Crossed Blades, page 28
I spent another night and day at the inn, to give my erstwhile companions time to move on. I wanted to give them a good head start so they’d run a lower chance of getting into trouble if I was caught. I spent the bulk of that time wandering the outskirts of the temple precinct, studying my map, and putting together a plan for my initial approach. After I passed beyond the limits of the map I was going to have to improvise, but there was nothing I could do about that. Finally, I paid my bill, hid the bulk of my traveling gear on a rooftop, and strapped on my swords.
It was time for the Son of Heaven to die.
21
You can inscribe a lie in letters of gold, but that won’t make it into beautiful truth. The temple complex was supposed to provide a sort of imperfect reflection of the gods’ own Celestial City here in the world of man. It was gorgeous, even I had to admit that, but for me it was like the beauty of a will-o’-wisp—a pretty falsehood meant to lead the unwary astray.
According to holy writ, the Celestial City’s streets are paved with ivory and pearl, its walls carved from jade, and its buildings roofed with purest gold. Not even the Son of Heaven could afford to counterfeit that kind of wealth, nor had he or his predecessors tried. To do so, they claimed, would have been blasphemy. No, Heaven’s Reach must only reflect heaven, not strive to imitate it.
So the streets were paved with plain stone, but crushed shells had been sprinkled over them and fixed in place with magic, so that they shone silver and white under sun and moon, and blue and gold by magesight. The walls were faced with pale green marble, and the rooftops covered in terra-cotta tile that was sheathed in silver foil enchanted against tarnishing. A thousand slaves came out at night to polish every surface so that it all shone and sparkled like a ghost of the city it was supposed to reflect.
I could easily have gone in through the gates with the rest of the pilgrims during the day. I chose to go over the wall after the sun went down instead, though it required more initial effort. I had the best reason in the world.
After I’d left the inn and parked my gear I’d conducted a small experiment that I’d been itching to try for the better part of two days. I split my medallion.
Every pilgrim was given a little cast pewter medallion when they made their “voluntary” donative at the gate shrine and was told to wear it openly for their time in the city. Of course, you didn’t get a medal if you didn’t donate, and no one without a medal got to enter the temple precinct. Even the priests wore them, though theirs were cast in silver.
The spells that bound the medallions were very slickly done. Wrapping each one in permanent self-sustaining spells would have been prohibitively costly of magical resources. What they’d done instead was enchant the major gates at the entrance to the precinct and between neighborhoods within it. When a medallion passed through any of these gates, powerful enchantment, built into the very stones of the arch, activated and energized the medallions.
When they placed the medallion around your neck at the gate shrine it looked like nothing but a cheap bit of religious jewelry of the sort any moderately prosperous and devout peasant might be able to afford. Magesight revealed nothing more about it than the regular sort, and it remained apparently ordinary until your group knelt on the threshold of the temple precinct and recited the prayer after the priest. There, each medallion flashed bright blue for a moment, and not just to mages’ eyes.
For the rest of the day, it would flash each time you passed through one of the “holy gates” that divided the sacred city into a series of individually defensible baileys or wards. In between, the medallion was infused with a very faint blue glow visible only to magesight. That remained after you left the temple precinct, but had visibly faded by the next day.
I couldn’t figure it out at first, not until I’d thought to split my medallion open along the casting seam. The medallion was actually two medallions, the outer religious piece, and the inner magical tracking device and key. There were four glyphs inscribed within. Finding, binding, sympathy, and identity.
From back to front, each medallion had a unique signature, each one keyed itself to its wearer, and would sound an alarm if separated from them, each one could be tracked using a simple spell. If you had a medallion, the temple could tell who you were, where you were, and probably where you’d been. If you didn’t, anyone who saw you knew you were an invader. It was a slick system.
Very slick. Roughly fifteen minutes after I broke mine open, a Hand and five Swords were sniffing around the well I’d thrown it down. A few minutes after that, the Hand had said a few words over the well and the broken medallion had flown up out of the depths to land at her feet.
I couldn’t hear what she told her escort from where I was perched on a nearby rooftop and I didn’t think it was worth risking a hearsay, but she didn’t seem too alarmed by the find. I figured I was probably not the first irreverent pilgrim who broke his shiny little toy and then panicked afterward. Triss agreed with me. Still, I was very glad I’d given the gate shrine attendants nothing but lies about my name and my business. Likewise the Radewalders, though I hoped no one would bother to go after them for questioning.
Getting over the outer wall wasn’t all that difficult. It never is. All it took was patience, climbing skills, a shroud, and the judicious application of tried and true magical techniques to the basic security wards. I was just moving from there toward the center of the precinct via one of the curtain walls that divided the baileys when a very unpleasant thought occurred to me.
A smart and paranoid magical architect might well have built the gates to do double duty: charge the medallions and scream bloody murder if someone without one passed through, or even over one. Since the mage who’d designed the security for Heaven’s Reach was clearly both paranoid and smart, it gave me more than a moment’s pause. I released Triss from his dream state and brought him up to date on my thinking.
Seems likely, given the circumstances, he sent back. What do you want to do about it?
We could go down and head inward at ground level, staying away from the gates, but that’s going to slow us down a lot.
Not to mention the fact that there may be other places besides that gates that have the same spells on them. Probably are, actually. He made a sort of mental “hmmmming” noise then that I didn’t like.
What is it, Triss?
As much as you or I may find the thought repulsive, the Son of Heaven is the representative of Shan here in the mortal realm.
And?
Do you suppose some of the gate spells are god magic?
As in, invisible to magesight? Oooh, that’s not a happy thought at all. It means that if there are some of them in places other than the gates, we’ll have no way of spotting them.
Exactly. Which brings me back to my original question; what do you want to do about it?
I guess now is the time to see if our secret weapon is going to work. I pulled out the finger that Kelos had given me—I still didn’t trust mine, though I found the idea that I had a backup reassuring. Looking at it closely I found the glyphs of binding and sympathy inscribed on the bezel, though not the ones for finding or identity. At least this way, we have a much better chance of running for it if it fails.
We do if it fails in a way that’s visible to us.
Have I ever told you that I find you too much the optimist?
No.
Good. A faint mental laugh tickled the edges of my mind as I resumed control over my familiar.
Moving very slowly and with the beringed finger well out in front of me I slipped forward along the top of the wall. A few yards shy of the nearer gate pier, the ring’s bezel began to glow very faintly blue in magesight. Reluctantly, I extended my shroud to cover the ring, blocking my own view. It was more important that I not attract the attention of any fortuitously placed guards than that I keep an eye on it. As I got closer still it began to glow with the same sort of worldly light as the medallions had earlier.
The pressure of the light coming off the ring prickled uncomfortably against the shadows that hid it, like a light sunburn late in the day. That amped up to a real burn that had me wishing I could uncover the damn thing as I passed over the central arch—normally Blades go out of the way to avoid carrying lights of any kind inside a shroud. Fortunately, it quickly faded again on the far side.
I could only hope that the lack of a finding glyph on the ring meant that the Signet was an important enough officer of the church that the monitoring system had been designed not to track and inconvenience whoever held the post. I did have an important secondary bit of positive evidence for that idea, if you assumed that Kelos had been keeping the finger close at hand over the few years since he’d changed his allegiance. If not, well, if not, I was probably going to die without ever getting anywhere close to my target.
I tucked the finger back into the divided bag I’d made for it and its mate, and moved on. The temple precinct was shaped a bit like a nautilus shell, spiraling inward through a series of walled baileys, each with its own shrines and temples, toward the central complex. My next check came as I crossed over another curtain wall, this one part of the encircling wall dividing the first of the inner rings from the next one in.
No sooner had I stepped from the transverse wall between two baileys to the larger ring wall, then I felt an intense flare of light from the pouch holding the Signets’ signets. Even through the thick fabric, the light chewed at my shroud and continued to do so as I made my way from there to the next transverse wall. It dimmed, but continued as I moved across to the next loop of the ring wall where it flared again.
At that point, I hopped down to the roof of a lesser temple and squatted in a sort of alcove made by the intersection of the two walls. Facing into the corner, I shifted the shadow away from my face and chest, moving it back and up to create a pocket of darkness before releasing Triss. When I opened the pouch, I could see the ring still glowing, but very dimly—I wouldn’t have been able to see it even by moonlight. Pulling out the finger, I moved it closer to the wall.
In response, and as expected, the glow brightened dramatically. Whatever magic tied the rings and the medallions to the gates was present in all of the major walls here in the depths of the precinct.
I don’t know what we’d do without this ring. I tapped the signet with my thumb. If Kelos hadn’t given it to us for the abbey attack, I don’t think we could have gotten even this far.
I don’t either, and I don’t like it. It makes things too easy, and it’s magic that’s not under our direct control. This is tied to Kelos’s life force. If he died or chose to sever the connection while we’re here, we’d be in the shit deep.
That’s why we made one of our own. I touched my free hand to the pouch at my breast. In fact, why don’t we check it?
I put the first Signet’s finger away and pulled out the one I’d made, moving it close to the wall. It was slimmer, coming from a woman’s hand, and the ring dimmer—its glow wasn’t even visible initially—and almost as much green as it was blue, but it did light up. The finger felt colder, too. Warm, but not quite blood warm, which might account for the dimness and green tinge.
But then, I wasn’t the mage that Kelos was, and I hadn’t had a slice of unicorn horn handy when I made it, nor a silver nail. I’d had to make do with a wedge of dracodon ivory and a bent sliver of silver, both pried loose from the altar furnishings beneath the stairs at the abbey. Not to mention that I hadn’t been able to harvest it until a few moments after the Signet’s death.
I liked touching it even less than the other one. It was bound to my life force, a connection I could feel as sort of a feathery tickle at the back of my mind. Most of the time I could ignore it, but when I actually handled the finger, that feathery feeling grew stronger and extended a line to the point of contact. It felt like a ghostly string running from the finger through my hand and up my arm to the back of my neck where it spiraled around my spine and on into my skull. Very disconcerting. I put it away as quickly as I could after I’d verified that it, too, glowed.
What do you think? I asked Triss.
It’s certainly connected with the magic of the precinct, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it actually working.
Me neither. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
For that matter, I don’t much like betting my life on the other one either. It’s a shitty choice, really. With yours I trust the man but not the magic. With Kelos’s I have the reverse problem.
Does that mean you want to turn back?
No. I still think we stand a decent chance of killing the Son of Heaven, mostly because of the ring. That’s worth the risk. Go.
I took control and shrouded up again. Between gates and guards and places where I had to double back on myself, it took me almost another two hours to get to the part of the complex that held the great temple and the Son of Heaven’s apartments. It was difficult and dangerous to get that far, but I never really faced anything that shadow and the Signet’s ring couldn’t get me past, and that made me deadly suspicious. It couldn’t possibly be this simple.
Oh, I made up reasons to explain the ease of my passage. The relative absence of the Hand was high on that list. I’d passed at least a dozen guard posts that had obviously been set up with a single watcher in mind, but which currently held three or four or even five of the Sword of Heaven’s soldiers. I couldn’t help but think that they would normally have been staffed by one of the Hand with a Storm hovering close by.
I would have liked to believe that, that weakness in the sorcery department was on account of the nearly three dozen members of the Hand that we had killed at the abbey. It was probably even true to some extent. No ruler, not even one as powerful as the Son of Heaven, could easily cover the loss of that many elite mages. But somehow I was certain that wasn’t all there was to it. Some other need or force was pulling the Hand away from the city and the temple complex, though what, I couldn’t say.
Whatever the reason, I soon found myself looking down on what had to be the several balconies that fronted the apartments of the Son of Heaven. It was the splendor that gave it away, which was one of the fundamental elements that had always made the work of the Blade easier. No matter how security conscious they were, the kinds of targets that drew the attention of my goddess and my brethren couldn’t resist the temptation to make their power manifest in their surroundings. In this case, a huge garden courtyard roofed entirely in spell-hardened glass to keep out both elements and assassins.
The cost of the glass alone was staggering, without adding in construction or the magic and the staff to maintain it. The garden itself was filled with all manner of tropical rarities that had no business growing here in the north, on the cold side of the mountains.
Here, too, was that counterfeit of the Celestial City that the Son of Heaven claimed was blasphemy. The garden paths were strewn with chips of real ivory and bits of pearl, the balconies railed with jade that matched the jade tiles facing the walls. There was even a small gold-roofed pavilion beside the fishpond. The security was very tight here, with every pane of glass and tile on the roof marked by wards of alarm.
Without the Signet’s ring finger I would never have been able to approach from the rooftops. With it, not only was I apparently invisible to the wards, but I had a key that allowed me to open an access panel in the garden’s glass roof. From there it was no work at all for someone with my skills to make his way down onto the balcony to the left of the garden terrace—the most logical one to be attached to a bedroom or withdrawing room.
Peering through the curtains, I found that I had arrived outside the latter. The presence of a pair of the Swords of Heaven on either side of the doors to the inner chamber told me all that I needed to know about whether I’d found the right place. I paused then to set one of the few spells that I know well, a cantrip that would create a zone of silence around me for a quarter of an hour. I used that quiet to kill the Swords where they stood.
Then I was alone. Nothing but one door and at most a few short yards stood between me and the bed where the Son of Heaven lay sleeping. I was seconds from making the man responsible for the death of both my friends and my dreams pay for his crimes. I reached for the handle of the door and found that I was shaking. I backed up and took several deep breaths. I wanted to be calm for this, to completely occupy the moment so that I wouldn’t miss the slightest nuance of this most deserved of deaths. As I tried to recenter myself, I forced myself to look away from the door, and really see the room, and . . .
Aral, are you all right?
What? I had no memory of releasing Triss. I mean, of course I am. I just want to treasure this moment.
Then why are you standing with your back against the wall as far from the Son of Heaven’s door as you can get?
Am I. I blinked, forcing my eyes to focus, and realized that I was. So I am.
What’s wrong?
I looked around and once again my eyes fell on the large wooden plaque on the wall just to the left of the balcony door. This time I made myself take in the sight and think about what it meant.
It was a display mount of a sort more typically seen in the audience hall of a castle than the bedroom of a high priest. Someone had sawn a ring out of a giant ebony, trimming the edges to make it into a perfect circle, perhaps six feet across. It was polished to a brilliant sheen that showed off rings marking hundreds of years of growth. Spaced around the edge of the ring were iron brackets each of which held the hilt of a sword of my goddess, its point directed inward, so that they formed a sort of pinwheel.
Looking at it made me want to vomit, but now that I had really seen it, I couldn’t look away. Without any conscious thought, my feet took me slowly across the room toward this proud display of purest sacrilege against my goddess. As I went, I remembered the rumor that the soul daggers of the remaining living Blades, mine included, were supposed to be imbedded in the wall of the privy that lay beyond the bedroom where the Son slept now. That way, he could start each day by pissing on them.
