Bared Blade, page 23
It was the corners of my eyes that did me in. I’d wanted to reshape them to make me look less foreign. I’d never make myself look truly Zhani, not without much better sculpting skills than I possessed, but I’d hoped to at least split the difference between my Varyan roots and my Zhani home. But the nerves in my eyelids were simply too sensitive for what I was trying to do and I started to black out.
I could feel my control of the spell slipping away as I went under and I tried to hang on, but I just couldn’t keep it together. The glyphs under my skin started to pulse and jump as the spell backlashed and my muscles convulsed in response, driving my fingers deep into the flesh of my face. I felt my bones bend and twist in response to the magic and knew that I was seconds away from tearing my own face in half.
That’s when the voice came into my mind. You are a Blade of Namara. The last Blade. You will control yourself as befits a servant of the goddess, and you will overcome this.
The voice was firm and cold and genderless, but strongly familiar, and my only thought was that somehow, beyond hope or prayer or death Justice herself was speaking to me. The thought was reinforced by the feeling of a second ghostly pair of hands closing over my own, weakly tugging at them, trying to move them back and away from my face. In that moment I believed that my goddess had returned to give me one last command.
And I obeyed.
How could I not? I reached through the agony and the backlash and the convulsions and I took control of my actions and my pain once again. I followed the guidance of the ghostly hands and stopped my own from tearing at my face. I’d never known pain like I felt then as I slowly and carefully smoothed out the damage I had inflicted on myself. It made me want to curl up and die, but every time I thought I had nothing more to give, the voice would speak again into the darkness of my mind.
You are Aral Kingslayer. You will not fail. You cannot fail. I love you and I will not let you fail. You will do this. You will survive and you will triumph.
And somewhere in there I realized that it was not the voice of Namara I was hearing. It was Triss. The hands that guided mine were cold and silken, wisps spun from the shadow that connected us even across the uncrossable lines of the diagram. It should have been crushing—a sort of second losing of my goddess—but it wasn’t. It was deeply comforting.
Never in all the long centuries of my order had Blade and Shade communicated that way, words spoken clearly mind-to-mind. To have it happen now in this moment of dire need, was, quite simply, a miracle. My goddess might be dead, but there was no other power but Justice that would grant a Blade that beneficence. Not after we had been damned by the Court of Heaven itself. Somewhere, somehow, the ghost of Justice lived on and had given me what I needed when I most needed it.
With that to hold onto and Triss to guide me, I completed the difficult task of redrawing the lines of my face. Again, how could I not? When I finished, I released the threads of the bonewright, then bowed my head briefly and whispered into the void.
Thank you, Namara, wherever you may have gone.
Triss flowed up and around me then, enclosing me in his wings and his love. She is in our hearts, as she has always been. You knew that once, though for a time you may have forgotten how to listen for her voice.
I looked inward, focusing my mind on the problems I now faced, and listening for the voice of my goddess to tell me what to do about them. But I could hear nothing but silence. I would have expected that to hurt me, like a new hope snatched away before it could fully form, but it didn’t. Namara might not have answered me in the way I would once have expected her to, but somehow that was exactly as it should be.
Because Triss was right, but he was also wrong. Namara did live within us, but not in our hearts. She lived on in the ideal of justice and our duty to see it done. But justice was not the simple thing I had once believed it to be. In my youth I had seen Justice as a sort of divine idol in the shape of Namara. I had worshipped that idol and served her as best I could, and that was right for the boy that I was. But many things had changed in the years since then and not all for the worse.
In my youth I had believed not just in my goddess but in the idea of the gods, that they were our rightful overlords and that they always held our best interests in their hearts. I had seen Namara as a part of something greater than the base strivings of those who walked the surface of our world. Because of that, the death of my goddess at the hands of her fellows had very nearly killed my soul.
It had also rewritten my identity far more thoroughly than the bonewright ever could and in ways that I was only beginning to understand. For one, the gods were us. Whether our evils and petty cruelties were a reflection of those who created us, or whether in some way we had created the gods we deserved through the power of our belief didn’t matter. What mattered was that the Court of Heaven held no more claim to true justice than did the courts of men.
While I might still agree with Namara’s ideal of justice, I was starting to understand that in simply handing my conscience over to the goddess of justice, I might not have made the justest of choices. It wasn’t merely that I no longer saw the world in the stark black and white that I had as Namara’s Blade. It was more that by falling into the place where the grays dominated the scale, I had finally started to understand the importance of all that lay between the extremes.
The world was no simple place, and in becoming more complex myself I had begun to see the complexity of that world. It was not a comfortable feeling, nor one that lent itself to the simple act of listening for the echo of the goddess in my heart. I had to think my way to the right answers now, an entirely more daunting proposition. Where was the justice in my present plight? And with it, my duty?
Aral?
Triss’s voice in my mind startled me out of the world of ideas and back into the one where my problems wore uniforms and carried death warrants with my name on them.
Yes?
Triss had shifted, leaning back so that he could look into my eyes. When are you going to drop the silence spell? This thinking words at you is much more work than speaking them would be.
Is it? And in asking the question I realized that it was. Mind speech must have something of magic to it, because using it felt a bit like spell casting and drew energy from the well of my soul.
With a thought and a gesture I dismissed my dome of silence. “Better?”
“Much.” Triss visibly relaxed, lowering his head back to rest on my shoulder. “How are you?” The words came out low and urgent, yet soft, as though he were afraid I might shatter.
How was I? I ran my palms over my face, feeling for deformities or other surprises. It felt good, smooth skin and stubble. Though I wouldn’t know what I looked like until I found myself some time and a mirror, it felt pretty much like my old face. Even the scabs and raw patches from my burns were gone. Externally I was doing fine. Of course, internally I felt like I’d been dragged behind a delivery cart for eight hours. It was a strange mix of wrung out and renewed.
“I’ll live,” I finally said.
“Good. I had my doubts there for a while.”
“How did you do it?” I asked.
“I don’t know really. It was like breaking down a barrier within my own head, a barrier made from my own substance—pain and blood, and nightmare giving way suddenly to wakefulness. I wanted so badly to reach you. I was beating at the invisible wall of the spell with my wings and claws, trying to cross into your half of the diagram with everything I had.”
Triss squeezed me with his wings again, hard enough to take my breath away. “But I just couldn’t get through, not even by following the line of shadow that always connects us. I was watching you die and I couldn’t bear it, and suddenly I thought of the way Tien Lun had spoken into my head. How she had torn something in my mind. I looked for the place she had opened and though I didn’t find it, I did find a new place to push. I can’t really describe it further than that except to say that it lay at the heart of what makes you and I an us. Somewhere in the interweaving of familiar bond, shadow link, and love there was a barrier that is no more.”
I’m glad, I thought at him.
So am I.
“Now can we help my mommy?” asked Scheroc.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Where was the justice in this situation? I didn’t know that either. Nor who really deserved to get their hands on the Kothmerk. All I knew for certain was that justice wasn’t on the side of the people who’d imprisoned Fei and used her to set a trap for me and my Dyad friend. That, and that I wanted to get the damned ring out of my city.
“I don’t know,” I said again. Then I pulled Qethar’s pebble from my pocket. “But there’s one way to find out.”
“But not here,” said Triss.
“No, of course not. For a number of reasons. I was thinking of someplace high up and close to water. I want the Durkoth out of his element and off balance for this conversation, and I think I know just the place.”
18
“How do I look?” I asked.
Harad leaned in close. “Different enough that I’d not have let you in if you knocked on the front door of my library.”
I grinned. “Then it’s a good thing I broke in like usual.”
“Yes, my wards knew you where I would not. This is, I presume, your response to those rather distressing wanted posters that have gone up all over the city. It seems a little drastic.…”
I nodded grimly, and felt a faint cool stirring across the back of my neck at the motion—Scheroc had insisted on coming along and I couldn’t think of any way short of a binding to keep the little elemental spirit from doing whatever it wanted. Since bindings range from uncomfortable to excruciating for the bound, depending on their natures, that’d be pretty much tantamount to declaring war on Fei. Not really an option I wanted to pursue even if she was locked up in a royal dungeon somewhere.
I was just trying to decide whether I should mention the creature to Harad, and if so, how much I should tell the old librarian, when he preempted me. “Did you know that you have Kaelin Fei’s familiar trailing along at your back?”
“Uh, yes?” Good answer there, Aral.
“That’s a story I’ll want to hear more of at some point. But I suppose that if you’re all right with having it following you around, it’s not a problem for me. Just keep it away from the stacks and any loose paper. The things make a dreadful mess.”
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that Harad would be aware of the qamasiin. He was, after all, one of the most powerful sorcerers I’d ever met, and the Ismere Library was both his passion and his home. I did wonder how he knew about its relationship to Fei—that was a story I would have loved to hear more about.
Founded nearly four hundred years ago by a Kadeshi merchant-adventurer who had headquartered his operations in Tien, the Ismere had grown to house one of the finest collections of books and scrolls anywhere north of the Sylvani Empire. We stood now in the third-floor reading room, my usual point of entry into the private lending facility—via the roof of the neighboring Ismere Club and a little pick work on the balcony door locks.
The Ismere was much better stocked than the Royal Library of Tien, in large part because it had never fallen foul of the sorts of censorship and purges the latter facility had faced over the years. More than one Zhani king or queen had tried to censor the Ismere as well, but they’d never managed to get far, mostly destroying inferior or badly damaged copies the library had intended to get rid of anyway. It’s hard to force one of the great mages to do anything they don’t want to do, and being a great mage was one of the minimum—if secret—qualifications for becoming chief librarian of the Ismere.
“While we’re on the topic of interesting stories, Aral,” said Harad, “what have you done to yourself? And how? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone manage that sort of bone-deep facial reshaping before, short of a full-on shape change, though I can see several ways that one might attempt it.”
“Actually, I’m not entirely sure about the what. It’s dark out there and I haven’t exactly had access to a good mirror. The how’s a longer tale than I have time for if I go into the level of detail I know you’re going to want. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll save that part for a later date. In the meantime”—I pointed at my face and smiled—“I don’t suppose…”
Harad nodded. “I think I can manage that.”
With a sweep of his hand and a mumbled word, Harad conjured a full-length mirror clearer than the finest silver. The librarian was an old friend, my oldest in one way, at a shade over six hundred years. His span had been greatly extended by his bond with whatever slow-aging familiar companioned him—the life of a mage and his familiar always tend toward the longer of the two. I didn’t know the nature of Harad’s familiar because he’d never volunteered that information, and I knew better than to push, but I had no doubt it was something at least as rare and exalted as one of the great dragons.
“Thank you.” I stepped up to the magic mirror and gave myself a careful looking over.
We hadn’t done too bad a job, Triss and I. The face wasn’t the one I’d been born with, of course, but it did all the things my old one had, if that makes any sense. I’ve always been a bit boring where it comes to looks, medium brown hair, medium brown eyes, skin somewhere between the dark side of light and the light side of dark, features neither ugly nor particularly handsome, medium build.… I am a touch on the tall side, and certainly my training has put a lot of muscle on that frame, but really, barring the wanted posters, I’m not the type who draws a lot of second looks.
The temple masters had often noted that very lack of distinction was one of my greatest assets as a Blade. The face looking back out of the mirror at me now fit that same old bill in a new and equally boring sort of way, which is exactly what I’d hoped to achieve. The exact details aren’t terribly important, but I was pleased with the way we’d managed to tone down the Varyanness of my appearance without really making me look too much like I came from anywhere else either.
If I’d had to make a guess at my apparent ethnicity, I’d have said my new face belonged in the Magelands where there was a lot more blending of bloodlines than almost anywhere else in the eleven kingdoms. Anyone from anywhere could claim Mageland citizenship if they tested positive for either of the mage’s gifts. An awful lot of refugees from conflicts and purges in the other ten kingdoms had ended up there because of that.
It made for the densest population of sorcerers anywhere in the east, though there were plenty of citizens who had no magical gifts at all, both native and immigrant, as there were other paths to citizenship. It also meant that mostly the rest of the world left the Magelands the hell alone. It wasn’t smart to piss off a population that could throw a thousand and one kinds of spells at you on a moment’s notice.
“Well?” Triss asked after a while. He sounded nervous. “What do you think?”
“That we did a good job, my friend.”
He let out a sigh of obvious relief. “I’m so glad. I was worried about the parts that I did. I don’t see you like your fellow humans see you, and I didn’t know if that was going to make for some horrible mistake that you would never forgive me for.”
I laughed. “Triss, there’s nothing you could do to me that I couldn’t forgive after all we’ve been through, though I am glad you didn’t put my nose back on upside down.”
Harad smiled. “I don’t know. It would lend you some of the character that you’ve always lacked.”
“In my business, character is a dirty word, and you know that, old man.”
“And yet, your Master Kelos with his eye patch and tattoos was quite the visible one in his day. And that beard…”
Harad had, once upon a time, been brought in as a teacher of the art of deception for my order. That was nearly three hundred years ago, when he’d been involved with an acting company in Varya, one in a long line of careers that he’d taken on over his more than half a millennium of life. It was that association with the Blades which had prevented him from frying me like a bug the first time I broke into his library some eleven years in the past. Well, his wards really, as they’d been keyed to allow the entrance of anyone companioned by a Shade, a condition since narrowed to be specific to me.
“Don’t go waving Kelos around as an example at me,” I said. “You know very well that he always put in a glass eye, covered his tattoos with makeup, and shaved off the beard when he went out on a mission. The more flamboyant aspects of his appearance were something he used to draw attention to what he wanted people to look for when they thought he might be stalking them. It was a stage magician’s trick, one I imagine that was originally drawn from the tool bag you created for the order.”
“There is that. But come, you’ve said you’re short on time and I think you’ve done sufficient homage to the niceties. What is it that you want from me in such a hurry. Questions answered? A banned book to read, like the one you needed when you got sucked into the Marchon affair? Is it something that we can work out over a drink? I’ve picked up a bottle of that whiskey you favor since you won’t drink my tea.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to pass on the drink.” Though I felt a distinct pang of regret at the thought. “And it’s neither answers nor a book that I’m hoping you can provide.”
“Well, if it’s not information you want, I have to say a library is a strange choice of venue. What are you here for?”
“I am looking to have a little talk and learn a few things. Just not from you. I need to speak with a Durkoth and I wanted to borrow your riverside grand balcony for a bit.”
Harad blinked several times, the only real exhibition of surprise I’d ever seen him make. “It seems an odd place at an odd time, but I think it can be arranged. Do you mind if I ask, why here?”
