Drawn Blades (8 page)

Before I had half crossed the distance, an archway opened itself in front of me. Beyond lay an enormous natural cavern, or such a good counterfeit of one that the distinction seemed hardly worth considering. It was filled with that same sourceless light that obscured as much as it exposed.

One of the first things I noticed as I crossed the threshold was the gentle music of falling water. It rolled slowly down countless spears of rock that hung from the ceiling and dripped from their tips. Sometimes it landed on upthrust points that mirrored those above. Sometimes it splashed into one of the irregular pools that serpentined their way among the rough spires and pillars.

The predominant color was a milky white, though pale blues and pinks could be seen veining the stone like the lines in a fine Varyan cheese. Here and there, translucent curtains of marble and travertine created smaller galleries or chambers that prevented me from seeing any great distance in one direction. Add in the rippling reflections from the pools, and the whole area took on a dreamy mazelike quality.

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered as I looked around. “And . . . somehow, holy.”

“To human eyes perhaps,” said Triss. “I find it more disturbing than anything. There are too many reflecting surfaces, and this light that comes from nowhere makes my soul ache. There are no true shadows here, and I do not belong. I would very much like to keep our time here brief.”

It was not the first time that Triss and I had a divergence of aesthetics—no surprise given our differing senses—but it was certainly one of the strongest. Well, no matter how lovely I might find the vista, if it made Triss that uncomfortable I would do what I could to hurry our departure. That meant I needed to get my meeting with Dame Krithak over in short order. A matter that would have been much simpler if I’d had any idea where to find her.

I took a dozen or so steps out into the cave, then stopped, looking for any signs that might point the way. At least, that was my intention. But, while I stopped walking, I didn’t stop moving. It was a most disconcerting feeling, made infinitely more so by the ease with which I remained upright. I’d had a certain amount of practice at trying to keep my footing on a floor half-covered in marbles, emphasis on
trying
. It’s a nearly, but not quite, impossible task, and this felt quite like that, only . . . not.

Maybe I’d better back up. In a perfect Namaran execution of justice, the goddess’s Blade moves in without being seen, kills the target silently, and is gone before anyone knows they were even there. In the real world, that rarely happens. So, our training had focused as much on the techniques of escape as it did on the methods of infiltration and the delivery of death. Basically, we spent a lot of time learning how to run away.

Speed, silence, and agility are at the top of any list of skills involved in the getaway. Since the emphasis of the Blade is on personal action, acrobatic ability, climbing, and slipping through narrow gaps come in next. But not far behind is the deployment of various sorts of deterrents to pursuit. Caltrops, trip wires, oil slicks, and scattered marbles can all do wonders, and I had practiced planting each and every one of them for hours at a time. But such things can trip you up as easily as your enemies, and Master Kelos had insisted we learn as much about dealing with them as we did about delivering them.

The ground under my boots now had some of that same stomach-twisting unsteadiness that you felt when you hit a carpet of marbles on a stone floor. I could feel it rolling me along at a speed not much below walking. Deep in my gut I
knew
that my feet ought to be shooting out from under me at any second. At the same time, the floor had a sort of . . . grippy, tacky feel to it, like when you stand where some sweet juice has been spilled.

The weird combination of slick and stick made my brain twist in uncomfortable ways and I was very happy when the ride came to an end. The floor took me around a thick fall of stone, rotated me a half turn, and deposited me neatly in front of what at a quick glance seemed a half-finished sculpture of a gorgeous woman on a pink marble throne. That first impression was, of course, wrong.

Dame Krithak sat . . . on? in? had merged with? a massive, low-backed chair of pink marble. There were no seams where the pale sleeveless dress that covered her met the stuff of the chair, no tiniest gap between the flesh of her forearms and the arms of the throne. For that matter, it wasn’t entirely clear where dress ended and Durkoth began. She was all of a piece, and that piece flowed continuously down from the top of her head through the throne and into the floor. She looked as though some sculptor had started to carve her free of one of the stalagmites that rose from the floor only to stop with the job three-quarters finished.

For all that, she looked far more human than either Thuroq or Qethar, simply because of the place she had chosen to set her throne. Though few people in the eleven kingdoms were half as pale as the finely whorled pink stone whose color Krithak had assumed, it was at least a shade that one could imagine seeing in skin. That appearance of life was somewhat muted by the fact that her hair and downcast eyes were the exact same mottled shade, but I still found it vaguely comforting.

“Dame Krithak, I presume?” I asked after long silence let me know that she would not be initiating our conversation.

She blinked several times, moving with that classic Durkothian stop-start-stop motion that always seemed to happen in the interstices of awareness so that you never actually
saw
them change position. Then her chin slowly lifted and blind-seeming eyes met my own.

“I am.”

I let another long silence fall between us before I continued, “I’m Aral. The King of the North asked me to come here and show you this.” I held up the smoke ring.

She reached out then and caught my hand, pulling it closer to her eyes. I wasn’t expecting her action or I would have moved the ring closer myself. That, or leaped back out of reach. I had been touched by the Durkoth before . . . and much to the same effect. Durkoth look as cold and hard as the stone where they dwell, but they are not. Oh, no, far from it.

They are warmer than we are, with skin like hot silk, smooth and supple and . . . I shook my head, trying to shake off the sexual glamour with it. But the tight pressure of my erection practically screamed my failure. There would be no easy escape from the sudden and intense desire I felt for the woman in front of me.

It didn’t matter that she was far more alien than she looked. It didn’t matter that she probably had as much interest in taking me to her bed as I might have had in screwing the sculpture she had appeared to be only a moment before. It didn’t matter that she was old by the standards of a people that lived until something external killed them. She looked young and beautiful and I wanted her. I wanted her right now.

But impulse is not action, and while I might not be able to rule my body’s response to the glamour of the Durkoth, I would sure as hell rule my own actions. Though I was practically trembling with lust, I forced myself to hold perfectly still and to breathe slowly and evenly while she turned my hand this way and that in her own.

Time moved with an impossible, almost syrupy, slowness that made the process an exquisite sort of torture that went on and on and on. When she lifted the ring up and touched it to her lips and the tip of her tongue, I had to bite the inside of my mouth to keep from responding.

Finally, finally, she released my hand, and the pure unreasoning wanting of her began to fade. I remained hard, and I don’t think I could have resisted for even a fraction of a heartbeat if she had invited me to take her there on the cold stone of the cave floor. But she evinced no more interest in me than I might have shown a piss-pot. In fact, she ignored me completely, and, ever so slowly, the physical aftereffects of my glamour-driven lust began to fade.

Once I reached a point where I could imagine speaking without begging her to bed me, I spoke into the silence, my voice harsh and husky. “Did you learn much?”

“Many things,” she said. “Most of them are beyond one who has no fathudor, no . . . sense-of-stone, but a few I think might be of use to you, Kingslayer.”

It was the first indication I had that she knew anything at all about me beyond the fact of the ring and the single name I had given her earlier. “Things such as . . .”

“The ring you wear is indeed a thing of the Fire That Burns Underground.” She touched the arm of her throne. “This dorak-ki, this throne of earth, sits atop one of the threads that binds the bones of the mountain. It is connected stone to stone in an unbroken inkathiq to the tomb of the one your people call the Smoldering Flame in the Brimstone Vale. Through it I can feel the essence of his shekat, his soul. That essence is reflected in your ring, though darkly, as through a warped and smoky mirror.”

“So, I
am
married to the Fire That Burns Underground?”

“No. Or, not directly. You are married to the echo of the Smoldering Flame as it burns in the heart of she who returned him to the tomb. I do not understand all of the implications, but you . . .” She held up a hand. “Wait! I sense something—”

Her words cut off abruptly as a cruel iron point suddenly appeared between her breasts. At first I didn’t understand what had happened, but then a torrent of the rich purple blood of the Durkoth began to flow out around the point of the spear that had been driven through the back of Krithak’s throne and out through her chest.

It was only in that instant that I realized that the gallery behind the Uthudor now held a pair of Durkoth. One still had his hands clasped around the base of the spear. The other was sliding around the throne, a soot-blackened iron axe held low in front of her.

L
ife
is simplest at the edge of the knife. When someone is trying to kill you, there is no time for second guesses or melancholy regrets. There is only the anticipation of blood and the question of who will spill it.

The axe came in fast and low. The woman wielding it brought the spike-tipped shaft upward from knee height in a jabbing cut that would have emasculated me if I hadn’t thrown myself backward into a reverse handspring. I landed with a splash as my left foot came down in the nearest pool, and I more than half expected it to slide out from under me. But the wet and angled stone seemed to grab onto my foot with some of that same sticky grip I’d felt earlier.

As I brought my arms down from their extension, I popped the catch on the knife in my left wrist sheath, flicking the hilt into my hand with the same gesture. A moment later, I flipped it at the axe-wielder’s face while I reached for a sword with my other hand.

The best thrown knife is unlikely to do much more than slow an opponent down, and this was little more than a snap toss. But even the toughest and most calculating of warriors will have a hard time ignoring a piece of pointed steel flying toward their eyes. The woman twisted aside in a move that was simultaneously inhumanly quick and impossibly statue slow. It looked like a series of painted pictures rifled quickly—each motion a moment of stillness that simply jumped to the next rather than flowing smoothly as a human’s would have.

Watching her sent a spiral of nausea eeling through my belly. I had to fight the impulse to look away as she turned the twist into a stomach-churning spin that brought her axe around at the side of my head with tremendous speed and force. But forcing her to dodge had given me time to free my second blade, and I caught the head of the axe on the back of my sword, lifting it up and over my head as I drove my other sword straight into her left thigh.

Goddess-forged steel hit the thin stone of her bloused pants with a harsh
chunk
that stung my hand and jarred all the way up to my shoulder. A normal sword might well have snapped. It certainly would have slid off her stone armor. But Namara’s swords are made of tougher stuff, and it went as deep as any hammer-driven chisel.

The Durkoth woman’s leg gave and she fell. She was still turning from the impulse of her failed swing and she landed hard on her back, sliding into the pool to my right and sinking instantly. The stone of her trousers clung to my sword and very nearly wrenched it free of my hand in the process, but I managed to hold on, turning the blade as I did so. The edge levered its way out through the big muscles in the front of her thigh and the stone layer above them as she went down.

Ware!
Triss shouted into my mind.

The effort of hanging on to my sword had spun me half around, putting me badly off balance as the woman’s companion came rushing in. He’d left the spear in Krithak and had drawn a short mace, which he swung at me now. There was simply no way to parry the blow, so I threw myself into an awkward sideways dive instead and the flanged mace passed through the space I’d occupied an instant before.

I expected to hit the bottom of the pool and slide a few yards through shallow water, but plunged deep instead, fooled by its crystalline clarity. I hadn’t had the time to take a deep breath and I caught a mouthful of water now. Touching bottom fifteen feet down, I kicked off immediately, aiming up and toward the far shore. Again, the clarity of the water deceived me, and I drove face-first into the steeply shallowing floor of the pool.

Stunned, I slithered forward through the knee-deep water, pushing my head up into the air and gasping for breath. I’d barely had time to register the bright blossom of red my broken nose left in the water below me when Triss yelped again and a hot silky hand caught my ankle from behind, yanking me back under. The mace clipped the side of my knee with a blow that might have shattered it if not for the dual protections of water slowing the Durkoth’s arm and Triss’s aid. My familiar pulled magic from my soul and used it to give himself greater physical presence as he wrapped my knee in the stuff of his own substance, briefly armoring me.

I pivoted in the water and stabbed downward along the line of my leg, but the Durkoth had already loosed his grip. I looked to see where he had gone, but couldn’t find him through the cloud of blood coming from my nose. I tried to kick myself back to the surface, but full boots and the weight of my gear only dragged me deeper.

Triss, where is he!?

Below you, I—

The mace struck again, skidding across my thigh. Again, the water and Triss saved me from serious injury. If the Durkoth had had a blade of some sort or kept his spear I’d have been finished.

Triss, give me some fins!

I won’t be able to armor you,
he sent, but I could feel that he had complied as my madly kicking legs suddenly met sharp resistance and I shot upward through the water.

I felt a tearing pain as the mace smashed into my left calf, and roughly dragged down across my heel, but it didn’t break the bone, and a moment later I was in the shallows again. This time I made it out of the water. I immediately dragged myself upright despite the injuries to my leg, staggering back from the pool’s edge as I did so.

The water of the pool, so clear mere minutes before, was a muddy soup now, full of blood and silt kicked up from the bottom. I couldn’t see what had become of my erstwhile attackers and I kept the points of my swords moving back and forth to cover the whole of the pool. Even so, I barely made my parry when the male Durkoth erupted out of the water like some lesser cousin of the dragons.

We went back and forth for a few passes after that, but I had both the better weapon and greater speed. With the element of surprise gone, the conclusion was all but inevitable, and he soon lost his head. I kicked it into the nearer pool and was about to do the same with his body when I noticed something odd on the breast of his shirt—a flat circle about the size of a silver riel. It looked to be made of a different stone from the rough granite of his shirt.

I waited another minute to make sure his companion wasn’t going to resurface. She didn’t, and I had to conclude that either the leg wound or the water had done for her—wrapping yourself in stone is not the best strategy for a swimmer.

Then I knelt and examined the circle. It was a delicate red marble and half-covered by a thick fold of his shirt. There was no way I was going to be able to get it off him without shattering it utterly. The little badge bore a simple intaglio design—a rough lump of something with a wisp of smoke rising off of it.

Once I’d fixed the image in my mind I kicked the body into the water and limped my way around to Krithak’s throne. I expected to find her dead, but the blood staining the corner of her mouth continued to bubble faintly and I could hear labored breathing. When I got closer, she turned a hand on her throne, beckoning me close with one crooked finger.

“. . . come,” she husked, her voice softer than a whisper. “Listen. I have things still to tell.”

Looking at the angle of the spear in her chest, I didn’t think she could possibly have much time left. But I knew removing it would only cut what little she had even shorter. Knowing I could do nothing more for her than obey her final request, I knelt and put my ear close to her lips.

“Fire Underground cultists . . . can tell by the smoke-darkened iron they carry . . . true Durkoth wield stone.”

“He wore a badge, a coal maybe, with smoke rising off of it. . . .”

“His emblem . . . yes.” She paused for several heartbeats. “Buried gods all have . . . followings among the First. To our . . . shame. They want to . . . refight the godwar. You must be wary. . . .”

Again she came to a halt. This time the silence lasted so long I thought she must have passed the final veil. But a sharply indrawn breath told me otherwise and after another few heartbeats she continued.

“With this burnt iron in my chest I . . . could . . . not stop them completely. But I locked the shekatudor, the . . . the stone’s soul, against them . . . prevented them from persuasion.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You probably saved my life.” I had wondered why the cultists hadn’t used the stone against me as Qethar had in our battle. Now I knew.

“My cave, my dorak-ki, my rule.” Despite her lack of air, these words came out hard and cold—absolute, a queen speaking from the heart of her power.

She coughed then, a deep tearing sound, and more blood leaked out around the head of the spear.

“You must . . . remove this.” She pointed her finger at her chest.

“It will kill you.”

“Almost certainly”—another cough—“but I will not die with this . . . accursed spike pinning me like . . . some . . . filthy slink. Do it.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

I stood and walked around behind the throne. The spear had a heavy barbed head like the harpoons monster hunters used when going after gryphon or other ferocious prey. Pulling it backward would tear Krithak’s heart out, if I could even get it to come out that way. The back of the throne seemed to have closed around the shaft—probably to keep Krithak from bleeding out. I’d seen Durkoth fashion bandages from stone before.

“I can’t make it gentle,” I said. “But I can make it fast.”

“Do it.”

The spear was short—probably for weight reasons, as it was solid iron from haft to tip—with no more than four feet sticking out of her back. I positioned myself carefully, took a deep breath, and then spun to the side, kicking the end of the shaft with the heel of my foot. It drove the spear forward the better part of three feet, and my second kick finished the job on that side. Four quick steps took me around to the front, where I grabbed the blood-slick shaft just below the head.

Triss, give me a hand here.

Of course.
He slid down and interposed himself between my hand and the barb of the spear. With one fast move I wrenched the spear the rest of the way out of Krithak’s chest. A flood of rich purple blood followed it, and Krithak’s head slumped.

I was sure she was gone then, but again I’d underestimated her toughness, and she somehow lifted her chin once more, holding her head high as the stuff of her seat flowed up and over her, encasing her in a second skin of pink stone. Pores in the surface opened up and somehow pulled all the blood inside, leaving the marble pure and unstained.

I left her then, looking much as she had when I arrived—an unfinished statue of a beautiful queen. Tomb, monument, and death mask all in one package. The spear I threw into the pool with the corpses.

Then, painfully, and with a lot of help from Triss, I forced my nose back into its proper shape. As I waited out the worst aftereffects, I had time to think about how things had gone since Siri came back into my life, from the whatsis to the Durkoth, and how much harder the latter had hit me.

When I mentioned that to Triss, he sent,
It’s always easier to fight a stupid foe than a smart one, no matter how powerful the former. Now, we should get moving. We don’t want to leave Faran alone with Thuroq for too long.

I nodded and forced myself back to my feet.
True.

As we made our way back to the entrance of the cavern, he sent,
There’s much to think about in what the Uthudor had to say.

And even more that I wish she’d been able to share. Perhaps we can learn more from Thuroq.

Why do I not believe it will be so simple?

Because nothing ever is,
I replied.

Not since the temple fell, no.

Which was not something I wanted to talk about. Fortunately, a perfect change of subject presented itself at that moment as the light in the cave began to dim.

Triss, is it me or are the lights going out?

It’s not you. The process started when Krithak died, but it was very slow at first—so slow I didn’t think I need mention it. Things just speeded up.

Oh good. I hope you’re right about how that thing works.
I indicated the stone chaise with a jerk of my chin.
If not, we’re going to have a hell of a time digging our way out.

For all that I kept my tone light, the idea of being trapped so deep in the earth left me cold and sweaty. Doubly so with the lights going out. I have no fear of the dark, but who knew what else might fail now that Krithak’s will no longer mastered the cavern.

When have I ever steered you wrong?
Triss asked rather smugly, but I could feel the hidden worry under the surface of his words, too.

Never yet, but there’s always a first time.
I eyed the lounge dubiously, half-afraid to try it in case it didn’t work.

Just sit on the damned thing and get it over with.

So, I did, and the reverse trip went much the same as the first one had. The stairs at the far end were tough going, and I paused before limping around the last turning.

Triss, shroud me up.

What? Why?

Because I don’t want Faran to do anything hasty if we come staggering around the corner soaking wet and covered in blood and bruises.