darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,41
then I would have to go to the meeting, too. Triss pulled them back up.
I left them there. My original plan had called for a two or three day stop at the castle at most. Breeze in, give Jax a briefing, collect a few journeymen to make into masters, and head for the temple. . . . But no. We had been there for nearly two weeks already, dealing with a never-ending series of decisions and discussions, with no escape in sight. I was beginning to suspect that Jax was trying to trap us there until the snow fell. I knew she wanted both Siri and me to stay on and instruct the youngsters, and she had more than enough guile to trap where she couldn’t convince.
I don’t remember playing the First Blade involving quite so much in the way of politics back at the temple, I sent.
It didn’t. Many of the duties they are trying to assign you used to belong to the high priestess or to Namara herself. Others were handled by the council on a much more routine basis.
Do you think Siri had any idea what she was getting me into when she vacated the role and insisted that I fill it?
Siri is very nearly as good a strategist as Kelos. . . .
I’m going to get her for this if it’s the last thing I do. I flipped the covers back again.
This time Triss didn’t pull them up. I’ll help.
Habit carried me out of bed and into the routines of dressing and equipping myself. Since there was no one actively trying to kill me, I put my shirt on before my sword rig. Then pants, and boots with their built-in sheathes and knives. I’d worn my wrist sheathes to bed, mostly because a lifetime of practice meant I slept poorly without them. My hood came next, though I left it and the attached scarf down since I wasn’t going a-hunting.
I was just bending over the ewer to wash my face and hands when I noticed smoke swirling wildly above the banked coals on my hearth. Siri, and unannounced. Never a good sign. Especially since she had stopped sleeping with me once we had decided to go after the Son of Heaven—she preferred not to indulge in such entanglements during a mission. I couldn’t blame her, and ours had always been an off-again, on-again casual sort of affair. Friends first, and lovers only when it seemed convenient.
I moved away from the ewer as the smoke thickened, giving myself space to draw if she needed my swords. “What is it?”
Siri stepped out of smoke. “News from the north and none of it good. Journeyman Kumi has just arrived from Riada. She foundered two horses getting here and went straight to Jax. I thought it best to listen in. There’s an army storming up the pass from the Kvanas.”
“The fortress at the mouth of the pass?” I asked, skipping over the obvious question of how she’d managed to listen in—she was Siri. “What happened there?” The Dalridian people took pride in the fact that it had never fallen but through treason in all the years since the founding of the kingdom.
“It was taken. The details are hazy, but Kumi said that they believe the invaders used catapults to launch a force of the restless dead over the walls into the courtyard in the deep of the night.”
“Risen,” said Triss.
“Almost certainly, with their hidden brethren leading the army. The Kvanas are the lands closest to Heaven’s Reach and among the most vulnerable to the Son of Heaven given the fragmentation of their governance and relative lack of mages among the clan leaders.”
“It’s a Caeni army?” I asked.
“Kumi didn’t say before I left to tell you, but that’s most likely. They’re the most settled of the great clans and least aggressive, but the pass lies deep in southern Caen. If it were Avarsi, Amrli, or Dvali they would have to come through the Caeni and that would mean internal war.”
The high arid plains of the Kvanas were terrible for farming and sparsely populated. The clans that eked out a living there were nomadic, a horse-centered culture that followed the herds as they grazed their way back and forth across the landscape. They lived most of the year in round felt tents, coming together only at the height of the green season for the swapping of brides and grooms and the renewal of old grudges.