Bared Blade (42 page)

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the next Fallen Blade novel

CROSSED BLADES

by Kelly McCullough

Coming December 2012 from Ace Books!

T
oday
I saw a ghost in an old lover’s eyes. I hadn’t realized how much I would miss my face until the moment Jax looked at me and saw a stranger.

I was sitting in the Gryphon’s Head, as I have so often in the past, and drinking too much whiskey—likewise. Only it wasn’t my usual whiskey, and I wasn’t my usual self. The bells of Shan had just sounded the sixth hour. The sun slanting in through the open windows of the tavern was still hot, but the first touch of evening had started to steal the fire from its bite. I’d taken a seat far from my usual table and ordered the Magelands whiskey instead of my favored Aveni to reinforce my recent loss of face.

I recognized Jax the instant she stepped into the Gryphon, though she had the sun behind her and shadow hid her face. First love is like that. It writes itself into your heart and your memory in letters that can never be erased.

Or can they?

The look Jax gave me when our eyes first met cut as deep as any. Not for what it said, but for what it didn’t. There was no recognition there, no hint of what had once been between
Jax Seldansbane and Aral Kingslayer. No love and no loss, just the cold assessment of a professional killer sizing up a room for threats. She gave me a single measured glance, alert for any trouble, then moved on when she didn’t see it, just as I would have in her place. I should have expected that, should have remembered what I had become, but I didn’t, and that indifference from one I had once loved tore at me. I was invisible to her, the ghost in her eyes.

It’s all right, Aral.
Triss’s familiar voice spoke directly into my mind, sweet and clear and wholly reassuring.
It’s you that have forgotten your face, not Jax.

As usual, my familiar was right. I felt a pressure on my shoulder like a friend’s hand, squeezing briefly and then gone. I glanced at the shadow that stretched out behind me and gave it a wry smile. Him really. Triss is a Shade, a creature of living night. He lives in my shadow, quite literally.

Thanks, my friend,
I sent back.
Even a month on it’s hard to remember what the bonewright did to my face.

I reached up, rubbing a rueful hand down my cheek and across my chin. Not that different from my old face, really, not from the inside anyway, and not to my fingers. But I knew that no mirror would show me the face of Aral Kingslayer ever again, nor even the somewhat more haggard and haunted version that I’d worn for my years as Aral the jack. That was for the best, considering all the wanted posters. I kept telling myself that, and until the instant Jax’s eyes had passed me over unrecognized, I had mostly even believed me.

I’ve never had a particularly distinguished sort of face. Medium brown everything, from eyes to hair to skin. Not too pretty, not too ugly, the kind of face that’s easy to ignore or forget. The masters and priests who raised me to be an assassin in the service of a goddess now dead had always told me it was one of my strongest assets.

My new face shared all the best of my old face, improved on it even. I had deliberately reshaped skin and bone in a way that removed most of the markers of my native land, worked at making myself look like the product of a mixed heritage. It was the sort of face you might see in any of the
eleven kingdoms of the east—never a native, but not a clear foreigner either. In so many ways it was the perfect face for what I had once been. Aral Kingslayer, Blade of Namara, the goddess of justice. How ironic then that I put it on only after the murder of my goddess, her temple’s destruction, and the death of all but a handful of my friends and fellows.

Easy.
Triss squeezed my shoulder again—a shadow’s touch—this time in warning.
Remember where we are and control yourself. They are hunting us still.

Again, he was right. The Gryphon was a public place, and one where I was known to have spent a good deal of time before my second life as a shadow jack was exposed. Looking around the room I could spy several tables’ worth of potential trouble. The place in the corner that I used to consider my regular spot, for example. A man and a woman sat there, both with their backs to the wall, both exhibiting the alert calm of the waiting hunter.

She was slender, tall and long limbed yet muscular and far from fragile. Ice blond hair and white skin marked her out as foreign as did her hard blue eyes, and her quick precise movement made me think of some sort of giant praying mantis. The man was also tall, but broad where she was slender, with heavy muscles showing through the thin silk of his long-sleeved tunic. He was as dark as any of the locals, but the angles of his face and his thick black beard suggested a Kadeshi background, as did the short broad-bladed axes he had tucked into his sash.

He caught me looking at him and raised an eyebrow ever so slightly, touching one of his axes in a way that told me he thought I was a thief. I pretended to be intimidated, swallowing heavily before looking down into my drink, and he snorted and went back to talking to the woman. Trouble averted easily enough, but dammit, I shouldn’t even be here. I should have walked away and found a different bar to haunt, a new place to start building myself a new identity to go with my new face.

But somehow I just couldn’t walk away from the old me that easily. Not even the drunken wreck of a version that
had earned his bread as a shadowside jack, the underworld’s all-purpose freelancer. Packages delivered, bodies guarded, the occasional contract theft. All in a day’s work for Aral the jack and, oh, what a very long fall from the days when the world had called me Kingslayer and the unjust had shivered when they thought of me.

Which brought me back to Jax. We had grown up together at the great temple of Namara. She had entered the service of Justice a year after I did, barely four. A tiny girl with long dark hair, pale skin, and a winsome smile that had grown into a wicked one as the years transformed the girl into a beautiful young woman. Though she had never grown all that much in physical stature, she had more than made up for it with her skills as a sorceress and assassin in the service of Justice, coming third in our generation for the quality of her kills, after Siri and I.

Why had she chosen this moment to walk back into my life? I didn’t make the foolish mistake of thinking her presence in the one place in all of Tien I was known to have frequented was any kind of coincidence. I also wondered where she had been hiding during the six years since the temple fell. Not in Zhan, I guessed by the lack of color to her skin. Nor anywhere else with brutal sun, unless she had become a creature wholly of the night.

Aven perhaps, or back home in Dalridia, or the mountains of the Magelands. One of those almost certainly. She would have had to hide someplace she could blend in, and someplace close enough that she could have reached Tien in four weeks or less. That ruled out Öse, Varya, and Radewald.

The news that the Kingslayer had been unmasked would have flown fast and far on wings of magic. Everyone in the eleven kingdoms with any sort of governmental or shadowside connections would have heard the message within a week, two at most. But unless she wanted to spend a lot of money and draw the sorts of attention that one of our kind couldn’t easily afford, Jax would have had to travel by more mundane means. No ship or horse could have brought her here from any farther afield so fast.

I knew that right after the fall Jax had spent time in the grip of the Hand of Heaven, the human instrument the gods had used to destroy the temple and Namara’s worshippers. As the personal enforcement arm of Shan’s highest priest, the Hand was known for its willingness to employ torture and the stake to achieve its aims. That no doubt explained the dozens of thin scars that threaded Jax’s face and arms, white on white like fine lace on a marble table.

But where had she been since her escape? And what had she been doing? Her clothes told me nothing. Like anyone both sane and in-purse who found themselves facing Tien in summer, Jax had opted for a vest and loose pants in the thinnest of silks—gray in this case. She had eschewed the more common sandals for light boots of the same sort that I wore for roof-running. The short, curved swords she wore in a double sheath on her right hip looked Dalridian in design, but they could have come from anywhere. No clues there. No clues anywhere really.

I wanted to go to her, to take her in my arms and tell her who I was and how very happy it made me to see her alive. But six years as a fugitive had taken its toll. I would wait and I would watch, and only when I was sure there was no trap would I make a move. Even then, caution must come before trust.

For several long minutes she chatted quietly with Jerik at the bar, obviously asking questions, though I couldn’t make out specifics. He kept shaking his head no and shrugging despite the fact that she flashed several heavy gold coins at him. Finally she seemed to give up, flipping her hair back with an angry snap of her neck that I’d seen too many times to count in the short, tumultuous year we had shared a bed. Without another word she stalked straight out the front door of the Gryphon.

It should have been funny watching hardened shadowside bonebreakers twice Jax’s size getting quickly and prudently out of her way as she gave them
the look
. But she’d caught me so off guard with the suddenness of her departure that I barely had the leisure to notice. I was far too busy trying
not to
appear
as though I was following her when I knocked back my drink and then rose to do just that.

What’s the plan?
Triss asked silently.
I thought we were going to take this slow.

That was before she left so quickly. We have no way of knowing if she’ll ever come back, and I want to know why she’s here.

Point. How shall we play it?

Cross her shadow. Tell Sshayar to let Jax know to meet us somewhere private at midnight. Walk away.

It was an old Blade trick for passing secret messages one to another. Shades had a means of silent communication that would allow Triss and Sshayar to exchange basic information, but with the exception of my newfound ability to communicate with Triss, no Shade could bespeak their Blade companion mind-to-mind. So, when we had a need to share secrets we passed them Shade to Shade for later verbal relay.

Great plan in theory. In practice …

I
hate it when we do that,
I thought at Triss.
Where the hell did she go?

That way,
replied Triss, unobtrusively nudging my right foot.
I can taste Sshayar’s essence on the street, but only very faintly. She’s hiding deep in Jax’s shadow and the sun is strong today, burning away the traces of her passing. We’ll have to move quickly if we want to keep track of her.

Jax had been barely forty feet ahead of me leaving the bar, but by the time I got out the door, she’d vanished into the crowd. Some of that was simply height. At a hair under five feet, Jax stood almost a head shorter than the average citizen of Tien. Thousands of whom were out wandering the streets in search of dinner. The Stumbles, where the Gryphon is located, is one of Tien’s worst neighborhoods. The streets are narrow and poorly kept—there are cobbles down there somewhere, but you have to dig through a lot of filth to find them. At the moment it was hard even to see the filth beneath the swirling mass of people that filled the street.

As was so often the case with slums, the Stumbles was also one of the city’s most heavily populated neighborhoods. The accommodations mostly varied from miserable to inadequate, but rooms and parts of rooms could be had for a few kips a day, and that meant that people who’d have been sleeping on the street in other parts of the city could put a door between themselves and the night while they slept. That meant a lot, especially in a place like the Stumbles.

As I threaded my way through the crowds guided silently by Triss, I kept an eye out for Jax. But between her height and the fact that almost everyone in that poor neighborhood wore light browns and middling grays, I never caught sight of her. I did spy a half dozen pickpockets and cutpurses, and had to warn off two of them with a look when they got too close to me. That last was a shock. Another painful reminder of my lost face—people knew Aral the jack in the Stumbles and would have known better than to even consider picking his pocket—but they didn’t know me.

No one knew me. Not the petty criminals, not Machim the beggar, nor Asleth the noodle vendor. No one. That should have made it easier for me to pass through the crowds, as people who would normally have wanted a piece of my time ignored me. It didn’t. Aral the jack was a dangerous man, a drunk maybe, and down on his luck, but people knew to get out of his way. Nobody knew to get of the way of …who?

I stopped in the middle of the street as the weight of that question hit me. Who was I, really?

Aral Kingslayer had died with his goddess. The man who wore that name had crawled into a bottle and not come out again. In his place a new Aral had emerged, Aral the drunk who had paid his bar bills by playing the shadowside jack. Doing things for money the older Aral would never have contemplated. Petty little illegalities, and all freelance so that there was never a chance he’d owe any loyalty to anyone ever again. Never anyone he’d have to care about.

That had all changed a bit over a year ago when a woman
named Maylien had found an echo of the old Kingslayer hiding under the skin of the jack.

For a little while I thought I’d found a new purpose in life, a new Aral who might have a chance at doing some good in the world again. That was the plan anyway. I’d even thought it was working right up till the moment I realized how much of me I’d lost with my face. I didn’t even have a name anymore. Not really. Not one I could wear in public. If your only name was a secret, was it even a name anymore?

Aral! Come on, we’re losing Jax.
Triss gave me a sharp slap on the side of my foot and I got moving again.

But I’d lost my hunger for the chase and I hardly even blinked when we lost the trail as it left the narrow streets of the Stumbles and plunged into the human river of Market Street.