darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,114

cracking the temple precinct.”

“I think I must have missed a move somewhere in your play there.” Faran’s voice was low and dangerous. “Because if I didn’t mishear anything, then Siri said that this spell going bad could turn Aral into something like the risen, and you responded with mouth noises that suggested fixing Aral’s problem is in some way contingent on breaking into the temple, instead of taking a new place as our signal priority.”

“It’s not my call to make,” said Kelos, “but if Aral really wants to solve the problem of the Son of Heaven, we need that finger in working condition. I don’t know what we’ll have to do to stop the spell from backlashing through Aral, but at the least it will involve severing the connection between the two of them and destroying the finger. But without that finger, and a major dose of luck, we’re screwed.”

Siri crossed her arms and nodded reluctant agreement.

Before Faran could argue further, I stepped in. “Let them explain.”

Siri went first. “I tried, Aral, I really did. But I couldn’t even touch the smoke inside the temple complex, much less use it as a way in. Part of that is simply distance. The farther I get from the Brimstone Vale and the tomb of the Smoldering Flame, the weaker the powers that come with being bound to the god. But there’s more to it than that. This is the place where the powers and attention of Heaven lie heaviest in the mortal world.

“See?” Siri touched a finger to one of her long braids.

For the first time in weeks I really looked at her hair. What can I say? I’d been too focused on what was going on inside my head and heart to pay close attention to anything in the outside world. The smoke that habitually looped and slithered through her tightly bound black curls had faded almost to nothing.

“It’s been like this since we scouted out the edge of the temple precinct three days ago,” she said.

“Kyrissa?” I asked.

Siri’s shadow reshaped itself into the form of a winged serpent, and I saw that the thick smoky feathers I had grown so used to were likewise faded and indistinct. Almost, she looked as she had in the days of our youth, before the fall of the temple and their entanglement with the buried god.

“I am much diminished,” said the Shade. “If that loss of power came with less of a sense of presence, I would happily make the trade, but alas, it does not. If anything, I have felt the attention of the Smoldering Flame growing as we traveled closer to this place of his enemies. His hate beats at my mind, and I fear how it will grow and burn if Siri and I actually enter the deeps of the temple.”

I raised an eyebrow at Siri, and she nodded. “I don’t know how far in we’ll be able to go with you. Not all the way, certainly. There’s god-magic at work here, both the Smoldering Flame’s and Shan’s. I started to feel physically ill the moment that Kelos and I entered the outermost loop of the temple precinct. Nausea and dizziness. Not debilitating, but whatever was going on also completely blocked my sense of smoke.”

“And that’s all the farther we’ve been able to get,” said Kelos. “There are new installations atop most of the major gates. Ostensibly, they’re shrines, designed to look like those little pagodas the Shanites are so fond of. But really, they’re protective tombs—a safe place for the risen to lie up during the day. They come out at sunset. I spotted several of them slipping off to play gargoyle in the dark. Chomarr didn’t mention them, either because they’re new, or because he was playing us. Combine the dead with the way the wards on the wall tops will slow us down and we’ve got a major problem.”

“Ugly,” I said.

The temple precinct was a walled city within the greater city. It spiraled inward from the great gate through a series of inner baileys like the chambers of a nautilus. Each bailey had its own temples and shrines and its own gates, both inner and outer. As I had discovered on my previous sortie, all of the walls after you passed the outermost ring had wards built into the very stones, many of them created by or enhanced with god-magic—invisible to mage sight. The only thing that had allowed me to get past them the last time was