Drawn Blades (24 page)

“That’s tiny,” said Faran.

“It is,” agreed Siri. “Life is different when you’re that size. Very different. Their culture changed as radically as their bodies. They became insular and much more hostile to outsiders. They live in hivelike cities and their tempers are even shorter than they are. Think angry, immortal, intelligent, spell-casting bees, and you won’t be too far from the truth. Their largest hive is built under the grand stairs of the Sylvani capitol. The stairs used to connect the palace with the port. They occupy some of the most expensive land in the city. But the big people no longer use them for fear of angry swarms of Asavi.”

Kayla sighed. “You do realize how badly you’ve just butchered twenty-five thousand years of First history, don’t you, dear?”

Siri assumed an air of startled innocence, and fluttered her eyelashes. “Is any of that wrong?”

“Well . . .”

“Then I just saved us all about six hundred hours of beautifully narrated blah-blah-blah blah-blah, didn’t I?”

Ash laughed aloud. “The child’s tongue strikes deeper than her swords.”

Faran spread her hands. “Speaking of blah-blah-blah, what would it mean if the Key
was
there?”

Ash’s grin faded. “It means that we won’t be able to help you beyond delivering you to the city. The Asavi do not allow any of the other First within their hives.”

As usual at any conference that involved their active participation, the Shades had assumed their preferred forms and taken positions along the walls beside or behind their respective partners. Triss flicked his wings now and leaned forward. “Wouldn’t size preclude the entry of anyone but the Asavi in any case?”

Ash shook his head. “Once, maybe. But the migration of so many of your people into the empire has changed the way that most of the First live. In many of our cities, the human population outnumbers the First. Humans do much of the brute labor of the empire these days—even some of the lesser craft work. The Asavi are more insular than the Sylvani, but where their settlements overlap those of my people, they have also taken to employing human workers.”

“How does that even work?” Faran asked, looking skeptical.

“The Mouse Gates,” said Kayla. Then, when that drew blank looks all around: “The Asavi breed some of the best mages in the empire. They have crafted powerful spell gates. Enter from the city side, and you shrink to fit the Asavi mold. Reenter from the hive side and you return to your normal stature.”

“That’s one hell of a fancy piece of magic,” I said.

Kayla nodded. “Yes, but it does have some rather sharp limitations. It only works to shrink and restore, never the other way round. You have to go out via the same gate through which you entered. It will not work on the First without special tuning, since the Asavi don’t want the rest of us anywhere within their boundaries. Most importantly, the transformation is unstable. The gate stores an imprint of you when you pass through. If you don’t pass back the other way within twelve hours, the gate sheds the imprint.”

“That sounds mild enough,” said Faran.

“It’s not.” Kayla pinched the flesh on the back of her hand. “We are made of more than this. Every fiber of our beings is infused with the essence of magic.”

Faran nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes, nima, the stuff that fills the well of the soul. Varies wildly from person to person and defines the power of the individual’s mage gift. Draw it down to cast big spells, etc. That’s first week of mage school stuff.”

Siri put a hand on Faran’s forearm. “Be polite.” Faran flared her nostrils, but nodded a moment later.

Kayla continued as though the exchange hadn’t happened. “Mage gift defines the maximum density of magic that the vessel of flesh can hold. When you pass through the Mouse Gate, you don’t become any more dense, so the extra nima has to be stored somewhere. A tiny part of it goes to feed the gate. The rest is held for your return. If you don’t make it back in time and the gate sheds the imprint, it also flares off the excess magic . . . which is still tied to the person’s soul.

“If you don’t leave the city within twelve hours of entering, your flared nima will backlash through your body, burning you up from within. The more power you had going in, the bigger the effect. A normal human might merely die of fever. A hedge witch will broil from the inside out. A more powerful mage will literally burst into flame.”

The smoke swirling in Siri’s hair suddenly increased its gyrations as she turned to Kelos. “I know why Ash
doesn’t
believe in the key, and I think he makes a damned good argument. Why are
you
certain the key exists?”

Kelos shrugged. “I’m not. But the Son of Heaven is. He wants it and he wants it very badly. That’s reason enough for me to deny it to him even without any other potential uses we might find for it. The best way to do that is to grab it and put it out of his reach.”

Faran boiled out of her chair and glared down the length of the table at Kelos. “A decade ago, you betrayed us all
to
the Son of Heaven. In the process, you killed almost everyone that I loved. Why the fuck should we trust you to be working against him now?”

If Kelos felt the least bit ashamed, he didn’t show it in face or voice. “Beyond my efforts to manipulate Aral into killing the Son of Heaven two years ago?” he asked mildly.

“Yeah, beyond that. I don’t believe that you actually wanted the Son dead. If you did, why is he still alive after Aral got close enough to leave those cuts on his face?” She turned and glanced at me. “No offense, Aral, but I think you got played there. You should have killed him, even if it would have made Kelos the next Son of Heaven.”

Kelos smiled. “That’s one place that we agree, Master Faran. Aral should have killed him, but not because it would have made me the Son of Heaven. I would have used the power to make the world a better place, but that was always a side effect of the plan, never its heart. No, Aral should have killed him for the very reason that those cuts have never healed.” He took a deep breath. “Maybe it’s finally time that I laid the whole story out.”

Kelos looked down the table at me and raised an enquiring eyebrow. He was leaving it up to me, and I found that I both needed to know this and felt a sick fear at the idea. What if he somehow convinced me that he’d made the right decision? Wouldn’t that make me in some way culpable in his betrayal? What if he didn’t and it killed what love I still had for him? It felt like someone had just plunged an ice dagger into my guts, but I nodded. I had to know.

Kelos leaned back in his chair and put his booted feet up on another, looking as relaxed as a big cat after feasting on a fresh kill. “Aral knows some of this, but I will tell it all now. It started with the Kitsune. . . .”

He went on to relate the story he’d told me by the fire earlier. That part left Siri looking thoughtful, but it didn’t touch the rage expressed in every line of Faran’s body.

When he finished with that portion of the thing, he launched into territory I knew only slightly from my conversations with Devin and the Kitsune herself. “The third time Nuriko came back, she had a proposition for me. She told me that she had aligned herself with the Son of Heaven, and that he wanted to bring down the goddess and bring the order under the control of the ‘Emperor of Heaven and the true rule of the gods.’ Through himself, of course.”

“And you found that convincing?” Kyrissa asked from her place on the wall behind Siri.

“Not in the slightest,” answered Kelos. “Neither did Nuriko, for that matter. We knew he was lying to us, and we knew why. But we both saw our chance to bring down the whole damn system. You see, the Son of Heaven is a rapportomancer.”

“A what?” asked Kayla.

“I don’t think you have them on this side of the wall,” said Siri. “It’s a term for someone who has the familiar gift but no mage gift.”

The First were their own focus—they didn’t need a partner to cast spells. That need for an external focus was a limitation the gods had placed on human magic after the rebellion of the First. A way to keep us from following our forebears into war with the gods—one of many.

Siri continued, “Rapportomancy is incredibly rare even among humans, with two notable exceptions.” She looked at Kelos now. “But I hadn’t heard that the Son came either from the Kanjurese Islands or Kodamia.”

The warrior caste who ruled the islands of Kanjuri were rapportomancers who bonded with the magically ensouled swords crafted by the mage smiths called Gojuru. The other exception, of course, were the Dyads of Kodamia—human-human mage-familiar pairings where the mage gift ran in one set of houses, and the familiar in another.

Kelos shook his head. “He’s neither, though you never know what you might find if you looked far enough back in his bloodline. Where he got the gift doesn’t matter. It’s what it’s done to him that’s important.”

“Done
to
him?” I asked.

“Yes.” He rose from his chair. “Once upon a time there was a young priest from Dan Eyre. His name was Corik. In the course of his duties ministering to the Kvanas, Corik had a run-in with the wandering dead, one of the risen. It bit him. Under normal circumstances the curse would have killed him over a period of hours to weeks, depending on the strength of his will. Then it would have resurrected his body as a new host to pass the undead contagion on to a fresh victim. But Corik was anything but normal. He was that one-in-a-million freak, an undiscovered rapportomancer among a people with no history of the gift.

“That’s where things get interesting, because the risen curse isn’t a spell. It’s more like a magical disease. It possesses a sort of life of its own, even a rudimentary will. As the curse devoured Corik’s life it also settled into his bones and soul. Somewhere in there it met with his rapportomancy and bang! Meld. Corik became the first human ever to bond with a living curse of the undead. I don’t know what kind of person Corik was before he merged his soul with an all-devouring curse. Pious? Ambitious? Cowardly?

“It doesn’t really matter, though, because Corik was three-quarters dead by the time he joined his soul to the disease—well on his way into the all-devouring madness of the undead. If it had happened a few days earlier he might have gained complete control over the curse, maybe even changed the course of risen history. A few days later, and he would have been too far along. He would simply have become another of the wandering dead with an especially close relationship to the curse that controlled him.

“But as it was, Corik wasn’t the only one who was transformed. In melding with the priest’s soul, this particular strand of the risen curse separated itself from the one that had birthed it. That meant that Corik Half-Risen was the only victim carrying that particular strand of the disease. At least, at first. But the curse had infused him with its need to pass itself along, and the best way for him to do that was to amass worldly power so that he could infect others. And, so, Corik arranged to ‘trip’ and slice the face of his superior with a jagged fingernail.

“Lacking Corik’s inborn familiar gift, the older priest quickly succumbed to the risen curse. He became one of the undead, inhabited by a part of the disease that was Corik’s familiar. In effect, he became Corik’s slave, and anyone that he bit or clawed became infected with Corik’s special strain of the curse in turn. Corik’s rise to become Son of Heaven was swift, climbing, as he did, up a ramp made from the bodies of those above him.”

“That explains so much,” I whispered. I knew from Devin that the Son had some control over the risen, but Devin had thought it was something to do with the authority conferred upon him by the gods.

Kelos nodded. “But even that wasn’t enough for the curse or for Corik. By the very nature of what they had become, it
couldn’t
be enough. He wanted more. So, he began to arrange for the infection of nobles and officials at every level of government in the eleven kingdoms. The only ones that he couldn’t touch were mages.”

“Why is that?” asked Faran, her face and voice expressing a sort of creeping horror.

“Because when you kill a mage, you kill the familiar,” I said—I had already figured some of this out in the course of helping Maylien, first to reclaim her barony, and, then, onto the throne of Zhan. What I hadn’t known was how it applied to the Son of Heaven. “The curse can only resurrect the mage, never the familiar. Infecting any mage instantly reveals the curse. That’s why the church has remained weak in Kodamia and Kanjuri, and the Magelands.” Jax and I had briefly had a piece of that part of the puzzle, but I hadn’t known what to do with it until now.

“Exactly.” Kelos returned to his chair.

Siri rubbed her neck, putting her hands inches from the hilts of her swords. “And you
knew
this when you betrayed the goddess, Kelos?”

“Of course.” Kelos crossed his arms. “Can’t you see it?”

Hands drifted closer to hilts. “I see a monster who deliberately set out to help an even bigger monster take over the eleven kingdoms.”

“Not at all,” replied Kelos. “Nuriko and I set out to help him corrupt and control the rulers of the eleven kingdoms because we wanted to free the land from rulers altogether. You know how it works; kill the mage, kill the familiar. Right now, the Son of Heaven is pair-bonded to three-quarters of the most important governing officials in the eleven kingdoms. If he dies, they die, too. With one stroke of the sword, you can behead the whole damned lot.”

A
good strategist can beat you. A great strategist can force you to beat yourself. A genius of strategy can make you believe that beating yourself is the only right thing to do.

Kelos was a genius. He wanted to tear the whole system down, and despite the fact that I disagreed with him in every possible way on the topic, I knew that at some point . . .

“I will have to kill the Son of Heaven,” I whispered.

Kelos nodded. “Eventually, yes. But first you have to deny him the key. With it he can make himself into a god and put himself forever beyond the reach of justice.”

“Justice!” I moved without thinking, snap drawing my swords in the same moment that I leaped onto the table. A half second later I stood with the edges of my blades touching the skin on either side of Kelos’s neck—just above the arteries. “You dare to speak to me of justice after destroying Namara?”

Red ringed my vision, narrowing it to Kelos’s face and the steel I held on either side of his jaw. Blood hammered in my ears and I wanted to kill him so very, very much. I pressed the swords into his flesh, dimpling the skin but not yet breaking it. It would take the tiniest of movements to end him. A short drawing cut with either hand. That was all.

“Go ahead. I deserve to die.” Kelos’s expression remained serene. “For what I did to the goddess. To you.” His eyes flicked over my shoulder. “To Siri and Faran, and all the others, living and dead. I have earned the death you hold in your hands, Aral. I won’t try to stop you or argue you out of it. Killing me
is
justice. Do it.” He closed his eyes and smiled.

Aral.

Yes, Triss. Don’t try to talk me out of this.

He deserves it, and the choice is yours, of course.

But?
I had to ask. I didn’t want to, but I had to.

He’s still playing you.

And, because Triss was right, I let my swords fall away from Kelos’s throat. “Clean up your own damned mess. You want the Son of Heaven dead so bad? You do it.”

Tell him he’s unworthy of those swords,
said Triss.

All right . . .
I didn’t see where Triss was going, but I trusted him. “You’re not worth bloodying the swords of the goddess.” I turned my back on Kelos, resheathing my swords as I returned to the floor and then to my seat.

When I got there, Faran gave me a hard look. “What is it with you and not killing people who really, really need it?”

“He
wants
me to kill him, and I’m done being played.”

“Can
I
kill him?” Faran asked, though she didn’t sound very hopeful.

I just shrugged.

“I won’t stop you,” Kelos answered her.

Faran settled back into her seat. “I’ll take that as a no.” She sighed. “Right, since I’m the apprentice, I guess it’s my job to ask the clueless questions. So, what does he think he’s going to accomplish by having one of us kill him?”

“I don’t know,” I replied and Faran rolled her eyes. “Not all of it anyway.” I turned to look at Kelos. “I do know that you believe that if I kill you it will somehow force me to go on to kill the Son of Heaven for you.”

Kelos smiled but didn’t say a word.

He’s not wrong,
sent Triss.

I am
not
going to be responsible for the destruction of the governments of most of the eleven kingdoms, no matter how much he wants me to. It’s madness.

So, if Kelos were dead, you would simply walk away and let the Son of Heaven and his risen slaves rule the bulk of the eleven kingdoms? Knowing that they are willing to shed endless quantities of blood to feed the curse? Knowing that they will only continue to expand their grip on the lands of man until there is nothing left but a vast empire of the dead? You will let them win?

I growled mentally.
It’s the Kitsune’s plot. She can deal with it.

We don’t know how long it will be before she comes back. It took her nearly twenty years after Kelos killed her. We don’t even know if she
will
return this time. You’re going to trust the fate of the human world to the possible resurrection of a madwoman. Really?

Dammit, Triss, you sound like you want me to do Kelos’s dirty work for him.

No, I am simply recognizing the fact that ultimately we may have no alternative. Kelos is very good at putting people in a position where they have to choose to do what he wants them to.

I’m confused. If you think that I’m just going to have to do what he wants in the end anyway, why did you keep me from killing him?

I stopped you because he wants it to be you. I suspect that has been his plan from before the temple fell. You heard what Nuriko had to say about Kelos. He believes in justice in his bones, and he believes that justice demands that the system die. But he also believes that betraying the goddess means that justice demands his death. He hates himself for what he’s done even though he believes he had no choice. He sees in you his ultimate successor as the true champion of justice. Especially after you beat him in Heaven’s Reach. If it’s you that kills him, especially with the swords of the goddess, he will see it as Namara’s will made manifest. It would offer him a sort of peace.

And
that’s
why you told me to say that he was unworthy?

Yes. I want him to suffer. I want him alive and aware of his crimes and I want him to think that you don’t believe he’s earned the death of Justice. If he wants to expiate his sins by giving up his life and going on to face the lords of judgment, let him do it his own damned self.

Remind me never to piss you off.

Triss snorted mentally.
That ship sailed long ago, but this goes so far beyond merely being pissed off that it’s another thing entirely.

I looked at Kelos, who had continued to smile knowingly while Triss and I had our little talk.
He knows we can mindspeak, doesn’t he?

Probably.

And, he’s
still
playing us. He thinks he’s got things set up so he wins either way, whether we kill him or not.

He is Kelos,
sent Triss, as if that was all the answer I needed.

And, in truth, it was.
Can we beat him?

The only way to find out is to play the game out.

I sighed. “All right, Kelos. If any of us kills you, you win one way. I’m sure that you have a winning scenario plotted out if we don’t kill you, too. What is it?”

His smile widened briefly. “Aral, you continue to make me proud for my part in your training.” Then he shut the expression off in a way that made it perfectly clear that the smile was only one more tool in a very large set. “If you want to find that out, you’ll have to go after the key.”

I rubbed my temples. “I suppose you have some way to compel us to that course?”

“Do you want the Son of Heaven to get the key? Because his agents are already on their way. News of his plans in that direction is what moved me to go after it myself and to seek out Siri.”

He turned to her now. “For that matter, now that the Smoldering Flame knows where to look, what do you think he will do about it? If you wish to remain Siri, you need to get there first
and
figure out how to keep the god in your head from using you to get what he needs to rise again. You
know
that I can help you there.”

Siri ran her fingers through her braids, stirring the smoke into mad whorls. “For my part, he’s right, Aral. I have no choice but to go after the key, and having Kelos at my side may make the difference between success and failure. But I won’t ask you or Faran to come with us. Not after all he’s done to you.”

I held up my hand with its ring of smoke. “I didn’t put this on idly, and I’m not going to abandon you now. Especially not to him.” I nodded at Kelos. “That said, I would prefer that we left Faran here.”

Faran crossed her arms and gave me a hard look. “And what if Faran doesn’t agree to be left?” she asked.

“Then, given the success I’ve had in the past at enforcing my will on her, I imagine that she will be joining us.”

Faran smiled. “So, he
does
learn. I had begun to have my doubts.”

“You aren’t the first to wonder about that,” Triss said with a snort.

Kelos stood. “Shall we go? The longer we wait, the greater our chance of failure.” He turned his gaze on Ash and Kayla. “I presume that if you wanted to, you could get us to Sylvas more quickly than we could make it by horse or the burning of boot leather.”

Ash looked at Siri. “I see why you said this man was so dangerous, child. He manipulates like a Sylvani courtier.” He canted his head to one side. “He lies like one, too, though the truths here serve his purpose as well as the falsehoods, making it very hard to sort one from the other. What would you have us do, Siri? Send you all along now, together? Or just the three of you.” His gesture excluded Kelos. “We can do either.”

“Much as I hate to say it, I’d rather have him inside the boat bailing water out than the other way round.”

“It’s your decision,” said Ash, though he didn’t sound the least bit happy about it.

“I’ll take them,” said Kayla. “The Changer is already riled from one outing. Let’s not give her another chance at slipping the leash again when her anger at being returned to the great binding is still so fresh.”

Ash sighed, but nodded. “That’s probably best.”

*   *   *

Sylvas
was a city of jewels. The Sylvani had occupied the site for twice ten thousand years, and when they built to last, they built in gemstone. Towers of ruby and sapphire climbed into the sky, while jade fortresses squatted side by side with manors of white opal. All of it as smooth and pure as if it had been grown. The streets were sheets of diamond.

“How did they make this?” Faran ran her fingertips along a wall of yellow citrine at least a foot thick. She left a long trail in the grime that covered the stone.

“They begin with rough sandstone or tufa blocks—any stone that’s easy to work with—laying them much as I am told things are done on your side of the wall,” replied Kayla. “Where they need to, they will reinforce the construction with iron or timber. Once it’s all in place, they fuse the stones together with magic, creating a single seamless skin of uniform material. The spells involved take years to lay and months to complete their work. But that is only the beginning.

“Transforming a tower of sandstone into one of ruby is the sort of magic that might take a score of your human generations to construct, and another dozen to play out, though stone to stone is an easier transmutation than wood to stone or any other cross-elemental spell. Five hundred years may pass between the laying of the first stone and the point when the building is ready for the arrival of its masters. But that’s all the talk we have time for. The nearest of the Mouse Gates lies just ahead.” Kayla’s long belled sleeve billowed around her arm with the gesture.

Before leaving the castle she had changed into a loose flowing set of garments the color of sand. They covered her from head to toe, concealing both her face and her gender. When Kelos asked her about the choice, she’d laughed.

“The Tolar are not well liked in the capitol,” she’d said. “But they are infinitely more welcome than Kayla Darkvelyn of the Kreyn. I find that it’s a more effective disguise by far than glamouring myself into the shape of a Sylvani maid tall and fair, however well the illusion is cast.”

“Why?” asked Ssithra.

“Fair seeming draws the eye. Seeing magic, the curious will then look deeper. Whereas the eye scorns the outcast, skipping on in search of visions more pleasant rather than seeking to pierce the veil of internal disdain. Your company will only enhance the effect. The Sylvani use humans; they do not love them. Hence this.” Her gesture took in the filthy buildings, trash-strewn streets, and harsh looks from the few natives we had passed.

With Ash’s help, Kayla had conjured us into an alley not far from a Mouse Gate that entered the Asavi city-within-a-city near the base of the grand stairs on the north side, near the center of the waterfront. Given its position, it ought to have been a wealthy neighborhood, and there were many once-grand houses to be seen on the street where we emerged from the alley. But the very presence of the Mouse Gate, and with it the heavy human traffic into the city understairs, had caused the Sylvani nobility who once lived there to seek fairer harbor.

The spells that kept sand and dust from accumulating on gemstone walls had long since fallen away, and a thin layer of grime covered everything. Here and there deep gouges showed in the stone where scavengers had tried their hands at chipping out a king’s ransom in precious gems. A futile effort according to Kayla. The spells that had once transformed tufa to topaz were of a piece, and removing a bit of stone from the matrix caused it to revert to its original form.

In a few places, more enterprising souls had gone so far as to try to carve out massive chunks of stone in hopes of circumventing the failure of their less ambitious peers. They, too, had failed, and even more spectacularly, causing whole wall sections to degenerate back into the coarser stone from which they had once been formed. Given the surrounding architecture, the gate that led into the city understairs stood out like a crow among gaudy parrots.