darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,54

times she might assume the shape of a serpent from the waist down, or, for certain formal ceremonies, legs. As always, and despite her stillness and the cold granite of her skin, she seemed utterly, wildly alive—more so than any merely mortal figure ever could.

Namara extended her middle hands, then, offering me a pair of black swords, though I knew somehow that this was not simply a revisiting of my investiture. I walked across the surface of the water as I had back then, reaching for these swords that both were and were not mine.

My hands touch the hilts and my experience of time shifts, as it usually does only in battle. I move wholly into the present moment with no real sense of past or future. I turn the blades as I pull them to me, drawing their sharp edges along the open palms of my goddess. They cut deep, leaving an impossible trail of bright red blood welling in their wake.

Namara yanks her hand back and away, and her expression shifts from welcoming benevolence to shock and horror. I feel the same way, but cannot do anything to affect the actions of my body as I whip the swords around and thrust them both up under her left breast, driving the points deep into stone flesh. I want to vomit when my blades enter her great heart. I can feel the ponderous beat of it through my fingers and palms, feel my own heart somehow matching its rhythm, as first it beats faster, then slows, and finally stops.

For perhaps a minute my own heart feels dead in my chest. Then, suddenly, and with a tearing pain, it begins to beat again. Above me, the life has left my stone goddess, rendering her into little more than a statue. I wonder then how I will be able to draw the swords from the stone. But when I tug on the hilts, they come away easily enough.

Namara topples forward and I step aside, letting her crash to ruin on the shore. Her granite neck snaps and her head rolls to the edge of the flags. I want to run and hide, or slit my wrists, or do anything that will let me move away from the enormity of what I’ve just done. But I still have no control over my body. I am an observer, my mind trapped in amber as my hands move of their own accord, chopping the upper arms from that great fractured torso. . . .

Time blurs as I butcher Namara’s stone corpse, hammering and hacking away and levering the broken pieces of my goddess into a rough heap. I create a nightmare throne where I may rest my arms on Namara’s and prop my feet upon her fallen head. As I mount my new seat, I hear a scraping noise behind me and I turn. Devin is there. He draws his swords and sets them before my feet before performing the formal obeisance a Kadeshi peasant gives his lord, banging his forehead thrice on the hard ground. The traitor swearing fealty to me, his new master . . .

I lean over one hacked-off arm of my goddess and vomit onto the greensward.

“Aral, hsst, Aral, wake up.”

I blink my eyes open, instantly awake, and find Siri kneeling beside me. The fingers of her hand rest lightly on the back of my right wrist. By the sun it is late afternoon.

“What is it?” I asked. “Have the risen come?”

She shook her head. “No. Nightmare. Yours. You were twitching and your breathing went off. I heard it from clear over there.” She flicked her chin back toward the place where she’d set her bedroll.

“I . . . it was a dream. That’s a relief.” I had put my horrible vision aside on waking, but now that she mentioned it, my dreaming murder of my goddess rushed back in to fill my heart with a guilty dread. “Sorry I was so loud.”

“It’s not the first time you’ve woken me up with a nightmare. I swear you get more of them than any of my other bedmates ever did. Was this the one about the stone dog that nearly killed you when you went after Ashvik?”

“Nope, this was a bright shiny new horror. I was at the pool of the goddess when she rose from the depths and . . .” I shivered at the memory and shook my head. The symbolism was entirely too obvious. “It was awful. I