Crossed Blades, page 1
Praise for
BROKEN BLADE
“A fascinating world . . . Broken Blade is a compelling read that was hard to put down.”
—Fresh Fiction
“This is the first of a new series filled with multifaceted characters, layered plots, and the type of quixotic scenarios that only the imagination of Kelly McCullough could possibly create. The author, once again, crosses genres . . . Stories by Kelly McCullough are one of a kind—just like him. I found Aral’s world to be compelling and highly addictive. Brilliant!”
—Huntress Book Reviews
“McCullough’s atmospheric little tale of betrayal and skullduggery is brisk, confident, intelligently conceived, and suspenseful . . . McCullough evokes a rich and textured setting of back alleys, rooftop hideouts, dank dungeons, and urban magical grime. Call it fantanoir . . . With as promising a start as this, McCullough’s new series is looking like one sharp blade indeed.”
—SF Reviews.net
“This book isn’t just great characters and intricate political plots; it’s also filled with some heart-pounding action.”
—Whatchamacallit Reviews
More Praise for Kelly McCullough
SPELLCRASH
“Simple and elegant . . . McCullough is the true demigod of Web magic. Brilliant.”
—Huntress Book Reviews
“The book is filled with action and suspense. The world-building is awesome, the plot intense, and there is plenty of pathos and humor.”
—Three Crow Press
“Entertaining and rapid-fire.”
—San Francisco Book Review
MYTHOS
“A smooth, flowing tale that entices the imagination.”
—Huntress Book Reviews
CODESPELL
“A hint of cyberpunk, a dollop of Greek mythology, and a sprinkle of techno-magic bake up into an airy genre mashup. Lots of fast-paced action and romantic angst up the ante as Ravirn faces down his formidable foes.”
—Publishers Weekly
“One long adrenaline rush, with a few small pauses for Ravirn to heal from his near-fatal brushes with the movers and shakers of the universe, all while trying to figure out how to survive the next inevitable encounter.”
—SFRevu
“Imaginative, fascinating, with a lot of adventure thrown in . . . Mr. McCullough has followed his first two books with a worthy sequel. CodeSpell will keep the reader on edge.”
—Fresh Fiction
“A fast-paced, energetic page-turner . . . Ravirn continues to be a fascinating protagonist.”
—RT Book Reviews
CYBERMANCY
“McCullough has true world-building skills, a great sense of Greek mythology, and the eye of a thriller writer. The blend of technology and magic is absolutely amazing, and I’m surprised no one has thought to do it quite like this before.”
—Blogcritics.org
“It’s smoothly readable, vivid, and fun . . . Highly recommended.”
—MyShelf.com
“McCullough has the most remarkable writing talent I have ever read . . . Not satisfied to write a single genre or to use a subgenre already made, he has created a new template that others will build stories upon in later years. But know this: McCullough is the original and unparalleled.”
—Huntress Book Reviews
WEBMAGE
“The most enjoyable science fantasy book I’ve read in the last four years . . . Its blending of magic and coding is inspired . . . WebMage has all the qualities I look for in a book—a wonderfully subdued sense of humor, nonstop action, and romantic relief. It’s a wonderful debut novel.”
—Christopher Stasheff, author of Saint Vidicon to the Rescue
“Inventive, irreverent, and fast-paced, strong on both action and humor.”
—The Green Man Review
“[An] original and outstanding debut . . . McCullough handles his plot with unfailing invention, orchestrating a mixture of humor, philosophy, and programming insights that give new meaning to terms as commonplace as ‘spell-checker’ and [as] esoteric as ‘programming in hex.’”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A unique first novel, this has a charming, fresh combination of mythological, magical, and computer elements . . . that will enchant many types of readers.”
—KLIATT
“McCullough’s first novel, written very much in the style of Roger Zelazny’s classic Amber novels, is a rollicking combination of verbal humor, wild adventures, and just plain fun.”
—VOYA
“Complex, well paced, highly creative, and, overall, an auspicious debut for McCullough . . . Well worth reading for fans of light fantasy.”
—Sci Fi Weekly
“This fast-paced, action-packed yarn is a lot of fun . . . Weaving myth, magic, IT jargon . . . into a bang-up story.”
—Booklist
“Kelly McCullough has the hacker ethic and the hacker mind-set down pat . . . The combination of mythos, magic, and technology is great fun.”
—Bewildering Stories
“It has finally happened. Someone crossed the genres of sci-fi and fantasy to create a magical world that has modern (futuristic) computer hackers . . . McCullough has taken characters out from the darkness of mythology and brought them into the light of this modern digital age . . . Out-freaking-standing.”
—Huntress Book Reviews
Ace Books by Kelly McCullough
The WebMage Series
WEBMAGE
CYBERMANCY
CODESPELL
MYTHOS
SPELLCRASH
The Fallen Blade Series
BROKEN BLADE
BARED BLADE
CROSSED BLADES
CROSSED BLADES
Kelly McCullough
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
CROSSED BLADES
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / December 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Kelly McCullough.
Excerpt from Blade Reforged by Kelly McCullough copyright © 2012 by Kelly McCullough.
Maps by Matthew A. Kuchta.
Cover art by John Jude Palencar.
Cover design by Judith Lagerman.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61342-9
ACE
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
For Laura, simply because I love her.
And in memory of Lee Perish, friend, aunt, fan—you will be missed.
Acknowledgments
Extra-special thanks are owed to Laura McCullough; Jack Byrne; Anne Sowards; my mapmaker, Matt Kuchta; Neil Gaiman for the loan of the dogs; and cover artist John Jude Palencar and cover designer Judith Lagerman, who have produced wonders for me.
Many thanks also to the active Wyrdsmiths: Lyda, Doug, Naomi, Bill, Eleanor, and Sean. My Web guru, Ben. Beta readers: Steph, Dave, Sari, Karl, Angie, Sean, Laura R., Matt, Mandy, April, Becky, Mike, Jason, Todd, Jonna, and Benjamin. My family: Carol, Paul and Jane, Lockwood and Darlene, Judy, Lee C., Kat, Jean, Lee P., and all the rest. My extended support structure: Bill and Nancy, Sara, James, Tom, Ann, Mike, Sandy, Marlann, and so many more. Lorraine, because she’s fabulous. Jackie Kessler—she knows why. Also, a hearty woof for Cabal and Lola.
Penguin folks: Kat Sherbo, Anne Sowards’s fabulous assistant; production editor Michelle Kasper; assistant production editor Jamie Snider; interior text designer Laura Corless; publicist Brad Brownson; and my copy editor, Mary Pell.
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Maps
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Terms and Characters
Currency
Calendar
Days of the Week
Special Excerpt from Blade Reforged
1
Today 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 worst fire of 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 sword could. 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 hadn’t, and that indifference from one I had once loved tore at me. I was invisible to her, a 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 who 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. A jack, one of the underworld’s all-purpose freelancers. Packages delivered, bodies guarded, the occasional contract theft. All in a day’s work for that Aral, 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.
I took another long pull on my whiskey, smoky and strong, just what I needed. Then, I reminded myself that my changed appearance was for the best, considering all the wanted posters showing my old face. I kept telling myself that, and until the instant Jax’s eyes had passed me over unrecognized, I had mostly even pretended to believe 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 aspects of my old face, improved on them 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. One where I was known to have spent a good deal of time, before my second life as a jack of the shadow trades 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. 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 I was deadly tired of running, and 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.
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 me.
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 that message within a week, two at most. 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.
