darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,113

found me.”

“That’s a bit . . . unusual,” I said. “Did Master Loris suggest it?”

“No. I was pretty broken up by the fall of the temple. Do you remember Master Zara?”

I nodded. “I remember her investiture. It happened a few weeks before my final mission.”

“We were . . . lovers, and more than that. She wanted me to marry her once I became a master. She was killed in the fighting at the fall. I never got the chance to say good-bye, and that gnawed at me. I wanted to fix it. Of course, I ultimately learned that necromancy can’t really touch a soul that died unbound, only the body left behind. But in the process, I spent a lot of time reading the more disturbing sorts of grimoires.”

“And somewhere in there you learned something that makes you worry about this?” I tapped the box with the finger in it.

“Yes.” She nodded. “It’s dying back from the tip.”

“That’s clear enough,” I agreed. As Faran noted, it had gone black and puffy. Also, the fingernail was visibly loose. A line of greenish skin marked the divide between the semi-living and obviously rotting tissue. It looked grotesque. “What about it?”

“Well,” said Kumi, “I’m wondering what happens when it dies all the way back to the ivory where the spell is anchored to your soul. Like you said, it’s not necromancy, but it does share a lot of means and methods with the darker art. One of the big reasons necromancy is so very dangerous is the tendency for the spells to backlash through the caster. What I want to know is, what kind of echo will the death of that”—she pointed at the finger—“produce in your soul?”

“Right.” Faran’s voice was bleak and angry. “We’re destroying this thing right now!” A ball of spell-light began to form around her clenched fist.

“Agreed,” said Triss.

Kumi put her hand over the box. “I wouldn’t do that. Without the proper precautions, anything you do to that finger could easily rebound back through Aral’s soul.”

“So what are the proper precautions, exactly?” asked Faran.

“I don’t know,” replied Kumi. “I was looking into a very different sort of necromantic spellwork. I didn’t cover anything like this.”

“That’s not good,” I said. “We’d better talk to Kelos and figure out how to sever the connection.”

* * *

“No idea,” said Kelos, from his place in one of the three chairs around the little table in the fallback. “Not with the finger half-dead already. If you look closely at the spell-light in the glyphs on the base here, you can see that the whole magical structure’s gone corrupt. You say the rot has progressed another quarter of an inch since you picked this up?”

I nodded. The line of decay had advanced significantly during the two days it had taken us to return to Heaven’s Reach.

“That seems like a mighty big coincidence.” Roric was sitting on the floor opposite Kelos. “That it just happens to go bad right when we get here, and then starts getting worse that fast.”

“It’s no coincidence,” said Siri, who had chosen to alternate standing with worried pacing. “I’d bet my eyeteeth the rot was triggered by Aral getting within some critical distance of the finger, and that the same effect is what’s causing it to move so quickly now.”

“So, what happens when it gets to the base of the finger?” asked Triss. He had taken on dragon form and settled on the floor in front of my chair, with his front legs up on the table.

“Nothing good,” said Siri. “I can’t say for sure, and necromancy’s not my specialty, but after talking it over with Kumi, I don’t like any of the answers. There’s a slim possibility it won’t have any effect at all, but I’d bet against that. Much more likely is that it will injure or kill Aral. It could even turn him into one of the restless dead, though that’s almost as unlikely as it failing to hurt him at all.”

“What!” Faran whipped around in her chair to glare at Kelos. “Did you know any of that when you made yours? Because that’s crazy dangerous magic you were playing with.”

Kelos shrugged. “I took precautions that Aral didn’t. Also, I’m not as convinced as Siri that we can make any meaningful guesses about what will happen if worse comes to worst. Besides, none of that will matter if we get the enchantment sorted before it reaches that point. That means we need to seriously expedite our schedule for