darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,123

moving against the weight of the water quite yet. I was about to ask Kelos how much longer we might have to wait before it slowed enough to move on, when I saw a pair of dark shapes eeling through the water at the edge of our light.

“Risen!” I shouted, drawing my swords and dropping them into a low guard, though I couldn’t do anything in terms of stance with my legs pressed back against the iron bars.

Kelos mirrored me on my right, bracing for the risen attack, but Faran was more clever than either of us. Pulling herself up out of the water, she kicked off the gate and launched herself forward, landing full on the back of the one coming in at me and punching her swords down and through its torso. A moment later, they both slammed into the grate a few inches to my left. Faran got up, the risen did not. The other one—coming in on Kelos’s far side—suddenly kicked off the bottom then, bursting up and out of the water like a crocodile going after a pig that had gotten too close to the shore.

But Kelos was no pig. He scissored his swords up and out, meeting the thing’s pounce. It still hit him square in the chest, but it did so minus its head and its arms below the elbows.

I had a sudden nasty thought. “How aware do you think those things are?”

“I don’t know,” said Kelos. “Why?”

“Because the risen curse is the Son of Heaven’s familiar. If he can see through their eyes . . .”

“Then he might know we’re here. Is that what you’re suggesting?” asked Faran.

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think so,” replied Kelos. “From what I’ve seen he can look out through their eyes, but mostly he doesn’t. There are simply too many of them seeing too many different things all at once. You know how hard it is to look at the world with a Shade’s vision. Admittedly, that’s a much more alien view of the world than a dead man’s, but it’s only one set of ‘eyes’ as it were. My sense of the thing is that the Son mostly doesn’t try to put himself into their heads, and when he does do it, he can’t really focus on more than one or two at a time.”

I let out a sigh. “There’s a relief.”

Kelos tilted one sword back and forth noncommittally. “Yes and no. While he probably didn’t see any of that, he might have been able to feel the risen die. Hopefully Siri has started her attack above by now, and he’s got lots of distraction on that front, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to hurry things along from here on out.”

He pushed forward, forcing his way through water that had dropped to about two feet, and against a much reduced flow. I fell in immediately behind Kelos, letting him take the brunt of the current.

You’re not going to turn back, are you? asked Triss.

No. I’m not. I can’t. I’ve come too far, and there’s too much at stake. I’ve got to see this through, one way or the other.

Are you going to kill the Son of Heaven?

I wish I knew, Triss, I really wish I knew.

22

Walking into the darkness.

That’s what life is really, one step after another toward the darkness that will inevitably claim us all. Some steps we take with eyes wide open and a firm sense that our feet will land on solid ground. Others are blind. Either way, we’re moving forward with the knowledge that whatever happens in the next few seconds, the road ultimately ends in the abyss.

I was in the dark now, and any step might be my last, a fact that I was infinitely aware of as I lifted the Signet’s finger to open the next gate. The grates had grown more frequent as we moved deeper under the temple precinct, and I was no longer under any doubts about whether the process of rot was being accelerated by my use of the key. The last gate, our sixth since the water fell to knee height, had pushed the line of rot beneath the thick band of the ring.

I couldn’t see the point of failure in the spell anymore, and this gate might be the one that sent the rot to the root, the one that would show me once and for all what would happen if the spell backlashed through me. But there was no point in turning back, even if