Darkened Blade

Book 6: A Fallen Blade Novel

by Kelly McCullough

Genres: Epic Fantasy; Ghost; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Kelly McCullough, author of Drawn Blades, presents another Fallen Blade adventure with Aral Kingslayer...

Aral Kingslayer has nothing to lose—and only justice to gain. Torn apart by the death of his goddess, he must avenge her in order to save himself from being lost forever....

It’s been nine long years since the death of his patron, Namara, and exalted assassin Aral Kingslayer desperately misses the thrill and glory of being a higher power of justice. Now he is haunted by the ghosts of the past—and by the ghost of the lost goddess herself.

When Namara calls upon Aral in a dream to seek justice for her death and the ruination of her temple, Aral must obtain the help of his fellow former Blades and his Shade familiar, Triss, to pursue the vengeance he knows Namara deserves. Even if it means attacking Heaven’s Son—and going against one of their own—in a bloody battle of epic proportions...

Release date: April 28, 2015

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 320

Sample

“Aral the jack, formerly the noble Aral Kingslayer, is the best kind of hero: damaged, cynical, and despondent, yet needing only the right cause to rise from his own ashes.”

—Alex Bledsoe, author of Wake of the Bloody Angel

Acknowledgments

1

I speak to the dead. Usually they don’t answer me back. Usually . . .

This time was different.

It’s been nine years since the death of Namara and the destruction of her temple. Nine years that saw my few remaining fellow Blades driven and harried before the forces of the archpriest called the Son of Heaven. Nine years of death and darkness and retreat. But only recently have I learned the real reasons for the fall of my goddess and her temple. . . .

My goddess was murdered by her peers for the crime of caring more about justice than the safety and comfort of those who inhabit the Empire of Heaven.

We were assassins once, killers in the service of Justice who used magic and the sword to bring death to those high lords of the eleven kingdoms who considered themselves above the law. Where courts and trials could not reach the great, we could. And they hated us for it. Us and our companion shadows, the elemental creatures of darkness known as Shades who conceal and complete us.

We knew of the hate of the mighty, and their fear, and we welcomed it. It was a sign that no one was beyond the reach of justice. What we didn’t know was that the gods themselves were also frightened, for Namara had made the swords that she gave us into a tool that might slay even a lord of Heaven, and that was the true reason for our fall. I know it now, but what to do with the knowledge? That is the question that had me calling out to the dead. That is the question that had brought me an answer.

Perhaps.

The bar was the Gryphon’s Head, a place I knew as well as I knew the dark parts of my own soul. It was the place where I had plumbed the depths of despair back in the days when I was trying to drink myself into the grave so many of my fellows had already entered. But this time it was different. None of the regulars were in evidence, not even Jerik, the bartender, who was one of my few true friends in the world.

No, tonight, the Gryphon was peopled with the dead. When I walked through the door, the first person I saw was Alinthide Poisonhand, whom I had loved from afar as a boy and who had died trying to kill a king. She nodded to me, but she said no words, merely pointing to an empty table by the back wall. It was my usual place, and the only table without a full complement of the fallen. Most of the closer dead were Blades and priests—those I had known at the temple in my youth.

But not all. At another table sat two kings that had fallen to my swords, forever changing my name from Aral Brandarzon to Aral Kingslayer, as the world knew me now. They glared hate at me, Ashvik and his bastard half brother Thauvik. Nor were they alone. Nea Sjensdor sat with them, Lady Signet, and preceptor of the Hand of Heaven—the order of sorcerers that had destroyed my temple—and another I had slain. There were more, for somehow the taproom of the Gryphon’s Head now looked both exactly as it ought and seemed to stretch out to encompass hundreds of tables.

Here were all my dead. Those I had loved. Those I had hated. And those who had meant nothing to me at all. These last were perhaps hardest to face, for I had killed many over the years, most for no more reason than that they had stood in the way when there were those I needed to slay. I will not attempt to excuse their deaths. Not here, and not when I, in my turn, stand before the lords of judgment. I did what I felt was right at the time, and I will pay the price when it comes due.

Slowly, I walked through the ranks of the silent dead, approaching the place that waited for me. There were only two chairs there, though five could have sat at the table comfortably. That, too, was in keeping with my past experiences, for once I had called the Gryphon’s Head my office and used that table to conduct my business. One chair was mine, and one belonged to my client, whoever that might be at the time.

I paused then, looking for my shadow and, with it, my familiar Triss. For Blades are sorcerers as well, dependent on our darkling companions to focus the gift of our magic. My Shade assumes the shape of a dragon made of shadow when he is not concealing himself within my own. But, there and then, though I could feel that he lived through the link that bound our souls, I had no shadow. I missed him dearly, for I love Triss more than I love myself, and I rely on his advice in all things.

Still, I drew back my chair and sat down, as I knew that I must. When I looked up, I was no longer alone. The greatest of my dead had come. Namara. My goddess.

“Hello, Aral, I’ve been waiting a long time to speak with you.”

When I had met with her in life, she usually wore the shape of a great stone statue with six arms and skin like granite. Today, she had assumed the size and shape of a beautiful woman in a scarlet dress. The only obvious evidence of her divinity were her six arms, but even without that, I would have known her, for her image was forever burned into my soul.

“You’re dead,” I said, wishing once more for Triss to come and stand beside me.

Namara inclined her head ever so slightly. “I am.”

“The dead do not return to us.” The words came out flat and hard.

“No, we do not.”

“Then, how . . .”

“I was a goddess, Aral. I am allowed certain dispensations.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You carry me in your heart. As long as it beats, there will a tiny part of me remain. When I knew that I was to die, I took steps to see that what I cared most about might live on beyond my own ending.”

“I . . . what do you want of me?”

“Only what I have ever wanted of you. Justice.”

“Is that why you’re here? To tell me you want me to . . . what? Do justice?”

“Yes.”

I was suddenly achingly furious. “Why now? Why not when I was in the fucking depths of despair and half dead from drinking myself unconscious every night?”

“Because I am dead. I’m not really here, Aral. I exist now only in your heart, and the hearts of those who once served me and may yet again. I do not speak from beyond the grave, I speak from within it. I could not come to you before you yourself summoned me up. Only in following the path I would have wished of you have you become again the man who can hear this message.”

“And your message is to seek justice?”

“That, and nothing more.”

“How?” I yelled. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I want justice, but I don’t even know where to look to find it.”

“Here,” she said, and reached a hand across, placing her palm on my chest above the heart. Her touch burned.

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s all the answer there is or ever was. You have found the path. Follow it.”

“But I can’t see it.”

“Neither could I. To seek to follow justice is to walk in shadows. Some days they part and you can see clearly where to put your feet. Some days they thicken and you may stray far from the road, at great cost in blood and souls. Know that now, for a little while, your feet are exactly where they need to be. That is all there is.” She began to fade.

“Wait, will I see you again?”

“I have delivered my message.”

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s the only one I have. Now let me leave you with a gift.”

One of her hands turned over and a cascade of efik beans spilled out of it. I looked at them with a sort of horror, expecting the drug craving again, the hunger that had been slowly devouring my soul. But I felt nothing.

“I . . . I don’t want them.”

“When you passed through smoke you left the flesh behind for a time and, with it, the needs of the flesh. That broke the physical desire in a way that only the power of a god could. What the Smoldering Flame began, I can finish here in this place and time, sealing the wound that was opened by the Kitsune.” She seemed little more than a ghost now.

“Will it last?” I asked, needing desperately to believe that it would.

She shrugged. “My power is broken. So that is up to you. It always was.”

“And the alcohol . . .” I couldn’t even ask the question.

“Was never sacred to me. That demon you must fight alone.”

Alone.

I sat bolt upright in my bed at the Roc and Diamond gasping for air.

What just happened? Triss spoke into my mind, his mental voice sounding muzzy and confused as though he were rising up from a deep and enchanted sleep. I had the strangest dream. . . .

“Aral?” It was Siri, waking beside me. “What . . .” Her voice trailed off as she touched the skin over my heart.

I looked down. Clearly visible in the late-morning light was a mark on my chest—like an old burn scar. It took the shape of a six-fingered hand.

I speak to the dead. My fallen brethren. The people I have killed unjustly whose forgiveness I beg in the small hours of the night. Most of all, my goddess. Usually, they don’t answer me back.

I think it’s better that way.

*   *   *

The Roc and Diamond was a typical example of architecture in the city of Wall. The ground floor was sixteen feet wide and sixty feet long, its shape determined by the nature of the gigantic magical ward that separated the lands of the Sylvani Empire from the human kingdoms to the north. The ward took the shape of a wall eight feet tall and eight feet wide, enclosing and confining the magics of the First within a perfect half circle that started and ended on the shore of the great eastern ocean. It was thousands of miles long and served as the only street of the strangest city in the world—a city a thousand miles long and forty feet wide.

The gods had created the wall as a sort of prison for the First, and they had endowed it with certain magical properties. Nothing could be built upon or remain atop the wall for any length of time. Stand still on the wall and you would find yourself slowly and inexorably sliding toward the nearest edge. Nothing could breach or harm the wall. For exactly sixteen feet on either side, the ground was as hard as granite, perfect footing for buildings, and the foundation of the city. For another hundred yards beyond that the ground looked normal but acted more like slow quicksand. Holes filled themselves in. Trees of any size couldn’t root properly and quickly fell over. And any attempt at erecting a building met with a similar fate. They called it the Fallows.

The wall was a bizarre place to build a city, but that interface between the human lands and the older Sylvani Empire provided opportunities that could be found nowhere else in the world.

My childhood mentor, Kelos Deathwalker, had once quoted a scrap of an ancient lay describing the place, and now that I was temporarily living on the wall, it came back to me often: “A stone snake five thousand miles long coils its way around the empire, a city riding on its back. Within is the oldest and mightiest civilization in the world, a dreaming land of decadence and corruption ruled over by ancient immortals fallen from grace. Beautiful and terrible they were in the power of their youth, and beautiful and terrible they remain, though they are ruined now and their strength broken—a decayed remnant of the world that was, bound forever within a wall built by the gods.”

The requirements of magic kept the city from growing out into the Fallows or over the wall, and the crowding of centuries prevented much expansion side to side. That meant that the more successful buildings went up. The Roc was no exception, with a number of towers reaching as high as six or seven stories—more than that made the edifice vulnerable to tipping in the wind, for there was no way to fasten the building to its footing.

The eight of us had taken rooms in the tallest of the towers while we sorted out what happened next. Four of us were human and Blades once; me, Siri, Faran, and Kelos the Traitor. Four were Shades. Triss, Kyrissa, Ssithra, and Malthiss. The first and most pressing question we had to deal with was the matter of Kelos.

What to do with the traitor who had betrayed the Temple of Namara to the Son of Heaven? It seemed a simple enough question to answer. The man certainly deserved to die, and there wasn’t one of us who didn’t want to kill him. But he was stuffed full of secrets, secrets that we might desperately need in the days to come. Especially if we decided to move against Heaven’s Son.

That didn’t even take into account that Kelos had all but raised Siri and me. A Blade enters the temple somewhere around the age of four or five. I have vague shadowy memories of the man who had begot me, but when I thought of a father, I pictured Kelos Deathwalker. Him I loved as much as I hated, and Siri felt likewise.

There was Malthiss to consider as well. Killing Kelos would kill his familiar, since the death of either half of a familiar-bonded pair always killed the other. How complicit was Malthiss in the crimes of his partner? Had Kelos compelled his familiar to join his treason? Persuaded him? Moved in harmony with him?

It was a tangle, and not the worst we faced. That was Heaven’s Son.

“Namara wants you to go after the Son of Heaven.” Kelos rose from his perch in the bay window to pace our small parlor. He was a big man with one eye covered by an old leather patch, and heavy with muscle, his skin a maze of scars and tattooed snakes’ coils. His familiar took the shape of a shadow basilisk, lying mostly invisible amongst the tattoos at the moment. “That was the message of Namara’s visit. Isn’t it obvious?”

I was beginning to wish that I’d had the sense to keep my dream a secret. But Siri had demanded an explanation for the fresh burn over my heart. And, whatever had happened to the temple, Siri was the last of us to wear the title of Namara’s First Blade—my superior in the order still. When she asked a question, old loyalties read an order.

“No,” I replied. “It’s not obvious. Not to me anyway, and I was told to follow my own heart in this and all things. She cautioned me, too, about how easy it is to stray from the path of justice and spoke of the great costs that follow. For that matter, I’m not sure the dream was anything more than wish fulfillment.”

“Which left you with a burn scar on your chest?” Siri asked mildly from her place beside the fire.

Wisps of smoke wafted off the fire to coil and curl around her before sliding back to roll up the chimney. More smoke ran through the long thick braids that hung down her back and across the coal black skin of shoulders exposed by the tight vest she wore instead of a shirt. Likewise exposed was the fresh stump of her left arm, which ended just below the elbow. Her familiar, Kyrissa, took the form of a winged serpent. Alone among the Shades she was no longer a thing purely of shadow, but wore feathers of smoke on her wings and the coils of her body.

“Briefly . . . and maybe.” I opened my shirt to expose the smooth skin over my heart—the print had faded away. “Do you see a scar there now?”

“No, but it was there in the morning. Both Triss and Kyrissa witnessed it.”

Triss nodded, and whispered into my mind, Sorry, but I have to agree with Siri here.

“There,” said Kelos. “The word of a First Blade is good enough for me.”

I shook my head. “Even if the dream was real, and Namara was somehow speaking to me from beyond death, that doesn’t mean I’m supposed to hare off after the Son of Heaven at this late date. She said I was already on the right path, and that I should follow justice. I had no plans to face the Son of Heaven when she said that. It could as easily have been a warning not to move against him.”

“What could be more just than killing the man who destroyed the temple?” demanded Kelos.

“You know”—Faran spoke up for the first time in several hours—“he’s got a point there.”

I started at that—Faran agreeing with Kelos? That would be a first. I turned to look at my apprentice. She was taller now than when I’d first met her, a young woman rather than a girl, and lovely in a hard and cold sort of way. Her hair was long and brown, her skin a bit paler than my own deep brown. A vicious scar carved its way down her forehead and across her cheek where she had nearly lost an eye—a scar that burned red now with barely suppressed anger.

“Those who destroyed the temple do deserve to die.” Faran drew her swords as she rose—swords of the goddess that had once belonged to a traitor Blade by the name of Parsi. “I think we should start with this one.” She lifted the point of one of her swords to prick the skin at the base of Kelos’s throat.

Kelos shrugged, but didn’t otherwise move. “I’ve certainly earned it. I won’t stop you.”

Faran’s arm remained perfectly still, but a drop of blood welled up on Kelos’s skin and began to roll its way down the length of the sword toward her hand. Tension hovered in the air like the bright moment before lightning rips open a stormy sky. She was a child of nine at the fall of the temple, thrown out into the world to make her own way. None of us had suffered more than she had.

“Well,” she demanded after a few long beats, “isn’t one of you going to order me to back off again?”

“No,” I said, my voice flat.

“No?” She turned her head to look at me, but kept her sword up.

“No. You know all the arguments against killing him as well as the arguments for it. If you aren’t yet convinced, demanding that you change your mind isn’t going to change anything. The goddess told me to seek justice. I say the same to you.”

I waited for the lightning to strike, vaguely relieved that I wouldn’t be the one who had to make that decision. The red drop rolled on down the sword until it finally touched the lapis oval of the guard—Namara’s all seeing eye. It clung there for a long moment, then dripped to the floor like a bloody tear.

Faran muttered a curse and flicked the blade back and up, away from Kelos’s throat. Slamming it home in the sheath on her back, she turned and stalked silently out of the room.

“Interesting play there, Aral.” Kelos raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know whether she’d go for it or not.”

“And I didn’t care,” I replied. “You’re on your own with her from now on.” I followed Faran out.

2

The dead should stay dead.

For six years after the fall of the temple I believed that Kelos had died defending our goddess and our people. Then I discovered what really happened and that he was still alive. I wish that he’d stayed dead.

I had climbed to the top of our little tower, an octagonal deck surrounded by a low wooden wall. The sun had long since set, but the moon was more than bright enough for eyes trained to the darkness, and I could see as well as I needed to. The wall stretched away east and west, its shape picked out by the magelights and oil lanterns glowing along its length, like some phosphorescent eel from the deep ocean.

“I liked him better when he was a corpse,” I said.

“It’s never too late. . . .” Faran’s voice spoke from behind me.

I turned, looking for the deeper bit of shadow I must have missed when I first came out on the rooftop. I found it in an angle of the wall not far from the stairhead. Or, at least, thought that I did—a shrouded Blade is all but invisible, especially at night. I crossed my arms and waited silently. A moment later the shadow thinned and resumed Ssithra’s phoenix shape, revealing Faran, who sat cross-legged with her back against the boards.

She lifted her chin. “It’s really not too late, you know. I could go back downstairs and kill him right now. Or . . . you could.”

“That wouldn’t solve the problem.”

“It would put an end to it.”

“No, it would only put an end to Kelos. It wouldn’t undo the fall of the temple or the death of Namara or any of the other horrors he helped perpetrate.”

And it wouldn’t salvage your memories of the man he was before he did those things, Triss said quietly into my mind. That man is already dead, and with him a part of you.

That, too.

Faran rose to face me, and her eyes were on a level with mine. “Then what is the lesson?”

“Huh?” I asked.

“You took me on as your apprentice, right?”

I nodded.

“So, teach me. How can you stand to let him live after all that he’s done? How can that be right? Namara’s Blades exist to bring justice to those who would not otherwise receive it, those who are protected by power from the results of their actions. Doesn’t Kelos fit the bill?”

“Namara’s Blades are gone.”

“That’s a dodge, Aral, and a pretty bad one at that. You’re still here and the ghost of the goddess told you herself that you should seek justice, that you should continue down the path she set you on.”

“I don’t know.” I turned my back on Faran and looked out into the darkness again. “I don’t want to kill him.”

“Not two minutes ago you said that you ‘liked him better as a corpse.’”

I nodded. “I did that. But the corpse I liked him as was a martyr to our goddess, not a traitor to her. That ship sank. Now, he wants me to kill him, or if I won’t do it, Siri or you. He believes that he deserves to die for his treachery.”

Faran put a hand on my shoulder and turned me to face her. “He’s not wrong.”

“No, he’s not. But what will it accomplish? He wants to die for his crimes, but he doesn’t repent them. He would do the same thing tomorrow in the same circumstances. He believed then and still does that by giving people hope for justice, Namara was relieving pressure that otherwise would have destroyed a corrupt system of governance. Is he wrong about that?”

“I don’t know.” Faran sighed. “In the lost years I made my way in the world by spying and commissioned theft. I saw a lot of corruption in the ruling classes, and I didn’t do anything about it because: hey, my goddess is dead and it’s not my fucking job. Then, I found you, and you showed me that there may be something to this whole justice business even without Namara to show us the way. But I don’t see it as clearly as you do. Is the system so corrupt that the only thing to do is burn it down and start over? Or is it more important that we keep righting the individual wrongs?”

“That’s really the question, isn’t it?” asked Triss. “The big one that we’re all fighting over without actually talking about it. Do we kill Kelos because of what he did to Namara, or do we back his play and move against the Son of Heaven?”

“Even that oversimplifies things,” I growled. “Is killing Heaven’s Son justice of the kind we were raised to deliver, or is it revenge? He is practically the personification of injustice rendered untouchable by power. If ever there was a man who deserved to die on the sword of a Blade, it’s the Son of Heaven. Killing him alone would certainly serve the old ideal.”

“But then there’s the problem of the risen,” said Faran.

I nodded and began to pace. The Son was more than just a priest, he was a rapportomancer—a very specialized sort of magic user, one with the familiar gift but no talent for actual magery, and his familiar . . . that was the rub. His familiar was a sort of death elemental, a strand of the curse of the restless dead—the one that gave birth to the risen. Once the curse had advanced far enough, the risen were easy to spot, with their rotting hides, and mindless hunger for the flesh of the living. But there were ways to prevent or hold off that deterioration for months, or even years if you were willing to spill enough fresh blood.

In the shape of the hidden risen, the Son’s strain of the curse wore the bodies of thousands of nobles and priests all through the eleven kingdoms, maybe even tens of thousands. They bathed in the blood of the living to disguise their undead condition and they gave the Son of Heaven de facto control over much of the East. Individually, killing them was as just as killing the Son himself. But, all at once . . . that was another thing entirely. What happens to a civilization when you remove the structures that rule it? The people with the experience of governing? In destroying the risen we might destroy kingdoms entire. Would it be just to ignore that cost?

Kelos believed that a new, more just, system would arise from the ashes of the old, that the inevitable civil wars and banditry and bloodshed would all ultimately prove to be worth it. But his vision of justice had led to the death of Namara and nearly all of my brethren, and that was a cost I could never accept.

Nuriko Shadowfox, his sometime lover, sometime foe who had started him down the path he now walked, had been even more radical in her plans. She didn’t believe in government at all, that somehow eliminating it entirely would lead to a new and better world. Her plan had been to destroy the system and then to spend the rest of her life preventing a new one from growing in its place at a blood cost I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

I didn’t know what I believed, but I knew damned well that killing the Son of Heaven would result in a bloodbath of epic proportion. For every one of the risen that died with him, tens or even hundreds of innocents would fall in the chaos left behind. If the weight of my dead was already crushing me when they numbered in the hundreds . . .

“I don’t know what to do, Faran. It was so much easier when the goddess told me where to go and who to kill. The responsibility was hers. I hate being the one who has to make the decisions.”

“Would you go back to living that way . . . ? If you could?” Faran’s tone was gentle, her expression sympathetic, but the question was as sharp as any knife, and it cut straight through to the pain that knotted my gut.

I desperately wanted to say yes. But . . . “No. I have seen too much of life’s grays to ever go back to that kind of certainty. Even knowing, as I now do, that Namara herself was uncertain . . . No. I lie to myself when I say the responsibility was hers. My actions were and always have been my own, and somewhere down deep I’ve always known that. If the responsibility for what I do belongs to me, so do the choices. I couldn’t go back to being a tool in another’s hand if my soul depended on it.”

“Then, stop letting Kelos manipulate you.”

Her mind is as sharp as her blades, sent Triss. She’s grown so much since we first found her.

I laughed a grim little laugh. “That would be much easier to do if I knew what he was trying to bend me into doing, and whether or not what he wants of me is the wrong thing to do. Because the flip side of the risen problem is that allowing the Son of Heaven to live is a decision with heavy consequences of its own. How much of the evil done by and for him am I responsible for if I refuse to end his life?”

That was the question that made me feel as though I was carrying shards of broken glass around in my chest.

Triss rose up and wrapped his wings around my shoulders. “Sometimes you come to a place where there are no right decisions and all paths lead to fell ends.”

“And then?” I whispered.

“You still must choose your way,” said Triss.

“But I don’t know how. . . .”

Faran stepp