hitched, and you just say ‘yes’ like it’s nothing? You don’t even know what sort of person she is now, Aral. That’s insane!” She glanced at Harad as though seeking his support, but the old librarian had an even better blank expression than I do.

“Perhaps it is,” I replied. “Perhaps Siri
has
become a monster in the years since I last saw her. I can’t imagine it, but I couldn’t imagine Master Kelos betraying the order and our goddess either. None of that changes what Siri once was and the duty I owe her.”