darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,10
Though the story has not been widely shared beyond the upper echelons of the temple, the intruder stabbed two swords of your goddess into the headboard of the Son of Heaven’s bed, bare fractions of an inch above his face. When the Son of Heaven woke up, he ran into them, putting twin slices into the flesh over his cheekbones. Those wounds have never healed.”
“That’s fascinating,” I said.
“Oh, do stop. Kelos was the one outlawed for the thing—losing his place as head of Heaven’s Shadow to Devin and garnering a death sentence in absentia—which is part of why I sought him out. But he’s already told me who actually marked the Son of Heaven’s face, and how, and why. That’s also when he told me that you’re the one I have to deal with if I want your people to help us with the Son of Heaven.”
“Me, not Siri?” Toragana nodded, and I glanced over her shoulder to where Kelos continued to pointedly ignore us all, wondering what he was up to. “Interesting.”
“Look, I don’t care about your internal politics. What I care about is rescuing my order and my religion from the half-risen monster who currently heads it, at any cost. If bringing him down means I have to work with the sworn enemies of the Hand and start the biggest war in a thousand years, well, that’s what I intend to do. My duty to Shan demands nothing less.”
“Do you believe that killing the Son will mean war?” I feared that it would, but I wanted to hear the Signet’s feelings on the matter.
Toragana nodded, her expression grim. “Half a dozen civil wars at the very least. How could it not? Corik Nofather controls most of the ruling houses of the East. When the old rulers fall, there will be a rush to fill that opening, the likes of which the eleven kingdoms have never seen. There will be pretenders, and wars of distraction, and bloody crusades to root out more of the hidden undead. I don’t like it, but I don’t see any way around it. We cannot allow a half-risen monster to sit the throne of Heaven’s Reach.”
Triss hissed silently in my mind. Do you think she’s right?
I don’t know, I sent, though I very much feared that she was. “How did you discover the Son’s true nature?”
“After you left him with those slices on his cheeks, the Son of Heaven went a little mad—paranoid and vindictive. He executed every guard who had been within a hundred yards of his rooms that night. Then he cut off all access to the innermost temple for the Hand, the Shadow, and those members of the Sword who are also mages.
“He restricted entry to a very few at first, his risen slaves within the priestly hierarchy and the military orders. But that also restricted his ability to get things done, so he started converting more and more risen. Concealing their true nature takes enormous amounts of blood. Too much to hide from someone with my connections and history in the church. Combine that with things that I scared out of Devin, and I knew what the truth had to be.”
“That’s when you decided to come to me.”
“Well, Kelos initially, but yes. Will you help me make war upon Heaven’s Son?”
I took a deep breath, as I tried to decide how to answer her. That’s when a large boulder smashed right through the Fallow-side wall of the Roc and Diamond at shoulder height. It passed directly over the table where Toragana and I faced each other before punching out the wall on the other side. A few inches left or right and it would have killed one or the other of us.
Triss wrapped me in a shroud of darkness as I rolled backward out of my chair. In a hand-off we had practiced thousands of times, he released control over his senses and substance to me as I bounced to my feet. My view of the world changed as my own vision became irrelevant and I shifted to seeing through Triss’s borrowed darksight. Color went away as textures and how they reflected or absorbed light became central to my awareness, and shadows took on a depth of meaning beyond anything I can ever hope to describe. . . .
As I drew my swords, a tattered horde of risen came pouring up the main stairway from the lower level.