Bared Blade, page 22
“It’s getting light,” said Triss.
I nodded. It was, and, as far as I could tell, the brewery remained undiscovered and abandoned. Or, at least, I couldn’t spy any watchers, and the dustheads who squatted in the lower levels weren’t acting any more paranoid than usual. After working our way completely around the building twice, we’d settled in atop a nearby tannery to give things a longer eyeball—businesses that stank tended to cluster in the worst neighborhoods.
“We need to get under cover,” Triss said. “Now.”
I nodded again, but maintained my perch in the angle where two sections of roof came together. Everything seemed all right. It even felt all right, but going back to a snug that might have been burned really rubbed me the wrong way. I ran through the alternatives in my head for perhaps the dozenth time, but none of them looked any better from this angle than they had earlier.
“I really don’t want to do this, Triss.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “But the sun’s coming up and the city is against us.”
“Aral Kingslayer?”
The voice that whispered in my ear was so gentle and quiet I barely registered it at the conscious level, but that didn’t stop my hands from flying to my swords. I drew them in the same motion that spun me out and away from my perch, bringing the blades up into a guard position between me and …nothing. There was no one above me on the roof and no obvious opening in the tiles through which the voice could have come.
“What the…” I trailed off as I turned slowly around again.
“There’s no one here, Aral,” hissed Triss. Then, before I could respond, “But I heard it, too. Show yourself!”
“You are Aral!” Right in my ear again, and louder, but still little more than a whisper.
This time as I spun I sliced the air with my swords, but air was all I cut.
“My mommy sent me to find Aral! And I did. I found you right where you were supposed to be! She’ll be so happy with me.”
“Your mommy?” I asked.
“Aral, I’m sorry about yesterday morning. I had no choice.” This time the voice sounded firmer and stronger, urgent but still little more than a whisper. “They forced me to it.” It also sounded very familiar.
“Fei?”
“My mommy!” The weaker voice again.
“I think it must be a qamasiin,” said Triss. “One of my cousins of the air, sometimes called the whisper on the wind.”
Oho! “And Fei’s familiar, if I don’t miss my guess. Which would explain a great many things about our captain.” An unfaced sorcerer with an invisible familiar could learn an awful lot about all sorts of things in a city like Tien, things that would do someone in the captain’s business a world of good. “Fei is your mommy isn’t she, little one?”
“Uh-huh. Scheroc found you for Mommy Fei. She will be so happy with Scheroc.”
“Found us for what?” I asked.
The qamasiin squeaked in alarm, then said, “Bad Scheroc! Bad! Forgets to deliver rest of message.” The voice shifted to mimic Fei’s once more. “The Elite have me and your Dyad friend VoS. They’ve got some foreign Durkoth helping them.”
Another vocal shift. “Aral, Triss, I think you can trust the captain, at least until we’re out of this.” It was Vala’s VoS voice. “She’s not been treated well down here.”
Back to Fei. “Get me out of this and all debts are paid. Hell, I might even owe you one. Scheroc can carry a message back to me and—shit! Guards are coming back—Scheroc, go!”
Well, well, well, Fei must have been all kinds of desperate to send Scheroc to ask me to bail her ass out. It was pretty much equivalent to putting a noose around her own neck, handing me the other end, and hoping I wouldn’t pull it tight. Being an unfaced mage in Crown service was very nearly as dangerous as being a hidden Blade. The Crown didn’t like officers who kept secrets.
“That’s all Scheroc has.” Scheroc sounded sad. “Will you help my mommy?”
“I might,” I said, flicking a hand signal to forestall any interruptions from Triss. “But I need to know some things first.”
“Anything!” it said.
“How did you find us?”
“Scheroc went right where the two-faced lady told him to and waited. Scheroc waited and waited and waited, but you never came!” The qamasiin sounded quite cross about that. “No one came, and it was boring. But then Scheroc saw you slinking around the edge of the place, and Scheroc came to listen for the voice of the Aral. You spoke in that voice, and Scheroc thought it must be you, but you were not where you were supposed to be, so Scheroc asked. And Scheroc was right!”
“That’s good, now—”
“Aral,” interrupted Triss. “If we don’t get off this roof in the next few minutes, the sun is going to finish coming up and then we’re going to have a hell of a time getting into the brewery unnoticed.”
“Point. Were you waiting for us over there?” I pointed at the brewery.
“Yes,” said Scheroc. “Where the big magic drawing is. It was empty and boring.”
“I guess we’ll have to count that as verification that it’s still uncompromised. Come on, Scheroc, we’d best finish this conversation inside, out of the light.”
17
I leaned my head back against the half barrel and closed my eyes. “Triss, have I told you recently what an absolute treasure you are?”
“I take it you’re getting tired of trying to draw sense out of our little qamasiin friend?” Triss dropped his head into my lap with a sigh.
I idly scratched the divots behind his ears. “You could say that. Or you could say that I’m just getting tired. How many times has it had to go back to Fei to get us an answer now?”
“Believe it or not, this is only the third, but I’m sure there’ll be more. Spirits of the air are neither very focused nor interested in the dealings of the fleshed, not even the mightiest of the mystrals. Scheroc is a qamasiin, a minor eddy born of a lesser breeze, barely one step up from the natural winds of the world.”
I opened my eyes just to keep from falling asleep. “I understand that, but it would make things so much easier if it could at least …I don’t know, tell us exactly where Fei and the others are being kept.”
“It has, and in some detail. It’s just that neither you nor I can make any sense of its referents. If I tried to tell you how to get someplace using only a shadow’s view of the world I don’t think you’d get much out of that either. For all that Scheroc speaks the tongue of Zhan, I don’t think it actually understands much of what it’s saying. So it’s no surprise that it makes no sense to us.”
“Which is a long way of telling me to suck it up and get ready to spend tonight following an invisible spirit who cares nothing for the limits of the fleshed as it makes its weird way across the palace compound, right?”
“That’s about the size of it, yes. Don’t forget the part where we have to break into what Fei called ‘an impregnable fortress buried deep under the roots of the palace’ and fight our way past the Elite guarding the place.”
“No fight!” came the sudden whisper in my ear.
“Oh, good, you’re back.” I sat upright again, though I’m sure the qamasiin wouldn’t have cared if I’d been hanging by my ankles from the ceiling. “What do you mean, ‘no fight’?”
“Mommy says no fight, guards will kill her and the Dyad. Aral must bargain them out.”
“Yeah, I’m having trouble seeing how that’s going to work. We’ve got nothing and nobody to bargain with.”
“Crush the pebble, summon Qethar.” This last was said in Fei’s voice. “You can trust Qethar. They hate him here. Offer him the Kothmerk and he can make us a back door. It’s the only way to get past the foreign Durkoth I’ve seen around the place.”
“In case your mommy hasn’t noticed, I don’t have the Kothmerk. I’ve got no leverage, and if I do crush the pebble, I’m pinpointing my location. Not smart when half the city is looking to turn me over to the Howlers and pick up the reward. Doubly so when I’m not sure whose side Qethar’s really on, no matter what Fei says.”
“Scheroc doesn’t understand, what does Aral want?”
“What I want is out of this fucking box that fucking Fei’s fucking poster put me in.” I started to rise, remembered the height of the ceiling, and settled back to the floor with a growl. “Dammit dammit dammit, I feel like a wolf caught in a trap, with those wanted posters out there everywhere. No. Worse. If I were a wolf at least I could gnaw my leg off and get free. Gnawing your own face off is a much harder…”
“What are you thinking?” demanded Triss. “I don’t like it when you go all quiet like that.”
But I barely heard him. My eyes had fallen on the diagram left behind by Vala and Stel, the remnants of the bonewright spell. “Maybe I can gnaw my own face off.” I rose to hands and knees and made my way over to the edge of the nearer hexagon.
“That’s madness, Aral.” Triss put himself squarely between me and the diagram, spreading his wings wide in warning. “You heard what Vala had to say after they finished performing the spell, how painful it was, how no ordinary mage could hope to handle it alone.”
“I am no ordinary mage, Triss. I am a Blade. Fallen perhaps, but still a product of the temple of Namara. From my first days in the order I was taught how to master and control my pain through will alone, disciplines of mind and body that no other school of magery ever taught because they simply didn’t have to.”
Triss didn’t move.
“Other mages have always had their magic to fall back on, spells to heal and spells to numb. But we could never be certain that magic would be an option, not when magesight might spy a spell’s light. You know I’m right, Triss.”
“No. I don’t.”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“Yes, you’re far better trained to deal with pain than nine and ninety other types of mage, but that still doesn’t mean that you can handle this. You’re talking about a spell that rearranges your very bones!”
“Several of them have been rearranged before. With less warning and to no good effect. I lived through it when Devin broke my wrist, and when that guard in Öse shattered my shoulder blade, and both times I got the job done despite the pain.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea.…”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea either. Frankly, it’s a terrible idea and I hate it, but I don’t have a better one that solves the problem the posters have made for us. Think about it, even if we can get from here to where Fei and Vala and Stel are being held without those posters getting us killed, I’ll still be exposed.”
“Help Fei?” said Scheroc.
I pushed myself back and up to squat on my heels, ignoring the qamasiin and focusing all my attention on Triss. “Even if we successfully bust them loose and somehow find the Kothmerk, return it to its rightful owner and then leave Tien, I’m going to have to deal with the problem of my face at some point. That likeness is going to spread to every one of the eleven kingdoms. I’ll never be able to show this face anywhere again safely.”
“I know but…”
“But what, Triss? As long as I look like this”—I touched a hand to my cheek—“I’m fucked. The bonewright gives me a way out. And not just once either. The goddess no longer protects my identity. Say we manage to change my face some other way—and we’re going to have to, or I’ll never be able to go out again—well, the next face I put on is just as vulnerable as this one. If it’s exposed somehow, I’ll be right back in the same trap. I know it’s dangerous, but if I can make the bonewright work for me, I’ll always have an out. I think that’s worth the risk.”
Triss’s wings slumped. “It might be at that, but do we have to do it right now?”
“Not this minute, no. We’re both too wrung out to try it short of a couple of hours’ sleep and a good meal, but I don’t think we can wait much longer than that. If we’re going to try it, then sooner is much better than later, because it increases our chances of succeeding at what’s going to be a damned hard job under the best of circumstances.”
Triss hissed grumpily. “All right. We’ll do it after breakfast, but I reserve the right to say ‘I told you so’ if you end up with your face twisted into a pretzel.”
“So noted.”
“Save Fei?” Scheroc sounded awfully pathetic.
I nodded. “Soon, little one. Soon.” At least, I hoped so.
I was actually a lot more pessimistic about our chances of making any of this work out than I’d let on to either familiar. Especially the bonewright, since I’ve never been much for high magic. A fact I was reminded of in ways both obvious and subtle as I worked to duplicate Vala’s spinning of the spell threads. Sitting in the middle of one of the hexagons that she had drawn and decorated with symbols, I moved through a slow recreation of her spell, while Triss offered up encouragement and corrections from his place in the other figure.
If Triss and I hadn’t watched the whole thing with an eye to reporting how to recreate it at a later date, it would have been utterly hopeless—thank you, Master Urayal. As it was, I had to check and recheck each colored thread of light as I set it in place with my will and the naming of the corresponding glyph, hoping that I had managed both the proper intent and intonation. What the Dyad sorceress had done with ease and verve in a matter of minutes took me over an hour to painstakingly set in place. But I did eventually get there, or at least I hoped that I had.
From within, the spell looked even more challenging than it had from the sidelines. The web of magic was all around me, a continually shifting net of color and light that I could only ever see a part of, since it lay as much behind as in front of me. But even more than the appearance, the feel of the spell daunted me. I could sense each of the connected glyphs as a presence anchored in my flesh—the ends of the lines were far more than just dots of light dappling my skin.
Each thread created an almost unreadably tiny replica of its master glyph, a replica that went ever so much farther than skin deep. I could feel the glyphs scribing themselves inside me. Most wrote themselves on the muscles and tissue lying just beneath my skin, others anchored themselves in sinew or bone, while some few drove deep, etching their meaning in heart and mind. It felt as though I were being illustrated from within, a living manuscript in three dimensions.
As I worked through the spell, I kept telling myself that the sensation would probably stop when I finished naming the glyphs, or at least that I would get used to it. Wrong on both counts. The threads of magic never quit moving and I never stopped feeling it as they wrote and rewrote their meanings within the medium of my flesh. It didn’t hurt, but it was the creepiest sensation that I’d ever experienced. Perhaps this was how the dead might feel could they be made aware of the worms burrowing through their nerveless flesh. Sensation returned somehow beyond pain, but not beyond the ghost of imagination.
“Are you all right?” Triss asked, and I realized that some long but unmeasured slice of time had passed since I set the last of the lines in place.
“I don’t know,” I replied a few heartbeats after I should have. “It’s a question with no simple answer. Say that I am unhurt, and you will strike as close to the mark as matters at the moment. This is a most disturbing sort of spell, my friend.”
“It’s not too late to call the whole thing off,” he said, his voice low and worried.
“No, but I’m not sure I’d be able to make myself assay the thing again if I aborted it now, and all the arguments I made before are still true. Much as I would prefer to take another path, I don’t see any way to get from here to where we need to go without passing through the gates of the bonewright.”
And so, before Triss could argue further, I began. Raising my hands to my face, I touched fingertips to cheekbones, sliding them back and down …into agony!
When I was thirteen, Siri clipped me beside the eye with a spinning backfist. She was wearing a pair of cestuses at the time, and the iron weight over her middle knuckle cracked the orbit of my eye socket. My whole head filled up with the most excruciating sort of pain, and I’d thought that I could almost feel the line of the fracture, like a ribbon of hot wire dragging along the bones of my skull. This was like that, only more so, a red hot chisel carving away at the planes of my face.
I shrieked and jerked my hands away from my cheeks. I couldn’t help myself. Triss responded with a hiss like a whole kettle of tea spilling into a roaring fire as he leaped forward to the very edge of the hexagon that held him. The necessities of the spell kept him there on the other side of the line, but I could see how badly he wanted to come to me.
Shifting to the Varyan that was his first human language, Triss barked my name, “Aral! Aral! Get it under control! You can’t make that kind of noise here, not with the caras-snuffling maniacs who live below.”
He was right, of course, and I forced myself to inhabit the pain, to own it and make it mine. Make pain a part of you instead of an outside enemy and it becomes your own, a possession that you can put aside for a time instead of an invader you have to fight. My face still burned, but I was in control again …for the moment. I knew that I had a lot more work to do and I didn’t think I’d be able to suppress the screams when I got to it. Which meant I needed to take precautions.
So, while holding the main structure of the bonewright firmly in my mind, I spun a second spell. Simpler, weaker, freestanding, something that I had learned long ago at the feet of Master Kelos—a zone of silence that would contain my anguish. As I finished, Triss nodded his approval, though I could tell from the set of his wings and the twitching of his tail that he was still deeply upset and worried.
So was I.
Not to mention frightened and hurting. It took an enormous effort of will to bring my hands back up to my face. This time I set my fingertips against the still raw-feeling lines of my cheekbones, and then stroked down from there with my thumbs to the hinges of my jaw. It felt like someone was hammering spikes into my jawbone as I swept my thumbs forward—shifting flesh and bone as I went. This time I didn’t scream. I didn’t dare, not while working on my jawbone. But oh how I whimpered.
