darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,18
or Blade in training has become the very sort of monster that the order existed to destroy.
But it is all too easy to tip the other way instead, to feel the deaths of those we must kill too keenly. If you are raised to see injustice and to look at its costs with unflinching eyes, you will see much of the aftermath of death. You will see the harm it does reflected in the eyes of the survivors, those who have lost friends, parents, lovers. . . . If you have any compassion at all, you cannot help but see that the Ashviks and other monsters also have friends, parents, lovers. . . . Most Blades die by violence, but it is not always an enemy that spills their blood. Too many die by their own hand.
I had come closer to that edge than I would ever admit to anyone, even Triss. . . . No, especially Triss. I shook off the thought, and forced myself to listen as Malthiss continued.
He was speaking directly to Faran. “. . . and so, the goddess only ever made around six hundred swords. Even with all of her strength, it took her centuries to manage that many. The swords that Kelos carries, or Aral or Siri, once belonged to another Blade, just as yours did. But where their swords were rededicated by the goddess herself and consecrated to their new wielders, yours are still attuned to she who used them last.”
“Hang on.” I held up a hand. “I knew that the swords returned to the goddess, but I don’t think I knew that.” It wasn’t a complete surprise—some things I had been told over the years implied it in retrospect—but I hadn’t ever really thought about it. I drew one of my swords and looked down its length at Malthiss. “I wonder who this belonged to before me.”
Malthiss leaned forward and touched the tip of his forked tongue to the steel. “Alinthide Poisonhand.”
I very nearly dropped the sword. Alinthide had been one of my favorite teachers, a smart, strong, wonderful woman. She was one of the Blades who had died trying to kill Ashvik, and I had held a mad secret crush for her in my heart from the age of fifteen to seventeen. Her death was the thing that had driven me to ask Namara to make me a Blade before my time and to give me Ashvik as my first assignment.
“Are you sure?” I asked him. “There were several killed in the time between when I was made a Blade and the investiture of the journeyman who came before me.”
Malthiss nodded. “There were also a hundred or more sets of inactive swords at that time without counting the two that were reforged into one for the Kitsune. It had been more than three hundred years since the goddess had last had a full complement of Blades.” He twisted his head in a gesture that took in the four of us. “Making you was a much harder task than making the swords.”
“Then how do you know that these were Alinthide’s?” I found that I desperately wanted it to be true, to know that something of that old love lived on.
“I can taste Serass in the swords,” said Malthiss, naming Alinthide’s companion. “Part of the darkness of the steel comes from the way it is bound to the Shade who partners its master. That leaves a record that only a great length of time, or the conscious effort of the goddess can erase. Falissil showed me how to touch the echo of that in the rededicated blade, though it only works if you knew the Shade personally. It’s something like recognizing a shadow trail, though fainter and more complex.”
Let me try. Triss rose up and touched his tongue to the sword. “I don’t . . . I’m not . . .”
Malthiss said something long and complicated in the hissing tongue of the Shades, and Triss responded in kind. Kyrissa came forward then to touch the sword as well, though Ssithra held back.
“Ssithra?” I asked.
The phoenix shrugged her wings. “Alinthide died before we came to the temple. I wouldn’t recognize her taste.”
“Perhaps not,” said Triss. “But you know mine. This is important knowledge and Malthiss may be the last of the old Shades who knows it. You should learn, too, so that it doesn’t die out.”
Ssithra nodded and moved forward. “Oh. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Thank you, Resshath Triss.”