Bared Blade (35 page)

I raised an eyebrow.
The girl does have to be one of ours, doesn’t she?

Almost certainly. But she’s young, somewhere between thirteen and sixteen at a guess, which makes her somewhere between six and nine at the fall of the temple. We would have been on active field duty for much of her initial training and I just didn’t pay that much attention to the little ones back then.

Do you think she’s with Devin?
I absolutely loathed the idea but I felt I had to broach it.

My one-time best friend among the Blades had turned traitor when the temple fell, along with some unknown number of the others. They’d set themselves up as the new order of the “Assassin Mage,” or some such pretentious garbage, and now when they weren’t doing favors for the Son of Heaven, they rented their skills out to the highest bidder.

At least, that’s what Devin had told me. That and that they were going to become the power behind every throne. But I had no way of knowing what he’d told me was truth and what was lies, and I trusted Devin about as much as I trusted Qethar at this point. Maybe less. The idea of our lost and found apprentice falling into his hands made me want to vomit.

I doubt it,
Triss said after a long pause.
If she had that kind of organization backing her up, I think there’d be a lot less chaos in the picture and a lot fewer bodies left where people could find them. That’s sloppy craftwork under the circumstances.

She moves like someone who studied under Kelos and Kaman,
I added,
which suggests she’s not a wild card who just happened to hit on a Shade when she summoned up a familiar.

No chance.

Just exploring all of the possibilities, partner. That would put her name on the wanted posters along with the rest of the Blades that escaped the fall of the temple but didn’t go over to the Son of Heaven.

Though they’d become fewer and farther between over the years since then, all I had to do to pull up the image of that poster was close my eyes—the thing was burned into my soul.

Let’s see. Remove me, Loris, Jax, Siri, and Kaman. That leaves five masters, all almost certainly dead, and all too old for our girl.

So are the journeymen.

That left a dozen or so names. Remove the boys, and you had five of the right age. One of those was Aveni, a pale blonde—rare and hard to forget. That brought us down to four. Omira, Jaeris, Faran, Altia. I named them to Triss.

Not Altia. Her companion was Olthiss and I’d have recognized that one, very sweet …nor Jaeris.
He slid back and forth across the floor in front of me, pacing.
Ssithra, it could have been Ssithra, very easily.

Which girl?
I sent my question with a force far greater than I’d intended—this
mattered
to me at some level down below the conscious.

Triss pulled his head back in startlement.
Faran. It’s got to be Ssithra, and that makes it Faran.

I tried to picture her. The name was Kadeshi, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. There were Farans aplenty in northern Zhan, southern Aven, the Magelands, even a few in the Kvanas. But none of those sounded right for some reason. Radewald maybe?

Yes, that was it. She was from up north, by Dan Eyre, right on the edge of the wastelands where things went strange. I got a brief flash of the girl’s face, laughing at something, a fall maybe. Laughing, but with a hard determined edge underneath.

Yes …on the obstacle course. She’d missed a tricky jump trying to take a shortcut and nearly broken her neck.
But she’d laughed about the incident instead of crying. A smart girl and determined. I didn’t know her at all really, but it was easy to imagine the girl who laughed like that surviving where so many others had died.

We have to find her and take care of her,
I sent.
She’s one of ours and we owe it to Namara’s memory to do what we can for her. But how do we do it?

I don’t know. It’s damned hard to find any Blade who doesn’t want to be found. It took the Elite weeks to catch her and they had the entire weight of the Crown behind them. She’s got to be very very good to have survived the fall of the temple and to go on to do what she’s done. Whatever mistake delivered her to the Elite last time, you can bet she won’t let it happen again.

“You all right in there, Aral?” It was Fei’s voice coming from the other side of the privy door.

“Yeah, just finishing up, sorry.”
We’ll talk more about this later.
I stood and cleaned up, then closed the lid that covered the hole in the marble bench with an audible bang. It was a nice privy, voiding directly into one of the faster running sewers, and with a good tight seal on the lid.

“We thought you might have fallen in,” she said when I opened the door.

She gave me a suspicious look as I stepped into the hall, but didn’t say any more, just went in and closed the door behind her. I had no doubt she’d sent Scheroc in to check on me, and was wondering what else I’d been doing in there besides the obvious.

“
Not
bad, Fei,” I said as I looked around the sitting room maybe half an hour later. “Not bad at all. And you’re sure no one can connect this place to Captain Kaelin Fei?”

She frowned at me over the lip of her ale pot—the expression pulled at the stitches in the big slice on her cheek. “Do I
look
dumb to you, Aral? Or have you just developed a need to spew pointless insults?”

I threw up my hands. “Sorry, it’s just awfully fancy for
a fallback by my standards. I can’t afford to keep a house as my
main
snug and you’ve got one you can just throw away on us? The corrupt cop gig must pay better than I’d imagined.” It sounded snippy, even to me—this Faran thing was really throwing me off my game.

Fei’s expression turned sour. “Oh, I’m not real happy about having to burn the place this way, but having the Elite turn on me like that means I need to stay officially dead, at least for the duration of this Kothmerk thing.”

What she didn’t say was that with the Elite involved she might need to stay officially dead forever. In which case, she’d have to abandon her Tienese real estate along with her job, any assets she couldn’t carry away easily, and probably her name. The king’s pet killers can really hold a grudge.

While an individual Elite might fail in his loyalty to a given king, if never the idea of the Crown, there was no fucking way that setup under the palace had been anything other than a Crown operation. Oh, given the politics involved with the Kothmerk, Thauvik would certainly deny his involvement to a degree that would include denouncing and executing the participants if they fucked up badly enough to embarrass him. But if he didn’t know
exactly
what they were doing down under the palace, I’d eat one of Qethar’s marble shirts.

The Durkoth himself was sitting in the corner on a stone chair he’d shaped from the flagstones he’d drawn from under the rugs. It looked rather like a throne, and probably irritated Fei no end. He hadn’t moved or spoken since we’d arrived a good hour earlier. I couldn’t say whether that was because he just needed some time to think after the raid on the underground fortress, or if he simply had no interest in the very human tasks that had occupied us since we got to Fei’s place.

Food and drink had topped my list after my talk with Triss, while the ex-prisoners had all been in a rush to make use of the house’s remarkably expensive and extensive bathing facilities after they took care of things like Fei’s stitches. Stel and Vala had yet to return from an extended date with the biggest tub I’d seen this side of a palace. I’d never have
guessed Fei for a secret sybarite, but her bathing room belonged in one of the more modern great houses.

I took another sip of my whiskey. It wasn’t Kyle’s, or even Aveni, but it wasn’t bad and it was definitely soothing my raw nerves. It came from a Magelands distillery I’d heard good things about but never had the chance to try before. Sharper and sweeter than an Aveni, but with a really nice layer of smoke left on the tongue after the drink was gone. Fei kept a good liquor cabinet.

Despite a couple of very pointed looks from Triss, I was just starting on my third round. It’d been a while since I’d let myself take a third drink, but I didn’t regret it this time. Traveling Qethar’s durathian road had left me with a bad case of the creepy crawlies. Between that and my worries about Faran, I really needed something to take the edge off the impulse to try to beat some answers out of our Durkoth friend. I had no doubt he knew more than he was sharing.

“Why don’t you just walk away now?” I asked Fei. “We both know what that place down there meant. Say you do solve the Kothmerk problem in a way that doesn’t put you permanently on the wrong side of your king. Would you honestly be willing to go back to serving a man who’d use you the way Thauvik just did?”

Fei’s expression went from sour to angry and she set aside her beer as she put both hands on the table and leaned toward me. “Don’t go all sanctimonious on me, Blade. I’m not the one who walked away from the fall of the house of Justice to become a two-kip jack of shadows.”

That hit me harder than any slap in the face, and much harder than it would have if I didn’t have Faran on my mind. I’d walked away from her and the other apprentices as surely as I’d walked away from the temple, though I hadn’t realized it till now. I set my drink aside as well, instinctively clearing my hands for a fight.

But Fei kept right on going. “My job’s never been about the bastard who wears the crown, and I’ve never had the luxury you temple-raised hothouse flowers did of sitting in judgment over the ass that sits on the throne. Nor do I get t
o stick to the pretty bits of the city like the shining knights who run the regular watch. My blood’s never been Zhani enough to get me that kind of job. Hell, I was barely able to talk my way onto the night watch in the Stumbles back when I started out. These days I’m the one stuck with keeping the fucking peace amongst the monsters and the mobsters any way I can.

“I know a lot of people look down on me because my hands are dirty from all the shadowside shit I have to touch in the course of my job. I want to save lives and keep the shadow wars from eating this city alive, and that means I’ve had to play kissy face with every kind of leech and lawbreaker imaginable. I understand what that makes me. But I will not take condescension from Aral fucking Kingslayer on the subject of crossing moral lines. I may be a crook in the service of keeping the worse crooks from doing too much harm, but I don’t see how there’s a whole hell of a lot of difference between that and black jacking for the gods.”

I expected to feel outrage when she finished yelling at me, and I could sense Triss worrying about my response—his emotions were coming through stronger and stronger since we’d developed the ability to speak mind-to-mind. In some ways I would have welcomed outrage. It would have been easier, less painful. But it just wasn’t there. Not after my experience with the bonewright and the thinking I’d had to do afterward.

What I felt was sympathy and shame. Though I’d never realized it before, Fei and I had a hell of a lot in common. We were both the end result of the corrosion of an idealist. So, instead of getting in Fei’s face the way she’d gotten in mine, I just nodded.

“Point.”

“What?” Fei collapsed back into her seat, deflating like a gaffed puffer fish. “Aren’t you going to go all self-righteous on me and talk about how much better your goddess is than my king?”

“Nope. My goddess is dead, Fei. I can’t serve her anymore. I realized that recently.” I took another sip of whiskey
and noticed the glass was empty. “I can still do my best to serve justice, and I’ve been working to get there again, though it’s shit for paying the bills. But that’s not really the same thing. Because, no matter how sure I am of my interpretation of justice, I don’t have a mandate from Heaven anymore and I can’t
know
I’m right. Quite the contrary. The Heavenly Court hates my guts.”

I shrugged. “Maybe they always did. Maybe we Blades never had that mandate we believed we did. Maybe Namara’s idea of justice was just as subjective as mine.”

Triss slid up against my back, wrapping his wings around me protectively.
Are you all right?

No. But I think I may finally be heading there. Thanks for hanging in there all these years.

“You’re a strange one,” said Fei. “Are you saying you don’t believe in Namara anymore?”

“Say I don’t believe in authority anymore and you’ll be closer to the truth. Not temporal, not religious. Maybe not even moral. It’s funny. I loved my goddess and I obeyed her without question. Her followers were and are my family. I killed who she said I should kill and spared those she wanted spared. I’m not at all sure that was right, but if you managed to bring her back from the grave somehow, I’d probably do the same again. Though I’m starting to hope that I’d have the strength not to.”

Triss leaned forward so that his head came into view on my right. He looked worried. “Where are you going with this, Aral?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but I think I’m giving up on the idea that having a goddess—or anyone else—define right and wrong for me is a good idea. I—we, have to find our own way to justice now, Triss, and duty, and that’s actually a good thing.” I turned my gaze back to Fei. “That’s pretty much what you do every day, isn’t it?”

She snorted. “Hardly anything so high flung as all that, Blade. Justice would probably throw my ass in a cell. I’m just trying to keep my city from drowning in its own shit.” She tossed back the rest of her beer and went to the liquor
cabinet. “Think of me more as one of those poor bastards whose job is to unblock the sewers, and you’re much closer to the truth.”

Yeah, right,
I thought at Triss. It seemed kinder than keeping Fei on the spot.
She can tell herself that all she wants, but she gave herself away earlier. She’s as bad as I ever was in her own way.

Bad? Not at all. At the moment I think you’re both rather wonderful.