darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,52
a second of the raiders. I understood that Triss was trying to make me feel better about my choices and my task, but I couldn’t agree with him. I am very good at what I do, and what I do is kill people. There is no way around that, but usually I am facing an enemy who is awake.
Taking out an alert guard with her back to the wall and a weapon in her hands? That is a challenge. Slipping past her to kill the duke she guards without her even knowing I was there until they find the body the next morning—there’s art to that, even joy. Likewise killing armed foes in a battle. But this slaughter?
No. I would do it because it was necessary, but I would take no pride in it.
I would like to say that something went wrong, that someone woke, and that great deeds were done in the aftermath. But that would be a lie. A hundred and twelve Avarsi warriors died that night, mostly in their sleep and mostly without so much as a grunt. It was no battle, it was butchery.
When the killing was done, we used horses and ropes to drag the bodies into a great pile with all of their gear and we set a slow burning magical fire that would devour the evidence of what had happened without making too great a light. That they were gone and that there had been a fire could not be concealed, but who had done it and why and how would be muddied. That would keep the enemy from throwing all of their strength over the pass after us. As long as they couldn’t know that it was us or that we had not gone another way or divided our forces before or after, they must cover all of our possible paths.
After the talk I’d had with Jax earlier, I couldn’t help but pay close attention to the students as they went about the task of hauling and burning bodies. Those who had helped with the killing mostly wore the grim mask I remembered from my own experiences in dealing with corpses. Those who hadn’t participated in the killing looked more disturbed by the exercise, though none of them balked or vomited.
I paid especially close attention to Malok and Altia since Jax had worried about their readiness to take the formal oath of a Blade. The former actually appeared calmer than many of his older peers. The latter, well . . . she didn’t look happy, but she did the work, and she did it without complaint or dawdling. And these were her people—well, the Avarsi and the Dvali did as much cross-clan horse and cattle raiding against one another as they did cooperating, but there were blood ties aplenty connecting the two clan confederations. I don’t know that I’d have done half as well at her age if the corpses had been Varyan.
“How are you doing?” I asked her when the thing was almost done.
“Better than I would have guessed if you’d asked me about it beforehand, Master Aral.”
“Good lass.” I punched her shoulder lightly.
As soon as the fire was burning well enough that nothing short of major magic would put it out, we turned loose all the horses and began the long climb to the high pass. Kelos had made the trek many times in the training of young Blades, so he led us, with Siri following just behind to keep a close eye on him. I brought up the rear with Faran. Again, I regretted the way that Kelos kept making himself useful. It would be so easy and so foolish to come to rely on him. . . .
As soon as the others had moved far enough ahead that we could speak with relative privacy, Faran turned a hard look on me. “You’re doing it again, old man.”
“Doing what, my young monster?”
“Bleeding over the wrong things.”
“How do you figure that?” I asked, even as Triss sent, She’s got you nailed.
“There are people who need to die. Sometimes, they’re like the Son of Heaven and they need to die because they are the horrors that have always haunted the darkness beyond the edge of civilization. Sometimes they need to die because they are doing things that need stopping—I’d put this entire invading army in that category. But, even if I didn’t, sometimes someone needs to die for no other reasons than because they are in the way.”