Drawn Blades (31 page)

The obvious leader of the troop was accompanied by a tight bundle of colors and tentaclelike streamers that reminded me of nothing so much as an octopus trying to conceal itself on a bright coral reef. She had taken a seat at a small table not far from the base of the stairs, where she sat as ramrod straight as if she were occupying a bench in the front row of the master temple at Heaven’s Reach. Her followers had ranged themselves around the room in a loose cordon that allowed them to see every entrance and exit and to cover each other as needed in case of assault. I had to give them points for execution at the same time I deplored their very existence.

Kelos, being Kelos, had taken a stool at the bar with his back to almost everyone, like he was daring someone to stick a knife in it. Tempting as that idea sounded from time to time, I ignored him in favor of approaching the woman at the table. A second glance refined my first impression. For one, she was absolutely ancient, her hair bone white rather than the blond I had first thought, and the lines in her face many and deep.

If she were not a sorcerer I might have guessed her age at eighty, but her life was tied to her familiar’s, and the Storms, like the Shades, may live for hundreds of years. For her to have aged so much, she must be at least three hundred, and maybe as old as six hundred.

“I am five hundred and thirty-eight,” she said, her voice crisp and more than half-amused. “Also, I don’t read minds, just faces, and I’ve had lots of practice. My name is Toragana, and this is my second time wearing the ring.” She waved her right hand, where the Signet’s insignia of office circled her thumb. “After a hundred and ninety years of retirement in a peaceful hermitage, I have been drafted back into the job, and I am not at all pleased about it. Now, sit. We have much to talk about and our time is short. The Son would kill us all if he knew I was here talking to you. Besides, I’m ancient and angry. Apoplexy could carry me off at any moment.”

I suppressed a grin and sat. Despite all the weight of history and blood that lay between our two orders, I found myself instinctively liking this woman. “Angry?” I prompted.

“Extraordinarily so. Mostly at Corik Nofather. First for failing to succumb decently to the risen curse fifty years ago, thereby sparing me the trouble of doing something about his continued reign as the Son of Heaven. Second, for doing such a horrible job on the throne,
necessitating
my doing something about it. Third, for being an inhuman monster, which makes doing something about it a task that requires me to seek help in that task. And, before you put on the curious tone and say, ‘Mostly?’ I’m also mad at myself for hiding away in my hermitage and missing out on the chance to simply kill the little bastard off before he got too powerful for one old woman to handle.”

I like her,
Triss sent rather bemusedly.

So do I.
This time I couldn’t stop a grin. “So, you know what he is, then—” She cut me off with a chop of her hand.

“Yes, and all of his history, though I haven’t been able to do anything with the information, since he’s converted the bulk of the curia into undead slaves.” She sighed. “I admit it’s an improvement in some cases, but still, it complicates things. The only ones I’ve been able to bring in on this are certain members of my own order and that idiot Devin Nightblade.”

I started at the name of my onetime best friend, now head of the rogue Blades, who had gone over to the Son of Heaven after the fall of the temple. He had been Kelos’s chief pawn in the matter, and he hated me with a rare vigor.

She nodded at my reaction. “A piece of work, that one. Venal, dumb in a clever sort of way, and more than half a coward. He speaks very highly of you, which would have been enough for me to look elsewhere for help if it weren’t for the fact that it’s obvious he despises you and that it pains him to feel the way he does about your abilities.”

“So, he sent you here?”

“No, I sent me here. Devin—gods help us—heads one of the five branches of Heaven’s forces on earth. I head another. Together we
ought
to be able to push the Son off his throne without any help. But in addition to Devin’s cowardice, his fallen Blades are bound by terrible oaths that prevent them from acting directly against the Son, and my own order is a hollow shell of what it once was. For which, curse Corik’s name for five thousand generations.” She spat on the floor.

“As much as I agree with you about the Son of Heaven, I’m finding it hard to feel a lot of sympathy for you after what your order did to mine.”

Her mouth tightened at that, but she nodded. “I can understand your position on that conflict. What would you say if I told you that I mostly shared it?”

“I . . . What?” That was not what I had expected.

“That attack killed over half of the active members of my order, and it utterly destroyed our command structure. Nor was that result unintentional. The Son cannot convert mages without revealing himself, and that means that his control over the Hand has always been the weakest element of his command of the forces of the church. Since he took office, he has been systematically throwing our most powerful and independent members into the riskiest of situations, and the pace has accelerated dramatically of late.

“Seven Signets have died in the last ten years. Two at the fall of your temple. One in an ill-planned mission to Aven. Another, you killed two years ago at the abbey outside Tavan. One vanished shortly afterward; no one knows where. One fell in the battle understairs during the conflict over the Key of Sylvaras. His replacement was executed for treason three weeks later. Discounting half-trained novices and dotards like myself, the order has a fifth as many members as it did when your temple fell.”

She slammed a fist down on the table. “The Son has killed more of us than your Blades have. After the death of the last Signet, there were only three active officers who have held significant command roles in the organization, and not one of them felt up to the task of assuming the office—which is why they came to me. Privately, and
before
I took the ring, the three of them told me that they thought it would be a death sentence for any of them to do so. All of them were willing to offer up their lives if they thought it would save the order, but not one of them believed they could make a difference.”

“And you think you can?” I asked.

“I honestly don’t know. But I had to try. That’s why I’m here. The Son has made
this
into little more than a shiny bauble.” She took off the ring and tossed it to me.

Reflexively, I caught it out of the air. When I opened my hand to look at it, I realized for the first time what was missing. “What happened to the magic . . . ?”

I held it up to my eye and looked through the circle at Toragana. I had held the ring of a Signet before. Two of them, actually, and each had glowed brightly in magesight, infused as they were with many spells. Among other enchantments, they were, or had been, keys that opened every one of the many wards that guarded the great temple at Heaven’s Reach.

“Two years ago
someone
slipped into the Son’s bedroom.” Toragana gave me a pointed look.

“Really?” I asked, my face as blank as I could make it.

“Really. Though the story has not been widely shared beyond the upper echelons of the temple, the intruder stabbed two swords of your goddess into the headboard of the Son’s bed bare fractions of an inch above his face. When the Son woke, he ran into them, putting twin slices into the flesh over his cheekbones. Those wounds have never healed.”

“That’s fascinating,” I said.

“Oh, do stop. Kelos was the one outlawed for the thing—losing his place as head of Heaven’s Shadow to Devin—which is part of why I sought him out. But he’s already told me who actually marked the Son’s face, and how, and why. That’s also when he told me that you’re the one I have to deal with if I want your people to help us with the Son.”

“Me, not Siri?” She nodded and, wondering what Kelos was up to, I glanced over her shoulder to where he continued to pointedly ignore us all. “Interesting.”

“Look, I don’t care about your internal politics. What I care about is rescuing my order and my religion from the half-risen monster who currently heads it.”

“How did you discover the Son’s true nature?”

“After you left the Son with those slices on his cheeks, he went a little mad—paranoid and vindictive. He executed every guard who had been within a hundred yards of his rooms that night. Then he cut off all access to the innermost temple for the Hand, the Shadow, and those members of the Templars who are also mages. He restricted entry to a very few at first, his risen slaves within the priestly hierarchy and the military orders. But that also restricted his ability to get things done, so he started converting more and more risen. Concealing their true nature takes enormous amounts of blood. Too much to hide. Combine that with things that I scared out of Devin, and I knew what the truth had to be.”

“That’s when you decided to come to me.”

“Well, Kelos initially, but yes. Will you help me make war upon Heaven’s Son?”

I took a deep breath as I tried to decide how to answer her. That’s when a large boulder smashed right through the Fallows-side wall of the Roc and Diamond at shoulder height. It passed directly over the table where Toragana and I faced each other before punching out the wall on the other side. A few inches left or right and it would have killed one or the other of us.

Triss wrapped me in a shroud of darkness as I rolled backward out of my chair. In a handoff we had practiced thousands of times, he released control over his senses and substance to me as I bounced to my feet. My view of the world changed as my own vision became irrelevant and I shifted to seeing through Triss’s borrowed darksight. Color went away as textures and how they reflected or absorbed light became central to my awareness, and shadows took on a depth of meaning beyond anything I can ever hope to describe. . . .

As I drew my swords, a tattered horde of risen came pouring up the main stairway from the lower level.

The Son of Heaven had moved first.