Drawn Blades (23 page)

Kelos didn’t so much as flinch. In fact, he laughed. “You’re not the first, you know. To kill her. That was me. I sliced Nuriko’s throat from ear to ear, a sword cut two inches deep, blood everywhere. There was no surviving it. I’ve killed thousands, Aral. I know death when I see it. I saw the light go out of her eyes as Thiussus took her into himself. And then they both vanished into the everdark, from which there is no returning.”

S
ometimes,
words strike like lightning. They come with no warning and no chance to get out of the way. A flash, a crash, and the thing they touch is destroyed.

That’s how I felt now, blown apart. “I . . . I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I,” said Kelos. “You know that Namara sent me to kill the Kitsune, right?”

“Of course.”

He had brought her sword back to lay at the feet of the goddess—the Kitsune was the only Blade to carry a single goddess-made blade—a great-sword created especially for Nuriko in the mode of the Kanjurese Islands where she had been born. Kelos’s execution of the Kitsune was the feat that had earned him the name of Deathwalker. But when I’d met Nuriko the previous summer, she was both very much alive
and
carrying the sword Kelos was supposed to have brought to the goddess.

Until this moment, I had assumed that the two of them had conspired to fake her death and then somehow return the sword to her. Now? I didn’t know what to believe. You see, I, too, had seen the Kitsune die by my own hand. I, too, had watched as the spark of life drained out of her eyes, watched as Thiussus took his partner into the everdark, known it to be a trip from which there is no returning.

My first thought now was that Devin had told Kelos about that night—that Kelos was using Devin’s descriptions of my actions to play mind games with me. But as much as I wanted that to be the story, I couldn’t make myself believe it. There was a hard ring of truth in Kelos’s words that I couldn’t quite dismiss.

He continued. “We fought on the rooftops of Emain Fell. The Kitsune had killed thirty-one Blades over ninety-four years of war with the order at that point, and Namara wanted to end her once and for all. The goddess sent Master Pol to kill the Duke of Fell, knowing she was sending Pol into a trap. She did it without telling anyone but me. We knew the Kitsune had some way of getting information out of the temple and the only one Namara trusted absolutely was me.”

“Ironic, that.”

“Now, perhaps yes. Then, no. I was completely committed to Namara in those days. It wasn’t until later that I realized her methods could never achieve her goals, and I had to make my choice between them.”

How dare he! We don’t have to listen to this self-serving ssissathshta!
Triss trailed off into angry hisses in the back of my mind.

I think it’s shit, too, Triss. But this may be our only chance to find out what he was thinking, and I
need
to know this.

Kelos continued, oblivious to our exchange. “The goddess sent me out after Pol. Not to save him, but to avenge him. I did both. Nuriko was a magnificent swordswoman, but you know that—you’ve killed her, too. Our fight was a close-run thing, the closest I’ve had short of when that basilisk took my eye. I have a dozen scars from that day with Nuriko, but her sword didn’t cut half so deep as her words.”

Kelos hunched his shoulders—the first movement he’d made since he sat down in the first place, and one that made him look beaten somehow. “It was a running fight and it lasted nearly four hours.”

“Four
hours
?” That was an almost unimaginably long time when you considered that a sword fight is usually decided in minutes, or even seconds.

“Much of that was spent chasing each other across the rooftops, or simply in gasping for breath between rounds. We were both utterly spent by the end. I think that the only reason I beat her was because I simply had more physical reserves to burn. I finally killed her atop the Temple of Shan, but I made a critical error first. Nuriko called hold and asked me for two minutes to speak. By then, I was sure I was going to win, and she was so damned good that I hated to have to kill her. So, I said yes. And that was my ruin. Did you speak with her?”

“I did, several times.”

“Then you know what she’s like. The intensity. The passion. The total commitment to the destruction of the system that creates the monsters Namara trained us to hunt . . .”

“The madness . . .” growled Triss.

Kelos laughed bitterly. “Perhaps, but if so, it’s a divine madness. The first thing she said was that she knew that I was going to kill her, but that it was all right. She didn’t blame me for not being able to see beyond my orders. I’d expected her to try to convince me to let her live—half wanted her to succeed, really—but she didn’t. All that she did was ask me two questions. First, she wanted to know if I really believed that killing some corrupt king actually changed anything, or if it was a never-ending cycle, with new monsters popping up as quickly as we eliminated the old ones.”

That fit with my experience. “She asked me the same thing.”

“What did you tell her? Thirteen years ago you killed Ashvik, a monster of a king. You just killed Ashvik’s successor a few months ago, another monster. Did killing Ashvik really change anything, or did it just push the problem down the road?”

It was a hard question to answer, but I thought back to Chiu the bandit chief and the scars on his back. “Sometimes, all you can do is hold back the darkness for a few seconds more. Executing Ashvik saved a lot of lives, even if Thauvik started the killing up again only a few years later. I don’t believe the people whose lives I saved think I wasted my effort.”

“We are neck deep in plague rats, Aral. Killing one king is like pointing out a particular rat and saying, ‘That rat? I’m going to kill that rat, because it will make a difference.’ That’s all you’re doing.”

I wasn’t going to have this argument. Not here. Not now. Not with this man. “What was her second question?”

“She asked me if I would open my eyes and look around and really think about the question over the years to come. And, if I was willing to do that much, would I promise to talk with her again later? We both knew by then that I was going to kill her, so it seemed like a ridiculous question. But she was brilliant and passionate and the greatest duelist I’d ever fought. I couldn’t refuse her.”

“And then you killed her.”

“And then I killed her, and Thiussus took her into the everdark, leaving behind her sword and an empty suit of clothes. I brought the sword to Namara and I went back to my duties. But I couldn’t forget Nuriko’s questions, and the more corrupt priests and debauched earls I executed, the more I saw that nothing ever changed. Nothing. Ever. Changed. For seventeen years I killed and killed and killed again, and the world didn’t get any better. And, somewhere in there, my heart broke. Nuriko was right, nothing we did mattered as long as the system itself was corrupt.”

“Then she came back,” I whispered.

“Then she came back.” Kelos nodded.

“What did she say the second time you talked?”

“She took me to a distillery in Aven, and she showed me how they make whiskey.”

That doesn’t make
any
sense,
Triss sent, and I echoed him aloud, “I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t at first either, but she showed me a thing called a safety valve. It’s a device that allows the still to let off pressure that might otherwise blow the whole thing up. She told me that Namara had become a safety valve for the evils of our system. That the goddess drained just enough evil out of the eleven kingdoms to keep the whole thing from exploding. She told me that without Namara to release that pressure we could bring the whole thing down and create a better world.”

“How did you answer her?” Triss asked.

“I told her that she was crazy . . . the first time. But again, she went away and left me to think about things on my own. A year or two later, she came back and asked me what I thought now. Aral, she may be crazy, but that doesn’t mean that she’s wrong.”

I looked away from Kelos, focusing my attention on the flames. I didn’t want to hear any more. “The glyph is glowing orange.”

Kelos turned around, staring up at me until I finally met his gaze. “Nuriko’s coming back, Aral. You know that as well as I do. She is something more than human if less than a goddess. What will
you
say to her when she asks you her question a second time?”

I drew my right-hand sword. Kelos smiled sadly, nodded, and turned his back on me. I knew that he would let me kill him then if I chose to do so.

Aral!
Triss spoke sharply into my mind.

I stepped forward and brought the blade down with all my might . . . shattering the glyph stone. As much as I despised what Kelos had done and become, I still loved more than I hated.

When the stone broke, the figure of smoke lifted her chin and looked me in the eyes. A second figure formed, splitting out of the first—a feathered serpent. It coiled itself around her shoulders, wings held high above her head. The smoke thickened and darkened. It took a step forward. Another.

One foot left the fire, becoming flesh as it touched the earth. Then the other. Siri stood before us, her face sweaty and strained, her eyes wide and staring. Shadow bloomed at her feet. Rushed upward. Infused the smoking serpent. Became Kyrissa. Siri stumbled forward, started to fall.

Kelos moved then, exhibiting that terrible speed that seemed impossible in such a big man. One moment, he was sitting on the ground a good two yards away from Siri. The next, he had caught her and lifted her back to her feet before her knees could touch the dirt.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Siri’s answer was deceptively calm. “Take your hands off of me, traitor, or I swear that I will turn you inside out and smoke your organs to feed to the dogs.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.” He released Siri, and stepped away.

Siri swayed, but she stayed upright this time. She closed her eyes for a long beat, and the swaying subsided. When she opened them again, she turned my way. “Took your damned time getting me out of that thing, didn’t you?”

I recognized her tone for what it was, and responded in kind. “I know how much you hate to have your elbow joggled when you’re working and I didn’t want to get my head bitten off for interrupting a daring escape.” I shrugged and sheathed my sword. “Is it
my
fault that you somehow got miscast as the damsel in distress for real this time?”

“Fuck you, Aral.” She looked around, spotted Ash and his brass man. “Castelle Filathalor?”

“I’m on the grounds,” replied Ash. “The stream is the boundary.”

“All right, then.” She took a staggering step toward Ash, then paused. “Aral, get your ass over here. Help me up to the castle and I’ll think about forgiving you your tardiness someday.”

As I lifted her arm across my shoulder, I glanced over at Kelos. I thought I saw pain in his eye as he watched us, and love, but only for an instant. Before I could be sure of what I’d seen, his face reassumed its normal masklike expression.

“You wanted to know what I will tell the Kitsune when she comes back,” I said over Siri’s shoulder. “I will tell her what I learned at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. The world isn’t a thing made up of black-and-white ideas. There is no
system
. There are only people. If you take a hammer to the
system
, that’s really what you’re destroying. People. When I kill a king, I kill a man. When you kill a system, you’re killing a hell of a lot of innocents. If you’re okay with that, then who is the monster? Really?”

*   *   *

“You
want to go
where
?” For the first time since I’d met him, Ash looked genuinely disconcerted.

“The city understairs,” Kelos repeated from the far end of the long kitchen table where we were all sitting. “That’s where the Son of Heaven believes the Key of Sylvaras is hidden.”

Kayla looked thoughtful. “If it actually existed, that’d be a damned fine place to hide it. You have to admit that, Ash.”

The couple had put together a big meal for us all—food was one of the things that the enchanted servants of the Changer did an especially poor job at—and we’d eaten it in place rather than haul it all to the castle’s great hall. Like the dinner we’d had back at the wall, the Sylvani-style meal was heavy on the curries and other complex dishes. We were drinking more of that lovely spiced tea, though they’d offered us a variety of stronger drinks that had brought the bitter longing sharply back to the surface for me.

“Back up,” said Faran. “What’s this city understairs?”

“Do you know much about the Asavi?” asked Kayla.

“Nope.”

“Well, in the beginning, there were the Kreyn,” Kayla began.

Siri held up a hand. “I hate to interrupt, but I know how the First tell stories, and none of us ephemeral types are long enough lived for you to do the whole thing properly.” She turned to look at Faran. “There used to only be one type of Other. They split into a bunch of tribes and fought our gods. They lost. Two of the tribes chose to live on the human side of the wall, the Durkoth and the Vesh’An. Everybody else stayed here. You know that part?”

Faran nodded.

“Good. Most of the tribes that stayed are more like each other than they are like the Durkoth or the Vesh’An. The one exception is the Asavi. In making their alliance with air, the Asavi were transformed every bit as radically as their cousins on our side of the wall. For starters, they grew wings. But winged flight is hard when you’re man-sized, so they shrank themselves as well.” She held her thumb and forefinger about two inches apart.