darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,134

you, Triss.

I stood, then swayed and almost fell as the fluttering in my heart turned into something with claws and teeth.

Faran caught me. “Are you all right?”

“I will be, I think. I just need to sit for a moment.”

“Here, lean on your sword for a beat.” I had dropped them when I knelt beside Kelos. Now she handed me one. Then, when she was sure I wouldn’t fall immediately, she leaped up and yanked the Son of Heaven’s corpse from his throne before helping me into it. “There.”

I forced myself not to clutch at my chest, or otherwise betray what was wrong. There were still things to do. Which reminded me. . . . “Do you have any idea what happened with the risen?”

“They died or went mad when you killed the Son of Heaven. The rotted ones went down immediately. The hidden type stayed upright—sustained by soaking in the blood of the living maybe—but they completely lost their wits, and I suspect all of them will ultimately fail as well, if they haven’t already.”

“Ahh, that makes a certain amount of sense. Thank you.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Again, I think I will be. I need . . . rest. Could you do me a favor?”

“Maybe. What is it?”

“Go grab Devin before he recovers enough to make a run for it. I want him under my thumb.”

She looked concerned. “I don’t want to leave you like this.”

“If we don’t catch him now, we won’t catch him at all. Please.”

“You’re hiding something,” she said, but then she sighed. “All right, but don’t you move off that throne.”

“I won’t, I promise.”

“All right,” she said. “Triss?”

My shadow reshaped itself into the familiar dragon outline. “Yes?”

“Don’t you dare let anything happen to him while I’m gone.”

“I will do my best,” said Triss.

She shook a finger. “You’d better.”

“I will.” He held up one paw as though he were taking an oath.

“Can I at least kill Chomarr on my way to collecting Devin?”

I nodded. “I don’t see why not.”

As soon as she was out of hearing Triss put his front paws in my lap and peered up into my face. “The finger?”

I nodded and pulled it out into the open, setting it on the arm of the throne. The line of rot had passed the bottom edge of the ring and there were only a few hairs’ breadths between it and the ivory plug. The tearing sensation in my heart had increased to the point where I didn’t think I would be able to stand if I tried.

“What are we going to do about it?” he asked.

“Hope,” I said, and then I swung my sword down on the finger with all the strength I could muster, aiming for that tiny slice of still living flesh.

Lightning flashed across my vision and then darkness swallowed me up.

When it passed, I found myself in the Gryphon’s Head surrounded by my dead. Across the table sat Namara.

“Am I dead?” I asked.

She smiled and shook her head.

“I killed the Son of Heaven, you know.”

“I do.”

“Did I get that right?”

“That is no longer for me to say. Your way is your own, for now and forever. You have transcended your need of me, and for that I am so very, very proud of you.”

“I won’t see you again, will I?”

She shook her head and was gone, taking the bar with her, and leaving behind a sense of peace and well-being like nothing I had felt since the fall of the temple. I had made my goddess proud. When I opened my eyes again, I was sitting on the throne of the Son of Heaven, and the previous occupant lay on the floor at my feet.

“Is this justice?” I asked, but he gave no answer.

I had my own opinions. For him certainly, for the thousands or tens of thousands who would now die in the upheavals to come . . . for that I had only my hope.

I speak to the dead. This time there was no answer.

I think it’s better that way.

I rose from the throne and stepped over the body of the Son of Heaven. There were things to do and the path of justice to follow. As for the future?

I would live in hope.

Epilogue

We burned Kelos’s body high on a bluff above Heaven’s Reach. Then we collected his ashes and put them in an urn and hid it within his fallback. That was three years ago. Three years of blood and death and war. Years in which the mantle of First Blade hung on my shoulders like a cape of lead. Where I wanted nothing more than to hang up my swords and walk away from all of it.

I had come very close to doing just that, to returning to the Gryphon’s Head and going back to being Aral the jack. I had even begun to drink again for a time. But circumstances and Triss’s love had led me away from that place and my own destruction, had put me back on the road I had begun when I accepted the title of First Blade, had brought me here, to a hill above the ruined Temple of Namara.

Across the water, on the island of the goddess, workers were raising a new chapter house for those who now called themselves the Blades of Justice and who looked to me to lead them into the future. It was a fortress and far more defensible than the old temple had ever been. It had to be, for we no longer had the goddess to protect us.

The ruined temple we would leave as a memorial to the fallen, though we’d cleaned up the graveyard and begun to bury our dead there once again. That was what had brought me here today. To bury one of our dead. Rebury, really. We had brought Kelos home. Though we would not place him in the graveyard. Siri and I had agreed that he neither deserved the honor nor would have accepted it.

No, we would bury him in an unmarked grave here on the hillside overlooking the ruin he had wrought. The ruin . . . and the promise.

I turned to Siri then and handed up my shovel. “Do you think he was right?”

She shook her head. “Say rather that he wasn’t wrong, and you will strike closer to the truth. The Evindine Free State would have made him smile, as would the Republic of Varya, but what happened in Zhan and, even worse, Heaven’s Reach . . .” She shivered a little as she handed me the urn. “Chomarr’s brief reign as the new Son of Heaven was ugly.”

“But Faran did get him in the end,” said Triss.

I placed the urn gently in the bottom of the hole. “That was . . . messy.”

“Poetic,” replied Siri.

I shook my head as I climbed out of the grave. “Not a touch excessive?”

“Richly deserved,” said Triss.

I couldn’t argue with that. Instead, I took the shovel back and started to fill in the grave.

I was just finishing up when Faran came over the crest of the hill. “News from Zhan! Harad sends word that Kaelin Fei has been elected to head the new government in Tien, and that she wants to see you.”

“That’ll be about the warlords on the Chenjou Peninsula, I imagine.”

“Probably,” said Faran. “Do you want me to go instead?”

“Not instead. As well. I could use someone to watch my back, and it’s time you checked in with Harad and Shang again.”

She nodded. “I’ll go get us ready.”

I sighed then and looked down at the grave and shook my head. “Dead three years and still playing us all. I don’t think he was any more right about the way things would play out than the Kitsune would have been, not without us doing everything we could to make the future better than the past.”

Siri squeezed my shoulder. “Funny, isn’t it? He betrayed us all and yet here we are working our hearts out trying to make his mad vision into a bright reality.” Then she followed after Faran.

When she was gone, I stood for a few silent minutes more beside the grave, with Triss wrapped around my shoulders in a shadow’s embrace, then I, too, turned away. I had a world to build and no more words for the dead.