darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,17

draw the risen down on whomever we left him with, and I didn’t need that on my already stained conscience if it could be avoided. At the moment, our unwelcome guest was sleeping in a corner.

“Namara’s swords will slay the risen for you.” Faran jabbed one of her swords in my direction. “And for Siri.” Another jab. “Hell, they even work for old one eye!” She jerked her chin at Kelos. “And he betrayed the temple!”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but the fact that you took them from Parsi’s corpse isn’t the problem. What made her Parsi was gone by then, moved on to face the lords of judgment and the wheel of rebirth. There was no one there to steal from, and we know there are other reasons that may cause the enchantment of the swords to fail. Devin’s wouldn’t work against the risen either, not for him anyway.”

“Are you saying I’m like Devin?” Faran’s voice went up a half octave as she stabbed the blades deep into the floorboards of the old barn loft.

Way to put your foot in it, my friend, sent Triss.

I took a deep breath. “No, Faran, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just noting that it’s possible to have been handed your swords by Namara herself and for them still not to do everything they’re supposed to. And no I don’t know why that is.”

A shadowy cobralike head lifted over Kelos’s shoulder. “I have been pondering it for some time, and I begin to think that I might know the answer. In this case, at least. Devin is another thing entirely.”

Triss flicked his wings sharply. Interesting . . .

He wasn’t the only one who started at Malthiss intruding himself into the conversation. The old Shade had always leaned toward the quiet side, a trait that seemed only to have deepened in the years since Kelos had betrayed the temple. Faran’s reaction was sharpest. When she wasn’t advocating for chopping Kelos’s head off, she tended to pretend that neither he nor his familiar existed. The fact that the two of them might know something she desperately wanted to obviously caused her considerable distress. I refrained from welcoming her to my world, but only by chewing on my tongue.

After several strained seconds, Faran turned to Malthiss, and nodded a jerky sort of nod that didn’t quite cross the line into a formal bow. “You have something to add, Resshath Malthiss?”

“Kelos won’t remember the conversation, but when I was much younger than I am now, I once spent a long evening discussing the swords with Falissil.”

“Falissil?” I didn’t recognize the name, and I found it difficult to imagine why Kelos wouldn’t have remembered the conversation.

Kelos actually blushed. “He was companion to Master Voros, who was First Blade a hundred years before I was born. Voros taught me to fence, and later, in my fifties, we had something of an . . . understanding.” He snorted. “It’s hard to believe I was ever that young.”

I nodded. That would explain Kelos missing that conversation and his blush. The Shades always tried to give their human partners at least the illusion of privacy when sex was involved. Kelos’s preference for bedding women was a fair bit stronger than my own, though he had been known to make exceptions over the years as well. But he wouldn’t have wanted to discuss the thing if it were a woman, either—he is too private a person.

Malthiss continued as though the interjection had never happened. “Falissil and Voros had moved on to teaching the younglings about the history of the order and the way of Justice. Part of that was sword lore, and Falissil knew much that I did not. It was a passion of both his and Voros’s and they had learned many things that lay outside the scope of the teaching of basics to children.”

I thought back to my own time in those classes. More than anything, what they had been about was channeling youthful energy and habits of thought into the pursuit of the right. A Blade has to walk a narrow path between loving death and being crushed by it.

From the day we entered the order at the age of four or five we were trained to kill the unjust, and to do so without regret or hesitation. That requires a ruthlessness that can all too easily slip over into a sort of blood hunger where killing becomes a goal in itself. More than one Blade