darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,57

any lack of mutual affection. The marriage had served its ritual purpose, and we were neither of us the marrying kind. A circumstance I wished I had figured out before it blew up my relationship with Jax back in the day. It might have saved a lot of pain, and many years of estrangement.

“And afterward?” I asked.

“Afterward, we were married, which made us one person for the purposes of that particular magic, and I still had to stretch myself to the limit to contact you while you were on one side of the Wall of the Sylvain and I was on the other. That boundary is so much more than a great ward to keep the buried gods inside. I think sometimes that it is a divider between different worlds entirely.”

Kyrissa hissed then, startling all of us. She had always been a particularly quiet Shade, and her transformation into a mixed creature of smoke and shadow had only increased her reticence. Now that she could speak mind-to-mind with Siri, as Triss and I did—another side effect of our brief marriage—she hardly ever made a sound.

Siri’s eyes went briefly far away as she listened to her familiar, and farther away still when she focused her attention on the fires below and behind us a moment later. “They’re opening up the cages.”

“That’s not good.”

“Most of the Kvani have moved to the far side of our burn. Only a few khans and shamans remain near the chariots, and I don’t think the shamans are much happier about it than the bulk of the raiders. But they have to stay close to maintain the show-magic on the cages.” She whistled. “They must have loosed a hundred or more of their risen.”

“What are the risen doing?”

“They’re milling around like a pack of hunting dogs waiting for the—there! They’re off and heading up the trail after us.”

11

There is no good way to break the news that tireless legions of the undead are racing up your backtrail. There really isn’t. Especially not to people you still think of as kids on some level, not even when those kids are themselves assassins in training.

Given that, I went for the bald truth, and got us back on our way with only the briefest of stops. No one panicked, which was good. Very few of them even looked nervous, which was less so. It suggested that they had way too much faith in me, and/or themselves.

We did pick up the pace, loping along under the stars now in a slow jog where we could manage it—the fastest we could get the agutes to move, though how long the goats would be willing or able to keep at it was an open question. This time, instead of dropping to the back of the pack, I moved to the front. I needed to think through our options and make plans, and I wanted to talk things over with Kelos—damn him for being so useful! And, damn me for being a weak enough leader to need the help.

Siri, Faran, and Jax all moved forward, too, while we sent Roric and Maryam to play tail guard. They didn’t have proper weapons for dealing with the risen, but we were a good ten hours ahead of our pursuers still. Even if the dead ran every minute of the night—they had no need of food or drink or rest—they wouldn’t catch up until sometime tomorrow night at the earliest. With a very few exceptions—the hidden risen being a notable entry on the list—the restless dead cannot bear the direct sun. That meant that our pursuers would have to hole up someplace shaded during most of the daylight hours, just as we had originally planned to do.

“How many are there?” asked Kelos.

“A hundred at least,” replied Siri. “Could be a hundred fifty. Maybe more. I only saw the chariots that came within about thirty feet of the fire.”

“Ugly, but not impossible,” said Faran. “We killed more than that back in Wall before we had to run.”

I shook my head. “We did, but only with a great deal of help and at bitter cost. Your shoulder is still healing, and if the cut had been so much as a quarter of an inch deeper you’d have lost the arm, and we might have lost you. I have a hard time regretting the warriors of the Hand that fell there, but I’ll note that they were on our side at the time. That means half of our force died