Bared Blade (39 page)

Qethar? Faran?

The Durkoth is down for the moment, but he’s not dead or he wouldn’t be bleeding so much. Faran’s shrouded up and no longer close enough for me to touch her and Ssithra, but their trail leads straight toward the Elite.

My vision was starting to come back and despite the dust shaken loose by the ongoing quivering of the earth, I could now dimly see the haze of preset spells that hung around the two Elites—they were armed for dragon.
Toward?

I’m afraid so, though I couldn’t say whether she’s going for Aigo or just trying to get out past him.

We’ve got to give her some cover either way, make a distraction.…

I looked around, sizing up my options—I didn’t have
many. The space was too tight to give me any real room for maneuver. The only real cover was the alcove where Qethar lay in a slowly spreading puddle of dark purple blood.

But as Triss had said, he wasn’t dead. He might get back in the game at any moment. Might already be on his way even, as a piece of stone had torn itself free of the floor and was now crawling sluglike up his arm toward the huge bleeding gash where his neck met his shoulder. I really didn’t want to be standing over him when he reentered the fray.

When we move, Aigo’s going to rain hell down on this whole tunnel,
sent Triss.

Of course, but if there’s anything at all to this idea of being a Blade without a goddess, it’s this moment right now. Faran and Ssithra are family. I won’t let any harm come to them.

So, what’s the plan?

There’s nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide, so it’s going to have to be a frontal assault. Give me the Kothmerk, then shroud me up.

I don’t think that’s such a …it’s gone! Ssithra must have lifted it off me when the two of them bolted.

“What?” I said aloud.

Then something small and red and shiny hit the wall next to the Elite and went bouncing off into the darkness behind them before splashing into the muck at the bottom of the channel.

As all eyes turned that way, Faran’s voice called out, “Was that what everyone’s looking for?”

“I’ve got it!” Aigo jumped down into the channel and went after the ring. “Keep an eye on the Durkoth and the assassin.”

Before Aigo had gone five steps, the second Elite let out a gurgling cry as Ssithra tore her throat out. I could tell it was Ssithra because she had to thin out a lot to manage both the kill and the shroud, and I got a flash of Faran’s boots as she leaped up and caught the edge of the hole the Elite had come through. Aigo whipped around then and unleashed one of his preset spells.

In magesight it registered as a wave of sickly yellow light that rolled down the tunnel, breaking over the collapsing Elite and quickly beginning to dissolve her. Clearly it was aimed more by hope than any planning, because it slid past the hole well below the place where I’d last seen evidence of Faran. However, it didn’t stop there, but came straight on toward me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Qethar forcing himself up onto hands and knees then. The bleeding of his neck had been mostly staunched by a bandage of stone, and the increasingly violent shaking of the ground seemed to have no effect on his equilibrium.

Then the world went dark as Triss enveloped me in a cloud of shadow. I leaped forward and to my right, landing neatly in the middle of Qethar’s back just as the stone slab that floored his alcove started moving upward toward a brand new hole in the roof. Behind me, a spike of violet energy stabbed through the place I had been standing. A moment later, I leaped again, launching myself from Qethar’s back up and out onto the street.

I hit rolling just as a stone dog breached the surface of the street, throwing itself into the air like a leaping dolphin. It would have smashed Qethar to a pulp if it hadn’t twisted suddenly in the air when it saw him, torquing itself around in the manner of a dropped cat trying desperately to get its feet under it. The maneuver worked, but only at the cost of the dog making a hard landing on its side. The ground lurched under the impact of the elemental, and several cobbles shattered. Then it reasserted control of its element and sank into the stones.

The street was in utter chaos. The ongoing and steadily worsening quaking of the earth had brought several nearby buildings down, though from what I could see, the effect extended a few blocks at most. Crown Guards were running to and fro, shouting madly and brandishing their weapons. Several Elite exchanged spells with what I guessed to be Vala and Stel sniping from a couple of nearby buildings—the incoming blasts looked an awful lot like the discharges from the former’s wand. Thick clouds of dust from the
falling buildings were clumping heavily around the Elite and any remotely organized looking group of the guard in a way that strongly suggested the intervention of a wind spirit.

Faran and Ssithra’s presence made itself known by the rather large number of soldiers bleeding out through opened throats. The pair were both very good and completely ruthless, a combination that went a long way toward explaining how they had survived the fall of the temple when so many others had not. I was trying to sort out where the pair might have gone by the simple but gruesome expedient of extrapolating along the line of dead they’d left in their wake when Aigo came up out of the ground a few feet in front of me. He was riding the back of his stone dog Graf, like a horse.

“It was a fake. The bitch assassin’s still got the ring!” he yelled, though the only reason I could hear him over the general sounds of mayhem was that he was so close. “She went that way!” He pointed with his sword. “Find her! Kill her!”

Neither he nor Graf even looked my way, just charged off in the direction I’d already decided on myself. As I started after them, I couldn’t help but notice Qethar sliding in to follow in their wake as well. He was still atop the stone slab from the sewers, riding it along the surface of the street like a one man raft. I moved in close behind him, but didn’t kill him yet. I might need the distraction he could provide.

He remained on hands and knees, nose up like a pointer and utterly focused on Aigo and Graf and whatever lay beyond them. It was easy enough to remain unnoticed even from just a few feet away. Faint threads of purple continued to leak out from under the stone bandage on his neck, and though he remained marble pale he had lost the look of perfection. His flesh seemed to be collapsing in on itself. None of which prevented him from going very nearly as fast as the racing stone dog. It was a pace I was hard-pressed to sustain, and neither of us was making any gains.

As we moved onward, the tremors traveled with us,
bringing down more buildings. A huge stone temple crashed down practically on top of us, filling the street with a wall of rubble and crushing a half dozen Crown Guards who’d rallied behind Aigo. It would have gotten me, too, I think, if I hadn’t been so close to Qethar. The falling and bouncing stones seemed to avoid him with uncanny prescience.

We made it another couple of blocks, with me slowly losing ground on Qethar and the gap between him and Aigo also growing steadily wider. I’m not sure what happened then, because Aigo was around a corner somewhere in front of us, but I heard a sudden shriek from up ahead, followed by a terrible angry hissing.

Ssithra!
sent Triss.

And Faran.
I pushed harder, finally passing Qethar.

I could have killed him then, but it would have cost me seconds I wasn’t sure I had. Instead, I gathered my nima and sent a sheet of magelightning flashing down the street in front of me. I hadn’t a chance of hitting Aigo or Graf, but I could hope to draw their attention away from the girl. I heard Qethar snarl something behind me about saving the Kothmerk. Suddenly, the whole street on which I was running started to move with me like a horizontal avalanche. More buildings fell as I accelerated toward the corner and whatever lay beyond.

I drew my swords and readied myself. Just before I reached the corner, I threw one high into the air ahead of me as a decoy. Then I dived forward low and fast, rolling as I hit the moving cobbles. Some sort of really nasty blue-green spellburst briefly converted the flying sword into a burning metal torch before it exploded above me, but better it than me. Tiny drops of molten metal flew everywhere. Some of them struck my back and legs, burning deep holes in my flesh that stung bitterly as I rolled across them and up onto my feet again just beyond the mouth of the street.

Faran lay crumpled at the foot of a statue of some long-dead general, her hair half burned away and blood streaking her face. She wasn’t moving, but Ssithra was still there and unfaded, which meant she was alive. Major Aigo and his
stone dog stood between me and her, the former facing me, while the latter repeatedly reared up on his hind legs and then drove down with his front paws like twinned sledgehammers, striking again and again at something on the cobbles.

The major whipped his head back and forth, scanning the darkened and dusty street, his hands raised high and strung with ready spells. That’s when Qethar came around the corner, riding his little stone slab. Aigo brought his hands down sharply, sending long strands of spell-light snaking toward the Durkoth like dozens of snapping whips. That distraction was the opportunity I’d been waiting for, and I dashed across the short distance separating me from the Elite.

Aigo must have seen something out of the corner of his eye, because he turned midcast and tried to wrench one hand’s tail of streamers sideways away from Qethar and toward me. But the spell had a lot of inertia, and he was only able to redirect a few of them with any hint of accuracy. Add in the ongoing shaking of the earth and my lacuna of shadow, and those few arcing trails of spell light that did come my way went wide enough of the mark that I never did find out what they would have done to me.

I heard Qethar’s hoarse grunt of pain from somewhere behind me in the same moment that I brought my remaining sword around in a two-handed stroke, separating Aigo’s head from his shoulders. I didn’t even pause long enough to watch it bounce, but raced straight on past him to the place where Faran had fallen. Dropping to my knees beside her, I checked her breathing and pulse—both ragged but still going. I wanted to sweep her up into my arms and get her the hell out of there. But I knew better than to move someone with unknown injuries, for fear of making things worse.

I was just reaching around to check her neck when she opened her eyes and looked up at me. “Master Aral?”

“I’m here, Faran. Don’t move. We don’t know how badly you’re hurt.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I’ve had worse. Much.” Then she laughed that same hard little laugh I had first heard from her so many years ago on the obstacle course, and
levered herself up onto her elbows. “What happened to the Kothmerk? Please, I have to know.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “and I don’t care.” But I did. I had to—even now the cursed thing could still start a war.

She opened her mouth to speak again, but I shook my head. “No, you’re right. I have to find out, and quickly. We can’t stay here for long. Bide a moment.”

But Triss was ahead of me again. “It’s here, shattered,” he called from somewhere behind me, and his voice sounded like it was coming through six feet of grave dirt. “That’s what the stone dog was doing. Destroying the ring so that Thauvik can have his war between Kodamia and the Durkoth.”

And then, presumably, he could sweep in and pick up the pieces afterward and own the gap of Kodamia and the gateway to the west. I swore.

Faran’s expression went cold and flat. “Show me.”

I helped her to her feet, and with Ssithra trailing along behind, we followed my own shadow trail to where Triss was waiting. The stone dog had fallen on his side, leaving behind a deep divot where he had driven one cobble some inches below the level of its fellows with his hammering paws. The Kothmerk had taken a lot of breaking, carving a roughly ring-shaped hole in the hard granite paving stone, a hole that was now filled with shimmering red dust and shards of ruby. Blood stone it was called sometimes and now blood would come of it. We had failed.

I turned away, looking back toward the fallen major and Qethar. The latter lay broken and bleeding atop his shattered raft of stone, as ruined as the ring he’d tried to steal. I thought he was dead at first, but then his hand moved and reached out. Catching the edge of a cobble, he dragged himself a few inches along the shaking ground in our direction, then reached for another cobble.

I raised my sword and pointed it at him. Though it was already far too late to do anything to protect the Kothmerk—Graf’s great stone paw had seen to that—I still didn’t trust him or his purpose.

“Let me through,” he whispered as he dragged himself closer. “Please, I must get to the Kothmerk.”

“It’s gone, Qethar, utterly destroyed. We all failed. Everyone except Aigo and Graf, and they’re dead.”

“No.” Qethar closed his eyes and hissed in pain, then opened them and dragged himself a few feet farther. “I failed my king. My ambitions. Myself even. But I will
not
fail my honor. The Kothmerk is the soul of the Durkoth and the soul of a Durkoth can restore it. Please, badly injured as I am, I could still save myself if I let the earth take me into her heart and hold me sleeping for but a few years. I would live then, but my honor would die. Let me keep that and spend my life instead. Let me make right the horror you and your kind have wrought upon the Durkoth. Let me through so that I may give my life to the sacred Kothmerk.”

What can it hurt?
Triss whispered into my mind.
The ring is shattered.

I sheathed my sword and reached to help Qethar, but he ignored the hand I extended him. Faran looked like she wanted to argue at first, but then she shook her head and moved aside. Qethar thanked us with his eyes, though no words passed his lips. It took him a good minute more of agonized crawling to reach the place where the broken ring lay on the scarred cobble.

He reached out his bloody right hand and laid it in the deep hole Graf’s blows had driven in the street. With an effort that must have cost him a lifetime’s worth of pain, Qethar pushed himself up onto hands and knees, keeping his right hand firmly in place in the hollow that held the shattered ring.