darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,78
holes aplenty in the wall around the gate, but I chose to climb over heaped rubble rather than to further violate the integrity of the old building, and the others had followed in my footsteps without complaint. The gardens within had suffered even more than the outer dead zone, having been planed flat and covered with a good inch of salt. Rain and sun had hammered that into a dusty white sheet almost too bright to look at, and I led us past it quickly.
I couldn’t give the temple proper the same courtesy I had the postern gate. The forces of Heaven’s Reach had been more thorough there, bringing down the entire section of wall that had once held the door to the kitchens. This whole part of the building was little more than an unevenly mounded pile of broken stone. The inner temple, though, was made of sterner stuff, its walls yards thick and reinforced with deep magic. Though they had torn the roof off, exposing the passages to the elements, much of the structure remained. Somehow, that made the hurt all the worse.
Once we passed the ruined arch that had led into the inner temple, we moved beyond any place I had visited since before the fall. We let our shrouds drop away then and Siri took the lead. When we passed through the door that opened into the Sanctuary of the Blades, I bit my lips hard. It was that or scream and bolt.
The Sanctuary was a great oval with ends that came to points. In the old days a high stone dome sheathed in white marble had covered it over except for a cutaway circle in the center that remained open to the sky. Under that circle had been a huge obsidian orb set in a wide ring of lapis tiling. From above, the orb had played the role of the iris in a huge unblinking eye fixed on the heavens—Justice fixing her gaze on her peers.
The orb had held our kila in those days—tri-bladed spirit knives given to each Blade by the goddess herself on their investiture. The first task of every Blade was to bring his or her knife from the sacred island here to the orb where they sank it deep into the stone in a ceremonial marriage with Justice. The orb was gone from the Sanctuary now, of course. Its broken remnants lay beside the stele that the Son of Heaven had caused to be erected in front of the temple to proclaim the ban of the gods on our order.
The kila had been chopped free of the stone, and it was rumored that those that were associated with living Blades now adorned the back wall of the Son of Heaven’s privy so that he could piss on them every morning. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to check the one time I had been in his quarters, so I couldn’t say whether that was truth or a petty fiction.
The missing kila I had known about. What I had not was that the stones from the shattered dome had been neatly moved aside to leave the lapis ring free of any debris. Then, someone had gone through and very carefully pulled up and destroyed hundreds of individual pieces of lapis, leaving behind voids that converted the whole into a necromantic circle of binding.
I forced my voice to a calm I didn’t feel. “Siri, was the spell circle here when you came through last time?” I pitched my voice low and soft, so that only those closest could hear it, and I waved for the students behind Jax to stop moving.
“It was.” She pointed to a place where the circle had been broken, the tiles shattered and burned by extreme heat, her voice equally quiet. “I broke the ring with lightning.”
“Do you know what it was binding?” Faran and Jax had moved forward, and Kumi followed Faran, but I didn’t think any of the others were close enough to hear.
Siri nodded. “I believe so.” A long silence followed, and I began to wonder if she wasn’t going to say more. “I believe that it imprisoned the souls of many of our fallen—bound here in torment. Though I didn’t know it then, I think that it held those whose bodies the Son’s servants had converted to host his risen curse.”
“So, some of the dead we have fought in the last few months . . .”