darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,76

to.

There would be plenty of risk on that front when we reached the sacred island.

14

My shattered heart lay before me, a vision of the unreachable past written in broken stone.

Namara’s temple had stood on a low hill above Lake Evinduin and the sacred island of the goddess for nearly eight hundred years, its great dome staring up into the vault of heaven with the Unblinking Eye of Justice. I had first seen the temple at the age of four when I entered the service of the goddess. From that day until its fall twenty years later, it had been my home, and my refuge, the center of my life, and the hallowed cradle of my religion.

Now . . . I took a deep breath and tried to release the lump of pain that filled my chest. Now, it was as dead as the goddess who had made it holy and the priests and laity who had been slain when she fell. Nothing grew on that hill, nor in the fields that surrounded it. The temple centered a dead zone that ran a long bow shot in every direction but lakeside, where the barren ground ran down only as far as the shore.

After the slaughter and the fire, the Sword of Heaven had brought in peasants from the surrounding farms and forced them to sow the fields and grounds with salt, turning the dirt over and over until the top foot was as barren as a sun-baked rock in the deepest desert. Spells they had laid, too, of desolation and blight and sterility. The Son of Heaven had pronounced the site cursed in the eyes of the gods and ordered that nothing be built there for a thousand years, nor any stone taken from the shattered buildings for use elsewhere.

Eight hundred years the temple had lasted, and now it might take another eight hundred years before nature even began to reclaim the ruins from the horrors wrought there by Heaven’s Son in the name of his gods. I stared at the shattered remnants of my only true home from our place of concealment in a little copse of fruit trees, with tears on my cheeks. Nor was I alone in crying. I could hear more than one of my companions quietly sobbing.

Faran stood beside me, her eyes dry and utterly bleak. “I haven’t been back but the once, since . . .” She shook her head.

Kelos had vanished into shadow before we got close enough to see the devastation—an entirely sensible move on his part, and one that he had warned me was coming. He would meet those of us who were performing the ritual of attunement later, on the sacred island—presuming the scaly monsters that haunted the deeps of the lake didn’t devour him along the way.

At the moment, I rather hoped that they would, though I doubted it. Professional courtesy between ancient horrors and all that. It would make the ritual that much harder, but I thought we could manage it without him, and with the ruins there in front of me, it seemed a small price to pay for that particular piece of long delayed justice.

“We’re here,” said Jax from behind me, her voice rough and throaty. “Now what?”

I turned to face her. “We need to find someplace to lay up for the day. Then, once night falls, the four of us will cross over to the island and attempt the attunement.”

“More than four, if you’re willing,” said Jax. “I’d like to bring Roric and Kumi with, if I might, as representatives for the younger generation.”

“Not Maryam?” I asked.

Jax shook her head. “No, this is a task that wants devotion more than anything. Roric and Kumi have more faith in Namara than any of my other charges retain. If she had survived, I would have wanted to bring Altia as well, but . . .” She clenched her jaw so hard I half expected to hear teeth cracking, but then she forced herself to relax.

Faran spoke into the suddenly charged silence that lay between us. “Any thoughts on where we can hide out till sunset?”

Siri leaned forward. “There are deep places under the temple that the invaders never reached, prayer rooms, a section of training labyrinth, even a long forgotten shrine to the Eye of Justice. There are rooms down there that haven’t been visited by any Blade but me in at least a century. The locals view the grounds as cursed and they will not enter them,