darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,131

of double doors on the side opposite the top of the stairs. Beyond lay a room I knew from my last visit—the withdrawing room just outside the Son of Heaven’s bedchamber. I recognized it by the circle of black swords stapled to a cross section of some enormous tree’s trunk on the wall—swords of Namara, obscene trophies taken from my fallen comrades.

Rage burned through me, but unlike the last time I had been here, it failed to consume my reason. With gritted teeth and a gut-churning effort of will, I held my concentration and finished my survey of the room around me. It was perhaps twice the size of the withdrawing room, and empty save for a few sculptures, a half-dozen benches, and the dead clogging the stairhead. Behind them another pair of doors opened into a grand audience chamber where the Son of Heaven sat on a white jade throne at the far end—a mirror of the Emperor of Heaven’s own black jade model.

He was tall and pale, almost white, as the men of Dan Eyre sometimes are, and somehow frail looking. Even from so far away I could see the wide, fixed gaze of the fanatic or the madman—the only expression on an otherwise too still face. His robes were white threaded with gold, except for two bright spots of red above his collarbones where the blood that ran from the never-healing cuts I’d left on his cheeks dripped. His hair was thick and black and long, bound up in a braid that trailed down over his shoulder into his lap. In one hand he held the ivory rod of his office. In the other, a human thigh bone with a great green gem on the end, like some obscene mace.

There were perhaps a score of men and women in the room as well, all wearing the trapping of various orders within the church. Most of them looked as alive as I did, but a few had telltale signs of rot cropping up in the shape of pupils gone milky or dark cracks in the flesh around the eyes and mouth or across the backs of their knuckles—the places where the skin needed to bend and twist.

I could never hope to fight them all, but I might be able to get past them to reach the Son of Heaven if I moved fast enough. So, of course, I froze. Here was the moment. Would I end the reign of the Son of Heaven and begin a war that would engulf the eleven kingdoms? Or would I . . . what? Walk away somehow? Crash through the nearest window and hope to escape into the night? I had no exit strategy, no alternate plan, no way to go but forward.

I had come all this way hoping against hope that I would find my way when I needed it most. Perhaps believing somewhere down in the depths of my heart, below thought or rationality, that when I reached this place, my goddess would give me a sign—that, one last time, she would choose my path for me. But there was no whisper in my heart save the flutter of a Signet’s dying finger, and no ghost of a benediction to give me solace. There was only the Son of Heaven on one hand and the spectre of war on the other.

Black fire erupted out of the stairhead, blowing apart the dead that waited there—how was Kelos doing that? Raw blasts of magical force burned nima like nothing else could. Was the well of his soul bottomless? Shadow flowed up the stairs and split in two.

“Hold the stairs,” Kelos called, as one of the shadows rolled toward the audience chamber and the waiting Son of Heaven.

Finally, I moved—falling in behind Kelos as he headed for the throne, drawn as much by my former master’s utter conviction as by my own sense that I must act even if I didn’t know what to do. A woman wearing the robes of an archpriestess of Balor lunged at me, extending long-nailed fingers like claws.

Without any thought or intention I killed her. Reflex flicked my right-hand sword across her throat, half severing her head and spilling her undead life away, though no blood flowed. Another of the hidden risen came at me and I gutted him with an equally reflexive drawing cut. That disconnection felt wrong and surreal, nightmarish. Where normally in a battle I become hyper-engaged, totally in and of the moment, I was