darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,16

was where the risen were thickest and the fall of the building squashed or buried a fair few of them. Then I had to run most of a mile out of my way before I could cut back to the wall.”

“Why are you carrying him? Did the risen get to him?”

“He’s missing an ear and a healthy strip of scalp, but I’m pretty sure I saved him from the curse with that cut. Even so, he wanted to stay behind.” Kelos shook his head. “I presume he intended to die there, taking as many of them with him as he could to avenge his Signet—damned Hand fanatic!”

Kelos had left out an important detail. “But then you talked him into it somehow?”

Right . . . sent Triss.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I knocked him on the other side of his head with the flat of my blade, threw him over my shoulder, and started running.”

“So, he might wake up angry,” I said dryly.

“Good chance, if he wakes up at all. I hit him pretty hard, and head injuries are funny things. I didn’t have time to sort it out gently, and he was the last of the Signet’s personal guard. Have to admit he’s a hell of a fighter. . . . But the important thing is that he might know something we need.”

“I’m so glad that you continue to place such a high value on other people’s decisions,” I said.

“I value other people’s decisions exactly to the degree that they make good sense.”

“To you!” I snapped.

“Is there any other measure a man can make beside what’s reasonable to him? If I think a person’s making a bad mistake, should I pretend it’s not so? Because that sure as hell won’t help things.”

Aral, let it go. You won’t change him.

I know, it’s just that he makes me crazy! I took a deep breath and tried to push my anger away.

It wasn’t productive right now, and it was clouding my thinking. It’s funny how the people who raised you can knock your best efforts at reacting like a reasonable person on the head. There’s something about having been a child to someone’s adult that leaves marks on you that can never be wholly erased. Somewhere in every exchange you have, there is the ghost of that old relationship trying to make itself felt.

“Speaking of which,” continued Kelos, “what are you doing up on a rooftop in rain like this with wounded? I thought I taught you both better than this.” He included Siri in his gesture.

She had abandoned her meditation and come up beside me while we were speaking. Now she used her remaining hand to flip Kelos a rude gesture.

That’s when I started to laugh. It was that or kill Kelos, and, as tempting as I found the idea, all the old arguments still held. I still needed what was in his head.

“Fine, we’ll get in out of the damned rain, Grandpa.”

And then what? That was the real question.

4

“You may rob a grave, but you cannot steal from the dead.” This was not the first variation we’d had on this particular conversation, but it didn’t hurt to say it again.

“If that’s not it, then why won’t these work for me, Aral?” Faran whipped her swords angrily through the air, then winced and rolled her injured shoulder.

It had been nearly a week, but even with much better magical care than we could provide, that arm was going to trouble her for a very long time . . . if not the rest of her life. We had camped for the night in the loft of an abandoned barn somewhere east of Tavan in the Magelands.

We should have made it to the city by now, but the risen continued to hunt us, and avoiding both them and the locals working to exterminate them was slowing us down—the last thing any of us wanted to do was to try to explain the whole thing to anyone official. Nursing the priest of the Hand we’d dragged along was another factor in our travel time. Kelos’s blow had left him with both a concussion and a pretty scrambled view of what had happened at the inn—a fact that became incredibly apparent during those few brief moments when he came awake enough to attempt conversation.

It would have been simplest to abandon him at another inn, or, better yet, a church facility, but there was still the chance that we might get important information out of him. Also, he might