darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,70
cold, merciless hunger.
I glanced over my shoulder. The trail ended fifty feet behind us, vanishing into a white void. The snow-covered slopes both above and below disappeared even faster since they lacked the string of gray-clad walkers to contrast against the gently falling flakes. Ahead? Ahead simply didn’t exist. The trail bent steeply to the right for all of five feet before it opened out into the teeth of the north wind and whirled away into infinity.
The blizzard had slackened considerably in the two days since our discussion in the tent, shedding most of its power. But the snow continued to fall gently if heavily. Big fat flakes had taken the sky from us along with almost everything else. The only things that existed at the moment were my fellows and a yawning crack in the world ahead. The sides of the canyon were too steep for snow to cling. Though the snowfall hid the bottom of the ravine and the Evindine, we could see the stone along its upper edges for some distance, a dark and ominous slice cutting through the white void.
Kelos glanced over the edge again. “I wish I could see the far end. I remember it running more or less straight west from this point to where it opens out at the bottom, but even a slight bend could be a major problem with this visibility.”
He looked up into the falling snow and shook his head. “But then, wishes are terrible currency. You can spend all you want but they never buy you anything. If I make it, I’ll try to send my signal straight back up the canyon—you’ll never see it if I aim anywhere but right at you, and even then . . .” He shrugged. “I guess we’ll just have to find out.”
Without another word, or even a glance in our direction, he leaped up and out. Malthiss spun him shadow wings that hid his arms before he reached the top of his jump. He jerked hard to the left when he hit the main current of the wind and had to bank to compensate, but then he dropped below the edge of the canyon—out of the brunt of the wind, sliding down and away—a dark arrow shot at an invisible target. Within seconds, the snow devoured him as thoroughly as it had everything else.
When I turned away I saw that Faran had a dreamy smile on her face—a look I had rarely seen there. I quirked a questioning eyebrow at her—more conscious than ever that I had adopted the gesture from the man who had just left us.
The smile hardened into something predatory and wild, much more Faran. “Sorry, simply thinking that we’re ahead either way.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Jax shook her head from beyond Faran. “That’s because you can’t bring yourself to hate him the way most of us do. What she means is that either he will have found a way out of this trap”—she spread her arms to take in the falling snow—“or he will die. Either way, the rest of us win.”
I winced inwardly, though I think I hid it well enough. Not at Jax wishing Kelos dead, mind you. She had every right to that wish, and to the same for me frankly, after the ruin my return had brought to her life in the past week. No, I winced because she was right about my feelings. Even though Kelos had betrayed my goddess to her destruction and was responsible for the death of so many of my friends and loved ones, I couldn’t hate him properly, couldn’t wipe away the memories of the man who had taught and nurtured me from the age of seven.
He might be the Traitor Kelos, but he was also the man who had sat beside me for two weeks straight when I nearly died from fever when I was nine. The man who had set my broken arm at twelve. The man who handed me a purse and wished me good hunting when the goddess had sent me after Ashvik in defiance of tradition, and who had done so knowing that the rest of the shadow council would be angry about someone so young being given the job. I wanted to hate him as the others did and, even more, to stop loving him as my father in service of Namara, but I couldn’t do it.
So, while the others were probably split about half and half between hoping he’d crash into