darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,5
path she set you on.”
“I don’t know.” I turned my back on Faran and looked out into the darkness again. “I don’t want to kill him.”
“Not two minutes ago you said that you ‘liked him better as a corpse.’”
I nodded. “I did that. But the corpse I liked him as was a martyr to our goddess, not a traitor to her. That ship sank. Now, he wants me to kill him, or if I won’t do it, Siri or you. He believes that he deserves to die for his treachery.”
Faran put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face her. “He’s not wrong.”
“No, he’s not. But what will it accomplish? He wants to die for his crimes, but he doesn’t repent them. He would do the same thing tomorrow in the same circumstances. He believed then and still does that by giving people hope for justice, Namara was relieving pressure that otherwise would have destroyed a corrupt system of governance. Is he wrong about that?”
“I don’t know.” Faran sighed. “In the lost years I made my way in the world by spying and commissioned theft. I saw a lot of corruption in the ruling classes, and I didn’t do anything about it because: hey, my goddess is dead and it’s not my fucking job. Then, I found you, and you showed me that there may be something to this whole justice business even without Namara to show us the way. But I don’t see it as clearly as you do. Is the system so corrupt that the only thing to do is burn it down and start over? Or is it more important that we keep righting the individual wrongs?”
“That’s really the question, isn’t it?” asked Triss. “The big one that we’re all fighting over without actually talking about it. Do we kill Kelos because of what he did to Namara, or do we back his play and move against the Son of Heaven?”
“Even that oversimplifies things,” I growled. “Is killing Heaven’s Son justice of the kind we were raised to deliver, or is it revenge? He is practically the personification of injustice rendered untouchable by power. If ever there was a man who deserved to die on the sword of a Blade, it’s the Son of Heaven. Killing him alone would certainly serve the old ideal.”
“But then there’s the problem of the risen,” said Faran.
I nodded and began to pace. The Son was more than just a priest, he was a rapportomancer—a very specialized sort of magic user, one with the familiar gift but no talent for actual magery, and his familiar . . . that was the rub. His familiar was a sort of death elemental, a strand of the curse of the restless dead—the one that gave birth to the risen. Once the curse had advanced far enough, the risen were easy to spot, with their rotting hides, and mindless hunger for the flesh of the living. But there were ways to prevent or hold off that deterioration for months, or even years if you were willing to spill enough fresh blood.
In the shape of the hidden risen, the Son’s strain of the curse wore the bodies of thousands of nobles and priests all through the eleven kingdoms, maybe even tens of thousands. They bathed in the blood of the living to disguise their undead condition and they gave the Son of Heaven de facto control over much of the East. Individually, killing them was as just as killing the Son himself. But, all at once . . . that was another thing entirely. What happens to a civilization when you remove the structures that rule it? The people with the experience of governing? In destroying the risen we might destroy kingdoms entire. Would it be just to ignore that cost?
Kelos believed that a new, more just, system would arise from the ashes of the old, that the inevitable civil wars and banditry and bloodshed would all ultimately prove to be worth it. But his vision of justice had led to the death of Namara and nearly all of my brethren, and that was a cost I could never accept.
Nuriko Shadowfox, his sometime lover, sometime foe who had started him down the path he now walked, had been even more radical in her plans. She didn’t believe in government at all, that somehow eliminating it entirely would lead to a new and better world. Her plan had been to destroy the system and then to