Drawn Blades (25 page)

“I see why they call them Mouse Gates,” said Faran.

At our end, the gate was tall enough to accommodate a horse and rider, its opening shaped into the snarling mouth of a mouse backed into a corner by a rat. It was made of some coarse gray substance that looked more grown than built—the cocoon of some great moth perhaps, or the rough nest of ten thousand wasps. The surface felt warm and slightly yielding, almost alive, when I bent to touch the tip of the lower jaw.

“This is where I must leave you,” said Kayla. “Good luck.” With a swirl of sand-colored silk, she turned and was gone.

“Well, that’s inviting. . . .” Siri pointed to the rapidly narrowing gullet that lay at the back of the open mouth.

Three young men wearing the clothes of common laborers slipped around us to enter the mouth. As soon as the first of the laborers crossed the threshold, lines of spell-light reached out from the tips of the mouse’s teeth, fastening themselves at wrists and ankles, neck, heart, and forehead. With each step beyond, the spell threads pulsed and the man visibly shrank. By the time he reached the throat of the gate he had shed nearly two feet and both his fellows had fallen in behind. Watching them out of sight was most disconcerting.

Following them into the mouth of the gate a moment later and
feeling
it was ten times more so. Make a three-sided pyramid of oranges twenty tall. Take away the top orange, then the two below it on one side, and the three below that, and so on down to the bottom. You now have a pyramid that looks much the same, but it’s only nineteen oranges tall. Do the same again, and now the pyramid is eighteen oranges tall. Now imagine how it might feel to
be
the pyramid. It was kind of like that.

“Slick.” Siri was right behind me and we’d reached a point where we were perhaps ten inches tall. “Very slick. I’d love to take this thing apart and see how they do it.”

A curtain of darkness hung across the path, blocking any view ahead, but I pushed on through what felt like a wall of cobwebs and staggered out the other end where we passed through a simple rounded arch. As I stumbled out into the Asavi city, I had a brief moment to compare the smaller end of the gate to the classic mouse hole as any sketch artist might have drawn it. Then I looked up and saw the stairs above. . . .

Each individual step that made up the grand stairs of Sylvas was a thirty-foot-long translucent bar of precious stone a foot wide and six inches high. Garnet, topaz, citrine, a graduated rainbow that ran for half a mile from harbor to palace. The Asavi had excavated a continuous gallery below that ran the entire length, like a hanging valley in the mountains where the sun shone down through a jeweled sky. It was breathtaking and I couldn’t take my eyes off the view as I slowly walked out into an open plaza.

“I was expecting something a bit more . . . rat hole,” said Faran. “This is . . . I don’t even know what.”

“Blood,” said Kelos, and at first I thought he was talking about the light.

We had entered the city near the base of the stairs where ruby and garnet dominated and the light painted the plaza in shades of crimson.

But then he continued, “I smell it in the air. There’s blood in the offing. We need to hurry, or we’ll be too late.” He started up the nearest street at a jog. As far as I could tell he hadn’t even looked at that marvelous ceiling.

“He’s right,” said Siri. “The god just went quiet in my head.”

The buildings were mostly made of some sort of dense stonelike material the color of honeycomb. Most of the people we passed on the street level were human, though the Asavi flitted this way and that in the air above. If they noticed those of us who needed to get about on foot they didn’t show it. Though they remained some distance away and moved with frightening speed, I got enough of a look at them to decide that they reminded me more of the Durkoth than any of their other cousins. Impossibly beautiful and alien, with no slightest hint of humanity in the austerely arrogant cast of their expressions.

Both sexes went shirtless—presumably to allow their gossamer wings the maximum freedom. Most had needle-like swords at their sides, and many carried blowguns as well. The tiny sheathed darts reminded me of one of the few bits of Asavi lore I’d ever learned at the temple—poison.

Three of the deadliest that we had used in the service of Namara were imported from the Sylvain. Two of those were delivered orally and used heavily by the Sylvani court for eliminating rivals. The third was best administered via some sort of puncture and it came from the Asavi.

Since Faran had been too young at the fall of the temple to have done much more than begun her training with poisons, I touched her on the shoulder, and spoke quietly. “The Asavi invented ancubonite.”

She whistled. “Good to know. That would explain why they’re all carrying those itty-bitty little pin-pricker swords as if they were serious weapons.”

Kelos suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the street. “Can you feel it?”

“What?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“The blood tension is singing in the air,” he whispered.

Do you think Kelos is cracking?
I sent to Triss, but I couldn’t help noticing the way the sun suddenly seemed to dim above the gemstone ceiling of the city.

How could he not?
replied Triss.
But I don’t think that’s what this is about. I can feel it, too, a sort of pressure dancing along the edge of perception. It’s more elemental than magical, but there’s definitely something there.

Before I had a chance to do or say anything more, a horrible squealing shriek came from somewhere down the street behind us. I drew my swords without thinking and spun into a defensive stance in the same instant that Triss rolled up my skin from below, bringing my shadow with him. Siri and Faran had whirled as well, slotting in on either side of me a few steps back. Without looking, I could feel that Kelos had remained facing up the hill, putting his back to mine and closing the fourth point of a defensive diamond.

The shriek repeated itself, followed this time by a sort of deep growling grunt. A few seconds later I could see something storming up the slope toward us. A trio of somethings. As they got closer details resolved themselves.

“Filathalor!” Siri snapped.

“Those tiger-boar things painted all over the Castelle?” Kelos asked from behind us.

“Yes,” I replied as they roared closer. “Saddled. The riders are Sylvani warriors in crystalline armor and they have lances.”

“I thought they only came out at the will of the Changer. Do you think that Ash and Kayla sold us out?” he asked, still without turning—that took a discipline that I’d have been hard-pressed to match.

“Impossible,” said Siri. “Or, very nearly. But the key probably has the Changer stirring in her slumber, and she has her cultists just as all of the buried gods— Ware!”

They were almost upon us then, and I tensed my legs to leap aside. I’d faced these things before and I knew there was no way any of us could hope to take one head-on. An angry buzzing made me look up as they closed. A dozen of the Asavi were zipping back and forth in the wake of the charging filathalor, weapons drawn. Bright lines of spell-light zipped back and forth between the flyers and the riders, but none of it seemed to have much impact.

At the last possible instant the lead rider hauled on her reins and the tiger-boars swerved left, going around us without engaging. They passed close enough for me to see the hundreds of poisoned darts sticking in the necks and shoulders of the filathalor. I could also hear a high chiming, like crystal rain, as more darts struck the helms and cuirasses of the riders.

It was the first time I’d seen Sylvani armor in action, and I took a moment to fix it in my memory. Wherever a dart struck the armor it created a momentary splash of bright lines, like fractures radiating out from the point of impact. The magically charged crystal was refracting the force of the blow, dispersing it throughout the structure of the armor—transforming the physical attack into light and scattering it until it dimmed away into nothingness.

But even the fanciest of armor couldn’t cover every gap perfectly, and one of the darts must have found a chink, because the trailing rider slumped in his seat and then tumbled to the ground a few lance lengths after they passed us. Neither of his companions so much as looked back, and his filathalor rode on without him.

“They must be here for the key,” Siri cried even as the Sylvani cultist hit the ground.

“After them!” yelled Kelos, and he was away.

I slowed as I reached the fallen cultist and swung my right-hand sword in a full over-arm chop aimed at the crest of his helm. I had no doubt that the ancubonite would finish him if it hadn’t already, but I was intensely aware of the Asavi flying above us and wanted to send them a signal about being the enemy of their enemies. I also wanted to see how the kinetic refraction of the armor would handle the god-magic of my swords.

Not very well, as it turned out. When the edge of my sword hit the top of the helm, it gave off a flash like brightest magelightning, and lines of light crazed their way through the translucent crystal. For one brief instant the helm was spiderwebbed with violet light. Then, with a crash and a tinkle, it shattered into a thousand pieces no bigger than the tip of my little finger. It did stop my blow, leaving the fallen Sylvani untouched, but only until my other sword parted his head from his shoulders.

Whether my demonstration worked or the Asavi just weren’t that interested in armed humans when there were obvious cultists of the Changer to deal with, I couldn’t say. But no darts fell upon us, and that was enough for me. I put on an extra burst of speed to catch up with the others. As I ran, I noticed a tugging at my ring finger and saw that the smoke there had grown thicker than ever as it whirled madly away.

Another of the riders fell off her filathalor before they turned into a filthy side street where we all ran headlong into a fight with at least four sides.

T
here
is nothing poetic about a battle when the blood is still flowing fresh in the gutters and the stench and the screams are hammering at your soul. There is not much good to be said about the aftermath either, but that doesn’t keep people from trying.

“Shroud!” Kelos yelled after we pelted around a corner and almost plowed into the back end of a filathalor.

It was an unnecessary warning. Blood and the opened sphincter smells of fresh death hung heavy in the air. By the time Kelos spoke, training as deep as instinct had already taken over. Siri and Faran and I each vanished into our own individual blind spots. Triss released control—and I lost track of the others within seconds as I dived into the narrow gap between two buildings—leaving me alone.

It was a small building and I quickly found the alley behind, moving along it until I reached a wide-open back door—presumably marking where the owners had very sensibly fled the battle out front. A ladder led upward from the back room to the rooftop, but I passed it by as I headed for the front windows. Normally, I would have made my way above to get an overview of things out front. But with so many heavily armed and potentially hostile flyers, I wanted a roof between me and the rain of poisonous darts.

Furnishings and the unmistakable stench of curing hides suggested that my temporary haven normally served as a leatherwork shop of some sort. One of the shuttered windows hung open and I pushed the shadow away from my eyes so that I could peer out into the small square fronting the shop. As I did so I felt Siri’s shroud brush across the back of my own, gently letting me know she had followed me.

“Madness,” I whispered as I looked out into the swirling chaos of a battle with no readily apparent objectives or obvious structure.

Blood and magic ruled the scene, with bodies and bits of bodies spread across the square every which way and spell-light flickering along every surface. I saw Asavi corpses and Sylvani, Tolar and Kreyn, the filathalor—apparently
something
could kill them—and a scattering of humans.

Most of the latter were obvious bystanders—likely caught in the initial explosion of violence. But I also saw one body in the loose silks of a Blade. One of those who had gone over to the Son and formed Heaven’s Shadow, no doubt, given the reddish tint to his grays. Three more wore the ritually tied hair bindings that marked the Hand of Heaven—the Son’s personal sorcerer-priests and shock troops.

That would explain the dimming of the sun earlier. The mages of the Hand were partnered by the Storms—powerful elementals that rode the thunder and lightning. They wore wings of deep black clouds and came in shapes that encompassed everything from lightning-tipped scepters, to spheres of ice or burning wheels spoked with slender whirlwinds. They
were
the weather, and the skies would mourn the violent passing of three of their number with a storm of massive proportions.

“Who’s winning?” Siri asked me.

“I can’t even tell who all the sides are. The Asavi, of course, and those who follow the Son of Heaven. The filathalor mark the presence of cultists of the Changer. Add all the fire magic out there to the way my ring’s going crazy and I guess we have to count the Smoldering Flame among the cultic types. Beyond that? Who knows? It’s a mess.”

“Should we be worried about Faran?” asked Siri.

“No, or not much. With the exception of the trouble she gets into by trying to watch my back, she’s significantly better at taking care of herself than I am. In that way, she’s rather like you at the same age.”

Siri snorted. “Fair enough. What do you think we ought to do now?”

“I honestly don’t know.” I slid down to sit against the base of the wall while I tried to sort it out. The thick stonelike material shook occasionally as spell blasts hit the other side, but it felt sturdy enough to protect us from all but the worst of direct attacks.

I felt Siri settle beside me. “Picking a side and wading in doesn’t strike me as a good survival strategy given the amount of dying that’s going on out there. This is no kind of fight for an assassin. Maybe we should just hole up here for a while and let the crowd thin itself out.”

I nodded though she couldn’t see me. “Hard to argue with that. I take it your divine affliction isn’t telling you where to find the key.”

Siri chuckled. “I’m afraid not. I
can
hear the god buzzing very faintly in the back of my mind when he talks to his cultists out there, but for the moment he’s shut me out. Probably because he knows that I wouldn’t surrender the key to him if I got ahold of it right now.”

“Right now?” I emphasized her qualifier.

“Yes, right now.” Siri’s voice went grim as she answered me. “Later? I don’t know. I can feel the dagger I left in his heart slowly burning away, Aral—feel it taking bits of me with it. In the early years it was a slow thing, more rot than fire, like a log crumbling in on itself in the woods. But since Kelos told me about the key, and, with me, the god . . . it’s terrifying.”

In all the years I had known her, Siri had never shown the slightest sign of fear. She had always been first in line to attempt the scariest jumps, or to try out a poison and its antidote. Hearing her say that she was terrified . . . that shook me. I tried to imagine what that might feel like, knowing that a will greater than your own was slowly devouring you from within, and that shook me even more.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“Nothing you haven’t already offered.” Siri reached through our overlapping shrouds to take my hand—the one with the ring. “I didn’t know what you would do when I sent my smoke seeming to you, Aral. It had been so many years since I’d seen you, and in all that time I never even
tried
to find you. Not after the fall, and not later when I first heard that you had resurfaced in Tien. I abandoned you and all the others and ran to the Sylvain and Ash for help with the god. You would have had every right to turn me away.”

“Siri—”

“Let me finish. You had no way of knowing who I was now, or that I wasn’t about to betray you. When you didn’t even hesitate over accepting my ring . . . I cried. It meant so much to me to be trusted when I felt like my soul was rotting away from within. I can never begin to thank you enough for that.”

I squeezed her hand between my own. “You are
Siri
. We entered the temple barely a year apart. I have loved you in one way or another for almost as long as I can remember.” I didn’t know if this was the right time for this conversation, but then, I didn’t know if we would live long enough for the chance to come again, so I plunged on. “I may not see us ever playing husband and wife in the traditional way, but I would happily give you my life. How could I deny you my hand?”

“How can you say that after all the betrayals you’ve suffered? Devin and Kelos and—”

I touched a fingertip to her lips to stop her words. “Devin is weak of heart. He always was. Though I thought of him as my brother once, I can’t blame him for bending to Kelos’s will. His spine is no stiffer now than it ever was. If he crosses me, I may have to kill him, but it’s hard to fault a puppet for dancing when someone tugs on his strings.”

“And Kelos? What about his betrayals?”

“You heard what he had to say. He fell to the weaknesses of his strengths. I might have done the same in the days before I learned to see the world in all its myriad shades.”

“You can’t mean that you would forgive him,” whispered Siri.

“For my own part, I might someday. For what he did to the goddess, no. That I can never forget or forgive.”

“Is that why you decided to give me your trust?” She sounded genuinely baffled. “Because the goddess was gone, and the only one I could betray is you?”

“Siri, when you sent your seeming to propose to me,
giving
you my trust never entered into it. I didn’t know what you wanted beyond my hand. I didn’t know who you had become. For all I knew, you could have been contracted to kill me. None of that mattered. What mattered was the Siri I knew from the temple, the Siri that I loved personally and honored as First Blade. I trusted
that
Siri, and I owed her my life’s blood if she asked for it.”

“The more you speak, the less I understand you. You couldn’t know that I was the same person.”

“I’m sorry. To me it’s very simple. In the old days, I wouldn’t have hesitated to walk into a fire at your request. You’ve never given me any reason to believe that the woman who I would have done that for is gone. If I were to revoke my trust in you simply because of what the world has done to me or what you
might
do in your turn, then my trust is hardly worth giving.”

“You’re mad. You know that, right?”

“Triss tells me so often enough, but I’m not sure that I agree. What I do makes sense to me. And, really, is there any other measure that matters?”

Siri laughed, perhaps the first true laugh I’d heard from her since coming to the Sylvain. “I do love you, Aral, madman or no, and I’m sorry to have drawn you into this.” Then she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “I’m still not all that enchanted with the idea of marriage, but if I had to marry someone, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather it were.”

“Thanks . . . I think.” Then I poked her in the ribs in lieu of a wink, since I understood exactly where she was coming from. I had no interest in marrying either, but better to an old friend if it needed doing.

A lull in the sounds of the fighting outside caught my attention then. “Might be time to get back into the game.” I turned and slid my eyes above the sill again, but the battle was still a confusing whirl with too many sides to keep track of, if somewhat slower. The biggest difference was that there were more bodies scattered about now. “I wish there was some way we could tell who has the key at the moment and slip up behind them.
That’s
an assassin’s fight.”

“Truth. But I can’t think of any way to pick out the key. Not without a lot more information about any magical signature it might have. Probably not even then. If it were visibly magical, or traceable by magic, someone would surely have found it before now.”

“Maybe we can reason out its whereabouts.” It was worth a shot, especially given the alternatives. I tried to shut out the sounds of death and mayhem so I could think it through.

Siri squeezed my hand. “I’m game, but how?”

“Start with the idea that the key’s been hidden here for ten thousand plus years without anyone finding it. Yet somehow, the Son of Heaven winkled it out.”

“It’s more likely that someone tipped him off,” replied Siri. “There are more humans in the empire than First these days. As much as you and I might have reasons to hate the Son of Heaven, he
is
the chief priest of the religions of man. Maybe someone here spotted the key and told their priest about it, and that’s how it got back to him.”

“Not a bad guess, that.” My own personal hatred of the man tended to blind me to the place he held in the hearts of most of our kind. “But that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that no one is likely to have happened along and turned up the key before the forces of Heaven’s Reach got here specifically looking for it. They probably had the key in hand when this all started.”

“Which means what?”

There was something important there, but I didn’t quite have a handle on it. “Let me chew on it for a bit. At a guess, touching the key did something that alerted the buried gods to its existence, or at least to those of them who were close by or knew to listen for it.”

“That would explain the way the Smoldering Flame suddenly went silent along about the time we arrived in the city understairs. Good. What else?”

“There’s a single ex-Blade corpse out there—Mabung, I think; his Shade took the form of an alligator—but I see no other evidence of our former brethren.” I could sense that part of it was important, but I didn’t know why yet. “All the humans still fighting at this point are Hand. They’re fanatics totally dedicated to the Son, and willing to die for him. . . .”

Then I had it. “The key’s already gone! The Shadow took it and left the Hand behind to confuse the issue and slow down any pursuit.”

“We have to find their trail!”

“And quickly.” I started pulling Siri toward the back door. “I wish we had some way to tell Faran what we were doing.” Kelos could rot for all I cared and I didn’t mention him. Neither did Siri.

*   *   *

“Now
I see why you say she can take care of herself,” said Siri.

“Funny, I was just thinking the opposite,” I grumbled.

We had found the shadow trail we were looking for. The initial track was made by a pair of shrouded Blades and very fresh—no more than half an hour old. It was hard to believe the fighting had started so recently, and that we had arrived more recently yet. A battle distorts time even if you’re only sitting on the edge of it. There was also the fact that the storm raging in the world above had dimmed the late-afternoon sun into something that approached an artificial night.

I didn’t recognize either of the original pair of shadow signatures—I’d only learned the art of detecting them at all in the last few years and I had yet to master it—but I had little doubt they belonged to a couple of our former brethren who had gone over to the Son. I did, however, recognize Kelos’s signature following along atop the others perhaps fifteen minutes ago, and Faran’s trailing his a few minutes behind.